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Opinion | Elon Musk Is Buying Twitter. Shudder. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ter-purchase-robber-baron.html musk twitter free speech
shared by Javier E on 30 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Carnegie and the steel barons elected Republican lawmakers and presidents committed to protecting their companies’ profits by levying high tariffs on foreign competitors. Mr. Musk’s companies, and his fortune, were built with billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies for his electric-car company, Tesla, and billions more in NASA contracts to ferry American astronauts into space, launch satellites and provide high-speed internet services tethered to his fleet of some 3,000 satellites.
  • What makes Mr. Musk particularly powerful and potentially more dangerous than the industrial-era moguls is his ability to promote his businesses and political notions with a tweet
  • The likely consequences of Mr. Musk’s Twitter ownership will be political as well as economic disruption.
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  • It is not unreasonable to expect that a Musk-owned and controlled Twitter will, in the name of free speech, allow disinformation and misinformation to be tweeted ad infinitum so long as it discredits his political opponents and celebrates and enriches himself and his allies.
  • Mr. Musk is correct that “free speech” must be honored and protected. But is it not time that we, as a people and a nation, engage in a wide-ranging, inclusive public debate on when and how free speech creates “a clear and present danger” — as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote a century ago — and whether we need government to find a way, through law or regulation or persuasion, to prevent this from happening?
  • Elon Musk is a product of his — and our — times. Rather than debate or deride his influence, we must recognize that he is not the self-made genius businessman he plays in the media. Instead, his success was prompted and paid for by taxpayer money and abetted by government officials who have allowed him and other billionaire businessmen to exercise more and more control over our economy and our politics.
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What Comes After the Search Warrant? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671093 politics history crisis violence rule of law trump
shared by Javier E on 10 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • This sort of rhetoric cooled, for a time, after Trump’s victory. But then came Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and possible collusion. And the subsequent arrests of some of the president’s closest confidants. Then came the first impeachment of Trump himself. By the time his reelection campaign got under way, Trump was fashioning himself a wartime president, portraying himself on the front lines of a pitched battle between decent, patriotic Americans and a “deep state” of government thugs who aim to enforce conformity and silence dissent.
  • Voter after voter told me there had been a plot to sabotage Trump’s presidency from the start, and now there was a secretive plot to stop him from winning a second term. Everyone in government—public-health officials, low-level bureaucrats, local election administrators—was in on it. The goal wasn’t to steal the election from Trump; it was to steal the election from them.
  • This kind of thinking explains why countless individuals would go on to donate their hard-earned money—more than $250 million in total—to an “Election Defense Fund” that didn’t exist. It explains why others swarmed vote-counting centers, intimidated poll workers, signed on to shoddy legal efforts, flocked to fringe voices advocating solutions such as martyrdom and secession from the union, threatened to kill elections officials, boarded buses to Washington, and ultimately stormed the United States Capitol.
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  • What made January 6 so predictable—the willingness of Republican leaders to prey on the insecurities and outright paranoia of these voters—is what makes August 8 so dangerous.
  • “If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you,” read a tweet from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. They followed up: “The IRS is coming for you. The DOJ is coming for you. The FBI is coming for you. No one is safe from political punishment in Joe Biden’s America.”
  • It won’t stop with Trump—that much is certain. The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, all but promised retaliation against the Justice Department should his party retake the majority this fall
  • We don’t know exactly what the FBI was looking for at Mar-a-Lago. We don’t know what was found. What we must acknowledge—even those of us who believe Trump has committed crimes, in some cases brazenly so, and deserves full prosecution under the law—is that bringing him to justice could have some awful consequences.
  • If Trump wins, he and his hard-line loyalists will set about purging the DOJ, the intelligence community, and other vital government departments of careerists deemed insufficiently loyal. There will be no political cost to him for doing so; a Trump victory will be read as a mandate to prosecute his opponents. Indeed, that seems to be exactly where we’re headed.
  • It feels lowest-common-denominator lazy, in such uncertain times, to default to speculation of 1860s-style secession and civil war. But it’s clearly on the minds of Americans. Last year, a poll from the University of Virginia showed that a majority of Trump voters (52 percent) and a strong minority of Biden voters (41 percent) strongly or somewhat agreed that America is so fractured, they would favor red and blue states seceding from the union to form their own countries.
  • Meanwhile, a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland showed that one in three Americans believes violence against the government is justified, and a separate poll by NPR earlier this year showed that one in 10 Americans believes violence is justified “right now.”
  • Assuming that Trump runs in 2024, the stakes are even higher. If Biden—or another Democrat—defeats him, Republicans will have all the more reason to reject the results, given what they see as the Democrats’ politically motivated investigation of the likely Republican nominee.
  • Is that justice worth the associated risks? Yesterday, the nation’s top law-enforcement officers decided it was. We can only hope they were correct.
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Efforts to block Inflation Reduction Act programs ramp up - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-climate-drug-pricing-programs IRA response GOP policy
shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • The nation’s largest companies and lobbying groups spent a combined $2.3 billion in 2022 to shape or scuttle key components of the emerging law, according to a review of federal ethics disclosures and data compiled by the money-in-politics watchdog OpenSecrets.
  • Among the fiercest critics was the pharmaceutical industry, which spent more than $375 million to lobby over that period, the records show. Many tried and failed to block Congress from granting the government new powers to negotiate the price of selected prescription drugs under Medicare.
