Why Ultraprocessed Foods Aren’t Always Bad diet is a bigger contributor globally to early death than smoking. In America, nearly half the adult population has Type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes. ....... These industrially produced foods with weird, hard-to-pronounce ingredients that you can’t find in your kitchen have been linked to Type 2 diabetes, depression, heart attacks and Alzheimer’s disease. ........ They are “driving the obesity epidemic” .......... ultraprocessed foods, which makes up about 60 percent of the American diet by some estimates, is so broad that it borders on useless. ....... Ultraprocessed foods are often very energy-dense because food companies have incentives to add fat or sugar to make foods tastier, and to remove water to make foods more shelf stable and cheaper to transport. ........ where the evidence for health is strong and unequivocal: eating lots of fruits and vegetables and lean protein. ......... we should aim to consume a diet rich in unprocessed foods, such as oily fish, nuts, fruit and vegetables ........... It’s not surprising that the population is so unhealthy when it is far easier and cheaper to get cakes, cookies, chips and other junk food than it is to get a healthy, balanced meal. .......... We consume too much fast food, too many sugary beverages, too many cakes, doughnuts and chips. And we consume too few legumes, fruits and vegetables. ........ The biggest dietary ills have been known for half a century; we need the new administration to finally act on them.
Where Does a ‘Remarkable’ U.S. Economy Go From Here? Faith Is Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be What if Trump Doesn’t Need to Keep Any of His Promises? How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve U.S.-China Relations While we were sleeping China took a great leap forward in high-tech manufacturing of everything. .......... China’s export machine is so strong now that only very high tariffs might really slow it down, and China’s response to very high tariffs could be to start cutting off American industries from crucial supplies that are now available almost nowhere else. That kind of supply-chain warfare is not what anyone, anywhere needs. ........... I call it the “Elon Musk-Taylor Swift paradigm.” America would use higher tariffs on China to buy time to lift up more Elon Musks — more homegrown manufacturers who can make big stuff so we can export more to the world and import less. And China would use the time to let in more Taylor Swifts — more opportunities for its youth to spend money on entertainment and consumer goods made abroad, but also to make more goods and offer more services — particularly in health care — that its own people want to buy. ........... By 2030, Smith wrote, the U.N. agency predicts “China will account for 45 percent of all global manufacturing, single-handedly matching or outmatching the U.S. and all of its allies. ............... “This is a level of manufacturing dominance by a single country seen only twice before in world history — by the U.K. at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and by the U.S. just after World War II.” Smith wrote, “It means that in an extended war of production, there is no guarantee that the entire world united could defeat China alone.” ......... I rode all over Shanghai in super-comfortable BYD electric cars operated by Didi, China’s Uber. BYD now offers a subcompact E.V., the Seagull, that starts at less than $10,000. ............. In an effort to export its large inventory of cars, China has begun construction of a fleet of 170 ships capable of carrying several thousand automobiles at a time across the ocean. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the world’s shipyards were delivering only four such vessels a year. ........... I took the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai. The trip is roughly the distance between New York City and Chicago. Only it takes just 4.5 hours because the train goes over 200 miles per hour and there’s almost 100 of them going back and forth each day. The ride is so smooth, if you put a dime on the ledge next to your window — half on the ledge and half off — it will be there exactly as you left it from the beginning of the trip to the end. .............. So, what do you think is going to happen? The rest of the world will gradually transition to Chinese-made self-driving E.V.s, “and America will become the new Cuba — the place where you visit to see old gas-guzzling cars that you drive yourself,” as Keith Bradsher, the Times Beijing bureau chief and an auto industry specialist, mused to me. ........... It was dark because it was so fully roboticized that the company doesn’t waste electricity keeping the lights on for any humans — except for the engineers who come to clean or adjust the machines once a day. ............... ‘dark factories’ with their 24-hour uninterrupted and unattended production capabilities .......... We no longer make that many things China wants to buy. It can do almost everything at least cheaper and often better. ........... You are really good” at taking products “from zero to 1. We are good at going from 2 to 100 ............. We have a three-year target to have zero labor for production and storage using a combination of robots and A.I.” Then “we can sit in China and control production outside of China. Then we can put factories closer to the customer.” ............. “Probably in the future the competition for the U.S. is not China, but A.I. It is coming for both of us.” ............
“The Chinese treat education like we treat sports”
............ the government’s prioritizing of Communist Party ideology and state-owned industries is driving some of China’s most talented private-sector innovators to quietly move their money, families or themselves to Japan, Dubai and Singapore. .............. I caught a virus in China that I never imagined I’d get: “Elon Musk appreciation.”
