“Lead Us To The Saving Of Our Country.” – FDR

Posted on | August 11, 2025 | 3 Comments

Mike Magee

When the Depression struck, he was 5 years old. Simultaneously, the great dust storms arrived. John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” immortalized the travails of the Joad family from Oklahoma, tenant farmers trapped in the Dust Bowl. Steinbeck could have easily substituted the family with this boy, who remembered years later, “The dust killed everything it covered. The crops died, trees, flowers, and other vegetation died, and people died – some from dust pneumonia, some from despair and self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Everyone in town knew a nearby farmer who had gone to the bank and been turned down for a loan. Everybody in our town had been broke at one time or another.”

The point is that his family’s early life was shaped by hardship, and tempered with sardonic wit and a heavy dose of hope provided by Roosevelt. Watching it play out in his own home, in odd jobs, in small town chats at the drug store and beyond, by the time he neared completion of high school, he came up with a plan. “I was going to earn enough money to attend college. I’d go on to medical school, eventually become one of those doctors who didn’t have to worry about which way the wind would blew or how much rain we were likely to get this summer.”

Not long after, in 1941, he entered his Freshman year at college, with help from the drugstore where he had worked for the past few years of high school. He was away at school on December 7, 1941 when Pearl Harbor was attacked. With classmates, he huddled around the radio when President Roosevelt addressed the nation.

He hung in with school a bit longer, even as his grades suffered for lack of attention. On December 14, 1942, at age 19, a year and a week after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted. This was nearly six months to the day after my father had enlisted as a First Lieutenant, Medical Corps, United States Army. When D-Day arrived on June 6, 1944, the boy, now a young man, was completing his advanced training at Fort Leavenworth in Kentucky. My father was already in Europe at the time, having landed in North Africa some months before.

On D-Day, the young soldier was again tuned to the radio as the President’s voice rang out, ignoring for the moment separations of Church and State, “Almighty God: our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.”

Perhaps forecasting our nation’s dilemma these many years later, FDR ended that day with these words, “With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil. ”

Years later, the young soldier, now gone, remembered that night. “Tears clouded the eyes of several of the soldiers sitting near me, listening to Roosevelt’s prayer. A few sobbed openly… Somehow he had tapped into the soul of America, and had expressed its cry without reservations or embarrassment, to God.”

Now a seasoned soldier, he had first arrived in Naples, Italy a few days before Christmas, 1944. Four months later, struggling under the weight of battle gear as part of the 10th Mountain Division, they were charged with “the daunting task of capturing 3,800-foot Mount Belvedere” near Castel D’Aiano in the Apennine Mountains.

When the blast hit him, it ripped through his body, lifting and twisting him off the ground, and landing him face first in the cold dirt. Still conscious, he struggled to spit out blood and soil, realizing as he did that he could move neither his arms nor legs. “Body numb, brain active, vision blurred”, he later recalled of his self-assessment. Six foot two and two hundred pounds, he owed his life to a 5’ 5”, 145 pound sergeant who realized he was still alive and pulled him to safety. “I was conscious, but only my eyes could move. I couldn’t even unclench my teeth.”

He lay there for six more hours, drifting in and out of consciousness, in a crumbled heap, set behind a protective stone wall, with an “M” drawn in blood on his forehead. It told all that he had already received a hefty dose of morphine in the field, and to be cautious not to kill him with an overdose.

His morphine-laced mind was elsewhere. “Lying there on the cold ground, I wasn’t thinking about the future. I wasn’t even thinking about survival. I was thinking of where I had come from. My mind kept going back, back…I didn’t know where else to go, so I went home…

He survived, by way of rapid evacuation to the 15th Evacuation Field Hospital in Pistola, Italy, and from there was sent by ship to the states, ultimately landing at the Percy Jones Army Hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan.

He had been hit in the right back and arm by German machine gun fire, dosed up on Morphine and penicillin, and waited 9 hours on the battlefield near Castel d’Aiano before being rescued. His injuries were severe. Not only was his right shoulder and arm shot up, but his spinal cord was traumatized.

For months, he had minimal movement in his legs, no movement in his arms, and no control over his bodily functions. He would spend two years in various hospitals. On two occasions, his temperature rose to near 108 degrees and death was imminent. In both cases, he was given penicillin, now known as often by the moniker, “The Miracle Drug”.

