On the Measure of Intelligence

Abstract 

To make deliberate progress towards more intelligent and more human-like artificial systems, we need to be following an appropriate feedback signal: we need to be able to define and evaluate intelligence in a way that enables comparisons between two systems, as well as comparisons with humans. Over the past hundred years, there has been an abundance of attempts to define and measure intelligence, across both the fields of psychology and AI. We summarize and critically assess these definitions and evaluation approaches, while making apparent the two historical conceptions of intelligence that have implicitly guided them. We note that in practice, the contemporary AI community still gravitates towards benchmarking intelligence by comparing the skill exhibited by AIs and humans at specific tasks, such as board games and video games. We argue that solely measuring skill at any given task falls short of measuring intelligence, because skill is heavily modulated by prior knowledge and experience: unlimited priors or unlimited training data allow experimenters to “buy” arbitrary levels of skills for a system, in a way that masks the system’s own generalization power. We then articulate a new formal definition of intelligence based on Algorithmic Information Theory, describing intelligence as skill-acquisition efficiency and highlighting the concepts of scope, generalization difficulty, priors, and experience, as critical pieces to be accounted for in characterizing intelligent systems. Using this definition, we propose a set of guidelines for what a general AI benchmark should look like. Finally, we present a new benchmark closely following these guidelines, the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), built upon an explicit set of priors designed to be as close as possible to innate human priors. We argue that ARC can be used to measure a human-like form of general fluid intelligence and that it enables fair general intelligence comparisons between AI systems and humans.

by François Chollet, Google, Inc./ArXiv, Nov. 5, 2019 |  Read more:

[ed. Click the pdf on the arXiv site for the full article. Apparently this is the acknowledged industry standard for assessing AI progress; a benchmark to determine when AI eventually reaches true Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). I don't have the ability to judge, but apparently the most powerful agent so far (as measured by this test) was just quietly revealed by OpenAI, the day before Christmas. o3- is a giant leap forward. See this post for everything we know so far (from 30,000 ft. up, to digging in the weeds): AI #96: o3 But Not Yet For Thee (DWAV). And: Time's Up for AI Policy (Miles Brundage):]

***

"The announcement of o3 today makes clear that superhuman coding and math are coming much sooner than many expected, and we have barely begun to think through or prepare for the implications of this (see this thread) – let alone the implications of superhuman legal reasoning, medical reasoning, etc. or the eventual availability of automated employees that can quickly learn to perform nearly any job doable on a computer.]"

John Moore. Spill, 2027. Ten Days, 2006-07.
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God in the Machine

Silicon Valley’s Obsession With AI Looks a Lot Like Religion (MIT Press Reader)

Image: Tech Agnostic, MIT Press

"The point here may be obvious, even painfully so: Our computing culture has become so ubiquitous and insular, so devoted and devotional, that it repeatedly recycles the tropes of traditional religions, because these are the patterns human beings evolved to deal with our anxieties about life, death, and the future. Our lives are painfully finite and contingent on countless factors far beyond our understanding, let alone our control, and we wish this were not so, because it is comforting to feel in charge of one’s own destiny. So we imagine that forces far beyond us are both subject to our logic and interested in our thoughts. (...)

“But,” you might very reasonably ask me, “you’re not talking about actual, noncrazy people who literally worship religion in a traditional way and worship tech at the same time, and think that the two things they’re doing are one and the same?”

To such a question, sadly, I would simply stare back at you, stone-faced.

To which perhaps you’d reply, “Are you?”

Pelle Cass, Futures Tennis, Brighton, Massachusetts (detail)

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[ed. Reminds me of the hilarious Eschaton competition in DFW's Infinite Jest.]

Social History of the Cardboard Box

Amid confusion there was a friendly sign. A smile. An arrow. A smarrow. Stacked up between street trees along the service road behind my Manhattan apartment were thousands of cardboard boxes standing on end — Chewy, Blue Apron, Peloton — the rising stars of internet commerce in the early months of the pandemic. And, of course, Amazon. Every third box was Amazon’s, instantly recognizable, with that famous logomark connecting two letters in the company name, promising to deliver with alacrity everything from A to Z. This was essential work, or legally constructed as such. Almost overnight, East 23rd Street became a curbside distribution hub, where workers unloaded trucks and moved boxes by handcart, bringing shampoo and socks, meal kits and milk-bones, stationary bikes and sourdough starter kits to the 30,000 or so humans, plus a few thousand pets, holed up in Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town. We extracted our wares, carefully flattened and stacked the boxes, sent the cardboard back to the curb, ready for reincarnation at a recycling center. There was comfort in this ritual — or at least familiarity, which passes for comfort in difficult times. The smarrow points the way forward. (...)

As historian Maria Rentetzi writes, “the cardboard box — the waste of our commercial world — is recycled in such a way as to make visible the disorder in our societies, the faults of capitalism.” It is an abject object that touches all parts of the city, from the granite kitchen island to the sewer grate. And for many of us, the cardboard box is our closest touchpoint to globalized trade, structuring our relations with people in distant places. It brings the logistics chain to our doorstep. The magnificently ripped metal freight container may get the Economist cover shot, but the plain brown box delivers messages to our homes. Its very existence in our homes, Marshall McLuhan would say, is the message. In the immortal words of Walter Paepcke, founder of the Container Corporation of America, “packages are not just commodities; they are communications.” 

Let’s unpack that, shall we? Boxes are media in multiple senses of the word. They’re lithographed surfaces designed to be read, and they’re dimensional containers that mediate between outside and inside worlds. They’re “media of transport and information, shapers of public opinion and consumer desire, and means of targeting attention.” And they’re “logistical media” that “arrange people and property into time and space,” that “coordinate and control the movement of labor, people, and things situated along and within global supply chains. The cardboard box is a minimalist form with maximalist ambitions, an arboreal apparatus made from one of the world’s most abundant renewable resources, then filled with plastic and moved around by copious quantities of oil. It doesn’t just coordinate and control landscapes; it transforms them. 

Cardboard’s ubiquity rests on simple claims: I can hold that, and I can go there. The Container Corporation of America was founded in 1926, and upon those claims it built an empire with surprising reach. The CCA made collapsible shipping boxes, and it transformed packaging into a science and an art. It advanced market research, shaped mid-century taste, and altered the chromatic universe through color standards. (...)

Of course, the spiritual heir to Walter Paepcke’s CCA — the vertically-integrated, multiply-armed hegemon of packaging, shipping, branding, resource extraction, and cultural influencing — is Jeff Bezos’s Amazon. Meanwhile, the intense relationship between cardboard boxes and graphic design, fused in the art department at the CCA, has influenced a new generation of package design.

The rise in online commerce has created what The Atlantic’s Amanda Mull calls a “packaging arms race” wherein the box is commonly designed alongside the product. “Regular people are conversant in the language of branding,” and are also branding themselves, through the aesthetic spectacle of unboxing videos on TikTok and Instagram. That, in turn, has led to more telegenic boxes. As Orora Packaging Solutions’ Chris Bradley told the publication Packaging Dive: “I’m thinking about the way that a YouTuber … would unbox it when we’re in the design process, because we want to have that big ‘aha’ or ‘wow’ moment.” Packaging is engineered to produce a crinkly sound, to evoke sonic memories such as the rustle of tissue paper on Christmas morning. Boxes are fit tight, anticipation building with just the right amount of friction and drag, until the lid slides off, releasing a gust of air and a subtle pop. Apple’s elegant boxes are tiny white-cube galleries showing off objets d’art. And sometimes patterns or messages are designed inside the box to cultivate interior ambience and intimacy. (...)

