Let's Know Things

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Let's Know Things

A calm, non-shouty, non-polemical, weekly news analysis podcast for folks of all stripes and leanings who want to know more about what's happening in the world around them. Hosted by analytic journalist Colin Wright since 2016. letsknowthings.substack.com

  1. Bird Flu

    5 DAYS AGO

    Bird Flu

    This week we talk about H5N1, fowl plague, and viral reservoirs. We also discuss the CDC, raw milk, and politics. Recommended Book: Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari Transcript In late-January of 2025, staff at the US Centers for Disease Control, the CDC, were told to stop working with the World Health Organization, and data, and some entire pages containing such data, and analysis of it, were removed from the CDC’s web presence—the collection of sites it maintains to provide information, resources, and raw research numbers and findings from all sorts of studies related to its remit. And that remit is to help the US public stay healthy. It provides services and guidelines and funding for research and programs that are meant to, among other things, prevent injury, help folks with disabilities, and as much as possible, at least, temper the impacts of disease spread. Its success in this regard has been mixed, historically, in part because these are big, complex, multifaceted issues, and with current technology and existing systems it’s arguably impossible to completely control the spread of disease and prevent all injury. But the CDC has also generally been a moderating force in this space, not always getting things right, itself, but providing the resources, monetary and otherwise, to entities that go on to do big, generally positive things across this range of interconnected fields. Many of the pages that were taken down from the CDC’s web presence in late-January popped back up within a few weeks, and now, according to experts from around the world, these pages have been altered—some mostly the same as they were, but others missing a whole lot of data, while still others now contain misinformation and/or polemic. A lot of that misinformation and political talking points are related to things the recently re-ascendent Trump administration has made a cornerstone of its ideological platform, including anti-trans policies and things that cast skepticism on vaccines, abortion, birth control, and even information related to sexually transmitted infections. Scientists doing research that is in any way connected to concepts like diversity, equality, and inclusivity—so-called DEI issues—have been forced to halt these studies, and research that even includes now-banned words in different contexts—words like gender, LGBT, and nonbinary—have likewise been halted, or in some cases banned altogether. Data sets and existing research that happen to include any reference to this collection of terms have likewise been pulled from the government’s publicly accessible archives; so some stuff actually connected to DEI issues, but initial looks into what’s been halted and cancelled shows that things like cancer research and other, completely non-political stuff, too, has been stopped because somewhere in the researchers’ paperwork was a word that is now not allowed by the new administration. All of which is part of a much bigger story, one that I won’t get into right now, as it’s still evolving, and is very much it’s own thing; that of the purge of government agencies that’s happening in the US right now, at the apparent behest of the president, and under the management of the world’s wealthiest person, Elon Musk, via his task force, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. This process and the policies underpinning it are facing a lot of legal pushback, even from other Republicans, in at least a few cases. But it’s also a story that’s evolving by the day, if not the minute, and the long-term ramifications are still up in the air; some are calling it the first move in an autogolpe, a coup from within, while others are calling it a hamfisted attempt to seem to be doing things, to be reducing expenses in the government, but in such a way that none of the actions will be particularly effective, and most will be countered by judicial decisions, once they catch up with the blitzkrieg-like speed of these potentially illegal actions. There’s been some speculation that this will end up being more of an albatross around the neck of the administration, than whatever it is they actually hope to accomplish with it—though of course there are just as many potentially valid concerns that, again, this is a grab for power, meant to centralize authority within the executive, with the president, and that, in turn could make it difficult for anyone but a Republican, and anyone but a staunch ally of Trump and his people, to ever win the White House again, at least for the foreseeable future. But right now, as all those balls are in the air and we’re waiting to see what the outcome of that flurry of activity will actually be, practically, I’d like to focus on one particular aspect of this culling of the CDC’s records, publicly available information, and staff. What I’d like to talk about today is bird flu, and what we think we know about its presence in the US right now, and how that presence is being felt by everyday people, already. — What we colloquially call bird flu, or sometimes avian flu, or the avian influenza, if you’re fancy, is actually a subtype of influenza called Influenza A virus subtype H5N1, or just H5N1. There have been many subtypes of bird flu over the generations, some of which have disappeared from the record (as far as we can tell, at least), while others are still tracked, but in animal populations in locations that make them low-risk, in terms of spreading beyond their host species. We’ve been studying various types of bird flu since at least the late-1800s, when researchers in Italy started looking into a disease colloquially called “fowl plague,” because it was afflicting chicken and other poultry flocks. This wasn’t the first time something that seems like it was probably this disease afflicted flocks and was recorded as having done so, but it was the first time such a plague was differentiated from bacterial diseases that were also prevalent in such poultry communities, and thus they could say it was something distinct from, for instance, fowl cholera, which was also pretty common back then. In the 1950s, it was confirmed that this avian flu was similar to flus that afflict humans, and in the 1970s, researchers figured out that the flus they were tracking in bird populations were diverse, in the sense that there were many subtypes, not just one universal disease. Today, we know that this type of Influenza A virus, of which H5N1 is just one example, are super common in wild waterfowl, and they’ve achieved this commonality, in part, by living in their respiratory and gastrointestinal systems without negatively effecting their host. So the birds can fly around and eat and peck at things without even getting a case of the bird sniffles, which means they’re less likely to isolate from their kin, which means they’re more likely to spread it to all of their friends. Waterfowl also tend to travel great distances, just as a matter of course, migrating across continents, in some cases, but in others simply flitting from lake to pond to puddle, looking for food. Domesticated birds, like chicken and ducks that are kept for their eggs or meat, tend to catch bird flu either by socializing with their wild kin, or by coming into contact with their feces, or surfaces that have been contaminated by their feces. In this way, traveling flocks of ducks and geese and seagulls, which maybe set down to get a drink or some food at a source of water in a bird meat facility, could infect a chicken directly, but just by flying overhead and pooping, they can do the same, as chickens will tend to peck around at the ground, and if that poop is somewhere nearby, boom, chicken infected, and then, in relatively short order, the whole coop is also infected. There are vaccines that can protect chickens and other domesticated birds from avian flu, but because of how widespread H5N1 in particular is, it mutates rapidly, so these vaccines are not a silver bullet. On top of that, buying and administrating them costs poultry companies more money, and because they might administer a vaccine that hasn’t kept up with the mutations of the disease, that could end up being a sunk cost; so the money question sometimes keeps poultry providers from vaccinating their flocks, but even those who do apply this layer of protection don’t always benefit from the investment as much as they would like. And birds that are thus infected spread the disease rapidly, but also tend to die in large numbers. The relatively chilled-out symptoms experienced by water fowl doesn’t always translate to other types of birds, so chickens will sometimes conk out pretty quickly, and on top of that, when bird flu gets into a poultry population and mutates within them, the new mutation of the disease might get out into the water fowl population, and that can then cause anywhere from mild flu symptoms to reliable death in those ducks and geese and such. So the version they have might be mundane, they give that mundane version to chickens, where it mutates into something else, and that new bird flu variant then goes back into the water fowl and, no longer mundane, kills them all. So part of the problem here, as is the case with any virulent, quick-spreading, treatment-resistant pathogen with large wild reservoirs where it can survive even when the populations we’re tracking are cured or culled, is that this thing evolves just really quickly. And that means anything we do, vaccines, killing infected populations or potentially infected populations, dividing flocks into smaller, easier to manage and segment groups, generally doesn’t keep up with the emergence of new versions of the disease. This can, in turn, result in new versions that spread even quicker, that are harder to detect, or which simply kill a lot faster. It can also lead to mutations that spread more readily to and within other species, including mammals. And t

