Back in 2008, I had a book contract to describe the obvious failings in Australian health care. It was planned to challenge the national myth that our system was ‘exceptional’, literally ‘best in the world’. I didn’t persist as Prime Minister Rudd was promising sweeping national reforms and there was genuine community enthusiasm for a Continue reading »
Reading
Just months before the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997, an old Hongkonger was interviewed. He was squatting next to a bundle of goods that he was hawking in the street. When asked about how he felt about the Chinese taking control again, he paused, drew on his cigarette and said, ‘maybe they Continue reading »
It’d be fair to say that there are two competing entities on the world stage right now. One composed of the G7, and the other a less structured group of countries that were once exploited by the G7. I left Wuhan on Wednesday morning this week, on a train which terminated at Xi’an but was Continue reading »
Just thought I’d share this because it’s very cool:
Someday, Sarah, our ship will come in, and I’ll buy you a diamond as big as your eye and a mink coat to rival any movie star. And then, Sarah, I’ll move us back to the neighborhood we used to live in before we got priced out.
Just imagine, Sarah, our own row house, the very same one we rented for five years for seven hundred dollars per month before the owner evicted us to sell to a developer. Only this time, Sarah, the shag carpets will have been replaced with the finest and most homogenous gray composite flooring. It will be so easy to clean, Sarah. And so neutral it will offend no one.
Just think, Sarah, soon we’ll be sitting on our old back stoop, and instead of hearing a domestic dispute, we’ll be deafened by the roar of the newly-yet-shoddily-installed central air unit. Just imagine it, Sarah: You. Me. And the neighborhood we lived in for years but can no longer afford.
If they win the presidency get ready for a revolution Picture if you will, it’s January 21st 2025 and Donald Trump has just been inaugurated for his second term after the Biden interregnum. Yes, it would be a horrific time, not unlike those first horrible weeks in 2016 when over half the country struggled to grasp how it was possible that an ignorant, bombastic, game show host had eked out a win through an electoral college fluke. But those feelings of despair are where the similarities will end. The next Trump administration will be ready to hit the ground running with their leader’s Retribution Agenda and it won’t be because Trump is any more effective at presidential leadership. It will be because right wing institutions will have spent their four years in the wilderness preparing for their chance to enact a radical overhaul of the federal government unlike anything we’ve ever seen in this country. Even some members of the GOP establishment are getting nervous: There was always talk of this among the original Trumpers, even though the president himself didn’t have a clue what they were talking about.
After ten years of publishing, The Nib is going to close down this summer.
The invisible hand is the idea that people operating based on their own self interest in a market economy will optimize “value” and by doing so will increase human welfare. If a person runs a company which makes something that people are willing to buy, they must want or need that thing, and the person will want to make more of that thing so that they can become richer. They do it out of greed, but the richer they get the more they improve the common weal, as it were.
So even though they aren’t doing what they do because they care about the welfare of others (Adam Smith is very clear about that) operating from greed leads to increase human welfare.
Works, except when it doesn’t.
Descriptive statements describe how the world objectively is. Prescriptive statements describe how the world ought to be.
Shake tables are way more complex than I thought
Before the late 1960s, it would have been hard to find anyone in the USA...
On this week's episode of The Audit, Dave and Josh break down why PragerU loves Bill Maher.
Pull back firmly A neighbor approached me last week about the possibilities for using A.I. in support of political campaigns. No way would I let it anywhere near campaign communications. Humans are not savvy enough not to include stock imagery from foreign sources in political ads. You’d let A.I. do it? Or generate audio that might pronounce Nevada Ne-VAH-duh? The neighbor asked Bard to list “North Carolina state representatives who voted to overturn the governor’s veto on abortion bill.” What Bard came back with after a blazing fast search of the Net was a blazing hot mess. With a few more seconds I, Human, grabbed the accurate list at the source here. Perhaps “voted to overturn the governor’s veto on abortion bill” is too vague. Which governor? Which override? Which abortion bill? (SB 20, 2023-2024 Session). I’m reminded of an old Isaac Asimov short story, “Risk.” Briefly: Gerald Black, the etherics engineer responsible for causing the NS-2 model to “get lost” in the previous story, is watching the next stage of hyperspace testing.
I’m writing an open access textbook on homelessness, with a focus on high-income countries. Each chapter gets uploaded to my website as it is completed. The latest chapter, on health, is now available. A ‘top 10’ overview of the chapter can be found here:https://nickfalvo.ca/health-and-homelessness/ All information pertaining to the book can be found here:https://nickfalvo.ca/book/
Open Rights Group has warned that the Data Protection and Digital Information (DPDI) Bill could allow Meta to get around the suspension of data transfers from Europe to the United States, which was imposed by Ireland’s data protector regulator today. The Data Protection Commission issued Meta with a fine of €1.2bn (£1bn) for mishandling Facebook […]
Time again to defend the ancien régime America does not negotiate with terrorists.* Unless, of course, they’ve been elected to Congress. The terrorists threatening to blow up the U.S. and world economy over paying debts the country has already incurred have demands. And hostages. “House Republicans decided to hold the economy hostage to slash assistance for low-income Americans while protecting tax cuts for the wealthy,” asserts E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post. “That’s a factual statement, not a partisan complaint.” The rest of Dionne’s Monday column details the hypocrisy at the heart of conservative backsliders’ demands for deficit reduction. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) wants the Trump-era tax cuts made permanent, “adding $3.5 trillion to the deficit over a decade.” McCarthy demands cuts to domestic discretionary spending that impact poorer Americans. Republicans want work requirements before The Irresponsibles may receive government benefits or they’ll trigger their MAGA suicide vests.
We are all realists and we all — Mäki, Cartwright, and I — self-consciously present ourselves as such. The most obvious research-guiding commonality, perhaps, is that we do all look at the ontological presuppositions of economics or economists. Where we part company, I believe, is that I want to go much further. I guess I […]
The Police — The Firemen
Foo Fighters — Foo Non-Violent Conflict Resolvers
Grateful Dead — Grateful We Got On the Right Dose of Antidepressants Before We’re Dead
Maroon 5 — Maroon 4 Because That One Guy Was Actually Super Toxic
The Jesus and Mary Chain — Jesus and Mary Are No Longer Chained to Gender Norms
The Killers — The Weaponized Incompetence Killers
Tom Waits — Tom Waits for Women to Finish Talking Without Interrupting Them
The Allman Brothers — Not All Men But Enough of Them Brothers
Red Hot Chili Peppers — Evenly Tempered Chili Peppers
Sting — It Stings When You Ignore My Feelings
The Rolling Stones — The Ethically Non-Monogamous Stones
Ween — Now We Know Not to Take Out Our Ween When No One Asked for It
The Strokes — The No Longer Need Ego Strokes
Steely Dan — Emotionally Available Dan
The explosive growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT threatens to disrupt many aspects of society. Geoffrey Hinton, the former head of AI at Google, recently announced his retirement; there is a growing sense of inevitability and a concomitant lack of agency. An initial humanistic hope might be that people would simply reject […]
As the world shifts away from Western dominance, China demands substantive reforms to the UN Security Council, challenging the archaic power structure and advocating for fair representation, signaling a crucial moment for global diplomacy and the future of the UN.
The post Led by China and India: The Global South Is Trying To Fix the UN appeared first on MintPress News.
TigerSwan worked with law enforcement to fight an information war against the Indigenous-led water protectors.
The post Pipeline Company Spent Big on Police Gear to Use Against Standing Rock Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.