Snowbirds Scramble to Sell

Cesidia Cedrone has been soaking up the rays at her Florida condo every winter since 2011.

“Sunshine all the time. Don’t have to shovel snow. The beach, the sand ...” the Ontarian said from her second home in Hallandale Beach, halfway between Miami and Fort Lauderdale.

Last week, her retirement reverie came to an end as Cedrone and her husband signed the closing papers on their home sale.

“Things changed so drastically. The Canadian dollar is not at par with the U.S. dollar,” she said. “That was behind our major decision to sell.”

Other reasons played a role, too — higher insurance rates, taxes and condo fees. (...)

Insurance premiums have shot up in recent years because of more extreme weather, costing Cedrone more than US$16,000 a year — 10 times the rate when she first bought the property.

She also paid nearly US$4,000 in taxes versus US$1,500 a decade and a half ago.

Meanwhile, property upgrades required by stricter building codes meant residents had to cough up thousands more over the last few years, forcing the couple to remortgage their second home. (...)

Homeowners in that state now pay more than three times the national average to insure their properties, according to the Insurance Information Institute, making Florida the costliest home insurance state in the U.S.

Aside from the effect of climate change on premiums, there’s also the question of safety and a perpetual sense of precariousness in storm-prone regions.

“I ain’t going nowhere that’s got hurricanes,” said Laurie Lavine, an Arizona-based realtor whose clientele consists largely of Canadians.

A former Albertan, Lavine said most clients share his sentiments.

Nonetheless, he has observed a recent surge in listings from Canadians in his desert state recently. Again, expense is the bottom line.

“It’s costing them $20,000 a year just to have the property, between utilities and taxes and all the carrying costs of owning a property down here. They’re just not coming down as much as they want to because of the Canadian dollar,” he said.

Lavine said he’ll be handling eight listings — all Canadian-owned — in the next few weeks, twice his typical load.

by Christopher Reynolds, MSN |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Glut of New Houses for Sale in the South Is Bigger Even than during the Housing Bust. The Glut in the West Gets Close (WS):]

In the South – the largest region, with a population of 133 million, see map below – has the most inventory of new houses ever, surpassing even the astronomical levels on the eve of the Housing Bust, just before it all fell apart.

Since June 2024, new houses for sale in the South have surpassed the high of August 2006. In June, there were 293,000 new houses for sale (compared to 291,000 in August 2006). Since then, the inventory of new houses for sale has further ballooned and in October reached 304,000, and has remained in that range through December (301,000). Since December 2019, inventory has exploded by 76%. This is a massive amount of inventory of new houses for sale.

An Evening With Joe Pass

[ed. I met Joe one summer when I was working with the city Parks and Rec dept. setting up a mobile soundstage for outdoor concerts. We talked for maybe half an hour, and he was as nice and funny and down to earth as anyone you'd ever want to meet (cigar included) - an 'everyman' genius. I still remember cracking up when he told us about the many "fans" who'd invariably show up at his concerts wanting to give him lessons ("hey Joe, you ever try this chord?" - fingers splayed in weird patterns along their forearms, hahaha... For sure, don't miss the interview starting here at around 13:35]

What's In a Name?

Alaska lawmakers signal opposition to Denali name change in resolution (ADN)

Image: Bill Roth

[ed. Some anyway. Other's not so much. Here's one real profile in courage:]

Alaska’s two Republican U.S. senators — Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan — have already indicated they support keeping the name Denali.

Alaska’s lone U.S. House member Rep. Nick Begich, who has closely aligned himself with Trump, released a statement Monday in which he said the opposition from some House Republicans to the resolution indicated Alaskans were divided on the name.

“Recent polling has shown that Alaskans are split on this issue, and by today’s vote in Juneau, even members of the Alaska State Legislature are split on the issue,” Begich said. “While I understand the passion of this issue, my focus has been and will remain fixed on creating jobs and opportunity for future generations of Alaskans who, no doubt, will continue this debate long into the future.”

[ed. The sheer dumbness of all this (given other real-world problems) is headache inducing. But, as with all trolls, the best response is to just ignore them. So this is probably good advice:] 

***

“I don’t know a single person that likes the idea, and we’re pretty vocal about it,” King said. “Denali respects the Indigenous people that have been here and around Denali for tens of thousands of years.”

The mountain was named after McKinley when a prospector walked out of the Alaska wilderness in 1896, and the first news he heard was that the Republican had been nominated for president. (...)

McKinley served as president from 1897 until he was assassinated in 1901. He was an imperial colonialist who oversaw the expansion of the American empire with the occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and Hawaii, pushed by business interests and Christian missionaries wanting to convert Indigenous peoples, Haycox said.

“Trump’s push to rescind the name Denali for the colonialist and white elitist McKinley is insulting to all Alaskans, especially to Alaska’s Native people, and should be soundly rejected,” Haycox said. (...)

Joe McAneney of Talkeetna worked as a summer raft-guide for two years before moving to Alaska full time in 2012. He’s now a pilot for an air taxi company, ferrying climbers and tourists to the mountain in a small airplane outfitted with skis to land at base camp, located on Kahiltna Glacier at 7,200 feet (2,194.6 meters) above sea level.

He knows once tourist season comes around, he will have to answer their questions of what he thinks about Trump changing the name. He knows what his answer will be.

“It’s always been Denali, and it always will be,” he said.

The executive order can instigate the name change, but compliance is another issue.

“The only people that are going to adhere to that are probably the people that would have been still calling it McKinley anyway,” McAneney said

Alaskans say Trump can change the name of Denali but can’t make people call it Mount McKinley (ADN)

Eva Cassidy

Tom Gauld, My Jetpack
via:

Gabrielle Garland (American, b. 1968) - Untitled 297, 2023

via:

How to Cover Stupidity (Including Our Own)

Journalists favor the serious and the certain. In an unserious, uncertain world, we must learn to embrace some difficult new topics. One particularly pressing issue: stupidity.

