July U.S. Election Check-in

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Well, I was all set to tell you that the polls moved decisively toward Biden in June, and that would have been true with just a few days to go. But it seems the debate on June 27 really did cause a sharp swing toward Trump. I don’t like it, but these are the facts of the case. We will see if the effect is persistent or if things slowly revert to trend. Either way, the polls closing in the last few days of June may not fully indicate the state of the damage, so it may get worse before it gets better for Biden, if it does in fact ever get better.

STATE2020 RESULTMost Recent 538 Poll Average (as of 7/1/24)
ArizonaBiden +0.4%Trump +4.8% (June 1: Trump +4.7)
GeorgiaBiden +0.3%Trump +6.3% (June 1: Trump +5.5)
WisconsinBiden +0.6%Trump +0.8% (June 1: Trump +1.4%)
North CarolinaTrump +1.3%Trump +7.3% (June 1: Trump +6.2%)
PennsylvaniaBiden +1.2%Trump +2.0% (June 1: Trump +2.0%)
MichiganBiden +2.8%Trump +1.8% (June 1: Trump +0.6%)
NevadaBiden +2.4%Trump +3.8% (June 1: Trump +5.9%)

In June, 1/7 swing states had large (> 1%) movement toward Biden – Nevada.

In June, 1/7 swing states had small (< 1%) movement toward Biden – Wisconsin.

In June, 1/7 swing states had no change – Pennsylvania.

In June, 2/7 swing states had small (< 1%) movement toward Trump – Arizona, Georgia.

In June, 2/7 swing states had large (> 1%) movement toward Trump – North Carolina and Michigan.

So the trend is all over the place, with big swings toward Trump coming right at the end of the month. Trump obviously has all the swing states at the moment and is headed for an electoral college landslide if current trends hold.

Enough has been written about the debate. I’ll just link to this Politico article that points out that if you were just reading the transcript, a lot of what he said was very reasonable and even astute. That was my impression when listening to the actual debate. But I can’t excuse any politician for failing to be prepared and put on a decent rhetorical performance – that is what they do, and there 10,000 politicians who could have done it better than Biden did on Thursday night. So either he was inexplicably, inexcusably poorly prepared, or he really is faltering physically and mentally, with dire consequences for our nation’s future.

how I’m using AI

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AI has definitely improved my personal productivity when it comes to computer programming. I haven’t been successful asking it to write whole programs for me, but it has been fantastic for solving syntax problems in minutes that might otherwise take me hours to figure out. For example, I have data in xyz format and I need it in zyx format, please give me some example code that works. Or, I need to pass an argument to a function and does it need to be in quotes, parentheses, enclosed in ancient hieroglyphics or some random combination of these? In the past, I always started with a Google search on these questions, looking first for a blog post with examples, and failing that for a Stack Overflow post. At some point, I started using ChatGPT when those two options failed. Then I figured out I have access to a version of CoPilot through my employer and any data or code I supply is not going to be automatically broadcast to the world, so I have gradually been shifting to that. I just learned that CoPilot is really a version of ChatGPT. (The article I linked to mentions some other AIs I had not heard of yet, such as “Claude”.)

Then at some point, I started going to AI after blog posts but before Stack Overflow. This is about where I am now. For one thing, AI tends to listen to my question, understand what I am looking for and give me a relevant answer much more often than Stack Overflow. For another, it is much more polite than the dick heads and whining weenies on Stack Overflow. You know who you are. Thank you for your free service in the past, and if you want me to continue coming to you, you may want to at least learn some manners. You could start by asking an AI to analyze your posts and suggest ways to not be such a dick head.

I am not using AI for writing, because for me writing and thinking are two halves of the same coin, and I can’t farm out the thinking. The one exception to this is thank you notes and other social niceties – I have no interest in burning my limited intellectual capacity on learning how to write these, so I am very happy to have AI do it. I tried asking CoPilot to find me promo codes for a few stores, but none of them worked. I suspect the companies are paying for the same AI I am using for free, so it is probably snitching to them so I can’t get a deal.

consumption of farmed fish exceeds consumption of wild fish for the first time

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In 2022, aquaculture supplied a majority of seafood consumed by humans for the first time. But there are many gray areas – fish are hatched in tanks, released to the wild or pens located in natural water bodies, then caught again later. Farmed fish are fed wild-caught fish. And regardless, fish farming generates nutrient loads to natural waters.

I’ve fantasized about a system where earthworms are produced using compost from food scraps and other sustainable sources, then fed to fish and shellfish in tanks, then the nutrient-enriched water is used in fertilizer-free hydroponic agriculture, and finally the water is cycled through a wetland treatment system and used repeatedly. So the only input to this hypothetical system would be garbage (okay, and air and energy), and the outputs would be compost, fish, shellfish, and vegetables. I’m sure there are may practical challenges to this system, but in principle it should work. AI might be able to constantly monitor and make small adjustments to a system like this to keep it running efficiently.

the Israel lobby

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Let’s tackle the U.S. Israel lobby just with a few facts and figures.

