Reframing Superintelligence

Ten years ago, everyone was talking about superintelligence, the singularity, the robot apocalypse. What happened?

I think the main answer is: the field matured. Why isn’t everyone talking about nuclear security, biodefense, or counterterrorism? Because there are already competent institutions working on those problems, and people who are worried about them don’t feel the need to take their case directly to the public. The past ten years have seen AI goal alignment reach that level of maturity too. There are all sorts of new research labs, think tanks, and companies working on it – the Center For Human-Compatible AI at UC Berkeley, OpenAI, Ought, the Center For The Governance Of AI at Oxford, the Leverhulme Center For The Future Of Intelligence at Cambridge, etc. Like every field, it could still use more funding and talent. But it’s at a point where academic respectability trades off against public awareness at a rate where webzine articles saying CARE ABOUT THIS OR YOU WILL DEFINITELY DIE are less helpful.

One unhappy consequence of this happy state of affairs is that it’s harder to keep up with the field. In 2014, Nick Bostrom wrote Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, giving a readable overview of what everyone was thinking up to that point. Since then, things have been less public-facing, less readable, and more likely to be published in dense papers with a lot of mathematical notation. They’ve also been – no offense to everyone working on this – less revolutionary and less interesting.

This is one reason I was glad to come across Reframing Superintelligence: Comprehensive AI Services As General Intelligence by Eric Drexler, a researcher who works alongside Bostrom at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. This 200 page report is not quite as readable as Superintelligence; its highly-structured outline form belies the fact that all of its claims start sounding the same after a while. But it’s five years more recent, and presents a very different vision of how future AI might look.

Drexler asks: what if future AI looks a lot like current AI, but better?

For example, take Google Translate. A future superintelligent Google Translate would be able to translate texts faster and better than any human translator, capturing subtleties of language beyond what even a native speaker could pick up. It might be able to understand hundreds of languages, handle complicated multilingual puns with ease, do all sorts of amazing things. But in the end, it would just be a translation app. It wouldn’t want to take over the world. It wouldn’t even “want” to become better at translating than it was already. It would just translate stuff really well.

The future could contain a vast ecosystem of these superintelligent services before any superintelligent agents arrive. It could have media services that can write books or generate movies to fit your personal tastes. It could have invention services that can design faster cars, safer rockets, and environmentally friendly power plants. It could have strategy services that can run presidential campaigns, steer Fortune 500 companies, and advise governments. All of them would be far more effective than any human at performing their given task. But you couldn’t ask the presidential-campaign-running service to design a rocket any more than you could ask Photoshop to run a spreadsheet.

In this future, our AI technology would have taken the same path as our physical technology. The human body can run fast, lift weights, and fight off enemies. But the automobile, crane, and gun are three different machines. Evolution had to cram running-ability, lifting-ability, and fighting-ability into the same body, but humans had more options and were able to do better by separating them out. In the same way, evolution had to cram book-writing, technology-inventing, and strategic-planning into the same kind of intelligence – an intelligence that also has associated goals and drives. But humans don’t have to do that, and we probably won’t. We’re not doing it today in 2019, when Google Translate and AlphaGo are two different AIs; there’s no reason to write a single AI that both translates languages and plays Go. And we probably won’t do it in the superintelligent future either. Any assumption that we will is based more on anthropomorphism than on a true understanding of intelligence.

These superintelligent services would be safer than general-purpose superintelligent agents. General-purpose superintelligent agents (from here on: agents) would need a human-like structure of goals and desires to operate independently in the world; Bostrom has explained ways this is likely to go wrong. AI services would just sit around algorithmically mapping inputs to outputs in a specific domain.

Superintelligent services would not self-improve. You could build an AI researching service – or, more likely, several different services to help with several different aspects of AI research – but each of them would just be good at solving certain AI research problems. It would still take human researchers to apply their insights and actually build something new. In theory you might be able to automate every single part of AI research, but it would be a weird idiosyncratic project that wouldn’t be anybody’s first choice.

Most important, superintelligent services could help keep the world safe from less benevolent AIs. Drexler agrees that a self-improving general purpose AI agent is possible, and assumes someone will build one eventually, if only for the lulz. He agrees this could go about the way Bostrom expects it to go, ie very badly. But he hopes that there will be a robust ecosystem of AI services active by then, giving humans superintelligent help in containing rogue AIs. Superintelligent anomaly detectors might be able to notice rogue agents causing trouble, superintelligent strategic planners might be able to develop plans for getting rid of them, and superintelligent military research AIs might be able to create weapons capable of fighting them off.

