Connect with us

Published

on

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

Lets say youre a politician in a close race and your opponent suffers a stroke. What do you do?

If you are Mehmet Oz running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, what you do is mock your opponents affliction. In August, the Oz campaign released a list of concessions it would offer to the Democrat John Fetterman in a candidates debate, including:

We will allow John to have all of his notes in front of him along with an earpiece so he can have the answers given to him by his staff, in real time. And: We will pay for any additional medical personnel he might need to have on standby.

Ozs derision of his opponents medical condition continued right up until Oz lost the race by more than 250,000 votes. Ozs defeat flipped the Pennsylvania seat from Republican to Democrat, dooming GOP hopes of a Senate majority in 2023.

A growing number of Republicans are now pointing their finger at Donald Trump for the partys disappointments in the 2022 elections, with good reason. Trump elevated election denial as an issue and burdened his party with a lot of election-denying candidatesand voters decisively repudiated them.

But not all of Trumps picks were obviously bad. Oz was for years a successful TV pitchman, trusted by millions of Americans for health advice. The first Muslim nominated for a Senate run by a major party, he advanced Republican claims to represent 21st-century America. Oz got himself tangled up between competing positions on abortion, sometimes in consecutive sentences, precisely because he hoped to position himself as moderate on such issues.

But Ozs decision to campaign as a jerk hurt him. When his opponent got sick, Oz could have drawn on his own medical background for compassion and understanding. Before he succumbed to the allure of TV, Oz was an acclaimed doctor whose innovations transformed the treatment of heart disease. He could have reminded voters of his best human qualities rather than displaying his worst.

The choice to do the opposite was his, not Trumps.

Adam Serwer: The cruelty is the point

And Oz was not unique. Many of the unsuccessful Republican candidates in 2022 offered voters weird, extreme, or obnoxious personas. Among the worst was Blake Masters, a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona. He released photos and campaign videos of himself playing with guns, looking like a sociopath. He lost by nearly five points. Trump endorsed Masters in the end, but Trump wasnt the one who initially selected or funded him. That unsavory distinction belongs to the tech billionaire and Republican donor Peter Thiel, who invested big and early in the campaign of his former university student.Trump-led Republicans have now endured four bad elections in a row.

Performative trolling did not always lead to failure. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis indulged in obnoxious stunts in 2022. He promoted anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists. He used the power of government to punish corporations that dissented from his culture-war policies. He spent $1.5 million of taxpayer money to send asylum seekers to Marthas Vineyard.

But DeSantis was an incumbent executive with a record of accomplishment. Antics intended to enrapture the national Fox News audience could be offset by actions to satisfy his local electorate: restoring the Everglades, raising teacher pay, and reopening public schools early despite COVID risks.

DeSantiss many Republican supporters must now ponder: What happens when and if the governor takes his show on the road? Pragmatic on state concerns, divisive on national issues! plays a little differently in a presidential race than it does at the state level. But the early indications are that hes sticking with divisiveness: A month after his reelection, DeSantis is bidding for the anti-vax vote by promoting extremist allegations from the far fringes that modern vaccines threaten public health.

A generation ago, politicians invested great effort in appearing agreeable: Ronald Reagans warm chuckle, Bill Clintons down-home charm, George W. Bushs smiling affability. By contrast, Donald Trump delighted in name-calling, rudeness, and open disdain. Not even his supporters would have described Trump as an agreeable person. Yet he made it to the White House all the samein part because of this trollish style of politics, which has encouraged others to emulate him.

Ilana E. Strauss: How science explains why some politicians are jerks

Has our hyper-polarized era changed the old rules of politics? James Poniewoziks 2019 book, Audience of One, argues that Trumps ascendancy was the product of a huge shift in media culture. The three big television networks of yore had sought to create the least objectionable program; they aimed to make shows that would offend the fewest viewers. As audiences fractured, however, the marketplace rewarded content that excited ever narrower segments of American society. Reagan and Clinton were replaced by Trump for much the same reason Walter Cronkite was replaced by Sean Hannity.

