Linkage

This is quite sweet…

… but what's really amusing is the response from fellow USians:

Your regular reminder that solving every problem by creating a competitive market of private sector "service providers" does not work.

Just 11.7% of jobseekers in Australia found long-term employment through a job provider in the latest financial year, according to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations’ annual report.

Service providers are allowed to claim publicly funded outcome payments when clients have completed four, 12 and 26 weeks in employment – regardless of whether the client or provider found the job.

[…]

Jeremy Poxon, a welfare advocate at the Antipoverty Centre, said the system was failing “en mass” to help get people into meaningful work.

“The government knows full well that this system is failing on this basic metric to help people into work,” he said.

It came as Guardian Australia revealed Centrelink has threatened payment suspensions to jobseekers at a rate of five a minute, despite serious concerns from social security experts that they are illegal.

Poxon said the data showed the system was better at punishing people than helping them into employment.

Every time I search for a solution to a problem for Drupal 10/11, I get page after page of results for Drupal 6/7. By the time of the release of Drupal 8, discussions had moved from groups and issue queues to Slack.

Communities are having the same debates over and over. New members ask questions that were definitely answered six months ago. Teams rediscover solutions to problems they already solved. Users search for solutions to problems that seem to repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

We used to have forums. And forums had one massive advantage: you could find things.

Threads had descriptive titles. There were categories. Search actually worked because the content was structured for retrieval. If someone asked a question that had been answered before, you could link them to the previous discussion instead of retyping everything.

Then Slack happened, and Discord, and Teams, and we all decided that real-time chat was simply better: More modern // more collaborative. More like how humans “naturally communicate” (as if there’s anything natural about the internet itself.)

[…]

Companies pay for Slack per user per month. The cost of storage is real but abstracted. Meanwhile, the cost of fragmenting and decaying knowledge is completely invisible until it’s too late. How do you measure the time wasted rehashing old decisions? How do you quantify the mistakes that could have been avoided if someone had been able to find that old discussion?

These costs are real and large, but they don’t show up in any budget line.

This is the essay on the Turing Test that I wish I were capable of writing. It takes a while to get up to speed, but when it does it's just delightful.

I am not as suspicious of the spiritual as Searle or Turing, and am broadly willing to entertain the possibility that there is such a thing as a soul that proves the essential difference between the thought of a man and a machine. But this seems beside the point. To my mind, Searle’s Chinese Rooms, though useful in thinking about artificial intelligence in the same way Schrödinger’s Cat is useful in thinking about quantum mechanics, simply puts the cart before the horse. Let the high speed men with paper, pencil, and rubber commence using their rulebook to carry on a conversation, whether in Chinese or any other language, and then we can discuss the metaphysical implications.

One needn’t go as far as souls anyway. Jefferson’s hypothesis—that there is some electrochemical basis to thought—is sufficient to solve the problem. Were it true, the reason computers seem fundamentally blocked from progress on the Turing Test would amount to the fact that they are wholly mechanical objects, while “thought” is as much a biological function as “digestion” or “copulation.” What’s notable to me is simply that the idea is instantly credible in the context of observable reality. I think about my household pets, and even though none of them are close to passing the Turing Test, not least due to their complete inability to use language, they are clearly routinely engaging in something that is closer to thought than anything LLMs serve up. It is possible to communicate with them, albeit non-verbally—if I pick up and shake the container they know contains treats, my cats recognize that as a symbol that I am offering treats, just as I understand that when they stand by the empty food bowl and scream they are asking me to fix the problem. This means that they have notions of both objects and desire. Frankly, on the evidence, I’d be a lot less surprised by my dog learning to use language than I would by my laptop.

Human civilisation is now officially too stupid to be allowed to continue:

There's only a handful of lenders in Australia that are accepting cryptocurrencies as collateral for loans.

While there's no clear and present danger to Australia's financial system, the federal government and regulators are watching them.

"Crypto assets can be highly volatile," ASIC told the ABC.

"Lenders securing loans with crypto may risk the collateral becoming insufficient to cover the loan if the value of the crypto drops quickly.

"For consumers, this means a higher risk of having your loan called back early, and needing to sell your crypto assets to cover a default."

But here's the problem.

The industry's keen to grow, but economists have told the ABC the further the industry grows, the more it will present a major risk to Australia's financial stability.

"What the law needs to do, what regulators need to do, is to ensure that people who are not especially sophisticated, or who don't have the capacity to understand and assess the risks that they might be exposed to aren't sucked in by unscrupulous operators," Saul Eslake says.

The White House will now allow retirement savers to invest in extremely risk and opaque crypto and private equity assets in their 401(k) retirement accounts. These sorts of investments had previously been banned. Why? Because they are risky and opaque and that is bad for retirement savers. Why will they now be allowed? Because both the private equity industry and the crypto industry are always in danger of suffering declines when enough money stops flowing into them, and opening the door to 401(k) money is a faucet of many hundreds of billions of dollars that will continue to keep valuations in those industries high. The shit that the smart investors would not pay for will now be packaged, branded, and sold to regular people who do not know any better. Who will benefit? Private equity firms, dumping their shitty stuff onto the public, and crypto firms, with a bigger pool of buyers for their worthless products. Who will lose? The public. 

These predatory industries have paid the Trump administration enough money to win support for this. That’s about it. Longer explanations are mostly bullshit.

Major banks have now decided to allow crypto to be used as collateral for loans. This sets the stage for a rapid collapse in crypto prices to spread its harm much more broadly throughout the financial system. Do you remember when, shortly before the 2008 financial crisis, the CEO of Citigroup famously said, “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance”? I don’t know why I just thought of that. 

Most people detained by ICE are being housed in sprawling complexes in rural areas, where the land is cheap and the protests are few. Akiv Dawson, a criminologist at Georgia Southern University, has been conducting research at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, which can hold up to 2,000 people at a time. She said that since Trump took office, courtrooms have been packed with immigrants whose experiences would, according to polling, trouble the average American—people who have lived in the U.S. for decades, have American-born children, and have never been convicted of a serious crime. She told me about a lawful permanent resident of 50 years whose child is a U.S. citizen and whose deceased wife was as well. The man explained in court that ICE agents had mistaken him for someone else when they arrested him. But he admitted in court to having a single criminal conviction—simple marijuana possession from 30 years ago—so the judge decided to let the deportation case against him proceed. The man told the judge that his belongings would soon be thrown into the street if he wasn’t released; he needed to go back to work and pay rent. “He began to panic,” Dawson told me. “He said, ‘My people don’t even know that I’m here. They came and took me from my bed.’” Dawson said the man asked the judge why this was happening after he had spent so many decades in the United States. She replied, “Sir, this is happening across the country.”

Dawson also told me about a young mother from Ecuador who had followed the legal process for requesting asylum and pleaded to be released on bail so that she could be reunited with her 2-year-old son, whom she had left with a neighbor. “She begged,” Dawson said, and recalled the woman saying, “Please, give me an opportunity so that I can do the process the right way.” The woman said she wouldn’t be able to continue with her asylum case if she was going to have to do it from inside a detention center. “I have a child. I can’t be here too long without him,” she said. With that, the judge said the woman had waived her right to relief, and continued processing her for removal from the country.

“Are you going to deport me with my son?” the woman asked. “I don’t have anyone to keep him here.”

“You would need to talk to your deportation officer,” the judge replied, according to Dawson. “I’m only handling your case.”

Usual caveat:  "affordable housing" isn't "social housing", which isn't "public housing". Public housing is what's needed. Also what was delivered as mandatory trickle-down housing in Sydney and presented here as a success story is not going to make a measurable difference to the situation.

New analysis from the Community Housing Industry Association Victoria (CHIA Vic) has revealed that since 2016, when the Central City Planning Provisions were amended to include a “public benefit uplift” incentive, developers have secured approval for almost 31,000 new homes. Not one of those has been delivered as affordable housing.

Instead, the voluntary scheme has overwhelmingly favoured commercial office space as the “public benefit” of choice. As reported by this masthead in early 2018, within just a year of its introduction more than 54,000 square metres of office floorspace had been awarded to applicants under the FAU mechanism, while no uplift had been granted for social housing, libraries, kindergartens or other community facilities that were also originally contemplated.

The result, according to CHIA Vic chief executive Sarah Toohey, is proof that voluntary approaches do not work.

"The voluntary developer contribution scheme for the Melbourne CBD and Southbank has not delivered a single affordable home since it was introduced nearly a decade ago," she said.

“What we’ve seen instead is developers opting for office space and other benefits that serve their own interests, while communities continue to miss out on the affordable homes they desperately need.”

The issue is back in the spotlight with the Suburban Rail Loop East planning documents now proposing a similar voluntary uplift framework around new station precincts. CHIA Vic has warned that without mandatory requirements, there is little chance of affordable housing being supplied in these high-demand areas either.

“The Suburban Rail Loop will add tens of thousands of new homes around station precincts but right now it’s not clear if any of them will be social or affordable housing,” Ms Toohey said. “We can’t leave the delivery of social housing in these precincts up to a voluntary scheme that we know from experience won’t work.”

By contrast, Sydney’s long-standing mandatory affordable housing contributions scheme has already provided more than 1500 homes since 1996, with a further 1950 projected by 2036.

Andor ruined the rest of Star Wars for me. The original trilogy was one long homage to cinema, fittingly for the nostalgia-drenched 1970s and 80s. Everything since inadvertently commented on commercial culture. Andor deliberately told an urgently relevant story about our current time, made more powerful by shifting the setting to a very familiar galaxy long ago and far, far away.