    21 min
  2. Planetary Defense

    FEB 11

    Planetary Defense

    This week we talk about DART, extinction events, and asteroid 2024 YR4. We also discuss Bruce Willis, Theia, and the Moon. Recommended Book: Exadelic by Jon Evans Transcript In the 1998 action flick Armageddon, an asteroid the size of Texas is nudged into a collision course with earth by a comet, and NASA only notices it 18 days before impact. The agency recruits a veteran oil driller, played by Bruce Willis, to fly out to the asteroid and drill a hole in it, and to detonate a nuke in that hole, which should destroy it before it hits earth, which undetonated, that rock not broken up ahead of time, would wipe out everything on the planet. It’s a fun late-90s flick loaded with some of the biggest names of the era, so I won’t ruin it for you if you haven’t seen it, but the crux of the plot is that there’s a lot going on in space, and at some point there’s a chance one of these big rocks hurling around in the void will line up just right with earth’s orbit, and that rock—because of how fast things move in space—would hit with enough force to wipe out a whole lot of living things; perhaps all living things. This film’s concept was predicated on historical events. Not the oilmen placing a nuke on a rogue asteroid, but the idea of an asteroid hitting earth and killing off pretty much everything. One theory as to how we got our Moon is that an object the size of Mars, called Theia, collided with Earth around 4.5 billion years ago. That collision, according to some versions of the so-called “giant impact hypothesis,” anyway, could have brought earth much of its water, as the constituent materials required for both water and carbon based life were seemingly most prevalent in the outer solar system back in those days, so this object would have slammed into early earth, created a disk of debris that combined that early earth’s materials with outer solar system materials, and that disk would have then reformed into a larger body, earth, and a smaller body, the moon. In far more recent history, though still unthinkably ancient by the measure of a human lifespan, an asteroid thought to be somewhere between 6 and 9 miles, which is about 10 to 15 km in diameter hit off the coast of what is today Mexico, along the Yucatan Peninsula, killing about 70% of all species on earth. This is called the Chicxulub Event, and it’s believed to be what killed the dinosaurs and all their peer species during that period, making way for, among other things, early mammals, and thus, eventually, humans. So that was an asteroid that, on the low end, was about as wide as Los Angeles. You can see why those in charge back in the 90s tapped Bruce Willis to help them handle an asteroid the size of Texas. Thankfully, most asteroid impacts aren’t as substantial, though they can still cause a lot of damage. What’s important to remember is that because these things are moving so fast, even though part of their material will be burnt up in the atmosphere, and even though they might not all be Texas-sized, they generate an absolutely boggling amount of energy upon impact. The exact amount of energy will vary based on all sorts of things, including the composition of the asteroid , the angle at which it hits, and where it hits; an oceanic impact will result in a whole lot of that energy just vaporizing water, for instance, while a land impact, which is less common because a little more than 70% of the planet is water, will result in more seismic consequences. That said, an asteroid that’s about 100 meters in diameter, so about 328 feet, which is a lot smaller than the aforementioned 6 to 9 mile asteroid—a 100 meter, 328 foot object hitting earth can result in a force equivalent to tens of megatons of TNT, each megaton equaling a million tons, and for comparison, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WWII ranged from 15,000 to 21,000 tons of TNT, mere kilotons. So a 100 meter, 328 foot asteroid hitting earth could generate somewhere between a few hundred thousand and a few million atomic bombs’ worth of energy. None of which would be particularly devastating on a planetary scale, in the sense that the ground beneath out feet would barely register such an impact. But the thin layer of habitable surface where most or all of the world’s life exists, certainly does. And that’s the other issue here, is that on top of even a relatively small asteroid being a city-killer, wiping out everyone and everything in a large area around where it strikes, it can also cause longer-term devastation by hurling a bunch of water and soil and detritus and dust and ash into the atmosphere, acting as a cloak around the planet, messing with agriculture, messing with growth patterns and other cycles for plants and animals; the water and heat cycles completely thrown off. All of which can cause other knock-on effects, like more severe storms in unusual places, periods of famine, and even conflict over scarcer resources. What I’d like to talk about today is a recently discovered asteroid that is being called a potential city-killer, and which is raising alarms in the planetary defense world because of its relatively high likelihood of hitting earth in 2032. — Asteroid 2024 YR4 is thought to be around 130-300 feet, which is about 40-90m in diameter, and it has what’s called an Earth-crossing, or Apollo-type orbit. Asteroids with this type of orbit won’t necessarily ever intersect with earth, and some are incredibly unlikely to ever do so. But some relatively few of them, that we’re aware of, anyway, have orbits that periodically get really close to earth’s, to the point that even a small tweak to their orbit, caused by gravitational perturbances or maybe being nudged by something else in space, could put them on course to cause a lot of damage. Global astronomical bodies keep tabs on these sorts of asteroids, and they keep an especially close eye on what are called PHAs, or potentially hazardous asteroids, because they are objects that are close-ish to Earth, are in orbits that could bring them even closer, perhaps even on an intersection path with earth at some point, and they have an absolute magnitude of 22 or brighter, which means they’re big enough to be fairly visible to our instruments, and that generally means they’ll be 500 feet or around 140m in diameter or larger, which puts them in the “will cause severe damage if it hits earth” category. That latter component of the definition is important, as while the Chelyabinsk meteor that blew up in what’s called an air burst over southwestern Russia in 2013 caused a lot of damage—generating about 400-500 kilotonnes of TNT worth of energy, about 30-times the energy released by the atomic bomb that blew up Hiroshima, resulting in a shock wave that injured nearly 1,500 people sufficiently that they had to seek medical attention, alongside all the broken glass and thousands of damaged buildings caused by that shockwave (which in turn caused those injuries)—that meteor is considered to be pretty tame compared to what we would expect from a larger impact. It was only about 60 feet, around 18m in diameter. That’s part of why asteroid 2024 YR4 is getting so much attention; it’s more than twice, maybe as much as five times that large, and current orbital models suggest that on December 22, 2032, it has a small chance of hitting earth. Small is a relative term here, though, both in the sense that the exact likelihood figure keeps changing, and will continue to do so as we’re able to capture more data leading up to that near-future deadline, and in the sense that even very small possibilities that a city-killer asteroid will hit earth is something that we should arguably be worried about, out of proportion to the smallness of the statistical likelihood. If you are told there’s a 1% chance you’ll die today, that means there’s a 99% chance you won’t, but that 1% chance is still really substantial in the context of living or not living. Similarly, a 1% chance of a large asteroid impacting earth is considered to be substantial because that means a 1% chance that a city could be completely wiped out, along with all the maybe millions of people living in it, all the plants an animals in the region, too, and we could see all those aforementioned weather effects, atmospheric issues, and so on, for a long time into the future. At the moment, as of the day I’m recording this, there’s a 2.2% chance this asteroid will hit earth on that day, December 22, 2032. Its likely impact zone, if it were to hit, stretches roughly along the equator, from just south of Mexico, across upper south america and the middle of africa, over to eastern India. If it’s on the larger side of current estimates, it’s possible that its blast could stretch for 31 miles in all directions from where it hits, because it’s a hard object the size of a large building traveling at around 38,000 miles per hour. So just shy of 7 years, 11 months from now, which is around 2,870 days, that thing could plow into a span of earth that contains quite a few major cities—but it could also hit a stretch of ocean, causing a separate set of problems, ranging from tsunamis to borked weather patterns and loads of sun-concealing, globe-spanning cloud cover. Again, though, the numbers here are weird because of the things they’re describing. Nearly 8 years is a long time in many ways, but if you’re staring down the barrel of a potentially city-killing asteroid, that begins to feel like not long at all; Bruce Willis only had 18 days, but he also lived in the world of Hollywood fantasy. In real life, spinning up that kind of mission takes a lot longer, and that’s after you settle on who’s going to pay for some kind of asteroid killing or deflecting program, how it’s going to work, and so on. Fortunately for everyone involved, back in late-2022, NASA launched a project called the Dou

