What Makes a Great Bookshop? Culture Dump (Micael T)
Why Every Great Story Follows the Same Ancient Pattern Classical Wisdom (Micael T)
Stunning fossil discovery challenges the origins of animal life Science Daily (Kevin W)
First Real-Time Brain-Controlled Hearing Device Neuroscience News
Arts and Cultural Engagement ‘Linked To Slower Pace of Biological Aging’ Guardian
Do Young People Suck? Lyman Stone (Micael T). Trust me, this is a really good piece.
Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them! Experimental History (Micael T). Important.
Hantavirus
WHO officials warn of more possible hantavirus cases in coming weeks CBS. Trying to close the barn door after the horse is in the next county.
Woman Diagnosed With Hantavirus After Being on Cruise Ship Now on an Artificial Lung in ‘Final Stage of Supportive Care,’ Doctor Says People. This may seem to be scare-mongering and click-bait but as we said during Covid (we called the pandemic in January when it was not official until March) that the precautionary principle, particularly with diseases with high fatality rates, demands excessive vigilance until risk can be better assessed. Our putting commerce ahead of public health has produced instead intense messaging to keep people proceeding as normal. If the US had not so totally demonized masking, that would be a cheap and easy fallback in communities that might be at risk.
On masking, it is depressing that someone has to say something this obvious:
Physical measures that can protect against COVID-19, including masks, air purifiers, and ultraviolet sterilizers, can also protect against the hantavirus. This is different from biological protection measures, such as vaccines. Therefore, the most effective way to deal with a new…
— Adam Wong (@Engineer_Wong) May 12, 2026
COVID-19/Pandemics
It's probably worth noting that there was a nearly 50% jump in covid detections in England last week on the NOIDS causative agents data, and that data isn't complete.
— tern (@1goodtern) May 12, 2026
‘Very contagious’ parvovirus swirling throughout Northern California SFGate (Paul R). Symptoms mild but risky for pregnant women. I saw no word re the immunocompromised.
Climate/Environment
Thousands of trout are released into Stockholm’s stream here Mitti via machine translation (Micael T)
New May spark plumes show El Niño rapidly intensifying, with 8 of 10 models pointing to a super event and four projecting the strongest on record.
Across all 693 ensemble members, the mean reaches +2.8˚C, consistent with the strongest El Niño on record. pic.twitter.com/9pDxNxAkXz
— Ben Noll (@BenNollWeather) May 10, 2026
Global fire outbreaks hit record high as ‘unprecedented’ heat extremes loom, scientists say Reuters
Wildfires are climbing Europe’s mountains as heat dries forests Earth
EXTRAORDINARY HEAT WAVE
Weeks with deadly heat and thousands of records in every single African country.There has never been anything like this:
‼️Today 47C in Algeria,Burkina Faso,Mali,Niger,Senegal,Chad,Mauritania,Chad,Sudan
May Record again at Ouahigouya 🇧🇫with 44.9C. pic.twitter.com/vHebe76meU
— Extreme Temperatures Around The World (@extremetemps) May 11, 2026
‘Not normal’: On one April day, all of the planet’s top 50 hottest cities were in a single country CNN
Australia Rainfall Deficiencies Deepen Across Eastern States E+E Leader
For global ocean temperatures only, @NOAANCEI reports that April 2026 was the 2nd-warmest April on record, behind only 2024. Ocean temps checked in at 0.95°C above the 20th-century average, or about 1.13°C above the mean of 1880–1920.
The wild part is that this is happening at… pic.twitter.com/OfSPPIxDVp
— The Global Warmer🔥🌏 🔥 (@TheGlobalWarmer) May 11, 2026
Wild Blueberry Farms Across Maine Suffer as Climate Change Upends Growing Seasons Inside Climate News :-(
China?
Trump’s China visit watched in US for signs of stability – and tangible wins South China Morning Post
Trump Flies to Beijing — But Who’s Actually Desperate? Think BRICS
Elon Musk and Tim Cook among CEOs joining Trump on China trip BBC. Some readers had expressed doubt that Trump would be able to round up an entourage.
Washington slaps new sanctions on China–Iran oil network ahead of Trump’s visit to Beijing The Cradle (Kevin W). I do not see how China can give the US anything in light of these insults right before the summit. This is intended to humiliate and China is very sensitive to that.
Trump-Xi Summit: Trump to ask Xi to ‘open up’ China DW. A stupid ask but will play well in the US.
Trump-Xi summit to show that everything now is leverage Asia Times (Kevin W)
China reiterates opposition to U.S. arms sales to Taiwan Xinhua
Africa
How Nigerians are coping with heat waves amid crippling power outages Global Voices. Coming to many more countries soon
South of the Border
Trump shares image depicting Venezuela as ’51st State’ after remarks on possible annexation Anadolu Agency
CIA escalates secret war on cartels with deadly operations inside Mexico CNN (Ann)
European Disunion
Was this European figure bribed by Team Trump to kill Airbus sales?
A TOP EUROPEAN OFFICIAL today suggested the west could sabotage planes western companies sold to China.
“Europe could ground more than half of all Chinese commercial planes by withholding software updates for China’s Airbus fleet,” said Mark Leonard, director of the European… pic.twitter.com/RccGoKQyKj
— Nury Vittachi (@NuryVittachi) May 11, 2026
Europe’s energy ministers shun crisis meeting Euractiv
EU to ban Brazilian meat imports from September Euronews
French Jobless Rate Jumps Above 8% for First Time Since 2021 Bloomberg
Old Blighty
Jess Phillips resigns as minister telling Starmer ‘deeds, not words, matter’ after PM says he won’t quit BBC. It took a while, but it looks like a fuse has finally been lit.
Starmer faces endgame as Wes Streeting launches ‘coup’ to beat rivals to the top job Middle East Eye
Israel v. The Resistance
The Israeli military is planting explosives and detonating life-sustaining infrastructures in southern Lebanon to escalate mass expulsions. https://t.co/L1novNrUR0
— Nicola Perugini (@PeruginiNic) May 12, 2026
Discord over Israel splits Eurovision Politico. I hate to reveal how parochial I am, but I do not understand why anyone cares about Eurovision. Having said that, de-legitimating Israel is a worthy enterprise.
Chinese Oil Tanker Tests Safe Passage Through Strait of Hormuz OilPrice. Note: “…f it is allowed to pass, it would only be the third tanker carrying oil for China from the Persian Gulf that has traversed Hormuz since the start of the war.”
U.S. Intelligence Shows Iran Retains Substantial Missile Capabilities New York Times. More on this in our daily Iran post.
