Vietnam Must Drop Charges Against Poet Tran Duc Thach - PEN America
President Where It Hurts: Can’t Even Succeed At Being A Loser
“He is a profoundly incompetent person, a loser," author Michael D’Antonio said of the president.
This is one of the best optical illusions I’ve ever seen: aside from rotating, these circles don’t move.
The left/right/up/down arrows were freaky enough but the in & out arrows really blew a gasket in my brain. For proof that the circles don’t move, blink your eyes quickly as you watch or check out this gif
US retail bloodshed has echoes of the Great Depression
The bloodletting that's taking place for US retail right now is eerily reminiscent of what happened during the Great Depression.
MICROBIOME NEWS: Gut microbes: The key to normal sleep. Gut flora seem to be the key to a lot of things.
One of the most famous figures of the Cold War period, Hiss was convicted in 1950 of perjury for lying to a federal grand jury. Specifically, Hiss was judged to have lied about his complicity in passing secret government documents to Whittaker Chambers, who thereupon passed the papers along to agents of the Soviet Union
Accused spy Alger Hiss released from prison
That’s the trailer for Our Friend, a movie based on the true story told in this Esquire article by Matthew Teague: The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word.
His wife was just thirty-four. They had two little girls. The cancer was everywhere, and the parts of dying that nobody talks about were about to start. His best friend came to help out for a couple weeks. And he never left.
I remember very clearly that essay and the day I read it — I think about it all the time. I don’t know if the movie is going to be any good (I hope so), but if you’ve never read this essay, carve out some time to do so today.
In Folajtar v. Attorney General of the United States, ___ F.3d ___, 2020 U.S. App. LEXIS 37006 (3rd Cir. 2020), here, decided yesterday, the Court held that a tax felon (tax perjury, § 7206(1)) was subject to the prohibition in 18 USC § 922(g)(1) denying felons the right to possess firearms. Basically, Folajtar argued that, because her nonviolent crime did not implicate valid reasons to deny her Second Amendment right to bear arms, she should be exempted from the prohibition.
Third Circuit Sustains Application of Gun Possession Prohibition to Tax Felon
“…In the two-and-a-half years since the Task Force set to work, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and AI have advanced remarkably. But the world has not been turned on its head by automation, nor has the labor market. Despite massive private investment, technology deadlines have been pushed back, part of a normal evolution as breathless promises turn into pilot trials, business plans, and early deployments — the diligent, if prosaic, work of making real technologies work in real settings to meet the demands of hard-nosed customers and managers. Yet, if our research did not confirm the dystopian vision of robots ushering workers off of factory floors or artificial intelligence rendering superfluous human expertise and judgment, it did uncover something equally pernicious: Amidst a technological ecosystem delivering rising productivity, and an economy generating plenty of jobs (at least until the COVID-19 crisis), we found a labor market in which the fruits are so unequally distributed, so skewed towards the top, that the majority of workers have tasted only a tiny morsel of a vast harvest…”
Report – The Work of the Future:Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines, 92 page PDF
Milestone for Notre-Dame as fire-damaged scaffolding cleared Agence France Presse
Bitcoin finally finds a rationale in doomsday scenarios FT
Stablecoins: risks, potential and regulation (PDF) Bank of International Settlements
What’s next for the Treasury-Fed COVID-19 lending facilities? Brookings Institution
Southwest CEO: “You should fly” Axios
Samir Ferdowski, This Database Is Finally Holding AI Accountable, Vice (Nov. 23, 2020). The Artificial Intelligence Incident Database (AIID) is a crowdsourced platform with intentions to wrangle in the Wild West of AI. “Fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice shame on you,” comes to mind, as the platform is being used to document and compile AI failures so they won’t happen again.