Month: January 2024

Alabama, having exhausted its other alternatives, executed Kenneth Eugene Smith tonight by fitting him with a mask and then pumping it full of nitrogen:

Witnesses saw Smith struggle as the gas began flowing into the mask that covered his entire face. He began writhing and thrashing for approximately two to four minutes, followed by around five minutes of heavy breathing.

This has prompted a lot of hand-wringing, but the convulsions are autonomic reactions. Smith was almost certainly unconscious when they happened.

The death penalty doesn't happen to be big hot button of mine, but I understand the opposition and I'm certainly OK with ending it. Still, if it's going to be done, I have a hard time understanding the endless controversies over the precise method it's applied. Nitrogen is fine, and almost certainly painless. Ditto for helium, once a favored method of suicide. That's because human choking reflexes don't respond to what kind of gas you inhale, only to a buildup of carbon dioxide. Obviously you don't get that when you breathe pure helium or nitrogen, so you barely even know anything is wrong. This is why accidental asphyxiation via nitrogen is fairly common.

Hanging is also painless. So is the guillotine. So is a firing squad if it's not botched. By contrast, lethal injection is idiotically complicated and never should have been adopted.

Opposing the death penalty is fine. But trying to pretend that even a brief and theoretical moment of discomfort is the real problem? That makes no sense.

Donald Trump went medieval on Nikki Haley after he beat her in New Hampshire. Rich Lowry says this was dumb:

She is appealing to the Republicans and Republican-leaning independents that Trump needs to substantially bring home in November to beat Biden. Killing her with kindness would make much more sense for Trump than, in irate speeches and unhinged social media posts, reminding her voters why they don’t like him in the first place.

Among ordinary people, sure, this would be true. But Trump's entire MO revolves around the twin ideas of revenge and retribution. He needs people to be scared of him, and that means convincing them that he'll come after anyone who crosses him. The only way to do that is to, in fact, come after anyone who crosses him.

By threatening Haley—and anyone who supports her—he's solidifying his reputation. He's making it clear that anyone who doesn't support Trump will be punished, something he considers vital to his success. In Trump's thuggish version of realpolitik, it's far more important than wheezy old ideas about how to attract one group of voters or another.

Three days ago I called Rep. James Comer a big fat liar. Since then, we've been on the edge of our seats wondering if I was right. Did he, in fact, lie about the testimony of Kevin Morris in the Hunter Biden affair?

Of course he did. A transcript of Morris's testimony was released on Tuesday and Philip Bump read it so I don't have to. Morris testified in detail about how he met Hunter; about the money he loaned him; and about the fact that he met Joe Biden only briefly on a couple of occasions:

Consider how Comer framed all of this. That the two met at a fundraiser and then Morris began paying Hunter Biden’s tax bills to insulate Joe Biden. That these were “loans” — implying they weren’t. That this generosity granted Morris dubious access to Joe Biden. None of this is justified by Morris’s testimony; Comer is instead simply trying to frame Morris’s testimony in negative terms.

He does so, presumably, because he knows that his close allies in right-wing media will not read the primary document and because he is signaling how the testimony should be contextualized.

It's just the usual lying about stuff that's in no way illegal, unethical, suspicious, or wrong in any way. Par for the course.

Hanging out in Laguna Beach as the sun dips into the Pacific.

Barbie got nominated for Best Picture but Greta Gerwig was snubbed in the Best Director category. Snubbed! It's an outrage!

Oh, calm down. This whole "snubbed" meme has always been idiotic, and it's maybe even more idiotic this year than before. Greta Gerwig likely missed out for a couple of banal reasons:

• There are ten Best Picture nominees and only five Best Director nominees. Five good directors are always going to get left out.
• Barbie was a traditional summer tentpole movie, a semi-cartoon crowd pleaser. For better or worse, those kinds of movies have never been Oscar bait. The Academy likes to think of itself as more serious.

This is probably all that's going on. Though I admit I think it's odd that Ryan Gosling got a Best Actor nod for what I thought was an OK but not outstanding performance as Ken.

Tyler Cowen links today to a (long) post about AI written by Alex Irpin, an AI researcher at Google. I recommend it for possibly vain reasons: As I read it, I was genuinely startled by how close it was to my own thinking. I swear, I almost felt like this guy could be my twin brother or something. My thinking processes and cognitive attitudes mimic his in an almost eerie way, and this made me trust his conclusions even after he left the realms I'm familiar with and entered areas way above my pay grade.

Anyway, Irpin is now more optimistic about AI than he was a few years ago. I especially liked this bit (which he wrote in 2020):

I suspect that many human-like learning behaviors could just be emergent properties of larger models. I also suspect that many things humans view as “intelligent” or “intentional” are neither. We just want to think we’re intelligent and intentional. We’re not, and the bar ML models need to cross is not as high as we think.

