Reading

Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 21:00
Recent additions to the Heap of Links… “Art is artifice plus, one hopes, a hint of genius… Such hints can shine through… in the most unlikely, indeed the silliest places. There is of course no reason why AI should not also be such a place” — Justin E.H. Smith (University of Paris 7) defends AI art, sort of “I do not think a degenerated scholasticism is the right historical metaphor for our time and era. I think late antiquity Hellenistic philosophy is where we should see ourselves” — “We are in a syncretic age. And I believe that is why we will soon be forgot,” says Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) “Ethics are mostly an afterthought for… profit-driven organisations, a compliance hoop they must jump through.
Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 20:00

Programa do governo da Bahia usa tecnologia para mapear crimes e premiar redução de mortes violentas – mas exclui estatísticas de violência policial nos monitoramentos.

The post Como manchas de calor e prêmios em dinheiro ajudam a tornar a polícia mais violenta na periferia de Salvador appeared first on The Intercept.

Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 11:40

55 journalists have been killed and hundreds more injured or detained by Israel since 2000. Yet for many Palestinian, the physical harm they face pales in comparison to the constant delegitimization of their work by in the media.

The post Palestinians Are Not Liars: Confronting the Violence of Media Delegitimization appeared first on MintPress News.

Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 11:30
I’ve said this many times: Republicans who know that Trump is a liability are basically just hoping that he goes to jail or dies because that’s the only thing that will shake loose the base (and there’s no guarantee that an indictment or jail term would do that either.) McKay Coppins in the Atlantic takes a look at that pathetically weak position: Press them hard enough, and most Republican officials—even the ones with MAGA hats in their closets and Mar-a-Lago selfies in their Twitter avatar—will privately admit that Donald Trump has become a problem. He’s presided over three abysmal election cycles since he took office, he is more unstable than ever, and yet he returned to the campaign trail this past weekend, declaring that he is “angry” and determined to win the  GOP presidential nomination again in 2024. Aside from his most blinkered loyalists, virtually everyone in the party agrees: It’s time to move on from Trump. But ask them how they plan to do that, and the discussion quickly veers into the realm of hopeful hypotheticals. Maybe he’ll get indicted and his legal problems will overwhelm him.
Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 11:30
The response of housing prices to financing conditions is determined by the effect on the marginal buyer, not the average household. I use heterogeneous willingness to pay (WTP) data from a stated preference experiment in Fuster and Zafar (2021) to estimate the effects of changes in mortgage rates and collateral constraints on housing prices by analysing the structure of housing demand curves. This work builds on their research, which focused on average changes in WTP. Relaxing down payment constraints has a large average effect on WTP, but the effect on price is less than half as large. Financially constrained households tend to respond more to relaxed constraints, but those households often have WTPs that are too low to affect market prices. Changing the mortgage rate has the same average effect on WTPs and on market prices, because there is no systematic relationship between a household's response to mortgage rates and their location on the demand curve. I use a heterogeneous user cost model of individual WTPs to understand how household heterogeneity determines the structure of overall housing demand.
Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 11:12
On Saturday, a small but passionate political protest took place opposite Downing Street, on a topic almost entirely ignored – not to mention actively whitewashed by the UK’s ‘mainstream’ media: the extent of nazi influence in Ukraine. The topic is papered over with equal diligence by what now passes for the ‘Labour party’, which punishes […]
Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 11:11

Do you realize the power of transportation to transform our societies? It’s easier to imagine a world with cars, planes, and rail systems. Rail has long been one of the most reliable and efficient modes of transport around the globe—but its impact isn’t limited only to convenience. It can also be a powerful tool for…

The post Exploring the Economic and Social Benefits of Sustainable Rail Construction appeared first on Peak Oil.