Weekend RoundUp (Feb 1st 2018)

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tech.newstatesman.com/guest-opinion/planetary-labour-market wrote:
A few months ago, I visited an artificial intelligence training centre in a rural town in Central Africa. Getting there involved a day-long drive from the nearest international airport. It was here, in a place where many people still live in thatched huts and few families possess any of the technological gadgets of the contemporary world, that workers are helping to build some of the world’s most advanced technologies and services.

In a large open-plan office with hundreds of desks and computers, workers spend eight hours a day doing highly repetitive work like matching names to photographs of minor celebrities they’ve never heard of, or identifying objects in photos of suburban America in cities that they will never go to. What these tasks have in common with the dozens of other routines performed in the room is that computers cannot yet perform them as effectively as humans. Real people are needed to structure, classify, and tag an enormous amount of unstructured information for companies using machine learning algorithms in products like autonomous vehicles and next-generation search engines.

What is most interesting about this work is that the workers themselves are never actually told much about what they are doing. They know, for instance, that they need to repeatedly tell a computer what the difference between a tree and a building is; but are never told anything about the end client, such as their name, location, or what this information is for. This is the ultimate in alienated labour: people doing work for companies they know nothing about, building products and services they will probably never use.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/neqvgg/unicef-is-asking-gamers-to-mine-cryptocurrency-for-syrian-children wrote:
UNICEF Is Asking Gamers to Mine Cryptocurrency for Syrian Children
Graphics cards are good for more than games.

WAR

www.voltairenet.org/article199471.html wrote:Today, Donald Trump finds himself in the same uncomfortable position that Mikhaïl Gorbatchev once occupied.

Let’s remember the end of the Soviet Union, in 1991. The colossus fell to ruins, throwing the economy of its populations back several decades, brutally amputating the life expectancy of its inhabitants by more than twenty years, and provoking the domino fall of several of its allies. At that time, the question of knowing what would be the consequences of this cataclysm on the other great empire of the 20th century – the United States and their allies – was already being asked.

Over the last sixteen years, the very old problems of US society have developed exponentially. During the most recent Black Friday sales, weapons became the best sellers, overtaking portable phones. The life expectancy of white US citizens has diminished drastically, specifically since 2001, while it has progressed for all other categories of the US population, as opioid epidemic for older white males has become a major national cause.

Seeking to avoid the implosion of his country, President George H. Bush decided to get rid of his Cold War military apparatus as quickly as possible. He forced international recognition of US leadership during operation « Desert Storm », then demobilised more than a million soldiers. Fearing the spectre of collapse, the Republican Party took over the House of Representatives in order to forced Democrat President Bill Clinton to rearm the country and integrate the ex-members of the Warsaw Pact into the Atlantic Alliance.

The Rearmament Act of 1995 and the strategy of Pentagon’s new map, which were implemented in the Greater Middle East from 2001, are now on their last legs. These measures forced the United States to concentrate the greater part of its resources on the destruction of the Muslim States and their societies, but allowed other countries to develop their own militaries, including Russia and China. Today, the US armed forces are no longer the strongest armies in the world.

Of course, the US armed forces have an unparalleled budget which is nine times greater than that of Russia. But its armies are pitifully unproductive. US armament is certainly produced in huge quantities, but it is obsolete compared with that of Russia and China. US engineers are no longer able to produce new weapons, as demonstrated by the failure of the F-35programme. At best, they cobble together bits of old machines and present them as new aircraft.

