Yesterday on this blog we highlighted Piedmont, California, which is 0.8% Black and 3.8% Latinx. Today we look at diversity-is-our-strength Oakland.
Folks in Oakland seem to have a lot more sex. “Cheated On? freeSTDcheck.org”:
Oakland is a center for Rainbow-first retail. Before one can spend $6 on a coffee, for example, one must walk underneath the sacred flag:
Who are the customers for $6 coffees? Quite a few undocumented immigrants, it seems, because the coffee shop is officially a place where migrant customers are safe from ICE thugs. (I didn’t see a bathroom for customers, so I’m not sure just how long a noble undocumented migrant could stay, as a purely practical matter.)
What passion goes hand-in-glove with Rainbow Flag worship? Pro-Hamas advocacy. The windows next to the door of Walden Pond Books.
What’s in the bookstore? Books celebrating a Hamas-/Palestinian Islamic Jihad-ruled “Free Palestine” with a Rainbow Flag in the background:
Detail:
Who among us is obstructing the glorious day when Free Palestine arrives? If we could only “catch a fascist” we, and our Palestinian brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters, might yet be okay.
What language would people speak in Free Palestine? “Queer Arabic”:
Were they any tutorials available on how to be queer? So glad that you asked! You can learn how to cook “Queer Food” from Queers at the Table and put in on a table that is an example of Queer X Design.
How different are readers’ tastes in California vs. the national average? Prominently featured Queers at the Table has just two Amazon reviews is “#753,447 in Books”. Queer X Design is significantly more popular: “#343,353 in Books”.
A queer hijabi Muslim immigrant survives her coming-of-age by drawing strength and hope from stories in the Quran … Through personal experiences, Lamya H navigates the complexities of gender, sexuality and faith as a queer, nonbinary Muslim.
What kind of people want to pay full price for books in the English language? Undocumented migrants who will presumably be shielded from ICE by the merchant:
What if you’re planning to head up the hill to Piedmont and need to agitate against the construction of affordable housing? You can prep by reading Golden Gates, regarding the “housing crisis” that in no conceivable way could have been caused by importing at least 70 million humans (more than the current population of France), mostly low-skill, over the past 50 years.
Criminals don’t tend to either Black or Latinx, but the bookstore says that you should buy “Books on Black, Latinx … history and culture” for people who are current incarcerated.
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has called on the world’s leading artificial-intelligence labs to slow down development and asked Washington to grant an antitrust exemption so they can coordinate on safety without being treated as a cartel. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk and Google’s Demis Hassabis were quick to support the slower pacing. But why do AI labs need an antitrust exemption?
When competitors agree on standards the rest of the industry is expected to meet, the law becomes suspicious.
In short, coordination is lawful when it creates value rather than excludes rivals or exploits consumers. If AI labs’ coordination is needed to create value and isn’t exclusionary or exploitative, they need not worry about antitrust liability.
So why demand an exemption? The labs appear to have in mind an agreement among competitors to restrict output and set a safety standard collectively rather than compete to produce the safest product. That is classic cartel conduct.
The labs’ apparent belief that competition will inevitably produce a race to the bottom is an awkward admission by OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which were founded to serve the public interest and premised on the idea that AI could be developed safely. Anthropic in particular espoused that safety would be its competitive advantage against rivals. If these companies genuinely believe slower development serves the public interest, nothing prevents them from slowing down unilaterally.
The strongest counterargument asserts that a coordinated slowdown solves a collective-action problem: A lab that slows down alone risks losing market share to rivals willing to cut corners. But this is precisely the problem OpenAI’s capped-profit structure and Anthropic’s public-benefit charter were supposed to solve by insulating their public-interest missions from competitive pressure.
The American frontier labs are purportedly concerned that Chinese models will close the performance gap and cut into what would be profits if they were profitable? Note that Anthropic says it is profitable, but Morningstar says that this is a scam:
The report, from the Financial Times citing multiple people with knowledge of the matter, said Anthropic told investors that it will profit on a measure called adjusted operating income.
