JEN PSAKI APPROVES: North Korea tells starving citizens to eat less: Report.
The West invested tens of billions (mostly in loans) propping up Boris Yeltsin's corrupt regime—backing Yeltsin's '93 coup against Russia's parliament & his fraudulent '96 election—and in return, gained hundreds of billions in offshored Russian wealth.
Billionaires Are Not Morally Qualified To Shape Human Civilization Caitlin Johnstone
Pathways to Parliament
Australia’s Parliament could be viewed as unrepresentative, elite and homogenous: it is stacked with private school graduates and MPs are twice as likely to be university educated. But this is not the full story.
Inspiration from the 1970s for Today’s Young Environmentalists
Today’s young environmentalists can learn much from the example of the 1970s.
IF YOU THINK FACEBOOK IS FULL OF DUBIOUS OUTRAGE-BAIT, WAIT ‘TIL YOU SEE THE COMPANY’S CRITICS: “Imagine a business model where people’s outrage is exploited for clicks, where emotions like affection and anger are valuable to tease out, and where, if people seem uninterested, you know you’ve done your job poorly. Of course, this describes both Facebook and the news media criticizing it.”
How Mort Sahl Changed Comedy And Flamed Out
Nature – Catalogue of billions of phrases from 107 million papers could ease computerized searching of the literature. In a project that could unlock the world’s research papers for easier computerized analysis, an American technologist has released online a gigantic index of the words and short phrases contained in more than 100 million journal articles — including many paywalled papers. The catalogue, which was released on 7 October and is free to use, holds tables of more than 355 billion words and sentence fragments listed next to the articles in which they appear. It is an effort to help scientists use software to glean insights from published work even if they have no legal access to the underlying papers, says its creator, Carl Malamud. He released the files under the auspices of Public Resource, a non-profit corporation in Sebastopol, California that he founded. Malamud says that because his index doesn’t contain the full text of articles, but only sentence snippets up to five words long, releasing it does not breach publishers’ copyright restrictions on the re-use of paywalled articles. However, one legal expert says that publishers might question the legality of how Malamud created the index in the first place…”
Washington Post op-ed: A Wealth Tax Is A Good Idea — If We Had a Different Supreme Court, by Daniel Hemel (Chicago; Google Scholar):
Senate Democrats and the Biden administration are reportedly nearing a deal on a new “billionaire tax” to pay for the package of spending programs that is stalled in Congress. The tax — which would apply annually to the increase in the value of stocks and other assets held by taxpayers with a net worth of $1 billion or more — appears to be one of the few revenue-raising measures that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), a key swing vote, is willing to countenance. But there is a potentially fatal flaw in the proposal that should cause progressives to view it as a Trojan horse: The current Supreme Court is quite likely to strike it down as unconstitutional.
Google Blog: “In this post, we’ll walk you through how kids, teens and families can make use of a new tool that gives minors more control over their images in Google Search. Because while we already provide a range of options for people seeking to remove content from Search, we know that kids and teens have to navigate some unique challenges online, especially when a picture of them is unexpectedly available on the internet. With a newly implemented policy, anyone under the age of 18, or their parent or guardian, can now request the removal of their images from Search results, following a few simple steps. This means these images won’t appear in the Images tab or as thumbnails in any feature in Google Search…Google also stresses that removing an image from its search results does not, of course, remove it from the web. The company encourages those going through the application process to contact the webmaster directly. Though in cases where doing so has been unsuccessful, removing information from Google’s index is certainly the next best thing…
Google will make exceptions for “cases of compelling public interest or newsworthiness”…
Company stands ground after watchdog finds it breached Australians’ privacy by scraping images online
Ooh: Australia's Information Commissioner and Privacy Commissioner has found that Clearview AI breached Australians’ privacy by scraping their biometric information from the web and disclosing it through a facial recognition tool
The Afterlife Of Rachel Held Evans: Wholehearted Faith
The COVID Retirement Boom - Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 2021-10-15
Farewell Chilcot and Barratt: public servants who truly served the public
Australian politicians could learn from two public officials — one who scrutinised the Iraq War, and one who sought change to the way we conduct war.