Turbotax is Blitzing Congress Again to Make Tax Filing Harder

Every year, Americans spend billions on tax prep services, paying a heavily concentrated industry of giant, wildly profitable firms to send the IRS information it already has. Despite the fact that most other rich countries have a far more efficient process, many Americans believe that adopting this process here is either impossible, immoral, or both.

That puts tax preparation in the same bucket as other forms of weird American exceptionalism – like the belief that we're too untrustworthy to have universal healthcare, or that we're so violent that we must all have assault rifles to protect ourselves from one another. (...)

It's a no-brainer, or it would be – if it wasn't for decades of lobbying by the massively concentrated tax-prep industry – wildly profitable corporate giants like HR Block and Intuit, the parent company of Turbotax, who spent 20 years lobbying congress, spending millions to ensure that Americans would have to pay the Turbotax tax in order to pay their income tax.

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free

... The point of getting the IRS to send you pre-populated tax returns isn't to deny you the opportunity to pay excellent, knowledgeable tax-prep specialists if you need them – it's to spare most of us from the needless expense of paying Intuit and HR Block to perform the rote form-filling by which they rake in billions in profits.

by Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. This is the first year I've stopped using TurboTax and it's really no big deal. Yeah, you fill in a few more blanks (like, name and address - horrors!), and probably should look closely at a couple sections in the IRS tax booklet, but beyond that, the pleasure of screwing Intuit and Block is more than worth it.]

Federal Reserve Independence Is the Problem

I watch CNBC almost every morning, and whenever a Biden administration official comes on to discuss the economy, the anchors inevitably ask about some aspect of Federal Reserve policy, usually interest rates. The last one I saw was the Treasury Department’s top deputy Wally Adeyemo, who said that the administration doesn’t comment on Fed actions, over concern of jeopardizing the independence of the central bank.

It is a very odd situation, to have the elected leader of the United States with a policy of such deference to the Fed that he even has his own officials refuse to make any public statement for fear of exerting influence. Even judges, whom most liberals hold in undeserved high regard, don’t get such deference. In 2011, Barack Obama openly criticized the Citizens United decision in the State of the Union. And Democrats routinely criticize judges. Unlike the Fed, judges are an entirely separate branch of government in the Constitution!

So what is the Fed? Technically, it’s the central bank, mandated by Congress to ensure that most people have jobs (“full employment”) and that prices are reasonably stable (“low inflation”). It executes on this dual mandate by controlling the price of money and credit in the economy. The Fed has two main functions. One, through the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), it sets the level at which big banks on Wall Street borrow money, thus organizing the amount of money the central bank prints. And two, through its bank supervisors, the Fed oversees the health of the financial system by examining individual banks.

Though it’s not often presented this way, these two functions jointly foster monetary policy. The FOMC pushes interest rates up or down, and the banks overseen by the Fed transmit those choices to borrowers and lenders throughout the economy. The FOMC is like the general setting the direction of an army, and the supervisors are the mid-level officers who make sure the army can do what it is ordered to do. Generally speaking, the Fed and Wall Street are partners, and Wall Street exerts significant influence over Fed actions, simply because they work together every day to trade billions of dollars of bonds.

So why does the Biden administration stay silent about how high finance works in America? There’s no law that says they must, and there’s also no evidence that keeping politicians silent about monetary policy is good for the economy. Indeed, from 1935 to 1950, when the president directly ran monetary policy, inequality collapsed, the economy boomed, and inflation was kept low despite economy-wide mobilization to fight World War II. But since the 1980s, we’ve had a weird 40-year tradition of what is known as “Fed independence,” whereby politicians are supposed to leave the Fed and its destructive economists alone. As far as I can tell, there is no reason for this choice, except that Wall Street likes it when high finance is considered apolitical.

A hands-off policy toward any entity that makes core political-economy decisions is problematic. But we’ve seen how this deference is especially damaging in real time, primarily because the Fed has done such a bad job recently. Take the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. SVB was regulated by the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, and examiners at the SF Fed didn’t act on the bank’s serious problems until the fall of the bank was imminent. This is despite public reporting in The Wall Street Journal about the hole in the bank’s balance sheet months earlier. The SF Fed examiners reportedly wrote several stern letters to SVB executives about the risks they were taking, and the executives threw them in the trash, and everyone went on with their lives until the bank collapsed.

The incompetence of the Fed examiners is quite obvious. The incompetence of the FOMC, which gave the orders to have its banks march to the tune of higher interest rates, and never bothered to care about whether the banks could handle it, is worse.

The closer you get to the facts, the more incompetent the Fed looks. Supervisors should never have allowed a bank funded with between 90 and 100 percent uninsured “hot money” deposits by venture capitalists to bet on unhedged long-term bonds. And you didn’t need to be a genius to get this fact. Everyone in Silicon Valley knew that SVB was insolvent; it was pretty much an open secret. Fed supervisors knew it, and so did the FOMC. They took no action.

And though the Fed might feel independent of politics, politics is not independent of the Fed.

In 2018, the Fed, along with its banking allies, wrote and lobbied for a bill, S. 2155, that didn’t quite take away its regulatory authority so much as give it the political cover to relax regulatory requirements over large regional banks. SVB lobbied for this legislation, but the prime actor here was the Fed itself. The general counsel of the Fed, Mark Van Der Weide, helped author S. 2155, and Fed Chair Jay Powell testified in favor of it. Janet Yellen, the former Fed chair and current Treasury secretary, supported it as well. Just a few months after Donald Trump signed S. 2155 into law, SVB announced a $500 million stock buyback program. And a few months after that, SVB began taking in huge deposits and making the bets that would lead to its undoing.

