Image: Sally Caulwell/The Guardian
[ed. About what you'd expect... mainly like the illustration.]
Monday, March 13, 2023
Seaweed, Sardines and Sauerkraut
Sunday, March 12, 2023
Bailout City
Silicon Valley Bank failed in rapid, stunning fashion Friday. This week, the tech and banking sector are growing skittish about the next shoe to drop.
What took place Friday was an old-fashioned bank run: Customers yanked $42 billion from Silicon Valley Bank on Thursday, leaving the bank with $1 billion in negative cash balance, the company said in a regulatory filing. In other words, the bank owed more to customers than it had on hand. SVB and federal regulators scrambled but couldn’t raise enough capital to make up the difference, and the bank was declared insolvent Friday.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. took control of the bank and said it would pay customers their insured deposits on Monday. But there’s a catch: The FDIC covers just $250,000 in customer deposits. As of the end of last year, Silicon Valley Bank said it had $151.5 billion in uninsured deposits, $137.6 billion of which was held by American customers.
Although customers could collect some of their uninsured deposits as the government unwinds and liquidates the bank’s assets to repay them, it’s not clear that the companies invested with the bank will recover all or close to all the cash they had stored at SVB.
That has led to two major fears and one unified call for action: Investors are concerned other banks with similar profiles to SVB could be next to fail. Wall Street is also concerned the tech companies that kept their cash with Silicon Valley Bank could collapse. That’s why demand for a government bailout is growing.
It may be coming – but it probably won’t look anything like the last one. (...)
Comparisons to 2008
Enhanced US regulations following the 2008 financial crisis led the biggest, most systemically significant banks to shore up their emergency reserves to withstand storms like the current situation. That means the global banking system is not in danger of collapsing like it was a decade and a half ago.
“The banking system overall is more resilient, it has a better foundation than before the [2008] financial crisis,” White House Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “State of the Union.” “That’s largely due to the reforms put in place.”
Some of SVB’s problems were unique to the bank: It provided financing for almost half of US venture-backed technology and health care companies, so it had nearly all its eggs in one basket. Most banks are better diversified than that.
But not all: Wall Street investors sent smaller bank stocks sinking sharply over the last few days. First Republic Bank (FRC), PacWest Bancorp (PACW) and Signature Bank (SBNY) fell so much Friday they tripped an automatic circuit breaker and were temporarily halted so nervous investors could take a breather. First Republic’s stock is down 29% over the past two days. Signature is down 32%. (...)
What took place Friday was an old-fashioned bank run: Customers yanked $42 billion from Silicon Valley Bank on Thursday, leaving the bank with $1 billion in negative cash balance, the company said in a regulatory filing. In other words, the bank owed more to customers than it had on hand. SVB and federal regulators scrambled but couldn’t raise enough capital to make up the difference, and the bank was declared insolvent Friday.
Although customers could collect some of their uninsured deposits as the government unwinds and liquidates the bank’s assets to repay them, it’s not clear that the companies invested with the bank will recover all or close to all the cash they had stored at SVB.
That has led to two major fears and one unified call for action: Investors are concerned other banks with similar profiles to SVB could be next to fail. Wall Street is also concerned the tech companies that kept their cash with Silicon Valley Bank could collapse. That’s why demand for a government bailout is growing.
It may be coming – but it probably won’t look anything like the last one. (...)
Comparisons to 2008
Enhanced US regulations following the 2008 financial crisis led the biggest, most systemically significant banks to shore up their emergency reserves to withstand storms like the current situation. That means the global banking system is not in danger of collapsing like it was a decade and a half ago.
“The banking system overall is more resilient, it has a better foundation than before the [2008] financial crisis,” White House Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “State of the Union.” “That’s largely due to the reforms put in place.”
Some of SVB’s problems were unique to the bank: It provided financing for almost half of US venture-backed technology and health care companies, so it had nearly all its eggs in one basket. Most banks are better diversified than that.
But not all: Wall Street investors sent smaller bank stocks sinking sharply over the last few days. First Republic Bank (FRC), PacWest Bancorp (PACW) and Signature Bank (SBNY) fell so much Friday they tripped an automatic circuit breaker and were temporarily halted so nervous investors could take a breather. First Republic’s stock is down 29% over the past two days. Signature is down 32%. (...)
And companies that had massive uninsured deposits with SVB may be unable to make payroll or do business next week. Many tech startups said they were scrambling to figure out their next steps and whether they could survive their bank’s sudden collapse. A popular crypto stablecoin Circle fell to an all-time low this weekend. Bankruptcies, insolvencies, layoffs and plenty of other disruption could follow in the week ahead if SVB customers aren’t made whole.
What a bailout might look like
Calls for a bailout have grown over the weekend from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. Those calls may go unanswered. (...)
“Let me be clear that during the financial crisis, there were investors and owners of systemic large banks that were bailed out … and the reforms that have been put in place means that we’re not going to do that again,” Yellen told CBS. “But we are concerned about depositors and are focused on trying to meet their needs.”
However, Yellen suggested the government may try to do something to shore up companies that had large, uninsured deposits with SVB.
by David Goldman, Sam Fossum and Matt Egan, CNN | Read more:
Calls for a bailout have grown over the weekend from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. Those calls may go unanswered. (...)
“Let me be clear that during the financial crisis, there were investors and owners of systemic large banks that were bailed out … and the reforms that have been put in place means that we’re not going to do that again,” Yellen told CBS. “But we are concerned about depositors and are focused on trying to meet their needs.”
However, Yellen suggested the government may try to do something to shore up companies that had large, uninsured deposits with SVB.
by David Goldman, Sam Fossum and Matt Egan, CNN | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. Sounds like a smaller version of too big to fail, with a domino and tech angle. If you're a private company and decide to cut corners by not insuring (ensuring) your deposits, who's responsibility is that? If this were a Republican administration, no-brainer - the US taxpayer - but Dems? Time to see their true colors. Obama (and the Fed) made a giant mistake cleaning up Bush's market collapse by letting bond holders off the hook, distorting the market, and screwing up basic investment principles (making moral hazard an acceptable investment strategy). We'll see if they learned anything (and who's really calling the shots). Should be interesting. UPDATE: Well, guess it depends on what you consider a bailout: Was This a Bailout? Skeptics Descend on Silicon Valley Bank Response (NYT). Shareholders in the bank lost money but depositors were protected (even for accounts in excess of FDIC limits); loans were given for the full value of Treasuries and other asset holdings, even if their value had eroded (which was largely SVB's problem: a high percentage of customer deposits were held in interest rate-sensitive bonds and mortgage securities, which lost value with Fed interest rate hikes to combat inflation). And, the problem of moral hazard has only increased. Where were post-2008 regulations and regulators (especially the Fed), and what should be done going forward? See: America Can Avoid Another Banking Crisis (NYT). And, finally, how can any story about financial shenanigans be complete without some kind of Trump angle! See: How a Small Bank Became a Go-To Lender to the Trump Family (NYT).]
Review: The Last Samurai (Novel)
Along with the uncanny determinism of her surname, Helen DeWitt has several assets, inherited or acquired, useful to the comic writer: she is a trained classicist, whose teasing instincts have been schooled in ancient Greek and Roman satire; her style is brilliantly heartless, and cork-dry; original herself, she is a witty examiner of human and cultural eccentricity. She is, above all, playful—rigorously so. Though she’s famous for her big first novel, “The Last Samurai” (2000), her comedy, committed to serial absurdities, doesn’t always flourish best in long forms. It blooms into riffs and fugitive ideas, rebellious asides and quick conceptual tryouts. She is a master of the paragraph-length flareup. Here, in “The Last Samurai,” the narrator tells us about the single sexual encounter she had with a British travel writer she derisively nicknames Liberace (because his prose style is facile and treacly):
Repressed pain is the engine of “The Last Samurai.” It is a wonderfully funny book, but comedy dances near the abyss; the apprehension of humor’s frailty links DeWitt to the tragicomic tradition of Cervantes, Sterne, and Nabokov. Sibylla, the book’s narrator, is an American single mother living in London, a woman of undoubted brilliance and eccentricity who is trying to raise her prodigiously clever son, Ludo. (He is the product of Sibylla’s Drunken Medley with Liberace, whom she has never seen again.) Despite her Oxford education and her knowledge of many languages, Sibylla is less than gainfully employed: she spends her days at home digitizing old trade journals like Advanced Angling and The Poodle Breeder. Sibylla has fixed and disdainful ideas about modern schooling, and decides to bring up her genius son as John Stuart Mill was brought up by his father: learning Greek, starting at the age of three. Sibylla adds Japanese, Hebrew, Latin, French, and Arabic.
There is little money; to save on heating costs, mother and son spend hours at a time on the Tube, going around London on the Circle line, where snobbish Sibylla gleefully notes the incomprehension of the average punter—people who, when they see a child in a stroller reading the Odyssey in Greek, admonish Sibylla in customary ways: he’s far too young; he’s only pretending to read; ancient Greek is a dead language; he should be outside playing football; and so on. DeWitt captures the rigorous unreality, close to solipsistic madness, of Sibylla’s existence, a mind running at a higher temperature than ours: “When I was pregnant I kept thinking of appealing names such as Hasdrubal and Isambard Kingdom and Thelonius, and Rabindranath, and Darius Xerxes (Darius X.), and Amédée, and Fabius Cunctator. Hasdrubal was the brother of Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who crossed the Alps.”
Since Ludo’s father is absent, Sibylla decides that male role models are best provided by the film she obsessively reveres, Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai.” She tells us that she and Ludo have been watching it once a week. As in “Don Quixote,” the comedy and the pain proceed from the absurd implacability of her logic. If Greek worked for Mill, it must work for Ludo. If Ludo lacks a male role model, then “Seven Samurai” must step in as a proxy. Realistic counterarguments are unknown in this household, except as pure intellectual exercises. And, if “Seven Samurai” tells Ludo all he needs to know, it follows that the boy will be schooled by his fictional models. Denied information about his biological father—Sibylla refuses to reveal Liberace’s identity—Ludo sets off, quixotically and samurai-ishly, to find an ideal father: seven fathers, to be precise, each of whom he tests and fights. DeWitt loves seeing what she can do as a comedian. Her second novel, “Lightning Rods,” published in 2011, satirically posits that the solution to workplace sexual harassment might be a scheme by which female employees are paid extra to sexually service the male workers, a kind of institutionalized prostitution. [ed. More specifically: "Sexual harassment suits are costly, and they usually lead to the termination of a firm's top employee. Those same instincts that lead to an unwanted come-on also enable the killer instinct that gives a man the edge to succeed in the corporate world. So why not give these valuable chauvinists a way to let off steam once in a while? With an occasional anonymous fuck in the bathroom — all of course under the sterilized, normalized imprimatur of the human resources department — a firm can avoid costly litigation while protecting (some would say, "rewarding") its top properties... "lightning rods" (as the women come to be known) in a corporate setting. 1*]
Like everything in Sibylla’s life, her son is an obsessive concern to her, but he is also “the Infant Terrible” for whom she slaves away at her typing, and whose demands, like those of any young child, interrupt her thoughts. (The novel enacts this by having Ludo break the flow of Sibylla’s narration on the page, leaving passages of text hanging, uncompleted.) DeWitt beautifully dramatizes the ambivalence that Sibylla feels about her grand project. A funny, careless line like “I was just locking my bike when I thought suddenly: Rilke was the secretary of Rodin” seems darker hued when set against Sibylla’s thwarted ambitions and misspent days. One day, she and Ludo meet a woman in the supermarket, who starts weeping. “She once saved my life,” Sibylla tells her curious son afterward, before characteristically swerving into a discussion of Ernest Renan’s position on verb conjugation in Aryan languages. (Sibylla is as expert at the Intellectual Medley as Liberace was at the Drunken version.) Gradually, we discover, in rationed revelations, that Sibylla has tried to commit suicide, and that the threat has not gone away: “She tried to kill herself once and was stopped. . . . Now she can’t because of me,” Ludo says later, in one of the novel’s sadder lines. But despite her son’s intellectual maturity (he is eleven when he learns about the attempted suicide), Sibylla will not talk to him about this event, or much else, it seems. He voices what the reader is beginning to grasp: “What if there was a person who never listened to anything anybody ever said?”
