Bird Song of the Day
Brown Thrasher, Lake Wales; Bok Sanctuary, Florida, United States. From 1963!
In Case You Might Miss…
- Trump strategy.
- Taleb: Tech firms “grey swans”?
- Ortberg soothes the analysts.
- Andreessen predicts AI-driven wage crash (and that’s a good thing).
- “Human Reproduction as Prisoner’s Dilemma”.
Politics
“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles
Energy in the executive:
“Trump: We’re Forging A New Political Majority That’s Shattering The New Deal Coalition” [RealClearPolitics]. President Donald Trump speaks at the House Republican Issues Conference at the Trump National Doral Miami Resort: “Together, we’re forging a new political majority that’s shattering and replacing Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, which dominated American politics for over 100 years…. If we do our job over the next 21 months, not only will House Republicans be reelected and expand our majority in 2026, we will cement a national governing coalition that will preserve American freedom for generations to come. There has never been anything like what’s happened in politics in the last few years.” • This, it seems to me, is the name of the game: Party (hence class) power. Presidential power is important, too, but which is more important? Party power, obviously, since without Party power a Democrat Administration could take over in 2028 and use all this “dictatorial” power for its own ends. Credit MAGA and Trump for understanding this, very much unlike the RINOs. (Another sign of Trump’s party leader perspective is the relative youth of so many of his appointments. If Hegseth, for example, doesn’t fall off the wagon or flame out, he’ll be around a long time. Unlike so many RINOs.)
“The Strategy Behind Trump’s Policy Blitz” [The Atlantic]. “The staff was still setting up dinner on Mar-a-Lago’s outdoor patio on a balmy early-January evening when Donald Trump sat down. He was surrounded by several top advisers who would soon join him in the West Wing and who wanted to get his input before his attention shifted to his wealthy guests and Palm Beach club members. Susie Wiles, the incoming chief of staff, led the conversation, listing some of the dozens of executive orders that had been teed up for Trump’s signature once he reclaimed the presidency. She wanted to talk about sequencing, according to a Trump adviser present at the meeting, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. How would he like to stagger the orders over the first few weeks back in office? ‘No,’ Trump replied, this person told me. ‘I want to sign as many as possible as soon as we show up.’ ‘Day one,’ he said.’ Indeed. And: “Trump’s ubiquity is also a deliberate strategy, several of his aides and allies told me. Part of the point is to send a message to the American people that their self-declared ‘favorite’ president is getting things done. The person at the Palm Beach meeting and another Trump adviser, who also requested anonymity to describe private conversations, told me that the White House’s flood of orders and news is also designed to disorient already despairing Democratic foes, leaving them so battered that they won’t be able to mount a cohesive opposition.” • Certainly Trump is sending the “getting things done” message; the contrast to the molasses-brained Biden Administration is instructive. But “cohesive opposition” from Democrats? I think Trump’s clear election win foreclosed 2017-style resistance, for good or ill. (Also, a nice example of the interplay between Wiles and Trump.)
“Trump’s Dictatorial Theory of Presidential Power – What the Executive Orders, in the Aggregate, Tell Us” [JustSecurity]. “On issue after issue, Trump claims that the Constitution directly empowers him to take certain actions, without any authorization by Congress and in the face of contrary statutes. The idea that the Constitution directly confers certain powers on the President is, by itself, neither new nor controversial. Yet in many of these orders, Trump is not simply asserting an inherent constitutional power to act. He is claiming a power to act in ways that clearly conflict with existing federal statutes. That is, he is asserting a constitutional prerogative to ignore, disregard, or even openly violate federal laws that are inconsistent with his policy agenda. Assertions of that general sort have been made in the past, and it is clear that the Constitution does confer on the President some exclusive powers that Congress may not regulate or restrict. Examples include the President’s power to veto proposed legislation, to grant pardons, to remove high-ranking executive officers he has appointed, and to recognize foreign governments. But these are the exceptions, not the rule. As Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett put it in her concurring opinion in the Trump immunity case, ‘the Constitution does not vest every exercise of executive power in the President’s sole discretion. … Congress has concurrent authority over many Government functions, and it may sometimes use that authority to regulate the President’s official conduct.’ Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion in that case was sloppy and ill-reasoned in many respects, but neither he nor anyone else on the Court disagreed with Justice Barrett on this basic point. Indeed, Roberts relied heavily on Justice Robert Jackson’s concurring opinion in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer, the steel seizure case. There, Jackson famously emphasized that presidential assertions of power to contravene federal law ‘must be scrutinized with caution, for what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our constitutional system.’ Trump’s recent executive orders would completely upend that equilibrium. He appears to be asserting a roving authority to override or simply ignore binding federal legislation whenever it interferes with his policy aims — regardless of whether the context is one of foreign affairs or national emergency. It is as though Trump is reprising his claim from his 2016 nomination acceptance speech that he alone can address the vital needs of the nation, but extending it to say that he alone has a mandate to suspend the law in pursuit of his goals.” • User tik-tok and birthright citizenship as examples. This is well worth a read (and the fact that material of this clarity is coming from the spook-adjacent lawfare community makes me want to hurl.
“The Problem With a President’s ‘First 100 Days'” [Foreign Policy]. “[T]he contemporary notion of the first 100 days took hold under Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. Following an inaugural address in which Roosevelt assured the nation that it had nothing to ‘fear but fear itself,’ he tried to show this principle in practice by confronting the massive crisis of the Great Depression in a proactive manner. Rather than waiting for the crisis to subside, Roosevelt would push Congress to legislate. Coupled with the fireside chats that he delivered on the radio to alleviate national insecurity, Roosevelt was able to move an unprecedented slate of major legislation through Congress.” You can see the parallel to Trump here: legislation vs. executive orders; fireside chat vs media firehose. But: “But the reality is that evaluating presidents through the 100 days framework has always been a limited tool…. Jimmy Carter, who many in the media considered as having an extremely successful 100 days—which included signing the Reorganization Act, which would allow the president to reorganize the executive branch in pursuit of efficiency; and an economic stimulus package that he signed into law 2 weeks after the 100 Days ended—suffered so much during the next few years that his reputation ended up being exactly the opposite of a leader who understood how to move the political needle.”
* * * “Breaking: The Handbasket is first to report catastrophic OMB funding memo” [The Handbasket]. “A copy of the memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) was provided to The Handbasket at approximately 5pm ET by a source whose anonymity is being protected for fear of professional retribution…. It is a truly unhinged document that sounds like it was written by the world’s most petty 4Chan poster—but then again, that’s who’s currently running our federal government. Here’s the first paragraph to get a feel for it (emphasis mine):
The American people elected Donald J. Trump to be President of the United States and gave him a mandate to increase the impact of every federal taxpayer dollar. In Fiscal Year 2024, of the nearly $10 trillion that the Federal Government spent, more than $3 trillion was Federal financial assistance, such as grants and loans. Career and political appointees in the Executive Branch have a duty to align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through Presidential priorities. Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending “wokeness” and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again. The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.
One of the more irritating things about MAGA and movement conservatives in general is that they seem to think that the Frankfurt School and people like Marcuse and his degenerate descendants like Robin DiAngelo or Ibrama Kendi are Marxists. Do you hear the DEI people talking about the working class owning and controlling the means of production? About democratic control of capital? No? On the bright side, “Know your enemy,” as Sun Tzu famously said.
