Yes, but some states provide that coverage on top of FMLA, e.g. California providing up to 52 weeks paid for injury recovery (DI), and 8 weeks for child care/ bonding (PFL).

Even if 8 weeks isn’t much, it’s 4 times what they were being offered, so certainly worth checking for their state.

Yes, anti-capitalist theory does need to move beyond Marxism, but it doesn’t need to move to (as Joseph Heath seems to believe) Rawlsian liberal-egalitarianism.

Perhaps this is the Mutualist in me chafing at Rawlsianism in general, but his emphasis on “Liberal vs Decent (vs Other) Peoples”, and his envisaged world order that can both “tolerate” other societies who disregard certain human rights, but also choose to intervene (as a structural component of the philosophy) into societies which they deem not “tolerable”, just feels like reinventing the “Rules-Based Liberal Order” of Western Liberal Militarism with a moral (self-)justification, rather than a monetary one. Same tune, new instrument. His focus on Hierarchy is anathema to his supposed desire to produce equity or equality; equality is the absence of hierarchy, which obviously can’t be enforced at a micro-level, but he’s gone the dead opposite direction, and somehow come to the conclusion that equality can be forcibly imposed (by someone with an unequal amount of power, of course).

Heath linked to a piece by Freddie deBoer on the inability of Western (Neo)Liberalism to create the outcomes it desires, and frankly I find that piece far more persuasive than Rawls’ insistence that you can maintain a massive, national and international-level hierarchy but actually everyone will do what’s “Right”. Any sufficiently large or permanent hierarchy will first and foremost seek to sustain itself, no matter who or what is in charge of it, and there’s no inherent way to prevent a system from doing or becoming bad. Systems and structures and even societies themselves are merely organizational tools, and no tool can prevent itself from being misused.

It makes me even more nervous when that large-scale, International “Order” is turned into a moral imperative, as it is in Rawlsianism. Now you’re just reinventing the Holy Roman Empire, with some council of supposed representative citizens in lieu of a Pope, but still operating under the auspices of being the ultimate arbiter of morality.

The solution to inequality isn’t creating some unassailably-powerful liberal-egalitarian super-entity, to enforce worldwide human rights, it’s to dismantle structures of control that perpetuate systemic inequality.

you’re failing to see the biases inherent to the content you’re consuming

You are underestimating people, I think. People choose their echo chambers because they understand that their positions are being challenged elsewhere. It’s not an inability to see the bias in what they consume, it’s a dislike of the alternative.

Every Trumper I talk to knows very well that Trump is unpopular, that Christian Nationalism is unpopular, that abortion rights are popular, etc, but they don’t care, and they don’t want to constantly be (rightfully) told and shown how dumb they are, so they wall themselves off in their gardens. “I’m just tired of hearing how bad Trump is all the time.”

Heartening news. Even if the alt-right manosphere is hoovering up more young men, if their message isn’t invigorating them to vote it limits the ‘blast radius’ pretty significantly.

Media literacy was never the problem, because it wasn’t actual confusion about what was real or not that was drawing people to the extreme alt-right sphere, it was confirmation bias that allowed people to choose not to critically assess the content for veracity.

But I don’t think you can solve this through “media ecology” either. Curating this volume of content is impossible, and there are legitimate dangers in giving the government too much ability to shut down free speech (see Germany condemning any form of pro-Palestinian rhetoric as antisemitic) in order to guard “truth”.

I think that this is similar to the issue of biased GenAI; you can’t fix bias at the human-output side, you have to build a society that doesn’t want to engage with bigotry, and explore and question its own assumptions (and that’s not ever a fixed state, it’s an ongoing process).

I actually like this.

This is not a gimmick of handing out “random” checks (which, we now know, all went to people who had already voted Republican), this affects all members equally, as a statement of values.

You can write in “abstain”, or leave blank, whatever you want if you don’t want to endorse any particular candidate, but democracy is important, and this might help push people to overcome the inconveniences that are often used to discourage people from voting.

I don’t know, I understand his concerns, but I don’t personally trust that what we’d get would be better than what we have, in total.

There are states who absolutely need federal oversight, or even just management, of their elections, because they’ve shown repeatedly that they are in the business of deliberate and persistent disenfranchisement. Then there are states who do much better now than any standard that a federal “bipartisan” commission would push in an emergency…

And who decides if it’s an emergency? The commission? The President? SCOTUS?

