Would You Press This Button?

Imagine Americans were offered this deal: Hit a big red button and China becomes the world’s first hyperpower. It rockets past the United States in technical sophistication, manufacturing capacity and wealth generation. China becomes so technologically advanced, and its human and robotic work force so huge, that Americans are left with only the dimmest comprehension of what is playing out on the economic, scientific and perhaps even geopolitical frontier.

But the rewards for disempowering ourselves are magnificent. The global economy booms, and Americans grow richer than ever before. We are given new cures and cheap energy and wondrous entertainments. Machines perform our labor and mood-enhancing drugs protect our psyches. We need not struggle — perhaps we need not even work — to live lives, long lives, of luxury and ease.

There, then, is the trade: Cede control and much that we have struggled for can be ours. But control, once gone, is gone.

Would you press the button?

The A.I. conversation centers questions of catastrophe. I want to center the question of success: What if A.I. works not as its architects fear, but as its inventors and investors hope? Wander outside of Silicon Valley’s p(doom) — their shorthand for the probability that A.I. extinguishes the human race — and you might notice that their p(utopia) has problems, too. They imagine something like the world I sketched above, but more extreme, with A.I. playing the role assigned to China.

An amusing collision of these visions came when Jacob Coxon, the 27-year-old OpenAI and Anthropic whistle-blower, sat down with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.” Coxon was there to warn that A.I. might kill us all, but when Stewart offhandedly mocked the “future utopia” of the A.I. architects, Coxon stopped him. “Well, I am a believer in the future utopia,” Coxon said. But what he said next sounded grimmer: “So I heard you talking about jobs. I think there will be no jobs.”

Coxon went on to describe “the world that is being envisioned by the people building this technology” as “no jobs. Universal high income. The dividends from entirely automated economic production can be distributed among real humans.”

This vision, or some variant of it, is common enough at A.I. companies. I have heard it often. But most people, face to face with this idea, are incredulous at hearing this world — in which virtually all advanced cognitive work is done by A.I. — described as utopian. Stewart certainly was. “So we’ll all just be performing in a play?” he asked.

I tend toward skepticism of the jobless future. Human beings are good at nothing if not finding something to do. (Who would have imagined, in our grueling agrarian past, that podcasting could be a full-time job?) But I find it easy to imagine how human control and comprehension of much of society could be handed over to machines. A few recent developments — some reflecting the outer boundary of what advanced A.I. can do and the other reflecting its advancing utility in daily life — reveal the ways it is already happening.

A few weeks ago, OpenAI dumped more than 700 manuscripts proposing solutions to nearly 400 advanced mathematical problems all at once. If you’re not a mathematician, and you are not close to any mathematicians, this may have passed by unnoticed. Within mathematics, it was an earthquake.

I am not a mathematician, but my father is. The area of math he worked in had to do with the way electrons move through disordered crystals. Sitting at the center of his field were two problems that were more than just unsolved; they were, my father says, “totally out of reach — nobody had any idea how to solve them.” OpenAI’s systems solved them in an afternoon. “It is the end of mathematics as we know it,” he texted me. “It is the first time I am glad I have retired.”

The newly formed Association for Human Mathematics, which has about 1,000 members, quickly released a statement: “Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done.” It’s an interesting sentence. Should mathematicians be able to decide which math problems do and do not get solved? How do we weigh the benefits and costs of a world where the frontier of mathematics is advancing rapidly, but human beings no longer understand it?

Imagine the OpenAI process running repeatedly, over a period of years: A.I. swarms solving problems no human being has solved, then using those solutions to pose new problems, which are solved by other A.I. swarms that have absorbed the work done by their predecessors, which allows for the formulation of yet more problems, and on and on. It is too much new math for humans to comprehend, but A.I.s can absorb it easily, and they do, driving forward advances in material sciences and energy production. Human beings do not understand all this new science, but they do benefit from it.

Is that world so different from the one we now inhabit? Few of us understand much about the borderlands of human knowledge. I cannot remotely comprehend the math my father did. How different is it if none of us can understand the math the A.I. does? And yet, a world where the farthest edge of knowledge and progress rests in algorithmic systems, rather than human minds, does seem different to me. Human control — which is, in my view, inseparable from human comprehension — is worth something, is it not?

As I was writing this, I read about a study in which theoretical physicists posed 50 complex, unpublished problems to advanced A.I. systems. These problems were difficult but solvable, taking a physicist who was expert in the particular area of the problem about a day to solve. The best A.I. solved 98 percent of them, at a cost of less than $3 per problem.

The physicists initially thought the A.I. had performed worse than it had, but the model insisted that it was the humans, not the A.I., that had erred, and it was right. “Frankly, I wasn’t expecting this day to come as soon as it has,” Suvrat Raju, one of the physicists behind the study, wrote. “After we found these results, I couldn’t sleep properly for a couple of nights.”

The grimmest A.I. stories often center on a single moment when superintelligence slips out of our control and begins plotting our demise. But the scenario I find more likely and more irresistible is called “gradual disempowerment.”

In this telling, there is no one moment when humanity loses control; there is instead a progression of small moments when we willingly give control away because it is the rational thing to do. Firms turn first more of their work and then more of their decision making over to advanced A.I.s because it gives them a competitive edge. Governments turn more battlefield decisions over to A.I. because it makes their forces swifter and more lethal. A.I. companies turn to recursive self-improvement — where the A.I. autonomously creates the next A.I. model — because it vaults them ahead of their competitors.

The key to this process is competitive pressure. Companies and governments and A.I. labs that resist are outcompeted by peers that give A.I.s more control and autonomy. Advances in A.I. systems — and, eventually, in A.I.-controlled drones and robotics — keep expanding the amount of work A.I.s can do better than human beings. Even assuming the A.I.s remain helpful and pliant, more and more of society’s basic functioning slips beyond the grasp of human beings.

by Ezra Klein, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Tamara Porras for The New York Times

[ed. We're screwed. Not because there aren't well-intentioned and very capable people working on AI safety and future planning but because the incentives to keep going as fast and far as we can are too great. The next 2-3 years will likely be historic, as various crises converge (AI, politics, finance, climate). See also: The AI Doc: (Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist) on Netflix. Highly recommended.]

Things look not good. Not good at all.

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Swallow tailed cardinalfish (Verulux cypselurus)

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Up a Creek

Nature writing after everyone stopped paying attention

Three men are out rafting on the Colorado River together: an activist, a government servant, and a journalist. This is not a setup for a joke. The year is 1969, and they have been brought together for the purposes of an article to be published in The New Yorker. Two are foes: David Brower, the longtime former executive director of the Sierra Club, and Floyd Dominy, the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, in charge of building the nation’s dams, against which Brower has waged a bitter war for years. The writer is John McPhee, who has put together this piece of stunt journalism; he is there to observe and record. Sitting in an inflatable boat in Arizona, south of the massive Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, the jewel in Dominy’s crown and the defeat of Brower’s life, the discussion turns into one of scale, time, and an existential threat:

The Colorado, Brower reminded us, used to be known as Old Red. This was because the river was full of red mud. It would never have been possible for Dominy to dip his cup in it in order to get water to go with his bourbon unless he wished to drink mud as well. On arriving at a campsite, rivermen used to fill their boats with water, so that the mud would settle to the bottom of the boats and they would have water for drinking and cooking. . . . “Emotionally, people are able to look only two generations back and two generations forward,” Brower said. “We need to see farther than that. It is absolutely inevitable, for example, that Lake Powell and Lake Mead will someday be completely filled with silt.”

“Nonsense, nonsense, complete nonsense. First of all, we will build silt-detention dams in the tributaries—in the Paria, in the Little Colorado. And, if necessary, we will build more.”

“Someday the reservoirs have to fill up, Floyd.”

“I wouldn’t admit that. I wouldn’t admit one inch!”

“Someday.”

“Someday! Yes, in geologic time, maybe . . .”

