BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-06-16 Fr
Do not fear to say: ÞE ORANGE MAN IS REALLY BAD!!!!; Marco Rubio should simply leave; quantum computing supremacy approaches; Wolff on þe end of þe WTO era, Lieven on imperial Russia's lust for...
…þe Dardanelles & the Bosporus, Leyden on generative “AI”, & what cynical & destructive Republicans tell themselves these days…
MUST READ: We Must Say True, Important, & Interesting Things:
There is always someone just tuning in, as Chad Orzel says.
So I really do cringe when Matthew Yglesias expresses his uncomfortableness with simply saying “the orange man is bad”. Donald Trump is bad. People should say the orange man is bad all of the time, and work very hard to say it in ways that do not bore those of us who have long been tuned in:
Matthew Yglesias: The Orange Man is bad: ‘Cringe but true: The central political fact of our era is that Donald Trump is a total piece of shit and scumbag. It long ago became “cringe” to center one’s politics on this point, but it remains fundamentally true…
It is not cringeworthy to say it. It is cringeworthy to bore people, and it is very difficult to handle a diverse audience in which someone new is always tuning in.
But what is really cringeworthy is to be “oversavvy”, and to fail to say THE ORANGE MAN IS BAD! because it is in some way “cringe” to say it.
THE ORANGE MAN IS VERY BAD!!!!
ONE IMAGE:
ONE VIDEO: Computing Quantum Supremacy Comes Closer:
Very Briefly Noted:
Brody Mullins: How Republicans and Big Business Broke Up: ‘Republican lawmakers, accusing CEOs of skewing left, have become less dependent on corporate PAC money than at any time in the past three decades…
Adam Tooze: The post-150 Decline (Albeit Not Fall) of the Roman Empire: ‘[Willem Jongman & al.:] “Ancient Rome was one of the largest and longest lasting world empires of preindustrial history, stretching from the North of England and the Danube to western Morocco, and the Syrian Desert. At the peak of its political power in the first and early second century A.D. it had a population that has been variously estimated between 60 and 90 million inhabitants. That population was so large because of the geographical extent of the Empire, but also because of relatively high population densities.
C.V. Wedgwood (1944): William the Silent: ‘William of Nassau, Prince of Orange 1533-1584…
Packy McCormick: IBM quantum computer passes calculation milestone: ‘Davide Castelvecchi for Nature: “Physicists at… IBM say they have evidence that quantum computers will soon beat ordinary ones at useful tasks… calculating properties of materials or the interactions of elementary particles… work[ing] around quantum noise… to get reliable results”…
Lant Pritchett: What I, as a development economist, have been actively “for”: ‘Rapid and sustained growth in broad based labor productivity…. Higher levels of state capability…. Effective education for all…. Labor mobility… From my point of view, a major problem… [has been] shy[ing] away from the hard slog of the four-fold transformations and instead look to fund specific (often cocooned from systems and implemented by NGOs to bypass states) project “interventions” that are “effective” and “attributable”…
Oliver Willis: Conservatives Aren't Like Normal Americans, But The Media Won't Admit That: ‘The Right Is Weird…. If the mainstream press was being honest… they would operate on the premise that the Republican Party is amplifying fringe, weird, beliefs… [but they] insist that “both sides” are in the pocket of identically extremist ideologies…
Daniel W. Drezner: Conservative Discovers Polanyi. Film at Eleven: ‘The mainstream media fascination with the conservative who can speak to leftists…. The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World could not help but take notice of last week’s Politico profile by Ian Ward of Patrick Deneen…. I just wish the media was less infatuated…. There is not much originality to echoing older critiques of neoliberalism and pairing them with half-baked reactionary solutions…
Rachel Sanderson: Berlusconi Wrote the Playbook for the Modern Strongman: ‘Italy’s longest-serving postwar premier turned media power into enduring influence…
Adam Tooze: TPP Re-Enactment Society: ‘Biden's Indo-Pacific Economic Framework “isn’t a trade agreement so much as a TPP re-enactment society: some impressive-looking battles with realistic replica weapons but no one getting hurt.” in the cutting words of Alan Beattie at the FT…
Michael R. Strain: The Inflated Sum of AI Fears: There is good reason to believe that AI, like all general-purpose technologies before it, will improve human welfare…. Democracy could be strengthened by advances in AI. One of the technology’s most promising opportunities is in education…
¶s:
With the coming of the "no limits" partnership between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and with the coming of a China interested in pacifying its billion poor people in its interior—those who are not sharing fully in growth—with foreign-affairs, victories and shows of China's national power, the world that those of us who worked to create and strengthen the WTO had hoped to help create is gone: Alan Wm. Wolff: Discarding a Utopian Vision for a World Divided: The Effect of Geopolitical Rivalry on the World Trading System: ‘The greater danger for the world trading system is… that the two largest trading countries, by their lack of adherence to and support for the multilateral trading system, may seriously damage it. Both rivals act outside the existing trade rules, creating negative examples that are not lost on other WTO members who may also choose to act outside of the system’s rules…. It is an open question as to how much the world economy, where the market has largely determined trade flows to date, will be reshaped to reflect geopolitical forces…. While the volume of trade between the US and China remains high, bilateral strategic decoupling is proceeding…. Where the US pressed Japan and the Netherlands to join in restricting exports to China of semiconductor production equipment, they have done so. Separately, learning from the European experience with excess dependency on Russia for fossil fuels, Western capitals have begun planning the diversification of sourcing of critical minerals, to avoid dependency on… China…
The Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, the Strait of Malacca, and the Bosporus and the Dardanelles—the four key water chokepoints of the world before World War I. The great power, Britain had grabbed control over two of them, and the United States over a third. Hence pre-WWI imperial Russia saw its manifest destiny as gaining control over the fourth: Dominic Lieven: The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution: ‘[Pre-WWI] Russian ambitions at Constantinople and the Straits have to be seen within the context of an imperialist age, in which the British took over Egypt to secure their hold on the Suez Canal and the Americans seized the Isthmus of Panama in order to control the key strategic and commercial highway between the Atlantic and the Pacific. As we shall see, the Straits on balance mattered more to Russia than even Suez or Panama did to the British or the Americans…
That Ken Goldberg has changed his mind on useful "AI" in his lifetime is much more than a straw in the wind, and Tim O'Reilly's pointing out that our real foe is not our technology but our selves is very wise: Peter Leyden: The Real Implications of Generative AI: ‘What we learned in an amazing Meeting of the Minds at Ground Zero in San Francisco…. Generative AI is a Very Big Deal…. Ken Goldberg… has long been skeptical of how much AI and robots could ultimately do in his lifetime. Goldberg has been in the AI field for 40 years and has watched all the ups and downs of broken promises…. The arrival of Gen AI has fundamentally changed Goldberg’s mind. He now thinks with a few tweaks AI will soon pass as human. What’s more, he always thought that AI could never be creative like humans. Now he sees how Gen AI already is creative and will get more creative with time…. “I think we're at a similar moment where there is a real reckoning of maybe there's another form of intelligence,” Goldberg said. “I'm not afraid that it's going to take over and dominate us, but it's a different form of intelligence and I think it's incredibly interesting and it's an opportunity for us to expand our own minds, to create new things, and we are going to be able to figure this out.”… The Concerns about AI are Really Concerns about Humans…. Tim O’Reilly did not express much concern for the dangers of AI that seem to be getting a lot of attention in the media…. Issues that people are most worried about are not problems with the technology but problems with human society…. “They're a mirror of all that's good and bad in our society, and it's really important to remember when we think about, ‘Oh, we're going to fix the bias.’ We don't want to be fixing the mirror. We want to be fixing what it is showing us, which is us”…
What cynical and destructive Republicans are telling each other these days: Not that Trump is innocent, and but rather that independence can be grifted: Joe Battenfeld: Will Trump indictment boomerang on Joe Biden?: ‘If the latest charges against Trump start to fall apart, it will throw the spotlight back on Democrats and Biden, and confirm what half the country believes – that this is a politically motivated prosecution…. The question now is, will the spotlight eventually come back to Biden and his own problem with keeping classified documents in his garage? And will voters blame Biden for bringing the case against Trump, despite the president’s attempts to stay away from it. It’s pretty hard for Biden to claim he knows nothing about the indictments. Difficult to believe the Department of Justice wouldn’t at least brief the White House about the coming charges. The DOJ is part of the administration, along with the FBI…. The collapse of the Russian collusion case helped the former president. Republican voters—and many independents—seem inclined to side with Trump right now in this latest attempt to wound him legally. And they are bound to take it out against Biden. At the very least, the case against Trump is likely to drag on well past next year’s election, meaning voters will have to decide based on incomplete information. The 80-year-old Biden—if he really does follow through with his reelection plans—better hope that Americans start to turn against his former rival soon, or there will be a reversal of the 2020 election—no matter how many indictments they bring…