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In Dubai’s AI job market, your passport matters

Ameca, a humanoid robot, smiled and blinked at the crowd at Dubai AI Week 2025, a celebration of all things artificial intelligence. Landmark announcements marked the event, including a $545 million hyperscale data center to supply Microsoft and Dubai’s first PhD program in AI. 

AI engineer Nair, 29, felt inspired. Since moving to the United Arab Emirates last October from Kerala, India, she had applied to hundreds of entry-level jobs and faced rejections, scams and exploitative offers. Rest of World is not revealing her first name to protect her identity.

Now she remembered why she’d emigrated. “Dubai is emerging as a global AI hub,” she told Rest of World. “It was fascinating to see how companies are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.”

Tech workers like Nair are moving to the UAE, attracted by a Golden Visa program that gives 10 years of residency to skilled professionals, no taxes, high salaries and the ease of setting up business, recruiters and tech professionals told Rest of World. 

“The UAE ranks second only to the U.S. in attracting top AI talent, with many of these experts now calling the UAE home,” Abdulla bin Touq Al Marri, UAE’s Minister of Economy, said last year.

The UAE has positioned itself as the U.S.’ tech ally.  During President Donald Trump’s recent visit, it secured access to 500,000 of the most advanced Nvidia chips, critical for AI development. It also announced plans to build the largest AI campus outside the U.S. in collaboration with American tech companies. And last year, Microsoft and Emirati AI firm G42 announced they are working together to create a “skilled and diverse AI workforce.” 


Amar Diwakar/Rest of World

The UAE’s laser-sharp focus on AI makes it attractive for tech workers at a time when opportunities are shrinking in the West. More than 50,000 tech workers, mostly mid-level managers and developers, have been laid off in the U.S. this year from about 100 companies, according to the layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi. There are also fewer openings for roles such as software developers, and many tech workers fear the Trump government’s stringent immigration policies. Venture capital investment in startups, too, has cooled in the West. 

But beneath the UAE’s sheen of opportunity, the job market can pose challenges for tech workers depending on where they’re from, workers and recruiters told Rest of World. Senior tech talent from the West are often headhunted for top positions at high salaries. Experienced AI experts from South Asia and Ukraine fill the lower ranks, for lower pay. 

And young talent like Nair fall in a gray area of AI professionals who struggle to get hired. With a Master’s in electronics engineering and specialization in AI hardware from an Indian college and one year of work experience, she has been job-hunting for months.

“You get automatic rejections,” she told Rest of World. “Companies want candidates with four to five years of experience for entry-level roles, or they hire through referrals.”

This is not due to a dearth of jobs. Dubai has more than 800 AI firms, most of them startups, according to the Dubai Center for Artificial Intelligence. Abu Dhabi has over 400 AI companies. Most of them plan to recruit this year. 

But the UAE also has an “abundance” of tech workers, according to a 2024 talent report by the UAE Ministry of Economy and immigration law firm Fragomen. Most of these workers are not qualified for specialized AI roles, the report said. 

About 95% of 50,000 companies surveyed in the report said they hired tech professionals from outside the Middle East. 

“There’s not enough domestic university talent so we recruit candidates from India and Ukraine,” Vahid Haghzare, director of SVA Recruitment based in Dubai, told Rest of World.

The data and AI combination here is hot. They have the money to execute fast.

The UAE is a “global migration node,” Froilan Malit Jr., a visiting scholar at American University in Dubai and an expert on migration to the Middle East, told Rest of World. It is a transit space for people from developing countries to gain experience before moving West, while Western professionals can leverage their expertise for higher pay and long-term residency in the UAE, he said. 

Western professionals are attracted by Dubai’s lifestyle perks, while Asian and Muslim tech workers appreciate a culture that’s a mix of East and West, Malit Jr. said. “It’s a win-win: tax-free income, top schools, security, and cosmopolitan living.”

Workers get different salaries based on their years of experience, and also where they are from, he said. Workers from developing nations experience a “citizenship penalty” and command a lower salary in the UAE than their western counterparts, Malit Jr. said. 

