Meta keeps bleeding local jobs into the twilight of AI hype. The latest round of layoffs has eliminated 1,395 jobs in King County. Though some may think that AI itself is the cause of this escalating redundancy, a closer examination reveals that it is instead massive spending on AI infrastructure. But why are tech companies making massive bets on this new technology? Is it really all that? No, it’s not.
This weekend, Uber’s COO Andrew Macdonald admitted, during a Rapid Response interview that “AI is not giving the company bang for its buck” and its costs are “hard to justify.” So, what’s really going on here? Why is Meta planning to spend over the next two years a staggering $600 billion on AI infrastructure? For an answer, we must turn to the greatest economist of the 20th century, Michal Kalecki. He maintained that capitalists earn what they spend, and workers spend what they earn. From this point of view, we can clearly see that if AI investments stopped, then its stock market value, which is presently soaring, would collapse. So, the profits that capitalists are currently making from AI come not from use value but solely stock/exchange value. AI may never make a conventional profit.
GeekWire reports that almost right after Meta announced it cut 1,400 jobs in King County, the megayacht owned by the company’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, made its way through the Ballard Locks and docked in Lake Union. The yacht, valued at $300 million, even has a launchpad. What our times completely lacks is a sense of shame.
That said, the AI giant Anthropic is, according to the Seattle Times, “expanding in Seattle.” In fact, tech companies have not yet closed the door on our city and Bellevue, which recently “nabbed tenants like OpenAI and TikTok.” True, Starbucks might be packing its bags and moving to Nashville; but Apple is also “scooping up space shed by Meta in South Lake Union.” In a word, Seattle is still not dying.
Elon Musk, is, as you’ve probably already heard, totally pissed that Christopher Nolan cast a black woman, Lupita Nyong’o, to play Helen of Troy in his adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Indeed, Musk went as far as to say that Nolan, a moderate Brit by any measure, desecrated one of the foundations of “Western Civilization.” What makes perfect sense in all of this nonsense is Musk’s insistence that the entire and messy history of the world conform to the foundations of capitalism, which were structured by the brutal extraction of free and cheap labor from Black and brown people. As a white South African, the fire of racial oppression is a matter of survival for him. Racism cannot depart from the economic system that’s soon to make him a trillionaire.
By the way, I was born around the same time and place (Southern Africa) as Elon Musk. During that period (the 60s and 70s), Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, which share a border, had identical racist laws (Apartheid). And so, Musk was born in a Whites Only hospital (it was named after this monster); and I, in a Blacks Only one.
We are not done with Elon Musk yet. This is what his bloody stupid Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) did to our government: “The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has asked staff to volunteer for urgent deployment to support Ebola screening at the country’s entry points, according to an email seen by Reuters on Tuesday,” Reuters writes. Jesus Fucking Christ. CDC needs volunteers not to sell cookies but to monitor, at major airports, incoming travelers for signs of Ebola. We are no longer prepared for this kind of danger. Why? Because millions of white Americans can’t get enough of an ex-Reality TV star.
Yesterday morning, an explosion occurred at the Nippon Dynawave Packing Company in Longview, Washington. Initially reports had the casualties at 1 dead and 9 injured. Today, Seattle Times reports that fire-and-rescue agencies now believe that 9 people who went missing after the industrial accident are certainly dead. The chemical company employees 550 people.
“What is that?… What is that?… Weird.” Well, it sounds like a gun popping in the Yesler Terrace area. The incident happened yesterday around 10 pm near Boren Avenue and E. Yesler. Two people were shot, and both were taken to Harborview in serious condition. One had a bullet wound in the abdomen and the other in the upper thigh. The suspect is still at large.
This Is Nothing but Heartbreaking: According to Seattle Transit Blog, Sound Transit—which is run by the former King County Executive Dow Constantine, for reasons that to this day are unclear to me—has predictably decided to kick the much-needed Graham Street Station, a station that would fill the great gap between Columbia City Station and Othello Station, into the unknown future. The problem comes down to cold cash. Sound Transit’s plan for an infill station demands $200 million. But as Seattle Transit Blog points out, similar infills in Portland’s light rail system cost, in 2010, between “$1 million and $3 million ($1.5 to $4.5 million in 2026 dollars).” Writes Andrew Lindstrom: “[W]e shouldn’t accept a $200 million price tag as some sort of normal thing.” Indeed, when you dig into the full ST Alternatives Analysis 2025 (as I did), you won’t really find in-depth discussions about costs and trade-offs with different options.” To be honest, what’s lacking in Sound Transit is that sense of urgency we find in car dealers, or transit advocates.
If You’re Angry About This: There’s a rally today at the Filipino Community Center to put pressure on the Sound Transit board. Mayor Katie Wilson and County Executive Girmay Zahilay will be there, as well as “community leaders.”
Well, if Dow Constantine and his team are not there for you, Lady Rainier sure is.
While reading Aristotle’ s Physics for the first time in 20 years, I was surprised by this curious passage, which concerns the essential difference between humanmade things and living things: “If you planted a bed and the rotting wood acquired the power of sending up a shoot, it would not be a bed that would come up, but wood—which shows that the arrangement in accordance with the rules of art is merely an incidental attribute, whereas the real nature is the other, which, further, persists continuously throughout the process of making.” My god, beds were pretty raw back then (2000 years ago). Planting one of our mass-produced beds would produce nothing. Capitalist beds have no power whatsoever.
Rob Base, one half of the duo that made pop history in 1988 with “It Takes Two,” died on Friday, May 22 after losing a battle with cancer. He departed during his 59th trip around the sun. Let’s close Slog AM with what I think is Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock’s masterpiece “Joy and Pain”:
