Self sacrifice and kin psychology in war: threats to family predict decisions to volunteer for a women's paramilitary organization - ScienceDirect

"how women respond to external threats. Using data from one of the largest female paramilitary organizations in history we show that women who have more brothers, women whose husbands serve in the military and women without children are more likely to volunteer. These results provide qualified support for the hypothesis that women are more likely to sacrifice for their country when members of their family are at risk. Overall, our analysis suggests that self-sacrifice and intense bonding with an imagined community of unknown individuals, such as the nation state, may arise out of a suite of psychological adaptations designed to facilitate cooperation among kin (i.e. kin psychology). "

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Green Energy and the New Metabolic World Order

"Electrostates vs. Petrostates
China is building a new green bloc, while the United States is doubling down on oil."

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Proto-Social Infrastructure and Stewardship of Commitment Pooling | International Journal of Community Currency Research

"This paper examines Commitment Pooling as a commons-based resource coordination framework. The Commitment Pooling protocol establishes rules for the exchange of resources, emphasizing reciprocity and mutual support. The infrastructure, blending proto-social systems like rotational labor with modern technologies such as blockchain, enables a transition from extractive to cooperative models. Central to this framework is stewardship, ensuring responsible governance and long-term sustainability of the commons. By integrating protocol, infrastructure, and stewardship, Commitment Pooling provides a flexible, scalable model for fostering cooperative, resilient economies and addressing contemporary challenges in resource management."

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Social media is harming adolescents at a scale large enough to cause changes at the population level | The World Happiness Report

"The evidence of harm is found in: 1) surveys of young people; 2) surveys of parents, teachers, and clinicians; 3) contents from corporate documents; 4) findings from cross-sectional studies; 5) findings from longitudinal studies; 6) findings from social media reduction experiments; and 7) findings from natural experiments.

We show there is now overwhelming evidence of severe and widespread direct harms (such as sextortion and cyberbullying), and compelling evidence of troubling indirect harms (such as depression and anxiety). Furthermore, we show that the harms and risks to individual users are so diverse and vast in scope that they justify the view that social media is causing harm at a population level.

We further argue that when these lines of evidence are considered alongside the timing, scope, and cross-national trends in adolescent wellbeing and mental health, they can help answer a second question: was the rapid adoption of always-available social media by adolescents in the early 2010s a substantial contributor to the population-level increases in mental illness that emerged by the mid 2010s in many Western nations? We call this the “historical trends question”. We draw on our findings about the vast scale of harm uncovered while answering the product safety question to argue that the answer to the historical trends question is “yes”."

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Substack Has Revived the Serial Novel | Compact

"And that is just what we are seeing. Several of my favorite reads of the past year have been serialized novels I read via an app on my phone, receiving the chapters piecemeal, a week at a time. A century and a half after the golden age of Dickens, Eliot, and Dumas, the “cultural engine” of Substack has given the serialized novel a new lease on life. "

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UBI Has Been Asking the Wrong Question for 60 Years | by Myung San Jun | Mar, 2026 | Medium

" is the architect of ABCity (AI Blockchain City) — a prototype for an electric civilization integrating AI, blockchain, energy infrastructure, and urban systems to address the converging crises of energy transition, labor displacement, and AI governance, proposing a new model of citizen-owned civilization."

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AI Is Not Unavoidable. Not This AI, That's for Sure - FOSS Force

"Reasons Why Current AI Is Not Unavoidable
We are told that stopping current AI would be not just impossible, but really, deeply wrong. That’s simply false, and here’s why:"

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Should religious AI chatbots be treated differently from all others?

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Do Tech VCs Dream of Electric Anything?

"o the “flat” self in fact has a history, and a prehistory. The navel-gazing neurotic is far older than Freud. Both, in fact, appear not as successors to the happy salad days of The Individual as invented by Modern Western Civilization, ie Whig history, but as present from its inception. To my eye a much more plausible account of the emergence, flourishing, and decline of this model of selfhood - and, I hope, one that squares the circle between the Tech VC Self and its critics - situates the change not in Freud, or LSD, but media ecologies. In other words, Andreessen’s own home turf: information technology."

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Yet Another Massive Study Says There’s No Evidence That Social Media Is Inherently Harmful To Teens | Techdirt

"Yet Another Massive Study Says There’s No Evidence That Social Media Is Inherently Harmful To Teens"

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