Capitalism

The Implosion of Southwest Airlines and Financialization

Southwest Airlines canceled thousands of flights representing more than 80%of all cancellations during the Christmas 2022 snowstorm. The scale of this service implosion led to stories about old software systems for managing passenger bookings and flight schedules. Then, discussions of Southwest’s point-to-point flight strategy that differs from the other major —>> read more –>>

Technology

Is OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI app a deceptive, perhaps dangerous tool?

Further experiments with ChatGPT (following yesterday’s post >>>) significantly weaken its usefulness and even suggest that it is a potentially dangerous, unreliable source of information. Experiment Six (continuing from previous post) – Query: when will ChatGPT provide bibliographic references for its answers? As an artificial intelligence, I am not able to —>> read more –>>

Technology

The State of Artificial Intelligence – OpenAI’s ChatGPT

ChatGPT has been all over the internet in recent weeks. I have now experimented with it and have some initial thoughts to share. I ran a number of “experiments” to explore what this natural language AI could do. Using the December 15th version of ChatGPT I posed a series of questions. —>> read more –>>

Justice/Jails

The State of Mass Incarceration – 2022

Prison Policy Initiative released a new report on the state of incarceration in 2022. (graphics from prison policy.org) Over 80% of those in Local Jails are waiting for trial – they’ve been convicted of nothing other than not having the money to buy their way out of jail. Drugs still —>> read more –>>

Social Nature

Our Social Nature and the Future

I’ve spent more than a year investigating the sources of our species reaction to autocrats, pandemics, global warming and the crisis of global capitalism. Here is a draft of an introduction to the topic. Lots of evolution, anthropology, archeology, neurology and cognitive psychology all rolled up. Now on to understanding —>> read more –>>