…it’s going to be a long stretch…& I’m not happy about how much of it is going have me sounding like “that guy”…so…I’m not sure how exactly…but I don’t think I can stick to just this lane today

What’s at stake is beyond just human rights. As Beijing dismantles Hong Kong’s freedoms, it is also dismantling the rule of law — the very foundation upon which fair and transparent business depends. The city’s autonomy has historically been a buffer against China’s worst impulses. But now, the city is a haven for circumventing U.S. sanctions against bad actors, including Russia, Iran and North Korea. Global companies operating in Hong Kong can no longer trust that contracts will be honored or disputes adjudicated fairly.

Trump should also realize that Hong Kong is central to his own economic agenda. Trump has often touted tariffs as a way to force China into fairer trade practices. Yet tariffs alone won’t achieve that goal if Hong Kong falls completely under Beijing’s thumb. If Hong Kong is lost, so, too, is a key leverage point. Trump doesn’t have to become a human rights crusader overnight, but he should recognize that standing up for Hong Kong’s freedoms aligns with his own priorities: protecting American businesses, countering China’s authoritarian ambitions, and securing a fairer trading relationship.

Trump once said that “the future does not belong to globalists.” Perhaps he was right. But the future also doesn’t belong to those who ignore the implications when autocrats crush the hopes of millions. The fate of Hong Kong is a test — not just for Xi, but for Trump himself.

China’s crackdown on Hong Kong is a test for Trump [WaPo]

…but…I dunno…jumping these tracks might not be pretty

Escalation might be a hard concept to grasp in a savage struggle that has led to an estimated 1 million casualties. Russian President Vladimir Putin began raising the stakes this fall when he invited thousands of North Korean troops to augment his thinly stretched and decimated military. Ukraine responded with strikes inside Russian territory using British and American long-range missiles, albeit only after the Biden administration finally lifted its restriction on the use of such weaponry. The Russians have responded by firing a new medium-range, hypersonic ballistic missile — thankfully not armed with the nuclear warheads such missiles are capable of carrying — at a Ukrainian weapons factory in Dnipro. President Joe Biden has agreed to provide Ukraine with antipersonnel land mines, weapons with a record of causing civilian casualties, but also perhaps the only things that can help Ukraine hold its lines against Russian and North Korean infantry assaults.
[…]
Ukraine’s European backers have shown signs of war-weariness and might be more amenable to a settlement. But the danger for Ukraine is that in his interest to strike a quick deal, Mr. Trump might settle for a bad one. A truce that ratifies Ukraine’s de facto dismemberment and leaves Ukrainians feeling disillusioned and betrayed by their Western backers would reward Mr. Putin’s aggression and encourage him to commit more of it.

Not only Mr. Putin. An abandonment of Ukraine — or a deal that leaves Ukraine untenably territorially diminished — would signal to dictators around the world that Western resolve comes with an expiration date. Imagine how Chinese President Xi Jinping would take a Western retreat from Ukraine as he contemplates taking Taiwan or the atolls and shoals in the oil-rich South China Sea. It’s not too soon to wonder — and worry — whether North Korea’s Kim Jong Un regards his army’s mission against Ukraine as preparation for a military move of his own on the Korean Peninsula.
[…]
A Ukraine left with a chunk of its eastern territory under Russian occupation is tantamount to a defeat — for Ukraine and for the West. During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump made much of the Biden administration’s precipitous and ill-planned withdrawal from Afghanistan, which Mr. Trump said signaled to the world American weakness. An abandonment of Ukraine, after nearly three years of what has been a unified American and European front, would send the same sort of signal. And if it came as a result of Mr. Trump’s negotiated deal, the onus would be on him. He won’t have Mr. Biden to blame anymore.

Trump wants to make a deal in Ukraine war. A bad deal is worse than none. [WaPo]

…tell me again about how the magic tariff fairy is gonna make it all better

China, the world’s renewable-energy leader and its biggest emitter of planet-warming greenhouse gases, is presenting itself as fully committed to the fight against climate change.

“Regardless of how the international situation or other countries’ policies change, China’s resolve and actions to actively address climate change will not waver,” Chinese Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang told delegates in the first week of talks, which overran their official closing time Friday

They’re here to finance climate action. But COP29 is more about bickering [NBC]

…uh huh…uh huh

Beijing sent nearly 1,000 delegates to Baku, and has been highlighting its global support of renewable energy: Ding said China had provided or mobilized $24.5 billion in climate finance for developing countries since 2016, putting it on par with countries such as Britain.

China’s dominance in green technologies is also evident: Chinese electric-vehicle giant BYD supplied a fleet of 160 battery-powered buses to transport journalists and negotiators to and from the summit venue, while VIPs are chauffeured in black sports-utility vehicles from Nio, a Chinese maker of luxury EVs.

…sure…I’ve seen a BYD car or two…they compare pretty favorably to those teslas you hear all that panel gap talk about, too…if you’re hunting for a metaphor

With Trump promising to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, which underpins the international negotiations, much of the world is hoping that China will take on more responsibility in global efforts to curb planetary warning.
[…]
China isn’t just positioning itself to exploit a vacuum in climate leadership as Trump returns to power. From the United Nations to global economic governance to nuclear policy, China is presenting itself as a stable and reliable international leader in a second Trump era.

“During the first Trump administration, the rest of the world thought that they could manage through four years of Trump, and it would be ephemeral,” said Evan Medeiros, a China expert at Georgetown University and a former national security official in the Obama administration. “A second Trump administration suggests to many countries that perhaps the orientation of the United States has changed, and the Chinese can leverage that.”

…can…&…errr…have?

As Trump retreated from the United Nations in his first term — announcing plans to pull out of the World Health Organization, for example — China made generous new funding pledges. It also stepped up efforts to place Chinese officials in leading U.N. roles: The agencies responsible for food and agriculture, telecommunications, industrial development and civil aviation have all been led by Chinese directors in recent years.

China’s activities at the United Nations are aimed at making “a point that they are here to lead to the reform of the global governance system to help it reflect what they see as a multipolar world today,” said Courtney Fung, an expert on China’s relationship with the United Nations at Macquarie University in Australia.

A particular target of China’s overtures has been the developing world, sometimes called the Global South, where economic assistance and political support usually go hand in hand.

Beijing has become the go-to partner for developing countries looking to build roads or airports, as the country has showered states in Africa and Latin America with billions in funding through Xi’s infrastructure development program, the Belt and Road Initiative.

…&…it plays

“It’s in their geostrategic interests to step up and fill the vacuum that the U.S. is leaving,” said Mohamed Adow, founding director of Power Shift Africa, a nongovernmental climate organization based in Nairobi. “It will help protect their people from the impacts of climate change and certainly help it curry favor with the rest of the world.”

Beijing also has an economic interest in trying to plug that gap. Chinese companies have signed a string of deals with Azerbaijan on the sidelines of talks, agreeing to build solar farms, energy-storage facilities and a BYD factory that will assemble 200 electric buses a year.

Xi has in recent years prioritized climate, especially after Trump walked onto the global stage. In 2020, just as the United States was set to formally withdraw from the Paris agreement, Xi announced plans to start reducing carbon dioxide emissions “before 2030” and to reach net-zero emissions by 2060.

…even when

[…] The country has been the world’s largest producer of atmosphere-warming greenhouse gases for nearly two decades, although the United States has released more in total since industrialization.

