Bruno Liljefors

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Welcome to a Multidimensional Economic Disaster

The global economy has become dependent on the AI industry. Trillions of dollars are being invested into the technology and the infrastructure it relies on; in the final months of 2025, functionally all economic growth in the United States came from AI investments. This would be risky even in ideal conditions. And we are very far from ideal conditions.

Much of the AI supply chain—chips, data centers, combustion turbines, and so on—relies on key materials that are produced in or transported through just a few places on Earth, with little overlap. In particular, the industry is highly dependent on the Middle East, which has been destabilized by the war in Iran. A global energy shock seems all but certain to come soon—the kind where even the best-case scenario is a disaster. The war could grind the AI build-out to a halt. This would be devastating for the tech firms that have issued historic amounts of debt to race against their highly leveraged competitors, and it would be devastating for the private lenders and banks that have been buying up that debt in the hope of ever bigger returns.

For the better part of the past year, Wall Street analysts and tech-industry observers have fretted publicly about an AI bubble. The fear is that too much money is coming in too fast and that generative-AI companies still have not offered anything close to a viable business model. If growth were to stall or the technology were to be seen as failing to deliver on its promises, the bubble might burst, triggering a chain reaction across the financial system. Everyone—big banks, private-equity firms, people who have no idea what’s mixed into their 401(k)—would be hit by the AI crash.

Until recently, that kind of crash felt hypothetical; today, it feels plausible and, to some, almost inevitable. “What’s unusual about this, unlike commercial real estate during the global financial crisis,” Paul Kedrosky, an investor and financial consultant, told us, “is all of these interlocking points of fragility.”

Perhaps the clearest examples are advanced memory and training chips, which are among the most important—and are by far the most expensive—components of training any AI model. Currently, most of them are produced by two companies in South Korea and one in Taiwan. These countries, in turn, get a large majority of their crude oil and much of their liquefied natural gas—which help fuel semiconductor manufacturing—from the Persian Gulf. The chip companies also require helium, sulfur, and bromine—three key inputs to silicon wafers—largely sourced from the region. In addition, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and other regional petrostates have become key investors in the American AI firms that purchase most of those chips.

Because of the war in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed to most shipping vessels, stranding one-fifth of the world’s exports of natural gas, one-third of the world’s exports of crude oil, and significant quantities of the planet’s exportable fertilizer, helium, and sulfur. Meanwhile, Iran and Israel have begun bombing much of the fossil-fuel infrastructure in the region, which could take many years to replace. In only a month of war, the price of Brent crude—a global oil benchmark—has jumped by 40 percent and could more than double, liquefied-natural-gas prices are soaring in Europe and Asia, and helium spot prices have already doubled. The strait is “critical to basically every aspect of the global economy,” Sam Winter-Levy, a technology and national-security researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told us. “The AI supply chain is not insulated.”

The situation could quickly deteriorate from here. A helium crunch could trigger a shortage of AI chips or cause chip prices to rise. AI companies need ever more advanced chips to fill their data centers—at higher prices, the massive server farms, already hurting from elevated energy costs caused by the war, would have almost no hope of becoming profitable. Without these chips, new data centers would not be built or would sit empty. Astronomical tech valuations, and in turn the entire stock market, could collapse.

One industry’s precarious position isn’t usually everyone’s problem. Unfortunately, AI is different. The biggest data-center players, known as hyperscalers, are among the biggest corporations in the history of capitalism; they include Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon. But even they will be pressed by collectively spending nearly $700 billion on AI in a single year. In order to get the money for these unprecedented projects, data-center providers are beginning to take on colossal amounts of debt. Some of this is done through creative deals with private-equity firms including Blackstone, BlackRock, and Blue Owl Capital—which themselves operate as sort of shadow banks that, since the most recent financial crisis, have arguably become as powerful and as influential as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were prior to 2008. Endowments, pensions, insurance funds, and other major institutions all trust private equity to invest their money.

For a while, it seemed like every time Google or Microsoft announced more data-center investments, their stock prices rose. Now the opposite occurs: The hyperscalers are spending far more, but investors have started to notice that they are not generating anything near the revenue they need to. The data-center boom’s top players—Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, and Oracle—have all lost 8 to 27 percent of their value since the start of the year, making them a huge drag on the overall stock market. And the $121 billion of debt that hyperscalers issued in 2025, four times more than what they averaged for years prior, is expected to grow dramatically.

All of the major players in this investment ecosystem are vulnerable. Private-equity firms are being squeezed on both ends by generative AI: During the coronavirus pandemic, they bought up software companies, which are now plummeting in value because AI is expected to eat their lunch. Meanwhile, private equity’s new investment strategy, data centers, is also falling apart because of AI. Blackstone, Blue Owl, and the like are sinking huge sums into data-center construction with the assumption that lease payments from tech companies will pay for their debt. In order to pay for their investments, private-equity companies raised money from major financial institutions—but now the viability of those lease payments is coming into question as the hyperscalers’ cash flow is strained. “There’s a reason to think we’re seeing some of the same 2008 dynamics now,” Brad Lipton, a former senior adviser at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and now the director of corporate power and financial regulation at the Roosevelt Institute, told us. “Everyone’s getting tied up together. Banks are lending money to private credit, which in turn lends it elsewhere. That amps up the risk.” [...]

The war in Iran affects data-center finances as well. Should energy prices continue to skyrocket, so will the cost of this already very expensive computing equipment, because it needs tremendous amounts of energy to manufacture and operate. And the war has exposed physical risks to these buildings. Janet Egan, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, described data centers to us as “large, juicy targets.” It is impossible to hide these facilities, which can cover 1 million square feet. Earlier this month, Iran bombed Amazon data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. American hyperscalers had been planning to build far more data centers in the region, because the Trump administration and the AI industry have sought funding from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Oman. Now there’s a two-way strain on those relationships. The physical security of the data centers is more precarious, and the conflict is damaging the economic health of the petrostates, thereby jeopardizing a major source of further investment in American AI firms. The Trump administration “staked a lot on the Gulf as their close AI partner, and now the war that they’ve launched poses a huge threat to the viability of the Gulf as that AI partner,” Winter-Levy said.

Plus, “what’s to prevent Iran or a proxy group, or another maligned actor, from tomorrow launching an armed drone against a data center in Northern Virginia?” Chip Usher, the senior director for intelligence at the Special Competitive Studies Project, a national-security and AI think tank, told us. “It could happen. Our defenses are not adequate.” State-sponsored cyberattacks of the variety Iran is known for could also knock a data center offline. You can build all manner of defenses—reinforced concrete, drone-interception systems—but doing so adds cost and time to already costly and slow construction. [...]

Even if Iran and the Strait of Hormuz don’t directly trigger an AI-driven financial crisis, the odds are decent that another vector could. (Remember tariffs?) Energy prices could stay elevated for years, because the targeted fossil-fuel facilities in the Persian Gulf will take a long time to restore. As the U.S. directs huge amounts of attention and military resources toward Iran, it’s easy to imagine China launching an invasion of Taiwan—a scenario that terrifies Silicon Valley, because it would halt the production of chips needed to train frontier models. That’s not even considering the single Dutch company that makes the high-tech lithography machines used to print virtually all AI chips, or the German company that makes the mirrors used in those machines. “There are too many ways for it to fail for it not to fail,” Kedrosky said of the AI industry’s web of risk. “All you can say for sure is this is a fragile and overdetermined system that must break, so it will.”

by Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: An Amazon Web Services data center in Manassas, Virginia (Nathan Howard / Bloomberg / Getty)

They’re Rich but Not Famous—and They’re Suddenly Everywhere

They’re not billionaires, but they’re still very, very rich.

