(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: A lighter touch [1] [] Date: 2023-11-23 We begin this Turkey Day with Rex Huppke of USA Today finding that the pardon of two turkeys named Liberty and Bell by President Biden is highly suspicious and may warrant investigation. The 81-year-old president, who is both feeble and incapable of thinking for himself AND a devious global criminal mastermind, pardoned two hulking, 42-pound turkeys at the White House on his birthday Monday. The young birds, Liberty and Bell, allegedly hail from Minnesota, though I was unable to independently confirm their place of origin. Is “Minnesota” some kind of code word used by members of the Biden Crime Family? Are we to believe the president issued these pardons without expecting something in return? Adding to my suspicions, I could hear the turkeys speaking a language that definitely wasn’t English. Isn’t that an interesting coincidence? Was it Turkish? I can’t be sure. So let’s see ... we have two young, strong male turkeys who may very well hail from a foreign country. Did they enter our country illegally with intent to do us harm? Is that why Biden pardoned them? I’m just asking questions here, folks. There’s some serious news below the fold. Also hopeful news. But hopefully not doom and gloom for this Turkey Day. Jerusalem Demsas of The Atlantic lists seven possible reasons that Americans might hate a good economy. Economists...are heavily influenced by low unemployment, often considered the standard metric for how the economy is performing. Last month the unemployment rate was down to 3.9 percent. But it’s not just unemployment that’s headed in the right direction. The Consumer Price Index was unchanged. A new paper shows that wage inequality has fallen over the past three years, driven by workers leaving their old jobs for better-paying ones. The U.S. has been adding jobs at a record clip. And wages—adjusted for inflation—may have finally surpassed pre-pandemic levels. [...] During the pandemic, the federal government provided Americans unprecedented support. It stopped evictions; it dropped thousands of dollars into personal bank accounts; it paused student-loan repayments; it gave aid to unemployed workers; it provided tax breaks to parents of young children, and billions in aid to state and local governments. In doing so, the government may have raised expectations for what a “good economy” is supposed to feel like. Given all of those supports, many people actually are doing worse on some measures than they were a few years ago: Real disposable personal income reached a high in March 2021 and has declined since then. In May, the economics writer Joey Politano noted that Americans had spent nearly all of the money they’d set aside during the pandemic. Put another way: In 2020 and 2021, Americans acquired new sources of income, which have since disappeared. If I found $10,000 on the ground one year, and was not so fortunate the next, I would be correct in telling a pollster that I’m worse off, even if I got a $5,000 raise. Kate Shaw of The New York Times says that many of the cases on the U.S. Supreme Court’s docket for the current term have the potential of dismantling major portions of “the administrative state.” “Administrative law” may sound dry and dusty. Justice Antonin Scalia once advised an audience to “steel yourselves for a pretty dull lecture” on that topic. But the administrative power cases pending before the court this term involve issues that touch the lives of every American. They involve the government’s ability to study and approve the safety and efficacy of the drugs we take; its power to protect consumers, enforce the securities laws and safeguard the nation’s waters; and ultimately to respond in innovative ways to the climate emergency. The outcome in these cases may even affect more obvious hot-button issues like guns and abortion. [...] Under the court’s current conservative supermajority, the project of dismantling the administrative state is already well underway. This has largely happened through the court’s use of what it terms the major questions doctrine, a novel principle the court has wielded to prevent agencies from taking actions of significant political or economic importance if they cannot point to explicit authorization from Congress. Peter Guest and Morgan Meaker of Wired try to untangle the drama of the firing and rehiring of Sam Altman at OpenAI. Open AI’s new boss is the same as the old boss. But the company—and the artificial intelligence industry—may have been profoundly changed by the past five days of high-stakes soap opera. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, cofounder, and figurehead, was removed by the board of directors on Friday. By Tuesday night, after a mass protest by the majority of the startup’s staff, Altman was on his way back, and most of the existing board was gone. But that board, mostly independent of OpenAI’s operations, bound to a “for the good of humanity” mission statement, was critical to the company’s uniqueness. [...] The chaotic leadership reset at OpenAI ended with the board being reshuffledto consist of establishment figures in tech and former US secretary of the treasury Larry Summers. Two directors associated with the “effective altruism” movement, the only women, were removed from the board. It has crystallized existing divides over how the future of AI should be governed. The outcome is seen very differently by doomers who worry that AI is going to destroy humanity; transhumanists who think the tech will hasten a utopian future; those who believe in freewheeling market capitalism; and advocates of tight regulation to contain tech giants that cannot be trusted to balance the potential harms of powerfully disruptive technology with a desire to make money. “To some extent, this was a collision course that had been set for a long time,” says Ord, who is also credited with cofounding the effective altruism movement, parts of which have become obsessed with the doomier end of the AI risk spectrum. “If it’s the case that the nonprofit governance board of OpenAI was fundamentally powerless to actually affect its behavior, then I think that exposing that it was powerless was probably a good thing.” Last summer’s profile of Oxford University philosophy professor William MacAskill in The New Yorker was my introduction to “effective altruism.” I wasn’t impressed. And a lot of people subscribing to “effective altruism” fell for convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. Orem Ziv and Yotam Ronen of +972 Magazine write that many of the families of Hamas’ murder victims and the families of hostages held by Hamas are also the blessed peacemakers. A new study in the Journal of Neurolinguistics from researchers at the University of Birmingham found that, when certain people come across grammar errors, their bodies respond physically. Heart rates change. Stress increases. Bad grammar activates the part of our nervous system that provokes the fight-or-flight impulse we get when being chased … like by a tiger. All of that happens when we encounter someone breaking grammar rules. To some of us, it can feel like an attack. No wonder apostrophes can make us angry. The researchers observed 41 people’s bodies while those subjects listened to short English speech samples, some of which contained grammatical errors, such as, “I think that culture is one of the areas most affected by a globalization,” and “People all around the world listen to same music, watch the same movies, and read same books.” Have the best possible Turkey Day or whatever you may (or may not) be celebrating! [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/23/2207538/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-A-lighter-touch?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=top_news_slot_8&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/