China continues to rely heavily on coal power, a leading source of carbon dioxide. In the early years of climate talks, Chinese officials were often accused of spoiling deals with concerns that stronger commitments would undermine Chinese economic growth.
[…]
Beijing also resisted pressure from Western nations before the talks this month to make an early announcement of targets to reduce emissions by 2035 and to join developed nations in contributing cash to help poor countries address the catastrophic impacts of climate change and to transition away from reliance on fossil fuels.
[…]
The contradiction between rhetoric and reality isn’t limited to the arena of climate change. Last week at APEC, Xi pitched China as a champion of free trade, exhorting countries to work together to “tear down the walls impeding the flow of trade” — in sharp contrast to Trump’s promises to slap high tariffs on international partners. At home, however, Beijing maintains a highly restrictive economic system that makes it difficult for foreign firms to do business in the country.

Lyle Morris, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, calls this “speaking out of both sides of their mouth.”

“They’re very good at externally having proposals that make them look very positive as an actor for global good, while at the same time pursuing domestic policies that seemingly undermine their own policies abroad,” he said.

China looks to step into global vacuum as Trump pulls the U.S. back [WaPo]

…yes, yes…you’re all very clever…very big & very clever…with all the smoke & mirrors…but…minor detail…the smoke is killing us…& if you cleared enough of it to take a look at your reflection you’d see a remarkable resemblance to the fucking problem…a truly insane amount of which seems to boil down to a need for you personally to feel big & clever…which increases exponentially as you prove yourself ever smaller & dumber…well…that part seems like a problem to me, any road

The proposals offer new evidence that Trump’s intention to dramatically shake up the status quo in Washington is likely to focus heavily on the Justice Department, the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, and that at least some of his agenda is fueled not by ideology or policy goals but personal grievance.

Asked about Trump’s plans to fire prosecutors on Smith’s team and investigate the 2020 election, a Trump spokeswoman echoed the president-elect’s frequent claim that the Justice Department cases against him were politically motivated.

…once more…for the cheap seats…if I…say…commit homicide on 5th avenue in broad daylight…& then announce that I’m running for mayor…if the NYPD kicks in my door & a SWAT team drags my ass out of bed before coffee after watching the footage of it I livestreamed…my political aspirations do not lend their actions a political motivation

…they might manage to make hay while the political sun shines bright enough to make the actual picture…a bit of a white out, you might say

…but that’s a different fucking thing

…it’s…not that fucking hard

…if you think about it…like…at all?

“President Trump campaigned on firing rogue bureaucrats who have engaged in the illegal weaponization of our American justice system, and the American people can expect he will deliver on that promise,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “One of the many reasons that President Trump won the election in a landslide is Americans are sick and tired of seeing their tax dollars spent on targeting the Biden-Harris Administration’s political enemies rather than going after real violent criminals in our streets.”

After the initial publication of this article, Trump’s team sent another statement from Leavitt: “President Trump and his transition team speaks for him, and anonymous sources not affiliated with him have no idea what they are talking about,” it said.

…he campaigned on warming over the federal HR version of a fucking pogrom…the project he denies knowing about has a 10,000 card rolodex of kool-aid addicts…he’s threatening to throw the richest man in the world’s pocketbook two years into the future to get his way today…& we haven’t really got through the warm up on trying to push the immunity envelope…&…he still wants to relitigate fucking 2020

…but…it’s us that don’t know what we’re talking about…because we’re focused on the wrong stuff for the wrong reasons because we’re just all wrong all the time?

It’s not clear how quickly or easily Trump could fire career staff, including the prosecutors who worked for Smith on the classified-documents and election-obstruction cases. Appeals on several fronts delayed the cases from going to trial before the November election, and Justice Department policy prohibits prosecuting sitting presidents. Smith is expected to submit court filings in both cases Dec. 2 explaining how he plans to wind them down.

Before Trump left office in 2021, he passed an executive order known as the “Schedule F” rule, which would have reclassified huge swaths of career government employees and made it easier to fire them. Biden reversed that order when he entered the White House, and his administration finalized rules through the Office of Personnel Management bolstering protections for career staffers.

Trump has vowed to reinstate the Schedule F rule, however. Even if he succeeds, legal experts said it could take years to implement the new rule, as the untested issue of firing masses of federal workers makes its way through the courts.

“The protections that Biden put in will help, but it will be a fight,” said Rushab Sanghvi, acting general counsel of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents some Justice Department employees — though not prosecutors.

…how can I put this?

“Since there’s no malfeasance, we will certainly work with anyone who wants to investigate our work,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D). “But we will expect them to act with integrity and go where the facts — not their agendas — will lead.”

…that’s what you expect?

Trump has continued to trumpet his allegations about 2020, using ominous language to suggest that he would try to criminally prosecute state officials. But neither the president-elect nor his allies have ever provided evidence to prove their claims of voter fraud, and they did not make similar claims during this month’s election after Trump emerged as the victor.

In September, he claimed without evidence in a social media post that there was “rampant cheating” in 2020 and promised that those responsible would “be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, which will include long-term prison sentences.”

“Please beware,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

Among the accusations Trump and his allies have lobbed at Benson and others: They allowed the counting of ballots from noncitizens, dead people or out-of-state residents; they illegally altered election rules during the coronavirus pandemic that allowed cheating to occur; and they barred GOP poll watchers from observing the voting or counting.

The plans show how president-elect Donald Trump wants to use the Justice Department to address his own personal grievances [WaPo]

…this shit isn’t subtle…& winter is coming for a lot of sweet summer chiles

Elon Musk has said UK MPs “will be summoned to the United States of America to explain their censorship and threats to American citizens” in a fresh escalation of tensions between the world’s richest man and Labour.

Musk, who has been a fixture at the side of Donald Trump since his re-election as US president, was responding to a Guardian report on Wednesday that the Commons’ science and technology select committee would call him to give evidence in the new year in its inquiry into the spread of harmful content on social media after the August riots.

The committee’s chair, Chi Onwurah, a Labour MP, said she wanted to see how Musk, who owns the X social media platform, “reconciles his promotion of freedom of expression with his promotion of pure disinformation”.

…not…say…we’re going to tell you you got to pretend bullshit is like talking about nazis in germany which you can apparently keep off that platform if the devs cost less than the lawyers will if you don’t…just…formally own your bullshit

Musk weighed in on changes to inheritance tax on farms by saying on Monday that “Britain is going full Stalin”. Peter Mandelson, who is tipped to become the next UK ambassador to Washington, then called for an end to the “feud” between Musk and the UK government, calling him “a sort of technological, industrial, commercial phenomenon” with whom the UK must build bridges.

…the UK government…& a man who had to pay ungodly amounts of other people’s theoretical money to buttress his at best mediocre talents as a twitter troll with more technological enhancement than keith richards has had drugs…are not peers…that’s not a feud…& calling it one aggrandizes the man to an unhelpful degree…but if I start in on what I think of peter mandelson…you all might stop speaking to me…& I’m pretty sure that ends badly for someone…& I’m not sure I like who it leaves for that to be?

However, [Peter] Kyle [the secretary of state for science and technology] added: “The way that he has characterised British society is wrong. I would love to have a conversation with him about how, with his view of free speech, we can keep people safe. Free speech, in my view, doesn’t include the right to sow either misinformation or hatred to a degree that damages either people or communities … as happened in August and that led to arrests because that was criminal activity.”

…just because they don’t go renditioning teenagers from russia because a bunch of twitter bots say a bunch of shit doesn’t mean if you’re determined everyone should always be aware of who you are & the utter shite you spout that you shouldn’t get the same deal anyone else not protected by a state-level actor with a use for your disinformational game would

It was not immediately clear to what “threats to American citizens” Musk was referring in his call for British MPs to be summoned to Washington, but one of his US-based online followers claimed, without providing evidence, he was called by British police and threatened with charges if he did not take down certain posts during the riots.

