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The family of Isaac Hayes is SUING Donald Trump and his campaign for 134 counts copyright infringement for the unauthorized use of the song “Hold On I’m Coming” at campaign rallies from 2022-2024. In a letter, they demand Trump stop using the song and pay $3 million.
Bernie Sanders
There is not a single state in America where you can afford a two-bedroom apartment while earning the minimum wage.
Something is wrong with this picture.
No more excuses. Tax billionaires, raise the minimum wage, build more affordable housing.
We’re Entering an AI Price-Fixing Dystopia
Algorithmic collusion appears to be spreading to more and more industries. And existing laws may not be equipped to stop it.
If you rent your home, there’s a good chance your landlord uses RealPage to set your monthly payment. The company describes itself as merely helping landlords set the most profitable price. But a series of lawsuits says it’s something else: an AI-enabled price-fixing conspiracy.
The classic image of price-fixing involves the executives of rival companies gathering behind closed doors and secretly agreeing to charge the same inflated price for whatever they’re selling. This type of collusion is one of the gravest sins you can commit against a free-market economy; the late Justice Antonin Scalia once called price-fixing the “supreme evil” of antitrust law. Agreeing to fix prices is punishable with up to 10 years in prison and a $100 million fine.
But, as the RealPage example suggests, technology may offer a workaround. Instead of getting together with your rivals and agreeing not to compete on price, you can all independently rely on a third party to set your prices for you. Property owners feed RealPage’s “property management software” their data, including unit prices and vacancy rates, and the algorithm—which also knows what competitors are charging—spits out a rent recommendation. If enough landlords use it, the result could look the same as a traditional price-fixing cartel: lockstep price increases instead of price competition, no secret handshake or clandestine meeting needed.
#K12EDUCATION
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/education/2024/08/09/after-30-years-of-reforms-report-examines-state-of-milwaukee-schools/74694344007/
‘Transformed system has not transformed outcomes for children,’ researchers say
OF COURSE BETSY DEVOSS
MADE A LOT OF MONEY.
#POLITICS
Greg Palast @Greg_Palast
Get ready for the quiet coup in November. Trump’s dreams of overturning the vote count of 2020 can now come true in 2024, thanks to a new rule passed by the MAGA-controlled Georgia State Election Board.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1823026786126709225.html
Let me break this down. Four years ago, Trump called the Secretary of State of Georgia and demanded: “What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.”
Georgia has de-criminalized rejecting the vote count. If this November’s vote, as polls now show, goes against him again, Trump won’t even have to make the call. Because, on August 6, the GOP majority on the Georgia State Election Board voted itself the right to reject the vote of any county if, in the MAGA-nauts view, a county board of elections did not conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into the county’s voting process.
Arizona Republican becomes first fake elector to plead guilty for role in Trump scheme
Black Books-Chapter Three
“The orange predator was sloppy, he knew that going back to his CIA days. The corpulent, idiot-playboy needed a minder especially since he had the same tastes as Barr’s old man – that never worked out well unless there was someone in the shadows to clean up the mess. To bury the evidence, or at least as much of it as they could find, before it all ended up in Putin’s shaky hands. He didn’t mind the ‘wet work’ as they called it back in his ‘Company’ days. Now here it all was in black and white. Ten million from Egypt’s El-Sisi because this skinflint motherfucker from Queens was too cheap to fund his own campaign.”
#SCIENCE
GIGO and GIIGO
The traditional ancient saying about computers is:
GIGO: Garbage In — Garbage Out
For generative AI, we could say:
GIIGO: Good Information In — Garbage Out ~ L
Lauren’s Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
Burst Damage by Edward Zitron
August 2, 2024 was Black Friday for the artificial intelligence boom, as a week of rough earnings from Big Tech led to what felt like the entire media industry to ask: is the AI bubble popping?
New Technologies to Combat Opioid Addiction
The Geopolitics of Routing
Cyberspace has emerged as a new space of competition and control for nations. The Internet is a network of networks where each network is an Autonomous System (ASes). ASes are independent administrative entities controlled by a variety of actors such as governments, companies, and universities. Their administrators have to agree and communicate on paths followed by packets traveling across the Internet, which is made possible by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Agreements between ASes are often confidential, but BGP requires neighboring ASes to interact in order to coordinate routing through the constant release of connectivity update messages. Therefore, BGP routing, that controls the path over which data transits is becoming geopolitical significance. We have in the past years developed methodologies to understand and represent the new forms of power rivalries and imbalances that occur within the lower layers of cyberspace. We have applied these methodologies to several case studies among which the analysis of Eastern Ukraine, the Gulf region, Taiwan, etc. In this presentation we will describe our methodologies and discuss about the geopolitical implications of networks, as well as methodologies to understand it. We will see that such studies entail large-scale multidisciplinary studies ranging from pure mathematics and topological algebra, passing by deep technical knowledge, to geopolitical expertise. This is the challenge we have to overcome.
Here is the link for this Zoom gathering:
https://zoom.us/j/966864863?pwd=bXNmR3ZBUVJOdzE1VExZZHhsM1Y2Zz09
Password: 076743
The Science Network @SciNetUCS
Curious to learn about the nexus among scientists, voters, & decisionmakers? Check out @AlyssaShearer4’s blog to learn the importance of communicating science during elections & increasing scientists’ civic engagement
#TECH
BREAKING: Banks, credit card companies, and more will be required to let customers talk to a human by pressing a single button under a new Biden administration proposed rule.
The @CFPB rule is part of a campaign to crack down on customer service “doom loops.”
Thousands of Corporate Secrets Were Left Exposed.
This Guy Found Them All
Google Chrome Will Soon Disable Extensions like uBlock Origin: Here’s What You Can Do!
Google Chrome is gearing up for Manifest v3 by phasing out legacy extensions.
Bill to Improve Fed Contractor Security Gets Senate Companion
A bipartisan pair of senators today announced their plan to introduce companion legislation to strengthen Federal cybersecurity by requiring government contractors to implement vulnerability disclosure policies (VDPs).
The Federal Contractor Cybersecurity Vulnerability Reduction Act was first introduced in the House by Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., in August 2023 and was favorably reported out of committee earlier this year and is now awaiting the full House for further consideration.
CISA director calls CrowdStrike-linked outage a “dress rehearsal” for what China may have planned for U.S. critical infrastructure. Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told a large crowd at the annual Black Hat cybersecurity conference that the fallout of the CrowdStrike situation — which disrupted medical care, canceled flights and shuttered retailers — showed what effects Chinese-linked activity tracked as Volt Typhoon could generate.
MANNERS
Origin of why you keep your elbows off the table.
Etiquette Expert Answers Etiquette Questions
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