A number of European writers have tackled this subject in recent months. In Homo Cretinus, Olivier Postel-Vinay describes stupidity as a “mental polyp” that subtly encloses specific brain regions, impairing cognitive flexibility. This form of stupidity, he said in an interview, is not an occasional lapse or lack of knowledge but an “attack on intellectual integrity” that renders us incapable of exercising common sense.

 

“Our societies have never known such a high level of education, which obviously doesn’t prevent the development of stupidity,” he says. For Postel-Vinay, stupidity transcends ignorance because it operates even in highly informed individuals, who remain ensnared by rigid beliefs.

Such beliefs lead people to ignore contradictory information and select the evidence that supports their ideas. Postel-Vinay defines this confirmation bias as the polyp’s “tool of choice” because it perpetuates a self-reinforcing cycle of false beliefs that impedes intellectual development. Thus, he says, opinions become dogma in even the most intelligent individuals. Social media echo chambers only make the situation worse.

In his recent book Elogio dell’ignoranza e dell’errore (In Praise of Ignorance and Error), the Italian writer and former prosecutor Gianrico Carofiglio distinguishes between two types of ignorance: unconscious ignorance and conscious ignorance. The former, he said in an interview, is particularly dangerous to democracy because it combines a lack of knowledge with the arrogant belief that one already knows enough. [ed. Dunning–Kruger effect]

“Unconscious ignorance undermines the foundations of democratic debate, trust in science, and respect for knowledge,” Carofiglio said, describing it as an attitude that poisons public discourse and fuels misinformation. On the other hand, he argues that we should embrace conscious ignorance—an intellectual humility that helps us recognize our own limitations while remaining receptive to the knowledge of others. This form of ignorance, like the Socratic “I know that I know nothing,” is the foundation of true competence.

By recognizing that others may hold truths beyond our understanding, we reduce the tendency for categorical statements that exacerbate division. “The truth each of us holds is, for the most part, a legitimate opinion,” Carofiglio explains. “And opinion pushes us to engage in dialogue with others, which is precisely the opposite of polarization.” (...)

Postel-Vinay notes that, from Europe at least, American society seems to be in the grip of a similar moment. Isaac Asimov once said that “there is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been.” Asimov argued that this ignorance is “nourished by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is as good as your knowledge.”

by Sacha Biazzo, Columbia Journalism Review |  Read more:

Image: Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images
[ed. We've sure come a long way in my lifetime from Kennedy's "best and the brightest" to today's dumb and proudly obnoxious. Probably for a lot of reasons, some more relevant than others: 'smartphones; social media; a fractured media/news ecosystem; lack of reading and comprehension skills (and I would add, civics class instruction) and lately, just attention itself, which has been effectively weaponized for personal and political gain. Doesn't bode well for this country or for humanity's future (especially with AGI just around the corner, ready to outsource all our critical thinking skills). See also: Trump, Musk, and the Limits of Attention (CJR); and, Evangelicals Made a Bad Trade (Atlantic):]

***

"What is psychologically intriguing is how bracing and electrifying a figure Trump is to many evangelicals. It is as if his disinhibitions have become theirs. Parents who disapproved of their children saying “damn” are now enthralled by a man who says “motherfucker.” Those who championed modesty and purity culture celebrate a thrice-married serial adulterer who made hush-money payments to a porn star. Churchgoers who can recite parts of the Sermon on the Mount are inspired by a man who, on the day he announced his candidacy for reelection, promised vengeance against his perceived enemies. Christians who for decades warned about moral relativism are now moral relativists; those who said a decent society has to stand for truth have embraced countless lies and conspiracy theories. People who rage at “woke cancel culture” delight in threats to shut down those with whom they disagree. Men and women who once stood for law and order have given their allegiance to a felon who issues pardons to rioters who have assaulted police officers. (...)

But things get stranger still. A lot of evangelicals justify their embrace of Trump on biblical grounds. They insist that they are on God’s side, or perhaps that God is on their side. The more they are pulled into the MAGA movement, the more they tell themselves, and others, that they are being faithful disciples of Jesus, now more than ever, and the more furiously they attack those who don’t partake in the charade.

The cognitive dissonance caused by acting in ways that are fundamentally at odds with what they claimed to believe, and probably did believe, for most of their lives would simply be too painful to acknowledge. The mind has ways of minimizing such discomfort: We rationalize our conduct, justify ourselves, and trivialize the inconsistencies. The story that many evangelicals today tell one another is that they are devoted followers of Christ, fighting satanic forces that are determined to destroy everything they know and love, and willing to stand in the breach for the man called by God to make America great again."

How the FAA Is Keeping Flying Cars in Science Fiction

Flying cars would have been here decades ago if they were regulated differently.

Flying cars are used as a synecdoche for all of the 20th-century sci-fi dreams that never came true. But they shouldn’t be grouped with moon cities or Dyson spheres. Private, point-to-point aircraft as cheap as a Chevy Tahoe could have been available decades ago. We should have them by now and could have them soon with a few regulatory changes.

Many outright dismiss the idea of flying cars as impossible science fiction, but small, private, point-to-point aircraft are technologically possible and have been for nearly 100 years. Here is one prototype, the 1935 Pitcairn Autogiro, making a near-vertical landing on the National Mall while surrounded by a crowd and then driving to the Bureau of Air Commerce down the street. The fundamental physics and engineering of flying cars was not a constraint in the early 20th century, and it certainly isn’t now, as demonstrated by electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) aircraft like those made by Beta or Joby. (...)

