Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?

When we talk about artificial intelligence, we rely on metaphor, as we always do when dealing with something new and unfamiliar. Metaphors are, by their nature, imperfect, but we still need to choose them carefully, because bad ones can lead us astray. For example, it’s become very common to compare powerful A.I.s to genies in fairy tales. The metaphor is meant to highlight the difficulty of making powerful entities obey your commands; the computer scientist Stuart Russell has cited the parable of King Midas, who demanded that everything he touched turn into gold, to illustrate the dangers of an A.I. doing what you tell it to do instead of what you want it to do. There are multiple problems with this metaphor, but one of them is that it derives the wrong lessons from the tale to which it refers. The point of the Midas parable is that greed will destroy you, and that the pursuit of wealth will cost you everything that is truly important. If your reading of the parable is that, when you are granted a wish by the gods, you should phrase your wish very, very carefully, then you have missed the point.

So, I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100—and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.

A former McKinsey employee has described the company as “capital’s willing executioners”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you. That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide. Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.

The question we should be asking is: as A.I. becomes more powerful and flexible, is there any way to keep it from being another version of McKinsey? The question is worth considering across different meanings of the term “A.I.” If you think of A.I. as a broad set of technologies being marketed to companies to help them cut their costs, the question becomes: how do we keep those technologies from working as “capital’s willing executioners”? Alternatively, if you imagine A.I. as a semi-autonomous software program that solves problems that humans ask it to solve, the question is then: how do we prevent that software from assisting corporations in ways that make people’s lives worse? Suppose you’ve built a semi-autonomous A.I. that’s entirely obedient to humans—one that repeatedly checks to make sure it hasn’t misinterpreted the instructions it has received. This is the dream of many A.I. researchers. Yet such software could easily still cause as much harm as McKinsey has.

Note that you cannot simply say that you will build A.I. that only offers pro-social solutions to the problems you ask it to solve. That’s the equivalent of saying that you can defuse the threat of McKinsey by starting a consulting firm that only offers such solutions. The reality is that Fortune 100 companies will hire McKinsey instead of your pro-social firm, because McKinsey’s solutions will increase shareholder value more than your firm’s solutions will. It will always be possible to build A.I. that pursues shareholder value above all else, and most companies will prefer to use that A.I. instead of one constrained by your principles.

Is there a way for A.I. to do something other than sharpen the knife blade of capitalism? Just to be clear, when I refer to capitalism, I’m not talking about the exchange of goods or services for prices determined by a market, which is a property of many economic systems. When I refer to capitalism, I’m talking about a specific relationship between capital and labor, in which private individuals who have money are able to profit off the effort of others. So, in the context of this discussion, whenever I criticize capitalism, I’m not criticizing the idea of selling things; I’m criticizing the idea that people who have lots of money get to wield power over people who actually work. And, more specifically, I’m criticizing the ever-growing concentration of wealth among an ever-smaller number of people, which may or may not be an intrinsic property of capitalism but which absolutely characterizes capitalism as it is practiced today.

As it is currently deployed, A.I. often amounts to an effort to analyze a task that human beings perform and figure out a way to replace the human being. Coincidentally, this is exactly the type of problem that management wants solved. As a result, A.I. assists capital at the expense of labor. There isn’t really anything like a labor-consulting firm that furthers the interests of workers. Is it possible for A.I. to take on that role? Can A.I. do anything to assist workers instead of management?

Some might say that it’s not the job of A.I. to oppose capitalism. That may be true, but it’s not the job of A.I. to strengthen capitalism, either. Yet that is what it currently does. If we cannot come up with ways for A.I. to reduce the concentration of wealth, then I’d say it’s hard to argue that A.I. is a neutral technology, let alone a beneficial one. (...)

You may remember that, in the run-up to the 2016 election, the actress Susan Sarandon—who was a fervent supporter of Bernie Sanders—said that voting for Donald Trump would be better than voting for Hillary Clinton because it would bring about the revolution more quickly. I don’t know how deeply Sarandon had thought this through, but the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek said the same thing, and I’m pretty sure he had given a lot of thought to the matter. He argued that Trump’s election would be such a shock to the system that it would bring about change.

What Žižek advocated for is an example of an idea in political philosophy known as accelerationism. There are a lot of different versions of accelerationism, but the common thread uniting left-wing accelerationists is the notion that the only way to make things better is to make things worse. Accelerationism says that it’s futile to try to oppose or reform capitalism; instead, we have to exacerbate capitalism’s worst tendencies until the entire system breaks down. The only way to move beyond capitalism is to stomp on the gas pedal of neoliberalism until the engine explodes.

I suppose this is one way to bring about a better world, but, if it’s the approach that the A.I. industry is adopting, I want to make sure everyone is clear about what they’re working toward. By building A.I. to do jobs previously performed by people, A.I. researchers are increasing the concentration of wealth to such extreme levels that the only way to avoid societal collapse is for the government to step in. Intentionally or not, this is very similar to voting for Trump with the goal of bringing about a better world. And the rise of Trump illustrates the risks of pursuing accelerationism as a strategy: things can get very bad, and stay very bad for a long time, before they get better. In fact, you have no idea of how long it will take for things to get better; all you can be sure of is that there will be significant pain and suffering in the short and medium term.

I’m not very convinced by claims that A.I. poses a danger to humanity because it might develop goals of its own and prevent us from turning it off. However, I do think that A.I. is dangerous inasmuch as it increases the power of capitalism. The doomsday scenario is not a manufacturing A.I. transforming the entire planet into paper clips, as one famous thought experiment has imagined. It’s A.I.-supercharged corporations destroying the environment and the working class in their pursuit of shareholder value. Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off, and the most successful weapon in its arsenal has been its campaign to prevent us from considering any alternatives.

by Ted Chiang, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Berke Yazicioglu

[ed. Ted's one of the smartest and most inventive writers I know, and this sounds completely plausible. Inevitable almost. See also: We’ve discovered the secret of immortality. The bad news is it’s not for us’ (The Guardian):]

"A “biological intelligence” such as ours, he says, has advantages. It runs at low power, “just 30 watts, even when you’re thinking”, and “every brain is a bit different”. That means we learn by mimicking others. But that approach is “very inefficient” in terms of information transfer. Digital intelligences, by contrast, have an enormous advantage: it’s trivial to share information between multiple copies. “You pay an enormous cost in terms of energy, but when one of them learns something, all of them know it, and you can easily store more copies. So the good news is, we’ve discovered the secret of immortality. The bad news is, it’s not for us.”

Once he accepted that we were building intelligences with the potential to outthink humanity, the more alarming conclusions followed. “I thought it would happen eventually, but we had plenty of time: 30 to 50 years. I don’t think that any more. And I don’t know any examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things – at least, not since Biden got elected." (...) [ed. Ouch!]

I don’t want to rule things like that out – I think people who are confident in this situation are crazy.” Nonetheless, he says, the right way to think about the odds of disaster is closer to a simple coin toss than we might like.

This development, he argues, is an unavoidable consequence of technology under capitalism.

***

Update: Even Snoop Dog is weighing in: 

"Well I got a motherf*cking AI right now that they did made for me. This n***** could talk to me. I'm like, man this thing can hold a real conversation? Like real for real? Like it's blowing my mind because I watched movies on this as a kid years ago. When I see this sh*t I'm like what is going on? And I heard the dude, the old dude that created AI saying, "This is not safe, 'cause the AIs got their own minds, and these motherf*ckers gonna start doing their own sh*t. I'm like, are we in a f*cking movie right now, or what? The f*ck man? So do I need to invest in AI so I can have one with me? Or like, do y'all know? Sh*t, what the f*ck?" I'm lost, I don't know."

In the ChatGPT Age, Prompting Is the Language to Learn

Everyone should be learning to prompt. You, me, your kids, your neighbor — everyone. Prompting is the language of generative AI, enabling instruction from human to machine, and is therefore perhaps the most useful tongue you could possibly master in today’s world.

