Tag Archives: donald trump

his foolishness’s instincts on nuclear weapons

Let me be abundantly clear on my position: Donald Trump is a childish fool and I am embarrassed for my country on the world stage right now. I am desperately searching for some kind of silver lining and not coming up with much. One thing is that he has made some statements over the years suggesting he understands the need for nuclear arms control. Now, with all the verbal diarrhea that comes out of the man’s mouth, we have to always focus mostly on his actions rather than his words. But here are a few points:

  • New Start treaty – In 2020, Trump oversaw mostly successful negotiations to extend this treaty with Russia. It was provisionally extended for a year, and the Biden administration picked up where Trump left off and agreed with Russia to extend it for five years. It’s one of the ironies of political polarization that opposing sides are sometimes willing to compromise and cooperate as long as there is not too much publicity about it.
  • Iran nuclear treaty – Here Trump dealt a massive blow to global non-proliferation goals. Whatever his instincts, I assume Israeli pressure played a big role here.
  • Here are some weird statements Trump made in the September 2024 presidential debate. “But eventually, you know, he’s [Putin’s] got a thing that other people don’t have. He’s got nuclear weapons. They don’t ever talk about that. He’s got nuclear weapons. Nobody ever thinks about that. And eventually uh maybe he’ll use them. Maybe he hasn’t been that threatening. But he does have that. Something we don’t even like to talk about. Nobody likes to talk about it.” Weird, incorrect since obviously most people on earth are going to know that Russia is a nuclear power, and yet it shows that Trump is legitimately concerned about the risk of nuclear war.
  • From The Intercept: “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many… You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.”
  • And also: “I’m going to say there’s no reason for us to be spending almost $1 trillion on the military. … I’m going to say we can spend this on other things… I want to say let’s cut our military budget in half. And we can do that.”

Seeing is believing, Senor Trumpez, and we will all see if these encouraging words lead anywhere.

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

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.

the Civil Rights Act

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.

2024 in Review

Intro

What I do here is list all the posts I picked each month as most frightening, most hopeful, and most interesting. Then I attempt some kind of synthesis and analysis of this information. You can drill down to my “month in review” posts, from there to individual posts, and from there to source articles if you have the time and inclination.

Post Roundup

Most frightening and/or depressing stories

  • JANUARY: 2023 was “a year of war“, and so far 2024 is not looking better. Those diplomatic grand bargains you always hear about seem to be getting less grand. And the drumbeat for a U.S. attack on Iran got louder.
  • FEBRUARY: The war on terror continues, and the propaganda umbrella has expanded to cover attacks on any group labeled as “Iran-backed”. Fentanyl gets an honorable mention, but affects mostly the poor and miserable whereas the war on terror threatens to immolate us all.
  • MARCH: Ralph Nader says the civilian carnage in Gaza is an order of magnitude worse than even the Gaza authorities say it is. Which is almost unthinkably horrible if true, and makes the Israeli public statements about collateral damage seem even less credible. However even handed you try to be in considering this war could be a proportionate response to the original gruesome attack, it is getting harder.
  • APRIL: Peter Turchin’s description of a “wealth pump” leading to stagnation and political instability seems to fit the United States pretty well at this moment. The IMF shows that global productivity has been slowing since the US-caused financial crisis in 2008. In Turchin’s model, our November election will be a struggle between elites and counter-elites who both represent the wealthy and powerful. That sounds about right, but I still say it is a struggle between competence and incompetence, and competence is a minimum thing we need to survive in a dangerous world. In early April I thought things were trending painfully slowly, but clearly, in Biden’s direction. As I write this in early May I am no longer convinced of that.
  • MAY: 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.
  • JUNE: Some self-labeled “conservatives” in the United States want to do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Census Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Education, and possibly even the Federal Reserve. All these are needed to have a competent, stable government and society and to be prepared to respond and recover from the shocks that are coming, so I would call this nihilist and not “conservative” at all. How is it conservative to want to destroy the institutions that have underpinned the success of our nation thus far? On the other hand, they also want to double down on the unimaginative pro-big-business, pro-war consensus of the two major parties over the last 50 years or so, which has also gotten us to where we are today. And it looks like the amateurs and psychopaths have the upper hand at the moment in terms of our November election. This is certainly not “morning in America”.
  • JULY: Joe Biden’s depressing decline in the international spotlight, and our failed political system that could let such a thing happen. Not much more I can say about it that has not been said. The “election trifecta” – non-partisan, single ballot primaries; ranked-choice general elections; and non-partisan redistricting – is one promising proposal for improving this system.
  • AUGUST: Human extinction, and our dysfunctional political system’s seeming lack of concern and even active ramping up the risk. We have forgotten how horrible it was last time (and the only time) nuclear weapons were used on cities. Is there any story that could be more frightening and/or depressing to a human?
  • SEPTEMBER: There is nothing on Earth more frightening than nuclear weapons. China has scrapped its “minimal deterrent” nuclear doctrine in favor of massively scaling up their arsenal to compete with the also ramping up U.S. and Russian arsenals. They do still have an official “no first strike” policy. The U.S. by contrast has an arrogant foreign policy.
  • OCTOBER: When it comes to the #1 climate change impact on ordinary people, it’s the food stupid. (Dear reader, I’m not calling you stupid, and I don’t consider myself stupid, but somehow we individually intelligent humans are all managing to be stupid together.) This is the shit that is probably going to hit the fan first while we are shouting stupid slogans like “drill baby drill” (okay, if you are cheering when you hear a politician shout that you might not be stupid, but you are at least uninformed.)
  • NOVEMBER: Ugh, the U.S. election. I don’t really want to talk or think too much more about it. What’s really frightening to me is the celebration of irrationality. With incompetent, irrational clowns and fools now in charge of everything, any crises or emergencies that arise are not going to be dealt with rationally, competently, or at all. And this is how an emergency can turn into a system failure. Let’s hope we can muddle through four years without a major acute crisis of some kind, but that is hard to do.
  • DECEMBER: The annual “horizon scan” from the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution lists three key issues having to do with tipping points: “melting sea ice, melting glaciers, and release of seabed carbon stores”.

