Day: August 28, 2025, 2:16 PM

AI Off

Chill Clowns, Political Economy

It doesn’t really matter if AI can really do your job or not, it’s so much cheaper they will try it anyway.

Exactly. That’s what so many otherwise smart people do not understand about AI. I am actually not sure how they can be so incredibly naïve about how this will work.

In short, it does not matter if an AI can actually do your job. If an MBA thinks they can string together four mediocre to bad AI agents to do your job for 1/20 the cost and 1/4 the quality, that is what is gonna happen.

It’s already happening. Pretending it’s not is just pure clownery.

The Whole Point

Chill Amusing, Annoying

This isn’t some slantwise intepretation. This is what the Dune books are about. Frank Herbert was very explicitly exploring how charismatic revolutionaries, even when they start outside the system, tend to reproduce the same oppressive structures they overthrow. That’s, like, the entire point of the whole series.

That’s not being clever, this interpretation. That is just being able to read. Dang.

Despin

Chill Political Economy

The economy is doing very poorly but it takes a while for it to be obvious.

And things are going to get so much worse.

Chill Links

Chinese astronauts make rocket fuel and oxygen in space using 1st-of-its-kind ‘artificial photosynthesis.’

One Universal Antiviral to Rule Them All?

China’s Guowang megaconstellation is more than another version of Starlink.

We now live in a highly polarized country, where even election results are contested. Politicians are cheerleaders, not statesmen. Economic statistics are discussed not in terms of their implication for the economy, but rather whether they have been altered to reflect a political agenda.

The Great Postal Boycott Must End. Inflation about to get insane.

The AI revolution is beginning to have a significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the American labor market.

To fend off the far right, democracy needs to deliver.

We have become an authoritarian state, and our top newsrooms are in denial. And soon we’ll be in a depression, and they will be in denial about that as well.