“Top USAID career staff placed on immediate leave” [Politico]. “The Trump administration has ordered dozens of top career employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development to go on administrative leave, according to six people told of the decision…. The decision appears to affect nearly every career staffer who holds a top leadership role at the agency, at least in Washington — around 60 officials, the current and former officials said. The cuts have left many offices within the agency entirely devoid of senior non-political leadership. The entire cadre of leaders who run USAID’s bureau for global health, for example, was put on leave, according to two of the officials. ‘This is a huge morale hit,’ said a former senior Trump administration official who was also told of the move. ‘This is the leadership of the agency. This is like taking out all the generals. I don’t know what they hope to accomplish by it.'” • Insofar as they’re spooks, I’m not crying.
“Trump Administration Halts H.I.V. Drug Distribution in Poor Countries” [New York Times]. The deck: “PEPFAR’s computer systems also are being taken offline, a sign that the program may not return, as Republican critics had hoped.” More: “The Trump administration has instructed organizations in other countries to stop disbursing H.I.V. medications purchased with U.S. aid, even if the drugs have already been obtained and are sitting in local clinics. The directive is part of a broader freeze on foreign aid initiated last week. It includes the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the global health program started by George W. Bush that is credited with saving more than 25 million lives worldwide. The administration had already moved to stop PEPFAR funding from moving to clinics, hospitals and other organizations in low-income countries. Appointments are being canceled, and patients are being turned away from clinics, according to people with knowledge of the situation who feared retribution if they spoke publicly. Many people with H.I.V. are facing abrupt interruptions to their treatment. But most federal officials are also under strict orders not to communicate with external partners, leading to confusion and anxiety, according to several people with knowledge of the situation.”
“Trump Administration Payment Freeze May Delay Money For Critical Preschool Program” [HuffPo]. “The online system that distributes federal money to Head Start programs is warning providers of upcoming delays, apparently because of the Trump administration’s sweeping review of federal spending. A message about the possible delays appeared this morning, as Head Start providers were logging on to file for their next distributions. HuffPost obtained a screenshot from an official at an early childhood advocacy organization; an official at a second advocacy group then confirmed hearing it about it from providers. The message says that “Due to Executive Orders regarding potentially unallowable grant payments, PMS [the payment system] is taking additional measures to process payments. Reviews of applicable programs and payments will result in delays and/or rejections of payments.’ It’s not clear whether the message appeared for all providers nationwide, or just some.”
* * * “Trump Ousts Top Labor Board Leaders Who Backed Broader Worker Rights” [Bloomberg]. “Donald Trump is forcing out top leaders of the US labor board, ushering in a swift reboot of workplace law enforcement while testing the limits of presidential authority. Jennifer Abruzzo, the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, said she was fired via email late on Monday. Gwynne Wilcox, who was one of the labor board’s two Democratic members, said she was ousted, too. ‘As the first Black woman board member, I brought a unique perspective [good riddance, because what is needed is a universal perspective across the entire working class, which by definition is not unique] that I believe will be lost upon my unprecedented and illegal removal,’ Wilcox said in a statement. ‘I will be pursuing all legal avenues to challenge my removal, which violates long-standing Supreme Court precedent.'” Nice to see that the Democrats have some sort of SWAT Team to rush to her defense. Oh, wait…. More: “Firing Wilcox was less expected, particularly given that there were already enough vacant seats on the board for Trump to install a Republican majority in the coming months.” Remember when the Democrats butchered getting another Democrat on the Board? Why, that was weeks ago! Anyhow, firing Wilcox is illegal why–
“Trump fires US labor board member, hobbling agency amid legal battles” [Reuters]. “Gwynne Wilcox, who was appointed to the board by Democratic former President Joe Biden, in a statement called her firing late Monday illegal and said she would pursue “all legal avenues” to challenge it…. Once board members are confirmed, federal law allows them to be removed only for ‘neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.’… The five-member board already had two vacancies, so the removal of Wilcox leaves the agency without a quorum to issue decisions even in routine cases accusing companies or unions of violating federal labor law. Hundreds of cases are pending before the board, including ones involving Amazon.com, Tesla, Walmart, Apple, and dozens against Starbucks as it faces a nationwide union campaign.” • So, no basis for the firing, so far as I can tell. No doubt one can be invented!
“Confirmed: Unions Squandered the Biden Years” [Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work]. “n constant fear of being crushed by hostile Republican laws, unions have poured billions of dollars into, mostly, getting Democrats elected at the national level. And Joe Biden was as good as this game has ever gotten for them. We just lived through four years of the fruits of this approach. It is not theoretical. We can now evaluate it on its merits…. The real question is: Has achieving electoral political power translated into the growth of union power?… Today, we can definitively say the answer is ‘no.’… In 2024, union density in America fell to 9.9% of the work force. In 1983, union density was 20.1%, meaning that organized labor is now less than half as powerful as it was during the Reagan presidency…. In 2020, union density was 10.8%. That means that over the course of the most pro-union presidency in my lifetime, not only did union density not rise—it declined into single digits. We are losing…. [Organizing] is the responsibility of existing unions and the broader labor movement. That means that unions must spend every dollar they possibly can on new organizing. They have not done this. They did not do it, during the course of the Biden administration. They still are not doing it. As a result—by the standard of ‘increasing the power of organized labor in the work force’—the Biden administration was squandered by organized labor.” • Yep.
“Amy Walter: You’re Not Hearing A Unified Outcry Among Democrats About Deportations In Major Cities” [Amy Walter, RealClearPolitics]. “I think the most important thing for Democrats to realize, though, is they’re in the minority. When you’re out of power, you are out of power. And the reality is they now can really just simply react to what is happening based on what Republicans are doing. And their strategy going forward in many ways is going to be a reaction to what the Republican Party did. Four years from now or three years from now or a year from now when the presidential race really begins, that’s when the Democratic messaging really begins. Who do Democrats want to be? What do they want their message to be? We don’t have an opposition party leader in this country like they do in so many other countries. It’s really the nominee of the party who becomes that messenger. And that is going to be a long time from now.” • Another way of saying this is that right now there’s an enormous power vacuum in the Democrat Party. And (a) nobody is stepping in to fill it, perhaps because (b) they would have to bypass the tired and corrupt Democrat apparatus to do it, and in any case (c) the only way forward for the Democrat Party is to abandon or at least put in its place its current base in the PMC, which lacks and has lacked the power to win elections on any principled basis, let alone govern (as Stoller keeps complaining, corrrectly). Three tall orders!
“Democrats’ playbook for Trump 2.0: Tune out the noise and focus on economic issues” [NBC]. By all means focus on “economic issues” as opposed to class power for workers. You’re liberals! “Less than 48 hours after President Donald Trump was inaugurated, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries held a closed-door meeting with Democratic lawmakers to issue a warning and a clarion call. The new administration was going to “flood the zone,” and Democrats couldn’t afford to chase every single outrage — or nothing was going to sink in for the American people, Jeffries told them, according to a person in the room who requested anonymity to discuss the private meeting. Jeffries, D-N.Y., urged members to focus their message on the cost of living, along with border security and community safety. ‘The House Republican Contract Against America is an extreme plan that will not lower costs for everyday Americans,” Jeffries told reporters the next day, referring to the GOP agenda and spending cuts it is weighing. “It will make our country more expensive.”” • Holy Lord, “Contract Against America.” Jeffries keeps his lamp trimmed and burning for Gingrich. Clue stick: Donald Trump is not Newt Gingrich.
