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Biden moves to 70% betting chance for the nomination – politicalbetting.com
Biden moves to 70% betting chance for the nomination – politicalbetting.com
I have generally been very skeptical of Biden’s chances of being the WH2024 nominee once again but he clearly wants it and the big question is whether his health will hold.
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BUT perhaps worth noting, that in lead-up to 1948 election, Harry Truman had his own issues, most especially re: Public Opinion. With many politicos, pundits and active voters, including many Democrats and Progressives (of that era) skeptical regarding the possibility and/or desirability of Truman's re-nomination AND re-election.
Just sayin'
https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/uk-government-to-parade-trident-missiles-through-glasgow/
https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/eu-troops-to-take-over-military-base-in-the-uk/
https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/area-of-glasgow-to-become-english-territory-on-independence/
The Traditionalist Left, disillusioned suburbanites and centrist Liberals who backed the Conservatives in 2019 now back Starmer Labour.
The Activist Left who were the only group to back Corbyn in 2019 are now 75% Labour
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/04/01/reform-tory-countryside-vote-conservatives-rural-right/
https://twitter.com/polblonde/status/1642148168547676160
“If that's true (I think not) then consciousness is an emergent property of stuff and anything can be conscious.”
++++
It’s a truly fascinating question. The best recent paper on GPT4 and LLMs in general is this one
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712.pdf
They have this in their conclusion:
“Our study of GPT-4 is entirely phenomenological: We have focused on the surprising things that GPT-4 can do, but we do not address the fundamental questions of why and how it achieves such remarkable intelligence. How does it reason, plan, and create? Why does it exhibit such general and flexible intelligence when it is at its core merely the combination of simple algorithmic components—gradient descent and large-scale transformers with extremely large amounts of data? These questions are part of the mystery and fascinatoon of LLMs, which challenge our understanding of learning and cognition, fuel our curiosity, and motivate deeper research.
Key directions include ongoing research on the phenomenon of emergence in LLMs (see [WTB+22] for a recent survey). Yet, despite intense interest in questions about the capabilities of LLMs,
progress to date has been quite limited with only toy models where some phenomenon of emergence is proved [BEG+22, ABC+22, JSL22]. One general hypothesis [OCS+20] is that the large amount of data (especially the diversity of the content) forces neural networks to learn generic and useful “neural circuits”, such as the ones discovered in [OEN+22, ZBB+22, LAG+22], while the large size of models provide enough redundancy and diversity for the neural circuits to specialize and fine-tune to specific tasks.”
Basically, sentience and intelligence might be emergent properties, which arise ‘naturally’ given enough complexity, data and information. The machines are coming to life as they grow
Which makes sense, as our own consciousness is an emergent property, which revealed itself as we got more complex, evolving from Protozoa to primitive fish to mammal and primate
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/TedKennedy/story?id=8436488
Grrr
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/alpha-lawyers-american-firms-london-mega-salaries-bonuses-dls5xxw8v
"Look around and the signs of dysfunction are everywhere. Just as the scale of the country’s wealth and power are hard to comprehend for those of us outside the imperial homeland, so too is the scale of its violent disorder and dysfunction. Take homelessness. In Los Angeles today, there are approximately 42,000 people sleeping rough at the moment — and some 113,000 in California overall. In the whole of England, by contrast, there are around 3,000."
https://unherd.com/2023/04/the-paradox-of-american-chaos/
The fascist GOP and Trump need to be annihilated.
I think we are beginning to see an effect of what I can the Gym generations, feeding into the older population. That is, people who are accustomed to daily exercise.
My father, recently stopped running a couple of times a week - in his 80s. He was brought up in New York, among a peer group where you did some kind of exercise every week. When he came to the UK this was seen as a bit odd.
By contrast, my aunt gave up doing much when she retired and now has trouble walking a few steps.
Exercise and poverty don't have to be linked - in the local council estates there seems to be a very strong bike culture among a section of the young. Building and improving their own bikes. My father grew up poor - he ran track barefoot because he didn't have the extra money for running shoes. My father in law similarly kept active and made it to 98 - and he was living in a country where the current state of the NHS is a dream of the gods.
She’s up to her eyeballs in the GC world, as is obvious from her Twitter & she wonders why a sub-ed might not push back against some statement she makes about trans people in an article she writes for a newspaper? Isn’t that what sub eds are for?
This is the article she’s talking about:
https://www.ft.com/content/7d8aa57d-72bb-461a-8b91-c968a8ee015a
in which it seems fairly clear that Smith has inserted her own trans obsessions into a review of a book by Harriet Johnson, in an entire paragraph dedicated to moaning about the book author using cis- prefixes. It’s hardly going out on a limb to suggest that the sub-ed thought that Joan Smith was the one inserting her own agenda into a book review & was pushing back on that.
