Hmmm 🤔 Let’s imagine what Democrats have to offer - open borders, with the associated flood of illegals into the US, boys playing against girls in all sports, young children having gender transition treatments/surgery, wind and solar energy debacles, use of lawfare to prosecute any political opponents, resurgence of DEI (didn’t earn it) policies, dilution of working class incomes, etc. Yeah, that all sounds like something sane people would embrace! 😵💫😵💫😵💫
Add to your list, Medicaid fraud, documented in MI, CA, ME reimbursing criminals to fund their hearts desire, at working Americans expense. Oh yes the Democrat party should run on giving us more income transfers, from the needy to the criminals.
WE DO NOT HAVE AI. We have Large Language Models. LLMs are NOT AI. They are SOFTWARE. CLOUD SOFTWARE. We do NOT have artificial intelligence. WE DO NOT HAVE THINKING MACHINES.
The idea that "AI" - chatbots that wake up, "set their own goals," and "simultaneously" start hacking servers - is fake. It doesn't have "a 10% chance of ending the human race." The Hugging Face hack isn't a mysterious, supernatural occurrence. It's a Python Loop and a chatbot. The people responsible didn't accidentally create god: they created autonomous malicious software and then failed to closely monitor it, resulting in it doing something both foreseeable and bad.
A malicious subroutine from a script written by a pereon IS bad, to be sure. But this this is more akin to a virus. It was created with purpose by a person (which means they are subject to ceiminal prosecution). But what it is NOT - is a "Rogue AI agent" that is "thinking".
As I understand the difference as a layperson, a virus is a script that performs a predetermined routine on the infected machine when it is activated.
Autonomous software, or AI, is different from a virus because it can independently apply its own internal logic if confronted with circumstances that its human creators did not anticipate in its original code.
Not “thinking”per se but qualitatively different and more dangerous than a scripted virus.
Interesting to review this essay from the archives in light of current insecurity about AI. I was struck particularly to be reminded that in 2020 Biden was the one voters looked to for a sense of stability. I recall a casual friend who, in a discussion about Warren (my preferred candidate in 2020), clasped her arms to her chest as if trying to ward off danger and said "she's too bold." Well, right now, in the face of the terrible mess we are in, I tend to think bold—so long as it is smart and strategic—is exactly what we need, and I'm not at all sure we will get it even if the Democrats succeed in taking Congress. As one example, both of my Senators (Schumer and Gillibrand) appear to be compromised when it comes to regulating AI, and from what I see, they are far from alone.
Actually no, and it's a key distinction: Biden was preferred as a known and controlled figurehead by the DNC who intervened in South Carolina using the single Democrat there, representative Clyburn, to suppress and push aside less controlled nominees: in the earlier primaries Biden finished 3rd and 4th, not even making second place until the party eliminated the public's choices.
Biden was never the choice of the people, who correctly saw him as old and out of touch and not particularly talented. He was the choice of the party elders, which is why very few now trust the party.
p.s. I was a Warren fan as well. I too was a bit baffled why she didn't do better, but then again, I too like bold.
Good points all. Clyburn saved Biden’s floundering candidacy, for sure. And there were a lot of shenanigans prior to the Iowa caucuses that hurt Warren, like the pressure on the Des Moines Register not to publish its endorsement of her. In a way, I think both what you write and what I wrote initially are true: I knew many people like the friend I note who admired Warren but were afraid she was “too much” for “other people.” I tried to persuade such friends to stop trying to game what such “others” might think and simply go for the candidate they thought would make the best president. But alas.
Warren has always been a good team player that way. When she saw she was not going to be able to pull through herself, she changed course and negotiated to get as much leverage as she could.
Well said but needs a little updating. Democrats can win by projecting strength and stability after four years of corruption and chaos, but that can’t happen unless mainstream Democrats directly reject the DSA’s radical and destabilizing platform and distance themselves from its fringe candidates.
I think it's much simpler: we, the voters, detest being lied to so often even the dimmest among us realize and resent it.
Th GOP has endlessly lied about having an alternative to current healthcare laws and requirements, and, after more than a decade of this, even the least tuned in voters know it.
Democrats have endlessly lied about supporting the working class while selling us all out (remember the government option carved out of the ACA by Joe Lieberman, who shamelessly betrayed his party and nation to help corporations?). By the time of the dimwitted and senile Biden and the DEI caricature Harris this had become too obvious for any to keep ignoring.
