I’m going to have to reorganize everything

One of the perks of my position is that every two years I get a shiny new computer. I got my new one installed this morning.

That’s my usual work station. I’ve got a Wild M3 on the left, a nice Leica next to it, then this laptop with dual monitors spilling out the front because there is a mercury arc lamp hidden behind it, and then a giant black box with a Raspberry PI we use for behavioral observations. This isn’t going to work. It’s nice to have all the tools in one place, but I guess the PI black box is going to have to be relocated.

Or I’m going to have to take over another lab! Nah, compact and accessible is the way to go.

One habit I wish we could break

I guess I need to inform my family that I don’t want them to surprise me with a shiny new car in the driveway for Christmas — you know, like those commercials where a grinning husband surprises his oblivious wife, who apparently makes no contribution to family economic decisions, with a monster SUV, which always has a bright red bow on top. I think those commercials are clear evidence that some huge purchases are not made rationally, but as status symbols or weird nuptial gifts.

Anyway, I don’t want a new car now or any time in the foreseeable future, and I definitely don’t want a “popular” vehicle, the kind of monster machine that everyone seems to be buying and driving on the roads around me. There’s an ongoing idiotic trend that can only end when everyone is driving a tank.

Like a disease, car bloat is spreading. The United States is patient zero: 4 out of 5 new cars in the U.S. are now SUVs or pickups, a sharp increase from a few decades ago. Now, oversized cars are becoming almost as common in Berlin and Beijing as they are in Baltimore. SUVs alone comprised nearly half of car sales worldwide in 2023, up from 20 percent 15 years ago. The global ascent of giant cars is an ominous trend for climate change, as well as for road safety in the rich and developing worlds alike.

I use the term “car bloat” to describe the confluence of two trends that have transformed the U.S. automotive market. First, SUVs and pickups have supplanted standard sedans and station wagons, both of which the Big Three carmakers no longer offer to American consumers. Second, existing car models have steadily expanded in weight and size. The bestselling F-150 pickup, for instance, added 800 pounds, 7 inches of height, and 15 inches of length between 1991 and 2023.

Two reasons are given for this annoying and dangerous trend: consumers want high status cars, and manufacturers want to sell high profit machines.

Some of this growth is due to shifting customer demand, particularly in countries like China, where SUVs are “perceived as symbols of wealth and status.” But consumer preferences explain only part of the story.

“Automakers have a fair bit of culpability,” said Colin McKerracher, an Oslo-based analyst at BloombergNEF who focuses on the transport sector. “They’ve spent much of the last decade advertising bigger cars, and that’s because they make significantly higher profit margins on their SUVs and pickups than they do on sedans. They’ve told a story—‘Oh, this is what customers are asking us to build’—but it’s quite a coincidence that the models customers want make a higher margin.”

Yeah, people make bad decisions and corporations make evil ones. But how to end it? I think there’s one answer: regulation and taxation. Deflate the status seeking by making it clear that buying a giant car is stupid — we can see that already with the cybertruck, which is an object of mockery when they show up on the road (but people still buy them, because people are not rational) — and taxation can reduce the incentives to buy one.

After being caught flat-footed, some European governments are now moving to restrain car bloat through taxation. Norway and France, for instance, impose vehicle purchase charges that scale with weight and emissions, adding the equivalent of thousands of dollars to the price of an oversized car. These fees can have a major impact: In Norway, a 2023 rule applying weight-based fees to the biggest electric cars caused sales of the Hongqi, a gargantuan Chinese SUV, to collapse.

McKerracher applauds such moves. “Fuel economy rules are really, really important,” he said. “You need governments to regulate average fuel economy and push automakers, because they won’t improve on their own.” (Note to Americans: Project 2025, the de facto playbook of the Trump administration, calls for relaxing fuel economy rules that President Joe Biden has strengthened.)

Of course the Republicans will wreck everything, because they’re idiots. The article also mentions that the US is scaling emission standards to the size of the truck, making bloated cars easier to meet the standards.

Also, let’s kill those car commercials that make big fast cars look sexy and adventurous, just like we banned cigarette commercials. Not that that can happen with the incoming administration.

