Month: January 2023
Every student in France will be given the opportunity to visit historical or memorial sites linked to antisemitism or racism as part of the country’s newly unveiled plan to combat hatred.
The National Plan to Fight Racism, Antisemitism and Discrimination Linked to Ethnic Origins for 2023 to 2026 was unveiled on Jan. 30 and is an update to the original plan, which was first announced in 2018.
The plan contains five primary goals, which are to measure the reality of racism, antisemitism and discrimination in France; accurately describe the reality of hate; provide better education and training for combating discrimination; sanction perpetrators; and support victims.
In addition to the student visits, 80 measures were listed in the plan. They include training civil servants on discrimination; studying discrimination in hiring and access to housing; streamlining the process for victims to file complaints; and making harsher penalties for government employees who participate in racist or antisemitic speech or actions.
Representatives of the American Jewish Committee, which worked with the French government to devise the plan, were among the audience at its unveiling. AJC’s Paris director Anne-Sophie Sebban praised the initiative, saying it is “essential for the government to have a robust strategy dedicated to confronting antisemitism in all its forms.” She noted that this plan, unlike its predecessor, creates benchmarks to judge how each component is working.
Antisemitic crime has spiked in France in recent years, with one watchdog group saying there were 589 hate crimes against Jews in 2021, an increase of 36% over the previous year. In 2022, several killings in the country were investigated as being motivated by antisemitism.
France is home to an estimated 500,000 Jews, the largest population of Jews of any country in Europe. While annual emigration statistics fluctuate, several thousand French Jews typically leave the country each year, often relocating in Israel.
Related
The post France unveils plan to combat antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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- JPMorgan strategist Mike Bell said the biggest market risk is if there is no recession this year and wage growth stays high.
- That would force the Federal Reserve to raise rates by more than expected to rein in inflation, he told Bloomberg.
- Both stocks and bonds would decline if the central bank isn’t able to deliver rate cuts that the market is expecting, he added.
The biggest threat to markets right now is if a recession doesn’t materialize, forcing the Federal Reserve to remain hawkish, JPMorgan strategist Mike Bell said.
The Fed has aggressively raised rates to combat rampant inflation since March of last year. A slew of economic data points indicate prices are cooling, but markets are bracing for a recession as the tight monetary policy slows the economy.
The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite are up nearly 6% and 11% in the past month, respectively, as Wall Street sees the Fed reversing its tightening campaign in response to an economic downturn.
But if the US economy avoids a recession and wage growth remains high, then the Fed would not cut rates as expected and instead would have to resume rate hikes in the second half of the year, lifting them higher than Wall Street currently anticipates, Bell told Bloomberg TV.
“Unfortunately, [at that point] you’re back into a world where both bonds and stocks would go down together,” he said.
But JPMorgan’s base case assumes there will be a recession in 2023 that will allow wage pressures to moderate and the Fed to cut rates in 2024, Bell said.
“My best guess is that the Fed is going to bring rates down to about 2.5% by the end of 2024,” he added.
The Fed is expected to deliver its smallest rate hike in nearly a year when its two-day policy meeting ends Wednesday.
A 25-basis-point rate hike this week plus another of the same size later this year that’s also widely expected would bring the fed funds rate to 4.75%-5.00%.
Read the original article on Business Insider
REUTERS/Dario Cantatore/NYSE Euronext
- C3.ai has soared 86% year-to-date as an investor frenzy builds for artificial intelligence.
- The surge higher has happened amid the growing success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT product.
- C3.ai announced on Tuesday that it would integrate ChatGPT into its product suite.
Shares of C3.ai have soared 85% year-to-date as an investor frenzy builds for stocks with exposure to artificial intelligence.
The stock has soared amid the growing success of OpenAI, a company unrelated to C3.ai which has taken the internet by storm in recent weeks via the release of its ChatGPT product.
ChatGPT has proven to be a useful showcase to both investors and consumers as to what artificial intelligence can do today, and what it may be capable of over time.
ChatGPT is a natural language chatbot that allows users to have human-like conversations on a myriad of topics. Just two months after its release, users of ChatGPT are using the platform to assist with writing emails, developing code, and answering questions on a myriad of topics, like investing.
The success of ChatGPT led to Microsoft investing an additional $10 billion in OpenAI at a valuation of about $29 billion. Microsoft had previously invested $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019. While C3.ai does not own a piece of OpenAI, it does have a contract with Microsoft’s cloud platform.