In 2019, the Fed wrote aggressive rules rolling back obligations on large regional banks. At the time, opponents of the legislation that triggered the rewrite predicted that removing requirements would lead to a blowup, but Fed officials (with one exception) nonetheless condescended to everyone who warned of too much risk in the system. Nellie Liang, who ran the Federal Reserve’s financial stability division for six years, responded to the bill by saying, “meh,” and from her temporary perch at the Brookings Institution, “It’s fine … I’m not upset about it.”

The Fed has announced it will investigate itself, which is, frankly, a very Fed thing to do. We will probably find out a few more relevant facts, as the Fed discovers that though the Fed could have done a bit better, the Fed’s stringent internal reform program that the Fed oversees will fix the problem. Don’t worry, the Fed is on it, even if the Fed is the problem. But because of deference from the White House and the Democrats in the name of Fed independence, no one will propose any real fixes. The Fed will promise to regulate banks a bit more, but of course, there’s no reason to assume the Fed will even realize what went wrong. 

by Matt Stoller, The Amercian Prospect | Read more:
Image: Alex Brandon/AP

[ed. This and the article below from TAP's special issue: Washington's Secret Policy Engine.]

Six Ways Existing Economic Models Are Killing the Economy

Americans have been hammered for decades with an economic message that amounts to this: When wealthy people like me gain even more wealth through tax cuts, deregulation, and policies that keep wages low, that leads to economic growth and benefits for everyone else in the economy. And equally, that investing in you, raising your wages, forgiving your debt, or helping your family would be bad—for you! This is the trickle-down way of thinking about economic cause and effect, and there can be no doubt that it has substantially contributed to the greatest upward transfer of wealth in the history of the world.

You would think that trying to sell such a disastrous outcome for the broad mass of citizens would be incredibly unpopular. No politician would outright say they want to shrink the middle class, make it harder to get by, or reward hard work less. No politician would outright say that rich people should get richer, while everyone else struggles to make a decent life.

But this message has been hidden under the confusing, technical-sounding, and often impenetrable language of economics. Many academic economists do important work trying to understand and improve the world. But most citizens’ experience of economics comes from hearing a story—a narrative that rationalizes who gets what and why. The people who benefit from trickle-down policy the most have deployed economists to work their magic to tell this story, and explain why there is no alternative to its scientific certitude.

One of the trickle-down economists’ main persuasive tools is the economic model, used to predict and assess the outcome of economic policies and other major economic developments. These existing models exert such great force on the political debate in large part because their predictions are treated by politicians and reporters as neutral, technocratic reality—simple economic facts, produced by experts, that reflect our best understanding of economic cause and effect.

What few understand is that these economic models do not, and never can, fully reflect the extraordinary complexity of human markets. Rather, the point is to create useful abstractions to provide decision-makers with a sense of the budgetary and economic impacts of a given policy proposal. More disturbingly, the assumptions baked into these models completely define what the models predict. If the assumptions are wrong, the models will be wrong too.

And these models are deeply and consistently wrong.

But “wrong” doesn’t capture the true problem. The deeper problem is that these models are all wrong in the very same way, and in the same direction. They are wrong in a way that massively benefits the rich, and massively disadvantages everyone and everything else.

The headlines derived from these models consistently reflect this bias: “Raising Minimum Wage to $15 Would Cost 1.4 Million Jobs, CBO Says,” or “Biden Corporate Tax Hike Could Shrink Economy, Slash U.S. Jobs, Study Shows.”

Models serve less as scientific analysis and more as incantations from the cult of neoliberalism, and if politicians and journalists continue to accept them with the same naïve credulity that they always have, they will hamper the astounding middle-out economic progress that the Biden administration has made toward rebuilding a more equitable, prosperous economy for all.

The problem is that few people take the time to explain what these faulty assumptions are, why they all promote the worldview of the rich and powerful, and why they shouldn’t be treated as science but as a trickle-down fantasyland.

Here are six of the assumptions built into most economic models that are among the most pernicious:

1. Models assume that public investments will “crowd out” private investment, and are by definition less productive than private investments.

What happens to the economy if the federal government spends $1 billion? The normal person would say that it depends what they spend it on, and how the policy is designed.

Not so in most economic models. They assume that any government spending will have less of a return than whatever private businesses spend their money on. Always.

But that’s not all. They say that government spending even comes with a penalty: It automatically causes businesses to spend less, leading to lower overall investment. Always.

Essentially, models assume that every increase in public investment is canceled out by the combination of lower returns and reduction in private investment. Taking this assumption to its logical extreme, there’s almost nothing government should ever invest in. It’s a good thing Eisenhower took office before the neoliberal style of thinking came to dominate Washington, or instead of interstate highways we’d still have dirt roads.

These assumptions aren’t even well hidden in models but baked directly into the math. As economist Mark Paul has noted, the Congressional Budget Office model assumes that all public investments are exactly half as productive as private investments. Public investments return 5 percent annually, while the same amount of private investment returns 10 percent.

The first indication that something is amiss here can be sensed in all these round numbers—a flat declaration that public spending is 50 percent less good than private spending. Precisely 50 percent. Every time. Obviously, this is not the result of rigorous data analysis. It’s simply recapitulating the old trickle-down myth that government is by definition wasteful, while private investment is always maximized for the greatest efficiency and return.

And it’s not even a little bit true. Think about health care. The U.S. government invests billions in basic research each year and is responsible for funding an incredible range of innovations, from mRNA vaccine technology to new antibiotics. Everyone benefits from this publicly funded research, sparking further innovations and benefits—much of it carried out by the private sector.

Then consider how Big Pharma invests its profits: with huge marketing budgets, predatory patent enforcement, $577 billion in stock buybacks over five years (more than was spent on research and development), and a 14 percent increase in executive compensation. It’s a bonanza for those corporations, but it’s the opposite of efficiency—except in the make-believe world constructed by economic models.

