Disney Makes Antitrust Problem Go Away by Buying Majority Stake in Fubo

Disney is buying Fubo and plans to merge the sports streaming platform with its Hulu + Live TV service, gaining 70 percent ownership of the company that up until today was suing it over antitrust concerns and allegations of anticompetitive practices.

According to Fubo’s announcement today, the unified company will be known as Fubo, and Fubo executives will run it. People will also continue to be able to subscribe to Fubo without subscribing to Hulu + Live TV and vice versa. Also part of the announcement is the revelation that Fubo has settled its antitrust lawsuit against Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) over Venu, a joint venture sports app that the companies plan to launch and that Fubo was seeking to block, citing the three firms' allegedly anticompetitive practices.

Fubo had previously claimed that Disney, Fox, and WBD had forced it to pay for irrelevant channels that don’t appeal to sports fans by bundling those networks with sports networks. Fubo’s lawsuit accused Disney and Fox of forcing it to spend millions on unwanted content and forcing it “to drop valuable channels” through price hikes. (...)

Sweetening the deal is an agreement from Disney, Fox, and WBD to pay Fubo an aggregate cash payment of $220 million upon the deal’s closure.

The merger is still subject to regulatory and Fubo shareholder approval as well as “other customary closing conditions,” per Fubo. It’s expected to take 12 to 18 months to close, The Hollywood Reporter said.

Fubo’s about-face

Fubo's merger with Disney represents a shocking about-face for the sports-streaming provider, which previously had raised alarms (citing Citi research) about Disney's ownership of 54 percent of the US sports rights market—ESPN (26.8 percent), Fox (17.3 percent), and WBD (9.9 percent). Fubo successfully got a preliminary injunction against Venu in August, and a trial was scheduled for October 2025.

Fubo CEO David Gandler said in February that Disney, Fox, and WBD “are erecting insurmountable barriers that will effectively block any new competitors.

"Each of these companies has consistently engaged in anticompetitive practices that aim to monopolize the market, stifle any form of competition, create higher pricing for subscribers, and cheat consumers from deserved choice," Gandler also said at the time.

Now, set to be a Disney company, Fubo is singing a new tune, with its announcement claiming that the merger “will enhance consumer choice by making available a broad set of programming offerings.”

In a statement today, Gandler added that the merger will allow Fubo to “provide consumers with greater choice and flexibility" and "to scale effectively," while adding that the deal "strengthens Fubo’s balance sheet” and sets Fubo up for “positive cash flow.” (...)

Disney didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“... a total deception”

Some remain skeptical about Disney buying out a company that was suing it over antitrust concerns.

"My initial reaction is that a defendant should not be able to buy its way out of antitrust liability by purchasing the plaintiff in a lawsuit. To the extent the plaintiff’s (Fubo’s) claims had any merit, then the deal will enshrine those anticompetitive effects,” Hal Singer, an economics professor at the University of Utah and managing director at Econ One, told Ars.

Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project, which had joined two amicus briefs supporting Fubo's lawsuit, said in a statement shared with Ars that Fubo had previously "led sports fans and industry observers to believe they were genuinely interested in challenging Disney’s illegal joint venture in sports streaming, only to cash a check and leave consumers and the entire streaming industry worse off.

"It’s a total deception," Hepner continued. "This deal does not resolve any of the concerns laid out by Fubo in litigation against Disney’s attempts to concentrate the sports streaming market and in fact worsens the status quo. We urge President-Elect Trump’s antitrust enforcers, along with state AGs and private stakeholders, to challenge this blatantly illegal deal to protect consumers and competition.” [ed. hahahaha...it's complex, probably take four years at least.]

A statement from the American Economic Liberties Project today also described the merger as "a troubling escalation" that showed Disney "reinforcing its dominance in the sports streaming market and silencing opposition to its monopolistic practices."

"This move will leave consumers with fewer choices, higher prices, and less innovation in an already concentrated industry," the group said.

by Scharon Harding, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image:Fubo; Reddit/AZFamily; and via
[ed. From the comments: "Gangster Solves Murder Problem with More Murder", which might be a future Disney product based on the new superhero - Crime Man (he stops crimes exclusively by committing crimes, thereby out-criming the criminals). Here in action:

The Karen Carpenter Story

[ed. The music a generation played when falling in love for the first time.]

Lahaina: Do Maui Wildfire Lawyers Deserve $1 Billion In Fees?

A Maui judge will decide this month how to divide up a $4 billion settlement among many groups of lawyers representing fire victims.

A legal battle playing out behind the scenes in Maui state court could mean the difference of $1 billion for victims of the 2023 Lahaina fires.

On one side is a small army of attorneys who have already filed lawsuits for what they say are 18,000 individual plaintiffs. These lawyers, who largely drove the post-Lahaina wildfire litigation, say they represent the bulk of victims and therefore should control most of the money. If they prevail, they could make $1 billion or more in legal fees.

On the other side are class action lawyers representing an amorphous group including victims who haven’t filed. They want more money steered to the class action and away from the plaintiffʻs lawyers, who they say want an undue share at the expense of victims.

At stake for both sides is the enormous $4 billion proposed settlement for Lahaina victims, paid for by public and private institutions that played a role in the fireʻs devastation. About $800 million has been pledged by the state of Hawaii; $872.54 million by Kamehameha Schools, one of the state’s largest public charities; and $1.99 billion by Hawaiian Electric Co., the power monopoly for all of the main Hawaiian Islands except Kauai. Communications utilities and large landowners have pledged the remainder.

The battle is set to culminate in a trial on January 29, where Maui Circuit Court Judge Peter Cahill will decide how to divide the pot between the two teams of lawyers to share with clients.

The individual plaintiffs’ lawyers say they should prevail because they represent the vast majority of victims, including people who suffered the most. But the class lawyers say some victims haven’t filed suit yet, which makes them part of the class, and they should be guaranteed there’s some money left.

“These guys know they can make a ton of money for doing very little work,” class action lawyer Terry Revere, said of the individual plaintiffs’ lawyers.

Class Is A Key To $4 Billion Settlement

Litigation from the Maui wildfires has played out on parallel tracks. Soon after the fires, attorneys descended on Maui, taking out advertisements in the airport and dashing to the courts.

Several class action lawsuits were filed in federal court in Honolulu. And scores of individual personal injury or property loss lawsuits were filed in state court on Maui, many by out-of-state mass-disaster lawyers teaming with lawyers licensed in Hawaii.

As the number of individual suits mushroomed, Cahill created a special proceeding to manage the cases, with four individual plaintiffs’ lawyers as liaisons.

