Valentina Lisitsa

Valentina Lisitsa, Beethoven, Moonlight Sonata III Presto Agitato
via:

[ed. Bravo! Can't imagine what it must feel like to see this sheet music for the first time.]

What I Think Will Happen if I Go to a Bar and Order a Whiskey Neat

One whiskey, neat,” I tell the bartender, settling myself onto a wooden stool. I can immediately sense, from the way he’s fiddling with his long but tasteful beard, that he’s attracted to me and intimidated by me in equal measure. When he hands me my glass, our fingers brush. He doesn’t say it’s on the house, but we both know that it is.

“I never do this, but can I take your picture?” the bartender asks, sheepishly. I tell him it’s no problem—people ask me that all the time. He pulls out a 35-mm. camera and I pose with my drink. Later, when the photo is displayed in his first gallery show, he’ll title it “Angel in Black.”

The bar begins to fill with the happy-hour crowd. As each patron enters and notices the beverage I’m holding, they give me a reverent nod. One young woman, so daunted by the ease and maturity I’m radiating—and so humiliated by her own order—whispers “vodka cranberry” to the barman and then starts weeping.

Suddenly, the phone on the wall begins to ring.

“It’s for you,” the bartender says to me, without checking to see who it’s for. He can tell from my general vibe that I don’t have a cell phone.

“Thought I’d find you here,” a gruff voice intones, on the other end of the line. I hang up. I’ve already told Keanu a million times: if he wants me so badly, he’d better come find me. I don’t care what he’s filming. [...]

We’re interrupted by a man in a suit. “You,” he says, making a beeline for me. He tells me that he’s the C.E.O. of Arm & Hammer and asks if I want a job in corporate. I make him wait as I take a slow swig, then I tell him I don’t believe in big business. He completely understands and apologizes for asking. Before he leaves, he slides me five crisp hundred-dollar bills. I ball up the cash and slip it into the baby’s fist. Money means nothing to me.

An hour goes by, and I start growing tired of strangers approaching and asking, point-blank, “Where did I go wrong?” I’ve facilitated an amicable divorce, convinced a billionaire to donate all his wealth, and was just made a city-council member in a Utah mining town called Strawberry. It’s time to go home.

I ask the bartender for the bill. He asks me to marry him.

“I love you, but I can’t,” I purr, placing my empty glass on a cocktail napkin. I leave the bar. I never return.

The bartender will pretend he doesn’t care. But at every shift for the rest of his life, he’ll stare longingly at the front door, pour himself a whiskey, and think of me.

by Maeve Dunigan, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Getty

[ed. Beautiful people. See also: "Funny how the trajectory of life can be altered by a few days... His girlfriend, who is still in her teens, is flipping through Vogue. For her, the sex must be like shagging Sandpaperman. What's in it for her? Apart from first-class air travel, five star accomodation, minglings with the rock aristocracy, movie directors, and charity tsars; exposure in every gossip magazine on Earth, and modeling contracts to match, obviously...."    ~  The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell

Kratom on the DEA Chopping Block

Jeffrey Deaver, a 58-year-old retired timber cutter in the state of Washington, has taken kratom for four years to help with severe chronic hip and knee pain.

He discovered the herbal product when he couldn't find relief from doctors and while waiting for surgeries. Scared at first, he "started small", but then took more until his pain went away.

"It was like a miracle," Deaver said. "I could sleep. I could function.

"I just don't know what I'd do without it."

Kratom - a herb with opioid-like effects - has grown in popularity in the US over the last decade, and is typically purchased over the counter and consumed in pill or liquid form.

This week, investigators found packaged kratom in the possession of two deceased University of Mississippi students. Although their deaths were not attributed to kratom, officials are now issuing warnings about its consumption. [ed. See the connection? Me neither.]

For years, anti-kratom advocates have pushed for bans, and in some countries, like the UK, it's illegal. But Kratom is not regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration and is legal in some states, including Mississippi.

Here's what we know about it:

What is kratom?

Kratom is a tree that is native to Southeast Asia in countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

It's been used for centuries for its stimulant properties, grounded and consumed similar to tea.

As its popularity spread around the globe, it entered the US market as a supplement around 2016.

"That's really where the problems began," said Dr Shane Speights, dean of the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine at Arkansas State University.

In the US kratom is mostly sold in highly concentrated forms either via pill, powder or liquid, Speights said.

It's also widely available - found everywhere from convenience stores and petrol stations to vape shops.

Also, because of the supplement classification, kratom products are not federally regulated.

"There's no way to know exactly what you're getting," Speight said. "You could go and create something in your basement, market it as a supplement, and nobody's really going to check and see what's in it."

What is kratom used for?

Kratom is often marketed as a safe, natural herbal supplement that helps with pain management, anxiety and depression.

In lower doses, its stimulant properties create a "caffeine-kind of buzz", Speights explained.

Because of its opioid-like effects, it has also been used with the goal of curbing addictions to actual opioids like fentanyl.

Those properties stem from the way the plant's compounds - like 7-Hydroxymitragynine - activate various hormones, including dopamine.

by Brandon Drenon and Madeline Halpert, BBC |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. More DEA stupidity. They've made it nearly impossible to get pain relief prescriptions from doctors now so people are turning to supplemental alternatives. However, anything that has an "opioid-like" effect is considered suspect by the DEA and proposed for regulation under the same Scheduling category as heroin, LSD and fentanyl (Schedule 1) - even if there's no, or little health evidence to support it. The same thing is happening with tianeptine, an anti-depressant that's been marketed in Europe and Latin America for decades (and also conveniently described as "gas station heroin"). Why not just put all gas stations under Schedule 1 restrictions. The DEA "whack-a-mole" strategy has never worked in the past and will never work in the future. The more you restrict something, the less oversight you have, the more impediments to scientific research you create, and the more opportunities for new markets to arise that are frequently worse (eg. fentanyl). For the same reason that we've been forced to remove our shoes at airports for years (because of one creative shoe bomber), various beneficial drugs are being restricted for everyone because of a few abusers. Insanity. See also: Rights and Reason Project.]

On “Simple Solutions” to the Western Water Problem

Spoiler: There is no such thing.

It seems like every time the Colorado River and other Western water woes make national headlines, some pundit — usually from the East Coast — weighs in with their “simple” or “obvious” solution. And I get mad and start throwing things around the room, then type out some blistering rant riddled with epithets and insults.

Well, the Colorado River is in the news again, and with it have come the usual swarm of oversimplified hot-takes. The one that really got my goat this time is from Matthew Yglesias, who wrote a piece headlined: The Western water crisis has a simple solution: Stop giving the majority of the water away to farmers for almost nothing!

These things piss me off so much not because they’re wrong, but because there is no “simple” solution to the Western water crisis. That’s because the crisis itself isn’t simple, and saying that it has simple fixes implies that the folks who have spent a lot of time trying to solve the problem are a bunch of idiots, since they hadn’t come up with this solution already. It seems as if Yglesias and his ilk assume that the West is not only monolithic, but that we Westerners are a bunch of backwoods bumpkins who don’t understand the region’s own problems.

Who cares what these bozos believe, right? Right. But judging by the comments on Yglesias’ social media posts, a lot of other people are similarly deluded. So I figured his piece provides a nice opportunity to clear some things up.

