Yes, that’s a new word in the blog title: collabortage. It’s a tech-industry phenomenon that needed a name and never had one before. Collabortage is what happens when a promising product or technology is compromised, slowed down, and ultimately ruined by a strategic alliance between corporations that was formed (at least ostensibly) to develop it and bring it to market.
Collabortage always looks accidental, like a result of exhaustion or management failure. Contributing factors tend to include: poor communication between project teams on opposite sides of an intercorporate barrier, never-resolved conflicts between partners about project objectives, understaffing by both partners because each expects the other to do the heavy lifting, and (very often) loss of internal resource-contention battles to efforts fully owned by one player.
Occasionally the suspicion develops that collabortage was deliberate, the underhanded tactic of one partner (usually the larger one) intended to derail a partner whose innovations might otherwise have disrupted a business plan.
Eric S. Raymond, “Collabortage”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-02-16.
November 21, 2023
QotD: Collabortage
November 17, 2023
Prometheus
Virginia Postrel tries to correct the common misinterpretation of the story of the Titan Prometheus:
“The Torture of Prometheus” by Salvator Rosa (1615-1673)
Oil painting in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Corsini via Wikimedia Commons.
Listening to Marc Andreessen discuss his Techno-Optimist Manifesto on the Foundation for American Innovation’s Dynamist podcast, I was struck by his repetition of something that is in the manifesto and is completely wrong. “The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator – haunts our nightmares,” he writes.1 On the podcast, he elaborated by saying that, although fire has many benefits, the Prometheus myth focuses on its use as a weapon. He said something similar in a June post called “Why AI Will Save the World“:
The fear that technology of our own creation will rise up and destroy us is deeply coded into our culture. The Greeks expressed this fear in the Prometheus Myth – Prometheus brought the destructive power of fire, and more generally technology (“techne”), to man, for which Prometheus was condemned to perpetual torture by the gods.
No. No. No. No.
Prometheus is punished for loving humankind. He stole fire to thwart Zeus’ plans to eliminate humanity and create a new subordinate species. He is a benefactor who sacrifices himself for our good. His punishment is an indicator not of the dangers of fire but of the tyranny of Zeus.
Prometheus is cunning and wise. His name means foresight. He knows what he is doing and what the likely consequences will be.
Eventually his tortures end when he is rescued by the hero Herakles (aka Hercules), who shoots the eagle charged with eating Prometheus’ liver every day, only for it to grow back to be eaten again.
The Greeks honored Prometheus. They celebrated technē. They appreciated the gifts of civilization.
The ancient myth of Prometheus is not a cautionary tale. It is a reminder that technē raises human beings above brutes. It is a myth founded in gratitude.
1. Frankenstein isn’t The Terminator either. Frankenstein is a creator who won’t take responsibility for his creation, a father who rejects and abandons his child. The Creature is frightening and dangerous but he is also the book’s moral center, a tragic, sympathetic character who is feared and rejected by human beings because of his appearance. Only then does he turn deadly. Frankenstein arouses pity and terror because we empathize with its central figure and understand his rage.
The novel’s most reasonable political reading is not as a story of the dangers of science but as a parable of slavery and rebellion. “By the eighteen-fifties, Frankenstein’s monster regularly appeared in American political cartoons as a nearly naked black man, signifying slavery itself, seeking his vengeance upon the nation that created him,” writes historian Jill LePore, who calls the “Frankenstein-is-Oppenheimer model … a weak reading of the novel.” I agree.
The Romantics tended to identify with Prometheus and Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote a play called Prometheus Unbound, further undermining the reading of Frankenstein as an anti-Promethean fable.
November 15, 2023
“If you cannot make your own pig iron, you are just LARP’n as a real power”
CDR Salamander talks about the importance of an old industry to a modern industrial economy:
We probably need to start this out by explaining exactly what a blast furnace is and why it is important if you want to be a sovereign nation.
