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tongoscar

Democratic candidates' views on climate change - Los Angeles Times - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...ironment-climate-change-policy

shared by tongoscar on 19 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • It is a rare area in this primary where candidates are marching mostly to the same beat. They almost universally support a Green New Deal. They all vow to immediately reenlist the U.S. in the Paris accord to fight global warming.
  • Each of them would scrap all of the Trump rollbacks and set a firm deadline for moving the nation to net zero emissions, the point at which any greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans are balanced by carbon sinks in the environment or technologies that remove carbon from the atmosphere.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden unveiled a bold $1.7-trillion plan for climate action that belies his brand of “incremental” progressivism. It doesn’t go as far as some of his rivals, but the Biden vision is hardly incremental.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • He is calling for much further-reaching action and arguing that his deep experience in diplomacy makes him uniquely qualified to reposition the U.S. as the world leader in confronting global warming.
  • “On Day One, Biden will sign a series of new executive orders with unprecedented reach that go well beyond the Obama-Biden administration platform and put us on the right track,” the candidate’s plan vows.
  • Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., takes a more measured approach to reaching net zero emissions than some of his more progressive rivals.
  • Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar is running as a moderate alternative to the progressive firebrands in the race. As such, her climate plans are more modest than those of some of her rivals.
katherineharron

Trump pursues his political obsessions as stark 100,000 coronavirus deaths landmark loo... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 26 May 20 - No Cached
  • Sometime in the next few days, the 100,000th American will succumb to Covid-19 in a pandemic that President Donald Trump once predicted would just "miraculously" disappear.
  • In his most politically significant maneuver, he heaped intense pressure on North Carolina's Democratic governor to permit a normal, crowded Republican National Convention, despite fears such a mass gathering could seed virus hot spots. Trump warned he could pull the huge money-earner out of Charlotte, which was picked to play host in August.
  • And he indulged his preoccupations on his tax returns, Hillary Clinton, Fox News, slanders against MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, the Russia investigation, Joe Biden's mental health, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, mail-in voting in November and highlighted dangerous and unproven Covid-19 therapies promoted on conservative media he has tested himself.
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  • "For as long as we have citizens willing to follow their example, to carry on their burden, to continue their legacy, then America's cause will never fail and American freedom will never, ever die."
  • But that doesn't mean it isn't jarring, as the most wrenching moment so far approaches in the nation's battle against a pandemic that while ebbing in terms of total deaths is trending up in 18 states, is steady in 22 and easing in 10 more. More than 98,000 people in the US have now died from the coronavirus and more than 1.6 million have been infected. More than 30 million Americans have lost their jobs and the unemployment rate is approaching Great Depression levels.
  • There was little evidence of a deeper meaning to his presidency at this stage than personal and political grievances.
  • No White House could have been fully prepared for the disaster and subsequent economic hollowing of this year's pandemic
  • Trump spent much of Memorial Day, fulminating against Cooper, complaining that the North Carolina governor was "unable to guarantee" the arena for the convention in August can be filled to capacity. The President is determined to deploy the full pageantry of convention season to portray a nation and economy in the full throes of what he calls a "transition to greatness."
  • Yet such a spectacle as the Republican convention seems utterly incongruous with real-world events. Sports teams that use such arenas are expecting to play without fans for at least months in a bio-secure environment. The prospect of thousands of delegates pouring into convention cities from all over the country, including coronavirus hotspots, is a huge headache for organizers.
  • "In other words, we would be spending millions of dollars building the Arena to a very high standard without even knowing if the Democrat Governor would allow the Republican Party to fully occupy the space."
  • It was not immediately clear whether Trump and the Republican National Committee are serious about pulling the convention from Charlotte.
  • Trump has used federal resources multiple times to fly to his resorts and golf courses. Trump's two rounds this weekend struck critics as inappropriate during a national crisis and on a weekend when American remembers its war dead.
  • "Nearly 100,000 lives have been lost, and tens of millions are out of work. Meanwhile, the president spent his day golfing," Biden wrote in a tweet accompanying an online ad Saturday.
  • Trump may not come under such criticism had he not been so dismissive of Obama's afternoons on the golf course -- and saying he wouldn't have time to play golf if he was elected president.
katherineharron

Move over, 'sit still'! Why kids need to move in school - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • A few years ago, when my girls were in the second and third grades, they raved about the dance breaks they would occasionally have during the school day.
  • My kids' teachers were certainly not alone. More teachers are incorporating some form of movement into the school day, especially as the research is pretty clear: Physical activity in school leads to better cognitive performance and fewer behavioral issues, not to mention cutting down on stress and anxiety.
  • It all seems like a no-brainer, especially as research shows that childhood obesity seems to be getting worse. As former first lady Michelle Obama advocated, let's get our kids to move.The challenge, though, is persuading school administrations to consistently make time for physical activity when they are pressed to meet stringent academic requirements and find the money to pay for some of the training.
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  • "When you exercise, you turn on the attention systems, so that means you're (paying) better attention, you're able to deal with more frustration, you're able to stay with it longer," he said. "You're able to manipulate information by turning ... on the front part of our brain to make it work better, and that's really key and important in terms of taking in information as well as performing with it."
katherineharron

