I thought this was really well known already? Or are we finding out it's worse than we thought, which would explain why runoff from highways kills fish, which we also already knew?

"Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all. Sometimes consumer prices are an incomplete, even misleading, signal of economic well-being."

Fascinating studies on the broader effects of Walmart:

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Seen a few folks astonished by my lack of support for ChatGPT and similar. Because AI, right?

Yeah, no. What we have right now is glorified autocorrect. Glorified autocorrect that takes the energy of an entire city to do what it does, plus half of Lake Erie to cool down while it's doing it.

The Guardian's business model relies on a highly casualised workforce with no employment rights. That's existed without serious collective challenge because in the UK journalism ecosystem, it's a monopolist. It's the only 'liberal' mainstream news org & there's been nowhere else to go.
6/

This week the Scott Trust sold the Observer brand to Tortoise Media. But they're using this to slash 70 core Guardian jobs in a neat sleight of hand. Observer journalists are *Guardian* journalists on *Guardian* contracts but they're being bundled out of the door.
2/

All of which to say is: judge any company by how it treats its lowliest employees. The Guardian has managed to maintain a system in which 1/3 of its journalists aren't even employees. The zero hours ones have to take a month off every year to prevent them accruing rights. Not even Uber does that.
7

Who's helping fund the unsupported claims that wind energy development is killing whales? A study from Brown University traces this to money from fossil fuel companies. @newrepublic.com newrepublic.com/article/1891...

UMass/Amherst (left) and Wesleyan University are both warning their international students to be on American soil before noon on Jan 20 -- Inauguration Day.

The bacteria in your gut depend on where you are in the social network around you.

The microbes within us treat our social networks as the extended environment in which they thrive. They can spread from person to person.

New #HNL work out today in @natureportfolio.bsky.social . 1/

News coverage of “Gut microbiome strain-sharing within isolated village social networks” via @natureportfolio.bsky.social is here: www.nature.com/articles/d41... 17/

If you want to go anywhere in Britain, you can’t rely on the trains, network rail (already nationalised) is just as hopeless as the train companies

Here’s someone who should be elevated to the #houseoflords 'helped 1,400 people put flooring in their homes' www.bbc.com/news/article...