    17 min
  3. US Protectionism

    FEB 4

    US Protectionism

    This week we talk about tax hikes, free trade, and the madman theory of negotiation. We also discuss EVs, Canada, and economic competition. Recommended Book: How Sanctions Work by Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez Transcript On January 20, 2025, the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, was inaugurated as the 47th President of the US following a hard-fought election that he ultimately won by only a little bit in terms of the popular vote—49.8% to 48.3%—but he won the electoral vote by a substantial margin: 312 to opponent Kamala Harris’ 226. Trump is the oldest person in US history to assume the country’s presidency, at 78 years old, and he’s only the second US president to win a non-consecutive term, the first being Grover Cleveland back in 1893. This new Trump presidency kicked off even before he officially stepped into office, his people interviewing government officials and low-level staff with what have been called loyalty tests, to assess who’s with them and who’s against them, including questions about whether they think the previous election, which Trump lost to former president Biden, was rigged against Trump—a conspiracy theory that’s popular with Trump and many of his supporters, but for which there’s no evidence. There was also a flurry of activity in Israel and the Gaza Strip, last minute negotiations between then-president Biden’s representatives gaining additional oomph when Trump’s incoming representatives added their heft to the effort, resulting in a long-pursued ceasefire agreement that, as of the day I’m recording this at least, still holds, a few weeks after it went into effect; hostages are still being exchanged, fighting has almost entirely halted between Israeli forces and Hamas fighters in Gaza, and while everyone involved is still holding their breath, worried that the whole thing could fall apart as previous efforts toward a lasting ceasefire have, negotiations about the second phase of the three-phase ceasefire plan started yesterday, and everything seems to be going mostly according to plan, thus far. That said, other aspects of the second Trump presidency have been less smooth and less celebrated—outside of the president’s orbit, at least. There have been a flurry of firings and forced retirements amongst long-serving public officials and employees—many seemingly the result of those aforementioned loyalty tests. This has left gaps in many fundamental agencies, and while those conducting this purge of said agencies have claimed this is part of the plan, and that those who have left or been forced to leave are part of the alleged deep state that has it in for Trump, and who worked against him and his plans during his first presidency, and that these agencies, furthermore, have long been overstaffed, and staffed with people who aren’t good at their jobs—so these purges will ultimately save the government money, and things will be restructured to work better, for some value of “better,” anyway. There have been outcries about this seeming gutting of the system, especially the regulatory system, from pretty much everyone else, national and international, with some analysts and Trump opponents calling this a coup in all but name; doing away with the systems that allow for accountability of those in charge, basically, and the very structures that allow democracy to happen in the country. And even short of that, we’re seeing all sorts of issues related to those empty seats, and could soon see consequences as a result of the loss of generational knowledge in these agencies about how to do things; even fairly basic things. All of which has been accompanied by a wave of revenge firings and demotions, and threats of legal action and even the jailing of Trump opponents. In some cases this has included pulling security details from anyone who’s spoken out against Trump or his policies in the past, including those who face persistent threats of violence, usually from Trump supporters. On the opposite side, those who have stuck by Trump, including those who were charged with crimes related to the January 6 incursion at the US Capitol Building, have been pardoned, given promotions, and at times publicly celebrated by the new administration. Some have been given cushy jobs and promotions for the well-connected amongst his supporters; Ken Howery the partner of venture capitalist and owner of government contractor Palantir, Peter Thield, and close ally of serial CEO and enthusiastic Trump supporter Elon Musk, was recently made ambassador to Denmark, for instance. Some of these moves have caused a fair bit of chaos, including a plane colliding with a military helicopter, which may have been the result of understaffing at the FAA, alongside an executive order that froze the funding of federal programs across the country. That executive order has been blocked by judges in some areas, and the Trump administration has since announced that they’ve rescinded the memo announcing that shutdown, but the initial impact was substantial, including the closure of regional Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid infrastructure, and the halting of government funded research and educational programs. Lots of people had their livelihoods threatened, lots worried they wouldn’t be able to afford necessary medical procedures or be able to pay their bills, and many people worried this might cause the country to lose ground against competitors in terms of scientific and technological development, while also leading to some pretty widespread negative health outcomes—the government has also pulled health data, so information about disease spread and even pandemics is now inaccessible, further amplifying that latter concern. And that’s just a very abbreviated, incomplete summary of some of the actions Trump’s administration has taken in its first two weeks back in office; part of a desire on their part to hit the ground rolling and get rid of elements that might stand in their way as they fundamentally change the US system of government to better match their ambitions and priorities. What I’d like to talk about today, is a specific focus of this new administration—one that was a focus of Trump’s previous administration, and to a certain degree Biden’s administration too: that of US protectionism, and the use of tariffs against perceived enemies; but also, in Trump’s case, at least, against long-time allies, as well. — On February 2 of 2025, Trump posted about tariffs on the twitter-clone he owns, Truth Social. And I’m going to quote the post in full, here, as I think it’s illustrative of what he intends to do in this regard in the coming months. “The “Tariff Lobby,” headed by the Globalist, and always wrong, Wall Street Journal, is working hard to justify Countries like Canada, Mexico, China, and too many others to name, continue the decades long RIPOFF OF AMERICA, both with regard to TRADE, CRIME, AND POISONOUS DRUGS that are allowed to so freely flow into AMERICA. THOSE DAYS ARE OVER! The USA has major deficits with Canada, Mexico, and China (and almost all countries!), owes 36 Trillion Dollars, and we’re not going to be the “Stupid Country” any longer. MAKE YOUR PRODUCT IN THE USA AND THERE ARE NO TARIFFS! Why should the United States lose TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN SUBSIDIZING OTHER COUNTRIES, and why should these other countries pay a small fraction of the cost of what USA citizens pay for Drugs and Pharmaceuticals, as an example? THIS WILL BE THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICA! WILL THERE BE SOME PAIN? YES, MAYBE (AND MAYBE NOT!). BUT WE WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, AND IT WILL ALL BE WORTH THE PRICE THAT MUST BE PAID. WE ARE A COUNTRY THAT IS NOW BEING RUN WITH COMMON SENSE — AND THE RESULTS WILL BE SPECTACULAR!!!” So there are several things happening there, probably the most fundamental of which is the claim that other countries, including the US’s allies, like Canada and Mexico, are taking advantage of the US when it comes to trade. This post followed Trump’s signature of an executive order that applied a 25% tariff on all Canadian and Mexican imports, and a 10% tariff on all Chinese imports. A tariff is basically a tax on certain goods brought into a country from other countries. So the US might impose a tariff on Chinese cars in order to keep those cars from flooding US markets and competing with US- and European-made models. And that’s what the US did under the first Trump, and then the Biden administration—it imposed a 100% border tax on electric vehicles from China, the theory being that these cars are underpriced because of how the Chinese economy works, because of how workers there are treated, and because the Chinese government subsidizes many of their industries, including the EV industry, so their cars are quite good and sold at low prices, but they got that way because they’re competing unfairly, according to this argument. Chinese cars sold at their sticker price on the US market, then, might kill off US car companies, which is not something the US government wants. Thus, the price on Chinese EVs is effectively doubled on the US market, and that, on a practical level, kills that competition, giving US carmakers cover until they can up their game and compete with their foreign rivals. The usual theory behind imposing tariffs, then, if you’re doing so for ostensible competitive reasons, at least, is that slapping an additional tax on such goods should allow local businesses to better compete against them, because that additional tax raises prices, and that means local offerings have a government-provided advantage. This can help level a perceptually imbalanced playing field, or it can rebalance things in favor of brands in your country. In reality, though, tariffs often, though not always, become a tax on customers, not on the companies they’re meant to target. Chinese ve