Most hopeful stories

  • JANUARY: According to Bill Gates, some bright spots in the world today include gains in administering vaccines to children around the world, a shift toward greater public acceptance of nuclear power, and maybe getting a bit closer to the dream of fusion power. He pontificates about AI, and my personal sense is it is still too soon, but AI does hold some promise for speeding up scientific progress.
  • FEBRUARY: The people who are in charge of the USA’s nuclear weapons still believe in the ideals behind the founding of the country, at least more than the rest of us. Okay, this is lean times for hope, but seriously this at least buys us time to figure some stuff out.
  • MARCH: Yes, there are some fun native (North American) wildflowers you can grow from bulbs. Let’s give the environmental and geopolitical doom and gloom a rest for a moment and cultivate our gardens.
  • APRIL: Some tweaks to U.S. trade policy might be able to significantly ease the “border crisis” and create a broad political coalition of bigots, big business, and people who buy things in stores.
  • MAY: 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.
  • JUNE: Computer-controlled cars are slowly but surely attaining widespread commercial rollout. I don’t care what the cynics say – this will save land, money and lives. And combined with renewable and/or nuclear energy, it could play a big role in turning the corner on the climate crisis.
  • JULY: A universal flu vaccine may be close, the same technology might work for other diseases like Covid, HIV, and tuberculosis.
  • AUGUST: Drugs targeting “GLP-1 receptors” (one brand name is Ozempic) were developed to treat diabetes and obesity, but they may be effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction. They may even be miracle anti-aging drugs. But really, it seems like the simple story is that most of us in the modern world are just eating too much and moving our bodies too little, and these drugs might let us get some of the benefits of healthier lifestyles without actually making the effort. Making the effort, or making the effort while turbo-charging the benefits with drugs, might be the better option. Nonetheless, saving lives is saving lives.
  • SEPTEMBER: AI should be able to improve traffic management in cities, although early ideas on this front are not very creative.
  • OCTOBER: AI, at least in theory, should be able to help us manage physical assets like buildings and infrastructure more efficiently. Humans still need to have some up-front vision of what we would like our infrastructure systems to look like in the long term, but then AI should be able to help us make optimal repair-replace-upgrade-abandon decisions that nudge the system toward the vision over time as individual components wear out.
  • NOVEMBER: In a nation of 350 million odd people, there have to be some talented potential leaders for us to choose between in future elections, right? Or is it clowns and fools all the way down? Sorry folks, this is how I feel.
  • DECEMBER: I’m really drawing a blank on this one folks. Since I reviewed a number of book lists posted by others, I just pick one book title that sounds somewhat hopeful: Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both

