Israel in Crisis, print edition

by philg

My mother is an American Jewish liberal Democrat (some redundancy in there?) and bought us a gift subscription to Moment, the magazine for American Jewish liberal Democrats. The latest issue arrived in the mail a few days ago. One of the cover stories is “Israel in Crisis”. Does this refer to the October 7 attack by Palestinians coming out of Gaza? To the military and political challenge of how Israel can fight a group that hunkers down in, around, and underneath hospitals? No. The “crisis” referred to relates to how power in Israel is divided between parliament and the supreme court (the democratically elected parliament is packed with haters, perhaps due to the large number of Jews in Israel who are descended from those who fled Arab countries starting in 1948 while the supreme court is enlightened, progressive, liberal, etc.).

I think this is a good illustration of the limitations of print-and-mail!

Related:

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Medical School 2020, Year 4, Week 29 (Radiology, week 1)

by philg

A two-week elective in MSK (musculoskeletal) radiology. The private practice radiology group that staffs our health system’s department offers 4 hours per day for medical students. I’ll be working in a large newly constructed clinic building from 9:00 – 11:00 am and 1:00 – 3:00 pm each weekday.

A typical day is as follows: I meet the attending on the MSK seat at 9:00 am. Precise Prasanna, a 39-year-old MSK fellowship-trained radiologist, is walking on the treadmill and dictating a shoulder MRI. He stops the treadmill to chat for a few minutes. Having arrived at 8:00 am, he is caught up on the worklist and has “parked” five interesting cases from this morning. He leaves the room for five minutes to refill his water and chat with his colleague on the abdominal seat while I go through them on the diagnostic monitor screen. 

I report what I have observed: “There is a high T2 signal in the right superior hip labrum.” He replies, “Good, look at the cam deformity [enlarged femoral head knocks into the acetabulum] causing femoral acetabular impingement.” He continues, “FAI is now known to be the most common cause of early osteoarthrosis. We see this all the time in female soccer players. A 10-year-old presents for anterior hip pain from a labrum tear. When you ask them they sometimes report their hip ‘stopping’ but kids get used to the impingement feeling. Twenty years ago we would have forgotten about it; now we realize FAI causes early OA so we intervene before destruction of the cartilage.” FAI can be diagnosed on a simple AP pelvis radiograph.

(Arthritis includes the suffix “itis,” suggesting inflammation, but most arthritis is due to wear and therefore osteoarthrosis is the preferred term.)

He points out the interesting aspects of 20 X-rays and 6 MRIs before it is time for live patients. We do three arthrograms, in which contrast agent is injected into the joint space under X-ray guidance. Most commonly, this is with gadolinium contrast in preparation for an MRI to fully assess the hip or shoulder labrum. Sometimes, this is to get better information from a patient who is not a candidate for an MRI. For example, Prasanna performs a shoulder arthrogram on a 28-year-old female bicycle accident victim whose implanted hardware following a previous humeral head fracture (motor vehicle collision) would distort the signal from susceptibility artifact. He points to the leaking of contrast from the joint space into the subacromial/subdeltoid bursa (fluid-filled cushion underneath tendons), indicating a full-thickness tear of the supraspinatus tendon. 

After lunch with Jane and our new puppy, I return for the 1:00 pm session. The radiologist in the abdominal seat calls me over to look at a CT scan of the chest and abdomen. “What do you see?” I respond, “There is a clear hypointensity disrupting the bright signal of the right pulmonary artery. Is this a pulmonary embolism?” He answers, “Yeah, I just sent her to the hospital. I don’t see any right heart strain. That’s all!”

Prasanna dictates reports with PowerScribe, voice recognition software specific to radiology. Every word he uses serves to further delineate the pathologic process. He explains to me that the main goal of an musculoskeletal radiologist is to pick up subtle findings of a pathologic process, e.g., rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis or severe meniscus tears, before it severely damages the articular (hyaline) cartilage. Once destroyed the joint is unsalvageable and must be replaced (arthroplasty). “For some diseases we can stop the inflammation with drugs or for some mechanical injuries an orthopedist can operate and prevent OA. If you see acute, non-traumatic, monoarticular arthritis, treat it as a septic joint until tapped [remove fluid with a needle].”

