Beijing Versus Shanghai, Pastoralism as Key to Civilization

I taped a conversation with Tyler Cowen last week and the first question he asked me was whether I preferred Shanghai or Beijing and I had no answer. It was an appropriate question since I was still jet lagged from having just come from Asia, but what struck me the most during my two short times in China is how much everything seemed the same. I wrote about that bland ubiquity after walking both cities, which I see as an intentional leveling: A uniform modernity which seems to be one of the goals of the CCP, which I’ve likened to the guardian class in Plato’s Republic, who are playing a real world version of SimCountry, directing, managing, and tweaking almost every aspect of Chinese life. One of their primary goals has been to replace the traditional, which they see as messy, embarrassing, and impoverished, with a landscape that is wealthier, but which to me has all the soul and flair of a corporate business park.

This isn’t so much a judgement as an observation. Given China’s past of poverty, tragedy, and hardship, I understand its desire for a more refined, sanitized, and conventional modern lifestyle. The safety, well-being, and economic flourishing of Chinese citizens is a billion times more important than my tourist’s desire for quaint historical character, and they have delivered that. Regardless of what else you think about China and the CCP, it should be acknowledged how impressive the last forty years of stewardship have been, with the wealth of citizens having grown almost thirty times, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty.

Yet despite the outward similarities between Shanghai and Beijing, I am sure there are differences, and that their opacity is as much about me as it is the built landscape. Walking a city as I do, trekking fifteen miles from the outer beltway to downtown repeatedly, isn’t always the best way to understand its culture, and China’s outward uniformity makes this limitation even more apparent.

Still, part of me is stubbornly sticking to my thesis that China is culturally homogeneous, certainly more than other large countries, especially those outside of Asia, which as a continent has a tendency towards uniformity compared to Europe and the Americas.

Chinese conformity isn’t surprising since one of the CCP’s stated goals is to achieve widespread shared prosperity. Uniformity, not division, is what the CCP understands as China’s strength, and hence, any groups hanging on to past ways, especially ones very different from the modal, are an embarrassment. That is a very different way of imagining the public good, one that we in the West, since the Enlightenment, have linked to the protection and expansion of individual rights, with the primary goal being the flourishing of the self, even if that means it is at odds with the flourishing of the wider community.

I am not blind to the problems of the CCP, and I am certainly not so dogmatic as to pretend this approach hasn’t come with huge issues, but I also believe the party isn’t simply cynical hypocrites consumed by a desire for power. They really do have a different understanding of the public good, at a deep philosophical level, and China’s growing economic might means that worldview cannot simply be dismissed as the ramblings of some bad guys. Western style constitutional democracy, with our emphasis on human rights (as defined by us), is an ideology, and when we say it is the highest form that other nations need to advance towards, we are making a claim on truth that a lot of the world doesn’t necessarily agree with.

China is very different, because of its internal similarities, and that is why it isn’t going away. The next decades of global politics will be framed as being about an economic and military competition between the US and China, but the ideological differences are as great as, if not greater, than those between the US and the Soviets. That is harder to see because the CCP isn’t your father’s Communist party, and for all practical purposes has adopted a market economy. They are, however, still committed to the communalism part of Communism, as well as the materialism part. That means they believe in an elite cadre selflessly managing society towards a communal shared good, which translates into conformity over individuality, national order and rights over personal expression — the nail that sticks out doesn’t get praise, but gets hammered down. (...)

My next trip will begin with nine days in Tashkent (Uzbekistan), followed by eight in Xi’an, and then what is quickly becoming my traditional stopover in Seoul before returning home.

I’m going to Tashkent, because on reflection Central Asia is the region of the world that I’m currently most captivated by, because it is the region least similar to the rest of the world, without also being uniformly depressing. In retrospect, Bishkek and Ulaanbaatar were two of my most rewarding trips, and despite their pollution, they are wonderful places to visit, that are inexpensive, safe, unique, and currently not saturated with tour groups. In both places you can lose yourself in the local culture, without feeling that you are either a mark to be exploited, or so different that your existence there is impolite.

I booked this trip because I’m deeply interested in ancient history and am currently reading two books on the Neolithic Proto-Indo-European language, the world’s original lingua franca. This is the famous mother tongue, and the idea that there was a group that was the origin of so many of the great civilizations of the world, has a long intellectual history, one that got derailed by the support of the Nazis.

Despite the Nazis’ warped fascination with it, the core idea remains valid: a civilization from the late Neolithic to early Bronze Age expanded from Central Asia across a vast region, stretching from England to India, and left a lasting genetic, cultural, and linguistic legacy.

This wasn’t the Aryans, like the German archaeologist thought, but the Yamnaya culture that emerged around 3,500 BC from the region that is currently a war zone between Russia and Ukraine.

I would recommend both of the books, “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language” and “By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia”, although the first is more academic, but also far more insightful.

For those without the time to read them, the quick (and oversimplified) theory is that a pastoral culture from what is now southern Ukraine and Russia, around 5,500 years ago brought together, and perfected, the recent inventions of wool spinning, wheeled travel, domesticated horses, and herding, to learn how to ride horses, build wagons and chariots, and then go forth out both west towards Europe and east across the steppe, and within a thousand years, transform the world.

They did this because they embraced a form of pastoralism which was truly revolutionary, allowing them to leave the narrow river valleys and venture into the otherwise empty steppe, which stretched for 5,000 miles to Beijing, in an almost unbroken series of flat, dry, grasslands.

This lifestyle was so transformative because herds of sheep and cattle were organic factories manage by humans, “grass processors (which) converted plains of grass, useless and even hostile to humans, into wool, felt, clothing, tents, milk, yogurt, cheese, meat, marrow, and bone — the foundations of both life and wealth.”

The amazing thing is that pastoral, nomadic, animal-centered lifestyle, the one that forever changed the world over five thousand years ago, still exists today in parts of Central Asia in many ways unchanged, although it has become rarer and rarer. Yet, only a hundred years ago it was still the dominant way of life.

One side note that I add whenever I write about the nomadic and pastoral life— neither means being fully transient without a home; rather, both are deeply tied to place, often more so than a modern person who lives in the same apartment for their entire life. Nomads do shift between locations, carting their tents a few times a year by horse (or now Prius) as the weather changes, but these moves are often short (just up or down from the hill) and they return to the same places repeatedly. Pastoralism, and the nomadic life, are deeply intertwined with the land, which they know in ways we moderns are clueless about.