Syndemics
“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison
Covid Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).
Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!
Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (wastewater); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).
Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).
Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).
Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, KF, KidDoc, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, thump, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).
Stay safe out there!
Lambert here: Everything’s gone dark except for trusty New York State hospitalization (daily), Walgreen’s positivity (weekly), and the Cleveland Clinic? Readers, do you have any suggestions about alternatives at state level? Thank you! How I wish we had Biobot back….
| Wastewater | |
| This week[1] CDC January 13 | Last week[2] CDC (until next week): |
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| Variants [3] CDC January 18 | Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC January 11 |
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| Hospitalization | |
| ★ New York[5] New York State, data January 27: | National [6] CDC January 24: |
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| Positivity | |
| National[7] Walgreens January 27: | Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic January 18: |
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| Travelers Data | |
| Positivity[9] CDC December 30: | Variants[10] CDC December 30 |
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| Deaths | |
| Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11] CDC January 11: | Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12] CDC January 11: |
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LEGEND
1) ★ for charts new today; all others are not updated.
2) For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the chart thumbnail and “open image in new tab.”
NOTES
[1] (CDC) Seeing more red and more orange, but nothing new at major hubs.
[2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map.
[3] (CDC Variants) XEC takes over. That WHO label, “Ommicron,” has done a great job normalizing successive waves of infection.
[4] (ED) A little uptick.
[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Definitely jumped.
[6] (Hospitalization: CDC). Leveling out.
[7] (Walgreens) Leveling out.
[8] (Cleveland) Continued upward trend since, well, Thanksgiving.
[9] (Travelers: Positivity) Leveling out.
[10] (Travelers: Variants). Positivity is new, but variants have not yet been released.
[11] Deaths low, positivity leveling out.
[12] Deaths low, ED leveling out.
Stats Watch
There are no official statistics of interest today.
Manufacturing: “Boeing Shares Surge by 6% Despite Difficult Year Marked by Losses and Challenges” [CEO World]. “Boeing’s stock rose by 6% on Tuesday morning after the company reported a fourth-quarter net loss that aligned with its recently disclosed preliminary results. The plane maker closed out a challenging year marked by significant financial setbacks, safety investigations, and a workers’ strike… After the report’s release, Boeing shares initially showed little movement in premarket trading. However, they surged after the market opened, recently trading at $186.49. The stock had entered the day down nearly 15% over the past 12 months.”
Manufacturing: “What Investors Found to Like in Boeing’s Tea Leaves” [Wall Street Journal]. “Overall, however, it appears that markets are no longer paying close attention to the minutiae of Boeing’s financial metrics. This is understandable, since brokers themselves are all over the place: 2025 free cash flow estimates range from negative $7.3 billion to a much smaller $1.2 billion burn. No other large commercial-aerospace firm offers such a huge degree of uncertainty. Despite much anticipation, Boeing didn’t provide financial targets for 2025. So what is it that investors like? Executives did say that free cash flow should be positive in the second half of the year as the many parked jets accumulated during years of trouble are finished and shipped to customers. Also, MAX deliveries for January are shaping up to be in the high 30s. With supply-chain constraints easing, the closely watched target of producing 38 MAXs a month is looking achievable this year. Crucially, new CEO Kelly Ortberg has given himself room to maneuver by ending the strike, issuing $24 billion in equity—more than twice what was initially expected—and focusing on quality control both at Boeing and its supplier Spirit AeroSystems. ‘The work at Spirit during the strike has really paid off,’ he told analysts Tuesday. ‘That team has done a great job of improving the overall performance and quality of the fuselages.'” Hmm. Concluding: “Investors are correctly looking beyond short-term noise, and hoping that 2025 will be the year in which ‘Mr. Fix-it’ finally puts Boeing on the recovery path. So far, though, this remains a mostly unquantifiable assumption.” • Ortberg soothes the analysts.
Mr. Market: “Black Swan’s Taleb Says Nvidia Rout Is Hint of What’s Coming” [Bloomberg]. “”This is the beginning,” Taleb told Bloomberg News in an interview after the close of markets on Monday. ‘The beginning of an adjustment of people to reality. Because now they realize, now, it’s no longer flawless. You have a small little chip on the glass.’ The frenzied selling was triggered by sudden fears that US tech giants may not dominate the field of artificial intelligence as expected. The concerns follow the emergence of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup that has demonstrated a lower-cost approach to developing the technology. Investors interpreted that as a threat to both demand for and reliance on Nvidia’s advanced chips. Taleb said investors have until now been too focused on a single narrative: That the company’s shares would keep rising as it maintains its dominance of AI. Monday’s retreat was actually ‘very little’ considering the risks in the industry, he said.” And: “[Taleb] described technology firms as ‘gray swans,’ because investors underestimate the deviations in their prices that are possible in a day.” • Hmm.
The fact that, following the DeepSeek ascendancy, uranium stocks fell 11% (on the 'fears' that the vast expansion of data centres may be unnecessary, rendering nuclear power less attractive), reveals how deeply in the void of madness the stock market had fallen…
— Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis) January 28, 2025
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 44 Fear (previous close: 39 Neutral) [CNN]. One week ago: 41 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Jan 27 at 1:49:14 PM ET.
Gallery
Geometrical:
Wassily Kandinsky, Odessa Port pic.twitter.com/I3AYGey7uR
— Impressions (@impression_ists) January 28, 2025
Groves of Academe
We’re empowering the worst of the worst:
Don’t worry about pausing your tenure clock. The board eliminated tenure. And your program.
— Associate Deans (@ass_deans) January 28, 2025
Zeitgeist Watch
“Human Reproduction as Prisoner’s Dilemma” [Aporia]. “The core problem marriage exists to solve is that it takes almost twenty years and an enormous amount of work and resources to raise children. This makes human reproduction analogous to a prisoner’s dilemma. Both father and mother can choose to fully commit or pursue other options. In this context, marriage provides a framework for encouraging, legitimizing, and stabilizing commitment.” This gloom conclusion caught my eye: “The shift from a cooperate/cooperate marriage system, where both men and women made sacrifices to gain the security required for childbearing, to a cooperate/defect one, where men are expected to uphold their end of the bargain in exchange for nothing, has failed. This is the legacy of second wave feminism. Men are dropping out of work or burning things down, and both marriage and children are increasingly relics of the past. We are thereby moving towards a defect/defect system of the kind I described at the start. Men increasingly disdain the daily grind (bewildering public intellectuals, who fail to understand why men won’t respond to market signals). Birth rates continue to decline. And things slowly fall apart. In the event of war, few feel the urge to defend their country. We are in the early stages of the same sort of centuries-long collapse that many civilizations throughout history have suffered.” • Qualified that this is not inevitable (since nothing in history is, I would argue).
“Top AI Investor Says Goal Is to Crash Human Wages” [Futurism]. “In a recent tweet, [Marc Andreessen,] the American billionaire investor casually proclaimed that AI must ‘crash’ everyone’s wages before it can deliver us an economic utopia — one that’ll definitely happen, and certainly not create a permanent underclass of have-nots…. ‘A world in which human wages crash from AI — logically, necessarily — is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero,’ Andreessen wrote. ‘Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies.’ So fret not, lowly laborer: you may be destined for financial ruin, but paradise is right around the corner. Pinky promise.” • “Near,” as in “near zero,” is doing rather a lot of work. If I’ve got zero, “near zero” might as well be on the moon. Or on Mars.