Every hour with Prasanna is an opportunity to learn more vocabulary, e.g., the Lisfranc ligament, named after the French surgeon who pioneered the “Lisfranc amputation” of the tarsal-metatarsal joint (mid foot) during the early 1800s. I learn names for common injuries from a shoulder dislocation, including the Hill-Sachs lesion (humeral head fracture as it strikes the glenoid) and the commonly accompanying Bankart fracture of the glenoid.

[Editor: read Madame Bovary for some insight into 19th century French foot surgery.]

School administrators had stressed that I was to work only with the MSK seat and stick to the 9-11, 1-3 schedule. On Thursday, however, I asked the two radiologists if it would be okay to work from 9-1, spending half the time with the abdominal seat, and having the whole afternoon free with the puppy. “Of course,” was the answer.

I watch Prasanna perform a hip arthrogram in prep for an MRI on a 59-year-old with worsening anterior hip pain and clicking for 3 months. He weighs at least 300 lbs. Once the needle is in the joint space, straw-color fluid slowly flows out of the catheter. This went on for a few minutes, until Prasanna aspirates a total of 50mL. “That feels so much better,” exclaims the patient. “I’m glad, the pain might come back a bit as I inject the contrast now.” After the procedure, he asks, “Do I need a hip replacement?” The radiologist explains, “We’ll know more once we get the MRI, but from just this X-ray, I see preservation of the joint space so my guess is no. You do have a large joint effusion and at least a labral tear so you might still need surgery, but not a joint replacement.”

The abdominal seat is reading a pelvic MRI on a 49-year-old female for rectal cancer staging. “The most important thing is if the tumor invades the sphincter complex.” The internal and external anal sphincter muscles are highlighted by the clear “intersphincteric fat pad” that is being pushed by the tumor on the posterior lateral side. The radiologist: “This is bad. She is going to probably have to get an APR (abdominal perineal resection, in which they remove the anus and create a colostomy). We’ll see what the rectal surgeons say at tumor board next week.”

We have a CT angiogram of an 86-year-old for an adrenal mass, her fourth in two years, due to an anomaly discovered on a CT scan after a fall. The abdominal radiologist says that the test should never have been ordered. “Leave this woman alone. Adrenal masses are statistically benign in the absence of metastatic disease (e.g., lung cancer). Teleradiologists never have the guts to ignore something out of fear of getting sued so she’s subject to never-ending imaging follow up.” He continues, “It’s weird to say, but I don’t always want the ordering provider to follow every finding in my report. Don’t treat the image, treat the patient. We balance this with the knowledge that this report will be forever cemented into the patient chart for litigation years in the future. We used to call up the ordering provider, or he would come down to us. With teleradiology, the doctors don’t collaborate and each one tries to defend against any possible lawsuit. It’s almost like we are in a game of tug-of-war on who bears legal ownership of a patient. Tag, you’re it! The result is that a patient who lives 4 hours from the nearest MRI machine will be doomed to perpetual follow-up on a statistically benign tumor.”

Statistics for the week… Study: 0 hours. Sleep: 8 hours/night; Fun: 2 nights. Example fun: Jane and I attend an engagement party for Outdoors Oswald, a mountain biker applying to emergency medicine at prestigious institutions. His fiance works for Epic, which allows her to work from home most days. She hopes to end up in New York City, even though “we’ll be broke.” They rented a private downstairs room, but did not order any food for the gathering. About half of the class was invited and consequently the open bar was used to the fullest extent. We left at 1:00 am with several classmates to grab a slice of pizza before Ubering home.

The rest of the book: http://fifthchance.com/MedicalSchool2020

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How is Rivian doing?

by philg

Back in November 2021, I asked “What edge does Rivian have in the truck or EV market?” and questioned the company’s stratospheric market cap. It has been two years. How is the company doing and how is the stock doing?

Given the calculation that working class subsidies to elite owners of EVs are $50,000 per vehicle (direct tax credits, higher costs for gas-powered cars due to EV percentage sales requirements, subsidized electricity), the company itself should be profitable. MotorTrend says otherwise: “Rivian Loses a Huge Amount on Every Vehicle It Sells” (October 5, 2023).

From May 2023, in the lower Manhattan neighborhood favored by elites (Chelsea):

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The wheels of justice move even slower than traffic in Los Angeles

by philg

“Under the 10 Freeway: Immigrant businesses scraped by while landlord dodged Caltrans” (Los Angeles Times):

Their landlord, Apex, owned by Ahmad Anthony Nowaid, had failed to pay rent on the 48,000-square-foot triangular lot at South Alameda and East 14th streets for more than a year, and owed $78,000, according to Caltrans, which sued the company for back rent in September.

