Mammon category archive
The Spoiled of War 0
Rex Huppke channels an oil executive’s thoughts about Donald Trump’s war of choice with Iran in this New Gilded Age.
A snippet:
The Crypto Con 0
Via The Japan Times, Bloomberg’s Andy Mukherjee is less than sanguine about nations relying on crypto, as seems to be a trend. A snippet:
“History Does Not Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes”* 0
Angela Wilson looks at the placement of proposed AI data centers and hears a rhyme. Here’s a bit from her parsing of the poesy:
“Black communities face the highest impact from AI and data centers because they’re already disproportionately impacted by climate change, which is driven by CO2 emitted in part by the energy production involved in running data centers,” according to the Climate Justice Alliance.
Follow the link. It gets verse.
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*Mark Twain.
Suffer the Children 0
As has been well demonstrated, that’s a Republican family value.
Via the Las Vegas Sun, Layla Sayed looks at the effects of the Trump maladministration’s actions on SNAP benefits. Here’s a tiny bit from her article (emphasis added):
These statistics are not just numbers — they’re people not being fed.
Before the new law, SNAP helped feed 41.7 million low-income Americans per month, 62% of whom were families with children.
Emoluments 0
David explains how Donald Trump is looking to profit from his “social” media posts.
Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0
Psychopathic? Anita Chabria argues that it well may be. Here’s how she opens her article:
Repeated law-breaking. Lying and deceit. Reckless disregard for safety. Lack of remorse.
Those are traits that help define a psychopath, someone who lives among us but doesn’t have the empathy and ethics necessary to behave in a civilized, or even safe, fashion.
Unfortunately, it’s also increasingly clear that these are the traits that define the most powerful artificial intelligence models being developed at alarming speed by for-profit corporations – corporations that would like us to believe that slowing down this roll toward AI dominance is somewhere between impossible and foolhardy.
Republican Family Values 0
Methinks that, when you read this article from the Des Moines Register about the struggles faced by Iowa residents since the Trump maladministration slasched SNAP benefits, you will understand why I hold that mean for the sake of mean is a Republican family value.
Metastasized 0
Ring of Fire’s Josh Gay reports on how a contractor constructing a data center for the Zuckerborg nearly poisoned a community with lethal waste water.
Emoluments 0
David follows the money.
The Crypto Con 0
But is it truly a con? At Above the Law, tax attorney Steven Chung applies the eye of a lawyer to Donald Trump’s crypto capers.
The Crypto Con Artists 0
Farron marvels at the art of the double-deal.
Emoluments, Reprise 0
Josh Gay follows the money.
Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0
Capable of critical thought? Zeynep Tufekci argues that (emphasis added)
Large language models are not reasoning machines. They’re plausibility engines. They can only assess which answers are probable, based on the data on which the models have been trained.
Follow the link for his arguements.
And, in more news of AI . . . .