Cahill eventually appointed mediators to help negotiate a settlement of all the wildfire lawsuits. With trials scheduled to begin in the fall of 2024 in Maui, the defendants and plaintiffs in August agreed to the proposed $4.04 billion settlement, with Gov. Josh Greenʻs office prodding the negotiations.

As part of the proposed deal, the class lawyers agreed to move their cases to state court before Cahill and into the settlement. That move addressed a lingering issue: how to deal with potential holdouts or people who hadn’t yet filed claims?

The answer was to have the class action serve as a catch-all for stray victims: those who didn’t sue would be part of the class and bound by the settlement among Hawaiʻi, Kamehameha Schools, HECO and some smaller parties.

The global insurance industry — which has paid out $2.3 billion in claims to home and business owners — remains the lone holdout to the agreement. It still wants to sue the parties at fault for the wildfires to recoup the claims it has paid. The Hawaii Supreme Court must decide whether the settlement can be final without the insurers on board.

While the court prepares for oral arguments in that case in February, Cahill has been hashing out how the class action and individual plaintiffs’ lawyers will divide the settlement money if the high court blesses the deal.

Class-action lawyers accuse the individual plaintiffs’s lawyers of being “carpetbaggers” trying to take an undue share of the pot. They say it’s better to distribute money to the class-action lawyers because distributions are subject to court oversight and must be fair, adequate and equitable, according to rules governing class actions.

Legal fees must also be approved by the court. And the class action lawyers handling the case say their fees will likely amount to less than 10% of the damages awarded, although Cahill will have the final say.

In contrast, the plaintiffs’ lawyers want to put the money into a “black box,” in which everything is private among the parties, says Revere. Individual plaintiffs’ lawyers typically charge contingency fees of 25%-40% of their damages they recover, which could be a payday of $1 billion or more, and could include substantial fees from clients signed up even after the proposed settlement was reached.

“It’s taxpayer money, it’s ratepayer money, and it’s charity money,” he added. “And once this goes into the carpetbaggers’ magic box, the court’s not going to have any control over it.”

By their estimates, at least a third of the property damage victims fall into the class, not represented by the individual plaintiffs’ lawyers, said Kyle Smith, a Kailua-based class-action lawyer. The percentages of those suffering business losses could be higher, he said.

Cynthia Wong, a Maui lawyer who serves as liaison for the individual plaintiffs, says it makes sense for them to control the lion’s share of the settlement because they did enormous amounts of work initiating lawsuits and signing up victims, assuring the most-harmed victims are compensated.

An administrator will oversee equitable distribution of money to individual victims, she said.

There shouldn’t even be a class to begin with, Wong said, because the damages suffered by victims are too varied. For example, Wong said, one category includes people who planned to travel to Lahaina between August and October of 2023 but had to cancel their trips. Itʻs unclear if Cahill would approve payment to them.

“How can you take money from the true victims and allot it to that kind of class category?” she said.

The bottom line: “The evidence will show that the class should get very, very little of this settlement.”(...)

In the end, Cahill will have to decide whether Wong and her colleagues are correct when they say the class should get very little.

Plaintiffs lawyers submitted reports showing the scope of loss for victims who have individually sued. There are an astonishing 18,543 plaintiffs associated with 8,725 addresses, among them, according to plaintiffs expert Philip Strunk. The individual plaintiffs’ lawyers represent more than 1,000 wrongful death and injury claims, another expert reported.

A construction expert estimating the costs of rebuilding at $2.3 billion.

Together the reports estimate the claims from individual plaintiffs at $6.8 billion on the low end – much more than the $4.04 billion the defendants have agreed to pay.

Expert Witness Admits Report Might Be Flawed

Revere and Smith, the class action lawyers, question some of these numbers. For example, the number of people filing suit — 18,543 — is 50% more than the total population of Lahaina before the fires, which the 2020 census had at about 12,702.

Wong defends the number, saying it makes sense that the tally of individual victims exceeds the entire population of Lahaina. For instance, she points out, a Lahaina business destroyed by the fire might have had multiple owners living outside of Lahaina.

But even Strunk admits his reported number of 18,000-some victims might be wrong because it contains “potential duplicate entries.” Multiple individual plaintiffs’ law firms apparently reported representing the same plaintiff, Strunk said in his declaration. His firm plans to implement a process to resolve the issue.

Revere said it’s not surprising that multiple firms are claiming to represent the same victims. He likened the individual plaintiffs’ lawyers to piranhas in a feeding frenzy over clients.

“As you can imagine, when you have a bunch of piranhas going after something, some of them are stealing each others’ clients,” he said.

by Stewart Yerton, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

Image: Maui Circuit Court Judge Peter Cahill; Hawaii Judiciary/Screenshot/2025

[ed. Who would've guessed?]

Clock is TikTok-ing

On Friday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in TikTok, Inc. v. Garland. TikTok is challenging the constitutionality of a law passed with bipartisan support by Congress and signed by President Biden that would require TikTok to essentially cease operations in the United States unless its owner, ByteDance — a company incorporated in the Cayman Islands but controlled by China (its headquarters is in Beijing) — sells the platform to an entity not controlled by a hostile foreign power.

TikTok’s C.E.O. has denied that ByteDance is controlled by China, and claimed that the company, in which the Chinese government holds a stake, is private. The United States disagrees. In its brief before the Supreme Court, the U.S. government notes that China prohibits the export of TikTok’s algorithm, and it argues that “because of the authoritarian structures and laws of the P.R.C. regime, Chinese companies lack meaningful independence from the P.R.C.’s agenda and objectives.

As evidence of the P.R.C.’s control, the U.S. government further notes that “the P.R.C. maintains a powerful Chinese Communist Party committee ‘embedded in ByteDance’ through which it can ‘exert its will on the company.’ ” (...).

Most people I know have strong feelings about TikTok. They love it or they hate it. TikTok is mainly a video-sharing application, and users can find themselves losing hours of their day scrolling through dance videos, practical jokes, political rants and clips from movies and television shows.

In that sense, TikTok isn’t all that different from Instagram or YouTube. Both platforms now feature short, TikTok-style videos. Instagram calls them “Reels,” while YouTube calls them “Shorts.” But what sets TikTok apart is its proprietary algorithm. It’s so effective that it can feel as if it’s reading your mind.

I’ve heard it described as “spooky” in its ability to anticipate your interests and desires. Like most social media platforms, it vacuums up your personal data and tracks the videos you watch to try to anticipate exactly what you like to see. TikTok just does it better. It’s more immersive and intimate than its competitors.

