The Trump memestock

I don’t usually cover news, but I want to highlight some recent finance shenanigans. Much of what I’m doing here is recapping the Wikipedia article, with some additional context.

Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) is a company that owns Truth Social—Donald Trump’s alternative to X. TMTG recently merged with Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC). DWAC is a type of company known as special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC). A SPAC is basically an empty shell company, whose entire purpose is to go public (meaning, publicly traded on the stock market), and then merge with a private company so that the private company can be public. SPACs are a method of skipping the usual bureaucracy required to take a company public. (See: educational video on SPACs.)

In other words, thanks to this merger, it’s now possible to buy and sell shares of Donald Trump’s Twitter clone.

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Bigots will seize upon anything to advance bigotry

March 31st is the day that has been designated Transgender Day of Visibility and president Biden made an annual proclamation to that effect. The date is an international recognition that has been around since 2009. The White House routinely issues proclamations such as this to recognize various things, and this one was one of 11 that were issued on March 29th.

But this year, March 31st is also Easter Sunday and so bigots have shrilly proclaimed that the date of the visibility day was deliberately chosen by the White House so as to be an insult to Christianity.
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Shock win for Democrat in Alabama, and Kari Lake admits defaming election official

There is an old political saying that ‘all politics is local‘, meaning that candidates for office needed to emphasize their local connections and highlight local issues in order to connect with voters. This was especially true for down ballot races that were for seats in state and local elected bodies. While national issues sometimes entered the discussion, they tended not to be front and center.

Not anymore. Nowadays, national issues are driving pretty much all elections, tending to overshadow local issues like infrastructure projects. As a consequence, local races are now viewed as venues for testing national issues. Hence the shock result in an Alabama state house race is raising eyebrows.

Alabama is a solid red state and the house seat had been comfortably won in 2022 by a Republican David Cole by a margin of 54-46% over Democrat Marilyn Lands. But Cole had to resign after being found guilty of voter fraud. (Is anyone surprised snymore that the party that shouts loudest about voter fraud seems to regularly produce people who actually commit it?)
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NOFORN//TS//SCI Unredacted

Classified materials and their handling appears to still be a news story. Back in 2016, I wrote a bit [stderr] about Clinton (Hillary)’s personal email server, which was accurate as far as I could make it, but that story has been somewhat shaded by recent mis-handling stories. Having to watch journalist and lawyers on the topic can be extremely painful, because of my constant awareness that the information about how classification regimes work is out there and all you need to do is a day or 2 of research.

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Islands of Insight teaches logic puzzles

Islands of Insight is a recent puzzle game taking place in a shared online world. This, by itself, is an extremely ambitious concept, because normally “puzzle” and “MMO” do not go together.  I know only of two other games that tried to be puzzle MMOs: Uru, a 2003 game in the Myst franchise that dropped the MMO aspect before commercial release; and Puzzle Pirates, another game from 2003 which is a “puzzle game” in the sense of Tetris.

There are three challenges facing a puzzle MMO: Puzzle games generally have small cult followings at best, whereas an MMO requires some level of mass appeal to be commercially successful. Puzzles are often solitary activities, whereas MMOs are social. Puzzles generally require careful bespoke design, whereas MMOs want endless content.

Did Islands of Insight succeed in squaring the circle, to create the Puzzle MMO? No, not at all. Despite the shared world, it’s not a very social game, and would work equally well solo. And while players seem to like it, it wasn’t commercially successful enough to support its development team.

But the game successfully addressed at least one of the challenges of the puzzle MMO.  They created over 10,000 puzzles with high quality standards to populate a large 3D world. These include perspective puzzles, mazes, hidden objects, moving block puzzles, and many more. I’d like to focus on the most numerous type of puzzle, the logic grid.

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But what about Free Speech?

You better not mention Hans Kristian Graebener on Twitter — Elon Musk doesn’t like it when you expose one of his favorite Nazis.

Twitter is nuking every single post that mentions the name Hans Kristian Graebener, even in quotes. Everyone that posts it is getting hit. I’ve never seen sitewide censorship like this done specifically on behalf of a neo nazi.