First, a book I haven’t read: The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Here’s the description on Amazon:

Originally published in 2007, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, provoked both howls of outrage and cheers of gratitude for challenging what had been a taboo issue in America: the impact of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy. A work of major importance, it remains as relevant today as it was in the immediate aftermath of the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006.

Mearsheimer and Walt describe in clear and bold terms the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States provides to Israel and argues that this support cannot be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds. This exceptional relationship is due largely to the political influence of a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. They provocatively contend that the lobby has a far-reaching impact on America’s posture throughout the Middle East―in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict―and the policies it has encouraged are in neither America’s national interest nor Israel’s long-term interest. The lobby’s influence also affects America’s relationship with important allies and increases dangers that all states face from global jihadist terror.

The publication of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy led to a sea change in how the U.S-Israel relationship was discussed, and continues to be one of the most talked-about books in foreign policy.

amazon.com

Second, a chart from the Council on Foreign Relations showing that since 1946, Israel has received close to double the amount of U.S. foreign aid compared to the next largest recipient, which is Egypt. The overwhelming amount of this aid has been military, which in practice often means the U.S. government buying weapons from the private U.S. arms industry to send abroad.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-145979905

And this is one argument I have heard, that part of the solid base of political support for the Israel lobby is the U.S. arms industry, because a relatively small investment in lobbying yields a huge return in profits. Which you can say about any lobbying, but in this case it is compounded by the already strong ideological, geopolitical, and highly motivated lobbying efforts in Israel’s favor.

today’s warming is not the result of emissions decades ago…well, it is and it isn’t

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I’ve repeated a couple times that if emissions were stabilized today, the climate would continue warming for decades. I am not a complete idiot, because this was the scientific understanding at one time, but it is time for me to update my understanding. Michael Mann explains:

The conventional wisdom was once that warming would continue on for decades even if we stopped emitting carbon into the atmosphere due to the sluggishness of the oceans, which continue to warm up even after CO2 stops increasing. This is known as committed warming. But committed warming is only half of the story, an artifact of simplistic early climate modeling experiments in which CO2 levels are kept fixed after the hypothetical cessation of emissions.

Later, more comprehensive simulations with interactive ocean carbon cycle dynamics revealed that CO2 levels actually drop after emissions cease as the oceans continue to draw carbon down from the atmosphere. That decrease in the greenhouse effect cancels out the committed warming, and the result is an essentially flat line. In other words, global temperatures stabilize quickly once net carbon emissions drop to zero.

aps.org

So today’s temperatures are the result of emissions over the past decades, but today’s rate of increase in temperature is about the current rate of emissions or at least very recent emissions. This article doesn’t explain, but I think it makes sense, that global temperatures would start to drop at some point as the oceans continued to soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. (I’m ignoring ocean acidification for the moment – perhaps this would never be reversed?) This would be encouraging if there were any serious commitment among the world’s governments and institutions to stop emissions in the near future. Nonetheless, Mann points out that the damage already done is not a logical excuse to stop doing further damage. Any action will reduce the severity of future impacts, even if the floor for those impacts has already been baked in.

GPT-4 and the Turing test

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I don’t know if the original Turing test was based on just one human participant, or if more than one was used, how those humans were chosen.

Scientists decided to replicate this test by asking 500 people to speak with four respondents, including a human and the 1960s-era AI program ELIZA as well as both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, the AI that powers ChatGPT. The conversations lasted five minutes — after which participants had to say whether they believed they were talking to a human or an AI. In the study, published May 9 to the pre-print arXiv server, the scientists found that participants judged GPT-4 to be human 54% of the time… GPT-3.5 scored 50% while the human participant scored 67%.

livescience.com

Should the criteria to pass be that 51% of a large random sample of humans could not correctly identify computer vs. human? How bad would the results have to be for the control (identifying the human as human) before we would conclude that the Turing test no longer makes sense?

It’s interesting that the Turing test is presented as a test of intelligence, but many of the things that apparently make computer conversationalists convincingly human are in fact cognitive biases, logical errors, and the appearance of emotionally-influenced decision making. These might be things you would look for if you wanted a computer to be a friend, but they are not things I would like for if I wanted a computer to counter my less rational human impulses and help me make more rational decisions.

May 2024 in Review

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Just realizing I never did a May 2024 post. Here it is. I also made a range of political musings in May, which I have chosen not to include below, but they are on the record for anyone interested.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: What a modern nuclear bomb would do to a large modern city. Do we already know this intellectually? Sure. Do we constantly need to be reminded and remind our elected leaders that this is absolutely unthinkable and must be avoided at any cost? Apparently.