Many parents I know hate TikTok for exactly that reason. They watch it consume hours of their kids’ lives, often with the most inane content. It’s often so inane that it can almost seem malicious — as if it’s deliberately dumbing down American discourse. The Chinese version of TikTok, by contrast, has more educational content, along with time limits for minors. The American version is swimming in dreck.

But “swimming in dreck” isn’t a constitutional reason for banning a social media platform. The First Amendment doesn’t protect just academic or political debate, it also protects all the silly dances, all the absurd jokes and all the ridiculous memes you see online.

The First Amendment does not, however, protect the free expression of the Chinese government. It does not protect the commercial activities of the Chinese government. And that brings us to the question that’s at the heart of the case before the Supreme Court: Is Congress’s TikTok ban truly about content? Or is it about control?

If it’s aimed at changing the content currently on the platform, then it’s almost certainly unconstitutional. After all, there is an American TikTok subsidiary that enjoys constitutional protection, and the American creators on the app are exercising their own constitutional rights. Stopping their speech because the federal government dislikes their content would be a clear violation of the First Amendment.

There are people I respect greatly, including my good friends and former colleagues at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (I was president of FIRE from 2004 to 2005), who see the case as primarily about content.

In an amicus brief they filed along with the Institute for Justice and the Reason Foundation, they stated their case clearly: “The nationwide ban on TikTok is the first time in history our government has proposed — or a court approved — prohibiting an entire medium of communications.”

The law, FIRE argues, “imposes a prior restraint, and restricts speech based on both its content and viewpoint” and is thus either unconstitutional per se or should be subject to the “highest level of First Amendment scrutiny.”

I disagree. This case isn’t about what’s on the platform, but rather who runs the application, and the People’s Republic of China has no constitutional right to control any avenue of communications within the United States.

Think of it this way: Under the law, TikTok could remain exactly the same as it is today — with the same algorithm, the same content and the same creators — so long as it sells the company to a corporation not controlled by a foreign adversary.

Adversarial foreign control matters for all the reasons I described in my opening scenario, and it’s easy to come up with other hypothetical problems. The U.S. and China are locked in a global economic and military competition, and there are ample reasons for China to want to exercise influence over American discourse.

Americans have the constitutional right to control the expression of the companies they create. They can choose to use their own companies to promote Chinese communist messages. An American can choose to vocally support China in a shooting war between the two countries (so long as advocacy doesn’t cross into material support).

But those are American rights, not Chinese rights, and the American content creators who use TikTok have ample opportunities to create identical content on any number of competing platforms. Indeed, they often do — it’s typical to see TikTok creators posting identical videos on Instagram and YouTube.

In addition, social media companies come and go. America has survived the demise of Myspace, Friendster and Vine, and it can certainly survive without TikTok.

In December, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia agreed with my assessment. The potential TikTok ban, it ruled, does not violate the First Amendment.

As the court explained, the law has two primary national security justifications: “(1) to counter the P.R.C.’s efforts to collect great quantities of data about tens of millions of Americans, and (2) to limit the P.R.C.’s ability to manipulate content covertly on the TikTok platform.”

The first justification does not implicate the content of speech at all. The second justification does implicate content, but the core issue is still control. As the court explained, “Specifically, the government invokes the risk that the P.R.C. might shape the content that American users receive, interfere with our political discourse and promote content based upon its alignment with the P.R.C.’s interests.” (...)

“Indeed,” Ginsburg wrote, “content on the platform could in principle remain unchanged after divestiture, and people in the United States would remain free to read and share as much P.R.C. propaganda (or any other content) as they desire on TikTok or any other platform of their choosing.”

The danger of TikTok used to be a rare point of agreement between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Trump’s administration attempted to ban TikTok during his first term. Biden signed the law that could actually make it happen.

But Trump has since changed his tune. During the campaign, he asked voters to vote for him to save TikTok, and on Dec. 27, he filed one of the most unusual legal briefs I’ve ever read. Essentially, he’s using the fact of his election victory and his social media experience to argue that he is uniquely and solely qualified to resolve the tension between American national security and the free speech rights of TikTok users.

The rhetoric of the brief is absurd. At one point it declares, “President Trump is one of the most powerful, prolific and influential users of social media in history.” Another section states, “President Trump alone possesses the consummate deal-making expertise, the electoral mandate and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the government.”

This isn’t a legal argument. It’s a love letter to Dear Leader Trump. It also flunks basic civics. Trump’s electoral win does not grant him special privileges to set aside a law that’s scheduled to go into effect before he takes office. Nor does his victory grant him special judicial deference to his constitutional judgment.

It’s unclear exactly why Trump changed his mind about TikTok. One of its major investors is a significant Trump donor, and Trump has almost 15 million followers on the platform. But regardless of the reasons, Trump’s policy preferences are irrelevant to the constitutional analysis.

The Supreme Court should give Trump a civics lesson. He does not have special authority to set aside laws that he dislikes. It should also draw a bright line between American speech, which is protected by the Constitution, and Chinese control of an American media outlet, which is not.

In many ways, this is the first Supreme Court case of a new cold war, this time with China, and it presents us with a constitutional I.Q. test. We can and should zealously defend the free speech rights of Americans, including their rights to dance, sing and meme away. But we cannot make it this easy for a hostile foreign power to collect our data and manipulate our public debate.

by David French, NY Times|  Read more:

Image: Illustration by George Douglas; source photographs by Alfred Gescheidt and ullstein bild/Getty Images

[ed. Not so sure. Conceivably this argument could be applied to any number of other businesses that aren't involved in data collection, 'communications', or 'propaganda': eg. software development, military arms technology, AI, nanotechnology, etc. So, China has a controlling influence in a business that operates in the US. Will a bit of paper shuffling eliminate that influence? Call me sceptical. And, why would we assume the US (CIA/NSA, etc.) isn't playing the same game? Or Russia? Smells fishy, like we're not getting some clear reasoning/motivations here.]

DR Pigekoret (feat. Luna Ersahin)

[ed. I initially posted DR Pigekoret (Danish National Girl's Choir) a little further below, with an excellent (and emotional) cover of Billy Joel's 'And So It Goes'. Here's another beautiful live performance, featuring Luna Erashin. I'd never heard of her before, but wow... very impressive. There's also this:]

Dying a “Good” Death

Disability and the Assisted Suicide Debate

I underwent countless appointments, expensive testing, and was continually gaslit and neglected by medical professionals. I was told that mast cell activation disorder wasn’t real (it is very real). I lost twenty pounds in a month and I reacted to anything I consumed. I began to throw up stomach acid because I could consume so little. I moved back home with my parents. As my reactions got worse and doctors shrugged in confusion, I grew desperate. Starving to death and having daily allergic reactions to things like sunlight on my skin or warm shower water was torturous. I made an ultimatum with myself: if I could not secure care, I would take my life.