*cough*

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/12/elon-musk-should-face-arrest-if-he-incited-uk-rioters-says-ex-twitter-chief

…tell me you’re a fuckwit without saying you’re a fuckwit

Another follower described the MPs’ wish to call Musk to give evidence as a trap, saying: “They’ll detain him at the border, demand to see the contents of his phone, and charge him under counter-terrorism laws when he refuses.”

…we should all be so fucking lucky…I expect they’ll get to that part right after they arrest netanyahu & book him a ticket to the hague

Musk has started calling himself “first buddy” in relation to the president-elect and has been given the job of reforming US government efficiency. It appears he will have considerable influence on the regulation of artificial intelligence, especially considering he owns an AI startup, xAI, which has attracted billions of dollars in investment from the Qatar sovereign wealth fund and Silicon Valley private equity giants.

Elon Musk to ‘summon MPs to US to explain threats to American citizens’ [WaPo]

…not saying he won’t “have considerable influence” over all kinds of shit…he already gets paid more than he paid for twitter by the federal purse one way or another…& we know how that sort of thing goes for…halliburton, say…but…”given the job of reforming US government” is one way to say it…given nominal charge of a think tank just like the one every GOP admin since forever has had that can produce tomes of fodder for the national passtime of claiming that if you just spend less on people who need help then you can afford not to have people who can afford to help themselves put their hand in their pocket…but on an industrial scale…with national infrastructure…& it’ll totally fix the deficit, too…can you spell m-a-g-i-c-a-l-t-h-i-n-k-i-n-g?

What counts as a tax cut?

That is the question on the minds of many Republicans on Capitol Hill these days as they consider how far — and how fast — they can cut taxes again. The wonky ways of measuring the federal budget are shaping up to be central to the debate.

Forcing the issue is the end of many of the tax cuts Republicans passed in 2017. Without any action by Congress next year, taxes would go up for most Americans, as provisions like lower marginal income rates and a larger standard deduction expired. Republicans want to protect their handiwork and extend the tax cuts before they lapse.

By conventional budget rules in Washington, doing so would amount to a tax cut — and an expensive one at that. Compared with a scenario where all of the 2017 tax cuts end as scheduled, extending them for 10 years would reduce the revenue the government collected by roughly $4 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Republicans are struggling to come up with other tax increases or spending cuts to cover that cost. So maybe it is not a surprise that some of them are starting to advance an alternative theory of the case: that continuing existing tax cuts actually costs nothing.

…if you’re thinking I’m just cherry-picking to make it sound as dumb as possible & there’s some sanewash version like “it’s just a maximalist threat to improve a bargaining position”…sorry?

“If you’re just extending current law, we’re not raising taxes or lowering taxes, that is a $4 trillion deficit. That’s ridiculous,” [Senator Michael D. Crapo, an Idaho Republican who is expected to lead the Senate Finance Committee next year] said in an interview with Larry Kudlow, who helps advise President-elect Donald J. Trump. Mr. Crapo said later, “We’re going to have to take the bold steps of saying to the American people that we are not going to let $4 trillion of tax hikes happen and that it’s not going to increase the deficit.”

Mr. Crapo, who said he had discussed the idea with Mr. Trump, added that Republicans could try to officially change budget rules so that extending the tax cuts is not shown to cost anything. Other Republicans may be wary of going that far, and some budget experts are raising alarms about the possibility.

“It’s clearly a budget gimmick and an end run around the needed efforts to make sure that, given our terrible fiscal situation, new policies don’t make it worse,” said Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that seeks smaller deficits.

It is a bipartisan tradition in Washington to work around (or just ignore) the findings of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation, the two bodies responsible for evaluating the cost of legislation.

…both sides™

In 2012, Congress and President Barack Obama faced a situation very similar to what lawmakers are dealing with now. Sweeping tax cuts signed into law by President George W. Bush were set to expire at the end of 2012, creating an expensive fiscal cliff. The Obama White House made the same argument as Mr. Crapo: The cost of legislation should be measured against “current policy,” which assumed that the Bush tax cuts would continue, not “current law,” under which the cuts would expire.

The thinking allowed the Obama White House to claim that the deal it made to extend many of the Bush tax cuts reduced the deficit by more than $700 billion over 10 years. The budget office, using the current law base line, said it actually increased deficits by roughly $4 trillion over that time frame.

Adopting a “current policy” mind-set again could help Republicans out of the fiscal hole they dug in 2017. Members of the party are exploring cuts to clean energy and social welfare programs next year, but unifying enough of those cuts may ultimately prove difficult. And then there are other, potentially expensive policies they may also want to pass, including the list of additional tax cuts Mr. Trump proposed during the campaign.

Making the math work will be easier if the party can look past roughly $4 trillion in expected deficits from extending the 2017 cuts. Republicans could simply argue that the estimated cost of the tax cuts is overblown or, as Mr. Crapo suggested, go beyond the rhetoric the Obama White House used and actually change the way budgets are measured.

Republicans Ponder: What if the Trump Tax Cuts Cost Nothing? [NYT]

…if you’re…I dunno…stuck adrift in a lifeboat, say…when someone in the same boat starts to make it obvious that they’re seeing things that aren’t there & no longer have any idea what their actual surroundings dictate about their circumstances…at what point is it morally acceptable to chin the bugger so he doesn’t go looking for a cellar the raft doesn’t have & sink everyone…asking for a friend?

I am finding it ever more difficult to be in this nasty world. Everything that I cherish is being destroyed and there is nowhere to go to find solace. I’ve always loved nature – but when I go for a walk now, I see every ash tree dying, I hear the loss of birdsong, I see how few insects there are. When I read the news, I just cannot comprehend how cruel humans are able to be, racism, misogyny, religious hate, cruelty to animals… The list is endless.

I work in climate change and am having to pretend every day that there is still a chance we can prevent catastrophic climate change. I find it ever harder to be around people who don’t get just how bad things are. I don’t have kids and am single. I can’t talk to my family about it because they are rightwing, wealthy climate sceptics. They patronise me (despite the fact I’m nearly 60 and a chief executive).

If I look to the future, I imagine how difficult it is going to be when food supplies are more affected by environmental crisis. People fought over toilet rolls during Covid – multiply that by 100 and apply it to food.

I don’t want to face all this horribleness on my own. I’ve had lots of chances at relationships, but don’t want fear of the future to be the basis of one. In the meantime, I am trying to keep a lid on it, trying to dissociate my feelings, pretending all the bad stuff isn’t happening. When what I really want to do is scream my head off at everyone. Planet Earth is so beautiful, so incredible, I cry with the pain of what we are doing to it and to each other. How am I supposed to remain feeling in this fucked up world?

…I don’t actually think I know them…but…we don’t have to know all our friends to know they’re friends, right?

…anyway…that’s the part the guardian published as “the question”…&…their answer has some stuff to be said for it

In his novel Candide, or Optimism, first published in 1759, Voltaire tells us of a young man who experiences a great deal of hardship and suffering. Using Candide’s experiences, Voltaire critiques the overly optimistic philosophy of the time. Like Candide, you too speak of a world marred by destruction and cruelty, and you are not mistaken. Although the forms of absurdity may change, the essence remains: human folly and suffering.
[…]
I cannot offer you the false balm of easy answers. What I can offer, however, is this: the world has ever been thus. The great and the small, all have trampled on one another in their greed, ignorance and pursuit of power. In the end, Voltaire decided, we are left with but one solution: to cultivate our own garden.

