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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The "designated survivor" is one of the weirder aspects of America's (very, very weird) political system.
Each year, during the State of the Union address, when both houses of Congress and the President are all under one roof, a single political figure, in the line of succession for the presidency, is spirited away to a hidden bunker, just in case the US legislative and administrative branches are decapitated in a single, spectacular terrorist strike:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designated_survivor
Initiated during the 1950s, designated survivors are a paranoid relic of the Cold War, but they're also a relic of an era when America was a less chud-dominated, more technocratic land. It's a longtermist sort of procedure, in stark opposition to vibes-based MAGA chaos in which the Mad King makes daily announcements of new wars, tariffs, monuments, and existential threats to the nation.
America's ruling class have always sought an equilibrium between its pure Id of hatred for labor, autocratic yearnings and apocalyptic fantasies, and its patient, scheming Ego, the author of endless FedSoc judicial nominee listings, Projects 2025, and decades-long schemes to overturn Dobbs and reverse the New Deal.
(Democrats have their own version of this, of course – the endless contest between the McKinsey wing of the party's right and its infinitely embroidered Machin-Synematic Universe.)
The problem is that once the atavistic, impulsive elements of your project escape containment, the resultant turbulence sucks everyone else into their chaotic vortex. How can you plan for anything when you're buffeted by endless stunts, feints, and distractions?
Nowhere is this failure to plan more vivid than in the age distribution of both chambers of the US legislature, its presidential candidates, and its judicial appointments. What's more, this is equally true of the Democrats and the Republicans.
The equilibrium of all of America's key institutions is brittle: legislative majorities are often just one or two seats wide. Key federal circuits and the Supreme Court are knife-edge balances. We keep getting presidential races between septuagenarians and octogenarians.
The question here isn't whether old people can be good at those jobs. They obviously can be. The problem is actuarial: old people are far more likely to die, or suffer severe medical episodes, than younger people. This is a fact of life that every person understands, and the older you get, the better you understand it.
I'm 55. 20 years ago, it was unusual for just one of my peers to die in a given year; now I lose a couple every year. It could be me next (my doctor just informed me that I am cancer free, following excision, radiotherapy and immunotherapy). Anyone who pretends this isn't true is setting themselves and the people around them up for terrible things.
If you're a writer, this means making plans for the smooth management of your literary estate. For the past couple decades, John Scalzi has been my anointed literary executor. He's a great choice: a fabulous writer with a good head for business and a strong handle on my politics and artistic sensibility, whose personal ethics are above reproach. The only problem is that John is a couple of years older than me, which means that he'd be a great executor if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, but not if I keel over with a heart attack in 20 years.
So this year, I added a second executor, Molly White, who is also a fantastic writer, also extremely ethical and also very attuned to my politics and literary sensibilities. Molly is 20 years younger than me, and she has relevant experience: she's also the executor of the literary estate of her great-grandfather (EB White).
In the unlikely event of my untimely death, Molly and John will do a great job running the estate (which mostly will consist of reviewing my agents' recommendations). And if John keels over right after me, Molly will be fine on her own.
Of course, the only reason I need a literary executor is that my kid is only 18. At 18, she's a remarkable, level-headed, ethical young person, but she's not yet fully formed. Literary history is filled with descendants who take over a literary estate and run it in terrible ways. The most notorious example here is Stephen Joyce, grandson of James Joyce and a colossal asshole:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_James_Joyce
The most likely destiny for my literary estate is that I will grow older alongside my daughter, who will mature in ways that make her a perfectly suitable literary executor (in addition to being the beneficiary of my literary estate) and in a few years I'll send a note of thanks to John and Molly and change the paperwork. But in the unlikely, awful event that my kid runs into serious challenges that make me question her judgment and probity, I'll be covered.
That's what planning is all about: thinking through various scenarios, including low-likelihood, high-salience ones that have easy mitigations, and taking appropriate and proportionate steps to avoid disaster.
