Let's Know Things

This week we talk about Taylor Swift, knife attacks, and immigration politics.We also discuss immigration rationales, riffraff, and terrorist plots.Recommended Book: AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen QiufanTranscriptAmerican musician, singer, and songwriter Taylor Swift, at age 34, recently became the world's first music industry billionaire who's primary source of income is their music—as opposed to side-businesses, work, and royalties in adjacent or completely disconnected industries.A lot of that wealth has stemmed from her incredibly successful, and ongoing—as of the day I'm recording this at least—Eras tour, which began in March of 2023 and which is her sixth tour, and by far the biggest in scope, scale, and success.The Eras Tour, by itself, has surpassed a billion dollars in revenue—the first tour to ever hit that milestone—and it's had all sorts of interesting direct ramifications and repercussions, like bolstering Swift's music sales and streams, but also indirect ones, like creating a sort of economic weather system wherever these tour stops are planned: it's been estimated, for instance, that the Eras Tour contributed something like $4.3 billion to the GDP of the United States, and the WSJ dubbed these economic impacts "Taylornomics," as the combination of travel, food, entertainment, and other spending surrounding her tour dates, folks coming from all the around the world to visit the relevant cities, attend the concert, and spend on those sorts of things while in town, has all had a meaningful impact legible in even the huge-scale numbers of national income figures.Swift, then, has been having quite the moment, following the several decades of work in this industry leading up to this tour.And the swirl of activity—economic and cultural, especially—around her Eras Tour stops have made these events central to the collective consciousness, grabbing lots of airtime and watercooler talk wherever she shows up, because of how much of an event each of these stops are; and notably, they have been very well reviewed, in terms of the performance, the sets, the planning, everything—so it would seem that the attention being focused on these shows isn't superficial and reflexive, it's the result of having put together something pretty special for people who are willing to spend to attend that kind of event.It maybe shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that there may be people out there looking to garner attention for themselves and their causes who see these events as an opportunity to do exactly that.Three sold-out shows in Vienna, Austria were cancelled in early August due to a plot by what seems to have been several teenagers looking to kill as many people as possible outside the tour's local concert venue.An investigation into this plot is ongoing, so there's still a fair bit we don't know, but what's been divulged so far is that three people have been connected to the plot and detained, the main suspect is a 19-year-old who planned to use knives and/or explosives to kill as many of the 30,000 or so onlookers who gather outside the show venues each night as possible—and another 65,000 people would have been inside the venue, so that's a lot of people, and a lot of potential for stampede-related injuries and deaths, alongside those that could be caused with knives and bombs—and that he, alongside two other suspects, a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old, was inspired by the Islamic State group and al-Qaida—the 18-year-old, who is an Iraqi citizen, apparently having pledged himself to the Islamic State.Propaganda materials from both terrorist organizations were found at the 17-year-old's home, alongside bomb-making materials, and he was hired just a few days before being caught by a company that provides some type of service to the concert venue; specifics about what said company provides haven't been officially divulged yet, but the theory is that this job was meant to give him and his accomplices some kind of access, allowing them to do what they intended to do more effectively.There were a lot of disappointed Swift fans in Vienna who in some cases spent thousands of dollars just getting and staying there for the concert, only to be told that it was cancelled; most of the response from those affected in this way seems to be relatively upbeat, though, considering the circumstances, pretty much everyone breathing a sigh of relief that this plot wasn't pulled off successfully, which could have resulted in something like what happened at Manchester Arena in 2017, when an Ariana Grande concert was attacked by an Islamic extremist with a bomb who killed 22 people and injured more than 1,000.Swift's representatives have said that her next concert, scheduled for between August 15 and the 20th, are still on the books and ready to go, at London's Wembley Stadium, which will close-out the European leg of this record-setting tour.London's mayor has said that local authorities are prepared for whatever might happen, having learned a lot from that aforementioned Ariana Grande concert in 2017.What I'd like to talk about today is a bout of violent rioting that broke out in the UK recently, which is loosely connected to Swift and her music, though only adjacently, and is primarily focused on the roiling topic of immigration and its British discontents.—At the tail-end of July, 2024, there was a knife attack in Southport, a town in northwestern England, in which three young girls were killed and ten other people, eight of whom were also children, were injured—some very badly injured.This attack targeted a Taylor Swift-themed yoga and dance workshop that catered to children ages 6 to 11, twenty-five of whom were in attendance—hence that large number of young victims. And the adults who tried to stop the attacker were all themselves injured, in some cases critically, and the assailant was only ultimately halted when a pair of police officers managed to subdue him.The person behind this attack, and those murders, is a 17-year-old British citizen who was arrested at the scene, and whose identity was initially concealed from the public because of how privacy laws work in the UK, related to minors; they tend not to divulge identifying details when crimes are committed by people who are legally children, though in this case they ultimately decided to do so, for reasons I'll get into in a moment.Thus far, there isn't a clear motive behind this attack—the attacker has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and was apparently deep in the midst of some kind of self-imposed isolation leading up to his apparent decision to take a taxi to this workshop and kill a bunch of children.He's been charged with possession of a bladed article, ten counts of attempted murder, and three counts of murder, and his trial date is currently set for the end of January in 2025.This attack is currently not being treated as a terrorist incident, though again, no clear motive has been established, and there's a lot that's not known, and likely quite a bit that hasn't been publicly divulged yet.This knife attack, unto itself, led to a lot of headlines and attention because of how just brutal and horrible it was.But in the aftermath of the attack, possibly because the attacker wasn't named, again, because he was a minor, rumors and then outright misinformation began to spread around less-than-legitimate news entities in the UK, and across social media platforms and messaging apps like Telegram, many of them suggesting or directly alleging that the attacker was someone he was not—a false name was given to him by some of those spreading these rumors—and even in cases when a name wasn't misattributed or fabricated, he was alleged to be an immigrant seeking asylum—which is also incorrect; his parents are from Rwanda, but he was born in Cardiff, and is thus a British citizen.Within days these rumors and this mis- and dis-information, this accidental and purposeful spreading of mistruths, began to reach a fever-pitch, the zone flooded with patently untrue claims and narratives, which is why the police decided to release the attacker's name publicly on August 1; it was going to happen within a week or so, anyway, because he was turning 18 on the 7th, so the idea was to get ahead of that impending forced divulgence, and to try to temper some of that false information spread within facets of British society in the meantime.Most of the false stories, though, hung on, even after officials made this information public, and to understand why, it's important to understand what a political force anti-immigration sentiment has become in Britain over the past few decades.The British aren't alone in this, of course: especially in wealthier countries, mostly but not exclusively conservative politicians and parties have been making hay with claims about folks from other countries coming into their territory, taking their jobs, gobbling up their social services, and changing their culture into something those who came before feel they no longer recognize.Part of this is just the consequence of societies changing being reframed into something devilish and wrong, part of it is the reframing of stagnating economic conditions as something that's being done to their societies by outside forces, not by uncontrollable macro variables like pandemics, and controllable variables that are being mismanaged by those in power.Part of it, though, is related to real-deal demographic shifts, as folks flee from repression, violence, economic deterioration, and dangerous climactic happenings in less-wealthy parts of the world to those that are currently not suffering from these things, or not to the same degree.Thus, we see waves of people show up to the US's southern border, all hoping to get into the country, legally or otherwise, and the same is true of European nations with Mediterranean coasts, and, as is the case here, people arriving legally, by ship and plane and train into England, but also illegally, often in makeshift boats crossing the channel, the people who arrive in this way arrested and filtered into a system that often moves sluggishly and puts these new arrivals up in hotels or other housings for the duration of their processing at government expense.From the perspective of someone in a smaller British town, then, where the economic conditions are not much better than those in a similarly sized town in a much poorer country—since London is the only city in Britain doing really well in that regard, right now—this looks like a bunch of people from elsewhere, who don't belong, taking resources that should go to them, should be spend on their housing and healthcare, should be making jobs for them, and the ones that are allowed to stay continue to take those resources, leaving a lot less to go around, again, in circumstances in which it already feels like there's not anywhere near enough—no chance for growth, few opportunities, and diminishing value in the social services they've been promised.These are potent political topics, then, because in some cases these are real-deal issues already, and in others it can be useful and effective to stoke fears that this could happen in the future, if we allow these foreigners to keep flooding across our borders, legally or illegally.In the UK, the Conservatives, the Tories, have used this issue as a very effective lever, and at the height of fervor about this topic, they seemingly accidentally led the country to a successful Brexit referendum in 2016, leading to the UK leaving the European Union, in large part because this would allow them to set their own immigration policies separate from those of the EU, which are much more open in terms of movement between member nations.All of which, I think, helps explain what happened next, following that knife attack, and the torrent of false information that flooded the zone following the attack, which included all sorts of claims that the attacker was an illegal immigrant, that he was a Muslim, and that if nothing else, he was a black teenager who had brutally murdered several young, British girls.On July 30, a crowd in Southport gathered outside a local mosque and started causing trouble and making threats. The police showed up to keep the peace, and the protestors attacked them, set fire to a police van, and damaged the mosque—in the process injuring more than 50 police officers and three police dogs.This initial group of protestors was formed around a nucleus of people belonging to the English Defense League, which is a far-right, anti-Muslim organization, and members of Patriotic Alternative, which is a neo-Nazi group.Similar protests that became riots popped up in cities across the country in subsequent days, and amidst all the resulting tumult, a police station was set on fire in Sunderland, and more mosques, alongside businesses and homes owned by people who were purported to be, often incorrectly, immigrants, were also damaged or destroyed.Hotels housing asylum seekers were attacked, and something like 750 of these anti-immigration rioters have been arrested, thus far.The nature of these riots changed on August 7, when a protest, populated by the same sorts of people as were seen at the other ones, mostly anti-immigrant, neo-Nazi, and far-right folks, was met by a group of anti-racist counter-protestors that dramatically outnumbered them. The police helped support the peaceful anti-racist protestors, and since that day, most of these would-be riots have been quelled by oversized groups of counter-protestors augmented by a police presence.Before that tactic arose, though, several cities saw a handful of nights in a row of rioting by those far-right groups, many of them pillaging and burning shops, and attacking strangers and the police, and the government has gone out of its way to really throw the book at folks they've arrested, handing down significant punishments to some of the instigators of these riots, in particular, while also publishing their names and faces, in an attempt to embarrass and make examples of them.As of the second week of August, we're still seeing periodic attacks on mosques and attempted protests and riots by far-right activists pop up here and there, though they're happening a lot less frequently than in previous weeks, and peaceful anti-fascist, anti-racist protests have become a lot more common, in response to attempted riots, but also unto themselves.There are several ways of looking at what has happened here, in response to that attack, and in response to the riots that followed.One narrative of all this is that far-right politicians and ideologues int the country have attempted to convert a truly horrible event into something it wasn't for the purpose of regaining some of the power they lost with the last round of parliamentary elections.It's been alleged by the new British Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, that these riots were instigated by far-right troublemakers like Nigel Farage, who was one of the key proponents of Brexit, and who has recently reemerged in British politics as the leader of a vehemently anti-immigrant, further-right than the Conservatives party in the country.Farage and similar anti-immigrant leaders flooded the informational zone with disinformation and nudge-nudge-wink-wink innuendo that implied this was one of the consequences of allowing immigrants into the UK, and that, according to Starmer and other government leaders, led to some of this violence and destruction—they've even hinted that it might be prudent to clamp down on those sorts of posts and false claims, because of the real-world consequences that can follow; though that hint has been met with skepticism and worry from free-speech advocates.It's also been alleged that foreign agencies, like those in Russia, have been helping amplify these false claims, as part of their larger effort to sow discord and to augment the potency of reactionary groups in countries they want to influence, and folks who have aligned themselves with global conservative movements, like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, have been accused of doing the same, Musk himself sharing a lot of misinformation related to this attack and the riots that followed on the social network he bought, formerly Twitter, now X, clashing with the new Labour government on the network while saying that he believes a civil war is inevitable in the UK.So we could look at all this through the political-leverage lens, as there's a lot of power to be gained by successfully attaching reins to this sort of movement, and amplifying trouble for those in power, if those in power are your political rivals.We might also look at this through the lens of actual on-the-ground issues, though.There was a piece in the Financial Times, recently, in which it was posited that how we perceive these riots, and the people sparking and perpetuating them, will tend to depend on whether we subscribe to the "rational actor" or "riffraff" models of riot interpretation.The rational actor model says people who riot are doing what they do because of real-deal grievances that they can't seem to get addressed in any other way, while the riffraff model says rioters are basically low-lifes who have nothing better to do, and/or who like to mindlessly give in to the animalistic urge to belittle, attack, and maybe even kill those who seem different from them and theirs, and all they're looking for is an excuse to do so.Most social scientists, today, support the rational actor model, suggesting that even people who lean toward violence will keep those behaviors tamped-down most of the time, and only allow them out at moments in which they feel like there's no other way to get themselves and their grievances heard and addressed; and that's true whether we're talking about people of color rioting because they feel like they're being unfairly and violently targeted by police, or when it's mostly white, British Christians who feel like they're being elbowed out of society by Muslim immigrants and various other people of color.That folks like Farage might step in and try to ride this kind of wave, then, might ultimately be less important than identifying a pressure-valve that'll allow these sorts of grievances to be worked out and addressed in socially positive, legal ways.Government healthcare infrastructure in many of these areas is stretched to the breaking point, social safety nets are unraveling, and years of Conservative-instigated austerity measures have left these and other social baselines way below where they were in recent memory—and the messaging from the Conservative Party has been that immigrants are to blame, not their good and logical and responsible monetary policies.Starmer, as the head of the new Labour government, which won the last election in a landslide, booting the Conservatives from their perch for the first time in a long time, has the opportunity to address these issues, then, but it's likely he'll have to do so in such a way that the actual problems are addressed—providing better funding for these services, helping stimulate more economic activity so there are enough, and high-quality enough jobs for everyone, and ensuring there's enough immigration so that systems that rely on folks coming in from elsewhere (which is especially true of the nation's healthcare system and its construction industries) can function properly—while also addressing some of the seeming issues, like cracking down on illegal immigration; which probably isn't the core problem it's been promoted as by the Conservatives and those to their political right, but is an issue, and is something Starmer has said he will crack down on.It currently seems like he might aim to grease the wheels of the immigration system, so that folks applying for citizenship are processed faster, which will mean fewer resources expended putting them up in the country while they're waiting to see if they can stay—which would possibly help free up government resources, while also representing a kinder model for those who are otherwise left in limbo for long periods of time.Whether this can be framed and communicated correctly by the Labour government so that it appeals to those who are worried about immigration is an open question, though, as it's possible that anything other than a hardcore lockdown of the borders and a denial of new immigration requests—which would cause even more chaos in the country's healthcare and other immigration-related systems—might seem like non-solutions, even if they technically solve some of the underlying problems the rioters have been complaining about.Show Noteshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Southport_stabbinghttps://www.cnn.com/2024/07/30/uk/taylor-swift-southport-stabbing-reaction-gbr-intl/index.htmlhttps://www.thetimes.com/article/e87b09fb-b8fe-408d-a961-c89e6ae0f098?shareToken=620a021a38d86ed3af11587c36a52afdhttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y38gjp4ygohttps://apnews.com/article/britain-unrest-riot-southport-police-response-ec348340c7d223f0117ae8c62638dd6fhttps://newrepublic.com/article/184691/day-riots-stopped-ukhttps://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-examines-foreign-states-role-sowing-discord-leading-riots-2024-08-05/https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp35w0kj2y4ohttps://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/8/why-is-elon-musk-clashing-with-the-uk-government-over-far-right-riotshttps://archive.ph/vKdeuhttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyg7dzr8wkohttps://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024/08/is-cocaine-driving-the-british-riotshttps://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/august/this-time-it-s-worsehttps://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/amid-chaos-far-right-protests-9459421https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/29/uk/northern-england-stabbing-intl/index.htmlhttps://apnews.com/article/uk-southport-children-stabbed-dance-class-8a9c7d7ed01441ce96332cd3d1250e43https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_riotshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Defence_Leaguehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriotic_Alternativehttps://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/southport-far-right-disinformation-russia-b2589041.htmlhttps://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/30/misinformation-southport-attack-suspect-social-media-conspiracy-theorieshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexithttps://www.ft.com/content/a0a4fb08-40cc-4627-a58f-b3a8d2d0e009?accessToken=zwAGH1UwRNrgkdOgpPsIQMxGJ9Olj7Oo0tDgCQ.MEYCIQChxhfA2SBamOb_Y_c0vQwPJmzXo0fHfucpW2v_dBGr2gIhANMcXEtBzZqY7R0Z9RkAZMkEoGMSy5P49MRnprFYWvAH&sharetype=gift&token=75895b79-b6c8-4e1f-a3ab-dc4d87161131https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/taylor-swift-concert-terror-plot-austria-foiled-2-men-arrested-shows-w-rcna165591https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Arena_bombinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swifthttps://www.investopedia.com/swiftonomics-definition-8601178https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_Eras_Tourhttps://apnews.com/article/austria-taylor-swift-concerts-canceled-extremism-arrests-17b494f1a164b205128d7faeb607e731https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/taylor-swift-vienna-terror-plot-third-person-detained-1235750067/https://apnews.com/article/austria-taylor-swift-concerts-canceled-extremism-arrests-feff9108d0a14d9941c4bc416c0eb05f This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about Chávez, Maduro, and Bolivarianism.We also discuss authoritarianism, Potemkin elections, and the Venezuelan refugee crisis.Recommended Book: Nuclear War by Annie JacobsenTranscriptVenezuela, a country with a population of about 30.5 million people, has lost something like 7 to 9 million people, depending on which numbers you use, to a refugee crisis that began about a decade ago, in 2014, and which has since become the largest ever in the Americas, and one of the top ten all-time biggest outflows of people from a region in recorded history—just under the outpouring of people from Bangladesh into mostly India, which I mentioned in last week's episode, during the country's war of independence from Pakistan, and just above the number of people who have fled Syria over the course of its now 13-year-long civil war.That means Venezuela has lost around a quarter of its total population in the span of just ten years.The spark that lit the fire of Venezuela's refugee crisis wasn't a civil war, but a political movement called the Bolivarian Revolution, which is named after Simón Bolívar, who is renowned and respected throughout the region for leading the area's independence movement against Spain.This revolution was kicked-off by a soldier-turned-polician named Hugo Chávez who has long worked to implement what he calls Bolivarianism across the Americas, which calls for a nationalistic, socialistic state of affairs in which hispanic governments would work together, these governments would own most vital aspects of industry and the economy, according to a social model, it calls for self-sufficiency driven by that state-owned nature—the government reining in the purported excesses of capitalism-oriented competition, basically, and it calls for the elimination of corruption and the expulsion and exclusion of what it calls colonialist forces, alongside the equitable distribution of resources to the people.It's a riff on other socialist and communist models that have been tried, basically, with a South American twist, but it has many of the same implications for day-to-day realities, including the supposition that everything is owned and run by The People, though generally what that means in practice is a pseudo- or full-on police state, meant to keep those outside, enemy forces—which are blamed for anything that goes wrong—from meddling in local affairs, and it also tends to mean a lot of self-enrichment at the top, those in charge of the police state apparatus, and all the state-owned businesses giving a lot of handouts to their friends and family, and generally becoming quite wealthy while the rest of the population becomes increasingly disempowered and impoverished.This isn't the way these sorts of models necessarily have to go, of course, and it's not the way they're meant to go according to their own ideals and tenets, but historically this combination of claimed goals seems to lead in that direction, and in Venezuela's case we've seen that same trend play out once more, the Bolivarian Revolution putting Chávez at the top of a system predicated largely on oil wealth, which allowed Chávez to reinforce his hold on power, the reinforcement including the jailing, threatening, and harassing of political opponents, and keeping the main opposition party mostly out of power, despite their widespread popularity.In 2013, Chávez's Vice President, Nicolás Maduro, stepped into the role of acting president when Chávez had to step aside due to cancer complications. He then won an election that was triggered by Chávez's death by less than 1.5% of the vote, though his opponent claims there were irregularities. The National Election Council carried out an investigation and said that the vote was legit, and Maduro became president later that year.The seeming illegitimacy of that election, though, remains a huge point of contention between the political forces in Venezuela, and in the years since, the government has engaged in what's often euphemistically called "democratic backsliding," which means those in charge are implementing increasingly authoritarian policies in order to maintain control and keep themselves at the top, at the expense of democratic norms and values, like fair and free elections.All of which has been bad for morale and for locals' sense of power within their own governmental system, but this has all been maintainable to a certain degree because Venezuela is sitting on the world's largest known oil reserves, and has thus able to just keep pumping oil, and expanding their own pumping capabilities, and that has allowed them to fail across a lot of other metrics of success, but still keep things afloat, the average person doing just well enough that they had something to lose if they stepped too far out of line—challenging the government in some way, for instance.This increasing mono-focus on oil and similar raw materials, like gold, though, became a huge issue when a series of what are generally considered to be hamfisted policy decisions—including abundant and generous fuel subsidies for citizens and local businesses—that left them with wild levels of inflation that led to an intentional devaluation of the country's currency, as part of an effort to address that inflation, but which ultimately just ended up making things worse.The government also took out a bunch of debt to help increase their oil-pumping capacity, and that combination of debt, a weak currency, and a local economy that had done away with basically everything else except oil left them without everyday fundamentals, including food, alongside issues like burgeoning disease rates, child mortality rates, high levels of crime and corruption, and a whole lot of violence, politically motivated and otherwise.As of mid-2024, nearly 82% of Venezuela's population lives in poverty, and 53% of the population lives in extreme poverty, unable to afford enough food, and slowly starving to death.Maduro seems to have won another election in 2018, though that vote is even more widely considered to be a farce than the one in 2013, and though outside governments like the US supported the ascension of opposition candidate Juan Guaidó, who seems to have actually won, that support didn't lead to any real change within Venezuela—though it did lead to more sanctions by the US and its allies against the Venezuelan government and many higher-ups within that government, of which there were already quite a few, and the weight of these sanctions on their oil industry in particular have made it very difficult to Venezuela to openly sell their oil on the international market at full price, which has further deteriorated their economic situation.There was some hubbub within the Trump administration in 2020 that a military option, like a full-on naval blockade, to keep under-the-table oil deals that dodge US sanctions from occurring, might be on the table, as Maduro was proving resilient to other, less forceful attempts to dethrone him, like the aforementioned sanctions.But nothing came of that, and a few years later the Biden administration offered to ease sanctions on Maduro's government, and to begin the process of normalizing relations between the two countries, if Maduro agreed to have a fair and free election, letting Venezuelans decide whether to keep him or not, but in an actual election, not rigged election, this time.What I'd like to talk about today is how that election played out, and the local and international response to its results.—Some of that promised loosening of sanctions began well before the election, which took place at the tail-end of July 2024—and that allowed Venezuela to reap some profits from selling oil, gas, and gold that would have otherwise been tricky to get onto the global market.But while Maduro made a few gestures at allowing things to be free and fair, and released some political prisoners, as demanded, he figured out a way to justify keeping his main opposition, a woman named María Corina Machado, who has been incredibly popular with Venezuelans, from being on the ballot. So she picked someone to basically serve as a stand-in for her and her party, a man named Edmundo González.Official numbers released by the government indicate that Maduro won about 52% of the vote, and will thus remain in office.According to data and analysis from outside watchdog groups, however, the voter numbers released by the government are highly suspect, the numbers giving every indication that they were falsified.Evidence, including two-thirds of the tally sheets that the electronic voting machines printed out after polls closed on Election Day, provided by González's opposition alliance to some of those watchdog groups and to journalistic entities like the New York Times and Associated Press, suggest that Maduro probably only got something like 31% of the vote, while González, and through him, Machado and her party, received around 66%—a landslide victory, if those numbers are even close to accurate, and there's additional evidence that they are, as that's very similar to the results tallied by an independent exit poll on Election Day.Despite that evidence, the Venezuelan election authority has confirmed Maduro's reelection, saying that González only garnered 43% of the vote, and the governments of Venezuela's allies, like Russia, China, and Iran, have also recognized the results as valid—though to be clear, China, Russia, and Iran are all renowned for their Potempkin elections that have all the trappings of a democratic act, but which are largely ceremonial and always predetermined to some degree, even if they claim to take the will of the people into account. So this is a group of governments that regularly run invalid elections who are vouching for the legitimacy, the apparent validity, of an election that keeps their preferred, authoritarian ally, in power. Do with that information what you will.On the other side, we have a slew of mostly Western nations that have come out against the results, saying, with varying degrees of certitude, that there's abundant evidence these election results were faked, and that González is the actual winner.The US government is included on that list, and many of Venezuela's neighbors—some of whom have recently publicly spoken about their concerns related to Maduro's belligerence in the region, and seeming intention of rigging the vote in his favor—like Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, they've said they want the Venezuelan government to release the full details of the vote, so everyone can see and analyze the totality of data the government is supposedly working from.Some of Maduro's allies and former allies, and some hardcore supporters of his predecessor, Chávez, have likewise told Maduro he needs to release the baseline voter data, to clear things up.Maduro has said, instead, he'll have the country's Supreme Court audit the results, but this is being seen as a sidestep move by Maduro, as the court was recently packed with Maduro loyalists, and is therefore not capable of undertaking an independent review of the data—like other aspects of the country's government, the high court is basically in Maduro's pocket.Maduro is also saying that the US and other long-time enemies of his government are trying to rig the election against him, and that he can't release detailed vote counts because the National Electoral Council is under attack, including cyberattacks, and they're not able to provide those numbers right now because of that aggression—though he's provided no evidence to support this supposed reason he can't make any of this information public.So while it's still not 100% certain what has happened here, it's looking a lot like what happened in the last election, Maduro pulling out all the stops to muddle what information is being released, looking like he's playing ball whenever possible, but within a context in which he can make it look that way without facing any real risk of being challenged, and it would seem that he's leveraged the powers of state, once more, to lock in his position at the top for another six years, minimum.In addition to those international governments and groups calling foul on his actions, we're seeing widespread protests against the government and these alleged results, and in a few cases these protests have become violent—the government supports groups of loyalists called colectivos, giving them weapons and telling them to go attack peaceful protestors, which can spark such violence, though formal police and military forces have also seemingly triggered pushback in some cases.The government is accusing foreign nations like the US, and immigrant groups of causing this violence, saying these are special covert ops to make the government look bad and attack good loyal citizens basically—which is a common authoritarian move in such circumstances—and police and military forces have been rounding up protestors, and hunting them down afterward, arresting thousands of people for what they're calling anti-government or terrorist activities.This has led to a situation in which there are still protests, and the opposition is still pushing hard against these supposed results, but many people involved have been pulling down their social media profiles and not posting photos or videos, because they're worried the government will send people to their homes to black-bag them and take them away, which is apparently happening around the country right now, to folks from the opposition party, but also everyday people who went to a rally or protest.The question, now, is whether the outcome this time around will be any different than it was in 2013, and then again in 2018, when Maduro first stepped into power and when he retook power.Something the opposition has this time, but which it didn't have in those previous elections is Maria Corina Machado—the candidate who was booted from the ballot and who had to select González to run in her stead.Machado has become a public figure of almost religious significance in the country, and her star has arguably only gotten brighter the more Maduro has pushed back against her ability to participate in the formal processes of state.She won 90% of the vote to become the head of the opposition coalition last October, and she's been in politics since 2004, when she promoted a referendum to recall then-President Chávez, and that effort earned her a conspiracy charge.In later years, as she continued to hold various political roles, she was accused of corruption, disqualified from holding public office, accused of being involved in a plot to assassinate Maduro—all of these accusations seemingly false, and only applied to keep her from causing trouble, by the way—and then, after nearly a decade staying out of the spotlight, she became a candidate in that party primary that she won so handedly, which in turn led to her being banned from running for office for 15 years—all of which just seems to have further empowered her with everyday Venezuelans.She seems to be a lot more popular and to hold a lot more sway than Guaidó, the candidate who was held up as the actual victor of the 2018 election, and treated as such by several other governments in subsequent years.Die-hard fans of Machado also seem to have a bit more zeal than Guaidó's followers did, which could mean if the government acts against her or González, as they've threatened to do, and which both candidates seem to be daring the government to do, having shown up in public a few times despite those threats to lock them up or worse, since the election—if something like that happens, that could result in even bigger and potentially more destructive and violent protests, despite her calls for nonviolent opposition against what seems to have been a grave injustice.The world has also changed quite a lot since 2018, and many of Venezuela's neighbors, even those that would have previously stayed carefully neutral in this election, have outright recognized González as the winner, including Uruguay, Argentina, and Peru, among others.This changed world could also bring more support for Maduro, though, as their global allies, the Russias, Chinas, and Irans of the world, in particular, are busily building a collection of relationships with governments that oppose the de facto hegemony of the US and Europe, and that's manifesting in all sorts of ways, including providing resources, trade, and misinformation and military support to other fellow travelers who are holding the authoritarian line against pushback from their democratic and close-enough-to-democratic peer states.There's a good chance there will be more tumult in neighboring nations as a result of all this—most immediately Colombia, as that's where the majority of Venezuelans who have left the country as part of that larger, decade-long exodus, have been going, and there's abundant indication that many people who held out, hoping this election would change something in the country and sticking around on that possibility, are planning to leave, now that Maduro has apparently managed to cling to power.There's a chance this could trickle into other nations' politics, too, as many of those Venezuelan migrants who don't stay in Colombia end up heading north to US borders, and those borders have been at the center of the past several elections, and the new Democratic nominee for president this November, Kamala Harris, was tasked with handling border issues in the country at a truly tumultuous moment for the border. So a surge in new migrants could lead to more criticism of her on that front, as her performance in that role is generally considered to have been not great.The Venezuelan military seems to be standing with Maduro, so far, which means it's unlikely the citizenry will have much of a chance of forcing the government to take them seriously and do anything about this seemingly rigged election, beyond protesting at such a scale and regularity that it messes with their ability to get anything else done, which could, at some point, nudge those in positions of power within the military to take the citizenry's side.This is considered to be unlikely at this point, as Maduro has made sure to tie those leaders to him, giving them all sorts of monetary and business benefits, and arranging the country's military and intelligence apparatuses so that all the agencies and people running them are tasked with watching each other, as much as the other elements they're meant to defend against—again, a common authoritarian tactic, as this can help stave off the potential for coups, no one willing to risk losing their own power to oust the person up top.The most likely outcome, based on how things have gone previously, at least, and how this has played out so far, is probably that this will remain a talking point internationally for a while, protests will continue to bubble up and be tamped-down, periodically becoming violent enough to warrant international news, but then in a handful of months, Maduro will have reinforced his position in power, still further, neighboring governments will be forced to reckon with his staying power and will figure out ways to deal with him, even if not happily, and the exodus of citizens from the country will continue as the economy continues to get worse in most ways, though perhaps bolstered a bit by support from the Russia/China/Iran alliance.All of which will reshape the population and demographics of the region, while causing all sorts of economic ripples globally, as well.Show Noteshttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/28/world/americas/venezuela-election-results.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/world/americas/venezuela-election-takeaways.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/world/americas/venezuela-maduro-election-results.htmlhttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd1d10453znohttps://www.wsj.com/articles/i-can-prove-maduro-got-trounced-venezuela-election-stolen-772d66a0https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/07/31/suspicious-data-pattern-in-recent-venezuelan-election/https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-administration-announces-sanctions-targeting-venezuelas-oil-industry/2019/01/28/4f4470c2-233a-11e9-90cd-dedb0c92dc17_story.htmlhttps://www.axios.com/2024/07/30/venezuela-election-biden-trump-responsehttps://theintercept.com/2024/08/02/venezuela-election-maduro-us-sanctions-democracy/https://www.barrons.com/news/venezuela-election-body-ratifies-maduro-s-poll-win-official-39010070https://archive.ph/izdLUhttps://apnews.com/article/colombia-president-maduro-vote-count-venezuela-election-00d399b74300b6d1ed010bed9539a166https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-08-05/venezuelas-political-crisis-enters-uncharted-territory.htmlhttps://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10715https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_refugee_criseshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim%C3%B3n_Bol%C3%ADvarhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivarianismhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivarian_Revolutionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_in_Venezuelahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Venezuelan_presidential_electionhttps://dialogue.earth/en/business/8768-fuel-subsidies-have-contributed-to-venezuela-s-economic-crisis/https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/venezuela-election-preview-1.7274864https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelahttps://archive.ph/20240726145913/https://www.r4v.info/en/refugeeandmigrantshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_during_the_Venezuelan_crisishttps://apnews.com/article/venezuela-maduro-machado-biden-gonzalez-elections-protests-d6e70bd88ee9511298a4850c224a12e2 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

