Charlie Stross: “actual international Neo-Nazi conspiracy to destroy democracy globally”

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Dearest readers, I have been dealing with a family emergency here on top of a plate that was already full before the family emergency. I am trying to be somewhat kind to myself and acknowledge that I have very real physical and mental limits. Which is a way of getting to my point that I might be doing some short posts for a little while. I would rather do short frequent posts than long, infrequent ones.

I am not as smart or entertaining and awesome a writer as Charlie Stross, obviously, but here is Charlie Stross acknowledging that he is somewhat overwhelmed by events and might be doing some short posts for awhile.

it’s really hard to write a good carpet-chewing rant by an evil wannabe galactic overlord against a background of an actual international Neo-Nazi conspiracy to destroy democracy globally, and another international conspiracy of billionaires trying to immanetize the AI eschaton and enslave everyone else, and … and … fuck, even Space Opera isn’t safe from the maniacs these days!

You can make fun of people who are serious but somewhat bumbling (think of George Bush or, gulp, Joe Biden) but it is hard to make fun of evil clowns. Clowns can be funny, but only when they are not evil.

Donald Trump causes evil clown panic to worsen

Okay, put an evil clown in a diaper and it’s at least a little bit funny…until they come for you or someone you care about.

federal courts vs. the executive branch

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I wondered what happens when a federal judge issues a contempt order.

“Well, the court, a judge, has tools available to him or her,” Gertner said. “In the first instance, they can cite the parties in front of them for contempt. They can impose fines, of course. Since one of the parties arguably here is Elon Musk, it’s not clear that fines are going to make a particle of difference. There’s even the possibility of imprisoning someone until the order is followed…”

“All of these are obviously empty threats with respect to the defendants,” she said. “In this case, the marshals would have to enforce whatever orders the judge entered. The problem is that the Marshals Service is under the Department of Justice, and if Trump wanted to fully not comply, he could direct the Department of Justice not to comply.”

If a state judge issued a contempt order against me, a local police officer or county sheriff’s deputy or state police officer would show up at my door. At the federal level, this would be a U.S. Marshall apparently. But the U.S. Marshalls fall under the Department of Justice. If the President ordered the Attorney General not to comply with a court order, the Attorney General would have an awkward decision to make. Presumably, every agency is going to have a team of lawyers giving them advice on the potential consequences of various courses of action, and they are going to make their decisions. Even then, one wonders if the President could pardon someone (even himself) issued a federal contempt of court order. Or appeal to the Supreme Court, and then we find out if they are as corrupt as some of us suspect they are. At this point, the Constitution is done and the next steps would have to be mass civil action or a military coup. All these things seem unthinkable in the United States, but the trend seems to be toward increased thinkability.

January 2025 in Review

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Well, January was a doozy. Here goes:

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Longreads #1 stories of 2024 – this is a lookback but I posted it in January and it has a ton of interesting stuff. Interesting, frightening, and depressing. The story on Israel’s dispatching of air strikes based on statistical analysis is the single most disturbing article I read last year. Everyone should read this article and decide for yourselves where you stand. Another one is called “When the Arctic Melts”. Even as the shadow of fossil fuel propaganda once again overspreads the land, I am afraid the globe could be approaching an irreversible tipping point into runaway warming and sea level rise. Let’s hope the world can afford another four-year round of U.S. backsliding and then pick up the pieces, but I am not sure.

Most hopeful story: I noted that congestion pricing in New York City could provide a glimmer of hope that transportation in the United States could begin to implement 21st century international best practices. (Yes, I am aware the century is a quarter over already – one more indicator of the U.S. slipping towards the bottom of the world’s more advanced nations.) Unfortunately, as I write this on February 13 we see the President himself actively interfering in this state and local matter. “States’ rights” for thee, not for me (i.e. only when it’s convenient to some disingenuous argument).

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: AI agents – coming soon to a computer near you.

R.I.P Donald Shoup

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Donald Shoup explained why parking is so scarce in walkable, livable cities. Basically, you can have walkable, livable cities, or you can have free parking. You can’t have both. This is a matter of geometry. Pricing parking is one answer. Progress on this issue is a dog fight every inch of the way. Most people are not interested in waking up from the auto-oil-highway propaganda matrix and seeing the world for what it is. The fight is worth it. Thank you Donald Shoup for opening my eyes to reality.