The point isn’t that government spending always returns more than private spending, just that the flat assumption that it is always worse by 50 percent simply doesn’t map to reality. We should assess policy by what it proposes to do, not who proposes to do it.

by Nick Hanauer, The American Prospect | Read more:
Image: KYODO
[ed. See also: How Policymakers Fight a Losing Battle With Models (TAP).]

Mary Lou Williams

5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Mary Lou Williams (NYT)

Today, Williams is remembered as a Mount Rushmore figure in jazz, possibly the greatest multiplier of openness and mastery the music has yet known.

A 20-Year-Old Unlike Any Other Is Golf’s Next Global Superstar

Augusta, Ga. — “If you would’ve told me when I was 16, which was four years ago …”

Tom Kim says this so comfortably, in a way that only the young can, those lost in the good life, whose age hasn’t worn away at that cloak of invincibility. Kim is 20. On Monday he played a practice round at Augusta National with Rory McIlroy, who turned pro in 2007, when Kim was 5; and Tiger Woods, who was an eight-time major winner by the time Kim was born in 2002; and Fred Couples, who was born in 1959, a breezy 43 years earlier.

Kim walked alongside those luminaries on the way from No. 11 green to 12 tee. The crowd greeted them as you’d expect. Swooning. Tiger did his little wave-and-nod. Rory smiled like Rory smiles. Freddie was Freddie.

But there, too, in that rarest of air, was Tom Kim.

Tom.

Kim.

Ask him about these moments and oftentimes he responds with the type of poise that suggests he’s always felt this was inevitable. That this is where he’d be. That this is where he belongs. He comes at it with an aw-shucks quality, but there’s an underlying tension at play — Tom Kim is aware of the hype. A few weeks ago, in a conversation at TPC Sawgrass, he offered a look and a shrug and said, “I don’t think I’m quite where people say I am. Basically, I’m just trying to get more experience out here really fast.”

How does one get experience really fast?

That’s the type of contradiction that comes on with a white-knuckle ascent like Tom Kim.

It’s not slowing. If anything, it’s only accelerating. It’ll hit another atmosphere on Thursday when Kim makes his Masters debut, playing alongside McIlroy and Sam Burns in a marquee afternoon grouping.

Why the big to-do? For those catching up, Kim began 2022 only holding status on the Asian Tour. He then landed a spot in the Scottish Open, finished third, then made the cut at the Open Championship at St. Andrews. Some began wondering, who the hell is this? Then Kim accepted special temporary status on the PGA Tour, finished seventh in Detroit, and then, in a thunderclap, won the Wyndham Championship by five shots. This was only seven months ago. At 20, Kim became the second-youngest winner on the PGA Tour since 1932, trailing only Jordan Spieth. (...)

That brings us to today where, more than any ranking, Tom Kim is a thing. A certified thing. The Nike deal came in January. An undisclosed amount, but surely a massive bag. Instead of being a walking billboard, Kim is exclusively adorned by the swoosh and no one is shy about what that means.

“He wants to be the GOAT,” Ben Harrison, Kim’s agent, said. “And, you know, if you want to be the GOAT, you’ve got to be among them. So, for him, as a brand, Nike is such an elite global brand. All the best athletes in the world, at some point, have been with them.”

This is a far cry from what was.

Kim speaks of formative years as if they’re of another time. Far removed. Unsentimental. Then you realize he’s referencing, like, 2019.

It was that recently that Joohyung Kim, born in 2002 in Seoul, South Korea, was essentially supporting his family. Parents Changik Lee and Kwanjoo Kim went all-in on Joohyung’s golfing dream early. Changik was a mini-tour pro turned teaching professional and taught his son the game. The family moved often, eventually landing in Australia, where Joohyung learned English and grew into a world-class junior player. As a kid, Joohyung loved Thomas the Tank Engine. He had the lunchbox, all the toys; he loved it so much that he started going by Thomas. By the time he was 11, an incidental name change was complete. He was Tom.

by Brendan Quinn, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Christian Petersen/Getty Images
[ed. It's Master's week. Whether he makes the cut or not, he's the real deal.]

Ivanka Trump Is Pained

Nepotism was never supposed to be this hard.

I ache for Ivanka. But mostly, I marvel at her — and at the many, many people like her who have a special talent, a preternatural discipline, for pausing at every pivotal crossroads and making a coldblooded, single-minded assessment: How do I navigate this to maximum advantage for me?

Ivanka navigates like Magellan. She’s GPS made flesh. At times, the coordinates and calculations have been easy: Daddy’s going to the White House; I will not be left behind. She traipsed after him to Washington. She traipsed after him to meetings with European leaders. She even traipsed after him to the Demilitarized Zone. She did so much traipsing that Twitter had a hashtag for it: #unwantedivanka. And then Daddy was dethroned, and the traipsing just wasn’t what it used to be.

Things got tricky: Daddy sent those ruffians to the Capitol, where they made a horrible mess and threatened to maul Mike Pence. Ivanka recalculated. For her appearance before the Jan. 6 committee, she wore a glimmer of disapproval.

And now, well, there’s no figuring out where to turn or whom to burn. Daddy was just hauled into a Manhattan courthouse because of that smuttiness with the porn star. Can Ivanka play the part of a distracted onlooker without seeming like a 24-karat ingrate?

Nothing good for her can come of this, so she’s saying and doing almost nothing at all. She’s in limbo. She’s in hiding. She has gone from gaga to Garbo and wants to be left alone, at least until the Stormy weather clears.

She did, according to a report in The New York Post, visit Daddy at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday. And last week, following his indictment, she put out that statement about it on Instagram. But it read as though it were written by a chatbot getting a pedicure. It comprised just 27 weightless, gutless, exquisitely noncommittal words — about loving Daddy, about loving America, about being “pained.” His indictment is a kidney stone to be passed.

And she’s the patron saint of all the unscrupulous opportunists who are taking little or big steps away from Daddy but contentedly ignored his depravity and destructiveness when there was power to be gained from that. When there was a profit to be made. (...)