The Germany We Knew Is Gone I Was a Health Insurance Executive. What I Saw Made Me Quit. What if Our Democracy Can’t Survive Without Christianity? Now we’ve finished a third consecutive presidential election when evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for one of the most immoral and cruel men ever to run for president........... a better version of Christianity, or Christianity living up to its ideals. ....... the three fundamentals of Christianity map very well onto the three fundamentals of Madisonian liberalism. And one of those is don’t be afraid. No. 2 is be like Jesus. Imitate Jesus. And No. 3 is forgive each other. And those things are very much like how you run a constitutional republic. .......... Christianity is a load-bearing wall in democracy, and the founders told us that ...... our liberal, secular Constitution, it’s great, as far as it goes, but it relies on virtues like truthfulness and lawfulness and the equal dignity of every individual. ............. Thin Christianity is my term for when Christianity becomes secularized and it becomes a consumer good, a commodity — people just shop for churches and they like what they hear and they’re not really challenged in church. And the problem with that is that a lot of the benefits of belief to the soul and to the Republic come from taking it seriously and participating — joining with a community, giving of yourself to others — not just treating it as a consumer good. ......... And then I come across Dallin Oaks. He’s a law professor and a former Utah Supreme Court justice. And he says that the church’s posture toward civic democracy needs to be based in patience, negotiation and mutual accommodation. And not for strategic reasons. He’s grounding this in the teachings of Jesus Christ. ............ and that’s what Christianity needs more of: teachings about how would Jesus approach politics.
Thomas Friedman on Syria, the U.S. and Trump Now Is Not the Time for Surrender Paul Krugman Elon Musk Flexes His Political Strength as Government Shutdown Looms The world’s richest man led the charge to kill a bipartisan spending deal, in part by promoting false and misleading claims about it. ........ Musk also shared misinformation about the bill, including false claims that it contained new aid for Ukraine or $3 billion in funds for a new stadium in Washington. ....... The president-elect has 96.2 million followers on X, while Mr. Musk has 207.9 million. (Mr. Musk is also far richer than Mr. Trump. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, he is worth $458 billion, while the president-elect is worth a mere $6.61 billion.) ........... Some even accused him of acting more like the president or vice president than a billionaire executive. .......... Mr. Musk was not initially expected to be part of the dinner but joined as it was underway ......... Despite his occasional presence on the Hill and in his role leading DOGE, Mr. Musk does not interact directly with many members of Congress. Mr. Ramaswamy has been the one talking directly with them. ........... Members were glued to his nonstop feed as they walked to and from votes, and some privately expressed concerns about their own political futures if he went through with his threats. ......... His posts followed a similar pattern of past activity on X, where he can become hyper-fixated on a single issue that bothers him. As the most popular user on X, Mr. Musk has used his feed as a bullhorn to drive conversation on the platform and beyond.
No bills should be passed Congress until Jan 20, when @realDonaldTrump takes office.
Xi and Putin pledge to shape a new world order as the Chinese leader leaves Russia with no peace in sight for Ukraine The White House said China’s position was not impartial and urged Beijing to pressure Russia to withdraw from Ukraine. ....... as Xi departed he told Putin: “Now there are changes that haven’t happened in 100 years. When we are together, we drive these changes.” ...... “I agree,” Putin said, to which Xi responded: “Take care of yourself dear friend, please.” ...... Kishida’s surprise visit to the Ukrainian capital stole some of the attention from Xi’s trip.
Sanctions as well as EU and G7 oil price cap are working. We must keep up the pressure.
Russia earned 42% less from selling oil this February than last. This shows oil price cap has been one of the most efficient tools in cutting Russia’s revenues. Need to continue reviewing it. pic.twitter.com/S49dqBYGi8
i am hearing that many big companies are asking people to come in T, W, & Th so i am not really surprised to hear this. not sure it's the best approach, but not surprising. https://t.co/WnEHDhZ1VZ
— Gale Wilkinson @VITALIZE (@galeforceVC) March 23, 2023
“You’re not a bank failure. You’re a bank disappointment.”
Biggest winner would be Facebook. Which is responsible for manufacturing the great TikTok scare. They get Congress to kill a rival — and distract from their own toxic practices?😵💫🤡💰https://t.co/0luD6IuIuL
Since the time of the Aztecs, the tamale has delighted the taste buds of everyone who has enjoyed this delicacy. In my district, we cherish the delectable tamales from our many Latin restaurants. On National Tamale Day, I salute everyone who has mastered the art of the tamale!🫔
— Assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar (@JeniferRajkumar) March 23, 2023
He has one of the most remarkable stories
From moving to the U.S. at 5 years old
To starting Palo Alto Delivery with his classmates in 2013
Going through 7 years of ups and downs, including almost running out of money
the trickle down effect of the 2021 boom in valuations and easy VC money is now showing in candidate comps.
met a super bright, amazing candidate who should get around $120k - $130k base for their experience, was drawing $180k ++, startup is dead and now their entire lifestyle…
Some takeaways - including those of particular relevance to India - from the broad Russia China Joint Statement on 'Deepening the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership of Coordination for the New Era' issued during Xi's visit to Russia.
