News items where I don’t so much have opinions or analysis, just questions (which, if answered, might lead to analysis). Well, question #8 edges towards analysis, I suppose.
Where did George Santos actually get all the money that he concretely spent on his campaign (which much of the time, seems to have been synonymous with spending on himself)? So far I haven’t seen any investigative reporting even offer a theory, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t from pulling versions of the Nigerian-prince-needs-help scam.
Why are the residents of Georgia Congressional District 14 completely indifferent to whether they are represented in Congress at all? Does Greene do constituent service of the normal kind? (Would anyone in the district answer these questions honestly if a reporter asked them?)
Ron DeSantis seems to have been running with the strategy of outdoing Trump in terms of extremist actions in order to get nominated and then trying to pivot towards the center later on. The strategy seems to be falling flat on its back right out the gate at step #1, but wouldn’t it have made #2 impossible anyway? Can you imagine anybody ever saying “oh, yeah, he’s actually kind of a centrist”? (Also, while I’m at it, why does the NYT think that a really complex parsing of Florida’s experience of the pandemic under DeSantis is going to change anybody’s mind about him?)
It seems impossible enough that any individual could raise $44 billion in the first place for any reason, but how can it be possible to be well on your way to losing $44 billion through your own stupidity and not at least have your kneecaps or fingers broken by a loan shark’s muscle? Or at least being out of money if you can’t fix it, or have something happen to you?
When a bare electoral majority in a democracy that might not be an actual popular majority insists on pushing through a major change in how decisions get made that drastically tilts political power towards the bare electoral majority coalition, isn’t that exactly when the other side almost has to do everything possible to make that move so costly that it gets undone? And isn’t a democracy where you can make those kinds of changes with simple legislative majorities exactly that kind of disaster waiting to happen?
Why does the Mission Impossible team in the new film continue to use digital technology well after they know their adversary is a globally distributed AI that can distort, conceal or contaminate their data and control their devices? For extra credit, why doesn’t the AI in question just kill Benjy when he uses an AI-controlled autonomous driving program later in the film?
Speaking of global AI, this excellent Cory Doctorow essay on digital feudalism as a massive system of rentier wealth displacing capitalism got me thinking about whether what he describes is exactly one of the apocalyptic scenarios that even AI designers are fretting about. E.g., once all of our devices have chips in them and can’t be made to function in a purely analog, mechanical way, and once they’re all tied to rent-collection, clearly the work of collecting—and thus of ‘evicting’ an owner from the use of a device—is going to have to be automated. Once you’ve got AIs doing that work, who is going to check up on them to see whether they are accurately recording that rents were not paid whenever they kill-switch a device? It’s already hard enough to get financial records corrected when you can, after a lot of work, reach a real human being. (We’ve noticed that the local private-equity owned hospital seems to have stopped answering its phone in its accounts department, which I’m sure is no accident.) Wouldn’t an AI that was managing the maximum collection of rents and an AI managing the kill-switches notice that you get an even more optimal income flow with outright extortion, e.g., escalating demands for more payments, performatively punitive shut-offs, “nice farm you got here, be a shame if you couldn’t harvest the crops here?” Did we just build the foundations for a new global mafia?
Let’s suppose you could actually prove with great certainty that covid-19 was the result of deliberate gain-of-function research on a coronavirus in a Chinese-funded laboratory and that it was released either by accident or with some purpose in mind. What could actually happen next within the context of existing geopolitics? I mean, we can prove that Russia invaded Ukraine with no real reason other than conquest and that they have been persistently targeting civilian populations with military attacks within Ukraine ever since, just like we can prove that Russia funds extensive efforts to subvert elections and that Russia has ordered the murder or attempted murder of its former citizens living in other countries and of political leaders in other countries. And it seems fairly well proven that Mohammed bin Salman ordered the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi. And this means what, exactly, in terms of consequences, so far? What do people who strongly believe in the evidence for a lab-leak think would or should happen if that were widely accepted as the true explanation?