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I would like to respond to Jon Miceks editorial in the April 14 edition of the Daily Item.

John, I am a Republican, and I do support repairing and rebuilding road and bridges, ensuring safe water, and strengthening our power grid. Unfortunately, President Biden and the Democrats have decided to brand things totally unrelated as infrastructure and add them into the bill. This is their way of advancing the progressive agenda.

Look at how they are solving problems. Our government is paying people to stay home, while businesses cant find employees. They canceled a pipeline project with great paying jobs, and tell those workers to go work on solar energy jobs for one fourth the pay, plus losing their retirement. They have abdicated any control of our borders.

As far as electric cars are concerned, if everybody went electric today, the grid would have massive failures. While there have been major gains in solar, wind, and battery technology, we are at the point of diminishing improvements.

The progressives are against many of the ways of generating electricity, including coal, natural gas, nuclear, and hydroelectric power, but current solar and wind power wont cover the added electric demand. Lithium mining for the car battery material is extremely dirty, and most of the lithium available is mined in other countries, mainly China. Also, our fire departments need training and equipment to handle an electric car fire.

The reason they are called progressives is that they want to progressively expand government, to progressively gain more control over our lives, while progressively increasing our taxes. This is because they know much better than the people who earn the money how it should be spent!

Thomas L. Dahlmann,

Shamokin Dam

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Progressive agenda | Opinion | dailyitem.com - Sunbury Daily Item

Of the 144 seats in the Louisiana Legislature, Democrats hold 47, and even fewer of those members espouse progressive ideas.

At the federal level, progressives like U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders advocate for higher minimum wages, universal health care and criminal justice reform and expect to make some headway toward their goals under the Biden administration. But in red Louisiana, the few progressives often find themselves having to moderate their stances as their ideas rarely make it through the Republican-run Legislature.

Most of the dozen or so most progressive members belong to the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus and represent lower-to-middle income parts of the states biggest cities.

Theres a lot of lobbyists representing special interests, but the people of Louisiana dont have anyone representing them at the table, said Rep. Matthew Willard, D-New Orleans. Theres no high-paid lobbyists representing the people.

Willard was elected in 2019, as was state Rep. Mandie Landry, D-New Orleans, another progressive.

A lot of members in Baton Rouge I think they just dont understand me, she said. Im like an alien to them.

In the legislative session that started Monday, Willard is pushing for easier access to midwives to help bring down the states high maternal and infant mortality rates. He also wants to establish a state income tax credit for parents with children under 18.

The progressives also support other proposals, like increasing the minimum wage, that would benefit the white working class, even though many of its members vote Republican. They also are seeking changes in the criminal justice system and hoping to bring more voters over to their side.

The division between moderate Democrats and progressives recently appeared on the federal level when eight Senate Democrats voted against a proposal in Washington to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Louisiana is one of five states that does not have a minimum wage set at the state level, and the federal one has not risen since 2009.

About half of Louisianas workforce would have seen a pay increase if the federal minimum wage would have increased to $15 an hour, Willard said. Louisiana defaults to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, a fact that Willard said is totally unacceptable.

State Rep. Royce Duplessis, D-New Orleans, said a low minimum wage creates negative societal impacts.

To me it seems to make more sense that we would want to ensure that people have a living wage, so they can work one good job to take care of family, be at home in the evening and help with homework or help with Little League, so that kids arent out breaking into cars, he said.

Gov. John Bel Edwards has tried several times to establish a state minimum wage as high as $10 an hour but has failed to get the votes given GOP opposition. He plans to try again this year, but Landry does not think he will succeed.

Its more likely going to happen on a federal level, especially with the Democrat majorities. I just dont see it happening in our state, she said.

Jan Moller, executive director of the nonprofit Louisiana Budget Project, said that polls since 2012 have shown broad support across party lines, age and race in Louisiana for raising the minimum wage. But the bill usually dies in the House Labor Committee, where lobbyists from the restaurant and other low-wage industries oppose it.

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Another focal point for progressives is to push for more changes in the state's criminal justice system.

Stung that Louisiana had become the incarceration capital of the world and by the cost of housing for so many inmates, Democrats and Republicans agreed in 2017 to let thousands of non-violent offenders out of jail.

But, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Louisiana in 2019 still had the highest incarceration rate of any state, with 683 incarcerated per 100,000 residents. The following states are Oklahoma with a rate of 639 and Mississippi with 636.

We warehouse more people in prison than anywhere else, and I think it's one reason we stay impoverished here, Landry said. It's a waste of resources, in the sense of we're wasting money on jails, but we're also wasting our actual people.

"It's not like people from Louisiana are any more dangerous than people anywhere else, she added. There is nothing in the water that makes people in Louisiana commit more crimes.

