Tootfinder

Palo Alro. July 17. Good Trouble Lives On.

By “accusing powerful people of doing things in secret for their own benefit, against the common good,”
RFK Jr is trafficking in conspiracy theories,
according to Joseph E. Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami who studies the phenomenon.
Having a top government official contradicting science is
“a serious, serious problem,”
Professor Uscinkski said,
“because the hope is that,
in a free society,
you develop expertise and me…

RFK Jr., Rejecting Vaccine Data, Fuels Distrust of Public Health Agencies
By promoting suspicions about the institutions he oversees, critics say Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is jeopardizing public health. He says he is pursuing transparency.

Imagine having this issue with a kid...
It isn't exactly common but it happens occasionally with K being about 120lb. these days and me being a hard-rode 60yrs. He's not stupid but he has never fully internalized that if he tries to fight me when I'm picking him up, he can succeed in sabotaging that process and it is NOT GOOD.

No Such Thing as Free Brain Time: For a Pigouvian Tax on Attention Capture
Hamza Belgroun (Sciences Po, UniCA, CNRS, WIMMICS, Laboratoire I3S - SPARKS), Franck Michel (Laboratoire I3S - SPARKS, WIMMICS), Fabien Gandon (WIMMICS, Laboratoire I3S - SPARKS)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06453

No Such Thing as Free Brain Time: For a Pigouvian Tax on Attention Capture
In our age of digital platforms, human attention has become a scarce and highly valuable resource, rivalrous, tradable, and increasingly subject to market dynamics. This article explores the commodification of attention within the framework of the attention economy, arguing that attention should be understood as a common good threatened by over-exploitation. Drawing from philosophical, economic, and legal perspectives, we first conceptualize attention not only as an individual cognitive process…

“On labor and AI”
https://buttondown.com/practicaltips/archive/on-labor-and-ai/
“[M]aybe large numbers of us should come to a common conclusion that these bubble-boy charlatans shouldn’t just get to decide that the world’s economy (not to mention its ecology) sh…

On labor and AI
Happy Labor/Labour Day/bank holiday to you. Seems like a good day to talk about the elephant in the room again. The predominant storyline around labor, of...

Hach, damals, als man noch Bücher lesen und genießen konnte, ohne ständig mit Politik und Ideologie konfrontiert zu werden ...

Very good. Gift link, they're should be no paywall.
Fully MAGA-fied Christianity
“Trump and the MAGA movement capitalized on, and then amplified, the problems facing Christian communities, but they did not create them,” @Peter_Wehner argues:
https://w…

Fully MAGA-fied Christianity
Politics, especially culture-war politics, now provides many fundamentalists and evangelicals with a sense of community and a common enemy.

I wish my colleagues would stop telling students to avoid books that are older than XX years (25 seems to be common). There are many reasons why scholars may not have written on a given subject recently. In history, at least, that reason is sometimes that someone published a very good study in 1979.

What is a good matching of probability measures? A counterfactual lens on transport maps
Lucas De Lara, Luca Ganassali
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16027 https://

What is a good matching of probability measures? A counterfactual lens on transport maps
Coupling probability measures lies at the core of many problems in statistics and machine learning, from domain adaptation to transfer learning and causal inference. Yet, even when restricted to deterministic transports, such couplings are not identifiable: two atomless marginals admit infinitely many transport maps. The common recourse to optimal transport, motivated by cost minimization and cyclical monotonicity, obscures the fact that several distinct notions of multivariate monotone matchin…

As usual, billionaires are willing to go to great lengths to avoid having to contribute even a fraction of their wealth to the common good. These people are the root of much that is wrong with the world, and we simply need to make it both unacceptable and impossible for anyone to be a billionaire at the expense of the vast majority of people worldwide.

Re-Representation in Sentential Relation Extraction with Sequence Routing Algorithm
Ramazan Ali Bahrami, Ramin Yahyapour
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21049 https://

Re-Representation in Sentential Relation Extraction with Sequence Routing Algorithm
Sentential relation extraction (RE) is an important task in natural language processing (NLP). In this paper we propose to do sentential RE with dynamic routing in capsules. We first show that the proposed approach outperform state of the art on common sentential relation extraction datasets Tacred, Tacredrev, Retacred, and Conll04. We then investigate potential reasons for its good performance on the mentioned datasets, and yet low performance on another similar, yet larger sentential RE datas…

Good Morning #Canada
In August 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Quebec could not legally secede from Canada unilaterally. The court's decision affirmed that any secession would require a constitutional amendment negotiated with the federal government and other provinces. This ruling stemmed from a reference case initiated by the federal government following a close referendum on Quebec sovereignty in 1995. Although Quebec was represented at the Supreme Supreme Court hearing, they did not participate in presenting arguments. They essentially ignored the ruling and planned a future referendum, which never happened.
This ruling established an important precedent that Alberta separatists should pay attention to. But details such as this ruling, aboriginal rights, or common sense seem to escape their attention spans.
#CanadaIsAwesome
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/supreme-court-says-quebec-can-t-separate-unilaterally-1.159509

Good to see at least some politicians realizing that you need to provide solutions that the voters need, not policies that the big donors like, the policies shaped by years of mindless repetition of Milton Friedman's failed economic hypotheses, policies based on "everyone knows - it's common sense" rather than actually looking at what works and what doesn't.
(And Friedman's nonsense has been a mantra since the 1970s, so everyone has heard the nonsense pre…

Good to see at least some politicians realizing that you need to provide solutions that the voters need, not policies that the big donors like, the policies shaped by years of mindless repetition of Milton Friedman's failed economic hypotheses, policies based on "everyone knows - it's common sense" rather than actually looking at what works and what doesn't.
(And Friedman's nonsense has been a mantra since the 1970s, so everyone has heard the nonsense pre…

