That would be just the sort of subject about which I’d love to read a well-considered journalistic take. Do you have any good references?

I suppose it’s not really about morality but more about rules-for-thee-but-not-for-me. I don’t think the US would be cool with Russian or Iranian ships coming very close to Miami on their way to Cuba or Mexico, especially without US-approved insurance or maintenance records.

Hormuz is a natural strait and leads to a natural gulf, but they are entirely within territorial water boundaries of several tightly packed countries. I can see many reasonable justifications for countries to assert control of ship traffic very close to their land borders. Smuggling, pollution, risk of catastrophe, etc.

Of course there are huge financial interests in returning to the status quo ante, and media mostly takes for granted that it’s the way things should be. I just want an introductory explainer of why, and how reciprocal that is to other navigational norms worldwide.

So the US should welcome, say, Russian (or perhaps Iranian) boats heading to Cuba or Mexico, regularly coming about 15 miles offshore of Miami without buying US-approved insurance policies?

I have yet to see anyone describe why transit through the strait should morally be left unencumbered by Iran and Oman. The strait is only about 35 miles wide but international waters don’t start until 230 statute miles offshore. Does the US not assert authority over waters between Florida and Cuba (110 miles) or Florida and Bahamas (125 miles)?

throwing away your old ICE car

But most people wouldn’t send their old car to the scrap heap, they would sell it on the secondary market to someone else (or a dealer, who would auction it into the secondary market). The old car would then continue to burn gas for likely many more years, until it “falls apart” anyway.

Stepping back, your old car may be the first in a chain of older (or more falling-apart) vehicles getting traded out, all the way down to one that really does get fully retired, or replacing one that was totaled in a collision. So choosing to keep it deprives someone else of its availability and thereby drives up used prices slightly.

For any study of this type of net effect, the authors need to pick a boundary for what gets considered. How many secondary market transactions do you study in that replacement chain, and what do those buyers substitute when the original ICE vehicle is not replaced with an EV? How far do you go in the pollution and other supply chain effects of manufacturing a new vehicle? I didn’t read a machine translation of your Swiss link, so I don’t know where the study authors drew the bounds, but I suspect it’s easy to choose and defend framing that supports either conclusion.

In my personal calculation, I can only see one step down the used chain, wherein my old vehicle would continue to be driven by someone else, so replacing it with an EV wouldn’t make a substantial difference. I love my old car with no surveillance, so I’m in no hurry to switch even though I’ll presumably buy an EV eventually.

Ultimately this is just one more example that that’s no ethical consumption within capitalism.

I’m kinda looking forward to the collapse of the Ai bubble.

Once upon a time, a lot of telecom bubble startups went under and left behind lots of dark fiber optic cable that others snatched up for far less than the capital cost of construction. But eventually, over subsequent decades, most of it was put into use. I expect these AI data centers will be similar, except a bunch of them are being built in stupid ways like with their own on site electricity generation.

I’m not that excited about what people will do with all of the super cheap bankruptcy auction surplus (formerly AI) data compute capacity. But at least it will be a novel problem.

If LLMs don’t turn into AGI and instead the AI bubble pops, maybe some of the data centers don’t get finished. Even so, many of the rest will likely continue to operate and consume water.

The US federal government will soon start decreeing how the overdrawn Colorado River will be resolved and things will get very ugly. Western water rights law is an unsustainable construct and all real solutions hurt rich people (even as they also hurt everyone else). Maybe the current administration is waiting until enough of the data centers are built before “solving” the water crisis by prioritizing AI over crops and humans in the name of national security.

But we’re still living in a bad B movie. If AGI actually works and we get SkyNet in the end, then the water infrastructure in most of those regions is probably plenty for the machines once all of the humans are gone.

Autoclanking

“Clearly these [US] demands are not about bringing us democracy but about plundering our resources and increasing worker exploitation,” he said.

Of course. Trump doesn’t even give even half a shit about the plight of approximately 99% of US citizens at home. He’s damned sure not interested in “bringing democracy” to Venezuela, beyond the vaguest headline fig leaf while enabling oligarchic plunder.

[Trump] added: “I’m going to say I have to speak to the person that right now is, you know, you know who he is, that’s running Taiwan.”

How is he so completely unprepared?

Not to discount the usefulness or complexity of curl in any way, but it’s not one of the larger codebases out there. It’s also pretty darned good. Firefox seems to have a very positive experience with Mythos, but they also had their own internal test harnesses from prior work, ready to utilize LLM analysis at scale. It was far more intensive than having a third party run something on their behalf and produce a report.

The US is one of only two countries in the world to tax the foreign earnings of its expats (the other is Eritrea). They’re so annoying about it on the finance side that many foreign banks refuse to give accounts to US expats. Renunciation is the only way to avoid that mess.

The US also takes a big exit tax on the wealth of anyone renouncing.

“The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran [is] they can’t have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told reporters at the White House before boarding a plane to China. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.”

Hmm, funny thing that goal. Why did the previous nonproliferation agreement fall apart again? Oh, right, that was Trump:

“I don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t withdrawn the U.S. from the deal,” Lisa Koch, an expert on American foreign policy and nuclear weapons and a Claremont McKenna College associate professor of government, told PolitiFact. “But I can say that if the United States had stayed in the (Iran agreement), and if everything had continued to go as it had been going between January 2016 and the U.S. withdrawal, Iran would still have an internationally monitored nuclear program and would not possess uranium enriched to the level at which Iran could decide to build nuclear bombs on a short timeline.”

Sorry, it was published over 40 years ago so the Spoilers Statute of Limitations has lapsed. It’s a good book though, put it back on your list.

They didn’t tell Ender that the “training missions” were all real battles until after he won the war, so that he wouldn’t have to grapple with ethics in real time. That was the essence of the Game.

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Nope, the next stages will be worse. Climate change is baked in and being in the 99% is gonna suck.

Is fascism a sub-stage of late-stage capitalism, or a subsequent stage?

One of the subsequent stages is AI-powered robot weapons, which I predict will be used on the domestic populace before too long, but also fits in the bad b-movie theme:

This Tuesday, while America was obsessively watching the latest bizarre twists in Trump’s Iran debacle, Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon rolled out a $1.5 trillion budget request that contained a line item almost nobody’s talking about: a 24,000 percent increase, from $225 million last year to $54.6 billion this year, for an outfit called the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group.

That’s the largest year-over-year jump for any program in the entire defense budget, and it’s earmarked to build out AI-driven autonomous human-killing systems inside the Special Operations Command headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.

You’ve found the plot! The twist is that this is what asymmetric warfare looks like, decades in the making. The US is currently losing the Cold War against the USSR, which began 5 years before Putin was born so it was his entire upbringing. He doesn’t need to maintain tight control of Donny, but merely let him wreak whatever havoc he will. The leopard face-eating will mostly just be sad because everything will be so badly damaged by the time the red team really understands how badly they’ve been had. Corporate greed is a reliable villain to rise to the occasion, that merely needed some unshackling. Billionaires gonna oligarch if you give them half a chance. Helping capitalism to self-destruct is possibly the ultimate communist victory.

Clankers gonna clank