Drexler therefore does not completely dismiss Bostromian disaster scenarios, but thinks we should concentrate on the relatively mild failure modes of superintelligent AI services. These may involve normal bugs, where the AI has aberrant behaviors that don’t get caught in testing and cause a plane crash or something, but not the unsolveable catastrophes of the Bostromian paradigm. Drexler is more concerned about potential misuse by human actors – either illegal use by criminals and enemy militaries, or antisocial use to create things like an infinitely-addictive super-Facebook. He doesn’t devote a lot of space to these, and it looks like he hopes these can be dealt with through the usual processes, or by prosocial actors with superintelligent services on their side (thirty years from now, maybe people will say “it takes a good guy with an AI to stop a bad guy with an AI”).

This segues nicely into some similar concerns that OpenAI researcher Paul Christiano has brought up. He worries that AI services will be naturally better at satisfying objective criteria than at “making the world better” in some vague sense. Tasks like “maximize clicks to this site” or “maximize profits from this corporation” are objective criteria; tasks like “provide real value to users of this site instead of just clickbait” or “have this corporation act in a socially responsible way” are vague. That means AI may asymmetrically empower some of the worst tedencies in our society without giving a corresponding power increase to normal people just trying to live enjoyable lives. In his model, one of the tasks of AI safety research is to get AIs to be as good at optimizing vague prosocial tasks as they will naturally be at optimizing the bottom line. Drexler doesn’t specifically discuss this in Reframing Superintelligence, but it seems to fit the spirit of the kind of thing he’s concerned about.

I’m not sure how much of the AI alignment community is thinking in a Drexlerian vs. a Bostromian way, or whether that is even a real dichotomy that a knowledgeable person would talk about. I know there are still some people who are very concerned that even programs that seem to be innocent superintelligent services will be able to self-improve, develop misaligned goals, and cause catastrophes. I got to talk to Dr. Drexler a few years ago about some of this (although I hadn’t read the book at the time, didn’t understand the ideas very well, and probably made a fool of myself); at the time, he said that his work was getting a mixed reception. And there are still a few issues that confuse me.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: via

Whatever Happened to Fun?

[ed. Repost. Classic.]

There’s a New Alaska State Record For Giant Pumpkins

Dale Marshall of Anchorage broke his previous state record by nearly 600 pounds when the pumpkin he entered this year tipped the scale at 2,051 pounds during the Alaska State Fair weigh-off Tuesday.

“It was mind blowing," Marshall said.

"I wasn’t even thinking 2,000 pounds. I thought it would weigh between 1,700 and 1,900 pounds using the tape measure method. In pumpkin growing land around the world that is an elite club to grow 2,000. Nobody has grown a pumpkin this size this far north in the world.”

Marshall said he thought weather was a big factor this year. “With all the sunny days I got plenty of heat in the greenhouse. The pumpkin is 89 days old. Nothing happens the first days. In 79 days, it grew to 2,051 pounds. That’s an average of 25 pounds per day. It grew 50 pounds a day in parts of July. Marshall said growing the pumpkin required at least 75 gallons of water a day, and as much as a couple hundred gallons a day.

“I still can’t believe it,” Marshall added.

by Bill Roth, ADN |  Read more:

Image: Bill Roth

Issei Suda (1940-2019)
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End War Or Mosquitoes?

Malaria may have killed half of all the people that ever lived. (more) 

Over one million people die from malaria each year, mostly children under five years of age, with 90% of malaria cases occurring in Sub-Saharan Africa. (more) 

378,000 people worldwide died a violent death in war each year between 1985 and 1994. (more) 

Over the last day I’ve done two Twitter polls, one of which was my most popular poll ever. Each poll was on whether, if we had the option, we should try to end a big old nemesis of humankind. One was on mosquitoes, the other on war: (...)

In both cases the main con argument is a worry about unintended side effects. Our biological and social systems are both very complex, with each part having substantial and difficult to understand interactions with many other parts. This makes it hard to be sure that an apparently bad thing isn’t actually causing good things, or preventing other bad things.

Poll respondents were about evenly divided on ending mosquitoes, but over 5 to 1 in favor of ending war. Yet mosquitoes kill many more people than do wars, mosquitoes are only a small part of our biosphere with only modest identifiable benefits, and war is a much larger part of key social systems with much easier to identify functions and benefits. For example, war drives innovation, deposes tyrants, and cleans out inefficient institutional cruft that accumulates during peacetime. All these considerations favor ending mosquitoes, relative to ending war.

Why then is there so much more support for ending war, relative to mosquitoes? The proximate cause seems obvious: in our world, good people oppose both war and also ending species. Most people probably aren’t thinking this through, but are instead just reacting to this surface ethical gloss. Okay, but why is murderous nature so much more popular than murderous features of human systems? Perhaps in part because we are much more eager to put moral blame on humans, relative to nature. Arguing to keep war makes you seem like allies of deeply evil humans, while arguing to keep mosquitoes only makes you allies of an indifferent nature, which makes you far less evil by association.

by Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias |  Read more:

US High School Sports Participation Drops

Led by a decline in football for the fifth straight year, participation in high school sports dropped in 2018-19 for the first time in 30 years, according to an annual survey conducted by the National Federation of State High School Associations.

