Human Interaction Inevitably Toxifies General Purpose Chat Technology

NYTimes  |  Soon after ChatGPT debuted last year, researchers tested what the artificial intelligence chatbot would write after it was asked questions peppered with conspiracy theories and false narratives.

The results — in writings formatted as news articles, essays and television scripts — were so troubling that the researchers minced no words.

“This tool is going to be the most powerful tool for spreading misinformation that has ever been on the internet,” said Gordon Crovitz, a co-chief executive of NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation and conducted the experiment last month. “Crafting a new false narrative can now be done at dramatic scale, and much more frequently — it’s like having A.I. agents contributing to disinformation.”

Disinformation is difficult to wrangle when it’s created manually by humans. Researchers predict that generative technology could make disinformation cheaper and easier to produce for an even larger number of conspiracy theorists and spreaders of disinformation.

Personalized, real-time chatbots could share conspiracy theories in increasingly credible and persuasive ways, researchers say, smoothing out human errors like poor syntax and mistranslations and advancing beyond easily discoverable copy-paste jobs. And they say that no available mitigation tactics can effectively combat it.

Predecessors to ChatGPT, which was created by the San Francisco artificial intelligence company OpenAI, have been used for years to pepper online forums and social media platforms with (often grammatically suspect) comments and spam. Microsoft had to halt activity from its Tay chatbot within 24 hours of introducing it on Twitter in 2016 after trolls taught it to spew racist and xenophobic language.

ChatGPT is far more powerful and sophisticated. Supplied with questions loaded with disinformation, it can produce convincing, clean variations on the content en masse within seconds, without disclosing its sources. On Tuesday, Microsoft and OpenAI introduced a new Bing search engine and web browser that can use chatbot technology to plan vacations, translate texts or conduct research.

Would Substack Rule Had The Fourth Estate Not Been Coopted By The Fourth Branch?

nymag  |  Between 2008 and 2019, the number of newsroom jobs in the United States fell by 26,000, according to the Pew Research Center. Over that same period, roughly 15,000 journalism majors were graduating into the U.S. labor market every year. In addition to making the competition for writerly employment exceptionally brutal, these developments also raised the barriers to merely entering that competition: Since regional newspapers have collapsed faster than national outlets, what jobs remain are now (even more) heavily concentrated in a handful of extremely high-cost cities.

Faced with a superabundant supply of underemployed writers, and increasingly thin to nonexistent profit margins, all manner of media companies in such cities have made a common practice of paying poverty wages for entry-level work. Applicants accept these terms because the outlets offer (potentially, eventually monetizable) “prestige,” and/or because they sought to emulate the success of that publication’s star writers, and/or because they had no other options, and/or because class privilege shielded them from the worst consequences of their underpayment.

Like the vast majority of the writers who create Substacks, the vast majority of the interns who take unpaid to barely paid positions in journalism will never attain the financial security of their publications’ big-name writers. And those big-name writers — and the interns who are able to approximate their success — are typically beneficiaries of an uneven playing field tilted in favor of the upper-middle class. My own path to a decent job in journalism was eased by parental subsidies, which made it possible for me to accept $8-an-hour internships in New York City without suffering malnutrition. The “advances” that most consequentially bias who gets to write for a living and who does not derive from accidents of birth.

The resurgence of labor organizing in media has mitigated the industry’s exploitative treatment of entry-level workers and the class bias inherent to it. And this is one of the many reasons why unionizing newsrooms is a vital project. But labor unions alone cannot solve the underlying problem of mass underemployment within the industry. America does not have more competent journalists than it needs. But it does have far more of them than media firms are capable of profitably employing, amid the erosion of the ad-supported business model.

Which is one major reason why there are so many writers willing to provide Substack with content free of charge.

There may be something distasteful about the fact that Substack benefits from journalists’ financial desperation. But ultimately the core problem here is not that a newsletter platform is helping cash-strapped writers squeeze some tips out of their Twitter followings. The problem is that legions of talented journalists are going underemployed, even as statehouses across the country are going under-covered. Forcing Substack to disclose every contract that it has ever offered will not free us from the scam that is the modern media industry. Only publicly financing the Fourth Estate can do that.

 

In Terms Of Public Trust U.S. Media Ranks Dead Last

jonathanturley |  For years, we have been discussing the decline of journalism values with the rise of open bias in the media. Now, a newly released report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford has found something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. The United States ranked dead last in media trust among 49 countries with just 29% saying that they trusted the media. The most tragic aspect is that it does not matter. The media has embraced the advocacy journalism and anyone questioning that trend risks instant cancellation.  The result is a type of state media where journalists are bound to the government by ideology rather than law.

The plunging level of trust reflects the loss of the premier news organizations to a type of woke journalism. We have have been discussing how writers, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and his key advisers. Even journalists are leading attacks on free speech and the free press.  This includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy. Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll has denounced how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. Likewise, the University of North Carolina recently offered an academic chair in Journalism to New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones. While Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her writing on The 1619 Project, she has been criticized for her role in purging dissenting views from the New York Times pages and embracing absurd anti-police conspiracy theories. Even waiting for the facts is viewed as unethical today by journalism professors who demand that reporters make political or social declarations through their coverage.

One of the lowest moments came with the New York Times’ mea culpa for publishing an opinion column by a conservative senator.  The New York Times was denounced by many of us for its  cringing apology after publishing a column by Sen. Tom Cotton (R, Ark.). and promising not to publish future such columns. It will not publish a column from a Republican senator on protests in the United States but it will publish columns from one of the Chinese leaders crushing protests for freedom in Hong Kong. Cotton was arguing that the use of national guard troops may be necessary to quell violent riots, noting the historical use of this option in past protests. This option was used most recently after the Capitol riot.