In fact, there is no single “Western water crisis.” The West is huge and is geographically, hydrographically, and ecologically diverse. While most, but not all, of the Western U.S. is in some stage of drought currently, not all of those places are experiencing a water crisis, per se. There is a Colorado River water crisis and a Rio Grande water crisis and a San Joaquin Valley water crisis, but those crises are not all the same.

The Colorado River crisis is multifaceted and manifests in different ways in different places and on different levels. The river itself is in crisis, in that stretches of the mainstem and its tributaries virtually dry up during summers like this one. Its users are facing a potential crisis, i.e. looming shortages, as in some of them are getting less water from the river than they did in the past. And the vast and complex plumbing system and legal framework that has been built up to harness and govern the river is perhaps facing the most immediate crisis: It is collapsing under its own weight and in many ways has become obsolete. Each of these is a distinct calamity, with its own twists, turns, causes, and bevy of potential solutions.

From his perch in the Northeast, however, Yglesias sees just one dimension, writing in the “nut graf” of his piece:

Even worse, the whole Western water conflict has an incredibly simple solution: End federal law’s current stipulation that a huge share of the available water must be sold at very low prices exclusively for the purpose of agriculture.

The issue here is well known, well understood, and not particularly controversial. It’s just that nobody seems to want to actually fix it.

Uh, not quite.

Yes, irrigated agriculture is by far the dominant consumer of Colorado River water, accounting for 52% of overall consumption and 74% of direct human consumption. And yes, agricultural users typically and notoriously pay less for the water than municipal users. No, this is not dictated by federal law.

Agricultural users were among the first entities in the colonial-settler era to put large quantities of water to beneficial use, giving them the most senior rights to the largest quantities of water. The Imperial Irrigation District, for example, has senior rights to about 3 million acre-feet of Colorado River water, most of which is used for agriculture.

These water rights holders have a legal right to use a set amount of water each year. They are not leasing or purchasing the water from the federal government or anyone else. It’s essentially theirs, for free, as long as they are able to divert it from the river and put it to beneficial use.

Usually the water rights are held by irrigation districts, ditch companies, municipalities, corporations, or, in some cases, very large individual landholders. In the late 1800s, these entities built their own diversions, canals, and delivery systems. Construction was often financed by private investors and the individual irrigators, who held stocks, or shares, in the ditch company. Each share would entitle its holder to a set amount of water from the canal. The shareholder would pay an annual fee for each share to cover construction, maintenance, and operating costs.

The Bureau of Reclamation was established in 1902 to build larger scale dams, diversions, and canals to deliver water to users and to spur agricultural development in the arid West. [...] 

One of the Bureau’s big projects was the 80-mile-long All-American Canal, built in the 1930s to ferry Colorado River water to the Imperial Irrigation District and other users. The IID entered into a 50-year payback contract, which ended in 1994. The Bureau still owns the canal, but the IID operates and maintains it and other infrastructure that delivers Colorado River water to nine cities and some 500,000 acres of farmland. [...]

Similar setups exist across the Colorado River Basin. But each system is distinct, and each has its own mix of federal and private funding and operational scenarios and rates.

And here’s one of the main flaws of Yglesias’s argument: He assumes that there’s some all powerful actor out there that sets rates and standards for water from the Colorado River, although he himself clearly doesn’t know who or what that actor is (he always uses the passive voice, or the all-encompassing “you” in these cases). That’s because that entity doesn’t exist. While the feds could stop subsidizing agriculture, and should not build any more water projects, they don’t have the authority to step in and adjust water rates. States probably could set rates for groundwater, but they can’t charge the IID for exercising their water rights on the Colorado River.

Next, Yglesias pivots to pillorying alfalfa, because that’s in vogue these days. I’m not going to get into that too much, because I’ve written about it so many times here before, but this little bit is pretty funny:

“The whole crisis is because of alfalfa” sounds ridiculous, in part because alfalfa is a funny word. But also because it’s so random. Wheat? That’s in bread and pasta. Everyone loves wheat. Cotton? That’s my shirt, I get why we need cotton.

But alfalfa?

Alfalfa is grown as animal feed.

Now, I’m no alfalfa apologist (nor am I an alfalfaphobe), but I feel like I should point out that most of the alfalfa grown with Colorado River water is used to feed dairy cows, which in turn produce milk and cheese and ice cream. Unless Yglesias is a vegan, he might want to consider that. He then argues that since alfalfa is relatively low-value (money wise) compared to Las Vegas casinos, Phoenix microchip factories, or housing, the water should be going to casinos, factories, and housing, not farms, which would presumably happen if farmers had to pay more for water (i.e. they’d go broke and be forced to sell).

In recent weeks I’ve written a piece or two about alfalfa. My thesis: As the biggest single water user in the Colorado River Basin, the crop must play an equally large role in contributing to the cuts necessary to keep the river from drying out. I know, it doesn’t seem like a hot-button topic. I mean, it’s just hay, after all.
Read full story

He continues:

The real point here, though, isn’t that the farmers are living high on the hog and need to be taken down a peg. You could easily let them keep their windfall water rights but turn those rights into property that they’re able to sell. Then existing cities or industrial users or real estate developers looking to build new housing or whoever else could just buy out the alfalfa farmers. The land currently under cultivation could shift to less water-intensive uses. Even a golf course uses significantly less water per acre than an alfalfa farm. Much of the land would, of course, turn into housing, but some could become non-irrigated parks with native vegetation.

First off, there is nothing novel or groundbreaking about this idea. Sprawl has been gobbling up farmland, and water rights, for decades in the West. Phoenix didn’t just grow into the desert, it also grew into citrus orchards and alfalfa fields, and will probably continue to build housing and data centers on what ag land remains. A different version of this concept, where a city or developer purchases a farmer’s water rights, but uses them somewhere else — a practice known as buy and dry — is also not uncommon.

This does not solve the water crisis. Instead of cutting consumption, which is what’s needed, it merely shifts the consumption from one use — agriculture — to other ones, such as housing and golf courses and chip manufacturing and data centers. This may wring more cash out of each acre-foot of water, but it doesn’t lower consumption. An acre-foot is an acre-foot, whether it’s going to alfalfa, a golf course, a neighborhood’s lawns, a data center or a swimming pool.

Besides, transitioning land out of agriculture comes with its own problems. We can argue forever about whether farming alfalfa or any other crop in the desert is appropriate, or of adequately high value, or whatever. We can argue that the Bureau of Reclamation should never have existed, and that irrigating the arid West should have been left to private entities operating in a free market. But the fact is, there is farming in the desert, those projects did end up subsidizing the agriculture industry, and communities, economies, cultures, and even new landscapes have emerged from and formed around those farms.

Taking vast swaths of land out of farming, whether to build houses or solar panels or to buy the water rights and use them somewhere else, has myriad consequences, many of them negative. Fields can become noxious-weed-clogged dust pits, the wildlife and ecosystems that have come to rely on irrigation runoff dry up, farm workers and families and the businesses that rely on them are displaced, communities’ economies are upended. As Madeline Wilson, an agricultural systems specialist for Colorado State University’s extension office pointed out at a 2024 panel on dust-on-snow, every field fallowed in the San Luis Valley for conservation purposes also represents a family. “We’re not just talking about drying up lands,” she said, “but the drying up of our economy.”

