The Trump administration has dramatically increased the number of legitimate shipments of prescriptions it seizes at the border. The Food and Drug Administration is seizing shipments of cheaper, legal medications from legitimate pharmacies around the world. High drug prices in the U.S. have long driven Americans to look internationally for cheaper medications. Historically, the federal …
The Guardian reports (July 20th) that the Chinese government is busy creating an individual profiling system for each and every Chinese citizen, a “social score” which will indicate who is a “desirable employee”, reliable tenant, valuable customer, their eligibility for a loan, whether they are shirkers or a “waste of time”. And, of course, who …
The health insurance industry has joined forces with data brokers to vacuum up personal details about hundreds of millions of Americans. The companies are tracking race, education level, TV habits, marital status, net worth, postings on social media, slowness paying bills, and what you order online. Complicated computer algorithms then produce predictions about how much …
Continue reading ‘The US health industry gets ever spookier’ »
Robots modelled on the human hand could soon be deployed on British farms to pick cauliflowers and other vegetables. Harvesting cauliflowers is not straightforward: each head must be assessed, to ensure that it is suitably white and compact, and then carefully prised from its stem, with a few outer leaves still attached to protect the …
Continue reading ‘Hurry up – the human workers will soon be gone!’ »
One dark chapter in the American story gets left out of the history books: the American Plan, which detained tens, and possibly hundreds of thousands of women from the 1910s through the 1950s. Under the plan, conceived during World War I to protect soldiers from “promiscuous” women and the diseases they possibly carried, women were …
