It’s an endless circle of pain and suffering. They move from one town to another or one camp to another. They are harassed and have their “shelters” and belongings confiscated by authorities. Here in Sonoma County homeless people are always on the move. The problem with making poverty illegal is that incarcerating the homeless costs taxpayers $106,000 annually for each, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. The solution according to many right-wing pundits is to make more arrests and end early-release programs. The bottom 3.5% who are unemployed in California are largely former felons who are unemployable due to their criminal history, or they are mentally ill, physically incapable or so dysfunctional they may never be employed. The end of the nation Damonte fears will come when the gap between the wealthy and poor keeps getting worse, not by its decrease.ĮDITOR: One in 200 Bay Area residents is homeless, according to KTVU. On the contrary, they, too, become able to contribute. When those who struggle are helped out of poverty, they don’t make the wealthy poor. I agree that divisiveness is not the answer, so let’s not frame our struggles in this divisive way. I belong to the group who work to contribute toward a better world for all of us. Like a vast number of us, I belong to neither his half who do not work because the other half will take care of them, nor his other half who believe it does no good to work because someone else is going to get what I work for. Listen to it sometime.ĮDITOR: As a Democrat, I feel a need to respond to Daniel Damonte (“Message for Democrats,” Letters, May 2). The story of easily dispensable migrant workers was more poignantly captured in song from years back, “Deportee.” I prefer the Bud and Travis version. Take the case of only one of our recent gun massacres in this country, this in Texas, and the remarks of that state’s governor, Gregg Abbott, that the victims were “illegal immigrants.” Abbott’s narrative is missing the unspoken qualifiers “only” or “just.” Abbott is despicable, but that’s not the point. We must educate children, and adults, to do the critical, skeptical thinking that separates truth from trash.Īnd Silicon Valley kids: please finish your self-driving car project before you run off in other directions.ĮDITOR: From this perspective, it does indeed seem true that art consistently precedes history. Will chatbots flood the internet with misinformation? Too late to shut that Pandora’s box. But if the chatbot had only seen pre-Hemingway texts, the story might sound more like Jane Austen than “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The emergence of the next Hemingway, Pablo Picasso or Miles Davis cannot be foreseen. If you asked a chatbot to write a short story, the result would almost certainly show the influence of Ernest Hemingway. Truly creative individuals are extremely rare. This is not creative, but it’s exactly what humans do when we write anything from a party invitation to a doctoral thesis. When queried, the software finds a likely pattern and composes a reply. Then they were fed billions of text examples - good, bad and indifferent - from the public internet. These computer programs were designed to recognize and classify patterns in written language. EDITOR: Message to the overgrown adolescents of Silicon Valley: Stop scaring us about the supposed intelligence of the “chatbots” now accessible on the internet.
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