Open Thread

Yuval Noah Harari on The Power of Truth in the Age of AI:

https://youtu.be/9IHplMvBLys (1:38:26)

Yuval Noah Harari explores the power of truth in the age of AI in this thought-provoking conversation about his new book “Nexus”. Don’t miss out on this deep dive into the intersection of democracy, artificial intelligence, history, and the concept of truth.

Yuval Noah Harari published an essay in the New York Times recently. “Large-scale democracies,” he wrote, “became feasible only after the rise of modern information technologies like the newspaper, the telegraph and the radio. The fact that modern democracy has been built on top of modern information technologies means that any major change in the underlying technology is likely to result in a political upheaval.” Well, we’re witnessing a major change in the underlying technology right now. Artificial intelligence is here, and if its proponents are to be believed, it will fundamentally transform how we consume information and communicate with each other. What this means for the future of democracy — and society as we know it — is the subject of Harari’s new book “Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI.”

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/059373422X/

Trump announces that as president, he will immediately implement a temporary 10% cap on credit card interest rates

This is Trump, so this is a “a concept of a plan” not an actual practical policy proposal. And, of course, “it’s complicated”.

Usury caps are obvious good policy and typify good populism.

Any serious usury cap would cause a financial crisis for banks and related systems. As opposed to the financial crises of households caused by usury.

Watch carefully how this is attacked and by whom.

@ Ian –

Good post yesterday on medieval universities. I didn’t know all that.

@ Bruce Wilder-

Bruce: “Any serious usury cap would cause a financial crisis for banks and related systems. As opposed to the financial crises of households caused by usury.”

I saw this come up on NC earlier today, and Yves S. said the more or less the same as you — it won’t happen — but with interesting specificity of details on why.

To whit: “There was a mini-crisis that was not well covered in connection with the Global Financial Crisis. Banks has sold off portfolios of credit card receivables. These were supposed to be transfers even though banks were still servicing the cards. When defaults mounted in the crisis, the buyers said, “You need to eat the losses or we will never buy this stuff again.” There was no way banks had the balance sheet capacity, much the less in a crisis, to retain new credit card receivables.

“However, if Trump finds a way to implement a variant of this idea (a cap at a higher level for new credit card loans), it would force the industry to go back to something like its model as of the 1980s: being much much much more stringent about extending credit, and imposing annual fees (which they all had as of then, the purpose was to assure they made some money on the consumer side from customers who paid off balances in full every month).”

Me: I recall the 1980s actually, and I don’t think the US economy now could survive the stringency on credit there was then, what with about one-third of the US population unable to cover an emergency/unexpected payout of $400 with cash on hand.

Bruce– what you share shows that Trump still has a few (right) “populist” instincts, and may not (?) be entirely sidelined with butt-hurt that Kamala ridiculed him about crowds leaving early, or spending his time explaining that “he’s a much better looking person than she is.”

Of course, it’s just as likely to actually happen if DJT gets into office as Kamala’s empty promises about finally helping the “middle class” under her administration. On the other hand, judging the millionaire & billionaire crowds who attended the DNC to her cabal that might mean people earning annually $275K to $1.5 million are “the middle”, so the rest of us will continue to be fvcked . . .

Real material benefits for anyone but lobbyists, the MIC, the FIRE sector, Big Pharma, etc. are not what either side of the duopoly, a 2-headed, rabid swine, will deliver. It’ll be more war, more environmental and social degradation, more spying and censorship, more cop violence and rabid nationalist (we can defeat Putin!! shriek the Dems, We are the Greatest Empire that ever existed in human history!”, we can jail the college brats who consider Palestinians human & put all the homeless & immigrants in work camps, promise the Rs) . . . In Leonard Cohen’s words, “Everybody knows that the good guys lost.” TINA, No hope, no change, just an Empire falling to pieces.

Bruce Wilder

This is Trump, so this is a “a concept of a plan” not an actual practical policy proposal.

Like his raising taxes on hedge fund managers (he lowered them) or giving ‘everyone great health care’ (his ‘plan’ would have someone 60 paying the average personal income in PREMIUMS ALONE, let alone getting actual health care) or ‘bringing back manufacturing ‘ (his 2017 tax cut made it easier, not harder, for companies to outsource production elsewhere). And there’s “renegotiating NAFTA’ where he put int he same people who had originally negotiated the treaty and these made essentially no changes.

As someone who had hoped back then that the anti-immigration and veiled racism of his 2016 campaign was just ‘theater’, ‘red meat’, for his base, while proposals like those above were his ‘real agenda’, it turns out that Trump’s hatred of the ‘other’ was the only thing you could count on while all the other policy proposals were ‘theater’. Yet people fell for them, and astonishingly still fall for them.

