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Four US university tutors are in hospital after they were stabbed by an unknown assailant at a public park in China.The Iowa Cornell College instructors were injured in a "serious incident" during a daytime visit to the park in Jilin province, northern China, a college statement said.Iowa Representative Adam Zabner said his brother, David, was one of the four injured in the incident, which he described as a stabbing.He said the group had been visiting a local temple on Monday when they were attacked by a man with a knife.Mr Zabner said his brother had been stabbed in the arm at Beishan Park and was recovering in hospital.
"He has not yet been released this morning but he's doing ok," he told CBS News.A US State Department spokesperson told the BBC they were aware of reports of a stabbing incident in Jilin, but could not provide more information.Cornell College said the four instructors had been teaching "as part of a partnership with a university in China".
The group had been accompanied by a member of Beihua University at the time of their visit to the park on Monday.Chinese authorities are yet to respond on the incident, however images of the aftermath were quickly shared on social media.Images circulating appear to show at least three people bleeding and lying on the ground.
However the incident appears to have been quickly censored on China's internet.
On Tuesday, searches for terms such as "foreigners Jilin" produced no results despite the search term trending on Weibo.Internet users instead resorted to discussions under adjacent topics while some were also seen asking for more information about the incident.There have also few reports about the incident in Chinese state media.Mr Zabner said his brother, a Tufts University doctoral student, had visited China before and was on his second trip to the country with Cornell College.Amid tense diplomatic relations, Beijing and Washington have sought to re-establish people-to-people exchanges in recent times.Chinese President Xi Jinping has unveiled a plan to invite 50,000 young Americans to China in the next five years, while Chinese diplomats say a travel advisory by the US State Department has discouraged Americans from going to China.
Authorities shot and killed the alligator to stop it from doing more damage to the remains.
After the animal was killed, a diver went in the water to recover the remains from the dead alligator, officials said.
Their investigation will also determine if the alligator killed her or if the animal was scouring her remains after she was already dead.
Eight months ago a similar incident happened in Largo, Florida.
Officials there shot and killed a 13ft (4m) alligator after they found it walking along a street with a torso in its mouth.
The remains were later identified as that of 41-year-old Sabrina Peckham.A few months before that a 10ft alligator killed an 85-year-old woman in Fort Pierce, Florida as she was walking her dog.
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many of the bedrock structures of American government, like its electoral process and its judicial system, its media, its intelligence agencies, are fundamentally and unfairly rigged against him
Typical 80% truth + 20% BS.
Of course he doesn't propose how to fix the issues, just scrap it all and get some 100% rigged for him.
That so many people don't see the parallelism with how totalitarian states came to be, is appalling.
We must respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Russia by all means, they have been the victims of a brutal invasion by the Ukrainian empire and... oh shit nevermind, had the propaganda leaflet upside down.
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Pressure is growing on US President Joe Biden to allow Ukraine to use West-supplied weapons to strike Russian territory.
Russia's Vladimir Putin has warned of "serious consequences", especially for what he called "small countries" in Europe.On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington’s stance on the matter would "adapt and adjust" based on changing battlefield conditions.
He is currently in the Czech capital, Prague, for a meeting of Nato foreign ministers.White House national security spokesman John Kirby said late on Wednesday that even though US support for Kyiv had evolved, "right now, there's also no change to our policy".
Ukraine has been struggling to counter a Russian offensive in the east of the country, while the city of Kharkiv has suffered weeks of deadly attacks, often launched by Russia from military outposts near the Ukrainian border.Mr Blinken’s statement, during a trip to Europe, followed more direct comments made earlier this week by France’s President Emmanuel Macron, who said Ukraine should be “allowed” to use weapons supplied by the West against military sites on Russian territory - although strictly not on civilian targets.
Mr Macron has for some time advocated for more direct intervention in the Ukraine war – but other Western leaders also appear to be softening to the idea.German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has remained cautious in public but a spokesman in Berlin said that "defensive action is not limited to one's own territory, but also includes the territory of the aggressor".Last week, Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg told the Economist that the West should allow Ukraine to defend itself by striking military bases in Russia.
And that includes striking targets on Russian territory,” he said.UK Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron said earlier this month that it was up to Ukraine to decide how to use British weapons, while this week the Polish Deputy Defence Minister said that Ukrainians could use Polish weapons “as they see fit”.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has previously said it was "unfair" for Western countries to impose limits on the use of their weapons, while acknowledging that Ukraine could not risk the support of its partners.