Nature writing, in the hands of McPhee, is like the interaction of river and silt. In calm, patient prose, McPhee observes, and facts accrue and settle until there is a formation that had not existed before. He is patient. He is slow, though not without a wry sense of humor (“They catch the beer and drink it, and they put the aluminum tongues inside the cans. I threw a tongue in the river and was booed by everyone.”). He is the chronicler of things that happen so gradually that we cannot see them unless someone takes the time to document them in their entirety. Brower and Dominy’s verbal duel would become the third and final part of Encounters with the Archdruid, one of McPhee’s best-known books and a landmark in environmental writing. In a new Library of America collection titled Encounters in Wild America, four of McPhee’s books, including Encounters, are canonized.

The questions Dominy and Brower raise about what will persist apply to the practice of writing nonfiction today. To Brower’s point, the long view, either backwards or forwards, is hard to make out. Little lasts long in our conditions of tweet and retweet. Nature writing requires slowness, because the value of nature itself is not inherently obvious. Rushing through our lives in a screen-mediated frenzy, we are farther than ever from what it takes to know it. In his interview, many years later, with The Paris Review, McPhee describes his own process in terms that are strikingly similar to the debate on the river:

It’s like the difference between geological time and human time. On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.

Today, writing in the spirit of geological time—to observe nature, but also for any kind of long-form journalism, really—is a vanished privilege. Meanwhile, Lake Powell really is filling up with silt—over “thirty thousand dump truck loads” per day—causing a long-term existential crisis, not to mention the man-made reservoirs of the Colorado River emptying out after years of sustained drought. With a good chance of outlasting the lake, McPhee is the modern archetype of the writer as practitioner of a gradual craft, working away at exquisitely detailed depictions of people and places. This work of dedicated attention, so essential to thinking about, say, the environment, is at risk of becoming a relic.

The span of McPhee’s writing in the Library of America collection covers work published in The New Yorker from 1967 to 1977—the critical years in the development of the environmental movement. The phrase “global warming” had only recently emerged, and there was still disagreement about humanity’s ability to create long-term change in the climate. The New Yorker was no stranger to the subject, publishing in 1962 a version of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which was still seeping its way through American consciousness. Between the bookends of Carson and Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature in 1989, McPhee was the presiding figure of The New Yorker in a time when it could lead the public conversation about environmentalism—long form could persuade through deft storytelling that integrated and presented the factual evidence.

In today’s swirl of information noise, it’s hard to imagine a similar piece ever breaking into public consciousness again. If Carson made an impassioned, if highly literary, plea (somewhat against the grain of the average New Yorker article) in a time when environmental issues were less politicized, McPhee’s work was more classically detached on a subject that was becoming a fierce battleground. Eschewing advocacy, McPhee is a patient aggregator in a sense foreign to today’s meaning of the term. Weaving between journalism and a more descriptive kind of nature writing, McPhee was given room to sprawl in a piece that was not only a portrait of Brower but also a work of landscape, broadening out from his human subject to display the ecosystem his subject sought to protect. A work like Encounters with the Archdruid would appear in three parts in the magazine over the course of a month in 1971, stretching to a total of over sixty thousand words.

I’m not aware of anyone who gets to write a sixty-thousand-word magazine piece these days. Size isn’t everything, but this is an obvious reflection of the current economics of journalism, as well as everyone’s perception of time. The print ad revenue that for decades sustained magazines like The New Yorker dried up, sucked into Meta and Google’s ad labyrinths. The reader’s patience, willingness, or capacity to read at all has been drained too, as writing in general competes with video algorithms. Everyone knows this. Good, long, serious articles still get written. But to observe the current against them is not simply nostalgia or sour grapes. The way we access information, the way we think, is still changing.

The purpose of reading a long article is no longer the acquisition of information, if it ever was primarily that. If there is new information, it will quickly be screenshotted and uploaded to social media platforms to be digested in bite-size pieces, or even rewritten by AI for efficiency fetishists. Or maybe readers would like an experience—what we used to call a story, perhaps—and there is no shortage of quicker, stickier content to flood the zone of the synapses. Information is oversaturated and undervalued, and journalistic narrative, at least for now, has been defeated. Say a decade ago, the idea of long-form journalism—the kind of in-depth article you might send to a friend to read on a lunch break (even if you hadn’t read it yourself)—still held prestige. Today, I’m not so sure. Is this writing still enjoyable? Is it necessary? Do you think you will make it to the end of this book review?

McPhee is one of The New Yorker’s signature staff writers—he has been a contributor since 1963, and remains a staff writer today. Across this seven-decade and thirty-plus-book career, he has long been considered one of the founders of both “creative nonfiction” and long-form journalism as we know it today. The course he taught for years on nonfiction writing at Princeton, where he came from and has lived almost his whole life, has been highly influential, with many of its students going on to publish their own books. (Including, notably, David Remnick, who edited this edition and edits The New Yorker.) He is known for the eclecticism of his subjects: truckers, roadkill, oranges, rocks. I can’t say if he invented this archaeology of the little thing you’ve never thought about before, but because of him it is now a whole subgenre of literary journalism, spawning pieces about hand sanitizer or paper jams. There is often no pressing reason for McPhee’s work (no news “peg,” as journalists like to call it)—his curiosity is considered reason enough, a permission that is a luxury for writers today. McPhee was a unique artist that slipped seamlessly into a commercial publishing world that today is well on its way out. Long form has died, long live short form.

His work is an artifact, one that aids reflection, but demands you stop first and take things slowly. It’s no accident that the books that Library of America have chosen to canonize first are about nature and the people who inhabit it. To appreciate, or even just think about an expanse—a nearly deserted forest, a glacier, a stretch of tundra—is difficult. You can look at an image, but you can just as quickly turn away or scroll past. His writing is a tool that helps us feel distance. You have to spend time on the page getting to know it, trying to imagine things you will most likely never experience yourself.

McPhee’s project is born from a tension that is common but often taken for granted. He is a classical journalist, a supposedly neutral, mostly invisible eye working to uncover and represent the facts. But he’s a storyteller first—rarely will you see the “inverted pyramid,” the paradigm of placing the most relevant information at the beginning of a (usually newspaper) story. When McPhee began his career in journalism, emerging from Princeton into the unsigned back pages of Time magazine, the stock-in-trade was profiles, and the profile is usually the vehicle for McPhee’s artistry, spread out and absorbed slowly. He meticulously plans the shape of his pieces, complete with outlines and diagrams, into extended book-length works, in which myriad details and digressions are as important as the core idea of the story (“A thousand details add up to one impression” is one of his mantras). There is something fundamentally painterly here: the portrait artist moving out to the edges, the frame widening, until the painting is not a portrait at all but instead a landscape.

by David Schurman Wallace, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I've read half a dozen John McPhee books (at least), none more impactful than Coming Into the Country. Made me buy a shotgun and start looking for bears around every corner when I first moved to Alaska.]

Why Do Architects Keep Building Things Nobody Likes?

Why Do Architects Keep Building Things Nobody Likes? (A&T)

Image: uncredited

[ed. Different incentives. See also: Modern Architects Declared War on Beauty (A&T)

On Audiophilia: Heaven’s Melodic Strains

I am a sick man. I have skipped Friday night plans to spend hours repositioning the speakers in my living room, by inches and degrees. I have squandered small fortunes on silver and black boxes that most people couldn’t identify, whose purpose they wouldn’t understand. I have disfigured my apartment with hulking foam panels to improve the room acoustics. I have shelled out for a high-resolution music streaming service with an unpronounceable name. I have frittered days and nights trawling the back pages of online forums to find the optimal tonearm mass for a certain phono cartridge, or the suitable crossover frequency for a particular model of subwoofer.

More than anything, I have spent long passages of this earthly life sitting on my ass, listening. I listen to music, but what I hear is sound. Texture, timbre, and tone; clarity and detail; space and depth. And I hear, even more acutely, what thwarts sound. Shrill treble, muddled bass — for me these are worse than peeves. They offend hearing. They diminish the human sensorium. Earbuds repulse me; laptop speakers grate; a tabletop Bluetooth unit is a kind of vandalism.

