I had a discussion with an old buddy about LLMs yesterday. He's writing fiction and is using ChatGPT like a rented mule.

He's got a character who's modeled on Andrew Tate but he wants him to be annoying, not a villain, so he'll type "give me ten things a sexist asshole would say about women that aren't awful." He's got a character who's a vampire so he'll type "give me a list of insults a vampire would use against townsfolk." Or he'll be analyzing plot points and he'll say "give me a list of movie scenes that would radically change the movie if they were absent."

In each one he goes through and picks what he likes. In the last one he argues with it. I pointed out that he's basically using ChatGPT like an extended thesaurus and he agreed. I also pointed out that if you ask an LLM "give me the stochastic mean of this vector through a set of points" you are using the LLM as it was intended to be used - it will give you the mediocrity every time and, because it's basically a hyperadvanced Magic 8 Ball every now and then it will be brilliant. But - I pointed out - when you ask it for an opinion it will fall down every time because it has absolutely no handles on any of its inputs and outputs. You can't ask it to tell you what scenes are crucial because it has no understanding of any of the concepts underneath. What it has is a diet of forum posts that it will never give you straight.

Shall we play "how can chatGPT do my job?" 'cuz they've been trying to AI automate my job forever.

See this guy? they were about $1500 back in '94. And what they do is analyze the audio signal passing through them looking for feedback, and then they drop one of eight filters on it. You can adjust the sensitivity to feedback, you can adjust the latch, you can adjust the release, you can adjust the aggressiveness. They were really big until about 2005 or so when it became cheap and easy to TEF sweep a room and ring it out to EQ out the frequencies that cause things to ring - I'm sitting here surrounded by ten speakers at 85dB and having spent an afternoon mapping and collating and inserting between 4 and 15 filters each channel I can't get feedback if I hold a condenser in front of left main.

Could an AI have done that? fuck yeah. That would have been delightful. But not without me moving the mic sixty times so what time am I actually saving?

That active seeking feedback reduciton thing has made it into machine tools - each servopak on my mill has more filters than that Sabine. And in general, the approach everyone takes is "set as many as you need to kill steady-state, use the roaming ones carefully" because who knows what modes you'll run into with this or that chunk of aluminum strapped down getting chewed up.

Everything I've got is already a waveform. We've been using Fourier transforms to operate on them for 40 years. My life is nothing but math. And despite the fact that GraceNote has literally released every song they know about as training data, telling the AI "make my mix sound better" still fucking failwhales. Like, on a basic, simple level. It understands what the sonogram of a song should sound like but that's like reconstructing a fetus from an ultrasound. What you get is uncanny valley nightmare fuel.

I don't need the mediocre middle of a million mixes, I need excellence. And excellence comes from humans because it is, by definition, not the mean. Anyone expecting that a machine purpose-built to give you a statistical average can give you only the good outliers is going to be disappointed for the simple fact that the machine doesn't understand "good" or "bad" it understands "highly rated" or "much engaged with." The machine thinks this is the best Jurassic Park cover ever made:

And the only way you can deal with that is to nerf it out on a case-by-case basis.

You could argue that LLMs are good for facts but not opinions but the problem is its method for handling facts only works for opinions. Are they useful? Yes. Are they a tool that will make big changes to a few industries? I don't see how they can't. Am I honestly excited to see their actual utility? You damn betcha. But where the world is now is this:

People who don't understand AI inflicting it on people who don't need AI to the detriment of people who don't want AI.

That's it. That's the game.

It's fucking exhausting. Doubly exhausting when you have to do it twice. Your cat was probably trying to do you a favor.

I think the BLM analogy fits and doesn't fit in a number of ways, so I question the utility in modeling everyone's turmoil around October 7 on BLM. I'll address it as far as it's useful, though. For example: Defund the police.

This is an opinion, but I believe slogans should be immediately obvious. This is, in my opinion, the problem wypepo have with the phrase "defund the police." It requires explanation. "Disarm the police?" That one's obvious. "Demilitarize the police?" equally obvious. Black Lives Matter chose language that spoke to those who already have affinity for them, not those who were on the fence.

Your argument is that "defund the police" means to stop "Increasing the police budgets to solve brutality." I agree with this position. I get it. But "defund the police" when shouted from a crowd does not mean "stop increasing police budgets to solve brutality" it means ACAB. it means "we can get along without police at all." It means "dissolve the carceral state." It's a step away from "storm the Bastille" not "let's de-escalate police violence through selective reductions in spending." And when shouted at people with "blue lives matter" stickers on their car, it means "fuck you."

There has been an appalling amount of antisemitism in response to October 7. Not anti-Zionism, good ol'fashioned Jew-hating bigotry. There has been a lot of triangulation around how any atrocity committed by Hamas is justifiable, about how any death in Gaza by anyone under any circumstances is a war crime. And while I believe the answer to the correct amount of reprisal for October 7 is zero (0) bombs, I also knew - Hamas also knew - Iran also knew - Russia also knew - that the number would be higher than that. And I also knew - as did Hamas, Iran and Russia - that whenever Israel opens a can of whoopass international hate crimes against Jews skyrocket. that's the point.

Black Lives Matter had a very simple cause - stop killing black people. It's a really easy one to agree with on the face of it and the reason it didn't get nearly enough done is the entrenched power of police unions and the political makeup of policing in the United States. And the fact that BLM's position was "defund the police" ie ACAB.

Shouting "defund the police" at a bunch of indemnified, entrenched police unions was never going to fucking accomplish a thing. De-escalation training? A drawing down of military hardware? SWAT rotation rather than dedicated squads? All of these things would make a difference. But to the people shouting "defund the police" they were a bunch of ineffectual, quisling half-measures. Nobody wanted to think about it, they wanted to shout slogans.

You've got this idea that the government of the United States is all-powerful and that Biden could somehow bring Israel to heel. It's worth pointing out that Netanyahu has never said a single polite thing about Democrats and that the only thing keeping him out of jail right now is his coalition. There's a path forward here - a tricky, game-playing, polticking path - but shouting "defund Israel" is not dissimilar from shouting "defund the police."

And I don't think anybody shouting it cares.

I think BLM was a spontaneous, loosely-organized movement that - and I hope I'm wrong about this - lacked the vision to push for lasting change and as a consequence, faded out of existence. I think the Left's position on October 7 is a spontaneous, loosely-organized movement that doesn't want the complications of geopolitics to interfere with its anger.

And I do - honestly and truly - feel that the butts-in-seats at State and above know more about this than I do, have more experience with this than I do, and feel the violence in Gaza as much or more than anyone else. I was wrong about Garland. I could be wrong about this. But I've done a fair amount of reading on Israel, Palestine and how we got here over the past 20 years and I don't see the slogans as helpful.

sigh

The point is that until 2019, everyone was fucking cool with the Armenian Genocide except Armenians.

The point is that until my lifetime everyone was fucking cool with the extermination of Native Americans.

And here you are - conflating "half the budget of NASA" and "so they can bomb children" without pausing to give any air whatsoever to the complications of the existence of Israel because it forces you to grapple with uncomfortable thoughts.

