Thursday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Stephanie Soucheray discusses how many patients whose senses of taste and smell have been affected by COVID-19 never fully recover, while the University of Waterloo finds new evidence of lasting impact on the brain. And Carolyn Bramante et al. study how metformin can reduce the severity of COVID infection.  

- Mike Bebernes wonders whether the combination of COVID and wildfires could prompt advances in indoor air safety. But that will require the current generation of adults to take ownership of responsibility for improving matters, rather than planning to leave a smoking husk of a world to today's children.  

- George Takei interviews Robert Reich about the need to fundamentally change the balance of power which currently lies solely with the robber baron class. And Cory Doctorow points out how the largest corporations are as fervently opposed to competition and market factors as anybody when they have the opportunity to extract profits from monopolies. 

- Meanwhile, Junaid Jahangir discusses the need to rein in inequality, including by recognizing corporate taxes as a valuable tool both to bring in public revenue and to eliminate incentives for profiteering. And Richard Barnthaler and Ian Gough discuss the prospect of an economy based on sufficiency rather than excess. 

- Finally, Michael Kan reports that instead of looking to protect people's privacy from corporate manipulation, the U.S. government is buying up (and re-identifying) personal information for itself.