(satire) *Centrist NFL Fan Spends Sunday Rooting For Line Of Scrimmage.*

With China defending the Burmese military rule, the US has no effective way to oppose it.

Sanctions would have little effect because China would not adopt them.

I wonder if there is some sort of communications technology that the US could provide to the resistance, that might aid its efforts.

A black defendant won a new trial because the jury deliberated in a room with a Confederate flag and other symbols.

This illustrates part of how systemic racism operates. The racism of the Confederacy, and the slavery system it fought for, propagates through the actions of its present-day adorers into racist influence on other people.

The retrial will not exactly tell us whether that influence was crucial in the first trial. Partly because the appeal found another error in his first trial: some evidence will not be admitted next time. Partly because it will have a different jury and maybe a different judge. But also because influences like this are not overwhelming. They do not compel a given outcome independent of what the facts justify. Rather, they change tendencies. They may or may not hurt a particular individual on a particular occasion, but overall they make the system more unfair.

The article linked to above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I object to bigotry, and normally I decline to link to articles which promote it. But I make exceptions for some articles which give important information about racism or the fight to eliminate racism. That article is one of the exceptions.

Sweden has adopted a multipurpose RFID person identification chip. This is very dangerous, because it tends to lead people to use one chip to identify themselves for many activities.

Even if different servers run by different operators control different activities, their databases are all pre-indexed.

Getting the chip inserted into one's hand makes this more shocking, but it is just the icing on the poisonous cake.

Timnit Gebru: * For truly ethical AI, its research must be independent from big tech.*

The billionaire "philanthropists" of Big Tech dominate nonprofit fundraising, too, and they use this to shape society according to their ideas. Bill Gates set up much-criticized changes in education in the US, and made almost all leaders and experts in the field reluctant to criticize them because they hoped for funding from the Gates Foundation.

Gebru's point makes sense to me, but that alone won't make AI in the service of companies safe. Letting servers run by others dominate your computing activities is giving those others tyrannical power over you. That moral issue is separate from the one that Gebru raises.

If part of what attracts people to use the servers is AI that "works well", that AI will contribute to dominating people, even if there is nothing wrong about how that AI itself functions.