“That’s what triggers a lot of tech workers from the Global South to move to the West, and then return [to the UAE] with a new passport,” he said.

Jarkko Moilanen, head of data products at the Abu Dhabi Department for Government Enablement, which oversees the city’s digital transformation, moved to the UAE in 2022 from Finland after being recruited as one of 200 global experts to help drive the effort.  

“I needed a change,” said the 50-year-old AI professional, who has helmed transformations at various tech companies in Finland. A year later, he decided to stay long-term in the UAE and applied for a Golden Visa.

The nation has made relocation relatively frictionless, especially for AI-related specialists, developers and entrepreneurs. Dubai had issued an estimated 158,000 Golden Visas by 2023.

Moilanen said that he is incentivized to stay in the UAE rather than go back to Europe, which he perceives as being in economic decline. In contrast, Abu Dhabi has gone all in on AI, and plans to become the world’s first AI-native government, laying the groundwork to fully automate and digitize government processes.

Moilanen said that he has also received multiple job offers from recruiters in Saudi Arabia, but has turned them down as he hopes to launch an AI and data business in the UAE.

“The data and AI combination here is hot. They have the money to execute fast,” he said.

AI startups are thriving in the UAE, with support from funds like Hub71, an Abu Dhabi-based incubator. In Dubai, Sandbox, funded by Oraseya Capital, supports existing startups, while the Dubai Future Accelerators helps companies collaborate with the government. 

You get automatic rejections. Companies want candidates with four to five years of experience for entry-level roles.

Entrepreneur Nidhima Kohli, originally from Luxembourg, recently launched her startup, The AI Accelerator, an online course meant to help entrepreneurs and executives use AI tools to improve productivity.  She migrated to Dubai in 2022 and received a Golden Visa the following year. 

“I’ve lived in London, Paris, and the U.S., but never felt as safe as in Dubai. It is international, people are approachable and happy to connect with you,” she told Rest of World. 

She said she appreciates the ease of networking and setting up a business in the UAE. “The UAE is putting money where its mouth is. They want to grow and not stifle innovation.”

But for less experienced workers from South Asia, like Nair, hurdles persist. She has seen many scam jobs on LinkedIn, including a recruiter who asked her to pay $1,000 for a certification course. She has also received exploitative offers. One company offered her 3,000 dirhams ($816) per month, much below market rate. Another asked her to work seven days a week, without paid leave or sick days. 

Despite all the setbacks, Nair remains hopeful for the road ahead. “I’m excited about the opportunities to grow, learn, and make a meaningful impact here.”

#Dubais #job #market #passport #matters

Thanks to the Team @ Rest of World – Source link & Great Job Amar Diwakar

Trump’s Big Beautiful Trade Wars Are Going Off The Rails

Sam Stein is joined by Greta Peisch, former General Counsel for the U.S. Trade Representative, to explain the latest legal developments in Trump’s tariff policies, including a court ruling challenging his use of emergency powers to impose broad trade restrictions, and how the ongoing legal uncertainty could affect future negotiations.

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As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams, and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members.

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Trump Throws Multi-Billion Dollar Tantrum

Sam Stein and Will Saletan discuss Trump’s $20 billion demand in lawsuit against CBS over 60 Minutes’ interview edit of Kamala Harris, and the bizarre legal claims and plaintiffs behind it.

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Bongino Melts Down on Fox. Can’t Handle Real Job?

Former podcast host turned Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino publicly melted down on Fox, overwhelmed by the reality of investigative work. Unable to prove his MAGA conspiracy theories, he’s facing backlash from supporters.

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RFK’s Health Report Is a Mess

Sam Stein sits down with NOTUS reporter Margaret Manto to break down RFK Jr.’s MAHA report—a document packed with fake citations, broken links, and bogus studies.

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The Second-Class Citizenship of Palestinian Israelis

Ilan Pappé

We had hoped that, once the initial shock and trauma had passed, those who still regard themselves as liberals in Israel would realize that the only way to change Israel is through the formation of a strong alliance between Palestinian and more progressive Jewish citizens. But that is not happening. October 7 turned those who regarded themselves as liberal Zionists into more extreme right-wing Zionists. So we don’t really have liberal Zionist political forces anymore. That means that the Palestinian community in Israel will be further isolated.

