Incoming!

They came from Florida, from Fox News and Fox Business, square-jawed men and women with big hair and collagen lips.

They came from professional football and World Wrestling Entertainment.

They came from daytime talk shows and reality television.

They were ‘straight out of central casting’, as the future president said.

Some of the women resembled his daughter and some of the women resembled his wife. None of the men resembled him.

A squad of them came with the future president to Madison Square Garden to watch Ultimate Fighting matches.

The future secretary of defence is adorned with the white supremacist tattoos of a Jerusalem cross, the Crusader rallying cry ‘Deus vult’ and an AR-15 assault rifle flanking an American flag.

The future secretary of homeland security once shot her hunting dog, Cricket, in a gravel pit because it couldn’t hunt, then shot her pet goat because it was getting old and ‘nasty’.

The future secretary of health and human services once cut off the head of a beached whale with a chainsaw, put it on the roof of his car and drove home. He brags that he has a freezer full of roadkill.

Less than half of all voters voted for the future president, but his team declared it a ‘landslide’, a ‘mandate’ to ‘drain the swamp’ and shake up the capital.

The future White House communications director calls the opposition ‘snowflakes’ whose ‘sad, miserable existence will be crushed’ when the future president returns to power.

The future director of the FBI promises a ‘government gangsters manhunt’ and revenge against disloyal journalists.

The future director of the Federal Communications Commission threatens to penalise television networks that criticise the future president.

They vow mass firings and the deportation of millions.

They vow to cut two trillion dollars from the federal budget – five times the combined annual salaries of all federal employees.

They vow an end to ‘wokeness’ in all its imagined forms and the return of American greatness.

But they have no connection to the work they will manage, or no experience in the work they will manage, or no experience managing large bureaucracies like the bureaucracies they will manage.

The future secretary of commerce is a billionaire.

The future secretary of the treasury is a billionaire.

The future secretary of the interior is a billionaire.

The future secretary of education is a billionaire.

The future special envoy to the Middle East is a billionaire.

The future director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) is a billionaire. (...)

The future deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism is a former Fox News regular and is banned from YouTube. He believes that violence is intrinsic to Islam. He wears the medal of the neo-Nazi Hungarian Order of Vitéz and was a supporter of the Magyar Gárda, a paramilitary group.

The future secretary of the navy has never been in the military, but he raised $12 million for the future president’s campaign at an event at his home in Aspen, where the future president warned that this ‘could be the last election we ever have’ if the ‘radical left-wing lunatics’ win.

The future ambassador to Israel is a Baptist minister and former Fox News host. He has said ‘there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.’

The future senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs is the father-in-law of the future president’s daughter.

The future special envoy to the Middle East is a frequent golf partner of the future president and has donated almost $2 million to his campaigns. He has close ties to Qatar.

The future ambassador to France, the father-in-law of another daughter of the future president, also donated $2 million to the campaign. He spent two years in prison for a number of offences, including hiring a prostitute to seduce and videotape his brother-in-law, who was going to testify against him. He will live in the luxurious Hôtel de Pontalba in Paris. (...)

The future White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser is allied with various white supremacist groups and is the most rabidly anti-immigrant member of the team. He believes ‘America is for Americans and Americans only,’ which means banning, among others, Muslims, refugees and university students from China, as well as deporting eleven million undocumented migrants. He was the architect of the policy of separating migrant children from their parents, and was seen gloating over photographs of children in cages. He has said that the Emma Lazarus poem (‘Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’) at the base of the Statue of Liberty was a later ‘woke’ addition that has nothing to do with American liberty. He considers the future president ‘a political genius’.

The future border tsar, a Fox News regular, implemented the family separation policy during the future president’s previous administration. He has initiated a project called ‘Defend the Border and Save Lives’ in collaboration with an anti-Muslim group, the United West. He has said: ‘I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen. They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.’

The future secretary of defence, a Fox News host, has called for an ‘American crusade’, ‘a holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom’, because the ‘irreconcilable differences between the left and the right in America ... cannot be resolved through the political process’. He claims there is a ‘cultural Marxist revolution ripping through the Pentagon’, epitomised by the US military slogan ‘Our diversity is our strength,’ which he says is the ‘dumbest phrase on planet Earth’. He warns that the invasion of Ukraine ‘pales in comparison’ to the threat of ‘wokeness’, for ‘this unholy alliance of political ideologues and Pentagon pussies has left our warriors without real defenders in Washington.’ ‘The next president of the United States needs to fire them all.’ He is opposed to Nato and the United Nations. He is known for drunken displays in which he rants against Muslims. Accused of rape, he paid the victim to remain silent. His mother once sent him an email saying that he is ‘despicable and abusive’ and asked: ‘Is there any sense of decency left in you?’ (...)

The future president is currently selling caps, wrapping paper, blankets, football jerseys, boat flags, pickleball paddles, necklaces, earrings, silk ties, chopping boards, Christmas decorations, slippers, tie clips, door mats, aprons, pyjamas, socks, Advent calendars, Christmas stockings, mugs, keychains, sweatshirts, note cards, bracelets, scented candles, beach bags, flip-flops, bathrobes, towels, sunglasses, corkscrews, water bottles, stickers, jogging pants, wine and champagne glasses, earbuds, hoodies, jelly beans, cookies, chocolates, honey, jewellery boxes, whiskey decanters, trays, wallets, flasks, wines, coasters, umbrellas, golf bags, plates, ashtrays, sports bras and dog leashes – all with his name on them.

Also available are a $100,000 gold watch, a $11,000 autographed guitar, digital trading card NFTs featuring the future president in heroic historic tableaux, God Bless the USA Bibles, Never Surrender High-Top Sneakers, Fight Fight Fight Cologne for Men (‘For patriots who never back down’) and a celebratory Victory Cologne, which comes in a bottle in the shape of the future president’s head.

The future secretary of state had previously called the future president a ‘con artist’, a ‘Third World strongman’, ‘the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency’, ‘a person that has no ideas of any substance’ and a ‘guy with the worst spray tan in America’ who wets his pants. He now says: ‘I didn’t know him as a person.’

by Eliot Weinberger, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Can't wait for all the greatness. But then I thought... really? They can't all be billionaires. Sure enough, they aren't. Just almost billionaires. See also: The rich are controlling our government (Elysian):]

***

"Importantly: Both sides feature a lot of very wealthy people and organizations, making it highly likely that our government will always favor their interests rather than the interests of the American people at large. The parties themselves are effectively just a pool of wealthy donors. In 2024, the Republican National Committee was funded by JPMorgan and American Financial Group. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) was funded by Microsoft and Alphabet (Google). Sequoia Capital contributed to both the RNC ($1.3 million) and Kamala Harris’ campaign ($8.8 million), making sure their interests were represented no matter which candidate reaches office.

This is why many believe that America is no longer a democracy, but an oligarchy puppeted by wealthy individuals and organizations who will always fix the economy and our tax policies in their favor. Elite donors function like kingmakers, funding candidates during primary campaigns and making introductions that ensure that only those aligned with their interests make it to general elections. By the time a candidate makes it onto a ballot, they are already sufficiently donor-captured. And by the time American citizens vote on them, we are choosing between two candidates who both represent elite interests more than American interests. When those candidates finally make it into office, their wealthy donors have a lot of power over the policies that get put into place and are even appointed to positions of power.

Rapa Nui

Image: Getty
[ed. How societies collapse. "Civilisations die from suicide, not from murder" ~ Arnold Toynbee.]

Bad Influence

Alyssa Sheil has what some would consider a dream job: she shops online for a living. Every day, an Amazon delivery truck pulls up to her home to drop off jewelry, handbags, desk chairs, fake plants, and transparent birdhouses that allow you to see the inhabitants make a home inside. So many packages arrive in a week that she doesn’t know the exact number when I ask.

Some of these items suck. The ones that don’t might eventually make it into one of Sheil’s videos, shared to her more than 430,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram with titles like “Amazon summer shoe haul,” “ASMR Amazon vacay jewelry unboxing,” and “Amazon kitchen finds I’m obsessed with.” (...)

