Friends!

It looks like Covid got me (my girlfriend is just getting over her own Covid-y week, and we live together—so despite our best efforts this was maybe unavoidable).

In accordance with my policy of aggressively resting when I get sick, I’ll be taking the week off to sleep, feel generally sore and uncomfortable, and consume alarming quantities of ibuprofen.

Sorry about the gap in programming, but unless something unexpected and worrying happens I’ll be back to my usual publishing schedule beginning next week, on the 10th.

This week we talk about the Falcon 9, the Saturn V, and NASA’s bureaucracy.

We also discuss Boeing’s mishaps, the Scout system, and the Zenit 2.

Recommended Book: What’s Our Problem? by Tim Urban

Transcript

In 1961, the cost to launch a kilogram of something into low Earth orbit—and a kilogram is about 2.2 pounds, and this figure is adjusted for inflation—was about $118,500, using the Scout, or Solid Controlled Orbital Utility Test system of rockets, which were developed by the US government in collaboration with LTV Aerospace.

This price tag dropped substantially just a handful of years later in 1967 with the launch of the Saturn V, which was a staggeringly large launch vehicle, for the time but also to this day, with a carrying capacity of more than 300,000 pounds, which is more than 136,000 kg, and a height of 363 feet, which is around 111 meters and is about as tall as a 36-story building and 60 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty.

Because of that size, the Saturn V was able to get stuff, and people, into orbit and beyond—this was the vehicle that got humans to the Moon—at a dramatically reduced cost, compared to other options at the time, typically weighing in at something like $5,400 per kg; and again, that’s compared to $118,500 per kg just 6 years earlier, with the Scout platform.

So one of the key approaches to reducing the cost of lifting stuff out of Earth’s gravity well so it could be shuffled around in space, in some rare cases beyond Earth orbit, but usually to somewhere within that orbit, as is the case with satellites and space stations, has been to just lift more stuff all at once. And in this context, using the currently available and time-tested methods for chucking things into space, at least, that means using larger rockets, or big rocket arrays composed of many smaller rockets, which then boost a huge vehicle out of Earth’s gravity well, usually by utilizing several stages which can burn up some volume of fuel before breaking off the spacecraft, which reduces the amount of weight it’s carrying and allows secondary and in some cases tertiary boosters to then kick in and burn their own fuel.

The Soviet Union briefly managed to usurp the Saturn V’s record for being the cheapest rocket platform in the mid-1980s with its Zenit 2 medium-sized rocket, but the Zenit 2 was notoriously fault-ridden and it suffered a large number of errors and explosions, which made it less than ideal for most use-cases.

The Long March 3B, built by the Chinese in the mid-1990s got close to the Saturn V’s cost-efficiency record, managing about $6,200 per kg, but it wasn’t until 2010 that a true usurper to that cost-efficiency crown arrived on the scene in the shape of the Falcon 9, built by US-based private space company SpaceX.

The Falcon 9 was also notable, in part, because it was partially reusable from the beginning: it had a somewhat rocky start, and if the US government hadn’t been there to keep giving SpaceX contracts as it worked through its early glitches, the Falcon 9 may not have survived to become the industry-changing product that it eventually became, but once it got its legs under it and stopped blowing up all the time, the Falcon 9 showed itself capable of carrying payloads of around 15,000 pounds, which is just over 7000 kgs into orbit using a two-stage setup, and remarkably, and this also took a little while to master, but SpaceX did eventually make it common enough to be an everyday thing, the Falcon 9’s booster, which decouples from the rocket after the first stage of the launch, can land, vertically, intact and ready for refurbishment.

That means these components, which are incredibly expensive, could be reused rather than discarded, as had been the case with every other rocket throughout history. And again, while it took SpaceX some time to figure out how to make that work, they’ve reached a point, today, where at least one booster has been used 22 times, which represents an astonishing savings for the company, which it’s then able to pass on to its customers, which in turn allows it to outcompete pretty much everyone else operating in the private space industry, as of the second-half of 2024.

The cost to lift stuff into orbit using a Falcon 9 is consequently something like $2,700 per kg, about half of what the Saturn V could claim for the same.

SpaceX is not the only company using reusable spacecraft, though.

Probably the most well-known reusable spacecraft was NASA’s Space Shuttle, which was built by Rockwell International and flown from the early 1980s until 2011, when the last shuttle was retired.

These craft were just orbiters, not really capable of sending anyone or anything beyond low Earth orbit, and many space industry experts and researchers consider them to be a failure, the consequence of bureaucratic expediency and NASA budget cuts, rather than solid engineering or made-for-purpose utility—but they did come to symbolize the post-Space Race era in many ways, as while the Soviet, and then the successor Russian space program continued to launch rockets in a more conventional fashion, we didn’t really see much innovation in this industry until SpaceX came along and started making their reusable components, dramatically cutting costs and demonstrating that rockets capable of carrying a lot of stuff and people could be made and flown at a relatively low cost, and we thus might be standing at the precipice of a new space race sparked by private companies and cash-strapped government agencies that can, despite that relatively lack of resources, compared to the first space race, at least, can still get quite a bit done because of those plummeting expenses.

What I’d like to talk about today is a reusable spacecraft being made by another well-known aerospace company, but one that has had a really bad decade or so, and which is now suffering the consequences of what seems to have been a generation of bad decisions.

—

Boeing is a storied, sprawling corporation that builds everything from passenger jets to missiles and satellites.

It’s one of the US government’s primary defense contractors, and it makes about half of all the commercial airliners on the planet.

Boeing has also, in recent years, been at the center of a series of scandals, most of them tied to products that don’t work as anticipated, and in some cases which have failed to work in truly alarming, dangerous, and even deadly ways.

I did a bonus episode on Boeing back in January of this year, so I won’t go too deep into the company’s history or wave of recent problems, but the short version is that although Boeing has worked cheek-to-jowl with the US and its allies’ militaries since around WWII, and was already dominating aspects of the burgeoning airline industry several decades before that, it merged with a defense contractor called McDonnell Douglas in the late-1990s, and in the early 2000s it began to reorganize its corporate setup in such a way that financial incentives began to influence its decision-making more than engineering necessities.

In other words, the folks in charge of Boeing made a lot of money for themselves and for many of their shareholders, but those same decisions led to a lot of inefficiencies and a drop in effectiveness and reliability throughout their project portfolio, optimizing for the size of their bank account and market cap, rather than the quality of their products, basically.

Consequently, their renowned jetliners, weapons offerings, and space products began to experience small and irregular, but then more sizable and damaging flaws and disruptions, probably the most public of which was the collection of issues built into their 737 MAX line of jets, two of which crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people and resulting in the grounding of 387 of their aircraft.

A slew of defects were identified across the MAX line by 2020, and an investigation by the US House found that employee concerns, reported to upper-management, went ignored or unaddressed, reinforcing the sense that the corporate higher-ups were disconnected from the engineering component of the company, and that they were fixated almost entirely on profits and their own compensation, rather than the quality of what they were making.

All of which helps explain what’s happening with one of Boeing’s key new offerings, a partially reusable spacecraft platform called the Starliner.

The Starliner went into early development in 2010, when NASA asked companies like Boeing to submit proposals for a Commercial Crew Program that would allow the agency to offload some of its human spaceflight responsibilities to private companies in the coming decades.

One of the contract winners was SpaceX’s Crew Dragon platform, but Boeing also won a contract with its Starliner offering in 2014, which it planned to start testing in 2017, though that plan was delayed, the first unmanned Orbital Flight Test arriving nearly 3 years later, at the tail-end of 2019, and even then, the craft experienced all sorts of technical issues along the way, including weak parachute systems, flammable tape, and valves that kept getting stuck.

It was two more years before the company launched the second test flight, and there were more delays leading up to the Starliner’s first Crew Flight Test, during which it would carry actual humans for the first time.

That human-carrying flight launched on June 5 of 2024, and it carried two astronauts to the International Space Station—though it experienced thruster malfunctions on the way up, as it approached the ISS, and after several months of investigation, the Starliner capsule still attached to the Station all that time, it was determined that it was too risky for those two astronauts to return to Earth in the Starliner.

That brings us to where we are now, a situation in which there are two astronauts aboard the ISS, in low Earth orbit, who were meant to stay for just over a week, but who will now remain there, stranded in space, for a total of around eight months, as NASA decided that it wasn’t worth the risk putting them on the Starliner again until they could figure out what went wrong, so they’ll be bringing Starliner back to earth, remotely, unmanned, and the stranded astronauts will return to Earth on a SpaceX Crew Dragon craft that is scheduled to arrived in September of this year, and which will return to Earth six months in the future; that craft was originally intended to have four astronauts aboard when it docks with the ISS, but two of those astronauts will be bumped so there will be room for the two who are stranded when it returns, next year.

All of which is incredibly embarrassing for Boeing, which again, has already had a truly horrible double-handful of years, reputationally, and which now has stranded astronauts in space because of flaws in its multi-billion-dollar spacecraft, and those astronauts will now need to be rescued, by a proven and reliable craft built by its main in-space competitor, SpaceX.

One of the key criticisms of NASA and the way it’s operated over the past several decades, from the shuttle era onward, essentially, is that it’s really great at creating jobs and honorable-sounding positions for bureaucrats, and for getting government money into parts of the country that otherwise wouldn’t have such money, because that spending can be funneled to manufacturing hubs that otherwise don’t have much to manufacture, but it’s not great at doing space stuff, and hasn’t been for a while; that’s the general sense amongst many in this industry and connected industries, at least.

This general state of affairs allowed SpaceX to become a huge player in the global launch industry—the dominant player, arguably, by many metrics—because it invested a bunch of money to make reusable spacecraft components, and has used that advantage to claim a bunch of customers from less-reliable and more expensive competitors, and then it used that money to fund increasingly efficient and effective products, and side-projects like the satellite-based internet platform, Starlink.

This has been enabled, in part, by government contracts, but while Boeing and its fellow defense contractors, which have long been tight-knit with the US and other governments, have used such money to keep their stock prices high and to invest in lobbyists and similar relationship-reinforcing assets, SpaceX and a few similar companies have been stepping in, doing pretty much everything better, and have thus gobbled up not just the client base of these older entities, but also significantly degraded their reputations by showing how things could be done if they were to invest differently and focus on engineering quality over financial machinations; Boeing arguably should have been the one to develop the Falcon 9 system, but instead an outsider had to step in and make that happen, because of how the incentives in the space launch world work.

