Raven Onthill

@ravenonthill

Just a dilettante amateur political science bird who lives in the US Pacific Northwest. If you want to know what I think, try my blogs at adviceunasked.blogspot.com and shinycroak.blogspot.com.

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Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· Jul 10

That article quotes the exact same abstract I just read. I think this quoted expert (in mechanical translation) has the right of it. If you're arguing against the use of air conditioning entirely what response do you propose?

For the experts interviewed, the debate is often too binary. "Air conditioning is neither good nor bad in itself," asserts urban planner Clément Gaillard. It constitutes a "maladaptation"-a response to global warming that creates new risks-"if we rely exclusively on this equipment to solve the heat problem."

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· Jul 7

@violetblue.bsky.social this, I think, is a telling observation, so I'm quoting it. (for bystanders, it's from her security newsletter at www.patreon.com/violetblue/p...)

That’s how it felt living in San Francisco when Uber launched and citywide traffic quadrupled with vacant Ubers before anyone understood what was happening, when Airbnbs killed the rental market before anyone understood what was happening, when Facebook-Google-Apple filled the city with newly wealthy, transplanted conservative workers fresh from college who hated San Francisco and everything we stood for, when driverless cars were tested all over the city and were running people over, when Facebook-Google-Apple overran the city with their own private shuttle buses that displaced real buses, and facial recognition startups tried to invade small businesses so tech jocks could sell people’s data to data brokers, with aspirations to partner with Facebook and cops. Some of us understood we were lab rats, runway for VC’s, just NPC’s for the next set of grifters. I know a little bit about being in a population subjected to nonconsensual surveillance and experiments by tech companies; every San Franciscan does. Don’t get me started on what I’d overhear from Facebook employees in bars about how they’d “solve” the “homeless problem.” More experiments.

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· Jun 30

One of the things chatbots have made clear is how vulnerable some people are to isolation in an information bubble. This used to be a risk only for the rich and powerful; the chatbots instead put everybody at risk.

Senate minority (Democratic) leader Charles Schumer: Despite Trump’s best efforts to bully them, the Supreme Court just reaffirmed that if you are born in America, you belong in America.

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· Jun 25

I'm sorry. I've been working on this for decades. It's frustrating to see all that we predicted coming true and our leaders going around saying "oh who could have known?"

VB Jens simple cartoon. With an exponential curve shown in two panels. In the left panel we have politicians being surprised by exponential growth; on the right we have scientists understanding exponential growth.

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· Jun 21

Cartoon: Freefall, 2010?

Winston Scudder Thurmad, bald guy
Florence Ambrose, wolf-headed furry
At an event, perhaps a con.

First panel:
Winston and Florence walking along. There's a robot in the foreground, seen from behind, and some decorative skulls high up on a wall in the background.

Second panel:
Florence, leaning forward, "This used to be a monster! He shouldn't be portrayed like this!"
Winston: "Just like Vlad the impaler. He was also a monster."

Third panel:
Robot in the background, seen from front.
Winston: "Then given distance and hundreds of years, look what happened to him."
Florence, holding a doll: "I don't care. Hitler shouldn't be cute. And he *definitely* shouldn't sparkle!"

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· Jun 17

:-)= We might as well point and laugh, because this is an utter disaster.

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· Jun 15

When I try to go to that URL I get this. Have you been hacked?

Pop up saying, "Download file? downloadfile.bin"

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· Jun 12

This, I wrote about four years ago. Still worthy of attention. The notes on Whitman's book are here: adviceunasked.blogspot.com/2022/09/note...

Working for Free: Reviewing Books for Goodreads and Amazon
September 26, 2022

A while back, I read Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model and took a few notes, intending to write a review. I decided not to finish the review (the notes are here) but before I stopped working on it, I looked it up in Goodreads I was struck by their high quality. there were many reviews in the 500 to 1000 word range and they’re very good. People are just giving away this work. In the old days these reviews would’ve been published in newspapers and the authors paid. Goodreads is owned by Amazon, which is one of the richest and most successful corporations in the world. And here we have these erudite, knowledgeable authors giving Amazon work for free? Really?

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· Jun 7

Key point:

I think it’s somewhat misunderstood what’s going on, but nevertheless, I sometimes say “a data center full of GPUs is like a warehouse full of bananas, that’s got a relatively short half life in terms of its usefulness.” That’s important to keep in mind. That’s what makes it different from prior CapEx spending. Moments like railroads, canals, rural electrification, take your pick, because of the nature of the perished ability of the thing that we’re investing in.