Sheil runs what is essentially a one-woman marketing operation, making product recommendations, trying on outfits, and convincing people to buy things they often don’t really need. Every time someone purchases something using her affiliate link, she gets a kickback. Shopping influencers like her have figured out how to build a career off someone else’s impulse buys. (...)

But all of this — the videos, the big house, her earnings — could come crashing down: Sheil is currently embroiled in a court case centered on the very content that is her livelihood, a Texas lawsuit in which she is being sued for damages that could reach into the millions. (...)

The next day, I fly to meet with Sydney Nicole Gifford, 24, the Amazon influencer that is suing Sheil, at her home outside of Minneapolis.

Gifford and her mother, Laura, greet me at the door. They are enthusiastic and inviting. Stepping inside, I am overwhelmed by a familiar palette: alarmingly neutral, not a single speck of color in sight. The house is still and silent, a vessel for content creation. In other words, it’s like I never left Sheil’s house — someone just shuffled the pieces around and plopped me onto a different set. (...)

In her lawsuit, Gifford alleges that Sheil copied her, down to specific frames in videos. She claims that repeated pattern and Sheil’s uncannily similar content ultimately cut into Gifford’s own earnings. The similarities extend, in Gifford’s telling, beyond just video content to eerie real-life aspects like her manner of speaking, appearance, and even tattoos.

Walking through the space, I can’t help but recognize a few furniture items that I also saw in Sheil’s home, which I had visited the day before: cream bouclé stools that double as storage; a curved full-length mirror propped up in the corner; a set of circular nesting tables that appear often in both her and Sheil’s videos.

In another world, these two parallel lives could go on indefinitely, accented by the same cream furniture, without crossing paths. But the same systems that make the careers of Sheil and Gifford possible — fine-tuned recommendation algorithms, affiliate marketing, fast fashion and cheap home goods — are now entangling them in a legal battle around ownership, style, and the creator industry.

So, who influenced whom?

In a complaint filed in the Western District of Texas this spring, Gifford accuses Sheil of “willful, intentional, and purposeful” copyright infringement in dozens of posts across platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Gifford says there’s been a pattern of copying: days or weeks after she would share photos or videos promoting an Amazon product, Sheil shared her own content doing the same thing. In dozens of cases, Gifford says the angle, tone, or the text on Sheil’s posts ripped off hers. Exhibits submitted in court include nearly 70 pages of side-by-side screenshots collected by Gifford comparing her social media posts, personal website, and other platforms where she says Sheil copied her. In one instance, Gifford promoted gold earrings in the shape of a bow, modeling them by gently swooping her hair back to show them off. Just a few days later, Sheil posted her own photos of the same earrings, similarly photographed. In another example submitted to the court, Gifford unboxes and tries on a white two-piece top and short set; a few weeks later, Sheil did the same. The pattern continued for around a year, Gifford alleges.

“It’s obviously very frustrating because I put a lot of time and effort into my business. I work very hard at what I do, and I love what I do,” Gifford says. “It felt like somebody took a piece of my business and is profiting off of it as their own.”

Despite how inescapably ubiquitous the influencer industry has become, there are relatively few norms and laws governing creators. What regulations do exist are poorly enforced. The rates that influencers command vary widely; creators, especially those with smaller followings, are left to their own devices as they negotiate with enormous corporations. Efforts at collective action or unionizing have mostly fallen flat. Laws around sponsored content and copyright exist, but creators bend or even ignore rules regularly. And although influencers are — naturally — influential, there remains a pervasive cultural stigma around their labor: influencers are seen as vapid, and their jobs are considered easy. The upshot is that the general public often has little sympathy for this group of workers, even though they are often exploited, and so they remain unprotected. When things go wrong for an influencer, it is risky to direct blame toward the corporations they cut deals with and close to impossible to direct it toward the audiences that rationalize their entire existence. Influencers may turn on other influencers not so much out of a desire for attention as it is a direct result of the material conditions under which they work. A case like the one between Gifford and Sheil, in other words, was a long time coming. (...)

Sheil denies she copied Gifford, whether that’s specific videos and products, her appearance, her content style, or her digital presence across different sites. “[Gifford’s] ‘look’ is not original,” Sheil’s attorneys write in a response filed to the court. “For that matter, on that front, neither is Sheil’s.”

Her response to Gifford’s suit opens with a quote attributed to Kim Kardashian, though its origin seems dubious: “People only rain on your parade because they’re jealous of your sun and tired of their shade.” It was Gifford that did the copying, Sheil alleges — not her.

Sheil and Gifford have a similar online persona and aesthetic, apart from just the neutral, minimal houses. They both have long, shiny hair that’s often set in gentle curls or slicked back into a bun. They opt for uncomplicated clothing like fitted tank tops and T-shirts, oversize sweat suits, and chunky off-white sneakers, paired with gold-toned rings, necklaces, and earrings. Their makeup is fresh and glowy, their nails are perfectly manicured, and they make fancy-looking drinks in their spotless white kitchens.

They are what the internet calls “clean girls.”

The “clean girl” is an image, a vibe, a genre — one that promotes self-care, comfort, and looking put-together. The most famous clean girl is perhaps Hailey Bieber, and there are countless explainers, tutorials, think pieces, and critiques of the trending aesthetic online. (There is a fairly obvious slippery slope when you categorize people as pure or virtuous based on how they look — especially when components of the look were originally established in non-white communities.) Minimal makeup and smooth hair alone are not enough to be a clean girl — clean girls have perfect white bedsheets, tidy homes with natural light, and of course, spend a lot of time bathing. Sheil’s and Gifford’s content does not align exactly with all of these tropes of the genre, but it is undeniably appealing to the same audience. Their homes, physical appearance, and implied lifestyle are meant to be aspirational. (...)

Amazon influencers like Gifford and Sheil don’t make content just to inspire people. They post on TikTok and Instagram to redirect audiences back to Amazon. In some ways, it is the most ruthless version of influencer marketing, where every item appearing onscreen is an opportunity for micro-earnings. Amazon declined to provide data on the number of people in its influencer program or how much money the company has paid out. That the company ultimately profiting from the sale is one of the largest retailers in the world makes the whole enterprise a bit off-putting — an empire built on fast, largely low-quality products that look great in photos but come from faceless companies that manufacture mountains of crap, much of which will eventually end up in a landfill. These are not vintage Jean Royère wool armchairs (which sold for $460,000 at auction, according to Christie’s); they are $800 decent-looking dupes that give the impression of luxury. If the argument is that Sheil is duplicating Gifford’s existence, there’s something to be said about the fact that the items both of them promote are also imitations of someone else’s work. (...)

“The really hard part for the plaintiffs in this case is to prove that in these photos and videos there is something protectable by copyright — that there is creativity going on here that was copied,” says Blake Reid, associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Boulder. The photos in question are relatively banal: images of a figure wearing generic clothing; a shot of a desk with a chair tucked in halfway. Sheil’s lawyers argue that the imagery Gifford claims was ripped off is actually just standard fare for influencer content that reappears again and again and which nobody can lay claim to — it’s the Amazon haul equivalent of swinging saloon doors in a country Western film, Reid explains. (...)

Reid says the outcome of Gifford’s lawsuit will depend on whether a judge or jury takes influencer content seriously as a creative endeavor. On one hand, it could be framed as “low-value commercial content” that all looks the same, in which case Gifford’s lawsuit could be seen as an attempt to lay claim to a template of mass-produced marketing — something that copyright law isn’t really for. But a judge might see influencer content as having enough creative weight to merit bringing copyright law into the picture.

“It depends a lot on what judge lands this, how they perceive it, [and] how it gets framed in the litigation,” he says.

“This is federal law with giant amounts of money on the line, coming in and regulating these nascent creative spaces where the rules and the social norms are just getting hashed out,” Reid says. “And then somebody’s like, ‘How about we bring this giant sledgehammer of copyright law in to sort it all out?’”

by Mia Sato, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: Montinique Monroe and Liam James Doyle
[ed. Interesting legals, inane profession, obnoxious Amazon incentives. See also: This Ocean Wave Has Rights (legal protection for nature - Nautilus). ]

The Best Free Way to Get Around a Paywall to Read an Article (and a Few More Methods to Try)

Over the past several years, countless websites have added paywalls. This means if you want to read their articles, you have to sign up and pay a monthly subscription fee. Some sites have a “metered” paywall—meaning you can read a certain number of articles for free before they ask for money—and others have a hard paywall, where you’ll have to pay to read even one article.

