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
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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

How a 'Hardwired Pause' on AI Development Might Work

If the world’s government and AI leaders ever agree to pause frontier AI training, is an international pact really feasible? How would it be implemented, coordinated and monitored?

In a first-of-its-kind academic study released today (Friday, Oct. 9), a multidisciplinary team of 26 researchers maps out a path toward an international, mutually verified pause of frontier AI training of at least 10 years. The team — which includes professors Barry Eichengreen and Stuart Russell from UC Berkeley and faculty from other top institutions, including Princeton, Stanford, Harvard and Oxford — combines expertise in computer science, economics, history, international relations, and Chinese and American politics with practical experience in diplomacy and government.

 

The researchers focus primarily on a plan that halts the production of AI training chips and replaces them over time with specialized “inference-only” chips, which serve fast, efficient inference on existing AI models but are not practically useful for training new models. Such a plan would permit the continued use of currently available AI products, while preventing new AI models from overwhelming states with social or economic disruption or threats to their national security. They also suggest verification measures that would allow world leaders to assure nervous rivals that they are upholding the pause agreement.

“We consider a scenario in which world leaders want to pause if they can be confident that others are pausing or that defections would be detected quickly enough,” writes co-organizer Wesley Holliday, a UC Berkeley philosophy professor, in the study. 

Frontier AI training refers to the development of ever more powerful AI models. In a hardwired pause of such training, societies could control how powerful these models are allowed to get. If they judge that certain models can offer economic and scientific benefits, a hardwired pause could give them a way to reap the benefits before they become powerful enough to pose catastrophic risks, thus avoiding the dangers of an uncontrolled AI race.

The rapid progress of frontier AI systems, combined with leading AI companies’ recent struggles to prevent their models from escaping containment and committing cybercrimes, has prompted widespread calls for a global pause until these systems can be built safely and controllably. For strategic reasons, however, a long-term pause could be difficult to arrange even if parties agree that it would be in their interests: without effective verification measures, rival companies or nations may fear that others will defect and thereby put them at a commercial or geopolitical disadvantage.

But the Working Group on AI Pause Feasibility’s detailed, 200-page report addresses such roadblocks with a framework for mutual verification.

Stopping, replacing, retiring AI training chips is key

Frontier AI training requires AI chips, which states can govern. The supply chain for AI chips is highly concentrated with several chokepoints, bolstering governments’ ability to enforce rules on their production.

“Bypassing existing supply chains is extraordinarily difficult,” writes study co-organizer Will Fithian, UC Berkeley associate professor of statistics. “An international prohibition on frontier AI training can take advantage of this fact about the hardware needed for AI training.”

The report proposes halting the production of AI training chips, which are needed to develop more powerful AI models. Over time, most or all of the pre-pause stock of such chips would be phased out. They would be replaced by inference-only AI chips, which are capable of fast, energy-efficient AI inference on approved models but are not practical for training new frontier AI models — even if stolen or seized — due to constraints hardwired into the chips.

During the chip replacement process, other verification measures would prevent residual training-capable AI chips from being used for frontier AI training.

Fithian and Holliday add that technologies needed for inference-only AI chips already are being developed for purely economic reasons, but that their economic attractiveness is currently limited by the rapid turnover of new models. If the training of new frontier models were prohibited, a hardwired pause would increase the economic advantages of these specialized chips and spur innovation in the development of other inference-only chips.

Other highlights of the report include:

• How a hardwired pause could be made politically palatable by offering ways to pursue AI-powered scientific and medical research, retain strategic insurance against being left behind in the AI race by defecting states, and pass on the economic benefits of cheaper inference to consumers.

• The new chips’ reduced resource demands, which would decrease their environmental impact and improve frictions in the U.S. between data center operators and local communities.

• How a hardwired pause safeguards against both covert evasion — when a state secretly trains new frontier models while ostensibly adhering to verification procedures — and overt breakout — when a state openly abrogates the pause in an attempt to build a much more powerful frontier model before other states could respond.

