Time |
Event |
3:47a |
Upcoming talk, June 5
On Monday, June 5th, RMS will give a talk,
"Digital Freedom and Digital Privacy",
in Rende, Italy, in the Great Hall at the University of Calabria.
The talk will follow a roundtable, "Relating Language Models, Future Artificial Intelligence,
Massive Data Collection, Open Source, and Free (Libre) Software":
Moderator: Giovambattista Ianni, Professor of Computer Science
Participants:
Vincenzo Bruno, Founder of Coopyleft
Ines Crispini, Steering Board of the Italian Society for AI Ethics
Stefano De Carlo, Board of Hacklab
Gianluigi Greco, President of the Italian Assoc. for Artificial Intelligence
Antonello Mantuano, Senior director of Cerved S.p.A.
Giuseppe Rossi, Director of Unical's ICT Services
Domenico Talia, Professor of Information Processing Systems
Both are in English.
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2:32p |
Brics summit and Putin
How
Putin could be prosecuted
for the crime of aggressive war.
Regime change in Russia would probably be a change for the better,
but it would be foolish to insist on that if it interferes with
reaching a just peace
to end the war. We should allow Putin to remain
in power in Russia if he agrees to release all of Ukraine's territory.
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2:32p |
Anti-Putin movement
Some Russians claim to have started
an anti-Putin armed guerrilla movement
operating in Russian territory.
However, they seem to have entered Russia across the Ukrainian border,
and to have picked up some US-made arms in Ukraine. So far they have
attacked only government targets.
In moral terms, I think what they are doing is admirable. Their
actions could help Ukraine win the war, but I think it will be
difficult to increase them enough to have a significant effect.
Putin could theoretically cite this as an excuse for attacking Ukraine
in some new ways. But I don't think that makes any difference. Putin
never needs a real excuse for any atrocity — he invents all the bogus excuses
he needs.
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2:32p |
Voter entrapment, FL
Florida officials systematically entrap convicts into registering to
vote and then voting. Then they get prosecuted for
"voter fraud".
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2:32p |
Elections disinformation, UK and US
*Elections in
UK and US at risk
from [neural-network-generated] disinformation, say experts.*
To refer to these systems as "artificial intelligence" spreads confusion,
so I don't call them that. Please join me in that refusal.
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2:32p |
Public land for housing, UK
Starmer has proposed a real, significant change: to build millions of
housing units under government direction, to
avoid a massive give-away
to the rich.
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2:32p |
Splinternet, RU
*You Should
Not Trust Russia’s
New "Trusted Root [certification authority for https]".*
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2:32p |
Sec. of [oil] Transportation
Buttigieg is going all-out to push for oil drilling in the Uinta basin
of the Colorado Plateau, and to
transport the oil
long distances by train alongside the Colorado River.
He is also planning to approve tax breaks for building the line for
these trains, so the owners can get a subsidy to prepare to poison the
water of a large region of the US.
There is no room in the carbon budget for developing any new oil fields,
no matter where the oil might be sent or how.
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2:32p |
NHS privatization strategy
*It's a horribly
effective [Tory] ploy:
under invest in the health service, then encourage patients to blame staff for any failures.*
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2:32p |
Protest-repression, AU
South Australia has passed repressive
laws against protests
that might
inconvenience others, and one of the politicians who voted for it says,
"be grateful we won't cut your head off."
The protests that the state wanted to prevent were going to be against
planet roaster companies that already kill people
by the hundreds of
thousands, and are working on raising
that to hundreds of millions.
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2:47p |
Urgent: Direct more pay to workers and less to CEOs
US citizens:
call on Biden
to use federal spending rules to direct more pay to workers and less to CEOs.
The White House comments lines are
+1-202-456-1111
and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
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2:47p |
Urgent: Avoid benefits outage
US citizens: if your congresscritter is a Republican, phone per at
1-833-964-2935 to call for raising taxes on the rich rather than
cutting the benefits that non-rich Americans (even those with jobs)
depend on. You could add, "Don't threaten to make the US default."
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2:47p |
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10:17p |
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10:17p |
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10:17p |
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10:17p |
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10:17p |
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11:02p |
Florida groups warn of danger from ‘dictator’ DeSantis
Americans, what DeMentis is doing to Florida shows what he would do to
the whole
US if he becomes president.
He has pioneered new sorts of bullying that
go beyond the corrupter.
DeMentis aims do more than defeat opposition; he seeks to punish those
that dared to oppose him.
I do not judge laws and government policies mainly based on whether
they induce big companies such as Disney to move work to my state
or my country. But I see, in DeMentis's efforts to punish Disney,
a plan for the sort of fascism that makes opposition too dangerous.
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11:02p |
those injured by 2020’s police violence speak out
Thugs around the US violently attacked protesters and journalists at
the rallies for George Floyd in 2020. Some of those shot with
"nonlethal" weapons and
left with irreparable injuries.
Have the thugs that refused to give Evans any help getting to the
hospital been punished for that?
Have the thugs that
encircled and besieged protesters
been punished for that?
|
11:02p |
Look at what hedge funds really do
The myth of Capitalism is that investors take risks with their money,
so they deserve a big profit when the risk succeeds. I can go along with this
to a point: we can't let the investors keep most of the wealth that a business
produces — most has to go to workers and to the state.
Nowadays, private equity fund managers and similar "investors" have
obtained plutocratist laws which assure them of
profits even from
failure.
This problem stems from another foolish general practice: the US has
more or less given up on penalizing companies that do harm. Instead,
the proposal is always to subsidize businesses that say they won't
do the harm.
And governments don't even bother to insist that the business do what
it was subsidized for.
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11:02p |
the contentious tool US immigration uses to get your data
The US immigration thug agency uses sites such as YouTube as well as Facebook
and Twitter to find all users who seem to be interested in
matters concerning
immigration.
It is clear that some of these subpoenas investigate people who are
not by any stretch of the imagination engaged in planning crimes.
These are nothing like the Proud Boys.
The only way to deal with this problem is not to let those sites collect
personal data on people for watching anything, unless there is a subpoena
to collect data on those who visit a particular channel or page.
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