New Not-So-Cold War
Russia Deploys Pacific Fleet to East China Sea to Protect Shipping Against U.S. Armed Takeovers Military Watch
Lavrov accuses West of putting pressure on countries not to buy Russian oil TASS
Reflections on a Day Scott Ritter (Micael T)
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
They’re Attacking Online Anonymity, And Other Notes Caitlin Johnstone (Micael T)
Imperial Collapse Watch
What Happens When Americans Realize How Miserable We Are? Paul Krugman. Good review, but would have been nice if Krugman had included inequality. Unequal societies are unhappy societies.
Federalism For Anti-Fascists Chris Armitage
Trump 2.0
Three Republicans Thrown Into Fiery Furnace For Not Bowing Down To Trump Statue Babylon Bee
$1.5b Trump Tower deal on Gold Coast, Australia scrapped. Developer says the brand is “toxic” ABC Australia (Ann)
McConnell hammers Hegseth over Pentagon funding plan, alienating allies The Hill
How Trump’s $500 Million UAE Crypto Deal Trades U.S. National Security for Family Profit Center for American Progress
John Helmer: Iran Just Did the Unthinkable – China’s Response to Trump Changes EVERYTHING Dialogue Works. Helmer goes on at length about Trump’s cognitive limits, which are severe.
Trump had one of his worst mental health episodes yet last night, posting over 55 times in 3 hours. Here is the list:
10:15 PM – Accuses Obama of attempting a coup in 2016
10:15 PM – Says Obama worked with CIA to overthrow Trump
10:15 PM – Reposts tweet saying Obama is a…— Harry Sisson (@harryjsisson) May 12, 2026
The Supremes
The Kitchen Where the Supreme Court Went to Die W. A. Lawrence
Our No Longer Free Press
Looks like Israeli intel got wind of Nick Kristof’s forthcoming NYT report containing first hand testimonies and extensive documentation of systematic Israeli rape of Palestinian detainees, and activated its assets to deflect the PR blow w/ a Daily Mail hoax article the next day https://t.co/sgNJe4KTGm
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) May 12, 2026
Economy
The Worst Spring Drought on Record Is Putting U.S. Crops at Risk Time
Tomatoes CPI +15.1% yoy
Ground beef CPI up 14.5% yoyChilli cookoffs are gonna be expensive this summer! pic.twitter.com/oznLq1A8Qd
— Tracy Alloway (@tracyalloway) May 12, 2026
Mr. Market is Off His Rocker
Shipping industry fears fuel shortages as Iran war squeezes bunker fuel supply Associated Press. Important and discussed in our Iran post
The Price Isn’t Right Arthur Berman
As the paper oil market rallies, in the North Sea physical market we have seen today the first trade at a **discount** to the Dated Brent benchmark since the war started.
The ironies of the oil market: when plenty (next few days) and dearth (next few weeks) coexist.
— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) May 12, 2026
AI
Where Are All The Data Centers? Ed Zitron
‘
The Bezzle
Waymo issues recall to deal with a flooding problem Techcrunch (Kevin W)
Marc Andreessen just leaked the system prompt he uses to make every LLM 10x smarter.
It's called the Anti-Glaze System Prompt.
One paste. Your AI stops kissing your ass and starts telling you the truth.
Here's what it actually does:
→ Kills "great question" forever
→ Kills… pic.twitter.com/f153qbxj8u— Guri Singh (@heygurisingh) May 12, 2026
Class Warfare
GM Cutting Hundreds of Salaried IT Workers As It Trims Costs, Evaluates Needs CNBC
There Is a Fire Sale on M.B.A.s Wall Street Journal. No archived or syndicated version yet.
Antidote du jour. Tracie H: “This is one I pulled up for Mother’s day”:
And a bonus. Is this a result of dogs with old human carers who perform manual labor?
While her owner struggled to lift a loaded wheelbarrow, her dog saw her and immediately ran to help her. ❤️❤️ pic.twitter.com/fmB4lzShZZ
— The Best (@Thebestfigen) May 12, 2026
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
109 comments
Comments are closed.
https://x.com/harryjsisson/status/2054129873593999597
Mental deterioration of Trump? A compilation
For Trump, it seems to be all about the grudges with Obama occupying a central position here. And it is surprising the number of things that trigger him. So was he sitting in bed on his mobile just typing away anything that floated into his mind? Just a sad, sad little man.
There does seem to be a pattern here – Obama has taken up rent-free occupancy in Trump’s mind. Nobel Peace Prize envy?
Also, wasn’t Taco on the plane to China during this timeline? Shouldn’t he have been focused on the Xi summit?
Trump on the plane at that time? Hmmm. Couldn’t someone have given him a bag of those little pretzels?
Yet:
Noting Sisson’s post and list on the Xitter: “Trump had one of his worst mental health episodes yet last night, posting over 55 times in 3 hours.”
No one is supervising Trump? Everyone in his regime thinks that logorrhea is okay? Admittedly, social media are already flooded with gazillions of logorrheics.
Something doesn’t make sense here: So the US of A is run by another set of courtiers and lackeys, much like Biden’s minders? Two administrations of imperial diaper carriers? I realize that that these courtiers are ambitious — thinking of how malign Markwayne Mullins gave up a powerful position in the U.S. Senate to pursue his dream of oppression… and of Antony Blinken, willing to be humiliated by the Ukrainians in that nazi-o-pizzeria in Kiev for the sake of his career in the revolving door… and ….
As I have asked before: What has gone wrong in U.S. culture to have produced two successive regimes of pasty over-Caucasianed guys who are non compos mentis? What is to be done?
I was just thinking that for a guy of Trump’s age, that Circadian rhythm disruption is going to play hell with him after landing several time zones away. I can see that his first meeting with President Xi is going to be fun, especially when he demands China’s surrender to his demands. And you can be certain that he will have a whole laundry list of demands to make.
He’ll be accompanied by his own personal chemist for the summit. If I were Xi, I’d hand him a cup when he gets off the plane and ask him to urinate in it …
I see that Trump has just landed and was given the red carpet treatment. Frankly I think that the Chinese missed a great opportunity here. They should have done an Alaska summit and had J-16s lined up on one side of the red carpet and J-20s on the other.
Rev Kev: Red carpet, maybe, but a little bird tells me that Xi has had an amateur chef flown in from Japan to make Trump a special course all of his own, fugu sashimi with fugu testicles on the side.
https://eu.dispatch.com/story/news/2009/01/27/7-sickened-by-bad-blowfish/23830753007/
Heh. Fan-fugu-tastic!
Come to think of it, there is something very Homer-esque about the Donald, physically and mentally.
IMHO an easy method in a settling like this is pure caffeine:
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/spilling-beans-how-much-caffeine-too-much
The problem is it has a strong, bitter taste: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5488350/
You would think Trump would take a page out of Netanyahu’s playbook and bring his laundry to China. I am assuming he has known several Chinese laundries in New York city and attests that they are the greatest. Now to go to the source.
