(1) Republicans Get Angry When You Do the Right Thing - 0 views
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We are living in, as George F. Will recently put it, “the most dangerous U.S. moment since World War II, more menacing than the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis”—because then the country was dealing with just one reckless nuclear power, and today it is dealing with three (China, Iran, Russia). Our national debt is dangerously high. Any serious discussion of the viability of Medicare and Social Security is sidelined indefinitely, even as the tidal wave of Baby Boomers reaches retirement age. The Southern border is indeed in crisis. Emerging technologies such as AI threaten to, at a minimum, have a significant economic impact.
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Such a time requires clarity, forward thinking, and moral leadership. But it is abundantly clear that Republicans are not up these challenges—which was not lost on Buck. “It is impossible for the Republican party to confront our problems and offer a course correction for the future while being fixated on retribution and vengeance for contrived injustices of the past.” Indeed, those issues decided the speakership election. They are the raison d’être of the party’s prohibitive nominee for president.
'We will coup whoever we want!': the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech... - 0 views
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there’s something different about today’s tech titans, as evidenced by a rash of recent books. Reading about their apocalypse bunkers, vampiric longevity strategies, outlandish social media pronouncements, private space programmes and virtual world-building ambitions, it’s hard to remember they’re not actors in a reality series or characters from a new Avengers movie.
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Unlike their forebears, contemporary billionaires do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest colony on the moon. In contrast, however avaricious, the titans of past gilded eras still saw themselves as human members of civil society.
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The ChatGPT impresario Sam Altman, whose board of directors sacked him as CEO before he made a dramatic comeback this week, wants to upload his consciousness to the cloud (if the AIs he helped build and now fears will permit him).
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Opinion | Biden Trade Policy Breaks With Tech Giants - The New York Times - 0 views
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One reason that the idea of free trade has fallen out of fashion in recent years is the perception that trade agreements reflect the wishes of big American corporations, at everybody else’s expense.
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U.S. officials fought for trade agreements that protect intellectual property — and drug companies got the chance to extend the life of patents, raising the price of medicine around the world. U.S. officials fought for investor protections — and mining companies got the right to sue for billions in “lost profit” if a country moved to protect its drinking water or the Amazon ecosystem. And for years, U.S. officials have fought for digital trade rules that allow data to move freely across national borders — prompting fears that the world’s most powerful tech companies would use those rules to stay ahead of competitors and shield themselves from regulations aimed at protecting consumers and privacy.
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That’s why the Biden administration, which came into office promising to fight for trade agreements that better reflect the interests of ordinary people, has dropped its advocacy for tech-friendly digital trade rules that American officials have championed for more than a decade.
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Opinion | The Reactionary Futurism of Marc Andreessen - The New York Times - 0 views
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“I consider Mark and Elon to be role models to children in their embrace of fighting,” Andreessen writes.
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Modern American society, at least in the big cities, is turning on law enforcement and tolerating crime, so you need combat skills to protect your loved ones. We are also fat and depressed, and learning to fight might help on both counts. In conclusion, “if it was good enough for Heracles and Theseus, it’s good enough for us.”
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what caught my eye was the veneration of the virile aggression of the Greeks, the call to rediscover the ways of the ancients. A list of things that were good enough for the Greeks but not good enough for us would run long: Slavery, pederasty and bloodletting come to mind
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Why Is Stanley Fish Teaching at Florida's New College? - 0 views
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Given how controversial New College is, why do you want to teach there now?Well, the simple nitty gritty reason is that I’m 85 years old, and someone who asks me to teach courses is a godsend. So I responded affirmatively.
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t first I wanted to ask about Ralston College, in Savannah, Ga., which you’ve been involved with at the planning stage, and which seems to promise a kind of great books or neotraditional education.
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It took about a decade of fundraising and planning and gift-giving for the college to begin but it’s now in operation. I was there less than a year ago, giving a lecture and talking to students and faculty members. I gave a talk about hate speech and free speech. And the morning before the talk, I attended a class on Homer, the Iliad. What was amazing about it was that not only was the Iliad being read in the original Greek, but the conversations between the students and the faculty member were being conducted in Greek. And six months before this course began, no student in it — and there were about 25 — had any knowledge whatsoever of the Greek language or Greek culture.
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Elon Musk, Sam Altman illustrate a Silicon Valley truth: icons are fallible - The Washi... - 0 views
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The mutiny inside OpenAI over the firing and un-firing of chief executive Sam Altman, and the implosion of X under owner Elon Musk, are not just Silicon Valley soap operas. They’re reminders: A select few make the decisions inside these society-shaping platforms, and money drives it all.