The mark emphasizes efficiency and systematicity. It wants us to feel plugged into the systems of global capitalism that bring this fuel to our doorstep, the logistics hubs and data centers and cardboard waystations, and the geographies and communities shaped around them. All those boxes piled up on 23rd Street, whether stamped with a crass Walmart starburst or a “local everywhere” sunflower, they’re all printed somewhere, on offset presses in factories that flatten and fold the fibers from pines grown in the southeastern United States or Brazil or some new frontier. And they’ll have a life beyond their brief stay in our homes, whether they’re sent to the recycling plant or repurposed for local uses — in some cases, providing shelter for, or delivering humanitarian aid to, human beings who have little time for Instagram or fancy olive oil. (...)

Under consumer pressure, Amazon and Walmart have also implemented “sustainable” packaging standards in an effort to cut back on all the boxes and plastic air pillows. But that hasn’t worked exactly as planned. It’s spawned a new repackaging industry, which relies on intermediary contractors to unbox and re-box goods from third-party sellers so they meet Amazon rules. As Josh Dzieza explains, “Amazon only accepts goods that are packaged a certain way. Products need to be made ready for the automated gauntlet of the fulfillment center. Old barcodes and prices need to be covered up and new ones added. Glass needs to be bubble wrapped. Loose items need to be bagged.” These re-boxers, who operate their own small-scale prep centers across the country, and especially in states without sales tax, are an integral, if invisible, link in Amazon’s logistical network. And that network, too, runs on cardboard.

Cardboard is more recyclable than other packaging materials, yet each regenerative cycle shortens and weakens the pine fibers, pushing degraded bits through the screens. Fibers can typically be recycled only five to seven times. So our seemingly endless need for boxes demands new trees. In a vivid feature for The New York Times Magazine, Matthew Shaer reports, “In Georgia and Alabama, family operations have given way to small empires of tree plantations, built largely on private land, and largely by planting pines in a region where other types of trees — or other varieties of crops, like cotton — once grew.” These monocultures are less biodiverse and more poorly able to store carbon, filter drinking water, and reduce erosion. It’s “just pines, pines, as far as the eye could see.” New plantation pines and old Amazon boxes feed the region’s new mega-mills. (...)

In his 1946 book Paperboard and Paper Containers, Harry J. Bettendorf extolled the civilizational gifts of the cardboard box: “Out of the piles, confusion and dirt of the earlier period came the cleanliness, order, precision and efficiency of mass production goods through the employment of mass production packages of paperboard.” In this moment, in the pause after World War II, after the Container Corporation had sent its boxes into battle, but before it endeavored to shape civic discourse through Aspen elites, here is a historian who believed cardboard boxes could deliver us to a better future. Little did he know what piles of waste, ideological confusion, and environmental destruction would be generated by the whole box-powered system of mass production and hyper-capitalism. Bettendorf’s box was a Trojan horse. A smarrow. A promise of progress that delivered not only order, precision, and prosperity, but also waste and exploitation.

This medium, in its most rudimentary form, has six faces, with two liners — an inside and an outside surface — each of which tells a different story about its journey, and ours. A package appears on our doorstep. Its printed exterior graphics identify and emblematize the sender. Its interior graphics constitute an intimate form of address. The mailing label on top documents, in terms intelligible to the humans and machines that constitute a delivery service, the route by which which its contents have reached us. What terrains and portals has it passed through? Who has scanned its barcode, and where? The seal on the bottom chronicles the box’s journey from paper roll through three-dimensional form awaiting fulfillment and activation. That seal, a story, has an unwritten preface, too: it tells of trees and forests, of land as yet another subject of mass production. It also has a tacit postscript: reincarnation as a placard, a plea, as cartonera, as a wish that its own future conditions of production and distribution express and enact a world better than the one we have now. A box that treads more lightly on the landscapes from which it derives and through which it travels.

by Shannon Mattern, Places Journal | Read more:
Images: Nick Shere, via Flickr under license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; Sainsbury Archive; Fabrice Florin, via Flickr under license CC BY-SA 2.0

[ed. Always feel slightly conflicted when I get a few new packages from Amazon (and see other piles stacked around the neighborhood). Especially when the boxes are oversized and overstuffed with packing materials. Bubble wrap for books?!]

Bleak Outlook for US Farmers

Many US midwestern grain farmers will lose money this year after reaping a bumper crop, and the outlook for their future income is bleak.

US farmers harvested some of the largest corn and soybean crops in history this year. Big harvests traditionally weigh on crop prices because of plentiful supply. And those price pressures comes at a time when costs remain persistently high to grow corn and soybeans, the US’s most valuable crops.

That double whammy is hurting farmers. Income will vary per farmer and per state, yet even for producers in top agricultural states such as Illinois, losses could be staggering.

Agricultural economists from the University of Illinois and Ohio State University estimate that the average Illinois farm could make a loss of $30,000 for 2024. Their projections place farm incomes at the lowest level since the 1980s’ farm crisis led to bankruptcies.

The decks are stacked against farmers for 2025 as well. Costs for seed, fertilizer and other inputs rose during 2022, fueled by the Russia-Ukraine war, which also lifted crop prices to record highs.

While crop prices are down nearly 50% from those highs, in part due to a global supply glut, input prices remain elevated. Sterling Smith, an independent commodities researcher, says the national average break-even price for corn is $5.67 a bushel, and $12.72 a bushel for soybeans. Those levels are far above current Chicago Board of Trade most-active futures prices of $4.43 for corn and $9.76 for soybeans.

“We’re looking at this crop, that, when it gets planted, of being a money-loser next year,” Smith says.

And things could look worse for farmers if Donald Trump places tariffs on imports. Trump pledged to impose across-the-board tariffs of 20% on all US imports, with a 60% tariff on Chinese goods. Recently, he advocated for 25% tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico.

Mexico, Canada and China are the three biggest importers of US agricultural goods, and agriculture is among the US’s biggest export engines. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates 16% of the US corn harvest and 40% of soybeans are exported. A trade war between those three countries could have both short-term and long-term impacts, Smith says.

Until the first trade war between China and the US in 2018, China was the No 1 destination for US agricultural goods. That came to a halt during the trade war, although China and the US eventually signed an agreement in 2019 to import a set amount of agricultural goods for two years.

During the skirmish, China began diversifying its suppliers, including buying from Brazil. Brazil was already a global grower and exporter of soybeans, but Chinese investment ramped up expansion, Smith says.

“China is not going to put their food supply at risk,” Smith says.

Brazil increased their soybean production by the equivalent of an area the size of the state of Kansas, and some estimates suggest it has as much as 70m acres (28m hectares) of unused pastureland it can plant to crops, the equivalent of two states the size of Iowa.

Brazil can also grow the equivalent of two crops in one year, planting soybeans in September and after that harvest, quickly plant a corn crop, he says, increasing Brazilian corn production. If Brazil continues with its aggressive expansion and the US continues its traditional output, a global situation of habitual oversupply will result, especially for soybeans, Smith says.

“The bigger, long-term problem (for the US) is production gets restructured. Brazil begins to produce a lot more, and suddenly we are pushed out of the export market,” he says, “The bottom line is maybe we have to plant fewer acres.”

by Debbie Carlson, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Tannen Maury/EPA

[ed. The last paragraph is the kicker... didn't know Brazil was such a big producer of soybeans and corn (and poised to expand further).]

Untitled

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The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter

I decided to read a 600-page book about Jimmy Carter because I was tired of only reading about the historical figures everyone already agrees are interesting.

John Adams became an HBO miniseries. Hamilton became a Broadway show. The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson became such status symbols that there was a whole pandemic meme about people ostentatiously displaying them in their Zoom backgrounds. But you never hear anyone bragging about their extensive knowledge of the Carter administration.

Like most people under 70, I was more aware of Carter’s post-presidency role as America’s kindly old grandfather, pottering around holding his wife’s hand and building Houses for Humanity. I mostly knew that he liked to wear sweaters, that he owned a peanut farm, and that he lost to Ronald Reagan.