 
The number of Americans worth tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars has boomed in the past few decades, thanks to a rising stock market, lucrative private investments and swelling valuations for small and midsize businesses. This growing class is now a huge force in the economy, driving the demand for everything from lavish hotel rooms to private jet travel.

“The ultrawealthy have grown really substantially,” said Owen Zidar, a Princeton economics professor who studies wealth. While some of these people made their money in technology or finance and live on the coasts, many others live outside of the highest-cost areas and own small businesses like car dealerships, he said.

 
Here is data on the rise of this group. Wealth measures a household’s assets, like stocks, bank accounts and home equity, minus liabilities like mortgages, car loans and credit-card debt.

More ultrawealthy people

There are about 430,000 U.S. households worth $30 million or more, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by Zidar. Within that, there are about 74,000 worth $100 million or more. Over the past few decades, the growth in the number of very rich households has surpassed general population growth.

The Fed’s data runs through 2022 and shows a small dip in some categories of the ultrawealthy in 2019. Many well-off households have further benefited from the big stock market gains of the past few years.

Get rich quick(er)

There are more very rich people in large part because their wealth has grown much faster than everyone else’s. Even adjusted for inflation, the wealth of the top 0.1% of households has grown more than 13-fold over the past 50 years, according to Realtime Inequality, a tracker developed by economists Emmanuel Saez, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman, a professor at the Paris School of Economics. In this analysis, American families with a net worth of $43 million and higher in 2024 are in the top 0.1%.

The bottom 50% have long struggled to build any wealth at all, but they have made some progress.

Average inflation-adjusted wealth turned negative for this group starting in the mid-1990s and then sank further during the 2008-09 financial crisis and housing collapse. It was only after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought stimulus checks and rising home values, that average wealth turned positive for the bottom 50% of households again.

Stocks and businesses

The typical American family leans heavily on homeownership to build their net worth, and homeowners of all wealth levels have benefited from the recent rise in home prices. 

Over time, though, the very wealthy have amassed more wealth, in part because they own the kinds of assets that have risen particularly dramatically. They have a lot of stocks, in some cases because they are top employees of publicly traded companies paid partially in shares. Many also own stakes in private businesses.

 
For the top 0.1%, nearly 72% of their wealth is made up of corporate equities, mutual fund shares and private businesses, according to the Fed. The S&P 500 has more than tripled in the past decade. And many private businesses have seen valuations rise, too.

Boomer wealth boom

Baby boomers collectively have far more wealth than any other living generation. That is largely because they bought homes and stocks decades ago and are benefiting from the long run-up in the values of those assets.

 
About two-thirds of households worth $30 million and up are headed by boomers, according to an analysis of Fed data by Zidar.

Spending it

Because there are so many more multimillionaires, products and services that cater to this group are also booming. Hermès, Brunello Cucinelli and Ferrari all recently reported strong sales from the richest customers, while some companies that target the merely well-off are facing flagging demand. 

by Rachel Louise Ensign, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Maureen Crosbie

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Politics as Bad Group Therapy

The [MAGA] rallies are set to return Saturday—the third such round in the past year—built around a slogan that suggests Americans are living under something closer to tyranny than democracy. It’s a striking claim for a country that fought a revolution to overthrow a king and hasn’t had one since. Still, it’s revealing. It reflects a broader shift in how political disagreement is understood—not as a clash of views, but as a struggle between victims and villains.

The U.S. remains what it has long been: a contentious, often frustrating democracy shaped by competing interests and imperfect leadership. But describing it in more dramatic terms raises the emotional stakes. It transforms ordinary political conflict into something more absolute—and more psychologically satisfying.

In my work as a psychotherapist, I’ve seen a parallel change in how people interpret their personal lives. Feelings are increasingly treated not as signals to examine but as conclusions to affirm. Discomfort is no longer something to work through but something to explain—often by projecting blame onto an external source. This mindset doesn’t stay in the therapy room. It has begun to shape political life, and the [MAGA] rallies offer a framework that favors affirmation over scrutiny: a clean moral narrative in which there are those who are wronged, and those responsible for the wrongdoing.

At their core, the rallies resemble bad group therapy—gatherings that offer validation, solidarity and emotional release. They feel good in the moment. Participants vent, find reinforcement among like-minded people, and leave feeling heard and aligned. The experience can seem productive, even clarifying. But like bad group therapy, it stops at validation. The feelings are processed but not challenged, reinforced but not examined. There is relief but little resolution, and the underlying problems remain. It offers the feeling of progress without the substance of it. [...]

This helps explain why disagreement in these settings can feel less like a difference of opinion and more like a breach of reality. That is part of their appeal. These gatherings offer not only political expression but psychological alignment—a sense of being among others who see the world the same way. The effect can be energizing but also insulating, as politics organized around shared feeling begins to drift away from shared fact.

The atmosphere often reflects this shift. Many rallies have taken on a performative, even theatrical quality, with costumes and exaggerated symbolism replacing direct political engagement. That approach lowers the stakes of confrontation but reinforces the idea that the primary goal is expression rather than persuasion. [...]

This style of politics rewards intensity over accuracy and certainty over nuance. It makes compromise difficult and disagreement suspect, shifting the goal from persuasion to affirmation. This helps explain why such movements can feel more effective than they are.

That cycle—expression, validation, temporary relief—can be powerful. It gives the impression that something meaningful has occurred. But without friction, challenge or genuine engagement with opposing views, little is resolved. Participants are left with a sense of involvement but few tangible outcomes.

As the rallies return, they will likely generate energy, visibility and a sense of shared purpose. But they will also illustrate a familiar trade-off: When politics becomes organized around emotional validation, it can feel more satisfying even as it becomes less effective.

Democratic systems depend on something more demanding: the ability to tolerate disagreement, engage with complexity and distinguish between what feels true and what is demonstrably so. That process is often uncomfortable. It requires restraint, patience and a willingness to confront ideas that don't affirm one’s own perspective.

The [MAGA] rallies, for all their intensity, transform frustration into clarity. They turn disagreement into moral certainty. In doing so, they risk turning politics into something that feels good in the moment—and accomplishes almost nothing.

by Jonathan Alpert, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

Image: Scott McIntyre for The New York Times
[ed. Haha, psych! Substitute No Kings for MAGA and you have a classic case of delusional projection. You'd think that if the Wall Steet Journal wanted to platform some random psychotherapist in their Op-ed section, they'd be a little more careful about who they select and what he has to contribute. Apparently not.]

Fuzz: Wildlife Conflict in the Modern Era

Recently, I read Fuzz: When Natures Breaks the Law by Mary Roach. Like all of her books, it is a meandering journey that touches on a common theme. Although the subtitle makes it seem that the theme is nature crime, the theme is more about conflicts between bureaucracy, modernity and nature rather than crime itself. A more accurate but worse title would be Fuzz: The Weird Ways Humans Deal with Nature while Navigating Bureaucracy and the Impossibility of People Wanting to be around Wildlife without Ever Being Inconvenienced. Some examples Roach explores include the Indian government’s attempt to sterilize monkeys, how the city of Aspen deals with bears raiding trash cans, and the many failed attempts at getting rid of birds including the infamous Australian emu war.

Reading Fuzz was often frustrating because most of the problems share the same basic structure regardless of time or place. Humans disturb a local ecosystem through moving there or extracting resources. Animals then wander into human settlements in response to ecosystem change that has worsened their food supply, altered the predator-prey ratio, or made it easier to get caloric rich food. Humans react by engaging in one of two strategies. Strategy one is to kill everything, which is usually ineffective because it does not affect the population levels or results in extinction (at least in the region) which results in further ecosystem change. Strategy two is to feed the wild animals because that seems like the nice thing to do except that feeding them encourages the animals to keep going into the human settlements which makes the animals bolder which leads to more conflict and potentially leads to attacks. Once this has started, the animals become so used to relying on people for food that they cannot be integrated back into the wild. Sometimes people become so frustrated and angry that they go back to the first strategy of kill everything.