In no way does this mean that farms should be immune from curtailment. Indeed, because agriculture is the biggest user of Colorado River water, it will have to take the largest cuts in consumption. There is simply nowhere else from which the 4 million acre-feet or more of reductions per year needed to bring demand into line with dwindling supplies can come. But forcing farmers into bankruptcy by jacking up water rates (if there was a mechanism to do so), or prescribing “incredibly simple” policy solutions that don’t consider the complexities of the situation and its myriad moving parts or the on-the-ground impacts, isn’t the way to do it.

The “root cause” of the Colorado River crises is not alfalfa or pecans or cotton or cattle, it’s not the prior appropriation doctrine or the low price of water, it’s not overpopulation, it’s not data centers or golf courses or lawns or bad forest management or lack of or too many reservoirs. The root cause is twofold. First, there’s scarcity. The Southwest is an arid place, and climate change-exacerbated warming is drying it out more: there is less precipitation; the precipitation we do get is falling as rain, not snow; the snow we get is melting faster; and evapotranspiration is happening at a higher rate. This all leads to less water in the streams, reservoirs, rivers, and even aquifers. Secondly, there’s the chronic and long-term failure to acknowledge the scarcity, and the stubborn refusal to adapt to it and adjust consumption accordingly. [...]

There is one simple solution to the Colorado River crises: Everyone on the river has to use less water. Period. 

by Jonathan P. Thompson, The Land Desk | Read more:
Image: the author

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Antique French Art Nouveau grape brooch by Fonsèque et Olive.
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Domenica Anita Niehoff (1945-2009), with Günter Zint (known for his Star Club work). 

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For the Love of Money

When SpaceX went public earlier this year, the net worth of its founder, Elon Musk, shot to over $1 trillion. Since then, it has fluctuated, sometimes dipping into the mere centibillions. Still, the fact that the world managed to confer upon one person, however briefly, assets worth more than the gross domestic product of all but seventeen countries (or all the property in Houston, all the new vehicles purchased in the United States last year, every professional sports team on the planet, etc.) has been widely proclaimed as the most important story about wealth in America today.

The economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick would disagree. In The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, the authors contend that the more important story is actually diffuse and harder to see.

There’s only one occasional trillionaire in America and fewer than one thousand billionaires, but there are more than twenty-three million millionaires. And a lot of those millionaires aren’t the ones you’re thinking of—the Wall Street moguls and Palo Alto magnates, the Tesla-driving technocrats, the bicoastal elites. Many are what Zidar and Zwick call Main Street Millionaires.

On average, they’re worth about $25 million, and most of them live not in New York City but in places like Topeka, Omaha, Baton Rouge, Mackinac Island, and Lake Minnetonka. They are the “stealthy wealthy” and they are hiding in plain sight:

They’re coaching your child’s soccer team, sitting next to you at community fundraisers, or chatting with you at neighborhood barbecues. They might be the dentist who expanded his office to a regional network of practices, the commercial HVAC contractor whose trucks you see around town, or the owner of that local restaurant chain that keeps opening new locations.

These are the “real rich” in America, Zidar and Zwick argue, and they matter much more than “a few high-profile billionaires on the coasts.” It’s an audacious claim, but one that’s hard to shoot down. The four hundred richest Americans—think of Bezos, Buffett, etc.—held about $4 trillion in wealth in 2022. The roughly three million Main Street Millionaires hold more than thirteen times as much. By investigating how these people made their fortunes, and how they wield them, Zidar and Zwick upend the consensus on wealth inequality in America. Yet their sobering conclusions aren’t enough to exorcise the authors of their Mammonism.

Only recently have we been able to make sense of the data that showed how rich Main Street Millionaires have become. For decades, the IRS collected detailed information from businesses and individuals, but they stored this data in siloed systems. Zidar and Zwick’s innovation, in 2014, was to connect those systems, building the first database that linked the tax data of businesses to that of their workers and owners. This allowed them to follow the money in ways that had once been impossible.

What they found surprised them. In 2022, America’s nine thousand C-suite public executives earned $38 billion. Not bad. But the top one percent of private business owners—the car dealers, poultry distributors, trash bag producers, franchisees—earned $570 billion, fifteen times more, despite comprising only ten times as many people.

According to Zidar and Zwick, the overlooked factor that explains this disparity is the homely entity provisioned in Title 26, Subtitle A, of the Internal Revenue Code, known as the pass-through. A pass-through is a business tax structure that includes “sole proprietorships, partnerships, limited liability companies, and S corporations,” and it is the structure preferred by Main Street Millionaires. A pass-through, unlike a C Corporation, which is the structure of most publicly traded companies in the United States, does not pay corporate or dividend taxes. Instead, the firm’s profits or losses “pass through” to the owners’ individual income taxes, where they are taxed at individual rates. And because the top individual rate has fallen below the corporate rate over the last four decades, it has become more beneficial to pay taxes as an individual. This shift has radically altered the composition of the economy: Before 1986, most business income in America was generated by C Corporations. Today, most business income is generated by pass-throughs.

Pass-through owners enjoy what one accountant calls “the best tax deal in America.” Indeed, to hear Zidar and Zwick tell it, it’s as if lawmakers forty years ago decided to make it their mission to make these people as much money as possible. They created loopholes for pass-through owners to avoid paying Medicare payroll taxes. They designed provisions to help them avoid the usual cap on state and local tax deductions. And, of course, they passed the Section 199A deduction, perhaps the Trump administration’s crowning fiscal achievement. Introduced in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and made permanent in 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Section 199A basically allows pass-through owners not to pay taxes on a fifth of their business income. In 2017, the government estimated that this deduction alone would cost the federal government about $415 billion in revenue over a decade. In part due to this falling revenue, tax enforcement has also shifted toward an “honor system.” Whereas pass-through owners simply tell the IRS how much money their employees make, they retain some “flexibility” in reporting. Evidently they’ve opted to exercise this prerogative. Pass-through owners’ unpaid income and self-employment taxes made up about $264 billion of the estimated $600 billion gap in what taxpayers owe but haven’t paid.

by Nico Taylor, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image:The Baffler/Public Domain Pictures

[ed. See also: Americans Don’t Understand Who’s Rich (Atlantic); and, The Wealthiest—and Stealthiest—Class in America (New Yorker).]

Not Ready For Prime Time

[ed. Interview with Piers Morgan, Tom Conti and Tilly Norwood (the AI generated actor). Also, Impact Theory co-founder Tom Bilyeu and game theorist Professor Jiang Xueqin. Some crazy glitches, but you can see where this is going.

See also: An “Interview” With Tilly Norwood Proves Absurd and Underwhelming (HR); and,
Tilly Norwood’s press tour is going about as well as you’d expect for an AI (TechCrunch).]

You Can Ignore the Bad Pundits

One easy trick to make yourself smarter.

Most wisdom comes from tangible experience in our wide world. It comes from human relationships, from travel, from living and loving and fighting and falling in the dirt. There is little wisdom to be had from spending years and years reading stuff on the internet. A single hard-won lesson, though, which I have learned after wasting an embarrassing amount of time reading and writing about politics, may help to save you a good amount of angst.

You can just ignore the bad pundits. You don’t have to read them. You can just carry right on with your life.

You don’t have to talk about the bad pundits. You don’t have to engage with them. You don’t have to craft painstaking responses to their vapid arguments. You don’t have to take them seriously. Their existence creates no obligation for you. Each new piece they produce generates no appointment on your calendar. The law does not accord them any reservation on your attention. They have no inherent power over you. Instead, they get their power from you. You give it to them, for free. You, who fancy yourself their enemy, provide the fuel for their careers.