The Blackrock, credit card companies and other finance CEOs are probably the American laundry equivalent. Hard to believe that they will be allowed to take over the Chinese market
No ticky no washy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oZc6pK5GM8
No ticky, no laundry, Jack Nicholson version.
I think the CEO contingent is there mostly to keep China from making Trump their pet.
And also because they’re so important nothing important can ever happen without them.
Kind of wild th Cook, who relies on China for the cameras and recording devices he sells in the US with annual upgrades, and Musk, who is part of a massive lobbying effort to convince that Chinese EVs should never be allowed into the US because of their cameras and recording devices, are together.
We Marxists welcome this new proof of our theory of the state executive as the committee for the management of the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.
Trump bringing so many people is an admission of weaknesses.
Wait a minute … I thought the Iranians bringing ‘so many people’ to the negotiations in Islamabad was a sign of strength?
Category error number one: They were not a show of strength but serious. One could easily argue that bringing so many looked over-eager, as in a proof of weakness.
Category error number two: The CEOs were not comparable in any way shape or form to Iranian expert teams working together under cohesive leadership with clear negotiating parameters. This is more like a guy who has been beaten up in a bar rounding up some of his mates, irrespective of whether any of them are good at fighting.
Trump is overmatched by Xi, so he dragged along CEOs as visible symbols of US economic heft. But China already knows about that and also clearly sees that that is declining.
Not so many bankers. Compute and private equity seemed to dominate published accounts.
The oligarch split enacted.
One difference I see between the two is that Biden’s minders, including Jill, seemed to have a lot more ability to exercise control. Trump’s entourage appears too fearful of the consequences to try an rein him in at all. It really is extraordinary, though, that he is allowed this stream of consciousness on his X account. I know this WWE-type bombast was part of his “charm” for MAGA true believers. But is their no concern for what the rest of the world thinks?
Many insider types like McMaster warned us about Trump’s irrational behavior during and after his first term. I believed them, but also saw these stories as part of the Establishment coup against him (Trump was right about the “coup” in his X ravings, by the way). Now we reap the consequences.
Going back to the 2016 GOP primary, the other contenders were political outsiders: Fiorino and Ben Carson, even Herman Cain made noise in 2012. The “moderates” lost in 2008 and 2012, and the latter year freed GOP voters to pursue any old nut.
Trump won in 2016 as an outsider too, and he didn’t squeak by Jeb!. Jeb! had all kinds of official support and dummy candidates, and Trump beat his brains in just kind of by bumbling about. Jeb! is not popular. He lost his 1994 race in Florida. He’s a tool, and that was where the GOP was lining up.
There isn’t an organized GOP power base left to fall back on. They can’t pass a budget in a timely manner. These are Republicans around Trump, so they aren’t concerned with anything other than their immediate greed without hitting rock bottom. It is just Trump. Maybe in Utah? But in Utah.
I remember thinking in 2016: “Surely the Powers that Be won’t impose on us a “choice” between the Clinton and Bush crime families *again*!” Of course the Democrats did, but the GOP suffered blowback from the fake populism they had been pushing on their constituents for years. I admit that seeing Jeb! destroyed, and then watching Hilliary go down as well, gave me a feeling of satisfaction – for a minute!
I think you are right that Trump is mainly surrounded by grifters and sycophants rather than anything resembling a party. Not only administration officials, but most Republican members of Congress, are afraid of him as well.
No one is supervising Trump? Everyone in his regime thinks that logorrhea is okay? Admittedly, social media are already flooded with gazillions of logorrheics.
Based on other notes, news, and comments I’m not sure that anyone around him wants to be the person to say, “Mr. President, step away from the electronics.”
Yes, that and Trump’s hopelessly racist.
I’ve said it before that the Norwegians should issue an exceptional Peace Prize for Trump with a larger medal and more extravagant party than Obama got. Perhaps they should, for the sake of world peace, take Obama’s medal back at the same time.
“Also, wasn’t Taco on the plane to China during this timeline? Shouldn’t he have been focused on the Xi summit?”
Maybe these are the issues he intends to raise with Xi while he’s there.
You ever spend time around someone with dementia? I am not a doctor, but this has all the hallmarks of that.
The Cult of Don’s Senility
Look at his lies – what do you see?
The cult of Don’s senility
I know your anger, I know your dreams
I’ve been everything you want to be
Oh, I’m the cult of Don’s senility
Like little Marco and a certain Kennedy …
I’m the cult of Don’s senility
The cult of Don’s senility
The cult of Don’s senility
Neon lights, Nobel Prize?
When a mirror speaks, the reflection lies
You won’t have to follow me
Only you can set me free
I sell the things you need to be
I’m the scowling face on your TV
Oh, I’m the cult of Don’s senility
I exploit you, still you love me
I tell you one and one makes three
Oh, I’m the cult of Don’s senility
Like Giuliani and Bondi!
Oh, I’m the cult of Don’s senility
The cult of Don’s senility
The cult of Don’s senility
Neon lights, still no Nobel Prize!
When our leader speaks, we feed on lies
You won’t have to follow me
Only you can set you free
He stole a fortune, you worship fame
You built a statue in Donald’s name
I’m every person you need to be
Oh, I’m the cult of Don’s senility
I am the cult of, I am the cult of
I am the cult of, I am the cult of
I am the cult of, I am the cult of
I am the cult of, I am the cult of Don’s senility
(ask not what Donald can do for you)
“Cult of Personality”, by Living Colour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xxgRUyzgs0&list=RDsiwpn14IE7E
Bravo!
This is in the post.
We require readers to read a post in full before commenting. You clearly did not.
I have only glancingly attended to reports of Trump going nuts, thinking rather that he’s just childish and insecure. But seeing the bulk and nature of this list, I now agree: He’s nuts.
Not so many bankers. Compute and private equity seemed to dominate published accounts.
The oligarch split enacted.
What if Melania is playing Nancy Reagan to Donald’s decline as Nancy did for Ronnie?
After all she was in charge as the USSR was shuttered. What awaits the world in the wake of Melania’s management?
Latest from Glenn Greenwald, public excerpt:
The Self-Indulgent, Dead-End Politics of AOC’s Partisan Liberalism
Ridglan Farms was forced to release thousands of beagles from hideous experiments because activists formed a trans-ideological coalition. AOC-style liberals would never dirty themselves in that way.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-self-indulgent-dead-end-politics
Max Bluementhal on Jimmy Dore discussing this story. utube.
Marjorie Taylor Greene EXPOSES AOC’s REFUSAL To Work Together Against Israel! w/ Max Blumenthal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pdiO7qga60
(Next time I hear a young whipper snapper say, “ok, boomer”, I’ll smile. / ;)
Saw a poll yesterday she was leading all others for the 2028 prize. Can’t find it now.
What a show it will be for 2028.