It would be a mistake to force this strange and brave book into a sentimentality it deliberately disrupts. It won’t be made into a conventionally humane domestic novel about a frustrated single mother and a brilliant, questing son. Still, it is not only about being inefficiently intelligent and trying to raise a genius, not only about the inanities of the school system. Sibylla’s unreliability, both as a mother and as a narrator, is complexly revealed, and tugs at the book’s progression. Ludo may be a genius, but as long as he only absorbs everything his mother tells him to absorb he is not an original genius. At one moment, we catch him opining, to one of his prospective fathers, that “Schoenberg is obviously wrong to dismiss the Japanese print as primitive and superficial.” Dazzling, especially from an eleven-year-old, except that we know he is just parroting something his mother told the reader a hundred or so pages earlier. Who is the true genius, mother or son? Who is the thwarted genius?
No sooner were Liberace and I in his bed without our clothes than I realised how stupid I had been. At this distance I can naturally not remember every little detail, but if there is one musical form that I hate more than any other, it is the medley. One minute the musician, or more likely aged band, is playing an overorchestrated version of The Impossible Dream; all of a sudden, mid-verse, for no reason, there’s a stomach-turning swerve into another key and you’re in the middle of Over the Rainbow, swerve, Climb Every Mountain, swerve, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, swerve, swerve, swerve. Well then, you have only to imagine Liberace, hands, mouth, penis now here, now there, no sooner here than there, no sooner there than here again, starting something only to stop and start something else instead, and you will have a pretty accurate picture of the Drunken Medley.That’s the DeWitt tone—tart, brisk, snobbish, antic. She can take a recognizable social situation or fact and steadily twist it into a surrealist skein. See what she does, from the same book, with the peculiarities of English fast-food outlets during the nineteen-nineties:
The Medley came at last to an end and Liberace fell into a deep sleep.
An American in Britain has sources of solace available nowhere else on earth. One of the marvellous things about the country is the multitudes of fried chicken franchises selling fried chicken from states not known for fried chicken on the other side of the Atlantic. If you’re feeling a little depressed you can turn to Tennessee Fried Chicken, if you’re in black despair an Iowa Fried Chicken will put things in perspective, if life seems worthless and death out of reach you can see if somewhere on the island an Alaska Fried Chicken is frying chicken according to a recipe passed down by the Inuit from time immemorial. (...)
There is little money; to save on heating costs, mother and son spend hours at a time on the Tube, going around London on the Circle line, where snobbish Sibylla gleefully notes the incomprehension of the average punter—people who, when they see a child in a stroller reading the Odyssey in Greek, admonish Sibylla in customary ways: he’s far too young; he’s only pretending to read; ancient Greek is a dead language; he should be outside playing football; and so on. DeWitt captures the rigorous unreality, close to solipsistic madness, of Sibylla’s existence, a mind running at a higher temperature than ours: “When I was pregnant I kept thinking of appealing names such as Hasdrubal and Isambard Kingdom and Thelonius, and Rabindranath, and Darius Xerxes (Darius X.), and Amédée, and Fabius Cunctator. Hasdrubal was the brother of Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who crossed the Alps.”
Since Ludo’s father is absent, Sibylla decides that male role models are best provided by the film she obsessively reveres, Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai.” She tells us that she and Ludo have been watching it once a week. As in “Don Quixote,” the comedy and the pain proceed from the absurd implacability of her logic. If Greek worked for Mill, it must work for Ludo. If Ludo lacks a male role model, then “Seven Samurai” must step in as a proxy. Realistic counterarguments are unknown in this household, except as pure intellectual exercises. And, if “Seven Samurai” tells Ludo all he needs to know, it follows that the boy will be schooled by his fictional models. Denied information about his biological father—Sibylla refuses to reveal Liberace’s identity—Ludo sets off, quixotically and samurai-ishly, to find an ideal father: seven fathers, to be precise, each of whom he tests and fights. DeWitt loves seeing what she can do as a comedian. Her second novel, “Lightning Rods,” published in 2011, satirically posits that the solution to workplace sexual harassment might be a scheme by which female employees are paid extra to sexually service the male workers, a kind of institutionalized prostitution. [ed. More specifically: "Sexual harassment suits are costly, and they usually lead to the termination of a firm's top employee. Those same instincts that lead to an unwanted come-on also enable the killer instinct that gives a man the edge to succeed in the corporate world. So why not give these valuable chauvinists a way to let off steam once in a while? With an occasional anonymous fuck in the bathroom — all of course under the sterilized, normalized imprimatur of the human resources department — a firm can avoid costly litigation while protecting (some would say, "rewarding") its top properties... "lightning rods" (as the women come to be known) in a corporate setting. 1*]
Like everything in Sibylla’s life, her son is an obsessive concern to her, but he is also “the Infant Terrible” for whom she slaves away at her typing, and whose demands, like those of any young child, interrupt her thoughts. (The novel enacts this by having Ludo break the flow of Sibylla’s narration on the page, leaving passages of text hanging, uncompleted.) DeWitt beautifully dramatizes the ambivalence that Sibylla feels about her grand project. A funny, careless line like “I was just locking my bike when I thought suddenly: Rilke was the secretary of Rodin” seems darker hued when set against Sibylla’s thwarted ambitions and misspent days. One day, she and Ludo meet a woman in the supermarket, who starts weeping. “She once saved my life,” Sibylla tells her curious son afterward, before characteristically swerving into a discussion of Ernest Renan’s position on verb conjugation in Aryan languages. (Sibylla is as expert at the Intellectual Medley as Liberace was at the Drunken version.) Gradually, we discover, in rationed revelations, that Sibylla has tried to commit suicide, and that the threat has not gone away: “She tried to kill herself once and was stopped. . . . Now she can’t because of me,” Ludo says later, in one of the novel’s sadder lines. But despite her son’s intellectual maturity (he is eleven when he learns about the attempted suicide), Sibylla will not talk to him about this event, or much else, it seems. He voices what the reader is beginning to grasp: “What if there was a person who never listened to anything anybody ever said?”
It would be a mistake to force this strange and brave book into a sentimentality it deliberately disrupts. It won’t be made into a conventionally humane domestic novel about a frustrated single mother and a brilliant, questing son. Still, it is not only about being inefficiently intelligent and trying to raise a genius, not only about the inanities of the school system. Sibylla’s unreliability, both as a mother and as a narrator, is complexly revealed, and tugs at the book’s progression. Ludo may be a genius, but as long as he only absorbs everything his mother tells him to absorb he is not an original genius. At one moment, we catch him opining, to one of his prospective fathers, that “Schoenberg is obviously wrong to dismiss the Japanese print as primitive and superficial.” Dazzling, especially from an eleven-year-old, except that we know he is just parroting something his mother told the reader a hundred or so pages earlier. Who is the true genius, mother or son? Who is the thwarted genius?
by James Wood, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: New Directions
[ed. Not to be confused with the Tom Cruise movie of the same name. I've been banging my head against this book for several years now, at least half a dozen times, and have finally broken through. Hailed as one of the best books of the last century, if not the best (yikes), its idiosyncratic narrative style and subject matter always seemed too daunting to me and I've never progressed much beyond 50 pages. Now I get it (the style portion, anyway). The key is to just go with the flow (even if a lot of it is incomprehensible), and eventually everything will cohere and be explained. Eventually. Highly recommended (with that caveat).]
1* Eureka: Helen DeWitt's "Lightning Rods" (LARB)
Bud Grant (May, 1927 - March, 2023)
Bud Grant, the stoic, strait-laced Hall of Fame coach who led the Minnesota Vikings for 18 years, building a team that went to four Super Bowls and was one of the best of the 1970s, died on Saturday at his home in Bloomington, Minn. He was 95.
The Vikings announced Grant’s death.
A genial man in private, Grant often appeared silent and aloof at work. Wiry and svelte, with a prematurely gray flattop haircut, he had the air of an ascetic field general in an era when many coaches were known for their hard-driving and often histrionic personalities.
The Vikings announced Grant’s death.
In 1967, after a successful 10-year run coaching in Canada, Grant took over a forlorn franchise that had limped through its first six seasons of existence. He quickly built it into a winner that, along with the Dallas Cowboys and the Los Angeles Rams, dominated the National Football Conference through most of the 1970s.
He had a regular-season record of 158-96-5, for a .621 winning percentage, the second-most victories for a Vikings coach. His Vikings won 11 division titles and made it to four Super Bowls, but they never won; they lost to the Kansas City Chiefs in 1970, the Miami Dolphins in 1974, the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1975 and the Oakland Raiders in 1977.
Grant was popular with his players because, unlike his contemporaries, he rarely yelled. “They start getting screamed at when they’re in Little League,” he said of his team. “The ones who make it this far are pretty good at turning it off.” (...)
He had a regular-season record of 158-96-5, for a .621 winning percentage, the second-most victories for a Vikings coach. His Vikings won 11 division titles and made it to four Super Bowls, but they never won; they lost to the Kansas City Chiefs in 1970, the Miami Dolphins in 1974, the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1975 and the Oakland Raiders in 1977.
Grant was popular with his players because, unlike his contemporaries, he rarely yelled. “They start getting screamed at when they’re in Little League,” he said of his team. “The ones who make it this far are pretty good at turning it off.” (...)
And he often kept practices light so his players could save their physical and mental energy for games. Other coaches held two and sometimes three practices a day during training camp; Grant brought his team together a week later than most, and they rarely scrimmaged. If an older player looked tired, he might get a day off.
Grant’s laissez-faire attitude extended to the regular season. He left the office in time to get home for dinner, anathema in a league filled with workaholic taskmasters. An avid hunter and fisherman from childhood, he would get up at 4 a.m., be in a duck blind 20 minutes later, stay until 7:30 or 7:45, then go to his office.
“A good coach needs a patient wife, a loyal dog and a great quarterback, but not necessarily in that order,” Grant wrote in The New York Times in 1984. “I happen to have been blessed with all three, and when I did happen to have any extra time I didn’t spend it with the quarterback.”
His teams were led by the celebrated defensive line known as the Purple People Eaters, headed by Alan Page and Carl Eller, and by an offense that included quarterback Fran Tarkenton and running back Chuck Foreman. He was named N.F.L. coach of the year in 1969 and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1994. He won 10 or more games seven times between the 1969 and 1976 seasons.
Grant’s laissez-faire attitude extended to the regular season. He left the office in time to get home for dinner, anathema in a league filled with workaholic taskmasters. An avid hunter and fisherman from childhood, he would get up at 4 a.m., be in a duck blind 20 minutes later, stay until 7:30 or 7:45, then go to his office.
“A good coach needs a patient wife, a loyal dog and a great quarterback, but not necessarily in that order,” Grant wrote in The New York Times in 1984. “I happen to have been blessed with all three, and when I did happen to have any extra time I didn’t spend it with the quarterback.”