Instead of doing that, you are free not to do it.

“Ugh, the New York Times opinion page is so awful!” Don’t read it then. “I can’t stand the bullshit that Bret Stephens wrote!” Don’t read it then. “I hate the sanctimony of David Brooks! I hate the smugness of Matt Yglesias! I hate the fascists at the Wall Street Journal, the bootlickers at the Washington Post, and the clowns at the Free Press!”

Don’t read them then. Problem solved.

You may interpret this as me telling you to shelter yourself from challenging opinions. Not at all. I encourage everyone to read widely and freely. When you read widely and freely, you are able to familiarize yourself with the work of many people. What you will come to realize is that many or even most of those people are not worth reading. Some because they don’t have much to say, and others because they are consistently wrong in a way that, once you figure it out, allows you to project their opinions into the future without needing to constantly check in on them. You can move on. You gave them their audition, and they didn’t pass. Not many will! This is all as it should be. You have a limited amount of time to read and most of that time should be spent reading books and the second most time should be spent reading facts, such as news. Opinion writing that does not prove its value is crowding out other things that have a much higher chance of being worthwhile.

Why does this seem so hard for so many of us in practice? Because we are all haunted by the demons of prestige. Prestige, a false god, tells us that a person’s work is valuable because of their position, their title, rather than because of the work itself. In the case of certain powerful people, this may be true. (It’s worth knowing what Elon Musk and Donald Trump think because it may directly affect many lives, notwithstanding the fact that they are morons.) In the case of writers, however, this is always false. Good work is valuable and bad work is not. The understandable tendency of many people to use prestige as a heuristic to guide their reading often leads them down a dead end road of frustration. [...]

Writers must be taken seriously if the quality of their work demands it and if not, not. That’s it! There are many ways to be a worthwhile pundit. Some are experts on specific subjects, and some get access to very important people’s thoughts, and some are gifted at distilling many disparate ideas into a coherent whole, and some are funny, a quality which justifies itself. My point is not that famous pundits are never worth reading, but rather that they are never worth reading just because of who they are. Look at this transcript of Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat discussing their own careers. One thing you may notice is that both of these people have spent their entire adult lives doing nothing but sitting at a computer blogging. Does that mean that they don’t know anything? Not at all. Then again, does it mean they do know anything? Also no. “Winning the pundit lottery with a New York Times gig” tells you nothing about whether these people are worthy of your attention. They must earn your respect, and their right to your time, solely with the quality of their work. That’s all they have! And you can judge that for yourself. Any further temptation to check for them because of the positions they hold is an error of judgment, by you. [...]

The more subtle and substantial danger of patronizing idiot pundits is that the accumulated weight of attention that we grant them bestows them with actual influence, which they use to make the world worse, as you would expect. This is bad enough when it’s, you know, Matt Yglesias morphing into a Democratic Party power broker; it is even worse when it is a calculated political effort, of the sort that Rahm Emanuel is trying to pull off now by parlaying his stint as a monotonous Wall Street Journal columnist into a presidential campaign.

James Carville is a wheezing old coot. Why is he influential? Because we all pay attention to him! Also, Donald Trump. Think about it. Depriving this sort of person of the material benefits of having a large audience is a patriotic act.

If you are a genuine hate read connoisseur, I respect it. But if you are a regular person who finds yourself continually getting mad at the idiot pundits you continue to read—stop!

The idea that if you want to be a well informed person you are obligated to read all the stuff that certain prestigious writers and outlets publish is not much different from the idea that since McDonald’s is very popular, you are obligated to stop there and eat a Big Mac every day. To keep your finger on the pulse. This, just like the belief that you must read every Jonathan Chait story, will eventually give you a heart attack. Embrace ignorance of dreary idiocy. It is the kind of ignorance that makes you smarter.

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. See also: Columnists and Their Lives of Quiet Desperation; and, Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses (HTW):]

***

"If you create things for the public, you will get yelled at by dumbasses. Indeed, this is the primary experience of being the sort of writer that I am. If you make a joke, they won’t get it. If you use sarcasm, they won’t detect it. If you exaggerate for effect, you will be taken literally, and if you try to be understated, you will be accused of a contemptible lack of urgency. If you make a reference, it will not be understood; if you choose one topic, they will wonder why you didn’t choose another; if you try to focus on one thing, they will ask why you didn’t focus on something else. Your high-minded arguments will be dismissed as inscrutable, your simple arguments will be dismissed as unsophisticated, and you, personally, will be dismissed as the sort of lightweight who should try getting a real job. Ever thought of that? [...]

America’s entire power structure has been taken over by the very same sort of dumbasses who have been yelling at all of us on the internet for years. Perhaps this was all foreordained from the very first day that email and message boards were invented. I don’t know. What I do know is that there is no need to look upon the dull, vindictive, racist monsters running our government as a new or inexplicable sort of villain. I see in them a much more familiar identity: internet commenters.

The shoddiness of their work, their love of spectacle, their constant speechifying, their disproportionate reaction to all setbacks, their dishonesty, their prejudices, their disdain for expertise, their willingness to trust quacks, their scapegoating of the less powerful, their embrace of performative gestures at the expense of substance, their misogyny, their ill-concealed social awkwardness funneled into needless displays of aggression—yes, this is all very much in character. The good news is that it is easy to diagnose this disease. The bad news is that if we don’t get it cleared up, our nation’s 250-year history will culminate in the same sort of recriminatory meltdown as an internet comment thread that spirals from “What did you do today?” to full Nazism with stunning speed."

Tell Me What “Socialism” Means

Before you tell me if it’s good or bad.

You may have noticed that political arguments often have a frustrating, circular nature. Charges and countercharges, points and counterpoints—all get made without ever seeming to converge on a shared reality. It may seem that you and your political opponents are talking past one another. Much of this, in electoral politics, is due to the fact that the discussions are in fact bad faith attacks that seek only to undermine, rather than to reach an agreement. But even good faith attempts to find common ground with political opponents frequently sink in these murky waters.

When this happens, stop and ask: What are we talking about? Are we talking about the same thing here? What is the definition of the terms that we are allegedly debating? Frequently, you will find that you and your counterpart each have a personal definition of the thing that you are arguing about, and those definitions are not the same. Your argument has not been about political substance at all; it has been about the meaning of a particular term. Failure to settle on a shared definition before you start the debate means that the debate can just go on forever in opposite directions, like two fighter jets flying past one another at different altitudes and wondering why they never get a chance to shoot down the enemy.

Nowhere in American politics does this stupid dilemma manifest itself more than the purported debate over “socialism.” Oh, you have opinions on “socialism?” And whether it is evil? Or great? And you would like to yell about them? Let me stop you right there. What exactly does that mean?

The majority of mainstream political discourse about socialism—and almost all of the discourse emanating from Republicans—is just bad faith, lowest-common-denominator red baiting, paltry attempts to wring some political advantage from the still-glowing embers of decades of Cold War anticommunism rhetoric that has soaked deep into the minds of anyone born before the turn of the century. None of this is a genuine attempt to discuss what socialism really is and what it might mean here, so I will ignore it. (A benefit of being a How Things Work reader is that I respect you enough to skip the many paragraphs of undeserved credulousness that other, less honest outlets would feel obligated to pay to this bullshit.)

What about those who do want to discuss the issue? Those who believe that they are trying to communicate something useful about whether or not socialism is desirable? In aggregate, I’m afraid, this has become one of the least productive mishmashes of disparate meanings in living memory.

