Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
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The Pandora Papers disclosures reveal the elaborate mechanisms that
the wealthy deploy to shift funds between global jurisdictions,
masking their true wealth and minimizing their tax obligations.
It unmasks the U.S. as a tax haven - including the state of
South Dakota with its proliferation of dynasty trusts.
...
While we should hold the billionaire tax dodgers to account, not
enough scrutiny is focused on the enablers, what social scientists
describe as "the wealth defense industry." These are the tax attorneys,
accountants, wealth managers and family-office staffers that are paid
millions to help billionaires sequester trillions.
...
The wealth defenders will crow "everything we do is legal" but segments
of the wealth defense industry are implicated in writing the rules
governing trusts in many U.S. states and designing the exotic transactions
that dance along the intent of the law. While the left hand is using
various wealth-hiding techniques and loopholes, the right hand is fending
off oversight, lobbying for special treatment, and creating new loophole
innovations.
Ian Welsh
Regulatory hurdles are massive. Everyone knows, for example, how to make insulin, and you'd think someone would get into the business and undercut producers. Insulin costs about $4 to make, and sells for over $300. In economics this looks like the sort of situation that would automatically lead to competition.
It doesn't. For one, getting permission to produce is hard and expensive. For the second, if you did manage to, it would be costly to setup the initial factory and supply chain, and that means the current producers would simply step in and undercut the new entrant till they went out of business (people would buy the cheapest), then push prices back up once they had driven the challenger out of business.
Emery N. Brown, M.D., Ph.D.
Consequently, they have developed a principled, neuroscience-based paradigm for using the EEG to monitor the brain states of patients receiving general anesthesia. In addition, they demonstrate that the state of general anesthesia can be rapidly reversed by activating specific brain circuits. Finally, they show that the state of general anesthesia can be controlled using closed-loop feedback control systems.
Some things I remember from the talk:
As of August 30, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has received reports of 12,908 severe breakthrough cases of Covid-19 among fully vaccinated people that resulted in hospitalization or death. For the more than 173 million people who were fully vaccinated by that date, that represents a less than a 1 in 13,000 chance of experiencing a severe breakthrough case of Covid-19.
About 70% of breakthrough cases resulting in hospitalization were among adults 65 and older and about 87% of breakthrough cases resulting in death were among adults 65 and older, the CDC data suggests.
Also see How much less likely are you to spread covid-19 if you're vaccinated?.
A recent study found that vaccinated people infected with the delta
variant are 63 per cent less likely to infect people who are unvaccinated.
What is important to realise, de Gier says, is that the full effect of
vaccines on reducing transmission is even higher than 63 per cent,
because most vaccinated people don’t become infected in the first place.
Despite mounting evidence that the virus reached humans through natural pathways - from infected animals such as bats - the lab-leak hypothesis recently jumped back into the news, thanks to CNN, the investigative news site the Intercept, and the Atlantic.
All treat the idea that the virus escaped from a lab credulously. They downplay or entirely ignore the latest scientific findings that support the theory that the virus' origin can be found in the animal kingdom - the view accepted by a preponderance of experts in virology.
Also see
Why I Still Believe Covid-19 Could Not Have Originated in a Lab.
Lab escape theories cannot clearly account for a virus that has evolved
for human-to-human transmissibility.
A member of the CCP's seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, he is
China's top ideological theorist, quietly credited as being the
"ideas man" behind each of Xi's signature political concepts,
including the "China Dream," the anti-corruption campaign,
the Belt and Road Initiative, a more assertive foreign policy,
and even "Xi Jinping Thought." Scrutinize any photograph of Xi
on an important trip or at a key meeting and one is likely to spot
Wang there in the background, never far from the leader's side.
...
"Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" has rapidly transformed China
into one of the most economically unequal societies on earth.
It now boasts a Gini Coefficient of, officially, around 0.47,
worse than the U.S.'s 0.41. The wealthiest 1% of the population now
holds around 31% of the country's wealth (not far behind the 35% in
the U.S.). But most people in China remain relatively poor: some
600 million still subsist on a monthly income of less than 1,000 yuan
($155) a month.
Meanwhile, Chinese tech giants have established monopoly positions even more robust than their U.S. counterparts, often with market shares nearing 90%. Corporate employment frequently features an exhausting "996" (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week) schedule. Others labor among struggling legions trapped by up-front debts in the vast system of modern-day indentured servitude that is the Chinese "gig economy." Up to 400 million Chinese are forecast to enjoy the liberation of such "self-employment" by 2036, according to Alibaba.
Erik Hoel, On making good predictions for 2050
Why are such smart people so impossibly bad at this? Why do they jump to your "headwires" controlling your "robot cook" as you get ready to drive your floating car? The truth is that most futurists are attracted to speculating about the future for the same reason as science fiction writers: they like geeking out about technological possibilities and the associated metaphysics. That's how you get a sci-fi book without the plot.
If you want to predict the future accurately, you should be an incrementalist and accept that human nature doesn't change along most axes. Meaning that the future will look a lot like the past. If Cicero were transported from ancient Rome to our time he would easily understand most things about our society.
The best we can do is modeling a generic worm - pretraining and running the neural network with fixed weights. Thus, no worm is "uploaded" because we can't read the weights, and these simulations are far from realistic because they are not capable of learning. Hence, it's merely a boring artificial neural network, not a brain emulation.
Over the past four and half decades - the time for which we have data - oil spills from tankers decreased very substantially. The dataset by the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation (ITOPF) covers more than four decades over which time the incidence of large oil spills from tankers greatly decreased. While in the 1970s there were 24.5 large (> 700 tonnes) oil spills per year, in the 2010s the average number of large oil spills decreased to 1.7 oil spills per year.
A Dutch supermarket chain says it will introduce 200 "chat registers"
in its stores for customers who aren't in a hurry and want to have a chat
during checkout.
...
"The Kletskassa is a checkout especially for people who are not in a hurry
and feel like having a chat," a Jumbo representative wrote in an email
to Motherboard. "Many people, especially the elderly, sometimes feel lonely.
It's a small gesture, but a very valuable one, especially in a world
that is digitizing and getting faster and faster."