But that is in the short term. In the long run, I think that October 7 was a wake-up call that the way the Jewish state was developed — as a supremacist state, a racist state based on oppression, occupation, and ethnic cleansing — is not working.

Yes, Israel is still powerful and has powerful allies, and the Palestinians are weak and cannot liberate themselves or end their oppression. But they will continue their struggle. And the world is beginning to understand that they are the victims — and not Israel. These processes will persist. We can already see that those Israelis who want a normal, democratic, liberal life don’t find it in Israel. They go to places like Germany or elsewhere. And those left behind don’t seem to be capable of running a state.

I am not sure the United States will always be there to pay for Israel’s expenditures. We can also see that the international community has had enough, at least the civil society. Yes, this has not impacted many governments yet, but it will surely happen. Therefore, I think that, ironically, the Palestinians in Israel are the only people who can offer a bridge from the unacceptable reality of apartheid, genocide, and ethnic cleansing to genuine coexistence — as it existed in Palestine before the arrival of Zionism.

Great Job Ilan Pappé & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.

Musk Hands Dems a Gift. They Promptly Chuck It.

(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Elon Musk isn’t very pleased with the “big, beautiful” budget the House passed before leaving town at the end of last week. He’s admitted to being disappointed with the legislation and has warned that it would harm critical subsidies for electric vehicles and solar projects. He’s also called it antithetical to the DOGE mission he has spearheaded at the behest of Donald Trump.

In all, it’s created a completely unexpected—and frankly, almost unthinkable—specter: the Republican party’s top donor, the president’s once-top adviser, publicly ragging on the biggest piece of legislation that the administration and its allies have attempted to push during their time in office.

Few opportunities like this have ever existed for an opposition party. And yet, in the 48 hours since Musk let his dissatisfaction be known, Democrats don’t appear to be doing much at all to capitalize on it.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries hasn’t posted on X, Facebook, or Instagram about Musk’s comments. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s opportunism extended to a single post about it on Facebook and X: “Wow, I didn’t realize Trump was even allowed to break with President Musk.” The Democratic National Committee’s rapid response account on X, “@Factpostnews,” posted about Musk’s comments twice. No formal statement was issued by any of their offices. Nor have other leader members of Congress jumped on Musk’s criticisms in any meaningful way.

Great Job Joe Perticone & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.

Live from Chicago

Adam Kinzinger joined Tim on stage in the Windy City Wednesday night to dis Chicken Trump, who’s made bitcoin bros, private prisons, his family and friends—and himself—the main winners in his ‘TACO’ trade economy. Meanwhile, Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran may be getting resurrected, and Trump finally seems to realize that Putin is a warmonger. Plus, Dems should put Qatar and El Salvador on notice that there will be a cost for their free gifts in the future, and we are the guys and girls on the white horse who will save this country.

Adam Kinzinger joins Tim Miller in Chicago.

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The Bulwark Podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Follow, leave us a review and wherever you tune in. Add the show to your player of choice, here.

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The Bill Comes Due for Trump’s Insanity

For years, we’ve been hearing that the combination of childish governance and chronic budget deficits would eventually catch up with the United States, but the US always outran the worrywarts. That era, one in which the Treasury could borrow limitlessly and at low cost, may be ending.

“For the first time in my professional life, we’re seeing a shift, with investors looking askance at Treasury debt,” John Velis, a money manager at BNY Mellon told Politico. The spark looks to have been Moody’s downgrade of the Treasury’s credit rating, but there was no new information in the rating agency’s decision. It did, however, as Velis noted, “focus minds.”

Moody’s is one of three big ratings agencies. Their main business is assessing the risk of default — that the debtor, whether a company or a government, may miss an interest payment or repayment of principal on their loan — and their major way of communicating that risk is a letter rating, looking much like a grade. Each has a different system, but they range from AAA down to C or D (as in default). Some institutional investors are, under government regulation or internal policy, required to buy only high-rated debt. Moody, using its own idiosyncratic system, cut the United States from Aaa, the highest, to Aa1, second highest.

