ReHacked vol. 342: Attention is a luxury good, Are we living in a golden age of stupidity and more
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"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both." --Dwight D. Eisenhower
Attention is a luxury good | Seth's Blog #information
Luxury goods are special: they are scarce and expensive, and they earn us status with some folks because it shows that we paid more than we needed to.
Luxury isn’t about quality, suitability or performance. Luxury isn’t a more accurate watch or a faster processor. Luxury is a marker that we can afford to do something others might consider wasteful.
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Why an abundance of choice is not the same as freedom | Aeon Essays #society #psychology #history #longread
By the time you read this essay, no matter the hour of the day, you will likely have already made some kind of choice: coffee with skimmed milk, whole milk, cream, or black? Sugar or no sugar? Tea instead? Personalised, preference-based choice is, at present, a deeply familiar aspect of life in much of the world, though perhaps most markedly so in the United States, where I live and work. It is also something people don’t generally spend a lot of time discussing, in part because it feels so ordinary. People around the globe shop for everything from housing to vacations to, yes, caffeinated drinks. They pick what they want to read, what they want to listen to, and what they want to believe. They vote for favourite candidates for office. They select friends and lovers, fields to study, professions and jobs, places to live, even insurance plans to hedge their bets when something they cannot choose occurs.
AI generated summary below
Sophia Rosenfeld argues that modern societies have conflated freedom with ever-expanding personal choice, but an abundance of options often fails to deliver genuine liberty and can even undermine collective well-being and democratic life.
Core thesis
Choice-as-freedom is a relatively recent cultural construct that grew from early modern consumerism and religious pluralism, becoming a 20th‑century ideal that equates autonomy with menu-like selection across markets, beliefs, relationships, and politics, yet this model frequently produces overload, inequality, and moral thinness rather than true emancipation.
Historical arc
- Early modern shopping and “freedom of conscience” normalized selection by preference, teaching people to browse and pick among pre-packaged options in shops, pulpits, and lending libraries, gradually extending to romance, employment, and secret-ballot politics by the 19th century.
- The 20th century universalized both choosers and “choice agents” (marketers, psychologists, economists), institutionalizing the study and steering of decisions while cementing the ideal that more options equal more freedom.
Contemporary dynamics
- Digital abundance has magnified choice opportunities and shifted them toward value-neutral preference expression, making choice a core marker of personhood and liberty in consumer and rights discourse, yet often yielding confusion, anxiety, and performative autonomy.
- Political and cultural flashpoints—from reproductive rights framing to pandemic slogans—reveal how a shopper’s model of liberty can occlude moral stakes and collective obligations, and can be mobilized against public goods and environmental protections.
Critiques and limits
- Behavioral insights show humans are error-prone and overwhelmed by proliferating options, while sociological critiques note that choice-centric cultures individualize blame when only bad or constrained options exist.
- A market model of governance risks hollowing democracy into consumer preference aggregation, inviting backlash from both anti-liberal movements and communal value traditions that view unbounded personal choice as corrosive.
Implications
- Treating choice as the apex of freedom narrows political imagination, making liberty look like picking from given menus rather than altering the menu, reshaping institutions, or removing oppressive constraints altogether.
- A richer conception of freedom should balance individual discretion with collective aims, recognize when choice architectures misfire, and revive alternative ideals of liberty grounded in emancipation, solidarity, and shared problem-solving rather than sheer option-multiplication.
Friendship Begins at Home - 3 Quarks Daily #psychology
As the philosophers knew, it’s more challenging and even painful, as Jung notes in the epigraph, to face that “glowing red-hot iron” of who one actually is. Yet doing so is the path to true love—to more genuine and intimate connections with ourselves and others. I think of the woman I mentioned, so fiercely critical, and the way she felt when she apologized to her adult son for how she’d spoken to him in their last conversation, but really for much of his life. He’d responded to her apology with such heartfelt gratitude that she felt simultaneously heartbroken and hopeful. Heartbroken to know the trouble she’d caused her beloved son, but hopeful, as she said, that she and her son could now become friends.
What happened in 2007? #technology #society
It's the damn phones!
The "reverse Flynn effect" refers to a recent decline or plateau in average IQ scores in some developed countries, contrasting with the historical rise in IQ scores known as the Flynn effect. This trend, sometimes called the negative Flynn effect, is attributed to factors like changes in education, lifestyle shifts such as increased screen time, and other environmental influences
How to Assemble an Electric Heating Element from Scratch | LOW←TECH MAGAZINE #hardware #diy
This manual guides you through the process of building a 12V DC electric resistance heating element for a self-made heating or cooking device.