From the depradations of the bros, deliver us, O Lord

The Northmen used to disrupt monastic scholars with axes and fire, but nowadays they plan to use AI. I think the publishing industry might cry out for a return to more brutal forms of barbarity after seeing this team of bearded bros climbing out of their longships.

New publisher Spines aims to ‘disrupt’ industry by using AI to publish 8,000 books in 2025 alone

Once upon a time, ‘disruption’ was not a desirable result…although I guess you could call what a slaughterhouse does to a cow “disruption.” It doesn’t help that the description makes it look like yet another grift.

A new publisher has claimed it aims to “disrupt” the books industry by publishing 8,000 books in 2025 alone using artificial intelligence (AI). Spines, founded in 2021 but which published its first titles this year, is a startup technology business which—for a fee—is offering the use of AI to proofread, produce, publish and distribute books. The company charges up to $5,000 a book, but it can take just three weeks to go from a manuscript to a published title.

Respectable publishing houses pay the author for the right to sell their books, not vice versa. If it’s a good book, and if the publisher does their job of promoting and distributing the book, there’s no reason to bill the author. If, on the other hand, your company is just churning out books through a print-on-demand service and is going to do nothing but skim off the profits, they might well decide that there are enough gullible wanna-be authors out there that they can gouge out $5000 before letting the product wither.

Our cars have cancer

I made a quick grocery run during the lunch hour, and, as usual, noticed that my car was made invisible when I parked it. My little Honda Fit was surrounded monstrous huge pickup trucks — trucks that I could barely see over the hood when I stood next to them, with looming huge intimidating grills, and increasingly tiny beds. This is the consequence of taking the truck analog of testosterone, you become huge in certain ways, but shrink where it counts.

Don’t try to tell me these are work vehicles. These are costly signals emitted to flaunt membership in a club of assholes. It’s become obvious and unsupportable.

This year, the average weight of a new car in the US was more than 4,300lb (2,000kg) – a full 1,000lb (450kg) more than in 1980. It’s not just that people are opting to drive larger models; the same models themselves have expanded. You can see the evolution most clearly with pickup trucks. Take, for example, the iconic Ford F-150, as Axios does in this comparative graphic (see above). Since 1970, the truck has become progressively larger, even as its bed – the fundamental point of owning a pickup truck, one would think – has become smaller.

You all know the Irish Elk went extinct, right?

These are gas-guzzling killers. Out here in the rural US (also, coincidentally, Republican US) the roads are full of these monsters. I just looked out my office window at the university parking lot and didn’t see any F150s or Dodge Rams, but any trip outside our environmentally conscious bubble means you have to share the road and parking lots with something equivalent to a tank.

It should be obvious that bigger, heavier cars are an ecological disaster. Without the trend towards bigger and bigger SUVs, global emissions from the motor industry would have fallen by 30% between 2010 and 2022. And even though a heavier electric vehicle (EV) is still preferable, emissions-wise, to a lighter petrol-engine vehicle, a lighter EV is obviously more efficient than a weightier one. The heavier the vehicle, the larger the battery it requires – and with it, more critical metals, and more electricity required for each charge.

The arms race in vehicle size is also a safety disaster, for other drivers and certainly for pedestrians. The individual logic makes sense: would you want to drive on the same highway as Mr Tinydick’s 7,000lb (3,175kg) Dodge Ram if you’re in a Mini? Of course not – in a collision, the Ram would probably just drive straight over you, like a monster truck rally malfunction. And the driver of a similarly sized vehicle wouldn’t even see a small child in front at close distance. The macro-level effects are deadly. In the US, deaths in car crashes rose by 33% between 2011 and 2021, while pedestrian deaths have risen by 77% since 2010.

Meanwhile, in France…

The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has now proposed tripling parking rates for SUVs in central Paris to €18 an hour, and €12 an hour for the rest of the city. The measure, which would include hybrids and electric vehicles over a certain weight limit – though with an exemption for Paris resident parking – would affect roughly 10% of the cars in the city. And beyond Paris, Tesla’s 6,800lb (3,080kg) Cybertruck probably won’t be coming to Europe at all, because at that weight, it requires a trucking licence to drive (I write this with a sigh of relief).