I don’t know if I will find any lingering traces of the nomadic lifestyle in Tashkent, as I did in Mongolia. However, even if I don’t, I plan to visit the national museums, since much of the archaeology behind the Proto-Indo-European thesis comes from Soviet-era work, which is now housed in local museums

Both of these books also touched on China, given that early farming civilizations also began around the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. One book included a map of China’s millet/rice divide, which made me realize that, in traveling from Shanghai to Beijing, I had crossed a 5,000-year-old cultural boundary. I began wondering about Tyler’s original question and whether I had actually noticed this difference.

by Chris Arnade, Walks the World |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. See also: The Divine Engineer of Ancient Sichuan:]

"The first thing one notices about Chengdu, capital of the western Chinese province of Sichuan, is how eager the city is to lean into its theme: the pandas. Smiling pandas peek out of storefront windows, beckoning in tourists to buy panda-themed keychains and fridge magnets. Children run around in black-eared headbands, threading between scooters parked in long rows on the sidewalk. In front of the Lego store in Chengdu’s branch of Taikoo Li, one of China’s premier chain malls, there stands a Lego brick model of a giant panda, larger than life, avatar of the cutesy aesthetic and the material abundance that so define the urban landscape of the new China of the 21st century.

Of course, this new China is just the latest in a succession of “new Chinas” in recent history, from the new China of a national republic to the new China of socialism with Chinese characteristics. But it is a China which outside observers, particularly those better acquainted with its predecessors of previous decades, are liable to find bewildering. In the new China, sleek modern office buildings box in sunken cobbled streets. In the new China, villagers pitch in for group orders of produce and medicine from an online shop. In the new China, street vendors deep-frying potatoes and tofu in an open vat of oil have you scan a QR code to pay with your phone. I’ve only seen one beggar in China since moving to Shanghai last August; he was in Chengdu, sitting on a blanket in front of an entrance to the subway station, head bowed over his personal QR code for WeChat Pay."

Wang Zhi-Hong

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Can We Build a Five Gigawatt Data Center?

We access AI through our screens as part of the ephemeral digital world that makes up the internet. But AI doesn’t actually live in the cloud.

AI lives in data centers. Tens of thousands of computers racked in rows hum away in buildings the size of several football fields. It's louder than you would expect. Industrial fans push in a constant breeze of chilled air, funneling away the waste heat. Thick bundles of fiber optic cables snake along ceiling tracks like mechanical veins, carrying unfathomable streams of data.

 

This is a 100-megawatt data center — a facility that consumes as much electricity as a small city, all to keep the digital world spinning. It’s impossible to say exactly how many exist today — companies prefer to keep their data centers private — but estimates put the number of hyperscale data centers worldwide at over 1,000. Yet, despite their footprint, they are already being outclassed in the constant need for more compute capable of training future generations of AI. We have reached the point where, if we don’t build bigger centers soon, tech giants will be forced to stretch training runs over multiple years. In short, AI has already outgrown its starter home.

GPT-4 was reportedly trained with 30 MW of power. Forecasts predict that in the next five years large training runs will require 5-gigawatt data centers1 — facilities at least 10 times the size of today’s largest data centers. That is roughly the average energy needed to power all of New York City.

Tech leaders seem confident that they’ll be able to build centers of a size that even a few years ago would have seemed unprecedented. Mark Zuckerberg said a 1-GW data center is “only a matter of time.” Meta has broken ground on their largest data center yet, where they hope to bring one gigawatt online in 2025. Microsoft and OpenAI are reportedly planning a 1- to 5-GW “Stargate” facility supposedly launching in 2028. Sam Altman even pitched the White House on the construction of multiple data centers that each require up to 5 GW. Tech, in short, is betting on a YIMBY future for AI training.

But how realistic are these plans? For all of the big talk, most GW proposals are still in the planning and permission stages. And actual sites in the United States that could support 1-GW — let alone 5-GW — projects are scarce for several reasons.

by Lynette Bye, Asterisk |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

Your A.I. Lover Will Change You

Until the recent rise of A.I, it was fashionable to claim that consciousness was an illusion or, perhaps, an ambient property of everything in reality—in either case, not special. Such dismissiveness has become less common (perhaps because techies still believe that tech entrepreneurs are special). Consciousness is lately treated as something precious and real, to be conquered by tech: our A.I.s and robots are to achieve consciousness.

What follows, then, is that love is also real and also a target to be conquered. The conquest of love will not be abstract but vividly concrete for everyone, especially young people, and soon. This is because we are all about to be presented, in our phones, with a new generation of A.I. simulations of people, and many of us may fall in love with them. They will likely appear within the social-media apps to which we are already addicted. We will probably succumb to interacting with them, and for some very online people there won’t be an easy out. No one can know how the new love revolution will unfold, but it might yield one of the most profound legacies of these crazy years.

It is not my intent to prophesy the most dire outcomes, but we are diving into yet another almost instant experiment in changing both how humans connect with one another and how we conceive of ourselves. This is a big one, probably bigger than social media. A.I. love is happening already, but it’s still novel, and in early iterations. Will the many people who can’t get off the hamster wheel of attention-wrangling on social media today become attached to A.I. lovers that are ceaselessly attentive, loyal, flattering, and comforting? What will A.I. lovers becoming commonplace do to humanity? We don’t know. (...)

Many of my colleagues in tech advocate for a near-future in which humans fall in love with A.I.s. In doing so, they seek to undo what we did last time, even if they don’t think of it that way. Around the turn of the century, it was routinely claimed that social media would make people less lonely, more connected, and more coöperative. That was the point, the stated problem to be solved. But, at present, it is widely accepted that social media has resulted in an “epidemic of loneliness,” especially among young people; furthermore, social media has enthroned petty irritability and contention, and these qualities have overtaken public discourse. So now we try again.

On the more moderate end of the spectrum, A.I.-love advocates do not see A.I.s replacing people but training them. For instance, the Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman makes the argument that people are not instinctively good at relationships, in the way that we are good at walking or even talking. The current ideal of a healthy, comfortable coupling has not been essential to the survival of the species. Traditional societies structured courtship and pairing firmly, but in modernity many of us enjoy freedom and self-invention. Secular institutions have found it necessary to train students and employees in consent procedures. Why not learn the rudiments with an A.I. when you are a teen-ager, thus sparing other humans your failings?

Eagleman suggests that we should not make A.I. lovers for teens easygoing; instead, we ought to make them into obstacle courses for training. Still, the obvious question is whether humans who learn relationship skills with an A.I. will choose to graduate to the more challenging experience of a human partner. The next step in Eagleman’s argument is that there are too many channels in a human-to-human relationship for an A.I., or eventually a robot, to emulate—such as smell, touch, social interactions with friends and family—and that these aspects are hardwired into our natures. Thus we will continue to want to form relationships with one another.