Voters want stability and strength and the current Democrats are still horribly weak on these essential values. The GOP is corrupt, but does project power and strength, the father figure to the Democrats' scolding mommy image.
While there are other, underlying issues, such as voters caring far less, even minorities, about racial representation than the DNC does, inverting MLK's famous lines about content of character being more worthy of judgment than color of skin, at its heart the Democrats have morphed into servants of the elite rather than fighters for the working class and the working class knows it.
I care much more that Hakeem Jeffries is a corporate lawyer for the elite than he is black. I'd much rather see a labor leader of any shade or either gender as House Speaker than a lobbyist for the rich, but the Democratic leadership much prefers their looming symbolic victory to actual progress or aid for any of us not on their donor lists.
We need a party that supports the majority of Americans. Neither of the current choices do. That's the essence of our discontent.
Democrats’ problem with the working class isn’t that they represent the corporate elite, it’s that they represent the top-20% college educated managerial/professional elite that monopolizes opportunity for itself and has left the 80% behind. Class resentment is 80-20, not 99-1, no matter how many times Democrats try to protect their base by deflecting it that way.
Class resentment may well follow the Pareto principle of 80/20, but wealth is actually even more concentrated: the .1% hold about 15% of the nation's total household wealth.
The top 1% hold roughly 31.7% to 34.8% of total U.S. wealth (reaching a record 31.7% to nearly 32% in recent Federal Reserve data).
The top 20% of Americans together own the vast majority of national wealth—typically upwards of 85% to 89% (with the top 1% holding ~32%, the next 19% holding around 50–55%, and the top 10% alone holding over 68%
So the actual donor class members are far more often the most wealthy individual out of the next 1000 or even 10,000 richest Americans.
Otherwise I agree. The central point is the Democrats aren't really even effectively pretending anymore to actually represent the interests of the vast majority of those of us who show up and work to have money to pay our bills.
It’s not about concentration of dollars or the ability to make political donations. It’s also not about race or gender.
It’s about the vast difference in lifestyles and opportunities for social and economic advancement between the 20% managerial/professional class - effectively a self-perpetuating upper caste -!and the 80% who lack four year degrees and upper middle class parents.
Richard Reeves’ book Dream Hoarders sums up the 80-20 class issue nicely.
It is interesting to me to see the focus on how things feel, rather than whether the economy is growing or declining, whether employment is increasing or declining, and whether wage income is growing or declining. Democrats might also focus on economic factors and attract voters who respond more to facts than feelings.
All fourteen of them. If that approach worked, candidates would be handing out fact sheets instead of spending millions on emotionally loaded commercials.
If you believe the polls, the they/them ad was the most effective piece of political propaganda of all time. Moving 2-3 points in a locked down race (and country) is no small thing. That wasn't about strength but about whose side are you on.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. The Democrats don’t get to simultaneously push (trans)gender ideology and pretend that they don’t push it.
The ad was actually about change because it presented voters with a choice between the side in favor of the previous status quo (us) and the side in favor of social change (they/them).
The chart showing a large number of people believe that we are currently politically unstable reminds me that change is hard, even when things are going to get better. It's like the abused spouse who is terrified of change; better to stay and get slapped around than go into the unknown.
I'm not looking for much to actually occur politically until Jan of 29, when whoever wins is inaugurated. Dems will win the midterms, maybe by a lot, maybe by less, whatever happens it will be gridlock with one possible exception.
Yesterday both parties agreed on an infrastructure permitting bill by both adding things they wanted rather than taking out things they didn't like. It was too good for both parties to pass up. We will need to make much more electricity, AI or not. Electric cars, busses, and trucks are becoming cheaper than gas. Battery storage is making solar a possibility for that crucial peak generating time of day.
An actual bill has to wait until after the midterms, and god knows what extremists on both sides can do before a bill actually passes, but at least there are a lot of people agreeing.
It's only natural that Democrats and the media who are the new conservative party reject AI. AI is new, and a big threat to people who might not be as bright as their phones. 15% of journos now work for the NYT, and they are very replaceable.
A great example of what I call populist fusion. A different sort of bipartisan ship which has traditionally been where the establishments divides up the goodies rather than empowering the people.
