HeavenlyPossum

Two things can be true at the same time:

• Intellectual property is a regime of state-enforced monopolies that exists to extract value from people using otherwise non-rivalrous ideas, to the advantage primarily of the already-rich and to the detriment of a world deprived of the free expression of those ideas, and

• Under a system in which people depend on returns to their intellectual labor to survive in capitalist markets, stealing the product of that labor with impunity does real harm to those workers.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/09/openai-chatgpt-microsoft-copyright-legal-case-documents-revelations/

British police will arrest pensioners for wearing t-shirts with words that merely *resemble* the name of the proscribed group Palestine Action but allowed a gang of masked racists to block the Port of Dover and terrorize people. The state will say a lot of words about its values and priorities, but its use of violence will always tell you what it actually cares about.

Not having any theory of the state or capitalism is how you end up with a society full of people who are intensely aware that things are failing and breaking down and falling apart but can’t explain why any of it is happening. So people on the right blame globalists or The Jews or DEI or trans kids in a desperate attempt to find someone to blame and sacrifice. And liberals blame leftists and anarchists for not voting hard enough or the general public for being too stupid to know they’re really in a vibecession and things are great, actually.

I had to attend mandatory training on the use of “AI” in the workplace today and two of the rules they told us are: 1) we can’t use AI to do our work for us, such as by asking it to reach conclusions that we might pass off as our own work, and 2) we can use AI when we have more data than is reasonable for a person to analyze, by feeding the data into an LLM and asking it to identify patterns for us. When I tried to explain that these are literally the same thing, and that the latter is just pretending to be the sci-version of the former, the instructor got really uncomfortable and changed the subject.

All of that said, the US is very obviously becoming dramatically weaker, very quickly, and only some of that is due to adversary action. The US has expended critical munitions and lost aircraft it cannot easily replace. It has pushed its most important naval vessels to the breaking point, taking them out of service for lengthy periods of time. It has lost bases in the Middle East but, more importantly, lost credibility with other states and corroded alliances on which the US relies for a wide array of powers: basing, overflight, logistics, intelligence sharing, and partner forces to augment its own. It has spent enormous sums of money not just on the war, but all sorts of boondoggles that will never come to fruition, like the “Trump-class battleship.” In its quest for ideological purity, it has purged its ranks of competent officers and shuttered components intended to think through problems like “how to win wars.”

So the US suffering defeat at the hands of another state is not, by itself, intrinsically good. We, the subaltern, don’t benefit from an adversary growing stronger at the expense of the US if that adversary is also malign and repressive. The people of Iran and the Gulf monarchies or Palestine are not any better off for the weakening of US power in the Middle East at the hands of the Iranian state. Imagine if this were a case of Elon Musk’s firms competing with Mark Zuckerberg’s firms and capturing market share and revenue from Zuckerberg. Would any of us be better or worse off for it?

Rare good news: we can now store excess solar power to heat homes in giant batteries made of crushed soapstone sand: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/science/a-finnish-town-now-heats-itself-through-winter-using-a-giant-battery-made-of-2000-tonnes-of-sand-charged-by-cheap-electricity-and-holding-the-warmth-for-months/amp_articleshow/132531824.cms

Many people say that generative “AI” is on the cusp of super-intelligence, but it keeps doing things like this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/30/government-map-mislabels-african-countries

It’s a bit like observing Hitler in 1939, assessing that he cannot even defeat the Soviet Union much less conquer the world, and concluding that he’s nothing to worry about.

A foundational pillar of liberal electoralism is recognizing that some policies enjoy overwhelming public support but aren’t implemented by the state, and blaming the electorate for failing to want it hard enough rather than a system that consistently doesn’t care about the electorate. https://bsky.app/profile/radiofreetom.bsky.social/post/3msmgl64irc27

What does the world get in return for that massive investment? Worse than nothing: “In our in-progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it. In an eight-month study of how generative AI changed work habits at a U.S.-based technology company with about 200 employees, we found that employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so.” https://archive.is/kvJ1d “…this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return.” https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Business_2025_Report.pdf

So, without much fanfare, the US appears to have resumed a practice that went out of favor among most states more than a century ago, and globally since the defeat of Nazi Germany: naked aggression to seize resources for the benefit of the aggressor and direct personal enrichment of the aggressor’s ruler. The US has spent the decades since 1945 enjoying immense benefits from a global system it established that transfers wealth and resources, but usually through indirect, institutional means. From Bretton Woods to the WTO and IMF to the dollar’s global reserve currency status to intellectual property regimes, US elites have redirected global wealth to themselves, but they have done so through formal institutions, processes, and international agreements.