Iran-Saudi ties: China-brokered ‘win-win’ deal could bring Yemen war to a close, analysts say Tehran and Riyadh have agreed to restore diplomatic relations following the Beijing-led talks that experts dubbed as ‘a major development in the Middle Eastern diplomacy’....... Analysts say the easing of tensions between the rivals could also prompt Saudi and Iran to end hostilities in Yemen by agreeing to a ‘face-saving’ resolution .......... The Chinese-mediated agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia to resume diplomatic relations after a seven-year hiatus is widely expected to de-escalate conflicts across the Middle East. Although details of the deal reached during five days of talks in Beijing have not been made public, many analysts believe they include an understanding on bringing the eight-year war in Yemen to a negotiated close. .
A Gold Mine of Clean Energy May Be Hiding Under Our Feet “We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness” ....... to have a friend takes time ......... Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. ...... its only combustion product is water. .......
hydrogen gas does exist in large quantities in Earth’s crust
........ Just think how much cheaper and easier would it be if we could drill for hydrogen the same way we drill for oil and natural gas, and thus put to good use society’s enormous investment in equipment built for the exploration, production and transportation of fossil fuels. ......... hundreds of millions of megatons of hydrogen in Earth’s crust, and even if only 10 percent of it is accessible, that would last thousands of years at the current rate of consumption ......... natural hydrogen from the ground should be producible for less than $1 per kilogram, versus around $5 per kilogram for “green” hydrogen that’s derived from water by electrolysis ......... History is replete with examples of ignored discoveries. Take the observation that sailors could prevent scurvy by eating citrus fruits. ......... the explorer Sir Richard Hawkins recorded in 1622 that “sower lemons and oranges” were “most fruitful” in preventing scurvy. He added, “I wish that some learned man would write of it.” But it took until 1753 for a Dr. James Lind to publish research proving Hawkins right. ........... “it was not until 42 years later that the Admiralty first issued an order for the distribution of lemon juice to sailors.” ......... Hydrogen gas isn’t typically found near hydrocarbons. ........ Geologists now believe that hydrogen is being constantly produced from a reaction between water and iron-rich rocks. It’s essentially rusting: The rocks capture the oxygen and release hydrogen. ....... But if hydrogen is available in gaseous form in the ground, the economics suddenly work ......... One idea for making it easier to transport is to mix it with natural gas or use nitrogen to make it into ammonia. ......... “By leveraging existing know-how from the oil and gas industry, extraction of hydrocarbons from shale formations went from essentially zero in 2008 to around $150 billion by 2019 and reinvented energy geopolitics along the way.” ......... It’s just a pair of atoms, colorless, tasteless and lighter than air. .
A ‘$10 Quintillion’ Asteroid if that much metal really could be brought to Earth, there would be far more than anyone needs, and its value would crash. ........ “It’s fundamental science. We’ve never visited an asteroid with a metal surface. It’s a whole new kind of object in our solar system.” ........ Earth has way more minerals than Psyche, but we don’t go around bragging about the sextillions of dollars’ worth of minerals that lie (inaccessibly) beneath our feet.......... Psyche would cost much more to corral than that palmful considering that it’s about as wide across as the distance from Los Angeles to Tijuana, Mexico. ........ What makes diamonds expensive and water cheap, considering that diamonds aren’t necessary and water is? Because diamonds are scarce and water isn’t. Ordinarily, anyway. If you were dying of thirst in the desert you would gladly give all your diamonds for one glass of water. ........... In the beginning of the solar system, she said, dust and gas formed into planetesimals. Some planetesimals coalesced into planets, others were flung into the sun, and yet others were stranded in the asteroid belt .
The Imminent Danger of A.I. Is One We’re Not Talking About “I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism,” Chiang told me. “And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.” .......... We are so stuck on asking what the technology can do that we are missing the more important questions: How will it be used? And who will decide? ......... “Sydney” is a predictive text system built to respond to human requests. Roose wanted Sydney to get weird — “what is your shadow self like?” he asked — and Sydney knew what weird territory for an A.I. system sounds like, because human beings have written countless stories imagining it. At some point the system predicted that what Roose wanted was basically a “Black Mirror” episode, and that, it seems, is what it gave him. ........... You tell a powerful A.I. system to make more paper clips and it starts destroying the world in its effort to turn everything into a paper clip. You try to turn it off but it replicates itself on every computer system it can find because being turned off would interfere with its objective: to make more paper clips. ..........
We are talking so much about the technology of A.I. that we are largely ignoring the business models that will power it.
........ “They’re not trained to predict facts,” she told me. “They’re essentially trained to make up things that look like facts.” ........ just shoehorning the technology into what tech companies make the most money from: ads.” ......... “very persuasive and borderline manipulative.” It was a striking comment. What is advertising, at its core? It’s persuasion and manipulation. ..........
the dark secret of the digital advertising industry is that the ads mostly don’t work.
