AI Reading for Wednesday November 6
Lovingly curated by man and machine
Apple wants Foxconn to make lots of AI servers but capacity is limited b/c they are making so many Nvidia AI servers - Nikkei Asia
Nvidia Passes Apple Again as World’s Largest Company - Yahoo Finance
Perplexity finalizing new funding round at $9 billion valuation, source says - Yahoo Finance
Netflix closes expensive game studio, pivots to game dev using AI. - gamesradar
Make funky beats with Google's MusicFX DJ - DJ Mag
Using Chatgpt as a Angry BabyMama simulator. - Reddit
Open-source robot cleans spills - X (formerly Twitter)
Gets $36,000 bill from OpenAI
Buenos días desde Argentina del Norte! Американцы должны начать изучать русский язык. The election result was a shock and yet all too unsurprising. The US has taken on characteristics of a banana republic in terms of inequality, polarization, inability to address basic social needs or even talk seriously about them.
I thought the election would break the other way. Trump lost in 2020. Then, he had the advantage of incumbency. Since then, he got even more demented, he perpetrated the assault on democracy on 1/6, was mixed up in national security violations, financial irregularities, campaign irregularities, rape allegations. Roe chickens came home to roost. Polls are error-prone and anyway said it was a toss-up.
The counter-argument was, the US has drifted from center-left to right wing since the 80s. The GOP makes everything worse for the working class, and pins it on Dems, leading to GOP gains, and the doom loop continues. We’re more divided. Divide people, and it becomes a number-go-up society, a looking out for number one society, not a looking out for each other society. I knew that, and that there was no room for error. But in our guts we all know he is nuts. He is so obviously unfit and making desperate promises and claims that were already rejected in 2020, that I thought reasonable independents would double down on that rejection. Americans would not reject everything America stands for. Even though it was only a small shift from 2020, that’s all Trump needed and I was very very wrong.
Why did it break against Harris? Trump got about the same votes as 2020 (probably slightly more). Dems got 10m less.
2024 - Harris 70,356,521 votes, Trump 74,264,010 votes
2020 - Biden 81,283,501, Trump 74,223,975
With California and other mail-in votes, Harris will catch up a little and Trump will add some. I don’t think 2m though?
There are missing Dem votes. Dems couldn’t motivate the the Biden 2020 voters, at least the more marginally attached ones. (Without deep survey data and a Sankey chart it’s hard to tell how many actual Biden 2020 voters dropped out, switched, etc.) Harris did not generate the same fear of Trump that Trump generated of communism, immigrants eating the dogs, poisoning the blood and whatnot. Fear is a greater motivator than joy. I thought women and lefties would turn out in droves to head off the danger. It beggars belief, but it seems like only the highly educated women did.
That is the proximate cause. More causes in no particular order:
Trump’s simple message still finds its target, despite the disasters of his last Administration, his obvious unfitness. Including:
I will fix it, and only I can fix it! Cult of glorious leader.
Authoritarianism: to hell with compromise, niceties like due process.
Nationalism: Make America Great Again!
Grievance: America is going to hell, all problems are caused by external/internal enemies.
Racial supremacy: foreigners are poisoning the blood. Don’t want immigrants, but want (white) people to have more babies. Liberals think you are garbage (never mind I’ve been calling them that, and traitors, and the enemy within and whatnot)
Mob intimidation: 1/6
Gaslighting/big lie, hard to pick just one, I won in 2020, greatest inauguration crowd ever, crime is way up, worst employment in history, your kid will go to school and come back with a sex change operation, Dems support abortion after birth, etc., etc.
Rejection of free elections/free speech, elections are fixed if I lose, 60 Minutes should lose CBS all their licenses etc.
Obviously, this is a textbook fascist playbook. It’s impossible to find any daylight whatsoever between this and Hitler’s political playbook (if not, you know, the goals it was put in service of, death camps, conquering Europe). It’s a simple message, it triggers the amygdala, fear of the other. It’s a much harder sell to say, we’re all in the same boat and let’s work together and compromise with each other to create a more perfect union.
Half of Trump’s voters are unabashed fascists. Christo-fascists who think government’s purpose is to bring about the Second Coming are a lot of that. And then traditional fascists who want a strongman to get things done, the ends justify the means, economic and social goals trump niceties like freedom and fairness, democracy, rights of anyone but the ruling class’s. The GOP quakes before the far right. They represent maybe half of the GOP, even the mainstreamers have to kowtow. The media soft-pedals it and doesn’t want to piss them off by calling them out. The GOP could nominate Satan and they would get at least 30% and probably more.