In its downgrade, Moody’s pointed to interest and debt burdens that are “significantly higher” than the US’s rich-country peers, while noting that the country still has exceptional strengths, like the size and dynamism of its economy. But those strengths “no longer fully counterbalance the decline in fiscal metrics.” They’re discreetly confident in the face of the political challenges of the Trump era: “Institutions and governance will not materially weaken, even if they are tested at times.”

S&P Global Ratings (formerly Standard & Poor’s) was the first of the big three ratings agencies to cut their rating on US Treasuries, back in August 2011. Curiously, über-investor Warren Buffett and former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan both dismissed the move, saying the United States could never default because we borrow in dollars — many other countries don’t have the privilege of borrowing in their own currency — and we can just print them as needed.

That’s true. It would be inflationary and panic-inducing, but it still wouldn’t be a default. S&P’s reasoning for the cut fourteen years ago was much like Moody’s in mid-May: “The effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political challenges have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges,” meaning chronic deficits and rising debt. The world of 2025 seems rather less stable and predictable than that of 2011.

Fitch, the smallest of the big three, announced its downgrade in August 2023, offering reasons very similar to S&P’s: rising debt and “a steady deterioration in standards of governance.” Countering that, Fitch noted high US scores on indexes of Political Stability and Rights, the Rule of Law, Institutional and Regulatory Quality, and Control of Corruption (caps in original). That looks quaint at a time when US tariffs on imports from China can go from 31 percent to 135 percent and back to 51 percent in just a few months on the whim of just one man, a man who happily disregards the law and who’s made a bundle on his own meme coin while using his office promoting crypto.

Fitch added that factors that could lead to another downgrade include “a marked increase in general government debt” and “a decline in the coherence and credibility of policymaking that undermines the reserve currency status of the U.S. dollar, thus diminishing the government’s financing flexibility.” We are very much there, but no critical comments yet from Fitch.

Fitch’s comment about the reserve currency status refers to the dollar’s role as the global currency, the one major commodities like oil are priced in, and the one in which countries keep their foreign reserves. (Foreign reserves are holdings that countries keep of currencies other than their own that serve as cushions in case of a foreign payments crisis. As of last year, 58 percent of those worldwide were denominated in US dollars.)

That reserve status has depended in part on the enormous size of the US economy and its financial markets; no market in the world matches the US Treasury market’s capacity to absorb billions in inflows and outflows with only the slightest ripple. But it also depends on the United States’ role as the foundation of capitalist power globally and its ultimate guarantor in a crisis.

During the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed and Treasury led a globally coordinated bailout. It’s not clear that Trump’s government would have the competence or stature to do the same today. Trump has deliberately frayed the ties among the principal capitalist states, and the US today is a source of systemic disorder, not stabilization.

Evidence of the “shift” that Velis cited can be found in the unprecedented ways in which markets panicked on Liberation Day, April 2, when Trump announced his big, not-so-beautiful tariffs. Normally in times of political or economic stress, investors from around the world plow into US assets, notably Treasury bonds. Since you need dollars to buy Treasuries, such flights to quality, as they’re called usually, push up the value of the dollar.

That didn’t happen after Liberation Day: the dollar fell, a sign that investors were dumping US assets rather than buying them. George Saravelos, a Deutsche Bank currency analyst (funny, since Deutsche was one of the few major banks to lend to Trump over the years, on often questionably generous terms), diagnosed a “dramatic regime change in markets” and an increasingly likely “confidence crisis” in the dollar. That panic has ebbed, but it does feel like something has changed.

In its downgrade note, Moody’s said, “US institutions and governance will not materially weaken, even if they are tested at times.” Hope dies last.

Republicans now thoroughly control the federal budget, but math makes budget balancing very hard for them. They’re committed to big tax cuts. Tariffs will offset that some, but not by much, so increasing revenue is out.