According to the report, adjusted operating income excludes stock-based compensation, which is not unusual for technology companies. However, the report also quotes its gross margins – above 80% – exclude revenue shared with distribution partners, as well as the cost of training its models.
(Like saying “Our family is doing great financially so long as we exclude the burdens of mortgage, college tuition, taxes that we have to pay to support families that don’t work, and payments on our two pavement-melting SUVs.”)
Let’s suppose that the AI companies get their antitrust exemption and they cut way back on the training costs that would keep them from being profitable if such costs were included in their new improved accounting scam. How would Americans then be prevented from downloading and running models from Chinese companies that aren’t part of the cartel? Anyone who tries to do this and offer a chatbot or API on the public Internet will be shut down by the FBI? Peasants with Mac Minis and AMD AI Halo-based machines will be hunted down somehow?
FDR made it illegal for Americans to own gold (Executive Order 6102), but the government didn’t do house-to-house searches. If typical desktop PCs adopt an architecture powerful enough to run AI models from countries where “AI slowdown collusion” isn’t happening, how will the government’s AI Safety Regulation Team (controlled by Effective Altruists who are friends with Sam Altman and Dario Amodei?) shut down home-based unsafe AI?
Circa 1980, I remember Ed Fredkin, one of the only professors at MIT who was smart enough to have skipped a PhD program (“poor as a professor, dumb as a Ph.D.” as the Chinese say), saying that he thought that AI could be achieved with VAX 11/780 computing power. Due to Moore’s Law, this would soon be available to everyone on the planet. “What if a teenager in Brazil figures out how to do AI? He can then have his AI trade stocks and become the richest person in the world and control entire nations,” Fredkin pointed out. He wanted computers to be licensed and controlled. Nvidia’s Rubin GPU is between 200 million and 500 million times faster than a VAX for “normal high-precision calculations”, according to ChatGPT, but closer to 200 billion times faster for “highly specialized low-precision matrix operations that dominate modern AI”. ChatGPT says that if we apply Moore’s Law to the Ryzen AI Halo product, it doesn’t reach Nvidia Rubin level until 2040ish (memory bandwidth, AI TOPS).
So… maybe a partnership between government and the current market leaders could suppress competition within the U.S. for the next 15 years or so, even if our brothers and sisters in China continue to deliver awesome free open-source models. Ownership of server-grade GPUs would have to be regulated, of course, but if the government could close schools and order peasants to stay home for Covid safety why not outlaw high-performance GPU ownership, except by responsible companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI, to keep all of society safe?
First in a series of posts about a trip to Northern California over Labor Day weekend. The trip began at FLL, a center of poetry (“Pack the Fun, No Carry-On Gun!”).
One is greeted by signage celebrating Harvey Milk (Florida Sen. Ashley Moody, by contrast, points out that Harvey Milk’s sexual relationship with a 16-year-old boy should disqualify him from being painted as a hero by first-grade teachers):
And, of course, one sees the Followers of Science (this one relying on a non-N95 mask):
After picking up the 2022 Tesla Y from Avis, I fought my way through heavy traffic (at 1 am on the Bay Bridge!) to Piedmont, California where open-borders candidate Kamala Harris recently won 85 percent of the vote. Where do the residents of Piedmont want the New Americans to live? Not in Piedmont, California. They’ve spent a couple of decades fighting the development of affordable housing, higher-density lower-cost market-rate housing, etc. More than 10 percent of the town, for example, signed an anti-development petition in 2022. This eventually reached the national news, e.g., “Civil war breaks out in rich, white California town as activists from crime-plagued neighboring city demand it’s ‘canceled’” (New York Post, August 2026):
Oakland resident Jesse Rosemoore is behind the provocative “Cancel Piedmont” campaign targeting the 1.7-square-mile city of roughly 11,000 people that is surrounded by Oakland but maintains its own schools, police, parks and tax base, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The median price of homes in Piedmont is almost $2.6 million, which is more than three-and-a-half times that of Oakland’s.