I believe human-level AI is approaching quickly because it relies on improvements in both software algorithms and hardware compute capacity. These are both advancing at exponential rates, and the combination of the two is advancing at a multi-exponential rate. Seven years ago I projected that this would produce full human-level AI by 2045, and that's more or less where Irpin is now.¹ But I've grown more optimistic, and today I'd put the timeline at around 2035, or maybe 2040. The amount of money and energy going into AI, along with spectacular increases in compute power, are staggering—far more than any of us were predicting even a few years ago. That just has to affect progress.

¹Though he also offers a 10% chance of human-level AI by 2028, which strikes even me as highly unlikely.

Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman have a new book coming out next week, but bits and pieces are being leaked already. First up is Sen. Lindsey Graham's grand jury testimony in late 2022:

A new book reveals that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) “threw Trump under the bus” during Graham’s secret grand jury testimony in the Georgia election subversion case.

....“After fighting a four-month legal battle all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to block his grand jury subpoena — and losing — South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham turned on a dime ‘and threw Trump under the bus,’ according to a source familiar with his testimony. According to secret grand jury testimony in Fulton County confirmed by the authors, Graham testified that if you told Trump ‘That Martians came and stole the election, he’d probably believe you.’

“He also suggested to the grand jurors that Trump cheated at golf.”

That's cold. Isikoff and Klaidman also say that Atlanta DA Fani Willis had trouble finding a prosecutor willing to take on the vote fraud case against Trump and others:

Willis initially approached Roy Barnes, the former governor of Georgia and one of the state's premier lawyers, to serve as the senior counsel on the case. But he turned her down. She then tried Gabe Banks, a former federal prosecutor and highly respected Atlanta criminal defense lawyer. Banks also wasn't interested.

Neither Barnes nor Banks wanted to plunge into such an all-consuming case at the expense of their lucrative law practices, as laid out in the book. But the two were even more concerned about the inevitable threats that would come with such a politically incendiary case. Barnes declined to discuss his conversations with Willis, but nodded to those concerns in an interview: "Hypothetically speaking, do you want a bodyguard following you around for the rest of your life?" Banks declined comment.

It was only after those two turned her down that Willis appointed Nathan Wade, whom she is currently suspected of being romantically involved with.

From Elon Musk, after Tesla announced weak results yesterday:

Tesla is currently between two major growth waves.

You betcha. But not everyone bought it:

Dan Ives, a tech analyst with Wedbush Securities, said executives failed to address short-term concerns, even though he remains sold on the company’s long-term value.

“We were dead wrong expecting Musk and team to step up like adults in the room on the call and give a strategic and financial overview of the ongoing price cuts, margin structure and fluctuating demand. … instead we got a high-level Tesla long-term view with another train wreck conference call,” Ives wrote Thursday.

The company’s falling margins and “constant never-ending price cuts” are concerns, Ives wrote.

I'm a little surprised that analysts are surprised by this. Tesla was always bound to run into weakening growth when the rest of the world started competing in the electric car space, and they were lucky it took so long. But the future is finally here, and that means Tesla actually has to compete on both price and quality. Slowing revenue and weakening profits were inevitable.

This has nothing to do with whether or not Elon Musk is in his right mind these days. The smartest CEO in the world would have trouble navigating the changing climate of the EV market and responding to the tsunami of cheap Chinese EVs that are now flooding the world. Musk may or may not be one of history's great business geniuses, but even he can't turn back the tide on command.

As everyone predicted, economic growth in the final quarter of 2023 was excellent:

Over the last year and a half, GDP growth has averaged about 3%. This is a nice, healthy growth rate, but without being so high that it threatens to overheat the economy and reignite a surge of inflation. This trend continued in Q4, which produced basically the best number we could have hoped for.

Over at National Review, Michael New insists that abortions have declined since the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision. In particular, he objects to contrary findings based on the WeCount project, which is fairly new and doesn't have very much pre-Dobbs data. He's right about that, but the Guttmacher Institute does have many years of data and their estimates suggest the same thing as WeCount:

As you can see, the abortion rate was already climbing from 2017-20, and Guttmacher's annual figures go only through 2020. So we don't know for sure precisely what happened in 2022 before and after red states began banning abortion. Still, the evidence strongly suggests that Dobbs had little effect because most of the affected women simply traveled to nearby states for abortions:

It's also the case that many red states have long made abortions difficult to get, so the pre and post-Dobbs environment in those states may not have been all that different.

What we do know is that Dobbs gave states the power to ban abortions, forcing upwards of 100,000 women in 2023 to travel long distances to end their pregnancies. We also know that the worst of these states are now desperately trying to ban women from even doing that. And we also know about a string of tragedies have already been caused by inhumane laws that have forced women to wait for lifesaving care.

So has Dobbs had an impact? Oh yes. It's just not the one conservatives were hoping for.

NOTE: Guttmacher data for 1973-2020 is here. Data for 2023 is here. Data for out-of-state travel is here.