Can we stop ‘going forward’?

There are some popular phrases that just grate on my nerves. You find them everywhere, especially when people are speaking on TV. They are just filler, often not serving any real function, and almost always they can be eliminated with any loss of clarity.

Here is an example that I found in a recent post by PZ Myers where he quoted the CEO of some video company saying the following:

“We’ve been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security. I think that got us into a place where, reaching the heights of Monument Valley 3 [production], contractors were always a relatively low percentage of our employee base. I think that’s something we’re looking to change going forward.

I think going forward, we’ll see that we’ve got a core team and any growth will come through contractors, which is something I hate about the industry. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years, and those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good. You want to be able to give that kind of stability […] but I think that’s a shift in how we want to work with people going forward.”

[Read more…]

Switzerland votes against population limits

Switzerland had a referendum yesterday on whether to place a limit of 10 million on the total population of the country by 2050, and the result was no, with 54% voting against the measure.

The referendum was closely watched in Brussels. A “yes” vote would have set Switzerland on a collision course with the EU, jeopardizing the country’s free-movement agreement with the bloc. Sixty percent of Swiss goods are sold to the EU, but that trade depends on their mutual pact.
…

The referendum was proposed by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, which argued it would help relieve pressures on the country’s environment and public services. The party has a long history of campaigning against immigration.

The “no” campaign focused on how restricting immigration might impact sectors like health care, where foreign-born workers are overrepresented. It also highlighted the risks for Switzerland’s relations with the EU, and the hazards of isolation more broadly in an unstable geopolitical environment.

Switzerland currently has a population of 9.1 million, which is set to rise above 10 million in the early 2040s. Some 28 percent of the current Swiss population was born abroad.

[Read more…]

What may be in the rumored US-Iran peace deal?

While Trump has been vacillating over whether there is an imminent peace deal or whether he will resume bombing, there clearly have been ongoing negotiations. What has been lacking in US media are details about what the deal may contain, other than vague statements that Trump has denounced as false because it seems like he has gained little. Trump has made at least 40 claims that a deal is imminent and he is such a liar that it is hard to take seriously anything he says. But Drop Site News has been monitoring Iranian media and they have published what the Iranians see as the framework of the proposed deal.

A number of terms in the memorandum of understanding (MOU) have been reported on by Iranian state media, although the details have yet to be finalized and have not been officially confirmed by Tehran or Washington. They include:

  • A permanent and immediate cessation of war on all fronts, including Lebanon.
  • Lifting of the U.S. naval blockade within 30 days.
  • Commitments from the U.S. not to expand its military presence in the region.
  • Sixty days of negotiations to reach a final agreement “based on nuclear issues and the complete lifting of” sanctions.
  • Reopening the strait of Hormuz within 30 days “with Iranian arrangements.”
  • Final negotiations will not begin before the release of half of Iran’s frozen funds, the suspension of oil sanctions and the lifting of the naval blockade. “Discussions about Iran’s missile program and support for resistance groups have been definitively removed from the agenda,” IRNA reported.
  • The 60-day period will address three issues left unresolved in the current MOU: the continuation of Iran’s peaceful nuclear program, the lifting of sanctions, and a mechanism for compensating Iran for its losses.
  • “If Tehran decides to sign the memorandum, some of its frozen funds will be released immediately, and the rest gradually,” IRNA reported.
  • The question of U.S. sanctions will reportedly be adjudicated during the 60-day negotiating period.
  • The memorandum contains no Iranian commitments on the nuclear issue and no U.S. commitment to lift sanctions.

Iran clarifies Hormuz control in light of the deal: Iran’s official state news agency released a statement stressing that “contrary to what is being circulated by Western media, Iran will not commit to relinquishing control of the Strait of Hormuz.”

[Read more…]

Here we go again, Trump vacillating wildly on Iran

Trump’s flailing over how to extricate himself from the Iran fiasco gets ever more desperate. It would be comical (and indeed late night talk show hosts are ridiculing him on this) if it did not have such dire consequences. Trump keeps switching from saying that a peace deal with Iran is imminent and will be signed in a matter of days and that they have pretty much agreed to all his demands (which the Iranians stoutly deny) to then threatening to start bombing, to then calling it off (sometimes all within one day) saying that the Iranians have agreed to a deal on his terms, which they deny again.