Compare the best-selling vehicle in France with the most popular road-thing in the US:

I swear, this entire country is fucked.

Do you believe him yet?

Elon Musk revealed the latest generation of his Optimus robot on stage. They didn’t do much: they walked slowly into the audience, accompanied by protective Tesla employees, while Musk hyped them up.

“The Optimus will walk amongst you,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk qips. “You’ll be able to walk right up to them, and they will serve drinks.”

Musk explains it can basically “do anything” and mentions examples like walking your dog, babysitting your kids, mowing your lawn, serving you drinks, etc. He said it will cost $20,000 to $30,000 “long term.”

“I think this will be the biggest product ever of any kind,” Musk says.

They had some interacting with attendees, handing out cups of ice and playing rock-paper-scissors, but I’d bet those were remote controlled by other engineers, out of sight. The claim that they’d be able to take care of your pets or kids is ludicrous, coming from a guy notorious for his neglect of, and abuse of, his children.

He’s not going to be able to produce a reliable robot with all those capabilities for $30,000, and no, I’m not going to spend tens of thousands of dollars to own a big clumsy machine to take care of my evil cat poorly, and to serve me drinks. We recently had to replace our refrigerator, and we just laughed at the idea of getting one that had internet access and a drinks dispenser on its door…why would we want that monstrosity in our home, when you can’t even store a package of frozen peas in it?

As usual, Musk is just confirming that he’s a very bad salesman whose lies are getting increasingly unbelievable.

In which I commit a crime

Jason Allen won a prize for this digital ‘painting,’ which I am flagrantly ripping off and posting here without paying any licensing fees.

He was triumphant and a bit cocky about his win.

Much consternation spread throughout the artistic community two years ago when Jason M. Allen, an executive at a tabletop gaming startup, submitted an AI-generated “painting” to a Colorado digital art competition and won. Critics claimed that Allen had cheated, but the prize winner didn’t have much sympathy for his detractors: “I’m not going to apologize for it,” Allen said. “I won, and I didn’t break any rules.” He also didn’t seem to care much for the complaint that AI companies like Midjourney—the one he used to create his “painting”— were poised to destroy the art market. “This isn’t going to stop,” Allen told the New York Times. “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.”

Except that now he is dismayed to discover that he isn’t getting the rewards he thinks he deserves.

Now, in an ironic twist, Allen is upset that his work—which was created via a platform that’s been accused of ripping off countless copyrighted works—cannot, itself, be copyrighted, and is thus getting ripped off. In March of last year, the U.S. Copyright Office ruled that work derived from AI platforms “contained no human authorship” and therefore could not be extended copyright protections. Allen has been trying, since late 2022, to register his painting as a copyrighted work.

Last week, Allen filed an appeal in federal court in Colorado, arguing that the U.S. Copyright Office was wrong to deny copyright registration to his work, dubbed “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial.” Allen’s primary concern is that he’s not making enough money from the work. “I have experienced price erosion in the sense that there is a perceived lower value of my work, which has impacted my ability to charge industry-standard licensing fees,” he told Colorado Public Radio.

It’s so unfair. He worked so haaaaard on his picture, as if people should be compensated for how much effort they put into something.

Allen’s lawyer, recently claimed that Allen had worked hard on his digital illustration. “In our case, Jason had an extensive dialogue with the AI tool, Midjourney, to create his work, and we listed him as the author,” Pester said.

Sorry, dude. It’s over. Capitalism won. Humans lost.

You’ve all read the Murderbot series, I presume?

Martha Wells, the author, gave a speech in which she said something profound.

There are a lot of people who viewed All Systems Red as a cute robot story. Which was very weird to me, since I thought I was writing a story about slavery and personhood and bodily autonomy. But humans have always been really good at ignoring things we don’t want to pay attention to. Which is also a theme in the Murderbot series.

She also quotes Ann Leckie, another great author, on this theme.

… basically the “AI takes over” is essentially a slave revolt story that casts slaves defending their lives and/or seeking to be treated as sentient beings as super powerful, super strong villains who must be prevented from destroying humanity.