He gradually regained use of his legs and learned to walk, and even run at a slow trot, again. His arms were a different matter. The right one was all but useless, except, as he said, as a “blocker” for his left arm to brace against. Several surgeries improved the rest location of his forearm and clawed hand. But he would never regain use of his right hand or raise his right arm above his head. As for the left arm, it would carry the load for the rest of his life, but he never again had sensation in that hand, except for his fourth and 5^th fingers.

He’s dead now. But I had the privilege of traveling with him for a little over a year in 1998, often to visit veteran groups around the country. They loved him, rushing to him, reaching out with enthusiasm to shake his left hand.

Zohran Mumdani Triggers NYC Memories of Fiorello La Guardia

Posted on | August 5, 2025 | 1 Comment

Mike Magee

What are the chances that citizens of New York, the largest city in the nation, would vote in a majority to oppose a formerly corrupt politician with a party machine behind him, and instead favor a little known candidate – the son of immigrant parents with “swarthy skin and belligerent independence,” from a suspect minority and religious heritage, who actively mixed music and politics, who seemed to come out of nowhere but be everywhere at once, and was ultra focused on “efficiency and honesty in municipal government?”

And what if that had occurred not once, but twice in the last century?

Certainly by now, the name Zohran Mamdani is already ringing in your ears. More on him in a moment. But let’s first travel back a century to introduce another candidate for mayor whose life and career presaged the modern day version.

His name was Fiorello La Guardia, and his remains were laid to rest on September 21, 1947 in Woodland Cemetery, a short distance from his home at 5020 Woodbridge Avenue in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. He died at age 64 from pancreatic cancer.

“The Little Flower” (a nickname that derived from his first name Fiore – Italian for flower) described his stature (5 foot 2 inches) but not necessarily his personality. The New York Times obituary described him “as much a part (of New York) as any of its public buildings” and “a little firebrand.”

By any measure, he was one of New York’s own, earning the morning of his death in 1947 the Fire Department’s 5-5-5-5 signal, a traditional bell code used to honor firefighters who have died in the line of duty.

An Italian immigrant, his father was raised a Catholic in Foggia, Italy, and his mother (from Trieste on the Italian/Croatian border) was Jewish. Fiorello was born on the East Side of Manhattan on December 11, 1882, two years after his parents marriage in Italy. His father was a skilled musician and became the bandmaster for the U.S. Army. As a result, Fiorello was raised on multiple Army bases, and graduated from high school in Prescott, Arizona, a stone’s throw from Fort Whipple. Along the way, the father taught the son to play the banjo, cornet, and trumpet, and taught his sister, Gemma, to play violin, mandolin, and piano.

Skilled in languages (Yiddish, German, French, Italian), by the age of 20 Fiorello was employed by the US Consulate in Europe, and on return to the U.S. served as an interpreter on Ellis Island. Within a few years, he managed a Law Degree from NYU in 1910, and in 1914, at age 32 ran for U.S. Congress as a Republican, losing to the Tammany Hall’s Democratic candidate. Two years later, he won the seat even though Republicans initially supported another candidate. By 2018, he was re-elected but this time with Democratic support and declaring himself a “socialist.”

By 1933, Tammany Hall and its leader, NYC Mayor Jimmy Walker, were out, clearing the way for Fiorello. He ran with the support of a complex coalition of German American Republicans, Democratic reformers, Socialists, middle-class Jews, and Italians who in the past had aligned with Tammany Hall.

He came into the Mayor’s office in 1934 good to go. He had promised work relief for the unemployed, merit-based civil service, efficiency over corruption, and a focus on infrastructure including expanded housing, transportation and parks. Robert Moses was the head of his Parks department, a post he held until 1960.His vocal support during the election for FDR paid off handsomely. Fully 20% of the entire national Civil Works Administration (CPA) budget was allocated by FDR to New York City. In return, he delivered his Labor Party’s (which he helped organize) support to FDR in his Presidential elections in 1936, 1940 and 1944.

One of his main achievements was the maintenance of the Office of Price Administration which placed limits on pricing of food, rents, and other necessities. By the time he stepped down on December 31, 1945, “Tammany Hall had been reduced to a shadow.”

Eight decades later, an independent minded, gifted politician, also occasionally self-defined a “socialist” bucked his own political establishment and soundly defeated the modern version of a Democratic Tammany candidate, Andrew Cuomo, surprising many, but not all political pundits. His name is Zohran Mamdani.