Here lies the body of Mary Lee
Died at the age of a hundred and three
For fifteen years she kept her virginity
Not a bad record for this vicinity

Quint was an ‘old-school’ working class boater/fisherman who had a lifetime of real-world experience with sharks. This was a time when guys like him could live on their boat in a harbor (near impossible in most locales these days) or perhaps stay in any number of very affordable units on Long Island (or in New England) at the time.

Quint lived ‘outside the matrix’ or largely outside the mainstream economic/political system – probably not paying any income taxes of note, though obviously paying taxes on, say gas for the boat (I think Quint’s boat was diesel) and other products and – to a lesser degree in the case of a Quint – services.

Quint may have paid a boat slip fee, or he may have worked something out with the truly local owner of the harbor. This local owner did their banking at one of the many small banks or savings and loans that were available because ‘big finance’ wasn’t nearly as big, and structures in place and enforced by personnel (is policy) enforced more competition among them.

This was all accepted by a majority of society such that it could be said to be the generally accepted and approved of (not just ‘tolerated’) ‘zeitgeist’ of the overall society.

A large complex society must allow for this. There must be sufficient ‘space’ and inbuilt opportunities for ‘self-employment’ of all manner, and cheap housing, which are obviously the result of political/economic structures that allow them to exist. A general ‘societal zeitgeist’ follows from this, if done artfully/skillfully.

The ‘zeitgeist’ in modern complex societies is set and ingrained and subsequently repeatedly ‘enforced’ (and thus deeply ingrained) by the media, This was true then, but to a much much lesser degree. There was much more ‘space’ in life away from media, The zeitgeist wasn’t nearly as propaganda and media-saturated as it is now because the full spectrum surveillance-state structure of which the media is an integral part wasn’t in place yet.

You couldn’t make the movie ‘Network’ today. What would you possibly say? Throw away the phones forever?

Of course, no one stopped watching TV after that movie was made. And the movie itself didn’t dare talk about propaganda you might find embedded in movies at the movie theater, like where you’d go to see Network at the time.

In fact, that movie was made just in time for the soon-to-be released wholesale introduction of ‘music televison’ to society. What a rollicking combination of image and narrative!

And Joe Turner read books for the CIA.

Again, due to the wanton wholesale destruction of the previous ‘order of things’ which included enforced regulations that prompted competition among many many players, we are now down to I believe five media conglomerates – themselves now largely controlled by PE or ‘larger finance’ – as opposed to the 50-100 or so companies at the time of the making of Jaws.

Yves Smith wrote a piece a few months ago about all the affordable housing options available for humans like Quint that were largely borne of New Deal political/economic structuring policies – policies that were in fact pushed for by a wide range of political factions including ‘populists’ and those to the left of FDR.

These are all gone now.

It was the middle class people on Amity Island who, god forbid, may have had to go on welfare if the beaches were closed due to ongoing shark attacks.

It was a tourist town whose populations swell in summer and many of its year-round residents often depend on having a good summer season to get them through the entire year.

Interestingly, neither Brody nor Hooper have this particular limiting economic/resource factor in their lives. Both have more stable jobs with benefits.

Perhaps even more interestingly, nor does Quint, though for different reasons.

In this particular situation, Brody, Hooper, and Quint are more ‘stable’ in their economic autonomy, though Brody/Hooper for quite different reasons than Quint. The people who sell their wares and sell food and ice cream during the summer are closer to taking a big hit – within the system – than Brody and Hooper.

Quint, who lives on the outskirts of the system, doesn’t have this issue either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPi40lQetew

But notice that Quint simply says that they’ll ‘be on welfare for the winter’ if they don’t act quickly and pay him ten grand for the shark-kill mission – which he wants to do alone because he’s only ever known how to operate largely alone, and presumably also because the payout will be all his.

Quint’s a rather savvy businessman in his own right.

In fact, he may have ginned the whole thing up, sharks and all, in order to put himself in position to for the big payout. That would be quite a ‘deep state’ endeavor carried out by the lone Quint!

Seriously though, notice that Quint DOES NOT say something like ‘that’ll put all your business’ on a payin’ basis OTHERWISE YOU’LL BE IN DESPERATE STRAITS ALMOST IMMEDIATELY AND YOU’LL BE FACING HOMELESSNESS LIKE SO MANY OTHERS IN THIS COUNTRY THESE DAYS.’

And none of the townspeople are in fact worried that things will get that bad because there is at least a minimal welfare system in place that people can use as needed to avoid such precarity.

At worst, they’d have to resort to welfare which wasn’t something someone necessarily wanted to be on and which wasn’t exactly something that one would go screaming from the rooftops. But it was there, it provided adequate resources as opposed to today, and it was relatively easy to navigate.

And this was the generally accepted zeitgeist of society in this place at this time.

Brody was both a ‘middle class’ and ‘working class’ guy who was both somewhat ‘educated’ (not as ‘highly’ as Hooper from the out-of-town ocean institute) but also lived and worked in town and thus was both well-known among the townfolk and wasn’t seen or perceived as ‘over-educated’ or ‘high-brow’ in any way. Sheriff Brody was generally liked and certainly respected by the majority of the town.