Are we living in a golden age of stupidity? | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian #ai #society
AI companies are determined to push their products on to the public before we fully understand the psychological and cognitive costs Human intelligence is too broad and varied to be reduced to words such as “stupid”, but there are worrying signs that all this digital convenience is costing us dearly. Across the economically developed countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Pisa scores, which measure 15-year-olds’ reading, maths and science, tended to peak around 2012. While over the 20th century IQ scores increased globally, perhaps due to improved access to education and better nutrition, in many developed countries they appear to have been declining.
Ireland Is Making Basic Income for Artists Program Permanent #economy #society #ubi
Several years after launching a trial, Ireland is set to make its basic income for artists program permanent starting in 2026.
Under the program, selected artists receive a weekly payment of approximately $375, or about $1,500 per month. There are 2,000 spots available, with applications set to open in September 2026; eligibility criteria have not yet been announced. The government may expand the program to additional applicants in the future, should more funding become available, according to Irish broadcaster RTÉ.
Tesla is at risk of losing subsidies in Korea over widespread battery failures | Electrek #hardware #automotive
Tesla is in hot water in South Korea as nearly 4,500 of its electric vehicles have reported serious battery issues, putting their eligibility for government subsidies at risk.
The issue centers around a “BMS_a079 error,” a fault in the Battery Management System that is causing headaches for nearly 4,500 Tesla owners. This error, which has been reported in both Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, triggers a safety protocol that limits the battery’s maximum charge to 50%. This effectively cripples the vehicle’s range, posing a major inconvenience for owners who rely on their Teslas for daily driving.
The CIA triad is dead — stop using a Cold War relic to fight 21st century threats | CSO Online #security
This structure also reframes the CISO role. Instead of a reactive technician, the CISO becomes a strategic partner, speaking in three languages:
- Core: Technology and engineering trust (“Our resilience is strong, but vendor SBOM adoption lags”).
- Complementary: Governance and duty (“We are tracking amber on EU AI Act provenance requirements”).
- Contextual: Societal trust and business impact (“Our OT segmentation project directly mitigates safety risk”).
GrapheneOS is finally ready to break free from Pixels, and it may never look back #software #copyrights #android
TL;DR
- The makers of GrapheneOS have confirmed they are partnering with a major Android OEM to bring the privacy-focused Android fork to Snapdragon-powered smartphones.
- The project has confirmed it’s bringing support for Pixel 10, but is unsure whether support will continue for Pixel 11.
- GrapheneOS didn’t reveal the name of its new partner, but said that those devices will be priced in the same range as Pixels.
Dutch government takes control of Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia #economy #hardware
The Dutch government has taken control of Nexperia, a Chinese-owned semiconductor maker based in the Netherlands, in an extraordinary move to ensure a sufficient supply of its chips remains available in Europe amid rising global trade tensions.
Nexperia, a subsidiary of China’s Wingtech Technology , specializes in the high-volume production of chips used in automotive, consumer electronics and other industries, making it vital for maintaining Europe’s technological supply chains.
On Sunday evening, the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs revealed that it had invoked the “Goods Availability Act” on the company in September in order “to prevent a situation in which the goods produced by Nexperia (finished and semi-finished products) would become unavailable in an emergency.”
Following the announcement from The Hague, Wingtech plunged its maximum daily limit of 10% on the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
Android’s sideloading limits are its most anti-consumer move yet #copyrights #software #android
Google's talk around "verified developers" sounds harmless and, in some ways, helpful. As reported on the Android Developer Blog, it is like "an ID check at the airport which confirms a traveler's identity but is separate from the security screening of their bags." Google's analogy, however, may be oversimplified. When this is enforced, the only way a developer’s app will be installable on devices that include Google Mobile Services (GMS) — which typically provide access to the Play Store — is by completing ID verification using government-issued documents or contact information. This will be rolled out globally in 2027.
Apps will be blocked from installing on most mainstream phones if their developer can't complete this verification. However, there are certain devices that will remain unaffected, even though they are just a tiny fraction of the total devices. These categories include all devices that do not pass Google's certification test, primarily custom ROMs or de-Googled phones.
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Dainius