Reading

Created
Wed, 26/06/2024 - 23:52
. We live in an unequal society where inequality is increasing in many areas, especially regarding income and wealth. The differences in living conditions for different groups, in terms of class, ethnicity, and gender, are unacceptably large. In the world of education, family background still has a significant impact on pupils’ performance, and it becomes […]
Created
Wed, 26/06/2024 - 23:00
Okay, panic This isn’t politics. Or is it? A single phrase made my head snap around during the intro to a morning economic report on the radio Tuesday. A show sponsor (I missed the name) during the intro touted its “hallucination-free AI” product. Hallucination-free is a selling point now? You recall the unsettling encounter last year with Microsoft’s Bing chatbot written up in the New York Times: As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead. (We’ve posted the full transcript of the conversation here.) Kevin Roose fretted: These A.I. models hallucinate, and make up emotions where none really exist. But so do humans. And for a few hours Tuesday night, I felt a strange new emotion — a foreboding feeling that A.I. had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same.
Created
Wed, 26/06/2024 - 22:57
What Xi Jingping Has Done Right to Preserve CCP Power and Effectiveness

I was a doubter about Xi. His early anti-corruption drive seemed most likely to be a way to purge the Party of his enemies, and I assumed he was driven primarily by ambition for personal power.

I was wrong.

If you want to join the CCP, you have to be accepted. It isn’t automatic. Once accepted you undergo training and if you want real power you have to rise: you have to be in charge and deliver.

In this the CCP is similar to the old Roman Republic: high political rank required you to rise up thru the cursus honorum. Doing so required you to gain experience with government: roads, sewage, trade, law and so on. In practice, few people were elected to the highest offices without military experience, and the result was that high elected officials had some actual experience with how both military and civic affairs ran.

Created
Wed, 26/06/2024 - 22:00

REQUIRED ITEMS

  • One 750 ml bottle of Jameson Irish Whiskey
  • A television or any device capable of streaming the debate live
  • A sense of resigned masochism that can come only from no longer having any reason to believe that we live in a world where outcomes can be predicted using logic and reason.

THE RULES

Every time Biden makes a moderately self-deprecating joke about his age—but manages to lose the thread and stumble over the punchline—take a drink. You’re going to need it to make it through this nightmare.

Each time Trump waves his freakish little jazz hands and places the emphasis on a random simple adverb at the end of his Gordian Knot of a sentence, consider running to the store for something a little stronger. Possibly Everclear.

Any time it becomes clear that both candidates actually agree on an issue—and that issue is nowhere near the border of your own personal ethical road map—take two shots, because why the hell not? What even is the point of this spectacle?

Created
Wed, 26/06/2024 - 08:30
A bunch of Nobel prize winning economists have some thoughts on Trump’s “economic proposals” Sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists signed a joint letter Tuesday warning of what they see as economic risks if former President Donald Trump were to serve a second term, including reheated inflation. “While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we all agree that Joe Biden’s economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump’s,” the economists wrote. Axios was first to report the letter. “There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets,” wrote the group of politically progressive academics. Trump has so far proposed making his first-term tax cuts permanent, imposing universal tariffs on all imports, with a China-specific tariff rate between 60% and 100%, and pressuring the independent Federal Reserve Board to cut interest rates.