I do not mean this literally, though your love of nature might lend itself well to such a task. I mean, rather, that you must focus on what is within your power. The world, with all its evils, is vast and terrible, but there is a corner of it that you can tend, that you can preserve with your heart and your mind.
[…]
As well as Pangloss the optimist, there is another character in the novel, Martin. He surrenders to despair, just like you are doing at the moment. I do not offer you Pangloss’s optimism but, and this is the important bit, do not surrender to despair like Martin the pessimist does. Martin’s pessimism stems from his life experiences. He has suffered greatly, which reinforces his belief that life is dominated by suffering rather than joy. Instead, I urge you, like Candide, to find your own way, to act where you can and to care deeply for those who share your values. The world will continue to be absurd, but you, with all your passion, your intellect, and your sorrow, can still make your corner of it more bearable.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/nov/24/the-climate-crisis-and-all-the-evil-in-the-world-drives-me-to-despair

…not to get all despair-is-the-mind-killer…but it’s that pascal’s wager business again…I don’t know if that’s the same as fake it ’til you make it…what with faking it being kind of a load-bearing element of the ailment & all…but…I’ll settle for not closing the door on any prerequisites for a reversal of miserable fortunes…immiseration of fortune-happy annihilationists optional, I guess…but…feels like it wouldn’t hurt…the rest of us?

After catastrophic floods engulfed Valencia last month, killing more than 200 people, it might seem counterintuitive to think about water shortages. But as the torrents of filthy water swept through towns and villages, people were left without electricity, food supplies – and drinking water. “It was brutal: cars, chunks of machinery, big stones, even dead bodies were swept along in the water. It gushed into the ground floor of buildings, into little shops, bakeries, hairdressers, the English school, bars: all were destroyed. This was climate change for real, climate change in capital letters,” says Josep de la Rubia of Valencia’s Ecologists in Action, describing the scene in the satellite towns south of the Valencian capital.

In the aftermath, hundreds of thousands of people were reliant on emergency tankers of water or donations of bottled water from citizen volunteers. Within a fortnight, the authorities had reconnected the tap water of 90% of the 850,000 people in affected areas, but all were advised to boil it before drinking it or to use bottled water. Across the region, 100 sewage treatment plants were damaged; in some areas, human waste seeped into flood waters, dead animals were swept into rivers and sodden rubbish and debris piled up. Valencia is on the brink of a sanitation crisis.

For more than a year before the floods, Valencia had been suffering the other extreme of climate change: drought. The two phenomena are connected – the months of hot weather raised the temperature of the sea and the humidity in the air, resulting in sudden and intense downpours. A year’s worth of rain fell in just 24 hours in some parts of Valencia.

…nothing biblical…that’d need…frogs or something

Extreme weather is being felt across Spain. “I watched with horror, sadness and astonishment when the floods engulfed Valencia,” says Roser Albó Garriga, a farmer in the mountains of Catalonia a few hundred miles north, who is suffering water scarcity. Recent heavy rains round Barcelona have not reached her area. “In the last few years, we haven’t had enough water to grow our crops or even to drink,” she says. Sudden torrential downpours do not resolve water shortages, she adds. Catalonia had unusually heavy rains in 2020, followed by four years of drought. “The truth is that these types of rains cause damage and misfortune,” she says, “but most of the water just ends up in the sea because the parched land can’t absorb it when so much falls all at once.”

…& what’s a little rise in sea level among friends, after all

But while Garriga and other Catalans have been suffering water shortages in recent years, there’s one group of people that appears to be immune, and even profits from them: the multinational companies extracting millions of litres of water from the very same land. This isn’t just a Spanish issue – across the world, from Uruguay to Mexico, Canada to the UK, many have begun to question whether private corporations should be allowed to siphon off a vital public resource, then sell it back to citizens as bottled water.

The tragedy in Spain makes the country one of the canaries in the coalmine when it comes to understanding the global threat to water security. Can the growing number of angry citizens surrounded by private water plants but left without safe water in their homes force a rethink of how this resource is managed? And as weather patterns change, should private companies continue to have easy access to vital reserves of underground water?

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/nov/23/spanish-villages-people-forced-to-buy-back-own-drinking-water-drought-flood

…if you think maybe you’d feel better after a good cry…go watch también la lluvia…if you don’t…maybe don’t translate the title…or learn anything about the setting for tank girl…point being if I start in on the statistics about how much water there is…& how little of it in a relative sense there is that isn’t brine…& how much of that even now manages to be a frozen asset…then the part where if you remove the tax element the price of bottle of evian is higher than the equivalent quantity of gas…even in places that call it petrol…almost doesn’t seem that surprising…in a plastic bottle, no less…made of stuff that we already broadly accept we go to war over access to…&…what can I say…madness that way lies…& it’s supposed to be a day of rest…absent with leave…not take leave of your senses…so…not sure for whose sake necessarily…but I’m not going there

To their disappointment, Democrats failed to gain ground in Arizona and New Hampshire, where Republicans expanded their legislative majorities, and they lost governing trifectas in Michigan and Minnesota.

But other states delivered reason for hope. Democrats held on to a one-seat majority in the Pennsylvania house even as Harris and congressional incumbents struggled across the state. In North Carolina, Democrats brought an end to Republicans’ legislative supermajority, restoring Governor-elect Josh Stein’s veto power. Perhaps most encouragingly for the party, Democrats made substantial gains in Wisconsin, where newly redrawn and much more competitive maps left the party well-poised to gain majorities in 2026.

The mixed results could help Democrats push back against Republicans’ federal policies at the state level, and they offer potential insight on the party’s best electoral strategies as they prepare for the new Trump era.

“We must pay attention to what’s going on in our backyard with the same level of enthusiasm that we do to what’s happening in the White House,” said Heather Williams, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC). “And I feel like that’s never been more true.”
[…]
Those high stakes have made Democrats increasingly aware of the importance of state legislatures, where Republicans have held a significant advantage in recent years. In 2016, when Trump first won office, Republicans held 68 legislative chambers compared with Democrats’ 29, according to the DLCC. Following the elections this month, Democrats expect to control 39 chambers, down from 41 before the elections but still a notable improvement since the beginning of Trump’s first term.

…it’s not like fighting loadsamoney with nofuckingcash looks like being an option

As Democrats have turned more of their attention to state legislative races, outside groups have joined the fight. The States Project, a Democratic-aligned organization, poured $70m into legislative elections this cycle, while the Super Pac Forward Majority devoted another $45m to the effort. The funding provided a substantial boon beyond the resources of the DLCC, the party’s official state legislative campaign arm that set a spending goal of $60m this cycle.

…but…holy shit cognitive dissonance is a helluva drug

“It’s not rocket science that dollars, tactics and message are potent ways to communicate with voters,” said Daniel Squadron, co-founder of the States Project. “We provide the dollars to candidates that let them get off the phones, separate themselves from in-state special interests and allow them to talk to voters and to treat these campaigns like the big-league contests they are.”

Historically, Democratic state legislative candidates have trailed several points behind the party’s presidential nominee, but early data suggests legislative candidates actually outperformed Harris in some key districts. Squadron believes face-to-face interactions with voters, as well as the high quality of many Democratic state legislative candidates this cycle, helped stave off larger losses down ballot even as the party suffered in federal races.

…wait…so…closer to home people are more willing to respond to something that seems to respond to the things they’re worried about not getting…from the people they opted to get to decide that?

The results suggest that Trump’s playbook may not be enough to elevate Republican state legislators to victory, presenting an opening for Democrats in future election cycles. As further evidence of that trend, Democrats managed to hold four Senate seats in states that Trump carried on election day.

“The Maga [‘Make America Great Again’] playbook doesn’t work at the state legislative level,” said Leslie Martes, chief strategy officer of Forward Majority. “Trump is Trump, and he’s incredibly masterful at what he does, but as we see time after time, Republicans struggle to duplicate it.”

