Sam Altman Spoke of the Future. Then His Changed. | The Best Exercises to Prevent Neck Pain | China’s enormous surveillance state is still growing | Tenants and Economists Are Pushing to Regulate Rent for a Vast Amount of U.S. Housing

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Sam Altman Spoke of the Future. Then His Changed. - The New York Times

Two podcast hosts recorded an interview with the chief executive of OpenAI. Two days later, he was fired.

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

In early November, a few days before a meeting of developers at OpenAI, the journalist Casey Newton bumped into Sam Altman, the company’s chief executive, at a birthday party. Mr. Altman had an idea: They should discuss “the future.”

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The Best Exercises to Prevent Neck Pain - The New York Times

Experts estimate that up to 80 percent of people will experience some form of neck pain in their lives, and as much as half of Americans will suffer from it this year alone.

While nothing can totally prevent such discomfort, there are things you can do to lower your chances. It starts with building up the muscles in your neck and spine as well as, not surprisingly, improving your posture.

While some neck pain is caused by accidents, falls or other traumatic events, most often it results from everyday movements like sitting on the couch, working on the computer, eating at the dinner table or driving, said Julia Bizjack, an orthopedic physical therapist for the Cleveland Clinic.

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China’s enormous surveillance state is still growing - The Economist

The sleepy county of Kaijiang, on the eastern fringes of Sichuan province, is hardly a hotbed of unrest. The authorities there seem intent on keeping it that way. They are hoping to upgrade the county’s portion of China’s “Skynet” surveillance system. According to a procurement notice from August, officials in Kaijiang want cameras that “support detection of more than 60 faces simultaneously”. The local system should be fast enough to analyse up to 100 faces per second and have the capacity to store up to 1.8bn images (Kaijiang has a population of 410,000). There must be “no blind spots”, says the document.

Officials argue that such measures protect the public. China’s abundance of CCTV cameras, many equipped with facial-recognition technology, “leave criminals with nowhere to hide”, boasts the People’s Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece. Chinese people report feeling safe from violent crime, so there is merit to these claims. But the cameras also protect the party. Dissidents and demonstrators can be tracked as easily as burglars. Step out of line and the government will probably know.

Measuring the size and growth of China’s surveillance state is hard, owing to the government’s secrecy, but analysts are trying. A team led by Martin Beraja of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology collected 3m public-sector procurement contracts issued between 2013 and 2019. Using their data, we tallied up the number of surveillance cameras bought by the authorities in 139 cities. Data are missing for some important places, such as the regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, where CCTV cameras are ubiquitous. That helps explain why there were only 8.5m surveillance cameras in the contracts. The People’s Daily, in 2017, said Skynet had 20m cameras. Others have put the number in the hundreds of millions.

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Tenants and Economists Are Pushing to Regulate Rent for a Vast Amount of U.S. Housing -

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