Paywalls are mostly a thing with news websites, largely because relying on advertising income alone isn’t a viable strategy anymore, and news companies are pursuing more direct revenue sources, like monthly subscriptions. Of course, paywalls aren’t entirely a bad thing—it’s wonderful to support journalism you find valuable, so by all means, if you can afford to pay to read articles, you absolutely should. If nothing else, I hope you support the websites that you read regularly—especially your friendly local news outlet.

But whether you lost your password, haven’t saved it on your phone, are in a rush, or are just strapped for cash and promise yourself that you’ll subscribe later, there are many ways to bypass paywalls on the internet—including one that has been my go-to for the past year or so.

You may be able to use some of these methods successfully today, but that could change in the future as websites clamp down on bypass methods. But if you can’t right now, here is my most-trusted way to bypass paywalls online, and a few more you can try. (This article is regularly updated as some methods stop working and others pop up.)

Archive.today is the best, most reliable option for bypassing paywalls

Archive.today is the fastest, most reliable way to quickly bypass a paywall that I've found, and I've been using it successfully for the past year across a wide range of sites. It's a site that will create an archived version of any website you paste into the search bar. (Think of an archived version like taking a screenshot of any website with a time stamp—a self-described “time capsule,” if you will.) Archive.today “saves a text and a graphical copy of the page for better accuracy” and gives you a short link to an unalterable record of any web page. Yes, yes—but as a bonus, you can often use this functionality to bypass a paywall and read an entire paywalled article without issue.

Just paste your article link into the black “I want to search the archive for saved snapshots” bar and you'll be taken to a page where you can view earlier archived versions. If the article you’re trying to bypass isn’t already archived, then put the URL into the red “My URL is alive and I want to archive its content” bar. The site will then begin generating the archived version, which usually only takes a few minutes. You'll be sent straight to this archived version once it's ready, and you can come back to it later by copying the new URL from your browser's nav bar.

You can also add browser extension to Chrome that will create a button in your browser toolbar you can click to instantly create an archived of any web page. The archived version will even automatically open up in a new tab.

I've only had this site fail me once or twice. Usually, there's already an existing archived version for anything I want to read, but creating a new one only takes a minute or two. Still, if it doesn't work, try the next option.

More free, easy methods to try to get around a paywall

Use 12ft.io

12ft.io is a simple website created with the sole purpose of breaking through paywalls—and like Archive.today, it's simple to use: Simply paste the paywalled link in the text field and hit “Submit.” (Alternately, you can type “https://12ft.io/” before the URL in your browser bar.) The site will then show you the cached, “unpaywalled version” of the page. The only problem is that the site doesn't always work on all websites (The Wall Street Journal being a notable example; I also can't get it to show me anything from Crain's Chicago Business). If you get the “access denied” message, try another method on this list. (...)

More complex solutions to your paywall problems

If you're willing to try solutions that are a little more technical than a mere copy and paste, one of these options might work for you.

Disable JavaScript in your browser

Some websites use JavaScript to hide content behind paywalls, and you can circumvent those blocks by disabling JavaScript in your browser. Note that disabling JavaScript can (and will) break most websites—some may not let you view comments, while others may not load at all. But it’s worth trying if you just need to read the content of the post.

Ideally, you’d use a separate browser for this so that you don’t have to keep enabling and disabling JavaScript. Once you’ve chosen your secondary browser, check out our guide to disabling JavaScript in various ones.

Use a VPN

Some paywalled sites, like The Washington Post, will let you read a limited number of articles for free each month, then throw up the wall once you've hit the limit. You can use a VPN to change up your IP address and trick the site into giving you more freebies. This method won't help you on sites that don't offer any free access, but it's worth trying, and will work with both paid and free VPNs. (...)

Edit a couple of elements on the webpage

If you understand a bit of HTML and CSS, you can edit elements using your browser to go past some paywalls. Essentially, you’re editing the page to remove the banners that lock content behind a subscription. It’s a lot like opening the curtains to reveal the nice view outside your window.

It works with some websites, but others have added a hard block that reveals the article only if you’ve signed in with a paid account. Still, it’s worth trying once to see if it works:

On any website, right-click the banner just below the last visible sentence of the article and select Inspect Element. This will open up a console where you can search for the offending elements and hide or change them. The exact element varies from site to site, but it’s often labeled display, paywall, or subscribe. Here’s a neat GIF on Reddit that shows you how to get it done.

by Pranay Parab and Joel Cunningham, Life Hacker | Read more:
Image: Ian Moore/Joel Cunningham
[ed. I've found Cookie Remover and Quick Javascript Switcher to be pretty good solutions for most sites, either singly or in combination. Then again, some walls seem made out of titanium. And for the brave: How to Browse the Dark Web (LH).]

A.I., the Electricians and the Boom Towns of Central Washington

East Wenatchee, Wash. — The tangy smell of Buffalo wings filled Side Chicks Sport Bar, as a dozen electricians crammed their big frames into booths. It was Tuesday night in East Wenatchee, Washington, and “brotherhood night” for the electrical union. Out-of-towners and locals swapped notes on who was coming and going, when new jobs were starting and what drama had gone down with a foreman.

Sean Nickell, 32, and Chris Bennett, 35, sat in a booth below a television blaring a Seattle Mariners baseball game. For years, they had followed each other to job sites around the country without knowing it. “I have just met this man all of a monthish ago, and the parallels are horrifying,” Bennett deadpanned.

They were here to build data centers, the brawny concrete buildings with HVAC systems the size of tractor-trailers that power the new artificial intelligence systems that the tech industry believes are the key to its future — and perhaps the future of the entire economy.

Electricity is the lifeblood of technology. And perhaps more than any computer technology that has come before it, building AI needs vast amounts of computing and the electrical power to make that happen.

So electricians are flocking to regions around the country that, at least for now, have power to spare. These traveling electricians are transforming the sagebrush here in central Washington, with substations going up on orchards and farmland. Hundreds have come to a triangle of counties tied together by hydropower dams along the Columbia River. They are chasing overtime and bonuses, working 60-hour weeks that can allow them to make as much as $2,800 a week after taxes.

For all the hype over $100,000 chips and million-dollar engineers, the billions pouring into the infrastructure of AI is being built by former morticians, retired pro football linebackers, single moms, two dudes described as Gandalf in overalls, onetime bouncers and a roving legend known as Big Job Bob.

AI is shaping up to be the kind of economy-bending force that inevitably creates winners and losers. That’s true locally, where the construction work will eventually slow down and the region will land on a new normal. But what the new normal turns out to be is anyone’s guess.

Bennett was from Erin, Tennessee, a “middle-of-nowhere” town, where an electrician he trained under suggested traveling because he could earn more, build more and see that there was more to this world than just Tennessee.

In nearby Quincy, where data centers started going up about 15 years ago for the internet boom that came before today’s AI boom, rumor has it that a local farmer sold his land for a data center and bought three Porsches — one red, one white, one blue. The agricultural town is rich, though most residents are not. It has a gleaming new high school, built with property taxes that one union official described as “straight-up data center money.” Still, 4 out of 5 students are eligible for free lunch.

The poverty rate for the district has inched down over the past decade, but how far it goes — and whether the opportunities outweigh the rising costs of living — is another open question.

In Washington, the work is all union, a condition of a state tax break that has saved the tech companies almost half a billion dollars. And the electrician union — the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers — is stretched: Microsoft alone has said it will need 2,300 electricians in the coming years. The union plans to train hundreds more apprentices.

Nickell and his wife, a medical imaging technician, have been on the road full time for six years. “We should be able to retire when I’m 43, 45,” he shrugged. “Something like that.”

By 7:30 p.m., Side Chicks was emptying out. Work started at dawn.

