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I did make a backup of the old one, for after Honkler stops being funny.
The latest craze: New York State is now joining a small group of states in passing a "look-back law." This means that for a one year period, New Yorkers can accuse people of sexual abuse in the distant past, no matter how long ago. Effectively, it nullifies the Statute of Limitations. So you can now say "this person sexually abused me in 1973, when I was one year old" and then file a civil suit, and possibly even criminal charges.
"A victim would get their courage up, they'd go to talk to a lawyer, and they would be told, 'Oh you're too late. You're not just too late, you're too late by 20 years,'" said Marci Hamilton, who is director of the advocacy group Child USA and a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
I don't wish to be cruel here, but if you waited over 20 years to report a crime, well...
Can a child under the age of 3 actually consent to having any adult touch their privates?
I see tort law legends being born....
Except under certain narrowly defined situations, and subject to the Close-in-Age Exemption, no one under 16-18 (varies by state) can legally consent to having any adult touch their privates.
Not long ago, I was having a conversation in which someone accused the New York Times of having a right-leaning political bias. At the time, I didn't feel that was true, but I did not argue the point as it wasn't really germane to the discussion.
And then, I saw this:
In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation
And, yes, that was from the NYT.
If that's right-leaning bias, then I really am the Prime Minister of the Conch Republic.
Where does one even begin criticizing this obvious hit-piece?
Well, the title, I guess. It doesn't even ask the question "is American capitalism brutal?", it just presupposes that it is, and then draws a direct line from prosperity to slavery.
"Given the choice between modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, lawfulness and cruelty, democracy and totalitarianism, America chose all of the above."
Beyond merely being doublespeak, this makes no sense. At least, it makes no sense to my addled old mind. What really perplexes me is that I cannot singularly identify the point at which indoctrination into the Church of Self-Loathing became universally recognized.
Yes, some vile, nasty **** went down in the early history of the US. No, this does not mean that those of us living in it 150 years later bear some indelible stain of either villainy or sanctity, depending upon where our skin color falls along a Pantone swatch book.
I'd argue the opposite, that the USA was able to overcome slavery and become prosperous anyway -- although it nearly destroyed itself in the process. It wasn't slavery that lead to prosperity. Slavery (and its related concepts, class and identity) keeps a society backwards. That's no opinion. Our Civil War proved it -- and you can see similar examples throughout the World. Despite having much greater fighting spirit and arguably better/tougher soldiers, the South was no match for the industrial might of the states where a focus on individual liberty led to advancement. That difference persisted through reconstruction and is still evident today.
The corollary is also true. It wasn't "identity" and "social justice" that ended slavery. Being true to the concepts of individualism and unalienable rights led to the creation of the Republican Party and the horrible war that finally ended slavery in this country. Slavery is still practiced in many parts of the world where individual liberty is suppressed. If we allow the rise of identity politics and the granting of rights based upon group membership in this country, slavery, albeit in a different form, is likely to re-emerge.
The TL;DR version is that because they both have feminine voices, and fulfill roles of servitude.
Mind you, last week we were complaining that AI was racist because servant-bots were predominantly white. (Think about the movie I, Robot.) Of course, if those bots had been painted black instead of white, that would have also been racist.
Anyway, the full article:
(With apologies to the users of MT, this forum software is really resisting my attempts to copy-n-paste this article in a way that doesn't result in it being horrible to read)
Today's voice assistants are facing their own "Me Too" moment.
We already knew humans could make biased AIs — but the United Nations says the reverse is true as well.
Millions of people talk to AI voice assistants, such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. When those assistants talk back, they do so in female-sounding voices, and a new UN report argues that those voices and the words they’re programmed to say amplify gender biases and encourage users to be sexist — but it’s not too late to change course.
Gender Abuse
The report is the work of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and its title — “I’d blush if I could” — is the response Siri was programmed in 2011 to give if a user called her a “bitch.”
According to UNESCO, that programming exemplifies the problems with today’s AI assistants.
“Siri’s submissiveness in the face of gender abuse — and the servility expressed by so many other digital assistants projected as young women — provides a powerful illustration of gender biases coded into technology products,” the report’s authors wrote.
It was only after UNESCO shared a draft of its report with Apple in April 2019 that the company changed Siri’s response to “I don’t know how to respond to that.”
“Me Too” Moment
The fact that Apple was willing to make the change is encouraging, but that’s just one phrase uttered by one assistant. According to UNESCO’s report, to truly make a difference, the tech industry will need to enact much more comprehensive changes.
A good starting place, according to the authors, would be for tech companies to hire more female programmers and stop making their assistants female by default, instead opting for gender-neutral voices.
“It is a ‘Me Too’ moment,” Saniye Gülser Corat, Director of UNESCO’s Division for Gender Equality, told CBS News. “We have to make sure that the AI we produce and that we use does pay attention to gender equality.”
So, yeah... Basically, don't do or say things, or else.
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