The Effects Of Platform Social Media On Politics And Identity Politics

newleftreview |   The reputation economy undergirded by platform capitalism has played an important role in the growth and mutation of the politics of recognition since the financial crisis. This is not simply to blame ‘the internet’ for identity politics, but to highlight how a new type of rationality has penetrated the social and cultural sphere, turning the distribution of esteem into a type of inter-capitalist competition. Controversies about the supposed threat to the liberal public sphere emanating from universities and the left often ignore a more structural transformation driven by Silicon Valley.

Cultural-political arguments in the Anglosphere frequently turn upon the question of free speech, and the need to rescue it from ‘identitarians’. In the uk, the Johnson government is intent on legislating to force universities to uphold ‘free-speech’ norms. While these allegations are often made in bad faith and on slim evidence—not to mention the accompanying crackdown on any free expression of Islamist views—the task should be to provide a more accurate diagnosis of the decline of liberal norms, not to deny that anything has changed. This requires paying close attention to the capitalist business model and the interfaces on which civil society and the public sphere increasingly depend. Arguments about censorship and ‘no-platforming’ of speakers are often driven by the quest for reputational advantage—on the part of institutions, individuals and social movements—and a need to avoid reputational damage. This is how the politics of recognition is now structured.

As Gramscian scholars have long argued, a capitalist business model does not only determine relations of production, but is mirrored in the mode of political and cultural activity that accompanies it—potentially providing a foothold for critique and resistance. Debates around Fordism and post-Fordism posed questions of what cultural and political analogues they facilitated, and of what new modes of organization and collectivism might emerge. For Jeremy Gilbert, similar questions need to be asked about the type of political-party mobilizations that might or might not be available through the template of the digital platform.footnote¹⁹ New technologies and economic relations also reconfigure the processes of political and cultural life, beyond their own immediate application.

This perspective tends to emphasize positive opportunities for new political strategies, but the negative outcomes also need to be identified. Platforms represent a watershed in the moral and cultural contests of modernity. They not only transform relations of production, but re-format how status and esteem are socially distributed. They are refashioning struggles for recognition no less decisively than the birth of print media did. At the same time, their logic is such that their principal effect is to generalize a feeling of misrecognition—heightening the urgency with which people seek recognition, but never satisfying this need. One effect of this process is the rise of groups who feel relatively deprived, to the point of political insurrection. In terms of Fraser’s perspectival dualism, one of the main questions raised by contemporary politics is how and why many people who are both economically privileged and culturally included can end up feeling like they are neither of those things.

Two paths of critique have opened up in this context, an internalist and an externalist one. The internalist path follows the example of pragmatist sociology in urging political movements to work with the grain of the speculative reputation economy, so as to sabotage centres of power. On a small scale, this might simply mean the mobilization of memes and trolls to build the capital value of a political insurgent or to undermine that of an incumbent power. This type of reputation warfare was notoriously used by the Trump campaign but is widely deployed on the left. Organizations like Greenpeace have worked to attack brand value through graphically disrupting the art galleries and museums that receive oil-industry sponsorship, for instance. Feher advocates a kind of ‘investee activism’, which posits the principal class conflict within neoliberal capitalism as a financial one, between investor and investee. In this perspective, resistance should take aim at the market value of company stocks and operate via debtor strikes that threaten the interests of finance capital and banks. Optimistically, Feher calls for the left to mobilize its own quasi-financial vision of a good society for investment: ‘Creditworthiness is worth vying for, lest we leave it to investors to determine who deserves to be appreciated and for what motives’.footnote²⁰ The very volatility of the moral-economic marketplace offers an opportunity to compete politically over the future.

The externalist critique focuses on the platform itself and its inherent injustices, both for its exploited workers and its users. Srnicek’s approach shows how Marxian political economy can identify the underlying structural conditions of this extractive business form and the variations that it can take. A materialist assessment and critique of the platform business model is a necessary starting point for rethinking the position of organized labour within the gig economy, in which employees are legally reconfigured as ‘contractors’. It is also the starting point for the real-utopian analysis and activism envisaged by Erik Olin Wright, which seeks to establish platform cooperatives and other forms of digital civic infrastructure.footnote²¹ Resistance to Amazon and Uber could involve inventing alternative means of mediating civic life that would not be dedicated to the extraction of rents. And yet, as Seymour’s critique of the ‘social industry’ reminds us, there are other aspects of platform technologies—their addictive, gamified qualities, which exploit and perpetuate our anxieties—whose very function is to suck the life out of social existence.

The challenge for social movements is how to update Fraser’s perspectival dualism for an age in which the platform is becoming a dominant distributor of both reward and mutated forms of recognition. Few movements can afford to abstain entirely from the reputation economy. A lesson from Black Lives Matter is that social media’s accumulation of reputational capital can be harnessed towards longer-standing goals of social and economic justice, as long as it remains a tactic or an instrument, and not a goal in its own right. Campaigns may trigger or seize reputational bubbles that spread at great speed—#MeToo is an example—and potentially burst soon after, making a political virtue of the ability to shift movements into other spaces, including the street. The quest for recognition is more exacting and slower than that for reputation, and appreciating this distinction is a first step to seeing beyond the cultural limits of the platform, towards the broader political and economic obstacles that currently stand in the way of full and equal participation.

Aaron Maté Got Heart And Integrity And The Empire Can't Stand It

caitlinjohnstone |  Ana Kasparian’s infamous Young Turks tantrum about Aaron Maté was the screams of a dying empire.

Some want to dismantle the imperial slaughter machine and create a harmonious world; others just want the imperial slaughter machine to give them healthcare. These are two entirely different positions. It’s not strange that these factions feud—it would be strange if they didn’t.

US progressives who smear The Grayzone and other anti-imperialist media never have any other equally anti-imperialist media that they promote and uphold as good. This is because they are imperialists.

