Tag: us

Trump Bunker

The final ignominy for a Republican Party brought low by Trump is that its own digital efforts may undermine its future. The data operation in which Priebus and the RNC invested so heavily has fed into Project Alamo, helping Parscale build Trump’s base. “They brought to the table this movement and people who were willing to donate and activate, and we brought to the table a 4-year investment and said we can process that for you. That willingness to embrace what the RNC built allowed them to harness that movement.” If the election results cause the party to fracture, Trump will be better positioned than the RNC to reach this mass of voters because he’ll own the list himself—and Priebus, after all he’s endured, will become just the latest to invest with Trump and wind up poorer for the experience.

Obama interview

OBAMA: We know the guys who are funding them, and if you talk to Larry Page or others, their general attitude, understandably, is, “The last thing we want is a bunch of bureaucrats slowing us down as we chase the unicorn out there.”

Part of the problem that we’ve seen is that our general commitment as a society to basic research has diminished. Our confidence in collective action has been chipped away, partly because of ideology and rhetoric.

The analogy that we still use when it comes to a great technology achievement, even 50 years later, is a moonshot. And somebody reminded me that the space program was 0.5% of GDP. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but in today’s $ that would be $80B that we would be spending annually … on AI. Right now we’re spending probably less than $1B. That undoubtedly will accelerate, but part of what we’re gonna have to understand is that if we want the values of a diverse community represented in these breakthrough technologies, then government funding has to be a part of it. And if government is not part of financing it, then all these issues that Joi has raised about the values embedded in these technologies end up being potentially lost or at least not properly debated.

Hurricane Matthew

with hurricane matthew, another october surprise is here:

This is like no storm in the record books. We are concerned about reports of people deciding to stay in areas under mandatory evacuation orders. This is a mistake. This is not hype. This is not hyperbole, and I am not kidding. I cannot overstate the danger of this storm.

Taos County

The mesa lacked almost every incentive for a permanent population. The one resource it had was cheap land tucked far away from neighbors, cops, building inspectors, and anyone else who might stop a person from doing whatever the hell he wanted on his very own scrap of dirt. Even among the recluses, word was eventually going to get out. Fugitives came to live in hiding. Veterans and retirees came to stretch a monthly check. The hippie communes that had taken root in Taos County in the ‘60s and ‘70s disbanded, and a few diehards decided that isolation on the mesa was the next best thing. Environmentalists came to build the experimental Earthship homes that would have been banned by county building codes. Entrepreneurs and enthusiasts came to grow marijuana. Many came to build a life that didn’t revolve around a steady job and a mortgage payment. Others came simply to retreat into themselves. Today, Taos County is one of the poorer counties in the country. Some do better, some do worse, but the gradation on the mesa, as in much of Taos County and New Mexico at large, is in terms of who has more of not very much. The only common culture, Elliot feels, is one of poverty.

it is amazing to find this level of anarchy in the continental us

Sabotaged Gun Tracing

There’s no telling how many guns we have in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. On purpose. Thing is, the geniuses who work there are quietly inventing ways to do the impossible. 65% of the time, workers at the tracing center are able to successfully trace a gun used in a crime back to the original purchaser. A routine trace takes ~1 week, but they can turn an “urgent” around in 24 hours. The San Bernardino case was an urgent. The Boston Marathon bomber case was an urgent. Gabby Giffords: urgent. Charleston. Aurora. Fort Hood. Columbine. Washington Navy Yard. Sikh temple. Just figure every crime you ever watched endless horrifying footage of on TV involved somebody here in Martinsburg searching through a rat’s nest of records and then experiencing a moment of jubilance upon seeing that, yes, this is it, here is the 4473 that belongs to that lunatic. (Or his mother. Or his uncle. Or the pawnshop dealer who sold it to someone else. Tracing the gun beyond the initial point of purchase is on the cops.) This is the maddening, inefficient way gun tracing works, and there is no effort afoot to make it work any better. For all the talking we do about imposing new limits on assault weapons, or stronger background checks, nobody talks about fixing the way we keep track—or don’t keep track—of where all the guns are.