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· Jun 7

One thing that he misses is the opportunity cost; what is lost by speculating, and it is speculation, in "AI" rather than in direct solutions to real problems: that money could have been spent on ending world hunger, solving climate change, or controlling disease. If one want speculation that is likely to pay off, ah, spectacularly, one could do worse than speculate in biomedicine; the field is advancing by leaps and bounds.

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· Jun 7

A lot of the studies that purport to show successes of "AI" are kind of rigged. A lot of facts tend to get left out of the published papers because they're produced by people with agendas, often by employees of the firms that are developing the "AI."

He's wrong about the chips surviving the bubble; they run them very hot and they only last about 5 years, if that. He is in general wrong about the value left behind once the bubble bursts. See Krugman and Wolf, https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-ai-with-martin-wolf

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· Jun 7

I have trouble with his delivery, so I read the transcript instead. In lieu of an extended rebuttal, here's a few notes.

A lot of what he is responding to is Anthropic pumping public expectations in advance of an IPO. He is right about are the perceptions of the chatbots. These are largely based on the no-charge public versions, and those aren't very good; the commercial versions are much better. But the commercial versions still aren't paying their dues. There's still no profit in this industry by standard accounting practices; Anthropic claims a profit, but their accounting practices are opaque, and they seem to be juggling the investments on top of that. The claims for Claude Mythos are not independently validated. See this interview with Bruce Schneier: https://youtu.be/bYdlldorVqY.

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· Jun 5

We're not getting out of this without a lot more violence.

The New York Times

Republicans rammed through their $70 billion bill to fund President Trump's immigration crackdown through the remainder of his term, after beating back bipartisan efforts to add language killing his plan to create a payout fund.

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· May 26

FTR, this is the page that's got everyone so upset. It's one page of fairly modest policy. One wonders if there's a slumlord to right-wing propaganda channel. I suppose there's also the possibility that some of the slumlords are mob which could create real risks.

Fix the City: Targeted enforcement
against the city’s worst landlords
A small group of persistent “bad actor” land-
lords have willfully and routinely neglected
their buildings, despite ongoing and escalat-
ed code enforcement by the City and years
of tenant organizing. Tenants at the mercy
of these landlords have endured unsafe and
unhealthy living conditions for years, and in
some cases, generations.
That ends now. This moment requires an
intervention that is comprehensive, firm,
swift, and focused on justice for tenants.
With increased funding for HPD’s signature
repair and enforcement programs, HPD will
introduce Fix the City, a dedicated program
to take enforcement actions on landlords
who speculate on buildings, persistently
disregard repairs, and refuse to improve or
change their business practices. [… Clipped for length]

Full text at https://www.nyc.gov/content/dam/nycgov/nyc-main/pdf/2026/block-by-block-report.pdf

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· May 26

The great story of fascism, Roger Griffin, one of his books I am struggling through, has this to say on the subject:

"Even when fascism succeeded in becoming a genuine mass movement (for example in Hungary, Finland, Romania), it proved just as incapable of seizing power from (neo-)conservative as from liberal regimes. We have already considered at some length the only two exceptions to this rule, Fascism and Nazism. These demonstrated another sort of impotence, namely their incapacity to create more than a grotesque travesty of the regenerated national community promised in their rhetoric."—Roger Griffin, The Nature Of Fascism

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· May 25

The motto of the rabid raccoon party: we bite anti-vaxxers

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· May 24

Or the UK. Whitman was writing about the influence of Jim Crow laws on the nazis.

“...to have a common law system like that of America is to have a system in which the traditions of the law do indeed have little power to ride herd on the demands of the politicians, and when the politics is bad, the law can be very bad indeed.” – James Q. Whitman

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· May 21

Let's have a rabid racoon bite Peter Thiel.

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· May 16

Blackletter law doesn't mean what you think it does. www.law.cornell.edu/wex/blacklet...

blackletter law

In common law legal structures, blackletter laws are the well-established legal rules that are certain and no longer disputable. Blackletter law is free from doubt and generally well-known. It also means well-established case law and refers to the basic key components of a subject in the law. Essentially, it refers to legal concepts that are ancient, important, and indisputable. The term “blackletter” originally refers to the text printed in old law books set in a Gothic type font, which are bold and black. This was due to the practice of medieval scribes and early modern publishers of printing the text of a law book in bold glossy print. Blackletter law is also known as hornbook law, the principles and concepts that are usually listed in a student textbook summary of a field, though blackletter law is characteristically more well-regarded and arcane.

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· May 13

Since I see that the vaccination panel is no longer recommending covid vaccines for everyone, it seems like a good time to repost this.

The rabid raccoon party. We bite antivaxxers.