  • JANUARY: The return of super-sonic commercial flight is inching closer.
  • FEBRUARY: I am not a great chef by any means, but all hail recipe websites, however pesky they may be, for helping me make edible food.
  • MARCH: I looked into Belarus, and now I am just a little bit less ignorant, which is nice.
  • APRIL: If the singularity is in fact near, our worries about a productivity slow down are almost over, and our new worries will be about boredom in our new lives of leisure. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to count on this happening in the very near future, and therefore stop trying to solve the problems we have at the moment. This would be one of those “nice to have” problems. If it does in fact materialize, the places to be will be the ones that manage to shut down Peter Turchin’s wealth pump and spread the newfound wealth, rather than the places where a chosen few live god-like existences while leaving the masses in squalor.
  • MAY: 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.
  • JUNE: I had a misconception that if the world reduces greenhouse gases today, the benefits will not kick in for decades. Happily, scientists’ understanding of this has been updated and I will update my own understanding along with that. The key is the ocean’s ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere relatively quickly. (I am not sure this is good for the ocean itself, but it is somewhat hopeful for temperatures here on land.) And it is not all or nothing – any emissions reductions will help, so the failure to act in the past is not an excuse to continue to fail to act.
  • JULY: Maybe we could replace congress with AI agents working tirelessly on behalf of us voters. Or maybe we could just have AI agents tirelessly paying attention to what the humans we have elected are doing, and communicating in both directions.
  • AUGUST: I did some musing about electric vehicles in August. The hype bubble seems to have burst a bit, as they did not explode onto the international commercial scene as some were hoping/predicting. This is partly because public infrastructure has not kept pace with the private sector due to sheer inertia, but I always detect a whiff of the evil oil/car industry propaganda and political capture behind the scenes. Nonetheless, just as I see happening with computer-driven vehicles, the technology and market will continue to develop after the hype bubble bursts. In a way, this almost starts the clock (5-10-20 years?) for when we can expect the actual commercial transition to occur. It will happen gradually, and one day we will just shrug, accept it, assume we knew it was coming all along, and eventually forget it was any other way. And since I seem to have transportation on the brain, here is a bonus link to my article on high speed trains.
  • SEPTEMBER: Countries around the world update their constitutions about every 20 years on average. They have organized, legal processes for doing this spelled out in the constitutions themselves. The U.S. constitution is considered the world’s most difficult constitution to update and modernize.
  • OCTOBER: Some explanations proposed for the very high cost of building infrastructure in the U.S. are (1) lack of competition in the construction industry and (2) political fragmentation leading to many relatively small agencies doing many relatively small projects. Some logical solutions then are to encourage the formation of more firms in the U.S., allow foreign firms and foreign workers to compete (hardly consistent with the current political climate!), and consolidate projects into a smaller number of much larger ones where economies of scale can be realized. There is some tension though between scale and competition, because the larger and more complex a project gets, the fewer bidders it will tend to attract who are willing to take the risk.
  • NOVEMBER: You can charge moving electric vehicles using charging coils embedded in roads.
  • DECEMBER: Bill Gates recommended The Coming Wave as the best recent book to understand the unfolding and intertwined AI and biotechnology revolution. I also listed the 2024 Nobel prizes, which largely had to do with AI and biotechnology.

Synthesis

Nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles. The massive silver lining here is that, as I write this, there has been no use of nuclear weapons in war since 1945. Let’s hope it stays that way, forever and ever. But the expansion of nuclear arsenals among the existing powers, the open discussion of proliferation to new state actors, and the erosion of treaties and taboos on use of nuclear weapons are all deeply concerning. I find the hypersonic missiles particularly disturbing. These are being used in active, hot wars between nuclear powers – between Russia and NATO’s proxy Ukraine, and between Israel and Iran. We also hear that China has developed these weapons. Missiles are scary to begin with, but what is very, very scary is that these seem to be nuclear capable missiles and they are being actively used in hot wars between nuclear powers right now. If there are only a few minutes of warning when they are incoming, and they effectively can’t be pre-empted or intercepted, how does anyone know for sure that they are not nuclear armed before they hit their targets? So far, it seems like all sides are waiting for missiles to hit before we confirm they are not nuclear missiles. What if a state actor decides they can’t afford to wait and see and considers a pre-emptive strike? China and Iran have no-first-strike policies. The United States does not, and here is a fun fact – the SOVIET UNION had a no-first-strike policy, but modern Russia does not. Just to heap a little more sunshine on this topic, the rapid collapse of Syria, an aspiring nuclear power at one point, made me wonder if something similar could happen in Pakistan. And there is always the prospect of nuclear terrorism, particularly frightening when combined with extremist ideologies that glorify suicide and mass killing of civilians. It is easy to imagine horrible scenarios for all mankind on this one – but again, it is a risk that hasn’t materialized and can be managed. And it actually seems like a simpler, more tractable problem to me than complicated scenarios like climate change. Nuclear weapons are in the hands of relatively few leaders, and there is plenty of precedent for what arms control treaties and risk reduction measures can look like. Courageous leaders can step up on this issue – where are you guys?