From the Ice Age to the Age of AI

Tumbleweeds the size of trash cans blew across the road as Alex Ybarra, a state representative, steered his black SUV through Quincy, population 8,315. His grandparents began cycling through this dead, flat land in the 1950s as farmworkers. Eventually, they stayed. For decades, his mother trimmed potatoes at the French fry factory that supplied McDonald’s.

Ybarra left for college, and eventually came back and worked at the local utility. “See all these streets?” he said, driving past the pink Mexican mercado and under power lines. Many roads were just gravel, “and there was no sidewalks anywhere, even downtown.”

That the modern internet would be powered from the sagebrush of central Washington dates back partly to the cataclysmic floods at the end of the last ice age.

As the climate warmed, a miles-wide ice dam on a glacial lake near Missoula, Montana, repeatedly failed, sending water whooshing downhill. With more force than all the world’s rivers combined, the water took just two days to haul through Washington and Oregon, bursting out to the Pacific Ocean. The floods carved narrow, vertically walled canyons that provided a tantalizing source of hydropower a century ago.

But the region, sparse and poor, could not afford dams. Around 1955, George Washington’s great-great-great-great grandnephew, a lawyer for the utility, helped broker a deal: The region’s richer areas helped fund dam construction, but in return locked in cheap hydropower for half a century.

When the deal expired in 2005, the timing could not have been better. The utility could keep more cheap, clean electricity for itself, just as big technology companies were starting to build data centers for their online businesses.

“When the data centers said, ‘We need energy,’” Ybarra recalled, “We said, ‘Oh yeah, we got plenty.’”

Microsoft bought about 75 acres of bean fields in Quincy the next year. (...)

In 2006, Washington State enacted its first sales tax break for data centers to encourage construction. For years, there had been handshake agreements to build with union workers, Mr. Hepner said. “It worked for a while, but corporations do what corporations do, trying to cut costs.”

When the tax breaks came up again in 2022, “we were like, ‘It stops right now or this tax exemption goes away,’” said Mr. Hepner, who had lobbied for the union.

But tax breaks pale in importance to finding power, land and labor. Four of the largest tech companies spent more than $200 billion in the last year on capital expenses, largely to build new data centers. They’re expected to spend just as much or more next year.

“I can’t think of a site selection or placement decision that was decided on a set of tax incentives,” said Bo Williams, the executive responsible for Microsoft’s data centers in North America.

The data centers spread west from Quincy to the dusty hillsides of East Wenatchee, then, recently, down the Columbia River to tiny Malaga, using transmission lines that fed a shuttered aluminum plant. The three clusters are strategic: Each is in a different county, with its own utility and power supply. There are already about 50 data center buildings, and more than 1,500 electricians working in the region.

Central Washington is just one of dozens of “hot spots” on Where2Bro.com, an unofficial bible for traveling electricians. The site lists gigs in Indiana, Iowa, Georgia, Texas and beyond, all booming as tech companies crawl the electrical grid for supply. Take the note from the union’s Local 124, based in Kansas City. “WORK IN LU 124 SHOULD BE EXCELLENT FOR SEVERAL YEARS TO COME,” it blared. “WILL NEED HELP FROM OUR TRAVELING BROTHERS AND SISTERS TO MAN IT.” 

by Karen Weise, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jovelle Tamayo
[ed. I live about 40 miles from Quincy and have been through three booms in my life: the early 60s tourism boom in Hawaii; the post-Alaska pipeline boom and Prudhoe Bay oil extravaganza; and the Exxon Valdez oil spill cleanup and settlement windfall. All I can say is, things are going to change, permanently, and not necessarily for the better (or worse). In the short-term, you might expect communities to be overun by transient workers with little connection to the local culture or sense of place (and the usual problems - increased drugs, prostitution, crime, lack of housing, overburdened services, etc). But, long-term, if you don't have a good plan in place or a secure vision for what you want your community/state to become, it'll be a free-for-all and a lot of money will just get wasted or blown on useless stuff. Usually people just go crazy for a while. How long that lasts and what's left after is the question.]

Why The Long Kiss Goodnight is a Great Alt-Christmas Movie

Everyone has their favorite film that serves as alternative Christmas movie fare, with Die Hard (1988) and Lethal Weapon (1987) typically topping the list—at least when all you want for Christmas is buddy-cop banter, car chases, shootouts, and glorious explosions. (Massive gratuitous property damage is a given.) I love me some Lethal Weapon but it's high time to give some holiday love to another great action flick set during the Christmas season: The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), starring Geena Davis as an amnesiac school teacher who turns out to have been a government assassin in her former life.

At the time, Davis was married to director Renny Harlin, coming off a disastrous showing for their previous collaboration, Cutthroat Island (1995), which remains one of the biggest box office bombs of all time. (It is indeed a pretty bad movie.) But Shane Black's smart, savvy script for The Long Kiss Goodnight seemed like the perfect next project for them; it was promising enough that New Line Cinema bought it for what was then a record $4 million.

Davis plays Samantha Caine, a small-town school teacher in Honesdale, PA, who has no memory since washing up on a beach eight years earlier with a head injury. Since then, she's given birth to a daughter, Caitlin (Yvonne Zima) and moved in with a kind-hearted fellow teacher named Hal (Tom Amandes). She's hired various private investigators to find out her true identity, but only the low-rent Mitch Henessey (Samuel L. Jackson) is still on the case. Then Mitch's assistant, Trin (Meloina Kanakaredes), finally finds some useful information—just in time, too, since Sam is attacked at home by a criminal named One-Eyed Jack (Joseph McKenna), who broke out of prison to exact revenge after recognizing Sam during her appearance as Mrs. Claus in the town's annual Christmas parade.

This coincides with Sam starting to recover fragments of her memory after a car accident following a holiday party. She'd already thought she might be a chef because of newly emerged expert knife skills. (The moment where she tosses a tomato in the air, skewers it into the wall with a kitchen knife, and nonchalantly says to her shocked partner and child, "Chefs do that," is priceless.) But when she ruthlessly snaps the neck of One-Eyed Jack in her kitchen—pausing afterward to lick blood off her fingers—it's clear that chef doesn't quite cover her unique skill set.

Mitch and Sam embark on a harrowing road trip to follow up on the newly unearthed clues to her past identity, which leads them to Dr. Nathan Waldman (Brian Cox, in a performance dripping with sardonic grumpiness). She learns her true name is Charlene "Charly" Baltimore, an assassin for the US government—and Waldman should know, since he trained her. (...)

Yes, there are some cheesy elements and the film's action is frequently over-the-top—but not any more so than countless other hugely popular action movies, particularly those from the 1980s and 1990s. It's all that wickedly sharp dialogue, expert pacing, and strong performances from the cast that makes the movie fire on all cylinders. Anchoring it all is the bickering dynamic and powerful bond between Sam/Charly and Mitch. Davis and Jackson have undeniable on-screen chemistry—an essential ingredient for any successful buddy-cop action film—and both are clearly relishing their respective roles.

It's a Christmas movie because it takes place at Christmas—plus all those traditional holiday trappings frequently figure into the plot in small, clever ways. (Do be aware it's R-rated if you have young children.) And of course there is a happy ending, although in an early cut, Mitch died saving Sam and her daughter. But during a test screening an audience member hollered, "You can't kill Sam Jackson!" And the studio wisely reconsidered. 

by Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica | Read more:

Image: New Line Cinema

[ed. Because nothing says Christmas like a murder mystery. I'll probably skip this one, but here you go.]

Cutting Government Is Easy... If You Go After McKinsey

"What the extreme socialist favors because of his creed,” wrote New Deal Antitrust Division chief Robert Jackson in 1938, “the extreme capitalist favors, because of his greed."

Jackson was FDR’s favorite lawyer, and he later ended up on the Supreme Court, after a stint leading prosecutions of Nazi officials at Nuremberg. And his fear, like that of most populists for hundreds of years, was the conjoined power of the state and corporations, the centralization of control in the hands of distant masters. Whether done for well-meaning reasons or for lusty greed was less important than the concentration itself.