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The two companies built devoted followings by promising to build populist technology for a changing world: X, formerly known as Twitter, with its global village of conversations, and OpenAI, the research lab behind ChatGPT, with its super-intelligent companions for human thought.
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But under Musk and Altman, the firms largely consolidated power within a small cadre of fellow believers and loyalists who deliberate in secrecy and answer to no one.
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Sara Menker Warns About Fallout of Rising Food Insecurity | Time - 0 views
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ara Menker runs a private company, Gro Intelligence, that uses data and AI to make predictions about climate change and food security, but when she appeared before the U.N. Security Council on May 19, she sounded more like an advocate. Gro’s data has found that, because of rising food prices around the world, 400 million people have become food insecure in the last 5 months alone. (Food insecurity, as Gro defines it, means people living on $3.59 a day or less.)
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Menker, 39, who was chosen as one of TIME’s Most Influential People in 2021, was born in Ethiopia, attended college at Mount Holyoke, worked as a commodities trader on Wall Street, and left to start Gro to use technology to tackle challenges like hunger and climate change. Today, Gro works with governments and big food companies, analyzing hundreds of trillions of data points from satellites, governments, and private sources, to forecast the supply of agricultural products globally.
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In recent months, as the war in Ukraine raged on, Gro’s systems started flagging problems that were putting a growing number of people at risk of going hungry. Some were worsened by the war, but many others have been building for longer, caused by the actions of other governments banning exports or imposing tariffs. Menker talked to TIME shortly after briefing the U.N.
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Science fiction's curious ability to predict the future | The Spectator - 0 views
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how many policy decisions have been influenced by dystopian visions? And how often did these turn out to be wise ones?
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The 1930s policy of appeasement, for example, was based partly on an exaggerated fear that the Luftwaffe could match H.G. Wells’s Martians in destroying London.
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science fiction has been a source of inspiration, too. When Silicon Valley began thinking about how to use the internet, they turned to writers such as William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. Today, no discussion of artificial intelligence is complete without reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey, just as nearly all conversations about robotics include a mention of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or the movie it inspired, Blade Runner.
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All the Trump Indictments Everywhere All at Once - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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.
DealBook: Suspension - 0 views
The Lesson of 1975 for Today's Pessimists - WSJ - 0 views
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out of the depths of the inflation-riddled ’70s came the democratization of computing and finance. It feels to me as if we’re at a similar point. What’s going to be democratized next?
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Start with quantum computing, autonomous vehicles and delivery drones. Even the once-in-a-generation innovation of machine learning and artificial intelligence is generating fear and doubt. Like homebrew computers, we’re at the rudimentary stage.
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Especially in medicine. Healthcare pricing, billing and reimbursements are completely nonsensical. ObamaCare made it worse, but change is beginning. Pandemic-enabled telemedicine is a crack in the old way’s armor. Self-directed healthcare will grow. Ozempic and magic pills are changing lives. Crispr gene editing is also rudimentary but could extend healthy life expectancies. Add precision oncology, computational biology, focused ultrasound and more. The upside is endless.
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In defense of science fiction - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion - 0 views
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I’m a big fan of science fiction (see my list of favorites from last week)! So when people start bashing the genre, I tend to leap to its defense
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this time, the people doing the bashing are some serious heavyweights themselves — Charles Stross, the celebrated award-winning sci-fi author, and Tyler Austin Harper, a professor who studies science fiction for a living
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The two critiques center around the same idea — that rich people have misused sci-fi, taking inspiration from dystopian stories and working to make those dystopias a reality.
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I tried out an Apple Vision Pro. It frightened me | Arwa Mahdawi | The Guardian - 0 views
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Despite all the marketed use cases, the most impressive aspect of it is the immersive video
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Watching a movie, however, feels like you’ve been transported into the content.
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that raises serious questions about how we perceive the world and what we consider reality. Big tech companies are desperate to rush this technology out but it’s not clear how much they’ve been worrying about the consequences.
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Opinion | The 100-Year Extinction Panic Is Back, Right on Schedule - The New York Times - 0 views
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The literary scholar Paul Saint-Amour has described the expectation of apocalypse — the sense that all history’s catastrophes and geopolitical traumas are leading us to “the prospect of an even more devastating futurity” — as the quintessential modern attitude. It’s visible everywhere in what has come to be known as the polycrisis.
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Climate anxiety, of the sort expressed by that student, is driving new fields in psychology, experimental therapies and debates about what a recent New Yorker article called “the morality of having kids in a burning, drowning world.”
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The conviction that the human species could be on its way out, extinguished by our own selfishness and violence, may well be the last bipartisan impulse.
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Power Corrupts, Absolutely - WSJ - 0 views
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