Climate
Top American banks exit net zero alliance: What does this mean for their European peers? EuroNews
NOAA told to search grant programs for climate-related terms Axios
UK conservation goals insufficient to save ants and bees, says expert Guardian
Syndemics
Protection from COVID reinfections plummeted from 80% to 5% with omicron Ars Technica
China?
Xi Jinping to visit Moscow on 9 May, Russian ambassador says Ukrainska Pravda
China’s Trump Strategy Foreign Affairs. Commentary:
China is switching the world from a model based on paywalled tech tied to a subordinate productive sector to a model based on cheap/free tech subordinated to a dominant productive sector. In this world there are no shortcuts: compete or die. 🇨🇳 https://t.co/Fjv8hMB3KP
— Philip Pilkington (@philippilk) January 29, 2025
Why the U.S. Has a Better Hand Than China in the Great Power Game Newsweek
Taiwan’s legacy chip industry contemplates future as China eats into share Reuters
Are China’s rural poor losing faith in education’s power to transform lives? South China Morning Post
China’s Long Economic Slowdown Dissent
Myanmar
Trump Extends US National Emergency Declaration on Myanmar The Irrawaddy
Syraqistan
Netanyahu praises Trump’s ‘revolutionary, creative’ Gaza plan Le Monde. Meanwhile:
To fly to the U.S. Netanyahu's plane flew via Europe's airspace unimpeded, which tells you all you need to know about Europe's "stand for justice and the respect of international law." https://t.co/7IjziUjNjb
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) February 7, 2025
How Trump and Netanyahu forced Mohammed bin Salman to draw a line on Palestine Middle East Eye
* * * Israel’s renaming of West Bank is step toward annexation: Palestinian ministry Anadolu Agency
* * * Israel Police Raid Prominent East Jerusalem Bookshops, Arrest Owners, Confiscate Books Haaretz
Trump repeats pledge to take control of Gaza even as pressure mounts to renew ceasefire AP
European Disunion
Germany will support Ukraine but won’t back its NATO membership – chancellor candidates’ debate Ukrainska Pravda
Germany’s Scholz slams CDU rival Merz for accepting far-right support in heated debate France24
* * *
South of the Border
Slashing the State Phenomenal World. The deck: “Argentina under Milei’s chainsaw.”
Ecuador set for run-off in presidential election dominated by security Al Jazeera
Trump Administration
Donald Trump to impose 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium imports FT
A pivotal senator says he extracted vaccine concessions from RFK Jr. How will that play out? LA Times
Trump says he has directed US Treasury to stop minting new pennies, citing rising cost AP
Doge
Donald Trump vows to cut billions of dollars from US defence spending FT. The deck: “President says ‘fraud and abuse’ at Pentagon will be Elon Musk’s next target.”
* * * Alarm as JD Vance says federal judges ‘aren’t allowed’ to control president Independent
The courts stand between Musk and a Treasury takeover FT
Supreme Court that Trump helped shape could have the last word on his aggressive executive orders AP
* * * Shutting Down CFPB Is Not Like Shutting Down USAID Credit Slips
USAID’s pullback from Egypt puts employees and programs at risk Enterprise; USAID (1):
2/14
Approaching the gate manned by Egyptian guards, we bluffed our way in and drove through the su*cide b*m8er barriers. This was aided, no doubt, by the fact that we were in a Mercedes (the diplomatic car of choice) and I look unmistakably American. pic.twitter.com/mQy9BcgnLK
— Larry Alex Taunton (@LarryTaunton) February 9, 2025
USAID (2):
Ahead of his time
Former president of Bolivia Evo Morales (2013): "We have decided to expel USAID from Bolivia… never again USAID, who manipulates and uses our leaders with handouts" pic.twitter.com/SndDJRtW13
— COMBATE |🇵🇷 (@upholdreality) February 6, 2025
* * * What Just Happened: Security Implications of Trump’s Efforts to Trim the CIA Workforce Just Security
Teen on Musk’s DOGE Team Graduated from ‘The Com’ Krebs on Security
The Elite Lawyers Working for Elon Musk’s DOGE Include Former Supreme Court Clerks ProPublica
The Scapegoat of the Hour Marianne Williamson, Transform
* * *
Democrats en déshabillé
Democratic senator says his party is ready to shut down government over Trump’s actions The Hill. Maybe soi, maybe not:
I really can't get over this one random dude without any credentials is stopping all of Congress from entering a fking building.
Democrats are so embarrassing https://t.co/PhmzN8IG14
— Pat Just Pat 🍉 (@PatTheSocialist) February 7, 2025
Digital Watch
Creators demand tech giants fess up and pay for all that AI training data The Register
Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training — court records reveal copyright violations Tom’s Hardware
* * * AI Governance Alliance World Economic Forum
Paris AI summit forecast: more talk than action Axios
DARPA To Launch Pre-Crime AML Program The Rage. AML = Anti-Money Laundering.
Sports Desk
The Eagles So Humiliated The Chiefs That Even Philly Fans Have To Believe Defector. Gritty is the way.
‘Not Like Us’ started as a diss. Now, it’s a Super Bowl anthem CNN. Musical interlude.
Class Warfare
Resisting Digital Feudalism Project Syndicate
LA’s rich and famous made ‘odd request’ of private armies as wildfires fueled fear, boss says FOX
Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Thinking fs
Antidote du jour (Thomas Fuhrmann):
Bonus antidote, via JL:
RIP Kuli. Kuli, a feline of modest size but mythic stature, who meowed her way into our lives and hearts in early 2012. She would often accompany us on morning walks before breakfast – two humans, a dog and a cat. She was an accomplished huntress, both of rodents and warm laps to sleep on. Diagnosed with FIV as a kitten, she outlived all expectations, to a span of almost 13 years of the best cat life we could give her. Farewell Tiny Tax Assistant, we love you and miss you dearly
.
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
250 comments
Comments are closed.
‘Arnaud Bertrand
@RnaudBertrand
To fly to the U.S. Netanyahu’s plane flew via Europe’s airspace unimpeded, which tells you all you need to know about Europe’s “stand for justice and the respect of international law.” ‘
And yet, yet, when the same authorities suspected that the Bolivian Presidential jet may have been carrying Edward Snowden back in 2013, they forced it to ground in Austria so that they could search it and other counties cooperated by closing their airspace to that jet-
https://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/02/world/americas/bolivia-presidential-plane/index.html
Love that juxtaposition!
Gooooooood Mooooooorning Fiatnam!
The demise of the little bit coin had come, it wasn’t as if you could buy anything with them, and its use had been relegated to essentially hand aerobics for cashiers in retail stores that had never heard of Swedish rounding although the practice had been going on for decades in our peer countries that ditched their Pennies.
None of the grunts in the platoon would ever go to battle with a handful of Lincolns jingling and a jangling in your BDU, they preferred stealthy Bitcoins which uttered no sound and could be used to buy illicit arms online if you found yourself in a firefight and needed backup asap.
I heard that army PX’s have not used Pennies since 1980. Too heavy to ship. I worked at a produce stand in Seattle where we also did not take pennies. He had some heated exchanges. We enjoyed saying, “No”.
Cents were once upon a time almost the size of a half $, and i’d gladly accept your 1794 starred reverse, here have a banana~
https://www.pcgs.com/coinfacts/coin/1794-1c-starred-reverse-bn/1374
There will be not another penny for one’s thoughts, a penny saved and earned, penny smart and pound foolish, or pennies from heaven.
Re Trump says he has directed US Treasury to stop minting new pennies, citing rising cost AP
A potential future scenario:
Back when Italy still had the lira, and there over a thousand to the £, there was a shortage of small value coins. You often got given sweets or similar in change when buying a coffee or the like. I was with a friend once who ordered a black coffee and got some sweets as change. He changed his mind and asked to add milk, which he got, but the guy at the till took back his sweets and gave him some cheaper sweets instead.
Maybe there is an upside……Ebay is offering a 1979 200 Lire coin for $1,800.
Curious, so I looked up the collector value and a 1979 200 Lire coin is worth 30¢.
The aforementioned ‘Swedish rounding’ is how the world of exiled small time money is calculated these days, you simply round up or down to the nearest decimal point, and if we are getting rid of Cents then it’s time to ditch Nickels too-the latter being the stealthiest coin around in that they are actually 75% copper in content.
Both cost around 3x the face value to mint.
If that happens the way Swedish rounding works is simple, say the bill comes to $42.37, presto it becomes $42.40. $42.34 becomes $42.30.
It ain’t rocket science.
The copper nickel alloy is called monel. Copper and nickel are 100 percent soluble without a phase change. It is more stable then stainless steel and is what nuclear submarine hulls are made of. I have a stash.
I think you will find (US anyway) submarine pressure hulls made of HY-100 steel MIL-S-21952. Monel though often used in shipboard systems, but at least in surface ships less expensive Cu-Ni alloys are more common.
Maybe I am mistaken but I was told at Bremerton that Trident class anyway were monel. It was awhile back.
Miscellaneous small coins, aka Shrapnel.
Better than the Japanese approach of making them so small as to be useless.
And why is the dime so small? Next up?
I’m going to make the dime bigger. It’s so small. You’ll see. It will be beautiful!
Israel Police Raid Prominent East Jerusalem Bookshops, Arrest Owners, Confiscate Books
Book burning to follow? And then presumably a Kristallnacht attacking Palestinian stores.
A police raid on a bookstore in any country raises questions about freedom of speech, censorship, rule of law, democracy, especially if politically or racially (as in Jewish supremacist) motivated.
Looks like the judge who approved the raid is ultra-orthodox. https://israel365news.com/321999/israel-appoints-first-ultra-orthodox-woman-judge/
Which puzzles me.
Police raiding a bookstore, that’s so shiny boots of leather! Trump is going to have a go at our universities if left to his own devices. What’s it called when your government cracks down on free speech and Goodnight Moon?
Book ’em, Book of Daniel!
Yes it is. If you can’t see that, I really can’t help you. You must have been asleep with the book banning that is already well underway in red states: https://pen.org/book-bans/
Your smarminess and negative value added comments degrade the site.
I agree with you, but I’m not sure what you’re responding to…
Agree about the freedoms? Did the comment get changed?
I toned it down and removed that bit since what preceded was probably unproductively harsh. But yes, people died for the freedoms we have enjoyed.
It wasn’t unproductively harsh, it was direct and to the point. imo.
I’m just not sure what text ‘Yes it is’ was responding to.
“Police raiding a bookstore, that’s so shiny boots of leather!”
I need to work on my distillation. That was supposed to convey a general observation of our US culture’s obsession with the fetishization of fascism, the phrase “shiny boots of leather” stolen from the Velvet Underground tune Venus in Furs.
Who stole it from Bob Dylan. Spanish Boots of Spanish Leather
Brava!
I wouldn’t mind if he stops current gain of function research at several US universities.
O put a moratorium on them, which was quietly ignored by funders. T lifted the moratorium in his first admin. He should reinstate it. imo.
From October 2024, four and a half months ago.
https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/gain-function-research-vital-us-innovation
And about that earlier ignored gain of function ban, read it and weep. UNC Chapel Hill has some history. From March 2016, during the ban on gain of function.
SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517719113
I’d be happy to see this nonsense shut down.
I read : Why the U.S. Has a Better Hand Than China in the Great Power Game Newsweek.
What struck me: has nothing change in 50 years? I recall thinking how US had these advantages as a new 2nd Lt in 1974….. I was partly correct. 1991 came faster than we hoped.
What has changed: only S Korea makes a noticeable quantity of artillery ammunition. The rest are all financialized (Japan maybe less financialized) importing things they no longer make.