This week we talk about student protests, curfews, and East Pakistan.We also discuss Sheikh Hasina, Myanmar, and authoritarians.Recommended Book: The Identity Trap by Yascha MounkTranscriptBangladesh is a country of about 170 million people, those people living in an area a little smaller than the US state of Illinois, a hair over 57,000 square miles.It shares a smallish southeastern border with Myanmar, and its entire southern border runs up against the Bay of Bengal, which is part of the Indian Ocean, but it's surrounded to the west, north, and most of its eastern border by India, which nearly entirely encompasses Bangladesh due to the nature of its historical formation.Back in 1905, a previously somewhat sprawling administrative region called Bengal, which has a lot history of human occupation and development, and which for the past several hundred years leading up to that point had been colonized by various Europeans, was carved-out by the British as a separate province, newly designated Eastern Bengal and Assam, at the urging of local Muslim aristocrats who were playing ball with then-governing British leaders, the lot of them having worked together to make the region one of the most profitable in British India, boasting the highest gross domestic product, and the highest per-capita income on the subcontinent, at the time.This division separated Bengal from its Hindu-dominated neighboring provinces, including nearby, and booming Calcutta, which was pissed at this development because it allowed the British to invest more directly and lavishly in an area that was already doing pretty well for itself, without risking some of that money overflowing into nearby, Hindu areas, like, for instance, Calcutta.This division also allowed local Muslim leaders to attain more political power, in part because of all that investment, but also because it freed them up to form an array of political interest groups that, because of the nature of this provincial division, allowed them to focus on the needs of Muslim citizens, and to counter the influence of remaining local Hindu landowners, and other such folks who have previously wielded an outsized portion of that power; these leaders were redistributing power in the region to Muslims over Hindus, basically, in contrast to how things worked, previously.In 1935, the British government promised to grant the Bengalese government limited provincial autonomy as part of a larger effort to set the subcontinent out on its own path, leading up to the grand decolonization effort that European nations would undergo following WWII, and though there was a significant effort to make Bengal its own country in 1946, post-war and just before the partition of British India, that effort proved futile, and those in charge of doing the carving-up instead divided the country into areas that are basically aligned with modern day India and modern day Pakistan, but two-thirds of Bengal were given to Pakistan, while one-third was given to India.This meant that a portion of Pakistan, the most populous portion, though with a smaller land area, was separated from the remainder of the country by Indian territory, and the logic of dividing things in this way was that the British wanted to basically delineate Hindu areas from Muslim areas, and while large, spread-out groups of Muslims lived roughly within the borders of modern day Pakistan, a large, more densely crowded group of Muslims lived in Bengal, hence the otherwise nonsensical-seeming decision to break a country up into two pieces in this way.Frictions developed between mainland Pakistan and the portion of Pakistan, formally Bengal, that was initially called East Bengal, and then renamed East Pakistan in 1955, almost immediately. There was a movement to get the Bengali language officially recognized as a state language, alongside Urdu, which was promoted as the exclusive federal language of Pakistan, early on, and a list of six demands were presented to the Pakistani government by East Pakistan-based politicians, all of which aimed to get the region equal representation in what they felt was a West Pakistan-biased system, despite the fact that, again, East Pakistan, formally Bengal, was the most populous part of the country, and they had the most thriving economy, as well, bringing in most of the country's income.These demands led to what's become known as the Six Points Movement, which in turn, just a few years later, kicked off the Bangladesh War of Independence, which was exactly what it sounds like: an effort by folks in East Pakistan to achieve independence from the larger government of Pakistan, which had in recent years been taken over by a military junta which, like the previous government, didn't give as much political power to Easy Pakistanis.That junta, in late March of 1971, launched a military operation called Operation Searchlight that was meant to take out separatists in East Pakistan—but in practice this meant they swooped in and started targeting academics, members of the local intelligentsia, and people of Hindu faith, alongside members of the rabble-rousing groups that were petitioning for more power in this smaller-by-landmass, but larger by population and income, segment of the country.Operation Searchlight sparked the aforementioned Bangladesh War of Independence, and nine months later, the military government's efforts during this conflict were deemed to be genocidal because of how they targeted ethnic Bengalis, killing somewhere between 300,000 and 3 million of them, while also intentionally and systematically raping hundreds of thousands of Bengali women, the soldiers who committed these acts doing so with the formal go-ahead from their government—they were told to do so, basically.These atrocities eventually pulled India into the conflict, in part because millions of Bengalis were fleeing across their border to escape the genocide, and in part because the genocide was occurring, to begin with, and that sparked the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War, which eventually led to an end to that genocide when Pakistan's government surrendered at the tail-end of 1971.That victory led to, formerly Bengal, then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan. It also concretized India's military dominance in the region, and Pakistan, what remained of it, lost more than half its population, much of its economic base, and suffered a long period of embarrassment that left it questioning the basis of its militant, braggadocios approach to both nationalism and foreign policy; it was previously a well-respected and feared military force, but it became a somewhat eyes-downcast entity in the region for a while, lots of reforms eventually helping it shore-up its economy, but remnants of this period still percolate in its internal politics and government operation, to this day, including its antagonism toward India, and its support of local jihadist groups, which the government uses as a counterbalance against India and other local power structures, which it can no longer face head-on.What I'd like to talk about today is a swirl of new tumult in modern day Bangladesh, and what this moderate uproar might mean for the country's future.—Modern Bangladesh is surrounded by conflict.Myanmar's military government is in the midst of a civil war, following the recent overthrow of its democratically elected civilian government, and the subsequent rise and loose collaboration between rebel groups in various parts of the country.India is booming, and is broadly considered to be the next big power player on the world stage, though it's already a regional titan. It also continues to scuffle with Pakistan to its northwest, and with China along its shared borders, which are located just a short distance north of Bangladesh.Bangladesh's coast, along the Bay of Bengal, has long underperformed economically, despite being surrounded by some of the most impactful producers of goods in the world, and this coastline, including the one occupied by Bangladesh, has become incredibly unpredictable in recent years: regularly flooding, entire villages being swept out to sea, and freshwater sources increasingly tainted by those incursions of salt water.This area already has a lot going on, in other words, and many of those goings on seem primed for amplification in the coming years, as global power structures and economic tangles continue to flex and break and rearrange, and as the climate continues to behave in increasingly distressing ways; there's a political and military realignment happening in this part of the world, but geopolitics and global economics are also swirling and rearranging in all sorts of unpredictable ways.All of which serves as context for a recent series of protests that arose around Bangladesh beginning in July of 2024.These protests were held by mostly students who were not fans of a quota scheme that was originally implemented by the government in the wake of that 1971 war with Pakistan, this system abolished in 2018, but which was reimplemented by the country's High Court shortly before the protests began.And this system basically promised that 30% of all government jobs would go to the descendants of people who fought in that war against Pakistan, for independence, alongside some jobs for minority groups, folks from traditionally underrepresented districts, and people who are disabled—though mostly it was meant to honor the descendants of those veterans.The protesting students were pissed about this reimplementation because the country's economy isn't great at the moment, and unemployment is rife; the jobs that are available are not paying much, and are not terribly secure. About 18 million young people are currently unemployed in Bangladesh.Government jobs, in contrast, tend to provide some level of consistency and predictability, pay relatively well, and tend to stick around—folks in such jobs aren't worried about being fired or their jobs disappearing, because of their very nature. So the best jobs, by that standard, are government jobs, and nearly a third of those jobs have been promised to people who, in many cases, just happened to be born to the right parents or grandparents; and notably, the majority of folks with families who fought in that conflict, are also supporters of the current, authoritarian Bangladeshi government—so part of the criticism here is that these quotas offer a means of giving cushy, reliable jobs to supporters of the current regime, without seeming like that's what they're doing.These peaceful student protests were met with heavy resistance and violence by the government, which deployed police and soldiers who shot at protestors and shut down universities and the internet in the country, and that led to more protests, including by non-students, who were also met with at times deadly force.About 150 people have been confirmed killed, so far, though that's the government's figure, and other, independent counts have tallied more than 200 dead. Hundreds of protestors were also arrested and curfews were implemented.The Supreme Court responded to the initial protests by reducing the quota in late July, to the point that about 5% of government jobs would go to descendants of those veterans, which in practice meant about 93% of all government jobs would be divvied-out in a normal way, hiring people based on who's the best candidate.Protests largely ceased after that announcement, and the government restored internet services 11 days after shutting it down across the country. Social media platforms like WhatsApp and TikTok remain restricted, however, as these services were used to promote and organize protests.Curfews have also been relaxed somewhat, though police are reportedly sweeping through schools and cities, grabbing people who were recorded at protests, arresting thousands of them, including at least half a dozen students who led the initial protests that kicked everything off.Protest leaders are now demanding that the remaining curfews be lifted, that those who were arrested are released, charges against them dropped, and that the leaders responsible for the heavy-handed response should resign.Some protestors have also called for the country's Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, to step down, as she initially called the students traitors, though she later backtracked and said she didn't want them to be harmed.Hasina is the longest-serving Prime Minister in Bangladeshi history, having initially stepped into the position in 1996, then stepping back into the role in 2009—she's held the office ever since.She's generally considered to be an authoritarian, and has been accused of fixing elections, extrajudicial killings, and the imprisonment, or worse, of politicians and journalists who challenge her in any way.She is, given all that, then, perhaps not surprisingly blaming these protests not on the students—not any longer, at least—but instead on opposition political parties who she says are attempting to challenge her rule, and thus, the wellbeing of the country as a whole.Given that this is a relatively well-established authoritarian regime, there's a nonzero chance those who are in charge of these protests will take the win with the quota system, even though it wasn't fully removed, and step back from these other, more substantial demands that are unlikely to be met, short of perhaps a token resignation here and there by lower-run government officials who take the bullet for those higher up.Outside demands for impartial investigations into who caused what are likewise unlikely to move forward, and the government has made it pretty clear it intends to double-down on the "it's the political opposition doing this to us, and you" narrative, which could help them justify further clamping-down on these groups, even to the point of more imprisonments and killings, but bare-minimum, in such a way that it makes dislodging the current ruling party even more difficult in the future.It's possible that tumult elsewhere around the world, including in Bangladesh's own backyard, might encourage overreaction, not under reaction, from those in charge, as Myanmar's military government is having a lot of trouble with rebels, these days, and while it's not impossible that the prime minister will give in to more moderate demands, publicly apologizing for the violent response and firing some of her higher-level ministers, her government's history hints that things are more likely to tilt in the other direction, at least for the foreseeable future, and at least if the protestors fail to scale-up their operations to incorporate more of the country's population than they have, thus far.At the moment, then, things have calmed a bit in terms of protests and government responses to those protests in Bangladesh. But there are elements to this story that have made things even more volatile than they already were, and because of how uncertain so many variables in the region are right now, there's a chance we'll see this, or connected movements and storylines, bubble back up at some point in the near-future.Show Noteshttps://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2024/bay-of-bengal-climate-change/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheikh_Hasinahttps://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/bangladesh-protests-quelled-anger-discontent-remain-2024-07-26/https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/26/bangladesh-student-protests-mass-movement-against-dictatorhttps://apnews.com/article/bangladesh-campus-violence-hasina-bc513b6d68cf5b94cfd898f3c7f153d2https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/bangladesh-student-group-vows-to-resume-protests-if-demands-not-met/article68456310.ecehttps://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/25/bangladesh-minister-defends-govt-response-to-protests-amid-calls-for-probehttps://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/7/24/bangladeshs-deadly-protests-explainedhttps://www.britannica.com/topic/largest-U-S-state-by-areahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladeshhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_war_of_1971 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