Liberal billionaire Nick Hanauer writes that “Neither socialism nor MAGA is the answer” to America’s inequality crisis. Instead, he advocates for higher minimum wages, higher taxes on the rich, stronger labor unions, and less concentrated corporate power. He puts forward his proposal for “market humanism” as a counterpoint to what is on offer from politicians like Zohran Mamdani, who supports higher minimum wages, higher taxes on the rich, stronger labor unions, and less concentrated corporate power.

Bernie Sanders is America’s most famous socialist politician. He became popular by calling for higher minimum wages, higher taxes on the rich, stronger labor unions, and less concentrated corporate power. When Elizabeth Warren was running for president against Bernie, she distinguished herself from him by declaring that she was, in fact, a capitalist, and wanted not socialism, but Accountable Capitalism. Her platform included higher minimum wages, higher taxes on the rich, stronger labor unions, and less concentrated corporate power.

On the other side is Donald Trump, an avowed anti-socialist, who is now aggressively pursuing state ownership of corporations.

What is the public supposed to take from this contradictory, uninformative war of labels? Polls now show that socialism is significantly more popular than capitalism among Democrats. What that means is that we have succeeded in getting people to imagine that “socialism” means things they like, more than “capitalism” does. This is good, I guess, but it is mostly an indicator of the fact that everyone’s personal definition of these terms is so flexible to the point of meaninglessness.

The dictionary definition of socialism is “any of various egalitarian economic and political theories or movements advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.” The Republican definition of socialism is “A laundry list of the worst abuses of totalitarian communist states; or, anything advocated by a Democrat that would cost the rich money.” The centrist definition of socialism is “anyone to our left.” The progressive capitalist definition of socialism is “other progressives who may share my values but who are sadly not economically savvy enough to understand that what we really need are higher minimum wages, higher taxes on the rich, stronger labor unions, and less concentrated corporate power.” That is, coincidentally, also more or less the definition of socialism that democratic socialists have. Each faction imagines that the others are unsophisticated, unrealistic dupes.

My purpose in writing this is not so much to try to litigate the One Correct Definition of Socialism, but rather to highlight the (critical!) fact that the big debate about the Soul of the Democratic Party or the Battle For the Faith of America or whatever is, for the most part, one big cloud of people talking past one another. The dirty secret is that most political commentators prefer it this way. It is easier to make grand proclamations about how either Free Enterprise Is Fundamental to Free People or how Capitalist Scum Must Die than to go about the tedious work of agreeing upon our terms and then having an actual policy debate.

I am a self-proclaimed socialist who writes for a socialist magazine and who just got back from attending the Socialist Conference. I promise you that socialists themselves do not have a shared definition of socialism. Much less do the people on the other side whose only reference point for socialism is “Cuba and uhhh Russia” have a shared definition of socialism. My own definition of what socialism means in the context of American politics would be something like “More public control and less private control in society, particularly in the economy, with the goal of producing greater equality.” That, I think, gets at what most of us actually mean when we talk about this stuff. (I have met few American socialists who are truly committed to the communist caricature of full state control of the economy, and even those who do will have to admit that that the path to getting there is described above.)

You will notice that even this definition is directional—it describes where we are trying to go in relation to where we are now, rather than articulating some strict Marxist benchmark that must be met. Politics itself is a directional endeavor, so this sort of definition is useful for politics. If you are an academic looking for analytical rigor above all, however, it might not satisfy you.

Who cares! If you take anything away from all of this, let it be: Almost all of America’s mainstream political debate over “socialism” is stupid. The portion of it that is not a scam on purpose is mostly a big waste of time. Do you support higher minimum wages, higher taxes on the rich, stronger labor unions, and less concentrated corporate power? Then we are on the same side. Let’s walk down that road together. If we make progress, we will reach some point where some people say, “This is far enough.” The rest of us will say, “No, we need to keep pushing this further.” At that point, we can have a debate about the actual policies in question, and their merits, and what the ideal we are trying to reach looks like. 

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. See also: Capital Is Organizing the World to Its Advantage and Everything Else Is a Sideshow (HTW):]

***

"We are all mad at the billionaires and whatnot but let’s be very clear about the mechanism driving all of this: American companies are making more money than ever and they don’t have to share it because workers don’t have the power to claim their fair share, and because some of the money has been used to purchase political influence to prevent the government from stepping in, and so therefore the money accrues to the owners, which is to say, to the rich. The richest ten percent of Americans own close to 90% of America’s stock market wealth.

This isn’t too hard to understand. I obviously didn’t invent this analysis—this is just grade school Marxism. But to reach these conclusions you don’t need to read any theory or know any buzzwords. You just need COMMON SENSE. All the money that businesses make will go either to the workers or to the owners. The goal of capital, of businesses, the logic of capitalism itself, is for businesses to try to take as close to 100% of the profits as possible for themselves. (Indeed, an amusing new economics paper shows that going to business schools causes managers to pursue exactly this mandate). This is the nature of a corporation. It will always do it, just like a fire will always want to burn. Our problem is that we have not kept corporations properly contained. So, like fire, they will consume everything.

It is far more accurate, more useful, and more true to understand politics as a battleground between capital and labor than as some sort of Democratic vs. Republican thing. Politics is just another arena for capital to organize in order to maximize its own growth."

via:

Why the Senate Is Weirdly Obsessed with College Sports Instead of Real Problems

Lots of news in the monopoly round-up, including a disastrous turn in the Paramount-Warner as the key state attorney general lead, Rob Bonta, caves. It’s not over, but this one took a bad turn. In better news, the crypto lobby lost its main objective for this Congress, and basically collapsed in an orgy of corruption and incompetence. Fitting, that. There’s also a bunch of news on AI, and a fascinating market power story involving musician Macklemore, Ticketmaster and Israel.

But I want to start with something you may have missed, which was a procedural vote in the Senate last week to give the National Collegiate Athletic Association a special exemption from antitrust law. The NCAA is a widely loathed organization that has for decades prevented college athletes from being paid, despite them working what are essentially full-time jobs as minor league professionals. In 2020, the Supreme Court took away the NCAA’s authority to set wages for college athletes and run college sports. Now, Congress is on the verge of restoring their monopoly power. I’ve asked Katie Van Dyck, an antitrust lawyer working on sports, to lay out what’s happening.

In July, Stanford football players elected representatives and formed the first player-led chapter of the College Football Players Association. The CFBPA’s ultimate goal is collective bargaining on a conference-by-conference basis. From Ernest Cooper, a Stanford linebacker and one of the team’s elected representatives:

“As a Power 4 college football player you’re working out year-round, you’re getting paid …. I don’t see why people wouldn’t see us as employees.”

Just a few days later, the Oregon State women’s basketball team collected enough signatures to seek an election with the United College Athletes Association. They have filed a petition with the Oregon Employment Relations Board. From the university, which is opposing the effort:

“Playing on a college basketball team is not service performed for hire …. Student athletes at OSU matriculate to obtain and [sic] education and voluntarily pursue basketball as part of that experience.”

Last year, over 100 women’s basketball players wrote to Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey asking for a formal way to be heard on the rules that govern their sport. Neither agreed to meet.

The Senate is about to weigh in against these athletes’ efforts, with the Protect College Sports Act (the “PCSA”), which has been taking up valuable debating time in the House and Senate. The two lead Senators on the bill are Republican Ted Cruz from Texas, and Democrat Maria Cantwell, from Washington state. Both have very sharp elbows and have used them to move this legislation.

