Author: A.T.

This Ezra Klein interview about artificial intelligence is a must-listen.

Is there a 10% chance A.I. will destroy humanity?

If so, should we take it?  (No.)

If not, how can we stop or slow A.I.’s development?  (We can’t.)

So what do we do?

Mankind is going to need some really thoughtful leaders in tech and government to give this story a happy ending.

Judging from his Easter message . . .

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HAPPY EASTER TO ALL, INCLUDING THOSE THAT DREAM ENDLESSLY OF DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY BECAUSE THEY ARE INCAPABLE OF DREAMING ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE, THOSE THAT ARE SO INCOMPETENT THEY DON’T REALIZE THAT HAVING A BORDER AND POWERFUL WALL IS A GOOD THING, & HAVING VOTER I.D., ALL PAPER BALLOTS, & SAME DAY VOTING WILL QUICKLY END MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD, & TO ALL OF THOSE WEAK & PATHETIC RINOS, RADICAL LEFT DEMOCRATS, SOCIALISTS MARXISTS, & COMMUNISTS WHO ARE KILLING OUR NATION, REMEMBER, WE WILL BE BACK!

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. . . Trump is not one of them.

Over the weekend I happened on a 2021 movie I had totally missed — Free Guy — that’s all about A.I.

It’s great.  A kind of Her-meets-Groundhog Day.

Growing up, I didn’t have an imaginary friend (I had a collie and a stamp collection), but lots of kids apparently do.  Soon, it may not be just kids.  For better or worse (I think both), lots of us may have imaginary friends.  And lovers.

Technology’s clock ticks faster and faster.

Hang on.

Listen to Ezra Klein, enjoy Free Guy, and have a great week.

Some of you ask me that from time to time.

A large chunk of it I entrust to Chris Brown’s Kentucky-based Aristides Capital (minimum investment: $500,000).

Like all hedge funds, his is open only to “accredited investors.”  Unlike many, his truly is hedged.  Which means he may do worse than some when the market soars, but less badly, if badly at all, when it falls.

He has yet to have a losing year.

His monthly investor letters are lively, informative, and — ordinarily — all about how the fund’s various holdings and strategies performed.  (Aristides was down 1.57% in February and a further .62% in March but remains slightly up for the year.  From inception in 2008, it has compounded my IRA at 15.87% annually, net of fees.)

This month’s letter added “some broader things” that I got Chris’s permission to share.

To wit:

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Last week, Kentucky lawmakers overrode Governor Beshear’s first and only veto, passing what the ACLU calls the “Worst Anti-Trans Bill in the Nation,” Senate Bill 150, into law. The bill combines: (1) a “Don’t Say Gay” law (specifying that no student, not even in high school or during sex ed instruction, shall receive any instruction that relates to sexual orientations or gender identities); (2) provisions opposing federal Title IX protections (the new law prohibits any local school district from making a policy that transgender students should be referred to by their preferred names/pronouns, and also includes a “bathroom bill,” mandating that transgender students may not use the restrooms or locker rooms that correspond with their gender identity); and (3) a trans health care ban, which bans physicians from providing gender-affirming health care to trans & non-binary adolescents, including any of a broad range of standard medical therapies supported by the American Medical Association and the American Association of Pediatrics.

This is stunningly cruel legislation, which essentially says to a very vulnerable group of kids, “We don’t want you to exist, we don’t believe that your lives are valid, and we are going to do everything possible to make your lives worse.” Kentucky voters were recently polled as to whether they support a ban trans-affirming health care for youth, and by overwhelming margins, they do not. But radicals in the legislature, largely from districts where they could never lose a general election, ignored common sense, the Golden Rule, and the will of the people.

One of the bill’s original sponsors, Republican Sen. Danny Carroll of Benton, proposed an amendment to soften the bill’s language, but to no avail. He was the sole Republican no vote in the Senate. “In the midst of all this, my fear, my no vote, is for those kids that are being left out. Those kids that may be contemplating suicide, may need to delay puberty. That can have a huge impact on them,” Carroll said. “We’re not doctors, with the exception of a couple of us, we’re not doctors. I trust them to make the right decisions when they’re dealing with those kids…”

In the Kentucky House of Representatives, four Republicans voted against the bill. Rep. Kimberly Moser (R), who represents part of two counties near Cincinnati, said during House debate, “I’d like to say to the rest of the world who’s watching Kentucky: We are not complete Neanderthals.” She was kicked off of her committee assignment by House Republican leadership.