A contrary view from Ellen Brown.
https://scheerpost.com/2025/02/09/ellen-brown-quantitative-easing-with-chinese-characteristics-how-to-fund-an-economic-miracle/
As with Russia will our ruling internationalists be conquered by old fashioned patriotism?
Good article. Shows what could have been done with QE during the GFC as opposed to bailing out corrupt banks and propping up a housing market that is now unaffordable for average Americans.
But all these “Cold War” with China articles are pure hokum at this point. It is either an indication of a completely delusional DC that has no idea how bad things have gotten or a distraction doled out to the peasants so that the looting from the top down can continue.
The proposed solutions like tariffs were appropriate 30 years ago when the trade imbalance was a thing. And imposing those tariffs on America’s two closest trade partners in violation of trade treaties America recently negotiated has a real stench of desperation.
*Sigh*
We don’t allow links to Ellen Brown because she does not remotely understand banking or monetary operations.
QE did not print money. It was an asset swap. It was designed to lower long Treasury bond rates and mortgage rates to goose housing prices and reduce the number of mortgages that were underwater.
The bank bailouts were direct: Treasury TARP, various Fed other programs.
QE also inefficiently provided stimulus by allowing many mortgage borrowers to refi at lower rates, increasing their discretionary income. The reason that was an inefficient stimulus is the banks take out a ton of fees on refis.
Bummer that – pardon me – thanks for the correction!
How’s this:
One wonders what could have been done during the GFC by smarter investing in our country as opposed to bailing out corrupt banks and propping up a housing market that is now unaffordable for average Americans.
That would have required legislation like the kind we had before Newt gutted the congressional IQ.
We refi-ed at a lower rate. It helped some. Worked out. I don’t know if, together with the bank, we stimulated the economy any, but it sweetened my current situation. So, thanks Obama!
Not to neglect your question, from all I can find, Russian oligarchs were not overcome with patriotism. They were brought back under control by a strong government lead by Putin:
Rich and powerless: How Putin controls Russia’s wealthy oligarchs
https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/rich-and-powerless-how-putin-controls-russia-s-wealthy-oligarchs-20231207-p5epp9.html
American oligarchs are either in government (insider trading a la Pelosi), or have bought it (SCOTUS “free speech” quarter billion bucks a la Musk) as the “owners row” at the swearing in ceremony made clear:
Billionaires, tech titans, presidents: A guide to who stood where at Trump’s inauguration
https://apnews.com/article/trump-inauguration-who-stood-where-a689828e986838c1735aeef03f3b32b3
Musk spent more than a quarter-billion dollars to elect Trump, including funding a mysterious super PAC, new filings show
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/05/politics/elon-musk-trump-campaign-finance-filings/index.html
It was telling that for a while, there were all those articles bouncing around about how if TikTok was to be sold, China would sell it to Elon:
Why China may be OK with TikTok selling to Elon Musk
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/14/tech/china-tiktok-sale-elon-musk-analysis/index.html
The article goes at length about how Elon is viewed as a “friend of China” (which may be true given the size of his investments at risk in China), but just neglects to point out that when you’ve found your “wrecking crew”, equipping him with the largest possible wrecking ball is a very smart thing to do.
Specifically, IIRC, Putin successfully prosecuted and jailed one for not paying his taxes over a very extended period, which seemed to be the norm among the oligarchs. I believe (and readers can correct me or fill in details) he told the rest the deal was they could pay a big chunk of what they owed and they would be given an amnesty, but they needed to stay out of politics and political influence. Khodorkovsky defied him. A long story followed but Khodorkovsky lost.
I remember something similar, including a video from several years ago with Putin sitting down with a bunch of the Russian oligarchs. I looked for it just now, but wasn’t able to put my finger on it. My recollection was that he gave a toned down version of the speech DeNiro gave after he caught the card counters in Casiino – he told them if they liked their money they’d acquired in the 90s, they’d stay out of politics.
The other guy who defied him was Bill Browder, whose Hermitage fund made a mint off Russia during the 90s. Russia wanted some taxes out of him, and he responded by claiming Putin was the villain looting Russia. This is wahat led to the Magnitsky act. If you follow all those claims over the years about Putin being the richest man in the world and whatnot, they pretty much trace back to Bill Browder. Most USians don’t realize these claims about Putin’s nefariousness lead back to a megarich Westerner who looted Russia.
And, as History the Trickster would have it, grandson of former CPUSA leader (during its Popular Front glory days) Earl Browder.
I was also struck by “One American ace is geography. While some argue that geography no longer matters in a borderless internet world, it remains important that the U.S. is surrounded by two large oceans and two friendly neighbors, while China has border disputes with half of its 14 neighbors, including India, which has now surpassed China in population.
Given Pres. Trump’s actions on tariffs the ” two friendly neighbors” may not be all that friendly anymore plus the steel and aluminum tariffs probably have slightly annoyed a number of NATO members besides the already angry Denmark and Canada.
Also, this ….
One American ace is geography…while some argue that geography no longer matters in a borderless internet world, it remains important that the U.S. is surrounded by two large oceans …
That some USians can still imagine these things give them any impunity or advantage in a world of hypersonic ICBMs, rapidly advancing bioweaponeering capability, and plain old potential 9-11s, is just one more indicator of how ignorant, arrogant, and frankly stupid some USians are.
Well, they will learn.
Ref: USAID … Hannah Arendt, described how in a totalitarian society front organizations are used to capture civil society IMO.
Look at what they always say is the solution is to “containing China”: More “AI”.
“Israel’s renaming of West Bank is step toward annexation: Palestinian ministry”
So will it be after the mid-terms when Trump announces that after the latest round of Israeli bombings in the West Bank, that the Palestinians should be evacuated out of the country while new, beautiful buildings will be built there for world people? And that the US will be taking over the West Bank while this goes on? And those Palestinians? They will probably be shoved into the middle of a desert in some poverty-stricken country where they will be given some crappy old tents so that they will fry in the summertime and freeze in the wintertime. And Trump? Unless you can afford a Rolex, he will never listen to you.
And those Palestinians? They will probably be shoved into the middle of a desert in some poverty-stricken country where they will be given some crappy old tents so that they will fry in the summertime and freeze in the wintertime.
This reminds me of a dire historical precedent, when a couple million people were violently expelled from their homes, forced to leave their homeland, and death-marched for hundreds of kilometers to be unceremoniously dumped in the Syrian desert — where most of them died: the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians.
“Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier?” (Who nowadays still talks about the annihilation of the Armenians?) A.Hitler, 1939.
Never again is more like forever again.
Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad (caps in the original), attributing it to some fictitious Roman historian from, presumably, around 70 AD.
I’ve been trying to give Trump the benefit of the doubt with regard to his plan in Gaza, but I saw a report this morning that he told Bret Baier that they wouldn’t be allowed to come back to Gaza. If this is a pressure tactic to get the other players to actually fix the problem, so that the Palestinians can come back to live there, then that would be good, but I’m worried it isn’t, particularly since Douglas MacGregor reports they have delivered MOABs to Israel… What on earth do they need those for?
Watched some of Scott Ritter on Dialogue Works and he has an interesting take on Trump.
That Trump’s foray into Gaza solutions is an ambit claim. That Trump throws out confusing signals all the time as part of his modus operandi, and that nothing of the sort will happen to Gaza(US development). That one part of this was to humiliate Netanyahu and put him in his place.
I recall a news item years ago about Trump having dinner with Chris Christie, where he basically seemed to toy with Christie, who was really angling for a job in the Trump administration.
Leads me to think that Trump only sees personalities: the people he likes and dislikes, the people who want something from him which means he can toy with them, the people who can be bullied or not, the people who can help him or not. I think he throws this all into the mix of how he will deal with each person. And since he is a billionaire, he must have been right a lot of the time.
He has goals, but he keeps them hidden while he is negotiating. He says of many people how he and they are friends. Then he sends out confusing signals. Netanyahu? A friend. Then posts Jeffrey Sach’s takedown. Then moves the chair out for Bibi. Then says he is taking Gaza for the US.
He makes enemies like we have hot dinners. Then he just moves on to the next person.
“Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training”
82TB of books? I thought that would be ALL of them but I asked DeepSeek what they thought. DeepSeek says there are 130 million books. They say an average file size of 5MB for 650TB of total data. I think that’s 10x too high due to the inclusion of .PDF files and that if only simple text files were copied, then Meta would have them all. Hopefully after noting which are fiction vs nonfiction.
That is an interesting point that. Are fiction books useful as a training set or are they excluded. If they concentrate on just non-fiction, how do those AIs cope when for a historical event, they have several points of view which may be contradictory? Do they concentrate on English language books – which would reflect western belief systems – and when they are digitized, just run answers through a translator for foreign languages? The whole exercise really is a black box when you think about it.
Same way the distinguish between useful posts on Reddit and idiocy, jokes, and trolling.
Being a sporadic user of Anna’s Books, I can’t recall seeing versions of books in*.txt format. Mostly are in pdf, epub, mobi…
I think you’re making the assumption that there are digitized versions of all 130 million published books, which may be incorrect especially if published pre-internet.
Having said that, I seem to recall one of the Google founders figured out a way to quickly scan entire books and started borrowing them by the truckload from the local library system. Previews/excerpts were made available online. But don’t know if a collection of entire editions is readily torrentable and is part of Meta’s 82TB.
Should add that I don’t think Google digitized all published books but I bet they gave it a good go.
Early book piracy was driven by publishers’ refusal to digitize older books with the exception of bestsellers remainders of which were being used as bricks to hold up shelves in used bookstores. This is in keeping with the publishing, recording and filmmaking industries’ love of selling the same product over and over and over again.
I have several bibliographies in my collection from authors who died long before computers. Many early digital books are in HTML or .txt format which, like early Word documents, use a fraction of the space .mobi and .epub files take up. .PDFs aren’t books so much as pictures of books and (imo) should only be used for magazines and illustrated books.
I suspect that only Meta really has a handle on just what Meta scraped or how useable it is. Makes no difference to me what their database is, I’m more concerned with how they use it specifically how they verify their data. Their logic model I can judge for myself but before I can trust, they must show me how they verify.
It’s not just Meta doing this.
What I particularly despise is the idea that it’s fair use, because they claim that AI is “reading” just like a human, when it actually learning to reproduce the text… and it’s destroying the means for authors to sustain their ability to produce new books.
When compression became a thing, a lot of hackers wondered whether compressing a song or movie would remove the copyright protection because the data was different. Oh, no, they were told — the law says bits have a “color” and the color has to do with the provenance of the data, not the expression of the data. So no, people couldn’t just copy Disney’s latest (or 70 year old) movie into DIVX. But this argument about provenance somehow doesn’t apply to OpenAI or Meta. Why not? It seems that the law is becoming “whatever suits the powerful’s short term interests.”
Always the contrarian on digital rights, I’m thinking you sound like the guy who wanted to make all the replicators on Star Trek coin operated.
I would like authors to be paid… do you not expect to be paid for your work?
How do you expect people to spend the time to understand topics deeply and explain them to others, if you are fine with taking that which is not offered?
We are not on a path towards “StarTrek”. Inequality is growing not falling.
Universal access to digital content can give us a Star Trek future.
We simply need to find new ways of paying artists, writers, musicians and other creators because Capitalism insists overpaying some while not paying the rest.
Remembering Aaron Swartz. Pace. From January 2013.