I think that is where global capitalist society has been heading for some time—hence a few miles of rail tunnel costing more than $16 billion to construct—but generative AI seems to have super-charged this process. It is, I anticipate, the last gasp of a struggling society to add yet another layer of complexity to solve its mounting problems. A huge quantity of very real resources are being invested in this new technology, with attendant specializations, interconnections, and bureaucratic management, to…make life worse and harder and costlier than it was before. Barring some miracle breakthrough, generative AI looks to be the first global endeavor that will nakedly, undeniably represent the peak of the curve, the point at which our investments begin to cost the world more than it invests.

In his work “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Joseph Tainter argued that societies are prone to collapse when the marginal returns on additional complexity begin to plateau and then decrease. A society might find itself so complex—with so many specialists, interconnections, and layers of hierarchy to maintain—that it has few or no resources left to respond to a new problem by adding more complexity, or even by maintaining its present level of complexity. In these circumstances, a society might economize by shedding layers of complexity: losing specializations, separating previously connected components, or—my favorite—shedding layers of hierarchy.

In contrast, the US spent a mere $298 billion on its Apollo space mission and got something tangible in return: giant rockets that carried human beings to another world and back. Why is the world getting *so little* from its investment in generative AI, especially compared to other investments that cost less but produced far more? Setting aside the fact that AI is largely a scam and that the finances of AI are a titanic bubble waiting to pop at any moment, I think that discrepancy in scale is worth considering. Where else have we seen something like that? https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-ECONOMY/AI-INVESTMENT/gkvlqbgxkpb/

The Financial Times attempted to estimate the dollar value of those oil sales, since there is no public accounting by the US, and came up with a figure of $13 billion. Given how poorly the Venezuelan economy was performing even before the devastating earthquakes, it’s likely that the US has dispersed only a fraction of the money it has collected back to the Venezuelan regime. https://archive.is/0BUoO

LLMs cannot think. They do not reason. They do not plan. There isn’t even an obvious mechanism for them to be aware that a physical world exists, much less plan to interact with and manipulate it.

There’s a kind of meta-answer we can also answer, one that encompasses all the rest: Complexity. Social complexity is a problem-solving tool. Societies often add complexity when they confront new problems: new specializations, new layers of bureaucratic management, new interconnections between components of those societies. But every additional layer of complexity requires resources. A general doctor has to be fed and clothed by the labor of other people while they are performing the labor of medical care. Expand medical care from general medicine to a whole ecosystem of highly specific specialists, though, and you now have many more people to feed and clothe while they are performing their specialized care. Critically, the marginal returns on those specializations decline. The very first doctor in a community might not be able to treat every ailment, or treat them very effectively, but a generalist provides a very high marginal return on those resources invested. These are the low-hanging fruit of complexity. But a hyper-specialized doctor might only be able to provide care to a small number of people, in highly specific settings. That care is very important to the patients receiving that care, but the marginal returns on those invested resources are lower.

The wildest thing about the Argentinian claim to the Falkland Islands is that Argentina had never exercised sovereignty over the islands. And also that the people who live there don’t want to be ruled by Argentina. And also the attempt by Argentina to rule the Falklands was concocted by a failing military dictatorship that wanted to distract the public by starting a war with a foreign power it thought it could easily beat. You would think that the Argentinian public would still not be so invested in such a ridiculous misadventure that mostly resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Argentinian conscripts.

