What an AR-15 bullet does to a person

A WaPo article provides images of what a .223 caliber bullet from an AR-15 does once it hits a person's body. The GOP wants to make the AR-15 the national gun. Here's why.

Warning, this is unpleasant.

Democracy under attack: Comparing Israel to the US

A NYT opinion piece compares the rise of radical right authoritarianism in Israel to the US counterpart. It's an interesting analysis:

The Kohelet Policy Forum is a libertarian-leaning think tank reportedly funded by at least one American billionaire that has emerged as the ideological architect of the proposed overhaul [radical right attack on Israeli democracy]. The plan’s intellectual backers have routinely pointed to the American model of elected leaders nominating and confirming Supreme Court justices as their inspiration. By invoking the forum, Mr. Bar-David touched on a key aspect of Israel’s social and judicial crisis that has been too often overlooked: American influence.

In many ways, the fight over the future of the judiciary marks the culmination of the Americanization of Israeli society. A segment of Israeli society has always admired the United States and has striven to reimagine itself in its image. Over the past few decades, though, it hasn’t been America’s grand traditions of democracy and multiculturalism that have infiltrated the psyche of many in the Jewish state but rather its less admirable attributes.

As in America, many on the Israeli right have stopped defining themselves based on policies and have resorted instead to nativism and resistance to democratic norms. The political wedge issues in Israel are no longer questions around Palestinian statehood but rather the independence of the courts, good governance and plain decency. It’s no surprise, then, that the heirs of Israel’s earlier generation of conservatives can no longer find their place in the ruling Likud party. They’ve become Israeli versions of so-called RINOs, or Republicans in name only.

Without the demarcation of the ideological rivalries of the past, Israel’s political map is now defined mostly along identity lines, with the ultra-Orthodox, nationalist settlers and working-class Mizrahi voters on one side (the “red” Israel) and the wealthier, mostly Ashkenazi, educated class of the coastal Tel Aviv and Haifa regions on the other (the “blue” Israel). Despite the socioeconomic gaps between them, the main points of contention tend to revolve around matters of decorum, tradition and grievances.  

An example of Israel’s echoes of the United States can be found in the changes to the socialist kibbutz movement that helped shape the country’s identity and fueled its growth, which has been all but overrun by privatization and rabid capitalism that has contributed to the country having among the highest rates of inequality among nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Israel’s collective and pioneering spirit has been ravaged by consumerism and commercialism.

Like America, Israel now finds itself hopelessly polarized along numerous societal fault lines: religious and secular, rural and urban, educated and not, traditional and progressive, hawks and doves.    

Before Mr. Netanyahu attempted this power grab, Donald Trump tried it. Before Israel’s Channel 14 peddled some of its propaganda and misinformation, Fox News was doing the same.  

There is a distinct taste of Americanism to this fresh conservative Israeli persona. Mr. Netanyahu, the country’s biggest panderer to identity politics, is Israel’s most American-style politician. He spent many years in the United States, and many of his pollsters and strategists, not to mention his inner circle, came straight from right-wing Republican campaigns. 

Make no mistake, Israeli politics has always been a blood sport. But only in recent years has this hyperpartisan discourse taken hold, one that transcends ideology and instead revolves around a wannabe strongman’s cult of personality.  

Israeli militancy has always existed. But it was the immigration of the Brooklyn-born rabbi Meir Kahane in the 1970s that helped introduce an American-tinged racism to it. Arabs were no longer just adversaries to overcome in war; they were vile enemies who had to be expelled or killed.

Note the reference (i) to being hopelessly polarized along numerous societal fault lines, (ii) a wannabe strongman’s cult of personality and (iii) American-tinged racism. If that feels sickeningly familiar, it should. That's where America is right now. We are hopelessly polarized and our democracy, pluralism, civil liberties, the rule of law and inconvenient facts and truths are all under a vicious attack by a radical right cult and its wannabe dictator. Decades of dark free speech is mostly responsible for this, ~80% in my opinion.

