In Your Heart

Two months ago, General Dynamics made an announcement that conjured a sense of déjà vu. To fix the problems at the factory, the company would team up with yet another unheard-of partner promising technological innovation. The solution this time? Artificial intelligence. A news release from General Dynamics and the new company, Deterrence, was filled with techno-business jargon. “AI-enabled capabilities” and “intelligence and connectivity” would be added at Mesquite and other General Dynamics factories, the companies wrote. “AI transforms production facilities into strategic assets,” Deterrence’s CEO said in the release. “We’re building autonomous manufacturing systems that learn, adapt, and scale in real time.” These pronouncements have baffled former Mesquite workers. “What are they talking about? There’s nothing to learn or adapt or scale,” one said. “It’s all broken.”  General Dynamics is doing this even as it replaces most of the Repkon equipment with traditional machines like those used in Scranton. How AI will wrest miracles from decades-old technology is unclear. But General Dynamics told investors it expects to be in production next year, and the Army told the inspector general that’ll amount to 20,000 shells a month.

Ukraine’s campaign of deep strikes against oil refineries, military bases, and logistical targets has brought the war home to Russians. The past week has seen at least a dozen attacks on the warehouses of Wildberries, an e-commerce retailer often described as the Russian Amazon. The opening salvo on the company’s flagship logistics facility near Moscow generated a smoke plume so enormous that it could be seen from space, blackening the skies over much of the metropolitan region. Other strikes set fire to Wildberries logistics hubs in St. Petersburg, Tver, and Simferopol in occupied Crimea. The company’s warehouses in Krasnodar, Tambov, and Voronezh were hit as well, killing several workers. [...] Look closer, however, and Wildberries makes an astonishingly obvious target. The retailer has developed into a vast supply channel for Russia’s war. With official military logistics beset by shortages, delays, incompetence, and corruption, Russian units at the front are dependent on private deliveries and donations of supplies and equipment, often crowdfunded; countless fighters also order on their own account. Until it was hastily scrubbed from the site over the weekend, Wildberries featured a dedicated catalog category “Everything for the SVO,” using the Russian acronym for “special military operation.” The catalog included more than 200,000 listings, including not just war-themed coffee mugs but also thousands of battlefield items, such as body armor, tactical helmets, and custom drone components such as drop rigs and tail fins tailored to Russian projectile grenades. (The items are still listed but now under other categories.) Many listings come with a “tested in the SVO” badge and official Russian certification stamps, meaning that this trade is actively encouraged by the platform. As of last week, top results in the SVO category included a Br2 military helmet, an armor vest with combat-fire-tested ballistic plates, and a combat medical kit; one-day delivery was available for an extra fee. Verified buyers gave these top items near-perfect star ratings, with buyers writing that they were ordering “for the guys in the SVO.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on X last week that the strikes were destroying “logistics hubs involved in supplying the Russian army with drone components, navigation equipment, and other gear.” Under international humanitarian law, a civilian object becomes a legitimate target when its function offers a “definite military advantage.” Wildberries easily passes that test—unlike Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian apartment blocks, shopping centers, and maternity clinics. Russian military bloggers have been explicit about Wildberries’ indispensability to front-line soldiers, posting screenshots of some of the most in-demand items, such as first-person-view drones and their spare parts. It seems that the company anticipated becoming a target: Shortly before the first strikes on its warehouses, Wildberries changed its terms and conditions to add drone and missile attacks to its force majeure clause, absolving a platform of liability for destroyed stock.

IRL what is liberalism?

I'm still pretty happy with my answer to Argumate here, if you're looking for a philosophically considered perspective that's not just a dictionary definition or an exonym.

On this day, 9 August 1956, 20,000 women in Pretoria, South Africa marched against pass laws: apartheid laws curtailing freedom of movement for Black and Indian people. The Federation of South African Women-organised demonstration delivered a petition against the laws with 100,000 signatures and the participants sang "Wathint’Abafazi Wathint’imbokodo" meaning ‘Now you have touched the women, you have struck a rock’. The protest kickstarted a wave of civil disobedience across the country over two years in which thousands of women were arrested, until leaders of the African National Congress panicked and called it off. August 9 is commemorated today in South Africa as Women's Day. More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/10880/south-africa-women's-day This story is one of hundreds featured in our book, Working Class History: Everyday Acts of Resistance & Rebellion, available here: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/products/working-class-history-everyday-acts-resistance-rebellion-book

I kinda sympathize with Bernie’s position in the sense that you should either let a person into the country freely or not let them in at all. Guest worker programs institute a second-class status where your right to stay in the country is controlled by your employer, giving them massive leverage over you. This clearly does undercut American’s wages, even moreso than regular immigration does. At least a regular immigrant legally has all the same rights in the labor market as a citizen does.

Our technology industry has failed to provide a coherent argument for its own existence on the national stage. If this is not solved, 2028 will become a referendum on caging, killing, and looting the technology industry over the water and power libels. The popular image of the AI boom is not uncertain. Recent polling suggests the average American understands AI is a thing that wastes water, skyrockets power costs, and scams their grandparents in exchange for exposing children to deviant sexual content, sports gambling, and all other manner of sin. If the best answer to why we should not imprison technology executives, burn down data centers, and kill the american technology sector is “so we can build better chatbots for your sports betting,” voters will vote to do so. In a zero-sum world, voters do not think long term; they envy, and then they loot. We do not loot the sewage system or the power grid because we understand they are the bulwarks against chaos. We accept their costs because they hold back chaos. Does the median voter believe the same to be true about technology? Technology is the only mechanism we have for escaping the Malthusian trap. But because we have been too cowardly to articulate this, because we have substituted “rationalism” and “AGI” for a coherent theology of Progress, the state sees the industry as only a parasite to be consumed. If we cannot articulate why innovation is a moral imperative, we can expect the entire technology industry to end up like Boston. First taxed, then looted, then exhausted. And we’ll be stuck wondering where it all went.