AI is the digital asbestos we'll be digging out of our walls for decades

Cory Doctorow at his best, incredible, I couldn't have brought this all together in one essay said any better.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Cory dismisses all the garbage claims and worries, and gets to the heart of it all.  AI is intended to cost middle class thinking and creative jobs, like computer coding, that's why so much is being invested in it.  The plan is to lay lots of those people off,  Then what about them?

Well, if AI delivered what it promised, this might well make consumers happy.  Why pay those people if AI does the job better?  But it won't.  It will make things go bad quickly.

Unlike earlier technologies which empowered people, creating centaurs like a human driving a car with the car doing the muscle work, AI creates reverse-centaurs, where humans are reduced to the function of monitoring the AI that does the "original" thinking.

The problem here is that people don't monitor things very well.  They are much better wired for actually doing things, including the original thinking.  Monitoring AI's thinking, when AI is designed to always choose the next most probable choice which always looks fine on the face of things, is an impossible task for people to do.  Especially the less experienced and less well paid people corporations plan to hire after the mass AI layoffs.  The basic problem is well known already and called automation blindness.

So we'll be left with shitty everything, delivered to us by corporate monopolies that offered us no choice, with mass unemployment and underemployment like never before.  And no easy way back.

Producers AND Consumers must unite to fight this monster.

Maybe after the bubble is popped, some of the developments and capabilities will be useful in limited ways, Cory details this too, but nothing like the investment going into them.  It won't be as simple as the WorldCom bust, which actually left useful fiber in the ground still being used.

I'd encourage people to never abandon real thinking and skills.  I myself continue writing blogs and computer programs the old fashioned way.

Cory also expounds on something relevant to this blog.  Cory says he writes parables and not forecasts.  That's what I do also.  It's like, if we keep doing business as usual, the climate in 2100 will be devastating.  But I don't know if we'll continue to do 'business as usual' by then.  I hope we don't, and at some point people accept the correct ideas, I'm hoping to create some here, and steer away from the greater disaster.  Then suppose 2100 arrives and disaster doesn't happen because of great social changes were made, similar to those I've suggested, to prevent it.  It would seem by then that my prognostications while wrong were useful.  And that is the point.  Not to foresee the future but to help guide it, by helping to illuminate the entire view.

Passports and Gender

Firstly, there is no good reason for passports to indicate the holder's "Sex" at all, it's supposedly for "identification" but such "identification" is of very limited value compared with the picture.  It's based on norms or stereotypes.  There are tall muscular women and short less muscular men, the reverse of the norms, and such people shouldn't be subject to extra suspicion.  I hate stereotypes*.  

Sex wasn't added to passports until 1976.  Somehow, humanity got by for thousands of years without such identification.  In 1976 the excuse was that changing styling norms made implicit Sex harder to identify.  But I can't understand why that was even an issue.  The look is the look, regardless of what Sex it suggests or embodies, and the look is what you see, unless you are disrobing people.  No government official needs to know the Sex.  They just need to see that the picture matches, and now we have sophisticated biometric facial matching.  Those are now considered so good that specifying height and weight is not done anymore.  (I think height and weight would be more useful than Sex for identification in most cases.  They can change but usually not that quickly.)

Anyway, a "Sex" requirement for Passports is now in international agreements.  I'd have my country comply with current international agreements by making X the requirement for all.  We don't participate in stereotyping.  Look at the picture, look at the other information.  Sex assignment is none of your damned business.  Both libertarians and communists should support that, with different reasoning.  Communists should realize such information only serves some kind of discrimination or exploitation, which is what pure communism is supposed to eliminate.  Libertarians should see any information that does not serve a legitimate government purpose should not be provided to it, because it enables some kind of unwanted government control.  Sex at birth neither identifies the current presentation (clothes, styling) nor the current genitals.

But if you ARE going to have Sex for identification, it's pretty good follow the rules established in 1992 for such purposes.  After sexual modification, one becomes the new gender for identification purposes.  Even the Soviet Union recognized that.  Then X is for people who haven't yet met those modification requirements.  This was a very reasonable system, neither fully libertarian (everyone is X) or not.

Requiring only sex at birth does not serve identification requirements.  It is political posturing against trans sexuality, and nothing more.

It might not be entirely unreasonable to add more explicit labels than X.  For example, trans-Male and trans-Female.  These would be used if people didn't yet qualify for labeling as their chosen gender under the '92 rules.  This works for identification even better than the '92 system.  It's not the preferred solution of either libertarians or communists, but it's not unreasonable either.

Identification by current sex status could be useful with dead bodies.  That is, what are the genitals now, not what were they at birth.  That's basically what the '92 rules do, and indicating the trans status goes farther than X which could be either.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/politics/supreme-court-passport-sex-markers-transgender

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/opinion/supreme-court-trump-passports-gender.html

The Supreme Court claimed "sex at birth" is a historical fact.  Fine, but Customs is not an academic or medical history department.  It is involved with identification for which "Sex at birth" is not even a relevant fact.  The fact relevant to identification would be Sex at Present.