I'm probably done with this shit. There's way too much desire on your behalf to go "but but but intifada" in response to any good-faith discussion. So I'll just say this:

I have been leaning into my Jewish heritage my entire life to criticize Israel. Can't call me anti-semitic when I bring up my Jewish grandmother! I was giving speeches against Israel before you were fucking born and the most infuriating, alienating aspect of modern politics is any discussion of "well here's how we got here" is invariably met by someone going "nope I've been thinking about this since yesterday and I've solved it."

So congratulations. Cling close to your absolutes. Shine thy platitudes and buff thy maxims for yours is the way.

The baths of Tiberias, where Joseph and Bessie Shoolman were enjoying a respite having successfully fled the Pogroms of 1881, were Ground Zero in the Nakba. Their granddaughter? Was kicked out of Radcliffe for being a Jew.

So come at me with "simple" again.

Anyway, the Israel stuff is pretty new.

sweet, sweet summer child

The Fundamentalist position on Israel has always boiled down to the Red Heifer which has to be born in "the Holy Land" to signify the Rapture and Tribulation. They've been there since like '77, a cursory reading of charismatic eschatology will say as much (I recommend the Left Behind series as it's basically "Rocky & Bullwinkle's Guide to the End Times"). "Fuck yeah Israel" also annoys the Zoomers who may/may not be sucking down a CCP's worth of Palestinian propaganda but either way are here for the outrage.

In the milieu you're examining? The individual talking points don't even matter. You say so yourself you just refuse to hear yourself saying them. It's all about owning the libs/triggering the snowflakes while the Zoomers are dutifully lining up behind the philosophy of "if it bugs my grandparents it's my jam".

And the thing you're missing is that, with dwindling victories among the populace, both sides are turning inward. The fucking NRB convention? The fuck even is that? Fucking 5,000 attendees is what that is, or roughly eight percent the attendance of the Northwest Flower & Garden Show which you have also never given a shit about but which is organized by the Seattle Orchid Society which my 80-year-old father-in-law is a board member of. Like, my wife has organized conventions for 5,000 people. Herself. In her spare time. They're "let's see if we can get Larry to do the keynote" level operations and here's the former president of the United States out here going "woo hoo red heifer" and selling fucking high tops.

Yet you're eating it fucking up as if it were the burning of the Reichstag.

I read the chat with 'bl00 and spence, and I think my cynical takeaway is that once a country can make nuclear weapons, they can do almost whatever they want to any non-nuclear regional powers, using the threat of proliferation.

This was argued in as many words by the Iranian foreign minister in 2008. He said, in effect, Bush put us, Iraq and North Korea in the Axis of Evil. North Korea has nukes and is still here. Iraq did not and is gone. Our instructions are clear.

Again, though, that's too simple. The United States has maintained an ambivalent, adversarial relationship with Israel when it benefits us - America fucked Britain over to help the Jews and recognized Israel two years before Britain. But then when the Israelis and British got too big for their britches the Americans fucked them both over (in no small part because it fucked Hungary). There's ample evidence that the CIA/NRO knew damn well the Yom Kippur War was bound to happen and let Israel get a little bit fucked before airdropping a fuckton of foreign aid and that frankly, the fall of Iran as a vassal US state caused America to give Israel too much leeway.

Israel is useful to the US. Need some Iranian physicists assassinated? Israel. Need an Iraqi reactor bombed? Israel. Need to shoot down some Soviet MiGs? Israel. Palestine? ... is not. That's really what it comes down to - it's proxy warfare all the way down.

Now. How much are you gonna wanna talk about proxy warfare in Intro to Fuckery? 'cuz it's complicated.

The power of language:

But that familiarity didn’t last. By the end of the first month, the class was split on the definition of “ethnic cleansing”—not only how to define it but who, in terms of the subject doing the action, can be charged with this human rights violation.

For those too young to remember, "ethnic cleansing" was a term unheard of before Slobodan Milosovic. The phrase was coined by the Serbians to describe what they were doing to the Bosnians to say "silly NATO! We're not committing genocide! We're practicing ethnic cleansing! What are you worried about!" It's an example of the power of language that "filling trenches with dead children" was very much genocide, but for the past 30 years everyone has been circling around the crime of "ethnic cleansing" to determine what, exactly, is the prosecutable crime there that doesn't trigger UN conventions against genocide.

It's also worth pointing out that when first introduced, embargoes were considered genocide. After all, they target a civilian population for purposes of death and displacement. Now of course they're the first tool in the kit despite knowing that they hurt the civilian population first and foremost.

The power of language:

The professor called our attention to his use of the term “ethnic cleansing” in his own writing. He wrote that around 750,000 Palestinians were displaced in 1948, an act that today would be considered ethnic cleansing. At first read, this statement seemed bold—he may not have named the Nakba, but his writing gestured toward violence. Even so, his examination felt sanitized. Palestinians “were displaced,” he wrote. But there was no mention of who did the displacing.

The Nakba was the direct result of European genocide and, if you like, "ethnic cleansing." The whole of the post-WWII economy of Europe was powered by confiscated Jewish wealth; the whole of the West German economy was Jewish wealth, the post-war economies of Eastern Europe and the USSR were powered by confiscated Jewish wealth and founded on confiscated Jewish property. The overwhelming majority of post-War American influence was due to massive expansion in the Western states which was only possible due to de-facto confiscation of property from Japanese Americans.

Meanwhile, of course, the 1948 war was in response to a partition plan that allowed Europe to kick the can down the road. If you give the Jews palestine you don't have to give them back Brussels. The British Empire, which had ruled the entire region with an iron fist for generations, was too weak to do anything but withdraw and the end result was genocide.

Jews did the displacing. It's also complicated.

The power of language:

After reading part of the article out loud, a girl who had been fidgeting in her seat said it couldn’t be.

“What couldn’t be?” my professor asked.

“Ethnic cleansing. Because it’s what happened in the Holocaust, so we can’t be charged with this,” she replied. Another student cut in. He qualified by referring to himself as a critic of Israel. “There’s a distinction between occupation and ethnic cleansing,” he announced. “It’s an issue of structural power and systematic violence—what happened in 1948 was not ethnic cleansing.”

I can't be guilty. There's no way I have any culpability here I'm just a smol bean. History, on every level, in every country, at any time, is "we did good" and "they did bad." The purpose of history education from a civics standpoint is to sheepdip your populace into the common understanding that defines your collective morals - that's why the southern US skirmishes over slavery every goddamn day and will until the end of time. Nobody wants to be the baddies. It doesn't help that we don't introduce the "are we the baddies" conversation until fucking college because any casual observation of the History Channel will clue you in to the fact that we're the baddies, all of us, at some point or another.

But unless you want to know this shit, there's too much complexity. "I benefit materially and spiritually from the oppression of others" is an ethics question for philosophy majors, not a viewpoint introduced to children and god help you if you try. So here's this poor Intro to Fuckery professor saddled with Mary Jane and Bobby Sue who are pretty sure the Nakba wasn't ethnic cleansing and into that mix you've got a Palestinian auditor who could obviously teach the class? But whose salary and tenure are not dependent on Mary Jane and Bobby Sue.

We're the baddies, all of us, at some point or another.

