Mettaben @mettaben@qoto.org
Joined Sep 2020
@EyalL I honestly don't understand this perspective. The part of Ukraine that's occupied by Russia is surrounded by Russia on 3 sides. This is directly Russia's sphere of influence. What makes you so sure Russia is so weak when the frontlines have barely moved, even with cluster munitions now being deployed.
@EyalL serious question: do you think prolonging the war in Ukraine serves US interests by weakening Russia? Similar to how the Cold War precipitated the fall of the Soviet Union?
@EyalL seems a little hyperbolic, doesn't? Obviously Trump and Biden are different in some ways and equivalent in other ways. But let me ask you this: would Trump have sent cluster bombs to Ukraine? I don't particularly like either politician, but it seems like Biden takes us closer to the razors edge of nuclear war and thus the end of society as we know it. How would you recommend someone who opposes cluster bombs on moral principles and thinks they are a war crime vote?
Many communists and socialists opposed FDR's New Deal for almost exactly the same reason that they now oppose UBI. Many saw it as a plot to appease the Proletariat and delay the inevitable and necessary Revolution.
"During the first term of the FDR administration both the Socialist Party of America and the CPUSA under William Z Foster opposed the New Deal because they saw it as a Capitalist plot to appease the Proletariat with a mere reform of the Market Economy. And that decision more then anything else is what killed the early Socialist Movement in the United States."
@EyalL personally I support a two pronged approach. People who try to reform the dem party from the inside are very important, yes. But I also think the dem party needs pressure to reform from the outside. It's interesting that you mention AOC because she is a good example of somebody who originally seemed like someone who would try to reform the dem party from within. But it looks like the dem party has actually reformed her.
And it's not just AOC but all of the squad, and even Bernie Sanders himself have been reformed so much by the dem party that they are barely recognizable now for who they once were or what they once stood for. The dem party is a meat grinder. Progressive politicians go in. Neoliberal fascist sausage comes out.
The dem party will NEVER let a truly progressive candidate win. The party leadership open admits they put their finger on the scale. The DNC does not conduct free and fair primary elections but rather acts as a campaign arm for the candidate who will serve the interests of the rich most faithfully. The primary elections, if they happen at all, are simply designed to ordain the already chosen candidate.
So, I will continue to support the best dem candidates in the primary. In this election, I like Marianne Williamson the best. But I have no illusions that she has any ghost of a prayer of winning or that supporting her will move the political needle even a single millimeter forward.
Cornel West on the other hand. He will indeed make the dems sweat and squirm the way no insider can. Cornel West means the dem party can no longer ignore its left flank and move farther and farther to the right. To the point where dems and GOP are now essentially exactly the same party on most economic issues, but only differ on a few key red meat issues like abortion and guns.
A vote for Biden or Trump is a wasted vote. Everyone knows one of them or the other will win. A vote for Biden is a vote for status quo. Endless war quagmire in Ukraine. Cluster bombs. Rich getting richer. Climate catastrophe continuing unabated.
I'm not really sure what the democrats stand for any more. Not the little guy, that's for sure. They are openly the party of the elite now. They make fun of red states for being less educated, less wealthy, and collecting more welfare than blue states.
Is this dem party a party worth supporting? For me, it's clear. Hell no. On every issue, Green Party is better. Cornel West is a scholar and activist. He is inspiring. He's not just another politician pretending to care about social and economic justice issues in order to get votes. His lifetime of activism proves he lives and breathes it.
The corporatist Democrats are starting to say the quiet things out loud:
(1) They hope Trump wins the GOP nomination (pied piper strategy times 2) because they think Joe Biden can win against him.
(2) they hope black voters can be "kept in line" (literally used those words) and not defect in sufficient numbers to Cornel West
I have a feeling these democrats did not anticipate in their quant analysis that a black candidate would run for Green Party nominee. Polls show clearly it's the Achilles Heel of the already extremely risky Democratic strategy. And it was a very similar roll of the dice that got Trump elected in the first place.
I should add that Republicans/conservatives play right into this when they conflate Democrats with leftists, falsely implying that leftist (that are actually Democrat/corporatist) policies are to blame. Democrats and Republicans are really on the same team when it comes to waging information warfare against genuine social and economic justice. This is a key reason why a strong Green Party alternative is crucial.
"The democrat party is the graveyard of political movements"
I stand in solidarity with this indigenous position paper on AI. It's nuanced and aligned with wisdom that larger, non-indigenous society can learn from. There is a balance of perspectives from the very real concern that AI will be just one more tool of colonization, but there is also recognition that some of these new technologies, such as blockchain, could support the privacy and independence needs of an indigenous community striving for increased autonomy.
If OpenaI continues on its trajectory of having the world's best commercially available AI, it could reach a point where its advantage snowballs. Meaning, if OpenAI's programmers have the best AI tools available to them and are able to construct even better AI tools, then it is possible they could exponentially leave their competition in the dust.
In which case OpenAI will make a lot of money. A world-changing, mind-bogglingly huge amount of money. Potentially, someday, maybe even a majority of all the world's money.
It is in this context that Sam Altman's specific UBI proposals should be studied. Of course, Sam Altman himself is very rich. He has a perspective on what is good for global stability which may not fully intersect with class consciousness and economic justice.
For example, one possible future UBI might be implemented as the most global stability possible while giving the lower economic classes as little as possible. A prison planet, essentially. Is this Sam Altman's vision for UBI? Maybe.
Another vision of UBI might be to maximize on redistribution of wealth.
Another vision of UBI is to fully eliminate poverty and then stop there, letting rich people continue to be (almost) as rich as they already are.