The property was one of five that Caltrans was attempting to evict Apex and another Nowaid company from, including a plot along the 5 Freeway in Sun Valley and another a block away from the fire. All told, Nowaid owed about $620,000 to Caltrans in unpaid rent as of September, the agency said in court filings.

In April, court records say, a Caltrans employee visited the lot and told tenants to stop paying their rent to Apex as the state planned to evict the company.

Several tenants, including Serafin, said they stopped paying Nowaid this month after receiving notice from the court to appear for the lawsuit in December. They said that the moment they stopped paying rent, Nowaid threatened to lock the gates again.

The story is interesting because you’d think that the government would have great access to its own courts, yet a California state agency was apparently unable to use the California state courts to evict a nonpaying tenant. Via their strong tenants rights laws, Californians managed to flambée their own 10-lane freeway (not sure if freeway is masculine or feminine in French, but in California it can identify as any gender, presumably).

Separately, the headline references “immigrant businesses”. Diversity was supposed to be the freeway’s strength. The primary tenant was named “Ahmad”, an Arabic name that is a diminutive of “Mohammed”. The article describes the subtenants as immigrants from Mexico. As a group, they should have been super strong, yet the article describes the result as economically marginal.

“I lost everything,” Serafin said. “We are not educated people. Most of the people are people that crossed the border, work hard, or maybe grew up here. But we are working-class people. We break our back to barely make a good living.”

The triangular tract was chaotic, with no clear entrance or address, and with unhoused people living in tents and trailers outside its gates. Graffiti was scrawled around the perimeter. Inside, workers and equipment shared close quarters amid the stacks of pallets.

Serafin said fires regularly broke out in encampments around the property, but calls to police or for cleanups often went unheeded. He and others would sometimes pay homeless people $20 just to move away from their businesses.

“We’re living paycheck to paycheck,” said Jose Luis Villamil Rodriguez, 53, who had a mechanic stand under the freeway.

Maybe it works better for private landlords? An aviation friend owns some apartment buildings in California. He says to budget $80,000 to $200,000 in legal fees to evict a tenant who doesn’t pay rent and 1-2 years of time, but “if the word ‘Covid’ is mentioned they get 4 years.”

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Elon Musk’s biggest failure to date: the solar roof

by philg

Since the mid-1960s, the U.S. has been embarked on a program of rapid population expansion via low-skill immigration (Pew):

We bring in low-skill migrants who are destined to become lower-than-median earners (if they work at all) and insist that they be provided with at least reasonably high quality housing. This makes sense only if the cost of building housing, and delivering the required energy to that housing, can be reduced via innovation.

What about America’s most successful innovator? His contribution to this challenge has been the solar roof. From Elon Musk:

Musk had helped his cousins, Peter and Lyndon Rive, launch SolarCity in 2006, and he bailed it out ten years later by having Tesla purchase it for $2.6 billion.

As always, he invoked to [Brian Dow] the steps of the algorithm and proceeded to show how they should be applied to the solar roofs. “Question every requirement.” Specifically, they should question the requirement that the installers must work around every vent and chimney pipe sticking up from a house. The pipes for dryers and ventilator fans should simply be sheared off and the solar roof tiles placed on top of them, he suggested. The air would still be able to vent under the tiles. “Delete.” The roof system had 240 different parts, from screws to clamps to rails. More than half should be deleted. “Simplify.” The website should offer just three types of roofs: small, medium, and large. After that, the goal was to “accelerate.” Install as many roofs as possible each week.

[during a sample installation in 2021] Musk clambered up a ladder to the peak of the roof, where he stood precariously. He was not happy. There were too many fasteners, he said. Each had to be nailed down, adding time to the installation process. Half should be deleted, he insisted. “Instead of two nails for each foot, try it with only one,” he ordered. “If the house has a hurricane, the whole neighborhood is fucked up, so who cares? One nail is going to be fine.” Someone protested that could lead to leaks. “Don’t worry about making it as waterproof as a submarine,” he said. “My house in California used to leak. Somewhere between sieve and submarine should be okay.” For a moment he laughed before returning to his dark intensity. No detail was too small. The tiles and railings were shipped to the sites packed in cardboard. That was wasteful. It took time to pack things and then unpack them. Get rid of the cardboard, he said, even at the warehouses. They should send him pictures from the factories, warehouses, and sites each week showing that they were no longer using cardboard.