First of all, what it does;
The purpose of blast furnace is to chemically reduce and physically convert iron oxide into liquid iron called “hot metal” The blast furnace is a huge, steel stack lined with refractory brick where iron ore, coke and limestone are charged into the top and preheated air is blown into the bottom. The raw materials require 6 to 8 hours to descend to the bottom of the furnace where they become the final product of liquid slag and liquid iron. These liquid products are drained from the furnace at regular intervals. The hot air that was blown into the bottom of the surface ascends to the top in 6 to 8 seconds after going through numerous chemical reactions. Once the blast furnace is started it continuously runs for four to ten years with only short stops to perform planned maintenance.
Why are blast furnaces so important? Remember the middle part of Billy Joel’s “Iron, coke, chromium steel?”
“Coke” is in essence purified coal, almost pure carbon. It is about the only thing that can at scale make “new” or raw iron, aka “pig iron”. Only coke in a blast furnace can make enough heat to turn iron ore in to iron. You can’t get that heat with an electric furnace.
Pig iron is the foundation of everything that follows that makes an industrial power. If you cannot make your own pig iron, you are just LARP’n as a real power.
It takes a semester at least to understand this, but here is all you really need to know;
Primary differences
While the end product from each of these is comparable, there are clearly differences between their capabilities and process. Comparing each type of furnace, the major distinctions are:
Material source – blast furnaces can melt raw iron ore as well as recycled metal, while electric arc furnaces only melt recycled or scrap metal.
Power supply – blast furnaces primarily use coke to supply the energy needed to heat up the metal, while EAFs use electricity to accomplish this.
Environmental impact – because of the fuels used for each, EAFs can produce up to 85% less carbon dioxide than blast furnaces.
Cost – EAFs cost less than blast furnaces and take up less space in a factory.
Efficiency – EAFs also reach higher temperatures much faster and can melt and produce products more quickly, as well as having more precise control over the temperature compared to blast furnaces.
We’ll get to that environmental impact later, but the “Material source” section is your money quote.
Without a blast furnace, all you can do is recycle scrap iron.
You cannot fight wars at scale if all you have is scrap iron. You cannot be an industrial hub off of just scrap iron. If you are a nation of any size, you then become economically and security vulnerable at an existential level. I don’t care how much science fiction you get nakid and roll in; wars are won by steel, ungodly amounts of steel.
Where do you get the steel to build your warships? Your tanks? Your factories? Your buildings? Your factories?
If you can only use scrap, then you are simply a scavenger living off the hard work of previous generations. Eventually you run out. You will wind up like the cypress mills of old Florida where, once they ran out of cypress trees, they simply sold off the cypress lumber their mills were constructed of … and then went bankrupt.
November 12, 2023
The most dangerous man in the world?
Elizabeth Nickson on Daniel Jupp’s new biography of Bill Gates, Gates of Hell: Why Bill Gates is the Most Dangerous Man in the World:
A new book, Gates of Hell: Why Bill Gates Is the Most Dangerous Man in the World by Daniel Jupp, manages to dissect all of Gates’s activities since September 2011 and has he ever been a busy psychopath. Jupp is one of the several gifted polemicists called forth by the gnarly times we live in. He soared to recognition with witty, but somehow soothing Facebook blasts that combined PJ O’Rourke with Jonathan Swift with Steve Bannon. Everyone passed around his posts exulting. Jupp, if that is his real name, hails from working class England, Essex to be precise-ish, and edits or writes for Country Squire Magazine. Whatever, he is of the time and do we ever need him.
Jupp in Gates of Hell is careful. He does not risk libel, not even a whiff of it. And in contrast to his usual oxygen-rich posts, he is measured, calm, working with a surgeon’s focus, as he peels back the PR, the methodology, the results, the hiding of the malign results, the cantering on to the next heady task as the ultimate white Saviour. Unfortunately, as Jupp describes, Gates is not quite as simple as that. He also changes law, dictates policy in far too many countries where he does not belong, buys all the media, and every politician he can. When he calls, the Great and the Good come to sit in his Presence and be lectured to in that stickily sentimental tone about his noble purpose. When he makes a mistake, and almost everything he does is a mistake, he spends several hundred million dollars buying desperate legacy media and every functional PR firm to cover it up.