I began to consider what death would be like. I looked up assisted suicide programs across the world. In doing so, I came across countless stories – some in favor of medical euthanasia, others firmly against it. I found news articles, white papers, research articles, and personal stories about the benefits and harms of assisted suicide. I read stories of disabled people who felt compelled to choose death because the world framed them as burdens. I watched interviews detailing flawed ethics and issues of consent. I came to think very differently about death. (...)

Amongst many others, these experiences have shaped my relationship with death. In all of these cases, medical and welfare supports could have improved the experience of death for everyone involved – for those dying, for caregivers, and for extended family members. I don’t think an early death, in any of these cases, would have necessarily been more “humane” or “dignified” than those that occurred. While these experiences are deeply personal, I believe they are emblematic of broader concerns with assisted dying.

In my opinion, those protesting against assisted dying laws are not asking dying people to suffer. The issue is not as black and white as people believe it to be. Those of us protesting do not want people to be in needless pain, instead we want resources other than death to alleviate suffering while people are still alive. We ask that policies ensure that no one is coerced or forced into choosing assisted dying. Similarly, we demand that policies are solid and that there are no legal loopholes to them. While internet debates have been furious over the past few weeks, I think we all want the same thing: an experience of death that honors and values the individual’s life. We differ, though, in what that experience looks like. (...)

Despite its roots in the eugenics movement, today twelve countries around the world permit assisted suicide in certain localities and certain cases. Right to Die Societies around the world are likewise pushing for expanded access to these programs for people who are not deemed terminally ill, citing that the right to die is rooted in individual liberties and compassion as “it is not always possible to relieve suffering.” Those in favor of assisted dying believe that we can enact legislation to ensure that the right to die is not abused by the state and that it will not be used to forward eugenics.

People are clearly suffering, but many are suffering from a lack of meaningful supports. As assisted dying programs expand, a cultural resonance follows. This cultural framework implies that living with significant medical or care needs is burdensome and that you should choose death because palliative care poses challenges for loved ones. In a hyper-capitalist world where palliative care costs an exorbitant amount of money, insurance frequently denies claims for supports and loved ones often do not have the time to perform caregiving because they need every working hour to scrape by, assisted dying offers a financial reprieve that is important to many people. The fact that death alone offers financial relief, time relief, and potentially relief from emotional distress is heinous. Death appears to be cost efficient in a world where healthy nondisabled people are considered valuable while older, sick, and disabled people are financial liabilities.

Despite the ongoing and active resistance of disabled people, it seems that assisted dying is only growing at an international scale. Safeguards have been violated for decades and yet new legislation continues to pass. At the same time, welfare cuts and gaps in medical care grow exponentially. In my opinion, assisted dying offers a neat and clean excuse for governments to further cut services instead of interrogating their failures. The core question at the heart of this debate is not “do you believe people have the right to die without suffering” but rather “what is an acceptable amount of collateral for you to have a peaceful death?”

by Nicole Schroeder, Disability Visibility Project |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Point taken, but I'm still a strong advocate for right-to-die options. We routinely use euthanasia for suffering pets, but not suffering people. I know many consider this an unsophisticated and/or un-nuanced view of the issue, but I also believe it should be an individual's inherent 'right' to decide their own fate under similar circumstances. We're taught from birth and throughout our lives to exert self-control, then that control is taken away at precisely the time when it might matter the most. Unfortunately, the process of acquiring multiple approvals, and the various caveats involved, are so byzantine as to be nearly unworkable. Yet, for many people who do finally gain approval there are also a significant number that never follow through. All that matters is that they have a choice - an option in case their quality of life and/or care becomes untenable. So yes, a better system of palliative care should be a given, but when there isn't (and there won't be soon) there should be an additional option. I know personally that I'm way more concerned about the process of dying, than dying itself. It shouldn't have to be that way.]

The Parable of Anna Akhmatova

The Parable of Anna Akhmatova 

Akhmatova, was a promising poet in the days before the Soviet Revolution, but her physical presence was just as compelling as her writing. Modigliani made at least twenty paintings of Akhmatova, and she had an affair with the famous poet Osip Mandelstam. Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak proposed marriage to her on multiple occasions.

Even far away at Oxford, philosopher and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin—whom I considered the most brilliant person in the entire University when I was a student there—allegedly pined away with romantic longings based on his brief encounter with Akhmatova 35 years before.

 

I don’t think it’s going too far to claim that she could have been a movie actress, given her beauty and allure.

But Akhmatova was crushed under Soviet rule.

Not only was her poetry sharply criticized and censored, but the secret police bugged her apartment, and kept her under surveillance.

She was silenced so completely, that many people simply assumed she was dead.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Nathan Altman, 1915

How to Be a Good Rhythm Guitarist

[ed. Placeholder. Eric definitely has a unique personality (New Yorker). But this is a good lesson with some great songs.]

Death of a Scientist

Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire is an unfinished nonfiction book devoted to the 1949 Mann Gulch fire in the woods of Montana, in which 13 of the firefighters who had parachuted in to fight it died. Maclean spent decades returning over and over again to the event, revisiting the site, interviewing survivors, and debating with scientists.

As the editor of the posthumously published edition, Alan Thomas, explained, Maclean struggled with the technicalities of fire science, and those difficulties were part of the reason he never finished the book. ...It clearly isn’t a masterpiece on the same level as his famous novella, A River Runs Through It, but it still stuck with me long after I finished.

I think that’s because there was another book that was taking shape inside the draft, and Maclean did not live long enough to complete the transformation. This other book would have been not a conventional piece of science journalism but a personal meditation on mortality and his own search for meaning: more “Old Men and Death” than “Young Men and Fire.”

I started to figure this out about the halfway point, where there’s a powerful scene where you can feel the book shifting from the determinedly factual into something else. It recounts the last day in the life of Harry Gisborne, a Forest Service scientist who was investigating the Mann Gulch fire. There’s a lot of wisdom here:

To Gisborne, science started and ended in observation, and theory should always be endangered by it. … He said to [Bob] Jansson: “I’m glad I got a chance to get up here. Tomorrow we can get all our dope together and work on Hypothesis Number One. Maybe it will lead to a theory.” This was at rest stop 35. By now the rest stops were becoming stations of the cross.