The researchers agree that a hardwired pause’s success depends on the cooperation of world leaders and their willingness to retire or transfer pre-pause stock to other jurisdictions or internationally governed data centers, such as scientific preserves. [...]

“Coordination is possible if the decision makers care enough about the future,” the authors write, “not just immediate payoffs, and if monitoring is adequate to support credible consequences for defections.”

by Sarah Fullerton, UC Berkeley News |  Read more:

Image: Yuki Iwamura/AP
[ed. Executive Summary here. Full Report here. Stop feeding the beast. Sounds reasonable until you consider a couple of constraints: like, tanking the economy (AI spending is the biggest single factor propping it up); and trillion dollar IPOs hanging in the balance (who's failure could also produce a cascade of financial failures).]

Sabra Field, September Corn
via:

Camille Lemoine

via:

Trump's Boomer-Palooza

It’s nearly 9 p.m. inside Dallas’s American Airlines Center, and Trump supporters are waving their cowboy hats in the air. They are slowly rocking from side to side as Lee Greenwood belts out “God Bless the USA” to the party faithful. The mood is triumphant, even euphoric, particularly once the president enters stage left. He is about to announce the dawn of a new golden age, but there’s a catch: “You know what happens if you don’t vote?” he asks. “You go to hell. You know that, okay? You go to hell, and I don’t want that to happen to you.”

This week’s GOP midterm convention — the first of its kind in more than 40 years — was supposed to be the big reset for a party hemorrhaging public support amid an unpopular war, rising fuel prices, and a broader cost-of-living crisis. Against this grim backdrop, the gathering, which became known as Trumpapalooza, was a chance for the party to regroup, fire up the base, and wrest back control of a narrative that could derail its electoral hopes in November.

It ended with the threat of eternal damnation (albeit a jokey one). [...]

Nearly everyone I spoke to at the convention acknowledged that a generational divide inside the party was emerging. Some dismissed it as a youthful rebellion, while others offered a bleaker diagnosis. They argued that Trump was the final string in the Republican bow, and once that snapped, there was no coming back. He was supposed to be the galvanizing force around which the entire movement was built. Now, he had become the very thing pulling it apart.

Conventions are rarely known for attracting the young and hip. And Trumpapalooza was no different. Inside this jumbo-sized arena, where every doorway and entrance was festooned with some kind of Trump poster, it looked more like a Caribbean cruise holiday than a political convention. The vast majority of the crowd were retirees, dressed head to toe in their finest MAGA regalia: sequin jackets with “DJT” emblazoned on the back, star-spangled cowboy boots, and T-shirts with Trump’s Georgia mugshot on the front. There was no alcohol, but spirits were so high I thought something had been slipped into their drinks. It was like Glastonbury for boomercons.

On both days, the stadium was slow to fill and never reached full capacity. It did, however, grow lively as familiar faces took to the stage. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas got one of the biggest cheers of the convention when he declared that “Sharia law has no place in America” — a point that was echoed, again and again, by other speakers. Most focused on the twin threat of Islamo-communism, punctuated by a recorded message from Trump intoning, “America must never be a communist country,” between each speech.

It was like a form of exposure therapy, repeated so many times that it felt more like a mantra than a message. Older attendees lapped it up, but the few young conservatives I spoke to were less impressed. “So far, all I’ve heard is communism, communism, communism, and that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon,” said one. “It’s like their brains have broken.” Another told me that he wasn’t even sure why he came. [...]

“Guys like James Fishback and Nick Fuentes are guys we have to consider,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief adviser, tells me. “Young people are telling older people that they don’t want to hear about legal immigration anymore because legal immigrants are stealing their jobs. They’re not hearing about mass deportations anymore, either. Young people are feeling the brunt of that. They don’t care about the Greater Israel project.”