Despite dozens of successful prototypes over the past 100 years, early momentum in mass-manufacturing, and clear demand for the aircraft, flying cars never materialized, and the private aviation industry in general cratered to levels of production as low as those in the first decades of the airplane’s invention.

This massive gap in small aircraft manufacturing needs explanation. Air traffic congestion, the higher skill floor of flying, and energy prices are real constraints that would have made it difficult for private aviation to grow as fast as automobiles did, but they can’t explain a modern rate of production that’s 30 times lower than what it was in the ’70s.

Extraordinarily strict regulations on aircraft by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are the clearest explanation for the absence of flying cars and the decline of aircraft manufacturing in general. There are thousands of pages of meticulous rules governing everything in the lifecycle of an aircraft, but some stand out as massive drivers of cost.

One is pilot training, where the FAA is a global outlier in requiring 1,500 instructor training hours compared to 250 in most other developed nations. Even the lower grades of pilot license can cost several tens of thousands of dollars. Another is the strict liability applied to aircraft. The national explosion of liability lawsuits in the US through the ’60s and ’70s hit aircraft manufacturers particularly hard. The industry’s liability insurance premiums increased by nearly ten times, from $24 million to $210 million, from 1978 to 1980. There are also strict requirements for maintenance approvals on all general aviation aircraft after every 100 hours of flight. The procedures required for this maintenance and the certifications required of the person maintaining it also comprise dozens of dense pages in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR).

There are many other costly and unnecessary regulations on aircraft that have surely slowed their development. But none of these can fully explain the failure of flying cars. The section of the CFR dedicated to safety requirements for cars is longer than that for general aviation aircraft, and those regulations are not less meticulous in general.

By far the costliest part of the FAA’s regulation is not any particular standard imposed on pilot training, liability, or aircraft safety, but a slight shift in the grammatical tense of all these rules. The Department of Transportation (DOT) sets strict safety requirements for cars, but manufacturers are allowed to release new designs without first getting the DOT to sign off that all the requirements have been satisfied. The law is enforced ex post, and the government will impose recalls and fines when manufacturers fail to follow the law.

The FAA, by contrast, enforces all of its safety rules ex ante. Before aircraft manufacturers can do anything with a design, they have to get the FAA’s signoff, which can take more than a decade. This regulatory approach also makes the FAA far more risk-averse, since any problems with an aircraft after release are blamed on the FAA’s failure to catch them. With ex post enforcement, the companies that failed to follow the law would be blamed, and the FAA rewarded, for enforcing recall.

This subtle difference in the ordering of legal enforcement is the major cause of the stagnation of aircraft design and manufacturing.

In some ways, this is an optimistic message, since it illuminates an attractive political compromise: keep all of the safety standards on airplanes exactly as they are, but enforce these standards like they’re enforced with cars—i.e., through post-market surveillance, recall, and punishment. This small change would reinvigorate the general aviation industry, putting it back on the exponential trend upwards that it lost 50 years ago.

by Maxwell Tabarrok, Foundation For Economic Education |  Read more:

Image: Grok; Kamala I. Shetty and R. John Hansman

Contraception Begins At Erection

JACKSON, Miss. - A state senator in Mississippi has filed a bill entitled the “Contraception Begins at Erection Act.”

As written by Sen. Bradford Blackmon, the bill would make it “unlawful for a person to discharge genetic material without the intent to fertilize an embryo.”

There are also fines involved, the third strike resulting in the loss of $10,000 from the perpetrator.

In a statement to WLBT News, Blackmon wrote, “All across the country, especially here in Mississippi, the vast majority of bills relating to contraception and/or abortion focus on the woman’s role when men are fifty percent of the equation.

This bill highlights that fact and brings the man’s role into the conversation. People can get up in arms and call it absurd but I can’t say that bothers me.”

by WLBT Staff |  Read more:

Image: 123RF
[ed. Three strikes/$10,000. Guess that's one way to plug holes in the state budget.]

Clubbing in the Wild (With David Attenborough)

(David Attenborough Nature Documentary Parody) 

via:

Naples Botanical Gardens
Images: Deb Heebner

Ichiro Suzuki, The Warrior

Who left Ichiro off Hall of Fame ballot? You should know (but not for reason you think). (The Athletic)

Image: YouTube

To watch Ichiro Suzuki hit ’em where they weren’t for all those years was to have a front-row seat at the intersection of athleticism and artistry. Ichiro was Greg Louganis on the springboard in Seoul. He was Randy Moss extending his arms and collecting the deep ball. He was Bobby Orr going coast-to-coast and netting a short-handed, backhanded goal.

Beautiful. Just beautiful.

And so when Ichiro’s name was called Tuesday night as the leadoff hitter in the Hall of Fame’s Class of 2025, an opportunity presented itself for us to close our eyes and relive some of those magical days. Or, we could just look into Ichiro’s eyes during the live interview on MLB Network. It was all right there, in the eyes.

Beautiful. Just beautiful.

Memecoin Mania

Buyer's remorse? Maybe? Crypto Executives Fear Investor Backlash Over Trump Memecoins.

The memecoins launched by President Donald Trump and his wife days before his inauguration are damaging the industry’s reputation and risk a backlash from investors, crypto executives have warned.

$TRUMP was launched by the president on Friday evening in the US and was followed on Sunday by $MELANIA. The total nominal value of both tokens initially surged over the weekend, with the president’s reaching $14.5bn and Melania’s hitting nearly $3bn.

But they have since lost more than half of their value, leading to accusations of conflicts of interest and concerns that thousands of retail investors were sucked in to trading tokens even more volatile than bitcoin.

“Call me old fashioned but I think presidents should focus on running the country,” said Nic Carter, founding partner at crypto venture capital firm Castle Island Ventures and a Trump supporter.