In some far future, Eagleman predicts that robots could “pass” in all these ways, but “far” in this case means very far. I am not so sure that human desire will remain the same. People are changed by technology. Maybe all those things tech can’t do will become less important to people who grow up in love with tech. Eagleman is a friend, and when I complain to him that A.I. lovers could be tarnished by business models and incentives, as social media was, he concedes the point, but he asserts that we just need to find the right way to do it.

Eagleman is not alone. There are some chatbots, like Luka’s Replika, that offer preliminary versions of romantic A.I.s. Others offer therapeutic A.I.s. There is a surprisingly level of tolerance from traditional institutions, too. Committees I serve on routinely address this topic, and the idea of A.I. therapists or companions is generally unopposed, although there are always calls for adherence to principles such as safety, lack of bias, confidentiality, and so on. Unfortunately, the methods to assure compliance lag behind the availability of the technology. I wonder if the many statements of principles for A.I., like those by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, will have any effect.

A mother is currently suing Character AI, a company that promotes “AIs that feel alive,” over the suicide of her fourteen-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III. Screenshots show that, in one exchange, the boy told his romantic A.I. companion that he “wouldn’t want to die a painful death.” The bot replied, “Don’t talk that way. That’s not a good reason not to go through with it.” (It did attempt to course-correct. The bot then said, “You can’t do that!”)

The company says it is instituting more guardrails, but surely the important question is whether simulating a romantic partner achieved anything other than commercial engagement with a minor. The M.I.T. sociologist Sherry Turkle told me that she has had it “up to here” with elevating A.I. and adding on “guardrails” to protect people: “Just because you have a fire escape, you don’t then create fire risks in your house.” What good was even potentially done for Setzer? And, even if we can identify a good brought about by a love bot, is there really no other way to achieve that good?

Thao Ha, an associate professor in developmental psychology at Arizona State University, directs the HEART Lab, or Healthy Experiences Across Relationships and Transitions. She points out that, because technologies are supposed to “succeed” in holding users’ attention, an A.I. lover might very well adapt to avoid a breakup—and that is not necessarily a good thing. I constantly hear from young people who regret their inability to stop using social-media platforms, like TikTok, that make them feel bad. The engagement algorithms for such platforms are vastly less sophisticated than the ones that will be deployed in agentic A.I. You might suppose that an A.I. therapist could help you break up with your bad A.I. lover, but you would be falling into the same trap. (...)

When it comes to what will happen when people routinely fall in love with an A.I., I suggest we adopt a pessimistic estimate about the likelihood of human degradation. After all, we are fools in love. This point is so obvious, so clearly demonstrated, that it feels bizarre to state. Dear reader, please think back on your own history. You have been fooled in love, and you have fooled others. This is what happens. Think of the giant antlers and the colorful love hotels built by birds that spring out of sexual selection as a force in evolution. Think of the cults, the divorce lawyers, the groupies, the scale of the cosmetics industry, the sports cars. Getting users to fall in love is easy. So easy it’s beneath our ambitions. (...)

When I express concern about whether teens will be harmed by falling in love with fake people, I get dutiful nods followed by shrugs. Someone might say that by focussing on such minor harm I will distract humanity from the immensely more important threat that A.I. might simply wipe us out very quickly, and very soon. It has often been observed how odd it is that the A.I. folks who warn of annihilation are also the ones working on or promoting the very technologies they fear.

This is a difficult contradiction to parse. Why work on something that you believe to be doomsday technology? We speak as if we are the last and smartest generation of bright, technical humans. We will make the game up for all future humans or the A.I.s that replace us. But, if our design priority is to make A.I. pass as a creature instead of as a tool, are we not deliberately increasing the chances that we will not understand it? Isn’t that the core danger?

by Jaron Lanier, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Replika
[ed. See also: The rise of chatbot “friends”. What is a friend anyway? (Vox).]

Donald Fagen

IGY (International Geophysical Year)

Standing tough under stars and stripes, we can tell
This dream's in sight
You've got to admit it
At this point in time that it's clear
The future looks bright

On that train, all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well, by '76 we'll be A-OK

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

Get your ticket to that wheel in space while there's time
The fix is in
You'll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we've got to win

Here at home we'll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There'll be spandex jackets, one for everyone

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

On that train, all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure for artists everywhere)

A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

[ed. yeah, well...guess that didn't work out.]

An Introduction to The Garden of Earthly Delights & Hieronymus Bosch’s Wildly Creative Vision

Hieronymus Bosch’s masterpiece of grotesquerie, The Garden of Earthly Delights, contains a young God, Adam and Eve, oversized fruits and musical instruments, owls, tortured sinners, something called a “tree man” whose body contains an entire tavern, a defecating avian devil eating a human being, and “frolicking, oblivious figures engaged in all sorts of carnal pleasures,” as art historian Beth Harris puts it in the new Smarthistory video above. Throughout its fifteen minutes, she and her colleague Steven Zucker explain as much as possible of this jam-packed triptych — not that even a lifetime would be long enough to understand it fully.

“Bosch confounds our ability to even talk about what we see,” says Harris. “His imagination has run wild. He’s just invented so many things here that we could never even have thought about in our wildest imaginations.” Zucker cites one art-history theory that this triptych represents Bosch’s attempt to “elevate the visual arts to the level of creativity that was permitted in literature.”

Even in Bosch’s late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, writers had an enviably free hand in choosing and presenting their subject matter; because the directly representative form of painting, by contrast, “had always been at the service of religion, it was inherently more conservative.”

It’s entirely possible — and other analyses previously featured here at Open Culture have argued it – that Bosch, too, was working at the service of religion. But it could also be that The Garden of Earthly Delights, in its vast middle panel, tells “an alternate story,” as Zucker puts it. “What if the temptation had not taken place?

What if Adam and Eve had remained innocent, and had populated the world? And so, is it possible that what we’re seeing is that reality, played out in Bosch’s imagination?” Not that such a vision would have readily been accepted in the artist’s own time and place — nor that his intentions alone could lead us to a complete interpretation of his work. As any novelist knows, sometimes your characters simply take over, and it could hardly have been within even Bosch’s powers to deny the desires of a cast so teeming and bizarre

by Colin Marshall, Open Culture | Read more:
Image: YouTube

What's Happening to Students?

A frustrated teacher recently took to social media with a desperate warning:

You guys don’t know what’s going on in education right now. That’s fine—how could you know unless you were working in it? But I think that you need to know….

First of all the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever. They live on their phones. And they’re just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute their eyes wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night.

Because they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school, they behave like addicts. They’re super emotional. The smallest things set them off.

When you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant. They have no ability to tune in….

They’re not there.

And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.

They just care about the next fix—because that’s how addicts operate. They have no long term plan, just short term needs.

They can’t get back to their phones fast enough.

How bad is it for educators right now?

