Tuesday, December 05, 2023

Will Clean Sweep The Next Election

at No comments:
Labels:

Sunday, December 03, 2023

3: Mount Jannu



What Israel Owes Gaza While collateral injuries may be unintentional and unavoidable, they remain a catastrophic side effect of war. Armed conflict, by its very nature, is a humanitarian disaster.

The Debate That Israel Needs Over the War

Sam Altman, Sugarcoating the Apocalypse It was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit to serve man, to keep an eye on galloping A.I. technology and ensure there were guardrails and kill switches — because when A.I. hits puberty, it will be like aliens landing......... “When you see something that is technically sweet,” Robert Oppenheimer said, “you go ahead and do it.” ........... the quicksilver A.I. has already leaped ahead of the snaillike lawmakers and bureaucrats. Nobody, even in Silicon Valley, has any clue how to control it. ......... Larry Page, a co-founder of Google and an A.I. accelerationist ........ Page dismissively told Musk he was “a specist” for siding with the human species in the A.I. argument. ......... Musk tweeted: “I’m still confused as to how a nonprofit to which I donated $100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. ......... A.I. could malevolently turn on us, manipulating us with what it has learned from being fed all the books ever written, including works of Machiavelli.

The Books That Explain Where We Are in 2023 “Today artificial intelligence and information technologies have absorbed many of the questions that were once taken up by theologians and philosophers: the mind’s relationship to the body, the question of free will, the possibility of immortality,” O’Gieblyn writes. “These are old problems, and although they now appear in different guises and go by different names, they persist in conversations about digital technologies much like those dead metaphors that still lurk in the syntax of contemporary speech. All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.” ......... metaphors are “two-way streets.” When we believe God made us in his image, we begin to remake God in ours. When we describe our minds using terms borrowed from computers, we begin to see our minds mirrored in computers, and we cease to value the parts of our minds that differ from computers. .......... The chips that power our iPhones and allow A.I. systems to carry out their calculations are magnificently intricate. “Unlike oil, which can be bought from many countries,” Miller writes, “our production of computing power depends fundamentally on a series of choke points: tools, chemicals, and software that often are produced by a handful of companies — and sometimes only by one. No other facet of the economy is so dependent on so few firms.” ........ The iPhone 12 runs on a chip with 11.8 billion transistors etched into its silicon. Only one company in the world can make that chip. That company relies, in turn, on machines and materials that are also made only by singular firms. Those machines and materials rely on similarly complex and fragile supply chains. If any node in this supply chain breaks, so too will much of the global economy break. If a country or alliance of countries can control these advanced supply chains, locking others out, they will have a powerful advantage in both war and commerce. .......... “Chip War” is a reminder of the physical artifacts that underlie what we so wrongly describe as the cloud. .......... China has loomed large in my thinking this year. The three signal legislative achievements of the Biden administration — the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act — were largely or partially about competing with, or strategically decoupling from, China. Outmaneuvering China is one of the few bipartisan paths left for legislation in Congress, which has led to way too many bills being framed and written as anti-China bills. Hawkishness toward China is the clearest through line from the Trump to Biden administrations. Biden kept Trump’s tariffs and began limiting China’s access to key technologies. The rhetoric cooled but the policy heated. ........ the New Deal order, which lasted roughly from the 1930s to the 1970s, and the neoliberal order, which spanned the 1970s to the 2010s. .......... The dismantling of the welfare state and the labor movement, meanwhile, marched in tandem with communism’s collapse. ........... In 1910, no American city had zoning rules. By the 1930s, most of the U.S. population lived under them. ........ the 1970s see something new: Housing is becoming the core of American wealth, and so homeowners begin using zoning rules to protect the worth of their homes by deciding what kinds of homes can be built near them, which is, of course, a way of deciding which kinds of people can move near them. ........... Fischel’s core argument — that zoning was something that the public demanded, not something that elites simply imposed ......... “What is curious is how elusive Bitcoin is, as a thing to understand. Bitcoin often gets explained but somehow never stays explained.” ........... the slave compounds where gangsters force prisoners to send those scam texts that populate our phones these days .......... “I am not a computer scientist, but I don’t think you can just call the concept of prices going up forever, for no reason, a ‘technology.’” ........... that’s what much of crypto was, or is. Old scams given new life by the sheen of code and technology. ..........

The elegance of the cryptography tricked people into thinking of trust as a problem of code rather than of human beings.

And so they had no defense when human beings started manipulating the code. ............. the strength and weakness, the idealism and the brutality, the hope and the horror, that has always been at Zionism’s heart. S

Beyoncé Is the Religious Experience We Need Right Now I have been a Baptist preacher for nearly 45 years, and to me, those concerts recalled what church at its best should be. ........ In a way, Beyoncé is what we call a process theologian: a theologian who believes that becoming takes priority over being and that temporal processes influence our understanding of God. “I feel like you see the show and it’s so beautiful,” Beyoncé announces in her documentary. “But I’m more fascinated in people seeing the process. I think the beauty is in the process.” ........ at the intersection of sound and sex, of groove and gender, of work and womanhood, Beyoncé soars as a thinker.