They were following a game trail along the cliffs high above the Missouri River at the lower end of the Gates of the Mountains, and were only a quarter or a half mile from their truck when they reached stop 37. Gisborne sat down on a rock and said: “Here’s a nice place to sit and watch the river. I made it good. My legs might ache a little, though, tomorrow.”

In his report, Jansson says: “I think Gisborne’s rising at point 37 on the map was due to the attack hitting him.” He goes on to explain in parenthesis that “thrombosis cases usually want to stand or sit up because of difficulty in breathing.” Gisborne died within a minute, and Jansson piled rocks around him so he would not fall off the game trail into the Missouri River a hundred feet below.

When Jansson knew Gisborne was dead, he stretched him out straight on the game trail, built the rocks around him higher, closed his eyes, and then put his glasses back on hi so, just in case he woke up, he could see where he was.

Then Jansson ran for help. The stars came out. Nothing moved on the game trail. The great Missouri passing below repeated the same succession of chords it probably will play for a million years to come. The only other motion was the moon floating across the lenses of Gisborne’s glasses, which at last were unobservant.

This is the death of a scientist, a scientist who did much to establish a science. On the day of his death he had the pleasure of discovering that his theory about the Mann Gulch blowup was wrong. It would be revealing if tomorrow had come and he had got all his dope together and had worked out a new Hypothesis Number One. Maybe it would have led to another theory, probably the right one.

In any case, because of him we have been able to form what is likely the correct theory. Gisborne’s portrait hangs on the staircase of the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory in Missoula, which immediately adjoins the Smokejumper base. He looks you square in the eye but is half amused as if he had caught you too attached to one of your theories, or one of his. …

For a scientist, this is a good way to live and die, maybe the ideal way for any of us–excitedly finding we were wrong and excitedly waiting for tomorrow to come so we can start over, get our new dope together, and find a Hypothesis Number One all over again. And being basically on the right track when we were wrong.

This was on November 9, 1949; Gisborne was only 56 years old.

by Andrew Batson, The Tangled Woof |  Read more:

Image: Young Men and Fire

Watch Duty

How a wildfire monitoring app became essential in the US west

Cristy Thomas began to panic as she called 911 for the second time on a warm October day but couldn’t get through. She anxiously watched the plume of black smoke pouring over her rural community in central California get larger.

Then she heard a familiar ping.

Watch Duty, an app that alerts users of wildfire risk and provides critical information about blazes as they unfold, had already registered the fire. She relaxed. The cavalry was coming.

“I can’t tell you the sigh of relief,” she said, recalling how soon after sirens blared through the neighborhood and helicopters thundered overhead. “We were seeing it happen and we had questions – but Watch Duty answered all of them.”

Thomas is one of millions of Watch Duty evangelists who helped fuel the meteoric rise in the app. In just three years since it launched, the organization now boasts up to 7.2 million active users and up to 512m pageviews at peak moments. For a mostly volunteer-run non-profit, the numbers are impressive, even by startup standards. But they are not surprising.

Watch Duty has changed the lives of people in fire-prone areas. No longer left to scramble for information when skies darken and ash fills the air, users can now rely on an app for fast and accurate intel – and it’s free.

It offers access to essential intel on where dangers are, with maps of fire perimeters, evacuation areas and where to go for shelter. Users can find feeds of wildfire cameras, track aircraft positions and see wind data all in one place. The app also helps identify when there’s little cause for alarm, when risks have subsided, and what agencies are working in the trenches.

“The app is not just about alerts, it is about a state of mind,” Watch Duty’s CEO, John Mills, said. The Silicon Valley alum founded the organization after moving from San Francisco to a sprawling ranch in Sonoma county where fire dangers are high. After starting in just four California counties, Watch Duty covered the entire state in its first year before rapidly expanding across the American west and into Hawaii.

As the community has grown – reaching people across 14 states in 2024 – new features and enhanced precision have accented its popularity, and according to Mills, filled unmet needs.

In the past years, it’s not just residents who have come to rely on the app. An array of responders, from firefighters to city officials to journalists are also logging on, ensuring key actors are on the same page.

“People always thank me for Watch Duty, and I am like, ‘you’re welcome – and I am sorry that you need it,’” Mills said. But it’s clear that the need is real. In each new area where they have offered the service, word of mouth has driven usage.

“We spent no money on marketing at all,” Mills said. “We just let the genie out of the bottle so the world would know things could never go back to the way things were.”

The app sprouted out of an emergency information ecosystem on social media that has for years communicated unofficial information. But unlike other platforms that seek to capture user attention and keep it there, Watch Duty has no algorithms that filter or muddy important information.

It relies on volunteers dubbed “reporters” who listen for emergency updates in the low hum of radio static, analyze data from the National Weather Service and other sources, and discuss findings with one another before sending push notifications to their active user base.

Run by real people, including active and retired wildland firefighters, dispatchers and veteran storm watchers, the team collaborates to quickly gather and vet information when a fire ignites.

An automated dispatch relays 911 alerts via Slack, kicking Watch Duty reporters in the particular region into action. Radio scanners, wildfire cameras, satellites and announcements from officials are scoured for intel. When conditions are confirmed they post the information, adding a push notification to users in the area if there’s a threat to life or property.

The network is fueled by hundreds of people who donate their time and a small staff of just 15 reporters and engineers. Together, they have alerted the public to more than 9,000 wildfires this year.

by Gabrielle Canon, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Gabrielle Canon/The Guardian; Jon Putman/Sopa Images/Rex/Shutterstock

[ed. Imagine that, somebody (Mr. Mills) developing a life saving tool just for altruistic reasons, no profit motive involved. I don't know what's more impressive, the app or the developer (and the volunteers who make it happen). Contrast with the post below. Downloaded it straight-away.]

Never Forgive Them

In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More regularly than not, I’ve found that the answer is fairly simple: the tech industry’s incentives no longer align with the user.

The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I’m stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way they’ve gradually degraded their products.

 

To be clear, I don’t believe that this gradual enshittification is part of some grand, Machiavellian long game by the tech companies, but rather the product of multiple consecutive decisions made in response to short-term financial needs. Even if it was, the result would be the same — people wouldn’t notice how bad things have gotten until it’s too late, or they might just assume that tech has always sucked, or they’re just personally incapable of using the tools that are increasingly fundamental to living in a modern world.

You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.

It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness.

