Politico: China’s trash ban forces Europe to confront its waste problem

Of the 56.4 million tons of paper EU citizens threw away in 2016, some 8 million ended up in China, purchased by recycling centers that turn it into cardboard and send it back to Europe as packaging for Chinese exports. That same year, the EU collected 8.4 million tons of plastic waste, and sent 1.6 million tons to China.

At the end of last year, Beijing put an end to the practice, putting in place strict limits on imports of foreign waste. Only eight weeks later, Europe is struggling to deal with mountains of plastic and paper waste. [...]

The EU is to some extent a victim of its own success. For years, European leaders have touted the benefits of limiting and reusing waste. Just last month, the European Commission presented its vision for the future of plastics, exhorting Europe to turn waste into an economic opportunity. [...]

The Commission’s Plastics Strategy, announced in January, aims to make all plastic packaging recyclable or reusable by 2030, something that it says could create 200,000 jobs. For that to happen, Europe’s capacity to sort and recycle waste would have to be multiplied fourfold — something that would cost as much as €16.6 billion.

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Politico: The thriller that predicted the Russia scandal

The People’s House centers around a Russian scheme to flip an election and put Republicans in power by depressing votes in the Midwest. Pipeline politics play an unexpectedly outsize role. Sexual harassment and systematic coverups in Congress abound. But it’s no unimaginative rehash. Pepper released the book in the summer of 2016, just as the presidential contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was heating up — and before Russia’s real-life campaign to influence the election had been revealed. In fact, the heart of the story had been written for three years when Russian government sent hackers to infiltrate the Democratic National Committee and sent their trolls to influence the election on social media. The Putin-like oligarch Pepper portrays as pulling the strings of U.S. politics had been fleshed out for two. [...]

As he waited for edits on the first book, early in 2016, Pepper got started on a sequel, The Wingman. He finished the bulk of the manuscript by January 2017, as Trump was getting sworn in. Now, one year into Trump’s tenure, his second offering in the otherwise dull world of political thrillers — which comes out on Monday — is an equally complex tale of kompromat influencing a presidential election, even more sexual misconduct, and an Erik Prince-like military contractor with close ties to the administration, this time told through the lens of a rollicking Democratic presidential primary. He wrote it before the now-infamous Steele dossier became public knowledge (and before, Pepper says, he learned about it) — and months before revelations about the Blackwater founder’s close ties to the Trump team and its Russian entanglements. If the first parallels were eerie, these ones were, Pepper admits, maybe even spooky. [...]

The key to writing a successful political thriller is to come up with a scenario that’s far-fetched enough to stretch the reader’s imagination, but not so insane as to be wholly unbelievable. Two years ago, a successful Russian plot to throw an American election by manipulating the Midwest would almost certainly fall into the latter category. So might the idea of systematic blackmail of a presidential candidate.

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Haaretz: Why We've Suppressed the Queer History of the Holocaust

While we may believe that this homophobia was a natural outgrowth of 1930s society, the opposite was the case. Redlich was from the Czechoslovakian town of Olomouc. Similarly to Weimar Germany, Czechoslovakia had a vocal movement calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality, there was a gay subculture, with bars, journals, novels, and activists.

Scholars like Insa Eschebach have pointed out that homophobia among those who were themselves victims of the Holocaust was a specific product of the concentration camp society. Reading survivors’ testimonies, the historian comes across often hair-curlingly vicious statements about prisoners who engaged in same sex conduct.

This homophobia was not a byproduct of the Nazis’ prejudice; the prisoners viewed same sex desire as a personification of all that was wrong in the violent world of the camps. [...]

The Holocaust produced a prisoner society that was deeply gendered, homophobic, hierarchical, and violent. We need to recognize that even  a collective of those who themselves had been excluded and victimized still excluded those they defined as "other."

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Nautilus Magazine: Waiting For the Robot Rembrandt

One reason to be optimistic is that humans are not the only creatures capable of creation without utility. For example, given drawing materials, chimpanzees have been observed to produce drawings for the sheer pleasure of it. In fact, the Okinawa exhibition includes drawings by five chimpanzees and a bonobo owned by Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a professor at Kyoto University—and all are classified into Category (4), “Machine Art / Machine Aesthetics,” to remind us of what is possible. If the animals had produced drawings in return for bananas, we would not have included them in that category, because their art would not been created for its own sake.

For AI to get to where chimpanzees are, two steps are needed. First, AI must be able to generate its own goals. The goals of today’s AI are designed by human programmers, who write so-called evaluation functions to calculate how well or poorly an algorithm is doing at any given time. The first piece of machine-made art that qualifies for category 4 will need to be able to write its own evaluation functions. [...]

When AI starts making fine art, will we recognize it? We can teach AI our own art history as a way of encouraging output that we will recognize and enjoy. On the other hand, untrained AI will be more likely to produce something starkly original and even unrecognizable, after the manner of so-called Outsider Art or Art Brut. While we cannot divine the internal aesthetic sense of the autistic artist Moriya Kishaba, one of our category-2 exhibitors, many people find his tilings of tiny Chinese characters strangely beautiful. The future of AI art is analogous to a world full of artists like Moriya before they were discovered.

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CGP Grey: This Video Will Make You Angry (Mar 10, 2015)