Rakesh Bhandari

This is literally the end of the rule of law. If a President can pardon people committing crimes on his behalf - and the Supreme Court says he himself can't be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his job - then the government becomes a lawless entity able to violate our rights without limit.

On the next All-In Podcast. David Sacks discusses how by not being a major source of VC funds in the Valley & destroying Russian bot farms that promote MAGA accounts, Ukraine provoked Starshield to throttle its battlefield communications and expose it to lethal attack.

Time to re-issue Kathleen Hall Jamieson's *Cyber-War*? Ukraine's destruction of Russian bot farms may well have been taken by the Potus & his BFF Musk as an attack on America's critical infrastructure & led the duo to cut off Ukraine's capabilities for battlefield communications.

Of all the vile actions of this regime this week, this is the most blatantly, most doctrinally fascist.

This is an utterly brilliant dissection of the electoral disenfranchisement in India. I'm committing myself to reading as much as possible by this young Rhodes-winning writer who has to his name works on Constitutional history, award-winning science fiction novels, & essays. time.com/article/2026...

Michael Jordan (the machine learning one): "Superintelligence is Science Fiction" 🔥🔥🔥 www.di.ens.fr/~fbach/MJord...

The SF Bay Area is at the edge of the posthuman. We've gone from moving fast & breaking things with CRISPR germline edits made possible (& cautioned against) by Doudna's Lab to self-recursively accelerating AI created in SF labs, which Gates warns could cull a billion people.

On October 16th, both the Holmes and Musk documentaries will be released, it seems. So it won't be Barbenheimer but Mulmes or Holsk?

Maybe they would have if his political career hadn’t been derailed by all that jail time for tax fraud, but we know who The Feds were harassing Lyndon LaRouche, aka Lynn Markus, on behalf of: the drug-running British Monarchy. 😜

This thread reminds me of the need for any student to be aware that different disciplines need different approaches. Eg deduction from axioms is OK in maths, not the social sciences; creating clarity OK in engineering, less so in literature. Beware of professional deformation.

You need a vote of 85% of shareholders to press the kill switch on the public-minded Anthropic Board of Directors. Say Amodei is worried that the Board will keep Anthropic in the sandbox. He rushes to go public so he has the votes to neutralize the Board, not just to get rich.

Teach people to demand pay in stock options, and then they maximize the value of those options at the expense of everyone else at the firm. I'd guess that this is one reason for the rent-extracting ways of business school-educated CEO's.

Yes, this social movement may emerge outside and against party politics. It may also birth a poet, a new Wm Blake decrying data centers not as dark Satanic mills but as Digital Mills of Urizen. That the Blake & other connections haven't yet been made suggests that this is only starting!

This science paper was quite the journey. A really scary one. Oh India... www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth...

I missed this when it came out, but super important discussion, including of the crazy energy demands of LLMs www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1...

So if Greenland uses force to shut down an unauthorized Trump-aligned firm from drilling for oil and Trump sends the US military to protect the illegal US firm, does NATO then use force to protect Greenland's sovereignty? The petro Axis of US & RU => WW3?

A couple of nice & not all that technical essays on AI in J Economic Perspectives, pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/... & pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/...

On how Enron's Special Purpose Vehicles to hide debt worked, see attached also.

The Fauci show trial is an amazing illustration of the fundamental immaturity and insecurity of the modern right. What really outrages them is that he dared to suggest that people make sacrifices for the common good. So much of X/techbro/manosphere thought is just insisting that should never happen.

Partial explanation here: scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scho....

Province of Inner Mongolia is at the poster child of China's energy bet. Last year, it cut coal use in power by 4% -- more than any other province. It is also home to 20 GW of new coal power plants in pipeline -- more than any other province. Great deep dive! 🎁🔗 www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

As the summer burns again, a reminder that only last year a top executive at both McKinsey and one of the largest insurance companies in Germany matter-of-factly stated that entire regions were becoming unisurable and capitalism therefore unviable. www.commondreams.org/news/capital...

Yes compare how well Biden got along with Strom Thurmond

Trillionaire exoneration day. One may not intend that 14 M people die by cutting aid, but the consequence of that action, as it was abruptly undertaken, was fully foreseeable and predictable. Clearly, this was man(mass)slaughter, a form of homicide.

People ceding their thinking this easily to LLMs may suggest they were already alienated from their thinking: thinking for them was already the alienated activity of apprehending the thoughts of the anyone or the agentic mouthpiecing of the principal in whose legal hold they already were

AI is starting to undermine democracy in direct ways already. Important investigation by @toddwoody.bsky.social & @zhirji.bsky.social 🎁🔗 www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Kill off higher ed to clear the way to accumulate power and money in the ways that the past and hard-won self-understanding would teach us not to and to prevent us from apprehending the genuinely new problems we should be solving and devising the tools to do so. Trump U forever

Charles Hall emphasized that with fossil fuels the energy rate on investment was falling, i.e. it was taking more fossil fuel energy to extract fossil fuel energy. This may explain early interest in renewables until they developed fast & threatened to strand fossil fuel assets & tech connected to it

"An electron can be sourced from coal, gas, sun, wind, or uranium; a combustion engine is married to a single fuel that must cross someone else’s chokepoint. Electrification is the purchase of optionality, and China bought more of it than any nation in history." www.ft.com/content/2f13...

In 2012, 30 states allowed no-excuse mail-in voting. In 2016, 8 states saw more than a fourth of voters send in their ballots. Taibbi has either gotten a lot dumber, or he just doesn't give a shit anymore.

To meet the ravenous energy demands of AI data centers, coal is making a comeback due to the blockages to gas in Russia, Hormuz, etc. So: a 19th-century dirty-energy technology alongside 21st-century automation: a new cyberpunk will be the aesthetic for civilizational collapse

Happy Birthday to us! 🥳 To mark our 25th anniversary, we asked 25 people to write up to 250 words on an idea that has been influential in their thinking. We hope you enjoy reading their contributions! Find them at www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/25-ideas

Top 10 reasons why Democrats need to talk about climate change now: 🧵

I wonder what we could instead pay energy companies to leave in the ground at a serious discount to their net present value at the moment.

I haven't yet read Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry of the Future. Does it tell us what happens next?

History will look at how a small number of rapacious and malicious plutocrats, with the full complicity of a thoroughly corrupt and intellectually bankrupt political party, caused the epic collapse of the greatest nation on the planet.

Why do philosophers discuss a fictional Trolley Problem? Chernobyl invented a real one. Pilots could make the radioactive waste come down on Belarus, killing fewer, or let it move in the clouds, likely eventually raining down on a more populous Moscow. theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Yes, Reader's Digest is undead, and apparently producing horror fiction, combining a critical sociology of AI as a mirror of the worst of us (shannonvallor@bsky.social) with a reboot of "The Stepford Wives".

Conflicts already give Trump exceptional powers; full-scale war will give Trump emergency powers. He has run his party into the ground. He will need all the power he can concentrate in himself to get his party and himself through the next two years. There will be no peace.