…there’s a lot of speeches getting made

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/feb/21/russia-ukraine-war-biden-arrives-in-poland-putin-to-make-state-of-the-nation-address-live

…&…variable degrees of sticking to what’s been said

Sunak has been told he is facing the possibility ministers may quit if his deal does not significantly rewrite the [Northern Ireland] protocol or remove any powers for the European court of justice.

The home secretary, Suella Braverman, a former chair of the European Research Group of hardline pro-Brexit, MPs, made a pointed intervention on Monday to urge Sunak not to drop a controversial bill that gives the UK potential powers to unilaterally override the protocol.
[…]
Her call struck a remarkably similar tone to the call from Boris Johnson. Sources close to the former prime minister over the weekend urged Sunak to keep the legislation as leverage.
[…]
“The legislation that the government introduced is one of the biggest tools we have in solving the problem on the Irish Sea.”

…whatever other tools that might suggest are present & accounted for…the spanner in the works remains pretty much the same as it ever was

David Jones, the deputy chair of the ERG, said: “The problem is that DUP has told No 10 that whatever they agree needs to meet the ‘seven tests’.

“One of those is that the people of Northern Ireland have to have a say in the laws that govern them, but it is hard to see how they do that without an entirely new agreement. What they are talking about now is some sort of new interpretation of the existing agreement, not a completely new one.”

Jones said he understood the DUP had asked to see the text of the full agreement – rather than the political framework – in order to move forward. That request is unlikely to be accepted.

The protocol bill, the brainchild of Liz Truss when she was foreign secretary, would allow the UK to unilaterally override parts of the Brexit treaty, and discarding the bill is seen as a gesture of goodwill when agreement is reached on application of the protocol.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/21/rishi-sunak-ni-protocol-deal-eu-brexiter-maria-caulfield

Even so. This Monday was meant to be the day. The day when the final piece of the Northern Ireland Brexit jigsaw fell into place. Rishi Sunak had had a cunning plan. There could be a green lane for goods coming from Great Britain whose final destination was Northern Ireland.

A red lane for goods bound for the republic. And a fudge to arbitrate on any disputes. A panel made up of UK and EU officials that we could pretend had nothing to do with EU law. Even though it obviously did. What else did people expect? The EU wasn’t about to become British any time soon.
[…]
Or maybe not. The mere hint that a deal was in the offing was enough to send all the Brexiters into a meltdown. Even those who had never been demanding that the UK leave the single market and the customs union in the first place. The whole point of their existence was to say no to everything. Even if they were presented with a deal that offered them everything they had always wanted, they would still find a way to say no. To do otherwise would be to show weakness. Besides, it was all probably a plot to lure them in. The first rule of the DUP is that if the EU is willing to agree to something then it must be a trap.
[…]
Johnson’s intervention had been short and sweet. Any deal that Sunak made had to be dodgy. Even though he had been a leaver from the start, Rish! was a natural born sellout. He wasn’t to be trusted. There was no such thing as a fair compromise when it came to Brexit. Only unfair compromises would do.
[…]
So what was needed was to make sure his bill to disapply any part of the Northern Ireland protocol that he and the idiotic Frosty the Snowman had negotiated was passed. Even though it was stuck in the House of Lords with no hope of it being voted through, it had to be passed. Because it was his. And Boris must get what Boris wants. It was a necessary backstop. We couldn’t have the EU thinking we had ever intended to keep our word. The protocol had only been a bit of nonsense to get Brexit through parliament. No one had ever meant it to be taken seriously.
[…]
Rish! acknowledged defeat. Of course he could get his deal through parliament. But only with Labour votes. Sure it would be the right thing to do. Right for the country. But since when was he that interested in doing what was best for the country? Party first. Always. So there was nothing for it. He sent James Cleverly back to Šefčovič with instructions to agree nothing for the time being. We’d waited seven years for a deal on Northern Ireland. What was a wee bit longer?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/20/rishi-sunak-shelves-irish-border-fudge-after-brexiters-say-no

…the talk is all well & good…well…okay…it often seems both unwell & not-good…but the point is it’s just talk

While Sydney is helpful, its actions are limited to the chatbox

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/ai-powered-bing-chat-spills-its-secrets-via-prompt-injection-attack/

h/t @kliu128https://t.co/u6L6j6uRIU

— Marvin von Hagen (@marvinvonhagen) February 9, 2023

Well, that was fast!

Within a few days, Microsoft has taught Bing to avoid most known prompt hacks. That's obv better than before, but it would be even better if it didn't just avoid problematic topics, but was actually aligned enough so that there was nothing to hide anymore 😉 https://t.co/3Se84tl08j pic.twitter.com/o9DzUnjWQm

— Marvin von Hagen (@marvinvonhagen) February 18, 2023

…so…what about the “speak louder than words part?”