You know: like squirreling away a designated survivor in a bunker far from DC during the State of the Union.
This is what makes America's political gerontocracy so weird. In their true hearts, the nonagenarian (1), octogenarians (5), septuagenarians (27) and late sexagenarians (7) in the US Senate know that they could keel over at any moment, and that in a 53:47 Senate, this could spell doom for their political project.
Sure, Mitch McConnell might be secretly dead and that's bad and weird. But it wouldn't be exceptional. We're talking about a legislature whose members sometimes disappear for months, only to be discovered in care homes with advanced dementia, while still somehow holding office:
It's a legislature whose most prominent grandees cling to power at the very brink of death's door, long after they can be effective leaders, just so they can anoint their successor during the next election:
Elections have consequences, but special elections, called after the sudden death of an elderly lawmaker, have wild consequences.
Of course, anyone can die suddenly. 15 years ago, one of my dearest friends, a contemporary, went to bed in seeming perfect health and never woke up. He was only 44. I still miss him, every day:
But the likelihood this happening goes up the older you get, and once you cross a certain age threshold, odds rise sharply. If you're part of a political project that's laying and executing long-term plans whose outcomes turn on hair-fine majorities, this should factor into your thinking. The failure to do so can throw everything you've worked for into disarray:
It's not limited to the legislature, of course. The Supreme Court's slide into its role as handmaiden to totalitarianism began when the dying Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to step down, because she wanted her successor to be picked by the first woman president:
The amazing thing here is that RBG made her name as a master strategist, but when it came to this incredibly consequential matter, she set strategy aside for hubris:
Security practitioners know that anyone can be hacked or scammed, and that the biggest vulnerability of all is to be so confident in your own procedures and discernment that you assume it could never happen to you. If you think you can't get scammed, you are a danger to yourself and others:
By the same token, any politician in their 70s or 80s who thinks that they can't suffer a stroke or heart attack or the kind of lapse that makes you freeze up during a presidential debate is a danger to their party, their politics and their nation:
This isn't about how healthy or robust any given politician is or feels; this is about the cold reality of actuarial tables. The older I get, the more those actuarial tables factor into my own decision-making. The fact that our political classes seem to think that they can choose the time and manner of their passing is baffling.
Why aren’t AI companies competing directly with their customers?
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"I often wonder what the Vintners buy/One half so precious as the Goods they sell" -The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
I first encountered that quote from someone extolling the virtues of bookstores, and it stuck with me, because for most of my childhood, every bookstore visit ended with me broke and wishing I'd had three times as much to spend.
As a larval hyperlexic, I just didn't understand what a bookseller could possibly buy with my money that was better than the books they already had? Of course, then I became a bookseller and discovered that Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is shit") applies to a bookstore's wares as much as it does to anything else. I also acquired a monthly rent obligation and discovered just how important money could be.
Nevertheless, Omar Khayyám's question stuck with me, especially when I fell down a years-long rabbit-hole of learning about scams and the finance sector (but I repeat myself). Every get-rich-quick schemer will tell you that they've found the infinite money hack, which they will sell to you for a remarkably reasonable sum. Likewise, every stock picker claims they can outperform a simple low-load index fund, and all they ask of you is a few hundred basis points in exchange for multiplying your wealth beyond the dreams of Creosote. Neither one has a good answer to Khayyám's question: if you can make all the money with your amazing system, why do you need my money?
This is a question that needs to be forcefully put to AI hucksters. In their more expansive moments, the Altmans and Amodeis of the world will tell you that they're planning to teach the word-guessing program so many words that it will wake up and become god. DOGE's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in the faces of the NIH lifers who begged them not to vaporize their long-running cancer research projects: "General AI is around the corner and it's going to cure cancer. Cancer research is a waste of money!"
Which all raises the question: if you've truly incubated a foetal demiurge in your "AI lab," why are you offering to sell it to me? What do the AI hucksters buy/One half so precious as the Gods they sell?"
