Pun Salad

For what it's worth, I have no opinion, pro or con, on Netflix buying Warner. I just hope Trump stays out of it.

Also of note:

• I have concerns. Wesley J. Smith is pretty certain that Robots Should Not Have 'Rights' (archive.today link)

  We live in an era when activists of various stripes argue that, well, everything should have rights. Animals, nature, plants, the moon, rivers, AI/robots, you name it.

  Now, in Newsweek, the transhumanism popularizer and California gubernatorial candidate Zoltan Istvan argues that we should give robots rights so they will show mercy on us. Seriously. From his article, “Why Giving Rights to Robots Might One Day Save Humans”:

  The discussion about giving rights to artificial intelligences and robots has evolved around whether they deserve or are entitled to them. Juxtapositions of this with women’s suffrage and racial injustices are often brought up in philosophy departments like the University of Oxford, where I’m a graduate student.

  This is the problem with all non-human-rights activists. They continually compare their favored supposed rights-bearers with human beings who were denied equality in the past. But those denials were wrong — and in some cases evil — because inherent equals were treated as if they were unequal.

  We live in a time where a lot of people don't think human beings should have the right to life if they have yet to be born. So my concerns will fall on a lot of deaf ears:

  • We have rights thanks to our living consciousness and free will.
  • Living consciousness and free will are (probably) emergent properties of a sufficiently complex nervous system.
  • There's no inherent reason that a "sufficiently complex nervous system" needs to be biology-based.
  • So …

  So I don't think Wesley's argument is a slam dunk. We're not there yet, but someday… maybe.

• Here I am, stuck in the middle with… Josh & Bernie?! Veronique de Rugy takes a look at the latest horseshoe woe: Coming for Your Credit Card From Left and Right.

  Take legislation introduced earlier this year by what would have once been an unlikely duo: Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Their "10 Percent Credit Card Interest Rate Cap Act" — also reflecting a Trump idea from the 2024 campaign — sounds compassionate. Who enjoys paying 25% interest?

  In practice, price controls of all sorts are disastrous. Credit card interest rates are high because unsecured consumer lending is very risky. They're the price for the lender taking a chance on a person. If the government artificially caps rates far below the market rate, banks will stop lending to riskier borrowers. That doesn't just mean broke shopaholics. It includes the working single parent using a financial last resort before payday.

  Just as rent controls can create a housing shortage by reducing the attractiveness of supplying those homes, interest-rate caps can create a credit shortage. They put millions of working-class Americans — the people proposals like these are supposed to protect — at risk of being "de-banked." Stripped of their credit cards, some will turn to payday lenders, loan sharks and pawn shops, whose charges are far higher.

  Vero is not saying anything that complicated or controversial. We live in a time when people flaunt their economic ignorance on purpose.

• It doesn't help to have the nickname "the Stupid Party". Yuval Levin explains it, hopefully with small enough words so that Josh Hawley can understand: Why Republicans Lose Every Healthcare Debate.

  Of course, medical care is not like other commodities. It involves life-and-death situations that threaten the people we love, there are enormous knowledge gaps between providers and consumers, and the most urgent and important services are often very expensive. That’s why we want to purchase insurance in advance, rather than directly buying care. And it’s why it makes sense to subsidize coverage for people who can’t afford it. That could be done in line with the economic logic of healthcare by using subsidies to give everyone the resources to enter competitive insurance markets as consumers making choices.

  But this is where politics gums things up. The fact is, most of us don’t actually want a lot of choice when it comes to healthcare. We just want to believe that everything is paid for. That creates an incentive to hide costs by routing most payments through insurers or government, which sustains the illusion that everything is free to the consumer. This has yielded a healthcare system without real prices, and therefore without enough pressure to restrain spending. In turn, that’s led to ever-rising costs paid for by ever-rising subsidies.

  For decades, this has meant that health policy proposals that make economic sense do not make political sense, and vice versa.

  Yuval's bottom line: "You can't beat something with nothing." Which is what the GOP's got.

• 

  Stark's other lesson was "Live Free or Die". But that's not what George Will is talking about when he explains A stark lesson about the president’s war powers. (WaPo gifted link)

  In “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution,” Michael W. McConnell, Stanford law professor and former federal judge, writes that Article I vests in Congress legislative powers “herein granted” and enumerated. Article II simply assumes the president shall exercise all powers executive in nature. Those powers were negligible in 1789, when the executive bureaucracy was smaller than Congress. Today, executive power is everywhere.

  The Constitutional Convention changed Congress’s power from “to make war” to “to declare war,” thereby expanding presidential war power. The Convention worried that if the power to “make” war belonged to Congress (which often was out of session), the president could not repel sudden attacks. Also, the power to declare war was already almost a nullity: Most wars then (and since) were declared by beginning them — waging war before, or rather than, declaring war. In Federalist 25, Alexander Hamilton noted that “the ceremony” of formally declaring war “has of late fallen into disuse.” Congress has not declared war since 1942 (against German allies Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania), many wars ago. Congress has, however, passed authorizations for uses of military force.

  Citing decisions of self-restraint by presidents Washington (dealing with Native American tribes), John Adams (the Quasi-War with France) and Thomas Jefferson (the Barbary War), McConnell concludes that an originalist understanding of war powers is that “congressional authorization is required before the President may employ the armed forces in offensive military operations that constitute acts of war.”

  McConnell's book sounds good. Amazon link at your right.

• Sounds like the setup for a bad SNL skit. But it's not. Ronald Bailey says NIMBYism is forcing AI into the Final Frontier: Google, SpaceX, and Blue Origin plan to put AI in space.

  The growth of the U.S. economy is being fueled by the hectic quest to build out massive data centers to run increasingly popular generative AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini. The power-hungry AI data centers are driving up electricity costs in some regions and sparking local "not-in-my-backyard" opposition.

  Consequently, some Big Tech players are looking to locate their data centers in space. They think that low earth orbit could mitigate the problem of pesky, annoyed neighbors and offer perpetual sunshine to power constellations of AI satellites.

  In November, Google unveiled Project Suncatcher, "a research moonshot to scale machine learning compute in space." A team of Google researchers is exploring how to deploy and fly fleets of solar-powered AI satellites that would beam down data from orbit.

  I foresee cooling problems. But I assume the big brains have figured that out already.

Recently on the book blog:

The penultimate entry on my "read/reread Ian Fleming's Bond books" project. (Yes, I go out of my way to use the word "penultimate" when I can.) This is Ian Fleming's final Bond novel, published posthumously; the last book is a combination of two novellas.

The critics were not particularly kind, even given the slack often given to dead authors. I can understand, it seemed padded to me. Especially the ending, which extended twenty pages past the ostensible climax.

The previous book, You Only Live Twice, ended with (spoilers ahead) an amnesiac Bond, thought dead by most of the world, about to head off to the Soviet Union to possibly recover his memory. Bad news: when this book opens, Bond's been KGB-brainwashed and turned into an assassin aimed at his old boss, M. That unpleasant situation is resolved by page 22 here. And, as a check to see if 007 is back to his old self, M gives him his assignment: track down the murderous gangster Scaramanga on Jamaica, mon, and terminate him with extreme prejudice.

Along the way, Bond discovers his deep affection for his old secretary, Mary Goodnight. He passes up a sure shot at Scaramanga because it just wouldn't be sporting. He infiltrates Scaramanga's organization, discovers Scaramanga's latest nefarious schecme, gets his cover blown, and becomes the target of Scaramanga's needlessly complex murder scheme.

So, many classic Bond elements are here, but it's kind of a slog. For completists only, I think.