💡 Axios Finish Line: America gets spiritual - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

💡 Axios Finish Line: America gets spiritual - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

1 big thing: What spirituality means to you

Illustration: Lindsey Bailey/Axios

There's a holy shift moment happening in the country, Carly Mallenbaum writes. Why it matters: U.S. adults are moving away from organized religion, while simultaneously embracing spirituality. By the numbers: Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults call themselves spiritual, according to Pew Research Center's latest survey of more than 35,000 Americans. But spirituality is no longer connected to religion. Half of all religiously unaffiliated adults say they are at least somewhat spiritual.  The fine print: 86% of U.S. adults believe people have a soul or spirit, Pew finds. 83% believe in God or a universal spirit. And 79% believe in something beyond the natural world. Case in point: We asked Finish Line readers to explain what spirituality means to them, and they delivered. Although responses came from people across different cities and towns, generations and religious upbringings, many of their ideas of spirituality fit into three major buckets.  Spirituality is tied to nature. "The way monarchs cocoon and hatch, flying thousands of miles with feather-like wings. The unconditional love of a trusted canine companion. I see acts of something bigger than ourselves," says Rich Collins, who's from Chocorua, N.H., and has identified as Catholic and agnostic over the years. "We use phrases like 'communing with nature' for a reason," says Deb Grant from Houston. "I believe we are seeking some connection with any gracious presence." 2.  Spirituality is found in kindness. "I believe in kindness and being present, listening more than talking, being there for others and remaining positive — especially when things go sideways," says Jim English of Milton, Mass., who was raised Roman Catholic. "The essence of spirituality is love," says Cole Blankenship, who lives in Reno, Nev., and has studied Buddhism and Christianity. "For me, spirituality is to learn to be a better human," says Hoshang Varshney from San Jose, Calif., who's "an atheist and Hindu by birth." 3.  Spirituality is believing in something bigger. "I call it the Great Cosmic Awareness," says Cheryl McBride of Hamburg, N.Y., who hasn't practiced Catholicism in 50 years but still believes "there is something 'out there' that is way above my pay grade." "Spirituality allows space for mystery," says the Rev. Lottie MacAulay Friedman, an ordained minister in Bellevue, Wash. "It means believing there is something far beyond these tangible bodies and limited perceptions," says Barbara Morgan of Covington, Ga. The bottom line: Although people are less religious — Penny Edgell, sociology professor at the University of Minnesota, says — "the need for tradition, ritual and things that feel more sacred has increased" in our stressful and efficiency-focused, modern lives.

The year of the robot - Transformer algorithms - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

The year of the robot - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

The secret behind these innovations is the same breakthrough that gave us ChatGPT: transformers.   Transformer algorithms allowed computers to understand how each word in a sentence relates to every other, predicting what comes next. Now, they’re helping robots grasp the relationships between objects and actions in the physical world.

Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong. - POLITICO

Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong. - POLITICO

...Many in Washington bristled at the public’s failure to register how strong the economy really was. They charged that right-wing echo chambers were conning voters into believing entirely preposterous narratives about America’s decline.

What they rarely considered was whether something else might be responsible for the disconnect — whether, for instance, government statistics were fundamentally flawed. What if the numbers supporting the case for broad-based prosperity were themselves misrepresentations? ...

...Democrats, on the whole, seemed much more inclined to believe what the economic indicators reported. Republicans, by contrast, seemed more inclined to believe what they were seeing with their own two eyes....

...Our research revealed that the data collected by the various agencies is largely accurate. Moreover, the people staffing those agencies are talented and well-intentioned. But the filters used to compute the headline statistics are flawed. As a result, they paint a much rosier picture of reality than bears out on the ground...

...If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate.

...vMy colleagues and I have modeled an alternative indicator, one that excludes many of the items that only the well-off tend to purchase — and tend to have more stable prices over time — and focuses on the measurements of prices charged for basic necessities, the goods and services that lower- and middle-income families typically can’t avoid. Here again, the results reveal how the challenges facing those with more modest incomes are obscured by the numbers. Our alternative indicator reveals that, since 2001, the cost of living for Americans with modest incomes has risen 35 percent faster than the CPI.

10 Friday AM Reads - Microsoft’s New Majorana 1 Processor Could Transform Quantum Computing:

10 Friday AM Reads - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

• Microsoft’s New Majorana 1 Processor Could Transform Quantum Computing: The processor uses qubits that can be measured without error and are resistant to outside interference, which the company says marks a “transformative leap toward practical quantum computing.” (Wired) see also Microsoft just claimed a quantum breakthrough. A quantum physicist explains what it means: Researchers at Microsoft have announced the creation of the first “topological qubits” in a device that stores information in an exotic state of matter, in what may be a significant breakthrough for quantum computing. (The Conversation)

2 – DeepSeek: now the truth comes out, and it’s not far from what I suspected - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

☕️ What does Nvidia know? - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

2 – DeepSeek: now the truth comes out, and it’s not far from what I suspected

DeepSeek rocked the world with newer, cheaper, faster to build AI models in January.