These people want everything from you — to control every moment you spend working with them so that you may provide them with more ways to make money, even if doing so doesn’t involve you getting anything else in return. Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and a majority of tech platforms are at war with the user, and, in the absence of any kind of consistent standards or effective regulations, the entire tech ecosystem has followed suit. A kind of Coalition of the Willing of the worst players in hyper-growth tech capitalism.

Things are being made linearly worse in the pursuit of growth in every aspect of our digital lives, and it’s because everything must grow, at all costs, at all times, unrelentingly, even if it makes the technology we use every day consistently harmful.

This year has, on some level, radicalized me, and today I’m going to explain why. It’s going to be a long one, because I need you to fully grasp the seriousness and widespread nature of the problem. (...)

We as a society need to reckon with how this twists us up, makes us more paranoid, more judgmental, more aggressive, more reactionary, because when everything is subtly annoying, we all simmer and suffer in manifold ways. There is no digital world and physical world — they are, and have been, the same for quite some time, and reporting on tech as if this isn’t the case fails the user. It may seem a little dramatic, but take a second and really think about how many little digital irritations you deal with in a day. It’s time to wake up to the fact that our digital lives are rotten.

I’m not talking about one single product or company, but most digital experiences. The interference is everywhere, and we’ve all learned to accept conditions that are, when written out plainly, are kind of insane. (...)

As every single platform we use is desperate to juice growth from every user, everything we interact with is hyper-monetized through plugins, advertising, microtransactions and other things that constantly gnaw at the user experience. We load websites expecting them to be broken, especially on mobile, because every single website has to have 15+ different ad trackers, video ads that cover large chunks of the screen, all while demanding our email or for us to let them send us notifications.

Every experience demands our email address, and giving out our email address adds another email to inboxes already stuffed with two types of spam — the actual “get the biggest laser” spam that hits the junk folder automatically, and the marketing emails we receive from clothing brands we wanted a discount from or newspapers we pay for that still feel it’s necessary to bother us 3 to 5 times a day. I’ve basically given up trying to fight back — how about you? (...)

It isn’t that you don’t “get” tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane. (...)

I’m not writing this to complain, but because I believe — as I hinted at a few weeks ago — that we are in the midst of the largest-scale ecological disaster of our time, because almost every single interaction with technology, which is required to live in modern society, has become actively adversarial to the user. These issues hit everything we do, all the time, a constant onslaught of interference, and I believe it’s so much bigger than just social media and algorithms — though they’re a big part of it, of course.

In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.

The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma. We seem, as a society, capable of understanding that social media can hurt us, unsettle us, or make us feel crazed and angry, but I think it’s time to accept that the rest of the tech ecosystem undermines our wellbeing in an equally-insidious way. And most people don’t know it’s happening, because everybody has accepted deeply shitty conditions for the last ten years. (...)

We all live in the ruins created by the Rot Economy, where the only thing that matters is growth. Growth of revenue, growth of the business, growth of metrics related to the business, growth of engagement, of clicks, of time on app, of purchases of micro-transactions, of impressions of ads, of things done that make executives feel happy.(...)

I’ve written a lot about how the growth-at-all-costs mindset of The Rot Economy is what directly leads big tech companies to make their products worse, but what I’ve never really quantified is the scale of its damage.(...)

Every single weird thing that you’ve experienced with an app or service online is the dread hand of the Rot Economy — the gravitational pull of growth, the demands upon you, the user, to do something. And when everybody is trying to chase growth, nobody is thinking stability, and because everybody is trying to grow, everybody sort of copies everybody else’s ideas, which is why we see microtransactions and invasive ads and annoying tricks that all kind of feel the same in everything, though they’re all subtly different and customized just for that one app. It’s exhausting.

For a while, I’ve had the Rot Economy compared to Cory Doctorow’s (excellent) enshittification theory, and I think it’s a great time to compare (and separate) the two. To quote Cory in The Financial Times, Enshittification is “[his] theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it.” He describes the three stages of decline:

“First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” (...)

Perhaps that’s semantics. However, Cory’s theory lacks a real perpetrator beyond corporations that naturally say “alright we’re gonna do Enshittification now, watch this.” Where The Rot Economy separates is that growth is, in and of itself, the force that drives companies to enshittify. While enshittification neatly fits across companies like Spotify and Meta (and their ad-focused business models), it doesn’t really make sense when it comes to things where there isn’t a clear split between business customers and consumers, like Microsoft or Salesforce — because enshittification is ultimately one part of the larger Rot Economy, where everything must grow forever. (...)

The Rot Economy isn’t simply growth-at-all-costs thinking — it’s a kind-of secular religion, something to believe in, that everything and anything can be more, should be more, must be more, that we are defined only by our pursuit of more growth, and that something that isn’t growing isn’t alive, and is in turn inferior.

No, perhaps not a religion. Religions are, for the most part, concerned with the hereafter, and contain an ethical dimension that says your present actions will affect your future — or your eternity. The Rot Economy is, by every metric, defined by its short-termism. 

by Ed Zitron, Where's Your Ed At? |  Read more:

Image: Newsweek/Getty via

[ed. I don't use Google anymore (DuckDuckGo instead) and was fortunate to intuit over a decade ago how damaging social media was to a healthy psyche. Consequently, I never got sucked into signing up with any platform, except for Facebook (for about six months after the movie The Social Network came out, and I quickly got out). However there was one exception: YouTube. But now, with all the ads, even that's become a thoroughly degraded experience. I agree with everything written here, but it feels incomplete. The rot economy, or enshittification, or whatever you want to call it, has a number of co-conspirators: the ad industy first and foremost; media (engagement/metrics), politicians (campaign donations); financial industry (banks, venture capitalists, private equity, etc.); and of course, corporations, shareholders and company managers who are all incentivized to squeeze every dollar they can out of us. One big non-virtuous circle of vultures and sharks, each contributing in their own way to making life more miserable, costly, and a constant battle to not get punked or plundered. What better time to elect a grifting billionaire and his billionaire buddies to game our federal government and perhaps embed permanent rot within our institutions, laws, and policies. See also: The Rot Economy.]

Public Domain Day, 2025

January 1, 2025 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1929 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1924! (Duke University School of Law)

Image: Duke University

Alma Naidu & Simon Oslender

[ed. And so it goes. Love this old Billy Joel song, nicely reimagined here (original here). And, don't miss this choral version by DR Pigekore (apparently the last performance led by director Philip Faber). Oh hell, I'll just put it up below:] [ed. See also: Mystery of Love.]