For Daddy’s current presidential campaign, she sent her regrets. “This time around,” she said in a statement released the same night he announced his candidacy, “I am choosing to prioritize my young children.” Were they not priorities before?

She added that she didn’t “plan to be involved in politics.” The thing about plans is they can change. Ivanka’s vanishing act is a testament to that.

by Frank Bruni, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ben Wiseman

[ed. Who doesn't appreciate a good burn now and then? Also in this column, a return to Love of Sentences:]

Anthony Lane had great fun reviewing the movie “Cocaine Bear,” which lends new definition to the phrase “high concept”: “Allegedly, it’s based on true events, in much the same way that ‘Pinocchio’ is based on string theory.” Also: “The animal kingdom is represented by a butterfly, a deer and a black bear. Only one of these is on cocaine, although with butterflies you can never really tell.” (...)

Also in The New Yorker, Nathan Heller described the effect of the internet and smartphones on college students’ attention spans: “Assigning ‘Middlemarch’ in that climate was like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip.” (...)

In The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan weighed in on the chilliness of Ron DeSantis, who gives her the feeling “that he might unplug your life support to re-charge his cellphone.”

In Pristine Alaska, an Oil Giant Prepares to Drill for Decades

In Pristine Alaska, an Oil Giant Prepares to Drill for Decades (NY Times )

At the earliest, the crude would begin flowing in about six years. By that time, the Biden administration hopes that demand for oil will have plummeted because of federal investments to encourage use of renewable energy and to encourage a transition to electric vehicles. (...)

“The stone age did not come to an end for a lack of stone,” Mr. Marks said, making the point that he expected the same would be true with oil. “That’s the long-term risk these companies face with electric cars and wind and hydro and everything else,” he said. “Eventually oil is going to go away, even if there’s still some to produce.” (...)

Willow will consist of as many as 199 wells spread across three drill sites, which the company believes could produce nearly 600 million barrels of oil over 30 years. That would make it the largest oil project in the United States. (...)

The benefits to Alaska, which remains dependent on fossil fuel revenues because it has no statewide sales tax or personal income tax, will be somewhat limited. Willow is on federal land, which means that Washington will receive royalties but that Alaska will be able to collect only oil-production taxes, which would be offset by company tax deductions for expenses. For a few years, until the oil starts flowing, Willow could even have a small negative impact on state revenues.

by Lisa Friedman and Clifford Krauss, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Erin Schaff

[ed. My best friend Deb is an environmental supervisor there. Two weeks on, two weeks off.]

Stockholm Design Lap, SDL, Stockholm Furniture Fair Rendering, 2023
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Gozilla Styling, 2022/2033
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Freetime/Nothing/Beer (5.1%)
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B. Langford, New Zealand Post, Munich 1972, Rowing Stamp
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The Single Most Important Thing

Is It Time for a Pause?

Many of the people building powerful AI systems think they’ll stumble on an AI system that forever changes our world fairly soon — three years, five years. I think they’re reasonably likely to be wrong about that, but I’m not sure they’re wrong about that. If we give them fifteen or twenty years, I start to suspect that they are entirely right.

And while I think that the enormous, terrifying challenges of making AI go well are very much solvable, it feels very possible, to me, that we won’t solve them in time.

It’s hard to overstate how much we have to gain from getting this right. It’s also hard to overstate how much we have to lose from getting it wrong. When I’m feeling optimistic about having grandchildren, I imagine that our grandchildren will look back in horror at how recklessly we endangered everyone in the world. And I’m much much more optimistic that humanity will figure this whole situation out in the end if we have twenty years than I am if we have five.

There’s all kinds of AI research being done — at labs, in academia, at nonprofits, and in a distributed fashion all across the internet — that’s so diffuse and varied that it would be hard to ‘slow down’ by fiat. But there’s one kind of AI research — training much larger, much more powerful language models — that it might make sense to try to slow down. If we could agree to hold off on training ever more powerful new models, we might buy more time to do AI alignment research on the models we have. This extra research could make it less likely that misaligned AI eventually seizes control from humans.

An open letter released on Wednesday, with signatures from Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, leading AI researcher Yoshua Bengio, and many other prominent figures, called for a six-month moratorium on training bigger, more dangerous ML models:

We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.

I tend to think that we are developing and releasing AI systems much faster and much more carelessly than is in our interests. And from talking to people in Silicon Valley and policymakers in DC, I think efforts to change that are rapidly gaining traction. “We should slow down AI capabilities progress” is a much more mainstream view than it was six months ago, and to me that seems like great news.

In my ideal world, we absolutely would be pausing after the release of GPT-4. People have been speculating about the alignment problem for decades, but this moment is an obvious golden age for alignment work. We finally have models powerful enough to do useful empirical work on understanding them, changing their behavior, evaluating their capabilities, noticing when they’re being deceptive or manipulative, and so on. There are so many open questions in alignment that I expect we can make a lot of progress on in five years, with the benefit of what we’ve learned from existing models. We’d be in a much better position if we could collectively slow down to give ourselves more time to do this work, and I hope we find a way to do that intelligently and effectively. As I’ve said above, I think the stakes are unfathomable, and it’s exciting to see the early stages of coordination to change our current, unwise trajectory.

On the letter itself, though, I have a bunch of uncertainties around whether a six month pause right now would actually help. (I suspect many of the letter-signatories share these uncertainties, and I don’t have strong opinions about the wisdom of signing it). Here are some of my worries:

• Is it better to ask for evaluations rather than a pause? Personally, I think labs should sign on to ongoing commitments to subject each new generation of model to a third-party dangerous capabilities audit. I’m much more excited about requiring audits and oversight before training dangerous models than about asking for ‘pauses’, which are hard to enforce.