Musk, Apartheid, and White Supremacy

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I’m not sure I can or want to say anything about Musk that others have not already said. As of a few years ago, I respected him as an innovator. While the U.S. auto companies hem and haw and make inferior cars at high prices and resist electrification, he figured out how to make superior electric cars at reasonable prices and get them into widespread commercial availability. While NASA couldn’t figure out how to get back to space since the retirement of the shuttle program, and quasi public-private entity Boeing seemed to be struggling to get the U.S. back into space, Musk stepped in and made real progress on that. Now certainly, he has been adept at using U.S. government contracts to massively scale up his business, and certainly heavy lobbying must have been a big part of that strategy. The latter is immoral in my view, and yet legal under what passes for outrageously corrupt U.S. law. For an amoral corporate “person”, legal compliance substitutes for moral and ethical behavior in a human person. Corporate “persons” seem to be able to corrupt human persons to their way of thinking. All that is pretty standard big business here in the corrupt U.S. system, and I wouldn’t consider Musk to be any more immoral or unethical than other humans who have played this game successfully under the established rules.

That was a year ago. Now, he is spouting what seem to be clearly white supremacist views. You hate to stereotype the Dutch South Africans as white supremacists, but there is a group of them including Musk and Peter Thiel who grew up under the apartheid system and seem to be motivated on some level by white supremist ideology. It is the very rare human being who pursue self interest in a truly amoral manner devoid of any sense of empathy – these are called psychopaths (and I truly think Donald Trump is one). For the rest of us, it is human nature to find ways to rationalize the advantages, or blame others for the disadvantages, we have been given on the uneven playing field of life. We can tell ourselves we are smarter or harder working than others, or we can come up with theories for why our genetic makeup or religious beliefs or country of origin make us superior to others in the natural order of things. Slave traders and slave owners did this, Nazis did this, American segregationists and red-liners and sub-prime lenders and mass incarcerators did this, white South Africans did this. So when we hear words like “meritocracy” or “preference” or “mentally deficient”, we should be asking ourselves if these are code-words for the same old tired Nazi/Jim Crow/Apartheid playbook we have been struggling to get past all these decades.

A quick aside on “supremacist” and “supremist”. The former seems to be the more accepted and widely used term, but both are accepted and widely used. Here are a couple fun quotes from the article I just linked to:

“The combine are determined to register the negroes, and the white supremacists are equally determined that they shall not.” (New Orleans Times Picayune, 1896)

“The ‘white supremists,’ or regular Democrats, say that the negroes shall not register.” (Chicago Daily Inter Ocean, 1896)

Seriously, it’s 2025. Let’s not go backwards America.

the Civil Rights Act

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I admit I don’t know much about the Civil Rights Act. I learned about Martin Luther King Jr.’s more positive moments 67 times in school, but I learned about neither his darker moments nor the ground-breaking legislation his leadership helped bring about. One thing I do know pretty well is the Clean Water Act. In the Clean Water Act, permittees (basically any entity with a pipe or ditch leading to a surface water, including factories obviously but also most cities, towns and larger developments, only not most farms) are required by law to collect data on what they are discharging and report it to their state environmental agency, which is required to report it to the federal Environmental Protection Agency. If they are discharging more than they should, the state agency has to step in (typically this means fine them once, then sue if that doesn’t work), and if the state agency fails, the EPA has to step in. If either the state or EPA fails, third party non-profit groups will step in and sue. (This seems unfair, but normally they sue the permittee, and the state and federal agencies will sign on to the lawsuit on the side of the third-party group. Basically the state and federal agencies are doing what would have been their job anyway, but the lawsuit has forced their hand in making this particular permittee a priority.)

Anyway, it would be hard for Presidential cronies to break this system. It is law and it is decentralized among federal, state, and private entities. The Clean Water Act was passed in 1972.

Now we turn to the Civil Rights Act, which was passed in 1964. It prohibits discrimination in the hiring and firing process, period. So why are we arguing about “affirmative action” and “diversity equity and inclusion” in 2025?

This is from a blog called Popular Information, which is written by Judd Legum, the founder of ThinkProgress. And that’s everything I know about it, so consider the credibility of the source as you consider this:

Trump issued an executive order repealing Executive Order 11246, which was put in place by Lyndon Johnson in 1965. For 60 years, Executive Order 11246 prohibited government contractors with contracts of more than $10,000 from discriminating in hiring or employment based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin…

it contained two words that became very controversial, and those were “affirmative action.” Affirmative action had been used in a previous executive order by John F. Kennedy, but it was still undefined. And so, over the rest of the Johnson administration and into the Nixon administration, there was a lot of discussion and debate about what exactly affirmative action meant. And so that became a critical part of the legacy. It was resolved by Nixon. The Nixon administration allowed for the use of goals and timetables to measure the inclusion of minorities and other protected groups within government contractors, and that process has been more or less in place since. Essentially, 11246, with some modest amendments, since 1965 has been in place as the primary mechanism for enforcing nondiscrimination in government contracts and also by government vendors and subcontractors…

Under 11246, government contractors have to demonstrate that they have a plan for reaching out to protected groups, including minorities and women. And then they have to report on the composition of their workforces, or their subcontractors.