Charles Hermans, The Masked Ball, 19th century (detail). Full image: here

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[ed. K.C. Chief's skybox.]

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[ed. From 1998. Many more since.]

N.C. Wyeth, “Dark Harbor Fishermen" 1943

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Operation Plumbbob

The first human object launched into space wasn’t Sputnik 1. It was actually a manhole cover.

 
Operation Plumbbob was a series of nuclear tests that were conducted between May 28 and October 7, 1957, at the Nevada Test Site, following Project 57, and preceding Project 58/58A.

Background

The operation consisted of 29 explosions, of which only two did not produce any nuclear yield. Twenty-one laboratories and government agencies were involved. While most Operation Plumbbob tests contributed to the development of warheads for intercontinental and intermediate range missiles, they also tested air defense and anti-submarine warheads with smaller yields. They included 43 military effects tests on civil and military structures, radiation and bio-medical studies, and aircraft structural tests. Operation Plumbbob had the tallest tower tests to date in the U.S. nuclear testing program as well as high-altitude balloon tests. One nuclear test involved the largest troop maneuver ever associated with U.S. nuclear testing.

Approximately 18,000 members of the U.S. Air Force, Army, Navy and Marines participated in exercises Desert Rock VII and VIII during Operation Plumbbob. The military was interested in knowing how the average foot-soldier would stand up, physically and psychologically, to the rigors of the tactical nuclear battlefield. (...)

The John shot on July 19, 1957, was the only test of the Air Force's AIR-2A Genie rocket with a nuclear warhead. It was fired from an F-89J Scorpion fighter over Yucca Flats at the Nevada National Security Site. On the ground, the Air Force carried out a public relations event by having five Air Force officers and a motion picture photographer stand under ground zero of the blast, which took place at between 18,500 and 20,000 feet (5,600 and 6,100 m) altitude, with the idea of demonstrating the possibility of the use of the weapon over civilian populations without ill effects. The five officers were Colonel Sidney C. Bruce, later professor of Electrical Engineering at Colorado University, died in 2005; Lieutenant Colonel Frank P. Ball, died in 2003; Major John W. Hughes II, died in 1990; Major Norman B. Bodinger, died in 1997; Major Donald A. Luttrell, died in 2014. The videographer, Akira "George" Yoshitake, died in 2013. (...)

Missing steel bore cap

In 1956, Robert Brownlee, from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, was asked to examine whether nuclear detonations could be conducted underground. The first subterranean test was the nuclear device known as Pascal A, which was lowered down a 500 ft (150 m) borehole. However, the detonated yield turned out to be 50,000 times greater than anticipated, creating a jet of fire that shot hundreds of meters into the sky. During the Pascal-B nuclear test of August 1957, a 900-kilogram (2,000 lb) iron lid was welded over the borehole to contain the nuclear blast, despite Brownlee predicting that it would not work. When Pascal-B was detonated, the blast went straight up the test shaft, launching the cap into the atmosphere. The plate was never found. Scientists believe compression heating caused the cap to vaporize as it sped through the atmosphere....Brownlee estimated that the explosion, combined with the specific design of the shaft, could accelerate the plate to approximately six times Earth's escape velocity.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: via

School Shootings Increase NRA Donations

The US has experienced a tragic increase in school shootings in recent years. Between 1995 and 2021, shootings on campuses of US schools have resulted in over 300 deaths and touched on the lives of more than 240,000 students, thrusting the issue into the forefront of public concern and sparking strong debates about the need for stricter gun regulation in the US. Policy proposals are often aimed at reducing access to firearms and increasing background checks for potential gun owners.

Previous scholarship on the consequences of school (and mass) shootings has found that citizens, on average, tend to become more left-wing in their attitudes toward gun regulation and voting behavior after shootings... On the legislative side, these tragic events often catalyze the introduction of new gun control bills. Nonetheless, in the vast majority of cases, gun regulation remains either unchanged or becomes even less restrictive in the aftermath of shootings. This limited legislative action on gun regulation raises a critical question: Why does the United States continue to struggle with implementing meaningful gun control measures despite recurring tragedies and public support for such measures? (...)

Using address-level data from 225,000 individual donations in a difference-in-differences design, this study provides causal evidence suggesting that donations to the NRA surge in counties that experience school shootings. In stark contrast to the typically transient nature of pro-gun regulation movements, this uptick in political participation endures over multiple years, remaining elevated over comparatively long periods of time. These effects are largest in states where gun regulation is weakest, adding to the political difficulties of enacting gun regulation in states with the greatest potential benefits in terms of reducing firearm-related deaths. Donations to gun control groups in affected regions do not seem to specifically respond to such events. (...)

In general, these effects are consistent with previous findings that suggest that gun rights supporters are a very politically active constituency that is comparatively easy to mobilize. Moreover, these findings are consistent with studies finding that gun rights supporters respond to threats of gun regulation by, e.g., preemptively purchasing guns, gathering information about gun rights, or joining gun rights organizations, especially after incidents that receive considerable media attention. The empirical pattern also aligns with anecdotal evidence suggesting that gun rights supporters mobilize by contacting legislators when perceiving gun rights under threat. (...)

Results

• The results of this study lead to three conclusions. First, school shootings have important effects on political participation on the political right. The causal estimates of this study demonstrate that gun rights supporters respond to school shootings by increasing contributions to political organizations committed to upholding Second Amendment rights. These effects are sizeable, with donations increasing by around 30% and donor numbers increasing by about 40% in affected counties as compared to the pretreatment baseline. (...)

• Second, the impact of school shootings on donations and donor counts is remarkably durable. Even multiple years after the incident, both donations and donor counts remain at elevated levels. Insofar as this pattern is indicative of citizens remaining actively committed to the cause of protecting gun rights, this highlights another difficulty in the struggle to enact stricter gun control laws. The time frame over which legislation is passed is medium to long term. Thus, while windows of opportunity might open the door for the introduction of new bill proposals, making sure that these bills eventually pass requires that gun control advocates collectively mobilize and remain mobilized over longer periods of time. However, gun control movements have historically struggled to keep such momentum up, and saliency usually wanes as the issue-attention cycle brings other issues to the forefront. (...)

• Last, the strength of these effects is most pronounced in states with weaker gun regulation. These states typically experience higher rates of firearm-related deaths and are most likely to benefit from gun control legislation. For instance, Kalesan et al. estimate that the introduction of universal background checks, as already existent in many states and supported by 92% of citizens in 2022, could reduce the rate of firearm-related deaths from 10.35 to 4.46 per 100,000 people in states without such a policy.

by Tobias Roemer, Science Advances |  Read more:

Image: Connecticut State Police/Reuters via

[ed. Please consider a thought or prayer on the back of your check.]