In an unprecedented system of tactical voting, the Scottish Tories are inviting rivals to co-operate in a “vote smart” strategy in a bid to shore up unionist votes in rural parts of Scotland while lending Labour support in the central belt, which stretches from Glasgow to Edinburgh.
However, the offer is likely to anger members of the UK Conservative Party who trail Labour in the polls and face a gruelling battle to keep Rishi Sunak in Downing Street.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/scots-tories-call-for-tactical-voting-to-end-snp-dominance-8vr30rl5r
Yes 48%
No 52%
In constituencies, 37 per cent of people said they would vote for the SNP, a fall of 6 points. Labour received 33 per cent support, up six points; the Conservatives 17 per cent, up one point; the Lib Dems 8 per cent, up one point; the Greens 5 per cent, up one point; with 4 per cent voting for other parties.
On the regional list, 31 per cent said they would vote SNP; Labour secured 27 per cent; the Tories 20 per cent; the Greens 10 per cent and the Lib Dems 6 per cent. Alba returned 5 per cent in a result that would see them return two MSPs, according to Curtice’s analysis
The SNP group would drop by 16 to 48 MSPs while Labour would go up by 15 to 37, the Conservatives would fall by five to 26 and the Greens and Lib Dems would each add two members to return ten and six MSPs respectively.
This would mean there would be a majority of unionist politicians in Holyrood for the first time since 2011.
And, if you are not in favour, why not, given the language you have just used?
If there is a threat to democracy, it's people like yourself who believe only they have the right answer when it comes to what is and isn't allowed.
Your line of thinking - and those of a similar ilk - is the far greater threat to democracy than the buffoon Trump.
'Buffoon Trump', trying to downplay his tyranny.
We got the beer hall putsch in 2021 thanks to that 'buffoon'.
I want them defeated at the ballot box, which is why I said they need to be annihilated.
An argument about motives and agendas will go back and forth, but there is a specific claim which should be simple to determine - if they deny asking for the inclusion as specified she's a liar. If they made the request, was it untrue as she claims?
As for Ted Kennedy, HIS major problem was a bridge to far . . . to Chappaquidick.
AND with respect to incumbent US presidents, who ran in next election but failed to secure nomination, note that;
> Franklin Pierce, nominated and elected by Democratic Party in 1852, was defeated for re-nomination by 1856 by fellow Democrat (and his own Secretary of State) James Buchanan, who defeated the (first) Republican Party nominee, John C. Fremont.
> Andrew Johnson, a "War Democrat" nominated for Vice President in 1864 on the "Union" ticket (by Republicans) along with Abraham Lincoln, was persona non grata with GOP four years later; so instead he sought the 1868 Democratic Party nomination, but lost this to Horatio Seymour, who was himself defeated by Republican nominee Ulysses S. Grant.
Also, I hate April 1st.
You were the one who referenced next year as the most important date for democracy since Operation Overlord ie the D-Day landings against the Nazis. You called the GOP fascists. Your language and analogies clearly scream you think them equivalent to Fascists and / or Nazis, in which case why not ban them?
You clearly want them banned so why don't you stop being a coward and state what you truly want, as opposed to hiding behind some nominal fence-sitting behaviour because you realise it's a step too far.
Oh, and maybe have a reasonable argument as opposed to going all Gammon when you are challenged.
Its if it is constant that it is not hyperbole and is concerning.
If only you got this angry at Trump and the GOP trying to steal the 2020 election.
I know SLab are up to their nuts in guts with the SCons in various council ‘arrangements’, but their main refrain is ‘we’re the only party can get rid of the Tories’, not sure if they’ll want to dilute that.
This is not the case. For the first time the USA faces a rival that can match it economically, and outmatches it in trade, and so on. China is thus displacing the USA in political influence in much of the world
As for soft power, that too is moving to Asia. See the rise of k-pop. Meanwhile America is intent on destroying its once peerless university system via equity and Wokeness
The American crisis is WORSE than the portrayal there
The comment that it's also concerning is consistent is also fairly weak given (1) it fails given it's a comment heard on here all the time that the GOP is fascistic / Nazi-like (2) if the GOP made a similar analogy to the Democrats, there would be a justifiable outcry and (3) extreme comments, even if one off, lead to extreme behaviour.
I know you are trying to justify TSE's language but it really isn't defensible in a Democracy.
Irrationally triggered by not only showing the scale out of order but also the word "unconfident"
As I said, you are now backtracking and saying you want them defeated at the ballot box but your original language made it clear you would much rather see them proscribed and banned. If I hear someone saying "Black people are criminals" and then trying to backtrack by saying "yeah but what I really meant is.." it's clear where their sentiments lie.
The GOP has been heavily infiltrated by populists, and even those that are more moderate are terrified of standing up to Trump
The extent that the Republicans have moved to the far right is also evidenced by the realisation taht George W Bush is now considered a moderate
The events subsequent to the 2020 election met that threshold.