There are tankies on the left. They don’t turn out except for e.g. Stein or Sanders. They despise mainstream Dems like Harris and Pelosi, who in turn despise them. They didn’t turn out this time because they are big mad about hot-button issues I don’t really want to bring up. OK, enjoy the next 4 years, assuming there is a free election in 4 years which is not a safe bet.
The non-fascist half (or less) of GOP voters just don’t care about democracy v. fascism, they vote their pocketbook, who is better for me, things like ideology and freedom and democracy and fascism are just abstractions. A lot of them don’t even have the capacity to analyze which will be better for them, vote based on vibes. I’m mad that Biden did this or some leftie said that. It’s more of a temper tantrum than anything else. Again, not the brightest, and Trump is a con man.
Dems have to get a super-majority of the independents and they decide elections. They are not the most plugged-in or the brightest, and Trump is a con man.
Some people say ‘inflation’. But jobs, real wages, real personal income are well above pre-pandemic levels and back on a normal path. The economic backdrop was a minor miracle for Biden. The pandemic disruption was massive. Everyone was out of work. First one set of goods and suppliers like exercise bikes and Amazon were in overwhelming demand. Then hospitality and travel workers. Then massive supply chain disruptions. Then inflation started overshooting. I thought only a recession would cure it, but we got a soft landing. An election at full employment with inflation back under control seemed like a best-case scenario for Harris. Of course, unexpected inflation creates winners and losers; people were hurt by the end of pandemic measures, child tax credit (thanks GOP), loan payment resumptions. But obviously Biden did a lot of stuff to mitigate that. I thought he would get a passing grade on the economy. Anyway, if you say ‘inflation’ when your real income is up, and you were better off in every way with Biden policies, you were voting for Trump anyway.
Musk will claim it was his social media and get-out-the-vote SuperPAC that did it. In fact, if Trump is outperforming significantly vs. 2020, get-out-the-vote makes little diff. But the Big Tech right-wing Mafia led by Musk will fully own this White House, if they can wrangle Trump. He might find a way to screw them over but they have leverage with social media, checkbooks.
The information battle space is massively tilted toward a GOP narrative. The fact that people will say ‘inflation’ is basically another way of saying, Democratic policies are going to help the undeserving who will make everything more expensive for me. It’s a BS narrative blaming Dems for unrelenting pressure on labor from capital and GOP-driven policies. The media will never call those out. Anything raising up poor people gets called out as socialist, blatant fascism staring you in the face is never called out.
There is a collapse of trust in elites and institutions. Voters think their institutions have failed them and actively want to tear them down. Dems are pro institutions, Trump wants to blow the institutions up (literally in the case of 1/6).
You can’t afford housing. You can’t afford college. You can’t afford medical care. Someone tells you a BS story in appealing language, it’s not your fault, it’s all the fault of the immigrants, only Trump can fix it. And you buy it.
There’s a significant contingent that stayed home because they just couldn’t vote for a Black woman. Trump is someone they can see as their leader, Harris is not.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The GOP is responsible for essentially all of the stuff the GOP claims to be mad about, offshoring, immigrants, high prices and consumer extraction.
The US is complicated, but the idea of freedom, anyone can make it regardless of race, color, creed, ideology, is pretty powerful. Of course we haven’t always lived up to that, slavery, Jim Crow, internments, Red scares. But there is no American ethnicity, only American culture and an open society and freedom are a big part of it. It’s incredibly sad to see so many turn their back on that.
Americans aren’t analytical. They aren’t taught the tools to think for themselves, to think critically about data, about economic and political systems, about social changes. It’s hard and there aren’t always good answers. But if someone says they are a rational free thinker, a contrarian who does their own research, it’s generally a tell that they are getting some bullshit from YouTube influencers.
Critical thinking is meta by definition, it’s not just what are you saying, but why are you saying it. Data doesn’t show up in a vacuum, to understand it you have to solve for the system that created it. Anyone who thinks meta is the woke mind virus is literally saying, you gotta drink our Kool-Aid, see things only from our point of view. Anyone who tries to be real gets eaten alive.
Americans have had it so good for so long they don’t realize if you break your toys you might not get better toys (institutions). So many of these people have never experienced a negative consequence of their actions in their lives. They think they are the good, hardworking real Americans and they are going to be OK regardless. Surely the leopard would never eat their face?