It’s tough because Federalism is a bad system, and creates these problems by its very nature, but this doesn’t change or correct for that system, it just creates another actor with vested authority over elections.

Defrauding corporations sounds like praxis to me.

I think you are confused about the delineation between local and federal governments. It’s not all one giant pool of tax money. None of Santa Clara County’s budget goes to missiles.

Also, this feels like you are too capitalism-pilled, and rather than just spending the $240 to do this work, and using the remaining $49,999,760 to just fund free college or UBI programs, you’re like, “how about we pay these people to do the most mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly boring work there is, reading old legal documents?”

You know what would actually happen if you did that? People would seriously read through them for 1 day, and then they’d be like, “clear”, “clear”, “clear” without looking at half of them. It’s not like you’re gonna find and fund another group to review the first group’s work, after all. So you’d still be where we are now, but you also wasted x* peoples’ time that they could have been enjoying doing literally anything else.

Products of a bigoted society goes in, bigoted product comes out.

In that regard, developers and decision makers would benefit from centering users’ social identities in their process, and acknowledging that these AI tools and their uses are highly context-dependent. They should also try to enhance their understanding of how these tools might be deployed in a way that is culturally responsive.

You can’t correct for bias at the ass-end of a mathematical algorithm. Generative AI is just caricaturizing our own society back to us; it’s a fun-house mirror that makes our own biases jump out. If they want a model that doesn’t produce bigoted outputs, they’re going to have to fix their inputs.

I think you may have misunderstood the purpose of this tool.

It doesn’t read the deeds, make a decision, and submit them for termination all on its own. It reads them, identifies racial covenants based on patterns of language (which is exactly what LLMs are very good at), and then flags them for a human to review.

This tool is not replacing jobs, because the whole point is that these reviews were never going to get the budget and manpower to be done manually, and instead would have simply remained on the books.

I get being disdainful or even angry about LLMs in our unregulated-capitalism anti-worker hellhole because of the way that most companies are using them, but tools aren’t themselves good or bad, they’re just tools. And using a tool to identify racial covenants in legal documents that otherwise would go un-remediated, seems like a pretty good use to me.

What do you believe would make this particular use prone to errors?

burned out, and his wife has continued the channel

Wow, that is surprising to hear. I bounced off him when I started seeing him just talking about stuff I’d already seen Twitter as though it was insider information, and prognosticating on things that were clearly outside his wheelhouse. I’ll check out the channel again and see how his wife is running it.

Santa Clara County alone has 24 million property records, but the study team focused mostly on 5.2 million records from the period 1902 to 1980. The artificial intelligence model completed its review of those records in six days for $258, according to the Stanford study. A manual review would have taken five years at a cost of more than $1.4 million, the study estimated.

This is an awesome use of an LLM. Talk about the cost savings of automation, especially when the alternative was the reviews just not getting done.

Congratulations!

I feel those 2 lessons directly conflict with each other. :P

Some people definitely do care; this has been a pain point with my partner’s wine-obsessed Italian family for years. Points 2 and 3 are entirely correct, that it’s almost always about the drinker(s) feeling judged.

This is such a sad miscarriage of justice, it truly shows how Texas’ leadership (specifically, the Board of Pardons and Paroles) has no regard for life. You literally have the original case detectives saying he is innocent, the main and really only “expert” witness now discredited, the entire “scientific” basis for the case not simply considered unsound, but in fact shown to be effectively impossible… but Texas be like, “if we get the chance to kill someone, no one’s gonna take that away from us”.

It’s set up so that even the governor can’t pardon a death row inmate unless the Pardons and Paroles Board first reviews the case and recommends a pardon, which the board has so far declined to do (and while the state supreme court issued a 30 day stay, the BPP still has not- as far as I’ve read- agreed to a review hearing).

edit: correction, apparently the BPP heard the case on the 16th, and declined to ask for clemency. Unreal.

Is this going to be Lethal Company, but in the Control world? 'Cause I’d play that.

If you want everything to burn, and the US to cease being a country, vote for Trump

That’s literally the dead opposite of what would happen. Trump will make the US into an authoritarian, dictatorial police state, not dissolve it.

The mental defense mechanisms people employ to protect their worldviews is crazy.

“Seeing Israel killing many many children makes me feel so bad about Israel, so I’m mad that news sites are showing me that they’re doing it!”