• Is the ask too small? I think I and the letter signers would generally agree that the ideal thing for society to do right now is something more continuous and iterative (and ultimately more ambitious) than a one-time six month pause at this stage. That means one big question is whether this opens the door to those larger efforts, or muddies the waters. Do steps that are in the right direction, but not sufficient, help us collectively produce common knowledge of the problem and build towards the right longer-term solutions, or do they mostly leave people misled about what it’s going to take to solve the problem? I’m not sure.

• What will we use the pause to do? An open letter like this one could be a step towards cooperative agreements on evaluations, standards, and governance, in which case it’s great. It could also go badly, if in six months labs go right back to developing powerful models and people walk away with the impression the pause was performative or meaningless. By itself, taking a few months off doesn’t gain us much (especially if a pause is entirely voluntary, so the least cooperative actors can simply ignore it). If we use that time well, to set up binding standards, good evaluations of whether our models are dangerous, and a much larger national conversation about what’s at stake here, then that could change everything.

• Does this ask impact companies unevenly? This specific call — to not train models larger than GPT-4 — is inapplicable to almost every AI lab today, because most of them can’t train models larger than GPT-4 in the next six months anyway. OpenAI may well be the only AI lab in a position to act on, or not act on, this demand.

That doesn’t delight me. Obviously, when regulations are being considered, one of the things companies inevitably do is try to design the regulations to advantage them and disadvantage their competitors. If proposed AI regulations appear to be an obvious grab at commercial rivals, I expect they’ll get less traction.

Moreover, I’m worried that an unevenly applied moratorium might backfire. If OpenAI can’t train GPT-5 for 6 months, other AI labs may use that time to rush to train GPT-4-sized models. That could mean that when the moratorium is lifted, OpenAI feels more pressure to get ahead again and may push for an even larger training run than they were planning originally. This moratorium could end up accomplishing very little except for making competitive dynamics even fiercer.

Overall, I’d prefer a policy that creates costs for all players and is careful to avoid creating potential perverse incentives.

Predicting the details of how future AI development will play out isn’t easy. But my best guess is that we’re facing a marathon, not a sprint. The next generation of language models will be even more powerful and scary than GPT-4, and the generation after that will be even scarier still. In my ideal world, we would pause and reflect and do a lot of safety evaluations, make models slightly bigger, and then pause again and do more reflecting and testing. We would do that over and over again as we inch toward transformative AI.

But we’re not living in an ideal world. The single most important thing we can do is to pause when the next model we train would be powerful enough to obsolete humans entirely, and then take as long as we need to work on AI alignment with the help of our existing models. That means that pausing now is mostly valuable insofar as it helps us build towards the harder, more complicated task of identifying when we might be at the brink and pausing for as long as we need to then. I’m not sure what the impact of this letter will be — it might help, or it might hurt.

by Kelsey Piper, Planned Obsolescence |  Read more:

[ed. See also: AI Risk is like Terminator; Stop Saying it's Not (Infinite Clout); and, The case for Terminator analogies (Slow Boring).]

The Great Forgetting - The Earth is Losing Its Memory

As a paleoclimatologist, my work revolves around the tenet that the past provides context and constraints for better understanding the future. Knowing how much the planet warmed when atmospheric carbon dioxide was as high or higher than it is today provides insight into the possible future trajectories of climate under rising greenhouse gases.

Earth records provide us with this information: Ice cores, tree rings, ocean sediments, stalactites and stalagmites in caves, growth rings in corals, tusks, and mollusks. These archives accrete memories on time periods varying from months to millions of years, allowing us to see a spectrum of Earth changes on various temporal and spatial scales—how biology, ocean, and ice respond to climate change in signature patterns, and the points at which those systems are pushed past thresholds.

This is one of the most important insights that paleoclimate archives provide: They show us how the real world breaks. How resilience folds into catastrophic failure. They show us the edges and asymmetries of the climate system: the thresholds of tolerance in ecological networks; the slow steady slog of diversification and the quick ax of extinction; the long timescales it takes for ice sheets to grow—accumulating million-year memories—and how fast they can melt, puddling history into storm surges that erode the banks of our futures. (...)

In geology, an “unconformity” represents an aberration in the normal accumulation of sediment, a glitch in the record-keeping of Earth’s history. “A stratum of amnesia in the geological record, where overlying rock, significantly younger than what lies below, represents some break in an otherwise continuous story of formation,” is how writer and poet Kim Stafford defined it.2

The longest lacuna in Earth’s history is known as the Great Unconformity. It represents a temporal gap ranging from a hundred million years to over a billion years, depending on the location. It’s visible in the Grand Canyon as the boundary between the Precambrian Vishnu Schist and the Cambrian Tapeats Sandstone, between which there is a billion years of missing time between about 1,600 and 600 million years ago. Looking at this line in the strata, it is hard to fathom all that would have conspired across that vast gulf of time, for which there is simply nothing. If it were instead to have been the last billion years that was erased, it would obliterate the entire history of complex life. No trace of a single animal having ever walked the land. No dinosaurs, no whales, no humans, no pyramids.

How does a billion years go missing? The Great Unconformity has long been a geological mystery, in no small part because it is a challenge to reconstruct history when records of history are missing.

It turns out, ice sheets are good shredders. Recent research suggests that the Great Unconformity may be a result of Snowball Earth—when the planet descended into deep cold (about 700 million years ago), and glaciers covered most of the land. A billion years of history was ground down by ice and bulldozed into the seafloor, where it was subducted into the Earth’s mantle and recycled into magma, ready to be remade into new history—albeit with a few hidden remnants of the past stored safely away in subterranean crystals.

While the erosive action of ice sheets may have been responsible for the largest unconformity in the Earth’s lithosphere, ice sheets themselves are some of the best memory banks on our planet. Greenland stores over 100,000 years of history. Antarctica stores over a million. These ice sheets are written by the daily weather, each snowstorm condensed into the jagged rhythms of ice age cycles that steadily build into mile-high mountains—the great brains of our planet, perched on the poles. (...)