Census data cited by the outlet shows Piedmont is roughly 70% white and around 1% black, while about one in five Oakland residents is black.
What does the front yard of someone who was willing to pay 3.5X for a house so that his/her/zir/their children wouldn’t encounter Black kids in their school look like? In case someone from the 1% minority of Black residents happens to walk by, this house (right next to a school), is equipped with a full-size “Black Lives Matter” sign.
Here’s another example in which the BLM sign has been augmented by pro-Hamas and pro-Iran signage.
(We later walked by the high school. Students were visible on outdoor patio and through a classroom window. All of them appeared white.)
Based on homeowner signage, quite a few Piedmont residents want to see a “Free Palestine”. What if, unlike in any other Arab or Muslim country, there were a significant number of remnant Jews in the resultant Hamas-ruled nation? (Remember that it wasn’t “ethnic cleansing” when Arab and Muslim nations got rid of their Jews after 1948.) The remnant Jews could have a temple devoted to advocating that the Gazans who perpetrated the October 7, 2023 attacks not suffer from any counterattack and, also, that Black Lives Matter (even more so when Arabs who call themselves “Palestinian” refer to Black people as abeed):
Kehilla Community Synagogue’s website says that they admit they are parked on land stolen from the indigenous and, also, that they want to fight ICE so as to increase the number of additional humans who will park themselves on land stolen from the indigenous people of North America:
Speaking of Native Americans, we’re informed by the Piedmont Righteous that they played no role in building any part of “America”. (Perhaps, like Boston, America was primarily built by immigrants from Somalia?)
Returning to the subject of schools, the elementary school recommends that everyone be masked. #SafetyFirst and, when masking the kindergartener, don’t forget the daily temperature check:
Everyone in Piedmont can agree that they don’t want a king in Washington, D.C. telling them they must allow the construction of affordable housing:
Would you be “OK” if you owned a $2.7 million for which you paid $135,000 (in 1977 dollars; $750,000 in post-Biden dollars) and on which you paid almost nothing in property tax thanks to California’s Proposition 13? No, you would not be okay! And you’d have to remind everyone “No Trespassing on Democracy”:
What about as an investor? Would you be okay investing $135,000 and getting out $2.7 million minus realtor commission, 50 years of maintenance expenses, etc.? ChatGPT says that you would not be okay! Had the $135,000 gone into the S&P 500 in 1977, with dividends reinvested, it would today be worth $36 million. (This might not account properly for federal and California state income tax on the dividends. One could also point out that the buyers likely used leverage (mortgage) to buy the house, but they could similarly have used leverage to buy the S&P 500.)
Here’s another way to be a rich douche and not be okay…. buy a Range Rover instead of a Honda or Toyota:
Let’s close by pointing out that the residents of Piedmont love Martin Luther King, Jr. so much that they leave the posters up eight months after the event:
A week ago, we visited the Tesla showroom in West Palm Beach (not in the part of town that is being gold-plated by Stephen Ross, but in a shabby “functional” area that includes Ferrari and Mercedes dealers as well as endless strip malls) to look at the Tesla Y L. Our 11-year-old was immediately sold on both the front and rear screens. He particularly enjoyed being able to adjust the front right seat while sitting in the 2nd row. The power folding 2nd- and 3rd-row seats are kind of cool.
For transporting four people, the luggage capacity is nowhere near what a minivan offers, but is still substantial. With four people plus a dog, though, the 2nd row becomes tight. A 50 lb. Canine-American could perhaps sit between the two 2nd-row seats, but it is nothing like the comfort of being up on the minivan’s 2nd-row bench (ChatGPT says that the Odyssey is about 14″ wider on the 2nd-row bench, at hip level, vs. the Tesla Y (non-L) 2nd-row bench). I’ve always disliked the Tesla interiors, including the seats and especially the “vegan leather”, but the grandma that we brought along pronounced that 2nd-row Tesla seat was more comfortable than her perch in the Honda Odyssey.