“We need to get the engineers who designed this system to come out here and see how hard it is to install,” he said angrily. Then he erupted. “I want to see the engineers out here installing it themselves. Not just doing it for five minutes. Up on roofs for days, for fucking days!” He ordered that, in the future, everyone on an installation team, even the engineers and managers, had to spend time drilling and hammering and sweating with the other workers. When we finally climbed back down to the ground, Brian Dow and his deputy Marcus Mueller gathered the dozen engineers and installers in the side yard to hear Musk’s thoughts. They weren’t pleasant. Why, he asked, did it take eight times longer to install a roof of solar tiles than one with regular tiles? One of the engineers, named Tony, began showing him all the wires and electronic parts. Musk already knew the workings of each component, and Tony made the mistake of sounding both assured and condescending. “How many roofs have you done?” Musk asked him. “I’ve got twenty years of experience in the roof business,” Tony answered. “But how many solar roofs have you installed?” Tony explained he was an engineer and had not actually been on a roof doing the installation. “Then you don’t fucking know what you’re fucking talking about,” Musk responded. “This is why your roofs are shit and take so long to install.”

The one-nail idea proved to be unworkable, failing during installation rather than requiring a hurricane. Musk’s intervention did result in reduced installation time, but he never got anywhere near the goal of 1,000 roofs per week. A year after the above events, and following the firing and replacing of quite a few top managers, the company was at 30 roofs per week.

(We tried and failed to get a Tesla solar roof for our house in Maskachusetts. See Tesla Solar Roof (the price is not the price). Here in Florida, we are theoretically using all solar power via paying a little extra every month. That extra money is funding a utility-scale solar array owned and operating by Florida Power & Light.)

In the rush to expand the U.S. population, nobody seems to have noticed that attempts to reduce construction costs have failed. The single-family home is still stick-built by developers in more or less the same way as 100 years ago. The dream of lower cost via prefab did not pan out. Apartment buildings aren’t getting cheaper to construct, in constant dollars, I don’t think, but inflation has been reduced by lowering quality. Developers use flammable wood and sprinklers instead of concrete. “Why America’s New Apartment Buildings All Look the Same” (Bloomberg 2019)

Los Angeles architect Tim Smith was sitting on a Hawaiian beach, reading through the latest building code, as one does, when he noticed that it classified wood treated with fire retardant as noncombustible. That made wood eligible, he realized, for a building category—originally known as “ordinary masonry construction” but long since amended to require only that outer walls be made entirely of noncombustible material—that allowed for five stories with sprinklers.

By putting five wood stories over a one-story concrete podium and covering more of the one-acre lot than a high-rise could fill, Smith figured out how to get the 100 apartments at 60 percent to 70 percent of the cost.

the buildings have proved highly flammable before the sprinklers and walls go in. Dozens of major fires have broken out at mid-rise construction sites over the past five years. Of the 13 U.S. blazes that resulted in damages of $20 million or more in 2017, according to the National Fire Protection Association, six were at wood-frame apartment buildings under construction.

Maybe these buildings won’t burn, but I expect them to degrade and sag more than a concrete apartment building would and be more resistant to rehab.

So… even our most successful innovator, backed up by $billions in capital, hasn’t been able to scratch, much less dent, the problem of housing costs being far higher than what immigrants can afford. And yet we continue to keep our border open.

Health care, obviously, is not affordable for today’s typical migrant, though the true cost is often disguised either by an employer or the government (Medicaid). Let’s also look at car prices. A car is the typical family’s third largest expense after housing and health care. It seems unfair to compare today’s pavement-melting SUVs to the cars of 1965. Maybe we could look at the bottom end of today’s car market as a comparable. CNBC says that this is 30,000 Bidies. That translates to about $5,500 in 1965 dollars (BLS). How much did a car cost in 1965? Hemmings says that a Corvette cost $4,223 in 1965 while a Mustang with a V-8 was $2,734. A basic Dodge Dart was $1,959 and a full-sized Chevy Impala was $2,295 (I think both would seat 6 humans, so they actually had more utility than today’s cheap cars!), according to this source.

So… the costs of producing all of the basics of American life have gone up, in real terms, since the modern immigration wave began, we do not seek to preferentially admit those who are likely to earn higher incomes, and even heroes such as Elon Musk can’t get the construction industry out of its productivity stagnation.

