Rich Americans get second passports, citing risk of instability
Wealthy U.S. families are increasingly applying for second citizenships and national residences as a way to hedge their financial risk, according to a leading law firm.
The wealthy are building these “passport portfolios” — collections of second, and even third or fourth, citizenships — in case they need to flee their home country.
The super-rich make contingency plans when revolution (via warfare or taxation) is nigh.
This is a bellwether.
Turchin's terrifying predictions
For graduates it has become a game of ‘musical chairs’ where you pay a huge sum to buy a ticket to play the game (University costs), but the number of chairs (graduate level jobs) remain the same. As the number of players increases year on year, massively in just a few decades, supply way exceeds demand. So graduates have to up their game and pay for another even more expensive ticket to get a Masters. Even worse, those who go on to do PhDs find there are no academic jobs available, as again supply has exceeded demand for many years. Graduates in the social sciences and humanities are particularly vulnerable but Turchin’s point is that, for a rapidly increasing graduate population there is a precarious future and lots of debt. This may be exacerbated by AI, as it eats into cognitive work, so has that group as its sweet spot.
This frustrated aspirant class, for Turchin, is dangerous. Always isolated from working class people, they have little in common with the non-graduate class or ideas like collective bargaining and trade unions. They have the time and support from their propertied parents to become activists and protestors and often pick up causes on campus around cancel culture, climate change, transgender issues and social justice. Poverty is not the problem, recognition of identity is.
I find myself in this "precariat" class. Most of my friends are in this group, too. We went to college with the promise it would lead to better jobs, higher wages, more social mobility, yet most of my friends are burdened with crippling debt.
I'm an anomaly. Early investments in the market have stablilized my economic position, and while I have no debt, financially, I'm solidly lower-middle class. But I own my home and have non-essential assets I could sell in an emergency. I live on less than $25k a year, but without debt, this is not diffcult.
I've watched identity politics take hold in my cohort. It captured me for a time, too, and I'm sure still animates me in some ways. I'm embarrassed by my participation in this push to focus so intently on identity, and I'm horrified at how so many of my contemporaries still behave. Compassion for others — those of a different class, gender, or belief — has disappeared in the face of a relentless focus on our differences. Tellingly, so many people closest to my ideological home — liberal, (ex?)Democrat, progressive — have adopted the worst habits of the political opposition. They've become closed off to new perspectives, refusing to engage with the ideas of a person on the basis of their gender, their race, their class. Worse, they still claim to be liberal, though this behavior is the antithesis of liberalism.
What is worrying is how easily we all march lock-step into the future, even when the signs of discontent are ringing in our ears. We are like those cartoon figures who run off the edge of the cliff and hang smiling in mid-air, before the fall. We don't adjust or adapt, we simply behave according to the groupthink of the socio-economic group we find ourselves in. The trick is to sit back, look, listen and read people like Turchin. You don't have to agree with him but it is voices like his that at least provide substance to predictions, not about 10nyears [sic] from now but next year!
This is a pretty damn salient analogy. Our current system of capitalism heavily favors those with capital, i.e. shareholders. If you have money in the stock market, you're the beneficiary of capitalism. Instead of money going to the employees of a company, that money is funneled to those that own stock in said company, i.e. "maximizing shareholder value." Those at the top make more and more off the labor of the working class.
This system has to change for our culture to avoid a painful (and maybe bloody) revolution. Wealth being funneled to the upper classes needs to be given to the working class, as they rightly deserve. It is, after all, their labor. But politically, this redistribution of wealth has been branded a handout, welfare, socialism. Tellingly, Republicans have convinced their own working-class constituents to vote against their best interest by making "socialism" such a toxic word.
These days, nuance has no place in America. That has something to do with our media and something to do with our level of education. It's remarkably difficult to explain the financial system or the stock market, and attempting to explain the nuances of capitalism, socialism, and how the two are blended to form a more equal, fair, just society is near impossible. Dependent on their political affiliation, people are triggered by the mere mention of either word and conversations about the nuances of policy become impossible.
We are in real trouble.
Report: Israel used AI tool called Lavender to choose targets in Gaza
The system had a 90 percent accuracy rate, sources said, meaning that about 10 percent of the people identified as Hamas operatives weren’t members of Hamas’ military wing at all. Some of the people Lavender flagged as targets just happened to have names or nicknames identical to those of known Hamas operatives; others were Hamas operatives’ relatives or people who used phones that had once belonged to a Hamas militant. “Mistakes were treated statistically,” a source who used Lavender told +972. “Because of the scope and magnitude, the protocol was that even if you don’t know for sure that the machine is right, you know statistically that it’s fine. So you go for it.”