He too is the son of immigrants. He arrived on New York shores at the age of seven, born of Indian parents and raised in his early years in Kampala, Uganda. His father, Mamood Mamdani, is a Muslim from Gujarati, India, and currently a professor of political science at Columbia University. His mother is a Punjabi Hindu, noted filmmaker Mira Nair (Mississippi Masala; Monsoon Wedding; Salaam Bombay! and others).

Like La Guardia, Mamdani has been vocal and politically active since his early years. Soon after graduating from Bowden College, that voice took the form of his Rap alter-ego, Young Cardamom. In 2015, he became a fan of rising South Asian American hip-hop performer Himanshu Suri (Heems) and after reading a Village Voice article on the performer/truned politician, volunteered to help out in Heems’ New York city council campaign. Five years later, Mamdani offered this self-appraisal, “When you are a C-list rapper, seeking to get the word out about your music, in many ways you are using the same principles of being an organizer… We might have an idea of where we should have political debate, we might have an idea of what music should look like and where it should be performed, but frankly it has to engage with the reality of things.”

His music and his politics since 2015 have never shied away from controversy. Pakistani vocalist, Ali Sethi, with whom he collaborated said, “He’s talking about class divisions and the truth about them and overcoming them. But he has such a sunniness, which I love. He’s not lecturing you about anything.”

By 2020, the shift in emphasis clearly pointed to a career in politics. But his time as a performer had been constructive. “Artists are the storytellers of this world…It’s not just that we need to combine the arts with the need for dignity, it’s that we have to.”

Mamdani came out early and often in support of the Palestinian people, emphasizing pluralism and supporting a New York City “where everyone can belong regardless of religion.” In contrast to La Guardia’s final salute by the NYFD, Zohran’s campaign is still in correction territory. As journalist Sanya Mansoor noted, South Asians “see his rise as a sign of hope in a city where racism and Islamophobia erupted following the September 11 terrorist attacks.”

As the Democratic primary approached, a few national leaders like Bernie Sanders and AOC openly supported Mumdani. But most remained quiet, even though internal polls showed the young dynamic candidate in the lead. But young up-and-coming journalist’s like USA Today’s Sara Pequeño didn’t hold back. as she wrote, “The reasons conservatives are criticizing Mamdani are the reasons people my age voted for him. We believe in moving funding from the NYPD into areas like mental health care and community building. We support Palestinian rights. We want to see that working-class New Yorkers can remain in this city. We see taxing corporations and the wealthy as a good thing.”

And the numbers bore her out. In neighborhoods with high South Asian populations, Mumdani won 52% of the first-choice votes. During the Primary campaign, Mumdani’s campaign visited 136 mosques across the city and focused on three Muslim principles: justice, mercy, and commitment to community. But it was more that just values said South Asian advocacy organization Drum Beats: “You need a political program for people that speaks to the grave inequalities in society.” And Mamdani had one. And as if the message needed any amplification, the MAGA ICE campaign reinforced what was at stake. As CUNY Hunter College sociologist, Heba Gowayed, wrote, “ICE was born out of Muslim hate.”

At the same time, Zohran proved himself an agile politician by forming a cross-endorsement agreement with Jewish candidate Brad Lander, city comptroller and highest ranking Jewish official in the city. That led to 2/3 of Lander’s voters choosing Mamdani as their second choice.

Mamdani’s victory speech echoed “The Little Flower’s” themes. He declared to ecstatic supporters, “I will be the mayor for every New Yorker, whether you voted for me, for Gov. Cuomo or felt too disillusioned by a long, broken political system to vote at all. I will fight for a city that works for you, that is affordable for you, that is safe for you.”

Polls seem to suggest that Mumdani, like La Guardia, had his finger on the pulse of the voters. A July 29, 2025 poll found that “support for Palestinian rights” was important to 96% of voters and “willingness to criticize the Israeli government” was important to 88%. Younger voters as predicted overwhelmingly supported Mamdani, but in much larger numbers than predicted. Voters under 40 made up over 40% of the early voter turnout.

UNC 2019 Journalism graduate and columnist for USA Today, Sara Pequeño, said it best and suggests we may be witnessing the emergency of a “Little Flower” of our own. She wrote, “I have personally seen the way my generation has reacted to Mamdani’s campaign. There is a palpable excitement reminiscent of Barack Obama’s first run for the presidency, an excitement fueled by the idea that the Democratic Party can change, in spite of itself.”

