Reading

Created
Wed, 07/06/2023 - 02:55

Our cutting-edge lemonade stand harnesses the insight of artificial intelligence to help us understand our customers’ needs like never before. We’re confident this next-gen technology was a valuable investment for our twenty-five-cent children’s drink business.

Before we opened our lemonade stand, we asked ourselves, what do our customers want? We immediately said lemonade, because that’s all we can offer as a pair of nine-year-olds, but then we had to think of some other stuff because our parents told us to use a full hour to answer that question.

So we talked mindlessly and wasted time looking up words we heard adults at home use, like “scalability,” “machine learning,” and “Malcolm Gladwell.” In the end, we determined that our business (the one constructed out of milk crates and posterboard) needed the unproven and expensive power of AI. Our parents said we were behaving exactly like real-life entrepreneurs.

Created
Wed, 07/06/2023 - 02:00
You’ve got to be joking. Philip Bump unravels the looney tunes James Comer and Chuck Grassley jihad against Chris Wray for failing to “turn over” a document they’ve already seen. It’s a complicated story and it’s very, very stupid so take a deep breath: Over the course of 2019, President Donald Trump and his allies were focused on the electoral threat posed by former vice president Joe Biden, the candidate leading in polling for the 2020 Democratic nomination. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani thought he had a useful angle to that end: an allegation from a former Ukrainian official that Biden had leveraged American funding to benefit a company for which Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, worked. That official, Viktor Shokin, met with Giuliani, then Trump’s attorney, to allege that the vice president had pressured Ukraine to fire him to block a probe into the energy company Burisma. The claim didn’t withstand scrutiny. Shokin’s ouster was a multinational effort predicated on the prosecutor’s failure to address corruption.
Created
Wed, 07/06/2023 - 00:30
Careful where you point that thing It’s all fun and games until someone loses their beach house or their life’s savings (Axios): Insurability in an age of climate change is a 50-state problem. It’s just growing more actute in California, Florida, Texas, Colorado, Louisiana and New York “as insurers are being forced to re-assess their risk tolerance as climate change leads to more common and severe extreme weather events, says Steve Bowen, chief science officer at Gallagher Re.” Rates in Florida “are expected to rise about 43% to nearly $6,000 in 2023,” according to the Insurance Information Institute. No problem. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican state legislators will just madate that “woke” insurers offer coverage anyway. Because Florida is where capitalism goes to die.
Created
Tue, 06/06/2023 - 23:31

All around us things are falling apart. Collectively, Americans are experiencing national and imperial decline. Can America save itself? Is this country, as presently constituted, even worth saving? For me, that last question is radical indeed. From my early years, I believed deeply in the idea of America. I knew this country wasn’t perfect, of course, not even close. Long before the 1619 Project, I was aware of the “original sin” of slavery and how central it was to our history. I also knew about the genocide of Native Americans. (As a teenager, my favorite movie — and so it remains — was Little Big Man, which pulled no punches when it came to the white man and his insatiably... Read more

Source: Clinging Bitterly to Guns and Religion appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Created
Tue, 06/06/2023 - 23:14

Dr. Ella Cockbain, associate professor at University College London, exposes the dangerous rhetoric behind British Home Secretary Suella Braverman's false claims about Britain's so-called "grooming gangs."

The post The Truth About Britain’s “Grooming Gangs,” with Ella Cockbain appeared first on MintPress News.

Created
Tue, 06/06/2023 - 23:00
Can we just get on with it? We keep getting teased that Donald Trump will soon be wearing an ankle bracelet over charges in one or another of the criminal investigations pending against him. So far, nada. Seriously, are we going to have to go Ralph Kramden on Jack Smith’s Ed Norton? (A very old cultural reference, sorry.) Again Monday, nada. CBS News: Attorneys representing former President Donald Trump — John Rowley, James Trusty and Lindsey Halligan — met with special counsel Jack Smith and federal prosecutors at the Justice Department at around 10 a.m. Monday, according to two people familiar with the matter.  The meeting took place weeks after Trump’s lawyers had requested a meeting with top federal law enforcement officials. The attorneys for the former president spent just under two hours inside the Main Justice building and declined to comment on their meeting as they left.   Trump himself, increasingly anxious under his Swords of Dumbocles, is freaking out in all caps on Truth Social, as Digby noted Monday.
Created
Tue, 06/06/2023 - 22:29

I am happy to share that Lauri Eskola has accepted our invitation to become a Drupal Core Product Manager.

The Core Product Managers communicate with different types of users, gather data about how Drupal is currently being used, and represent Drupal's end users (like site builders and content authors). They help determine the core feature set and work to holistically improve Drupal's out-of-the-box experience.

Lauri has been working with Drupal for almost 13 years. Not only is Lauri a subsystem maintainer of the theme system, Claro, and CKEditor 5, but he has also been a Frontend Framework Manager and a Drupal Core Committer since 2017.

Created
Tue, 06/06/2023 - 22:00

I left Cornwall behind having not done a fraction of the things I wanted to do. My brother drove me to his home in Northumberland. He then left me to my own devices for a couple of days as he had business in Aberdeen. I have the luxury of staying …

Created
Tue, 06/06/2023 - 22:00

This Pride Month, we’re proud to stand with the LGBTQIA+ community. We believe everyone has a part to play in doing The Work of eradicating injustice and homophobia for good. And we thought our part could be coloring in our social media logo for a month.

Some fight for equality on the legislative front; some raise funds for hard-working charities; some mentor homeless LGBT youth. Our weapon of choice is an AI drawing of a rainbow.

From July through May, we’d probably say we identify as a heterosexual, cisgender financial institution slash legal person. But when June comes around, we don our digital rainbow background and become a Big Gay Bank of Gays (BGBG).

We are thrilled to make this brief, flimsy gesture that angers some and accomplishes little to commemorate and celebrate those who fought and gave their lives for LGBTQIA+ rights. Without their sacrifice, there would be no corresponding and totally unexpected 5 percent gross uptick in profits during this sudden gay interlude. We’re even more thrilled about that.

Created
Tue, 06/06/2023 - 19:49

As Rachel Reeves jets off to the US to meet financiers, policymakers and politicians, she has used the opportunity to claim that a Labour government will embrace ‘Bidenomics’—the economic agenda that has been pursued by the current US President.   Having lost control over the House in this year’s midterms, the Biden administration has been […]