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Javier E

'Humanity's remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50': meet the neo-lu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...es-warning-of-an-ai-apocalypse

AI threat timeline warning apocalypse

shared by Javier E on 17 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • A few weeks back, in January, the largest-ever survey of AI researchers found that 16% of them believed their work would lead to the extinction of humankind.
  • “That’s a one-in-six chance of catastrophe,” says Alistair Stewart, a former British soldier turned master’s student. “That’s Russian-roulette odds.”
  • What would the others have us do? Stewart, the soldier turned grad student, wants a moratorium on the development of AIs until we understand them better – until those Russian-roulette-like odds improve. Yudkowsky would have us freeze everything today, this instant. “You could say that nobody’s allowed to train something more powerful than GPT-4,” he suggests. “Humanity could decide not to die and it would not be that hard.”
Javier E

The Influencer Is a Young Teenage Girl. The Audience Is 92% Adult Men. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ram-meta-safety-risks-6d27497e

teenage meta exploitation pedophile girl culture

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • Instagram makes it easy for strangers to find photos of children, and its algorithm is built to identify users’ interests and push similar content. Investigations by The Wall Street Journal and outside researchers have found that, upon recognizing that an account might be sexually interested in children, Instagram’s algorithm recommends child accounts for the user to follow, as well as sexual content related to both children and adults.
  • That algorithm has become the engine powering the growth of an insidious world in which young girls’ online popularity is perversely predicated on gaining large numbers of male followers. 
  • Instagram photos of young girls become a dark currency, swapped and discussed obsessively among men on encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram. The Journal reviewed dozens of conversations in which the men fetishized specific body parts and expressed pleasure in knowing that many parents of young influencers understand that hundreds, if not thousands, of pedophiles have found their children online.   
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  • One man, speaking about one of his favorite young influencers in a Telegram exchange captured by a child-safety activist, said that her mother knew “damn well” that many of her daughter’s followers were “pervy adult men.”
  • Meta looms over everything young influencers do on Instagram. It connects their accounts with strangers, and it can upend their star turns when it chooses. The company periodically shuts down accounts if it determines they have violated policies against child sexual exploitation or abuse. Some parents say their accounts have been shut down without such violations. 
  • Over the course of reporting this story, during which time the Journal inquired about the account the mom managed for her daughter, Meta shut down the account twice. The mom said she believed she hadn’t violated Meta’s policies. 
  • Meta’s guidance for content creators stresses the importance of engaging with followers to keep them and attract new ones. The hundreds of comments on any given post included some from other young fashion influencers, but also a large number of men leaving comments like “Gorgeous!” The mom generally liked or thanked them all, save for any that were expressly inappropriate. 
  • Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company enables parents who run accounts for their children to control who is able to message them on Instagram or comment on their accounts. Meta’s guidance for creators also offers tips for building a safe online community, and the company has publicized a range of tools to help teens and parents achieve this.
  • Like many young girls, the daughter envied fashion influencers who made a living posting glamour content. When the mother agreed to help her daughter build her following and become an influencer, she set some rules. Her daughter wouldn’t be allowed to access the account or interact with anyone who sent messages. And they couldn’t post anything indicating exactly where they live. 
  • The mom stopped blocking so many users. Within a year of launching, the account had more than 100,000 followers. The daughter’s popularity earned her invitations to modeling events in big coastal cities where she met other young influencers. 
  • Social-media platforms have helped level the playing field for parents seeking an audience for their children’s talents. Instagram, in particular, is visually driven and easily navigable, which also makes it appealing for child-focused brands.