The only way to do actual foreign policy journalism in the western world is to make a conscious decision to tell the truth without being bullied into accepting any unproven US narrative, no matter how badly they smear you and no matter how hard it is to find work and make a living.

US liberals are orders of magnitude more outraged about a small group of wingnuts making people nervous in the Capitol building for a few hours than they are about the fact that their government is constantly murdering people around the world.

The blame for public distrust in government and media institutions rests solely on those government and media institutions.

Most westerners know that Bush and his allies destroyed Iraq, while hardly any westerners know Obama and his allies destroyed Syria. That right there tells you why we haven’t seen any full-scale US ground invasions lately. America’s solution to the PR crisis caused by the horrific consequences of its military interventionism has been to switch to preferencing sanctions, blockades, and proxy wars where violence is outsourced to other powers so the US doesn’t take the blame.

Syria is a perfect example of this new model of imperialist slaughter. The US power alliance absolutely demolished that country by arming jihadist proxy forces and then sanctioning the hell out of it to keep it from rebuilding, all with the goal of eventually toppling Damascus, but the general public is completely unaware of this.

And make no mistake, good PR is absolutely essential to the operation of the empire. They don’t pour that much energy into manufacturing consent because it’s fun, they do it because they have to. You can’t rule a managed democracy without good perception management.

Paying Woke-Tax To Read About Press Disintermediation By Substack

NYTimes  |  Danny Lavery had just agreed to a two-year, $430,000 contract with the newsletter platform Substack when I met him for coffee last week in Brooklyn, and he was deciding what to do with the money.

“I think the thing that I’m the most looking forward to about this is to start a retirement account,” said Mr. Lavery, who founded the feminist humor blog The Toast and will be giving up an advice column in Slate.

Mr. Lavery already has about 1,800 paying subscribers to his Substack newsletter, The Shatner Chatner, whose most popular piece is written from the perspective of a goose. Annual subscriptions cost $50.

The contract is structured a bit like a book advance: Substack’s bet is that it will make back its money by taking most of Mr. Lavery’s subscription income for those two years. The deal now means Mr. Lavery’s household has two Substack incomes. His wife, Grace Lavery, an associate English professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who edits the Transgender Studies Quarterly, had already signed on for a $125,000 advance.

Along with the revenue the Laverys will bring in, the move is good media politics for the company. Substack has been facing a mutiny from a group of writers who objected to sharing the platform with people who they said were anti-transgender, including a writer who made fun of people’s appearances on a dating app. Signing up two high-profile transgender writers was a signal that Substack was trying to remain a platform for people who sometimes hate one another, and who sometimes, like Dr. Lavery, heatedly criticize the company.

Feuds among and about Substack writers were a major category of media drama during the pandemic winter — a lot of drama for a company that mostly just makes it easy to email large groups for free. For those who want to charge subscribers on their email list, Substack takes a 10 percent fee. “The mindshare Substack has in media right now is insane,” said Casey Newton, who left The Verge to start a newsletter on Substack called Platformer. Substack, he said, has become a target for “a lot of people to project their anxieties.”

Substack has captivated an anxious industry because it embodies larger forces and contradictions. For one, the new media economy promises both to make some writers rich and to turn others into the content-creation equivalent of Uber drivers, even as journalists turn increasingly to labor unions to level out pay scales.

This new direct-to-consumer media also means that battles over the boundaries of acceptable views and the ensuing arguments about “cancel culture” — for instance, in New York Magazine’s firing of Andrew Sullivan — are no longer the kind of devastating career blows they once were. (Only Twitter retains that power.) Big media cancellation is often an offramp to a bigger income. Though Substack paid advances to a few dozen writers, most are simply making money from readers. That includes most of the top figures on the platform, who make seven-figure sums from more than 10,000 paying subscribers — among them Mr. Sullivan, the liberal historian Heather Cox Richardson, and the confrontational libertarian Glenn Greenwald.

This new ability of individuals to make a living directly from their audiences isn’t just transforming journalism. It’s also been the case for adult performers on OnlyFans, musicians on Patreon, B-list celebrities on Cameo. In Hollywood, too, power has migrated toward talent, whether it’s marquee showrunners or actors. This power shift is a major headache for big institutions, from The New York Times to record labels. And Silicon Valley investors, eager to disrupt and angry at their portrayal in big media, have been gleefully backing it. Substack embodies this cultural shift, but it’s riding the wave, not creating it.

 

Meet Spot, Pick, And Stretch - Amazon's New Tireless And Uncomplaining Warehouse Workers

and these workers don't have to stop and pee in a bottle....,

bostondynamics |  Robotic navigation of complex subterranean settings is important for a wide variety of applications ranging from mining and planetary cave exploration to search and rescue and first response. In many cases, these domains are too high-risk for personnel to enter, but they introduce a lot of challenges and hazards for robotic systems, testing the limits of their mobility, autonomy, perception, and communications.

The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge seeks novel approaches to rapidly map, navigate, and search fully unknown underground environments during time-constrained operations and/or disaster response scenarios. In the most recent competition, called the Urban Circuit, teams raced against one another in an unfinished power plant in Elma, Washington. Each team's robots searched for a set of spatially-distributed objects, earning a point for finding and precisely localizing each object.

Whether robots are exploring caves on other planets or disaster areas here on Earth, autonomy enables them to navigate extreme environments without human guidance or access to GPS.

 

The Solution

TEAM CoSTAR, which stands for Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Robots, relies on a team of heterogeneous autonomous robots that can roll, walk or fly, depending on what they encounter. Robots autonomously explore and create a 3D map of the subsurface environment. CoSTAR is a collaboration between NASA’s JPL, MIT, Caltech, KAIST, LTU, and industry partners.

