Not all consequences are intentional.
Trump’s App Shutdown Is a Gift to Mexico’s Cartels
There were few fond obituaries in the American press last week when the Trump administration announced that it was shutting down CBP One, the app immigrants had once been able to use to schedule asylum appointments with US Customs and Border Protection. Even before the administration largely disabled the app in January, immigrant-rights advocates had complained for years that the software was glitchy and difficult to use. They also said it helped officials illegally limit the flow of asylum seekers into the country, while MAGA types tarred it for supposedly making entry too easy.
South of the border, however, the app will be missed. Some immigrants and those who work with them say it provided a rare alternative to Mexican drug cartels’ exploitative, often-violent system of human smuggling and trafficking. For “many, many” asylum seekers with reasonable claims, the app proved to be an essential lifeline and a peaceful substitute for cartel muscle, says Pastor Guillermo Navarrete, who runs the Tijuana side of the Border Church, a weekly Methodist service held on both sides of the rust-colored border wall. As its capabilities expanded over the past couple of years, “it was a surprise from the American government,” Navarrete says, “because it was useful.”
Perspective.
ChatGPT and academic work: new psychological phenomena
This study describes the impact of ChatGPT use on the nature of work from the perspective of academics and educators. We elucidate six phenomena: (1) the cognitive workload associated with conducting Turing tests to determine if ChatGPT has been involved in work productions; (2) the ethical void and alienation that result from recondite ChatGPT use; (3) insights into the motives of individuals who fail to disclose their ChatGPT use, while, at the same time, the recipient does not reveal their awareness of that use; (4) the sense of ennui as the meanings of texts dissipate and no longer reveal the sender’s state of understanding; (5) a redefinition of utility, wherein certain texts show redundancy with patterns already embedded in the base model, while physical measurements and personal observations are considered as unique and novel; (6) a power dynamic between sender and recipient, inadvertently leaving non-participants as disadvantaged third parties. This paper makes clear that the introduction of AI tools into society has far-reaching effects, initially most prominent in text-related fields, such as academia. Whether these implementations represent beneficial innovations for human prosperity, or a rather different line of social evolution, represents the pith of our present discussion.
Leading indicator…
Exclusive: US suspends some efforts to counter Russian sabotage as Trump moves closer to Putin
Several U.S. national security agencies have halted work on a coordinated effort to counter Russian sabotage, disinformation and cyberattacks, easing pressure on Moscow as the Trump Administration pushes Russia to end its war in Ukraine.
Trailing datum…
Russia using criminal networks to drive increase in sabotage acts, says Europol
Russia and other state actors are driving an increase in politically motivated cyber-attacks and sabotage of infrastructure and public institutions in the EU, the bloc’s police enforcement agency has found.
Europol’s 80-page serious and organised crime threat assessment for 2025 also describes in detail how “hybrid threat” actors have established a “shadow alliance” with organised criminal gangs in Europe to try to destabilise the functioning of the EU and its member states.
Could be useful.
https://www.bespacific.com/50-free-datasets-in-50-minutes/
50 Free Datasets in 50 Minutes
50 Free Datasets in 50 Minutes. National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. Minneapolis, Minnesota, March 6, 2025: “Below are federal government datasets with individual-level structured data that can be downloaded for free as Excel or CSV files and localized to any city, county or state in the United States. Unless noted, all the data is updated and can be used to analyze trends, as well as comparisons for your community to the rest of your state, or nation. Some datasets include addresses or longitude/latitude to enable mapping. Most of the datasets are available directly from the government agency, but we have provided other datasets that reputable data journalists or organizations have acquired, often through FOIA, cleaned up and provided to you for free (e.g., Data Liberation Project, started by Jeremy Singer-Vine and now coordinated by MuckRock and Big Local News). All of these datasets empower you to localize federal-level data to your community. Links can be dynamic and ever changing, so if one ends up being broken, Google to find its new location. Also, we provide the actual URL so you can put it in the Internet Archive to see what the website contained in the past. Some datasets can be pretty complicated, but most sites provide code sheets and data dictionaries to explain the content. Also, in many cases, tipsheets from previous IRE/NICAR conferences available at the IRE Resource Center go into depth in how to interpret the data, and the pros, cons, limitations and pitfalls of particular datasets…
Search websites of data gatherers who have already pulled together federal datasets and posted them online, then acquire the data yourself. They include the Data Liberation Project, Data is Plural, the Accountability Project, MuckRock, Kaggle, Google Dataset Search, GovernmentAttic.org, ProPublica (check their archived data store list, which isn’t updated, but provides good ideas), and Big Local News…”
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