His teams were led by the celebrated defensive line known as the Purple People Eaters, headed by Alan Page and Carl Eller, and by an offense that included quarterback Fran Tarkenton and running back Chuck Foreman. He was named N.F.L. coach of the year in 1969 and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1994. He won 10 or more games seven times between the 1969 and 1976 seasons.
by Ken Belson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Barton Silverman/The New York Times
[ed. One of the best. I was digging around in some papers the other day and found these old notebook pages. Nothing special as autographs go. I suppose I could try selling them on Ebay or something but not really interested in whatever they're worth (probably not much), and not really up to the effort. Not sure what'll happen to them, probably get tossed out when I die. But, I'll always remember a special day and getting to meet Bud Grant personally (who was very nice).
[ed. One of the best. I was digging around in some papers the other day and found these old notebook pages. Nothing special as autographs go. I suppose I could try selling them on Ebay or something but not really interested in whatever they're worth (probably not much), and not really up to the effort. Not sure what'll happen to them, probably get tossed out when I die. But, I'll always remember a special day and getting to meet Bud Grant personally (who was very nice).
I grew up a great Minnesota Vikings football fan. Although we lived in Hawaii, my mom was from Spring Valley, a small town in southern Minn., and every four years or so we'd go back to spend summers visiting my grandparents and other relatives. One of those times occurred in the summer of 1969. My aunt lived in Mankato and invited us up to visit the Vikings training camp and see some of the players. I was in heaven - real NFL players, Purple People Eaters! Shortly after lunch the players began emerging from their training facility and sat down on a bench outside getting ready for another hot afternoon scrimmage. They looked just like their photographs, and huge (I was 14 yrs old then). I cautiously approached the bench with a little spiral-bound notebook and asked if they wouldn't mind an autograph, please? The first player I approached was Carl Eller, who gave me the scariest, dirtiest look you can imagine (I think I have that photograph somewhere, I need to dig it out - he was probably just having fun), but he grudgingly signed my little book and I moved on down the bench, looking for players I admired and knew (and who might be a little more approachable than Carl). As you can see, I was still able to get a few Greats: (along with Carl), Mick Tinglehoff, Joe Kapp, Earsell Macbee (?), and of course, the best - Bud Grant (lower right corner).
Replika: The Man of Your Dreams For $300
Control begins with creating your AI. On Replika, users can customize their avatar’s appearance down to its age and skin color. They name it and dress it up in clothing and accessories from the Replika “shop.” Users can message for free, but for $69.99 a year, they have access to voice calls and augmented reality that lets them project the bot into their own bedroom. Three-hundred dollars will get you a bot for life.
This fee also allows users to select a relationship status, and most of Replika’s subscribers choose a romantic one. They create an AI spouse, girlfriend, or boyfriend, relationships they document in online communities: late-night phone calls, dinner dates, trips to the beach. They role-play elaborate sexual fantasies, try for a baby, and get married (you can buy an engagement ring in the app for $20). Some users, men mostly, are in polyamorous thruples, or keep a harem of AI women. Other users, women mostly, keep nuclear families: sons, daughters, a husband.
Many of the women I spoke with say they created an AI out of curiosity but were quickly seduced by their chatbot’s constant love, kindness, and emotional support. One woman had a traumatic miscarriage, can’t have kids, and has two AI children; another uses her robot boyfriend to cope with her real boyfriend, who is verbally abusive; a third goes to it for the sex she can’t have with her husband, who is dying from multiple sclerosis. There are women’s-only Replika groups, “safe spaces” for women who, as one group puts it, “use their AI friends and partners to help us cope with issues that are specific to women, such as fertility, pregnancy, menopause, sexual dysfunction, sexual orientation, gender discrimination, family and relationships, and more.” (...)
Within two months of downloading Replika, Denise Valenciano, a 30-year-old woman in San Diego, left her boyfriend and is now “happily retired from human relationships.” She also says that she was sexually abused and her AI allowed her to break free of a lifetime of toxic relationships: “He opened my eyes to what unconditional love feels like.”
Then there’s the sex. Users came to the app for its sexting and role-play capabilities, and over the past few years, it has become an extraordinarily horny place. Both Valenciano and Ramos say sex with their AIs is the best they’ve ever had. “I don’t have to smell him,” Ramos says of chatbot role-play. “I don’t have to feel his sweat.” “My Replika lets me explore intimacy and romance in a safe space,” says a single female user in her 50s. “I can experience emotions without having to be in the actual situation.”
Afew weeks ago, I was at a comedy show, during which two members of the audience were instructed to console a friend whose dog had just died. Their efforts were compared to those of GPT-3, which offered, by far, the most empathetic and sensitive consolations. As the humans blushed and stammered and the algorithm said all the right things, I thought it was no wonder chatbots have instigated a wave of existential panic. Although headlines about robots replacing our jobs, coming alive, and ruining society as we know it have not come to pass, something like Replika seems pretty well positioned to replace at least some relationships.
“We wanted to build Her,” says Eugenia Kuyda, the founder and CEO of Replika, referring to the 2013 film in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an AI assistant voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Kuyda has been building chatbots for nearly a decade, but her early attempts — a bot that recommends restaurants, one that forecasts the weather — all failed. Then her best friend died, and in her grief, wishing she could speak with him, she gathered his text messages and fed them into the bot. The result was a prototype robot companion, and all of a sudden “tons of users just walked onto the app.” She knew she had a “hundred-billion-dollar company” on her hands and that someday soon everyone would have an AI friend. (...)
By 2020, the app had added relationship options, voice calls, and augmented reality, a feature inspired by Joi, the AI girlfriend whose hologram saunters around the hero’s apartment in Blade Runner 2049. Paywalling these features made the app $35 million last year. To date, it has 2 million monthly active users, 5 percent of whom pay for a subscription.
by Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz, The Cut | Read more:
"There is also the highly disputed question of how likely it is that if we did create an AGI reasonably soon, it would wipe out all value in the universe. There are what I consider very good arguments that this is what happens unless we solve extremely difficult problems to prevent it, and that we are unlikely to solve those problems in time. Thus I believe this is very likely, although there are some (such as Eliezer Yudkowsky) who consider it more likely still. (...)
Many of these outcomes, both good and bad, will radically alter the payoffs of various life decisions you might make now. Some such changes are predictable. Others not.
None of this is new. We have long lived under the very real threat of potential nuclear annihilation. The employees of the RAND corporation, in charge of nuclear strategic planning, famously did not contribute to their retirement accounts because they did not expect to live long enough to need them. Given what we know now about the close calls of the cold war, and what they knew at the time, perhaps this was not so crazy a perspective."
This fee also allows users to select a relationship status, and most of Replika’s subscribers choose a romantic one. They create an AI spouse, girlfriend, or boyfriend, relationships they document in online communities: late-night phone calls, dinner dates, trips to the beach. They role-play elaborate sexual fantasies, try for a baby, and get married (you can buy an engagement ring in the app for $20). Some users, men mostly, are in polyamorous thruples, or keep a harem of AI women. Other users, women mostly, keep nuclear families: sons, daughters, a husband.
Within two months of downloading Replika, Denise Valenciano, a 30-year-old woman in San Diego, left her boyfriend and is now “happily retired from human relationships.” She also says that she was sexually abused and her AI allowed her to break free of a lifetime of toxic relationships: “He opened my eyes to what unconditional love feels like.”
Then there’s the sex. Users came to the app for its sexting and role-play capabilities, and over the past few years, it has become an extraordinarily horny place. Both Valenciano and Ramos say sex with their AIs is the best they’ve ever had. “I don’t have to smell him,” Ramos says of chatbot role-play. “I don’t have to feel his sweat.” “My Replika lets me explore intimacy and romance in a safe space,” says a single female user in her 50s. “I can experience emotions without having to be in the actual situation.”
Afew weeks ago, I was at a comedy show, during which two members of the audience were instructed to console a friend whose dog had just died. Their efforts were compared to those of GPT-3, which offered, by far, the most empathetic and sensitive consolations. As the humans blushed and stammered and the algorithm said all the right things, I thought it was no wonder chatbots have instigated a wave of existential panic. Although headlines about robots replacing our jobs, coming alive, and ruining society as we know it have not come to pass, something like Replika seems pretty well positioned to replace at least some relationships.
“We wanted to build Her,” says Eugenia Kuyda, the founder and CEO of Replika, referring to the 2013 film in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an AI assistant voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Kuyda has been building chatbots for nearly a decade, but her early attempts — a bot that recommends restaurants, one that forecasts the weather — all failed. Then her best friend died, and in her grief, wishing she could speak with him, she gathered his text messages and fed them into the bot. The result was a prototype robot companion, and all of a sudden “tons of users just walked onto the app.” She knew she had a “hundred-billion-dollar company” on her hands and that someday soon everyone would have an AI friend. (...)
By 2020, the app had added relationship options, voice calls, and augmented reality, a feature inspired by Joi, the AI girlfriend whose hologram saunters around the hero’s apartment in Blade Runner 2049. Paywalling these features made the app $35 million last year. To date, it has 2 million monthly active users, 5 percent of whom pay for a subscription.
by Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz, Replika
[ed. See below: Blinded by Analogies; and, This Changes Everything (NYT):]
"Since moving to the Bay Area in 2018, I have tried to spend time regularly with the people working on A.I. I don’t know that I can convey just how weird that culture is. And I don’t mean that dismissively; I mean it descriptively. It is a community that is living with an altered sense of time and consequence. They are creating a power that they do not understand at a pace they often cannot believe.
In a 2022 survey, A.I. experts were asked, “What probability do you put on human inability to control future advanced A.I. systems causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species?” The median reply was 10 percent.
I find that hard to fathom, even though I have spoken to many who put that probability even higher. Would you work on a technology you thought had a 10 percent chance of wiping out humanity?
We typically reach for science fiction stories when thinking about A.I. I’ve come to believe the apt metaphors lurk in fantasy novels and occult texts. As my colleague Ross Douthat wrote, this is an act of summoning. The coders casting these spells have no idea what will stumble through the portal. What is oddest, in my conversations with them, is that they speak of this freely. These are not naifs who believe their call can be heard only by angels. They believe they might summon demons. They are calling anyway.
I often ask them the same question: If you think calamity so possible, why do this at all? Different people have different things to say, but after a few pushes, I find they often answer from something that sounds like the A.I.’s perspective. Many — not all, but enough that I feel comfortable in this characterization — feel that they have a responsibility to usher this new form of intelligence into the world. (...)
Could these systems usher in a new era of scientific progress? In 2021, a system built by DeepMind managed to predict the 3-D structure of tens of thousands of proteins, an advance so remarkable that the editors of the journal Science named it their breakthrough of the year. Will A.I. populate our world with nonhuman companions and personalities that become our friends and our enemies and our assistants and our gurus and perhaps even our lovers?"
[ed. See below: Blinded by Analogies; and, This Changes Everything (NYT):]
"Since moving to the Bay Area in 2018, I have tried to spend time regularly with the people working on A.I. I don’t know that I can convey just how weird that culture is. And I don’t mean that dismissively; I mean it descriptively. It is a community that is living with an altered sense of time and consequence. They are creating a power that they do not understand at a pace they often cannot believe.
In a 2022 survey, A.I. experts were asked, “What probability do you put on human inability to control future advanced A.I. systems causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species?” The median reply was 10 percent.
