Cats, charts, and politics
For all the good it will do, I would like to remind everyone yet again that GPT-4 is not artificial intelligence. Neither is anything else. AI, by any reasonable definition, doesn't exist yet.
GPT-4 is amazing. It will have a huge impact on the world. It's definitely on the road to AI, the same way the Model T was on the road to a Ferrari. But it's still not AI. Not yet.
The judge in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News has issued a summary judgment that Fox did, indeed, lie about Dominion's voting machines:
In his ruling, Davis determined that the conservative cable-news network had undeniably broadcast falsehoods when it allowed allies of Donald Trump to float baseless conspiracy theories about Dominion supposedly rigging voting machines to boost Joe Biden.
However, Davis said he will leave it to a jury to decide whether Fox knew the statements were false when they aired them or acted recklessly in doing so — the “actual malice” standard required to prove a case of defamation.
This means Dominion doesn't have to clutter up its case by convincing a jury that Fox lied. Nor that the lies defamed Dominion. Nor that Fox was "just reporting the news." The judge has already decided those questions.
All they have to do is show that Fox knew it was lying—which seems like something of a no-brainer to me. Still, Dominion has to prove it. Stay tuned.
The full ruling is here.
*OK, fine, what he said is that "there is no genuine issue of material fact as to falsity....[it] is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true" [italics, bolding, and caps in original]. But maybe none of the 115 statements at issue are lies. Maybe all the folks at Fox believed this stuff and it was just a big misunderstanding!
I am willing to go out on a limb and say that this is unlikely with extreme prejudice. But for legal reasons the judge himself didn't say it.
It is not hard to imagine a conservative local prosecutor trying to charge President Biden with, say, failing to adequately guard the border.
“This presents the opportunity for potentially thousands of state and local prosecutors to investigate and charge a president without the impediment imposed by D.O.J.’s policy against indicting sitting presidents,” said Stanley M. Brand, a former House counsel whose firm represents a couple of Trump associates in the investigation into the mishandling of classified documents.
This chart shows total household financial assets through the end of 2022:
The basic story is easy to see. In 2020 assets grew above normal as spending slowed and the COVID rescue bill started putting money in people's pockets. This peaked in late 2021 at about $13 trillion above the pre-pandemic trend. Then, as the government bennies faded out, people spent down their savings and assets declined. At the end of 2022 assets stabilized, but at a level about $5 trillion below the pre-pandemic trendline.
Now here's income:
Income has been falling since mid-2021. It is now at a rate about $1.5 trillion below the pre-pandemic trend.
Now spending:
Spending cratered when the pandemic hit but then grew sharply as government programs kicked in. It flattened out in 2021 and has settled in at a rate about $0.3 trillion below the pre-pandemic trendline.
So income is down about $1.5 trillion but spending is down only $0.3 trillion. This can be made up by draining assets (primarily household savings), but assets are already well below their trendline. At this point, the only way spending can remain at its current level is if income makes a miraculous recovery, which is pretty unlikely. By the middle of this year we should start to see consistent declines in personal expenditures.
It's a showdown on the fenceline. Charlie and our squirrel are having a staring contest, which the squirrel won on sheer speed. It scampered over to the bush near Charlie and then zipped down. It happened so fast Charlie hardly had time to blink. Those squirrels are quick little beasties.
NBC News reports on Audrey Hale, the shooter in the Nashville school shooting earlier this week:
Even before authorities said Hale was transgender, users on extremist websites spent hours sharing their hopes that the shooter was trans or nonbinary, the primary targets of hate and harassment campaigns by the infamous extremist site 4chan over the last year.
When police said the shooter was transgender, the site immediately began posting threats against the LGBTQ community, vowing “revenge” and sleuthing for hints of ties to larger LGBTQ organizations in social media profiles online, though no such ties have been reported so far.
Fox News dived right in, of course. It was catnip for Tucker and Laura. As it turns out, though, it's not even clear that Hale was transgender.
Samira Hardcastle, who attended high school with Hale, said that “people just assumed that she was gay.” After high school, Hardcastle didn’t talk to Hale but did follow Hale on social media
“She didn’t come out saying she was transgender or that she identified as a male,” Hardcastle said of Hale’s social media posts. She added that Hale began using a different name on social media “in the last year or two maybe.”
In response to a request from NBC News regarding how police know Hale is transgender, among other questions, Nashville officials said their leadership will use the most available information when identifying a person by gender, and that they are consistently referring to Hale as a woman who has also used male pronouns and went by a different name as well.
Might be worth waiting a bit on this one, folks.
Good news on the inflation front today. The Fed's Favorite Measure of Inflation™ was down from its spike in January:
The core rate of PCE inflation is still too high, but the headline rate clocked in at 3.2%, which isn't bad. On a trendline basis, it was around 2.9%.