“Starbucks staff given ‘panic button’ for laptop lurkers who won’t leave” [The Telegraph]. “Starbucks is to install panic buttons for staff as it cracks down on customers who sit in its shops or try to use its lavatories without buying anything. US workers have been given new guidelines on how to eject customers who stay in the stores for a ‘prolonged’ amount of time, attempt to use lavatories or fill up water bottles without making a purchase, as first reported by Business Insider. The company is also training workers in conflict de-escalation. According to reports, panic buttons have even been installed in a handful of stores in a trial of how best to keep them secure. Starbucks said earlier this month that it would no longer allow customers in the US to use its amenities for free, as part of an attempt by Brian Niccol, the new chief executive, to revive the business… The about-turn comes amid a wider pushback against customers who sit in coffee shops for hours at a time, taking advantage of free wi-fi but not spending more than the cost of one coffee in many cases. As well as preventing shops from making money by turning tables, so-called laptop lurkers have also been criticised for dampening the environment of bars and coffee shops and turning them into less social spaces.” • I seem to recall that the strong coffee-house culture of fin de siècle Vienna was due to a horrid housing situation. If one is looking for root causes. As far as reviving the business, the coffee is burnt and the food is dull. Fix that!
Oof. Dad.
I had to google the provinces to get this.
You … outdid yourself. This is indeed a terrible map. pic.twitter.com/FczhRQ0A1G
— Lefteris Karapetsas | Hiring for @rotkiapp (@LefterisJP) January 28, 2025
Contact information for plants: Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, to (a) find out how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal and (b) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi, lichen, and coral are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. From TH:
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A world in which human wages crash from AI — logically, necessarily — is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero,’ Andreessen wrote. ‘Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies.’
Wow.
Somebody correct me if I am wrong, but I seem to remember that this procedure — crushing wages => prices of good and services crash => everybody is wealthier — had been postulated a long time ago and was known as “Pigou’s effect”.
The idea is of course more than dubious, because nothing guarantees that the profit margin expected by firms will itself crash. If not, then there is no reason why final prices would crash.
Just checking: is Marc also taking a pay cut, or is it just the unworthy?
After all, his manifestos and briefings already basically feel like they were AI written…
My gut reaction was ‘You first, Comrade!’
Me too, except a bit more colorful at that last part.
I think you’re right. It runs against the grain of most everything I’ve ever seen about the impact of deflation on the interrelationship between investment decisions and falling demand.
“Interesting” to note that Investopedia misrepresents the Keynesian critique by herding it into the loanable funds corral:
Well, if AI turns out to be what he imagines, it would be indeed great, except for one problem: how the cornucopia produced by AI is distributed? There already is sort of cornucopia in the sense that there is no material reason for people being hungry and homeless, it’s the result of rich people hoarding resources so they can have other people on tight lash. So if step one is to crash wages, then step two is him relinquishing control over his billions and companies he owns, and letting AI operated factories to give the products for free, right? Right?
This is where open source is crucial, as it makes hoarding by oligarchs impossible.
> was known as “Pigou’s effect”.
Thank you! Andresseen is the slave of a defunct economist!
They would simply redirect the output of the industrial hive directly into the furnaces rather than have it affect price levels.
“Credit MAGA and Trump for understanding this”
It seems clear that this time around Trump sees winning as not only payback time but also legacy time. Probably his only real reason for wanting Greenland is so he can point to the map and say “look what I did”–nothing to do with strategy.
Whereas saving us from the Dems may be legacy enough if Taibbi’s notion of another Church Committee comes to pass. Arguably Biden’s legacy on the other hand is that Trump is once again president.
Trump is showing a much greater strategic vision this time around (it’s a low bar, but clearing that low bar also beats the Democrat/PMC opposition).
My thoughts on the DEI aspect of the MAGA-PMC civil war.
Everybody here is so caught up in the excitement of DEI programs being over they gloss over how the PMC is just moving onto different issues. Trump’s things are America First and also the healthcare tomfoolery with RFK Jr and Dr Oz. That is in response to people’s current issues: lack of jobs and poor healthcare.
Barbara Ehrenreich defines the PMC as “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.” Which is to say, they exist to placate and distract the working class.
In 2020 the BLM movement was in full swing. Partially because everybody was out of work with Covid so they had free time to protest. We were also coming off of #metoo i think. The PMC created DEI programs to coopt these movements by placating them with useless programs that did nothing.
Now people’s biggest issues are lack of jobs. So Trump is blaming foreign enemies for it instead of billionaires profiting off of exploited labor. And we’re currently in the midst of a syndemic – look at Lambert’s covid charts. Plus healthcare companies refusing coverage – look at Luigi Mangione. So the PMC is responding with healthcare wonkery to distract people from the true issues.
You cite We Have Never Been Woke in your article. I actually have my copy on a shelf in my dorm right now. Al-Gharbi points out that there’s another subset of the PMC that focused in the opposite of DEI stuff that’s all pro-america symbolism. That’s what Republicans are doing.
I will restate my point: the PMC exists to placate the working class. The working class is currently not that upset about race and gender things. So they have switched to focusing on employment and health related topics. It’s that simple.
I’m not so sure the PMC placates the working class.
Perhaps part of the PMC exists to assure the upper class that the working class is safely placated.
Not the same thing as “placating the working class”.
I don’t see the USA working class as much influenced by the PMC.
I already clocked Musk as a third generation Technocracy proto-fascist. I did not understand until now how completely the classic Technocracy map has infected Trump.
Senator Gary Peters of Michigan has said he isn’t running in 2026. He is a D. So that opens up his seat. Gretchen Whitmer has already said she will not run for the empty senate seat. But, Mayo Pete has said he is looking into it. He recently moved to Michgan. He could run for the Senate seat and maybe Whitmer is looking at the big prize. There is also a guy named Peters, who has shown interest for the Senate seat.
This is according to my Michigan PMC friends who love them some Big Gretch and especially Mayo Pete.
They can have them.
***
On another note, the WH press meetings are quite different.
Insurrectiongate babies will be leaders in Congress for decades much as the Watergate babies were.
> Insurrectiongate babies will be leaders in Congress for decades much as the Watergate babies were.
Well put, and correct.
RE: You’re Not Hearing A Unified Outcry Among Democrats About Deportations In Major Cities
Boo hoo. In addition to Lambert’s tall orders, I will just add that we could have had Bernie Sanders’ entirely reasonable immigration policies designed to protect the wages of US workers AND allow for new entrants.
Pretty tired of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over deportations, especially given the alacrity with which Martha’s Vineyard denizens rid themselves of busloads of immigrants a couple years ago. I had a conversation with a businessperson and a member of Congress recently and both decried what Trump might do, with the businessperson complaining about the potential loss of labor in their industry. I kept my mouth shut about that, and didn’t ask why this businessperson was knowingly employing people who could be deported, and yet didn’t expect to see any consequences for themself.
I told both that my guess is Trump will make a bunch of high profile deportations of a few thousand people at the beginning of his term for show, and then move on to something else – he knows the businesspeople do like that cheap labor, even the liberal ones who pretend to be more virtuous. I may be wrong, but that looks to be what’s happening here. I doubt it will continue for four years straight, but I guess we shall see…
And real estate business people super duper like Hispanic labor although I’m not sure they are paying them less than the native born. At least all the construction I see around here have Hispanic crews. Agriculture and things like meatpacking are probably where the illegals wind up.
