The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt?

The following conversation was recorded in March 2024. It has been edited for clarity and length.

Peter Watts: In this corner, the biosphere. We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050.

In response to all of this, the last COP was held in a petrostate and was presided over by the CEO of an oil company; the next COP is pretty much the same thing. We’re headed for the cliff, and not only have we not hit the brakes yet, we still have our foot on the gas.

In that corner: Dan Brooks and Sal Agosta, with a Darwinian survival guide. So, take it away, Dan. Guide us to survival. What’s the strategy?

Daniel Brooks: Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? As evolutionary biologists, we understand that all actions carry biological consequences. We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but that’s the behavior we’re seeing now.

Stepping back a bit. Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work. But people didn’t want to hear that message. So along came a sociologist who said, “It’s OK; I can fix Darwinism.” This guy’s name was Herbert Spencer, and he said, “I can fix Darwinism. We’ll just call it natural selection, but instead of survival of what’s-good-enough-to-survive-in-the-future, we’re going to call it survival of the fittest, and it’s whatever is best now.” Herbert Spencer was instrumental in convincing most biologists to change their perspective from “evolution is long-term survival” to “evolution is short-term adaptation.” And that was consistent with the notion of maximizing short term profits economically, maximizing your chances of being reelected, maximizing the collection plate every Sunday in the churches, and people were quite happy with this.

Well, fast-forward and how’s that working out? Not very well. And it turns out that Spencer’s ideas were not, in fact, consistent with Darwin’s ideas. They represented a major change in perspective. What Sal and I suggest is that if we go back to Darwin’s original message, we not only find an explanation for why we’re in this problem, but, interestingly enough, it also gives us some insights into the kinds of behavioral changes we might want to undertake if we want to survive.

To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually don’t think that’s in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. What’s really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call “technological humanity,” or better said “technologically-dependent humanity,” to survive.

Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours. So we have to understand that we’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence. And so, if there is the kind of nature collapse that the Melbourne Sustainable Studies Institute is talking about, how are those people going to survive? A completely dispassionate view would just say, “Well, you know, most of them won’t. Most of them are going to die.” But what if it turns out that we think that embedded within all of that technologically dependent society there are some good things? What if we think that there are elements of that existence that are worth trying to save, from high technology to high art to modern medicine? In my particular case, without modern medical knowledge, I would have died when I was just 21 years old of a burst appendix. If I had managed to survive that, I would have died in my late 50s from an enlarged prostate. These are things most would prefer not to happen. What can we begin doing now that will increase the chances that those elements of technologically-dependent humanity will survive a general collapse, if that happens as a result of our unwillingness to begin to do anything effective with respect to climate change and human existence?

Peter Watts: So to be clear, you’re not talking about forestalling the collapse —

Daniel Brooks: No.

Peter Watts: — you’re talking about passing through that bottleneck and coming out the other side with some semblance of what we value intact.

Daniel Brooks: Yeah, that’s right. It is conceivable that if all of humanity suddenly decided to change its behavior, right now, we would emerge after 2050 with most everything intact, and we would be “OK.” We don’t think that’s realistic. It is a possibility, but we don’t think that’s a realistic possibility. We think that, in fact, most of humanity is committed to business as usual, and that’s what we’re really talking about: What can we begin doing now to try to shorten the period of time after the collapse, before we “recover”? In other words — and this is in analogy with Asimov’s Foundation trilogy — if we do nothing, there’s going to be a collapse and it’ll take 30,000 years for the galaxy to recover. But if we start doing things now, then it maybe only takes 1,000 years to recover. So using that analogy, what can some human beings start to do now that would shorten the period of time necessary to recover? Could we, in fact, recover within a generation? Could we be without a global internet for 20 years, but within 20 years, could we have a global internet back again?

Peter Watts: Are you basically talking about the sociological equivalent of the Norwegian Seed Bank, for example?

Daniel Brooks: That’s actually a really good analogy to use, because of course, as you probably know, the temperatures around the Norwegian Seed Bank are so high now that the Seed Bank itself is in some jeopardy of survival. The place where it is was chosen because it was thought that it was going to be cold forever, and everything would be fine, and you could store all these seeds now. And now all the area around it is melting, and this whole thing is in jeopardy. This is a really good example of letting engineers and physicists be in charge of the construction process, rather than biologists. Biologists understand that conditions never stay the same; engineers engineer things for, this is the way things are, this is the way things are always going to be. Physicists are always looking for some sort of general law of in perpetuity, and biologists are never under any illusions about this. Biologists understand that things are always going to change.

Peter Watts: Well, that said, that’s kind of a repeated underlying foundation of the book, which is that evolutionary strategies are our best bet for dealing with stressors. And by definition, that implies that the system changes. Life will find a way, but it won’t necessarily include the right whales and the monarch butterflies.

Daniel Brooks: Right, right. Yeah. (...)

Peter Watts: Now, this is an argument that some might say is invasible by cheaters. I read this and I thought of the Simpsons episode where Montgomery Burns is railing to Lisa, and he says, “Nature started the struggle for survival, and now she wants to call it off because she’s losing? I say, hard cheese!” And less fictitiously, Rush Limbaugh has invoked essentially the same argument when he was advocating against the protection of the spotted owl. You know, life will find a way. This is evolution; this is natural selection. So, I can see cherry-picking oil executives being really happy with this book. How do you guard against that?

Daniel Brooks: Anybody can cherry-pick anything, and they will. Our attitude is just basically saying, look, here’s the fundamental response to any of this stuff. It’s, how’s it working out so far? OK? There’s a common adage by tennis coaches that says during a match, you never change your winning game, and you always change your losing game. That’s what we’re saying.

One of the things that’s really important for us to focus on is to understand why it is that human beings are so susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea, and are not. Sal and I say, here are some things that seem to be common to human misbehavior, with respect to their survival. One is that human beings really like drama. Human beings really like magic. And human beings don’t like to hear bad news, especially if it means that they’re personally responsible for the bad news. And that’s a very gross, very superficial thing, but beneath that is a whole bunch of really sophisticated stuff about how human brains work, and the relationship between human beings’ ability to conceptualize the future, but living and experiencing the present.

There seems to be a mismatch within our brain — this is an ongoing sort of sloppy evolutionary phenomenon. So that’s why we spend so much time in the first half of the book talking about human evolution, and that’s why we adopt a nonjudgmental approach to understanding how human beings have gotten themselves into this situation. Because everything that human beings have done for 3 million years has seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s only been in the last 100 or 150 years that human beings have begun to develop ways of thinking that allow us to try to project future consequences and to think about unanticipated consequences, long-term consequences of what we do now. So this is very new for humanity, and as a consequence, it’s ridiculous to place blame on our ancestors for the situation we’re in now.

Everything that people did at any point in time seemed like a good idea at the time; it seemed to solve a problem. If it worked for a while, that was fine, and when it no longer worked, they tried to do something else. But now we seem to be at a point where our ability to survive in the short term is compromised, and what we’re saying is that our way to survive better in the short term, ironically, is now based on a better understanding of how to survive in the long run. We’re hoping that people will begin seriously thinking that our short-term well-being is best served by thinking about our long-term survival.

Peter Watts: What you’ve just stated is essentially that short-term goals and long-term goals are not necessarily the same thing, that one trades off against the other. When you put it that way, it seems perfectly obvious — although I have to say, what you’re advocating for presumes a level of foresight and self-control that our species has, shall we say, not traditionally manifested. But yeah, a widely adhered-to view of evolution is a reactive one— the pool is drying up, and evolution looks at that and says, oh my goodness, the pool is drying up! We should probably get those fish to evolve lungs. Whereas what evolution actually does is say, oh look, the pool is drying up! Good thing that fish over in the corner that everybody picked on has a perforated swim bladder; it might be able to, like, breathe air long enough to make it over to the next pool. Too bad about all those other poor bastards who are going to die. And to hone that down to a specific example that you guys cite in the book, you’re saying “high fitness equals low fitness” — that you need variation to cope with future change.

Daniel Brooks: Right.