These problems can seem intractable. People have a hard time being convinced that killing everything doesn’t work and the people who don’t want to kill the animals have a hard time accepting that their help may makes things worse. They continue to feed the wild animals, resist methods that would discourage the animals (such as locking trashcans), and mainly advocate translocation (moving the animal to a different area) even though translocation rarely works. Whether because of blinding love or hate, people have a hard time handling wild animals wandering into their homes and cities.

Even though reading about these issues was frustrating, Fuzz left me feeling more inspired than dejected. There are examples of humans humanely and successfully addressing human-wildlife conflict and limiting the presence of introduced flora and fauna. They do so through careful study of local ecosystems, which includes the humans who live there and how they feel about wildlife. What was the most inspiring thing in the book was seeing how much the animal rights and environmental movements have changed how the public handles these wildlife issues. Before the 1970s, the kill everything approach was the norm. Now it is not.

Throughout these stories, Roach makes the case that the best way to deal with wildlife conflict is to find better ways to live with animals that isn’t killing them or making them reliant on humans. Sometimes the solution is simple and easy. After multiple chapters of ridiculous attempts to stop birds from eating crops, Roach argues that it’s better to do nothing or to hire a human to scare the birds off. Other times the solution is complicated. In New Zealand, there’s research being done on using genetic engineering to induce infertility among mice and other destructive, introduced species as a way to reduce the population without mass poisoning. The researchers are trying to limit unintended consequences but there will always be risk. The important question is whether the unknown risk of doing something is worth the known risk of doing nothing. I appreciate that there are people out there doing the often thankless work of trying to make humans and wildlife happy. Roach did an excellent job of showing the myriad of ways this plays out and, unlike other books I’ve read, Roach discusses these issues without claiming that now is the first time humans have tried caring about nature and ecological balance.

by Mia Milne, Solar Thoughts |  Read more:

Image: Fuzz

[ed. This issue has played out forever in my old hometown of Anchorage, Alaska (as you can imagine), and will probably never be resolved to everyone's satisfaction. It's a form of politics. What's the science say, and what are the options? How feasible are mitigative policies, and how much will they cost? Finally arriving at the most relevant question: what kind of city do you want to live in (that would perpetually kill its animal populations and modify its natural environment)?]

Hall Thorpe (1874 - 1947) - Nasturtiums. Colour woodcut.
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Q Day is Coming

Google is dramatically shortening its readiness deadline for the arrival of Q Day, the point at which existing quantum computers can break public-key cryptography algorithms that secure decades’ worth of secrets belonging to militaries, banks, governments, and nearly every individual on earth.

In a post published on Wednesday, Google said it is giving itself until 2029 to prepare for this event. The post went on to warn that the rest of the world needs to follow suit by adopting PQC—short for post-quantum cryptography—algorithms to augment or replace elliptic curves and RSA, both of which will be broken.

The end is nigh

“As a pioneer in both quantum and PQC, it’s our responsibility to lead by example and share an ambitious timeline,” wrote Heather Adkins, Google’s VP of security engineering, and Sophie Schmieg, a senior cryptography engineer. “By doing this, we hope to provide the clarity and urgency needed to accelerate digital transitions not only for Google, but also across the industry.”

Separately, Google detailed its timeline for making Android quantum resistant, the first time the company has publicly discussed PQC support on the operating system. Starting with the beta version, Android 17 will support ML-DSA, a digital signing algorithm standard advanced by the National Institute for Standards and Technology. ML-DSA will be added to Android’s hardware root of trust. The move will allow developers to have PQC keys for signing their apps and verifying other software signatures. [...]

So what’s spooking Google so much?

Wednesday’s hard deadline came as a surprise to many cryptography engineers, including those who have been active in the PQC transition for years.

“That is certainly a significant acceleration/tightening of the public transition timelines we’ve seen to date, and is accelerated over even what we’ve seen the US government ask for,” Brian LaMacchia, a cryptography engineer who oversaw Microsoft’s post-quantum transition from 2015 to 2022 and now works at Farcaster Consulting Group, said in an interview. “The 2029 timeline is an aggressive speedup but raises the question of what’s motivating them.”

Google didn’t lay out the rationale for the revision in either of its posts. A spokeswoman didn’t immediately provide answers to questions sent by email.

Estimates for when Q Day will arrive have varied widely since the mid-1990s, when mathematician Peter Shor first showed that a quantum computer of sufficient strength could factor integers in polynomial time, much faster than classical computers. That put the world on notice that RSA’s days were limited. Follow-on research showed quantum computers provided a similar speed-up in solving the discrete log problem that underpins elliptic curves. [...]

In preparation for Q Day, cryptographers have devised new encryption algorithms that rely on problems that quantum computers don’t have an advantage over classical computers in solving. Rather than factoring or solving the discrete log, one approach involves mathematical structures known as lattices. A second approach involves a stateless hash-based digital signature scheme. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has advanced several algorithms that have yet to be broken and are presumed to be secure.

In 2022 the NSA set a deadline for PQC readiness in national security systems by 2033 and for 2030 for a few specific applications.

by Dan Goodin, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: JuSun/Getty

[ed. So does this mean we don't need passwords anymore? Or the old ones won't work? I can't tell. Tech companies have been telling us that'd happen for years, too. It's coming! And, how does strong AI affect any of this? If I have to change all my passwords everywhere I'm going to go crazy.]

The End of Taylor and Travis

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will be extraordinarily rich until they’re dead. They may keep dating, they may marry, and they may have children. Or, they could break up. Their personal lives, played out so much on the public stage, shouldn’t concern us too much. They deserve happiness, like anyone else.

What’s become clear, with the passage of a year, is just how thoroughly they once dominated the culture and how such a phenomenon is unlikely to repeat itself. Neither individual, barring an unforeseen twist, will approach the heights of 2023, when Swift embarked on her Eras Tour and entered into a relationship with the Super Bowl-winning Kansas City Chiefs tight end. They each enjoyed fame, for a wedge of time at the end of last year, that rivaled any twentieth century celebrity’s at the apogee of the old analog culture. It was, in retrospect, the last gasp of what can be called Empire. We are not going back to Elvis and Marilyn, the Beatles and Michael Jackson. Swift and Kelce, for a fleeting number of months, almost brought us there, with Swift donning red in her luxury suite during prime time to cheer on a future Hall of Famer playing America’s most popular sport. Kelce even won another Super Bowl as Mr. Taylor Swift. Imagine that thrill. For a man who once longed to be as famous as the Rock, this was the zenith. He must have been sure he was headed to celebrity’s very upper limits.

Kelce and his brother have a popular podcast called New Heights. They banter about football and interview athletes. When Kelce began dating Swift, the podcast attracted many more listeners. Earlier this year, the Kelce brothers signed a $100 million deal with Amazon’s podcast studio, Wondery. For a podcast that only launched a few years ago—and was hosted by brothers who, before the year 2023, weren’t especially famous—this was the greatest of coups. It was a confirmation of the ascension of the Kelces and a credit to Swift’s own halo of fame, which has made even an ex-Eagles center into a household name.

Money is money, though, and the zeitgeist is something else. Recently, I noticed that many videos of the New Heights podcast on YouTube were failing to rack up 1 million views. For a pair of podcasters who have enjoyed so much conventional fame, these numbers struck me as rather anemic. My suspicions were confirmed when I checked in on comedian Theo Von’s YouTube channel. Von, something of a mini-Joe Rogan, is not nearly as well-known as Kelce. Yet his full videos—interviews with various comedians, cultural figures, and politicians—routinely exceed 1 million views. His total subscriber count on YouTube beats New Heights by nearly 1 million. I cite YouTube because I truly think the platform, despite its obvious dominance, still manages to be underrated by the mainstream. YouTube is the future of television and audio alike. If its parent company, Google/Alphabet, cared more about winning the streaming wars, YouTube Premium could probably put Spotify out of business. For less than $20 a month, a premium account allows a user to skip all advertisements and listen to what amounts to virtually the entire music catalog on Earth—one, in terms of human-made quality songs, even larger than Spotify’s.

It is on YouTube where the Kelces not only trail Von but get lapped by computer scientist Lex Fridman. It’s probably not worth bringing up Rogan, who is nearing 19 million YouTube subscribers, nine times as many as the New Heights podcast. This is how relevancy is measured in 2024. And since the Kelces, on aesthetics and substance, aren’t exceeding any of these other men—if anything, the NFL brothers are far less interesting—it is the fairest, and perhaps only way, to judge them.

It can be argued Travis Kelce will never be the Rock because he lacks the Rock’s charisma and gravitas. He’s too straining, too preening, nakedly thirsty for the attention he’s mostly receiving because he was able to date his generation’s Madonna. But it’s the crumbling superstructure of fame that will truly hold Kelce back. It was Old Hollywood and Old Television that made the Rock who he was; it was the world before social media had metastasized and culture had fractured. Millions of boys watched the Rock wrestle on linear television in the 1990s and bought DVDs of his action movies in the 2000s. There was a monoculture for the Rock to seize. Kecle won’t be so lucky.

by Ross Barkan, Political Currents |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Truncated post for subscribers, but a good short take nonetheless. You can kind of get a feeling of where this is heading.]

A Theory about Dishes

“Washing dishes” (1914) photograph by Harry Whittier Frees

In 2016, an article by Matthew Fray titled, “She Divorced Me Because I Left Dishes by The Sink” went viral. It begins by addressing the ridiculousness of the title.

It seems so unreasonable when you put it that way: My wife left me because sometimes I leave dishes by the sink.

It makes her seem ridiculous; and makes me seem like a victim of unfair expectations.

The author then goes on to talk about why his wife cared about the dishes he left and how it reflected her broader concerns about not feeling respected and wanting her partner to share the mental load of managing a house. Toward the end, he summarizes the real problem his wife and other women in her situation have.

The wife doesn’t want to divorce her husband because he leaves used drinking glasses by the sink.

She wants to divorce him because she feels like he doesn’t respect or appreciate her, which suggests he doesn’t love her, and she can’t count on him to be her lifelong partner.

In the end, it was not about the dishes but about a broader pattern of behavior that left the wife feeling unsupported in their marriage. The dishes are a symbol, an artistic flourish to represent one piece of the frustration many couples, especially straight ones, have when it comes to dividing household labor. But what if this is not the whole story? What if dishes have a unique ability to create resentment and domestic misery?

There was a group of friends I knew who decided to all live together after high school. When their lease was up, they did not renew and there were some bitter feelings. At least one person claims that the reason their setup did not work out was because of conflict over the dishes. Maybe the dishes were a symptom of a bigger problem related to communication or willingness of everyone to share in household labor. But what if we take this reason seriously? What if that household did fall apart because of the dishes?

Conflict over dishes is so common that I am willing to bet every person reading this has argued about dishes at some point in their life whether that be with their parents, their own children, their partners or their roommates. There are always dishes to wash and most people find washing them to be unpleasant. Over time after hearing about other people’s conflicts and dealing with my own, I have come to think much more seriously about dishwashing than any sane person should. I have read empirical research on the division of dishwashing labor and its effects on relationships (most of which, oddly enough, focus on sexual satisfaction). I have read multiple takes by Christians who argue that dishwashing is part of God’s punishment for Eve eating the apple. Then I explored the many articles whose title is a play on “everyone wants a community/village/commune but no one wants to do the dishes.”

My radical conclusion after reading the dishwashing literature is that who does the dishes is not a petty concern and the fact that people see it as petty is the main reason it can prove to be such a destructive force in households whether those houses consists of married couples, roommates, or income sharing commune dwellers.

Evidence for the Surprising Importance of Dishwashing

Out of the few scientific studies on the division of dishwashing labor, the most relevant is Carlson, Miller and Sassler’s (2018) study that compared how the division of labor of different household tasks affects relationship satisfaction (including its effects on sex). Out of all the tasks they included (preparing/cooking meals, house cleaning, shopping, laundry, home maintenance, and paying bills), the “most consequential to relationship quality” was washing the dishes. When women were doing much more of the dishwashing, there was lower relationships satisfaction, more reports of relationship troubles, higher likelihood of having talked about separating, and a higher likelihood of physical arguments. Dishwashing was unique in its ability to cause discord and unhappiness.

Unfortunately, most research on division of household labor does not separate out dishwashing from other tasks so the rest of my evidence is anecdotal. After Mathew Fray wrote the above mentioned article about his wife leaving him over the dishes, he became a relationship coach and wrote a book about how men can save their marriages. His article about dishes resonated so much that he spun it into an entire career. [...]

My Guesses as to Why Dishwashing is so Important

Compared to other household tasks, dishwashing is more constant and has less potential to be fulfilling. There are other tasks that are gross, such as cleaning the toilet or gutters, but those aren’t daily tasks. Other tasks that are daily, such as cooking, are ones that many people enjoy and even do as a hobby. No one washes dishes as a hobby. The closest task in terms of regularity and unpleasantness might be laundry. In households where one person does everyone’s laundry then it does become a daily task of often unnoticed drudgery. But in most households laundry is not a daily issue in the way dishes are.

My main theory is that the perception of dishwashing as a petty concern is the problem. Most of the comments under Mathew Fray’s article are in the vein of “in a healthy marriage people do not care so much about dishes.” The whole reason the article went viral is the ridiculousness of the idea that dishes could be so important. When an issue is considered petty then the onus is on the resentful person to let it go rather than force a solution that everyone is satisfied with but it’s hard to let go when the dishwasher is reminded of their resentment everyday, multiple times a day. Washing the dishes does not take long but those short bursts of annoyances adds up.

by Mia Milne, Solar Thoughts |  Read more:

Image: “Washing dishes” (1914) photograph by Harry Whittier Frees

NASA's 'Lunar Viceroy' on Moon Base Plans

NASA's “Lunar Viceroy” talks about how NASA will build a Moon base (Ars Technica)

Image: Rendering of a Moon base that will be built over the next decade. Credit: NASA

[ed. In the next 10 years.]

Seeing Like a Sedan

Waymos and Cybercabs see the world through very different sensors. Which technology wins out will determine the future of self-driving vehicles.

Picture a fall afternoon in Austin, Texas. The city is experiencing a sudden rainstorm, common there in October. Along a wet and darkened city street drive two robotaxis. Each has passengers. Neither has a driver.

Both cars drive themselves, but they perceive the world very differently.

 

One robotaxi is a Waymo. From its roof, a mounted lidar rig spins continuously, sending out laser pulses that bounce back from the road, the storefronts, and other vehicles, while radar signals emanate from its bumpers and side panels. The Waymo uses these sensors to generate a detailed 3D model of its surroundings, detecting pedestrians and cars that human drivers might struggle to see.

In the next lane is a Tesla Cybercab, operating in unsupervised full self-driving mode. It has no lidar and no radar, just eight cameras housed in pockets of glass. The car processes these video feeds through a neural network, identifying objects, estimating their dimensions, and planning its path accordingly.

This scenario is only partially imaginary. Waymo already operates, in limited fashion, in Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Phoenix, with announced plans to operate in many more cities. Tesla Motors launched an Austin pilot of its robotaxi business in June 2025, albeit using Model Y vehicles with safety monitors rather than the still-in-development Cybercab. The outcome of their competition will tell us much about the future of urban transportation.

The engineers who built the earliest automated driving systems would find the Waymo unsurprising. For nearly two decades after the first automated vehicles emerged, a consensus prevailed: To operate safely, an AV required redundant sensing modalities. Cameras, lidar, and radar each had weaknesses, but they could compensate for each other. That consensus is why those engineers would find the Cybercab so remarkable. In 2016, Tesla broke with orthodoxy by embracing the idea that autonomy could ultimately be solved with vision and compute and without lidar — a philosophical stance it later embodied in its full vision-only system. What humans can do with their eyeballs and a brain, the firm reasoned, a car must also be able to do with sufficient cameras and compute. If a human can drive without lidar, so, too, can an AV… or so Tesla asserts.

This philosophical disagreement will shortly play out before our eyes in the form of a massive contest between AVs that rely on multiple sensing modalities — lidar, radar, cameras — and AVs that rely on cameras and compute alone.

The stakes of this contest are enormous. The global taxi and ride-hailing market was valued at approximately $243 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $640 billion by 2032. In the United States alone, people take over 3.6 billion ride-hailing trips annually. Converting even a fraction of this market to AVs represents a multibillion-dollar opportunity. Serving just the American market, at maturity, will require millions of vehicles.

Given the scale involved, the cost of each vehicle matters. The figures are commercially sensitive, but it is certainly true that cameras are cheaper than lidar. If Tesla’s bet pays off, building a Cybercab will cost a fraction of what it will take to build a Waymo. Which vision wins out has profound implications for how quickly each company will be able to put vehicles into service, as well as for how quickly robotaxi service can scale to bring its benefits to ordinary consumers across the United States and beyond.

by Andrew Miller, Asterisk |  Read more:

Image: Jared Nangle

[ed. via DWAtV:]

***

A relevant thing about Elon Musk is that, while he has a lot of technical expertise and can accomplish a lot of seemingly impossible tasks, he also just says things.

For example, here’s another thing he just said this week, in a trick he’s pulled several times without delivering, where the prediction market is at 12% but that seems rather high to me:

NewsWire: Elon Musk offers to pay TSA workers' salaries amid government shutdown.

Just saying things, and announcing with confidence he will do things he probably cannot do, is central to his strategy of then yelling at people to sleep on floors until they manage to do it, which occasionally works to at least some extent. Elon Musk may plausibly start such a project, but the chances he achieves the goals he is stating are very low.

Announce periodically you are going to the moon and stars, and if one time you end up with SpaceX, it’s still a win. It’s worked for him quite well, so far.

Edgar Ende - The Sleepers (The Fallen) 1933
via:

Correct Gray

There may be 50 shades, but there’s only one Correct Grey.

Sometimes a colour name is a whole mood. Rouge Noir: the stamp of cult 1990s glamour. Millennial pink: the colour of overthinking and oversharing. Elephant’s Breath by Farrow & Ball: the imperial age of the gastro pub.

I have a new favourite. Pairs is a lovely little Scottish brand which makes great quality socks at good prices. There are many cute names – Frosting Pink, Milky Tea Beige – but the one I just had to click on was Correct Grey, “a warm grey with nods to a classic British school sock”, according to the website.

Correct Grey nails it, because grey is absolutely correct for right now. Not just for socks, but for style top to toe, it is the coolest shade at this moment. No need to panic. Black is always fine, navy is perennially elegant. Brights are going to make a comeback this year, too. You have options. But grey is the colour that says: when it comes to fashion in 2026, I have understood the assignment.

Those Correct Grey socks are, well, the correct grey. This is a different colour to what I think of as tracksuit-bottom grey. (Was the grey tracksuit bottom the defining object of the first half of this decade? But that’s a question for another day.) Tracksuit-bottom-grey is wan and pale, with all the energy of an old photocopy. If tracksuit-bottom grey were a person, it would be scrolling its phone and not looking up when spoken to. Correct Grey is richer and more intense, with a nod to box-fresh school uniform and a new-term attitude.

But, wait. Didn’t grey used to be boring? How did it become fashion’s coolest colour? Sportswear, for a start. I was slightly rude about grey tracksuit bottoms because I’m a bit over them, but the ubiquity of grey marl flannel has done a lot to reframe grey as a fashion colour. Quiet luxury, with its emphasis on fabric and feel, has helped too, because soft neutral shades – grey, camel, navy – show off a quality fabric at its best. And psychologically, there is something about the liminal nature of grey, standing as it does in direct opposition to the notion that life is either black or white. This speaks to the blur of modern life with its lack of boundaries, of working from home in pyjamas but dealing with office emails on your phone while out at dinner.

by Jess Cartner-Morley, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Pairs

[ed. Works for me.]

Should I Stay or Should I Go

Trump Draws Bipartisan Backlash for Easing Oil Sanctions on Russia and Iran (NYT).

Image: Amit Dave/Reuters

[ed. TACOman in action. Cool picture. See also: For Putin, the War in Iran Changed Everything (NYT).]

Earlier this month, President Trump lifted restrictions on Russian oil exports, allowing shipments to resume to buyers around the world as officials scrambled to stabilize global supply following disruptions tied to the war in Iran. Days later, the administration temporarily waived sanctions on roughly 140 million barrels of Iranian oil sitting at sea, opening those cargoes to the global market for 30 days.

A Critical Political Season Could Decide if Alaska Is a Failed ‘Petrostate’

A governor who spent two terms cutting services to preserve Alaskans’ oil-funded annual checks is leaving office. Voters must now decide what comes next for the state’s faltering fiscal model.

Juneau, Alaska, takes pride in providing services that some larger cities would shy away from — child care and housing assistance, arts grants, three libraries, two public pools, an arboretum, a ski area and a pledge that all 250 miles of borough roads will be plowed, if possible, within 48 hours after a snowstorm ends.

But the system that has made that possible — a steady flow of revenue from oil production — is cracking like Arctic ice in spring, not just in Juneau, Alaska’s capital, but across the state. Even with the war in Iran sending oil prices sky high, the oil-dependent model that has financed generous public services while giving Alaskans annual checks from a Permanent Fund can no longer keep both promises.

And a political year that will include a wide-open governor’s race and one of the most watched Senate contests in the country could help decide the future of what has become known in some circles as a “petrostate,” for its public reliance on oil production, on the brink.

“The petrostate hasn’t quite failed yet,” said Joseph Geldhof, a Juneau lawyer, but “it will if something does not change.”

Anything that increases global oil prices is good for Alaska’s finances, and state economists expect that the Iran war will mean a revenue bump of at least $500 million this fiscal year, as well as a similar windfall next year if the fighting continues.

But that money is essentially already accounted for to fill existing budget gaps, and short-term war gains won’t solve either the immediate problem for Alaska residents — rising gas prices hit them hard, too — or the long-term supply-and-demand fundamentals, such as the spread of electric vehicles in Europe and China, the freeing up of supply from Venezuela and the long-term decline in production along Alaska’s North Slope.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican who has spent nearly eight years cutting state government services to protect Alaska’s Permanent Fund dividend, is leaving office this year with one of the lowest approval ratings of any governor, according to recent polls. The crowded race to succeed him coincides with Senator Dan Sullivan’s bid for re-election against a formidable Democratic challenger, former Representative Mary Peltola.

Those elections pose a fundamental question for Alaskans: Will voters opt for more financial austerity in the name of preserving their annual payments and almost nonexistent state taxation, or will they accept a more politically fraught reimagining of the state’s fiscal structure?

The governor called it “a philosophical debate over the role of government.”

“If you look at where we are and how expensive things are here, we just don’t have the ability to do the kinds of things you can do in Texas or Iowa,” Mr. Dunleavy said. “It’s not going to be roads everywhere, schools everywhere, services everywhere. Alaska is a different place.” [ed. especially if you give away all your revenue.]

The math no longer works, even for the minimal level of services Mr. Dunleavy describes. Nils Andreassen, executive director of the Alaska Municipal League, estimated that one in 10 local governments are now “semi-functioning, unable to keep the doors open for a full year.” He predicted some will eventually close.

Brett Watson, an economist at the University of Alaska Anchorage, agreed.

“Practically speaking, we are probably at the end of our ability to continue to pay a dividend, provide the same level of state services and not broadly pay taxes,” he said.

Alaska’s financial dilemma started in 1968 with the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay. Voters and elected leaders created a sovereign wealth fund, whose principal cannot be touched without a vote of the people. They legislated an annual dividend for nearly every resident and abolished the state income tax.

But as oil production has risen, not only in the Middle East but in new parts of the United States, Russia and elsewhere, prices have become more volatile and Alaska’s revenues have plunged.

The war in Iran and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have offered Alaska politicians reprieves, Mr. Watson said, “but waiting for global disruption isn’t a long-term strategy.”

Alaskan lawmakers now use interest, dividends and investment profits generated by the sovereign wealth fund for government operating costs, and for an annual dividend to residents. That payout peaked at $3,284 in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine and oil prices topped $100 a barrel, but it has averaged $1,370 over the last decade.

This year, even before the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, the governor asked legislators for $3,600 per person, and he proposed a constitutional amendment to guarantee a dividend in perpetuity.

But such payments now compete directly with core government work like road maintenance, education and prisons. Mr. Dunleavy has used his line-item veto hundreds of times to cut programs and preserve the annual dividend, which he views as “nonnegotiable” because “the people know what to do with their money better than politicians do.”

As state government shrank, local governments either had to go without many basic services or go it alone. Juneau has chosen the second option, using local money to help keep people in a region reachable only by plane or boat, and where prices reflect that remoteness.

“Go take a look at another town that’s 32,000 people, maybe in the Midwest,” said Laura McDonnell, who owns a store selling Alaska-made crafts and jewelry just steps from where cruise ships dock. “How many performing arts centers and libraries and museums and swimming pools do those communities have?”

Plenty of communities subsidize housing construction, said Neil Steininger, who is a Juneau city and borough assemblyman and a former state budget director, “and we extend that to other things because we believe they’re important for quality of life.”

“I don’t skate, and I don’t swim, and I don’t play hockey, but those things are a big part of why I’m here,” he said. [...]

Many Republican leaders continue to maintain that Alaska is on fundamentally strong fiscal ground: Like a family that is house rich but cash poor, Alaska just needs to make some changes in its financial structure.

“We are as far from a failed petrostate as you can imagine, but we have a revenue problem,” said the co-chairman of the Alaska Senate Finance Committee, Bert Stedman, whose office is decorated with historical photos, maps and MAGA memorabilia.

Mr. Dunleavy said the dividend was created to ensure both that the natural resources fueling Alaska’s economy would belong to its residents and that future legislatures could not spend oil money recklessly.

But lawmakers have not approved his $3,600-an-Alaskan dividend request. Instead, politicians in both major parties hope upcoming elections for governor and Senate will clarify what voters actually want — changes to the dividend, a seasonal sales tax aimed at tourists, an income tax or still more cuts.

“It is going to take a governor willing to put it all on the line,” said Bryce Edgmon, who is the state House speaker and a former Democrat who is now an independent. “Just saying ‘protect the dividend’ is no longer an answer.”

Under Alaska’s ranked-choice-voting system, the top four candidates will advance from an Aug. 18 primary to the November general election. Most of the prominent Republican candidates, including Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom and the conservative activist Bernadette Wilson, echo Mr. Dunleavy’s calls to protect the dividend at almost any cost. Most of the Democrats support a more substantial remaking of the state’s fiscal structure, including by changing the formula for funding public schools and potentially making oil companies pay more in taxes.

In all, 17 people are seeking the governor’s mansion, which sits in the shadow of Mount Juneau and up a hill from the hard decisions facing Juneau’s civic leaders. As they ponder what to cut, they’re also worried that the current financial crisis, like others in the past, will not be enough to push through real structural change.

by By Anna Griffin, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ruth Fremson

[ed. Republicans and greedy Alaskans have killed what used to be a unique and vibrant state. I say this fully acknowledging that Republicans were once the most vociferous protectors of what we'd call Alaska's culture and pioneering spirit, but that was a long time ago. When the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) was being debated shortly after oil started flowing - and even before that, when the state received $900 million in lease sale revenue for future Prudhoe Bay development - I thought it was a bad idea, giving free money away to people just for living there. I understood the reasoning - that politicians and special interest groups couldn't be trusted not to blow all the sudden wealth - which, in fact, is what they've done with most of the account's alternate savings accounts and contingency funds (interest on investments, criminal penalties, etc). Everything but the principal, which is constitutionally protected. What's worse was the decision to get rid of state income taxes. Once you do that it's almost impossible to get those taxes resinstated. Human nature. Governor Jay Hammond, who conceived of the PFD program, imagined it being based on longevity and commitment - the longer you lived in Alaska the more you'd receive in payments. But the state supreme court struck that down for being discriminatory and unconsititutional. So, anybody that came up and stayed for just a year qualified. Even the military. You can imagine how that has affected (infected?) the population and mindset of residents and politicians ever since. Red as any red state, Alaska was, and continues to be, one of the most socialist states in the country. It also receives (or used to, anyway) more federal dollars per capita than any other state. So greed and a deep sense of entitlement from these handouts became the new ethic. That's how the current govenor got elected - by promising massive PFDs that would exceed anything ever seen, while cutting govenment spending and other essential services to the bone. Which he has done every year during his tenure. Now they're broke and we'll see how much people still living there care about Alaska's future. Are they willing to make the difficult decisions that will put it on a sustainable course, or continue to push for endless freebies? I have my guesses. As an aside - if you can contribute to Mary Peltola's senate campaign for Senate, please do. She's the real deal, and cares deeply about the future of the state, its history, and its people and is running against another one of Trump's zombies that coasted in on his coattails. You can learn more about her at this link. See also: Thanks for all the fish (ADN), which also includes links to recent stories like this: Anchorage School Board approves ‘severe’ budget with hundreds of staff layoffs and 3 school closures (ST).]

Wu Guanzhong (Chinese, 1919-2010), A Little Coastal Town.
via:

China and the Future of Science

[The following post is a polished transcript of a speech I recently gave to a private gathering of American technologists. Its contents may be of interest to a larger audience. -TG.]

The Chinese socio-political system differs from our own. From the perspective of the topic of this conference, here is the most salient distinction: the Chinese system has a telos. The Chinese party-state is fundamentally a set of goal-oriented institutions. This is not unique to China—it is in fact a distinguishing feature of all Leninist systems. I sometimes think of Leninist systems as a little bit like that bus in the movie Speed. Who here has seen it? For those who haven’t, here is basic gist of that film: an extortionist attaches a bomb to the speedometer of a bus. If the bus ever slows below 50 miles per hour, everyone blows up. So it is with your average communist system. Either it hurtles towards some clearly defined goal or things start to fall apart.

In the early days of Mao, the overarching aim of the communist system was to seize state power, first through subversion and insurgency, then through more regular combined arms warfare. In the later days of Mao the newly established Chinese state and the society it intertwined were oriented around class struggle, both at home and abroad. From the 1980s through the 2010s the Chinese system was orbited a different yet still very explicitly stated goal: getting rich. In theory, if not always in practice, every action taken by every cadre, every soldier, and every state employee was subordinate to this larger, unifying aim. We must make China rich.

That is no longer the animating telos of the Chinese system. There is a new goal, one that has been articulated with great clarity by Chairman Xi and the Chinese central committee: In 2026, the aim of China’s communist enterprise is to lead humanity through what they call “the next round of techno scientific revolution and industrial transformation.” The Chinese leadership believes humanity stands on the cusp of the next industrial revolution. China can only be restored to its ancestral greatness if it is the pioneer of this revolution. All machinery of party and state must bend towards this end. All 100 million members of the Communist Party of China, all 50 million government employees of the PRC, all two million soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, and ultimately all of the 1.4 billion people that call China home must be mobilized to accomplish this aim. That is the ambition. China will be the greatest scientific power the world has ever seen—or bust.

The communists are deadly serious about their pursuit of this aim. Statistics provide one window into the seriousness of their intent. Now I don’t intend for the remainder of this speech to be a laundry list of numbers, but I think the numbers are useful for helping us see the scale of what China has already accomplished and the speed with which they have accomplished it. They are also strong signal of future intent—it is difficult to survey the numbers and not appreciate just how ironclad China’s commitment to scientific achievement really is.

Now scientific achievement is difficult to measure. One common metric is to count the so-called “high impact papers” – journal articles highly cited by other leading lights in a given scientific field. Count up these papers over the course of a year, see who wrote them, see where those authors work, and—voila!—you have a ranked list of which institutions are putting out the most high-impact science in a given year. Had you done this counting exercise in the year 2005, you would have discovered that six of the world’s ten most productive universities were in the United States. Today only one of those universities is in the United States. That university is Harvard, coming in at spot number three on the list. At spot number one? Zhejiang University.

How many of you have heard of Zhejiang University? Can I get a show of hands?

And of course, Zhejiang University is just one of the Chinese institutions on this top ten list. China claims not just the number-one spot, but also the number-two spot. And not just the number-one and number-two spots, but also the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, ninth spots go to the Chinese.

The scientific publisher Nature makes a similar catalog on a slightly more granular level, looking at specific fields of science. According to Nature’s most recent rankings, 18 of the top 25 most productive research institutes in the physical sciences, 19 of the top 20 in geosciences, and a full 25 out of 25 in chemistry are Chinese. Only in the biosciences do American scientists still have a lead—but even on that list three of the top ten are Chinese.

The kicker is, none of that was true even just a decade ago.

The most granular analysis of all is published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI. ASPI publishes a neat research tracker that surveys new publications in 74 distinct high-end technologies. Unlike the statistics I just discussed, their tracker includes research published by scientists working in national laboratories and private institutions as well as those published by academic scientists. For each category they make a list of the ten institutions that are publishing the most high-impact science in that particular topic. What have they found? For 66 of the 74 categories tracked, a majority of the institutions that are now publishing the highest-impact science are Chinese. In many areas of science the dominance is total: For example, ten of then most productive research institutions in the fields of nanoscale material manufacturing, photonic sensors, chemical coating, drone operations, automated swarms, and undersea communications are Chinese. The number is nine out of ten for work on supercapacitors, advanced composite materials, inertial navigation systems, and satellite positioning, eight out of ten in advanced optical communications, advanced radiofrequency communications, and new chemical coatings, and seven out of ten for directed energy technologies, nuclear engineering, and nuclear waste treatment.

The scale of Chinese scientific production is in part a story about people. China graduates five times the number of medical and biomedical students than we do every year, seven times the number of engineers, and two-and-a-half times the number of undergraduates with research experience in artificial intelligence. Last year China graduated almost double the number of STEM PhD students than we did—and that number is actually worse than it sounds because—depending on the exact year you do the counting—between one sixth and one fifth of our STEM graduates are themselves Chinese.

Many of these researchers go back. They go back partially because they are well compensated for doing so. They also go back because of the research opportunities afforded to them. A recent study found that returning Chinese scientists go on to become the lead author on 2.5 times more papers than their colleagues who stay in the United States. Many Chinese research labs have 30 or 40 people attached to them—the equivalent to a commercial research lab in the United States. Ask any scientist who has gone to China in the past three years to visit academic colleagues and they will tell you how astounded they are at the quality of the laboratory equipment and machinery that their Chinese colleagues have access to. If in the not-so-distant past Chinese localities competed with each other to lay the most asphalt, now that funding pours into laboratory equipment, scientific instruments, and advanced scientific facilities. Thus China now has the world’s most sensitive ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray detector, the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, the world’s strongest steady-state magnetic field, the world’s fastest quantum computer by computational advantage, and the world’s most sensitive neutrino detector. Just yesterday an attendee at this conference informed me of another I should add to my list: the world’s largest primate medical research center.

Now I can already hear some of your objections. “Tanner, these measures don’t include classified research. They don’t include the proprietary research by private companies—that is the stuff that actually pushes technology forward. American companies are not publishing billion-dollar trade secrets in the latest journals. The Chinese scientists are under insane publish or perish pressures—they are far more likely to lie and cheat. Don’t you know Chinese scientists take part in citation cartels? Haven’t you read those bitter critiques of the new system written by China’s own disgruntled scientists?”

My main response to this: you guys have lost the thread. I am reminded of a similar style of argument we often see in AI development. Every time a new model is released people play around with it for a bit and then start to catalog the flaws of this model. But the real story, the story historians will tell a generation from now, is never about the model of the moment. What matters is movement between those moments. History is made by the trend-line. What capabilities did the models have four years ago? What capabilities do they have now? What might they reasonably be expected to have in a decade hence?

Something similar might be said for science and China.

by Tanner Greer, The Scholar's Stage |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: The China Tech Canon (Asterisk).]

Enneagram Types

via: AI search and the Enneagram Institute

[ed. If you read the post following this one which discusses personal "agency" (which I encourage you to do) this might be helpful.]

On Agency and 'Can You Just Do Things?'

Clara Collier: In the spring of next year, you have a book coming out called You Can Just Do Things. It’s about agency. I'm interested in agency as a buzzword, as a concept, as a Silicon Valley cultural phenomenon, as a thing I can exercise in my life — maybe even as a thing I shouldn't exercise so much in my life. So, to start: How do you define agency? And why did you want to write a book about it?

Cate Hall: I define agency as the capacity to both see and act on all of the degrees of freedom that life offers. So it has two components: One is noticing degrees of freedom, the other is taking action on the basis of them.

I think agency is a hot topic right now for a lot of reasons, but I personally care about it because I have been through periods of my life that were characterized by very low agency, which made me miserable. I think that there is a pervasive belief — in tech and in the Bay Area, but also in the the world at large — that agency is an inherent trait. I think that is really wrong. So I'm interested in talking, at a practical level, about how agency can be cultivated to make it more accessible.

Clara: There’s an interesting cleavage between the way that you think and write about agency, and agency as a tech world buzzword. Why do you think this concept is so popular now?

Cate: I've wondered a lot about this. Certainly at least some part of it is that different ideas just become fads, but it's hard to understand why things take off when they do.

However, I suspect that some part of what is driving this interest is a concern that people have that they don't really know what their future looks like. They desire to control or lay claim to their future in a way they hope agency will provide.