Suspicion of Big Government and Big Business, or their combination, is about this singular dynamic. As Jackson’s heir, current antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter echoed this view in his recent farewell speech, “When companies larger, wealthier and more powerful than most world governments threaten individual liberty with coercive private taxation and regulation,” he said “it threatens our way of life.” It doesn’t matter if it’s government or business engaged in tyranny, the moral consequence of a malevolent governing power is the same.

In many ways, the anger that Donald Trump is bringing to bear, with the President-elect asking Elon Musk to cut $2 trillion of government spending through the “Department of Government Efficiency,” is taking advantage of this fear. Now, the reason I’m writing about DOGE is because a few days ago, Congress was on the verge of passing legislation to fund the government, and as part of that legislation, to restrict pharmacy benefit managers and block junk fees. Musk and Trump, however, alleged government waste, and thwarted these disruptive new laws.

This move, though it will be framed as shaking things up, is just a rehash of what we’ve seen for decades. One of the games we’ve seen from conservatives since the “New Right” elections of 1978, and through the Tea Party, and now under Trump this week, is masquerading as a disruptor, while enacting standard pro-Wall Street policy. But I think a reasonable question is as follows. What would it actually look like to take on this fusion of corporate and governing power that Americans despise?

After all, while the failure to pass populist laws was disappointing, it is worth considering why Americans think there’s massive waste and tyranny in the institutions that govern them, and why they elected someone to cut through it.

So here’s the simple way to slice through the bloat we see all around us. It’s not easy, because it would require a genuine commitment to taking on the enormously powerful people who benefit from the status quo. But it is simple to understand, and in explaining it, I hope it will also explain what Americans really want done by their new leaders.

The Collusion Tax

There are plenty of studies showing massive government waste, but it’s not in the Federal workforce. It’s in procurement, the place where the government buys from the private sector, everything from pencils to software to nuclear submarines. The government spends about $750 billion a year on contracts. How much of this money is wasted?

It turns out, the answer is a lot.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) points out that about a fifth of it is stolen by contractors through bid rigging, the so-called “Collusion tax.” Collusion is when contractors get together in groups and conspire on their bids so that the government overpays for goods and services. According to the OECD, “The elimination of bid rigging could help reduce procurement prices by 20% or more.”

If you take $750 billion, just in Federal procurement spending, that’s $150 billion a year of pure overpayment, due to this one form of crime. There are other boring reports saying something similar. Earlier this year, for instance the Government Accountability Office published a report on fraud, showing the government loses between $233 billion to $521 billion on fraud.

That’s a lot of money. There are plenty of ways to get at it, two of them being to increase penalties against fraud and collusion, and shift law enforcement resources from silly things like disinformation monitoring to investigating contractor fraud. I don’t think that’ll happen, the Republicans and Donald Trump are dead set on defunding the tax cops, aka the IRS, and that’s a key agency in taking on this kind of fraud. But they could.

Still, there’s an even easier approach to taking on the problem. Go after McKinsey and management consultants throughout the Federal government.

5% of Government Spending Goes to Consultants

Why take on management consultants? Well, for starters, the government spends far too much on people giving it advice. In it's 2024 budget, the Biden administration requested $70 billion for management consulting, aka “professional services,” which is 5% of all discretionary spending. The Defense Department alone asked for $32.9 billion. So just cutting all management consulting would be a big chunk of savings.

by Matt Stollar, BIG |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. "The total payroll of the federal government is about $110 billion a year [ed. Personnel]. Federal government spending was $6.1 trillion. You cannot meaningfully shrink the federal government by firing “unelected bureaucrats.”

What is money spent on? Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are 45%. Defense and debt payments are 28%. The VA, education and transportation are 15%. SNAP, UI, child nutrition, and the earned income tax credit are 7.5%. The remainder is stuff like military pensions. (...)

What this means is that if you want to save money, you need to be talking about *how to provide important benefits more efficiently.* How can we provide similar quality healthcare at lower cost? NOT, “we are going to get rid of a bunch of stuff no one wants in the first place.” 

~ Jason Abaluck, Professor of Economics/Yale University. See: here and here.

[UPDATE]: [ed. From the silver lining dept, here's a DOGE benefit I hadn't thought about but that might actually be useful. Employing AI to analyze regulatory intent vs. regulatory implementation vs. regulatory evolution/application, vs. regulatory law definitions/challenges/impediments. From Jennifer Pahlkah's Eating Policy substack -
Um, Congress, you might want to take a look at this:

***

"Last Friday’s post got a lot of very insightful comments. In response to one comment about the potential of using AI to break through the wall of complex law and policy, darulharb writes:

That is, I suspect, exactly what they're doing right now [meaning DOGE]: spinning up the A.I. systems that will be tasked with taking a comprehensive and detailed look at both the legal and regulatory structure, and the expenditures. This is something that previous reform commissions never had the technical capability to attempt before, because the technology didn't exist. The most shocking thing I believe we'll see greater public awareness of because of DOGE is the degree to which even Congress doesn't know what is going on. 

This is likely spot on. The reality is that in many domains, the regulatory and spending complexity is such that it’s very hard for anyone to know what’s going on. You might think it’s Congress’s job to understand how the laws they’ve written have been operationalized, but that’s one of their chief complaints — that they don’t really understand what happens within the agency and they don’t always think it's consistent with their intentions. And the agencies themselves are dealing with the accretive nature of what comes down from Congress — new laws naturally reference and amend old laws, creating one confusing web of language. Then there’s the web of the regulations previous staff have written, not to mention the policies, forms, and processes that have been born from those regulations that seem to carry the weight of the law but are really somewhat arbitrary expressions of one way they could be operationalized. (...)

It may also significantly curtail their ability to understand their own work, both legislative and oversight, and act quickly, right as a potentially adversarial actor is emerging. Most commentary on DOGE has pitted it against the agencies it has vowed to drastically cut, but Congress is going to want to have a say in what they propose to do (...). In other words, if the budget passed by Congress says we’re spending this, we’re spending this, DOGE or Trump be damned. I have no idea how that is going to play out legally, but I do suspect that if DOGE has the tools my commenter thinks they probably already have at their disposal, one party in this brewing fight is going to have some significant advantages. Marci’s pacing problem frames the fast pace of change in society at large against a slow pace in government, but we may be about to see a massive pacing problem — a dramatic speed asymmetry — within government itself.]

Lyle Mays

[ed. Lyle. Gone too soon. Can you imagine someone with his gifts deciding to become a software development manager? People (and their motivations) are complex. Listen to him here (especially around the 5:00 mark).]

The Eddie, 2024

Barry Sweet has a front seat to the mass of humanity that descends on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, for the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational.

“If you watch from early morning until early afternoon, it’s like a pilgrimage,” he said of the crowds for the surf competition, better known as the Eddie.

Alongside his wife, Janelle, and her sister, Deann Sakuoka, he watches from the vantage point of Pupukea Grill, a food truck run by his family that is parked off the two-lane Kamehameha Highway, a 10-minute walk from Waimea Bay and one of the few restaurants within miles.

When the Eddie is called some 48 hours before the contest is set to begin, a prestigious list of invitees — 45 competitors and 25 alternates — begins scrambling. Surfers from Australia, Brazil, France, Italy, South Africa and Tahiti had a host of logistics to work out to make it to Waimea Bay in time on Sunday.

They are joined by tens of thousands of spectators who crowd a small strip of beach and the surrounding cliffs, many camping out as soon as the ubiquitous event is called. Kamehameha Highway, which hugs the bay, is clogged long before the sun comes up. It is the only road to and from the bay.

Like many big-wave competitions, the Eddie has a holding period that lasts for a few months, between mid-December and mid-March, meaning it could run at any point in that period if the conditions are right. But unlike most such events, the Eddie rarely happens, giving rise to the slogan “the bay calls the day.”

The face of the wave, the part of the wave that can be surfed, must reach heights of 40 feet, or the size of a four-story building. That’s unusual, and it’s rarer for those conditions to sustain a full day of competition.