…I’m not going to pretend I have the secret decoder ring that lets me quantify how much of the brownian motion in the value of the MAGA coefficient is based on its valence in the orange spectrum…but…correlatively…all those troll farms & bot nets & keyboard warriors with national mandates

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/24/russia-aggressive-and-reckless-in-cyber-realm-and-threat-to-nato-uk-minister-to-warn

…those bits of his advantage don’t generally pertain to those sorts of races…I’m not saying that’s a form of security through obscurity…but it’s functionally visible daylight I’m seeing between those in terms of the ratio between information shoved at folks & stuff they know their feelings for on home turf where they have skin in the game & first hand observations to work from…more fool me, maybe…but that seems to have been the fashion at the time & I’m already doing a servicable abe simpson routine with these clouds that won’t get off my lawn?

Blueprints for English prisons leaked online in major security breach [Independent]

…you could ask someone with some relevant experience how to parse that sort of thing

Jeff Jarvis was born in 1954 and studied journalism at Illinois’s Northwestern University. He worked as a TV critic and created the magazine Entertainment Weekly, later leading the online arm of US media company Advance Publications. Since 2001, he has been blogging at Buzzmachine.com and in 2005 he became an associate professor at City University of New York’s graduate school of journalism, directing its new media programme before retiring last year. Jarvis, who lives in New York, is the co-host of the podcasts This Week in Google and AI Inside.

…why would you do that…aside from it probably beating having to keep listening to me?

My glib answer is that somebody has to defend the freedoms of the internet because I fear they’re under attack. It’s important to say that I’m not defending the corporations or current proprietors of the internet, but I do think that moral panic over the net will lead to regulation that will affect freedoms for all. This turned into more of a critique of media’s coverage than I had predicted.

…&…look…I’m gonna quibble here & there

Media have been engaged in moral panics going way back. What separates this media moral panic from others is the conflict of interest involved: in the media’s view, this new technology competes with them for both audience and advertising dollars – and that is rarely revealed. In my book, I chronicle the failures of Rupert Murdoch on the internet and the billions of dollars that he wasted. He decided to turn on it because he couldn’t succeed at it. The Wall Street Journal fired the first shot with a series demonising the cookie and ad targeting.

…the poor understanding at the never-read-the-EULA end of the deal of what the deal is with cookies is not helped by making it the one-stop-shop c-word of the debate the way carbon is the only variable that matters in a thing that’s literally about how everything plays into everything else…but…& this is where that pairing of hole cards in the opening salvo of what this guy frames as offensive manoeuvres strikes me as eliding more than it elucidates…the huge amount of the internet that is predicated on a thing that blurs the line between a captialist paradigm & a panopticon…because none of the lights stay on without everything being predicated on an optimized advertising substrate…that’s the razor blade in your oatmeal & raisins…murdoch wanted it to work the way the sun did in the UK…which is the antithesis of how the early internet actually worked for the most part…& like elon he burned a lot of money being ostensibly wrong about how to go about making that happen…but…the big money that does advertising like goebbels annexed madison avenue…when they’re trying to look harmless…& will cave on principle for expedience & preservation of the metrics they actually care about with actual despots in ways that they know will result in injury to bodies politic & physical…they…acted accordingly…you know…shareholders…fiduciary duty…noblesse oblige

In the book, you tell Shoshana Zuboff and other critics of surveillance capitalism to get a grip. Why?
I object to Zuboff’s use of the term “surveillance”, especially today when we have governments that have behind them the power of law, imprisonment, fine and weapons as they surveil populaces. And so to trivialise surveillance by characterising advertising cookies as that is offensive to me and overblown. Should there be changes around ad targeting? Sure, but I don’t think it starts with that kind of a klaxon call.

…uh…jeff…wasn’t this you just a minute ago?

Yes, but social media give a megaphone to our worst instincts and voices…
It does that, but it also enables communities who were not there before to come together. To be clear, I’m an old white guy who learns things very late in life, but I’ve learned a lot by reading the scholars of Black Twitter – André Brock Jr, Charlton McIlwain, Meredith Clark. The internet also enabled these communities to come together in a way that they could not gather because they were not heard in mass media.

…only…about that “old white guy who learns things very late in life” part

It feels intuitively right to me whenever someone says that phones and social media are negatively affecting our mental health. Why do you push back on that?
As I read the literature on this, it’s clear that the research is far from definitive either way. When we blame the phone for young people’s problems, we once again pass over the much more serious issues. In the US, children are afraid to go to school for [fear of] getting shot. Young women evermore have no control over their bodies. They are inheriting a climate that we fucked up. They are in the midst of a fascist takeover of the country. Oh yeah, let’s blame the phones.

…maybe…hear me out, jeff…maybe some old white guys don’t learn the sort of “surveillance” a data breach in the personal data of clients of a period-tracking app in a deep red state can shade into doesn’t seem so trivial if you hold the telescope the right way around…until…later in life…after some poor ladies get to learn it the hard way…& maybe it’s not the phones we’re blaming…maybe they’re…how does it go?

…oh, yeah…those are just tools…if you kill someone with one…or one is instrumental in someone taking their own life…that’s not the fault of the people who fine-tuned precisely the payload & the means of delivery that made that possible…that’s just good business…if you make things that kill people & make no bones about it…that seem like about where we are…don’t sweat the kids sweating the facist-enabling device they’re lo-jacking themselves with because it’s not as scary as getting shot so let’s not deal with it until after solving the thing we haven’t solved in forever because we don’t have time now the kids are starting to worry if forever might be nearing its expiration date faster than they were planning to expire themselves…is that about the page I find myself on, jeff?

What’s your take on AI?
I’m more frightened of the AI boys than I am of their AI. The problem is they have corrupted the language around it, so the word “safety” is now meaningless because the doomsters treat safety as them not destroying humankind, when there are very real safety issues that need to be dealt with around bias and fraud and the environment and so on. So it’s difficult to have the conversation now because we don’t have common terms.

…shite…I fucked up…I…will in fact be going off on one…apologies in advance…but I’ll get to that…let me just get this to a point where it’s up & figure out if I pick tunes before or after?

Are you surprised by how far to the right certain Silicon Valley billionaires have leaned?
I think one shouldn’t be surprised about the corrupting venality of billions of dollars and I think that’s what we saw at work in some of those cases. The argument that I heard during the election was: “Well, maybe the moguls have gone to the right, but the workers have not.” I don’t know. It wasn’t that long ago when employees at Google revolted over machine learning and defence. So far, I’m not hearing any rumblings of a worker revolt from Anthropic against working with evil empire Palantir for defence contracts. So I don’t know where the pulse of Silicon Valley will be, and I fear that it could go farther right all around or farther into a safety cave.

…but that’s all a no-alarm fire & let’s not worry about the lesser harm phones might do while there’s all these smoking chekhovian guns everywhere…eh, jeff?

One of your solutions for making a better internet is to demote the geeks. That feels hard to imagine.

…oh, I dunno…I can imagine it just fine…it’s what the implementing looks like in anything resembling reality that I can’t seem to bring into mental focus…dunno about you?

Yeah, but looking back at history, it becomes less difficult. Printers were all-important at the beginning, they made every decision and then they were just hired to do an industrial job. Radio, similarly, was a kind of mysterious technology until it wasn’t, and I think the same will be true of the internet and, eventually, AI. With AI, I think that, ironically – and unintentionally – it’s the geeks demoting themselves. I’m not a coder but I can now have a computer do what I want it to do without coders. Eventually, it’s not hard to imagine that anyone can tell the machine what they want to do and it will then do it without the technologists.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/23/jeff-jarvis-elon-musks-investment-in-twitter-seemed-insane-but-it-gave-him-this-power

…demoting themselves, jeff?

…this…could take me a while?

…ok…real quick…for context

A biography by a British graphic novelist of Elon Musk is struggling to find an English-language publisher due to feared “legal consequences”.

