Today's Water Cooler 2026-05-22

Birdsong of the Day

Moar mimidae:

Avon Park AFR (Survey Point B9), Polk, Florida, United States. With a Northern Bobwhite (Eastern), a Red-headed Woodpecker, a Mourning Dove, and and American Crow.

In Case You Might Miss…

(1) “Google Search’s I/O 2026 updates: AI agents and more”

(2) “Ebola outbreak: the data that show why researchers are so alarmed”

(3) “ ‘The report’s so stupid’: The DNC 2024 autopsy is roiling Democrats”

(4) “Long-Distance Movements of Feral Hogs Are Coming From These Key States

Politics

Trump Administration

“Government agencies are getting dragged down by ‘data gravity.’ Here’s how they’ll break free.” [Federal News Network]. “n the mid-1990s, when NASA computer scientists began using the phrase ‘Big Data,’ they were describing files large enough to overwhelm standard computing systems. At the time, a few gigabytes could easily strain storage, memory and processing. Today, the challenge is fundamentally different: Where a few gigabytes could once cripple a 1990s workstation, organizations now face continuously growing datasets — enough to fill millions of libraries each day — that must be processed and acted on in near real time. Our existing infrastructure was never designed to operate at this scale. The result is a widening gap between the data organizations collect and the intelligence they can operationalize — particularly in environments where leaders are trying to run artificial intelligence on top of architectures built for a completely different era of computing…. Organizations are drowning in signals but struggling to extract meaningful intelligence from them. This is the phenomenon we commonly refer to as ‘data gravity.’” • Nice metaphor, but I can’t help but think we could toss all the surveillance data and focus on, say, life expectancy, and save a bundle on storage besides preserving the Republic.

“I don’t think there is an option but for the human to get out of the loop. Otherwise your human will always be your limiting factor.”

“DOT considers taking humans out of the AI loop” [FedScoop]. “The Department of Transportation is considering whether workers always need to be in the loop for AI workflows, according to one of the agency’s top technology leaders. Having a human in the loop — which means having a team member control whether an AI tool starts or stops an action — is a risk management strategy present across the federal government. But as AI agents creep closer to agencies’ tech stacks, the prevalence of the practice may lessen. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, for example, handles about 500,000 inspections a year, according to Ankur Saini, chief product and technology officer for several DOT units, including FMCSA. With around 7 million drivers, the agency predicts many fraudulent carriers are escaping the check-in. AI agents offer a path to speed up the inspection process and reduce oversight gaps by initiating documentation requests from a motor carrier and taking over other low-risk tasks. ‘For these transformative use cases, I don’t think there is an option but for the human to get out of the loop,’ Saini said last week during ACT-IAC’s Emerging Technology & Innovation Conference in Arlington, Va. ‘Otherwise your human will always be your limiting factor.’ • Here we come, IRS and Social Security!

Election 2026

AOC sees opportunity in data centers:

This is what drinking water in Georgia looks like after Meta began data center construction in the community.

Today I called for EPA and Congressional investigations into the impact of data center construction on local drinking water supplies.

We cannot take water for granted. pic.twitter.com/jQlaJ0TXFV

— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@RepAOC) May 21, 2026

Democrats en Déshabillé

“D.N.C. 2024 Election Autopsy Reopens Wounds of Harris Loss” [New York Times]. “The document itself was widely mocked. Atop each page was a bright red disclaimer that the D.N.C. ‘was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein.’ A page with the title ‘Executive Summary’ was blank except for a note in red reading: ‘This section was not provided by author.’ Particular facts included in the version that the committee released were highlighted in yellow and annotated as either unverified and inaccurate. There was no list of who was interviewed, no transcriptions and no notes, which made determining the veracity of the draft all but impossible, said a person familiar with the process.” They can’t even manage to common and release a fake document? What’s wrong with these people? And: “Many Democrats were alarmed at the poor financial state of the party. On Wednesday, the D.N.C.’s latest financial report showed it had $3 million more in debts than cash on hand. The Republican National Committee, in contrast, had $123.9 million on hand and no debts.” Leaving dark money out of the question, of course. But still. And: “Mr. Martin had entrusted a longtime ally, Paul Rivera, to oversee the autopsy, but Mr. Rivera’s final product ‘wasn’t ready for prime time. Not even close,’ Mr. Martin wrote in a Substack post on Thursday.” • Martin’s own hand-picked ally and coroner?! From page one:

