| Time |
Event |
| 7:22a |
Devon politics
Some districts in the UK are experimenting with an unofficial primary election
which helps the voters figure out which opposition party they support has the
best chance of
defeating the incumbent party.
This is not part of the official electoral system, but helps voters
determine how to vote tactically in the official election.
|
| 7:22a |
Arms sales to Israel
Canada will halt arms sales to Israel, based on reproach in the
legislature for Israel's disregard for the likes of
Palestinian
civilians in Gaza.
|
| 7:22a |
Biden's big tech defeat
Biden negotiated changes in NAFTA, weakening business power in the area of
international
digital business.
|
| 7:22a |
Marañón River
A court in Peru decided that the River Marañón has
"intrinsic rights".
In philosophical terms, that is absurd, because exercising rights
requires volition, and the river is not capable of that.
The practical content of the decision is good. To preserve the
river's existence, ensure it continues to flow, restore damage, reduce
pollution in it, and protect it's ecosystems are legitimate and
important responsibilities — of humans, including the state.
However, to call those goals "rights" of the river itself is absurd,
because the river cannot think, want, or decide anything. It is not
in fact capable of exercising rights.
There is no need to base policies to protect nature on an incoherent
philosophical foundation. We can establish a responsibility to
protect rivers without asserting that they have rights.
|
| 7:22a |
Kidnapping fears and stats
Kidnapping of children is so rare in the US that parents who worry
about it are giving
themselves pointless grief.
The article compares that risk with other risks children face.
|
| 12:23p |
Urgent: ExxonMobile-enabled climate upheaval
US citizens:
Tell ExxonMobile:
you caused the climate crisis — not us.
When a few powerful entities — such as, major oil companies — reshape the system
that most people live in so that only by making difficult efforts can they avoid putting the
world in grave danger, those entities become responsible for the harm they have led and
pressured people to do.
|
| 12:23p |
Urgent: Support Schumer's rebuke to Netanyahu
US citizens:
Support Senator Schumer's rebuke
to Netanyahu, and the pressure on Israel to stop the mass killing of Palestinian civilians.
|
| 12:23p |
Urgent: Ships with renewable, not fracked, energy
Everyone:
call on Canada
to power ships with renewable energy, not fracked methane.
|
| 12:23p |
|
| 12:23p |
Minimum wage battle, Minneapolis
Ride companies Guber and Lyft threaten to leave Minneapolis now
that the city has voted to require them to
pay at least minimum wage.
The officials that voted to require paying drivers decent wage say that those
exploitative
and gouging companies are
welcome to leave. May this start a world-wide movement to end such exploitation of workers.
|
| 12:23p |
|
| 12:23p |
Bill to tame LLM "releases", CA
California is
considering a bill
that would require companies to test large "artificial intelligence" models for "unsafe"
behavior before "releasing" them, and set up ways to shut them down completely.
The best known large language models do not properly qualify as "intelligence", but I expect
that the bill would define the term with the usual misguided usage. In terms of substance,
that is the right decision: the bill would be useless for its purpose if it did not cover
bullshit generators.
The bill would apply to "released" programs. Bullshit generators are typically not released at
all -- you can't get a copy of GPT4, not even an executable copy. They are made available for
use only as SaaSS (Service as a Software Substitute):
I expect that the author intends the law to apply to those systems, and it would be ineffective
if it did not apply to them. That implies that the bill's sponsor, or perhaps the author of
the article, is distorting the word "released" to include unreleased programs.
This will cause further confusion. It is surely possible to write the law to have the intended
meaning without spreading confusions about the meaning of words.
There is a substantive issue, too. Will this law effectively prohibit the real release of free
software to do machine learning? It could do that, depending on the precise wording.
|
| 12:23p |
Millions of displaced Congolese, DRC
*It's time to ask
why the US and UK fund Rwanda
while atrocities [it supports] mount up in DRC.*
The western sponsors of Rwanda may be racists and they may enjoy seeing black Africans suffer.
But I am skeptical that they join such a complex and selective scheme involving dividing groups
of blacks against each other. I suspect that money is somehow at the root of that.
|