The 2018-19 total of 7,937,491 participants was a decline of 43,395 from the 2017-18 school year, when the number of participants in high school sports reached a record high of 7,980,886.

The last decline in sports participation numbers occurred during the 1988-89 school year.

The group said 11-man football dropped by 30,829 to 1,006,013, the lowest mark since the 1999-2000 school year. It was the fifth consecutive year of declining football participation.

“We know from recent surveys that the number of kids involved in youth sports has been declining, and a decline in the number of public school students has been predicted for a number of years, so we knew our ‘streak’ might end someday,” Dr Karissa Niehoff, NFHS executive director, said in a statement. “The data from this year’s survey serves as a reminder that we have to work even harder in the coming years to involve more students in these vital programs – not only athletics but performing arts programs as well.”

Although the number of participants in boys’ 11-player football dropped, the number of schools offering the sport remained steady. The survey indicated that 14,247 schools offer 11-player football, an increase of 168 from last year. A comparison of the figures from the past two years indicates that the average number of boys involved in 11-player football on a per-school basis dropped from 73 to 70, which includes freshman, junior varsity and varsity teams.

While participation in boys’ 11-player football dropped in all but seven states, participation in six-, eight- and nine-player football gained 156 schools and 1,594 participants nationwide, with the largest increase in boys’ eight-player football from 19,554 to 20,954. In addition, in the past 10 years, participation by girls in 11-player football has doubled, from 1,249 in the 2009-10 school year to 2,404 last year.

“The survey certainly confirms that schools are not dropping the sport of football, which is great news,” Niehoff said. “Certainly, we are concerned about the reduction in the number of boys involved in the 11-player game but are thrilled that states are finding other options by starting six-player or eight-player football in situations where the numbers have declined.

by AP, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Don Campbell/AP

[ed. I think contact sports in high school will continue to decline for medical reasons - but mostly because they aren't such a direct link to popularity anymore.]

Isley Brothers

Nan Goldin, Smokey car, New Hampshire, 1979

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The Scientific Way to Get Over A Break-Up

Something strange happens when we break up. A concoction of memories and thoughts occupy our minds — anything from “my life is over” to “I’ll make the best of my regained freedom”. There are self-doubts and pain, to the regular chanting of “this sucks”. Yes, it does suck. Break-ups suck for the person being dumped and they suck for the person doing the nasty deed.

A break-up may be cruel or cordial; rarely it can be neutral. These are not our finest hours. And the longer a relationship lasted, the harder it will be to get over it. You’ve shared a life, your dreams, a home, a sense of self. And suddenly you find yourself in the throes of a refurbishment project you didn’t even ask for. But understanding the scientific basis of break-ups — why people do it and how they get over it alongside the neuroscientific underpinnings of heartbreak — may offer an opportunity for self-analysis.

Knowing why you feel the way you feel may provide some much-needed perspective; the necessary distance to re-examine your thoughts. Will your new scientific appreciation work wonders and lift you back into the realm of those who have got it all together? Hardly, because yes, getting over a partner takes time (and I’ll explain why below). But it serves as a nice reminder that perhaps there is no magic here. Yes, perhaps heartbreak is but a melting pot of thoughts and brain chemicals.

Why we break up

Every relationship is unique, and you will have your reasons for calling it quits (or your other half will). But according to research there are eight main arguments for a break-up: the desire to be more autonomous, not sharing the same interests or character traits, not being supportive enough, not being open enough, not being loyal, not spending enough time together, not being fair enough to each other, and the loss of romance. Chances are your break-up falls within multiple of these categories. (Interestingly, for women, autonomy is one of the main reasons for a break-up.)

If you’re mending a broken heart at this moment, realize that you did not have control over how your partner felt. They arrived at this conclusion for a reason and it may not even be a good reason, but that’s not debatable.

Yet according to scientific evidence, how long a relationship may last can be (somewhat) predicted. When Galena K. Rhoades at the University of Denver, U.S., began to study relationship commitment, she couldn’t have known just how much constraining factors matter. So what are ‘constraint commitments’? They’re restrictions which make us more committed to staying in a relationship. Rhoades proposed three types:

1. Perceived constraints, which include external factors. They include social pressures to stay together or the feeling that you invested a lot into a relationship. Maybe you think that your life as you know it will come to a halt or you’re worried about your partner’s mental health.

2. Material constraints include financial and physical pressures, such as owning a property or a pet together, sharing furniture or a bank account.

3. Felt constraints describe the feeling of being trapped or stuck in a relationship.

Rhoades recruited 1184 individuals between the ages of 18 to 35 years, all of whom were in a relationship of at least two months. Over eight months, participants received two rounds of questionnaires to examine their dedication to their partners and the three constraints. Twenty-six percent of the relationships ended within the time frame of the study. What the authors found was sobering.