“CoSTAR develops a holistic autonomy, perception, and communication framework called NeBula (Networked Belief-aware Perceptual Autonomy), enabling various rolling and flying robots to autonomously explore unknown environments. In the second year of the project, we aimed at extending our autonomy framework to explore underground structures including multiple levels and mobility stressing-features. We were looking into expanding the locomotion capabilities of our robotic team to support this level of autonomy. Spot was the perfect choice for us due to its size, agility, and capabilities.

We got the Spot robot only about 2 months before the competition. Thanks to the modularity of the NeBula and great support from Boston Dynamics, the team was able to integrate our autonomy framework NeBula on Spot in several weeks. It was a risky and aggressive change in our plans very close to the competition, but it paid off and the integrated NeBula-on-Spot framework demonstrated an amazing performance in the competition.” said CoSTAR's team lead Ali Agha of JPL. "The NeBula-powered Spots were able to explore 100s of meters autonomously in less than 60 minutes, negotiate mobility-stressing terrains and obstacles, and go up and down stairs, exploring multiple levels."

 

The Results

Performance of the NeBula-enabled Spots alongside CoSTARs roving and flying robots led to the first place in the urban round of competition for team CoSTAR. For more information about Team CoSTAR's win, see:

• Robots Autonomously Navigate Underground in DARPA Challenge
• Teams CoSTAR and BARCS Take Top Spots in DARPA Subterranean Challenge Urban Circuit
• SubT Challenge Urban Circuit Overview

Blue-Anon Infinitely More Dangerous And Destructive Than Q-Anon...,

greenwald |  Journalists with the largest and most influential media outlets disseminated an outright and quite significant lie on Tuesday to hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, on Twitter. While some of them were shamed into acknowledging the falsity of their claim, many refused to, causing it to continue to spread up until this very moment. It is well worth examining how they function because this is how they deceive the public again and again, and it is why public trust in their pronouncements has justifiably plummeted.

The lie they told involved claims of Russian involvement in the procurement of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, The New York Post obtained that laptop and published a series of articles about the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine, China and elsewhere. In response, Twitter banned the posting of any links to that reporting and locked The Post out of its Twitter account for close to two weeks, while Facebook, through a long-time Democratic operative, announced that it would algorithmically suppress the reporting.

The excuse used by those social media companies for censoring this reporting was the same invoked by media outlets to justify their refusal to report the contents of these documents: namely, that the materials were “Russian disinformation.” That claim of “Russian disinformation” was concocted by a group of several dozen former CIA officials and other operatives of the intelligence community devoted to defeating Trump. Immediately after The Post published its first story about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine that traded on his influence with his father, these career spies and propagandists, led by Obama CIA Director and serial liar John Brennan, published a letter asserting that the appearance of these Biden documents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

News outlets uncritically hyped this claim as fact even though these security state operatives themselves admitted: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails…are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” Even though this claim came from trained liars who, with uncharacteristic candor, acknowledged that they did not “have evidence” for their claim, media outlets uncritically ratified this assertion.

This was a topic I discussed extensively in October when I announced my resignation from The Intercept after senior editors — for the first time in seven years — violated the contractual prohibition on editorial interference in my journalism by demanding I significantly alter my reporting about these documents by removing the sections that reflected negatively on Biden. What I found particularly galling about their pretense that they have such high-level and rigorous editorial standards — standards they claimed, for the first time ever, that my article failed to meet — was that a mere week prior to their censorship of my article, they published an article by a different journalist which, at a media outlet we created with the explicit purpose of treating government claims with skepticism, instead treated the CIA’s claims of “Russian disinformation” as fact. Even worse, when they quoted the CIA’s letter, they omitted the part where even those intelligence agents acknowledged that they had no evidence for their assertion.

 

Economic And Cultural (Power) Discontents Of A Fallen Professional Class (Redux 9/30/20)

benjaminstudebaker  |  Then there are jobs that require a degree but which are less secure and less lucrative than they used to be. Attacks on teachers’ unions, for instance, are gradually eroding the benefits and security which teachers have traditionally enjoyed. As this happens, the distinction in living standard between teachers and ordinary workers becomes blurrier and blurrier. Tenured teachers still have a better situation than most workers, but fewer and fewer teachers are put in position to acquire tenure. Within teaching, then, there is a minority of secure, tenured faculty–who are part of the rump professional class. Then there are teachers who have no realistic path to tenure and have been effectively turned into casual workers. These teachers are part of the fallen professional class. The rump professional class and the fallen professional class have largely the same education, but are nonetheless treated very differently, because the system is not interested in rewarding their merit but in reducing the cost of the education system.

The fallen professionals want to be part of the rump professional class, but can no longer access it materially. They can only access it culturally, by maintaining their familiarity with the language and ideas of the rump professionals. For this reason, the fallen professionals try very hard to continue to be part of the culture of the rump professionals. This enables many rump professionals to make money off their fallen counterparts by selling an ersatz version of the experience of professional class life. This takes the form of podcasts, YouTube videos, and prestige TV shows and films. By consuming this media, the fallen professional continues to feel part of the rump professional class, even as the fallen professional is robbed of the material benefits of being a member.

Because the fallen professionals want to feel superior to the ordinary workers, the rump professionals have a financial incentive to sell ideas which flatter this superiority complex. This has led, in recent years, to the development of a woke industry which invents new terms and grounds for taking offence. By using these terms and taking offence in these ways, the fallen professionals feel they are participating in the culture of the rump professionals and they can distinguish themselves from the ordinary workers, who fail to use the language or to recognise the offensiveness.

The rump professionals justify this commercialisation of radicalism on the grounds that it is ostensibly morally committed to resisting racism, patriarchy, fascism, or even capitalism itself. But the main effect of the product is to create cultural barriers between the fallen professionals and the ordinary workers, so the fallen professionals will continue to politically identify with the rump professionals and therefore with the rich. The language is used to label the ordinary worker a deplorable bigot, and the ordinary worker responds by seeking the absolute destruction of these professionals through right nationalist politics. Mortified by the right nationalism of the workers, the rump and fallen professionals lean ever harder into denouncing them as bigots, creating a vicious cycle which pushes the workers further and further to the right.