  • While Meta bans children under the age of 13 from independently opening social-media accounts, the company allows what it calls adult-run minor accounts, managed by parents. Often those accounts are pursuing influencer status, part of a burgeoning global influencer industry expected to be worth $480 billion by 2027, according to a recent Goldman Sachs report. 
  • Young influencers, reachable through direct messages, routinely solicit their followers for patronage, posting links to payment accounts and Amazon gift registries in their bios.
  • The Midwestern mom debated whether to charge for access to extra photos and videos via Instagram’s subscription feature. She said she has always rejected private offers to buy photos of her daughter, but she decided that offering subscriptions was different because it didn’t involve a one-on-one transaction.
  • The Journal asked Meta why it had at some points removed photos from the account. Weeks later, Meta disabled the account’s subscription feature, and then shut down the account without saying why. 
  • “There’s no personal connection,” she said. “You’re just finding a way to monetize from this fame that’s impersonal.”
  • The mom allowed the men to purchase subscriptions so long as they kept their distance and weren’t overtly inappropriate in messages and comments. “In hindsight, they’re probably the scariest ones of all,” she said. 
  • Stone, the Meta spokesman, said that the company will no longer allow accounts that primarily post child-focused content to offer subscriptions or receive gifts, and that the company is developing tools to enforce that.
  • he mom saw her daughter, though young, as capable of choosing to make money as an influencer and deciding when she felt uncomfortable. The mom saw her own role as providing the support needed for her daughter to do that.
  • The mom also discussed safety concerns with her now ex-husband, who has generally supported the influencer pursuit. In an interview, he characterized the untoward interest in his daughter as “the seedy underbelly” of the industry, and said he felt comfortable with her online presence so long as her mom posted appropriate content and remained vigilant about protecting her physical safety.
  • an anonymous person professing to be a child-safety activist sent her an email that contained screenshots and videos showing her daughter’s photos being traded on Telegram. Some of the users were painfully explicit about their sexual interest. Many of the photos were bikini or leotard photos from when the account first started.
  • Still, the mom realized she couldn’t stop men from trading the photos, which will likely continue to circulate even after her daughter becomes an adult. “Every little influencer with a thousand or more followers is on Telegram,” she said. “They just don’t know it.”
  • Early last year, Meta safety staffers began investigating the risks associated with adult-run accounts for children offering subscriptions, according to internal documents. The staffers reviewed a sample of subscribers to such accounts and determined that nearly all the subscribers demonstrated malicious behavior toward children.
  • The staffers found that the subscribers mostly liked or saved photos of children, child-sexualizing material and, in some cases, illicit underage-sex content. The users searched the platform using hashtags such as #sexualizegirls and #tweenmodel. 
  • The staffers found that some accounts with large numbers of followers sold additional content to subscribers who offered extra money on Instagram or other platforms, and that some engaged with subscribers in sexual discussions about their children. In every case, they concluded that the parents running those accounts knew that their subscribers were motivated by sexual gratification.
  • In the following months, the Journal began its own review of parent-run modeling accounts and found numerous instances where Meta wasn’t enforcing its own child-safety policies and community guidelines. 
  • The Journal asked Meta about several accounts that appeared to have violated platform rules in how they promoted photos of their children. The company deleted some of those accounts, as well as others, as it worked to address safety issues.
  • In 2022, Instagram started letting certain content creators offer paid-subscription services. At the time, the company allowed accounts featuring children to offer subscriptions if they were run or co-managed by parents.
  • The removal of the account made for a despondent week for the mom and daughter. The mother was incensed at Meta’s lack of explanation and the prospect that users had falsely reported inappropriate activity on the account. She was torn about what to do. When it was shut down, the account had roughly 80% male followers.
  • The account soon had more than 100,000 followers, about 92% of whom were male, according to the dashboard. Within months, Meta shut down that account as well. The company said the account had violated its policies related to child exploitation, but it didn’t specify how. 
  • Meta’s Stone said it doesn’t allow accounts it has previously shut down to resume the same activity on backup accounts. 
Javier E