......... a Bing that has access to reams of my personal data and is coolly trying to manipulate me on behalf of whichever advertiser has paid the parent company the most money. .......... “I think we wind up very fast in a world where we just don’t know what to trust anymore” ....... Large language models, as they’re called, are built to persuade. They have been trained to convince humans that they are something close to human. They have been programmed to hold conversations ......... They are being turned into friends for the lonely and assistants for the harried. They are being pitched as capable of replacing the work of scores of writers and graphic designers and form-fillers — industries that long thought themselves immune to the ferocious automation that came for farmers and manufacturing workers. ......... the advertising-based models could gather so much more data to train the systems that they’d have an innate advantage over the subscription models, no matter how much worse their societal consequences were. ......... Much of the work of the modern state is applying the values of society to the workings of markets, so that the latter serve, to some rough extent, the former. We have done this extremely well in some markets — think of how few airplanes crash, and how free of contamination most food is — and catastrophically poorly in others. ........... wait long enough and the winners of the A.I. gold rush will have the capital and user base to resist any real attempt at regulation. ........ Most fears about capitalism are best understood as fears about our inability to regulate capitalism. .
A War With China Would Be Unlike Anything Americans Faced Before would probably cut off U.S. access to world-leading semiconductors and other critical components manufactured in Taiwan. ........ U.S. citizens have grown accustomed to sending their military off to fight far from home. But China is a different kind of foe — a military, economic and technological power capable of making a war felt in the American homeland.......... the challenges facing the United States are serious, and its citizens need to become better aware of them. ............
China would probably launch a lightning air, sea and cyber assault to seize control of key strategic targets on Taiwan within hours, before the United States and its allies could intervene. Taiwan is slightly bigger than the state of Maryland; if you recall how quickly Afghanistan and Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021, you start to realize that the takeover of Taiwan could happen relatively quickly. China also has more than 1,350 ballistic and cruise missiles poised to strike U.S. and allied forces in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and American-held territories in the Western Pacific. Then there’s the sheer difficulty the United States would face waging war thousands of miles across the Pacific against an adversary that has the world’s largest navy and Asia’s biggest air force.
........... the Chinese are prepared to wage a much broader type of warfare that would reach deep into American society. ......... a multipronged campaign to divide Americans and undermine and exhaust their will to engage in a prolonged conflict — what China’s military calls enemy disintegration. ........ China has built a formidable cyberwarfare capability designed to penetrate, manipulate and disrupt the United States and allied governments, media organizations, businesses and civil society. If war were to break out, China can be expected to use this to disrupt communications and spread fake news and other disinformation. The aim would be to foster confusion, division and distrust and hinder decision making. ......... China could also weaponize its dominance of supply chains and shipping. The impact on Americans would be profound. ......... American consumers rely on moderately priced Chinese-made imports for everything from electronics to furniture to shoes ........ U.S. supplies of many products could soon run low, paralyzing a vast range of businesses. ......... China is now the dominant global industrial power by many measures. In 2004 U.S. manufacturing output was more than twice China’s; in 2021, China’s output was double that of the United States. China produces more ships, steel and smartphones than any other country and is a world leader in the production of chemicals, metals, heavy industrial equipment and electronics — the basic building blocks of a military-industrial economy. ............
it is important for Washington to avoid provocations and maintain a civil discourse with Beijing.
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China Is Running Covert Operations That Could Seriously Overwhelm Us China has acquired global economic and diplomatic influence, enabling covert operations that extend well beyond traditional intelligence gathering, are growing in scale and threaten to overwhelm Western security agencies. ...... a “breathtaking” Chinese effort to steal technology and economic intelligence and to influence foreign politics in Beijing’s favor. The pace was quickening ............
China can best be described as an intelligence state.
The party views the business of acquiring and protecting secrets as an all-of-nation undertaking ........... and ensure that engagement with Beijing is tempered by a hardheaded sense of reality. .......... Barely visible on the world stage 30 years ago, China’s intelligence agencies are now powerful and well resourced. They are adept at exploiting the vulnerabilities of open societies and growing dependence on China’s economy to collect vast volumes of intelligence and data. Much of this takes place in the cyber domain ........... China’s consulate in Houston was closed by the Trump administration in 2020 after it served as a national hub for collecting high-tech intelligence. ......... China’s Intelligence Law, which was enacted in 2017, required its citizens to assist intelligence agencies. .......... the United Front Work Department, a party organization that seeks to co-opt well-placed members of Chinese diaspora communities ............ a British politician whose office received substantial funding from an ethnic Chinese lawyer who thereby gained access to the British political establishment. ......... One Chinese approach is to patiently cultivate relationships with politicians at the city or community level who show potential to rise to even higher office. Another is known as elite capture, in which influential Western corporate or government figures are offered lucrative sinecures or business opportunities in return for advocating policies that jibe with Chinese interests. ........... Mr. Xi has stressed the need to adopt “asymmetrical” means to catch up to the West technologically. ......... The Soviet Union lost the Cold War not because of its intelligence operations — which were good — but because of the failure of its governing ideals. ........ must ensure that strategies they employ honor the ideals of freedom, openness and lawfulness that pose the greatest threat to the Chinese party-state. .