The spending side isn’t so easy either, if you’ve ruled out cuts to the Pentagon. The budget is basically divided into three big parts: mandatory, discretionary, and interest payments. Mandatory spending is for programs that Congress doesn’t have to authorize afresh every fiscal year — they’re on autopilot from year to year unless Congress overhauls them.

The bulk of mandatory spending is accounted for by “entitlement programs,” notably Social Security and Medicare, and Medicaid. The term, which has acquired an unfortunate aura of moral disapproval, reflects the fact that if you qualify for the benefits, they’re yours — you’re “entitled” to them, without having to jump through hoops (though Medicaid, since it’s mostly for poor people, has some hoops and will get more).

Discretionary spending, by contrast, has to be authorized at a level set by Congress every year; this includes everything from education and the military (which accounts for almost half of it) to the environment (which accounts for very little of it).

Serious cuts to Social Security and Medicare are, for now, politically impossible, so that leaves little more than Medicaid and civilian discretionary spending to chop. You could cut both categories to zero and the budget still wouldn’t balance.

To the Right, the problem is out-of-control spending. Measured as a share of GDP, spending has risen, mostly because of Medicare and Medicaid, thanks to an aging population and an insane health care financing system, along with some help from interest payments. Social Security’s share is up only mildly.

Surprisingly, the military spending share of GDP has fallen by more than two-thirds since 1962 and half since 1986, the peak of the Reagan-era buildup. It’s still way too high, and if Trump has his way, which he usually does, it will climb. DOGE-style cuts to the Weather Service and scientific research are immensely damaging but save only trivial amounts of money.

One could narrow, or even close, the budget gap with an approach that’s forbidden in mainstream discourse: raising taxes. As a share of GDP, federal revenues in 2024, 17.1 percent, were almost exactly what they were in 1962 even as the spending share has risen from 18.2 percent to 23.4 percent. Restoring corporate tax rates, which are at near-record lows, to the levels of the early 1960s and restoring the income tax structure of the Clinton years — hardly radical moves — would reduce the deficit by nearly a third. Cut the military budget in half, admittedly a more radical move, and you’d reduce it by well over half.

Some on the Left argue that debt and deficits are nothing to worry about, or are even healthy stimuli, and only spoilsport “austerians” think they matter. On the second point, looking at eighteen major countries, on average, high-debt and -deficit countries are more unequal and have higher poverty rates than low-debt/low-deficit countries. The Nordic social democracies have small public debts and deficits, countering the belief that deficit spending is somehow egalitarian.

On the worry point, yes, the US Treasury has enjoyed tremendous freedom to borrow, but that seems a privilege not worth testing. Markets can turn on a dime, and manias can become panics almost overnight. There’s always the option of just printing the money, an idea modern monetary theorists say they are unfairly accused of. Trump himself has endorsed the printing approach several times, first in 2016 and again in his first presidency. Since we just went through a disastrous inflation, money printing, which can be seriously inflationary, doesn’t seem like a live option.

More extreme would be some kind of default. The idea of the Treasury not keeping up on its debt seems too extreme for Trump, but he does have a casual attitude toward default and bankruptcy. As he said in 2016 of his debt-driven business strategy, when you run into trouble, just negotiate.

And what does he mean by negotiate? “Hey, guess what? The economy just crashed. I’m gonna give you back half.” Trump’s advisors have talked about forcing foreign holders of Treasury bonds to exchange them for one-hundred-year bonds at low-interest rates or pay “taxes” on their interest payments, either of which would be a default — though this sort of thing is now supposedly off the table, which is good, because it would blow up the world’s financial markets, and not to the benefit of the global working class.

Aside from worrying about a market panic about the US suddenly being unable to borrow, or being forced to pay very high interest rates, the share of the budget going to service the Treasury’s debt has been rising and will only rise further. Last year, an eighth of federal spending went to interest payments, the highest in twenty-five years. That’s 43 percent more than we spent on Medicaid and 238 percent what we spent on income security. We’d rather borrow money from rich people and pay them interest than tax them.