So like the Clean Water Act, regulated parties had to actively collect and submit data to show they were complying with the Civil Rights Act. This data could be scrutinized by public and private entities, leading to enforcement by public agencies and the threat of private law suits to force public agencies to do their jobs if that was necessary. But unlike the Clean Water Act, the requirement to collect and submit the data was the result of an executive order and not a law. So some lawyer in Trump’s camp was smart and evil enough to understand this and to remove that reporting requirement after 60+ years. The law is still there, but it will be harder to monitor and prove that someone is breaking the law.

The obvious solution going forward would seem to be for Congress to amend the Civil Rights Act to include the text of the executive order. It would even make a lot of sense to add the protections of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act to the U.S. Constitution itself. These things are not going to happen while the current iteration of the Good Ol’ Neo-Nazi Party is in the majority, despite support for basic bedrock civil rights being a bipartisan consensus for many decades under many center-right administrations.

here come the agents

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Who knows what combination of reality and sales pitch this really represents, but OpenAI is pushing the idea of AI agents, which I recently mused could be a big thing in 2025.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took the technology world by surprise on Thursday with the release of Operator, his company’s first AI agent that can act autonomously on the web…

“This idea of delegating your ‘proof of personhood’ to an agent and letting it act on your behalf is actually super important,” he [not Altman, a different guy talking here] said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Instead of only allowing people you think are human [on your website], you will also allow AI agents that represent a real human…

World’s ID technology could also be used to license AI agents to act on your behalf, Sada said. In a recent blog post, the project notes that its proof of human tools will not only distinguish humans from bots, as they do today, but could help people control a network of AI agents online.

So there you have it. Humans are already interacting with AI agents. But soon, we will be able to authorize AI agents to interact with other AI agents on our behalf. But we will need good AI agents to try to protect us from bad AI agents and bad people doing bad things with AI agents. How will the average person be able to tell if their AI agent is good enough to protect us from AI agents controlled by much richer and powerful people, corporations, and government agencies? For that matter, my mind goes back to Charlie Stross’s Accelerando. I didn’t find it to be a particularly easy or entertaining read, but in that book AIs are able to incorporate themselves, which gives them most of the rights of people, which enables them to legally act in their own interest. Where is all this going to be even a year from now compared to today?

“Evolution, Morpheus. Evolution! Like The Dinosaur. Look Out That Window. You’ve Had Your Time. The Future Is OUR World, Morpheus. The Future Is OUR Time.”

“I’m Agent Johnson. This is Special Agent Johnson. No relation.”

record adoption rate for ChatGPT

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I mentioned recently that I had couldn’t remember any technology being adopted into widespread commercial and public use as fast as the large language models. Here is some empirical confirmation of my impression, from Reuters:

ChatGPT, the popular chatbot from OpenAI, is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January, just two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a UBS study on Wednesday.

The report, citing data from analytics firm Similarweb, said an average of about 13 million unique visitors had used ChatGPT per day in January, more than double the levels of December.

“In 20 years following the internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer internet app,” UBS analysts wrote in the note.

Websites and apps are not exactly technologies, and the large learning models are more than just websites or apps. What about cell phones themselves, or radio, or electricity, or toothpaste, or the plough, or the wheel, or fire? I think the adoption of all these critical technologies probably had a half life measured in years at least, probably decades or even centuries the further back you go. I’m sure there are many scholarly studies out there.

health insurance cost inflation

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I seriously have the best of intentions not to be overly political in this blog, but it’s just really hard right now as the U.S. government is making absurdly ignorant policy choices that are not even consistent with their barely coherent stated goals. In this case, after stating a goal of bringing living costs down for “ordinary people” (maybe we could take that to mean the middle 50% of the income distribution?), there is a good chance Republicans will raise health insurance costs massively for people using the Affordable Care Act. (They are no longer talking about repealing that act, just adding “Un” in front of affordable.) The article I link to is from my home state of Pennsylvania, and estimates what the Good Ol’ Boy Party is proposing would raise costs more than 50% for a family of four with a household income around $125,000. Actually, they don’t have to propose anything, or even do anything at all – all they have to do is let sunset provisions in existing laws expire as they probably planned all along.

So basically, Trump and cronies assume that Americans are too busy/distracted/uninformed (I never say “stupid”) to notice that their health care costs explode if at the same time the price of everyday spending on things like gasoline and groceries were to slow down a bit. That, and they may hope to break the Affordable Care Act on purpose, point out it is broken, and then try to eliminate it. This is like intentionally breaking your own personal car and then arguing that this proves cars are not a workable technology for anyone to get from point A to point B.