Digital Activist’s Suicide Casts Spotlight on Growth of Open-Access Movement
Aaron Swartz was threatened with criminal trial for downloading millions of academic articles. Although he may have employed questionable methods, the data-access principles he fought for are becoming widely embraced.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/digital-activists-suicide-casts-spotlight-on-growth-of-open-access-movement/
It’s OK if you’re an AI, I guess. / :-\
Highly speculative. No previous examples of claim exist.
Please do so before depriving authors of their meager earnings.
Copyright was established as a mechanism to achieve this — the first printing shops were ripping authors off. Simply destroying it and not replacing it with something equal or better will lead to a new dark age.
I didn’t make authors earnings meager, capitalism did. Removing copyright destroys nothing, it just lets bookmobiles operate without an accountant walking in front of them waving the copyright lantern.
How are we harmed by giving everyone access to all the books, music and art in the world?
Quick reminder: digital file sharing is not a criminal act. You can be sued by creators (aka publishers) for damages but you cannot be jailed. Corrupt as our Congress is, even they refused to criminalize copying.
This isn’t about entertainment, this is about the future of knowledge. I dream of schoolkids having age-restricted but otherwise full access to the Library of Congress. That’s how you get a Star Trek future. Capitalism only leads to Ferenghi-ism.
Authors are harmed. Why buy it if you don’t have to?
You never told me how you would ensure authors and their families get to eat. Unless that is solved, books will be a status symbol for the already wealthy, and few will have any value.
A lot of academic/technical book authors were unhappy at how much publishers were charging for their books–many would have preferred if they were available more readily, say for students. They were certainly getting next to nothing for their books. Granted, it’s a niche market, but an indicator nevertheless that at least some authors don’t make much compared to the publishers.
Not disagreeing. Just want a mechanism to ensure people are paid for their work. Strange this is so controversial in the 21st century.
As I said, we need to figure that out. My solution would be to digitize all US published books and make them available through the Library of Congress via bittorrent which could easily be incorporated into all browsers. This would take time and that time could be used to give ALL Americans access to broadband.
After ensuring the download and review systems couldn’t be gamed, authors would get paid their percentage of whatever sum is set aside by Congress. No payments to anyone with less than 200 readers. It would still be hard to make a living by writing, but this would be vastly more equitable than the current system and would still give plenty of bragging rights to bestselling authors.
The more we learn about USAID, the more we have to question why some books are bestsellers and others aren’t. The current system is creaky and obsolete. Change isn’t just desirable, it’s necessary. Other countries have already done this.
Which ones?
Norway has made all books by Norwegian authors digitally available to Norwegians for free. I think either Denmark or Netherlands has done the same or was taking it under consideration.
Our current system is a form of knowledge Apartheid. Poor children do not have access to the same resources as kids from affluent, digitally savvy families. That inequality would be very easy to even out given universal access to digital content.
Making all published content available on a universal platform for free would put an end to AI writing fiction (why bother if no money involved and yes, only human authors get Library of Congress royalties).
Interesting, thank you.
That’s Communism. You can’t have that.
I wholeheartedly agree. But the more our economies align, the more education spreads within countries and globally, and the more emancipation of minorities is accepted – paradoxically the less economic transition to truly equal societies, utopian concepts, become defendable in the West.
While filesharing and all you mention were part of the blogosphere and even represented in parliaments e.g. by the pirate party 10+ years ago it´s now almost verboten to suggest this. I remember just before Covid to say VPNs could be outlawed was considered the joke of a lunatic.
If you want to get beaten up I suggest you go to Berlinale next week visit a few of the parties where film folks is gathering and on stage put out your demands.
They will treat you like the combination of Putin, Marine Le Pen and Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar.
“I would like authors to be paid” is a wisdom equivalent to “I want peace in the world”, and this ain’t Miss World competition. If you want people to appreciate such talk, you need to be in a swimming suit.
Copyright remained in effect when writing went from typewriter to to Xerox machine, from vinal records to CDs, etc. The notion that copyright is attached to the technology and not to the creative effort is a legal sleight of hand, imo. / ;)
But the techies make sure their intellectual property is protected and that they collect from it.
Just saw this example today:
Arm’s CEO on the future of AI and why he does not fear DeepSeek – FT
Rene Haas has reshaped chip designer’s business to focus on royalties rather than fees
“…This turned out fortuitously, allowing Haas and his team to try out new strategies. He decided to flip Arm’s business model, tying higher royalties to the devices that used its chip architecture, rather than focusing on upfront licence fees. Arm was charging roughly the same royalty on a chip that appeared in a blender as one that went into a high-end data centre, which he says was “crazy”. He reorganised the company along vertical lines, creating a business for servers, and a business for cars, for example. Arm’s designs had to be priced “commensurate with the value”…
Although my AI for my medical dictation is a completely different company than Meta, I have often wondered if it too is not somehow infused with fiction and literature.
We have now had 5 issues in the past 2 months in which things literally NEVER came up in the visit, but are in the note, and this is done so in a very “Frank Capra movie” way.
For example – after never ever talking to a patient about where they will pick up their prescriptions – a sentence stating the following was in the note —- “The patient will pick up their prescription at Shepherd Drug in Barnesville”
This is not the only example. Again hallucinating. And again – after reading through the outputs of these things , one does get the idea that it is copying something from literature or movies or magazines.
FWIW – there is no Shepherd Drug nor is there a Barnseville anywhere even remotely close to us. Nor are these names even remotely phonetically approaching anything around here that could have come up – as in the recording was muffled or something. This is not even close.
I am beginning to suspect the AI is drawing from other sources. 82 Tb is a lot of novels or movies to draw from. The sad thing is that at times it is also just making up medical stuff as well.
I get more concerned by the hour.
It’s fairly routine for me now to ask ChatGPT for book recommendations on some given very narrowly focused topic or question, often theological, and, on checking, to learn a good percentage (I want to say 20%) of the titles and authors don’t even exist. The only thing is, the author names and titles are so unique, so obscure, it’s easy to establish they never existed in any context, fiction or non.
One possibility is students or grads may have inserted fraudulent citations in their theses, dissertations, research papers, etc., and ChatGPT went and gobbled it up.
Side note, it would be interesting to use ChatGPT to trace back to those fraudulent citations.
Overheard regarding a grad level lit review; AI is really good at determining if a publication meets your criteria, really bad at sourcing publications. An anecdote, but I’ve been keeping an eye out for similar news.
Is AI turning into a digital equivalent of the middle ages beastiary books which described animals that never were as having real existence? Examples:
the griffin
https://smarthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/BYVANCKB_mimi_72a23_046r_afb.jpg
the manticore
https://www.medievalists.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Manticore-from-the-Salisbury-Bestiary.jpg
and of course the unicorn
https://i0.wp.com/www.medievalists.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/RochesterBestiaryFolio021rMonoceros_s1.jpg?resize=731%2C576
Hallucinations of the middle ages. / ;)
Then, there’s the pelican. ;)
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/609s9z/til_linnaeus_included_in_his_classification_of/
Me thinks less “made up” than incorrectly correlated. Imagine finding a deer’s skull on a beach next to a washed up narwhal’s horn in 1100 or 1200 A.D. You know. / my 2 cents
Thanks for the link.
Consider digital audio: one samples an analog continuous sound wave at regular sampling points. The frequency of samples limits the highest sound frequency you can reproduce (the Nyquist limit).
Now imagine a surface in 3D space. Machine learning uses its training materials as points to determine where that surface is. It then uses that surface to make its predictions as to what to output. Obviously, if an area is well described by many points, the surface it finds will closely match reality, but often it isn’t, and the surface does not match reality. In those areas the output will seem strange, or irrelevant. Although the algorithm isn’t doing anything different, people call the output from those areas “hallucinations” or “confabulations”, whereas when the algorithm dealing with an area where the surface matches reality, they think the tool is working well.
Will more data solve the problem? Well the problem is that we aren’t dealing with 3D, but extremely high dimensionality, and the surface is an extremely high dimensional manifold. Therefore the probability the data in the real world just so happens to be sufficiently dense to properly define the manifold falls to zero. Hence we will need a different approach to remove all “confabulations”.
In a sense flora’s Medieval bestiary is similar: too little knowledge leading to narwhal’s tusks being assigned to unicorns, dinosaur bones being assigned to dragons, etc.
Once again, the use of language to skew our understanding and soothe our emotions.
The people who decided we would all call this AI situation “hallucinating” could have chosen a lot of other more accurate, every-day words.
Just getting things wrong until now was called ‘making an error’. Or if deliberate, ‘lying’.
In this case, AI appears to be advertising, but crude attempt. Since advertising is one thing that makes the billionaires richer, then putting advertising in AI is probably a future part of the business plan and will probably become ubiquitous once they get the mechanics right.
AI the new opiate of the masses via Bernays – ???? – machinations on fixing humans …. securing rents in perpetuity …
@IM Doc: Sounds like you are using Whisper.
Here’s a list of silly things people apply LLMs to. The entire website is worth a read.
“LA’s rich and famous made ‘odd request’ of private armies as wildfires fueled fear, boss says”
TRANSLATION – The wealthy, massive deniers of climate change & producers of it, want private fire & security to protect their property from what they deny & shoot the poor who suffer most from it.
It’s a sort of pure microcosm of Capitalism-red-in-tooth-and-claw, isn’t it?
Well, the boys in red, at least on the offensive side of the ball, really stunk up the place yesterday. Congrats to the Eagles, who turned out to be as good as the hype this time. They played like they realized that the only way to beat the Chiefs was to crush them.
Mahomes drops to 17-4 in playoffs, with two of those losses being in overtime and two being real stinkers. Chiefs fans still have a lot to celebrate about these last seven years, but it feels like there’s a rebuild coming, at least on the offensive side of the ball.
If Mahomes final touchdown throw late in the 4th quarter had won the game instead of it being the vehicle that allowed the score to look less lopsided, it would have been heralded as the most important touchdown pass ever in Superbowl history, twas a thing of beauty in a downright ugly game, punctuated by some of the lamest TV commercials for a SB that i’ve ever seen, whatever became of funny?
Props to the Eagles-they destroyed KC.
It wasn’t all that long ago (well maybe 3 or 4 decades ago) that a lifelong Philadelphia fan left instructions for his funeral that the city’s entire pro football team be his pall bearers so that he could be let down by the Eagles one last time.
That is actually an old Vikings joke going back more than your 4 decades. Probably back all the way to the first ever Packers winning season. So says this U of Minnesota graduate from early 1970s.
It was against the Eagles 2nd string D, so there would likely have been a different outcome if it had meant anything.
For immediate and easy reference, it can always be much worse and dare I suggest a most dire appearing franchise that reportedly is worth a few billions no matter what…
My nearby team located in Charlotte, “your Carolina Panthers”…the only good news is this newest of new head coaches survived a full season, and they’ve money to spend or waste…by comparison, for KC the Hunt family are league royalty in their ownership and navigation of free agency and drafting young talent…I have read a good historical detail about the founding of that fledgling AFL ( that team, the league as well ) pre-merger and the wilder west days of ownership on a proverbial shoe string and likely a prayer..
In the current year, Gunz control is a great example of Chesterton’s fence: democrats whining about fascism while elevating to a leadership position someone who wants to disarm them.
This is Making Shit Up.
What the Democrats wanted to do did not even approach “disarming”. See Australia for what that looks like.
The most aggressive thing the Democrats put forward as a policy idea, and IIRC this never got even as far as a proposed bill in recent years, was gun registration requirements.
I think the reference is to newly elected DNC Vice Chair David Hogg’s statements. Even the Due Dissidence guys say this will be a turn off for a lot of people the Dems claim to want votes from.
