Ian Welsh – The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

It appears that the Iranians are no longer negotiating with America. In fact they’ve said that they won’t negotiate as long as Trump is President. Their demands are an end to all attacks, including in Lebanon and Gaza, a return of all frozen funds, an end to all oil sanctions and that US bases are never rebuilt. They won’t negotiate on the Strait, saying that’s between them and Oman.

While this is understandable: Trump is completely untrustworthy and can’t keep a deal, I think it’s not entirely true.

But when dealing with Trump, everything has to be cash or carry. The first step will be giving them all the funds: flown in in crates in non-US dollar denominations. The second is an end to sanctions.

At that point, I’d guess they’ll talk.

But the bottom line is simple: America has lost the war.

Further the new Supreme Leader has systematically been putting hard liners in key positions, including some who thought that when Israel kept attacking Lebanon, Iran should have attacked Israel. The new supreme leader is far more hardline than the old. He gave the less hardline leaders a chance to negotiate with the MOU, but that failed. The Iranian government works on “if there’s a consensus to try something the supreme leader will usually let it happen to see if it works.”

But it failed. And that gives Motjaba the legitimacy to say “you had your shot, now we’ll try it the other way.”

Iran’s fairly opaque, though not as much as what passes for Trump’s brain, so I don’t know what they’ll do, but I think if they are serious about Lebanon and Gaza they’re going to have to go to war with Israel in a real way, and defeat Israel unambiguously, as they have America.

Assuming that Israel doesn’t use nukes (which would lead to the end of Israel), this is entirely within their capabilities: they’re still producing missiles and drones, and the US is virtually out of interceptors and low on many other important weapons. Bases are badly damaged and dangerous to use. Aircraft carriers are exhausted and they’ve now had to withdraw ALL carriers from Asia. Ukraine is essentially out of interceptors, and Russia is hitting everything and anything it wants, and attacks on ports have turned Ukraine into a land locked country just as harvest season hits and Ukraine needs to ship out its grain.

The US Empire is overstretched, and Israel is a small country with less than ten million people. It’s the tail that wags the dog, but there’s not much dog left to wag and increasing influential Americans are admitting they’re going to have to make a deal on Iranian terms.

Iran has now won the missile race, which I said they would do day one of the war. The question is if they’ll win the economic race: both America and Iran’s economies are under pressure: who will succumb to that first?

Thankfully for Iran, they’ve been sanctioned for decades and China is supporting them economically. They’re not nearly as reliant on imported goods as the US is. So my guess is they win the “who can take the economic pain longer” race too, especially since if Trump doesn’t cut a deal and possibly even if he does given how long he’s left it, the Republicans are likely to get slaughtered in the midterms and Trump’s control of Congress is in question. Sure, Democrats are massive warmongers too, but forcing Trump to admit defeat isn’t politically unpalatable.

All of this is, essentially, a result of a stubborn refusal to admit reality. To admit that America couldn’t manufacture enough weapons. To admit that Iran could close the Strait and that it mattered. The weird support of Ukraine attacking Russian refineries, just as America needs Russian oil on the market.

America is so used to being able to shove everyone around that it just doesn’t seem to have occurred to most American leaders that they could decisively lose a war in a way they could not just walk away from as in Vietnam or Afghanistan. The Iranians have America by the balls and are squeezing, and America has no way to make them stop.

It’s a contest of who can inflict and endure the most pain, and the answer to both questions is “Iran.”

So Iran will win this war and it will get a good peace deal. That’s essentially baked in now. The question is if they can or will do what is necessary to force Israel out of Lebanon and Gaza. My guess is Gaza ain’t happening, but I think Lebanon is possible. The same calculus applies to Israel as America: Iran can do more damage to Israel than vice-versa, has a more secure weapons supply and nukes don’t change that: Israel can destroy Iran, but that won’t destroy all their missiles and the remaining forces would then take out Israel, including using a dirty nuke, and hitting Israel’s nuclear facilities and desalination plants. Israel would be rendered uninhabitable.

If Iran pushes hard enough on Israel, they’ll be forced to back down as well.

Wars have consequences. This one will be looked back on by historians as the death knell of America. It may be the death knell of Israel as well.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 16, 2026

By Tony Wikrent

On August 16, 2026

3 Comments

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 16, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

War on voting

How Many States Does It Take to Steal an Election? One, and It Already Happened. Texas alone handed over 18 million voter records and signed a removal agreement.