TikTok May Be More Dangerous Than It Looks TikTok, as we know it today, is only a few years old. But its growth is like nothing we’ve seen before. In 2021, it had more active users than Twitter, more U.S. watch minutes than YouTube, more app downloads than Facebook, more site visits than Google. ........ and asked some of the students where they liked to get their news. Almost every one said TikTok. ......... Chief executives will act in accordance with party wishes or see their lives upended and their companies dismembered.......... Apps like TikTok collect data from users. That data could be valuable to foreign governments. That’s why the Army and Navy banned TikTok from soldiers’ work phones........
TikTok has been thick with videos backing the Russian narrative on the war in Ukraine.
............ 186 Russian TikTok influencers who normally post beauty tips, prank videos and fluff. ........ They’ve banned Facebook and Google and Twitter and, yes, TikTok. ByteDance has had to manage a different version of the app, known as Douyin, for Chinese audiences, one that abides by the rules of Chinese censors. ........ TikTok’s billion users don’t think they’re looking at a Chinese government propaganda operation because, for the most part, they’re not. They’re watching makeup tutorials and recipes and lip sync videos and funny dances. But that would make it all the more powerful a propaganda outlet, if deployed. And because each TikTok feed is different, we have no real way of knowing what people are seeing. It would be trivially easy to use it to shape or distort public opinion, and to do so quietly, perhaps untraceably. .
President Biden’s Succession Problem This month his doctor reported that Mr. Biden is “healthy,” “vigorous” and “fit” to carry out the duties of president. ........ what Franklin D. Roosevelt did in 1944: He expressed a preference for certain candidates but turned the choice of his running mate over to the delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. ....... People remember him when he didn’t whisper or mumble, when his gait was not that of someone concerned about tripping or falling. ........ in the last week of March 1944, “Roosevelt’s health was deteriorating so steadily that he canceled all appointments and confined himself to his bedroom.” His daughter, Anna, arranged for a checkup at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where a young cardiologist, Dr. Howard Bruenn, examined him. The doctor concluded that, if his congestive heart failure was left untreated, the president was unlikely to survive for more than a year. .........
A charismatic candidate like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might inspire the base and sweep the field.
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Indian Americans Rapidly Climbing Political Ranks The 2024 cycle reflects huge strides in representation: A decade ago, “it was inconceivable that someone named Raj Goyle — let alone Rajeev Goyle — would run for office in Wichita,” said Mr. Goyle, a former Kansas lawmaker......... In 2013, the House of Representatives had a single Indian American member. Fewer than 10 Indian Americans were serving in state legislatures. None had been elected to the Senate. None had run for president. ........... Ten years later, the Congress sworn in last month includes five Indian Americans. Nearly 50 are in state legislatures. The vice president is Indian American. Nikki Haley’s campaign announcement this month makes 2024 the third consecutive cycle in which an Indian American has run for president, and Vivek Ramaswamy’s newly announced candidacy makes it the first cycle with two........... Indian Americans, whose populations in states including Georgia, Pennsylvania and Texas are large enough to help sway local, state and federal races. ............ “There’s a natural trend, society is more accepting, and there is deliberate political strategy to make it happen.” ............ When Mr. Goyle ran for the Kansas House in 2006 as a Democrat against a Republican incumbent, he was told that the incumbent’s reaction to learning she had a challenger had been, “Who is Rod Doyle?” ........ the watershed appears to have been 2016, just after then-Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana became the first Indian American to run for president. .......... the year Representatives Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Ro Khanna of California and Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois were elected, bringing the number of Indian Americans in the House from one — Representative Ami Bera of California, elected in 2012 — to four. It was also the year Kamala Harris became the first Indian American elected to the Senate. ...........
the four House members — who call themselves the Samosa Caucus
......... Notably, the increase in Indian American representation is not centered on districts where Indian Americans are a majority. Ms. Jayapal represents a Seattle-based district that is mostly white. Mr. Thanedar represents a district in and around Detroit, a majority-Black city, and defeated eight Black candidates in a Democratic primary last year......... Immigrants from India are often highly educated and, because of the legacy of British colonization, often speak English .......... Indian Americans are more likely to engage in the American democratic system than immigrants from autocratic countries. .......... All five Indian Americans in Congress, and almost all state legislators, are Democrats. ........... “I ran as an immigrant, South Asian American woman,” Ms. Jayapal said of her first campaign. “I really ran on my story, I ran on my experience, and even though I represent a district that is largely white, I think that that story is a big part of the reason that people elected me.” ........... In general elections, it makes it harder for Republicans to tap into a base excited to promote its own representation. .
‘Saturday Night Live’ Mocks Trump’s Trip to Ohio Woody Harrelson was the host this week of an episode, which featured Jack White as musical guest........ “It’s wonderful to be here in the town of East Palestine,” Johnson said. “Not a great name. But I had to come here and see these wonderful people who have been abandoned by Biden. He’s on spring break in Ukraine with his friend Zelensky in the T-shirt, very disrespectful. Zelensky thinks he’s rocking that ringer tee like Scott Pilgrim. But I’m here and I brought hats. Cameras and hats.” .......... “Earlier today a farmer came up to me, big fella, and he said, ‘Sir, we have nothing to eat because our dirt is poisoned.’ And I said, well, what are you doing eating the dirt? Don’t eat the dirt, folks. Don’t eat the dirt. You should be eating the cold McDonald’s I brought you. And the bottled water, Trump Ice. I’ll be honest, I just put my sticker on some Dasani.” .......... “But your train exploded and who do we blame? We blame Buttigieg. Pete Buttigieg. This was his responsibility. Unfortunately he was too busy being a nerd and being gay.” .
