Slow Horses, season 3, Apple TV+ review: Gary Oldman's spy drama deserves a bigger audience

www.telegraph.co.uk

Slow Horses, season 3, Apple TV+ review: Gary Oldman's spy drama deserves a bigger audience

By Anita Singh, Arts and Entertainment Editor

3 minutes

Is Slow Horses the perfect TV drama? I think it might be, you know. It’s clever. It’s fun. It combines the action scenes of a spy thriller with the joy of seeing a marvellously greasy Gary Oldman contemplating washing his armpits with Fairy Liquid.

It’s on Apple TV+, which most people don’t have, but honestly – consider taking out a subscription just for this. No, I’m not getting a kickback. I just wish more people could see it. Really, I wish it was on the BBC so everyone could see it, but BBC dramas tend to take themselves extremely seriously these days. They’d never have Oldman in his yellowing vest and underpants, submitting to an MI5 medical and telling his doctor that he has quit smoking. “Really?” asks the somewhat sceptical doctor. “Yeah,” replies Lamb. “I haven’t had one for 27 minutes.” As for his alcohol intake? “I dunno. Two-three bottles a week.” “Wine?” “Whisky.”

Lamb heads up the team of disgraced spies at Slough House. One of the hallmarks of Mick Herron’s books, on which the show is based, is that these “quarter-wits” (as Kristin Scott Thomas’s elegant security chief puts it) are as far from the world of Bourne and Bond as you could get. But this third series – based on Herron’s novel Real Tigers – opens with slick scenes that would not look out of place in either franchise, taking us from a well-appointed apartment via water taxis across the Bosphorus to a car chase through the streets of Istanbul.

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Then we’re back to Britain, where one of the Slough House team is kidnapped. Lamb is the first to realise that his colleague is missing, because despite outward appearances (“You put me on a treadmill, you’ll be done for manslaughter,” he warns the doctor) he’s sharp as a tack. As River Cartwright, leading man Jack Lowden brings the energy and fulfils the action-hero role, albeit with a great deal of self-deprecation.

The drama makes great use of its London setting, filmed in and around the Barbican, and there are funny little touches that only a British show would include, such as the bungling head of security at MI5’s Regent’s Park headquarters dunking a KitKat Chunky into his cup of tea. As ever, the writing is top quality, particularly the insults. “Keep walking until you get to the sea,” Scott Thomas says, “and when you get to the sea, keep walking with your mouth open.”

Slow Horses season 3 is on Apple TV+ from Friday 1 December

Trump would make inflation worse. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

Nov. 20, 2023

12 - 15 minutes

There’s been incredible interest recently in the question of whether Americans’ perceptions of the economy align with reality.

To an extent, though, all the descriptive wrangling over both this question and its relevance to the 2024 campaign involve a set of facts on which sane people (unfortunately not as large a share of the commentariat as one would like) likely agree:

    The unemployment rate is low.

    Interest rates are high.

    Inflation is above target.

Whether you rate the current situation “good” or “bad” or “mixed” or “things are good but I’m mad about the big spike in inflation that happened and I don’t want to give Biden any credit,” we’d all like to see inflation and interest rates decline without unemployment rising.

And I think we’re on a trajectory where this is likely to happen.

Former Boston Federal Reserve President Eric Rosengren said last week that a soft landing is now his “base case,” which seems correct to me. That, again, doesn’t mean that you need to love Joe Biden or think the current economy is fabulous or forgive him for whatever policy errors you believe he committed in the past. But it does mean that when you consider a particular electoral outcome or world event or policy change, you should ask yourself whether that change is going to make things better or worse.

A huge regional war in the Middle East, for example, would clearly make things worse by disrupting global oil supplies. A miraculous peace deal between Russia and Ukraine would make things better by facilitating more global agricultural production. And most relevant to American voters as they think about the presidential election, implementing Donald Trump’s policy ideas1 would make things worse.

The press still largely covers Trump as an amusing sideshow, as if the world were stuck in a perpetual 2015, and the loudest critiques of this I hear call for more alarmist coverage of his authoritarian leanings. But I think the single most under covered story in American politics is about what you might call the “boring” stakes of the 2024 election. If the country elects Trump and a Republican congress and they implement their ideas on tax policy, trade, and immigration, what’s going to happen to the big economic variables that everyone cares about?

Because it seems to me that either they will make inflation and interest rates a lot higher, or else they’re going to be forced into the kind of draconian Social Security and Medicare cuts they claim not to want.

Even though Barack Obama signed significant fiscal stimulus into law in 2009-2010, these measures were insufficient to restore the economy to a state of full employment. In an ideal world, congressional Democrats would have structured the Affordable Care Act to front-load spending and provide additional stimulus. Failing that, the post-midterms White House probably should have been more accommodating of congressional Republicans’ desire for tax cuts (which would have been stimulative), if in exchange they could have gotten Republicans to agree to higher spending. Instead, Obama and House GOP leaders enacted a series of short-term austerity measures that slowed economic recovery.

The upshot is that even though growth was totally fine throughout Obama’s second term, the economy was still a little under-heated. Interest rates and inflation were consistently low (which was nice), but the labor market remained well below its pre-recession peak when Trump was inaugurated.

If you didn’t happen to know that the 2016 campaign was a dramatic moment in American political history, nothing about the economic trends would have suggested a significant break when Trump took office.

But with a Republican in the White House, congressional Republicans suddenly stopped caring about spending cuts and agreed to increase domestic spending, while also increasing military spending and cutting taxes. This did cause some Democrats to complain about the budget deficit, but I said it was fine and I was right. As the economy crept closer to full employment, interest rates started to go up, but only a little, and then declining demand from abroad sent them back down again until Covid changed everything.

It’s fascinating to ask what would have happened in American politics and policy had Covid not intervened, but that’s not a question we’ll ever be able to answer.

Instead, we had three years of Latin American-style macroeconomic populism under conditions that made this at best appropriate and at worst fine. Trump raised tariffs, for example, which tends to push prices up. But inflation was low, so nobody really noticed or cared. The tariffs generated retaliation from our trade partners, which was bad for American farmers, so Trump showered farmers with extra subsidies and, again, since interest rates were low nobody really noticed or cared. Then came a Covid-induced economic crisis, a series of massive stimulus bills, a rapid return to full employment, and a spike of inflation that was contained by a rapid surge in interest rates. It’s understandable that people have a certain nostalgia for the pre-Covid economy, but electing Trump is not going to reverse the linear passage of time.

Current circumstances are very different.

Inflation is back under control, but it’s still above the two percent target level. And to get inflation back under control, interest rates came up a lot. They came up high enough that it’s a real problem in the housing market, and also high enough that rising interest expenses are an issue for the federal government. In this environment, the centerpiece of the GOP economic agenda is an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) that will cost trillions of dollars and primarily benefit rich people.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, we are looking at $3.3 trillion in additional deficits from the direct loss of revenue and another $500 billion in increased interest costs. Trump would partially offset this with about $2 trillion in additional revenue raised by imposing an across-the-board tariff of 10 percent.

So we’d end up with somewhere between $1.3 and $1.8 trillion in higher deficits.

Tariffs, of course, are highly regressive, so despite the enormous tax cuts, lower-income families will end up paying higher taxes on net. And beyond that, tariffs have a distinct inflationary impact. You could raise $2 trillion with a relatively small across-the-board Value Added Tax that would make the price of almost everything a little bit higher. Alternatively, you can do it Trump’s way with a much higher 10 percent tax that’s only levied on foreign-made stuff.

To understand the impact of this on prices, consider a more specific policy, like a 10 percent tax on imported olive oil. That makes imported olive oil more expensive, and also raises some revenue. But it’s also going to raise the price of domestic olive oil, because price competition from foreigners has diminished. A portion of the higher consumer prices flows to the government as revenue, but another huge chunk of money is transferred from consumers to domestic olive oil producers as windfall profits. If investors are convinced that the tariffs are likely to last for a while, those windfall profits will attract capital investment into American olive oil, workers will transition into the field, and we’ll have a booming olive oil industry.