Duplessis wants to change that Louisiana is one of six states that sentences criminals to life without parole. According to the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group in Washington, D.C., Louisiana held 4,377 prisoners on life sentences without parole in 2020. That equates to 14% of the prison population, tied for the highest in the country with Massachusetts.

I dont believe everybody should be released, but I do believe everybody should have the opportunity to come up for review, to assess whether or not they have rehabilitated themselves, said Duplessis.

We are a state that promotes Christian values in our faith, he added. And part of Christian values, the last time I checked, is believing in redemption. I want us to have a conversation around the issue of redemption.

The Democratic Party in Louisiana can do a better job at our messaging in letting the people of Louisiana know that we are working on their behalf, Willard said.

In a conservative state, Democrats are often hurt by cultural and religious issues, like their partys pro-choice stance on abortion. Willard sees Louisiana Democrats as more diverse.

State Sen. Katrina Jackson, D-Monroe, introduced a bill in 2019, for instance, that outlawed abortion after a heartbeat was detected. Edwards, the only Democratic governor in the U.S. who is pro-life, signed the bill into law.

We have always been a big tent party, Willard said. Were not the type of party where if you disagree or dissent, which is at the heart of American democracy, that youre going to be censored or called out. I think thats anti-democratic.

Landry, one of the few white progressive Democrats in the Legislature, is fervently pro-choice. Landry also has authored a bill for the 2021 session that would decriminalize prostitution. Her bill would help individuals who are being trafficked or encounter violence during consensual sex go to the police without the threat of being arrested.

Landry thinks she seems alien to other lawmakers not just because of her ideas but because she is one of only 26 women in the Legislature.

As much support as I get from my district, I get stuff thrown at me elsewhere, she said. Its mostly from men, mostly from white men, but not entirely. I get a little bit from white women around the state. But its a lot.

Originally posted here:
Louisiana's Legislature isn't totally conservative. Here's where progressives are focused - The Advocate

Say No to Vaccine Passports

The Libertarian Party opposes 'vaccine passports' and any government mandated documentation, surveillance, restrictions, mandates, or laws which tread on the rights of the people.

With vaccination progressing across the US and internationally, there is a growing danger that 'vaccine passports' of some type will become reality. As the Washington Post reported last week, "the Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a standard way of handling credentials often referred to as 'vaccine passports' that would allow Americans to prove they have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to reopen" and Reason.com had a long list of efforts to establish some form of 'vaccine passport'.

After a year of ever expanding government overreach justified by the Covid Pandemic, and which the Libertarian Party of Massachusetts opposes, 'vaccine passports' are among the most dystopian measures to be added. They represent egregious violations of privacy and are nothing less than an attempt to establish mandatory vaccination by restricting the lives of non-vaccinated persons, regardless of any actual infection and risk of spread. This is a power the government should not have.

The Libertarian Party at the National level, of which the Libertarian Party of Massachusetts is the local state affiliate, has adopted a resolution, rejecting vaccine passports. It states that the Libertarian National Committee stands in stark defiance of all attempts by government to interfere with the private sector response to COVID19 as well as the degradation of civil liberties and livelihood at the hands of legislators. We oppose vaccine passports and any government mandated documentation, surveillance, restrictions, mandates, or laws which tread on the rights of the people. We stand in service of those seeking freedom in the United States as the centrifugal force of liberty.

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Libertarian Association of Massachussetts

The cloud company published a new blueprint for a fault-tolerant quantum computer that describes a new way of controlling qubits to make sure that they carry out calculations as accurately as possible.

Amazon's cloud subsidiary AWS has released its first research paper detailing a new architecture for a future quantum computer, which, if realized, could set a new standard for error correction.

The cloud company published a new blueprint for a fault-tolerant quantum computer that, although still purely theoretical, describes a new way of controlling quantum bits (or qubits) to ensure that they carry out calculations as accurately as possible.

The paper is likely to grab the attention of many experts who are working to improve quantum error correction (QEC), a field that's growing in parallel with quantum computing that seeks to resolve one of the key barriers standing in the way of realising useful, large-scale quantum computers.

Quantum systems, which are expected to generate breakthroughs in industries ranging from finance to drug discovery thanks to exponentially greater compute capabilities, are effectively still riddled with imperfections, or errors, that can spoil the results of calculations.

SEE: Hiring Kit: Computer Hardware Engineer (TechRepublic Premium)

The building blocks of quantum computers, qubits, exist in a special, quantum state: instead of representing either a one or a zero, like the bits found in classical devices, quantum bits can exist in both states at the same time. While this enables a quantum computer to carry out many calculations at once, qubits are also highly unstable, and at risk of collapsing from their quantum state as soon as they are exposed to the outside environment. Consequently, the calculations performed by qubits in quantum gates cannot always be relied upon -- and scientists are now exploring ways to discover when a qubit has made an error, and to correct the mistake.