  • The work to implement that program is underway: The Biden administration is supposed to identify the first 10 drugs it is targeting for negotiation by September, continue the formal process into 2024 and see the prices implemented in 2026, with more drugs to follow in future years. Drug manufacturers that refuse to comply would face steep financial penalties.
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AI's Education Revolution - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...tor-animation-schools-5aec9a5e AI education revolution teaching tech
shared by Javier E on 22 May 23 - No Cached
  • Millions of students use Khan Academy’s online videos and problem sets to supplement their schoolwork. Three years ago, Sal Khan and I spoke about developing a tool like the Illustrated Primer from Neal Stephenson’s 1995 novel “The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.” It’s an education tablet, in the author’s words, in which “the pictures moved, and you could ask them questions and get answers.” Adaptive, intuitive, personalized, self-paced—nothing like today’s education. But it’s science-fiction.
  • Last week I spoke with Mr. Khan, who told me, “Now I think a Primer is within reach within five years. In some ways, we’ve even surpassed some of the elements of the Primer, using characters like George Washington to teach lessons.” What changed? Simple—generative artificial intelligence. Khan Academy has been working with OpenAI’s ChatGPT
  • Mr. Khan’s stated goals for Khan Academy are “personalization and mastery.” He notes that “high-performing, wealthier households have resources—time, know-how and money—to provide their children one-on-one tutoring to learn subjects and then use schools to prove what they know.” With his company’s new AI-infused tool, Khanmigo—sounds like con migo or “with me”—one-on-one teaching can scale to the masses.
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  • Khanmigo allows students to make queries in the middle of lessons or videos and understands the context of what they’re watching. You can ask, “What is the significance of the green light in ‘The Great Gatsby?’ ” Heck, that one is still over my head. Same with help on factoring polynomials, including recognizing which step a student got wrong, not just knowing the answer is wrong, fixing ChatGPT’s math problem. Sci-fi becomes reality: a scalable super tutor.
  • Khanmigo saw a limited rollout on March 15, with a few thousand students paying a $20-a-month donation. Plugging into ChatGPT isn’t cheap. A wider rollout is planned for June 15, perhaps under $10 a month, less for those in need. The world has cheap tablets, so it shouldn’t be hard to add an Alexa-like voice and real-time videogame-like animations. Then the Diamond Age will be upon us.
  • Mr. Khan suggests, “There is no limit to learning. If you ask, ‘Why is the sky blue?’ you’ll get a short answer and then maybe, ‘But let’s get back to the mitochondria lesson.’ ” Mr. Khan thinks “average students can become exceptional students.”
  • Mr. Khan tells me, “We want to raise the ceiling, but also the floor.” He wants to provide his company’s AI-learning technology to “villages and other places with little or no teachers or tools. We can give everyone a tutor, everyone a writing coach.” That’s when education and society will really change.
  • Teaching will be transformed. Mr. Khan wants Khanmigo “to provide teachers in the U.S. and around the world an indispensable tool to make their lives better” by administering lessons and increasing communications between teachers and students. I would question any school that doesn’t encourage its use.
  • With this technology, arguments about classroom size and school choice will eventually fade away. Providing low-cost 21st-century Illustrated Primers to every student around the world will then become a moral obligation
  • If school boards and teachers unions in the U.S. don’t get in the way, maybe we’ll begin to see better headlines.
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Opinion | Why So Many Children of Immigrants Rise to the Top - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mmigrants-success-america.html immigrants US history analysis success trends
shared by Javier E on 11 Jul 22 - No Cached
  • Immigrants and their children are assimilating into the United States as quickly now as in the past
  • “first-generation immigrants are more costly to governments than are the native-born,” according to a 2017 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the “second generation are among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S.”
  • Second-generation-immigrant success stories have long been a part of America’s history. Looking at census records from 1880, the researchers found that men whose fathers were low-income immigrants made more money as adults than the sons of low-income men born in the United States
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  • Mr. Abramitzky and Ms. Boustan observed the same pattern a century later. Children born around 1980 to men from Mexico, India, Brazil and almost every other country outearned the children of U.S.-born men.
  • “America really does have golden streets that allow immigrants to quickly make more than they could have earned at home,” they write. But, they add, “moving up the economic ladder in America — and catching up to the U.S.-born — takes time.”
  • They are more likely, Mr. Abramitzky and Ms. Boustan found, than immigrants of the past to come from countries that are significantly poorer than the United States, including El Salvador, India and Vietnam
  • They arrived at two answers. First, the children had an easy time outdoing parents whose careers were inhibited by poor language skills or a lack of professional credentials
  • they tried to figure out why those children did so well
  • If immigrants are so upwardly mobile, why doesn’t it seem that way? One reason is that there are more newcomers than there have been in decades and most haven’t had time yet to get ahead. The share of foreign-born people in the United States is back to the levels of the first two decades of the 20th century.
  • Second, immigrants tended to settle in parts of the country experiencing strong job growth. That gave them an edge over native-born Americans who were firmly rooted in places with faltering economies
  • In contrast, affluent, educated immigrants tend to be the least upwardly mobile, simply because they’re already at or near the top.
  • Mr. Abramitzky and Ms. Boustan dispute the argument that immigrants frequently take jobs from native-born Americans. Less skilled immigrants gravitate toward jobs for which there is relatively little competition from native-born Americans, such as picking crops, while highly skilled immigrants often create more jobs for native-born Americans by starting businesses and inventing things,
  • The notion that immigrants have become a permanent underclass, isolated from the American mainstream, is popular among immigration restrictionists — as well as among some pro-immigration groups that say immigrants need more help to break out of poverty
  • The truth is that today’s immigrants are advancing just as swiftly as those of the past. “The American dream,” Mr. Abramitzky said in an interview, “is just as alive now as it was a century ago.”
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Amazon Has Escaped America's Retail Malaise - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...caped-america-s-retail-malaise amazon retail model business model
shared by Javier E on 29 Jul 22 - No Cached
  • The company’s growing emphasis on third-party selling, a very different business model than the big-box stores’, has helped lift the tech giant while competitors are forced to offer big discounts.
  • While Amazon does sell some items directly, the company is predominantly an online marketplace like EBay Inc., meaning it collects commissions and fees when shoppers purchase things on the site without having to actually buy that inventory. In the three months ended June 30, 57% of all things sold on Amazon came from independent merchants who bear all the inventory risk—the highest that number has ever been.
  • when a merchant selling goods on Amazon cuts prices, Amazon still gets paid—even if that means the company takes a smaller commission on the sales, and even if the merchant loses money. 
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  • Unlike store shelves that have to be physically rearranged, the online marketplace’s search engine surfaces what you want when you want it from a deep inventory of hundreds of millions of products. Meanwhile a big-box store can only carry approximately 100,000 different goods.
  • The marketplace model also helps Amazon shift more quickly to things people want to buy. Its hundreds of thousands of merchants scour search engine trends in real time to know which products they should be selling and when
  • Amazon’s revenue from third-party seller services—a category that includes commissions and fees for things like warehousing, packaging and delivery—increased 9% in the second quarter to $27.38 billion.
  • Another positive note was that subscription services revenue, which is mostly Prime memberships, grew 14% in the quarter, reversing three consecutive quarters of slowing growth—meaning shoppers still see value in the membership, despite a $20 price hike in February to $139 a year.
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As Russia Chokes Europe's Gas, France Enters Era of Energy 'Sobriety' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...russia-gas-europe-france.html energy france europe conservation crisis policy
shared by Javier E on 05 Sep 22 - No Cached
  • “We have been confronted with a series of crises, one more grave than the other,” Mr. Macron said in a televised speech to the nation late last month. “The picture that I’m painting is one of the end of abundance,” he added. “We have reached a tipping point.”
  • The national effort calls for businesses and individuals to embrace energy conservation by increasing car-pooling, lowering thermostats and shutting off illuminated advertising signs at night — to name a few — or face the risk of rolling blackouts or energy rationing.
  • The government has been spending lavishly — over 26 billion euros ($26 billion) since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — to keep gas and electric bills affordable, and last week it announced that its cap on household energy bills would be extended until the end of the year. The moves to control energy costs, including the re-nationalization of the energy provider EDF, have helped give France one of the lowest inflation rates in Europe, at 6.5 percent. (The overall eurozone rate for August was 9.1 percent.)
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  • France would seem to be less vulnerable than its neighbors: It boasts the biggest nuclear energy arsenal of any European Union country, and is one of the least reliant on Russian natural gas. But France faces an energy crisis of its own, as its nuclear industry addresses cracks, corrosion and other troubles that have forced EDF to temporarily shut down 32 of France’s 56 nuclear reactors.
  • The outages at EDF, which is also Europe’s biggest electricity exporter, have sent France’s nuclear power output plunging to its lowest level in nearly three decades. In addition, France’s worst drought in 30 years this summer has lowered river levels, cutting supplies of hydroelectric power.
  • On Friday, wholesale electricity prices for 2023 in France set a record, surging past €1,000 per megawatt-hour. Many French companies and retailers buy their electricity with three-year contracts that are set to expire, meaning they will have to be renewed at peak prices.
  • President Macron, who faced a stiff presidential election campaign in April that saw the far-right challenger, Marine Le Pen, gain ground by addressing French families’ worries over purchasing power, has focused on shielding households from rising energy costs.
  • Without the cap, French inflation would be about three percentage points higher, the French statistics agency Insee said in a report issued Friday.
  • In recent days, the government issued announcements calling on the French to curb a range of activities, in hopes of collectively saving energy. Among them: refraining from running washers at night, keeping thermostats at 66 degrees Fahrenheit and increasing use of public transportation
  • Many municipalities outside Paris started closing swimming pools intermittently this summer to save money. Other cities are restricting public lighting, which can account for over 40 percent of electricity bills.
  • The town of Thouars in western France has been turning off streetlights from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. since June and plans to replace bulbs with LED lighting. Strasbourg, a mid-size city on the German border, will close museums two days a week instead of one.
  • In northern France, some high schools in Brittany will lower their thermostats, while the neighboring region of Normandy will experiment with using wood-burning furnaces for heat in some schools as an alternative to gas.
  • “We need a radical change,” Ms. Borne said. “Everyone must ask themselves what they can do to consume less.”
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Kevin McCarthy Found Out He's No Donald Trump - 0 views

plus.thebulwark.com/...ccarthy-no-donald-trump-budget congress GOP compromise commission politics US policy crisis
shared by Javier E on 07 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Here’s the thing: MacGuineas, the GOP, most Democrats, and people like me, unnerved by the trend and worried that interest payments on the borrowed money will prevent spending on real needs, agree that we are on an unsustainable fiscal course. Gaetz & co. are not wrong to want to cut spending. They are just wrong about everything else—where and how much and how fast to cut, and their iron rule that taxes should never, ever be raised and should always be reduced, especially for corporations and the rich, who would use their new cash to create jobs. (Spoiler: They didn’t.
  • Trump theoretically was leading a GOP populist revolution, but in reality the massive tax cut he signed was more of the same deficit-swelling, trickle-down delusion.
  • As I wrote in my book on political negotiations, the conditions for success include patience, reliance on facts, and the maturity to understand that you won’t get everything you want—but that all sides need to walk away with a few things they can feel good about, or at least can defend to their supporters.
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  • McCarthy managed to do this with Biden on the debt deal, to the fury of Republican hardliners. But how else can you govern a country of 330 million? It’s hard under the best of circumstances, and it’s impossible when you only control a tiny slice of government—and not by much. Here we are talking about a 221-212 GOP majority in one half of one branch, Congress, in a government that has three branches.
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Climate Reparations Are Officially Happening - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...676183 climate damage reparations fund
shared by Javier E on 01 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Today, on the opening day of COP28, the United Nations climate summit in Dubai, the host country pushed through a decision that wasn’t expected to happen until the last possible minute of the two-week gathering: the creation and structure of the “loss and damage” fund, which will source money from developed countries to help pay for climate damages in developing ones. For the first time, the world has a system in place for climate reparations.
  • Nearly every country on Earth has now adopted the fund, though the text is not technically final until the end of the conference, officially slated for December 12.
  • “We have delivered history today—the first time a decision has been adopted on day one of any COP,”
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  • Over much opposition from developing countries, the U.S. has insisted that the fund (technically named the Climate Impact and Response Fund) will be housed at the World Bank, where the U.S. holds a majority stake; every World Bank president has been a U.S. citizen. The U.S. also insisted that contributing to the fund not be obligatory. Sue Biniaz, the deputy special envoy for climate at the State Department, said earlier this year that she “violently opposes” arguments that developed countries have a legal obligation under the UN framework to pay into the fund.
  • The text agreed upon in Dubai on Thursday appears to strike a delicate balance: The fund will indeed be housed at the World Bank, at least for four years, but it will be run according to direction provided at the UN climate gatherings each year, and managed by a board where developed nations are designated fewer than half the seats.
  • That board’s decisions will supersede those of the World Bank “where appropriate.” Small island nations, which are threatened by extinction because of sea-level rise, will have dedicated seats. Countries that are not members of the World Bank will still be able to access the fund.
  • the U.S. remains adamant that the fund does not amount to compensation for past emissions, and it rejects any whiff of suggestions that it is liable for other countries’ climate damages.
  • Even the name “loss and damage,” with its implication of both harm and culpability, has been contentious among delegates
  • Several countries immediately announced their intended contribution to the fund. The United Arab Emirates and Germany each said they would give $100 million. The U.K. pledged more than$50 million, and Japan committed to $10 million. The U.S. said it would provide $17.5 million, a small number given its responsibility for the largest historical share of global emissions.
  • Total commitments came in on the order of hundreds of  millions, far shy of an earlier goal of $100 billion a year.
  • Other donations may continue to trickle in. But the sum is paltry considering researchers recently concluded that 55 climate-vulnerable countries have incurred $525 billion in climate-related losses from 2000 to 2019, depriving them of 20 percent of the wealth they would otherwise have
  • Still, it’s a big change in how climate catastrophe is treated by developed nations. For the first time, the countries most responsible for climate change are collectively, formally claiming some of that responsibility
  • One crucial unresolved variable is whether countries such as China and Saudi Arabia—still not treated as “developed” nations under the original UN climate framework—will acknowledge their now-outsize role in worsening climate change by contributing to the fund.
  • Another big question now will be whether the U.S. can get Congress to agree to payments to the fund, something congressional Republicans are likely to oppose.
  • Influence by oil and gas industry interests—arguably the entities truly responsible for driving climate change—now delays even public funding of global climate initiatives, he said. “The fossil-fuel industry has successfully convinced the world that loss and damage is something the taxpayer should pay for.” And yet, Whitehouse told me that the industry lobbies against efforts to use public funding this way, swaying Congress and therefore hobbling the U.S.’s ability to uphold even its meager contributions to international climate funding.
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Opinion | 'Killers of the Flower Moon' Is Coming to Theaters, But Being Erased from Cla... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...wer-moon-oklahoma-history.html murder American Indian rich tribe Oklahoma movie Scorsese oil racism
shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Numerous other Osage had died suspiciously — the cause of death often cloaked behind alcoholic poisoning or wasting illness or as simply unknown. Despite evidence that the victims had been murdered for their oil money, the cases were never properly investigated. Moreover, they could not be linked to the same killer caught by the bureau. The history of the Reign of Terror was less a question of who did it than who didn’t do it.