It passed a procedural hurdle last week, by a 74–24 margin, to proceed to a full vote, which will happen shortly. Populist politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were opposed, but the “aye” column included most of the Senate, including some surprising center-left supporters, like Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and co-sponsor Peter Welch (D-Vt.).

It’s worth saying upfront that it is weird that Congress is focusing on this topic to the exclusion of most other things. There are massive cost increases in health care, a war in Iran driving up prices, risky problems with artificial intelligence technology and financing, and on and on, but Congress is spending its time on… college sports.

There have been countless commercials during football season promoting this legislation. Nick Saban has made his case before the Senate and on ESPN GameDay. Amazon, Paramount, and Disney are on the Hill lobbying. Even Deion Sanders has joined the bandwagon. All of them say that college sports, a $20 billion industry and growing, are in chaos. Ted Cruz even went on ESPN GameDay, and was hilariously booed with “Ted You Suck!” chants as he pitched this legislation for ten full minutes.

Still, this lobbying campaign isn’t the sole reason Congress is focusing on college athletics to the exclusion of everything else. Another reason is that, as BIG often chronicles, the superrich tend to have their priorities addressed in our political system. And the superrich love college sports. For instance, billionaire Larry Ellison, who is right now financing the Paramount-Warner takeover, and owns TikTok and Oracle, is deeply involved in the University of Michigan’s athletic department finances, because his sixth wife is an alumni of the school.

For decades, wealthy alumni, known as “boosters,” have played a part in funding college sports, as a sort of passionate high-end hobby. Key here was that the athletes didn’t get paid, which not only reduced costs but also contributed to an endless series of scandals involving athletes paid under the table.

But this whole system got a rude awakening in 2021, when the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the NCAA’s request for “immunity from the normal operation of the antitrust laws” in its landmark NCAA v. Alston decision. It did so at least in part based on the NCAA’s admission that it “enjoy[ed] monopsony control” and was “capable of depressing wages below competitive levels.” Justice Kavanaugh wrote that “[t]he NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America.”

The Alston decision created a sea change in college athletics, forcing the NCAA to abandon a long-standing ban on athlete compensation within days of the opinion’s release. Before 2021, universities were only allowed to award scholarships and certain “education-related” benefits like tutors and laptops. The result was coaches and administrators earning millions while the athletes on the field brought home nothing beyond a scholarship. It was a blatantly unfair and exploitative system. The Alston decision forced the NCAA to make a change.

Today, athletes can sign name, image, and likeness (“NIL”) deals with sponsors like Nike and Gatorade. Boosters frequently set up funds to bring in star players. And starting in 2025, schools can pay athletes directly via revenue-sharing, named for the athletic department revenue that funds it. Revenue-sharing is currently capped at $20.5 million per school, but a report published by The Athletic shows that the biggest programs are spending over $50 million a year on their rosters.

Alston also ushered a wave of lawsuits challenging other NCAA rules, including those limiting the number of transfers, restricting eligibility for older players and professional athletes, and capping the amount of prize money tennis players can collect. These have frustrated coaches, administrators, and some fans alike. And it changed the way universities finance athletics, since traditionally they cross-subsidize revenue-generating sports with those that don’t bring in enough cash.

Given the massive changes in college athletics wrought by the Alston decision, universities began a big lobbying campaign. Enter the Protect College Sports Act. To its proponents, the PCSA restores balance to college sports, putting the NCAA back as the governor of the system. It limits revenue sharing, regulates NIL deals, and imposes uniform rules on transfers and recruiting. It also grants an antitrust exemption to schools to pool and sell media rights. The idea here is to “fix” college athletics and make it more sustainable. Senator Cantwell’s office even released a financial report during the first PCSA procedural vote claiming that her bill will put an end to “unsustainable athletics spending [] amplifying the broader fiscal pressures facing higher education.”

But there’s a reason athletes and labor unions are opposed. The truth is, the PCSA is the culmination of a 5-year, multi-million-dollar lobbying campaign by the NCAA to secure an antitrust exemption that will allow it to unilaterally set the rules governing athletes’ compensation and eligibility.

by Matt Stollar, BIG |  Read more:

Image: Ronald Martinez/Getty Images via
[ed. College and professional sports are Big Business personified. Reminds me of record companies and how they treat 'talent'. See also: AI Is an Elite Crime Spree (BIG).]

The 25 Science-Fiction Books You Must Read, Ranked

And six short story collections

Some ‘best of’ lists seek to achieve a spurious objectivity through means such as reader polls, complex ranking systems or asking distinguished experts for their views.

This is not one of those lists. This list has instead been compiled by the greatly superior method1 of me thinking really hard about it and assuming that my opinion mattered more than anyone else’s.

In terms of criteria, firstly, every book on the list is an excellent read. Some of the books on here may be worthy, but there are no books on here purely for their worthiness. Secondly, every book is one that will make you think, or open your eyes to a new perspective - for that is a core function of science fiction, to explore new possibilities. And thirdly, to whittle the list down to 25, I have taken into account relevance and impact - either to the world of today, or to the genre more broadly.

While the borders of every genre are porous, every book on here has a clear claim to being science fiction. There is no pure fantasy, or alternate history - much though I enjoy those genres, this is not their list.

So, without further ado, let’s get cracking. As is traditional, we’ll do this in reverse order, so you’re kept guessing to the very end as to whether I’m overlooking your own favourites, or saying they’re amongst the best.

Last and First Men - Olaf Stapledon (1930)

A future history, not a novel, Stapledon takes us forward across billions of years as new races of humanity rise and fall - on Earth, on Venus and ultimately on Neptune. Some winged, some more intelligent and some less intelligent, some deliberately designed and some evolved, each have their turn on the stage. [...]

The Mote in God’s Eye - Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (1974)

What happens when you combine Niven’s extraordinary imagination with Pournelle’s ability to actually tell a story that has a plot? You get The Mote in God’s Eye, perhaps the best first-contact encounter with a truly alien extra-terrestrial species ever written, in a richly rendered future setting. A rare occasion of a joint-authored novel being better than any that either has written alone. [...]

The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham (1951)

What if almost everyone went blind, and sentient, walking, carnivorous plants inherited the earth? This unlikely premise forms the basis for one of the most civilly bleak post-apocalyptic novels, as the protagonist and his companion wend their way across the devastated Home Counties, seeking a safe haven where the remnants of humanity can survive. [...]

The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson (1995)

A world of nanotechnology and AI, in which nation states have been supplanted by ‘phyles’ - groupings, sometimes ethnic, sometimes regional, sometimes political, of freely associating individuals - the Diamond Age tells the story of Nell, a young girl growing up in poverty who receives an advanced AI ‘primer’, designed to educate and guide its owner into a ‘more interesting life’. A wildly imaginative roller-coaster ride through a provocative future. [...]

The Warrior’s Apprentice - Lois McMaster Bujold (1986)

Arguably the best science-fiction author currently writing, The Warrior’s Apprentice introduces the brilliant, driven, physically stunted Miles Vorkosigan, primary protagonist of her Vorkosigan Saga, and follows him as he ‘accidentally’ builds himself a mercenary fleet. Modern space opera at its finest. [...]