Rep. Kim Banta, another northern Kentucky Republican, co-authored an editorial before the vote, which read in part: “We have seen the painful struggle of students who were perceived as different, and we have made extra efforts to be more accepting so that their school day is less miserable. Schools should be safe, happy places — not judgment zones where marginalized kids feel unsafe — or the consequences could be tragic. It’s time to spray a fire hose on the hostile teacher rhetoric and consider the broader consequences, including teachers leaving the profession (adding to the teacher shortage), college students averse to entering the profession, and companies doing business elsewhere. Let your legislator know you’d like them to focus on more pressing issues, like homelessness, addiction, family-care leave, and infant and maternal mortality, among other things.”

Banta explained her “no” vote this way: “I felt like we were singling out a very fragile group who already struggle for acceptance and belonging, and I just honestly, I said, ‘this is mean, and I can’t do this.’”

My gosh is Banta is right about business. Twenty-percent of young adults born between 1997 and 2003 now identify as LGBTQ. If you are the parent of a trans or non-binary kid, or really any queer kid, do you want to be in Kentucky right now? My second-born is non-binary; fortunately they are already a happily grown adult but there’s no way I’d want them to have to fight hateful garbage from adults (!!!) at school. A radical legislature unaligned with the people of our state is hurting business in other ways, too. If you’re a woman of reproductive age, do you want to live in a state that bans abortion, even in the case of rape or incest? Or a state that might force you to carry a non-viable fetus around for weeks? Surveys of high-earning women show that these issues matter to the vast majority of them. Kentucky, you are not making it easier for us to compete with New York and San Francisco for the next analyst we are trying to hire.

Highly-Gerrymandered legislatures are a disaster. Whether on the Right, or the Left, they are not “sending their best people” to begin with, and then those people are generally unconstrained by the next general election, and need only win a primary. Michigan went through a non-partisan redistricting process a few years ago, and the results are pretty good. Sure, there are still a few wackos, but if you listen to an episode of Stateside, the Michigan Public Radio show about politics, you’ll frequently hear Republicans and Democrats discussing legislative priorities with one another, in a respectful way, and working to actually accomplish what is feasible. It feels like being on another planet compared to Kentucky, or Ohio where 9-figure corruption scandals have become frequent and normalized, and you know there’s a decent chance the next law will be something only 20 or 30% of the people of your state support.

Kentucky, and our nation, have real challenges that demand real solutions. A grim report from the Financial Times shows American life expectancy has fallen such that it is not only years worse than other developed nations, but now worse than Lebanon (ranked 150th in the global corruption rankings!), and somehow even worse than communist Cuba.

Nor is it only less wealthy folks who are dying early here. Shockingly, for folks making the same amount of income in the US or England, Americans are dying on average five years earlier.

How? Our rates of premature death are higher than peer countries throughout childhood, but from age 17 to 45, the relative risk of death is dramatically higher than our peers, literally 4-fold higher at age 30.

The late political scientist Robert Lane’s The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies attempts to explain why becoming wealthier has not made places like the United States happier in recent decades. It’s a good book, with a lot of academic literature, well presented, and the conclusion is basically this: once your basic needs are met, happiness largely comes from a rich family life and connections with other people (i.e. friends and your community).

Meanwhile, according to a recent WSJ/National Opinion Research Center poll published last month, only 27 percent of Americans say “Community involvement” is a value they personally consider “very important,” down from previous readings of 47 to 62% over the last two decades. Community involvement is not valued by members of either political party (32% of Dems, 23% of Independents, and 25% of Republicans rate it as “very important”).