Its an ingenious theory. But, as Poniewozik acknowledges, democratic politics in a two-party system remains an inescapably broadcast business. Trumps material sold well enough in 2016 to win (with help from FBI Director James Comeys intervention against Hillary Clinton, Russian hackers amplified by the Trump campaign, and the mechanics of the Electoral College). But in 2020, Trump met the political incarnation of the Least Objectionable Program: Joe Biden, who is to politics what Jay Leno was to late-night entertainment.

Trump-led Republicans have now endured four bad elections in a row. In 2018, they lost the House. In 2020, they lost the presidency. In 2021, they lost the Senate. In 2022, they won back the Housebarelybut otherwise failed to score the gains one expects of the opposition party in a midterm. They suffered a net loss of one Senate seat and two governorships. They failed to flip a single chamber in any state legislature. In fact, the Democrats gained control of four: one each in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, and both in Michigan.

Plausible theories about why Republicans fared so badly in 2022 abound. The economy? Gas prices fell in the second half of 2022, while the economy continued to grow. Abortion? The Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June, and Republican officeholders began musing almost immediately about a national ban, while draconian restrictions began spreading through the states. Attacks on democracy? In contest after contest, Republicans expressed their contempt for free elections, and independent voters responded by rejecting them.America is a huge country full of decent people who are offended by bullying and cruelty.

All of these factors clearly played a role. But dont under-?weight the impact of the performative obnoxiousness that now pervades Republican messaging. Conservatives have built career paths for young people that start on extremist message boards and lead to jobs on Republican campaigns, then jobs in state and federal offices, and then jobs in conservative media.

Former top Trump-administration officials set up a well-funded dark-money group, Citizens for Sanity, that spent millions to post trolling messages on local TV in battleground states, intended to annoy viewers into voting Republican, such as Protect pregnant men from climate discrimination. The effect was just to make the Republicans seem juvenile.

In 2021, thenHouse Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy posted a video of himself reading aloud from Dr. Seuss to protest the Seuss estates withdrawing some works for being racially insensitive (although he took care to read Green Eggs and Ham, not one of the withdrawn books).

Trump himself often seemed to borrow his scripts from a Borscht Belt insult comicfor instance, performing imagined dialogues making fun of his opponents adult children during the 2020 campaign.

This is not a both sides story. Democatic candidates dont try to energize their base by owning the conservatives; thats just not a phrase you hear. The Democratic coalition is bigger and looser than the Republican coalition, and its not clear that Democrats even have an obvious base the way that Republicans do. The people who heeded Representative Jim Clyburns endorsement of Joe Biden in South Carolina do not necessarily have much in common with those who knocked on doors for Senator Elizabeth Warrens presidential campaign. Trying to energize all of the Democratic Partys many different bases with deliberate offensiveness against perceived cultural adversaries would likely fizzle at best, and backfire at worst. On the Republican side, however, the politics of performance can beor seemrewarding, at least in the short run.

This pattern of behavior bids fair to repeat itself in 2024. As I write these words at the beginning of 2023, the conservative world is most excited not by the prospect of big legislative action from a Republican House majority, and not by Trumps declared candidacy for president in 2024 or by DeSantiss as-yet-undeclared one, but by the chance to repeat its 2020 attacks on the personal misconduct of President Bidens son Hunter.

In the summer of 2019, the Trump administration put enormous pressure on the newly elected Zelensky administration in Ukraine to announce some kind of criminal investigation of the Biden family. This first round of Trumps project to manufacture an anti-Biden scandal exploded into Trumps first impeachment.

The failure of round one did not deter the Trump campaign. It tried again in 2020. This time, the scandal project was based on sexually explicit photographs and putatively compromising emails featuring Hunter Biden. The story the Trump campaign told about how it obtained these materials sounded dubious: Hunter Biden himself supposedly delivered his computer to a legally blind repairman in Delaware but never returned to retrieve itso the repairman tracked down Rudy Giuliani and handed over a copy of the hard drive. The repairman had also previously given the laptop itself to the FBI. Far-fetched stories can sometimes prove true, and so might this one.