There’s never been a serious effort in this country to ban handguns by blue team, handguns being the vast majority of the gun violence problem. In classic Biden fashion he tried to ban sales to 18-20 year olds only and even that failed in the courts, smh.
Re: one random dude stopping members of congress from entering a building.
If you want to find reason for optimism, here…
Trump’s abject lawlessness and naked use of raw power may very well speed up the exit of today’s utterly useless democrats. Voters are going to run out of patience with the feigned helplessness and complaining that dems have gotten so comfortable with that they’ve forgotten how to do congressional stuff. The early, confused chants at random protests to, “do something” are an early sign of that.
There’s even recent precedent in Mexico. Trump so thoroughly humiliated Pena Nieto (remember that guy?) as a useless, corrupt, do-nothing hack that the PRI got completely smoked at the next election. It became a matter of Mexican pride. AMLO got elected with a strong majority and made a point of…well…doing stuff, and being seen to be doing stuff. Voters liked it much better.
‘one random dude stopping members of congress from entering a building.’
Time to call out the Senate Parliamentarian. That’ll show them.
Make sure to dress to the nine’s!
“…. Doctor says I’m impotent, and if you is impotent, you gotsta look impotent! “”
“We may have to consider shutting down the govt! , maybe…………”
“Are China’s rural poor losing faith in education’s power to transform lives?”
Rural incomes in China have for years been increasing faster than urban incomes, and the basis of rural income increases is very largely increasing technology application to agriculture and land management. Technology application in agriculture is attractive enough to have a flow of students from developing countries studying Chinese methodology.
Education is obviously improving lives in rural China and rural families are especially grateful for the high quality-free or -minimal cost education offered.
Thank you for steadfastly reminding us that Western propaganda about China is lies, lies, lies. Some of us realize it and are disgusted with the cretins running the show.
Its the same with the “China failing growth” narrative. China’s population is to all intents stable, while its GDP is growing at 5% a year; so that’s a 5% increase in GDP per capita per year. At its current stage of development and the size of the economy, its natural that China’s GDP growth would slow down.
The Chinese state has very successfully redirected investment from housing to productive industry, increasing the pace of economic upgrading, without causing a financial crash. Western governments would love to have China’s “problems”
No, its GDP is NOT growing at 5% a year. I can tell you here from the sex capital of Southeast Asia that Chinese tourism is way down v. last year, and that was before the actor kidnapping scandal made things even worse.
The reported China GDP figures have been widely recognized as unreliable forever. That is why analysts looks for proxies like electricity use…and then China started hiding that.
Michael Pettis has debunked that: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/2189245/chinas-gdp-growth-could-be-half-reported-number-says-us
One specific and large source of difference from how everyone else calculates GDP is bad debt losses are debited from GDP totals. China does not do that.
So the China Electric Council is just lying then about 7% annual electricity usage growth and the huge expansion in Chinese renewables, while coal electricity generation remains stable, is just feeding nothing? Pettis pushes the “China over-production and under-consumption” narrative that has been used for years, while Chinese consumption actually keeps increasing as real incomes rise.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-power-demand-growing-faster-than-expected-2024-industry-association-says-2024-10-29/#:~:text=The%20China%20Electricity%20Council%20now,kWh%20in%20its%20previous%20report.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-record-surge-of-clean-energy-in-2024-halts-chinas-co2-rise/#:~:text=Even%20larger%20clean%20energy%20additions%20likely%20in%202025&text=Yet%20solar%20and%20wind%20capacity,wind%20connected%20to%20the%20grid.
I can tell you from direct and indirect reports I am here (where I am has lots of Chinese backing for projects plus an intermarried mafia) that China is not in very good shape right now. These reports are consistent. Yes, anecdata but the sources they tie back to are pretty varied (like princeling children, tour operators, Chinese entrepreneurs and entertainers).
From the Financial Times November 2024. Note it specifically questions consumption data:
https://www.ft.com/content/de9af759-2b94-4b7e-98e4-42698900efeb
As for the figures you cited, any GDP estimates or proxies need to cut to reflect debt writedowns.
The Pettis article is from 6 years ago, how is that relevant to 2025? He has been going on about Chinese “issues” for a very long time, but China just keeps on growing and upgrading its economy. He wants China to mimic the consumption centric Western nations, while China focuses on investment raising real wages. GDP is a calculation of the output of goods and services, debt is not a part of that calculation – so what is the problem with Chinese GDP per capita? Chinese debt is also predominantly owned by Chinese, much of it the state, while Chinese nominal GDP grows and it has very large foreign exchange reserves.
China is rebalancing quite massively (and successfully) from the housing investment driven economy to one more focused on the development and upgrading of the productive forces. It is managing bad debts in a very controlled fashion, which a Party-state dominated society that owns and significantly controls most of the financial sector can do. The US has regularly played the same games in allowing banks to count actual bad debts as good ones on their balance sheet, so that they can “work off the bad debts”. The Fed also took on massive amounts of devalued debt securities and loans onto its books in the GFC at face value to socialize private losses. As European states and the ECB did in the early 2010s.
The rebalancing will most definitely be felt by the richer and younger Chinese who invested in now much depreciated Tier-1 and Tier-2 city properties, but much much less by the less wealthy and outside those cities. Also, much of the easy money in property and financial speculation has been stopped. So the group that travels abroad and ostentatiously consumes and speaks much better English will be affected. And the groups that you mention would certainly be feeling the pain. There is also a very strong official drive away from the exuberant display of wealth. While luxury goods suffered in 2024, new car sales reached a new record.
As for the FT, it sadly lost its journalistic integrity a few years ago. I say sadly, because before it was a very reliable source. Referring to 2007 when there most definitely were issues with Chinese GDP reporting is pretty irrelevant for 2025, especially after the government made strenuous efforts to clean up its act. Accurate statistics are central to accurate decision making by both the state and private actors, and they understood that. The rest of the story is hardly better than unsourced tittle tattle (well below previous FT standards). Excluding students from the youth unemployment count is actually the general standard, shame on the FT for not stating such. China does not include any meaningful amount for the fictitious “household implied rent” as the US does, so there are definitely swings and roundabouts.
I have contacts who own businesses in other parts of SE Asia and they also report that China has slowed, so this is a completely different set of data points. Chinese investment in projects here is also down, which is again not a function of tourism. I said the reports were coming from all sorts of sources, including princelings, and struck me as admissions against interest.
The underlying Pettis reports on how China’s GDP computation is not comparable to Western methods is here, which I was remiss in not posting. The structural issues on how GDP is computed remain the same: https://carnegieendowment.org/china-financial-markets/2019/01/what-is-gdp-in-china?lang=en
See also:
https://www.marketplace.org/2023/07/17/is-gdp-still-a-useful-gauge-of-chinas-economy/
Very interesting, thanks.
By the way, it seems something odd is going on in the Gold market: https://peakprosperity.com/something-just-broke-in-londons-gold-market/
Leaving to one side the undoubted biases in Chinese data (stated numbers have always to be taken with a large grain of salt), GDP is itself a very inadequate measure of economic development – Simon Kuznets, who developed the measure in the 1940’s repeatedly warned about this and was not happy about politicians using it to compare countries, in particular at different stages of development. Its worth reading his own analyses of its weaknesses to understand why its very unwise to see short term changes as having any real meaning with regard to ‘real’ growth.
There are of course proxies such as energy use, but they too are limited, in particular in recent years. Japanese energy use actually increased significantly after the crash in 1990 – mostly because the government turned to covering much of the country in concrete in a desperate attempt to keep the economy going. It is unsurprising that energy usage (specifically electricity use) is increasing in China as it has heavily skewed its economy towards investment, otherwise known as making vast amounts of concrete and steel and trying to find somewhere to put it. There is also a major transition taking place within the economy to move from direct thermal to electric use for industry, which is undoubtedly skewing the figures. In many ways, a drop in overall energy use would probably be a good sign, because it would indicate that older plant is being finally mothballed in favour of more modern higher productivity industrial uses.
The Chinese property bubble was by some measures the greatest misallocation of capital in history. It hasn’t even come close to being resolved, property prices to income are still vastly out of synch with nearly every other country at similar or higher levels of development. Your comments about who are effected are way off the mark – property is the fundamental source of saving for hundreds of millions of ordinary middle income Chinese. 80% of Chinese are homeowners, and 20% own two or more properties. The rich and better off were protected by their foreign hedges. I don’t believe there is a precedent in history for such a high proportion of a population to be so invested in one form of savings, and then seeing it going into terminal decline. The Japanese, Irish and Spanish property crashes were small beer in comparison to the decline in China, and its only at its initial stages, there is a long, long, way before it hits a floor. You cannot win against the long term fundamentals. Add in a demographic decline and what we are seeing is a massive destruction of what was always purely notional wealth.
There is nothing new or anti-Chinese in Pettis’s analysis. He is saying nothing that has not been written repeatedly since the 1990’s by Chinese economists and even the Chinese government itself. The choice to go for a suppression of domestic demand and a very high investment oriented economy was deliberate. Its the exact same model which was pioneered by the US, then followed by Germany, Japan (twice), ROK, China, etc. The hazard in this model is, and has always been well known to students of economic development – that you can only go so far with investment before rates of return fall, and you can only produce goods in line with long term demand. Supply does not create demand unless we find another planet to sell stuff to (or… crazy idea this – you pay people enough to buy more stuff). And if foreigners no longer want to take up your demand, you have to develop it yourself.
China is now in a situation which was widely predicted – by the Chinese government itself which was quite open in the early to mid ’00s about the upcoming need to recalibrate and balance (the 2007 crash knocked this off course). Its the same ‘ceiling’ that the US hit in the 1870’s (the Long Recession, which took around 2 decades to resolve itself), and every other fast growing developing economy has hit a similar ceiling at some stage. Some have gotten past it (ROK), some just got over the line before staggering to a halt (Japan), some fell all the way back (Argentina, Brazil, etc). These issues are well known to anyone with a passing acquaintance with economic history (which obviously excludes most economists).
China is perfectly capable of getting past this problem – in theory anyway. But its one thing to identify a problem, its another thing to implement the solutions. So far, they are doubling down on past policies (i.e. increasing ‘investment’ and hoping demand for it appears by some magic), which is probably just putting off the inevitable return to fundamentals.
This has been an amazing thread, and has really muddled my, mostly positive, view of China’s prosperity. I’ve read some of the links and hope to read more. Wow. No idea where things are going.
However, it has also reinforced my high opinion of NC’s comments. I am grateful to the bloggers, moderators, and commentariat (I think I’ll go have a cry now).
No chance of China massively increasing immigration to bolster the demographics and inflate demand? They could start with people of Chinese ancestry. But then, I guess if Japan didn’t go down that route…
I would think that consistently putting out inaccurate information would make it easier for the public to distrust their own government; I have never seen any honest reasoning for hiding or giving false statistics because it will eventually come out.
It might take enough time to save the careers of some or allow others to game the system for greater profit, but just as with the official inflation numbers given by the American government, many, if not most people, distrust them and therefore mistrust the government. And the inadequate cost-of-living adjustments I see every year from Social Security just makes me distrust more and support less the government.
But again, the blowback from the lies often does not hurt the original liars.
https://english.news.cn/20250209/c8290bb24eb44e7f916de075b5e2d492/c.html
February 9, 2025
Chinese scientists develop gene-editing method to reduce corn plant height
BEIJING — Chinese scientists have developed a gene-editing technique to reduce corn plant height, enabling the creation of compact, high-density varieties resistant to lodging, according to a study * published in the Plant Biotechnology Journal.