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· May 10

From WIP

Historically, it is not the government or elected officials that have resisted the various attempts, some successful, some not, to turn the US government into an authoritarian aristocratic state; it is the people. Republicanism, in the original sense of the word, runs deep in the US public. The Vietnam war was not ended by the Federal bureaucracy or Congress; it was a popular movement that ended it. The prosecutions Maddow describes in *Ultra* failed, but it was reported and the public voted out the Nazi collaborators in Congress. Union veterans were the strongest opponents of the Compromise of 1877. And now the major opposition to Trump and the neo-fascist Republican Party is not elected officials or federal bureaucrats; it is a broad public coalition.

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· May 10

😬😬😬

For most readers this will be warning enough. The experimentally minded, however, should be further warned that, although the quota- tions, diagrams and rituals in the novel are authentic, they are in no case complete. The book is not, and was not intended to be, either synoptic or encyclopedic. It is not a vade mecum, but a cursus infamam.

James Blish

Alexandria (Va.), 1968

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· May 7

A Brief Note on Medical Records Privacy, as a blog post, <https://shinycroak.blogspot.com/2026/05/a-brief-note-on-medical-records-privacy.html>

If anyone actually wanted to achieve medical privacy in electronic medical communications, they could use encrypted email and Signal; there would be no third parties to disclose the information.

I don’t know why so many people and medical offices so willing to trust third party information brokers like Oracle and Epic with their communications and medical records. These companies’ business model is gathering information about patients; there’s a huge conflict of interest in relying on them to transmit private information. Two major medical data firms, Oracle Health, formerly Cerner, and Epic, the provider of MyChart, have both been sued over privacy violations. MyChart requires all future privacy disputes to be handled by private arbitration, making it difficult to gain a reasonable settlement should medical privacy be breached.

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· May 7

"Goodbye to the United States for at least a generation."—Raven Onthill, June 2018

There is no law any more, only the whim of the Court's conservatives.

There will be more analysis forthcoming but, in addition to the specific awfulness of this decision, it is deferential to dictatorial power on the part of the Executive, which, at a time of enormous abuse of such power, is idiotic.

In the coming decades we will probably see the Court rule in favor of various racist, sexist, and classist policies. We will see attempts to re-implement the system of racial segregation at the state level. I do not believe the fight is lost. People will fight, and fight hard. In many states they will win. But we will likely enter a period of internal terrorism; a second Civil War.

Thank you Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kennedy, and Thomas. Thank you Democratic Senators who didn't fight the nominations of Alito and Gorsuch when it mattered.

Goodbye to the United States for at least a generation.

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· May 6

On Obama, November 2010. Our first Black President turned out to be a better performer than executive, and he still is. Sigh.

Well, I guess we know now. Faced with an election that is the crystallized result of essence of policy failure, Obama decides that he...sent the wrong message. Has this man ever passed a math class? Or done any physical craft? Done anything where failure is not the result of failing to be persuasive? Perhaps not.

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· May 6

Argh. Writing on April 17. adviceunasked.blogspot.com/2026/04/trad...

Trade in Our Time

I'm at the resource war. I'm at the trade war. I'm at the combination resource war trade war.—lumpyprol

If enough of these factions, all alike and all hating each other, come together the global economy will unravel. The networks of trade that make us a rich world, if not all of us rich people, will be dismantled and all nations will be the poorer for it.—Raven Onthill, July 2016

It seems that we now have trade in our time, but I think that time is short. The US-Iran-Israel ceasefire only kicks the can down the road. The Arab Gulf states resent paying tolls to Iran. Iran will continue to assert its authority in the future, possibly even undertake jihad. Other nations that sit astride trade routes will also assert their power. Oh, yes, and China and the US are now sqaubbling over control of the Panama Canal.

It seems likely that in the long run, global trade will be much reduced. Further shooting wars wars seem possible.
Posted by Raven Onthill at 8:37 PM

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· May 6

"AI" in K-12 education.

Clippy, with the text "I see you have homework. Would you like me to help you cheat on it?"

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· Apr 30

Sigh.

Collection of graphics documenting anthropogenic climate change.

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· Apr 30

Sigh. I fear the Compromise of 2027.

‪Dr. Sarah Parcak‬, ‪@indyfromspace.bsky.social‬
And let me be clear: Maine is a white state and is as racist in large swathes as Alabama (where I now live). It is basically libertarian Alabama. So. He appeals to Maine voters in a deeply comfortable way (to them). Sorry if that makes you uncomfortable. It is the truth.

Raven Onthill@ravenonthill· Apr 30

The next time people start claiming that Sanders is a racist you can show them this. I'm sick of the Sanders hate. I've never been a big Berniebro but he's okay, he's a decent person, and claiming he doesn't believe what he's believed all his life is just so mean.