So now imagine doing this across the economy. The price of everything goes up. A fraction of those higher consumer prices flow to the government, and the rest goes as windfall profits to people who own American businesses. But you can’t attract new workers into producing everything simultaneously. That would just be inflation on top of inflation. And with the deficit soaring due to regressive tax cuts, interest are going to go up up up.

In a full employment, higher pressure economy, the country needs supply-side reform to generate further sustainable wage gains.

Biden has delivered on this in some areas, though unfortunately not to the extent that I would like. And here’s where you’d hope a Republican administration would sing. But the whole point of Trump’s politics is that relative to a traditional Republican, he’s not much of a free market reformer — his signature issue is immigration.

Despite fears early in his term, Trump didn’t meaningfully increase interior enforcement and deportations of long-settled residents of the United States, because enforcement resources were instead concentrated at the southern border. But this time around, Trump and his team have mapped out a plan that they believe will make it feasible for them to deport millions of people who’ve been living and working in this country for years.

I’m not sure whether their legal theories will pan out, but if they do, the upshot will be:

    Some amount of labor and other resources diverted away from current production and toward running the deportation apparatus.

    A shrinkage of the labor force, as unauthorized workers are forced out of the country. 

Trump is also planning to cut legal immigration, which would further shrink the labor force. This could have some disinflationary impact by opening up additional vacant housing units, but it’s a huge negative shock to the price of services and the productive capacity of the economy.

Someone is going to say, of course, “aha, Yglesias admits it, immigrants cut wages!” but living through several years of fights about inflation really ought to cure people of this. Of course many deported workers could be replaced by American citizens brought in at higher (nominal) wages. But that will push down real wages for everyone else via higher prices. More to the point, in a low-unemployment economy, the replacement workers will just be vacating some other job and need to be replaced themselves. The Fed will respond to this with higher interest rates to quell job openings.

Trump is just, in general, not much of a supply-sider.

He hates the idea of self-driving cars, and campaigned hard against zoning reform. Of course, in other areas, there’s no doubt a Trump administration will lean in a deregulatory direction. But even though there are a million little regulated areas, basically no amount of deregulation on the supply side is remotely capable of outweighing anti-supply moves on trade, immigration, and housing.

Keep in mind that due to population aging, each and every year the cost of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid rises as a share of the overall American economy. So if Trump is elected again, we’re talking about piling new policies that tend to raise interest rates on top of an underlying dynamic that pushes rates higher.

That’s bad news.

It’s also why George W. Bush was so keen to cut Social Security, and why Paul Ryan was desperate to cut Medicare. It’s not like those guys didn’t realize that these were politically dicey ideas. They didn’t propose them just for fun, they proposed them because it’s the only way to make the GOP tax cut agenda work. Trump says he doesn’t want to do political risky cuts, but he’s outlined an agenda that’s going to push the country into an interest rate crisis where pressure to enact severe cuts will be enormous. And that’s because it’s not just his fiscal policies — his overall policy approach is highly inflationary.

What the country actually needs, meanwhile, is policies that take the good news about the economy (full employment) into account and try to actually address the problems of high prices and high interest rates.

That means the opposite of Republicans’ bombs-away tax cuts. We should pair spending cuts with tax increases as a balanced, measured approach. And we should undertake pro-growth initiatives like returning to the bipartisan tradition of seeking freer trade and a more productive configuration of the global economy. We ought to expand legal immigration, especially to people who have valuable skills related to technology and health care, but more broadly to people working in critical services like child and elder care. We should reform land use policies to make housing more abundant.

And then, yes, we should call in some Republican economists to help go through the federal rulebook and pare-back laws with high costs and low benefits. But is Jones Act cheering Donald Trump going to make progress on that front? I’m skeptical. If you’re really excited about an administration that’s going to spend time litigating whether you can give drug dealers the death penalty, then it’s absolutely true that Trump is a charismatic channel for social conservative impulses. But if you’re actually worried about the economy, there’s nothing good happening there.

The 10 Worst Lines from the Supreme Court's New Code of Conduct. By David Janovsky,Sarah Turberville

www.pogo.org

14 - 17 minutes

On November 13, the Supreme Court surprised many by issuing a code of conduct. We have long called for a code that would address the unique issues that arise from service on the nation’s highest court —after all, these are the nine most powerful judges in the country, so it’s only fair they be held to the highest standards of conduct. We’ve been advocating for a code that would define unethical conduct and explain its consequences.

Instead, the court has offered a code that seeks to legitimize unethical conduct. 

We doubt it’s a coincidence that the court released its code just as the Senate Judiciary Committee was preparing to subpoena Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow, who have lavished gifts on several justices, for records about their role in some of the court’s current ethics scandals. But since the court’s code is far from adequate, it’s essential Congress keep up its efforts to strengthen the court’s ethics framework. 

Here are the most problematic elements — and some thoughts on the path not taken.

1. “The absence of a Code, however, has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules. To dispel this misunderstanding, we are issuing this Code, which largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct.”

This passage, from the introduction to the Code of Conduct, makes it clear that the justices still don’t understand the ethics problems facing the court, or how those problems are damaging the public’s trust in them. The issue is not that people don’t understand all that the court does to uphold ethics standards; it is that for years, many of the justices have acted in ways that actively undermine the public’s confidence in their impartiality. The public has watched as justices accepted lavish gifts from wealthy activists, made inflammatory remarks about political figures, decided not to recuse from cases despite conflicts of interest, and appeared before groups seeking to influence the court’s jurisprudence. Unfortunately, rather than making efforts to rein in the problematic behavior, the code that follows this introduction endorses it. It represents a colossal missed opportunity. 

2. “A Justice should comply with the restrictions on acceptance of gifts and the prohibition on solicitation of gifts set forth in the Judicial Conference Regulations on Gifts now in effect.”

The assumption underlying this provision is pretty galling: It’s not only that accepting yacht travel, trips on private jets, and stays at corporate luxury accommodations is completely fine, but that the public had no right to know about these gifts until the judicial conference “clarified” its guidance earlier this year. This is preposterous. These lavish gifts and travel should have been reported under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 (we explained why when we asked the Justice Department to investigate and possibly fine Justice Clarence Thomas for what appears to be a rather clear-cut case of violating federal law). The new code does little more than excuse past (very bad) behavior, while failing to meaningfully rein in the seemingly endless billionaire gift-giving to justices. A low-level executive branch employee would be facing an investigation for the kind of behavior we have seen from justices on the highest court in the land. This code only embraces this absurd imbalance.

3. “For some time, all Justices have agreed to comply with the statute governing financial disclosure, and the undersigned Members of the Court each individually reaffirm that commitment.”

The code of conduct for other federal judges requires them to comply with the financial disclosure law, and for good reason: The law is mandatory for judges, including Supreme Court justices. But the justices’ new code makes it seem like their financial disclosures are simply an act of goodwill — an “affirmed commitment,” not a statutorily mandated practice. Chief Justice John Roberts has been hinting since 2011 that he doesn’t think Congress has the power to require the justices to publish financial disclosures, and this framing seems calculated to make the justices look committed to transparency while subtly furthering the notion that they are above the law. 

Not for nothing, but the justices have a decidedly mixed record when it comes to actually complying with the financial disclosure rules. It’s quite common for justices to have to revise their disclosures to include unreported items, and recent reporting indicates that Justice Thomas still may not have reported complete information about a forgiven loan he used to purchase a luxury bus. 

    “It’s quite common for justices to have to revise their disclosures to include unreported items, and recent reporting indicates that Justice Thomas still may not have reported complete information about a forgiven loan he used to purchase a luxury bus.”

4. A justice should disqualify from a case “where an unbiased and reasonable person who is aware of all relevant circumstances would doubt that the Justice could fairly discharge his or her duties.” 

This line is amazing. The justices have actually written a standard for themselves here that is lower than the one that already applies to them through federal law, which requires the justices to disqualify themselves from cases where their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” While the new language may appear, at first blush, to mirror the general recusal standard for lower courts, the Supreme Court’s framing could actually provide ample cover for a justice to hear a case that they should be disqualified from by claiming that any critics are simply biased against them. 

Meanwhile the code does not address the justices’ own biases as they will continue to be judges in their own recusal decision-making — something we’ve repeatedly pointed out needs to change.  

