Politicians lie all the time. They are protected and most will do and say anything to get re-elected. This is the first time in our history, however when a president has engaged in this level of corruption.
This is why he should be impeached and let the chips fall where they may.
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Kübler-Ross 2024: The Trump vs. Biden Stages of Grief
I’m alternating between anger and bargaining, but I still hope we can avoid the need for acceptance.
By Lance Morrow
The 2024 presidential election has voters passing through the famous five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I’m currently somewhere between anger and bargaining. I hope never to arrive at No. 5. The sequence unfolds as follows:
• Denial. Out of 332 million people in the most powerful country in the world, we are forced to choose between Donald Trump and Joe Biden? Impossible!
• Anger. Blood pressure rises. Curses. Gnashing of teeth. My mother used to say that if Richard Nixon was elected, she’d move to Canada. But if we all moved to Canada, we’d have Justin Trudeau, who is hardly an improvement.
• Bargaining. There must be a way, we tell ourselves. The mind succumbs to magical thinking. I imagine a joint press conference in which Messrs. Trump and Biden announce to an astonished world: “The good of the country—and our personal honor—demand that we both step aside, so that American politics and government may refresh themselves. As of today, each party will be free to bring forth a field of younger candidates to compete for its nomination. It’s what the American people want, and what sanity demands.”
A grateful world praises them as “statesmen.”
Of course, Messrs. Trump and Biden won’t do it. Power and Vanity are the game, not Honor. Honor departed from American public life about the same time that Shame took a hike. Pride remains—we recently had a month of it. But Honor is a threadbare American antique.
We know that Messrs. Trump and Biden won’t—God bless them—slip away to some Elba or St. Helena, some mid-ocean spa for world-historical discards.
What to do? This is getting to be an emergency. Is there any way to force the two of them to make themselves scarce? There seems no orderly, conventional path. Merrick Garland’s Justice Department does what it can to disable Mr. Trump with indictments, but the law has a lumbering, Br’er Bear metabolism. It grinds along in low gear. There’s every chance the world will find itself watching—horrified, fascinated—as Mr. Trump proceeds from victory to victory in the primaries, heading toward nomination for the nation’s highest office while simultaneously his opponent’s Justice Department schemes, like Wile E. Coyote, to put him in prison. Both outcomes are possible: Mr. Trump in the White House or Mr. Trump in the jailhouse. Hunter Biden’s squalors, meantime, work in some obscurely Oedipal way to undermine his old man.
How to get this done? Think outside the box. One concocts modest proposals in the manner of Jonathan Swift.
Donald Trump, the Buffalo Bill or Gorgeous George of 21st-century politics, once said he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a single vote. He was probably right. How about if Messrs. Trump and Biden were to meet for a duel in the middle of Fifth Avenue?
No? How about something less violent but more corrupt? What if the American people were to bribe Messrs. Trump and Biden to retire from public life? The federal government spent $6.2 trillion in fiscal 2022. A few billion bestowed equally on Messrs. Trump and Biden—a brace of golden parachutes—might seem a bargain to the American electorate. Or let Congress pass an Act of Oblivion granting both men amnesty for any crimes, past, present or future, that they may have committed.
The Constitution requires that a candidate for president be at least 35. It doesn’t address the age question at the other end. The Founders worried about someone being too young but not about his being too old. All over Washington, one sees powerful arguments—Sen. Dianne Feinstein (90), Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (81), former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (83)—for a mandatory retirement age of 75.
But Mr. Biden, 80, and Mr. Trump, 77, are grandfathered in. Democracy has outsmarted itself. The mighty apparatus of American politics seems, in this pair, to have made the case for letting artificial intelligence choose our future presidents. The job is too important, and the stakes are too high, for the task to be left to a process that has such bad judgment.
• Depression. I always knew the 21st century would pull something like this.
• Acceptance. What’s wrong with bowing to the truth that democracy—the worst political system except for all the others, as Winston Churchill said—sometimes produces stupid results? Maybe Trump vs. Biden is the price we pay for the childish messes that we the people like to be free to get ourselves into from time to time.
I’m still hoping that American voters, or Americans’ traditional dumb luck, will find a way to avoid stage five. Sometimes these things work themselves out in unexpected ways. My mother never moved to Canada. But Nixon left the White House and returned to California earlier than he’d planned.
Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of “The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism.”
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From a market standpoint stocks like NVDA and SMCI, among others, will prove critical.
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AI Has Finally Become Transformative
After a decade’s worth of innovation, new models can change the world the way the internet did.
By Martin Casado
Artificial intelligence has generated tremendous value across many applications over the last decade, including search, ad targeting and recommendations. But nearly all these gains have gone to tech giants such as Google and Facebook. Despite the hoopla—and a lot of related startup activity—AI hasn’t brought a market transformation similar to the internet or mobile, in which an entire new class of companies emerge and become household names. That may soon change.
Despite AI’s enormous capabilities, the economic realities for using it haven’t been great for startups. Often the amount of value a company gets from AI diminishes quickly over time, and therefore requires significant continuing investment. And while the benefits are tangible, it is hard for startups to maintain growth and distance themselves from more-standard approaches. As a result, AI’s primary value has been to improve existing operations for incumbents who have the resources to invest at the required levels.
A common failure scenario in earlier-generation AI startups (which I call the AI mediocrity spiral) highlights a few major factors at play.
In order for a startup’s AI-based application to have sufficient accuracy early on, the company hires humans to perform the function it hopes the AI will automate over time. Often, this is part of an escalation path where a first cut of the AI will handle the most common use cases, and humans manage the long tail of less-common ones.
Early investors tend to be more focused on growth than on margins. To raise capital and keep the board happy, the company continues to hire people rather than invest in the automation—which proves tricky anyway because of the aforementioned complications. By the time the company is ready for growth-level investment, it has already built an entire organization around hiring humans in the loop, and it’s too difficult to unwind. The result is a business that shows relatively high initial growth, but maintains a low margin and, over time, becomes difficult to scale.
Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case with the current wave of generative AI applications such as ChatGPT and the foundation models such as GPT-4 that power them. While still very early, we’re already seeing use cases in large existing markets with orders-of-magnitude improvement in time, cost and performance. This has led to some of the fastest-growing technology and product adoption in the history of the software industry. We may be experiencing what is likely the start of a new supercycle on par with the advent of the microchip or the internet.
For one reason, accuracy isn’t that important for many applications. When a model is generating novel images or engaging in entertaining banter, being correct simply means appealing to or engaging the user. In other popular uses, like helping developers write code, the user is the human in the loop—iterating and providing the feedback to improve the generated answers.
Another big reason things are different now is that generative AI is facilitating uses, from companionship to therapeutic art communities, previously impossible for computers in any meaningful way. We don’t really have a good understanding of what the behaviors will lead to, nor what the best products are to fulfill them. Amazingly, while the use cases for these new behaviors are still emerging, millions of users have already shown a willingness to pay.
This all means opportunity for the new class of generative AI startups to evolve along with users, while incumbents focus on applying the technology to their existing cash-cow business lines.
Generative AI can bring real economic benefits to large industries with established and expensive workloads. Large language models could save costs by performing tasks such as summarizing discovery documents without replacing attorneys, to take one example. And there are plenty of similar jobs spread across fields like medicine, computer programming, design and entertainment.
Consider the task of creating an image to use for marketing content or for a movie poster. For companies running their own version of an open-source model like Stable Diffusion, it costs roughly 0.1 cent and takes around one second to generate an image. Hiring a graphic designer or a photographer would cost hundreds of dollars and take hours or days. Even if, for simplicity’s sake, we underestimate the cost at $100 and the time at one hour, generative AI is 1/100,000th the cost and 3,600 times the speed of the human alternative.
For generative AI to remake our economies and lives to the same degree does assume a continued pace of innovation, but many experts believe we’re very likely to see continued progress. There might be growing pains like the Hollywood strikes along the way, but the end result is more jobs, more economic expansion and better goods for consumers. This was the case with the microchip and the internet, and it will be with generative AI, too.
Mr. Casado is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
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Will this new strategy work? Can The Marine Corp adopt? Will it impede China?
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Makeshift Bases and Fast-Moving Troops: How the Marines Train to Thwart China
Military exercise in northern Australia shows how U.S. tactics are moving away from land wars
U.S. Marines listening to a briefing shortly before boarding an Osprey for a training exercise in Australia’s north.
