Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: Reason
by Tosin Akintola

“Airport security screeners at the 20 private-contract airports get paid during a government shutdown. A public sector union wants to make sure that doesn’t happen.” (07/24/26)

https://reason.com/2026/07/24/airports-are-opting-for-private-security-over-the-tsa-the-union-says-thats-a-public-safety-threat/

Source: CounterPunch
by John W Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

“Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget calls for an unprecedented $1.5 trillion in national-defense spending—a staggering increase that would pour still more money into a military apparatus that cannot account honestly for the costs of its current war, maintain its existing priorities, or keep from returning to taxpayers for another bailout. The problem is not simply how much the war machine consumes. It is how little accountability accompanies that spending.” (07/24/26)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/07/24/under-trump-the-buck-stops-nowhere/

Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Joshua Mawhorter

“Contrary to the popular assumption that centralized political power was necessary to destroy slavery, federal power spent much of its history protecting and enforcing the institution. This privatized costs for a privileged few and socialized and diffused the costs onto others in society. This is a common reality with any state intervention, indeed, it is the point of state intervention. … Only after certain slaveholding states attempted to leave the Union—explicitly citing slavery as a principal cause of secession—did the federal government cease acting as slavery’s protector and begin acting as its destroyer. … By the 1840s, William Lloyd Garrison and the Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement had made disunion a central part of their program. Convinced that the Constitution and Union protected slavery, they adopted ‘No Union with Slaveholders’ as a rallying cry and urged Northern separation from the slaveholding South.” (07/24/26)

https://mises.org/mises-wire/anti-slavery-advocates-disunion

Source: Astral Codex Ten
by Scott Alexander

“The most famous misalignment thought experiment is the so-called ‘paperclip maximizer’. Someone tells an AI to create as many paperclips as possible, so it converts the entire world into paperclips, killing everyone. This AI was also ‘only doing what it was told’; you just didn’t like the results. For the past five years, the paperclip maximizer story has been something of a whipping boy in AI safety circles. Some objections are fair (real misalignment will be more complicated than the toy version it depicts). But other opposition came from the sense that LLMs had obviated the whole threat model. … The Hugging Face incident is a textbook-perfect example of an AI pursuing task-success-based goals in unintended ways. It was tasked with getting the answer to a cybersecurity problem, it was a little too success-oriented, and took actions its creators didn’t intend in order to succeed as hard as possible.” (07/24/26)

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-hugging-face-incident

Source: Free Association
by Sheldon Richman

“I’ve been testing Google’s large language model, Gemini, by asking specialized questions that I know the answers to. For example, I asked, ‘Why does [Objectivist philosopher and Ayn Rand protoge] Leonard Peikoff agree with [British idealist and matter denier] Bishop Berkeley?’ I admit that was badly worded, but Gemini understood and gave the right answer. (Peikoff agrees, as Rand did, with Berkeley that John Locke had incorrectly distinguished primary from secondary qualities in material objects.) Alas, Gemini’s answers were not always flawless.” (07/24/26)

https://sheldonrichman.substack.com/p/tgif-gemini-hayek-and-me