Climate change effects

From the viewpoint of the 

insurance industry 

To recap: due to rising seas and increasing hurricane and wildfire risk and other long-predicted consequences of global warming, the cost of insurance for homeowners in many disaster-prone areas has been skyrocketing at a staggering rate. Many of these areas, particularly the coastal South, are the same places experiencing the fastest population growth in America. State governments want to maintain this economic influx. Because we have no coherent federal policy for managing insurance rates (much less for adequately dealing with the underlying problem of carbon emissions), states are left with the problem themselves. Because many state governments are run by some of the most craven political cowards you will find anywhere, they tend to manage the problem of fleeing insurance companies by trying to stuff policies into state-run “insurer of last resort” firms. Because state governments do not have enough money to actually pay out the claims in the event of a serious disaster in a highly populated area, what we are really dealing with is sort of the paper fiction of insurance—just enough to keep the real estate market pumping and stave off immediate exodus, with the implicit knowledge that in the worst case scenario, these (red, socialist-loathing) states will run to the federal government for a bailout, and then keep on doing the same thing. It is emblematic of our general response to the problem of climate change itself: ignore it, paper it over, and pray that the bill doesn’t come due while it’s our responsibility to pay it.

…

I am not even suggesting answers to these questions here. I am just trying to illustrate how far away we are from a genuine public discourse on this topic. We are still mired in the “Everything is fine!” phase, where nervous, sweating politicians with pasted-on smiles beckon you into their doomed states while silently praying that the collapse doesn’t come while they’re still in office. Even the more enlightened political discussions tend to focus on the near future, rather than gaming out the full, decades-long cost of our battle to defend the status quo. We need leaders brave enough to make millions of people face the fact that they are fucked one way or another, and the only question is how specifically they are going to be fucked, and how soon. Yet our electoral system is optimized against anyone who talks like this being able to sustain a long career. We prefer being soothed and lied to. So I expect it to continue in that vein for far longer than it should. By the time America is ready to talk about this crisis like adults, the method of fucking will, I’m guessing, already be decided by Mother Nature herself.

AI 2024

Situational awareness

The most extraordinary techno-capital acceleration has been set in motion. As AI revenue grows rapidly, many trillions of dollars will go into GPU, datacenter, and power buildout before the end of the decade. The industrial mobilization, including growing US electricity production by 10s of percent, will be intense. 

AGI by 2027 is strikingly plausible. GPT-2 to GPT-4 took us from ~preschooler to ~smart high-schooler abilities in 4 years. Tracing trendlines in compute (~0.5 orders of magnitude or OOMs/year), algorithmic efficiencies (~0.5 OOMs/year), and “unhobbling” gains (from chatbot to agent), we should expect another preschooler-to-high-schooler-sized qualitative jump by 2027. 

After hope for climate action ends

All we have is courage 

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/06/courage-or-hope-facing-the-climate-future.html

Economic termites

Parasitic activity   monopoly rent extraction from miscellaneous gatekeepers 

‘something is very wrong with our society’ is everywhere now. Corporate procurement officers just assume costs are going up, it’s in budget projections for the Defense Department, and we expect cost overruns on everything. ‘Inflation’ is now a catch-all for a basic view that stuff is just going to suck more and more. 

So what’s going on? Today’s piece is about a concept I am going to call ‘economic termites,’ which are instances of monopolization big enough to make investors a huge amount of money, but not noticeable enough for most of us. An individual termite isn’t big enough to matter, but the existence of a termite is extremely bad news, because it means there are others. Add enough of them up, and you get our modern economic experience.

The concept of an economic termite is the cousin to Cory Doctorow’s ‘enshittification’ or Yves Smith’s ‘crapification,’ terms that describe how a platform gradually degrades the quality of its service as it gains market power and gets pushed to extract cash by financiers. Economic termites describes where these same forces get into the mostly unseen business foundations of our society and profiteer.

Degrowth

An Introductory thread

To eradicate poverty at $5 a day, global GDP would have to increase to 175 times its present size. In other words, we need to extract, produce and consume 175 times more commodities than we presently do.... Even if such outlandish growth were possible, the consequences would be disastrous. We would quickly chew through our planet’s ecosystems, destroying the forests, the soils and, most importantly, the climate.... 'There is simply no way this can be achieved without triggering truly catastrophic climate change – which, apart from anything else, would obliterate any potential gains from poverty reduction.’

Russian side of the Ukraine

Here is the two part article by Guy Mettan in the Floutist Substack about the other side of the front line, ie the Russian side. Guy Mettan “is an independent journalist in Geneva and a member of the Grand Council of the Canton of Geneva. He has previously worked at the Journal de Genève, Le Temps stratégique, Bilan, and Le Nouveau Quotidien. He subsequently served as director and editor-in-chief of Tribune de Genève. In 1996, Mettan founded Le Club suisse de la presse, of which he was president and later director from 1998 to 2019. ”

Part 1:
https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/report-from-donbas

Part 2:
https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/in-ukraine-a-war-for-memory

These articles are written in a style that all war correspondents should emulate. Lots of information in them that I haven’t seen written about anywhere else concerning the return to life as “normal” before the Maiden coup. Amazing what Russia is doing already to rebuild.