Kevin Drum

This is an early sunflower blooming at our local Audubon bird sanctuary. The place was practically overrun by them.

There's lots of talk about the skyrocketing amount of manufacturing being built lately, and with good reason:

Manufacturing construction is nearly flat from 1980-2015. Then there was a modest increase. But since 2021 it's nearly doubled, thanks mostly to the infrastructure bill, IRA, and the CHIPS Act. Presumably manufacturing employment will also increase once all these factories are finished.

Large language AIs like ChatGPT train themselves on vast amounts of information hoovered up from every corner of the internet:

"In the absence of meaningful privacy regulations, that means that people can scrape really widely all over the internet, take anything that is ‘publicly available’ — that top layer of the internet for lack of a better term — and just use it in their product," said Ben Winters, who leads the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s AI and Human Rights Project and co-authored its report on generative AI harms.

....For creators — writers, musicians, and actors, for instance — copyrights and image rights are a major issue, and it’s pretty obvious why. Generative AI models have both been trained on their work and could put them out of work in the future.

That’s why comedian Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta as part of a class action lawsuit. She alleges that the two companies trained off of her written work by using datasets that contained text from her book, The Bedwetter. There are also lawsuits over image rights and the use of open source computer code.

I dunno. Google scrapes every bit as much data to "train" its search engine, which is a source of enormous profit. The Wayback Machine is nonprofit, but it literally duplicates huge amounts of copyrighted material and makes it publicly available. Wikipedia relies on an army of volunteers, not automated scraping, but the result is similar: an enormous website that's the product of gathering information from all over the internet. Google Books explicitly scans copyrighted works and the Supreme Court ruled that it was "transformative" and therefore A-OK.

Maybe all this stuff should be illegal. But that would sure make the internet a lot less useful for everyone. And training an AI is at least as transformative as creating an index of books. It's hard to see these lawsuits going anywhere.

The GDP report this morning was OK, but the BEA also released its estimate of personal income today. Adjusted for inflation, it increased at an annualized rate of 1.0% in Q2. Since the start of the pandemic it's up a total of 0.9%:

Not so great. Inflation numbers come out tomorrow.

The BEA released its first estimate of GDP growth in Q2 and there were no surprises. It was up a respectable 2.4%:

GDP growth was mostly due to increased consumer spending and nonresidential investment. For those predicting a soft landing, this was good news.

WTAF?

Big companies just can't help themselves:

Some of the largest consumer brands in the country have continued to raise prices aggressively this year while raking in large profits, posing a tough problem for the Federal Reserve as it aims to tame inflation.

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Unilever have each reported raising prices significantly in the second quarter, from about 8 percent at Unilever to 15 percent at Pepsi.

Meanwhile, wages continue to grow at a slower pace than inflation.

Ron DeSantis decided today he has something on his mind:

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), when asked if he would consider naming 2024 Democratic candidate RFK Jr. as his vice president:

“Sic him on the FDA if he’d be willing to serve, or sic him on CDC.” pic.twitter.com/C7wASCmbt6

— The Recount (@therecount) July 26, 2023

DeSantis undoubtedly blurted this out because he figured it would own the libs. What he doesn't realize is that virtually all of us libs can't stand RFK Jr. DeSantis isn't owning anyone.

This is sort of like the Hunter Biden affair. Conservatives just can't get it through their heads that most libs don't care about Hunter Biden. Unless there's evidence connecting his sleaziness to Joe Biden—and there isn't—we just don't give a rat's ass.

I got the itemization of charges for my CAR-T treatment today. Check it out:

Yes, that's seven digits. There are some other trivial charges, just a few measly tens of thousands of dollars here and there, that bring the entire cost of the procedure to about $1.2 million. Under the circumstances, I guess I can't complain about my high Obamacare premiums anymore, can I?

Now, I'm sure that Kaiser Permanente's negotiated rate is much less than this. Still, it's an impressive thing to get emailed to you.