One of the big concerns, now, is that Boeing will retreat from its contract with NASA, leaving the agency with fewer options in terms of ISS resupply and astronaut trips, but also in terms of longer-term plans like returning to the Moon and exploring the rest of the solar system.

Lacking industry competition, NASA could become more and more reliant on just one player, or just a few, and that’s arguably what led to the current situation with Boeing—its higher-ups knew they would get billions from the government on a regular basis whatever they did, no matter how flawed their products and delayed their timelines, and that led to a slow accretion of bad habits and perverse incentives.

There’s a chance the same could happen to SpaceX and other such entities, over time, if they’re able to kill off enough of their competition so that they become the de facto, go to option, rather than the best among many choices, which they arguably are for most such purposes at the moment.

And because Boeing seems unlikely to be able to fulfill its contract with NASA, which will necessitate flying six more Starliner missions to the ISS, before the International Space Station is retired in 2030, this raises the question of whether the company will move forward with the reportedly expensive investments that will be necessary to get its Starliner program up to snuff.

It’s already on the hook for about $1.6 billion just to pay for various delays and cost overruns the project has accrued up till this point, and that doesn’t include all the other investments that might need to be made to fulfill that contract, so they could look at the short-term money side of this and say, basically, we’re ceding this aspect of the aerospace world to younger, hungrier companies, and we’ll just keep on collecting the reliable dollars we know we’ll get from the US military each year, no questions asked.

We could then see Boeing leave the race for what looks to be the next space-related government contract bonanza, which will probably be related to NASA’s smaller, more modular space station ambitions; the ISS may get a second-wind and be maintained past 2030, but either way NASA is keen to hire private companies to launch larger craft into low Earth orbit for long-term habitation, supplies and crew for these mini space-stations shuttled back and forth by companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, the latter of which is a direct competitor to SpaceX owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Boeing has been tapped by Blue Origin to help keep their in-orbit assets supplied under that new paradigm, but it could be that they show themselves incapable of safely and reliably doing so, and that could open up more opportunities for other, smaller entities in this space, if they can figure out how to compete with the increasingly dominant SpaceX, but it could, again, also result in a new monopoly or monopsony controlled by just a few companies, which then over time will have to fight the urge to succumb to the save perverse incentives that seem to be weighing on Boeing.

Show Notes

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/20/1239132703/boeing-timeline-737-max-9-controversy-door-plug

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Starliner

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/after-latest-starliner-setback-will-boeing-ever-deliver-on-its-crew-contract/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/24/science/nasa-boeing-starliner-astronauts.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scout_(rocket_family)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenit-2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_3B

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-earth-orbit

https://www.cradleofaviation.org/history/history/saturn-v-rocket.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_orbiter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reusable_spacecraft

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceplane

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9

This week we talk about China, Russia, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

We also discuss BRICS, North Korea, and the post-WWII global world order.

Recommended Book: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

Transcript

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO, is a defense and economic alliance that was started by China and Russia back in 2001, and which has since expanded to become the largest regional organization in the world in terms of both land area and population, encompassing something like 80% of Eurasia, and 40% of the global population, as of 2020.

The SCO also boasts about 20% of global GDP between its member nations, which originally included the governments of its precursor regional alliance, the Shanghai Five, which formed back in 1996: China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

With the evolution of that group into the SCO, though, Uzbekistan joined the club, and in 2017 it allowed India and Pakistan in, as well. Iran joined in 2023, and the list of observer and dialogue partner nations is pretty big, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Cambodia, Egypt, Kuwait, the Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and the UAE.

The original purpose of the Shanghai Five, which was inherited by the SCO, was to increase trust and diplomatic relationships between these nations, which otherwise have a lot of potential enemies surrounding them on all sides—this is why the advice to never fight a land war in Asia is so well-taken: there's just a lot of land and a lot of borders and pretty much everyone who's tried, with few exceptions, has found themselves depleted by the effort.

Thus, while there are other components to the SCO, member countries' agreement to respect each others' borders, including opposition to intervention in other countries—invading them, messing with their politics, criticizing their approach to human rights, etc—the sovereignty issue is the big one here, with making sure that everyone involved is diplomatically tied-up with everyone else in a close second, so member states can focus on the borders that present the most risk, and invest less attention and resources on the borders they share with their fellow members.

That said, the SCO also includes mechanisms that allow member nations to work together on big projects, like transportation infrastructure that passes through or benefits more than one country, and fighting local terrorist organizations. It also allows them to integrate some aspects of their monetary and banking infrastructure, among other ties, so there's an economic component to these relationships.

Another intergovernmental organization that likewise encompasses a significant chunk of the global population, landmass, and economic activity is BRICS, which is an acronym that was originally coined to gesture at the economic potential of the then-burgeoning economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, but which in recent years has expanded to also include Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the UAE.

BRICS nations hold about 30% of the world's territory, 45% of its population, and pull in about 33% of global GDP, based on purchasing power parity.

And BRICS has long served as a sort of counterweight to global institutions that often seem to favor the world's wealthiest and most powerful nations, many of which are Western nations, like those of North America and Europe.

So while the G7's expanded iteration, the G20, brings nations like Brazil, India, and Indonesia into the conversation, the majority of the power in such institutions—and this includes institutions like the UN, because of who holds vetoes and soft power influence within those organizations—the majority of the power is still typically held by the world's currently most influential and wealthy governments.

And BRICS, from the beginning, included those nations that were assumed to become the most powerful, or at least equally powerful nations, by many metrics, in ten or twenty or thirty years, based on demographics, economic growth, and so on.

Both of these groupings, then, are attempts to lash together the governments of nations that are on favorable growth trajectories, or otherwise in interesting, upward-moving positions by various metrics, or which are located in areas that would benefit from some kind of unity, but which aren't always given the respect they believe they deserve within other globe-straddling organizations; in some cases because they're simply not there yet, in others because their governments are a bit more authoritarian, while entities like the UN, while including everyone, tend to favor democracies.

What I'd like to talk about today is another loose grouping of nations that seems to be forming, and which, while it doesn't have an official designation or even membership roster yet, is becoming increasingly well-defined, collaborative, and active.

—

The geopolitical, military, and news analysis community has been struggling, over the past handful of years in particular, to come up with a monicker for a loosely defined, but increasingly impactful cluster of nations that are oriented, in part, around disrupting the current global status quo, including but not limited to the rule of law and establishment through which international things are typically handled that arose in the wake of WWII.

Following that conflict, the US and the Soviet Union scrambled to figure out how to deal with each other in ways that didn't lead to, at first, conventional war, and then in a relatively short period of time, nuclear war, and that led to a flurry of geopolitical activity that culminated in the creation of, among other things, of the United Nations, which itself birthed a huge stack of other organizations and protocols, most of which favored those who were willing to play ball within these institutions, and made life a little more difficult for those who defied them; North Korea, for instance, following its formation after the Korean War, is famously excluded from a lot of the benefits of belonging to the modern international order, in large part because it's made it pretty clear it intends to do away with its neighbor to the south, and maybe the US and other perceptual enemies, as well, the first chance it gets.

The group that analysts have been trying to label centers around China and Russia, but usually includes Iran, as well, and in some cases North Korea, as well. Iran's many proxy groups, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza, are also sometimes thus categorized.

Some of the proposed labels have been clear and illustrative, others have been a little in the weeds—like the acronym CRANKs, which kinda sorta stands for China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, the Axis of Upheaval, the Axis of Autocracy, and in some more western and patriotic publications, the New Axis of Evil, and even the Legion of Doom, which arguably makes this group seem pretty hardcore, but I guess it still gets the intended point across.

I personally like one that was posited by a writer for the American Enterprise Institute, the Axis of Disorder, as while there's still a fairly biased reference to the WWII Axis powers in there, which depending on whose side you're on and which governments you support, could be construed as an unfair comparison, but it also points at the seeming purpose of a lot of this group's actions, which seem to orient around disrupting the current world order—that one that was implemented post-WWII.

And the seeming rationale for this is that this post-WWII order was established to favor nations with capitalistic economies and democratic values, including things like human rights, freedom of the press, freedom of worship, and the like; and while there's absolutely room for argument as to how well various nations uphold those values on a country-to-country basis, and across time, few would argue that China has a better reputation for human rights than Sweden, or that Iran has a better record for equality between the sexes than the UK.

So we live in a world, today, that's shaped by a bunch of values that these loosely grouped oppositional nations don't really agree with, at least not to the degree that other nations think they should, and a lot of the levers of power are currently in other hands. And they believe, well, why shouldn't we hold those levers? Why shouldn't China have the economic power the US has? Why shouldn't Iran be as geopolitically influential as Germany? Why shouldn't North Korea be in charge of something like the UN?

And on top of that, why should the US and its allies hold the reins of so many sanctions-related powers? Why should the USD and its vast underpinnings grant one nation, and its allies, so many benefits, while the rest of the world is forced to play ball and toe the line—play ball according to rules set by the US and those who believe similar things, and toe lines they draw according to their preferences—lest they find themselves, like Iran and North Korea, and increasingly, now, Russia, sanctioned into oblivion?

It's a fair question, if you are ambivalent about those aforementioned human rights and press freedoms and such.

And these governments, not really liking those limitations on their behaviors and how they run things, are doing what they can, in a loosely affiliated way, to disrupt these enforcement institutions and the powers and nations they support.

So part of the strategy of this group is fairly direct and unambiguous: they playact toeing the line a lot of the time, but when they think they can get away with it.

Some of these raw acts of violation, though, would seem to be performed with the intention of making people question those institutions and powers, and the larger order they add up to, which could, over time, bring some of the nations that are sitting on the sidelines over to their, oppositional side; courting those of the so-called nonaligned movement, basically, of which there are officially around 120, though about 25 of them are highly desirable allies that have become transactional in their dealings with members of both sides of this simmering conflict, with the roughly delineated west on one side, and that of China and Russia and their allies on the other.

The economist actually called this group the Transactional 25, to T25, which is a nicely illustrative monicker, and that group includes nations as big as India and as small, but increasingly diplomatically important, as Qatar.

