#uspol #mitchmcConnell

Wanna feel old? 1852 was 174 years ago.

2/

"Oligarchs are owed the natural resources of the globe & total political control over people"

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/11/the-2024-election-was-defined-by-oligarchs-musk-mellon-bezos-zuckerberg/

"The Epstein Class deserve to cook the books to favor themselves"
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/elon-musk-spacex-ipo-investors.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2026/06/11/near-trillionaire-elon-musk-a-saudi-prince-and-twitters-founder-here-are-the-spacex-ipos-biggest-winners/

"The fossil fuel industry & its tech proxies are can buy corrupt Supreme Court Justices & members of Congress"
https://www.reuters.com/world/judge-approves-elon-musk-settlement-with-us-sec-over-twitter-disclosures-2026-07-08/

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/us-judge-allows-sec-musk-deal-despite-significant-misgivings

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxn9qel9y4o

https://statedemocracy.law.wisc.edu/our-work/wisconsin-public-radio-as-musk-pours-millions-into-wisconsin-supreme-court-race-tesla-files-case-that-could-reach-justices

https://www.jsonline.com/story/opinion/contributors/2026/04/05/wisconsin-supreme-court-election-elon-musk-bribery/89406507007/

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5941842-musk-america-pac-lawsuit/

In this weeks edition of our newsletter:

* AI at work: Fair, accurate or biased?
* Data centres are getting hot.
* The UK in search of AI regulation.
* Palantir & Met Police
* Scotland could get data centre moratorium

#AiEthics #datacenter #uk

https://read.misalignedmag.com/misaligned-bits-33-at-work-14ae0ca09c19

4/4 But even if a winter happens, LLMs will persist as a product. My thesis has been since I started working with them last summer that they'll have to be scoped well to be useful. This necessarily means big tech stops serving these as human replacements and scaling them through intense resource consumption. https://misaligned.markets/llm-intelligence-is-a-dark-pattern/

3/4 The railway for AI is pretty mixed. As a field it has a different series of tracks that have converged at times. But There's no telling where future progress might come from. It may involve building on old tracks or creating a new line all together. All this is to say, a winter is possible.

2/4 As part of my analysis I created a visual metaphor. I imagined the linage of a technology's innovations as train stations along a route. The building of stations is a political act that requires social or monetary capital. Stations can be contested too as the Internet's history shows. https://misaligned.markets/gtr-internet-history-governance/#imagining-the-history-of-the-internet-as-a-railway

1/4 One of the reasons I started discussing and writing about the AI bubble is because I took seriously the question of post-bubble residuals. No one was taking this seriously earlier this year. https://zirk.us/@MidniteMikeWrites/116523605434204476

Started a #podcast with my friend Nick called The Last Enclosure, about the way modern capitalists are enclosing our minds and bodies. Episode 3 is out! We talk about the full spectrum of AI boosters and how they're contributing to the permanent underclass narrative. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNRC397OPmw

Started a #podcast with my friend Nick called The Last Enclosure, about the way modern capitalists are enclosing our minds and bodies. Episode 3 is out! We talk about the full spectrum of AI boosters and how they're contributing to the permanent underclass narrative. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNRC397OPmw

(5/8) Digital goods are the perfect illustration.

Digital assets are non-rivalrous; one person's use doesn't deplete another's, and the marginal cost of production is near zero. Yet, the tech industry has produced the most profitable companies in history.

Why?

Because they've found ways to capture value that have nothing to do with distribution.

https://misaligned.markets/21st-century-property-rights-conflicts/

Y’all remember a ways back when I said 3 major #egg producers were scamming the country, and that #avianflu was not causing the price surges, it was price fixing, cause I can do basic addition?

And industry executives and analysts were saying that there was nothing to see except a supply shock of a disease killing lots of hens. As one industry executive put it at the time, it’s all just “supply disruption, ‘act of God’ type stuff.”

Yeah. It was a #conspiracy to fix prices. Emails between each other writing down the damn conspiracy. They made billions. Guess how much they have to pay in fines? If you guessed less than 1%, you’ve been paying attention to the #kakistocracy.

Eat the rich.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/crime-pays-the-egg-bandits-made-a

It feels really hard to celebrate my country right now. How do I celebrate a country with detention camps? I know there are great people here, who are working toward a better tomorrow, but it feels nuts to want to shoot off fireworks right now. Add on this massive heat wave that most of the United States is going through, and I'm just feeling trapped. Of course, then I feel ungrateful, I have a place to live, I'm not in a camp, I have food, and friends. My mental health feels less than stellar right now. Anyway, sorry for the brain dump, I just wanted to be honest, it feels so complicated right now, what do we do, how do we help? I love you all. I hope you're safe, cool, and have a good weekend. Feel free to share your thoughts and feelings too, if you want.

Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Me: "Therefore, any sufficiently complicated technical problem is indistinguishable from a curse."

#infosec #sysadmin #bofh

Capitalism and markets have always been at odds. Nowhere is that more apparent than in tech, where companies can decide to sell revocable products using
DRM/licenses. Capitalists always get to choose how to label market inputs:

https://misaligned.markets/21st-century-property-rights-conflicts/

(1/8) As always @pluralistic writes about exactly what's on my mind a thread 🧵:

My political economy begins by taking F.A. Hayek seriously. I kid you not.

Hayek saw markets as a form of decentralized processing a logical “spontaneous order” that aggregates knowledge. He saw this pattern everywhere, including within the human mind (I'm sure like Dawkins he'd have been one-shotted by Claude).

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116527241278574264

#capitalism #economics #markets #oligarchy

1/2 I'm starting two new podcasts. The first is the Misaligned Markets #podcast! I'm narrating some of my posts, but also I'm interviewing activists, researchers, and scholars in my area of interest as I put off going to grad school.

https://misaligned.markets/misaligned-markets-podcast-teaser/

What's that saying... 'If buying isn't owning...'

Sony deletes another large stash of movies off users' accounts after users "purchased" the movies. Cue up the "I'm tired boss" meme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l19tXQcw2tE

the fact that copying text is paywalled in the read-only version of microsoft word is absolutely bonkers

The problem with Jeff Bezos' ideology is that it's based on a false premise. The idea that "6,000 years ago someone invented the plow" is based on a faulty belief that ancient humans functioned as individuals. They did not. Ancient humans were collectivist.

Archeological evidence demonstrates that for hundreds of thousands of years, early humans congregated around communal gathering places, like the fire, and engaged in problem solving and passing on of shared learning down through generations.

Additionally, the plow (and tools like it) were developed by humans in Mesopotamia, Europe, Egypt, East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa as well as other places - not in one place by one person. This is known as parallel development.

Believing that the plow was invented by one 'genius' is like believing language was invented by one person. It is a silly myth and represents the projection of current moral standards onto past events.

Collectivism is how we survived and progressed as a species. - Anthony Zenkus
#Evolution