Gaythia Weis @Gaythia@qoto.org

Last year the NYPD spent $150 Million to catch people who weren't able to afford to pay the subway fare. They collectively owed just $104,000 in fares.

Instead of funding cops to shoot people, why not use the money to make public transport free for people who can't afford it?

https://hellgatenyc.com/the-nypd-spent-150-million-to-catch-farebeaters-who-cost-the-mta-104000/

KOSA could block youth access to life-saving sexual and reproductive health resources. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/09/kosas-online-censorship-threatens-abortion-access

'Contrary to public perception, we observe considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens and find no evidence that undocumented criminality has increased in recent years'
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117

1/2 Dear fellow Europeans, I am respectfully asking you to consider signing this European Citizen Initiative to institute a billionaire tax. It was invented by leading French economist Thomas Piketty; I read the whole thing, and it is technically excellent. Hit me if you have questions, but please sign it, it is important.

https://www.tax-the-rich.eu/

It needs 1 million signatures (currently 300K) and seven countries over their threshold (currently three: Denmark, France, Germany).

Students in my War and Holocaust course struggle to understand the Nazi Revolution. How does a party which wins 38% in 1932 move so quickly to a one-party dictatorship? It’s several things:

1. Fear. Am I really prepared to oppose this violent, lawless clique?

2. Opportunism. What can I gain by aligning myself to the movement?

3. Ambiguity. Is there real danger here? Maybe I can ride this out and go back to my life when the clouds pass?

Age-gating is not an effective way to keep kids safe online because one election could change the definition of “harmful content” to information disliked by puritanical communities.

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/09/16/heritage-foundation-admits-kosa-will-be-useful-for-removing-pro-abortion-content-if-trump-wins/

Given KOSA’s current bi-partisan support in the US, I hope conservatives saying the quiet part out loud will change Democrats’ position to strong opposition.

https://www.stopkosa.com/

#StopKOSA #USPol

⛔️🇺🇦Red-lines, and failed air defense deliveries by “partners”, allow Russians terrorists to target civil infrastructure in Hlukhiv, two people injured (PHOTOS and more) https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/3906595-russians-targeted-civil-infrastructure-in-hlukhiv-two-people-injured.html #Ukraine #Press #USA #US #UK #EU #NATO #News #UnitedStates #EuropeanUnion #UnitedKingdom #russiaUkraineWar #10yrInvasionofUkraine
#Article7 #Article7HungaryNow

Yesterday was my best ever day on the weather blog (shameless plug: https://ingallswx.com ). I got 2,606 views, shattering my old record which was about 1,600 or so. Plus I gained 3 new email subscribers.

Thanks to everyone for valuing my weather forecasts. I really appreciate it and excited to continue growing this medium!

This is the script of my national network radio report from yesterday regarding the use of generative AI by government agencies in ways that could potentially be risky to millions of people. As always, there were some very minor wording changes from this script as I presented this report live.

- - -

Well, a lot of people who track developments in AI, especially generative AI, are very concerned about this, and you don't need to be an AI expert to understand why. Anyone who has spent any time interacting with these generative AI systems now knows how they can misinterpret and confuse information, and generate answers and reports that may seem superficially convincing but are often completely wrong, or even worse are partly right and partly wrong, which is a recipe for even worse outcomes, because there might be enough correct info there to cause you to miss crucial wrong information that's mixed in.

Now given the overall sorry state of these error-prone AI systems, I think most of us would agree that one place we don't want them being depended on now is in government agencies where the effects of AI errors could drastically affect people's lives in potentially awful ways. But unfortunately, as we had feared would be the case, there are already instances of agencies rushing to use these AI systems for time-saving to largely replace human activities, and while in theory they have human oversight, experts are very concerned that these systems will not be properly supervised and that the results could be very problematic to say the least.

So here are just two examples. Police departments are beginning to use AI systems that replace human-written police reports regarding contacts with the public, all sorts of incidents, with AI generated reports that are created using the audio from officer body cameras. Now if you've ever watched bodycam footage on YouTube or whatever, you know it can be confusing enough for humans who have a lifetime of experience to know what's going on even when you have both audio and video. Yes, writing up a police report can be time consuming, but at least then you know that these crucial documents (and courts may often have limited if any ability to treat those reports as other than accurate) were generated by a human being not an AI system that doesn't really think or understand anything in ways we typically would use those terms.

Here's another example. A U.S. state has signed a contract with Google to use their AI -- which they admit makes mistakes -- don't we know it! -- to create reports that will determine if people receive unemployment benefits -- which can be crucial to their even being able to have necessities like food or shelter during highly stressful periods in their lives. And it seems that even though there are concerns about this, Google apparently gave quite the sales pitch and got the contract.

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how confused AIs could create reports in both of these situations that could severely negatively impact innocent people's lives if the reports are not completely accurate and fully trustworthy. The sorts of errors that may only be an annoyance in a Search AI Overview could potentially be devastating in a police report or determination about unemployment benefits.

Now in theory humans are supposed to review these reports before they're made official. One method for trying to enforce that is, for example, to embed some really obvious loony statements in the reports to see if the human reviewer catches them. But we know that the urge to perhaps give a cursory glance at an AI report and then click the "Looks good to me!" box and move on is going to be irresistible in so many cases.

The Big Tech AI firms are great at giving sales pitches to governments, and in most cases to government officials who are not experts on AI. So they may find these pitches so attractive that they're willing to use the public as essentially guinea pigs for AI applications that may not be ready for prime time. And many actual AI experts feel that these should not be used when errors could harm people's lives in significant ways.

Again, our own experiences with these AI systems demonstrate how disturbingly frequently they get things wrong, and as a society this expansion of their use in these ways should be of enormous concern to us all.

- - -

L

In an Unprecedented Move, Ohio Is Funding the Construction of Private Religious Schools https://www.propublica.org/article/ohio-taxpayer-money-funding-private-religious-schools

Last week, Space Telescope Science Institute staff visited NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland to get a peak at the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is being built in a very large clean room!

#FireHisAss
“U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy assured state election officials in a letter released Monday that he’ll work with them to handle their warnings of problems with election mail delivery during the primary season, while insisting that the Postal Service will be ready for the flood of mail-in ballots ahead of the November election,” the AP reports.

Public officials should not be involved in this type of activity at all.”

From Justin Miller, in our magazine: Ken and Angela Paxton have ties to a jet-setting lobbyist-turned-CEO caught in a tangled web of alleged fraud involving a powerful business clan and a commercial shipping giant. https://www.texasobserver.org/paxtons-lobbyist-ceo-alleged-fraud/

#politics #USpol #fraud #KenPaxton #news #corruption #Texas

KOSA will be used to hurt marginalized people, which is exactly what the far right wants.

The dems supporting this bill are misinformed, and should follow Ron Wyden's lead.

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/09/16/heritage-foundation-admits-kosa-will-be-useful-for-removing-pro-abortion-content-if-trump-wins/

So the former guy who literally made it easier for mentally ill people to buy guns and has tried to eliminate all rules on guns now had a mentally ill guy with an assault rifle on one of his golf courses in a state where you can take a gun basically anywhere? Got it.

"Crypto companies are spending $800,000 a day to try to take out Ohio U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown..."

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/sherrod-brown-crypto-bernie-moreno-millions-1235102478/

Forced birth in a country with:

—No universal healthcare
—No universal childcare
—No paid family & medical leave
—One of the highest rates of maternal mortality among rich nations

Again, the right's agenda isn't about "life." It's about control.