But I wondered what, if any, hidden depths lay within the peanut farmer. Also, I wanted to enter this contest, and I didn’t want to pick a book that I thought a bunch of other people might also review. So I turned to The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, by Kai Bird. Like Carter, this book seems to have been largely forgotten. It won a Pulitzer, but I had never heard of it until I googled “best book about Jimmy Carter.” It seems to have gotten a lot less attention than similar recent biographies about Grant, Roosevelt, and Truman, and it’s hard to imagine it ever becoming a TV show or a musical.

Carter was born in 1924 in Plains, Georgia, which, as you can tell from the name “Plains,” is very dull. His father was a successful farmer, which made his family wealthy by local standards. Almost every other Plains resident during Carter’s childhood was an impoverished African-American, many of whom worked on the Carter farm, a fact that is often cited as the answer to the central mystery of Carter’s childhood: how he grew up white in the Depression-era South without becoming a huge racist. It probably doesn’t tell the whole story, though, as his siblings came out just about as racist as you’d expect.

Carter attends the Naval Academy and eventually becomes a lieutenant on a nuclear submarine. At one point, he participates in a cleanup mission in which he is lowered directly into the core of an active nuclear reactor, thus causing him to develop superpowers that he will later use to win the presidency. Perhaps because of this experience—but, more likely, because he realizes that his deep-seated religious beliefs make him a poor fit for a career in an organization designed to wage war—he quits the Navy at 29 and returns home to Plains. “God did not intend for me to kill,” he says, which would have been an awesome catchphrase had those superpowers actually been real.

Searching for a new career, Carter runs for State Senate, loses due to voter fraud, then challenges the results and wins by 15 votes in a new election. A few years later, he runs for governor, and loses for real this time, to avowed segregationist (and man with a truly awesome name) Lester Maddox. Having never experienced failure in any way before, Carter is plunged into a profound spiritual crisis by this loss. Today, we would probably just say he was depressed. But as a religious Christian in the Deep South in 1966, you don’t “get depressed,” you have a spiritual crisis.

In 1970 Carter runs for governor again. This time, however, he decides to do whatever it takes to win. He runs a sleazy campaign that flies in the face of his modern-day reputation as kindly and honest. His campaign strategy has two core planks: 1) pretend to be a racist to appeal to the masses, and 2) avoid taking a stand on any other issue. Carter describes himself nonsensically as a “conservative progressive” and avoids commenting on the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement. He’s so good at pretending to be racist that the white supremacist White Citizens Council endorses him. He even wins the endorsement of his old opponent, outgoing Governor Maddox, who’s term-limited from running again. As far as anyone can tell, Carter never expresses any second thoughts about his disingenuous behavior during the campaign. Having passed through his spiritual crisis, he’s now guided by an unshakeable faith in his own goodness—a faith that justifies a victory by any means necessary.

The “fake racist” strategy works. Carter trounces his opponent, a wealthy businessman named Carl Sanders who he caricatures as “Cuff Links Carl”—when he’s not busy falsely accusing him of corruption, or hypocritically bashing him for his support of Martin Luther King. In January 1971, Carter is sworn in as the 76th Governor of Georgia.

Just a few minutes into his inaugural speech, Carter drops the pretenses of his campaign and executes on one of the most dramatic about-faces in modern-day political history when he declares that “the era of racial discrimination in Georgia is over.” The crowd gasps audibly, and outgoing Governor Maddox denounces Carter as a liar before the inauguration is even over. But Carter doesn’t care. He’s governor now, and he’s going to do what he wants.

II.

And what he wants to do is… well, honestly, not all that much. Carter’s governing style is less “bold visionary,” more “competent manager.” He appoints more minorities to civil service jobs, starts an early childhood development program, and passes a reorg that streamlines a bunch of governmental agencies, but mostly he thinks about running for president. Governors in Georgia are limited to a single term, and Carter has national ambitions. He commits privately to a presidential run only a year into his time in the governor’s office.

When he first enters the 1976 Democratic primary, Carter is a complete unknown, and the general consensus is that he’s the longest of long shots. (“Jimmy who?” one opponent asks.) But two things go very, very right for him. First, he’s one of the few people who fully understands the changes to the Democratic primary process that were implemented after the chaos of the 1968 convention. He stakes his campaign on the now-familiar strategy of winning the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, which is groundbreaking at the time. More importantly, the fact that no one has ever heard of him turns out to be a huge advantage in the wake of Watergate, when voters are hungry for an outsider.

Despite the fact that his gubernatorial campaign was premised entirely on obscuring his actual beliefs, he opens his presidential campaign with the slogan “I’ll never lie to you.” He runs an Obama-esque campaign, emphasizing his personal background and outsider status rather than any specific accomplishments. By the time he wins the primary, he has a huge polling lead over the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, who’s unpopular thanks to his recent pardon of Richard Nixon and the memory of that time he slipped and fell down the stairs of Air Force One.

Carter then proceeds to squander almost his entire lead via a series of poor campaign decisions. First, he’s so overconfident that he refuses to prepare for his first debate with Ford, and completely bungles it as a result. He then sits for an interview with Playboy weeks before the election and, completely unprompted, mentions that he’s “looked on a lot of women with lust” in his life and “committed adultery in [his] heart many times.” There’s a growing perception that Carter is, in the infamous words of one journalist, “a weirdo.” (...)

Although his lead shrinks consistently up through election day, Carter nonetheless manages to squeak out a narrow victory against Ford, 49.9 to 47.9%. Had just 10,000 voters in two states flipped their votes, Carter would have lost the electoral college. But they didn’t. And now, the weirdo has become the president.

III.

You’re Jimmy Carter, and just 23 years ago you were an unemployed Navy dropout. Now, you’re the most powerful man in the world. What do you do next?

The first answer is, you micromanage to a spectacular degree. Alone among all presidents since Truman, Carter refuses to appoint a Chief of Staff. He then immediately demonstrates why he needs one by involving himself in a comical number of minor decisions, including personally deciding which magazine subscriptions his speechwriting team should get, cutting down on the amount of food served at breakfast with congressional leaders, and canceling car service for his staff because it’ll save $92,000 of the $409 billion federal budget. Oh, and he also insists that all White House thermostats be set at 65° (55° at night), though this last mandate is eventually rescinded when the staff—some of whom are so cold they’ve been typing with gloves on—rebel.

The charitable interpretation of these decisions is that, in the wake of Watergate, Carter wants to emphasize that he and his staff are servants of the American people. The uncharitable interpretation is that Carter is an obsessive egomaniac who believes there is no situation that won’t be improved by his personal involvement.

The next thing Carter tries to do is a little bit of everything. Since his campaign was mostly focused on his personality and outsider status, he doesn’t have a specific core promise to fulfill, and as a result, his time in office is a hodgepodge of different legislative priorities. Sounds like a recipe for complete gridlock, but amazingly, Carter gets a good chunk of his agenda through Congress. He deregulates the airline and trucking industries, establishes the Department of Energy, and teams up with Ralph Nader to implement vehicle safety regulations. He passes a sweeping civil service restructuring bill, reforms Social Security, and expands the Head Start program. Oh, and along the way he also legalizes craft brewing. (...)

Somehow, he does all of this while having one of the worst relationships with Congress of any modern president. Some of the conflict is personal: Carter is the anti-LBJ in that he hates dealmaking and is perpetually unwilling to compromise. Deep down, he sees the dirty business of politics as inherently sinful, and he doesn’t understand why everyone can’t just do the right thing, especially when he’s explained to them at great length why it’s the right thing to do. He has huge Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, but they relate to each other with barely veiled contempt. (It doesn’t help that Carter is the complete personal antithesis of Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, a classic old-school Irish Democrat who loves back-slapping, cutting deals, and being a part of the Establishment Carter ran against.) Carter repeatedly vetoes bills passed by his own party because he has minor issues with them. At one point, he petulantly vetoes a $37bn defense bill because he thinks one specific item in it, representing less than 2% of the total, is a waste of money.