As there is no Spanish tile option for the Tesla solar roof, I don’t think that we would be able to get one. I typed in some data on our house, including that we pay $600/month for electric (the average number might be closer to $500) and got a quote from their web site:

If we assume a zero interest rate environment, the purchase price works out to 606 months of electric bills. The roof then pays for itself in 50 years. Perhaps it would be fairer to subtract the likely cost of a new tile roof since we will need one of those eventually. Let’s call that $80,000. Now we’re down to a 39-year payback period. This is before considering the subsidies from working class renters that our rulers have generously decreed.

Related:

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Elon Musk provides inspiration for the damaged

by philg

One defining principle of our age is that a damaged human is an economically useless human. Parents weren’t nice to you? You can be mean to others for the next 75 years. Back pain at age 50 when working for the government? Retire on disability (see “A Disability Epidemic Among a Railroad’s Retirees” (NYT): “Virtually every career employee [at the government-owned Long Island Rail Road] — as many as 97 percent in one recent year — applies for and gets disability payments soon after retirement. … The L.I.R.R.’s disability rate suggests it is one of the nation’s most dangerous places to work. Yet in four of the last five years, the railroad has won national awards for improving worker safety.”) Back pain at age 50 when scraping by on minimum wage? Segue to SSDI and Medicaid-funded opioids.

Elon Musk (the book) is a good inspiration to power through the pain, both emotional and physical. Tending to confirm The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications, his mom’s mom was divorced and Elon’s mom was divorced and Elon himself is now thrice-divorced. Elon’s mom could be brutally frank and Elon’s dad was just plain brutal, as was life growing up in South Africa.

His most searing experiences came at school. For a long time, he was the youngest and smallest student in his class. He had trouble picking up social cues. Empathy did not come naturally, and he had neither the desire nor the instinct to be ingratiating. As a result, he was regularly picked on by bullies, who would come up and punch him in the face. “If you have never been punched in the nose, you have no idea how it affects you the rest of your life,” he says. At assembly one morning, a student who was horsing around with a gang of friends bumped into him. Elon pushed him back. Words were exchanged. The boy and his friends hunted Elon down at recess and found him eating a sandwich. They came up from behind, kicked him in the head, and pushed him down a set of concrete steps. “They sat on him and just kept beating the shit out of him and kicking him in the head,” says Kimbal, who had been sitting with him. “When they got finished, I couldn’t even recognize his face. It was such a swollen ball of flesh that you could barely see his eyes.” He was taken to the hospital and was out of school for a week. Decades later, he was still getting corrective surgery to try to fix the tissues inside his nose. But those scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, Errol Musk, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist who to this day bedevils Elon. After the school fight, Errol sided with the kid who pummeled Elon’s face. “The boy had just lost his father to suicide, and Elon had called him stupid,” Errol says. “Elon had this tendency to call people stupid. How could I possibly blame that child?”

When Elon finally came home from the hospital, his father berated him. “I had to stand for an hour as he yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless,” Elon recalls. Kimbal, who had to watch the tirade, says it was the worst memory of his life. “My father just lost it, went ballistic, as he often did. He had zero compassion.” Both Elon and Kimbal, who no longer speak to their father, say his claim that Elon provoked the attack is unhinged and that the perpetrator ended up being sent to juvenile prison for it.

How about back pain, the standard American initiative-killer?

For his forty-second birthday, in June 2013, Talulah [Riley; photo below] rented an ersatz castle in Tarrytown, New York, just north of New York City, and invited forty friends. The theme this time was Japanese steampunk, and Musk and the other men were dressed as samurai warriors. There was a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, which had been rewritten slightly to feature Musk as the Japanese emperor, and a demonstration by a knife-thrower. Musk, never one to avoid risks, even needless ones, put a pink balloon just underneath his groin for the knife-thrower to target while blindfolded. The culmination was a demonstration of Sumo wrestling. At the end, the group’s 350-pound champion invited Musk into the ring. “I went full strength at him to try a judo throw, because I thought he was trying to take it easy on me,” Musk says. “I decided to see if I could throw this guy, and I did. But I also blew out a disc at the base of my neck.” Ever since, Musk has suffered severe bouts of back and neck pain; he would end up having three operations to try to repair his C5-C6 intervertebral disc. During meetings at the Tesla or SpaceX factories, he would sometimes lie flat on the floor with an ice pack at the base of his neck.