Antarctica has been the slowest beast to awaken, but the icy tentacles that reach out to moor the giant are starting to slip. These floating ice shelves extend out from where the ice sheet is grounded to the bedrock, helping to stabilize the interior, but now they are starting to weaken from the forces of ocean warming and rising seas. As the ice shelves disintegrate into the ocean, the ice upstream accelerates its descent, increasing sea level.

In 2022, double heat waves hit the Arctic and Antarctic, temperatures soaring close to 40 degrees Celsius higher than usual. The Conger ice shelf in East Antarctica said its final farewell following this heat wave. West Antarctica has long been considered the more vulnerable to near-term ice shelf loss, but now, even the East is starting to show its fray. Heat makes easy work of forgetting. (...)

Before a tipping point in a complex system, there are early warning signals that may be detected. The most widely applicable of these early warning signals is “critical slowing down”—the phenomenon we are all familiar with before our computer crashes, and rather than heed the implications of this slower processing power, we jam at the keys in frustration, doubling down on our demands until the computer blacks out. These are the times information is most likely to be lost if it hasn’t been secured in long-term storage.

Critical slowing down indicates the system is losing its ability to attain its previous equilibrium and is instead becoming attracted or pulled into an alternate state. It is a loss of resilience, a loss of the negative feedbacks that help keep a system rooted in stability. Various subsystems that are sensitive to thresholds—such as the Amazon rainforest—are already showing signs of critical slowing down.

Given the complexity of the Earth System, it is hard to fathom the extent of information loss currently underway. There are, however, attempts to quantify the memory loss in the Earth System.

In one model, where anthropogenic CO2 emissions are the stressor, and the strain on the system is the ability of the land and ocean to sequester carbon, researchers show the latter is inherently slower than the former. They estimate that 60 percent of Earth’s memory had already been degraded by 1959, and that the ability for Earth to build-up memory has been impaired, reducing its capacity to respond to stresses within its natural stress-strain regime.16 Estimates of persistence in this model—akin to critical slowing down—are increasing, signaling a departure from the bounds of Earth’s natural regime well before 2050, if the stressors of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide continue their current trajectory. The ocean is undergoing memory loss too, increasing variability and reducing predictability of future temperature patterns.

The intractable problem we face is the asymmetry of timescales: It takes time to build memory, but it can be erased in a geological instant. Like so many things we take for granted, it is difficult to see these stabilizing forces until they are gone. As we untether the anchors of the past, the future becomes unmoored.

by Summer Praetorius, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Katherine Streeter

Why Asa Hutchinson’s View of the World Isn’t Working for Republicans

Ahead of his presidential announcement, Hutchinson, a Republican, spent several days in the first-in-the nation caucus state of Iowa, stirring speculation that he intended to enter into what he acknowledged is a tense national political landscape.

"I have made a decision, and my decision is I'm going to run for president of the United States," Hutchinson told Karl. "While the formal announcement will be later in April, in Bentonville [Arkansas], I want to make it clear to you, Jonathan, I am going to be running. And the reason is, I've traveled the country for six months, I hear people talk about the leadership of our country. I'm convinced that people want leaders that appeal to the best of America, and not simply appeal to our worst instincts."

The former governor told Karl he is inspired by his travels around the country over the last six months and acknowledged it would take "a lot of hard work and good messaging" to raise his national profile and break through a crowded primary field.

"It’s still about retail politics in many of these states, and also, this is one of the most unpredictable political environments that I've seen in my lifetime. So my message of experience, of consistent conservatism and hope for our future in solving problems that face Americans, I think that that resonates," Hutchinson said. (...)

"I think it's a sad day for America that we have a former president that's indicted, and so it's a great distraction, but at the same time, we can't set aside what our Constitution requires -- which is electing a new leader for our country -- just because we have this side controversy and criminal charges that are pending. And so we've got to press on, and the American people are gonna have to separate what the ideas are for our future," he said.

Karl pressed Hutchinson on whether he believes Trump should drop out of the race now that he’s been indicted.

"I do," Hutchinson said, standing by the position he took before Trump was charged. "I mean, first of all, the office is more important than any individual person. And so for the sake of the office of the presidency, I do think that's too much of a sideshow and distraction and he needs to be able to concentrate on his due process and there is a presumption of innocence."

"I've always said that people don't have to step aside from public office if they're under investigation, but if it reaches the point of criminal charges that have to be answered, the office is always more important than a person. And so, there's some consistency there. And I do believe if we're looking at the presidency and the future of our country, then we don't need that distraction," he added.

In contrast to GOP presidential candidates and potential candidates, Hutchinson did not blast the indictment as purely political, noting "the grand jury found probable cause and that's the standard for any criminal charges in our society." (...)

Despite his critique of Trump, the former Arkansas governor drew a distinction that his political position is in the “non-Trump lane” rather than the “anti-Trump lane.”

"When I say ‘non-Trump’, I want to be able to speak to the Trump voters. I want to be able to speak to all of the party and say, ‘This is the leadership that I want to provide, and I think that we need to have border security. I think we need to have a strong America; we need to spend less at the federal level.’ These are the values that I represent," Hutchinson said.

by Alisa Wiersema, ABC News | Read more:

Image: ABC News
[ed. He's still a Republican. But hey, anyone who promotes comity and normality and actual governing over batshit crazy and performative politics is definitely going to be an improvement. Granted, it's a pretty low bar, but at least he's giving the party an option going foward. We'll see what they do with it. See also: Why Asa Hutchinson’s view of the world isn’t working for Republicans (Politico).]

