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JV Last has a great piece up today about the Colorado decision that you should read in its entirety. I’ll just excerpt this one part: Have you ever noticed how, whenever Trump does something terrible, there is always an argument that holding him accountable can only help him? You can’t impeach him in 2020, because it’ll just make him stronger. You can’t impeach him in 2021, because you’ll turn him into a martyr. You can’t raid Mar-a-Lago to take back classified documents, because you’ll rile up his base. You can’t prosecute him for crimes X, Y, and Z, because it’ll make Republican voters love him more. There is a strange, self-limiting, helplessness to that thinking: A wicked man does immoral and illegal things—and society’s reaction is to say that we must indulge his depredations, because if we tried to hold him accountable then he would become even worse. Is there any other aspect of life in which Americans take that view? That’s not how parents deal with children. It’s not how regulatory agencies deal with corporations. And it’s not how the justice system deals with criminals.
Kate Winslet goes hardline politician in the upcoming HBO miniseries The Regime, suspiciously resembling a younger, sexier Margaret Thatcher.
This paper examines the factors associated with the adoption of cloud computing and artificial intelligence/machine learning, two emerging digital general-purpose technologies (GPT), as well as firms' post-adoption outcomes. To do so we identify adoption of GPT based on references to these technologies in listed company reports, and merge this with data on their Board of Directors, their hiring activities and their financial performance. We find that firms that have directors with relevant technological backgrounds, or female representation on their Board, are more likely to profitably adopt GPT, with the former being particularly important. Worker skills also appear important, with firms that adopt GPT, particularly those that do so profitably, being more likely to hire skilled staff following adoption. Finally, while early adopters of GPT experience a dip in profitability following adoption, this is not evident for more recent adopters. This suggests that GPT may have become easier to adopt over time, potentially due to changes in the technologies or the availability of relevant skills, which is encouraging in terms of future productivity outcomes.
I’m sure this is terrible news for Joe Biden: The best answer to most of this is “not sure” unless you are a highly educated constitutional scholar or Supreme Court expert. But we all have our uneducated opinions. I’m going with “will reverse” myself. But it’s nice to see that some of the Republicans agree that he committed an insurrection and should be barred though. If they stick with that then Trump will lose. Happy Hollandaise!
Where many see the death of reality on the internet, this hacker-turned-Notre Dame professor sees communion.
The post Stop Worrying About Deepfakes appeared first on Nautilus.
If you cast your mind back to 2016 and after in Britain, there were a series of shock horror predictions being made about the impact on the nation of leaving the European Union. The scaremongering didn’t dissaude the voters and the Referendum was determined in favour of leaving. It seems I lost some friends as…
Psychedelic treatment is helping patients make difficult emotional breakthroughs.
The post Will Psychedelics Replace Antidepressants? appeared first on Nautilus.
Tipping points—elements of the Earth’s climatic system that can be flipped from one state to another with a relatively minor change in temperature, and which could then cause major and abrupt changes in the climatic system itself—are a key concern for climate scientists (Lenton et al. 2023, p. 36). One of leading scientists in this … Continue reading "Neoclassical economics and the demise of capitalism"
This should have been interrogated a little bit more. These people disapprove of Biden’s Israel policy but think his support for Israel and Palestine is about right? I guess they might not think he shouldn’t support of either of them at all but that seems like a stretch. It’s weird question but it should be this confusing. I think this shows the limitations of polling right now. People are expressing their discontent with Joe Biden on the economy despite telling pollsters their own financial situation is improved and they’re saying they disapprove of his handling of Israel despite the fact that they think he’s gotten the balance between the two warring parties about right. They’re basically saying they disapprove of Joe Biden and it actually has nothing to do with his policies. In fact, they like his policies. They’ve just decided they don’t like him. I have to assume that some of this (at least among swing voters and Democrats) is about the PTSD dynamic that lingers from the pandemic and also the chaos that Trump and the Republicans constantly cause and which people think Biden is impotent to stop.
An at-risk source entrusted the paper with protecting his sensitive personal information. Then the Times published it for the world to see.
The post New York Times Doxxes Source Trafficked by Chinese Gang appeared first on The Intercept.
