The Week That Was

The announcement from Arizona’s Valley of the Sun that new building permits will be suspended due to a lack of water is evidence that at least in some parts of the country we are beginning to encounter the constraints that will be imposed on our future plans by climate change.

That was the week’s most important story, though it got minimal attention.

What is ironic is that it was a relatively wet winter in the Phoenix area, as the remnants of California’s atmospheric rivers brought storm after storm over from the coast.

But it wasn’t enough to sustain continued expansion in what up until now has long been one of the fastest-growing parts of the U.S. There simply isn’t enough water to go around.

We’ve likely reached a tipping point.

***

Bipartisan government finally arrived in Washington, D.C., this week in the form of the Congressional deal to avert a government default on debt payments. This story got most of the media attention.

The two parties can’t seem to agree on much, but under the leadership of President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy, they marshaled a solid consensus of elected officials from both parties to raise the debt ceiling while limiting some of the runaway spending that is fueling the debt crisis year after year.

It was a moment that called for a little bit of mutual congratulation and perhaps praise, but the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, couldn’t help but make a self-serving, gloating speech instead, crediting his own party while not even acknowledging the many Republicans who voted for the deal. McCarthy’s own speech was somewhat better, but he gratuitously criticized what he characterized as a long White House delay on the issue.

Biden’s victory lap speech was the most gracious of the three, thanking McCarthy and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, and praising the bipartisanship that got the deal done. He maintained that his political priorities remain intact, however, and got in a few digs at his GOP opponents in the upcoming presidential campaign.

All in all, a positive development for the nation.

***

Mike Pence was cleared in his classified documents probe by the Justice Department, which was not a surprise. I doubt anyone thinks that the strait-laced Pence, who will not even have dinner alone with a woman not his wife, ever intended to keep classified documents in his home in the first place. It was an honest mistake.

But similar investigations by special prosecutors into Trump and Biden, both of whom also had classified documents in their possession after leaving office, remain active. Biden’s case is from the distant past, stemming like Pence’s from when he was vice-president, and it seems unlikely to amount to anything much legally.

Trump’s is another matter, and is one of the serious legal threats imperiling his campaign for president in 2024. Many other Republicans, including Pence, appear poised to enter the race to challenge Biden next year. Their calculation is at least partly built on the assumption that Trump will eventually be forced to step aside.

Let’s hope they are right. We do not need a return of the man whose only honest slogan would be “Make America Hate Again.”

That’s one thing we don’t need more of.

***

In a personal update, I’m about to begin an attempt to garden in a birthday present — a large wooden planter in the front yard. I’m planning to buy soil and seeds this weekend and resume a hobby from many years ago. Photos will be forthcoming.

LINKS:

• Arizona announces limits on construction in Phoenix area as groundwater disappears (CNN)

• Arizona Limits Construction Around Phoenix as Its Water Supply Dwindles (NYT)

• May jobs report released: Booming 339,000 jobs added as unemployment rises to 3.7% (USA Today)

• Wall Street leaps, nearly escapes its bear market after strong jobs report (AP)

• Biden is delivering on his most far-fetched pledge: Compromise (WP)

• Kevin McCarthy’s victory lap over the debt ceiling bill could end early (Guardian)

• Biden ‘misunderestimated’ Kevin McCarthy, and it led to a major conservative victory (The Hill)

• Recording of Trump Underscores Growing Evidence in Documents Case (NYT)

• Georgia probe of Trump broadens to activities in other states (WP)

• Trump attorneys haven’t found classified document former president referred to on tape following subpoena (CNN)

• India train crash: Hundreds dead (BBC)

• Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences (Economist)

• The Illusion of China’s AI Prowess — Regulating AI Will Not Set America Back in the Technology Race (FA)

• AI Won’t Wipe Out Humanity (Yet) (Wired)

• OpenAI is pursuing a new way to fight A.I. ‘hallucinations’ (CNBC)

• Beware ‘death by GPT syndrome’ (Financial Times)

• Welcome to the new surreal. How AI-generated video is changing film. (MIT TR)

• Introducing The Information’s Generative AI Database (The Information)

• Why Hollywood Really Fears Generative AI (Wired)

• Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang: ‘The machines we have now are not conscious’ (Financial Times)

• We Spoke With 5 People Who Work With A.I. Here’s What Keeps Them Up at Night. (NYT)

• I Think My Wife Is Cheating on Me—With a Robot. Help! (Slate)

• Japan's birth rate declined for the seventh consecutive year in 2022 to a record low, the health ministry said, underscoring the sense of crisis gripping the country as the population shrinks and ages rapidly. (Reuters)

• The Heavy Cost of Banning Books About Black Children (Time)

• The secret push to bury Paraquat’s link to Parkinson’s disease (Guardian)

• These are the 4 most common barriers to emotional intelligence (Fast Company)

• Meta Tells Office Workers to Come In Three Days per Week This Fall (Bloomberg)

• Authorities in Mexico find 45 bags containing human remains amid search for missing youths (ABC)

• Ukraine Says It Stopped Russia’s Latest Missile and Drone Attacks on Kyiv (WSJ)

• Are lightning bugs going extinct? A visual guide to why the firefly is fighting off a dimming of its light (USA Today)

• Scientists discover mysterious cosmic threads in Milky Way (Guardian)

• Rocks Beneath Antarctic Ice Sheet Reveal Surprising Past (SciTechDaily)

• The Key to America’s Victory in the Second World War (Atlantic)

• Woman Disgusted After Finding Out There Over 2,000 Calories In Recommended Daily Intake (The Onion)

List

LINKS:

• Senate passes debt ceiling bill, sending it to Biden to become law and avert disaster (NBC)

• The biggest lesson from the debt ceiling fight (CNN) 

• Just don’t boast: How Biden world sought to ace the debt ceiling standoff (Politico)

• Sidestepping crisis, Biden and McCarthy claim victory in debt deal (WP)

• The Sound and Fury of the House Freedom Caucus (New Yorker)

• How Chris Christie could be a wild card in 2024 GOP race (The Hill)

• LGBTQ+ people flock to Florida for Gay Days festival (AP)

• Prosecutors Scrutinize Handling of Security Footage by Trump Aides in Documents Case (NYT)

• Senate votes to overturn Biden’s student loan relief program (NBC)

• The Roberts Court takes aim at the Establishment Clause (The Hill)

• Climate Shocks Are Making Parts of America Uninsurable. It Just Got Worse.(NYT)

• Putin Hiding Out After Panic ‘Behind the Scenes’ of Moscow Drone Attack (Daily Beast)

• A pop-up restaurant in Kabul is run by women for women. The Taliban is watching (NPR)

• Scientists Gave People Psychedelics—and Then Erased Their Memory (Wired)

• New 'quasi-moon' discovered near Earth has been travelling alongside our planet since 100 BC (LiveScience)

• Software offers new way to listen for signals from the stars (Phys.org)

• Top Chinese scientist concedes that coronavirus may have leaked from Wuhan lab (Yahoo)

• Avoiding potential 'extinction event' from AI requires action, US official says (ABC)

• Capital letter test is a foolproof way of sorting AIs from humans (NewScientist)

• The AI revolution is about to take over your web browser (Verge)

• All the unexpected ways ChatGPT is infiltrating students’ lives (WP)

• Unveiling the Mysteries of AI Neurons: How OpenAI’s GPT-4 Automatically Writes and Scores Explanations for GPT-2 Neuron Behavior (MarkTechNews)

• Guy Who Sucks At Being A Person Sees Huge Potential In AI (The Onion)

 

In Passing

 In the early days of the Web, as we were all discovering how easy it suddenly was to rediscover each other, many of us became fascinated by the few degrees of separation that connected us one to another.

Like many others, I reconnected with friends from college who I had not been in touch with for decades. As we compared notes, it turned out that on occasion we’d actually been within a few blocks of each other at times but never knew that at the time.

Social media brought all of this connecting to a new level. Now we could not only connect with everyone we’d ever known, we could expand our social networks many times over.

My students at Stanford made sure I got on Facebook very early. When Twitter and LinkedIn came along, I was covering the tech industry for BNET and almost without effort I builtd large numbers of connections there as well.

All of this was fine in most ways, though I never became a regular user of any of the social networks, personally or professionally.

Then came Covid.

Suddenly we were forced into physical isolation from each other and social media became almost our only option for staying in touch. Zoom calls emerged, mostly for business usage, but I was part of at least three reunions with large circles of friends during the pandemic, including former colleagues from Rolling Stone.

