The Death of the Mind

North Carolina law says the State Board of Elections is composed of five members, all of whom must be a registered member of one of the two largest parties. The major party that holds the governorship gets three members, and the other large party gets two members. UPDATE: see this story.
For some time, independent voters and their allies have been trying to win a lawsuit that says it violates the U.S. Constitution that an independent can never be on the board. The first such lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed, and a new lawsuit was filed by Common Cause earlier this year. The State officials who are being sued filed a brief on October 14, arguing that the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2022/10/18/north-carolina-files-brief-in-lawsuit-over-composition-of-state-board-of-elections/

Recent polls suggest that the Democrats’ sidelining of economic issues to go all in on the Capitol riot hasn’t borne fruit. While voters are most concerned about inflation, they think the party’s main priority is January 6, which barely registers.
The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol on June 16, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) When the Democrats embarked on their January 6 media extravaganza earlier this year, there were two schools of thought.
If you read more Democratic-friendly press outlets, the series of sometimes-prime-time hearings were all part of a canny electoral strategy to fire up the party’s base, while also…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2022/10/democrats-january-6-hearings-capitol-riot-polls-economy-inflation/

Biden’s Labor Department has proposed an employment rule that would
classify the drivers of Uber and Lyft as employees.

This would be a big step forward for employee’s rights, but it won’t
do anything about the injustice of Uber and Lyft to the passengers:
making them nonfree software (an app) and identify themselves
(enabling surveillance). This should be forbidden.

So I will continue to get into an Uber or Lyft car. I go out of my
way to get a real taxi that I can board anonymously and pay with cash.
Or I take a bus. Or I walk.

In some places, such as New York City, even taxis are part of a
surveillance machine. A cab driver there told me that all NYC taxis
are…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2022-jul-oct.html#16_October_2022_(Proposed_rule_to_classify_Uber_and_Lyft_drivers_as_employees)

I’ve released man-db 2.11.0
(announcement,
NEWS), and
uploaded it to Debian unstable.
The biggest chunk of work here was fixing some extremely long-standing
issues with how the database is built. Despite being in the package name,
man-db’s database is much less important than it used to be: most uses of
man(1) haven’t required it in a long time, and both hardware and
software
improvements
mean that even some searches can be done by brute force without needing
prior indexing. However, the database is still needed for the whatis(1)
and apropos(1) commands.
The database has a simple format – no relational structure here, it’s just a
simple key-value database using old-fashioned DBM-like interfaces and
composing a few fields to form values – but there are a number of subtleties
involved. The issues tend to…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~cjwatson/blog/reproducible-man-db-databases.html

US businesses have been inventing “holidays” as excuses to get people
to spend money for more than a century.
About 10 of the many examples.

I decided long ago to disregard all the holidays that pressure people
to give gifts.
I would not “celebrate” Record Store Day, but I do wish there were a
good record store in Boston, with a big selection of classical and
world records — I would visit it from time to time to look for
interesting CDs to buy. The CD is the last media substrate that was
invented without malfeatures to restrict people or impose nonfree
technology, and I am happy to use it.
Meanwhile: Out, out, damned Spotify! It has the same injustices as Amazon…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2022-jul-oct.html#14_October_2022_(Inventing_holidays_to_get_people_to_spend)

by Heather Vogell, ProPublica, with data analysis by Haru Coryne, ProPublica, and Ryan Little ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants. “Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent

Enlarge / In culture, nerve cells spontaneously form the structures needed to communicate with each other. (credit: JUAN GAERTNER / Getty Images)
One of the more exciting developments in AI has been the development of algorithms that can teach themselves the rules of a system. Early versions of things like game-playing algorithms had to be given the basics of a game. But newer versions don’t need that—they simply need a system that keeps track of some reward like a score, and they can figure out which actions maximize that without needing a formal description of the game’s rules.
A paper released by the journal Neuron takes this a step further by using actual neurons…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1889781