Happiness, or, conversely, high levels of chronic and repeated acute stress, have a huge impact on our mortality. Public health is supposed to be more than tracking Covid disease cases, or encouraging people to get vaccinated. It is the role of public health to promote healthy lifestyles, help prevent disease, protect people from environmental hazards, and ensure access to quality care. We don’t have that. We have a fake food pyramid, a smorgasbord of high-sugar, calorie dense foods, rampant gun violence, a raging drug epidemic among young adults largely isolated from meaningful connection (and a readily-available supply of lethal, fentanyl- and Tranq-adulterated, drugs), a carceral system that destroys families and re-traumatizes people rather than making them less likely to commit more crimes, health care that is unaffordable for many, and few shared public opportunities for participating in exercise, sports & leisure. Free markets are great for many things, but free markets alone cannot fix the alienation of modern life; the profits from many of these problems fall to a relatively select group of companies, whereas the burdens fall on all of us as a society.

I am an inherently optimistic person, mainly for the reason that it’s functional. No matter how challenging a situation is, if you believe it’s fixable, you’re likely to function better than if you lose hope. But, at a certain point, if we are to thrive as a nation, we need to collectively understand that happiness is not a fixed pie, nor does happiness come from making other people unhappy. As Kennedy famously noted, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” We desperately need to focus on lifting all the boats.

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→ Amen to that.  And thanks for septupling my IRA.

I’ve never met Ben Platt.  I do know the wonderful Judith Light.  Harold Arlen lived next door.  I was recently bar mitzvah-ed but haven’t been to a seder in 50 years.  I am a terrible Jew.

I found this really moving. (Six minutes.)

In America, there should be a place for all of us.*

In my view, the good people of Waukesha, Wisconsin shouldn’t be banning rainbow-titled songs but, rather, learning the words.

(Too preachy?  I am an accredited Internet minister.  I have performed two legal weddings.)

Happy Passover, Good Friday, Blessed Ramadan — or none-of-the-above.

*Very much including the able-bodied straight white Christian males who feel under attack for — through no fault of their own! — not having had to face the challenges others have and do.

The big news yesterday (other than the Trump thing and our big win in Wisconsin) was that CHRA, suggested here last week at $3, is being delisted from the New York Stock Exhange.  It will henceforth be listed in the Pink Sheets under the same symbol.

I bought more.

Closing at $1.55, and with 3.37 million shares outstanding, the whole company was valued at $5 million.  Which is deceptive, because it also has $135 million in debt coming due in three years.  But less than a year ago the stock was as high as $50, and I like to think they may right the ship.  “With over 30 years of experience, Charah Solutions is a leading provider of mission-critical environmental services and byproduct recycling to the power generation industry.” 

Only with money you can truly afford to lose!

APE, suggested here four months ago at $1.05, jumping to $2.56 a few weeks later (where I like to think you may have sold half), closed yesterday at $1.68, up 20 cents on news that the convergence of AMC and APE shares is moving forward.  AMC fell 23% to $3.93, but still sold at a ridiculous premium to its twin.  (Imagine two identical ham sandwiches with lettuce and mustard.  If one is $1.68, why would the other be $3.93?)

I’m likely going to hold on until the two literally become one, at which point AMC will trade simply on the basis of what the market thinks the business is worth.  I have no idea what that will be in the short term, let alone the long term.

Standard valuation is based on assets-less-liabilities and on future earning power.  Might AMC command a “glamour” premium — the way sports teams do (the Dallas Cowboys alone are reportedly worth $5.7 billion) — just because it could be kind of cool to say you own the world’s largest theater chain and get a shout out at the Oscars?

I don’t know.

Only with money you can truly afford to lose!

You know how walking, healthy eating, low stress, and plenty of sleep are good for almost . . . anything?  That’s not voodoo or quack science, it’s just true.

Well, it seems that doing BrainHQ exercises — even if the company has yet to find a way to make them as much fun as crossword puzzles (which have no proven positive effects on your health) — also helps with almost everything.  From reduced likelihood of developing dementia (the big one!) to fewer falls and broken hips, fewer and less severe auto accidents, relieved tinnitus, PTSD, depression, and more.  Here’s a summary of 70 studies from last year alone.

As long-time readers know, I own a tiny sliver of this company, so when you sign up for free daily exercises, I smile; and when you upgrade to a paid subscription for full access, I go wild.

Younger readers:  the perfect gift for Mother’s Day or Father’s Day.  Plan ahead!

Whatever today’s charges turn out to be, I have two questi0ns:

If the Stormy Daniels expose had NOT been hushed up two weeks before the 2016 election, with early voting already underway, might Trump have gotten 77,745 fewer votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin?

That’s my first question.

I ask, because, as you know, all it would have taken for Hillary to win the Electoral College was for 38,723 Trump voters to have flipped blue.  Not a lot out of nearly 14 million votes cast in those three states.

Or, if no votes would have flipped, then all that would have been needed was for fewer than 1% of the Trump voters in those states simply to have stayed home.

Some may think the Stormy Daniels story wouldn’t have affected the outcome, but I’ll tell you someone who thought it was worth $130,000 not to take that chance.  (More than that, really, because to make Michael Cohen whole, after taxes, Trump apparently paid about twice as much — and he is not a man who parts with money easily.)

So as trivial as the porn star pay-off seems to Jim Jordan, et al, it’s not crazy to think that without it, Hillary would have been president and our third branch of government solidly progressive instead of right-wing.

So is Trump innocent of whatever he’s charged with today unless proven guilty?  For sure.

But is it outrageous for a grand jury to think he should not be above the law?  And for objective observers to think that paying off Stormy Daniels may have changed the course of human history?

I don’t think so.

And here’s the second question I’d put to those Republicans who think today’s indictment is an “outrageous abuse of prosecutorial discretion”:

Was it an outrageous abuse of prosecutorial discretion for Trump’s Justice Department to indict and imprison Trump’s co-conspirator?

WOKE IS BROKE:  With some of my fellow Stanford Law students, there’s no room for argument.  

So well said.

Pass it on.

Democrats and sane Republicans mourn the passing of the once-Grand Old Party . . . a party that is now in full-throated support of its indicted leader and incensed that public urination might be demoted from a criminal to a civil offense.

Read that piece if you’re curious; but today I want to talk about Uganda.

Nine years ago we learned how Uganda was Seduced by conservative American Evangelicals into making homosexuality punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

Last week the Ugandan parliament voted overwhelmingly to crack down further, with life sentences and the death penalty.

And we learned How U.S. Evangelicals Helped Homophobia Flourish in Africa,

You don’t need to read those to get the idea.  (Likewise: US Christian Right pours more than $50m into Africa.)

What I’d rather focus on is what the Pope told the Associated Press two months ago:

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We are all God’s children.

And God loves us as we are.

Being homosexual is not a crime.

It’s a sin.

But it is also a sin to lack charity with one another.

Let’s distinguish sin from crime.

Every man and woman must have a window in their life

where they can turn their hope and where they can see the dignity of God.

And being homosexual isn’t a crime.

It’s a human condition.

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Not to mention what Jesus himself said about homosexuality!

(If you don’t know, it’s worth 30 seconds to watch.)

And it should be noted that Pope Francis later clarified his remarks to the AP:

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When I said it is a sin, I was simply referring to Catholic moral teaching, which says that EVERY sexual act outside of marriage is a sin.

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Gay and straight alike.

Oops.

As for Wisconsin, this headline caught my eye:

Wisconsin School District Bans Miley Cyrus-Dolly Parton Duet with ‘Rainbow’ in Title.  

I mean, c’mon, guys.

We’re not realistically going to send all the immigrants — and descendants of immigrants, millions of whose ancestors “immigrated” involuntarily — “back to where they came from.”

Or non-straight folks back into the closet.

We’re just not.

And most of us, white, black, or brown, liberal, independent or conservative, straight, gay, or trans, urban, suburban, or rural — very much including most Trump voters — are good decent people once you get to know us.  We are!  And we share lots of common ground.

That was true of the Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda, who got along fine for decades until it went catastrophically wrong.  It was true of gentile and Jewish Berliners before the forces of darkness took hold.  (Have you seen Leopoldstadt?)

Among the forces of darkness working to stoke our divisions:

> Putin.

> White separatists.

> The profit motive.  Conflict sells.  And as Fox executives made clear, telling the truth would have been “bad for business.”

> Religion, the source of so much bloodshed over the centuries.