Opinion | The GOP has a lock on some states, Democrats others. It's not healthy. - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...democrats-one-party-state-rule

one-party rule campaign politics US history culture policy

shared by Javier E on 18 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • We have watched the national polarization that divides Americans in eerily equal numbers play out in vastly uneven ways, state to state. But talk of “red” and “blue” doesn’t capture either the full extent of the imbalance, or the knock-on consequences for the formation and pursuit of sound public policy.
  • It happened pretty quickly. In the early 2000s, three-fifths of the states saw reasonable political balance between the two major parties
  • Today, “trifecta” government, meaning one-party control of the governorship and both legislative bodies, has become the norm across the 50 states. In 40 states, containing 83 percent of the American population, one party enjoys trifecta dominance, and often by overwhelming margins.
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  • The roots of this phenomenon have been well studied. They include the cultural aggression of elite institutions and the predictable reaction to it, the nationalization of issues abetted by the collapse of local media and the pernicious effects of the antisocial media.
  • The gerrymandering that once exaggerated a dominant party’s political margin is no longer much of a factor; social clustering and these other factors have often done a more effective job than the political bosses ever did. In many jurisdictions today, one would have to reverse gerrymander, mixing geographies and crossing all kinds of legal boundary lines, to produce a truly competitive electorate.
  • Our campaign messages, as they had to, mostly centered on specific, new ideas: ethics reforms, access to health insurance, property tax caps, automatic tax refunds and many more, all couched in rhetoric stressing Indianans’ commonality as people, and the need for every part of the state to participate fully in its better future. Boy, is that passé.
  • Ideas fashioned not to stroke the erogenous zones of a riled-up minority of left or right, but to speak to the broader public in pursuit of a general election victory, evoke our common interest instead of our differences and antagonisms. But such campaigns rarely make sense these days.
  • Political campaigns need not necessarily be dispiriting, narrowcasting mudfests. They can be vehicles, in fact the best possible vehicles, for floating constructive ideas to an attentive public. Ideas proposed by a successful campaign have a higher likelihood of enactment after the election
  • Once in office, to make effective change, we had to engage with our Democratic counterparts, even in the years when we achieved full but narrow legislative control.
  • In 2024, 30 states feature not only trifecta government but 2-to-1 majorities in at least one house. In that setting, both campaigns and governance look totally different than they do in genuine two-party polities.
  • This year, our next governor ran a smart race and won his victory fair and square. The problem is that neither he, nor any of his competitors, had an incentive to offer their soon-to-be employers a sense of how Indiana could move forward.
  • What voters saw instead, besides attacks on each other, were political advertisements centered on “standing up to China,” taking on foreign drug cartels and closing the Mexican border. It became difficult to tell whether these folks were running for secretary of state or secretary of homeland security.
  • Wise policy and good government can and do emerge in lopsided states. But competition, always and everywhere, fosters innovation. In politics, it also compels a sensitivity and an outreach to the widest possible audiences.
  • The contours of the current system don’t conduce to those outcomes; until that changes, we have to hope for candidates who, elected by 5 percent of the state, somehow come to consider their duty of service to all the rest.
Javier E

Abortion Rights Debate Shifts to Pregnancy and Fertility as Election Nears - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ortion-roe-wade-pregnancy.html

abortion rights debate pregnancy fertility

shared by Javier E on 25 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • The public conversation about abortion has grown into one about the complexities of pregnancy and reproduction, as the consequences of bans have played out in the news. The question is no longer just whether you can get an abortion, but also, Can you get one if pregnancy complications put you in septic shock? Can you find an obstetrician when so many are leaving states with bans? If you miscarry, will the hospital send you home to bleed? Can you and your partner do in vitro fertilization?
  • That shift helps explain why a record percentage of Americans are now declaring themselves single-issue voters on abortion rights — especially among Black voters, Democrats, women and those ages 18 to 29. Republican women are increasingly saying their party’s opposition to abortion is too extreme, and Democrats are running on the issue after years of running away from it.
  • Tresa Undem, who has been polling people on abortion for 25 years, estimated that before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe, less than 15 percent of the public considered abortion personally relevant — women who could get pregnant and would choose an abortion.
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  • “People used to talk about politicians trying to control our bodies,” she said. “Now it’s, they have no business getting involved in these medical decisions, these politicians don’t have medical expertise, they’re making these laws, and they’re not basing it on health care or science.”
  • Seventy-three percent of independents who support abortion rights said stories about women almost dying because of bans would affect how they vote.
  • “Now it’s about pregnancy, and everybody knows someone who had a baby or wants to have a baby or might get pregnant,” she said. “It’s profoundly personal to a majority of the public.”
  • Anti-abortion groups have responded by trying to carve out a difference between “elective abortion” for unwanted pregnancies — which they want banned — and “maternal fetal separation” in medical emergencies. (The medical procedure is the same.)
  • Opponents have long stigmatized abortion as something irresponsible women use as birth control or because they care more about their careers than having children. “When the focus shifts to the dangers that abortion bans inflict on pregnant people,” said Reva Siegel, a constitutional law professor at Yale who has written extensively about the country’s abortion conflict, “it’s easier for Americans to talk about.”
  • Technology and criminal law have flipped the script, she said.
  • Before Roe legalized abortion nationally in 1973, the law allowed more leeway for what were considered “therapeutic abortions.” Doctors, often solo practitioners, could use their good faith judgment to provide them. Even the Southern Baptist Convention supported abortions in cases of fetal deformity or when a woman’s physical or mental health was at risk.
  • Now, the threat of prosecution, $100,000 fines and loss of their medical licenses have chilled doctors and hospital systems in treating women with pregnancy complications. More often than not in some states, lawyers are making the decisions.
  • In Georgia, she said, more people opposed the state’s ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy once they were told that this meant two weeks after the average woman misses her period — not, as her own partner believed, six weeks after conception. Some voters, she said, believed that six weeks meant six weeks after women found out they were pregnant.
Javier E

