Five Things: Non-Deal, Personal Interest, Moral Decisions, Dumb House, Cottage Cheese
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Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
Friday was a day to remember. It was my birthday. I turned 54. I woke up just after 6 in the morning when rain, thunder and lighting turned the morning into something dark, very wet and loud. So I told my kids that I’ll give them a ride to school. We went out to the car and you probably know this situation when somehow the car doors do not open and everyone is pulling the door handles? That’s what we did, only while standing outside in torrential rain. We went back inside, my daughter got the other car key from the apartment and I tried again. She finally managed to get the little key thingy out of the key fob so I could open the door. It worked. They came running to the car again. I couldn’t open their doors. I felt like being in a movie where some evil overlord is shutting down computer systems to create havoc. After about 15 minutes of trying to get the car going, I stopped the experiment, took the kids to the subway and went for a walk with the dog. When I came home I found out that the DWR coating of my jacket wasn’t as good as I remembered it. Then the rain stopped, the sun came out and my birthday turned into a really wonderful day with nice presents, great food and lots of time with my family. The car will now be towed back to the dealer, since it didn’t handle the latest software update as expected. Thankfully my wife managed to wrangle down a hotline again and we got a brand new Volvo XC90 in exchange for now. Of course I always remembered how my dad used to say that he doesn’t want any tech in his car, so we always had to manually roll the windows up and down as he didn’t trust electric windows… when I tell my kids about that, they probably think I was raised by barbarians, not to mention their astonishment when I tell them about black and white TV or landline phones and no mobile phone until I was in my mid-20s. Anyhow, I had a great birthday!
The Art of the Non-Deal
It is clear that Trump is being driven to reopen the Strait of Hormuz at virtually any cost by the domestic pressure from rising oil prices and inflation. Being unwilling to send ground forces to Iran, he has had few cards to play over the past six weeks to get further Iranian concessions. So he has chosen to back down and accept a return to the status quo ante from before he began the war on February 28.
The world will indeed be better off if the Strait is re-opened. Perhaps Trump’s hardcore MAGA supporters can be persuaded that he has negotiated a consummate deal and achieved a great victory. But everyone else will understand that the world’s most powerful country is being run by a feckless and ignorant president who will impose immense costs on both other countries and his own people if he thinks it will benefit himself.
What I really do not understand about this war: the USA and Israel had established aerial supremacy, they could do endless sorties as they wanted and destroyed rocket launchers, ammunition depots, military compounds, infrastructure and what not. Why the fuck didn’t it occur to anyone that the Strait of Hormuz is so important for international trade and could therefore quickly be turned into the achilles’ heel? Especially since the Houthis did the same just a little over a year ago when tried to close access to the Red Sea. Unbelievable that the USA didn’t see that coming, and then again, I didn’t really expect Trump and Hegseth to be able to formulate a coherent strategy.
Trump Put His Own Interests Above All in the Iran Deal
You don’t need to be a foreign policy expert to see what happened here. You need to be a domestic policy expert. Trump sold out America’s ally in the war, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states for the swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan. Trump knew that the food inflation and high gasoline prices triggered by this war were a prescription for a Republican wipeout in the midterms. He had to stop the war now to get prices down by November, because if the Democrats take the House and Senate, Trump will be looking at endless investigations into how he has used the presidency to enrich himself and his family — and possibly even impeachment.
So, Trump did what he always does: He abandoned all principle and all allies and put his personal interests above all other considerations.
I am sure Trump never had any other principle than making sure to use his office to increase his family’s personal wealth. What a disgrace.
How will AI make moral decisions for you and me?
The short answer is we need a moral psychology of AI for the same reasons we need moral psychology of humans. We need to understand what drives humans to be more or less moral, in order to promote a more moral society and more moral behavior in our institutions. Now that AI machines are increasingly interfacing with the world, I think we need to do the same for them, since they will be making decisions with moral consequences.
We need to understand what moral principles they follow, if any, and to what extent these are due to their training, their programming, the datasets they were fed or the contexts in which they operate.
Oh, this is such an interesting topic and my brain starts to hurt when I think it through, knowing what I know about AI - and the tech business.
In Praise of a Dumb House
Within the next year, Samsung will begin embedding Google Gemini directly into Bespoke AI refrigerators, microwaves, and ranges. Do I want my fridge cameras scanning my groceries (the images are called “shelfies”) and ordering more? LG’s Signature Oven Range has introduced Gourmet AI, which recognizes your dishes and automatically applies what it deems to be optimal settings. AI Browning monitors bread and sends notifications when it’s ready. But, like, I have eyes. A fridge that informs me if my milk is spoiling? I have a nose. Do I really need AI to tell me when fresh food is good or bad? What if I suddenly can’t turn off this allegedly smart oven and burn my house down?
I love tech and I love playing with new gadgets. But there is so little appeal for a smart home for me. I’m using Alexa as loudspeakers and to set a timer in the kitchen. I take a screen into the kitchen when I am cooking. Everything else is just tech for tech’s sake, without any real use case, at least for me. Also, I want to decide myself what to buy and what to cook, or rather carry out the decisions made by my wife.
Where Has All the Cottage Cheese Gone?
Until recently, cottage cheese had been dismissed as a soulless diet food. Sales of the product peaked in the 1970s, when the average American ate about five pounds of it per year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But dairy manufacturers began to refocus their processing capacity on yogurt, which eclipsed cottage cheese sales by the mid-1980s.
A growing obsession with protein among American consumers has given the white curds a new life. A few years ago, online fans began posting about “protein-maxxing” with cottage cheese, adding it to ice cream, smoothies, flatbreads, bagels and pasta dishes. TikTok creators became cottage cheese converts, enticed by the product’s roughly 14 grams of protein per serving.
I have been eating cottage cheese for breakfast almost daily for many years. It helps me lose weight or at least not gain too much. And I really do like it, either pure or with fruit.
But, when in the USA, I have learned to avoid cottage cheese. All I ever found in the grocery store was gooey, over-priced and nasty-tasting stuff. Interesting to know that even this kind of cottage cheese is flying off the shelves there, it’s probably because of all the stupid “now with more protein than ever!”-labels.
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That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico