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From Ezra Klein (archive link:

Among the many unique experiences of reporting on A.I. is this: In a young industry flooded with hype and money, person after person tells me that they are desperate to be regulated, even if it slows them down. In fact, especially if it slows them down.

What they tell me is obvious to anyone watching. Competition is forcing them to go too fast and cut too many corners. This technology is too important to be left to a race between Microsoft, Google, Meta and a few other firms. But no one company can slow down to a safe pace without risking irrelevancy. That’s where the government comes in — or so they hope.

A place to start is with the frameworks policymakers have already put forward to govern A.I. The two major proposals, at least in the West, are the “Blueprint for an A.I. Bill of Rights,” which the White House put forward in 2022, and the Artificial Intelligence Act, which the European Commission proposed in 2021. Then, last week, China released its latest regulatory approach.

Let’s start with the European proposal, as it came first. The Artificial Intelligence Act tries to regulate A.I. systems according to how they’re used. It is particularly concerned with high-risk uses, which include everything from overseeing critical infrastructure to grading papers to calculating credit scores to making hiring decisions. High-risk uses, in other words, are any use in which a person’s life or livelihood might depend on a decision made by a machine-learning algorithm.

The European Commission described this approach as “future-proof,” which proved to be predictably arrogant, as new A.I. systems have already thrown the bill’s clean definitions into chaos. Focusing on use cases is fine for narrow systems designed for a specific use, but it’s a category error when it’s applied to generalized systems. Models like GPT-4 don’t do any one thing except predict the next word in a sequence. You can use them to write code, pass the bar exam, draw up contracts, create political campaigns, plot market strategy and power A.I. companions or sexbots. In trying to regulate systems by use case, the Artificial Intelligence Act ends up saying very little about how to regulate the underlying model that’s powering all these use cases.

Unintended consequences abound. The A.I.A. mandates, for example, that in high-risk cases, “training, validation and testing data sets shall be relevant, representative, free of errors and complete.” But what the large language models are showing is that the most powerful systems are those trained on the largest data sets. Those sets can’t plausibly be free of error, and it’s not clear what it would mean for them to be “representative.” There’s a strong case to be made for data transparency, but I don’t think Europe intends to deploy weaker, less capable systems across everything from exam grading to infrastructure.

The other problem with the use case approach is that it treats A.I. as a technology that will, itself, respect boundaries. But its disrespect for boundaries is what most worries the people working on these systems. Imagine that “personal assistant” is rated as a low-risk use case and a hypothetical GPT-6 is deployed to power an absolutely fabulous personal assistant. The system gets tuned to be extremely good at interacting with human beings and accomplishing a diverse set of goals in the real world. That’s great until someone asks it to secure a restaurant reservation at the hottest place in town and the system decides that the only way to do it is to cause a disruption that leads a third of that night’s diners to cancel their bookings.

Sounds like sci-fi? Sorry, but this kind of problem is sci-fact. Anyone training these systems has watched them come up with solutions to problems that human beings would never consider, and for good reason. OpenAI, for instance, trained a system to play the boat racing game CoastRunners, and built in positive reinforcement for racking up a high score. It was assumed that would give the system an incentive to finish the race. But the system instead discovered “an isolated lagoon where it can turn in a large circle and repeatedly knock over three targets, timing its movement so as to always knock over the targets just as they repopulate.” Choosing this strategy meant “repeatedly catching on fire, crashing into other boats, and going the wrong way on the track,” but it also meant the highest scores, so that’s what the model did.

This is an example of “alignment risk,” the danger that what we want the systems to do and what they will actually do could diverge, and perhaps do so violently. Curbing alignment risk requires curbing the systems themselves, not just the ways we permit people to use them.

The White House’s Blueprint for an A.I. Bill of Rights is a more interesting proposal (and if you want to dig deeper into it, I interviewed its lead author, Alondra Nelson, on my podcast). But where the European Commission’s approach is much too tailored, the White House blueprint may well be too broad. No A.I. system today comes close to adhering to the framework, and it’s not clear that any of them could.

“Automated systems should provide explanations that are technically valid, meaningful and useful to you and to any operators or others who need to understand the system, and calibrated to the level of risk based on the context,” the blueprint says. Love it. But every expert I talk to says basically the same thing: We have made no progress on interpretability, and while there is certainly a chance we will, it is only a chance. For now, we have no idea what is happening inside these prediction systems. Force them to provide an explanation, and the one they give is itself a prediction of what we want to hear — it’s turtles all the way down.

The blueprint also says that “automated systems should be developed with consultation from diverse communities, stakeholders, and domain experts to identify concerns, risks and potential impacts of the system.” This is crucial, and it would be interesting to see the White House or Congress flesh out how much consultation is needed, what type is sufficient and how regulators will make sure the public’s wishes are actually followed.

It goes on to insist that “systems should undergo predeployment testing, risk identification and mitigation, and ongoing monitoring that demonstrate they are safe and effective based on their intended use.” This, too, is essential, but we do not understand these systems well enough to test and audit them effectively. OpenAI would certainly prefer that users didn’t keep jail-breaking GPT-4 to get it to ignore the company’s constraints, but the company has not been able to design a testing regime capable of coming anywhere close to that.

Perhaps the most interesting of the blueprint’s proposals is that “you should be able to opt out from automated systems in favor of a human alternative, where appropriate.” In that sentence, the devil lurks in the definition of “appropriate.” But the underlying principle is worth considering. Should there be an opt-out from A.I. systems? Which ones? When is an opt-out clause a genuine choice, and at what point does it become merely an invitation to recede from society altogether, like saying you can choose not to use the internet or vehicular transport or banking services if you so choose.

Then there are China’s proposed new rules. I won’t say much on these, except to note that they are much more restrictive than anything the United States or Europe is imagining, which makes me very skeptical of arguments that we are in a race with China to develop advanced artificial intelligence. China seems perfectly willing to cripple the development of general A.I. so it can concentrate on systems that will more reliably serve state interests.

China insists, for example, that “content generated through the use of generative A.I. shall reflect the Socialist Core Values, and may not contain: subversion of state power; overturning of the socialist system; incitement of separatism; harm to national unity; propagation of terrorism or extremism; propagation of ethnic hatred or ethnic discrimination; violent, obscene, or sexual information; false information; as well as content that may upset economic order or social order.”

If China means what it says, its A.I. sector has its work cut out for it. A.I. is advancing so quickly in the United States precisely because we’re allowing unpredictable systems to proliferate. Predictable A.I. is, for now, weaker A.I.

I wouldn’t go as far as China is going with A.I. regulation. But we need to go a lot further than we have — and fast, before these systems get too many users and companies get addicted to profits and start beating back regulators. I’m glad to see that Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, is launching an initiative on A.I. regulation. And I won’t pretend to know exactly what he and his colleagues should do. But after talking to a lot of people working on these problems and reading through a lot of policy papers imagining solutions, there are a few categories I’d prioritize.

The first is the question — and it is a question — of interpretability. As I said above, it’s not clear that interpretability is achievable. But without it, we will be turning more and more of our society over to algorithms we do not understand. If you told me you were building a next generation nuclear power plant, but there was no way to get accurate readings on whether the reactor core was going to blow up, I’d say you shouldn’t build it. Is A.I. like that power plant? I’m not sure. But that’s a question society should consider, not a question that should be decided by a few hundred technologists. At the very least, I think it’s worth insisting that A.I. companies spend a good bit more time and money discovering whether this problem is solvable.

The second is security. For all the talk of an A.I. race with China, the easiest way for China — or any country for that matter, or even any hacker collective — to catch up on A.I. is to simply steal the work being done here. Any firm building A.I. systems above a certain scale should be operating with hardened cybersecurity. It’s ridiculous to block the export of advanced semiconductors to China but to simply hope that every 26-year-old engineer at OpenAI is following appropriate security measures.

The third is evaluations and audits. This is how models will be evaluated for everything from bias to the ability to scam people to the tendency to replicate themselves across the internet.

Right now, the testing done to make sure large models are safe is voluntary, opaque and inconsistent. No best practices have been accepted across the industry, and not nearly enough work has been done to build testing regimes in which the public can have confidence. That needs to change — and fast. Airplanes rarely crash because the Federal Aviation Administration is excellent at its job. The Food and Drug Administration is arguably too rigorous in its assessments of new drugs and devices, but it is very good at keeping unsafe products off the market. The government needs to do more here than just write up some standards. It needs to make investments and build institutions to conduct the monitoring.

The fourth is liability. There’s going to be a temptation to treat A.I. systems the way we treat social media platforms and exempt the companies that build them from the harms caused by those who use them. I believe that would be a mistake. The way to make A.I. systems safe is to give the companies that design the models a good reason to make them safe. Making them bear at least some liability for what their models do would encourage a lot more caution.

The fifth is, for lack of a better term, humanness. Do we want a world filled with A. I. systems that are designed to seem human in their interactions with human beings? Because make no mistake: That is a design decision, not an emergent property of machine-learning code. A.I. systems can be tuned to return dull and caveat-filled answers, or they can be built to show off sparkling personalities and become enmeshed in the emotional lives of human beings.

I think the latter class of programs has the potential to do a lot of good as well as a lot of harm, so the conditions under which they operate should be thought through carefully. It might, for instance, make sense to place fairly tight limits on the kinds of personalities that can be built for A.I. systems that interact with children. I’d also like to see very tight limits on any ability to make money by using A.I. companions to manipulate consumer behavior.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. Others will have different priorities and different views. And the good news is that new proposals are being released almost daily. The Future of Life Institute’s policy recommendations are strong, and I think the A.I. Objectives Institute’s focus on the human-run institutions that will design and own A.I. systems is critical. But one thing regulators shouldn’t fear is imperfect rules that slow a young industry. For once, much of that industry is desperate for someone to help slow it down.

Jackass is set to be photographed, fingerprinted and arraigned on Tuesday.

I urge all humans (regardless of their stance on/interest in this criminal case) to come to NYC to express (or not) themselves. And once you've done that, stick around for a few days or a week.

I'd start with some nice dim sum. Jing Fong is just a few blocks (perhaps a 5-7 minute walk up Centre Street, 202 Centre Street to be precise) from the Manhattan Criminal Court building where Trump will be arraigned (100 Centre Street, to be precise).

If you're not a fan of Chinese food, head over to Little Italy for some lovely Italian food.

Don't forget to stop by Cafe Ferrara for some dessert. I heartily recommend the Sfogliatelle, although just about everything there is delicious!

Or (or in addition to) head downtown to the 9/11 memorial (open 'til 8PM, associated museum closes at 7PM)

If you're around Trump Tower, walk a few blocks south to 53rd Street and turn right. MoMA is right there.

It has a wonderful permanent collection, as well as several interesting current exhibits (see link above). Highly recommended!

I'd also highly recommend The Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of the City of New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (not as close to Trump Tower as MoMa, but everything is pretty close in Manhattan).

Or head a few blocks uptown and you'll be at Central Park, especially since Tuesday will be a really nice day, (mid 60s and sunny). There are so many wonderful places in the park (the Mall, Sheep Meadow, The Great Lawn, The Shakespeare Garden, the famed Central Park Carousel, Belvedere castle (where, incidentally, the National Weather Service maintains weather monitoring equipment. So if you hear the news say "it's 64 degrees in Central Park, that's where the measurements are taken). If you're with your SO (or want them to be so), go to the Castle around sunset -- ~7:39PM on Tuesday) and take them to the Pagoda next to the castle. It's one of the most romantic places in all of NYC.

And there are too many wonderful museums, Broadway shows, musical performances from jazz to hip hop and everything in between! Numerous dance clubs and a wide variety of other places and activities as well.

If you're interested, recreational cannabis is legal to posess in NY State. There are currently three state-sanctioned cannabis retail dispensaries in Manhattan (where Trump Tower and the Criminal Court are located), and ~1500 unsanctioned stores/dispensaries around the city as well. "Dude! Look at the colors! Wow!"

And there are so many other places to go, things to do and experiences to have. From the U.S.S. Intrepid, (if you stick around 'til at least Thursday Shen Yun, the opera and rafts and rafts of other stuff.

So come on down to protest/support (or not) who and/or what ever you want, and stay for all the wonderful stuff NYC has to offer!

Hotels are kind of expensive in NYC, but deals can be had. What many folks do is to stay in hotels/motels outside the city and take public transportation (free parking is hard to find and paid parking is very expensive -- much more so than public transportation, and driving in NYC can be incredibly slow). I personally really like The Arthouse Hotel on the Upper West Side. Near the iconic Zabar's, The Beacon Theater, Central Park, The NY Historical Society (an often overlooked gem!) and (my favorite) The American Museum of Natural History.

I couldn't possibly expound on all the fabulous stuff to do and see in NYC (I believe journal entries have a character limit), but you will certainly find many wonderful things here!

So come and support/protest Trump, then stay for all sorts of wonderful stuff!

All (as long as you're not violent) are welcome and encouraged to come and stay as long as you like. We support free speech and peaceful protest here. Enjoy!

Paul Krugman writes:

After their party’s disappointing performance in the midterms, Republican elites seem to have decided that Donald Trump is their big problem. The Murdoch media empire has been trashing the former president. Many donors and operatives are reportedly rallying around Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. But Trump, who is widely expected to announce his 2024 presidential campaign on Tuesday, won’t go quietly.

Will Trump secure the nomination despite elite qualms? If he doesn’t, will a man who has never shown any loyalty to his party or, for that matter, anyone but himself, sabotage the G.O.P. out of spite? I don’t know more than anyone else who follows the news.

Let’s talk instead about how remarkable it is that someone like Trump managed to dominate one of America’s two major political parties and surely retains a substantial base.

I’m not talking about the fact that Trump holds what I consider reprehensible policy views or even the fact that he engaged in several acts, including an attempt to overturn a national election, that can reasonably be described as seditious. Clearly, most of the G.O.P. is OK with all of that.

I’m talking instead about the evident perception by many Republicans that Trump is a strong leader, when he is in reality extraordinarily weak.

Start with personal character — not my favorite subject (I’m much more comfortable talking about policy), but something that clearly matters when you’re choosing a commander in chief.

I don’t think it’s romanticizing the past to say that once upon a time politicians who sought the presidency had to appear, well, presidential. That is, they had to display gravitas and dignity; whatever their behavior behind closed doors, in public they had to appear mature and self-controlled.

Trump, however, comes across as 76 going on a very bratty 14. He veers, sometimes in consecutive sentences, between cringeworthy boasting (what kind of person describes himself as a stable genius?) and whining, between bombast and self-pity.

Beyond personal affect, what stands out about Trump’s time in office is his weakness, his inability to get things done.

On domestic policy, Trump ran in 2016 as a different kind of Republican, one who would break with the party’s tax-cutting, anti-government orthodoxy. Once in the White House, however, he was putty in Mitch McConnell’s hands. His only major domestic policy initiatives were a failed attempt to repeal Obamacare and a standard-issue G.O.P. tax cut for corporations and the wealthy.

What about his promises to invest in infrastructure? Nothing came of them: “It’s Infrastructure Week!” became a running joke.

On foreign policy, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un played Trump for a fool with empty reassurances about denuclearization. China’s Xi Jinping did much the same over trade, getting Trump to pause his tariff hikes in return for a promise to buy U.S. goods that proved entirely empty.

In short, Trump’s performance in office was feeble — especially compared with that of his successor.

President Biden didn’t get everything he wanted on domestic policy, but he did get a major infrastructure bill and, in the Inflation Reduction Act, both unprecedented spending to fight climate change and a significant strengthening of health care. And Democrats’ unexpectedly strong showing in the midterms probably ensures that these policy successes will endure.

Overseas, Biden assembled and held together a coalition in support of Ukraine that has enabled the invaded nation to resist Russia’s attack — a huge foreign-policy success reminiscent of America’s pre-Pearl Harbor role as the “arsenal of democracy.” And Biden’s China policy, centering on export restrictions designed to undermine China’s technological ambitions, is vastly more aggressive than anything Trump did, even if it hasn’t gotten nearly as much media attention.

Yet Biden is often portrayed as weak and out of it, while Trump was perceived by 90 percent of Republicans as a “strong leader” on the day he grudgingly left office. How is this possible?

The Trump personality cult may have been enabled in part by forces that go beyond politics. After all, we used to expect dignified behavior from captains of industry as well as politicians. But these days, perhaps because celebrity culture infects everything, business leaders are taken seriously even when they seem unable to refrain from flamboyant displays of ego and insecurity. (Cough. Elon Musk. Cough.)

Also, the Republican elites trying to distance themselves from Trump spent years fluffing his image. Until a few days ago Fox News, the main source of political information for much of the G.O.P. base, gave Trump the kind of hagiographic coverage you’d expect from state media in a dictatorship.

And Republican politicians, many of whom knew Trump for what he was, spent years praising him in language reminiscent of Politburo members praising the party chairman.

Now those same elites want to push Trump out of the picture. But while they may be able to deny him the nomination, they probably won’t be able to avoid paying a heavy price for their past cowardice.

What makes a strong or weak leader? Discuss.

Do we even want a strong leader, or just someone we can pour our desires and aspirations into and then call it a day, regardless of results?

Note that the above is an opinion piece, not news reporting. I take back what I wrote earlier, please do provide your opinions, although some facts wouldn't hurt.

Excerpts of an interim report[PDF] from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)

II. INTRODUCTION
Following an invitation from the United States government to observe the 8 November 2022 mid-term congressional elections, and in accordance with its mandate, the OSCE Office for democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) established a Limited Election Observation Mission (LEOM) on 26 September.¹ The mission, led by Tana de Zulueta, consists of a 17-member core team based in Washington D.C. and 40 long-term observers (LTOs) deployed on 4 October throughout the country.² Mission members come from 25 OSCE participating States.

¹See previous ODIHR election reports on the United States.

²In its Needs Assessment Mission report, ODIHR recommended an Election Observation Mission (EOM) that would include, in addition to a core team of analysts, 100 long-term observers as well as 400 short-term observers (STOs) for observation of election day procedures. However, in response to its request for secondment of observers, ODIHR received an insignificant number of STOs from participating States, which made a statistically valid observation of election day proceedings impossible. Against this backdrop, ODIHR has taken a decision to change the format of the observation activity deployed to the United States of America from an Election Observation Mission to a Limited Election Observation Mission (LEOM). In line with ODIHR standard methodology for LEOMs, the mission will not carry out a comprehensive or systematic observation of election-day proceedings but intends to visit a number of polling stations on election day.

The Executive Summary details some of their findings:

I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
• Mid-term congressional elections will be held on 8 November 2022 to elect 35 of 100 senators and all 435 members of the House of Representatives. A total of 1,275 candidates are standing for a seat in Congress, including 343 women. At the state levels, 36 governors and most state legislators as well as 27 secretaries of state, 25 of whom also serve as the chief election administrators in their states, will also be elected.

• The electoral legal framework is complex and diverse, with states adopting their own laws and regulations on most aspects. States have enacted more than 400 separate bills or amendments since the last elections, mostly related to absentee and mail voting, early voting, ballot drop boxes and ballot collection, voter identification and voter registration. The elements of elections regulated by federal law are limited to the voting rights of racial and linguistic minorities, military and overseas voting, voting of persons with disabilities, campaign finance, and minimum standards for the use of New Voting Technologies (NVT). The federal legal framework has not changed since the 2020 elections.

• Following the 2020 population census, the share of the 435 House seats held by each state were reapportioned, and electoral district boundaries within the 44 states that have more than one House seat were redrawn. Redistricting is highly politicized, with state legislatures responsible for delimitation in 33 of the 44 states with more than one congressional district. Bipartisan commissions conduct redistricting in three states, and eight states use hybrid commissions composed of experts and political representatives. As of May 2022, 78 challenges have been filed, in state and federal courts, against redrawn district maps, often alleging partisan gerrymandering. Pursuant to court decisions, district maps were changed in 13 states. Some cases are still pending as there is no deadline for review.

• States are responsible for managing elections, and some 6,460 entities are charged with administering elections in jurisdictions across the country. At the federal level, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) regulates campaign finance, and the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is charged with channeling federal funds to local authorities, and functions in an advisory role providing guidance to jurisdictions on meeting federal requirements and serving as a clearinghouse for information
about election administration including chain of custody best practices, election security, voting accessibility, procurement, audits and recounts.

• In 41 states, elections are completely or partly managed by elected or appointed officials, many of whom are running for reelection. Most ODIHR Limited Election Observation Mission (LEOM) interlocutors noted concerns with threats of violence targeted at election officials at state and county level since 2021. Congress has allocated funds to counter threats against election workers, and a Joint Taskforce of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation was created in July 2022 to gather information on threats and deal with these at the federal level.

• The use of NVT is broad and varies considerably across and within states. Ballot scanning combined with automatic tabulation is used in most jurisdictions, and around 70 per cent of voters can choose between using a voting machine and marking a paper ballot by hand. Most states require or have the option for post-election audits. States and local election officials cooperate with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to mitigate potential cybersecurity risks.

• Voting rights are subject to numerous restrictions. Some 4.1 million citizens resident in the District of Columbia and U.S. territories lack full representation in Congress. In all but two states and the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, the voting rights of inmates and former felons are restricted. Some voters with psychosocial and intellectual disabilities remain disenfranchised in all but ten states.

• Voter registration is active and implemented at the state level, with rules varying between states. Forty states and Washington D.C. offer online voter registration. There has been a growing trend towards the introduction of identity documents (IDs), with 35 states requiring some form of voter ID. Proponents of ID requirements cite better safeguards, while opponents claim that strict ID rules and varying access to ID target racial and ethnic minority groups and disadvantaged communities.

• Early in-person voting is allowed in 44 states and was ongoing in 17, as of 17 October. Absentee voting by mail is possible in all states, with some states requiring a justification. Military personnel serving abroad, their families, and registered voters who are resident overseas use absentee voting to cast their ballots. Early voting is seen by election officials as a way to reduce pressure on election day, while absentee voting allows mainly voters who cannot vote in person on election day to participate in the process. Widespread and continued claims that absentee ballots are susceptible to fraud appear to have an impact on the level of trust in the current election process.

• The political campaigns by the two major parties are marked by intensely divisive and at times inflammatory rhetoric. A number of Republican candidates in key races, including candidates for
secretary of state who would have direct responsibility for overseeing future elections in their states, challenged, or refused to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 results.

• Campaign finance is regulated by federal law and enforced by the FEC and the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ). While candidates and parties are bound by individual donation limits and disclosure requirements, entities which are deemed ‘independent’ are not required to observe donation limits but are subject to disclosure requirements and are prohibited from co-ordinating their campaigns with candidates or their committees. Some non-profit organizations, which are bound by neither donation limits nor public disclosure requirements, can also engage in campaigning, provided that this is not their primary activity. ODIHR LEOM interlocutors express concern that undisclosed contributions do not allow voters to make a well-informed choice. It is projected that the campaign expenditures in this electoral cycle will reach USD 9.3 billion.

• While pluralistic and diverse, the media landscape is highly polarized. Declining trust in traditional news media has been exacerbated by derogatory comments and legal action against critical media by political actors, as well as online misinformation and disinformation. Major social media companies have adjusted their policies regarding the spread of misleading information, including in relation to elections, although with varying emphasis and concerns.

• Available election dispute resolution mechanisms are diverse and include judicial and administrative avenues, including state and federal courts and county election boards. Pursuant to a redistricting appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether state election laws and district maps adopted by state legislatures are subject to judicial review by state courts. Following the 2020 elections, additional mechanisms for investigation and prosecution of election crimes were established or existing ones were strengthened, often coupled with criminalization of some irregularities in 28 states. While some stakeholders perceive these measures as strengthening election integrity, others view them as
criminalization of common mistakes of the election administration.
Election observation is regulated by state law, with rules regulating observers’ access to the different stages of the process varying widely between states. Seventeen states do not allow for international observation. Some interlocutors raised concerns that in light of growing skepticism of the integrity of election administration, some partisan observers may use their position to unduly interfere in the process on election day.

Soylent News was unavailable to me for several hours today (29 September 2022).

the issue, AFAICT, was that SN's authoritative DNS (ns{1,2,3,4,5}.linode.com) wasn't returning responses to *any* DNS requests for Soylentnews.org.

Whois reports:
Name Server: ns1.linode.com
Name Server: ns2.linode.com
Name Server: ns3.linode.com
Name Server: ns4.linode.com
Name Server: ns5.linode.com

Which were returning no data for DNS queries (A and NS) of SoylentNews.Org via direct requests to the authoritative servers.

As such, I was unable to access the site or the IRC server (as DNS resolution was failing).

So did linode have DNS issues today? a check of downdetector.com doesn't show any reports about this.

Did I miss a posting about this? Did this affect everyone? Or is it just me?

Steve from Ohio called in to Washington Journal [at 14:00] this morning and made a proposal I thought quite interesting.

He noted that the House of Representatives becomes less representative as population increases.

Some background about that:
The number of House members (435) hasn't increased since the Permanent Apportionment Act was passed in 1929.

At that time, the US population was ~120 mllion.

93 years later, the population is almost three times larger.

As a solution, he suggested that the size of a congressional district should be set to the population of the smallest state (since the minimum a state can have is a single representative), at the moment, Wyoming with 576,851.

And then create congressional districts of that size across the nation.

Currently, that would amount to 572 congressional districts. Which would be a ~25% increase in districts.

I find this idea really interesting. Couple that with a requirement for geographically contiguous districts (none of that gerrymandered bullshit) and we could have better and fairer representation.

Seems like a good idea to me. I expect there are other opinions about that as well. Let's hear them all!

From here. Archive link here:

Why do millions of Americans on both the right and the left ignore their own economic self-interest when they choose which political party to support?

Partisan prioritization of cultural and racial issues has, to a notable extent, superseded the economic conflicts that once characterized the nation’s politics, leading to what scholars call a “dematerialization” of American electoral competition.

On the right, millions of working- and middle-class whites have shifted their focus away from the goal of income redistribution — an objective Democrats have customarily promoted — to support the Republican preference for traditional, even reactionary, sociocultural values. At the same time, college-educated white voters have come to support tax and spending initiatives that subordinate their own financial self-interest in favor of redistribution and liberal social values.

Benjamin Enke and Alex Wu, economists at Harvard, and Mattias Polborn, a political scientist at Vanderbilt, capture the rationale underlying this push-me, pull-you cycle in their April paper, “Morals as Luxury Goods and Political Polarization”:

The logic is that when the rich get disproportionately richer, they place a higher weight on moral considerations, which induces some rich moral liberals to swing Democratic. This, in turn, induces the parties to polarize on social issues because their voter bases have now both become more extreme. Faced with such socially increasingly polarized parties, a poor, morally conservative voter may well become more likely to vote Republican, even when his materially preferred economic policy has moved to the left as a result of increased income inequality. In turn, when poor moral conservatives swing Republican, this further pushes the Republican Party position on social issues to the right and the Democratic one further left.

The idea that moral values are, in that sense, luxury goods, Enke, Wu and Polborn write, “is not new but has appeared in different terminology across the social sciences, such as in Abraham Maslow’s (1943) ‘hierarchy of needs’, the influential ‘postmaterialism’ literature initiated by Ronald Inglehart (1997, 2020), or the argument that modernization increases demand for democracy (Seymour Martin Lipset, 1959).”

These trends manifest, the authors continue, “in two ways: first, in any given survey year, rich people report being less materialist than the poor. Second, as average incomes increased over time, the U.S. population as a whole became less materially oriented.”

In a separate 2020 paper, “Moral Values and Voting,” Enke found that

starting in the 1960s, Republicans and Democrats polarized in their moral appeal: for more than 30 years, Democrats increasingly placed a stronger emphasis on universalist moral concepts, a trend that was considerably weaker among Republicans. Thus, today the Democratic Party has a substantially more universalist profile than the Republican Party.

Enke measured the level of support for universalist values by using what he calls “a moral foundation questionnaire” that “elicits respondents’ agreement with moral value statements,” including such “universalist statements” as “Compassion with suffering is a crucial virtue,” “Laws should treat everyone fairly” and “Justice most important requirement for society,” in contrast to such “communal values” statements as “Be loyal to your family even if they have done something wrong,” “Be a team player, rather than express oneself” and “Soldiers must obey even if they disagree with an order.”

Analyzing the speeches of recent presidential candidates, Enke contends that Donald Trump stood apart for his focus on the world of his followers:

Trump’s moral language is less universalist, or equivalently, more communal, than that of any other presidential nominee in recent history. Trump is also more communal than his 2016 primary contenders. Moreover, the difference in moral appeal between Trump and Hillary Clinton is particularly pronounced.

In their paper on morals as luxury goods, Enke, Wu and Polborn contend that it is the most affluent and best-educated citizens who propel the contemporary political emphasis on moral and cultural issues, stressing that “the cultural or moral conflict is between different subsets of the elite. This conflict among elites induces party polarization, which then propagates into changes in voting behavior among the poor.”

In a joint email, Enke and his co-authors elaborated on this process:

As the rich become richer over time, they place a higher weight on their moral values relative to their material incentives. As a result, some voters who are both rich and morally liberal who used to vote Republican swing to the Democrats. The Democratic constituency becomes more morally liberal on average, while the Republican constituency becomes more morally conservative, on average. To make these new constituencies happy, the Democratic Party moves to the left on social issues and the Republican Party to the right.

White voters who are low-income, morally conservative and formerly Democrats, the authors continue,

can now swing Republican because of the change in party positions. Now that the parties are polarized socially, it becomes more relevant for people to vote based on their values, simply because the stakes have increased. As a result, in our model, poor moral conservatives can swing Republican over time even though they don’t become richer and even though economic inequality increased to their disadvantage. In our model, this is all driven by the fact that the parties partly accommodate the changing priorities of the rich, which are now more moral in nature.

In “Identity, beliefs, and political conflict,” Giampaolo Bonomi, a doctoral candidate in economics at the University of California, San Diego, and Nicola Gennaioli and Guido Tabellini, professors of economics at Bocconi University in Milan, make a similar argument:

Economic shocks that boost conflict among cultural groups can also trigger a shift to cultural identity. We offer two examples: skilled biased technical change and globalization. If these shocks hurt less educated and hence more conservative voters, and benefit more educated and hence more progressive voters, they make cultural cleavages more salient and can induce a switch to cultural identity. As a result, economic losers become more socially and fiscally conservative.

In support of their argument, Bonomi, Gennaioli and Tabellini cite the work of David Autor and of Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig to “show that, both in the U.S. and in Europe, losses from international trade foster support for right-wing and conservative parties.”

Their analysis reveals how economic issues mesh with cultural issues in ways that make it difficult to define whether the economic framework creates the moral framework or vice versa.

In an email, Gennaioli noted that their paper “helps explain important real-world phenomena that cannot be understood under the conventional rational choice theory,” which then leads to the question: Why do voters adopt seemingly irrational positions?

Gennaioli wrote:

This question must be broken down into two. First: why do economic losers identify as “cultural conservatives” as opposed to “working class”? Second: how does the “cultural conservative” identity shape the policies that economic losers do or do not demand?

In answer to the first question, Gennaioli contended that

cultural identity is triggered by shocks of a specific kind: those that amplify the economic conflict between culturally conservative vs. progressive voters. Examples of such shocks are expanded international trade, or introduction of labor-saving technologies. These shocks hurt less-educated workers — who tend to be more conservative — while they often benefit more educated voters — who tend to be more progressive because of their higher education. These shocks thus focus the losers on what they have in common, that they belong to a culturally conservative local community particularly exposed to import competition. Thus, losers of trade and technology shocks tend to view social conflict as “us, the conservatives” vs. “them, the progressives.”

Gennaioli observed further:

On the one hand, as economic losers abandon the working class, they also abandon its very stereotypical idea that fighting income disparities is a social priority. On the other hand, culturally conservative losers do not want the universal redistribution of the left, which may go to progressive people or ethnic minorities they dislike. Instead, they may favor specific policies such as protectionism or subsidies to specific sectors/places/workers.

Edsall also presents more data from several other papers/authors. The whole article (and its source material) are an interesting read.

Does this analysis make any sense to you? The concept that the educated elites drive the mechanisms that polarize/unite the rest of us seems to hit all the right buttons, but is pretty depressing.

Is that a function of a failure to teach history (successfully) and civics (at all) that leaves the hoi polloi at the mercy of the educated, as they actually understand how to twiddle the levers of power?

Or is there more to it than that?

I, for one, won't shed any tears for Mr. al-Zawahiri.

It's pretty clear that this guy had no compunctions about killing innocent people in attempta to further his political goals.

No matter what you might think of those goals, using murder, violence and fear while trying to achieve them is flat wrong.

The world is a better place without Ayman al-Zawahiri. Given his track record, it's likely that he would have killed more innocent people in the future.

That said, extra-judicial killings by my government, in my name, is ethically troubling to me.

al-Zawahiri is just the latest example of such acts by the US government, perpetrated over the last 20 years or so.

This isn't (and certainly shouldn't be) a partisan issue, especially since multiple presidential administrations of both major parties have enthusiastically engaged in such extra-judicial murders.

Which, of course, is made much worse, as all too often such operations end up killing innocent people, the very thing we demonize these thugs for doing.

I recognize that al-Zawahiri (nor bin Laden, for that matter) was never going to be brought to the US (or, even better the ICC) for prosecution.

That said, I'm still uncomfortable with the use of extra-judicial murder by my government.

While I am conflicted about this (as al-Zawahiri has killed too many innocents to allow him to continue doing so), I think it's worthwhile to discuss this.

Are we a nation of laws? Is due process irrelevant for non-US citizens?

What are the moral and ethical implications of supporting such activities?

Yes. I am well aware that scumbags like bin Laden and al-Zawahiri didn't give a rat's ass about any of that. But just because other folks are bloodthirsty scum, does that necessarily mean we have to be that way too?

In case you've been hiding under a rock and haven't heard about this (as it's been covered quite widely), here's a sampling of coverage from the 'net:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/cia-drone-strike-kills-al-qaida-leader-ayman-al-zawahri-in-afghanistan

https://www.foxnews.com/us/al-qaeda-leader-ayman-al-zawahiri-killed-drone-strike-9-11-families-react

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2022/08/01/us-reportedly-kills-top-al-qaeda-leader-in-afghanistan-drone-strike/

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/08/01/al-qaeda-leader-ayman-al-zawahiri-killed-drone-strike-afghanistan/

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/aug/1/biden-speak-operation-against-al-qaida-afghanistan/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/1/al-qaedas-ayman-al-zawahiri-killed-in-us-drone-strike-reports

The National Task Force on Election Crises released its final report [PDF] on the 2020 general election.

The task force is made up of folks with expertise from a broad spectrum of political actors in the US, including a former RNC chairman, noted academics/think tankers and politicians of all stripes.

The Executive Summary of the report::

The 2020 election was defined by paradox and contradiction. Thanks to millions of poll workers, election officials, and citizens who stepped up to make our democracy work, the election was secure and free from systemic or significant fraud. A record 160 million Americans voted and had their voices heard. Yet still, voter intimidation and racial disparities in access to the ballot continued, our election system was revealed to be aging and unnecessarily confusing, Americans weathered a wave of disinformation and, of course, there were unprecedented efforts to delegitimize and overturn the election results—ultimately inciting a crisis, the likes of which we’ve not experienced in modern history. In the end, Congress counted all of the electoral votes, but only after President Trump sought to both coerce federal and state officials to overturn the results and incited a violent insurrection. This attack on our democracy culminated with white supremacist rioters attacking the Capitol seeking to not only overturn the Constitutional order, but also to take hostages and assassinate members of Congress and the Vice President. While American democracy has survived this crisis so far, we will only be able to prevent the next one if we both 1) ensure accountability for all those who incited, abetted, and participated in the insurrection, and 2) adopt preventative reforms based on the lessons we learned in this election. Those lessons and reforms are the focus of this report.

The National Task Force on Election Crises is a nonpartisan group that was formed to help the country prevent and confront election crises, in order to protect a free and fair 2020 election. In this report, the Task Force highlights many challenges that emerged in the election, including instances in which the president undermined the electoral process. Of course, the Task Force would have highlighted challenges to a free and fair election and a smooth transition if they came from another presidential candidate.

Election administrators helped mitigate a crisis.

State and local officials conducted the general election in spite of extraordinary challenges posed by a global pandemic. Officials from both parties worked together to expand voting options, recruit hundreds of thousands of poll workers, and become expert crisis communicators, often for the first time. At the same time, there were challenges and failures, including long lines in a number of states, complications stemming from absentee ballots, voter intimidation, isolated system malfunctions, and—above all—widespread challenges of disinformation and partisan polarization around efforts to make voting accessible.

Social media companies learned key lessons from 2016.

Some platforms adapted their policies to be more vigilant against election-related disinformation in the 2020 election cycle, attempting to contextualize disinformation and slow its spread. That said, false claims were far-reaching, coming particularly from President Trump, his allies, and his family members. These claims resulted in widespread refusal to accept the results, and troubling threats of violence against election officials and others. Social media platforms also were used to both inspire and coordinate participation in the insurrection on January 6th.

Election reporting was careful and voters patient.

Because of the unprecedented volume of absentee ballots and lack of pre-canvassing or processing in critical battleground states, preliminary results took much longer than usual. In general, the media and voters were prepared to wait for results and traditional and social media correctly described President Trump’s claims of victory as false. Outlets took care to explain why results may change during counting, were transparent about how election projections are made, and resisted political pressure to interfere with their decision desks. That said, this election proved that responsible reporting is no match for disinformation spread by candidates and political leaders.

President Trump’s refusal to accept the results badly damaged the perception of election legitimacy and led to the insurrection on January 6th.

Baseless allegations of fraud, false claims of victory by President Trump, and attempts to overturn the result were supported by many Republican officials. This delayed the presidential transition, helped convince the vast majority of Trump’s supporters that the election had not been legitimate, and led to the attack on the Capitol on January 6th.

Efforts to disenfranchise voters and reverse the outcome were a threat to democracy.

Starting on Election Night and continuing through to January, there were concerted efforts to delegitimize the election, seed doubt in the outcome, and overturn the results. These attempts included baseless lawsuits that sought to disenfranchise entire states and pressure state officials to interfere with the counting and certification of results. Attempts to overturn a legitimate, democratic election took a toll on the country and likely caused lasting damage to the perceived legitimacy and long-term stability of American institutions and our system of government.

I encourage everyone to read this report and understand the facts around this election and its aftermath. There have been far too many lies, exaggerations and bullshit around this. We should be *proud* of how our elections worked, especially given the myriad challenges to doing so.

I don't normally post videos.

I don't normally post shit from Twitter.

But I just saw this linked to on another site and I'm just flabbergasted.

I was aware of the lies and misinformation coming out, but I had no idea that members of Congress, senators and so many other folks had pretty much come out and told people to *literally* rise up against the US government.

And it isn't whackos on Facebook or thedonald.win or parler either. This is on Fox and other channels in your fucking cable lineup.

Many elected officials and many of right wing media folks, along with those in Trump's orbit calling for insurrection against our legitimate government.

WTF?!?!?

I usually never shut up, but frankly I'm speechless.

Just watch the damn video mashup.