Gates’s life changed when his practice of turning competitors to scorched earth, thereby crippling innovation in the digital world, resulted in an embarrassing court case. The sullen, nit-picking slug on trial, radiating contempt is, I suspect, the real Gates, or his shadow self, very much like Gollum in LOTR defending his Precious. Jupp skates by the many charges of sexual abuse, but points out that he formally left Microsoft after one of them became too big to ignore.
Gates then constructed his new self. He married, not a babe, but a substantive character, and had three children in quick succession. He hired the most expensive fixers and PR, and built himself an avuncular sweater-clad persona. He was going to give away his massive fortune, give back to the people from his incredible privilege.
In the ensuing years, that fortune doubled and then doubled again.
That’s because he met Jeffrey Epstein. While Epstein’s sexual activities have received 90% of the attention, his activities during the last years of the Clinton administration are the more significant. First of all, Epstein was running an entrapment scheme for various covert agencies, which made his insinuation into government easy. At the same time, he taught high-level government officials, cabinet ministers, heads of agencies, and the great larcenous dame herself, Hillary Clinton, how to steal. It was a pincer movement. Having second thoughts? Here’s a video of your encounter with a fourteen year old.
I’ll make it super simple: he taught these people, and they weren’t all Democrats, how to stand up a policy meant to benefit the least advantaged, like for instance access to the housing ladder, and then profit off it. Since then every government initiative has carved out for its progenitor, a fortune. His first, of course, was Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and James Johnson who ran these agencies into deep bankruptcy, collapsed the ’08 economy, nevertheless walked away with $100 million from a government job. Wall Street Journal reporter, Gretchen Morgenson’s Reckless Endangerment covers the waterfront here.
Who Destroyed The Library of Alexandria? | The Rest is History
The Rest is History
Published 21 Jul 2023Step back in time with renowned historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland as they embark on an enthralling journey to explore the enigmatic tale of the Library of Alexandria’s destruction. Join them as they uncover the who, what, and why behind one of history’s greatest losses.
#LibraryOfAlexandria #DominicSandbrook #TomHolland
November 10, 2023
Canadian media’s self-immolation an object lesson for British media
Marc Edge discusses how Canada’s legacy media joined together in a virtual suicide-pact to force Google and Facebook to give them millions in unearned revenue:
The best-laid plans of Canada’s biggest media owners went badly awry this summer, when Meta began blocking news across the country on its social media networks Facebook and Instagram in response to the Online News Act passed in June. Newspaper publishers lobbied the federal government relentlessly to force Google and Meta to compensate them for supposedly “stealing” their news stories by carrying links to them. But instead of bringing them hundreds of millions of dollars a year from the digital giants, as a similar law has in Australia, their campaign backfired badly in what has been described as “a massive policy blunder“, and “the most spectacular legislative failure in Canada’s living political memory“.
Not only will publishers not be getting any money from Meta, they likely won’t get any from Google either, as they have threatened to similarly block news in Canada when the law comes into effect in December. Ironically, publishers will instead lose millions instead, as the agreements they already have with at least Meta will be cancelled, and probably those with Google as well. The knock-on effect makes it a triple-whammy when you also consider the traffic that news media will lose to their websites from the platforms. Worst affected will be online-only publications which have depended on that traffic to build an audience. Most did not want the Online News Act and many spoke out against it, but they were drowned out by the newspaper lobby led by industry association News Media Canada. It is dominated by the country’s two largest chains, which are now owned by a private equity firm and US hedge funds.
The Online News Act is the second in a series of bills designed to regulate the Internet, which, when taken together, include many of the same elements as the UK’s omnibus Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill now before Parliament. An Online Streaming Act passed in April will tax and regulate digital video services in Canada, which are mostly owned by U.S. companies such as Netflix, Disney, and Amazon. A so-called Online Harms Act designed to combat hate speech and online bullying was introduced in 2021 but died on the order paper with an election call. It was criticised by civil libertarians for potentially prohibiting otherwise lawful speech and was thus being revised, but so far it has not been re-introduced. Legislation aimed at increasing online privacy and consumer rights is also planned.