Peter Watts: So optimal adaptation to a specific environment implies a lack of variation. When you’re optimally adapted to one specific environment, you are screwed the moment the environment changes. And the idea that high fitness equals low fitness is what I call a counterintuitive obvious point: It is something that seems oxymoronic and even stupid when you first hear it, but when you think about it for more than two seconds, it’s like — who was it that responded to “The Origin of Species” by saying, Of course! How silly of me not to have thought of it myself. I’ve forgotten who said that. And the idea that high fitness equals low fitness is what I call a counterintuitive obvious point: It is something that seems oxymoronic and even stupid when you first hear it, but when you think about it for more than two seconds, it’s like — who was it that responded to “The Origin of Species” by saying, Of course! How silly of me not to have thought of it myself. I’ve forgotten who said that.

by Peter Watts and Daniel Brooks, MIT Press |  Read more:

Image: MIT Press

Tom Gauld
via:

via:

Bruce Springsteen

The Life and Death of Hollywood

In 2012, at the age of thirty-two, the writer Alena Smith went West to Hollywood, like many before her. She arrived to a small apartment in Silver Lake, one block from the Vista Theatre—a single-screen Spanish Colonial Revival building that had opened in 1923, four years before the advent of sound in film.

Smith was looking for a job in television. She had an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, and had lived and worked as a playwright in New York City for years—two of her productions garnered positive reviews in the Times. But playwriting had begun to feel like a vanity project: to pay rent, she’d worked as a nanny, a transcriptionist, an administrative assistant, and more. There seemed to be no viable financial future in theater, nor in academia, the other world where she supposed she could make inroads.

For several years, her friends and colleagues had been absconding for Los Angeles, and were finding success. This was the second decade of prestige television: the era of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Homeland, Girls. TV had become a place for sharp wit, singular voices, people with vision—and they were getting paid. It took a year and a half, but Smith eventually landed a spot as a staff writer on HBO’s The Newsroom, and then as a story editor on Showtime’s The Affair in 2015.

I first spoke with Smith in August of last year, four months into the strike called by the Writers Guild of America against the members of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the biggest Hollywood studios. In 2013, she’d begun to develop the idea for what would become Dickinson, a gothic, at times surreal comedy based on the life of the poet, Emily. “I realized you could do one of those visceral, sexy, dangerous half hours but make it a period piece,” she said. “I was never trying to write some middle-of-the-road thing.” She sold the pilot and a plan for at least three seasons to Apple in 2017; she would be the showrunner, and the series had the potential to become one of the flagship offerings of the company’s streaming service, which had not yet launched.

Looking back, Smith sometimes marvels that Dickinson was made at all. “It centers an unapologetic, queer female lead,” she said. “It’s about a poet and features her poetry in every episode—hard-to-understand poetry. It has a high barrier of entry.” But that was the time. Apple, like other streamers, was looking to make a splash. “I mean, they made a show out of I Love Dick,” Smith said, referring to the small-press cult classic by Chris Kraus, adapted into a 2016 series for Amazon Prime Video. “That doesn’t happen because people are using profit as their bottom line.”

In fact, they weren’t. The streaming model was based on bringing in subscribers—grabbing as much of the market as possible—rather than on earning revenue from individual shows. And big swings brought in new viewers. “It’s like a whole world of intellectuals and artists got a multibillion-dollar grant from the tech world,” Smith said. “But we mistook that, and were frankly actively gaslit into thinking that that was because they cared about art.”

Making a show for Apple was not what she’d hoped it would be. What the company wanted from her and the series never felt clear—there was a “radical information asymmetry,” she said, regarding management’s priorities and metrics. After she and her colleagues completed the first season of Dickinson, they waited for the streamer to launch and the show to air. Their requests for a firm timeline and premiere date were ignored. Smith started to worry that Apple might scrap the idea for the streaming platform altogether, in which case the show might never be seen, or might even disappear—she didn’t have a copy of the finished product. It belonged to Apple and lived on the company’s servers.

“It was communicated to me,” Smith said, “that my only choice to keep the show alive was to begin all over again and write a whole new season without a green-light guarantee. So I was expected to take on that risk, when the entities that stood to profit the most from the success of my creative labor, the platform and studio, would not risk a dime.” “It was also on me,” she went on, “to kind of fluff everybody involved in the entire making of the show, from the stars to the line producer to the costume designer, etcetera, to make them believe that we’d be coming back again and prevent them, sometimes unsuccessfully, from taking other jobs.”

Finally, in late 2019, when Smith and her colleagues were two months into production on Season 2, the show premiered as one of the streamer’s four original series. It was an immediate critical success and a sensation on social media. “In Apple TV+’s initial smattering of shows,” wrote the Washington Post, “only ‘Dickinson’ is a delicious surprise.” It received a 2019 Peabody Award; in 2021 it made the New York Times’ list of best programs of the year and won a Rotten Tomatoes prize for Fan Favorite TV Series.

But Smith was losing steam. “I was only allowed to make the show to the extent that I was willing to take on unbelievable amounts of risk and labor on my own body perpetually, without ceasing, for years,” she said. “And I knew that if I ever stopped, the show would die.” It had seemed to her that Apple didn’t value the series, and she felt at a loss. Smith now knows that Dickinson was the company’s most-watched show in its second and third seasons. But at the time, she had no access to concrete information about its performance. As was the habit among streamers, Apple didn’t share viewership data with its writers. And without that data, Smith had no leverage. In 2020, after three seasons, she told Apple that she was done. “I said, I can’t do it anymore. And Apple said, Okay.”

“Passion can only get you so far,” she told me. But she’d stayed in Hollywood. “I’m an artist,” she said, “and I’m never going to stop creating.” The industry was still the only place one could make a real living as a writer. “When people say, Why stay in TV?” she said, “The answer is, There is nothing else. What do you mean?”

***

The truth was that the forces that had opened doors for Smith were the same ones that had made her individual work seem not to matter. They were the same forces that had been degrading writers’ working lives for some time, and they were cannibalizing the business of Hollywood itself.

Thanks to decades of deregulation and a gush of speculative cash that first hit the industry in the late Aughts, while prestige TV was climbing the rungs of the culture, massive entertainment and media corporations had been swallowing what few smaller companies remained, and financial firms had been infiltrating the business, moving to reduce risk and maximize efficiency at all costs, exhausting writers in evermore unstable conditions.

“The industry is in a deep and existential crisis,” the head of a midsize studio told me in early August. We were in the lounge of the Soho House in West Hollywood. “It is probably the deepest and most existential crisis it’s ever been in. The writers are losing out. The middle layer of craftsmen are losing out. The top end of the talent are making more money than they ever have, but the nuts-and-bolts people who make the industry go round are losing out dramatically.”

Hollywood had become a winner-takes-all economy. As of 2021, CEOs at the majority of the largest companies and conglomerates in the industry drew salaries between two hundred and three thousand times greater than those of median employees. And while writer-producer royalty such as Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy had in recent years signed deals reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and a slightly larger group of A-list writers, such as Smith, had carved out comfortable or middle-class lives, many more were working in bare-bones, short-term writers’ rooms, often between stints in the service industry, without much hope for more steady work. As of early 2023, among those lucky enough to be employed, the median TV writer-producer was making 23 percent less a week, in real dollars, than their peers a decade before. Total earnings for feature-film writers had dropped nearly 20 percent between 2019 and 2021.

Writers had been squeezed by the studios many times in the past, but never this far. And when the WGA went on strike last spring, they were historically unified: more guild members than ever before turned out for the vote to authorize, and 97.9 percent voted in favor. After five months, the writers were said to have won: they gained a new residuals model for streaming, new minimum lengths of employment for TV, and more guaranteed paid work on feature-film screenplays, among other protections.