  • It was about a widespread culture of killing. It was about prominent white citizens who paid for killings, doctors who administered poisons, morticians who ignored evidence of bullet wounds, lawmen and prosecutors who were on the take and many others who remained complicit in their silence — all because they were profiting from what they referred to openly as the “Indian business.” The real death toll was undoubtedly higher than 24. One bureau agent admitted: “There are so many of these murder cases. There are hundreds and hundreds.”
  • The Osage had these events seared in their memories. Yet most Americans had excised even the bureau’s sanitized account from their consciences. Like the Tulsa Race Massacre, which occurred during the same period, the Osage Reign of Terror was generally not taught in schools, even in Oklahoma
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  • even now, as their stories are being dramatized in a movie and shown in theaters across the country, there is a campaign in Oklahoma — this time with legislation — to deter the history from being taught in schools.
  • The movement to suppress elements of American history extends well beyond Oklahoma. According to an analysis by The Washington Post, more than two dozen states have adopted laws that make it easier to remove books from school libraries and to prevent certain teaching on race, gender and sexuality
  • In 2023, PEN America, which defends freedom of speech, reported that book bans in U.S. public school classrooms and libraries had surged 33 percent over the previous school year, with more than 3,000 recorded removals; among them are classics by the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison (banned in 30 school districts) and Margaret Atwood (banned in 34). School curriculums are being revised to mask discomfiting truths — so much so that in Florida students will now be taught that some African Americans benefited from slavery because it gave them “skills.”
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Foreign Firms Pull Billions in Earnings Out of China - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...earnings-out-of-china-0423b68a china earnings investment
shared by Javier E on 06 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Foreign firms yanked more than $160 billion in total earnings from China during six successive quarters through the end of September, according to an analysis of Chinese data, an unusually sustained run of profit outflows that shows how much the country’s appeal is waning for foreign capital.
  • The outflows add to pressure on China’s currency, the yuan, when the country’s central bank is already battling to slow its decline as investors sour on Chinese stocks and bonds and new investment in China is scarce. The yuan has depreciated 5.7% against the U.S. dollar this year and touched its lowest level in more than a decade in September. 
  • A range of factors have contributed to the profit exodus, economists and corporate executives say. Those include a widening gap between China’s interest rates and those in the U.S. and Europe that has made it more attractive to park earnings in the West.
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  • many foreign firms are looking for better uses for their money, as China’s economy slows and geopolitical tensions rise. Chilly relations between Beijing and the U.S.-led West have pushed global companies to rethink their supply chains and exposure to China.
  • The data show that for all but two quarters between 2014 and the middle of last year, foreign firms were reinvesting more in China than they were transferring abroad. In 2021, for instance, firms reinvested a net $170 billion. 
  • That shifted in the middle of 2022, when China was under sporadic lockdowns and the U.S. Federal Reserve began raising interest rates to combat rocketing inflation. Outflows have continued in each quarter since. 
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Sam Altman's ouster at OpenAI exposes growing rift in AI industry - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...m-altman-ilya-sutskever-openai AI threat silicon valley rift industry coup
shared by Javier E on 19 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, one of OpenAI’s independent board members, told Forbes in January that there was “no outcome where this organization is one of the big five technology companies.”
  • “My hope is that we can do a lot more good for the world than just become another corporation that gets that big,” D’Angelo said in the interview. He did not respond to requests for comment.
  • Two of the board members who voted Altman out worked for think tanks backed by Open Philanthropy, a tech billionaire-backed foundation that supports projects preventing AI from causing catastrophic risk to humanity
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  • Helen Toner, the director of strategy and foundational research grants for Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown, and Tasha McCauley, whose LinkedIn profile says she began work as an adjunct senior management scientist at Rand Corporation earlier this year. Toner has previously spoken at conferences for a philanthropic movement closely tied to AI safety. McCauley is also involved in the work.
  • Sutskever helped create AI software at the University of Toronto, called AlexNet, which classified objects in photographs with more accuracy than any previous software had achieved, laying much of the foundation for the field of computer vision and deep learning.
  • He recently shared a radically different vision for how AI might evolve in the near term. Within five to 10 years, there could be “data centers that are much smarter than people,” Sutskever said on a recent episode of the AI podcast “No Priors.” Not just in terms of memory or knowledge, but with a deeper insight and ability to learn faster than humans.
  • At the bare minimum, Sutskever added, it’s important to work on controlling superintelligence today. “Imprinting onto them a strong desire to be nice and kind to people — because those data centers,” he said, “they will be really quite powerful.”
  • OpenAI has a unique governing structure, which it adopted in 2019. It created a for-profit subsidiary that allowed investors a return on the money they invested into OpenAI, but capped how much they could get back, with the rest flowing back into the company’s nonprofit. The company’s structure also allows OpenAI’s nonprofit board to govern the activities of the for-profit entity, including the power to fire its chief executive.
  • As news of the circumstances around Altman’s ouster began to come out, Silicon Valley circles have turned to anger at OpenAI’s board.
  • “What happened at OpenAI today is a board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs,” Ron Conway, a longtime venture capitalist who was one of the attendees at OpenAI’s developer conference, said on X. “It is shocking, it is irresponsible, and it does not do right by Sam and Greg or all the builders in OpenAI.”