5. “A Justice should not speak at or otherwise participate in an event that promotes a commercial product or service, except that a Justice may attend and speak at an event where the Justice’s books are available for purchase. … 

“A Justice should not to any substantial degree use judicial chambers, resources, or staff to engage in activities that do not materially support official functions or other activities permitted under these Canons.”

Multiple justices have signed massive book deals after being confirmed to the Supreme Court — deals don’t count toward the cap on their outside income. But the judiciary’s hands-off approach to book revenue is out of line with how some other parts of the government, such as the House of Representatives, regulate similar deals. Making a rule that preserves your unfettered ability to cash in on book deals is not necessarily the best way to signal a seriousness about ethics. 

The Code of Conduct says the latter part of the provision, about staff and resources, is to explicitly permit the justices to have security details with them when they travel. We wholeheartedly support that. But because of the way the code is written, this also means the justices can use their official resources — and their law clerks — to research, review, and even sell their books. There aren’t many circumstances where an employer would endorse the use of company resources to run their side hustle, but that’s what this amounts to. 

6. “Except in unusual circumstances, no [appearance of impropriety] will be created when a Justice speaks to a group of students or any other group associated with an educational institution, a bar group, a religious group, or a non-partisan scholarly or cultural group.”

Some have already referred to this as the “Fed Soc” carve out; in short, it decrees that there is no problem with justices continuing to appear before controversial, ideologically oriented organizations, organizations where they have made problematic and disparaging remarks in the past. The code also does not address the problem of closed-door speeches given to such groups, where the justices’ remarks are not open to the public or the media. The court’s breezy declaration that this kind of conduct won’t “create an appearance of impropriety” does little to quell the public’s justified outrage. For their part, Justices Roberts and Kagan have tended to avoid appearing at these kinds of events, and the court would have done well to codify their more cautious approach. 

The Code also permits the justices to let organizations use their names, positions, and judicial designation in fundraising materials "if comparable information and designations are listed for others.” This provision ignores the unique position and power that the Nine hold in our society. The justices should be prohibited from participating in fundraising. Full stop. Whether it’s for the Koch network, the American Bar Association, or a tiny nonprofit, Supreme Court justices simply should not lend the prestige of their offices to fundraising, especially given the current lack of transparency about whether and how funds raised flow into agenda-setting before the court. 

    “The justices should be prohibited from participating in fundraising. Full stop.”

7. “The rule of necessity may override the rule of disqualification.”

The rule of disqualification says that a judge must sit out a case if they are not, or appear not to be, impartial and unbiased. The rule of necessity says that if there is absolutely no other judge to hear a case, an otherwise disqualified judge can participate. At least, that’s what “necessity” means to most judges. But because the Supreme Court has a rather high opinion of itself, it has twisted the rule of necessity to mean it’s more important for a potentially disqualified justice to stay on a case rather than have only eight justices participate. They’ve applied the rule of necessity this way even though history reveals that an even number of justices would not necessarily bring the court to an impasse: The court has functioned for months, even years, with a vacant seat. We’d be happy to have our reading of this sentence proven wrong, but this seems like a way of saying the justices don’t have to recuse unless they feel like it. 

8. “Canon 3B addresses the inherently judicial function of recusal” (emphasis added).

This one is subtle, but it could be a sign that the justices are out to stymie Congress’s efforts to pass judicial ethics laws. Congress has a fair amount of authority over the mechanics and logistics of the Supreme Court: It sets the number of justices and the day the court’s term begins, lays out some basic disclosure rules, and even controls the amount of discretion the court has over all but a few elements of its docket. But the Constitution does not grant Congress judicial power, so Congress cannot, for instance, control how a justice rules in any given case. As Congress has dedicated more time in the last several years to strengthening the court’s ethics rules, some (including Justice Samuel Alito) have claimed that ethics laws impermissibly encroach on the court’s judicial powers. Against that backdrop, this line is particularly concerning. Congress has set recusal rules through statute for nearly a century, but it seems the justices may be laying the groundwork for weakening those efforts. 

9. “The Justices follow the same general principles and statutory standards for recusal as other federal judges, including in the evaluation of motions to recuse made by parties. But the application of those principles can differ due to the effect on the Court’s processes and the administration of justice in the event that one or more Members must withdraw from a case.”

In other words, “we follow the same rules as other justices, but because we are unique, we will actually bend the rules for ourselves.” Consider the path not taken: The justices could have recognized that they are the most powerful and visible jurists in the country, and because they feel it is important for all nine of them to participate in each case they rule on, they would go above and beyond to ensure their behavior is beyond reproach and conflicts would arise in only the rarest of circumstances. That would have made the court a model for ethics. But instead, the code of conduct lowers the bar, so the justices can step over it without breaking their strides. 

10. “A Justice should not hold membership in any organization that practices invidious discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, or national origin.” 

This one is perplexing: Why does the code limit membership in only some discriminatory organizations? The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, for instance, protects Americans from employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age, disability, and genetic information. The justices should not be allowed to join discriminatory organizations, nor should they appear before them. After all, these are the judges responsible for ensuring equal justice for all, and use of the facilities or benefits of such entities can be viewed by the public as endorsement of such discrimination. This is an area where the code of conduct for other federal judges needs to be updated as well, and the Supreme Court should have led the effort rather than simply adopting existing, inadequate language. 

There are some glaring omissions from the justices’ new code, too. It doesn’t call for publication of recusal decision-making, which could go a long way to creating more consistent and appropriate decisions to sit out a case. Nor does it suggest that recusals ought to be decided by someone other than the justice whose impartiality is in question. Given what we now know about sources of spousal income at the court and the serious ways in which that could present a conflict of interest, the court could have also included more robust reporting requirements on spousal income and, if relevant, clients. And, as many have already pointed out, the court fails to address a single way in which this “binding” code might be enforced.

This is a missed opportunity of massive proportions. It appears conspicuously well-timed to throw off what was becoming a very serious Senate investigation into corruption at the Supreme Court. Far from proving that the court has its house in order, this disappointing code of conduct should spur everyone who cares about an ethical Supreme Court to redouble their efforts. 

    

The Man Behind the A.I. Revolution Just Got Fired. It’s a Scandal. Here’s What We Know. By Nitish Pahwa

slate.com

10 - 12 minutes

The Industry

Everything We Know About OpenAI’s Shocking Ouster of Sam Altman

The controversial king of artificial intelligence was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board,” according to a board statement.

Sam Altman sitting in a white chair against a blue background

The man who brought you the latest in man vs. machine. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images.

This is a breaking news post that has been updated with new information.

Late Friday afternoon, the famed artificial intelligence company OpenAI made a shocking announcement: Effective immediately, its board of directors was firing CEO Sam Altman, both from his leadership position and from the OpenAI board. CTO Mira Murati will assume Altman’s duties as the company oversees a “leadership transition” and seeks a “permanent successor” for the top job. In addition, OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman is “stepping down as chairman of the board”—although it was originally implied that Brockman would remain at OpenAI in a corporate role, he later shared that “based on today’s news, i quit.” In a tweeted statement, Altman wrote: “i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people. will have more to say about what’s next later.”

It’s a heckuva pre-weekend news dump from what is perhaps the best-known and most influential A.I. company of the decade, if not the century. After all, OpenAI’s late-2022 releases of its generative-text bot, ChatGPT, and its automated imagemaker, DALL-E 2, did more than anything else to mainstream and advance the much-hyped artificial intelligence revolution. ChatGPT was, for a time, the fastest-growing app in history, and its widespread use goaded Big Tech giants like Facebook and Google to put out their own A.I. tools as quickly as possible, fueling an arms race that’s already disrupted countless industries from digital media to show business. Altman became the singular face of these advancements, explaining his company and its magical creations to magazine reporters, anxious members of Congress, and wide-eyed world leaders. (It was his now-almost-year-old tweet that launched ChatGPT into the stratosphere.) Plus, OpenAI had just held its first developers conference last week, with Altman giving the keynote address.

What happened to Sam Altman, and where does OpenAI go from here? Why does it matter? And was Altman’s job itself displaced by A.I.???? (Probably not.) Here’s what we know now, and why the tech world is freaking out about this.

Who’s this guy, again?