How the $500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works Your attention is constantly being bought, packaged and sold. Tim Hwang explains how. ........ Attention is, in total, the depth of thought and consideration a society can bring to bear on itself, its problems, its opportunities — everything from how to find economic prosperity, to solving climate change, to strengthening our democracy, or for that matter, doing the reverse of any of those things. All of it depends on our capacity to pay attention, on the quality of the attention we pay, and on the condition we’re in when we pay attention. ........... Tim Hwang was director of Harvard M.I.T. Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative. He was a global public policy lead for A.I. at Google. ......... We see the banner ads. We know we’re tracked across the internet....... “Subprime Attention Crisis,” which is a really good explanation of the business model responsible for our collective attention today..........
our attention here isn’t just being bought and sold. It’s being used and changed.
.......... a very particular kind of advertising, which is known as programmatic advertising, which is the use of algorithms to buy and sell attention online. ......... The very fact that you get to use a lot of services for free on the internet is really powered by the fact that they are funded through advertising........ for both Google and Facebook, to take two examples, we’re talking about companies that have over 80 percent of their revenue coming from these advertising sources. .......... continues to shape why things are designed on the internet the way they are. ....... If you’re able to aggregate a lot of attention online, we just have this almost religious faith that there’s just some way that you’ve got to be able to turn this into money. You will become a Google. You will become a Facebook. ......... if you come to a V.C. and you say, I want to do a subscription business model, they’ll say, well, I don’t know — we don’t have a whole lot of examples of that really blowing up, so why don’t you just do advertising? .......... they were basically like, we’ll have advertising, but it’ll constitute 10 percent, 20 percent — maybe 15 percent of our revenue. Most of it’s going to come from licensing our search algorithm, which is obviously not the case. .......... newspapers, which are heavily advertising supported — not only, but heavily — magazines — heavily advertising supported............ television news, including cable news, that is heavily advertising supported. Radio is heavily advertising supported. Then you go online and you have search — advertising supported. You have social media — advertising supported. ........
the only major one that always comes to mind that is not built on advertising is books.
........ there is a norm to say, yes, a book is a thing that I will buy. And even if it’s basically just a text file, I’d be willing to pay X amount of money for it ......... It makes it really difficult for you to convince someone to pay for content because the psychological cost of content is just zero. ........ about online advertising as a different kind of phenomena.......... the system — programmatic advertising — which, in my book — and the book kind of refers to it — looks a lot more like the capital markets, like high frequency trading ......... hey, we’ve got Tim — male, 25 to 35 — on the East Coast who’s looking at this website. Who wants to advertise to him? ........... advertising as a science — that we could measure, quantify, and deliver ads in a way that would truly finally get rid of the touchy-feely aspects of the industry, and that’s the dream ......... it’s been responsible for a lot of ad dollars moving out of old media to the web, because of this promise of measurability and scalability and data. ......... I think of attention as the most important, often worst theorized, least explored thing in life. It’s everything, and then it’s very hard to get your hands around what exactly it is. ............. “The amorphous, shapeless concept of attention has been transformed into discrete comparable pieces that can be captured, priced and sold. Buyers and sellers can quickly evaluate opportunities and transact in attention at massive scale without individually evaluating each opportunity.” ..........
an absurd exercise, which is, how do we turn this thing — attention — which is just me looking at something into something that can be bought or sold.
............ We’re talking about global servers talking to one another rather than anyone having to pick up the phone or call anyone to facilitate the delivery of ads. ......... one of the premier engineering achievements of the 20th century ....... I think you say, what did Google do? People say, oh, my god, they figured out search......... And that’s half of the story of what Google did. But they also figured out the business model of online advertising to a very large degree. ........... a marketplace on a keyword-by-keyword basis — a product called AdWords. And this was the system that they set up was essentially an auction infrastructure. ......... created this waterfall of money that’s kind of supported the company to this day. ........ no search engine in their right mind should adopt advertising because once you have a third party that is paying to access eyeballs in your search engine, you have lots and lots of incentives to shape your experience to cater to the people who are really paying your bills. .......... you’ll hear the head of Netflix say, our big competitor is sleep, and Netflix has autoplay, and they are obsessed with how long you use Netflix for a month. ............
the internet is kind of like to blame for a lot of the content ills that we see on the internet.
