All posts tagged: slope

Newsom Scrubs ‘0 Million’ Slippery Slope From National ‘Billionaire Tax’ Pitch – And He’s Coming After Inheritance Too

Newsom Scrubs ‘$100 Million’ Slippery Slope From National ‘Billionaire Tax’ Pitch – And He’s Coming After Inheritance Too

Published by Jenni Sidey

California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) on Friday called for a national tax on billionaires. Except, in the original version, it was anyone with a net worth of at least $100 million – as quoted by multiple outlets, citing a post from Newsom’s Substack account.  As originally reported by Politico: His plan to address the country’s yawning wealth gap includes “a true minimum tax on billionaires and those with a net worth of $100 million” and creating a national public equity fund to give all Americans a stake in the economic gains created by artificial intelligence companies.  The post now reads: “So here is what I support: A national billionaires’ tax. A true minimum tax on billionaires — a modern Buffett Rule — that ensures the people at the very top pay at least the tax rate their own workers pay.” Bitch please.  Newsom also wants to tax inheritance – writing “We also need to rewrite our inheritance rules. Over the next twenty years, this country will live through the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history, with roughly $124 trillion changing hands. …

Alpine skiing-Women’s GS sparks ‘junior slope’ jibe but Shiffrin praises piste’s safety

Alpine skiing-Women’s GS sparks ‘junior slope’ jibe but Shiffrin praises piste’s safety

Published by Sam Flores

(Adds dropped word in headline) By Julien Pretot CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, ITALY, Feb 15 : The two leading giant slalom racers of the season delivered a blunt verdict on the Olympic course on Sunday, with Switzerland’s Camille Rast saying the hill felt “like a junior race slope” after a race that left her and Austria’s Julia Scheib just outside the podium places. Rast, who finished 12th and 0.37 seconds off the medals, said the layout — flat after a strong top section and unforgiving to mistakes — was not like a traditional giant slalom. “I would love to race on the real slalom slope from the World Champs, because that’s a real slalom slope. This is like a junior race slope. But that’s life. We are at the Olympics and we take what we have to do,” said Rast, second in the giant slalom World Cup standings. American Mikaela Shiffrin, who placed 11th, instead praised the piste’s safety and spectacle. “I don’t think anybody would say there was danger on this hill today. It was actually …

AI and the Slippery Slope of Frictionless Intelligence

AI and the Slippery Slope of Frictionless Intelligence

Published by Jenni Sidey

Here’s what really strikes me. Artificial intelligence doesn’t just operate differently from human thought but inverts nearly every cognitive constraint we face. AI exists in computational antithesis to human thought, something I’ve been calling anti-intellgence. This is where human cognition is memory-bound, and stateless. Where we strive toward fluency, it generates instantly. Where our judgment emerges slowly through error and revision, its outputs appear complete. Where understanding requires a sort of metabolic effort, confidence arrives without cost. These aren’t simply differences in capability; they represent an inversion of the conditions under which intelligence itself is produced. For us, thinking carries weight because it carries cost. Understanding requires time, and judgment emerges through this struggle. And it’s this experience that shapes belief, and intelligence remains inseparable from this friction. We work toward insight, and that work matters because meaning emerges through this effort of human thought. So far, so good. But artificial intelligence operates under fundamentally different conditions. A large language model isn’t constrained by memory in the human sense. And let’s make this clear. It …

Collar Cams Offer a Bear’s Eye View Into the Lives of Grizzlies on Alaska’s Desolate North Slope

Collar Cams Offer a Bear’s Eye View Into the Lives of Grizzlies on Alaska’s Desolate North Slope

Published by Sam Flores

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The life of one of the most remote grizzly bear populations in the world is being documented by the animals themselves, with collar cameras that provide a rare glimpse of how they survive on Alaska’s rugged and desolate North Slope. Twelve of the 200 or so grizzlies that roam the frigid, treeless terrain near the Arctic Ocean have been outfitted with the cameras as part of a research project by Washington State University and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The videos they record — many partially obscured by the undersides of whiskery muzzles — show the bears playing or fighting with companions, gnawing on a caribou, snarfing up berries, napping on a beach, and swimming in a pond looking for fish. Packing on the pounds for winter The bears hibernate about eight months of the year. “They really have a really short window to obtain enough food resources to pack on enough fat to survive that period,” said Washington State doctoral student Ellery Vincent, who is leading the project …

Conservatives are more prone to slippery slope thinking

Conservatives are more prone to slippery slope thinking

Published by José Betancourt

New research suggests that individuals who identify as politically conservative are more likely than their liberal counterparts to find “slippery slope” arguments logically sound. This tendency appears to stem from a greater reliance on intuitive thinking styles rather than deliberate processing. The findings were published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Slippery slope arguments are a staple of rhetoric in law, ethics, and politics. These arguments suggest that a minor, seemingly harmless initial action will trigger a chain reaction leading to a catastrophic final outcome. A classic example is the idea that eating one cookie will lead to eating ten, which will eventually result in significant weight gain. Despite the prevalence of this argumentative structure, psychological research has historically lacked a clear understanding of who finds these arguments persuasive. “The most immediate motivation for this research was an observation that, despite being relatively common in everyday discussions and well-researched in philosophy and law, there is simply not much psychological research on slippery slope thinking and arguments,” explained study author Rajen A. Anderson, an assistant …

Assisted-Suicide Slippery Slope Keeps Slip-Sliding Away

Assisted-Suicide Slippery Slope Keeps Slip-Sliding Away

Published by Jenni Sidey

This article is republished from National Review with the permission of the author. When assisted suicide is first proposed for legalization, we are assured by death activists that strict guidelines will protect against abuse. But they don’t mean it. Once the laws pass, the supposed protections — which are always flaccid to begin with — are soon redefined by activists and the media as “barriers,” et voila, the laws are soon loosened. It’s all a con, but people seem to fall for it every time. Image Credit: Felipe Caparrós – Adobe Stock This pattern can be seen vividly playing out in Victoria, Australia. The state was the first in that country to legalize assisted suicide, and now the government is making more people eligible for legally hastened death. From the premier’s announcement: The new legislation will remove unnecessary barriers to accessing VAD, improve clarity for practitioners, strengthen safety measures and make the system fairer and more compassionate. See what I mean? “Strengthen safety,” (!!!) and “fairer and more compassionate,” really just means more people can become dead …