Foundation - Isaac Asimov (1951)

A novel that shaped the genre, Foundation tells the story of a Galactic Empire in decline, the brilliant psychohistorian who sees a way to minimise the harm - and the lives of those who followed him, living his plan, guiding the new Foundation in its ascent. [...]

The Three-Body Problem - Liu Cixin (2008)

by Edrith, World of Edrith |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. Not a bad list. Could easily be doubled.]

China and the Future of Science

The Chinese socio-political system differs from our own. From the perspective of the topic of this conference, here is the most salient distinction: the Chinese system has a telos. The Chinese party-state is fundamentally a set of goal-oriented institutions. This is not unique to China—it is in fact a distinguishing feature of all Leninist systems. I sometimes think of Leninist systems as a little bit like that bus in the movie Speed. Who here has seen it? For those who haven’t, here is basic gist of that film: an extortionist attaches a bomb to the speedometer of a bus. If the bus ever slows below 50 miles per hour, everyone blows up. So it is with your average communist system. Either it hurtles towards some clearly defined goal or things start to fall apart.

In the early days of Mao, the overarching aim of the communist system was to seize state power, first through subversion and insurgency, then through more regular combined arms warfare. In the later days of Mao the newly established Chinese state and the society it intertwined were oriented around class struggle, both at home and abroad. From the 1980s through the 2010s the Chinese system was orbited a different yet still very explicitly stated goal: getting rich. In theory, if not always in practice, every action taken by every cadre, every soldier, and every state employee was subordinate to this larger, unifying aim. We must make China rich.

That is no longer the animating telos of the Chinese system. There is a new goal, one that has been articulated with great clarity by Chairman Xi and the Chinese central committee: In 2026, the aim of China’s communist enterprise is to lead humanity through what they call “the next round of techno scientific revolution and industrial transformation.”2 The Chinese leadership believes humanity stands on the cusp of the next industrial revolution. China can only be restored to its ancestral greatness if it is the pioneer of this revolution. All machinery of party and state must bend towards this end. All 100 million members of the Communist Party of China, all 50 million government employees of the PRC, all two million soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, and ultimately all of the 1.4 billion people that call China home must be mobilized to accomplish this aim. That is the ambition. China will be the greatest scientific power the world has ever seen—or bust.

The communists are deadly serious about their pursuit of this aim. Statistics provide one window into the seriousness of their intent. Now I don’t intend for the remainder of this speech to be a laundry list of numbers, but I think the numbers are useful for helping us see the scale of what China has already accomplished and the speed with which they have accomplished it. They are also strong signal of future intent—it is difficult to survey the numbers and not appreciate just how ironclad China’s commitment to scientific achievement really is.

Now scientific achievement is difficult to measure. One common metric is to count the so-called “high impact papers” – journal articles highly cited by other leading lights in a given scientific field. Count up these papers over the course of a year, see who wrote them, see where those authors work, and—voila!—you have a ranked list of which institutions are putting out the most high-impact science in a given year. Had you done this counting exercise in the year 2005, you would have discovered that six of the world’s ten most productive universities were in the United States. Today only one of those universities is in the United States. That university is Harvard, coming in at spot number three on the list. At spot number one? Zhejiang University.

How many of you have heard of Zhejiang University? Can I get a show of hands?

And of course, Zhejiang University is just one of the Chinese institutions on this top ten list. China claims not just the number-one spot, but also the number-two spot. And not just the number-one and number-two spots, but also the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, ninth spots go to the Chinese.

The scientific publisher Nature makes a similar catalog on a slightly more granular level, looking at specific fields of science. According to Nature’s most recent rankings, 18 of the top 25 most productive research institutes in the physical sciences, 19 of the top 20 in geosciences, and a full 25 out of 25 in chemistry are Chinese. Only in the biosciences do American scientists still have a lead—but even on that list three of the top ten are Chinese.

The kicker is, none of that was true even just a decade ago.

The most granular analysis of all is published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI. ASPI publishes a neat research tracker that surveys new publications in 74 distinct high-end technologies. Unlike the statistics I just discussed, their tracker includes research published by scientists working in national laboratories and private institutions as well as those published by academic scientists. For each category they make a list of the ten institutions that are publishing the most high-impact science in that particular topic. What have they found? For 66 of the 74 categories tracked, a majority of the institutions that are now publishing the highest-impact science are Chinese. In many areas of science the dominance is total: For example, ten of then most productive research institutions in the fields of nanoscale material manufacturing, photonic sensors, chemical coating, drone operations, automated swarms, and undersea communications are Chinese. The number is nine out of ten for work on supercapacitors, advanced composite materials, inertial navigation systems, and satellite positioning, eight out of ten in advanced optical communications, advanced radiofrequency communications, and new chemical coatings, and seven out of ten for directed energy technologies, nuclear engineering, and nuclear waste treatment.

The scale of Chinese scientific production is in part a story about people. China graduates five times the number of medical and biomedical students than we do every year, seven times the number of engineers, and two-and-a-half times the number of undergraduates with research experience in artificial intelligence. Last year China graduated almost double the number of STEM PhD students than we did—and that number is actually worse than it sounds because—depending on the exact year you do the counting—between one sixth and one fifth of our STEM graduates are themselves Chinese.

Many of these researchers go back. They go back partially because they are well compensated for doing so. They also go back because of the research opportunities afforded to them. A recent study found that returning Chinese scientists go on to become the lead author on 2.5 times more papers than their colleagues who stay in the United States.9 Many Chinese research labs have 30 or 40 people attached to them—the equivalent to a commercial research lab in the United States. Ask any scientist who has gone to China in the past three years to visit academic colleagues and they will tell you how astounded they are at the quality of the laboratory equipment and machinery that their Chinese colleagues have access to. If in the not-so-distant past Chinese localities competed with each other to lay the most asphalt, now that funding pours into laboratory equipment, scientific instruments, and advanced scientific facilities. Thus China now has the world’s most sensitive ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray detector, the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, the world’s strongest steady-state magnetic field, the world’s fastest quantum computer by computational advantage, and the world’s most sensitive neutrino detector. Just yesterday an attendee at this conference informed me of another I should add to my list: the world’s largest primate medical research center.

Now I can already hear some of your objections. “Tanner, these measures don’t include classified research. They don’t include the proprietary research by private companies—that is the stuff that actually pushes technology forward. American companies are not publishing billion-dollar trade secrets in the latest journals. The Chinese scientists are under insane publish or perish pressures—they are far more likely to lie and cheat. Don’t you know Chinese scientists take part in citation cartels? Haven’t you read those bitter critiques of the new system written by China’s own disgruntled scientists?”

My main response to this: you guys have lost the thread. I am reminded of a similar style of argument we often see in AI development. Every time a new model is released people play around with it for a bit and then start to catalog the flaws of this model. But the real story, the story historians will tell a generation from now, is never about the model of the moment. What matters is movement between those moments. History is made by the trend-line. What capabilities did the models have four years ago? What capabilities do they have now? What might they reasonably be expected to have in a decade hence?

Something similar might be said for science and China.

Moreover, it is not hard so hard to find examples of dominance in the scientific literature leading to dominance in the world of applied technology. More than a decade ago Chinese researchers began to dominate academic work on batteries. Today China produces 80% of the world’s battery cells. Around that same time Chinese researchers took the lead on factory robots and factory automation. Today Chinese firms buy more robots than the rest of the world combined. They have a higher robot density than almost every other country in world, despite being the world’s second largest nation. Another example: China is the only place where the unit cost of building a new nuclear reactor has gone down over the last decade. Do you think this is unrelated to the number of nuclear engineers they train and the amount of basic research they publish on nuclear engineering? Again I beg you to look at the trend-line: In 2026 China has 102 nuclear reactors either in operation or under construction. How many did they have 15 years ago? Less than 30.