Sam Altman’s origin story is a classic Silicon Valley fable: In 2005, at the age of 19, he dropped out of Stanford University to co-found a location-sharing social network, Loopt, that earned investments and attention from big venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and a then-upstart Y Combinator. Loopt never got close to reaching the sensational scale of Facebook and Twitter, but it did establish Altman on the scene, and he went on to start his own venture capital firm, Hydrazine Capital. Altman later leveraged this experience to become president of Y Combinator, overseeing and expanding the fund’s vast portfolio of high-profile companies—including Reddit, which he helped usher through a rocky transitional period in 2015. That same year, flanked by a powerful crew of tech figures—Facebook’s Peter Thiel, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, and Stripe’s Greg Brockman, among others—Altman announced the formation of OpenAI and poured reams of money into the nonprofit, becoming co-chair alongside Elon Musk, who’d often been a voice of caution when it came to A.I.

Wait, OpenAI’s been around that long? And it was a nonprofit?

Yes! In a blog post from Dec. 11, 2015, co-written with OpenAI research director Ilya Sutskever, Brockman noted that the new firm’s goal was “to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” That, as we now know, didn’t last long: In 2018, Musk professed his worry that OpenAI was falling behind Google when it came to keeping up with the rapid pace of A.I. developments, and expressed his desire to take over the whole thing. Altman and the OpenAI board rejected this, so Musk resigned from the firm and yanked his planned investments. Faced with a financial shortfall, Altman himself proceeded to take over OpenAI and transform it into a for-profit entity, allowing it to earn the types of financial investment it couldn’t as a mere nonprofit. Microsoft soon came knocking with $1 billion and bunch of high-tech resources, allowing OpenAI to catch up with competitors and, eventually, burst into the mainstream with the awe-inspiring powers of ChatGPT.

And Sam had been top dog ever since?

Indeed. By 2020, Altman had fully stepped away from Y Combinator to focus on OpenAI and a few other weird side projects, like the eye-scanning cryptocurrency token WorldCoin. (According to CoinDesk, WorldCoin’s value plunged by 12 percent after OpenAI’s Friday announcement.)

Artificial intelligence remained at the center of Altman’s attention, though—as well as the subject of his most dire fears. Altman, a doomsday prepper, was influenced by tech-world thinkers who raised alarm over the prospect of an all-powerful A.I. that could learn to think for itself and, resultingly, trample over human civilization as we know it. Altman and other like-minded folks did not trust companies like Google to be responsible with their creations, and they wanted OpenAI to be a model of powerful A.I. that was aptly guardrailed and regulated to prevent human obsolescence.

… huh.

Yeah, it’s a whole thing, a guiding a philosophy that spurred Altman and his colleagues not only to craft advanced tools like ChatGPT, but also warn of what these things could potentially do down the line. You may remember that it was a motif in his testimony to Congress earlier this year, and a view that’s been adopted by a lot of people in government.

So, with Altman gone, does that mean OpenAI is shifting its perspectives? Or its mode of business? Or … ?

We don’t know for sure just yet. The nut of the OpenAI board statement reads: “Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.” There haven’t been any specifics mentioned either by OpenAI execs or Altman, but one can fairly hazard to say there’s something bad lurking in the background here. The board further wrote that “OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. The board remains fully committed to serving this mission. We are grateful for Sam’s many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI. At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward.” (And no, we don’t know why Brockman left his position as board chair, either.)

How bad is bad?

It’s hard to say at the moment, but the news has reinvited speculation around some ugly allegations. For a lengthy September profile of Sam Altman, New York magazine’s Elizabeth Weil spoke in depth with his younger sister, Annie Altman, who explained how she fell out with her family more broadly, citing Sam’s emotional callousness and tech-world ambitions. The profile then brought attention to a series of years-old tweets from Annie in which she alleged “experience[ing] sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse from my biological siblings, mostly Sam Altman.” To be clear, these statements were not a part of the profile, and we have not heard anything directly from Annie either in regard to the accusations or to Sam’s ouster. (The only Twitter action Annie has taken since the news broke is to retweet a call from a tech researcher to “join me in saying FUCK YOU SAM! by supporting his sister annie, a brilliant human & sex worker who survived years of that shithead’s abuse!”)

Wow. So … what will OpenAI’s “new leadership” look like?

Until the board appoints a permanent replacement for Altman, Murati, the CTO, will take the helm. According to a Fast Company profile from March, which deemed Murati “one of tech’s most influential innovators,” Murati assumed her executive role at OpenAI in May of last year, and has reportedly been in charge “of OpenAI’s strategy to test its tools in public.” This suggests it was her idea to release ChatGPT in November of last year, at least in part, and to allow both human reception of—and experimentation with—the chatbot to take place so publicly. She previously worked at Tesla, helping develop the Model X and its (controversial) Autopilot self-driver program, and then worked with augmented reality for a few years before joining OpenAI in 2018. Even though Musk himself left the nonprofit that year, it’s reasonable to assume Murati has retained plenty of Muskian ideas about A.I. from her time at Tesla. A notable quote of hers from the Fast Company piece: “You could make technological progress in a vacuum without real-world contacts. But then the question is, are you actually moving in the right direction?”

For her first move as chief executive, Murati told OpenAI staff on Friday that the company’s relationship with Microsoft was “stable,” according to reporting from the Information. That’s gotta be a relief to investors.

    Artificial Intelligence

    Elon Musk

Third anniversary mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

22 - 28 minutes

It’s not the third anniversary of the mailbag columns, but still — it’s been a thrilling three years running this site, and I always love answering your questions.

Some good stuff happening this week. A Thanksgiving dinner will cost less in 2023 than it did in 2022. US-China talks led to some agreement on renewables deployment. Brookline is going to allow more multifamily housing. Home sales are up in general. Wages have risen faster than prices since the pandemic, and inequality is down. The Consumer Price Index was flat in October, and the Producer Price Index was actually down.

I also wanted to flag a candidate of interest. Janelle Bynum is a member of the Oregon House who is running against Republican incumbent Lori Chavez-DeRemer for the OR-5 seat in congress. Bynum beat Chavez-DeRemer in two separate state legislative races, but Chavez-DeRemer was able to get into congress in 2022 after progressives knocked off the incumbent Democrat in a primary. I honestly did not love the incumbent Democrat in question, Kurt Schrader, but I’d much rather have had him than LCD, who’s replacement-level Republican. Bynum can win this seat. She’s endorsed by the UFCW, the Congressional Black Caucus, the New Democrats Caucus, and Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, and I’d consider throwing some money her way a good investment in factional partisanship.

Onwards!

Roberto: Thanksgiving (and a presidential election year) are upon us. Any advice on handling political / current event discussions at family gatherings? My typical approach recently is the WarGames strategy: the only way to win is to not play the game. I try not to take the bait from my conservative family members and steer conversation toward less charged topics. But while disengaging is probably best for my sanity, most of my family members seem to be (conservative-leaning) moderates in a key battleground state, and it can feel like I'm squandering an opportunity.

As a highly trained professional political pundit, I’m generally loathe to get involved in arguments with amateurs.

A few weeks ago, a casual acquaintance started firing-off flaming hot takes on the Israel/Palestine conflict on the playground, which I thought was an odd life choice. I also wasn’t going to get into an argument with him about it, though, so another professional comms parent and I just tried to deflect. But I live in DC and don’t have much interpersonal reaction with residents of swing states. “Relational organizing” (i.e., talking to people you know) can be a powerful technique, and while I don’t think you should try to browbeat family members into voting for Joe Biden, it is probably worth arming yourself with some key facts and talking points so that you’re able to nudge people in a constructive direction.

Now of course, I don’t know what your family members think! But my general sense is that most conservatives are highly motivated by a dislike of the far left and tend to exaggerate the extent to which the Democratic Party is influenced by the left and, to an extent, get confused about cause and effect.

It’s probably useful to point out that under Biden, American oil production is at an all-time high, as is American natural gas production. Police funding is up, and the homicide rate, which rose very sharply during Donald Trump’s presidency, has now fallen below that Trump peak. You might also want to remind people that Trump spent the fall of 2020 worrying that if Biden won the election, the rioting that afflicted America’s cities during Trump’s presidency would intensify and the country would return to hard Covid lockdowns, but neither of those things happened. Biden has defied the immigration lawyer lobby to crack down on people who cross through Mexico before making asylum claims in the United States. Biden has been widely praised by Jewish leaders for his policy toward Israel.

