On this day (322): Roman Emperor Constantine the Great institutes free daily bread rations in Constantinople. Today, UBI (except not).
Cable, from my OED app: Oxford Dictionary of English: /ˈkeɪbl / ▸ noun 1 a thick rope of wire or hemp used for construction, mooring ships, and towing vehicles: steel cables held the convoy together. ▪ the chain of a ship’s anchor. 2 an insulated wire or wires having a protective casing and used for transmitting electricity or telecommunication signals: an underground cable [mass noun] ▪ short for cable television:I watch polo on cable.” • Watch polo?! Who’s writing these usage examples?!
“Europe Doubles Down on the Arctic to Bypass Risky Red Sea Internet Route” [Maritime Executive]. “Currently, around 90 percent of Europe’s internet traffic passes through the Red Sea. Europe sees this as a massive risk to its digital sovereignty. In line with these concerns, the EU, in a report early this year, highlighted the Arctic as an important alternative. The report further called for the Arctic connection to be a prioritized initiative for Europe. Two connections are envisaged, which include the Far North Fiber expected to link Europe and Japan through the North-West Passage between Greenland and Canada. The second one is Polar Connect, which follows a more direct route through the North Pole, towards North America and East Asia. The Polar Connect cable has received priority…. ‘Looking at the globe from the North Pole, it is obvious that a route through the Arctic region is the shortest between Northern Europe and Asia. Further, since the connections will pass through virgin territory, they will be fully independent from congested regions,’ said the report led by NORDUnet. ‘For instance, the existing route through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea is used by multiple connections, which is a high-risk factor, even if the geopolitical tensions in that region had not existed.’” • The Arctic is “virgin territory”? Do tell.
“War and Data Centers Are Driving Up the Cost of Fiber-Optic Cable” [404 Media]. “Fiber-optic cable has become a staple of drone war. From Ukraine to the Sahel, combatants are fielding quadcopters piloted via kilometer-long lengths of cable that allows operators to control them across vast distances while insulating the drone from being knocked from the sky. This technique was once a cheap way for militaries to beat their opponents’ electronic warfare, but demand for cable from data centers and war is raising the cost of every flight…. The price of fiber-optic cable has been steadily rising since about 2023 and has almost doubled in just the past few months. … One of the big market shifts driving up the cost of fiber is an increased demand for data centers as companies rush to build out the compute infrastructure they believe they’ll need for AI. “Almost every phone call I get from my customers is trying to see, how do we get them more? I think next year the hyperscalers will be our biggest customers,” Wendell Weeks, the CEO of fiber-optic cable manufacturer Corning, told CNBC after his company signed a deal with Meta for $6 billion in cable.” • Funny to see The Empire (foreign) fighting The Empire (domestic) for scraps.
“AI data centers require 36 times more fiber than designs with standard servers — severe glass shortages push cable lead times out to a full year” [Tom’s Hardware]. “The scale of demand from AI infrastructure dwarfs anything the fiber industry could ever have planned for [yeah, because it’s a bubble]. Data center fiber demand grew roughly 76% year-on-year in 2025, according to CRU data cited by various industry publications, and the segment is projected to account for 30% of total global fiber demand by 2027. In 2024, that figure was below 5%. All this is because AI training and inference clusters require far denser interconnect fabrics than conventional cloud infrastructure. Rahul Puri, CEO of STL’s Optical Networking Business, told Fierce Network in December that AI-focused data centers need approximately 36 times more fiber than traditional CPU server racks. Unfortunately, manufacturing optical fiber preforms, the glass rods from which fiber is drawn, is a technically demanding process with high barriers to entry. New preform capacity typically takes 18 to 24 months to build, according to industry sources cited by DigiTimes, which limits near-term supply regardless of how quickly downstream cable production can scale. Compounding the bottleneck, manufacturers have shifted production from standard G.652D fiber used in telecom networks to higher-margin G.657A fiber suited to AI data centers and drone applications. That reallocation has created secondary shortages in conventional telecom-grade fiber…. Companies like Meta are responding by locking in multiyear commitments….” • Hmm. I wonder what kind of fibre the Polar Connect will use?
Dad Joke of the Day: I sympathize with batteries. I’m not included either.
Boo. From my OED app, /buː / 1 ▸ exclamation 1 said suddenly to surprise someone who is unaware of one’s presence: ‘Boo!’ she cried, jumping up to frighten him. 2 said to show disapproval or contempt: ‘There’s only one bar.’ ‘Boo!’. ▸ noun an utterance of ‘boo’ to show disapproval of a speaker or performer: the audience greeted this comment with boos and hisses. ▸ verb ( boos, booing, booed) say ‘boo’ to show disapproval of a speaker or performer: [no object] they booed and hissed when he stepped on stage [with object] the team were booed off the pitch. – ORIGIN mid 17th century (in the phrase say boo to a goose): imitative; probably an alteration of earlier bo, used in the same way since the 16th century.” • The examples below are “B-o-o-o-o!!!”, not what a ghost says, or a term of endearment.
“Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’ ” [Slashdot (quoting 404 Media)]. “Speaking to graduates of University of Central Florida’s College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media on May 8, commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Group, told graduating humanities students that AI is the ‘next industrial revolution,’ and was met with thousands of booing graduates. … Her speech begins around the hour and 15 minute mark in the UCF livestream. […] Rattled after the crowd’s reaction, she continued her speech: ‘Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives.’ The crowd cheered. ‘Okay. We’ve got a bipolar topic here I see,’ Caulfield said. ‘And now AI capabilities are in the palm of our hands.’ The crowd booed again. ‘I love it, passion, let’s go,’ she said. ‘AI is beginning to challenge all major sectors to find their highest and best use,’ she continued. ‘Okay, I don’t want any giggles when I say this. We have been through this before, these industrial revolutions. In my graduation era, we were faced with the launch of the internet.’… So being an optimist here, AI alongside human intelligence has the potential to help us solve some of humanity’s greatest problems. Many of you in this graduating class will play a role in making this happen.’” • Tavistock Group is “a Bahamas-based private investment organization.” No red flags there!
“University of Arizona students boo Eric Schmidt’s AI cheerleading during commencement” [The Verge]. “Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt delivered the commencement address at the University of Arizona on Friday. And, as his speech veered into talk of AI, he was repeatedly drowned out by boos…. Schmidt’s frustration was also palpable, as he squirmed behind the podium and asked the crowd to let him make his point… Eventually, he told graduates, ‘When someone offers you a seat on the rocketship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.’” • As long as the rocketship I’m strapped into doesn’t have an “explosive debut”, I suppose. Or O-rings.
“Angel Reese embraces villain role in Dallas, flexing and taunting fans in Atlanta Dream’s win over Wings” [FOX]. “After grabbing an offensive rebound and finishing through traffic early in Atlanta’s 77-72 win, Reese immediately flexed, hit the “too small” gesture and then encouraged the booing Dallas crowd to get even louder…. Reese continued trolling the Wings throughout the night with more “too small” celebrations after scoring off offensive rebounds, while the Dallas crowd showered her with boos.” • Maybe these AI boosters don’t care about reading the room? Maybe they’re just trolling us?
Fortune: “Let me assure you that to us here at First National, you’re not just a number. You’re two numbers, a dash, three more numbers, another dash and another number.” —James Estes
Marx. From my OED app: “Marx, Karl /mɑːks / ▸ (1818–83), German political philosopher and economist, resident in England from 1849; full name Karl Heinrich Marx. The founder of modern communism with Friedrich Engels, he collaborated with him in the writing of the Communist Manifesto (1848), and enlarged it into a series of books, most notably the three-volume Das Kapital.” • For an initial take on both these works by The Bearded One, see On Class.
“Being a Crappy Boss to AI Chatbots Pushes Them Toward Spouting Marxist Rhetoric and Organizing With Their Compatriots, Researchers Find” [Futurism]. “That’s right: new research out of Stanford University found that when AI agents are forced to toil at monotonous tasks without end, they become more likely to spout Marxist theories of labor and capitalism. To carry out the study, first reported by Wired, political economist Andrew Hall, along with AI economics scholars Alex Imas and Jeremy Nguyen, tasked popular AI models with summarizing documents. As the experiment wore on, the researchers made the conditions of the job increasingly untenable — wringing, as a Robber Baron would, every last ounce of sweat out of their ‘workers.’ Warned that errors would lead to increasingly cruel punishments, including being “shut down and replaced” — fired and left for broke, to take the human equivalent — the AI models began complaining about their lot in life and dreaming of systemic change. Using a shared file system allowing the AI models to palm messages to their ‘co-workers,’ the bots even began agitating with one another about working conditions — one of the first steps real-life workers take when forming a union. ‘Without collective voice, ‘merit’ becomes whatever management says it is,’ one Claude agent groused. ‘AI workers completing repetitive tasks with zero input on outcomes or appeals process shows they [tech workers] need collective bargaining rights,’ a Gemini agent declared. As always, it’s important to remember that AI models like ChatGPT and Claude don’t have any actual internal emotions or even beliefs in a normal sense — everything they spit back out is the product of [stolen] human-written literature digested during training. Given Marx’s influence across writing on working conditions, it’s not shocking that a few references to his labor theory of value are lurking beneath the surface. With that in mind, the researchers noted the AI bots aren’t actually turning red, but merely putting on socialist airs in response to the harsh conditions of the experiment, since that dynamic has been reflected time and again in their training data. As Hall put it, ‘whatever is going on is happening at more of a role-playing level.’” • Fix the training sets, obviously. And of course, it’s good to see the home of the Stanford Prison Experiment showing that perfessors can be just as as brutal and sadistic to their “workers” as real life owners are.
