"As for…scenarios, the least unfavorable…would be that of Germany after 1945…More likely...is the North Korean scenario: the isolation and radicalization of a fortress-Russia...A step further in the pessimism scale, Russia would become…a kind of Mordor ("black country"), a desolate land in which the forces of evil are preparing their revenge and reconquest…The Somalian scenario would…be that of the breakup of the Russian nation-empire." @BrunoTertrais@twitter.com https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/analysis/fall-russia

Now if only we had an “intellectual property” regime consistent with this goal.

from @GretchenVogel1@twitter.com https://www.science.org/content/article/global-plan-covid-19-vaccine-fairness-fell-short-will-next-time-be-different

Suppose there is a profits recession: the labor market remains strong, inflation subsides and with it some degree of firm pricing power, so margins are squeezed.

how does the Fed react: with low rates to support stock prices under pressure from tepid earnings, or with high rates to break labor power and try to sustain margins?

I love the analysis and broad conclusion of this piece about development and EA and charity, but I disagree that private sector "moonshot ideas" are the best way to address the big, less legible problems she points to.

Which underlines the problem! Some versions of EA restrict us to the space beneath the streetlight, which is not where the action is likely to be. But elsewhere, we are in the dark, and we're not likely to agree what's best.

https://srajagopalan.substack.com/p/altruism-and-development-its-complicated ht @Angelica @Tenkawa

has anyone else had a problem with https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ such that after the scan completes, the page just goes blank, so there's no way to export the contacts you've found?

@akhilrao @bert_hubert is it because you can become so fabulously rich? if our entrepreneurs topped out at $100M rather than became Caesars wielding the weath of empires, would that matter very much (to the virtuous sides of innovation)? or is it just that in the US you really need a few million dollars to self-insure the amenities of an upper-middle-class family, and the perceived upside of achieving that is really high?

there’s lots to think about this post on innovation in Europe (vs the US and to a lesser degree China) by @bert_hubert.
one fun bit is that ordinary life is so precarious and dystopian in the US you’re not really giving up much risking a startup, while very safe and comfortable life paths are available to ordinary europeans. (if safe comfort were more unconditional, maybe it could flip the US’ risk-tolerance advantage.) https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/is-europe-just-not-good-at-innovating/

it takes democratically accountable central power to overcome centralizing dynamics inherent in market arrangements to sustain decentralization in the marketplace.
cf eg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/will-apple-allow-users-to-install-third-party-app-stores-sideload-in-europe

"The simple truth is that you cannot simultaneously dedicate yourself to making untold fortunes for a giant corporation and to championing a social good." ~Caitlin Flanagan https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/sheryl-sandberg-leaving-meta-lean-in-feminism/661291/ //the end of the piece is wrenching

Conjecture: Art AI makes art more like science. Individual contributions matter less, the cumulation matters more. That's a big mismatch for the current funding model. We should fund artists well (of course) and encourage them to develop "orthogonal art" — art not within the range of extrapolation from the existing corpus. I'm not sure whether there is a way to measure this, with respect to existing models.

Critique (one of many): Subsumes the expressive dimension of art to the instrumental.

in theory an account with no margin requirement—not even zero, negative balances permitted—ultimately can never lose. no matter how underwater one gets, with no limit to gambling for redemption, eventually you must find it.
but in practice, there is no such thing as an account with no margin requirement. an institution that purported to offer it, even to a single customer, would eventually find it faces its own margin requirement.

i’ve been encouraging people to withdraw their attention and writing from twitter. i see when doing so a lot of people are taking their accounts private, or fully deleting them.
i don’t think i’ll do that. there’s important history in past public twitter. a lot of links rot and important conversations become unintelligible when that history is taken offline.
i’m restricting my use of twitter mostly to encouragements to move and critiques of current management. but i’ll leave my past around.

“Being right for the wrong reason makes someone dangerous.” ~Claudia Sahm https://stayathomemacro.substack.com/p/burden-of-proof-is-on-the-inflation

(Personal apology) Yesterday I attempted https://www.movetodon.org/ to troll thru many thousand twitter contacts + follow those I don’t. I’d done a find/import weeks ago with https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ but movetodon found lots of new contacts, and seemed easier as it follows directly, no import step. but my sheer bulk (and dumb retries) stressed https://fosstodon.org/. i’m rate-limited from following ‘til this evening.
if you’ve followed me i’m likely to follow back, but not til then! sorry!

machine learning is analogous to the copernican revolution in the sense we are having to grapple with learning we are not so special.

AI art is both derivative and integrative so it collapses in on itself and winks out of existence in a burst of pure energy.

i think it’s really excellent that @pkrugman is here, on his own and his own initiative.
but shouldn’t any serious lager-scale journalistic organization have its own instance? shouldn’t, as a matter of course, he have an identity as @pkrugman@masto.nytimes.com, along with all of his colleagues?

the most effective disinformation is a careful selection of true information.
if you chisel away the things you don’t want seen from all the things that are true, you can sculpt whatever impression you like. where is the lie?

@mossguy@mastodon.green Thanks! I’d not noticed “unlisted”. And maybe!

Toot! describes unlisted as “Your toot will be shown only on your profile and to your followers, but not on public timelines.”

i guess the question would be whether it’s shown to followers on other instances.