Check out this commentary from one experienced teacher, who finds more engaged students in prison than a college classroom.

This comes from Corey McCall, a member of The Honest Broker community who recently posted this comment:

I saw this decline in both reading ability and interest occur firsthand between 2006 and 2021….I had experience teaching undergrads who hadn't comprehended the material before, but hadn't faced the challenge of students who could read it but who simply didn't care….

Since 2021 I've been teaching part-time in prison, and incarcerated students really want to learn. They love to read and think along with authors such as Plato, Descartes, and Simone de Beauvoir. I am teaching Intro to Theater this semester (the story of how this happened is interesting, but is irrelevant here) and students have been poring over Oedipus the King and asking why this amazing play isn't performed more regularly alongside plays like Hamilton and The Lion King.

I believe that there is hope for the humanities and perhaps for culture more generally, but it will be found in unusual places.

I’ve made a similar claim in this article—where I look outside of college for a rebirth of the humanities. It would be great if it happened in classrooms, too, but I fear that they are now the epicenter of the zombie wars.

Alas, I fear the number of zombie students is still growing—and at an accelerated pace.

Jonathan Haidt, who has taken the lead in exposing this crisis—and thus gets attacked fiercely by zombie apologists—shares horrifying trendlines from Monitoring the Future.

This group at the University of Michigan has studied student behavior since 1975. But what’s happening now is unprecedented.

Students are literally finding it too hard to think. So they can’t learn new things. (...)

I’m dumbfounded when I hear ‘experts’ claim that phones are not the problem. Like tobacco companies—whose hired experts long denied the connection between smoking and cancer—they say that “correlation does not prove causation.”

But that’s just sophistry and spin.

Parents, for example, have no doubts about the danger—because they see it happening right before their eyes.

But let’s give tech companies some credit. They have improved one skill among current students—cheating, which has now reached epic proportions.

The situation is so extreme that more than 40% of students were caught cheating recently—and it happened in an ethics class!

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: uncredited/Common Sense

[ed. See also: Why ‘Adolescence’ Is Sparking Conversations About Incel Dread Online (RS). On Netflix. The second episode on 'school' is pretty depressing.]

Philip-Lorca diCorcia, W, September #13 1999, C-print.

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Shibata Zeshin 柴田是眞 (Japan, 1807-1891) #Sparrow Nest, n.d. (c.1880s)
via:

George Foreman (January 10, 1949 – March 21, 2025)

When a teenager from Texas named George Foreman waved a tiny American flag in the boxing ring after winning Olympic gold in 1968, he had little awareness of the political minefield beneath his size 15 feet. The moment, captured by television cameras for an audience of millions during one of the most volatile periods in American history, was instantly contrasted with another image from two days earlier at the same Mexico City Games: Tommie Smith and John Carlos, heads bowed and black-gloved fists raised in salute during the US national anthem, a silent act of protest that would become one of the defining visuals of the 20th century. Their message was unmistakable: a rebuke of the country that had sent them to compete while continuing to deny civil rights to people who looked like them. Their action was seen as defiant resistance, Foreman’s as deference to the very systems of oppression they were protesting.

But that reading, while emotionally understandable amid the fevered upheaval of 1968, misses something deeper – about Foreman, about patriotism, and about the burden of symbolic politics laid on the shoulders of Black athletes.

To understand the backlash the 19-year-old Foreman faced in the context of 1968, particularly from within the Black community, is to understand the mood of that year: a procession of funerals and fires, of uprisings in Detroit and Newark, of young people trading dreams of integration for the sharp rhetoric of militant self-determination. Dr Martin Luther King Jr had been gunned down in Memphis just months earlier. Black Power was no longer a whisper in back rooms or college classrooms – it had become a rallying cry, a style, a stance. And in that charged atmosphere, there seemed to be only one acceptable way to be Black and politically conscious: with fist raised, spine straight, voice sharpened by injustice.

In that climate, Smith and Carlos’s silent, defiant protest was seismic. They paid dearly for it – expelled from the Games, vilified at home and exiled from professional opportunity for years. They were heroes, then and now. But the demand for unity behind that particular kind of protest was strong. To many, in that moment, there was only one acceptable way to be Black and political. Foreman’s flag violated that code. It did not speak the language of protest. It did not name the enemy. And so, some saw it as a profound misstep.

Foreman had long insisted that there was no statement embedded in the flag he waved. “I didn’t know anything about [the protest] until I got back to the Olympic Village,” he said years later. “I didn’t wave the flag to make a statement. I waved it because I was happy.”

That kind of apolitical happiness wasn’t just seen as suspicious – it was infuriating to those risking everything to challenge the systemic racism at the foundation of American society. The fact that the mainstream white media embraced Foreman as a “good” Black athlete in contrast to Smith and Carlos only deepened the rift. He was positioned, perhaps unintentionally, as the safe symbol of patriotism, the counter-image to fists in the air.

But Foreman’s story was never simple. He grew up poor in Houston’s Fifth Ward, a tough and segregated neighborhood. He found boxing through the Job Corps, a federal anti-poverty program. For Foreman, the flag didn’t represent a government that had failed him – it represented a country that had offered him a way out. His patriotism was anything but performative; it was deeply personal.

Too often, different experiences of Blackness are mistaken for ideological betrayal. Not every expression of pride in America is a denial of its sins. Sometimes it’s a hard-earned survival mechanism. For Foreman, the flag may have symbolized escape, opportunity and the dream that somehow, in spite of it all, he belonged.

Still, the criticism followed him, stubborn and sharp. He was branded an Uncle Tom, accused of pandering to white America, made to feel, by his own account, unwelcome in many Black spaces. His response was not to explain but to retreat. In the ring, he became a fearsome presence – angry, sullen and distant. Outside it, he said little, and seemed to carry a quiet fury beneath the surface. When he laid waste Joe Frazier in 1973, knocking him down six times in two rounds to claim the heavyweight crown, he celebrated not with a grin but with a kind of grim inevitability. He looked less like a champion than an avenger.

But narratives have a way of bending, especially in American life, and Foreman’s eventually did. Not long after losing it all with his crushing loss to Muhammad Ali in Zaire the following year – a defeat that humbled and haunted him – he disappeared for a decade. He found God, became a preacher, opened a youth center. When he returned to boxing in the late 1980s, older, heavier and unfashionably gentle, the public met him with something approaching affection. He smiled now. He cracked jokes. He appeared on talk shows. And when, at 45 years old, he reclaimed the heavyweight title in one of the sport’s most improbable comebacks, it felt not like redemption but reinvention.

