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Cake day: November 30th, 2023

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  • Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) made the stakes clear Monday morning. There is only one “objector” to speeding up Senate consideration of the government funding package — Paul. The senator wants to strip a section from the bill that would prevent the sale of hemp-derived products like Delta-8 at gas stations, corner stores, or online without federal regulation.

    Paul defended his stance as part of his duty to Kentucky. “Just to be clear: I am not delaying this bill. The timing is already fixed under Senate procedure. But there is extraneous language in this package that has nothing to do with reopening the government and would harm Kentucky’s hemp farmers and small businesses,” he said in a statement posted on X. “Standing up for Kentucky jobs is part of my job,” he added.






  • The U.S. military has carried out 17 known attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 70 people. The most recent attack, on a vessel in the Caribbean Sea on Thursday killed three civilians. Military officials admitted to lawmakers that they do not know the identities of all the people on board a vessel before they conduct a lethal strike. Following most of the attacks, War Secretary Pete Hegseth or President Donald Trump have claimed that the victims belonged to an unspecified designated terrorist organization, or DTO.

    “This is not just a secret war, but a secret unauthorized war. Or, in reality, a make-believe war, because most of these groups we probably couldn’t even be in a war with.”

    Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement arrested suspected drug smugglers.

    Senate Republicans blocked a war powers resolution on Thursday aimed at preventing Trump from attacking Venezuela after a bipartisan group of senators warned that the undeclared war on alleged drug smugglers in the region could escalate. The vote to advance the resolution failed with 49 senators supporting it and 51 opposing it.

    The resolution, led by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., would have directed the president “to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces for hostilities within or against Venezuela, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force.” The resolution had 15 co-sponsors, including Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.



  • Web use is hard to measure, but by one estimate monthly traffic from search engines has fallen by 15% in the past year. Some of the loudest complaints have come from the news media, an industry in which we acknowledge an interest. But the drought is a wider problem. Science and education sites have lost a tenth of their visitors in the past year. Reference sites are down by 15% and health sites by 31%. Some big names are being gutted: Tripadvisor.com, which recommends the best hotels or beaches, is down by a third; Webmd, which offers reassurance (or alarm) to the poorly, has fallen by half.

    As the old model buckles, the web is changing. It is becoming less open, as formerly ad-funded content is hidden from bots, behind paywalls. Content firms are reaching people through channels other than search, from email newsletters to social media and in-person events. They are pushing into audio and video, which are harder for ai to summarise than text. Big brands are striking content-licensing deals with ai companies. Plenty of other transactions and lawsuits are going on. (The Economist Group has yet to license its work for ai training, but has agreed to let Google use select articles for one of its ai services.) Hundreds of millions of small sites—the internet’s collectively invaluable long tail—lack the clout to do this.

    No one should expect the web of the future to look just as it does today. ai-powered search will rightly shake up some services: business directories, for instance, face disintermediation as answer-bots field queries such as “emergency plumber” or “houses for sale”. But the evaporation of incentives to create content presents a fundamental problem. If human traffic is drying up, the web will need a new currency

    Bringing a new business model to the web is daunting; it may take a shove from regulators to get started. Yet everyone has an interest in making content-creation pay. Publishers may be the ones complaining now, but if the content tap dries up, ai companies will suffer, too. Some are more vulnerable than others. Whereas Meta can draw on data posted to its social networks and Google owns YouTube, the world’s biggest video vault, Openai relies entirely on others for its content.

    If nothing changes, the risk is of a modern-day tragedy of the commons. The shared resource of the open web will be over-exploited, leading to its eventual exhaustion. If that process is not stopped, one of the great common properties of humanity could be gravely diminished. The tragedy of the web would be a tragedy for everyone.

    As others have commented, the economist is presenting this as a capitalist issue that requires a monetary fix. The most ironic element to me is that one of the elements of the tragedy of the commons is that is indicates the requirement of a public interest and it’s regulatory interest so the commons can work. So another way to perceive this is that we need a non-capital framework to allow the web to persist. Say perhaps like roads are created as infrastructure to allow the free movement of it’s citizens in a “safe” and organized way, perhaps we should change our perspective on the utility of the we and it’s content. I’m not suggesting that we copy the transportation to the internet as it obviously breaks down, but the need to think outside the capitalist box is apparent. Libraries have been funded both publicly and privately as public interest, and have the capacity to work both for and nonprofit. This adaptation need not just be ‘free’ market driven. Especially as we do not actually live in a free market, but I’ll let others drive down that hole.