Gosh. He’ll suspend his support for free speech to help conceal a notorious creep? Maybe his support isn’t that deep.

Have they tried calling him Gräbener? It might sneak past some of the automated blocking.

People are good at producing vomit all on their own

The last couple of posts were all about blaming AI for the decay of the internet. I must be fair and impartial, though: humans are also to blame.

For instance, Andrew Tate is in and out of jail and facing extradition from Romania. The only reason we know of that scumbag’s existence is thanks to the internet.

Tate and his brother are dual US-British nationals. Tate is a former kickboxer who has built up a massive social media following — 8.9 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter — by sharing misogynistic views about the role of women and masculinity.

He was previously banned from various prominent social media platforms for those views, but has been reinstated on X.

As far as I know, he had no assistance from AI — he built that empire with his own personal human hate-mongering.

It goes without saying that he “has been reinstated on X,” because Elon Musk is another human who is enabling more poisonous speech.

Link Roundup: March 2024

All the links today are videos.  So, if you don’t like videos, you’re welcome to skip.

AI Slop World | Jack Saint (video, 28 min) – Jack Saint discusses the sort of AI trash that we love to mock, such as the recent incident where someone made a terrible Wonka-themed event, and advertised it with AI art.  I appreciate Jack’s more nuanced take here, because I think “haha AI bad” really misses a lot.  I mean, it is funny.  But this is basically some guy desperate for money doing something incompetent and scammy to make money.  This is a phenomenon that predates generative AI, and arguably could have been done better with stock art and plagiarism.  We should be asking if this is truly representative of what we fear to come out of AI, or if it’s just the easy target.

I’d like to talk about this more in the future, but something I’ve noticed, is that a lot of anti-AI discussion specifically targets generative AI as it is used in a creative mode, such as generating articles or visual art.  It’s also said that the big problem with AI is that it’s going to take our jobs.  I think people are missing that there’s a mismatch between these two points.  If generative AI does indeed replace a bunch of jobs across industries, you gotta realize that many of those jobs are not creative.  So you can mock AI art for being soulless and bad at drawing hands, but none of that is going to mean anything when LLMs are used to perform non-creative tasks with objectively measurable outcomes–and still replace jobs in the process.  So the mockery of AI art feels like uselessly grabbing at the ankles of a machine that actually runs on treads.

Our Car Was Stolen!? A video essay | The Leftist Cooks (video, 1:31 hours) – A kafkaesque anecdote interspersed with a discussion of the psychology of poverty.  For instance, people in poverty have stronger time discounting functions, meaning they’re more likely to prefer a marshmallow now than two marshmallows later.  But this is arguably entirely rational.

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The GOP ties itself up in knots over Alabama IVF ruling

After the Alabama supreme court ruled that embryos are children and deserve all the protections that children are entitled to, IVF clinics in the state began to stop providing IVF services because of fears that if any embryo were to be destroyed (which is done routinely with embryos that are no longer needed), they could be culpable.

The ruling has caused an uproar because IVF treatments have broad support. So the state legislature rushed to pass a law to protect IVF doctors and parents from any legal repercussions. But apparently the law is pretty tortured in its reasoning.

The enacted legislation doesn’t define or clarify whether under state law frozen embryos created via IVF have the same rights as children. Rather, the narrowly tailored bill is designed to protect doctors, clinics and other health care personnel who provide IVF treatment and services by offering such workers civil and criminal “immunity.”

The new law will “provide civil and criminal immunity for death or damage to an embryo to any individual or entity when providing or receiving services related to in vitro fertilization.”

It says that “no action, suit, or criminal prosecution for the damage to or death of an embryo shall be brought or maintained against any individual or entity when providing or receiving services related to in vitro fertilization.”

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Every time the police are scrutinized, they look worse

I highly recommend this 3-part, thorough article about the police by Radley Balko. It’s central focus is on the Minneapolis Police Department (which is a horror) and on George Floyd, but it’s wide-ranging and indicts the corruption, racism, and brutality of police forces everywhere.

It’s a long series, and I can’t possibly do it justice, so I’ll just highlight one thing that leapt out at me. The police all around the country have resorted to a phony medical excuse for deaths in police custody. You’ll hardly believe it — it’s called excited delirium.