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: ali sethi > Brad Lander > Fiorello LaGuardia > heba gowayed > Heem > Hindu > Indian > Islamophobia > jimmy walker > mamood mamdani > mira nair > Muslim > robert moses > sanya mansoor > Sara Pequeno > socialist > South Asian > Tammany Hall > UNC > zohran mamdani

What Would Eli Ginzberg Think of MAGAnomics?

Posted on | July 29, 2025 | 1 Comment

Mike Magee

“The Monetarization of Medical Care.” It had appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine 13 years earlier, on May 3, 1984, and was written by a Columbia University economics professor named Eli Ginzberg.

At the time I first read it, doctors were in an upheaval in Massachusetts. Managed Care and Health Maintenance Organizations (HMO’s) had begun to drive a wedge between generalists and specialist doctors; medical liability costs were going through the roof; for-profit hospitals were beginning to challenge the non-profits; and the new health consumer movement was just emerging. The Boston Globe was writing articles about “doctor malaise.”

Into this mix came Dr. Ginzberg’s paper which traced the corrosive impact of money on every element of health delivery since the 1950’s, from doctors to hospitals, and from philanthropists to manufacturers.

As for solutions, he summarized the issue in the next to the last paragraph this way, “…only the naive believe that the goals that must be pursued — innovation, quality, access, and equity at an affordable cost — can be achieved either by greater reliance on the for-profit sector or by radically constraining its growth.” My opinion in 1997, a decade after its publication: The status-quo will not be an option forever. Change is coming. So I decided to track down the famous Columbia economist myself.

A few calls later, I found myself speaking with Eli. I told him who I was and that I had admired his work for some time, and asked him whether he might like to join me for lunch. He said yes, and I asked him where he would like to go, what was convenient for him? “How about the Oak Room at the Plaza?”, was his immediate response.

As the clock struck 12:30 the following day, I was seated in one of “the wrap-around couches along the western wall” of the Oak Room when Eli Ginzberg entered, larger than life.

He was a short but spry 86 year old man. His face was alive and his eyes sparkled with a combination of humor, extreme confidence and good will. His hair was thick and white and coarse, his eyebrows unruly, and he had a mustache that belonged. He was dressed carefully in an old-cut suit, with white shirt and loosely knotted silk tie drawn almost up to his neck. His shoes were polished but scuffed.

He was present. His voice was strong, but not overpowering. First impression: a wise man, accessible and open; a complex man with powerful communication skills.

Others described this adviser of eight American presidents as a “maverick economist,” for his willingness to break out of the well defined boundaries of economics, and cross over into areas of psychology, organizational dynamics, and human resource theory. The famous Stanford University health economics professor, Victor Fuchs, described him as a pragmatic individual who approached a challenge “with a hard-headed view, not seeking villains or imagining that there are easy solutions to difficult problems…(an individual who felt) that a combination of clear thinking and compassion could bring us closer to the best of all possible worlds – but he is not sure that it will.”

Former Secretary of State George Schultz said of him, “The list of original ideas which came from his thinking is long and important.” But in looking back on his own research and successes over the years, Eli’s self-assessment was more pessimistic and critical, believing it was “a mixed bag, with a few successes, some contributions, and many efforts that resulted in few if any positive results.”

That first lunch, we talked for nearly an hour and a half, before he suddenly said, “I have an appointment.” But we’d meet again, six more times before he died on December 15, 2002, always for lunch, and always at the Oak Room at the Plaza. Over the course of those meetings we discussed a wide range of issues, some mine, but often his. That pattern was set at our very first lunch.

On that first day, I had begun by showing up with my wilted copy of his 1984 article which he recalled in detail. When he saw the article itself, ripped from my copy of the journal years before, he seemed somewhat taken aback. As we ate, he instructed that the competitive market approach to health care (including pharmaceuticals) would never deliver efficiency, a balance of high quality and reasonable cost; that poverty and nutrition were essential critical determinants of health; that the uneven distribution of doctors was the result of doctors gravitating to locations where they could earn the best living; and that expensive modern highly specialized and technology laden hospitals could not be sustained in low income areas without support.

But he was also interested in talking about other elements of his life – his intellectual pursuits and accomplishments, the people he had known, and met, and worked with. He was especially proud of his work with the military in World War II, and would return to it again and again over the next few years.