“ ‘The report’s so stupid’: The DNC 2024 autopsy is roiling Democrats” [Politico]. “Martin released a lengthy statement apologizing for how he handled the autopsy, which was written by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, although his name does not appear on the released copy and he is no longer working for the DNC. The DNC never received a finished report, according to a person within the party granted anonymity to share details, and the author did not turn over a list of interviewees or transcripts despite multiple requests. The post-election analysis contains interviews with hundreds of operatives from all 50 states.” And: “By putting a bright red disclaimer atop every page noting that the ‘document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC’ — the party made one thing very clear: It still hasn’t formed its own conclusion of what went wrong, or where it’s headed next.” • So Rivera was Martin’s “ally”… and this was his deliverable to Martin…. I’m struggling to come up with an explanation, even a Machiavellian one. (OK, maybe it’s good for the interviewees that none of them were mentioned, because they can still get work, but it’s hard to believe that was Rivera or Martin’s concern.)

“DNC Releases, Then Disowns, 2024 Election Autopsy” [NOTUS]. “The incomplete report the DNC released does not tackle some of the biggest fault lines still debated within the party: Joe Biden’s initial decision to run for reelection, Kamala Harris’ nomination without a serious primary process and the impact of the war in Gaza on younger voters. The report does not appear to land on an explanation for what went wrong, failing to include an executive summary, even though one was mentioned in the report….. Paul Rivera, a Democratic consultant, led the post-mortem effort, along with the DNC’s Office of Strategy and Innovation.” Oh. What role did they play? More: “In his statement, Martin said he chose Rivera because he didn’t want the report ‘led by anybody directly tied to the 2024 cycle, either the campaign or the consultants involved.’ While he didn’t attack Rivera directly, he eviscerated the results.” And: “The author refused to finish the report when asked, the person familiar added.” • Could it be as simple as the DNC didn’t have the cash on hand to pay Rivera? Not if Martin was a volunteer—

“Autopsy of the autopsy: How the DNC’s 2024 post-mortem turned into a crisis” [CNN]. “Martin entrusted a top priority to a friend, Democratic consultant Paul Rivera, who volunteered to work on it part-time and waited several months to contact key officials with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ campaigns. Many top decision-makers in the campaigns were ultimately never interviewed, and Harris herself has expressed frustration privately that questions about the document have gone on.” And the money: “Multiple past donors to the DNC, which is already in debt compared with its cash-flush Republican counterpart, have told Martin they will not write checks because of how he handled the autopsy. Others have clawed back promised donations in their fury over his decision to hold [sic?] the report. Martin, meanwhile, has continued in private conversations to blame the money troubles on debt left over from Harris’ campaign, though she has since raised more money than that for the DNC.” But: “[The report] avoids many of the topics that have divided the party since 2024: Biden’s decision to run again, Harris taking over as the nominee without a nominating process or how the ticket’s positions on the war in Gaza affected Democrats in key states like Michigan.” More: “Though he’d set the autopsy as a priority, Martin decided to have Rivera in charge as a part-time volunteer while juggling other clients. Rivera would sometimes say he was available to conduct interviews only before 9 a.m., after 7 p.m. or on weekends. Martin kept him so siloed that the most senior staff could do was occasionally chip in with suggestions of people he should consider contacting.” So Martin didn’t “set the autopsy as a priority.” More: “Among those not included in interviews: Biden, Harris or Walz. Top strategists, including Biden aides Mike Donilon, Anita Dunn, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed, and top Harris decision-makers like Jen O’Malley Dillon, Stephanie Cutter and David Plouffe, weren’t interviewed either. Neither were close Harris aides Sheila Nix, Kirsten Allen, Erin Wilson, Brian Fallon and Jalisa Washington-Price, or Sam Cornale, the Walz traveling chief of staff who had also been executive director of the DNC.” So they turned on him? I’d ask cui bono, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone; nobody comes out looking good. One of my favorite clips:

“What do we learn, Palmer?”