For some time now, the left has sought to use these fallen professionals as “class traitors”. They are supposed to lead left-wing movements and organise on the ground. But the fallen professionals cannot do this, because they have contempt for the people they are trying to lead. This contempt is nurtured by the cultural content manufactured by the rump professionals.

None of this is anyone’s fault, individually. Because it’s getting harder and harder to be part of the rump professional class, would-be professionals must do everything they can to compete, and that means they have to look for money wherever they can find it. Those who make it must make money off those who do not. Those who do not were fed lies from childhood. They were told that a professional class life was achievable, and they were told it would be wonderful and fulfilling. Their desire to get the recognition and meaning they were promised is a reasonable consequence of the way they were socialised. And how can the ordinary worker react in any other way? The worker cannot have dignity without resisting a professional culture that constantly denigrates workers for lacking elite education.

One In Eight People Formerly Employed In Higher Ed Lost Their Job Last Year

chronicle  |  Colleges and universities closed out 2020 with continued job losses, resulting in a 13-percent drop since last February. It was a dispiriting coda to a truly brutal year for higher ed’s labor force.

Since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, the U.S. Labor Department estimates that American academic institutions have shed a net total of at least 650,000 workers, according to preliminary, seasonally adjusted figures released on Friday. Put another way, for every eight workers employed in academe in February 2020, at least one had lost or left that job 10 months later.

Across the broader economy, 9.9 million fewer people held jobs in January 2021 than in February 2020. The national unemployment rate fell to 6.3 percent on Friday. At no point since the Labor Department began keeping industry tallies, in the late 1950s, have colleges and universities ever shed so many employees at such an incredible rate.

The Second And Third Drone Ages Are The End Of Both Infantry And Nocturnal Urban Crime...,

sicsempertyrannis  |  Back in early 1981, I did a few “odd jobs” between graduating from the Infantry Officer Advanced Course and starting the SF Officers Course. One of these jobs was as an ARTEP evaluator for a mech infantry company on Fort Benning. While I had plenty of book learning about tank-mech infantry teams, I was much more comfortable following a dismounted night attack through a cold January swamp. There was no Moon and a stiff, steady breeze so I felt we were making a stealthy approach. Although the attack was well executed, I learned something disconcerting during the after action review. Our night approach through the swamp was monitored by a high flying AC-130 gunship from 1st SOW. The gunship caught the heat signature of each approaching soldier as they silently slid through that moonless swamp. The lesson I took was that the idea of remaining undetected in uninhabited forests and mountains was a myth. Combine that with the Fort Benning aphorism, “If you can be seen, you can be killed” and I quickly became enamored with the concept of urban guerrilla warfare once I reached 10th Group. We would survive behind the Iron Curtain only by hiding among those we were to liberate from oppression.

So what does this stroll down memory lane have to do with the new drone wars? A lot, actually. It’s the same principle. Armies can be seen and killed from above by a wide range of drones in 2020 just as we could be seen and killed by the AC-130 back in 1980. The difference lies in the proliferation of these drones and the fact that they are less expensive than manned aircraft. They also don’t expose pilots or operators to death or capture. 

First there were our Predators and Reapers hunting down jihadis and the occasional wedding party. We have well over 500 of these heavy drones. We have even more smaller drones down to man packed, hand launched tactical varieties. But we are not alone anymore. China is producing them like gangbusters. Turkey has emerged as a major leader in the development and employment of drones. One of these, the Bayratkar T2B, has had success in Syria, Libya and Azerbaijan. Erdogan has also deployed the T2B against the PKK within Turkey and northern Iraq. 

The T2B is a medium altitude tactical drone. It has a range of more than 150 km and can fly at a maximum altitude of 22,500 feet. It has a maximum speed of 120 knots, a cruise speed of 70 knots and endurance of more than 24 hours. The T2B is powered with a 100 horsepower Rotax civil engine, an engine common to ultralight and homebuilt aircraft. The unit cost of the aircraft itself is less than 100 thousand dollars. Its electro-optical reconnaissance, surveillance and targeting system is now produced by Aselan in Turkey at a cost of 400 thousand dollars per unit. Although it does use GPS, it is not satellite controlled. Ground stations control the T2B by line-of-sight radio signal. The munitions, also produced in Turkey by Roketsan, are laser-guided, precision, long range and light weight. They include thermobaric and tandem warheads effective against reactive armor. Overall, the T2B is an impressive piece of kit.

How In The World Do You Detect Or Defend Against Truck-Hauled Swarms Of Smart Switchblade Drones?

thedrive  |  China recently conducted a test involving a swarm of loitering munitions, also often referred to as suicide drones, deployed from a box-like array of tubular launchers on a light tactical vehicle and from helicopters. This underscores how the drone swarm threat, broadly, is becoming ever-more real and will present increasingly serious challenges for military forces around the world in future conflicts.

The China Academy of Electronics and Information Technology (CAEIT) reportedly carried out the test in September. CAEIT is a subsidiary of the state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), which carried out a record-breaking drone swarm experiment in June 2017, involving nearly 120 small fixed-wing unmanned aircraft. Four months later, CAEIT conducted its own larger experiment with 200 fixed-wing drones. Chinese companies have also demonstrated impressive swarms using quad-copter-type drones for large public displays.

We don't know the name or designation of the drones CAEIT used in its September test, or that of the complete system being employed. However, video footage, seen below, shows that the unmanned aircraft are very similar in form and function to more recent models of China Poly Defense's CH-901 loitering munition. 

When the tube-launched CH-901 first emerged in 2016, it featured a pair of pop-out wings, as well as a folding v-tail. More recently, that design has evolved and replaced the v-tail with another set of pop-out wings and folding twin-tail arrangement, similar to the drones we see in the CAEIT test video. 