(I didn’t understand the appeal of SSDI and opioids until, at around age 50, I decided to repeatedly throw a friend’s 7-year-old onto a couch. This required a twisting motion and, the next morning, I could barely move.)

Elon Musk worked like a demon for years after this injury (I think that we can be confident that the surgeries did not render him “good as new”) and also after the malaria+Stanford misdiagnosis that nearly killed him (see previous post).

Maybe all of this damage will eventually catch up with him, but until then I think we can all look to Elon as inspiration to stop making excuses!

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Grand Theft Auto comes to life in Los Angeles

by philg

Someone torched a homeless encampment and a pallet storage facility underneath a 10-lane freeway, melting the guard rails and resulting in a shower of concrete that had been supporting the freeway. A gaming enthusiast striving for a high score in Grand Theft Auto? No. Real life in Los Angeles this weekend. The Daily Mail:

Coincidentally, our tender 8- and 10-year-olds were at a birthday party this weekend where the hosts brought in a “gaming truck” with Xbox. Their mom was supervising, saw Mario on the outside of the truck, and decided that it would be okay if the boys played “a racing game”. At dinner, the boys recounted the fun that they’d had smashing into buildings, running over criminals, stealing and punching, etc. “Were you playing Grand Theft Auto?” I asked. “Yes, that was the name of the game!” they responded.

I had always thought of Grand Theft Auto, which I’ve never played, as American. What other country has a lot of cars and social decay? Wikipedia, however, says that the creators are Scottish.

Proving that there is always balance in the universe, just as Los Angeles was being trashed by this fire San Francisco was being cleaned up. Also from the Daily Mail… “Outrage as San Francisco boots vagrants off streets ahead of Xi Jinping visit – as California Governor Gavin Newsom admits woke city was only given polish to impress world leaders”:

  • In the span of a few days, the city scrubbed seven intersections in the notorious Tenderloin and South of Market – leaving the hotspots almost unrecognizable
  • Where tents were once propped up, sidewalks are clear and spotless. Locales where homeless once congregated are cleared, video from the sites shows
  • Hangouts along Mission Street and Market are no more, along with an open drug market that for over a year has been outside the Nancy Pelosi Federal building
  • Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom admitted the clean-ups were only done to provide a good impression for visiting world leaders

Gavin Newsom said that the idea of a border wall was “a monument to stupidity” and “a distraction” when Trump proposed it. Here’s the new San Francisco border wall:

Let’s check on traffic in LA at 10:30 am on a Monday:

It doesn’t look worse than usual!

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Elon Musk and the founding of OpenAI

by philg

I was surprised when listening to Elon Musk at the important role Musk played in the founding of OpenAI (I had heard that at one point, but then forgot it).

Before he was worried about population collapse, Musk was worried about AI. His interest in LLMs seems to date from 2013 when he invested $5 million in DeepMind, which was later acquired by Google.

Musk proceeded to publicly warn of the danger. “Our biggest existential threat,” he told a 2014 symposium at MIT, “is probably artificial intelligence.” When Amazon announced its chatbot digital assistant, Alexa, that year, followed by a similar product from Google, Musk began to warn about what would happen when these systems became smarter than humans. They could surpass us and begin treating us as pets. “I don’t love the idea of being a house cat,” he said. The best way to prevent a problem was to ensure that AI remained tightly aligned and partnered with humans. “The danger comes when artificial intelligence is decoupled from human will.” So Musk began hosting a series of dinner discussions that included members of his old PayPal mafia, including Thiel and Hoffman, on ways to counter Google and promote AI safety. He even reached out to President Obama, who agreed to a one-on-one meeting in May 2015. Musk explained the risk and suggested that it be regulated. “Obama got it,” Musk says. “But I realized that it was not going to rise to the level of something that he would do anything about.”

Musk wasn’t happy that Larry Page at Google, who was now in control of the technology, did not share his concern.