Trump has publicly claimed that the US has seized even more than that from Venezuela, and that the US is simply “taking” money from another country, and that this money has financed the invasion in January with much more left over. This might, of course, simply be Trump’s normal bullshitting and confabulation, made worse by his advancing dementia. But I’ve found that he’s rarely only ever truthful when he’s admitting having done something awful about which he’s proud. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/07/27/trump-says-us-has-sold-more-than-13-billion-of-venezuela-oil-.html

In Texas, a woman was murdered by a man with his car after he became angered by a gesture her boyfriend made. Never let anyone tell you that the US lacks honor killings, because that quite clearly what this is. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/boxer-hannah-rapp-killed-texas-driver-strikes-bicycle-rcna588234

My opinion on birth rates is that no one should have an opinion on birth rates. People should be free and empowered to have exactly as many children as they desire to have. Fussing over birth rates is biopolitics verging on fascism. And it’s even sillier when you consider how atrocious we are at anticipating fertility rates even in the near future or their effects on society.

Proponents of capitalism have explained to me repeatedly that market competition drives prices down and that capitalists cannot possibly collude to raise prices, because one of them will inevitably defect to undercut the others. Anyway: “The states and federal government accused Cal-Maine Foods, Versova and Hickman’s Egg Ranch of a behind-the-scenes arrangement to ‘artificially inflate the daily price quotations for eggs’ between June 2022 and March 2025. In particular, their investigation found that the companies coordinated on what bids they would submit to Urner Barry Publications, a company that runs an index key to determining how much grocery stores, restaurants and others pay for billions of eggs each year.” https://apnews.com/article/egg-prices-collusion-settlement-d32b05892541613df3f4e4932109ee0c

Consider that the Holland Tunnel opened in 1927, connecting New Jersey and Manhattan. It cost about $48 million to construct, equivalent to about $890 million today. Consider that the Hudson Tunnel Project, an ongoing effort to build and revitalize rail tunnels to New York City, is currently estimated to cost more than $16 billion. Why has infrastructure gotten so much more expensive to construct in places like the US? There are a variety of ways to answer this question. Labor has gotten more expensive. Regulations have proliferated. Raw materials are harder to source. And so on.

I have discovered that my boss’ boss has been an enthusiastic adopter of the Claude LLM. I already had little respect for this person, who holds the job mainly because of fortuitous timing when joining the workforce and a stubborn willingness to outlast anyone with actual talent. When editing some of my work, this person stumbled over a particular sentence of mine (it was perfectly fine so this was mostly a them-issue). Instead of offering edits, or asking me to rewrite it, this person sent me several options generated by Claude and asked me to pick which one I liked best. Now, writing clearly and conveying information accurately is basically the entirety of our jobs. There really isn’t anything else. Without a hint of irony, this person has transformed themselves into a conduit for LLM slop. If we’re just going to ask an LLM to hallucinate our work for us, there is absolutely no point for anyone to pay our salaries. Just have the chatbot shit it out.

Remember a few years ago when the press tripped over itself to report how a the Pentagon had tested an AI drone that ended up shooting its own human commander because it decided that was the most efficient way around being denied permission to strike targets? It was obviously bullshit, a mere sci-fi thought experiment, that everyone credulously ate the fuck up because of how cool it sounded. Do not believe these absolute conmen. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/01/us-military-drone-ai-killed-operator-simulated-test

“Both at his West Palm Beach home and at the office, survivors say Epstein sometimes sexually assaulted them while an officer in uniform was nearby, ostensibly to keep an eye on the newly registered sex offender. At the Florida Science Foundation, a rotating roster of officers would sit near the entrance to the office. Two women said they remembered thinking that the officers seemed afraid of Epstein.” ACAB because police exist to protect the interests and prerogatives of elites, not to protect you from “crime.” https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/20/politics/roza-gilles-jeffrey-epstein-victim-abuse

@nemobis@mamot.fr No, that is a typo of “disburse.”