The idea that intelligence is not what matters — because intelligence is becoming cheap — is growing. So there has to be something else that we can rely on, as humans, to supply a sense of control or meaning to life. Part of the enthusiasm about agency emerges from that perspective.

Clara: One thing in this space that I find concerning is the idea of “just do what high agency people are doing”. I think that leads to inauthenticity, where people pursue something that they think they should do just because it seems to be “high agency.”

Cate: That seems like a valid concern. I am interested in a flavor of agency that has to do with freedom above all else. There's one version of agency that is primarily concerned with personal freedom. There's another version that is primarily concerned with personal ambition — the version of agency that I hear more often in tech circles. I think that LARPing [live action role play in gaming] as a high-agency person by following the playbook of a tech founder seems unlikely to be a true exercise of agency, and therefore is unlikely to confer the benefits of “true agency:” a meaningful life that, upon reflection, you are happy to have lived.

Clara: I like the term reflection there. I have a kind of Rawlsian definition of agency: doing what you would do at reflective equilibrium.

Cate: I think that makes sense to me. There's the concept of coherent extrapolated volition: What would you do if you had more information? I've always liked that idea. If you were a better version of yourself, wiser and more knowledgeable, what would you actually want?

Jake Eaton: Maybe we can narrow this down more by talking about your own experiences, Cate, because I think you define agency orthogonal to how it’s sometimes used in the Bay. When you were younger, you graduated Yale Law, you held several high-status, high-performing jobs — you were a supreme court attorney and you clerked for a judge on the Second Circuit. I think most anyone reading your CV would think: This person has high agency. But you talk about these accomplishments as if they were done before you had any.

Cate: Yeah, I think this points to where agency and ambition actually diverge. It seems fairly clear, at least to me, that you can be high agency without being highly ambitious. That might describe somebody who is highly agentic in shaping the kind of personal, emotional, or spiritual life they want, but who is not especially motivated to succeed financially or professionally.

You can also be highly successful and highly ambitious without being highly agentic. That looks like following a path with a certain kind of excellence and endurance that reliably leads to success, to accolades, to money. But you haven’t reflected on that path; it’s not a matter of you having decided, yes, this is the life path that I want to be on. And that is what characterized my life until around the age of 30.

Jake: Do you reject the use of the term NPC? [non-playing background character in gaming]

Cate: I really hate it. The one context in which I will not reject it outright is when somebody is using it to describe their own personal transformation. Otherwise, I have a very strong allergy to the term and find it morally repugnant. The idea that some people do not count because they are not thinking for themselves in the way that the speaker believes they should is, to me, really vile. I have a hard time even getting along with somebody who I know has used the term, I find it so offensive.

Jake: Yeah, our Slack is full of both of us ranting about everyone who uses it and how much we hate it too.

Clara: It's so horrible. I'm not against ambition. I like being around people who want to change the world. I like being around people who want to do unusual things. But the more time I spend in spaces that valorize these qualities, the more I tend to run into people who have this deeply dehumanizing view of others. How separable are these things?

Cate: My first instinct is that you're seeing some sort of selection effect, where sociopaths tend to do both. People who tend to view others in transactional terms are also people who are high agency, in the sense that they have never bothered to learn social scripts. They are very low in conscientiousness. And so, naturally, without any study, they are able to exude high-agency instincts. A large part of learning high agency is learning not to be so constrained in your view of the world and of what comprises possible action. The people who, for whatever reason, never learn those things in the first place are who we think of as naturally agentic — but they are also high in dark triad traits.

So this is a consistent concern that I also have: that it is probably the worst people that you can think of who are really high agency. Agency itself is not necessarily a good thing. It becomes a good thing as a toolkit, developed by people who are also high in conscientiousness, who want good things for the world, and who might otherwise be constrained by narrow perspectives on what counts as socially acceptable action.

Jake: What's your model for how someone actually gains agency? Where did it come from for you; what happened around age 30? My own experience, and that of others I’ve spoken with, is that you can read plenty about self-determination or self-actualization that simply doesn’t click, until, one day, it does. That experience feels to me much more like grace than something that can be deliberately chosen or affected.

Cate: I think that there are a few different types of situations which reliably prompt people towards this direction. The first one that I ever benefited from was LSD. Drug experiences can be really useful in extracting you from your ordinary environment and giving you a newfound perspective on how you’re living your life. I think if I had never tried LSD, I might plausibly still be a lawyer living in DC. So psychedelics in particular — maybe MDMA.

Another is something that I discuss in my TED Talk and in the book: desperation, or call it being in emergency mode. I was trying to escape from the very low-agency point of addiction. Sometimes life becomes unbearable, and that prompts you to take dramatic action. In addiction circles, this is called the gift of desperation. That can be a result of addiction, but it can also be a health scare, or any event that serves as a trigger to reevaluate how you are living.

The third category is exposure to high-agency people. You can osmose agency from your environment if you're exposed to the right kinds of people. I experienced this while at Alvea, my gig before Astera, where I was working with a couple of people who were radically high agency — total outliers in this sense. I saw how they operated in the world and how much they were willing to question. That was really instructive for me.

So psychedelics, desperation, exposure to high-agency people. I think those are the standard things. And then there is just grace. Sometimes people wake up one day and they're like, oh, I don't like the way that I'm living. And that happens. But it's less reliable for me.

Jake: From a predictive processing framework, it strikes me that a lot of what you're talking about is just finding some way to break your priors about what’s possible for yourself.

Cate: Totally.

Jake: How, then, does the book fit into the broader project of actually providing people with agency?

Cate: I guess I'm trying to provide a fourth pathway, which is: Somebody puts a book in front of you and gives you something to think about. Agency has a reputation for being an inherent trait, as opposed to something deliberately cultivated. I think that fairly describes how a lot of people pick up agency. If it's not inherent, then it can be a matter of luck — who they happen to meet, or life circumstances that call them to become higher agency.

But I think agency is something that can be deliberately cultivated by a lot more people. And the hope is that I'm able to describe a useful set of approaches to life that cause people to feel more free and able to do what they want to — as an alternative to taking acid or bumping into people, you know?

Clara: This is also something I've noticed in my own life. Moving to the Bay Area and ending up in a very particular community here was really instrumental in me deciding I could do things that had not been on my action menu before. On the other hand, it's always hard for me to tell. When am I doing something that is actually, again, high agency? And when is it something that my community considers valuable, or cool, or agentic?

Cate: Working in AI safety is a version of this too. There are certain scripts you can follow that seem radical from the perspective of somebody outside of the community, but within the community, they're just the way that things are done. It can be easy to delude yourself into thinking that you are doing something radical and creative as an expression of your own deep interests, when in fact you are doing what everybody around you is doing. This is not an indictment of AI safety, or anybody in particular. [...]

Clara: What do you think about the relationship between agency and risk?

Cate: There definitely is a relationship. It's interesting: a lot of what I view as high agency involves taking a chance on something that is uncertain, instead of sticking with something certain. For example: Going to work at a startup instead of taking a corporate job, or deciding to break up with your partner of two years who you aren't enthusiastic about marrying, knowing there's a chance you won't meet anybody that you are more excited to date.

I think that there is an openness to risk and uncertainty that seems to go hand in hand with agency. Beyond that, there's probably a sociological overlap: many of the groups especially drawn to agency discourse right now also tend to be risk-loving for other reasons.

Fundamentally, I believe that most people take too few risks and limit their results in life because of that. Embracing some degree of risk is probably part and parcel of a high-agency mindset. 

by Cate Hall, Clara Collier, Jake Eaton, Asterisk |  Read more:

Image: via Harper Collins Publishers

[ed. See also (from Ms Hall's substack Useful Fictions): How to be more agentic.]