Corn, the world’s most-produced cereal crop, is crucial to global food security. While increasing planting density is a key strategy for boosting yields, progress in developing shorter, sturdier plants has been limited by a lack of genetic resources.
The research was conducted by the Biotechnology Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) in collaboration with Anhui Agricultural University and South China Agricultural University. It focused on modifying the Br2 gene through targeted gene editing. Researchers designed a knockout vector for the Br2 gene and identified seven transgenic lines with distinct mutations in corn inbred varieties.
Hybridization experiments showed that all 28 hybrid offspring derived from crosses with elite inbred lines produced dwarf progeny. To accelerate breeding, the team developed a haploid inducer-mediated genome editing system, enabling the conversion of edited haploid plants into stable double-haploid lines within two generations. Three elite inbred lines treated with the system exhibited significant reductions in plant height.
“This method allows rapid and precise modification of plant height across different genetic backgrounds,” said Wang Baobao, corresponding author of the study and a researcher at the CAAS. “It provides critical technical support for breeding corn varieties optimized for dense planting and enhanced lodging resistance.”
* https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pbi.14571?af=R
Thank you.
Lodging in corn is when the corn stalk breaks below the ear, making it difficult to harvest
CA, I want to apologize for my shitty tone a couple days back. Sorry.
Lodging in corn…a new frontier for airbnb. /s
lol. mices or meeces air b’n’b. too funny.
Germany will give Ukraine enough rope to hang itself, but not an inch more. And by give, I mean sell.
Germany hasn’t got that much more to offer the Ukraine. Their budget is in tatters, tatters I tell you because of all they money that they have shipped to the Ukraine. The only real way that they could send more is to take money from things like pensions, healthcare, infrastructure, schools, etc. and even Scholz refuses to go there.
Guess who will be hit the hardest by Trump’s tariff on aluminum an steel? Correct, Canada and Mexico…
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/how-the-eurdollar-system-works-lebanons
US is choosing to put its electricity in data centers for AI and Trump whines that Canada gets subsidized because US has to buy stuff from Canadians, instead of getting things for free. He is the developer who is famous for not paying his contractors…
Being burned with his first presidency in the emisplaced expectations, now I am telling myself that there is still sooo much to hit rock bottom. The link with Mark Anderssen and Horowitz and technofeudalism open the vistas of hell waiting for the US and then the world. Chuck Palahniuk’s descriptions of Hell in his books Damned and Doomed give a close flavour. And we are not yet all in Las Vegas, baby…
What AIppens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas.
Oz is getting hit by those sanctions as well. Could it be that Trump is doing mafia tactics? I mean putting on all these tariffs to different countries around the world, including close allies, and then soon asking them what they will give him to take those sanctions away. Suddenly, countries like China are looking more and more a better trade partner.
Just to be on the safe side, I invested in aluminum futures yesterday, 6 short term contracts… each containing 12 ounces of barley soda.
You know who has lots of aluminum?
Russia.
Looks like Trump blew his own balls off, again. (Or maybe, Europe’s balls.)
Notice that this is a reboot of the extra tariffs on steel and aluminium levied under… the first Trump presidency, in 2018.
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Spectrum magazine has a cover article on electrical transformer shortages. https://spectrum.ieee.org/transformer-shortage
Causes are varied, from both demand, aging infrastruture, and damage from storms and war/sabotage. It’s not only impacting renewable energy projects, but new home construction, as permits were denied as a utility couldn’t get enough step-down transformers.
As for expanding capacity:
Wowsers, thanks!
>> The capacity of all the energy projects waiting to connect to the U.S. grid amounts to 2,600 GW—more than double the nation’s entire generation capacity currently. An average estimate of U.S. EV adoption suggests the country will have 125 million EVs by 2040. The electricity demands of U.S. data centers may double by the end of this decade because of the boom in artificial intelligence. The National Renewable Energy Lab found that U.S. transformer capacity will need to increase by as much as 260 percent by 2050 to handle all the extra load.
This reads like an AI hallucination. Math isn’t mathing. And that’s based on competition, not even including hostile intent and neolib forced scarcities.
indeed, illusions w/out means….structure lacking inference.
and today…pennies for transference….lol
Yes… Bret Weinstein was warning about this last year before May due to the then upcoming solar maximum — a Carrington event would have done a lot of damage. He said we’re still building transformers in a way that ensures they cannot survive such an event because it’s (slightly) cheaper.
With the explosive growth in data centers plus the ramping up of AI as seen in the demand for NVDA chips this has been a concern of mine for over 2 years. I have been wondering when the impending crisis will finally hit the mainstream media. IEEE Spectrum, in the engineering world – formerly my world, now retired – is as mainstream as it gets in technical publications.
So many events (action movies) in the real world requiring popcorn ….. but I rarely do movies anymore.
In retirement I want my garden and a little sanity if I can find it.
Farewell Tiny Tax Assistant, Go in peace little one, the rest of us will be along shortly.
Kuli
For JL, thank you for sharing the magnificent Kuli with us, and for providing the best cat life.
Hope he let’s us know how that turns out. For a glass-half full perspective, should soon be even easier for RFK Jr kooks and cronies like the Means siblings to sell Black Salve and Pennyroyal and colorful powders full of lead for wellness and detoxifying and curing cancer.
I hate to make extreme statements, but Vance appears to really hate the principle of checks and balances, while the online MAGA echo-chamber appears to have never even heard of it. It’s all quite disconcerting and lends credence to views that the Constitution itself is under attack. I didn’t think I would ever come to that view, certainly not in my lifetime.
I agree, and the fact is that concentration of power in one branch was one of the big fears of the founders.
The attack on the CFPB was kind of the last straw for me. They’re funded from the Fed so there is literally no savings from attacking them.
In the spirit of Yves post about closing comments, on new posts, I am going to take a holiday from commenting myself and focus on doing what I can to raise awareness and raise hell with any of my Congress cretins, and more likely local officials around here who might get their ear.
Hah, just try and explain to the average MAGA the intentions of the Founding Fathers and how the Federalist Papers help us understand them. That’s when you are told to take your Liberal Arts edumacation and shove it where the sun don’t shine :)
The sad thing is that, being an immigrant, I’ve twice sworn to defend the Constitution: when I was naturalized and when I joined the military, and I take these oaths with all due solemnity. Many of these MAGA folks have never taken such an oath, yet people like me are “the enemy.” Dunno how much more absurd it can possibly get.
A few years back (don’t ask me to count ‘em) I adopted as a motto the words of the immortal Hunter S. Thompson – “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional. “ I do note that ‘weird’ and ‘absurd’ aren’t quite synonymous but they do share common ground.
The Presidency has always been the most powerful branch of government. I didn’t cut short my retirement to work the 2016 election because I thought President Bernie was going to start foreign wars or loot the Treasury or cave in to Congress.
Donald Trump is the first non-eunuch to occupy the Oval Office since Reagan.
At the same time, Congress has always been the most powerful branch of government thanks to very powerful Speakers and Senate Majority leaders. Their strength comes from being largely invisible to the public which makes them less accountable.
The Courts have the ultimate final say but when gamed by too many political cronies both the other branches have shown a willingness to simply ignore the courts which rely on the Executive branch to enforce their will.
In truth there is no most powerful branch of government. Each is handicapped by our original oddsmakers but the voters hold all the wild cards and can blow everything up every two years assuming hacks on the bench don’t become accessories to suppressing the vote.
Back in ye olde days of Heavy Manufacturing, my union local dumped its leadership every three years due to inflation erasing our wage and benefit gains. I think the USA has been going through the same process but since all their candidates come from the same duopoly, there’s little appreciable difference from one administration to the next.
Trump is what happens when you get a protest vote. Unlike the Ned Lamonts and Howard Deans, Trump used judo to flip the primaries on his half of the duopoly before taking his campaign all the way into the endzone in each of three straight elections. [I’m confident that hindsight and FOIA will conclude that 2020 was gamed by the refs.]
The courts will rein Trump in under the assumption he will listen to them. I don’t care how much Trump breaks, it can be fixed later. The important thing now is to break the things that are breaking we the people.
And what if some of those things stay broken and enable the Age of MuskThiel? We should not be so cavalier about breaking things, for that’s actually Silicone Valley’s motto and they don’t give a rat’s hind end about breaking them on behalf of “We the Prople.”
On your last paragraph, you have lost your mind.
It takes decades to build institutions that function even adequately. Nothing Musk destroys will be rebuilt in your lifetime, even assuming that is of interest, as opposed to reducing more people to penury to make them more compliant.
I simply do not believe that any of those institutions are still working. I have zero faith in our courts, no faith in the Congress and the Executive branch is a Portrait of Dorian Gray style snapshot of how ugly things have gotten.
I have faith in the American people. Trump is not powerful enough to break our country, doesn’t really know how to fix anything but when the (water/electricity/deliveries) stop, solutions will be quickly found.
Whatever Trump breaks can and will be fixed. Maybe not by Trump but this isn’t about Trump. This is about fixing a broken country and right now transparency is important. We’re being shown what is broken and Trump is talking about how he will fix things. How is this worse than Biden insisting nothing’s broken and never talking about what he’s really up to?
If things seem scary to some right now, it’s only because they didn’t realize how bad things were. Did anyone here really understand how completely “deep state” funded the wokesters and domesticated news outlets? I knew it was happening but underestimated the problem by several magnitudes of corruption.
At some point you have to clean the sausage making machine and that includes the grease trap. This won’t be pretty but it is necessary. Fwiw, the people are not getting the D party back until the current many-humped monster is slain. The only road back for Democrats is to fire the entire leadership and rebuild from scratch. No incumbents or holdevers allowed, restraining orders will be needed. Democrats are the stye in everyone’s eye that makes it hard to see what Trump is/is not doing.
Sorry for the rants but my whole life has been about effecting political change. Now that it’s here I’m somewhat surprised by the reluctance of many to embrace the pig. Change is never pretty and I’m not trying to put lipstick on anything. And yes, I do wash my hands after doing politics.
I understand where you are coming from, and I even agree with you to an extent, but it took roughly a century to create what the oligarchs have spent over fifty years in destroying. I do not look forward at the great amount of suffering and ruined lives.
After the destruction and the likely following civil unrest ends, which I guess will be around 2040-2050, it will take another century to rebuild the system to where it was in 1972; my teenage nieces will likely be great-great-grandparents before this cycle concludes. So, around 2150, if the country is not destroyed.
In the spirit of the political entropy discussion from a few days ago, the move fast/break things crowd has gotten away with it up to now but there is no natural equilibrium that guarantees the US/West will come back…
It may be that equilibrium puts china/asia/russia on top for centuries.
Looking around I am not sanguine…
They’re fleecing the commons, and like a bachelors fish tank full of change, it’s super easy until you’ve ferreted out all the quarters….
There’s a logical flaw in your thinking: just because things are awful doesn’t mean they can’t get worse. A stock that declines 99% can still decline another 99%. And what evidence do you have that Trump has any sincere intention to “clean the grease trap?”
Did Wokeness and Identity Politics come about because of the Deep State? No, their genesis was via the Left’s defeat and withdrawal into academia in the 1970’s, though their recent moment in the sun was opportunistically used by the Overclass and National Security establishment as a misdirection away from class politics, until they could be safely discarded for having done their job.
Will Identity Politics disappear? Of course not, it will just be reclaimed by its traditional practitioners: xenophobes, bigots and profiteers off the same.
Honestly what worries me is that the rebuild might be possible for US’ians but that in order to do that, they’d happily cheer on the unchecked Imperialism X.0 abroad. Hoovering up the last of the worlds resources where they can and to hell with the ghettofication of the globe, especially given what would then be serious climate adaptation needed. And that’s not even speaking of AI.
…fortunately there are another 8bn human beings who have a say in this matter too and a few sane Americans like yourself…empire needs people to lose hope. Because we are many and the imperialists are not. So lets not do the empire that favour.
The problem is that Trump/Musk are acting indiscriminately. USAID deserves to go feet first into the wood chipper, but the CFPB does not. And as far as any agency good/bad, there is supposed to be a constitutional process to take it to the wood chipper.
Once the lines are crossed there is no going back. Even if you like what Trump’s doing, I’m sure that there will be a future Democrat President who will follow Trump’s lead and go even further, and you will not like that one bit.
First Non-Eunuch. LOL, what a great title.
One good thing that came out of Trump is that the presently illegal Romanian President is stepping down on Feb 12 I think, and that there will be a huge investigation coming from the US (a lot of stolen funds and it doesn’t pertain necessarily to Romania, but EU commission by and large). It will look into the illegal stopping of election, which the Venice Convention already found absolutely inapropriate.
I seem to recall that FDR faced similar criticism.
As Matt Bruenig has commented, the constitution talks about roles but procedurally, impeachment is the only remedy.
These comparisons to FDR are totally misleading. He was trying to launch public works programs w/o Congressional approval, not tearing down existing institutions and violating laws.
There’s that Supreme Court that FDR wanted to bring down. I have somewhat mixed feelings about FDR’s legacy–not so much what he did, but how he went about doing it, although with the caveat that, if he really wanted to seize power, he probably could have done a lot worse.
Are you concerned about Congress willingly ceding the Constitution’s war making power to the executive–given that you fought in one? And how many in Congress have stood up and objected to American participation in the slaughter in Gaza? Doubtless this is why Trump acts so confident he get away with his genocide on the Med.
We have an imperial president because we have an empire, which is also something the long ago founders objected to however hypocritically they may have been when it came to the natives.
Musk should not be rummaging around but it’s merely a reflection of a society that is full of wealthy people who are ok with this. There are very few genuine populists left in our politics or ruling class on either side. There are some or even many who are open to giving the poor charity but giving them power is not on the agenda.
And for people like Musk and Trump, who are already quite rich, it’s all about power. Add Pelosi, the Obamas, the Clintons and lots of others to that list.
Congress is responsible, yes. But it won’t do anything unless under popular pressure. The only such I see comes from the MAGA, which is why I view these know-nothings, well meaning though many of them are, as skillfully manipulated enablers of this attack on the government and the Constitution. So the question is how to stop that before it’s too late? Frankly, I can’t see a way unless Trump and Musk seriously overreach and turn the populist MAGAs against themselves.
And yeah, for this sad state of affairs we have to thank the establishment Dems for killing the Sanders movement, as well as Sanders himself for lacking the spine to blow up the Dem party.
Let me just add that I think Congress does have a lot of culpability in our sad state of affairs. Abdicating responsibility for the power to make war to the executive branch led to the latter overstepping the Constitution – nature abhors a vacuum.
There used to be some Congress members who were thoughtful enough to push back without having to see protests in their district, but they’re pretty much all long gone (Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich.) We’re left with the AOCs and M T-Gs. Most likely the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision spelled the end – we have the best Congress money can buy. And war sells, at least to the Dow Jones crew.
I have mixed feelings on this. Because the Status Quo is also thoroughly corrupted and is maintained by those who profit from it at the expense of the societal health and well being, if you will. I don’t think I’ll go so far as Mark G. in thinking that whatever happens, it’s more important to tear things down and hope that what gets put back together is decent enough, but there is something to that. What we’d like to see is a fairly thoroughgoing reform of the Status Quo without tearing the foundations apart and that seems a difficult middle ground. We are forced into either keeping the status quo with all its warts and ailments…b/c TINA, or accept the unacceptable as the alternative because the SQ sucks so badly.
Fyi – the American Medical Association youtube page is publishing updates on avian flu, TB, etc. Jerome Adams, former surgeon general, noted this on his X account.
A good take on DOGE:
Elon Tweet Shows How DOGE MANIPULATES Class Consciousness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiXZ_g3ka5k
But embedded within it’s take on DOGE is why asset prices (like houses) always have to go up.
Saludatory video. Clarifies how the cost-cutting is a pretext for Musk and his ilk to wrest the last vestiges of power & money from the working class / regular USians as embodied in our federal government.
It would be very useful if people could mention the second best site with minimal echo chamber comments for those of us who have leaned upon Naked Capitalism to fill this role for a long time and don’t have any tolerance for facebook, twitter, reddit. IM Doc’s covid comments were the greatest and the comment section here was the only place to find them.
Is there a next best?
: (
IMO there has never been anything remotely approaching this place in terms of the level of discourse. It’s a shame that Yves patience has run out, but I don’t blame her.
Way back in the day, Calculated Risk had a great commentariat, but the owner long ago shut down comments there.
It takes a LOT of work to moderate and cultivate a good comment section. Zero tolerance for sock puppets, those who post personal attacks, and other misbehavior is a must. In the past, commenting holidays have solved the problem; not sure if we’ll get a reprieve.
Yup. It would be a shame if we can’t have nice things because of a few people, but it’s better for a good thing to end on its own terms rather than be sullied on others’.
Ditto. I’m sad, but I don’t blame her. Those shoulders have carried a lot of weight.
I found Naked Cap through Calculated Risk in 2006 and I remember the comment section over at CR. I switched to reading NC before CR cut off the comments. I have loved this place and the comments since the beginning when you could read some really expert opinions about a lot of things.
Since the rise of trump everything has degraded just like the comment section here. I am surprised Yves kept it open as long as she did but the comments have been degraded for about 2 years by my reckoning.
I will miss this place.
I am saddened by the news of closed comments as well. I have relied on comments to inform and learn important information. One can’t hold on to anything in life. To do so is to suffer. Here’s to change…
I am saddened that discourse degraded so much that it had to happen. I am sad that Yves and other NC staff had to put up with so much work, stress and toxicity to keep comments going. I am grateful that they did. I am grateful that I learned so much from many interesting and well-informed commenters. I am also grateful that by reading and sometimes participating in comments I felt less alone and paranoid and insane.
What’s unfortunate knowledge for us all, based both on Yves testimony and much of our own experience, is that pretty much all comments sections if left to their own devices devolve into an ugly mess. Someone comes in with an extreme view, others correct them, someone calls someone names, and then it’s just poo flinging. Now we all realize if we didn’t before, that our wonderful, unique, comments section has been due to Yves, and others’, hard labor.
So thank you, thank you Yves, for your yeo-woman’s work providing us this wonderful forum for all this time. Sorry for any trouble we’ve caused. I hope a way can be found to continue this in future. Is there any way, any of us to communicate, to restart conversation? There used to be a number of blogs with comments sections. I can’t seem to find any.
There are blogs with comments sections (e.g. Andrei Martyanov, Larry Johnson, Moon Of Alabama), but every blog is different in subjects covered and the commenting community itself.
I go to those, and they’re nice, thanks. The only problem I have with the 3 for all the discussion I might look for is that they all 3 focus on foreign affairs, only part of my interest, but thanks! This blog hit everything and has been wonderful, the original pieces and the underneath comments sections both. I will really miss the comments section it it doesn’t return. I’m sure everyone will.
Oh, and AM, do you have to subscribe to see his comments section? It seems I don’t see any comments there. New Economic Perspectives used to have nice comments, if I recall.
A shout out here: Aurelian has a really thoughtful blog with usually good comments beneath it. https://aurelien2022.substack.com/
Thanks for this jonboinAR — It’s been good connecting here on NC — I hope we will be able to do so again someday. But like you, I understand Yves’ reasons and continue to be grateful for NC.
I really do hope to see you around, Carla. I mean it. It’s been really good to know you. By the way, y’all, also, Ian Welsh! You know that one don’t you, Carla?
Anyway, it’s not this blog itself that I (and others, I presume) are mourning, just the wonderful comments section that I never realized how much was due to our esteemed host’s refereeing of. I’ll still be coming here to read their great posts.
Simplicius the Thinker has a pretty good substack, although he has paywalls for some of his work.
As is his right – work shouldn’t be free.
Credit Slips is a good blog for finance and bankruptcy news.
I am tempted to write something on my personal substack about what appears to be a big problem coming for D.O.G.E. The tl;dr is that I see no evidence of actual budget cuts to USAID or any other agency in the FY2025 appropriation that is now one month away from expiring. All the talk is about next year’s budget and reconciliation, but if GOP Swamp-stooges just kick the can with another CR, then USAID funding continues absent another defy-the-courts strategy.
Either Republicans get real about actual budget cuts, or the D.O.G.E. shock-n-awe attack runs out of gas quickly.
AM’s blog (smoothiex12.blogspot.com) uses Disqus for comment section, and does not require login to read. Same comment platform is used on southfront.press, for example.
P.S. In the first post I forgot to mention Substack, and many “blogs” there (Simplicius, BIg Serge, etc).
I’m wondering if there’s a concerted effort by bot wranglers or interested parties behind this.
At this point, I also wonder if U.S.A.I.D. money could be behind such an effort, if such an effort does exist. Not so much a correct-the-record effort as a wear’em-down-with-bs effort. / ;)
adding: AI has many potential uses. / ;)
Enough incoming flak to cause a comments shut off must mean NC is over the target, as they say.
Agree, as MaryLand said in their comments, it is like losing a friend. I often find the comments a nice expansion on the posts and links.
I have noticed an increase in new commenters, which is nice. However, aside from having the regular new, untrained commenters, I wonder if there are attack commentators whose job is to overwhelm troublesome sites, which NC is for many.
i come for the links and stay for the comments – a life preserver for me – discovering NC 10+ years ago was sustenance when i seemed to be the only one of my friends that felt Obama stabbed us in the back – must have missed the memo about comments ending – can never fully express my thanks, nor the loss it will create – a unique and solitary blessing amidst the chaos, the proverbial beacon in the dark night – your the best Yves, you as well Lambert, may you both live long and prosper – and to all of you regular commenters, a sincere appreciation for your humor and intelligence, a level to which i can only humbly admire and appreciate – the patient moderators as well – it’s getting chilly now, has nothing to do with the weather and a sweater ain’t gonna help – jb
According to one redditor, the alt-right has détourned f-scism.
The shitposting started right around the inauguration, and the shitposts tend to have a distinctly NAFO feel. Also, since the election I’ve seen MRA/MGTOW-adjacent redditors engaging in much more than usual abusive trolling in nominally serious venues as well, and showing no remorse about instrumentalizing the emotions of others in service of their traditions.
Lest we forget, Tulsi’s MOS is psyops, and the derp state would like us all focused on dying and starving for the next war. The destruction of public coordination goods would just be the latest move in capital’s need to remain capital, and the post-WWII military’s positive control over society.
Until the next comment section… 🫡
Real Clear Politics but you have to keep your eyes open. They’re fanatical about pairing their links without making a show of it but if you scan their morning and afternoon link aggregations you’ll always see each link followed by one with an opposing view.
My feel for NC’s aggregation has always been links to what they thought were good reads, important reads or informative if only for the opposing view. Real Clear is much more focused in this regard. I read them more actively in the 2000s. I believe they have always leaned right. They linked to my old blog once and I asked them not to link to me again because I thought they were using me to provide an extreme viewpoint from the left to make the paired conservative link look more reasonable. [I am not and never will be a journalist, anything coming out of my keyboard is meant to influence your views : ]
Flora turned me on to Citizen Free Press which has lots of links but a very pronounced MAGA ‘tude. They see themselves as the new Drudge Report but are actually I think a bit better than that.