Munich bombings? Palestinians. Lebanese civil war? Palestinians. October 7? Palestinians. I could very easily make the argument that each of those was justified and retaliatory but I won't. Fundamentally the Israelis wear uniforms, the Palestinians don't, both sides know it's because that would be the end of the Palestinians and the Israelis get to sit there going "checkmate."

The power of language:

The word “complicated” is often used to describe the occupation in Palestine, a word that insists that occupation is untouchable—Palestine’s history is too complex, there are too many moving parts, it’s a puzzle that can never be solved. But this word is condescending—a distraction. It wants us to feel small, worthless, and petty in our investigation. It demands power structures remain in place, allowing some to speak while requiring others to stay quiet.

"Simple" implies it can be fixed. "Complicated" implies that it can't. It's been nigh onto 80 years and the world can't agree on borders, let alone what happens after that, and it's not like nobody has tried. Ben Gurion and Maier firmly believed that there would never truly be peace until they had exterminated the Palestinians but they also knew that Hitler held those exact same firm beliefs about the Jews so they didn't shout it from the mountaintops. Meanwhile four generations of Arab states have loudly proclaimed that the only pathway to peace is the eradication of Israel which - c'mon. You're going to triangulate around the phrase "ethnic cleansing" and ignore that it's a stated goal of Hamas' charter? Bartcop argued the simplest solution would be to give the Jews Oklahoma and I'm not sure he's wrong, despite the obvious distaste Israel would have for replacing Jerusalem with Tulsa.

"Complicated" masks the fact that in a simpler time, both the Palestinians and the Jews would be extinct. That "simpler time" wasn't so long ago.

And that really gets to the worst part of the Israel/Palestine conflict: both sides plead simplicity and if you disagree, you're a murderer.

IN MY ADULT LIFE I have watched the phrase "ethnic cleansing" be born, ridiculed, argued, enshrined and defined. What started out as "you murderous asshole that's genocide" has become "well, but let's figure out if this is bad or bad-bad" and it's nothing more than a way to justify sitting back and doing nothing. A lot of that is because "genocide" was used to set what the Nazis were doing apart from what everyone throughout history has always done, which was generally just referred to as "winning." And yet there are still Palestinians, and there are still Jews, because as a civilization we no longer permit that scale of win.

If it were simple it would be solved already. That it's not means any argument put forth for solving it in Intro to Fuckery is likely to be eliding some important details.

To the contrary, I started taking semaglutide (generic Ozempic) because a doctor friend of my wife's commented online about how much success she was having treating depression and mood disorders with it. I've been on it four? months now? And I gotta say it takes the edge off. More than that, I've lost like fucking zero weight which, combined with everything else, made me start to go "hmmm I dunno maybe the fact that the miracle weight loss drug is doing nothing should draw my attention to how much thinner I am than nearly all of my contemporaries and how pleased doctors are to see me despite my constantly bemoaning my health."

I wanna call it weird shit but it's not. All it does is mess with your sense of hunger - in my case, a lot. I think for people who just straight gorge themselves it keeps them from gorging themselves. For me? It's basically antabuse for food. And like everything else. I've probably had three shots of alcohol in four months and I basically can't eat pizza anymore without regretting it hours later. Like, I can't handle fat or grease most of the time. Fried foods are pretty much straight out.

The real drag is that it basically makes hunger and nausea feel about the same so you're at "I kinda feel like I'm coming down with the stomach flu, I should probably have a handful of granola." When I was coming down with stomach flu I tried to blame it on the semaglutide and spent some time on forums seeing if I was right; you look at most of the True Believers and they are putting up with GNARLY symptoms and cheering each other on. Shit like "yeah I now take GasX and pepto three times a day it's great!"

The Reuters "study" is Reuters going through an adverse data database and finding 265 cases in fourteen years - if vaccines had side effects incidence that low the Wakefield zombies would never have risen from the grave. They have zero controls and don't report how many negatives they find. The Nature study has an n of 1.6 million.

Yeah the best advice in nearly any endeavor is "hire the best expert you can afford and do what they tell you" and if you are paying artists for a campaign that is fuckin' awesome. No shade intended.

The business model of all these AI companies, on the other hand, is "get people who would never pay experts to pay us because they don't believe in expertise."

Here's the TRUE issue:

1) LLMs lose money whenever you use them.

2) ChatGPT plus is $20 a month. Midjourney is $10 or $60 a month. Copilot is $30 a month. Stable Diffiusion is $9 or $49 a month.

3) Photoshop is $23 a month. Premiere is $23 a month. Animate is $23 a month. Audition is $23 a month. All of them combined is $60 a month.

4) Adobe Stock is $30 a month.

Fundamentally, "make me an image that might have too many toes that might just be a bad rip-off of a license-protected product" is consumer-cost-competitive with "find me an image that was created by humans under crystal-clear licensing terms." And fundamentally, "draw a fuzzy monster that is either kneeling or squatting, I don't care" is more expensive than "here is an absolute bazooka of a content tool in any medium you care to work in."

And that is why none of this shit is being sold to professionals - it's nowhere near the costs-benefits breakpoint where they'd consider it.

You know what fucking sucks about being a creative professional? You're surrounded by other creative professionals who are so fucking egotistical that they're 100% certain they're a creative genius while you're a button pusher. They'll slave away for weeks on something visual and then when it gets to the audio their every instruction is "no more like this. no more like that. No do it more like that. Can't you just give me your sessions and teach me how to use your software you're clearly a fucking idiot oh oops did I say that out loud?" I "worked" with this guy Jesse - friend of a friend - who was a graphics guy on Jimmy Kimmel. He wanted a sound effect for something - I think it was a brain ray zapping Bryan Cranston or some shit for half a second in a 2-minute throwaway bit before his interview. So I spent 20 minutes coming up with a brain ray zapping sound effect. Mutherfucker called me during lunch and left a seven minute message about all the changes he wanted. I noped out and said "sorry, Jesse, no bid" and the only award his short film ever got? Was for sound. That I did. It's fuckin' awesome. It's a werewolf in wrestling gear painted gold for some reason. But the idea that I might know what I'm doing is absolutely fucking unthinkable to a certain segment of creative.

All this AI bullshit is for that guy. The dipshit who prefers to shout at other professionals rather than trust them, who has no respect for the expertise of others, who can't fucking wrap their head around the idea that art requires artists.

And they don't have enough money to support it. Fuckin' every AI company out there is losing money at prices that make Creative Cloud look like a bargain and their solution is to ask for 10% of global GDP to fix the problem.

Dude we had this discussion just a couple days ago:

And I say this as an apex predator in a field that has already experienced an "AI-like" mass extinction event: there are far fewer professional mixers now than there were ten years ago but not because AI can do it, but because the massive proliferation of untalented executives who don't understand post-production made everyone read their television. If you don't need it to actually sound good, you've been able to do it at your house since shortly after Nirvana's "Nevermind" came out. If you need someone to pay for it, I'm right here with $30k worth of Pro Tools.

Are you arguing that my direct and existential experience with exactly this issue somehow disqualifies my opinion?

Nobody thought that computers would mean the death of stores, until they enabled people to shop from home and get it delivered.

