tingilinde

palantir

They're all in for Trump

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Palantir, the surveillance giant, is taking on an increased role with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including finding the physical location of people who are marked for deportation, according to Palantir Slacks and other internal messages obtained by 404 Media.

The leak shows that Palantir’s work with ICE includes producing leads for law enforcement to find people to deport and keeping track of the logistics of Trump’s mass deportation effort, and provides concrete insight into the Trump administration’s wish to leverage data to enforce its immigration agenda. The internal communications also show Palantir leadership preparing for a potential backlash from employees or outsiders, with them writing FAQs that can be sent to friends or family that start to ask about Palantir’s work with ICE.

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opposing trends

Susan Crawford on global warming and the ability of US cities to deal with damage and disaster.

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The acceleration of extreme climate and weather disasters in the United States has wrought a death toll thousands deep while inflicting billions in economic losses over the past four decades, and data show that Harris County sits at the epicenter of the devastation. . . .

A National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) study ranked Harris County as having the highest weather and climate hazard risk after considering its physical exposure to natural disasters, along with the vulnerability and resilience of its population and infrastructure, including homes, businesses, vehicles and crops.

It's not just Houston. Put yourself in a city CFO's shoes. You're trying to plan ahead to avoid building in floodplains, encourage flood mitigation, and generally keep people safer from chronic flooding, extreme weather, extreme heat, wildfires, and all the other harms predictably coming your city's way. Meanwhile, federal aid is evaporating, some of your property values are going down (affecting property tax revenues), insurance is exiting or becoming unaffordable for many (affecting property values), and now reliable federal tenants in your downtowns are pulling up stakes and leaving. Borrowing money may become sharply more expensive at the same time that construction costs—profoundly affected by tariffs as well as inflation generally—are climbing. All of this makes for a truly difficult job, the costs of which will end up on residents' shoulders one way or another.

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more reasons not to own a tesla

Oddometer tampering and other fun courtesy of the fact the heart of the car is controlled by Elon.

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The suit was filed by a California driver who bought a used Tesla with 36,772 miles on it. The car's suspension kept failing, necessitating multiple servicings, and that was when the plaintiff noticed that the odometer readings for his identical daily drive were going up by ever-larger increments. This wasn't exactly subtle: he was driving 20 miles per day, but the odometer was clocking 72.35 miles/day. Still, how many of us monitor our daily odometer readings?

In short order, his car's odometer had rolled over the 50k mark and Tesla informed him that they would no longer perform warranty service on his lemon. Right after this happened, the new mileage clocked by his odometer returned to normal. This isn't the only Tesla owner who's noticed this behavior: Tesla subreddits are full of similar complaints:

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xi vs trump

Xi wins - Trump has put the US in a losing position. A New Yorker interview with MIT China expert Yasheng Huang

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I think it’s clear they don’t want a trade war. Their economy is struggling, and the export sector has been one of its few bright spots. Last year, they had almost a trillion-dollar trade surplus. The property sector is not doing well. The technology sector is doing well, but it’s not really adding that much to G.D.P. growth. So this was purely a trade war that was initiated by the United States, and not by China.

I don’t think they want to cave in. That would make the Chinese leadership look very bad. And, moreover, I don’t think they trust the Trump Administration. Even if they were to give concessions this time around, I don’t think they believe that the concessions would hold. So there are multiple motivations on their part not to quickly come to an agreement if that agreement requires significant concessions.

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a conflict between money and principle

The Catholic belief that life begins at conception apparently ends where money's involved.

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An Iowa law that was passed in 2017 said that non-economic damages in cases involving the “personal injury or death” of a “patient” should be capped at $250,000… unless there was really good reason to raise that amount—like “a “substantial or permanent loss or impairment of a bodily function.” That makes sense. If you’re forced to suffer the rest of your life due to a doctor’s mistake, you may be entitled to a larger amount.

Should the loss of a pregnancy count under that exemption? If so, the Catholic hospital could be paying a lot more than $250,000 to the Andersons if a jury believes that it was the hospital’s negligence that led to the death of the fetus.

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trump's coming drug tariffs

And how they will impact you and people you know.

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While some drugs are made at least in part in the United States, America’s reliance on China for medicines has generated alarm for years, with both Republicans and Democrats identifying it as a national security vulnerability.

Many drugs are not produced without at least one stage of the manufacturing process happening in China. Even India’s giant generic drug sector is deeply dependent on China, because Indian manufacturers typically obtain their raw materials from Chinese plants.

Imposing disruptive levies on lifesaving medications creates risks for Mr. Trump that were not a major concern with some of his other tariff targets, like steel and aluminum, where Americans generally aren’t directly exposed to increased prices.

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a tip of the hat to Jim

 

exolife?

Very preliminary, but still...