The car is substantially back-ordered. The folks who work in the West Palm Beach showroom, plainly not on commission since they weren’t interested in talking to us, said that they already had 700 customers who had ordered and were waiting. Delivery is now promised (sort of) for January. The Launch edition remains a bad choice for Floridians due to the 10% range penalty from dragging around a useless second motor. Our last snow was in 1977 so the AWD isn’t needed. Acceleration any faster than a 1981 Corvette (0-60 in 9.2 seconds) isn’t required when the roads are jammed (pretty much always, as soon as one gets south of the DJT airport). The staff at the showroom said that the Launch edition was “almost sold out” so perhaps there is hope for a “premium RWD Y L” (there already is a “premium RWD Y” at $4,000 less than the AWD Y and with 357 miles of range vs. 327; the Launch Y L AWD is at 332 miles so a Y L RWD with the same battery should perhaps hit 360 miles of range when brand new?).
We’re in a strange situation, I think, with the self-driving hardware. Tesla says that AI5 won’t be in cars for a while because they need the chips, which Samsung says they’re already fabbing, for “Optimus and our supercomputer clusters.” AI5 seems to have disappeared from the news even faster than Graham Platner, but I am pretty sure that if I (a) wait for the Y L RWD to become available, and (b) order a Y L RWD on the first day of availability that it will be delivered with HW4 exactly one day before Tesla switches all of the cars over to AI5.
Prof. Dr. Jason Atta Kwei Arday, Ph.D. was a “sociology of education” scholar. His work, despite generating awe at Cambridge University, failed to impress ChatGPT. What would happen if both sociology and education were eliminated as academic research departments and, instead, the questions being asked were bounced into economics (and maybe a few to anthropology)? Would the world then suffer for lack of interesting or useful research results? ChatGPT estimated that Professor Arday was certainly a better researcher than at least 30% of the people in education/sociology and possibly better than 50% (i.e., as many as half of the people getting paid to do research in this area are even less competent).
Can anyone think of a PhD thesis or journal paper from sociology or education that has had significant impact and that wouldn’t have fit reasonably well within economics or, perhaps, anthropology?
(This is not to suggest that the “Doctor of Education” professional education programs, such as what Prof. Dr. Jill Biden, EdD went through, should be eliminated. I don’t know enough to say whether these EdD programs make better school principals and other education bureaucrats.)
How much less would future generations earn if degrees in education were no longer offered because the faculty had all been cut loose? The chart below says that young people earn $18,000 less over a 10-year horizon if they get a degree in education vs. simply do the work that a median high-school graduate would do:
(“Social Sciences” that aren’t economics get a boost in earnings, so perhaps a sociology degree actually does have cash value? Wikipedia lists a huge number of majors that could fall under this umbrella, including degrees that prepare young people for lucrative DEI management jobs. This 2015 study found that sociology graduates had among the lowest earnings of any social science majors. We also have to consider the selection bias of those who choose to attend college and those who have the stick-to-itiveness to finish a degree. That population would probably do quite well economically if they never attended college, but simply started working at 18. That same issue cuts through all of the studies, I think. An 18-year-old who had what it takes to get into college and complete a CS degree could probably also do great via self-study and practical experience as a programmer.)
Let’s check in with the world’s leading sociologists and see if we’d be sorry if they were cut loose. Here’s Joya Misra, professor at University of Maskachusetts and head of the prestigious American Sociological Association, which publishes the leading journal in the field (ASR), giving a presidential address:
She emphasizes how feminist and decolonial methods that bring sociological researchers into collaborative and participatory partnerships with broader communities can develop transformative solutions, building communities of hope, justice, and joy.