To the contrary - EVERYONE thought Amazon was coming for their livelihood they just knew there was nothing they could do about it. Barnes & Noble was blocked from buying Ingram because it would have created a vertical monopoly; Amazon was allowed to eat everyone's lunch because they didn't have stores.

Robots were never supposed to replace workers in restaurants, except now even mid scale restaurants have discovered that it much cheaper to put a Wi-Fi enabled iPad on the table than pay a human to take your order.

The first time I read about the downfall of cheap service was in Newsweek in 1987. There's kiosks and there's table service and I think you will find that aside from the pandemic, hospitality employment has been growing steadily since WWII. McDonald's is definitely employing fewer workers per store but that's never really been considered an overly-desirable job and really - what have we lost?

AI is taking over a lot of office jobs now too.

Which ones? I recognize that my experience is a count against me but I've got more employees than fingers at this point. How much of your payroll have you farmed out to AI?

I mean we NEED mailroom staff, because all the people who work in offices started in the mailroom (in the 1980s) except now there hasn’t been a mailroom since 1990s because people realized that they could reduce their labor costs by using emails instead of inter office memos hand delivered by humans.

...is this a Sammy Glick thing? What are you getting at, exactly?

Let's back up a minute: I pointed out that it takes hundreds of skilled individuals to make a movie and you came back with

- retail

- fast food

- mail sorting

And you came back maaaaaaad.

Once more with feeling: Izotope came out with a plugin called "total mix" in 2011 or 2012. Theoretically it would take your shitty Discovery Channel audio and magically tweak it so that it sounded like a TV show. It was pretty comical; a lot of us beta-test for Izotope and that one was something they didn't even tell us about because... you know. We would have been mad.

It was okay though because instead they unleashed it on a bunch of editors who hate us anyway because we insist we need annoying things like "time" and "money" to make their pretty videos sound like television so Izotope didn't need us anymore anyway. Except the editors tried Total Mix and came back with "what is this hickory-roasted bullshit" because even though the "AI" (yes, they used that terminology) was definitely listening to their audio, and definitely doing something, it didn't know the audio equivalent of "cats have four legs".

It was such a catastrophe that Izotope spent a bunch of money scrubbing the Internet of any mention of "Total Mix." You won't find any record of it now - in part because RME's had a product called "Totalmix" for 20 years (nice job Izotope) and in part because mostly what AI is doing these days is data poisoning. And really, Izotope now has a number of garbage products they sell to neophytes - Vea, Nectar, Neutron, Tonal Balance Control and Neoverb are all "AI" products designed to make your dogshit amateur production sound less dogshit. And they do! They make your dogshit sound less dogshit.

But they don't make it sound good.

Izotope, wisely, still sells real tools. They're expensive, they're complicated and you know what? They are fucking chockablock with AI. I've been using RX for more than 20 years now and the stuff it can do is spooky. But it won't do any of that spooky shit for you because you don't know what you're doing. You could learn? You could get as good at it as I am! But you'd have to put in the time, and then you'd want to be paid. And then we'd be right back where we started.

Look. Let's say a robot can do 99% of my job. Let's say you spent $50k on a commercial with absolutely no humans in it. Let's say you're competing against an ad agency that you know has a human who gets a thousand dollars to do an audio polish. Let's be honest - you're going to pay me a thousand dollars. Because I can get you that last one percent that keeps you from losing your next contract.

Machines have been displacing human workers since the mutherfucking plow, dude. The skills change and so does the work. I tell you what, though - an Amish dude with a team of horses is always going to kick my ass in a corn-growing contest no matter how bitchin' my tractor 'cuz the Amish dude? Knows a thing or two about growing corn. Me? I'm gonna google "how do you grow corn" and try and figure out which of five contradictory snippets I should pay attention to. I'm fukt.

It's just a tool. It's feared by people who don't understand tools, and people who understand what happens when you let people do whatever they want with tools.

I would like Zygar to be right. I don't think he is. I read his book - it's basically Plokhi's book but with more apologies and justifications for the Russians being rank bastards going back to the Vikings. His forward and afterward are both pretty much pleas to his friends in Kyiv to stop calling him a monster. And the book, in general, is "Russia didn't solely fuck up Ukraine, there were ex-Soviet Ukrainians who were just as wretched." An interesting point emphasized by both Zygar and Plokhy is that the power structures of the USSR were rife with opportunistic Ukrainians who both recognized that there was no future in Ukrainian politics and also that the Russians, in general, suck at castle intrigue.

The main difference I see between Ukrainian writers on Russia and Russian writers on Russia is the Russians tend to be "we don't have to be dicks" while the Ukrainians are at "but you always are."

The biggest difficulty I'm seeing right now is there are a lot of building owners who take their purchase price in like 2009-2018, extrapolate 6% per year appreciation because that's what the industry tells them they're entitled to, and then utterly disregard that the 4% rate they bought with and the 8.5% prime (11.5% SBA(7a)) that's out there now do not lend themselves to similar payments.

Let's say you bought a $1m building in April of 2017. You put $300k down. You're at $3600/mo ($2600/mo interest-only). You need to come up with $570k in the next two months and your calculations say your building is currently worth $1.8m.

Let's say I'm negotiating to buy a building in February of 2024. I can put $300k down. That $2600/mo interest-only payment and $300k down buys me a... $650k building. Yeah. You financed $700k, I financed $350k, we have the same payment.

Let's say I'm negotiating to buy your building in February of 2024. I can put $300k down. I'm now paying $12k a month ($11k interest-only).

Let's instead say "fuck this shit" and put that $300k in a CD making 5.5%. If I extrapolate out to when the balloon payment would be due (10 years), I've made $200k just leaving my money in the bank.

Let's now say "fukkit let's rent" and you're gonna be super eager to tie me down to whatever you can fucking get because it's good for your cap rate but I'm gonna go hollupaminnit

And go "yeah, that's residential, but go check out that office vacancy rate again fucko" and keep my powder decidedly fucking dry.

You bought a building seven years ago for a million dollars because it was going to be your retirement. You were going to sell it for $1.8, buy another for $1m using a 1031 exchange and live off of $100k a year until it's time to do it again. And here I am, going "payment for payment your property is worth $650k fucko" and that leaves you $70k after your balloon payment.

We're over a million dollars apart. On what was, in 2017, a million dollar building. Who's gonna blink first? That's what it looks like for me.

LOL I'm in the process of buying two commercial buildings right now I have lots of thinks. What ruminations in particular interest you because I could go 2000 words on this without pausing for breath.

Elsewhere on Bloomberg:

My experience is that the Internet is a good source for "a recipe" while cook books are better sources for "a recipe that works" or "a recipe that is good." Food Network churned out two entire generations of celebrity chefs whose food is passable at best; most online bloggers will make a recipe once, photograph the shit out of it and then be extremely coquettish about whether it's any good. On the other hand, the recipes presented by restaurant owners and caterers and the like are generally presented as loss-leaders to drive up revenue at their physical business and if the recipes suck, that doesn't happen.

If I'm trying something new I'll peruse five or six versions online. If I've decided it has promise I'll delve into the four linear feet of cookbooks at my disposal.