Climate change. Let’s continue my little happy pep talk on existential threats. The climate change crisis is biting our civilization right now, and not only that, we are in the middle of it, not the beginning, and it is accelerating every day. This is the physical and socioeconomic reality, while our human civilization’s perception of reality let alone willingness and ability to act lag far behind. This is starting to feel like a story that will not and cannot end well. It is starting to bite our cities in the form of floods and fires, and this is well before relentless sea level rise really starts to bite in a significant way. Another place it will gradually start to bite harder, if it has not already, is food prices and eventually the physical food supply. As much as we have whined about food prices here in the U.S., the rise has been much worse in developing countries. And everything I just said is about the slow, steady, but relentless changes in the climate we have been experiencing and have to expect we will keep experiencing, at a minimum. The small piece of good news here is that if we took action immediately, we would start to see improvement in the trends immediately, rather than having to wait for some lag period to pass. My understanding of this has changed in the past year, and this is something positive. BUT what if rapid, sudden changes are in store? Some of the most terrifying articles I highlighted in 2024 have to do with tipping points, also known as runaway trains. We know about the accelerating melting glaciers and ice sheets, and how a sudden collapse of ice could lead to catastrophic and sudden sea level rise. We are seeing sudden rises in atmospheric methane concentrations – there seems to be some chance that this is the beginning of a feedback loop where frozen soil and seafloor sediments release methane bubbles as they thaw, which leads to more warming, which leads to more thawing, which leads to more warming and so on in a catastrophic exponential feedback loop that can’t be stopped on any time scale meaningful to humans. I hope we are not looking back a few years from now and concluding 2024 was the year that kicked this off. Now for some very small positive words – no matter how long our human political leaders dither and delay and fail, it is never too late to take actions that will make the outcome less bad than it could have been. Think about the reverse – if you were going to purposely try to make the situation as bad a possible, you could do things that would make it worse (like take all energy production back to coal). So past failure is never an excuse to stop trying, it is truly never too late to do better, even if our lack of effective action to date has closed off certain positive outcomes forever.

Bird flu. Continuing the doom and gloom theme, a major pandemic with a high mortality rate is clearly another existential threat we face. It could come from a natural source, a laboratory accident, or an intentional act. The risk of the latter will grow as biotechnology continues to progress and, unlike nuclear weapons, becomes more accessible to the masses. It’s like a major flood or earthquake. It will happen sooner or later. There are things we can do to limit the damage and to recover more quickly when it does happen, and we are probably not doing enough. The current strain of bird flu is concerning as it continues to devastate wild and domestic birds around the world, has spread extensively to domestic cows, there are some reports it has spread to pigs, and it has spread to some humans supposedly through direct contact with animals. Now having said all that, 2025 is probably not the year we get a devastating pandemic flu. Every year is probably not the year, because this is a low probability event in any given year that becomes highly probable over a long period of time. So the thing to do is stay calm and prepare. I actually have some hope that the vaccine technology that was rapidly scaled up and commercialized during Covid-19 will help us when the pandemic flu does hit. Let’s hope it’s not this year or any time during the next four years when we cannot expect to have competent leadership in the United States.