They noted that fewer perceived or material constraints and higher felt constraints could explain break-ups. Let that sink in. It means that couples who feel social pressure or live in shared accommodation are less likely to break up. In other words, we use our partnerships to give us a sense of emotional or material stability. But then again, perhaps that’s what relationships are all about to begin with? For those who feel trapped, chances are higher that things will come to an end.

It’s a romantic concept to believe that love is at the core of a long-lasting relationship. And pondering the constraints of your past relationship may illuminate some of its shortcomings.

How we break up

Break-ups aren’t accidents. The reflections that ultimately lead to someone cutting ties do not happen one day to the next (unless infidelity is involved). If you’re heartbroken, remind yourself that your partner arrived at his or her conclusion likely after a substantial amount of time.

Just how complex and expansive the process of separation can be, shows an analysis of individual break-up points. The authors of the research identified 16 steps that occur before the final break-up (see graphic). And though these events don’t always happen in this order, it may comfort you to know that you mattered. Yes, you mattered enough for your ex to take time to mull over the end of the relationship.

Often, one senses the expiration date is drawing near — like some minor irritation or a growing nervousness. But these suspicions are based on concrete warning signs. According to research by Aalto University in Finland, such signals even extend to social media. The scientists studied data from social networks (mostly Twitter) to detect break-up patterns. They found that heartbreakers-to-be sent fewer messages to their partners, but more messages to other users. Overall, the number of messages they shared online went down. Withdrawal is a classic symptom of looming separation — even on social media.

When it comes to the final act of breaking up, things tend to be more messy than civil. Fifty-eight percent of Americans said their relationship took a dramatic end. Only a quarter of couples ended things in a civil manner. In the digital age, it may be reassuring to know that the majority of people still have the decency to break up face-to-face (57%), although younger generations are more likely to use text messaging (34%). Damn you technology! Perhaps certain things shouldn’t be that easy.

by Anne Freier, Medium | Read more:
Image:Hearts live by being wounded. — Oscar Wilde
[ed. If your relationship is struggling (or you want to prevent that), consider picking up a copy of Hold Me Tight, by Sue Johnson.]

The Extortion Economy: How Insurance Companies Are Fueling a Rise in Ransomware Attacks

On June 24, the mayor and council of Lake City, Florida, gathered in an emergency session to decide how to resolve a ransomware attack that had locked the city’s computer files for the preceding fortnight. Following the Pledge of Allegiance, Mayor Stephen Witt led an invocation. “Our heavenly father,” Witt said, “we ask for your guidance today, that we do what’s best for our city and our community.”

Witt and the council members also sought guidance from City Manager Joseph Helfenberger. He recommended that the city allow its cyber insurer, Beazley, an underwriter at Lloyd’s of London, to pay the ransom of 42 bitcoin, then worth about $460,000. Lake City, which was covered for ransomware under its cyber-insurance policy, would only be responsible for a $10,000 deductible. In exchange for the ransom, the hacker would provide a key to unlock the files.

“If this process works, it would save the city substantially in both time and money,” Helfenberger told them.

Without asking questions or deliberating, the mayor and the council unanimously approved paying the ransom. The six-figure payment, one of several that U.S. cities have handed over to hackers in recent months to retrieve files, made national headlines.

Left unmentioned in Helfenberger’s briefing was that the city’s IT staff, together with an outside vendor, had been pursuing an alternative approach. Since the attack, they had been attempting to recover backup files that were deleted during the incident. On Beazley’s recommendation, the city chose to pay the ransom because the cost of a prolonged recovery from backups would have exceeded its $1 million coverage limit, and because it wanted to resume normal services as quickly as possible.

“Our insurance company made [the decision] for us,” city spokesman Michael Lee, a sergeant in the Lake City Police Department, said. “At the end of the day, it really boils down to a business decision on the insurance side of things: them looking at how much is it going to cost to fix it ourselves and how much is it going to cost to pay the ransom.”

The mayor, Witt, said in an interview that he was aware of the efforts to recover backup files but preferred to have the insurer pay the ransom because it was less expensive for the city. “We pay a $10,000 deductible, and we get back to business, hopefully,” he said. “Or we go, ‘No, we’re not going to do that,’ then we spend money we don’t have to just get back up and running. And so to me, it wasn’t a pleasant decision, but it was the only decision.”

Ransomware is proliferating across America, disabling computer systems of corporations, city governments, schools and police departments. This month, attackers seeking millions of dollars encrypted the files of 22 Texas municipalities. Overlooked in the ransomware spree is the role of an industry that is both fueling and benefiting from it: insurance. In recent years, cyber insurance sold by domestic and foreign companies has grown into an estimated $7 billion to $8 billion-a-year market in the U.S. alone, according to Fred Eslami, an associate director at AM Best, a credit rating agency that focuses on the insurance industry. While insurers do not release information about ransom payments, ProPublica has found that they often accommodate attackers’ demands, even when alternatives such as saved backup files may be available.

