BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-05-28 Su

Just before launch, all signs for "Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse" look very good indeed; Ken Goldberg on how we are approaching not a Singularity but a Multiplicity; the US spends a lot on its...

…military; Krugman on inflation; Keisling on market as crowdsourcing mechanism, Scaggs on auto insurance sticker shock, Drezner on DeSantis’s non-approach to Latin America, & Velasco on what the median voter in Chile wants…

MUST-READ: Clone Nepo Lego Jump Cocaine Bear Spiderverse:

My first cousin Phil Lord has a movie on which he is a writer-producer coming out on June 2.

So far, the plastromancers are very very favorable indeed:

Brandon Davis: ‘Across the #SpiderVerse is simply an incredible accomplishment. It’s stunning but also very much an unfinished story by its end. Visually, it’s such a stunning achievement. It’s everything a #SpiderMan fan could ask for and much more. So good, it’s hard to believe it exists…

Hollywood Reporter:

Aaron Couch: The Widening Web of Phil Lord and Chris Miller: ‘The Oscar-winning duo on the intense pressure of the long-awaited ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’, navigating the writers strike as multihyphenates, and their "filthy" talking dog movie 'Strays': "Historically, we have had the advantage of low expectations"…. Two and a half weeks out from Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse hitting theaters… stars [Shameik] Moore as Miles [Morales], the Brooklyn teen Spider-Man who in this installment travels to different universes to team up with various Spider-heroes. Hailee Steinfeld returns as Spider-Gwen… Issa Rae as Spider-Woman and Daniel Kaluuya as Spider-Punk, a British take on the hero. Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson direct, with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings scribe Dave Callaham writing alongside Lord and Miller…. Sony has bet big… $100 million, before marketing costs…

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse arrives five years after the Oscar-winning original. SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT INC

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MUST-WATCH: Ken Goldberg: Singularity or Multiplicity?

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ONE IMAGE: How Great Is U.S. Military Dominance?:

Is there any reason to think that any of our non-allies are getting more value for their military expenditures than we are?:

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Very Briefly Noted:

1. Last Bear Standing: NVIDIA and the Return to Normal: ‘NVIDIA smashed earnings. What does it mean for the market?… Guidance implies not merely a return to sequential growth, but a continuation of the rapid growth…

2. Cognitive Revolution: Our Guests Tell Us Their Favorite AI Tools:

   ‘What leading AI founders, builders, and investors actually use in their daily life…. ChatGPT… CoPilot… Bearly.ai… Layup… MusicLM… Supermeme.ai… Character.ai… EzDubs.AI…

3. Tim Harford: What neo-Luddites get right — and wrong — about Big Tech:

   ‘Is AI the latest threat to livelihoods? That depends on society…. Technology does not create mass unemployment, but is nevertheless quite capable of destroying livelihoods, creating unintended consequences and concentrating power in the hands of a few?… Better policies… will fall on stony ground without countervailing sources of political power capable of standing up to monopolists and billionaires…

4. Theodore Roosevelt (1907): Address on the Occasion of the Laying of the Corner Stone of the Pilgrim Memorial Monument: ‘We have traveled far since his day…. You, sons of the Puritans, and we, who are descended from races whom the Puritans would have deemed alien—we are all Americans together…

5. Amanda Marcotte: Trump's rally cry to MAGA hasn't gone ignored — they've just redirected their rage: ‘MAGA fans are too afraid of prison to riot, but rising hate crimes suggest they've turned their rage on minorities…

6. Zoë Schiffer: Inside Twitter’s failed Space launch: ‘How a decimated team and shrinking server capacity rained on Ron DeSantis' parade…. Musk cut the Spaces team… [from] 100 employees, down to roughly three…. “Practically no one remaining knows the current architecture in depth,” one person lamented…

7. Greg Mankiw (2013): Defending the 1%…

8. Phillips P. O’Brien: No, tanks are not obsolete, they are just really vulnerable: ‘What is obsolete is the earlier view of Russian armored warfare…. Basically the Russians have lost something equivalent to almost ten times the losses of German armor at the Battle of Kursk…. Ukrainian losses in tanks have been very high, if not as catastrophic…. [The tank] has some important support roles to play, it is just extremely vulnerable to defensive firepower and is getting destroyed at a historic pace. If the tank cant be more protected going forward, its future role is very much in question…

9. Robert Skidelsky: Creeping Toward Dystopia: ‘The extent to which governments can spy on their citizens depends not only on the available technologies but also on the checks and balances provided by the political system. That is why China, whose regulatory system is entirely focused on preserving the political stability and upholding “socialist values,” was able to establish the world’s most pervasive system of electronic state surveillance. It also helps explain why China is eager to position itself as a world leader in regulating generative AI…