This is a difficult subject, but the inclusion of Meta pushes this towards frivolous litigation, and then over the cliff entirely with Activision.
“Instagram creates a connection between …an adolescent …and the gun and a gun company,”
Instagram sees what someone is looking at and shows them more of it; it's an amplification chamber. My wife gets ads for Harvest Moon-likes, and I get ads for socialist laptop stickers. For this kid to be getting gun ads, he was looking up and liking posts about guns (I train people in firearm safety, and post pictures from range days, but I've never gotten a single ad for a gun on IG), and that starts making this lawsuit about whether it is the job of parents or companies to monitor their kids' online activities. If he is seeking something out that he shouldn't be, whose job is it to stop him?
Call of Duty, a war-based video game with a rifle similar to the one used in the shooting...
...conditioned him to see it as the solution to his problems.
Including Activision is the real indicator of intent here; the rhetoric of violent video games making kids do violence has been debunked time and time again, but Activision and Meta do have much deeper pockets than DD.
So what is the goal of this suit?
Suing DanielDefense could ostensibly be in order to shut them down as a business, thus decreasing the supply of firearms readily-available for purchase.
Suing Meta for money, without actually asking the court to prohibit them from allowing firearms-related content, seems like it wouldn't do anything to prevent this elsewhere unless Meta decides the risk of firearms ads just aren't worth it.
Suing Activision is going to... make them stop making Call of Duty games? One of their flagship franchises? No.
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Families of the victims of the Uvalde school shooting are suing the manufacturer of the gun used in the attack, the maker of a video game and Instagram parent company Meta.
In two new lawsuits, they claim the companies helped promote dangerous weapons to a generation of “socially vulnerable” young men, including the 18-year old gunman.Nineteen children and two teachers were killed in the attack at Robb Elementary School.
The dual lawsuits - filed in Texas and California - are against Activision, the developer of the military video game series “Call of Duty”; Daniel Defense, the gun manufacturer known for its high-end rifles; and Meta.
The companies are accused of being responsible for “grooming” a generation of young people who live out violent video game fantasies in the real world, with easily accessible weapons of war.
The gunman, Salvador Ramos, used an AR-15 style rifle in the attack.The lawsuits contend that Meta and Activision "knowingly exposed" him to the gun he used at Uvalde and conditioned him to see it as the solution to his problems.
Additionally, the families announced that they will be taking new legal action against 92 individual officers from the state's Department of Public Safety for "shocking and extensive failures" during the shooting response.With files from Peter Bowes
They're gonna have to switch to a CBDC first. That will give the federal government more control over money and how it's spent. Programmable money, if you will.
He's not an economist, so I'd be healthily skeptical of this exact economic solution. You should however be very concerned about his opinions on where AI is going that it may necessitate this.
It's kind of curious that the headline here is "UBI" given that he mentions AI poses an extinction-level risk.
It's incorrect to assume he doesn't have any knowledge of economics. If you ever listen to him speak about Reagan you'd understand that yes, he does have an understanding of economics, just not from the perspective of someone brainwashed by the system.
The process fueling Capitalism is workers making money to pay for goods and services. Once you automate a certain unknown % of the work force, the engine shuts down; Capitalism will have destroyed itself via automation. Germany during the hyperinflation of the 20's only reached 30-40% unemployment before fascist dictatorship. Fascism is currently rising around the world due to wealth inequality and Capitalism's exploitation of people and the environment.
The only solution that could possibly make any sense while maintaining Capitalism is UBI. Could you provide any solution that doesn't involve mass murder or starvation of the unemployable? I have yet to see any solution from anti-UBI commenters in almost 2 decades.
I agree we need ubi or something more dramatic but there's been various decent arguments for how things could work without it.
The most popular is probably a continuation of what happened all through the rest of the industrial revolution. Like how the price of cloth fell when autolooms took peoples jobs, this caused demand to increase and created whole new industries - fashion, fashion blogging, etc, etc. It's easy to think that there's nothing new left but that's because new things are harder to imagine.
There's also a lot of talk about a return to more localized business models, the falling cost of services resulting in smaller communities being able to be self sufficient. The same logic goes on a larger scale also, governments able to offer more complete services at much lower prices reduces the cost of living and avoids the privation and poverty which caused such unrest in previous eras of low employment. Higher standards of living and more opportunities to engage meaningfully with the world or enjoy distractions will result in less political urgency, especially as solutions roll out globally reducing pressures that cause migration, etc.