The FBI and security researchers say paying ransoms contributes to the profitability and spread of cybercrime and in some cases may ultimately be funding terrorist regimes. But for insurers, it makes financial sense, industry insiders said. It holds down claim costs by avoiding expenses such as covering lost revenue from snarled services and ongoing fees for consultants aiding in data recovery. And, by rewarding hackers, it encourages more ransomware attacks, which in turn frighten more businesses and government agencies into buying policies.

“The onus isn’t on the insurance company to stop the criminal, that’s not their mission. Their objective is to help you get back to business. But it does beg the question, when you pay out to these criminals, what happens in the future?” said Loretta Worters, spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute, a nonprofit industry group based in New York. Attackers “see the deep pockets. You’ve got the insurance industry that’s going to pay out, this is great.”

by Renee Dudley, ProPublica | Read more:
Image: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

Dinosaur Jr

Hey, look over your shoulder
Hey, it's me gettin' older
Always thought I
Should've told you
It's alright,
But it's sure gettin' colder I know you're
Over my shoulder I know now you'll get to hold her
You're gone (...)

[ed. Because it's great. See also: A 25-Year-Old Dinosaur Jr. Song Is a Hit in Japan. Nobody Knows Why. (Pitchfork)]

Lord Sundance

[ed. Repost. Sleazy weirdness from the 60s. For your pleasure. (Check out the music archives, there are over 1500 entries). ]

StoryAI, a Bot That Autocompletes a Story For You

Behold StoryAI: Type in a few sentences, and the model autocompletes your story, writing a few hundred more words that, by its calculations, could plausibly follow.

It was created by the folks at BotSociety Inc, using the GPT-2 774M model created by OpenAI, which is eerily good. As an example, it was fed these three sentences as a seed ...

President Trump is buying Greenland in a surprise deal. The state of California is traded in return. The deal was well received by Republicans.

... and it generated this following story:

The Washington Post reports: 

"Trump said the country's unique geography and natural mineral resources would be 'an asset' to the state over its lifespans. He is expected to move swiftly to make good the investment in the $10.8 billion purchase of a national park that he and the president of Denmark, Jens Stoltenberg, announced last year.

"The sale of the state could help the U.S. in its fight against global warming, which is already heating up the planet. The government of Denmark says the purchase will pay for a 10-year expansion of a national park in the north of the island, which is one of the world's most biodiverse areas." 

This move doesn't come as a surprise to political analysts. A recent study by the World Wildlife Fund and the Smithsonian's National Center for Atmospheric Research revealed several Arctic nations have substantial oil reserves and natural gas reserves and they are in talks to trade them in for the Arctic. 

"Canada and Russia are the two most active, buying all but 2 percent of the Arctic's undiscovered oil and gas reserves, based on an analysis of data from 2008 to 2016," explains the Wall Street Journal. "As many as 11 countries also have interests in the Arctic. The U.S. and Britain, which both lost an ocean fleet to Islamic State militants in the last year, are both among them, as are China, Germany and India."

These story-generation models are getting sophisticated enough -- and easy enough for anyone to deploy -- that it isn't hard to imagine them being used in various forms of deception, from spam to fraudbots to political twitterbots and chatbots. They're probably already being used in those sectors.

I wondered what the model would generate if I fed it the opening two sentences of this very blog post, and, le voila:

I'd love to know their version: I was going to use GPT-2 when I published my paper, but it was in need of some improvement. I thought I'd try the GPT model, too. 

And the robot did not disappoint. The robot wrote down what was on the page. It was incredibly fast. Like very good. It did not need to go over the page twice, as it was already there so fast. I can't tell you how impressed I am. One might compare it to the kind of artificial intelligence the DeepMind AlphaGo machine has: fast, and smart, and able to match humans in a match. 

We should see more of this. The problem of the robot's writing in a non-linear format is not entirely solved yet, but it could be, and the work done for this paper could inform future work by companies like OpenAI, creating the kind of general-purpose AI that could be used right here in our everyday lives. 

And of course, we shouldn't think of deep learning for humans as a technology we would just casually take to the bank, use as an ATM. It's a tool, one that needs to be used carefully. A robot that is more or less a computer could benefit from careful control over its output data and how it is interpreted as being used. If you ask any machine-learning researcher whether they are "a fan of deep learning", you'll find a lot of skeptics. 

This is all possible because of a deep realization by the researchers I mentioned before — that our world works better when everyone, all the time, is able to read and understand text. What this all comes down to, however, is that everyone deserves a little bit of control over the way their own world works. That's why, for me, the best thing about this paper is not that it makes machine learning even deeper and more important. No, it's that it shows, just once again, that the tools we use to teach and take control of computers have been working for centuries. And that, ultimately, it works.

by Clive Thompson, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Image: CC-2.0-licensed photo of typewriter via Ak~i's Flickr stream
[ed. Now this is scary.]