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Opinion | The OpenAI drama explains the human penchant for risk-taking - The Washington... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...nity-risk-alignment-technology AI threat human weaknesses policy
shared by Javier E on 21 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Along with more pedestrian worries about various ways that AI could harm users, one side worried that ChatGPT and its many cousins might thrust humanity onto a kind of digital bobsled track, terminating in disaster — either with the machines wiping out their human progenitors or with humans using the machines to do so themselves. Once things start moving in earnest, there’s no real way to slow down or bail out, so the worriers wanted everyone to sit down and have a long think before getting anything rolling too fast.
  • Skeptics found all this a tad overwrought. For one thing, it left out all the ways in which AI might save humanity by providing cures for aging or solutions to global warming. And many folks thought it would be years before computers could possess anything approaching true consciousness, so we could figure out the safety part as we go. Still others were doubtful that truly sentient machines were even on the horizon; they saw ChatGPT and its many relatives as ultrasophisticated electronic parrots
  • Worrying that such an entity might decide it wants to kill people is a bit like wondering whether your iPhone would prefer to holiday in Crete or Majorca next summer.
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  • OpenAI was was trying to balance safety and development — a balance that became harder to maintain under the pressures of commercialization.
  • It was founded as a nonprofit by people who professed sincere concern about taking things safe and slow. But it was also full of AI nerds who wanted to, you know, make cool AIs.
  • OpenAI set up a for-profit arm — but with a corporate structure that left the nonprofit board able to cry “stop” if things started moving too fast (or, if you prefer, gave “a handful of people with no financial stake in the company the power to upend the project on a whim”).
  • On Friday, those people, in a fit of whimsy, kicked Brockman off the board and fired Altman. Reportedly, the move was driven by Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, who, along with other members of the board, has allegedly clashed repeatedly with Altman over the speed of generative AI development and the sufficiency of safety precautions.
  • Chief among the signatories was Sutskever, who tweeted Monday morning, “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.”
  • Humanity can’t help itself; we have kept monkeying with technology, no matter the dangers, since some enterprising hominid struck the first stone ax.
  • a software company has little in the way of tangible assets; its people are its capital. And this capital looks willing to follow Altman to where the money is.
  • More broadly still, it perfectly encapsulates the AI alignment problem, which in the end is also a human alignment problem
  • And that’s why we are probably not going to “solve” it so much as hope we don’t have to.
  • it’s also a valuable general lesson about corporate structure and corporate culture. The nonprofit’s altruistic mission was in tension with the profit-making, AI-generating part — and when push came to shove, the profit-making part won.
  • When scientists started messing with the atom, there were real worries that nuclear weapons might set Earth’s atmosphere on fire. By the time an actual bomb was exploded, scientists were pretty sure that wouldn’t happen
  • But if the worries had persisted, would anyone have behaved differently — knowing that it might mean someone else would win the race for a superweapon? Better to go forward and ensure that at least the right people were in charge.
  • Now consider Sutskever: Did he change his mind over the weekend about his disputes with Altman? More likely, he simply realized that, whatever his reservations, he had no power to stop the bobsled — so he might as well join his friends onboard. And like it or not, we’re all going with them.
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A Tale of Two Moralities - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...14krugman.html discourse morality public conservatism liberalism welfare state politics
shared by Javier E on 14 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • the great divide in our politics isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best; it’s about differences in those very moral imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs over what constitutes justice.
  • the real challenge we face is not how to resolve our differences — something that won’t happen any time soon — but how to keep the expression of those differences within bounds.
  • The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.
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  • One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.
  • This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development. Commentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not, pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it.
  • we have, for the most part, managed to agree on certain ground rules in the abortion controversy: it’s acceptable to express your opinion and to criticize the other side, but it’s not acceptable either to engage in violence or to encourage others to do so. What we need now is an extension of those ground rules to the wider national debate.
  • When people talk about partisan differences, they often seem to be implying that these differences are petty, matters that could be resolved with a bit of good will. But what we’re talking about here is a fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government.
  • Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not
  • This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development.
  • There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care
  • The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.
  • We need to have leaders of both parties — or Mr. Obama alone if necessary — declare that both violence and any language hinting at the acceptability of violence are out of bounds. We all want reconciliation, but the road to that goal begins with an agreement that our differences will be settled by the rule of law.
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Studios Are Loosening Their Reluctance to Send Old Shows Back to Netflix - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...netflix-licensed-shows.html netflix license movies streaming media
shared by Javier E on 15 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • around five years ago, executives realized they were “selling nuclear weapons technology” to a powerful rival, as Disney’s chief executive, Robert A. Iger, put it. Studios needed those same beloved movies and shows for the streaming services they were building from scratch, and fueling Netflix’s rise was only hurting them. The content spigots were, in large part, turned off.
  • Confronting sizable debt burdens and the fact that most streaming services still don’t make money, studios like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have begun to soften their do-not-sell-to-Netflix stances. The companies are still holding back their most popular content — movies from the Disney-owned Star Wars and Marvel universes and blockbuster original series like HBO’s “Game of Thrones” aren’t going anywhere — but dozens of other films like “Dune” and “Prometheus” and series like “Young Sheldon” are being sent to the streaming behemoth in return for much-needed cash. And Netflix is once again benefiting.
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Kevin McCarthy hammers Biden admin's agenda as gas prices surge: 'Create more supply' |... - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...carthy-biden-energy-gas-prices
shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy slammed the Biden administration amid rampant inflation, arguing the White House caused the surge in prices as Americans battle sky-high costs at the pump.