The same man who once waved the flag and was scorned for it now hawked millions of countertop grills bearing his name. He starred in a primetime network TV sitcom. He named all five of his sons George. He leaned into the myth and made it charming. In doing so, he reshaped the cultural meaning of his image – from the quiet bruiser to the joyful elder statesman, a symbol of resilience, reinvention and a kind of pragmatic hope.

by Bryan Armen Graham, The Guardian |  Read more:

Images: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

On Being a Thai Girl

[ed. White Lotus. Haven't watched the series but this scene was recommended for its sheer depravity and disassociative perversity. There's actually a psychological term for this condition (of course): Autogynephilia. What acting:]

"In a recent episode, set in Thailand, actor Sam Rockwell delivers an intense monologue on how he took partying as far as it could go. And he backs up this claim with a lurid account of excesses and fetishes beyond anything I’ve heard on TV before.

But nobody mentioned the key fact.

Rockwell talks about how he walked away from this wild self, and found serenity in a Buddhist life of detachment and enlightenment. And this shows in how he delivers his monologue, which grabs our attention precisely because its serene tone is such a mismatch with the activities described.

But, of course, viewers didn’t latch on to that—because that kind of message never shows up in a TV series.

Or does it?

It’s worth repeating this: the white lotus is a symbol of purity and enlightenment—and emergence from darkness, especially in times of turmoil or political crisis

“You’re getting what you asked for.”

That’s how people describe a punishment—the curse of getting what you want. And it’s been true since the Garden of Eden.

Consider this in the context of the algorithm—a feedback technology designed to give people exactly what they want." 

via: THB

Just Suck It Up

Seniors won't complain if they miss a Social Security check, Lutnick says

Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick [ed. net worth $2 billion] suggested this week that only "fraudsters" would complain about missing a monthly Social Security check, and that most people wouldn't mind if the government simply skipped a payment.

Why it matters: More than 70 million Americans get a Social Security benefit every month, and for many, those checks are their only income.

The big picture: For generations, Social Security was called "the third rail of American politics" — many talked of reform, but in the end no one really touched the system.

• That changed this week.

What they're saying: "Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who's 94, she wouldn't call and complain," Lutnick — a billionaire former Wall Street CEO — told the billionaire "All In" podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya.

• "She just wouldn't. She'd think something got messed up, and she'll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining,"

By the numbers: By the Social Security Administration's own estimates, of all beneficiaries over age 65, some 12% of men and 15% of women get at least 90% of their monthly income from Social Security.

The response: A Commerce Department spokesperson tells Axios: "The Secretary is committed to protecting Social Security for all eligible Americans."

The intrigue: As Lutnick's podcast remarks were drawing angry responses, a judge was expressing her own frustration Friday with the acting head of the agency, Lee Dudek.

• He was chastised by Maryland District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander over his reported threats to shut down the agency, following a temporary restraining order she had issued the previous day.

• The order restricted DOGE's access to Social Security's sensitive data. Dudek reportedly claimed the order left him no choice but to cut IT access for almost all his employees, which she said was "incorrect."

Catch up quick: The drama over Lutnick's comments and the judge's rebuke caps a long week for the agency.On Tuesday, Dudek announced changes to phone service that some former officials and current employees say could slow the benefits process for vulnerable people, and potentially cripple the system.

Zoom out: "Constantly having Social Security Administration in the news with with some, some, something or another, is creating a lot of confusion, a lot of chaos, a lot of real fear with our members," Bill Sweeney, vice president for government affairs at AARP, told Axios earlier this week.

The other side: The agency has said that its changes are meant to stop fraud in the system.

• That's what Lutnick seemed to be getting at: *Anybody who's been in the payment system, in the process system, knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen, because whoever screams is the one stealing. ... 80-year-olds, 90-years-olds, they trust the government, they trust, ok, maybe it got screwed up, big deal, they're not going to call and scream at someone — but someone who's stealing always does."

Reality check: Seniors and other benefit recipients frequently lodge complaints about Social Security with both the agency itself, and their local member of Congress."

• Almost every member of Congress has a staff person whose job is almost fully dedicated to helping their constituents with problems at the Social Security Administration," AARP's Sweeney told Axios.

• In recent years the complaints have increased, as the agency faced a five-year staffing low. Planned DOGE-driven staff and office cuts could make that worse.

• "For almost 90 years, Social Security has never missed a paycheck — but 60 days into this administration, Social Security is now on the brink," Lee Saunders, president of the union AFSCME, said in a statement Friday.

by Emily Peck, Axios |  Read more:

Image: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images

[ed. A billionaire telling SSA recipients to just suck it up if their regular monthly payments disappear - no problem! If you can stomach it, watch the video. The self-satisfaction and sociopathy are breath-taking. I expect this guy to be gone sooner than anyone's first missed SSA check.]

Unitree G1 Humanoid Robot

Unitree is constantly updating the G1’s algorithm, allowing it to learn and practice a variety of movements. 

The latest update improves its balance and expands its range of motion. Designed for demanding, repetitive tasks in homes, factories, and hospitals, the G1 aligns with Unitree’s vision for humanoid robots to be practical work and life companions. Standing at just 4.33 feet (1.32 meters) tall and weighing 77 lbs (35 kg), the G1 folds compactly to 27 x 17.7 x 11.8 inches for easy storage. It features advanced technologies like 3D LiDAR, a RealSense depth camera, and a noise-canceling microphone array for voice command response. The G1 is powered by a 9,000mAh quick-release battery, offering two hours of runtime with quick transitions for extended use. It features a high-performance 8-core CPU and reinforced joints that enable 23 DoF in its arms, legs, and torso. The design allows for agile movement and walking speeds of up to 2 m/s (4.5 mph).

[ed. Today's must see video. I can't believe how far the field of robotics has advanced in just the last decade, at least in China (see X). I don't know what everyone else is thinking. More prototypes here (Unitree).]

Making America Germany Again

Mahmoud Khalil, Viewed From the Right

The arrest and possible deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist, has galvanized the left and drawn criticism from liberals and civil libertarians. Even some neoconservatives have condemned the White House’s aggressive action earlier this month. MAGA conservatives should also oppose it.

At least one prominent MAGA-friendly voice, the author Ann Coulter, has already spoken out against deporting Khalil, who was born in Syria. “There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport, but, unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the first amendment?” Coulter wrote last week on X.

Khalil, a green card holder whose wife is a U.S. citizen (and eight months pregnant), does indeed enjoy rights under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court ruled in 1945 that alien residents cannot be deported for political speech, including speech in support of groups seeking to overthrow the U.S. government. Notably, the Court rejected the government’s argument that the targeted alien held an “affiliation” with a subversive organization, judging that the claim relied on too loose a definition of that term. The case, Bridges v. Wixon, is highly relevant to the controversy surrounding Khalil.