We need to make room for moderation, compromise, and common ground.

One three-part key to doing that:

> “Open primaries” (as in California), where candidates can’t win appealing only to the extremes.

> “Ranked choice voting” (as in Alaska and Maine), which also makes room for moderates to win.

> Easy voting by mail (Oregon and Utah, among others), so that most people vote in the primaries, not just the highly motivated extremes.

Rainbows are beautiful!

And so is religion, when not taken literally.  Which brings us back to Uganda.

As the simple Ugandan woman says near the end of “The Book of Mormon,” the most profane, blasphemous, irreverent show ever . . . thereby redeeming the entire show and bringing sense not just to Mormonism but to all religions . . . marveling that the young missionaries have lost their faith in the preposterous stories they’ve been told (everyone gets his own planet?) . . . religion is not to be taken literally — “Eet eez a MET-a-phor!”

(As I’ve written before, could someone please get this word to the Islamic fundamentalists?  Or at least to those who believe God calls them to murder?)

(Here’s the banned Rainbow song, by the way.)

Have a great week!

Following up on my earlier post, in which I suggested that — just as the Trump Justice Department believed there was a case against Michael Cohen and “Individual 1” that led to Cohen’s indictment, conviction, and imprisonment — so is it not unreasonable for a grand jury to decide (given the uniquely American concept of “equal treatment under the law”) that there may be a case against Individual 1, too . . .  and that the legal process should take its course as it did for Cohen.

Here is the Republican point of view of that perspective — worth 90 seconds of your time.

For those of us who’ve listened to the “Georgia” conversation . . . or followed the events of January 6, 2021 . . . or think it’s illegal to lie about top secret documents you claim not to have and refuse to return . . . there is the hope that at least three more indictments will be forthcoming . . . in each case, offering defendant Trump the same opportunity all the rest of us have to remain innocent until proven guilty.*

*Realistically, given the millions he raises to fund his defense, he has a far better opportunity than most indicted Americans have.  As, for example, these five impoverished young men who spent between 6 and 13 years behind bars before proven innocent . . . and for whose death by electrocution Trump loudly advocated in citywide newspaper ads.

Hurray for Finland joining NATO!  With Sweden not far behind.  Great news for the free world.

Hurray for inflation’s continuing ebb!  Could full employment and the Fed’s 2% target inflation rate be in our future?

Hurray for the rule of law!  As, for example, when the Trump Justice Department sent Michael Cohen to prison for a crime committed at the behest of co-conspirator “Individual 1” (who could not be indicted while in office but is out of office now).

How can Trump and the overwhelming majority of Republican electeds who fear him be outraged that a grand jury, after much deliberation, decided a trial should be held for the co-conspirator?  If he’s innocent, so be it!  If he’s guilty, and that’s affirmed by all the inevitable appeals, so be that, too!

How is it that Michael Cohen was handcuffed and shackled at his arraignment (though he never resisted or called the prosecutor an animal), but Lindsey Graham is beyond aflutter that his co-conspirator will be finger-printed?

How has the rule of law — something fundamental to American democracy — become something only one of the two political parties still accepts?

UPDATES

BOREF plunged when someone apparently put in to sell 7,000 shares “at the market.”  According to one of you with access to this kind of data, the first 1,300 shares got filled at $4.75; the remaining 5,700 at $2.27.  Maybe a long-time BOREF holder passed away and his executor, not realizing how thinly it trades, neglected to put it in as a “limit” order.

Whether at a $10 million valuation ($2 a share) or a $25 million valuation ($5), BOREF will either eventually go to zero or — if WheelTug gets certified and begins flying — to many times its current valuation.

The company, in May, announced “rapid progress.”

But that was May, 2010.

“Rapid” may not have been the word they were searching for.

Still (witness last month’s news as an example), the game’s not over.  And remains a total gamble.

CHRA, meanwhile, suggested just a couple of days ago (versus BOREF, 23 years ago), is trading as though it’s going out of business.  As I suppose it may. Its market cap is now around $10 million also (though unlike BOREF it’s burdened with $135 million in long-term debt plus a further $65 million or so in less pressing convertible debt).