The language before the invasion had been no less assertive. At a briefing in January 2022, US state department officials said Washington was prepared to implement sanctions “with massive consequences that were not considered in 2014 [when Russia annexed Crimea]. That means the gradualism of the past is out, and this time we’ll start at the top of the escalation ladder and stay there.”

The Institute for International Finance (IIF) predicted a 15% fall in Russian GDP in 2022. JP Morgan envisaged a 12% contraction. Russia’s own technocrats privately warned Putin of a possible 30% fall.
[…]
The Russian economy contracted by only 2.2% last year. Unemployment, according to admittedly dubious official figures, now stands at 3.7 %. The construction sector has been able to grow significantly even if the car and electronics industries have suffered. A bumper harvest has driven growth in the agricultural sector.

Russia is now forecast by the International Monetary Fund to grow faster in 2023 and 2024 than the UK. It is hardly financial apocalypse now.
[…]
Defenders of sanctions say the ruble and headline gross domestic product are dreadful indicators, partly because Russian statistics are either classified or manipulated as part of the war effort. “Please do not ask me about GDP figures. They do not matter,” said Elina Ribakova, the deputy chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, a global industry body.

Vladimir Milov, a former Russian deputy energy minister and author of a Martens Centre report on sanctions, said it may be more instructive to track a dozen or so “soft indicators” such as alcohol sales, divorce rates, shoplifting, spending on food, opinion polls, bank customer sentiment or tax revenues.
[…]
Economists at the Kyiv School of Economics go further, arguing that a decisive turning point may already have been reached as a growing Russian fiscal deficit – spurred by extra defence spending and collapsing hydrocarbon revenues – forces Russia’s central bank to eat up its reserves.

[…hold that thought]

…mind you

Last month Russian oil accounted for about 27% of the 5 million bpd of crude imported by India, the world’s third-biggest oil importer and consumer, the data showed.
[…]
Refiners in India, which rarely used to buy Russian oil because of costly logistics, have emerged as Russia’s key oil client, snapping up discounted crude shunned by Western nations since the invasion of Ukraine last February.
[…]
During April-January, the first ten months of this fiscal year, Iraq continued to be the largest oil supplier to India, while Russia became the second-biggest supplier, replacing Saudi Arabia which is now in third place, the data showed.

Higher purchases of Russian oil dragged down Indian imports from the Middle East to an all time low of 48% and member nations of Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) declined to the lowest ever, the data showed.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/indias-russian-oil-imports-surge-record-january-trade-2023-02-17/

…&…if some dude “rolling coal” wants to know why gas isn’t cheaper…it’s got something to do with that…maybe more than whether or not joe biden is down with drilling for oil in the arctic circle…anyway…it doesn’t entirely not-suit “the west”…but it’s one of the ways russia’s made better bank than some plans would have had it

But in the key opening exchange of the sanctions battle, the Russian central bank, ironically largely staffed by liberal pragmatists opposed to the invasion of Ukraine, got the better of the west. On 28 February, the west tried to ambush Russia by simply freezing what was reported by the country’s central bank to be roughly $300bn or (40%) of its total foreign exchange reserves held overseas. The remainder was not held in western currencies. “The aim was to make it harder to defend the currency, increase the cost of financing the war and fuel inflation,” said Demarais.

But the Russian central bank’s governor, Elvira Nabiullina, responded decisively, raising the key interest rate to 20% on 28 February, effectively shutting down mortgages and corporate lending but making deposits extremely attractive. It deterred citizens from panicking and withdrawing all their money from their accounts. On 7 March, for the first time in the modern Russian history, the central bank completely banned the sale and withdrawal of dollars and euros deposited before 24 February. Russia also negotiated for some its banks – notably Gazprombank – to remain in the global financial messaging system Swift because they handled payments related to oil and gas exports on which the EU were heavily reliant. After a short period of stress in March 2022, structural liquidity returned more or less to pre-sanctions levels. By June the rouble had stabilised.
[…]
Once its initial financial blitzkrieg – prepared in secret in the US Treasury in the months before war – had been repelled, the west had to revise its strategy, accepting implicitly it had not quite started at the top of the sanctions ladder and there were further rungs to climb. The second phase was going to be more a war of attrition, constant adjustment and consensus-building across the EU.
[…]
But flaws in the process appeared. Since EU sanction packages require unanimity, ideological outliers like Hungary held massive leverage. Viktor Orbán’s personal connection with specific Russian oligarchs became apparent. For instance, in September last year the Hungarian prime minister asked, probably in return for favours by Putin, for three Russian oligarchs to be removed from the EU sanctions list. Before the 15 March renewal deadline, Orbán has lobbied to remove the same trio plus an other six. At successive European Council meetings, his ministers have threatened use of the veto, delaying key sanctions decisions. Most recently, Orbán breezily insulted Ukraine as “a no man’s land akin to Afghanistan”.
[…]
Differences in the vigour with which sanctions were enforced became striking. EU figures show Greece had frozen only €222,000 in Russian assets and Malta only €200,000. The same two countries in April had tried to block a ban on Russian flagged ships entering EU ports. Austrian companies have hardly rushed to leave Russia. One estimate says 43 Austrian firms have stayed and only two left completely. Belgium has lobbied to keep the 500-year-old diamond industry in Antwerp open to Russia’s Alrosa mining company.
[…]
By the third quarter of 2022, Russian imports from Turkey had surged to over $1bn a month, roughly double the figure for the same period the previous year.

Turkey became a route for Russia to import vital western-produced goods such as manufacturing parts. Some economists for instance have noticed a mini boomlet in trade between Italy and Turkey, suggesting enterprising Italian traders regard Istanbul as a useful access point into forbidden Russian markets.
[…]
The US is also looking askance at another ally, the United Arab Emirates. Research by a team of Berlin-based data analysts examining more than 500,000 bank transactions after the war started found that, in terms of value, 66% of withdrawals by non-resident customers of Russian banks went to beneficiaries located in the UAE. This represents a 40% rise on the previous year.

…they weren’t intentionally pulling your leg about making life difficult for vlad…but…pull the other one…it’s got bells on

The surprising resilience of the Russian economy is not primarily due to the technical professionalism of central bank officials or murky sanctions busting, but instead a blindingly obvious structural flaw in the sanctions: Europe’s reliance on Russian oil and gas exports, the source of 40% of Russian budget revenue.
[…]
It took until June, after private lobbying by the US and evidence of war crimes in Ukraine, for the EU in its sixth sanctions package to agree to an EU-wide ban on Russian oil exports. But the ban was only to come into force in two delayed phases. The ban on the purchase, import or transfer of Russian seaborne crude oil was not to apply until 5 December and the ban on other refined oil products such as diesel came in on 5 February.

The price of Europe’s caution is well known. With the exception of 2020 and 2018, oil and gas had provided 60% of Russian goods exports in every year since 2002. But the early summer of 2022 was a total bonanza for the Russian treasury, as it benefited from the record surge in energy prices. In March, Russia was making €1bn a day from energy exports. Oil and gas increased to 60% of Russian fiscal revenues, up from 40%. Germany alone has bought €24bn of Russian fossil fuels since the invasion.

Europe funded the Russian war machine that it denounced. The surplus on Russia’s current account for the year was $227.4bn – a 86% increase on the previous year and more than double the previous record. That helped strengthen the rouble, making imports cheaper. This in turn helped to gradually bring down inflation, taking some pressure off the real incomes of the ordinary Russian population.

By the summer Russian treasury coffers were so bloated that Putin felt confident enough to launch a counterattack by slowing gas supplies to Europe. With 40 % of Europe’s gas coming from Russia, he demanded in April that any country refusing to pay for its gas in roubles would be cut off. Europe huffed but complied. By June he started tampering with the gas flow through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline from Russia into Germany. He first cut deliveries through the pipeline by 75%, from 170m cubic metres a day to roughly 40m. In July, the pipeline was shut for 10 days, citing the need for essential maintenance work. On reopening, the flow was reduced to 20m cubic metres a day.

…then…well…a lot of people seem to think they know who did what & why

Referenced video: https://t.co/eU2N9rGBLP

— Beau of The Fifth Column (@BeauTFC) February 10, 2023

Russian gas exports to Europe tumbled by more than 75% compared with the prewar period. The daily price of natural gas on the stock exchange Amsterdam Euronext which had peaked at more than €300 a megawatt hour after the invasion, has now fallen well below 100 again, to under €60, still high by the standards of 2020 . Inflation is slowly descending across Europe, and Germany looks to have avoided the widely predicted recession.
[…]
Russia exports natural gas from eastern fields to China through the 2,500-mile Power of Siberia 1 pipeline, but the western fields, which had served the European markets, are not connected to this export route and cannot be easily redirected to China. Eventually a Power of Siberia 2 pipeline will connect the two fields, but the estimated completion date is 2030. China is also not such a profitable market. Russia was estimated to be charging $3 a metric million British thermal unit (MMBtu) for deliveries to China via the Power of Siberia pipeline, while the estimated charge for deliveries to Europe had been sold at $10-$25/MMBtu.

Putin is also in danger of being screwed to the floor over oil, his crown jewel. After persistent US Treasury lobbying, the west supplemented the EU ban on Russian crude oil exports by introducing an unprecedented market intervention that seeks to set a world wide price cap of $60 a barrel for Russian seaborne oil. From 5 December, the same date as the EU import ban, any firm providing payments, insurance, financial services, or brokering, bunkering, piloting services to a ship carrying Russian oil could not receive insurance cover if the oil was being purchased for more than $60 a barrel. If the US or EU catches any company misrepresenting the price or submitting a fraudulent attestation, the G7 can impose sanctions on that company. The UK proposes fines of $1.2m.
[…]
The price cap is in its infancy, and since the price of seaborne Urals crude averaged $49.48 in January, below the $60 cap, EU tankers – mainly Greek – can legitimately carry on transporting oil to China and India. Reports suggest crude oil loading from Russian ports have reached a multi-month high. At best the cap has had the effect of institutionalising price discounts. At worst it is proving toothless. Ukraine and its expert team advisers on sanctions led by the former US envoy Michael McFaul say the cap needs to be halved especially if its purpose is to blow a hole in Russia’s budget.

But the US Treasury, in setting the cap, was balancing different objectives: reducing Russia’s income and keeping enough supplies on the seas to avoid another spike in oil prices. That requires a perilous assessment of the price at which Putin decides it is not profitable to extract or export oil. The US is trying to postpone a review of the cap level until March to allow more evidence to be collated.
[…]
Putin plans to spend 6.3 % of GDP on defence and national security in the 2023 federal budget alone, doubling defence spending to more than 10tn roubles. The question then becomes how long this level of spending can be sustained if energy revenues are falling so fast.

Demarais said the first signs of serious strain would be unplanned debt issuance and the sale of some of its 310bn yuan (£37.5bn), the only currency in Russia’s reserves that can be used for interventions in the foreign exchange market.

Various estimates exist, but some say Russia’s planned spending is probably sustainable on an assumed Urals crude oil pice of $70 a barrel. Russia won’t burn through its stock of yuan assets this year unless the Urals price halves and averages $25 a barrel, according to Bloomberg Economics.

The US bank Citigroup estimates it would only take an average price of $35 to deplete the available yuan resources already in 2023.
[…]
But as the past year has shown, Russia is not sitting idle in the face of a price cap. Learning from its growing ally, Iran, it has assembled an ageing dark fleet of smaller, older ships carrying crude oil mainly to China and India. Evasion will be attempted through multiple means: flags of convenience; the blending of crude; Russian insurance schemes; or the simple manipulation of documents. New crude oil transfer hubs are already emerging. It will depend on whether this covert market grows into a viable alternative to the G7 cap, and the price at which the oil is bought by China.
[…]
Ultimately it is not as decisive as the battlefield, but if the west can stay the course, Putin may yet find his options narrowing. If he survives it will be a huge blow to the power of the dollar, and one that will not go unnoticed in Beijing.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/20/sanctions-war-russia-ukraine-year-on-vladimir-putin

…it’s…how you tell ’em?

After the State of the Union address at the beginning of this month, the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece that argued: “Joe Biden is Bernie Sanders.” By this it meant that, somehow, by stealth, under the cover of darkness, a “democratic socialist” – both words apparently terms of abuse in the WSJ commentator’s lexicon – had invaded the White House and was now making policy for ordinary Americans, interfering in the unjust struggle of their lives, trying to help them get decent jobs and provide them with affordable healthcare. The implication was clear: offshore your assets and offer unhinged prayers to Marjorie Taylor Greene!

Speaking to Sanders last week, I wondered if that was how it felt to him.

The 81-year-old senator for Vermont gave one of his brief, gravelly guffaws, his concession to small talk. “Not quite,” he said. “I do go to the White House every now and then and chat with the president but no, I’m not in the White House. But that’s the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch’s paper – you know Rupert Murdoch in the UK, right?”
[…]
“Well, the fact is the Wall Street Journal is shocked – flabbergasted! – that an American president would have the courage to mention in his speech, say, that the oil industry made $200bn in profit, while jacking up prices for everyone; they are shocked to hear that a president wants to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry; shocked to hear a president talk about the need to raise teacher salaries. Joe Biden is far more conservative than I am. But to his credit, I think he has seen what the progressive movement is doing in this country. And he feels comfortable with some of our ideas – and I appreciate that.”

[…back to bernie in a bit]

…the GOP may still be doing its best to choke out anything that might resemble a policy idea of bernie’s with a shot at making it into legislation in the senate…while pushing the courts to award them the rights & privileges of their trademarked brand of dystopia…but compared to the fate of one jeremy corbyn

Sir Keir Starmer has said that former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will not stand for the party in the next general election, as he pledged to take a “zero tolerance” approach to antisemitism.
[…]
Starmer’s comments mark his strongest break yet with Corbyn, who served as leader between 2015 and 2020, and come after the UK equalities watchdog said it was “content with the actions” taken by Labour to address antisemitism.
[…]
Insisting that it would “never again” be captured by “narrow interests”, Starmer also confirmed that Corbyn would not represent the party at the next election. “What I said about the party changing, I meant, and we are not going back, and that is why Jeremy Corbyn will not stand as a Labour candidate.”

Jeremy Corbyn will not be Labour candidate at next election, vows Keir Starmer [FT]

…bernie & those mittens may never have quite grasped the nettle of party leadership…but…career-wise the two have some parallels

For a generation of millennials raised on digital noise, Sanders became, in 2016, the political equivalent of a rare vinyl record: tangible, authentic, a reliable source of timeless indy riffs. For all but the most self-righteous of those fans – a strident few believed him a sellout for eventually endorsing the “centrist” Biden – he retains that appeal (strange to think that the progressive hero of the land-of-the-next-new-thing is an octogenarian – stranger that both of his most visible political rivals are, too). Sanders has written a new book partly aimed at that millennial generation – its Day-Glo title is It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism – reminding the young of their age-old rights and responsibilities.

The driving narrative of the book is outrage at the obscene wealth inequalities in the world’s richest economy. One of the things that Biden had the temerity – in the Wall Street Journal’s view – to raise in his State of the Union address was a billionaire minimum tax, “because no billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a firefighter or a schoolteacher”. Under the proposed tax on annual gains in wealth, tech billionaire Elon Musk, for example, would have paid upwards of $20bn a year through the pandemic. Sanders would go further, but he concedes it’s a start. In his book he refers to America’s billionaires as oligarchs. He hopes the pejorative will finally start to catch on.

“One of the points that I wanted to make,” he says, “is yeah, of course the oligarchs run Russia. But guess what? Oligarchs run the United States as well. And it’s not just the United States, it’s not just Russia; Europe, the UK, all over the world, we’re seeing a small number of incredibly wealthy people running things in their favour. A global oligarchy. This is an issue that needs to be talked about.”

…along with a few other things

“Well,” he says, “just before talking to you, I came from a meeting with Lula [Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva], the president of Brazil. That is exactly what we talked about. He had the same phenomenon with a rightwing authoritarian, [Jair] Bolsonaro, refusing to accept the election result.” He had been discussing with Lula something Franklin Roosevelt argued in the 1930s: “FDR said freedom is not just the right to vote. It is the right to healthcare, housing, a secure job. When [government] works to do that rather than looking after the interests of billionaires, then people will say ‘you know what, I think democracy works’. If it doesn’t do that, bad things happen and Trump and Bolsonaro gain a foothold.”
[…]
One of the causal factors Sanders addresses in his book is the alarming growth of news deserts in the US: cities and regions where there are no local news outlets at all. In the absence of knowing what is happening in their neighbourhood, people become entangled in the seductive conspiracy threads of social media. But as well as proposing a method of federal funding for local news, Sanders also keeps the faith that social media – a powerful personal campaigning platform for him – can be redeemed. Isn’t there a certain naivety in this? Isn’t the divisive anger that drives the revenues of Twitter and the rest always more likely to be a reactionary than a progressive force?

“Well,” he says, “I think, the more we know, the more positive options are open to us. And in terms of anger, I think people do have the right to be angry. In America right now, weekly inflation-adjusted wages for workers are lower than they were 50 years ago. Should people be angry that their bosses now make 400 times what they make? I know in the UK you have in a lot of strikes and turmoil. It is about the fact that in the last 40 years, 50 years, there has been an unprecedented transfer of wealth, from the working families to the top 1%. Should people be angry about that? Damn right they should.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/19/bernie-sanders-oligarchs-ok-angry-about-capitalism-interview

…if it’s all getting a bit old for you…you are not alone

It is the year of the octogenarian. American TV viewers can find Patrick Stewart, 82, boldly going in a new series of Star Trek: Picard and 80-year-old Harrison Ford starring in two shows plus a trailer for the fifth installment of Indiana Jones.

And a switch to the news is likely to serve up Joe Biden, at 80 the oldest president in US history, or Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, who turns 81 on Monday. But while action heroes are evergreen, the political class is facing demands for generational change.
[…]
Gerontocracy crept up on Washington slowly but inexorably. Biden, elected to the Senate in 1972, has been a public figure for half a century and, if re-elected as president, would be 86 at the end of his second term. At a recent commemorative event at the White House he hosted Bill Clinton, who was president three decades ago – but is four years his junior.

The octogenarian McConnell is the longest-serving leader in the history of the Senate and has offered no hint of retirement. Chuck Schumer, Democratic majority leader in the same chamber, is 72. Senator Bernie Sanders, standard bearer of the left in the past two Democratic primaries, is 81.
[…]
Of all the Congresses since 1789, the current one has the second oldest Senate (average age 63.9) and third oldest House of Representatives (average age 57.5). Critics say the backup of talent puts it out of step with the American public, whose average age is 38. One example is around the tech sector and social media as members of Congress have often struggled to keep pace with rapid change and its implications for society.

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “I’m 70, so I have great sympathy for these people: 80 is looking a lot younger than it used to, as far as I’m concerned. But no, it’s ridiculous. We’ve got to get back to electing people in their 50s and early 60s.”

“That’s the right time for president. You have a good chance of remaining reasonably healthy for eight years if you get a second term. Everybody knows that makes more sense but here we are. What can you say? This was the option we were given in 2020 and we’re going to get essentially the same one in 2024.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/19/us-congress-presidency-gerontocracy

…algorithmic-ly speaking…that would probably be considered…sub-optimal

A January survey of 300 human resources leaders at U.S. companies revealed that 98 percent of them say software and algorithms will help them make layoff decisions this year. And as companies lay off large swaths of people — with cuts creeping into the five digits — it’s hard for humans to execute alone.
[…]
Human resource companies have taken advantage of the artificial intelligence boom. Companies, such as Eightfold AI, use algorithms to analyze billions of data points scraped from online career profiles and other skills databases, helping recruiters find candidates whose applications might not otherwise surface.

Since the 2008 recession, human resources departments have become “incredibly data driven,” said Brian Westfall, a senior HR analyst at Capterra, a software review site. Turning to algorithms can be particularly comforting for some managers while making tricky decisions such as layoffs, he added.

Many people use software that analyzes performance data. Seventy percent of HR managers in Capterra’s survey said performance was the most important factor when assessing who to layoff.

Other metrics used to lay people off might be less clear-cut, Westfall said. For instance, HR algorithms can calculate what factors make someone a “flight risk,” and more likely to quit the company.

This raises numerous issues, he said. If an organization has a problem with discrimination, for instance, people of color may leave the company at higher rates, but if the algorithm is not trained to know that, it could consider non-White workers a higher “flight risk,” and suggest more of them for cuts, he added.

“You can kind of see where the snowball gets rolling,” he said, “and all of a sudden, these data points where you don’t know how that data was created or how that data was influenced suddenly lead to poor decisions.”
[…]
But HR organizations have been “overwhelmed since the pandemic” and they’ll continue using software to help ease their workload, said Zack Bombatch, a labor and employment attorney and member of Disrupt HR, an organization which tracks advances in human resources.

Given that, leaders can’t let algorithms solely decide who to cut, and need to review suggestions to ensure it isn’t biased against people of color, women or old people — which would bring lawsuits.

“Don’t try to pass the buck to the software,” he said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/02/20/layoff-algorithms/

…or…to put it another way…don’t shoot the messenger…because…you can’t un-shoot the messenger?

The Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear oral arguments in Gonzalez v. Google, a lawsuit that argues tech companies should be legally liable for harmful content that their algorithms promote. The Gonzalez family contends that by recommending ISIS-related content, Google’s YouTube acted as a recruiting platform for the group in violation of U.S. laws against aiding and abetting terrorists.

At stake is Section 230, a provision written in 1996, years before the founding of Google and most modern tech giants, but one that courts have found shields platforms from culpability over the posts, photos and videos that people share on their services.
[…]
The Gonzalez family’s lawyers say that applying Section 230 to algorithmic recommendations incentivizes promoting harmful content, and that it denies victims an opportunity to seek redress when they can show those recommendations caused injuries or even death.

The resulting battle has emerged as a political lightning rod because of its potential implications for the future of online speech. Recommendation algorithms underlie almost every interaction people have online, from innocuous song suggestions on Spotify to more nefarious prompts to join groups about conspiracy theories on Facebook.
[…]
The case comes amid growing concern that the laws that govern the internet — many forged years before the invention of social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or TikTok — are ill equipped to oversee the modern web. Politicians from both parties are clamoring to introduce new digital rules after the U.S. government has taken a largely laissez-faire approach to tech regulation over the last three decades. But efforts to craft new laws have stalled in Congress, pushing courts and state legislatures to take up the mantle.

Now, the Supreme Court is slated to play an increasingly central role. After hearing the Google case on Tuesday, the justices on Wednesday will take up Twitter v. Taamneh, another case brought by the family of a terrorist attack victim alleging social media companies are responsible for allowing the Islamic State to use their platforms.

And in the term beginning in October, the court is likely to consider challenges to a law in Florida that would bar social media companies from suspending politicians, and a similar law in Texas that blocks companies from removing content based on a user’s political ideology.