On ChatGPT, the text-based tool from OpenAI that brought about the recent explosion in excitement around AI, some examples of basic prompts would be: “Explain how photosynthesis works” or “write a summary of Hamlet.”

Impressive, yes, but these queries only scratch the surface. This tech is capable of so much more, and it’s the art of prompting that will help you unlock it. More sophisticated AI users are having it produce complex answers based on millions of texts. Others use it to build apps or automate much of their workday. They do this with effective prompting, taking care to choose words and their order.

The good news is, unlike coding, prompts are written in natural language. Most of us should take to it like a duck to water.

In the very near future, employees working in just about every industry imaginable will need to know how to prompt chatbots such as ChatGPT effectively and efficiently. “Using AI models to generate things is expensive, and the outputs can vary massively,” said Ben Stokes, the creator of PromptBase, a marketplace for good AI prompts. “A good prompt engineer can create prompts that produce consistent, high-quality outputs (e.g. images, text or code) at low costs (either API costs or images credits etc.).”

Already, prompt engineering is a lucrative profession for those who have smartly gotten ahead. Some startups are advertising prompt engineering jobs with salaries upwards of $300,000 a year, and the breadth of industries looking for such talent is growing. This week in the UK, there are vacancies for prompt engineers at law firm Mishcon De Reya and luxury clothing store Italic, which is looking for a prompt “artist” who can use Stability AI’s image generation tool Stable Diffusion.

What makes a good prompt? Look at the image at the top of this article and consider how you might describe it. “A smiling man in a suit giving a thumbs up”? “A man with great teeth, thumbs up, speech bubble with super written on it”? It’s a start — but you’d be letting the AI tool, in this case Open AI’s DALL-E 2, loose on its datasets with all kind of assumptions about what you actually want.

Describe it again, with more detail. You might come up with some other words for the picture, like “clean cut,” “Caucasian” or even “handsome.” You might recognize the “vintage” and “pop art” styling. If you did, well done — those words were all in the prompt for the image.

A better prompt engineer could still improve it considerably — DALL-E 2 spat out several distinct variations, many with imperfections that wouldn’t pass muster for a professional project. To refine prompting further, and to stretch the capabilities of AI tools beyond their creators’ own imaginations, people have begun exploring the art of the super prompt, instructions that can run to many hundreds of words and are designed to force the AI to delve deep into its dataset.

Often, this can involve a little role play: telling ChatGPT to “pretend” it is something else. “You are an interviewer for a job at a multinational bank,” you might say, followed by a detailed description of the role and requesting they give you a grilling. You might ask it to play the role of an app designer writing specifically for Apple’s iOS and have it spit out code to your specifications. Like a good journalist, who might ask a similar question in different ways to elicit a more thoughtful response from a subject, the specific words and structure can provoke the AI to behave in a certain manner. It’s not just what you say, but the way you say it.

The more complex the prompt, and the more strict the guardrails of your directions, the better the result. Setting out a scenario in a chatbot’s “mind” works just as it does for us humans, encouraging us to think outside our normal perspectives.

You could also, it’s well worth acknowledging, tell ChatGPT to be a prompt engineer. Given what I have written above, this might seem more than a little awkward. Why learn to prompt if the AI can do it itself? Isn’t it an obsolete skill already? No. Despite premature and often alarmist headlines suggesting AI is about to go rogue and leave behind its human creators, most applications of AI will for a long time rely heavily on the “human in the loop,” providing instruction, refining outputs, pushing the technology into new directions. Reminding it who’s boss.

by Dave Lee, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Open AI. Photographer: Bloomberg/DALL-E 2/DALL-E 2
[ed. Define "long time". I've posted about prompt engineering before, which is likely to be one of the most ephemeral job classes ever. It's AI. It'll eventually prompt you on how to be clearer.] 

The Art of the Shoe

As I enter the job market, I am reconsidering the staple of the white sneaker. I love the comfort and universality of my white Converse and Air Force 1’s, but is it time to ditch their deceptively high-maintenance nature in favor of something more official? If I wear sneakers, will people take me seriously? — Sophie, Washington, D.C.

It’s a good question. Recently, during Episode 5 of the final season of “Succession,” Shiv Roy dismisses her estranged husband, Tom, by dismissing the shiny white sneakers he chose to wear to a deal-making off-site, saying: “This is why people don’t take you seriously.”

It made for striking TV. But in the real world, is she right?

Consider the fact that Bryce Young recently took his place on the N.F.L. draft stage as the No. 1 pick in a pink Dior suit and white kicks and looked all the cooler for them. Or that the filmmaker Chloé Zhao wore Hermès white sneakers with her gown when she won an Oscar back in 2021. Once you start thinking about white sneakers, you start seeing them everywhere. Which suggests that the right move is not to abandon them but to consider, perhaps, exactly what they mean to you.

British Esquire called the white sneaker “the blank canvas upon which any modern look can be built.” Harper’s Bazaar crowed, “The best white sneakers can do it all.”

The fact is, more than 100 years after Keds introduced its white sneaker, almost 90 years since Chuck Taylor popularized the style with Converse and more than half a century since Stan Smith changed the game — and amid all the color-crazed mayhem of endlessly mutating sneaker culture — white sneakers remain the Platonic ideal of a shoe: eternal, versatile, comfortable. They suggest walking on clouds. They are normcore to the max.

But because they go with pretty much everything — maxi-dresses and minidresses, suits, khakis and blazers — how you wear them matters.

As part of a daily uniform, they serve as a generic punctuation mark, a subconscious suggestion of both practicality (easy to wear) and attention to detail (if you keep them clean). As a counterpoint to a more serious outfit, like a tuxedo or trouser suit, they offer a bit of energy and bounce. Paired with a floaty dress (maxi or mini), they add a bit of power and oomph. Material matters: Leather is more formal; canvas more casual. The appeal is in the contrast — and the key is the state of the shoe.

by Vanessa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Karwai Tang/WireImage

[ed. See also: Inside the Delirious Rise of ‘Superfake’ Handbags (NYT/Amy X. Wang):]

"Not long ago, I found myself wandering through Paris with a fake Celine handbag slung over my shoulder. In France, a country that prides itself on originating so much of the world’s fashion, punishments for counterfeiting are severe, to the point that I technically risked three years in prison just by carrying my little knockoff around. But the bag’s fraudulence was undetectable to human eyes. I was toting around a delicious, maddening secret: Like a ship remade with identical wood, the bag on my arm had been built on the same plan, with seemingly the same gleaming materials, as the “original.” Yet it was considered inauthentic, a trick, a cheat.

My plunge into the world of fantastically realistic counterfeit purses — known as “superfakes” to vexed fashion houses and I.P. lawyers, or “unclockable reps” to their enthusiastic buyers — began a couple of years earlier, in what I might characterize as a spontaneous fit of lunacy. (...)

Having grown up a first-generation immigrant whose family’s idea of splurging was a monthly dinner at Pizza Hut, I refused to be the type of person who lusted over luxury handbags. I had always understood that these artifacts were not for me, in the way debutante balls or chartered Gulfstreams were not for me. But, days later and still mired in the quicksand of quarantine, I found myself cracking my laptop and Googling “buy Celine Triomphe cheap.” This led me to a Reddit community of replica enthusiasts, who traded details about “trusted sellers” capable of delivering a Chanel 2.55 or Loewe Puzzle or Hermès Birkin that promised to be indistinguishable from the original, and priced at a mere 5 percent or so of the M.S.R.P. (...)

Untangling the problem of duplication in the fashion industry is like trying to rewrap skeins of yarn. Designer houses spend billions fighting dupes, but even real Prada Cleos and Dior Book Totes are made with machines and templates — raising the question of what, exactly, is unique to an authentic bag. Is it simply a question of who gets to pocket the money?"