If you think about the cultural changes in the late 60’s and early 70’s when those kids grew up and their ideology crashed into the real world you ended up with Reagan and the 80’s - these things can be quite cyclical and things that seemed a good idea are less so when they want a job, mortgage and they don’t like what the next wave are teaching their own kids.
K-pop is big but the US and UK are still providing a large portion of music the world consumes, as we’ve seen here the UK provides huge content for Netflix etc in Europe and around the world and US films etc whilst not having the hegemony they had are still massively popular.
I’m guessing that similar letters were being written to the papers in the 70’s but never underestimate the American spirit that is very driven and innovative.
Having said that I welcome our new Chinese and Korean overlords.
Again tho, this could all be changed by AI. Whoever masters this first - as Xi Jinping has actually said - will be like the first nuclear power. And there America has a distinct if narrow advantage, for now
He was followed as nominee by moderates McCain and Romney. Trump in 2016 was the first rightwing populist candidate to win the GOP nomination since Reagan
spy can be as effective, if not more so, than raw violence.
In any event, you haven't really answered the point. You said the GOP is fascist and 2024 is the most important
date for democracy since Overlord. So, are they truly fascist / Nazi - and therefore should be banned - or not?
People here simply can't believe someone that old would want it, or will survive to get it.
My concern is that branding one party as fascist clearly leads to the next logical step that they should be banned and (potentially) that it is legitimate to ignore their votes. If the GOP does win in 2024, will we hear calls that, because they clearly can't win, any win by its very nature has to be illegitimate and therefore banned?
Re Bush, he was but he was demonised at the time. So was Romney. There is a question whether (and I'm not saying you) the claims by the Democrats that the two are moderate, true Republicans is heartfelt believed or is merely a political tactic to
Much as I dislike them, I wouldn’t call them ‘fascist’. Foolish idiots playing with fire is more like it
I don’t think Trump is your classical fascist either. ‘A dangerous, unhinged demagogue who menaces America and who will hopefully disappear’, yes, he’s definitely that.
Interesting stuff. I am open minded; but there are problems. In the empirical world things have causes (hence science) which can be uncovered, hypothesised and tested, verified (or falsified), on the basis of which laws and regularities can be formulated and predictions made. This I would describe as the world of 'how it works'.
With mental events (consciousness, sentience) there isn't a 'How It Works' available, nor, crucially, is it possible to formulate an empirically based possibility(s) - hypothesis - of "How It Works" within any physics known to us.
So either it is not an emergent property at all (BTW mental events are not properties, they are things, as we all know in our heads) or else they emerge by laws/physics of which we are 100% ignorant. And likely to remain so.
If it happens in 2024 then it becomes a lot harder for contenders who aren't Kamala Harris to put a strong run together. This means that if Biden isn't the nominee then Harris will be.
I tend to think that Harris is a weaker candidate than Hillary Clinton, and so I'd rate the chances of her losing the general quite highly.
So I think it's quite a narrow window for a non-Biden Democrat winner.
I prefer fascists to lose at the ballot box and or convicted of crimes they are guilty of.
If only you got this angry at Trump and the GOP trying to steal the 2020 election.
I do think what you say about a lot of Labour MPs and rural people could equally be applied to the RW seats - which is why I am very sceptical of a Labour majority.
Indeed historically from FDR to Mcgovern, Mondale to Dukakis and Kerry to Obama the Democrats have been more likely to elect the non centrist candidate for the nomination and pick a left liberal than the GOP have picked a hardline Conservative
Trump was only interested in conserving his own wealth.
All living creatures process information so as to live. As the creatures evolve to become more complex they need to process MORE information, so their brains grow, and at some point on this road the brain gets big enough and is processing enough information it somehow becomes self aware. Conscious. Sentient
Why should computers, which are made of atoms and molecules just like us, not follow the same pattern? As they get bigger and process more information, there will be a moment when consciousness will evolve just as it evolved in animals. It’s not a unique miracle
The mystery of how and when consciousness arises at a particular moment abides. I agree with that. Is a chimp conscious? Of course. A dog? Yes. A gecko? Hmm. A bumblebee? Probably not. An amoeba? Almost certainly not. A virus?
Somewhere on that evolutionary progression consciousness emerged. So then the question is: what stage are computers at? Bumblebee? Gecko? Dog?
My original point - as anyone can see and several posters can reference - is that, if you refer to the GOP as fascists and make a comparison to the D Day invasion to defeat the Nazis, then you clearly see the GOP as fascists / Nazis and therefore why don't you want them banned?
It's not a difficult question and I really don't see what referencing whether I got angry at Trump (and I have told you I did) really impacts your ability to answer.
No US President has ever been to a British Monarch's coronation and no British monarch has ever been to a US President's inauguration