    23 min
  4. DeepSeek AI

    JAN 28

    DeepSeek AI

    This week we talk about OpenAI, the Stargate Project, and Meta. We also discuss o1, AGI, and efficiency. Recommended Book: The Shortest History of Economics by Andrew Leigh Transcript One of the bigger news items these past few weeks, in terms of the numbers involved, at least, was an announcement by US tech company OpenAI that it will be starting a new company called the Stargate Project, which will boast a total $500 billion-worth of investment, the first $100 billion of which will be deployed immediately. All that money will be plowed into artificial intelligence infrastructure, especially large-scale computing clusters of the kind required to operate AI systems like ChatGPT, and the funds are coming from OpenAI itself, alongside SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX, with Arm, Microsoft, and NVIDIA also involved as technology partners. It’s a big, beefy enterprise, in other words, and the fact that this has been in the works since 2022, it’s official announcement seemingly held back so that newly returned US President Trump could announce it as part of his administration’s focus on American infrastructure and AI dominance, didn’t dim the glow of the now-formal announcement of what looks to be a truly audacious bet on this collection of technologies, doubts about the players involved having the money they’ve promised ready, notwithstanding. That said, this is far from the only big, billions and tens of billions-scale wager in this space right now. Last year, Microsoft announced a $30 billion infrastructure fund, in collaboration with BlackRock, and earlier in January of 2025, Google’s CEO said that his company would spend about $80 billion on the same, separate from their commitment to Stargate. Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently divulged that the company would spend somewhere between $60-65 billion on capital expenditures, mostly on AI, in 2025—that’s up about 70% from 2024 spending. And last December, xAI CEO Elon Musk announced that his company had just raised a fresh $6 billion to build-out more compute infrastructure; and his role at the head of that company is assumed to be part of why he trash-talked the aforementioned Stargate effort, though there’s also a long-simmering animus between him and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and the fact that everyone seems to be trying to get in good with Trump—which is probably part of why many of these announcements are happening right now: Trump is in the position to king-make or cripple their respective efforts, so whomever can get in good with him, or best with him, might have an advantage in what’s become a very expensive knife-fight in this most rapidly burgeoning of tech investment loci. There’s a reason there’s so much money flowing to this space, announcements aside, right now, too: the chatbots that’ve emerged from the GPT, LLM era of AI systems are impressive and useful for many things, and AI powered bots could even replace other sorts of user interfaces, like search engines and apps, with time. But there are also some more out-there efforts that are beginning to bear fruit. AI is helping Google’s DeepMind team discover new materials at an astonishing rate—including both the discovery and the testing of their properties, stage. AI systems are also being used to accelerate drug discovery and trial design, and a company (backed by OpenAI’s Altman) is trying to extend human life by a decade using exactly this process. Meta has a new tool that enables real-time speech and text translation between up to (depending on the type of translation being done) 101 different languages, and we’re even seeing AI systems meant to detect and track small, otherwise overlooked infrastructure issues, like potholes, at a local level. And to be clear, this is far from a US government and US-based tech company effort: government agencies, globally, are scrambling to figure out how to regulate AI in such a way that harms are limited but research, investment, and innovation isn’t hampered, and entities all over the place are plowing vast wealth into these projects and their related infrastructure; India’s Reliance Group recently announced it will build what could become the world’s biggest data center, planned to go into operation within two years—a project with an estimated price tag of somewhere between $20-30 billion. And that, all by itself, would more than triple the country’s data center footprint. So this scramble is big but also global, and it’s partly motivated by the gold rush-like desire to be first to something like artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which would theoretically be capable of doing basically anything a human can do, and possibly better. That could, depending on the cost of developing and running such a system, put a lot of humans out of work, scrambling the world and its economy it all sorts of ways, and causing untold disruptions and maybe even havoc. That chaos could be very good for business, however, for whomever is able to sell this new commodity of labor to everyone else, replacing most or all of their employees with digital versions of the same—each one cheaper than a comparable human would be to perform the same work. What I’d like to talk about today, though, is a challenge to the currently dominant theory of operation in this industry, and why a new family of AI models is sending many of the tech world’s biggest players into a panic. — A lot of the news coming out of the AI world, at the moment, is focused on what are called agents, or agentic AI. An AI agent is a system that can operate with agency: it can do things on its own. So you could have one of these systems, something you might engage with like a chatbot, but one capable of taking complex instructions, and you could tell it to find the best e-bike for your use case, and it would then take your info, your context, your needs into consideration, do a bunch of research, and maybe even buy and set up the delivery of the bike for you, with limited check-ins required on your part. A truly agentic AI would operate as sort of a personal assistant, capable of doing anything a human personal assistant would be able to do—sans the physical body, of course—though that could come later. This is generally seen as a step on the path toward AGI, and perhaps even AI superintelligence, which would be AGI that’s massively smarter and better at everything than any human, all of which also moves these things from the realm of “tool to be wielded by humans”, toward something more like a robot that can do all the things it’s supposed to do, without a human present; a different category of product and service. This type of AI, with this level of capability, is generally considered to be really expensive to make—to train, in the industry parlance—and to use, because of how much computing power is required to run the code required to leverage these sorts of smarts. In 2020, ChatGPT-3 cost somewhere between $2-4 million to train. Its successor, ChatGPT-4, which was deployed in 2023 cost more like $75-100 million. That’s a lot more money. The model is a lot more powerful, granted, but the scaling laws that have seemed to be at play in this space, the increase in cost between generations of AI, have suggested that getting another capability leap comparable to what we saw between ChatGPT-3 and 4 would cost something like a billion dollars, and even that might give us a jump, but not the same staggering growth in performance that we saw between those generations. The are arguments to be made that the size and type of dataset matter, here, and that the culling of said datasets, and how the models are tuned to use the data and respond to things are also vital, perhaps as much or more so than the initial training. Companies like OpenAI have also figured out all sorts of ways to wring more performance out of less training and compute, including things like allowing the AI to reference other sources—basically doing a web search or checking wikipedia and similar references, in addition to knowledge that already exists in its training dataset—or allowing them to “think” longer, giving them more time to work through a problem or task, which tends to lead to better results, even with weaker—in terms of training and compute power—systems. Ultimately, though, most of these companies seem to be assuming that more money churned into more infrastructure and compute capability will be necessary, to make these things better at doing science and solving global problems, at maybe running military campaigns-scale issues, but also at replacing humans as employees—creating more agentic, ultimately, they hope, AGI-level systems. So that’s a big part of why there’s so much money sloshing around in the AI world right now: all these companies want to build the biggest, baddest model, they would love to develop AGI and put everyone out of work, and they assume that more money will equal more potency, so if they don’t start building now, they risk being left behind in a couple of years when all their competitor’s snazzy new assets are available and powering their AI systems—which could allow their competitors to get there first, and there’s a general assumption that it’s important to be first or close to first on this, as truly AGI-level, or beyond AI could theoretically allow them to refine their own systems faster, which could secure them a permanent lead over their opposition, moving forward. Though the US is generally considered to be in the prime position in that particular race, so far, China has been investing a lot in this space, as well, and many of their investments have been similar to those of their Western competitors; dropping lots of money on the issue, building big infrastructure, and so on. They’ve been hindered quite a lot by Western, especially US, sanctions, though, and that’s made it more difficult, not impossible, but mor