But some of the conflict is structural. To his credit, Carter is one of the first politicians to see that the post-New Deal consensus is fraying. Economic growth is slowing, inflation is rising, union membership is declining, all of which means that the traditional Democratic way of doing things—launching new federal programs, catering to interest groups, and accepting some waste and inefficiency as a cost of doing business—is on its way out, even if the old-school Dems don’t realize it yet. Really, Carter is less of a Democrat and more of a 1920’s-style Progressive Republican in the model of Teddy Roosevelt: focused on efficient, rational government, non-ideological problem-solving, and ethical stewardship.

Carter finds more success in the arena of foreign policy, where instead of dealing with mercurial politicians from his own country, he can deal with mercurial politicians from other countries. He starts by tackling the third rail of the Panama Canal. The United States built the Canal by essentially colonizing the part of Panama it runs through, and obviously, the Panamanians aren’t super cool with that. The U.S. government has been kicking the can down the road since the LBJ era by continually promising to return sovereignty over the canal to Panama eventually, and after over a decade of “eventually,” the Panamanians are getting impatient.

The politically easy move for Carter would be to drag out the negotiations until the canal becomes the next president’s problem, just as Johnson, Nixon, and Ford all did before him. But for better or for worse, Carter almost never does the politically easy thing. “It’s obvious we cheated the Panamanians out of their canal,” he says, and he negotiates a treaty in which ownership of the canal is turned over to Panama, in exchange for the U.S.’s right to militarily ensure its “neutral operation.” It’s a clever diplomatic solution—Panama gets nominal ownership while we retain all the benefits ownership provides—but the American public hates it. To the average voter, it feels like we’re just giving some random country “our” canal.

To get the treaty approved by the Senate, Carter plays the congressional negotiating game well for the first and maybe only time in his presidency. He lobbies heavily for his treaty with every senator, cutting individual deals with each of them as needed. One even goes so far as to say that in exchange for his vote, Carter has to… wait for it… read an entire semantics textbook the senator wrote back when he was a professor. Oh, and Carter also has to tell him what he thinks of it, in detail, to prove he actually read it. Carter is appalled, but he grits his teeth and reads the book. It’s a good thing he does, because the Senate ratifies the treaty by a single vote. Although it remains unpopular with the general public (five senators later lose their seats over their yes votes), those in the know understand that Carter cut a great deal for America. Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos knows it too. Ashamed of his poor negotiating skills, he gets visibly drunk at the signing ceremony and falls out of his chair. He also confesses that if the negotiations had broken down, he would have just had the military destroy the entire canal out of spite.

Flush with confidence from his Panama Canal victory (his canalchemy? his Panamachievement?), Carter decides he should continue tackling foreign policy problems other people think are impossible. And there’s one obvious candidate: the conflict between Israel and the Arab states. Every single one of his advisors tells him this is a huge mistake and he definitely shouldn’t get involved, but knowing Carter, this only makes him want to do it more. His strategy: bring Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin to Camp David for a series of intense negotiations. As usual, Carter believes that if he can just get the relevant parties in a room with him, he can convince them to see things his way.

At Camp David, as with the Panama Canal, Carter reveals himself to be a masterful negotiator, which only makes his constant inability to successfully negotiate with Congress all the more infuriating. When dealing with his own country, he’s disgusted by the horse-trading inherent in politics and continually shoots himself in the foot by refusing to get in the muck. But somehow, when dealing with other countries, he’s able to accept that there’s inevitably going to be a certain amount of dirty work involved. This biography doesn’t really try to provide a theory for this discrepancy, and I wasn’t able to come up with one either. Perhaps Carter holds his own country to a higher standard—or perhaps, as president, he sees himself as above Congress and expects a subservience he doesn’t expect from other countries’ leaders.

Anyway, after two weeks of nonstop conversation between the three countries’ teams—during which negotiations almost fail more than once—they reach a deal. Essentially, the broad outlines are: 1) Egypt will officially recognize Israel and end the state of war between the two countries and 2) Israel will stop building settlements in the West Bank and transition towards self-governance for inhabitants of both the West Bank and Gaza. The Camp David Accords, as they’re known, are a phenomenal success, putting the region on a path straight to the utopia it is today: a prosperous, conflict-free Middle East in which democracy and human rights flourish and the Palestinian people have full self-determination.

Sike! Obviously, that doesn’t happen. The Camp David Accords are seen as a triumph at the time, but in the long run, the picture is more mixed. The first part of the deal holds up, even after Sadat—who ends up becoming quite close with Carter—is assassinated by fundamentalists just a few years later. But the Israelis immediately welch on the second part of the deal and continue building settlements. Today’s Israel has more than 20x the number of settlers as it did then, making the intensity of the Carter/Begin dispute seem depressingly quaint in retrospect. 

by Max Nussenbaum, Astral Codex Ten | Read more:
Image: Andy Warhol

[ed. Repost. See also: Jimmy Carter’s Presidency Was Not What You Think (NYT).]

The Joy of Clutter

In the late 20th century, Japan was known for its minimalism: its Zen arts, its tidy and ordered cities, its refined foods and fashions. But Tsuzuki peeled away this façade to reveal a more complicated side to his nation. And Tokyo was the perfect setting for this exfoliation. Like the interiors he photographed, it remains visually overwhelming – even cluttered. Outside, enormous animated advertisements compete for attention against a jigsaw puzzle of metal, glass, concrete and plastic. In the sprawling residential districts that radiate from the city centre, compact homes are packed in formations as dense as transistors on a semiconductor chip, while confusing geometries of power lines spiderweb the skies above.

In suburbs across the nation, homes filled to the rafters with hoarded junk are common enough to have an ironic idiom: gomi-yashiki (trash-mansions). And in areas where space is limited, cluttered residences and shops will often erupt, disgorging things onto the street in a semi-controlled jumble so ubiquitous that urban planners have a name for it: afuré-dashi (spilling-outs). This is an ecstatic, emergent complexity, born less from planning than from organic growth, from the inevitable chaos of lives being lived.

Tsuzuki dismissed the West’s obsession with Japanese minimalism as ‘some Japanophile’s dream’ in the introduction to the English translation of Tokyo: A Certain Style (1999). ‘Our lifestyles are a lot more ordinary,’ he explained. ‘We live in cozy wood-framed apartments or mini-condos crammed to the gills with things.’ Yet more than three decades after Tsuzuki tried to wake the dreaming Japanophile, the outside world still worships Japan for its supposed simplicity, minimalism and restraint. You can see it in the global spread of meticulously curated Japanese cuisine, the deliberately unadorned concrete of modernist architects like Tadao Andō, and even through minimalist brands like Muji – whose very name translates into ‘the absence of a brand’ in Japanese.

Millions around the world continue to turn to Japanese gurus for help in purging their diets, closets and living spaces of all but the most essential items. Books like Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2011) and Fumio Sasaki’s Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism (2015) reframe clutter as a dire threat to mental health and spiritual growth. They have become colossal hits in the United States and other countries. However, as the world turns to Japan to tidy up, it’s important to remember that these books were originally intended for Japanese readers; they weren’t written for the world outside. If Japan truly were a minimalist paradise, why would it need Kondos and Sasakis in the first place?

Japan, then, isn’t really a paragon of refined simplicity. But if clutter is such an important part of everyday life here, why is it so often overlooked? The story of the world’s fascination with Japanese stuff is in many ways not about Japan at all. It is the story of our own changing desires, our social anxieties, our urges to consume and accumulate, and our realisation that possessing more things doesn’t necessarily translate into more happiness. In Japan, we believe we have found solutions to our problems.

The grass may seem neater on the other side, but Japan’s clutter tells a different story. It’s one that reveals a far more complex and nuanced relationship with stuff, one that suggests minimalism and clutter aren’t opposites, but two sides of the same coin.

by Matt Alt, Aeon |  Read more:

Images: Lee Chapman

Incoming!

They came from Florida, from Fox News and Fox Business, square-jawed men and women with big hair and collagen lips.

They came from professional football and World Wrestling Entertainment.

