10 Comments

That Apple vision pro sounds like an upgraded Oculus VR for use with Meta. Looking at the Oculus device, I didn’t see anything compelling about it, and it looks like Meta and Facebook are moving on. I wonder how Apple will use this. Maybe they have a bigger vision for virtual reality and the metaverse.

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Nolan: "The idea of being mocked and shouted down by the unwashed masses strikes fear in the heart of the powerful because it is emblematic of their inability to buy that respect that cannot be bought" ???

Not so sure about this. Musk was pretty respectable a log as he was just making money with EV and space ships. It is mainly the Twitterpocalypse that has tarnished his reputation.

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Our World in Data: Excess Mortality in the COVID Plague Years…: I know we must categorize "shocks" as shocks to aggregate demand or aggregate supply or both, but it would be nice if we don't forget that what happened here was, first and foremost, a health shock. It came exogenously. It may have had little to do with the level of real per capita incomes before the shock occurred. It was economic activity that responded (rapidly) to the shock rather than the other way around. So, we had as close to a 'natural experiment,' as possible for the question: Does health influence economic growth? Albeit over a very short term. Replace COVID with, say, Cancer today or Tuberculosis in the 19th century (among a number of other pandemics and epidemics), I wonder if an assessment of that issue will be different. Bard, this goes to the heart of that chart in your grad (or was it undergrad?) course, where, if I'm recalling correctly, levels of per capita output appeared on the X-axis and life expectancy on the Y-axis.

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Tett. Rich political orphans, so sad. [Where is my crocodile tear emoji?] They really ought to have thought harder before committing to a party that sold fiscals deficits as a growth strategy. Is it any surprise that it expanded into anti-immigration and more recently protectionism, antipathy to measures reducing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere?

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There is a plug by Steven Attewell for Across the Spiderverse up at LGM.

IIRC, the universe of the Aristoi was created by "the inept." But perhaps it ought to have been merely "the inauspicious."

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ONE IMAGE: Supply-Chain Normalization: Use CPI-goods instead of aggregate CPI and that chart would looks even more dramatic.

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"And as for the $3500 price? Remember that the 1984 Macintosh—128K RAM, single 400KB floppy drive, 9-inch diagonal black-and-white screen, Motorola 68000 processor of 70,000 transistors running at 8MHz (by comparison an Apple silicon M2MAX has 70 billion transistors running at 3GHz) cost the equivalent of $6,500 today." Yes, Lol! I also remember my first Pentium 60 (went obsolete in a few months) and the "Start Me Up" Windows 95 campaign. And Netscape. Haha!

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