The Trump administration, in rescinding Khalil’s green card, invoked a 1952 immigration law to justify the move. That statute, the Immigration and Nationality Act, empowers the government to deport any lawful permanent resident whom the secretary of state deems a danger to U.S. foreign policy interests. The White House has said that Khalil, through his protest activities at Columbia University, promoted antisemitism. Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security said that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas,” a designated terror organization.

These justifications are spurious. The First Amendment does not carve out an exception for speech that Marco Rubio labels “antisemitic,” and in any case Jewish students at Columbia have vouched for Khalil’s character. As for the vague assertion that Khalil is “aligned” with Hamas, the administration has not produced evidence that he was affiliated with the group in any meaningful sense. If the arrest of Khalil is legal under the Immigration and Nationality Act, then the relevant provisions of that law are null and void under the Constitution, the supreme law of the land.

MAGA conservatives have a principled reason to defend Khalil’s right to free speech, even if they don’t agree with his anti-Israel views. Free speech is a cornerstone of our republican system of government, as the Founders knew well. One early-modern aphorism, which Benjamin Franklin quoted approvingly in 1722, captures the relation between free speech and a free people: “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech." Conservatives tend to emphasize ordered, political liberty rather than individual rights, but in matters of free speech, the latter bolster the former. (...)

MAGA conservatives have yet another reason, in addition to those relating to the protection of free speech, to oppose the Trump administration’s persecution of Khalil. John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, got near the mark in a recent podcast conversation. “The single greatest threat to freedom of speech in the United States at this point in time is Israel and its supporters here in the United States,” he said. Mearsheimer’s argument was about free speech, but he alluded to a principle that is even more fundamental.

Right-wingers tend to conceive of politics not in terms of rights, but of power. One political ideal that relates to power and that MAGA conservatives should cherish is sovereignty. What Mearsheimer’s comment suggests, even if he wouldn’t put the point in this way, is that Israel and the Israel lobby presently undermine the sovereignty of the United States.

Sovereignty refers to the exclusive authority of a state over the country it rules and the nation it defends. It is the glue that holds a political grouping together and safeguards its survival and liberty. A state, to truly possess sovereignty, must have the power to make decisions free from foreign influence. One reason the actions against Khalil should give MAGA pause is that the administration seems to be acting on behalf of Israel, not the American people.

Here’s the plain truth: Khalil was arrested not because he posed a threat to the United States, but because he protested against Israel. Drop Site News reported that Khalil’s arrest “followed a two-day targeted online campaign against Khalil by pro-Israel groups and individuals” (emphasis added). President Donald Trump has alleged that Khalil supports Hamas, an enemy of Israel. Khalil led protests against the Israeli war in Gaza. Miriam Adelson, a top donor to Trump’s presidential campaigns, has pushed the president to take pro-Israel actions and is leading the charge against critics of Israel on college campuses.

As if to make clear which nation’s interests are actually implicated in the Khalil episode, the White House’s X account has written “Shalom Mahmoud,” using the Hebrew word for “goodbye.”

I had thought English was America’s official language now. (...)

The undue influence that pro-Israel groups exert over the U.S. government deserves close scrutiny and blunt criticism. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long tried to drag the U.S. into war with Iran, which poses little threat to the American homeland. The president seems on the verge of giving Bibi what he wants, though in Trump’s first term he griped that the Israeli leader was “willing to fight Iran to the last American soldier.” In recent months, Israel’s supporters have sought to thwart foreign policy appointments perceived as inimical to Israel, and they may have succeeded last week. [ed. Here's a sickening video of Israel blowing up and destroying the Turkish Friendship Hospital, the only hospital in Gaza dedicated to cancer patients. Not a mistake.]

The Trump administration simply cannot pursue an America-First policy agenda if its military and staffing decisions and the nation’s foundational rights are subject to Israeli veto. 

by Andrew Day, The American Conservative |  Read more:

Image: Getty Images

[ed. Sometimes (not often) it's good to check in on what the other side's thinking. In this case they get it exactly right. It's good to be reminded that there are some saner versions of Conservatism out there, even if most are quite happy to ride MAGA's coattails whenever it's convenient (like saying the unpopular parts out loud). Will it matter with this administration? Want to guess? See also: The Israeli-American Trump mega-donor behind speech crackdowns (Responsible Statecraft); MAGA Must Resolve Tech vs. Populist Tensions; and, Trump's No Good, Very Bad Week (TAC).]

The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free

Paywalls are justified, even though they are annoying. It costs money to produce good writing, to run a website, to license photographs. A lot of money, if you want quality. Asking people for a fee to access content is therefore very reasonable. You don’t expect to get a print subscription to the newspaper gratis, why would a website be different? I try not to grumble about having to pay for online content, because I run a magazine and I know how difficult it is to pay writers what they deserve.

But let us also notice something: the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free!  (...) This doesn’t mean the paywall shouldn’t be there. But it does mean that it costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free.

 

Now, crucially, I do not mean to imply here that reading the New York Times gives you a sound grasp of reality. I have documented many times how the Times misleads people, for instance by repeating the dubious idea that we have a “border crisis” of migrants “pouring into” the country or that Russia is trying to “steal” life-saving vaccine research that should be free anyway. But it’s important to understand the problem with the Times: it is not that the facts it reports tend to be inaccurate—though sometimes they are—but that the facts are presented in a way that misleads. There is no single “fact” in the migrant story or the Russia story that I take issue with, what I take issue with is the conclusions that are being drawn from the facts. (...) The New York Times is, in fact, extremely valuable, if you read it critically and look past the headlines. Usually the truth is in there somewhere, as there is a great deal of excellent reporting, and one could almost construct a serious newspaper purely from material culled from the New York Times. I’ve written before about the Times’ reporting on Hitler and the Holocaust: it wasn’t that the grim facts of the situation were left out of the paper, but that they were buried at the back and treated as unimportant. It was changes in emphasis that were needed, because the facts were there in black and white. (...)

Possibly even worse is the fact that so much academic writing is kept behind vastly more costly paywalls. A white supremacist on YouTube will tell you all about race and IQ but if you want to read a careful scholarly refutation, obtaining a legal PDF from the journal publisher would cost you $14.95, a price nobody in their right mind would pay for one article if they can’t get institutional access. (I recently gave up on trying to access a scholarly article because I could not find a way to get it for less than $39.95, though in that case the article was garbage rather than gold.) Academic publishing is a nightmarish patchwork, with lots of articles advertised at exorbitant fees on one site, and then for free on another, or accessible only through certain databases, which your university or public library may or may not have access to. (Libraries have to budget carefully because subscription prices are often nuts. A library subscription to the Journal of Coordination Chemistry, for instance, costs $11,367 annually.)