This year’s conditions were created by a big storm that formed in the west Pacific Ocean, east of Japan, late on Thursday, said Kevin Wallis, director of forecasting at the surf forecasting website Surfline. It’s a Goldilocks-type scenario: If the storm had been too far away, the waves would have been too small. If the storm came too close, it could have brought bad wind and weather, he said.

The event was last held in January 2023, weeks after a false start sent dozens scrambling to the North Shore of Oahu before the competition was canceled because of changing conditions. In 2016, it was called off the morning of the event because of a swell change, and was eventually held weeks later.

The big-wave surfer Felicity Palmateer decided to begin her long journey from Perth, Australia before the event was even called. She has long chased unpredictable swells but she didn’t want to risk missing this event.

“It’s so much more than a surf contest,” she said.

It’s a sentiment echoed by surfers, like Ms. Palmateer, who are stepping into their first Eddie, and by veterans of the event like Peter Mel, a big-wave surfer who will be surfing his ninth Eddie, a remarkable accomplishment considering this is only the 11th time the contest is running.

“It’s a celebration of not just surfing itself but of the culture, of life-saving, of watermen, and the heritage of Hawaii,” Mr. Mel said.

The event was founded in 1984 to honor Eddie Aikau, a surfer from Hawaii and the first lifeguard on the North Shore of Oahu. He was revered as a surfer who would paddle into waves no one else would attempt, and he saved more than 500 people as a lifeguard.

In 1978, Mr. Aikau joined the crew of a canoe voyage retracing the ancient Polynesian migration route between Hawaii and Tahiti. The vessel, the Hokulea, capsized off the coast of Lanai hours after setting sail. Mr. Aikau took his surfboard and paddled toward shore to get help. The rest of the crew was rescued, but Mr. Aikau was never seen again.

Being invited to the event is a sign of respect and recognition from the Aikau family, and for many big wave surfers, it’s the pinnacle of their careers. Even if the event doesn’t run, an Aikau nod is equivalent to a trip to the Super Bowl.

by Talya Minsberg, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Brian Bielmann/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
[ed. See also (for a good sense of the vibe): Landon McNamara Wins the 2024 Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational (Yahoo News).]

John Steinbeck On Helicopter Pilots

On January 7, 1967, John Steinbeck was in Pleiku, where he boarded a UH-1 Huey helicopter with D Troop, 1st Squadron, 10th Cavalry. He wrote the following about the helicopter pilots:

“I wish I could tell you about these pilots. They make me sick with envy. They ride their vehicles the way a man controls a fine, well-trained quarter horse. They weave along stream beds, rise like swallows to clear trees, they turn and twist and dip like swifts in the evening. I watch their hands and feet on the controls, the delicacy of the coordination reminds me of the sure and seeming slow hands of (Pablo) Casals on the cello. They are truly musicians’ hands and they play their controls like music and they dance them like ballerinas and they make me jealous because I want so much to do it. Remember your child night dream of perfect flight free and wonderful? It’s like that, and sadly I know I never can. My hands are too old and forgetful to take orders from the command center, which speaks of updrafts and side winds, of drift and shift, or ground fire indicated by a tiny puff or flash, or a hit and all these commands must be obeyed by the musicians hands instantly and automatically. I must take my longing out in admiration and the joy of seeing it.

via:

[ed. I've flown hundreds of hours in helicopters and while most pilots have been extremely competent, a few were exceptionally so (and I always requested them if I could). Man and machine perfectly in sync. For example, landing on a rocky outcropping barely larger than the vessel itself, blades a hands-length from sheer rock wall; "skiing" down a miles-long glacier, 10 ft. above the undulating ice surface, going a hundred miles and hour; half-landing on cliffs, with skids balanced and hanging on the edge, engine powered up to keep from tumbling over backwards (that one was close). Just the sheer joy of feeling like a bird (or a bumble bee). And seeing some of the most beautiful and remote country at variable altitudes and pace (like an ice field stretching from horizon to horizon). Never got complacent about the exhilaration of it all, and at times wondered (like Mr. Steinbeck) if it would be possible to learn myself. But it's not a cheap (or even relatively affordable) undertaking and most pilots I knew came up through the military.]

Regulatory Capture

Cory Doctorow’s Vision for a Just Tech Revolution (Jacobin)

[ed. Covers a lot of territory, so here's just one example - regulatory capture. Obviously, many industries favor regulations if they can benefit from them, as most big players/monopolies do, especially if they're barriers to competition. Well worth a read for an overview of some technological issues we're facing today, not necessarily about what might be coming in the future (eg. AI). Also, to keep this from turning into another tech blog (yuk!), hopefully this'll be the last post of this type for awhile. Lots of things churning at the moment.]

Regulatory Capture

I think the first thing we need to understand is the relationship between market concentration and regulatory capture. The term regulatory capture has got a funny history. It comes out of some of the most unhinged elements of neoliberal economics. It was coined by public choice theorists who operate in a world of perfectly uniform cows that are perfectly spherical and have uniform density and move around on frictionless surfaces that never make any contact with the world.

According to public choice theory, because the state is the most powerful actor in most polities, successful firms will be those that are the most determined actors in seeking to usurp that power. They will go to incredible lengths to seize and harness that power, which other market participants won’t be able to match in terms of force and motivation. And so they’ll always win. And then they’ll use the power of the state to exclude new market entrants who would otherwise offer consumers a better deal. And so, we should just get rid of the state, right? The only way to prevent regulatory capture is to have no regulation. That’s the conclusion that the public choice people come to. But very clearly, this is not true.

When dining at a restaurant, we can reasonably expect not to fall victim to food poisoning, and the structural components supporting the roof above us usually remain intact. This suggests that we possess the knowledge and expertise to determine the appropriate types of steel, alloys, and construction methods for constructing a structurally sound building. Similarly, our antilock braking systems don’t routinely experience catastrophic failures when we apply the brakes, ensuring our safety while driving. In other words, we know how to make good regulation. It’s not some lost art like embalming pharaohs.

Regulatory capture primarily occurs in concentrated markets characterized by a small number of firms that, instead of competing, become very cozy with each other. And that means that they can extract lots of money. They have giant margins, and so they have lots of excess capital that they can spend on lobbying. And then — this is very crucial –—because they’re few in number, they can agree on what those regulations should be. So, they don’t sabotage each other. They have class solidarity. They solve the collective action problem that they would otherwise be plagued by.

As the tech sector has become increasingly concentrated — largely due to the abandonment of antitrust enforcement four decades ago— its tendency to monopoly has become more and more pronounced. At the same time, every presidential administration has become more lenient about the tech sector’s monopoly (until the current one, which has made a sharp reversal of it, which is very important). So, because we let them become very concentrated, they captured the regulators, and they were able to make policies that do two things.

The first is they were able to forestall policy that prevents them from exploiting the wonderful flexibility of digital technologies to do bad things to us. They’ve effectively exempted themselves from labor, consumer protection, and privacy law. And we’re all familiar with this, right? “It’s not a labor violation if you do it with an app.” On the other hand, they have managed to stop any of us or any new market entrant — whether that’s workers or co-ops or nonprofits or startups or large firms — from using that same digital flexibility. They have managed to protect themselves from all the gimmicks that the tech sector is able to use to abuse us as consumers, as workers, and as citizens.

It’s a perfect storm: an intensely concentrated tech sector and regulatory capture. Because the tech sector captures its regulators, it is able to enjoy wide latitude in using the flexibility of digital tools to do us harm. And because it’s captured those regulators, it’s able to prevent anyone, be they fellow members of the ruling class, capitalists or would be feudalist, but also workers, consumers, and activists, from using those same flexibilities to resist them. That’s the airtight bubble they’ve built. (...)

Deb Chachra is a leftist material scientist. She has a book coming out in mid-November called How Infrastructure Works. And it’s a very good book about what infrastructure means, because infrastructure never amortizes over the life of the people who build it. That’s kind of one of the defining characteristics of infrastructure. Infrastructure is always an act of solidarity with people who aren’t born yet, and infrastructure always requires planning that goes beyond what markets can accomplish. 

by David Moscrop and Cory Doctorow, Jacobin |  Read more:

Image: Peter Dazeley/Getty Images

The Line

The emergence of technologically-created artificial entities marks a moment where society must defend or redefine "the line" that distinguishes persons and non-persons.

