On the waterfront

Is Trump playing games with tariffs to manipulate the markets for financial gain?

YouTube:

Kara and Scott discuss Senator Joni Ernst’s callous comments about Medicaid cuts, Texas’s new law requiring app stores to verify ages, and Taylor Swift’s blockbuster deal to get the rights to her masters. Then, Elon leaves The White House with a literal black eye, and denies a New York Times report about his ketamine use. Plus, Trump raises tariffs yet again, and lashes out at China.

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
6:09 Sen. Ernst: “We All Are Going to Die”
14:41 Texas Age Verification Bill
21:29 Taylor Swift Regains Ownership of Masters
24:55 Elon Denies Drug Use
33:55 Trump Axes Elon Ally for NASA Admin
38:26 Trump Doubles Steel and Aluminum Tariffs
43:48 Trump Lashes Out at China
48:19 Wins and Fails

While the whole discussion is worth listening to – except for the opening 6 minutes, which is BS of interest only to Swisher/Galloway fans – I’ve cued it up to the discussion of tariffs at 38:26. We start off with TACO, “Trump Always Chickens Out,” which is widely taken as an index of his incompetence. Starting at about 40:21 Scott Galloway asserts that Trump is using tariffs to deliberately manipulate the markets so that he and his insider buddies can make a “shit-ton” of money.

Why we're nowhere near AGI (whatever that is)

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆 𝗳𝗮𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗮 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗮𝗹𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘆 𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗱 𝗔𝗚𝗜 𝗼𝗿 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗹𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘆 𝗲𝘅𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝗰𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗱. 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝘆:

1. True AGI [Artificial General Intelligence] ought to be…

— Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) June 2, 2025

Hydrangea blossoms

Ukraine vs. Russia, drones vs. behemoth

Helene CooperJulian E. BarnesEric SchmittLara Jakes and Adam Entous, Ukraine Shows It Can Still Flip the Script on How Wars Are Waged, NYTimes, June 2, 2025.

In launching an audacious drone attack on airfields and warplanes deep inside Russia, Ukraine is continuing to change the way wars will be conducted in the 21st century, according to U.S. officials and military analysts.

American and European security officials said battle damage assessments were still coming in from the attacks, which took place Sunday, but they estimated that as many as 20 Russian strategic aircraft may have been destroyed or severely damaged, dealing a serious blow to Russian’s long-range strike capabilities.

Officials said Russia’s losses included six Tu-95 and four TU-22M long-range strategic bombers, as well as A-50 warplanes, which are used to detect air defenses and guided missiles.

The attack, known as Operation Spider’s Web, hurt Moscow’s prized strategic capabilities. But just as significantly, it demonstrated Ukraine’s ability to strike nearly anywhere in Russia, and to destroy warplanes costing $100 million or more with drones with price tags as low as $600, according to one U.S. defense official. [...]

The drones were smuggled into Russia and packed inside wooden transport containers that had remote-controlled lids and then loaded onto trucks, the S.B.U. said in a statement.

One U.S. defense official compared the Ukrainian move to the Israeli operation last year that targeted the pagers of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon.

The next level:

But Ukraine “has now taken warfare to the next level,” said Evelyn Farkas, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia.

“They are showing that you can now coordinate drones in order to achieve strategic effect,” Dr. Farkas, who is now the executive director of the McCain Institute, said in an interview.

Kateryna Stepanenko, a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, said the strikes show that “nowhere in Russia is safe,” and that Ukraine is “shaping a new type of warfare.”

And US military bases?

Samuel Bendett, an expert on Russian drones and other weapons at the Center for Naval Analysis, said “we are slowly coming around” to threats posed against American military bases by drones.

“When it comes to large military bases that have a lot of aircraft parked on the tarmac, the lesson from the Ukrainian attack is that such a strike can potentially come at any moment,” Mr. Bendett said on Monday. “At this point, it’s unlikely that our bases feature comprehensive protection against short range threats.”

And Trump wants to waste more money:

Ukraine’s attacks on Russian airfields show that the $175 billion that Mr. Trump wants to spend on the shield project “is a misapplication of resources,” said Alexander Vindman, a Ukrainian-born former U.S. Army officer who served on the National Security Council in 2019.