Fuckin' Sam Altman makes me miss Adam Neumann

I'm dealing with global warming also. It's not like this is happening to GenZ alone. We're all in it.

I'm dealing with the corporate hollowing-out of America also. It's not like this is happening to GenZ alone. We're all in it.

Yes. Shit still sucks. And with a different sort of vibe. But I don't know how I can say this any clearer:

Pessimism should never be an excuse for inaction. "your problems don't matter and aren't going to be solved anyways?" c'mon, man. I deserve better than that. Nowhere did I say that. Nowhere did I say anything CLOSE to that. What I said is "I've seen shit a whole lot more hopeless than it is now." I've said it a half-dozen ways. I've elaborated, I've elucidated, I've enumerated and you keep coming back with "but but but."

You know what fucking sucked? TSR being bought by Wizards of the Coast. Fuck you. Magic: The Gathering is Bridge for dipshits and always has been. Pokemon is a fucking blight on the minds of children worldwide and the fact that the thriving community that so threatened the 'boomers that they held fucking congressional hearings about it is now owned by Hasbro means I don't now and never do need to give the first fuck about anyone buying dungeons and dragons ever again. We've gotten to the point where D&D nerds wonder why The Olds care about turning everything into Stephen Universe to which I say "let it all rot."

You can't say which one is worse. I can. I can say it with no hesitation. And I say it with this level of stridency because every.single.mutherfucker.up.in.this.bitch is offended by my optimism and truly - y'all are a bunch of WATBs.

Bolton's book is fucking hilarious. The pomposity drips off the page like wet red paint. He also comes off as a self-aggrandizing oaf - there are a number of statements and arguments made in that book where you're left going "did you even go to college."

But the best part is as a deeply unserious man with a wafer-thin understanding of the world, the degree to which Trump just fucking rubs him the wrong way is a goddamn joy. It's like watching leprosy write an essay about how much lupus sucks.

I was stuck in traffic behind a Chevy Astro with a Florida plate when NPR announced that the Supreme Court had handed the presidency to George Bush. That was fucking dispiriting.

I volunteered for the Kerry Campaign, which was so thick on the ground in Seattle that "undecided voters" got sick of us hounding them. Exit polls showed Kerry wiping the floor with Bush and the voting machines were garbage. Kerry rolled over within hours. That was fucking dispiriting.

THE OCTOBER SURPRISE WAS FUCKING REAL AND NOBODY CARES. That's fucking dispiriting.

Trump? Trump did exactly what everyone predicted he would do and the country largely went "what the fuck?" he was every bit as incompetent as everyone predicted, he was every bit as vainglorious and ineffective as everyone predicted, he tried to overthrow the fucking government of the United States and what he got was 300-something lost lawsuits and a bunch of poop-throwing idiots in Nancy Pelosi's office.

"You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want"

- Donald Rumsfeld

Fuck yeah, let's switch up the parliamentary procedure. Let's switch up fuckin' whatever we can. Is it worse to run on Hillarycare and then accomplish nothing? In 2007 I lost my job. State law compelled insurers to offer plans at the same rates as they were available to corporations, but as then-insurance-commissioner future-governer Chris Gregoire told me personally over the phone, "all we can do is sue and it didn't work last time." So THERE WAS NO FUCKING INSURANCE AVAILABLE TO ME UNTIL OBAMACARE. Now? now we all gripe about how much it costs but that's a very different thing than it being simply un-fucking-available.

Joe Biden, objectively speaking, is the most liberal president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And yet the Online Left is at "well he hasn't been able to control the Israelis just like every president since the fucking SS Exodus therefore I'm staying home."

Backintheday? Back when we knew the election had been stolen and an illegal war was busy killing hundreds of thousands and fucking up two cultures for generations? When ISIS didn't exist but you knew it was around the corner because how couldn't it be? Duncan Black coined the term "WATB" ("whiney-ass titty baby") to describe the right-wing pundits and public figures who got absolutely everything they wanted and yet still complained about how unfair everything was. It's always been more satisfying on the tongue than "snowflake."

Pick your pejorative. Either way, insisting on exactly the right conditions for your delicate ass to flower is for orchids, not politics.

Filing this under “mental models for understanding how to utilize LLMs”.

For all the wrong reasons.

Hey! Dan Shipper here. Registration is open for my new course, Maximize Your Mind With ChatGPT.

Fuckin' what the world needs now is EST with buzzwords. Landmark with tech trends. 10/10. No notes.

Time isn’t as linear as you think. It has ripples and folds like smooth silk. It doubles back on itself, and if you know where to look, you can catch the future shimmering in the present.

Not according to thermodynamics but do go off.

Last week I wrote about how ChatGPT changed my conception of intelligence and the way I see the world. I’ve started to see ChatGPT as a summarizer of human knowledge, and once I made that connection, I started to see summarizing everywhere: in the code I write (summaries of what’s on StackOverflow), and the emails I send (summaries of meetings I had), and the articles I write (summaries of books I read).

Great. We can agree on that. LLMs take a corpus of knowledge, navigate it ad nauseum, build a black box association LUT and then vomit out datapoints that have been stochastically randomized from regular to extra-spicy. If you want the mean, median and mode of a million color swatches, LLMs will give you a paint chip. Or, run it a dozen times, get a dozen similar paint chips.

Summarizing used to be a skill I needed to have, and a valuable one at that. But before it had been mostly invisible, bundled into an amorphous set of tasks that I’d called “intelligence”—things that only I and other humans could do.

Well there's your first mistake. Summarizing is fucking math. What you're talking about is insight and insight is what wins, not "summarizing."

But now that I can use ChatGPT for summarizing, I’ve carved that task out of my skill set and handed it over to AI.

Yup. If you want the mean, median and mode of a large corpus of data without any insights into the data what-so-fucking-ever, ChatGPT is the tool for you. So yeah - if you are basically eliminating insight as a valuable commodity, ChatGPT is fucking amazeballs.

Now, my intelligence has learned to be the thing that directs or edits summarizing, rather than doing the summarizing myself.

Great! You've now put yourself in the position of guessing whether the machine is correct or not without any way to get the machine to show its work.

As Every’s Evan Armstrong argued several months ago, “AI is an abstraction layer over lower-level thinking.” That lower-level thinking is, largely, summarizing.

No it's fucking PATTERN RECOGNITION.

If I’m using ChatGPT in this way today, there’s a good chance this behavior—handing off summarizing to AI—is going to become widespread in the future. That could have a significant impact on the economy.

Let's be clear - those of us with insight both long for and dread a world where all you chumps have deprecated insight. Long for it because we're going to wipe the floor with you. Dread because the world will be a fucking dumpster fire.

But what happens when that very skill—knowing and utilizing the right knowledge at the right time—becomes something that computers can do faster and sometimes just as well as we can?

I'm sorry but when did we go from "summarizing" to "knowing and utilizing" as if they were the same thing? Because they're not even vaguely the same thing. Here's a whole post about ChatGPT not knowing SHIT.

It means a transition from a knowledge economy to an allocation economy. You won’t be judged on how much you know, but instead on how well you can allocate and manage the resources to get work done.

Does Dan have any employees? 'cuz I judge my employees on whether or not they can do the tasks I've hired them for.