None of that is to say that conservatives have no legitimate beefs with him. Many people want to make abortion illegal, to enact large tax cuts, to see Russia to conquer Ukraine, and to dismantle the public school system in the United States. Biden does not want to do those things, and if you do, it’s perfectly reasonable to vote for Trump. But I personally think it’s striking that Republicans (and Fox News) rarely campaign in those terms. They instead campaign against a made-up version of the Democratic Party that has AOC on the right flank and Stalin on the left.

Belisarius: My youngest kid’s preschool tuition rate just went up again, and is literally 50% higher than it was when she was born in late 2020.

I know it isn’t Biden’s or Democrat’s fault, but...this sucks. It is a very difficult to look at the numbers, and be rational, and overcome the feeling that the economy is just awful.

Separate from any questions about Biden or “the economy,” the number one fact about the world that I wish was more broadly appreciated is this: In a healthy economy where wages rise faster than prices, the relative price of labor-intensive services goes up, and it goes up faster the healthier economic growth is.

Sometimes that fact is just a curiosity. It sounds paradoxical that the richer world of 2023 is less able to afford intricate hand-crafted decorative architecture than the world of 1823, but when you ponder the economics, it actually makes sense. But some labor-intensive sectors like childcare, elementary school teaching, police work, and elder care have critical social functions. Your expectation should be that if you have 20 years of healthy economic growth, then either the tax burden to support your teachers and cops will rise or else the average quality of policing and the school system will decline. The only alternative to those dynamics is to find good ways to make these sectors less labor-intensive. With policing, for example, we can rely more on surveillance and facial recognition software. That’s controversial, but I think the controversy stems in large part from people not really thinking hard enough about the underlying economic fundamentals. On childcare, it seems like we’re still pretty far from robot nannies, so if we want it to be affordable to people in the long run, we' need higher taxes and more subsidies.

Scott Spitze: How do Democrats fight the meme that Republicans are good on the economy? It seems to be the main thing keeping the GOP afloat with the average voter. But it's not actually true: short-term economic output has little correlation with the party in power (and the government has little control over the economy in general) and many GOP policies are not exactly priming long term growth. Is this just something where voters say they care about the economy but really only care about marginal tax rates?

My interpretation of this is that voters are thinking in terms of pretty crude tradeoffs.

They always say they like Democrats more on climate, on the environment, and on various tender-hearted issues related to helping poor people and social justice. A naive person could read that and think “oh the voters are crying out for massive welfare state expansion and huge curbs on fossil fuels.” But then you see that voters like Republicans more on “the economy.” Basically, Republicans are the party that will go for growth, even if it means screwing people over or trashing the environment, whereas Democrats take a more balanced view. That’s a pretty crude caricature of the parties and an oversimplification of how policy tradeoffs work, but as a simplification, it’s not terrible. In terms of what Democrats can do, I think it’s find ways to say “here is a thing we did to address Economic Problem X [which today would be high prices] that isn’t just a way of achieving Progressive Social Goal Y.”

Secret Squirrel: You were joking about how, since they brought David Cameron back in the UK, Biden should make Obama the Duke of Honolulu and appoint him Foreign Secretary. But what should Obama do all day? He's 62, enormously talented, still popular and I assume pretty bored.

By all accounts, he’s having a great time being a kind of random celebrity and doing sporadic high profile political events.

The thing that I, personally, would love to see him do is a series of super-secret trainings and seminars with young elected officials where he delivers some real talk about his life and career and the art of pandering. There is a way you go from holding down a safe state legislature seat in Hyde Park to becoming President of the United States, and it is not doing the whole progressive advocacy group checklist or fully aligning yourself with the hopes and dreams of your personal social peers.

Sean O: Assuming Trump was not a factor, which Republican primary candidate do you prefer, and which do you believe would win the primary?

Of the people who got in the race, I think Chris Christie would make the best president because he’s the most moderate. But by the same token, he’s too moderate to win.

The sheer volume of the Ron DeSantis Hype Train at its peak makes it look foolish in retrospect now that it’s deflated, but I think we had clear signs that he would have been the favorite if Trump had decided to step away from electoral politics.

David_in_Chicago: When is the last time you changed your mind? Question inspired by this r/EzraKlein thread but wanted to broaden it.

I change my mind a lot! I know I have this reputation for being an uber-generalist who runs his mouth about everything, but I have tons of unsettled views that I mostly don’t write about. For example, last week I was reading something that was mostly about meth users but it incidentally mentioned a guy who runs a needle exchange program. It occurred to me that I had broadly positive views on needle exchange, but that my knowledge of the issue was driven by research that was done a while ago. And over the course of my career, the treatments for HIV have gotten a lot better, while the problem of opioid addiction has gotten a lot more serious.

So I wondered, has the balance of considerations shifted? I searched around, and found this Analisa Packham article suggesting that yes, in the fentanyl era, these programs may do more harm than good. My mind changed! But I also wasn’t going to fire off a 2,000-word column based on one paper. I may see other things that change my mind back.

Pat Thomas: Now that it’s a two person race, do you prefer either Angela Alsobrooks or David Trone in the Democratic primary for Senate in Maryland?

Speaking of things I don’t have strongly held opinions about, I keep not finding a clear basis for making a choice in this race.

Trone is white and represents suburbs west of DC (plus conservative areas farther west) while Alsobrooks is Black and represents suburbs east of DC. Looking at their endorsements patterns, it mostly seems to follow geographic and racial lines rather than any clear ideological split. Trone has been a totally unremarkable House member who doesn’t stand out in any positive or negative way to me, while Alsobrooks has been the best person on housing in PG County politics, but that’s an extraordinarily low bar. If one or the other wants to come out as a champion of land use reform or education reform or nuclear energy or something else I care about, then I’ll hop on that person’s bandwagon, but so far neither has. They both seem like they’d be fine, and they don’t seem that different.

I do like that Alsobrooks actually talks about her work as a prosecutor and reducing violent crime, while Trone just wants you to know he’s a good progressive who cares about reform. There isn’t really a policy contrast, but Alsobrooks’ message is better, so if I had to vote tomorrow, that’s my thin basis for preferring her. But my endorsement is very much up for grabs in this race if someone wants to try to impress me.

StrangePolyhedrons: Now that history has cooled just a little and we can look back without it being a current political hot potato, did the United States make a mistake not signing up for the Trans Pacific Partnership? Would our economy be in better or worse shape if we had? What was your take at the time and have you changed your mind?

There are, I think, two different questions about the TPP.

    Was it a good idea for the United States to pursue a multilateral trade agreement with the bloc of countries involved in TPP?

    Was the specific content of the TPP trade agreement good or bad for America or the world?

I think the answer to number one is a clear “yes,” while number two is much more of a mixed bag. I defended TPP’s financial services chapter against its critics and thought the complaints offered about its government procurement chapter were mostly wrong. But what I wrote at the time was that while the abstract national security case for TPP made sense, the specific design of the deal didn’t really follow through on that concept.

Broadly speaking, TPP offered foreign countries better access to the American market. In exchange, we asked them to do things, primarily open their domestic markets to American banks (a fine idea but hardly a huge win for the average American) and copy bad American intellectual property rules. A truly “strategic” TPP would have asked for fewer favors for American businesses and insisted on stronger supply chain rules to ensure that Vietnam (or whatever else) wasn’t just being used as a cutout for products that were largely Chinese. At the time, I thought sinking TPP was fine because the same basic idea could return in a better form. But then Trump became president, which I was not expecting in 2015, and just this week Biden’s efforts to do TPP-but-better collapsed due to opposition from congressional Democrats. If I had known that future history, I would have thought that getting some form of TPP done and trying to improve it from the inside was probably the better option.

Thomas L Hutcheson: Since blocking any specific fossil fuel producing or transportation project (what I sort of unfairly call McKibbin-ism, although I’ve even seen John Quiggins defend it in the much larger context of exporting coal from Australia.) will, because of substitution, result in very little CO2 emission avoided but at the cost of the lost project benefits and political costs to the Democratic Administration that goes along, why is this such a popular “activist” tactic?