Of course, designs featuring two pairs of folding wings are very common for tube-launched drones and loitering munitions, including the Switchblade suicide drone from U.S. manufacturer AeroVironment. The unmanned aircraft CAEIT employed in its experiment is also reminiscent of American defense contractor Raytheon's Coyote.

The Coyote comparison also extends to launch options CAEIT demonstrated in its recent test. The 48-tube ground-based launcher, which is mounted on a modified 6x6 version of the Dongfeng Mengshi light tactical vehicle, is similar in some respects to multi-tube trail-mounted launchers that the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research used to launch Coyotes as part of its Low-Cost UAV Swarming Technology (LOCUST) effort, as seen in the video below. Poly Defense has also shown at least a mock-up of an array of tubular launchers for the CH-901.  Fist tap Dale

Before Bullshidt Ruled The World The Military Would Tell You What It Cost To Field An "Army Of One"....,

30 Years old, so you know that the current cost is some multiple of what it was back in the days of Desert Storm.  Total estimated annual cost for the current Soldier System is $138.3 K per year which includes individual soldier personnel cost - $39.5 K, soldier clothing and equipment - $1.6K, soldier supplies - $2.6K, division support - $40.8K, and Echelon Above Division support - $53.9K. Current Soldier System equipment represents about 1% oftotal system cost. 

What does this mean? From a system perspective, even significant increases in equipment costs translate into only minor system level cost increases. For example, a 500% increase in soldier clothing and equipment cost for a future Soldier System would translate into about a 6% increase in total Soldier System cost. In turn, for this increase to be cost effective, the future Soldier System need only generate a 6% increase in soldier effectiveness to be more effective than the current Soldier System.

CONCLUSION. The current expenses for soldiers' clothing and equipment represent about 1% of the total Soldier System cost. The investment in advanced equipment/material technologies for future Soldier Systems, even if significantly more expensive, need generate only minimal improvements in overall Soldier System effectiveness to be cost-effective. Analysis of Current Light Infantry Soldier System Costs 

- Now, on to the current bullshidt

NBCNews |  “The least important part really of the cost of a soldier, sailor, airman or woman is the equipment, helmets, boots, even airplanes and tanks and things like that,” says Daniel Goure of the Lexington Institute. “The real costs are the personnel costs, we’re talking about training, we’re talking about housing, we’re talking about dependent care for families, daycare for children, we’re talking about health care, which is a huge issue.”

Let’s just look at recruiting alone. This year, recruiting one Marine cost $6,539, including advertising, college fund and enlistment bonuses. Train that marine and you add $1,614, including the uniform, gear, laundry and chow. Then give that recruit some real classroom learning and tack on an additional $301. Remember, you haven’t paid him yet. Pay, allowance, clothing and moving expenses will add $19,973. Give him some ammo at $787 and then provide him with a staff of drill sergeants, teachers and support staff for $15,674. Total value of a new Marine: $44,887.

But in the interest of accuracy, we’re still way off.

“We have an extraordinarily technical military,” says Goure. “The majority of people are not on the front line, coming off the beaches with rifles. They are behind the scenes, running equipment; they’re the people running unmanned aerial vehicles like the Predator.”

HIGHER EDUCATION

Old-fashioned infantrymen are in fact one of the rarest commodities in today’s military, a force now filled with Ph.D.s and highly specialized officers. What about that kind of education? Last year, the cost of graduating one officer, likely specializing in science and engineering, from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point was $340,000. But let’s say that officer likes to fly. Put him in a $19 million F-16 fighter.

So what’s the overall average cost of sending a soldier to defend our freedom? Well, that was my assignment, and after spending two weeks trying to pry that number out of the U.S. military, our crack team of investigative journalists in the Washington bureau came up with the following answer: it’s simply not a knowable number. Suffice it to say, the figure is priceless.

Amazon Loaded For Bear With Fake Coronavirus Remedies

gizmodo |  It’s no secret that Amazon’s marketplace is overrun with garbage—literal or otherwise—and that the company struggles and often fails to manage its own massive marketplace that lumps legitimately trustworthy brands and products in with third-party sellers. Amazon’s latest challenge appears to be regulating a burgeoning market for products feeding off of flu and coronavirus fears—including products that claim to “kill” them. 

In an email obtained by CNBC, Amazon has been contacting third-party merchants about products that make extraordinary and unapproved claims relating to coronavirus, as a strain that originated in Wuhan, China continues to spread globally. In that email, Amazon informs a seller that the company removed from its store an item “identified as a face mask or related product that makes unapproved medical marketing claims regarding coronavirus or the flu.”

The email cites federal regulations on products making unapproved medical claims in their marketing and further states that its own rules bar “the listing or sale of products that are marketed as unapproved or unregistered medical devices.” According to CNBC, users have also posted about receiving these warnings in seller groups on Facebook. 

Disturbingly, CNBC also found multiple live listings for disinfectants that were still up on Amazon’s marketplace as of this writing, several of which claimed the item “kills coronavirus.” Moreover, Gizmodo found that simply searching “kills coronavirus” or “kill coronavirus” turns up numerous products with these claims in their titles, so they’re not exactly needles in a haystack.

Amazon did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the seller notice, its ongoing response to the products, and items that remained on its site at the time of publication.