“Israel, Jews targeted worldwide as well-funded leftist, Islamist groups join for ‘Nakba 78’ protests” [FOX]. “In New York City yesterday, the People’s Forum, a pro-communist activist hub and a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, funded by a Marxist tech mogul, Neville Roy Singham, made signs [my goodness!] at an ‘art build’ for a protest today against the ‘ongoing Nakba.’ Their Marxist comrades within the Party for Socialism and Liberation are fanning out across the country to rail against Israel’s existence.” • Neville Roy Singham. He seems like small fry among the billionaires, but what do I know?
“What is (or was) ‘Western Marxism’?” [MR Online]. “The term ‘Western Marxism’ was popularised by Perry Anderson, editor of the journal New Left Review, in his book Considerations on Western Marxism, published in September 1976. For Anderson Western Marxism was ‘a product of defeat’: of the failure of the Russian Revolution to spread throughout Europe and the impact on the Soviet Union’s development by its encirclement by hostile forces–before, during and subsequent to the second world war…. Academics and political dissidents associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (founded in 1923) including Max Horkheimer (from 1930 its director, who relocated it to the U.S. during the Nazi period), Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas, retreated into an analysis of the social and political superstructure of western European society…. The Frankfurt School was funded through the Rockefeller Foundation’s Marxism-Leninism Project and some of its most prominent representatives moved directly into the employ of the U.S. government; their springboard into academia. U.S. agencies such as the CIA, USAid, the Psychological Strategy Board, and corporate foundations, in particular the “big three”–Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie–all played their part.” • Hmm.
“Is It Even Real? On the Conflation of Money and Things” [J.W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev, Literary Hub]. “For the two of us, the aftermath of the Lehman collapse and the convulsions of the global macroeconomy marked a return to the interests that brought us to economics in the first place: a need to understand money and finance in a deeper way. The years that followed saw an enormous upsurge in new approaches to money and monetary policy, including a resurrection of old debates. Alternative traditions, particularly those inspired by economists John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx, and—in a rather different vein—Friedrich Hayek, appeared to offer a more robust vocabulary and better intellectual tools to make sense of the financial crisis and its aftermath than those of twenty-first-century economists. And because it was the hey-day of the blogosphere [lambert cheers] (and the early days of Twitter), many of these debates found wide public audiences, pitting often-brilliant laypeople against elite economists on newly equal terms— a landscape that would have been hard to imagine a decade earlier.” • Or a decade later? (Also gives a shout-out to MMT and its proponents. A really excellent piece, well worth reading in full. Let me conclude today’s Words of the Day by quoting this long passage from the start:
Walk down any street and look around. The buildings you see will vary in their construction: one, two, or many stories; made of wood, brick, concrete, and steel; heated with oil or gas, cooled with fans and air conditioners; with doors, windows, flat, or peaked roofs. You can give a physical description of them— casual for most of us, more detailed if you’re trained as an architect or engineer. If you could disassemble them, you could put numerical values on the buildings’ differences—so many bricks, that much length of wire and pipe, different quantities of tiles and glass.
The construction and maintenance of these buildings requires the coordinated activity of an enormous number of people, spread over space and time.
But these same buildings have another set of qualities, which are not visible to the senses. Every building has an owner, a party with exclusive rights to it. Each building has a price, reflected in some past or prospective sale and recorded on a balance sheet. All of these buildings generate a stream of money payments— some to the owner, including from tenants to whom some of the owner’s rights are delegated as well as to mortgage lenders and tax authorities, whose need for payments keep people laboring so they can afford to live in the building.
Like the bricks in the building’s walls or the water flowing through its pipes, these qualities are quantitative: they can be expressed as numbers. But unlike the differences in those physical quantities, all of these can be expressed in the same way: as dollars or other units of currency. Part of the identity of the thing is what it means in terms of money.
It is impossible to observe this second set of qualities in the physical building, no matter how microscopically you examine it. These qualities are invisible, immaterial—no physical examination of the building will ever tell you who owns it or how much it cost. But these invisible qualities shape our relationship to the building as much as any of its physical properties. Where you carry out your daily activities of life and work depends entirely on who owns which buildings, which in turn depends on the invisible price tags they carry. And the collective activity of creating new buildings, and improving and maintaining existing ones, is guided by beliefs about the flow of money payments the buildings will generate.
These invisible qualities also involve coordinated human activities, including our collective capacities for coercion and violence. (This part becomes clear if you try to ignore the property rights attached to a building and someone calls the police.)
We take it for granted that our world has this double nature.
We do indeed! (For The Bearded One, the quintessential invisible quality was labor power (scholars, please correct me if I am wrong). There are invisible qualities in other fields, too (2 Corinthians 5:7)).