They came from daytime talk shows and reality television.

They were ‘straight out of central casting’, as the future president said.

Some of the women resembled his daughter and some of the women resembled his wife. None of the men resembled him.

A squad of them came with the future president to Madison Square Garden to watch Ultimate Fighting matches.

The future secretary of defence is adorned with the white supremacist tattoos of a Jerusalem cross, the Crusader rallying cry ‘Deus vult’ and an AR-15 assault rifle flanking an American flag.

The future secretary of homeland security once shot her hunting dog, Cricket, in a gravel pit because it couldn’t hunt, then shot her pet goat because it was getting old and ‘nasty’.

The future secretary of health and human services once cut off the head of a beached whale with a chainsaw, put it on the roof of his car and drove home. He brags that he has a freezer full of roadkill.

Less than half of all voters voted for the future president, but his team declared it a ‘landslide’, a ‘mandate’ to ‘drain the swamp’ and shake up the capital.

The future White House communications director calls the opposition ‘snowflakes’ whose ‘sad, miserable existence will be crushed’ when the future president returns to power.

The future director of the FBI promises a ‘government gangsters manhunt’ and revenge against disloyal journalists.

The future director of the Federal Communications Commission threatens to penalise television networks that criticise the future president.

They vow mass firings and the deportation of millions.

They vow to cut two trillion dollars from the federal budget – five times the combined annual salaries of all federal employees.

They vow an end to ‘wokeness’ in all its imagined forms and the return of American greatness.

But they have no connection to the work they will manage, or no experience in the work they will manage, or no experience managing large bureaucracies like the bureaucracies they will manage.

The future secretary of commerce is a billionaire.

The future secretary of the treasury is a billionaire.

The future secretary of the interior is a billionaire.

The future secretary of education is a billionaire.

The future special envoy to the Middle East is a billionaire.

The future director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) is a billionaire. (...)

The future deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism is a former Fox News regular and is banned from YouTube. He believes that violence is intrinsic to Islam. He wears the medal of the neo-Nazi Hungarian Order of Vitéz and was a supporter of the Magyar Gárda, a paramilitary group.

The future secretary of the navy has never been in the military, but he raised $12 million for the future president’s campaign at an event at his home in Aspen, where the future president warned that this ‘could be the last election we ever have’ if the ‘radical left-wing lunatics’ win.

The future ambassador to Israel is a Baptist minister and former Fox News host. He has said ‘there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.’

The future senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs is the father-in-law of the future president’s daughter.

The future special envoy to the Middle East is a frequent golf partner of the future president and has donated almost $2 million to his campaigns. He has close ties to Qatar.

The future ambassador to France, the father-in-law of another daughter of the future president, also donated $2 million to the campaign. He spent two years in prison for a number of offences, including hiring a prostitute to seduce and videotape his brother-in-law, who was going to testify against him. He will live in the luxurious Hôtel de Pontalba in Paris. (...)

The future White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser is allied with various white supremacist groups and is the most rabidly anti-immigrant member of the team. He believes ‘America is for Americans and Americans only,’ which means banning, among others, Muslims, refugees and university students from China, as well as deporting eleven million undocumented migrants. He was the architect of the policy of separating migrant children from their parents, and was seen gloating over photographs of children in cages. He has said that the Emma Lazarus poem (‘Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’) at the base of the Statue of Liberty was a later ‘woke’ addition that has nothing to do with American liberty. He considers the future president ‘a political genius’.

The future border tsar, a Fox News regular, implemented the family separation policy during the future president’s previous administration. He has initiated a project called ‘Defend the Border and Save Lives’ in collaboration with an anti-Muslim group, the United West. He has said: ‘I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen. They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.’

The future secretary of defence, a Fox News host, has called for an ‘American crusade’, ‘a holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom’, because the ‘irreconcilable differences between the left and the right in America ... cannot be resolved through the political process’. He claims there is a ‘cultural Marxist revolution ripping through the Pentagon’, epitomised by the US military slogan ‘Our diversity is our strength,’ which he says is the ‘dumbest phrase on planet Earth’. He warns that the invasion of Ukraine ‘pales in comparison’ to the threat of ‘wokeness’, for ‘this unholy alliance of political ideologues and Pentagon pussies has left our warriors without real defenders in Washington.’ ‘The next president of the United States needs to fire them all.’ He is opposed to Nato and the United Nations. He is known for drunken displays in which he rants against Muslims. Accused of rape, he paid the victim to remain silent. His mother once sent him an email saying that he is ‘despicable and abusive’ and asked: ‘Is there any sense of decency left in you?’ (...)

The future president is currently selling caps, wrapping paper, blankets, football jerseys, boat flags, pickleball paddles, necklaces, earrings, silk ties, chopping boards, Christmas decorations, slippers, tie clips, door mats, aprons, pyjamas, socks, Advent calendars, Christmas stockings, mugs, keychains, sweatshirts, note cards, bracelets, scented candles, beach bags, flip-flops, bathrobes, towels, sunglasses, corkscrews, water bottles, stickers, jogging pants, wine and champagne glasses, earbuds, hoodies, jelly beans, cookies, chocolates, honey, jewellery boxes, whiskey decanters, trays, wallets, flasks, wines, coasters, umbrellas, golf bags, plates, ashtrays, sports bras and dog leashes – all with his name on them.

Also available are a $100,000 gold watch, a $11,000 autographed guitar, digital trading card NFTs featuring the future president in heroic historic tableaux, God Bless the USA Bibles, Never Surrender High-Top Sneakers, Fight Fight Fight Cologne for Men (‘For patriots who never back down’) and a celebratory Victory Cologne, which comes in a bottle in the shape of the future president’s head.

The future secretary of state had previously called the future president a ‘con artist’, a ‘Third World strongman’, ‘the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency’, ‘a person that has no ideas of any substance’ and a ‘guy with the worst spray tan in America’ who wets his pants. He now says: ‘I didn’t know him as a person.’

by Eliot Weinberger, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Can't wait for all the greatness. But then I thought... really? They can't all be billionaires. Sure enough, they aren't. Just almost billionaires. See also: The rich are controlling our government (Elysian):]

***

"Importantly: Both sides feature a lot of very wealthy people and organizations, making it highly likely that our government will always favor their interests rather than the interests of the American people at large. The parties themselves are effectively just a pool of wealthy donors. In 2024, the Republican National Committee was funded by JPMorgan and American Financial Group. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) was funded by Microsoft and Alphabet (Google). Sequoia Capital contributed to both the RNC ($1.3 million) and Kamala Harris’ campaign ($8.8 million), making sure their interests were represented no matter which candidate reaches office.

This is why many believe that America is no longer a democracy, but an oligarchy puppeted by wealthy individuals and organizations who will always fix the economy and our tax policies in their favor. Elite donors function like kingmakers, funding candidates during primary campaigns and making introductions that ensure that only those aligned with their interests make it to general elections. By the time a candidate makes it onto a ballot, they are already sufficiently donor-captured. And by the time American citizens vote on them, we are choosing between two candidates who both represent elite interests more than American interests. When those candidates finally make it into office, their wealthy donors have a lot of power over the policies that get put into place and are even appointed to positions of power.

Rapa Nui

Image: Getty
[ed. How societies collapse. "Civilisations die from suicide, not from murder" ~ Arnold Toynbee.]

Bad Influence

Alyssa Sheil has what some would consider a dream job: she shops online for a living. Every day, an Amazon delivery truck pulls up to her home to drop off jewelry, handbags, desk chairs, fake plants, and transparent birdhouses that allow you to see the inhabitants make a home inside. So many packages arrive in a week that she doesn’t know the exact number when I ask.

Some of these items suck. The ones that don’t might eventually make it into one of Sheil’s videos, shared to her more than 430,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram with titles like “Amazon summer shoe haul,” “ASMR Amazon vacay jewelry unboxing,” and “Amazon kitchen finds I’m obsessed with.” (...)