"The quantum algorithms that are known to be useful -- those that are likely to have an overwhelming advantage over classical algorithms -- may require millions or billions of quantum gates. Unfortunately, quantum gates, the building blocks of quantum algorithms, are prone to errors," said AWS Center for Quantum Computing research scientists Patricio Arrangoiz-Arriola and Earl Campbellin a blog post.

"These error rates have decreased over time, but are still many orders of magnitude larger than what is needed to run high-fidelity algorithms. To reduce error rates further, researchers need to supplement approaches that lower gate error rates at the physical level with other methods such as QEC."

There are different ways to carry out quantum error correction. The conventional approach, known as active QEC, uses many imperfect qubits (called 'physical qubits') to correct one qubit that has been identified as faulty, to restore the particle to a state of precision. The controllable qubit created in this way is called a 'logical qubit'.

Active QEC, however, creates a large hardware overhead in that many physical qubits are required to encode every logical qubit, which makes it even harder to build a universal quantum computer comprising large-scale qubit circuits.

Another approach, passive QEC, focuses on engineering a physical computing system that has an inherent stability against errors. Although much of the work around passive QEC is still experimental, the method aims to create intrinsic fault-tolerance that could accelerate the construction of a quantum computer with a large number of qubits.

In the new blueprint, AWS's researchers combine both active and passive QEC to create a quantum computer that, in principle, could achieve higher levels of precision. The architecture presents a system based on 'cat states' -- a form of passive QEC where qubits are kept in a state of superposition within an oscillator, while pairs of photons are injected and extracted to ensure that the quantum state remains stable.

This design, according to the scientists, has been shown to reduce bit-flip error, which occurs when a qubit's state flips from one to zero or vice versa. But to further protect qubits from other types of error that might arise, the researchers propose coupling passive QEC with known active QEC techniques.

Repetition code, for example, is a well-established approach to detect and correct error in quantum devices, which Arrangoiz-Arriola and Campbell used together with cat states to improve fault tolerance in their theoretical quantum computer.

The results seem promising: the combination of cat states and repetition code produced an architecture in which just over 2,000 superconducting components used for stabilization could produce a hundred logical qubits capable of executing a thousand gates.

"This may fit in a single dilution refrigerator using current or near-term technology and would go far beyond what we can simulate on a classical computer," said Arrangoiz-Arriola and Campbell.

Before the theoretical architecture proposed by the researchers takes shape as a physical device, however, several challenges remain. For example, cat states have already been demonstrated in the lab in previous proof-of-concept experiments, but they are yet to be produced at a useful scale.

The paper nevertheless suggests that AWS is gearing up for quantum computing, as major tech players increasingly enter what appears to be a race for quantum.

IBM recentlyunveiled a roadmapthat eyes a 1,121-qubit system for 2023, and is currently working on a 127-qubit processor. Google's 54-qubit Sycamore chip made headlines in 2019for achieving quantum supremacy; and Microsoft recently made itscloud-based quantum ecosystem, Azure Quantum, available for public preview.

Amazon, for its part, launched an AWS-managed service called Amazon Braket, which allows scientists, researchers and developers toexperiment with computers from quantum hardware providers, such as D-Wave, IonQ and Rigetti. However, the company is yet to build its own quantum computer.

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AWS reveals a new method to build a more accurate quantum computer - ZDNet

[Courtesty of LG Electronics]

Multiphysics is the coupled processes or systems involving more than one simultaneously occurring physical field and the studies of and knowledge about these processes and systems. Multiphysics simulations are used to analyze and validate them.

LG Electronics said the joint study would increase the competitiveness of future technologies by utilizing quantum computing that uses quantum bits or qubits, based on the principles of quantum theory, which explains the nature and behavior of energy and matter on the quantum level. Theoretically, a quantum computer would gain enormous processing power and perform tasks using all possible permutations simultaneously.

"Quantum computing is an innovative technology that goes beyond existing technologies and has considerable potential," said LG Electronics chief technology officer Park Il-pyung."Based on open innovation strategies, we will strengthen technological competitiveness with potential companies like Qu&Co and promote a high-level application study."

Qu&Co CTO Vincent Elfving said his company would cooperate with LG Electronics to introduce a new technology that effectively solves non-linear problems by utilizing quantum algorithms. The Amsterdam-based company develops quantum-computing algorithms, software and services running on currently available quantum hardware.

South Korea has joined an international race to develop quantum computing technology and hardware. The Ministry of Science and ICT aims to develop a practical five-qubit quantum computer by 2023.

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LG Electronics works with Dutch firm to develop quantum computing technology for multiphysics simulation - Aju Business Daily