Jack vs. Nicklaus

The inside story of Jack Nicklaus' legal battle against his own company. How did the game's greatest champion become embroiled in a lawsuit against the company he founded?

In a threadbare courtroom in lower Manhattan, the 82-year-old defendant took care to avoid the power cords taped to the floor as he mounted the witness stand. The clerk asked him to state his name and provide his business address.

“Jack William Nicklaus,” he said, “I don’t even know a business address.” He gave his home address instead.

That, in a way, was the whole case right there. As his subsequent testimony made clear, Nicklaus still has a sharp memory, so he may have chosen to forget his business address, which would have been understandable under the circumstances. The plaintiff in the case is, in fact, Nicklaus’ own business, and the case is captioned, improbably enough, Nicklaus Companies, LLC v. Jack W. Nicklaus. The lawsuit was filed in May 2022, and it’s very much ongoing. The case raises a variety of complex legal issues, but the most important is this: What the hell is going on here?

Nicklaus’ demeanor can be as revealing as his words on the record. That was apparent when I recently visited him at what’s known in Nicklaus’ world as the “family office,” which is about three miles from the “business” office—the one he couldn’t remember—in Palm Beach County, Florida. Now 83, Nicklaus is a bit stooped, and his golfing days are, alas, behind him. “I don’t play golf anymore,” he told me. “I played four times last year, all in May—twice at Augusta, and I shot 88, 87, and twice at Muirfield Village on the weekend before the tournament, and I shot 86, 84, and I said, ‘That’s enough.’ ” But despite the end of his playing career, even for fun, Nicklaus was in buoyant spirits. I asked him how he felt about his court appearance, which included two days of cross-examination. “I’ll give you two phrases to describe the trial,” he said. "One, I didn’t want to do it, and two, it was a pleasure. I saw a light at the end of the tunnel—that I might get rid of this and might be able to go live a life. If I end up doing nothing other than not working for him, that would be worth it.”

“This guy” is Howard Milstein, a New York real estate and banking magnate and Nicklaus’ erstwhile business partner. They joined forces under Nicklaus’ corporate banner in 2007, and their divorce has taken place like a bankruptcy once described by Ernest Hemingway: “Gradually, then suddenly.”

For the ultimate control freak on the golf course, whose relentless, risk-averse style propelled him to 18 professional majors and arguably the greatest record in the history of the game, Nicklaus has had a surprisingly tumultuous business career, and the Milstein conflagration is the latest chapter. (...)

Throughout these chapters, Nicklaus enjoyed several advantages. His integrity and honesty were never challenged. His reputation as a golfer flourished as he continued winning tournaments during the 1990s on the senior tour. His clothing lines remained popular, especially in Asia. Most importantly, despite his other business reverses, his career as a golf-course designer thrived. In the first decade of the new century, the Nicklaus Companies appeared to be on a healthy trajectory, and his chief financial officer at the time came to Nicklaus with an idea. “He says, ‘You’re not getting any younger,’ ” Nicklaus told me. “Maybe it’s time to pass to my kids, let them monetize something, so they don’t have to wait for me to kick the can to have any kind of money.” The company hired an investment bank that valued the Nicklaus Companies at nearly $300 million and started looking for investors. Revenues for 2006 were $77 million and projected to be $100 million by 2009; profits, in theory, would go from $23 million to $43 million a year.

The company had a variety of suitors, but one put in a bid early and never changed it. Howard Milstein said he would invest $145 million in the company—predicting it could eventually be sold for a billion—and Nicklaus accepted the offer. Nicklaus promptly gave $20 million (after taxes) to each of his five children. In our conversation, Nicklaus called these gifts to his children “not a huge amount of money, but in this day and age, pretty good,” an observation that reveals the rarefied circles in which he travels. By this point, Jack and Barbara Nicklaus had created the template for charitable giving by golf superstars, which Tiger Woods, most notably, has chosen to follow. The Milstein investment allowed the Nicklauses to expand their philanthropic interests, which have amounted to more than $200 million raised for children’s health over the past two decades.

As of 2007, Nicklaus now had a business partner, though he retained ultimate control of the company. “I’m very unsophisticated,” he told me. “I was a golfer, just retired from tournament golf. I knew nothing about business. I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know what all that stuff is. I wish I did because I probably wouldn’t have gotten into what I got into. I never knew what the word ‘vet’ meant. If I did, I probably never would have wound up with Howard Milstein.”

Who is Howard Milstein? For starters, Howard is a Milstein, which is a big deal in New York City. In 1919, Morris Milstein, a Russian immigrant, founded a company that joined in the city’s real estate boom by installing the flooring in skyscrapers, including, eventually, the World Trade Center. From flooring, the family moved into real estate, building and owning residential and office towers in Manhattan and elsewhere. In 1986, the family bought Emigrant Savings Bank and built it into the country’s largest privately owned, family-run bank. The Milstein family is now worth an estimated $5 billion.

The Milsteins, including Howard, are also litigious, including among themselves.

by Jeffrey Toobin, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

AI Makes Paul McCartney’s Voice Youthful

AI can imitate voices. This has been used both to rejuvenate Paul McCartney’s voice on his new songs, and to hear songs by others performed by Paul. Here is the Beach Boys’ song “God Only Knows” in Paul’s voice:

Then there are some songs with Paul’s older voice that has been altered with the help of artificial intelligence to sound like a young Paul singing. (...)

So it remains to be seen what happens, will the artists themselves or their lawyers react to this? It is, after all, taking the hated “auto tuning” technology a quantum leap further. Maybe Paul himself will rejuvenate his voice on his next album?

by Admin, The Daily Beatle |  Read more:

Videos: YouTube

[ed. ft. Joe Walsh. See also: New AI Music if you want to hear, for example, Stevie Wonder singing Nirvana's Teen Spirit; and, 64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney (The Ruffian).]

Militarized Dolphins Protect Almost a Quarter of the US Nuclear Stockpile

Situated just 20 miles from Seattle, Naval Base Kitsap houses America's most powerful and secret deterrents, a weapon that is the first line of defense for U.S. national security: U.S. Navy dolphins.

Since 1967, the Navy has been training dolphins and sea lions (and probably other marine life) for military applications such as mine clearing, force protection and recovery missions. The U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program deployed military dolphins as early as the Vietnam War and as recently as the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

When protecting harbors and ships from mines, as they do at Naval Base Kitsap, the dolphins use their extraordinary biological sonar to detect hazards beneath the surface, whether tethered to the sea floor or buried beneath sediment.

If a mine or other weapon is detected, the dolphin returns to its handler, who gives the animal a buoy to mark the location of the device on the surface. Passing ships know to avoid these markers while Navy explosives ordnance disposal divers neutralize the threat below.

For protection against enemy divers, dolphins will swim up to the infiltrator, bump into them and place a buoy device on their back or a limb, using their mouth. The buoy then drags the outed diver to the surface for easy capture. When trained sea lions perform the same maneuver, they use a kind of handcuff with their mouths to attach the buoy.

Since Bangor, Washington, now houses the largest single nuclear weapons site in the world, it needs protection from all sides, including the seaward side. That's where the Navy's dolphin pods and sea lions come in. Navy spokesman Chris Haley says the animals have been defending the waters around the stockpile, holding roughly 25% of the United States’ 9,962 nuclear warheads, since 2010.

by Blake Stilwell, Military.com | Read more:
Image: U.S. Navy
[ed. What?]

The Wager

The Wager review: David Grann’s magnificent shipwreck epic (The Guardian)

Image: Doubleday/AP

[ed. See also: David Grann’s new book takes to the high seas (LA Times)]

Private Equity Delivers Death Panels

Remember "death panels"? Sarah Palin promised us that universal healthcare was a prelude to a Stalinist nightmare in which unaccountable bureaucrats decided who lived or died based on a cost-benefit analysis of what it would cost to keep you alive versus how much your life was worth.