Elon Musk: Investigation into a New Master of the World is the latest graphic novel by Darryl Cunningham, from West Yorkshire. Cunningham, 64, has written and illustrated seven nonfiction books on topics ranging from the 2008 global economic meltdown (Supercrash), to Russian leader Vladimir Putin (subtitled The Rise of a Dictator).

His first book, Psychiatric Tales, which drew on his time working on an acute psychiatric ward, was called an “unsettling but rewarding experience” in an Observer review in 2010.

Although his previous books have all found publishers in the UK and America, there has been silence on the Elon Musk project, despite the fact that it has already been translated into French and published in France to positive reviews.

His French publishers, Delcourt, shopped it around at the Frankfurt book fair last month, and French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche called it “rich and thought-provoking”.

Cunningham said in a post on his Patreon website last week: “Its publication in other countries looks unlikely. I’m told that there was interest from various international publishers at the recent Frankfurt book fair, but there was concern over possible legal consequences.”

He told the Observer: “I’m surprised publishers are so seemingly cautious of publishing the Musk book when there are already many books published on Musk and various aspects of his businesses.

…possible legal consequences, you say…what the fuck are those if they don’t flow both ways?

…there…might be more to this story?

“But it looks like we live in a climate of fear where the worst people have immense power, and because of this there’s a tendency for the individuals, institutions, businesses and the state to run for cover.”
[…]
The book is certainly no glowing hagiography. Drawing on various sources, Cunningham tells the life story of Musk, going back to his parents, Errol and Maye, and Musk’s grandfather, who Cunningham says was “a bit of a white supremacist”.

He charts the rise of Musk to the “billionaire class” through his various business dealings including acquiring Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, which he renamed X.

Cunningham said: “Knowing what I know about the man, my conclusion is that it’s incredible that such a mediocre figure can amass such wealth, but it was ever thus.”

…uh huh

Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/23/we-live-in-a-climate-of-fear-graphic-novelists-elon-musk-book-cant-find-uk-or-us-publisher

…really?

…have you looked…or is that like when an old white guy learns late in life that the glasses he’s looking for are on his fucking face?

…call that a goalpost…& for the other…gimme a minute…I had it at some point since I got out of bed?

…here it is

It is easy to see why he and others are worried. The electoral triumph of Donald Trump leaves America in the charge of a man who considers “tariff” to be a “beautiful word”. This week Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil, declared that “neoliberal globalisation has failed”. Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, warns that “we are witnessing a fragmentation of the global economy into competing blocs”, while the latest World Economic Outlook from the IMF centres on the risks of protectionism.

…yadda yadda?

But here is the curious, even startling, thing. If you actually look at the data, rhetoric does not entirely match reality. Yes, America is threatening to become less globalist and US-China ties are weakening. But flows between other countries are rising. What we are seeing is a shift to a multipolar world — not necessarily towards deglobalisation.

The usual way that politicians and voters track this is by looking at trade. Data from the World Trade Organization, for example, projects that trade growth will accelerate next year to 3 per cent, up from 2.7 per cent this year.

However, arguably a better way to frame this is in an update released this week to a March study by the NYU Stern School of Business and the DHL shipping group. This series, which uses data starting in 2001, provides a bigger picture since it covers four different categories of global flows — not just trade but people, information and capital, too.

Echoing the WTO data, the NYU series shows that overall global trade in goods and services remains strong. And while population flows collapsed during the pandemic, they have since rebounded. What is even more interesting is that information flows have exploded dramatically in the past two decades — although this is now flatlining due to spreading internet and patent controls. And the movement of money? Well, capital flows were at the same level in late 2023 as in 2008, the last peak.

Thus the overall global connectedness index, which measures international activity against domestic across all categories, was around 25 per cent in 2023. That is roughly the same level as in 2022, which was a record high.

There are various caveats. This series ends in late 2023, so the update does not (yet) capture the full impact of this year’s rise in populism and protectionism. And the involvement of DHL might make anti-globalist critics sneer, given that this is a company with a vested interest in those flows.

What is more, even if you assume that this survey is rigorously independent — which it seems to be — tracking globalisation data is so fiendishly hard that it can always be challenged (which is why a substantial chunk is devoted to the methodology and sources for its 9mn data points).

Finally, not all globalisation reflects good or genuine integration. One factor boosting indices, for instance, is the growing use of offshore tax havens, as the economist Brad Setser has noted.

However, even with those caveats, the pattern is arresting and sometimes counter-intuitive. As you might expect, the data shows that flows between America and China have declined since 2016, or when Trump became president, by around a quarter. But what is less obvious is that these two countries were still more interconnected in late 2023 than any other pair of nations, except America and the UK.

Globalisation is not dead — it’s just changed [FT]

…ok…I’ll go do some stretches & see if I can stretch to picking some tunes before I go ham?

…only nearly a couple dozen…& I may or may not find time to add something to it that isn’t a bit…words over sounds…but I’ll need to get the crazy talk out of my system before I can get back to whistling while we work?

…ok…time to make your call about how much slippage you want in your differential calculus, I guess…because I am about to veer off-piste…so…I’m gonna line my run up at a slippery slope sometimes referred to as “debt financing“…sort of?

[…] a notable group of countries is trying to stay non-aligned, rather than rigidly locked into any geopolitical bloc, and they are trading with each other and a wide range of partners. “The global economy is increasingly multipolar … today’s multipolarity could support globalisation,” the March report notes.

This might change if geopolitics deteriorate. But the key point is this: what happens next to globalisation does not depend on Trump alone. Other countries are stepping into the breach – including, but not limited to, China. Latin America is a case in point.

The next US Treasury secretary should pay attention – particularly given the $9tn of dollar debt that they need to sell to investors all around the world in the next year.

…the FT one about the rumoured death of globalisation being a multipolar exaggeration

…& then tell gravity to do one

Elon Musk is a legendary workaholic and control freak. His biographer, Walter Isaacson, recounts how he runs his companies with brutal drive and determination. He sends his employees emails telling them that “a maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle”. He now promises to bring that maniacal energy to bear on ensuring that “small-government revolutionaries join this administration!” The question is: is Musk’s vision for the US government more Twitter or more SpaceX? Is he going to slash and burn and fill the place with toxic trolls and conspiracy theorists? Or is he going to reduce costs by a factor of 10 and halve delivery times while producing a genuinely breathtaking breakthrough in engineering that many doubted could be achieved?

In the oceans of newsprint that have been splurged on Musk since he officially endorsed Trump, the narrative of how an entrepreneur who once backed the Democrats and worried about climate change morphed into a conspiracy-theorising Trump supporter has coalesced into a single origin story.

…these are from that other FT one that made me all mad about how he talked a lot of shit about a lot of books he clearly doesn’t understand any better now than when he thought it was a bad thing that he read them as a barely-teen

Whether or not such echoes are conscious on Musk’s part, the highly online rightwing movement that was energised by Trump is now being energised by Musk too. Take Curtis Yarvin, a computer programmer-turned-blogger whose lengthy posts under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug are credited with helping articulate an intellectual framework for a movement known as the Dark Enlightenment.

Yarvin says the US is effectively an oligarchy, run by an amorphous blob he calls “The Cathedral”, a nexus of liberal elites in academia and the media who control the operations of the administrative state. The solution to this problem, Yarvin proposes, is an American Caesar – a dictator or monarch – to take over the reins of power and run the US like a start-up. (JD Vance, the vice-president-elect, has talked about his interest in Yarvin’s ideas.)