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Now a team of researchers is offering what it contends is the strongest indication yet of extraterrestrial life, not in our solar system but on a massive planet, known as K2-18b, that orbits a star 120 light-years from Earth. A repeated analysis of the exoplanet’s
atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known source: living organisms such as marine algae.

“It is in no one’s interest to claim prematurely that we have detected life,” said Nikku Madhusudhan, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge and an author of the new study, at a news conference on Tuesday. Still, he said, the best explanation for his group’s observations is that K2-18b is covered with a warm ocean, brimming with life.

“This is a revolutionary moment,” Dr. Madhusudhan said. “It’s the first time humanity has seen potential biosignatures on a habitable planet.”

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why trump will lose the trade war(s)

Commentary by Paul Krugman

of course Congress could put a stop to this.. since they're not it's reasonable to talk about the Trump-GOP trade war.

 

 

on energy non-conservation

A very clear discussion using Noether's Theorem. This bothered me a lot until I mentioned it to a theoretical physicist (Jack Smith) who made it crystal clear in fifteen minutes.

the san diego quake

Judith and Kyle are on the case -- fascinating stuff!

the san diego quake

Judith and Kyle are on the case -- fascinating stuff!

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How does earthquake early warning work? At the very moment when a rupture begins, seismic waves begin to radiate outward from the fault zone. The rupture front also moves along the fault surface, continually generating new seismic waves as it goes. P waves (compressional waves) and S waves (shear waves) are born at the same moment and location, but the P waves quickly outrace their sheary siblings. The first detection at any station is the faster P-wave. Right when the first jolt of the P wave arrives at a station, it is difficult to tell whether an earthquake has struck somewhere, or whether a truck has backed into a nearby building. However, this unusual signal triggers a system that is watching over all of the seismometers at the same time. This nearly omniscient system communicates at the speed of light and can tell whether a pattern of triggers is consistent with an earthquake, and can even (roughly) estimate the magnitude of the earthquake, once the seismic waves have passed below enough stations.

This is the basis of the ShakeAlert system, which is one of several earthquake early warning systems in operation around the globe. Once the readings exceed some pre-defined threshold and an earthquake has been identified, messages are sent out at light speed, outracing the ground motion and providing seconds, or (for large events) up to a minute, of warning. (We note that although digital messages can travel extremely fast, interfaces between communications systems typically add a few seconds of delay. For most technology applications, this is irrelevant, but in the case of early warning it actually matters quite a lot.) Overall, the level of technology required to reliably support this system is extremely impressive.

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the san diego quake

Judith and Kyle are on the case -- fascinating stuff!

ai as normal technlology

A high level discussion from Arvind and Sayash.  They're seasoned academic researchers with no axe to grind as opposed to the (in my mind) overly-optimistic techbros.

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We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity.1

The statement “AI is normal technology” is three things: a description of current AI, a prediction about the foreseeable future of AI, and a prescription about how we should treat it. We view AI as a tool that we can and should remain in control of, and we argue that this goal does not require drastic policy interventions or technical breakthroughs. We do not think that viewing AI as a humanlike intelligence is currently accurate or useful for understanding its societal impacts, nor is it likely to be in our vision of the future.2

The normal technology frame is about the relationship between technology and society. It rejects technological determinism, especially the notion of AI itself as an agent in determining its future. It is guided by lessons from past technological revolutions, such as the slow and uncertain nature of technology adoption and diffusion. It also emphasizes continuity between the past and the future trajectory of AI in terms of societal impact and the role of institutions in shaping this trajectory.

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massachusetts v oklahoma

Comparing two states where all counties went for a one presidential candidate in the last election.

a tip of the hat to sara

 

ai and lessons from the luddites

An interesting piece in the New Yorker

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As alarm about artificial intelligence has gone global, so has a fascination with the Luddites. The British podcast “The Ned Ludd Radio Hour” describes itself as “your weekly dose of tech skepticism, cynicism, and absurdism.” Kindred themes are explored in the podcast “This Machine Kills,” co-hosted by the social theorist Jathan Sadowski, whose new book, “The Mechanic and the Luddite,” argues that the fetishization of A.I. and other digital technologies obscures their role in disciplining labor and reinforcing a profit-driven system. “Luddites want technology—the future—to work for all of us,” he told the Guardian.

The technology journalist Brian Merchant makes a similar case in “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech” (2023). Blending a vivid account of the original Luddites with an indictment of contemporary tech giants like Amazon and Uber, Merchant portrays the current wave of automation as part of a centuries-long struggle over labor and power. “Working people are staring down entrepreneurs, tech monopolies, and venture capital firms that are hunting for new forms of labor-saving tech—be it AI, robotics, or software automation—to replace them,” Merchant writes. “They are again faced with losing their jobs to the machine.”

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I used to say the predicted enormous impact of AI (particularly generate AI) was years off given adoption rates of technologies in businesses, but I've recanted given what gAI driven DOGE is doing.  Perhaps it will destroy what we think of as America.