    22 min
  5. Gaza Peace Deal

    JAN 21

    Gaza Peace Deal

    This week we talk about October 7, the Gaza ceasefire plan, and Netanyahu. We also discuss Hamas, Qatar, and the new US administration. Recommended Book: Witch King by Martha Wells Transcript On October 7, 2023, the militant group Hamas launched a sneak attack from the Israeli occupied Gaza Strip against Israel itself, killing about 1,200 people and taking just over 250 hostages. Israeli forces were caught stunningly unaware by this, but shortly thereafter, Israel launched a counterattack into Gaza, sweeping through the Strip, with both on the ground incursions of tanks and troops, and with seemingly endless air raids and missile strikes, ostensibly to clear out Hamas fighters and find their leadership, but the net impact of this, on top of Hamas’ organization being substantially degraded, was the reductiond entire cities to rubble and the displacement almost the entirety of the Gazan population—something like 2.3 million people, most of whom have been living on the streets or in ramshackle encampments, without reliable sources of food, water, or shelter, as aid shipments from elsewhere have been held back by Israeli forces, for more than a year. Gaza’s Health Ministry estimates that more than 46,000 Palestinians and other Gazan residents have been killed as a result of the fighting over the past 15 months, with more than double that, nearly 110,000 wounded. The Israeli military says they’ve killed more than 17,000 militants over the course of their invasion, though both sources are biased and are operating from incomplete numbers, so these figures are all considered to be suspect at this point, if probably in the right general ballpark, in terms of orders of magnitude. The hostages taken by Hamas during that initial attack into Israel have remained a tricky issue throughout this conflict, as Hamas leaders have continuously used them as bargaining chips and at times, human shields, and the Israeli government has regularly reassured the hostages’ families that they’re focused on returning those captives home safely—but they’ve done this while also, in many cases, seemingly doing the opposite; focusing on taking out Hamas and its leadership, first and foremost, to the point that Israeli forces have seemingly killed many of the hostages they’re attempting to rescue, because they went in after a Hamas leader or bombed a neighborhood into oblivion without first checking to see who was in that neighborhood. This stance has in some cases been incredibly inconvenient for the Israeli government, as the families of the hostages have in some cases been at the center of, or even sparked, some of the large protests against the Israeli government and its actions that have become a fixture of Israeli life since this war started. Prime Minister Netanyahu and his military leaders have been a particular focus of this internal ire, but the Israeli government in general has been targeted by seemingly endless public acts, meant to show civilian discontent with how they’re doing things. Since that day when Hamas attacked Israel in October of 2023, this war has expanded to encompass not just Israel and Hamas, but also other militant groups, like the Houthis operating out of Yemen, and Hezbollah, operating out of Southern Lebanon, just on the other side of Israel’s northern border. All three groups are supported, in terms of training, weapons, and money, by Iran’s government, and they’ve helped Iran sustain a collection of proxy conflicts throughout the region for years, without Iran ever having to get directly involved. These relationships and that sponsoring of these groups has allowed Iran to exert its influence throughout the Middle East and beyond, including into the Red Sea, which typically serves as a vital international shipping channel, but because of regular attacks against shipping vessels by the Houthis from Yemen, the whole of the global supply chain has been disrupted, all sorts of things becoming more expensive and goosing already high inflation levels, because of the longer routes and thus, more expensive shipping costs that have become necessary in an era in which this channel is dangerous to traverse. This dynamic, of Iran playing puppetmaster with its proxies throughout the Middle East, has shifted a fair bit over the course of this war, as these attacks, on Israel and other entities in the region, have attracted counterattacks by Israel and their allies, including the US, and that in turn has left Hezbollah all but destroyed—a series of brazen decapitation attacks by Israeli forces basically wiping out the whole of the group’s upper ranks and resource stockpiles within a matter of days. They’ve also destroyed much of Hamas’ local infrastructure and leadership, and the Houthis, while attracting a lot more attention and prestige for their efforts in the Red Sea, have also seen their capacity to operating more broadly degraded by the presence of a swelling, and increasingly aggressive, anti-Houthi fleet. All of which has significantly diminished Iran’s reach, and its capacity to move pieces on the board. Attacks directly against Iran by Israel, too—which were met with remarkably ineffective counterattacks—have likewise destroyed infrastructure, but perhaps more importantly substantially reduced Iran’s credibility as a true force in the region; they’re still a huge military power, in other words, but unless something changes, like their military managing to develop a nuclear weapon, they’re no longer considered force they were at the beginning of all this; their weakness at range, in particular, makes them look downright ineffectual compared to pretty much all the other military powers in the region, right now. This has also, arguably, made them a less appealing ally for Russia. And though the two nations recently announced a new defense pact, this pact was seemingly signed because both nations recently lost a valuable supplicant state in Syria, which saw its Assad government toppled not long ago—the new government not clearly aligned with either of them, and perhaps even oppositional to them. This pact was made from a place of relative weakness, then, not strength, and its dictates are pretty limited: no mutual defense clause, no formal alliance. It’s basically meant to indicate that the two nations won’t actively help anyone else attack the other from their territory, which is about as noncommittal as these sorts of agreements get. To Russia, still, then, Iran is more or less a provider of drones and rockets, not a peer or even true regional power. And that’s partly the result of the weakness Iran has shown in the face of repeated Israeli aggression toward them, during this conflict. This conflict has also shaped global politics, as people on the political left, in particular, have tended to rally for innocent Gazan civilians, while those on the right have tended to support Israel’s (also conservative) government, and it’s decision to conduct the war as it has. This may have nudged the recent US presidential election in Trump’s favor, and other campaigns have likewise been at least minutely affected by this issue, and its polarizing, at times fracturing impact on left-leaning parties in particular. What I’d like to talk about today, though, is what looks to be the beginning of the end of this conflict, and what a newly negotiated ceasefire between the involved parties entails. — The events I breezed through in the intro paint a far from complete picture of what’s happened during this war; it’s been big, expansive, expensive, and brutal, and has fundamentally changed the geopolitical setup of the region, and in some ways the world, as well. Just as potentially wide-reaching is the ceasefire that’s been negotiated and, as of the day I’m recording this at least, one day after it officially came into effect, is so far still active, and which seems primed to nudge things away from active conflict and toward some new state of affairs in the region. So let’s jump in and talk about the details of this ceasefire. Governments have been shipping diplomats to the region since this thing broke out, all wanting to polish their reputation as peacemakers and reliable intermediaries, and all trying to formalize something like this, some kind of lasting peace, pretty much from the day Hamas launched that sneak attack, but even more so after Israel began pummeling Gaza to dust. And Qatar has been a focal point for these peace efforts from the get-go, enjoyinf some initial success in helping the two groups establish a four-day ceasefire in late-November 2023, that period later extended by several days, so that in total 100 Israeli hostages were freed in exchange for the freedom of 240 Palestinian women and children who were being held in Israeli jails. Qatar has been building its reputation for these sorts of negotiations, and Egypt joined in, partly for the same reputational reasons, but also because Israel’s invasion has come dangerously close to their shared border, and there have been concerns that displaced Palestinians might be forced across that border by Israel’s attack, creating a humanitarian crisis within Egypt that would have been expensive and disruptive in many ways. The worst case version of that concern didn’t materialize, but Egypt maintained its involvement in the peacemaking process, working with representatives from the US and Qatar, the former a staunch ally of Israel, the latter on good terms with Hamas, even housing some of their leaders, to keep negotiators from Hamas and Israel talking. Throughout the war, these and other involved parties have generally supported a three-phase ceasefire proposal, which would begin with a ceasing of hostilities, followed by the release of all Israeli hostages being held in Gaza and a bunch of Palestinians being held in Israeli prison, and following that, if everything goes according to plan, the