Why is China pouring so many resources into scientific and technological advance? Here is a 30-second thumbnail sketch: Xi Jinping and those around him have a specific view of history. Like most Chinese, they remember with fondness past eras when their nation was the centerpiece of human civilization. They mourn China’s fall from those grand heights. They remember with bitterness the “century of humiliation” in which their people were exploited by foreign powers and wasted by vicious warlords. The Communist Party of China was founded to save China from that fate. From its inception it has seen itself as the vehicle for the salvation of the Chinese nation and thence the restoration of this nation to its rightful place at the center of the human story.

But why was China displaced from its spot “at the center of the world stage” in the first place? Chinese intellectuals have been asking this question for more than a century. Here is their most common answer: science and technology. Today Party-affiliated thinkers often describe modern human history as punctuated by discrete revolutionary moments when a new technological regime comes into being. They call these moments “rounds of techno-scientific revolution and industrial transformation.” In such moments the material basis of human civilization changes. Those who master this transition master… well, just about everything.

by Tanner Greer, Scholar's Stage |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Go USA. See also: The Cure for Cancer Is Not a Pure Math Benchmark (SS).]

'Kawarikiri' - The Art of Garnishing

 

via: Japan Eats
[ed. Also, this Parrotfish (Uhu) sushi and saute (the scales are enormous):]

DOGE Team Dreams

Tyler Hassen’s initiation into Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, started as a series of tests.

The Houston oil executive says he was given vague instructions to show up at an unfamiliar D.C. address. He hastily packed three suitcases and flew east, taking an Uber to a building that he soon learned belonged to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. He was whisked to a private office, acutely aware that his tailored suit stood out among the hoodie-clad engineers “too locked in” to their laptops to look up. He was ordered to go through the website of the Department of Commerce and, within days, find two to five ideas to present to Musk.

He checked into a nearby J.W. Marriott and told his wife he didn’t know how long he would be gone.

Thus began an 11-month stint at the center of a national firestorm — an exhilarating, chaotic and sometimes scary experience, Hassen told The Washington Post, in his first major interview detailing his forthcoming memoir and plans. The memoir, “Inside DOGE: The Real Story From a Senior Insider,” which recounts his time working for the secretive cost-cutting group, is the first tell-all to emerge from one of the most controversial periods of President Donald Trump’s time in office — a moment Hassen said he would gladly live through again.

“There’s this misconception that we all just went in there and didn’t really think about what we were doing,” Hassen said, speaking virtually from a hotel room in San Diego. “I spent 24/7 thinking about it, waking up at 3 in the morning thinking, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ … And I know I did.”

At the heart of the book is a split screen: For many Americans, Musk’s project was a callous showcase of bending government to a billionaire’s will, associated with tens of thousands of federal layoffs, reams of lawsuits, an AI-enabled effort to kill off wasteful contracts and the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

But Hassen’s memoir enters a different vision into the historical record: He portrays a period marked by a clash in worldviews, in which hardcore capitalists are granted unprecedented power to change a system that they argue operates under completely different incentives, logic and norms.

To Hassen, whose pre-government career involved turning around distressed companies, “DOGE was not radical,” he writes in the book. It was “not a wrecking ball, but a catalyst.”

In conversation, Hassen comes across as mild-mannered, a distant temperament from Musk, who famously brandished a red metallic chainsaw as a metaphor for cutting government waste. A 43-year-old dad with Boy Scout energy, he doesn’t cut the image of the nerd-engineer DOGE bro. He spent his entire adult life “hiring, firing, reorganizing and rescuing failing businesses” in industrial manufacturing and the energy sectors — a skill set that appealed to Musk, his longtime deputy, Steve Davis, and Baris Akis, a venture capitalist who served as a volunteer recruiter.

But for years, he seethed with rage over the national debt, now at $40 trillion. He felt angry that the amount the U.S. spends annually just to service that debt is more than the government spends on national defense and many other public benefits.

So he raised his hand — making a cold outreach to Musk through a network of business world connections, he said in the interview, and pressed the point.

“I’m staring at my daughter, who is 5, and thinking about her at 25 with $100 trillion of debt. And I know if we don’t do something about it now, we’re going to be there,” he said. “We’ve got to fix it now.”

By its own accounting, DOGE fell far short of the $2 trillion Musk claimed he would save, and an independent report from the Government Accountability Office has found DOGE’s own savings figures to be flawed. But Hassen told The Post he believes the effort was a success.

“Did we eliminate the deficit? No. Of course not,” he said. “But we made it on the top of everyone’s minds, albeit briefly, for a few months, that this deficit is something that we need to fix.”

In the book, he argues that “DOGE fit squarely” within a tradition practiced by some Democratic presidents, from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, who also sought to shrink bloated government. DOGE was different, he goes on to concede, because of its speed, “faster than Washington was ready for and faster than its defenses could absorb.”

But Hassen insists that DOGE was not cruel, a word that appears six times in the memoir, often in relation to laying off federal workers. The refrain can read as a plea for reconsideration of an effort he argues was poorly understood.

“In the private sector, there’s an understood bargain,” he writes. “You’re hired to create value. If the value disappears, so does the job. It isn’t personal. It isn’t cruel. It’s the operating system of capitalism.”

Government, he argues in the book, runs on a different logic. Value is “presumed,” “permanence is the default,” and “the moral burden of proofs falls on anyone who questions headcount — no matter how bloated the system becomes.” [...]

He told The Post he was exhilarated to get deep into the bowels of the bureaucracy and deploy his corporate-honed skill sets to attack a problem that had long troubled him.

During his first week at DOGE, the team met in a sparse conference room on the top floor of the SpaceX offices — empty except for a giant American flag on the wall, “because it reminded us why we are here,” he told The Post. “We had billionaires to 22-year-olds who had dropped out of Harvard, all sitting there on our laptops working with public information — trying to figure out how we can help solve this deficit, this crisis that we’re in.” [...] [ed. like talking to Congress?]

During his time at Interior, Hassen was almost like a Where’s Waldo character, popping up in key moments that caught the country’s attention. When wildfires struck California, Hassen made an unusual decision to fly to the state to grill local officials about why the state’s largest water plant wasn’t running at full capacity.

The image of him at the Jones Pumping Plant in California became one of the first posts from the DOGE X account identifying its members — prompting a flood of hateful messages and threats to Hassen and his family, he said.

When Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico, it fell to Hassen to officially register the rechristened Gulf of America in the Interior Department’s Geographic Names Information System — a move that then triggered a broader recognition of the name change on Google Maps and other online directories.

Hassen says he felt the difference in mindset between the public and the private sector every day. “It showed up in the way career staff spoke about ‘the workforce’ as something apart — almost sacred,” he writes. “Until we can say out loud that government is a workforce like any other — noble in purpose, human in composition, and subject to reality like everything else — reform will look like cruelty before it looks like competence.”

by Elizabeth Dwoskin, The Washington Post, via Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: WaPo

[ed. Nice. Can't wait for AI and the 'operating system of capitalism' (Praise the Lord!) to reduce its workforce by at least one cult memoirist.]