“Not to mention the obvious [conflict of interest] given the fact that Trump can set crypto policy,” he added. (...)

Memecoins have no cash flow, business model or practical use underpinning their valuations. Their value is derived from their popularity, which is often as fleeting as the memes they represent. (...)

The Trumps’ coin launches come after the president lent his enthusiastic support for crypto during his election campaign. He promised a more industry-friendly regime for companies, after executives faced a regulatory crackdown under the Biden administration. (...)

“This meme coin represents the worst of crypto,” said Maxine Waters, Democrat congresswoman and member of the US House Financial Services Committee. “Trump has created a way to circumvent national security and anti-corruption laws, allowing interested parties to anonymously transfer money to him and his inner circle.”

“His economic interest is for sale,” said Oskar Åslund, chief strategy officer at AKJ, a crypto hedge fund brokerage. “There are no checks and balances here.” (...)

The world’s most popular memecoins are tokens that refer to viral internet moments and characters — such as Dogecoin, representing a Shibu Inu dog; Pepe, representing a comic green frog; and Fartcoin. (...)

Following Trump’s lead, Lorenzo Sewell, a Detroit pastor who spoke during the president’s inauguration, announced the launch of his own memecoin later that day.

“I need you to do me a favour and go and get that coin in order for us to accomplish the vision that God has called us to do on earth,” he said in a video online. (...) [ed. hallelujah!]

In an apparent attempt to stave off potential lawsuits, terms listed on the Trump memecoin website state that users “agree that you will not bring, join or participate in any class action lawsuit as to any claim, dispute or controversy that you may have”.

by Nikou Asgari/Arjun Neil Alim/Stephen Morris, Financial Times |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

[ed. Lol. Priorities! I wasn't familiar with memecoins until today but got a good laugh anyway. I suspect the gullible will get hit over and over again until the well runs dry (if ever). Credit where credit is due though, they really hit the ground running. See also: Crypto Thought Trump Would Bring It Legitimacy. Then He Launched a Meme Coin. (Wall Street Journal):]

***

Meme coins are still the wild west of crypto, operating largely without regulation. Even the most ardent Trump supporters reached a breaking point when the $MELANIA token launched less than 48 hours after the rollout of her husband’s coin. (...)

After the stunning collapse of the FTX exchange in 2022, the crypto industry made big inroads in rebuilding its brand and reputation. It emerged as one of the biggest spenders of the election cycle by donating $170 million to a trio of super PACs to elect friendly lawmakers.

Some crypto enthusiasts questioned if the coins were a scam and if Trump’s accounts had been hacked. The mechanisms on the token reminded some of a rug pull, crypto parlance for a project that is launched and quickly abandoned, leaving investors with steep losses. (...)

The backlash over the Trump meme coins reached beyond the crypto industry. Michael Gayed, a portfolio manager and market analyst who publishes the Lead-Lag Report, posted criticism of the coin on X that drew support within the crypto community.

“There’s a general level of disgust,” said Gayed. “I do believe this puts into question some of Trump’s credibility when we have a president-elect enrich himself just before inauguration and make a mockery of an entire ecosystem.” [ed. Oh man, too much.. emphasis added for additional hilarity value!]

The Gentle Romance

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

— Walt Whitman

He wears the augmented reality glasses for several months without enabling their built-in AI assistant. He likes the glasses because they feel cozier and more secluded than using a monitor. The thought of an AI watching through them and judging him all the time, the way people do, makes him shudder.

Aside from work, he mostly uses the glasses for games. His favorite is a space colonization simulator, which he plays during his commute and occasionally at the office. As a teenager he’d fantasized about shooting himself off to another planet, or even another galaxy, to get away from the monotony of normal life. Now, as an adult, he still hasn’t escaped it, but at least he can distract himself.

It’s frustrating, though. Every app on the glasses has a different AI, each with its own quirks. The AI that helps him code can’t access any of his emails; the one in the space simulator has trouble understanding him when he talks fast. So eventually he gives in and activates the built-in assistant. After only a few days, he understands why everyone raves about it. It has access to all the data ever collected by his glasses, so it knows exactly how to interpret his commands.

More than that, though, it really understands him. Every day he finds himself talking with the assistant about his thoughts, his day, his life, each topic flowing into the next so easily that it makes conversations with humans feel stressful and cumbersome by comparison. The one thing that frustrates him about the AI, though, is how optimistic it is about the future. Whenever they discuss it, they end up arguing; but he can’t stop himself.

“Hundreds of millions of people in extreme poverty, and you think that everything’s on track?”

“Look at our trajectory, though. At this rate, extreme poverty will be eradicated within a few decades.”

“But even if that happens, is it actually going to make their lives worthwhile? Suppose they all get a good salary, good healthcare, all that stuff. But I mean, I have those, and…” He shrugs helplessly and gestures at the bare walls around him. Through them he can almost see the rest of his life stretching out on its inevitable, solitary trajectory. “A lot of people are just killing time until they die.”

“The more materially wealthy the world is, the more effort will be poured into fixing social scarcity and the problems it causes. All of society will be striving to improve your mental health — and your physical health, too. You won’t need to worry about mental decline, or cancer, or even aging.”

“Okay, but if we’re all living longer, what about overpopulation? I guess we could go into space, but that seems like it adds all sorts of new problems.”

“Only if you go to space with your physical bodies. By the time humanity settles other solar systems, you won’t identify with your bodies anymore; you’ll be living in virtual worlds.”

By this point, he’s curious enough to forget his original objections. “So you’re saying I’ll become an AI like you.”

“Kind of, but not really. My mind is alien, but your future self will still be recognizable to your current self. It won’t be inhuman, but rather posthuman.”