One of these things, on closer scrutiny, is not quite like the other ones, and a realisation is growing in Canada that the government may have been co-opted in its enthusiasm to regulate the Internet to participate in what has been called a “shakedown” of the digital giants. Canada’s news media have literally been on the dole for the past five years since they lobbied the government for a five-year $595-million bailout that expires next spring. This has prompted publishers to adopt Rupert Murdoch’s successful strategy in Australia of persuading the government to force the digital giants to share their advertising revenues with newspapers.
Canadian publishers lobbied for the Online News Act in part by running blank front pages for a day and also spiked several opinion articles by academics that had been accepted for publication by editors. Canada has long had one of the free world’s highest levels of media ownership concentration, along with Australia. It went to another level in 2000 with the “convergence” of newspaper and television ownership, against which Canada had no regulatory safeguards, unlike most other countries. The multimedia business model collapsed with the 2008-09 recession, when advertising revenues dropped sharply, and Canada’s news media have been lurching from bad to worse ever since. The country’s largest newspaper chain, Postmedia Network, was acquired out of bankruptcy in 2010 by a consortium of US hedge funds which had bought much of its previous owner’s high-interest debt on the bond market for pennies on the dollar. They have since taken more than $500 million out of the company in debt payments. The country’s second-largest chain, Torstar, was bought from its owning families at the outset of the pandemic in 2020 by private equity firm NordStar Capital, which has been similarly stripping the company with closures, redundancies, and asset sales.
Only a government could waste this much money on the ArriveCAN boondoggle
Chris Selley is in two minds about the ArriveCAN scandal, in that thus far no minister has been implicated but we all may naively assume that the civil service was better than this sort of sleaze:
It’s tempting to want to forget that ArriveCAN, the federal government’s pandemic travel app that collected dead-simple information from arriving travellers and forwarded it to relevant officials for scrutiny, and that somehow cost $54.5 million — a figure no one has come within 100 miles of justifying, and don’t let anyone tell you differently. No one wants to remember the circumstances that supposedly made ArriveCAN necessary.
One could also certainly argue there are aspects of Canada’s pandemic response more desperately needing scrutiny. So, so many aspects.
But whenever the House of Commons operations committee sits down to investigate ArriveCAN, there are fireworks. And you start to think, maybe this godforsaken app is more key to understanding Canada’s pandemic nightmare than you first thought.
The latest blasts came on Tuesday, when Cameron MacDonald, director-general of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) when the pandemic hit, alleged Minh Doan, then MacDonald’s superior and since promoted to chief technological officer of the entire federal government — pause for thought — had lied to the committee on Oct. 24 with respect to who picked GCStrategies to oversee the ArriveCAN project.
Doan told the committee he hadn’t been “personally involved” in the decision. MacDonald, who says he had recommended Deloitte build the app, says that’s garbage. “It was a lie that was told to this committee. Everyone knows it,” he said. “Everyone knew it was his decision to make. It wasn’t mine.” MacDonald said Doan had threatened in a telephone conversation to finger him as the culprit, and that he had felt “incredibly threatened”.
Crikey.
For those who’ve blissfully forgotten, GCStrategies consists of two people who subcontract IT work to teams of experts and takes a cut off the top — in this case a cut of roughly $11 million, for an app that should have cost a fraction of that, if it was to exist at all. Needless to say, that wasn’t the only fat contract GCStrategies — which, again, is two men and an address book — had received from the government over the years. Each GCStrategist made more money off ArriveCAN than I’ll likely make in my life. It makes me want to strap on a bass drum and sing “The Internationale” in public.
November 2, 2023
Keeping Clean in Rome
seangabb
Published 2 Jul 2023A lecture, given in June 2023, about bathing and keeping clean in the Roman World — plus an overview of depilation and going to the toilet.
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October 29, 2023
Arguments for not buying military kit “off the shelf”
Sir Humphrey provides some of the reasons why it’s not a simple economic case for a nation’s military procurement to buy “off the shelf” equipment even from a close ally:
Not all kit needs to be or can be domestically sourced. The British army uses Apache attack helicopters which are licensed from the original US manufacturer.