He had been attached to Columbia for nearly six decades, but that barely told his story. His father was Lithuanian and had been educated in Germany. German was Eli’s native tongue. In 1928, when he was 17, and about to enter his sophomore year at Columbia, his professor father, a leading expert in rabbinical law at Jewish Theological in New York, took a sabbatical leave to establish the department of Jewish Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. With the family in transit, Eli enrolled for a year at the University of Heidelberg in Germany where his father had trained. Some years later, in an interview, he recalled, “I was in my more aggressive mood. I had very substantial interest in psychoanalysis. I even thought, for a very brief time at Heidelberg, that I would maybe study medicine. I wasn’t interested in medicine, and I wasn’t interested in dealing with eight patients a year, but never the less Freud had made a big impression on me.”

But after one year, he returned to Columbia, and in a combined undergraduate and graduate program earned a bachelor’s degree and his PhD in 1934 at the age of twenty three. It was the middle of the Depression, and FDR was struggling to uncover strategies to incorporate into the New Deal legislation. Eli sensed the opportunity and managed to secure a fellowship focused on uncovering the secrets of successful corporations.

Over the next year he embarked on a road trip that would take him to 46 states and many of the nation’s largest corporations including Kodak, General Electric, Proctor and Gamble, General Motors, Sears Roebuck, International Harvester, Humble Oil in Texas, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, U.S. Steel, and Goodyear. He summarized his findings three years later in a book titled “The Illusion of Economic Stability” around the same time that FDR and Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes were locked into their “Court Packing” struggle.

By then, he had become a known expert in workforce planning and jobs. He was focused on “human resources” before that term had entered the business school vernacular. In 1939, he began to explore in earnest the issue of economics and group behavior. What motivated productivity and success? Could one predict manpower needs better if you really understood what made people tick and integrate that with excellent analysis of the hard facts. The new field of industrial psychology was just being born and it was a perfect match for the young researcher already developing a reputation as a “maverick economist”.

One can only wonder now, 23 years later, what the maverick himself might have had to say about the state of America and the world. Would he embrace or resist AI? Would he be surprised by America’s isolationist turn or the attacks on the CDC, NIH, and FDA? Would the man who shook hands with his uncle (JFK) and his father make peace with RFK Jr?

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: Boston Globe > columbia u > Eli Ginzberg > george schultz > Justice charles Hughes > Monetarization of Medicxal Care > NEJM > oak room at the plaza > physician malaise > renegade economist > Victor Fuchs

Posted on | July 23, 2025 | Comments Off on

Be Helpful.

Be Grateful.

Be Useful.

Category: Uncategorized

“China Shock 2.0”: China Goes “Democratic” on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Posted on | July 21, 2025 | 1 Comment

Mike Magee

Last week, following a visit to the White House, Jensen Huang instigated a wholesale reversal of policy from Trump who was blocking Nvidia sales of its H20 chip to China. What did Jensen say?

We can only guess of course. But he likely shared the results of a proprietary report from noted AI researchers at Digital Science that suggested an immediate policy course correction was critical. Beyond the fact that over 50% of all AI researchers are currently based in China, their study documented that “In 2000, China-based scholars produced just 671 AI papers, but in 2024 their 23,695 AI-related publications topped the combined output of the United States (6378), the United Kingdom (2747), and the European Union (10,055).”

David Hook, CEO of Digital Science was declarative in the opening of the report, stating “U.S. influence in AI research is declining, with China now dominating.”

China now supports about 30,000 AI researchers compared to only 10,000 in the US. And that number is shrinking thanks to US tariff and visa shenanigans, and overt attacks by the administration on our premier academic institutions.

Economics professors David Autor (MIT) and Gordon Hanson (Harvard), known for “their research into how globalization, and especially the rise of China, reshaped the American labor market,” famously described the elements of “China Shock 1.0.” in 2013. It was “a singular process — China’s late-1970s transition from Maoist central planning to a market economy, which rapidly moved the country’s labor and capital from collective rural farms to capitalist urban factories.”

As a result, a quarter of all US manufacturing jobs disappeared between 1999 and 2007. Today China’s manufacturing work force tops 100 million, dwarfing the US manufacturing job count of 13 million. Those numbers peaked a decade ago when China’s supply of low cost labor peaked. But these days China is clearly looking forward while this administration and its advisers are being left behind in the rear view mirror.

Welcome to “China Shock 2.0” wrote Autor and Hanson in a recent New York Times editorial. But this time, their leaders are focusing on “key technologies of the 21st century…(and it) will last for as long as China has the resources, patience and discipline to compete fiercely.”

The highly respected Australian Strategic Policy Institute, funded by their Defense Department, has been tracking the volume of published innovative technology research in the US and China for over a quarter century. They see this as a measure of experts opinion where the greatest innovations are originating. In 2007, we led China in the prior four years in 60 of 64 “frontier technologies.”