 

American tech experts (who are spending billions) said, “no way.”

 

I told you, “Watch and see."

 

China was very likely to have used American know-how and our open-source AI models as part of the workup to train its models. Just like insisting that “partners” doing business in China are required to reveal critical trade secrets that Beijing “borrows” - to put it gently – as a way to build native industries.

 

Reports this morning suggest I may have been on to something. (Read)

 

Chinese researchers apparently used a technique called “distillation” to hoover information from larger, top tier models that was then, in turn, used to train smaller, cheaper and faster to build versions.

 

Silicon Valley researchers were gob smacked but then recreated the scenario.

 

CNBC reports  “researchers at Berkeley said, they recreated OpenAI’s reasoning model for $450 in 19 hours last month. Soon after, researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington created their own reasoning model in just 26 minutes, using less than $50 in compute credits, they said. The startup Hugging Face recreated OpenAI’s newest and flashiest feature, Deep Research, as a 24-hour coding challenge.”

 

My guess is that global intelligence organizations are very aware of what’s happened, but that information will never see the light of day for a variety of reasons.

 

It’s a tough row to hoe.

 

The West built AI then proudly trumpeted the fact that it was “open source” which is a lot like waving an all you can eat sign in front of a ginormous, hungry Viking looking for dinner.

 

Keith’s Investing Tip: Technology is accelerating at a tremendous pace and every investor who is thinking in terms of what was will be left behind by what “will be.” Most investors could probably double their tech allocation and still not have enough.

(1) Trump's Master Plan: How Russia Lost Everything | George Friedman - YouTube

(1) Trump's Master Plan: How Russia Lost Everything | George Friedman - YouTube

Ending A Catastrophe for Ukraine and Russia 

Ed D’Agostino // Partner & COO, Mauldin Economics George Friedman // Author & Strategist, Geopolitical Futures 

Ed D'Agostino: 

George Friedman, it's always good to see you in what I would've called unprecedented times. But before we started rolling, you indicated that maybe this isn't so unprecedented. Set the stage for us. What's going on here with our new president? 

George Friedman: 

At times of historical crisis, presidents come in looking to violate the norm because the norm is unsustainable, and they appear to be nearly criminals. When the immigrants started coming to the United States in the early 19th century, Andrew Jackson decided to change the population structure of Georgia. The Supreme Court said he couldn't. He said, "Well, the Supreme Court orders this. Let them enforce it." 

Franklin Roosevelt had the hundred days. Why a hundred days? Because he saw a massive banking crisis, and he saw that he had to massively restructure the banking system. And if he waited a hundred days, Congress would get involved, and he wanted to beat that. And he had the famous hundred days for which he was called a dictator, for which the columnist said he was completely unqualified for this office, that he's breaking all norms. And yes, he was breaking our norms, where the norms were unsustainable.

Personalities aside, and Trump has a strange personality, this is the moment that America had to have this president. I didn't vote for him, but now I think I understand him. He is trying to disrupt America because it's unsustainable. He's now trying to disrupt the world because it's unsustainable, and that's where we are now. The United States has great power. When the president decides to do this, he no longer just does it to the banking system. The whole world explodes.

Ed D'Agostino: 

So that sets the stage. 

George Friedman: Okay. 

Ed D'Agostino: 

Let's talk about what's happening as you and I speak literally, and this is Wednesday the 19th, and this will air Friday the 21st. So who knows what will happen in between? But right now, we have a war in Ukraine that is in the process of being potentially settled through a negotiation. You've called this war a failure from Putin's perspective. Do you still feel that way, and if so, why? 

George Friedman: 

It was a catastrophe. The Russian army in three years could not overrun what is virtually a thirdrate country. It failed. It cost the Russians massive lives, massive positions in the world, and massive amounts of money, and he has nothing to show for it. This has weakened his political position in Russia substantially. There's unrest in Siberia. There are things being written, raising the question of what he's doing. He, Putin, is in political trouble. The way he formulates it is that he's the great victor and aggressor, but now willing to settle on something reasonable on his terms. Well, this is what politicians do, turn failure into success. But the idea that Russia is a great power is gone. If they can't beat Ukraine, who's the next player, Armenia? They are not players, and Trump has realized this.

The Prophet of Trump’s Second Term - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

The Prophet of Trump’s Second Term - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

...odevilla died in 2021, but his ideas endure. His core insight, developed in a 2010 essay and in subsequent books and publications, was that a progressive ruling class based on a sense of social superiority had captured government and academia and large parts of the business sector and waged war against ordinary Americans to maintain and expand its power. The result, Codevilla said, was an increasingly oppressive centralized bureaucracy immune to supervision, and an American empire that failed to keep Americans safe.