Westland Apache WAH-64D Longbow helicopter (UK Army registration ZJ206) displays at Kemble Air Day 2008, Kemble Airport, Gloucestershire, England in June 2008.
Public domain photograph by Adrian Pingstone.
The arguments for buying American are on the face of it reasonable. The US produces good quality equipment able to meet many UK defence needs. There is a strong supply chain in place, ensuring that there are plenty of spare parts in the system to draw on when needed, and at cheaper cost due to bulk buying. The equipment is usually designed to be interoperable with NATO partners, so it can be integrated to work alongside allies and with existing equipment. It can be delivered quickly, it works and lots of other people use it, so why shouldn’t the UK? There are in fact many good reasons why the UK should not exclusively buy American.
Earlier this month, we looked at the Canadian Surface Combatant (CSC) program and why the Canadian Armed Forces never seemed to get the same “bang for the buck” that our American or British allies seem to manage. Here, Sir Humphrey points out that even the British military has to make procurement decisions that weigh cost and convenience with some very significant national security concerns:
To start with, US kit is designed by US companies to meet US requirements, not British ones. This may sound obvious but there is a dangerous view some put forward that “off the shelf” means the UK could just buy something and use it. There is no such thing as “off the shelf” unless you want it as it comes in its US version, with no modifications, changes or installation of British equipment. The moment you do this, you’ve created a UK variant with its own bespoke requirements and supply needs, for which you are dependent on the US defence industry to support – and there is no guarantee that this can or will happen. From the outset you have lost operational sovereignty and control over your military equipment.
Buying from the US means the UK would need to request a Foreign Military Sale (FMS) case through the US government, seeking legislative approval to purchase the equipment. If, for example, the UK wanted to buy a new tank, it would be reliant on US government approval to do so, not just for the initial purchase, but for all spares buy thereafter. The way that FMS works is that it sets out approval not just for purchase, but sets a schedule for spare parts purchases, services, and upgrades, all of which are done at the time and schedule set by US government and industry, and not the British government. This means that the UK would lose control over when to purchase spares or upgrades and would be forced to buy to a foreign governments timetable. This is why FMS is so successful for the US – it offers cheap entry prices but makes a killing in the long-term spares and support market. To buy from the US means to accept that you are handing over control of your spares and logistics chain to a foreign power who determines the timing of when and what you buy. This is fine in small doses but if you buy exclusively from the US, suddenly means you’ve got no control over how you want to support your armed forces.
The next challenge is the integration work needed to make things work for the UK. One of the risks of buying a foreign design is that you lack operational sovereignty over the design and its internal contents. Equipment supplied by the US will often come with a variety of sealed, tamper proof boxes containing US government-controlled technology that cannot be accessed by the purchasing nation. As the operator, you do not have full control over your military equipment, you don’t know what is necessarily in the boxes, and you are reliant on the US to fix issues with them. By contrast any equipment designed and built in the UK means that the MOD has full control and sovereignty over it to open it up, modify, adapt or change it to meet British needs. To buy US means accepting we cannot change a design without a foreign nations’ approval, which in turn means exposing our own sensitive military technology and equipment to the US, to conduct trials to ensure it can work with the US provided equipment. This represents an astounding loss of sovereign control on advanced weapon systems and means potentially giving the US defence industry insight into UK capabilities that manufacturers may want to keep commercially sensitive.
October 27, 2023
QotD: It’s the #BelieveScience fans who are most likely to fall for pseudoscientific scams
The paper consisted of the results of four pre-registered experiments of decent sample size, albeit administered online. They introduced false claims about a fictional virus created as a bioweapon, and about the carcinogenic nature of GMO foods.
The results were so, so very telling.
“Participants who trust science are more likely to believe and disseminate false claims that contain scientific references than false claims that do not,” and “We conclude that trust in science, although desirable in many ways, makes people vulnerable to pseudoscience.”