With Joe Biden off the trail, Democratic super PACs race to fill the void - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • With traditional campaigning abandoned and the Democrats' presidential front-runner hunkered down at home, deep-pocketed Democratic groups are racing to hit President Donald Trump over his response to the coronavirus pandemic.
  • "This crisis could be the defining issue of this election," Kyle Tharp, of the nonprofit group Acronym, said Wednesday. "Now more than ever, voters need to be made aware of how Trump's handling of this threat and downplaying of its impact has made it worse and has made Americans less safe."
  • "Crisis comes to every presidency. We don't blame them for that. What matters is how they handle it," the narrator says, before saying that Trump "let the virus spread unchecked across America."
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  • The pandemic, which had infected more than 64,000 and killed at least 900 in the US as of Wednesday evening, has upended American life and brought the economy to a halt a little more than seven months before the general election.
  • A new Gallup poll shows 60% of Americans approve of Trump's handling of the crisis, while 38% disapprove. A Monmouth University survey shows a tighter margin: 50% say the President has done a good job; 45% say he has done a bad job.
  • Perrine called Democrats' ads "disgusting" and a "politicization" of the pandemic.
  • "There'll be plenty of time for voters to judge @realDonaldTrump & his handling of the Coronavirus crisis, including the first weeks when he sent dangerously misleading signals by downplaying the threat," David Axelrod, a CNN contributor and former aide to President Barack Obama, wrote on Twitter as the first round of coronavirus advertising began to emerge last week.
  • Using Trump's own words and actions to remind people of his failures while he tries to rewrite history is essential," Plouffe tweeted.
johnsonel7

Chief Justice John Roberts warns about dangers of fake news - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.com/...ut-dangers-of-fake-news-091791

fake news social media language

shared by johnsonel7 on 02 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Chief Justice John Roberts — who’s on the verge of an extraordinarily high-profile balancing act presiding over the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump — issued a warning on Tuesday about the dangers of misinformation in the internet era.
  • “In our age, when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital,” Roberts declared
  • “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in a statement. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”
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  • He pointed to a 1788 attack on founder John Jay, who was struck in the head with a rock while trying to quell a lawless mob whipped up by talk that medical students were robbing graves to experiment on corpses. The episode appears to have limited Jay’s contributions to the Federalist Papers, leaving most of those writings to be prepared by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Roberts observed. “It is sadly ironic that John Jay’s efforts to educate his fellow citizens about the Framers’ plan of government fell victim to a rock thrown by a rioter motivated by a rumor,”
peterconnelly

Opinion: Texas' new social media law affects all of us - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

CNN.com

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Earlier this month, a federal appeals court ruled that a Texas law, which allows residents to sue social media companies for "censoring" what they post, could go into effect.
  • The biggest challenge facing social media companies today is doing exactly what HB 20 seems to disallow: removing misinformation and hate speech.
  • They can remove toxic content like misinformation and hate speech and get tied up in bottomless, costly lawsuits. They can let their platforms turn into cesspools of hate and misinformation and watch people stop using them altogether. Or they can just stop offering their services in Texas, which also exposes them to potential liability since the law makes it illegal for social media platforms to discriminate against Texans based on their location.
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  • The state law, referred to as HB 20, makes it illegal for large social networks like Facebook and Twitter to "block, ban, remove, de-platform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression."
  • HB 20 does carve out exemptions, including those that allow social networks to remove content that "directly incites criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence targeted against a person or group" based on certain characteristics, or that "is unlawful expression."
  • We need to fix social networks by removing toxic content. This month's appeals court ruling does the exact opposite and could even deal a fatal blow to social media as we know it. The only thing worse than not fixing the social platforms we have now would be to see them be subject to a constant slew of lawsuits or devolve into platforms that become bastions of hate speech and misinformation. Let's hope Congress doesn't let us down.
Javier E