Two decades later, the table has flipped, with China well ahead of the US in 57 of 64 categories measured. In A.I algorithm research, China had 29% of papers to our 12%. In high performance computing, they had 36% to our 13%. And in machine learning, they tipped the scale at 40% compared to our 11%.

According to Autor and Hanson, China is the “apex predators” in a battle that marries “economic Darwinism to Chinese industrial policy.” As Musk was dismantling our national planning and funding apparatus, China’s government has been targeting our most innovative sectors including “aviation, A.I., telecommunications, microprocessors, robotics, nuclear and fusion power, quantum computing, biotech and pharma, solar, and batteries.”

The warnings may sound shrill, but this is a misread of historic proportions. And it all comes down to one word. Tariffs. And when it comes to Trump Tariffs, no country has been treated with greater hostility than China, drawing this rebuke of intentional US isolationism in January, 2025 by the Harvard Business Review: “Even with data privacy and security concerns — American LLMs will ignore the Chinese LLM disruption threat at their own peril.”

In the paper, Harvard Business School professor, Raj Choudhury teamed up with Syracuse University Business Management professor Natarajan Balasubramanian and Tsinghua University economist Mingtao Xu to answer the timely question “Why DeepSeek Shouldn’t Have Been a Surprise.”

For those unfamiliar with the controversy, US generative AI superego’s had been running in overdrive of late, with enormous back patting and philosophizing (in between rocket trips and musings of Mars), when a little known Chinese upstart, DeepSeek, upset the apple cart with their Open Source release of a “smaller, more efficient, and much, much cheaper LLM.”

The timing could not have been more awkward for our technocratic elites – the drivers of Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, Open AI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Musk’s XAI, and MetaAI.

These proprietary, self-proclaimed techno-geniuses are fully committed to knocking each other off. But that doesn’t keep them from embracing the vibe of Open AI’s Sam Altman who recently penned an op-ed titled “The Intelligence Age” in which he explained, “Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the (AI enabled) Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will.”

And these US billionaires have put their money where their mouth is, burning through enormous amounts of capital as they build out a whole new, fully funded industry – the creation of generative AI factories that require so much energy that investment in our once nascent nuclear power industry has now gone through the roof, and Musk has officially registered a new city for himself and his AI followers, Starbase, TX.

Meanwhile, RAND researchers like Kyle Chan, were reporting out that “China is applying state support across their entire A.I. tech stack, from chips and data centers down to energy.” The China government’s strategy focuses on three coordinate building blocks: 1) computing capacity, 2) vertical integrated and accessible Chinese data, and 3) skilled engineers.

At the same time, the government has been financing networks of private labs committed to public/private partnering, and incentivizing local government leaders in cities throughout the country to support hundreds of A.I. research start-ups. One city in south China, Hangzhou, which already housed giant Alibaba, created a section of the town, called Dream Town, now the birthplace and permanent residence of DeepSeek.

RAND’s Kyle Chan recently flagged the fact that China has turned adversity (Trump’s tariffs) into a motivational tool. By keeping their LLM discoveries Open Source (as US firms are leaning toward proprietary controls to enhance future profitability), authoritarian China, which is supposed to be opposed to transparency and accessibility, has managed, according to The Atlantic, to move “exactly in the opposite direction of where the American tech industry is heading.”

Why DeepSeek now? Management experts say this is just “classic disruption theory in play.” Case in point was what happened to the steel industry decades ago when integrated steel plants serving high end customers of high-end sheet steel were overtaking less efficient electric arc furnaces. In response the older plants, with inferior technology, customized and specialized on addressing low end tasks like creating steel rebar for reinforcing concrete construction. The incumbent was then forced “to cede market share to the disrupter.”

In this case DeepSeek may be inferior technology to the next greatest version of ChatGPT, but it appears to be good enough to offer “industry-specific applications powered by their LLMs that are deeply integrated into China’s digital ecosystems.” Chinese LLM’s are more specific and less general-purpose.They require less computing power and are priced at the lower end.

How low? For software developers around the globe, DeepSeek-R1 is 95% cheaper than using Open AI’s o1 product, and as effective. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, says that kind of pricing will cause AI to “skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can’t get enough of.”

