AND THE TEN HOUR WORK WEEK

Silicon Valley leaders think A.I. will one day fund free cash handouts. But SO CALLED experts aren’t convinced

In as little as 10 years, AI could generate enough wealth to pay every adult in the U.S. $13,500 a year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in his 2,933 word piece called "Moore's Law for Everything."

But critics are concerned that Altman's views could cause more harm than good, and that he's misleading the public on where AI is headed.

Glen Weyl, an economist and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, wrote on Twitter: "This beautifully epitomizes the AI ideology that I believe is the most dangerous force in the world today."

 Provided by CNBC Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator

Artificial intelligence companies could become so powerful and so wealthy that they're able to provide a universal basic income to every man, woman and child on Earth.

That's how some in the AI community have interpreted a lengthy blog post from Sam Altman, the CEO of research lab OpenAI, that was published earlier this month

In as little as 10 years, AI could generate enough wealth to pay every adult in the U.S. $13,500 a year, Altman said in his 2,933 word piece called "Moore's Law for Everything."

"My work at OpenAI reminds me every day about the magnitude of the socioeconomic change that is coming sooner than most people believe," said Altman, the former president of renowned start-up accelerator Y-Combinator earlier this month. "Software that can think and learn will do more and more of the work that people now do."

But critics are concerned that Altman's views could cause more harm than good, and that he's misleading the public on where AI is headed.

Glen Weyl, an economist and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, wrote on Twitter: "This beautifully epitomizes the AI ideology that I believe is the most dangerous force in the world today."

One industry source, who asked to remain anonymous due to the nature of the discussion, told CNBC that Altman "envisions a world wherein he and his AI-CEO peers become so immensely powerful that they run every non-AI company (employing people) out of business and every American worker to unemployment. So powerful that a percentage of OpenAI's (and its peers') income could bankroll UBI for every citizen of America."

Altman will be able to "get away with it," the source said, because "politicians will be enticed by his immense tax revenue and by the popularity that paying their voter's salaries (UBI) will give them. But this is an illusion. Sam is no different from any other capitalist trying to persuade the government to allow an oligarchy."

Taxing capital

One of the main thrusts of the essay is a call to tax capital — companies and land — instead of labor. That's where the UBI money would come from.

"We could do something called the American Equity Fund," wrote Altman. "The American Equity Fund would be capitalized by taxing companies above a certain valuation 2.5% of their market value each year, payable in shares transferred to the fund, and by taxing 2.5% of the value of all privately-held land, payable in dollars."

He added: "All citizens over 18 would get an annual distribution, in dollars and company shares, into their accounts. People would be entrusted to use the money however they needed or wanted — for better education, healthcare, housing, starting a company, whatever."

Altman said every citizen would get more money from the fund each year, providing the country keeps doing better.

"Every citizen would therefore increasingly partake of the freedoms, powers, autonomies, and opportunities that come with economic self-determination," he said. "Poverty would be greatly reduced and many more people would have a shot at the life they want."

Matt Clifford, the co-founder of start-up builder Entrepreneur First, wrote in his "Thoughts in Between" newsletter: "I don't think there is anything intellectually radical here ... these ideas have been around for a long time — but it's fascinating as a showcase of how mainstream these previously fringe ideas have become among tech elites."

Meanwhile, Matt Prewitt, president of non-profit RadicalxChange, which describes itself as a global movement for next-generation political economies, told CNBC: "The piece sells a vision of the future that lets our future overlords off way too easy, and would likely create a sort of peasant class encompassing most of society."

He added: "I can imagine even worse futures — but this the wrong direction in which to point our imaginations. By focusing instead on guaranteeing and enabling deeper, broader participation in political and economic life, I think we can do far better."

Richard Miller, founder of tech consultancy firm Miller-Klein Associates, told CNBC that Altman's post feels "muddled," adding that "the model is unfettered capitalism."

Michael Jordan, an academic at University of California Berkeley, told CNBC the blog post is too far from anything intellectually reasonable, either from a technology point of view, or an economic point of view, that he'd prefer not to comment.

In Altman's defense, he wrote in his blog that the idea is designed to be little more than a "conversation starter." Altman did not immediately reply to a CNBC request for an interview.

An OpenAI spokesperson encouraged people to read the essay for themselves.

Not everyone disagreed with Altman. "I like the suggested wealth taxation strategies," wrote Deloitte worker Janine Moir on Twitter.
A.I.'s abilities

Founded in San Francisco in 2015 by a group of entrepreneurs including Elon Musk, OpenAI is widely regarded as one of the top AI labs in the world, along with Facebook AI Research, and DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014.

The research lab, backed by Microsoft with $1 billion in July 2019, is best known for creating an AI image generator, called Dall-E, and an AI text generator, known as GPT-3. It has also developed agents that can beat the best humans at games like Dota 2. But it's nowhere near creating the AI technology that Altman describes, experts told CNBC.

Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT, told CNBC: "There is an incredible mistaken optimism of what AI is capable of doing."

Acemoglu said algorithms are good at performing some "very, very narrow tasks" and that they can sometimes help businesses to cut costs or improve a product.

"But they're not that revolutionary, and there's no evidence that any of this is going to be revolutionary," he said, adding that AI leaders are "waxing lyrical about what AI is doing already and how it's revolutionizing things."

In terms of the measures that are standard for economic success, like total factor productivity growth, or output per worker, many sectors are having the worst time they've had in about 100 years, Acemoglu said. "It's not comparable to previous periods of rapid technological progress," he said.

"If you look at the 1950s and the 1960s, the rate of TFP (total factor productivity) growth was about 3% a year," said Acemoglu. "Today it's about 0.5%. What that means is you're losing about a point and a half percentage growth of GDP (gross domestic product) every year so it's a really huge, huge, huge productivity slowdown. It's completely inconsistent with this view that we're just getting an enormous amount of benefits (from AI)."

Technology evangelists have been saying AI will change the world for years with some speculating that "artificial general intelligence" and "superintelligence" isn't far away.

AGI is the hypothetical ability of an AI to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can, while superintelligence is defined by Oxford professor Nick Bostrom as "any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest."

But some argue that we're no closer to AGI or superintelligence than we were at the start of the century.

"One can say, and some do, 'oh it's just around the corner.' But the premise of that doesn't seem to be very well articulated. It was just around the corner 10 years ago and it hasn't come," said Acemoglu.

'Lighting a fuse': Amazon vote may spark more union pushes

What happens inside a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, could have major implications not just for the country's second-largest employer but the labour movement at large.

© Provided by The Canadian Press UNION YES SIGN

Organizers are pushing for some 6,000 Amazon workers there to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union on the promise it will lead to better working conditions, better pay and more respect. Amazon is pushing back, arguing that it already offers more than twice the minimum wage in Alabama and workers get such benefits as health care, vision and dental insurance without paying union dues.

The two sides are fully aware that it's not just the Bessemer warehouse on the line. Organizers hope what happens there will inspire thousands of workers nationwide — and not just at Amazon — to consider unionizing and revive a labour movement that has been waning for decades.

“This is lighting a fuse, which I believe is going to spark an explosion of union organizing across the country, regardless of the results,” says RWDSU president Stuart Appelbaum.

The union push could spread to other parts of Amazon and threaten the company's profits, which soared 84% last year to $21 billion. At a time when many companies were cutting jobs, Amazon was one of the few still hiring, bringing on board 500,000 people last year alone to keep up with a surge of online orders.

Bessemer workers finished casting their votes on Monday. The counting begins on Tuesday, which could take days or longer depending on how many votes are received and how much time it takes for each side to review. The process is being overseen by the National Labor Relations Board and a majority of the votes will decide the final outcome.

What that outcome will be is anyone's guess. Appelbaum thinks workers who voted early likely rejected the union because Amazon’s messaging got to them first. He says momentum changed in March as organizers talked to more workers and heard from basketball players and high-profile elected officials, including President Joe Biden.

For Amazon, which employs more than 950,000 full- and part-time workers in the U.S. and nearly 1.3 million worldwide, a union could lead to higher wages that would eat into its profits. Higher wages would also mean higher costs to get packages to shoppers’ doorsteps, which may prompt Amazon to raise prices, says Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

Any push to unionize is considered a long shot, since labour laws tend to favour employers. Alabama itself is a “right-to-work” state, which allows workers in unionized shops to opt out of paying union dues even as they retain the benefits and job protection negotiated by the union.

Kent Wong, the director of the UCLA Labor Center, says companies in the past have closed stores, warehouses or plants after workers have voted to unionize.

“There’s a history of companies going to great lengths to avoid recognizing the union,” he says.

Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer and biggest private employer, has successfully fought off organizing efforts over the years. In 2000, it got rid of butchers in 180 of its stores after they voted to form a union. Walmart said it cut the jobs because people preferred pre-packaged meat. Five years later, it closed a store in Canada where some 200 workers were close to winning a union contract. At the time, Walmart said demands from union negotiators made it impossible for the store to sustain itself.

The only other time Amazon came up against a union vote was in 2014, when the majority of the 30 workers at a Delaware warehouse turned it down.

This time around, Amazon has been hanging anti-union signs throughout the Bessemer warehouse, including inside bathroom stalls, and holding mandatory meetings to convince workers why the union is a bad idea, according to one worker who recently testified at a Senate hearing. It has also created a website for employees that tells them they’ll have to pay $500 in union dues a month, taking away money that could go to dinners and school supplies.

Amazon's hardball tactics extend beyond squashing union efforts. Last year, it fired a worker who organized a walkout at a New York warehouse to demand greater protection against coronavirus, saying the employee himself flouted distancing rules. When Seattle, the home of its headquarters, passed a new tax on big companies in 2018, Amazon protested by stopping construction of a new high-rise building in the city; the tax was repealed four weeks later. And in 2019, Amazon ditched plans to build a $2.5 billion headquarters for 25,000 workers in New York after pushback from progressive politicians and unions.

Beyond Amazon is an anti-union culture that dominates the South. And unions have lost ground nationally for decades since their peak in the decades following World War II. In 1970, almost a third of the U.S. workforce belonged to a union. In 2020, that figure was 10.8%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Private sector workers now account for less than half of the 14.3 million union members across the country.

Advocates say a victory would signal a shift in the narrative about unions, helping refute the typical arguments from companies, including Amazon, that workers can win adequate compensation and conditions by dealing with management directly.

“It is because of unions that we have a five-day work week. It is because of unions that we have safer conditions in our places of work. It is because of unions that we have benefits,” says Rep. Terri Sewell, whose congressional district includes the Amazon facility. “Workers should have the right to choose whether they organize or not.”

Union leaders are circumspect about specific organizing plans after the Bessemer vote, and Appelbaum says he doesn't want to tip off Amazon to any future efforts. But there is broad consensus that a win would spur workers at some of the 230 other Amazon warehouses to mount a similar union campaign.

It’s less clear whether any ripple effects would reach other prime targets like Walmart and the expansive auto industry that has burgeoned across the South in recent decades. Both have largely succeeded at keeping unions at bay.

The auto workers union has had some of the largest union pushes of the last decade, but their most intense and publicized efforts ended in failure. In 2017, a years-long campaign to unionize a Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, ended with a decisive 2,244-1,307 rejection of the union — the kind of margin that would be devastating in Bessemer. Two years later, however, Volkswagen workers in Tennessee had a much more evenly split vote, with 776 workers supporting unionization and 833 voting against it.

Besides the number of Amazon workers involved, the Alabama campaign has stood out because of how explicitly many advocates have linked the effort to the civil rights movement of the 20th century. The RWDSU estimates that more than 80% of the warehouse workers in Bessemer are Black.

Robert Korstad, a Duke Emeritus professor and labour history expert, says those dynamics could help in Bessemer.

“The history of the Black struggle in Alabama is pretty deeply entrenched in the social, political and religious institutions there,” he says. “We’re starting to see people rise up again. So this Amazon struggle is part of a larger struggle that’s gone on a long time.”

The question, Korstad says, is whether a win in Bessemer truly becomes a “ripple effect” that inspires workers across racial and ethnic lines elsewhere.

Joseph Pisani And Bill Barrow, The Associated Press

Kimmel Jokes the Suez Canal Blockage Means 'Capitalism Had a Heart Attack' 

© TheWrap Jimmy Kimmel Suez Canal

On Monday, Jimmy Kimmel celebrated the end of the Suez Canal blockage during his opening monologue by joking that the whole thing was basically "capitalism had a heart attack" and wondering how the hell it happened in the first place.

"I have to say — after all the fighting and the tooth-gnashing over the past few years – it was nice to see the whole world come together to make fun of a boat," Kimmel said as he got into the joke.

"The container ship – known as the Ever Given — was wedged in the Suez Canal for the last six days — it was finally freed this morning by a fleet of tug boats. Same way they got Trump out of the White House," Kimmel continued.

Also read: Suez Canal Ship Has Been Freed -- and So Have All the Memes

Kimmel then described how the canal, "one of the main arteries for ships carrying goods around the globe," ended up being "completely blocked by this ship. Basically, capitalism had a heart attack over this last week," he joked.

Kimmel joked that the delivery delays caused by the canal blockage caused all sort of problems, for instance Ikea had a lot of products suck in transit. "Which means thousands of men in their twenties now have an excuse for why they don't own a headboard," said Kimmel.

"But still, it's crazy that something like this can bring the world of commerce to a halt," Kimmel said, later adding "if this was a urethra — they'd have to operate."

"They're still investigating how this happened," he said, concluding the gag. The shipping company is blaming a strong gust of wind. Which, don't know. They finished this canal in 1869. In 150 years, this is the first time they had wind?"

Watch the whole monologue above. Kimmel's canal jokes happen at the very beginning.

Joe Biden plans to build huge offshore wind farms to tackle the climate crisis

President Joe Biden's administration has detailed a plan to build huge offshore wind farms in the United States.

The White House said the plans would create up to 44,000 jobs by 2030.

President Biden has called climate change one of the four "major crises" he plans to tackle as president.

President Joe Biden's administration has detailed a plan to build huge offshore wind farms in the United States as part of his plans to tackle climate change.

The project, which was unveiled on Monday, aims to create 30 extra gigawatts of offshore wind generation to US coastlines by 2030, while creating tens of thousands of jobs.

The White House said meeting that target would cost $12 billion a year in capital investment on both US coastlines and would employ 44,000 workers, as well as 33,000 additional jobs in communities supported by offshore wind generation.

The wind farms would supply power to 10 million homes and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 78 million metric tons, the White House said.

As one part of the efforts, Interior Department announced a new "priority wind energy area" in the New York Bight, a shallow area between Long Island and the New Jersey coastline, where the agency hopes to construct a wind farm by 2030.

"The announcements we're making today I hope will just jump-start everyone's understanding of the potential for offshore wind energy, and move this industry forward in a way that's going to allow us to really focus on the supply chain issue as well, because we're not just talking about erecting wind turbines in the oceans, we're talking about massive turbines that are actually manufactured in the United States," national climate adviser Gina McCarthy said Monday, in comments reported by Politico.

President Biden pledged to make tackling climate change a central part of his agenda in the White House, describing it as one of the four "major crises" facing the United States.

In his first week in office, he issued an executive order calling on the United States to create a "clean energy economy" and create millions of new jobs.

Biden administration plans major reboot for U.S. offshore wind power

The federal government will create a New Wind Energy Area offshore between Long Island and the New Jersey coast.

A wind farm shares space with corn fields in Latimer, Iowa, on Feb. 2, 2020.

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters file



March 29, 2021, 

By Josh Lederman


WASHINGTON — The offshore wind industry is getting a major boost from the Biden administration as the White House aims to reinvigorate a potential source of renewable, emissions-free electricity that has never fully taken off in the United States.

As part of a government-wide effort announced Monday, the White House set a new target to deploy enough offshore windmills to power millions of American homes — 30 gigawatts — by 2030.


To accomplish that goal, the Interior Department will create a New Wind Energy Area offshore between Long Island and the New Jersey coast, where the administration will lease space, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said.

The Interior Department also announced it would move ahead with a key environmental review needed to proceed with permitting for Ocean Wind, a major project planned off the coast of New Jersey, which would be the third commercial offshore wind project for the U.S.

‘The science is screaming at us’: John Kerry reboots U.S. climate cooperation

MARCH 9, 2021   01:41

The White House said hitting their new target would directly employ more than 44,000 people, with tens of thousands more jobs created by increased economic activity in nearby communities.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the approach to offshore wind in the past has “looked like a chicken with its head cut off.”

“It is a new day under the Biden administration,” Granholm said.

Offshore wind — in which gigantic wind turbines located in waters off the coast churn out electricity to power homes and businesses onshore — is an untapped opportunity to expand electrical generation from sources that don’t produce heat-trapping greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

But in the U.S., while on-land wind farms have flourished in recent years, offshore wind has yet to take off in a significant way, in part due to bureaucratic and permitting hurdles that were a source of major frustration for renewable energy companies during the Trump administration. As of now, the U.S. has only one operational offshore commercial wind farm, with just five turbines.

In contrast, wind energy from onshore wind farms made up more than 8 percent of U.S. electricity generation in 2020, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data, a number that is expected to grow.

Biden administration designates new offshore wind energy area

Wind Energy Areas(WEAs)

NEW YORK

Long Island

NEW

JERSEY

Barnegat Light

New York/New Jersey Bight

10 miles

Source: U.S. Department of the Interior

Graphic: Jiachuan Wu / NBC News

Another reason offshore wind has been slow: The Energy Department has said that more than 58 percent of offshore wind resources are in “deep water,” where it’s impractical to attach massive structures to the seabed and floating platforms must be used instead, a nascent technology that until recently has often been cost-prohibitive.

To accelerate offshore wind growth, the Energy Department plans to make $3 billion in funding available through its loan guarantee program, which will also target equipment suppliers and development of transmission for power generated from offshore wind.


“President Biden believes we have an enormous opportunity in front of us to not only address the threats of climate change, but use it as a chance to create millions of good-paying, union jobs that will fuel America’s economic recovery,” Gina McCarthy, the White House national climate advisor, said in a statement.

Moving the U.S. toward renewable, low-carbon energy sources like wind, solar and geothermal is critical to Biden’s goals of zeroing out greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector by 2035 and from the entire U.S. economy by 2050.

Yet to meet global goals to keep climate change in check, the U.S. must also “electrify” other sectors that currently are powered by burning fossil fuels, such as cars and trucks, heating for homes and businesses, and gas cooking stoves. That means the U.S. must plan to use far more electricity in the coming years than it does now. To achieve the intended emission reductions, that electricity must come from renewable sources like wind rather than from coal- or gas-fired power plants, creating yet more pressure for the U.S. to quickly ramp up production of offshore wind power.


In one early action aimed to speed up the industry’s growth, shortly after Biden took office his administration renewed the permitting process for the stalled Vineyard Wind project off Martha’s Vineyard. The developer has said the project will create enough electricity to power 400,000 Massachusetts homes.

The White House’s push to ramp up offshore wind was quickly praised by environmental groups and climate hawks in Congress. House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., said the U.S. would “benefit tremendously” from the Biden administration’s commitment to clean energy such as wind.

“The positive contrast with the Trump administration couldn’t be more obvious,” Grijalva said.

TO JUSTIFY NOT TAKING NO FOR AN ANWSER

The Alberta government has tasked a five-member committee with finding out how people feel about open-pit coal mining in the Rocky Mountains and their eastern slopes. 

Here's a description of committee members as provided by the Alberta Energy Department:

Ron Wallace: Is to chair the committee. He's an internationally recognized expert in regulatory policies associated with environmental assessment and monitoring. He has served on numerous regulatory boards dealing with energy and environmental issues, in addition to having extensive experience in the private sector. He was also a permanent member of the National Energy Board.

Fred Bradley: Minister of the environment in former Progressive Conservative premier Peter Lougheed's government. He served as member of the legislature for Pincher Creek-Crowsnest. After retiring from politics, he served as chairman of the Alberta Research Council.

Natalie Charlton: Executive director of the Hinton and District Chamber of Commerce. She has served on various boards and has experience advocating for alternative energy resources.

Bill Trafford: President of the Livingstone Landowners Group, which represents landowners and supporters of the Livingstone-Porcupine area of Alberta. He has 35 years of experience in the IT industry and the health sector.

Eric North Peigan: A small business owner and member of Pikanii First Nation. He operates a teepee camp that provides an immersive cultural experience for tourists.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 29. 2021

NO ENVIRONMENTALISTS, UNIONS, GEOLOGISTS, ENGINEERS, ETC ETC

IS THIS COMMITTEE FULL TIME OR PART TIME

STILL UP FOR DEBATE

Did volcanoes kill the dinosaurs? 

New research says no

If you asked Joe Blow on the street how the dinosaurs went extinct, he'd mostly likely say an asteroid wiped them out, but the truth is a little more complex than that. By this stage, we're well aware that a massive asteroid around 10 to 15 kilometers wide struck Earth around 66 million years ago. We even know where it hit: the Chicxulub crater, located in the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, is 150 kilometers wide. Pretty difficult to miss.

© Provided by CNET The rock got them. 

© Oli Scarff/Getty Images

But many scientists still subscribe to the theory that a massive volcanic range, located in India, was the main driver of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event that killed the dinosaurs. That volcanic range, named the Deccan Traps, is at the center of that debate.

We know lava was spewing from the Deccan Traps during the period in which the dinosaurs went extinct, but we don't know the precise timing of those eruptions or if the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere was significant enough to cause the type of global warming consistent with extinction events in the past.

Until now.

Recent research by a multi-institutional team led by scientists from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York has attempted to measure how much carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere, hoping to understand the role volcanoes played in the fifth extinction event.

The results? Volcanic eruptions most likely weren't a significant driver of dinosaur extinction.

"Our team analyzed Deccan Traps CO2 budgets that coincided with the warming event," said Andres Hernandez Nava, a Ph.D. student in the Graduate Center CUNY's Earth and Environmental Science program, "and we found that carbon outgassing from lava volumes alone couldn't have caused that level of global warming."

The team used lasers and ion beams to measure the carbon dioxide of frozen magma trapped inside Deccan Traps crystals from the end-Cretaceous period and performed modeling of that climate in an attempt to test the impacts of Deccan Traps release on surface temperatures. The data revealed that most likely the Deccan Traps contributed to a temperature increase of around 3 degrees Celsius. Significant, for sure, but most likely not enough to create a fifth extinction event.

In short, as my 5-year-old son says when I ask who killed the dinosaurs: "A big rock got them."

Dust devil shatters ice on frozen lake

Duration: 01:03

A photographer was left flabbergasted when a dust devil suddenly appeared in front of him on a frozen lake near Copenhagen, Denmark.

Bill Nelson - Chance Encounters In The Garden Of Lights, Disc1 

1987

Bill Nelson  formerly of Be Bop Deluxe applying the trance magicks of Austin Osman Spare

 to create gnostic musick

Biden task force to probe science manipulation under Trump

In a letter to federal agencies, the panel aims to “prevent improper political interference in the conduct of scientific research."


March 29, 2021, 
By Josh Lederman


WASHINGTON — A new White House task force will examine instances where the Trump administration may have distorted or suppressed science in critical government decisions, with an eye toward creating fail-safes to prevent it from happening again, the White House said Monday.

In a letter to federal agencies, obtained by NBC News, the White House said the task force’s mandate would include identifying whether current policies effectively “prevent improper political interference in the conduct of scientific research” and “prevent the suppression or distortion of scientific or technological findings.”


“Restoring and safeguarding scientific integrity will require the participation and contribution of scientists from across government, who will bring their diverse perspectives to the endeavor,” the letter states, which was signed by Jane Lubchenco and Alondra Nelson, two officials in the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Biden taps Michael Regan to lead Environmental Protection Agency

DEC. 17, 2020  0:26

It is the latest attempt by President Joe Biden’s administration to erase the remnants of former President Donald Trump, who Biden aides say diminished the federal government’s credibility with the public on critical issues by disregarding facts to fit the former president’s message. Under Trump, the White House offered conflicting recommendations about the need for masks to fight Covid-19 and the severity of the pandemic, while pushing aside experts in government who sounded the alarm about climate change.

Julia Krieger, a spokeswoman for the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the task force would take a “whole-of-government, forward-looking review of science across federal agencies, in part by examining practices that were antithetical to that mission over the last four years.” She said that would include “Trump-era policies that eschewed scientific integrity in favor of politics.”

Formally announced on Monday, the task force was first called for in a January 27 memorandum Biden signed that declared that critical decisions should not be “distorted or influenced by political considerations.” The White House is asking federal agencies to nominate members for the task force by April 2.

In a sign that the White House was looking beyond the traditional bureaucracies, like the Energy Department and Environmental Protection Agency, a lengthy list of divisions that handle national security, financial and health-related issues were invited to nominate members to the task force. Among those receiving the White House letter on Monday were the Justice, Treasury and Defense departments, as well as the Office of Director of National Intelligence, National Institutes of Health, and the State Department.

The White House effort to look broadly across the federal government comes after the EPA last week launched its own effort to review environmental policies and decisions to see where scientific data may have been manipulated or intentionally suppressed, and to update those policies if needed, NBC News reported.

“When politics drives science rather than science informing policy, we are more likely to make policy choices that sacrifice the health of the most vulnerable among us,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan wrote in a letter to staff last week.

Under Trump’s EPA, the agency was frequently accused of distorting science and data for political purposes and to justify laxer regulations on polluting industries whose emissions contribute to global warming. During Trump’s years in office, the EPA removed climate change data from its website, and scores of top scientists and long-serving policy experts left the agency.

VOTER SUPPRESSION; GOP,CCP AUTHORITARIAN STATISM BAON

 China unanimously approves contentious proposal to overhaul Hong Kong's electoral system

HKong, March 30 (ANI): China on Tuesday approved the most controversial and sweeping overhaul of Hong Kong's electoral system, which will slash the number of directly elected seats in the city's legislature from half to about one-fifth.

Read more At: 

https://www.aninews.in/news/world/asia/china-unanimously-approves-contentious-proposal-to-overhaul-hong-kongs-electoral-system20210330141457/

AUTHORITARIAN STATISTS;CCP,GOP

TikTok is prompting users to follow far-right extremist accounts

Three Percenter, QAnon, Patriot Party, and Oath Keeper accounts are being recommended by TikTok’s algorithm

Media Matters / Molly Butler

WRITTEN BY OLIVIA LITTLE
PUBLISHED 03/26/21 

TikTok’s account recommendation algorithm appears to be prompting users to follow far-right extremist movements, with Three Percenter, QAnon, Patriot Party, and Oath Keeper accounts all being pushed by the platform’s algorithm. These include far-right movements that were deeply involved in the planning and execution of the January 6 insurrection, which resulted in five deaths and nearly 140 injuries to police defending the Capitol.

Three Percenter, QAnon, Patriot Party, and Oath Keeper content is prohibited by TikTok, but the company’s algorithm appears to be both circulating their content and helping them to expand their following.

A TikTok spokesperson told Vox that the platform’s recommendation of accounts to follow is “based on user behavior”; the company’s other explanation of the algorithm (found on the information button next to “suggested accounts”) claims that account recommendations are tailored to the “interests” or “connections” of an individual user.

To analyze how this process appears to operate, Media Matters reviewed and tracked which accounts TikTok recommended under a “suggested accounts” prompt after following a specific account from TikTok’s “For You” page.

Our analysis found that by following TikTok’s suggested follower prompts, users can easily be exposed to and increasingly served far-right extremist accounts and content. This is uniquely harmful because it has the potential to further radicalize people interested in these far-right extremist movements, and it doesn’t even require users to seek them out; TikTok hand-delivers the extremist movements to its users, many of whom are 14 or younger.

Using this process, Media Matters identified six common scenarios demonstrating how following specific accounts from TikTok’s “For You” page shapes the type of extremist content recommended by the platform’s “suggested accounts” algorithm.

For example, after following a QAnon account from the “For You” page, TikTok recommended another QAnon account. After following that second QAnon account, TikTok then recommended a Three Percenter account.

In another example, after following a Three Percenter account from the “For You” page, TikTok suggested following a different Three Percenter account. After following the second account, TikTok recommended yet another Three Percenter account. After following several Three Percenter accounts, the web of radicalization expanded and accounts from Patriot Party, QAnon, and others were all recommended at times.

This accelerated pattern of recommendations is alarming and has the potential to push TikTok users down a far-right rabbit hole, further populating user feeds with the sort of extremist movements behind the Capitol attack.

The following graphic illustrates the accounts fed to our “For You” page which were followed, and then TikTok’s suggested accounts indicated by an arrow. (Accounts with two graphics indicate split extremist ideology, such as a Patriot Party account that also pushed QAnon conspiracy theories.)


CitationMolly Butler / Media Matters

#HACK

Stanford Scientists Post Entire mRNA Sequence for Moderna Vaccine on Github


Tom McKay
3/29/2021

A doctor preparing a dose of Moderna vaccine in Ostrava, Czech Republic, in January 2021.Photo: Radek Mca/AFP (Getty Images)






A group of Stanford researchers has hacked Moderna’s messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine for the novel coronavirus, Motherboard first reported on Monday, and published its entire genetic sequence on the open-source code repository Github.

The mRNA vaccines work by delivering genetic information that allows the body’s own cells to produce a viral protein—such as a harmless, engineered version of the spike protein that the coronavirus uses to break its way into the body’s cells. When the body subsequently produces that protein, the immune system rapidly mobilizes to fight it, conducting a sort of live-fire training exercise that prepares it to fight the actual coronavirus; the actual mRNA delivered by the vaccine quickly disintegrates, but the antibodies stick around as a garrison against future infection. Per the MIT News Office, this allows for much easier and faster production than prior generations of vaccines relying on manufacturing the proteins under laboratory conditions. The mRNA sequence more or less serves as a sort of source code for the vaccine.

The documents the Stanford team published on Github include two pages of explanation and two pages containing the entire mRNA sequence for Moderna’s vaccine. Researchers wrote in the report that although Moderna’s mRNA has ended up in a large swathe of the population, scientists and medical personnel don’t have access to the actual genetic sequences involved.

“With the rollout of vaccines for COVID-19, these synthetic mRNAs have become broadly distributed RNA species in numerous human populations,” the researchers wrote. “Despite their ubiquity, sequences are not always available for such RNAs... Sharing of sequence information for broadly used therapeutics has the benefit of allowing any researchers or clinicians using sequencing approaches to rapidly identify such sequences as therapeutic-derived rather than host or infectious in origin.”

The research team told Motherboard that they didn’t “reverse engineer” the vaccine, they simply “posted the putative sequence of two synthetic RNA molecules that have become sufficiently prevalent in the general environment of medicine and human biology in 2021.”

“As the vaccine has been rolling out, these sequences have begun to show up in many different investigational and diagnostic studies,” Stanford scientists Andrew Fire and Massa Shoura told Motherboard by email. “Knowing these sequences and having the ability to differentiate them from other RNAs in analyzing future biomedical data sets is of great utility.”

“For this work, RNAs were obtained as discards from the small portions of vaccine doses that remained in vials after immunization; such portions would have been required to be otherwise discarded and were analyzed under FDA authorization for research use,” they added. Fire and Shoura told Motherboard that they had received permission from the FDA to collect scraps of vaccines that wouldn’t have otherwise been used from empty vials and that they’d notified Moderna in advance of their plans to publish the sequence without receiving any objection in turn.

There is a “substantial economy of scale and educational value in having the sequences available ASAP and in not having to guess where they have come from,” the two researchers told Motherboard.

Moderna’s mRNA vaccine and the competing one made by Pfizer-BioNTech were the first ones ever approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Per Motherboard, PowerDNS founder Bert Hubert was able to use publicly available data to reveal Pfizer’s mRNA sequence late last year.

As Hubert wrote in a separate blog post, however, this does not mean that anyone is going to be homebrewing either vaccine soon in a “distributed manufacturing revolution.” Hubert detailed the ridiculously complicated supply chain that powers the pharmaceutical companies’ vaccine manufacturing, which involves numerous complex ingredients, DNA and mRNA production in specialized facilities, and combining mRNA and lipids into lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), the last of which perhaps only a number of experts in the “low hundreds” know how to do. The final steps, including formulation where the LNPs are mixed with other more generic ingredients and are filled into vials, also require specialized knowledge and equipment—with subsequent distribution to patients being its own daunting technical challenge.

“Technically, the last step of the supply chain of these mRNA COVID-19 vaccines is the production of the spike protein,” Hubert concluded. “That’s what happens in the cells of your body after you receive the vaccine. You are the globally distributed vaccine manufacturing revolution.”

Joe Biden’s administration is facing pressure from some legislators to suspend patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines, according to Time, in the hopes of ensuring that profit incentives won’t get in the way of attaining levels of mass vaccination that could snuff out the pandemic. (Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, a member of the Pfizer board of directors, has argued that bottlenecks in mass vaccination lay primarily in supplies and production, not intellectual property restrictions.) The White House is still considering whether to do that, according to CNBC.

 

Amazon union vote count set to start for Alabama warehouse workers

Campaign viewed as one of the biggest and most consequential unionization drives in recent America history

If successful, the warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, would be the first union at Amazon in the US, as many Amazon workers in Europe are already unionized. Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty Images

Michael Sainato

Tue 30 Mar 2021 

Vote counting is set to begin in an election to determine whether Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, will form a union in what is viewed as one of the biggest and most consequential unionization drives in recent America history.

The contest has pitted America’s labor movement – backed by a slew of Democrat politicians and some Republicans – against one of the most powerful companies in the world.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) will start to tally the votes to see if the Bessemer workers will form a union with the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). If successful, the warehouse would be the first union at Amazon in the US, as many Amazon workers in Europe are already unionized.

“This campaign has already been a victory in many ways. Even though we don’t know how the vote will turn out, we believe we have opened the door to more organizing around the country, and we have exposed the lengths to which employers will go to crush their employees trying to gain a union voice,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of RWDSU. “This campaign has become the prime example for why we need labor law reform in this country.

Around 5,800 employees were eligible to vote in the election, with a majority of those who voted to determine the outcome.

The results could take a while to be finally counted and the process could be legally fraught. The NLRB said it will not have an estimate for how long the vote count will take until counting begins. The union estimated it will take about a week for results.

During the vote count, the union and Amazon will have the opportunity to challenge the veracity of ballots and file objections within five business days of the vote count.

The results could also be delayed if enough ballots are challenged to affect the outcome of the election, at which point a hearing officer with the NLRB will determine whether a challenged ballot will be counted.

Amazon aggressively opposed the union organizing efforts at the Bessemer warehouse, encouraging workers to vote “no” in the election through posters, signs, mailings, a website, texts, ads, captive audience meetings, and hired union avoidance consultants at nearly $10,000 per day ahead of the election. Under the Pro Act, a labor law reform bill supported by Democrats and labor unions around the US, employers would be prohibited from forcing workers into captive audience meetings, and fines would significantly be increased for labor law violations.

The union drive has received support from unions and organizations in the Bessemer area and around the US. Several congress members visited the union organizing site over the past few weeks to show their support for the workers.

“This election is important because it’s the start to addressing inadequate working conditions,” said Eric Hall, founder of the Black Lives Matter chapter in Birmingham, Alabama, which has supported the union organizing efforts and participated in rallies to garner community support for the workers.

An estimated 85% of the Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer are Black.

“Birmingham is a city known for its strong stance for civil rights. Its people led a rebellion against racism and Jim Crow, and in this present day movement it’s the grand and great grandchildren fighting against today’s injustices, fighting against the rich and powerful, fighting systemic racism, fighting economic and social injustice,” said Hall.

According to the RWDSU, hundreds of Amazon workers around the US have reached out to the union during the Alabama organizing effort with interests to start union organizing within their workplaces.

As the union election in Alabama concluded, Amazon executives increasingly attacked their critics, with recent spars on social media from Amazon CEO Dave Clark and Amazon’s communications team against Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congressman Mark Pocan.

According to Recode, the tweets came after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos expressed dismay that executives weren’t pushing back enough on criticism toward the company.

Shortly after Amazon’s PR account claimed reports workers urinate in bottles due to their inability to take bathroom breaks during shifts are false, The Intercept reported on leaked emails and memos where Amazon management discussed problems with delivery drivers urinating in plastic bottles and defecating in plastic bags.

An Amazon spokesperson said in an email: “We don’t believe the RWDSU represents the majority of our employees’ views. Our employees choose to work at Amazon because we offer some of the best jobs available everywhere we hire, and we encourage anyone to compare our total compensation package, health benefits, and workplace environment to any other company with similar jobs.”