Christopher Armitage, Aug 13, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]

Eighteen states have handed their complete voter files to the Trump Justice Department, the drivers license and Social Security numbers of every registered voter included. Between them, those eighteen states hold 148 US House seats, 36 Senate seats, and 184 electoral votes, roughly two thirds of what it takes to run the House, the Senate, and the White House.

A March 2025 executive order ordered states to change how they run elections and threatened to withhold federal money from the ones that refused to comply. The Justice Department went straight for the data, asking all 50 states and the District of Columbia to hand over their voter files. The Department of Homeland Security rebuilt a dormant database called SAVE so states could run those files through it for citizenship checks.

A second order, in March 2026, told the Postal Service to deliver ballots only to voters on a federally approved list. Financial pressure was also applied via grant conditions that make states rewrite their election rules and run their rolls through SAVE or lose 20 percent of their homeland security funding, a program worth more than a billion dollars. DHS made those conditions official in July, and two dozen states sued within two weeks….

A New Draft Rule for the Census Seeks Sweeping Changes to How Political Power Is Allocated – PM is publishing the Trump administration’s plan for changes to political apportionment and Census data collection.

Layla A. Jones and Josh Kovensky, 08.11.26 [Talking Points Memo]

War

Pentagon Drafting New Nuclear Strategy To Expand Options for Tactical Nuclear Weapons Use

[Antiwar.com, via Naked Capitalism 08-11-2026]

Previously reported via Scott Ritter but important not to miss.

Deep Intel on Carrier LINCOLN’s Morale Crisis (YouTube video)

Ward Carroll, August 14, 2026 [YouTube]

4:53

The problem started with the loss of Fifth Fleet headquarters due to Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks early in the war, which some war planners might describe as a single point failure. According to Vice Admiral Verisimo, quote, “When Bahrain was no longer a port for logistics, food and mail, all the gear that was there when the shooting started got stuck there.” So that was an initial very large backlog. That also caused us to undergo very contested logistics, very difficult and long supply lines, we had to prioritize food, which was also a challenge and remains on occasion to be a challenge. End quote.

Deadly clash aboard US carrier Abraham Lincoln leaves seven dead, several injured: Report

[Press TV, via Naked Capitalism 08-12-2026]

Seven US Navy personnel have reportedly been killed and several others wounded in a violent clash aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, as growing unrest among the carrier’s crew has exposed mounting pressure inside the US military amid a prolonged deployment.

The incident erupted after an adviser to US Central Command (CENTCOM) chief Brad Cooper boarded the carrier to address mounting complaints from crew members following protests by their families over the ship’s prolonged deployment, according to Tasnim News Agency, citing an informed military source.

The adviser was reportedly met with boos and had water bottles thrown at him while addressing a gathering of personnel.

The confrontation subsequently escalated into a fight among crew members involving knives and other bladed weapons, leaving seven personnel dead and several others wounded, according to the source….

Multiple USS Abraham Lincoln sailors have tried to go overboard amid extended deployment, families say

[Military Times, via Naked Capitalism 08-12-2026]

U.S. has lost 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones, roughly 25% of fleet, in Iran war

[Washington Post, summarized by Drop Site Daily: August 14, 2026]

The U.S. military has lost at least 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones during its war with Iran, representing about a quarter of the pre-war fleet and a potential taxpayer cost exceeding $1.3 billion, according to three officials cited by The Washington Post on Friday.

Ukrainian drones wipe out entire US tank brigade in live war game

[Ars Technica, via Naked Capitalism 08-14-2026]

How Iran Adapted Its Attacks as U.S. War Munitions Dwindled

[New York Times

Russian Arena-M Active Protection System Finally Comes of Age on the Battlefield

[Simplicius, via Naked Capitalism 08-11-2026]

…As a first quick background, the Arena-M was originally created to stop various munitions like ATGMs and Javelins, including from “top attack” mode. These are obviously no longer a problem compared to the pervasiveness of drones. But here is test footage of an Arena-M system on a T-72B3M intercepting a small missile from a top-attack and direct trajectory as example of how it works:

The system works by having a small millimeter-wave doppler radar which detects incoming projectiles and then launches a hard-kill countermeasure that is timed and fused to explode near the tank which showers the incoming projectile with shrapnel.

Now, in a recent assault in the Dobropillya direction out of Shakhove, near Pokrovsk, Russian forces reportedly used tanks with these Arena-M systems for the first time. Footage released by the Azov Corp which defends the area showed one possible shoot down of an FPV drone by the Arena system….

But the shocker was that major pro-Ukrainian figures which included American analyst Rob Lee and a Ukrainian Special Operations veteran Dmytro Putiata spoke to the Azov units involved in the attack and learned that the Arena-M system actually worked remarkably well….

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On August 15, 2026

7 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

How I Learned About Leaders & Human Nature

By Ian Welsh

On August 14, 2026

15 Comments

As a kid, my parents moved around a fair bit. I went to a lot of schools during my elementary years.

It was instructive.

From grade 3 to grade 6 1/2 I was at Emily Carr elementary school in Vancouver. The leaders on the male side were two boys: one red haired freckled Irish kid who wanted to be a football player and a tiny, but extremely fast and coordinated Chinese kid. The class had almost no bullying and it was because of them.

They accepted everyone into their group. You were always welcome to play with them. They were friendly, egalitarian in the way boys are (some are better at sports, but everyone gets to play) and they didn’t bully, and they didn’t tolerate it. Mostly they never had to do anything, other kids followed their example, but I remember one case, and only one, where the Irish kid told someone intimidating a weaker boy the age old “if you want to fight someone, fight someone your own size.”

The fight wasn’t necessary, the kid backed down and his behaviour changed. He wanted to fit in, to have the approval of the leaders.

Half way thru grade 6 my parents moved and I went to a new school in Coquitlam (can’t remember the name, don’t care enough to search.) The leader there was a big kid, only half decent at sports, but he led by constant threats and bullying. And so a lot of the other boys copied him: the pecking order was based on who could shove who around.

Entirely based on who the lead kids were. Entirely. (Teachers were not involved in this stuff back then unless it caused actual injury.)

I hated the boarding school I spent high school in. The kid leadership was… indifferent, not good like the Irish/Chinese pair, or bad like the bully, just self-involved. So there wasn’t much bullying, but there was some, and it could be moderately nasty. I knew one kid who got the “hung up in locker” treatment frequently. Personally I was just ostracized, partially deservingly, but mostly left alone.

But the leadership of the staff was good. The place had fair rules, fairly enforced. The Headmaster, Alan Brown, was on top of the teachers and the boarding house masters. He knew every kid’s name, in a place with about 500 students. And the reason the bullying didn’t get completely out of hand was that he tamped down the worse cases, and he was startlingly effective. Usually the last thing you wanted was teachers involved, but every case I saw him involve in he made better.

His emphasis was on truth. Not lying. Kids do bad shit sometimes, it’s not a big deal usually, but you damn well better not lie about it.

I didn’t like him much, and he didn’t like me: I was sullen, under-performed in most classes and didn’t like team sports. But I respected him and part of that was because he didn’t like me but he treated me fairly. That was the first time I saw an adult with power operate like that.

(That I so rarely saw adults not abuse or misuse their power is one of the reasons I turned into a good analyst. My default assumption is that people with power are scum, and in the current time period in most of the world, that’s the right default.)

As an adult, it was a few bosses who made an impression on me. Once again, if the boss was good, the place was good to work at. If they weren’t, it was always shit. The fish always rotted from the head. Whenever I run into bad service at a corporation regularly (as opposed to one bad apple or someone having a bad day) I know it’s a management issue, and in those cases where I’ve investigated, it always was.

Working at the megacorp was particularly instructive. My first job was to help it go public (yup, bad sign) and my boss (also named Ian) was probably the best boss I ever had. It was a small team, and he trusted us. The strongest memory I have of him is when he gave me an extra task near the end of the job, and I said to him “I’m already working 60 hour weeks. I can do this. But if you give me one more thing, you need to tell me what other task you’ve given me not to do.”

He nodded and agreed. I think I’ve had three bosses total who would have reacted that way.

He also let us take time off when things were slow, which they sometimes were. He was 100% focused on getting the actual job done (given there was a deadline and billions of dollars at stake this made sense, but it still rare). If you were getting it done, what you did in your spare time was up to you.

But what made the megacorp so instructive wasn’t one good boss, it was watching and working on different teams. They might as well have been different companies depending on the boss. Some were wonderful. Some sucked. It all flowed from the boss.

Over time good bosses became rarer, though, because the big boss was now a scumbag standard executive whose primary goal was to make bigger quarterly results so that he could have higher bonuses. The ethics and morality and kindness which had been fairly common slowly went away as the good bosses left, because every slice of heaven had been some boss protecting their workers from upper management, unlike pre-going public when the upper management were basically decent people who expected to get wealthy but not rich.

One visit to the US, to help in a company my employer had taken over, was particularly instructive. I was senior operations, but not management. First day I noticed they were doing something counter-productive: actively harmful, but easy to stop. I went to the manager and told her, she replied (paraphrased and in the condescending tone possible) “that’s a management decision and I don’t want you to ever involve yourself in such decisions again. Just do your job.”

Of course her staff, and indeed the entire company’s staff, were completely demoralized, never accepted ownership of or solved any problem, and always said “I did what you and the rules told me to do. I don’t do anything else.”

Then I got involved in politics, and I can count the number of politicians I’ve met who I’d trust to walk my dog on one hand.

But what all this taught me is that leaders really, really do matter and nothing matters more to how well anything functions than who leads it. Nothing matters more than how we select our leaders.

We, of course, select them badly. But what was interesting to me was watching, over decades, as the number of good leaders declined and as the niches where they could operate were reduced in number. Every year, just a little. Over decades: massive.

Good groups are possible. Better societies are possible. But it all starts with who leads us and figuring how to select the right people.

Yes, There Is Reason To Believe Humans Can Do Better

By Ian Welsh

On August 13, 2026

27 Comments

Had a commenter in the last post say that humans always over-consume. When I said that commons had been stable for as long as centuries they answered that this was true, but that those families produced too many kids.

Humans change how they do things. Once we didn’t fly. Once there had never been democracy. Once there had never been kings. Once there were no domesticated animals. Once there were no monotheisms. Once there we no… (insert a million examples.)

If we assume that human nature is always bad or good, we’re fools. Human nature has a lot of range and is very dependent on conditioning.

Right now all the usual fools are screaming that there aren’t enough children being born.

So… we know that sometimes humans don’t over-produce babies and we know that sometimes, very long periods, humans manage commons.

Is there some way we can put those two things together at a reasonable replacement rate? Can we find a way to have a relatively stable non overconsuming good society to live in?

Can we change culture so that over-consumption and display is regarded with revulsion? Certainly there have been cultures like that.

Change is possible and because change is possible better worlds are possible. Because change is possible, worse worlds are also possible.

But we operate on the assumption that human nature allows for good outcomes because if we operate on the assumption that it doesn’t, then all that is left is to sit back and wait for extinction. And if we assume no solutions are possible, and they are, well, we won’t find them, having already written them off.

Intellectual honesty is “I don’t know if we can find a better solution but I also don’t know that we can’t, and I do know that humans have often found new ways of doing things.”

A better world is easy enough to imagine. And that’s the first step to change: find a pole star and navigate by it. We chose “let’s organize our society around greed” as a polestar and it changed the world. Now it’s running us off a cliff.

Perhaps there are other polestars which would work better?

Humans generally change societies radically after a crisis. But when they do so, they reach for the ideas that are hanging around. If those ideas aren’t good ones (neoliberalism in the 70s, for example) humans will turn a crisis into something worse by choosing a cure that is worse than disease.

So the job is to make sure good ideas hanging around. Eric Anderson has suggested a land ethic. Make your suggestions in the comments.

The Fundamental Political Question Of Production & Distribution

By Ian Welsh

On August 12, 2026

24 Comments

For those of us who want the purpose of government and society to be creating the best life for the most people there are two fundamental questions.

First: how to produce what is good for people and produces a good life.

Second: how to distribute what is good for people and produces a good life.

Among people of genuine good will there’s a lot of disagreement about how to do this.

The argument of capitalists is follows: if you produce something someone wants and is able to buy you’ve increased utility. If they didn’t want to buy it, they wouldn’t, so it must be good for them. Trying to figure out what is good for people is stupid: individuals know better than government or firms, so whatever they actually buy (or do) must be what they want, and what they want must be good for them.

Whoever sells the most at the most profit must be producing most utility, so if you have a lot of money this means you’re doing a lot of good and not only do you deserve your money, you should have it because money is the ability to command resources and you’ve proved that when you command resources you increase utility. Making money is the same as producing utility, in other words.

Now the smarter capitalists (non libertarians) admit that there are edge cases: people may want heroin, but we still make it illegal. They don’t think there are a lot of edge cases.

The counter-arguments are pretty simple: when we look at time periods where oligarchs are in control like the gilded era or the neoliberal era, they all end in disaster for the society. In the case of the gilded age, a direct road to the Great Depression (without which WWII probably doesn’t happen). In the case of neoliberalism, a multi-decade increase in inequality, and in the heartland, most social statistics turning negative. (Things like, oh, lifespan and child mortality.) Massive homelessness, hunger, all that stuff. (I’m old enough to remember when there were no food banks.)

Such people argue that “utility” is meaningless: it’s a circular definition, whatever people do is what they want to do and must be good. We all know that we often do things that aren’t good for us (mmm, a nice can of coke) and all of us who aren’t near the top of society have “freely” worked at jobs we hated because not doing so would lead to homelessness. Coercion is all thru the system, and it can’t operate without it. If it could, they wouldn’t need so many police.

Note that the idea that greed and wealth are good flies in the face of pretty much all traditional ethical teaching. Doesn’t matter if it’s Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem or even most pagan faiths: they all condemn having much more than you need when others are poor or hungry.

But, say the capitalists, we tried that for a long time and what worked to create widespread prosperity was capitalism!

Was it?

Or was it industrialization, which we did in capitalist ways and can we imagine that industrialization could have been done in other ways?

Or perhaps the capitalists are right (Marx thought so) and industrialization required capitalism, but once we’re industrialized, we should find a better way, because we know that capitalism is unstable and tends to devolve into fascism, plus tends to create oligarchies over time which then cause massive economic problems.

Or, perhaps the argument is for certain types of capitalism: the New Deal variety worked pretty well, after all. Except that it devolved in neoliberalism and gave away an industrial base which it took the West centuries to build. (Not that China shouldn’t industrialize, but that doing so by wiping out Western industry seems pretty bad for Westerners.)

Then there’s the ecological argument: if capitalism can’t control its environmental destruction, and if that environmental destruction is so serious that it endangers hundreds of millions to billions of lives and is causing a mass extinction event, perhaps whether or not it creates, for a few centuries, prosperity for some people, is not all that relevant. I can keep myself warm by burning my possessions one by one, then burning down my house, but no one thinks that’s smart.

I think a fair reading of capitalism is that it failed to handle to industrialization’s negative side effects and that it regularly devolves into degraded political forms which do great harm.

The “well, it’s the best thing we’ve come up” with argument is foolish: if the best thing we’ve come up with will kill billions of people and keeps causing wars and impoverishing people even though there’s a surplus, we obviously need to come up with something better.

We’ve changed our governing forms and our economic forms many times in the past. We’ve tried new things. The idea that this is (or was) the “end of history” and capitalism and neoliberal democracy are the best we can do is argument for running ourselves off a cliff and after the rise of the CPC, the idea that oligarchy/neoliberalism or “liberal” democracy are the best systems even in their own terms is obviously bullshit. China’s crushing them.

That’s not a brief for China, precisely, it has its own issues and continues an over-consumption economy based on planned obsolescence. But it does demolish the idea that how we do things in the West is obviously superior and can never be replaced by anything better.

But this still comes back to the original two questions: how do we produce what is good and how do we distribute what we create?

Add to them “how do we live in prosperous societies with high welfare without destroying the environment or drawing down irreplaceable resources?”

And those are the questions we haven’t got a good answer to yet and which we urgently need answers to because right now we aren’t just walking off a cliff, we’re feeding ourselves into a chipper foot first.

China, as much as I admire them, and as much as they are doing more than anyone else for the environment (it isn’t even close) is just running an old playbook: the same one America ran, the same one Japan ran, the same one South Korea ran.

And while it’s good that they’re increasing electrification and finally getting carbon under control, it’s not enough by itself because there’s still far too much needless consumption in order to keep the profit feedback mechanism which runs markets (and the Chinese have very competitive markets, just ones that operate under general direction guidance).

I’m not giving answers to these questions today. If you have some, feel free to put them in comments. I have a few ideas, of course, but I think it’s more important for most people to start asking the right questions, and to agree that they are the right questions, than to leap to answers, because if we don’t agree on problems and goals, we won’t agree on solutions.

So start thinking.

Maybe Early AI Adoption Is Stupid?

By Ian Welsh

On August 11, 2026

14 Comments

The thing about AI is that it takes previous costs (your engineers and their tools) and makes them more expensive. Often much more expensive:

if you built your saas business before ai, your entire business was designed around one assumption which was that software has ~zero marginal cost.

ai blows that up. every ai action costs money. incumbents now have to create more expensive tiers or introduce usage based pricing. both force customers to make a new purchasing decisions while revenue doesn’t automatically increase just cuz the product became more expensive to operate. so your cost per seat rises, your gross margins compress, & adoption remains uncertain.

meanwhile, the model labs are subsidizing ai usage like crazy, so they can undercut you. ai native startups are burning venture capital to acquire users, so they can undercut you too.

(lack of capitalization in original)

I really don’t know what to think of AI for coding. I’m no longer a coder, haven’t been for almost thirty years now, so I don’t have enough firsthand knowledge, though I did have an AI generate basic sorting and random number generation code just to get my hands a little wet. Among devs I trust, opinion is split. Some love it, some hate it, some are on the margins. Here’s one in the hate category:

Are companies actually seeing massive productivity gains from their AI adoption?…

… All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in², but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. Even if you grant that AI tooling accelerates specific workloads, the method and scale of the current investments is senseless. Frequently the failure is not related to AI itself, but rather that companies are terminally bad at running software projects effectively, and as I have remarked previously, AI projects are subject to all the failure modes of normal projects plus you can get everything right and then still fail because of the method’s novelty. Very few companies are so good at shipping software that they can afford the extra risk profile…

…

our team has quickly learned while on an engagement not to ask anything about ongoing AI projects in any context – by the time that project has started, it is too late for the management team, and intervention is not possible until a crisis point is inevitably reached. There is no conceivable positive outcome. The failure rate is so high that even basic inquiry leaves us in an untenable position. Any coherent question about how it’s going, what the goal is, who is using it, constitutes an inadvertent attack on the chain of command responsible for the work because there are no good answers to anything. Even in rare cases where my interlocutor has stated that things are going well (usually while the project is still mid-flight and failure has not had a chance to manifest), it is generally obvious that they are doomed, but at least in these cases I can simply agree and then go home to scream into a pillow for six hours straight³.

All of this is to say that I am very confident that almost every report at a company about “massive AI productivity gains” is untrue as a matter of brute fact. Even if some companies are seeing clear gains, this is the exception, not the norm.

It’s a long post and the entire thing is worth reading. This is a high end engineering consultant who gets a view on a lot of companies.

My feeling/guess is that AI is not mature, that the use cases exist, but that it introduces significant risks of new failure modes because AIs aren’t reliable and aren’t actually intelligent: they don’t know what they’re doing. If you don’t do the work yourself or audit it to the level where you might as well have done it yourself, it seems easy for errors to creep in, for hard to maintain or understand code to be created, and for new failure modes to exist.

If I were an executive in most businesses I wouldn’t be using AI for much, if anything yet, though I’d let a few people have an account and test it, and would do so myself. It’s moving fast, it clearly adds risks and mistakes that we don’t know how to mitigate yet, it’s expensive and that’s with massive subsidies, so becoming dependent on it when prices are likely to increase significantly is unwise.

There are going to be exceptions: if you’re Google, not sure you have much choice. But if you manufacture widgets or sell hamburgers or build homes or are a lawyer (who can’t afford to have the AI hallucinate cites) I’d give it a pass for now, or use it very warily in exploration mode. I use it for research myself, especially as search engines get worse and worse, but I also check the sources it uses.

And, as we’ve discussed before, non open models have huge risks, since prices can easily be raised, the government can intervene to cripple the model or deny to other nations, and the company itself can make changes to the model which make it less useful to you. So even if using AI I’d be primarily focusing on Open models (which means mostly Chinese.)

But my best guess is that this is a real tech, with real uses, which is not yet near to mature and which is being deployed before people understand what it’s good at or how to use it safely and cost effectively, or, more importantly, when NOT to use it. I’d also guess that at least so far, it’s not the second coming, the next great thing, in the way that its evangelists preach.

So far it seems to increase failure rates on real projects and raise costs significantly at the same time. Unless I’m running a business where I must be in it, I think I’d take it slow.

There are very few businesses where “the way we did it in 2022” will expose you to significant risk and costs. If you’re in one of those businesses, chill a little and observe. Let other people pay the price and make the mistakes. If you need to, because it’s the current “everyone must do” just lie and say you’re into it, while doing the minimum.

This is certainly something I could be wrong about. I’m confident that Chinese AI will win, for example, I’m less certain about how useful AI will turn out to be. I do think that I’m almost certainly right that most companies adopting it in a big way, NOW, are making a mistake. Wait. See how it turns out. Let other people figure out what it’s good for, how to manage it, how to mitigate the risks and how to drive costs down.

And remember, even if it’s the true next big thing, early rushers often get badly burned, as with the dot-com bubble. Don’t buy hype, make sure what you’re investing in is real and you understand what it’s good for and what it sucks at.

Defund The Police and Abolish Prisons?

By Ian Welsh

On August 10, 2026

22 Comments

Glenn Greenwald has an article in which he goes after AOC and others for the hysteria of the woke era (which is apparently behind us?)

Most of it I agree with, but I’m not entirely down with this:

AOC, on Sunday, went on ABC’s morning news program with Jonathan Karl, where she was asked about some of Hong’s statements, including her call for “abolishing prisons” and “[defunding] the police,” policies and phrases that have proven to be deeply unpopular. AOC, who herself aggressively advocated those policies, sought to laughingly dismiss this all as just some momentary, harmless frenzy of “craziness” that never really meant much and that everyone has all just agreed to move beyond:

I can’t really imagine America operating with no police or prisons.

But if you got rid of three quarters of prisons and released three quarters of prisoners tomorrow I think that’d be a good idea, if done with some care.

These rates are deranged, and “abolish prisons” is exaggeration for effect, but the idea is simple enough: take all that money and spend it on welfare and social services and transfer payments and so on. It’s also worth remembering that the US did not always lock up so many people:

There’s been a slight dip since 2014, but the massive spike in how many people were locked up that started around 1980 has not flattened back to the previous historical norm. American courts are so overwhelmed with cases that most people in prison never had a real trial: they just plead out under threat of massive sentences if they dared fight.

As for police effectiveness, this is a chart of what percentage of homicides they solve.

And it’s really worse than the above chart:

That statistic would have stunned detectives in the early 1960s. In 1962 the FBI reported a clearance rate of 93 percent. Today, homicide is the only violent‑crime category that clears even half its reported cases; rape, robbery, and aggravated assault fare far worse. Murders themselves declined by 14.9 percent in 2024, but the clearance rate refused to rebound alongside them.

Why the hell are more and more cops constantly being hired when the more there are the worse they are at catching criminals?

This is like everything in America. No one looks at what actually produces good results. As far as I can tell most of the decline in crime in America isn’t about cops, it’s about getting lead out of gasoline. It certainly isn’t because criminals are scared of being caught.

And this is odd. Really odd. You’d think with all the surveillance devices we now have it’d be easier to solve crimes than in the sixties, not harder, but it turns out that what really matters is whether or not the police are trusted: whether informants will talk to them. And, more and more, they aren’t trusted and most of police work isn’t Sherlock Holmesesque brilliance or cleverly uncovering forensic clues: it’s people being willing to tell the cops what happened.

So when people, especially those in crime ridden areas, start saying things like “abolish prisons and defund the police” this an indication of a problem. And part of the solution probably is to have less cops and less prisons and spend that money on other things. This is especially the case because a lot of what police do could be done in other ways: should police really be doing wellness checks given how often they wind up shooting mentally ill people?

It’d be cheaper to have social workers take over a lot of what cops do, too. Cops are very well paid in America.

I’m no fan of “woke” and I’ve been an opponent of much of identify politics for decades.

But the truth is that America’s incarceration, court and police systems are all world class piles of flaming garbage and everyone involved with them knows it.

The response to police sucking at their jobs and to America locking up more people than anyone else in the world never seems to be a common sense “this isn’t working, we should do something else” it’s always “let’s fund them more, give them more military equipment, get rid of more due process and lock up even more people.”

I’m pretty damn sure that cutting police budgets in a quarter and releasing most non-violent criminals and closing prisons, then directing all that money to social welfare and transfer payments wouldn’t make the US any worse and would probably make it better.

And if that means being “woke”, I’m to that extent woke.