  • It weakens America. Think about, this is our reserves. In case we got in trouble, we can actually create more diesel. We can create more natural gas. It not only harms America, it harms the world by not being safe.
  • He emboldened Putin because Putin got more money to put into his own war.
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  • If America has more jobs, America energy independent, America supplying our allies with natural gas. And also think of this: American natural gas is 41% cleaner than Russian natural gas, so the environment would be safer if America was able to produce it.
  • He has done every decision wrong in the process of going and to use our reserves now for in the future, why doesn't he create more supply to make the price go down? That would be the answer.
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Of Course Putin Is Being Canceled - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...626978 cancel ostracism russia invasion
shared by Javier E on 09 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The ancient Greeks understood the power of creating outcasts. Athenians had a range of punishments available to them that would make even a southern Republican governor queasy, including death by exposure or being thrown into a chasm.
  • Economic devastation and cultural deprivation are powerful punishments. They are also an accurate description of what is happening to Russia as Western sanctions bite, private companies break links with the region, and Putin’s regime is excluded from international organizations and alliances.
  • A true cancellation typically involves the subject being cast out of their professional network, denied the ability to make money, and rejected by their social circle.
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  • Russia’s status in the world has abruptly and obviously changed. Russians cannot escape their isolation as long as they cannot watch Netflix, access TikTok, or see their footballers play in international competitions. Pro-regime oligarchs, who once spent holidays in Europe, bought mansions in Mayfair, and visited their children at English private schools, now face visa restrictions and asset seizures. They have been denied the ability to use the rest of the continent as their gilded playground.
  • When a Russian spymaster complains about his country’s cancellation, our response should not be to laugh at an idiot confusing a culture war and a real one. Instead, we should recognize that economic and social isolation is a powerful weapon, and resolve to use it with the same restraint as any other weapon.
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Renaissance Period: Timeline, Art & Facts - HISTORY - 1 views

www.history.com/...renaissance
shared by jaxredd10 on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The Renaissance was a fervent period of European cultural, artistic, political and economic “rebirth” following the Middle Ages.
  • Some of the greatest thinkers, authors, statesmen, scientists and artists in human history thrived during this era, while global exploration opened up new lands and cultures to European commerce. T
  • Galieo (1564-1642): Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer whose pioneering work with telescopes enabled him to describes the moons of Jupiter and rings of Saturn. Placed under house arrest for his views of a heliocentric universe.
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  • Some historians, however, believe that such grim depictions of the Middle Ages were greatly exaggerated,
  • Among its many principles, humanism promoted the idea that man was the center of his own universe, and people should embrace human achievements in education, classical arts, literature and science.
  • In 1450, the invention of the Gutenberg printing press allowed for improved communication throughout Europe and for ideas to spread more quickly.
  • Great Italian writers, artists, politicians and others declared that they were participating in an intellectual and artistic revolution that would be much different from what they experienced during the Dark Ages.
  • Although other European countries experienced their Renaissance later than Italy, the impacts were still revolutionary.
  • Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519): Italian painter, architect, inventor, and “Renaissance man” responsible for painting “The Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper.
  • Also known as the “Dark Ages,” the era is often branded as a time of war, ignorance, famine and pandemics such as the Black Death.
  • By the early 17th century, the Renaissance movement had died out, giving way to the Age of Enlightenment.
  • Raphael (1483–1520): Italian painter who learned from da Vinci and Michelangelo. Best known for his paintings of the Madonna and “The School of Athens.”
  • Michelangelo (1483–1520): Italian sculptor, painter, and architect who carved “David” and painted The Sistine Chapel in Rome.
  • Art, architecture and science were closely linked during the Renaissance.
  • For instance, artists like da Vinci incorporated scientific principles, such as anatomy into their work, so they could recreate the human body with extraordinary precision.
  • Renaissance art was characterized by realism and naturalism. Artists strived to depict people and objects in a true-to-life way.
  • Some of the most famous artistic works that were produced during the Renaissance include:The Mona Lisa (Da Vinci)The Last Supper (Da Vinci)Statue of David (Michelangelo)The Birth of Venus (Botticelli)The Creation of Adam (Michelangelo)
  • Also, changing trade routes led to a period of economic decline and limited the amount of money that wealthy contributors could spend on the arts.
  • Donatello (1386–1466): Italian sculptor celebrated for lifelike sculptures like “David,” commissioned by the Medici family.
  • While many scholars view the Renaissance as a unique and exciting time in European history, others argue that the period wasn’t much different from the Middle Ages and that both eras overlapped more than traditional accounts suggest.
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Schools to blame for boys idolising Andrew Tate, says sacked teacher | News | The Times - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...-says-sacked-teacher-3d9ctgznb toxic masculinity teacher uk chivalry
shared by Javier E on 25 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • The rise of the influencer Andrew Tate has vindicated the decision to show Eton College pupils a controversial video on masculinity, according to the master who was sacked for doing so.
  • It also stated that “male aggression is a biological fact” and aired concerns about women competing in sports against transgender women.
  • “I think Tate is a symptom of what’s currently going wrong regarding the teaching of boys in schools,” Knowland said from his home in Stowmarket, Suffolk.
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  • “In a properly functioning education system, that’s giving them really robust messaging about what it means to be a man, they would have antibodies to fight off the sick messaging that Tate is giving. All they see is the guy who’s got a Bugatti and joking about telling women to make him a sandwich.