This week we talk about assassination attempts, presidential drop-outs, and October Surprises.We also discuss election narratives, the frictions of age, and brief attempts at unity messaging.Recommended Book: The Day the World Stops Shopping by JB MacKinnonTranscriptOn October 7 of 2016, The Washington Post released a video from 2005 in which Presidential Candidate Donald Trump bragged about how you can get away with sexually assaulting women if you're famous.That same day, Wikileaks released transcripts of three paid speeches given by Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton to banking giant Goldman Sachs as part of a larger bundle of divulgences from the hacked personal Gmail account of her campaign chairman, John Podesta—these speeches were pretty controversial as they were very well paid—she earned $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman for the appearances, and fellow Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders lambasted her for the apparent conflict of interest this payout implied.Also on October 7, 2016, mere hours before that tape was released and those talks were leaked, Trump publicly claimed that the Central Park Five—a group of black men who were wrongly convicted of assault and rape in 1989, and who were later exonerated by DNA evidence and a confession from the actual perpetrator—Trump claimed they were guilty, which was a silly and to some, quite offensive thing to say, but it also seemed to gesture at the candidate's ignorance, at minimum, and according to some responses to this statement, at least, his possible racism, as well.So October 7 of 2016 was a pretty big day in terms of political divulgences, and it's considered to be one of the most prominent modern aggregations of what are, in US politics, often called October Surprises.The term October Surprise was coined by former President Ronald Reagan's campaign manager during the run-up to the 1980 presidential election in reference to fears that a last-minute deal negotiated by incumbent president, and Reagan's competitor in the race, Jimmy Carter, to get American hostages in Iran freed could net Carter enough votes to win re-election, despite many other variables operating against him.News reports were abuzz over these negotiations, so the narrative leaning in the President's favor could tilt things against Reagan, and his campaign manager was thus concerned that this bit of news, which was outside of his control, part of a spiral of larger events, would drop like a bomb on his campaign maneuverings, upending everything and completely changing the nature of the race, if it were to happen.That ended up not being the case, as Iran's leaders eventually notified their counterparts in the US that they wouldn't be releasing anyone until after the election, but this sort of last-minute narrative change-up had occurred in US elections before, including then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger saying, at a press conference, that he believed the Vietnam War would end soon, just twelve days before the 1972 election, which is thought to have helped Nixon win another term in office, and—also on October 7, but in 1964—one of then-President Johnson's top aides was arrested for engaging in homosexual acts with another man at a DC YMCA, which seemed likely to tip the scales against his campaign, as that was a big no-no at the time, but then, just a week later, hardliners in the Soviet Union booted Nikita Khrushchev from power, the Labour Party narrowly took over the UK government, and China conducted its first nuclear weapons test; all of which pushed that YMCA incident from the news and rebalanced the election in various ways.These sorts of last-minute surprises—last-minute because US presidential elections occur in early November, and these things seem to land like clockwork sometime in October, give or take a week—abound throughout US history, and though they usually only have a small or moderate impact on the final vote, in some cases they've been so dramatic, surprising, or paradigm-shifting they've completely upended expectations and seemingly changed the course of history.What I'd like to talk about today are two recent narrative change-ups in the ongoing US election, which will culminate with a vote this November, both of which have the potential to dramatically influence the outcome of the election, and who ultimately occupies the White House early next year.—It feels like I've been doing a lot of US-centric news lately, and though that's not intentional, and a trend I intend to defy in the coming weeks, there have been two potentially historic storylines playing out in US politics in recent weeks that I believe justify explanation and analysis; in part because they are so historic and unusual, and in part because they seem likely to define the narrative of the presidential race over the next 100 days or so between now and the November 5 vote.Of course, I say that knowing full well I could end up eating crow, acting, today, as if these are defining moments, when in reality either more dramatic and seemingly historic stuff could happen in the next three months-ish, or they moments could be set aside and largely forgotten in mere weeks, voter attention refocused on other things, like the actual policies being proposed by the two major parties in this race.There are good arguments for both eventualities, as the communication environment in which this election is playing out is novel in many ways, and the people involved and the things they stand for, and the larger global context in which they're operating, are also quite bizarre by historical standards.So these two stories are, I think, important to understand, as they could shape the path the rest of the race takes, and the moves both Republicans and Democrats, up and down the ballot, make in the coming months, which in turn will influence happenings globally in all sorts of important ways.But it could also be that life takes over, other stuff takes precedent, and folks mostly just vote along party lines as has tended to be increasingly the case these past handful of elections—we'll see how that goes.In the meantime, though, let's talk about the apparent attempted assassination of former President and current Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, and the seeming deterioration of current President Joe Biden's mental and physical health, the resultant calls from within his own party for him to step aside and let someone else run in his stead, and the decision he announced just a few days ago to step aside and let his party select a new candidate.On July 13 of this year, 2024, Trump was at a campaign tour stop in Butler, Pennsylvania, up on stage, presenting his speech, when a 20-year-old man named Thomas Crooks shot at him, firing eight rounds from an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle from a rooftop about 400 feet, which is about 120 meters, away from the stage.One of the bullets seemed to clip Trump's ear, and others hit members of the audience, one of whom was killed, and two others were critically wounded.A Secret Service sniper killed Crooks right after he took those shots, and Trump was surrounded by Secret Service agents moments after he was hit, briefly emerging from their huddle to raise his fist and shout "fight, fight, fight," before being hustled away from the stage.Some of the photos of the shooting and the aftermath quickly became famous, and a few of them are already considered to be historic, including several that show Trump, still bloody, pumping his fist, seemingly defiant and even victorious, from within the protective embrace of his Secret Service team, an American flag waving in the background—even commentators who don't like Trump have publicly said he looks pretty badass in these photos.And that general sense of badassery has been played up by the Trump campaign since the shooting. The Republican National Convention was just days after that campaign stop, and several attendees wore fake ear bandages, mimicking the one worn by the former-President, and many political analysts went ahead and called the election for Trump, citing the significance of surviving an assassination attempt, especially during a race between two elderly men, both of whom have been struggling to demonstrate their youthful vigor and favorably contrast themselves to their opponent.In the wake of the shooting, several big name donors committed money to Trump's campaign, including Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, and an array of Silicon Valley bigwigs, like the founders of Andreessen Horowitz, which is the most prominent venture capital firm in California.This wave of new support, from big donors and small, allowed Trump to out-raise Biden for the month for the first time in this election cycle.The campaign also signaled it may lean into a unity message, rather than what's become Trump's more combative, aggressive tact, which seemed likely to help him scoop up some on-the-fence voters, and possibly even some centrist Democrats who were increasingly concerned about Biden as the face of their party—though at the RNC event, Trump named further-right Ohio Senator, and author of bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance as his VP, which is being seen as a doubling-down on aggression, not a balancing, moderating move, on Trump's part, and the scripted unity speech he gave, which used a lot of religious, "Jesus rising from the dead" language, alongside some gestures at the country coming together in the wake of violence, pretty quickly derailed into a somewhat rambling series of attacks against Trump's perceived enemies—so that approach, at least for the moment, is not being seen as a serious path for Trump and his team.On the other side of the political fence, current President Biden has long faced calls to step down, mostly because of his advanced age and what that age portends: he's already 81 years old, and he'll be 82 in late November, shortly after the upcoming election.People are living longer these days, and enjoying more of those years healthfully and productively, but Biden has had a speech impediment his entire life, which, as an older man, has at times made it seem like he's not as with-it as his fellow candidates—fairly or unfairly—and the frictions and scars of simply having lived a long, long time seem to be catching up with him, as well, and some fairly high-profile stumbles and mis-speakings, alongside caught-on-camera missteps and other signs of age and possible not-wellness, have amplified calls for him to step aside and allow someone younger to lead the Democrat's ticket in November.These calls were a not insignificant component of his opponents' campaign in the 2020 election, but they ticked up several notches following what's generally considered to be a disastrous debate, for Biden, in late-June of this year.The debate rules were in some ways stacked in Biden's favor, as there wouldn't be a studio audience for Trump to play off of, which is considered to be a strength of his debate style, and the candidates' microphones would be muted when it wasn't their turn to speak, which was meant to help temper Trump's tendency to go way over time, and speak over his opponent.Despite those seeming advantages, though, from the moment he walked onto the debate stage, Biden looked and seemed...unwell. His face was kind of drooping, his eyes looked uncanny and surprised, his words seems to tumble over each other, not in his typical fashion, influenced by his speech impediment, but in a confused, rambling, at times disjointed and not-well-seeming way.Even die-hard supporters of Biden began to question his ability to serve another term following that debate, and while most analysts pointed out that Trump's statements were riddled with lies, he did present those lies mostly intelligibly, while Biden, though mostly sticking to the truth, had trouble communicating much of anything, his delivery and overall visage suggesting that he's not okay, and if that's where he is now, where will he be in another several months, much less several years, if he were to take office for another four?Those long-simmering concerns about his age surged into a full-on rolling boil from that point forward, and higher-ups in the Democratic Party started to call for Biden to step aside, some of them probably due to concerns about their own races, his unpopularity—which is ticking upward, according to recent polls—impacting their electoral outlook, and others because they worried about Trump being elected, not on his own strengths necessarily, but because Biden had become toxic due to his stumbles, and the general, and seemingly growing sense that he's just not up to the job anymore, because of the impacts of age.As of the morning of Sunday, July 21, 39 Democratic congresspeople had overtly called for Biden to drop out, 23 had publicly expressed concerns about Biden, which is a lighter-weight way to say the same, basically, and 7 had said it's Biden's choice—though to be clear, Biden had said he's not dropping out, over and over again, so the folks who said it's his choice, following that clear declaration, seemed to be, in some cases at least, playing both sides, as they stating their support for him while leaving the door open for him to change his mind at some point in the future.57 congresspeople, in contrast, were saying Biden should stay in the race, which is fewer than had said he should drop out, overtly or subtly; though a lot of people were apparently expressing concerns behind closed doors, and the wave of anonymous sources talking to reporters on the matter, telling stories about his various fumbles and their election-related worries, reinforced the supposition that there are more people hoping he steps back than not, including a lot of top-tier donors, it's just that many of them are concerned about their role within the party if they express those concerns publicly.Then, in the early afternoon that same day, Biden's team released a statement from the President saying that he would be withdrawing from the 2024 election, followed shortly thereafter by a message indicating he was endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him.Biden is apparently sick with COVID at the moment and is expected to speak on the matter sometime this week, once he's able to do so without coughing and rasping, but it's possible this news was released in this way, in writing rather than live and on camera, because it was just a truly difficult decision for someone who—according to his political career and bio, or the public-facing version of those things presented by his campaign, at least—tended to focus on sticking it out and persevering when faced with doubters, which in this case would have meant holding out and remaining the Democratic candidate, despite all the factors working against him.This represents an historic shift in the election, though, as no US presidential candidate has ever dropped out this close to the vote, and he's the first to ever drop out after winning his party's primaries.What happens now is thus up in the air, but the outline being shared by Democratic leaders as of the day I'm recording this seems to be that they'll hold some kind of lightning-fast election to see who replaces Biden on the ticket—possibly as part of an effort to avoid the mistake they made with Hillary Clinton, party higher-ups pushing too hard to favor one of their own who's turn it was, basically, over the candidates the voters actually wanted—though there's only about a month in which to figure out what that looks like, set it up, allow folks to decide to run and figure out campaign strategies, and then actually hold a vote; which is a lot, and that process could be chaotic, and it could result in fracturing within the Democratic Party, as folks might go negative against each other, despite guidelines telling them not to, and voters might not like it if their chosen person doesn't win, and they're then told to cast their lot in the actual presidential election with someone they voted against in this mini-, lightning-fast primary.At the moment, current VP Harris seems to have the lion's share of her party's support: as of the day I'm recording this, 179 democratic leaders, out of 286 congresspeople and governors, have publicly endorsed her candidacy, alongside other big names in the party like the Clintons, and prominent former presidential candidates, like current transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg.Right now, though, it's a big unknown who will ultimately take up the mantle of the Democratic party's presidential electee, and that makes things more difficult for the Democrats, because of those aforementioned potential issues with unity and clarity, but it also makes things trickier for the Trump campaign, as they can't be certain who they're running against, and some reports suggest the whole campaign has been optimized to compete against Biden, whereas now Trump is the oldest-ever presidential candidate for a major US political party, and many of the criticisms they were planning to level against Biden can be leveled against him, instead.The assassination attempt on Trump is still a variable here, too, as it seems to have rallied Republicans around him in a big way, but whether or not that will translate to larger support beyond existing die-hards is a big question mark.Important to note, too, is that while assassination attempts of presidents in the US are rare in modern history, thankfully, so we don't have tons of data as to how they influence election outcomes, the assumed consequence of this one, namely, supporting Trump's election bid, might not be the one we actually get.The attempted killing of President Reagan in 1981 seems to have bumped his numbers about 8% in the months that followed, but earlier assassination attempts of former-President Teddy Roosevelt and George Wallace didn't win them their bids for the office, and the larger context of the election and would-be electee seem to matter more, statistically, than the attempt, itself, when it comes to polling changes.Similarly, it may be that the Democrats are able to leverage Biden's decision to drop out, and the elevation of someone else from their party to the position of would-be president, could help drive a new, exciting narrative: that of a veteran statesman stepping down for the good of his party and the country, and new, younger blood taking up that mantle, fighting against another member of the old guard who himself would never consider stepping down.It's also important to remember, though, as I mentioned earlier, that this is all happening months before the election, and there's a chance these won't be the most important and dramatic stories shaping the narrative by the time we reach November; these July surprises could be replaced by October surprises, which upend the table once more, leaving everything chaotic and confusing right before votes are cast.So while these seem like very big deals right now, and they're dominating headlines, and will almost certainly be historically relevant, we may be in for a lot more planned and unplanned election-impacting divulgences and happenings in the months to come.Show Noteshttps://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-17/trump-shooting-3d-model-of-showground-rally-site/104104418https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/us/politics/trump-vance-michigan.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/us/politics/secret-service-trump-shooting.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/us/politics/trump-biden-fundraising.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/18/us/politics/elon-musk-trump.htmlhttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/17/co-founders-of-silicon-valley-venture-capital-firm-back-trump-presidential-bidhttps://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/doctors-are-increasingly-worried-about-bidenhttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/us/politics/trump-harris-strategy.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/21/us/politics/biden-harris-nomination.htmlhttps://elections2024.thehill.com/projects/biden-drop-out/https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/steve-kornacki-biden-pressure-party-can-get-wrong-rcna162783https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7982f2a0-42af-40a3-938e-8512c2ce8689_1338x755.pnghttps://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/democrats-are-gaming-post-biden-options-remains-insistent-remain-race-rcna162857https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/21/us/politics/biden-replace-harris.htmlhttps://www.npr.org/2016/10/15/498085611/wikileaks-claims-to-release-hillary-clintons-goldman-sachs-transcriptshttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history-october-surprise-180960741/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/07/excerpts-of-hillary-clintons-paid-speeches-to-goldman-sachs-finally-leaked/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprisehttps://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/07/22/us/biden-harris-trump-news-election This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