What gives me heart is this link, showing that CHRA “insiders” did a lot more buying than selling this past year.

Also the fact that it’s one of just a few players in a large market; with around $300 million in sales that might again turn profitable once they straighten themselves out.

Down from $50 a year ago to just above $2 now, it may be that some of the last few days’ selling was just some fund manager dumping a couple of hundred thousand shares, regardless of price, to get an embarrassing loser off his list of holdings by quarter’s end (which was yesterday).

We’ll see.  Only with money we can truly afford to lose.

Have a great weekend.

From a 2007 post: 

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I always thought I would miss immortality by about 50 years – which really pissed me off. I know, lots of people say they wouldn’t WANT to live forever, but I sure would, if only because it will take that long to successfully cancel my Norton Anti-Virus subscription.

It’s just immensely frustrating to think that after a 13 billion-year evolutionary run-up, all leading to this, I would miss it by, like, 15 minutes.

. . .

Well, now comes great, life-changing news.

. . .

[I]n about 15 years, we will have advanced to the point that adult life expectancy is increasing by more than one full year per year. So your life expectancy at that point would begin to increase. And your physical and mental capabilities may actually begin to improve.

I like this idea very much.

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Fifteen years later, I have managed to cancel my Norton subscription.

And gotten my first iPhone.  (And my second and fourteenth.)

We’ve begun finally to revitalize our infrastructure, passed the Chips Act, expanded access to affordable health care, reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, secured marriage equality, twice elected a black president — and look!

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Humans will achieve immortality in eight YEARS, says former Google engineer who has predicted the future with 86% accuracy . . .

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It’s stunning.

As are these unbelievable never-before-seen photos of the 2001 Great Cascadia Earthquake.

Hey, humans: it’s all kinda coming to a head over the next decade or two.

Let’s try to love each other and not hurtle off the rails.

Bottom fishers (0nly with money you can truly afford to lose!): VRNX, CHRA, OPRT.

Five bad guys:

KORESH: I watched Waco: American Apocalypse.  No question, the idiot who ordered the raid AFTER they’d lost the element of surprise was an idiot.  And it may be that David Koresh genuinely believed he was the second coming of  Christ and that it was thus okay to have 11 wives and boxes of hand grenades (illegal since 1968).  A nice guy, just deluded.  But however much better, with hindsight, the government might have handled Waco, it strikes me as hard to see Koresh as a hero.  Or sane.  Or benign.

Yet that’s how the Oklahoma City bomber saw him.

McVEIGH: Until watching the film, I had not realized that Timothy McVeigh had driven to Waco to show his support for Koresh.  Two years later, he would go on to murder 168 people, 19 of them children, out of rage against the United States government.

TRUMP‘s choice of Waco for last Saturday’s rally — during which he celebrated the January 6th rioters who tried violently to return him to power — was one more sign that, like Koresh and McVeigh, he is not a stable, law-abiding, patriotic American.  His affinity for autocrats, his love of violence (bone spur notwithstanding), and his admiration for Putin suggest a contempt for democracy . . . that a horrifying number of Republican officials, who still support him, seem to share.

PUTIN:  Drunk with his own power — he alone can fix it — this massive murderer, rumored to be the richest man in the world, surely now ranks as one of the worst humans ever to have lived.  Putin’s Former Publicity Masterminds Air His Dirty Laundry.

NETANYAHU: And then there’s Bibi, who, like Putin, apparently put his thumb on 2016’s scale; and who, like Trump and Putin, does not want his power limited by an independent judiciary that might send him to jail.  Netanyahu Cannot Be Trusted, writes Thomas Friedman. 

Whatever happened to people drawing comfort and inspiration from religion without a million rounds of ammunition?

Whatever happened to patriots supporting their government and abiding by its laws . . . trying to change the ones they don’t like by raising their voices and casting their votes?

Gore’s concession to Bush, and the Clinton hand-off of power, were exemplary (even though Gore got more votes and likely won Florida, had the votes been counted fairly).

Hillary’s concession to Trump and the Obama hand-off of power were exemplary (even though Hillary got 7 million more votes and had had to face outrageous thumbs on the scale).

Trump’s hand-off of power to Biden?

Not so much.