Eh, maybe the Dem estab will cancel the pres primaries….again. That would make 4 primaries the base voter preference doesn’t matter. / ;)
Why not? Primary elections are apparently somewhat new in the scheme of things and are by no means sacred. As you suggest, it’s not like Ms. Harris was voted in as the D candidate, right?
So why not just drop the pretense and go back to the Way It Was a century ago?
A century ago, political parties did not select their nominees through primary elections. Instead, parties ran their own processes using their own rules, and hearing from—mostly—party stalwarts, with little role for rank-and-file members. In other words, nominees were selected in the proverbial smoke-filled back room.
https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/primaries-more-than-one-way-to-find-a-party-nominee
Old Blighty
During the broadcast of the ridiculous and obscene spectacle of the King’s Speech, BBC announced that Wes Streeting will announce his claim for the Leadersphip tomorrow.
It’s like putting a new wallpaper over the old moldy walls.
One of those old 19th century dark green wallpapers that were impregnated with arsenic to get that colour.
What for? Will Streeting bring different policies to the government?
I think shiny wesley is a desperate continuity candidate to head off the supposed left wing firebrands that remain within the party.
He approaches starmer in both charisma, vision and rectitude.
An excellent choice to steer the UK onto the rocks of reform which, of course, will be the deplorables’ fault.
…and the local oligarchies’ desire.
Just a heads up, the link for the story The Kitchen Where the Supreme Court Went to Die W. A. Lawrence yields an error message.
Thanks for all your hard work.
Working link for “The Kitchen Where the Supreme Court Went to Die” article at-
https://wendy664.substack.com/p/the-kitchen-where-the-supreme-court
It was just missing the initial ‘h’ in https.
Fixed. Sorry this took so long.
Kill any commercial aircraft imports, surely? Just speeds China bettening down the hatches and bring up domestic manu of critical complex infrastructure. Then export them.
Just in time for summer:
A major watchdog says data centers are wreaking havoc on North America’s power grid
Link to the full report:
https://www.nerc.com/globalassets/programs/bpsa/alerts/level-3-computational-load-alert.pdf
Re: Motor oils and lubricants shortages
The cat is out of the bag; it’s all over X.com.
The panic buying probably starts now. Best to panic early, I always say.
Yeah, got mine for the Fiat and VW a few weeks ago. Both require fancy specs, not just xW-xx. So cautionary note: getting an oil change anywhere in a few months may not bung the correct oil in there. How would you know?
Panic early, panic often.
The Hunger Games have begun.
Now the inflation genie is really out of the bottle:
https://seekingalpha.com/news/4592012-producer-price-index-surges-past-expectations-in-april-amid-iran-war-oil-shock
PPI comes in smoking hot. Kevin Warsh last seen day-drinking behind a dumpster. Jerome Powell’s last day at the office as Fed Chair is Friday; last seen whistling happy tunes while working on his short game.
I hope not to be flamed for sharing this, but I consider the information important enough to be worth disseminating here.
At my Wall St firm, the AI rollout is happening furiously. We started with CoPilot deployed to our Office365 Suites last year, which was running the OpenAI/ChatGPT LLM models.
My frank evaluation: they were decent enough at replacing the now completely useless/polluted by ads/manipulated by SEO search engines (i.e. Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo), but only when retrieving information in small chunks. For larger tasks, rather than admit limitations, there were errors. Everything, especially complex technical/scientific information needed to be fact checked. However, its decent enough at this itself, if you tell it to be, and will provide sources for claims when pressed.
We recently gained access to Claude through a pilot program. Anthropic is pressing Wall St very hard right now to displace Copilot/ChatGPT as it is still in the very early adoption phase.
I was selected in my dept to get access to one of the Claude licenses. In my 2-3 months of experience, I must say, as somewhat of a general AI skeptic given (1) my doubts about the ability of AI to ever live up to the hype, (2) my wariness given shortcomings of the early iterations of CoPilot/ChatGPT, and (3) concerns of making me and colleagues obsolete…. Claude is making massive waves in a way that CoPilot/ChatGPT did not. Senior management was lukewarm on CoPilot, but their hair is on fire to get Claude in everyone’s hands.
When used properly, it is insanely useful both as a research tool and as an assistant for things like programming/coding (which, while useful for my particular job, would take up too much time for me to do before, but now I can do given that Claude speeds up code production on the order of 6-8x beyond what my speed to develop code would be without it).
This is not a sales pitch for AI. Rather, this is a warning that the valid arguments against AI that it was unreliable and actually created more problems than being solved are on much shakier ground than 12 months ago. This is also not to say anything about its economic viability as currently constructed. I’m not privy to the negotiations with Anthropic, but my sense is that the firm will pay many millions for an annual license to gain access firmwide, and my sense is that this is also happening at other banks as they recognize the utility/reliability of the latest Anthropic models relative to the OpenAI models that powered CoPilot in the early days.
And I would be remiss to not add that now, via some agreement with Microsoft, we can now deploy the latest Claude models (Opus) within CoPilot itself. So Microsoft is not putting all its eggs in the OpenAI basket, surely recognizing the demand surge created as the Claude deployment across enterprises has dramatically raised the bar of AI performance and pulled in many skeptics given the substantial level of improvement in performance as users adopt Claude.
I will end with this: I’ve heard rumors that at Wells Fargo, employees who are not using AI are being given remedial training so that they start implementing it into their workflows. So, there soon won’t be an option: you’ll either use AI to be more productive or you will be disciplined.
Thanks for the real world anecdote.
My suspicion is that these banks are pushing AI the hardest because they all have investments in OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. Plus, they stand to make a lot of bank on IPO’s.
I’ll also note that the big banks are also the ones pushing “return to office” the hardest, and coincidentally, they have a lot of clients who are probably hurting from WFH (commercial real estate investors, private equity, REITs.)
So, massive conflict of interest, as usual. However, I am not saying this to dismiss your point, which as I understand it is that they are pushing this (family blog) hard and it seems like a giant (family blog) sandwich that we’re all gonna have to take a bite of. No doubt it will spread from the banks to other large corporate entities.
This is certainly true in my world but also they are ramping up training for “judgement” and other skills that add up to being able to check, correct, and police the AI output.
And as I’ve said before, a lot of the “AI” being hyped internally is not new, just bog standard machine leaning and automation.
When people try to say you’ve always been surrounded by data centers, I suppose they’re trying to pretend the server rooms for this and the rest of onsite needs are in someway similar to the beast about to eat Utah.
They are foisting chatbots (chariots, according to autocorrect) LLMs on us, in
concert with very strict rules about their use and extra layers of approval required before we can release the AI magic beans into the wild.
I might be uncharitable, but what do wall street firms do that would be of wider benefit doing slightly faster, or even with just less humans?