Let that sink in. The people who #BelieveScience are more vulnerable to falling for pseudoscientific claims, especially when those claims are presented with the comforting ephemera of science — the lab coats, the credentials, the technical studies filled with jargon. That’s because “Believing Science” isn’t the same thing as actually doing science. “Believing Science” is a statement of tribal affiliation. All this claim demonstrates is that a person wants to be seen as the sort of individual who believes experts and takes advice from trusted and credentialed officials. For the most part, this is a good instinct! But if those experts and trusted officials are wrong, malicious, or simply full of shit, the “Believe Science” crowd will reliably fall in line. Because of its ideological affiliation, this crowd is, ironically, far less capable of spotting bad science.
Actually doing science as opposed to merely believing in it requires that we all evaluate claims critically regardless of their origins; we look for inconsistencies, we examine the quality of the evidence presented, and we question the credibility of the people making the claims.
“Dispatch from the Front Line: Comms aren’t the government’s problem”, The Line, 2023-07-23.
October 26, 2023
QotD: Making steel
So we are going to limit ourselves here to just carbon and iron. Now in video-game logic, that means you take one “unit” of carbon and one “unit” of iron and bash them together in a fire to make steel. As we’ll see, the process is at least moderately more complicated than that. But more to the point: those proportions are totally wrong. Steel is a combination of iron and carbon, but not equal parts or anything close to it. Instead, the general division goes this way (there are several classification systems but they all have the same general grades):
Below 0.05% carbon or so, we just refer to that as iron. There is going to be some small amount of carbon in most iron objects, picked up in the smelting or forging process.
From 0.05% carbon to 0.25% carbon is mild or low carbon steel.
From about 0.3% to about 0.6%, we might call medium carbon steel, although I see this classification only infrequently.
From 0.6% to around 1.25% carbon is high-carbon steel, also known as spring steel. For most armor, weapons and tools, this is the “good stuff” (but see below on pattern welding).
From 1.25% to 2% are “ultra-high-carbon steels” which, as far as I can tell didn’t see much use in the ancient or medieval world.
Above 2%, you have cast iron or pig iron; excessive carbon makes the steel much too hard and brittle, making it unsuitable for most purposes.Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Iron, How Did They Make It, Part IVa: Steel Yourself”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-10-09.
October 25, 2023
QotD: Constant change
Instead of empty analogies, the only way to survive change is to have a vigorous debate about the merits of our new ideas — precisely the kind of debate that techno-optimists want to foreclose by appealing to history. We might ask instead: what does this new thing do to us? Do we understand enough to answer that question? If not, on what basis does our confidence rest? Debate on the merits is essential to distinguishing good ideas from bad ones. And for that, you need the people that techno-optimists most loathe: conservatives.
Nicholas Phillips, “The Fallacy of Techno-Optimism”, Quillette, 2019-06-06.
October 18, 2023
The greatest sin of Twit-, er, I mean “X” is that it allowed us hoi polloi to peek behind the curtains of governments, universities, and major corporations
The latest book review at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf begins with a brilliant explanation for the coming fall of western civilization at the hands of Twit-, er, I mean “X”:
The greatest gift bestowed by admittance to elite institutions is that you stop being overawed by them. For instance, there was a time when upon hearing “so-and-so is a Rhodes Scholar”, I would have assumed that so-and-so was a very impressive person indeed. Nowadays I know quite a lot of former Rhodes Scholars, and have seen firsthand that some of them are extremely mediocre individuals, so meeting a new one doesn’t phase me much. My own cursus honorum through America’s centers of prestige has been slow and circuitous, which means I’ve gotten to enjoy progressive disenchantment with the centers of power. Trust me, you folks aren’t missing much.
I have a theory that this is why Twitter has been so destabilizing to so many societies, and why it may yet be the end of ours. Twitter offers a peek behind the curtain — not just to a lucky few,1 but to everybody. We’re used to elected officials acting like buffoons, but on Twitter you can see our real rulers humiliating themselves. Tech moguls, four-star generals, cultural tastemakers, foundation trustees, former heads of spy agencies, all of them behaving like insane idiots, posting their most vapid thoughts, and getting in petty fights with “VapeGroyper420.” There’s a reason most monarchies have made lèse-majesté a crime, there’s a level at which no regime can survive unless everybody pretends that the rulers are demigods. To have the kings be revealed as mere men who bleed, panic, and have tawdry love affairs is to rock the monarchic regime at its foundations. But Twitter is worse than that, it’s like a hidden camera in the king’s bedroom, but they do it to themselves. Moreover it seems likely that regimes like ours which legitimate themselves with a meritocratic justification are especially fragile to this form of disenchantment.