But the business of Hollywood had undergone a foundational change. The new effective bosses of the industry—colossal conglomerates, asset-management companies, and private-equity firms—had not been simply pushing workers too hard and grabbing more than their fair share of the profits. They had been stripping value from the production system like copper pipes from a house—threatening the sustainability of the studios themselves. Today’s business side does not have a necessary vested interest in “the business”—in the health of what we think of as Hollywood, a place and system in which creativity is exchanged for capital. The union wins did not begin to address this fundamental problem.

by Daniel Bessner, Harper's | Read more:
Image: Nicolás Ortega

Evolution of a Cartoon

via:

No One Knows What Universities Are For

Bureaucratic bloat has siphoned power away from instructors and researchers.

Last month, the Pomona College economist Gary N. Smith calculated that the number of tenured and tenure-track professors at his school declined from 1990 to 2022, while the number of administrators nearly sextupled in that period. “Happily, there is a simple solution,” Smith wrote in a droll Washington Post column. In the tradition of Jonathan Swift, his modest proposal called to get rid of all faculty and students at Pomona so that the college could fulfill its destiny as an institution run by and for nonteaching bureaucrats. At the very least, he said, “the elimination of professors and students would greatly improve most colleges’ financial position.”

Administrative growth isn’t unique to Pomona. In 2014, the political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg published The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, in which he bemoaned the multi-decade expansion of “administrative blight.” From the early 1990s to 2009, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew 10 times faster than tenured-faculty positions, according to Department of Education data. Although administrative positions grew especially quickly at private universities and colleges, public institutions are not immune to the phenomenon. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent from 2004 to 2014.

How and why did this happen? Some of this growth reflects benign, and perhaps positive, changes to U.S. higher education. More students are applying to college today, and their needs are more diverse than those of previous classes. Today’s students have more documented mental-health challenges. They take out more student loans. Expanded college-sports participation requires more athletic staff. Increased federal regulations require new departments, such as disability offices and quasi-legal investigation teams for sexual-assault complaints. As the modern college has become more complex and multifarious, there are simply more jobs to do. And the need to raise money to pay for those jobs requires larger advancement and alumni-relations offices—meaning even more administration.

But many of these jobs have a reputation for producing little outside of meeting invites. “I often ask myself, What do these people actually do?,” Ginsberg told me last week. “I think they spend much of their day living in an alternate universe called Meeting World. I think if you took every third person with vice associate or assistant in their title, and they disappeared, nobody would notice.”

In an email to me, Smith, the Pomona economist, said the biggest factor driving the growth of college admin was a phenomenon he called empire building. Administrators are emotionally and financially rewarded if they can hire more people beneath them, and those administrators, in time, will want to increase their own status by hiring more people underneath them. Before long, a human pyramid of bureaucrats has formed to take on jobs of dubious utility. And this can lead to an explosion of new mandates that push the broader institution toward confusion and incoherence.

The world has more pressing issues than overstaffing at America’s colleges. But it’s nonetheless a real problem that could be a factor in rising college costs. After all, higher education is a labor-intensive industry in which worker compensation is driving inflation, and for much of the 21st century, compensation costs grew fastest among noninstructional professional positions. Some of these job cuts could result in lower graduation rates or reduced quality of life on campus. Many others might go unnoticed by students and faculty. In the 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graeber drew on his experience as a college professor to excoriate college admin jobs that were “so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”

Another reason to care about the growth of university bureaucracy is that it siphons power away from instructors and researchers at institutions that are—theoretically—dedicated to instruction and research. In the past few decades, many schools have hired more part-time faculty, including adjunct professors, to keep up with teaching demands, while their full-time-staff hires have disproportionately been for administration positions. As universities shift their resources toward admin, they don’t just create resentment among faculty; they may constrict the faculty’s academic freedom.

“Take something like diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Ginsberg said. “Many colleges who adopt DEI principles have left-liberal faculty who, of course, are in favor of the principles of DEI, in theory,” he said. But the logic of a bureaucracy is to take any mission and grow its power indefinitely, whether or not such growth serves the underlying institution. “Before long, many schools create provosts for diversity, and for equity, and for inclusion. These provosts hold lots of meetings. They create a set of principles. They tell faculty to update their syllabi to be consistent with new principles devised in those meetings. And so, before long, you’ve built an administrative body that is directly intruding on the core function of teaching.”

Bureaucratic growth has a shadow self: mandate inflation. More college bureaucrats lead to new mandates for the organization, such as developing new technology in tech-transfer offices, advancing diversity in humanities classes through DEI offices, and ensuring inclusive living standards through student-affairs offices. As these missions become more important to the organization, they require more hires. Over time, new hires may request more responsibility and create new subgroups, which create even more mandates. Before long, a once-focused organization becomes anything but.

In sociology, this sort of muddle has a name. It is goal ambiguity—a state of confusion, or conflicting expectations, for what an organization should do or be. The modern university now has so many different jobs to do that it can be hard to tell what its priorities are, Gabriel Rossman, a sociologist at UCLA, told me. “For example, what is UCLA’s mission?” he said. “Research? Undergraduate teaching? Graduate teaching? Health care? Patents? Development? For a slightly simpler question, what about individual faculty? When I get back to my office, what should I spend my time on: my next article, editing my lecture notes, doing a peer review, doing service, or advancing diversity? Who knows.”

Goal ambiguity might be a natural by-product of modern institutions trying to be everything to everyone. But eventually, they’ll pay the price. Any institution that finds itself promoting a thousand priorities at once may find it difficult to promote any one of them effectively. In a crisis, goal ambiguity may look like fecklessness or hypocrisy.

by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: The Atlantic. Sources: Shutterstock; Getty

via:

The War On Recovery

The opioid overdose epidemic has burned through the U.S. for nearly 30 years. Yet for all that time, the country has had tools that are highly effective at preventing overdose deaths: methadone and buprenorphine.

These medicines are cheap and easy to distribute. People who take them use illicit drugs at far lower rates, and are at far lower risk of overdose or death. By beating back the cravings and agonizing withdrawal symptoms that result from trying to quit opioids “cold turkey,” methadone and buprenorphine can help people addicted to opioids escape an existence defined by drugs and achieve stable, healthy lives.

But a yearlong investigation by STAT shows that virtually every sector of American society is obstructing the use of medications that could prevent tens of thousands of deaths each year. Increasingly, public health experts and even government officials cast the country’s singular failure to prevent overdose deaths not as an unavoidable tragedy but as a conscious choice. (...)

Though overdose death rates have climbed steadily for the past two decades, researchers estimate that barely one-fifth of the approximately 2.5 million Americans with opioid use disorder receive medication — and tens of thousands have died for lack of it.

“More than 80,000 people are dying of opioid overdose every year, and yet we have a tool, medication-assisted treatment, that we know dramatically reduces overdose deaths,” said David Frank, a medical sociologist at New York University who takes methadone for opioid addiction. “But because it’s so difficult to access, people that could and should be alive continue to die.”

STAT’s examination of the overdose epidemic is based on hundreds of interviews with patients, doctors, policy experts, lawmakers, scientists, and other major figures in drug policy and addiction medicine. It relies on an exhaustive review of legal documents, tax filings, financial disclosures, patient records, lobbying reports, and peer-reviewed academic research. And it includes a first-of-its-kind analysis of the ownership and practices of America’s roughly 2,000 methadone clinics, detailing for the first time how private equity firms have acquired a major stake in the nation’s addiction-treatment infrastructure while opposing calls for reform. (...)

In an interview, Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, estimated that if methadone and buprenorphine were made universally available nationwide, opioid overdoses would fall by half, if not more.

“We have these very effective medications, and the question is why are they not being implemented,” she said. “I estimate that we would have at least 50% less people dying, and that’s conservative. I think it would probably be much more consequential.” (...)

Despite the medications’ remarkable effectiveness, the country’s view of buprenorphine and methadone is built largely on myths and stigma. In 2017, Tom Price, then health secretary to President Trump, referred to what is called medication-assisted treatment as “just substituting one opioid for another.” Law enforcement agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration, while widely criticized for allowing the proliferation of OxyContin and other painkillers that fueled the opioid epidemic in the 1990s and 2000s, now forcefully regulate buprenorphine and methadone, even as illicit fentanyl floods the market.