Trump’s not good at follow through as we know. Could be that’s why he is in such a hurry.
The one thing no one ever seems to explain is that, when Trump was prez and had his policies to restrict “immigration” like remain in Mexico or “build the wall,” vegetables / food, gas, and new houses were a lot less expensive than they are now.
I’d imagine that a harvard-trained “economist” could ‘splain how “migrants” in $500 a day hotel rooms in nyc are necessary to keep the price of green peppers “affordable,” but I just don’t see it.
>I’d imagine that a harvard-trained “economist” could ‘splain how “migrants” in $500 a day hotel rooms in nyc are necessary to keep the price of green peppers “affordable,” but I just don’t see it.
They would probably tell you that in the city those “migrants” are needed to clean the hotel rooms that paying customers use and thereby keeping up the profit margins of the big hotel chains. Oh, and restaurants, construction sites and a hundred other businesses…
‘Trump-l’œil’
Hmmm.. I’m trying to see it from your perspective…
Is that what a comb-over is called these days?
I think some of whether it continues will be based on who he thinks he has to keep happy. Right now he isn’t worried about much of the business community. He is worried about the people who kept him relevant during his time in the wilderness. And they want the migrants gone and the gates closed.
I’ve been thinking maybe the deportations are a means to turn the exploitation of immigrant labor from small businesses doing it illegally, to big business doing it legally (as they do in Silicon Valley).
Love the map of Bhutan and the province names. Check out the province in the far east of the country. Trashy Gang (Trashigang).
I love languages. We’ve run some of these down before, but when you ask for a croissant and they bring you an army boot.
“I soon learned that everyone in Paris was like that. You would go into a bakery and be greeted by some vast sluglike creature with a look that told you you would never be friends. In halting French you would ask for a small loaf of bread. The woman would give you a long, cold stare and then put a dead beaver on the counter. “No, no,” you would say, hands aflutter, “not a dead beaver. A loaf of bread.” The sluglike creature would stare at you in patent disbelief, then turn to the other customers and address them in French at much too high a speed for you to follow, but the drift of which clearly was that this person here, this American tourist, had come in and asked for a dead beaver and she had given him a dead beaver and now he was saying that he didn’t want a dead beaver at all, he wanted a loaf of bread. The other customers would look at you as if you had just tried to fart in their handbags, and you would have no choice but to slink away and console yourself with the thought that in another four days you would be in Brussels and probably able to eat again.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There
Would the development of DeepSeek be a confirmation of the the observation that “…it turns out that if you want someone to administer capitalism well, you could do a lot worse than a Communist Party.”?
From Numb in India, part 7: Land of gloop previously linked at NC.
Or
https://indi.ca/how-communism-is-obviously-outcompeting-capitalism/
Innocent Ice cream truck mistaken for ICE police vehicle in Vegas:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/public-safety-and-emergencies/general/las-vegas-ice-cream-truck-mistaken-for-ice-vehicle-as-deportation-raids-unfold/ar-AA1y1dfY?ocid=BingNewsSerp
ICE cream man
Sung to the tune of, “Ice Cream Man” by Van Halen
Melody
Dedicated to one little lady ..
Well now, wintertime in Vegas, babe, need something to keep you cool
Ah now, expulsion time’s here, babe, stay low and keep your cool
Better look out, now, though; crackdown’s comin’ for you (tell you what it is)
I’m your ICE cream man, I’ll Terry stop ya when I’m passing by, oh my my
I’m your ICE cream man, I’ll Terry stop ya when I’m passing by
Say now none of my agents are guaranteed to satisfy (the bill of rights, baby!)
Hold on …
I got no magistratin’, warrantless arrests, all flavors of patdowns, too
I’m your ICE cream man, I’ll Terry stop ya when I’m passin’ by
See now none of my flavors are guaranteed to satisfy … due process … hold on one more
Say I’m usually passin’ by just ’round eleven o-clock
I’m usually passin’ by just round eleven o-clock
And if you let me apprehend you, your barrio will be my regular stop …
Allright boys, I’ve got no magistratin’, warrantless arrests, all flavors of pat downs, too
I’m your ICE cream man, I’ll Terry stop ya when I’m passin’ by
They say none of my flavors are guaranteed to satisfy due process under the 4th amendment
I’m your ICE cream man, I’ll stop ya when I’m passin’ by 2x
They say all my flavors of due process aren’t guaranteed to satisfy …
[Edward VH]
I’m your ICE cream man, I’ll Terry stop ya when I’m passin’ by 2x
They say none of my flavors of due process are guaranteed to satisfy
I’m your ICE cream man
I’m your ICE cream man
B-b-b-b-b-b-baby oh my my my
All my flavors of due process aren’t guarantee-ee-ee-ee-ee-eed to satisfy
The importance of the emergence of DeepSeek as an AI tool that is comparable to any American AI tool, is that the accomplishment reflects the effectiveness of Chinese development through a period of sustained efforts by America to undermine or prevent Chinese development. Just as the Obama presidency marked a formal foreign policy design to contain China, as the Wolf Amendment of April 2011 shows, with the effort to undermine a Chinese space program, so Chinese advancement has been fought by America ever since.
However, China indeed has an advanced space program now that is strengthening continually and China has comparable programs even through AI.
The question is how the Chinese advance is being accomplished. The answer is academic research and development.
Far superior to any well-known US AI tool:
Open source means that anyone who wants it has the code, for free. Anyone who wants to modify it is free to do so. Anyone who wants to delete any code that might potentially let China, the US, or your favorite techbro track them can easily do so. Anyone who wants to can train and run it on their own servers, for free. The servers do not need to be connected to the internet. You can run it on an air-gapped Raspberry Pi for $100, if you want to.
Unlike every commercially available US AI engine, everyone is free to deploy their own version, mix it, match it, trade it with their friends. Corporations and governments have no ability to monitor what you choose to do with DeepSeek, unless you allow them to. This is the Linux, Wikipedia, and archive.org of AI.
Would it be fair to say that USAI efforts are more akin to a DeepSeep?
DeepSleep, perhaps.
Buck suck.
“This is the Linux, Wikipedia, and archive.org of AI.”
Good points, but with regard to this last sentence, one of these things is not like the others in my opinion.
Well, it is a model. You can download it and reinforce train it if you wish, but you have to use their research paper to train a new foundation model from scratch if you don’t like whatever China-isms might be included in their foundation model.
Still, they’ve provided I think all the information you need to follow their approach for a foundation model, if you have sucked up the Internet as they probably did, for use as a training set, prior to many places getting wise to this and putting up terms of service or technical fixes to prevent such content theft.
The approach is just part of it; getting the world’s data is the other part.
Not “Far superior to any well-known US AI tool” if you refer to benchmarks. “Comparable” is more like it.
“You can run it on an air-gapped Raspberry Pi for $100, if you want to.” Sure, if you want to run the 1.5b version of the model. The full version (which is what gets you to “comparable”) is 671b. Not going to run that on your Pi box. The recommended front end (SGLang) suggests using 8 NVidia H200 GPU to run the full FP8 model.