She appears to cite Hater-in-Chief Ron DeSantis!
at this time of rising authoritarianism, attacks on academic freedom, and loss of trust in science, sociology must recenter itself … DeSantis 2024
The implication that sociology is a form of “science” is interesting, but even more interesting is that the cited article is about Ron DeSantis, but isn’t by Ron DeSantis. It’s by Gary DeSantis, adjunct teacher at State College of Florida Manatee-Sarasota in the tennis training capital of Bradenton, Florida. Here’s the abstract of “‘We believe in education, not indoctrination’: Governor Ron DeSantis, critical race theory, and anti-intellectualism in Florida” by the other Mr. DeSantis:
This article examines how Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ remarks contribute to anti-intellectualism and fuel the pushback against critical race theory (CRT) championed by like-minded conservative Republicans who view its instruction as an affront to society and authentic historical narratives. Dismissing educators and scholars who uphold the teaching of CRT as unpatriotic and denigrating to American society, DeSantis, who has presidential aspirations, has effectively used the issue (along with a number of other matters) to solidify his conservative base fearful of social and hegemonic change. Although CRT is not taught in Florida public schools, similar to other conservative-dominated states which have seized on the teaching of CRT as anathema to their civic principles, DeSantis’ thinly veiled attempt to appease right-wing voters is yet another example of Republicans stoking cultural wars designed to energize conservative constituents against what many of them perceive as liberal attacks on their beliefs and values.
Circling back to Joya Misra, in her address she mentions the problem of “overinclusion”, which does not mean hiring the incompetent/below-average because of personal characteristics:
In one article, we focus on the experiences of faculty of color, considering how faculty in the twenty-first century, in an era of DEI, still experience substantial exclusion and exploitation in their jobs (Misra, Kane-Lee, et al. 2024). We theorized three different processes. First, we conceptualized overinclusion: how faculty of color are asked to do more work, and work that is devalued in promotions, such as mentoring and service—leaving them less time for more valued activities, such as research, as well as less choice about what they would like to do
The second process we identified is active exclusion. Research on faculty of color has identified this issue for decades … Active exclusion explains why highly qualified people are not offered jobs, not offered good jobs, receive fewer resources for their work, or face greater challenges being promoted.
Prof. Misra’s personal work:
We have to do the work to identify inequalities before we can identify more equitable approaches. But I worry that we too often stop at identifying the disjunctures, the inequalities, and the brokenness of our world
The world is “broken” when someone like her can get a lifetime taxpayer-funded job?
As a feminist and as a methodologist, I suggest we build on participatory action and community-engaged methods to envision a different, more community-focused discipline … As such, I adopt an epistemological approach to knowledge production that builds on feminist and decolonial methodologies, even as it is at odds with some traditional approaches to empirical research. Feminists have long called for epistemological approaches that undo the divide between expert and participant
Building on this work allows us to link U.S. sociology to sociological traditions from other parts of the world, where the relationship between academia and activism looks different.
There’s a bit of hope in western Maskachusetts:
In the town of Amherst, where I live, we are working on a plan for reparations (Lord et al. 2023). How can we possibly make reparations for the centuries of enslavement, displacement, discrimination, death, and the constant grind of anti-Black racism? … So far, the town has pledged only two million dollars to the reparations fund and has yet to fully fund that two million … I am endlessly infuriated with the town for not doing more. And yet, what is the alternative? Not to work toward reparations?
Maybe there’s some social media output for Prof. Dr. Joya Misra, Ph.D.? A quick search revealed that she was far too virtuous to have an account on X. She posted on Facebook in support of what the Supreme Court found to be racism that violated the 14th amendment:
She was proud to have been injected with the Sacrament of Fauci:
What about on Blue Sky, the natural home for conventional-minded progressives? Joya Misra does have an account!
(When the candidate for whom the majority of people vote is elected, that’s the end of democracy.)