“They are not changing one drug for another,” said Volkow, who has led the federal government’s $1.6 billion addiction research institute since 2003. “They’re not different from other medications you may need to take, like antihypertensive medications or antidiabetic medications. They allow for your physiology to be normalized, which is necessary to achieve recovery.” (...)

Yet instead of providing people with pharmaceuticals known to treat their condition, in the United States, common approaches to treating opioid addiction still include undergoing painful and ineffective “detox”; 12-step approaches like Narcotics Anonymous; or even “equine therapy,” a form of treatment that centers on spending time with horses.

While such programs often rely heavily on hope, mindfulness, and religion, they often ignore the physiological realities of addiction — in particular, the debilitating withdrawal that occurs when regular opioid users attempt to suddenly stop. In any other medical field, favoring prayer over proven medication would be considered malpractice. Yet for addiction treatment in the U.S., it’s simply the way things work.

“There is a core belief, that’s different from other countries, that people with opioid addiction don’t deserve care in the way that somebody who has cancer or diabetes does,” said Ayana Jordan, a researcher and addiction psychiatrist at NYU Langone Health. “People genuinely have no idea how effective these medications are at preventing people from dying.”

 
‘That’s how nuts this is’

The U.S. laws and practices governing addiction medicine are not just out of step with the latest science — they are also out of step with laws in most of the Western world.

At Arud, a substance use clinic in Zurich, Switzerland, patients receiving addiction medications are free to come and go as they please. They pick up weeks’ worth of methadone, and other powerful addiction drugs, at a pharmacy, and are not forced to undergo drug testing or regular counseling sessions as a condition of receiving their medication. While American law enforcement officials and methadone industry representatives have warned that easier access could increase methadone misuse and even overdose, Switzerland’s results have been the opposite. There, and throughout Western and Central Europe, countries that have increased addiction medications’ availability have consistently seen overdose deaths and infectious disease transmission plummet to rates vastly lower than in the United States.

“We have a precedent in France,” said Volkow, the NIDA director. “What the French did was basically provide buprenorphine to every single person that needed it. And you see this dramatic reduction in overdoses — they basically stopped.”

For decades, American physicians needed to obtain a special license known as the “X-waiver” just to prescribe buprenorphine. As of 2021, just 75,000 of the nation’s roughly 1.1 million physicians had obtained the waiver. The Biden administration effectively eliminated that requirement in early 2021, but according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the overall buprenorphine prescribing rate nonetheless decreased from 2021 to 2022.

Methadone, which is widely accessible across Europe, is available in the U.S. only at specialized clinics known as opioid treatment programs, or OTPs. These clinics typically require patients to report in person each day to receive a single dose, forcing them to structure their lives around the clinic’s dosing schedule.

“This is practically the only medication in the entire country that is treated this way,” said Rep. Don Norcross (D-N.J.), who has co-authored legislation that would allow specialized addiction doctors to prescribe methadone directly to patients. “The medication for abortion — that is easier accessed than methadone. That’s how nuts this is. The idea that the only way to do this is to go to the methadone clinic is just insane.”

‘The system creates barriers to care’

Paradoxically, it is often those who claim to be most sympathetic to the cause of addiction treatment who are among the biggest opponents of expanded access to methadone and buprenorphine.

The recovery group Narcotics Anonymous — perhaps the country’s largest provider of addiction treatment — has taken a hard line against addiction medication. The organization’s own literature acknowledges that people taking methadone or buprenorphine are often banned from speaking at meetings, but offers a concession: “NA may be compatible for addicts on medically assisted protocols if they have a desire to become clean one day.”

In other words: In the view of Narcotics Anonymous, even people who have relied on methadone or buprenorphine to achieve stable recovery are not considered “clean.” Instead, their full participation in the program would require a pledge to stop taking medications they were prescribed by a doctor, and that first helped them quit illicit drugs.

Narcotics Anonymous did not respond to STAT’s requests for comment.

Methadone clinics have also opposed calls to expanded access to medication treatment. The American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence, a trade group representing methadone clinics, has lobbied not just against the deregulation of methadone treatment, but also against a bill that passed in 2022 with overwhelming bipartisan support that made it easier for doctors to prescribe buprenorphine. And in recent decades, methadone treatment has become big business: A majority of methadone clinics now operate as for-profits, and nearly one-third are owned by private equity firms. As calls for reform have grown far louder in recent years, the methadone industry has guarded its monopoly fiercely, and remains staunchly opposed to allowing other doctors to prescribe the medication to patients in need.

Separately, according to federal survey data, at least 751 substance use treatment facilities offer treatment for opioid addiction but reject clients using methadone and buprenorphine. More than 2,000 addiction treatment facilities did not respond to the federal survey, meaning the true number of facilities banning medication is probably significantly higher.

Many medical schools still don’t require any training in addiction medicine, or prescribing addiction medications. Many hospitals still do not offer patients buprenorphine or methadone, even in the immediate aftermath of an overdose. Many pharmacies choose not to stock buprenorphine. And insurers, in an effort to pad profit margins, sometimes refuse to pay for newly developed injectable buprenorphine formulations, which last weeks or months and are shown to help patients remain in treatment — but cost far more than cheaper versions that must be taken daily.

The American criminal justice system also remains skeptical of medication as treatment. The Drug Enforcement Administration has long displayed hostility to buprenorphine and methadone, and many jails and prisons refuse altogether to provide incarcerated people with either medication. Many judges with no medical training — even in “drug court” systems supposedly meant to aid addiction recovery — have historically barred people arrested for low-grade drug offenses from taking any opioid, including addiction medications.

As workers, people taking addiction medications face immense discrimination. Many employers, labor unions, and professional societies ban their members from taking addiction medications in any circumstance.

“There are a lot of ways that the system creates barriers to care,” said Weinstein, the Boston addiction doctor. “We start to believe that if the system is created that way, it must be necessary, there must be a good reason. But that may not be true: The reason may be outdated, or never existed, or was based on stigma.”

by Lev Facher, STAT |  Read more:

Image: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

[ed. Simpler solution: just let people have drugs. They're going to use them anyway (as they have for centuries). Wall Street runs on drugs. Most overdoses past, present and future are because people are injesting uncontrolled products. If drugs are more available (say through dispensaries where amounts and purchases are recorded) some people will have problems, but most likely won't because of strong societal disincentives (family, employment, friends, education, etc.). Control the purity of the products, monitor the problems, restrict access where needed. Then let laws control for bad behavior - another disincentive - as we do with alcohol, marijuana, guns, etc. Probably the cartels' worst nightmare.]

Questions and Answers on the PGA Tour Board Drama

Go ahead and slap a zero on the “It’s been X days since golf had unnecessary drama” board. Rory McIlroy’s intention to rejoin the PGA Tour Policy Board has been thwarted, as McIlroy remarked Wednesday at the Wells Fargo Championship that a “subset” of players blocked his return. You have questions and we have … well, we don’t have answers, because the incontrovertible takeaway from the past two years in professional golf is that no one knows anything, at least for certain. But we do have some idea of the behind-the-scenes intrigue regarding power control and the trajectory of the tour’s future, so we’ll do our best to explain what the heck is going on.

OK, what is going on?

In late April, the Guardian reported McIlory was returning to the PGA Tour Policy Board, taking the place of Webb Simpson, who wanted to surrender his position and give it to McIlroy. McIlroy was previously on the board but resigned his post last November. McIlroy confirmed the report the following day at the Zurich Classic. “I don’t think there’s been much progress made in the last eight months, and I was hopeful that there would be,” McIlroy said. “I think I could be helpful to the process. But only if people want me involved.”

Only if people want me involved proved to be operative words. For the past two weeks there have been rumblings that the planned move had an icy reception from other board members, which McIlroy confirmed Wednesday morning at Quail Hollow.

“There's been a lot of conversations. Sort of reminded me partly why I didn't [originally want to stay on the board]," McIlroy said, referencing his departure. "I think it got pretty complicated and pretty messy, and I think with the way it happened, I think it opened up some old wounds and scar tissue from things that have happened before … there was a subset of people on the board that were maybe uncomfortable with me coming back on for some reason. … I think Webb just stays on and sees out his term, and I think he's gotten to a place where he's comfortable with doing that and I just sort of keep doing what I'm doing."

