And the Rest

Slavery has gone nowhere:

ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, is now reportedly in talks with investors to raise funds at a $29 billion valuation, including a potential $10 billion investment by Microsoft. That would make OpenAI, which was founded in San Francisco in 2015 with the aim of building superintelligent machines, one of the world’s most valuable AI companies.

But the success story is not one of Silicon Valley genius alone. In its quest to make ChatGPT less toxic, OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan laborers earning less than $2 per hour, a TIME investigation has found.

 

What the tribunal will decide is to give a predatory man who trolls actual women in an establishment where they should not feel as though some creep is staring at them all the leeway he wants:

Another Canadian trans issue has garnered international attention after B.C. transgender woman Brigid Klyne-Simpson told local media of being “extremely devastated” after being denied access to a women-only gym.

“It was important to me to be in a place that would be, like, explicitly accepting, like, ‘You are a woman, you’re allowed to be here,’” Klyne-Simpson said in an interview with CHEK News. ...

The CHEK story hinted that Klyne-Simpson could take the case before the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, a body that does indeed encourage British Columbians to file complaints in instances where they are “denied services” over the issue of “gender identity or expression.”

If the tribunal were to take the case and rule in Klyne-Simpson’s favour, the B.C. Human Rights Code could empower the body to order Bodyworks to reverse its policy and also to provide compensation to Klyne-Simpson “for injury to dignity, feelings and self respect.”

 

 

Yes, the world could use another Raoul Wallenberg: 

People like Wallenberg are our moral compass when it comes to understanding the difference between good and evil. The macro level is often relatively easy to understand, as the forces between good and evil, darkness and light, continue to battle one another through every generation. But the character traits we need to explore and understand go deeper. They exist on the individual and the person-to-person level.

Wallenberg displayed humanity’s best character traits: kindness and altruism. He was assigned to Budapest as Sweden’s special envoy in 1944 and, while there, issued thousands of fake protective passports to Jewish refugees and sheltered many of them in the 32 buildings he rented and declared as Swedish territory. His action was a personal volition, going above and beyond the call of duty and out of the bounds of his diplomatic charge.

We need to understand the character traits that drive heroic people like Wallenberg to selfless acts of valour. His actions and those of the Swedish legation in Budapest are legendary. He successfully negotiated with the Germans that bearers of protective passes would not have to be identified with the yellow Star of David. He even rallied other diplomats around him, including the Hungarian minister of foreign affairs, to issue 9,000 protective passes.

In one eye witness account that encapsulates the fortitude of this man, his driver, Sandor Ardai, recounted one of the many times Wallenberg intercepted an outbound train filled with Jews heading to Auschwitz:

“He climbed up on the roof of the train and began handing in protective passes through the doors, which were not yet sealed. He ignored orders from the Germans for him to get down, then the Arrow Cross men began shooting and shouting at him to go away. He ignored them and calmly continued handing out passports to the hands that were reaching out for them.…

“After Wallenberg had handed over the last of the passports he ordered all those who had one to leave the train and walk to the caravan of cars parked nearby, all marked in Swedish colours.”

We should all ask ourselves what we would do if we were in the same position. Would we risk our lives to save others?

 

 

Interesting:

A 13-foot-long painting by artist Edvard Munch — which was found in a barn in the woods of Norway after being hidden from Nazis during the Second World War — will be displayed for the first time since 1979 before being auctioned off in March.

Dance on the Beach was part of a larger work called The Reinhardt Frieze, made up of 12 canvases. It was commissioned by director Max Reinhardt for his avant-garde theatre in Berlin in 1906. The frieze was meant to give the audience an immersive experience and “trailblazed the relationship between performance and art,” auction house Sotheby’s said in a statement.