There’s already a class of people who are engaged in this kind of work every day: managers.

that is not what managers do. Managers coordinate people.

They need to know things like how to evaluate talent, manage without micromanaging, and estimate how long a project will take.

I don't think this guy has ever met a manager.

Individual contributors—the people in the rest of the economy, who do the actual work—don't need that skill today.

Or, for that matter, an "individual contributor."

But in this new economy, the allocation economy, they will. Even junior employees will be expected to use AI, which will force them into the role of manager—model manager.

Fucking lol every employee I have is "expected to use" visual basic, HTML5, VoIP, SSL and Java. They don't know that? And that's fine. What they do is "their jobs" and they do them well. Why the fuck would ChatGPT be any goddamn different?

(500 words of big-think bullshit ommitted)

Of course, Nightshade is not able to reverse the flow of time: any artworks scraped prior to being shaded by the tool were still used to train AI models, and shading them now may impact the model’s efficacy going forward, but only if those images are re-scraped and used again to train an updated version of an AI image generator model.

If the NYTimes lawsuit prevails even a little bit, they'll have to.

I have a complex regard for Haidt because on the one hand, his research is imaginative, well-designed and supports a lot of his basic conclusions. On the other hand, he's all about I used to be a liberal until they ignored my conclusions now I am SYNNNNDROMMMMME

Haidt's fundamental argument is "Western liberal thought is an anomaly across humanity, therefore we should be more accepting of conservatives." Compare and contrast with neoliberalism: "Western liberal thought is an anomaly across humanity, that's why we run the fucking planet, bitchez." I think liberals and conservatives are way too wrapped around the wheel justifying their social mores, which is kind of Haidt's point. Haidt is one of those people wrapped around the wheel, which is why he's controversial.

I will also say that there's a real need for both sides of the culture wars to scour the field for swords rather than plowshares. To whit:

The post shows how three very bad ideas were nurtured on Tumblr, around 2013, and then escaped into progressive online communities (and ultimately into progressive real-world communities such as university campuses), leading to a sharp rise in signs of depression, anxiety, and hopelessness that was most pronounced in young women on the left.

Okay, what are the "three very bad ideas?"

1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker

    2. Always trust your feelings

    3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people. 

That's too general to be useful and is dismissive of a whole lot of nuance. "What doesn't kill you makes you weaker" is a flippant argument against safe spaces, which are valuable in therapy and divisive in general society. But there's always going to be a give and take over defining the square. The thing nobody wants to talk about regarding campuses is that it's a captive population paying through the absolute nose for a questionable credential before they parachute into an economy that has never been so challenging for young people since the advent of child labor laws and there will be a lot of jockeying by young people trying to get their money's worth while they still can. And the gay ones? Are gonna wanna not get hassled for being gay. Jon Haidt is ten years older than me, which means he was just starting to teach in an era where manic Christian preachers would stand in the middle of the square and shout "you're going to burn in hell, faggot" through a megaphone at anyone with colored hair. Wait, what am I talking about that shit was still happening in 2019 in the middle of one of the most liberal community colleges in the middle of one of the most liberal west coast states in America.

Haidt himself would agree that people need time to heal from trauma and that people heal slower if the trauma is ongoing. The vast majority of even the most terminally online lefties would agree that not everything needs to be nerfed out for all things and all people at all times. Yet everyone will go to the mattresses warring over the viability of safe spaces because of course we will.

I also think that "internet" and "social media" are very much not the same thing. Social media could be great for kids but the fundamental layout adapted and espoused by every social media company out there (except one) is dark design through and through. I don't think you can credibly say "most studies on social media are bad" and have any credibility when (1) Facebook designed their own studies (2) ran them for their own edification only (3) by their own metrics determined that social media is bad (4) did fucking nothing about it while (5) hiding the results. If RJR pays someone to determine if cigarettes cause cancer, gets told conclusively that cigarettes cause cancer, hides the info that cigarettes cause cancer and continue to sell cigarettes as if they don't cause cancer? Yeah that's negligence. Social media, same same. You'd think they'd run a study or two about how to make social media not an overwhelming net negative. Maybe they have! But if they had any results that said anything other than "go out of business" you'd expect them to trumpet those results from the rooftops.

You're absolutely right about toddlers and iPads. The contention is "how bad is unfettered iPad access for your kid" and pretty much any analysis you run is going to tell you "worse than Youtube would have you believe." Fundamentally, the problem is risk assessment and social media companies' attempts to elide the actual risks.

I've mixed entire seasons of Hell's Kitchen and I've mixed entire seasons of Master Chef. What has always interested me is how collaborative an environment Master Chef is - the cast lives in the same hotel for the duration, and they have a little hang-out room where they look up recipes and stuff, and none of it is filmed. Behind the scenes there's a ridiculous amount of camaraderie that Fox deliberately excises. Compare and contrast with Hell's Kitchen - those guys live in the same dorm and they hate each other. Master Chef has to play down how much everyone is just there to have a good time and make friends while Hell's Kitchen has to play down the fact that their contestants are fragging each other.

I feel like when you start with amateurs, who know they're amateurs, who have no interest in becoming professionals? You get a bunch of vacationers who are not going to let you ruin a good time. We had to reshoot a couple ceremonial beats on Master Chef once because none of the producers were clever enough to notice that all the contestants were wearing matching chef hats in solidarity with a contestant who had just been (kinda unfairly) eliminated. But I feel like when you start with the grasping influencer "professional" caste you get people who will stitch each other up for a pack of cigarettes.

From that perspective, Bake-off can't help but be nice. They shoot that thing Friday-Saturday-Sunday and then the normies go back home and practice. They're constantly reminded of normalcy, they can commiserate with the outside world, they have time to reflect. The stuff that makes it crap is entirely enforced by the producers - "Bakers, you have half an hour to make macaroons!" "Welcome to an un-airconditioned tent in July, let's temper chocolate!" "Yes it's raining absolute buckets but for some fucking reason you are all going to make toffee today because we're British and have no fucking idea how to work with the weather." "That's right, we've failed to give you blast chillers for another season, have fun making the ice cream we insist be done in three hours." If the British weren't a bunch of cheap shits that show would be so much better.

I am FPSing vicariously through you, warrior. Give 'em hell.

Here's the game-theory breakdown on the situation:

Who benefits from Trump being the last Republican president?

Forget aspirations, forget statements of intent, forget philosophical leanings, get down'n'dirty on it. Conservatism, not capital-C American Conservatism but "conservatism" as sociological behavior, is rules-based order and altering those rules destroys order. Conservatism ruled China for several thousand years - "what the emperor says, goes." Conservatism ruled Islam for more than half of its run, with varying amounts of "It's in the Quran" "it's in the Quran and Hadith" "it's in the Quran, Hadith and Sunnah". Al Qaeda and ISIS are widely regarded as apostates by conservative muslims, FWIW, because of their loose interpretations of the Quran.

Conservatism and populism never align. Conservative social principles are often aped by populists but they never walk the walk. In the political climate of the Weimar republic the Nazis were radicals through and through. So were Mussolini and the fascista. If anything, radical populism is used to sweep away liberalism and replace it with conservatism (see: Iran) but once in place, conservatives gonna conserve.