10. Jay Kuo: Did Trump Violate the Espionage Act?: ‘New reporting suggests that he did, and that the case is reaching a decision point…. Trump’s response has been to say, “What about Joe Biden?”—which shows he still doesn’t really understand how his case of willful retention and communication and of obstruction is so markedly different…

¶s:

1. Paul Krugman: Finally, we’re all starting to agree on inflation: ‘The pessimists… who predicted large inflation were right, while the optimists who minimized the risks—myself unfortunately included—were wrong. But the paper argues that the pessimists were largely right for the wrong reasons. They expected that inflation would arrive via a hugely overheated labor market, but that’s mostly not what happened…. Much of the price shock coming from high spending can be fairly easily reversed, and is in fact reversing as we speak…. There’s actually a sort of consensus: While much recent inflation reflected temporary factors, the economy is still running too hot and needs to cool off. The six-million-job question is whether this cooling off needs to involve a large rise in unemployment…. What has been really striking since late 2022 is that vacancies have come way down without any rise in unemployment…

2. Lynne Kiesling: Markets Are Knowledge Ecosystems: ‘Markets are knowledge ecosystems because prices connect individuals in the network of exchange and communicate some of their dispersed, private, subjective, tacit knowledge through the actions they take. The emergent outcomes we observe are a consequence of making choices and taking actions. The more we represent markets as ecosystems, and the price system as the nervous system of that ecosystem, the less we think mechanistically about markets, and that's a good thing…. Knowledge that we use to make economic decisions is also often tacit. Every day we use knowledge that we don't know we possess to make choices and to engage in exchange…

3. Alexandra Scaggs: What’s going on with US car insurance?: ‘Let’s say you’re a first-time car purchaser this month, preparing to move outside of a major US city…. You’re making an uncomfortably large down payment because interest rates are high. Before you drive away, you just need to sort out insurance. Normally this is an afterthought. But not this year. In fact, your car might have to sit on the lot for a day or two while you shop around for a policy that’s not exorbitantly priced. You’re not uniquely uninsurable, but US auto insurers have been losing money on underwriting policies, and prices are going up fast…. The pressures on auto-insurance profitability have been caused mostly by unexpected “severity” rather than “frequency”. That means insurers aren’t paying out on policies more often, but they are paying higher amounts. To put it simply: It’s not because more car accidents are happening, but the insurers’ average cost of car accidents (both those that are already paid and those that they expect to pay) are higher…. Allstate and Progressive have talked at length about raising prices…. Allstate continued to lose money on its auto underwriting in the first quarter, while Progressive just barely eked out a profit. In other words, this doesn’t look like a “greedflation” story for the auto insurers just yet…

4. Daniel W. Drezner: The Florida governor did not have the best start to his presidential campaign: ‘Ron DeSantis[’s]… Twitter Spaces… announcement worked about as well as one would expect from a company that fired 90 percent of its engineers over the past year…. This has annoyed Republicans casting about for an alternative to Donald Trump. See… Rich Lowry…. Read… Lowry’s column to see the political case for DeSantis. The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is not entirely persuaded…. This is particularly true on international affairs; even Lowry acknowledged that DeSantis’ foreign policy musings to date have been underwhelming at best…. I, for one, am super-curious to learn exactly how a President DeSantis would block Chinese economic engagement with Latin America. It is not like DeSantis has said or done anything that would indicate a willingness to engage with Latin America in ways that would woo them away from China. To the extent he mentions Latin America, he focuses on cracking down on immigration and completing the wall along the Southern border. If those are his stated policy aims, why would President Lula of Brazil or President López Obrador of Mexico give a flying f*** about U.S. preferences in the region?…

5. Andrés Velasco: How the Far Left Paves the Way for the Far Right: ‘In October 2022, Chileans elected a far-left constitutional convention which produced a text so bizarrely radical that nearly two-thirds of voters rejected it. Now Chileans have elected a new Constitutional Council and put a far-right party in the driver’s seat…. The average voter wants to hear one thing… how they will make the streets safer. On this point, the government has almost no credibility. Many of the young men and women who today are ministers or far-left members of parliament heaped praise on those who torched more than a dozen subway stations and hundreds of shops in late 2019. The emblem of the rioters, visible in T-shirts and flags, was a black dog called Matapacos (cop-killer). The Boric administration first wanted to pass an amnesty…. Boric tried to appease his coalition’s hardliners by selectively pardoning 12 people who had already been sentenced, as well as a man serving time for a politically motivated bank robbery in 2013…. Of course, the government did not cause Chile’s recent crime wave. That is not the point. But across South America, woe to the politician who is perceived to legitimize violence or appears soft on crime. Boric seems to have learned the lesson too late, handing the ideal gift to Kast and his brand of authoritarian-with-a-smile, socially-conservative populism…