Geopolitics

“Appalachian Region Could Hold Key to U.S. Battery Supply Chain Independence” [OilPrice.com (KF)]. “The United States Geological Survey has made a potentially game-changing discovery in the Appalachian region. New research suggests that the ancient mountain range may be home to over 300 years’ worth of lithium resources, presenting a potentially critical opportunity for the United States to wean itself off of international lithium deposits and build up domestic lithium markets.” • I guess we’ll need some other reason to go to war with China, then.

“The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born” [Baldur Bjarnason]. Our current globalised tech industry can only exist because of the protectionism and policy uniformity imposed by the United States on its hegemony. That billions of people across dozens of countries work and interact on unified platforms whose laws and regulations are, for all practical purposes, basically that of the US – the policies of end-user nations tend to have a minimal effect on how any of these platforms are run – is an artifact of US dominance… The software industry has shifted its entire value proposition from ‘we make tools that help you make or save money’ to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world. That strategy only works when you’re in charge.”

“Palantir’s laboratory” [Events in Ukraine]. “If there’s any country that embodies [Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s] ideals of total militarism with the airs of technological futurism, it’s Ukraine. Israel, too, of course, but I suspect the Israelis are somewhat less transparent and enthusiastic to act as labrats. Palantir’s love for Ukraine is telling. They see the future for the west in Ukraine. I’ve also always had this opinion — the world, or at least the west, is most certainly Ukrainizing. Militarization and criminalization of incorrect speech acts is already widespread. The next step is state-supported paramilitaries and closed borders. Ukraine also shows how despite all Palantir’s technological fetishism, wars are fought with human bodies.” • Or lost by them.

“The Iran War By The Numbers” [The Onion]. “The Onion examines the key facts and figures behind the conflict: 19-ish

Missiles U.S. will have left for next three decades of global conflicts… 1 Number of blood clots it would take to end this all. ” • Funny, I suppose, but exactly as happened with targeted assassinations in Iran, a person capable of playing an equivalent role will step into it.

“US-Iran war news LIVE: Qatar negotiating team, Pak army chief fly to Tehran as talks to end war gather pace” [Hindustan Times]. • Big if true.

“Netanyahu ‘beside himself with rage’ after furious phone call with Trump over Iran war that left the Israeli leader ‘with his hair on fire’ [Daily Mail]. • Amusing, and also bug if true. Also, does Bibi have that much hair?

Pandemics and Public Health

Stay safe out there!

Infection

“Ebola outbreak: the data that show why researchers are so alarmed” [Nature]. “By the time both the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda declared an Ebola outbreak on 15 May, officials said that they had recorded 246 suspected cases and 80 suspected deaths. A few days later, on 18 May, an international research team released the results of a modelling study suggesting that the true number of infections could be vastly higher. Those data points are shocking researchers and public-health specialists: the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on 19 May that he is ‘deeply concerned about the scale and speed of the epidemic.’ That’s because, compared with past outbreaks, these numbers stand out. … The startling size of the outbreak — along with its occurrence in urban and semi-urban areas in the Ituri and North Kivu provinces of the DRC, where people travel and interact a lot — prompted the WHO to declare the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 17 May.” And: “Another major unknown is how fast case numbers are growing, which could indicate when the outbreak started and how big it could get.” • Interestingly, though Nature writes that “All Ebola viruses are transmitted through contact with blood and other bodily fluids,” it does not go take the final step and say it’s not airborne.

Lambert here: The business section (formerly “Stats”) was far too long and hard to read. So I’m breaking it up into buckets. Of course, there will be overlap: “AI” with “Police and Thieves” — so hard to choose! And of course no buckets survive contact with content, so expect more changes. Suggestions welcome; please use the Contact form!

Business Sentiment

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 58 Greed (previous close: 58 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 62 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). • Drifting lower, a little faster….

