Kevin Drum

Last week Media Matters published a piece showing advertisements on Twitter being served up next to antisemitic posts. Elon Musk said the claim was wrong and filed a lawsuit.

As far as I'm concerned, this is what SLAPP laws are for, and they don't get used nearly enough. Musk's suit is nothing more than an attempt by a guy with bottomless riches to bankrupt someone he doesn't like.¹

But at least Musk and Twitter are private actors who have no special responsibility to the public. That can't be said for the attorney general of Texas, an elected officer. Nonetheless, he decided to stick his oar in:

Paxton hasn't actually done anything yet, and he probably won't. But this is still an egregious abuse of power by a public official. Every conservative organization concerned about free speech should be denouncing this. Instead, crickets.

¹Also stupid, since it will keep the whole thing in the public eye and probably alienate even more advertisers.

The more time that goes by, the more sorry I am about the failure of the 2000 Camp David Summit. It was the last chance for even a minimal chance at Middle Eastern peace and a Palestinian state. Instead we got another intifada on one side and a reinvigorated dismantling of the West Bank on the other.

It's a damn shame, and everything happening today is a result of it. That is all.

How is Joe Biden doing these days? Courtesy of CNN, here are his approval ratings from a variety of national polls over the past few months:

From August through October Biden's approval dropped about 1.5% per month. Since the Israel-Gaza war broke out a month ago, his approval has improved by about half a percent.

I'd like to generate a chart like this just for young Democrats, but I can't find the data to do it. My suspicion is that Biden has been hemorrhaging approval from young voters for a long time and the Israel-Gaza war hasn't really had a big effect. But I don't know that.

In any case, even if it has had an effect, it's apparently been counterbalanced by increased approval from older voters. Taken as a whole, the war has rather surprisingly had only a very small effect on Biden's approval, and probably a positive one.

POSTSCRIPT: The change is even more dramatic if you draw two separate trend lines for the before and after periods:

All the usual caveats about small time frames and limited sample sizes apply here. This is all suggestive of what's happened, but not definitive.

Some slender swans swimming serenely south on the silken Seine.

Just remember: they're all crooks. All of them:

Changpeng Zhao, founder of the world’s largest crypto exchange, agreed to plead guilty to federal money laundering charges and step down as chief executive of Binance, which will pay a $4.3 billion fine, according to court documents.

....Court papers filed by the government say that Binance chose not to implement anti-money laundering measures, essentially allowing the firm to become a clearinghouse for all manner of illicit financial transactions. Between 2018 and 2022, that led to nearly $900 million in financial transactions that violated sanctions against Iran, the court papers charge.

One way or another, the only real use case for crypto is still crime. It doesn't hold its value better than ordinary money. It's not cheaper to do transactions. It's certainly not safer. But if you want something untraceable and unregulated—and what aspiring criminal kingpin doesn't?—then it's great.

On the bright side, at least Binance hasn't imploded and taken everyone's money with it. I guess that's something.

After a brief rebound in February, sales of existing homes just keep going lower and lower:

In January 2021, existing homes sold at an annualized rate of 6.6 million. They've fallen 42% since then, due largely to higher interest rates. Unless you can pay cash, selling your home and moving to a new one means a big increase in your mortgage as you trade your old 3% loan for a shiny new 8% one.

Total factor productivity is, roughly, productivity gains due to technological advances. We didn't get much of it in 2022:

The entertainment industry apparently adopted new technology with tremendous enthusiasm. The mining industry didn't.

The New York Times has an intensely frustrating piece about driverless cars today. Most of the focus is on San Francisco, and the story includes three safety statistics:

In San Francisco, more than 600 self-driving vehicle incidents were documented from June 2022 to June 2023.... Last year, the number of 911 calls from San Francisco residents about robotaxis began rising, city officials said. In one three-month period, 28 incidents were reported.... The city’s Fire Department created a separate autonomous vehicle incident form, said Darius Luttropp, a deputy chief of the department. As of Oct. 15, 87 incidents had been recorded with the form.

All of these numbers are useless without some point of comparison. What's an "incident"? How many were documented for ordinary cars? Is 600 a lot or a little?

A trip to the San Francisco municipal website didn't help—although I learned that over an average year Muni buses are responsible for roughly 1,200 collisions and the city suffers about 25-30 traffic deaths. As far as I know, this compares to zero fatalities and about 150 collisions from driverless cars—all of them minor and nearly all of them the fault of another car.

On a per mile basis, driverless cars in San Francisco are involved in 1-2 collisions per 100,000 miles compared to Muni's average of 4-5. Total 911 calls amount to 6,000 every three months.

But I'd really like comparisons to the statistics the Times uses. If San Francisco knows how many incidents were reported for driverless cars, after all, they must also know how many total incidents were reported. Ditto for auto-related 911 calls. That's what should be in the story if it's to make any sense.

Republicans have recently backburnered the notion of cutting Social Security benefits, so Politico reports that some Democrats are telling Joe Biden to broaden the fight:

Progressives have pitched Biden officials and Democratic leaders in recent months on endorsing a plan to expand Americans’ Social Security benefits, according to several people involved in the informal discussions.

Here is the average annual Social Security benefit for someone who retires at age 67, the current full retirement age:

The median income in the US is currently about $40,000, which translates to a Social Security benefit of $21,000 per year. What do you think? Is that enough?

In the LA Times, Brian Merchant writes that OpenAI itself isn't the only thing that self-destructed this weekend:

All the while, something else went up in flames: the fiction that anything other than the profit motive is going to govern how AI gets developed and deployed. Concerns about “AI safety” are going to be steamrolled by the tech giants itching to tap in to a new revenue stream every time.

....However this plays out, it has already succeeded in underlining how aggressively [Sam Altman] has been pursuing business interests. For most tech titans, this would be a “well, duh” situation....

I'm going to stop right there because, yes, this is a "well, duh" situation. After all, AI is headed toward being the most commercially successful product in human history. It will be bigger than railroads, bigger than cars, bigger than oil.

What else did anyone expect? Over the next few decades AI is poised to replace most human labor. That's about as big as an industry can get, and there's nothing much that can stop it. We haven't even stopped the proliferation of fossil fuels or nuclear weapons, and those are nice, easy, concrete things. By contrast, software is like a phantom: impossible to get your arms around and impossible to effectively regulate.

Adoption of AI is going to be existential for practically every industry currently in existence, spawning dozens of huge AI providers around the world. Demand is going to be off the charts. Growth will be astronomic.

This has been obvious for a long time—or it should have been, anyway. But if it really took the OpenAI debacle to make it clear, then maybe OpenAI's board really has done the world a favor. Getting our heads out of the sand is the first step toward enlightenment.