As from now, international relations are dominated by this question – will the United States accept its current position or not. The election of Donald Trump to the White House is first of all the consequence of this undeniable collapse.

http://www.defenseone.com wrote:“Today, America’s military reclaims an era of strategic purpose, alert to the realities of a changing world,” said Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, according to the prepared remarks of his speech on Friday morning. “We will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists, but great power competition—not terrorism—is now the primary focus of U.S. national security,”

http://therealnews.com/t2/story:21038:Russiagate-is-Dangerous%2C-Will-Washington-Get-the-Memo%3F wrote:STEPHEN COHEN: Well, Mattis will presumably have to explain that when, eventually, as I fear they will, international terrorists blow an American subway, or an American sports arena as they've doing across Europe and Russia for years. That's simply in myopic point of view of what's been happening during the last 20 years. And I don't know what to say except it's fundamentally wrong. It's basically anti-Russian. So, they de-escalate the importance of terrorism. They get there, whoa, nobody wants to give Trump any credit, but in his State of the Union speech, the only thing he said about Russia is that it's a rival. He didn't say it's an enemy. He didn't say it's a threat. He said it's a rival. That's absolutely true. He was not down with his generals during the State of the Union speech.

What's the most worrying thing? That the new Cold War is unfolding not far away from Russia, like the last in Berlin, but on Russia's borders in the Baltic and in Ukraine. That we are building up our military presence there, so the Russians are counter-building up, though within their territory. That means the chances of hot war are now much greater than they were before. Meanwhile, not only do we not have a discussion of these real dangers in the United States but anyone who wants to incite a discussion, including the President of the United States, is called treasonous.

I mean, every time Trump has tried with Putin to reach a cooperative arrangement, for example, on fighting terrorism in Syria, which is a worthy purpose, a necessary purpose, literally, the New York Times and the others call him treasonous. Whereas, in the old days, the old Cold War, we had a robust discussion. There is none here. We have no alert system that's warning the American people and its representatives how dangerous this is. And as we mentioned before, I mean, it's not only Nunes, it's a lot of people who are being called Kremlin agents because they want to digress from the basic narrative.

Meanwhile, I would add because it's not reported here, that people in Moscow who formed their political establishment, who surround Putin and the Kremlin, I mean, the big brains who are formed policy tankers, and who have always tended to be kind of pro-American, and very moderate, have simply come to the conclusion that war is coming. They can't think of a single thing to tell the Kremlin to offset hawkish views in the Kremlin. Every day, I mean, this list of oligarchs and the rest. Every day, there's something new. And these were the people in Moscow who are daytime peacekeeping interlockers. They have been destroyed by Russiagate. Their influence as Russia is zilch. And the McCarthyites in Russia, they have various terms, now called the pro-American lobby in Russia... This is the damage that's been done. There's never been anything like this in my lifetime.

AARON MATÉ: There is a report put out recently by the very influential Council on Foreign Relations. And they echo something you've been saying for a long time. They say the US is currently in a second cold war with Russia. Now, they arrived to different conclusions that you do, and call for an even more aggressive policy towards Russia than we have already. But I'm wondering what you think the aims there are of people from an establishment group like this. I mean, this is the cream of the crop when it comes to the US foreign policy establishment, pushing now for ramping up the confrontation with Russia.

STEPHEN COHEN: Well, for many years, the people who ran the council denied we were in a new Cold War. When I was arguing that, they said I was wrong. I think partly because they don't understand what Cold War is. But mainly because of their own complicity in the policy making. You have to understand, if you don't or your viewers don't, what is the council on foreign relations? It's not just a think tank. The council is and has been for almost 100 years, certainly 50 years, the single most influential non-governmental center of foreign policy influence. What it's done over the years because of its elite membership, is shaped essentially the parameters of mainstream discussion, what's culture and what isn't culture. It didn't do a bad job during the last Cold War. But now, it's published the report saying we're in "second Cold War"with Russia. That's correct, assuming the first one really ended. Of course, they blame it entirely on Russia. And therefore, they have what they call a list of recommendations that probably would lead the Hot War.

I wasn't surprised, but I was sufficiently aggrieved that I sent a letter of resignation because I've been a member since the 1970s. But nothing will change their course. They don't debate it. But they are a reflection of where we're at in this country in terms of our political establishment because as much as the council influences the political establishment, if like the New York Times, for example, mirrors what's permissible, what's being thought within the political establishment. It's a new Cold War, and I won't reiterate what I said to you last time we were on, but for various reasons, I assure you, this new Cold War is much more dangerous, much more likely to end in Hot War, was then was the 40-year of Cold War, which we barely survived.