The skeleton key for understanding a lot of activist behavior is that activists believe strongly in activism, so the proximate goal of almost any activist campaign is to build activist movement strength rather than accomplish policy goals.

To that end, the Generic Activist Playbook works like this:

    Demand something.

    The object of your demand needs to be someone who can grant your demand.

    The object of your demand needs to care what you think about him. 

This is why student debt cancellation became such an important talking point. It does literally nothing to improve the long-term trajectory of American higher education, but precisely because it’s a random unilateral one-off you, can “demand” that Biden do it. McKibben’s great insight about Keystone is that because it required State Department sign-off in a way that is outside the normal cost-benefit regulatory framework, Obama had the power to block it, so you could unleash the GAP on it. It’s true that it wasn’t important in terms of reducing emissions, but the goal of climate activism isn’t to reduce emissions, it’s to build climate activism and Keystone was GAP-able.

GAP is also why the initial instinct of a lot of left activists was to respond to the Dobbs ruling by getting mad at Joe Biden for not issuing enough emergency declarations. The question of “what will help protect abortion rights?” literally does not arise because that’s not how activists think about things. Then people like Ashley All (and her donors!) came around with the abortion rights initiative strategy, which has helped preserve freedom for millions of people. That’s great, but it mostly underscores that “activism” as a category of human activity is badly overrated by contemporary progressives.

Aaron: Privatize Amtrak!

At first I said this as a troll but then… why not? I’m a transit novice so I’m sure I’m missing something, but Japan and Italy have had varying degrees of privately owned train companies, with obvious success. Privately owned train companies would seem more likely to prioritize ridership/money spent than Amtrak has been. They would probably be more willing to hire foreign experts. It might be easier to focus on northeast corridor if it’s not seen as government jobs program. Hell, Republicans might even support it as a means of “shrinking government. So what am I missing?

There’s nothing wrong with privatizing Amtrak, but I caution enthusiasts that doing so wouldn’t magically solve anything. A private passenger railroad would still be a heavily regulated entity (freight railroads are regulated) that asks for government subsidies for basic infrastructure (freight railroads and airlines do this and obviously car companies do not pay for highway construction), and so the quality of the political decision-making is still really crucial.

The case for privatization would have to be that it changes the political dynamic, which could be true. But part of the Japanese story is they reformed governance before privatizing in order to maximize the value of the asset. In the UK, where they kind of thoughtless sold-off poorly managed rail assets, they just ended up with some bad rent-seeking private railroads.

Dave: It seems like some parts of the country are clearly over-extended in terms of available resources or climate vulnerability. For example Arizona doesn’t have enough water and many places in Florida will just keep getting devastated by natural disasters. Do you think government should use zoning laws or similar restrictions to prevent further over-extension as climate change gets worse?

The idea that Arizona “doesn’t have enough water” to accommodate its population growth is a serious misunderstanding. What happened is that people realized that the desert is a good place for farming since it’s so sunny, but that only works if you have a source of water that is not the rain (this is why Egypt was a major cradle of civilization), so a lot of water is sent to Arizona for use in agricultural irrigation.

And there’s nothing wrong with that! Bringing water to Arizona to irrigate crops is a reasonable thing for a modern industrial society to do. But the United States tends to let farmers use water at a discount price, which leads to overconsumption and to residential users facing a zero-sum scramble for an unreasonably scarce resource. What Western states need to do is price water appropriately. In terms of Florida, though, I have to admit I don’t really understand their insurance issues and need to learn more about this.

Tom Hitchner: In your column marking 3 years of Slow Boring, you wrote that today, just as when you launched, you thought that “Donald Trump is a corrupt, authoritarian menace whose term in office ended up going much better on a practical level than it might have, but whose fundamental lack of shame or principle risks inflicting massive long-term damage on the country.” I certainly agree with your assessment but I'm surprised to think you thought that at launch, since at that time Trump had just been beaten and it wasn't obvious (at least to me) that he would even run again, let alone that he'd still be the unquestioned head of the party. Thinking back to mid-November 2021, what did you think was going to happen with Donald Trump over the following few years? Do you think there was a plausible timeline in which Trump ends up on the sidelines?

I’m not a super-prescient person, and I didn’t anticipate the violence and drama of January 6. But I thought it was clear from the moment that Trump refused to concede that he was executing a power move on the GOP.

Normally if a presidential candidate loses, different factions immediately start explaining why the incompetence and failure of the candidate proves the party needs to move in the direction of Faction A or Faction B. Trump — from the moment of the election — was extremely effective at combatting this natural evolution, and everyone in the establishment just kept hoping they could somehow ride it out. Then 1/6 happened, which was alarming enough that some Republicans made a fitful effort to ditch the guy before mostly giving up. But what was striking to me in November 2020 was that a non-violent refusal to admit he’d lost was something everyone was happy to go along with.

Monkey staring at a monolith: How should the US change its asylum policy?

I'm struck by the fact that current US asylum policy combined with a long wait time for asylum cases has created a de facto visa procedure that is attracting people from as far away as Asia to travel to Mexico, cross the US border, and wait to be detained by Border Patrol. This seems really sub-optimal.

My gut instinct is that asylum simply should not be available to anyone caught inside the US illegally or to people who travel through an intermediate nation on the way to the US, but I assume there's some reason this rule is not in place.

Just to review the actual policy trajectory, in May the Biden administration imposed a new rule that banned people from claiming asylum if they passed through other countries without making asylum claims there first. Border crossings did, in fact, drop in response to that. But a district court judge issued a stay against that rule in July, and then in August a circuit court lifted the stay. Despite the circuit court rulings, though, in August and September we saw record crossings and then a big drop in October as the administration sent more personnel to the area.

Maybe the numbers will keep falling, and we’ll look back and decide that this policy change fixed things.

But that seems unlikely. Historically, policy changes at the border do result in an initial drop, but then people figure out that the most fundamental reality of the situation is unchanged — if a ton of people are apprehended by Border Patrol all at once, there is no logistically tractable way to detain them all or process them instantly. You can say “well, the rule is you can’t apply for asylum since you passed through Mexico without applying there.” But a rule is not a procedure for implementing the rule. That’s how you wind up with authoritarian musings, like Trump’s idea that the Border Patrol should shoot migrants on site.

In practice, what successful enforcement regimes (including the one Trump eventually landed on) seem to rely on is externalization of enforcement. Basically, instead of having the Border Patrol be capricious and cruel in its policing of the US-Mexico border, you try to get the governments of Mexico and Central America to do the dirty work. That fundamentally is what Trump pulled off, at least temporarily, by 2019. Europe has tried this for a while with Turkey and various countries in North Africa, and I think their experience (beyond human rights concerns) is that effort can wane over time.

Nicaragua is currently deliberately facilitating migration from Haiti, Cuba, and Africa to the United States because they’re mad at sanctions the United States imposed over Daniel Ortega’s attacks on democracy. It’s conceivable that an administration more fanatical about reducing migration would just make a deal with Ortega instead of imposing those sanctions. Is that would Trump would do? Well, on the one hand, he is more fanatical about migration. But on the other hand, he (like most Republicans) is generally more fanatical about being hostile to leftist Latin American regimes.

All of which is to say that part of what the United States needs here is more consensus as to what our actual priorities are. If Democrats and Republicans agree that the number one most important thing is to block migration, we can probably achieve that. But you then can’t turn around and say “oh he’s gone soft on communism” or whatever, and there will probably be consequence for a range of other priorities including fentanyl and trade.

Cybertruck's Launch Is Already an Exhausting Joke

www.vice.com

Cybertruck's Launch Is Already an Exhausting Joke

8 - 9 minutes

FREDERIC J. BROWN / Contributor via Getty

Screen Shot 2021-02-24 at 3

Moveable explores the future of transportation, infrastructure, energy, and cities.

In 2019, Tesla revealed two new cars. In March, it revealed the Model Y, a slightly taller version of the Model 3 with a rear hatch door instead of a trunk. It was largely hailed as a smart but boring car. This is what grown-up car companies do: They iterate on successful models year after year, decade after decade. The Model Y is now one of the world’s best-selling cars, a genuine hit, and easily the best and most profitable product Elon Musk has ever helped make. Musk has tweeted about the Model Y just seven times. And then, Cybertruck came along.