Just as software started eating the world and now Big Tech is eating software with AI, Big Tech is now eating government. They will insert themselves into every transaction and take a vig, and surveil and extract everyone. It will be an even greater golden age of techbro excess and grift. And of course they own the media and social media.
The current era of relative US hegemony can be understood as a strong-dollar era. It’s the reverse of the 70s, an era of slow growth and high inflation and ‘malaise’. The world lost confidence in the US in the wake of Vietnam, abandonment of the gold standard, oil crisis, economic mismanagement. Currently, we are able to run large trade and budget deficits because the rest of the world wants to run up surpluses and buy US bonds and other assets as a store of wealth. The demand for dollars and US assets has a downside, it hollows out US manufacturing, gives us financialization, the Dutch disease, casino capitalism. If Trump imposes tariffs, dismantles the Federal government to eliminate state capacity to meddle with tech and other oligarchs, expels workers, cuts taxes, disbands NATO, it may create a lot of uncertainty and political risk and send us back to the 70s. Leaving the gold standard was an implicit default, Trump’s incoherent policies could amount to a similar abandonment of international commitments leading to global realignments away from the US.
Of course Russia will love that, and it’s not exactly a coincidence. Trump is in bed with BRIC strongmen. And Musk is in bed with crypto dweebs. A lot of techbros think they will step into the breach and create an alternative financial system with crypto, and eat the Fed in addition to the administrative and regulatory state. Of course, that implies dollar hyperinflation and global economic collapse, which is bad for everyone. But there are crypto maximalists who think all of the above is inevitable and desirable in the long run. Especially if it puts them in charge of the commanding heights. So they are useful idiots for Putin and others who would prefer to end the hegemony of the US and the dollar. Disruption is good, right? How bad could it be if you disrupt the foundation of everything, like the Sun? I don’t think they have thought things through.
I think anybody who doesn’t think that this crowd is the extreme right, who doesn’t think Trump dreams of being Hitler or that Musk is a white supremacist, isn’t really paying attention or using critical thinking.
But when the shit really hits the fan, Trump voters are going to claim they didn’t vote for this. Well, you saw 4 years of this, you saw Jan 6, evidence of sexual assault, national security violations, financial shenanigans, calls for violence, ample evidence of dementia, felonies, and that is what you wanted. Good job!
Possible outcomes:
4 years of ineffective chaos and limited damage (except to Ukraine or immigrants). Obvious, Trump is an imbecile with increasing dementia. His administration was incompetent 4 years ago. They did not suddenly grow big brains. In fact, the ones with any brains left and called out Trump as an absolute moron and extremist. Trump will be scraping the bottom for new appointees who will be even more extreme and even less competent. Well, Musk is competent and extreme. Maybe he will be the regent or maybe he will get backstabbed to death.
Long term diminishment of the institutional capacity of the federal government (a top objective of Musk and Project 2025), destruction of NATO, Smoot-Hawley tariffs, global recession.
Imagine if there is a pandemic with anti-vaxxer RFK in charge; strategic crises with a Flynn in charge; domestic unrest with a McCarthyist, shoot-first-ask-questions later person leading law enforcement; financial crisis with a Judy Shelton in charge. Dude was certainly not joking about firing squads or using the military against political opponents. The tell is when they claim in all seriousness that their opponents are doing it, spying on them, weaponizing the government, putting opponents in jail or camps, committing violence. Whatever they accuse their opponents of doing, they will do themselves. Maybe guardrails hold and maybe they don’t. If you don’t take him literally and seriously by now, you should start, even if it might already be too late.
The lunatics will be in charge of the asylum. All bets are off. Anything is possible. American Troubles, global recession and even world war are not off the table. If the US isn’t prepared to back Ukraine and other former Soviet republics and clients, Putin will be quick to take advantage, likewise China with Taiwan and other hotspots. Empires don’t last forever. The Soviet empire collapsed because they became dependent on energy exports and when the oil price fell, they had written a lot of checks to internal constituents and places like Cuba which they couldn’t cash. This empire has a lot of enemies and vulnerabilities and overextensions and outstanding checks, is riding high, and pride goeth before a fall.
The lights are going out one by one and I will not live to see the them lit again. Perhaps the Lord forgives people who do not know what they are doing, but I do not. Neither does reality. Buckle up, my friends.
Expect this to be edited out and the Substack to be discontinued in the not too-distant future. The imminent death of Obamacare is going to require some lifestyle changes and I can ill afford crazy rants out there. Speaking your mind is about to become dangerous.
Follow the latest AI headlines via SkynetAndChill.com on Bluesky