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Revealed: Britain's most desirable bungalows

3 months 4 weeks ago
Bungalows in some of the UK's most up-and-coming areas have hit the market, including a lavish £1m seven-bedroom home in rural Kent, and a modern £1.35m property with a 'vast' open-plan kitchen.

Are Elites Meritocratic and Efficiency-Seeking? Evidence from MBA Students

3 months 4 weeks ago
Abstract of a paper on pre-print server Arxiv: Elites disproportionately influence policymaking, yet little is known about their fairness and efficiency preferences -- key determinants of support for redistributive policies. We investigate these preferences in an incentivized lab experiment with a group of future elites -- Ivy League MBA students. We find that MBA students implement substantially more unequal earnings distributions than the average American, regardless of whether inequality stems from luck or merit. Their redistributive choices are also highly responsive to efficiency costs, with an effect that is an order of magnitude larger than that found in representative U.S. samples. Analyzing fairness ideals, we find that MBA students are less likely to be strict meritocrats than the broader population. These findings provide novel insights into how elites' redistributive preferences may shape high levels of inequality in the U.S.

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DHS Has Been Collecting US Citizens' DNA for Years

3 months 4 weeks ago
Customs and Border Protection collected DNA from nearly 2,000 US citizens between 2020 and 2024 and sent the samples to the FBI's CODIS crime database, according to Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy & Technology analysis of newly released government data. The collection included approximately 95 minors, some as young as 14, and travelers never charged with crimes. Congress never authorized DNA collection from citizens, children or civil detainees. DHS has contributed 2.6 million profiles to CODIS since 2020, with 97% collected under civil rather than criminal authority. The expansion followed a 2020 Justice Department rule that revoked DHS's waiver from DNA collection requirements. Former FBI director Christopher Wray testified in 2023 that monthly DNA submissions jumped from a few thousand to 92,000, creating a backlog of 650,000 unprocessed kits. Georgetown researchers project DHS could account for one-third of CODIS by 2034. The DHS Inspector General found in 2021 that the department lacked central oversight of DNA collection.

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Slow Wi-Fi? Add houseplants to the list of suspects

3 months 4 weeks ago
Pass the tinfoil hat

Houseplants could be slowing down your Wi-Fi, according to Broadband Genie, which reckons surfers can increase broadband speeds by almost 40 percent just by moving their router away from any greenery.…

Dan Robinson

U.S. News Rankings Are Out After a Tumultuous Year for Colleges

3 months 4 weeks ago
An anonymous reader shares a report: Battered by funding cuts, bombarded by the White House and braced for demographic changes set to send enrollment into a nosedive, America's colleges and universities have spent this year in flux. But one of higher education's rituals resurfaced again on Tuesday, when U.S. News & World Report published the college rankings that many administrators obsessively track and routinely malign. And, at least in the judgment of U.S. News, all of the headline-making upheaval has so far led to ... well, a lot of stability. Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University retained the top three spots in the publisher's rankings of national universities. Stanford University kept its place at No. 4, though Yale University also joined it there. Williams College remained U.S. News's pick for the best national liberal arts college, just as Spelman College was again the top-ranked historically Black institution. In one notable change, the University of California, Berkeley, was deemed the country's top public university. But it simply switched places with its counterpart in Los Angeles.

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