No master, daily work - The 9th Small Theater Festival BOOK PLAYS 沒有大師﹅日常用功　第九屆足跡小劇場演書節 Step Out 足跡 Nov 2018
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Life Long Pursuit. Feng zi watercolor exhibition《半生緣：一世情》鳯子畫展 / exhibition design / yunyi / Jun 2013
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Catherine DeQuattro Nolin, The Night Kitchen 2, 2022
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Executive Speak

“Our goal within this media evolution is to meet audiences wherever and however they consume content, by working with great worldwide storytellers to develop and execute their vision,” said Paul Buccieri, president and Chairman of A+E Networks Group. “Over the last four years, we have been on a journey to expand our production capabilities in both scripted and factual, and we’ve established key relationships in the talent management space as well as continued creating compelling content across our brands to further meet the needs of our valued partners and viewers.”

History Channel Greenlights New Projects From Kevin Costner, Bradley Cooper, Morgan Freeman (Variety)

Image: Yellowstone/Paramount

[ed. There are actually people on this planet that speak and understand this language. Imagine what that does to a person's brain. See also: How Kevin Costner Took Over Fox News Headquarters (Variety):]

The bulk of Fox Corp.’s portfolio is comprised of ad-supported media that consumers can access without a subscription. Even so, the company has dipped its toe into premium streaming waters with Fox Nation, which launched as a sort of “Netflix for conservatives,” but has expanded into what Klarman called “news adjacent” content. (...)

“I think the outdoors is something you can imagine is something our audience is very interested in, and Yellowstone in particular is an American icon, fronted by a guy who is starring in a show by the same name who is also an icon,” says Klarman. “It’s very meta.”

How Many New Songs Are Released Each Day?

Can you have too many songs?

That seems like a nice problem to have, until you start looking at the implications. They’re scary—both for musicians and fans.

Songs are like tribbles. One is cute, and you love it. Even five or ten are fine. But when you encounter a thousand of them, you run away as fast as you can.

I fear that’s happening in music right now. It’s become tribble-ized—and hence trivialized.

But let’s analyze the situation, and try to reach some conclusions. I’ll start with one tiny genre (jazz)—where it’s easier for me to wrap my mind around the numbers—and then try to assess the larger picture.

I warn you: It’s ugly.

Many jazz fans consider 1959 as the high point of the genre. That year saw the release of so many beloved recordings, including:

• Kind of Blue by Miles Davis

• Time Out by Dave Brubeck

• Mingus Ah Um by Charles Mingus

• The Shape of Jazz to Come by Ornette Coleman

• Giant Steps by John Coltrane

But that short list just scratches the surface. I could easily add another 10 or 20 jazz albums from 1959 that are undisputed classics—and probably another 50 to 100 recordings that are still cherished by many jazz fans today.

But here’s the surprising twist to all this. Somebody once told me that Downbeat, the leading jazz magazine, only received around 500 jazz records to review during the entire year of 1959.

It’s hard to imagine somebody releasing a jazz record in 1959, and not submitting it for review. So this means that around 20% or more of all the jazz records released that year are still heard and admired today—after 60 years!

In the fickle world of music, that’s an extraordinary success rate. Just releasing a jazz record that year gave you a 1-in-5 chance of ongoing success into the next millennium.

Now let’s compare this with the current day. It’s a depressing story, but somebody ought to tell it straight. I guess that means me.

Nobody really knows how many jazz albums are are getting released in the year 2023. But I probably have a better sense of this than most—because I constantly hear from musicians, labels, and publicists about their new music. Sometimes I will receive 50 or more pitches on new records in a single day.

Here’s my best guess: I’d estimate that somewhere between five and ten thousand new jazz recordings will be issued this year.

Clearly if you judge an art form by supply—and ignore that pesky little matter of demand—we are living in a golden age. We have far exceeded anything dreamt of by jazz lovers back in 1959.

In those distant days, a music fan could actually listen to every new jazz album, and still have time to spare. Nowadays that’s impossible. There’s not a single person on the planet who can even scratch the surface of all the accumulated music.

But here’s an even more extreme comparison. Let’s ask how many of these recordings will still be heard and loved in 60 years time. I’m afraid to answer that. But we are a long, long way from 1959 when a recording artist had a twenty percent chance, more or less, of making a lasting impact.

Here’s the sad truth for a musician in the current day. They can’t even begin to compete in their field, because they are almost always lost in the noise before the competition even begins.

This can’t be healthy. You flourish as a creative person when you actively compete at the highest levels of your vocation. If the actual situation is that you’re just lost in a crowd, you’re demoralized from the start. Instead of demonstrating your skills, you’re shouting out for attention—and ineffectively in almost every instance.

It’s like the difference between fighting for the heavyweight title, when you can demonstrate all your subtle boxing moves, and trying to prevail in a street riot. And that’s exactly what the music scene feels like in the current moment—a riot, with no rules or boundaries. You never win; at best, you survive.

Now let’s look for an even scarier number. How many recordings are released each year in all music genres?

In 2019, Spotify claimed that 40,000 tracks were added each day to its platform. And by 2021, the number increased to 60,000. But last September, the CEOs of two major labels made the staggering claim that 100,000 songs were now getting released each day.

Some argued that these figures were inflated. This couldn’t really be happening.

But a few weeks ago, Billboard reported that SoundCloud added 45 million tracks over a 12 month period. That works out to around 123,000 new songs every day.

The mind reels at this concept.

Here’s another odd twist: AI is now composing music at a fast clip. As I’ve written elsewhere, you can now get customized AI songs for just a few dollars—and the music is delivered almost instantaneously.

But do we really need AI songs, if human musicians are creating 123,000 per day? I’m not sure what the saturation point is, but we must have reached it long ago. And I’m not even going to try to guess how many of these songs resemble other songs—because, after all, there aren’t an infinite number of melodic phrases in a 12-tone system.

Is there a single unsung melody left to sing? The scope of copyright infringement must be off the charts.