She re-skies (?) a blue (?) exhorting the righteous to #resist:
Considering all of the above, and remembering that this is perhaps the best sociologist in the United States (elected by peers to head their organization), would it be a net loss to the average citizen if all departments of sociology were shut down and the taxpayer funds redirected to economics, literature, engineering, and actual science?
Americans in the Northeast are making plans to come down to Florida this winter, either 183 days (the “skip on state taxes” plan) or just a shorter break from misery. They might want to consider this New York Times article from 31 years ago, “Scientists Say Earth’s Warming Could Set Off Wide Disruptions” (September 18, 1995):
A continuing rise in average global sea level, which is likely to amount to more than a foot and a half by the year 2100. This, say the scientists, would inundate parts of many heavily populated river deltas and the cities on them, making them uninhabitable, and would destroy many beaches around the world. At the most likely rate of rise, some experts say, most of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States would be gone in 25 years. They are already disappearing at an average of 2 to 3 feet a year.
The NYT’s “experts” were sort of right. It did become impossible to go to a lot of East Coast beaches in 2020, but that was because Science made it illegal (#StayHomeSaveLives), not because the beach had physically disappeared.
Maskachusetts COVID-19 Order No. 22, issued 25 years after the NYT article predicted beach closure:
How has Florida’s shoreline changed over time? Here’s Catesby’s map from circa 1729:
Compare to today (Google Earth):
Loosely related, but I had to mention this in case it jinxes us with a repeat of Hurricane Andrew (1992; Category 5 landfall, 25-mile-wide swath of destruction south of Miami), “The Atlantic Just Broke a 60-Year Record” (ScienceAlert):
September 12th became the furthest into the year we have ever gone without a hurricane in the Atlantic basin since the advent of modern satellite tracking in 1966 – by a day.
“El Niño is being supersized before our eyes,” explains António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
“The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up.”
The footprints of the destroyed buildings are preserved as memorials, surrounded by the names of those killed, starting with the 1993 parking garage jihad.
The museum is nearly all underground:
The museum has a lot of touch screens:
A cornerstone plaque was preserved, dedicated to the thousands of legacy Americans who constructed the World Trade Center:
Generally speaking, the destruction and deaths that occurred at the site are attributed to motive-free “terrorists” with no relationship to any religion. Example:
A drawing from Alexandra, age 3, whose father was killed in the not-related-to-Islam attacks:
The remains of Ladder Company 3’s truck were preserved:
All 11 members of Ladder Company 3 were in the North Tower when it collapsed and all were killed.
One fight that New Yorkers will apparently never give up on is the struggle against SARS-CoV-2. More than five years after coronapanic began, the “one person per bench” rule still applies:
The gift shop reminds us that most of the heroes of 9/11 were female:
Some were Canine-Americans:
We are reminded that “Love is Stronger than Hate”:
A last look at a tower foundation:
A few steps away, it’s back to the average New York City streetscape:
(The company is so forward-thinking that they’re already in 2027 while us peasants are stuck in 2026.)
Net income was almost $60 billion and an even-more-eye-popping 62% of revenue. For every dollar in sales, the company enjoys 62 cents in profit. The typical S&P 500 company earns about 15% in what the NYT tells us is an economy that has been destroyed by Donald Trump (the 10-year average is 11%).
(I want to pause here and take credit for my investment acumen. My standard line was that Nvidia’s profit margin couldn’t stay at 30%, despite the goodness of CUDA, because people who were big users of GPU would find better price/performance chips and recompile their software to run on those competitor GPUs. These latest quarterly results certainly prove my prediction correct because the profit margin did not stay at 30% (it moved to 62%). “Follow me for more investment advice.”)
Federal corporate income tax isn’t based on profitability, but is a flat 21% (Nvidia actually pays closer to 16.5% due to some money being earned in countries with lower tax rates, credits for research, etc.).