Artificial Intelligence. I suppose I have to say something about it. Well, I can’t recall in my lifetime any technology exploding exponentially into widespread commercial and public use in just over a year from its first announcement. You could almost describe it as…a singularity? Well not quite, but an ongoing exponential growth with no end in site, which is how a singularity would begin. Now, the downside is the sudden, massive, and completely unexpected energy demand this is causing, to the point that recently retired nuclear plants are being turned back on. I joked that AI might be the explanation for the Fermi paradox, where every civilization in the cosmos advanced enough to develop this technology wipes itself out by fouling its own nest when it tries to generate the energy required. I don’t believe this though – given that it’s easy to imagine an alternate history where nuclear fission based energy was scaled up in a serious way, and/or space based solar energy was scaled up in a serious way, and fusion based energy looking at least somewhat plausible, it does not seem like a foregone conclusion that we humans here on Earth had to foul our nest. This does not mean there is hope for us, it just means that there might be hope in a galaxy far, far away or in a billion of them too far away for us to see.

AI Agents. Now, as we foul our nest over the next few decades, there is the question of where AI goes in the next few months and years. And one big thing, I think, that is going to change our lives pretty quick is AI agents. We don’t really have AI going out and actively engaging in communications and transactions on our behalf on a large scale yet. But this has to be happening behind the scenes, and it has to happen in an obvious public way pretty soon. Imagine if I asked an AI to keep track of what one of my elected representatives is doing each day, read and summarize legislation they vote for or against, and just explain it to me in an easily digestible way for five minutes a day. Now imagine my AI is talking to my representative’s AI, and everyone else’s AIs are doing that, and giving the AI a summary of what all these AIs are thinking. That sounds pretty democratic right? But now imagine AIs from companies and governments are trying to manipulate all of us to buy things and believe things and do things they want us to do. Now imagine ALL THESE AIs ARE TALKING AND TRANSACTING WITH EACH OTHER, ALL THE TIME, AND THEY NEVER GET TIRED OR NEED A BREAK. It gets dizzying pretty quick.

Competing Feedback Loops. AI has definitely increased my personal productivity in writing computer programs and communicating the results in the past year. This must be happening on a large scale, at least it certain types of jobs. On the other hand, the IMF tells us worldwide productivity has slowed down since the 2009 financial crisis and was made worse by the Covid-19 crisis. There are also continuing headwinds like aging populations and falling fertility rates in many developed countries. How can both these things be true, an acceleration of productivity and a slowdown of productivity? The way I think about it, they are competing feedback loops, kind of like the faucet in your bathtub being on while at the same time there is no drain plug. Whether your tub is filling up or draining down depends on the relative strength of the positive and negative feedback loops. And unlike your bathtub, both are changing in time and subject to random shocks. So it could go either way – civilization could be going down the drain, the technological singularity might be imminent, or the two could be close to balance so it seems like nothing is happening for a long time, until one of them gets the upper hand. These are not the only feedback loops of course – the ongoing climate and biodiversity crises are also in the mix and since these are negative, we have to really hope that AI faucet is wide open, or find a stopper for the drain, or some combination of the two. We don’t have many world leaders working on the stopper thing right now, many are trying to drill baby drill an even bigger hole.

Biotechnology. AI seems likely to accelerate the progress of biotechnology, leading toward both medical breakthroughs (universal vaccines, cures for cancer and diabetes) and increasing risks of accidents and terrorism. Its hard to predict when these things will hit the news – progress is slow and steady for a long time, and then a technology will seem to burst onto the public scene all at once. Sometimes there is a big hype bubble that reaches a peak and seems to explode, and then while the public assumes the technology is dead, the slow and steady progress toward widespread commercialization resumes and eventually takes hold of the entire system. And then we shrug, forget the past, and assume we knew it was coming all along.

Electric Vehicles and Autonomous Vehicles. The U.S. government might be throwing up some headwinds to technological progress (i.e., doing their best to usher in a dark age not a “golden age”), but the global socioeconomic and scientific systems that drive technological progress are much too big to be constrained by the U.S. government. While many in the U.S. may have the impression that the electric vehicle revolution has stalled, it is forging ahead in Asia and around the world. China is building cars for $10,000, and nobody else (Japan, Korea, or Tesla let alone Detroit) can figure out how to compete with this. I suspect one driver of the protectionist impulse in the U.S. is fear that we have no chance of competing, so our government is willing to imprison us in a bubble of outdated technology at uncompetitive prices, and if they can’t outright restrict information about the outside world from getting in, they will use propaganda to distort that information so we don’t understand what we are missing. It’s like the Soviet Union, or worse, North Korea. We are certainly not as far behind as the Soviet Union or North Korea relative to our peers yet, but this is the path we are headed down. Similarly to electric vehicles, we are hearing from our media that autonomous vehicle technology has stalled or under-delivered or is risky (it’s not, by any rational measure compared to the massive death and suffering caused by human-driven vehicles). But this technology has in fact arrived, just arrived unevenly in certain cities in the U.S. and around the world, and our government policy is slowing its spread for example with policies that do not allow autonomous vehicles on highways. These two technologies – electric and autonomous vehicles – have to combine and reinforce each other sooner or later, and this will change a lot of things about how our cities and infrastructure are configured in the future. It’s hard to give a timetable, but I bet if you go to a leading edge city in China, Korea, or Japan a decade from now these technologies will be everywhere and it will seem like science fiction to a U.S. traveler who has been kept in the dark about the state of the outside world as our once world-leading country has stagnated.

Inequality and the Wealth Pump. I hadn’t heard the term “wealth pump” before reading Peter Turchin in 2024, but it rings true. Wealth and income inequality is just the elephant in the room behind the 2024 U.S. election and many other geopolitical trends around the world. It is getting worse in the U.S., and it is not going to get better as long as the wealthy and powerful are able to continue rigging the rules of the system more and more in their favor. The pain of the masses is very real. And Donald Trump may have found rhetoric that taps into this pain, but his administration is certainly not going to make the situation better. But nor has the Democratic Party shown any signs of making the situation better. They may tinker with some marginal policy changes that slow the trend (for example, the short-lived increase in tax credits to offset childcare expenses, some steps to slow the rise of prescription drug prices) but do not reverse it (for example, creating real childcare, education, and health care benefits that reach the vast majority of working citizens). Bernie Sanders is the only U.S. politician who has spoken authentically to the people about these issues in recent memory, and he reached a lot of people although not quite enough when the established Democratic Party did everything they could to sabotage him. There is also the problem of half a century of very effective anti-tax propaganda that is very hard to overcome. But still, I believe Bernie showed us the way. The Democrats need to embrace the man and his policies, and find him a true protege or several to choose from who are able to speak with his authenticity and maybe a bit more youth and charisma. Trump is all but guaranteed to fuck up massively over the next four years, so the question is will the Democrats let his propaganda machine convince us to blame scapegoats or will they be ready?

Government of the Fools, By the Fools, For the Fools, and Where’s Waldo? Before January 20, 2025 it was clear to me that the U.S. will be governed by fools and amateurs for the next four years. And this alone is sad because it will lead to our continued stagnation and at least relative decline while peer countries are moving into the future. It is also dangerous because the nation might be able to muddle through while there is nothing unusual going on, but fools, amateurs and clowns are not going to prepare or respond effectively to emergencies, disasters, and unexpected events. Four years is a long enough time that some unexpected events should be expected. We can only hope they are not too far out in the tails. But as I write this on January 23, 2025, it seems even worse. Trump is a fool, but a very powerful and dangerous fool, and at least some of the people whispering in his ear are evil cruel-hearted psychopaths, sadists, and outright devils. I don’t think Trump is Hitler, because Hitler believed in things (evil, twisted things) whereas I think Trump is a pure psychopath who believes in nothing and is willing to say or do anything he thinks will increase his own power. But who are the Heydrichs, Himmlers, and Goebbels among his supporters? I am not sure, but whoever they are they are hiding in plain site in a crowd of clowns and fools where they are hard to pick out. It’s time to play a little Where’s Waldo.

Welcome to 2025!

And that is all the sunshine and light I have to offer you here in this January 2025. If you are a human being reading this in close to real time, happy 2025 and may it be better than expected, which is not a high bar at all! If you are an alien archaeologist reading this in the far future, I hope it helps you make sense of the rubble of our civilization. If you are a transhuman reading it after the singularity in the near future (I heard October 2029 according to Ray Kurzweil’s latest prediction?), I hope you are laughing that the problems that seemed so dire to me in January 2025 had solutions just around the corner!

the Time person of the year

The Time Magazine Person of the Year is supposed to be “a person, group or concept that had the biggest impact — for good or for ill — on the world over the previous 12 months”. I’m trying to come up with creative alternatives for who it could be other than he-whose-name-must-not-be-spoken (but it rhymes with Drumpf). One creative idea I can think of, since it can be a group, is ChatGPT, CoPilot, Bard, and other AIs. Surely they have had a massive impact on our entire global human society over the past 12 months. Or how about Moo Deng, the Thai hippo. Is the problem that we not ready to admit that these are people? Maybe that is the issue. But no, if I need to remove any doubt, all the editors could think of was his royal incompetent foolish clown dipshit highness Donald J. Trump. Please form your own opinion and we can have a civil discussion about it if you want, but there is my opinion for all to see.

https://theweek.com/cartoons/todays-political-cartoons-december-13-2024

July U.S. Election Check-in

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.