Now things are settling back to pre-pandemic normal and people are socializing again, but it’s my view that the disruption of the past few years has damaged us in many ways, especially social.

We were all informed that we had to be cautious around one another in ways we’d previously not been aware of. We became a society of agoraphobics, which is to say, pathologically anti-social beings.

To this day, the extremes still are apparent among us. You know, the kind of person when walking their dog will cross to the other side of the street rather than pass too closely to you on the sidewalk.

People who when they greet you won’t shake hands, let alone hug you.

All of this depresses me greatly. People need each other, and being so afraid of other people is itself a disease that destroys society just like war.

It’s called disconnection.

LINKS:

• US debt ceiling bill passes House with broad bipartisan support (Reuters)

• Manchin could get a gas pipeline out of the debt ceiling deal, and environmental advocates are livid (CNN)

• Chris Christie to announce GOP presidential campaign next week (Axios)

• Mom Who Got Amanda Gorman’s Poetry Restricted Has Ties To Proud Boys, Antisemitism (Yahoo)

• Drones attack Russian oil refineries; Medvedev says British officials aiding Ukraine can be military targets (CNBC)

• Putin’s war in Ukraine has now reached his doorstep – what does that mean for Russia? (Independent)

• Drone attacks on Moscow and Kyiv escalate tensions in warring capitals (WP)

• Qatar prime minister, Taliban chief hold secret Afghan talks (Reuters)

• EU accused of ‘staggering neglect’ after just 271 Afghans resettled across bloc (Guardian)

• Fueled by AI, Nvidia joins the $1 trillion club (CNN)

• AI 'godfather' Yoshua Bengio feels 'lost' over life's work (BBC)

• China warns of artificial intelligence risks, calls for beefed-up national security measures (NBC)

• Roll– Make Professional Videos in Minutes using AI (NewsShooter)

• Sunak and Biden to discuss AI after ‘extinction risk’ warning (Politico)

• I Asked AI Chatbots to Help Me Shop. They All Failed (Wired)

• China Is Flirting With AI Catastrophe (FA)

• A Week With the Wild Children of the A.I. Boom (NYT)

• What’s new in robots? An AI-powered humanoid machine that writes poems (AP)

• Twitter Is Now Worth Just 33% of Elon Musk’s Purchase Price, Fidelity Says (Bloomberg)

• We Asked Workers Why They’re Not Coming Back to the Office (WSJ)

• Chesa Boudin is taking a new job at UC Berkeley (SFC)

• Semi-Retirees Know the Key to Work-Life Balance — More and more older adults are working—in large part because they want to. (Atlantic)

• NASA’s UFO Research Team Briefs the Public (WSJ)

• Earth is ‘really quite sick now’ and in danger zone in nearly all ecological ways, study says (AP)

• Energized Chris Christie Ready For Next Chapter Of Humiliation (The Onion)

Back Then

When I taught memoir writing, my students found that old family photos were at least as important as letters, journals and other written documents. Yesterday I stumbled upon this one of my mother holding me on my first birthday.

I love the car in the background and the long row of houses there in the post-war suburb outside of Detroit. It helps locate us in time and place and literally screams “far away and long ago.”

This photo is one of many in an old black photo album with crumbling pages. The tape holding the photos to the paper has worn off in many cases, leaving the images in free-fall.

It was the late 1940s. Other photos in the album show my father, sisters, friends, relatives and a classic of my Scottish grandparents in front of their camping trailer.

I could try as a writer to describe that era, but it would be difficult to capture much of it with more than a smidgeon of the richness these simple images effortlessly convey.

LINKS:

• Debt ceiling deal faces first hurdle in Republican-led House (WP)

• Crucial days ahead as debt ceiling deal goes for vote (AP)

• Biden Saves Student Loan Forgiveness (For Now), But Confirms End Of Student Loan Pause (Forbes)

• Is Student Debt Forgiveness Happening, or What? (Slate)

• Why the debt deal infuriates climate activists (WP)

• Why Spending Cuts Likely Won’t Shake the Economy (NYT)

• AI Poses ‘Risk of Extinction’ on Par With Pandemics and Nuclear War, Tech Executives Warn — More than 350 people, including OpenAI and Google executives, sign a statement sounding an alarm about the technology (WSJ)

• The biggest problem in AI? Lying chatbots. (WP)

• AI Has Evolved To Reason Like Humans, Scientists Say (Yahoo)

• Elon Musk Has Moved Rapidly To Realize His AI Ambitions by Buying up Oracle’s Spare Server (WCCFTech)

• ChatGPT Scored Higher on a Medical Quiz Than a Real Human Doctor (ScienceAlert)

• AI Canon (AH)

• Digital payments are already reshaping economies (Economist)

• Ukraine war comes to Moscow as drones strike both capitals (Reuters)

• Ukraine Has A Growing Arsenal Of Drones Able To Hit Moscow (Forbes)

• Taiwan Rushes to Prevent China From Cutting Internet, Phones (Bloomberg)

• Iran vs Afghanistan: Why Helmand water-sharing dispute is boiling over, decades after treaty (The Print)

• Trump lawyer said to have been waved off searching office for secret records (Guardian)

• The Trees Don’t Care About Us (Atlantic)

• SpaceX and the science of failure (The Hill)

• Tea, apples and berries could stave off age-related memory loss, study suggests (Guardian)

• The revolt of the Christian home-schoolers (WP)

• CEO Outlines Challenges Company Facing Due To Own Insatiable Greed (The Onion)

 

The Deal

So after all the psychodrama, it appears that the various factions of the U.S. government have averted a default catastrophe with a tentative deal between the President and the Speaker of the House.

That’s the headline news from over the long Memorial Day Weekend, and for a change it’s a bit of good news. Republicans and Democrats seemed to have finished squeezing the final drops of partisan advantage out of this manufactured “crisis” before finally reaching an agreement that brings spending somewhat under control while raising the debt ceiling for a couple years.

It all ended rather quietly; my hunch is they all just got worn out. That’s the thing about fighting — for most people it takes too much energy to sustain indefinitely. Eventually, the warring parties exhaust themselves, and at that moment, a ceasefire finally becomes possible.

This is in no way an indication that extreme partisanship is over in American politics — the protagonists are simply taking a break, that’s all.

But that’s very good news for the rest of us, the country, and the world economy.

LINKS:

• Biden and McCarthy lean on holdouts in both parties to pass debt ceiling deal (CNN)

• Inside Biden’s relentless soft-sell on the debt ceiling bill (Axios)

• McConnell endorses debt limit deal, calls on Senate conservatives not to delay it (The Hill)

• In Pursuit of Consensus, Did Biden Find the Reasonable Middle or Give Away Too Much? (NYT)

• Moscow drone attack: Putin says Ukraine trying to frighten Russians (BBC)

• U.S. hardware helps Ukraine fend off increasingly heavy Russian missile and drone attacks (CBS)

• Russia issues arrest warrant for Lindsey Graham over Ukraine comments (AP)

• Florida Memorial Day mass shooting: 9 people, including 4 minors, wounded on Hollywood Broadwalk (CBS)

• A new wave of mass migration has begun (Economist)

• AI means everyone can now be a programmer, Nvidia chief says (Reuters)

• They’re afraid their AIs will come for them’: Doug Rushkoff on why tech billionaires are in escape mode (Guardian)

• Workers Are Terrified About AI. What Can They Do About It? (Daily Beast)

• Lawyer apologizes for fake court citations from ChatGPT (CNN)

• The AI genie is out of the bottle, and we can’t put it back in (VentureBeat)

• Japan Will Try to Beam Solar Power from Space by 2025 (Slashdot)

• Erdogan's victory could be fateful for Turkey's democracy and role in the world (NPR)

• Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has signed one of the world's harshest anti-LGBTQ laws. (Reuters)

• Afghan Women Who Aided U.S. Military Wait for Asylum in America (NYT)

• ‘I just have you’: the rural Australians helping Afghan asylum seekers find refuge (Guardian)

• Militant Groups In Afghanistan Looking To Topple Central Asian Governments (RFE)

• At Least Three Are Killed in Clashes on Iranian-Afghan Border (NYT)

• Dealing with the Taliban to stop a humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan (Interpreter)

• Afghan Singer Arrested For Putting Taliban Verses To Music (RFE)

• Vacant skyscrapers, empty trains: can San Francisco once again reinvent itself? (Guardian)

• Saving the stories of the last Holocaust survivors (Axios)

• Dad’s Entire Parenting Strategy Just Ensuring Son Doesn’t Become Yankees Fan (The Onion)