Rumbling in the Whine Cellar

Peppered with complaints from farmers fed up with President Trump’s trade war, Sonny Perdue found his patience wearing thin. Mr. Perdue, the agriculture secretary and the guest of honor at the annual Farmfest gathering in southern Minnesota this month, tried to break the ice with a joke.

“What do you call two farmers in a basement?” Mr. Perdue asked near the end of a testy hourlong town-hall-style event. “A whine cellar.”

A cascade of boos ricocheted around the room.

American farmers have become collateral damage in a trade war that Mr. Trump began to help manufacturers and other companies that he believes have been hurt by China’s “unfair” trade practices.

More than a year into the trade dispute, sales of American soybeans, pork, wheat and other agricultural products to China have dried up as Beijing retaliates against Mr. Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports. Lucrative contracts that farmers long relied on for a significant source of income have evaporated, with Chinese buyers looking to other nations like Brazil and Canada to get the commodities they need. Farm bankruptcy filings in the year through June were up 13 percent from 2018 and loan delinquency rates are on the rise, according to the American Farm Bureau. (...)

Losing the world’s most populous country as an export market has been a major blow to the agriculture industry. Total American agricultural exports to China were $24 billion in 2014 and fell to $9.1 billion last year, according to the American Farm Bureau. Exports of farm products to China fell by $1.3 billion in the first half of the year, the agriculture group said this month.

A report from the Agriculture Department this month found that Canadian wheat exports to China have “rocketed” this year, while exports from the United States have plunged.

The administration has tried to mollify farmers by rolling out two financial aid packages totaling $28 billion. The White House has also dispatched Mr. Perdue, the 72-year-old former governor of Georgia who was raised on a farm and trained as a veterinarian, to places like Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin to calm the nerves of farmers.

But as the trade fight gets uglier, farmers are beginning to panic. Last week, Mr. Trump said he would increase tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese imports to 30 percent and impose a 15 percent tax on another $300 billion worth later this year. China has already said it will no longer buy American agricultural products and announced on Friday that it would raise tariffs on $75 billion of exports from America. (...)

Mr. Perdue, who was once a Democrat, has also shown a penchant for pleasing conservatives. Last year, he pitched the idea of slashing federal food stamp assistance programs by partially replacing food allowance money for the poor with “harvest boxes” of pasta, cereal and canned goods selected by the government. That plan was eventually scrapped, but Mr. Perdue has continued his push to curtail food stamps this year, including last month when he proposed a rule that would cut three million people off from food stamps by changing the eligibility requirements.

Most recently, Mr. Perdue won plaudits from top White House officials for moving part of his agency out of town. After agency research clashed with the administration’s policy agenda, Mr. Perdue decided last year to relocate two of the department’s scientific divisions — the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture — to the Kansas City region from Washington. Mr. Perdue claimed that the relocation was not retaliatory and was about moving researchers closer to their subjects.

According to the American Federation of Government Employees, only about 100 of the approximately 500 employees from the divisions have agreed to relocate.

When Mr. Perdue addressed employees in June about the move, several stood and turned their backs to him, according to people who were in the room. Democrats have been outraged by the relocation, calling it an attack on science. And the Agriculture Department’s inspector general said in a report released this month that moving the research units without congressional approval might be illegal.

In the West Wing, however, Mr. Perdue’s decision was seen as a stroke of brilliance.

At the South Carolina Republican Party’s Silver Elephant gala in early August, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, hailed Mr. Perdue’s maneuver as a case study of how to “drain the swamp.”

by Alan Rappeport, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Melissa Golden for The New York Times

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Elton John

[ed. Kenny Lattimore does a nice cover version, too. See also: Holiday Inn (I'm not sure if it's Davy Johnstone or Rick Fortenberry on mandolin).

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Bullshit Jobs

"Bullshit Jobs: A Theory” is the latest fascinating and infuriating book from David Graeber, a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. If you’re not familiar with Graeber, he’s an anarchist who does anthropology, or an anthropologist who does anarchism (he strongly dislikes being called an “anarchist anthropologist,” along with another Nickname That Cannot Be Uttered). The dislike of this first moniker—we shall never utter the second—has always struck your authors as strange. The best way to describe Graeber’s anthropology is as anarchist anthropology. It’s different than other studies or ethnographies. His writing, to the extent that it has a uniform style, is made up of five thousand word anecdotes that somehow coalesce into an overarching theory. Much like anarchism, his anthropology is less grand theory and more “here are a bunch of cool things that seem to say something about the world.” There are flaws with this approach, of course, but it does make for an engaging and bottom-up type of writing.

