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.
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On this week’s Lever Time: David is joined by Russell Brand to discuss his evolution from comedian to political content creator, and we interview the authors of Chokepoint Capitalism.
A new bill would allow prisoners to get time off their sentence if they donate their organs or bone marrow.
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.
A Brexit supporter in Westminster in 2019. Photo: Lindsay Lipscombe/Alamy
New ONS data reveals how cold homes and food insecurity is impacting people's physical and emotional health
There's so much to be angry about right now.
Enter the office of Big Business Brain, CEO.
Australia is moving towards defeating a referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, because it's lacking the support traditionally needed for “Yes” to succeed. read now...
The Treasurer has unveiled a flawed and shallow economic argument for a reshaped and ‘uniquely’ Australian capitalism that exists in a post-crisis world. read now...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.
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.
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.
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 […]
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.
David Jacobs has been appointed to the position of Head of Domestic Markets at the Reserve Bank of Australia following the resignation of Jonathan Kearns late last year. Mr Jacobs will commence his new role on 6 February 2023.
That what budget talks are for Josh Marshall makes an important point about the reasons the Democrats cannot negotiate around raising the debt ceiling. It’s not that they won’t ever negotiate. It’s that they can’t negotiate with people who think they can hold the world economy hostage in order to get their way: No one — not the White House or any Democrats on Capitol Hill — is saying they won’t negotiate the federal budget or how much the country should be spending on this or that priority or how much debt the country should take on. Kevin McCarthy is right when he says, albeit disingenuously: you can’t say you won’t negotiate. That’s what democratic governance is. That’s true. In the last Congress Democrats’ had a tenuous but complete control of Congress as well as the White House. Now Republicans hold the House by an equally tenuous but real margin. By definition, that means fiscal policy will move in the Republican direction during the next two years. That’s the democratic process. The extent of the shift is what negotiation is about. Each side has its own set of tools at its disposal.
One question for Jon Rueda, a doctoral student in moral philosophy at the University of Granada.
The post Can AI Help Us Be Better People? appeared first on Nautilus.
I am certainly not the first person to point to wartime mobilization as a model for our response to climate change. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made headlines3 for it within politics, but academics such as JW Mason, Andrew Bossie, and Isabella Weber have also worked to extract lessons from World War II for today.4 In my research I zero in on the Treasury, a key nexus of macroeconomic policymaking, and compare and contrast their view specifically with that of MMT.Of course, the MMT economists noticed this too.
The method is historical: I dug through various sources, primary and secondary, to piece together the worldview held by Treasury officials. The result is a surprisingly long list of direct quotations that you could easily mistake for having come from an MMT economist.…
Good article based on MMT principles but which is framed to appeal to the progressives looking at a Green New Deal rather than as a tract promoting MMT.
Strange Matters
How They Paid for the War
Strange Matters
How They Paid for the War
"We'll meticulously extract it using 20,000 tonnes of explosives"