*I'm kind of an odd person myself, and that seems to attract the most aggressive dogs, thugs, and racist cops, except that as a lucky white guy I haven't had any trouble with cops.  I would prefer being judged by rules rather than stereotypes.  If I'm not stepping on owner's property, or if I'm doing so for a legitimate purpose like delivering the mail, leave me alone.  I don't want to be attacked because I look fearful or indecisive or just different.

Debunking October 7 Rape Allegations

https://x.com/zei_squirrel/status/1984972198520492039

Norman Finkelstein points to the very same UN report that Israelis tout as proof that there was rape by Hamas (based on "witness" reports).  That very same report concluded there was no physical evidence of any kind (photographic, video, or forensic).  5000 photos and 50 hours of video were examined.

The claimed rapes were in public, gang rapes, with the Israeli witnesses claiming to be hiding nearby.  Any one of these witnesses could have take a photograph or cell phone video, but none exist.  The region next to Gaza has more security cameras than anywhere on earth.  And yet, there is no security camera footage of these alleged rapes.

Finkelstein concludes there is not merely "no evidence," there is strong evidence the rapes did not occur.

A number of the other viral photographs and videos are also debunked in this thread.

Hundreds of independent journalists are boycotting the NYTimes opinion page because of their fueling of Hamas rape hoaxes.

https://x.com/aaronjmate/status/1982854007514095657

*****

Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers flaunt their actual documented rapes and those who dare prosecute them are persecuted.

https://x.com/aaronjmate/status/1985516055414862065

LLM AI is a dead end

 Ed Zitron's ultimate denunciation of Large Language Model AI.

I agree completely, and he barely mentions that even if it worked, the desired ends are mass unemployment and (not mentioned) surveillance.

He says this is different from other kinds of AI like self driving cars, which he doesn't discuss further.

Full of interesting links too.

The CIA created the New Left

Here's a long X thread on how and why western intelligence agencies created a New Left focused on cultural issues to divert attention away from Class Warfare.

Authors/Books Mentioned:

Hauke Ritz

Who Paid The Piper by Frances Stonor Saunders

The Death of the Left

"The Ghost In The Machine" substack essay by Ryan Perkins (highly recommended).

The End of Ideology by Daniel Bell

I'll Burn That Bridge When I Come To It by Norman Finkelstein

le Capitalisme de la Seduction by Michel Clouscard

Who Paid The Pipers of Western Marxism by Gabriel Rockhill

Funny I didn't see any mention of the Frankfurt School of Critical Marxism in the X thread (but it is brought up in the Perkins essay).  That goes way back and was infamously enabled by western intelligence in various ways.

One of the key features of the New Left, Frankfurt School, and so on was the focus on subjectivity, as compared to the materialism of Marx's Marxism.  As Ryan Perkins says in The Ghost In The Machine:

The constant fragmenting of group identity and the downward spiral of subjectivity has created an atomised society of isolated and disempowered individuals inoculating society against solidarity.

Swing Dance Styles

I'm now learning West Coast Swing, which only seems especially difficult to me because all the swing dancing I've done before derived from Lindy Hop, the original swing dance from the 20's.  When I learned swing dancing in California in the 1980's, what I was learning was Jitterbug, a simplified version of Lindy Hop from the 30's.  Another simplified version of Lindy Hop from the 30's, and later standardized, became East Coast Swing.  But the original Lindy was generally considered the most athletic, most challenging, and had the most variations and potential improvisations of all.  Finally, West Coast Swing, an entirely different dance, was invented for dancing at concerts in the 40's and 50's.  Lindy Hop is a stationary dance you can do in one small spot if you need to, like on stage, and West Coast Swing is a panel dance you can do in one small floor area, going back and forth but never exactly stationary.

https://duetdancestudio.com/blog-dance-lessons-chicago/east-coast-swing-vs-west-coast-swing

RO systems remove microplastics better than other filters alone

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10054062/

Not surprisingly, RO systems are better at removing microplastics than other filters and do so quite efficiently.  (I was even worried the RO might add microplastics, because the membrane itself is plastic, but apparently whatever it adds is dwarfed by what it removes.)

Other research shows that microplastics mainly result from heat, such as heating water in plastic cups.

I'm shocked at how many liberals and leftists are utterly opposed to RO filtration and insist you must drink tap water.

I use RO water for drinking--including icemaking, cooking, and facial cleansing.  I plan to get a chlorine filter for my shower.

I think it's worth it just for removing the chlorine and chlorine byproducts, not to mention mediocre taste, especially after chilling.  My chilled 9ppm RO filtered water tastes wonderfully crisp and everything cooked tastes better.

I noticed fewer issues on my fact when I started using RO water for facial cleansing.

Chlorine is one of the most reactive substances there is, but strangely people regard it as safe in tiny amounts in their drinking water, while sweating even smaller amounts of metals like lead (also removed by RO) which are relatively inert, in water supplies, chocolate, and protein powders.  Not long ago, we were literally drowning in lead, now in close to parts per billion it's become the reason to avoid everything good.

For that matter, microplastics are fairly inert too.

It is true that calcium supplementation is more called for since I would otherwise be getting about 250mg calcium from my water, which is largely lost.  But that would be true anyway, just in slightly smaller amount.  One must add up and determined the additional needed calcium to reach 1000mg or 1200mg for seniors.