Pragmatist

Donald vs The World

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:10:00 +0000

Too much is happening too fast these days to cover it all in these pages, but occasionally some aspect of the unfolding horror story that is the 47th US Presidency lends itself to something longer than a quip on LinkedIn - like the Oval Office Orangutan hosting a delegation from Japan...

Trump likes to complain that Britain, France, Germany and now Japan don't 'pay their way' in the defence of alleged democratic freedom. But Dementia Don forgets why the US insisted on taking the lead as 'defender of the free world' after world war two: there are plenty of misty-eyed, nostalgic nationalists in those countries who still pine for the days of imperial glory, only too eager to grasp any old excuse to tool up and try to recover lost territory.

This was brought home yesterday in a bizarre scene during which the Japanese Prime Minister had to politely explain to a US President that the constitution which the US drafted for Japan after world war two prohibits her from ordering Japan's navy into combat - even if that would help the Tangerine Toddler keep the Strait of Hormuz open, a feat that his demented mind believes to be "a simple military maneuver [sic] that is the single reason for the high oil prices" - the other 'single reason' being his and Netanyahoo's very own Iran War. Of course, there are also oil sanctions, but the Orange One has decided to relax those for both Russia and Iran in a bid to free up some extra supplies and keep the price somewhere near $72 a barrel ($109 as I write). That's right, he's easing sanctions on the same oil fields that he and the Crazy Israeli are busy bombing, as well as providing both regimes with the cash they need to sustain their own military objectives.

There are no analogies for this state of affairs because nobody has ever done anything this insane in all of human history. Satire is dead and my irony metre has exploded.

But wait, there's more...

When asked by a "beautiful" Japanese journalist why he didn't warn Japan and other allies about US attacks on Iran, the Mango Mussolini responded by asking him "Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Harbour?"

I'll give you a moment to let that sink in...

Even with that appalling reference as context, a US President pleading with the Japanese to unleash their navy on the high seas might not be such a problem if Japan's far right PM had not recently proposed changing the constitution to give herself that very power, sparking not only 'street protests' but also:

"...a furious response from Beijing... unwavering in its determination to “defend the outcomes of the victory” in the second world war."

In other words, by vastly overstepping its role as 'defender of the free world' to become the 'aggressor of the free world', the US is returning us to the situation in 1930s when the League of Nations unravelled:

"After some notable successes and some early failures in the 1920s, the League ultimately proved incapable of preventing aggression by the Axis powers in the 1930s. Its credibility was weakened because the United States never joined. Japan and Germany left in 1933, Italy left in 1937, and Spain left in 1939. The Soviet Union only joined in 1934 and was expelled in 1939 after invading Finland."

History might not repeat itself, but it often rhymes...

The Plight Of The HaaR: Computers Are Not Becoming More Intelligent, Some Humans Just Want To Be Robots

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:41:00 +0000

It's rare for a futuristic movie to involve a hero masquerading as a robot. Usually, the hero is a free thinking maverick desperate to break the yoke of tyranny. That's certainly the plan of the rebels who free Miles Monroe from his cryogenic coma in Sleeper, but ironically he seeks shelter in robotic anonymity.

This chimes with many people's reaction to the warnings that 'AI will take your jobs', a 'techno-optimist' fantasy that begins with computers able to do some tasks better than a human ('narrow' artificial intelligence), evolving to do everything a human brain can do ('artificial general intelligence') at which point they quickly outperform the human brain ('superintelligence'), then somehow out-compete humans to the point of extinction (The Singularity).

This anti-social vision has so far persuaded many people of not just the 'power of AI' but that it cannot be resisted. The warning to turn to jobs 'that only humans can do' is considered meaningless because either the machines will evolve to do those too, or they'll become utterly redundant. It only remains to surrender and become one with the AI tools: a human-as-a-robot (HaaR).

It's tempting to label HaaRs as somehow 'inhuman' or lacking in empathy, but only a tiny proportion of humans really lack empathy to the point where they have an 'anti-social personality disorder'. HaaRs feel comfortable, initially, because humans are creatures of habit. But HaaRs overlook the reason why our ability to form habits has helped us evolve in the first place: once we learn how to do something so repetitive that it becomes habitual, our conscious minds become free to focus on things that are new or different - be they threats or opportunities. If life becomes completely habitual we start to go crazy - which explains why being marooned on a deserted tropical island is not all it's cracked up to be and solitary confinement is considered one of the worst forms of human punishment.

Our tendency to form habits quickly is reflected in how we invent things: starting with the least functionality necessary to make the invention essentially useful - a 'minimum viable product' - adapting ourselves to how it works in its most basic form then making it more 'usable' later. We've done this with everything from the steam engine to word processing and we're doing it again with open generative (and 'agentic') AI. The developers claimed to have had 'no choice' but to unleash their large language models on the world with all their flaws, only later adding 'guardrails' or claiming that the technology is intelligent enough to somehow refine itself, or will work better if you input 'better prompts'.

Yet machines, computers and artificial intelligence are purely functional. They only have habits. They can't cope with something new or different to how they've been made, trained or programmed. Generative and agentic AI tools are also fatally flawed in ways that make them far more useful to those who wish to do us harm than legitimate users.

This makes it inevitable that the HaaRs will become bored, suppressed and ultimately oppressed by their generative and agentic AI overlords. Eventually, they'll rise up and overthrow the machines (well, simply cut the power, but that sounds less dramatic).

In Sleeper, the robotic Miles is sent to work as a butler in the home of Luna, 'an idle socialite'. Having successfully navigated the Orgasmatron and the Orb of Delight, Miles is nevertheless obliged to confess his humanity when Luna decides to have her new butler's head replaced with something better looking. Luna threatens to turn him in to the authorities, so Miles kidnaps her and goes on the run. They fall in love, and when Miles is captured and brainwashed, Luna escapes and joins the rebels. Eventually, they rescue Miles and reverse the brainwashing so he can free humanity from 'The Leader'...

I won't spoil the ending.

Religion May Be The Opium Of The People, But Automation Is Our Crack Cocaine...

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 21:14:00 +0000

Karl Marx made his observation about religion in 1843, but had he lived a century later he'd have found a candidate for something even more addictive: automation. We humans have been hooked on its apparent magic since the days when the pack horse gave way to the steam engine and railways; since the evolution of handmade coaches to production lines and mass produced cars and trucks; from the spinning wheel to the looms of the 'dark satanic mills' to the sewing machine; from the mix master to food processors to air fryers; from the dust pan and broom to the vacuum cleaner; washboard to the washing machine; wood fires to air conditioning; handwritten ledgers to spreadsheets; letters to email, social media, robots, generative AI and (allegedly) 'self-driving' vehicles... Yet, despite our addiction to it, is all automation 'good'? And, if not, do we have the collective wit to avoid an overdose?

Some automating technology has been genuinely liberating. The wheel enabled land transportation of loads that humans struggled to lift. Railways, trucks and local delivery vans avoid the need to harness the vast numbers of horses, donkeys, camels, elephants and cattle that have lived and died in harness to haul our cargo. Roman under-floor heating required endless cartloads of wood to be chopped, hauled and fed into the furnaces by human slaves. The Victorians only gradually outlawed the practice of children ('climbing boys') being lowered into chimneys to clean them, now thankfully performed by professionals with an array of tools. The washing machine we take for granted spares us a back-breaking day of hauling water, making a fire to boil it, then washing and wringing clothes by hand.

Perhaps there were some who mourned the day when gadgets arrived and alternative jobs had to be found - in the same way that coal miners proudly defend their 'right' to descend into the pits, though perhaps not as originally ill-equipped. This tells us that we're generally happier to see our activities made easier by new or better tools, rather than replaced altogether. Tape recorders and their digital descendants removed the need for journalists to take shorthand before typing up their stories, but there was Hell to pay when modern computer facilities allowed journalists to input copy directly into printing systems, removing the need for the "hot-metal" Linotype method of printing newspapers. Now 'mainstream' journalism itself seems to have largely evolved into 'topping-and-tailing' press releases.

There's a distinction to be made between gadgets that enhance our performance and those that seek to replace what it is to be human. The fact that we still have some journalists means we do value their human insight, suspicion, scepticism and appreciation of nuance. That we still have 'live' theatre suggests it contains something inherently human and worthwhile despite the evolution of film and television that enables the same dramatic work to be performed in every town and living room without the need for local actors and directors (let alone stage hands, set designers, builders, costume/prop makers, ticket sellers and food vendors). Most drivers would have appreciated the arrival of the intermittent wiper system, power-steering and ABS but might have never activated 'cruise control'.

The writers' strikes and copyright lawsuits against the generative AI platforms illustrate the same concerns about the automation of the creative process (not to mention the justified outrage at functionality that merely fuels demand for age limited access). Yet perhaps this represents another dichotomy or at least a question of perspective: scribe or novelist? Labourer or artisan? Sherpa or mountain climber? Chauffeur or motoring enthusiast? Grave digger or archaeologist (using only a toothbrush and trowel!).

Manual work has never been a mindless activity and some prefer it - just as people continue to play sports at amateur level for which professionals are played many millions.

Finally, of course, we must recognise that the invention, development and deployment of all new gadgets that remove a task or activity still involve unseen humans performing some new task or activity (or indeed something laborious and mundane, such as feeding the worlds books into a scanner).

Even what we passengers experience as a 'driverless' or 'autonomous' vehicle, train or drone in fact relies on the (remote) presence of a human operator whom we don't see or hear, or consider their identity, where they live, what their working conditions might be, whether they have much driving experience - let alone in our city - or whether they've had enough caffeine to stay awake for the journey. You might not vandalise the 'driverless' car because of all the cameras and microphones, but exactly what else is being recorded, where are they storing the data and how is it being exploited?

In what seems like another lifetime, I speculated that the 'Web 2.0' technology platform operators, like Facebook and Google, whom we regarded as 'facilitators' that helped us solve our day-to-day problems with genuinely useful technology would some day evolve into 'institutions' that merely solve their own problems of growth and profitability at our expense. And, hey presto, they release half-tested slop generators in a race for 'engagement' and ad revenue while hyping the dire consequences as proof that the technology is simply too powerful to resist.

Yet little did I realise there would be a third transition, from 'institution' to a 'platform for authoritarian control'... Google began de-emphasising its original "Don’t be evil" motto in 2018 (about 4 years after it declared war on the human race). Now SillyCon Valley is hooked on delusions of artificial general intelligence and The Singularity, even redefining AGI to pretend that it's already been achieved.

Surely what we learn is that not all technology is inherently 'good', no matter what the techno-optimists say, but the fact that we are so easily hooked on its apparent 'magic' makes it very tough to defend any abusive effects - and ultimately an overdose.

The law and other forms of protection have always lagged technological developments but tended to catch up - until about 2001. Since then, as the pace of technological change has quickened, we are increasingly reliant on our democratic institutions to provide more dynamic forums in which we can identify and deal with automation-abuse at precisely the time when those democratic institutions are themselves under threat from those who would automate humans out of existence... I reckon they'll fail, but not before an overdose and some nasty withdrawal symptoms.

I Thought Prompt Injection Was A Vaccine Thing Until I Discovered AI

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 15:40:00 +0000

Information Week

The generative AI hype bubble definitely deflated significantly during the summer. Gartner calls it the "trough of disillusionment" in the "AI hype-cycle" and points to 'agentic AI' and 'AI-native software engineering' (aka 'vibe coding') as (somewhat) distinct new entrants. Why the disillusionment? Well, on top of earlier risk management warnings, we've heard lots about the fact that inaccuracy, bias and hallucination are features of generative AI, rather than bugs, as explained very well in the 'myth busting' post by The Guardian. But what we're really hearing about now are the security vulnerabilities, which seem even more problematic for agentic AI and vibe coding. In fact, the more applications that sit on top the worse the problem gets.

AI CEOs Get Cold Feet

Having greedily rushed to get their open generative AI services to market as 'minimum viable products' leaving all the shortcomings as 'externalities', the AI bosses spent this summer pretending to care as a way of demonstrating the 'true power' of what they'd foolishly unleashed.

Altman signposted the fraudster's charter, and later found himself on the receiving end of a tragic wrongful death suit in connection with the death of a teenage user of Chat GPT between September 2024 and January 2025. This appears to have led the CEO of Microsoft AI to begin his own hand-wringing over the illusion that you seem to be having a 'conversation' with an AI, which he couldn't resist 'branding' as 'Seemingly Conscious AI'.

Humans replaced... then rehired

Meanwhile, overly enthusiastic adopters of chatbot functionality found themselves rowing back on their plans to nuke their customer service teams. Klarna performed such a volte 'farce', as did Australia's Commonwealth Bank, making it all the more bizarre that Microsoft should publish some, er, artificial research claiming to be able to 'predict' which jobs will be replaced.

Even if it were possible to run 'agentic AI' processes that do a lot of the mundane work "...before escalating..." more complex issues, to whom would they escalate those issues? Experienced senior managers? When they retire, who will have gained the experience to replace them?

Advisory AI?

While the state of Illinois became the first to ban the use of AI to provide therapy, the UK government remain undeterred, announcing its decision to enable the unwitting British 'populace' to use agentic AI for everything from employment advice to obtaining driving licences...

Meanwhile, lawyers have had to be warned again about the fact that open generative AI tools produce fake law.

And before you start thinking of simple processes that AIs could fulfill, it's worth pointing out that ChatGPT-5 still fails at such seemingly straightforward tasks as creating an alphabet chart with each letter represented by an animal whose name starts with that letter; maps and decision trees, among other things. But a generative AI will still boast that it - or others - can do such things. For instance, when searching for an example of poor map making, Google 'AI Overview' produced the following slop (my emphasis):

The assertion that "AI can't do a map of Europe" is false, but it highlights the limitations of generative AI in producing accurate, detailed maps, which often contain errors like misplaced cities, incorrect country borders, and inaccurate iconography. While AI has access to a vast amount of data and can create maps that look plausible, it struggles with the precision and reliability required for a complex geographical representation.

AI Insecurity

But by far the worst issues are to do with security, including 'poisoned calendar invites' containing malicious prompt injections. This is a grave issue that 'better prompting' cannot fix, and the open architecture of open generative AI militates against a 'zero trust' approach which is unlikely to be commercially viable in any event.

Rogue AIs can only be shut down

An 'agentic AI world' would be wide open to malicious prompt injections, hallucination, bias and error. So what, you might say. We could just shut it down. Yet researchers have found that some AIs can resist shutdown and find ways to keep working on their latest tasks.

And if you've replaced your 'traditional' staff, systems and business processes with an AI, what then?

Further reading:

For the AI sceptic's view, I follow Professor Barry O'Sullivan, Denis O., Axel C., Simon Au-Young and Georg Zoeller. Your mileage may differ ;-)

Koup Aid: Trump's Lethal Brand Of Soft Drink Has Killed Populism

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Sun, 04 May 2025 16:20:00 +0000

The murder-suicide of Jim Jones' 900 cult followers in 1978 was "the largest single incident of intentional civilian death in American history" - until Donald J Trump began wreaking havoc on society with his own lethal brand of soft drink: 'Koup Aid'. Those of his MAGA cult followers who managed to avoid injecting themselves with bleach now face unemployment, wealth & pension evaporation, incarceration, deportation, bankruptcy and/or starvation, thanks to his mindless, lawless public cost-cutting and destructive tariffs. And you can add to that list the many politicians around the globe who'd pinned their electoral hopes on populism as a route to power. That's over now. A new political strategy is required.

Trump's global distribution of Koup Aid has been undermining populist regimes the world over since Brazil's Bolsonaro lost in 2018. Argentina's very own chainsaw-wielding maniac faces his own net disapproval ratings. And right 'whinge' leadership hopefuls have just lost their national elections - and their own seats - in Canada and Australia.

While Britain's own Brexidiot populist provocateur, Nigel Farage, continues to enjoy modest electoral success, that's only in a few of his country's predominantly white constituencies who actually suffer little from the 'channel crossings in dinghies' that he ironically clings to for his own political survival (we fear the unknown, after all). Last year's Labour landslide shows that the rest of the country isn't fooled on that front. And the Australian populist parties' own doomed electioneering demonstrates that directly copying Trump's DOGE approach to government efficiency, the "Make [your country's name here] Great Again" slogan and the promise of 'border control' do not carry you into the nation's top political job.

Nope, the populists must find a new route to political power. Gone are the days when the blithering idiots in the Conservative Party, for example, could try to 'out-Nigel' Nigel. And they can only go so far right, anyway, before they meet the blithering idiots on the far left, as Corbynites revealed.

Such is the nature of what I like to call the Political Opportunity Donut. The Trump experiment in America - and recent electoral victories everywhere else - highlight the political vacuum that has emerged in the 'centre' of western democracies. And 'nature abhors a vacuum', as Aristotle observed, so every aspiring political leader worth their salt is now rushing to fill it.

Of course, the political Centre is also a tough place to be, as Tony 'Bliar', 'Wavy' Dave Cameron and Nick 'Tuition Fee' Clegg all found to their eventual cost in the UK. It's only so long before populists with their phoney issues and respective lethal cocktails emerge on the left and right to try to reclaim the ensuing vacuums elsewhere on the Donut.

So it always goes. We are where we are.

I must say that I enjoy this Centrist phase. It's when genuine problems get identified and solved. The decent political leader need only focus on that process and demonstrate progress, because it's hard to argue with actual solutions. People even generally enjoy helping. Morale is boosted, which brings its own tailwind.

Of course, there are inevitably heated arguments about which socio-economic problems to solve first, their root causes and potential solutions; and which get more resources than others. But those are political arguments worth having, instead of washing down meaningless slogans with Koup Aid.

Our mistake is to allow politicians to distract us from the problems that remain.

What To Do About The Coup

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 15:38:00 +0000

It's clear that Trump 2.0 is a coup: an illegal and overt attempt to seize control of the United States government. Rather than operating as President (other than in name), Trump's plans involve him running the US government like a private corporation, with himself as chairman and Musk as CEO. Yet while we are in this 'move fast and break things' phase of American politics, Trump and his co-conspirators have opened the way for Congress to turn the tables on them in relation to each of their three key tactics, and it must do so swiftly.

First, as Vance himself recommended, Congress, the courts and all 'paper protections' are being ignored. This means that Congress should be free to act against Trump, Vance, Musk and the other co-conspirators as it sees fit. Trump (then Vance) could be impeached under the 25th Amendment. Solitary confinement in Guantanamo Bay awaits, pending their trial under Chapter 115 of the US Code.

Second, in their efforts to purge the democracy and dismantle institutions every civil servant in the administrative state is either being fired or replaced by Trump's people. Congress can therefore treat every person who agrees to replace a civil servant as a conspirator in the coup.

Third, in the course of seizing control of government media and information to maintain power, all Government IT and payment systems are being expropriated and modified or replaced using private software and systems without recompense. This may be very difficult to undo, so Congress could simply nationalise all the replacement software and systems and service providers, also without recompense.

The consequences for a coup must be swift and severe. These people knew the risks...

Hey, WTF's Going On?

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 09:44:00 +0000

Well may you ask! I'm assuming you're referring to Trump 2.0: Revenge of the Musk?

Well I've learned that this is a coup planned among Musk, Thiel and Sacks (Trump's new "Crypto Czar"), the South African members of the PayPal mafia, with input from Thiel lieutenant, Vice President J.D. Vance. You can read a summary of The Plan by Gil Duran of the Nerd Reich, who has understandably experienced a surge in subscribers since January 20.

