Reading
Articles, essays, and other things I’ve been reading online.
November 2026
- Musk seeking tax breaks for $24B data center in SpaceX's hometown politico.comWe might call this municipal state capture, when SpaceX executives get to vote on a SpaceX proposal: “The three-person city commission — two members of which are also SpaceX executives — will consider the company’s proposal at a Dec. 9 hearing.”
- Newsom Commutes the Sentences of California’s 548 Death Row Inmates nytimes.comNewsom’s commutation was an unexpected move. “California has more death row inmates than any other state, and Mr. Newsom’s action cancels approximately one-fourth of all death sentences nationwide.”
- Political Capitalism in Perspective: An Interview with Dylan Riley historicalmaterialism.orgThis interview with Dylan Riley (UC Berkeley) offers a good entry point to the literature on political capitalism, as an alternative theorization of present-day capitalism to the technofeudalism thesis, and a corrective supplement to the notion of neoliberalism.
October 2026
- Wrong on Sunday, right on Monday. Why AI chatbots have a confidence problem fullfact.org
One of the biggest problems with the AI rollout of the past few years has been its largely unregulated, Wild-West nature. Despite technical advances, hallucinations are still a concern.
Should regulators demand a minimum accuracy threshold for models released to the public? Or at least require independent, systematic auditing of accuracy? That raises the issue of who gets to decide what counts as factual, but the alternative is letting Silicon Valley police itself, with dubious results.
Here’s a fact-checking report that points in the right direction.
- Microsoft to Offer Buyouts to 60,000 Workers in Latest Cost Cut bloomberg.comCorporations think AI will allow them to keep growing their revenue while downsizing their workforce. That may work in the near term and at the level of the individual firm, but it’s hardly going to play out that way at the aggregate level and in the long run. If millions of jobs are automated away, who’s going to buy the goods and services? (Microsoft just announced they’re offering buyouts to 60,000 workers.)
- The AI industry’s gigantic debts are making investors nervous economist.comIn every boom there are externalities, some of which will undoubtedly be highly negative and left to be picked up by ordinary people—the asymmetric socialization of costs amid the privatization of gains from the AI gold rush.
- No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector | The Daily Spark apollo.comApollo’s Torsten Slok argues that the massive AI buildout hasn’t brought any measurable gains to non-tech sectors in the U.S. “The AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7, and so far, there is no evidence that revenue growth or margins are improving outside the tech sector,” Slok writes.
- Musk’s bet of the century ft.comThis week, Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla and SpaceX are exploring a merger, which would combine “most of his business interests into what amounts to a single publicly traded Musk Inc.” This potential conglomerate could grant the world’s richest man even greater powers, including majority voting control over Tesla, where he now holds only about a fifth of the shares.
- Living off assets? European household incomes in the ‘asset economy’ academic.oup.comAn empirical assessment of the “petit-rentier” class in the “asset economy” across 23 European countries. Perhaps unsurprisingly, “the ‘asset economy’ appears to consolidate trajectories of income concentration rather than democratisation.”
- Warhound raises $200M to engineer war dogs and arm them with Anduril gear techcrunch.comThe tech right’s dreams are truly the stuff of nightmares: Warhound “combines advanced cloning and genetic engineering to develop the next generation of working dogs for military use. The dogs will then get high-tech hardware developed by Anduril.”