Rapture Index: Closes down one on Oil Supply/Price. “Despite all the fighting in the Middle East, oil prices have declined” [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 182. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) • I’d never checked the FAQ for this site. It’s everything I expected, and more.

Business: AI

“Google Search’s I/O 2026 updates: AI agents and more” [Google]. “The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind — from quick facts to the deep, complex or hyper-specific questions that can be hard to articulate.” Dude, come on The goal of Search has always been simple: To maximize time on site, hence revenues from advertisers. That’s why Google enshittified search. More: “You’ll continue to get a range of results from Search, just like you do today.” That’s what I’m afraid of. I used to be able to find stuff! More: “We’re also making it even simpler to continue the conversation with Search. You can easily ask a follow-up question right from an AI Overview, and flow into a conversational back and forth with AI Mode.” Like I said: Maximize time on site. And: “Your context stays with you, and as you explore more deeply, the links and supporting articles get even more relevant.” • “Even more”! You mean, like another Wikipedia article? Worth reading in full, either for the massive self-delusion or the horrid puffery-huffery, whichever. Try Kagi.

“Google Changes Its Search Box for the First Time in 25 Years” [New York Times]. “In addition, people can ask follow-up questions with a chatbot on Google’s main search page. The company will also offer digital assistants, known as agents, to automate searches so that someone who may be apartment hunting can be notified of a new listing without opening a real estate site like Zillow.” And of course the agent will be working for you, and now whoever paid Google for upranking their service (Zillow, for all we know, though of course now they have to pay Google rent). And: “Richard Kramer, a financial analyst with Arete Research, said the changes were helping Google make more money from advertising. Last year, Google’s ad clicks rose 6 percent, and it charged 7 percent more for each click. The company’s annual profit has more than doubled since 2022 to $132 billion. ‘The open web is on its way out,’ Mr. Kramer said, referring to the way internet traffic now often begins and ends with a visit to Google rather than visiting other sites. ‘With A.I., Google is reducing everyone to raw data providers.’” • Rather like the enclosures, no? Meanwhile, this is the firm that deliberately enshittified search for money. Why would anybody trust them?

“How Google Is Starting to Win the A.I. Race” [New York Times]. “Google is rapidly developing ways to use A.I. to increase profit with online advertising, its bread and butter. In its last quarter, Google reported, its advertising revenue rose 16 percent to $77 billion, fueled by A.I. technology that has helped marketers collect deeper information about users’ interests.” • Because of course they are. And: “The company also said it was continuing to add its A.I. into tools that people use every day — for instance, by letting a person using Google Docs ask Gemini to draft a speech that includes personal anecdotes and jokes.” • If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made!

“Google Search’s AI evolution includes more ads” [The Verge]. “Google’s AI-powered Search era apparently also extends to its ads. Now, when you search for a product, Google’s Gemini AI chatbot will surface relevant items and generate a ‘custom explainer’ about why you should purchase a specific one. The update comes just one day after Google revealed a new Search box for larger, more conversational queries, along with a focus on AI-generated results. In an example shared by Google, someone searching for a ‘compact espresso pod machine’ might see a Nespresso Vertuo Up under a ‘Sponsored Product’ label…. ‘We’re reinventing ads for AI Search so they feel like_{MR SUBLIMINAL “Feel like” doing a lot of work there} helpful additions to your conversation,’ Vidhya Srinivasan, Google’s vice president of ads and commerce, writes in the announcement. ‘These next-generation ad formats close the gap between a person’s initial question and their final purchase, while making it easier to discover new brands along the way.’” • I’m wondering when Google ditches the “Sponsored Product” label, and does product placement in the text of the AI slop itself (or in the autogenerated videos). What’s to stop them?s

“Google reinvents search before AI rivals replace it” [Axios]. “The company is putting AI wherever it thinks customers might want it. For example, a new ‘Ask YouTube’ feature lets people ask a how-to question and get both a text answer and a video that contains the answer.” • Part of YouTube’s charm is how miserably bad its search function is. The chatbot will still be using YouTube’s data structure, which is bad (or else its search results would already be good). In any case, the “answer” is gonna be AI slop anyhow (especially in health).