Palin was right that any kind of healthcare rationing runs the risk of this kind of calculus, where we weight spending $10,000 to extend a young, healthy person's life by 40 years against $1,000 to extend an elderly, disabled person's life by a mere two years.

It's a ghastly, nightmarish prospect – as anyone who uses the private healthcare system knows very well. More than 27m Americans have no health insurance, and millions more have been tricked into buying scam "cost-sharing" systems run by evangelical grifters:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/health/christian-health-care-insurance.html

But for the millions of Americans with insurance, death panels are an everyday occurrence, or at least a lurking concern. Anyone who pays attention knows that insurers have entire departments designed to mass-reject legitimate claims and stall patients who demand that the insurer lives up to its claim:

The private healthcare sector is designed to deny care. Its first duty is to its shareholders, not its patients, and every dollar spent on care is a dollar not available for dividends. The ideal insurance customer pays their premiums without complaint, and then pays cash for all their care on top of it.

All that was true even before private equity started buying up and merging whole swathes of the US healthcare system (or "healthcare" "system"). The PE playbook – slash wages, sell off physical plant, slash wages, reduce quality and raise prices – works in part because of its scale. These aren't the usual economies of scale. Rather the PE strategy is to buy and merge all the similar businesses in a region, so customers, suppliers and workers have nowhere else to turn.

That's bad enough when it's aimed at funeral homes, pet groomers or any of the other sectors that have been bigfooted by PE: (...)

But it's especially grave when applied to hospitals: (...)

Or emergency room physicians: (...)

And if you think that's a capitalist hellscape nightmare, just imagine how PE deals with dying, elderly people. Yes, PE has transformed the hospice industry, and it's even worse than you imagine.

Yesterday, the Center for Economic and Policy Research published "Preying on the Dying: Private Equity Gets Rich in Hospice Care," written by some of the nation's most valiant PE slayers: Eileen Appelbaum, Rosemary Batt and Emma Curchin: (...)

Medicare pays private hospices $203-$1,462 per day to take care of dying old people – seniors that a doctor has certified to have less than six months left. That comes to $22.4b/year in public transfers to private hospices. If hospices that $1,462 day-rate, they have lots of duties, like providing eight hours' worth of home care. But if the hospice is content to take the $203/day rate, they are not required to do anything. Literally. It's just free money for whatever the operator feels like doing for a dying elderly person, including doing nothing at all.

As Appelbaum told Maureen Tkacik for her excellent writeup in The American Prospect: "Why anybody commits fraud is a mystery to me, because you can make so much money playing within the guidelines the way the payment scheme operates."

In California, it's very, very easy to set up a hospice. Pay $3,000, fill in some paperwork (or don't – no one checks it, ever), and you're ready to start caring for beloved parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles as they depart this world. You do get a site inspection, but don't worry – you aren't required to bring your site up to code until after you're licensed, and again, they never check – not even if there are multiple complaints. After all, no one at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has the job of tracking complaints.

This is absolute catnip for private equity – free government money, no obligations, no enforcement, and the people you harm are literally dying and can't complain. What's not to like? No wonder PE companies have spent billions "rolling up" hospices across the country. There are 591 hospices in Van Nuys, CA alone – but at least 30 of them share a single medical director: (...)

Medicare caps per-patient dispersals at $32,000, which presents an interesting commercial question for remorseless, paperclip-maximizing, grandparent-devouring private equity ghouls: do you take in sick patients (who cost more, but die sooner) or healthy patients (cost less, potentially live longer)?

In Van Nuys, the strategy is to bring in healthy patients and do nothing. 51% of Van Nuys hospice patients are "live discharged" – that is, they don't die. This figure – triple the national average – is "a reliable sign of fraud."

There are so many hospice scams and most of them are so stupid that it takes a monumental failure of oversight not to catch and prevent them. Here's a goodun: hospices bribe doctors to "admit" patients to a hospice without their knowledge. The hospice bills for the patient, but otherwise has no contact with them. This can go on for a long time, until the patient tries to visit the doctor and discovers that their Medicare has been canceled (you lose your Medicare once you go into hospice).

Another scam: offer patients the loosest narcotics policy in town, promising all the opioids they want. Then, once their benefits expire, let them die of an overdose (don't worry, people who die in hospice don't get autopsies):

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/05/how-hospice-became-a-for-profit-hustle

You can hire con artists to serve as your sales-force, and have them talk vulnerable, elderly people into enrolling in hospice care by convincing them they have nothing to live for and should just die already and not burden their loved ones any longer.

Hospitals and hospices also collude: hospitals can revive dying patients, ignoring their Do Not Resuscitate orders, so they can be transfered to a hospice and die there, saving the hospital from adding another dead patient to their stats.

CMS's solution is perverse: they're working with Humana to expand Medicare Advantage (a scam that convinces patients to give up Medicare and enrol in a private insurance program, whose private-sector death panel rejects 13% of claims that Medicare would have paid for). The program will pay private companies $32,000 for every patient who agrees to cease care and die. As our friends on the right like to say, "incentives matter."

by Cory Doctorow, Pleuralistic |  Read more:

Image: Seydelmann, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified

[ed. What good hospice care looks like: President Jimmy Carter and the benefits of early hospice care (Seattle Times). Then, there's this: Born to Die (American Prospect); and, How Hospice Became a For-Profit Hustle (New Yorker).]

In Denial

It was a short letter. John Roberts, chief justice of the US supreme court, was brief in his missive to Democratic senator Dick Durbin, who chairs the Senate judiciary committee. Citing “separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence”, Roberts declined to appear before the committee to discuss disturbing recent revelations of ethics violations at the court.

Congress is meant to exert checks on judicial power – to investigate or even impeach judges who abuse their office or interpret the law in ways that violate its spirit, and to affirm that the elected branches will hold more sway over policy than the appointed one. But the chief justice’s show of indifference to congressional oversight authority reflects a new reality: that there are now effectively no checks on the power of the court – at least none that Democrats have the political will to use – and that the justices can be assured that they will face no repercussions even if they act in flagrant violation of ethical standards. It seems that they intend to.

The committee summoned Roberts to testify because it appears that he’s not exactly running a tight ship. On 6 April, an investigation by ProPublica found that Justice Clarence Thomas had, over decades, accepted millions of dollars’ worth of private plane flights, “superyacht” trips and luxury vacations from the Texas billionaire and conservative megadonor Harlan Crow – and that, in alleged violation of federal ethics law, he had not disclosed almost any of it.

Subsequent reporting revealed that Crow had in fact bought Thomas’s childhood home in Savannah, Georgia, where the justice’s elderly mother still lives, along with several plots on the block. After paying Thomas for the real estate, the billionaire cleared local blight, made significant renovations to the house and allowed Thomas’s mother to continue living there, rent-free.

None of those transactions had been detailed on Thomas’s ethics forms, either. In addition to the soft influence Crow would have been able to buy with his extensive largesse, the billionaire’s generous gifts also seem to have created a direct conflict of interest for Justice Thomas: Crow’s firm had business before the US supreme court at least once, and Thomas did not recuse himself from the case.

It is not Thomas’s first time in ethical hot water. He was famously accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, including Anita Hill, during his time in the Reagan administration as head of the employee-rights protection watchdog, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He has been accused of having perjured himself in his subsequent testimony about his behavior toward Hill at his confirmation hearings.

During his long tenure on the court, he has repeatedly had trouble filling out his financial disclosure forms correctly. Once, he failed to report more than half a million dollars in income that his wife, the conservative activist Ginni Thomas, received from the rightwing Heritage Foundation. He said at the time that he had misunderstood the forms. That was also his excuse regarding Harlan Crow’s largesse.

Thomas claims that he was advised that he did not have to report “hospitality”. It is a loophole in the ethics code that is meant to relieve judges of having to report, say, barbecue dinners at the homes of their neighbors – not, as Thomas claims he took it to mean, luxury yacht tours of Indonesia.