Of course, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA) will swell the deficit. Spending cuts in the bill, around 80 percent of them from Medicaid and food stamps (now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP), will be damaging to their beneficiaries — 10–14 million people could lose Medicaid, and 11 million could see cuts to food benefits — but only very partially offset the tax cuts. Overall, the Penn Wharton budget model estimates that the poorest 20 percent of Americans will take a 15 percent hit to income in 2026, while the top 0.1 percent would gain 3 percent, based on the version of the OBBBA passed by the House. Penn Wharton adds a cheerful note: the act could increase GDP growth and capital accumulation because “cuts to Medicaid and SNAP” will force people to “work longer hours and increase precautionary savings.”

Sadly, loss of medical and food benefits isn’t the sort of thing that upsets bond traders or ratings agencies. But chaotic governance and endless borrowing can, and we’ve got plenty of that. Trump, who bragged in that 2016 interview that “nobody knows debt better than me. I’ve made a fortune by using debt,” may find that running the US government is more challenging than running some casinos into the ground and making off with the loot.

Trump promised in 2016 that “we’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning.” It’s hard to see the winning in ratings downgrades, deep budget cuts, and potential fiscal crises.

Great Job Doug Henwood & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.

Community Before Strategy

The fam. (Photo by Hannah Yoest)

The first time we tried getting Bulwark members together we did it at a baseball game in Washington. It was kind of a DIY mess: The Nationals reserved a section for us, people sent money to me via PayPal. I bought the ticket for them and then forwarded it. I think maybe 100 people came that night and we just hung out and watched a ballgame together.

It was great.

Last night a thousand people from this community came together in Chicago at a theater down the street from Wrigley. When we booked this place I thought the venue was too big for us; that we’d never fill it. We sold it out in 72 hours. Truth is, we could have gone bigger. If you want to watch the show, it’s here.

The Next Level

Live in Chicago! Pardons, Authoritarianism, and Xanax

Live in Chicago! Pardons, Authoritarianism, and Xanax

Live from Chicago, Tim Miller, Sarah Longwell, and JVL break down the latest wave of Trump pardons, the rising authoritarian behavior from GOP leaders, and the Democratic Party’s identity crisis. Also, who is the worst (and best?) cabinet member so far, and what comes next?

I want to talk about two things.

First: Thank you. To all of you. Everyone who came out last night. Everyone who reads this newsletter. Everyone who convenes with us over podcasts or on YouTube. Everyone who talks in the comments or emails back and forth with me. From the bottom of my heart.

Second: This is how we fight back.

Over the weekend Carl Safina published a profound essay about resisting authoritarianism that drew on his work studying animal behavior.

One late afternoon long ago at the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, I was with a group of birders when we located a pride of sleeping lions. As evening approached, they yawned big-fanged yawns and slowly roused. About 10 in total, scarred veterans and prime young hunters.

It was time for them to hunt. But first they licked one another, pressed bodies and indulged in much face rubbing. They reaffirmed, “Yes, we are together, we remain as one.” Only then did they set off.

Their tawny bodies flowed up into the tall golden grass along the ridge of a low hill. One sat; the others kept walking. Ten yards on, another sat while the others walked. And so on until the ridge was lined with a hidden picket fence of hungry lions all attentively gazing onto a plain where a herd of unsuspecting zebras grazed. Then one, who’d remained standing, poured herself downhill. Her job was to flank and then spook the zebras into running uphill, directly into her veteran sisters and their spry younger hunters.

Rubbing noses does not catch a zebra. But only after the lions rubbed noses and reaffirmed a shared identity were the zebras in any danger. Those lions showed me that a sense of community is prerequisite for coordinated strategy.

And here’s his big point:

As individuals we cannot always formulate the full fix. But we can be a part of a movement to forge one. . . . [C]ommunity comes before strategy.

Yes. YES.

Say it again. Tattoo it on your eyelids. Put it on a pillow.

Community comes before strategy.

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A couple weeks ago on the Secret pod I was having kind of a dark week of the soul and Sarah asked me, If people are so terrible and everything is lost, then what are we even doing here?