There's more at the link.

43% of US workers use generative AI, using. it for 43% of tasks

AI use is ubiquitous & leads to performance gains at the individual level that are not passed on to organizations

In a representative survey of US workers, 43.2% now use generative AI at work. They use it for 1/3 of their tasks & report a tripling of productivity on those tasks. pic.twitter.com/BXm5YJ1IjJ

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) June 2, 2025

Wacky Bow Ties

GDP growth among the G8 for the last decade: The US vs. the rest

Despite the stories about British stagnation, the UK's GDP per capita grew faster than median among the G8 the last 10 years. The real story is the US vs. the rest. pic.twitter.com/083uQIYnZ0

— Benjamin Todd (@ben_j_todd) June 1, 2025

H/t Tyler Cowen.

The French Film That Inspired Japanese Anime

Staff, The French Film That Changed Japanese Animation, Animation Obsessive, June 1, 2025.

The film wasn’t meant to come out — but it did. In 1952, The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep appeared at the Venice Film Festival. It was a French animated feature by Paul Grimault, who later set out to destroy many copies of it, and to lock away the rest.

It was his magnum opus. When The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep got started in the ‘40s, it was “expected to be the European answer to American-made feature films,” according to historian Giannalberto Bendazzi. It’s a surreal tale about a tyrant king and two paintings (a shepherdess, a chimney sweep) that come to life and try to escape his vast, vertical kingdom. Dazzling and hyper-technical animation brings it together.

But, after a few years of production, the project’s scope outstripped its budget. Grimault ran out of money. It was quickly assembled and released anyway.

“[D]espite Grimault’s opposition, his partner André Sarrut decided to exploit the film before its completion (one-fifth was yet to be filmed),” Bendazzi wrote. “Lawsuits, criticism from the press and intellectuals’ indignation could not prevent the film from being shown in an incomplete version.”

That version toured the world. There was an English dub — now reportedly in the public domain, and free on the Internet Archive. More impactful was the Japanese release of 1955. Its title was Yabunirami no Bokun (“The Cross-Eyed Tyrant”), and it took root.

Japan’s press and intelligentsia raved about Grimault’s film. Its incompleteness barely registered. Here was a movie beyond Disney, they argued — something with a deep political meaning, ties to modern art and its own approach to animated characters. “It is not a children’s cartoon (manga), but a sort of experimental film,” noted the Asahi Shimbun.

It did well in theaters. And, in the years ahead, it grew into a near-universal reference point for Japan’s animation industry.4 Among its fans were the young Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, and their colleagues at the studio Toei Doga in Tokyo.

“If I had not seen this film,” Takahata later wrote, “I would have never imagined entering the world of animation.”

When Takahata first watched Grimault’s film in the 1950s, he was attending university. It “made a vivid impression on me,” he said.5 This thing went “way beyond established ideas at the time.”

Miyazaki's reaction, quoted in the post:

I first saw The Cross-Eyed Tyrant in manga form. At that time, manga versions of movies were being created and circulated without paying for the license. Osamu Tezuka also created manga based on Disney’s Pinocchio. That was the era. I thought the manga version was interesting.

There's much more at the link.

Triptych: Hoboken Terminal

The Corporate University [and beyond?]

Liz Hoffman, Universities’ nightmare scenario: it’s not just federal funding cuts, Semafor, May 29, 2025.

Top universities are financial titans, generating investment profits that mirror those of Wall Street firms. They are health care companies; the University of Pennsylvania gets half its revenue from the hospitals it runs. They commercialize the inventions that spring from their labs. They sell four-year subscriptions for rent and classes to their students and lifelong memberships in an elite club to their donors (posthumous, if the checks are big enough).

By revenue, UPenn is bigger than BNY Mellon; Columbia is as big as Coinbase. But these universities operate on profit margins thinner than those of a grocery store. In short, they make a lot of money but spend almost all of it.

That leaves little wiggle room when any of their revenue streams is threatened, as they are all now by the Trump administration. Harvard has sued to block several of the president’s attacks. “They want to show how smart they are, and they’re getting their ass kicked,” Trump told reporters Wednesday.