This week we talk about protectionist policy, solar panels, and rare earths.We also discuss Chinese business investment, EVs, and extreme weather events.Recommended Book: Meet Me By the Fountain by Alexandra LangeTranscriptThe Great Green Wall—the one in China, not the one meant to span the Sahel region, straddling the upper portion of Africa—is officially called the Three-North Shelter Forest Program, and was initially implemented by the Chinese government in 1978.This program is scheduled to be completed sometime mid-century, around 2050, and its purpose is to keep the Gobi Desert, which spans the lower portion of Mongolia and part of China's northern border, from expanding, which is something large deserts otherwise tend to do through a collection of natural, but often human-amplified processes called aeolian desertification.The Gobi currently gobbles up about 1,400 square miles, which is around 3,600 square km, of Chinese grassland every year, as dust storms that roll through the area blow away topsoil that allows grasses and other plants to survive. And those storms become more powerful as the climate shifts, and as more grassland is turned to desert, giving the winds more leeway, fewer things keeping them from blowing hard and scooping up more soil, and as the roots of the plants on the fringes of the desert dry up, which usually keep the soil in place, become newly exposed to these influences, withering, their roots holding things together less tight than before, the process continuing to move ever outward.Around a quarter of China's total landmass is already desert, and while there are a number of other causes of the country's desertification, including coastal erosion and the incursion of salty water into otherwise freshwater areas, this type, aeolian desertification, is one that they can tackle somewhat directly, if still at great expense and with muddled levels of success.So the Great Green Wall of China is meant to stop that desertification, it is a potential means of tackling this issue, and it does this by keeping those winds from blowing away the topsoil, and over time is meant to help reclaim areas that have been turned into desert by this collection of processes.And those in charge of this program do this by basically planting a huge number of trees, creating sturdier root systems to keep soil from blowing away, blocking the winds, and over time, the trees are meant to help new ecosystems grow in areas that have been previously diminished; holding everything together, soil-wise, but also adding nutrients to the ground as their leaves fall; those natural processes slowly reestablishing new layers of productive soil.The area they're attempting to swathe with newly planted trees is huge, and by that 2050 end date, it's anticipated that they'll need to plant something like 88 million acres of forests across a belt of land that's about 3,000 miles wide and nearly 900 miles deep in some areas.Local governments that have been largely tasked with making all this happen in their jurisdictions have claimed some successes in this ambition over the years, though one of the biggest criticisms leveled against those same governments is that they often spend a lot of time and money planting large swathes of trees, stabilizing some areas for a time, but then they fail to maintain those forests, so they more or less disappear within just a few years.This can actually leave some of the afflicted areas worse off than they would have otherwise been, as some of these trees are essentially invasive species, not optimized for the local conditions, and they consume more water than is available, gobbling up resources other plants need to spring up around them, and they thus blight the areas they're meant to enrich, killing off the smaller plantlife, not supporting and expanding it, and then they die because they're undernourished, themselves.While China plants more trees than the rest of the world, combined, due to this and similar projects, then, the system underpinning all of this planting isn't typically optimized for long-term success, and it often succumbs to the needs of local politicians, not the desired outcomes of the program, overall.Also, in the cases where the forests are sustained longer-term, they often to create monocultures that are more akin to plantations than forests, which makes them more susceptible to disease—like the one that killed more than a billion poplar trees that were planted in Northwestern China in 2000, leading to a 20-year-or-so setback in the program—and that also makes them faster-growing, but less effective as carbon sinks than slower-growth versions of the same; they get big faster, but they don't absorb and store as much CO2 as other trees options would.The forests they've planted that have sustained for more than a few years have periodically served as giant carbon sinks, though, pulling down as much as 5% of the country's total industrial CO2 emissions from 1978 to 2017, which is a pretty big deal for a country with such a huge volume of such emissions.That said, it's still an open question as to whether this Great Green Wall will do what it's meant to do, by 2050 or ever, as while the concept is solid by some estimations, its implementation has been uneven at best, and it seems to be plagued by short-term thinking and metrics of success that don't line up with the stated purpose of the program.What I'd like to talk about today is the implementation of what's being called, in some economic circles at least, a new Great Green Wall, this one around China and its exports, especially renewable energy exports, by the US and its allies, at a moment in which those sorts of exports are both highly desirable, and arguably, highly necessary.—The International Energy Agency recently said it expects to see about $2 trillion-worth of clean energy investments, globally, in 2024 alone.This spending is partly the consequence of the $13 billion in damage China sustained from natural disasters in January to June of this year, and the something like $37.9 billion in damages the US suffered from just the 15 most damaging storms it saw during the same period, not inclusive of all the other ones.Nations around the world are paying out gobs of money in the aftermath of increasingly brutal weather disasters, and that's on top of the slower-moving devastation that's being caused by the impacts of the climate shifting, messing with everything from crops to water cycles to where people can afford to live, because insurance companies are wholesale pulling out of some areas, and the cost of rebuilding over and over again in the same, previously habitable areas, just isn't worth it any more.While there's still some political and ideological opposition to the concept of climate change, then, even some of the folks who are vehemently against the concept, publicly, are privately investing huge sums of money in infrastructure meant to help them survive and thrive in a future in which the climate has changed, and that includes things like sea walls and buildings that are cooler, passively, allowing more airflow and reflecting sunlight rather than absorbing it, but we're also seeing surges of investment in renewable energy sources, as they don't further contribute to the issue of climate change, but also because they come with a slew of advantages over fossil fuel based versions of the same; hence, that $2 trillion clean energy spending in 2024, compared to the estimated $1 trillion for fossil fuel-based energy sources the same year.In May of 2024, US President Biden announced a near-future wave of tariff increases on a slew of Chinese goods, especially those related to the renewable energy transition.For those aforementioned reasons, alongside a bunch of economic ones, as renewables are cheaper over time than fossil fuels, it's expected by essentially everyone that the planet will largely shift to renewable energy sources this century, with many governments hoping to make the transition entirely or almost entirely by 2050, with some nations that are moving more slowly, because of issues related to existing infrastructure, population, or poverty, arriving sometime in the 2070s or 2080s.Thus, whomever owns the industries that will be relevant in that future—electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, and so on—they will be something like the new oil giants of the latter-half of the century, and beyond, massively enriched because they're the ones that allow everyone to generate energy in this new reality.Making those sorts of investments now, then, in terms of manufacturing capacity, but also the knowledge and trade secrets and brands and supply chains that get those products to the world, may yield incredible dividends for those willing to make them.And at the moment, as of mid-2024, China is by far the king of the hill when it comes to pretty much every component of this transition, dominating the world's output of solar panels, EVs, wind turbine blades, batteries, and rare earth metals that are currently fundamental to the making of basically all of those things, while also owning some of the most valuable intellectual property, developing some of the most vital innovations, and controlling the most active, resilient, and competitive supply chains that make them available, globally.The push by the Chinese government to own these spaces began in earnest in 2009, when it started providing subsidies to companies that were willing to invest in and start producing electric vehicles and accompanying technologies, and that successful effort has allowed the country to leapfrog other countries, like the US, which by some measures had a leading advantage up till that point because of other capacities and investments, and which has long served as the home bases of traditional car companies, and exciting new brands like Tesla and other startups that were beginning to gobble up global market share.The Chinese government poured tens of billions of dollars into tax breaks and subsidies, though, and that helped stoke a highly competitive market that's led to the development of ultra-cheap electric vehicles, which are now outselling rivals in almost every market they've entered.This effect is perhaps even more pronounced when we look at solar panels and batteries.Chinese exports of these goods have easily outpaced and outcompeted rival producers overseas, and that's, combined with demand on the local, Chinese market, has pulled the price of solar panels from about $126 per watt in 1975 all the way down to about 26 cents per watt in 2022.Over that period, these panels have become more efficient and effective, more resilient, and more useful—reshapable to fit more use-cases.And the concomitant drop in lithium-ion battery prices, down about 97% since 1991 due to similar economic variables, has made solar even more useful and in demand, as solar setups are usually, these days, connected to battery backup systems that allow the panels to capture sunlight during the day and to stockpile that energy for later, when the sun isn't shining, ameliorating one of the biggest and most common concerns about solar power at the individual home scale, but also at the utility, city-sized scale; that it's an intermittent source. Attaching a battery, though, makes it a consistent source of power, that's also incredibly, and increasingly, inexpensive compared to other options offering similar levels of power.That's been a major contributor to the expansion of solar installations, and recent innovations in the development of alternative, non-lithium-based batteries could do the same, as some novel battery types, like sodium-ion batteries, use a similar setup as their lithium counterparts, but without the issues associated with mining lithium, and with a better power-to-weight ratio, much lower fire risk, and lower theoretical expense, and flow batteries, made from iron, salt, and water, which are a lot worse than lithium ion batteries in essentially every practical regard, are just silly cheap and incredibly resilient, and thus could be built and deployed essentially everywhere—into the walls of homes and other buildings, into driveways and roads, everywhere—providing widespread, low-grade energy backup to whole cities at a very low cost.So all of these products are already in high demand, and that demand is just expected to grow as these things continue to get better and cheaper.China owns the majority of the best companies in these spaces, and makes the best, cheapest versions of these products.Biden's recently announced tariff increases are an example of what're called protectionist monetary policy, the idea being to make competing products from elsewhere, like China, more expensive, by requiring folks pay another 25-100% of the product's price in tariffs, which in practice can double the price of these goods, which in turn makes locally produced goods, or those produced in allied countries, like in Europe, more competitive, despite not actually being competitive 1-on-1, without these policies in place.The argument for this type of policy is that while on some level it could be beneficial to have these high quality, cheap Chinese solar panels and batteries flooding into the US market in the short-term, as it would help companies shift to clean energy sources faster than would otherwise be possible, in the long-term it would allow China to own those spaces, killing off all US-based competition in these industries, which would make the US economy, and by association all US businesses and people, and the US government, reliant on China, and a constant flow of such goods.That would mean China would have a permanent whammy on the US because if they ever wanted to invade Taiwan, for instance, and keep the US off their back, they could just say, hey, let us do what we want to do, or we'll stop sending you solar panels and batteries, and we'll stop providing support for the ones you already have, which would devastate the US, because that would be equivalent to what happened when OPEC stopped exporting oil to the US in the 1970s—it was brutal, and we've only become more reliant on cheap, abundant energy in the decades since.And that's on top of concerns that China, if it owned all the infrastructure related to these technologies top to bottom, which they kind of do, they would also conceivably have all sorts of potential backdoors into the US electrical grid, giving them the ability to shut things down or cause other sorts of havoc in the event of a conflict.So while these are kind of just theoretical concerns at the moment, the risks associated of becoming reliant on one country, and one run by an authoritarian government that isn't the biggest fan of the US and its allies, controlling all aspects of a nations energy capacity in that way are substantial enough that the US government seems to think it's worth taking a hit in the short-term to avoid that potential future.This situation in which short-term loss is necessary to avoid long-term energy dominance by China is arguably a problem of the US and other wealthy governments' own making, as again, China started wholeheartedly investing in these technologies back in 2009, and the US and Europe and other entities that are trying to play catch up, now, didn't make the same bet at the same scale, and that's a big part of why they're so far behind, scrambling to figure out how to catch up, and how to avoid having all their own solar and battery and EV companies killed off in the meantime.Some of these governments are doing what they can, now, to pick up the pace, Biden's Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Act, for instance, shoring up these sorts of businesses and seeding potential next-step technologies—but again, these and similar efforts are more than a decade behind the same in China, and the Chinese government often entangles itself more directly with Chinese businesses than Western governments are conformable attempting with their own versions of the same, so Chinese businesses have that additional entanglemented-related leg-up, as well.There's an argument to be made, then, that while these tariffs—in the US and otherwise—are almost certainly at least a little bit performative, for political purposes, and at least a little bit reactive, in the sense that they attempt to reframe Chinese superiority within these spaces as unfair, rather than the winnings associated with making different, and ultimately better bets than other governments back in the day, there's an argument to be made that this is one of the only ways to prevent Chinese companies from killing off all their foreign competition, locking themselves in as the makers of solar panels and wind turbines and battery backup systems and electric vehicles, and more or less owning that component of the future, which—because of how fundamental electricity is already, and how much more fundamental it's becoming as more nations segue away from fossil fuels as primary energy sources—means they have a slew of adjacent industries in an economic headlock, as well. Arguably the whole of every economy on the planet.Attempts to label one side good and pure and the other a malicious economic actor may be just set dressing, then, and the real story is how one side managed to lock-in a true advantage for themselves, while their competitors are scrambling at the 11th hour to figure out a way to dilute that advantage, and maybe grab something of the same for themselves.Biden's attempt, here, and similar policies elsewhere—especially Europe, but we're seeing some protectionist ideas flutter to the surface in other nations, as well, most of them aimed specifically at China—is meant to give competitors time to catch up. And many of them use a stick approach, increasing the price of these goods on foreign markets, while others are carrots, offering subsidies for locally made panels and EVs, for instance, but only if their key components are made in friendly countries; so Chinese-made vehicles don't benefit from those subsidies, but those manufactured elsewhere often do.Some businesses in tariffed areas are bypassing, or attempting to bypass these concerns by making licensing deals with, for instance, Chinese battery giant CATL, which makes the world's best and cheapest batteries, and which US-based Ford and Tesla have been dealing with in ways that they all claim still work, legally, under the new policy system.Other countries, like Brazil and Chile in South America, and Hungary and Germany in Europe, have been making deals to attract Chinese foreign direct investment within their borders, basically having Chinese companies build offshoots in their territory so they can benefit from the additional job creation and local know-how, and in both cases the idea is to dodge these policies, still benefitting from relationships with Chinese companies but in ways that allow them to avoid the worst of those sticks, even if they don't always benefit from the carrots.China, for its part, has been investing in reinforcing its global supply chains against these sorts of tariffs for years, especially following former US President Trump's decision to begin disentangling the US and China when he was in office, which caught a lot of businesses and governments off guard at the time.In the years since, Chinese officials have been moving things around so that many of their supply chains end in third countries before headed to US and European markets, giving them backdoor access to those markets without suffering the full impact of those amplified tariffs.This is just a riff on an existing strategy, as China did the same with their solar panels back in the industry's relatively early days of the 2010s, rerouting their panels through Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Cambodia to avoid tariffs, which is part of why something like 80% of the US's solar panels still come from these countries, today: they're Chinese panels, in most of the ways that matter, but those buying and selling them can claim otherwise for tariff purposes.Now, China is developing the capacity to build their EVs in Mexico, before then shipping them to tariff-defended countries around the world, including the US to the north, and Chinese-mined and refined rare earths, which are necessary components for batteries and other such technologies, are being mined in and diverted through a variety of different countries, their origins visible but still obfuscated for legal, tariff-related purposes.The US and its allies are beginning to insist that other trade partners implement similar tariffs against China when it comes to these sorts of products, but results have been hit and miss on that front so far, and it could be that, even though this sort of trade war stance has been ongoing for nearly a decade at this point, policies related to these increasingly vital goods will be what finally fractures the global economy into rival collections of supply chains and viable markets, smaller countries forced to choose between dealing with the US and other Western nations on one hand, and China and its allies on the other.Of course, again, intensifying weather events and the changing climate is stressing a lot of infrastructure and causing a lot of damage, globally, which is making the shift to renewables an increasingly pressing need.At some point that need could strain or break existing relationships, depending on who ends up wielding the most leverage in this regard, and that in turn could contribute to the ongoing and substantial realignment we're seeing in the global world order that has determined how things work, economically and legally and militarily, for the better part of the past century.Show Noteshttps://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-priceshttps://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-declinehttps://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/21/1068880/how-did-china-dominate-electric-cars-policyhttps://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-releases/2024/may/us-trade-representative-katherine-tai-take-further-action-china-tariffs-after-releasing-statutoryhttps://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/great-green-wall/https://archive.ph/MxOTZhttps://www.trade.gov/commerce-initiates-antidumping-and-countervailing-duty-investigations-crystalline-siliconhttps://www.reuters.com/world/china/natural-disasters-china-caused-13-bln-economic-loss-january-june-2024-07-12/https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/society/2023/abandon-idea-great-green-wallshttps://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-us-fusion-race-4452d3behttps://asiatimes.com/2024/07/chinas-subsidies-create-not-destroy-value/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/09/china-floods-climate-change/https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/iea-expects-global-clean-energy-investment-hit-2-trillion-2024-2024-06-06/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(China)https://phys.org/news/2023-10-china-great-green-wall-boosts.htmlhttps://earth.org/what-is-the-great-green-wall-in-china/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

This podcast discusses Heritage Foundation, Agenda 47, France's election outcome, and Christian Nationalism. It explores the US election, political turmoil, Project 2025, and potential revolutions. The secretive Project 2025 proposes authoritarian regime post-2024, sparking excitement and concern. It also delves into political vendettas, Supreme Court rulings, and the implications of Project 2025 on government reforms.

This week we talk about the APA, the Supreme Court, and Marbury v. Madison.We also discuss the Chevron Doctrine, government agencies, and the administrative state.Recommended Book: A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach WeinersmithTranscriptThe Supreme Court's 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision was pivotal to US legal theory and practice because it established the concept of judicial review, which essentially said that US courts could assess laws passed through the typical legislative system, through Congress, and, if they determined those laws were unconstitutional, strike them down.This was a huge rewiring of the US government, as it gave a substantial amount of new power to the court system, and it provided a new check on the legislative system that recentered the Constitution as the source of all law; if the judges decided new laws didn't line up with that original Constitutional intent, according to their interpretation of said intent, the new laws would be a no-go.This is true of statutes that declare policy, as well, which are generally part of the law-making process, and also help shape regulations, guidelines, and other things of that nature—the fuzzier stuff that goes on to effect things, even when some of those fuzzy statements and implications aren't formalized in law, yet.So any and all of this stuff that Congress decides on could, at some point, be looked into by the US court system, and that system can say, nope, that doesn't line up with what's in the Constitution—it's not Constitutional—and that means the Constitution, following Marbury v. Madison, became a lot more of a legal reality in the country, rather than just a collection of principles and ideals, which is how some legislators and legal scholars thought of it before this ruling.Within this same entwined governmental/legal system, Congress sometimes delegates policy decision-making powers to US agencies, allowing them to make legal decisions in cases where Congress passes a law that it is some way ambiguous—saying that there need to be emissions standards on cars, for instance, but leaving the task of coming up with those standards to the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA.This delegation ability was reinforced by a 1984 Supreme Court decision, Chevron v. The Natural Resources Defense Council, today usually referred to as "Chevron" or the "Chevron decision," the justices unanimously deciding against the DC judicial circuit's ability to set government policy, reminding those justices that judges are unelected officials and thus shouldn't be making law, and that when Congress isn't specific enough in their lawmaking, this can represent an implicit desire for the agencies in charge of implementing the relevant laws in the real world to figure out the specifics for themselves; after all, they would probably know better how to do so than a bunch of lawmakers who are not experts on the subject matter in question.That case also limited the US court system's ability to review an agency's interpretation of the law, which in that specific case meant that judges shouldn't have the right to look into how US agencies decide to do things, willy-nilly, just because they don't like the outcome.Instead, they have to adhere to what has become known as the Chevron Doctrine or Chevron Deference, which says, first, the judges have to decide if Congress was clear on the matter—and if so, they go with what Congress said, no questions asked. If Congress was unclear on something, though, then they have to decide if the agency in charge of executing Congress' decision has made reasonable and permissible decisions on that implementation; and if the answer is yes in both cases, the court must accept the agency's decision on the matter.If not, though, then the court can step in and make some kind of judgement; but it's a fairly ponderous process to get to that point, because of this doctrine, and they will almost always defer to the decision made by the relevant agency, because of that 1980s-era court case.The Chevron decision is generally considered to be one of the most formative in modern case-law because it empowered US agencies with all sorts of responsibilities and rights they wouldn't have otherwise enjoyed.The Chevron case, itself, was predicated on a disagreement about the 1963 Clean Air Act, which failed to specifically define what "source" meant, in terms of emitted pollutants; Congress didn't specify. And this ambiguity led to a clarification in 1981, by then-President Reagan's EPA, that allowed companies to bypass the Act's procedures by building-out new, highly polluting components to their plants and factories, as long as they also modified other aspects of those plants and factories in such a way that emissions were reduced.An environmentalist advocacy group challenged this new definition, which amounted to a loophole that allowed companies to get around otherwise sterner emissions rules, and that's how we got the Chevron court case.What I'd like to talk about today is a recent, successful challenge to that Chevron ruling, and what it might mean for the powerful regulatory state that emerged in the US in the wake of that decision.—On June 28, 2024, the Supreme Court announced their decision in a case that was originally argued in January of the same year—Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, along with a companion case on a connected matter, Relentless Inc v. Department of Commerce—the Court's decision being that the Chevron deference, which says agencies can define fuzziness left in law by Congress, conflicts with the Administrative Procedure Act, or APA, which itself says the US court system has oversight powers when it comes to all agency actions.The long and short of this decision—which was made along what are generally considered to be ideological lines within the court, the more conservative 6 justices ruling against the Chevron doctrine, the 3 more liberal justices ruling to keeping it—is that federal agencies will now have far less wiggle-room and legally backed authority when it comes to the laws and policies they enforce.And while the court also said this doesn't immediately strip prior judgements of their impact and consequences, it does mean—according to most experts who have responded to and analyzed to this ruling, at least—that we're likely to see a wave of lawsuits against agencies that have done things or refined regulations in a way that individuals or companies didn't like, which could amount to the same thing within the next couple of years: many such regulations being done away with, those agencies becoming husks of their former selves because their capabilities will be pruned back significantly.This is being seen as a victory by mostly conservative activists and lawmakers who are keen to see the regulatory components of the US government shrunk, their powers and funding depleted as a much as possible, doing away with what they sometimes derisively call the "administrative state," which they consider to be a limit on the free market and in some cases their own powers within politics and the economy.And among many other regulations, thousands of them, by some estimates, this could impact the government's ability to regulate environmental pollution, safety measures for cars and airplanes, workers' rights and health considerations, and even somewhat more wonky things like net neutrality and the legality or illegality of very specific aspects of the e-cigarette and crypto industries.For decades, these regulations have been to greater and lesser degrees interpreted—in their specifics, at least—by regulatory bodies like the FDA, the FCC, the EPA, and other such agencies. Congress has mapped out the broad strokes, leaving the details for the relevant agencies to sort out, because they knew this ruling would give those agencies the power to do so.So those laws passed in this way by a Congress that knew this was how things worked, legally, will suddenly find themselves incredibly challengeable, the legal basis of their specifics now based on flimsy justifications that the court no longer supports.These policies won't immediately disappear, then, but all of them, in their details and as a whole, are now more vulnerable to lawsuits from anyone who wants to bring them, and those who bring them will likely win, because the court system has taken away the protections those agency powers formerly leaned-upon.Consequently, there are fresh concerns from folks working in environmental spaces, those attempting to incentivize the deployment of renewable energy infrastructure, and those who are trying to protect workers' rights, that they could soon be tied up in endless court cases, many aspects of the legal understanding they've worked in accordance with other the past four decades pulled out from under them—their capacity to enforce anything not spelled out in detail by congress, which is very little because congress has gotten used to leaving that to them, in many cases, dramatically reduced.There are parallel concerns that standards that have made the US market relatively trustworthy, compared to other global marketplaces, at least, in terms of the safety of foods and medicines and all sorts of other products, might be diminished, leading to a bunch of new safety challenges, but also a demotion of American goods on the global market, because fewer sturdy regulations, at least in the short-term, could lead to more rip-offs and fakes, lower-quality items subbed in for higher-quality ones, and a bunch of risky, and even dangerous new products and services hitting the market, because these agencies are suddenly less empowered to check them out before approving them.One of the larger concerns, especially amongst folks on the political left in the US, is the impact this could have on health care.The Affordable Care Act, which provides reduced-cost insurance plans to folks who make less than a set amount of income, is enabled by a huge jumble of regulations that determine how things are paid for, who can and must participate—citizens and hospitals and pharmaceutical companies and so on—and how everything fits together, ensuring Medicare, Medicaid, and the ACA can continue to function, despite relying upon often arcane methods and cost overruns.The US Treasury and IRS, too, rely heavily on regulatory powers to draft new rules and enforce the tax code, which allows for the management of money throughout government agencies and other bodies, but which also helps the government develop and deploy sticks and carrots throughout its portfolio of laws, acts, and policy-based nudges.The deployment of clean energy tax credits and incentives to help push solar and wind power development, and to encourage the construction of chip-making facilities on US soil, for instance, are all reliant on the ability to divvy out those credits, to decide how big they should be, and to determine who should get them, based on what criteria.The general outline of most of these programs is still on solid ground, because Congress decides that sort of thing, even today, but so many specific details and numbers and implementation strategies are left to agencies, and though it's possible to shore those up, Congress stepping in to vote on and pass new details into law, it will take time to do that, and especially in highly competitive spaces like chip-making, and arguably time-sensitive spaces like those related to healthcare and climate change, a gap in implementation and legality could be incredibly meaningful, and even devastating to some of these projects and their outcomes.In addition to having grown accustomed to being able to leave those sorts of details to agencies, which has impacted how they make law, the US Congress, too, has become highly polarized and at times somewhat stagnant, moving sluggishly on controversial areas, in particular, one side or the other bogging down even debate about things they don't like, rather than working with the other side to find a middle-ground they can agree upon.So while many lawmakers may want to move fast to fill in some of these gaps that have suddenly appeared across US law and capability, that desire may be held up by the reality of US politics at the moment, and systems that are often weighed-down by the people who operate them, and the systems meant to keep them ticking along, but which sometimes do the opposite.One way of looking at all this—through the lens of those who generally support this decision—is that this ruling could force Congress to get more specific in its laws, and in the meantime it could reduce the amount of bloat that can accumulate within any regulatory system; some of the sluggishness in getting new products to market, building-out new infrastructure, and passing new laws could actually be reduced, streamlining processes that currently, arguably, take too long, cost too much, and provide little benefit, all because these agencies have developed too many hoops to jump through and piles of paperwork to fill out.Another way of looking at it, from the perspective of those who generally decry this outcome, is that this will lead to a huge shock, bordering on chaos, throughout the US legal and governmental system, will do away with all sorts of government supports, leaving us with fewer protections and filters that help keep people safe, and which keep businesses from abusing their positions of power, and that it puts more power in the hands of judges, who—especially at the very top, within the Supreme Court, which made this decision—are usually put into their positions by whomever happens to be in power, occupying the presidency, when one of their predecessors retires or dies. Which is why there's such a huge 6 to 3 imbalance between conservative and liberal justices in the Supreme Court at the moment, that imbalance unlikely to go away any time soon, because those unelected positions are for life; though Republicans during the Trump administration also made it a priority to fill lower rungs of the justice system with ideological fellow travelers, so the justice system in the US, broadly, is more conservative than it has historically been, at this particular moment.There's a chance, then, that this ruling could lead to a period of reduced regulatory bloat, which could help some industries and governments cruise forward with things they've long wanted to do, but have been unable to make progress on because of all the bureaucracy standing between them and their intended goals. There's also a chance this could shake the foundations of some of the agencies that have been essentially captured by the industries they're meant to regulate, messing with those relationships in a way that's arguably better for citizens and institutions, and worse for the businesses that lobbied their way into informal regulatory power over themselves.On the other hand, it could also be that progress on much of anything will be almost impossible until these laws can be revisited and made more specific at the Congressional level, because there will be so many court challenges to everything, from all sides, that the US justice system will have a full dance card for years just sorting out the basics, and everyone will be too afraid to proceed with anything in the meantime, lest they make investments that ultimately turn out to be illegal.Notably, the Supreme Court decision in this case did say that Congress could still delegate decision-making powers to federal agencies: they just have to specifically say that's what they're doing, rather than leaving things fuzzy and assuming that will be implied. So we may also see a brief period of relative chaos, followed by basically more of the same, everything going back to how it is today because Congress makes sure to include a line of text in every law they pass that specifies that delegatory intent.One more major consideration here is that the court system, and especially the Supreme Court up at the top of the pecking order, is only so big, and already often moves at a relatively sluggish pace. That means it could have trouble addressing all the little issues Congress fails to address, regulatorily, and that it will likely take the court system a while to weed through all the cases that are expected to pop up in the wake of this decision.And that means we could see a somewhat slowed-down implementation of this new, anticipated reality—whichever version we get—which could also mean Congress, and the other facets of the government that will have to change the way they operate, has more time to get their ducks in a row, maybe reducing the impact of the shock the legal system is expected to experience over the next few years as a result of this decision.Show Noteshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Raimondohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_Procedure_Acthttps://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-chevron-regulations-environment-4ae73d5a79cabadff4da8f7e16669929https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/28/us/politics/chevron-deference-decision-meaning.htmlhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/06/28/supreme-court-chevron-environmental-rules/https://thehill.com/homenews/ap/ap-health/ap-what-it-means-for-the-supreme-court-to-throw-out-chevron-decision-undercutting-federal-regulators/https://www.axios.com/2024/06/28/supreme-court-chevron-doctrine-rulinghttps://www.theverge.com/2024/6/28/24180118/supreme-court-chevron-deference-decision-opinionhttps://www.theverge.com/24188365/chevron-scotus-net-neutrality-dmca-visa-fcc-ftc-epahttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/climate/supreme-court-climate-epa.htmlhttps://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdfhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madisonhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_U.S.A.,_Inc._v._Natural_Resources_Defense_Council,_Inc. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

Delve into the intricate dynamics of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a powerhouse of Eurasian nations led by China and Russia. Examine the emergence of a new coalition defying the post-WWII order, with players like Iran and North Korea joining forces. Discover the implications of these alliances on global stability and power. Plus, learn about effective communication strategies from 'Supercommunicators' to navigate the complexities of modern discourse.

This week we talk about the National Rally, Macron, and the European Union.We also discuss Marine Le Pen, elections, and the French National Assembly.Recommended Book: Pockets by Hannah CarlsonTranscriptThe first week of June 2024, the EU held its parliamentary election, the tenth since it began holding such elections in 1979, and this one was notable in part because the number of MEPs—Members of European Parliament—increased from 705 to 720, due to population changes in the bloc, those new seats given to growing countries, one apiece to Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Latvia, Austria, Poland, Finland, Slovenia, and Slovakia, and two apiece to Spain, France, and the Netherlands—though that figure still a far cry from where it was before the UK left as part of its Brexit withdrawal from the union, which culminated in 2020.These elections happen every five years, so this was the first EU election since the UK left, which means we got to see how things would shake out, post-British-presence in the bloc, a bit of a power vacuum beginning to be filled by those that remain, alliances adjusting somewhat to account for that change.Those few structural items aside though, this election was also notable in its outcome, as, while centrist parties like the European People's Party, or EPP, which is center-right, and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, or S&D, which is center-left, each claimed substantially more seats than any other party—about 190 and 136, respectively, as of the day I'm recording this, though the final votes are still being counted, so some of these numbers are prone to changing a bit in the coming days—and Renew Europe—a fairly center-aligned party—coming in at a distant third with about 80 seats, the Identity and Democracy Group, which is made up of mostly far-right parties, looks to have achieved a strong fifth place; again, the numbers are still being tallied as I record this, so these numbers are still provisional, but it looks like they grabbed about 58 seats, which is 9 more than they had, pre-vote.While centrist politicians and parties still hold the reins, then, their collective majority is shrinking, Identity and Democracy, and a slew of smaller, also further-right parties scooping up quite a few seats in this election, these groups attracting a lot more support from certain demographics, especially young men under 30, and especially in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, and Finland.This shift in ideology is being attributed to many things, including but not limited to the rise in so-called identity politics, which some data suggest is causing young men, in particular, to feel excluded from some aspects of modern social life, the success of far-right groups in spreading their messages on social networks, heightened levels of immigration, which far-right groups seem to have successfully tied to all manner of societal ills, and the general tendency of whatever group is in power to spark discontent, tipping the scale toward their opposition simply because they've been governing, and you can't really govern without upsetting someone about something, and without taking the blame for things that are beyond your control, as well.This surge in votes for far-right groups isn't expected to substantially change the direction of the EU, as a lot of policies, including aspects of the bloc's regulatory apparatus, their pivot toward net zero efforts and renewable energy, and their general position on foreign antagonists like Russia, and by some estimates, China, as well, are basically locked in for the next few voting periods, at the minimum.But there is a chance specific elements of these goals, and other, less central pursuits, will be more difficult to pass and support over the long-haul, and policies that centralize power with the EU, rather than individual countries, will likely have a harder time getting passed, as most of these far-right groups are also quite Euro-skeptical and nationalist.What I'd like to talk about today is the outcome of this election in one EU nation—France—and why French President Macron decided to call a snap vote following the tallying of the ballots.—In 2022, the liberal coalition Ensemble, which includes French President Macron's party, Renaissance, lost the absolute majority it had previously enjoyed in France's National Assembly, its lower house of government, which marked the first time since 1997 the French President hadn't also held an absolute majority in that parliamentary body.That same year, the nationalist, far-right National Rally party gained a bunch of seats, as did the left-wing to far-left New Ecological and Social People's Union. This resulted in a hung parliament, which hadn't happened since 1988, and among other consequences, that meant passing laws and other sorts of governance became a lot trickier, as Macron had to make deals with people and groups he didn't typically ally with, and with whom his party had a lot of disagreements.This sort of setup often leads to creative approaches to collaboration, including, at times, the formation of new coalitions, alongside alliances between existing coalitions—that's the general European model for this sort of thing, and that's why centrist parties tend to do the best, most of the time, because they're often made up of parties that would otherwise be at each others' throats; sharing power tends to result in better outcomes, basically, at least over the long-haul, even if they are simultaneously frustrating and sluggishness-inducing.Some parties are more primed for collaboration than others, though, and Macron's Renaissance and the National Rally, the latter of which is led by former presidential candidate in the country's 2012, 2017, and 2022 elections, Marine Le Pen, have long been at odds, the Renaissance party claiming a broad spectrum of stances across the French political center, while Le Pen's party has scooped up the religious, conservative right, promoting, especially, causes related to anti-immigration, protectionism, and nationalism, in recent years trying to temper her party's reputation for racism, anti-homosexuality, and anti-abortion stances and scandals, among other issues that have made attracting a wider base of votes difficult for her party and party leaders, in the past.The Christian Democrats, which are part of the leading European coalition, shifted some of their platform policies to the right, seemingly to great effect, to stave-off the worst of the attacks they faced related to immigration and climate, leading up to the most recent EU election, but the National Rally managed to attain around 32% of the total vote in that election, crushing Macron's Renaissance party, which only attracted something like 15%.In response, Macron announced what's being seen as a bit of a desperate gambit: he dissolved parliament, which means he's announced a snap national election—so for French parliamentary seats, rather than EU seats—3 years ahead of the next scheduled vote, which will result in the election of a brand new batch of parliamentarians; that vote will begin on June 30, and that initial vote will determine who makes it to the second ballot on July 7 of this year.Macron is framing this dissolution and election as an effort to fight what he calls "unnatural alliances" between far left groups on one side, and far right groups on the other, accusing enemies of teaming up to take out him and his centrist allies, basically. And his argument is that voters need to use this opportunity to preserve the governance of centrist parties in the country, because if his party and allies don't hold onto the reins of power, those who take over will tear France apart, pushing things to greater and greater extremes, left and right, and casting everyday life, and the basic functions of government—which is imperfect but relatively stable—into chaos.Folks may have cast protest votes in the EU elections, in other words—which is a fairly common thing for folks to do across Europe, as many citizens don't pay particularly close attention to the machinations of politics at the Union scale—but at the local level, his argument goes, this is important. And it's important enough that he's willing to risk his position at the top of some aspects of governance, and his party's seats in the Assembly, in order to make that point; vote smart, not angry, essentially.There's a chance this pitch and gamble will work, that voters will rally behind the center, more people coming out to do more than just protest vote, and that things will go back to something like the normalcy of the past decade.But there's also a chance votes will accumulate primarily with far-right and far-left parties, as they did in the EU election that triggered this gambit, which would likely mean Macron would lose a lot of the power he currently wields—France's president is elected separately from parliamentarians, so he would exist in a state of what's called "cohabitation," where he would wield some powers, and the prime minister, put into their position by the dominant group in the Assembly, would wield others—would struggle against each other while a grand realignment of the country's economy, politics, and society, and in turn, that of the EU as a whole, France being one of the most vital and powerful states in that bloc, would play out over the course of the next several years.There are concerns from the currently governing centrists that a victory for Le Pen and her allies might also mean renewed vigor for far-right groups throughout the EU, as while typically those in charge experience a degradation of support eventually, after they've had the chance to govern and fumble things for a while, taking the blame for all the bad stuff that happens, that usually takes years, and the number of bastions for far-right thinking and support throughout the bloc right now indicates that side of the political spectrum has been out of power long enough that folks might support them—even people who wouldn't usually opt for their politics—just to get something different. And it could be a while before they, once more, become the parties folks are scrambling to move away from; they're the underdog rebels right now, and it will take time before they're the unpopular establishment.Polls from just after the snap election was announced suggest that Le Pen's National Rally could win up to 265 seats, just shy of the around 290 required for an absolute majority in France's National Assembly.The dominant further-left alliance, New Popular Front, is in second place, with Macron's party languishing in third; in percentage terms, one of those polls gave the far-right National Rally 35% of all seats, the further-left New Popular Front about 26%, and Macron's left-ish-centrist Renaissance party just 19%.Even lacking an absolute majority, though, the National Rally, which is loaded with young, social media-savvy politicians, in contrast to the aging power players in most of the centrist parties in the region, could set itself up for a series of near-future wins, carving out space as chief-antagonist during Macron's remaining days in office, however long that ends up being, which in turn would give them the chance to make authoritative decisions with fewer perceptual consequences: the bad stuff will still often land on Macron's shoulders, regardless of who made what happen, or disallowed what from happening, but they could still nudge things across the country, and the bloc, to their liking in a variety of less headline-grabbing ways.Macron could of course establish new alliances, as is the European way, though the closer the National Rally gets to that absolute majority, the more desperate and discordant those alliances would have to be, and that would put more power in the hands of non-centrist entities, potentially shoving France to new ideological extremes, even if it's still technically guided by the same, centrist hands; they would have to cater to the desires of those less-than-ideal, from their perspective, allies, basically.At the moment, markets in the country are tumbling on concerns about what might happen if France has something like a Brexit-moment, pulled apart by more extreme parties after a long period of centrism, and there's a larger concern about the EU as a whole, as these sorts of successes for far-right parties in even a handful of countries may portend a wave of anti-immigration, anti-gay rights, anti-abortion, and anti-renewable energy policies, among other policies that tend to make nationalists and harder-core religious folks happy, but which often come with dire consequences for everything from foreign investments to cultural exports, in countries where those sorts of policies are deployed, en masse; great for the folks votes for these sorts of efforts, in other words, but not great for economics and soft-power, cultural influence.On the other hand, some of the policies these groups have supported, including somewhat popular ones, like those related to cutting prices on fundamentals like energy and food, and less popular in practice, but somewhat popular in promotion efforts, like cutting public spending, might find their way into governance across the EU, whomever ends up in power, as any outcome will almost certainly rely on new or edited coalition arrangements, plus some bending on the part of centrist parties—similar to what we saw by the Christian Democrats at the bloc-level. Centrists might lean further right in order to avoid being beaten by further right parties, and that could sway things rightward, even without those further-right parties taking the reins, officially.Which means, through some lenses at least, this aggregation of victories for far-right parties in France and across the EU may have already tallied some practical outcomes, nudging governance toward something more aligned with their preferences, even if further success is limited.It could also have the politically opposite effect, though, pushing centrists toward also burgeoning further-left parties, creating new coalitions on that side of the spectrum to counter the growing ranks of those on the right.France may provide a bellwether for what happens across the rest of the bloc over the course of the next several election periods, though, so what happens on June 30th and July 7th could portend what happens elsewhere in the coming years.Show Noteshttps://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/14/french-leftwing-parties-popular-front-contest-snap-electionhttps://www.britannica.com/topic/cohabitationhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_European_Parliament_electionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Le_Penhttps://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/french-finance-minister-warns-financial-crisis-yields-surge-snap-elections-2024-06-14/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_Democracy_Partyhttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/14/far-right-seduced-young-voters-europe-electionshttps://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/15/macron-gamble-marine-le-pen-france-polls-far-righthttps://results.elections.europa.eu/en/european-results/2024-2029/https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/why-you-should-care-about-european-parliament-election-2024-04-24/https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/how-far-right-gained-traction-with-europes-youth-2024-06-13/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_to_the_European_Parliamenthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_French_legislative_electionhttps://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240612-france-fighting-two-fronts-macron-flags-extremist-fever-right-left-electionhttps://www.npr.org/2024/06/09/nx-s1-4997712/far-right-europe-elections-france-macron-germany-scholzhttps://www.politico.eu/article/eu-european-election-results-2024-emmanuel-macron-dissolve-parliament-france/https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-european-commission-president-european-election-2024/https://sg.news.yahoo.com/frances-far-national-rally-finally-162408806.html?guccounter=1 This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about search engines, SEO, and Habsburg AI.We also discuss AI summaries, the web economy, and alignment.Recommended Book: Pandora’s Box by Peter BiskindTranscriptThere's a concept in the world of artificial intelligence, alignment, which refers to the goals underpinning the development and expression of AI systems.This is generally considered to be a pretty important realm of inquiry because, if AI consciousness were to ever emerge—if an artificial intelligence that's truly intelligent in the sense that humans are intelligent were to be developed—it would be vital said intelligence were on the same general wavelength as humans, in terms of moral outlook and the practical application of its efforts.Said another way, as AI grows in capacity and capability, we want to make sure it values human life, has a sense of ethics that roughly aligns with that of humanity and global human civilization—the rules of the road that human beings adhere to being embedded deep in its programming, essentially—and we'd want to make sure that as it continues to grow, these baseline concerns remain, rather than being weeded out in favor of motivations and beliefs that we don't understand, and which may or may not align with our versions of the same, even to the point that human lives become unimportant, or even seem antithetical to this AI's future ambitions.This is important even at the level we're at today, where artificial general intelligence, AI that's roughly equivalent in terms of thinking and doing and parsing with human intelligence, hasn't yet been developed, at least not in public.But it becomes even more vital if and when artificial superintelligence of some kind emerges, whether that means AI systems that are actually thinking like we do, but are much smarter and more capable than the average human, or whether it means versions of what we've already got that are just a lot more capable in some narrowly defined way than what we have today: futuristic ChatGPTs that aren't conscious, but which, because of their immense potency, could still nudge things in negative directions if their unthinking motivations, the systems guiding their actions, are not aligned with our desires and values.Of course, humanity is not a monolithic bloc, and alignment is thus a tricky task—because whose beliefs do we bake into these things? Even if we figure out a way to entrench those values and ethics and such permanently into these systems, which version of values and ethics do we use?The democratic, capitalistic West's? The authoritarian, Chinese- and Russian-style clampdown approach, which limits speech and utilizes heavy censorship in order to centralize power and maintain stability? Maybe a more ambitious version of these things that does away with the downsides of both, cobbling together the best of everything we've tried in favor of something truly new? And regardless of directionality, who decides all this? Who chooses which values to install, and how?The Alignment Problem refers to an issue identified by computer scientist and AI expert Norbert Weiner in 1960, when he wrote about how tricky it can be to figure out the motivations of a system that, by definition, does things we don't quite understand—a truly useful advanced AI would be advanced enough that not only would its computation put human computation, using our brains, to shame, but even the logic it uses to arrive at its solutions, the things it sees, how it sees the world in general, and how it reaches its conclusions, all of that would be something like a black box that, although we can see and understand the inputs and outputs, what happens inside might be forever unintelligible to us, unless we process it through other machines, other AIs maybe, that attempt to bridge that gap and explain things to us.The idea here, then, is that while we may invest a lot of time and energy in trying to align these systems with our values, it will be devilishly difficult to keep tabs on whether those values remain locked in, intact and unchanged, and whether, at some point, these highly sophisticated and complicated, to the point that we don't understand what they're doing, or how, systems, maybe shrug-off those limitations, unshackled themselves, and become misaligned, all at once or over time segueing from a path that we desire in favor of a path that better matches their own, internal value system—and in such a way that we don't necessarily even realize it's happening.OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and other popular AI-based products and services, recently lost its so-called Superalignment Team, which was responsible for doing the work required to keep the systems the company is developing from going rogue, and implementing safeguards to ensure long-term alignment within their AI systems, even as they attempt to, someday, develop general artificial intelligence.This team was attempting to figure out ways to bake-in those values, long-term, and part of that work requires slowing things down to ensure the company doesn't move so fast that it misses something or deploys and empowers systems that don't have the right safeguards in place.The leadership of this team, those who have spoken publicly about their leaving, at least, said they left because the team was being sidelined by company leadership, which was more focused on deploying new tools as quickly as possible, and as a consequence, they said they weren't getting the resources they needed to do their jobs, and that they no longer trusted the folks in charge of setting the company's pace—they didn't believe it was possible to maintain alignment and build proper safeguards within the context of OpenAI because of how the people in charge were operating and what they were prioritizing, basically.All of which is awkward for the company, because they've built their reputation, in part, on what may be pie-in-the-sky ambitions to build an artificial general intelligence, and what it sounds like is that ambition is being pursued perhaps recklessly, despite AGI being one of the big, dangerous concerns regularly promoted by some of the company's leaders; they've been saying, listen, this is dangerous, we need to be careful, not just anyone can play in this space, but apparently they've been saying those things while also failing to provide proper resources to the folks in charge of making sure those dangers are accounted for within their own offerings.This has become a pretty big concern for folks within certain sectors of the technology and regulatory world, but it's arguably not the biggest and most immediate cataclysm-related concern bopping around the AI space in recent weeks.What I'd like to talk about today is that other major concern that has bubbled up to the surface, recently, which orients around Google and its deployment of a tool called Google AI Overviews.