I’m coming back to Tom Murphy, the astrophysicist who doomed himself into being a primitivist who celebrates babies dying because there are too many people and high infant mortality makes us love the survivors even more. Here he is, helpfully illustrating my point in my post above: “I lean toward the conclusion that modernity was inevitable. My position is reasonably strengthened by the observation that we are, in fact, where we are.” https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/09/was-modernity-inevitable/ In other words, human society produced an outcome, which means that outcome was inevitable, and to prove it was inevitable, Murphy can point to the facts that a) the outcome exists and b) things happened in the past before the present. Murphy bolsters his argument by invoking “game theory” without actually explain in what he means by this or engaging in any actual game theory (he is, after all, an astrophysicist and not a game theorist). This is a common trope in this sort of STEM approach to human society—an invocation of a sort of naive, “folk” game theory, in which one can imagine a plausible set of interactions that might lead to one outcome prevailing over another. A Just So story about states and industrial capitalism inevitably and inexorably emerging and dominating all alternatives.

I think about this incident with Italy a lot, especially when I encounter takes by well-meaning and optimistic but profoundly naive Americans like this: “the US decline is entirely and solely attributable to Trump, and as soon as he’s gone, everything will go back to normal.” https://bsky.app/profile/bythepeople1863.bsky.social/post/3mq6kxzmn2c2g

It’s hard to imagine how many times the US has had to make those requests over the course of decades. It should have been routine many, many years ago. This is the sort of oversight that should have been rendered impossible by Standard Operating Procedures. And yet…they just didn’t do it. The US has gotten sloppy in a subtle but really silly and completely unnecessary way.

So, unsurprisingly, US reserves are still catastrophically low, because the flow of oil did not meaningfully resume following the MOU. Trump’s resumption of aggression against Iran this month makes it even less likely that flows will resume any time soon. The US has managed this mostly by drawing down its Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR): “Crude-oil stocks in the SPR — a program created in the wake of the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s to deal with shortages of crude — fell to 319.5 million barrels as of the week ended July 3. That’s the lowest since 1983, according to data from the Energy Information Administration… So, if the congressionally mandated minimum is at about 250 million barrels and there are just over 300 million barrels left in the SPR, the U.S. possibly could release 1 million barrels per day for 60 days, or 2 million barrels a day for 30 days, noted Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research.” https://archive.is/vB6rs

But! Take a look at the chart in the link below, which covers vessel traffic in the Strait of Hormuz from February to 9 July. It shows that the number of vessel transits cratered after the US attacked Iran. And, other than a slight uptick in July, following the MOU, it has not meaningfully recovered. The world is *still* down about a fifth to a quarter of its oil production, as well as gas and an array of other critical industrial products. https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-update-special-report-july-9-2026/

I’ve spent much of my life diving into history, and most of the last decade exploring what we might call Deep History, an exploration of human society that treats the last few thousand years as just one small part of the human experience. Deep History teaches us that human societies are incredibly diverse, to the point that virtually every permutation has been tried somewhere by someone. There have been murderously violent societies and societies with virtually no violence at all. There have been egalitarian societies and rigidly hierarchical societies. There have been peaceful, egalitarian farmers and murderously authoritarian foragers. There have been stateless cities and hunter-gatherers with slaves and kings. There have been expansionist farmers and farmers who lived in the same spot their ancestors did 10,000 years earlier. And while every human society adapts in response to its material circumstances, there is no mechanical process that automatically and inevitably produces any particular outcome (none of which are permanent anyway). Human society does not mechanically emerge from circumstances like the result of a math problem. It is the outcome of deliberate decisions, but also random chance, and also emergent behavior. States dominate the world now, but it wasn’t obvious that would be the case until only a few centuries ago; Murphy’s teleological approach papers over all of the defeats, collapses, and near-misses that could have taken history in very different directions.

The failure by the US military to properly request permission to land in Italy was almost certainly the responsibility of some mid-level officer or senior enlisted person deep in the bowels of the US military bureaucracy, as well as all of the institutions around that person who should have known better. Donald Trump did not tell that person to ignore bilateral treaties with Italy. This isn’t an issue of some responsible general getting purged in one of Pete Hegseth’s anti-DEI moves. You cannot pin this screw-up on a single person. This is the fault of a giant bureaucracy that had figured out and routinized this sort of basic task, just…choosing not to do it.