Month: June 2024

This is Charlie rolling around on the backyard patio. He's been escaping the yard lately, so we've set an early curfew and put him back in a collar. Bright pink this time. So far he hasn't chewed it off, so we're hopeful.

Tyler Cowen points today to an essay by Dean Ball about regulation of AI. Basically, Ball is afraid of endless upward ratcheting. A seemingly limited law—like California's, which proposes to regulate AI models that could produce WMDs and similar catastrophes—is likely to grow over time:

Let’s say that many parents start choosing to homeschool their children using AI, or send their kids to private schools that use AI to reduce the cost of education. Already, in some states, public school enrollment is declining, and some schools are even being closed. Some employees of the public school system will inevitably be let go. In most states, California included, public teachers’ unions are among the most powerful political actors, so we can reasonably assume that even the threat of this would be considered a five-alarm fire by many within the state’s political class.

....So perhaps you have an incentive, guided by legislators, the teachers’ unions, and other political actors, to take a look at this issue. They have many questions: are the models being used to educate children biased in some way? Do they comply with state curricular standards? What if a child asks the model how to make a bomb, or how to find adult content online?

Ball looks at this from a public choice framework: what are the regulators incentivized to do? Regulate! So they'll always be looking around for new stuff to tackle.

That's fine, but I don't think you need to bother with this framework. I know that most people still don't believe this, but AI is going to put lots of people out of work. Lots and lots. And when that happens, one of the responses is certain to be government bans on AIs performing certain tasks. After all, governments already do this, protecting favored industries with tariffs or licensing requirements or whatnot. How hard would it be to mandate the continued use of human doctors and human lawyers even if someday they aren't necessary? Those folks have more than enough political clout to get it done.

On the other hand, taxi drivers, say, don't have a lot of political clout. So driverless cars might well take over their jobs with no one willing to do anything about it. Sorry about that.

Any way you look at it, though, there's someday going to be lots of pressure to preserve jobs by regulating robots and AI. Maybe in ten years, maybe in five years, maybe tomorrow. But it's going to happen.

Last night I did a quick check on how Donald Trump's Truth Social stock was doing. It was down but not worth a post. But it turns out I was just a day too early. DJT plummeted 15% today and has now declined by half since Trump's guilty verdict in the hush money trial:

Volume has been huge for the last two days, but who knows what's going on. Lots of people selling and not so many buying, right?

In any case, it still has a ways to go before it gets to its true underlying value of about $3. When will that happen? Beats me. As Keynes sort of said, people can stay stupid longer than you can imagine.

POSTSCRIPT: Considering how much Trump blathers about everything under the sun, it's a little odd that he almost never mentions his stock. Is it because he's afraid of the SEC? Because he figures that drawing attention to it will produce nothing but more bad reviews? Or that he doesn't want the suckers to catch on to the ruse and thinks it's better not to risk saying something that might alert them?

Anyway, it just goes to show that Trump can keep his mouth shut if he has sufficient motivation.

Israeli TV says that Benjamin Netanyahu was off the reservation when he publicly accused the US of withholding weapons:

Channels 13 and 12 said a clandestine meeting held before Netanyahu’s Tuesday video statement — which accused Washington of withholding arms shipments to Israel, calling it “inconceivable” — included National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and other officials, all of whom unequivocally objected to Netanyahu’s intention.

Though Dermer was in favor of a public confrontation after previously discussing the idea with Netanyahu, he asked the premier to wait with the criticism until he and Hanegbi meet US officials at the White House on Thursday, the network said.

Both Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi were reportedly opposed to airing the dispute publicly, instead preferring to handle matters behind closed doors over concerns a public rift with the US could benefit the Hamas and Hezbollah terror groups.

This is a very strange report. Dermer merely wanted to wait until after a meeting at the White House. Gallant and Halevi didn't want to provide aid and comfort to Hamas and Hezbollah.

But there's something obvious missing here. Did anyone object to Netanyahu's accusation on the grounds that it wasn't true? Everything I've read suggests Joe Biden was genuinely mystified by Netanyahu's outburst. Aside from a single shipment of heavy bombs withheld a month ago, it doesn't appear that the US has stopped or slow-walked any armaments at all.

So wtf is going on? Were a few shipments late for some reason, and Netanyahu believed the reasons were just excuses? Have there been threats of delays? Or what?

It continues to be remarkable the way Netanyahu treats Biden, an old friend and supporter who may occasionally counsel prudence but has also consistently made it clear that the US will provide Israel with anything it needs to prosecute the war. We've supplied billions of dollars in armaments. We helped shoot down Iran's drone/missile attack. We've provided massive amounts of intelligence assistance. We've taken the lead in protecting Red Sea shipping from Houthi attacks.

Needless to say, this compares to approximately zero military support from any other country besides Germany, and we're doing it at the same time that we're drawing down our own stockpiles of weaponry to supply Ukraine. I get that Netanyahu supports Trump, but this kind of behavior seems close to insane. What more could anyone in Israel want from us?