The UnOz’s Person of the Year award is one of the most anticipated events of the year, with defamation lawyers everywhere especially keen to see the list. 2023 was a year like no other. For Australia it felt like a... Read More ›
Are you sure? It seems like this new year can’t get any more turbulent or our political system more volatile. We’re going to have Donald Trump on trial, epic Supreme Court decisions, foreign policy crises and, oh yeah, the most important election of our lives. I’m already reeling with it and I’m sure you are too. We are living through very, very consequential times. Obviously, the end of the cold war shook everything up after 40 years of a stand-off and the modern conservative movement’s long-term project finally flowering changed our politics. But things have been hurtling at warp speed over the past two decades with an epic terrorist attack that sent the nation into a frenzy and enabled a tragic war from which we still have not fully recovered. The financial crisis of 2008 was the worst economic catastrophe the vast majority of us have ever experienced. (Only the very oldest Americans went through the Great Depression.) The technological revolution of the last few decades is changing our lives so quickly that we can’t keep up from day to day.
In my undergraduate dissertation, titled: An exploration into how neoliberal economic policies have impacted Britain's North - South divide in urban spaces since the 1980s, I explore how Britain’s adoption of neoliberal policies furthered existing urban inequality through an ability to ‘lock-in’ existing variation and reinforce itself by coercing urban spaces to compete against each other. I emphasise the importance of viewing neoliberalism as a dynamic and contradictory framework as opposed to a static ideology, and encourage this to be mapped onto space, with a specific focus on urban spaces in Britain. This mapping enables the evolution and perpetuation of neoliberal ideology to be unpacked, with its ever-increasing influence on the living standards of citizens being key to understanding the geographic unevenness in British society.
The post Competition and Contradiction in Neoliberal Britain’s Spatial Divide appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
Along with new images from BBC's Ncuti Gatwa & Millie Gibson- starring Doctor Who Christmas Special, Gibson tackles some TARDIS questions.
The cult has been going mad over this: Donald Trump keeps sharing a photo on social media featuring a bright-red arrow pointing at the head of a bearded man at his civil fraud trial — claiming he is the son of the judge. The Post can now confirm that the pictured bespectacled, well-groomed target is not the kin of Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron. I should know — I’m the guy in the photo. Trump, 77, on Tuesday yet again signal-boosted the photo of me sitting a few rows into the court gallery along with an article by a fringe-right activist inexplicably claiming Engoron’s son is “financially benefitting” from being given a “prominent” seat at the trial. The post went out to Trump’s 6.52 million followers on the Truth Social app. It was the second time within a month that the former president shared the photo of me and a screenshot of the Nov. 7 article from Laura Loomer, an anti-Muslim activist who once described Islam as a “cancer” and has been banned from social media sites in the past.
The protests and protest candidates failed because they lacked organizational structures and concrete policies.
So, we’re watching The Bells of St. Mary’s for the fifth time—wholesome movie, so much more fun than hot jazz and lively bars—when some fella in the balcony starts hollering, “Hee-haw!” at me. “Is that man drunk, daddy?” whispers Zuzu, afraid. “No,” I sigh, sinking lower into my seat. “That’s just Sam Wainwright.”
George Bailey here. I love Sam Wainwright, I really do. But if he says, “Hee-haw!” one more time, I’m going to fucking kill him.
His speech at my father’s funeral? “Hee-haw.” My wedding toast? “Hee-haw.” His honeymoon night? “Hee-haw,” over and over again. I only know this because his fancy, fur-draped wife came crying to Mary and asked if that was normal. It is not normal.
So, we’re watching The Bells of St. Mary’s for the fifth time—wholesome movie, so much more fun than hot jazz and lively bars—when some fella in the balcony starts hollering, “Hee-haw!” at me. “Is that man drunk, daddy?” whispers Zuzu, afraid. “No,” I sigh, sinking lower into my seat. “That’s just Sam Wainwright.”
George Bailey here. I love Sam Wainwright, I really do. But if he says, “Hee-haw!” one more time, I’m going to fucking kill him.
His speech at my father’s funeral? “Hee-haw.” My wedding toast? “Hee-haw.” His honeymoon night? “Hee-haw,” over and over again. I only know this because his fancy, fur-draped wife came crying to Mary and asked if that was normal. It is not normal.