The word audiophile — etymologically, one who “loves to hear” — has a wine-sipping pretension that I hate, but sometimes an ugly shoe fits. Like similarly suffixed psychopathologies, the term suggests a state of warped dependence, of inbent sublimation. I didn’t set out to be this way, but neither have I ever sought help. My symptoms are apparent, their causes obscure. What, after all, do we love when we love sound?

Audiophilia was born in gimmickry, and has never fully risen above it. Starting in the 1940s, a sudden onrush of consumer audio innovations — wide-range speakers, FM radio, long-playing vinyl records — created an equally sudden demand for whiz-bang demonstrations of “lifelike” sound. [...]

Audiophiles obsess, tinker, tweak, and upgrade, their gear addiction now served by a global subindustry of specialty brands, most of them unknown to the broader public; there are still record labels whose main marketing draw is their audio quality. And more than a little of that midcentury zealotry survives in subsequent sonic novelties that tease and amaze the ears with their “realism”: spatial audio, high-res audio, surround sound. Sound snobs would plotz at the comparison, but when an audiophile tests their stereo with the sawtooth jag of a guitar or the spelunk of a low bass note, what — besides thousands of dollars’ worth of gear — makes them any different from a teenager mainlining the rustles and gurgles of ASMR videos on YouTube? When we submit ourselves to sound for its own sake, something elemental, infantile, awakens.

Yet unlike most cultic formations, audiophiles know, deep down, that their god is a false one. Recorded songs are finite temporal events, but in the audiophile dream, or delusion, the record holds an infinity of retrievable detail, a renewing depth that can always be heard better, truer — if only we have the right tools. Audiophiles, the High Fidelity magazine cofounder C. G. Burke once wrote, are simply “people [who] wish an oboe to sound unmistakably and completely like an oboe.” That word like is key. All audio playback — mono or stereo, analog or digital — is at base an imitation, a simulacrum. Choose your sound and you choose your illusion. And almost as soon as naturalistic audio entered the American home, the wars of illusion began. Do you want to feel like the band or orchestra or DJ is here in your room, or like you’re there, in the studio or concert hall? Do you judge a system’s sound by its nearness to live performance, or to the recording? And how would you tell?

All subcultures suffer their schisms, and for audiophiles, a defining split is between subjectivism and objectivism in listening — between those who trust their ears and those who trust their measurements. In a 2004 academic article, the ethnomusicologist Marc Perlman framed it as a conflict between “golden ears” and “meter readers.” The golden ear, in Perlman’s lavishly adjectived definition, claims an “intimate, embodied, personal, inalienable, charismatic superiority of aural discrimination,” a master listener’s ability to distinguish and rank audio equipment by the subtlest gradations of sonic quality. His rival, the meter reader, prizes “rationalized,” “impersonal,” “scientific” authority, by way of spiritless, lab-testable criteria that don’t depend on the vagaries of human hearing: signal-to-noise ratio, crossover distortion, dynamic power output.

No love is lost between these camps. To Robert Harley, editor of the flagship golden-ears monthly The Absolute Sound, meter readers are philistines “who reject the listening experience,” for whom “nothing more can be known about an audio component beyond its technical performance.” Upmarket mystics like Harley are in turn a favorite punch line among the echt meter readers of Audio Science Review, an online database whose contributors meticulously test and rank components — 1,986 and counting — based on measurements, no ears required. In their respective languages, both extremes circle an epistemic cul-de-sac. A meter reader’s greatest compliment for a piece of gear is that it “measures well”; the golden ear’s highest praise, tautologically, is that it sounds “musical.” From a certain height, the problem becomes one of knowledge itself: Do you believe what you hear, or do you hear what you believe?

These warring phenomenologies also play out in silicon and copper. Perlman’s binary maps roughly onto the divide between — bear with me here — solid-state audio equipment, which uses semiconductors, like nearly all consumer electronics since the 1970s; and vacuum-tube gear, a throwback design where power is transmitted by electrodes in glass cylinders. Meter readers bade good riddance to tubes decades ago, but golden ears can’t quit them. Psychoacoustic lore holds that the kind of harmonic distortions associated with tubes — subtle overtones that smooth certain frequencies, as if steeping the music in a sepia mist — sound gentler, “warmer,” than the granular accuracy of solid-state equipment. Likewise, while digital media long ago conquered analog in the rest of the world, among audiophiles the contest has never been settled. Objectivists point to the quantifiably superior stability and fidelity of digital codecs, while subjectivists cherish the earthy sonic “presence” of records and reel-to-reel tapes. Today digital sources and solid-state parts almost always measure better; yet untold money and ingenuity go into the design of new turntables and tube amps, and demand is only growing. [...]

Who are these audiophiles? We are — overwhelmingly, smotheringly — men, skewing older but not geriatric, often but not always white, with at least a little disposable income, sometimes far too much. I haven’t discerned a socio-professional pattern; audiophiles are dentists and bartenders, lawyers and mail carriers. Curiously (or not), the proportion of musicians and audio engineers seems not much higher than in the general population.

Such, anyway, is our outward appearance. As for our inner life, no piece of writing depicts it with more tough love than the great — the only? — audiophile novel of our time, Ge Fei’s The Invisibility Cloak, published in 2012 and translated into English by Canaan Morse in 2016. “The name ‘audiophile’ has never sat well with me,” its protagonist, Cui, confides unconvincingly near the start of the book. “I’m just a craftsman.” A master maker of custom tube amplifiers in Beijing, Cui wearily plies his trade while sinking ever deeper into a middle-age, postdivorce funk. Building tube amps, he muses, is “probably the most insignificant industry in China today”; he guesses that in the whole city there are no “more than twenty of us.” Yet the boutique marginality of what he calls his “racket” puts him in close contact with China’s new class of yuppies and executives, eager to outfit their homes with artisanal sound. The novel follows Cui from one nouveau riche living room to another, where clients are reliably entranced by his setups, “as if listening to heaven’s melodic strains.” “Five or six of these ‘victims’ a year,” he tells us, “is enough to keep my pathetic business hobbling along.” Cui isn’t much for introspection, but in his gripes and regrets, in making a modest living from something he enjoys immodestly, he inhabits a melancholy that any sick man will recognize. As we hold life and sound apart, they only join closer.

Short and episodic, the novel’s narrative patterns match those of the audiophile mind. Liberally scattered amid childhood flashbacks, scenes from a failed marriage, money troubles, and family quarrels — in a word, life — are gearhead reveries on the glories of hi-fi, named by brand and model. Cui admires a set of Amati Anniversario speakers, their cabinets “lacquered and buffed to the tones of a violin and a mirror’s shine”; one type of RCA vacuum tube is nicknamed “The King,” another “The Pillar of Heaven.” A prized pair of vintage Tannoy Autograph speakers seduce him “like gorgeous twin sisters,” with an “intoxicating allure,” an “unbelievable fullness” and “flawless piano timbre.” When Cui’s wife asks for the divorce, his only request is “that she leave me all the audio equipment, including the Autograph speakers.” She agrees.

I linger on Ge’s novel in part because the field of recent hi-fi writing is otherwise so desolate. In this century the American audiophile press, like most print media, has withered to bare life. Long gone are the postwar années glorieuses of Audio and Stereo Review, High Fidelity and Audiocraft, with their ten-page features, critical essays, how-to guides, and no-fluff component tests, serving professionals and consumers, snobs and novices alike. (I mean, Ralph Ellison wrote for High Fidelity — as did Nat Hentoff, Aaron Copland, and Jacques Barzun.) Today readers have a choice of just two ad-heavy monthlies, each offering a thin digest of industry-friendly gear takes and skimpily reported columns. Stereophile maintains a pretense of objective rigor; product reviews include results of tests by the magazine’s “technical editor,” full of graphs and charts. In The Absolute Sound, meanwhile, quality is more or less measured by price. The most offensively expensive gear sends the magazine’s credulous shills into transports of Hildegardian ecstasy. For $89,000, you can make mystic communion with the “engrossing, enlightening . . . awe-inspiring” 300-watt Goldmund Telos 800 power amplifier, with its “dynamic envelope that seems to have no bounds,” and “transient attacks . . . more powerful than you had imagined possible” — fittingly, the magazine calls its annual product awards the Golden Ears.