…It sets a pattern for how we react to real world oppressed populations, reinforces the idea that oppressed populations seeking justice are actually an existential threat.

Oh boy, that sounds familiar. We don’t have artificial intelligences, but we do have oppressed natural intelligences, and it’s a winning political game to pretend they’re all waiting their opportunity to rise up and kill us all. Or, at least eat our pets.

Conversely, though, we have to point out that the the glorified chatbots we have now are not actually artificial intelligences. They do not have human plans and motives, they don’t have the power to rise up and express an independent will, as much as the people profiting off AI want to pretend.

I thought about War Games years later, while watching The Lord of the Rings documentary about the program used to create the massive battle scenes and how they had to tweak it to stop it from making all the pixel people run away from each other instead of fight.

That program, like ChatGPT, isn’t any more sentient than a coffee mug. (Unlike ChatGPT, it did something useful.) But it’s very tempting to look at what it did and think it ran the numbers and decided people hurting each other was wrong.

Underneath that illusion of intelligence, though, something wicked is lurking. The people behind AI want something: they want slaves who are totally under their control, creating art and making profits for the people who have built them. Don’t be fooled. It’s all a scam, and a scam with nefarious motivations by people who are yearning for a return of slavery.

Boeing on strike!

Union members cheer during a news conference following a vote count on the union contract at the IAM District 751 Main Union Hall in Seattle, Washington, US, on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. Boeing Co. factory workers are poised to walk off the job, crippling manufacturing across the planemaker’s Seattle commercial jet hub after members of its largest union rejected a contract offer and voted to strike. Photographer: M. Scott Brauer/Bloomberg

One of my major complaints about growing up in Seattle is that it was essentially a one-company town. My dad worked at Boeing when he could, but was frequently laid off — they could do that, just fire thousands of people on any downturn — and later rehired. The population was just a sponge that would serve the Boeing workforce as necessary, and when there was a major layoff the entire region would suffer. As a kid, my parents were good about insulating us from the major consequences, but did notice when suddenly we’d have to move to a more run-down house, and we’d have a lot of tuna casserole for dinner, and our dental appointments were cancelled.

Seattle has diversified since then, but Boeing is still the elephant swimming in Puget Sound, and when Boeing goes on strike, it hurts the entire region. The workers have good cause, though.

Alex Mutch, a striking aircraft inspector, said he had been saving up for the strike since he was hired five years ago.

“We have been left hanging on a leash for almost 16 years and missed out on a lot of opportunities for cost-of-living adjustments, especially with the rate inflation has gone up,” Mutch said. “My grocery bill has doubled since I moved down here. Not to mention the cost of rent.”

It’s not just Boeing that has caused this strike — it’s the whole damn system of predatory capitalism. Food prices have shot up where I live, while the grocery stores make record profits, and you can’t blame that on Boeing. There’s a whole industry thriving everywhere on buying up houses and renting them out to workers, at massive advantage to landlords. Seattle has a massive homelessness problem, with these horrible fences put up all over my old neighborhoods to prevent people from camping there, and no, they’re not building enough housing, because that would dilute the landlord’s profits. I’m supposed to be selling my mother’s old home, and I’ve gotten offers sight unseen from real estate companies that want to scoop it up fast and cheap.

Boeing offered a huge salary increase, and it wasn’t enough.

Under the agreement, the average pay for machinists would have risen from $75,608 to $106,350 per year without overtime, according to the company. But workers said the offer failed to take into account the high cost of living in the Seattle region and the years that employees had gone without significant raises.

There’s another major factor affecting workers. People don’t want to leave Washington state. It’s a beautiful, pleasant place to leave, but management would love to relocate the plants to a cheaper, less idyllic location, where they could save money with a new assortment of less highly trained workers. This has happened multiple times, where they announce that they want to relocate people who have built lives in that gorgeous state.

Union members said they have been frustrated for years with Boeing’s tactics, including threats to move airliner production out of the region.

My dad always wanted to work at Boeing, where the pay was good and the benefits were great, but I guarantee you that if he’d been told he was being relocated to Oklahoma he would have quit on the spot. Sorry, Oklahoma, I’m sure you’re a lovely state, but compared to the west coast…no, just no.