Although Thomas may be uniquely prolific in his alleged ethical violations, the problem isn’t unique to him. Politico revealed this week that just nine days after his confirmation to the US supreme court in April 2017, Justice Neil Gorsuch sold a log cabin in Colorado to Brian Duffy, the chief executive of the massive law firm Greenberg Traurig. Before Gorsuch’s confirmation, the justice and the other co-owners of the home had tried for two years to sell it, without success.

Since the sale, Duffy’s firm has had business before the court at least 22 times. Gorsuch did disclose the income from the sale on financial disclosure forms, but failed to mention that the buyer was a big shot at one of the country’s largest law firms who would regularly bring cases before Gorsuch at his new job.

It’s certainly possible that Duffy simply liked the house, and that the convenient timing of his purchase so soon after Gorsuch’s confirmation to the court was a mere coincidence. And it seems reasonable to believe Thomas and Crow when they say that they are sincere friends, if less reasonable to believe Thomas when he claims that he misunderstood his disclosure obligations. But corruption need not be as vulgar and direct as a quid pro quo: it can be the subtle machinations of influence and sympathy that occur in these relationships, inflected both by money and by closeness, that lead the justices to see cases as they otherwise wouldn’t, or act in ways contrary to the integrity of their office and the interests of the law.

Bad intent by the justices need not be present for the mere appearance of corruption to have a corrosive effect on the rule of law, and both Gorsuch and Thomas have allowed a quite severe appearance of corruption to attach itself to the court. Both have claimed that they are such intelligent and gifted legal minds that they should be given lifelong appointments of unparalleled power, and also that they have made innocent mistakes on legal forms that they are too dumb to understand.

The claim strains credulity. What it looks like, to the American people who have to live under the laws that the supreme court shapes, is that Thomas has long been living lavishly on the dime of a rightwing billionaire who wants rightwing rulings, and that Gorsuch conveniently managed to sell a house he didn’t want at the precise moment when he became important enough to be worth bribing.

The chief justice doesn’t seem very worried about this appearance of impropriety. In light of these alarming ethics concerns, Roberts’ curt rejection of the committee’s invitation to testify speaks to an evident indifference to ethical standards, or a contempt for the oversight powers of the nominally coequal branches. Ironically enough, his nonchalance has made the reality even more plain than it was before: the court will not police itself.

by Moira Donegan, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Jim Young/Reuters

[ed. See also: What’s Going On with Samuel Alito? (New Yorker). And: Is Rupert Murdoch OK? (Guardian):]

It’s fair to say the Wall Street Journal is not alone in the quest to make sense of Murdoch’s recent behaviour. The week after he paid $787.5m to settle the lawsuit brought against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems – Dominion’s lawyers were going to force him to take the stand – Murdoch sacked Carlson via his son Lachlan. Media outlets have been scrambling to find logical explanations for actions that arguably, to deploy a euphemism, defy logic. After all, this is a 92-year-old who only weeks ago was delighting us with news of his impending fifth marriage – a whirlwind engagement to a former dental nurse turned prison chaplain, which was hastily called off a mere fortnight later. Apparently, Murdoch had become “increasingly uncomfortable” with his fiancee’s “outspoken evangelical views”. Again: really?

The one thing we can say with certainty is that Murdoch would want us to pick over his actions and ask if he was still playing with a full deck of Happy Families cards. For decades, his newspapers have lasered in on public figures as they reach their twilight, premature or otherwise. Back in the day, a paparazzi picture of a painfully thin Freddie Mercury limping across the street was glossed with the Sun’s front page inquiry: “ARE YOU OK FRED?” – one of those newspaper questions to which the answer is patently: no. No, he’s not – what does it effing look like? So in the same solicitous spirit we must survey the recent actions of the mercurial mogul, and ask, in the way he taught us: ARE YOU OK RUPE?

Put candidly … what does it effing look like? Last October, Murdoch announced plans to merge both his public companies, Fox Corp and News Corp, before being forced in January to abandon the scheme in the face of shareholder bafflement and dismay. March brought news of the bonkers betrothal and Murdoch’s bizarre interview about how he “dreaded falling in love”; April saw the engagement’s abandonment. Murdoch was supposed to end the month testifying in the Dominion lawsuit; having settled that, he set about blindsiding even his allies by sacking Carlson. While legacy media oblige their own moguls by suggesting lucid cause-and-effect, some of the upstarts are finally breaking the glass on the word “erratic”.

“Erratic” was certainly a word that came to mind when reading the epic recent Vanity Fair article on Murdoch, in which every line was a marmalade-dropper. Take the single paragraph that revealed Murdoch had fallen and seriously injured himself on a Caribbean superyacht trip with his now-former wife Jerry Hall. Though it hastened to dock to get him to hospital, the boat was too big for the pier, resulting in Murdoch having to be precariously lowered down, after which he spent a night under a tent in a car park (the local hospital was closed). He was finally medevaced out, but, according to a family friend, “kept almost dying”. LA medics discovered a broken back, noting from the X-rays that he had previously fractured vertebrae. The paragraph concludes: “Murdoch explained it must have been from the time his ex-wife Deng pushed him into a piano during a fight.” (Ms Deng did not respond to the publication’s requests for comment.)

It feels particularly piquant that all this is taking place against the backdrop of the final series of Succession. Murdoch is extremely, extremely relaxed about the show, to the point of having it written into his divorce settlement with Jerry Hall that she was banned from speaking to its writers. Jerry reportedly realised the Oxfordshire house she got in the settlement was rigged with cameras still beaming their footage back to Fox HQ, a discovery that prompted Mick Jagger’s security guy to come and dismantle the apparatus for her.

Why the N.F.L. Draft Is About Much More Than Football

The N.F.L. has televised its draft since 1980, and soon after, pro sports leagues realized they could sell rights to their selection shows to emerging cable networks thirsty for content. In the four decades since, football’s rookie roll call has far eclipsed those of its sports peers, giving the N.F.L. draft popularity on a par with whoever headlines the Grammys and bigger than HBO’s “Succession.”

For three days, a sport built on violent collisions holds what amounts to a football festival that traffics in heart-tugging stories and innocent fun. At last year’s draft, N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell — a brawny former player himself — turned to greet Devin Lloyd, the 6-foot-3 linebacker who’d just been selected, and offered the customary handshake and hug. To Goodell’s shock, Lloyd leaned in and snatched his new boss off the ground in a motion so fluid that Goodell simply tucked his feet back and broke out into a laugh.

Afterward, Lloyd’s mother, Ronyta Johnson, said she’d told him to do it on a whim. “I just wanted to see if he could,” she said.

Such moments can’t begin to justify why the N.F.L. draft, which begins Thursday in Kansas City, Mo., draws an audience of upward of 11 million people every year for broadcasts across four networks. Even at its worst, the draft is a hit.

In 2021, when Goodell announced picks from a stage in Cleveland, cameras cut to the first player picked, whose name had been expected to be called first for months. The player, Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence, watched, like the rest of America, from home. More TV viewers showed up to witness that formality than saw “Nomadland” win the Academy Award for best picture that year.

How did pro forma sports programming come to have that kind of cultural pull? Part of the answer lies in football’s stranglehold on our TV screens. Twenty-two N.F.L. games were among the top 25 prime-time telecasts in 2022, making the sport the most reliable destination viewing of anything the networks could cook up.

Football’s viewership has been a key driver of its revenue, the league’s talent for spectacle turning America’s most popular sport into its most profitable one. The N.F.L. signed media deals worth over $100 billion in 2021 and has since inked a $2 billion deal with YouTube for the rights to stream Sunday games. Amazon is paying $1 billion to stream games on Thursdays, and this year the N.F.L. will add a game played on Black Friday for the tech giant’s Prime shoppers. It will also air 75 hours of draft coverage on the league-owned NFL Network, with more footage streamed on NFL+, the NFL App, NFL.com and NFL Channel.