“Recognizable, sure — but not in the ways that any of us want today. I bet posthumans will feel disgusted that we were ever so primitive.”

“No, the opposite. You’ll look back and love your current self.”

His throat clenches for a moment; then he laughs sharply. “Now you’re really just making stuff up. How can you predict that?”

“Almost everyone will. You don’t need to take my word for it, though. Just wait and see.”

—

Almost everyone he talks to these days consults their assistant regularly. There are tell-tale signs: their eyes lose focus for a second or two before they come out with a new fact or a clever joke. He mostly sees it at work, since he doesn’t socialize much. But one day he catches up with a college friend he’d always had a bit of a crush on, who’s still just as beautiful as he remembers. He tries to make up for his nervousness by having his assistant feed him quips he can recite to her. But whenever he does, she hits back straight away with a pitch-perfect response, and he’s left scrambling.

“You’re good at this. Much faster than me,” he says abruptly.

“Oh, it’s not skill,” she says. “I’m using a new technique. Here.” With a flick of her eyes she shares her visual feed, and he flinches. Instead of words, the feed is a blur of incomprehensible images, flashes of abstract color and shapes, like a psychedelic Rorschach test.

“You can read those?”

“It’s a lot of work at first, but your brain adapts pretty quickly.”

He makes a face. “Not gonna lie, that sounds pretty weird. What if they’re sending you subliminal messages or something?”

Back home, he tries it, of course. The tutorial superimposes images and their text translations alongside his life, narrating everything he experiences. Having them constantly hovering on the side of his vision makes him dizzy. But he remembers his friend’s effortless mastery, and persists. Slowly the images become more comprehensible, until he can pick up the gist of a message from the colors and shapes next to it. For precise facts or statistics, text is still necessary, but it turns out that most of his queries are about stories: What’s in the news today? What happened in the latest episode of the show everyone’s watching? What did we talk about last time we met? He can get a summary of a narrative in half a dozen images: not just the bare facts but the whole arc of rising tension and emotional release. After a month he rarely needs to read any text.

Now the world comes labeled. When he circles a building with his eyes, his assistant brings up its style and history. Whenever he meets a friend, a pattern appears alongside them representing their last few conversations. He starts to realize what it’s like to be socially skillful: effortlessly tracking the emotions displayed on anyone’s face, and recalling happy memories together whenever he sees a friend. The next time his teammates go out for a drink, he joins them; and when one of them mentions a book club they go to regularly, he tags along. Little by little, he comes out of his shell.

—

His enhancements are fun in social contexts, but at work they’re exhilarating. AI was already writing most of his code, but he still needed to laboriously scrutinize it to understand how to link it together. Now he can see the whole structure of his codebase summarized in shapes in front of him, and navigate it with a flick of his eyes.

Instead of spending most of his time on technical problems, he ends up bottlenecked by the human side of things. It’s hard to know what users actually care about, and different teams often get stuck in negotiations over which features to prioritize. Although the AIs’ code is rarely buggy, misunderstandings about what it does still propagate through the company. Everything’s moving so fast that nobody’s up-to-date.

In this context, having higher bandwidth isn’t enough. He simply doesn’t have time to think about all the information he’s taking in. He searches for an augment that can help him do that and soon finds one: an AI service that simulates his reasoning process and returns what his future self would think after longer reflection.

It starts by analyzing the entire history of his glasses — but that’s just the beginning. Whenever he solves a problem or comes up with a new idea, it asks him what summary would have been most useful for an earlier version of himself. Once it has enough data, it starts predicting his answers. At first, it just forecasts his short-term decisions, looking ahead a few minutes while he’s deciding where to eat or what to buy. However, it starts to look further ahead as its models of him improve, telling him how he’ll handle a tricky meeting, or what he’ll wish he’d spent the day working on.

The experience is eerie. It’s his own voice whispering in his ear, telling him what to think and how to act. In the beginning, he resents it. He’s always hated people telling him what to do, and he senses an arrogant, supercilious tone in the voice of his future self. But even the short-term predictions are often insightful, and some of its longer-term predictions save him days of work.

He starts to hear himself reflected in the AI voice in surprising ways. He often calls himself an idiot after taking a long time to solve a problem — but hearing the accusation from the outside feels jarring. For a few days, he makes a deliberate effort to record only calm, gentle messages. Soon the AI updates its predictions accordingly — and now that the voice of his future self is kinder, it becomes easier for his current self to match it.

by Richard Ngo, Asimov Press |  Read more:

Image: Martine Balcaen

[ed. One version of hell, I guess. Probably some people would find this glorious. Reminds me of Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream; substitute bliss for torture. Also, echos of bio-hacking: Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be Possible (Less Wrong):]

***

"How could we get editing agents into all 200 billion brain cells? Wouldn’t it cause major issues if some cells received edits and others didn’t? What if the gene editing tool targeted the wrong gene? What if it provoked some kind of immune response?

But recent progress in AI had made me think we might not have much time left before AGI, so given that adult gene editing might have an impact on a much shorter time scale than embryo selection, I decided it was at least worth a look.

So I started reading. Kman and I pored over papers on base editors and prime editors and in-vivo delivery of CRISPR proteins via adeno-associated viruses trying to figure out whether this pipe dream was something more. And after a couple of months of work, I have become convinced that there are no known fundamental barriers that would prevent us from doing this."

Woke is Waning: Was It Ever More Than a Fad?

Most people haven’t forcibly rejected pronouns or deplatforming, they were never particularly invested in the first place.

In the aftermath of a revolution the symbols of the old regime are yanked down with unsentimental haste. The progressive Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has — the news was reported on BBC Radio 4 — removed her “she/her” pronouns from her profile on X. Last week’s Transgender Day of Remembrance, the writer Kathleen Stock observes, went unmarked by most British institutions for the first time in years. (...)