Quants spend lots of time writing shitty little scripts to pull and organize data for their traders
(Source: I work for a company providing AI services directly adjacent to tools like Claude Code and spend several hours a day discussing use case implementation with companies rolling AI out across their software teams and have more than ten financial services or trading firms in my current book of business)
That strikes me as a rather narrow benefit, but I am glad that the preposterous misallocation of resources that anthropic demands is at least helping quants.
“Why Every Great Story Follows the Same Ancient Pattern”
What he says is quite true. The young farmhand that was Luke Skywalker in the first film was not the same as the experienced Jedi Knight that he was in later films. But it was a long road with hard work, many mistakes, moments of personal despair, and personal loss to get there. It is something of a life lesson here that many can relate to. But then Hollywood invented the idea of the Mary Sue. A character that is already great at everything, will show up older experienced characters because they are so naturally talented and is already complete. Yeah, who can relate to that except in some sort of fantasy.
I think it was David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs book where he showed how all these Hollywood productions have been essentially taken over by executives, “expert committees”, and a whole bunch of other people with not much else to do. The Mary Sue that no normal person can relate to is probably the synthesis of all these elites mongering among themselves
A lot of suspicion has been cast at modern writers who quite often have no real life experience other than having been to college. Worse still, too many have a lot of emotional baggage that they carry around and project it into their screenplays. The scripts that they then come up with are at best pretty ordinary and you see the results in how modern Hollywood films & TV series fare. That is how you end up with “Starfleet Academy” and the disaster that it was.
It was only fairly recently, when I happened to rewatch The Unforgiven at the same time that I was rereading The Odyssey, that it dawned (rosy fingeredly) on me that most every Hollywood revenge action movie cribbed its ending from Homer, knowingly or otherwise. Kill ’em all, and let the gods sort them out.
One would like to think we’ve advanced in the last 3,000 years or so, but…
Any thoughts on the new Nolan Odyssey? I was excited they might tell the story from the “Wrath of Athena” perspective (the Clay book) but based on the trailers I think it will gloss over Athena as the instrument of Odysseus’ punishment for his sacreliges
Zendaya is playing Athena and I have to say, she is not my favorite actress, so for me, glossing over Athena’s role might be a plus. I did note she wasn’t in the trailer I saw at all. I also got this from a friend, which is pretty funny – https://www.reddit.com/r/shittymoviedetails/s/Q0oqWTsSoA I sincerely hope he doesn’t really speak with that accent. It’s got to be better than the Troy movie from the early Aughts though, which is admittedly a low bar.
If you like the sword and sandal stuff and can do without Athena or any deus ex machina at all, The Return from a couple years ago, starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus, was really quite good. The director leaves out everything supernatural and concentrates on the human drama – the movie starts with Odysseus washing up on the shores of Ithaca so it just covers the last part of the original epic.
The accent is real. Odysseus as a southie! The kids online seem to love it?! I presume they never actually read homer after high school. I got strong “death of Stalin” vibes though (Zhukov, Beria et al with English accents)
Also, the way the movie deals with the Trojan horse looks interesting –
“Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse isn’t a towering colossus looming over the coast of Troy. It’s sinking. Half-submerged, it looks less like a monument than a mistake, an offering to the gods already being claimed by the sea.
~snip~
“If the horse were sinking into the sand and about to be swept away by the tide, the Trojans would never believe there could be anybody in there,” says Nolan, pouring Earl Grey from a teapot wrapped in a geometric cozy at the bright but unassuming offices of his production company, Syncopy. “They would be rescuing this thing from the waves and dragging it into the city as a prize. It wouldn’t be on wheels, like a roller skate.” ”
I’m interested to see how the pull that off. If they explain why the Achaeans would need a giant wooden equine to begin with (siege engine?), and how they would manage to stay silent and uninjured while being turned ass over Earl Grey teapot as the horse is pulled out of the surf, that would really better a clever interpretation.
Jimmy Dore has doubts about the latest hantavirus MSM narrative. utube.
Here’s How You Know The Hantavirus Is A SCAM!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQMzdnNUPJg
and from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show:
Hantavirus Is Not the Next Covid, But Try Telling That to the News Media
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGMmgMke9p8
Just adding counter points-of-view to consider.
“Jimmy Dore has doubts about the latest hantavirus MSM narrative.”
That’s a shocker. The night club comedian is quick to get out front on making sure everybody continues to gather in tight spaces with poor ventilation regardless of what deadly diseases might be floating around.
We can always expect a message from Dore and the elites of “keep shopping, eating out, working and sending your kids to school” no matter what the risks might be. The show must go on!
The price isn’t right by Art Berman–
Nate Hagens released an interview of Berman this morning, done in the last few days, that covers the following:
Hagens always includes a timeline of topics so you can spot cut a particular topic if you like.
Berman is Hagens’ best guest. Hagens can also be good when he has scientists on, but I think he’s terrible whenever he has his woo-woo, new-agey guests or when he’s doomsaying about AI.
Hagens has some grating ideological blind spots. He’s class war blind as he is energy aware. He had one guest on awhile back who very rightly blamed billionaires/capitalists for our social and environmental problems–Hagens pushed back and basically defended billionaires as those with a “stake” in the system who knew it best and therefore were more likely to be engaged in addressing our predicament. He is a former Wall Street (I think Goldman Sachs) executive, after all. He does not have much taste for class war as he’s one of the winners.
I stopped listening regularly to him after that. A man can leave Goldman Sachs, but Goldman Sachs never leaves the man.
What I get from him is a view that ideology isn’t helpful right now. He’s not a defender of capitalism. He’s leans more to the “woo-woo” side as you (and perhaps, Lambert) would put it. People like:
Daniel Schmachtenberger; Iain McGilchrist; Nate Soares; and John Vervaeke.
A similar “woo-woo” accusation might be laid at the feet of three of those listed above, who got together to talk about things like worldview, dark traits, game theory and woo-woo.
The idea is that our predicament is so multi-faceted and profound that a change of ideologies would make little difference, even if such a change in the West were remotely possible. Moreover, Marxism’s record on stewardship of the Earth is less than stellar. The three fellows who got together in the above clip all argue that a widespread change in worldview is necessary to navigate the catastrophe ahead in a way that does not put all the burden on the masses while cushioning the impacts on the rich. When we consider how the elites throughout the neoliberal world have lost connection with reality, isn’t it clear that something deeper than ideology is at work? These people have become extraordinarily rigid in their thinking, evaluating any possible tinkering with the edifice like a Jenga player placing a risky piece.
As for the billionaires, I think Hagens runs in circles where he attempts to “spread the gospel” to billionaires with the hope of gaining their financial support for his projects, and maybe even getting them to change some behavior. He takes what will probably be called a “Charlie Kirk” approach, talking to just about anybody, including some, like Sam Harris, that put a frown on my face. But overall, I learn a lot from his interviews and his Franklys.
For someone who preaches a “systems” view, Hagens’ class blindness is unforgivable. The anarchic capitalist system cannot address an ecological and social predicament that requires rational, human governance of the whole world. In other words: central planning of the economy.
Whether or not past central planners were remiss in their management of the environment is irrelevant from a systems point of view. Independent capitalists competing for market domination in their own petty domains cannot possibly govern on that principle and also responsibly manage human affairs. They must therefore be overthrown and their pell-mell market system replaced by a more rational and comprehensive system, one in which society is driven by conscious intervention and not by crude “feedback mechanisms” like market price.
Hagens’ refusal to commit to the systems view makes him intellectually vulnerable to the woo-woo, the soft-focus prattle, the hand-wavey idealism.
“Reflections on a Day”
I found the following section very relevant-
‘The Chinese officers have always been present in the past, but always melted away once the formal phase of the proceedings were finished. This year they stayed for the informal celebrations, and joined the Russian officers for toasts and comradeship. For the first time in my direct experience, the narrative of the sacrifice of the Soviet people at the hands of the Nazis was placed on the same level as the sacrifice of the Chinese people at the hands of Imperial Japan (27 million and 40 million, respectively.) Victory Day, at least as how it was marked that evening, was broadened to take into consideration the Chinese experience, and toasts were made to mark their shared histories.’
They actually remember their past and honour it. When I was a kid, VE and VJ days actually meant something. Now? Who cares? Most would not even know what you are talking about.
‘Nury Vittachi
@NuryVittachi
A TOP EUROPEAN OFFICIAL today suggested the west could sabotage planes western companies sold to China.
“Europe could ground more than half of all Chinese commercial planes by withholding software updates for China’s Airbus fleet,” said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, in an article in the Guardian today.’
The day that that happens is the day that EU exports die a violent death. Who would buy EU exports if the EU tried to do something like this? Thought to check up on that Mark Leonard character and found for a start that not only is he the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations but that he founded it back in ’07. It is his own platform-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Leonard_(director)
I regularly don my cognitive hazmat suit to listen to his podcast “The World in Thirty Minutes” to get a sense for what the wretched Atlanticist Euroblob is busy telling itself.
Let’s just say that my gag reflex gets a regular workout there.
Oh, good heavens, baby, where is Don’s medicine?
Well, he must have left it outside, with his etiquette
The undertaker’s rule of thumb
It’s hard to talk with a novacaine tongue
(Yes it is)
This prez smells like mental illness
The scars he hides are now our business
I can’t seem to make hare nor hide of it
No baby, gov ain’t a punishment
Hypnotized by his rotten behavior
Yeah, this week’s fashion is last year’s flavor
I got a head full of sermons and an idol to aspire
Yeah, the politics of the world’s greatest liars
Every time
So, tell me baby, is it true, all those things they say about you?
This prez smells like mental illness
The scars he hides are now our business
I can’t seem to make hide nor hare of this
No baby, gov ain’t a punishment
The Black Crowes, “Hotel Illness”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjihjhvaMxk&list=RDhjihjhvaMxk
“Do Young People Suck?”
‘Marriage rates are declining, and this is a key part of why fertility is declining.’
Ahem, could it be that young people are working their butts off so that they don’t end up on the streets? That they find it a hard time to meet rent leaving not much money for dating? Back in the 50s & 60s, a guy could work a job, support his wife (at home) and children, pay his bills, have two cars and maybe have a shack in the country for weekends. And this is within living memory. Now? Not a chance. And if polls show that young men think that they suck, maybe because their culture told them that they did, again and again. I tend to think it a bit of a rebellion how these same young men came out in force to vote for Trump. Not because they thought him great but there was a counter movement to this idea that there is something inherently wrong with them. I find the videos of ShoeOnHead very informative here-
https://www.youtube.com/@Shoe0nHead/videos
Yes, it could be that young people are working their butts off just to survive.
NPR did a shout out to single, never married mothers for Mother’s Day, which is ok. How many young women who want families are finding it difficult these days to find a man financially secure enough to take on the responsibilities of marriage and family?
The birthrate in the US fell during the Great Depression.
I TOLD YOU TO READ THE PIECE!!!
You obviously did not.
One of its big findings is that young people think young people suck.
I did read the piece. And personally I found that scatter gun of statistics unsatisfactory. We do not live in a culture that encourages nor support young people and I think that the hand wave of that author saying that young men think that they suck an unsatisfactory explanation for what is going on. If young people are saying that they suck, this would to my mind be indicative of a lack of self confidence more than anything else.
I have a few doubts about that article. It makes what looks to me like a statistical error while saying nothing about the elephant in the room.
The elephant in the room is the famous finding that 80% (or whatever it actually is) of women on dating apps are only interested in 20% of the men. What I have heard (no personal experience, but the data is powerful) this is devastating for the three groups involved:
1) Most men don’t get dates at all. Some become extremely resentful. They are also alienated by the negative experiences of women for which they bear no responsibility – see #3 below.
2) The top men have a surfeit of options. They appear to be the big winners here, with access to all the sex they want. But this eventually leaves them feeling empty and with a low opinion of women.
3) Dating apps provide women access to a massive pool of men. This deceives them into believing that they can find their dream partners – but access is not the same as commitment. Women are told by the culture that they have an obligation to put out, and that it’s fun to engage in no-strings sex just like men. In reality women are not like men. Many wake up the next morning with a sinking feeling. They find it incredibly hurtful being used and discarded and develop extremely negative views of men. I find this a likely explanation for the explosion of MeToo.
To me, the failure to address this, even to explain it away (I would love to hear that it is false), is a fatal flaw in the article. It also connects with a statistical error that is small, but that might be indicative of the author’s overall reasoning. This has to do with choking. (An aside: I have no problem with kink, but “breath control” is genuinely dangerous. I find the rise of choking disturbing.) The data shows a large number of women have experienced choking, while only a small number of men have performed it. The article suggests this is due to misreporting. The alternative explanation is obvious in light of the 80/20 phenomenon: a small number of men are choking a large number of women.
We may be effectively seeing the return of polygyny. Large numbers of unattached men historically lead to social instability and war. I believe it is Chris Williamson who has suggested that the only reason this hasn’t already happened is that young men are effectively sedated with a combination of porn, pot and video games.
I think this is correct. The Democrats sure made it hard for men to vote for them the likes of Kamala’s Man Enough ad.
This. Thanks for stating it better than I could.
re: Russia Deploys Pacific Fleet to East China Sea
10 Russian ships transits Japan’s Tsushima Strait and enter the East China Sea, en route towards the Yellow Sea.
https://t.me/rnintel/60695
Owen Lewis
@is_OwenLewis
Okay folks, this qualifies as BREAKING NEWS!
Harold “Sonny” White, the warp drive pioneer behind NASA’s EagleWorks Lab, just stepped out of stealth with Casimir Inc. to unveil MicroSPARC: the first battery free chip to harvest continuous electrical power straight from the quantum vacuum via the Casimir force.
The 5 mm × 5 mm device uses millions of custom microscale Casimir cavities fabricated on a substrate. Inside each cavity, two fixed conductive walls create a region of negative vacuum pressure (the well known Casimir effect). Stationary micropillars anchored in the middle act as antennas. Electrons from the cavity walls then quantum tunnel to the pillars because the interior is a lower energy “quieter” zone — and the probability of tunneling back is orders of magnitude lower. This one way “quantum ratchet” flow generates a measurable DC current with no external power source or moving parts.
Prototypes already fabricated at university nanofab facilities (Texas A&M AggieFab, MIT.nano) have been tested in RF-shielded, low noise chambers for weeks. The team reports outputs ranging from millivolts to volts at picoamp to microamp levels using precision electrometers and Kelvin Probe Force Microscopy. Target performance for the first commercial chip: ~1.5 V at 25 µA (≈40 µW continuous). Stacking and scaling could reach milliwatts or even watts per device.
Initial applications are ultra low power: always on IoT sensors, wearables, and medical implants. Longer term roadmap includes trickle charging phones, powering small electronics, and eventually grid independent homes or EVs. Commercialization is targeted for 2028, starting at ~$100/W before dropping toward $10/W.
White ties the work directly to his earlier theoretical paper on emergent quantization from a dynamic vacuum and sees it as a practical power source for the deep-space missions he’s long championed.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and independent scientists have so far declined public comment. But if the engineering scales as hoped, MicroSPARC would represent a genuine paradigm shift: continuous, maintenance free power drawn from the fabric of spacetime itself.
A bold leap from warp-drive theory into real hardware. Progress (and vacuum-powered chips) marches on.
Photo: MicroSPARC | Casimir Inc.
Source: https://thedebrief.org/free-energy-from-the-vacuum-warp-drive-pioneer-unveils-battery-free-microsparc-that-allegedly-draws-power-from-the-quantum-vacuum/
Quote
CasimirInc
@CasimirInc
·May 12
“We already have functioning prototype devices fabricated and tested in research nanofabrication environments.” – @DrSonnyWhite, Founder and CEO of Casimir in @Debriefmedia today.
https://thedebrief.org/free-energy-from-the-vacuum-warp-drive-pioneer-unveils-battery-free-microsparc-that-allegedly-draws-power-from-the-quantum-vacuum/
“eventually grid independent homes or EVs”
Hmmm. I doubt that.
Having resorted to Wikipedia to confirm that there really is such a thing as a Casimir effect, I am blown away by the potential for “free” power based on already confirmed experiments. If we don’t destroy the world first, we have the possibility of an amazing future.
I’m sorry, but this smells like a perpetual motion machine. The “quantum ratchet” is an old physics exercise to show that, at thermal equilibrium, no energy can be extracted from the environment. That said, in the presence of thermal, electrical or chemical potential gradients, energy can be extracted using similar methods.
The CEO of Casimir has made an extraordinary claim that really needs some extraordinary evidence. We need to know the circumstances under which this system is said to work. I know of no case where the Second Law of Thermodynamics has been broken on a macroscopic scale. The Fluctuation Theorem allows for apparent decreases in entropy in localized zones, but these are compensated by an overall increase of entropy of the whole system under consideration.
Sorry, but I call this bogus!
No Child Left With a Brain?
Why U.S. Test Scores Are in a ‘Generation-Long Decline’ (NY Times)
and I wonder why this is?
Hint: Students in their own words say it is sickness
Chronic Absenteeism Still a Struggle in 2024–2025 (RAND)
Tech is trash in schools
Being taken out of school for over a year definitely did not help, generally speaking. Getting the kiddies even more hooked on learning from a computer during that time specifically and bigly dumbed things down, in my humble opinion.
I have tried, to no avail, to convince the people teaching my kid that teaching on an ipad definitely teaches kids how to use an ipad, much to the delight of techbro squillionaires everywhere, but not necessarily how to do math, write, or think for themselves.
“Some readers had expressed doubt that Trump would be able to round up an entourage.”
I admit to being one of them, at least to the extent of a full entourage. Here is the entire list (16), compiled from the BBC article:
Jensen Huang (Nvidia)
Tim Cook (Apple)
Elon Musk(Tesla and SpaceX)
Larry Fink (BlackRock)
Dina Powell McCormick (Meta)
Kelly Ortberg (Boeing)
Ryan McInerney (Visa)
Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone)
Brian Sikes (Cargill)
Jane Fraser (Citi)
Jim Anderson (Coherent)
Henry Lawrence Culp (GE Aerospace)
David Solomon (Goldman Sachs)
Jacob Thaysen (Illumina)
Michael Miebach (Mastercard)
Sanjay Mehrotra (Micron Technology)
The companies are more interesting than the personalities.
Is this a trophy entourage? Another dominance play by Trump in which he tells Xi, “These 16 industry leaders represent $x trillion of value, y times greater than the GDP of China!”
There is no mention of what cabinet members will tag along. You might expect at least the Sec of State and maybe Treasury to attend.
Seems like another stunt, but perhaps that is obvious.
This is what diplomacy reduced to “because markets” yields.
Your republic is finished.
Or less insulting to China:
Another dominance play by Trump in which he tells Xi, “These 16 industry leaders represent $x trillion of value, y times greater than the GDP of Iran!”
China must be absolutely delighted that Trump has dragged along the billionaires that run so much of America. It shows that nothing will fundamentally change in America going forward which is exactly what works best for China, has worked best for China for multiple decades.
Climate/Environment
Clearly we are all going to hell in a hand-basket, but maybe the local trees not so quickly. The island is loaded with majestic Beechwood trees, and they are not doing well. Beech leaf disease (BLD) is widespread here now and is caused by a microscopic, foliar-feeding nematode, Litylenchus crenatae mccannii. The wicked cold and snowy winter we had seems to have severely affected these critters because, the new foliage is looking great even on affected trees. Alas, they will eventually succumb, but this summer severe may improve to chronic, and these beauties will brighten our days for a bit longer.
What public health?
With a Friend in Trump, the Tobacco Industry Secures a Lucrative Win (NY Times)
This is the guy that fought tooth and nail to stymie approval of updated Novavax every year. What a s**t.
A selective conscious I guess.
It seems like the only recent public health figure that’s any good on actual policy is Trump’s first surgeon general. Maybe he should run for president.
>Where Are All The Data Centers?
I believe that rising construction material costs are a major factor behind delays in data center construction. Prices for materials such as iron, steel, copper, aluminum, and concrete have skyrocketed in recent years, with overall costs increasing by more than 40% since 2020. Consequently, many construction projects have been delayed or canceled. With energy prices also soaring and no indication that this upward trend will reverse, the delays caused by rising costs have created a vicious cycle that leads to even higher costs. I am concerned that many of the data centers currently under construction will be abandoned midway through due to shrinking profit margins caused by these costs.
More nasty news
FCC approves $40 billion sale of EchoStar spectrum to SpaceX, AT&T (Reuters)
We should just let Musk own everything. He can be our first iteration of The Corporation or Tyrell Corporation.
Thanks Tracie H for the momma cat and rascal kittens photo. What a crew!
yes, beautiful pic and cat crew!
Yeah, great photo that.
From the conclusion of “Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them!”:
I agree about rules and laws. It is not possible to run a society by rules. If we are not beset by theft, it is not because of the law, but because most people are not thieves. The law is an exception: it only applies where there has already been a social failure. Laws, to my mind, represent failures.
Not entirely: laws can also create norms. But only to an extent. The attempt by liberals and the left to substitute law for culture over the past half century has been a major contributor to the polarization of today. For example, if I recall correctly in the 1960s and 1970s the green movement had success with environmental legislation, so from about the 1980s on they focused on laws and lawsuits rather than on building broad public support. (I suspect the predominance of professionals – e.g. lawyers – in the movement was also a factor. It was their inclination and in their interests.) Looking at the collapse of the climate cause, and the movements own abandonment of many other issues: it seems that culture has the last word.
But I have a huge problem with what the article takes for granted. “The only way to have some influence over the future . . . is to have some influence over those wants.” In other words, this is about control. The problem with the using the force of the law is not that it is wrong, but that it is ultimately ineffective. The “we” of author and audience know what needs to be done. The only question is how to do it. In its crude form this is porcine maquillage, as NC often says. In its more thoroughgoing form it is a belief that “we” should remake people into who we wish them to be.
This is also ineffective. People can tell when your sweet words are in reality efforts at control. And they are not ultimately persuadable because they are genuinely irreducibly different. Diversity is the human condition: we are born fundamentally different, right down to significant genetic influences on political convictions. We are not blank slates to be written upon. I am with Arendt and her belief that natality – that each of us brings something new into the world – is of great worth; in its suppression the root of great inhumanity.
So my real problem is that I believe that this kind of propaganda is wrong. It treats human beings as means to achieve your ideal, not as ends in themselves with their own diverse natures. Whose truth? What kind of love? Peace at what cost?
What is missing is simple but essential. Listen – with sincerity, with an openness to changing your mind, with respect that can tolerate difference and and expectation for negotiation and compromise. Not only does listening make for more effective persuasion and better, more stable outcomes, but the meeting of human beings equal in dignity – in harmony and in difference – is an end in itself.
Few listen. They act as gods. We fall apart. I believe that this, not any particular political programme (perhaps not even a lack of universal material benefits) is the source of polarization today.
this:”What is missing is simple but essential. Listen – with sincerity, with an openness to changing your mind, with respect that can tolerate difference and and expectation for negotiation and compromise. Not only does listening make for more effective persuasion and better, more stable outcomes, but the meeting of human beings equal in dignity – in harmony and in difference – is an end in itself.”
accept the other as they are, and it goes a long way to establishing a connection, and then they’re less likely to kill you because you are different than them.
ive lived most of my life in rural texas.
as an anarcho-socialist,lol…with libertine features, and a mind that puts them all to shame…but i keep the latter under a bushel basket, lest i alienate my neighbors.
because they are my neighbors, and i not only have to exist alongside them, they have their own inherent worth.
two housholds close to me are religious nutjobs.
i share a fence with one of them…help another, and get manure from him.
we just dont discuss religion or politics, and everythings cool.
i bring veggies and fruit…hang em on a doorknob when nobody’s home, preferably.
and am there if they need me.
another excellent post, Alphonse(great uncle of that name got the purple heart and some other high honor,posthumously, for singlehandedly providing cover fire on Guam so that his team could escape…street named Pinter in honolulu, after him.”
“The only way to have some influence over the future…is to have some influence over those wants.…you won’t get anything you want unless you can convince other people to want it, too.”
I don’t even agree with the premise. The examples I am thinking of come from Japan: (1) You lose your wallet in Japan—there’s something like an 80% chance that it will be returned to you, with everything intact. (2) Japanese fans famously tidied up at the 2022 World Cup opener at Khalifa International Stadium in Qatar as they had at the 2022 tournament opener between hosts Qatar and Ecuador (where their own team hadn’t even been involved) and at the World Cup in Russia four years before that.
Do Japanese people “want” to do those things? Are they “convinced” to “want” to do them? That’s the wrong frame—I wouldn’t say yes to either of those. Those behaviors are simply what is done in those circumstances. Well, how does that behavior come about? Well, the broadest explanation is that just about everything in the environment in Japan supports those behaviors and very little discourages them, e.g., a string of small neighborhood police stations, kōban, makes it easy to turn in items that have been lost; kids in Japan routinely clean their classrooms and hallways in their school, as just two points of environmental support.
That’s the “crock pot” theory enunciated in the post but, instead of a pretty opaque metaphor, pointing to the environment at least gives a clue as to where we might find the controlling factors. Can we “design” environments in which what people do is whatever it is “we” (whoever that is) want them to do? Well, we try to, almost always. (That’s what that Substack post is about.) We’re just not all that great at analyzing what might make such environments more effective (e.g., ascribing behavior to people’s “wants.”)
Trump not greeted by Xi at the tarmac:
https://x.com/CalltoActivism/status/2054560595169489183
Instead, US ambassador to China David Purdue and some Chinese official of lesser status greeted him.
Note that I am not certain that this is a breach of protocol, or that past Presidential visits received an in-person greeting from Xi at the airport. But I want to say the summit is off to an inauspicious start.
A U.S. Senate Candidate Says Foreign Truckers Are Making America’s Roads Unsafe. His Own Truckers Have Caused Harm. (Pro Publica)
Is there a place where speed limits are even enforced anymore?
Adding a bit of slop to everyone’s life: OpenAI Codex now connects to your productivity apps, and it suggests that it can draft emails for all the email you’re behind on.
So we can have slop replied to with slop generated with slop.
Maybe the problem is too many useless emails in the first place?
Who’s going to pay for all this? The compute cost is enormous. It’s hard to believe it is more profitable to have slop reply to slop than to simply send less email.
Just saw Xi greeting the US delegation. The scowl on Kegbreath’s face and the brief stab of a handshake with Xi was something to see.
“God I need a drink” He seems to be thinking.
It’s the apex of his career, meeting one of the world’s greats, and he’s pouting.
Hopeless.