The Republican party has been using conservative social principles in a populist framework since Newt Gingrich. They've been able to protect their positions through gerrymandering and the peculiarities of the electoral college but a brief glimpse at the 2022 results makes it pretty clear that taking down Roe was dangerous. It's also been a 40-year goal so I reckon most conservatives would argue it was worth it. Trump, on the other hand...

Aside from flipping the supreme court his term in office was a net loss. He polarized the electorate past the point where Republicans can accomplish anything. The Republicans have lost John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Liz Cheney and Jeff Flake for not being crazy enough. Pretend you're in the Federalist Society. Do you consider Marjorie Taylor Greene a good trade for Paul Ryan? JD Vance a good trade for Jeff Flake? Do these picks advance your goals? Do they enrich your coffers?

Keep in mind: corporations have been noticing how shitty the Republicans have been for them. And keep in mind: it's not like the Republicans chose Trump. They ended up with him because they've been dog-whistling so long that the yard ended up full of mutts.

Liberals forget: Democrats will only vote for Democrats if those Democrats pass their 99-point purity test. Republicans will vote for Republicans unless they do something so repugnant that they stay home instead. Democrats are grudgingly aligned with the Democratic party but Republicans need a formal excommunication before they'll disregard a Republican.

So who benefits from the Federalist Society trashing their principles for a man who is anathema to everything the Federalist Society holds dear? Clarence Thomas, for sure. That dude will go wherever he's paid to go, or more specifically, wherever Ginny is paid to make him go. Gorsuch? Gorsuch gives no fucks for Trump. Alito? Alito wouldn't piss on Trump if he were on fire, much like Scalia before him. It's all a game to Alito and Trump doesn't play by the rules. Cavanaugh? He might. But he also knows that at best, Democrats will forever be working angles for his downfall and never let the world forget about his hearings and at worst, he'll end up sidelined in an ornamental court that will never do anything but rubberstamp a hereditary Trump administration. Barrett? Tough to say but she's got the same problems as Cavanaugh. Roberts? Roberts upheld Obamacare via state's rights. If you look at the way Roberts has been ruling, he's trying to preserve the (conservative) legitimacy of the supreme court and he's been using State's Rights to do it.

The Republican Party is in a death spiral. Trump had 4 years to stuff the administration with loyalists and his insurrection still failed. Not only that but everyone associated with it is either career-finished, legally-imperiled or both. Who are these clever opportunists looking this situation over and going "now that the Democrats have forewarning this is all going to be easier and more lucrative this time?"

Conservatives never signed up for Trump, they've just been unable to get rid of him. But he's an old man, growing increasingly febrile, with less and less influence among business interests and a policy platform increasingly divorced from the wants and needs of mainstream conservatism. What does a Trump administration look like in, say, 2027? Are the Republicans busily laying the groundwork for a Ramaswamy administration? A Stephen Miller administration? Who's left aside from lickspittle toadies? And how do you actually get anything done?

It's one thing to back Caesar Augustus when he's got the Praetorian Guard. It's quite another when he's on the outs and you're four years away from a Caligula administration. So right now? Everyone is trying to say the right thing to maintain their position for a time when they can say what they want again.

I'll say this again, for clarity and posterity: TRUMP TOOK HIS BEST SHOT AND FAILED. Mutherfucker pulled out all the stops leading up to January 6, and left no stone unturned in the aftermath. Every move since has been a portrait of incompetence. The part liberals miss is that every Republican is telegraphing "I want to keep my job" which overlaps with "I want Trump in office" until it doesn't. When you face no electoral penalty for dishonesty, capriciousness, duplicity and falsehood, you can say whatever the fuck you want so they all want Trump. As soon as it's safe to say they don't? They'll act like they never did.

From a game theory perspective, a supreme court ruling that says "yup, states can ban whoever the fuck they want" benefits the conservatives more. It would allow them to do things like simply ban Democrats from running in Florida, for example. For a while, anyway, but it gives them a lot of performative juice.

I don't this is at all settled. I think there's a lot of really exotic parliamentary maneuvering going on and part of it is boxing the Supreme Court into branding Trump an insurrectionist. Four more years of Biden hurts them a lot less than a second Trump administration and they know it - Biden faces consequences for reneging on deals.

They'll never say this of course. But if you watch the behavior of anybody who actually runs things (McConnell, Roberts) you get a very different perspective on Republican behavior than if you just watch Lindsay Graham say some shit on Fox and Friends.

You got to Book 4 and stopped because things bog down in interpersonal relationships with characters you don't care about. It's the same problem with the show - it's interesting until it isn't/

Speaking from my haughty perch of hundreds of economics charts per day, the largest determinant of blue collar revival is policy.

To be (undeservedly) charitable towards The Economist, this is likely less obvious in Europe. Europe has long had a better social safety net, a higher wage standard and a more equitable tax structure. The Marshall Plan, fundamentally, rebuilt Europe's economy the way the Democratic Party would shape America if the Republicans weren't in the way. Europe's COVID policies, as a result, largely reflected a tepid enhancement of the status quo because the status quo was almost good enough... at least when compared to hypercapitalist economies like America's. American COVID policies, on the other hand, were "quick, Republicans are sleeping, pass massive social reforms" because there were (and are) plenty to pass.

Do you remember walking into the gun section of Bass Pro Shops and not being titillated, not being amused, not being intimidated, not being agitated but being genuinely and truly awed? The sheer Americanness of it all left you speechless for several minutes. It was useful for me to see that reaction because frankly, it's the water I swim in. Preposterous amounts of gun culture has been a given going back to Lea Thompson with an AK-47. It's like that backpack you wore up the mountain - you don't truly realize how heavy it is until you take it off.

Remember that feeling and recognize that's the way Americans feel when they learn about things like European healthcare. European college. European vacations. It's a fundamental, speechless recognition of a vast difference that has no supporting evidence for its existence beyond cultural choices. It's a horrified, irreversible recognition of a great wrong that you have no way to right.

It's important to understand that COVID relief, for Americans, was a realization that the wrongs can be righted. It was discovering that shitty treatment was a choice. The minute you make more money sitting at home than you do driving a forklift? You're never driving a forklift for that much ever again. You could watch it in everyone's eyes. Families getting $700 a month just for being families - even though it was their own money, from their own tax credit, that they were getting anyway - the government sending them checks just for having kids felt like a dream. Bartenders recognizing that no, they're not going to get abused by drunks for $2 and tips ever again because clearly, that's a choice by their employer.

We did a funny thing up here. We raised the wages on service staff from $2 to $15. And for a while, all the restaurant owners got salty and put things on the receipts telling you that you didn't have to tip. And you know what? After COVID? The little receipt notes went away and the tips stayed the same. Do people eat less at restaurants? Yeah. Are the restaurants doing fine? Yeah. And when you do go? Your service is hella better. Go figure. as Quatrarius points out, there's a massive difference between being "underpaid" and being "grossly underpaid."