Six months later, Tesla revealed the Cybertruck, which is supposedly getting delivered at the end of the month to very patient customers who placed a deposit for the car before the pandemic. The Cybertruck is already a laughing stock, and the steady drip of worrying videos and images going viral ahead of its release aren't helping. 

Deliveries were supposed to begin in 2021. It was supposed to be an off-roading champion and speed demon, modular but “literally bulletproof,” with a base price starting around $40,000. During the reveal, the unbreakable windows broke. In recent weeks, the Cybertruck has been widely mocked online for failing to summit a small dirt hill, having a dumb logo, looking ridiculous from behind, and panel gaps through which a much more reasonably sized car could drive. It cannot be sold in Europe, a huge market for Tesla, because it is too big and lacks life-saving crumple zones in the case of a crash. Tesla also said it retained the right to sue owners who resell their Cybertrucks within a year before quietly removing that section from its terms. And these are just the tidbits that have come out while the prototypes are in the hands of some of Musk’s most fervent fans. Elon Musk has tweeted about the Cybertruck 27 times.

All of this has led some people to wonder why the Cybertruck exists. The short answer is that the Cybertruck exists because it is the perfect Elon Musk car, the total embodiment of everything he is—a thing that tries to be a bunch of different things at once and is not very good at any of them, but, seems revolutionary and interesting if you look at it very briefly, only for just a second. 

The full explanation here involves remembering the pre-pandemic Elon Musk. This was before he became a far-right troll, hobnobbing with white nationalists and Nazis on Twitter and telling them they make good points. This was before he owned Twitter, very publicly turned it into a garbage fire of uselessness, and changed its name to a letter he likes. This was before he supported Kanye West for president and predicted there would be “close to zero new cases” of Covid by the end of April 2020. Back in 2019, it was still controversial to say Elon Musk wasn’t the generational genius many thought he was.

In 2019, I worked for a car website that covered the auto industry. Musk was both a constant source of debate and also an exhausting human to think about. We were sick of him, but also couldn’t get enough. Musk’s outsized impact on the otherwise boring, staid auto industry was a chaos particle in an otherwise closed system. Musk, for all of his faults, did shit we didn’t expect. He generated news and gave us things to write about. Musk exploited this, getting free advertisement for his car company by constantly saying newsworthy stuff which would get him free press coverage. It seems pretty obvious to me now that at some point the part of his brain that understood the game atrophied and died, leaving the part of his brain that thinks of crazy things to say sole proprietorship over his thoughts. Still, there was little debate at the car website that Musk was, on the most basic level, a smart guy. He had to be. Look at Tesla.

There is now an adage, which I will credit to former Twitter engineer Rod Hilton, that everyone thinks Musk is a genius until you hear him talk about a subject you know something about. As Hilton put it, “He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius. Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius. Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.”

Screenshot 2023-11-15 at 12.35.22 PM.png

I had a similar trajectory. Before I worked for the car website I covered public transportation. Musk famously hates public transportation and started a whole tunneling company for his cars specifically to make it obsolete. Some of the dumbest things I have ever heard someone say about public transportation came out of Elon Musk’s mouth. These were the kind of things that aren’t even debatable or questionable but are just plain ignorant, the kind of thoughts a five-year-old playing with toy cars might say. Hundreds of tunnels under a city would eliminate traffic forever, he claimed. It was then, around the time Musk created The Boring Company in 2016, that I realized Musk has two undeniable skill sets: generating attention for himself and playing the role of a smart person.

Musk is an entertainer. He is an actor playing a smart person, and like all good entertainers, he’s good at making his fans feel entertained. When the Cybertruck was released, all of our posts about it on the car website did monster traffic, because people were entertained. Friends and family who know nothing about cars were texting me to ask about the Cybertruck. It was a genuinely shocking car reveal, the complete opposite of the Model Y in every way, and therefore pure Musk. Even the window shattering was played to laughs and applause. In 2019, the Cybertruck won Motortrend’s Concept Car of the Year because car writers were entertained, too. 

For those who regard cars as little more than necessary appliances like a washing machine or refrigerator—which, ironically, the Cybertruck bears a great deal of resemblance to—a concept car is not a new thing. It is a prototype, usually not even functional, wheeled out during motor show conventions for marketing purposes. It is a way, along with sponsoring racing teams, traditional car companies signal they’re thinking big, exciting, radical new ideas while releasing the 48th version of the Honda Accord or whatever. Most of these companies are smart enough to not turn the concept cars into real cars, because concept cars, almost by definition, are wildly impractical vehicles that would be near impossible to manufacture reliably on a massive scale and that no one in their right mind would want to buy.

I have no idea if the Cybertruck will sell. Another infamous entertainer, P.T. Barnum, is widely associated with the saying “There’s a sucker born every minute,” which leaves an awful lot of possibilities for a shameless self-promoter like Musk to make a buck. But I do know why the Cybertruck exists. It is three years late, has barely appeared in public, lacks many of the promised specifications, and has been promoted with precisely zero dollars in advertising. But here we are talking about it, and the man who revealed it. That is, after all, what he wants.

Correction: A previous version of this story said the Model Y has a hatch instead of a frunk. The Model Y also has a frunk. It does not have a trunk.

Is Israel Abiding by International Law in Gaza? - Israel News - Haaretz

Is Israel Abiding by International Law in Gaza? - Israel News - Haaretz

Read time: 12 minutes

archived 15 Nov 2023 11:50:21 UTC

Is Israel Abiding by International Law in Gaza?

Hamas makes it is hard for the IDF to comply with international laws of war when it operates out of hospitals and schools, and tries to prevent civilians from evacuating. This is what experts think about the army's conduct in Gaza so far

At first the international consensus seemed solid: Israel has the right to fight back after Hamas killed more than 1,200 people and kidnapped 239 others into Gaza. But five weeks later, Israel's military is facing criticism worldwide, including allegations that it is committing war crimes.

Most Israeli legal experts interviewed for this article believe that the military is adhering to international law, and they are unanimous in that the Supreme Court's independence is vital in protecting Israeli soldiers, political leaders and defense chiefs from prosecution abroad after the war.

Two weeks ago the Foreign Ministry released a document crafted by the Justice Ministry and military prosecutors that rejects the international criticism and seeks to persuade the world that the Israel Defense Forces’ war on Hamas is fully legitimate.

The attorney general's office and the military prosecution are helping the government comply with the rules. Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and her team are outlining the broad legal policy, while military prosecutors are advising the IDF on combat issues including the legality of specific targets.

Hamas operates out of residential areas, hospitals and schools, and also tries to prevent civilians from leaving combat zones. This makes it difficult for the IDF to comply with the international laws of war, whose main goal is to avoid harm to civilians.

There’s a lot of fog of war and disinformation, and, unfortunately, based on experience, I find it hard to believe that the information that the IDF spokesperson and the Israeli government are providing is accurate.

The previous attorney general, Avichai Mendelblit, argues that even in this situation, Israel must do everything it can to comply with the rules.

“The fact that Hamas stops people from evacuating doesn’t exempt Israel from proportionality and cautionary measures to prevent harm to civilians,” he says. “If the other side is committing war crimes, that doesn’t give you legitimacy to violate [the rules].”

Our blood is hot and the grief and sorrow are immense; I feel these emotions every day. But in the end, war has to be waged from the head and not the gut.

Avichai Mendelblit

Mendelblit strongly opposes the call to lift all restrictions in the battle against Hamas; he notes the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay after 9/11 where, according to media reports, prisoners were severely tortured. The prison was set up at the U.S. base on Cuba's coast, outside U.S. territory, in order to skirt American constitutional law. “These are things we haven’t accepted,” Mendelblit says.

But the intensifying cries in Israel to fight the enemy without restraints threaten international support. The public’s lust for revenge even includes political leaders like Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, who said that nuclear weapons were an option (though he later claimed he was only speaking metaphorically).

“I’m hearing that ‘we don’t care what happens there’ or that ‘we need to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza.’ All these statements not only don't suit us morally, they’re extraordinary stupidity,” Mendelblit says.