Of course, they might answer, "We need your money now so we can make god later." That's why they want your boss to fire you and replace you with their chatbots and split your wages with your former employer. But this just raises the same question: if you have a chatbot that can do a doctor's job, why sell it to a hospital? Why not just open your own hospital? If you've got a chatbot that can do a tax accountant's job, why sell it to a tax-prep service? Why not just open a tax-prep service? If you've got a chatbot that can teach my kids, why sell it to my local school district? Why not just open a school?
If the chatbot can do the job, and if the chatbot costs less than the worker who does the job today, then the chatbot company can profitably sell services more cheaply than anyone who presently employs that worker, because the chatbot company already owns the chatbot. If you were really on a glide path to creating an all-powerful deity and just needed cash to keep the venture going until the cancer-curing word-guesser awoke from its long slumber, then wouldn't you want as much cash as possible? Why would you voluntarily split the take with some sucky, washed, non-god-generating business from before 2022?
I think the only reason this question doesn't come up more frequently is that we're stewing in what Douglas Rushkoff calls the "go meta" economy, in which the most respectable and smartest business to operate must be as many abstraction layers away from real work as possible. Don't drive a taxi, own a medallion that you rent to the cab driver. Don't own a medallion, start a "rideshare" company. Don't start a rideshare company, invest in a rideshare company. Don't invest in a rideshare company, buy options to invest in a rideshare company:
The inverse relationship between doing something useful and making money is deeply ingrained in our economic wisdom. Take the world of online grifters, who don't just peddle get-rich-quick PDFs, they also peddle tools to generate get-rich-quick PDFs, as well as tools to steal other "wealth influencers'" insta videos and deepfake yourself into their pretend private jets:
The scam economy boasts a bewildering array of ancillary services, like a $150/month service that lets you produce fake screenshots showing vast monthly income on other scam services (November Kelly calls this "The world's most expensive 'inspect element'"):
It's an old truism that in a gold rush, the only people who come out ahead are the people selling the picks and shovels. But that's not true – there's even more money to be made wholesaling picks and shovels to the retailers who operate the frontier mercantiles. Go meta!
So it's not surprising that we don't ask why these AI god-botherers need our stupid money while they're immanentizing the eschaton. Why would they operate a hospital if they could go meta and sell the doctorbots to the MBAs running the hospital?
The last couple years experimenting with AI I've come to the conclusion that the main reason it works isn't a mystery because it has to be a mystery. It's a mystery because they need it to be.
That's why they've been hogging all the RAM and GPUs to the point of ordering the entire yearly worldwide supply in advance.
That's why they keep building data centres despite demand not justifying it.
That's why every open source model China releases is a hit to the stock market.
The secret sauce behind LLMs isn't really as demanding as they claim. There's waste built into it.
Every response within a chat sends the entire message chain through the robot's brain. It doesn't have loading bars, it doesn't let you calculate how many tokens you've used, it doesn't even let you see when you're crossing the limits until you're there.
It's almost like they don't want you to have control over how much you use.
ChatGPT in particular is prone to scope creep. It subtly talks you into expanding the reach of your projects to require more computation. It always delivers 90% of a project, with something missing so you ask another question.
Claude turns everything into a file creation request, even if it can deliver in plain text just fine. It's enticing to see how your simple table becomes a fancy react file or an HTML with heavy formatting.
Neither of these issues are present on DeepSeek or on local models. Which means they aren't inherent issues with LLMs.
It's not a bug, it's a feature.
They want you to keep paying unmetered rent. They do tricks to convince you to spend more than you meant making something bigger than you planned. They do this subtly, to make you think it was your idea.
The thing is, Chinese local models prove that we already have good enough AI for most things. It's plateauing in capacity, it needs to grow in efficiency and memory use. But intelligence is already at J.A.R.V.I.S levels, and can run fine on consumer grade hardware. We've reached a stability point.