Europe Has a New Economic Engine: American Tourists - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...omy-american-tourists-f6112f78

europe tourism portugal greece

shared by Javier E on 21 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • the Mediterranean rush is turning Europe’s recent economic history on its head. In the 2010s, Germany and other manufacturing-heavy economies helped drag the continent out of its debt crisis thanks to strong exports of cars and capital goods, especially to China.
  • Today, Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal contribute between a quarter and half of the bloc’s annual growth. 
  • While Germany’s economy is flatlining, Spain is Europe’s fastest-growing big economy. Nearly three-quarters of the country’s recent growth and one in four new jobs are linked to tourism
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  • In Greece, an unlikely economic star since the pandemic, as many as 44% of all jobs are connected to tourism. 
  • Can Europe’s emerging “museum economy” support sustained wealth creation and the expansive welfare systems Europeans have become accustomed to since the end of World War II? And what happens if the dollar falls and the tourists leave?
  • Rent and other living expenses are rising in hot spots, making it harder for many locals to make ends meet. A heightened focus on tourism, which turns a quick profit but remains a low-productivity activity, tethers these economies to a highly cyclical industry
  • It also risks keeping workers and capital from more profitable areas, like tech and high-end manufacturing. 
  • some economists, residents and politicians are concerned about the boom’s long-term implications.
  • “It is literally, for Americans right now, the place to go,”
  • The strong dollar—and a powerful post-Covid recovery—has empowered millions of Americans who would have vacationed in the U.S. before the pandemic. They are now finding they can afford a lavish European holiday.
  • One reason is the brutal sovereign debt crisis that hit the continent’s south especially hard just over a decade ago. Unable to stimulate demand with public spending or to energize exports by devaluing their currency—the euro, which is shared by 20 states—those countries could only boost their competitiveness by lowering wages.
  • “Your dollar goes a lot further,” Cross said over coffee in the lobby of her five-star hotel. “You don’t feel you’re scrounging as much.”
  • Tourism now generates one-fifth of economic output in Lisbon and supports one in four jobs. That boom has reverberated far beyond the capital.
  • Portugal’s gross domestic product grew nearly 8% between 2019 and 2024, compared with less than 1% for Germany,
  • The government recorded a rare 1.2% of GDP budget surplus last year, and its debt-to-GDP ratio is expected to fall to 95% this year, the lowest since 2009
  • Portugal’s population is growing again after years of decline, thanks in part to an influx of migrant workers and to various tax incentives and investor visas that have attracted high-income workers. 
  • Moedas, Lisbon’s mayor, says there’s room for further growth. For a city that doubles in size to around one million every day, including commuters, only around 35,000 are tourists, he said. “We are very far from a situation of so-called overtourism.”
  • The trend is part of a global readjustment following the Covid-19 lockdowns. Spending on travel and hospitality worldwide grew roughly seven times faster than the global economy over the past two years, according to Oxford Economics. That pattern is expected to continue for the next decade, though to a lesser degree.
  • Europe, especially southern Europe, has benefited more than many other regions. Though it is home to just 5% of the world’s population, the European Union received around one-third of all international tourist dollars—more than half a trillion dollars—last year. This is up roughly threefold over two decades, and compares with about $150 billion for the U.S., where tourism has been slower to rebound.
  • In Portugal, a country of 10 million that juts out into the North Atlantic from Spain, Americans recently surpassed Spaniards as the biggest group of foreign tourists. 
  • This and a real estate collapse that left hundreds of thousands of workers suddenly available made the region’s tourist industry ultracompetitive, much cheaper than Caribbean beach destinations and on a par with Latin American destinations like Mexico. 
  • Once an owner of TAP, Neeleman increased the number of direct flights to the U.S. eightfold between 2015 and 2020, adding major hubs such as JFK and Boston Logan, betting that would open up an untapped market. As bookings soared, other U.S. airlines followed. 
  • “It was actually comical, because I went from knowing no one who had been to Portugal to everyone telling me they were going to Portugal,”
  • For Gonçalo Hall, a 36-year-old tech worker, the influx of foreign cash that has transformed Lisbon has been overwhelmingly beneficial for the city. When he lived in the capital 15 years ago, he wouldn’t walk in the historic downtown after 8 p.m. It was “full of homeless people, not safe. Lots of empty and abandoned buildings,” he said. 
  • “The quality of life in Lisbon doesn’t match the prices. Even expats are leaving,” said Hall, who moved to the Atlantic island of Madeira during the pandemic and continues to work remotely.  