......... I think it’s very wrong to believe that, at the core of this, ads are to blame for the outrage culture, if you will, of online discourse. ........ You have a website on the internet you can just plug into this ecosystem and start making money. You have ad dollars you want to spend — just put your coin in the slot and you go. .......... what’s the collection of texts that you encounter online and how is it connected to one another is very much shaped by ads. .......... The dream has been this sort of like laissez-faire vision of online ads. That these ad exchanges would connect ad buyers and ad sellers, and we would have a kind of transparent marketplace where finally, finally, finally, we’d be able to overcome what’s known as Wanamaker’s law. ........... Wanamaker’s law is 50 percent of the money that I spend on advertising is wasted — I just don’t know which. ........... subprime attention crisis is a bubble in the making. ........... the reality is actually like things are getting more and more dysfunctional with time, and that the central promise of this market, which is I can reach a consumer and get them to buy my product, is not really ultimately playing out. ......... 56 percent of display advertising — so the kind of ads that you see on places like Facebook — may actually never see a real person, that it’s lost to fraud. ............. $1 out of every $3 is lost to fraud online. ........ 41 percent of ad campaigns don’t actually reach the person because the ad data is all inaccurate. So you think you’re reaching male, 25 to 35. Turns out, it’s female 75 to 95 that’s living somewhere completely different from where you thought. ......... even if the ad is delivered, 56 percent of ads are just never seen ........... They’re below the fold, they’re in some weird corner of the site. You’re just not looking at it because you’re reading the article. .......... this ecosystem funds almost everything that we know about — the web. ........ It subsidizes the fact that we can access a lot of services for free online. It funds journalism and media. .......... if you think about the entire wave of advancements in A.I., those are being done by companies that can only subsidize those at a huge, huge loss because they make money through advertising. So there’s also this relationship between the health of this ecosystem and the advancement in science and technology. ............... well, if it turns out the advertising isn’t working, then a lot of the economic underpinning of the web all of a sudden blows up. ............ there’s an old Keynesian insight about financial crises, which is that what is weird about them and the damage they inflict is that nothing has happened to the factories, nothing has gone wrong with the people, nothing has been lost in our knowledge of how to do work. ................ Unlike in the subprime mortgage crisis where all the houses were basically fine — you could inhabit them — I worry that our collective attention is being degraded by the way the web has evolved. And every individual player has an individual incentive to grab more and more attention. It’s highly competitive. They’re all competing with each other for our attention. .............. this tragedy of the commons dynamic, where everybody is basically exhausting our attention, making us irritable and angry at each other and unable to focus. ................ the first banner advertisement that ended up on the web.... It was this AT&T campaign that was running on, I think, WIRED.com’s website. And the clickthrough rates there in 1994 were 44 percent, which is wild ............... the stats that we have today from banner advertising, it’s more like 0.1 percent. You’re thrilled if you get anywhere near 1 percent clickthrough. ........... how much are people actually paying attention to the ad, is declining, declining, declining .......... the core underlying asset, which is attention, has become so degraded with time that this channel is becoming useless. .......... the internet is just going through the same thing that all other media channels have had, which is that it fills with terrible advertising, and then people are attracted to the high value attention channel, and they move on. And maybe that’s happening with the internet as a whole. ............ People don’t like the way the modern internet feels, they don’t like the ads on it. To some degree, they just don’t even like what they’re doing on it.........
8 percent of the population is responsible for 85 percent of the clicks online.
.......... We’re not going to see a Twitter competitor just because people just don’t want that experience anymore. .......... a shift to more mixed business models. ......... a lot more experimentation with subscription. ........... You think of Netflix, or Disney+, or H.B.O. Max — those are not advertising-based businesses. ......... The New York Times itself, which has built a huge subscription business online — .......... OpenAI has a lot of investment from Microsoft, which obviously sells a lot of software. ........... what the kind of A.I. we’re creating is good at is just creating endless quantities of personalized manipulated content and figuring out what people want from that content. ......... One thing that worries me is actually a world in which A.I. is used to make online advertising much, much, much more effective, and personalized, and omnipresent, and creepy ......... rather than putting your search query into a box and getting 10 links, what you now have is a single voice that synthesizes the information and then offers an opinion ........... the quality is getting to the point where, do you need these creative agencies, do you need the whole kind of, again, infrastructure of marketing to produce ads that have that vibe that we spent a lot of money on it and it’s brand advertising? And I think that is something that will definitely change in the next few years......... a lot of what I get now is unintentionally hilarious. Like, I go, I buy a bicycle, and then for two months, everybody is like, you want to buy a bicycle? How do you feel about bicycles? ....... what they are able to do now, I think, is quite amazing, and it’ll be better in a year, and that much better in two years, and that much better in five years. .......... this company Bechtel, which is one of the big companies that helped build the Hoover Dam, and basically became the mega infrastructure builders of the 20th century. It’s completely fascinating — explains much of the west, explains nuclear power. The company is in everything, and so it’s a totally fascinating story. .