“Anyone who wants to modify it is free to do so”. No, the code is licensed under MIT. The model, and any derivative model from it, is licensed under DeepSeek’s own license, which reads a lot like GPL but is not identical.
> DeepSeek
Note the curious offrhyme to “Deep Six.” Some sort of subtle Chinese joke?
If India was doing it, it would, of course be called….DeepSikh.
I thought DeepSeek come from Deep Thought, which probably came from Deep Throat.
Hopefully China will do the same for Google Search. Yandex is already better and China must have good indexing to run the Great Internet Wall .Many people are already trying to use DeepSeek as a search engine but open source doesn’t mean collaborative in all cases.
I don’t think we can be so quick and definitive in attributing DeepSeek’s success to Chinese academic research and development prowess, at least until we’ve evaluated IP theft as another hypothesis.
. . . of course if the origin story of US LLM’s is IP theft for training data, Open Source of the model after it was expropriated could be a sort of karmic circle.
Think what it means that the Nature.com Index of high-quality science research publishing for the latest 12 months shows 4 of the top 5 publishing institutions are Chinese, 8 of the top 10 institutions are Chinese, and 11 of the top 15.
Harvard is at number 2;
German institutions are at numbers 7 and 14;
A French institution is number 11.
The rest are Chinese; over and over Chinese.
It’s about to get much worse. Now that Trump is requiring that all public and academic research be subject to MAGA комиссáр approval, emptying Federal and university labs, and shutting down Federal data collection and public access that might be inconvenient, expect basic research in the US to collapse.
I’m starting to wonder if Trump is actually the Manchurian Candidate. He’s the driving force accelerating global Chinese technical, economic, and political hegemony.
If you haven’t noticed already – basic research in the USA collapsed long ago. We have three huge problems going on among many others.
1) The sheer amount of just absolutely meaningless drivel, funded by NIH and so many others, has overwhelmed the system beyond belief.
2) The complete takeover of the science and medical publishing industry by corporations that has allowed agenda-based publication and all kinds of conditions on publication; again rendering the vast majority of published work worthless.
3) The recent issues or repeated and overwhelming evidence of complete fraud – in many different universities and researchers, whom had previously been held in very high regard. Almost all of this is funded by the NIH.
Sorry, the “Trump cleaning house” screamers have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. What we have now is a vast corrupt system that is just robbing the national treasury blind. They are just mad the gravy train is ending. These types of convulsions have happened repeatedly in medicine. The last one being the Flexner situation in the 1920s. There were all kinds of doomsayers back then today. But after the cleanup, medicine entered its golden age. It is profoundly difficult for those trying to do good work and the right thing to do their job when the entire system is so full of corruption and malefactors.
I have been begging my colleagues for decades to clean it up. The gravy train was too much for them to change anything. I also kept telling them if they refused to clean it up, someone was going to do it for them. And they were not going to like it one bit. The day of judgement has arrived. If anyone had told me ten years ago it would be a GOP President I would have laughed out loud, but here we are.
So true, the neoliberal “publish or perish” BS has driven a huge amount of publishing drivel just so academics can meet some irrelevant performance metric instituted by some no-nothing administrator. Gone are the days when a researcher would spend years publishing nothing as they worked on the important questions and spent the time necessary for important answers.
Then in addition the careerists who chase the government grants and care little for academic ethics.
This is one of several older articles in Nature pointing out a real problem with publish or perish: a rush to publish findings where up to 70% of the test results fail the reproducibility criteria.
From 2016:
i,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility
https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a
And a 2015 Nature article:
Over half of psychology studies fail reproducibility test
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18248
Also, the publish or perish demand does cause many researchers to submit their older published results repackaged as a new insight on a single part of the older publication. Publication acceptance is reasonably assured using this method, but new ground in the field is not broken, ground that might take years of research to show meaningful results. Publish or perish works sort of like a company focusing only on its quarterly profits, imo.
Construction Physics talks about how other basic research has declined.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-influence-of-bell-labs
Yes, what IM Doc says. Times three. This has been covered here regularly for the last few years. Earlier today I spoke to medical students who are exploring academic medicine as tutors and preceptors of medical students in their future. Some will do research. The topic was the Central Dogma of Alzheimer’s disease (Amyloid Cascade Hypothesis) and how it has led us down one long blind alley for about 100 years. So far, anyway.
A very influential paper on a soluble amyloid protein that was shown to be an early marker for Alzheimer’s was finally retracted last year, 18 years after publication in the world’s leading scientific journal. Two of the authors disagreed with the decision of their colleagues. Images in the paper had been manipulated to show something that probably isn’t true. The original data are lost or not available or not in condition to answer the questions. A follow-up paper, published in 2013 and corrected in 2022, further supported this theory. The first author (the scientist who did most of the work) on both papers is solely responsible for scientific misconduct in the retracted paper, based on the available evidence. He did not assent to the retraction, which happened nevertheless. The one author of the paper who would not respond to editors’ queries according to the retraction notice is a Program Officer at NIH, based on my reading. Nevertheless, according the the NIH Reporter database, the first author has two NIH grants that add up to $1.3M in total costs to the NIH budget. Both are on neurodegenerative diseases. I’m too lazy to look the institution’s “overhead rate,” but based on very long experience the institution takes about $600,000 off the top of that total. That could explain why this scientist still has a job? Just asking.
This is not a one-off thing. These Augean Stables desperately need a redirected river. And like IM Doc, I am surprised how this came about. But not that it might be happening.
>>>The original data are lost or not available or not in condition to answer the questions
That is just flaky as heck.
But, but… I’m guessing the pretty damn sane concern is MOTIVATION & impact being ignored by a media by, for, about & solely from a wealthy, ofay, INSURED perspective? The rest of us will “fall by the wayside” as only repercussions which affect upscale demographics are of any interest? “Science” to poor folks is largely libertarian think-tank academic sophistry & blatant PhARMA boondoggle hasbara & K Street social-network advocacy solutions firm gaslighting, between PR & marketing churls (probably, inbred NEPO interns) using AI to recycle old campaigns. It’s BEEN about everything BUT “the science,” for so damn long. But Trump’s only interest is “getting his little taste,” like Emilio Barzini; then, shorting those ruined by the churn?
Hello, lovely commentariat. Hoping you’ll find this interesting; it’s a piece on the Greenland talk from Peter Theil’s pet publication, Palladium, a journal of “governance futurism”. I’m using some of the information and thinking in it to inform a piece on the sort of veins of international capital, sea lanes and pipelines and railway lines, their ownership, and how they drive events, for my substack. Wishing all an easy afternoon.
«Ryan McEntush is an investing partner at Andreessen Horowitz.»
So is this Andreessen’s AI-Greenland connection?
https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/generate/all/global/all
The Nature Index
1 October 2023 – 30 September 2024 *
Rank Institution ( Count) ( Share)
1 Chinese Academy of Sciences ( 8881) ( 2633)
2 Harvard University ( 3830) ( 1144)
3 University of Science and Technology of China ( 2490) ( 782)
4 Zhejiang University ( 1994) ( 782)
5 Peking University ( 2872) ( 764)
6 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences ( 3694) ( 737)
7 Max Planck Society ( 2763) ( 726)
8 Tsinghua University ( 2357) ( 709)
9 Nanjing University ( 1761) ( 700)
10 Shanghai Jiao Tong University ( 1865) ( 681)
11 French National Centre for Scientific Research ( 4567) ( 620)
12 Sun Yat-sen University ( 1544) ( 616)
13 Fudan University ( 1673) ( 610)
14 Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres ( 2913) ( 573)
15 Sichuan University ( 1015) ( 511)
* Tables highlight the most prolific institutions and countries in high-quality research publishing for the year
Seems like the natural order of things is re-asserting itself, after a few centuries.
