composed and performed by Christopher Otto
engineered, edited, mixed and mastered by Christopher Botta

Violin Octet

It's a Ben and Hesse solo special!!!!! don't worry we found jacques and zir is safe although zi are speaking fluent cantonese and only fluent cantonese so get ready for that. Song ID's are coming please direct all hate towards Hesse as she forgot to send the ID's also for the record I liked the merzbow additions I just wasn't sure how it would play here. I'm sorry for doubting you guys. Thanks so much for subscribing and listening it means the world to us all.

SD 142 - Watermelon Salad

We're Baaaaaack! For this week's Undercover Billionaire bonus ep you are locked in The Business Chamber alone with Ben and Jake, who discuss our beautiful, beautiful billionaires: Grant's struggles with COVID, Monique's struggles with flat tires, and Elaine's struggles with nothing because she is a perfect queen playing 5D Go. They also discuss their weekly expenses, the difference between Entrepreneurs and Technicians, and much more!

*Unlocked* SD 168 UB 4 Dr Bronner Face Reveal

Part 1 –– We welcome returning champ Nick Chavez – mechanical engineer, marxist political economist – for a long conversation about his new essay examining the real nitty-gritty aspects of production and labor, knowledge and management. Time to step down from the ivory tower and onto the shop floor. We talk extensively about different modes of manufacturing and the stratification of technical expertise within capitalist production – and what needs to be kept, changed, and abolished in a transition to communist production. 

••• Nick’s essay: https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/field-notes/Technical-Expertise-and-Communist-Production 
••• Nick’s new blog: https://designformanufracture.wordpress.com/ 
••• Nick’s new twitter: https://twitter.com/DFManufracture

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills   

Grab TMK gear: https://www.bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ 

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

229. Capitalist Manufacturing // Manufacturing Communism – Part 1 (ft. Nick Chavez)

Richard Seymour discusses his recent blogpost on the so-called lockdown sceptics, and in particular the work of Toby Green and his book 'The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left'. We talked about the straw man arguments, factual inaccuracies and conspiratorial thinking that characterise the book and the lockdown sceptic literature more generally. We also talked about why parts of the left have been receptive to some of this work and also what to make of the alliance between some self-styled anti-woke leftists and religious conservatives.

Interregnum - on the lockdown 'sceptics'

Biden’s administration used an Air Force F-22 Raptor jet fighter and Raytheon’s Sidewinder missile, to shoot down a meandering Chinese balloon on Saturday. Republicans in Congress called the balloon a “show of force,” and Biden canceled Secretary of State Blinken’s trip to China.

Brian is joined by Dr. Ken Hammond, professor of East Asian and Global History at New Mexico State University, founding director of the Confucius Institute at New Mexico State University, and leading organizer with Pivot to Peace.

Please make an urgently-needed contribution to The Socialist Program by joining our Patreon community at patreon.com/thesocialistprogram. We rely on the generous support of our listeners to keep bringing you consistent, high-quality shows. All Patreon donors of $5 a month or more are invited to join the monthly Q&A seminar with Brian.

The War Drive Against China Keeps Ballooning

We are joined by Abeba Birhane — Senior Fellow in Trustworthy AI at the Mozilla Foundation — for a critical discussion about the release of GPT-4 and OpenAI. We also get into the excellent work that Abeba and colleagues have done mapping the specific values encoded into, and the surveillance pipeline that influences, the vast majority of AI/ML research. 

••• Abeba’s twitter: https://twitter.com/Abebab
••• Abeba’s paper – The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3531146.3533083 

Stuff we referenced
••• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI will reshape society, acknowledges risks: 'A little bit scared of this' https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/openai-ceo-sam-altman-ai-reshape-society-acknowledges/story?id=97897122 
••• GPT-4 Technical Report https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf
••• Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712
••• The Sparks of AGI? Or the End of Science? https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-sparks-of-agi-or-the-end-of-science
••• GPT-4 and professional benchmarks: the wrong answer to the wrong question https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/gpt-4-and-professional-benchmarks

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills   

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

243. GPT-4 and the Politics of OpaqueAI (ft. Abeba Birhane)

Extremist Javier Milei won Argentina's presidential election on a far-right platform, pledging to abolish most government ministries, abandon monetary sovereignty, and adopt the US dollar, while cutting ties with China and withdrawing from BRICS. Ben Norton explains how a history of debt and colonialism keeps the South American nation trapped in seemingly endless crisis.

VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FN6hoIb-QqA

Check out our article "How Argentina has been trapped in neocolonial debt for 200 years: An economic history": https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/12/18/argentina-neocolonial-debt-history

Our related video "Global debt is unpayable: How Wall Street traps poor countries, profiting rich ones": https://youtube.com/watch?v=WRkhWQ0sRn4

Judicial coup in Argentina: Corrupt judges conspire with media oligarchs to ban Cristina Kirchner from office: https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/12/08/judicial-coup-argentina-cristina-kirchner


TOPICS
0:00 Meet Javier Milei
7:54 History of debt traps
13:38 Sergio Massa and Peronists
19:27 Economist Ha-joon Chang on dollarization
22:27 Cut ties with China and Brazil?
24:51 Far-right "libertarianism"
27:55 Inflation, IMF, and foreign debt
30:46 Alberto Fernández surrenders to IMF
33:58 Investocracy: Rule by foreign investors
38:09 Exports and imports
39:35 Dependency theory
43:09 Protectionism and kicking away the ladder
46:28 Past failed dollarization schemes
52:56 Outro

How extremist Javier Milei became Argentina's president: A story of debt, crisis, and empire

nomi's got heat

https://www.patreon.com/generationloss

404 // Showgirls (1995)

Liz and Brace go POSTAL on Trevor Noah’s Clinton interview and Ghislane’s relationship, plus Liz loses her shit and nearly smashes up the studio

Episode 23: Gutsy W*men

We sit down for an epic two-hour episode with the legend Yasha Levine to ramble through American soft power, intelligence technology, Russiagate and more.

**PRODUCER'S NOTE**: The canonical numbering scheme has been corrected to account for inflation and bonus episodes.

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