BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-04-19 We
Hokusai; Nilay Patel on copyright & its future; immigration & the end of American exceptionalism; Matt Yglesias, Angela Angel, & Timothy Burke; interest rates, digital currencies, debt relief, & th...
ONE VIDEO: The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Hokusai, Explained:
MUST-READ: Copyright Wars Heat Up Again:
From the Verge:
Nilay Patel: AI Drake just set an impossible legal trap for Google: ‘The first legal problem with using AI to make a song with vocals that sound like they’re from Drake is that the final product isn’t a copy of anything. Copyright law is very much based on the idea of making copies…. Music copyright in particular has been getting aggressively expansive… but it’s still all based on copies of actual songs. Fake Drake isn’t a copy of any song in the Drake catalog, so there’s just no dead-ahead copyright claim to make. There’s no copy…. Google, Microsoft, StabilityAI, and every other AI company are all claiming that those training copies are fair use… “fair” as in “fair as determined by a court on a case-by-case application of 17 United States Code §107which lays out a four-factor test for fair use that is as contentious and unpredictable as anything in American political life.”… If Google agrees with Universal that AI-generated music is an impermissible derivative work… it undercuts its own fair use argument for Bard and every other generative AI product it makes…. If Google disagrees with Universal… it protects its own AI efforts and the future of the company, but probably triggers a bunch of future lawsuits from Universal and potentially other labels, and certainly risks losing access to Universal’s music on YouTube, which puts YouTube at risk…
Where I think this is ultimately going to land is with the dominance of publicity property rights—the right you have that others not profit in a more than de minimis way off of your “name, image, and likeness” without your consent.
ONE IMAGE: Did the Trump Administration Mark the End of American Exceptionalism?:
An America that does not attract entrepreneurial and scientific talent is an America that is no longer exceptional:
Very Briefly Noted:
Martin Wolf: The future of interest rates is a riddle: ‘Inflation’s comeback has changed the world — but how much we don’t yet know…
Willem H. Buiter: The Overwhelming Case for CBDCs…
Anne O. Krueger: Breaking the Debt-Relief Paralysis: ‘The world’s poor should not be paying the price for disagreements among the world’s largest creditors. But that will continue to happen until the international community – especially the United States, China, and other major IMF shareholders – strengthens and streamlines the debt-restructuring process…
Zhang Jun: China’s Abandoned Illusion of High Growth: ‘China’s slowing economic growth is a reflection of a new policy approach by the central government. Instead of chasing rapid growth rates at a time when the world economy is sputtering, China’s government is emphasizing job creation and macroeconomic stability…
Vlad Savov: Is Apple Falling Behind in the AI Race Against Microsoft, Google, Amazon?: ‘The world’s most valuable tech company and the biggest tech storyline of the year are strangely divorced. But first...
Perry Anderson (1974): Lineages of the Absolutist State…
Ken White: ‘“We moderate racist shit because this is our site” is defensible. “We don’t moderate anything because we’re philosophically opposed to it” is defensible. “We don’t moderate because it’s too expensive and open for abuse” is defensible. “I don’t want to get drawn into a discussion of whether or not we moderate racist shit” is not defensible…
James Crabtree: The Dean of Shandong: ‘A westerner’s defence of China’s political system. Daniel Bell gives a wry and perceptive insider account of Chinese university life but is less than convincing in his support for authoritarianism…
Sarah Longwell: You Have to Think of Trump’s Election as Year Zero: ‘Because Republican voters say they don’t want any part of a Republican party that looks anything like it did before 2016…
Tana Ganeva: Ron DeSantis to campaign on waterboarding Minnie Mouse…
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Matt Yglesias: Bad incentives and the politics of fear: ‘I do understand the logic of “fear of looters and anarchists makes me want to turn to the political right,” but Trump was president while this stuff was happening. Both Trump and Joe Biden spoke out against rioting during the fall campaign, but you could tell by the tone that Biden was genuinely hoping that people would not riot because he thought rioting was bad for the cities where it was happening and bad for him politically, while the right greeted the outbreak of a new round of disorder in Kenosha with glee because they don’t care about cities and thought rioting was good for them…. I don’t think Trump wanted to see more rioting exactly, nor did he deliberately try to make rioting happen. But… Trump… favors drama, conflict, and tension…. Where he benefits from things spiraling out of control, those basic impulses are indulged…. This is why the conservative response to disorder in 2020 — and in subsequent years — has been long on messaging and position-taking and short on policy…
Angela Nagle: Scarce Labor As The Cause Of Innovation: ‘In The Soul Of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde famously wrote “The fact is that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.” Many did not share Wilde’s optimism. We have been panicking about mechanisation - robots taking our jobs - for as long as mechanisation has existed. But that fear was based on the assumption of a stable or growing labor pool. What if population decline and thus a labor shortage is also happening?…
Timothy Burke: No Exit: ‘An anthropologist from Mars, a brain in a jar, and a time-travelling historian from two centuries in the future meet up. They’re following their own Star of Bethlehem: two news stories from the week of April 17th, 2023: a Black teenager shot by an 84-year old white man because he came to the white man’s house by mistake and a 20-year old woman killed because she was in a car that went up the wrong driveway and the homeowner shot at the car as it turned around to leave. They want to bring the gift of explanation to the world, coming as they do to these incidents with no prior investment in them…. As they start out on their journey, they see the news that two cheerleaders in Texas were shot after accidentally trying to get in the wrong car…
Wim Buiter is not advocating CBDC. He is advocating the abolition of cash, with nothing else of moment changing. This may be false advertising, but good policy. Cash is unhygienic and criminogenic, as well as imposing a zero lower bound on interest rates. The only coherent argument for cash is a libertarian one, and I ain't a libertarian.
Regarding Nagle and “Scarce Labor,” the US corporate research lab has new possibilities with the introduction of true AI and Boston Dynamics robotics possibilities. US hegemony might continue for a little while longer...