AC Grayling explores the factors that have driven the rise of 'illiberal democracy’
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Rebecca Freeman As another year draws to an end and the blog prepares for some downtime over the festive period, we wanted to take a look back at the blog in 2023. In case you missed any of our posts the first time round, the five most viewed posts for the year were: We hope … Continue reading Top 5 posts 2023
En svensk fotbollslegendar har gått ur tiden. Zlatan i all ära, men för mig kommer alltid den här grabben att vara nummer ett. Bosse Larsson (1944-2023) spelade 16 säsonger i MFF. Han vann sex SM-guld och toppade skytteligan vid tre tillfällen. 1965 gjorde han 28 mål på 22 matcher. Bosse var — precis som yours […]
Hundreds of UK health workers have shut down the central London headquarters of US tech giant and spy firm Palantir to disrupt its business. Their mass picket aims to blockade entry to and exit from the building in protest against NHS England awarding a £330 million contract to Palantir, a company which professes to be […]
Why A Soccer Super-Fan Taken Hostage By Hamas Is A “Ray of Hope” In Israel
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.