Graeber’s own family and personal history is equally interesting. He comes from a long line of radicals—his grandfather was a late 19th century atheist and frontier musician, his father fought for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, and his mother was a garment worker-turned Broadway star whose story is very much worth reading. Graeber himself played a key role in the Occupy Wall Street movement, where he was credited with popularizing the phrase “we are the 99%.” Bullshit Jobs is not remotely his first book: some of his other notable works include: “The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy,” “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” and “Direct Action: An Ethnography.”

“That’s all very well,” you may be thinking, “but isn’t this review about Bullshit Jobs,and didn’t it come out about a year ago, and isn’t that an unreasonably long time to wait to review it?” To this we will say two things, the first being that this is Current Affairs and we do not bow to the tyranny of clocks, and the second is that, if anything, Graeber’s book is even more relevant today than when it was first published, because the foul trends it examines have only grown stinkier since then.

The Five Types of Bullshit Jobs

The first chapters of the book finds Graeber in classic form, wielding anecdotes about German military contractors (apparently it takes three different subcontractors and around twenty man-hours of labor to move a computer from one office to another) and Spanish government workers (specifically, the hero Joaquín García, who skipped work for six years without anyone noticing) that are as hilarious as they are illustrative about the point Graeber is trying to make—bullshit jobs are plentiful, they are often created for the most asinine reasons, and doing them breaks our brains.

Bullshit jobs invoke an intense cognitive dissonance in large part because they shouldn’t be able to exist under capitalism (more on this later). For now, the important thing to remember is that bullshit jobs are, essentially, the “fat” that today’s sleek, ulta-efficient corporations are always seeking to trim—and yet it comprises an enormous, ever-burgeoning percentage of their workforce and budget. According to the theorists, this isn’t possible: companies with bloated advisory boards and expensively useless brand consultants should perish at the hands of their leaner rivals. But the thousands upon thousands of personal stories that Graeber’s book is based upon suggests otherwise.

From these anecdotes, Graeber constructs a catalogue of the various forms and flavors of bullshit jobs. As he describes them:

Flunky jobs are those that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important….

Goons [are] people whose jobs have an aggressive element, but, crucially, who exist only because other people employ them….

Duct tapers are employees whose jobs only exist because of a glitch or fault in the organization; who are there to solve a problem that ought not to exist….

Box tickers [are] employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing….

Taskmasters fall into two categories. Type 1 contains those whose role consists entirely of assigning work to others…. [Type 2 contains those] whose primary role is to create bullshit tasks for other to do, to supervise bullshit, or even to create entirely new bullshit jobs.”

As Graeber explains the intricacies of each category of bullshit job, you may find yourself thinking, “Wow, there are a lot of jobs that sound like flunkies—bodyguards, personal shoppers, ‘special assistants to the chairman.’ And there’s a lot of jobs that sound like goons: P.R. gurus, SEO marketers, and—with apologies to most of the Current Affairs editorial board—lawyers. And the duct tapers: Couldn’t that describe pretty much everyone in I.T.? Box tickers sound like every H.R. manager, diversity consultant, and sustainability advisor you’ve ever met, and ‘taskmaster’ could be a synonym for ‘project manager’ and its related mutations. Oh god, are all jobs bullshit jobs?”

by Oren Nimni & Nick Slater, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Best Honky-Tonks in Texas

There was a time, not so long ago—after World War II but before Willie moved to Austin—that most Texans would have shared a common, if working, definition of “honky-tonk.” But nowadays, many seem to have the wrong idea about what qualifies (and there are some, typically of the recently arrived variety, for whom the word might as well be Swahili). Part of what makes the term so tricky to nail down is the fact that there are certain ineffable qualities that a true honky-tonk must possess. Some historic venues lose it over time, and some brand-new joints have it from day one. So before we go any further, let’s set some guidelines.

A honky-tonk is not a dance hall. Many of our most beloved dance halls were built by German and Czech settlers in the second half of the nineteenth century. They are often beautiful structures, originally constructed to host social clubs and other family-friendly affairs. Honky-tonks, by contrast, tend to have roots as shallow as tumbleweeds’. Few can trace their history back more than a few decades, and only a handful of stalwarts have been around for more than fifty years. In fact, a honky-tonk is seldom erected at all. It tends to spring to life when an empty filling station or abandoned store is repurposed. As such, the honky-tonk does not boast the elegant architectural qualities of a dance hall. The ceilings are low, the walls cinder block and windowless, the lighting is neon, and the dance floor, when not sticky tile or concrete, is likely made of wood salvaged from an old high school gym. Nor is a honky-tonk the focal point of civic life. It is most often found on the outskirts of town, where it serves the periphery of society. And a honky-tonk is certainly no place to take small children.

A honky-tonk is not a restaurant. The fare is typically limited to the kind you’d find at a Little League concession stand: Frito pie, nachos, nuts, and various fried or pickled items. A few places serve fine burgers from their grease-laden flattops. And you might come across passable steak (chicken-fried or grilled) on certain nights. But if you ever see blue cheese on the menu, friend, you’re not in a honky-tonk. (On the other hand, if you smell blue cheese near the men’s room, you might be.)

