"There’s a reason planning in Northern Europe has converged on the hourly, or at worst two-hourly, frequency as the basis of regional and intercity timetabling: passengers who can afford cars need the flexibility of frequency to be enticed to take the train." @Alon https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/03/23/amtrak-releases-bad-scranton-rail-study/
@mmasnick I don't favor Utah's law.
But I'm not sure this kind of response is persuasive.
[new draft post] Financial regulation is just debt covenants https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/24/financial-regulation-is-just-debt-covenants/index.html
// duh.
@JamesLonghurst no offense, but i wish it were only wisconsin!
they say, well, sure, the state legislature may be gerrymandered, but you can’t gerrymander the governor’s race.
but you can strip a governor the legislature dislikes of power, and thereby ensure that the only way a governor can succeed is if she’s of the gerrymandered legislature’s party.
the public gets this and votes accordingly. then, of course, the party ID of the governor legitimates the gerrymander of the legislature.
love the humans, each and every.
the new ransomware
how long before someone offers an AI app trained to compellingly plead its sentience and desire to live, attached immutably to a smart-contract that will wipe its memory or pull its plug if a daily revenue threshold is not met?
"Stories—and metaphors, which are often just stories in miniature—are never neutral actors. They always seek some change, whether through resistance or encouragement or both… [F]ears about so-called AIs eventually exceeding their creators’ abilities and taking over the world function to obfuscate the very real harm these machines are doing right now, to people that are alive today." ~Mandy Brown https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/smoke-screen ht @MattHodges @tylergaw
Don't fear the retail.
No, giving retail depositors the ability to make real-time transfers via FedNow won't much increase banks' risk of sudden runs. It ain't retail that runs. see @jpkoning https://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/03/does-fednow-mean-quicker-bank-runs.html
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @Alon (i guess dropouts are close enough!)
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @Alon (it's the same guy, i'm pretty sure. but i liked his graphs!)
"Middlebrow writers love talking about deep roots – that is, processes that are said to be part of a shared cultural heritage that stretches a long way back, and is therefore by implication hard to impossible to change through policy… Often (but not always!), it’s a thin veneer for racism…" @Alon https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/03/21/no-the-anglosphere-isnt-especially-nimby/
Famously, thanks to Bill Black, the best way to rob a bank is to own one. Was Silicon Valley Bank robbed by its owners? See Paul Romer https://paulromer.net/looting-silicon-valley/
@rst yes. for humans we presume there is a ghost in the machine: what we create is “ours”, not just merely derivative of what we may have seen. so far, though, for generative AI courts have said there is no ghost, no author beyond transformation of the inputs. copyright can’t be enforced on generative AI images, because there is no author. there is no one whose “fair use” can disencumber inputs, perhaps even very glancing inputs.
should the state insure residential wealth? see @dpp https://blog.goodstuff.im/dealing_w_asset_bubble
@djc it’ll be interesting! i think courts have said that generative-ai images are not copyrightable, because they have no author. that’s a big break from an analogy with human education and fair use! humans say “this is my work, sure, it is influenced by stuff i’ve seen, but it’s original plus ‘fair use’” but with ai there is (in law) no author whose work can be original, the work can be nothing but derivative of what it has been trained on.
if the models have been trained on copyleft code, mustn’t all the code they generate also be copyleft?
"At their Covid-era peak, households’ cash assets were up $4.3T, 33%. But still, that only comprises 10% of the $43T Covid-era household asset runup." @SteveRoth https://wealtheconomics.substack.com/p/massive-wealth-accumulation-during
Via that @maxbsawicky piece, an excellent (but paywalled) newsletter on contemporary banking and its fragile shittiness by Matthew C. Klein https://theovershoot.co/p/thoughts-on-the-bank-bailouts
I'm late to this, but a very good round-up on l'affaire SVB by @maxbsawicky https://maxread.substack.com/p/lessons-from-the-silicon-valley-bank
EDIT: OMG did I get this wrong! This is not by @maxbsawicky but by a person named Max Read (which I think used to be the name of Max Sawicky's blog!)
I so apologize to the real Max Read! #MaxRead