In the latest chaotic reversals, he seemed outraged that the Iranian drones had shot down a US helicopter and in retaliation he started bombing again.

The United States launched a second round of airstrikes on Iran into Thursday morning after President Donald Trump warned that Tehran would “pay the price” for stalled negotiations, and Iran responded with strikes targeting Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan.
…

The U.S. Central Command said it had “completed” its latest round of airstrikes just before sunrise in Iran. The military command said the strikes came “in response to Iran’s unwarranted and continued aggression” and targeted “Iranian military surveillance capabilities, communication systems and air defense sites.” It did not elaborate on the damage done by the strikes, which it said were carried out by the U.S. Air Force, Marines and Navy.
…

Iran responded by launching strikes on Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan, and Kuwait closed its airspace as its air defenses fought off the attack. Kuwait’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation said flights were being diverted to other airports, without elaborating.

[Read more…]

Encouraging primary election results for progressives

Tuesday saw primary races in many states. Most primary races (unlike the few ‘jungle’ primaries in states like California) are within parties to see who gets to be the party’s nominee in the general election and hence they are better seen as indicators of the relative strengths of the competing factions within the parties.

And yesterday’s results showed promising results for progressives in the Democratic party.

Bernie Sanders and his progressive allies are on a hot streak.

The Vermont senator’s endorsed candidates cleaned house on Tuesday, a coast-to-coast show of force headlined by a resounding win for his embattled Senate pick in Maine, Graham Platner, in spite of days of turmoil that had thrown his candidacy into question.

It wasn’t just Platner. Hours before his victory was called, Sanders-backed Randy Villegas advanced to a runoff ahead of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s endorsed candidate, as he fights to face Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) in a swingy Central Valley seat. Other Sanders-backed victors for House seats in recent weeks include Adam Hamawy and Analilia Mejia in New Jersey, Sam Forstag in Montana, Brian Poindexter in Ohio and Bob Brooks in a key Pennsylvania swing district.
…

“Progressives are on the march,” Sanders declared last week in a statement lauding his slate of “candidates willing to stand up for working people [who] are taking on the establishment and WINNING.” On Tuesday, he commended Platner’s “landslide victory.”

The senator’s support has been instrumental in powering unknown candidates to major wins this cycle, a demonstration of just how much political influence the 84-year-old progressive leader still commands.

[Read more…]

Trump booed at basketball game

He attended game 3 in New York of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio. Given that he has been booed whenever he shows up at sports events and is shown on the bog screen, at this game they showed him during the playing of the national anthem, no doubt thinking that people would not boo at that time.

No such luck.

Donald Trump was loudly booed when he was shown on the video screens at Madison Square Garden on Monday night before Game 3 of the NBA finals between the San Antonio Spurs and New York Knicks.

Trump was shown on the jumbotron while the Star-Spangled Banner was being sung before the game, and jeers and boos broke out around the arena. The president was shown for a little over eight seconds and held a salute the whole time with a smile on his face. A few seconds later, the video board showed Knicks players in line and the boos turned to cheers.

[Read more…]

It may take the collapse of the AI bubble to save us from these sociopaths

There is a lot in the news these days that is depressing so it takes a lot for me to point to one article and say that it may be a top competitor to be the most depressing thing that I have read this year. It is a long profile of OpenAI head Sam Altman and it deals with him and all the other big players jockeying to be the biggest player in the AI world.

[T]he founding premise of OpenAI was that it would have to be different. The founders, who included Altman, Sutskever, Brockman, and Elon Musk, asserted that artificial intelligence could be the most powerful, and potentially dangerous, invention in human history, and that perhaps, given the existential risk, an unusual corporate structure would be required. The firm was established as a nonprofit, whose board had a duty to prioritize the safety of humanity over the company’s success, or even its survival. The C.E.O. had to be a person of uncommon integrity.

