@wim so MUCH to look forward to!
@gsignoret no matter how cleverly you can interact with a thing, if we don’t feel like we are “touching souls” (a definition of love from Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You”), our lonesomeness won’t be quenched.
maybe having a soul to touch is a different kind of Turing Test, maybe it is something else entirely. for better or for worse I guess we’ll see.
so many people seem to think there’s nothing to be done, progress is over. but i look around and see so many surfaces that are not yet covered with ads.
"solidarity is absurdly powerful, which is why they go to such great lengths to discredit it. In Sweden, the solidarity strikes against Tesla – who refuses to recognize its maintenance workers' union – have spread to nine unions." @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/24/coalescence/
// it's long past time to relegalize solidarity strikes in the US and wherever they are banned
everything in moderation, especially moderation.
@carnage4life the new “cancelled by the algorithm”
@hcetamd sure. being a dick is perfectly legal. but a person unwilling or unable to restrain expression of those views certainly ought find work other than high-level positions in US diplomacy and foreign policy. i’m a bit skeptical he restrained himself so well that no one had any idea, and i worry why he wasn’t filtered out long before he attained his roles.
@BenRossTransit So far! But if you believe the believers, AI is going to be a very different kind of beast. So far, no. ChatGPT can write your first draft, but you'd better fact-check the heck out of it. Cruise dispensed with drivers, but each car had 1.5 humans on the backend. No technological disemployment crisis there. Maybe, like self-driving cars a decade ago, this moment's wild predictions will ultimately yield... not much change a decade from now. But maybe this time it's different.
if AI stuff really does render the part of the PMC that considers itself the meritocracy also-rans like everybody else, will we see a lot more political support for social democracy?
@SteveRoth i don't think MMT sees any puzzle in Japan's low inflation, because MMT is best understood as the claim that any relationship between accounting debt/deficits and inflation is loose and unreliable to the point of uselessless, so inflation should be understood by virtue of more detailed analysis of flows, regulations, real production and constraints.
@SteveRoth there's asset ownership and there are transfers. the quasi-equity position "the state" — consolidating Alaska's govt into the broader entity — has in oil extraction is disinflationary cet paribus. state asset ownership, if that doesn't compromise the quality of deployment, is disinflationary relative to private ownership. if the state went into debt — same as making transfers! — to purchase the asset, the net effect would depend on price. 1/
@SteveRoth if it overpays, inflationary, underpays disinflationary, although in either case the effect would probably relatively minor because the financial positions the transaction is affecting is those of the already rich, less sensitive to marginal income. in fact the price was zero (it's from a tax), so likely net disinflationary, income otherwise to private parties disappears into the state. 2/
@SteveRoth if the state creates a new expenditure, transferring income generated by the asset broadly rather than to the not-very-wealthy, well, that transfer is likely inflationary, whatever it was financed from. analytically, i think we can mostly separate the disinflationary impulse of the tax from the inflationary impulse of the transfer, and would probably score the whole thing as net inflationary, as it's a redistribution of income from rich to less rich. /fin
@SteveRoth (taxes can be lower is another way of saying disinflationary, in some respects! although perhaps also taxes in Norway can be lower to meet distributional as well as price level objectives if we think of the SWF as overcoming inequalities we'd otherwise use taxes to blunt.)
@SteveRoth while we're being persnickety, it's not SWF vs no SWF, but the activity. an SWF is just a formalism within the state. invested funds (there's another word to unpack!) are likely to be less inflationary (with nothing special about the zero-point, so sometimes disinflationary) than simple transfers. (although sometimes transfers might count as investments! in which case they might be disinflationary!) whether the formalism of an SWF (or central bank) are involved is not really material.
@SteveRoth debts/deficits and inflation can both have similar causes, there can be correlations, but they are far too loose to treat debt as predictive or a measure of inflation risk.
debt backed by productive assets is *disinflationary*. debt engendered by effective transfers to the very wealthy is close to noninflationary. debt as an accounting quantity is a very bad measure or target. we’re not interested in the accounting quantity per se, and it doesn’t predict what we *are* interested in.
@SteveRoth “do the SWF-style JCB non-gov equity/bond asset holdings protect Japan from that inflation? If so, how?”
debt backed by (sufficiently) productive assets is disinflationary. 1/
@SteveRoth if the state goes into debt to build infrastructure that reduces production and distribution costs, whatever extra aggregate demand comes from the deficit spending (hard to predict, depends on distribution, regulation, interest rates) can be more than matched by the infrastructure’s contribution to (downward shift of aggregate supply curve). 2/
@SteveRoth if the state goes into debt to buy domestic financial assets that appreciate and/or yield, income flows (broadly construed!) that would otherwise contribute to aggregate demand of the private sector instead accrue to the state, offsetting any contribution to aggregate demand of the initial purchases. 3/
@SteveRoth if the state goes into debt to purchase foreign financial assets, and those appreciate in domestic currency terms or yield FX income flows, the states capacity and likely actual practice to support the value of its own paper by selling FX or foreign assets and purchasing domestic paper increase, disinflationary as an ordinary practice in ordinary times (although sometimes “blood in the water” if initiated during a currency/inflation crisis!) 4/
@SteveRoth it’s just not a good frame, to say debt is inflationary but a SWF is protective. it’s more accurate to say going into debt to build an SWF is disinflationary if the investments are “good” (lots to unpack there!), inflationary if the investments are not. the debt per se can’t be evaluated in its inflationariness independent of what’s going on on the asset side, what it is funding. /fin
it’s kind of weird that “ghosting” means the opposite of “haunting”.
not very hopeful. tremors in a once-and-hopefully-not-future catastrophe that haunts present day catastrophes. https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/nov/23/former-yugoslavia-countries-war-crimes-past-risk-return-conflict-council-of-europe-official-says
what AI may teach us is
how desolate is
a machine without a ghost.
"Capitalism is itself a kind of artificial intelligence, and it’s far further along than anything the computer scientists have yet coded." #EzraKlein https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/opinion/openai-sam-altman.html ht @MattHodges @tchambers
// we've been in the foom for quite a while, no need for transformers or LLMs to get us there. though they'll add spice.
i'm less interested in #StuartSeldowitz than i am in the question of how a person with his views and mien attained the positions he attained, whether the systems that enabled that have been reformed, whether there aren't likeminded colleagues who continue to, um, serve.
@bhawthorne @april you live in a better timeline, at least from the perspective of those of us fond of our mythical Australias.