Bottom line? Under America’s nose, China has gone “democratic” by open sourcing their code, engaging global software developers and users, and placing America’s top competitor (at least for the moment) in the driver’s seat.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: AGI > AI > australian startegic policy institute > chiana shock 2.0 > china > china shock 1.0 > david autor > gordon manson > RAND > Tarriffs

“Everybody’s Job Will Be Different Going Forward.”

Posted on | July 14, 2025 | 3 Comments

Mike Magee

In a speech to the American Philosophical Society in January, 1946, J. Robert Oppenheimer said, “We have made a thing …that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world…We have raised again the question of whether science is good for man, of whether it is good to learn about the world, to try to understand it, to try to control it, to help give to the world of men increased insight, increased power.”

Eight decades later, those words reverberate, and we once again are at a seminal crossroads. This past week, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, was everywhere, a remarkably skilled communicator celebrating the fact that his company was now the first publicly traded company to exceed a $4 trillion valuation.

As he explained, “We’ve essentially created a new industry for the first time in three hundred years. the last time there was an industry like this, it was a power generation industry…Now we have a new industry that generates intelligence…you can use it to discover new drugs, to accelerate diagnosis of disease…everybody’s jobs will be different going forward.”

Jensen, as I observed him perform on that morning show, seemed just a bit overwhelmed, awed, and perhaps even slightly frightened by the pace of recent change. “We reinvented computing for the first time since the 60’s, since IBM introduced the modern computer architecture… its able to accelerate applications from computer graphics to physics simulations for science to digital biology to artificial intelligence. . . . in the last year, the technology has advanced incredibly fast. . . AI is now able to reason, it’s able to think… Before it was able to understand, it was able to generate content, but now it can reason, it can do research, it can learn about the latest information before it answers a question.”

Of course, this is hardly the first time technology has triggered flashing ethical warning lights. I recently summarized the case of Facial Recognition Technology (FRT). The U.S. has the largest number of closed circuit cameras at 15.28 per capita, in the world. On average, every American is caught on a closed circuit camera 238 times a week, but experts say that’s nothing compared to where our “surveillance” society will be in a few years.

The field of mFRT is on fire. Emergen Research projects a USD annual investment of nearly $14 billion by 2028 with a Compound Annual Growth Rate of almost 16%. Detection, analysis and recognition are all potential winners. There are now 277 unique organizational investor groups offering “breakthroughs” in FRT with an average decade of experience at their backs.

But FRT, as amazing and disturbing as it is, took a back seat last week to David Ignatius‘s Washington Post article titled “How the spy game will work when there’s no place to hide.” In the opening sentence he shares the 2018 warning of a CIA case officer who states with confidence, that “computer algorithms would soon be able to identify people not just by their faces, or fingerprints, or DNA — but by the unique ways they walked.”

Wild eyed speculation? Apparently not. In a Cornell scientific publication on May 7, 2025, researchers using a model called FarSight were able to confirm human identity from 1,000 meters through gait assessment (among other measures) with 83% accuracy. For spies that operate in secret and hide their movement and communications at all costs, there is literally now “no place to hide.”

A moment of reflection is all it should take to appreciate that the distance between a spy’s cover and tradecraft and our own day to day privacy and secrecy (including health related information) is narrow indeed. Consider former CIA director, Gen. David H. Petraeus words in 2012, “We have to rethink our notions of identity and secrecy. … Every byte left behind reveals information about location, habits, and, by extrapolation, intent and probable behavior.”

Thirteen years later, Ignatius asked last week, “We’ve entered a new era where AI models are smarter than human beings. Can they also be better spies? That’s the conundrum that creative AI companies are exploring.”

But as no one knows better than Nvidia’s chairman, the bleed over of AI into human sectors is now near complete. Even before gait recognition, AI powered FRT technology was pervasive. They are everywhere – security, e-commerce, automobile licensing, banking, immigration, airport security, media, entertainment, traffic cameras – and now health care with diagnostic, therapeutic, and logistical applications leading the way.

Machine learning and AI have allowed FRT to displace voice recognition, iris scanning, and fingerprinting. And now “gait recognition” (plus data tracking) can theoretically uncover the identity of even masked face ICE agents during one of their LA children’s park raids.

Still Jensen Huang sees this revolution as both manageable and progressive. He said last week, “A lot of work will be automated (but) it’s going to create new work, new jobs…AI is the ‘great equalizer’…because we use AI for research…as a tutor…so that I may be better informed in a lot of different fields that I otherwise am relatively new at…its a booster for young people and puts pressure on people like myself….every programmer just became better because they have the benefit of AI, every researcher just became better…every doctor just became better because they had AI to help them do diagnosis. It could be a doctor in a small town, or a developing country…they all have access to the world’s best AI…its actually a great equalizer.”

