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Created
Thu, 24/04/2025 - 23:31

The United States has been in the throes of a mental health and overdose crisis so severe it has spanned five presidential administrations and been classified as an official state of emergency in three of them. No one knows exactly how this emergency will play out during the current Trumpian cocktail of uncertainty, fear, and cuts to social services, but charts of the recent turbulence of the stock market suggest a relevant visual: imagine the nervous systems of millions of already struggling Americans, along with millions more who are being pushed to the limits of what they can handle, all experiencing deep emotional crashes, briefly recovering, only to collapse again into new lows. And while it might be tempting to... Read more

Source: This Mental Health Awareness Month appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Created
Thu, 24/04/2025 - 20:49

I have recently been asked by the Panoptykon Foundation if it was possible to create an online age verification system that would not be a privacy nightmare. I highly recommend reading their piece, which dives into several issues around age verification.

I replied that yes, under certain assumptions, this is possible. And provided a rough sketch of such a system.

But before we dive into it, I have to be clear: I am not a fan of introducing online age verification systems. Privacy is just one of the many issues related to them. I dive into some of those later in this post.

However, the broader context is that age verification is becoming required by law in for a lot of services. And systems that are used for it are horrendously bad – like, say, Discord’s idea to verify age of people either by requring a scan of an ID, or enabling the camera in order to let them analyze our face.

Created
Thu, 24/04/2025 - 20:20
There are other sleights of hand that cause economists problems. In their quest for statistical “identification” of a causal effect, economists often have to resort to techniques that answer either a narrower or a somewhat different version of the question that motivated the research. Results from randomized social experiments carried out in particular regions of, […]
Created
Thu, 24/04/2025 - 18:00
Tom Davies CHAPS is a critical element of the UK’s payments landscape, handling 92% of UK payment values despite comprising 0.5% of volumes. CHAPS is used for high-value and time-critical payments, including money market and foreign exchange transactions, supplier payments, and house purchases. We forecast CHAPS volumes to help CHAPS participants in making staffing decisions … Continue reading Balancing complexity and performance in forecasting models: insights from CHAPS volume predictions
Created
Thu, 24/04/2025 - 17:43

As a Labour MP, I know who I represent in Westminster. When I take my seat in Parliament, I do so in the interests of many communities that have been left behind by four decades of deindustrialisation. On the one side of my constituency is Clackmannanshire, whose mills, pits, and breweries were once the providers […]

Created
Thu, 24/04/2025 - 13:50

Leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone reveal that a blueprint for Ukraine’s failed effort to capture the village of Krynky was assembled by Project Alchemy, a secret military-intelligence cell created by the British Ministry of Defence which sought “at all costs” to “keep Ukraine fighting.” The Krynky plot led to a bloodbath that remains one of the war’s biggest disasters. On the morning of October 30 2023, dozens of Ukrainian commandos on small boats glided across the Dnieper River to […]

The post UK intel behind Ukraine’s disastrous Krynky invasion, leaked documents reveal first appeared on The Grayzone.

The post UK intel behind Ukraine’s disastrous Krynky invasion, leaked documents reveal appeared first on The Grayzone.