This, that, and the other:

Summing up: The Trump administration’s across-the-front assault — if it survives legal challenges — could push universities into financial ruin. So far, universities have been borrowing to fill the gap, and my colleague Reed Albergotti recently highlighted some ways that Silicon Valley is stepping in to fund research, but neither source can fill the gap.

Step Back

The nightmare scenario outlined above would hit US banks, which have built a brisk business lending against the good name of university endowments.

In recent years, banks have lent money to Wall Street investment firms, backed by the promises from Harvard and other university endowments to pony up money for their next funds. The total size of these “capital call” loans isn’t clear, but they belong to a fast-growing bucket of loans that has worried global regulators, which are watching the post-2008 financial reordering for signs of a spillover event.

Loans against fund commitments by university endowments are a big chunk of those loans, and they have been assumed to be safe, on that theory that big institutions wouldn’t renege on promises to invest in, for example, Blackstone’s next fund: “Our counterparty here is, like, Harvard,” one Goldman executive told me in early 2024.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

What do I think of this?

On the one hand, I think Trump's rampage against universities is destructive, potentially enormously so. Right now his rage is directed against the big private universities. They aren't the whole system, not by a long shot. Many, by no means all, of the best thinkers are there. Beyond this, various (some? many?) states have been making (drastic) changes to their systems of higher education, e.g. Florida.

OTOH, when I was a graduate student in English at SUNY Buffalo, arguably the best experimental English program in the nation at the time (1973-78), the faculty thought of Harvard English as high-class deadwood. While Harvard English has come up in the world since then, and SUNY English is no longer what it was then, that's still pretty much how I think about the whole system. It's broken and the corporate nature of the big privates is but a visible symptom of that.

The whole system needs to be rebuilt, along with K-through-12, incorporating AI. That's a big job. One that will take generations, and a new world as well. We've got our work cut out for us.

Sex/Life, gender inversions of old themes [Media Notes 162A]

Over the last two weeks or so I worked my way through a Netflix series, Sex/Life:

is an American erotic drama television series created by Stacy Rukeyser for Netflix. The series is inspired by the novel 44 Chapters About 4 Men by BB Easton and it premiered on June 25, 2021. In September 2021, the series was renewed for a second season, which was released on March 2, 2023. In April 2023, the series was canceled after two seasons

Here’s what Wikipedia had to say about its reception:

The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports a 21% approval rating with an average rating of 5.5/10, based on 24 critic reviews. The website’s critical consensus reads, “Suffocating its more provocative ideas with steamy interludes and melodramatic writing, this erotic drama is too obsessed with sex to ever fully come to life.” Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 45 out of 100 based on 11 critics, indicating “mixed or average reviews”.

When I read that after having seen the first or second episode, I was not exactly inspired to binge watch the rest.

And indeed I did not. But I somehow worked my way through to the end, one, two, or even three episodes at a time. And I’m glad I did, not because they finally pulled it off. They didn’t. But for what they attempted, that’s interesting. The principles in the series are confused. That’s OK. That’s standard. But the folks who made Sex/Life are confused as well. That’s not OK. But it’s interesting.

What’s going on here

Here’s the Wikipedia summary of the first episode, “The Wives are in Connecticut”:

Billie Connelly is a housewife living in Connecticut, married to her husband Cooper and with two young children. While loving her husband and family, Billie cannot stop herself from consistently reminiscing about her past as a wild party girl. The longing for her previous life grows ever stronger as her relationship with Cooper continues to disappoint her sexually. Despite the counsel of her best friend Sasha, Billie also keeps thinking back to her former relationship with Brad, a record producer. Billie documents her desires on her laptop, and this is discovered one morning by Cooper, leading the two to have passionate sex for the first time in years. However, after Cooper leaves for work, Billie impulsively goes to New York City to confide her feelings to Sasha. Upon arrival, Billie is left devastated when she sees Sasha slept with Brad the previous night.

That is to say, Billie is caught between good husband, father, and provider, Cooper, and hot bad/boy ex-lover, Brad. Now, that’s interesting. Why? Because it inverts a situation that Freud described early in the 20th century, where a men are often split between a woman they ravish sexually and a woman they marry and have children with – the Madonna/whore syndrome. A woman can be one or the other, but not both.