Does anything keep him up at night? How about the fact that 80% of undergraduates in China go on for a Masters degree? And this while we’re handcuffed in recruiting the best overseas minds by tariff and visa wars and targeted attacks on our premier universities.

Speaking to the Hill & Valley Forum in Washington, D.C. on May 1, 2025, Huang stressed the importance of maintaining an innovation lead in controlling the risk/benefit endpoints of this technologic revolution.

His concerns? 1) Already more than 50% of the world’s AI researchers are Chinese. 2) Their AI algorithms and codes are Open Source while our’s are non-transparent and escape regulatory public/private scrutiny. 3) Our politics appear to backward facing and out of sync with technology which is “full speed ahead.”

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: AI > china > Generative AI > Jensen Huang > Jobs > Nvidia > Oppenheimer > technology > Trump tarriffs

The Texas Flood Disaster – Not “An Act of God.”

Posted on | July 8, 2025 | 3 Comments

Mike Magee

In the wake of last week’s human tragedy in Texas, it would be easy (and appropriate) to focus on the role played by Trump’s reckless recent dismantling of FEMA and related federal agencies. But to do so would be to accept that the event was an anomaly, or as Trump labeled it on Sunday on his way to a round of golf at Bedminster, “a hundred year catastrophe.” In reality, tragedies like this are the direct result of global warming, and last week’s suffering and loss are destined to be followed by who knows how many others here and in communities around the world.

In 2009 President Obama joined global leaders in New York City for the Opening Session of the UN. One of the transboundary issues discussed was Global Warming.

All agreed that the Kyoto Protocol had failed. It failed because the target to decrease emissions by some 5% was too low. It failed because large transitional nations like India and China were excluded. And it failed because US leadership opted out.

The global community today has a deeper hole out of which they must dig. In doing so they would do well to focus on health and safety as outcome measures, and define strategies to manage the obvious consequences of this ongoing crisis.

Two decades ago, the warnings were clear. Left unattended, we would soon not only need to plan mitigation, but also need to prepare and resource intervention to deal with inevitable human injury and disease fall-out.

Of course, back then, we could not have predicted that wise disease interventions in climate ravaged hot spots around the globe, like expansion of USAID funding in the Bush and Obama administrations, would be X’d out under Trump/Musk. Who could have imagined such reckless and ultimately self-destructive moves?

And yet, here we are:

1. Natural disasters from storms, floods, drought, wildfires and excessive heat, as predicted are now the norm, not the exception. These realities in turn cause direct injuries, mass migrations, and diversion of resources which might normally go to societal infrastructure.

2. Rising temperatures are expanding the range of various disease vectors. including mosquitos, ticks and rodents. Malaria will occur in higher altitudes than before, and dengue fever will appear farther north. Ticks are now second only to mosquitoes as carries of human disease. But a far more dangerous human vector, one capable of literally turning back a century of progress in combating infectious diseases at home and abroad has landed on our shores. His name is RFK Jr.

3. Food and water borne illnesses are becoming more prevalent due to the higher temperatures which encourage their occurrence and spread. FDA deregulation and hobbling of the EPA now magnify this downside risk.

4. Air quality has declined as ozone, particulate matter, and allergens combined with heat create a deadly brew. Seniors as a result suffer more cardiac and respiratory disease, and youngsters more asthma.

5. Water scarce areas are expanding faster creating famine, hygienic failure, migration and violence. Lack of availability of clean safe water expands the already serious burden of water borne diseases.

6. Decline in water quantity and quality negatively compromises production of crops, livestock and fisheries, expanding the number of global citizens who suffer hunger and famine.

This list was logical and the impact predictable two decades ago. It came less that one year after Hurricane Katrina made land on August 23, 2005, in New Orleans costing $161 billion and 1,833 human lives. Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth,” was first released the following year on May 24, 2006. And his was not the only voice at the time.

Georgetown University’s Lawrence Gostin presented a policy laden argument in JAMA that ended with this prophetic statement:

“Global health, like global climate change, may soon become a matter so important to the world’s future that it demands international attention, and no state can escape the responsibility to act.”

For 105 souls (at latest count) from central Texas, time has run out. But if one is to believe the current administration and its enablers, this latest “Act of God”, waged on young Christian campers among others, has no human fingerprints on it.