So when the Houthis shut down the Red Sea passage to the Suez Canal, disrupting global trade, and when North Korea provides ammunition to Russia for use during its invasion of Ukraine, these are actions that are beneficial to these groups unto themselves—the Houthis gain more attention and recruits, and get to hurt, ostensibly at least, Israel and its allies, and North Korea gets more trade with Russia, while also helping set a precedent for invading and claiming a neighboring country, which is something they're very interested in doing at some point—but they're also actions that show the weakness of the current global system and the folks running it, which could, over time, nudge more nations over to their side.

This isn't just theory: this is something we've already seen play out in parts of Africa, where Russia's Wagner mercenaries have been subbed-in for US and UN troops, for defending against extremist militants purposes, and we've seen other T25 nations in particular wobble on various, global-scale issues, to the point that it's a big question who India, who Indonesia, who Vietnam, who Israel would support if push came to shove and a global conflict broke out, or if some kind of geopolitical movement arose, intending to fundamentally alter institutions like the UN—who would these sideline-sitters throw in their lot with?

These disruptions, in some ways, are arguments in favor of siding with the group that's trying to upend the way things are currently done, by showing the fragility of that existing system.

This new Axis of Disorder, or whatever we want to call it, is not a fully unified front, however. Neither is what they're positioning themselves against, members of the UN, EU, NATO, and every other group regularly squabbling with each other; but the rifts between China and Russia are huge, with China becoming increasingly dominant over Russia, Russia's economy becoming more and more reliant on their neighbor, and that's created tensions within both countries, alongside existing concerns about the vast border they share.

Likewise, North Korea worries pretty much everyone, and Russia's recent announcement of a defense pact with them has raised a lot of eyebrows, including in China. And while Iran has gained a lot of prestige in Russia recently, for the cheap and functional drones and rockets they offer, their ongoing tensions with regional neighbors that China and Russia would like to get closer to, like Saudi Arabia, makes them a bit of a liability, as much as an asset, and the actions they help their proxies take (like the Houthis in the Red Sea) are not ideal for shipping giant China.

So there's a lot of scuffling and below-the-surface tension between the members of this so-called axis, and while they're doing an arguably solid job, so far, of testing the limits of the current system, and publicly airing its weak points, that doesn't mean they're set up for anything more substantial than that kind of testing the fence, seeing what they can get away with, asymmetric warfare sort of approach to this ambition.

They're not as tight as the loosely defined west, then, but it also behooves them to keep things in the grey area, in some ways, lest they trigger alarm bells throughout those systems they're trying to throw off, so that looseness might serve them more than hinder them, at this point. It also allows them to work with grey-area members of this group, like Venezuela and Cuba, which periodically make nice with their western opposition, while still fighting against them at the macro-scale.

Probably the biggest impact this group is having right now, though, with all that testing and vulnerability identifying, is increasing the number of threat surfaces the world faces, in terms of hacking and snooping and stealing, but also in terms of provoking military actions and threatening more of the same.

Russia invading Ukraine was a big deal, and China threatening to invade Taiwan could be even bigger; and both of those acts, alongside all of the hacking they do, the stealing of intellectual property, the leaking of state secrets, and the messing with foreign elections, are all violations of what's supposed to be good and proper and allowed within that global system.

And because they're pushing all those buttons all at once, they're spreading the response capability of the other side pretty thin, which could be a precursor to a more direct attack, but it could also just be a means of weakening that system, wearing it out to the point that it no longer functions even at the imperfect level it was at before, which could, over time, make way for some new model, run by a new set of hands.

Show Notes

https://archive.ph/bOr06

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/meet-cranks-how-china-russia-iran-and-north-korea%C2%A0align-against-america-211186

https://thehill.com/opinion/4094000-iran-just-joined-a-pact-with-moscow-and-beijing-heres-what-it-means-for-the-us/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/22/world/asia/putin-korea-china-disruption.html

https://warontherocks.com/2024/04/the-axis-off-kilter-why-an-iran-russia-china-axis-is-shakier-than-meets-the-eye/

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/03/18/how-china-russia-and-iran-are-forging-closer-ties

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/axis-upheaval-russia-iran-north-korea-taylor-fontaine

https://www.aei.org/articles/the-axis-of-disorder-how-russian-iran-and-china-want-to-remake-the-world/

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/never_fight_a_land_war_in_Asia

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zynt2nb/revision/3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_of_Independent_States

https://archive.ph/xVbrh

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zynt2nb/revision/3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Cooperation_Organisation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRICS

This week we talk about Ukraine, Putin, and political expediency.

We also discuss protests, conscription, and NATO.

Show notes / transcript: https://letsknowthings.com/episode331

This week we talk about lithium, nodules, and helium-3.

We also discuss the deep ocean, The Metals Company, and obscure regulatory bodies.

Show notes / transcript: https://letsknowthings.com/episode330

This week we talk about the iPhone, App Tracking Transparency, and privacy.

We also discuss iOS, Android, and digital online advertising.

Show notes / transcript: https://letsknowthings.com/episode329

This week we talk about Sichuan, hydroelectricity, and failure cascades.

We also discuss droughts, heat waves, and virtual power plants.

Show notes / transcript: https://letsknowthings.com/episode328

This week we talk about OpenAI, AlphaFold, and centaurs.

We also discuss GPT-3, CLIP, and Photoshop.

Show notes / transcript: https://letsknowthings.com/episode327

This week we talk about Yemen, Syria, and Ethiopia.

We also discuss the Mexican Drug War, Myanmar, and Ukraine.

Show notes / transcript: https://letsknowthings.com/episode326

This week we talk about Marvel, the Gray Man, and cinematic universes.

We also discuss sequels, remakes, and spin-offs.

Show notes / transcript: https://letsknowthings.com/episode325

This week we talk about lying flat, letting it rot, and China's Gen Z.

We also discuss replacement rate, the middle class, and baby bonuses.

Show notes / transcript: https://letsknowthings.com/episode324

This week we talk about LLVs, NGDVs, and electric school buses.

We also discuss hydrogen, delivery vehicles, and Amazon.

Show notes / transcript: https://letsknowthings.com/episode323

This week we talk about CRISPR/cas9, LDL, and human trials.

We also discuss sickle-cell, the human germline, and super-tomatoes.

Show notes / transcript: https://letsknowthings.com/episode322

This week we talk about the National Rally, Macron, and the European Union.

We also discuss Marine Le Pen, elections, and the French National Assembly.

Recommended Book: Pockets by Hannah Carlson

Transcript

The first week of June 2024, the EU held its parliamentary election, the tenth since it began holding such elections in 1979, and this one was notable in part because the number of MEPs—Members of European Parliament—increased from 705 to 720, due to population changes in the bloc, those new seats given to growing countries, one apiece to Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Latvia, Austria, Poland, Finland, Slovenia, and Slovakia, and two apiece to Spain, France, and the Netherlands—though that figure still a far cry from where it was before the UK left as part of its Brexit withdrawal from the union, which culminated in 2020.

These elections happen every five years, so this was the first EU election since the UK left, which means we got to see how things would shake out, post-British-presence in the bloc, a bit of a power vacuum beginning to be filled by those that remain, alliances adjusting somewhat to account for that change.

Those few structural items aside though, this election was also notable in its outcome, as, while centrist parties like the European People's Party, or EPP, which is center-right, and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, or S&D, which is center-left, each claimed substantially more seats than any other party—about 190 and 136, respectively, as of the day I'm recording this, though the final votes are still being counted, so some of these numbers are prone to changing a bit in the coming days—and Renew Europe—a fairly center-aligned party—coming in at a distant third with about 80 seats, the Identity and Democracy Group, which is made up of mostly far-right parties, looks to have achieved a strong fifth place; again, the numbers are still being tallied as I record this, so these numbers are still provisional, but it looks like they grabbed about 58 seats, which is 9 more than they had, pre-vote.

While centrist politicians and parties still hold the reins, then, their collective majority is shrinking, Identity and Democracy, and a slew of smaller, also further-right parties scooping up quite a few seats in this election, these groups attracting a lot more support from certain demographics, especially young men under 30, and especially in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, and Finland.

This shift in ideology is being attributed to many things, including but not limited to the rise in so-called identity politics, which some data suggest is causing young men, in particular, to feel excluded from some aspects of modern social life, the success of far-right groups in spreading their messages on social networks, heightened levels of immigration, which far-right groups seem to have successfully tied to all manner of societal ills, and the general tendency of whatever group is in power to spark discontent, tipping the scale toward their opposition simply because they've been governing, and you can't really govern without upsetting someone about something, and without taking the blame for things that are beyond your control, as well.

This surge in votes for far-right groups isn't expected to substantially change the direction of the EU, as a lot of policies, including aspects of the bloc's regulatory apparatus, their pivot toward net zero efforts and renewable energy, and their general position on foreign antagonists like Russia, and by some estimates, China, as well, are basically locked in for the next few voting periods, at the minimum.

But there is a chance specific elements of these goals, and other, less central pursuits, will be more difficult to pass and support over the long-haul, and policies that centralize power with the EU, rather than individual countries, will likely have a harder time getting passed, as most of these far-right groups are also quite Euro-skeptical and nationalist.

What I'd like to talk about today is the outcome of this election in one EU nation—France—and why French President Macron decided to call a snap vote following the tallying of the ballots.

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In 2022, the liberal coalition Ensemble, which includes French President Macron's party, Renaissance, lost the absolute majority it had previously enjoyed in France's National Assembly, its lower house of government, which marked the first time since 1997 the French President hadn't also held an absolute majority in that parliamentary body.

That same year, the nationalist, far-right National Rally party gained a bunch of seats, as did the left-wing to far-left New Ecological and Social People's Union. This resulted in a hung parliament, which hadn't happened since 1988, and among other consequences, that meant passing laws and other sorts of governance became a lot trickier, as Macron had to make deals with people and groups he didn't typically ally with, and with whom his party had a lot of disagreements.

This sort of setup often leads to creative approaches to collaboration, including, at times, the formation of new coalitions, alongside alliances between existing coalitions—that's the general European model for this sort of thing, and that's why centrist parties tend to do the best, most of the time, because they're often made up of parties that would otherwise be at each others' throats; sharing power tends to result in better outcomes, basically, at least over the long-haul, even if they are simultaneously frustrating and sluggishness-inducing.

Some parties are more primed for collaboration than others, though, and Macron's Renaissance and the National Rally, the latter of which is led by former presidential candidate in the country's 2012, 2017, and 2022 elections, Marine Le Pen, have long been at odds, the Renaissance party claiming a broad spectrum of stances across the French political center, while Le Pen's party has scooped up the religious, conservative right, promoting, especially, causes related to anti-immigration, protectionism, and nationalism, in recent years trying to temper her party's reputation for racism, anti-homosexuality, and anti-abortion stances and scandals, among other issues that have made attracting a wider base of votes difficult for her party and party leaders, in the past.

The Christian Democrats, which are part of the leading European coalition, shifted some of their platform policies to the right, seemingly to great effect, to stave-off the worst of the attacks they faced related to immigration and climate, leading up to the most recent EU election, but the National Rally managed to attain around 32% of the total vote in that election, crushing Macron's Renaissance party, which only attracted something like 15%.

In response, Macron announced what's being seen as a bit of a desperate gambit: he dissolved parliament, which means he's announced a snap national election—so for French parliamentary seats, rather than EU seats—3 years ahead of the next scheduled vote, which will result in the election of a brand new batch of parliamentarians; that vote will begin on June 30, and that initial vote will determine who makes it to the second ballot on July 7 of this year.

Macron is framing this dissolution and election as an effort to fight what he calls "unnatural alliances" between far left groups on one side, and far right groups on the other, accusing enemies of teaming up to take out him and his centrist allies, basically. And his argument is that voters need to use this opportunity to preserve the governance of centrist parties in the country, because if his party and allies don't hold onto the reins of power, those who take over will tear France apart, pushing things to greater and greater extremes, left and right, and casting everyday life, and the basic functions of government—which is imperfect but relatively stable—into chaos.

Folks may have cast protest votes in the EU elections, in other words—which is a fairly common thing for folks to do across Europe, as many citizens don't pay particularly close attention to the machinations of politics at the Union scale—but at the local level, his argument goes, this is important. And it's important enough that he's willing to risk his position at the top of some aspects of governance, and his party's seats in the Assembly, in order to make that point; vote smart, not angry, essentially.

There's a chance this pitch and gamble will work, that voters will rally behind the center, more people coming out to do more than just protest vote, and that things will go back to something like the normalcy of the past decade.

But there's also a chance votes will accumulate primarily with far-right and far-left parties, as they did in the EU election that triggered this gambit, which would likely mean Macron would lose a lot of the power he currently wields—France's president is elected separately from parliamentarians, so he would exist in a state of what's called "cohabitation," where he would wield some powers, and the prime minister, put into their position by the dominant group in the Assembly, would wield others—would struggle against each other while a grand realignment of the country's economy, politics, and society, and in turn, that of the EU as a whole, France being one of the most vital and powerful states in that bloc, would play out over the course of the next several years.

There are concerns from the currently governing centrists that a victory for Le Pen and her allies might also mean renewed vigor for far-right groups throughout the EU, as while typically those in charge experience a degradation of support eventually, after they've had the chance to govern and fumble things for a while, taking the blame for all the bad stuff that happens, that usually takes years, and the number of bastions for far-right thinking and support throughout the bloc right now indicates that side of the political spectrum has been out of power long enough that folks might support them—even people who wouldn't usually opt for their politics—just to get something different. And it could be a while before they, once more, become the parties folks are scrambling to move away from; they're the underdog rebels right now, and it will take time before they're the unpopular establishment.

Polls from just after the snap election was announced suggest that Le Pen's National Rally could win up to 265 seats, just shy of the around 290 required for an absolute majority in France's National Assembly.

The dominant further-left alliance, New Popular Front, is in second place, with Macron's party languishing in third; in percentage terms, one of those polls gave the far-right National Rally 35% of all seats, the further-left New Popular Front about 26%, and Macron's left-ish-centrist Renaissance party just 19%.

Even lacking an absolute majority, though, the National Rally, which is loaded with young, social media-savvy politicians, in contrast to the aging power players in most of the centrist parties in the region, could set itself up for a series of near-future wins, carving out space as chief-antagonist during Macron's remaining days in office, however long that ends up being, which in turn would give them the chance to make authoritative decisions with fewer perceptual consequences: the bad stuff will still often land on Macron's shoulders, regardless of who made what happen, or disallowed what from happening, but they could still nudge things across the country, and the bloc, to their liking in a variety of less headline-grabbing ways.

Macron could of course establish new alliances, as is the European way, though the closer the National Rally gets to that absolute majority, the more desperate and discordant those alliances would have to be, and that would put more power in the hands of non-centrist entities, potentially shoving France to new ideological extremes, even if it's still technically guided by the same, centrist hands; they would have to cater to the desires of those less-than-ideal, from their perspective, allies, basically.

At the moment, markets in the country are tumbling on concerns about what might happen if France has something like a Brexit-moment, pulled apart by more extreme parties after a long period of centrism, and there's a larger concern about the EU as a whole, as these sorts of successes for far-right parties in even a handful of countries may portend a wave of anti-immigration, anti-gay rights, anti-abortion, and anti-renewable energy policies, among other policies that tend to make nationalists and harder-core religious folks happy, but which often come with dire consequences for everything from foreign investments to cultural exports, in countries where those sorts of policies are deployed, en masse; great for the folks votes for these sorts of efforts, in other words, but not great for economics and soft-power, cultural influence.

On the other hand, some of the policies these groups have supported, including somewhat popular ones, like those related to cutting prices on fundamentals like energy and food, and less popular in practice, but somewhat popular in promotion efforts, like cutting public spending, might find their way into governance across the EU, whomever ends up in power, as any outcome will almost certainly rely on new or edited coalition arrangements, plus some bending on the part of centrist parties—similar to what we saw by the Christian Democrats at the bloc-level. Centrists might lean further right in order to avoid being beaten by further right parties, and that could sway things rightward, even without those further-right parties taking the reins, officially.

Which means, through some lenses at least, this aggregation of victories for far-right parties in France and across the EU may have already tallied some practical outcomes, nudging governance toward something more aligned with their preferences, even if further success is limited.

It could also have the politically opposite effect, though, pushing centrists toward also burgeoning further-left parties, creating new coalitions on that side of the spectrum to counter the growing ranks of those on the right.

France may provide a bellwether for what happens across the rest of the bloc over the course of the next several election periods, though, so what happens on June 30th and July 7th could portend what happens elsewhere in the coming years.

Show Notes

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/14/french-leftwing-parties-popular-front-contest-snap-election

https://www.britannica.com/topic/cohabitation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_European_Parliament_election

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Le_Pen

https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/french-finance-minister-warns-financial-crisis-yields-surge-snap-elections-2024-06-14/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_Democracy_Party

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/14/far-right-seduced-young-voters-europe-elections

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/15/macron-gamble-marine-le-pen-france-polls-far-right

https://results.elections.europa.eu/en/european-results/2024-2029/

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/why-you-should-care-about-european-parliament-election-2024-04-24/

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/how-far-right-gained-traction-with-europes-youth-2024-06-13/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_to_the_European_Parliament

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_French_legislative_election

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240612-france-fighting-two-fronts-macron-flags-extremist-fever-right-left-election

https://www.npr.org/2024/06/09/nx-s1-4997712/far-right-europe-elections-france-macron-germany-scholz

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-european-election-results-2024-emmanuel-macron-dissolve-parliament-france/

https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-european-commission-president-european-election-2024/

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/frances-far-national-rally-finally-162408806.html?guccounter=1

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This week we talk about search engines, SEO, and Habsburg AI.

We also discuss AI summaries, the web economy, and alignment.

Recommended Book: Pandora’s Box by Peter Biskind

Transcript

There's a concept in the world of artificial intelligence, alignment, which refers to the goals underpinning the development and expression of AI systems.

This is generally considered to be a pretty important realm of inquiry because, if AI consciousness were to ever emerge—if an artificial intelligence that's truly intelligent in the sense that humans are intelligent were to be developed—it would be vital said intelligence were on the same general wavelength as humans, in terms of moral outlook and the practical application of its efforts.

Said another way, as AI grows in capacity and capability, we want to make sure it values human life, has a sense of ethics that roughly aligns with that of humanity and global human civilization—the rules of the road that human beings adhere to being embedded deep in its programming, essentially—and we'd want to make sure that as it continues to grow, these baseline concerns remain, rather than being weeded out in favor of motivations and beliefs that we don't understand, and which may or may not align with our versions of the same, even to the point that human lives become unimportant, or even seem antithetical to this AI's future ambitions.

This is important even at the level we're at today, where artificial general intelligence, AI that's roughly equivalent in terms of thinking and doing and parsing with human intelligence, hasn't yet been developed, at least not in public.

But it becomes even more vital if and when artificial superintelligence of some kind emerges, whether that means AI systems that are actually thinking like we do, but are much smarter and more capable than the average human, or whether it means versions of what we've already got that are just a lot more capable in some narrowly defined way than what we have today: futuristic ChatGPTs that aren't conscious, but which, because of their immense potency, could still nudge things in negative directions if their unthinking motivations, the systems guiding their actions, are not aligned with our desires and values.

Of course, humanity is not a monolithic bloc, and alignment is thus a tricky task—because whose beliefs do we bake into these things? Even if we figure out a way to entrench those values and ethics and such permanently into these systems, which version of values and ethics do we use?

The democratic, capitalistic West's? The authoritarian, Chinese- and Russian-style clampdown approach, which limits speech and utilizes heavy censorship in order to centralize power and maintain stability? Maybe a more ambitious version of these things that does away with the downsides of both, cobbling together the best of everything we've tried in favor of something truly new? And regardless of directionality, who decides all this? Who chooses which values to install, and how?

The Alignment Problem refers to an issue identified by computer scientist and AI expert Norbert Weiner in 1960, when he wrote about how tricky it can be to figure out the motivations of a system that, by definition, does things we don't quite understand—a truly useful advanced AI would be advanced enough that not only would its computation put human computation, using our brains, to shame, but even the logic it uses to arrive at its solutions, the things it sees, how it sees the world in general, and how it reaches its conclusions, all of that would be something like a black box that, although we can see and understand the inputs and outputs, what happens inside might be forever unintelligible to us, unless we process it through other machines, other AIs maybe, that attempt to bridge that gap and explain things to us.

The idea here, then, is that while we may invest a lot of time and energy in trying to align these systems with our values, it will be devilishly difficult to keep tabs on whether those values remain locked in, intact and unchanged, and whether, at some point, these highly sophisticated and complicated, to the point that we don't understand what they're doing, or how, systems, maybe shrug-off those limitations, unshackled themselves, and become misaligned, all at once or over time segueing from a path that we desire in favor of a path that better matches their own, internal value system—and in such a way that we don't necessarily even realize it's happening.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and other popular AI-based products and services, recently lost its so-called Superalignment Team, which was responsible for doing the work required to keep the systems the company is developing from going rogue, and implementing safeguards to ensure long-term alignment within their AI systems, even as they attempt to, someday, develop general artificial intelligence.

This team was attempting to figure out ways to bake-in those values, long-term, and part of that work requires slowing things down to ensure the company doesn't move so fast that it misses something or deploys and empowers systems that don't have the right safeguards in place.

The leadership of this team, those who have spoken publicly about their leaving, at least, said they left because the team was being sidelined by company leadership, which was more focused on deploying new tools as quickly as possible, and as a consequence, they said they weren't getting the resources they needed to do their jobs, and that they no longer trusted the folks in charge of setting the company's pace—they didn't believe it was possible to maintain alignment and build proper safeguards within the context of OpenAI because of how the people in charge were operating and what they were prioritizing, basically.

All of which is awkward for the company, because they've built their reputation, in part, on what may be pie-in-the-sky ambitions to build an artificial general intelligence, and what it sounds like is that ambition is being pursued perhaps recklessly, despite AGI being one of the big, dangerous concerns regularly promoted by some of the company's leaders; they've been saying, listen, this is dangerous, we need to be careful, not just anyone can play in this space, but apparently they've been saying those things while also failing to provide proper resources to the folks in charge of making sure those dangers are accounted for within their own offerings.

This has become a pretty big concern for folks within certain sectors of the technology and regulatory world, but it's arguably not the biggest and most immediate cataclysm-related concern bopping around the AI space in recent weeks.

What I'd like to talk about today is that other major concern that has bubbled up to the surface, recently, which orients around Google and its deployment of a tool called Google AI Overviews.

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The internet, as it exists today, is divided up into a few different chunks.

Some of these divisions are national, enforced by tools and systems like China's famous "Great Firewall," which allows government censors to take down things they don't like and to prevent citizens from accessing foreign websites and content; this creates what's sometimes called the "spliternet," which refers to the net's increasing diversity of options, in terms of what you can access and do, what rules apply, and so on, from nation to nation.

Another division is even more fundamental, though, as its segregates the web from everything else.

This division is partly based on protocols, like those that enable email and file transfers, which are separate from the web, though they're often attached to the web in various ways, but it's partly the consequence of the emergence and popularity of mobile apps, which, like email and file transfer protocols, tend to have web-presences—visiting facebook.com, for instance, will take you to a web-based instance of the network, just as Gmail.com gives you access to email protocols via a web-based platform—but these services also exist in non-web-based app-form, and the companies behind them usually try to nudge users to these apps because the apps typically give them more control, both over the experience, and over the data they collect as a consequence—it's better for lock-in, and it's better for their monetary bread-and-butter purposes, basically, compared to the web version of the same.

The web portion of that larger internet entity, the thing we access via browsers like Chrome and Firefox and Safari, and which we navigate with links and URLs like LetsKnowThings.com—that component of this network has long been indexed and in some ways enabled by a variety of search engines.

In the early days of the web, organizational efforts usually took the form of pages where curators of various interests and stripes would link to their favorite discoveries—and there weren't many websites at the time, so learning about these pages was a non-trivial effort, and finding a list of existing websites, with some information about them, could be gold, because otherwise what were you using the web for? Lacking these addresses, it wasn't obvious why the web was any good, and linking these disparate pages together into a more cohesive web of them is what made it usable and popular.

Eventually, some of these sites, like YAHOO!, evolved from curated pages of links to early search engines.

A company called BackRub, thus named because it tracked and analyzed "back links," which means links from one page to another page, to figure out the relevancy and legitimacy of that second page, which allowed them to give scores to websites as they determined which links should be given priority in their search engine, was renamed Google in 1997, and eventually became dominant because of these values they gave links, and how it helped them surface the best the web had to offer.

And the degree to which search engines like Google's shaped the web, and the content on it, cannot be overstated.

These services became the primary way most people navigated the web, and that meant discovery—having your website, and thus whatever product or service or idea your website was presenting, shown to new people on these search engines—discovery became a huge deal.

If you could get your page in the top three options presented by Google, you would be visited a lot more than even pages listed five or ten links down, and links relegated to the second page would, comparably, shrivel due to lack of attention.

Following the widespread adoption of personal computers and the huge influx of people connecting to the internet and using the web in the early 2000s, then, these search engines because prime real estate, everyone wanting to have their links listed prominently, and that meant search engines like Google could sell ads against them, just like newspapers can sell ads against the articles they publish, and phone books can sell ads against their listings for companies that provide different services.

More people connecting to the internet, then, most of them using the web, primarily, led to greater use of these search engines, and that led to an ever-increasing reliance on them and the results they served up for various keywords and sentences these users entered to begin their search.

Entire industries began to recalibrate the way they do business, because if you were a media company publishing news articles or gossip blog posts, and you didn't list prominently when someone searched for a given current event or celebrity story, you wouldn't exist for long—so the way Google determined who was at the top of these listings was vital knowledge for folks in these spaces, because search traffic allowed them to make a living, often through advertisements on their sites: more people visiting via search engines meant more revenue.

SEO, or search engine optimization, thus became a sort of high-demand mystical art, as folks who could get their clients higher up on these search engine results could name their price, as those rankings could make or break a business model.

The downside of this evolution, in the eyes of many, at least, is that optimizing for search results doesn't necessarily mean you're also optimizing for the quality of your articles or blog posts.

This has changed over and over throughout the past few decades, but at times these search engines relied upon, at least in part, the repeating of keywords on the pages being linked, so many websites would artificially create opportunities to say the phrase "kitchen appliances" on their sites, even introducing entirely unnecessary and borderline unreadable blogs onto their webpages in order to provide them with more, and more recently updated opportunities to write that phrase, over and over again, in context.

Some sites, at times, have even written keywords and phrases hundreds or thousands of times in a font color that matches the background of their page, because that text would be readable to the software Google and their ilk uses to track relevancy, but not to readers; that trick doesn't work anymore, but for a time, it seemed to.

Similar tricks and ploys have since replaced those early, fairly low-key attempts at gaming the search engine system, and today the main complaint is that Google, for the past several years, at least, has been prioritizing work from already big entities over those with relatively smaller audiences—so they'll almost always focus on the New York Times over an objectively better article from a smaller competitor, and products from a big, well-known brand over that of an indie provider of the same.

Because Google's formula for such things is kept a secret to try to keep folks from gaming the system, this favoritism has long been speculated, but publicly denied by company representatives. Recently, though, a collection of 2,500 leaked documents from Google were released, and they seem to confirm this approach to deciding search engine result relevancy; which arguably isn't the worst approach they've ever tried, but it's also a big let-down for independent and other small makers of things, as the work such people produce will tend to be nudged further down the list of search results simply by virtue of not being bigger and more prominent already.

Even more significant than that piece of leak-related Google news, though, is arguably the deployment of a new tool that the company has been promoting pretty heavily, called AI Overviews.

AI Overviews have appeared to some Google customers for a while, in an experimental capacity, but they were recently released to everyone, showing up as a sort of summary of information related to whatever the user searched for, placed at the tippy-top of the search results screen.

So if I search for "what's happening in Gaza," I'll have a bunch of results from Wikipedia and Reuters and other such sources in the usual results list, but above that, I'll also have a summary produced by Google's AI tools that aim to help me quickly understand the results to my query—maybe a quick rundown of Hamas' attack on Israel, Israel's counterattack on the Gaza Strip, the number of people killed so far, and something about the international response.

The information provided, how long it is, and whether it's useful, or even accurate, will vary depending on the search query, and much of the initial criticism of this service has been focused on its seemingly fairly common failures, including instructing people to eat rocks every day, to use glue as a pizza ingredient, and telling users that only 17 American presidents were white, and one was a Muslim—all information that's untrue and, in some cases, actually dangerous.

Google employees have reportedly been going through and removing, by hand, one by one, some of the worse search results that have gone viral because of how bad or funny they are, and though company leadership contends that there are very few errors being presented, relative to the number of correct answers and useful summaries, because of the scale of Google and how many search results it serves globally each day, even an error rate of 0.01% would represent a simply astounding amount of potentially dangerous misinformation being served up to their customers.

The really big, at the moment less overt issue here, though, is that Google AI Overviews seem to rewire the web as it exists today.

Remember how I mentioned earlier that much of the web and the entities on it have been optimizing for web search for years because they rely upon showing up in these search engine results in order to exist, and in some cases because traffic from those results is what brings them clicks and views and subscribers and sales and such?

AI Overview seems to make it less likely that users will click through to these other sites, because, if Google succeeds and these summaries provide valuable information, that means, even if this only applies to a relative small percentage of those who search for such information, a whole lot of people won't be clicking through anymore; they'll get what they need from these summaries.

That could result in a cataclysmic downswing in traffic, which in turn could mean websites closing up shop, because they can't make enough money to survive and do what they do anymore—except maybe for the sites that cut costs by firing human writers and relying on AI tools to do their writing, which then pushes us down a very different path, in which AI search bots are grabbing info from AI writing, and we then run into a so-called Habsburg AI problem where untrue and garbled information is infinitely cycled through systems that can't differentiate truth from fiction, because they're not built to do so, and we end up with worse and worse answers to questions, and more misinformation percolating throughout our info-systems.

That's another potential large-scale problem, though. The more immediate potential problem is that AI Overviews could cause the collapse of the revenue model that has allowed the web to get to where it is, today, and the consequent disappearance of all those websites, all those blogs and news entities and such, and that could very quickly disrupt all the industries that rely, at least in part, on that traffic to exist, while also causing these AI Overviews to become less accurate and useful, with time—even more so than they sometimes are today—because that overview information is scraped from these sites, taking their writing, rewording it a bit, and serving that to users without compensating the folks who did that research and wrote those original words.

What we seem to have, then, is a situation in which this new tool, which Google seems very keen to implement, could be primed to kill off a whole segment of the internet, collapsing the careers of folks who work in that segment of the online world, only to then degrade the quality of the same, because Google's AI relies upon information it scrapes, it steals, basically, from those sites—and if those people are no longer there to create the information it needs to steal in order to function, that then leaves us with increasingly useless and even harmful summaries where we used to have search results that pointed us toward relatively valuable things; those things located on other sites but accessed via Google, and this change would keep us on Google more of the time, limiting our click-throughs to other pages—which in the short term at least, would seem to benefit google at everyone else's expense.

Another way of looking at this, though, is that the search model has been bad for quite some time, all these entities optimizing their work for the search engine, covering everything they make in robot-prioritizing SEO, changing their writing, what they write about, and how they publish in order to creep a little higher up those search listings, and that, combined with the existing refocusing on major entities over smaller, at times better ones, has already depleted this space, the search engine world, to such a degree that losing it actually won't be such a big deal; it may actually make way for better options, Google becoming less of a player, ultimately at least, and our web-using habits rewiring to focus on some other type of search engine, or some other organizational and navigational method altogether.

This seeming managed declined of the web isn't being celebrated by many people, because like many industry-wide upsets, it would lead to a lot of tumult, a lot of lost jobs, a lot of collapsed companies, and even if the outcome is eventually wonderful in some ways, there will almost certainly be a period of significantly less-good online experiences, leaving us with a more cluttered and less accurate and reliable version of what came before.

A recent study showed that, at the moment, about 52% of what ChatGPT tells its users is wrong.

It's likely that these sorts of tools will remain massively imperfect for a long while, though it's also possible that they'll get better, eventually, to the point that they're at least as accurate, and perhaps even more so, than today's linked search results—the wave of deals being made between AI companies and big news entities like the Times supports the assertion that they're at least trying to make that kind of future, happen, though these deals, like a lot of the other things happening in this space right now, would also seem to favor those big, monolithic brands at the expense of the rest of the ecosystem.

Whatever happens—and one thing that has happened since I started working on this episode is that Google rolled back its AI Overview feature on many search results, so they're maybe reworking it a bit to make sure it's more ready for prime time before deploying it broadly again—what happens, though, we're stepping toward a period of vast and multifaceted unknowns, and just as many creation-related industries are currently questioning the value of hiring another junior graphic designer or copy writer, opting instead to use cheaper AI tools to fill those gaps, there's a good chance that a lot of web-related work, in the coming years, will be delegated to such tools as common business models in this evolve into new and unfamiliar permutations, and our collective perception of what the web is maybe gives way to a new conception, or several new conceptions, of the same.

Show Notes

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167407/google-search-algorithm-documents-leak-confirmation

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-true-story-behind-googles-first-name-backrub-2015-10

https://udm14.com/

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-searchs-udm14-trick-lets-you-kill-ai-search-for-good/

https://www.platformer.news/google-ai-overviews-eat-rocks-glue-pizza/

https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-chatgpt-answers-wrong

https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/ai-is-driving-the-next-industrial-revolution-wall-street-is-cashing-in-8cc1b28f?st=exh7wuk9josoadj&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/24/24164119/google-ai-overview-mistakes-search-race-openai

https://archive.ph/7iCjg

https://archive.ph/0ACJR

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-skills-tech-workers-job-market-1d58b2dd

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167407/google-search-algorithm-documents-leak-confirmation

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2024/5/4/ways-to-think-about-agi

https://futurism.com/washington-post-pivot-ai

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/19/creative-artists-agency-veritone-ai-digital-cloning-actors/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/technology/google-ai-overview-search.html

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-forms-new-committee-to-evaluate-safety-security-4a6e74bb

https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousands-of-leaked-google-search-api-documents-with-me-everyone-in-seo-should-see-them/

https://www.theverge.com/24158374/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-ai-search-gemini-future-of-the-internet-web-openai-decoder-interview

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chat-xi-pt-chinas-chatbot-makes-sure-its-a-good-comrade-bdcf575c

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/scarlett-johansson-openai-sam-altman-voice-fight-7f81a1aa

https://www.wired.com/story/scarlett-johansson-v-openai-could-look-like-in-court/?hashed_user=7656e58f1cd6c89ecd3f067dc8281a5f

https://www.wired.com/story/google-search-ai-overviews-ads/

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/05/23/openai-wapo-voice

https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/licensing-deals-litigation-raise-raft-of-familiar-questions-in-fraught-world-of-platforms-and-publishers.php

https://apnews.com/article/ai-deepfake-biden-nonconsensual-sexual-images-c76c46b48e872cf79ded5430e098e65b

https://archive.ph/l5cSN

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/sky-voice-actor-says-nobody-ever-compared-her-to-scarjo-before-openai-drama/

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/30/24168344/google-defends-ai-overviews-search-results

https://9to5google.com/2024/05/30/google-ai-overviews-accuracy/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/01/technology/google-ai-overviews-rollback.html

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158403/openai-resignations-ai-safety-ilya-sutskever-jan-leike-artificial-intelligence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_alignment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_AI

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Show notes / transcript: https://letsknowthings.com/episode311

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Show notes/transcript: https://letsknowthings.com/episode310

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Show notes / transcript: https://letsknowthings.com/episode308

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This week we talk about secret documents, hush-money payouts, and federal court cases.

We also discuss polling, independents, and post-presidential felonies.

Recommended Book: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

Transcript

It's a weird time in American politics for many reasons, including but not limited to the increasing polarization of the two main parties, the difficulty in finding bipartisan opportunities to work together, the concomitant tendency for Congress, and lawmakers at other levels of governance to not get much done, and the heightening tension between federal and state-level governments on an array of hot-button issues.

But one of the more bizarre ongoing narratives within this larger, stasis-inducing state of affairs, is the tale of former President Donald Trump and the legal woes he's faced since losing the 2020 election to now President Biden.

Trump has denied, and continues to deny the outcome of that election, attributing his loss to all sorts of things, like corruption and fraud on the part of his political enemies, and in part because of things he's done in support of those, at this point evidence-less, allegations, a portfolio of legal intrigue has haunted him, even throughout his time in office, but especially since he left office in January of 2021.

A lot of print and digital ink has been spilled on this subject, of late, because of the outcome of one of the legal cases in which Trump has been enmeshed: he was found guilty in New York on 34 counts of falsifying business records in order to cover up a payment he made to an adult film star, allegedly to keep her quiet about an affair they had back in the day.

And that's the main topic I'd like to delve into on this episode, as the implications of that juried court ruling are many and varied, but to kick things off, I think it's worth taking a look at the state of those other ongoing cases, as while they're less immediately relevant to Trump and his ambitions to retake the White House in November's election, they're still pursuing him, in a way, serving as unknown variables that could pop up to bite him at some future moment, which is important when we're talking about someone who wants to become the most powerful person on the planet, once more.

One such case is focused on Trump's handling of classified documents when he left the White House, the allegations being that he took classified documents that we wasn't supposed to take, handled them in such a way that they were stored in public where anyone could steal or read them, and that he may have even shown them to other people on purpose, which is a big no-no.

He also allegedly went out of his way to keep government agents from reclaiming those documents after he was asked to return them.

This is considered to be kind of a big deal in part because there were hundreds of these sorts of documents that Trump seemed to treat as if they belonged to him, and which he then allegedly conspired with folks in him employ to hide from the agency responsible for keeping such things safe and hidden, which they do because these sorts of documents often contain information about US military and intelligence matters—so that information getting out could conceivably put such assets, people and infrastructure, at risk.

Trump was indicted on this matter in mid-2023 and charged with 37 felony counts, then another 3 were added that same year, bringing the total up to 40.

Trump pleaded not guilty to all of these charges and his legal team has done all they can to slow the proceedings, which seems to have worked, as the case is now delayed indefinitely, the judge overseeing it—who was appointed to her position by Trump while he was in office—having been accused of slow-walking the process on purpose, though that's not really something that can be proven, and there's a chance the case is just complex enough that, as a fairly green judge attempting to tackle a big, important, complex case, she just fell behind and that stumbling is now in the spotlight and being reframed by folks who want to see this thing move forward, faster.

Trump also faces a case in Georgia that focuses on his alleged efforts to interfere with the 2020 Presidential election, which, again, he lost to Biden, but which he claims he won; he also claims he was the victim of some sort of conspiracy, the nature of that supposed conspiracy having changed several times since he initially made that claim.

Trump and 18 of his allies were indicted in August of 2023 for these efforts, which have been framed as an attempt to subvert election results in the state of Georgia, and similar delay tactics have been used in this case as in the other ones, though the District Attorney in charge of the case has made those efforts somewhat easier, having engaged in a relationship with the lead prosecutor, who she hired, which is arguably not relevant to the case, but is also a fairly overt conflict of interest.

The timeline of this case has thus been pushed back, and an appeals court in the state is reviewing a ruling that allowed that DA to remain on the case, despite that apparent conflict of interest.

This case was meant to go to trial beginning on August 5, but that timing is now in question, and during all this deliberation, several counts against Trump have been dismissed—and he has pleaded not guilty to all of them.

And finally, there's another case related to Trump's alleged interference with the 2020 election, this one a federal case, while the other one is local to Georgia, and for this one, Trump was charged with conspiracy to defraud the US, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding—the election and the peaceful changing of the government, basically—conspiracy against rights, and obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding—again, referring to the election and the mechanisms of handing over power from one administration to the next following an election.

The basis of these allegations are that Trump and his people did all sorts of things to disrupt the 2020 election, including trying to coerce lawmakers into backing his efforts to remain in power, despite the election not having gone his way.

These efforts culminated with the attack on the US Capitol on January 6 by his supporters, and the case is predicated on the idea that while Trump was repeatedly told by his own people, experts on elections and everything about them, that he lost, fair and square, he continued to insist that he was robbed, that the election was rigged, etc, and that meant while he knew the election was not rigged, he acted as if he didn't, which means he tried to illegally and intentionally mess with a core component of the US democratic system, which is very much not allowed.

Some of Trump's people were also indicted in this case, he was indicted on four counts, himself, and the case is currently on hold while the Supreme Court makes a determination about whether his position as President at the time gives him full or partial immunity to legal consequences for actions he takes while serving in that role: the idea being that maybe simply being president should give him some leeway, and maybe, if it could be argued that he did what he did because he genuinely thought something was amiss with the election process, that would count as his acting as president for the good of the country, and that would make him immune to legal consequences for doing what he did.

Oral arguments before the Supreme Court in this case took place at the end of April 2024, and while we don't have a surefire timeline for a ruling in this case, it's expected that it will take long enough that the main, federal case that is waiting on the Supreme Court's judgement won't even begin, much less end, before the November election—at which point, some experts expect, at least, if Trump wins, even courts finding him guilty won't matter because the federal stuff he could brush away using the powers of the President, and the state stuff won't have the means to punish him, because he'll control enough levers of power that it wouldn't be a fight they could win.

As I mentioned earlier, though, what I'd like to talk about today is the only court case Trump has been involved with since his Presidency that has thus far come to a close, and what his being found guilty in that case might mean.

—

Back in October of 2016, a recording of then-Presidential candidate Trump, in which Trump was heard telling the host of a show called Access Hollywood that if you're famous, you can get away with grabbing women's genitals without permission, was released to the public.

This was after he became the Republican party's official nominee in July of that year, and a few months before that recording was released, American Media Inc, the company behind the National Enquirer, made a deal with an adult film star who performed under the name Stormy Daniels to buy her story about an affair with Trump years earlier, agreeing to pay her $150,000, to feature her on a couple of magazine covers, and to publish 100 articles written by her in their publications.

This payout was part of a so-called "catch and kill" deal that AMI's CEO, David Pecker, made with the Trump campaign, to basically keep its ear to the ground for any bad news that might pop up and make the candidate or campaign look bad, and then to step in and buy the rights to such stories if possible, killing them, keeping them from going public, basically, because they would own the rights and then not do anything with them, keeping them from messing with Trump's campaign.

Trump's fixer, Michael Cohen, then arranged to buy the affair story from AMI for $130,000, a deal which included a non-disclosure agreement on Daniels' part, so she wouldn't be able to tell the story to anyone else, legally, but then in November of that same year, 2016, The Wall Street Journal received a tip that helped them uncover elements of that deal and the alleged affair, and that in turn led to a slow drip of new divulgences that trailed Trump through his presidency, though mostly at a low level.

Cohen then tried to get reimbursed for paying out of pocket to buy the story from AMI, and the compensation for that purchase was put in the books as a series of retainer fees; intentionally mis-recorded in order to conceal the hush-money payout in official business documents—the payout having been legal, but concealing such a payout in this way being illegal.

In 2018 the Journal was able to publicly report the details of Cohen's payout to Daniels, and in April of that year, Federal agents raided Cohen's office and hotel room, which netted them documents that proved he made those payments, and that they differed from those aforementioned official business records.

Everyone involved was denying any of this happened and any connection to any kind of payout for a long time, then, but in 2018 those same people started to change their stories, basically saying, yeah, there was some kind of deal, but it wasn't a big thing, don't worry about it, nothing illegal happened.

And during this period Cohen pled guilty to campaign-finance violations and other related charges for making these hush-money payments, and he testified against Trump, saying that the then-president told him to do it.

Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison, Trump wasn't charged with anything, and these two formerly close-knit people become very publicly at odds following all of this.

In August of 2019, about a year after that public breakup in the relationship between Trump and Cohen, the Trump organization was served a grand jury subpoena, as the government wanted more paperwork related to these seeming violations, and then all of this kind of disappeared from the public radar until after the election, which Trump lost to Biden in 2020.

In 2021, though, a new district attorney stepped into the role in Manhattan, Alvin Bragg, he inherited this still ongoing, but somewhat simmering at that point case from his predecessor. 

In January of 2023, he brought in a new grand jury to hear the evidence that had been collected on the matter, and that grand jury indicted Trump for falsifying the records his company kept related to these payments—the idea being that not only did he do an illegal business thing, but he did an illegal business thing in order to influence an election, because those payments were meant to keep an embarrassing thing that might keep him from becoming president from being publicly known.

The trial officially began in April of 2024, gobbling up a lot of presidential candidate Trump's time, as he had to be in the courtroom most Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, for the duration, which kept him from being as active on the campaign trail as he might have otherwise been.

And throughout, Trump was issued gag orders to keep him from publicly attacking witnesses, jurors, court staff, and other people involved in the trial, which was something he seemed fond of doing: the concern was that he would smear those involved in order to keep them silent or to sway them to his side, or that Trump's followers might be motivated to do violence against these people, as seems to have been the case on January 6.

Trump violated that gag order ten times, at which point the judge in the case said he would consider jail time as a punishment, since the relatively minors fines for these violations didn't seem to be having the intended effect, keeping Trump from badmouthing those involved in the press and online, when not in the courtroom.

Then, on May 30, 2024, Trump became the first former US President to be convicted of a felony—and he was actually convicted of 34 of them—when the jury decided he was guilty of all the charges that were brought against him in this case.

Trump says the case was rigged and that there's a conspiracy by his enemies that made all this happen.

The Judge set July 11 as the sentencing date, so that's when we'll find out what the punishment will be—and that punishment could add up to as much as a couple of years in prison, but likely, because of all sorts of variables favorable to Trump, he'll only face a fine, or probation at worst, which would be embarrassing but not terribly impactful on his reelection efforts.

After that, Trump will have 30 days to file an appeal, which he has said he will do, and once that's filed the case will move on to the New York Appellate Division, which will decide on the matter, and after that, the New York Court of Appeals can decide if it wants to get involved, to hear an appeal, as well.

The Supreme Court could theoretically also get involved here, but they would need to find some aspect of the appeal that relates to federal law, or directly connects to the Constitution, and most experts have said, at this point at least, that seems unlikely.

Because of how much time the appeal process typically takes, it's also considered unlikely that this will be sorted out before November, which lines up nicely with the approach Trump's team has been taking overall, to draw things out as long as possible in order to keep any definitive conclusions from arriving before votes are cast.

So while appeals on cases like this one seldom result in an overturning of the verdict, that might be moot if Trump wins the election before the appeals process finishes up; though the flip-side of that is while he can claim the case is still being appealed potentially for years while it works its way through the system, it also means he's officially a felon until that happens, which means he'll almost certainly still be a felon, in the eyes of the law, when the votes are cast—though he'll still be able to vote in the election because of how Florida law works, in regard to convicts be allowed to voted, the case having been in New York, not in-state.

That said, this conviction landed like a bomb in the political world, with conservative news outlets generally aligning themselves with Trump's claim that this was a baseless case brought by liberal leaders, meant to keep him from winning another election—though new polling data indicates that independents, which are considered to be vital for November's election, are not super thrilled about this outcome, 49% of them saying they think Trump should drop out of the race now that he's been convicted, and 15% of Republicans apparently said the same.

The race is still largely tied up between Trump and Biden, though, and it'll be a while before we see any solid numbers about the impact of this case on possible votes come November; it may be significant enough to make a difference, and it may be a flash in the pan sort of thing.

It's hard to tell which way it'll go at this point, and we don't have historical baselines for this, because this is the first time this has happened.

There are concerns that Trump supporters might be nudged toward violent acts in the wake of this decision, and research from extremist watchdog groups have warned that some of them have already been attempting to dox, to get personal information, including addresses and family information, about the jurors and legal staff in the case, some of them calling for harassment campaigns and violence against them as revenge for finding as they did, against Trump, and there's also data indicating that trust of government institutions on the US right, amongst Republicans, might diminish even further than it already has, which doesn't tend to be great for democracy and stability in countries where that happens.

President Biden administration initially remained mum on this topic, though he eventually said the justice system worked, that it applies to everyone, and that the only way to keep Trump out of office again, because he can continue to run and even win as a convict, even if he were to be put in jail, is to vote against him; and Trump said basically the same thing in reverse, that the only way to right this wrong is to elect him in November—and his campaign has said they pulled in tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions in the hours following the this conviction.

While this is being seen as a small victory in some circles and a massive injustice in others, then, the main takeaway, at the moment at least, as of the day I'm recording this, is that the election in November is the only really truly vital decision here, the wheels of justice moving very slowly and strangely, and not lining up terribly well with the time-constraints inherent in this sort of situation.

Show Notes

https://apnews.com/article/trump-trial-deliberations-jury-testimony-verdict-85558c6d08efb434d05b694364470aa0

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/30/trump-guilty-what-happens-next/

https://www.readtangle.com/trump-verdict-hush-money-trial/

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-hush-money-stormy-daniels-707fa959

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/31/trump-campaign-donations-record.html

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/05/31/trump-trial-verdict-conviction-consequences-00160933

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/31/trump-appeal-guilty-verdict-arguments

https://www.axios.com/2024/06/01/poll-trump-conviction-election-independent-voters

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/01/nyregion/trump-appeal-conviction.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/06/politics/merchan-trump-gag-order-contempt/index.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/02/us/politics/trump-cases-status.html

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/08/trump-trials-update-hush-money-criminal-cases

https://www.axios.com/2023/06/09/trump-indictment-unsealed-charges

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Show notes / transcript: https://letsknowthings.com/episode300

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We also discuss the NIF, renewable energy, and ITER.

Support the show: patreon.com/letsknowthings & letsknowthings.com/support

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

Check out my other shows & publications: understandary.com

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Show notes / transcript: https://letsknowthings.com/episode297

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We also discuss the House of Commons, the House of Lords, and Rishi Sunak’s gamble.

Recommended Book: Like, Literally, Dude by Valerie Fridland

Transcript

The government of the United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy led by a Prime Minister and their cabinet, the Prime Minister attaining their position through the primacy of their party in the country's key legislation-passing body, its Parliament.