    23 min
  6. LA Wildfires

    JAN 14

    LA Wildfires

    This week we talk about the Pacific Palisades, Hurricane Katrina, and reinsurance. We also discuss developed property values, arsons, and the cost of disasters. Recommended Book: The Data Detective by Tim Harford Transcript Natural disasters, whether we’re talking about storms or fires or earthquakes, or some combination of those and other often related issues, like flooding, can be incredibly expensive. This has always been true, both in terms of lives and material damage caused, but also in terms of raw currency—the value of stuff that’s destroyed and thus has to be rebuilt, replaced, or in some rare cases partitioned off so that similar things don’t happen in the future, or because the space is just so irreparably demolished that it’s not cost effective to do anything with the land, moving forward. The four most expensive natural disasters that we’ve been able to tally—so this doesn’t include historical disasters that are far enough back that we can’t really quantify the damage, due to an inability to directly compare, or insufficient data upon which to base such quantification—the top four that we can line up against other such disasters and compare the numbers for are all earthquakes. The earthquake in Japan in 2011 that, in addition to causing a lot of damage unto itself, also caused the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant tops the list, with a cost at the time of around $360 billion, which would be nearly $490 billion in today’s dollars. The second most expensive natural disaster is also an earthquake in Japan, this one hitting a region called Hanshin in 1995, causing about $200 billion worth of damage in mid-90s money, which would be about $400 billion, today, and the third was an earthquake not too long ago, the 2023 quake that struck along Turkey and Syria’s border, causing something like $160 billion in damage. The fourth costliest natural disaster hit China in 2008, causing around $130 billion in damage, which is about $184 billion in today’s money. These disasters also caused a lot of casualties and deaths; about 20,000 people died in that most-costly, nuclear-incident-triggering quake, while nearly 88,000 were killed in that fourth-most-costly, Chinese one. The Great Hanshin quake, in comparison, lead to somewhere around 6,000 deaths: which is still just a staggering human loss, but it’s an order of magnitude less than in those other comparable disasters; which hints at the trend we see with these sorts of events—the scale of wounded and killed doesn’t necessarily correlate with the scale of costs associated with damaged and destroyed infrastructure and other assets. The costliest natural disaster in US history, as of the first week of 2025, at least, was Hurricane Katrina back in 2005, which all but destroyed the city of New Orleans and much of the surrounding area, causing around $125 billion in damage, which is equivalent to about $195 billion, today, but it only led to around 1,400 deaths: again, all of those deaths absolute tragedies, and any disaster that causes that many deaths is an historical event. But looking at the raw numbers, that’s a shockingly low figure compared to the sum of the monetary damages tallied; it’s actually remarkable as few people died as they did, looking at this storm and it’s impacts through that lens. What I’d like to talk about today is another natural disaster, this one ongoing as I record this, that looks primed to take the record of most-costly, in terms of money, US natural disaster from Katrina, and some of the implications of this disaster. — Part of why disasters in the US, natural or otherwise, tend to result in fewer fatalities than those that occur elsewhere is that the US is a very wealthy country with relatively high-quality and widely dispersed infrastructure. There are quibbles to be voiced about that claim, as many recent reports indicate that said infrastructure isn’t terribly well maintained, and that the country’s healthcare setup and relatively low pay and support for the sorts of people who save lives and rescue victims in the midst of such disasters raise questions about how long this will continue to be the case; some of these high-quality systems are somewhat fragile, in other words, and won’t always perform at the level they arguably should. That said, in general, when need be, US government institutions—federal and regional—are capable of throwing money at issues until they mostly go away, and they have a lot of decent resources to leverage when need-be, as well. Americans in general also have reasonable amounts of resources to call upon, on average at least, when they need to flee town and stay elsewhere for a while until a storm subsides, for instance. This is all on average, and we tend to see the gaps in that generality when disasters hit, and Katrina is a perfect example of this disaster illuminated dichotomy, as a lot of the country’s least well off people, who have arguably been let down by the system and their government in various ways, were unable to do what everyone else was capable of doing, and were thus stuck in ramshackle and dangerous accommodations, and in some cases weren’t rescued because of the nature of the infrastructure that was meant to help protect them, but which was ultimately incapable of doing so. Other people were shuttled by those entities to other parts of the country while the disaster was being handled, and some were never brought back—it was all a pretty big scandal. Looking at the averages, though, the US tends to experience disasters that are more expensive in terms of money than lives because there’s more costly infrastructure in place, more valuable assets owned by pretty much everyone, compared to many other nations around the world, at least, and folks are generally capable of getting out of the way of stuff that might kill them—at least when we’re talking about things like storms and fires. Case in point is the ongoing, as of the day I’m recording this, jumble of wildfires that are menacing, and in some cases demolishing, parts of the Greater Los Angeles area in Southern California. As of the day I’m recording this, a day before this episode goes live, there are two primary fires still spreading, designated as the Eaton and Palisades fires, those names based on the regions in which they started to flare out of control, and several smaller ones called the Kenneth, Hurst, and Lidia fires. The Palisades fire is currently the largest, having burned about 24,000 acres, followed by the Eaton, which has consumed around 14,000 acres. The Kenneth, Hurst, and Lidia fires have burned around 1,000, 800, and 400 acres, respectively. That’s…not huge. Tens of thousands of acres is a decent sized plot of land, definitely, but for comparison, the Smokehouse Creek Fire that burned through parts of Texas and Oklahoma in 2024, and which became the largest wildfire in Texas history, consumed more than 1,100,000 acres. The Park Fire, which plagued Northern California in mid-2024, is the state’s largest-ever arson-caused fire, and it consumed nearly half a million acres. So a total of just of 40,000 acres or so for this new collection of fires is piddly, within that context. The difference here is that both of those other fires consumed mostly, though not entirely, undeveloped land. And such land, while not value-less, is not the same kind of asset, in terms of dollars and cents, as heavily developed, with homes and businesses and electrical cables and roads and other such infrastructure, land tends to be. These new, Southern California fires are smaller than those other, big-name wildfires, then, but they’re also consuming some of the most expensive real estate, and the properties and other assets build atop that real estate, in the world. As of right now, the Kenneth and Lidia fires are completely contained, and the Hurst is getting there. The Eaton and Palisades fires, the two largest of the group, are still mostly uncontained, however, due in part to wild and dangerous winds that are making containment efforts difficult, in some cases preventing aerial efforts, and in others making conditions extra risky for people on the ground, due to the dynamic and quick-moving nature of things. Given all of this, and again, given that these fires are burning homes worth tens of millions of dollars, located on coastal land that’s in some case worth around the same, it’s perhaps no surprise that analysts are already projecting that these fires could cause something like $50 to $150 billion in economic losses; and for comparison, the aforementioned Camp Fire in Northern California, which also consumed some fairly expensive homes and real estate, in addition to the undeveloped park land it consumed, only tallied about $30 billion in damage, all told, while the fires that hit Hawaii in 2023 added up to just $5.7 billion. Of that $50-150 billion total, it’s estimated that around $20 billion will be covered by insurance, which represents a staggering loss for those without any, or without the proper insurance, but also potentially represents a huge loss for residents of California, as the state has an insurance of last resort scheme called the FAIR Plan, which is a privately run, but state-created entity that serves those who can’t find insurance via conventional, private insurers. And often, though not always this means those customers are in areas that are too expensive or too risky for traditional insurance companies to operate in. In practice, that usually means insurers of last resort have a portfolio full of risky bets, and the plans they offer are more expensive than usual, and tend to provide less coverage and benefits than the conventional stuff. In these sorts of situations, though, we have a whole lot of risky bets than have suddenly come up snake eyes, this FAIR Plan suddenly having to pay out billions of dollars to their customers