However editorially atrophied, these magazines continue to carry authority, at least for the moneyed boomers who dominate the high-end market. For everyone else, there’s the internet. A sun-starved terrarium of forums, blogs, vlogs, and podcasts serves every niche and extremity of the audiophile audience. As repositories of technical nous and venues for arcane bickering — are idler-wheel turntable motors really superior to belt-drive designs? — the forums fill some of the void left by the decline of hi-fi journalism, but it takes a hardy scroller to sift the useful from the inane. And most audiophile vlogs are little more than meandering infomercials for products that brands have sent hosts to “review.” I should know, because I’ve watched so many of them.

Perlman’s dyad needs updating for an American economy more slanted than ever toward Sardanapalian excess. Among audiophiles, the bitterest battles now rage over the unconscionable cost of high-end hi-fi, and the outlandish claims made for the priciest gear. An unusually reflective recent Stereophile editorial lamented audio’s unchecked “premiumization.” How, not just as a matter of value but a question of science, can any consumer amplifier cost $150,000, like the 225-watt, 400-pound Statement 450i iQ? (The Absolute Sound: “resplendent,” “superb,” “extraordinary.”) Speakers readily reach the half-million mark; you can spend a year’s salary on audiophile power conditioners, audiophile equipment racks, audiophile Ethernet cables. At the scammiest fringe, things enter RFK Jr. brainworm territory: crystals, orbs, and amulets alleged to improve acoustics, reduce static buildup, and perhaps open a channel to the divine. [...]

Since long before the advent of high fidelity, the historian of recording Greg Milner notes, audio adepts have “believed that the key to perfect sound was to simplify the process.” One fewer link in the chain means “one less chance for the original sound to be corrupted.” (The legendary speaker designer Stewart Hegeman reportedly defined a perfect amplifier as “a straight wire with gain.”) Audiophiles thus devise their most elaborate contraptions in pursuit of simplicity. A fully loaded high-end home system might include a turntable with a freestanding tonearm, a step-up transformer, a phono preamplifier, a stereo preamplifier, two power amplifiers (one for each channel), a streamer, a music server, a digital-to-analog converter, a CD transport, two loudspeakers, two subwoofers, and assorted peripherals, not to mention many feet of RCA, XLR, HDMI, optical, coaxial, Ethernet, and speaker cables. Each of these devices does one thing at a time and no more, the better to pass on a pure, unblemished signal. Of course, such a setup also makes for a complex, multinodal signal path, with more junctures where things can go wrong. A sane person would call it overkill. For the audiophile, it’s another reason to spend even more money. [...]

Yet among leisure-class hobbies, something about hi-fi remains apart, unassimilated. Where it touches other domains of luxury consumption, the results can only be absurd. In a recent TV commercial for Lexus’s new electric SUV, a handsome white man in loafers lounges in a wide, high-windowed living room. The space is almost empty, save for the Lexus itself, somehow parked in the corner, and, alone in the middle of the floor, a gleaming black and silver VPI Titan Direct turntable ($64,000), equipped with a VPI Shyla dual moving coil cartridge ($2,200). The stylus lowers, and the gossamer muted trumpet of Miles Davis’s “Blue in Green” begins playing. In a close-up, twilight kisses the vinyl grooves, which fade into a view of the SUV doing slow, graceful donuts on the beach. In another close-up, the man turns his gaze downward, as if in contemplation. “The greatest measure of an automobile,” a bourbon-rich baritone voice rumbles, “is how it makes you feel.” The loafered man doesn’t seem to feel much. After twenty seconds of listening, he gets up and leaves. I would too if, like him, I had spent five figures on a turntable only to dump it on the floor, and placed my speakers against a wall of sound-reflecting windows, too far apart and approximately fifty feet away from my listening chair, which is also facing the wrong way.

by Colin Vanderburg, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Dark Pool. 1995

Leaked Anthropic Draft AI Regulatory Bill Is Unacceptable and Troubling

There is a newly leaked bill that Anthropic is purportedly shopping around is (if you assume its bugs get fixed).

It is similar to the FRONTIER Act, with stronger preemption of state laws, stronger transparency provisions and weaker enforcement provisions.

Having slept on this, I find it unacceptable that Anthropic is actively shopping exactly the type of bill I have warned we will need to fight against during the lame duck session. They are trying to use this last time with a Republican Congress to pass preemption of exactly the important state laws, and get some transparency but not much enforcement in exchange.

This reads as intentional, that Anthropic is more afraid that the government might enforce rules against Anthropic, than they are worried about the ability of the government to enforce rules against everyone. Anthropic’s policy team seems to have, chosen protecting their business interests and guarding against their political risk, at the expense of safety considerations.

There was no need for the company purportedly existing to promote safety to propose a bill that is not even actively stronger than the FRONTIER Act, when the FRONTIER Act was a compromise bill proposed back in June.

Even if you were fine with what is being given up, what you get in return very obviously does not meet the moment. Nor is there any need for such compromises. It seems rather insane for Anthropic to be proposing it now. This seems like the bill that someone on the anti-regulatory side should be pushing. It is not obvious this makes us safer than doing nothing, even if the alternative is fully nothing at all levels.

Say it isn't so, Anthropic, or at least that it was a mistake and is no longer so, or I am going to be rather cross.

If you want the full text, here is a copy.

Others RTFB (Read the Bill)

I have not had the time to do so, but the other usual suspects quickly sprinted to RTFB (read the bill) and they did not like what they saw. You can try to call this a ‘pretty reasonable AI safety bill’ as Charlie Bullock does, but that is by the standards of people trying to protect the industry from more impactful regulation. [...]

Charlie Bullock: Big news. My take: Anthropic deserves some credit for actually proposing a pretty reasonable AI safety bill; that’s more than other frontier labs have done.

But they don’t deserve *too* much credit, IMO; this bill is weaker than the Trahan-Obernolte FRONTIER Act in some key ways, and since the political momentum has shifted significantly in the direction of safety since FRONTIER was introduced back in July, I think new bills introduced today should ideally go further than FRONTIER was able to go rather than regressing.

To be fair to Anthropic, the main places where this bill is significantly weaker than FRONTIER are (a) rulemaking (very strong in FRONTIER, almost nonexistent in Anthropic’s bill) and (b) the emergency shutdown authority. Even if you take safety seriously, it might make some sense to dial those authorities back if you didn’t trust the executive branch to wield them responsibly, because those are the easiest provisions for a hypothetical President who hypothetically might not like a certain frontier AI company to abuse.

There are some improvements over FRONTIER as well; for instance, this bill does specify that auditors are employed on a continuing basis and has better provisions regarding auditor access to information. Happy to see that from Anthropic (although I think their access provision is still a little undercooked and has Fourth Amendment problems).

Overall, I think the embedded auditor bills that get introduced in the coming months are going to be significantly better and more ambitious than this, and I hope Anthropic supports those bills instead of opposing anything that treats catastrophic risks like the serious national security issue they are. Still, it’s encouraging to see a frontier lab come this far. [...]

Nathan Calvin: Charlie’s analysis is right but he is nicer than I am - I found myself viscerally angry at multiple points reading this bill. There are some good and sensible parts, but overall this legislation is not remotely close to meeting the moment and I overall think passing it would make us less protected against catastrophic risks than we are under existing law.

Two parts that stand out as particularly infuriating when taken together:

1. Some of the preemption provisions are remarkably far reaching and consequential, and in addition to preempting legislation like SB 53 would also remove general powers that state courts have to enjoin defendants and protect the public. Most outrageously, it has a provision that looks like its intended to stops states from enforcing laws or judicial decrees that “suspend the development, deployment, or internal use of an AI model” to protect their citizens from imminent catastrophic harms. Such powers to block and suspend model deployments would then only reside with the federal government.

2. The federal governments powers to restrict the development, deployment, or internal use of a frontier model has to meet an absurdly high bar.

First, there needs to be an imminent risk of a catastrophic harm (meaning killing more than 50 people or causing more than a billion dollars in damage). But thats not enough! The agency head needs to make a detailed determination with no deference given to show why no alternative would prevent the imminent catastrophe. Next the court is also explicitly told to consider the harms to the developer and other harms from restricting the model, but no considerations in the other direction.

This is absurd! For all of its warning about the potential for AI to cause a catastrophe that kills literally everyone on the planet, Anthropic’s proposed federal law likely makes it harder than under existing law for a court to get an order blocking or restricting the development of frontier models? WTF??

There are also a bunch of others things that I would like to see improved - the substantive details of the auditing section and the potential for rule-making on substantive safety standards both come to mind - but I think these stand out as particularly indefensible.

Charlie Bullock: Nathan’s righteous anger has inspired me to make one more mildly disapproving observation: it’s kind of wild that the Anthropic bill has no government licensing for the independent auditors.

Licensing is, IMO, the bare minimum thing that you need to even be able to pretend that your auditing regime isn’t just going to devolve into a race to the bottom. Without it, auditors will inevitably compete with each other to offer their customers, the labs, the least bothersome audits available at the lowest possible price point. Obviously Anthropic trusts itself to do a great job of picking great auditors, but do they trust OpenAI to do the same? What about SpaceXSI?

Why Would Anthropic Do This?

The new Anthropic bill is weaker than their June framework, and offers both forward-looking and backward-looking preemption in exchange, despite months of movement to enable us to do more. What are we even doing? [...]

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV |  Read more:

Image: Draft bill

[ed. Best I can tell (haven't RTFB) the draft seeks to: 1) preempt state's rights to write and enforce stronger safety provisions - so, in effect, we get a single point of federal decision-making/enforcement vs. 50 votes; 2) install "independent auditors" to evaluate model safety who's credentials and funding sources are undefined; and 3) set an arbitrary trigger for a single federal judge to intervene/block a model’s release or use only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages, or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people - all to be decided using a set of process provisions that are ambiguous at best - see the REQUIRED FINDINGS above - and over some unspecified period of time. So, all in all, not good. And, even more not good - other frontier labs don't seem to be on board with even these few minimal restrictions. As one commenter notes: there aren't really any Good Guys in this race anymore (if there ever really were), just Bad, Badder, and Baddest. Good Intentions Paving Company secures lucrative "Hell" contract, news at 11.]

[ed. Addendum: The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is now streaming on Netflix. Highly recommended.]

Let’s Kill the Four-Chord Song

Let’s Kill the Four-Chord Song

Nothing contributes more to the stagnation of current hit radio than the abandonment of song form, and its replacement with repeating four-chord vamps. This approach to composition imposes deadening constraints—making it almost impossible for songwriters to develop material, and provide the surprises and contrasts essential to their craft.

If you look at this trendline (provided by culture analytics guru Chris Dalla Riva) you see that the audience’s turn to old music coincides with the rise of the four-chord song. [...]

 

If you’re clever, you can do a lot with just four chords—via dynamics, beats, texture, or (as a last resort) shifting to a different four-chord pattern. Taylor Swift’s work offers many examples of how to achieve this variety in the midst of sameness. She represents today’s four-chord aesthetic at its peak.

But, in the final analysis, there are limits to what producers can do with such a narrow formula. After so many years, it’s only natural that it should reach a point of exhaustion—much like other styles have in earlier days. There’s a reason why audiences abandoned the madrigal, the Viennese waltz, and other once dominant styles. After too much of the same thing, they decide to move on.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

Anthony Scaramucci Says the Universe Did Katie Zacharia a Favor

The former White House communications director reflects on his record for occupational brevity being broken.

No job is forever. Some barely exceed the lifespan of a mayfly. In the late nineteen-seventies, Madonna moved to New York to try to make it as a dancer and lasted about a week working at Dunkin’ Donuts. As she once explained breezily to Howard Stern, “I was playing with the jelly-squirter machine.”

Katie Zacharia, late of the Zhong Lun law firm, in Beijing (though not, strictly speaking, an attorney, as it turns out), has just set a new American record for shortest tenure as White House press secretary. She lasted about as long as Madonna did at Dunkin’ Donuts.

Zacharia brought to her work a gossamer résumé in the field of communications: a brief stint as a commentator at Newsmax and less than two months as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. The cynical might glance at Zacharia and remark upon her outward similarity to others in the Trump circle, including Natalie Harp, the aide known in the White House as “the human printer,” and two previous press secretaries, Kayleigh McEnany and Karoline Leavitt. But that would be wrong. She did bring to the job a certain conspiratorial frame of mind. Several years ago, seemingly under the influence of the now largely forgotten Pizzagate scandal, she called John Podesta, the former Clinton and Obama Administration adviser, a pedophile. (This was both false and unkind.) Working the same set of obsessions, she has written that “the radical left Hollywood elitists are sick pedo cannibals.” (Ditto.) Zacharia has also shared phony medical information, including this: “8 in 10 women had a miscarriage after getting the COVID vaccine.”

Zacharia’s one and only appearance in the White House press room took place on October 13th. It lasted fourteen minutes. She wore a pained smile and stumbled nervously through a written script. She took questions from Breitbart, Fox News, and the Daily Mail and delivered a terse announcement that the ineffable Kimberly Guilfoyle, the U.S. Ambassador to Greece and former paramour of the President’s son Donald, Jr., would now be pursuing other career opportunities. At one point, Zacharia referred to her husband as “my president.” Jen Psaki, who had done the same job for Joe Biden, remarked, perhaps uncharitably, that the briefing “was basically an SNL skit . . . except it wasn’t.” After it was revealed that Zacharia had overstated her status as an attorney (she is not an attorney), and after a peculiar and decidedly disastrous appearance with Sean Hannity on Fox News, she was out.

To get some perspective on this episode, I reached out to Anthony Scaramucci, who, in the early days of the first Trump Presidency, lasted ten days as White House communications director before being shown the door. “Records are made to be broken,” he told me cheerfully while on vacation in Hawaii. “I am trying to lay low on this. I don’t believe in grave stomping,” he went on. “That podium is a hard podium, as we all know. But the universe did her a favor. She shouldn’t be in that job.”

Scaramucci, known to all as the Mooch, took pains to be gracious to Zacharia. “I’m not a hater of hers,” he said. “I don’t know her.” Though he added, dryly, that his emotions now were what Joe DiMaggio’s might have been if the Yankee Clipper’s fifty-six-game hitting streak, set in 1941, had been eclipsed. (It still stands.) [...]

Scaramucci’s only appearance at the press-room podium went more smoothly than anything managed by Zacharia, but it was soon evident that he was not going to countenance leaking—which, even in the earliest days, was rife in the Trump White House. With the reporter’s tape rolling, Scaramucci charged into a long string of invective, threats, and fury. [...]

Scaramucci insinuated that disloyal aides around Trump would soon be on the receiving end of his ire and would be out of a job: “O.K., the Mooch showed up a week ago,” he said. “This is going to get cleaned up very shortly, O.K.? Because I nailed these guys. I’ve got digital fingerprints on everything they’ve done through the F.B.I. and the fucking Department of Justice.” By way of ending the call, Scaramucci said, “Yeah, let me go, though, because I’ve gotta start tweeting some shit to make this guy crazy.” [...]

Scaramucci, who grew up on Long Island, had a career in finance before his truncated White House career. His politics veered all over the road. He supported Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and, in 2016, Scott Walker and Jeb Bush. Before joining the Trump campaign that year, he had called Trump a “hack politician.” Scaramucci now regards the Trump Presidency, he told me, as a “disaster,” but quickly adds that, as a patriot, he wishes it were otherwise. These days, he writes books and hosts the podcast “The Rest Is Politics US,” with Katty Kay, a British journalist. He has called Trump “an orange wrecking ball” and a “sociopathic reality-TV star.” Recently, on the podcast “How to Fail,” he said the President grew “more malevolent” during the Biden years: “He’s, like, ‘Hey, man, I didn’t steal enough in the first term.’ He had four years to figure out how to steal more.”

By way of wishing his distant successor and record-breaker well, Scaramucci told me that after some initial struggles, he found his way. There was life after the White House press room. “I didn’t blame the firing on anyone but me,” he said. “If you play in the N.F.L. and get a concussion, you don’t blame the N.F.L.”

The truth was, he said, “I didn’t like the job. I can’t speak for [Zacharia], but for me the firing came with some level of relief. There is a feeling of humiliation, but also relief.”

Why was there relief? I asked.

“Have you ever worked for Donald Trump?” he said.

Not so far. Has he changed much?

“I think he is similar to the way he was, maybe more unhinged now, and people around him now—there are more lackeys. There are no John Kellys around.”

Does the President seem like a lesser person to you now?

“He could have age-related neurodegeneration, but he is the same person,” Scaramucci said. “Age is slowing him down, but he is an energetic eighty years old.”

by David Remnick, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Samuel Corum/Abaca/Reuters
[ed. Comedy gold. I miss the Mooch, especially given his successors. "Occupational brevity" (lol) that's a new one.]

Suzuki Kouichi,  鈴木孝一 葱, Spring Onion
via:

Sierra Hull

Monopoly Roundup: AI Cockroaches Scurry Out from Under Nvidia

Before we get to the Good and the Bad news, after the jump for paid subscribers only, I want to highlight an important but little-noticed story that has implications for the AI bubble, and particularly, for the most valuable company in the world, Nvidia. Nvidia is the center of the AI revolution, with its software layer CUDA and its AI chips dominating training and inference for models. It is worth $6 trillion, and its CEO, Jensen Huang, is now a global superstar who regularly sits down with national leaders and puts Donald Trump on speakerphone at major conferences.

Nvidia, despite its immense profits and prestige, is known for doing something a bit scuzzy, called “circular financing.” That is, it invests in its own customers so they can buy its chips. Sometimes it goes through multiple layers, like investing in OpenAI, which buys from Oracle, which buys from Nvidia. But there are a host of smaller AI companies in which Nvidia, as well as hedge funds and banks, have put a lot of money. And one of them, a little noticed AI data center company called Firmus, tried to sell shares to on the stock market this week. Yet investors revolted, and the company had to scrap its initial public offering.

Aside from Nvidia, Firmus was backed by blue chip financial firms Jane Street and Blackstone, and it was set to become Australia’s biggest IPO ever, at $30 billion in valuation. So this failure is a big deal, and it raised eyebrows all over Wall Street.

What happened? It turns out, Firmus executives got a little too greedy. In a normal initial public offering, companies restrict insiders from selling their shares for a time period. There are a few reasons to do so. First, restricting insiders sales is a vote of confidence in the new firm, a statement from executives and early investors that “hey yeah we want your money investors, but we have skin in the game in the form of owning our own stock.” Second, it’s a statement that the stock won’t be met with a lot of immediate selling pressure in the markets, since insiders can’t dump their shares.

This time, however, Firmus set up terms to let them sell immediately, meaning those who were most in-the-know wanted to cash out ASAP. That looks bad, a clear indication that insiders don’t think the company is a valuable going concern but see it as a temporary vehicle for self-enrichment. On a practical level, huge selling pressure would have flooded the market and crushed investors. So money managers, after being harmed with Paramount bonds, SpaceX, and a number of others, refused to bid, and the banks behind Firmus had to pull the offering. It’s one of the biggest flops in recent capital markets history.

What matters here are three things. First, the Firmus IPO was backed by the most prestigious companies in AI. Second, there are many companies like Firmus. And third, the company’s co-founder, Oliver Curtis, has a criminal background in stock manipulation, and yet the banks still went ahead with the offering. Yes, you read that right:

A decade ago, Oliver Curtis was at the lowest point in his life as he was sent to prison for pocketing $1.4 million in insider trading. Now, he is one of the richest people in Australia and preparing for a $6 billion move he sees as his redemption.

There’s another co-founder of Firmus, Tim Rosenfeld. He’s not a criminal, but he’s a cousin of Curtis, and his background was running a loss-making lingerie company called Steadmark.

What makes this situation more than a run of the mill scam is the involvement of Nvidia in Firmus and its criminal co-founder. Why would Nvidia get in bed with a crook? Well, Firmus is in an important industry segment that generates demand for Nvidia chips. Firmus is a “neocloud,” which are basically racks of servers funded by venture capitalists and Nvidia to buy chips and rent out computing power. Think of a neocloud as a way to keep debt off the books of the big AI firms. Neoclouds are a corporate shell containing real estate, chips, and financing. Often there are multiple layers of investors, phantom contracts or insider self-dealing, all wrapped in a narrative that they are engaged in “advanced AI” deployment.

This move has tended to work because of the involvement of the most prestigious players in AI. When Nvidia (or Google or Anthropic) backstops or does business with a neocloud, investors think there must be something there. So the neocloud’s valuation goes up a lot. Then that neocloud raises more money at a high valuation, announces more data centers, and orders more chips. That’s more profits for Nvidia, more investments, and so on and so forth.

These investments take place in the private market, with hedge funds and insiders thinking they are getting in at a low valuation. They often don’t even care if there’s a good business model here, since they think someone else will be left holding the bag. The business model never really made much sense, with Firmus starting as a bitcoin miner, before pivoting to AI. But it didn’t matter, because Firmus was about to sell shares to the last set of investors out there - you and me in the public markets. Fortunately, it looks like the public market participants have wisened up, at least in this case.

Firmus, however, is not the only scam in the AI space. Many such neoclouds started as bitcoin miners before jumping to the AI boom, often funded by a prestigious AI firm like Nvidia. And that suggests there’s something systemic going on.

Here are a few other neocloud or adjacent plays: There’s TeraWulf, which has big leasing deals with Anthropic and Google, and whose backers have been allegedly caught engaged in market manipulation. Google bankrolled the company’s shift from bitcoin mining to AI data center. Here’s Grizzly Research:

Our research uncovers that TeraWulf’s third-largest shareholder is an entity controlled by the wife of John O’Rourke, the disgraced CEO of Riot Blockchain, who was charged for his part of a $27 million “Lucrative Market Manipulation Schemes” by the SEC.

There’s Sharon AI, a competitor to Firmus, which also has deals with Nvidia and is backed by Oaktree Capital management. Here’s Sharon AI’s owner, who was involved in a mysterious fire [...]

There’s Applied Digital. According to the Bear Cave, this company started by providing staff to production companies, pivoted to plasma technology, then processing potatoes, then to blockchain, and finally to AI with financing from Nvidia in 2024. However, here it gets creepier, since Nvidia sold its stake in 2026, after Applied Digital had bought its chips with billions in borrowed money.

There are so many of these dodgy firms with no obvious business model and billions or tens of billions of valuation. Nscale. Celsius Mining. Coreweave. Nebius. Crusoe. SB Energy. Hut 8. Lancium. Iren. Bitdeer. And so on and so forth. With lots of stories like this.

How did I hear of this situation? Well there’s a document floating around Wall Street that describes this set of companies. Short-sellers, and there aren’t that many left, know the best way to understand where the scammers are isn’t to look at a particular industry sector, but to follow the scammers from industry to industry. As a contact put it, “This is like the SPAC craze of 2021. Whatever the hot thing of the day is, that is what the grifters will gravitate to. Shell companies did reverse takeovers with Chinese firms, the biotech bubble, shale, and others. Stock promoters will promote.” In other words, the same people just move from scam to scam, since unethical stock promotion itself is their business.

This whole scene is reminiscent of a specific part of the global financial crisis in 2008, which had a similar dynamic. Subprime lenders like Ameriquest were fly-by-night operations that somehow suddenly grew into multi-billion dollar lenders from 2003 onward. These guys weren’t particularly good at credit analysis, they were simply promoters willing to break the law. As Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean wrote in All the Devils Are Here, some salesmen were using meth or cocaine to lend more money to bad credit risks.

Now, at some level, this situation made no sense. Lending out money that was sure not to be paid back is a bad business. However, there is one way in which losing money deliberately can be quite profitable. If you are charging fees on your loans, and the money you are losing is not yours, then it works out great, at least for the scammer. But how did these operators get access to huge amounts of capital?

Here’s where the analogy to Nvidia comes in. The actual prestigious actors losing other people’s money were companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and so forth, who were backstopping these subprime lenders with warehouse lines of credit. This loan was a special kind of facility that let the subprime lenders keep lending, and then send the mortgages they were creating to Wall Street, where they would be processed into mortgage-backed securities.

These securities were then sold to pension funds, who bore losses. Sometimes, as Naked Capitalism noted, Goldman was even shorting these securities, so they wanted bad credit risks. At any rate, the prestige of Wall Street banks masked the obvious graft going on, and the credit tripwires that ordinarily would have slowed a credit cycle. Michael Lewis wrote up a fake version of this story in The Big Short, portraying Wall Street bankers as foolish instead of on the take.

Since we never fixed anything in our credit markets, we keep having such scams, whether the fracking guys, the China reverse mergers, WeWork, crypto and Sam Bankman-Fried, and now, the AI neoclouds. But the scamming isn’t just a result of grifters who want to steal, those kinds of people are always around. It’s that Nvidia, with its immense prestige on Wall Street and access to power in DC, is playing the role of Goldman in 2005. And with the important exception of Elizabeth Warren, there’s not a lot of interest in reimposing any controls on capital.

That’s not good. It’s also not surprising.

All that said, the residual memory of scams and crises and bailouts among the public is real, and impossible to ignore. And in a few weeks, voters may decide they’d like to have Elizabeth Warren holding the gavel running the Senate Banking Committee.

by Matt Stollar, BIG |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. So much graft. Everywhere. See also: How Expedia Rigs Travel Markets and Raises Your Hotel Prices (BIG).]

UnitedHealth Group’s Corporate Empire Grows

Updated Sunlight Report Reveals 2,807 Entities Across UnitedHealth Group’s Corporate Empire (Healthcare Un-covered)

The Center for Health & Democracy has released the latest edition of its Sunlight Report on UnitedHealth Group, revealing 2,807 entities that make up the world’s largest health care conglomerate, including 376 additional entities identified since the report’s initial release in July 2025.

The Sunlight Report is a first-of-its-kind project that uses publicly available regulatory filings and other records to document UnitedHealth’s sprawling and often opaque corporate structure, shedding light on the company’s growing influence over American health care.

The October 2026 update finds that UnitedHealth’s rapid acquisition growth has slowed considerably, although its vast network of insurance companies, physician practices, surgery centers, pharmacies and other health care businesses remains largely intact.

The report highlights UnitedHealth’s $3 billion acquisition of Alegeus Technologies, which administers health savings accounts, flexible spending accounts and other health benefit accounts for more than 26 million people. The deal gives UnitedHealth a greater role in managing patients’ own health care dollars, in addition to the insurance premiums it already collects. All at a time, mind you, when HSAs and other “savings vehicles” are being considered by Republicans in Washington as part of a potential health care plan.

by Wendell Potter, Joey Rettino, and Seth Glickman, Healthcare Un-covered | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Remember those "death panels" Sarah Palin whined about during debate over Obamacare? Well, they're here, and they're real. What does it mean? Well, definitely no antitrust/monopoly investigations from this administration. But, practically? From the comments:]

*****

The number that stops me isn't 2,807 — it's 26 million. The Alegeus acquisition means the same conglomerate that already collects the premiums, owns the PBM, the pharmacies and the physician practices now also administers the health savings accounts patients are supposed to use to pay their own way. From the pharmacy counter, that completes a circle worth naming: one corporate structure decides what your plan covers, what your pharmacy gets reimbursed, what shows up in your doctor's office, and now how your own health savings dollars flow. I see the seams of that arrangement every day — the prior auth arriving from the same company that owns the prescriber, the reimbursement pressure on the independent pharmacy across the street, the patient who thinks they're choosing when the choices were already made upstream. Consolidation doesn't just reduce competition; it moves the point of accountability so far inward that it's invisible. Reports like this matter precisely because they make the structure visible. Who else has felt the consolidation from the patient's side of the counter?

Robert Clark
via:

This Mortal Soul

This Mortal Soul - Song to the Siren

Don’t Trust People Who Talk Like This

A few days ago, David Ellison took control of Warner Bros for $111 billion—and is now merging it into Paramount (which he acquired back in 2024). But he needed some help from Dad to make this happen. Tech titan Larry Ellison gave personal guarantees to the tune of $40 billion in order to seal the deal.

As a result, this son of a Silicon Valley CEO is now the most powerful person in Hollywood. So I watched with interest when David Ellison appeared on CNBC to talk about his plans for the future.

I’m still in a state of shock—because he speaks a language that, a few years ago, nobody in the creative community would even have understood.

You might think that Ellison would talk about making great movies or bringing audiences back to theaters—or, at a minimum, creating entertainment for the masses, if not something more artistic.

But that’s not what he has in mind.

Instead Ellison boasts: “We are positioned to win in every single vertical that we operate in….We have the greatest content engine with marquee intellectual properties. You’re immediately getting to scale in streaming” he adds; and then there’s his “incredibly profitable linear portfolio.”

Of course, it wasn’t easy to get to this point. Ellison recalled his previous visit to CNBC. “We launched the hostile on your show,” he tells the host, “so coming full circle today is quite remarkable.”

Have people in the creative world ever talked like this? Did Picasso win in every vertical? Did Shakespeare brag about his “content engine”? Did Beethoven ever achieve a “profitable linear portfolio”?

But those saps were losers by today’s standards. Maybe they should have launched a hostile, instead of wasting so much time on their craft.

I still remember the first time I heard someone describe different vocations and livelihoods as verticals. That was right before the dotcom bubble burst, and I’d been called in to help a web business that, a few weeks later, went broke. The people who spoke in such a cavalier way were soon unemployed.

I felt sorry for them. But I viewed that obfuscating way of speech as a contributor to the problems that brought them down. I still feel that way. I just can’t trust people who talk like this. It’s like they just took a Voight-Kampff test, and failed miserably. I fear I’m talking to replicants, not human beings.

Judging by the news stories out of Hollywood, there are a lot of replicants in the film business nowadays.

On the other hand, I’ve talked to hundreds (or maybe thousands) of artistic people over the years. Against long odds, they somehow manage to make a living in creative pursuits. That is their vertical, so to speak. Sometimes they don’t even want to talk about how creativity happens—it seems almost magical, and the process is very fragile, even for the greatest artists. [...]

But I can’t just blame David Ellison, because he’s not alone. Business and finance jargon is now the only language spoken among the people who make the final decisions on almost every aesthetic or artistic matter.

So when the head of Warner Bros music gets asked about AI, he describes it as “an incredible value creation opportunity.” Say what? But at least that’s better than the CEO who praised AI’s ability to “eliminate lower-value human capital.”

The brutal reality is that we have reached the stage where artistry can be discussed without any consideration of the artist—who is now an inconvenience in the value chain.

And that value chain is all that matters anymore. [...]

Nowadays the decision-makers have other priorities. They have verticals to dominate. If they could, they would do it with bots instead of artists.

We deserve better stewards for our creative culture.