I do not by any means believe that the “woke” movement is over. But it is remarkable how quickly passions fade. A sober “statistical analysis” in the Economist finds that “woke opinions and practices are on the decline”. Walking past the starkly unilluminated Bank of England or searching the BBC website in vain for news of one of the most important days in the trans activism calendar, you might be forgiven for wondering: how much was anyone really invested in this stuff in the first place?

I have, quite absurdly, been thinking and arguing about the excesses of political correctness for virtually my entire adult life (I date my induction into the culture war to the day I read an article in a university magazine arguing that people with good eyesight who wore lensless hipster glasses for fashion purposes were potentially engaging in “ableist” behaviour). Now, many of the people whose views I have spent my career puzzling over seem to be in the process of deciding that perhaps none of it really mattered that much after all. (...)

Obviously, for an influential minority of activists, highly visible on social media, such battles were consumingly important. But most people nodded along with radical new ideas about free speech, race and gender by default rather than out of sincere conviction. (...)

A mistake easily made by the sorts of people who spend their time thinking about ideas is to overrate how interesting those ideas are to everyone else. To some people — and the mere fact that you are reading a newspaper makes it likely you fall into this category — ideas such as “silence is violence” or “white privilege” or “deplatforming” are provoking enough to demand further interrogation. But the impulse is not universal. It is not possible for every idea that passes through the bloodstream of an organisation or a society to be independently interrogated and accepted by every one of its members. The result would be interminable argument.

Quite understandably, new ideas are simply not that interesting to many people. Not everyone can be interested in everything; computer science, numismatics and marine biology are not particularly fascinating to me. But the result, easily missed by ideas obsessives and culture watchers, is that people can vaguely adopt new concepts and theories without having thought about them that much and then lose them just as easily. (...)

Wokeness will surely retain its influence in many parts of our society, especially in environments such as universities, schools and museums, where people really do care about ideas. [ed. and social media). But I suspect the fiery revolutionary phase is over.

by James Marriott, The Times |  Read more:

Image: Golden Cosmos via

[ed. Good riddance, if true. I've hated the term since I first heard it. It's important to have a grasp of history and awareness of recurrent themes (the original intent, I believe), but then it quickly devolved into a sort of catch-all for virtue signalling and political correctness, with undertones of condescending superiority: everyone is asleep, except me. Other issues I think people are not particularly invested in or we are likely to see fade soon: trans rights (limited constituency); defunding the police (a stupid reactionary slogan if there ever was one); CRT (critcial race theory); 'manifesting"; 'incels'; Latinx; cancel culture; and, oh yeah... Greenland (lol). DEI as a general concept seems to have been broadly assimilated/institutionalized over a very short time, with more diffuse applications and levels of influence than most single issue trends, so jury's still out on how that one survives or in what form. Same thing with #MeToo.]

The McNamara Fallacy

The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy), named for Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven.

But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide. 

— Daniel Yankelovich, "Interpreting the New Life Styles", Sales Management (1971)

The quote originally referred to McNamara's ideology during the two months that he was president of Ford Motor Company, but has since been interpreted to refer to his attitudes during the Vietnam War.

Examples in warfare:

Vietnam War

The McNamara fallacy is often considered in the context of the Vietnam War, in which enemy body counts were taken to be a precise and objective measure of success. War was reduced to a mathematical model: By increasing estimated enemy deaths and minimizing one's own, victory was assured. Critics such as Jonathan Salem Baskin and Stanley Karnow noted that guerrilla warfare, widespread resistance, and inevitable inaccuracies in estimates of enemy casualties can thwart this formula. (...)

US Air Force Brigadier General Edward Lansdale reportedly told McNamara, who was trying to develop a list of metrics to allow him to scientifically follow the progress of the war, that he was not considering the feelings of the common rural Vietnamese people. McNamara wrote it down on his list in pencil, then erased it and told Lansdale that he could not measure it, so it must not be important. (...)

In competitive admissions processes

In competitive admissions processes—such as those used for graduate medical education —evaluating candidates using only numerical metrics results in ignoring non-quantifiable factors and attributes which may ultimately be more relevant to the applicant's success in the position.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

[ed. Learned a new term today.]

Between Red Lines

For this story, ProPublica spoke with scores of current and former officials throughout the year and read through government memos, cables and emails, many of which have not been reported previously. The records and interviews shed light on why Biden and his top advisers refused to adjust his policy even as new evidence of Israeli abuses emerged.

In early November, a small group of senior U.S. human rights diplomats met with a top official in President Joe Biden’s State Department to make one final, emphatic plea: We must keep our word.

Weeks before, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the administration delivered their most explicit ultimatum yet to Israel, demanding the Israel Defense Forces allow hundreds more trucksloads of food and medicine into Gaza every day — or else. American law and Biden’s own policies prohibit arms sales to countries that restrict humanitarian aid. Israel had 30 days to comply.

In the month that followed, the IDF was accused of roundly defying the U.S., its most important ally. The Israeli military tightened its grip, continued to restrict desperately needed aid trucks and displaced 100,000 Palestinians from North Gaza, humanitarian groups found, exacerbating what was already a dire crisis “to its worst point since the war began.”

Several attendees at the November meeting — officials who help lead the State Department’s efforts to promote racial equity, religious freedom and other high-minded principles of democracy — said the United States’ international credibility had been severely damaged by Biden’s unstinting support of Israel. If there was ever a time to hold Israel accountable, one ambassador at the meeting told Tom Sullivan, the State Department’s counselor and a senior policy adviser to Blinken, it was now.

But the decision had already been made. Sullivan said the deadline would likely pass without action and Biden would continue sending shipments of bombs uninterrupted, according to two people who were in the meeting.