Google's Relationship With Facts Is Getting Wobblier - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...675899

google accuracy AI search nonsense knowledge research technology

shared by Javier E on 07 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Misinformation or even disinformation in search results was already a problem before generative AI. Back in 2017, The Outline noted that a snippet once confidently asserted that Barack Obama was the king of America.
  • This is what experts have worried about since ChatGPT first launched: false information confidently presented as fact, without any indication that it could be totally wrong. The problem is “the way things are presented to the user, which is Here’s the answer,” Chirag Shah, a professor of information and computer science at the University of Washington, told me. “You don’t need to follow the sources. We’re just going to give you the snippet that would answer your question. But what if that snippet is taken out of context?”
  • Responding to the notion that Google is incentivized to prevent users from navigating away, he added that “we have no desire to keep people on Google.
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  • Pandu Nayak, a vice president for search who leads the company’s search-quality teams, told me that snippets are designed to be helpful to the user, to surface relevant and high-caliber results. He argued that they are “usually an invitation to learn more” about a subject
  • “It’s a strange world where these massive companies think they’re just going to slap this generative slop at the top of search results and expect that they’re going to maintain quality of the experience,” Nicholas Diakopoulos, a professor of communication studies and computer science at Northwestern University, told me. “I’ve caught myself starting to read the generative results, and then I stop myself halfway through. I’m like, Wait, Nick. You can’t trust this.”
  • Nayak said the team focuses on the bigger underlying problem, and whether its algorithm can be trained to address it.
  • If Nayak is right, and people do still follow links even when presented with a snippet, anyone who wants to gain clicks or money through search has an incentive to capitalize on that—perhaps even by flooding the zone with AI-written content.
  • Nayak told me that Google plans to fight AI-generated spam as aggressively as it fights regular spam, and claimed that the company keeps about 99 percent of spam out of search results.
  • The result is a world that feels more confused, not less, as a result of new technology.
  • The Kenya result still pops up on Google, despite viral posts about it. This is a strategic choice, not an error. If a snippet violates Google policy (for example, if it includes hate speech) the company manually intervenes and suppresses it, Nayak said. However, if the snippet is untrue but doesn’t violate any policy or cause harm, the company will not intervene.
  • experts I spoke with had several ideas for how tech companies might mitigate the potential harms of relying on AI in search
  • For starters, tech companies could become more transparent about generative AI. Diakopoulos suggested that they could publish information about the quality of facts provided when people ask questions about important topics
  • They can use a coding technique known as “retrieval-augmented generation,” or RAG, which instructs the bot to cross-check its answer with what is published elsewhere, essentially helping it self-fact-check. (A spokesperson for Google said the company uses similar techniques to improve its output.) They could open up their tools to researchers to stress-test it. Or they could add more human oversight to their outputs, maybe investing in fact-checking efforts.
  • Fact-checking, however, is a fraught proposition. In January, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, laid off roughly 6 percent of its workers, and last month, the company cut at least 40 jobs in its Google News division. This is the team that, in the past, has worked with professional fact-checking organizations to add fact-checks into search results
  • Alex Heath, at The Verge, reported that top leaders were among those laid off, and Google declined to give me more information. It certainly suggests that Google is not investing more in its fact-checking partnerships as it builds its generative-AI tool.
  • Nayak acknowledged how daunting a task human-based fact-checking is for a platform of Google’s extraordinary scale. Fifteen percent of daily searches are ones the search engine hasn’t seen before, Nayak told me. “With this kind of scale and this kind of novelty, there’s no sense in which we can manually curate results.”
  • Creating an infinite, largely automated, and still accurate encyclopedia seems impossible. And yet that seems to be the strategic direction Google is taking.
  • A representative for Google told me that this was an example of a “false premise” search, a type that is known to trip up the algorithm. If she were trying to date me, she argued, she wouldn’t just stop at the AI-generated response given by the search engine, but would click the link to fact-check it.
Javier E

All the Trump Indictments Everywhere All at Once - 0 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...ump-indictments-everywhere-all

corruption gop maga electorate trump culture politics inflation policy bias

shared by Javier E on 24 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • Here’s Furman:There’s what economists think people should think about inflation—and what people actually think about inflation are different. . . .Inflation has big winners and losers. So surprise inflation helps debtors and hurts creditors. And there are probably tens of millions of people in our economy who have benefited from inflation. Maybe it’s a business that was able to raise prices more. Maybe a worker who was able to get a bigger raise. Maybe it’s someone whose mortgage is now worth 10 percent less.But there are not tens of millions of people who think they’ve benefited from inflation. In fact, I’m not sure there are tens of people who think they’ve benefited from inflation.And so it has these winners and losers. The losers are very aware of their losses. The winners are completely oblivious to their gains.So then as a policymaker, do you want to sort of make people happy? Or do you want to sort of do what you think is in their economic and financial interests? And that to me is not obvious.
  • Oh it’s obvious to me. The People are the problem.But they’re a persistent problem and until the AIs replace us, The People aren’t going away. So given this constraint, I’m not sure that an optimal solution is ever going to be politically possible in American democracy. The country is too fractured. Our political institutions too compromised.
  • so if you work from the assumption that we’re going to shoot wide of the mark in one direction or the other, I’d still rather be on the Trump-Biden side of having done too much, and dealing with our attendant problems than the Bush-Obama side of having done too little.
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