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“And so even though men can be exploited sexually and boys can as well, it breaks down that women and girls are the ones who were exploited sort of most of the time. And so this is the way that sort of the experience of slavery is most sort of shaped by the gender of a person.”

“So in both Islamic and Jewish law, like, a slave owner owns the body of the enslaved person. And so, you know, the slaves do not have many rights. They can be bought and sold in perpetuity. Slaves are due a certain amount of, like, daily maintenance, like, sort of bare provisions for the necessities of life, food and drink, sort of a minimum amount of clothing, a sleeping blanket, for example.”

“And so the slave trader in the period that I study, it mainly appears as a diffuse capillary network in which small numbers of enslaved people are parts of mixed cargoes, and they're sent with handlers through a series of ports until they reach their final destination. This capillary network could stretch all the way to India if you're a merchant in Cairo.”

“They signed a three year lease for a store. They put a $100,000 in a bank account, and they handed a debit card to Luna, which is powered by Claude Sonnet 4.6, and just told them, hey. Turn a profit. So there are a few things that have gone awry, Kevin. One of them, they made a bunch of strange inventory choices, including ordering a thousand toilet seat covers for the employee bathroom, then listed them as merchandise, which you and I would never do if we were running a convenience store.”

“AI's approval rating is 26%, which is lower than ICE's or just about any other unpopular institution you can think of. People hate this stuff. And the the tech CEOs have realized that they are very, very hated. And so now you're you're seeing some of them be like, yo. Wait a minute. No. No. Like, we're we'll do something good for lots of people that that aren't just us.”

“We should try and find ways to get off of taxing human labor. We're going to be trying to encourage job type arrangements in every quarter. And right now, income tax is a discouraging factor on both the employer and the worker. So tax AI, tax the bots, don't tax humans. And the way I would do a universal basic income, if any of them come to me and, you know, is, I would do some amount like $1,200 a month, for every American and just start paying it out as as quickly as you can.”

“We should also talk about the fact that under Tim Cook's tenure, Apple has become what I would consider an AI laggard. Right? They are not a frontier AI model company. Their own AI efforts under the banner of Apple Intelligence have been sort of delayed over and over again. They have not managed to give Siri the sort of brain transplant that they have been teasing now for years. And I think it is fair to say that they are behind when it comes to AI and all AI related things.”

“That was yeah. That happened three years into his tenure, and, that rascal Bono convinced him to put songs of innocence into the hands of something like 500,000,000 people. What's your favorite song off songs of innocence, by the way? I have like, that album has started auto playing in my car so many times over the years.”

“Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements and keystrokes for AI training data. This tool, which is called model capability initiative, will run on work related apps and websites on US based employees' computers and will also take occasional snapshots of the content on employees' screens. This is part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in internal memos seen by Reuters.”

“I remember when the Apple Watch came out, there was this moment of, like, oh, Apple's cooked. Like, they can no longer innovate. This thing is obviously not going to work. This is just a gadget for luxury users, and this is not going to sort of be useful enough for many people to shell out for. And then I think Tim Cook, to his credit, saw that health was taking off. The people wanted to track their steps. They wanted to know if their blood oxygen levels were changing or if their heartbeat was irregular.”

“Tim Cook, presented Trump with a golden glass statue in August 2025 while he was seeking tariff relief in what just appeared to be an obvious bribe right out in the open. By the way, he did get that tariff relief, so it worked. Tim Cook also attended the VIP screening of Melania, which, again, when I said this man would do anything for his company, I think that is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.”

“I think the important thing I want to underscore is that both in Islam, both in Jewish culture and religion, like slave owners tell themselves stories of good and bad slave owners. And so they really, and this is important because they never arrive, I don't think, at a critique of slavery as an institution, because they are focused on like the problem is what slavery has done badly. And that unscrupulous men don't follow the laws of slavery like they should.”

“In the Jewish context, we mainly see a form of enumition. That's the outright freeing of a person, in which you give them a deed of enumition. The deed says, you are now free. You belong to yourself. You are free to join the Jewish community if you wish, and to adopt a new name amongst the Jews.”

“I think the thing that has made me the most sad, Kevin, has been the darkening of the culture in Silicon Valley where a lot of folks who, I think could have been talked into UBI type proposals, or, hey, let's try and keep the machinery going. They have given up. They're just like, fuck it. I've got my bunker. You know, like, I'm just projecting forward. Like, I have seen that degree of fatalism from many, many more folks in the valley than I would have imagined.”

“So the Titan project was Apple's $10,000,000,000 effort to build a self driving car, which I think was instinctively something that, honestly, a lot of people really wanted. Right? Like, when I heard that Apple was building a car, like, I definitely wanted to see it. I definitely wanted to test drive it. I definitely wanted to see if songs of innocence would autoplay when I turned the key in the ignition, but they canceled the project in 2024.”

“Chinese robot beats human best time in half marathon after a stumble. A five foot five humanoid called Lightning Short King, developed by Chinese smartphone maker Honor, has beat the human world record time for a half marathon. But just before completing the race, there was some drama. Lightning slammed into a barricade and collapsed. The robot managed to get back on its feet and ran across the finish line in fifty minutes and twenty six seconds.”

“So what does the Geniza provide? It provides something of you from the bottom up, I would say, so we get more glimpses of everyday life. For the period between, let's call it 1000 to 1250, which is a period of a caliphate we can talk about, it's a period of the Crusades, it's a period of intense global interaction between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. The Geniza provide really uncommon evidence for this period.”

“And sometimes Jewish and Christian slave ownership can be construed by Muslim authorities as a sign of Jews or Christians being too haughty, or there could be a crackdown on their slave owning as a way to reassert a social order, for example. And in slave people could sometimes use that law to convert to Islam if they have an owner who's non-Muslim and compel their owner to sell them.”