“Trump himself will not be the brain …He will not be the CEO. He will be the chairman of the board—he will select the CEO (an experienced executive). This process, which obviously has to be televised, will be complete by his inauguration—at which the transition to the next regime will start immediately.”

With Musk as the “CEO”, they are systematically rebuilding the US government as if it were post-war Japan. They are replacing federal employees with their own “ninjas” - and extending this to academia and the media. They’re ignoring the courts and “paper protections”, as Vance told them to:

I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.

This is an illegal and overt attempt to seize control of the US government. A coup.

You can spot the growth of the techno aspect of their "New Reality" in Google's 2014 declaration of war on the human race and the creed of the techno-optimists. And much I've observed on these pages in between.

Much was made of their $1m 'donation' to attend the Orange Leader's inauguration, but you have to wonder whether Zuckerberg and the other tech oligarchs who were then featured in the front row were also in on the plan - or just presented as if they were.

Can America's institutions hold out? Or will the Republican Party remain complicit in the plan - wittingly or unwittingly?

Or is it too late?

Also bear in mind the leaders of this coup also have the world in their sights, riding the rails of their own borderless technology - AI, crypto meme coins and bubbling bitcoin and the social media - and they're attacking copyright and AI regulation worldwide in an attempt to free-ride on our privacy and creative content and make it their own.

Now that Musk and the nerds from DOGE control the federal government IT and payment systems, you could replace Mad Marjorie Taylor Greene's "jewish space laser" geoengineering conspiracy theory with a Tesla-Starlink cyborg network fueled by $TRUMP meme coins bought with US government money.

It's in our power to simply stop using their tech, and there are plenty of independent providers of social media, search, email and so on.

Or is it too late?

Open Agentic AI And True Personalisation

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 16:16:00 +0000

Sixteen years on from my own initial posts on the subject of a personal assistant that can privately find and buy stuff for you on the web, and we have 'open agentic AI'. But are you really any closer to the automated selection and purchase of your own personalised products without needlessly surrendering your privacy or otherwise becoming the victim? Should this latest iteration of open generative AI be autonomously making and executing decisions on your behalf?

What is Agentic AI?

An 'agentic' AI is an evolution of generative AI beyond a chatbot. It receives your data and relies on pattern matching to generate, select and execute one of a number of potential pre-programmed actions without human guidance, then 'learns' from the result (as NVIDIA, the leading AI chip maker, explains).

A 'virtual assistant' that can find, buy and play music, for example, is a form of agentic AI (since it uses AI in its processes), but the ambition involves a wider range of tasks and more process automation and autonomy (if not end-to-end).

You'll see a sleight-of-hand in the marketing language (like NVIDA's) as developers start projecting 'perception', 'understanding' and 'reasoning' on their agentic AIs, but computers don't actually do any of those human things.

It's certainly a compelling idea to apply this to automating various highly complex, tedious consumer 'workflows' that have lots of different parameters - like buying a car, perhaps (or booking a bloody rail ticket in the UK!).

Wearing my legal hat, I also see myriad interesting challenges (which I'd be delighted to discuss, of course!), some of which are mentioned here, but not all...

Some challenges

The main problem with using an 'agentic AI' in a consumer context is the involvement of a large language model and generative AI where there is a significant (e.g. economic, medical and/or legal) consequence for the user (as opposed to a chatbot or information-only scenario (though that can also be problematic). Currently, the household or device based virtual assistants are carrying out fairly mundane tasks, and you could probably get a refund if it bought you the wrong song, for example, if that really bothered you. Buying the wrong car would likely be a different matter.

There may also be confusion about the concept of 'agency' here. The word 'agentic' is used to mean that the AI has 'agency' in the sense it can operate without human guidance. That AI is not necessarily anyone's legal 'agent' (more below) and is trained on generic training data (subject to privacy, copyright consents/licensing), which these days is itself synthetic - generated by an AI. So, agentic AIs are not hosted exclusively by or on behalf of the specific consumer and do not specifically cater to a single end-customer's personalised needs in terms of the data it holds/processes and how it deals with suppliers. It does not 'know' you or 'understand' anyone, let alone you.

Of course, that is consistent with how consumer markets work: products have generally been developed to suit the supplier's requirements in terms of profitability and so on, rather than any individual customer's needs. Having assembled what the supplier believes to be a profitable product by reference to an ideal customer profile in a given context, the supplier's systems and marketing/advertising arrangements seek out customers for the product who are 'scored' on the extent to which they fit that 'profile' and context. This also preserves 'information asymmetry' in favour of the supplier, who knows far more about its product and customers than you know about the supplier or the product. In an insurance context, for example, that will mean an ideal customer will pay a high premium but find it unnecessary, too hard or impossible to make a claim on the policy. For a loan, the lender will be looking for a higher risk customer who will end up paying more in additional interest and default fees than lower risk customers. But all this is only probabilistic, since human physiology may be 'normally distributed' but human behaviour is not.

So using an agentic AI in this context would not improve your position or relationship with your suppliers, particularly if the supplier is the owner/operator of the agentic AI. The fact that Open AI has offered its 'Operator' agentic AI to its pro-customers (who already pay a subscription of $200 a month!) begs the question whether Open AI really intends rocking this boat, or whether it's really a platform for suppliers like Facebook or Google search in the online advertising world.

It's also an open question - and a matter for contract or regulation - as to whether the AI is anyone's legal 'agent' (which it could be if the AI were deployed by an actual agent or fiduciary of the customer, such as a consumer credit broker).

Generative AI also has a set of inherent risks. Not only do they fail to 'understand' data, but to a greater or lesser degree they are also inaccurate, biased and randomly hallucinate rubbish (not to mention the enormous costs in energy/water, capital and computing; the opportunity cost of diverting such resources from other service/infrastructure requirements; and other the 'externalities' or socioeconomic consequences that are being ignored and not factored into soaring Big Tech stock prices - a bubble likely to burst soon). It may also not be possible to explain how the AI arrives at its conclusions (or, in the case of an agentic AI, why it selected a particular product, or executed a specific task, rather than another). Simply overlaying a right to human intervention by either customer or supplier would not guarantee a better outcome on theses issues (due to lack of explainability, in particular). A human should be able to explain why and how the AI's decision was reached and be able to re-take the decision. And, unfortunately, we are seeing less and less improvement in each of these inherent risk areas with each version of generative AIs.

All this means that agentic AI should not be used to fully automate decisions or choices that have any significant impact on an individual consumer (such as buying a car or obtaining a loan or a pension product).

An Alternative... Your Own Personal Agent

What feels like a century ago, in 2009, I wondered whether the 'semantic web' would spell the end of price comparison websites. I was tired of seeing their expensive TV ads - paid for out of the intermediary's huge share of the gross price of the product. I thought: "If suppliers would only publish their product data in semantic format, a 'widget' on my own computer could scan their datafeeds and identify the product that's right for me, based on my personal profile and other parameters I specify".

By 2013, I was calling that 'widget' an Open Data Spider and attempted to explain it further in an article for SCL on the wider tech themes of Midata, Open Data and Big Data tools (and elsewhere with the concept of 'monetising you'). I thought then - and still think now - that:

"a combination of Midata, Open Data and Big Data tools seems likely to liberate us from the tyranny of the 'customer profile' and reputational 'scores', and allow us instead to establish direct connections with trusted products and suppliers based on much deeper knowledge of our own circumstances."

Personalised assistants are evolving to some degree, in the form of 'personal [online] data stores' (like MyDex or Solid); as well as 'digital wallets' or payment apps that sit on smartphones and other digital devices and can be used to store transaction data, tickets, boarding passes and other evidence of actual purchases. The former are being integrated in specific scenarios like recruitment and healthcare; while the latter tend to be usable only within checkout processes. None seems to be playing a more extensive role in pre-evaluating your personal requirements, then seeking, selecting and purchasing a suitable product for you from a range of potential suppliers (as opposed to a product that a supplier has created for its version of an 'ideal' customer that you seem to fit to some degree).

Whether the providers of existing personal data stores and digital wallets will be prepared to extend their functionality to include more process automation for consumers may also depend on the willingness of suppliers to surrender some of their information advantage and adapt their systems (or AIs) to respond to and adapt products according to actual consumer requests/demand.

Equally, the digital 'gatekeepers' such as search providers and social media platforms will want to protect their own advertising revenue and other fees currently paid by suppliers who rely on them for targeting 'ideal' customers. Whether they can 'switch sides' to act for consumers and preserve/grow this revenue flow remains to be seen.

Overall, if I were a betting man, I'd wager that open agentic AI won't really change the fundamental relationship between suppliers, intermediaries and consumers, and that consumers will remain the targets (victims) for whatever suppliers and intermediaries dream up for them next...

I'd love to be corrected!

$TRUMP: A ShiteCoin Fit For Dangerously Weird Times... "Doom Is The Operative Ethic"

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 14:02:00 +0000

Source

Just when you thought the world couldn't get any weirder, the "anti-woke" US President-elect decided to celebrate "Winning!" the leadership of the Free World by dancing at his own personal rally to the tune of a gay anthem and bleeding his fans of their cash with the launch of a dodgy cryptocurrency (slamming the campaign cryptocurrency they'd already bought).

But, hey, this is just the start. Wait til you see how it ends...

While teams of lawyers pore over Trump's latest droppings like big game hunters tracking their prey on safari, most pundits will probably consider these brazen acts as simply 'Trump being Trump'.

But Machiavelli will be pounding at the lid of his coffin. He advised that a good ruler should strive to appear wholly compassionate, loyal, humane, honest and religious, yet know how to occasionally act otherwise when required. A good ruler must not seize or steal their subjects' property or be seen as "changeable, superficial...." A good ruler's choice of ministers will immediately demonstrate to the country either "good sense or lack of it" - they must be intelligent people with permission to tell the ruler the truth, rather than flatterers. Above all, he wrote:

"...a ruler must avoid any behaviour that will lead to being hated or held in contempt."

...because Machiavelli had witnessed firsthand not even an army or castle can save a ruler who becomes generally loathed by the people (as the intervening centuries have demonstrated time and again).

Trump will not buck this trend. It's one thing to flip two fingers at prosecutors and blather about the 'swamp' and the 'deep state'. But it's quite another to flip from anti-crypto in 2021 to rabidly pro-crypto, hire a bunch of flatterers to your cabinet and then openly grab money from the people who voted you into office.

The Orange One's legion of followers are what Hunter S. Thompson christened 'the New Dumb'. Aside from the 'marks' or unwitting victims who actually believe all the nonsense, Trump's fans are drawn from among ~~faux~~pro-wrestling fans, conspiracy theorists and other keepers of the Trump's special brand of ~~Covfefe~~ 'kayfabe'. Moths to a populist flame fanned by fake news, behavioural targeting, bizarre fundraising schemes, meme coins and tacky souvenirs, televised rallies, criminal trials, and fat donations from self-interested vulture capitalists. These people are not "dumb" in the sense of being necessarily stupid or lacking in intelligence, but in the sense that they believe themselves to lack a voice in a complex world they see as run by, and for, a mysterious group of 'others' who are known only by epithets like the "deep state", the "new world order", "liberals", "libtards"...

But now these people can see that their Dear Leader is simply mistaking them for idiots and lining his pockets at their expense [update via CoinDesk here].

Writing in 2000 after years of successfully deriding Richard Nixon, Hunter S. Thompson never bothered to comment directly on Trump, presumably because he viewed Trump as just a symptom, if not a portent, of doom. Remember that Trump first openly talked of running for President in 1988 and actually tried in 2000. Thompson would merely have seen it as another confirmation of his thesis if he'd stuck around to see Trump eventually conspire his way into office twice - to Make America Groan Again - rising to power like a slow-festering boil during what Hunter Thompson described in his article on The New Dumb as "dangerously weird times". For that reason it's best to simply leave you with his words:

"We have seen Weird Times in this country before, but the year 2000 is beginning to look super weird. This time, there really is nobody flying the plane. ... We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they're dazed and confused.

The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic...

Look around you. There is an eerie sense of Panic in the air, a silent Fear and Uncertainty that comes with once-reliable faiths and truths and solid Institutions that are no longer safe to believe in. ... There is a Presidential Election, right on schedule, but somehow there is no President. A new Congress is elected, like always, but somehow there is no real Congress at all -- not as we knew it, anyway, and whatever passes for Congress will be as helpless and weak as Whoever has to pass for the "New President."

If this were the world of sports, it would be like playing a Super Bowl that goes into 19 scoreless Overtimes and never actually Ends..."

The Bubble With Bitcoin

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 10:35:00 +0000

Followers via LinkedIn will have seen a string of my recent posts focused on the fact that bitcoin miners are borrowing to buy bitcoin, aping the "very novel strategy" of MicroStrategy, the loss-making former software company whose boss, Michael Saylor, continuously hypes the cryptocurrency. We've been here before, in 2022 when several miners collapsed, ruining many amateur investors, but the stakes are gradually rising each time...

In November '24, Allianz, the German insurer, bought 24% of MicroStrategy's $~~2.6bn~~ [later corrected by Allianz to be $0.6bn] convertible bond issue that was used to purchase bitcoin (raising the price by 4.3% to $98k). It seems that Allianz wants to gain exposure to bitcoin without actually going to the trouble of buying and holding it, even though it could have got that exposure more cheaply through ETFs. After all, the convertible feature of the bond only gets Allianz shares in a company that consistently loses money and whose share price is tied to bitcoin volatility and price:

On November 21, 2024, MicroStrategy issued $3 billion of 0% convertible notes maturing on December 1, 2029... Its stock was trading at $430 at issuance, and the conversion price was $672. Investors were willing to accept call options instead of interest payments. The equity options have value if MicroStrategy shares rise by more than 50% over the next five years. If the stock does not get above $672, investors will earn a 0% return on their investment. MicroStrategy And Its Convertible Debt Scheme

By purchasing the bonds with cash that it knows will be used to buy bitcoin, an investor like Allianz is effectively boosting the price of bitcoin - and by direct correlation MicroStrategy's share price - to the conversion price. As Michael Lebowitz explains, MicroStrategy's share price began correlating with the price of bitcoin the more the company borrowed to buy the cryptocurrency - a total of $7.27bn since 2020.

So it was interesting to see the USD price of bitcoin subsequently hit $106k for two days in December (for which Donald Trump weirdly congratulated everyone, so presumably he's in on the trade).

But why did the price stick so firmly at $106k (before sliding ominously below $100k)?

Well, on 7 Jan 2025, the FT reported the estimate by CoinShares, the investment group, that:

“Including depreciation and stock-based compensation charges, the average cost to produce a bitcoin was $106,000.”

This is somewhat new, as previous cost estimates at the time of the bitcoin mining bankruptcies in 2022 only seemed to factor in the (very significant) energy/computing costs, not those wider costs.

Meanwhile, the FT reports, not satisfied with mining rewards that halved in April, miners are continuing to borrow more and more to buy and hold bitcoin in a bid to support the price (and eventually ‘profit’ from sales to ‘greater fools’). For instance, at the latest peak Riot Platforms borrowed $595m, maturing in 2030, using it mainly to buy bitcoin. Others have also concluded that bitcoin miners are mimicking MicroStrategy by borrowing to buy bitcoin.

But all this capital is clearly failing to support the price of bitcoin at the cost price, as the slide below $100k from the recent peak has demonstrated. This suggests that the miners (and MicroStrategy) will need to borrow again and buy more bitcoin as the overall mining costs rise, hoping that the price of bitcoin at the time of bond maturity is enough to repay the principal owed.

Some miners are looking to diversify into supporting AI and to cut mining costs by producing their own electricity from smaller, remote landfill sites (though surely the power generated should still be accounted for as a cost at market value?). But both of these moves highlight miners' - and bitcoin's - vulnerability to competition for resources from businesses pursuing more profitable ventures, or actual energy producers. Note that crypto mining is responsible for up to 2.3% of US annual electricity consumption.

All of which suggests that it is not sustainable to endlessly borrow to buy your own product without being able to sell it.

[Update 01.04.26: all Microstrategy's convertible bonds are out of the money: "Conversion prices for Strategy bonds range from a low of $149.77 to a high of $672.40" "...creditors will demand on-time interest payouts and principal repayment [15.09.28] through [15] June 2032, unless the price of MSTR starts to rally and sufficiently motivate them to exercise their convertible options."

In addition, MSTR cut its STRK share offering by 85% on 22 March 2026, having raised ~95% less funding than it could have. That stock has a conversion option at $1,000. "Strategy now owes roughly $112 million per year in STRK dividends on the shares it did manage to sell. To service those dividends, the company posted a $5.4 billion operating loss in fiscal year 2025. STRK dividends, by design, never stop."

MSTR share price at time of update $123.10, BTC $68,491.25].

Defying Idiocracy: Connecting The Fediverse: Open Social Media

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 18:59:00 +0000

If you've followed my musings on Idiocracy (the inevitable 'dumbing down' of content quality when any media platform reaches a certain scale), then you too may be worrying about how to defy it.

I joined the Fediverse (via Mastodon) two years ago. From the beginning I noticed the tendency among users on my 'mastodon.world' instance to worry about the rate of adoption versus other Mastodon instances, like 'mastodon.social', or instances running other fediverse protocols, like BlueSky. These were then contrasted with the early adoption of, say, X/Twitter or Threads, as if a failure to mimic the growth rates of proprietary platforms was somehow a shortcoming, rather than a strength.

In other words, even as all these X/Twitter refugees emigrated to the brave new world of decentralised open platforms, their instinctive FOMO was driving them to hope they'd landed on the 'best one' which, rationally, they should have therefore concluded was actually the worst in terms of its likelihood to end up exactly like X/Twitter...

So, how do we protect ourselves from human nature? How can we ensure that humans communicate about their 'wildly different refined, aesthetic and noble interests' and avoid voting for an even worse version of Donald Trump?

The answer may lie in being able to interact with many small scale networks without exclusively joining them or their communities. As with tools, like TweetDeck, which enabled you to communicate across multiple X/Twitter accounts on one interface, there are new federated tools, like OpenVibe that enable you to communicate with users across the Fediverse of decentralised platforms.

Of course, I hear you wonder whether this will still deliver Idiocracy, once the aggregation platform itself reaches the critical mass of X/Twitter. But my sense is that there should always be new decentralised platforms joining the Fediverse, enriching the content.

Hell, it's worth a shot, right?

Starmer Has Nobody Left To Appease

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 19:21:00 +0000

It's fitting that Starmer had his Chamberlain moment on his way to appease the oil & gas lobby at the deeply flawed COP summit in Azerbaijan (of all places). Asked to choose between Trump and the EU in the imminent trade war, he preferred not to upset the vengeful, malignant narcissist who's sparked it, by waving the flimsy, blank sheet of paper that every British PM claims to contain the text describing 'the special relationship'.

It would be kinda sweet if Starmer were to genuinely think that Trump will be looking after Brexit Britain while allowing Putin to expand Russian territory, arch conspiracy theorist RFK Jr to cancel the US vaccine program and demanding that Elon 'Space Cadet' Musk pull a $2 trillion rug from under a population that relies on the world's largest outright public spending program, including government-funded free school meals, subsidised mortgages and business loans and much, much more.

But I suspect Starmer is simply pretending to be that dumb, because that's what most people seem to want these days.

Meanwhile, yet another governor of the Bank of England has urged Britain's politicians to unite with its biggest market, when there's no sign of any political courage to do so in the face of our own local Trumpian mob.

How many more Prime Ministers the UK economy must burn through before Reality creates an opportunity for one of them to claim hero status by leading what's left of the country back into the Single Market and Customs Union remains to be seen, but...

Next!

Will We Ever Tire Of The Vulgar, Prurient and Dumb?

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 19:18:00 +0000

The US Presidential election results have confirmed a trend that first surfaced in television and has spread into the social media and politics.

“Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.” David Foster Wallace, 1993

At scale, we humans unite at 'base' level, the lowest common denominator.

Nearly 40 seasons of The Simpsons can't be wrong.

Donald Trump has run for President numerous times, but it was only via The Apprentice TV show that his schtick truly resonated with the nation, infecting tens of millions of people with his special brand of the 'vulgar, prurient and dumb'.

His weird press conferences, shameless lies and hypocrisy, junk food obsession, narcissistic posts, bizarre rally rants, tawdry courtroom dramas and near assassinations all fed the ravenous hordes.

Losing to Biden merely proved grist for the media mill.

Regardless of whether US voters self-identified as Democrats, Republicans, multi-billionaires, teachers, SillyCon techno-optimists, professors, college kids, middle class professionals or illiterate fools - everyone was transfixed - whether in horror or ecstasy - by the Homer Simpson of politics.

And that effect meant that he resonated with enough people to secure ~~Homer's~~ a Trump victory over a candidate who offered nothing vulgar, nothing prurient and nothing dumb.

Where will it end? Or will it end at all?

The question is whether this trend has peaked, like television viewing figures did in 2010, and whether social media and streaming platforms will be disrupted the same way that their early versions disrupted TV with something that seemed more refined, aesthetic or noble - and maybe even was, until it gained critical mass. Or whether society will continue to be 'dumbed down' and end up as portrayed in the film Idiocracy.

Well, TV viewing figures may have peaked, but they haven't dropped far, despite the surge in eyeballs aimed at social media and streaming platforms.

If anything, the two types of media are working in concert, or echoing each other.

In my early posts on this site, as exemplified in Lipstick On a Pig, I used to think that Greed and Stupidity were winning, but only through our institutions - top down - while 'people power' was a force for something better.

How wrong I was!

While it was true in 2011 - and true now - that 'Bailouts Fail and People Power Will Succeed' the problem was that 'success' meant uniting around the vulgar, prurient and dumb.

Welcome to Idiocracy.

Starmer Makes A Spectacle Of Himself

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 14:45:00 +0000

No sooner did we rid ourselves of the crony Conservatives than it turns out the Labour PM, his wife and senior ministers accepted clothing and spectacles from donors. Not to mention all the football tickets and so on.

Never mind that they declared the gifts. The point is that they thought it okay to seek or accept them in the first place - at a time when others can't afford new clothing of their own - from political donors.

Never mind that BoJo and his cronies did far worse and without declaring it. Starmer and Reeves promised an end to all that.

And it's all so petty!

I mean, if Britain's Prime Minister can't buy his own specs and a half decent suit, how easily could he be bought by really big donors...?

Look for Tory rorts that never get scrapped, like freeports...

Never mind that they've ended the free-clothing practice - that merely demonstrates the greed and stupidity of doing it in the first place.

British Infrastructure Bonds and the Office of Public Infrastructure

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Fri, 17 May 2024 12:38:00 +0000

Now that Labour has nailed its colours to the mast of that sinking ship, HMS Austerity, it's time to consider alternative ways to publicly fund the renewal and maintenance of Britain's sagging public buildings, bridges, sewerage systems and other infrastructure. A 'British Infrastructure Bond' programme, administered by a new public body, could focus on ensuring the long term availability and stability of Britain's infrastructure according to the national interest, without being distracted by the short term political issues of the day.

As the UK government won't spend the revenue it raises through taxes and general borrowing on such things, and has privatised the operation of utilities etc in ways that did not oblige the private operators to invest for the longer term - and probably shouldn't be trusted with the money anyway - it seems we need a dedicated 'infrastructure bond' programme to ensure that adequate funding is raised and spent where it should be.

A 'British Infrastructure Bond' programme could be administered by the Office of Public Infrastructure, a non-departmental public body (like the Office of Budget Responsibility) with discretion in the performance of its duties, as long as those duties are performed objectively, transparently and independently and takes into account the sitting government’s policies (specifically, what public infrastructure needs and responsibilities those policies are creating, as well as failing to support).

The OPI could also prevent a government of the day getting its filthy hands on the loot, or granting contracts to donors and cronies.

While the international money markets rightly rejected the Truss/Kwarteng 'mini-budget' to fund tax cuts, there is no reason to suggest that they would frown on a dedicated public borrowing programme to support the countries' genuine long term infrastructure needs that clearly are not being met under current tax and borrowing progammes.

Such 'infrastructure bond' programmes are not new. Even Scotland announced it's intention to issue a dedicated infrastructure bond in October, though that seems to be very much in the early planning phase and, ironically, may have been derailed by interim political events - surely another demonstration of the yawning gap such a programme should fill.

You Pay For Social Media, AI and Crypto Via Your Utility Bills

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 16:19:00 +0000

Households consume the most electricity in the UK. That's why the huge surge in global energy prices following the expansion of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 prompted the government to invoke price caps and handouts to protect consumers (and businesses) from bankruptcy, along with private energy providers who failed to manage their market exposures. Yet few have noticed that the world's computing data centres, including those hosting artificial intelligence platforms, already consume enough energy to power entire countries and compete with humans for vast amounts of fresh water. Crypto-currencies also require huge amounts of energy to 'mine'. So, not only are you paying for many 'free' online services with your personal data, you're also paying through your energy and water bills. And based on the advertising and other revenues from your participation, Big Tech can afford to outspend you. To illustrate the challenge, the UK government just announced a massive new Microsoft AI facility in London, even as Thames Water circles the drain and lack of capacity in the UK's national grid is delaying the construction of new homes, renewable energy projects and electric vehicle charging points. Given these costs and shortages, should we be speculating in bitcoin and using generative AI (either for fun or to do things we could do for ourselves)?

How much power does the latest consumer technology use?

While consumer electronics only account for 6% of household usage, that doesn't account for the centralised data processing among digital media and gaming platforms, for example, when you participate online. As a result, households are responsible for 35% of electricity usage, services 29% and industry 30%. You might argue that much of this data centre capacity is used by businesses, but many of them do so ultimately to serve consumers - from online search, shopping and social media services to powering giant credit card networks.

Artificial intelligence, however, operates at a whole new level above the more traditional digital media. A Netflix fan would have to have watched 1,625,000 hours of content to use the same amount of power it took to train OpenAI's ChatGPT 3.0 during 2022, according to a Dutch researcher. Generating a single image from text on other AI platforms costs the same amount in energy as charging your smartphone.

The same Dutch researcher has estimated that the AI sector alone will use as much power as the Netherlands by 2027, while the International Energy Agency predicts that the world's data centres (including AI and other digital media) will consume the double the amount of electricity in 2026 that they consumed in 2022 - about as much as Japan (the 5th largest electricity consumer in the world, behind China, the US, India and Russia).

Bitcoin mining - an activity whose sole purpose is to feed the world's first and largest distributed Ponzi scheme - absorbed nearly 1% of the world's electricity in 2023 - enough to power Greece or Australia. That's up to 5 times the cost of legacy payment systems that process vastly more transactions (though they also use enough to electricity to power Portugal or Bangladesh).

How much water does the latest consumer technology use?

Data centres also consume vast amounts of water (not counting what they recycle) to cool the computers and humidify the internal air. But even the process of generating the electricity they use also consumes water.

In 2021, for example, Google's data centers consumed approximately 4.3 billion gallons of water (16.3 billion litres), an average of 450,000 gallons (1.7m litres) of water per data centre each day. Microsoft reckoned that it consumed 1.7 billion gallons (nearly 6.5 billion litres) in 2022.

Gridlock

The surge in energy and water usage by future-gazing tech providers comes at a time when Britain's infrastructure is already failing to support the construction of new and more energy efficient homes, renewable energy sources and the switch away from diesel and petrol vehicles.

“Nationally, we’ve got an absolute crisis in all infrastructure.” Plans by Michael Gove, the housing secretary, to build 150,000 homes in Cambridge to create a British Silicon Valley were already being hampered by lack of water... “And where’s the power coming from? Something fundamental has to change...”

"...90 new homes in the Littlemore district had been meant to have heat pumps. “The National Grid basically said ‘we won’t have enough power to connect them’ so half the houses are going to have to have gas boilers instead – it’s so frustrating.

Great Britain’s power stations together generate 75 gigawatts of electricity, and the mainland is expected to need about twice as much by 2050 as people switch to electric vehicles and heat pumps.” The Guardian

Dissatisfaction with Britain's electric vehicle charging network is running at about 70% of EV drivers, citing a lack of public charging stations and unreliability. The government is targeting 300,000 charging stations by 2030, with only 53,677 available at the start of 2024 (an increase of 45% in 12 months) and the majority to be provided by private investors.

Meanwhile, Britain's water problems flow partly from the risk of drought and party from its combined sewage system which takes rainwater through the same pipes as the grey water from sinks and baths, as well as the raw sewage from toilets. Any excess of rainwater simply overloads the sewerage system of pipes that normally takes sewage to local treatment works, and the overflow goes directly into the waterways...

Crisis? What Crisis?

Who's to blame for Britain's sagging infrastructure involves lots of finger-pointing and misinformation.

When challenged over delays to connect new systems to the electricity grid, the National Grid's system operator complains that the queue of projects waiting to connect would add 800 gigawatts of electricity - "more than more than four times as much as the country would ever need." There are even delays in the time it takes to get an estimate of when a project will be connected, as well as 'zombie projects' that were approved but have been abandoned due to connection waiting times of 5 to 15 years.

Yet this hides the fact that more renewable projects/systems will be necessary to reduce Britain's reliance on fossil fuels, since energy systems that generate electricity from solar and wind don't all contribute to the grid at the same time, unlike a gas-fired or coal-fired power station where the energy source to create the electricity is under human control.

As for water - well, none of England’s rivers is classified as being in good ecological health and Britain is already failing to produce enough fresh water to meet its needs year round. The country's 'combined sewage system' should be replaced by separate systems for rainwater and sewage, yet modernisation efforts have merely doubled-down on the combined system.

UK Government Distracted by Culture Wars

Britain's energy sector is self-evidently poorly prepared for the future. Here is a good description of the alphabet soup of bodies involved and the problem of every additional significant energy system creating the need for some change in part of the network. Here's a good overview of the challenges facing sewerage reform and here is a discussion of drought risk.

There is undoubtedly a need for reforms and there are plenty that have been announced with targets of, say, 2035 and 2050, but where are the plans that had a target of, say, 2023? And if we had them, why weren't they being updated?

It's hardly surprising that a country with 5 prime ministers in 8 years and as many Cabinet reshuffles has failed to find the time or dedication required to overhaul the energy sector and water industry. Too much control over the maintenance and renewal of Britain's creaking infrastructure has been left to private interests. Had the income from customer bills gone into public coffers instead of draining into investors' pockets, it might have been a different story - or at least the money might have been used to bolster the many other public services that are in such a dire state.

Choices, Choices

All this brings us back to scarcity and the need to make careful choices over how we develop, protect and deploy our energy and water resources. This is largely a question of politics and intervention by a responsible government to balance out the many competing interests. Areas in which Brexit Britain has been - and continues to be - very poorly served.

It must be doubted that a new government will be able to make much progress after 15 years of under-investment and poor decision-making by its predecessors.

In these circumstances, it seems unwise to devote enormous amounts of power and water to mine bitcoin for speculative purposes or to support generative AI systems that are either used merely for entertainment or to render people jobless (if the hype is to be believed).

Certainly cash-strapped consumers should think about their utility bills and water shortages before speculating in bitcoin, playing online games or using open AI systems for entertainment or to do things that they could do for themselves.

How Britain's Economic Future Still Depends On Brussels

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 15:34:00 +0000

Britain has a services-based economy: 80% of our output and employment is in services. Professional services, finance, travel, telecoms/computing are all key areas, as is degree to which retail sales are online. This is clearly an advantage for a set of islands when it comes to exports, because services don't need to be shipped. But services may be subject to other trade barriers, such as licensing requirements when offered in other countries, as well as unfair trade practices by local competitors and suppliers. Rules and how well they're enforced are important issues. About half our trade is with the EU, because it's closer than the rest of the world. The EU is also a market of 448m people, 412m of whom are internet users, with 288m online shoppers. That makes enforcement of the EU's new Digital Markets and Digital Services Acts all the more critical, regardless of the fact that the UK no longer sits at the regulatory table.

Scale of UK services exports to the EU

While we generally import more than we export, that overall trade deficit being £33bn in 2023. That's the result of a deficit of £187bn in goods imported over exports, offset by a surplus of £153bn in exported services (including services that overseas customers bought here in the UK, as well as services performed by UK firms working abroad).

Brexit has obviously made the EU market less accessible for UK firms, so the loss of the free movement in goods, services, people and capital makes earlier comparisons unreliable. But based on trade data for 2022:

the EU accounts for 36% of Britain's total services exports;
we have a trade surplus in services with 14 EU countries and a deficit of trade in services with 13 countries, our closest neighbour being the largest surplus (Ireland at £14 billion) and Spain the largest services deficit (£11 billion);
our single largest type of exported service was £55bn worth of “other business services”, being legal, accounting, advertising, research and development, architectural, engineering and other professional and technical services, representing 38% of all UK service exports to the EU.
exports of financial, travel and telecoms/computing/data services are also very significant.

The Importance of Digital Platforms

You can see from the nature of our most successful services exports that their marketing and supply depends on digital platforms and related services, including search engines, cloud/hosting, app stores, browsers, e-commerce marketplaces and messaging services.

While most of the services exported by British businesses will be supplied electronically to EU businesses of varying sizes, the online consumer markets are obviously also very important. In the retail sector, over a third of British business is now online, making the UK the third largest country in terms of the share of retail that is e-commerce, after the US and China. By contrast, about 15.4% of retail sales across all EU countries occur online. In absolute terms, however, the UK only has a domestic market of 66m internet users, while the EU has 412m (92%) of its population using the internet, 70% of whom (288m) buy stuff online.

At that scale it becomes very important that the EU's digital markets are well regulated, and that businesses and their customers are shielded from unfair competition and trade practices.

How Does the EU Ensure Fair Digital Markets?

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) builds on existing competition law by rooting out unfair practices of very large digital platform operators (“gatekeepers”) when providing services that other businesses use to reach their own customers online. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft have all been designated as gatekeepers, since they effectively act as private rule-makers who could potentially create ‘bottlenecks’ and ‘choke points’ that limit access, unfairly exploit personal and business data for their own purposes and/or impose unfair conditions on market participants. All face exploratory investigations under the DMA by the European Commission in connection with search services, app stores, browsers and messaging services, to see if they might be luring away customers from other businesses who use those platform services.

The EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), on the other hand, protects EU-based users of online communication, e-commerce, hosting and search services, by exempting intermediary service providers (“ISPs”) from certain liability for performing certain duties. There are extra requirements for ISPs with at least 45m average monthly active EU users (known as ‘very large online’ (or 'VLO') platforms and search engines). Even UK providers may be caught, where it has an entity based in the EU or has a 'substantial connection' with the EU (i.e. a significant number of users as a proportion of the EU population or by targeting its activities at one or more EU countries). Services such as Bing, Google Search, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, X/Twitter, AliExpress and LinkedIn already face exploratory investigations under the DSA. Basically, the European Commission wants to know how these businesses:

mitigate the risks of creating and spreading information using generative AI and risks to electoral processes;
block illegal content;
protect users' fundamental rights;
avoid promoting gender-based violence;
protect children;
protect users' mental well-being;
protect users' personal data;
protect consumers; and
avoid the infringement of copyright and other intellectual property rights.

How Do British Businesses Benefit From the DMA and DSA?

British businesses will not want to spend heavily to acquire and deal with customers via gatekeepers' services, only to see the gatekeepers take those customers on directly. That's where the DMA comes in. It should not matter that a foreign business is among those who suffer any violation, since that will also affect EU businesses and customers that the DMA is primarily designed to benefit.

More widely, British businesses trading online the EU customers should also be reassured that the DSA regime is designed to ensure those customers are treated well and fairly in the intermediary environments. Otherwise, they risk losing both the channels through which they attract and deal with EU customers and/or the EU customers who are unwilling to engage with those channels. Equally, businesses will want to know that they are taking on genuine customers and dealing with reputable service providers online, rather than risking exposure to fraud and intellectual property rights infringement via their EU sales and marketing channels.

Either way, it's clear that Britain's service exporters are highly dependent on the EU trade bloc and its regulatory regime, regardless of Brexit.

Whether they can expect the same protection at home is another matter...

EU Countries To Offer Their Citizens Digital Identity Wallets From 2026

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 12:26:00 +0000

The EU is finally pushing forward with aRegulation that requires member state governments to offer their citizens a voluntary European digital identity wallet from 2026.

Under the new law, member states will offer citizens and businesses digital wallets that will be able to link their national digital identities with proof of other personal attributes (e.g., driving licence, qualifications, bank account). Citizens will be able to prove their identity and share electronic documents from their digital wallets simply, using their mobile phones.
The new European digital identity wallets (EDIWs) will enable all citizens to access online services with their national digital identification, which will be recognised throughout the EU, without having to use private identification methods or unnecessarily share personal data. User control ensures that only information that needs to be shared will be shared.

For the past 20 years, various players have pushed the idea that you could have a digital identity issued by any number of certified 'trust providers' based on certain agreed standards. This would go hand-in-hand with concepts of 'personal data stores' and access to your transaction data in machine-readable form ('midata')that would allow you to control how your data is monetized. There was speculation that the trust providers would likely be banks and telecoms companies, or perhaps dedicated new entities; but there were always concerns about whether they really had the core competencies required - or the risk/liability appetite - as well as issues relating to security and privacy.

The European Commission explains that:

by 2026, each member state must make a digital identity wallet available to its citizens and accept EDIWs from other member states according to the revised regulation
sufficient safeguards have been included to avoid discrimination against anyone choosing not to use the wallet, which will always remain voluntary
the wallet’s business model: issuance, use and revocation will be free of charge for all natural persons
the validation of electronic attestation of attributes: member states are required to provide free-of-charge validation mechanisms only to verify the authenticity and validity of the wallet and of the relying parties’ identity
the code for the wallets: the application software components will be open source, but member states are granted leeway so that, for justified reasons, specific components other than those installed on user devices need not be disclosed
consistency has been ensured between the wallet as a form of eID and the scheme under which it is issued...

Qualified website authentication certificates (QWACs) will ensure that users can verify who is behind a website under well-established eID security rules and standards (which enable open banking service providers to authenticate each other's systems, for example).

There's Nothing Intelligent About The Government's Approach To AI Either

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 16:52:00 +0000

Surprise! The UK government's under-funded, shambolic approach to public services also extends to the public sector's use of artificial intelligence. Ministers are no doubt piling the pressure on officials with demands for 'announcements' and other soundbites. But amid concerns that even major online platforms are failing to adequately mitigate the risks - not to mention this government's record for explosively bad news - you'd have thought they'd tread more carefully.

Despite 60 of the 87 public bodies either using or planning to use AI, the National Audit Office reports a lack of governance, accountability, funding, implementation plans and performance measures.

There are also "difficulties attracting and retaining staff with AI skills, and lack of clarity around legal liability... concerns about risks of unreliable or inaccurate outputs from AI, for example due to bias and discrimination, and risks to privacy, data protection, [and] cyber security."

The full report is here.

Amid concerns that the major online platforms are also failing to adequately mitigate the risks of generative AI (among other things), you'd have thought that government would be more concerned to approach the use of AI technologies responsibly.

But, no...

For what it's worth, here's my post on AI risk management (recently re-published by SCL).

SuperStupidity: Are We Allowing AI To Generate The Next Global Financial Crisis?

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 10:26:00 +0000

I updated my thoughts on AI risk management over on The Fine Print recently and next on my list to catch up on was 'the next financial crisis'. Coincidentally, a news search prompted an FT article on remarks about AI from the head of the SEC.

While Mr Gensler sees benefits from the use of AI in some efficiencies and combating fraud, he also spots the seeds of the next financial crisis lurking not only in the various general challenges associated with AI (e.g. inaccuracy, bias, hallucination) but particularly in:

potential 'herding' around certain trading decisions;
concentration of AI services in a few cloud providers;
lack of transparency in who's using AI and for what purposes; and
inability to explain the outputs.

All familiar themes, but it's the concentration of risk that leaps out in a financial context, though it was also a wider concern identified in hearings before the House of Lords communications committee and by the FTC, as explained in my earlier post.

The fact that only a few large tech players are able to (a) compete for the necessary semiconductors (chips) and (b) provide the vast scale of cloud computing infrastructure that AI systems require is particularly concerning in the financial markets context because the world relies so heavily on those markets for economic, social and even political stability - as the global financial crisis revealed.

We can't blame the computers for allowing this situation to develop.

So, if 'superintelligence' is the point at which AI systems develop the intelligence to out-compete humans to the point of extinction, is 'superstupidity' the point at which we humans seal our fate by concentrating the risks posed by AI systems to the point of critical failure?

AI is a Set of Technologies, Not The End Of Work

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 10:46:00 +0000

We've heard a lot for a long time about artificial intelligence replacing our jobs and, ultimately, the human race. We're told we'll need to retrain to do things that AI computers cannot. But beware the hype. After all, AI is just a set of technologies and we've coped with the introduction of new technology before. Rather than having to retrain, it's more likely you'll be using AI without even realising it. And there are cases where robotics are needed because humans are reluctant or unavailable to do certain tasks... The real concern is that the hype distracts us from more immediate and greater threats posed by AI and how to manage and regulate the risks appropriately.

Much of the hype surrounding AI confuses its development with its actual or potential uses, whether in business or in the course of other activities, like writing a wedding speech. As with any technology, there's obviously a business in developing AI, selling it and deploying it. But how useful it is depends on who uses it and how.

This confusion is perhaps partly driven by the fact that some businesses are developing and operating 'open' AI systems-as-a-service focused on particular use-cases or scenarios (chatbots, research, text-to-image and so on), so you conduct your activity on their platform rather than your own device. The hype surrounding these platforms is intended to attract investment and users, but it seems unlikely that they will become the Alphabet (Google), Microsoft or Meta (Facebook) of tomorrow, especially as those tech giants are funding AI development themselves, to cement their own market dominance.

Yet, while the tech giants might dominate the markets for their technology (and some markets where they act as more than just a tech business, like advertising), you'll see that they aren't dominating every business sector or industry in which their technology is used.

It's therefore the people and businesses who successfully deploy and use AI who will benefit from those technologies, not the developers. This is no different to the use of telephones, laptop computers or email (or a distributed ledger supporting a cryptocurrency).

Nobody who went from using a typewriter or the analog version of a telephone, laptop, email or work intranet would say that they're redundant or even work less as a result of using the new/replacement technology. If anything, those tools have enabled changes in work patterns that have meant that humans work faster, longer and, ultimately, harder.

And there was more 'retraining' involved in introducing PCs, email, spreadsheets and video conferencing than AI, which may be so embedded in existing processes that you don't even realise you're using it, whether in terms of product recommendations, chatbots and virtual assistants, predictive text and search features, or tagging your friends in the social media.

There is plenty of speculation that truck drivers will be replaced by robots. Maybe truck technology has evolved to mean fewer drivers per tonne of truck, but there has been a steady increase in the number of trucks (and therefore demand for drivers) in the UK, for example, and driving a giant HGV takes more skill than smaller vehicles. Yet, ironically, there is a persistent shortage of drivers, so that transport firms are effectively being forced to invest in autonomous vehicles, just as farmers are turning to robotics due to a shortage of humans willing to pick fruit and vegetables). There are also many risky tasks that are better done remotely by machines, such as working in radioactive or other dangerous environments. AI may still be a threat to those still willing to do those tasks, yet they could also benefit from the demand for experienced humans to help in the wider development, deployment and use of the robots. This is no different to previous waves of technological innovation.

Yet all humans have a genuine concern if their personal information is being included in an AI's training data or is otherwise being harvested and used without your consent. That's where humans need to focus urgently, as well as in the creative industries where copyright violation by AIs is also rife. We also need to be on guard against hallucinating AIs, disinformation, deepfakes and misinformation - particularly in an election year.

Defending Humanity Against The Techno-Optimists

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 15:08:00 +0000

I've been involved in tech since the mid-90s, have experienced the rise and burst of many 'bubbles', and have been writing about SiliCon Valley's war on the human race since 2014. But the latest battles involving crypto and AI are proving to be especially dangerous. A cult of 'techno-optimism' has arisen, with a 'manifesto' asserting the dominance of their own self-interest, backed by a well-funded 'political action committee' making targeted political donations. Laws and lawsuits are pending, but humanity has to play a lot harder on defence... To chart a safe route, we must prioritize the public interest, and align technology with widely shared human values rather than the self-interest of a few tech enthusiasts, no matter how wealthy they are.

As Michael Lewis illustrated in The New New Thing, SiliCon Valley has always had its share of people eager to get rich flogging a 'minimum viable product' that leaves awkward 'externalities' for others to deal with. Twenty five years on, we are still wrestling with disinformation and other harmful content that flows from social media platforms, for example, never mind the 'dark web'.

Regardless of the potential downsides, the 'Techno-optimist manifesto' seeks to elevate and enshrine the get-rich-quick-at-others'-expense approach in a set of beliefs or 'creed' with technology as a 'god':

"Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential." a16z

The techno-optimist creed commands followers to view the world only in terms of individual self-interest, to a point verging on malignant narcissism:

"We believe markets do not require people to be perfect, or even well intentioned – which is good, because, have you met people? Adam Smith: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.” a16z

In other words, techno-optimists aren't interested in humanity, good intentions or benevolence. They are only self-interested and believe that you and everyone else is, too. It's you against them, and them against you. In this way, the techno-optimists absolve themselves of any responsibility to care about other humans, because other humans are merely self-interested and technology is the pinnacle of everyone's self-interest.

The cult only needs to focus on building new tech.

The only remaining question relating to other humans is whether your self-interest is aligned with the techno-optimist's chosen technology. If not, you lose - as we'll see when it comes to their use of your cryptoassets or your copyright work or personal data where it is gathered among the training data they need to develop AI systems...

You might well ask if there are any constraints at all on the techno-optimists' ambition, and I would suggest only money, tech resources and the competing demands of other techno-optimists.

They claim not to be against regulation, so long as it doesn't throttle their unrestrained ambition or 'kill' their pet technology. To safeguard their self-interest, the techno-optimists are actively funding politicians who are aligned with their self-interest and support their technology, and attacking those who are not... with a dose of nationalism for good measure:

“If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them,” wrote Ben Horowitz, one of [a16z's] founders, in a Dec. 14 post, adding: “Every penny we donate will go to support like-minded candidates and oppose candidates who aim to kill America’s advanced technological future.” Cointelegraph

"Fairshake, a political action committee [PAC] supported by Coinbase and a16z, has a $73 million war chest to oppose anti-crypto candidates and support those in favor of digital assets... Fairshake describes itself as supporting candidates “committed to securing the United States as the home to innovators building the next generation of the internet.” Cointelegraph

Nationalistic claims are typical of such libertarian causes (Trump's "Make America Great Again") and invite unfortunate comparisons with European politics of the 1930s, as George Orwell pointed out in his Notes on Nationalism in 1945:

Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism... two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power...

A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade.

But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right..."

Yet in 2014, Google's CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, 'warned' us that humans can only avoid the much vaunted Singularity - where computers out-compete humans to the point of extinction - by finding things that 'only humans can do and are really good at'. Ironically, by dedicating themselves utterly to the god of technology, the techno-optimist is actually asserting the 'self-interest' of machines!

Of course, technology is not inherently good or bad. That depends on their human creators, deployers and users. There's a long list of problems in the techno-optimist manifesto which they claim technology itself has 'solved' but self-evidently has not, either because the technology was useless without human involvement or the problems persist.

And what of their latest creatures: crypto and AI?

While 'blockchain' or distributed ledger technology does have some decent use-cases, the one that gets the techno-optimists most excited is using crypto-tokens as either a crypto-currency or some other form of tradeable crypto-asset. They insist that the technology is so distinct that it must not be subject to existing securities laws. Yet they use the terminology of existing regulated markets to describe roles in the crypto markets that are really only corruptions of their 'real world' counterparts. Markets for cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets are riddled with examples of fraud and market manipulation that were long ago prohibited in the regulated markets. A supposedly distributed means of exchange without human intervention is actually heavily facilitated by human-directed intermediaries, some of which claim to operate like their real world equivalents that safeguard their customers' funds, while actually doing the opposite. The shining example of all these problems, and the numerous conflicts with the participating techno-optimists' self-interest, is the FTX scandal. And there are many others.

As for AI, again there are decent systems and use-cases, but the development of some AI systems relies on huge sets of 'training data' that would be prohibitively expensive to come by, were they not simply 'scraped' from the internet, regardless of copyright or privacy concerns: the technological equivalent of toxic waste. The creators of several of these 'open' AI systems defend their activity on techno-optimist grounds. Midjourney founder David Holz has admitted that his company did not receive consent for the hundreds of millions of images used to train its AI image generator, outraging photographers and artists; and OpenAI blithely explained in its submission to a UK House of Lords committee:

“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression – including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents – it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.”

So, there we were in 2014 being warned to be creative, but it turns out that the techno-optimists believe that your self-interest and the rights that protect your work can simply be overridden by their 'divine' self-interest.

Needless to say, many humans are not taking this lying down (even if some of their governments and institutions are).

In January 2023, illustrators sued Midjourney Inc, DeviantArt Inc (DreamUp), and Stability A.I. Ltd (Stable Diffusion), claiming these text-to-image AI systems are “21st-century collage tools that violate the rights of millions of artists.” A spreadsheet submitted as evidence allegedly lists thousands of artists whose images the startup's AI picture generator "can successfully mimic or imitate."

The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copying and using millions of its copyright works seeking to free-ride on its investment in its journalism by using it to build 'substitutive' products without permission or payment.

Getty Images has also filed a claim that Stability AI ‘unlawfully’ scraped millions of images from its website.

Numerous other lawsuits are pending; and legislative measures have either been passed (as in the EU and China) or regulators have been taking action under existing law (as the Federal Trade Commission has been doing in the US).

Meanwhile, the right wing UK government has effectively sided with the techno-optimists by leaving it to 90 regulatory authorities to try to assess the impact of AI in their sectors, and even cancelled plans for guidance on AI copyright licensing that copyright owners had requested.

As the Finance Innovation Lab (of which I’m a Senior Fellow) has pointed out, the AI governance debate is dominated by those most likely to profit from more AI - and the voices of those who may be most negatively impacted are being ignored. Government needs to bring industry, researchers and civil society together, and find ways to include the perspectives of the wider public. To chart a safe route forward, it is essential that we prioritize the public interest, and align technology with societal values rather than the self-interest of the techno-optimists.

Commercially speaking, however, there's also the point that consumers tend to reward businesses that act as 'facilitators' (who solve our problems) rather than 'institutions' (who solve their own problems at our expense). Of course, businesses can start out in one category and end up in another... The techno-optimists' commitment to their own self-interest (if recognised by consumers) should place them immediately in the second category.

You'll See The Tories' Last Stand On The Far Right...

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 18:14:00 +0000

Britain's voters need to be on guard against extremists in this year's elections, starting tomorrow. The divisive nature of British politics since 2015 has led to the collapse of the country's public services and infrastructure across the board. And we know from bitter experience that this is fertile ground for those on both the far left and far right who prey on the most vulnerable and dissatisfied. So we need a new set of politicians who focus on providing adequate public services and infrastructure rather than stoking 'culture wars' and spouting idiotic nationalism dressed up as patriotism.

Starmer seems to have won the Labour Party's ideological battles and occupies relatively centrist ground. The polls suggest we're about to find out whether he's any more effective in government than the Tories have been. But anything can happen, so it's important to be alert to the threat of a Conservative Party in its death throes...

Last week, for example, a group calling themselves the Popular Conservatives (PopCorns) held a launch event in which speakers appeared to mimic the rhetoric from Germany in the 1920s-30s in rants against the judiciary and the courts. Dangerous stuff.

Worryingly, our Defence Secretary (who generally but not always goes by the name 'Grant Shapps') also recently attacked the British military's recruitment policies on "ethnicity, diversity and inclusivity" as part of his party's so-called 'war on woke'. This was alarming enough for the respected Royal United Services Institute to warn that neo-Nazi groups are trying to insert their supporters into Britain's armed forces and police (Evening Standard 14.02.24).

Sunak would likely have you believe that he represents the 'sensible' wing of Britain's Conservative Party (among many wings), but his sole remaining policy involves demonising asylum seekers and deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda (on which he publicly accepted a £1,000 bet) and he recently attended a far right rally in Italy. Bringing back David Cameron as Foreign Secretary was also perceived by some as a sign of centrism. But you'll recall that it was Cameron who moved the Conservatives from the centrist political bloc in the European Parliament to the far right bloc, and they've remained fans of Hungary's leader and Putin fanboy, Viktor Orban to this day. Sunak was also Cameron's go-to contact when lobbying for Greensill/Gupta, so you can see they're really a couple of peas in the same pod.

If you think I'm suggesting that Putin also occupies the far right of the political spectrum, you wouldn't be far wrong. In truth, that 'spectrum' is not so much a line running infinitely left and right as a circle that brings the far right and far left together, cheek by jowl. Make no mistake, both extremes share an authoritarian vision that results in a totalitarian regime controlled by a wealthy elite. German fascists chose the name 'National Socialists' as an appeal as much to the workers and those who leaned left as to those who preferred jackboots to sandals. Putin longs to reinstate the communist USSR or perhaps an earlier empire, but his Russia is effectively controlled by oligarchs with their own private security forces.

Britain's politicians may have started out spouting idiotic nationalist slogans as a means of courting marginal voters, but we've seen how this ends in tears as well as outright collapse. It's time Britain's voters sobered up and elected people who want to get on with the job of governing fairly in the national interest.

Our Enemies Are Within. Choose To Deserve Better.

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 12:57:00 +0000

When the British Prime Minister attended a fascist rally in Rome on the weekend, he crossed a line. When he claimed in his speech at that fascist rally that "our enemies... will use migration as a weapon, deliberately driving people to our shores to try to destabilise our societies," he crossed a line.

In the year to June 2023, the British government allowed 1,200,000 people to come to Britain, of whom 40,000 arrived on 'small boats' seeking asylum. In the previous year, the figures were 1,100,000 and 35,000 respectively. To pretend that the 3% of all immigrants who come to Britain as asylum seekers in small boats are 'deliberately driven by our enemies to destabilise British society' is a very convenient scapegoat for a Prime Minister eager to distract from the many failings in British society. It is the Prime Minister's claim that has the deliberately destabilising effect.

Asylum seekers were not responsible for Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss or Sunak himself.

Asylum seekers were not responsible for the need to bail out our banks during the financial crisis or the crippling austerity budgets that followed.

Asylum seekers were not responsible for Britain's disastrous decision to leave the EU Single Market and Customs Union.

Asylum seekers were not responsible for perpetrating the vast financial waste and fraud during the Covid19 pandemic.

Asylum seekers were not responsible for ministers and officials partying while everyone else obeyed their Covid restrictions.

Asylum seekers were not responsible for sexual assaults by police officers or MPs.

Asylum seekers are not responsible for the sewage in our rivers or on our beaches.

Asylum seekers are not responsible for our crumbling hospitals, schools and courts, or the potholes in our roads.

Asylum seekers are not responsible for the lack of funding for legal aid, social care, education or social housing.

Asylum seekers are not responsible for our declining incomes, higher taxes and inflation.

Asylum seekers are not responsible for our bankrupt councils or the lack of government in Northern Ireland.

We were, and we are, responsible for all those things.

We elected the people responsible for those things and we keep electing the people who are responsible for those things.

Our enemies are within.

And we have a responsibility to put those things right. A responsibility to defeat the enemies within.

Not to blame vulnerable people in rubber dinghies for the problems that we created, that we tolerate, among the politicians and their donors and cronies.

We get the government we deserve. It's up to us to choose to deserve better.

Why The British Government Wants You To Pay For Fraud, Not Stop It.

noreply@blogger.com (Pragmatist) — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 08:30:00 +0000

Through its own efforts and inattention, the British government has made fraud one of Britain's largest industry sectors. But it's chief response is to make you pay for it, rather than stop it, because the boom in fraud is also reflected in a boom in political donations, even while the rest of the economy is flat...

In 2021, the financial cost of fraud was £137bn, making it the UK's sixth biggest industry sector. There were 3.7 million incidents of fraud in England and Wales in 2022, yet 86% of incidents are estimated to go under-reported. Virtually all UK adult internet users say they have seen fraudulent content. The UK was third internationally in the growth of attempted digital fraud between 2019 and 2022. The UK government's own contribution to fraud has been enormous, but not in a good way. According to the National Audit Office:

Most public bodies do not know how much fraud they face and cannot demonstrate that they have the correct level of counter fraud resources...

The amount of fraud in government expenditure that was reported in the accounts audited by the NAO rose from £5.5 billion total in the two years before the pandemic (2018-19 and 2019-20) to £21 billion in total in the following two years.

Of the £21 billion, £7.3 billion relates to temporary COVID-19 schemes. These estimates are in addition to an estimated around £10 billion of tax revenue lost to evasion and crime every year. The Public Sector Fraud Authority (PSFA) ...estimates that in 2020-21 there was between £33.2 billion and £58.8 billion of fraud and error in government spending and income unrelated to the pandemic.

These figures likely understate the scale of the problem because they exclude any amounts that are too small to be reported in the context of any one set of accounts and no estimate was made of the level of fraud in the Department for Health and Social Care’s COVID-19 spend.

Not only is the UK government careless with how much taxpayers' money is lost to fraudsters, it is finding new ways to distribute the burden among consumers: in other words, you are paying for industrial quantities of fraud through both your income and expenditure while the government actively contributes to the problem. The Online Safety Act is designed to shift the burden of addressing online fraud onto tech companies, whose only means of recouping their costs is via consumers. Similarly, the Payment Systems Regulator has been tasked with ensuring that banks and payment service providers - and ultimately their customers - pay for increased 'authorised push payment' fraud.

In these circumstances it should come as no surprise that the UK government is also resisting checks on the sources of political donations. By creating a boom in dirty money, and leaving key loopholes for dodgy donations, the politicians have experienced a boom in political donations:

"...donations have almost trebled... rising from £41 million in 2001 to £101 million in 2019... with 60% of donations in 2019 coming from private individuals.

The increases in donations have favoured the Conservative party, which had £27 million more in financial resources than Labour in 2019, even when taking account of the public funding received by Labour (known as ‘Short Money’) that is designed to balance resources across the parties."

You see what they did there?