In this case it’s the woman who is thus split, between good-man hubby and bad-boy boyfriend. Freud and many thereafter assumed that this split was inherent in human nature. If so, then how can we possibly have a series where the shoe is on the other foot, as it were? Either Sex/Life is a complete fabrication, or Freud was wrong, along with many others. I think Freud was wrong about human nature. And, this being the 21st century and this is Netflix, we even have a scene where Cooper tries, and fails, at a sexual practice called “coital alignment technique,” of which bad-boy Brad was a master (S1, e5). [If you’re curious, read the Wikipedia entry and search YouTube for instructional videos. It’s not rocket science.]

And then there’s best-friend Sasha, who is a successful academic and single. Earlier in her life she had a choice between following her lover to graduate school on the West Coast or staying east to finish her own education. She chose to stay east. This inverts another trope, the man who’s split between the career on which his identity is staked and the woman he loves. In this case it’s the woman who is thus split.

Where Sex/Life fails is that, in the last episode, it all works out. Billy gets to marry Brad, who’s no longer bad-boy, and is in fact a dad, with another woman, a model who divorced him. And Sasha gets her old love-of-her-life boyfriend, who gives up his job to be with her. And, yes, good old Cooper is taken care of as well. So, we get to be happy for them, but we haven’t got the foggiest how that all happened. Or, rather, we have ideas, but they're all foggy.

As one commentator put it:

...the tale has many inconsistencies. Truthfully, it is impossible for values to change and advance at this rate. Additionally, this season’s conclusion leaves a bitter aftertaste, as Billie gets back with her toxic ex, Brad.

It seems like it’s high time for shows to tell stories that accurately depict relationships, or at the very least, reveal how unhealthily connected people don’t yield desirable results. Towards the end, this show achieves none of these things. In actuality, it encourages and directs the viewers to tolerate unhealthy relationships.

Can we work it out?

I think so, though don’t ask me to work it out here and now. But I will make some observations.

There’s a name for the problem, or at least one aspect of it: essentialism. That’s the idea that things, including men and woman, have an irreducible and ineradicable nature, an essence. Madonna and whore are two essentialist views of women while bad-boy and good-hubby are essentialist views of men. Why not drop the essentialism and allow both men and women to embody both bundles of behavioral traits?

If it were that easy, we’d have done it long ago. Why’s it troublesome? Because the problem is not fundamentally a logical puzzle to be solved by the rational part of our minds. It’s a problem lodged in the so-called lizard brain, where attachment (Madonna, good-hubby) is one behavioral system while sexual passion (whore, bad boy) is another. I think if we examine the ethological literature on our primate ancestors – here I’m shooting from the hip; it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at that literature – we’ll find that they have no need to combine the two systems into a coordinated way of interacting with a member of the opposite sex. Adults do not form long-term monogamous pair bonds. Thus the problem does not arise.

Humans do, or at least that has been the ideal in Western society (and in others as well) going back to the early modern era. Shakespeare wrestled with the problem in many of his plays, something I examined (and in terms of modern “evolutionary psychology,” though I didn’t use the term) in an essay I published three decades ago: At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare's Greatest Creation? [I’ve appended the abstract as an appendix.] But I don’t think he came up with a viable solution. Why do I say that? Because it he had done so, half a century ago, the problem would not be with us today. Obviously enough, it is.

Bonus: An exercise for the reader: Compare this series with The Seven Year Itch (1955), which starred Marilyn Monroe. It dealt with the issue by some very clever flim-flammery which simply denied that men and women seeking active sex lives were at all problematic, or perhaps even real. For extra credit, follow the problematic through Mad Men.

Appendix: How Shakespeare struggled with the problem

Abstract: The plots in three of Shakespeare's plays are launched by the same device: the protagonist mistakenly believes that his beloved has betrayed him. One of these plays is a comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, one a tragedy, Othello, and one a romance, The Winter's Tale. Shakespeare thus considered this one problematic situation, which has to do with a male difficulty in accepting one's beloved as both a sexual and a nurturing person, at three times in his life and produced different kinds of plays. By looking at his career through modern studies of adult development, we can see that the shift from one genre to another follows the reorganization of Shakespeare's psyche. The ultimate fruit of that development is Shakespeare's final play, The Tempest, whose protagonist, Prospero, has managed to integrate those aspects of himself which had been in conflict in earlier plays. If we then place Shakespeare's career in a broader psycho-historical context we can see how he helped make the modern nuclear family psychologically possible. 