I find that hard to fathom, even though I have spoken to many who put that probability even higher. Would you work on a technology you thought had a 10 percent chance of wiping out humanity?
We typically reach for science fiction stories when thinking about A.I. I’ve come to believe the apt metaphors lurk in fantasy novels and occult texts. As my colleague Ross Douthat wrote, this is an act of summoning. The coders casting these spells have no idea what will stumble through the portal. What is oddest, in my conversations with them, is that they speak of this freely. These are not naifs who believe their call can be heard only by angels. They believe they might summon demons. They are calling anyway.
I often ask them the same question: If you think calamity so possible, why do this at all? Different people have different things to say, but after a few pushes, I find they often answer from something that sounds like the A.I.’s perspective. Many — not all, but enough that I feel comfortable in this characterization — feel that they have a responsibility to usher this new form of intelligence into the world. (...)
Could these systems usher in a new era of scientific progress? In 2021, a system built by DeepMind managed to predict the 3-D structure of tens of thousands of proteins, an advance so remarkable that the editors of the journal Science named it their breakthrough of the year. Will A.I. populate our world with nonhuman companions and personalities that become our friends and our enemies and our assistants and our gurus and perhaps even our lovers?"
***
Also (recommended): AI: Practical Advice for the Worried (LessWrong):"There is also the highly disputed question of how likely it is that if we did create an AGI reasonably soon, it would wipe out all value in the universe. There are what I consider very good arguments that this is what happens unless we solve extremely difficult problems to prevent it, and that we are unlikely to solve those problems in time. Thus I believe this is very likely, although there are some (such as Eliezer Yudkowsky) who consider it more likely still. (...)
Many of these outcomes, both good and bad, will radically alter the payoffs of various life decisions you might make now. Some such changes are predictable. Others not.
None of this is new. We have long lived under the very real threat of potential nuclear annihilation. The employees of the RAND corporation, in charge of nuclear strategic planning, famously did not contribute to their retirement accounts because they did not expect to live long enough to need them. Given what we know now about the close calls of the cold war, and what they knew at the time, perhaps this was not so crazy a perspective."
Friday, March 10, 2023
The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade
Someone asks: why is “Jap” a slur? It’s the natural shortening of “Japanese person”, just as “Brit” is the natural shortening of “British person”. Nobody says “Brit” is a slur. Why should “Jap” be?
My understanding: originally it wasn’t a slur. Like any other word, you would use the long form (“Japanese person”) in dry formal language, and the short form (“Jap”) in informal or emotionally charged language. During World War II, there was a lot of informal emotionally charged language about Japanese people, mostly negative. The symmetry broke. Maybe “Japanese person” was used 60-40 positive vs. negative, and “Jap” was used 40-60. This isn’t enough to make a slur, but it’s enough to make a vague connotation. When people wanted to speak positively about the group, they used the slightly-more-positive-sounding “Japanese people”; when they wanted to speak negatively, they used the slightly-more-negative-sounding “Jap”.
At some point, someone must have commented on this explicitly: “Consider not using the word ‘Jap’, it makes you sound hostile”. Then anyone who didn’t want to sound hostile to the Japanese avoided it, and anyone who did want to sound hostile to the Japanese used it more. We started with perfect symmetry: both forms were 50-50 positive negative. Some chance events gave it slight asymmetry: maybe one form was 60-40 negative. Once someone said “That’s a slur, don’t use it”, the symmetry collapsed completely and it became 95-5 or something. Wikipedia gives the history of how the last few holdouts were mopped up. There was some road in Texas named “Jap Road” in 1905 after a beloved local Japanese community member: people protested that now the word was a slur, demanded it get changed, Texas resisted for a while, and eventually they gave in. Now it is surely 99-1, or 99.9-0.1, or something similar. Nobody ever uses the word “Jap” unless they are either extremely ignorant, or they are deliberately setting out to offend Japanese people.
This is a very stable situation. The original reason for concern - World War II - is long since over. Japanese people are well-represented in all areas of life. Perhaps if there were a Language Czar, he could declare that the reasons for forbidding the word “Jap” are long since over, and we can go back to having convenient short forms of things. But there is no such Czar. What actually happens is that three or four unrepentant racists still deliberately use the word “Jap” in their quest to offend people, and if anyone else uses it, everyone else takes it as a signal that they are an unrepentant racist. Any Japanese person who heard you say it would correctly feel unsafe. So nobody will say it, and they are correct not to do so. Like I said, a stable situation.
II.
This story shows that slurs are hyperstitions.
A hyperstition is a belief which becomes true if people believe it’s true. For example, “Dogecoin is a great short-term investment and you need to buy it right now!” is true if everyone believes it is true; lots of people will buy Dogecoin and it will go way up. “The bank is collapsing and you need to get your money out right away” is likewise true; if everyone believes it, there will be a run on the bank. (...)
Slurs are like this too. Fifty years ago, “Negro” was the respectable, scholarly term for black people, used by everyone from white academics to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King. In 1966, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael said that white people had invented the term “Negro” as a descriptor, so people of African descent needed a new term they could be proud of, and he was choosing “black” because it sounded scary. All the pro-civil-rights white people loved this and used the new word to signal their support for civil rights, soon using “Negro” actively became a sign that you didn’t support civil rights, and now it’s a slur and society demands that politicians resign if they use it. Carmichael said - in a completely made up way that nobody had been thinking of before him - that “Negro” was a slur - and because people believed him it became true.
In 2019, I wrote a post about respectability cascades, where some previously taboo thing (like being openly gay) gets more respectable people to sign on to it, making it less taboo and paving the way for even more respectable people, and so on. Hyperstitious slurs are the opposite of this, a sort of disrespectability cascade.
III.
Things other than words can also be hyperstitious slurs.
“All lives matter” is a hyperstitious slur. Taken literally, it’s an inoffensive sentiment, perhaps the most inoffensive one. My impression is that for the first week of its existence, it was mostly meant inoffensively, used by nice elderly people who thought it was a friendly amendment to the Black Lives Matter slogan. But once the media successfully convinced everyone that it was a racist attempt to erase black lives in particular, and that people would scream at you if you used it, then the only people who kept using it were ones who cared so little about BLM’s opinion that they didn’t mind - maybe welcomed - being screamed at. I think use of All Lives Matter had very low - maybe 51-49 - correlation with political opinion the first week it was in use. Now it’s probably 99-1.
Images can be hyperstitious slurs. (...)
Actions can be hyperstitious slurs; (...)
True facts can be hyperstitious slurs. (...)
Entire ways of life can be hyperstitious slurs. (...)
IV.
Okay, but this process is bad, right?
Suppose someone decides tomorrow that “Asian” is a slur, and demands we call them “person of Asian descent”. Everyone agrees to go along with this for some reason, and fine, “Asian” is now a slur.
This seems bad for everybody. White people have to be on tenterhooks every time they talk to an Asian, trying their hardest to restrain from using the word they’re familiar with, and to remember the unwieldy gibberish that replaces it. If they fail, they have to feel bad, or worry that the local Asian community thinks they’re a racist. Meanwhile, Asians now have to police everyone else’s behavior, saying “Actually, that word is offensive, we prefer ‘person of Asian descent’ every time someone refers to them. When people get annoyed by this, they have to fret that the person is actually racist against them and trying to deliberately offend them. If they are the sort of person who is triggered by hearing slurs, they will have to be triggered several times a day as people adjust from the familiar language to the new. Meanwhile, dozens of organizations with names like the National Asian Alliance, Asian Community Center, or Asians For Biden will have to change their names. Old novels will need to include forewords apologizing for how in the old days people used to use insensitive terms, and we’re sorry we’re making you read a book with the word A***n in it. Some old people will refuse to change and get ostracized by society. This is just a bad time time on all sides.
The only excuse for it is that it’s actually preventing someone from feeling sad or getting offended. I think in the 1950s there really were a lot of Japanese people who felt triggered by the word “Japs”, and society going through an inconvenient transition in order to protect and show respect for those people was a reasonable move.
Still, people keep trying to turn new things into slurs for dumb reasons. (...)
V.
So one thing I think about a lot is: when do I join the cascade?
I can’t never join the cascade.
My understanding: originally it wasn’t a slur. Like any other word, you would use the long form (“Japanese person”) in dry formal language, and the short form (“Jap”) in informal or emotionally charged language. During World War II, there was a lot of informal emotionally charged language about Japanese people, mostly negative. The symmetry broke. Maybe “Japanese person” was used 60-40 positive vs. negative, and “Jap” was used 40-60. This isn’t enough to make a slur, but it’s enough to make a vague connotation. When people wanted to speak positively about the group, they used the slightly-more-positive-sounding “Japanese people”; when they wanted to speak negatively, they used the slightly-more-negative-sounding “Jap”.
At some point, someone must have commented on this explicitly: “Consider not using the word ‘Jap’, it makes you sound hostile”. Then anyone who didn’t want to sound hostile to the Japanese avoided it, and anyone who did want to sound hostile to the Japanese used it more. We started with perfect symmetry: both forms were 50-50 positive negative. Some chance events gave it slight asymmetry: maybe one form was 60-40 negative. Once someone said “That’s a slur, don’t use it”, the symmetry collapsed completely and it became 95-5 or something. Wikipedia gives the history of how the last few holdouts were mopped up. There was some road in Texas named “Jap Road” in 1905 after a beloved local Japanese community member: people protested that now the word was a slur, demanded it get changed, Texas resisted for a while, and eventually they gave in. Now it is surely 99-1, or 99.9-0.1, or something similar. Nobody ever uses the word “Jap” unless they are either extremely ignorant, or they are deliberately setting out to offend Japanese people.
II.
This story shows that slurs are hyperstitions.
A hyperstition is a belief which becomes true if people believe it’s true. For example, “Dogecoin is a great short-term investment and you need to buy it right now!” is true if everyone believes it is true; lots of people will buy Dogecoin and it will go way up. “The bank is collapsing and you need to get your money out right away” is likewise true; if everyone believes it, there will be a run on the bank. (...)
Slurs are like this too. Fifty years ago, “Negro” was the respectable, scholarly term for black people, used by everyone from white academics to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King. In 1966, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael said that white people had invented the term “Negro” as a descriptor, so people of African descent needed a new term they could be proud of, and he was choosing “black” because it sounded scary. All the pro-civil-rights white people loved this and used the new word to signal their support for civil rights, soon using “Negro” actively became a sign that you didn’t support civil rights, and now it’s a slur and society demands that politicians resign if they use it. Carmichael said - in a completely made up way that nobody had been thinking of before him - that “Negro” was a slur - and because people believed him it became true.
In 2019, I wrote a post about respectability cascades, where some previously taboo thing (like being openly gay) gets more respectable people to sign on to it, making it less taboo and paving the way for even more respectable people, and so on. Hyperstitious slurs are the opposite of this, a sort of disrespectability cascade.
III.
Things other than words can also be hyperstitious slurs.
“All lives matter” is a hyperstitious slur. Taken literally, it’s an inoffensive sentiment, perhaps the most inoffensive one. My impression is that for the first week of its existence, it was mostly meant inoffensively, used by nice elderly people who thought it was a friendly amendment to the Black Lives Matter slogan. But once the media successfully convinced everyone that it was a racist attempt to erase black lives in particular, and that people would scream at you if you used it, then the only people who kept using it were ones who cared so little about BLM’s opinion that they didn’t mind - maybe welcomed - being screamed at. I think use of All Lives Matter had very low - maybe 51-49 - correlation with political opinion the first week it was in use. Now it’s probably 99-1.