I didn’t have an answer then. But I do now. We’re building the community. And as we build that power, we’ll figure it out.

That’s my ask. Come join us. If you can’t afford the membership, that’s fine. We never leave anyone out. Just hit reply to this email—it goes directly to me—and we’ll take care of you.

If you can afford it, come and stand with us. Build with us. Grow with us. Because when we’re united we’re powerful.

TACO has the potential to hurt Trump.

(1) It’s simple. Trump Always Chickens Out. You can put that phrase anywhere, apply it to anything, and everyone knows what it means.

(2) It’s meme-able. You have the slogan. You have the word mark. And you have an universally recognizable image. Hell, there’s even a pre-built emoji for it. You can put this thing anywhere and it will be a symbol of the democracy movement.

(3) It’s universal. You can apply it to any situation. Trump pulls back on tariffs? TACO. Trump gives in to Putin? TACO. Trump increases the national debt? TACO.

(4) It’s organic. No Democratic strategist came up with TACO. It’s an observation that emerged from the finance world—from the very same bros who voted for Trump in the first place. You can feel the disdain of his own supporters dripping off of it.

(5) It hits at something deep inside Trump. It’s about his soul. It’s about his weakness.

(6) It’s a provocation. Real talk: It’s usually good that Trump chickens out. It’s good that he didn’t try to use the military to remain in office in January of 2021. It’s good that he pulled the 150 percent tariffs back to 45 percent, or 30 percent, or whatever they’re at this morning.

But in the current dynamic, that’s how Trump wins. He says he’s going to do some insane thing, his supporters give him credit for doing it—but then he pulls back in order to avoid the worst real-world consequences.

By hitting him with TACO over and over, you (a) reveal his pull-backs as weakness and (b) dare him to go through with the stuff that will screw up the real world—and, in theory, create pain for his movement.

Maybe it’s just the high from all the face rubbing last night, but I think TACO has the potential to be a real weapon. I want to put it on red hats in the MAGA font, put it on stickers, see it plastered all over the public sphere, guerrilla-style.

And from there, we see what happens.

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A Wired piece on AI and music.

Smith and Hay finished their album and called it Jazz. That fall, they released it on all the usual places—Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal—and as a physical album. Alas, it failed to take off. Smith and Hay weren’t total nobodies; a few songs they had coproduced for other artists years earlier had gotten some buzz. So the two men decided to retool Jazz and release an updated version, adding new songs.

Jazz (Deluxe) came out in January 2018. Right away, it shot up the Billboard chart and hit No. 1. Hay was elated. At last, real, measurable success had arrived.

Then, just as suddenly, the album disappeared from the ranking. “Nobody drops off the next week to zero,” says Hay, remembering his confusion. He called other artists to ask if they’d ever seen this before. They hadn’t. Questions piled up. If so many people had listened, why did they suddenly stop? He scanned the internet for chatter. Even a single freaking tweet would have been nice. Nada. Where were the fans? “No one’s talking about the music,” Hay realized.Pulling up Spotify’s dashboard for artists, Hay scrutinized the analytics for the pair’s work. Listeners appeared concentrated in far-flung places like Vietnam. Things only got stranger from there. Here’s how Hay remembers it: He started receiving notices from distributors, the companies that handle the licensing of indie artists’ music. The distributors were flagging Smith and Hay’s music, from Jazz and from other projects, for streaming fraud and pulling it down. Smith told Hay it was a mistake and that Hay had messed up securing the proper rights for samples. Hay frantically tried to correct the issue, but the flagging persisted.

Hay, panicking, badgered Smith to help him figure out what was happening. Finally, Hay says, Smith offered some answers: Smith had instructed his staff at the medical clinics to stream their songs. It didn’t sound like the full story.

Then, last September, Smith turned up at the heart of another music streaming incident, this one rather epic. The FBI arrested him and charged him in the first AI streaming fraud case in the United States. The government claims that between 2017 and 2024, Smith made over $10 million in royalties by using bot armies to continuously play AI-generated tracks on streaming platforms.

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Great Job Jonathan V. Last & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.

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