Highlights 4. AI Intelligence Plateau?

November 20, 2015, Lincoln Cathedral  

 

Is AI Plateauing? 

“If this were just a few hedged anonymous reports about “less improvement,” I honestly wouldn’t give it too much credence. But traditional funders and boosters like Marc Andreessen are also saying the models are reaching a “ceiling,” and now one of the great proponents of the scaling hypothesis (the idea that AI capabilities scale with how big they are and the amount of data they’re fed) is agreeing. Ilya Sutskever was always the quiet scientific brains behind OpenAI, not Sam Altman, so what he recently told Reuters should be given significant weight:

‘Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of AI labs Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and OpenAI, told Reuters recently that results from scaling up pre-training—the phase of training an AI model that uses a vast amount of unlabeled data to understand language patterns and structures—have plateaued.’

“[Though it’s bad that AI cost increases exponentially], I think people focusing on price or the domain-specificity of improvements are missing the even bigger picture about this new supposed scaling law. For what I’m noticing is that the field of AI research appears to be reverting to what the mostly-stuck AI of the 70s, 80s, and 90s relied on: search.

 

“I don’t mean searching the web, rather, I mean examples like when this summer Google DeepMind released their state-of-the-art math AI able to handle mathematical Olympiad problems. It's a hybrid, very different than a leading generalist LLM. How does it work? It just considers a huge number of possibilities.

‘When presented with a problem, AlphaProof generates solution candidates and then proves or disproves them by searching over possible proof steps…. The training loop was also applied during the contest, reinforcing proofs of self-generated variations of the contest problems until a full solution could be found.’

“This sort of move makes sense, because search was the main advantage for AIs against humans for a very long time . . .”

 

“Continued improvements are going to happen, but if the post-GPT-4 gains in AI came mainly from adding first better prompts (chain-of-thought prompting) and now more recently the addition of search to the process (either over many potential outputs or over the model’s parameters itself) this is different than actually constructing baseline-smarter artificial neural networks. It indicates to me a return to the 70s, 80s, and 90s in AI.”

 

SOURCE: Eric Hoel, The Intrinsic Perspective

 

EPISTEMIC COLLAPSE

 

"I do think there is an information story to be told here, but I also think, and I promise I'll address it, but I also think that people who vote for Trump, many of them often understand themselves to be voting for his spirit and not for specifics, right? And they are voting for the spirit of resentment, they are voting for the spirit of sort of anti-establishment thinking, they are voting for the spirit of having somebody punish their enemies, right? And that spirit, that vibe of Trumpist dominance, gratification and like fun resentment, right?

 

“That is an emotional register that can contain a ton of contradictions, right? So you can be pro-abortion rights, at least in your state, and be pro-Trump at the same time, because it is perfectly possible to favor abortion access for you and also fucking hate a lot of other people and want to see them punished, right? And that is, I think, a continuous theme you see in Trump supporters.

 

“If you ask them about Trump policies, often they will say, well, I don't support that, but they do support the animating feature behind those policies, the sort of spirit of sadistic, jeering, fuck you. That's what they really like, they enjoy the anger. But I do also think, to your point, that there's an information ecosystem problem, right?

 

“Like this information ecosystem is dog shit. It is impossible to get reliable information. The media has lost its credibility, but it's also just lost its monopoly on the audiences.

 

“People don't trust the most credible sources to be telling them the truth, but they're also not really listening to those sources anymore. So they're listening to a lot of fucking --d“

 

“Podcasts.”

 

“A lot of goddamn podcasters”

 

“Fuck them. I hate those guys.”

 

“They're listening to podcasters. They're watching influencers who do front-facing videos on TikTok and Instagram reels. They're getting a lot of information sort of ambiently from what they see posted by their connections or what their friends who saw something posted online say to them over burgers.

 

There's this ambient disinformation and a corrosion of the information environment and the reliability of information that has led to, I think, a really profound epistemic collapse that is completely impervious to the style of politics that involves facts and policy mattering.”

 

SOURCE: Moira In Bed With The Right Podcast: Episode 42 Nov 19, 2024

 

 SOURCE: KAL, The Economist, November 14, 2024

UNIVERSITIES DOING TRUMP’S WORK FOR HIM

 

“The contradiction between liberalism’s substantive ends and its formal means is not a new problem. One could argue—I would—that virtually every historical moment of substantive liberal triumph has been made possible by social movements that imposed themselves from below, often over the protest of liberal policymakers and thinkers, registering their objection to the means despite their abstract support for the ends. Universal adult suffrage, the welfare state, equal protection under law—such is the story of each of these.

 

“In our time, there are entrenched institutional liberal forces, not only in formal politics but in the universities, the press, the legal system, the nonprofit sector, and even the corporate world, that intone the threat Trumpism poses to democracy and the rule of law, yet work every day to defeat their own internal left-wing challengers: student protests, labor struggles, “woke excesses.” When they raid encampments (student or unhoused) or bust unions, they do Trump’s work for him, remaking Americans in authoritarian ways. The phenomenon that Trump represents can only be defeated when liberal institutionalists cease trying to quash the insurgent left in the name of protecting democracy, and instead look to it as an ally and a source of strength. This is not because the ideas of the left already represent a suppressed silent majority—a fantastical, self-flattering delusion—but because it is only the left that has a coherent vision to offer against the ideas of the right.”

 

SOURCE: Gabriel Winant, Dissent (November 7, 2024)

 

 

IT’S THE RACE AND CLASS COMBINATION, STUPID

 

"There are countless polls that show Americans want things that are anathema to the Republican Party and especially to Trump’s agenda. At least 65 percent of Americans believe that the federal government has a “responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care.” More than 50 percent insist that “government aid to the poor does more good than harm.” Nearly 80 percent believe that Social Security benefits should not be reduced in any way. Polling by Pew also shows that most Americans believe that the government should do more to help “the needy even if it means going deeper into debt.” Nearly 70 percent of Americans are concerned about the costs of child care, and thus nearly 80 percent support some kind of government-subsidized, affordable-child-care initiative. And overwhelming majorities agree that the U.S. is enveloped in an ongoing housing crisis. More than 60 percent of voters agreed with the statement “Housing is a basic necessity, and the private market is unable to address many Americans’ affordability concerns.” In hurricane-wrecked and Republican-controlled Florida, a recent survey found that a whopping 90 percent of residents believe that climate change is real and 58 percent believe that it’s human-caused. Nearly 70 percent of them want the state and federal governments to do more to address it.

 

"Despite the widespread desires of ordinary Americans for the government to play more of a role in improving their quality of life, Trump and the Republican Party reject these calls for greater public spending and services to help those in need of it. But the Democratic Party has also been reluctant to cast itself as the party for greater government intervention to help with health care, housing, and child care. For more than a generation, the Democratic Party has envisioned itself as jettisoning its reputation as the party of social welfare, most dramatically exemplified by the War on Poverty and the Great Society initiatives, the signature legislation of the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Harris has made some modest proposals like expanding the child tax credit and providing grants for potential first-time homeowners, but none is nearly enough to offset the economic malaise that ordinary people are experiencing right now. It is almost as if the Democrats believed that the sharp personal contrast between the candidates — a white supremacist Trump against a Black South Asian daughter of immigrants — was significant enough to outweigh substantive mention of any other details of why their party should prevail.

 

"In her unprecedented run for office, Harris has almost completely retreated from the more progressive positions she took during the heated primary in 2020 and the bolder proposals that the Biden-Harris campaign eventually adopted. These promises, designed to convince the millions of young people protesting in the streets to cast their votes for the Democratic ticket, included increasing the minimum wage, paid family leave, subsidized child care, canceling student debt, and other big government expenditures, some of which were realized in the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act signed by Biden in 2021. The Democrats won in 2020 with 81 million votes, the most in American history.

 

"But in this election, even though ambitious government proposals are still popular with wide swaths of the electorate, Harris has returned to a political message that emphasizes the supremacy of capital, marginalizes the role of the state and public expenditure, and has legitimized Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric on the border and wherever Black and brown bodies need to be surveilled and policed. She has deftly avoided any mention of the 2020 protests that are the reason she was selected as Biden’s running mate in the first place. The simultaneous eruption of protest in response to the murder of George Floyd and the unfolding human tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic raised the demands not only for police reform but also for the state to play a greater role in helping suffering people. Since her ascension to the top of the ticket, Harris and the Democratic National Committee have excised the influence of the Black Lives Matter social movement that suffused the party’s 2020 political platform and its emphasis on countering racism, police brutality, and inequality. It has been airbrushed from history. Indeed, in the Harris and Walz 80-page platform, the words “racism,” “inequality,” “diversity,” and “police brutality” are nowhere to be found.

 

"[I]n this race, Trump is setting the terms, and this time he has shed the patina of economic populism that once defined him and is leaning even more heavily into conspiracy ramblings and outrageous bigotry. Harris, lacking sufficient pressure from the left, has largely abandoned gestures or appeals to the working class and instead touts endorsements from current and former Republicans, including war criminal Dick Cheney. Focused on appealing to middle-of-the-road and undecided voters, Harris has now been left to scramble to bolster support among core Democratic bases, including Black men. Weeks away from the election, Harris promised up to $20,000 in forgivable loans for Black entrepreneurs, an initiative to tackle sickle cell disease, more regulatory protections for cryptocurrency investors, and the creation of new opportunities for Black men to participate in the emerging cannabis industry. It reeks more of desperation than as part of a coherent plan to mobilize voters."

 

SOURCE, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Hammer and Hope (Fall 2024).

 

THEFT OF ENJOYMENT

 

“Nationalism thus presents a privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the social field. The national Cause is ultimately nothing but the way subjects of a given ethnic community organize their enjoyment through national myths. What is therefore at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of the national Thing. We always impute to the ‘other’ an excessive enjoyment; s/he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the ‘other’ is the peculiar way it organizes its enjoyment: precisely the surplus, the ‘excess’ that pertains to it—the smell of their food, their ‘noisy’ songs and dances, their strange manners, their attitude to work (in the racist perspective, the ‘other’ is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or an idler living on our labour; and it is quite amusing to note the ease with which one passes from reproaching the other with a refusal to work, to reproaching him for the theft of work). The basic paradox is that our Thing is conceived as something inaccessible to the other, and at the same time threatened by it; this is also the case with castration, which, according to Freud, is experienced as something that ‘really cannot happen’, but we are nonetheless horrified by its prospect. The ground of incompatibility between different ethnic subject positions is thus not exclusively the different structure of their symbolic identifications. What categorically resists universalization is rather the particular structure of their relationship towards enjoyment:

 

‘Why does the Other remain Other? What is the cause for our hatred of him, for our hatred of him in his very being? It is hatred of the enjoyment in the Other. This would be the most general formula of the modern racism we are witnessing today: a hatred of the particular way the Other enjoys. . .The question of tolerance or intolerance is not at all concerned with the subject of science and its human rights. It is located on the level of tolerance or intolerance toward the enjoyment of the Other, the Other as he who essentially steals my own enjoyment. We know, of course, that the fundamental status of the object is to be always already snatched away by the Other. It is precisely this theft of enjoyment that we write down in shorthand as minus-Phi, the matheme of castration. The problem is apparently unsolvable as the Other is the Other in my interior. The root of racism is thus hatred of my own enjoyment. There is no other enjoyment but my own. If the Other is in me, occupying the place of extimacy, then the hatred is also my own.’ (Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Extimité)

 

“What we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us: the lack (‘castration’) is original; enjoyment constitutes itself as ‘stolen’, or, to quote Hegel’s precise formulation from his Science of Logic, it ‘only comes to be through being left behind. Yugoslavia today is a case-study of such a paradox, in which we are witness to a detailed network of ‘decantations’ and ‘thefts’ of enjoyment.’”

 

SOURCE: Slavoj Žižek, New Left Review (Sept/Oct 1990)

 

Hightlights 3. Never Enough; Trump Bad for News, Good for News Moguls; THE PROBLEM WASN’T DEFUND THE POLICE; IT’S THE VOTER ERROR, STUPID; School's Out, Forever; It's Not the Policy

November 13, 2015, Beirut from Crown Plaza, 6:26am

 (NEVER) ENOUGH

 

“Mr. Trump’s voters are granted a level of care and coddling that defies credulity and that is afforded to no other voting bloc. Many of them believe the most ludicrous things: babies being aborted after birth and children going to school as one gender and returning home surgically altered as another gender even though these things simply do not happen. Time and again, we hear the wild lies these voters believe and we act as if they are sharing the same reality as ours, as if they are making informed decisions about legitimate issues. We act as if they get to dictate the terms of political engagement on a foundation of fevered mendacity.

 

“We must refuse to participate in a mass delusion. We must refuse to accept that the ignorance on display is a congenital condition rather than a choice. All of us should refuse to pretend that any of this is normal and that these voters are just woefully misunderstood and that if only the Democrats addressed their economic anxiety, they might vote differently. While they are numerous, that does not make them right.

 

“These are adults, so let us treat them like adults. Let us acknowledge that they want to believe nonsense and conjecture. They want to believe anything that affirms their worldview. They want to celebrate a leader who allows them to nurture their basest beliefs about others. The biggest challenge of our lifetime will be figuring out how to combat the American willingness to embrace flagrant misinformation and bigotry. …

 

“Absolutely anything is possible, and we must acknowledge this, not out of surrender, but as a means of readying ourselves for the impossible fights ahead.”

 

SOURCE: Roxane Gay, New York Times

 

MOGULS EXCITED TO USE TRUMP TO FURTHER CONSOLIDATE MEDIA OWNERSHIP, LAY OFF WORKERS          

 

“Trump is suing CBS News, accusing 60 Minutes of editing an interview with Kamala Harris in a way that flattered the vice-president. He also said his debate with Harris, which many observers judged her to have won, had been ‘rigged’ by CBS. ‘They ought to take away their licence for the way they did that,’ he said. 

 

“While Trump has previously lost defamation lawsuits against media outlets including CNN and The New York Times, the threats are costly and time-consuming for media organisations that are already under financial pressure.

 

“The chair of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates US radio and TV, said in October that it ‘does not revoke licences for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage’ . . . .  

 

“Trump has announced plans to ‘shatter the leftwing censorship regime,’ blaming ‘depraved corporate news media’ for ‘conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people.’ …

 

“But Trump has pledged to bring the FCC, an independent regulatory agency, ‘back under presidential authority, as the constitution demands’— a misreading of the law, according to media scholars. ‘What he wants is to weaponise the FCC,’ Kaplan said.  . . . 

Yet despite the concerns over what the incoming administration might mean for journalism and few hopes of the same sort of ‘Trump bump’ in audiences that was seen during his last administration, there is a sense of cautious optimism that dealmaking can return to the sector.

 

David Zaslav, chief executive of CNN owner Warner Bros Discovery, told analysts last week that Trump’s return would offer ‘an opportunity for consolidation.’

 

His comments landed with a thud with journalists at CNN, who are bracing for job losses and 

cost cuts in the coming months. But on Wall Street, Warner’s struggling stock price has risen 8.6 per cent.

 

“’It is reasonable to assume a pro-consolidation regulatory climate,’ wrote Rich Greenfield, analyst at LightShed Partners. ‘We would expect great urgency to pursue M&A.’”

 

SOURCE: Daniel Thomas, et al., Financial Times

 

THE PROBLEM WASN’T “DEFUND THE POLICE”

 

Doug Henwood: “Now, there's been a war on progressive prosecutors. Some of them lost, not all of them lost in the most recent round of elections. What about that?

 

“How much effect do they have? And are they a disappearing breed?”

 

Alex Vitaly: “Well, they're not a disappearing breed. We still have several and some of them are very popular and have won re-election like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia. I always have felt that there are profound limits to the progressive prosecutor movement, which was largely driven by folks in the defense bar, you know, lawyers trying to remake the legal system, and thinking that that would be sufficient to dial back mass criminalization.

 

“And I think what that movement lacked was a strong basis in communities that experience high levels of crime and disorder relative to other areas, and that just pursuing a strategy of reduced incarceration doesn't address the profound insecurities that a lot of these communities experience. And this made that whole movement really vulnerable to backlash, because the infrastructure of public safety in the communities was not enhanced by this movement. With some exceptions, including Krasner, who's gone out and raised millions of dollars to put into actual communities, to make communities safer, and of course, he has enjoyed, as a result, the highest level of kind of electoral support. . . . .

 

“We always knew that one of the weaknesses of the three-word phrase ‘defund the police’ is that it only captured the kind of negative aspects of the argument, as if it were sort of a punishment of police, rather than the positive aspects of the argument, which were to take those resources that we spend on policing and put them into community-based safety strategies to create flourishing neighborhoods. We need to go back to that original concept of divest from the criminal legal system, invest in communities.

 

“When we do that and we have a chance to explain it to people, there's actually very high levels of support for that. Things like getting police out of schools and bringing in counselors and after school programs, creating community-based mental health crisis response teams instead of sending police. It turns out that hundreds of cities are actually investing in these alternatives to policing, but what they're not doing is actually dialing back policing.”

 

SOURCE: Doug Henwood and Alex Vitaly, Background Briefing November 14, 2024

 

IT’S THE VOTER ERROR, STUPID

 

SOURCE: Christopher Hale, Twitter

 

DARK PROMISE: SCHOOL'S OUT, FOREVER

 

“For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. ‘Liberal democracy,’ he says, ‘offers moral constraints without problem-solving’ — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while ‘populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.’ Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn’t interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect’s appeal in terms of something more primal: ‘Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.’

 

“Around the world, populist autocrats have leveraged the thrilling power of that promise to transform their countries into vehicles for their own singular will. Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban vowed to restore a simpler, more orderly past, in which men were men and in charge. What they delivered was permission to abandon societal inhibitions, to amplify the grievances of one’s own group and heap hate on assorted others, particularly on groups that cannot speak up for themselves. Magyar calls this ‘morally unconstrained collective egoism.’

 

“Trump and his supporters have shown tremendous hostility to civic institutions — the judiciary, the media, universities, many nonprofits, some religious groups — that seek to define and enforce our obligations to one another. Autocrats such as Orban and Putin reject that deliberative process, claiming for themselves the exclusive right to define those obligations. If those two leaders, and Trump’s own first term, are any indication, he will likely begin by getting rid of experts, regulators and other civil servants he sees as superfluous, eliminating jobs that he thinks simply shouldn’t exist. Expect asylum officers to be high on that list.

 

“A major target outside of government will be universities. In Hungary, the Central European University, a pioneering research and educational institution (and Magyar’s academic home), was forced into exile. To understand what can happen to public universities in the United States, look at Florida, where the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis has effectively turned the state university system into a highly policed arm of his government. The MAGA movement’s attack on private universities has been underway for some time; most recently it drove the congressional hearings on antisemitism, in the wake of which half a dozen college presidents no longer have their jobs. Watch for moves to strip private universities of federal funding and tax breaks. Under this kind of financial pressure, even the largest and wealthiest universities will cut jobs and shutter departments; smaller liberal arts colleges will go out of business.”

 

SOURCE: Masha Gessen, New York Times

 

IT’S NOT THE POLICY

 

 

SOURCE: Keith Boykin, Twitter

 

 

Highlights 2. Most Polarized Democracy; Trust Crash; Christian Soldier; The Annunciation of the Culture Warriors; Vichy Republicans; Head Chopping Justice: And if Only Twitter Voted; Three-quarters of UK Universities in Deficit September 2025; 84% of University of California Seismic Need Not Funded

November 9, 2016, cousin's guest room, Columbus, Ohio

MOST POLARIZED DEMOCRACY 

“Pernicious polarization threatens democracies by hampering their ability to solve problems and — worse — by increasing the risks of political violence and authoritarianism. Here again, the findings are not encouraging. In a separate analysis based on the same dataset but focused just on democracies since 1950, we found that severe polarization correlates with serious democratic decline. Of the 52 instances where democracies reached pernicious levels of polarization, fully half of them experienced erosion of their democracy, with most of them sliding into authoritarianism. All of the 16 cases that managed to reduce polarization to below-pernicious levels stayed democratic as they did so. Even within this “lucky” subset, some have since repolarized. . . .

"Strikingly, the US is quite alone among the ranks of perniciously polarized democracies in terms of its wealth and democratic experience. There simply is no other wealthy, long-standing democracy in the V-DEM dataset as badly polarized as the US."

SOURCE: Jennifer McCoy, Bloomberg

TRUST CRASH

Trust that the government will do the right thing plunged for both parties under Nixon. It plunged again for Republicans under Biden, but had already plunged for them under Bush I and Bush II. It has never recovered to 1960s levels.

SOURCE: The Economist

CHRISTIAN SOLDIER

Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Fox personality Pete Hegreth, emerges from the pool.

SOURCE: Matthew D. Taylor

“There are at least two major strands of Christian supremacy operating in the U.S. today: the highbrow Calvinists and the populist charismatics. Both groups are Protestant, and both have theological roots in an obscure group of Reformed (Calvinist) American theologians called the “Christian Reconstructionists,” who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. 

“The Reconstructionists draw inspiration from 16th-century theologian John Calvin’s Geneva, a theocratic city-state where unrepentant heretics could be executed by a government that enforced orthodoxy.

 

Though certainly not representative of all Calvinists, today’s Reconstructionists have embraced a vision of what they call ‘dominion theology.’ They interpret certain Bible passages to mean that Christians must ‘take dominion’ over every society and remake it into the kingdom of God. 

 

“Today, they hold conferences with titles such as ‘Blueprints for Christendom 2.0’ and talk about how they will help Jesus the ‘warrior-king’ to ‘dominion-ize’ this world.

 

“These theological intellectuals of the Christian far right are radicalizing more run-of-the-mill Christian nationalists. Reconstructionist luminaries today include people like Stephen Wolfe, a scholar with a Ph.D. in political theory who argues full-throatedly in his book The Case for Christian Nationalism that ‘Non-Christians … are not entitled to political equality.’”

SOURCE: Matthew D. Taylor

THE ANNUNCIATION OF THE CULTURE WARRIORS

“South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a long-time Trump supporter who shares his hardline views on immigration, has been tapped for Homeland Security secretary. His choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, former Representative Lee Zeldin, has little environmental experience but has been a firm Trump supporter.

 

“Rubio originally clashed with Trump when both sought the Republican nomination in 2016. But he became a staunch Trump supporter in the Senate and helped lead outreach to Hispanics during this year’s election campaign. He’s gone as far as comparing the various court cases against Trump to Cuban show trials.

 

“Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick to be ambassador to the United Nations, was one of his first national security announcements — and reflects not just loyalty to Trump but her penchant for going after cultural elites. . . .

 

“His choice for White House national security advisor, Representative Mike Waltz of Florida, is a combat-decorated former Green Beret who introduced an act in Congress to end diversity, equity and inclusion policies in the military and halt the teaching of critical race theory. His choice for defense secretary, Hegseth, comes directly from Fox News — and has also supported efforts to counter such “woke” policies in the military.”

SOURCE: Iain Marlow, Bloomberg 

VICHY REPUBLICANS

"If you’re surprised, you’re a dupe. President Trump is going to do in his second term what he said he’d do on the campaign trail, and what he tried fitfully to do in his first term. He’s going to turn the federal government into an instrument of MAGA policy and grievance. He’s going to pursue retribution against enemies. He’s going to destroy what remains of the older norms that guide the operations of the government, and of the institutional checks that constrain the abuse of power. . . .

 

“Will Republicans and conservatives now stand up to Trump? Was yesterday a real wake up call for them, or simply the latest of dozens such moments when the alarm sounds, and they first mute it, then turn it off, and then conveniently forget that it ever sounded in the first place?

 

“I’m not optimistic. . . . Trump is their master. As Rep. Troy Nehls (R–Tex.) said yesterday, “His mission, and his goals and objectives, whatever that is, we need to embrace it. All of it. Every single word. . . . If Donald Trump says, ‘Jump three feet high and scratch your head,’ we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That’s it.”

 

“That’s it. That’s Trump’s Republican party. That’s our Republican party.”

SOURCE: William Kristol and Andrew Egger

HEAD CHOPPING JUSTICE

“The announcement of Gaetz’s nomination may have thrilled MAGA, but it shocked official Washington, coming on the heels of a brazen series of selections by Trump for other cabinet posts. The congressman’s firebrand label is well deserved. He has been a bombastic member of the House, keen to throw sharp elbows at his foes, defend Trump in dramatic ways and pick fights within his own party’s tent. 

“That attitude has won him many enemies on the Hill. But it was also fundamental to Trump’s decision to choose him for the AG slot, according to a Trump adviser familiar with the transition process. 

“’None of the attorneys had what Trump wants, and they didn’t talk like Gaetz,’ the adviser said. ‘Everyone else looked at AG as if they were applying for a judicial appointment. They talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional bullshit. Gaetz was the only one who said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go over there and start cuttin’ fuckin’ heads.”’ . . .

“In the Trump era, immediate shock and awe often has a way of morphing into awkwardly-rationalized acceptance by Republicans. And even the once tough-talking Mullin signaled on Wednesday afternoon that he’d be at least open to voting for Gaetz.

“’I completely trust President Trump’s decision-making on this one,’ Mullin told CNN’s Jake Tapper. ‘He has to answer those questions. And hopefully, he‘s able to answer the questions right. If he can, then we’ll go through the confirmation process.’” . . .

“In the Trump era, immediate shock and awe often has a way of morphing into awkwardly-rationalized acceptance by Republicans. And even the once tough-talking Mullin signaled on Wednesday afternoon that he’d be at least open to voting for Gaetz.

“”I completely trust President Trump’s decision-making on this one,” Mullin told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “He has to answer those questions. And hopefully, he‘s able to answer the questions right. If he can, then we’ll go through the confirmation process.’”

SOURCE: Mark A. Caputo

AND IF ONLY TWITTER VOTED

SOURCE: Midwest Sandernista

THREE-QUARTERS OF UK UNIVERSITIES TO BE IN DEFICIT IN SEPTEMBER 2025

“Almost three-quarters of such institutions are forecast to be in deficit in the academic year starting September 2025, following a £3.4bn decline in net income across the sector, according to a report published on Friday by the Office for Students. . . .

“The OfS said some providers would need to consider significant structural changes such as mergers, with the aggregate deficit expected to reach £1.6bn in 2025-26. The most recent financial returns for the HE sector from the end of 2023 forecast a surplus of £1.8bn.

“Redundancy and restructuring programmes are under way at 76 higher education institutions.

“About 100 providers fell short of their UK undergraduate recruitment forecasts for the current academic year, and roughly 150 failed to meet targets for international enrolments, according to OfS estimates. . . .

“Vivienne Stern, chief executive of Universities UK, the main sector lobby group, welcomed the increase in tuition fees but added the government needed to work with universities on a longer-term solution.

“’Across the sector tough decisions have already been made to control costs, and universities will look to go further still to be as efficient and effective as possible,’ she added.

“The University and College Union, which represents lecturers, said the government needed to provide long-term public funding to universities. . . .”

SOURCE: Amy Borrett and Peter Foster

84% OF UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SEISMIC NEED NOT FUNDED.

"UC has $16 billion in seismic retrofit needs but only identified funding for 16% of that, or $2.5 billion, last academic year. . . .

 "The scale of the need is vast. According to the UC, about 1,464 buildings require seismic upgrades across the system.

 

"UC officials disclosed yesterday that the system is debuting a new plan in which campuses will reduce its backlog of structures that need seismic upgrades by 4% annually, with the structures most in need of an overhaul receiving priority.

 

"And then there’s all the new construction UC needs. The system completed 139 projects at a cost of $1.4 billion last academic year — but has more than $20 billion in active construction plans for about 400 projects. More than half of those are for UC’s extensive medical care operation, in part to satisfy state rules on strengthening hospitals to better withstand earthquakes. 

 

"Through 2030, UC’s construction plans total $30 billion, with about $12 billion for its medical centers. Philanthropy helps pay for all those projects, but only a little. Just about $2 billion of the construction plan budget will come from gifts. About $300 million will come from state funds directly — a relatively tiny portion of the overall revenue picture for the system’s six-year building plan. Much of the projects will be paid for with external financing, such as bonds that the system sells to investors. 

 

"But that’s just projects with a funding source. UC Berkeley, for example, has more than $14 billion in construction needs but has identified the funding for just about $2.8 billion of that."

SOURCE: Mikhail Zinshteyn

Liner Note 4. Budget Strategies of Enshittification

November 9, 2022, Hyde Park

This is my ISRF Director's Note for November. Higher education's main response to political adversity has been accommodation. My comments on this here are relevant to the U.S. as much as the U.K. situation, including the data on teaching and research losses.

The Democratic and Labour parties regularly hint around about breaking with neoliberal austerity to build an equitable economic order, and then they don't. There are lessons for rebuilding in 2025 as well.  

Let’s say you work for Disney, and you’re part of the group that CEO Bob Iger instructed to “fix streaming.” By “fix” he meant, keep it from losing money in every quarter for a total loss of $4 billion in 2022. Bob offered a public hint about how to do this: “Basically we invested too much.”

You come up with a simple plan:

1. You invest less in new content, avoid challenging and therefore risky content, and cheapen existing content. You fire some people.

2. You raise prices, a lot.

Source: The Honest Broker.

3. You plan how to cut 100% of the loss over 2 to 3 years.

4. You ignore critics who call this an Endgame strategy and post rude charts about paying more to get less while subsidizing your creative decline.

The result is that 1 + 2 = 3. You do enough enshittification of your product and workforce (1) while seriously jacking up prices (2) so that you achieve (3), the actual ending of all your loss-making. The culture gets worse (4), but you achieve your financial goal of revenues equal to or greater than expenditures—about break-even in just two years.

Source:  The Honest Broker.

How does this compare to higher education policy in England and Wales?  

1. You have already been investing less in new content, avoiding challenging and therefore risky content and cutting existing programmes of that type. You have been cheapening existing content with larger classes, narrower module choice, and the like. You have been firing people.

2. You tripled your prices in 2012, but accepted simultaneous cuts in public revenue and the benefits are gone. The Labour party has just granted you a 3.1% fee increase for home students, which will increase their 2025 fees by £285 to £9,535. This will increase your teaching revenues for these students by £390 million per year. (The only other change is a minor increase in the amount students are allowed to borrow for maintenance.)

3. Instead of making up 100% of your loses, you plan to shrink them somewhat.  You lost £1 billion teaching home students in 2021-22, so with the 3.1% increase you can cut that by £390 million, or about one-third? Sadly, no: that inflation adjustment just keeps you from losing an additional £390 million on this year’s teaching . You’re still losing £1 billion pounds a year (more since that 2021-22 figure, and National Insurance rises will take £372 million of that £390 million). Your plan, in effect, is to reduce your home teaching losses by 0 percent!

4. You ignore critics who say your 1 + 2 = 0 as a solution for the university and you don’t address their concerns. You stay caught between the media, which exclaims that the £285 rise after an eight-year freeze “is a further test of students’ faith”, and universities, as when Sussex VC Sasha Roseneil states the fact that “unfortunately neither students nor universities will find adequate solutions in these modest uplifts.” Domestic teaching revenue remains nearly one-fifth below what it was for someone starting university in 2012-13. And the public maintains their perception that higher ed is unable to manage its affairs.

In the Disney case, enshittification makes you solvent, meaning you can theoretically avoid the Endgame strategy. (Ted Gioia, the source of those charts, is pretty sure you won’t, and indeed the logic of shareholder capitalism cuts against mature companies reducing their returns on investment by investing in better product.)

In the British university case, enshittification leaves you in the same hole you were in before.

What would work better? Not turning universities into corporations like Disney, but the opposite.

They should state their actual financial needs as required by their essential public functions, and then set up a plan with government to fix 100% of the shortfall between what the functions cost and what they can raise without further harming their students.

Take this HEPI chart from one of my previous notes.

Figure reproduced from Higher Education Policy Institute.

Home university students need to be taught properly; universities need a further billion pounds a year to do that. Government should supply 100% of that loss with a central grant, booked as an expenditure like schools or NHS.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies reported that “in 2023/24, £1,034 million was allocated to fund the teaching of high-cost courses, including medicine, dentistry and other laboratory-based courses.” This amount needs to be more than doubled, to fund the shortfall on the rest.

Similarly, in 2020-21 research lost nearly £5 billion. Research is a public good and national priority for all political parties. The government should fully fund the indirect costs of research, fixing 100% of that £5 billion loss. The sector could construct a five-year plan to achieve this.

Another chart from the same note:

Figure reproduced from Higher Education Policy Institute.

These shortfalls between student need and student funds are ridiculous. They are not shortfalls in grants but in the right to borrow. Universities should press government relentlessly to fund full maintenance costs, including restored grants for lower-income students.

There’s always great agony about the public supporting students, since as graduates they are cast as an elite. This isn’t true of most graduate salaries, but more importantly it neglects the public benefits, pecuniary but especially non-pecuniary, that all of society reaps from ever-larger numbers of highly educated people.

The standard view also neglects the reality that students are subsidizing the public with their fees. Not yet published calculations by our research partner James Brackley show students paying about five-sixths of the (declining) funding for their instruction.

Figure used with permission from the author.

Government grants covering home student shortfall would go part of the way towards equitable sharing of the costs of benefits that are social as much as they are individual.

Full public funding would make sense to the public if higher education organizations, like Universities UK, tied it directly to better student learning, more and higher quality research results, and better public benefits.

When universities pitch graduate salaries, commercial spin-offs, and other private benefits while ignoring the need for much greater public contributions, it is an Endgame strategy. But it wouldn’t be hard to replace.