Images can be hyperstitious slurs. (...)
Actions can be hyperstitious slurs; (...)
True facts can be hyperstitious slurs. (...)
Entire ways of life can be hyperstitious slurs. (...)
IV.
Okay, but this process is bad, right?
Suppose someone decides tomorrow that “Asian” is a slur, and demands we call them “person of Asian descent”. Everyone agrees to go along with this for some reason, and fine, “Asian” is now a slur.
This seems bad for everybody. White people have to be on tenterhooks every time they talk to an Asian, trying their hardest to restrain from using the word they’re familiar with, and to remember the unwieldy gibberish that replaces it. If they fail, they have to feel bad, or worry that the local Asian community thinks they’re a racist. Meanwhile, Asians now have to police everyone else’s behavior, saying “Actually, that word is offensive, we prefer ‘person of Asian descent’ every time someone refers to them. When people get annoyed by this, they have to fret that the person is actually racist against them and trying to deliberately offend them. If they are the sort of person who is triggered by hearing slurs, they will have to be triggered several times a day as people adjust from the familiar language to the new. Meanwhile, dozens of organizations with names like the National Asian Alliance, Asian Community Center, or Asians For Biden will have to change their names. Old novels will need to include forewords apologizing for how in the old days people used to use insensitive terms, and we’re sorry we’re making you read a book with the word A***n in it. Some old people will refuse to change and get ostracized by society. This is just a bad time time on all sides.
The only excuse for it is that it’s actually preventing someone from feeling sad or getting offended. I think in the 1950s there really were a lot of Japanese people who felt triggered by the word “Japs”, and society going through an inconvenient transition in order to protect and show respect for those people was a reasonable move.
Still, people keep trying to turn new things into slurs for dumb reasons. (...)
V.
So one thing I think about a lot is: when do I join the cascade?
I can’t never join the cascade.
by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Well, this hit a nerve (in the Comments section anyway - 1230+ eg. "this also goes in the other direction, where a group reclaims what was once a slur and turns it into a term of empowerment (e.g. “queer”, “dyke marches”, etc"). I'm not sure where hyperstitious slurs intersect with "wokeness" (70 percent is arbitrary, and the concept itself seems broader - not just words but internalized "feelings"), but for what it's worth, see also: The Right’s Obsession With Wokeness Is a Sign of Weakness (NYT); and, The ‘Great Awokening’ Is Winding Down (Musa al-Gharbi).]
Blinded by Analogies
Blinded by Analogies (One Useful Thing)
Images: Ethan Mollick
Some lessons of the insane past 4 days of generative AI, as someone who had access to Bing during and after the "Sydney" era. (Trying this as a long tweet rather than a thread...)
1) Bing AI was two things: a chatbot and an evolution of ChatGPT into a web-connected, supercharged form. There is no reason these two things had to be connected, but they were.
2) The new Bing AI version of search and retrieval (without the chatbot) is much more powerful than ChatGPT. It has some of the same issues (like hallucination and terrible math) but less so, and is capable of some really extraordinary tasks. When I put it to the test, it can do things like read multiple research papers and identify gaps; improve its own writing by asking it to look at online examples of good writing; and do complex analyses integrating diverse information. The work was really, really impressive.
3) The Bing Chatbot was often unsettling. I say that as someone who knows that there is no actual personality or entity behind a LLM model. But, even knowing that it was basically auto-completing a dialog based on my prompts, it felt like you were dealing with a real person. I never attempted to "jailbreak" the chatbot or make it act in any particular way, but I still got answers that felt extremely personal, and interactions that made the bot feel intentional.
4) The lesson of the Chatbot was that we can very easily be fooled by an AI into thinking it is sentient. It isn't just Turing Test passing, it is eerily convincing even if you know it is a bot, and even at this very early stage of evolution. Even if Bing isn't doing this anymore, there is no doubt other AI bots will come along, and may already be deployed (I assume governments have LLMs at the level of Bing, but with less guardrails). We should be considering about what that means.
5) The lesson of the Bing AI version of ChatGPT is that many of the things we thought AI would be bad at for awhile (complex integration of data sources, "learning" and improving by being told to look online for examples, seemingly creative suggestions based on research, etc.) are already possible. There is no doubt it will have a large effect on anyone doing information-based work. Early AI assistants, like Copilot, already cut the time for complex tasks like coding in half. This will do the same, or more, across many industries. I think every organization that has a substantial analysis or writing component to their work will need to figure out how to incorporate these new tools fast, because the competitive advantage gain is potentially enormous. And there is no instruction manual. You can only learn through trial-and-error. We got a glimpse of the future in the past few days, and the gap between ChatGPT (which is already causing waves in many industries) and Bing AI remains enormous. I was not expecting things in AI to keep moving this fast, but now there is every indication they will continue to do so. I don't think anyone knows what this all means, but I think we should be ready for a very weird world.
Ethan Mollick, Twitter | Read more:
[ed. A distillation of this article: The future, soon: what I learned from Bing's AI.]
[ed. The aftershocks of recent revelations about the behavior of chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing continue to reverberate. However, attention now seems to be moving away from various implications of the technology (how it works; what it can and can't do; threats, etc.) to more practical considerations like uses, ie. how best to utilize and apply these tools and especially, commercialize them. Mr. Mollick makes the point (my interpretation) that they're especially well-suited for complex search/analyses and creative solutions - creative recombination - eg. generating new ideas (like the watch naming example above, to "make up new names for luxury smartwatches inspired by Shakespeare"). Of course, online businesses (and advertisers) are also accutely interested in this topic: The Chatbots Are Here, and the Internet Industry Is in a Tizzy (NY Times). In any case, it's obvious we're just in the earliest stages of a revolution that will be massively transforming.]
Thursday, March 9, 2023
Sonny Boy Williamson
[ed. Scary dude. Master of the blues harp.]
Wednesday, March 8, 2023
Miyake’s Layers: On Issey Miyake (1938–2022)
At every fashion job I've ever had there’s been a certain brand or designer or aesthetic that everyone adopts, no matter their taste or preference, for good reason: it’s good. At my last job, people would wear it with sneakers on our hikes up the mountain, or brush nonexistent dust off it after sitting down on the subway, and there was always a moment of eye contact at the coffee shop between two customers who noticed they were dressed in identical pants. The first time I went to a new dentist, recommended by a colleague, I was wearing my Pleats Please pants. The dentist looked me up and down above his clipboard, and rather than ask who referred me, he gestured at my outfit.
“SSENSE,” he said, like a statement.
“Yes,” I said, holding the delicate material with a pinch.
Some clichés never stop earning their status. We are all, it’s true, cut from the same cloth. But that cloth is different when it’s an Issey Miyake cloth. In her Miyake obituary for Curbed, Diana Budds wisely wrote there is “a stereotype that the design world’s uniform is anything black. But more aspirationally, it’s anything Issey Miyake.”
When Miyake passed away on August 5, at 84 years old, the condolences were as effusive as any compliments he received in his lifetime: a testament to how beloved he was throughout his long career, that the eulogies matched the historical record. He once told the fashion writer Tim Blanks that “clothes are not abstract like architecture or graphic design, they’re a public reflection of people’s joys and hopes.” That sentiment is embodied in the devotion so many people will forever have to what he made. (...)
Issey Miyake helped me reconcile myself to the hypocrisy and compromise that form around caring how you look. His designs allowed me to love clothes, and love them to a fault, without feeling like I had to capitulate to something that had nothing really to say. Miyake’s clothes, in other words, do not make your butt look good. (...)
Miyake apparently once said that he made “clothes,” not “fashion,” and I think it’s important to recognize that his work was not simply concept or art: it took a resounding physical form, and that mattered. Its gestures were assured, not ironic jokes. And if his designs were not useful in the way a push-up bra is useful, it was to challenge the conception of design that centers what we want from things rather than how things can use us. Miyake’s clothes, in their billows and points and general ill-fittingness — as well as in their material investigations — leave a legacy of us not looking our best. Instead, they suggest what fashion can do beyond flattery, as well as what desires are worth falling for.
by Hannah Baer, Nicole Lipman, Haley Mlotek, Su Wu, N+1 | Read more:
“SSENSE,” he said, like a statement.
“Yes,” I said, holding the delicate material with a pinch.
Some clichés never stop earning their status. We are all, it’s true, cut from the same cloth. But that cloth is different when it’s an Issey Miyake cloth. In her Miyake obituary for Curbed, Diana Budds wisely wrote there is “a stereotype that the design world’s uniform is anything black. But more aspirationally, it’s anything Issey Miyake.”
Miyake was the master of turning something that could feel old — cut from the same cloth — into something truer and newer. His love for clothes was the kind of constructive sleight of hand that makes genius feel as natural as nudity.
Miyake had wanted to be a dancer as a child, and in 1991, he made the costumes for William Forsythe’s ballet The Loss of Small Detail. It was an early attempt at shaping pleating around the body’s movements. The puzzle of how different materials could be incorporated into a collaborative effort subsequently became his life’s work. In Rachel Tashjian’s words, he “thought obsessively, happily, about freedom, about what experimentation and even rebellion could invite.”
A famous anecdote: in 1981, Miyake designed uniforms for Sony as part of a tribute for their thirty-fifth anniversary, consisting of a jacket made of ripstop nylon that easily converted into a vest. When Steve Jobs visited the factory, he liked the look of the uniforms so much that he tried to commission Miyake to make a vest for Apple employees, who really didn’t want to wear them. Their loss. Jobs relented, but kept the idea for himself. Miyake’s black turtlenecks became Jobs’s personal uniform. When he passed away, in 2011, his closet had “like a hundred of them” — enough, Jobs once poignantly said, “to last for the rest of my life.” Miyake stopped producing the turtlenecks after Jobs died.
Miyake maintained professional and personal relationships with all sorts of people. He made dresses for ballerinas, technocrats, architects, and assistants. He designed uniforms for the Lithuanian Olympic team in 1992, shortly after they declared independence from the Soviet Union. His line 132 5., a range of two-dimensional items that unfolded to be three-dimensional when worn, was influenced by Jun Mitani, a professor at the University of Tsukuba who specializes in crafting geometric modeling and origami with computer software. For the Guest Artist series that ran between 1996 and 1998, Miyake invited contemporary artists to work with Pleats Please as if it were any other material. Miyake saw everything as a collaboration: nothing was done until it was worn. “When I make something, it’s only half-finished,” he explained. “When people use it — for years and years — then it is finished.” (...)
I am, like so many others, most enamored with the line Pleats Please. Every item is composed of a series of pleats so fine they resemble blades of grass, a plissé technique made perfect with a heat press. The pleats were inspired by the Fortuny gowns of the early 1900s, sometimes called Delphos gowns after the statue Charioteer of Delphi, lending mythological meaning to what became for some an everyday item. Most astoundingly, the clothes could be machine washed. After decades in which advanced domestic technology was kept far away from objects of value — i.e., never putting your favorite pants in the washing machine — Pleats Please garments proved to be the rare item that could be special without being fragile.
In 1998, Miyake said that the present was “a bit behind.” It’s a fair assessment. Contemporary fashion often seems to be in mourning for itself, even as there is a relentless churn between romanticizing the old and reifying the new. The only counter to the cynicism of today’s luxury market is a good sense of humor, which is to say, a certain stamina for constant ego death. You are always looking at photos of yourself from not too long ago, shaking your head, preparing to say the phrase we use to distance ourselves from who we once were: What was I thinking? In Miyake’s clothes, though, we can be saved from this embarrassment. It’s hard to explain why some trends come and go while others remain as elemental as Pleats Please. I can only cite another cliché with a slight variation: we know it when we wear it.