Bernie Sanders informs us that nobody needs to own more than 3 houses. The analogy for a corporation would be that no company needs to earn more than a 25% profit margin and, therefore, the corporate income tax rate should go up closer to 100% on the chunk of a company’s earnings that are more than 25%.
Speaking of Bernie and Nvidia, TIME’s 100 AI “innovators, leaders, and thinkers reshaping our world through groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence” does not include any current or former employees of Nvidia (sorry, Jensen Huang, Bill Dally, and the rest of the merry band identified in Even companies worth $1 trillion don’t want to pay Nvidia’s prices). Bernie Sanders, however, is featured as one of the top 100:
Perhaps this is because Senator Sanders was the first author of the 2017 paper that kicked off the modern LLM:
Let’s check in on what would have been our tax dollars (capital gains tax on appreciated Microsoft stock) if not for our wise policy of allowing rich douches to deduct unlimited amounts for “charity” (not to be confused with “vanity”!)… “Gates Foundation Pledges $1 Billion to Combat A.I. Inequality” (New York Times, today):
The foundation’s annual Goalkeepers report, released on Monday, advocated an urgent effort to ensure that A.I. “helps narrow gaps between the richest and poorest rather than widening them.”
The foundation said that it would divide the new funding among external groups working on its priorities, spanning work like encouraging A.I. use among doctors, farmers and teachers, or developing data sets in more languages.
Last month, Mr. Gates warned that A.I. would spread across the economy, possibly causing job losses across the economy and leaving little room for one industry to absorb the refugees from another. The biggest tech companies in the world, including Microsoft, are racing to help corporate customers adopt A.I., and have said it could replace many workers.
The visionary was telling Americans to bulk up on low-skill immigrants just a year before Google kicked off the LLM revolution by publishing its transformer architecture (BBC 2016):
The billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has told the BBC that the United States “should set a better example” by taking in more refugees.
Mr Gates said his home country “had the capacity” to follow the examples of Germany and Sweden, who were “to be congratulated” for welcoming migrants.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mr Gates added that governments were dealing with “tight budgets”. However, he emphasised that the issue was largely a political one, and that “the total number of refugees is not a world record”.
The statement about “tight budgets” is confusing. We’re informed that low-skill migrants make a society richer. If true, why is a government budget a limiting factor? Separately, how has Germany done economically and culturally since 2016 thanks to its virtuous refugee policy? The refugees of 2016 are now fully established in the German labor market. With unprecedented levels of low-skill immigrant residents, Germany should thus be experiencing an unprecedented economic boom. The Wikipedia page titled “German economic crisis (2022–present)” says “[Germany] became the worst-performing major economy globally in 2023” (attributed to “slowing immigration to Germany” because, of course, the fix when open borders doesn’t work is more-open borders).
How about Sweden? With government at 50% of GDP, the country was roughly evenly balanced between those who benefit from a larger government and those who are harmed by an expansion of government, welfare, etc. (The U.S. percentage of GDP devoted to government is similar if we include nominally “private” (but heavily regulated) health care.) In a recent narrowly-decided election, the balance was tipped to the “expand the government and keep the borders open” party by immigrant voters (about 13% of those eligible; source; see also this X post).
Was Gates’s 2016 statement due to the crisp mountain air at Davos? No.
the U.S. immigration laws are bad – really, really bad. I’d say treatment of immigrants is one of the greatest injustices done in our government’s name. (Bill Gates, quoted in Rolling Stone 2014)
Why do Africans need a snow white savior and 7 dwarf NGOs to tell them how to use ChatGPT? Is this new Gates Foundation program an example of epistemic injustice? (Wikipedia: “Epistemic injustice occurs when an individual or group is wronged in their “capacity as a knower”, meaning that their ability to produce knowledge is called into question.”) Here’s a still frame from Bill Gates’s video:
ChatGPT says that it is in the Wolof language, spoken in “Senegal and also in The Gambia and Mauritania”. ChatGPT adds “I can usually read, translate, summarize, and explain Wolof documents, especially standard written Wolof.” So the video example of how AI doesn’t work for African languages is provided in a language that the most familiar AI understands well enough to translate.