Michael Stipe Is Writing His Next Act. Slowly. How do you reinvent yourself after being a global superstar? The former R.E.M. frontman is still figuring that out....... All his life, thoughts, feelings and sensory information have coursed through him at gale force. ......... We met for the first time in May 2022 at his art studio on the Lower East Side........... It was an unusual experience: being Michael Stipe, being in R.E.M., selling some 90 million albums, touring the world. The band was among the most acclaimed of its generation, and Stipe was always its most recognizable member. The face of R.E.M. was his face. In fact, that’s what his bandmate Mike Mills nicknamed him: Face. ......... The group spent much of its career touring at a breakneck pace, first scrappily and strapped for cash and later as the center of a frenetic, industrial-scale production — both of which strained Stipe’s body and mental health. ............. Stipe had the insight to lay off drugs but found himself chewed up on tour by the explosions of adrenaline and subsequent crashes. By 1985, after five years and four records, the band had reached a new, more demanding level of success. But Stipe was sunk in a depression, tumbling through what he describes as a more than yearlong nervous breakdown. “I was exhausted. I was malnourished. And there was a virus that was killing men who slept with men dead — some men I knew. Some men I knew very well,” he said. “Every time I got a rash, or my glands got swollen, every time I got sick, I’d be like: ‘That’s it. It’s H.I.V.’ .......... “I look at bands that are my contemporaries who, at some point, took a year off from recording and touring to go scuba diving. We didn’t know you could do that.” ........ In 2008, after his queerness randomly became news again, R.E.M. posted a video online in which Stipe read a stilted press release. He was there to announce, “after years of awkward speculation,” that the other members of R.E.M. were, in fact, straight. “I am happy for my bandmates and congratulate their candidness and their courage in making this bold statement,” he deadpanned. ........... For nearly 32 years, Stipe had been plugged into a particular socket. Now he was unplugged — it was as simple as that. When Rolling Stone asked if he planned to make a solo album, he answered, “It’s unfathomable to me right now.” ......... He can sing lines like “You know with love comes strange currencies/And here is my appeal” for a stadium full of people who will all sing them back, and for whom, in that alchemical moment, those words mean something vital, mean everything, even if no one agrees what they mean. .......... Stipe was working with no record company, no timetable, no agenda but his own. He was energized by this structurelessness; he knew what pressure felt like from his former life in R.E.M. and was certain he didn’t want that again. And yet, because there were zero constraints on him, he started to feel thwarted, flattened, constrained. One day, in September, I was with him when he came across the phrase “dire wolf” on a plaque — the name of an extinct Pleistocene-era creature, new to him. Stipe paused to consider it. I could feel his attention spiraling away: dire wolf, dire wolf, dire wolf. He took a picture of the words.

Lessons From Kissinger’s Triumphs and Catastrophes
Ask Brutalized Cambodians What They Think of Kissinger
Three American Climbers Solve the ‘Last Great Problem in the Himalayas’ Scaling Mount Jannu’s north face without fixed ropes or oxygen was “the greatest climb ever,” one expert said, far more difficult than reaching the summit of Everest. .......... At 25,295 feet, Jannu — with its remote location and combination of height, steepness and altitude — is one of the most daunting peaks for climbers. Its north face, especially, has stirred and vexed mountaineers........... The three men used only what they could carry on their backs. ......... the day-to-day struggle to ascend nearly two miles of mostly sheer rock and ice ........... The expedition began with a 30-hour drive from Kathmandu, Nepal. A hiking trek to base camp began at 5,000 feet of elevation, and for six days the climbers used porters and pack animals to climb out of swampy junglelike terrain. .......... They prepared their climbing packs, taking advantage of ever-improving gear. Climbing tools — ice axes, crampons, ice screws, pitons and so on — are stronger and lighter than ever. .......... They carried dehydrated food. They had one stove, one pot and one two-pound sleeping bag, wide enough to fit three men, the better for body warmth. ............. The most helpful technical innovation might have been the two inflatable single-person portaledges, hanging perches that could be anchored to cliff sides so that climbers could rest. The climbers fastened the portaledges side-by-side and slept with their heads resting against the rock, their feet out over the void. ........... They slept the first night at 19,000 feet, in a crack “where the glacier movement separates away from the ice that’s stuck to the mountain face,” Rousseau said. “Which sounds crazy to a lot of people, that we camped inside a crevasse, essentially.” They could feel and hear the movement of the glacial ice. “It’s just wild to see how fast that is pulling away from the mountain and how active it is,” Marvell said. .......... This was three men, two ropes and one shared sleeping bag. ........ Now they are climbing’s newest power throuple. ....... Cornell, 29, is known as a quiet, compact free-solo (no rope) ice climber. He usually spends winters near Bozeman, Mont., and summers around the rock-climbing hub of Yosemite National Park, working at a restaurant (owned by Anker, a mentor) to help fund his pursuits. He lives in a 2003 Freightliner van, with 320,000 miles, fitted with a bed, stove and other amenities. ........... Cornell noted the trusting relationship the three men have built and the necessity of perfect harmony during an expedition. .......... After a day at base camp, the men flew in a helicopter back to Kathmandu, where Rousseau and Marvell spent five days in a hospital, getting their hands treated.



It’s Not the Economy. It’s the Fascism.

In 2024, it’s not the economy. It’s the democracy. It’s the decency. It’s the truth.

........ “We will be voting on whether to preserve our republic,” she writes. “As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for a four-year term. But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution.” ........ The two current runners-up for the Republican presidential nomination, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, raised their hands when they were asked, during a debate in August, about whether they’d support Trump as the party’s nominee even if he was convicted of felonies. .......... Those plans include the use of military funds for huge detention camps for undocumented immigrants, a Justice Department turned into a personal revenge force and ideological litmus tests for federal employees to ensure maximal sycophancy.
at No comments:
Labels:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)