Hmmm 🤔 Let’s imagine what Democrats have to offer - open borders, with the associated flood of illegals into the US, boys playing against girls in all sports, young children having gender transition treatments/surgery, wind and solar energy debacles, use of lawfare to prosecute any political opponents, resurgence of DEI (didn’t earn it) policies, dilution of working class incomes, etc. Yeah, that all sounds like something sane people would embrace! 😵💫😵💫😵💫
Add to your list, Medicaid fraud, documented in MI, CA, ME reimbursing criminals to fund their hearts desire, at working Americans expense. Oh yes the Democrat party should run on giving us more income transfers, from the needy to the criminals.
Excellent additions! I suspect there are more that deserved to be listed, but I just can’t remember them all!
WE DO NOT HAVE AI. We have Large Language Models. LLMs are NOT AI. They are SOFTWARE. CLOUD SOFTWARE. We do NOT have artificial intelligence. WE DO NOT HAVE THINKING MACHINES.
The idea that "AI" - chatbots that wake up, "set their own goals," and "simultaneously" start hacking servers - is fake. It doesn't have "a 10% chance of ending the human race." The Hugging Face hack isn't a mysterious, supernatural occurrence. It's a Python Loop and a chatbot. The people responsible didn't accidentally create god: they created autonomous malicious software and then failed to closely monitor it, resulting in it doing something both foreseeable and bad.
How is unmonitored “autonomous malicious software” any better than the thing we call AI?
A malicious subroutine from a script written by a pereon IS bad, to be sure. But this this is more akin to a virus. It was created with purpose by a person (which means they are subject to ceiminal prosecution). But what it is NOT - is a "Rogue AI agent" that is "thinking".
As I understand the difference as a layperson, a virus is a script that performs a predetermined routine on the infected machine when it is activated.
Autonomous software, or AI, is different from a virus because it can independently apply its own internal logic if confronted with circumstances that its human creators did not anticipate in its original code.
Not “thinking”per se but qualitatively different and more dangerous than a scripted virus.
Interesting to review this essay from the archives in light of current insecurity about AI. I was struck particularly to be reminded that in 2020 Biden was the one voters looked to for a sense of stability. I recall a casual friend who, in a discussion about Warren (my preferred candidate in 2020), clasped her arms to her chest as if trying to ward off danger and said "she's too bold." Well, right now, in the face of the terrible mess we are in, I tend to think bold—so long as it is smart and strategic—is exactly what we need, and I'm not at all sure we will get it even if the Democrats succeed in taking Congress. As one example, both of my Senators (Schumer and Gillibrand) appear to be compromised when it comes to regulating AI, and from what I see, they are far from alone.
Actually no, and it's a key distinction: Biden was preferred as a known and controlled figurehead by the DNC who intervened in South Carolina using the single Democrat there, representative Clyburn, to suppress and push aside less controlled nominees: in the earlier primaries Biden finished 3rd and 4th, not even making second place until the party eliminated the public's choices.
Biden was never the choice of the people, who correctly saw him as old and out of touch and not particularly talented. He was the choice of the party elders, which is why very few now trust the party.
p.s. I was a Warren fan as well. I too was a bit baffled why she didn't do better, but then again, I too like bold.
Good points all. Clyburn saved Biden’s floundering candidacy, for sure. And there were a lot of shenanigans prior to the Iowa caucuses that hurt Warren, like the pressure on the Des Moines Register not to publish its endorsement of her. In a way, I think both what you write and what I wrote initially are true: I knew many people like the friend I note who admired Warren but were afraid she was “too much” for “other people.” I tried to persuade such friends to stop trying to game what such “others” might think and simply go for the candidate they thought would make the best president. But alas.
I'd remind you both that Warren was part of the deal as I remember. She got to appoint some anti monopolists for dropping out at just the right time.
Warren has always been a good team player that way. When she saw she was not going to be able to pull through herself, she changed course and negotiated to get as much leverage as she could.
Well said but needs a little updating. Democrats can win by projecting strength and stability after four years of corruption and chaos, but that can’t happen unless mainstream Democrats directly reject the DSA’s radical and destabilizing platform and distance themselves from its fringe candidates.
I think it's much simpler: we, the voters, detest being lied to so often even the dimmest among us realize and resent it.
Th GOP has endlessly lied about having an alternative to current healthcare laws and requirements, and, after more than a decade of this, even the least tuned in voters know it.
Democrats have endlessly lied about supporting the working class while selling us all out (remember the government option carved out of the ACA by Joe Lieberman, who shamelessly betrayed his party and nation to help corporations?). By the time of the dimwitted and senile Biden and the DEI caricature Harris this had become too obvious for any to keep ignoring.