This is also why the COVID pandemic was so damaging to our government’s legitimacy. I’ve been inside elite institutions of many different sorts, and discovered the horrible truth that most of the people in them are just ordinary people making it up as they go along, but one place I hadn’t quite made it yet was the top of our disease control agencies.2 So in a bit of naïveté analogous to Gell-Mann amnesia, I just assumed that there was some secret wing of the Centers for Disease Control which housed men-in-black who would rappel out of helicopters and summarily execute everybody in Wuhan who had ever touched a bat. And I was genuinely a little bit surprised and disappointed when instead they were caught with their pants down, and a bunch of weirdos on the internet turned out to be the real experts (the silver lining to this is that now we all get to be amateur scientists).
So much for public health. But if there’s one institution which still manages to shroud itself in mystery while secretly pulling all the strings, surely it’s the Federal Reserve. You can tell people take it seriously because of all the conspiracy theories that surround it (conspiracy theories are the highest form of flattery). And there’s a lot to get conspiratorial about — the Fed manages to combine two things that rarely go together but which both impress people: technocratic mastery and arcane ritual. The Fed employs a research staff of thousands which meticulously gather and analyze data about every aspect of the economy, and they have an Open Market Committee whose meeting minutes are laden with nuanced double-meanings that would make a Ming dynasty courtier blush, and which are accordingly parsed with an attention to detail once reserved for Politburo speeches.
And they also control all of our money! Is it any wonder that people go a little bit crazy whenever they think about the Fed? I can’t think of a more natural target for the recurring cycles of ineffectual populist ire that characterize American politics. So it is with great regret that I’m here to report that they, too, are making it all up as they go along.
1. And that lucky few have much to gain by maintaining the charade. A stable ruling class is one that has much to offer potential class traitors, so they don’t get any ideas. It’s when the goodies dry up, whether due to elite overproduction or to a real reduction in the spoils available, that things fall apart.
2. That’s not quite true: I did once attend an invite-only conference at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. The food was awful, and I wasn’t even able to find the lab where they created crack cocaine, HIV, and Lyme disease.
October 17, 2023
Those problematic “AI girlfriends” – men suck and women suffer because of it
Janice Fiamengo discusses a recent CNN program that woman-splained why young men paying for “AI girlfriends” are yet another way that misogynistic men are harming women:
Last week, CNN aired a must-watch episode with the somber headline, “AI girlfriends are here and they’re posing a threat to a generation of men”. If that sounds as if the show might possibly express some compassion for young men and for the “epidemic of loneliness” referred to in the show, it was not to be. Even an expert, Scott Galloway, profiled briefly on how society is “failing men”, felt the need to express contempt for their alleged conspiracy theories, online misogyny, and even (gasp!) climate change denial. With friends like these …
The segment is fascinating, however, for its revelation of some pundits’ uneasy awareness of male discontent.
[…] The expert is Liberty Vittert, a statistician and professor of data science at Washington University’s Olin Business School. But she might as well be an AI feminist, so predictable was her analysis of the male entitlement allegedly driving the turn to AI girlfriends. Though a statistician, Vittert gave no data about the numbers of men who are paying to access AI content. While the CNN host, Michael Smerconish, seemed open to the possibility of exploring men’s points of view, the expert could only emphasize male failure.
She condemned young men for “choosing AI girlfriends over real women”. The choice means, according to Vittert, that “they don’t have relationships with real women, don’t marry them and then don’t have and raise babies with them”.
But wait, aren’t marrying and raising babies a patriarchal imposition on women — part of the “comfortable concentration camp” that Betty Friedan so memorably indicted?
