How AI is eating the internet. Where to buy an affordable American-badged car. The G7 horror show & subjectivity in language.
Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
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Martin Barré (1924-1993), Sans titre.
How AI is undoing the search-bargain on which the internet has hitherto depended
As OpenAI and other upstarts have soared, Google, which has about 90% of the conventional search market in America, has added AI features to its own search engine in a bid to keep up. Last year it began preceding some search results with AI-generated “overviews”, which have since become ubiquitous. In May it launched “AI mode”, a chatbot-like version of its search engine. The company now promises that, with AI, users can “let Google do the Googling for you”. Yet as Google does the Googling, humans no longer visit the websites from which the information is gleaned. Similarweb, which measures traffic to more than 100m web domains, estimates that worldwide search traffic (by humans) fell by about 15% in the year to June. Although some categories, such as hobbyists’ sites, are doing fine, others have been hit hard (see chart). Many of the most affected are precisely the kind that might have commonly answered search queries. Science and education sites have lost 10% of their visitors. Reference sites have lost 15%. Health sites have lost 31%. For companies that sell advertising or subscriptions, lost visitors means lost revenue. “We had a very positive relationship with Google for a long time…They broke the deal,” says Neil Vogel, head of Dotdash Meredith, which owns titles such as People and Food & Wine. Three years ago its sites got more than 60% of their traffic from Google. Now the figure is in the mid-30s. “They are stealing our content to compete with us,” says Mr Vogel. Google has insisted that its use of others’ content is fair. But since it launched its AI overviews, the share of news-related searches resulting in no onward clicks has risen from 56% to 69%, estimates Similarweb.
Source: Economist
Calling the US an emerging market is Bigly defamatory to emerging markets
Any comparison made between Trump’s actions and emerging markets would be highly defamatory. To emerging markets, that is. The stereotype of an emerging market basket-case is that el presidente defenestrates a hapless central bank governor — probably one he himself just appointed — every other weekend on some stupid pretext. But, while it’s all relative, emerging markets are increasingly now bastions of monetary policy orthodoxy — strict adherents to central bank independence, and cast-iron inflation targets. Which is why el presidente has in most cases stopped doing the defenestrating. He might be defenestrating plenty of other people — especially if they are political opponents. He might even be invading other countries. But by and large he has learned to tolerate the technocratic former investment banker or ex-New York Fed type who will keep rates high, let the currency float, and rebuild foreign exchange reserves to entice investment. Turkish interest rates are 46 per cent and you’ve heard barely a peep from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Vladimir Putin has also kept Elvira Nabiullina around to run Russia’s war economy despite oligarch complaints about borrowing costs. In emerging-market democracies, the South African Reserve Bank has gone from constant low-level political threats of interference to being quite close to lowering its inflation target. Brazil’s central bank is a byword for orthodoxy despite often being a political football at times. Even Nigeria’s banks can list in London, with investors far more comfortable with its monetary policy framework. Outside Asia, real rates are quite high in many countries. … please don’t tar these markets with the ongoing US institutional meltdown.
Source: Joseph Cotterill in acerbic form: Financial Times
American electricity prices are rising sharply this summer, thanks to heavy demand and supply tightness.
According to the CPI index, electricity has topped the broad inflation rate for three straight months. That’s partly because everyone jacked up the AC during an unusually tropical June, but grid spending pushes up prices, too:
Affordable American-branded cars DO exist! Made in China and imported to Mexico
Would you believe me if I told you that you could buy a brand spanking new Chevrolet that gets 48 miles per gallon for only about $17,000? It sounds too good to be true, but that’s the actual price tag for the Aveo. There’s just one catch, if you’re from the states: In North America, the model is sold in only Mexico. Oh, and this “Heartbeat of America” Chevy? It’s actually made in China. In a new feature, Bloomberg News’ Amy Stillman and David Welch report that Chinese-made cars are infiltrating Mexico because “cheaper labor and component costs allow companies to churn out less expensive cars.” In the US, the average price for a new car is almost $49,000, and GM’s least expensive model in the states — the Chevy Trax — costs thousands more than the Aveo. “Washington has promised to shield American automakers from Chinese imports with tariffs,” Amy and David write, “but that hasn’t stopped GM, Ford Motor Co. and Stellantis NV — which owns the Chrysler, Jeep and Ram brands — from shipping their own China-made cars to Mexico. They’re part of a wave of Chinese car exports in recent years.”
It’s the start of a troubling trend, writes Shannon O’Neil. “While Mexico’s overall trading ties with China pale in comparison [to ties with America], they have been growing at double-digit rates,” she writes. “Most worrisome for Mexico, the surge is mostly one way. Chinese imports nearly doubled over the last decade to some $130 billion, while Mexican exports back total less than $10 billion, leaving a $120 billion bilateral trade deficit outstripping that between the US and China in relative size and share.” What’s worse, Shannon says there’s a precedent for it: “In 2000 Mexico exported more computers, telecommunication equipment, clothes and auto parts to the US than any other country. Just over a decade later, it had lost its lead to China in all but auto parts.”
Source: Amy Stillman and David Welch in Bloomberg
Martin Barré 58-40-III (1924-1993)
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The Shining: my trip to the G7 horror show with Emmanuel Macron: Emmanuel Carrère in find form in the Guardian
As the minutes passed, more and more slowly it seemed, people started wondering where Merz could be. Had he panicked? Fled? The delay had already lasted a good half-hour – a long time for an event scheduled to last no more than 36 hours in all. Finally, the two appeared, Merz tall, slim and grey, with body language that did little to clarify whether he was in the role of hostage or chosen one, Trump true to his image – midnight blue suit, red tie, orange face, thick-set body, only the wisp of a smile. Two leaders talking one-on-one before the official opening of the summit is totally against protocol, Bonne whispered in my ear, an open and deliberate affront, certainly not in the style of poor Merz, an old-school Christian Democrat, the frail and wobbly bulwark against a German far-right already endorsed by the US vice-president, JD Vance. Trump had used Merz to send the usual message: I do what I want. As to what happened next, I’ll spare you the pleasantries, the welcome speeches and the photocall. Soon the first plenary discussion began, which only the sherpas (PR+1) were allowed to attend, but I had access to the press room where you can see and hear everything as if you were sitting at the table. Kicking things off, Trump said that all this talk was meaningless in the absence of Putin – excluded from the club by that incompetent Obama after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 – a message he repeated in an increasingly grim tone every time anyone dared to send a comment his way. Taking his cue from Carney, Macron acted as if things were off to a great start and valiantly argued for a trade and tariff agreement that would be beneficial for all parties. Coming to his aid, Meloni suddenly pulled two world maps from her bag and showed them to Trump, saying: “Look, Donald: all of this, in blue, is us 20 years ago, when we were still in charge. And this in red is trade today, ie mainly China. So it would be better if we, the blues, could reach an agreement between us against the reds, because the question now is no longer so much who we let in, but how not to get kicked out.” Her tirade over, she nodded vigorously in approval of herself. And as I was starting to find her increasingly likable, I asked myself an embarrassing question: if I weren’t French, if I observed her from a distance, would I find Marine Le Pen likable, too? In any case, one thing you can say about Meloni is that she’s the least poker-faced person imaginable: when something amuses her she bursts out laughing, if something bores her she rolls her eyes and lets out a huge sigh. After an hour and a half, as expected, we’d got nowhere. Trump condescended to quip to Keir Starmer: “You say you’re a democracy but that’s not true: you’ve got a king.” Starmer laughed a little obsequiously, relieved like someone who’s been struck by lightning once and is unlikely to be struck again. He was wrong: a few hours later, standing with Trump outside the hotel, the latter let a sheaf of papers slip from a folder, scattering them on the ground, and as he made no move to pick them up, it was Starmer who, after a moment’s hesitation, bent down and literally knelt at the master’s feet – a devastating image that of course went around the world. Afterwards in smaller rooms there were a few bilats – as bilateral discussions between two leaders are called. I attended the ones between Macron and Starmer and then Macron and Carney: they made little impression on me. At the end of the afternoon, Macron held an impromptu press conference outside the hotel. Asked if he approved of the Israeli strikes on Iran and the prospect of a regime change in Tehran, he replied that however detestable the regime may be, revolutions imposed from outside rarely end well. Just look at Iraq and Libya. “How do you intepret [Trump’s] apparent sudden departure from the G7?” the journalist went on. Most of us present at this exchange weren’t aware that Trump had left, and the announcement left us stunned. For a moment Macron himself seemed taken aback. “I think,” he said, “he’s gone to negotiate a ceasefire between Iran and Israel.” Macron’s intention, in my opinion, was to politely clear Trump of accusations that he’d been boorish and had a temper tantrum, but the lightning strike was not long in coming. Arriving in Washington a few hours later, Trump said he hadn’t been going to negotiate a ceasefire but something “much bigger” (which was true: after three days of hesitation, the US joined the war alongside Israel). Trump added that while Macron is a “nice guy”, he’s “publicity seeking” and, later, that he “doesn’t get it right too often”, to which Macron responded with a shrug and no hard feelings: this wasn’t the first or last comment of its kind, a jibe between friends who get on well despite the odd squabble. (As Reagan put it when he was told in 1981 that Israel had just bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor: “Boys will be boys.”)
Source: The Guardian
Can’t help thrilling to Maureen McLane’s poetic philosophy
As Susan Stewart observes and as Elaine Scarry so lovingly, carefully shows in The Body in Pain, we spend our lives relying on the near aliveness of nature and of the object world, taking for granted, when privileged, when secure, that the object world, which includes poems as much as tools or tables or computers, responsively answers to and as if by magic anticipates human needs, human desires. Any artifact, indeed any humanly prepared or transformed substance, bears within it not only the congealed labor Marx reminds us it does or the movement of thought Arendt tells us it does but also a more generalized human well-wishing: Be well. Sit in this chair. This chair knows and anticipates both the human need for rest and the contours of a resting human body. Now shut the window. This window bespeaks and answers the simultaneous desire for shelter and our love of light and a view. Now read this poem. This poem bespeaks our desire to commune, to hear and be heard, to make the chaos of inner feeling not only sentient but sharable. This poem brings the murk of inner corporeal urgencies into enunciation, as Susan Stewart might put it. If a mountain nymph is a creature of fantasy, her imagined subjectivity is no less compellingly spoken, brilliantly and economically thought, for that. A stranger may address us across centuries, languages, countries, genders. An object, an artifact, addresses us. We lend and are lent a voice, a form. We may be addressed across species. A sympathetic cognitive projection underlies the logic of address here— Hurl your green over us— and enacts that broader linguistic, discursive condition of intersubjectivity about which Emile Benveniste wrote so illuminatingly years ago in his essay “Subjectivity in Language” (1958). Regarding the reciprocal structure of personal pronouns, “I” and “you,” Benveniste observed, “This polarity of persons is the fundamental condition in language, of which the process of communication, in which we share, is only a mere pragmatic consequence … The very terms we are using here, I and you, are not to be taken as figures but as linguistic forms indicating ‘person.’ It is a remarkable fact—but who would notice it, since it is so familiar?—that the ‘personal pronouns’ are never missing from among the signs of a language, no matter what its type, epoch, or region may be. A language without expression of person cannot be imagined.” I may be a mountain nymph. You may be the sea. To command you, to address you, I must think you. “I” must think “you.” And yet even as I think you I interfuse you with my own nature—my pines, my fir, my rocks. Or rather, “our rocks.”
Source: McLane, Maureen N.. My Poets (pp. 126-127). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
…. , but also worrying about what happens when all this turns in a violent, dangerous, threatening, erasing direction.
Martin Barré Greenwich 1957
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