“Our blood is hot and the grief and sorrow are immense; I feel these emotions every day. But in the end, war has to be waged from the head and not the gut. We’re committed to the rules of international law because even in our difficult situation we’re part of the family of nations. If we follow the rules, we’ll be able to keep the war clock running longer.”

Mendelblit, however, notes an extreme approach: The UN Human Rights Council claims that in the war on terror, Israel must follow human rights law and ordinary criminal law.

“But it’s impossible to fight terror like that, so Israel’s approach is that it must act against terror groups based on the four principles of the laws of war, or the laws of armed conflict,” Mendelblit says.

Thus, Israel's attacks must be solely for military purposes and in no way be collective punishment of civilians. Second, the attacks must be proportional; there must not be excessive harm to civilians relative to the military objective.

Third, the IDF must take precautionary measures to avoid harming civilians as far as is possible. Fourth, Israel must respond to civilians’ humanitarian needs such as medicine and food.

The issue of proportionality stands at the center of the dispute between Israel’s critics and supporters: Has the harm to civilians Gaza been excessive?

Prof. Barak Medina of Hebrew University’s Law Faculty says that, during the current fighting, this question is hard to answer for several reasons. First, Hamas isn't a reliable source for the number of dead and wounded in Gaza. Then there's the issue of proportionality.

Medina says the question isn’t “the harm that Hamas inflicted, it’s the harm that it’s likely to inflict in the future if the organization isn’t disabled.”

Still, he believes that “by all appearances, the IDF has been adhering to the laws of war so far.” He bases this conclusion in part on the so-called humanitarian corridors through which Israel has urged Gazans to flee.

“Hamas’ attack made clear that there is no effective defense for Israeli civilians,” Medina says. “The only way is offense, and in the current circumstances, which include giving Gaza civilians the chance to flee and limiting attacks so that the non-targeted damage isn’t too severe, Israel is complying with the laws of war.”

The families of the hostages are expected to take Hamas to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Sfard adds: “There’s a lot of fog of war and disinformation, and, unfortunately, based on experience, I find it hard to believe that the information that the IDF spokesperson and the Israeli government are providing is accurate.”

Michael Sfard says that he 'definitely fears that Israel isn't complying with the laws of war – that it attacks civilian targets and carries out disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks.'

He says the high number of fatalities in Gaza doesn't prove that Israel has violated the laws of war, “but it certainly creates a suspicion and shifts the burden onto the army to explain and justify its actions.”

Mendelblit, meanwhile, criticizes the “counting of skulls.” “They say that if 20 of your civilians died, you’re allowed to kill 20 of the enemy’s civilians. That isn't true,” he says.

“In every attack you have to consider the military advantage you can achieve against the disadvantage. If your aim is to destroy Hamas, this is a legitimate goal, and obviously this requires many operations: firing from afar, a ground invasion. And the result will be more significant.”

Unlike Mendelblit, Hassan Jabareen, the general director of the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights, says the number of civilians killed is of great importance. “We’re talking about more than 10,000 dead, of which more than 4,000 are children,” says Jabareen, who relies on the statistics released by the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry in Gaza, which Israel says are inaccurate.

“Granted, a combat situation isn’t sterile, but when so many women and children are being killed every day, this attests to something being done systematically, to indifference to the killing of civilians,” he says. “So this is disproportionate harm – and it’s forbidden. To kill one person, you’re not allowed to kill 100 civilians.”

Increased 'collateral damage'

Several of the experts say one key factor tips the scales toward the military goals, despite the concerns about harm to civilians: the 239 hostages.

Former Deputy Attorney General Raz Nizri and Shelly Aviv Yeini, an expert in international law at the University of Haifa, volunteer for the Hostages and Missing Families Forum. They say the kidnappings restrict Israel’s freedom of movement in Gaza.

“The abduction of civilians is a war crime under the laws of war and international criminal law,” Aviv Yeini says. “Their forced disappearance without any information on their condition falls within the definition of crimes against humanity.”

The families of the hostages are expected to take Hamas to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. According to Aviv Yeini, “Since proportionality in warfare weighs the military advantage of a certain attack against the collateral damage, the calculation of proportionality will ‘tolerate’ increased incidental damage if the military objective significantly advances the release of the hostages.”

Nizri adds that “in the current conflict the declared goal is the release of the hostages and the overthrow of Hamas’ rule – a broader goal than the state has declared in the past.” He notes the critics around the world who don't consider Hamas’ kidnapping of civilians a crime against humanity.

“A good example is the letter in which the Columbia University faculty members referred to the massacre and abductions as a legitimate means of resistance to the occupation,” he says. “Massacre and kidnapping have no legal justification and there is no judicial possibility for clearing crimes against humanity.”

Medina, meanwhile, notes Israel's occupation of the West Bank, but he adds that from a legal standpoint, the occupation “doesn’t influence the legality of Israel’s response to Hamas, and it certainly doesn’t absolve Hamas of responsibility for its war crimes.” Still, he admits that “the international community is losing patience with us because of the occupation.”

Jabareen adds that “Hamas enjoys no exemption from international criminal justice. The Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead determined that Hamas committed crimes against international law,” he says, referring to the 2008-09 Gaza war.

Still, Jabareen believes that Israel is violating international law in both its declarations and its attacks on Gaza, which he says are indiscriminate.

“Until today there was a certain prudence, if only rhetorical,” he says. “Today, anyone who says it’s necessary to be careful and not harm civilians is considered radical.”

Sfard adds that he “definitely fears that Israel isn't complying with the laws of war – that it attacks civilian targets and carries out disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks.” He says this fear “stems from what we're hearing about what’s happening in Gaza, and from past experience about our methods of warfare in Gaza.”

He mentions the airstrike on the Jabalya refugee camp and says the IDF Spokesperson's Unit stated that the military knew there were civilians there and attacked anyway to kill a Hamas commander. “This raises a very strong suspicion of a deliberate disproportionate attack,” Sfard says.

The Supreme Court's protection

No single international body determines whether international law has been violated, but a case is underway at the International Criminal Court in the Hague on suspicions of war crimes in past Israeli-Palestinian wars. Israel is not a member of the court but the Palestinians joined in 2015.

Any investigations could lead to indictments and arrest warrants for the prime minister, other politicians and members of the military. If an arrest warrant is issued, each of the 123 member states will have to hand over any suspect who enters its territory. Indictments against political leaders could seriously erode Israel’s image around the world and its foreign relations. This prospect would also restrict senior officials’ foreign travel.

Everyone interviewed for this article says the independence of Israel's judiciary, headed by the Supreme Court, is essential for warding off international sanctions.

Medina notes that international law allows a country's judicial system to handle war crimes cases if that system is effective and independent. The less judicial oversight a country has, the greater the risk the International Criminal Court will prosecute military officers and policymakers.

According to Aviv Yeini, “an independent and effective judiciary protects Israel from intervention when there is a suspicion of a violation of international law. The Supreme Court has gained a reputation over the years as a strong and independent court.”

But the judiciary's independence has been impaired since Benjamin Netanyahu’s most recent government took over late last year. Hamas' October 7 attack was preceded by nine months of the government striving to weaken the judiciary through legislation. If that had succeeded, Israeli political and military leaders might have found themselves today vulnerable to international justice.

“As soon as the world perceives that the Supreme Court and attorney general have been weakened and they’re not independent, we’ll be harmed,” Mendelblit says.

“This government sought to crush the system’s independence with utter recklessness. Fortunately for us, Levin and Rothman’s initiative hasn’t been realized, and the Supreme Court is still viewed as an independent body,” Mendelblit says, referring to Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Simcha Rothman, the chairman of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee.

“We didn’t need the war to understand that if you destroy the Supreme Court and the institution of the attorney general, turning them into mouthpieces of the regime, the world will deal with you and halt your opportunity to fight.

“We have a serious problem of eroding our legitimacy as a member of the family of nations. Critically, the independence of the State Prosecutor’s Office, the attorney general and the Supreme Court allow us to say we’re acting according to the rules of international law and the laws of war.

“The American aircraft carriers were sent here to protect us only because Israel is a front line for democracy against the horrors of Iran and Hamas. This war proves that there are two possibilities: Either we’ll be a democracy and play by the rules of international law, or we won’t exist at all.”