In 2012 Yarvin proposed an acronym: Rage, or Retire All Government Employees. Which sounds like an idea not entirely dissimilar to Doge. On that subject, Yarvin says that he hopes Musk never gets to Mars. “Elon is much more useful here on Earth,” he writes, adding that the acronym for Musk’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency “recalls the doges of the Most Serene Republic of Venice, but few are familiar with the etymology of “doge”. [cf. teh interwebs etymology with the mispelling of dog like return to monke…but don’t trouble yourself with the online cultural analysis…this isn’t about that right now…right?] It is just the Venetian dialect spelling of “duke”, from the Latin dux – or, in standard Italian – duce. Just sayin’.” Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Just don’t call them fascists. But I’m not convinced that Musk’s rapid slide into conspiracy theory land and his all-in embrace of “dark Maga” is just the result of a fragile ego scorned at a White House summit. This narrative ignores a deeply strange and ideological strain in Musk’s own thinking that stretches much further back.

…okay…now bear with me…it helps if you don’t know what most of the next bit is on about…what I’m trying to see the shape of in the white space is what might seem like a working anaolgy for the kind of good-enough that thinks current-twitter is an engine of psychohistory that you should call a freedom technology…so getting less of it than you don’t should make that an easier trick to pull off…even without more money than god to metaphorically cocoon yourself in until everywhere is your comfort zone

The scale and complexity of quantum systems that can be simulated using AI is advancing rapidly, says Giuseppe Carleo, a professor of computational physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). Last month, he coauthored a paper published in Science showing that neural-network-based approaches are rapidly becoming the leading technique for modeling materials with strong quantum properties. Meta also recently unveiled an AI model trained on a massive new data set of materials that has jumped to the top of a leaderboard for machine-learning approaches to material discovery.

Given the pace of recent advances, a growing number of researchers are now asking whether AI could solve a substantial chunk of the most interesting problems in chemistry and materials science before large-scale quantum computers become a reality.

“The existence of these new contenders in machine learning is a serious hit to the potential applications of quantum computers,” says Carleo “In my opinion, these companies will find out sooner or later that their investments are not justified.”

…sucks for us…quantum physics is real…& that’s the physical universe in which we grew the human brain…so…somewhere in that there’s some quantum shit…just like every other thing up here in the macroverse…& it’s been argued that those aren’t not-a-quantum-computer…be a shame if we wound up the wrong side of built in obselesence when the game stops being building a better mousetrap & moves right along to coding up more optimized mice…but I’ll get there in due course

The promise of quantum computers lies in their potential to carry out certain calculations much faster than conventional computers. Realizing this promise will require much larger quantum processors than we have today. The biggest devices have just crossed the thousand-qubit mark, but achieving an undeniable advantage over classical computers will likely require tens of thousands, if not millions. Once that hardware is available, though, a handful of quantum algorithms, like the encryption-cracking Shor’s algorithm, have the potential to solve problems exponentially faster than classical algorithms can.

But for many quantum algorithms with more obvious commercial applications, like searching databases, solving optimization problems, or powering AI, the speed advantage is more modest. And last year, a paper coauthored by Microsoft’s head of quantum computing, Matthias Troyer, showed that these theoretical advantages disappear if you account for the fact that quantum hardware operates orders of magnitude slower than modern computer chips. The difficulty of getting large amounts of classical data in and out of a quantum computer is also a major barrier.

So Troyer and his colleagues concluded that quantum computers should instead focus on problems in chemistry and materials science that require simulation of systems where quantum effects dominate. A computer that operates along the same quantum principles as these systems should, in theory, have a natural advantage here. In fact, this has been a driving idea behind quantum computing ever since the renowned physicist Richard Feynman first proposed the idea.

The rules of quantum mechanics govern many things with huge practical and commercial value, like proteins, drugs, and materials. Their properties are determined by the interactions of their constituent particles, in particular their electrons—and simulating these interactions in a computer should make it possible to predict what kinds of characteristics a molecule will exhibit. This could prove invaluable for discovering things like new medicines or more efficient battery chemistries, for example.

But the intuition-defying rules of quantum mechanics—in particular, the phenomenon of entanglement, which allows the quantum states of distant particles to become intrinsically linked—can make these interactions incredibly complex. Precisely tracking them requires complicated math that gets exponentially tougher the more particles are involved. That can make simulating large quantum systems intractable on classical machines.

…still…if the US election is a large quantum system…for the sake of largely-but-not-entirely-fallacious argument…& the mediasphere is a classical machine…& the human mind really is a quantum-enabled computer…it seems like we got so entangled we tripped over running before we walked…which…doesn’t augur too good for either product being ready for market

This is where quantum computers could shine. Because they also operate on quantum principles, they are able to represent quantum states much more efficiently than is possible on classical machines. They could also take advantage of quantum effects to speed up their calculations.

…supervenience is something else…& some of the else is pretty definitely quantum…you only have to “get” the broad strokes

But not all quantum systems are the same. Their complexity is determined by the extent to which their particles interact, or correlate, with each other. In systems where these interactions are strong, tracking all these relationships can quickly explode the number of calculations required to model the system. But in most that are of practical interest to chemists and materials scientists, correlation is weak, says Carleo. That means their particles don’t affect each other’s behavior significantly, which makes the systems far simpler to model.

…so…still just me stuck with bits of my mind throwing up unsolicited parallels between talking about this & the sort of electoral interference that comes with a blunt instrument shaped like zombie twitter with a button marked “loudest account”, then…or…nah?

The upshot, says Carleo, is that quantum computers are unlikely to provide any advantage for most problems in chemistry and materials science. Classical tools that can accurately model weakly correlated systems already exist, the most prominent being density functional theory (DFT). The insight behind DFT is that all you need to understand a system’s key properties is its electron density, a measure of how its electrons are distributed in space. This makes for much simpler computation but can still provide accurate results for weakly correlated systems.

…so…you don’t think the US voting public is a “weakly correlated system”?

Simulating large systems using these approaches requires considerable computing power. But in recent years there’s been an explosion of research using DFT to generate data on chemicals, biomolecules, and materials—data that can be used to train neural networks. These AI models learn patterns in the data that allow them to predict what properties a particular chemical structure is likely to have, but they are orders of magnitude cheaper to run than conventional DFT calculations.

…& call-me-mars-inc is orders of magnitude cheaper than fucking temu

This has dramatically expanded the size of systems that can be modeled—to as many as 100,000 atoms at a time—and how long simulations can run, says Alexandre Tkatchenko, a physics professor at the University of Luxembourg. “It’s wonderful. You can really do most of chemistry,” he says.

Olexandr Isayev, a chemistry professor at Carnegie Mellon University, says these techniques are already being widely applied by companies in chemistry and life sciences. And for researchers, previously out of reach problems such as optimizing chemical reactions, developing new battery materials, and understanding protein binding are finally becoming tractable.

As with most AI applications, the biggest bottleneck is data, says Isayev. Meta’s recently released materials data set was made up of DFT calculations on 118 million molecules. A model trained on this data achieved state-of-the-art performance, but creating the training material took vast computing resources, well beyond what’s accessible to most research teams. That means fulfilling the full promise of this approach will require massive investment.

Modeling a weakly correlated system using DFT is not an exponentially scaling problem, though. This suggests that with more data and computing resources, AI-based classical approaches could simulate even the largest of these systems, says Tkatchenko. Given that quantum computers powerful enough to compete are likely still decades away, he adds, AI’s current trajectory suggests it could reach important milestones, such as precisely simulating how drugs bind to a protein, much sooner.

…now…I’m not up to anything as useful as foldingathome…so this needs a generous quantity of salt strewn across it…but…well

When it comes to simulating strongly correlated quantum systems—ones whose particles interact a lot—methods like DFT quickly run out of steam. While more exotic, these systems include materials with potentially transformative capabilities, like high-temperature superconductivity or ultra-precise sensing. But even here, AI is making significant strides.

