Month: December 2025

The threat to German auto producers isn’t from Chinese cars flooding Germany. It’s from Chinese cars flooding to emerging markets (red), where they’re killing the market for German cars. That’s not something EU tariffs on China are going to be able to fix.

— Read on x.com/robin_j_brooks/status/2004219526184108178

As a novelist and a journalist covering A.I., I’ve tended to dismiss the threat it poses to authors. I won’t enlist A.I. to write on my behalf for the same reason that I won’t enlist a robot to do other hard stuff—hike a mountain, argue with my husband. But, lately, I’ve been pushing up against the limitations of that logic. I can write a book for my own reasons, but I can sell the book only if readers like it more than what they can get from, say, a chatbot. If readers prefer A.I.-generated fiction, then authors won’t be able to stop it.

— Read on www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/what-if-readers-like-ai-generated-fiction

Give me a young star, and I can use the reductionist laws of physics to predict that star’s future: It will live a million years rather than a billion years; it will die as a black hole rather than as a white dwarf. But the components of a living organism yield something new and unexpected, a phenomenon called “emergence.” Give me a simple cell from the early days of Earth’s history, and I could never predict that some 4 billion years later it would evolve into a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face. Kangaroos—like humans—are an unpredictable, emergent consequence of life’s evolution.

— Read on www.theatlantic.com/science/2025/12/physics-life-reductionism-complexity/685257/

Readers of this series will recognize some recurring themes: The work that client firms are settling for is not better when it’s produced by AI, but it’s cheaper, and deemed “good enough.” Copywriting work has not vanished completely, but has often been degraded to gigs editing client-generated AI output. Wages and rates are in free fall, though some hold out hope that business will realize that a human touch will help them stand out from the avalanche of AI homogeneity.

As for Jacques, he’s relocated to Mexico, where the cost of living is cheaper, while he looks for new work. He’s not optimistic. As he put it, “It’s getting dark out there, man.”

— Read on www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/i-was-forced-to-use-ai-until-the

I find thinking of things as a trade-off helps with post-decision regret. If you made a big decision and it’s not perfect, just remember that this decision had trade-offs, and any other choice would have just had a different set of trade-offs (maybe much worse).

— Read on actsofvolition.com/2025/12/its-all-trade-offs/

On January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1925. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon.[3] The literary highlights range from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage and the first four Nancy Drew novels. From cartoons and comic strips, the characters Betty Boop, Pluto (originally named Rover), and Blondie and Dagwood made their first appearances. Films from the year featured Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, the Marx Brothers, and John Wayne in his first leading role. Among the public domain compositions are I Got Rhythm, Georgia on My Mind, and Dream a Little Dream of Me.

— Read on web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2026/

In a white paper examining more than 24,000 posts and 18,000 accounts across 14 digital platforms between Oct. 4 (the day after The Life of a Showgirl came out) and Oct. 18, shared first with Rolling Stone, the firm concluded that just 3.77 percent of accounts drove 28 percent of the conversation around Swift and the album during that period. This cluster of evidently coordinated accounts pushed the most inflammatory Swift content, including conspiracy theories about her supposed Nazi allusions, callouts for her theoretical MAGA ties, and posts that framed her relationship with fiancé Travis Kelce as inherently conservative or “trad,” with all of this framed as leftist critique.

— Read on www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/taylor-swifts-social-media-campaign-life-of-a-showgirl-1235480646/

Young people complain they’ve been permanently locked out of opportunity. They will never become homeowners, never be able to support a family, only keep treading water at precarious gig jobs forever. They got a 5.9 GPA and couldn’t get into college; they applied to 2,051 companies in the past week without so much as a politely-phrased rejection. Sometime in the 1990s, the Boomers ripped up the social contract where hard work leads to a pleasant middle-class life, replacing it with a hellworld where you will own nothing and numb the pain with algorithmic slop. The only live political question is whether to blame immigrants, blame billionaires, or just trade crypto in the hopes that some memecoin buys you a ticket out of the permanent underclass.

Meanwhile, economists say things have never been better.

— Read on www.astralcodexten.com/p/vibecession-much-more-than-you-wanted

Newer evidence suggests that ditching tough-to-attain goals can actually be good for us. According to a review of more than 230 studies recently published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, adjusting our goals in response to stress or challenges, rather than grinding on, is often “a more appropriate and beneficial response.”

— Read on nautil.us/the-surprising-benefits-of-giving-up-1248362/