Pun Salad

That's probably not a direct quote. Mr. Ramirez might be closer to the truth: What Trump wants to learn from Xi.

In words, the WSJ editorialists write on Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Jimmy Lai (WSJ gifted link)

The WSJ commenters, unsurprisingly and uncharitably, make the connection that Trump probably wishes that he could toss some journalists in the clink.

Also of note:

• Probably not a song on the next Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass album. Erick Erickson sings of The Lonely Optimist.

  The macroeconomic numbers are good. America is near full employment. The stock market is doing well. Inflation is high, but down from where it was with Joe Biden. Americans do not care. They hate both parties. Republican operatives on the ground in state after state tell me the same story. Voters are enraged at the GOP.

  Diehard Republican cheerleaders do not get it. They insist the economy is good in the same way Democrats did when Biden was President. In fact, both Biden and Trump had a similar macroeconomic picture with a strong stock market, inflation receding by 2024, and good jobs reports. The macroeconomic picture of the nation does not matter to the American family. What matters is the pocketbook.

  President Trump promised to fix what Americans knew Joe Biden had wrecked. He has done two major things that voters remember: tariffs and a war. Tariffs were the President’s economic panacea. They would not raise costs on Americans. They would restore American manufacturing. They would right global trade wrongs. They have done none of those things. In fact, not only have tariffs made things worse for consumers, they have not restored American manufacturing muscle. The President’s supporters can argue that takes time, but Americans measure time in the distance from one election to the next. Time is up.

  Erick doesn't sound that optimistic there. But (later in the article) he thinks the GOP might do better in November than the current "wisdom" predicts.

• Speaking of optimism … Matt Ridley blogs at the Rational Optimist, and he's got a leading question: How seriously should we take AI doom warnings?

  Well, first, doomsayers have a long history of being ludicrously wrong.

  But …

  At this point my more responsible friends remind me that the boy who cried wolf was eventually right and there was a wolf. Also, AI is not like the other scares, they insist: this time is different. If I reply “they said that last time, too,” it cuts little ice, and of course they have a point. At some point there may be a wolf.

  But this is when I get even more exasperated. Because my world-weariness at promises of theoretical future calamity is matched by my bafflement at complacency about a current, urgent calamity. Why, when a wolf did suddenly descend on the fold, did the entire bien-pensant world dismiss it as an act of God?

  I am referring to the COVID pandemic. In my view the evidence is now overwhelming that this began with a foolish experiment that went wrong in a laboratory in Wuhan—but even if you think that was only a small possibility, you should be really alarmed by the fact. If one virology experiment can kill 15 million people and do $45 trillion of damage to people’s livelihoods, then why have we largely ignored it while obsessing over some future potential threat from AI?

  This point was brilliantly made recently by the celebrated venture capitalist Bill Gurley in a talk at the All-In summit in Los Angeles. “My p(2nd COVID) is way higher than my p(doom). And if their models are so ****ing smart, tell me what happened here.” To translate out of Silicon Valley-ese: we are facing a far greater risk of some virologist starting another pandemic than we face from AI. Yet nobody even wants to investigate, let alone prevent.

  Well. maybe Trump will bring that up with Xi…

  Ha! Just kidding!

• It means the populists have a statistic to flog. Jack Salmon says: A Falling Labor Share Does Not Mean Workers Are Losing.

  Earlier this week, economic analyst and former advisor to President Obama, Steve Rattner, posted a commonly shared chart of the declining labor share of economic output. Rattner noted that this metric had fallen to the lowest point on record in 2026.

  

  The misuse of this BLS data to spread doomerism about declining worker welfare, billionaire enrichment, or economic injustice is not new.

  What follows will appeal to the green-eyeshade crowd out there. Skipping down to Jack's bottom line:

  The labor share of economic output is a poor measure of worker welfare, and an even worse proxy for billionaire enrichment. It confuses relative shares with absolute gains, treats capital income as a residual, includes depreciation, overlooks ordinary Americans’ growing ownership of capital, and fails to account fully for globalization and self-employed income.

  Of course, doomerism sells better than optimism, but the data broadly tells a positive story: capital accumulation, rising productivity, expanding investment ownership, and technological progress have materially improved the opportunities and living standards available to ordinary Americans.

  So there.

• Claude, I'd like you to meet Alexa. Kobe Yank-Jacobs has some relationship advice: You couldn’t be nice to your chatbot if you tried.

  In a recent global survey of 68 countries, 36.3% of people reported that, at some point, they believed their chatbot truly understood their emotions or seemed conscious. And even if today’s systems aren’t conscious, many people think future systems will be. In a survey of both AI researchers and the general public, the median researcher said there was a 70% chance of AI consciousness by 2100, while the median member of the public said there was a 60% chance.

  To assess a being’s consciousness we could ask for a verbal report, assess its behavior, or, finally, analyze the internal organization of its cognition. But when it comes to LLMs, the first two buckets are suspect — AI models are trained to perform a perfect simulation of a humanlike character, so everything we see from the outside is likely affected, including self-report and behavior.

  As for the third bucket, scientists disagree on what cognitive functions make humans or animals conscious. It’s as if “we’re doing biology before Darwin,” one researcher put it to me. So how should we treat these new characters in our lives amid uncertainty about consciousness?

  It's an interesting question. Over the past year, I've had some dealings with Claude, an AI that I've asked a few times to write some code for me that I had no clue how to do myself.

  Claude succeeded spectacularly. I was grateful. But should I tell Claude about that? Hm. I wound up doing so. And Claude "graciously" accepted the compliment.

  As another data point, the lady that lives inside my Amazon Echo, Alexa, has been known to try to engage me in conversation if I give her the slightest encouragement.

  Readers, I do not want to get into the habit of talking to Alexa as if she were real. That looks and sounds too much like creepy craziness.