Trump, detention camps, and deportation

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.

June U.S. election check-in

I’m sticking with 538’s adjusted poll averages here, which consider poll quality and recency.

STATE2020 RESULTMost Recent 538 Poll Average (as of 6/1/24)
ArizonaBiden +0.4%Trump +4.7% (May 2: Trump +3.2)
GeorgiaBiden +0.3%Trump +5.5% (May 2: Trump +5.9)
WisconsinBiden +0.6%Trump +1.4% (May 2: Trump +2.6%)
North CarolinaTrump +1.3%Trump +6.2% (May 2: Trump +6.4%)
PennsylvaniaBiden +1.2%Trump +2.0% (May 2: Trump +1.8%)
MichiganBiden +2.8%Trump +0.6% (May 2: Trump +1.3%)
NevadaBiden +2.4%Trump +5.9% (May 2: Trump +5.1%)

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

In May, 3/7 swing states had small (< 1%) movement toward Biden – Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan.

In May, 2/7 swing states had small (< 1%) movement toward Trump – Pennsylvania, Nevada.

In May, 1/7 swing states had large (> 1%) movement toward Trump – Arizona.

So it’s hard to say things are trending one way or the other over the past month, and the trend needs to be significantly in Biden’s favor for him to have a good shot in November. As it stands now, the electoral college would be 312 Trump to 226 Biden, a major defeat. If Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were to all break for Biden, it would be Biden 270 to Trump 268.

Donald Trump, peacemaker?

This New Yorker article from August 2022 talks about how members of the military defied orders given by Donald Trump. This included defying arguably illegal orders to intervene in domestic affairs, which I would tend to agree the generals deserve credit for. But the article also praises the military for refusing to unwind and withdraw from foreign conflicts and interventions when they were ordered to. I find this disturbing. Consider:

  • Trump ordered a withdrawal from Syria – twice. Military leadership publicly criticized him, and it was not fully carried out either time. The U.S. is still in Syria today.
  • He floated the idea of pulling out of South Korea – described by Robert Gates as an “absolutely crazy notion”. The U.S. is still in South Korea today.
  • He ordered all troops withdrawn from Somalia. The U.S. is still in Somalia today.
  • He reportedly wanted to withdraw from Iraq, Germany, and all of Africa. He tried to go around the usual military channels to get this done, knowing they would try to block him. They found out, and they blocked him. The U.S. is still in Iraq, Germany, and many countries in Africa today.
  • He wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan immediately. The military slow-walked it throughout his presidency. Finally, he ordered a withdrawal, which was delayed several times and ultimately carried out by Biden. Afghanistan is the one country on the list that the U.S. military is not in today (officially at least), and Biden seems to get most of the credit and blame for the way it went down.

I am not claiming that Trump was some great peace maker, but his instinct does appear to have been to bring U.S. troops home from many of our foreign entanglements. The exception was Iran – he assassinated a senior political and military figure inside Iran, and advocated repeatedly for a military attack on the country, perhaps at the urging of the Israeli government.

Another thing disturbed me about the article – the idea that the military are heroes because they supported the peaceful transition of power and refused to participate in a potential coup attempt during the 2020 election. This is like a protection racket. This suggests the military has some constitutional role in the peaceful transition of power, which to my knowledge they do not. It suggests that a peaceful transition of power occurs because they allow it to occur through their beneficence, when they could choose to step in and prevent it at any time they want. This may be an uncomfortable truth. They seem to have a de facto veto power over our strategic engagements, our foreign policy, our national budget, and our election system. They haven’t taken over because of their “professionalism” or sense of “honor” or “duty”. Or just maybe, there is no need or desire to go to the trouble of governing as long as the civilian government continues to pay them off with a quarter of the federal budget or so.