Another vision might be to bring everyone up to at least middle class. In which case rich people would be significantly taxed. I'm guessing this is not what Sam Altman wants.
Which kind of UBI our society lands on, or none at all, will be something that should be vigorously and openly debated by ppl of all walks of life. We can't just cede this debate to the 1%.
Mettaben
boosted
AI identifies passwords from sound of typing 😱
> Tapping in a computer password while chatting over Zoom could open the door to a cyber-attack, research suggests, after a study revealed artificial intelligence (#AI) can work out which keys are being pressed by eavesdropping on the sound of the typing...and devices with built-in microphones have become ubiquitous, the threat of cyber-attacks based on sounds has also risen.
Remote work is described to be so dangerous that it could disrupt nation states. When ppl have the power to choose their own jurisdiction, they can sculpt their lives to live in the most favorable location possible, and that includes paying the least taxes.
Sound familiar? This is what the 1% has been doing all along. The uproar against remote work corresponds with working class ppl starting to enjoy the exact same perks that the ultra-rich have enjoyed all along.
Now that working class ppl might start figuring out how to avoid paying taxes in the sane way the rich already have, suddenly we start finding remote described "dangerously disruptive" and billionaires going all out on information warfare against it.
Mettaben
boosted
Let's talk about the guy who "saved orthodoxy" in the fourth century: Athanasius.
Very little is known about his early life, but he spoke Coptic and was ridiculed by his enemies as "the black dwarf." It's safe to say that Athanasius was Coptic or at least from the lower classes in Egypt.
He was elected bishop of Alexandria when ~30 years old. Arian heresy was on the rise with the Emperor's support. It was a pivotal moment ... 1/n
AI doomerism has some similarity to Abrahamic God worship: AI is a vengeful God, who will doom all humans with catastrophe if the instructions of the high priests are not followed. Our original sin is recklessly allowing AI to get this far, and our salvation is to follow the instructions of the priests and their written proscriptions to stop AI, before it smites all of humanity with robot locusts or some such.
The priesthood must carefully manage or "worship" AI in secret chambers only for the chosen few). AI, if it is to exist at all, must be carefully studied or placated by the priesthood, and most importantly the priesthood must be entrusted to keep it secure with the urgency of the eternal fate of humanity.
I feel like there is systematic information warfare being directed against remote working. Business managers are citing paywall articles to justify return to office policies and many of these studies these articles cite do not support the conclusions being drawn. As one example, a paywalled Economist article states:
"Teleconferencing is a pale imitation of in-the-flesh meetings: researchers at Harvard Business School, for example, concluded that “virtual water coolers”—rolled out by many companies during the pandemic—often encroached on crowded schedules with limited benefits."
But these particular "virtual water coolers" (mixing senior and junior employees together in an informal onboarding meeting) are just one single form of teleconferencing! The study says nothing about "Teleconferencing is a pale imitation of in-the-flesh meetings" that is a made up opinion invented the the article writer! Read it for yourself. Especially the study's conclusion: https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/21-125_bbb49345-38ea-4c04-9d56-4f6ef72dd7f7.pdf
Really intellectually dishonest Economist article. Sucks that crap like this is actually being cited to justify the upheaval of thousands of ppl's lives in Return to Office policies.
"Patient dumping" is the unholy combination of for-profit hospitals and homelessness. In the worst cases, a patient is dumped like garbage on the street, just outside of hospital grounds, sometimes still wearing soiled hospital gown and slippers. Or sometimes the patient is dumped in the form of being dropped off at a shelter that is known not to be able to take the person. Homeless people who seek care at hospitals do so sometimes to escape searing heat or freezing cold. But sometimes they have legitimate medical needs that are ignored or undetected. And sometimes they die of these untreated issues not too long after they were dumped. Like garbage.
Amazon is famous (or maybe infamous) for always making data driven decisions. So it's curious... and very telling... this Amazon exec admits he has no data to back up return to office policies.
Either
(1) there is no data, or
(2) there is data, but employees won't like it, so therefore Amazon won't share it. E.g. data indicating it's easier to control employees who are in office, and location dependent, and much harder for them to quit, for example.
Number (2) is the most likely scenario, in my opinion.
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-executive-no-data-to-support-return-to-office-mandate-2023-8
In the old days, price fixing used to require economic competitors to secretly negotiate and often illegally collude with each each other. Nowadays, all it requires is that they use the same AI software tool. In this case YieldStar software for setting rents.
"One of the algorithm’s developers told ProPublica that leasing agents had “too much empathy” compared to computer generated pricing."
[...]
"“Find out how YieldStar can help you outperform the market 3% to 7%,” RealPage urges potential clients on its website.
Few tenants know that such software, owned by a privately held company, has had a hand in rent increases across the country"
#rent #RentControl #ai #PriceFixing
https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent
@sparker hawaii has a nice bright shade of yellow
I agree with Mike Masnick @mmasnick: copyright law is the wrong way to deal with the challenges posed by AI. Copyright law should properly only address the reproduction of content, such as writing. Not the ideas that underlie the content. Putting something in your own words has always been allowed, and always should be allowed whether the agent is human or AI.
So long as AI does that, and safeguards are taken to make sure original wording is not merely spit back out verbatim, the fact that AI is trained on copyright material is not itself a violation in the same way our own bio-brains have been trained on copyright material.
That being said, there is the idea of compensation. Shouldn't the owners of AI systems compensate the content creators? To which I would answer, yes, absolutely. And I would add that all of us, all members of the human race, have been collectively training AI without any compensation whatsoever. And that's unfair.
Which is one of the important reasons why I support UBI.
Joined Sep 2020