  • The average Portuguese employee earns around €1,000 a month after tax, or around $1,100 a month, and only 2% earn more than €2,000. A one-bedroom apartment in Lisbon can easily cost more than €500,000 to buy, or over €1,200 a month to rent. Rents in nearby cities are also climbing as people leave the capital, squeezed out as lucrative short-term rentals transform the housing market. 
  • Jessica Ribeiro, a 35-year-old sociologist, pays around €490 a month for an apartment that she shares with her ex-husband in a town close to Lisbon. Neither can afford to leave. Both make a little more than the minimum wage of €820 a month, and soaring rents mean it is impossible to find an apartment in the neighborhood for less than €700, Ribeiro said. 
  • “The harm that tourism has brought is infinitely bigger than the benefits,” Ribeiro said. “It sends people away from their place of work, making their lives much harder.” 
  • A frequent complaint from residents and housing advocates is that some of the boom’s biggest winners are American companies, from Airbnb to Uber, which often pay little tax in the places where they do most of their business.
  • Lisbon is cracking down on Airbnbs and increasing taxes on tourists, doubling the nightly city tax from €2 to €4, which should raise €80 million a year. Airbnb has paid Lisbon and Porto, Portugal’s two biggest cities, more than €63 million after entering into voluntary tax collection agreements with local officials. Moedas said he is considering “a bit more regulation” of the city’s many Ubers, whose drivers he said don’t always respect traffic rules. 
  • Around nine in 10 Airbnb hosts in Portugal rent their family home and almost half say the extra income helps them afford to stay in their homes, according to a spokesperson for the company. “Guests using our platform account for just 10% of total nights booked in Portugal, and we follow the rules and only allow listings that are registered with local authorities,”
  • Higher rents are forcing many businesses and cultural and social spaces catering to locals to close, according to Silva. “This is not an economy that is serving the needs of the majority of people,” she said.
  • Signs of discontent are bubbling up across the region. Tens of thousands of local residents marched in Spain’s Balearic and Canary islands in recent months to protest mass tourism and overcrowding. On Mallorca, activists have put up fake signs at some popular beaches warning in English of the risk of falling rocks or dangerous jellyfish to deter tourists, according to social-media posts.
  • Serving foreigners is difficult to scale up and is more exposed to economic headwinds. Like the discovery of oil, southern Europe’s new focus on tourism can crowd out higher-value activities by hogging capital and workers, a phenomenon some economists have dubbed the “beach disease.”
  • “Portugal isn’t an industrialized country. It’s just the playground of the EU,” said Priscila Valadão, a 43-year-old administrative assistant in Lisbon. She makes €905 a month and rents a room from a friend for €250 a month. “The type of jobs being offered…are restricted to a type of activity that really doesn’t enrich the country,”
  • For Europe’s policymakers, having people open hotels or restaurants is easier than incentivizing them to build up advanced manufacturing, which is capital intensive and takes a long time to pay off, said Marcos Carias, an economist with French insurer Coface. 
  • “Tourism is the easy way out,” Carias said. “What is the incentive to look for ingenuity and go through the pain of creating new economic value if tourism works as a short-term solution?”
  • Proponents say tourism attracts capital to poor regions, and can serve as a base to build a more diversified economy. Lisbon’s Moedas said he is trying to leverage the influx of foreign visitors to build up sectors such as culture and technology, including by developing conferences and cultural events. 
  • “Some extreme left parties basically say we need to reduce tourism,” Moedas said, but that is the wrong approach. “What we have to do is to increase other sectors like innovation, technology…. We should still invest in tourism, but we should go up the ladder.”
  • While Dias, the hotel owner, is diversifying into nightlife, he refuses to envisage a future where the sector would have to rely heavily on visitors from elsewhere.
  • More than one-third of highly qualified Portuguese students leave the country after graduating,
  • Even higher-paid technology workers have started decamping to cheaper places. 
  • Tiago Araújo, chief executive of tourism tech startup HiJiffy, has held on to his employees but says many of them have been moving out of Lisbon. The trend, which started during Covid, is now being primarily driven by the housing crisis.
  • In Athens, Mayor Haris Doukas says he is working on extending the tourist season, increasing the average length of stay and promoting specific types of tourism, such as organizing conferences and business meetings, to attract visitors with higher purchasing power. He’s also called for new taxes to help the city accommodate the millions of additional tourists thronging to the ancient capital.
  • If Americans stop coming to Lisbon, he said, “I don’t think we can charge this kind of [price] because we will have to go to Europeans, and the Europeans, they don’t have money.”
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