“Demis Hassabis said this might be the ‘foothills of the singularity.’ What?” [The Verge]. “Welcome to a ‘profound moment for humanity,’ according to Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, who closed out Google I/O’s keynote presentation on Tuesday, saying: “Google’s cutting-edge research and products will help unlock AGI’s incredible potential for the benefit of the entire world.” See, we enshittified search for the public good! More:When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity. It will be a profound moment for humanity. This technology will be a force multiplier for human ingenuity and usher in a new golden age of scientific discovery and progress, improving the lives of everyone, everywhere.” … Just before announcing we’ve possibly arrived at ‘the foothills of the singularity,’ Hassabis introduced Gemini for Science, a set of tools and experiments in Google Labs and Google Antigravity intended for helping with scientific research. According to Hassabis, with tools like these, Google hopes to ‘reimagine drug discovery with the goal of one day solving all disease.’” • Yes. I mean, look at the health videos on YouTube now! Preying on babies! Besides being [glassbowls], these guys are nuts.

“AI’s Macroeconomic Challenges and Promises” [Liberty Street Economics]. “AI is rewiring the financial system. Until recently, the major AI companies funded capital investment almost entirely from retained earnings, insulating the AI buildout from credit-market conditions. That changed in late 2025: capital expenditures began to exceed operating cash flows, and the firms raised over $100 billion of new debt. Beneath those headline bond issues lies a more intricate layer—off-balance-sheet project finance vehicles funding data center construction, securitizations backed by lease cash flows, and hundreds of billions in forward lease commitments that will not appear on balance sheets for years. Much of this debt is predicated on AI productivity returns that have not yet materialized. If expectations shift, the correction could travel quickly and widely: the same institutions—insurers, asset managers, pension funds—hold overlapping exposures across corporate bonds, securitizations, and private placements, so a broad repricing would hit them from multiple directions at once.” • Well worth reading in full.

“Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I.” [New York Times (via)]. And the deck: “Steven Rosenbaum, author of “The Future of Truth,” said he had started his own investigation after The New York Times asked about the fake quotes.” • He’s gonna find the real killer!

Business: Tech

“Google publishes exploit code threatening millions of Chromium users” [Ars Technica]. “Google on Wednesday published exploit code for an unfixed vulnerability in its Chromium browser codebase that threatens millions of people using Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and virtually all other Chromium-based browsers…. Since its reporting 46 months ago, the vulnerability remained unknown except to Chromium developers. Then on Wednesday morning, it was published to the Chromium bug tracker. [Lyra Rebane, the independent researcher who discovered the vulnerability and privately reported it to Google in late 2022 in an interview,] initially assumed the vulnerability was finally fixed. Shortly thereafter, she learned that, in fact, it remained unpatched. While Google removed the post, it remains available on archival sites, along with the exploit code.” • This is the company that’s going to cure all diseases.

“Google Is Making Huge Changes That Are Poised to Decimate What’s Left of Journalism” [Futurism]. “But the most consequential change is what the revamped searches will return. Instead of showing you a ranked list of links to other websites, you’ll get conversational-style answers. As is already happening with the years-long rollout of AI Overviews — plus AI chatbots broadly — this means even fewer people will be visiting the sites that the AI features are pilfering their answers from in the first place. This is bad news for any business dependent on web traffic and ad revenue to keep the lights on, and it’s especially perilous for journalism, an industry that’s always had trouble keeping up in the internet age, when fewer people are willing to pay for access to information. Now that its product can be wholly regurgitated by a chatbot, it could spell the end for a vast swathe of publications. One study, for example, found that that users are 58 percent less likely to click a link when an AI overview appears above it. Another report found that after the advent of AI Overviews, ten major tech news outlets lost as much as 97 percent of US web traffic from Google. If fewer and fewer people are actually visiting news sites because an AI chatbot — or Google’s revamped AI search — regurgitates their content, how are these sites expected to stay afloat? The answer: many in the industry are expecting that they won’t.” • Will there be some sort of metric for the percentage of content in AI training sets is autocoprophagic, now that humans can’t affort to write? My guess is that it will approach 100%.

