I miss the old days when I could weight-shame you.

The framing of this Financial Times article by Richard Waters is off.

First in the dek, “Machines have an insatiable need for our personal information.” And then again in the body text (so don’t blame it all on SEO):

[T]he machines have an insatiable need, and the processing of this type of personal data won’t stop…

It’s machines don’t need. It’s people that need. I don’t know, maybe people are too easily confused by referring to things as A.I.?

The conclusion hooks back into place though:

Left unchecked, [machine learning systems] could lead to a new digital capitalism run wild, as companies seek to exploit their new powers to understand and influence humanity purely to feed their own bottom lines. This is the warning contained in Surveillance Capitalism, the recent tome by Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff that has become a rallying cry for the digitally disaffected.

Warren Ellis on Kevin Smith.

A useful and well-made interactive from The New York Times and Alberto Cairo.

I was elected with 78% of the vote by the people of Minnesota’s 5th District, not the Alabama Republican Party. If you want to clean up politics, maybe don’t nominate an accused child molester as your Senate candidate?

– Ilhan Omar (D-MN) on Twitter to Alabama Republicans who moved to support a resolution calling for her expulsion from the House

This should help.

As political scientists, we are used to other fields parachuting in and claiming to “discover” things we have known for decades.

– Chris W. Bonneau and Kristin Kanthak in an excellent rejoinder to a crummy article in the The Chronicle of Higher Education

Better get back to it. There’s a scotch egg in the fridge I can eat once I’ve got something checked off my To Do list, and I crave the congress of meat, egg and breadcrumbs.

Actually… this newsletter is something on my to-do list, and now it’s done.

So it goes.