There is a line. It is the line that separates persons— entities with moral and legal rights— from nonpersons, things, animals, machines— stuff we can buy, sell, or destroy. In moral and legal terms, it is the line between subject and object. If I have a chicken, I can sell it, eat it, or dress it in Napoleonic finery. It is, after all, my chicken. Even if eating meat were banned for moral reasons, no one would think the chicken should be able to vote or own property. It is not a person. If I choose to turn off Apple’s digital assistant Siri, we would laugh if “she” pleaded to be allowed to remain active on my phone. The reason her responses are “cute” is because they sound like something a person would say, but we know they come from a machine. We live our lives under the assumption of this line. Even to say “we” is to conjure it up. But how do we know, and how should we choose, what is inside and what is outside? 

This book is about that line and the challenges that this century will bring to it. I hope to convince you of three things. First, our culture, morality, and law will have to face new challenges to what it means to be human, or to be a legal person— and those two categories are not the same. A variety of synthetic entities ranging from artificial intelligences to genetically engineered human- animal hybrids or chimeras are going to force us to confront what our criteria for humanity and also for legal personhood are and should be. 

Second, we have not thought adequately about the issue, either individually or as a culture. As you sit there right now, can you explain to me which has the better claim to humanity or personhood: a thoughtful, brilliant, apparently self- aware computer or a chimp- human hybrid with a large amount of human DNA? Are you even sure of your own views, let alone what society will decide? 

Third, the debate will not play out in the way that you expect. We already have “artificial persons” with legal rights— they are called corporations. You probably have a view on whether that is a good thing. Is it relevant here? And what about those who claim that life begins at conception? Will the pro- life movement embrace or reject an Artificial Intelligence or a genetic hybrid? Will your religious beliefs be a better predictor of your opinions, or will the amount of science fiction you have watched or read? 

For all of our alarms, excursions, and moral panics about artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, we have devoted surprisingly little time to thinking about the possible personhood of the new entities this century will bring us. We agonize about the effect of artificial intelligence on employment, or the threat that our creations will destroy us. But what about their potential claims to be inside the line, to be “us,” not machines or animals but, if not humans, then at least persons, deserving all the moral and legal respect that any other person has by virtue of their status? Our prior history in failing to recognize the humanity and legal personhood of members of our own species does not exactly fill one with optimism about our ability to answer the question well off- the- cuff. 

In the 1780s, the British Society for the Abolition of Slavery had as its seal a picture of a kneeling slave in chains, surrounded by the words “Am I not a man and a brother?” Its message was simple and powerful. Here I am, a person, and yet you treat me as a thing, as property, as an animal, as something to be bought, sold, and bent to your will. What do we say when the genetic hybrid or the computer- based intelligence asks us the very same question? Am I not a man— legally, a person— and a brother? And yet what if this burst of sympathy takes us in exactly the wrong direction, leading us to anthropomorphize a clever chatbot, or think a genetically engineered mouse is human because it has large amounts of human DNA? What if we empathetically enfranchise Artificial Intelligences who proceed to destroy our species? Imagine a malicious, superintelligent computer network, Skynet, interfering in, or running, our elections. It would make us deeply nostalgic for the era when all we had to worry about was Russian hackers. 

The questions run deeper. Are we wrong even to discuss the subject, let alone to make comparisons to prior examples of denying legal personality to humans? Some believe that the invocation of “robot rights” is, at best, a distraction from real issues of injustice, mere “First World philosophical musings, too disengaged from actual affairs of humans in the real world.” Others go further, arguing that only human interests are important and even provocatively claiming that we should treat AI and robots as our “slaves.” In this view, extending legal and moral personality to AI should be judged solely on the effects it would have on the human species, and the costs outweigh the benefits. 

If you find yourself nodding along sagely, remember that there are clever moral philosophers lurking in the bushes who would tell you to replace “Artificial Intelligence” with “slaves,” the phrase “human species” with “white race,” and think about what it took to pass the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. During those debates there were actually people who argued that the idea of extending legal and moral personality to slaves should be judged solely on the effects it would have on the white race and the costs outweighed the benefits. “What’s in it for us?” is not always a compelling ethical position. (Ayn Rand might have disagreed. I find myself unmoved by that fact.) From this point of view, moral arguments about personality and consciousness cannot be neatly confined by the species line; indeed they are a logical extension of the movements defending both the personality and the rights of marginalized humans. Sohail Inayatullah describes the ridicule he faced from Pakistani colleagues after he raised the possibility of “robot rights” and quotes the legal scholar Christopher Stone, author of the famous environmental work Should Trees Have Standing?, in his defense: “[T]hroughout legal history, each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been theretofore, a bit unthinkable. We are inclined to suppose the rightlessness of rightless ‘things’ to be a decree of Nature, not a legal convention acting in support of the status quo.”

As the debate unfolds, people are going to make analogies and comparisons to prior struggles for justice and, because analogies are analogies, some are going to see those analogies as astoundingly disrespectful and demeaning. “How dare you invoke noble X in support of your trivial moral claim!” Others will see the current moment as the next step on the march that noble X personified. I feel confident predicting this will happen— because it has. The struggle with our moral future will also be a struggle about the correct meaning to draw from our moral past. It already is. 

In this book, I will lay out two broad ways in which the personhood question is likely to be presented. Crudely speaking, you could describe them as empathy and efficiency, or moral reasoning and administrative convenience. 

The first side of the debate will revolve around the dialectic between our empathy and our moral reasoning. As our experiences of interaction with smarter machines or transgenic species prompt us to wonder about the line, we will question our moral assessments. We will consult our syllogisms about the definition of “humanity” and the qualifications for personhood— be they based on simple species- membership or on the cognitive capacities that are said to set humans apart, morally speaking. You will listen to the quirky, sometimes melancholy, sometimes funny responses from the LaMDA- derived emotional support bot that keeps your grandmother company, or you will look at the genetic makeup of some newly engineered human- animal chimera and begin to wonder: “Is this conscious? Is it human? Should it be recognized as a person? Am I acting rightly toward it?” 

The second side of the debate will have a very different character. Here the analogy is to corporate personhood. We did not give corporations legal personhood and constitutional rights because we saw the essential humanity, the moral potential, behind their web of contracts. We did it because corporate personality was useful. It was a way of aligning legal rights and economic activity. We wanted corporations to be able to make contracts, to get and give loans, to sue and be sued. Personality was a useful legal fiction, a social construct the contours of which, even now, we heatedly debate. Will the same be true for Artificial Intelligence? Will we recognize its personality so we have an entity to sue when the self- driving car goes off the road or a robotic Jeeves to make our contracts and pay our bills? And is that approach also possible with the transgenic species, engineered to serve? Or will the debate focus instead on what makes us human and whether we can recognize those concepts beyond the species line and thus force us to redefine legal personhood? The answer, surely, is both. 

The book will sometimes deal with moral theory and constitutional or human rights. But this is not the clean- room vision of history in which all debates begin from first principles, and it is directed beyond an academic audience. I want to understand how we will discuss these issues as well as how we should. We do not start from a blank canvas, but in medias res. Our books and movies, from Erewhon to Blade Runner, our political fights, our histories of emancipation and resistance, our evolving technologies, our views on everything from animal rights to corporate PACs, all of these are grist to my mill. The best way to explain what I mean is to show you. Here are the stories of two imaginary entities. Today, they are fictional. Tomorrow? That is the point of the book.

by James Boyle, The Line (full book) |  Read more:

Image: The Line

[ed. This was also a central theme in Issac Asimov's I Robot series with the robot R. Daneel Olivaw, who was almost indistinguishable from humans. See also: James Boyle's new book The Line explores how AI is challenging our concepts of personhood (Duke Law):]

"A longtime proponent of open access, Boyle, the William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Law, is a founding board member of Creative Commons, an organization launched in 2001 to encourage the free availability of art, scholarship, and cultural materials through licenses that individuals and institutions can attach to their work. Boyle has made The Line accessible to all as a free download under such a license. It is also available in hardcover or digital formats.

In The Line, Boyle explores how technological developments in artificial intelligence challenge our concept of personhood, and of "the line" we believe separates our species from the rest of the world – and that also separates "persons" with legal rights from objects – and discusses the possibility of legal and moral personhood for artificially created entities, and what it might mean for humanity’s concept of itself."

Time's Up For AI Policy

AI that exceeds human performance in nearly every cognitive domain is almost certain to be built and deployed in the next few years.

AI policy decisions made in the next few months will shape how that AI is governed. The security and safety measures in place for safeguarding that AI will be among the most important in history. Key upcoming milestones include the first acts of the Trump administration, the first acts of the next US congress, the UK AI bill, and the EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice.

If there are ways that you can help improve the governance of AI in these and other countries, you should be doing it now or in the next few months, not planning for ways to have an impact several years from now.

The announcement of o3 today makes clear that superhuman coding and math are coming much sooner than many expected, and we have barely begun to think through or prepare for the implications of this (see this thread) – let alone the implications of superhuman legal reasoning, medical reasoning, etc. or the eventual availability of automated employees that can quickly learn to perform nearly any job doable on a computer.

There is no secret insight that frontier AI companies have which explains why people who work there are so bullish about AI capabilities improving rapidly in the next few years. The evidence is now all in the open. It may be harder for outsiders to fully process this truth without living it day in and day out, as frontier company employees do, but you have to try anyway, since everyone’s future depends on a shared understanding of this new reality.

It is difficult to conclusively demonstrate any of these conclusions one way or the other, so I don’t have an airtight argument, and I expect debate to continue through and beyond the point of cross-domain superhuman AI. But I want to share the resources, intuitions, and arguments I find personally compelling in the hopes of nudging the conversation forward a tiny bit.

This blog post is intended as a starter kit for what some call “feeling the AGI,” which I defined previously as:

• Refusing to forget how wild it is that AI capabilities are what they are

• Recognizing that there is much further to go, and no obvious "human-level" ceiling

• Taking seriously one's moral obligation to shape the outcomes of AGI as positively as one can

(I will focus on the first two since the third follows naturally from agreement on the first two and is less contested, though of course what specifically you can do about it depends on your personal situation.)

How far we’ve come and how it happened

It has not always been the case that AI systems could understand and generate language fluently – even just for chit chat, let alone for solving complex problems in physics, biology, economics, law, medicine, etc. Likewise for image understanding and generation, audio understanding and generation, etc.

This all happened because some companies (building on ideas from academia) bet big on scaling up deep learning, i.e. making a big artificial neural network (basically just a bunch of numbers that serve as “knobs” to fiddle with), and then tweaking those knobs a little bit each time it gets something right or wrong.

Language models in particular first read a bunch of text from the Internet (tweaking their knobs in order to get better and better at generating “text that looks like the Internet”), and then they get feedback from humans (or, increasingly, from AI) on how well they’re doing at solving real tasks (allowing more tweaking of the knobs based on experience). In the process, they become useful general-purpose assistants.

It turns out that learning to mimic the Internet teaches you a ton about grammar, syntax, facts, writing style, humor, reasoning, etc., and that with enough trial and error, it’s possible for AI systems to outperform humans at any well-defined task. (...)

The fact that this all works so well — and so much more easily and quickly than many expected — is easily one of the biggest and most important discoveries in human history, and still not fully appreciated.

Here are some videos that explain how we got here, and some other key things to know about the current trajectory of AI.  [ed. ..yikes]

Here are some other long reads on related topics. As with the videos, I don’t endorse all of the claims in all of these references, but in the aggregate I hope they give you some 80/20 version of what people at the leading companies know and believe, though I also think that regularly using AI systems yourself (particularly on really hard questions) is critical in order to build up an intuition for what AI is capable of at a given time, and how that is changing rapidly over time.

There is no wall and there is no ceiling

There is a lot of “gas left in the tank” of AI’s social impacts even without further improvements in capabilities — but those improvements are coming. (...)

Note that it is not just researchers but also the CEOs of these companies who are saying that this rate of progress will continue (or accelerate). I know some people think that this is hype, but please, please trust me — it’s not.

We will not run out of ideas, chips, or energy unless there’s a war over AI or some catastrophic incident that causes a dramatic government crackdown on AI. By default we maybe would have run out of energy but it seems like the Trump administration and Congress are going to make sure that doesn’t happen. We’re much more likely to run out of time to prepare.

by Miles Brundage, Mile's Substack |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. Can't help but wonder how my kid's, and especially my grandkid's, lives will go. See also: Why I’m Leaving OpenAI and What I’m Doing Next (MS):]

Who are you/what did you do at OpenAI?

Until the end of day this Friday, I’m a researcher and manager at OpenAI. I have been here for over six years, which is pretty long by OpenAI standards (it has grown a lot over those six years!). I started as a research scientist on the Policy team, then became Head of Policy Research, and am currently Senior Advisor for AGI Readiness. Before that I was in academia, getting my PhD in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology from Arizona State University, and then as a post-doc at Oxford, and I worked for a bit in government at the US Department of Energy.

The teams I’ve led (Policy Research and then AGI Readiness) have, in my view, done a lot of really important work shaping OpenAI’s deployment practices, e.g., starting our external red teaming program and driving the first several OpenAI system cards, and publishing a lot of influential work on topics such as the societal implications of language models and AI agents, frontier AI regulation, compute governance, etc.

I’m incredibly grateful for the time I’ve been at OpenAI, and deeply appreciate my managers over the years for trusting me with increasing responsibilities, the dozens of people I’ve had the honor of managing and from whom I learned so much, and the countless brilliant colleagues I’ve worked with on a range of teams who made working at OpenAI such a fascinating and rewarding experience.

Why are you leaving?

I decided that I want to impact and influence AI's development from outside the industry rather than inside. There are several considerations pointing to that conclusion:

• The opportunity costs have become very high: I don’t have time to work on various research topics that I think are important, and in some cases I think they’d be more impactful if I worked on them outside of industry. OpenAI is now so high-profile, and its outputs reviewed from so many different angles, that it’s hard for me to publish on all the topics that are important to me. To be clear, while I wouldn’t say I’ve always agreed with OpenAI’s stance on publication review, I do think it’s reasonable for there to be some publishing constraints in industry (and I have helped write several iterations of OpenAI’s policies), but for me the constraints have become too much.

• I want to be less biased: It is difficult to be impartial about an organization when you are a part of it and work closely with people there everyday, and people are right to question policy ideas coming from industry given financial conflicts of interest. I have tried to be as impartial as I can in my analysis, but I’m sure there has been some bias, and certainly working at OpenAI affects how people perceive my statements as well as those from others in industry. I think it’s critical to have more industry-independent voices in the policy conversation than there are today, and I plan to be one of them.

• I’ve done much of what I set out to do at OpenAI: Since starting my latest role as Senior Advisor for AGI Readiness, I’ve begun to think more explicitly about two kinds of AGI readiness–OpenAI’s readiness to steward increasingly powerful AI capabilities, and the world’s readiness to effectively manage those capabilities (including via regulating OpenAI and other companies). On the former, I’ve already told executives and the board (the audience of my advice) a fair amount about what I think OpenAI needs to do and what the gaps are, and on the latter, I think I can be more effective externally.

It’s hard to say which of the bullets above is most important and they’re related in various ways, but each played some role in my decision.

So how are OpenAI and the world doing on AGI readiness?

In short, neither OpenAI nor any other frontier lab is ready, and the world is also not ready.

To be clear, I don’t think this is a controversial statement among OpenAI’s leadership, and notably, that’s a different question from whether the company and the world are on track to be ready at the relevant time (though I think the gaps remaining are substantial enough that I’ll be working on AI policy for the rest of my career).

Whether the company and the world are on track for AGI readiness is a complex function of how safety and security culture play out over time (for which recent additions to the board are steps in the right direction), how regulation affects organizational incentives, how various facts about AI capabilities and the difficulty of safety play out, and various other factors.