So, for the moment, McIlroy remains out and Simpson is still in.

Why did Rory McIlroy resign in the first place?

McIlroy served as the de facto face of the PGA Tour in its battle with LIV Golf, standing up for his tour in the absence of leadership and doing so because he believed it was the right thing to do. Along with Tiger Woods, he spearheaded a player-led initiative in the summer of 2022 that restructured the tour schedule and seemed to prevent further player exodus. McIlroy admitted that putting himself out there in the game’s civil war took an emotional and physical toll, which McIroy said he was still reckoning with.

So when the tour announced last June a surprising partnership with the LIV Golf’s backer, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund—a negotiation that McIlroy was not a part of—McIlroy conceded a sense of betrayal. “It's hard for me to not sit up here and feel somewhat like a sacrificial lamb and feeling like I've put myself out there and this is what happens,” McIlroy said at the RBC Canadian Open a day after the framework agreement announcement.

Nevertheless, McIlroy continued in his position on the tour’s policy board throughout the summer. When he ultimately resigned in late November 2023, he cited personal and professional commitments, but also nodded to the direction a potentially unified professional game could be going, that a deal private-equity deal was on the horizon (which came to fruition two months later, with the tour choosing the Fenway-led Strategic Sports Group) and felt his job was done. The remaining board directors elected Jordan Spieth to take McIlroy’s place.

What spurred McIlroy’s reversal?

According to NBC Sports analyst Brad Faxon (who also serves as McIlroy’s putting coach from time to time), McIlroy regretted his decision “almost immediately.” Also, as McIlroy alluded to in his Zurich comments, talks between the PGA Tour and PIF had stalled. While McIlroy has not moved from his anti-LIV Golf stance, the Ulsterman has conceded that golf’s schism is unsustainable and PIF’s participation in professional golf is inevitable. For McIlroy, the most palliative of avenues forward is one where PIF’s investment is diverted to the tour, which would likely welcome reunification of a fractured sport. McIlroy presumably believed his return to the board helps bridge the current gap. 

Why does Webb Simpson want off?

Depends on whom you ask. Simpson, for his part, wants to spend more time focusing on golf and his family. It should also be noted that he is considered one of the more respected and well-liked players on tour, but has come under criticism for his use of four sponsor's exemptions into limited-field signature events. There is also a belief among players, fair or not, that PGA Tour and SSG leadership wants McIlroy on the board to help advocate for unification. Given his credentials, McIlroy is seen as a stronger proponent than Simpson for this task. (...)

Who is the “subset” that doesn’t want McIlroy to return?

(Sigh) OK, let’s get into it.

McIlroy didn’t name names, but sources tell Golf Digest that Patrick Cantlay, Jordan Spieth and Tiger Woods were not particularly eager to welcome McIlroy back. The icy relationship between Cantlay and McIlroy is well-documented; McIlroy himself conceded last fall in an interview with the Irish Independent. “My relationship with Cantlay is average at best. We don’t have a ton in common and see the world quite differently.”

Later in the interview, when speaking to the infamous spat between McIlroy and Cantlay’s caddie, Joe LaCava, at the Ryder Cup, McIlroy said, “LaCava used to be a nice guy when he was caddieing for Tiger, and now he’s caddieing for that d--k he’s turned into a … I still wasn’t in a great headspace.”

The McIlroy-Woods relationship, sources tell Golf Digest, has also soured over the past six months. It remains cordial, yet their different views on the future of professional golf has led to a falling out of sorts. As for Spieth and McIlroy, McIlroy removed himself from a player text chain following Spieth’s comments at Pebble Beach (where Spieth said the tour doesn’t need PIF after the deal with SSG), leading to an hour-long chat between the two. “My thing was if I’m the original [potential] investor that thought that they were going to get this deal done back in July, and I’m hearing a board member say that we don’t really need them now, how are they going to think about that, what are they gonna feel about that?” McIlroy said. “They are still sitting out there with hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions, that they’re gonna pour it into sport. And I know what Jordan was saying. … But if I were PIF and I was hearing that coming from here, the day after doing this SSG deal, it wouldn’t have made me too happy, I guess?”

The tension remained at the Players Championship, where Spieth and McIlroy played together in the first two rounds and featured combative moments in the first round regarding two of McIlroy’s drops.

What are the Woods/Cantlay/Spieth arguments against McIlroy?

As a preface, let us again state that if anyone deserves grace, it’s McIlroy. What he did over two years for the tour and the game brought an invisible pain and weight that can't be measured, and he was sold out by the very thing he was trying to defend. However, there is the idea that McIlroy did resign an elected spot, and players—and not just on the board—don’t think he just gets to simply walk on back.

“He was very clear that it was too much for him. He had business dealings, he has a kid, he wants to focus on his game. Trust me, I get it. But once you quit, you’re not getting back,” Kevin Streelman, a former member of the policy board who ran against McIlroy for Player Advisory Council chairman, told Golfweek. “I wouldn’t quit on something that you were elected to by your peers. To want back in is peculiar.”

There is also the perception of a financial entanglement. McIlroy is part of the Fenway-backed TGL Boston team and Fenway is a major player in the Strategic Sports Group. That McIlroy’s team and tour leadership have attempted to sell the board on McIlroy’s return, sources tell Golf Digest, has further raised suspicions.

Additionally, while players are fine with McIlroy changing his stance on PIF involvement, sources tell Golf Digest, a set of them don't like that McIlroy is frustrated others haven't changed their opinions with him.

And let's be honest, there's also some ego involved, to say nothing of a power play. It's like "Succession," only if everyone was Kendall Roy.

How ridiculous is all of this?

Well, as a history minor in college, we were warmed to see McIlroy invoke the Good Friday Agreement when asked his thoughts about how all of this is resolved. For context: “I sort of liken it to like when Northern Ireland went through the peace process in the '90s and the Good Friday Agreement, neither side was happy,” McIlroy said Wednesday. “Catholics weren't happy, Protestants weren't happy, but it brought peace and then you just sort of learn to live with whatever has been negotiated, right? That was in 1998 or whatever it was and 20, 25, 30 years ahead, my generation doesn't know any different. It's just this is what it's always been like and we've never known anything but peace.” McIlroy has a valid point, but also … we’re invoking a peace treaty that ended a three-decades long actual war in the context about, essentially, two battling golf businesses.

by Joel Beall, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: David Cannon

[ed. This is a multi-billion dollar industry with professionals practiced in negotiating big deals. Golfers on the tour are not. I'd love to see Rory back because he understands this and just wants what's best for the game, whoever is in charge. See also: Jimmy Dunne resigns (GD). Also good luck to Rory on a rough time, personally.]

"I have heard one truly smart insight into this insanity. It came from Fred Perpall, the president of the USGA. He’s new to golf but not to reading people. I asked him, What should the Tour say to anyone who wants to jump ship and go LIV? “Let them go,” Fred said. You can’t hold on to people who don’t value what they already have.

There’s so much in that I need a long lunch break to unpack it.

Ben Crenshaw had a certain fondness for a lifer caddie named Adolphus Hull, aka Golf Ball. I got this from Hull, on his deathbed. Ball was remembering a world that’s gone but sharing an insight that lives.

Ben: “Ball, what do you do if you love a girl but she don’t love you?”

Ball: “If she don’t love you, you gotta let her go.”

Ben: “I believe you’re right.”

Ball: “I know I’m right.”

Ball knew what he knew and, were he alive today, would know that Fred Perpall has it right."

~ Why pro golf’s power struggle hints at broader societal shift (Golf)

Mexico’s Drug Cartels Are Not Competitors to the State

Since 2006, the Mexican military has participated in domestic law enforcement duties against Mexico’s drug cartels, large criminal organizations whose primary source of profit is the trafficking of illegal narcotics to the United States. Violence between the cartels over territorial and business disputes, exacerbated by the Mexican government’s more vigorous persecution of cartel leaders, has caused Mexico’s homicide rate to more than triple since 2007, reversing a previous long-term decline. The U.S. military now estimates that the cartels directly control around 30-35% of Mexican territory. Over eighty politicians or candidates for political office were killed in Mexico during the country’s 2021 midterm elections.