    21 min
  7. Lone Wolves

    JAN 7

    Lone Wolves

    This week we talk about Luigi Mangione, VAW attacks, and mass shootings. We also discuss stochastic violence, terrorism, and Cybertrucks. Recommended Book: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh Transcript The terms “Lone Wolf,” “Lone Wolf Actor,” and “Lone Wolf Killer” are interchangeably used in many countries—though most commonly and prominently in the United States—to describe someone who commits a mass-killing or other mass-casualty event, but who is not part of an organization like a terrorist group or other criminal network like a gang. The term is hotly contested in the scholarly world, as it’s applied loosely and inconsistently, and the definition varies somewhat by location, government, law enforcement entity investigating said killings, and the press reporting upon it. But in general, to be defined as a mass-casualty event or mass-killing, a collection of murders must occur in public—so it can’t be a person killing their family at home, for instance—it must involve at least four victims—so someone killing or injuring three strangers in a public place will typically not be categorized in this way—and it must not occur as part of another crime, like a robbery gone wrong, or as part of a larger conflict between two rival gangs. Within this context of mass-killings and mass-casualty attacks, a lone wolf is someone who acts solo, the term originating with the concept of a wolf that has been separated from, or perhaps outcast from its pack. Someone who kills a bunch of people at the instruction of a terrorist organization like ISIS, then, would not be considered a lone wolf, even if they committed the act without any direct aid from that group; though this definition is wobbly even in that regard, as someone who takes inspiration from a group like ISIS, committing a mass-killing to support that group’s cause, but not directly connected to the group, might be labeled a lone wolf, or not. And there’s no hard-set rule as to which definition is correct. This was a somewhat common issue back in the late-20th century, when many so-called lone wolf terrorists were committing acts of violence in support of anarchist ends, but the anarchist groups from which they derived their inspiration, and in some cases with which they collaborated, were leaderless by nature—so it couldn’t really be said that they were instructed to carry out these acts, they were just inspired by these fellow ideological travelers, and that made determining whether they acted on their own behest or not a tricky and perhaps impossible undertaking; a lot of it is semantics. Also confounding the simple categorization of such killers and attacks is the concept of stochastic terrorism, which is a type of violence that is almost always political or ideological in nature, as opposed to being revenge-driven or otherwise personal, and it’s generally incited by someone with a public persona—a politician or other leader—who creates an environment in which violence is more likely to occur, that violence seemingly random, but on average directed in a specific direction. So a politician who says something like “Man, people from the opposing party really believe some horrible stuff, I wouldn’t be surprised if something happened to them, considering how evil they are,” while at the same time stoking the flames of potential violence throughout the population by increasing animosity between political parties and maybe even religious groups, might be aiming to spark stochastic terror that would benefit them and their ambitions. By riling up their base in this way, by sowing the seeds for potential attacks against their perceived enemies, violence in their favor, aimed at those enemies, is more likely to happen, but in a way that’s deniable for them—just a random act of ideological murder that they can denounce, despite arguably having asymmetrically instigated it. Is stochastic terror an example of planting seeds for violence that makes the resultant killings something more like directed attacks, and therefore not lone wolf in nature, then? Or are all lone wolves arguably inspired by something they’ve learned or experienced or been told, and thus arguably stochastic in nature—no direct guidance or instruction, but still inspired by someone or something, somewhere along the way? What I’d like to talk about today are three instances of recent supposedly lone wolf attacks, and why some experts are predicting we’ll see more such attacks, especially but not exclusively in the US, in the coming years. — There were nearly 500 officially recognized mass-shootings in the US in 2024—and again, that means 4 or more people injured or killed in public, and not as part of another crime being committed. That’s down from previous years, the preceding four of which have each had more than 600 mass shootings, and on average a little less than 10 people are killed in these shootings—though that figure is nudged upward by the largest of these mass killings, like one in Las Vegas in 2017 that saw 60 people killed and more than 800 wounded, many in the resulting stampede, by a 64-year-old seemingly lone wolf gunman who fired on an open-air music festival from the 32nd floor window of a nearby hotel. Gun homicides in the US are rampant beyond mass-killings: there were about 21,000 murders committed with guns in the country in 2021, alone—and notably, self-inflicted gun deaths, suicides using these weapons, eclipse that number, tallying more than 26,000 that same year. That means more than 50 people are killed by guns in the US every single day, and about 4 out of every 5 murders are committed using guns in the country; which makes sense, as guns are very effective at what they’re meant to do, which is killing something, and there are a lot of guns in the US: about 120 of them per 100 people, as of 2018. And to be clear, that doesn’t mean everyone owns a gun: that average is driven sky-high by the gun-enthusiasts who tend to buy a lot of the things, though gun ownership has continued to increase in scope in recent years, as political and economic uncertainty, especially in areas where perception of crime levels, if not always actual elevated crime levels, increases, tends to drive more widespread gun sales. Given all of that, it’s maybe not a huge surprise that many apparent lone wolf attacks in the United States are committed using firearms; sometimes assault rifles, sometimes guns that have been augmented using bump-stocks or similar add-ons to make a normal gun into basically an assault rifle, and sometimes just using a pistol, which can be easily pocketed and carried around pretty much everywhere in this country. On December 4, 2024, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, which is part of the largest health insurance company in the United States, UnitedHealth Group, Brian Thompson, was gunned down in front of the Midtown Manhattan Hilton Hotel. The alleged killer, who was later identified by law enforcement officials as Luigi Mangione, was captured on nearby CCTV cameras, was wearing a hoodie and an expensive backpack while shooting Thompson, and used a pistol with a suppressor—a silencer—to shoot him multiple times, the bullet casings left behind inscribed with the words Delay, Deny, and Depose; terms that have been associated with the US health insurance industry for legal tactics they lean on in order to pocket more money, allegedly at the expense of their customers who have their claims denied or long-term delayed, in some cases leaving them without the care they require, and in some cases leaving them in crippling debt following a necessary medical procedure that the insurance company says they won’t pay for. The response to killings of any kind, even in a gun-happy country like the US, tends to be fairly grim and sad; the endless mutterings of “thoughts and prayers” by politicians and other public figures has become so common and toothless as to be near-satire at this point, but generally the tone is antagonistic toward whomever committed the killing, before then swinging toward calls for more security and policing if you’re on the political right, and more gun regulation if you’re on the political left. And that’s generally where we leave things until the next headlines-capturing shooting; and we typically, unfortunately, don’t have long to wait. Thompson’s murder, though, was almost immediately met with celebration across the political spectrum; working class folks, Democrats and Republicans and everyone in between and on the furthest political extremes basically muttering about how it serves him right, before realizing everyone else was muttering the same thing, and that led to outright enthusiasm, especially online, and even calls for more of the same across the social media landscape—many normal people doing the politician and ideologue thing by basically posting their hopes that someone will knock off other CEOs as well, seemingly aiming to spark more stochastic violence in their favored direction. The wealthy and especially the CEO class were horrified at this response, perhaps understandably, and there was pushback from mainstream journalistic and political entities across the board, with lots of tut-tutting and finger-wagging at anyone who dared celebrate what looked to be the cold-blooded murder of another human being. But the nature of American healthcare and especially health insurance being what it is—massively imperfect at least, and by some assessments borderline abusive or even outright evil—this was seen by many as just desserts for someone who himself had committed millions of dollars worth of fraud and gotten away with it, and who was running UnitedHealthcare in such a way that it denies more claims than any of its peers, which in turn has allowed itself to massively enrich itself and its shareholders at the expense of its customers. There were many cries of “serv