In truth those are the only other aggregation sites I rely on these days. I’ve followed pretty much every aggregation blog ever (spotting the good link in a long list is my super power) going all the way back to Bartcop but NC, RC and CFP are the only aggregators left standing that I’m aware of. I’d love to be corrected by others with more links, tbh.
A self curated X feed is a very good source for news and thoughtful commentary. Just one example: I follow Michael Pettis for his macro commentary on China. Found Brad Setser through him; Brian digs through Chinese balance of payments data.
Setzer had a really nice blog way back. I miss it and other great blogs. Better blog times. Hey Socal, if you see this again, could you possibly list some good “X”-ers to follow? Thanks.
Your mileage will vary but here are some accounts I follow that others might find interesting in no particular order:
Glenn Diesen – foreign policy
Harry Crane – statistics professor at Rutgers
Anna Wong – chief US Economist at Bloomberg
Danielle Beckman – neuroscientist, has been writing about microscopic evidence of brain damage caused by Covid
System Update – Glenn Greenwald
Alex Christoforou – on of the Duran anchors
Dr Daniel Swain – Climate scientist, focus mainly on events impacting west coast
Anas Alhaji – global energy analyst
Isabella M Weber – economist, wrote recently on seller’s inflation
Eric Topol – health related topics
Matt Bruenig – labor law and policy
Matt Taibbi
Tracy Shuchart – commodity economist whose politics you would want to ignore probably
Arnaud Bertrand – French expat in China
Nick Timiraos – WSJ correspondent, reputed official leaker for Fed
Wolf Richter – featured frequently here
Raina MacIntyre – Epidemic prevention and response,
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Ashish Jha – in the spirit of keep your enemies closer
China Beige Book – data on Chinese economy
Lars P Syll – heterodox economist
Ole Peters – physicist, ergodicity economics
Mark Blyth – economics professor at Brown
Adam Tooze – History and Econ Theory, Columbia University
Branco Milanovic – economist with focus on inequality
Sabine Hossenfelder – particle physics, popularizer of science topics, and acquired taste for many
Dr_Gingerballs – IT academic, comments on options markets and is vocal AI non-believer
Diane Swonk – chief economist at KPMG US
Over time I trim accounts when the noise/info ratio for me is too high (Taibbi is on the bubble for me right now) and add people I come across who look interesting, not necessarily because I agree with them.
Oh man, thanks! There’s Glen Greenwald, too. I follow him mostly by podcast, but I only listen to podcasts when I happen to be traveling, or outside, or tying flies. :-)
You had Glen, sorry!
Why the U.S. Has a Better Hand Than China in the Great Power Game – Newsweek
I really don’t know where to begin with the contradictions, especially in light of the last few weeks.
These days, I just notice how so many of the “gotta watch or contain China” articles mostly are exhortations for more AI and privatization.
Regarding the beautiful photo of Kuli kuli rest in peace. Beautiful girl. She looks a lot like my Katy. She found us and we fell in love. Thanks to you for including her today, always reminding that the cat distribution system is alive and well. Showed up in our back patio.
One of our best days ever. Delightful smart diminutive girl we love you!
Our hearts go out to you in your loss. May the system bring you joy.
I’m sorry the comments section is being discontinued, but I can understand the reasons why.
Maybe IM Doc, Aurelien and some of the other valued regulars can be invited to be regular contributors.
Good idea. I vote for Wukchumni, as well … his humor has helped keep me sane.
Agree with all those plus Amfortas. CA could also report on China.
There is a meme about this:
Meta illegally downloaded 80+ terabytes of books from LibGen, Anna’s Archive, and Z-library to train their AI models.
In 2010, Aaron Swartz downloaded only 70 GBs of articles from JSTOR (0.0875% of Meta). Faced $1 million in fine and 35 years in jail. Took his own life in 2013.
I’d be happy to frame Meta as avenging Swartz, exactly inasmuch as Meta keeps another copy of Anna’s alive and accessible to all.
I too am very sad to see comments eliminated. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to deal with the volume of it. I have wondered if some of it is from those who are deliberately trying to inject controversy in order to destroy it. So sad. I always learn something from our commenters. That has been valuable to me in addition to the excellent posts and important links. Also the humor provided by commenters has helped brighten a rather dismal set of current events. I don’t know of another site that does that with such good will. I will truly miss our community of often well informed contributors. Wishing everyone peace and love.
It’s like the death of a friend. That might sound pathetic, but I’ve been a reader here for about 15 years. A sad day, indeed.
Me thinks the NC Mod Squad are currently fighting a sudden rush of barbarians at the gate.
I hope when the barbarians have been beaten back the comments sections will resume. / ;)
That’s very possible. Like a DDOS to try to paralyze the site. Keeping my fingers crossed that there will be light at the end of the tunnel.
It definitely sucks, because now Organizers rely on Naked Capitalism’s Information to challenge the Duopoly and Recruit IRL.
Yves and Lambert provide an invaluable service to the Working Class.
I have a sibling determined to move abroad during the T admin. Any comments I make to them that staying in the US to make a difference here and now is important is met with indifference. What can I say.
This is my country, I was born here, I will die here, I will stay here and try to make a difference. I’m not going abroard until some better time arrives. My sibling will have nothing of this argument. I’m very sad for my sibling. My sibling sounds like a sort of tourist in life, imo. / my 2 cents
We in this together, Flora!
We do it because it’s the right thing to do.
It takes courage and humility to see the big picture.
(outside of Canada and ignoring legalities/permits, etc.) Even moving to Britain involves lots of culture shock and paperwork.
Then throw in that, best case scenario, one is >6+ travel-hours away from your family, friends.
but if it works for some people, it works.
ironically, T-man said it best, “fight, fight, fight…” no matter the subject matter (rhetorically, mentally of course).
It’s that evil hussy Taylor Swift corrupting Travis Kelce’s morals.
Taibbi and Kirn. no paywall.
America This Week – Livestream Tonight at 8 PM ET/7 PM CT
https://www.racket.news/p/america-this-week-livestream-tonight-cd5
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/technology/elon-musk-openai-bid.html/
I guess they have a number now that all that info has been scraped up.
The opening:
“A group of investors led by Elon Musk has made a $97.4 billion bid to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, according to two people familiar with the bid, escalating a yearslong tussle for control of the company between Mr. Musk and OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman.
The consortium includes Vy Capital and Xai, Mr. Musk’s artificial intelligence company, as well as the Hollywood power-broker Ari Emanuel and other investors, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions are ongoing.
The Wall Street Journal earlier reported news of the offer.
OpenAI declined to comment on the bid. The company has not yet seen the bid, according to a person familiar with OpenAI’s potential response, but Mr. Altman posted a response.
“No thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” Mr. Altman said on X.
Mr. Musk replied to the post: “Swindler,” he said…”
The unbearable uselessness of liberal anti-zionism
A review of Peter Beinart’s “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza”
Uselessness of anti-zionism? huh.
This is *still* the best comment section, bar none, of any website on such topics — interesting, intelligent, informative, witty, and convivial. I’m sorry about the shutdown. I completely understand — not worth Ms. Smith’s time to deal with toxicity, ignorance, and certainly not abuse. I will miss it.
Yes, sadly the hard working people behind the site seem to be getting overwhelmed with bad faith BTLers. And in general its been pretty noticeable that tempers are getting frayed and more and more comments consist of snark. But it still been by far the best comments section on the planet.
A break for everyone is probably a good thing. Hopefully the comments section will return one day, but the important thing is the sanity and good work of Yves and the crew.
I’ll admit, my temper flared once at least on the comment section a while back. Totally lost if once at another site, covid being the trigger. You feel pretty silly afterwards.
At least I have stupidpol. Once that gets canned, I don’t know what’s left.
Yuuuup.
Stupidpol and Naked Capitalism are my go tos!
Thanks for the stupidpol tip. I’ll give that a whirl.
I assume it’s only temporary?
For a moment, I thought there should just be a no snark policy. But then what gets defined as snark is in the eye of the beholder. This is a hard problem.
How vitriolic were the worst comments? I guess the mods were so good at catching them fast I didn’t get to see them. The bad comments I see are ones that just have logical or evidentiary issues.
Agreed. It is the best discussion forum on the web.
I think those of us who have been around for awhile all understand the number rule here which is “not my blog.” The fate of this by now venerable institution rest in the hands of the person who created it and the only appropriate response is
NC, long may it wave.
Not sure this makes it thru, I hope it’s just a holiday, but just in case, I have a burner email in case anyone wants to stay in touch.
(You’ll probably find it fitting with my sense of humor)
guitarchimp3 AT gmail DOT COM
Life’s been good to me, so far.
Same-if anyone wants to keep in touch: constantgardener33@gmail.com
Will miss everyone so much. Please take care, all. Thank you to Yves, Lambert, and the rest of the crew. You guys changed my world.
I had a brainwave: we all start commenting on Yves’s Twitter account instead…but it looks like she stopped posting in November. https://x.com/yvessmith
Or we could follow the lead of the teens who migrated to the comments section of a video of a deer. Maybe we could even just comment on that video? only partly /s
re: NATO arms-buildup plan by German Council on Foreign Relations
This appears to be the first explicit study from Germany demanding larger and more modern nuclear capabilities for NATO in response to RU.
I heard of this just today. So far had only a quick look.
The pdf itself is German but could be translated too. See the link for download.
A pretty long summary however is on the webpage which I machine-translated as usual. That should be more than enough:
NATO’s nuclear turning point
Options for Strengthening the Deterrent Potential
Dr. Karl-Heinz Kamp
https://archive.is/cTDUL
The essence:
Due to current limitations of NATO the best way to increase “deterrence” would be many Tomahawks including nuclear-tipped. The author also argues airborne cruise missiles would be desireable but would need 10 years to develope.
Following obvious points:
-On the genesis of the war its full of lies and half-truths as is to be expected by the Council.
-According to Hans Kristensen nuclear warheads for Tomahawks are mostly destroyed and are not easily available if at all. US has not been planning on reequipping Tomahawks with them.
-This means higher budget demands with lesser money available.
-Higher risks of accidental war.
-No change of strategic and military weakness of NATO vs. RU.
Something the Council has not grasped. they are still completely oblivious of RU supremacy.
-Most amazingly: Not a single mention of RU weapons systems. Which makes the study fit for the garbage can. How can they even attempt to analyze this matter without looking at what and how Russia would react and with what arsenal?
To stress F-35s as a solution is as usual to play chess without an adversary (Lee Slusher had pointed this out in January). Current RU air-to-air missiles have a reach of 400 km. Add to that the uselessness of F-35 and the many troubles mentioned here over the months. Russian capabilities of EW against Tomahawks. Not to speak of S-500/550s unknown scope.
But just like with the NATO study by Greenpeace being used by the antiwar movement, this one will pop up in coming weeks and months used by the hawks.
p.s. I already am seeing German antiwar activists reacting worried not understanding the true nature of this.
AG, good info ty. Glanced at the xlation (a glance was enough), appreciate and agree with your summation.
Kudos Nick on the AMLO post. te agradesco, compa. great research.
I knew I was going to miss the comments, but I didn’t realize how much. I check NC several times a day. Some days I don’t have time to do much more than a fast catch up, others I have fallen down a rabbit hole reading long comment threads, following links, and just enjoying bursts of silly humor. I cannot tell you how many times it is the comments, mostly from regulars, have enlightened me why links were important. And even more importantly making me look at something I thought I understood differently than I had ever before.