Here’s another twist. The numbers are still staggering even if we focus solely on the three major labels.

These three companies alone issue 3,900 tracks per day.

Now that’s a truly humbling number. Not long ago, getting a record contract with a major label put you in a small elite group. Now you’re just another face in the crowd—and that crowd gets larger every day.

Let me try to put all of this into perspective, at least as best I can. Below are my conclusions—along with some suggestions on how we ought to respond to this deluge of music.

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Images: The Trouble With Tribbles/Star Trek; Jimmy Taurrell for Variety via:

Should We Ban the Purchase of Cigarettes for Life? A US Town is Trying

Silbaugh is one of 255 town meeting members in Brookline, Massachusetts, an urban-suburban “island inside Boston” – its neighboring boroughs have long been swallowed into the city. The town’s 63,000 residents are 70% white, with a median household income of $122,000.

Two years ago, Silbaugh and her neighbor Anthony Ishak passed an ordinance banning anyone born after 1 January 2000 from ever buying cigarettes in their town. The measure took effect in September 2021. The idea was to curb youth smoking rates without yanking anything away from people already addicted, essentially grandfathering out tobacco. Every year, there’d be a smaller slice of the population that could buy cigarettes, until one day no one would be left. At least, that was the vision.

In tobacco’s heyday in the mid-20th century, 45% of US adults smoked. Fast-forward to 2020, after decades of aggressive anti-smoking campaigns, and the rate was down to 12.5%. It’s progress, to be sure, but cigarettes still kill roughly half a million people in the US every year – more than car accidents, alcohol, murders, suicides and illegal drugs combined. If current trajectories persist, tobacco will kill 1bn people in the 21st century, or one person every three seconds.

So it’s hard to imagine that a world without cigarettes would be a bad thing. Prohibition might fast-track it and help avoid needless suffering, as public health officials will remind you. But at what cost? There’s obviously no enumerated right to cigarettes, but there is a right to live our lives as we see fit, so long as we don’t infringe on others’ ability to do the same.

While the tobacco endgame – smoking rates below 5% – seems ultimately inevitable, getting the timeline right is the $1.85tn question. Should cigarettes die on their own, or at the hands of the state? (...)

Over time, though, nicotinic receptors become less responsive to the drug, so the brain starts to create more of them. And these multiplying receptors are like petulant baby birds, incessantly crying to be fed. Go too long without a cigarette, and withdrawal’s sure to follow – irritability, depression and cravings galore. Of course, there’s no gun to the head, but smoking another cigarette takes the pain away and offers an immediate sense of pleasure, if only for a short while.

The biology is interesting and all, says Carl Hart, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at Columbia University, but it alone can’t tell us what the boundaries of public health should be – whether prohibition is proper in the name of the collective good.

Known for his controversial views on drug use (he advocates for the legalization of all drugs and wrote a book in which he admits to having used heroin regularly for the past five years), Hart wears his hair in long dreadlocks, and his hands move prophetically, a beat or two ahead of his words. He gesticulates with indignation as he tells me that any vision of a tobacco endgame is that of sick or naive zealots.

“Our declaration of independence, the first founding principles of the country, says that we are free, and we have the right to these three birth rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Now they’re trying to overturn those basic principles,” Hart says. “Public health is all around us to enhance safety, but not to take away the activity.”

He’s not advocating for a world without regulation – he believes in age restrictions, banning cigarettes indoors and eliminating harmful additives – but one with free choice. “I don’t smoke tobacco cigarettes, but it’s not up to me to decide what benefit other people get from that product,” Hart says. “I am not the ruler and lord of their domain.”

He adds that history is teeming with failures of similar policies. Alcohol prohibition was meant to reduce domestic violence and poverty but instead fueled unimaginable violence and organized crime, with homicide rates increasing by 78%. The “war on drugs” was similarly disastrous, incarcerating millions of Black and Hispanic Americans without reducing the availability of illegal drugs. “Now if we think about tobacco in the same way,” Hart says, “the people who are gonna pay the price are the same people who pay the price – poor people.”

So one of birthdate bans’ selling points is equity, reducing high smoking rates in vulnerable communities, according to Silbaugh and Ishak, the Brookline town meeting members.

Hart dismisses that as a cruel joke. “This is what we do: we pretend to care about those communities and not really deal with the issues they face.” They need gainful employment, health insurance, and pensions, but public health exploits their deprivation to justify paternalistic bans instead.

“What the fuck,” Hart scowls. “It just blows my mind.”

Take any set of drugs – say marijuana, heroin, amphetamines and hallucinogens – and ask yourself which ones should be legal versus illegal. There are certainly places at the extremes: Portugal, for instance, has decriminalized all drug use, while Singapore has attached the death penalty to consumption. But what exactly does the US do?

Mark Gottlieb, a public health lawyer at Northeastern University, describes how federal drug policy seems almost random, carved into stone by whoever’s in power, oddities of their own times.

Hart puts it more directly: “Whatever the white majority says is illegal, is illegal.”

The ideal, of course, would be to have society plot all drugs on a spectrum and legalize those whose benefits outweigh the harms. But it’s probably ridiculous to claim that harm reduction alone drives US drug policy, given that alcohol and cigarettes are not only legal but remarkably accessible. “I find it ironic that these two drugs collectively cause way more destruction, loss of life, loss of productivity than every other drug of abuse all combined,” says Lukas.

It might even be overly generous to lump cigarettes with alcohol. After all, when used exactly as its manufacturers intended, tobacco kills up to half its users, making cigarettes the deadliest object in the history of human civilization. And while 5% of individuals who drink are alcoholics, 90% of those who smoke are nicotinics, according to Robert Proctor, a professor of history at Stanford University. “But that’s not even a word, right? We don’t even have a word for nicotinics because almost everyone who smokes is addicted.” 

by Simar Bajaj, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image: Lucas Jackson/Reuters