That said, am I too assume that replication crisis is confined to science as practiced in the West? I doubt it.
From the little I know the Chinese have the same problem with honest research as the West and for similar reasons: publish or perish. There are great incentives including pressure from the leadership to get something, anything, and no real consequences for being dishonest. So, if you want that promotion, be it in China or the West, you best cheat.
The only difference between the two is that the Chinese government also pushes for more papers because it is good optics or PR for China and the central party and not just the funding, employment, or promotions for everyone else.
Correct all around. The Chinese have cracked down on scientists who publish in neo-predatory open-access journals in more than a few cases, however.
Yes, the evidence is all there in the Harvard Business Review:
https://hbr.org/2014/03/why-china-cant-innovate
March, 2014
Why China Can’t Innovate
By Regina M. Abrami, William C. Kirby and F. Warren McFarlan
The Chinese can’t innovate, so how could they replicate? Which is why the Chinese were repeatedly missing the light side, and finally needed to say they landed on the dark side of the Moon where it is too dark for anyone to check.
The barrage of holocaustiana let loose on the internet the past few days strikes me as a last gasp to shame or if you’d prefer guilt the world.
It’s along the lines of finding that now 99 year old German who was tangentially involved in a small capacity @ Auschwitz and bring them to justice, or Poland deciding rather all of the sudden that Germany must pay trillions for war damages, what if nobody is still alive to blame in a decade!
The fourth turning plays in big time of course, with ramming their holocaust down our throats, while holocausting Palestinians, you can have it both ways!
Abba Eban said there’s “no business like Shoah business” which is both a crack he couldn’t get away with today and a hint that Israel’s founders were quite aware of what you are talking about. From what I understand–being a tyke at the time–many Zionists didn’t want to talk about the Holocaust at first and may have even seen Jewish victimization as shameful. Militancy was seen as the antidote. Perhaps when that militancy started to overwhelm the region they felt the need for another antidote. In any case, while it’s undoubtedly wrong to downplay the Holocaust it’s also wrong to downplay all the other holocausts. Consistency matters. That war killed tens of millions, not just six.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
This was true of the Federalist Society judicial appointees in Trump’s first term, as well. Many of these judges will be on the bench 40 years after Trump’s second term ends.
If Trump pulls his second term off, he’ll have cemented direction and terms of our politics for the next generation. Meanwhile, Biden wasn’t even president for his term, and liberal Democrats only have grift and personal enrichment to show for it all.
It’s almost like one party wants to Govern, and the other does not. (Whether either can actually Govern well, is another story, of course, to say nothing of the morals of policies applied.)
I didn’t mention it before, but I really like the “In Case You Might Miss…” subheader– this formatting is freakin awesome and much appreciated! Thank you.
A request (sorry!): Covid deaths; in context of other leading causes of death, where does it stand?
Chart?
I have an interest in mortality statistics, so if it is the US you are interested in, CDC has the numbers for 2023. There might be more recent numbers, but these were the one I found. 2024 may still be collated.
Covid at position 10, after liver diseases at position 10 and ahead of suicide at position 11. About 50 thousand dead. Down from 186 thousand and position 4 in 2022. In turn down from 417 thousand and spot 3 in 2021.
For context, heart diseases and cancer are in the lead with six to seven hundred thousand a year (if you survive to old age, that is typically what kills you). Accidents seems to most years hold spot number 3 at a bit over 200 thousand, but was temporarily pushed down to spot 4 by Covid in 2021 (and presumably 2020 but I didn’t find those numbers in a quick search).
Though the US has a higher murder rate then Europe, and it increased in 2020 to about 24 thousand, murders are in comparision about half of suicides and a tenth of accidents a year.
Here are a bunch of birdsongs, including a cassowary and a kiwi. Very interesting that the two flightless birds that are the most like dinosaurs sound very reptilian! I’d never heard their calls before.
Also, I would like a pet kookaburra.
I’m not sure your neighbors would, unless they’re miles away.
On funding freezes, in my circle this is already causing real hardship today.
Friend who just started as a reading tutor with head start was told the program is frozen. She also may not get paid for last two weeks. She’s living paycheck to paycheck and this was the job that closed the gap.
Friend who was schedule to get a mammogram can’t complete paperwork because Medicaid portal is down. I read on CNBC this will be back “shortly”. The stress and anxiety this causes should not be dismissed.
Another friend who is on a social security disability and requires IV nutrition twice a week is terrified from what they hear from their provider about what services might be frozen. Normally I would say don’t worry they won’t cut services that will hurt people, but I don’t believe that anymore.
Not sure what path we’re on but the idea of real programs, the kind the average American uses, being suspended for long period of time is giving me COVID lockdown vibes in terms of societal disruption.
The real-harms to most of us are certainly accelerating: I often have heard of this expressed in Trump vs. Biden or Democrat vs. Republican terms, but rarely expressed as a systematic crisis: most people are still watching
the birdeethe picture-show without looking at the overall production itself.Funding for “social programs” (Socialist!!!) and “entitlements” have been getting cut, cut, and more cut since this Gen X has been alive: this is just another round.
I’ve been a step or two behind on the ladder of the benefits and opportunities of the American experiment my whole life, being gaslighted by boomers and silents who were living in the past with expired worldview, who are/were living living-dead lives as though trapped in amber, like victims of a Pompei; delusional, denying, suffocating on the ashes of the American Dream.
I’m really sad and sorry for the hurt that your friends are now experiencing, but I gotta ask, if you’re only noticing this now, where have you been?
This goes way beyond that. It is the early stages of a revolution to see how quickly the Executive can consolidate power and how many things in the federal government can be smashed or broken so they can’t be put back together again.
The system wasn’t designed for this type of President to be lawfully elected or for Congress to relinquish its role & responsibilities to him.
The people behind Trump are counting on most Americans to be paralyzed and apathetic while focusing on their own immediate family & friends. The right-wing news ecosystem won’t mention it or its effects. A lot of MAGA supporters will have to find out first-hand.
So far, it’s worked because the events have been so chaotic & numerous that people cannot see the larger picture.
I warned folks back in the Obamacare early days that Medicaid expansion would end with a nasty rug-pull for the States in the future.
All that carrot of “90% federal funding” was always contingent on future Congresses and administrations playing ball. No Congress can bind a future one to fund anything. It always has to go through the appropriations process.
Looks like the day of reckoning has arrived. Pay up, States!
States are in no position to assume Medicaid funding (or even the bulk of it), but the more significant issue is with institutionalized elderly. In every state, Medicaid is the biggest funder of long-term institutionalized elderly services (e.g., skilled nursing facilities). Many of these facilities, especially the ones that Medicaid recipients dominate, have low margins, little/no cash reserves, and no access to capital markets.
What would governors, including GOP governors, do if their state’s post-acute system collapses? In the United States, there is no alternative infrastructure or plan to accommodate it, and very few people have private long-term care health insurance, let alone the retirement savings to pay for it.
Describing the Biden years as the most “Union Friendly” administration of his lifetime…would someone please give him a better quality of airplane glue?