The problem is you can't raise rent on stability. So you just keep throwing compute at the problem until you can justify asking for more money. Which is why they choke the memory market.
If nobody can buy memory, nobody can run local AI. If no one can run local AI, they have to keep paying unmetered rent. Development is slow, and importantly, the black box remains a black box.
That's why every memory breakthrough comes from Chinese companies. Because they're the only ones sharing their data. Capitalist companies don't want people to study how the models work.
With subscriptions, there's rent seeking. With local models, there's reverse engineering. Once enough people get their hands into the guts of the robot it won't be long before we figure out exactly how they work, and find more efficient ways to make them that don't require as many data centres.
Meanwhile, Fable and GPT 5.6 are being shadow marketed with all these rumours about how dangerous they are, and AI companies are begging for regulations from the government. Yes, they want control of those regulations, but that's not all.
What they're really after is a government ban on local AI. They want to cut off access so that they control all the intelligence.
Eventually, the goal is making contracts with large corporations to employ their robots instead of people. If no one has local AI, because they can't understand it or because it's illegal, then they can no longer compete against a faster worker that demands no labour rights, even if it does C+ work at best.
And that's where the real fun begins. And by fun I mean starving out the working class.
They aren't competing directly with their customers yet. First they have to educate them, jus like Spotify educated their consumers into forgetting how piracy works. They have to make them reliant on cloud compute, just like how Google Drive made everyone reliant on its storage before raising prices. And they want them to be ignorant of how much energy anything takes.
That's going to take one generation.
Not long ago every teenager knew how to use a computer. Now they depend on Apple for everything. It's a masterful business model. So what if we could apply it to every form of labour?
It's okay, just hand us your credit card and we'll do the rest. How much, you ask? Don't worry about that. Just keep your monthly payments coming. Oh, you can't afford it? You want your computer to do it? Well fuck you, we bought all the computers, so now you work for us.
The tech has never been the conspiracy. It's the business model.
One time a friend told me that if she wanted to have a chill night she would come to me and ask for tea and a book to read. I didn’t like tea at the time, but I always made sure my cupboards had them in case she needed a quiet night. One time I told my boss that I loved oranges, but couldn’t peel them because of my nails. For a year he made sure to peel me one at least once a week. Once my friends gave me a made up superlative of “most likely to have a pen they could borrow” and ever since I’ve made sure I always carry a pen with me. A long time ago, my high school librarian told me that no one would care what my grade in my sophomore chemistry class was if I’m bringing them doughnuts and asking them about their day.
Sometimes friendship is about carrying pens and peeling oranges. But the point is, surrounding yourself with people who you want to do the little things for. The point of it all is bringing in the doughnuts because you’ve found the people who deserve the doughnuts.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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“Different from the Others” is considered one of the first sympathetic portrayals of gay men on film. It was nearly destroyed
Richard Oswald’s Different from the Others was a radical silent film produced in 1919 during the Weimar Republic. And it was almost erased from history.
Different from the Others was co-written by Oswald and renowned sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who also played a role in the film and partially funded it through his Institute for Sexual Science.
The film follows a doomed gay relationship between a successful concert violinist and one of his students and explores the impact of homophobia, conversion therapy and the threat of being outed. The film was intended to rally against Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, the 1871 law that criminalized homosexuality.
Different from the Others is considered one of the first sympathetic portrayals of gay men in cinema, and it was praised by audiences. But conservative Catholic, Protestant and antisemitic groups protested the co-writers’ Jewish identities and the film’s thesis that homophobia, not homosexuality, was a social evil.
Different from the Others was censored throughout Germany in 1920 following claims that the film would endanger public safety or turn impressionable young people gay. By October of 1920, only doctors and medical researchers were able to view it via private educational screenings.
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Maaan, this Ernest Chiriacka illustration has been in my K/S inspiration folder for over a year now!! Thank you for making this post—this was the push I needed to finally make it happen xD
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