Hard Pass

He finally apologized yesterday.

Donald Trump is considering removing Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for the District of Columbia, over a Justice Department conclusion that problems with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool stemmed from a flawed renovation rather than vandalism, two people familiar with his thinking told CNN.

The president is “furious” with Pirro, one of the sources said, telling CNN that he fumed about her all weekend. They added that based on his criticisms of her, they find it “highly likely she’s removed from her job.”

The other source, a senior administration official, said Trump was “blindsided” by Pirro’s court filing: “The president did not know beforehand that she was going to do that.”

cross-posted from: https://yall.theatl.social/post/11925645

From WABE Politics News:

More than 1,000 Georgia Democrats gathered in Savannah Saturday for a pep rally and strategy session, brandishing their determination to put a Democrat, Keisha Lance Bottoms, into the governor’s seat […]

#Atlanta #WABE #AtlantaPolitics #AtlantaNews #theATLBot

All hail redundancy

He continued in a similar, ranty vein, “Don’t believe the Radical Left’s Fake Poll numbers. They are Crooked and Corrupt, just like the Country Destroying Dumocrats are Crooked and Corrupt. VOTE REPUBLICAN FOR GREATNESS IN AMERICA!”

Fresh data from CNN puts his approval at a meager 34 percent, matching his post-Jan. 6 trough, while a new AP-NORC poll has him tied at a post-2017 low of 33 percent. Quinnipiac paints an even grimmer picture, dropping him to a career low of 32 percent.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1305963/social-media-algorithms-shape-the-beliefs-people-form-even-small-changes-to-content-cura

Research Paper.

• Algorithms shape the beliefs people form: Simple changes to content curation algorithms can affect beliefs, consensus, and belief accuracy.
• Personalized engagement-based ranking can be problematic: Although users perceive these feeds positively, they tend to lead to less consensus and less accurate beliefs.
• Consensus is possible: Bridging-based ranking can help promote consensus by surfacing content that receives approval across different groups.
• Belief accuracy can be improved: Intelligence-based ranking can promote more accurate collective and individual judgments.
• Small algorithmic changes can have large effects: Simple changes to how posts are sampled and ranked can substantially influence the beliefs people form.

San Jose Mercury News:

A Bay Area News Group analysis of campaign finance data found that 34 Silicon Valley executives and investors, along with 14 of their spouses, poured $194 million into state elections over the past 1 1/2 years.… Continue reading

The post “Silicon Valley Donors Pour $194 Million into California Politics. Now Comes the Wealth Tax Fight” appeared first on Election Law Blog.

A hedge fund worth $45 billion at its height sold nearly its entire stock portfolio to Citadel Securities last week. As recently as a month ago, the fund was up 439 percent on the year, according to an investor letter from its founder, 24-year-old former OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner. But its portfolio, aggressively invested in companies tied to the artificial intelligence industry, dropped 67 percent in July.

Hilariously, the fund was called Situational Awareness.

Last week, the tech-heavy Nasdaq saw its second correction of the year, named for a drop of at least 10 percent from its peak. SpaceX has lost the equivalent of the entire value of Tesla since its post-IPO high in June, and it’s still dropping. For whatever reason—the rise of cheaper and more flexible Chinese AI models, the recognition that U.S. AI companies simply aren’t generating enough revenue to justify skyrocketing capital expenditures, the general economic drag from Trump’s tariffs and wars, or the increasingly operatic financial maneuvers to keep the wheels moving—the shine is way off the AI rose for investors.

The problem is that the industry is bound so tightly with the stock market that a change in feeling from AI investors could be all it takes to generate a market-wide crash, as we’re seeing to some degree. In other words, if AI is propping up the economy, who is propping up AI?

The answer, extrapolating from a fascinating new paper about private credit and the life insurance industry, could be the U.S. taxpayer.

Private credit is private equity’s $3 trillion financing arm. They make largely unregulated, relatively high-risk, relatively complex and opaque loans, mostly to their own portfolio companies. Private credit is entangled, maybe more than the rest of Wall Street, in AI mania. For example, in the mid-2010s private equity bought up hundreds of software-as-a-service providers, and its private credit affiliates made thousands of loans to them, only to see these portfolio companies buckle recently as AI replicated their tasks.