Emphasis mine.
Welcome to the future.
David Foster Wallace interview on German TV
This interview only becomes more prescient.
A model of life…in which I have a right to be entertained all the time seems not to be a promising one.
Will the Stock Market Crash? This Hedge-Funder Thinks So
Look, the only way to get us out of this is to tear the Band-Aid off. You know, it’s cold turkey. But of course, that’s a big, big problem, and I do not think we have the societal temperament for that. So who knows? Who the hell knows? I wish I could give you something, but I can’t give anything. And I don’t think there is anything, frankly. I think it’s a moot point anyway because they’re just going to have to do more and more and more. Powell has been talking a big game the past year or so, but it’s all a big bluff.
The Dark Mountain Manifesto
Around the world, discontent can be heard. The extremists are grinding their knives and moving in as the machine’s coughing and stuttering exposes the inadequacies of the political oligarchies who claimed to have everything in hand. Old gods are rearing their heads, and old answers: revolution, war, ethnic strife. Politics as we have known it totters, like the machine it was built to sustain. In its place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart.
A lot has changed since I first read this almost 15 years ago, but it has only become more prescient.
America Is Headed Toward Collapse
The long history of human society compiled in our database suggests that America’s current economy is so lucrative for the ruling elites that achieving fundamental reform might require a violent revolution. But we have reason for hope. It is not unprecedented for a ruling class—with adequate pressure from below—to allow for the nonviolent reversal of elite overproduction. But such an outcome requires elites to sacrifice their near-term self-interest for our long-term collective interests. At the moment, they don’t seem prepared to do that.
A.I. Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Industry Leaders Warn
Some skeptics argue that A.I. technology is still too immature to pose an existential threat. When it comes to today’s A.I. systems, they worry more about short-term problems, such as biased and incorrect responses, than longer-term dangers.
But others have argued that A.I. is improving so rapidly that it has already surpassed human-level performance in some areas, and it will soon surpass it in others. They say the technology has showed signs of advanced capabilities and understanding, giving rise to fears that “artificial general intelligence,” or A.G.I., a type of artificial intelligence that can match or exceed human-level performance at a wide variety of tasks, may not be far-off.
This just isn’t a path humanity needs to go down. What is it with us humans? Why can’t we stop? What motivates us to do this shit?
Maybe you think our self-destruction isn’t inevitable, but deep in my gut, that feels naive and ignorant of human nature.
Is there a word for the feeling of being deeply ashamed of my species, yet complicit in some of our worst behaviors? That shame, that fear of what feels inevitable, undergirds my entire life and has since I was an adolescent. I describe it as the awareness we’re all tethered together and collectively running toward a cliff, yet most everyone seems not to see the edge. A few of us are trying to slow down — we see what’s coming — but we can’t stop the lot of us.
I want us to slow down. I want to not wake up each morning with this itch behind my eyes, this breathlessness in my gut, this primal suspicion that we’re all fucking ourselves.
Again and again, the phrase that comes to mind is “it doesn’t have to be this way.” And yet it feels inevitable.
Make it make sense.
Poll: 61% of Americans say AI threatens humanity’s future
The poll also revealed a political divide in perceptions of AI, with 70 percent of Donald Trump voters expressing greater concern about AI versus 60 percent of Joe Biden voters. Regarding religious beliefs, evangelical Christians were more likely to “strongly agree” that AI poses risks to human civilization, at 32 percent, compared to 24 percent of non-evangelical Christians.
Strange bedfellows.
How Could AI Change War? U.S. Defense Experts Warn About New Tech
“If we stop, guess who’s not going to stop: potential adversaries overseas,” the Pentagon’s chief information officer, John Sherman, said on Wednesday. “We’ve got to keep moving.”
A cliff? What cliff…
Faster, faster!
AI plus MRI yields the ability to recognize what the mind is hearing.
Today, researchers announced a new bit of mind reading that’s impressive in its scope. By combining fMRI brain imaging with a system that’s somewhat like the predictive text of cell phones, they’ve worked out the gist of the sentences a person is hearing in near real time. While the system doesn’t get the exact words right and makes a fair number of mistakes, it’s also flexible enough that it can reconstruct an imaginary monologue that goes on entirely within someone’s head.
The hardest part of the AI revolution will be the discovery of empirical evidence that free will is a myth.
‘Godfather of AI’ quits Google with regrets and fears about his life’s work.
The spread of misinformation is only Hinton’s immediate concern. On a longer timeline he’s worried that AI will eliminate rote jobs, and possibly humanity itself as AI begins to write and run its own code.
The A.I. Dilemma
50% of AI researchers think there’s a 10% or greater chance that AI will cause the extinction of the human race.