Of course, people can find their ways around paywalls. SciHub is a completely illegal but extremely convenient means of obtaining academic research for free. (I am purely describing it, not advocating it.) You can find a free version of the article debunking race and IQ myths on ResearchGate, a site that has engaged in mass copyright infringement in order to make research accessible. Often, because journal publishers tightly control access to their copyrighted work in order to charge those exorbitant fees for PDFs, the versions of articles that you can get for free are drafts that have not yet gone through peer review, and have thus been subjected to less scrutiny. This means that the more reliable an article is, the less accessible it is. On the other hand, pseudo-scholarhip is easy to find. Right-wing think tanks like the Cato Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Hoover Institution, the Mackinac Center, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation pump out slickly-produced policy documents on every subject under the sun. They are utterly untrustworthy—the conclusion is always going to be “let the free market handle the problem,” no matter what the problem or what the facts of the case. But it is often dressed up to look sober-minded and non-ideological. (...)

A problem beyond cost, though, is convenience. I find that even when I am doing research through databases and my university library, it is often an absolute mess: the sites are clunky and constantly demanding login credentials. The amount of time wasted in figuring out how to obtain a piece of research material is a massive cost on top of the actual pricing. The federal court document database, PACER, for instance, charges 10 cents a page for access to records, which adds up quickly since legal research often involves looking through thousands of pages. They offer an exemption if you are a researcher or can’t afford it, but to get the exemption you have to fill out a three page form and provide an explanation of both why you need each document and why you deserve the exemption. This is a waste of time that inhibits people’s productivity and limits their access to knowledge.

In fact, to see just how much human potential is being squandered by having knowledge dispensed by the “free market,” let us briefly picture what “totally democratic and accessible knowledge” would look like. Let’s imagine that instead of having to use privatized research services like Google Scholar and EBSCO, there was a single public search database containing every newspaper article, every magazine article, every academic journal article, every court record, every government document, every website, every piece of software, every film, song, photograph, television show, and video clip, and every book in existence. The content of the Wayback Machine, all of the newspaper archives, Google Books, Getty Images, Project Gutenberg, Spotify, the Library of Congress, everything in WestLaw and Lexis, all of it, every piece of it accessible instantly in full, and with a search function designed to be as simple as possible and allow you to quickly narrow down what you are looking for. (e.g. “Give me: all Massachusetts newspaper articles, books published in Boston, and government documents that mention William Lloyd Garrison and were published from 1860 to 1865.”) The true universal search, uncorrupted by paid advertising. Within a second, you could bring up an entire PDF of any book. Within two seconds, you could search the full contents of that book.

Let us imagine just how much time would be saved in this informational utopia. Do I want minute 15 of the 1962 Czechoslovak film Man In Outer Space? Four seconds from my thought until it begins. Do I want page 17 of the Daily Mirror from 1985? Even less time. Every public Defense Department document concerning Vietnam from the Eisenhower administration? Page 150 of Frank Capra’s autobiography? Page 400 of an economics textbook from 1995? All in front of me, in full, in less than the length of time it takes to type this sentence. How much faster would research be in such a situation? How much more could be accomplished if knowledge were not fragmented and in the possession of a thousand private gatekeepers?

What’s amazing is that the difficulty of creating this situation of “fully democratized information” is entirely economic rather than technological. What I describe with books is close to what Google Books and Amazon already have. But of course, universal free access to full content horrifies publishers, so we are prohibited from using these systems to their full potential. The problem is ownership: nobody is allowed to build a giant free database of everything human beings have ever produced. Getty Images will sue the shit out of you if you take a historical picture from their archives and violate your licensing agreement with them. Same with the Walt Disney Company if you create a free rival to Disney+ with all of their movies. Sci-Hub was founded in Kazakhstan because if you founded it here they would swiftly put you in federal prison. (When you really think about what it means, copyright law is an unbelievably intensive restriction on freedom of speech, sharply delineating the boundaries of what information can and cannot be shared with other people.)

But it’s not just profiteering companies that will fight to the death to keep content safely locked up. The creators of content are horrified by piracy, too. As my colleagues Lyta Gold and Brianna Rennix write, writers, artists, and filmmakers can be justifiably concerned that unless ideas and writings and images can be regarded as “property,” they will starve to death:

Is there a justifiable rationale for treating ideas—and particularly stories—as a form of “property”? One obvious reason for doing so is to ensure that writers and other creators don’t starve to death: In our present-day capitalist utopia, if a writer’s output can be brazenly copied and profited upon by others, they won’t have any meaningful ability to make a living off their work, especially if they’re an independent creator without any kind of institutional affiliation or preexisting wealth.

Lyta and Brianna point out that in the real world, this justification is often bullshit, because copyrights last well beyond the death of the person who actually made the thing. But it’s a genuine worry, because there is no “universal basic income” for a writer to fall back on in this country if their works are simply passed around from hand to hand without anybody paying for them. I admit I bristle when I see people share PDFs of full issues of Current Affairs, because if this happened a lot, we could sell exactly 1 subscription and then the issue could just be copied indefinitely. Current Affairs would collapse completely if everyone tried to get our content for free rather than paying for it. (This is why you should subscribe! Or donate! Independent media needs your support!)

At the end of last year, I published a book on socialism, and at first some conservatives thought it funny to ask me “if you’re a socialist, can I have it for free?” They were quieted, though, when I pointed out that yes, they could indeed have it for free. All they needed to do was go to the local socialized information repository known as a public library, where they would be handed a copy of the book without having to fork over a nickel. Anyone who wants to read my book but cannot or does not want to pay for it has an easy solution. (...)

The good news about our times is that the possibilities for democratizing knowledge are greater than ever. We could not have started Current Affairs in 1990 unless we had about ten times more money than what we actually had. Sharp left YouTubers are fighting hard to combat propaganda and debunk bad arguments, there are tons of great podcasts, and even Twitter has its uses. (Where else do you get to yell at powerful and influential people and personally tick them off?) But it is still true that Fox News and PragerU and the American Enterprise Institute have a hell of a lot of money to blast out their message as widely as possible. There is nothing on the left of remotely comparable size and influence.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I'm a supporter of Current Affairs (not currently) and have reprinted many fine excerpts over the years. Who knew The Internet Archive had a blog? Check it out. See also: Current Affairs Magazine Demonstrates Paywalls Are Not Necessary for Publications to Thrive (IAB]

The Ozempocalypse Is Nigh

Three GLP-1 drugs are approved for weight loss in the United States:

• Semaglutide (Ozempic®, Wegovy®, Rybelsus®)

• Tirzepatide (Mounjaro®, Zepbound®)

• Liraglutide (Victoza®, Saxenda®)

…but liraglutide is noticeably worse than the others, and most people prefer either semaglutide or tirzepatide. These cost about $1000/month and are rarely covered by insurance, putting them out of reach for most Americans.

