Links of Interest for December 28, 2022
Corn or maize has become one of the world's three staple crops. That's not good for our health, hunger, cultural diversity, or the planet.
Photo by Ilia Usmanov on Unsplash.
- How Changing Diets Leave Us Exposed to War, Extreme Weather and Market Turbulence
- A global convergence around specific food products means that we're flattening our cultural differences, but also that we're making the global food supply more vulnerable to political and climate-related supply shocks. The gist of this story is also available as an episode of Bloomberg's The Big Take podcast. It's titled We All Eat The Same Stuff.
- California’s Lost History of Lynching Latinos in L.A. More Than 100 Years Ago
- California has never had the same proportions of Black Americans as Southern states, thanks to a different history of colonialization and enslavement practices. But that doesn't mean the history of Anglophone/Hispanophone conflict wasn't as deep or as troubling in some ways. Case in point: lynching as retribution was practiced here too.
- Porn, Piracy, Fraud: What Lurks Inside Google’s Black Box Ad Empire
- Google is still funding terrible stuff, unbeknownst to many of those buying inventory on their ad network.
- Why the super rich are inevitable
- A visual look at the Yard Sale Model, a model that illustrates how, in a free-market economy, wealth invariably skews to a narrow few unless there are policies — taxation and redistribution, for example — to counter it. This reminds me that one of my goals for 2023 is to read Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century.