"A country that lets itself be led around by the marginal logic of comparative advantage will end up with short-term economic gains, but these gains may be offset by the loss of deeper technological capabilities." @noahpinion_mirror https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/putin-is-a-rest-stop-on-the-road

I love this, from @mihaip. I wish they had a System 6 or 7 installation with Aldus PageMaker and a lot of fonts and (anachronistically) print to PDF. I could just give a middle finger to the last few decades of desktop publishing churn. https://infinitemac.org/ ht @burritojustice

"paradoxical misapprehension of agency. People, institutions, forces see it where it isn't, can't see it where it is, imagine they have none and others have it all...

to take the personal authority of believing things that don't fit together easily or clearly, is a sovereign act: it asserts priority over the systems of thought that constrain agency."

by @tb@tldr.nettime.org

---

https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-2303/msg00005.html

#agency

just remember, the bots made him do it. john galt has no agency.

#musktodon is not a great instance.

"The paradox of freedom, Florida style, is that it’s really an assertion of control. *People like us should be free to do what we want, and free to stop other people from doing what they want when we don’t approve.* That’s why it would be deeply unfair to call Ron DeSantis a petty tyrant. If he is a tyrant, he is an expansive one." #HelenLewis https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ron-desantis-florida-state-politics-gop/673489/

#Florida

[New Post] Excerpts! https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9830.html

@failedLyndonLaRouchite @yarrriv @Alon @davidzipper (one of my quirky urbanisms is i favor elevated bike lanes. but that’s yet another expensive investment that’s a very hard sell.)

I don’t think the case for fare-free transit is about equity really at all. It’s about reducing the barriers to entry of transit, particularly to infrequent travelers who usually travel by car and don’t keep a fare card. It’s about making it posssible to float in and out of buses on impulse, making transit feel like an option all enjoy rather than just some service other people pay to use. cf @davidzipper https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23653855/covid-transit-fares-buses-subways-crisis

in #Israel we are witnessing perhaps the first human capital strike.

(with all the neoliberal-ish implications of the term "human capital" as distinct from old-fashioned labor and old-fashioned capital.)

[new draft post] Banks should fail much more often https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/26/banks-should-fail-much-more-often/index.html

On egalitarianism without welfarism. #BrankoMilanovic https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-equality-without-welfare

@CoolerPseudonym i hope not! but i think stock market valuation multiples are maybe something whose fluctuations we can live with and skip the apocalypse.

@CoolerPseudonym if you think that, you’ll probably prefer passive, why play a very arbitrary zero-sum game, negative sum after trading and active management costs? and you’ll contribute to the rotation into passive, maybe enjoy the updraft if you are not in too late a cohort!

@CoolerPseudonym yeah. it only works while passive share is increasing, relative to active share and/or nonequity investment. can’t go on forever, but can have a big effect for a while! (and could go into reverse, too, if there’s a rotation from passive equity back to more cash-heavy active or something else).

is the success of a shift from active management to index funds (mechanically, temporarily) self-fulfilling?

“If active managers are redeemed and replaced with passive managers who want to hold less cash, the ONLY solution is for equity prices to rise.” ~#MichaelGreen #ProfPlum99 https://michaelwgreen.substack.com/p/an-ode-to-a-burning-urn-of-cash

#finance

Have Iraq and Ukraine both gone basically according to the hegemon’s plan?

I don’t buy it. But it’s a provocative thesis, and #DavidTimoney #FromArseToElbow is always worth a read.

https://fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2023/03/who-remembers-war.html

having an LLM do your writing for you is like having a robot do your pooping.

the product may be indistinguishable from or even higher quality than your own, but still it won’t quite work.

the devil pays well but you are never happy.