“Progression without progress” [Science]. “Progress in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to advance scientific discovery has made it increasingly realistic to envision automated ‘end-to-end science; (ETES) systems: integrated pipelines that could generate hypotheses, run experiments (in silico or robotic), analyze results, and produce publishable outputs with minimal human intervention. The critical question is not whether AI can ‘do’ science but whether science—as a social, evolutionary system that generates trustworthy knowledge—survives the way AI does it. Although no single community is explicitly calling for fully autonomous science, ETES is the logical endpoint of current trajectories: increasing automation, integration across tasks, and competitive pressure for speed and scale. In this sense, it is less a proposal than a direction of travel. Fully autonomous pipelines may ultimately occupy only part of the scientific landscape. But they epitomize, in extreme form, the same forces already reshaping knowledge production.

However, science is not simply a sequence of tasks that can be optimized.” And: “Even if individual AI systems generate internally diverse hypotheses, they are likely to be built on a small number of dominant platforms, trained on overlapping data, and optimized under similar objectives. As in other markets for digital technologies, concentration is a plausible outcome: a handful of systems shaping the majority of scientific output. This produces correlation, not independence. Simulated diversity within a system does not substitute for epistemic diversity across genuinely competing approaches.

The consequence is not merely institutional; it is epistemic. The scientific system thrives on inefficiency: redundant efforts, failed attempts, and divergent paths. These are not costs to be eliminated but sources of discovery. By contrast, optimization pressures drive convergence—faster iteration within a constrained search space. The result may be more output but less exploration of the unexpected.”

Feral Hog Watch

“Long-Distance Movements of Feral Hogs Are Coming From These Key States” [Lindsay Thomas, National Deer Association]. “It’s no secret that the biggest driver of the feral hog problem in the United States is people who trap and relocate live pigs for money or hunting opportunity. Now we have a roadmap of wild pig distribution, and it’s far worse than anything I imagined. Forget about Cletus and Earl hauling a pineywoods rooter across the creek in the bed of a pickup. We’re talking about interstate commerce involving a lot of pigs, and much of it is illegal…. since 2014 USDA-APHIS has sampled the genetics of more than 23,000 wild pigs. Another 2,500 to 3,000 pigs removed in USDA hog control operations are added to the archive annually. Researchers have identified 14,284 genotypes of feral swine and their geographic origins. They can look at a pig’s DNA and name its place of birth within a 12-mile margin of error. That’s how they produced this map showing the geographic origin points of all the pigs identified as having been translocated:”

More: “According to the researchers, 18.6% of all wild pigs sampled in the United States had been translocated in their lifetimes! This information makes one thing clear: Many wild pigs were moving at 70 mph when they exploded across the map of the United States in recent decades…. Researchers found Texas pigs now living in 26 out of 38 states they investigated. In many states where feral hogs appeared recently, all of them arrived on wheels and not through natural movement. Every pig the USDA sampled in Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Utah, Washington and West Virginia was identified as a translocated animal. In six other states, a very high percentage of feral hogs were translocated: Arizona (71%), Illinois (95%), Kentucky (77%), New Mexico (77%), Pennsylvania (81%), and Virginia (88%).” • What’s the business model? Hunting? And speaking of business models and translocation–

“A Biological Bomb: The Feral Hog Invasion” [(press release) Clemson University]. “Hogs roaming freely in the wildlands of the southeastern U.S. has gone on since the 1500s when the Spanish introduced them to support their attempts at colonization as well as a potential food supply for shipwrecked sailors, especially in the Caribbean islands. As eastern America became increasingly colonized, farmers commonly free-ranged their hogs and cattle. Free range remained a common and legal practice through the early 1900s. Farmers ear-notched their livestock to tell which animals belonged to whom. Early fences were mostly built to keep livestock out of crops and yards. However, by the mid-1900s almost all states had outlawed free range. By then, feral populations (populations of free ranging animals of domestic descent) of hogs, cattle and some horses were well established in some places, particularly in lower coastal plain ecosystems. In addition to these feral hog populations, European wild boar were brought to the United States by wealthy hunting interests. The first and most notable of these importations was in the Smoky Mountains around 1912. Fencing was constructed around the large hunting preserve, but that was short-lived due to falling trees and rot. Escaped wild boar quickly interbred with free ranging hogs which developed crossbred populations.”