By almost all metrics, American productivity is on trend or better compared to where we were prior to COVID. By almost all metrics, Europe is not. This is not because Europe is a bunch of laggards, it's because Europe had less room for improvement. Energy insecurity? Yeah for Europe. The US and Canada are the 4th and 5th largest oil exporters in the world and the 3rd, Iraq, is effectively a vassal state. What we got was the CHIPs act and the American Rescue Plan, both of which were tailor-made to grow blue-collar industry in red states.

From 2010 to 2020 I got emails telling me how to "offshore" my production. Since 2021 I have been getting emails telling me how to "onshore" or "nearshore" my production. There's a real and deserved recognition that the United States fundamentally gave up its position as a manufacturing leader in exchange for the financialization of American industry. There will be a real and deserved recognition that the United States fuckn' up and decided not to do that anymore in 2021. Partly? That's China being too expensive. Partly? That's global polarization and the unpredictability of trade in a world where history has decidedly not ended. But mostly it's the result of the Republican Party giving up any attempts whatsoever to throw sops at business once Paul Ryan left, leaving the Democrats to go

Remember the '50s? Worked out pretty well for you guys, right? Yeah taxes were high but so were profits and you had no problem attracting labor because the government made sure everyone was mostly okay most of the time. How would you like the '50s again? 'cuz we're thinking errbody loves the '50s, unless you were black, but that's a whole other issue we'll sidestep for now. So how 'bout the '50s?

It is fair and accurate to recognize the Trump administration as a kernel panic of the American operating system. Things have not fully reset but the vacancy of an empty stack was rapidly filled by Democrats, who care about wonky shit more than gay penguins in children's books.

The Economist should know this. I want to believe they see the same charts I do. I want to believe they have better sources of information than I do. But they are not demonstrating it.

1) Online advertising is horrifically ineffective.

2) Online advertising is the primary method of remuneration for the lion's share of the internet.

3) Online advertising has, nonetheless, annihilated traditional advertising and thus, driven traditional advertisers online.

4) Traditional advertisers are unlike online advertisers in that they demand metrics to refine their advertising. As a result, the futility of online advertising grows increasingly obvious, driving down the prices of online advertising and driving down the remuneration for the lion's share of the internet.

5) Substack is first-past-the-post to say "give some away for free, sell some more, we take a cut"

6) Substack becomes the de-facto home for quality content.

Ryan Holiday, back when he had a point to make, made the point that "journalism" as we know it came about when the New York Times started selling subscriptions to their paper, thereby reducing the pressure to rely on sensationalism. Within a couple years the yellow sheets were entirely done and America had a Fourth Estate. The British never really figured out "subscriptions" which is why their journalism remains tit-driven.

https://i.imgur.com/WHMZ8JF.mp4

The FrankenKern has two spindles. One of them is a $50k ISO20 grinding spindle from Fischer SFJ. It runs at 20k RPM and takes whatever tools fit in an ISO20 tool holder. The other is a $4k 1/8" PCB cutter from NSK. It runs at 50k RPM and takes anything on a 1/8" shank. It'll have three spindles but that's another story.

The crazy-expensive grinding spindle clamp is 60mm, to fit a 60mm Fischer SFJ. The NSK is 50mm. Not only that the digging end of the Fischer protrudes about 50mm more than the NSK would like to. So I basically need a 75mm sleeve with set screws in it, that's 60mm on the outside and 50mm on the inside, preferably as straight as possible (both spindles have a runout of 1 micron or less).

Paging McMaster-Carr

The unpleasant discovery, though, is that your magic $50 McMaster drill bushing is Rockwell 61. As in, "will burnish your cheap shitty Chinese Amazon drill bits to a shiny bluntness" even before you acknowledge that you're trying to drill a curved surface with a 40-year-old drill press.

So you wander into Western Tool, as one does, and say "I need to drill and tap some 3mm holes in this" and they look at it and they look at you and they hem and haw and you say "and it's 1144 so my understanding is you can't anneal it, drill it, tap it and re-temper it" and they go "hmmm" and they get on the phone with drill manufacturers and they come back and say "so we've got $10 bits that are rated to Rockwell 45, I can get you this one that's rated to Rockwell 80, good luck with the tapping, you're better off thread milling it" and you sit there going "where the hell am I going to find a machine with enough precision and rigidity to thread mill a 3mm hole" and then you mentally stare at the camera like the monkey kid in Jumanji.

BUT

You also decide to look up the thermal expansion coefficient of 1144 and recognize that at the circumference you're working with you get about a micron per degree c and the difference between 0.0015" shim stock and 0.0020" shim stock is 75 degrees and it's already got between 0.003" and 0.0035" clearance so you get yourself about $10 worth of stainless steel shim stock of Amazon and put your drill bushing in the oven and decide to write a pubski post about it while you wait for it to heat up for a second time because yes indeedy, a 0.004" feeler gage will totally fit between a bushing at 350 and a spindle at 40 and when that thing tightens down? It's gonna take a blowtorch to get it off again prolly.

Wish me luck.

EDIT: well that was just this side of catastrophe. Thermal expansion of 1144 is 11.5 microns per minute. Thermal expansion of 303 is 17.2 which means I had time to get it partway on before it locked up like the 405 on the day before Thanksgiving a good inch away from anywhere useful. Some judicious blowtorching some gentle persuasion via claw hammer and we again have four parts but I'm thinkin' (A) 1 shim is enough (B) we're gonna let that spindle hang out in the freezer overnight.

To be fair, that answer wasn't originally mine; it came from a book on relationship advice I read maybe 25 years ago. I had recently ditched a relationship where I was paying for everything because she wanted to demonstrate her "financial independence" from daddy - the same daddy who flew us to Kauai for two weeks for her graduation, the same daddy who guilt-bought cars for his kids.

The advice came from their take on how unequal financial partners can have an equal relationship - if she's a barista and he's an investment broker, it's pretty dumb to expect them to split the tab down the center. What's important is that both partners feel they're on an equal footing, so sometimes she treats at Wing Stop, sometimes he treats at Ruth's Chris. The argument went further: when cohabiting, there should be a joint account and two private accounts so that the money responsible for maintaining the mechanics of the relationship is sorted while the money responsible for maintaining the joy of the relationship exists within each partner's sphere of autonomy.

I've seen a lot of relationship structures. I've seen a lot of different ways people make each other happy. And the through-line on "unhappy" is always one partner giving more than they think they're getting. There's no point in arbitrating where that line is or how much laundry-folding equals one mowed lawn or whatever; what matters is that whatever one partner needs is given freely by the other.

You want an example? My wife's needs are simple: (1) don't fuck with her pillow (2) don't leave your socks in the living room. Need something ornate sewn by the evening? No problem. On the other hand, she lives in dire fear of the written word so if I vomit 250 words for a job posting, she sees that as saving her days and days. It would take me several weeks to accomplish anything with fabric but I can spit out limericks in near-realtime - what I give up is nominal but it means the world to her, what she gives up is nominal but it's huge for me.

(1) don't fuck with the pillow (2) don't leave your socks in the living room is much more achievable to me than (A) guess what mood I'm in and respond properly or else I will rip the remote from your fingers and fling it at the wall without so much as a word of warning BUT

I have seen, been around, befriended and counseled people who fucking need to scratch that crazy-ass "I must date an unstable histrionic bitch" itch.

Chicanery works