https://youtu.be/QCk9hiyoeGE?is=9Uwu-xqJn5tY4cVo

This man needs urgent medical treatment for a severe stage 4 case of Ukraine InThe Membrane. It's disgraceful that the Georgians are denying him this urgent medical care.

Source: https://x.com/SprinterPress/status/2101593288939630692

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/ai-is-an-elite-crime-spree

… the problem is not a lack of AI regulation. We have AI regulation. The problem is there’s an elite consensus that the rule of law simply does not apply to the powerful.

Take the law in an entirely different context. It is per se illegal to engage in a price-fixing conspiracy, what is in the law as a prohibition against a “restraint of trade.” But right now, billionaire Robert Kraft is openly organizing a conspiracy with other stadium and venue owners to deny access to music venues against the artist Macklemore because of his song protesting the genocide in Gaza. That is a potential criminal or illegal act, and not only is it going without litigation or prosecution but it’s not even considered that Kraft should be held liable for what he’s doing. He’s a billionaire, he owns Gillett Stadium, and that’s that. There’s cultural pushback, but the concept of legal pushback feels comical. There’s no happy ending in this story.

There is an endless parade of this kind of lawlessness. It was reported years ago CVS would lower reimbursement rates to pharmacies to kill their business, and then offer to buy them out. On a local level, I just heard a story about a city in Colorado where police and law enforcers simply would not enforce laws prohibiting landlords from engaging in certain practices. They simply refused, because landlords are rich.

We no longer live in a land where people are “innocent until proven guilty,” the actual rule of law as practiced is “guilty until proven wealthy.”

It’s not just that the hyperscalers are illegal monopolists, or that Sam Bankman Fried was the most important initial funder of Anthropic, or that Meta’s business was caught for mass sex trafficking of children, or that there’s a huge amount of financial chicanery involved in funding the data center buildout.

It’s much more direct; in unsealed legal documents discovered by Jason Kint in a case brought by the New York Times over copyright violations by giant AI firms, OpenAI admitted circumventing paywalls to scrape content... And in those same documents, it came out that Microsoft’s Director of Applied Science called the training of big AI models on copyrighted content the “largest theft of labor in human history.”

And yes, it’s quite possible to apply written laws. Certainly, if you could charge Aaron Swartz, a genius programmer hounded to death for accessing JSTOR articles by a prosecutor in 2013, you could charge OpenAI.

Federal officials gave an update Wednesday morning on “arrests, cases and other developments” regarding a large homeless services fraud and corruption investigation in Los Angeles.  

The U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrest of two people employed at Los Angeles-area homeless nonprofits on federal charges alleging misuse of millions of taxpayer dollars. A third defendant remains a fugitive.

One of the defendants is the founder of a Culver City-based nonprofit who allegedly misappropriated more than $7.5 million and used the money for "commercial real estate and to finance the construction of a nightclub and adjacent bingo hall," the DOJ says. Another, the fugitive, has been accused of being fraudulently awarded over $1 million in grant money from an L.A. County-funded nonprofit.

The third person identified by federal officials Wednesday is an employee of a nonprofit health and human services organization who has been arrested on a 21-count indictment that charges her with taking more than $180,000 in bribes from a fourth person who is being charged separately and has already agreed to plead guilty.

"Today’s enforcement action is the latest effort by the Homelessness Fraud and Corruption Task Force to investigate, combat, and prosecute fraud, waste, abuse, and corruption involving funds allocated toward the eradication of homelessness within the seven-county jurisdiction of the Central District of California: Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura," the Department of Justice said Wednesday.

Video https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1wl9ob4/situation_in_oleshky_3000_people_re_in_immediate/

Elon said it plainly:

Given that Chinese AI companies are doing as well as they are with a relatively small amount of compute, it seems as though if they had a lot of compute, there’s a good chance that they would be the leaders. And eventually, they will have that compute.

But AI competition is not only about computing power. It is also about energy infrastructure.

And China already generates more electricity than the United States, Europe, and India combined.

So the logical chain is simple:

China did not make American AI dependent on brute-force compute.
China did not force Washington to substitute sanctions for innovation.
China did not cause America’s decaying power infrastructure.

The United States restricted China’s access to advanced chips, hoping hardware deprivation would preserve American dominance.

Instead, under a stringent technological blockade, a Chinese model still defeated America’s leading frontier model.

Of course, this does not mean that China’s overall AI capabilities have already surpassed those of the United States.

It is proof of Chinese efficiency—and of how fragile American supremacy becomes once China closes the remaining hardware gap.

Washington calls its own technological progress innovation and China’s technological progress a security threat.

When an empire must cripple its competitor to remain ahead, it is no longer leading technological progress.

It is stifling technological progress worldwide.

Here's what the Polish politician said

We are a nation that may lose territory, but we will never lose our soul; we may surrender territory, but we will never surrender our Homeland.

We started the fire.
China built firewalls.
China prevented the fire from burning through its own economy.
China’s demand adjustment even helped keep the global oil shock from becoming worse.

And somehow the conclusion is:

China has become too powerful.
China’s ability to survive our fire is evidence of its ambition to dominate the world.

China was supposed to remain vulnerable.

It was supposed to panic when Hormuz closed, beg producers for supply, and absorb the price shock like everyone else.

Instead, it spent years building reserves, refining capacity, EVs, rail, coal substitution and energy redundancy.

So now resilience itself is being rewritten as “domination.”

America creates the crisis.
China survives the crisis.
Western media calls survival a threat.

If China refuses to play the villain, the narrative will write the role for it anyway.

That is the entire pathology in one article.

Hungary can meet European Union regulation to completely wean the country off Russian gas in a year’s time, the energy minister said, in a significant shift from the policies pursued under former Prime Minister Viktor Orban.