Finally....

I note, as an afterthought, that plays to my current hobbyhorse project, Homo Ludens Rising: A Manifesto for the Fourth Arena, I note that in a world where social organization is dominated by Homo economicus, “whores” and “bad-boys” will always be a threat to society and so will always be marginalized. It is quite possible that in such a society, this problematic cannot be satisfactorily resolved.

I follow that thought in a new post: Sex/Life: I don’t buy it. [Media Notes 162B] {Blame it on Homo economicus}

On yesterday's walk from Hoboken terminal to Stevens

Polyworking for fun work and profit

Elizabeth Lazarowitz, Don’t Call It a Side Hustle. These Americans Are ‘Polyworking.’ NYTimes, May 30, 2025.

For a growing number of Americans, juggling more than one job, or “polyworking,” has become just another day at the office.

The number of people with multiple full- or part-time jobs climbed to over 8.9 million in March for the first time since 1994, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the phenomenon, before ticking down slightly in April.

As a practice, it’s not so new. Think “moonlighting.”

But as a term, polyworking (and the similar “polyemployment”) is more recent. It began cropping up in human resources research and in traditional and social media after the Covid-19 pandemic as an upbeat spin on millennial workers’ reputation for taking on side hustles, trying to monetize hobbies and eschewing 9-to-5 work.

“It’s a way to take back ownership of work and one’s career in a meaningful way, pushing back against the sense that you are identified by one job, one employer,” said Erin Hatton, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo who studies the labor market.

But she added it also candy-coats the biggest reason many people do it: They have to. “There is an element of gloss to it that minimizes the hardship and economic need that forces them to cobble together a variety of subpar jobs,” Professor Hatton said.

The final paragraphs:

“The way the economy’s going, you can’t live off of one job, even two jobs sometimes,” said Marcel Wizzard, 25, who lives in Hackensack, N.J., with his parents. Aiming to pay off his credit card debt, he clocks 40-hour weeks as an Amazon delivery worker and after his shifts end, he hops in his car to deliver food to Uber Eats customers.

Clouding the economic outlook is a staggering number of government layoffs, a trade war set off by the Trump administration’s tariffs and a volatile stock market.

“We are in a moment of pretty intense turmoil economically, politically and culturally,” Professor Hatton said. It is, she said, “creating a fair amount of economic anxiety, if not real hardship, so that would go a long way to explaining the drive to find extra work.”

There's more at the link.

Trombone Shorty at the White House: Fire on the Bayou

When he got in office, Obama was not the leader I thought I'd voted for. He as a by-the-numbers apparatchik of the sclerotic Democratic Party. But he got this right:

YouTube:

House band:
Crispin Cioe - sax
Kiku Collins - trumpet
Nathan East - bass
Charlie Giordano - keyboards, accordian
Patience Higgins - woodwinds
Bashiri Johnson - percussion
Robbie Kondor - piano
Kate Markowitz - vocals
Arnold McCuller - vocals
Shawn Pelton - drums
Catherine Russel - vocals
Ira Siegel - guitar

Additional musicians:
Andy Einhorn - piano
Ted Firth - piano
Thomas Hambridge - drums
Demetrios Pappas - piano
Martin Sammon - keyboards

Troy Andrews (born January 2, 1986), also known by the stage name #TromboneShorty, is an American musician, producer, actor and philanthropist from New Orleans, Louisiana. He is best known as a trombone and trumpet player but also plays drums, organ, and tuba. He has worked with some of the biggest names in rock, pop, jazz, funk, and #hiphop. Andrews is the younger brother of trumpeter and bandleader James Andrews and the grandson of singer and songwriter Jessie Hill. Other musical family members are cousins Glen David Andrews and the late Travis "Trumpet Black" Hill. Andrews began playing trombone at age four, and since 2009 has toured with his own band, Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue.