So Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court justice, takes all sorts of gifts from mega-wealthy political donors. The question is do these folks get anything in return. Not difficult to answer. Haven’t we been here before, just after Justice Scalia died? From a previous posting: Supreme Court.

A bit complicated, but there is a new rule to penalize unreliable energy sources and reward reliable ones. Since renewables have this reputation of being unreliable it seems this was a quiet way to prop up existing gas and coal plants. Turns out that so far, this is benefitting renewables, mostly wind.

Gas Generators Get Caught With Their Plants Down

I think the title is a bit misleading. I would say traditional fascist techniques are required by those in power now that no one believes neoliberal promises (“trickle down economics”). All that is left now is the politics of scapegoating combined with violence. There is a possibility of a return to actual democracy, where masses of people have actual power to improve their situation by voting, but it seems to be a slim possibility. The article is broad in it’s approach but mostly a critique of Modi’s India. From Boston Review.

Why Neoliberalism Needs Neofascists

I’ve been involved in the fringes of artificial intelligence since the mid-1980s. Anyone else remember expert systems, and hardware like Symbolics, LMI and the famed Texas Instrument Explorer workstations? Of course it was over sold and then came the A.I. “nuclear winter”. But in the late 1980s the backpropagation algorithm was a big step forward. Not much has changed since then, except everything (hardware, data) got bigger.

While progress chugged along as it usually does, every decade or so the A.I. world gets picked up by the popular press and the popular imagination. I would say today’s image and chatBot work is impressive, but lack of accuracy will limit its use. This has always been the case with these sorts of technologies and the application areas they seek to address.

My prediction: A.I. will lead to very annoying new forms of spam as well as inferior forms of entertainment. It will also change the way we interact. Imagine the following office scenario:

Employee gathers a few bits of data, feeds them to an A.I. and produces a long, complex document. Employee sends out document to peers and management and perhaps a wider audience. Nobody reads it. Instead they send it to an A.I. summarizer which gives back a few simple sentences. A.I. will become the middle man that will simultaneously explode and condense our information flows. That is my prediction.

The Important Pundit’s Tales…of TERROR!

This always seemed to be a proverbial no-brainer to me. After almost complete loss of their power grid after a hurricane (or two?), parts of Puerto Rico turn to renewables. A good read from VoA.

‘We’re Building Another Puerto Rico’: Communities Adapt to Climate Change