CISA says "Privatizing the CVE Program would dilute its value as a public good," and that dialogue it has had "opened the door to new relationships, conversations, and valuable feedback about the CVE Program."
CVE Quality for a Cyber Secure Future
http…

Empirical AI Ethics: Reconfiguring Ethics towards a Situated, Plural, and Transformative Approach
Paula Helm, Selin Gerlek
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17727 https://

Empirical AI Ethics: Reconfiguring Ethics towards a Situated, Plural, and Transformative Approach
Mainstream AI ethics, with its reliance on top-down, principle-driven frameworks, fails to account for the situated realities of diverse communities affected by AI (Artificial Intelligence). Critics have argued that AI ethics frequently serves corporate interests through practices of 'ethics washing', operating more as a tool for public relations than as a means of preventing harm or advancing the common good. As a result, growing scepticism among critical scholars has cast the field as complic…

Non-participant externalities reshape the evolution of altruistic punishment
Zhao Song, Chen Shen, Valerio Capraro, The Anh Han
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08302 https://

Non-participant externalities reshape the evolution of altruistic punishment
While voluntary participation is a key mechanism that enables altruistic punishment to emerge, its explanatory power typically rests on the common assumption that non-participants have no impact on the public good. Yet, given the decentralized nature of voluntary participation, opting out does not necessarily preclude individuals from influencing the public good. Here, we revisit the role of voluntary participation by allowing non-participants to exert either positive or negative impacts on the…

Good Morning #Canada
I have one final chapter for The Dirt on Canadian Farming, and it's more of an opinion piece.
As I conducted research on each province for information on their agriculture, there were numerous news stories about how farmers and farm organizations were fighting against loss of farmland. Urban growth, new housing development, and sprawling industrial parks are gobbling up prime farmland. The attached article is just one example. The statistics released by each province have common trends:the average age of farmers increasing, individual farm operators in decline, larger farms are increasing, renting of farmland is growing, and overall arable land is in decline. With the sparsely populated prairies holding the majority of fertile farmland, Canada likely won't lose our global impact because of development for houses or industry. But elsewhere, our food chain will be pushed further away from where we live. Or disappear.
#CanadaIsAwesome #SaveOurFarmland
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/waterloo-region-new-update-wilmot-land-plans-1.7534644

The average undergrad tuition fee in the 1974/75 academic year in Canada, across all disciplines, was $547 ($3445 adjusted to 2025)
Fees 50 years later in 2024/25 were $7360 ($7496 adjusted)
That is more than double. 117%.
And I *know* from personal experience this is a low ball average. If I could find a breakdown by discipline or by length of study for today, some would be even more obscene.
What has changed? Any occupation outside a minimum wage paying job demands a 2-4yr undergraduate diploma or degree, if not more.
Think about the 1970s and how common it was for people to get good paying jobs, leading to careers, without even high school education. Our free education stops with high school.
My family is a good example.
Mom and Step Dad: teacher college/degree. One got a Masters mid career.
Dad: didn’t complete HS
Father in law: didn’t complete HS
Mother in law: completed HS mid-career
Leadership positions and full careers demand a Masters or PhD requiring 5-10 years of study after HS!
Add in the cost of food and housing and the massive cuts happening at all colleges and universities because of the loss of international student tuition and I am going to go out on a limb and say our students today are going to pay double the price for a far worse experience than possibly any time since the Second World War.
Public education should be free.
Food and Housing should be controlled.
If the only thing government cares about is the economy, then they are setting us up for failure, and have been for decades.
(Don’t get me started on the kinds of “values” Canadian governments demonstrate when International student tuitions are 5x more than domestic students, let alone the inherent revenue risk in that funding strategy that has now come home to roost)
#canpoli #cdnpoli #education #university #college #canada
(
74/75 Source Stats Can: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3710015001&pickMembers[0]=1.1&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=1972 / 1973&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2006 / 2007&referencePeriods=19720101,20060101
24/25 source stats can: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3710004501
cc: @… @…

Good Morning #Canada
We are wrapping up a Canada-cation with the family at Blue Mountain in Collingwood, Ontario. This area has exploded as a year-round resort since my wife and I skied here in the mid-70s. One of the big tourist attractions that we never visited was Blue Mountain Pottery. Started in 1953 to help increase revenues in the gift shop for the ski resort, it produced pottery with distinctive mixtures of glazes, the most common of which included a blue-green and a dark grey or black glaze. The pottery became popular in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s; it was also exported to the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. After Blue Mountain Pottery closed in 2004, the pottery became popular among collectors, and examples are held by the Royal Ontario Museum and the George R. Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art.
#CanadaIsAwesome #Pottery #CanadaCation
https://www.mountainlifemedia.ca/2014/07/how-pottery-saved-blue-mountain/

Good Morning #Canada
Yesterday, we upgraded our water filtration and, to ease the pain in my wallet, I thought I would share some facts on well water for those who care.
- approximately 11% of Canadians rely on non-municipal water sources.
- the vast majority of wells are drilled wells because they are safer, provide higher volume, and generally last longer.
- dug wells (like ours) are less common and are usually placed where there is a high water table. They are more susceptible to surface runoff.
- well water, although free, is not necessarily cheaper than municipal supply. There is a large upfront cost, which can vary greatly depending on soil conditions, but $25K for drilled and $10K for dug is not uncommon.
- a pump and filtration equipment can cost another $10K, depending on water treatment needed. We needed an additional Iron Filter due to high concentration. Sediment filters and UV treatment require annual maintenance, typically $400 .
#CanadaIsAwesome #Water #GlassHalfFull