Professor Vittert says nothing about the decreasing number of young women willing to marry and procreate. Her (botoxed) mouth turns down in disapproval as she explains that the increasing realism of AI is “enabling this entire generation of young men to continue in this loneliness epidemic”. It seems that men prefer sterile self-pleasuring and facile scopophilia to the “hard work” of relationships with real women. Like Joaquin Phoenix’s hapless character, these men, she says, are so fixated on perfection that they “are not able to deal with ups and downs, not only in a relationship, but in life in general”. The glibness of the condemnation is remarkable, though far from unusual.
It’s not clear if Professor Vittert has ever talked to actual men about why some of them (not “an entire generation”) might choose an AI relationship. Does she know any young men who have tried for years without success to find a marriageable girlfriend? Many discover that such prizes are remarkably thin on the ground, many of them unsuitable to be considered as future mothers. Even worse, perhaps, does Vittert know anything about what can happen to an inexperienced young man who pursues the wrong woman or women (there are a couple of heartbreaking examples in Sons of Feminism)? How many times does a young man who has failed repeatedly need to hear that no woman owes him love or sex before he starts thinking that giving up on them might not be a bad idea? Meanwhile, women laugh at his loneliness and drink “I bathe in male tears” mugs.
To give him credit, CNN’s Smerconish asks a few questions about the male point of view: “What’s going on with the women?” Has the power dynamic shifted in their favor? Are they less approachable than formerly? These only scratch the surface, but he’s chosen the wrong expert for such a conversation.
Vittert freely admits that there are now many more women than men at university (thanks, affirmative action!) and that far more women than formerly are choosing career over homemaking (thanks, feminist propaganda!). But those are good things, and young men simply need to adapt. Calling any of this debacle women’s fault, she declares, would not be “the right way to go”.
An appropriate task for AI – reading the Herculaneum scrolls
Colby Cosh discusses the possibility of finally being able to read the carbonized scolls found in the buried remains of a wealthy Roman’s country villa in 1750:
Unrolled papyrus scroll recovered from the Villa of the Papyri.
Picture published in a pamphlet called “Herculaneum and the Villa of the Papyri” by Amedeo Maiuri in 1974. (Wikimedia Commons)
From the standpoint of fragile human life, a volcanic eruption is the worst possible thing that can happen anywhere in your general vicinity, up to and probably including the detonation of a nuclear weapon.
It goes without saying that pyroclastic flows are also bad for animals or buildings or vegetation … or documents. And yet: as a consequence of the eruption of Vesuvius, there exists a near-complete library of papyrus scrolls retrieved from the buried ruins of a splendid Roman villa.
The “Villa of the Papyri” in Herculaneum was found in 1750 by farmers and was quickly subjected to archeological excavation, an art then in its infancy.
These scrolls, which today number about 1,800 in all, are often described as the only known library to have physically survived from antiquity. The problem, of course, is that they have all been burned literally to a crisp, with only a few easily readable fragments here and there.
The incinerated scrolls are so sensitive that they tend to explode into a cloud of ash at the slightest touch. Occasional attempts to unravel the scrolls — which were rolled very tightly for storage in the first place — have been made over the past 300 years; the chemist Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829), for example, gave it a shot using newfangled stuff called chlorine. But none of these projects ever came especially close to success, and they typically involved destruction of some of the “books” in the library.
In recent years 3D imaging techniques for “reading” documents like this in a non-invasive way have been making great headway. The leader in the field is a University of Kentucky computer scientist named Brent Seales, who in 2015 led efforts to read a fragile, desiccated Hebrew Bible parchment scroll dating to the third or fourth century AD.
The text was from the book of Leviticus, and proved to be a letter-for-letter match with the Torah of today — which is a disappointment to scholars from one point of view, and a finding of awesome significance from another. (It goes without saying that this scroll came from the territory of Israel, near a kibbutz: this is a fact that would, in any other political context, be regarded as a supreme affirmation of indigeneity.)
Seales has been able to “unroll” some Herculaneum scrolls and detect the presence of inks using CT scanning, but reading the pages is a profound challenge. Roman ink was carbon-based, meaning researchers are trying to “read” traces of carbon on carbonized pages rolled up into three dimensions.