[ed. Help a buddy out?]

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Texas Plows Ahead

The Texas Responsible AI Governance Act (TRAIGA) has been formally introduced in the Texas legislature, now bearing an official bill number: HB 1709. It has been modified from its original draft, improving on it in some important ways and worsening in others. In the end, TRAIGA/HB 1709 still retains most of the fundamental flaws I described in my first essay on the bill. It is, by far, the most aggressive AI regulation America has seen with a serious chance at becoming law—much more even than SB 1047, the California AI bill that was the most-discussed AI policy of 2024 before being vetoed in September.

This bill is massive, so I will not cover all its provisions comprehensively. Here, however, is a summary of what the new version of TRAIGA does.

TRAIGA in Brief

The ostensible purpose of TRAIGA is to combat algorithmic discrimination, or the notion that an AI system might discriminate, intentionally or unintentionally, against a consumer based on their race, color, national origin, gender, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy status, age, disability status, genetic information, citizenship status, veteran status, military service record, and, if you reside in Austin, which has its own protected classes, marital status, source of income, and student status. It also seeks to ensure the “ethical” deployment of AI by creating an exceptionally powerful AI regulator, and by banning certain use cases, such as social scoring, subliminal manipulation by AI, and a few others.

Precisely like SB 1047, TRAIGA accomplishes its goal by imposing “reasonable care” negligence liability. But TRAIGA goes much further. First, unlike SB 1047, TRAIGA’s liability is very broad. SB 1047 created an obligation for developers of AI models that cost over $100 million to exercise “reasonable care” (a common legal term of art) to avoid harms greater than $500 million. TRAIGA requires developers (both foundation model developers and fine-tuners), distributors (cloud service providers, mainly), and deployers (corporate users who are not small businesses) of any AI model regardless of size or cost to exercise “reasonable care” to avoid “algorithmic discrimination” against all of the protected classes listed above. Under long-standing legal precedent, discrimination can be deemed to have occurred regardless of discriminatory intent; in other words, even if you provably did not intend to discriminate, you can still be found to have discriminated so long as there is a negative effect of some kind on any of the above-listed groups. And you can bear liability for these harms.

On top of this, TRAIGA requires developers and deployers to write a variety of lengthy compliance documents—“High-Risk Reports” for developers, “Risk Identification and Management Policies” for developers and deployers, and “Impact Assessments” for deployers. These requirements apply to any AI system that is used, or could conceivably be used, as a “substantial factor” in making a “consequential decision” (I’ll define these terms in a moment, because their definitions have changed since the original version). The Impact Assessments must be performed for every discrete use case, whereas the High-Risk Reports and Risk-Identification and Management Policies apply at the model and firm levels, respectively—meaning that they can cover multiple use cases. However, all of these documents must be updated regularly, including when a “substantial modification” is made to a model. In the case of a frontier language model, such modifications happen almost monthly, so both developers and deployers who use such systems can expect to be writing and updating these compliance documents constantly.

In theory, TRAIGA contains exemptions for open-source AI, but it is weak—bordering on nonsensical: the exemption only applies to open models that are not used as “substantial factors” in “consequential decisions,” but it is not clear how a developer of an open-source language model could possibly prevent their model from being used in “consequential decisions,” given the very nature of open-source software. Furthermore, the bill defines open-source AI differently in different provisions, at one point allowing only models that openly release training data, code, and model weights, and at another point allowing models that release weights and “technical architecture.” If you are an open-source developer, the odds are that every provision, including the liability, applies to you.

On top of this, TRAIGA creates the most powerful AI regulator in America, and therefore among the most powerful in the world: the Texas Artificial Intelligence Council, a new body with the ability to issue binding rules regarding “standards for ethical artificial intelligence development and deployment,” among a great many other things. This is far more powerful than the regulator envisioned by SB 1047, which had only narrow rulemaking authority.

The bill comes out of a multistate policymaker working group convened by the Future of Privacy Forum, a progressive non-profit focused on importing EU-style technology law into the United States. States like California, Connecticut, Colorado, and Virginia have introduced similar regulations; in important ways, they resemble the European Union’s AI Act, with that law’s focus on preemptive regulation of the use of technology by businesses.

All of this is purported by its sponsor, Representative Giovanni Capriglione, a Republican, as a model for “red state” AI legislation—in the months after Donald Trump ran a successful presidential campaign based in part on the idea of broad-based deregulation of the economy. Color me skeptical that Representative Capriglione’s bill matches the current mood of the Republican Party; indeed, I would be hard-pressed to come up with legislation that conflicts more comprehensively with the priorities of the Republican Party as articulated by its leaders. Perhaps you view this as a virtue, perhaps you view it as a sin; I view it as a fact.

All of this has been the thrust of TRAIGA since the beginning. But how has the bill changed since it was previewed in October?

by Dean W. Ball, Hyperdimensionl |  Read more:
Image: State Rep. Giovanni Capriglione/uncredited via:

[ed. Wow. Texas (!) takes a mighty swing at AI regulation. Will it be a homer or foul ball? Definitely interesting to see what kind of pushback this bill gets, and what that means for future efforts. Already we can see it being positioned as a "red state" policy position (as if AI were a political football - or, maybe it's just a sales pitch), and the usual scare tactics around stiffling "future innovation". Regardless, a lot of thought went into this, which in itself is encouraging, and a good template for what comes next. Also, a side note - ballpark estimate of the economic stakes involved (PwC):]

***

• What comes through strongly from all the analysis we’ve carried out for this report is just how big a game changer AI is likely to be, and how much value potential is up for grabs. AI could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy in 2030, more than the current output of China and India combined. Of this, $6.6 trillion is likely to come from increased productivity and $9.1 trillion is likely to come from consumption-side effects.

• Labour productivity improvements will drive initial GDP gains as firms seek to "augment" the productivity of their labour force with AI technologies and to automate some tasks and roles.

• Our research also shows that 45% of total economic gains by 2030 will come from product enhancements, stimulating consumer demand. This is because AI will drive greater product variety, with increased personalisation, attractiveness and affordability over time.

• The greatest economic gains from AI will be in China (26% boost to GDP in 2030) and North America (14.5% boost), equivalent to a total of $10.7 trillion and accounting for almost 70% of the global economic impact.  ~ Sizing the Prize (PwC)