I bought my first pair of Pleats Please pants after many, many discussions with my peers who were better versed in the sizing than I was. When they arrived in the mail I touched them as carefully as I would anything precious, then wore them to go grocery shopping. I now own two shirts as well, and a skirt will follow as soon as I have the money. These items are not what most people would consider affordable, but they are what anyone can recognize as valuable. They are not exactly practical, but they are worn so easily. They are a marvel. (...)
Miyake had wanted to be a dancer as a child, and in 1991, he made the costumes for William Forsythe’s ballet The Loss of Small Detail. It was an early attempt at shaping pleating around the body’s movements. The puzzle of how different materials could be incorporated into a collaborative effort subsequently became his life’s work. In Rachel Tashjian’s words, he “thought obsessively, happily, about freedom, about what experimentation and even rebellion could invite.”
A famous anecdote: in 1981, Miyake designed uniforms for Sony as part of a tribute for their thirty-fifth anniversary, consisting of a jacket made of ripstop nylon that easily converted into a vest. When Steve Jobs visited the factory, he liked the look of the uniforms so much that he tried to commission Miyake to make a vest for Apple employees, who really didn’t want to wear them. Their loss. Jobs relented, but kept the idea for himself. Miyake’s black turtlenecks became Jobs’s personal uniform. When he passed away, in 2011, his closet had “like a hundred of them” — enough, Jobs once poignantly said, “to last for the rest of my life.” Miyake stopped producing the turtlenecks after Jobs died.
Miyake maintained professional and personal relationships with all sorts of people. He made dresses for ballerinas, technocrats, architects, and assistants. He designed uniforms for the Lithuanian Olympic team in 1992, shortly after they declared independence from the Soviet Union. His line 132 5., a range of two-dimensional items that unfolded to be three-dimensional when worn, was influenced by Jun Mitani, a professor at the University of Tsukuba who specializes in crafting geometric modeling and origami with computer software. For the Guest Artist series that ran between 1996 and 1998, Miyake invited contemporary artists to work with Pleats Please as if it were any other material. Miyake saw everything as a collaboration: nothing was done until it was worn. “When I make something, it’s only half-finished,” he explained. “When people use it — for years and years — then it is finished.” (...)
I am, like so many others, most enamored with the line Pleats Please. Every item is composed of a series of pleats so fine they resemble blades of grass, a plissé technique made perfect with a heat press. The pleats were inspired by the Fortuny gowns of the early 1900s, sometimes called Delphos gowns after the statue Charioteer of Delphi, lending mythological meaning to what became for some an everyday item. Most astoundingly, the clothes could be machine washed. After decades in which advanced domestic technology was kept far away from objects of value — i.e., never putting your favorite pants in the washing machine — Pleats Please garments proved to be the rare item that could be special without being fragile.
In 1998, Miyake said that the present was “a bit behind.” It’s a fair assessment. Contemporary fashion often seems to be in mourning for itself, even as there is a relentless churn between romanticizing the old and reifying the new. The only counter to the cynicism of today’s luxury market is a good sense of humor, which is to say, a certain stamina for constant ego death. You are always looking at photos of yourself from not too long ago, shaking your head, preparing to say the phrase we use to distance ourselves from who we once were: What was I thinking? In Miyake’s clothes, though, we can be saved from this embarrassment. It’s hard to explain why some trends come and go while others remain as elemental as Pleats Please. I can only cite another cliché with a slight variation: we know it when we wear it.
I bought my first pair of Pleats Please pants after many, many discussions with my peers who were better versed in the sizing than I was. When they arrived in the mail I touched them as carefully as I would anything precious, then wore them to go grocery shopping. I now own two shirts as well, and a skirt will follow as soon as I have the money. These items are not what most people would consider affordable, but they are what anyone can recognize as valuable. They are not exactly practical, but they are worn so easily. They are a marvel. (...)
Issey Miyake helped me reconcile myself to the hypocrisy and compromise that form around caring how you look. His designs allowed me to love clothes, and love them to a fault, without feeling like I had to capitulate to something that had nothing really to say. Miyake’s clothes, in other words, do not make your butt look good. (...)
Miyake apparently once said that he made “clothes,” not “fashion,” and I think it’s important to recognize that his work was not simply concept or art: it took a resounding physical form, and that mattered. Its gestures were assured, not ironic jokes. And if his designs were not useful in the way a push-up bra is useful, it was to challenge the conception of design that centers what we want from things rather than how things can use us. Miyake’s clothes, in their billows and points and general ill-fittingness — as well as in their material investigations — leave a legacy of us not looking our best. Instead, they suggest what fashion can do beyond flattery, as well as what desires are worth falling for.
by Hannah Baer, Nicole Lipman, Haley Mlotek, Su Wu, N+1 | Read more:
Image: via
Monday, March 6, 2023
The Illogic of Nuclear Escalation
This past summer, a bipartisan majority of Congress, with the blessing of President Biden, approved a massive military-spending bill that included $51 billion for nuclear weapons — nearly 20 percent more than allotted by the previous year’s budget, which itself broke previous records. Earlier in the spring, the Biden administration sent to congress a Nuclear Posture Review, committing to upgrade all three “legs” of the “strategic Triad” — including a new missile-launching submarine, a new bomber and a new land-based intercontinental ballistic missile — as well as a bevy of new bombs and warheads for these weapons to launch or drop. Since these weapons are still in development or the early phases of production, the costs are bound to grow; the price tag for the refurbished Triad alone is estimated at $2 trillion over the next 30 years.
The official rationale for this upgrade is that the existing subs, bombers and ICBMs are approaching obsolescence. Even if this claim were true (more about that later), it begs the question of whether the arsenal needs to be as large as it is. A serious assessment of the arsenal must begin by asking “How much is enough?” and, its corollary query, “Enough to do what?”
Yet in the debate over America’s nuclear stockpile, to the extent there is debate, these questions are going unasked. It is hard to have an informed public debate, as many of the issues are classified, esoteric or both. But even the debates in Congress and inside the executive branch tend to be shallow. Almost nobody is asking those basic questions. In fact, in the 60-plus years of the nuclear arms race, almost nobody ever has.
It’s important to examine the secret history of this race to understand not only how we got here but how to ask those questions — and how to change course. (...)
In 1989, soon after George H.W. Bush was sworn in as president, his secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, was briefed on the latest version of the nuclear war plan. Cheney asked his assistant on strategic issues, a civilian analyst named Franklin Miller, to sit in. Miller had perused the array of classified documents reciting the rationales for limited nuclear options. Yet, he noticed, the briefing said nothing about such options.
Cheney and Miller were also struck by one detail in the war plan: It called for hitting the Soviet transportation network with 725 nuclear weapons. Cheney asked the briefer, a SAC general, why. The general shrugged and said he’d get back to him on that. (He never did.) After the meeting, Cheney told Miller to go out to Strategic Air Command’s headquarters, in Omaha, and conduct a thorough review of the war plan; he alerted the officers at SAC that Miller should have full authority to look at everything.
What Miller discovered made the term “overkill” seem a gross understatement. For example, just outside Moscow, the Soviets had an ancient anti-ballistic missile system holding 68 interceptors. After the Cold War, U.S. inspectors discovered that the system was completely useless. But the war plan specified that the site had to be destroyed with near-total certainty. SAC intelligence estimated (incorrectly) that each of the Soviet interceptors had a high probability of shooting down an incoming American warhead. So, JSTPS — Omaha’s nuclear targeting agency — assigned 69 warheads to hit the site, to make absolutely certain that at least one of the warheads got through.
Another jaw-dropping example: One part of the nuclear war plan called for destroying the Soviet tank army. As a result, JSTPS aimed a lot of weapons at not only the tanks themselves, but also the factory that produced the tanks, the steel mill that supplied the factory, the ore-processing facility that supplied the steel mill, and the mine that furnished the ore. Miller and his staff learned that some SAC analysts had already pointed out the excesses. A branch of math called nodal analysis suggested that, as long as the central links of a supply system were destroyed, there was no need to destroy every single piece; in many cases, just a few warheads, aimed at the right targets, would cripple the system. Gradually, Miller realized that the entire war plan was like this — a senseless aggregate of compartmentalized calculations.
Then came the key revelation. At this point the Bush administration was negotiating the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviets. During one of his trips, one of Miller’s assistants asked a JSTPS officer whether the treaty’s prospective cuts would affect SAC’s ability to fulfill its mission — whether the U.S. could continue to deter nuclear war and limit damage if deterrence failed. The officer replied that he didn’t do that sort of analysis. JSTPS, he went on, was prohibited from setting requirements or analyzing whether a certain kind of attack, with a certain number of weapons, would be militarily effective. When asked what the JSTPS actually did, the officer explained that they take all the weapons that are assigned to SAC and aim them at all the targets on the list.
The code was unlocked. It turned out that the war plan was based on supply, not demand — on how many weapons SAC happened to have, not on how many were needed.
Yet in the debate over America’s nuclear stockpile, to the extent there is debate, these questions are going unasked. It is hard to have an informed public debate, as many of the issues are classified, esoteric or both. But even the debates in Congress and inside the executive branch tend to be shallow. Almost nobody is asking those basic questions. In fact, in the 60-plus years of the nuclear arms race, almost nobody ever has.
It’s important to examine the secret history of this race to understand not only how we got here but how to ask those questions — and how to change course. (...)
In 1989, soon after George H.W. Bush was sworn in as president, his secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, was briefed on the latest version of the nuclear war plan. Cheney asked his assistant on strategic issues, a civilian analyst named Franklin Miller, to sit in. Miller had perused the array of classified documents reciting the rationales for limited nuclear options. Yet, he noticed, the briefing said nothing about such options.
Cheney and Miller were also struck by one detail in the war plan: It called for hitting the Soviet transportation network with 725 nuclear weapons. Cheney asked the briefer, a SAC general, why. The general shrugged and said he’d get back to him on that. (He never did.) After the meeting, Cheney told Miller to go out to Strategic Air Command’s headquarters, in Omaha, and conduct a thorough review of the war plan; he alerted the officers at SAC that Miller should have full authority to look at everything.
What Miller discovered made the term “overkill” seem a gross understatement. For example, just outside Moscow, the Soviets had an ancient anti-ballistic missile system holding 68 interceptors. After the Cold War, U.S. inspectors discovered that the system was completely useless. But the war plan specified that the site had to be destroyed with near-total certainty. SAC intelligence estimated (incorrectly) that each of the Soviet interceptors had a high probability of shooting down an incoming American warhead. So, JSTPS — Omaha’s nuclear targeting agency — assigned 69 warheads to hit the site, to make absolutely certain that at least one of the warheads got through.
Another jaw-dropping example: One part of the nuclear war plan called for destroying the Soviet tank army. As a result, JSTPS aimed a lot of weapons at not only the tanks themselves, but also the factory that produced the tanks, the steel mill that supplied the factory, the ore-processing facility that supplied the steel mill, and the mine that furnished the ore. Miller and his staff learned that some SAC analysts had already pointed out the excesses. A branch of math called nodal analysis suggested that, as long as the central links of a supply system were destroyed, there was no need to destroy every single piece; in many cases, just a few warheads, aimed at the right targets, would cripple the system. Gradually, Miller realized that the entire war plan was like this — a senseless aggregate of compartmentalized calculations.
Then came the key revelation. At this point the Bush administration was negotiating the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviets. During one of his trips, one of Miller’s assistants asked a JSTPS officer whether the treaty’s prospective cuts would affect SAC’s ability to fulfill its mission — whether the U.S. could continue to deter nuclear war and limit damage if deterrence failed. The officer replied that he didn’t do that sort of analysis. JSTPS, he went on, was prohibited from setting requirements or analyzing whether a certain kind of attack, with a certain number of weapons, would be militarily effective. When asked what the JSTPS actually did, the officer explained that they take all the weapons that are assigned to SAC and aim them at all the targets on the list.
The code was unlocked. It turned out that the war plan was based on supply, not demand — on how many weapons SAC happened to have, not on how many were needed.
by Fred Kaplan, Asterisk | Read more:
Image: Federation of American Scientists (2022) / OurWorldInData.org
B-52s
[ed. Wonder how you'd teach this in songwriting classes. SNL 1980. See also: The B-52s Are Still Sassy After All These Years (Flood). And, the undeniably danceable Love Shack.]
February 18, 2023
Republican leaders are recognizing that the sight of Republican lawmakers heckling the president of the United States didn’t do their party any favors.
It not only called attention to their behavior, it prompted many news outlets to fact-check President Biden’s claim that Republicans had called for cuts to Social Security and Medicare or even called to get rid of them. Those outlets noted that while Republicans have repeatedly said they have no intention of cutting those programs, what Biden said was true: Republican leaders have repeatedly suggested such cuts, or even the elimination of those programs, in speeches, news interviews, and written proposals.
Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told Alexander Bolton of The Hill that Republicans should stick to “reasonable and enduring policy” proposals. “I think we’re missing an opportunity to differentiate,” he said. “Focus on policy. If you get that done, it will age well.”
But therein lies the Republican Party’s problem. What ARE its reasonable and enduring policies? One of the reasons Biden keeps pressuring the party to release its budget is that it’s not at all clear what the party stands for.
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refused to issue any plans before the 2022 midterm election, and in 2020, for the first time in its history, the party refused to write a party platform. The Republican National Committee simply resolved that if its party platform committee had met, it “would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party's strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration.” So, it resolved that “the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President's America-first agenda.”
Cutting Social Security is a centerpiece of the ideology the party adopted in the 1980s: that the government in place since 1933 was stunting the economy and should be privatized as much as possible.
In place of using the federal government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure, Reagan Republicans promised that cutting taxes and regulation would free up capital, which investors would then plow into new businesses, creating new jobs and moving everybody upward. Americans could have low taxes and services both, they promised, for “supply-side economics” would create such economic growth that lower tax rates would still produce high enough revenues to keep the debt low and maintain services.
But constructing an economy that favored the “supply side” rather than the “demand side”—those ordinary Americans who would spend more money in their daily lives—did not, in fact, produce great economic growth or produce tax revenues high enough to keep paying expenses. In January 1981, President Ronald Reagan called the federal deficit, then almost $74 billion, “out of control.” Within two years, he had increased it to $208 billion. The debt, too, nearly tripled during Reagan’s term, from $930 billion to $2.6 trillion. The Republican solution was to cut taxes and slash the government even further.
As early as his 1978 congressional race, George W. Bush called for fixing Social Security’s finances by permitting people to invest their payroll tax themselves. In his second term as president in 2005, he called for it again. When Republican senator Rick Scott of Florida proposed an 11-point (which he later changed to a 12 points) “Plan to Rescue America” last year, vowing to “sunset” all laws automatically after five years, the idea reflected that Republican vision. It permitted the cutting of Social Security without attaching those cuts to any one person or party.
But American voters like Social Security and Medicare and, just as they refused Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security, recoiled from Scott’s plan. Yesterday, under pressure from voters and from other Republicans who recognized the political damage being done, Scott wrote an op-ed saying his plan was “obviously not intended to include entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security—programs that hard-working people have paid into their entire lives—or the funds dedicated to our national security.” (The online version of the plan remains unchanged as of Saturday morning.)
Scott attacked Biden for suggesting otherwise, but he also attacked Mitch McConnell, who also condemned Scott’s plan, accusing them of engaging in “shallow gotcha politics, which is what Washington does.” He also accused “Washington politicians” for “lying to you every chance they get.” Scott’s venom illustrated the growing rift in the Republican Party.
Since the 1990s, Republicans have had an ideological problem: voters don’t actually like their economic vision, which has cut services and neglected infrastructure even as it has dramatically moved wealth upward. So to keep voters behind them, Republicans hammered on social and cultural issues, portraying those who liked the active government as godless socialists who were catering to minorities and women. “There is a religious war going on in this country,” Republican Pat Buchanan told the Republican National Convention in 1992. “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”
A generation later, that culture war has joined with the economic vision of the older party to create a new ideology. More than half of Republicans now reject the idea of a democracy based in the rule of law and instead support Christian nationalism, insisting that the United States is a Christian nation and that our society and our laws should be based in evangelical Christian values. Forty percent of the strongest adherents of Christian nationalism think “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” while 22% of sympathizers agree with that position.
Scott released his 11-point plan because, he said, “Americans deserve to know what we will do when given the chance,” and his plan reflected the new Republicans. Sunsetting laws and tax cuts were only part of the plan. He promised to cut government jobs by 25% over the next five years, “sell off all non-essential government assets, buildings and land, and use the proceeds to pay down our national debt,” get rid of all federal programs that local governments can take over, cut taxes, “grow America’s economy,” and “stop Socialism.”
It not only called attention to their behavior, it prompted many news outlets to fact-check President Biden’s claim that Republicans had called for cuts to Social Security and Medicare or even called to get rid of them. Those outlets noted that while Republicans have repeatedly said they have no intention of cutting those programs, what Biden said was true: Republican leaders have repeatedly suggested such cuts, or even the elimination of those programs, in speeches, news interviews, and written proposals.
Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told Alexander Bolton of The Hill that Republicans should stick to “reasonable and enduring policy” proposals. “I think we’re missing an opportunity to differentiate,” he said. “Focus on policy. If you get that done, it will age well.”
But therein lies the Republican Party’s problem. What ARE its reasonable and enduring policies? One of the reasons Biden keeps pressuring the party to release its budget is that it’s not at all clear what the party stands for.
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refused to issue any plans before the 2022 midterm election, and in 2020, for the first time in its history, the party refused to write a party platform. The Republican National Committee simply resolved that if its party platform committee had met, it “would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party's strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration.” So, it resolved that “the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President's America-first agenda.”
Cutting Social Security is a centerpiece of the ideology the party adopted in the 1980s: that the government in place since 1933 was stunting the economy and should be privatized as much as possible.
In place of using the federal government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure, Reagan Republicans promised that cutting taxes and regulation would free up capital, which investors would then plow into new businesses, creating new jobs and moving everybody upward. Americans could have low taxes and services both, they promised, for “supply-side economics” would create such economic growth that lower tax rates would still produce high enough revenues to keep the debt low and maintain services.
But constructing an economy that favored the “supply side” rather than the “demand side”—those ordinary Americans who would spend more money in their daily lives—did not, in fact, produce great economic growth or produce tax revenues high enough to keep paying expenses. In January 1981, President Ronald Reagan called the federal deficit, then almost $74 billion, “out of control.” Within two years, he had increased it to $208 billion. The debt, too, nearly tripled during Reagan’s term, from $930 billion to $2.6 trillion. The Republican solution was to cut taxes and slash the government even further.
As early as his 1978 congressional race, George W. Bush called for fixing Social Security’s finances by permitting people to invest their payroll tax themselves. In his second term as president in 2005, he called for it again. When Republican senator Rick Scott of Florida proposed an 11-point (which he later changed to a 12 points) “Plan to Rescue America” last year, vowing to “sunset” all laws automatically after five years, the idea reflected that Republican vision. It permitted the cutting of Social Security without attaching those cuts to any one person or party.
But American voters like Social Security and Medicare and, just as they refused Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security, recoiled from Scott’s plan. Yesterday, under pressure from voters and from other Republicans who recognized the political damage being done, Scott wrote an op-ed saying his plan was “obviously not intended to include entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security—programs that hard-working people have paid into their entire lives—or the funds dedicated to our national security.” (The online version of the plan remains unchanged as of Saturday morning.)
Scott attacked Biden for suggesting otherwise, but he also attacked Mitch McConnell, who also condemned Scott’s plan, accusing them of engaging in “shallow gotcha politics, which is what Washington does.” He also accused “Washington politicians” for “lying to you every chance they get.” Scott’s venom illustrated the growing rift in the Republican Party.
Since the 1990s, Republicans have had an ideological problem: voters don’t actually like their economic vision, which has cut services and neglected infrastructure even as it has dramatically moved wealth upward. So to keep voters behind them, Republicans hammered on social and cultural issues, portraying those who liked the active government as godless socialists who were catering to minorities and women. “There is a religious war going on in this country,” Republican Pat Buchanan told the Republican National Convention in 1992. “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”
A generation later, that culture war has joined with the economic vision of the older party to create a new ideology. More than half of Republicans now reject the idea of a democracy based in the rule of law and instead support Christian nationalism, insisting that the United States is a Christian nation and that our society and our laws should be based in evangelical Christian values. Forty percent of the strongest adherents of Christian nationalism think “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” while 22% of sympathizers agree with that position.
Scott released his 11-point plan because, he said, “Americans deserve to know what we will do when given the chance,” and his plan reflected the new Republicans. Sunsetting laws and tax cuts were only part of the plan. He promised to cut government jobs by 25% over the next five years, “sell off all non-essential government assets, buildings and land, and use the proceeds to pay down our national debt,” get rid of all federal programs that local governments can take over, cut taxes, “grow America’s economy,” and “stop Socialism.”
by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American | Read more:
[ed. Concise and accurate summation. Unfortunately.]
Sunday, March 5, 2023
Three Times
[ed. From the essay Three Times (N+1), on pregnancy and abortion.]
Re-Genesis
The term anitya (अनित्य) refers to the impermanence of all worldly things, and according to Wikipedia, it first appears in verse 1.2.10 of the Katha Upanishad. Buddhism and Hinduism share this doctrine, though they disagree on whether or not the Self exists. I was first made aware of the term and concept aged 24 during a meditation retreat in the Himalayas in April 1991. After 11 hours of meditation practice, we were sitting crosslegged on the floor, listening to the deep, patient voice of our absent guru, SN Goenka, issue from the speakers of a battered Ashram blaster.
Goenka was emphasising the difference between understanding the reality of universal impermanence as a theoretical proposition—such as one learned in quantum mechanics, astro-physics, or the history of light entertainment—and grasping it on a more personal level, integrating it into one’s life, and leaving it on in the background like Alexa to monitor and mitigate one’s emotional reactions to life’s irritations. The difference, he said, was profound. It was everything.
My impulse was to shrug. So what? Yes, things change. I’ve noticed. Yes, the sands of time will run through the hourglass and the desert winds will blow away the dust of my bones and raze my vainglorious monuments to the ground. Big deal. I like change. New things replace the old and the world would be boring were it otherwise.
Well, I’m 57 now, and I’m less sanguine than I was about this sort of thing. To some changes, I am reconciled. Others sadden me, but I have accepted that it is less than politic to complain. But I am having particular difficulty accepting the slow disappearance and death of a cultural edifice I had always assumed to be eternal—rock music. Nor I think am I alone. Many from my generational cohort—Boomers before me and Gen-Xers after—seem to be stuck in the first stage of grief: denial.