In speaking with others, from North to South and East to West, this season all are talking about how windy it has been.
Are there charts out there that could confirm or refute this perception, because if there are, I’m not finding them.
I’m think that this could be important, so I’d appreciate the help.
I was able to find historic data for my location by searching historic wind speeds. I also found a 2022 article that claims wind speeds in Europe slowed from 1978 – 2010 but increased slightly since then. I think wind speeds should theoretically slow down as temperature differentials between latitudes reduces since they are driven by the pole-equator difference.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/global-stilling-is-climate-change-slowing-the-worlds-wind
I’m not aware of any charts but the National Weather Service does provide daily climate summaries for the U.S.
For the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, daily summary data can be found by selecting the desired month/year in the “Daily Weather Observations for the Twin Cities” box.
A quick check indicates that this is the windiest January (by only 0.1 mph, though — average 10.3 MPH and bound to go up with today’s gusty conditions) for Minneapolis/St. Paul this century.
About Marcuse, et al. It is easy to overestimate many GOP responses by ascribing some coherent approach.
Voters hear Marcuse, to the extent they have ever heard of him, and group with lefty, progressive, commie and the like as on the fringe and all therefore bad. They don’t make much distinction or dwell on any differences, let alone consider nuances. There is a guilt by association that suffices to put all in one bucket. Polarization numbs.
Overwhelmed? Lack of interest in further research? Time preference? Pick a reason as any would do to start.
The funding shutdown has all of the landlords who take housing vouchers really concerned here in Chicago.
I just got an “urgent” email asking everybody to call their congressman to stop this.
What it means is that organizations who administer the vouchers won’t get the rental payments Feb. 1st. They won’t have any money to forward to the landlords. Some of the administrators are also landlords and they won’t get paid. This generally means that a lot of landlords and administrators won’t be able to pay their mortgages let alone their employees. That means chaos come Feb 1.
While I am not directly involved I feel sorry for all those who count on this program.
The collateral damage around the federal funding “pauses” looks to be vast. For instance grants. The bottom line is grants both create jobs and fund salaries as well as support university budgets. I’m hearing that SNAP benefits are on “pause”. Really? That’s intentionally brutal. Has to be.
I reckon the whole thing will go strong sideways, less there’s a plan for alternative support. There’s plenty of universities and people depend on SNAP in flyover country. Trump needs to be careful not to break MAGA.
I see this as the MAGA version of Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture.
That’s a reasonable take. I see a judge has put a temporary “hold up a minute” on the freeze.
Interesting times.
So, for those who actively and continue to resist, Trump is going to kill, deport, or send a large number of people to various labor and prison camps?
The thing about Trump is that there is no way to predict what he is going to do, or what he is serious about and what is bravado. One possible interpretation of this executive order is that they freeze everything, and figure out which programs cause people to complain the most, and then they can cut the programs that don’t result in outrage. But I may be giving him too much credit. . .
I hope Trump will prove to be for the Democrats what Deep Seek has just been to Sam Altman, Nvidia, and others: a wake up call to compete.
Wassily Kandinsky, Odessa Port
I was not aware of Kandinsky’s realistic work. That is one heck of a beautiful work of art with a solid composition and terrific choice of color. It’s fun to compare this with images on a search page: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wassily+kandinsky+paintings&t=osx&iax=images&ia=images
Thank you for this link. I wasn’t aware of this type of his work either. There seem to be three paintings of Odessa Port, but the reflection of the sky on the water in one almost produces vertigo in me. Transports and makes me soar.
“Human Reproduction as Prisoner’s Dilemma”
I find it difficult figuring out how to respond to articles like this one. If a person is religious in a traditional Western sense, then you can get behind virginity until marriage, restrictions on divorce, social punishment for fornication, adultery etc. all the factors you need to enforce the cooperate/cooperate norm that the author feels is beneficial. On the other hand, what secular person is willing to get behind them-especially for themselves? Further, the religious person doesn’t support enforcement of these moral norms because of some long-term civilizational benefit after they die, they do it because God will punish them if they don’t. Maybe some form of secular nationalism could confer some kind of quasi-religious mysticism for the project without fairy tales (the nation as an on-going family), but that seems like thin gruel, especially given the genetic distance between strangers in even homogenous nations. Again, are the secular persons going to show up for this tent show? I have my doubts. You would need some really talented bards at the very least to spin the epic.
I fear the best you can get to is some form of the Platonic big lie to perpetuate beneficial social customs, and yes, perhaps the Catholic Church is the best example, but where does that leave us? Take your medicine, its false but its good for you? Not very Faustian for certain.
What else? Caesarism? Augustus put in a bunch of socially conservative marriage laws to reform Rome on account of similar problems to those expressed by the author, while completely ignoring them for his own person. Have we become such children that we need either Sky Daddy or Caesar to compel us to make the right choices? And why not embrace the decline? Civilizations rise, civilizations fall, and the decline is usually the most fun, until it isn’t and hopefully we will be dead by then.
Let’s embrace the decline!
There’s too much childbearing and child rearing going on. The current mess we find ourselves in is down to 8 Billion human lives in simultaneous being. Unfortunately, neoliberal capitalism demands ever cheaper labor and simply draws on migrants to fill the gaps in societies that have figured this out.
We are all prisoners.
Apparently Facebook has started blocking any posts about Linux or related subjects:
Facebook removing Linux discussions as security threats
https://boingboing.net/2025/01/27/facebook-marking-linux-discussion-as-security-threats.html
Which is interesting because Facebook uses Linux, a lot of Linux:
Facebook and the kernel
https://lwn.net/Articles/591780/
But in Facebook’s defense, I certainly consider FB to be malware so I guess there is a bit of logic to their actions. It keeps showing up on smartphones even after being deleted:
Facebook keeps reinstalling itself on my phone. How can I stop this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidQuestions/comments/r7x897/facebook_keeps_reinstalling_itself_on_my_phone/
My U.S. Dept of Labor friend got a “buyout letter” today. They aren’t only going after “DEI” hires but age too. My friend is a white male with a senior role in IT auditing but is 47. They targeted a few other of his older co-workers, too.
No one with half a brain or common sense will accept the RIF. It’s a scam, and they aren’t offering anything. Basically, let DOGE or what Trump group fire you and get more in the process. There is already talk of a class action lawsuit against the federal government for doing this, and I’m sure powerful labor attorney law firms are chomping at the bit.
He’s an older dad, and what is massively screwed up is that the return-to-work policy has created a childcare crisis in the greater DC area. They have called 50+ daycare centers within a 20-30 minute drive. No one has an opening, and almost everyone has a 200+ child waiting list. It’s a clusterf@%#.
Ironically, he was already going three days a week and staying home on Friday. His situation is so dire that he is talking to his 75-year-old parents about moving from Florida to take care of their youngest child (3 years old).
He is a diehard Republican and has no illusions about what he was getting when he voted for Trump again. Still, this entire process is going to turn a lot of the DC establishment against Trump even more, and if he thinks the federal government employees were hostile to him before, wait. When you make it untenable for people and screw with their families & livelihood to the point of forcing them to make dire choices, they aren’t going to like the result.
Vought said during his Senate confirmation that “he wanted people to feel the pain.” He had better be careful that he didn’t get his wish.
S
If you have a copy of the letter, and you trust me to redacr it suitably, could you send it to me? Thanks