This may be an extreme position, but it reflects the anti-establishment sentiment coursing through the young Right and Left. Both camps share a deep hostility toward the party establishment and a desire for a far more radical policy program. One side wants no borders. The other wants a sealed border. One wants to abolish ICE. The other wants to deport millions. One wants to abolish the Senate. The other wants a CEO-monarch. The only point on which the two sides converge is Israel.

I asked Sean Spicer, Trump’s former press secretary, if he is concerned by this dynamic. He agreed that young voters had become more populist in the last few years, but it did not pose a major problem for the GOP. “Young voters are very transactional, and they’re not as motivated as seniors,” he says. “If they’re not going to vote Republican, I’d rather they just don’t vote. That’s not great, but it’s not the worst scenario.” [...]

A little more than 40 years ago, V.S. Naipaul went to the Republican National Convention, also in Dallas. He bemoaned the quality of speeches, complaining that all contained “the same tone, the same personality (or absence of it), the same language: unallusive, cleansed, sterile; nerveless and dead; computer language, programmed sometimes to rise to passion, but getting no higher than copywriter’s glib,” he wrote. “As though, at the heart of this great, man-magnifying occasion, there was a hollow, a vacancy.”

Today, that vacancy feels deeper than ever. As one young attendee succinctly put it to me: “It’s over, but we’re not allowed to say it’s over.”

by James Billout, Unherd |  Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. Having observed Trump for over 60 years, his MO is pretty consistent: he's either lying, projecting, scamming, or suing - frequently all at once. Not to mention the pathological need for self-promotion. How anyone who experienced his first term and said "yeah, we need more of that" is beyond comprehension. Tariffs, DOGE, Greenland, Canada, Venezuela, Iran, fishing boat murders, ICE murders and kidnappings, public and cultural facilities screw-ups, Epstein, Putin, Strait of Hormuz oil, rising inflation, election interference, Big Beautiful tax breaks for the wealthy, new Medicaid and Medicare restrictions, media exiles, crytocurrency scams, convicted felon pardons. And more (a free jet in every pot)? All facilitated by a Cabinet of boot-licking, incompetent sycophants. Do his supporters really want more of this, by a president who only cares about half the country? Guess so. What a poltical philosophy to live by (such as it is). See also: Our Increasingly Insecure President (NYT):]

***

At least the old political machines used to give you five bucks if you voted for the machine ticket; Trump is giving voters a $5,000 I.O.U., for this money he says he’s going to give them. And this, of course, from a guy who is famous for not paying his debts.

But the very fact that I am mentioning this is what Trump wants people to do, because he doesn’t want people to talk about the war or inflation, or lots of other things. And I think that this is going to be a real contest between whether it’s a normal midterm election, where Democrats can focus the election on Trump and his record. Which, as Charlie Cook says — the great political analyst, who’s very careful in what he says — a lot of Trump voters think they were victims of a bait-and-switch, given Trump’s priorities, when they voted for him in the presidential race.

And Trump goes: Here’s $5,000, and by the way, the Democrats are communists, and you can’t possibly elect them.

He’s almost daring voters to judge him on this record, frankly, of promises he has not kept. But he seems afraid, when he essentially has to offer — he’s reduced to offering people money: I’ll give you five grand apiece, American adults, if the Republicans win.

In essence, it’s sort of being reduced to the offer of a bribe. If we’ve learned something about Trump, though, it’s that whatever happens in November, he’s going to declare victory. If the Republicans do better than expected, he’ll say, probably correctly, that it was because of him. It’s because of his coattails, because he asked people to vote as if he is on the ballot himself. If the Republicans get spanked, it’ll be because, when he’s not on the ballot, people just aren’t excited — because it’s really all about him. He’s always been able to separate his brand from that of the party. Trump is very good at declaring victory even when he loses — sometimes especially when he loses.

Inside Larry Ellison's Wide Web of Power, Money and Politics

PROLOGUE: THE ISLAND

The first sign was the orange Corvette.

In the early days of July, the residents of Lanai started seeing a C8 Stingray the color of a traffic cone tearing along the island’s switchback roads. Then other signals came. The clerk working the cigarette counter at the Pine Isle Market said her nephew, a private chef, had flown in and had been shopping for a big group.