Whatever the origin of the Hunter Biden materials, the authenticity of at least some of which has been confirmed by reputable media outlets, theres no dispute about their impact on the 2020 election. They flopped.

Pro-Trump Republicans could never accept that their go-to tactic had this time failed. Somebody or something else had to be to blame. They decided that this somebody or something was Twitter, which had briefly blocked links to the initial New York Post story on the laptop and its contents.

So now the new Twitterand Elon Musk allies who have been offered privileged access to the companys internal workingsis trying again to elevate the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, and to allege a cover-up involving the press, tech companies, and the national-security establishment. Its all very exciting to the tiny minority of Americans who closely follow political schemes. And its all pushing conservatives and Republicans back onto the same doomed path they followed in the Trump years: stunts and memes and insults and fabricated controversies in place of practical solutions to the real problems everyday people face. The party has lost contact with the sensibility of mainstream America, a huge country full of decent people who are offended by bullying and cruelty.

Theres talk of some kind of review by the Republican National Committee of what went wrong in 2022. If it happens, it will likely focus on organization, fundraising, and technology. For any political operation, there is always room to improve in these areas. But if the party is to thrive in the post-Trump era, it needs to start with something more basic: at least pretend to be nice.

* Lead image source credits: Chris Graythen / Getty; Ed Jones / AFP / Getty; Drew Angerer / Getty; Paul Hennessy / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty; Michael M. Santiago / Getty; Brandon Bell / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty; Alex Wong / Getty

This article appears in the March 2023 print edition with the headline Party of Trolls. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Continue Reading

Environment

Tesla Semi suffers more delays and ‘dramatic’ price increase

Published

on

By

Tesla Semi suffers more delays and 'dramatic' price increase

According to a Tesla Semi customer, the electric truck program is suffering more delays and a price increase that is described as “dramatic.”

Tesla Semi has seen many delays, more than any other vehicle program at Tesla.

It was initially unveiled in 2017, and CEO Elon Musk claimed that it would go into production in 2019.

In late 2022, Tesla held an event where it unveiled the “production version” of the Tesla Semi and delivered the first few units to a “customer-partner”: PepsiCo.

Advertisement – scroll for more content

Tesla Semi PepsiCo truck u/Tutrifor
Tesla Semi Image credit: u/Tutrifor

More than 3 years later, the vehicle never went into volume production. Instead, Tesla only ran a very low volume pilot production at a factory in Nevada and only delivered a few dozen trucks to customers as part of test programs.

But Tesla promised that things would finally happen for the Tesla Semi this year.

Tesla has been building a new high-volume production factory specifically for the Tesla Semi program in a new building next to Gigafactory Nevada.

The goal was to start production in 2025, start customer deliveries, and ramp up to 50,000 trucks yearly.

Now, Ryder, a large transportation company and early customer-partner in Tesla’s semi truck program, is talking about further delays. The company also refers to a significant price increase.

California’s Mobile Source Air Pollution Reduction Review Committee (MSRC) awarded Ryder funding for a project to deploy Tesla Semi trucks and Megachargers at two of its facilities in the state.

Ryder had previously asked for extensions amid the delays in the Tesla Semi program.

In a new letter sent to MSRC last week and obtained by Electrek, Ryder asked the agency for another 28-month delay. The letter references delays in “Tesla product design, vehicle production” and it mentions “dramatic changes to the Tesla product economics”:

This extension is needed due to delays in Tesla product design, vehicle production and dramatic changes to the Tesla product economics. These delays have caused us to reevaluate the current Ryder fleet in the area.

The logistics company now says it plans to “deploy 18 Tesla Semi vehicles by June 2026.”

The reference to “dramatic changes to the Tesla product economics” points to a significant price increase for the Tesla Semi, which further communication with MSRC confirms.