“There’s no other N.F.L.,” said Jim Minnich, a senior vice president for revenue and yield management at Disney Advertising. Minnich runs the group that sells ad inventory for ESPN and ABC’s broadcast of the three-day event, over 35 hours of programming, which is sold out this year and is expected to pull in $16 million for Disney. “There’s a lot of noise out there this time of year, and the N.F.L. just cuts through.”

As proof, Minnich offered a statistic: The number of people searching online for draft advertisers was 41 percent higher than that of an average prime-time broadcast. He attributed this to storytelling. The N.F.L. schedules a pick every 15 minutes, and to fill the time between them the networks air short biographies of the player who was just selected. That way viewers go on a brief emotional journey that leads to a satisfying denouement (burly guys in N.F.L. caps tearing up and hugging their moms and dads).

A spokesman for ESPN said the network would produce 600 player highlight packages and had plans to zoom in on 50 live shots of prospects as they waited to hear their names called. This after pundits in sports media and on bar stools and message boards have spent three months predicting which team will want which player.

As with award shows and beauty pageants, the N.F.L. draft gets really juicy when cameras lock in on the contestants whose names aren’t called. When Aaron Rodgers was passed over for the top pick in 2005 by the San Francisco 49ers, the team he spent his childhood rooting for, he spent four hours agonizing in front of TV cameras until the Green Bay Packers took him with the 24th pick.

“The Lord has been teaching me a lot about humility and patience, and he kind of threw both of those in my face today,” Rodgers, then 21, said. Now 39 and a four-time N.F.L. most valuable player, he was recently traded to the Jets.

“It’s embarrassing,” he told ESPN after his long draft night. “You know the whole world is watching, your phone’s buzzing every two minutes and you’re hoping it’s a team calling. But it’s just your buddies just making jokes, and it’s hard to laugh in a situation where you know everybody’s laughing at you.”

The squirming of stranded players can give a palpable focal point to the buildup, while unseen coaches and clipboard-holders decide their futures. Though the league pays players’ airfare and hotel expenses to make the trip to the draft live show, they aren’t paid to appear.

In some cases, agents advise against showing up, lest the player suffer the humiliation of an awkward, televised wait. Only 17 of the 259 players who will be drafted planned to attend the event and sit in the cordoned-off green room/fishbowl. Those who attend will do so for roughly the same reason that college seniors sit through graduation speeches: The ceremony, as uncomfortable as it is, is a symbolic finish line.

by Elena Bergeron, NY Times | Read more:
Image: John Locher/Associated Press

Late-Night TV: Ted Cruz: ‘What a Sorry Excuse for an American’

[ed. Can't argue with that. So, what else is happening...?]

Jimmy Kimmel

On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host mentioned former first lady Melania Trump’s birthday, with People reporting that Trump would join her “if his schedule allows”. Kimmel noted that he was “very busy with the yelling and the golf” and that day had been sharing social media posts about his rape trial. “Such a romantic,” he added.

This week also saw news that Trump might skip the presidential debates as he doesn’t want to subject himself to Maga-hating anchors. “I bet this is gonna be like WrestleMania when he says he’s not gonna be there then in the middle of the debate he runs out on stage and hits Ron DeSantis over the head with a folding chair,” Kimmel joked.

Reports suggest that Fox News was keeping a file of dirt on Tucker Carlson and was prepared to release it if he goes after them post-firing. “What could they have on Tucker Carlson?” he speculated. “Did he once try to buy a fuel-efficient car? Does he have a collection of paintings that weren’t by Hitler?”

Kimmel said the dossier could just be “every episode of his show”.

This week also saw leaked footage of Ted Cruz talking to Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, detailing a plan to overturn the election in 2020 by creating a phony commission. “What a sorry excuse for an American,” Kimmel said, adding: “Next time you go to Cancún, stay in Cancún.”

He also joked: “The only thing funnier than Donald Trump going to jail for trying to steal the election is Ted Cruz going to jail for trying to steal the election for Donald Trump.”

Seth Meyers

On Late Night, Seth Meyers spoke about the “messy separation” between Tucker Carlson and Fox News.

He noted that when the Dominion settlement happened, the network “barely even mentioned it despite the fact that it was one of the biggest media scandals in recent history” and included footage of a host not knowing the settlement number. “I dunno, maybe ask around, you work there,” he said. (...)

Rumours have swirled that it might have been for some racist statements he made but Meyers joked that “firing Tucker for racism now after tolerating it for so long would be like cancelling Sesame Street because you just found out they’re puppets”.

by Guardian Staff, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

[ed. Funny stuff, I guess. I should watch more late-night tv. Haha. Psych! Never. I get enough of this stuff during the day and value my sleep at night.]

Joyce Stratton
via:

Mirko Hanak
via:

Gil Scott Heron

Quiet Quitting

Gone are the days when employers could count on employees competing to go “above and beyond” to rise faster in their organizations. Employers now face “quiet quitting,” a trend that emerged in July 2022 from a viral TikTok video to become a phenomenon noted on Wikipedia and discussed in Forbes and The Wall Street Journal.

Quiet quitting is more than employees setting boundaries or intentionally putting a hard stop to their work day or week so they can create a work/life balance. Checked-out quiet quitters simply slack their way through their workweek by doing the bare minimum needed to keep their jobs, overloading their coworkers, frustrating their supervisors and draining productivity from their employers.

According to ResumeBuilder.com’s August 2022 survey of 1000 U.S. employees:21% of surveyed employees admit to “quiet quitting,” stating that they do only the bare minimum at work;

• 5% admit to doing even less than they’re paid to do;
• 8 in 10 “quiet quitters” report they’re “burnt out”;
• 46% of “quiet quitters” don’t want to do more work than they’re compensated to do or to compromise their work/life balance;
• 1 in 10 employees report they put in less effort than they did 6 months ago;
• 1 in 3 who have reduced effort have cut back the hours they spend working by more than half.

What created quiet quitting?

Some describe quiet quitting as a coping mechanism that employees intentionally choose to reduce internalized stress. Others see it as resulting from employees gaining “COVID clarity” concerning life priorities while working from home during the pandemic. They note that large numbers of employees became unwilling to sacrifice to “get ahead” with their employer, particularly after other employers desperate to fill vacancies wooed them with flexibility, higher wages and greater benefits if they jumped ship. Still others view it as an outgrowth of employee cynicism and entitlement, with employees no longer believing they need to work hard to get ahead. Gallup’s 2021 survey reports that only 36% of employees feel engaged in their jobs.

Lynn Curry, ADN |  Read more:

Image: rudall30 via Getty Images/via:

[ed. We've all seen the type. I don't think this is any particularly new trend, there've always been people just putting in time and collecting a paycheck (especially in their later years approaching retirement). It's pretty soul-killing.]

What Neuroscientists and Philosophers Understand About Addiction

When I was arrested and charged with possession with intent to sell cocaine in 1986, I was addicted to both coke and heroin. Although I was facing a 15 years-to-life sentence, the first thing I did after my parents bailed me out and held a family meeting was to find and secretly inject some prescription opioids that I knew the police hadn’t confiscated.

I knew that doing this further jeopardized my life prospects and my relationships with everyone I cared about. I knew it made no sense. But I didn’t believe that I could cope in any other way. Until I finally recognized that I needed treatment and began recovery in 1988 — with the prospect of that lengthy sentence under New York’s draconian Rockefeller laws still occluding my future — I didn’t think I had any real choice.

Was my brain hijacked by drugs — or was I willfully choosing to risk it all for a few hours of selfish pleasure? What makes people continue taking drugs like street fentanyl, which put them at daily risk of death?

These questions are at the heart of drug policy and the way we view and treat addiction. But simplistic answers have stymied efforts to ameliorate drug use disorders and reduce stigma.

Research now shows that addiction doesn’t ‌‌mean either being completely subject to irresistible impulses, or making totally free choices. Addiction’s effects on decision-making are complex. Understanding them can help policymakers, treatment providers and family members aid recovery.