Excited delirium, on the other hand, posits that some people just spontaneously die during intense, high-stress interactions with police, through no fault of law enforcement. It’s also highly dubious and not supported by any major medical organization.

Over the last several decades, there’s been a concerted effort to pressure medical examiners to diagnose excited delirium when the real cause of death was positional asphyxia. This not only exonerates cops who kill, it encourages police practices that will lead to more deaths.

George Floyd’s death prompted renewed scrutiny of excited delirium and its origins. This was overdue.

The first reason to be skeptical of the condition is that it’s rarely if ever diagnosed outside a law enforcement context. If there really is a condition that causes people to die spontaneously during a mental health crisis, while under the influence of some drugs, or while panicked with no accompanying signs of medical distress, we ought to see it under other high-stress, volatile scenarios like street or bar brawls, or when people are forcibly admitted to psychiatric facilities. This just doesn’t happen.

The origin of excited delirium is shonky and steeped in bigotry. But it doesn’t involve police or police restraint. The condition was first described in the mid-1980s by Miami medical examiner Charles Wetli after a wave of black sex workers were found dead under mysterious circumstances. Because some of the women had cocaine in their system, Wetli theorized that there must be something about the physiology of black women that causes them to spontaneously die after mixing cocaine with sex.

The phrase “physiology of black women” ought to have set off alarms all over the place. Yeah, this swarm of dead black women whose bodies are littering the streets…nobody killed them. They just drop dead when mixing cocaine with sex. Yeah, that’s the ticket. File those corpses away under “natural causes”. No way they were murdered.

Except…

Despite the absurdity of Wetli’s theory, it precluded homicide as a manner of death, which made it much more difficult for police to investigate the possible murders. It wasn’t until a victim was found in a similar state as the other bodies, but had no cocaine in her system, that the city’s chief medical examiner reviewed the doctor’s work in the other cases. He found evidence of asphyxiation that Wetli had overlooked. Police eventually arrested a serial killer named Charles Henry Williams for the murders. Williams is now believed to have killed at least 32 black women through asphyxiation.

Wetli was promoted and became a medical examiner in New York, where he continued to promote ludicrous, racist theories.

You might be saying right now that George Floyd was not a woman and wasn’t having sex, so how does this relate? Well, fact-free explanations can expand without restraint.

In the absence of any accountability, Wetli continued to develop his theory in ways that proved convenient for law enforcement. He expanded excited delirium to also include black men, particularly those who die in police custody. “Seventy percent of people dying of coke-induced delirium are black males, even though most users are white,” he once said. Instead of concluding that perhaps this was because police were more likely to use excessive force against black men, Wetli added, “It may be genetic.” The diagnosis has since expanded to include “exhaustive mania,” a form of excited delirium that, conveniently, occurs in people who haven’t ingested drugs or alcohol.

If I had a nickel for every instance of a racist saying “it’s genetic”, I’d be able to buy back Twitter from Elon Musk.

Excited delirium is even more useful for the cops. In addition to making their victims conveniently drop dead while leaving the police blameless, it has several other symptoms that play into the cop’s battery of excuses.

There is no diagnostic test for excited delirium. Instead, it’s become a catch-all diagnosis based on a broad range of symptoms and behavior that could be attributed to any number of conditions — symptoms like erratic behavior, psychosis, public nudity, and, weirdly, a tendency to propel oneself through glass.

But the most absurd supposed symptoms are an imperviousness to pain and “superhuman strength.”

There are obviously some drugs that can dull a user’s sensitivity to pain. And a rush of adrenaline can prompt a person to run faster or lift more weight than they otherwise might. But the idea that excited delirium can give people near-superpowers has been incredibly harmful. The claim doesn’t merely excuse brutality, it practically demands it. It also reinforces racist tropes about the brutishness of black men.

This isn’t merely old racist nonsense from the 1980s, it was part of the MPD’s training materials at least as recently as 2021.

You know, maybe it’s not true that all cops are bad. I think you could make a good case that many of them are racist, gullible, and not very bright. They’re not intentionally evil, they’re just so damned stupid that they stumble into badness.