On a year-over-year basis, headline PCE was 5.0% and core PCE was 4.6%. Both were down from the previous month.
Over at National Review today I came across a link to a "massively researched, thoroughly reported, and well-thought-out essay" that is "an early contender for essay of the year."
NR is a nice, mainstream conservative publication, so I clicked the link to find out what mainstream conservatism finds interesting these days. Here is one paragraph:
Something monstrous is taking shape in America. Formally, it exhibits the synergy of state and corporate power in service of a tribal zeal that is the hallmark of fascism. Yet anyone who spends time in America and is not a brainwashed zealot can tell that it is not a fascist country. What is coming into being is a new form of government and social organization that is as different from mid-twentieth century liberal democracy as the early American republic was from the British monarchism that it grew out of and eventually supplanted. A state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals, is being replaced by a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms. It resembles the Chinese system of social credit and one-party state control, and yet that, too, misses the distinctively American and providential character of the control system. In the time we lose trying to name it, the thing itself may disappear back into the bureaucratic shadows, covering up any trace of it with automated deletions from the top-secret data centers of Amazon Web Services, “the trusted cloud for government.”
That's from the prologue, which is 2,000 words long. The actual essay itself turns out to be 11,000 words long. It's by Jacob Siegel, an editor at Tablet, and the topic is disinformation, which Siegel calls "the hoax of the century."
I won't pretend that I read all 13,000 words closely, but I did skim my way through the entire thing.¹ Siegel's contention, delivered with the connect-the-dots fervor of a JFK conspiracy theorist, is that the deep state has invented a fake disinformation crisis as a way of justifying the creation of a massive left-wing surveillance apparatus based on government control of social media and designed to censor conservative thought. Siegel relies mostly on stale old hobbyhorses like Hamilton 68, the Twitter files, GEC, CISA, the Steele dossier, and the "Russia hoax," and along the way he namechecks a rogues gallery of conservative bugbears, including George Soros, Alex Berenson, Klaus Schwab ("capo di tutti capi of the global expert class"), Hunter Biden, and "a class of journalists, retired generals, spies, Democratic Party bosses, party apparatchiks, and counterterrorism experts against the remnant of the American people who refused to submit to their authority."
In other words, it's basically made up out of buzzwords and gauze. There's barely a single word that exposes either a massive domestic surveillance operation or any serious government control of social media. And it's not as if the government doesn't know how to set up something like this if it wants to. As you may recall, the NSA really does surveil practically everything that crisscrosses the country, and it requires thousands of people, millions of terabytes of storage, and dozens of massive supercomputers. Siegel can do no more than point to a few haggard little groups of maybe 10 or 15 people each.
Is this essay the "Flight 93 Election" of 2023? Or just a lonely conspiracy theory that happened to get picked up by an NR writer on a bad day? I will be curious to see if it gets any further pickup in right-wing circles.
In any case, it's an interesting look at a particular way of thinking that's been picking up steam over the past year or two: namely that conservatives are widely convinced that social media is involved in a massive plot to censor them despite the fact that conservative accounts are among the most popular on nearly every social media platform. If you wonder how they square these two things, Siegel's essay is a place to start.
¹Because I'm a pro, that's why.
Earlier today I came across a tweet from Kristen Soltis Anderson about a Pew Research poll asking people which federal agencies they viewed favorably.¹ Her primary takeaway is that between 2019 and 2023 Republican views of nearly every federal agency have cratered.
I was noodling around with this, and finally decided that much of it could probably be explained by a Democrat being president vs. a Republican being president. There's no way to tease this apart, so instead I went back and got survey data from 2015 as well. What I found was sort of interesting. First, here are Democrats:
The lines go from most to least favorable agency, and there aren't very many large changes between the years. Now here are Republicans:
This time it makes a considerable difference who the president is. In 2019 Republicans felt consistently more favorable toward federal agencies than they did under either Obama or Biden.
If you look at 2015 vs. 2023, Republican views are fairly consistent for all the agencies except these four:
The FBI is down because lots of Republicans think they're out to get Donald Trump. The CDC is obviously down because of masks and vaccines and so forth. The CIA is down because they've disputed some of Trump's assertions about election fraud and Russian election interference. Veterans Affairs is up because Republicans were mad at them in 2015 due to some scandals surrounding wait times. (The same is true of Democrats, but to a smaller degree.)
So the upshot here is that Democrats have agencies they like and agencies they don't, and those views stay about the same regardless of who's in the White House. The opposite is true of Republicans: They consistently view the government less favorably when the opposition controls the White House, and they change their opinion of specific agencies when they view them as being anti-Republican.
¹The biggest winners were: the Postal Service, NASA, and the National Park Service.
Despite all the rain, it doesn't seem like we're in for a poppy superbloom this year. But the sunflowers are looking terrific. Here's a few of them out in the desert near Indio.