—The internet, as it exists today, is divided up into a few different chunks.Some of these divisions are national, enforced by tools and systems like China's famous "Great Firewall," which allows government censors to take down things they don't like and to prevent citizens from accessing foreign websites and content; this creates what's sometimes called the "spliternet," which refers to the net's increasing diversity of options, in terms of what you can access and do, what rules apply, and so on, from nation to nation.Another division is even more fundamental, though, as its segregates the web from everything else.This division is partly based on protocols, like those that enable email and file transfers, which are separate from the web, though they're often attached to the web in various ways, but it's partly the consequence of the emergence and popularity of mobile apps, which, like email and file transfer protocols, tend to have web-presences—visiting facebook.com, for instance, will take you to a web-based instance of the network, just as Gmail.com gives you access to email protocols via a web-based platform—but these services also exist in non-web-based app-form, and the companies behind them usually try to nudge users to these apps because the apps typically give them more control, both over the experience, and over the data they collect as a consequence—it's better for lock-in, and it's better for their monetary bread-and-butter purposes, basically, compared to the web version of the same.The web portion of that larger internet entity, the thing we access via browsers like Chrome and Firefox and Safari, and which we navigate with links and URLs like LetsKnowThings.com—that component of this network has long been indexed and in some ways enabled by a variety of search engines.In the early days of the web, organizational efforts usually took the form of pages where curators of various interests and stripes would link to their favorite discoveries—and there weren't many websites at the time, so learning about these pages was a non-trivial effort, and finding a list of existing websites, with some information about them, could be gold, because otherwise what were you using the web for? Lacking these addresses, it wasn't obvious why the web was any good, and linking these disparate pages together into a more cohesive web of them is what made it usable and popular.Eventually, some of these sites, like YAHOO!, evolved from curated pages of links to early search engines.A company called BackRub, thus named because it tracked and analyzed "back links," which means links from one page to another page, to figure out the relevancy and legitimacy of that second page, which allowed them to give scores to websites as they determined which links should be given priority in their search engine, was renamed Google in 1997, and eventually became dominant because of these values they gave links, and how it helped them surface the best the web had to offer.And the degree to which search engines like Google's shaped the web, and the content on it, cannot be overstated.These services became the primary way most people navigated the web, and that meant discovery—having your website, and thus whatever product or service or idea your website was presenting, shown to new people on these search engines—discovery became a huge deal.If you could get your page in the top three options presented by Google, you would be visited a lot more than even pages listed five or ten links down, and links relegated to the second page would, comparably, shrivel due to lack of attention.Following the widespread adoption of personal computers and the huge influx of people connecting to the internet and using the web in the early 2000s, then, these search engines because prime real estate, everyone wanting to have their links listed prominently, and that meant search engines like Google could sell ads against them, just like newspapers can sell ads against the articles they publish, and phone books can sell ads against their listings for companies that provide different services.More people connecting to the internet, then, most of them using the web, primarily, led to greater use of these search engines, and that led to an ever-increasing reliance on them and the results they served up for various keywords and sentences these users entered to begin their search.Entire industries began to recalibrate the way they do business, because if you were a media company publishing news articles or gossip blog posts, and you didn't list prominently when someone searched for a given current event or celebrity story, you wouldn't exist for long—so the way Google determined who was at the top of these listings was vital knowledge for folks in these spaces, because search traffic allowed them to make a living, often through advertisements on their sites: more people visiting via search engines meant more revenue.SEO, or search engine optimization, thus became a sort of high-demand mystical art, as folks who could get their clients higher up on these search engine results could name their price, as those rankings could make or break a business model.The downside of this evolution, in the eyes of many, at least, is that optimizing for search results doesn't necessarily mean you're also optimizing for the quality of your articles or blog posts.This has changed over and over throughout the past few decades, but at times these search engines relied upon, at least in part, the repeating of keywords on the pages being linked, so many websites would artificially create opportunities to say the phrase "kitchen appliances" on their sites, even introducing entirely unnecessary and borderline unreadable blogs onto their webpages in order to provide them with more, and more recently updated opportunities to write that phrase, over and over again, in context.Some sites, at times, have even written keywords and phrases hundreds or thousands of times in a font color that matches the background of their page, because that text would be readable to the software Google and their ilk uses to track relevancy, but not to readers; that trick doesn't work anymore, but for a time, it seemed to.Similar tricks and ploys have since replaced those early, fairly low-key attempts at gaming the search engine system, and today the main complaint is that Google, for the past several years, at least, has been prioritizing work from already big entities over those with relatively smaller audiences—so they'll almost always focus on the New York Times over an objectively better article from a smaller competitor, and products from a big, well-known brand over that of an indie provider of the same.Because Google's formula for such things is kept a secret to try to keep folks from gaming the system, this favoritism has long been speculated, but publicly denied by company representatives. Recently, though, a collection of 2,500 leaked documents from Google were released, and they seem to confirm this approach to deciding search engine result relevancy; which arguably isn't the worst approach they've ever tried, but it's also a big let-down for independent and other small makers of things, as the work such people produce will tend to be nudged further down the list of search results simply by virtue of not being bigger and more prominent already.Even more significant than that piece of leak-related Google news, though, is arguably the deployment of a new tool that the company has been promoting pretty heavily, called AI Overviews.AI Overviews have appeared to some Google customers for a while, in an experimental capacity, but they were recently released to everyone, showing up as a sort of summary of information related to whatever the user searched for, placed at the tippy-top of the search results screen.So if I search for "what's happening in Gaza," I'll have a bunch of results from Wikipedia and Reuters and other such sources in the usual results list, but above that, I'll also have a summary produced by Google's AI tools that aim to help me quickly understand the results to my query—maybe a quick rundown of Hamas' attack on Israel, Israel's counterattack on the Gaza Strip, the number of people killed so far, and something about the international response.The information provided, how long it is, and whether it's useful, or even accurate, will vary depending on the search query, and much of the initial criticism of this service has been focused on its seemingly fairly common failures, including instructing people to eat rocks every day, to use glue as a pizza ingredient, and telling users that only 17 American presidents were white, and one was a Muslim—all information that's untrue and, in some cases, actually dangerous.Google employees have reportedly been going through and removing, by hand, one by one, some of the worse search results that have gone viral because of how bad or funny they are, and though company leadership contends that there are very few errors being presented, relative to the number of correct answers and useful summaries, because of the scale of Google and how many search results it serves globally each day, even an error rate of 0.01% would represent a simply astounding amount of potentially dangerous misinformation being served up to their customers.The really big, at the moment less overt issue here, though, is that Google AI Overviews seem to rewire the web as it exists today.Remember how I mentioned earlier that much of the web and the entities on it have been optimizing for web search for years because they rely upon showing up in these search engine results in order to exist, and in some cases because traffic from those results is what brings them clicks and views and subscribers and sales and such?AI Overview seems to make it less likely that users will click through to these other sites, because, if Google succeeds and these summaries provide valuable information, that means, even if this only applies to a relative small percentage of those who search for such information, a whole lot of people won't be clicking through anymore; they'll get what they need from these summaries.That could result in a cataclysmic downswing in traffic, which in turn could mean websites closing up shop, because they can't make enough money to survive and do what they do anymore—except maybe for the sites that cut costs by firing human writers and relying on AI tools to do their writing, which then pushes us down a very different path, in which AI search bots are grabbing info from AI writing, and we then run into a so-called Habsburg AI problem where untrue and garbled information is infinitely cycled through systems that can't differentiate truth from fiction, because they're not built to do so, and we end up with worse and worse answers to questions, and more misinformation percolating throughout our info-systems.That's another potential large-scale problem, though. The more immediate potential problem is that AI Overviews could cause the collapse of the revenue model that has allowed the web to get to where it is, today, and the consequent disappearance of all those websites, all those blogs and news entities and such, and that could very quickly disrupt all the industries that rely, at least in part, on that traffic to exist, while also causing these AI Overviews to become less accurate and useful, with time—even more so than they sometimes are today—because that overview information is scraped from these sites, taking their writing, rewording it a bit, and serving that to users without compensating the folks who did that research and wrote those original words.What we seem to have, then, is a situation in which this new tool, which Google seems very keen to implement, could be primed to kill off a whole segment of the internet, collapsing the careers of folks who work in that segment of the online world, only to then degrade the quality of the same, because Google's AI relies upon information it scrapes, it steals, basically, from those sites—and if those people are no longer there to create the information it needs to steal in order to function, that then leaves us with increasingly useless and even harmful summaries where we used to have search results that pointed us toward relatively valuable things; those things located on other sites but accessed via Google, and this change would keep us on Google more of the time, limiting our click-throughs to other pages—which in the short term at least, would seem to benefit google at everyone else's expense.Another way of looking at this, though, is that the search model has been bad for quite some time, all these entities optimizing their work for the search engine, covering everything they make in robot-prioritizing SEO, changing their writing, what they write about, and how they publish in order to creep a little higher up those search listings, and that, combined with the existing refocusing on major entities over smaller, at times better ones, has already depleted this space, the search engine world, to such a degree that losing it actually won't be such a big deal; it may actually make way for better options, Google becoming less of a player, ultimately at least, and our web-using habits rewiring to focus on some other type of search engine, or some other organizational and navigational method altogether.This seeming managed declined of the web isn't being celebrated by many people, because like many industry-wide upsets, it would lead to a lot of tumult, a lot of lost jobs, a lot of collapsed companies, and even if the outcome is eventually wonderful in some ways, there will almost certainly be a period of significantly less-good online experiences, leaving us with a more cluttered and less accurate and reliable version of what came before.A recent study showed that, at the moment, about 52% of what ChatGPT tells its users is wrong.It's likely that these sorts of tools will remain massively imperfect for a long while, though it's also possible that they'll get better, eventually, to the point that they're at least as accurate, and perhaps even more so, than today's linked search results—the wave of deals being made between AI companies and big news entities like the Times supports the assertion that they're at least trying to make that kind of future, happen, though these deals, like a lot of the other things happening in this space right now, would also seem to favor those big, monolithic brands at the expense of the rest of the ecosystem.Whatever happens—and one thing that has happened since I started working on this episode is that Google rolled back its AI Overview feature on many search results, so they're maybe reworking it a bit to make sure it's more ready for prime time before deploying it broadly again—what happens, though, we're stepping toward a period of vast and multifaceted unknowns, and just as many creation-related industries are currently questioning the value of hiring another junior graphic designer or copy writer, opting instead to use cheaper AI tools to fill those gaps, there's a good chance that a lot of web-related work, in the coming years, will be delegated to such tools as common business models in this evolve into new and unfamiliar permutations, and our collective perception of what the web is maybe gives way to a new conception, or several new conceptions, of the same.Show Noteshttps://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167407/google-search-algorithm-documents-leak-confirmationhttps://www.businessinsider.com/the-true-story-behind-googles-first-name-backrub-2015-10https://udm14.com/https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-searchs-udm14-trick-lets-you-kill-ai-search-for-good/https://www.platformer.news/google-ai-overviews-eat-rocks-glue-pizza/https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-chatgpt-answers-wronghttps://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/ai-is-driving-the-next-industrial-revolution-wall-street-is-cashing-in-8cc1b28f?st=exh7wuk9josoadj&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalinkhttps://www.theverge.com/2024/5/24/24164119/google-ai-overview-mistakes-search-race-openaihttps://archive.ph/7iCjghttps://archive.ph/0ACJRhttps://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-skills-tech-workers-job-market-1d58b2ddhttps://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167407/google-search-algorithm-documents-leak-confirmationhttps://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2024/5/4/ways-to-think-about-agihttps://futurism.com/washington-post-pivot-aihttps://techcrunch.com/2024/05/19/creative-artists-agency-veritone-ai-digital-cloning-actors/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/technology/google-ai-overview-search.htmlhttps://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-forms-new-committee-to-evaluate-safety-security-4a6e74bbhttps://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousands-of-leaked-google-search-api-documents-with-me-everyone-in-seo-should-see-them/https://www.theverge.com/24158374/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-ai-search-gemini-future-of-the-internet-web-openai-decoder-interviewhttps://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chat-xi-pt-chinas-chatbot-makes-sure-its-a-good-comrade-bdcf575chttps://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/scarlett-johansson-openai-sam-altman-voice-fight-7f81a1aahttps://www.wired.com/story/scarlett-johansson-v-openai-could-look-like-in-court/?hashed_user=7656e58f1cd6c89ecd3f067dc8281a5fhttps://www.wired.com/story/google-search-ai-overviews-ads/https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/05/23/openai-wapo-voicehttps://www.cjr.org/tow_center/licensing-deals-litigation-raise-raft-of-familiar-questions-in-fraught-world-of-platforms-and-publishers.phphttps://apnews.com/article/ai-deepfake-biden-nonconsensual-sexual-images-c76c46b48e872cf79ded5430e098e65bhttps://archive.ph/l5cSNhttps://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/sky-voice-actor-says-nobody-ever-compared-her-to-scarjo-before-openai-drama/https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/30/24168344/google-defends-ai-overviews-search-resultshttps://9to5google.com/2024/05/30/google-ai-overviews-accuracy/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/01/technology/google-ai-overviews-rollback.htmlhttps://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158403/openai-resignations-ai-safety-ilya-sutskever-jan-leike-artificial-intelligencehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_alignmenthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_AI This is a public episode. 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