JoBo

It doesn't matter? This incident was doubly antisemitic, preventing someone from protesting because they are Jewish, and assuming that pro-Palestinian protesters would attack them simply because they were Jewish (ie equating Jewishness with support for Israel and criticism of Israel with antisemitism).

Yes, he's a provocateur. So what? If the copper had said it was because they wanted to keep the two groups of protesters apart (as they routinely do, or are supposed to do), that would be fine. But he decided to be racist about it instead.

National Highways says the radar detects 89% of stopped vehicles - but that means one in 10 are not spotted.

At least 79 people have been killed on smart motorways since they were introduced in 2010. In the past five years, seven coroners have called for them to be made safer.

National Highways' latest figures suggest that if you break down on a smart motorway without a hard shoulder you are three times more likely to be killed or seriously injured than on one with a hard shoulder.

No brainer. But then they quote this prick without directly challenging the contradiction:

The agency's operational control director Andrew Page-Dove says action was being taken to "close the gap between how drivers feel and what the safety statistics show".

The 'gap' seems to be a result of drivers having a much more accurate perception than the people paid to defend them.

National Highways says reinstating the hard shoulder would increase congestion and that there are well-rehearsed contingency plans to deal with power outages.

Just add more lanes. That'll work. It's never worked but obviously it'll work. Fuckwits.

I think you overestimate the amount of 'thought' going on here. (ref}

The way he plays with the meaning of words

She (or, if you're not sure, they).

any kind of bureaucratic or rule-based decision-making

Human-written rules are often flawed, and for similar reasons (the sole human thought process that 'AI' is very good at reproducing is system justification). But human-written rules can be written down and they can be interrogated. But Apple landed itself in court because it had no clue how its credit algorithm worked and could not conceive how it could possibly be sexist if the machine didn't get any gender data to analyse.

Perhaps that is the point.

That is, indeed, the point.

She was crap at her job but she was also too inexperienced for it and employed to do it by cost-cutting producers who took so many shortcuts on set safety, half the crew walked out before this happened.

More powerful heads need to roll.

What high profile court case?

Oh, please! Streisand the fuck out of it. Plenty of people have done what he did without ever being forced to acknowledge it was rape. Keep this story going for the sake of everyone, everywhere.

This is an easy statement to make but context matters. In this case, he was not named by the media but had they not covered the story, he would never have been charged because it suited the political establishment to do nothing at all.

Higgins alleged she was raped by a colleague in an exclusive 2021 television interview with the Network Ten’s “The Project” program, which also raised questions about the official response by ministers and political staffers in the aftermath of the alleged assault.

After the interview aired, Lehrmann was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, but the trial was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct and not revived due to fears about Higgins’ mental health.

It is very easy to have a play with a benefits calculator to find out what reality looks like for yourself.

In-work benefits keep working people who earn less than they need to survive at or slightly above the poverty level. For people who are unable to work, due to sickness, disability or a lack of available jobs, it keeps them stuck below the poverty level with just about enough to survive but not to thrive.

As the article points out, the philosophy this system was built on was not necessarily well thought out at the time. In the post-covid era it is disastrous.

The legal system didn't deal with it, as per fucking usual. He decided that he would use that fact to prove he was innocent, giving the court an opportunity to explain very carefully why he is quite clearly guilty.

This was a huge political scandal. It's not reasonable to declare that the media should not have reported it.

It's asking why don't we use it for that purpose, not suggesting that there is anything easy about doing so. I don't know how you think science works, but it's not like that.

The data cannot be understood. These models are too large for that.

Apple says it doesn't understand why its credit card gives lower credit limits to women that men even if they have the same (or better) credit scores, because they don't use sex as a datapoint. But it's freaking obvious why, if you have a basic grasp of the social sciences and humanities. Women were not given the legal right to their own bank accounts until the 1970s. After that, banks could be forced to grant them bank accounts but not to extend the same amount of credit. Women earn and spend in ways that are different, on average, to men. So the algorithm does not need to be told that the applicant is a woman, it just identifies them as the sort of person who earns and spends like the class of people with historically lower credit limits.

Apple's 'sexist' credit card investigated by US regulator

Garbage in, garbage out. Society has been garbage for marginalised groups since forever and there's no way to take that out of the data. Especially not big data. You can try but you just end up playing whackamole with new sources of bias, many of which cannot be measured well, if at all.