    23 min
  8. South Korean Tumult

    12/17/2024

    South Korean Tumult

    This week we talk about Yoon, martial law, and impeachment. We also discuss the PPP, chaebol, and dictators. Recommended Book: Starter Villain by John Scalzi Transcript In the wake of WWII, Korea—which was previously held by the recently-defeated Japanese Empire—was split into two countries, the north backed by the Soviet Union and the south backed by the United States and its allies. North Korea had a guerrilla fighter and staunch Soviet-style communism activist, Kim Il Sung, placed at the head of its new government, while South Korea was to be led by a longtime local politician named Syngman Rhee, who had run the country earlier, from 1919 until 1925, at which point he was impeached, and then again in 1947-1948, as head of the country’s post-war provisional government. Rhee was a hardcore Korean independence activist during a period when the Japanese were clamping down on their mainland holdings and doing away with anyone who caused trouble or sparked anti-colonial protests, so he spent some time in exile, in China, returned to the US, where he was educated, for a bit, and then the US military returned him to Korea to run that provisional government once the dust had settled and the Japanese had been ousted from the area. Rhee was an ideal representative in the region by American standards, in some ways, as he was vehemently anti-communist, even to the point of killing and supporting the killing of something like 100,000 communist sympathizers during an uprising on South Korea’s Jeju Island. He was president when North Korea invaded, sparking the Korean War, and then refused to sign the armistice that would have formally ended the conflict in 1953, because he believed the only solution to the conflict between these nations was a military one, and he held out hope that the South would someday conquer the North and unify Korea as a nation, once more. Rhee then won reelection in 1956, and changed the country’s constitution to allow him to remain in office, getting rid of the two-term limit—which was not a popular move, but it worked, and he was able to run uncontested in 1960, because his opponent died of cancer in the lead-up to the election—though his opposition protested the results, claiming a rigged voting process, and this led to a huge movement by students in the country, which became known as the April Revolution; students were shot by police while protesting during this period, and that ultimately led to Rhee stepping down that same year, 1960. So Rhee was a western-educated, christian conservative who was vehemently anti-communist, though also living in a part of the world in which an aggressive communist dictatorship recently invaded, and was threatening to do so again—so it could be argued his paranoia was more justified than in other parts of the world that had similar frenzied moments and governments during the cold war, though of course the violence against innocent citizens was impossible to justify even for him and his government; his authoritarian rule was brought to an end following that shooting of student protestors, and that left a power vacuum in the country, and South Korea saw 13 months of infighting and instability before a General named Park Chung Hee launched a coup that put him in charge. Park positioned himself as president, and he did pretty well in terms of economic growth and overall national development—at this point the South was way behind the North in pretty much every regard—but he was also an out-and-out dictator who ruled with an iron fist, and in 1972 he put an entirely new constitution into effect that allowed him to keep running for president every six years, in perpetuity, no term limits, and which gave the president, so himself, basically unlimited, unchecked powers. The presence of a seemingly pretty capable, newly empowered dictator helped South Korea’s economy, manufacturing base, and infrastructure develop at an even more rapid pace than before, though his nearly 18-year presidency was also defined by the oppression he was able to leverage against anyone who said anything he didn’t like, who challenged him in any way, and who spoke out of turn against the things he wanted to do, or the constitution that allowed him to do all those things. In 1979, he was assassinated, and there’s still a lot of speculation as to the why of the killing—the assassin was in Park’s orbit, and was seemingly doing okay as part of that all-powerful government entity—but alongside speculation that it might have been planned by the US, in order to keep South Korea from developing a nuclear weapon, that it might have been the result of political jealousy, and that if might have been just an impulsive act by someone who was done being pushed around by a bully, it’s also possible that the perpetrator was a democracy activist who wanted to get a successful and long-ruling dictator out of the way. Whatever the actual catalyst was, the outcome was more political upheaval, which by the end of the year, we’re still in 1979, led to yet another military coup. This new coup leader was General Chun Doo-hwan, and he implemented martial law across the whole of the country by mid-year, as he ascended to the role of president, and he cracked down on democracy movements that erupted across the country pretty violently. Chun held onto power for nearly 8 years, ruling as a dictator, like his predecessor, until 1987, when a student democracy activist was tortured to death by his security forces. This torture was revealed to the country by a group of pro-democracy catholic priests in June of that year, and that sparked what became known as the June Democratic Struggle, which led to the June 29 Declaration, which was an announcement by the head of the ruling party—so the head of the party the dictatorial president belonged to, the Democratic Justice Party—that the next presidential vote would allow for the direct election of the president. That party leader, Roh Tae-woo, very narrowly won the election, and his term lasted from 1988 until 1993; and during his tenure, the country entered the UN, that was in 1991, and his presidency is generally considered to be a pivotal moment for the country, as while he was technically from the same party as the previous ruler, a dictator, he distanced himself and his administration from his precursor during the election, and he abided by that previously enforced two-term limit. By 1996, things had changed a lot in the country, the government fully recalibrating toward democratic values, and those previous rulers—the dictator Chun and his ally-turned-democratic reformer, Roh—were convicted for their corruption during the Chun administration, and for their mass-killings of pro-democracy protestors during that period, as well. Both were pardoned by the new president, but both were also quite old, so this was seen as a somewhat expedient political maneuver without a lot of downsides, as neither was really involved in politics or capable of causing much damage at that point in their lives. In the years since, especially since the turn of the century, South Korea has become one of the world’s most successful economies, but also a flourishing example of democratic values; there are still some remnants of those previous setups, including the government’s tight ties with the so-called chaebol, or “rich family” companies, which were business entities propped up by government support, which were often given monopoly rights that other businesses didn’t enjoy, as part of a government effort to pull the country out of agrarianism back in the mid-20th century; companies like Hyundai, Samsung, and LG thus enjoy outsized economic power, to this day, alongside a whole lot of political influence in the country, as a result of this setup, which is a holdover from those earlier, dictatorial times. But South Korea has generally erred toward rule of law since the late-1990s, even to the point of punishing their most powerful elected leaders, like President Park, who was accused of corruption, bribery, and influence-peddling, by removing her from office, then sentencing her to 24 years in jail. What I’d like to talk about today, though, is a recent seeming abuse of power at a pretty staggering level in South Korean governance, and the consequences of that abuse for the country and for the abuser. — In March of 2022, Yoon Suk Yeol, a conservative candidate of the People Power Party, who was hoping to oust the incumbent Democratic Party from office, won the narrowest victory in South Korea history. In his previous role as the chief of the Seoul Central District Prosecutor’s Office, Yoon was partly responsible for convicting former President Park for her abuses of power, and his public disagreements with President Moon, who appointed him as Prosecutor General of the country in 2019, led to his popularity in conservative circles, in turn leading to his ascension as a candidate in 2021. Yoon ran on a conservative platform that’s become familiar in elections around the world in recent decades; basically deregulation paired with culture-war issues, like doing away with government support for gender equality and other often politically liberal efforts of that nature. He won the election by less than a percentage point, and his tenure is office has not been favorably reviewed by democratic watchdogs, which have noted various sorts of corruption and democratic backsliding under his watch, and economic and policy analysts consider his administration to have been a somewhat ineffectual one. Yoon’s tenure, like his candidacy, was also plagued by gaffes and seeming missteps. He tried to raise the country’s maximum weekly working hours from 52 to 69, though he pulled back on this idea after a huge wave of backlash from young people. He was also criticized for having just three women in his government, and two among his vice-ministerial level of

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A calm, non-shouty, non-polemical, weekly news analysis podcast for folks of all stripes and leanings who want to know more about what's happening in the world around them. Hosted by analytic journalist Colin Wright since 2016. letsknowthings.substack.com

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