What we can learn from the ancient art of wayfinding BBC
Why Chanos Failed Russell Clark. The deck: “Is Short Selling A Dead Industry?”
GM Plans $10 Billion Stock Buyback in Bid to Assuage Investors WSJ
Genetics and Life Insurance – Time for Their Relationship to be Tested Again Actuaries Digital
Climate
The good and bad news on climate change Martin Wolf, FT
California & Florida Rank In Top 5 States Impacted By Climate-Related Natural Disasters The Brockovich Report
#COVID19
Where are our leaders? John Snow Project
Denmark reports Mycoplasma pneumonia epidemic Center for Infectious Research and Policy
China?
China jobs: How much employment pressure is the world’s second-largest economy facing? Channel News Asia
China’s Nov factory activity likely contracted for second month Hellenic Shipping News
Xi Jinping calls legal backing on foreign affairs an ‘urgent task’ for China South China Morning Post
Moderna begins work on China mRNA manufacturing site Channel News Asia
The World’s Largest Buyer of U.S. Debt Isn’t Going Away WSJ
Marginal Nation: Bestselling Author’s New Novel Warns of Grim Future for Japan Nippon
Myanmar
Time to start planning postwar future of Myanmar’s military Nikkei Asia. Why this dude thinks “the international community” has any standing in this matter is beyond me. “Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?” –Dr. Samuel Johnson
India
An Indian official plotted to assassinate a Sikh separatist leader in New York, US prosecutors say AP
India forms committee to look into security concerns raised by US Channel News Asia
The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge Asian Review of Books
Syraqistan
Humanitarian pause extended in Gaza Strip for Thursday Anadolu Agency
Intel: Unclear how big a threat next Turkey flotilla is Jerusalem Post. Not a lot of coverage of the “1000 boats.” That’s a lot. I would have expected photos and TikToks to be all over the Twitter. They’re not.
The Hamas Attack and Israel’s War in Gaza Council for Global Cooperation
Hamas is not as popular in Gaza as it seems. But Israel’s tactics will ensure their survival Forward
New Footage Shows Latest Hamas Kill Against Israeli Armour Military Watch
Opinion: Why does Israel have so many Palestinians in detention and available to swap? LA Times
US Embassy in Azerbaijan cancels alumni meeting after being labeled “a gathering of agents” JAM News
New Not-So-Cold War
Will the Ukraine war end in a peace treaty? Gilbert Doctorow, Armageddon Newsletter. The final paragraph:
Russia has no need of a peace treaty if it succeeds in taking back Kharkov and Kherson, and, in a somewhat more distant time frame, captures Odessa and the Black Sea littoral all the way to Transnistria. This scenario is entirely possible. By pushing back Ukraine in this way, Russia will look after its own security needs sufficiently. Rump Ukraine will be a failed state that can be allowed to join the European Union, where it will be seeking vast financial support for decades. Rump Ukraine can even be allowed to join NATO, which from the Russian perspective, could provide some discipline and forestall attempts to implement insane revanchist provocations that Kiev, left to its own devices, might plan.
Haas and Kupchan divided the process of convincing Kyiv into stages (Google translation) Nezavisimaya Gazeta
A Containment Strategy for Ukraine Foreign Affairs. Mere cope.
Biden’s role in Ukraine peace is clear now Responsible Statecraft
Free Agents? Branko Marcetic, New Left Review
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s remarks and answers to media questions at the Primakov Readings International Forum, Moscow, November 27 2023 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation
Protest at Polish-Ukrainian border escalates as farmers join in BNE Intellinews
Slovak hauliers decide to carry out threats to block Ukrainian border Ukrainska Pravda
The Nord Stream Lies Just Keep Coming Consortium News
Russia’s Powerful Invisible Defenses Around Sevastopol Rendered Visible Naval News
Ukraine aid’s best-kept secret: Most of the money stays in the U.S.A. WaPo
Russia to require foreigners to sign ‘loyalty agreement’ Al Jazeera
Biden Administration
White House Christmas tree winched back into place after being blown over by high winds Sky News
Spook Country
CTIL Files #1: US And UK Military Contractors Created Sweeping Plan For Global Censorship In 2018, New Documents Show Public. Grab a cup of coffee, because the origin story of the Censorship Industrial complex is important. One of life’s little ironies (and please read the article and don’t just focus on this quote; I have to get this on the record because nobody else will):
But one person involved, Bonnie Smalley, replied over LinkedIn, saying, “all i can comment on is that i joined cti league [CTIL] which is unaffiliated with any govt orgs because i wanted to combat the inject bleach[1] nonsense online during covid…. i can assure you that we had nothing to do with the govt though.”
NOTE [1] Trump did not, in fact, advocate injecting bleach or anything like it, as I show from the transcript here. So spook Smalley either fell for disformation propagated by a Democrat dogpile, or she’s lying. Or both!
Digital Watch
Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT Milad Nasr, Nicholas Carlini, et al. Github:
We have just released a paper that allows us to extract several megabytes of ChatGPT’s training data for about two hundred dollars. (Language models, like ChatGPT, are trained on data taken from the public internet. Our attack shows that, by querying the model, we can actually extract some of the exact data it was trained on.) We estimate that it would be possible to extract ~a gigabyte of ChatGPT’s training dataset from the model by spending more money querying the model.
“Undigested chunks” comes to mind. Also, “outright theft.”
AI Turned These Memes Into Videos and It’s the Worst Thing I’ve Ever Seen Gizmodo. The deck: “As usual, AI takes the brilliant cultural output of human beings and turns it into abominable slop.”
Critical tipping point: AI- and human-generated online contents are considered similarly credible (press release) Mainz University of Applied Sciences and Johannes Gutenberg University. Bullshit works because it is credible.
The Ideologies of Silicon Valley (PDF) Crooked Timber
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism Slate Star Codex (DC).
AI won’t take your job, might shrink your wages, European Central Bank reckons The Register
It’s All Bullshit The Baffler
Antitrust
Bulk of Consumers Continue to Back Antitrust Cases Against Big Tech Morning Consult
The Case for Ambulance Chasing Lawyers Matt Stoller, BIG
B-a-a-a-d Banks
Bukele’s Bitcoin Mess and the U.S.-Backed Bank That Enabled It Foreign Policy
Why Banks Are Suddenly Closing Down Customer Accounts NYT
Obituaries
Henry Kissinger, secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford, dies at 100 AP. Commentary:
“Posterity will ne’er survey / a Nobler grave than this”:
Wikipedia editor “Asticky” edited Henry Kissinger’s article at 8:46 ET and then changed her userpage to this (with the edit summary “lmao”) pic.twitter.com/4QjoX7KARW
— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwiki) November 30, 2023
The eulogies pour in:
Henry Kissinger was a towering intellect, diplomat and practitioner who – not without controversy – helped shape American foreign policy with a lasting impact worldwide. A refugee from Nazi Germany, and the first Jewish Secretary of State, he was unapologetic about his heritage…
— ADL (@ADL) November 30, 2023
Charlie Munger, who was Warren Buffett’s right-hand man at Berkshire, dies at 99 Reuters
How Warren Buffett Privately Traded in Stocks That Berkshire Hathaway Was Buying and Selling ProPublica
Zeitgeist Watch
More Americans than ever think US headed in wrong direction as Congress’ approval near rock bottom: survey FOX
Class Warfare
UAW will try to organize workers at all US nonunion factories after winning new contracts in Detroit AP
The resurgence of union power is bigger than money Indiana Capital Chronicle
Revealed: how top PR firm uses ‘trust barometer’ to promote world’s autocrats Guardian
Ethics has no foundation Aeon
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