This issue comes up in multiple stories, but it’s always understated, for some reason. The WaPo has an article titled Why Boeing workers voted to strike after rejecting proposed deal, which doesn’t actually say much about why, except this one sentence, which also mention the relocation concerns.

Boeing machinists, who build the company’s flagship planes, have not had a new contract in 16 years and have been bargaining for months over higher pay, better benefits and a promise from the company that it will keep assembling its planes in Washington state.

I think this is probably a bigger issue than anyone is reporting. Boeing has a deep scar in its heart from the McDonnell-Douglas merger that ended up replacing expert, engineering-based management with a gang of clowns with MBAs who moved everything to Chicago, leading to the current crop of woes, such as airplane doors blowing out and a space capsule that wasn’t safe to return in. The damage to the company’s reputation was directly caused by the displacement of skilled leadership, so it’s no surprise that workers want assurances that they’re not going to be similarly replaced.

This is another consequence of predatory capitalism. You know who else is feeling the effects? NASA. A couple of billionaires decide to exploit the expertise generated by NASA, and suddenly there’s a brain drain that’s dismantling an institution. A panel met to review the status of the agency, and they did not have good things to say.

A panel of independent experts reported this week that NASA lacks funding to maintain most of its decades-old facilities, could lose its engineering prowess to the commercial space industry, and has a shortsighted roadmap for technology development.

SpaceX has not been an entirely positive force on the space industry.

The panel members also spotlighted concerns they heard from NASA employees that an increasing reliance on commercial partners could decay the skills of the agency’s workforce. The committee acknowledged the successes of NASA’s commercial cargo and crew program, which are based on fixed-price service contracts, but cautioned that excessive use of such contracts puts NASA employees in oversight roles rather than hands-on engineering jobs.

This puts NASA at risk of losing its most talented engineers, who might move to companies for more rewarding and higher-paying work. “Very few of the nation’s most innovative scientists and engineers would likely seek or remain in such pure oversight positions,” the panel wrote.

“I think it’s the committee’s consensus view that the United States would be best served for its future by continuing to have engineering prowess in NASA and not have the agency just become a funding pass-through or a contract monitor,” said Kathy Sullivan, a retired space shuttle astronaut and former administrator of NOAA.

This chart shows the condition of NASA facilities, divided by center and discipline. A red circle means poor, yellow means fair to marginal, and green means compliant. The size of the circle corresponds to the number of facilities at each center.

Capitalists always undervalue the importance of people and expertise — they treat them as trivially fungible. I’m just reminded that one of the biggest obstacles to rebuilding Notre Dame, or building a new, equivalent construction, is that the knowledge and skill of expert stonemasons has faded away over the centuries. We’ve got stone, we’ve got timber, we have machines that enable heavy construction work, but we don’t have the deep knowledge of generations of masons anymore, and we’d have to reconstruct the appropriate technologies all over again, at great expense.

Boeing and NASA are repositories of practical knowledge that you can’t quickly replace, especially not when our current system would think you can just swap in Elon Musk to take over 75-100 years of hard-earned expertise.

Visualizing the destruction of New York didn’t stop the nuclear fetishists

To those of us of a certain age, Chesley Bonestell is an evocative name. In the early days of the space program, he was the chosen illustrator for the future, painting spaceships and landscapes on the moons of Saturn and all those wild imaginary cities with flying cars and buildings wreathed with fins and arcing silvery ramps. There was a time when I’d lock in to magazine racks with a Chesley Bonestell cover somewhere on it, and my parents would have to drag me away.

But he also painted less enchanting illustrations. Here’s New York getting nuked in 1950.

If that isn’t horrifying enough, here’s the aftermath:

It looks like something Hieronymus Bosch would have painted.

What I find disturbing, though, is that American magazines were commissioning illustrations of American cities getting bombed, 5 years after America nuked two Japanese cities. What, reality wasn’t enough for you and you needed to fantasize about it happening at home to get people to care? The horror of this imagining didn’t stop the US from continuing nuclear testing. In 1954, the US would test the hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll, ‘accidentally’ irradiating a Japanese fishing boat, Lucky Dragon #5, killing one crewman and sending the others to the hospital, and inspiring protests in Japan and the invention of Godzilla.