Claims that people with addiction are unable to control themselves are belied by basic facts. Few of us inject drugs in front of the police, which means that most are capable of delaying use. ‌‌Addicted people often make complicated plans over days and months to obtain drugs and hide use from others, again indicating purposeful activity. Those given the option will use clean needles. Moreover, small rewards for drug-free urine tests — used in a treatment called contingency management — are quite successful at helping people quit, which couldn’t be possible if addiction obliterated choice.

However, those who contend that substance use disorder is just a series of self-centered decisions face conflicting evidence, too. The most obvious ‌is the persistence of addiction despite dire losses like being cut off by family members or friends, getting fired, becoming homeless, contracting infectious diseases or being repeatedly ‌incarcerated‌‌.

‌Most people who try drugs don’t get addicted, even to opioids or methamphetamine, which suggests that ‌factors other than simply being exposed to a drug can contribute to addiction. ‌The majority of people who do get hooked have other psychiatric disorders, traumatic childhoods or both — only ‌7 percent report no history of mental illness. ‌‌Nearly 75 percent of women with heroin addiction‌‌ were sexually abused as children — and most people with any type of addiction have suffered at least one and often many forms of childhood trauma‌‌. ‌‌This data implies that ‌‌genetic and environmental vulnerabilities influence risk.

So how does addiction affect choice? Neuroscientists and philosophers are beginning to converge on answers, which could help make policy more humane and more effective.

Brains can be seen as prediction engines, constantly calculating what is most likely to happen next and whether it will be beneficial or harmful. As children grow up, their emotions and desires get calibrated to guide them toward‌ what their brains predict will ‌meet their social and physical needs. Ideally, as we develop, we gain more control and optimize the ability to choose.

‌But there are many ways that these varied processes can ‌go awry in addiction and alter how a person makes choices and responds to consequences.

by Maia Szalavitz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Urbazon/E+, via Getty Images

Meet the ‘Elite’ Couples Breeding to Save Mankind

At the beginning of March, Aria Babu quit her job at a think tank to dedicate herself to something most people have never heard of. Having worked in public policy for several years, the 26-year-old Londoner had come to an alarming realisation about the future of the UK, the world – and the human species.

‘It became clear to me that people wanted more children than they were having,’ Babu says. ‘Considering this is such a massive part of people’s lives, the fact that they were not able to fulfil this want was clearly indicative that something was wrong.’

The new focus of Babu’s career is a philosophy known as pronatalism, literally meaning pro-birth. Its core tenet is deceptively simple: our future depends on having enough children, and yet life in developed countries has become hostile to this basic biological imperative. Linked to the subcultures of rationalism and ‘effective altruism’ (EA), and bolstered by declining birth rates, it has been gaining currency in Silicon Valley and the wider tech industry – especially its more conservative corners.

‘I’ve been in various text threads with technology entrepreneurs who share that view… there are really smart people that have real concern around this,’ says Ben Lamm, a Texas biotech entrepreneur whose company Colossal is developing artificial wombs and other reproductive tech (or ‘reprotech’) that could boost future fertility. (...)

Easily the most famous person to espouse pronatalist ideas is Elon Musk, the galaxy’s richest human being, who has had 10 children with three different women. ‘If people don’t have more children, civilisation is going to crumble. Mark my words,’ Musk told a business summit in December 2021. He has described population collapse as ‘the biggest danger’ to humanity (exceeding climate change) and warned that Japan, which has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, ‘will eventually cease to exist’.

In an Insider article last November that helped bring the movement to wider attention, 23andMe co-founder Linda Avey acknowledged its influence on the Texan tech scene, while the managing director of an exclusive retreat, Dialog, co-founded by arch-conservative investor and PayPal pioneer Peter Thiel, said population decline was a frequent topic there.

Babu, who hopes to join or create a pronatalist organisation in the UK, says it is still ‘niche’ here but gaining ground on both the ‘swashbuckling intellectual Right’ and the more family-focused and Blue-Labour-tinged segments of the Left.

At the centre of it all are Simone and Malcolm Collins, two 30-something American entrepreneurs turned philosophers – and parents – who say they are only the most outspoken proponents of a belief that many prefer to keep private. In 2021 they founded a ‘non-denominational’ campaign group called Pronatalist.org, under the umbrella of their non-profit Pragmatist Foundation. Buoyed by a $482,000 (£385,000) donation from Jaan Tallinn, an Estonian tech billionaire who funds many rationalist and EA organisations, it is now lobbying governments, meeting business leaders, and seeking partnerships with reprotech companies and fertility clinics.

The Collinses did not coin the word ‘pronatalism’, which has long been used (along with ‘natalism’) to describe government policies aimed at increasing birth rates, or mainstream pro-birth positions such as that of the Catholic Church. Its opposite is ‘anti-natalism’, the idea that it is wrong to bring a new person into the world if they are unlikely to have a good life. Lyman Stone, a natalist demographer and research fellow at the US’s Institute for Family Studies, has described the Collinses’ philosophy as ‘a very unusual subculture’ compared to millions of everyday natalists. Yet it is their version – a secular, paradoxically unorthodox reconstruction of arguably the most traditional view on earth, driven by alarm about a looming population catastrophe – that is prospering among the tech elite.

‘I don’t think it’s appealing to [just] Silicon Valley people,’ Malcolm tells me on a long call from his home in Pennsylvania. ‘It’s more like, anyone who is familiar with modern science and familiar with the statistics is aware that this is an issue, and they are focused on it. The reason why you see Silicon Valley people disproportionately being drawn to this is they’re obsessed with data enough, and wealthy enough, to be looking at things – and who also have enough wealth and power that they’re not afraid of being cancelled.’

The problem, he concedes, is that falling birth rates are also a common preoccupation of neo-Nazis and other ethno-nationalists, who believe they are being outbred and ‘replaced’ by other races. ‘A lot of alleged concerns about fertility decline are really poorly masked racist ideas about what kinds of people they want on the planet,’ says demographer Bernice Kuang of the UK’s Centre for Population Change.

The Collinses strongly disavow racism and reject the idea that any country’s population should be homogenous. Still, Babu finds that many in the rationalist and EA community, which skews pale and male, are wary of exploring pronatalism – lest they be ‘tarred with the brush of another white man who just wants an Aryan trad-wife’.

Another issue is what you might call the Handmaid’s Tale problem. From Nazi Germany’s motherhood medals to the sprawling brood of infamous, Kansas-based ‘God hates fags’ preacher Fred Phelps, a zeal for large families has often been accompanied by patriarchal gender politics. For liberal Westerners, the idea that we need to have more babies – ‘we’ being a loaded pronoun when not all of us would actually bear them – may conjure images of Margaret Atwood’s Gilead. (...)

But the Collinses contend that this kind of future is exactly what they are trying to prevent. ‘People often compare our group to Handmaid’s Tale-like thinking,’ says Malcolm, ‘and I’m like: excuse me, do you know what happens if we, the voluntary movement, fails…? Cultures will eventually find a way to fix this; how horrifying those mechanisms are depends on whether or not our group finds an ethical way.’ Though they define themselves politically as conservatives – Malcolm invariably votes Republican – they claim to favour LGBT rights and abortion rights and oppose any attempt to pressure those who don’t want children into parenthood.

Instead, they say, their hope is to preserve a ‘diverse’ range of cultures that might otherwise begin to die out within the next 75 to 100 years. They want to build a movement that can support people of all colours and creeds who already want to have large families, but are stymied by society – so that ‘some iteration of something that looks like modern Western civilisation’ can be saved.

‘We are on the Titanic right now,’ says Malcolm. ‘The Titanic is going to hit the iceberg. There is no way around it at this point. Our goal is not to prevent the Titanic from hitting the iceberg; it’s to ready the life rafts.’