In the US, old-fashioned, pro-democracy and pro-civil liberties conservatives are now dead RINOs. They are either out of power or cowed into silent submission and complicity with corrupt, radical right Republican Party authoritarianism and its polarizing identity politics. The same phenomenon has occurred in Israel. 

But that makes sense. If authoritarians want dictator-style wealth, power and control, democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties need to be sharply curtailed or completely controlled by the dictator, theocrats, kleptocrats or plutocrats. About the same situation applies in Russia, China, North Korea and all or nearly all other current dictatorships or plutocracies.

Israelis protest after the tyrant wannabe

fired his Minister of Defense for opposing

the radical right slow coup to kill democracy

Tech news bits: ChatGPT improves rapidly; Cat videos are crippling war material supplies

This post ushers in a whole new universe of content here at DP, tech stuff!! Yeah, well, tech stiff is not new here. Whatever.

From the Computers Are Going To Take Your Job Files -- ChatGPT rapidly gets a lot smarter: One could have reasonably believed that ChatGPT would get better over time. But this fast. Insider writes:

A professor says he's stunned that ChatGPT went from a D grade 

on his economics test to an A in just 3 months

An economics professor said the progress ChatGPT made — it improved its score from a D to an A on his economics test in just three months — has stunned him.

when ChatGPT-4 debuted, its progress stunned Caplan. It scored 73% on the same midterm test, equivalent to an A and among the best scores in his class.

ChatGPT's paywalled upgrade sought to fix some of the early issues with the beta version, GPT-3.5. This purportedly included making ChatGPT 40% more likely to return accurate responses, as well as making it able to handle more nuanced instructions.

For Caplan, the improvements were obvious. The bot gave clear answers to his questions, understanding principles it previously struggled with. It also scored perfect marks explaining and evaluating concepts that economists like Paul Krugman have championed.

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From the Sucking The Juice Out Of The War Files: Insider writes:

Weapons firm says it can't meet soaring demand for artillery shells 

because a TikTok data center is eating all the electricity

• An arms manufacturer complained that TikTok's data center is using all the electricity in the region.

• As a result, the company cannot keep up with the surging demand for artillery rounds.

• The CEO told the FT the company's growth is "challenged by the storage of cat videos."

"We are concerned because we see our future growth is challenged by the storage of cat videos," said Morten Brandtzæg, the CEO of the Norwegian arms manufacturer Nammo, in an interview with the Financial Times.

Brandtzæg said the demand for artillery rounds was 15 times higher than normal — a trend driven by the war in Ukraine, which has featured heavy artillery use.

Ukraine, for instance, would like to increase its daily usage of rounds from 6,000 to 65,000, he said.

Ukrainian soldiers fire at Russian positions from a U.S.-supplied M777 howitzer 

(my favorite artillery piece) in Kherson region, Ukraine, Jan. 9, 2023

Actually, multiple sources are reporting that there is a huge gap in what US arms manufacturers can produce and the vast demand for arms and supplies from Ukraine. Lots of stories had come out saying that the Russian could not keep up with demand, and so far that has not made much noticeable difference. But the US military is now reporting that its reserves of all kinds of modern arms and ammo are being rapidly depleted and manufacturers cannot keep up.

Does anyone else get a sense that the wheels have come off the cart in America, or is that just my paranoia speaking? Remember when America could not even make simple cloth. M95 and N95 masks in the early days of COVID? America feels significantly broken and mostly not fixable, especially if brass knuckles capitalism gets much more control of commerce and government than it already has.

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Making an updgrade by downgrading it: Insider writes on a trend that many consumers are noticing. If I recall right, I first started noticing this about 25 years ago.

