79 days remain until the November midterms
|
What’s coming up on Sunday Kos …
- How Daily Kos Elections analyzes and reports on polls, by David Nir
- The final battle of the Civil Social Justice War will be in the heart, mind and spirit of the nation, by Frank Vyan Walton
- Marijuana, opioids, and alcohol: It is time to change the paradigm, by Egberto Willies
- Trump tariffs hurting farmers, and GOP could pay a price in midterms, by Sher Watts Spooner
- 7 questions for Erica Newsome, West Virginia teacher, about the West Virginia teacher’s strike, by David Akadjian
- Why Donald Trump needs to increase immigration, by Jon Perr
- Support the troops—by allowing them to be ripped off, by Mark E Andersen
- ‘Trumpslaining’ the narrative about Puerto Rico’s recovery, by Denise Oliver Velez
- While obsessing over 'endangered' white people, mainstream media helps normalize white supremacy, by Kelly Macias
- Trump uses race, culture to divide and distract us. GOP is government by the corrupt for the rich, by Ian Reifowitz
• Will machine learning narrow or widen the disparity in maternal deaths of white and black mothers?
• Report finds CEO-to-worker compensation at 312-1, not quite the record, but egads. The report used two measures. The first included stock options realized (in addition to salary, bonuses, restricted stock grants, and long-term incentive payouts). Gauged by this, in 2017 the average CEO of the 350 largest firms in the U.S. received $18.9 million in compensation, a 17.6 percent increase over 2016. In the same period, the average worker’s compensation rose just 0.3 percent. The 312-to-1 ratio far exceeded the 20-to-1 ratio in 1965 and the 58-to-1 ratio in 1989. But it was lower than the all-time record of 344-to-1 in 2000. A second measure tracks the value of stock options at the time they are granted. Gauged by this method, average CEO compensation rose to $13.3 million in 2017, up from $13.0 million in 2016.
• China challenges U.S. solar tariffs at World Trade Organization: Some experts think Beijing is likely to win its complaint against the tariff on solar cells imported into the U.S. That tariff started at 30 percent this year and will phase down over the next four years. But Chinese solar manufacturers have a bigger issue at home now since Beijing cut the amount of subsidies it is providing to them. It is estimated the impact of that cutback will be that 20 gigawatts less of solar capacity will be installed this year than had previously been forecast for China.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Federal judge says California cannot dodge a lawsuit regarding allegedly unconstitutional rules to hide aspects of its executions:
U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg denied the state’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit challenging rules that bar the public from viewing the preparation and injection of lethal drugs – as well as the aftermath of botched executions.
Quoting from the 2002 Ninth Circuit ruling California First Amendment Coalition v. Woodford—which ruled in favor of executions remaining open to the public—Seeborg agreed the public has a First Amendment right to “view executions from the moment the condemned is escorted to the execution chamber, including those ‘initial procedures’ that are inextricably intertwined with the process.”
• Evidence shows some of the oldest galaxies in existence orbit around the Milky Way:
Astronomers from the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, have found evidence that the faintest satellite galaxies orbiting our own Milky Way galaxy are amongst the very first galaxies that formed in our Universe.
Scientists working on this research have described the finding as "hugely exciting" explaining that that finding some of the Universe's earliest galaxies orbiting the Milky Way is "equivalent to finding the remains of the first humans that inhabited the Earth."
• AI is the future, but where are the women?
FOR ALL THEIR differences, big tech companies agree on where we’re heading: into a future dominated by smart machines. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple all say that every aspect of our lives will soon be transformed by artificial intelligence and machine learning, through innovations such as self-driving cars and facial recognition. Yet the people whose work underpins that vision don’t much resemble the society their inventions are supposed to transform. WIRED worked with Montreal startup Element AI to estimate the diversity of leading machine learning researchers, and found that only 12 percent were women.
That estimate came from tallying the numbers of men and women who had contributed work at three top machine learning conferences in 2017. It suggests the group supposedly charting society’s future is even less inclusive than the broader tech industry, which has its own well-known diversity problems.
Monday through Friday you can catch the Kagro in the Morning Show 9 AM ET by dropping in here, or you can download the Stitcher app (found in the app stores or at Stitcher.com), and find a live stream there, by searching for "Netroots Radio.” |