Sheil runs what is essentially a one-woman marketing operation, making product recommendations, trying on outfits, and convincing people to buy things they often don’t really need. Every time someone purchases something using her affiliate link, she gets a kickback. Shopping influencers like her have figured out how to build a career off someone else’s impulse buys. (...)

But all of this — the videos, the big house, her earnings — could come crashing down: Sheil is currently embroiled in a court case centered on the very content that is her livelihood, a Texas lawsuit in which she is being sued for damages that could reach into the millions. (...)

The next day, I fly to meet with Sydney Nicole Gifford, 24, the Amazon influencer that is suing Sheil, at her home outside of Minneapolis.

Gifford and her mother, Laura, greet me at the door. They are enthusiastic and inviting. Stepping inside, I am overwhelmed by a familiar palette: alarmingly neutral, not a single speck of color in sight. The house is still and silent, a vessel for content creation. In other words, it’s like I never left Sheil’s house — someone just shuffled the pieces around and plopped me onto a different set. (...)

In her lawsuit, Gifford alleges that Sheil copied her, down to specific frames in videos. She claims that repeated pattern and Sheil’s uncannily similar content ultimately cut into Gifford’s own earnings. The similarities extend, in Gifford’s telling, beyond just video content to eerie real-life aspects like her manner of speaking, appearance, and even tattoos.

Walking through the space, I can’t help but recognize a few furniture items that I also saw in Sheil’s home, which I had visited the day before: cream bouclé stools that double as storage; a curved full-length mirror propped up in the corner; a set of circular nesting tables that appear often in both her and Sheil’s videos.

In another world, these two parallel lives could go on indefinitely, accented by the same cream furniture, without crossing paths. But the same systems that make the careers of Sheil and Gifford possible — fine-tuned recommendation algorithms, affiliate marketing, fast fashion and cheap home goods — are now entangling them in a legal battle around ownership, style, and the creator industry.

So, who influenced whom?

In a complaint filed in the Western District of Texas this spring, Gifford accuses Sheil of “willful, intentional, and purposeful” copyright infringement in dozens of posts across platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Gifford says there’s been a pattern of copying: days or weeks after she would share photos or videos promoting an Amazon product, Sheil shared her own content doing the same thing. In dozens of cases, Gifford says the angle, tone, or the text on Sheil’s posts ripped off hers. Exhibits submitted in court include nearly 70 pages of side-by-side screenshots collected by Gifford comparing her social media posts, personal website, and other platforms where she says Sheil copied her. In one instance, Gifford promoted gold earrings in the shape of a bow, modeling them by gently swooping her hair back to show them off. Just a few days later, Sheil posted her own photos of the same earrings, similarly photographed. In another example submitted to the court, Gifford unboxes and tries on a white two-piece top and short set; a few weeks later, Sheil did the same. The pattern continued for around a year, Gifford alleges.

“It’s obviously very frustrating because I put a lot of time and effort into my business. I work very hard at what I do, and I love what I do,” Gifford says. “It felt like somebody took a piece of my business and is profiting off of it as their own.”

Despite how inescapably ubiquitous the influencer industry has become, there are relatively few norms and laws governing creators. What regulations do exist are poorly enforced. The rates that influencers command vary widely; creators, especially those with smaller followings, are left to their own devices as they negotiate with enormous corporations. Efforts at collective action or unionizing have mostly fallen flat. Laws around sponsored content and copyright exist, but creators bend or even ignore rules regularly. And although influencers are — naturally — influential, there remains a pervasive cultural stigma around their labor: influencers are seen as vapid, and their jobs are considered easy. The upshot is that the general public often has little sympathy for this group of workers, even though they are often exploited, and so they remain unprotected. When things go wrong for an influencer, it is risky to direct blame toward the corporations they cut deals with and close to impossible to direct it toward the audiences that rationalize their entire existence. Influencers may turn on other influencers not so much out of a desire for attention as it is a direct result of the material conditions under which they work. A case like the one between Gifford and Sheil, in other words, was a long time coming. (...)

Sheil denies she copied Gifford, whether that’s specific videos and products, her appearance, her content style, or her digital presence across different sites. “[Gifford’s] ‘look’ is not original,” Sheil’s attorneys write in a response filed to the court. “For that matter, on that front, neither is Sheil’s.”

Her response to Gifford’s suit opens with a quote attributed to Kim Kardashian, though its origin seems dubious: “People only rain on your parade because they’re jealous of your sun and tired of their shade.” It was Gifford that did the copying, Sheil alleges — not her.

Sheil and Gifford have a similar online persona and aesthetic, apart from just the neutral, minimal houses. They both have long, shiny hair that’s often set in gentle curls or slicked back into a bun. They opt for uncomplicated clothing like fitted tank tops and T-shirts, oversize sweat suits, and chunky off-white sneakers, paired with gold-toned rings, necklaces, and earrings. Their makeup is fresh and glowy, their nails are perfectly manicured, and they make fancy-looking drinks in their spotless white kitchens.

They are what the internet calls “clean girls.”

The “clean girl” is an image, a vibe, a genre — one that promotes self-care, comfort, and looking put-together. The most famous clean girl is perhaps Hailey Bieber, and there are countless explainers, tutorials, think pieces, and critiques of the trending aesthetic online. (There is a fairly obvious slippery slope when you categorize people as pure or virtuous based on how they look — especially when components of the look were originally established in non-white communities.) Minimal makeup and smooth hair alone are not enough to be a clean girl — clean girls have perfect white bedsheets, tidy homes with natural light, and of course, spend a lot of time bathing. Sheil’s and Gifford’s content does not align exactly with all of these tropes of the genre, but it is undeniably appealing to the same audience. Their homes, physical appearance, and implied lifestyle are meant to be aspirational. (...)

Amazon influencers like Gifford and Sheil don’t make content just to inspire people. They post on TikTok and Instagram to redirect audiences back to Amazon. In some ways, it is the most ruthless version of influencer marketing, where every item appearing onscreen is an opportunity for micro-earnings. Amazon declined to provide data on the number of people in its influencer program or how much money the company has paid out. That the company ultimately profiting from the sale is one of the largest retailers in the world makes the whole enterprise a bit off-putting — an empire built on fast, largely low-quality products that look great in photos but come from faceless companies that manufacture mountains of crap, much of which will eventually end up in a landfill. These are not vintage Jean Royère wool armchairs (which sold for $460,000 at auction, according to Christie’s); they are $800 decent-looking dupes that give the impression of luxury. If the argument is that Sheil is duplicating Gifford’s existence, there’s something to be said about the fact that the items both of them promote are also imitations of someone else’s work. (...)

“The really hard part for the plaintiffs in this case is to prove that in these photos and videos there is something protectable by copyright — that there is creativity going on here that was copied,” says Blake Reid, associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Boulder. The photos in question are relatively banal: images of a figure wearing generic clothing; a shot of a desk with a chair tucked in halfway. Sheil’s lawyers argue that the imagery Gifford claims was ripped off is actually just standard fare for influencer content that reappears again and again and which nobody can lay claim to — it’s the Amazon haul equivalent of swinging saloon doors in a country Western film, Reid explains. (...)

Reid says the outcome of Gifford’s lawsuit will depend on whether a judge or jury takes influencer content seriously as a creative endeavor. On one hand, it could be framed as “low-value commercial content” that all looks the same, in which case Gifford’s lawsuit could be seen as an attempt to lay claim to a template of mass-produced marketing — something that copyright law isn’t really for. But a judge might see influencer content as having enough creative weight to merit bringing copyright law into the picture.

“It depends a lot on what judge lands this, how they perceive it, [and] how it gets framed in the litigation,” he says.