In 2017, EPFL’s Carleo and Microsoft’s Troyer published a seminal paper in Science showing that neural networks could model strongly correlated quantum systems. The approach doesn’t learn from data in the classical sense. Instead, Carleo says, it is similar to DeepMind’s AlphaZero model, which mastered the games of Go, chess, and shogi using nothing more than the rules of each game and the ability to play itself.

In this case, the rules of the game are provided by Schrödinger’s equation, which can precisely describe a system’s quantum state, or wave function. The model plays against itself by arranging particles in a certain configuration and then measuring the system’s energy level. The goal is to reach the lowest energy configuration (known as the ground state), which determines the system’s properties. The model repeats this process until energy levels stop falling, indicating that the ground state—or something close to it—has been reached.

The power of these models is their ability to compress information, says Carleo. “The wave function is a very complicated mathematical object,” he says. “What has been shown by several papers now is that [the neural network] is able to capture the complexity of this object in a way that can be handled by a classical machine.”

…fails the falsifiability framework but who’s seriously willing to bet money they can’t afford to lose that he doesn’t think tweeting “there may be more to this [thing about pelosi’s husband fighting a male prostitute]” is “tweaking the waveform” to control what it collapses into?

…go rather than chess is a target that has to do with capabilities for a different “kind” of “thinking”…it’s debateable whether actually deepmind did it that way or just made the other sort pull the same detail…not unlike AI-that-isn’t-I managing to out-benchmark quantum kit at things that should have a solid home-field advantage on…& on a different day that might be what I elected to be sent off by…theory of mind is kinda my jam given the opportunity…but…that day ain’t today

These techniques are catching the eye of some big players in the tech industry. In August, researchers at DeepMind showed in a paper in Science that they could accurately model excited states in quantum systems, which could one day help predict the behavior of things like solar cells, sensors, and lasers. Scientists at Microsoft Research have also developed an open-source software suite to help more researchers use neural networks for simulation.

One of the main advantages of the approach is that it piggybacks on massive investments in AI software and hardware, says Filippo Vicentini, a professor of AI and condensed-matter physics at École Polytechnique in France, who was also a coauthor on the Science benchmarking paper: “Being able to leverage these kinds of technological advancements gives us a huge edge.”

There is a caveat: Because the ground states are effectively found through trial and error rather than explicit calculations, they are only approximations. But this is also why the approach could make progress on what has looked like an intractable problem, says Juan Carrasquilla, a researcher at ETH Zurich, and another coauthor on the Science benchmarking paper.

If you want to precisely track all the interactions in a strongly correlated system, the number of calculations you need to do rises exponentially with the system’s size. But if you’re happy with an answer that is just good enough, there’s plenty of scope for taking shortcuts.

…who does “taking shortcuts” bring to mind?

“Perhaps there’s no hope to capture it exactly,” says Carrasquilla. “But there’s hope to capture enough information that we capture all the aspects that physicists[particular people] care about. And if we do that, it’s basically indistinguishable from a true solution[™].”

…how’s that for a shortcut?

“Because of the exponential complexity, you can always find problems for which you can’t find a shortcut,” says Frank Noe, research manager at Microsoft Research, who has led much of the company’s work in this area. “But I think the number of systems for which you can’t find a good shortcut will just become much smaller.”

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/11/07/1106730/why-ai-could-eat-quantum-computings-lunch/

…so…while I’m trying to get lemons, limes, oranges & all kinds of other shit to fruit on one tree…here’s a thing…”AI” could be super useful…to nearly anyone…if you imagine being able to take the bits of you that give a shit about a thing & put them to work getting to grips with it before bringing back the shit you’d care to know about it…call them personalized agents…that way we can argue about the person part the way I do about the I in AI…that’ll be something to look forward to

The research architecture combines large language models with qualitative interview analysis to create detailed behavioral simulations. The system processes personal narratives to understand individual decision-making patterns and value systems.
[…]
The architecture demonstrates significant improvements over traditional demographic-based modeling approaches, particularly in maintaining accuracy across different social groups.

https://huggingface.co/blog/mikelabs/generative-agent-simulations-1000-people

…the fuck does that think it’s talking about?

Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People
[Joon Sung Park, Carolyn Q. Zou, Aaron Shaw, Benjamin Mako Hill, Carrie Cai, Meredith Ringel Morris, Robb Willer, Percy Liang, Michael S. Bernstein]

…well…a couple of hours & the kind of “you are this blend of these five sliding-scale attributes” methodology that can’t encapsulate a person but still gets consulted when those are getting hired…can make one that’s good enough to spin up a focus group that gets 5% past the pareto divide…& what’s 15% of a person worth…before or after they’re 3/5 of one of those…of a second class…to a black box with baked in bias?

That’s now possible, according to a new paper from a team including researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind, which has been published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Led by Joon Sung Park, a Stanford PhD student in computer science, the team recruited 1,000 people who varied by age, gender, race, region, education, and political ideology. They were paid up to $100 for their participation. From interviews with them, the team created agent replicas of those individuals. As a test of how well the agents mimicked their human counterparts, participants did a series of personality tests, social surveys, and logic games, twice each, two weeks apart; then the agents completed the same exercises. The results were 85% similar.

“If you can have a bunch of small ‘yous’ running around and actually making the decisions that you would have made—that, I think, is ultimately the future,” Park says.

In the paper the replicas are called simulation agents, and the impetus for creating them is to make it easier for researchers in social sciences and other fields to conduct studies that would be expensive, impractical, or unethical to do with real human subjects. If you can create AI models that behave like real people, the thinking goes, you can use them to test everything from how well interventions on social media combat misinformation to what behaviors cause traffic jams.

Such simulation agents are slightly different from the agents that are dominating the work of leading AI companies today. Called tool-based agents, those are models built to do things for you, not converse with you. For example, they might enter data, retrieve information you have stored somewhere, or “someday” book travel for you and schedule appointments. Salesforce announced its own tool-based agents in September, followed by Anthropic in October, and OpenAI is planning to release some in January, according to Bloomberg.

The two types of agents are different but share common ground. Research on simulation agents, like the ones in this paper, is likely to lead to stronger AI agents overall, says John Horton, an associate professor of information technologies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who founded a company to conduct research using AI-simulated participants.

“This paper is showing how you can do a kind of hybrid: use real humans to generate personas which can then be used programmatically/in-simulation in ways you could not with real humans,” he told MIT Technology Review in an email.

The research comes with caveats, not the least of which is the danger that it points to. Just as image generation technology has made it easy to create harmful deepfakes of people without their consent, any agent generation technology raises questions about the ease with which people can build tools to personify others online, saying or authorizing things they didn’t intend to say.

The evaluation methods the team used to test how well the AI agents replicated their corresponding humans were also fairly basic. These included the General Social Survey—which collects information on one’s demographics, happiness, behaviors, and more—and assessments of the Big Five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Such tests are commonly used in social science research but don’t pretend to capture all the unique details that make us ourselves. The AI agents were also worse at replicating the humans in behavioral tests like the “dictator game,” which is meant to illuminate how participants consider values such as fairness.
[…]
Interviews aren’t the only option, though. Companies that offer to make “digital twins” of users, like Tavus, can have their AI models ingest customer emails or other data. It tends to take a pretty large data set to replicate someone’s personality that way, Tavus CEO Hassaan Raza told me, but this new paper suggests a more efficient route.

“What was really cool here is that they show you might not need that much information,” Raza says, adding that his company will experiment with the approach. “How about you just talk to an AI interviewer for 30 minutes today, 30 minutes tomorrow? And then we use that to construct this digital twin of you.”

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/11/20/1107100/ai-can-now-create-a-replica-of-your-personality/

…there’s ways that shit could be…so fucking cool

…I wanna go live where that’s how that would go

…because I dunno about y’all…but where I actually live?

…you don’t even wanna know…but I’m sorry to say I’m pretty sure we gonna learn