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NCommander is publishing a Meta story today: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=22/11/20/0342250 It will be published on the front page with all of the restrictions that apply to such stories and discussions.

In it NCommander explains how he sees the future of the site developing with regards to software, hardware and administration. Some of those views are different now from the views that many of us held in 2014. The requirement for some of our servers is no longer justified, and there are better technologies available for achieving what we are trying to do thus also reducing our running costs. The administration of the site is placing an increasing burden on the relatively few administrators that remain in the support team. Society has also changed. Some discussion has been replaced by intimidation and threats. It is much more polarised than it was in 2014. In many ways this is the same as for numerous other web sites. However, the abuse and toxic atmosphere created by a small number of Anonymous Cowards is unacceptable and must be reversed if the site is to survive. The responsibility for some of the problems that we are experiencing, and the resulting actions that we have had to take, is placed entirely at their feet.

A few months ago the majority of the community opted - albeit very reluctantly - to remove AC posts from the front pages of the site. This action has successfully removed the vast majority of the abuse from our discussions. We are seeing a slow increase in the number of comments week-on-week and the signal-to-noise ratio is now much higher. It is only right that we also reconsider the implications of that change.

This journal entry is to enable anyone who wishes to remain anonymous to express their views. I promise that I will read it and will ensure that genuine views are considered when the community decides which path it wishes to follow. I cannot make any assurances that other members of the site's administration will read it - although I expect that at least some will. If you have an account then I strongly encourage you to leave your views under NCommander's Meta story and not here.

I further my promise that I will try to represent your views as honestly and fairly as I can.

If you abuse this journal then you are simply giving more support to the alternative options that might be considered than you are to the status quo. I encourage you to expresses sensible, logical and considered views but should you decide that abuse is what you prefer then this journal entry can simply be removed. You are being given an opportunity - do not throw it away.

About 18 months after he lost the 2020 election, Election Conspiracist in Chief Donald Trump sued Hillary Clinton and dozens of other Democrats over the election he had won nearly six years earlier.

That lawsuit went nowhere. But going nowhere meant tying up a lot of the court’s time, what with Trump’s lawyers dumping 193-page complaints onto the docket and targeting more than 30 defendants with a bizarre set of allegations claiming the election, that Trump won, had been rigged. That such an alleged rigging would result in Trump’s victory suggests either the defendants secretly wanted Trump to win or, more logically, that the plaintiff was full of shit.

The district court ruled against Trump roughly six months after the lawsuit was filed, finding that it was not only not the RICO (yes, that was in there too), but it wasn’t anything else either, no matter how many words Trump’s lawyers had tossed together in exceedingly long legal filings.

The lawyers representing Trump in this ridiculous waste of publicly funded time are now being hit with sanctions by the court that had the misfortune of handling this lawsuit. They will join a long list of other lawyers currently or formerly employed by the former president who have been fined or sued for engaging in baseless lawsuits over election results.

The sanction order [PDF] helpfully lists the offending legal professionals right up front, allowing readers to avoid accidentally seeking representation from this group of lawyers who decided to shed their respectability to engage in extremely performative litigation.

Defendant Charles Dolan has moved for sanctions pursuant to Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Upon review of the motion (DE 268), Plaintiff’s response (DE 270) and Defendant’s reply (DE 276), and for the reasons explained below, the motion is granted. Accordingly, sanctions shall be awarded jointly and severally against Alina Habba, Michael T. Madaio, Habba Madaio & Associates, Peter Ticktin, Jamie Alan Sasson, and The Ticktin Law Group.

That’s who is getting sanctioned. Here’s why: mainly it’s all the lying.

The pleadings in this case contained factual allegations that were either knowingly false or made in reckless disregard for the truth. The following examples are indicative.

When suing someone it helps to know where they live, as this can have subject matter or personal jurisdiction significance. In this case for instance, Mr. Dolan argued that he engaged in no activities in Florida that made him susceptible to suit here. He filed an affidavit stating under oath that he lived in Virginia. His lawyers advised Mr. Trump’s lawyers of that. Moreover, the summons in this case indicated an Arlington, Virginia address and the return of service indicated he was served there. Yet the Amended Complaint alleged that Mr. Dolan was a resident of New York. The Trump lawyers’ answer:

[I]t must be noted that Charles Dolan is an incredibly common name, and Plaintiff’s counsel’s traditional search methods identified countless individuals with said name across the country, many of whom reside in New York.

While alone not of great significance, this response reflects the cavalier attitude towards facts demonstrated throughout the case.

Just one of many problems with the allegations. Those are things in court cases that are supposed to be factual. These weren’t. Trump’s legal reps couldn’t seem to decide whether Dolan was the head of the Democratic National Committee, a senior Clinton Campaign official, or just someone who happened to be in the racketeering business of keeping Trump out of office. The lawsuit cherry-picked information from a government indictment in an attempt to portray Dolan’s statements to investigators as deliberate lies deployed to further a conspiracy against Trump. None of this was true and pretty much everything alleged was either provably false or entirely inaccurate.

The court sums it up this way:

In short, I find that Mr. Trump’s lawyers were warned about the lack of foundation for their factual contentions, turned a blind eye towards information in their possession, and misrepresented the Danchenko Indictment they claim as their primary support. The lawyers failed to conduct a pre-filing inquiry into the allegations against Mr. Dolan and have continued to advance Plaintiff’s false claims based upon nothing but conjecture, speculation, and guesswork. This is precisely the conduct Rule 11 is intended to deter.

[It continues....]

upstart writes:

The Gig Law Causing Chaos in California Strip Clubs:

Teddy earned what she considers good money as a self-employed dancer working in California's strip clubs. Yes, there were slow nights when wages slumped, says Teddy, who asks to use a pseudonym because not everyone in her life knows she is a sex worker. But the slow nights balanced out with evenings when the club was crammed full of customers. She says on average she never took home less than California's minimum wage (currently $15 per hour).

Teddy now refers to this period as the "era before AB 5"—a California state law officially called Assembly Bill 5, which aimed to reclassify self-employed workers as employees. Under this law, more workers are entitled to benefits such as overtime and minimum wage. The law's supporters, such as US Senator Elizabeth Warren, described the law as an answer to exploitation in the gig economy. But a controversial 2020 public vote meant the rules have not yet been applied to companies such as Uber and Lyft. Instead AB 5 reshaped a raft of other industries, from yoga studios to theater productions and trucking.

The debate about AB 5's impact on industries beyond the gig economy is in the spotlight again, as the Biden administration explores a new federal law to protect workers from misclassification. Although the US House of Representatives passed a federal version of AB 5—called the "Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act"—back in March 2021, it has since stalled in the Senate. Last week, the Department of Labor proposed a new law designed to turn more self-employed Americans into employees entitled to the minimum wage.

"The Department of Labor's proposal does not go nearly as far as AB 5," says Keith Cunningham-Parmeter, a law professor at Willamette University in Oregon who studies the impact of gig work regulation on offline workers. "AB 5 created a presumption that most workers hired by firms were employees," he says, while the Department of Labor's new rule effectively creates a test to be used in court to understand if a  worker should be considered an employee by considering a series of factors, including how much control they have over their earnings and the way they do their jobs.

Yet the unintended impact that AB 5 is having on strip clubs serves as a warning to policymakers who focus too much on misclassification in the gig economy. Since AB 5, that trade has experienced some of the most dramatic changes in the state. Dancers are divided about whether they want to become employees. But there is a growing consensus that strip clubs' interpretation of the law has resulted in dancers' pay being slashed and their jobs becoming more precarious. Although there are similarities between dancers and gig workers, dancers also believe there are important differences that mean they deserve tailored legislation. They say they do not want to be regulated like gig workers.

"AB 5 has been implemented in an absolutely horrific way throughout clubs in California, in ways that pushed a lot of people out of the industry and made it a way less lucrative and way less viable job than it was before," says Teddy, who is now a member of the activist group Strippers United. "AB 5 was meant to protect gig workers and it just happened to catch dancers in a technicality."

[...] Workers and researchers warn the gig economy is warping the debate about employee status, meaning that the problems faced by independent contractors in different industries are being lumped together. "Everyone talks about these bills as gig worker bills. But when you look at them, they apply to workers across industries, digital and analog," says Cunningham-Parmeter. "Even today, in 2022, the vast majority of low wage workers are not gig workers."

Other industries are divided about whether AB 5 had a positive impact on self-employed workers. Writers and typists are among those who have campaigned to repeal the law, claiming it hurts their ability to find work. "Due to California law AB 5, SpeakWrite cannot accept applications from California residents," says one job advert posted by transcription service SpeakWrite. Truckers have also complained about AB 5's changes. In July 2022, a convoy of truckers blockaded the port Port of Oakland to protest AB 5, arguing their new status as employees meant they have less flexibility in when and how they work.

Before AB 5, California employment officials estimated that companies misclassified up to 500,000 workers as independent contractors, says Cunningham-Parmeter. He believes the introduction of minimum wage and overtime protection was a positive development for the vast majority, even if  some companies abuse the spirit of the new law.

"Studies indicate that companies can save up to 30 percent of payroll and labor costs by misclassifying their workers as independent contractors," he says. "Therefore, it should come as no surprise that when some businesses, like strip clubs, were forced to finally treat their workers as employees, many such firms passed those new costs on to workers in the form of reduced wages or hours."

In a first, Ukrainian and Russian human rights officials met Monday during a prisoner exchange between the two sides.

Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, met with Tatyana Moskalkova, Russian Human Rights Commissioner, during the swap of more than 200 prisoners of war.

Moskalkova posted video of the meeting on Telegram. It is unclear where exactly the exchange took place.

In the video, Lubinets and Moskalkova approach each other on a deserted highway, shake hands, and have a brief exchange.

Today is the day that our civilian sailors will be coming home, Moskalkova told Lubinets. It's also important that we ensure that safe corridors exist for our work with the evacuated. We have a Iot of questions, but the most important is returning all their documents to them. So that's what I am coming to you today for, and I'm here to help in the case that an evacuee or refugee needs a specific document or confirmation of their identity.

It's an important humanitarian aspect in terms of social rights, she said.

Lubinets replied that we are exchanging lists, and I request that you will work through it and be in touch on what's possible.

Most importantly, we have activated the process of exchanging civilians of our countries. I'm sure that you want this as much as we do.

Moskalkova said that certainly everyone is interested in this path forward.

In a summation of the meeting posted on Telegram, Moskalkova said that she met for the first time with Commissioner for Human Rights of Ukraine Dmitry Valeryevich Lubinets. We had a constructive dialogue and agreed to continue working to ensure the proper treatment of prisoners, keep working for future exchanges, to protect the rights of civilians, and learn the fate of missing persons.

Lubinets,on his Telegram account, said that the need for negotiations is the humanitarian sphere.

In particular, we talked about the need to intensify the repatriation of prisoners of war and the release of civilian hostages, he said.

He said that the two discussed, among other things, the need to develop ways to visit prisoners of war, inspect places of their detention, both on the territory controlled by the Russian Federation and in Ukraine and thorough searches for missing persons.

They also discussed Ukraine's desire to visit prisoners of war held in Olenivka, which is in an occupied portion of the Donetsk region.

At the end of the meeting, it was agreed to send official letters for the implementation of the discussed tasks involving the protection of human rights, Lubinets said.

upstart writes:

Federal gig worker proposal tanks Uber, Lyft and DoorDash stocks:

The stock prices of Uber, Lyft and DoorDash slid on Tuesday after the Department of Labor announced proposed changes to how workers should be classified. The prospective guidance is intended to "combat employee misclassification," the federal agency said in a statement.

Soon after, Uber's share price dropped by more than 10% to $24.61, while Lyft's tanked more than 12% to $11.22 and DoorDash's fell more than 5% to $44.98 at the time of writing.

The rule could make it easier for contractors to gain full employment status if they are "economically dependent" on a company. However, the scope of the proposal itself would be limited to areas such as minimum wage enforcement.

Uber, Lyft and DoorDash depend extensively upon gig workers, who haul people and meals around on their behalf but do not receive many hard-won benefits of employment — such as employer contributions toward their Social Security and Medicare taxes. Despite pressure from labor organizers and some lawmakers, some tech firms have fought to continue classifying their workers as independent contractors, arguing the status benefits their businesses, other local businesses and workers themselves.

Ride-hail and meal-delivery companies say that changing how gig workers are classified would threaten their businesses, yet these firms — Uber, Lyft and DoorDash — have also posted hefty net losses under the status quo.

Attempts to alter gig worker classification in the U.S. include a recently rejected ballot measure in Massachusetts, which could have explicitly defined such workers as independent contractors.

In California, an effort to secure benefits for gig workers — AB-5 — passed in 2019. A year later, app-based gig workers in California were excluded from the law via Proposition 22, which itself was deemed unconstitutional in the state in 2021. However, app-based gig companies have appealed that ruling and continue to operate in California under the guidance of Prop 22. (Every day is a winding road.)

[...] The Labor Department's proposal is subject to a public comment period, which runs from from October 13 to November 28.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Goes Completely Rogue, Blocks Inspector General's Access To Files, Facilities:

Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Goes Completely Rogue, Blocks Inspector General's Access To Files, Facilities

The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has been problematic pretty much ever since its inception. Its prior iteration — headed up by Sheriff Lee Baca — was an abhorrent mess. The LASD was (and still is!) home to gangs formed by deputies — cliques that encouraged members to violate rights and abuse those incarcerated in the county jail. Baca's department became infamous for its internal corruption, something manifested by its obstruction of federal investigations and rogue jailhouse informant program.

Enter Sheriff Alex Villanueva. Elected after promising to clean up the troubled department, Villanueva soon showed he was more interested in shielding his officers from public scrutiny and ignoring the internal rot that had turned the agency into a menace to Los Angeles society.

The new sheriff created a handpicked "Public Integrity Unit," an entity whose name seemed to indicate Villanueva would be cleaning up the department. Shortly thereafter it became apparent the unit was far more interested in targeting the department's critics in the Los Angeles government.

Villanueva only amped things from there. He threatened county leaders with defamation suits for continuing to (accurately) portraying the department as infested with cliques of rogue deputies. He also sent his officers out to raid the homes of two prominent critics involved in civilian oversight of the department under the pretense the LASD was investigating fraudulent acquisition of county contracts.

With members of the county's civilian oversight sufficiently cowed by legal threats, non-compliance, and seizure of their electronic devices, the sheriff has moved on to shutting down the internal remnants of LASD accountability, as Alene Tchekmedyian reports for the Los Angeles Times.

This astounding display of power follows Villanueva's (unfounded) assertions that IG Huntsman is a "Holocaust denier" and his still-unproven claim that the Inspector General has committed crimes of his own, such as "stealing" confidential files on LASD officials from the department. The Inspector General has responded his access was limited to his office's investigations and was lawfully obtained.

This suggests the LASD is doing nothing more than concocting criminal charges to bypass internal and external oversight — an impression that isn't helped by the LASD's failure to move forward with charges against the Inspector General, despite making these claims for more than three years.

Original Submission

quietus writes:

We've talked a bit, in the past, about the possibility of a nuclear bomb signal/demonstration by Russia, in its conflict with Ukraine and the West. The thought there has always been about a demonstration explosion, probably with a low-yield weapon, on or off the battlefield, or a nuclear power plant 'incident'.

Now, Global Times, a mouthpiece for the more right-wing within China's CCP, has described an alternative scenario. That scenario is provocatively titled Note to the US - a nuclear war can be won by rivals

The scenario looks simple: detonating one or multiple nuclear bombs in the stratosphere, creating an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), that would cause nationwide electrical grid anomalies, cascading systems failures, and ultimately unravel the fabric of American society. (Or, more likely, European society -- but then the Global Times is rather obsessed with the US, and counts the EU among future third-world nations anyway.)

Even non-state and rogue state actors could defeat the US with only a small number of EMP weapons, is noted, and one of the advantages of such an attack is that attribution is rather hard to do:

At least 15 nations can access low earth orbit, and many have access to geosynchronous orbit. The real nature of every object launched cannot be known with certainty. Nuclear weapons can also be concealed in and called down from the clutter of the super-synchronous graveyard orbit for surprise use.

And thus the MAD aspect is removed from nuclear weapons, argues Global Times: it's hard to bomb the real culprit back to the Stone Age, if you don't know who to blame in the first place. To end with some good news: luckily,

... the electrical infrastructure designs of Russia and others have spared no expense in applying Cold War civil defense lessons. Command economies, long range planning, hardened grids, and stability of centralized leadership further aid their societies in surviving any potential EMP attack. Given their histories and traditions, those cultures are probably more adept at continued functionality in the absence of amenities and infrastructure than the US.

Pfewww.

Original Submission

Republicans suffered from a significantly higher COVID-19 excess death rate during the pandemic than Democrats, according to a new study.

For much of the early phase of the pandemic, voters from the two parties endured a somewhat comparable excess death rate, with Republicans sustaining about 22% higher excess deaths. However, when the pandemic shifted into the vaccine phase, a much more drastic dichotomy between the two parties emerged, with Republicans sustaining 76% more excess deaths than Democrats, the study found.

"Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats," the study said. "The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available."

The excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats jumped from 1.6 percentage points to 10.4 percentage points after vaccines became available, according to the study.

"This sharp contrast in the excess death rate gap before and after vaccines were available suggests that vaccine take-up likely played an important role," the NBER study explained. "Data on vaccine take-up by party is limited and unavailable in our dataset, but there is evidence of differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake based on political party affiliation."

The NBER study noted it was able to obtain voting data from Florida and Ohio but that it was not able to receive information on a person’s vaccination status.

Other studies and polling found that Democrats were more likely to receive a COVID-19 vaccine or undergo more stringent pandemic prevention measures than Democrats. For example, a recent Morning Consult poll found that only 64% of Republicans were vaccinated or planned to get vaccinated compared to 87% of Democrats.

In Florida, 69.3% of residents are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, while 59.6% of Ohioans are fully vaccinated against the virus, according to Our World In Data. The national average is 68.4% fully vaccinated for COVID-19.

upstart writes:

Justice Department demands Trump return more classified documents:

Trump still has classified documents in his possession and must return them, the Justice Department demands.

In numerous court filings, prosecutors indicated they had concerns that classified records were possibly still missing. For instance, the Justice Department described the need to determine if other classified records still hadn't been collected, and pointed to the empty envelopes with classified banners that were seized in the August Mar-a-Lago search. ...

Late last week, the Biden administration was tight-lipped on whether Trump had turned over all of the records.

"With respect to the second issue concerning whether former President Trump has surrendered all presidential records, we respectfully refer you to the Department of Justice in light of its ongoing investigation," the National Archives told the House Oversight Committee, which had raised the question.

The super-rich 'preppers' planning to save themselves from the apocalypse:

Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences

As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I don't usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin what's left of the internet, much less civilisation?

Still, sometimes a combination of morbid curiosity and cold hard cash is enough to get me on a stage in front of the tech elite, where I try to talk some sense into them about how their businesses are affecting our lives out here in the real world. That's how I found myself accepting an invitation to address a group mysteriously described as "ultra-wealthy stakeholders", out in the middle of the desert.

A limo was waiting for me at the airport. As the sun began to dip over the horizon, I realised I had been in the car for three hours. What sort of wealthy hedge-fund types would drive this far from the airport for a conference? Then I saw it. On a parallel path next to the highway, as if racing against us, a small jet was coming in for a landing on a private airfield. Of course.

The next morning, two men in matching Patagonia fleeces came for me in a golf cart and conveyed me through rocks and underbrush to a meeting hall. They left me to drink coffee and prepare in what I figured was serving as my green room. But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to me. They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world. At least two of them were billionaires. After a bit of small talk, I realised they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come to ask questions.

They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: "How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?" The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?

The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed "in time".

I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don't just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.

This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That's when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.

Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir's Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.

These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they've reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch. Will it be Jeff Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Mark Zuckerberg to his virtual metaverse? And these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that's fuelling most of this speculation to begin with.

What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where "winning" means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It's as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.

Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let's call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.

Never before have our society's most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else. Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.

Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalisation of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused.

Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.

By the time I boarded my return flight to New York, my mind was reeling with the implications of The Mindset. What were its main tenets? Who were its true believers? What, if anything, could we do to resist it? Before I had even landed, I posted an article about my strange encounter – to surprising effect.