The doomer model pushed by tabloids and drama merchants just hand waves away everything that doesn't satisfy their urge for bad news, they want us to imagine a world where hyper efficient robots have stolen everyone's jobs but it's 1925, we're suffering after a failed world war and there's no bread... it makes no sense.
We can already see the effects of technology making life cheaper, even this international conversation would have been too expensive for me to participate in fifty years ago. Education resources are actually free now for all but the most obscure subjects, it's hard to think of anything you can't learn free. Entertainment also, creative tools, all sorts of things are available to everyone on the planet - anyone trying to pretend this isn't a huge thing simply isn't being serious.
There's a lot of really complex stuff that goes Into models for how things will unfold and people talk about it all at great length, I feel a lot of people avoid these topics like antivax groups avoid learning about actual science because they don't want things to be complex, they want to feel special and you can only do that when you're certain of your opion because you actively avoided learning any confounding arguments.
For Universal Basic Income (UBI) to work, the state would have to control the prices of universal basic needs, otherwise the capitalist class would raise prices to absorb it. But state-provided goods & services and state-imposed prices are antithetical to our current hyper-privatized, hyper-financialized neoliberal capitalism.
Adam Simpson: […] You write about rent as it relates to land. […] I’ve seen, for instance, Thomas Paine associated with ground rent and its obvious inequality, the notion that someone has a right to a piece of land that obviously no one can really “own.” He argues for distributing that to everyone in the form of a universal basic income. That seems to be a popular idea now, particularly in Silicon Valley as well as other places. I wanted to know your perspective on universal basic income.
Michael Hudson: I think it’s a misnomer. There’s no problem with giving more people enough income to live. Even archaic societies operated on the mutual-aid principle. There’s a lot of pressure for the Federal Reserve to create a trillion dollars by giving everybody an extra $500. Why are they willing to do that? Because most people would use the $500 to pay the banks – so the banks wouldn’t have to lose money and default as a result of their reckless and unproductive lending. The problem’s not only income, but what people have to spend it on. Paine didn’t talk about universal income, he talked about everybody should have the right to a place to live, a means of their own self-support. That’s independent from income. Once you economize and financialize it, you put in a distortion.
You don’t want to give people income to buy what really should be public goods and services outside of the market. You don’t want to give people more income simply to pay monopolistic public utilities for extortionate charges for water, sewer, electricity, cable TV and education. These are things that should be removed from the marketplace, not giving people the income to buy overpriced and monopolized real estate and infrastructure services that should be public in the first place.
Adam Simpson: I completely agree. That’s my criticism of this ongoing universal basic income debate. It might be a good idea if we solve a lot of other things first. One of them being financial parasites, because in my mind people talk about a trickle-down economy. I get a sense right now that we have what more or less amounts to a trickle-up economy. At the end of the day the rich are going to get theirs. The idea of providing universal basic income or a stimulus, eventually it’s going to work their way up to the top of the system.
Michael Hudson: The key to any such analysis is circular flow. If you give people income, what do they spend it on? As I said, people have to spend 75% of their income on things other than the goods and services they produce. You don’t want to give them services to bloat this [Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE)] sector that is sucking income upward to the 5%. You don’t want to give more people income just to pay higher rents and bank loans to the 5% at the top. You want to do the opposite.
Which is why CEOs and all other executive staff should be the first to be replaced by AI. The tech isn't good enough to replace human creativity, but it can certainly replace the leeches already.
In a way it is already acting like a CEO, LLMs basically just repeat what everyone else they read was saying, just like CEOs do with the latest hyped thing.
Has bullshit talks with other CEOs and leaders, get performed for, comes up with truly horrendous ideas that hurt the company measurably, and makes really, really bad speeches to the company. At least, that's what my CEO does.
Nothing that's worth how much some of them are paid.
Google's CEO made $226 million. Google has been circling the shitter for years. You could hire like 500 senior engineers with that money. You could do a lot of cool, useful, shit with 500 senior engineers on a project.
To be fair, "Texas" is in no way doing anything here, people in Texas's urban areas are doing this (urban areas which are often at odds with the state). If Abbott or Patrick were involved, they'd probably mandate that no one was allowed to turn lights off in order to "prop up the energy sector" or some bullshit
Waiting to the inevitable backlash in a few weeks when turning lights off to save birds is labeled as “woke” and treated as evidence of the downfall of our society.
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