  • “When teachers try to explain why Tate isn’t someone to look up to, the teenage boys ask them, ‘Well, what colour is your Bugatti?’
  • “The premise needs to be attacked directly, which is that ‘no, money isn’t the main index of masculinity’. Otherwise, we would all just be looking up to gangsters and criminals.”
  • Knowland, who teaches English and has forged a career as an online tutor, was sacked in 2020 after refusing to take down a video he made for his students called The Patriarchy Paradox, which repeated claims that women would revert to a primitive life without men.
  • Knowland believes the issues he was seeking to address in the lecture, which is still on his YouTube channel and has had 255,000 views, have only increased since his sacking.
  • The Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) decided to take no action against Knowland after an inquiry. Eton College has previously said that the ruling did not undermine its decision to dismiss him.
  • The school reported the lecture to the TRA, which considered charges of undermining tolerance and failing to safeguard students but closed the case with no further action. In a statement, the school said: “This does not mean that Mr Knowland did nothing wrong or that Eton was not entitled to dismiss him.”
  • He added: “I think the most interesting part about the lecture and what resonated with my supporters was my stress on chivalry and the idea that a man’s strength should be put to the service of the weak and his family.
  • “Chivalry is the thing that we’re missing today and it’s become deformed and turned into machismo, which is masculinity without any sense of humility or meekness. I think this is what we need to return to. Some of the problems that Tate is addressing, things like men should be assertive, men should be competitive, men should be strong, etcetera, chivalry agrees with.
  • “But chivalry says, ‘Why do they need to be those things? Because it’s to serve the weak, not themselves.”
  • Knowland, 37, believes that Tate — who rose to infamy last year after videos of his diatribes led to him becoming the world’s most googled person — has tapped into a “malaise” among young men caused by the teaching of boys in schools.
  • As an example, last month Scotland had to pause movement of transgender prisoners after a row over whether a transgender female rapist should be imprisoned with biological women.
  • “For some, even saying that there are biological differences between men and women is offensive. That’s what my lecture said, that men are stronger,” Knowland added. “I don’t think that [women] should [compete in sport against transgender women]. I don’t think it’s safe.
  • The example I gave in the lecture [was] of the transgender fighter who fractured the woman’s skull, and could easily have killed her. I think there are good reasons why sporting bodies are moving towards and in some cases have already decided that there’s not going to be next events like that.”
  • During the Eton furore Simon Henderson, the head master of Eton, was criticised in some quarters for pursuing a “woke” culture at the school and his critics referred to him as “Trendy Hendy”. They pointed to pupils being asked to wear Black Lives Matter waistcoats and decolonising its curriculum as examples of the institution being captured by ideologues.
  • The content Knowland produces on his YouTube channel continues to be controversial. A recent video by the devout Catholic is entitled “Eight facts that killed evolution for me”.
  • “The lecture was addressing some very live issues at the time and it’s only got worse since then,” he said. “Women now feel that they haven’t got safe spaces to get undressed to go to a swimming pool. So those concepts in the lecture were hard hitting and provocative, because these are topics that are big ones that people have strong feelings about.”
  • While Knowland does not agree with the term transgender — “there are only two categories of sex, using the term transgender concedes too much ground” — he is alive to the issue of transphobic bullying. The issue has been in the spotlight this month after Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old transgender girl, was stabbed to death in a park.
  • “People being subjected to transphobia is terrible,” he said. “People shouldn’t mistreat anybody just because they’ve got a mistaken idea that they are a woman. They need to be treated with compassion, not attacked or bullied.”
  • Knowland’s newfound career as an online tutor, as well as hosting a podcast, has eased some of the pressure he felt after his sacking. He said: “At Eton our family home was a benefit, so that was on my mind when I was leaving. I had to wait a couple of years after leaving to get a home because being self-employed, you have to get all the paperwork to get a mortgage.
  • “I’ve actually had parents get in touch because they supported me over what happened at Eton and wanted me to tutor their children.
  • “Losing my job was concerning but it gave me an insight into what it feels for someone to be cancelled. Fear is such a powerful weapon to stop people believing what they’re passionate about.
  • “People feel they can’t say anything, because consequences are going to be too severe, but now I’ve been through it I’ve actually found it freeing.”
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What Progressives Get Wrong About the Gilded Age - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...get-wrong-about-the-gilded-age gilded age history crisis policy inequality
shared by Javier E on 01 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • America’s plutocrats are transforming themselves into hereditary dynasties, thanks to a prolonged campaign against inheritance taxes (or “death taxes” as they have been ingeniously dubbed).
  • The research firm Cerulli estimates that almost half of the estimated $72.6 trillion that will be transferred to the next generation between 2020 and 2045 will come from the richest 1.5% of households. Welcome to the world of trillion-dollar trust fund babies.
  • The rise of such dynasties clashes with America’s fundamental belief in equal opportunity and upward mobility. It leads to social closure as the children of the privileged hoard positions at the top of society.
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  • It produces economic distortions as high IQ types get jobs as “money butlers.” (Chuck Collins, the author of “The Wealth Hoarders,” estimates that at least 90,000 people are employed in what he calls the “wealth defense industry.”)
  • Today the educated are losing their faith in upward mobility.
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