(ChatGPT identifies the photo as likely from Saloum, Senegal and can give some history: “religiously motivated Muslim violence and coercive Islamization occurred in Saloum, especially during Maba Diakhou Bâ’s jihad of the 1860s”; it was a peaceful jihad according to George W. Bush that resulted in Muslims becoming 97 percent of the population in Senegal (state.gov))
Readers: since you’ll have to pick up the slack and pay the taxes that Bill Gates skipped on via his foundation, what do you think of this program? If Gates Foundation employees aren’t going to work at a company training and/or running an LLM how are they going to have a significant effect on what AI can do for the Africans that the Gates Foundation purports to understand? Unless they think that Africans are stupid, wouldn’t it make more sense just to give $1 billion to Africans and let them spend it on whatever they believe that they need? Even if having trained do-gooders spend money rather than letting the purported beneficiaries choose, is the local language idea a good one? A lot of people get motivated to learn widely-spoken languages because proficiency will enable them to play a desired videogame or watch and understand a movie (estimate of at least 200 million English learners for video gaming in 2020). Imagine the motivation for someone in Senegal to learn French or English if that were the only way to take advantage of AI (which, of course, it currently isn’t since ChatGPT actually does understand Wolof and 80 percent of Senegal’s adults already have smartphones).
Finally, if AI is unsafe, which Bill Gates says it is, why would working to make an unsafe technology more widespread in Africa, or anywhere else, be a noble endeavor?
The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor. Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.
A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unsrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN’s World Food Program.
… believe me, Africa existed before you Europeans came along. And we didn’t do all that poorly either.
Loosely related, my latest way of responding to anyone in academia who expresses an interest in AI safety, AI regulation (now that Trump is anti-regulation, all of my academic friends are very keen on government-imposed restrictions), etc.:
I do feel unsafe. Current models are close to PhD-level intelligence. At some point in 2027, they’re expected to achieve the intelligence of a human who decided not to enter a PhD program.
Not very related, my X response to a New York Times article about the horror of Sydney Sweeney being shown to the general public:
Thank you for highlighting this important issue. As someone who feels physically ill after exposure to photos of Sydney Sweeney, I feel seen. In case it helps others, I find that the wave of nausea can be reduced by looking at photos of Megan Rapinoe kneeling during the National… pic.twitter.com/jFCnNs4Lja
The front page of the New York Times, exactly 25 years ago:
Some excerpts, not in quote style for readability (modern correction: the Langley-based F-16s arrived in D.C. closer to 22 minutes after the Pentagon impact):
The forces or ideas that transformed Mr. Atta are not clear. What is clear, however, is that two years ago his habits began to change. He requested a prayer room at the university for himself and 20 other Arab students. He grew a beard. He listed himself at the university under a different family name, el-Amirals.
Mr. Atta, who was registered in Germany as a native of the United Arab Emirates but appears on other documents as an Egyptian, was for most of his years in Germany an apparently secular man. Then ”something changed in him,” said one of his teachers, Alptekin Ozdemir, a Turk who has lectured at the university for 15 years and helps advise the foreign students there. Perhaps 40 to 50 of them are Arabs, out of a student body of 3,600.
Rescue workers in lower Manhattan carried body bags from piles of wreckage to refrigerated trucks. One worker said he had found the remains of people strapped into what seemed to be airplane seats. Another reported finding the body of a flight attendant, her hands bound.
But despite elaborate plans that link civilian and military efforts to control the nation’s airspace in defense of the country, and despite two other jetliners’ having already hit the World Trade Center in New York, the fighter planes that scrambled into protective orbits around Washington did not arrive until 15 minutes after Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.