It’s not clear that we will get them. I’ve predicted that tech will eventually swallow up almost the entire creative economy—and I shudder to see how rapidly that forecast is coming true. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve called for creators and fans to support alternative channels.

We need to create our own parallel ecosystem—and as fast as possible. We’re fortunate that some people and organizations are already working on it.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Picasso, Three Musicians

[ed. See also: When Did Everyone Start Talking Like a Hollywood Windbag? (NYT):]

***

There’s a little phrase that has been creeping further into American speech over the past decade. That’s how it seems, anyway, based on the ever-growing number of complaints about its use. Online, people grumble that it’s all over podcasts, movie podcasts in particular...

The phrase in question is: the X of it all. We have to talk, somebody might say, about the renovating-the-Kennedy-Center of it all, or the Dolly Parton’s nephew of it all, or the Greta Gerwig of it all. The “X” can be replaced with any noun or noun phrase you like: This is the kind of plug-and-play template that’s often called a snowclone, like “X is the new Y” or “the mother of all X’s.” “The X of it all” is the whole gestalt of that thing, all its baggage and implications, in the present context. [...]

This would hardly be the first bit of language to hit the entertainment industry and then spread — partly through that industry’s public mockery of its own smarmy, jargon-spewing suits — to everyone else... This is an industry whose language revolves around story, producing narrative shorthand so familiar that young people on TikTok sometimes describe their own lives in terms of seasons, casts, canon events, lore. Its “executive-ese” may seem gauche, reductive or laughable at first — but if it’s efficient shorthand, it will probably reach you eventually.

Mauna Kea? (No. 3)
via:

[ed. Hard to tell from the backward angle. One of my all-time favorite courses.]

Chet Baker

What if Political Polarization Is Not the Disease but the Cure?

With President Trump in the White House, rising authoritarianism has prompted a battle royal within academia over polarization, pitting those who argue that it undermines democracy against those who see it as a tool to motivate defenders of democracy.

This debate in the rarefied atmosphere of elite academia is virtually certain to have real-world consequences three weeks from now, as Democrats are heavy favorites to take control of the House and have something like a 50-50 shot of turning the Senate. In power, they will have to decide how tough and how aggressive to be in pushing back against the Trump administration.

Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the author of the groundbreaking 2018 book “Uncivil Agreement,” is a prime exemplar of this shift.

In the book, Mason described how in recent decades, on both the American right and left, voters’ multiple social identities — race, religion, ideology, cultural outlook and party affiliation — increasingly aligned. The result: Elections became matters of political life-or-death struggles as the parties turned into antagonistic social groups.

In an article published in The Journal of Democracy this month, “Polarization Is Not the Problem,” Mason wrote:

Partisan polarization is not the greatest threat to U.S. democracy, but a symptom of a deeper struggle over who belongs and deserves equal rights.

Rapid gains by racial minorities, women and L.G.B.T.Q. citizens have produced an ethnonationalist backlash whose adherents now wield disproportionate power through the Republican Party. This conflict has intensified partisan animosity and moral disengagement, but a “both sides” diagnosis obscures the asymmetry between a faction seeking to reverse social progress and those resisting it.

“Polarization,” Mason then contended, with an artful turn of phrase, 

is therefore less the disease than democracy’s immune response to an unpopular, antidemocratic movement.

Suppressing that response in the name of civility would only strengthen the movement and imperil pluralistic self-government. The United States can still become its most inclusive democracy, but only if leaders defend equal rights and voters hold accountable those who will not.

Mason is not alone in her assessment.

In a paper published in July, “It’s Not Polarization; It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right,” Petter Törnberg, associate professor of computational social science at the University of Amsterdam, argued:

Neutrality is not borne out by the empirical evidence. Across advanced democracies, crisis is resulting not from mutual divergence but from the one-sided transformation of the political right: the mainstreaming of authoritarian rhetoric, the normalization of conspiracy and hate as political strategies, and the systematic dismantling of institutional guardrails. 

Törnberg makes the case that claims of objectivity and neutrality are themselves problematic. “Conceptual choices are not politically neutral,” he wrote. “Casting authoritarian threats as mutual breaches of etiquette is not simply a misdiagnosis: It is an abdication of responsibility.”  [...]

The ivory tower debate over polarization is soon likely to become front-page news. Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, wrote by email: “Democrats are likely to regain power in Congress and states. If they confuse the current thermostatic liberal trends in public opinion as an opportunity for extreme governance, they are likely to face another backlash.”

These controversies over polarization are infused with high levels of a kind of moral charge — is this good or bad? — that Grossmann argues grow out of the “widespread concern among scholars about democratic backsliding in the United States. There is also perennial concern about the tendency to treat it as an outcome of polarization, or colloquially, to ‘both sides’ the discussion of that backsliding when Donald Trump is central instigator.”

To be more concrete, Grossmann continued, “We have just lived through the consequences of the Democratic reaction to the first Trump administration, which included moving leftward on immigration and racial injustice in response to Trump’s overreach. But the policy and rhetorical countertrends on these issues under Biden — however morally justified — contributed to Trump’s return.”

Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has adopted an approach akin to — although certainly different from — Mason’s, arguing that well before Trump took command of the Republican Party, 

polarization resulted from the dominant disagreement between Democrats and Republicans shifting from the anodyne “how much should government do” to the visceral “how much racial, social and cultural change should the U.S. engage in.”

It results from disagreements about the rights revolutions — for African Americans, women, L.G.B.T.Q. folks — taking center stage in the conflict between parties. [...]

Thomas Zimmer, a historian at Georgetown, is an outspoken supporter of Mason’s thesis. “I am fully aligned with Lilliana Mason on this,” he said. “In fact, I have been offering a similar critique of what I would call the ‘polarization narrative’ for years.”

“Once polarization is adopted as an overarching diagnosis, as a governing historical and political paradigm,” Zimmer wrote by email, “it obscures not only what the key challenge to achieving a pluralistic democracy is — the anti-democratic radicalization of the right — but also transports a misleading idea of America’s recent past and how we got to where we are now.”

Much of academia’s polarization narrative creates a false picture of American society, Zimmer argued:

We tend to tell a story of the American polity in decline, almost always casting the “consensus” of the postwar era in a problematically favorable light, mythologizing it as a moment of unity and order.

And such a declinist tale often comes with a hefty dose of nostalgia for that long-lost ”consensus,” something the right has successfully weaponized. But political consensus, to the extent it ever existed, was usually confined to white male elites and based on a cross-partisan accord to leave a discriminatory social order intact and deny marginalized groups equal representation and civil rights.

Put differently, he continued, “it wasn’t a coincidence that polarization started when one party broke with the white elite consensus and supported — albeit reluctantly — the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. In many ways, polarization is the price U.S. society has had to pay for real progress toward multiracial pluralism.”

While Zimmer points the finger of blame at the rising strength of the radical right, Gregory Conti, a political scientist at Princeton, looks in the opposite direction.

In an Oct. 6 essay, “How ‘Woke 1’ Radicalized the GOP,” Conti and Aaron Sibarium, a staff writer at The Washington Free Beacon, an online conservative news site, wrote:

The radicalism of Trump II is better understood as a response to Peak Woke than as a continuation of a coherent ideology already in place during Trump’s rise. Despite his unorthodox and boundary-pushing rhetoric, in his first term Trump largely respected the cultural consensus of the Obama years, poking at its edges but leaving the most important assumptions intact.

It was wokeness, not Trump, that dissolved that consensus. If liberals had clamped down on their woke flank, many of their preferred policies would likely still be in place, and Trump’s second term (on the assumption that there was one) would have been more moderate in many respects.

Fortunately for my career as an analyst, the onslaught of these scholarly conflicts is unrelenting. [...]

So does your vaunted analyst have a take? I think they are all right.

The Republican Party is dominated by a president beneath contempt who reigns over a collection of spineless sycophants.

In the face of this opposition, the Democratic Party has repeatedly failed to stand tall, all too willing to succumb to left-wing orthodoxies that alienate the average voter.

by Thomas B. Edsall, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times