Weekly Grounding #3
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published on Fridays to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I found during the past week. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these updates directly in your inbox.
Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:
“Ukraine is Already Looking to a Postwar Digital Future”
This must-read article in The Financial Times describes the role of new digital technologies in shaping the political future of Ukraine. The focus is on an app called DIIA (short for “state and I”), which came online in 2020 and has since been lauded by none other than Samantha Power. Why might that be? The FT reports: “During the Covid-19 pandemic, for instance, the app let Ukrainians verify their vaccination status” and notes that DIIA gave Ukrainian “citizens the world’s first digital passport.” The article continues: “The country’s prewar economy was dominated by agriculture and heavy industry. But government officials now see tech’s potential as a key pillar, and dream of modelling themselves on Israel.” No wonder the Biden administration keeps the aid flowing.
“America’s Wars and the US Debt Crisis”
In this important opinion piece, economist Jeffrey Sachs correctly identifies the American war machine as the driving force behind soaring U.S. debt. His proposal would be a popular one with an American public exhausted from endless war: “The US' annual military spending is now around $900 billion, roughly 40 percent of the world's total, and greater than the next 10 countries combined. US military spending in 2022 was triple that of China. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the military outlays for 2024-2033 will be a staggering $10.3 trillion on current baseline. A quarter or more of that could be avoided by ending its wars of choice, closing down many of the country's 800 or so military bases around the world, and negotiating new arms control agreements with China and Russia.”
Speaking of wars and foreign policy, it appears that Democratic Party presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s principled calls for peace have gained him respect among voters. The Wall Street Journal reports that new polling data finds that “Mr. Kennedy may have the best nationwide favorability rating of any politician in the country. Perhaps it’s no surprise given his name and family history that Mr. Kennedy is extremely well known, but the relative paucity of people with an unfavorable view is striking among current politicians. In the Echelon poll, 44% of survey respondents view Mr. Kennedy favorably, just 4 percentage points better than the 40% who have a similar opinion of Mr. Biden. But while a full 58% of likely voters have an unfavorable view of the president, only 22% have such low regard for Mr. Kennedy.”
“China Sends First Civilian Into Orbit as Xi Jinping Pursues ‘Eternal Dream’”
It has always amazed me how often communists—past and present—have been captivated by space exploration. I have written about this here on Handful of Earth in my essay, “The Left’s Problem with Technology”, and Xi Jinping’s “‘eternal dream’ of becoming a space power” is yet another example: “China has made rapid progress on its space programme as it competes with the US to gain an edge in advanced technology with civilian and military uses. The deputy director of China’s space agency on Monday confirmed plans to put a taikonaut on the Moon by 2030. In 2019, the country became the first to land on the far side of the Moon.”
“China’s Youth Unemployment Problem”
This is an informative article on Project Syndicate about the labor and housing market in major Chinese cities. The following paragraph was particularly striking: “According to a 2021 survey, jobs for new graduates in big cities like Shanghai and Beijing paid an average of only CN¥5,290 ($749) per month. That is just enough to rent a 25-square-meter (269 square feet) apartment (Chinese cities now have some of the world’s most expensive real estate). And these young people can see that a job with such a low starting salary is unlikely to provide the income progression needed to support a family ten years down the line. Since urban white-collar workers are typically expected to work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days per week, a dual-career couple with a child must rely heavily on a nanny. Yet in Shanghai and Beijing, nannies, who usually come from the countryside and often have not graduated from high school, earn CN¥6,000 per month on average – more than recent college graduates.”
“Men Flee College By the Millions”
This monologue by Saagar Enjeti at Breaking Points provides a concise summary of the staggering decrease in college enrollment among men since the pandemic. This is an important issue and one that will continue to radically reshape gender and class relationships in the coming years. For those interested in this topic, FT Global Business Columnist Rana Faroohar’s reflections from earlier this year are a great place to start. Faroohar states that she will have her high school-age son consider “union trade programmes along with the more traditional college search,” a remarkable statement coming from an elite journalist.
“The White House Agrees You Have a Small Brain”
This is a technical yet accessible essay on the argument for existential risk from artificial intelligence by
at . Here’s the central claim: “The threat of extinction in the face of AI boils down to the fact that artificial neural networks like GPT-4 are not bounded in the same way as our biological neural networks. In their size, they do not have to be sensitive to metabolic cost, they do not have to be constructed from a list of a few thousand genes, they do not have to be crumpled up and grooved just to fit inside a skull that can in turn fit through their mothers’ birth canals. Instead artificial neural networks can be scaled up, and up, and up, and given more neurons, and fed more and more data to learn from, and there’s no upper-bounds other than how much computing power the network can greedily suckle.”
This essay by
at the provides a fascinating analysis of the “validation” rituals enacted by student activists on college campuses: “The mother’s face, then, wordlessly grants the baby his or her very first experience of recognition by the Other. And if he’s right, my hunch is that these profoundly un-scaffolded selves in campus politics - selves who furiously reject the idea that the world is not co-extensive with their defensively buttressed self-definition - are a long-term consequences of widespread early maternal deprivation. That is, of infants for whom there was no one consistent face looking back, at a stage where that reflection was of fundamental importance to the formation of an integrated psyche.”
Did you find anything interesting this week? Feel free to share in the comments!