In the agenda of a meeting to discuss the extension and changes to the project yesterday, MSRC confirms that the project went from 42 to 18 Tesla Semi trucks while the project commitment is not changing:

Ryder has indicated that their electric tractor manufacturer partner, Tesla, has experienced continued delays in product design and production. There have also been dramatic changes to the product economics. Ryder requests to reduce the number of vehicles from 42 to 18, stating that this would maintain their $7.5 million private match commitment.

In addition to the electric trucks, the project originally involved installing two integrated power centers and four Tesla Megachargers, split between two locations. Ryder is also looking to now install 3 Megachargers per location for a total of 6 instead of 4.

Tesla Semi Megacharger hero

The project changes also mention that “Ryder states that Tesla now requires 600kW chargers rather than the 750kW units originally engineered.”

Tesla Semi Price

When originally unveiling the Tesla Semi in 2017, the automaker mentioned prices of $150,000 for a 300-mile range truck and $180,000 for the 500-mile version. Tesla also took orders for a “Founder’s Series Semi” at $200,000.

However, Tesla didn’t update the prices when launching the “production version” of the truck in late 2023. Price increases have been speculated, but the company has never confirmed them.

New diesel-powered Class 8 semi trucks in the US today often range between $150,000 and $220,000.

The combination of a reasonable purchase price and low operation costs, thanks to cheaper electric rates than diesel, made the Tesla Semi a potentially revolutionary product to reduce the overall costs of operation in trucking while reducing emissions.

However, Ryder now points to a “dramatic” price increase for the Tesla Semi.

What is the cost of a Tesla Semi electric truck now?

Electrek’s Take

As I have often stated, Tesla Semi is the vehicle program I am most excited about at Tesla right now.

If Tesla can produce class 8 trucks capable of moving cargo of similar weight as diesel trucks over 500 miles on a single charge in high volume at a reasonable price point, they have a revolutionary product on their hands.

But the reasonable price part is now being questioned.

After reading the communications between Ryder and MSRC, while not clear, it looks like the program could be interpreted as MSRC covering the costs of installing the charging stations while Ryder committed $7.5 million to buying the trucks.

The math makes sense for the original funding request since $7.5 million divided by 42 trucks results in around $180,000 per truck — what Tesla first quoted for the 500-mile Tesla Semi truck.

Now, with just 18 trucks, it would point to a price of $415,000 per Tesla Semi truck. It’s possible that some of Ryder’s commitment could also go to an increase in Megacharger prices – either per charger or due to the two additional chargers. MSRC said that they don’t give more money when prices go up after an extension.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the 500-mile Tesla Semi ends up costing $350,000 to $400,000.

If that’s the case, Tesla Semi is impressive, but it won’t be the revolutionary product that will change the trucking industry.

It will need to be closer to $250,000-$300,000 to have a significant impact, which is not impossible with higher-volume production but would be difficult.

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

Continue Reading

Technology

AI could affect 40% of jobs and widen inequality between nations, UN warns

Published

on

By

AI could affect 40% of jobs and widen inequality between nations, UN warns

Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.

Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images

Artificial intelligence is projected to reach $4.8 trillion in market value by 2033, but the technology’s benefits remain highly concentrated, according to the U.N. Trade and Development agency.

In a report released on Thursday, UNCTAD said the AI market cap would roughly equate to the size of Germany’s economy, with the technology offering productivity gains and driving digital transformation. 

However, the agency also raised concerns about automation and job displacement, warning that AI could affect 40% of jobs worldwide. On top of that, AI is not inherently inclusive, meaning the economic gains from the tech remain “highly concentrated,” the report added. 

“The benefits of AI-driven automation often favour capital over labour, which could widen inequality and reduce the competitive advantage of low-cost labour in developing economies,” it said. 

The potential for AI to cause unemployment and inequality is a long-standing concern, with the IMF making similar warnings over a year ago. In January, The World Economic Forum released findings that as many as 41% of employers were planning on downsizing their staff in areas where AI could replicate them.  