“This is federal law with giant amounts of money on the line, coming in and regulating these nascent creative spaces where the rules and the social norms are just getting hashed out,” Reid says. “And then somebody’s like, ‘How about we bring this giant sledgehammer of copyright law in to sort it all out?’”

by Mia Sato, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: Montinique Monroe and Liam James Doyle
[ed. Interesting legals, inane profession, obnoxious Amazon incentives. See also: This Ocean Wave Has Rights (legal protection for nature - Nautilus). ]

The Best Free Way to Get Around a Paywall to Read an Article (and a Few More Methods to Try)

Over the past several years, countless websites have added paywalls. This means if you want to read their articles, you have to sign up and pay a monthly subscription fee. Some sites have a “metered” paywall—meaning you can read a certain number of articles for free before they ask for money—and others have a hard paywall, where you’ll have to pay to read even one article.

Paywalls are mostly a thing with news websites, largely because relying on advertising income alone isn’t a viable strategy anymore, and news companies are pursuing more direct revenue sources, like monthly subscriptions. Of course, paywalls aren’t entirely a bad thing—it’s wonderful to support journalism you find valuable, so by all means, if you can afford to pay to read articles, you absolutely should. If nothing else, I hope you support the websites that you read regularly—especially your friendly local news outlet.

But whether you lost your password, haven’t saved it on your phone, are in a rush, or are just strapped for cash and promise yourself that you’ll subscribe later, there are many ways to bypass paywalls on the internet—including one that has been my go-to for the past year or so.

You may be able to use some of these methods successfully today, but that could change in the future as websites clamp down on bypass methods. But if you can’t right now, here is my most-trusted way to bypass paywalls online, and a few more you can try. (This article is regularly updated as some methods stop working and others pop up.)

Archive.today is the best, most reliable option for bypassing paywalls

Archive.today is the fastest, most reliable way to quickly bypass a paywall that I've found, and I've been using it successfully for the past year across a wide range of sites. It's a site that will create an archived version of any website you paste into the search bar. (Think of an archived version like taking a screenshot of any website with a time stamp—a self-described “time capsule,” if you will.) Archive.today “saves a text and a graphical copy of the page for better accuracy” and gives you a short link to an unalterable record of any web page. Yes, yes—but as a bonus, you can often use this functionality to bypass a paywall and read an entire paywalled article without issue.

Just paste your article link into the black “I want to search the archive for saved snapshots” bar and you'll be taken to a page where you can view earlier archived versions. If the article you’re trying to bypass isn’t already archived, then put the URL into the red “My URL is alive and I want to archive its content” bar. The site will then begin generating the archived version, which usually only takes a few minutes. You'll be sent straight to this archived version once it's ready, and you can come back to it later by copying the new URL from your browser's nav bar.

You can also add browser extension to Chrome that will create a button in your browser toolbar you can click to instantly create an archived of any web page. The archived version will even automatically open up in a new tab.

I've only had this site fail me once or twice. Usually, there's already an existing archived version for anything I want to read, but creating a new one only takes a minute or two. Still, if it doesn't work, try the next option.

More free, easy methods to try to get around a paywall

Use 12ft.io

12ft.io is a simple website created with the sole purpose of breaking through paywalls—and like Archive.today, it's simple to use: Simply paste the paywalled link in the text field and hit “Submit.” (Alternately, you can type “https://12ft.io/” before the URL in your browser bar.) The site will then show you the cached, “unpaywalled version” of the page. The only problem is that the site doesn't always work on all websites (The Wall Street Journal being a notable example; I also can't get it to show me anything from Crain's Chicago Business). If you get the “access denied” message, try another method on this list. (...)

More complex solutions to your paywall problems

If you're willing to try solutions that are a little more technical than a mere copy and paste, one of these options might work for you.

Disable JavaScript in your browser

Some websites use JavaScript to hide content behind paywalls, and you can circumvent those blocks by disabling JavaScript in your browser. Note that disabling JavaScript can (and will) break most websites—some may not let you view comments, while others may not load at all. But it’s worth trying if you just need to read the content of the post.

Ideally, you’d use a separate browser for this so that you don’t have to keep enabling and disabling JavaScript. Once you’ve chosen your secondary browser, check out our guide to disabling JavaScript in various ones.

Use a VPN

Some paywalled sites, like The Washington Post, will let you read a limited number of articles for free each month, then throw up the wall once you've hit the limit. You can use a VPN to change up your IP address and trick the site into giving you more freebies. This method won't help you on sites that don't offer any free access, but it's worth trying, and will work with both paid and free VPNs. (...)

Edit a couple of elements on the webpage

If you understand a bit of HTML and CSS, you can edit elements using your browser to go past some paywalls. Essentially, you’re editing the page to remove the banners that lock content behind a subscription. It’s a lot like opening the curtains to reveal the nice view outside your window.

It works with some websites, but others have added a hard block that reveals the article only if you’ve signed in with a paid account. Still, it’s worth trying once to see if it works:

On any website, right-click the banner just below the last visible sentence of the article and select Inspect Element. This will open up a console where you can search for the offending elements and hide or change them. The exact element varies from site to site, but it’s often labeled display, paywall, or subscribe. Here’s a neat GIF on Reddit that shows you how to get it done.

by Pranay Parab and Joel Cunningham, Life Hacker | Read more:
Image: Ian Moore/Joel Cunningham
[ed. I've found Cookie Remover and Quick Javascript Switcher to be pretty good solutions for most sites, either singly or in combination. Then again, some walls seem made out of titanium. And for the brave: How to Browse the Dark Web (LH).]

A.I., the Electricians and the Boom Towns of Central Washington

East Wenatchee, Wash. — The tangy smell of Buffalo wings filled Side Chicks Sport Bar, as a dozen electricians crammed their big frames into booths. It was Tuesday night in East Wenatchee, Washington, and “brotherhood night” for the electrical union. Out-of-towners and locals swapped notes on who was coming and going, when new jobs were starting and what drama had gone down with a foreman.

Sean Nickell, 32, and Chris Bennett, 35, sat in a booth below a television blaring a Seattle Mariners baseball game. For years, they had followed each other to job sites around the country without knowing it. “I have just met this man all of a monthish ago, and the parallels are horrifying,” Bennett deadpanned.

They were here to build data centers, the brawny concrete buildings with HVAC systems the size of tractor-trailers that power the new artificial intelligence systems that the tech industry believes are the key to its future — and perhaps the future of the entire economy.

Electricity is the lifeblood of technology. And perhaps more than any computer technology that has come before it, building AI needs vast amounts of computing and the electrical power to make that happen.

So electricians are flocking to regions around the country that, at least for now, have power to spare. These traveling electricians are transforming the sagebrush here in central Washington, with substations going up on orchards and farmland. Hundreds have come to a triangle of counties tied together by hydropower dams along the Columbia River. They are chasing overtime and bonuses, working 60-hour weeks that can allow them to make as much as $2,800 a week after taxes.

For all the hype over $100,000 chips and million-dollar engineers, the billions pouring into the infrastructure of AI is being built by former morticians, retired pro football linebackers, single moms, two dudes described as Gandalf in overalls, onetime bouncers and a roving legend known as Big Job Bob.

AI is shaping up to be the kind of economy-bending force that inevitably creates winners and losers. That’s true locally, where the construction work will eventually slow down and the region will land on a new normal. But what the new normal turns out to be is anyone’s guess.

Bennett was from Erin, Tennessee, a “middle-of-nowhere” town, where an electrician he trained under suggested traveling because he could earn more, build more and see that there was more to this world than just Tennessee.

In nearby Quincy, where data centers started going up about 15 years ago for the internet boom that came before today’s AI boom, rumor has it that a local farmer sold his land for a data center and bought three Porsches — one red, one white, one blue. The agricultural town is rich, though most residents are not. It has a gleaming new high school, built with property taxes that one union official described as “straight-up data center money.” Still, 4 out of 5 students are eligible for free lunch.

The poverty rate for the district has inched down over the past decade, but how far it goes — and whether the opportunities outweigh the rising costs of living — is another open question.