Thank you to Yves and Lambert and Connor and any moderators I don’t know. Both for the treasure that is Naked Capitalism and for keeping the comment section open as long as they could. But I also want to thank the NC community, your comments have also been a treasure…most of the time. Your observations, analysis, parodies and links have been invaluable over the time I have been here. And that is over a decade. I hope that maybe some of you get called upon to provide your insights and expertise in posts when Yves thinks it best. Thank you.
Now I am going to go be the cranky person I am on a porch yelling about how we can’t have nice things. :)
Pat, Thank you perfectly saying what I likely could not find the words to express. The education from the commenters has at times been as important as the post itself.
The break in posting comments is understandable and was probably inevitable
I do hope they may be allowed one last time after Lambert’s last regular WC, and that he will grace us on occasion in the future with his yellow waders.
Until then, to everyone, thanks and be well.
Not just losing a friend, it’s losing s whole community of friends. A precious resource made possible by the extraordinary daily and nightly vigilance of Yves, Lambert and the invisible but indispensable moderators.
Grateful for what has persisted for these many years. Can’t help hoping that it may someday be restored
Sad to see comments going away. I think they are just as important as the information the site brings and I don’t think I’ll continue to support the site if I have no say about the content. Lots of times I don’t understand the context and people who do help me understand it.
I feel that this is collective punishment since the many are being punished for the actions of the few.
Maybe if the support for this site goes down Yves will rethink this action.
I will especially miss the comments from IM Doc. What a treasure!
> I feel that this is collective punishment since the many are being punished for the actions
> of the few. Maybe if the support for this site goes down Yves will rethink this action.
Thanks, Sam. I’ve been hesitating about making the following comment but you’ve just persuaded me to go ahead.
One of the ‘pillars’ of the recurring fund-raising campaigns here is ‘support for expanded comments’. Under the present circumstances, I wonder if those of us who donated specifically to further that particular goal can expect a refund of our contributions.
…may be fake may be not, tweet by Jim Ferguson on possible pardon of Snowden…
Since this is probably the last opportunity to do so, I’d like to thank Lambert, Yves, and moderation for their hard work and dedication to truthtelling.
It’s really sad that comments are being disabled. I have being scanning this site since 2008 to understand the Anglo-American view of events. The comments were really the most useful part of the harvest. So long, and thanks for the interesting discussions.
Chiming in to second the appreciation and regret expressed so well above.
Thank you Yves, Lambert, and team for this wonderful forum where I’ve learned so much –
I will miss the commentariat! the fine wit of Wuk, and the excellent wags who graced us with
the Nakedcapitalism Songbook
This states “How are we sure Little Marko didn’t install any back doors”.
Ignoring the unnecessary snark, being able to write to a database does not allow one to install a back door. Modifying source code does not imply one can actually compile and deploy a system. Usually one has a separate repository for the source code, so any changes could be seen. If “little Marko” was able to install a backdoor, whatever permissions he was given, the entire Treasury Department IT team is beyond incompetent… and “little Marko” should be commended for making obvious that the Treasury could be trivially hacked. However in the real world, it is extremely unlikely that the Treasury Department IT team is still writing and deploying code the way it was done in tiny programming shops in the 1980s.
Moreover, most tech people would understand Elon Musk to be meaning that multiple people are registered as holding the same SSN at the same time, and that there is no check to ensure this is not happening, but hey, why not hold him to the strict definition of the term, and besmirch his intelligence… it’s so much easier than reconsidering one’s priors.
I’m afraid that without corrections, Naked Capitalism’s reliability as a source on topics its authors are unfamiliar with will fall… Oh well.
Oh, and the reason not holding the same SSN at the same time is relevant is that people without an SSN have been known to use someone else’s.
We hear about scammers collecting poor widow’s SS benefits, but how many bosses credit their ‘illegal’ employees’ wages to their own (maybe their spouse’s) SSN? Somehow I doubt Elon is looking for this kind of grift.
Another correction is that DOGE has been reporting its progress on its twitter feed (which was somewhat obvious given the fact Elon’s running it) pretty much since the beginning. Their website has been empty but has stuff on it now (mostly said twitter feed).
I’m sure your comments on this site contributed to the comment section being discontinued. Heil Musk!
my thoughts too. that disrespectful tone makes me very angry. We Are Guests Here. -a.v.
So are you saying having write access across a database wouldn’t allow for that? Because if you are, you’d be very wrong, but it depends on what you have write access to (and how the database is set up in relation to the servers/computers in the system).
If you’re modifying source code, the assumption would be that you’re not just doing so senselessly and for no reason whatsoever. If I modify the source code for something I’m working on, I’m generally doing so with an eye to (re-)compiling (if it needs to be compiled) and (re-)deploying the application with the changes made.
I work on databases and I’ve actually worked with some of Social Security’s own databases in the past, and I’m telling you what he said is nonsense for the ones I know of. Or, more accurately, it’s “not even wrong”; at best, it’d be highly misleading. On the few database tables that had SSNs, “de-duplicating” the SSNs would have been extremely stupid since the SSNs were legitimate duplicates in the context of the tables in question.
While you could say that there isn’t a constraint on these tables to make the SSNs unique, you wouldn’t want them to be unique there. Given that there are legitimate duplicates historically (people accidentally assigned the same SSNs decades ago), even a table filled only with names and SSNs wouldn’t allow for a unique constraint on the SSNs without doing violence to what actually happened. You could say they’re “not deduplicated” (in the vaguest sense of “deduplication”), but if you do, it’d mean you’ve either misunderstood what you’re looking at, or you’re trying to make something that’s trivially true (and necessary to represent the data correctly) sound bad to people who don’t know much about SQL or the databases in question.
Database is data. Backdoor is code. So no, I’m not “very wrong”.
You can compile whatever you want on your own machine, but in a real work environment with many people working on a product, the final build and deployment is not done by a random developer, it is done by build engineers who have access to the servers. Everything else is a dev build and does not have the same access. Most developers don’t even have access to production data. In small companies this can be the same person, but the treasury is not such a place. Yes, I know, many startups now fly by the seat of their pants, but that’s not the way one does things if the data matters.
You should have a check on SSNs being unique because that should be be the default. If they are not, there should be a flag stating they have been manually reviewed, and the reason for them not being unique. This is basic data validation. Rank and file employees do not enter data through SQL statements but with an application and that application should be doing basic data validation if you want your data to have any value.
Seriously, the Treasury is not some 2 cent workplace. It’s important. Things should be done at least as well as in a FAANG or in a local government.
Database is data. Backdoor is code. So no, I’m not “very wrong”.
Um, perhaps you might consider actually looking into what is in a typical database before making such blanket nonsense statements. Triggers? Stored procedures? Access controls? There’s tons of code in any database I’ve had to work with. That’s before you get to pathological cases where the code gets stored *as* data…. little Bobby Table is famous for a very good reason. Maybe your exposure to databases is limited to key value stores? Because otherwise, I’m struggling to parse that statement as written. Sure, a dev environment should limit how bad it could be, but you aren’t convincing anyone with flippant statements that are factually **wrong**.
Yes indeed. I could write a long message that essentially reproduces what you said but an (albeit imperfect) real world example might help some people. The guy in USA who registered “null” as his car number plate to avoid toll road charges etc. Backfired spectacularly because his attempt to use a database entry to be code got interpreted very differently.
People who learnt Fortran and COBOL etc learnt that specifying what format a variable is is programming 101. Those who merely “brute forced it” tend to make silly statements.
Little Bobby tables was an example of not validating input properly and sending strings directly to the database that can be executed as SQL statements. That’s a fault in the code, and modifying the database doesn’t do that.
I am not aware of any stored procedure which would allow you unfiltered read/write access to that data later. Yes, you could change the datastructure so that you show users a view that lies, or you could modify the data, but that is not a backdoor.
Yes, changing access controls, or changing a password would let you have access, but that’s not supposed to be available to any user, only to admin users, and it’s not a back door, it’s the front door.
Yes, I’ve used SQL databases, thank you very much.
Maybe take it to r/sysadmin? Could be a better place for this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/uov9uk/why_do_so_many_sysadmin_role_people_seem_to_be/
I stumbled across this story after finding it on a site that I used to visit regularly. I stopped going there because I think what’s on offer isn’t reliable. Regardless, when I did look at the particular piece I’m linking below, I was stunned. Then I tried to verify at least one of the claims (I couldn’t), and amazingly, just like rabbits, the story has propagated across the internet.
https://eko.substack.com/p/override
reads like fiction…selfish people don’t do unselfish things…for instance if the springfield potholes are fixed IRL then bezos demanded it for his warehouse network to reduce wear on his personal infrastructure. We’ve been living in a time of monsters for many a year now…
Agree, tegnost. When I reread the story the 2nd time, farther down in the story there is a sentence starting with “Imagine” which prefaces a repeat of the same potholes being repaired etc. I think the first part of the fairy tale is written to confuse fiction with fact. There will be many people scammed by this who won’t look into the validity of the story.
Thx. Reads like fiction along with the illustrations. I have an “imagine”. Imagine if a verifiable and searchable version the mapped payments system is released to the public. I know, I know, dreaming here.
“I know, dreaming here”
Hah! :)
Ignoring the happy propaganda tone of this, the notion that one can access the treasury’s databases to uncover hidden flows of money is unsurprising. Why? Because the IRS requires one to declare a lot in this country. I have learned a lot just by looking at the data charities must report and is made public. So within the Treasury there must be a lot more information available.
There’s also proof by example of people doing similar work using automation in a more difficult situation: DataRepublican has been building graphs of money flows and analyzing them using graphviz. Her job is harder because the data is in PDFs, not in a database, so it must be extracted from them. She built an index to help her search all them. Find her here.
I am laser focused on the happy propaganda tone because I think its purpose is to make the people who voted for Trump believe that almost instantly, upon his election, his team was out there repairing roads, water systems, etc. overnight. It keeps the masses pacified for a while; they, too, can have nice things! All this topped off with the indoctrination of whiz-bang instant accounting.
The whole piece gave me the creeps, frankly.
I agree that the piece itself is bizarre, a sign of the state of things.
This piece of propaganda may be an extremely valuable find, because it suggests a hubristic fascination with particular mechanical systems that may expose important vulnerabilities of our opponents (“our” being Lefties like me). The difference between mechanisms and biological or ecological systems is that the latter are made up not of inert components that do what they were built to do, but living organisms that do, in a sense, what they “want” to do, and which respond actively to changes in their surroundings and condition in order to account for them and to continue to continue, so to speak. For instance, in the case of a social mechanism — a state, corporation, or agency — the components act, some of the time at least, in ways their masters or operators cannot predict or fully control. This is sometimes called “corruption” (because their masters don’t like it) but that is value-loading of a process which may have actually different values for different evaluators. I hope this makes sense, because I intend to cite the aforesaid propaganda and my opinions of it, with maybe some revision on contemplation, to those who may find it useful for purposes I agree with.
Thank you Starry Gordon. You have given me food for thought, but alas, my brain is not firing on all cells this morning – yet.. I plan to circle back to reread.
Trump wants denuclearization talks with Russia and China, hopes for defense spending cuts. Military Industrial Contractor stocks fall a little. Also says Russia should rejoin G7.
https://theweek.com/97248/what-is-the-inf-treaty-and-why-has-donald-trump-pulled-out
What is the INF treaty and why has Donald Trump pulled out?
The US has formally withdrawn from a nuclear treaty with Russia, prompting fears of a new arms race.