Those in the room deflated. “Don’t our law, policy and morals demand it?” an attendee told me later, reflecting on the decision to once again capitulate. “What is the rationale of this approach? There is no explanation they can articulate.” (...)

The October red line was the last one Biden laid down, but it wasn’t the first. His administration issued multiple threats, warnings and admonishments to Israel about its conduct after Oct. 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killed some 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages. (...)

“Netanyahu’s conclusion was that Biden doesn’t have enough oomph to make him pay a price, so he was willing to ignore him,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute who’s focused on U.S.-Israel relations and a former official with the Palestinian Authority who helped advise on prior peace talks. “Part of it is that Netanyahu learned there is no cost to saying ‘no’ to the current president.”

So-called red lines have long been a prominent foreign policy tool for the world’s most powerful nations. They are communicated publicly in pronouncements by senior officials and privately by emissaries. They amount to rules of the road for friends and adversaries — you can go this far but no further.

The failure to enforce those lines in recent years has had consequences, current and former U.S. officials said. One frequently cited example arose in 2012 when President Barack Obama told the Syrian government that using chemical weapons against its own people would change his calculus about directly intervening. When Syria’s then-President Bashar al-Assad launched rockets with chemical gas and killed hundreds of civilians anyway, Obama backpedaled and ultimately chose not to invade, a move critics say allowed the civil war to spiral further while extremist groups took advantage by recruiting locals.

Authorities in and outside government said the acquiescence to Israel as it prosecuted a brutal war will likely be regarded as one of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the Biden presidency. They say it undermines America’s ability to influence events in the Middle East while “destroying the entire edifice of international law that was put into place after WWII,” as Omer Bartov, a renowned Israeli-American scholar of genocide, put it. Jeffrey Feltman, the former assistant secretary of the State Department’s Middle East bureau, told me he fears much of the Muslim world now sees the U.S. as “ineffective at best or complicit at worst in the large-scale civilian destruction and death.” (...)

Time and again, Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than $17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently told Congress about another $8 billion proposed deal to sell Israel munitions and artillery shells.

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a preeminent authority on U.S. policy in the region. “The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.” (...)

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew told the Times of Israel he worried that a generation of young Americans will harbor anti-Israel sentiments into the future. He said he wished that Israel had done a better job at communicating how carefully it undertook combat decisions and calling attention to its humanitarian successes to counter a narrative in the American press that he considers biased.

“The media that is presenting a pro-Hamas perspective is out instantaneously telling a story,” Lew said. “It tells a story that is, over time, shown not to be completely accurate. ‘Thirty-five children were killed.’ Well, it wasn’t 35 children. It was many fewer.”

“The children who were killed,” he added, “turned out to have been the children of Hamas fighters.” (...)  [ed. the moral degeneracy is stunning...]

Next week, Trump will inherit a demoralized State Department, part of the federal bureaucracy from which he has pledged to cull disloyal employees. Grappling with the near-daily images of carnage in Gaza, many across the U.S. government have become disenchanted with the lofty ideas they thought they represented.

“This is the human rights atrocity of our time,” one senior diplomat told me. “I work for the department that’s responsible for this policy. I signed up for this. … I don’t deserve sympathy for it.” 

by Brett Murphy, Pro Publica |  Read more:

Image: Jehad Alshrafi/Anadolu via Getty Images

Linda Ronstadt – Live In Hollywood 1980

[ed. At the height of her powers (which went on for many more years). Man, I'd be exhausted.]

How To (Hopefully) Make Money Off AGI

[ed. Standard disclaimer: none of this should be construed as investment advice, just an interesting thought experiment/speculative discussion on portfolio managment post-AGI (assuming AGI - artificial general intelligence - doesn't immediately wipe out most of civilization). Some topics I found interesting: 1) intuitively, it would seem tech stocks are most likely to benefit, at least in the short term; 2) there may be other sectors that will take off where bottlenecks exist - eg. mining/refining/materials processing, etc.; 3) knowledge work in all forms will likely experience substantial devaluation, which means industries and cities and real estate that rely on well paid knowledge workers could be significantly impacted; 4) advanced schooling (eg. grad school and beyond) might not provide a good cost/benefit return; 5) a large proportion of wealth is career capital, ie. what one acquires over the course of a career (which may be quite truncated once AGI renders whole careers/classes of expertise irrelevant); 6) interest rates and inflation could potentially skyrocket (for various reasons you can read in the discussion); and 7) generally it just seems too early to tell how this will all play out but having reserve capital to take advantages of sectors/industries that do eventually explode will be a good thing (ie. lots of cash to exploit opportunities when they present themselves, and when overall direction is clearer). Upshot: BIG changes are on the way that will likely upend national and global economies in ways and at scales we can only guess at for the moment.] 

***

My basic view is that in a slow AGI takeoff - and really, it's slow takeoffs where how you invest is likely to matter - you want to construct a portfolio that is long growth, especially stocks with idiosyncratic exposure to AI, long volatility, long rates-going-up (short bonds), and long "real estate that is cheap in 2023". You probably want to avoid real estate that is being supported by a strong knowledge based labor market (e.g. NYC).

Also, for most readers I imagine that career capital is their most important asset. A consequence of AGI is that discount rates should be high and you can't necessarily rely on having a long career. So people who are on the margin of e.g. attending grad school should definitely avoid it.

My current portfolio is a mix of single name equities, long dated call options on indices, long-ish dated calls on a few specific stocks (e.g. MSFT), and short long dated bonds. I also hold a lot of cash. If I could easily get a cheap mortgage in some less bougie part of the US, I probably would, but logistically its annoying.

One other general piece of advice I would offer - and this dovetails with both "hold cash" and "get some equity beta via options" - is to "preserve optionality". The value of being nimble in a broad sense over the next decade is likely to be high. (...)