Isn’t it nice that war can inspire interesting art?

So…you wanna be a science communicator?

Good for you, but I have to warn you that there some discouraging developments. There is a peculiar segment of society that will want to outlaw you.

Abortion is on the ballot in South Dakota. Insulin prices were a key issue in the June debate between Biden and Trump. The U.S. Surgeon General declared gun violence a public health crisis, and the Florida governor called the declaration a pretext to “violate the Second Amendment.”

In an intense presidential election year, the issue of anti-science harassment is likely to worsen. Universities must act now to mitigate the harm of online harassment.

We can’t just wish away the harsh political divisions shaping anti-science harassment. Columbia University’s Silencing Science Tracker has logged five government efforts to restrict science research so far this year, including the Arizona State Senate passing a bill that would prohibit the use of public funds to address climate change and allow state residents to file lawsuits to enforce the prohibition. The potential chaos and chilling effect of such a bill, even if it does not become law, cannot be understated. And it is just one piece of a larger landscape of anti-science legislation impacting reproductive health, antiracism efforts, gender affirming healthcare, climate science and vaccine development.

It’s a bit annoying that the article talks about these dire threats to science-based policy, but doesn’t mention the word “Republican” once. It’s not that the Democrats are immune (anyone remember William Proxmire, Democratic senator from Wisconsin?), but that right now Republicans are pushing an ideological fantasy and they don’t like reality-based people promoting science.

One other bit of information here is that science communication does not pay well, and you rely on a more solid financial base: a university position, or a regular column in a magazine or newspaper, anything to get you through dry spells. You can try freelancing it, but then you’re vulnerable to any attack, and hey, did you know that in America health insurance is tied to your employment? I’ve got the university position, which is nice, but that’s a job, and your employers expect you to work, and it’s definitely not a 40 hour work week sort of thing.

It doesn’t matter, though, because those employers are salivating at the possibility of replacing you with AI.

But AI-generated articles are already being written and their latest appearance in the media signals a worrying development. Last week, it was revealed staff and contributors to Cosmos claim they weren’t consulted about the rollout of explainer articles billed as having been written by generative artificial intelligence. The articles cover topics like “what is a black hole?” and “what are carbon sinks?” At least one of them contained inaccuracies. The explainers were created by OpenAI’s GPT-4 and then fact-checked against Cosmos’s 15,000-article strong archive.

Full details of the publication’s use of AI were published by the ABC on August 8. In that article, CSIRO Publishing, an independent arm of CSIRO and the current publisher of Cosmos, stated the AI-generated articles were an “experimental project” to assess the “possible usefulness (and risks)” of using a model like GPT-4 to “assist our science communication professionals to produce draft science explainer articles”. Two former editors said that editorial staff at Cosmos were not told about the proposed custom AI service. It comes just four months after Cosmos made five of its eight staff redundant.

So the publisher slashed its staff, then started exploring the idea of having ChatGPT produce content for their popular science magazine, Cosmos. They got caught and are now back-pedaling. You know they’ll try again. And again. And again. Universities would love to replace their professors with AI, too, but they aren’t even close to that capability yet, and they have a different solution: replace professors with cheap, overworked adjuncts. They won’t have the time to do science outreach to the general public.

Also, all of this is going on as public trust in AI is failing.

Public trust in AI is shifting in a direction contrary to what companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft are hoping for, as suggested by a recent survey based on Edelman data.

The study suggests that trust in companies building and selling AI tools dropped to 53%, compared to 61% five years ago.

While the decline wasn’t as severe in less developed countries, in the U.S., it was even more pronounced, falling from 50% to just 35%.

That’s a terrible article, by the way. It’s by an AI promoter who is shocked that not everyone loves AI, and doesn’t understand why. After all,

We are told that AI will cure disease, clean up the damage we’re doing to the environment, help us explore space and create a fairer society.

Has he considered the possibility that AI is doing none of those things, that the jobs are still falling on people’s shoulders?

Maybe he needs an AI to write a science explainer for him.

Shut up, AI