By Mike Cherney
ROYAL AUSTRALIAN AIR FORCE BASE SCHERGER—On a recent morning, three tilt-rotor Osprey aircraft carrying some 18 U.S. Marines each took off from this remote air base in Australia’s north. After landing about 700 miles away in a town called Bloomsbury, the Marines rushed out and took up positions along a dirt road near houses and farm animals.
The maneuver being practiced is part of the U.S. military strategy for confronting China, which U.S. officials believe is preparing for a possible invasion of Taiwan, the self-governing and democratic island that Beijing claims as part of its territory.
After two decades fighting land wars in the Middle East, the Marines are now training for small, mobile and hard-to-detect teams to set up temporary bases and move from island to island in the Indo-Pacific, where the troops can then use rockets, aircraft and other weapons to deny any adversary use of pivotal waterways nearby. For the Marines, the Scherger air base, in Australia’s tropical zone and not far from Papua New Guinea, imitates the climatic conditions the troops might face in flashpoints such as the disputed South China Sea and around Taiwan.
“We can’t do what we have done for so long,” Brig. Gen. Kevin Jarrard, assistant division commander of the 1st Marine Division, said shortly after Marines stormed out from the Ospreys during the training exercise in Australia. “We cut our teeth during the desert wars for 20 years—where we really did not have to think much about operating some place where we didn’t have complete air supremacy, and we really didn’t have to think about managing our digital signatures at all.”
The concept, called expeditionary advanced base operations, has similarities with the U.S.’s campaign against Japan in World War II, but there are new challenges. Rather than just fighting their way in, the idea is for Marines to be prepositioned or stealthily deployed to areas within the range of China’s missiles, aircraft and ships. That means U.S. troops would need to keep their electronic, thermal and physical footprints low—and be able to move fast.
Allies such as Japan and the Philippines, which control many of the most advantageous locations for these small teams, would need to consent to the U.S. using their territory in a conflict, which isn’t guaranteed. And the U.S. must figure out how to deploy, supply and provide medical care for troops over the Indo-Pacific’s vast distances.
One point of tension for military planners is making sure the Marines have adequate firepower without making them easy to detect, said Ben Ho, an associate editor at the International Institute for Strategic Studies who focuses on future conflict and cyber power. Still, Ho said the concept, which seeks to deny China aerial and maritime superiority during a conflict, fits with the U.S.’s strategy of trying to deter Beijing from military action.
Taiwan’s annual military exercises and civilian drills have expanded dramatically this year in the wake of the Ukraine war and increasing fears of invasion from mainland China. WSJ visited the island democracy to see how it is preparing to defend itself. Photo: Joyu Wang
“The deployment of numerous, relatively cheap anti-air and antiship missile systems envisaged in this concept could impose disproportionate costs on the adversary,” he said.
China says its foreign policy aims for peace, and its officials have accused the U.S. of stoking tensions in the region, though Beijing hasn’t ruled out using military force to take Taiwan.
At Scherger, one of several remote military installations in Australia’s north, the Marines practiced setting up a temporary base—and using it to send troops farther afield. Soldiers slept in tents and ate military rations. A makeshift medical facility was covered in camouflage netting. At a briefing, officers used a map on the ground made from drink cans and power cords. Ospreys were parked on a tarmac nearby.
One goal was to understand better how far the Marines could project a credible force from their local home base—which in this case was Darwin, a northern Australian city where Marines have been deploying annually for training. The drill called for the Marines to go from Darwin to Scherger, and then from Scherger to Bloomsbury, covering a distance of nearly 1,500 miles.
Col. Brendan Sullivan, a Marine regiment commander who is also the commanding officer of this year’s deployment in Darwin, said the Marines were practicing a “hub-spoke-node” approach. A hub is a more robust base where supplies can be centralized, while a spoke is an intermediate encampment connecting the rear to the most far-flung teams in the nodes—where troops are most likely to directly engage an enemy, he said. In the drill, Scherger played the intermediate role.
“Scherger is a great training venue,” Sullivan said. “It’s austere, so it mimics a lot of the challenges that we would encounter operating in a lot of other locations.”
Capt. Jared Griffith, a company commander on the mission from Scherger to Bloomsbury, said his objective was to secure the area so that heavier weapons, including a simulated truck-mounted antiship missile launcher, could safely occupy firing positions. He wanted his platoons to operate farther away from other units—a tactic that creates many smaller, hard-to-hit targets for the enemy.
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