“We’re at a point where both the courts and legislators are considering whether they want to continue to have a hands-off approach to the internet,” said Jeff Kosseff, a cybersecurity law professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and author of “The Twenty-Six Words That Created The internet.”
[…]
The key portion of Section 230 is only 26 words long and says: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
[…]
Former president Donald Trump and President Biden have criticized the provision, calling for its repeal, but for different reasons. Democrats largely argue that Section 230 allows tech companies to duck responsibility for the hate speech, misinformation and other problematic content on their platforms. Republicans, meanwhile, allege companies take down too much content, and have sought to address long-running accusations of political bias in the tech industry by altering the provision.
[…]
But the key question in Gonzalez — whether the providers are immunized when their algorithms target and recommend specific content — has not been Thomas’s focus. He and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. have expressed more concern about decisions by providers to take down content or ban speakers. Those issues will be raised more clearly when the court confronts laws from Florida and Texas that provide such regulation. The lower courts are divided on the constitutionality of the laws, and the court has asked the Biden administration to weigh in on whether to review the laws.

Alito, joined by Thomas and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, last year made clear they expect the court to review laws that address “the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.”
[…]
The majority of the 75 amicus briefs filed by nonprofits, legal scholars and businesses favor Google. Groups or individuals that receive funding from Google produced 37 briefs, and nine others came from other tech companies whose business would be affected by changes to Section 230, including Facebook parent company Meta and Twitter.
[…]
But the Biden administration is siding, at least in part, with the Gonzalez plaintiffs. While Section 230 protects YouTube for allowing ISIS-affiliated content on the site, the government says, recommending content through the use of algorithms and other features requires a different analysis, without blanket immunity.

Google disputes that recommendations are endorsements. “Recommendation algorithms are what make it possible to find the needles in humanity’s largest haystack,” Google tells the court. “Given that virtually everyone depends on tailored online results, Section 230 is the Atlas propping up the modern internet — just as Congress envisioned in 1996.”

Farid said that in the Gonzalez case, the justices are grappling with many of the problems in the tech industry that have emerged over the last decade. He said there’s a growing urgency to address harms online as technology accelerates, especially with the recent boom in artificial intelligence.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/02/20/google-v-gonzalez-section-230/

…so…I might tend to think that those specific judges are indeed a little too long in the tooth…or possibly dentures…to be in a position to chew through what they’re proposing to bite into there…but…even if maybe they’d do a better job than our current crop of legal & legislative “intelligences”…I’d as soon not see us wash our hands of the problem of figuring it out in favor of just letting the machines figure it out amongst themselves?

Policing requires hundreds of judgments to be made each day, often under conditions of extreme pressure and uncertainty: who and where to police, which cases and victims to prioritise, who to believe and which lines of inquiry to follow. As Malcolm Gladwell explains in Blink, these rapid decisions – often described as “hunches” – are informed by our individual social and emotional experiences, but also the prejudices we have all internalised from wider society, such as racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

Could artificial intelligence therefore offer a fairer and more efficient way forward for 21st-century policing? There are broadly two types of AI: “narrow AI”, which can perform specific tasks such as image recognition, and “general purpose AI”, which makes far more complex judgments and decisions extending across all kinds of domains. General purpose AI relies on deep learning – absorbing huge amounts of data and using it to continually adjust and improve performance, and has the potential to take over more and more of the tasks humans do at work. ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art language processing model that has the ability to write research papers, articles and even poems in a matter of seconds, is the latest example of this to catch the public imagination.

AI can already search through millions of pictures and analyse vast amounts of social media posts in order to identify and locate potential suspects. Drawing upon other kinds of data, it could also help predict the times and places where crime is most likely to occur. In particular cases, it could test hypotheses and filter out errors, allowing officers to focus on lines of inquiry most justified by the available evidence.

…so…minority report, then? …future crime, here we come…next stop thought crime & ED-209’s for all…oh…wait…that sounds like a shit idea…exactly how low is this policing bar if the machines have a shot at raising it?

Faster, fairer, evidence-based decisions for a fraction of the cost certainly sounds attractive, but early research suggests the need for caution. So called “predictive policing” uses historical information to identify possible future perpetrators and victims, but studies have shown that the source data for this kind of modelling can be riddled with preconceptions, generating, for example, results that categorise people of colour as disproportionately “dangerous” or “lawless”. A 2016 Rand Corporation study concluded that Chicago’s “heat map” of anticipated violent crime failed to reduce gun violence, but led to more arrests in low-income and racially diverse neighbourhoods.

More profoundly, AI is designed to achieve the objectives we set it. So, as Prof Stuart Russell warned in his 2021 Reith Lectures, any tasks must be carefully defined within a framework that benefits humanity lest, as in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the command to fetch water results in an unstoppable flood.
[…]
Instead of debating what AI will or will not be able to do in the future, we should be asking what we want from our criminal and justice system, and how AI could help us to achieve it. Our ambitions are unlikely to be delivered merely by replacing officers with computers – but think what might be achieved in a human-machine team, where each learns from and adds value to the other. What if we subjected human beings to the same scrutiny that we quite rightly place on AI, exposing our biases and assumptions to ongoing and constructive challenge? What if AI could assist with repetitive and resource-intensive tasks, giving police officers what Prof Eric Topol, writing about the AI revolution in medicine, has called the “gift of time”? This would allow them to treat both victims and the accused with the dignity that only humans can embody and that all members of society deserve.

Perhaps this would earn the trust and consent from the public upon which policing really depends.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/20/the-big-idea-should-robots-take-over-fighting

…sure…the whole “policing by consent” deal might sound like a quaint idea from the old country when applied to the state of affairs in, say, the states…but…before we decide to outsource the whole thing to a souped-up magic 8-ball…maybe acknowledging that if being old doesn’t necessarily mean you understand everything…the opposite of that isn’t that being younger means you do

“He is certainly the man of the hour, which is all the more remarkable given that he’s 37 years old,” said Oren Etzioni, an expert in artificial intelligence who served for years as the head of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle.
[…]
OpenAI, based in San Francisco, is still small by tech company standards, with 375 people as of last month, according to an Altman tweet, but the size understates its influence and Altman’s.

Despite a boyish appearance and a wardrobe full of T-shirts and jeans, Altman is a seasoned insider in corporate and political circles. He co-hosted a fundraiser for President Barack Obama in 2014 with then-Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and in 2017, with no real political experience, he considered a run for California governor, according to former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. He has attended the elite Sun Valley and Bilderberg business conferences and his friend circle includes tech billionaires such as Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman and Musk — whose money went to starting OpenAI in 2015.

Before he turned 30, Altman became the head of Y Combinator, a storied startup incubator and investment firm that has helped produce companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox and Reddit. Not afraid of big ideas, he pushed its investments into areas such as nuclear energy.
[…]
All the adoration has been too much for some other people in the field, including Timnit Gebru, a well-known AI ethics researcher who was forced out at Google in 2020 over a paper she co-wrote that criticized large language models like the ones OpenAI and Google have released.

“I honestly feel like the whole world is going bonkers with the ChatGPT hype,” Gebru said in a post on LinkedIn this month.

Gebru, who did not respond to an interview request, quoted from one of the more outlandishly optimistic claims that Altman has made in the past year. Altman tweeted that “before this decade is out,” cheap energy and advanced AI would be so abundant that “many people will choose to relax all the time” — in short, a utopia where no one needs to work.

…by current indications…I’m not sure that’s as relaxing a prospect as he seems to think…but…I guess the chance would be a fine thing?

ChatGPT faces intense criticism on a few fronts. First, its system is based on information taken from the open internet, which some consider outright theft. Second, it sometimes confidently spits back false information. And third, perhaps paradoxically, it may be so disruptive that OpenAI should not have released it to the public so quickly. Four years ago, OpenAI initially declined to publicly release a full version of GPT-2, a predecessor of ChatGPT, on the basis that it could be misused, including to impersonate others.

And then there’s the idea, fueled by philosophers and pop culture, that AI bots could one day threaten human life.
[…]
Altman rarely grants interviews to mainstream media, so he does a lot of his explaining through Twitter, in meetings with Congress, on his blog and in interviews with wealthy investors or journalists who target narrow audiences. Altman has frequently advised people who work in tech to ignore the press, though he did grant an interview this month to Forbes magazine and speak on a New York Times podcast where he disparaged his own creation.
[…]
“He’s not a showman. He’s not like Musk or Thiel. He doesn’t have catchphrases,” O’Mara said.

But he does often share their outlook, she added. “He has the Silicon Valley worldview that’s shared among the small and extremely close group of men who have a lot of power in the valley right now,” she said.
[…]
It’s not clear that Americans want another tech whiz kid in their lives after a series of flameouts. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is headed for prison in April. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is under indictment. And in an NBC News poll last year, voters gave low marks to Musk and Zuckerberg.
[…]
And ChatGPT is consistently front page tech news. Even Chinese companies are following OpenAI’s lead in the space, planning their own ChatGPT clones.

ChatGPT, for what it’s worth, doesn’t name Altman as the person most responsible for its birth, despite his title as CEO.

“If we were to name one person who played a key role, it would be Ilya Sutskever,” ChatGPT said in response to a question from NBC News. Sutskever is OpenAI’s chief scientist, a former Google employee and a co-author of an influential 2017 paper on neural networks.

Sam Altman is tech’s next household name — if we survive the killer robots [NBC]

…it’s always the quiet ones you have to watch out for?