At the Four Seasons down in Manele, the island’s pharmacist Kert Shuster was leaving brunch at Nobu when he saw a security detail he recognized moving through the lobby. It’d been a while, but Shuster knew—he’d just missed Larry Ellison.

A few years had passed, it seemed, since the man who owns all but a sliver of the Hawaiian island nine miles west of Maui had last set foot there. Now Ellison and his extended family were staying in a new compound above Manele’s steep volcanic shoreline. The cluster of houses was built by Japanese carpenters whom Ellison had once brought in and boarded in private barracks up-island.

For Lanai’s 3,000 regular residents, actually seeing Ellison is rare. His presence is more typically sensed—like a change in air pressure.

“I noticed the salad bar was really good that day,” Shuster tells me. “That’s what it’s like when Larry’s back. People step up. Things just get better.”

For the past 40 years, the people of Lanai have lived at the pleasure of one billionaire or another. Before Ellison there was David Murdock, a real estate magnate who took control of the island in 1985, when it was still a pineapple plantation. Murdock was a visible ruler who’d make his rounds in the local stores, attend community meetings, and give employees he had fired 30 minutes’ notice before sending them off in a helicopter. But Lanai had been a ­money pit for him, and the 2008 crash was the final straw. In 2012, he sold it to Ellison for a reported $300 million.

If Murdock ran the island like the plantation owner he was, Ellison runs it like a distant god. He points, and an amenity appears.

His first move was refurbishing the community pool that Murdock had closed. He answered the housing shortage with the Hokuao development, where the homes are pastel-colored and stamped everywhere with the touch of their benefactor. Each has a Tesla solar roof, a Big Green Egg in the yard, two Japanese Toto toilets, and interiors painted a custom color called Ellison White. (It’s a Benjamin Moore white base with a shot of oxide yellow and a half shot of black, your choice for sheen may vary.) Shuster, who lives in Hokuao, once told Ellison how much he loved the place. “I feel like I moved into your house,” he had said.

“Good,” his host responded. “I wanted to make it like a place that even I could live in.”

Ellison owns Lanai’s only gas station, where a sign reminds customers they’re paying “the Lowest Prices in Hawaii.” And he upgraded the movie theater that today bills itself as being “the crown jewel of theater experiences in Hawai‘i.” In July it was showing Supergirl, which was produced by Warner Bros., the movie studio Ellison, along with his son, will soon control.

“Sigourney Weaver lives here part-time, and she says that this is the most beautiful theater in the world,” Gail Allen, a longtime Lanai resident, tells me. “It serves truffle-oil popcorn,” she adds.

The sense is that life is pretty good on the island since Ellison bought it. Or at least could be worse. “We could have become Molokai,” says Alberta de Jetley, another longtime resident who ran the island’s newspaper, Lanai Today, before selling it to Ellison.

At a picnic table outside Richard’s Market, the other grocery store on Lanai (this one Ellison owns), a handful of residents hold a coffee klatch de Jetley calls the Laugh Group. That morning, beneath overcast skies, the Laugh Group was discussing the island’s recently arrived proprietor.

One member, Mari Lynn Di Lullo, brought up a time she saw a Tesla straddling two stalls in a parking lot. “Jeez, look at the way they parked,” she’d uttered to members of a security detail loitering nearby. “If you didn’t know better, you would think he owned the place.”

Just then the owner of the car—and everything else—appeared, laughing.

“He’s not pretentious,” Di Lullo told her coffee group. “He’s low on the radar.”

The radar. Interesting choice of words about a man who has made a case for a mass AI-enabled surveillance system.

That afternoon a woman came through the grocery checkout line wearing a Sensei Farms sweatshirt. The company is one of Ellison’s island projects: a hydroponic greenhouse concept meant to be the Tesla of agriculture. Eight years in and ­several hundred million dollars later, Sensei Farms describes itself as “a thought ­leader in greenhouse-grown produce.” It has an endcap with boxed salad mixes at the island’s grocery stores.