Drone Technology Has Disintermediated the Imperial Sovereign Murder Monopoly

technologyreview |  Sophisticated weapons systems have one drawback: the enemy must expose himself within the effective killing range in order for the weapon to work as intended. The smart combatant, of course, rarely exposes himself. So when we do home in on enemy fighters, we use a $30 million aircraft to drop a JDAM (joint direct attack munition) and kill a dozen guys living in tents on the side of a mountain. What has that $30 million technological advantage bought us? The highly (and expensively) trained aviator piloting a beautifully complex flying and killing machine just extinguished some men living under canvas and sticks, men with a few thousand rounds of small arms ammo at their disposal. The pilot will return to his expensive air base or carrier. He will have a hot shower, eat hot chow, Skype his wife and children, maybe play some Xbox, and hit the gym before he hits the rack. He will not, nor will he be asked to, concern himself with the men he killed a few hours ago. And in a draw or valley a few klicks away from where the pilot’s munitions impacted, there is another group of men living under extremely basic circumstances, eating boiled rice and maybe a little roasted meat. They will ambush an American convoy or attack a government-friendly village in the morning. Native grit debases our technologically superior forces and materiel. Native grit wins a war.

asiatimes |   Houthi striking capability – from drone swarms to ballistic missile attacks – has been improving remarkably for the past year or so. It’s not by accident that the UAE saw which way the geopolitical and geoeconomic winds were blowing: Abu Dhabi withdrew from Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s vicious war against Yemen and now is engaged in what it describes as a  “peace-first” strategy.

Even before Abqaiq, the Houthis had already engineered quite a few attacks against Saudi oil installations as well as Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports. In early July, Yemen’s Operations Command Center staged an exhibition in full regalia in Sana’a featuring their whole range of ballistic and winged missiles and drones.

 The situation has now reached a point where there’s plenty of chatter across the Persian Gulf about a spectacular scenario: the Houthis investing in a mad dash across the Arabian desert to capture Mecca and Medina in conjunction with a mass Shiite uprising in the Eastern oil belt. That’s not far-fetched anymore. Stranger things have happened in the Middle East. After all, the Saudis can’t even win a bar brawl – that’s why they rely on mercenaries.

Orientalism strikes again

The US intel refrain that the Houthis are incapable of such a sophisticated attack betrays the worst strands of orientalism and white man’s burden/superiority complex.

The only missile parts shown by the Saudis so far come from a Yemeni Quds 1 cruise missile. According to Brigadier General Yahya Saree, spokesman for the Sana’a-based Yemeni Armed Forces, “the Quds system proved its great ability to hit its targets and to bypass enemy interceptor systems.”

Our Civil War is Actually The Kochtopus vs. The Vampire Squid

economicnoise |  Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge.  That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.

The Mueller investigation is about removing President Trump from office and overturning the results of an election. We all know that. But it’s not the first time they’ve done this. The first time a Republican president was elected this century, they said he didn’t really win. The Supreme Court gave him the election. There’s a pattern here.

What do sure odds of the Democrats rejecting the next Republican president really mean? It means they don’t accept the results of any election that they don’t win. It means they don’t believe that transfers of power in this country are determined by elections.

That’s a civil war.

There’s no shooting. At least not unless you count the attempt to kill a bunch of Republicans at a charity baseball game practice. But the Democrats have rejected our system of government.

This isn’t dissent. It’s not disagreement. You can hate the other party. You can think they’re the worst thing that ever happened to the country. But then you work harder to win the next election. When you consistently reject the results of elections that you don’t win, what you want is a dictatorship.

Your very own dictatorship.

The only legitimate exercise of power in this country, according to Democrats, is its own. Whenever Republicans exercise power, it’s inherently illegitimate. The Democrats lost Congress. They lost the White House. So what did they do? They began trying to run the country through Federal judges and bureaucrats. Every time that a Federal judge issues an order saying that the President of the United States can’t scratch his own back without his say so, that’s the civil war.

Public Obeisance to Corporate Ideology

straightlinelogic |  Offices and 8,000 stores were closed for an afternoon so that employees could discuss how to make Starbucks a more welcoming place. Judging by its success, Starbucks has already made millions of customers of all races, ethnicities, genders, and sexual persuasions feel welcome. You have to wonder what the employees responsible for doing so, probably 99 percent of Starbucks’ workforce, feel about this pointless waste of time, which could have been, in a company-wide email, condensed down to: Treat everyone who walks into Starbucks like you’d like to be treated.

Why did Schultz make a mountain out of this molehill? Nobody has questioned his or his company’s commitment to treating everyone walking into a Starbucks equally. This was simply an instance when employees may have failed to live up to the commitment. Schultz is a member in good standing of the establishment, and professes to believe all the things members are supposed to believe in. Why couldn’t he have handled the matter in the same way Robert Iger, CEO and Chairman of the Walt Disney Company, and another member in good standing, handled the Roseanne Barr matter?

He could have. That he didn’t speaks to an insidious issue and its even more insidious corollary. There is less and less in the realm of private behavior, action, and thoughts that remains private, that is not subject to public scrutiny and demands, demands which are implicitly or explicitly backed by recourse to the government. For the government itself, on the other hand, more and more of what it does is shielded from publicity and disclosure.

For CEOs of large companies, virtually everything they and their companies do is fair game for public comment, media attention, lawsuits, and regulatory, legislative, and judicial redress. Schultz probably thought his over-the-top public atonement would preempt the kind of media—including social media—and government crucification that’s meted out to the defiant and the insufficiently contrite.

Afrikan Liberation Movement - Amazon Giving RealTime Facial Rekognition To Law Enforcement

WaPo |  Amazon has been essentially giving away facial recognition tools to law enforcement agencies in Oregon and Orlando, according to documents obtained by American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, paving the way for a rollout of technology that is causing concern among civil rights groups.

Amazon is providing the technology, known as Rekognition, as well as consulting services, according to the documents, which the ACLU obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

A coalition of civil rights groups, in a letter released Tuesday, called on Amazon to stop selling the program to law enforcement because it could lead to the expansion of surveillance of vulnerable communities.

“We demand that Amazon stop powering a government surveillance infrastructure that poses a grave threat to customers and communities across the country,” the groups wrote in the letter.