Most hopeful story: The U.S. might manage to connect two large cities with true high speed rail, relatively soon and relatively cost effectively. The trick is that there is not much between these cities other than flat desert. The route will mostly follow an existing highway, and we should think about doing this more as autonomous vehicles very gradually start to reduce demand on our highways in coming decades.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Drone deliveries make some sense, but what we really need is infrastructure on the ground that lets all sorts of slow, light-weight vehicles zip around in our cities efficiently and safely. And this means separating them completely from those fast, heavy vehicles designed for highway travel.

China 10-15 years head of U.S. in ability to deploy nuclear power, and gearing up for fusion

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This article from “Information Technology and Innovation Foundation”, which I have never heard of but does not raise my government propaganda hackles, says China is “China likely stands 10 to 15 years ahead of the United States in its ability to deploy fourth-generation nuclear reactors at scale”. Also, “China’s innovation strengths in nuclear power pertain especially to organizational, systemic, and incremental innovation.” So, we can still invent technology here in the USA but we can’t follow through to execute and construct it at scale. Sounds about right. Plus, we have a strong headwind of fossil fuel company propaganda to overcome, which the nuclear and regulated electric utility industries do not seem able to match.

Nuclear power has to be a big part of the climate solution. It just has to, and we should have started the pipeline decades ago, but there is no time like the present and China has the right idea. There is no reason this should be threatening to the U.S. either, other than our companies’ inability to compete. We should partner with them and get this technology built for the good of the world, which is also our own good. Or if companies based in China are too much of a political hot potato, partner with Japanese and Korean companies that know how to get things built.

being a book cover in the after life

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Apparently, there are books out there bound with human skin. Of course, my mind having been poisoned by the sick minds in Hollywood, I immediately thought of serial killers. But apparently this is something doctors used to do occasionally with the skin of people who died of natural causes. It reminded me of the story about the doctor who kept Einstein’s eyes. It seems wrong by modern standards, but it seems like in the past it was sometimes considered acceptable scientific practice, and/or even considered a tribute to the dead individual to some extent. I suppose if I felt okay about my body being used as a medical cadaver or a crash test dummy (which is a thing), it would not seem comparatively bad to live on as a book. Maybe someone would like to use my scrotum as a coin purse (not all that far fetched – this is a thing with certain animals).

Trump, detention camps, and deportation

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Trump is talking about incarcerating and detaining all the undocumented immigrants in the United States, which would be about 11 million people. Snopes does a good job of fact checking the specific things he has said about this.

A November 2023 New York Times investigation found that Trump was planning “an extreme expansion” of his first-term immigration policies, including rounding up undocumented people in the United States and putting them in detention camps before expelling them from the country…

Trump had made similar comments in September 2023, saying he would carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” He also said he would be, “Following the Eisenhower Model” for such deportations, referencing a 1954 campaign to round up and expel Mexican migrants named for an ethnic slur—Operation Wetback.

In sum, in December 2023 speeches, Trump did call for mass deportations and emphasized that such migrants come from all over the world, using rhetoric that echoed past speeches. Furthermore, reporting confirms that there are indeed plans for a future Trump administration to build huge detention camps to hold migrants.

Snopes

It is not hearsay that Trump is talking about these things – he gave an interview to Time (covered here, confusingly, by CNN) in which he talked about this explicitly. He says he plans to round 15-20 million people up into detention camps and deport them.

Some people say the Trump-Hitler comparisons are overblown, but it is worth remembering that Hitler had schemes to deport Jews to Madagascar, Alaska, and/or Siberia among other places, before he gave up on those and came up with his “final solution”. The other parallel is that he managed to bring local police and security forces under his central control, which echoes Trump’s discussion of using the National Guard and military here.

The human rights abuses this would engender are fairly obvious, but there are also many practical issues. Citizens of the United States are not required to carry papers proving their citizenship, so who do you choose to detain and how do you go about proving that they are undocumented? It would likely be done on the basis of (perceived) ethnicity, which brings to mind the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the mistaken deportation of Mexican Americans in the 1950s. You could swoop in and interrogate inmates of jails and prisons, which is probably what would actually happen, but this would not add up to millions of people. The other thing you can do, and the U.S. government has done, is swoop into work places and demand to see papers. This is actually somewhat practical since workers are in fact required to prove they are eligible to work. However, being ineligible to work does not automatically mean your presence in the country is illegal. So now people might be swept up and held in detention camps without due process while courts try to figure out who they are. Even if a legal proceeding determines that an individual is in the country illegally, there is the problem of where to deport that person to (once again, see Hitler). Again, people could be held for years without due process while this plays out.

Finally, if you want to make inflation worse, deporting a huge chunk of the low-wage work force is a great way to do that. It would be much more humane and pro-business to expand work permits and temporary visas to let people in who want to work, but put some restrictions on how long they can stay and who they can bring along. This would be a win for human rights and would be business friendly, which at least traditional Republicans are nominally in favor of. The other side of this coin is to encourage U.S. business investment in Latin America, which would have the twin benefits of reducing migration pressure and producing cheap stuff to import, which also helps to hold down prices.