However, the UNCTAD report also highlights inequalities between nations, with U.N. data showing that 40% of global corporate research and development spending in AI is concentrated among just 100 firms, mainly those in the U.S. and China. 

Furthermore, it notes that leading tech giants, such as Apple, Nvidia and Microsoft — companies that stand to benefit from the AI boom — have a market value that rivals the gross domestic product of the entire African continent. 

This AI dominance at national and corporate levels threatens to widen those technological divides, leaving many nations at risk of lagging behind, UNCTAD said. It noted that 118 countries — mostly in the Global South — are absent from major AI governance discussions. 

UN recommendations 

But AI is not just about job replacement, the report said, noting that it can also “create new industries and and empower workers” — provided there is adequate investment in reskilling and upskilling.

But in order for developing nations not to fall behind, they must “have a seat at the table” when it comes to AI regulation and ethical frameworks, it said.

In its report, UNCTAD makes a number of recommendations to the international community for driving inclusive growth. They include an AI public disclosure mechanism, shared AI infrastructure, the use of open-source AI models and initiatives to share AI knowledge and resources. 

Open-source generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available on the web for possible modification and redistribution.

“AI can be a catalyst for progress, innovation, and shared prosperity – but only if countries actively shape its trajectory,” the report concludes. 

“Strategic investments, inclusive governance, and international cooperation are key to ensuring that AI benefits all, rather than reinforcing existing divides.”

Continue Reading

Environment

BP chair Helge Lund to step down after oil major pledges strategic reset

Published

on

By

BP chair Helge Lund to step down after oil major pledges strategic reset

British oil and gasoline company BP (British Petroleum) signage is being pictured in Warsaw, Poland, on July 29, 2024.

Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

British oil major BP on Friday said its chair Helge Lund will soon step down, kickstarting a succession process shortly after the company launched a fundamental strategic reset.

“Having fundamentally reset our strategy, bp’s focus now is on delivering the strategy at pace, improving performance and growing shareholder value,” Lund said in a statement.

“Now is the right time to start the process to find my successor and enable an orderly and seamless handover,” he added.

Lund is expected to step down in 2026. BP said the succession process will be led by Amanda Blanc in her capacity as senior independent director.

Shares of BP traded 2.2% lower on Friday morning. The London-listed firm has lagged its industry rivals in recent years.

BP announced in February that it plans to ramp up annual oil and gas investment to $10 billion through 2027 and slash spending on renewables as part of its new strategic direction.

Analysts have broadly welcomed BP’s renewed focus on hydrocarbons, although the beleaguered energy giant remains under significant pressure from activist investors.

U.S. hedge fund Elliott Management has built a stake of around 5% to become one of BP’s largest shareholders, according to Reuters.

Activist investor Follow This, meanwhile, recently pushed for investors to vote against Lund’s reappointment as chair at BP’s April 17 shareholder meeting in protest over the firm’s recent strategy U-turn.

Lund had previously backed BP’s 2020 strategy, when Bernard Looney was CEO, to boost investment in renewables and cut production of oil and gas by 40% by 2030.

BP CEO Murray Auchincloss, who took the helm on a permanent basis in January last year, is under significant pressure to reassure investors that the company is on the right track to improve its financial performance.

‘A more clearly defined break’

“Elliott continues to press BP for a sharper, more clearly defined break with the strategy to pivot more quickly toward renewables, that was outlined by Bernard Looney when he was CEO,” Russ Mould, AJ Bell’s investment director, told CNBC via email on Friday.

“Mr Lund was chair then and so he is firmly associated with that plan, which current boss Murray Auchincloss is refining,” he added.

Mould said activist campaigns tend to have “fairly classic thrusts,” such as a change in management or governance, higher shareholder distributions, an overhaul of corporate structure and operational improvements.

“In BP’s case, we now have a shift in capital allocation and a change in management, so it will be interesting to see if this appeases Elliott, though it would be no surprise if it feels more can and should be done,” Mould said.

Continue Reading

Trending