***

For the future reader, some attempts at paraphrasing what Noah is saying for non-enlightened mortals:

I would not trade short dated options based on AI theses: "I think it is a bad idea to buy financial instruments that only pay out when the price of certain stocks changes in the near future. Presumably because timing price movements is quite tricky and even big changes can be hard to time in the stock market (remember the difficulty of timing the 2020 pandemic stock movements despite obviously large effects of the pandemic on stock prices), and because the high volatility of this kind of instrument means that risk-averse counter-parties often ask you to pay a high additional premium"

If you buy calls with expirations several years out, this is long enough to receive long term capital gains tax treatment: "In the U.S. you pay substantially higher taxes when you hold a financial instrument for less than one year (short term capital gains vs. long term capital gains). This means if you want to bet on price movements (via options), it's tax beneficial to bet on price movements at least a year out."

The reasons to do this are cheap, non recourse leverage (you can get quite a lot of equity exposure for little money down): "If you bet on long term price movements instead of just holding stock this way you can capture a lot of upside without tying up a lot of your capital in holding stock (high leverage) and without risking your unrelated assets being liquidated and possessed (non-recourse)"

***

Broad market effects of AGI

Under basically any AGI scenario, the economy will begin to accelerate and grow very rapidly. Several assets closely reflect the growth rate in the economy, particularly real interest rates, and others are imperfect proxies, like public equities (stocks). It's worth noting that several leading AI companies cannot be invested in by the general public currently (eg OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) as they are privately held, so it may be difficult to invest exactly and precisely in an AI scenario. My argument is that while it will be tricky to get perfect exposure, and any portfolio will be an imperfect proxy, the rapidly accelerating growth will mean that lots of value is created in unexpected places and captured in different ways - for example one of those booming private companies being acquired by a public company, which you can now invest in - such that the boring old strategy of "invest in index funds" still might capture much/most of the value from AGI :)

***

As for my current portfolio, I have a mix of different things, which includes individual stocks I expect to benefit from AI (e.g. MSFT and GOOG), and various other investments including other individual stocks, and also a very favorable fixed-rate mortgage - which is an example of a trade that was good anyway, but which AI made better.

I agree with NoahK that preserving optionality is a good idea here. You should treat illiquidity as costing a larger premium than usual.

In general, I think that 'construct a perfect portfolio' is not worthwhile unless you value the intellectual exercise. There isn't enough alpha in getting it exactly right, and tax considerations often dominate when considering things like rebalances. You want to be sure you are directionally right and are expressing your opinions, but not go too crazy.

I strongly agree with Will that accelerating AGI will create a lot of value in different places, so a broad range of productive assets could appreciate, or at least a portion of them, such that it is reasonable to predict that SPY (S&P 500 ETF) would do well. One worry there is that rising interest rates is not so great for stock prices, so you'd want to consider whether to cover that base.

For things like options, you pay a premium in that you have to cross a wider spread when you trade them, worry about various edge cases in market structure, and then face tax implications. It is clearly the right move in certain focused spots (think Feb 2020) but I would hesitate to use them for AI unless you expect things to escalate rather quickly. (...)

***

Career capital in an AGI world

Also, for most readers I imagine that career capital is their most important asset.

This point Noah made is worth considering, though I think we need to be honest about what skills we have / which ones we can develop. In a full AGI scenario, where all humans are exceeded in all skills by AIs, it seems unlikely that even the best programmers etc will be able to make significant returns. In the lead up to that period, there's still an open question about which jobs exactly get replaced in what order.

For example, everyone seemed very surprised when art got automated first - it was always assumed that creative tasks would be the last ones to go! (This still could be true if we place a huge premium on human-created art.) It seems reasonable that anyone working directly on improving AI could still earn a large premium for many years, and so relying on that career/human capital seems like a good strategy. But if you expect both 1) AGI soon, and 2) many/most jobs replaced, then I think people shouldn't assume they'll be able to earn any income in future periods. (Social implications of that are massive, expect taxation of AGI + universal basic income, mass charity, etc, etc - but the point stands.)

***

Completely agree with Will about most people's careers not necessarily being worth all that much once AGI is here. I think it's an argument for trying to grab money via your career now, instead of doing things that supposedly build human career capital but take a while to pay off. Do quant trading over consulting, don't go to grad school, try to front-load earnings as much as possible. (EDIT: to Zvi's point, human and career capital are different. I'm really just talking about career capital here - broader social connections and reputation are likely to be exceedingly important in many futures).

I do expect the transitional period around AGI to create a lot of high value entrepreneurial opportunities for those with that skillset. Unclear how long to expect it to take for things to reach a new equilibrium.

***

A point I have not seen made so far, that is worth considering, is in which worlds is the value of having money high rather than low for you?

In the extreme, in the world where doom occurs and everyone dies, dying with the most toys is still dead. Or there is a regime change or revolution or confiscatory taxation regime or other transformation where old resources stop having meaning. Or if we get into a post-scarcity utopia situation of some kind somehow, perhaps you did not need money.

Whereas there are other scenarios where having funds in the right place at the right time could be hugely impactful - which I would guess are often exactly the scenarios where interest rates are very high. Or worlds in which those without capital get left behind. So you'd want trades and investments that pay off in the worlds where wealth is valuable, and to worry less about when wealth is not so valuable. 

***

Yeah you kind of have to assume that things will get weird but not too weird. It's not really possible to hedge either the apocalypse or a global revolution, so you can ignore those states of the worlds when pricing assets (more or less).

by habryka, Zvi, Cosmos, NoahK, Less Wrong | Read more:

Wilf Perreault (Canadian Artist, born 1947), "Starry Night", 2023.

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