This was also before the local police became highly militarized in this country.

Brody, who didn’t like ‘the water’ himself (that’s some bad hat, Harry), acted as the bridge between two guys who loved the water, though in very different ways.

Hooper’s scientism didn’t in any way tie him to theory above practice and experience, but could perhaps be said to be less immediately experiential than Quint. And Quint certainly didn’t have time for what he considered to be both an overemphasis on, and an overclassification of, things that were outside his purview anyway. Guy’s got a life to live.

Upon first meeting Hooper and seeing all his fancy sciency stuff, the very experienced Quint wondered aloud how it could possibly ever be useful: “Not sure what the shark is going to do with that tank…might eat it I suppose. Seen one eat a rocking chair one time.”

And Hooper, once out on the boat and really experiencing things the way perhaps he never had before, was quite keen to be part of the ‘old school’ way of using the barrels to bring the shark to the surface.

‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat.’

Quint correctly called the size of the shark when they first saw it. Hooper thought it was smaller than it actually was. Perhaps he needed a little more perspective of the kind Brody refused to give him a little later. Quint’s raw experiential background instantly ‘sizes’ the shark more accurately than Hooper’s largely theoretical background.

Once they do decide to use Hooper’s tank and poison dart, things don’t exactly go well. Quint was right – the shark ate the damn thing!

Jaws was ultimately killed by inserting a highly flammable tank of compressed gas into its mouth and shooting the tank with a rifle, this blowing Jaws up forever. Even though Quint was dead by this time, the method of killing turned out to be rather rudimentary – a method the Quint character himself would certainly have employed were he still around.

Of the three main characters, only Sheriff Brody has a ‘stable’ woman in his life – the wonderful Lorraine Gary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOgnSbW_OJk

And now for something completely different:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqBC33jBc8w&t=1023s

those people will simply be forced into even more predatory unregulated lending like payday loans.

There is no upside for the debtor in easy credit at 25%. That there is predatory lending at 400% is horrifying. But, credit at usurious interest rate doesn’t help someone who lacks the income — it just reduces their future income. Nor does it help “the economy” to draw resources into the dark business of extracting blood from turnips.

Yves Smith loves to stroke her own ego with knowing remarks about obscure back office arrangements constraining financial policy. It is nonsense. The big banks should have been broken and broken up in the financial crisis of 2007-8. Most key banking functions, like assessing credit risk, do not scale and banking becomes less efficient as very large institutions are forced by their own size and scope to adopt algorithmic methods. Credit card operations are very profitable for the big banks because it is all a numbers game run by computers for monopoly cartels, with people supplying only the colorful marketing offers to draw new suckers in the door, but from a social welfare point-of-view, it is a social loss that destroys lives and reduces net household income for poor and merely middle-class credit card users. Rich credit card users get airline points and cash back, further exacerbating income inequality. Most will think they deserve these benefits and many will congratulate themselves on the social conscience that tenderly advocates for keeping the lifeline of “easy” credit open to those people who “need” it.

And, Ian, organ donation, really? jeebus.

The Israeli population of Israel since 1967 has never been more than one smaill US state.
It is clamed that US aid to Israel is a few billion a year and has been a few billion a year for decacdes, up until 2023.
Niether Symour Hirsh nor Chris Hedges nor Pepe Escobar nor anyone else for that matter has ever claimed that the US provides more aid than that every year to Israel.
i myself have doubts about whether or not any country could do what Israel does without substantially more aid from the US than is publically claimed.
Have I missed a publicly released information??

Escalation cycle intensifying. Reporting indicates that the IAF struck 300-400 aim points across Southern Lebanon and Hezbollah responded with ~140 rockets, ranging targets as far South as Haifa (reporting indicates that Ramat David AB was among the targets). This after a similar scale of Hezbollah launches on Friday on targets closer to the border, preceded by IAF strikes on Thursday night.

It harms them if they believe that their access to state services is predicated on their willingness to donate their organs, *particularly* if they believe that the level of medical care (or any other state service) they may receive is at all influenced by their potential value as an organ donor. The opinion polling on this would be apocalyptic and the offensive IO potential massive.

I wouldn’t view this as Hezbollah being pushed “over the edge” into some sort of emotional response. In my view, they’ve been deliberately placed on the horns of a strategic dilemma as a central element of Israeli national strategy. Whether the intensification cycle continues will tell us a lot about how Gallant’s rhetoric should be interpreted (i.e., are they attempting a relatively low-cost reset of the deterrence calculus or are they gearing up for something bigger).

Headline in The Guardian:

Ohio residents flock to Springfield’s Haitian restaurants: ‘They are family’

Locals support and volunteer at Haitian-owned businesses to stand against Trump and Vance’s anti-immigrant lies

I just stare at this report and wonder at the processes of payment and professional imperative that drive it into existence.