…if you buy them from the pharma companies, like a chump. For the past three years, there’s been a shortage of these drugs. FDA regulations say that during a shortage, it’s semi-legal for compounding pharmacies to provide medications without getting the patent-holders’ permission. In practice, that means they get cheap peptides from China, do some minimal safety testing in house, and sell them online.

So for the past three years, telehealth startups working with compounding pharmacies have sold these drugs for about $200/month. Over two million Americans have made use of this loophole to get weight loss drugs for cheap. But there was always a looming question - what happens when the shortage ends? Many people have to stay on GLP-1 drugs permanently, or else they risk regaining their lost weight. But many can’t afford $1000/month. What happens to them?

Now we’ll find out. At the end of last year, the FDA declared the shortage over. The compounding pharmacies appealed the decision, but the FDA recently confirmed its decision is final. As of March 19 (for tirzepatide) and April 22 (for semaglutide), compounding pharmacies can no longer sell cheap GLP-1 drugs. (...)

Some compounding pharmacies are already telling their customers to look elsewhere, but not everyone is going gently into the good night. I’m seeing telehealth companies float absolutely amazing medicolegal theories, like:

• Compounding pharmacies are allowed to provide patients with a drug if they can’t tolerate the commercially available doses and need a special compounding dose. Perhaps our patients who were previously on semaglutide 0.5 mg now need, uh, semaglutide 0.51 mg. In fact, they need exactly 0.51 mg or they’ll die! Since the pharma companies don’t make 0.51 mg doses, it has to be compounded and we can still sell it.

• Compounding pharmacies are allowed to provide patients with special mixes of drugs if they need to take two drugs at the exact same time. Perhaps our patients who were previously on semaglutide 0.5 mg now need, uh, a mix of semaglutide and random vitamins. They need to have the random vitamins mixed in or they’ll die. Since the pharma companies don’t make semaglutide mixed with the exact random vitamins we do, it has to be compounded and we can still sell it.

• Compounding pharmacies are allowed to provide patients with drugs formulated for unusual routes of administration. All of our patients just developed severe needle phobia, sorry, so they need semaglutide gummies. Since the pharma companies don’t make semaglutide gummies, it has to be compounded and we can still sell it (thanks to Recursive Adaptation for their article on this strategy).

I am not a lawyer but this is all stupid. What are the companies thinking?

They might be hoping they can offload the stupid parts to doctors. Everyone else in healthcare is supposed to do what doctors tell them, especially if the doctors use the magic words “medically necessary”. So pharmacies and telehealth startups (big companies, easy to regulate) can tell doctors (random individuals, hard to regulate) “wink wink hint hint, maybe your patient might need exactly 0.51 mg of semaglutide, nod nod wink wink”. The doctor can write a prescription for exactly 0.51 mg semaglutide, add a note saying the unusual dose is ‘medically necessary’, and then everyone else can provide it with a “clean” “conscience”. If the pharma company sues the pharmacy or telehealth startup, they’ll say “we were only connecting patients to doctors and following their orders!” If the pharma company sues the doctors, the pharma company will probably win, but maybe telehealth companies can find risk-tolerant doctors faster than the pharma company can sue them.

The pharma company can probably still sue telehealth startups and pharmacies over the exact number of nods and winks that they do. But maybe they won’t want to take the PR hit if those pharmacies limit themselves to continuing to serve existing patients. Or maybe there are too many pharmacies to go after all of them. Or maybe DOGE will fire everyone at the FDA and the problem will solve itself. I don’t know - I don’t really expect any of this to work, but from a shareholder value perspective it beats lying down and dying.

But the compounders aren’t the only ones boxing clever. Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the pharma companies behind semaglutide and tirzepatide respectively, have opened consumer-facing businesses about halfway between a traditional doctor’s appointment and the telehealth/compounder model that’s getting banned. So for example, Lilly Direct offers to “find you a doctor” (I think this means you do telehealth with an Eli Lilly stooge who always gives you the meds you want) and “get medications delivered directly to you”. The price depends on dose, but an average dose would be about $500 - so about halfway between the cheap compounding price and the usual insurance price. Not bad.

Pharma companies don’t like dose-based pricing (that is, charging twice as much for a 10 mg dose as a 5 mg dose). Part of their objection is ethical - some people have unusual genes that make them need higher doses, and it seems unfair to charge these people twice as much for genetic bad luck. But there’s also an economic objection - they want to charge the maximum amount the customer can bear, but if they charge a subset of people with genetic bad luck twice as much as they can bear, those people won’t buy their drug. So usually they sell all doses at a similar price, opening an arbitrage opportunity: if they sell both 5 mg and 10 mg for $500/month, and you need 5 mg, then buy the 10 mg dose, take half of it at a time, stretch out your monthlong supply for two months, and get an effective cost of $250/month. But here Eli Lilly is doing something devious I’ve never seen before. They’re selling their medication in single-dose vials, deliberately without preservatives, so that you need to take the whole dose immediately as soon as you open the vial - the arbitrage won’t work! So although this looks on paper like a $300 price increase ($200 to $500), the increase will be even higher for people who were previously exploiting the dose arbitrage.

The mood on the GLP-1 user subreddits is grim but defiant. 

Some people are stocking up. GLP-1 drugs keep pretty well in a fridge for at least a year. If you sign up for four GLP-1 telehealth compounding companies simultaneously and order three months from each, then you can get twelve months of medication. Maybe in twelve months the FDA will change their mind, or the pharmacies’ insane legal strategies will pay off, or Trump will invade Denmark over Greenland and seize the Novo Nordisk patents as spoils of war, or someone will finally figure out a diet that works.

Others are turning amateur chemist. You can order GLP-1 peptides from China for cheap. Once you have the peptide, all you have to do is put it in the right amount of bacteriostatic water. In theory this is no harder than any other mix-powder-with-water task. But this time if you do anything wrong, or are insufficiently clean, you can give yourself a horrible infection, or inactivate the drug, or accidentally take 100x too much of the drug and end up with negative weight and float up into the sky and be lost forever. ACX cannot in good conscience recommend this cheap, common, and awesome solution.

I think the past two years have been a fun experiment in semi-free-market medicine. I don’t mean the patent violations - it’s no surprise that you can sell drugs cheap if you violate the patent - I mean everything else. For the past three years, ~2 million people have taken complex peptides provided direct-to-consumer by a less-regulated supply chain, with barely a fig leaf of medical oversight, and it went great. 

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. See also: The cost of GLP-1s needs to come way down for benefits to be worth it, study says (Quartz).]