Google, Amazon, and Meta are making their core products worse — on purpose

In recent years, Google users have developed one very specific complaint about the ubiquitous search engine: They can't find any answers. A simple search for "best pc for gaming" leads to a page dominated by sponsored links rather than helpful advice on which computer to buy. Meanwhile, the actual results are chock-full of low-quality, search-engine-optimized affiliate content designed to generate money for the publisher rather than provide high-quality answers. As a result, users have resorted to work-arounds and hacks to try and find useful information among the ads and low-quality chum. In short, Google's flagship service now sucks.  

All of these miserable online experiences are symptoms of an insidious underlying disease: In Silicon Valley, the user's experience has become subordinate to the company's stock price. Google, Amazon, Meta, and other tech companies have monetized confusion, constantly testing how much they can interfere with and manipulate users.

This makes perfect sense if one looks at it from the point of view of a brass knuckles capitalist. Why try to improve something that already works, when it is easier to break it and add some useless fluff to distract from what was broken? Why not stuff ads and sponsored links in a search result if it forces consumers to wade through the garbage to find what they want, thereby generating some extra profit when an ad snags someone?

I notice this most acutely now with Amazon, where searches are now loaded with crap I don't want and did not search for. Unfortunately, Amazon does not have much in the way of significant competition. When I try a non-Amazon source, the selection is usually poor and/or service bad or non-existent. 

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AI and human intelligence are becoming a gray area?: Vice writes about an alleged blurring of the line between humans and machines:

On Wednesday, Microsoft researchers released a paper on the arXiv preprint server titled “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4.” They declared that GPT-4 showed early signs of AGI, meaning that it has capabilities that are at or above human level. 

“We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting,” the researchers write in the paper’s abstract. “Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4’s performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4’s capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system.”  

Microsoft researchers observed fundamental leaps in GPT-4’s abilities to reason, plan, solve problems, and synthesize complex ideas that signal a paradigm shift in the field of computer science,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.  

With all this being said, it is clear that the “sparks” the researchers claim to have found are largely overpowered by the number of limitations and biases that the model has displayed since its release.

Although the paper's title is asserted to be more click bait than substance, the technology is improving rapidly. At some point fairly soon, there is going to be serious blurring of work by AI and humans in increasingly complex topics. One thing that makes improvements faster and better is learning what limitations and biases the AI has. Once those are known they can be improved and fixed.

One question this raises is what about jobs and job losses. A poll conducted 10 days after the first version of ChatGPT came out indicated that over half of employers who tested it, had started to lay people off and replace them with the AI software. Other questions are how far will AI make inroads into jobs and and how fast will it happen? 

Not Your Average JOE

 In case you haven't heard:

National Joe Day

National Joe Day is somewhat of a different holiday that falls on the 27th of March every year. It’s a holiday in which people celebrate the name Joe and all of the people they know with that name.

How To Observe National Joe Day

National Joe Day is probably one of the easiest holidays to celebrate. On this day, all a person has to do is to celebrate a Joe in your life, celebrate a famous Joe, or even change your own name to Joe for the day. People can also use the day to enjoy a hot cup of Joe or even a plate of sloppy Joes.

https://www.holidayscalendar.com/event/national-joe-day/

Now, which Joes should we celebrate?

Joe Biden? One of the most successful Presidents ever in terms of legislation passed during his first term, but still, for some reason, immensely unpopular? Any theories as to way?

How about Joe Manchin? Somehow, he always does manage to coming around to supporting the other Joe's agenda, though he likes to drag it out before he does and is still beholding to the oil industry. But, he does manage to stay popular in a red district. A pain in the butt? Or a surviver?

Of course we could go way OUT there and give some love to:

Joe Exotic

Such a handsome fellow, agree?

If you want more on politics, there is also:

The anti-Trump Republican, not the rock star. Mind you, has his star faded? I seldom see any more interesting news items on him.

SO, who are your favorite Joes, your least favorite Joes, or are there any Joes you know personally you want to give a big shout out to on this National Joe Day?