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The Paris Olympics Promised Flying Taxis — Here’s Why They Failed to Launch (Maria)

The author writes, “In November 2022, [cybersecurity policy consultant] Dominique Lazarski stood among a small crowd of people on the Pontoise airfield near Paris, watching a flying taxi trace wide circles in a clear blue sky after it took off for the first time from a working vertiport in France. … Yet after years of planning, the project failed to convince Parisian politicians, the public and safety officials that the technology was ready for widespread use at the Summer Olympics. A sole flying taxi ascended over Versailles for five minutes on the last day of the Olympics, but it had no passengers. The promise of tourists traveling over Paris in flying taxis failed to materialize.”

Kamala Harris’s Election Would Defy History, Only 1 Sitting Vice President Has Been Elected President in 188 Years (Reader Steve)

From PBS: “As Vice President Kamala Harris begins her fall campaign for the White House, she can look to history and hope for better luck than others in her position who have tried the same. Since 1836, only one sitting vice president, George H.W. Bush in 1988, has been elected to the White House. Among those who tried and failed were Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and Al Gore in 2000. All three lost in narrow elections shaped by issues ranging from war and scandal to crime and the subtleties of televised debates. But two other factors proved crucial for each vice president: whether the incumbent president was well-liked and whether the president and vice president enjoyed a productive relationship.”

How the Hell Was Trump Allowed To Use Arlington National Cemetery as a Campaign Prop? (DonkeyHotey)

From Esquire: “Well, luckily for the former president’s campaign, it wasn’t raining on Monday, when he grotesquely used Arlington National Cemetery as a campaign prop because, as we know, he gets a little nervous around soldiers’ graves in the rain, and he says things that require him to lie his ass off later. Most recently, of course, he devalued the Congressional Medal of Honor in favor of a bauble he draped on Rush Limbaugh and the wife of one of the sleaziest of his sleazy donors. So the sun was out and shining as this third-generation draft dodger pretended to care about the soldiers who were suckers and losers enough to get killed during the United States’ withdrawal from its Afghanistan adventure. How in the hell this was allowed to happen is beyond me.”

Conservative Republican Endorses Harris, Calls Trump a Threat to Democracy (Al)

From CNN: “Retired federal appeals court Judge J. Michael Luttig, a prominent conservative legal scholar put on the bench by President George H.W. Bush, is endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris over former President Donald Trump, whose candidacy he describes as an existential threat to American democracy. It will be the first time Luttig, a veteran of two Republican administrations, has voted for a Democrat. ‘In the presidential election of 2024 there is only one political party and one candidate for the presidency that can claim the mantle of defender and protector of America’s Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law,’ Luttig wrote in a statement obtained exclusively by CNN. ‘As a result, I will unhesitatingly vote for the Democratic Party’s candidate for the Presidency of the United States, Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris.’”

When AI’s Output Is a Threat to AI Itself (Russ)

The author writes, “The internet is becoming awash in words and images generated by artificial intelligence. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, wrote in February that the company generated about 100 billion words per day — a million novels’ worth of text, every day, an unknown share of which finds its way onto the internet. … All this A.I.-generated information can make it harder for us to know what’s real. And it also poses a problem for A.I. companies. As they trawl the web for new data to train their next models on — an increasingly challenging task — they’re likely to ingest some of their own A.I.-generated content, creating an unintentional feedback loop in which what was once the output from one A.I. becomes the input for another.”

Incarcerated People Are Drinking Unsafe Water in Illinois State Prisons (Laura)

From Sierra Magazine: “As a community organizer with the Coalition to Decarcerate Illinois, [Brian Harrington] has been helping to call out the Department of Corrections for the dirty water that Menard and 29 of the state’s other facilities have, for decades, knowingly provided to incarcerated people — a crisis that is only worsening. After years of inaction by the department and the Illinois EPA that regulates it, the coalition, prisoner’s rights and environmental groups and other advocates are now taking their concerns to the federal government. On April 15, they filed a legal petition urging the United States EPA to take emergency action to address unsafe drinking water in Illinois’ correctional facilities that comes from aging and neglected plumbing. The petitioners are asking the EPA to use its ‘imminent and substantial endangerment’ authority under the Safe Drinking Water Act to help protect as many as 30,000 incarcerated people.”

Horses Can Plan Ahead and Think Strategically, Scientists Find (Dana)

The author writes, “The old English proverb ‘you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink’ has been used since the 16th century to describe the difficulty of getting someone to act in their own best interests. Now, research by equine scientists suggests the use of this phrase has been inadvertently maligning horses for centuries. Horses have the ability to think and plan ahead and are far more intelligent than scientists previously thought, according to a Nottingham Trent University study that analyzed the animal’s responses to a reward-based game. The horses cannily adapted their approach to the game to get the most treats — while making the least effort.”

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