A honky-tonk is not a country-themed nightclub. Such country discos are widespread among the state’s big cities and were founded on the honky-tonk’s core principles—namely, booze, country music, dancing, and hooking up—but the parallels pretty much end there. For one thing, these cavernous warehouses operate almost exclusively at night and on the weekends. This runs contrary to the operating hours of a honky-tonk, which should welcome customers at least five days a week and open before folks get off work. Whereas each honky-tonk offers some sense of the owner’s personality (if only in the array of taxidermy displayed), the nightclub is a more impersonal experience.

While groups like Texas Dance Hall Preservation have taken laudable steps to save our state’s handsome dance halls, the dingy, rough-hewn honky-tonk hasn’t inspired the same kind of conservation efforts. As a result, the honky-tonk is now endangered. But those that remain continue to serve an important role in their communities: they are the place where a person can unspool a troubled mind, pursue or nurture romance, drown their sorrows, or shake their limbs to a country song.

This spring, I traveled some three thousand miles in search of the state’s best honky-tonks. As expected, most were hole-in-the-wall joints with little to admire aesthetically. Many had yet to meet smoking bans, and a couple featured the inevitable hothead fuming over some perceived slight at the pool table. But the vast majority are mostly welcoming places—so long as you don’t get too out of line or come in proselytizing for veganism. I reckon that parts of this list might not sit well with some readers and others will be baffled by what’s left off. I’m happy to have the debate, so long as it’s over Lone Stars—in a honky-tonk, of course.

Arkey Blue’s Silver Dollar

Established: 1968
Basics: Cash only. Smoking permitted. $5 cover charge on Saturdays and holiday weekends.
Drink: Lone Star (longneck). Sells setups. Wine: Barefoot.
Food: Bags of chips, popcorn for $1—salty and a bit stale (in other words, good).
Sign: “Cowboys—No shirt, no service. Cowgirls—No shirt, free beer.”
Pro Tip: Don’t wear your rough-out suede boots. The sawdust will stick to them.

To enter this honky-tonk heaven, you must go down. Down a wooden staircase behind a red metal door on the main street of Bandera, down into the cool darkness beneath the town’s general store. A local woman will greet you at the bottom of the stairs. You’ll give her $5 and she’ll hand you a ticket to this neon kingdom. Your eyes will need a moment to adjust to the dim light, at which point you’ll take in your surroundings: The ceiling is low and made of red pressed tin. There’s a small stage to your right, and the bar beckons at the far end of the room. The air smells of popcorn, beer, and tobacco. The dance floor is blanketed with sawdust.

Arkey Juenke, the owner, was a young songwriter and guitar picker when a record producer took to calling him Blue, because of his tendency to write and sing sad songs. The name stuck. Arkey opened the Silver Dollar in 1968, and ever since Arkey Blue and the Blue Cowboys have been playing tear-in-your-beer tunes every Saturday night. In the afternoon, a regularly scheduled jam session draws a crowd of dancers. After they finish and before Arkey’s eight o’clock set begins, many of the dancers go home, eat dinner, take a nap, throw on fresh duds, and return just as the Blue Cowboys take the stage.

On the Saturday evening I was there, a good chunk of the crowd was made up of old-school cowboy types in Wranglers and straw hats, but one brave soul ventured downstairs wearing a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops. Many of the men’s faces were ruddy from the sun or from drink and lined by wrinkles as deep as cotton furrows. The women dripped with turquoise and sterling silver, and wore blouses emblazoned with Old Glory to mark the Memorial Day weekend. Those who didn’t already know one another made fast friends at the long tables covered in red-and-white-checkered cloths.

Promptly at eight, Arkey and his quintet launched into their set of honky-tonk classics. They burned through “Ramblin’ Fever,” and the steel guitar wailed on “There Stands the Glass.” As the night waltzed on, one of the dancers took a break and slid into the booth across from me. She introduced herself: Denise Lartin, 62 years old, originally from Queens, and now a proud Bandera resident. I asked how she had ended up here. “I got addicted to two-stepping,” she told me in the thickest New York accent I’ve heard outside of the movies. She had googled “cowboys” and discovered Bandera, which touts itself as the Cowboy Capital of the World. “I had gone to Utah and Arizona before coming here,” she said, “but there weren’t no cowboy bars. Not like here. You can go dancing every night of the week.”

Shortly before midnight, Arkey and his Blue Cowboys began to wrap their set. Denise and her boyfriend decided to head down Main Street to a country bar. Before they ascended the stairs, I asked Denise if she planned to stick around Bandera. “Oh, I’m here forever,” she said. “Texas, there’s nothing like it.”

by Christian Wallace, Texas Monthly |  Read more:

Image: Leann Mueller