I’ve been playing around with DeepDreamGenerator’s newish “text prompt” artificial intelligence image creator. This image was generated from the prompt “A working class brasserie circa 1938, in the style of John Singer Sargent.” I can see a hint of Sargent, but the clientele seems to be bourgeois rather than working class.

Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, and Debt:

BlockFi plans to file assets and liabilities for bankruptcy case on Jan. 11

A troubling signal from America’s retirement accounts

Vanguard, which oversees roughly 5 million retirement accounts, found that a growing number of participants in its employer-sponsored plans were requesting loans or seeking withdrawals as inflation rocketed over the last year. Data from the $7.2 trillion asset management firm found that a record number of savers used their 401(k)s to address immediate emergencies like medical bills or prolonged unemployment.

Crypto Markets Analysis: Falling Inflation Expectations Might Signal Bullish Turn for Bitcoin

Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:

Maybe Don’t Unleash the Kraken

The ways we’re talking about the coronavirus are only getting weirder.

More US schools institute mask mandates as COVID cases rise

Politics:

Think tank simulation predicts ‘heavy’ losses on all sides, including US, if China invades Taiwan

House GOP Signals Cuts to Social Security, Medicare

House Republicans are making clear that they intend to seek cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare with their new majority in the 118th Congress.

Seek all you want. I hate to break it to them, but a tenuous slim majority in one chamber of the legislature does not mean you get to impose your will. This would be DOA in the Senate.

Trump’s Legal Strategy of Annoyance Is No Longer Working

A Decade of Global Tumult Likely Ahead

Nearly half of top foreign policy experts think Russia will become a failed state or break up by 2033, while a large majority expects China to try to take Taiwan by force, according to a new survey by the Atlantic Council that points to a decade of global tumult ahead.

JUST IN: A judge has ordered the unsealing of key excerpts of Donald Trump's deposition in E. Jean Carroll's lawsuit against him.https://t.co/khzZGZJpRe pic.twitter.com/6KAC5jRK4c

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) January 9, 2023

Biden Faces Pressure to Remove Bolsonaro

After watching supporters of former U.S. leader Donald Trump invade the U.S. Capitol two years ago, Democratic President Joe Biden is now facing mounting pressure to remove Bolsonaro from his self-imposed exile in suburban Orlando.

Afghanistan’s Taliban reportedly have control of US biometric devices – a lesson in life-and-death consequences of data privacy

The fuck they can't. pic.twitter.com/ck8Z2CJLxO

— Middle Age Riot (@middleageriot) January 9, 2023

Biden Struggles to Find Judges in the South

The dearth of nominees offered in southern states, notably where both U.S. senators are Republican, threatens to undercut Biden’s large-scale effort to counteract Trump’s effect on the federal judiciary, particularly to bolster civil rights and ensure voter protections.
The Biden team’s well-documented diversification of the courts — nominees have been overwhelmingly women and people of color, such as Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and offered professional diversity, including public defenders and civil rights lawyers — has withered when it comes to district courts in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Texas, where more than a dozen such court vacancies exist.

Mass arrests as Lula condemns ‘terrorist'’riots

Netanyahu Races Ahead with Hard-Line Agenda

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government has wasted no time implementing its ultra-nationalist agenda, including adopting a seemingly petty ban on displaying the Palestinian flag and shaking the foundations of Israel’s democracy with a proposed legal assault on the Supreme Court.

A Moscow diary: fear, loathing and deep denial

Serendipity:

My lawyer, the robot

The eerie new capabilities of artificial intelligence are about to show up inside a courtroom — in the form of an AI chatbot lawyer that will soon argue a case in traffic court.
That’s according to Joshua Browder, the founder of a consumer-empowerment startup who conceived of the scheme.
Sometime next month, Browder is planning to send a real defendant into a real court armed with a recording device and a set of earbuds. Browder’s company will feed audio of the proceedings into an AI that will in turn spit out legal arguments; the defendant, he says, has agreed to repeat verbatim the outputs of the chatbot to an unwitting judge.
Browder declined to identify the defendant or the jurisdiction for next month’s court date, citing fears that the judge would catch wind of the planned stunt and block it.

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