Sam Altman on the A.I. Revolution, Trillionaires and the Future of Political Power Will A.I. give us the lives of leisure we long for — or usher in a feudal dystopia? It depends. ........ “Moore’s Law for Everything,” is Altman’s effort to try and imagine the political consequences of true artificial intelligence and the policies that could decide whether it ushers in utopia or dystopia. .......... computer power has been growing exponentially for decades now. But prices have actually been falling .........
true A.I. could get us closer to Moore’s law for everything. It can make everything better, even as it makes everything cheaper.
........... A.I. will create phenomenal wealth, but it will do so by driving the price of a lot of labor to basically zero. That is how everything gets cheaper. It’s also how a lot of people lose their jobs. ........... A.I., it’s not just going to redistribute wealth and jobs, it’s going to redistribute power. .
Moore's Law for Everything My work at OpenAI reminds me every day about the magnitude of the socioeconomic change that is coming sooner than most people believe. Software that can think and learn will do more and more of the work that people now do. Even more power will shift from labor to capital. If public policy doesn’t adapt accordingly, most people will end up worse off than they are today. ........... We need to design a system that embraces this technological future and taxes the assets that will make up most of the value in that world–companies and land–in order to fairly distribute some of the coming wealth. Doing so can make the society of the future much less divisive and enable everyone to participate in its gains. .......... In the next five years, computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice. ........... This revolution will create phenomenal wealth. .......... The world will change so rapidly and drastically that an equally drastic change in policy will be needed to distribute this wealth and enable more people to pursue the life they want. ......... If we get both of these right, we can improve the standard of living for people more than we ever have before. .......... it must be designed for the radically different society of the near future. Policy plans that don’t account for this imminent transformation will fail for the same reason that the organizing principles of pre-agrarian or feudal societies would fail today. ......... Compare how the world looked 15 years ago (no smartphones, really), 150 years ago (no combustion engine, no home electricity), 1,500 years ago (no industrial machines), and 15,000 years ago (no agriculture). ......... To the three great technological revolutions–the agricultural, the industrial, and the computational–we will add a fourth: the AI revolution. This revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to have what they need, if we as a society manage it responsibly............ The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we’ve made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel. ........ there are two paths to affording a good life: an individual acquires more money (which makes that person wealthier), or prices fall (which makes everyone wealthier). .......... The best way to increase societal wealth is to decrease the cost of goods, from food to video games. ........ In the last couple of decades, costs in the US for TVs, computers, and entertainment have dropped. But other costs have risen significantly, most notably those for housing, healthcare, and higher education. Redistribution of wealth alone won’t work if these costs continue to soar. ............ AI will lower the cost of goods and services, because labor is the driving cost at many levels of the supply chain. If robots can build a house on land you already own from natural resources mined and refined onsite, using solar power, the cost of building that house is close to the cost to rent the robots. And if those robots are made by other robots, the cost to rent them will be much less than it was when humans made them. ............. AI doctors that can diagnose health problems better than any human, and AI teachers that can diagnose and explain exactly what a student doesn’t understand............
Imagine a world where, for decades, everything–housing, education, food, clothing, etc.–became half as expensive every two years.
. ......... Economic inclusivity matters because it’s fair, produces a stable society, and can create the largest slices of pie for the most people. As a side benefit, it produces more growth. ......... the price of progress in capitalism is inequality........... a society that does not offer sufficient equality of opportunity for everyone to advance is not a society that will last. ........... As AI produces most of the world’s basic goods and services, people will be freed up to spend more time with people they care about, care for people, appreciate art and nature, or work toward social good. ......... We should therefore focus on taxing capital rather than labor, and we should use these taxes as an opportunity to directly distribute ownership and wealth to citizens. In other words, the best way to improve capitalism is to enable everyone to benefit from it directly as an equity owner. .......... the American Equity Fund. The American Equity Fund would be capitalized by taxing companies above a certain valuation 2.5% of their market value each year, payable in shares transferred to the fund, and by taxing 2.5% of the value of all privately-held land, payable in dollars. ............. The value of land appreciates because of the work society does around it: the network effects of the companies operating around a piece of land, the public transportation that makes it accessible, and the nearby restaurants, coffeeshops, and access to nature that makes it desirable. Because the landowner didn’t do all that work, it’s fair for that value to be shared with the larger society that did. ................. There is about $50 trillion worth of value, as measured by market capitalization, in US companies alone. Assume that, as it has on average over the past century, this will at least double over the next decade. ........... There is also about $30 trillion worth of privately-held land in the US .......... a decade from now each of the 250 million adults in America would get about $13,500 every year. That dividend could be much higher if AI accelerates growth, but even if it’s not, $13,500 will have much greater purchasing power than it does now because technology will have greatly reduced the cost of goods and services. And that effective purchasing power will go up dramatically every year. .............. we need technology to create more wealth, and policy to fairly distribute it. .......... In the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt was able to enact a huge social safety net that no one would have thought possible five years earlier. We are in a similar moment now. So a movement that is both pro-business and pro-people will unite a remarkably broad constituency. ........... Achieving 50% GDP growth sounds like it would take a long time (it took 13 years for the economy to grow 50% to its 2019 level). But once AI starts to arrive, growth will be extremely rapid. ..........