I’m the same age as rock music—maybe exactly the same age. I was born on Sunday, May 9th, 1965, among the first members of Generation X. That was also the day The Beatles first saw Bob Dylan play live, at the Royal Albert Hall. The large gamete encountered the small and something entirely new was created. The same weekend, Dylan began scrawling the lyrics to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ on a napkin at the Savoy hotel—a free-form screed of scornful contempt for his own generation’s Beautiful and Damned, which evolved over subsequent weeks into what is now (statistically, at any rate) the most acclaimed song of all time. Bruce Springsteen once described it as “a torrent that comes rushing towards you. Floods your soul, floods your mind,” and when it was released in July, it changed everything. That summer, rock ’n’ roll, folk, and blues, drugs, poetry, Byronic peacock swagger, disdain, and conceit all coalesced into the greatest sound the world had ever heard.
It didn’t last. The art historian Kenneth Clark once wrote somewhere that every artistic movement lasts a generation if you’re lucky. You get between 15 and 25 years before the candle begins to gutter. 1965–80 is the short rock century. 1955–80 is the long one, if you want to start with The King rather than his Jester. In his 2016 book, Never a Dull Moment, music journalist David Hepworth convincingly places rock music’s peak at 1971 (and in Uncommon People the following year, he dates the end of the rock star to 1994). So by the time I started hearing LPs that belonged to friends’ older siblings in 1977, the bloom was already coming off.
My full induction occurred on November 17th, 1979, when the Friday Rock Show’s Tommy Vance played through a listeners’ poll that lasted fully two hours. I remember my parents turning off the TV and generously leaving me to it, no idea of the irreversible changes being made to my brain. I already knew ‘Smoke on the Water,’ ‘Child in Time,’ and ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ but I was now introduced to ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond,’ ‘Supper’s Ready,’ ‘Layla,’ and ‘Free Bird.’ It was like seeing the Taj Mahal, Hagia Sophia, and Chartres for the first time all on the same evening. I have never entirely come down since. But six months later, according to the Clark Formula, it was all over. Rock, like Axl, was a blown Rose.
Sure, there were aftershocks–Guns N’ Roses among them. America’s Indie scene produced REM, Pixies, and Sonic Youth, while grunge produced Nirvana. Troopers like AC/DC and the Stones kept on keeping on like nothing had changed while a handful of names from the ’70s like Ozzy and Aerosmith enjoyed successful second acts. But the whole scene increasingly resembled a postmodern pastiche, like the Disneyfied, castrated facsimile of Vegas at the end of Martin Scorsese’s Casino. Springsteen remains glorious but he is leading a revivalist prayer meeting, not imparting the original revelation. By the mid-’90s, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was honouring talent faster than Rock and Roll could generate it.
And now? A few good men have not deserted their posts but they are dying in their boots. The reinforcements never came. “Just about every rock legend you can think of,” Damon Linker wrote in an essay for the Week, “is going to die within the next decade or so.” The stats are grim and foretell a “tidal wave of obituaries”:
Goenka was emphasising the difference between understanding the reality of universal impermanence as a theoretical proposition—such as one learned in quantum mechanics, astro-physics, or the history of light entertainment—and grasping it on a more personal level, integrating it into one’s life, and leaving it on in the background like Alexa to monitor and mitigate one’s emotional reactions to life’s irritations. The difference, he said, was profound. It was everything.
My impulse was to shrug. So what? Yes, things change. I’ve noticed. Yes, the sands of time will run through the hourglass and the desert winds will blow away the dust of my bones and raze my vainglorious monuments to the ground. Big deal. I like change. New things replace the old and the world would be boring were it otherwise.
I’m the same age as rock music—maybe exactly the same age. I was born on Sunday, May 9th, 1965, among the first members of Generation X. That was also the day The Beatles first saw Bob Dylan play live, at the Royal Albert Hall. The large gamete encountered the small and something entirely new was created. The same weekend, Dylan began scrawling the lyrics to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ on a napkin at the Savoy hotel—a free-form screed of scornful contempt for his own generation’s Beautiful and Damned, which evolved over subsequent weeks into what is now (statistically, at any rate) the most acclaimed song of all time. Bruce Springsteen once described it as “a torrent that comes rushing towards you. Floods your soul, floods your mind,” and when it was released in July, it changed everything. That summer, rock ’n’ roll, folk, and blues, drugs, poetry, Byronic peacock swagger, disdain, and conceit all coalesced into the greatest sound the world had ever heard.
It didn’t last. The art historian Kenneth Clark once wrote somewhere that every artistic movement lasts a generation if you’re lucky. You get between 15 and 25 years before the candle begins to gutter. 1965–80 is the short rock century. 1955–80 is the long one, if you want to start with The King rather than his Jester. In his 2016 book, Never a Dull Moment, music journalist David Hepworth convincingly places rock music’s peak at 1971 (and in Uncommon People the following year, he dates the end of the rock star to 1994). So by the time I started hearing LPs that belonged to friends’ older siblings in 1977, the bloom was already coming off.
My full induction occurred on November 17th, 1979, when the Friday Rock Show’s Tommy Vance played through a listeners’ poll that lasted fully two hours. I remember my parents turning off the TV and generously leaving me to it, no idea of the irreversible changes being made to my brain. I already knew ‘Smoke on the Water,’ ‘Child in Time,’ and ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ but I was now introduced to ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond,’ ‘Supper’s Ready,’ ‘Layla,’ and ‘Free Bird.’ It was like seeing the Taj Mahal, Hagia Sophia, and Chartres for the first time all on the same evening. I have never entirely come down since. But six months later, according to the Clark Formula, it was all over. Rock, like Axl, was a blown Rose.
Sure, there were aftershocks–Guns N’ Roses among them. America’s Indie scene produced REM, Pixies, and Sonic Youth, while grunge produced Nirvana. Troopers like AC/DC and the Stones kept on keeping on like nothing had changed while a handful of names from the ’70s like Ozzy and Aerosmith enjoyed successful second acts. But the whole scene increasingly resembled a postmodern pastiche, like the Disneyfied, castrated facsimile of Vegas at the end of Martin Scorsese’s Casino. Springsteen remains glorious but he is leading a revivalist prayer meeting, not imparting the original revelation. By the mid-’90s, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was honouring talent faster than Rock and Roll could generate it.
And now? A few good men have not deserted their posts but they are dying in their boots. The reinforcements never came. “Just about every rock legend you can think of,” Damon Linker wrote in an essay for the Week, “is going to die within the next decade or so.” The stats are grim and foretell a “tidal wave of obituaries”:
Behold the killing fields that lie before us: Bob Dylan (78 years old); Paul McCartney (77); Paul Simon (77) and Art Garfunkel (77); Carole King (77); Brian Wilson (77); Mick Jagger (76) and Keith Richards (75); Joni Mitchell (75); Jimmy Page (75) and Robert Plant (71); Ray Davies (75); Roger Daltrey (75) and Pete Townshend (74); Roger Waters (75) and David Gilmour (73); Rod Stewart (74); Eric Clapton (74); Debbie Harry (74); Neil Young (73); Van Morrison (73); Bryan Ferry (73); Elton John (72); Don Henley (72); James Taylor (71); Jackson Browne (70); Billy Joel (70); and Bruce Springsteen (69, but turning 70 next month).A few of these legends might manage to live into their 90s, despite all the …wear and tear to which they’ve subjected their bodies over the decades. But most of them will not.
That essay was published four years ago. It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. And as these totems of cheerfully complacent youth and vitality meet their maker, Linker writes, it “will force us not only to endure their passing, but to confront our own mortality as well.” Concert attendances remain high, but demographics toll the bell. Those tickets, album sales, and streams are so heavily skewed towards the elderly now that the whole project is just one cold snap away from oblivion.
by Simon Evans, Quillette | Read more:
Image: Genesis performing in 2007. Photo by Andrew Bossi via Wikipedia.[ed. See also: The coming death of just about every rock legend (The Week):]
"Before rock emerged from rhythm and blues in the late 1950s, and again since it began its long withdrawing roar in the late 1990s, the norm for popular music has been songwriting and record production conducted on the model of an assembly line. This is usually called the "Brill Building" approach to making music, named after the building in midtown Manhattan where leading music industry offices and studios were located in the pre-rock era. Professional songwriters toiled away in small cubicles, crafting future hits for singers who made records closely overseen by a team of producers and corporate drones. Today, something remarkably similar happens in pop and hip-hop, with song files zipping around the globe to a small number of highly successful songwriters and producers who add hooks and production flourishes in order to generate a team-built product that can only be described as pristine, if soulless, perfection.
This is music created by committee and consensus, actively seeking the largest possible audience as an end in itself. Rock (especially as practiced by the most creatively ambitious bands of the mid-1960s: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, and the Beach Boys) shattered this way of doing things, and for a few decades, a new model of the rock auteur prevailed. As critic Steven Hyden recounts in his delightful book Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock, rock bands and individual rock stars were given an enormous amount of creative freedom, and the best of them used every bit of it. They wrote their own music and lyrics, crafted their own arrangements, experimented with wildly ambitious production techniques, and oversaw the design of their album covers, the launching of marketing campaigns, and the conjuring of increasingly theatrical and decadent concert tours.
This doesn't mean there was no corporate oversight or outside influence on rock musicians. Record companies and professional producers and engineers were usually at the helm, making sure to protect their reputations and investments. Yet to an astonishing degree, the artists got their way. Songs and albums were treated by all — the musicians themselves, but also the record companies, critics, and of course the fans — as Statements. For a time, the capitalist juggernaut made possible and sustained the creation of popular art that sometimes achieved a new form of human excellence. That it didn't last shouldn't keep us from appreciating how remarkable it was while it did."
"Before rock emerged from rhythm and blues in the late 1950s, and again since it began its long withdrawing roar in the late 1990s, the norm for popular music has been songwriting and record production conducted on the model of an assembly line. This is usually called the "Brill Building" approach to making music, named after the building in midtown Manhattan where leading music industry offices and studios were located in the pre-rock era. Professional songwriters toiled away in small cubicles, crafting future hits for singers who made records closely overseen by a team of producers and corporate drones. Today, something remarkably similar happens in pop and hip-hop, with song files zipping around the globe to a small number of highly successful songwriters and producers who add hooks and production flourishes in order to generate a team-built product that can only be described as pristine, if soulless, perfection.
This is music created by committee and consensus, actively seeking the largest possible audience as an end in itself. Rock (especially as practiced by the most creatively ambitious bands of the mid-1960s: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, and the Beach Boys) shattered this way of doing things, and for a few decades, a new model of the rock auteur prevailed. As critic Steven Hyden recounts in his delightful book Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock, rock bands and individual rock stars were given an enormous amount of creative freedom, and the best of them used every bit of it. They wrote their own music and lyrics, crafted their own arrangements, experimented with wildly ambitious production techniques, and oversaw the design of their album covers, the launching of marketing campaigns, and the conjuring of increasingly theatrical and decadent concert tours.
This doesn't mean there was no corporate oversight or outside influence on rock musicians. Record companies and professional producers and engineers were usually at the helm, making sure to protect their reputations and investments. Yet to an astonishing degree, the artists got their way. Songs and albums were treated by all — the musicians themselves, but also the record companies, critics, and of course the fans — as Statements. For a time, the capitalist juggernaut made possible and sustained the creation of popular art that sometimes achieved a new form of human excellence. That it didn't last shouldn't keep us from appreciating how remarkable it was while it did."
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