Voters want stability and strength and the current Democrats are still horribly weak on these essential values. The GOP is corrupt, but does project power and strength, the father figure to the Democrats' scolding mommy image.
While there are other, underlying issues, such as voters caring far less, even minorities, about racial representation than the DNC does, inverting MLK's famous lines about content of character being more worthy of judgment than color of skin, at its heart the Democrats have morphed into servants of the elite rather than fighters for the working class and the working class knows it.
I care much more that Hakeem Jeffries is a corporate lawyer for the elite than he is black. I'd much rather see a labor leader of any shade or either gender as House Speaker than a lobbyist for the rich, but the Democratic leadership much prefers their looming symbolic victory to actual progress or aid for any of us not on their donor lists.
We need a party that supports the majority of Americans. Neither of the current choices do. That's the essence of our discontent.
Democrats’ problem with the working class isn’t that they represent the corporate elite, it’s that they represent the top-20% college educated managerial/professional elite that monopolizes opportunity for itself and has left the 80% behind. Class resentment is 80-20, not 99-1, no matter how many times Democrats try to protect their base by deflecting it that way.
Class resentment may well follow the Pareto principle of 80/20, but wealth is actually even more concentrated: the .1% hold about 15% of the nation's total household wealth.
The top 1% hold roughly 31.7% to 34.8% of total U.S. wealth (reaching a record 31.7% to nearly 32% in recent Federal Reserve data).
The top 20% of Americans together own the vast majority of national wealth—typically upwards of 85% to 89% (with the top 1% holding ~32%, the next 19% holding around 50–55%, and the top 10% alone holding over 68%
So the actual donor class members are far more often the most wealthy individual out of the next 1000 or even 10,000 richest Americans.
Otherwise I agree. The central point is the Democrats aren't really even effectively pretending anymore to actually represent the interests of the vast majority of those of us who show up and work to have money to pay our bills.
Google search data for what that is worth.
It’s not about concentration of dollars or the ability to make political donations. It’s also not about race or gender.
It’s about the vast difference in lifestyles and opportunities for social and economic advancement between the 20% managerial/professional class - effectively a self-perpetuating upper caste -!and the 80% who lack four year degrees and upper middle class parents.
Richard Reeves’ book Dream Hoarders sums up the 80-20 class issue nicely.
I think that’s why their former TLP colleague (John Halpin) has been extolling cynicism as a virtue.
I often think he is not wrong.
It is interesting to me to see the focus on how things feel, rather than whether the economy is growing or declining, whether employment is increasing or declining, and whether wage income is growing or declining. Democrats might also focus on economic factors and attract voters who respond more to facts than feelings.
All fourteen of them. If that approach worked, candidates would be handing out fact sheets instead of spending millions on emotionally loaded commercials.
If you believe the polls, the they/them ad was the most effective piece of political propaganda of all time. Moving 2-3 points in a locked down race (and country) is no small thing. That wasn't about strength but about whose side are you on.
“Propaganda”
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. The Democrats don’t get to simultaneously push (trans)gender ideology and pretend that they don’t push it.
The ad was actually about change because it presented voters with a choice between the side in favor of the previous status quo (us) and the side in favor of social change (they/them).
The chart showing a large number of people believe that we are currently politically unstable reminds me that change is hard, even when things are going to get better. It's like the abused spouse who is terrified of change; better to stay and get slapped around than go into the unknown.
I'm not looking for much to actually occur politically until Jan of 29, when whoever wins is inaugurated. Dems will win the midterms, maybe by a lot, maybe by less, whatever happens it will be gridlock with one possible exception.
Yesterday both parties agreed on an infrastructure permitting bill by both adding things they wanted rather than taking out things they didn't like. It was too good for both parties to pass up. We will need to make much more electricity, AI or not. Electric cars, busses, and trucks are becoming cheaper than gas. Battery storage is making solar a possibility for that crucial peak generating time of day.
An actual bill has to wait until after the midterms, and god knows what extremists on both sides can do before a bill actually passes, but at least there are a lot of people agreeing.
It's only natural that Democrats and the media who are the new conservative party reject AI. AI is new, and a big threat to people who might not be as bright as their phones. 15% of journos now work for the NYT, and they are very replaceable.
Hijacking turned out ok.
A great example of what I call populist fusion. A different sort of bipartisan ship which has traditionally been where the establishments divides up the goodies rather than empowering the people.