SpaceX launched its first 50 Falcon 9 rockets in a little under seven years. Today we have a new record holder for the quickest to 50:

Until today I had never heard of Rocket Labs, the company that makes the Electron rocket. And in fairness, there's a big difference between Electron and SpaceX's Falcon 9: Electron can lift about 300 kilograms into low-earth orbit while Falcon 9 can lift about 23 tonnes. They're playing in different leagues.

But apparently there's a good market for small-payload launches and Rocket Labs is making the most of it.

The Border Patrol chose today to randomly release numbers for May, and it turns out that.......nothing has changed:

CBP recorded 171,000 crossings in May, down a bit from April. Of those, 118,000 were illegal crossings and 53,000 were asylum requests, mostly scheduled via the CBP One app.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says that illegal crossings have been down by about a third since President Biden announced his crackdown on asylum a couple of weeks ago. That would be nice, but since crossings are sometimes seasonal I wouldn't put too much stock in this until we have a few months of numbers.

Sunset in Ontario. That's California, not Canada.

Alex Tabarrok points me today to a Washington Times story about rural broadband:

Residents in rural America are eager to access high-speed internet under a $42.5 billion federal modernization program, but not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks nearly three years after President Biden signed the funding into law, and no project will break ground until sometime next year.

....Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr said the program’s goal of providing high-speed internet to most underserved areas will not be fully realized until 2030, nine years after its enactment.... “There hasn’t been a single shovel’s worth of dirt that has even been turned towards connecting people,” Mr. Carr said.

The Times portrays this as a problem caused by liberal demands in the law: union workers, climate change considerations, etc. But that's not really the story.

The BEAD program was authorized in late 2021 as part of the bipartisan Infrastructure Act. But the feds only provide the money. All of the actual buildout is done by the states, so the first step was to use an FCC map to determine which areas were most underserved—something that obviously had nothing to do with liberal wish lists. Following that, state allocations were set in June 2023, and every state had submitted an application by the start of 2024. That was only six months ago.

Some states have been faster than others. Some allow cities to apply for funds, others keep it all at the state level. All of them have to come up with 25% matching funds. Nevertheless, in the past six months 15 states have been fully approved and every one of the others are very close. This too has nothing to do with liberal demands. Six months is just not a very long time when it comes to planning the disbursement of billion-dollar grants.

Bottom line: Disbursing $42 billion takes a while, especially when it's being funneled through all 50 states. You have to allocate the money fairly. You have to get plans from each state about how they're going to use the money. And finally the states have to actually begin digging holes and laying fiber. Along the way there will be the usual disagreements about what's acceptable and what's not, some along partisan lines and some just garden variety complaints from broadband providers. Overall, though, there's been nothing unusual about BEAD and it's rolling out pretty much on schedule.

Hezbollah has been shooting rockets into northern Israel on a daily basis ever since the Gaza war started. An American envoy recently told Lebanon to rein in Hezbollah or face retaliation from Israel, and Atrios is unhappy about this:

I know for some the only de-escalation tool they know is threats, but I submit there are better ones.

I couldn't agree more except for one thing: what are the "better ones"? Hezbollah's only demand is a ceasefire in Gaza, so de-escalation involves figuring out how to negotiate that. This is obviously not an easy task.

In any case, this is unfair to Amos Hochstein, the envoy in question, who's been pretty tireless at trying to de-escalate the situation on the border:

Speaking after meeting with Lebanon’s Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, a close ally of Hezbollah, Hochstein called for “urgent” de-escalation.... The US envoy had travelled to Beirut following meetings in Israel on Monday. Israel’s Haaretz reported that he had warned Israeli officials that continuing the Israeli-Hezbollah confrontation could lead to a “wide-scale Iranian attack”.

In Beirut, Hochstein said it is in “everyone’s interest” to resolve the conflict quickly and diplomatically. “That is both achievable and it is urgent.”

That's from Al Jazeerah. Whatever else you can say about US support for the Gaza war, Joe Biden has been vocal and persistent in his efforts to prevent the war from spreading. Maybe there's more he could do without abandoning his support for Israel, but I'm not sure what.

The Supreme Court is apparently bound and determined to leave its most controversial cases until the very last week of the term. That would be next Thursday, when we'll finally get rulings on Trump's immunity, Chevron deference, and more.

This week all we got was a boring tax case that no one cares much about. It revolves around the esoteric question of whether Congress can tax overseas profits even if those profits have been reinvested in the company. The only interesting thing about this is that taxing unrealized profits is kinda sorta like a wealth tax. If the court overturned this provision, it might mean they'd overturn a wealth tax too.

But they didn't:

The vote was 7 to 2, with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh writing the majority opinion. He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and the court’s three liberals. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., and Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, joined by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.

All of the liberals and most of the conservatives agreed to uphold the tax. I'm not sure this really means all that much, but to the extent it does it's a win for liberals and continues the Trump court's habit of being not quite as conservative as most people think (or hoped).