Zeitgeist Watch

“Mathematics is out there” [Aeon]. “he equations that govern black holes were true before there were black holes. That claim is hotly contested, and cuts through one of the deepest fault lines in the philosophy of mathematics. On one side are those who hold that mathematical structures, including well-established principles and basic geometric shapes like the tetrahedron, exist independently of human thought – not as a language we invented to describe reality, but rather as the substrate of reality itself. On the other side of the debate are those who argue that mathematics is the product of human labours, imposed on a world that would be wholly indifferent to it were we not here…. Mathematical theorems, once proven with rigour, do not bend to political pressure. Unlike diamonds, they truly last forever.”• Hmm. Interesting, though!

“Geography is four-dimensional” [Derek Sivers (via)]. “Last year I went to China and loved it. So clean, polite, efficient, and all-around nice. A German friend said I’m crazy because ‘China is filthy, rude, noisy, and awful - with everyone spitting and pushing.’ I asked when he was there, and he said 2002. Ah! But that place is long gone. It’s not like that anymore. When someone speaks of a place, you have to ask, ‘When?’ Geography is four-dimensional. You can’t know a place — only a place as it was at a time. Where is bound to when. Unless you are in a place right now, you can only speak of it in past-tense…. I used to describe myself as American, but that’s becoming less true with time. I’m from the America of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. But that place is long gone. It’s not like that anymore.” • They do things differently there….

Class Warfare

“It’s Not Neofeudalism, It’s Hypercapitalism” [Jacobin]. “One of the most persistent left shibboleths is the notion that productive investment is giving way to unproductive speculation, leading to the ‘hollowing out’ of the industrial economy and the decline of capitalism. After all, it seems obvious that capitalists would rather make a quick buck than undertake the arduous and risky process of actually producing something. Neo-feudalism is having a moment. Such arguments have typically focused on the supposedly parasitic role of finance and ‘fictitious capital.’ More recently, however, they have been extended to describe an emerging ‘rentier capitalism,’ in which the extraction of rent through monopoly power and control over the state has displaced production as the primary means through which capitalists accumulate wealth. In reality, the dystopia unfolding around us is not the result of capitalism’s logic breaking down — it is the direct expression of that logic…. For starters, one might ask, what is the source of the ‘rent’ these capitalists are supposedly extracting? In order for value to be extracted in the form of rent, it must first be produced. … Yet this doesn’t work empirically. As Scott Aquanno and I showed in a recent paper in the Review of Radical Political Economics, the major tech firms that are typically the target of these arguments have not persistently earned above-average profits. Their profits have gravitated around the average. Nor is there evidence that capital mobility across the economy has been diminished in the way monopoly-capital or rentier-capitalism arguments would require. This means that even if we assume these firms’ activities are wholly ‘unproductive’ (which is not actually the case), their income is not rent. Rather, it would be what Marx calls ‘commercial profit,’ or profit accruing to capitals that perform circulation and realization functions. Google, Meta, Amazon, and the like are not simply leeching value from productive firms but building and operating infrastructures that other capitals use to circulate commodities, reduce turnover time, realize surplus value, and compete more effectively.” • Subject to correction by a genuine scholar, this argument makes sense to me.

Nice title:

News of the Wired

I am not feeling wired today.

Plantidote of the Day

Via ChiGal:

ChiGal writes: “Waterlilies at the Chicago Botanical Garden.”

Send your plantidotes as attachments to lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [AT] protonmail [DOT] com. And if you put “Plant” or “Plantidote” in the subject line, I’ll be less likely to lose it. Gardens are fine. Gardening season approaches, at least in the Northeast! Fungi are honorary plants.