Weekend Reading #58

Some longer and more involved reading for the weekend:

• First up is a new Weekend Knowledge Dump from Active Response Training.  Lots of good stuff, but here are some of the links that caught my attention for one reason or another:
• An article from Pew Pew Tactical on the history of the fighting tomahawk. Not very much on the origin of the tomahawk but what happened after it was introduced to America and its use since. The author also has some recommendations on current manufactured models. 
• "The Myth of 'Stupid Places and Stupid People'." Notwithstanding the title, this article actually examines the myth that compliance with a criminal will keep you safe. As for Farnam's rules of self defense, I disagree with the author's assertion it is a "myth". Of course it doesn't guarantee that you won't be a victim of violent crime. But if you don't go to bars or other places rowdy, drunk people congregate (especially if you accompany people who like to pick fights); walk through alleyways in the crime infested areas of town after dark; hang around gangbangers; or visit drug dealers, your life will be a hell of lot safer than those who do those things. 
• "Casing a Joint: Why You Should Sit Facing the Door." More than just an explanation of why you should sit facing the door (or the cash register, as Greg adds), it offers some advice on situational awareness and evaluating the security of buildings that you may visit.
• "Nine Generations of American Firearms Culture." A brief overview of the technology, laws, and public attitudes concerning firearms for 9 periods of time in America. Of course, you can't really understand the changes if you don't include migration and urbanization, because people coming from countries without a history of firearm ownership and people living in congested urban centers have different attitudes toward firearms from those living in small towns or the countryside. And video games. Imagine how different things would be if you didn't have a few generations of young men playing first person shooters who wanted to own copies or clones of the weapons they used in those games. 
• "27 Statistics on Gunshot Wounds: How Much Does It Cost to Get Shot?" This article is from 2021, but appears to be referencing studies looking at hospitalizations for gunshot wounds between 2004 and 2013.  But with that data set, it has some interesting statistics, including the following:

They found that there was an annual rate of 10.1 admissions per 100,000 people in the US. While this might fluctuate in a given year, they noted that it remained fairly stable across the reporting period. More than 80% of hospitalizations were for people between the ages of 15-44. They also noted that males were 9 times more likely to be admitted for this, and African American populations were 10 times more likely than white populations to suffer from gunshot wounds when admitted.  

 As has been noted by others, we don't have a gun problem, we have a problem with certain sub-set of our population: ethnic street gangs.

• "Inside the Mind of a Home Defense Shooting," which can be best summed up: "A home-invasion gunfight is not only a physical event — it is a neurobiological upheaval."
• "Up Close & Too Personal" which has some tips on shooting at contact or near contact distances (e.g., less than 3 feet). 
• "Which Is Better in 2026: 9mm Luger or 45 ACP?" The debate rages on, but at least this article gives you lots of information on kinetic energy, penetration in ballistic gel, and kinetic energy transfer. But I have to agree with Greg that most of this is b.s. when applied to handgun bullets. Unless you are talking about high velocity rifle bullets, energy transfer is of little relevance. What you want is something that makes a big hole and penetrates far enough to damage vital organs. And penetration is, itself, hard to predict because it depends on many factors: velocity, density, momentum, the shape of the bullet, the medium that is struck, etc. Bullet expansion, when discussing modern hollowpoints, largely depends on velocity and the starting diameter of the projectile. In that regard, the 9mm has the advantage over the .45 ACP when it comes to velocity, but the .45 ACP has an obvious advantage over the 9mm when it comes to starting diameter. Greg lists the factors he looks for in a defensive cartridge and it seems a pretty good list of criteria.

• Next up is John Wilder's latest piece, "Your Chatbot Is Cute. Theirs Is a Chained God. Here’s Why That Changes Everything," in which he extrapolates from prior technological breakthroughs what will be the end result of the AI revolution: a feudal like society where the ultra-wealth and powerful elites have god-like AIs at their command to further grow and protect their power and wealth while the 99.9999% of humanity is reduced to serfdom. (Assuming, I would add, that the elites even allow most of humanity to continue to live: "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature" was one of the tenets on the Georgia Guidestones). John explains:

      For the ultra-wealthy and national governments (which are basically the same thing at that scale), the A.I. of the future won’t be the public chatbot.  It will be a custom, proprietary, always-on system with access to individual datasets, massive private compute clusters, and real-time integration into their empires.  Imagine an A.I. that doesn’t just answer questions:  it anticipates needs across global supply chains, optimizes investments with keen foresight, runs entire divisions of virtual employees, and even simulates political and market outcomes with terrifying accuracy.

  [snip]

      The rest of us?  We’ll get the consumer version.  The good enough.  Best Value® A.I.:  the one that’s rate-limited, censored in annoying ways, and always trying to sell me something or nudge me toward approved opinions.  It’ll be helpful for writing emails or generating images of cats on porches, but it won’t be the strategic weapon the elites wield.
  
      This isn’t conspiracy, it’s simply the outcome of every technological advancement, ever, scaled to the size required by A.I.  ...  

  But the consequence will be a permanent divide between the elites and those destined to be the Morlocks. As John goes on to explain, the only thing preventing such a split previously has been the dispersion of talent among humanity--talent needed by the elites and society--allowing a path out of poverty. But "[w]hen the rich have A.I. that can do most of that thinking better, faster, and without needing health insurance or vacation days, the demand for actual human talent craters."  And, with it, "[t]he path to becoming rich effectively dies for 99.999% of humanity." 

      Don't dismiss this lightly. It is already beginning to happen (see "Vast desert city [ed: Phoenix] known for offering 'ladder to the middle class' with its back office jobs is at risk of being hollowed out by AI and offshoring"--Daily Mail). 

      John lists some steps to protect yourself from becoming wholly irrelevant, so be sure to read his whole article.  

• "Determinants of Success: Merit, Connections, Luck (As illustrated by my personal quest to enter Moscow University)" by Peter Turchin. He begins by explaining:

    In their book The Highest Exam, Jia and Li, following standard sociological literature, identify three such factors: merit, connections, and luck. The importance of luck is often underestimated. It’s natural for successful people to claim (and even believe) that their achievements are entirely due to their brilliance and hard work. (On this topic, I recommend reading Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H. Frank.) But it’s hard to quantify the effect of luck, and in statistical analyses we often have to assign the unexplained, residual variance to this factor.

    Merit, on the other hand is, in principle, measurable. Different professions use a variety of metrics to rank people by merit. In academia, which I know well, the department head usually has a point system of assigning merit to each faculty, based on their publications (and how many citations they get), getting research proposals funded, serving on committees, and such. In my department this system was known to the faculty and generally agreed to be fair.

    This leaves us connections, which is an important, but not the only component of, more generally, social power. After all, there are four sources of social power. One can advance up the hierarchy by means of coercion, economic power, and persuasion (threatening or intimidating people, paying them off, or talking them over to one’s side). Still, the political or relational form of power — being embedded in a power network — is, of course, most important. ...

Turchin goes on to explain that the mix of three (at least for admission to an elite university) varies in different countries, but all three play a role. He then dissects his experience getting into an elite university in the Soviet Union. An interesting point he touches on (although it didn't seem to impact his advancement) is the role of bad connections. Turchin's father had become a Soviet dissident by the time Turchin was trying to get into college, which he recognizes could have cut against him in his quest to get into Moscow University (although it apparently didn't since he was eventually admitted). But I remember reading several years ago that the U.S. elite universities actually discriminated in their admissions against young people who had been in Future Farmers of America, the Boy Scouts, and certain other organizations that were markers of a rural and/or conservative upbringing.