In Washington, the work is all union, a condition of a state tax break that has saved the tech companies almost half a billion dollars. And the electrician union — the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers — is stretched: Microsoft alone has said it will need 2,300 electricians in the coming years. The union plans to train hundreds more apprentices.

Nickell and his wife, a medical imaging technician, have been on the road full time for six years. “We should be able to retire when I’m 43, 45,” he shrugged. “Something like that.”

By 7:30 p.m., Side Chicks was emptying out. Work started at dawn.

From the Ice Age to the Age of AI

Tumbleweeds the size of trash cans blew across the road as Alex Ybarra, a state representative, steered his black SUV through Quincy, population 8,315. His grandparents began cycling through this dead, flat land in the 1950s as farmworkers. Eventually, they stayed. For decades, his mother trimmed potatoes at the French fry factory that supplied McDonald’s.

Ybarra left for college, and eventually came back and worked at the local utility. “See all these streets?” he said, driving past the pink Mexican mercado and under power lines. Many roads were just gravel, “and there was no sidewalks anywhere, even downtown.”

That the modern internet would be powered from the sagebrush of central Washington dates back partly to the cataclysmic floods at the end of the last ice age.

As the climate warmed, a miles-wide ice dam on a glacial lake near Missoula, Montana, repeatedly failed, sending water whooshing downhill. With more force than all the world’s rivers combined, the water took just two days to haul through Washington and Oregon, bursting out to the Pacific Ocean. The floods carved narrow, vertically walled canyons that provided a tantalizing source of hydropower a century ago.

But the region, sparse and poor, could not afford dams. Around 1955, George Washington’s great-great-great-great grandnephew, a lawyer for the utility, helped broker a deal: The region’s richer areas helped fund dam construction, but in return locked in cheap hydropower for half a century.

When the deal expired in 2005, the timing could not have been better. The utility could keep more cheap, clean electricity for itself, just as big technology companies were starting to build data centers for their online businesses.

“When the data centers said, ‘We need energy,’” Ybarra recalled, “We said, ‘Oh yeah, we got plenty.’”

Microsoft bought about 75 acres of bean fields in Quincy the next year. (...)

In 2006, Washington State enacted its first sales tax break for data centers to encourage construction. For years, there had been handshake agreements to build with union workers, Mr. Hepner said. “It worked for a while, but corporations do what corporations do, trying to cut costs.”

When the tax breaks came up again in 2022, “we were like, ‘It stops right now or this tax exemption goes away,’” said Mr. Hepner, who had lobbied for the union.

But tax breaks pale in importance to finding power, land and labor. Four of the largest tech companies spent more than $200 billion in the last year on capital expenses, largely to build new data centers. They’re expected to spend just as much or more next year.

“I can’t think of a site selection or placement decision that was decided on a set of tax incentives,” said Bo Williams, the executive responsible for Microsoft’s data centers in North America.

The data centers spread west from Quincy to the dusty hillsides of East Wenatchee, then, recently, down the Columbia River to tiny Malaga, using transmission lines that fed a shuttered aluminum plant. The three clusters are strategic: Each is in a different county, with its own utility and power supply. There are already about 50 data center buildings, and more than 1,500 electricians working in the region.

Central Washington is just one of dozens of “hot spots” on Where2Bro.com, an unofficial bible for traveling electricians. The site lists gigs in Indiana, Iowa, Georgia, Texas and beyond, all booming as tech companies crawl the electrical grid for supply. Take the note from the union’s Local 124, based in Kansas City. “WORK IN LU 124 SHOULD BE EXCELLENT FOR SEVERAL YEARS TO COME,” it blared. “WILL NEED HELP FROM OUR TRAVELING BROTHERS AND SISTERS TO MAN IT.” 

by Karen Weise, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jovelle Tamayo
[ed. I live about 40 miles from Quincy and have been through three booms in my life: the early 60s tourism boom in Hawaii; the post-Alaska pipeline boom and Prudhoe Bay oil extravaganza; and the Exxon Valdez oil spill cleanup and settlement windfall. All I can say is, things are going to change, permanently, and not necessarily for the better (or worse). In the short-term, you might expect communities to be overun by transient workers with little connection to the local culture or sense of place (and the usual problems - increased drugs, prostitution, crime, lack of housing, overburdened services, etc). But, long-term, if you don't have a good plan in place or a secure vision for what you want your community/state to become, it'll be a free-for-all and a lot of money will just get wasted or blown on useless stuff. Usually people just go crazy for a while. How long that lasts and what's left after is the question.]

Why The Long Kiss Goodnight is a Great Alt-Christmas Movie

Everyone has their favorite film that serves as alternative Christmas movie fare, with Die Hard (1988) and Lethal Weapon (1987) typically topping the list—at least when all you want for Christmas is buddy-cop banter, car chases, shootouts, and glorious explosions. (Massive gratuitous property damage is a given.) I love me some Lethal Weapon but it's high time to give some holiday love to another great action flick set during the Christmas season: The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), starring Geena Davis as an amnesiac school teacher who turns out to have been a government assassin in her former life.

At the time, Davis was married to director Renny Harlin, coming off a disastrous showing for their previous collaboration, Cutthroat Island (1995), which remains one of the biggest box office bombs of all time. (It is indeed a pretty bad movie.) But Shane Black's smart, savvy script for The Long Kiss Goodnight seemed like the perfect next project for them; it was promising enough that New Line Cinema bought it for what was then a record $4 million.

Davis plays Samantha Caine, a small-town school teacher in Honesdale, PA, who has no memory since washing up on a beach eight years earlier with a head injury. Since then, she's given birth to a daughter, Caitlin (Yvonne Zima) and moved in with a kind-hearted fellow teacher named Hal (Tom Amandes). She's hired various private investigators to find out her true identity, but only the low-rent Mitch Henessey (Samuel L. Jackson) is still on the case. Then Mitch's assistant, Trin (Meloina Kanakaredes), finally finds some useful information—just in time, too, since Sam is attacked at home by a criminal named One-Eyed Jack (Joseph McKenna), who broke out of prison to exact revenge after recognizing Sam during her appearance as Mrs. Claus in the town's annual Christmas parade.

This coincides with Sam starting to recover fragments of her memory after a car accident following a holiday party. She'd already thought she might be a chef because of newly emerged expert knife skills. (The moment where she tosses a tomato in the air, skewers it into the wall with a kitchen knife, and nonchalantly says to her shocked partner and child, "Chefs do that," is priceless.) But when she ruthlessly snaps the neck of One-Eyed Jack in her kitchen—pausing afterward to lick blood off her fingers—it's clear that chef doesn't quite cover her unique skill set.

Mitch and Sam embark on a harrowing road trip to follow up on the newly unearthed clues to her past identity, which leads them to Dr. Nathan Waldman (Brian Cox, in a performance dripping with sardonic grumpiness). She learns her true name is Charlene "Charly" Baltimore, an assassin for the US government—and Waldman should know, since he trained her. (...)

Yes, there are some cheesy elements and the film's action is frequently over-the-top—but not any more so than countless other hugely popular action movies, particularly those from the 1980s and 1990s. It's all that wickedly sharp dialogue, expert pacing, and strong performances from the cast that makes the movie fire on all cylinders. Anchoring it all is the bickering dynamic and powerful bond between Sam/Charly and Mitch. Davis and Jackson have undeniable on-screen chemistry—an essential ingredient for any successful buddy-cop action film—and both are clearly relishing their respective roles.

It's a Christmas movie because it takes place at Christmas—plus all those traditional holiday trappings frequently figure into the plot in small, clever ways. (Do be aware it's R-rated if you have young children.) And of course there is a happy ending, although in an early cut, Mitch died saving Sam and her daughter. But during a test screening an audience member hollered, "You can't kill Sam Jackson!" And the studio wisely reconsidered. 

by Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica | Read more:

Image: New Line Cinema

[ed. Because nothing says Christmas like a murder mystery. I'll probably skip this one, but here you go.]