But Altman is portrayed in the article by many who have worked with him as utterly untrustworthy and a power-seeker, whose actions did not match the noble goals that it had set forth.
 [Read more…]

The trial of Rodrigo Duterte

Rodrigo Duterte was president of the Philippines from 2016 to 2022. A self-proclaimed tough guy, he encouraged the extra-judicial killings (i.e., murder without trial by government forces) of supposed drug dealers and criminals, claiming that he himself had carried out such killings when he had been mayor of the town of Davao. The victims were alleged drug users, alleged petty criminals, and street children. After leaving the office of the presidency, he was re-elected as mayor of Davao in 2025.

But he may not be able to serve out his term as mayor because a little over a year ago, he was arrested and taken to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to stand trial and is now the first former Asian head of state to stand trial in the ICC.

On March 11, 2025, Duterte touched down at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport after a flight from Hong Kong to find more than three hundred officers waiting for him. Under “Operation Pursuit,” Filipino police and Interpol executed an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant tying him to crimes against humanity committed during his self-proclaimed “war on drugs” and quickly put him on a plane to the Netherlands.

The ICC judges have now confirmed that Duterte will stand trial in November 2026. We should be happy that the once untouchable strongman has been in jail for over a year and will soon be held to account for his record in power.
[Read more…]

A new twist on the Turing test?

Recent developments in AI technology and its spawning of personalized chatbots has renewed attention in the Turing test.

The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1949, is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human. In the test, a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart. The results would not depend on the machine’s ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely its answers resembled those of a human.

It seems clear that, by and large, these AI chatbots can simulate human conversation pretty well, apart from the tendency to occasionally hallucinate, to make up stuff and say it will confidence, a trait that many humans also exhibit. If one is not aware of the details of what it says, one might easily be convinced that the made-up fact is genuine. For example, a mathematician friend of mine said that his son (also a mathematician) tested out an AI system. He multiplied two very large integers together and then fed the result into the AI system and asked whether the number was ‘prime’ i.e., not divisible by any number other than 1 and itself. The machine said ‘yes’.

But despite those well known problems, people are treating the AI bots as being at least partly sentient, as demonstrated by those who seem to have formed long-term ‘relationships ‘with them and consider them as friends or even more. So at least as far as these people are concerned, these bots seem to have passed the Turing test.
[Read more…]

The end of the American empire

During their heyday, empires seem permanent, so strong and their rivals so weak that it is hard to imagine them being displaced from their position of dominance.But empires do die and historian of empires Albert McCoy writes that all the signs indicate that we are witnessing the end of the American empire.

Writing in 1942, during some of Britain’s darkest days in World War II, the editors of the venerable London Times looked far beyond the relentless German attacks on their forces in Egypt or the Nazi U-Boat sinkings of Royal Navy ships in the Atlantic to predict their empire’s future with an uncommon prescience. With its contradictory motto of “Imperium et Libertas” (Empire and Liberty), the vast British Empire, which still covered a quarter of the globe, had already become what those editors called “a self-liquidating concern.” Once the “temporary circumstances” that had allowed Britain’s ascent — naval dominance, industrial preeminence, and “the relative weakness of rival states” — faded, that empire’s “ultimate reliance on coercion” could no longer hold. Ready for self-governance, Britain’s many colonies, the editors suggested, would soon begin breaking away and so eclipse the empire. And that prediction couldn’t have been more accurate. Within five years of that editorial’s publication, the British Empire had already started to break apart.

Writing in a May 2026 edition of the New York Times, contributing editor Christopher Caldwell made a strikingly similar prediction about the future of U.S. global hegemony. Under the provocative headline “America Is Officially an Empire in Decline,” Caldwell noted some unsettling parallels between the fate of America today and Great Britain 80 years ago. Back then, England was “deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent,” and found itself “essentially bankrupt” by the end of World War II. Apart from its “ill-fated attempt” to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, however, it managed to decolonize in a successful fashion by giving up “territories it could no longer afford.” As he points out, Britain even “wound up on reasonably good terms with its former colonial possessions.”

At the start of his second term as president in 2025, Donald Trump, Caldwell continued, “had a chance of pulling off something similar” by withdrawing “to a less expansive sphere of influence” and “refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere.” Caldwell considered that strategy potentially “workable” since “imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends.” Instead of keeping to that plan, however, Trump “has overextended the empire dangerously” by his intervention in Iran, which has now become nothing less than a “watershed in the decline of the American empire.”

[Read more…]