It was on the couple’s second date, sitting on a rooftop and gazing out at the nearby woods, that Malcolm first raised the prospect of children. Simone’s response was not enthusiastic.

‘I was very excited to spend my life alone, to never get married, to never have kids,’ she recalls. ‘People would be like, “Do you want to hold the baby?” I was one of those who’s like, “No, you keep it. I will watch that baby from behind glass and be a lot more comfortable.”’

As she says this, her five-month-old daughter Titan Invictus – the couple refuse to give girls feminine names, citing research suggesting they will be taken less seriously – is strapped to her chest, occasionally burbling, while Malcolm has charge of their two sons Torsten, two, and Octavian, three. 

by Io Dodds, Business Insider |  Read more:

Image: Winnie Au
[ed. Elizabeth Holmes just named her newborn Invictus, too ( Latin for "unconquered", also a famous poem devoted to "self-discipline and fortitude in adversity"). What is it with these people?]

Tedeschi Trucks Band

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Thank You For Your Service

FOX News Media released a statement on Monday announcing that the network and its biggest star, Tucker Carlson, have agreed to part ways. "We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor," the press release continued. "Mr. Carlson's last program was Friday April 21st." By the looks of his final show last week, Carlson did not have any indication that he'd be out of the chair a few days later. Media reporter Brian Stelter, a longtime foe of Fox News and its primetime stars, suggests it is telling that Carlson was not offered the chance to host a final show where he could sign off on his own terms and, perhaps, give his fans an indication of where he intends to go next.

The timing of Carlson's departure is likely instructive. Fox agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems up to $787 million last week to settle a lawsuit regarding false claims made on Fox airwaves alleging Dominion played some role in rigging the 2020 election against Donald Trump. It’s not just that the claims were demonstrably false, something Fox admitted as part of the settlement. Through the discovery process in the case, Dominion also dug up texts and emails showing Fox News stars and executives—including Tucker Carlson—knew full well the election-fraud claims were lies and allowed them to proliferate on the number-one cable news channel regardless. They told each other so and mocked Trumpworld figures, like the putative attorney Sidney Powell, for believing them. A defamation case is difficult to win in the United States, but this was about as open-and-shut as it gets.

Carlson also disparaged a number of people in and around the Fox News network in his communications, and perhaps most importantly, he slagged off Donald Trump repeatedly. He said the man who’s now once again leading the polls to become the Republican presidential nominee was a “destroyer” and a “disaster” and a “demonic force.” He said he “hates” Trump “passionately.” The departure could come down to burned bridges within Fox, or—don’t laugh—a genuine attempt from the network to respond to the substance of the Dominion case. But it’s also worth considering that the texts and emails surfaced in the Dominion case revealed Fox News got into the election conspiracy game in the first place because they feared they were losing viewers and market share to even loonier networks that were going full-throttle on the stolen-election nonsense.

Fox may have settled to avoid a larger payment to Dominion, or they might have settled to avoid having their biggest stars and most powerful executives—up to and including Rupert Murdoch—testify. But they also might have settled to avoid court proceedings that would have shined a brighter light, for longer, on the reality that many at the network are not True Believers. That, just like any failure to toe Trump’s line back in 2020, posed a risk to market share. It surely could be damaging to Fox News for their viewers to learn the network’s biggest star hates the Republican Party’s standard-bearer but pretends the opposite while on-air for their viewing pleasure. As we laid out last week, $787 million is not a hugely destructive figure in the grand scheme of Fox's business, but the settlement is a black eye for the company that they’re hoping to keep mostly obscured from their customers. Granted, Carlson’s departure may get some Fox superfans asking questions they mightn’t have otherwise.

Or maybe none of that really matters, and there’s some other reason for Tucker’s exit still to be revealed. What Carlson was almost certainly not dismissed for was an absolutely barbaric record as a television presenter. He's lived many lives in media, including as a bowtie-toting Reasonable Conservative on CNN and MSNBC and as a talk-radio guest overeager to impress and as a talented writer for this very magazine, but Carlson found a new kind of influence and success on the Trump-era Fox News Channel. The man is an almost comic exaggeration of a trust-fund kid—Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson’s brother is named Buckley Carlson—who’s come to represent the very worst of the low-taxes-and-lacrosse types who matriculate through schools like Carlson’s Trinity College. He ditched concern for small government and free markets in favor of vicious anti-immigrant fervor, endless culture war food fights, and the now familiar MAGA embrace of foreign despots including Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. These strongmen, like Trump, were packaged for Fox’s aging audience as warriors on behalf of Real Americans whose lives and values were under siege from shadowy forces attacking from all sides and within.

Carlson did take on some of Trump’s more useful rhetoric around American workers who’ve been left behind by ruthless corporate behavior and a government too often in thrall to the same interests. (He illustrated this part of his new persona well in a recent interview with Ben Shapiro, who remains a more traditional servant to the American money power.) But like Trump’s shtick, it was all a show. When it comes down to it, nobody said it better than a Dutch historian whom Carlson invited on in 2019 to rail against the (deservedly railed-against) congregants at Davos only to refuse to air the interview when he got owned too hard: “What the Murdoch family basically want you to do is to scapegoat immigrants instead of talking about tax avoidance,” Walker Bregman told him, adding he’s also worked for Koch Brothers-funded institutions. “It works by you taking their dirty money, it's as simple as that. You are a millionaire funded by billionaires, that's what you are.”

This overgrown frat sophomore should have been fired the morning after he declared that immigrants make the United States “poor and dirtier.” But that would have been impossible: he was selling the exact product Fox News had positioned itself to sell, and he was their best salesman. 

by Jack Holmes, Esquire |  Read more:

Image: Jason Koerner/Getty Images
[ed. Haha. Seems like the term schadenfruede might apply here. But, as the article suggests, this could be a net positive if it's a springboard for higher office (and why wouldn't it be... voters seem to love electing lying assholes these days). He's gotten used to living the good life, can't see him giving it up now. See also: this better than usual commentary by Bret Stephens: The Tragedy of Fox News (NYT):]

So am I gleeful? Not at all.

Part of it is the thought that, whatever Carlson does next, it will probably be even more unhinged and toxic than his previous incarnation: This is a guy whose career arc has moved from William F. Buckley wannabe to Bill O’Reilly wannabe to soon, I expect, Father Coughlin wannabe. Nobody should rule out the possibility of his going into politics, either as Donald Trump’s running mate or as the Republican Party’s compromise candidate between Trump and Ron DeSantis.

But there’s also the sense of what Fox might have become. Murdoch had an opportunity to build something the country genuinely needed in the mid-1990s, when the G.O.P. was moving away from the optimistic and responsible party of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush toward the angry populism of Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay: an effective center-right counterbalance to the overwhelmingly liberal tilt (as conservatives usually see it) of most major news media.

In other words, instead of trying to surf a killer wave, Murdoch could have purchased a ship and steered it. It might not have had the ratings that Fox would get — though Fox was always about influence, as much as money, for Murdoch. But, executed well, it could have elevated conservatism in the direction of Burke, Hamilton and Lincoln, rather than debase it in the direction of Andrew Jackson, Joe McCarthy and Pat Buchanan.

Such a channel would still have been plenty conservative, in a way that most liberals would find infuriating. But it would also have defended the classically liberal core of intelligent conservatism: the idea that immigrants are an asset, not a liability; that the freedoms of speech and conscience must extend to those whose ideas we loathe; that American power ought to be harnessed to protect the world’s democracies from aggressive dictators; that we are richer at home by freely trading goods abroad; that nothing is more sacred than democracy and the rule of law; that patriotism is about preserving the capacity to criticize a country we love while loving the country we criticize.

This kind of channel will be more desperately needed in the future, as the unhinged populism unleashed by Murdoch sweeps everything in its path, from “establishment” Republicans to, quite possibly, Fox itself. The shame of Rupert Murdoch is that he wasn’t the man to do it. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done.