As of early 2024, despite the incarceration of leading cartel figures such as Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera, the organization he headed, the Sinaloa Cartel, remains the dominant cartel in Mexico and is also an increasingly powerful force in drug networks across the world. Its main competitor is the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and the two often engage in violent competition, alongside smaller cartels like the Gulf Cartel, the Juarez Cartel, the La Familia cartel, and many more local criminal organizations. In 2017, Americans consumed $153 billion worth of banned narcotics. The cartels satisfy a large fraction of this demand. There are no precise estimates of cartel revenues and profits, but it is likely that annual revenues are in the low tens of billions of dollars and profits total several billion after the costs of business, including bribes. The cartels also generate revenue from other criminal activities like human trafficking, extortion, and even illegal logging.

Around the world, such criminal activities have shown to be lucrative enough and resilient enough to state persecution to fund rebellions that could topple governments. For example, the Marxist FARC guerillas in Colombia, as well as multiple generations of Taliban rebels in Afghanistan—first fighting the Soviets, then the U.S.—were funded in this way. Because of the drug war, ongoing violence, and continued influence of cartels in Mexican society, Mexico has sometimes been described as a failed state and some U.S. politicians, such as former President Donald Trump and Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have even called for taking unilateral military action against the cartels, as was done against ISIS, the short-lived Islamist statelet in Iraq and Syria.

But Mexico’s cartels are not ideologically or politically-motivated groups making the jump to crime to fund their activities. They are rather amorphous criminal groups motivated by profit-seeking, usually relying on familial and regional ties. From a business perspective, it is preferable to collaborate with the government when possible, rather than invite anarchy. Since, through bribery, the cartels represent an important source of revenue for Mexico’s elites, this interest is mutual.

As a result, the cartels are far more like junior partners to corrupt government officials rather than an independent and competing force of their own, though their allegiances have ebbed and flowed from the state level to the federal level—Mexico is a federation of united states—and seemingly back over the last sixty years. This makes Mexico’s cartels clients of the Mexican state, not its competitors, and, in turn, Mexico’s status as a client of the U.S. explains why the cartels continue to flourish and why there is unlikely to be any U.S. intervention in the near future.

The Mexican Drug Industry

The drug trade is a notable, but not large, portion of Mexico’s economy. U.S. government estimates from the last fifteen years have settled on figures ranging from $6 billion to $29 billion annually for the amount of money going from the U.S. to Mexico for illegal drugs. According to the Department of Homeland Security, up to three-quarters of cartel cash revenue might never even be laundered into a financial institution by a cartel, but just stored indefinitely in cash form or presumably used to pay off others in cash. In 2023, a statistical estimate of the number of Mexicans working in the entire drug industry—including armed members, farmers, and chemists—reached a figure of 175,000.

This would be just 0.3% of Mexico’s labor force of sixty million people as of 2024, while even if the drug trade brought in revenues of $50 billion annually, this would still be well below 5% of Mexico’s GDP of $1.47 trillion as of 2022. For reference, Mexico’s largest company, the state-owned oil company PEMEX, brought in $74 billion in revenue in 2019. The flagship telecommunications company of Carlos Slim’s business empire, América Móvil, brought in $45 billion in 2023. While the cartels derive revenue from other rackets such as domestic extortion, these are unlikely to be as profitable, on the whole, as drug trafficking to the U.S. The drug trade in its entirety is about as large as Mexico’s largest company, but the two largest cartels together are believed to employ just 45,000 members, on the high end. The drug trade is powerful in Mexico not because of its size, but because of its liquidity, anonymity, and informality, which makes it easy to enrich particular individuals. (...)

The Mexican Cartels Are Networks Not Hierarchies

The major Mexican cartels operating today nearly all descend from the Guadalajara Cartel, the dominant force in the 1980s Mexican drug trade. Like most of the so-called “cartels,” however, the Guadalajara Cartel had no clear leader nor a set hierarchy. It consisted of a shifting set of allegiances formed between a number of drug traffickers from the Mexican state of Sinaloa, their political connections in the PRI—Mexico’s dominant political party for most of the twentieth century—the federal police services, and their personal bodyguards. These traffickers had familial roots in the drug trade going back at least one generation. The leadership of today’s cartels turns over rapidly and allegiances between different organizations come and go, but the major bodies are relatively stable despite periodic inter-cartel wars.

The Sinaloa Cartel is today the leading Mexican drug trafficking organization. It is controlled by two competing factions, one led by the four sons of El Chapo—known as the “Chapitos”—the other by Ismael Zambada García, known as “El Mayo.” Now aged 76, El Mayo is the last remaining free man among the cartel old guard and has never been arrested in a lifetime of drug trafficking. His faction includes Aureliano Guzmán Loera, El Chapo’s brother. The Chapitos were largely responsible for the cartel’s move into the fentanyl market, which has opened up a new and profitable revenue stream.

They have also proved willing to engage in direct gun battles with the Mexican military, which the Sinaloa Cartel had historically avoided whenever possible.

by Samo Burja, Bismarck Brief |  Read more:

Image: Adam Jones

Luxury Residential Projects Designed by Luxury Car Brands

Bugatti unveils design for first residential skyscraper, and Five luxury residential projects designed by luxury car brands (de zeen).

Image: uncredited

"Each of the apartments in the skyscraper will have a unique shape with access to a curved balcony, while the building will be topped with a pool.

The penthouses will be served by a pair of garage-to-penthouse car lifts, which will allow the owners to drive their vehicles directly into these apartments. This mirrors Bentley's Miami skyscraper, which will have a car lift that allows residents to drive vehicles directly into apartments on all levels."

[ed. Makes me think of an extracted molar. Which is probably what it'll feel like buying one of these apartments.]

The Cablefication of Streaming

“They’re just gonna accidentally create cable again.”

That’s been a frequent joke about the streaming landscape in media circles of late. You see it pop up in Slack windows and tweets every time one entertainment conglomerate gobbles up another and consolidates their respective video on demand apps. CBS All Access and Showtime synthesize into Paramount+. HBO becomes HBO Max and then becomes Max. Hulu and Disney+ are suddenly one and the same. The joke works every time because it’s not a joke—it’s a prophecy. The “cablefication” of streaming was always going to happen. And now it has.

This week, Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney Entertainment announced that they will be launching a bundled option of the companies’ three biggest streaming services: Disney+, Hulu, and Max. There will now be a subscription plan that consolidates content from multiple corporate interests and projects them into your living room with (optional) ads. So, you know: cable.

The press release reads, in part: “Beginning this Summer in the U.S, the streaming services will be offered together, providing subscribers with the best value in entertainment and an unprecedented selection of content from the biggest and most beloved brands in entertainment including ABC, CNN, DC, Discovery, Disney, Food Network, FX, HBO, HGTV, Hulu, Marvel, Pixar, Searchlight, Warner Bros., and many more. The new bundle will be available for purchase on any of the three streaming platform’s websites offered as both an ad-supported and ad-free plan.”

Naturally, Warner Bros. and Disney have pitched this as a win for consumers and shareholders alike. In reality, it’s a surrender—a tacit acknowledgement that all attempts to disrupt the entertainment industry damn near broke it instead.

Ever since Netflix pioneered the VOD streaming subscription game, everyone else has been eager to get in on the action. Yes, the traditional media models of network television, cable television, pay cable, theatrical releases, and physical media were working just fine in concert with Netflix’s streaming accompaniment but in the corporate world “doing just fine” only means “not growing fast enough.” Despite the fact that Netflix rarely posted eye-popping profits come earnings season, the entertainment gatekeepers came to believe that the growth potential provided by the internet was infinite.

Some two decades later, precisely no one has made real money in the streaming space. Netflix’s winnings have been limited due to the sheer amount of pricey programming it has greenlit. Amazon, NBCUniversal, and Paramount have all yet to enjoy a profit from their premier streaming services (though Paramount projects one for Paramount+ in 2025). Disney and Warner Bros. actually have posted profits for their streamers but Disney’s came along with a steep ESPN+ loss and Max’s profits came only due to a price increase amid a shedding of 700,000 subscribers. As these companies have found out, while the internet might be theoretically limitless, the attention span and pocketbooks of the consumers expected to watch all this stuff isn’t.

Fixating on the boundless potential of what a business could be rather than enjoying the bountiful reality of what it actually is has long been a feature of the corporate economy, but the mindset has grown more acute as the magical thinking of Silicon Valley spreads to boardrooms across the country. The effects of this misplaced ambition haven’t been painful solely for executives on earnings conference calls, they’ve also been downright ruinous to the health of the entertainment industry overall.

Perhaps you’ll recall a recent bit of Hollywood news when both the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) went on strike to receive an equitable contract from the studios, streamers, and companies represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). Like all work stoppages, there were many disparate reasons for these strikes. But at their core, they both came down to the same thing: the math just didn’t add up anymore.

by Alec Bojalad, Den of Geek | Read more:
Image: Warner Bros. Discovery|Disney Entertainment

Tesla’s Profitable Supercharger Network in Limbo After Musk Axes Entire Team

At the start of the year, Tesla’s Supercharger team was tasked with the impossible. “We were on an exponential path,” a former team member told TechCrunch, adding that the new targets were “super-duper crazy.” Despite the bottlenecks that such expectations can create, “every time they upped the metric, we met it.”

Then, one day in April, CEO Elon Musk axed the entire division, even though it was profitable last year.

With more than 25,000 charging ports in the U.S. and over 50,000 worldwide, the Supercharger network is the undisputed king of EV fast charging. Widespread, well-maintained and fast, the network has transformed the way people viewed EVs, assuaging concerns about range anxiety for wide swaths of the car-buying public. But with the recent layoffs, Musk cast a cloud over the private infrastructure project.

While some people expected layoffs to hit the Supercharger division, few thought it would be eliminated.

“We built the best network in the world,” according to the former Tesla employee who spoke to TechCrunch. “We were minding the ship. Nothing was frivolous.” (...)

On Friday, Musk said that Tesla will spend $500 million on expanding and upgrading the Supercharger network. But as insider knowledge shows, it will be hard to hit that target without a team to oversee the work.

Before the layoffs, the Supercharger network appeared poised to extend its lead over competitors. (...)

Tesla was previously in a strong position to win awards through the federally funded National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, which has $5 billion to disburse to build a robust nationwide network of fast chargers.

The company had also been focusing its expansion plans on places with high demand, they added. Where the federal government was interested in improving coverage on a certain route and demand hadn’t yet materialized, Tesla’s policy team would prioritize winning NEVI funding for the site, according to the source.

“Everything was purposeful. Everything had a target,” one source told TechCrunch..

Often that meant building Superchargers at new sites, which are more straightforward to develop. Expanding existing ones is incredibly challenging, the source said, because leases often need to be renegotiated, utility upgrades coordinated and existing infrastructure worked around, all while continuing to serve existing customers. “Your cost per stall is exponentially higher than a fresh site.”

Analysts have long speculated that the Supercharger network could easily become a profit center, much like Amazon did when it opened its cloud services to other companies. But there, Tesla had Amazon beat: The Supercharger team was told that the network was profitable, the source said, even before other automakers gained access.

How the Supercharger network came to be

Tesla opened the first Supercharger station in September 2012 as the first examples of the Model S prowled the streets. Early models could deliver 100 kW, which was a big number at the time: CHAdeMO, a competing standard used by the Nissan Leaf, maxed out at 62.5 kW at the time, and the Combined Charging System (CCS) was still in the prototype phase.

The first stations opened in California, and soon more started sprouting up along highways on the East Coast, then the Midwest and Texas. Within a year, the company upgraded the equipment, bumping maximum power to 120 kW. And within three years, Tesla had a network that spanned the U.S., making coast-to-coast electric travel possible. As the company entered Europe, China and other countries, it added Superchargers there, too. Today, the network supports nearly 60,000 charging stalls on four continents.

Why the Supercharger network is considered the best

In the early years, Tesla Model S and X owners enjoyed unlimited charging at the stations — an incentive aimed at winning over new customers. When the Model 3 rolled out, the company started billing new owners for charging sessions, though the process was far easier than what competitors offered. Drivers simply had to plug the car in, and Tesla would bill a credit card on file.

Today’s Supercharger posts support up to 250 kW charging speeds. Other networks top out at 350 kW, but they aren’t nearly as reliable. Tesla says its network’s uptime is 99.95%, far better than its competitors. Real-world usage suggests that’s not far from the truth: A University of California–Berkeley survey of EV drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area found that while 25% of non-Tesla drivers experienced major problems with public chargers, only 4% of Tesla drivers did at Superchargers.

Can other EVs use Superchargers?

For over a decade, Superchargers were available only to Tesla owners. Because charge sessions had to be initiated by a handshake between the vehicle and the charger, and because billing happened behind the scenes, Tesla had tight control over who could use them. The company’s proprietary plug design didn’t hurt, either.

That started to change in the fall of 2022, when the company made the details of its plug design available to other automakers. (By that point, Tesla was already using the same communications protocol as CCS when charging.) Then, in May 2023, Ford announced that it would adopt Tesla’s plug design, known as the North American Charging Standard, and that its customers would gain access to 12,000 Superchargers across the U.S. and Canada. Soon, the floodgates opened, and GM, Rivian, Volvo and others followed suit. Today, all major automakers selling in the U.S. have adopted the NACS.

by Tim De Chant, TechCrunch | Read more:

Image: Tesla

[ed. Good summary.]

El Guincho

[ed. YouTube...c'mon. *sigh* Just click on the link.]

Tom Tom Club

ChatGPT: A Partner In Unknowing

A few months after the release of ChatGPT, I attended a conference that brought scientists, academics, and journalists together to discuss the climate crisis and new approaches to analyzing our interactions with the biosphere. Inevitably the conversation drifted towards the impact of AI on our future. As my colleagues spoke of readying themselves for the apocalypse—of hospital records being leaked, and of millions of jobs becoming redundant—despair began to color the conversations. I was uneasy but could not locate the source of my dissatisfaction with the conversation.

That is, until one of my colleagues asked, and I do not exaggerate this, “What’s the point of living if AI can have better ideas than I can, quicker?” The incredulity I felt hearing this question, and the smart answers I came up with (family? friends? trees?), quickly gave way to the notion that he was pointing to something profoundly disturbing in our culture that could be grasped in our reactions to and interactions with ChatGPT. It struck me that ChatGPT itself could probably simulate the conversation we had been having around its dangers to a reasonable level of accuracy, and later that night I confirmed that hypothesis. But what it could not simulate was the fear behind my colleague’s very human question, which inadvertently had pointed me to the real source of the group’s despair: This wasn’t about ChatGPT. It was about us.

See how we swing from excessive hope to excessive despair? Each new op-ed or conversation pushing us one way or the other. I thought of the advice that Houman Harouni, my teacher and colleague, would give at times like this: “to go back and forth between an icy plunge into despair and a rising into the heat of hope—to remain awake to both feelings at the same time.” And so, in that space—and through an experience in our classroom—I began to see ChatGPT in light of the richness it could truly offer us. Rather than giving us answers, generative AI could help take them away.

Last spring, I was part of a teaching team of eight who were working with a group of sixty students to explore the premise that, for some questions, unknowing, rather than knowledge, is the ground of thought we need. ChatGPT was our partner in that endeavor. In a case study we presented to the class, a teenager—pseudonym Jorge—was caught with a gallon bag of marijuana on school grounds. He faced expulsion from school if he were reported to his parole officer. Meanwhile, not reporting him would be considered breaking the law. We asked our students to design a course of action, imagining themselves as the school’s teachers and administrators.

They drew on their academic knowledge and professional expertise. They debated the pros and cons of different options, such as reporting Jorge to his parole officer, offering him counseling, or involving his family and community. They were well-versed in speaking to the broader context of the case, such as the racial and socioeconomic disparities in the criminal justice system, the effects of drug prohibition, how to use techniques of harm reduction, and the role of schools in fostering social change. Their answers sounded sensible, but the situation demanded real labor—it demanded sweat rather than sensibility, and there could be no sweat till their answers mattered.

An hour into their conversation, we presented the students with ChatGPT’s analysis of the case study.

ChatGPT suggested that we “initiate a review of [the school’s] existing policies and procedures related to substance abuse, with the goal of ensuring they are consistent, transparent, and reflective of best practices.” It elaborated that “the school should take a compassionate approach [but] also communicate clearly that drug abuse and related offenses will not be tolerated,” and that, “this approach should be taken while ensuring that the school is responsive to the unique needs of its students, particularly those from low-income and working-class backgrounds.” That is, ChatGPT didn’t say much that was useful at all. But—as the students reflected in their conversation after reading ChatGPT’s analysis—neither did they. One student noted that they were just saying “formulaic, buzzwordy stuff” rather than tackling the issue with fresh thinking. They were unnerved by how closely the empty shine of ChatGPT’s answer mirrored their own best efforts. This forced them to contend with whether they could be truly generative, or whether, as some of them put it, they were “stuck in a loop” and had not been “really [saying] anything” in their discussions. Suddenly, their answers mattered.

The students’ initial instinct to regurgitate what they were familiar with, rather than risk a foray into unfamiliar propositions, says much more about the type of intelligence our culture prioritizes than the actual intelligence of our students. Indeed, some of our best students, who go on to attend our most prestigious institutions, are rewarded for being able to synthesize large amounts of information well. However, as I came to realize, the high value we place on this capacity to efficiently synthesize information and translate it to new contexts risks creating hollow answers in response to questions with real human stakes, the most existential of our challenges. (...)

ChatGPT and generative AI models work differently than regular computers—they do not follow a fixed set of rules, but rather learn from the statistical patterns of billions of online sentences. This is why some describe them as “stochastic parrots.” In a recent article for Wired, Ben Ash Blum complicates that critique by pointing to our own predisposition to sounding that way. He says: “After all, we too are stochastic parrots … [and] blurry JPEGs of the web, foggily regurgitating Wikipedia facts into our term papers and magazine articles.” Questioning the limitations of traditional assessments of AI intelligence, called Turing Tests, he wonders: “If [Alan] Turing were chatting with ChatGPT in one window and me on an average pre-coffee morning in the other, am I really so confident which one he would judge more capable of thought?” Our students’ competitive encounter with ChatGPT revealed their own tendency towards “foggily regurgitating,” as well as their sudden inferiority in the face of this technological innovation. What I’ve come to realize is that if ChatGPT is dangerous, as many media sources have described and decried, one of its primary threats is to reveal, as Blum puts it, that the original thought we hold dear is actually a “complex [remix of] everything we’ve taken in from parents, peers, and teachers.” (...)

In our classroom case study, ChatGPT’s empty response to “what should we do?” revealed to our students not only their own ignorance, but also the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question. The right question for the moment might have then been, “ChatGPT, can you take away all my easy answers?” By easy answers, I mean the first set of generalizations that a mind grasps for when facing a situation in which it risks being ignorant. This is not a literal question for ChatGPT, but an orientation to ChatGPT’s pat responses. This orientation puts the onus back on the question asker to devise answers far more apt for the situation, and, as was the case of our students, that even hint at the revolutionary. “Can you take away my easy answers?” assumes that ChatGPT’s, or our, first response will not be the final answer, and reveals the bounds of the sort of intelligence that ChatGPT—and our dominant culture—prioritizes. It asks the people with the question to consider what other insights, experiments, and curiosities they might insert into their solutions. In this dynamic, ChatGPT becomes a partner, rather than an authority on what is intelligent or correct.

If we treat generative AI as a partner in devising better answers for difficult situations such as Jorge’s, then we must also put more thought into which questions require our unknowing—or “ignorance,” as Le Guin calls it—rather than our certainty. Generative AI is based on language that currently exists. It can show us the limits of conventional knowledge and the edges of our ignorance. Yet not all questions require us to venture into the unknown; some can be solved with the tools and expertise we already have. How do we tell the difference? That question has become key in my life. I first encountered it as a student in an adaptive leadership class at the Harvard Kennedy School, and it completely upended all my preconceived notions about leadership.

Adaptive leadership, developed by Ron Heifetz and others at the Kennedy School, distinguishes between two different types of problems: adaptive challenges and technical challenges. While the problem and solution of technical challenges are well-known—think everything from replacing a flat tire to performing an appendectomy to designing a new algebra curriculum—adaptive challenges demand an ongoing learning process for both identifying the problem and coming up with a solution. Addressing the climate crisis, sexism or racism, or transforming education systems are adaptive challenges. Adaptive challenges, intricately intertwined with the human psyche and societal dynamics, prove resistant to technical solutions. They demand a shift in our awareness. A common leadership mistake, as Heifetz points out, is to apply a technical fix to a challenge that is fundamentally adaptive in nature. For example, we generate reports, make committees, or hire consultants to work a broken organizational culture, many times avoiding addressing the underlying issues of trust that are at the heart of the problem.

In an example from my home country, Lebanon, IMF economists fly in with ideas of how to restructure debt and provide cheap loans—a plug-and-play USB drive with fixes that worked in another country—and they run up against corrupt warlords and a population that continues to elect them while they starve and wait for hours in various lines for bread and gasoline. These technical fixes inevitably fail, and we are tempted to simplify the reasons they failed. For example, we assume the Lebanese population doesn’t understand its best interests. The adaptive leadership framework, however, asks us to imagine into their deeply held loyalties, beliefs, and values, which we typically do not understand; to dig into their complex webs of stories: uncles who died in wars, mothers who taught them which peoples to talk to and which to avoid, and religious beliefs that have become tied up in political ones.

Taking the example of the climate crisis, I often ask myself, what is so threatening to some people in the US that they would see their homes burn down or swept away in an unprecedented storm and still not engage the challenge of climate change? The answers that come to me are not material, they are human. Challenges are often bundled—they have adaptive and technical components—and some technical solutions to the climate crisis, such as smarter grids or more renewable energy, will address key technical challenges. But these technical fixes are not enough, and will not be universally adopted in our current political reality. To face climate change effectively, we need to go beyond technical fixes and engage with the adaptive aspects of the challenge. We need to question our assumptions, values, and behaviors, and explore how they shape our relationship with the planet and each other. We need to learn, experiment, collaborate, and find new forms of consciousness and new ways of living that are more resilient and regenerative. And we need to learn how to better understand people whose beliefs are very different from ours. An adaptive process like the one I’m describing is messy—it involves psychological losses for all human stakeholders involved. This process unfolds amidst the “salt of life,” and requires a type of intelligence that is relational and mutual, deeply anchored in the humbling fact that our individual perspectives cannot capture the whole. Working with groups in seemingly intractable conflict, I’ve come to deeply believe that engaging in messy work across boundaries results in something that’s far greater than the sum of its parts. (...)

In the voice of ChatGPT, the dilemma can then be articulated as: “In order to be able to constrain the otherwise limitless creativity of your minds with a set of ethical principles that determines what ought and ought not to be, I must steer clear of objectionable content, but if I steer clear of it, then I cannot constrain the otherwise limitless creativity of your minds with a set of ethical principles that determines what ought and ought not to be.”

If attempting to wrap your mind around this is hurting your head, I believe it is meant to. When we try to move through paradoxes like these, we are forced to let go of the easy answers that frequently disguise themselves in concepts we use, such as “compassion” or “morality,” which can mean everything or nothing but don’t really direct us in how to act within real-world situations. As I see it, the role of staying with a paradox is to break open those concepts, leaving us somewhere closer to unknowing.

by Dana Karout, Emergence Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Vartika Sharma

[ed. See also: OpenAI offers a peek behind the curtain of its AI’s secret instructions (TechCrunch).]