Musk then turned to Sam Altman, a tightly bundled software entrepreneur, sports car enthusiast, and survivalist who, behind his polished veneer, had a Musk-like intensity. Altman had met Musk a few years earlier and spent three hours with him in conversation as they toured the SpaceX factory. “It was funny how some of the engineers would scatter or look away when they saw Elon coming,” Altman says. “They were afraid of him. But I was impressed by how much detail he understood about every little piece of the rocket.” At a small dinner in Palo Alto, Altman and Musk decided to cofound a nonprofit artificial intelligence research lab, which they named OpenAI. It would make its software open-source and try to counter Google’s growing dominance of the field. Thiel and Hoffman joined Musk in putting up the money. “We wanted to have something like a Linux version of AI that was not controlled by any one person or corporation,” Musk says. “The goal was to increase the probability that AI would develop in a safe way that would be beneficial to humanity.” One question they discussed at dinner was what would be safer: a small number of AI systems that were controlled by big corporations or a large number of independent systems? They concluded that a large number of competing systems, providing checks and balances on each other, was better. Just as humans work collectively to stop evil actors, so too would a large collection of independent AI bots work to stop bad bots. For Musk, this was the reason to make OpenAI truly open, so that lots of people could build systems based on its source code. “I think the best defense against the misuse of AI is to empower as many people as possible to have AI,” he told Wired’s Steven Levy at the time.

I asked a friend who works at OpenAI (for $1 million per year!) if this vision had been realized, i.e., if I could download the source code and tinker with it. He laughed.

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Who wants to meet at the Las Vegas Formula 1 practice? (Thursday)

by philg

I’m between expert witness appointments in Los Angeles and Montreal on Thursday, November 16 so I’m joining a friend (a brilliant patent litigator from Manhattan who retired to Las Vegas) at the practice that evening. We’re in the West Harmon section. Tickets in this section on the Ticketmaster resale market, after all of the fee scams, are about $215. If anyone wants to meet, maybe for breakfast on Friday morning or in the afternoon on Thursday or at the event itself, please email philg@mit.edu.

Separately, speaking of fee scams, here’s a snapshot from a hotel search:

Expedia says that it is a $24 hotel room. In the fine print, though, it turns out to cost $71. Blame the tax man/tax woman/tax non-binary human? No. The resort fee is $44, nearly double the purported cost of the room! Is it a fabulous resort with a lazy river for the kids? No! It’s the run-down Rio Hotel & Casino, whose pool is actually closed after October 1. A recent Google review of the “resort”:

What can I say. The Rio has impressed me this time. They took a bar that was set really low and managed to lower that bar lower.
So at least they give you choices. Masquerade section comes with 5 minutes of hot water, old carpeting, a window view from inside and outside of the bathroom, 1997 model phone, holes around the tub that have rotted out, plus people painting the exterior and driving in 3 inch screws at 10 at night.
Or you can choose the freshly remodeled beautiful rooms in the other tower with a jackhammer going off at 6am with no water at all in the morning.
Mind you some wait times to check in are over an hour.
We have 10 rooms here and not one is even close to being acceptable.
I only visit for work. I would never spend my money for this experience.
One good note. Housekeeping does the best with what they have to work with.

From two months ago, a verified guest:

It smelled like mildew. I called the front desk several times but nobody ever picked up.It took minimum of 30 minutes to wait for an elevator because most of the elevators didnt work.

From a week ago:

Rooms need renovations. Wi-Fi is abysmal. Resort fee for closed pool and broken WiFi

I think that I will pay up for the Hilton instead! ($25 resort fee, but it doesn’t feel like as much of a scam because the room itself is $122)

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Amber Heard, as perceived by the Musk family and friends

by philg

Continuing to listen to Elon Musk…

Musk was not bred for domestic tranquility. Most of his romantic relationships involve psychological turmoil. The most agonizing of them all was with the actress Amber Heard, who drew him into a dark vortex that lasted more than a year and produced a deep-seated pain that lingers to this day. “It was brutal,” he says.

His brother and friends hated her with a passion that made their distaste for Justine pale. “She was just so toxic,” Kimbal says. “A nightmare.” Musk’s chief of staff Sam Teller compares her to a comic-book villain. “She was like the Joker in Batman,” he says. “She didn’t have a goal or aim other than chaos. She thrives on destabilizing everything.” She and Musk would stay up all night fighting, and then he would not be able to get up until the afternoon.

The end finally came after a wild trip to Rio de Janeiro that December with Kimbal and his wife and some of the kids. When they got to the hotel, Elon and Amber had another of their flamethrowing fights. She locked herself in the room and started yelling that she was afraid she would be attacked and that Elon had taken her passport. The security guards and Kimbal’s wife all tried to convince her that she was safe, her passport was in her bag, and she could and should leave whenever she wanted. “She really is a very good actress, so she will say things that you’re like, ‘Wow, maybe she’s telling you the truth,’ but she isn’t,” Kimbal says.

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