I introduced myself to the woman and asked what she did for the farm. She smiled.

“They said there would be a journalist on the island today,” the employee told me before starting to walk away. “They warned us about you in our morning meeting.”

I hadn’t told anyone at Sensei Farms I was coming.

Ellison’s newest gift to Lanai is at the entrance to the Four Seasons. In a man-made lagoon surrounded by fake lava rock stands a monumental bronze he commissioned from British artist Damien Hirst. It shows a crew of Polynesian voyagers in an outrigger canoe flung skyward on a cresting wave that up close is revealed to be not water but a knot of sea monsters. A shark bursts through the swell, its mouth open wide enough to take the canoe whole. A mo‘o, the lizard spirit of Hawaiian water, coils below the hull. Amidships, a chief in a feathered cape clutches the ankle of another paddler who is facing away. A loose paddle, some cargo, and a few bronze flowers slide down a wave. And above all of it, from something beneath the surface, hang two giant octopus arms with suckers the size of dinner plates, muscular and curled and about to crash down on everyone.

It’s titled Overcoming Adversity.

PART I: THE CEPHALOPOD

Ellison has long been fixated on the octopus. Cephalopod Corp is what he named the corporate entity atop his private investments. He has another company called Octopus Holdings LP, which, with its general partner Tentacle Corp, put up the money behind Lanai. His venture capital firm that over the years has backed Netsuite, Theranos, and Sensei Farms is called Tako Ventures, tako being the Japanese word for octopus. In many of the villas he built on Lanai hang ukiyo-e prints, many with a tako.

For years it was Ellison’s quiet way to talk about himself.

“His joke is he is the octopus,” says a former executive who worked closely with Ellison. This person was one of several dozen sources I spoke to for this story, most under the condition of anonymity to be able to discuss sensitive matters.

“He loves being the éminence grise. He loves the notion that he’s so powerful, there’s nothing he can’t get into.”

The joke has become a fact in full view. At 82, the last of the founding moguls of Silicon Valley who’s still in the game has extended his grasp into a convergence of power that no other fortune could manage. Where Elon Musk built an empire that’s loud and cultish, Ellison—his mentor and close friend—has pieced together something patient, proximate, and structural. The kind whose shape is clear once you see how far it goes.

One arm of the octopus is wrapped around Oracle, the 49-year-old company he is dragging from dull database vendor into one of the essential data center providers of the AI boom. It is a damn-the-torpedoes move into infrastructure that’s risky even for an executive who nearly lost the company once before. He has saddled Oracle with $130 billion in debt, turned its free cash flow negative, and chained its fortunes to a single volatile partner, OpenAI.

A second arm has closed on American media. Larry’s son David has transformed the independent production company Skydance into the last great consolidator in Hollywood, largely with Dad’s money. Skydance has gobbled up Paramount and with it CBS News; now it has won Warner Bros. Discovery in a $110 billion deal. Ellison also has the American spin-off of TikTok, which an Oracle-led consortium pried loose from its Chinese owner.

A third appendage winds toward political power. As Silicon Valley staged its noisy migration to Trumpism, Ellison worked quietly to influence the president, establishing an effective if not always close relationship. Outside America, he bankrolls his friend Tony Blair’s nonprofit organization, which pushes governments to adopt new technologies like AI. And he has been a steadfast supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu, hosting the prime minister on Lanai while the Israeli leader faced corruption charges at home.

Ellison has had a reputation as a killer in Silicon Valley for decades. In 2011, Bryan Cantrill—who quit Oracle within a year of its taking over Sun Microsystems—told a roomful of engineers not to “anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.” Instead, said Cantrill, think of him as a lawnmower: It doesn’t hate you, it just mows, and if you put your hand in, it’ll chop it off. Cantrill told me recently he hasn’t changed his mind.

by Tom Dotan, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Images: Yuko Shimizu; Damien Hurst

[ed. Vicious and evil.]