C3.ai soared as much as 28% on Tuesday after the company said it would integrate ChatGPT into its product suite of artificial intelligence tools.
“The C3 Generative AI Product Suite integrates the latest AI capabilities from organizations such as Open AI, Google, and academia, and the most advanced models, such as ChatGPT and GPT-3 into C3 AI’s enterprise AI products,” C3.ai said in a Tuesday press release.
“Combining the full potential of natural language, generative pre-trained transformers, enterprise AI, and predictive analytics will change everything about enterprise computing,” C3.ai CEO Thomas Siebel said.
The recent surge in C3.ai’s stock price has helped it reach levels not seen since August. Despite the year-to-date surge, C3.ai is down 89% from its record December 2020 high of $183.90 per share.
Read the original article on Business Insider
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- Ford announced price cuts for its electric vehicles shortly after Tesla did the same.
- The moves don’t make sense, but Tesla’s larger scale gives it a near-term advantage, BofA said.
- Overall, strategists said price cuts in the EV market could result in higher sales volumes.
Tesla kicked off 2023 by slashing the price of its vehicles by as much as 20%, and this week Ford did the same for its electric Mustang Mach-E model range.
Neither move made much sense, according to Bank of America, though Tesla still holds a near-term advantage, the bank analysts said.
“The logic appears odd to us,” strategists wrote in a Tuesday note. “Both TSLA and Ford are citing demand that exceeds supply, which means that cutting prices would be a direct hit to the bottom line today and unnecessarily degrades future earnings power.”
On one hand, Elon Musk’s decision for Tesla could have been driven by easing demand or his target 50% growth rate, though BofA noted the approach was still strange.
But for Ford, in order to meet its sales volume targets and maintain profits, the legacy automaker would have to produce and sell about 33% more vehicles than anticipated due to the price cuts, Bank of America estimated. Cutting vehicle prices is a risky move if that additional capacity isn’t possible.
The company said in a statement that it expects to produce 130,000 units of its Mustang Mach-E this year, revised from a prior target of 78,000.
“We are responding to changes in the market place,” Ford’s chief customer officer Marin Gjaja said in a media briefing. “We want to stay competitive in the market place.”
Gjaja maintained that Ford’s price cuts were not a direct response to Tesla’s move.
BofA says the two companies are unlikely to spark an all-out price war reminiscent of the early 2000s, when General Motors was driven to bankruptcy. Automakers today are better positioned, leaving strategists to conclude that a bad actor won’t be able to destroy competitive pricing.
Nonetheless, Bank of America said the auto industry does not always act rationally, hence the recent price cuts. Given the relative novelty and small size of the EV market, obstacles are bound to emerge, which makes the already-challenging business even more so.
Read the original article on Business Insider
Ian Donley
- Ian Donley is a gay and autistic man.
- In college, he had a lot of casual sex with men because physical touch was important to him.
- Now he says that while sex gives him a needed rush, he wants something emotionally meaningful.
I’m autistic, and most people I meet, especially on dates, don’t understand what that means.
They point to TV shows like “Atypical” and “The Good Doctor” or to the “socially awkward kid” your parents forced you to befriend. That’s not me.
As an autistic person, I’ve been able to “mask” as neurotypical — somebody who doesn’t have atypical patterns of thoughts or behaviors. But as I’ve gotten older, I proudly lean into my intersectional identity as a gay and autistic man — even though I have special intricacies, like needing foreplay when it comes to dating and sex.
When I went to college, I started experimenting with my sexuality
As a gay man from Temecula, a conservative small town in California, I had very slim options: the other 18-year-old guy who respectfully declined to date me or the 50-year-old married man with two kids under the age of 6.
I ended up losing my virginity during my first few months of college, with a guy from Grindr who had more experience than me, which made me feel relaxed. It was also amazing, exhilarating, and euphoric.
It felt good to finally give that to myself. The shame I felt toward my sexual orientation disappeared. It felt like I finally became an adult. My sex life took off from there.
But the majority of my experiences were one-night stands with guys from Grindr, and the couple of regulars I did have were interested only in a minimalist relationship. I knew very little about them, and vice versa. Most of my interactions with them started with, “Hey, what’s up,” and ended with me putting my clothes on and walking home without anyone noticing.
In retrospect, it’s clear that my need for physical touch was what drove me to it. It made me feel connected not to only my partners but also, most importantly, myself.
Through my sexual encounters in college, I learned more about my autistic identity during sex
As part of my autism, I have a dopamine deficiency, which means I crave high amounts of dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a substance made in your brain. Basically, it makes you feel good.
Of course, each autistic person is different. But that’s what drove me to have casual sex in college — the chase of dopamine. The physical touch during foreplay is what makes me feel great and activates high levels of dopamine in me. In my experience, a lot of men ignore this part of sex, but foreplay is essential for me. It breaks down some of my walls and helps me feel comfortable. They say slow and steady wins the race, and I believe that applies to sex.
I’ve been with guys who disregard my feelings about it, and it makes it difficult for me to enjoy any other part of the sexual encounter.
When I talk about foreplay, I’m not necessarily talking about sexual acts. I like a man who will embrace any form of physical touch. I enjoy hugs a lot. I grew up being hesitant about showing any kind of physical affection toward men but have realized that it is not only OK to be affectionate but also important.
Now, as a 24-year-old, my criteria for what I look for in a partner have changed
While sex is fun, a good way to connect with people, and a means to satisfy my craving for touch and dopamine, it doesn’t completely fulfill me. As I got older, sex became mechanical to me because I started losing my value as a person. I was honoring my sensory cravings but not my emotional ones.
I allowed myself to have casual sex, thinking I would find the right guy for me, but, ultimately, I was hurting myself emotionally. I’ve built more restraint in terms of whom I give my body to. The most important factor is finding a partner who will respect my intricacies as an autistic person but will also fulfill me emotionally — not just physically.
Read the original article on Business Insider
The big cyberlaw story of the week is the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Google and the many hats it wears in the online ad ecosystem. Lee Berger explains the Justice Department’s theory, which is not dissimilar to the Texas attorney general’s two-year-old claims. When you have lost both the Biden administration and the Texas attorney general, I suggest, you cannot look too many places for friends—and certainly not to Brussels, which is also pursuing similar claims of its own. So what is the Justice Department’s late-to-the-party contribution? At least two things, Lee suggests: a jury demand that will put all those complex Borkian consumer-welfare doctrines in front of a northern Virginia jury and a “rocket docket” that will allow Justice to catch up with and maybe lap the other lawsuits against the company. This case looks as though it will be long and ugly for Google, unless it turns out to be short and ugly. Mark reminds us that, for the Justice Department, finding an effective remedy may be harder than proving anticompetitive conduct.
Nathan Simington assesses the administration’s announced deal with Japan and the Netherlands to enforce a tougher decoupling policy against China’s semiconductor makers. Details are still a little sparse, but some kind of deal was essential for the United States. But for Japan and the Netherlands, the details are critical, and any arrangement will require flexibility and sophistication on the part of the Commerce Department.
Megan Stifel and I chew over the Justice Department/FBI victory lap after putting a stick in the spokes of The Hive ransomware infrastructure. We agree that the lap was warranted. Among other things, the FBI handled its access to decryption keys with more care than in the past, providing them to many victims before taking down a big chunk of the ransomware gang’s tools. The bad news? Nobody was arrested, and the infrastructure can probably be reconstituted in the near term.
Here is an evergreen headline: “Facebook is going to reinstate Donald Trump’s account.” That could be the opening line of any story in the last few months, and that is probably Facebook’s strategy—a long, teasing dance of seven veils so that by the time Trump starts posting, it will be old news. If that is Facebook’s PR strategy, it is working, Mark MacCarthy reports. Nobody much cares, and they certainly do not seem to be mad at Facebook. So the company is out of the woods, and they have left the ex-president on the receiving end of a blow to the ego that is bound to sting.
Megan has more good news on the cybercrime front: The FBI identified the North Korean hacking group that stole $100 million in crypto last year—and may have kept the regime from getting its hands on any of the funds.
Nathan unpacks two competing news stories. First, “OMG, ChatGPT will help bad guys write malware.” Second: “OMG, ChatGPT will help good guys find and fix security holes.” He thinks they are both a bit overwrought, but maybe a glimpse of the future.
Mark and Megan explain TikTok’s new offer to Washington. Megan also covers Congress’s “TayTay v. Ticketmaster” hearing after disclosing her personal conflict of interest.
Nathan answers my question: how can the FAA be so good a preventing airliners from crashing and so bad at preventing its systems from crashing? The ensuing discussion turns up more on-point bathroom humor than anyone would have expected.
In quick hits, I cover three stories:
- First, my complaint about Gen. Milley’s egregious and self-admitted overclassification of January 6th records. And the prospect that he may be investigated for it.
- Next, the delightful Iran-Iraq War pity-they-cannot-both-lose fight between James Dolan, the owner of Madison Square Garden, and the lawyers he his’s barred from the Garden. In a tactic that reminds me of Donald Trump, Dolan is doubling down on confrontation despite the mounting legal troubles it’s created. My explanation? I am betting both men have Daddy issues.
You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug! The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.
China v Taiwan: who would win? Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow and director of research at Brookings. He specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, and American national security policy.
We discuss:
- The limits of scenarios that predict the outcome of a China-Taiwan conflict.
- What are intercontinental rail guns?
- How sports teams that play each other in the same year can have different outcomes – and what this says about predictability.
- Given all this, what’s the point of modelling exercises?
Click here to listen to ChinaTalk in your favorite podcast app.
Mike’s paper: https://www.brookings.edu/research/can-china-take-taiwan-why-no-one-really-knows/
My paper: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/E2BghQq9pwPgtHgiH/war-between-the-us-and-china-a-case-study-for-epistemic
Outro music: Battle Cry of Freedom by George Root https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW4ZwyYJYbQ
Check out the Substack at ChinaTalk.media!
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The dodo bird isn’t coming back anytime soon. Nor is the woolly mammoth. But a company working on technologies to bring back extinct species has attracted more investors, while other scientists are skeptical such feats are possible or a good idea.
Colossal Biosciences first announced its ambitious plan to revive the woolly mammoth two years ago, and on Tuesday said it wanted to bring back the dodo bird, too.
“The dodo is a symbol of man-made extinction,” said Ben Lamm, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder and CEO of Colossal. The company has formed a division to focus on bird-related genetic technologies.
The last dodo, a flightless bird about the size of a turkey, was killed in 1681 on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius.
The Dallas company, which launched in 2021, also announced Tuesday it had raised an additional $150 million in funding. To date, it has raised $225 million from wide-ranging investors that include United States Innovative Technology Fund, Breyer Capital and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm which invests in technology.
The prospect of bringing the dodo back isn’t expected to directly make money, said Lamm. But the genetic tools and equipment that the company develops to try to do it may have other uses, including for human health care, he said.
For example, Colossal is now testing tools to tweak several parts of the genome simultaneously. It’s also working on technologies for what is sometimes called an “artificial womb,” he said.
The dodo’s closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon, said Beth Shapiro, a molecular biologist on Colossal’s scientific advisory board, who has been studying the dodo for two decades. Shapiro is paid by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which also supports The Associated Press’ Health and Science Department.
Her team plans to study DNA differences between the Nicobar pigeon and the dodo to understand “what are the genes that really make a dodo a dodo,” she said.
The team may then attempt to edit Nicobar pigeon cells to make them resemble dodo cells. It may be possible to put the tweaked cells into developing eggs of other birds, such as pigeons or chickens, to create offspring that may in turn naturally produce dodo eggs, said Shapiro. The concept is still in an early theoretical stage for dodos.
Because animals are a product of both their genetics and their environment — which has changed dramatically since the 1600s — Shapiro said that “it’s not possible to recreate a 100% identical copy of something that’s gone.”
Other scientists wonder if it’s even advisable to try, and question whether “de-extinction” diverts attention and money away from efforts to save species still on Earth.
“There’s a real hazard in saying that if we destroy nature, we can just put it back together again — because we can’t,” said Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who has no connection to Colossal.
“And where on Earth would you put a woolly mammoth, other than in a cage?” asked Pimm, who noted that the ecosystems where mammoths lived disappeared long ago.
On a practical level, conservation biologists familiar with captive breeding programs say that it can be tricky for zoo-bred animals to ever adapt to the wild.
It helps if they can learn from other wild animals of their kind — an advantage that potential dodos and mammoths won’t have, said Boris Worm, a biologist at the University of Dalhousie in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who has no connection to Colossal.
“Preventing species from going extinct in the first place should be our priority, and in most cases, it’s a lot cheaper,” said Worm.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