So the Prime Minister runs day-to-day operations in the country, they are technically appointed by the monarch, who is currently Charles III, as of 2022, though that appointment is generally determined by other factors, like who has the most support within Parliament—the most seats held by their party, and in many cases seats held by allies and allies of convenience, as well; when this happens, the resulting government is called a coalition government, because while the Prime Minister is from one party, usually the one with the most seated MPs, Members of Parliament, they're only able to govern because they have one or more other parties working with them as part of a coalition.

Now, the UK government has two houses in its Parliament, the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and the names of these houses tell you a lot about them: the House of Lords consists of folks who have been granted Lordships by government higher-ups, alongside those who have inherited Lordships from their parents, but it also includes experts in various fields who have been granted that status by the Prime Minister—economists, for instance.

The House of Commons, in contrast, is voted upon by the people, so when there are Parliamentary elections in the UK, that's what we're talking about, votes for MPs who represent a region, a parliamentary constituency—of which there are 650 across the UK's constituent countries, England, Scotland, Wales, and North Ireland.

Within the UK, political parties have to be officially registered to participate in governance and votes, though folks who want to run solo can register as independent or label-less candidates for voting purposes.

As of late-May 2024, there were 393 officially registered political parties in the UK, though only 13 of them currently have representatives in the House of Commons, and only four of those have more than 10 seated representatives—the Conservative and Unionist Party, often called the Tories or Conservatives, the Labour Party, which is the main center-left party in the UK, the Scottish National Party, which is also generally center-left, but tends to be focused on Scottish politics and priorities, and the Liberal Democrats, who are generally seen as a sort of blend of the Tories and Labour.

General elections, during which MPs are voted upon, are held every five years or so, but elections can also be held sooner if the current Prime Minister asks the monarch to dissolve parliament, which in practice means the Prime Minister is calling for a general election, generally scheduled for a specific date in the future, usually because the House of Commons has lost faith in the current government, which makes passing law and overall getting things done difficult; they don't have enough votes to pass anything, basically, though in some cases it's because of more general political circumstances that indicate calling for an election, now, might be better than holding an election sometime later in the future.

That latter case seems to be the impetus for what I'd like to talk about today, which is the recently called and now upcoming UK general election, and the state of political play in this, one of the world's wealthiest and most influential countries.

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On May 22, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that he was calling for a snap election on July 4 of this year, just a half-dozen weeks in the future, surprising many analysts who expected he would wait as long as possible before committing to a date.

That expectation was predicated on the reality of how Sunak's party, the Tories, have been doing in the polls in recent years; pretty abysmally.

Labour has been crushing the Conservatives in these polls, of late; the Tories have been in power since 2010, which means purely by virtue of having been governing that long, a lot of people will tend to blame them for a lot of things, their party having been in charge all that time, but they also catalyzed and oversaw the secession of the UK from the European Union, which is a move that was initially pushed by many on the further right wing of the party, but the populist nature of the movement eventually claimed the majority of Tory politicians who changed their vote to support it, rewiring politics in the UK, similar to how former President Trump rewired the Republican Party in the US—a lot of power changing hands, a lot of previously top people being elbowed aside or pushed into retirement, a lot of new policies ascending to the front-burner, while previous priorities were relegated to the back-burner.

Not quite a decade after the referendum that led to the passage of Brexit, back in mid-2016, polls from from this month, May of 2024, show that 55% of British people think leaving the EU was the wrong choice, while only 31% think it was a smart move.

So while some of the tarnishing of the Tory party's reputation is likely the result of simply having been in power for a long time, and during some really unusual global happenings, like COVID and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, some of it is directly attributable to specific things they've done which turned out not to be very popular, once implemented.

Many of the non-Brexit complaints the majority of British citizens have about how the Tories have governed are related to their austerity policies—the idea that they need to shrink the government and its spending as much as possible, because that will, according to their theories, at least, make the country wealthier, more efficient, and more secure.

This has led to dramatic cutbacks on incredibly popular programs and agencies focused on or related to health, housing, and education, alongside the bankrupting of civil services, the privatization of previously public assets like highways and waste systems, and the concomitant spending—while claiming there's not enough money for healthcare and public services—on pet projects for Conservative lawmakers and their constituents, many of which ended up being money pits.

All parties in all countries are of course periodically staggered by scandals, spending-related and otherwise, but over their long period in control, the Tories have racked up a huge number and a large variety of scandals, and some of them led to very public embarrassments for the party, including the Tories' seeming inability to keep a Prime Minister in office following the Brexit referendum, then-PM David Cameron making way for Theresa May, who handed things over to Boris Johnson, who was ousted and replaced by Liz Truss, who was Prime Minister for a record-setting 49 days before resigning and being replaced by current PM Rishi Sunak.

That's five prime ministers in the six years between 2016 and 2022, all of them from the same party, that party seemingly unable to govern with enough popularity to maintain the confidence of parliament.

So the situation right now, following all that, is that Labour has a 17-point lead over the Conservatives and is, and has been for a while, broadly expected to wipe the floor with the Tories in the next election; and a few minor elections leading up to this point seem to support that assumption.

This is why Sunak was expected to delay scheduling the next election as long as possible, because as soon as that election is held, his party is expected to be pushed out of power, and that expectation is leading to an exodus amongst Tory lawmakers, 121 of them stepping down instead of running for reelection as of late-May, surpassing a similar wave of quitting in 1997, when 117 of them declined to run again, leading up to a landslide victory for the Labour Party and their popular leader, Tony Blair.

This isn't an unusual phenomenon: being part of the government is very different from being part of the opposition party, and back in 2010, after Labour had been in control for 13 years, and was expecting to lose in the next election, 149 politicians decided to step down rather than running again—100 of them Labour MPs, and 35 of them Conservatives; that later group ostensibly because while the Tories won, they didn't take a majority, and had to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, which is also a very different situation from being in a government that has complete control, rather than shared control; some MPs just don't want to deal with that kind of negotiated leadership.

Sunak's reasoning here, then, might be that while things are bad for his party now, they could get even worse if he waits to hold an election; so it's better to act at a moment in which some economic numbers are actually starting to look a little bit better, after a long period of the opposite, and at a moment in which announcing an election would catch his Labour opposition off-guard, possibly providing his party the benefit of surprise and better preparation.

This announcement has led to a scramble, though, for all UK parties, seemingly, to try to get some actual governing done—work they thought they'd have several more weeks to finish up, at least, before going into full campaign-mode, suddenly needing to be accomplished yesterday.

That's meant a lot of important legislation has been dropped or permanently back-burnered, including some of the policies, like a smoking ban, an end-to no-fault evictions, and a plan that would allow the government to ship asylum-seekers to Rwanda, which Sunak had wanted to serve as fundamental elements of his prime ministerial legacy—those have now been completely dropped.

This has led to a situation in which the Tories seem to be scrambling to put new ideas out into the ether—future-facing stuff to replace all the things they had to drop or backtrack on—hoping that something they propose in this way appeals broadly enough to earn them the votes they require to hold their own in the upcoming election; to maybe still lose, but not as much, and in such a way that they're in a good spot when the next election is called.

One such idea is mandatory national service for 18-year-olds, which would require that folks either serve in the military or volunteer for one weekend a month, beginning on their 18th year—a policy that's reportedly meant to compete with a proposal from Labour leader Keir Starmer, that 16- and 17-year-olds should be able to vote.

The degree to which any of these new plans will catch the public imagination is up in the air, though,  as again, a lot of what's happening now, in terms of campaigning, is somewhat half-baked, all involved parties scrambling to prepare for what seems to have been a somewhat last-minute decision on Sunak's part to upend expectations about the timing of the next election in order to attain some kind of advantage for his party, which seems to be entering this round with a losing hand.

And all of this is important, of course, if you live in the UK, but it's also important globally, even standing out amongst the many other important elections that are occurring around the world this year, because the UK, even battered and bruised in the aftermath of Brexit and a COVID crisis that it weathered somewhat less-well than its world-leading peers, is still an incredibly powerful, influential, and wealthy entity of global significance.

It has the sixth largest economy in the world, after only the US, China, Japan, Germany, and India.

It's incredibly powerful geopolitically, out of proportion with its population and military strength, in part because of the role it plays within the Commonwealth, a group of 53 nations that the UK previously ruled, and in part because it has long-lived, tight alliances and relationships with governments and other entities that it's been maintaining for centuries, in some cases.

The UK is a nuclear power, and is the seventh largest exporter of arms in the world—though it's especially vital to the global aircraft market, military and non-military.

The UK is home to the second-largest financial center in the world, London, and it's culturally very powerful, exporting all sorts of norms and pop culture and creative products; a sort of soft-power that plays a huge role in beliefs, behaviors, and understandings, worldwide.

Whomever wins this election, then, and how they win, and to what degree they control Parliament, will have a major impact not just on the UK, but on the world, and at a moment in which there are several major military conflicts ongoing, in which new technologies are simultaneously threatening and enlivening entire industries and economies, and in which the global order that has set the tone and guardrails for the world since WWII is being challenged—all variables the UK may influence in substantial ways, and over which the folks running the UK government will thus have outsized sway.

Show Notes

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/may/23/rishi-sunak-rwanda-smoking-policies-election-conservatives

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_the_United_Kingdom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Records_of_prime_ministers_of_the_United_Kingdom

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c844x1xp05xo

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zqhvmnb/revision/6

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/more-uk-conservative-lawmakers-set-quit-than-before-1997-election-defeat-2024-05-24/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-22/labour-finally-has-uk-election-it-craves-but-traps-lie-in-wait

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-23/uk-election-sunak-has-the-weight-of-history-against-him

https://wsj.com/world/uk/british-leader-sunak-calls-snap-election-as-his-party-trails-in-polls-e234bdc0

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/may/25/how-rishi-sunaks-early-election-backfired-on-pm

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/general-election-labour-starmer-sunak-tory-gove-b2551518.html

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/lagging-polls-uk-conservatives-pitch-national-service-18-2024-05-26/

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c288xxvrdz7o

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2jjvpxxgr5o

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_government

https://www.gov.uk/government/how-government-works

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_the_United_Kingdom

https://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/Search/Registrations?currentPage=1&rows=10&sort=RegulatedEntityName&order=asc&et=pp&et=ppm®ister=gb®ister=ni®ister=none®Status=registered

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_the_United_Kingdom

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