Amazon spokeswoman Nina Lindsey did not directly address the concerns of civil rights groups. “Amazon requires that customers comply with the law and be responsible when they use AWS services,” she said, referring to Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud software division that houses the facial recognition program. “When we find that AWS services are being abused by a customer, we suspend that customer’s right to use our services.”

She said that the technology has many useful purposes, including finding abducted people.  Amusement parks have used it to locate lost children. During the royal wedding this past weekend, clients used Rekognition to identify wedding attendees, she said. (Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.)

The details about Amazon’s program illustrate the proliferation of cutting-edge technologies deep into American society — often without public vetting or debate. Axon, the maker of Taser electroshock weapons and the wearable body cameras for police, has voiced interest in pursuing face recognition for its body-worn cameras, prompting a similar backlash from civil rights groups.  Hundreds of Google employees protested last month to demand that the company stop providing artificial intelligence to the Pentagon to help analyze drone footage.

Urban Reconnaissance Through Supervised Autonomy (URSA)

DARPA |  DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office is hosting a Proposers Day to provide information to potential applicants on the structure and objectives of the new Urban Reconnaissance through Supervised Autonomy (URSA) program. URSA aims to develop technology to enable autonomous systems operated and supervised by U.S. ground forces to detect hostile forces and establish positive identification of combatants before U.S. troops encounter them. The URSA program seeks to overcome the inherent complexity of the urban environment by combining new knowledge about human behaviors, autonomy algorithms, integrated sensors, multiple sensor modalities, and measurable human responses to discriminate the subtle differences between hostile individuals and noncombatants. Additional details are available at https://www.fbo.gov/spg/ODA/DARPA/CMO/DARPA-SN-18-48/listing.html. 

To register, visit https://www.client-meeting.net/Proposers-Day-May-2018. Registration closes at 4:00 PM ET on April 25, 2018.

Please address administrative questions to DARPA-SN-18-48@darpa.mil, and refer to the URSA Proposers Day (DARPA-SN-18-48) in all correspondence. 

DARPA hosts Proposers Days to provide potential performers with information on whether and how they might respond to the Government’s research and development solicitations and to increase efficiency in proposal preparation and evaluation. Therefore, the URSA Proposers Day is open only to registered potential applicants, and not to the media or general public.

Full URSA program details will be made available in a forthcoming Broad Agency Announcement posted to the Federal Business Opportunities website. 

One year of accumulation of crime in central Chicago [OC] from r/dataisbeautiful

Blockchain Is Not Only Crappy NSA Technology...,

medium |  Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built on trust, norms, and institutions inherently function better than the type of no-need-for-trusted-parties systems blockchain envisions. That’s permanent: no matter how much blockchain improves it is still headed in the wrong direction.

This December I wrote a widely-circulated article on the inapplicability of blockchain to any actual problem. People objected mostly not to the technology argument, but rather hoped that decentralization could produce integrity.

Let’s start with this: Venmo is a free service to transfer dollars, and bitcoin transfers are not free. Yet after I wrote an article last December saying bitcoin had no use, someone responded that Venmo and Paypal are raking in consumers’ money and people should switch to bitcoin.

What a surreal contrast between blockchain’s non-usefulness/non-adoption and the conviction of its believers! It’s so entirely evident that this person didn’t become a bitcoin enthusiast because they were looking for a convenient, free way to transfer money from one person to another and discovered bitcoin. In fact, I would assert that there is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast.

There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast.

The number of retailers accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment is declining, and its biggest corporate boosters like IBM, NASDAQ, Fidelity, Swift and Walmart have gone long on press but short on actual rollout. Even the most prominent blockchain company, Ripple, doesn’t use blockchain in its product. You read that right: the company Ripple decided the best way to move money across international borders was to not use Ripples.

A blockchain is a literal technology, not a metaphor

Why all the enthusiasm for something so useless in practice?

People have made a number of implausible claims about the future of blockchain—like that you should use it for AI in place of the type of behavior-tracking that google and facebook do, for example. This is based on a misunderstanding of what a blockchain is. A blockchain isn’t an ethereal thing out there in the universe that you can “put” things into, it’s a specific data structure: a linear transaction log, typically replicated by computers whose owners (called miners) are rewarded for logging new transactions.

themaven |  I completely agree with much of what you wrote here. I’d like to point out a couple things:

First, in regards to “There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast.” There is in fact at least one such person: me. In 2010 I was looking for a payment system which did not have any possibility for chargebacks. It turns out that bitcoin is GREAT for that, and I became a blockchain enthusiast as a result.

The ugly truth about blockchain is that it is immensely useful, but only when you are in some way trying to circumvent an authority of some sort. In my case, I wanted to take payments for digital goods without losing any to chargebacks. It’s also great for sending money to Venezuela (circumventing the authority of the government of Venezuela, which would really rather you not). It’s great for raising money for projects (ICOs are really about circumventing various regulatory authorities who make that difficult). It’s great for buying drugs, taking payment for ransomware, and any number of terrible illegal things related to human trafficking, money laundering, etc.

Frankly, the day that significant trading of derivatives (gold futures, oil futures, options, etc) starts happening on blockchain, I expect a bubble that will make previous crypto bubbles look tiny in comparison. This is not because blockchain is an easier way to trade these contracts! It is because some percentage of rich traders would like to do anonymous trading and avoid pesky laws about paying taxes on trading profits and not doing insider trading.

I sum it up like this: are you trying to do something with money that requires avoiding an authority somewhere? If not, there is a better technical solution than blockchain. That does NOT mean that what you are doing is illegal for you (it’s perfectly legal for me to send money to Venezuela). It just means that some authority somewhere doesn’t like what you are doing.

Blockchain is inherently in opposition to governmental control of the world of finance. The only reason governments aren’t more antagonistic towards blockchain is that they don’t truly understand how dangerous it is. I wrote at length about this back in 2013 in an article called “Bitcoin’s Dystopian Future”: