BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-09-22 Fr
Crypto is indefensible; grifting Trump-enabling journamalist Carl Cannon; Worf Emulating Tȟašúŋke Witkó; very briefly noted; & Lindsey on young libertarians, Alvin on Mexico, & Pinsky hypes LLM, &...
Crypto is indefensible; grifting Trump-enabling journamalist Carl Cannon; Worf Emulating Tȟašúŋke Witkó; very briefly noted; & Lindsey on young libertarians, Alvin on Mexico, & Pinsky hypes LLM, & I briefly note…
MUST-READ: In Which I Try & Fail to Defend Web3, If Not Crypto:
Intellectually defeated by John Crespi, I am:
Brad DeLong: ‘The idea of a world-accessible database into which you can write stuff about yourself that anyone who needs the information can then read, and that that database is then independent—not controlled by any particular potentially gate-keeping entity—that is not crazy.vThe idea that the most important things to write in this database are transfers of NFTs is crazy…
John Crespi: ‘My point is at the end of the day you still have to certify the NFT or DeLong post is really what it says it is. Just like there really is wheat in a silo in Garden City, carbon on a farm near Des Moines, methane on a dairy farm in Tulare, and organic grapes in Lodi. We've been doing that part forever and Blockchain cannot change the initial certification. The ledger for the nodes after that certification is a marginal improvement over the current supply chain certification, not a transformative one IMHO…
Brad DeLong: ‘Yes. One of my favorite quotes from Vernor Vinge:
“Say what?” General Coldhaven’s voice cut through whatever his former boss had been about to say.
“Autologs from the ships themselves. I’m trying to get through to their captains right now, sir—we’re still bidding each other’s crypto.”
Dugway pounced on the report. “And until we talk to them direct, I don’t believe anything. I know those commanders. Something strange is going on here.”
“We have real launches and real targets, sir.” The technician tapped the crosses and circles.
Dugway: “You have nothing but pretty lights!”...
ONE IMAGE: The Seamy Grifting Underbelly of the Trump-Enabling:
Shall we count the lies <https://www.dailymadereviews.com/watch/bio/1j/new/n/kinetic/1790v15/content-844-34.php>?:
There are people who claim that RCP editorial head Carl Cannon was once an honest journalist. If so, it shows how true it is that changes are great—that the owl was once the baker’s daughter.
ONE VIDEO: Worf Emulating Tȟašúŋke Witkó:
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Noah Smith: At least five interesting things for the middle of your week: ‘The threat from commercial real estate…. Property developers borrow a lot… have to periodically roll that debt over…. And if commercial real estate developers go bust en masse, banks are in trouble too…
Matthew C. Klein: The Fed's Bullishness Is Pushing Up Rates: ‘The latest projections suggest that the economy has more underlying momentum than previously believed *and* that there is less need to crush the job market to bring inflation back into line by 2026…
Chris Anstey: Rising Confidence: ‘Last November… Powell was candid on the chance of the US achieving a soft landing: “the path has narrowed.” When the March banking turmoil erupted, he said the pathway “still exists.” Today… policymakers are getting more hopeful that… inflation will be quelled without a painful recession…
Martin Ellison, Sang Seok Lee, & Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke: The Ends of 27 Big Depressions: ‘Leaving the gold standard… boosting inflationary expectations, lowering real interest rates, and stimulating interest-sensitive expenditures…. 27 countries, using modern nowcasting methods and a new dataset containing more than 230,000 monthly and quarterly observations for over 1,500 variables….e. IV, diff-in-diff, and synthetic matching techniques suggest that the relationship is causal…
Economic History: Liverpool News: Archaeologists discover world’s oldest wooden structure: ‘Half a million years ago, earlier than was previously thought possible, humans were building structures made of wood, according to… a team from the University of Liverpool and Aberystwyth University…. The excavation of well-preserved wood at the archaeological site of Kalambo Falls, Zambia, dating back at least 476,000 years and predating the evolution of our own species, Homo sapiens…
Technogrifts!: Bryce Elder: Adam Jonas explains why Tesla will be better at being Nvidia than Nvidia: ‘Carmaker is now AI stock, please ignore all previous communications: The Muskoverse is… cacophonous…. Competing for our attention today… informational fog… antisemitic tropes, “terminal monkeys”… oddly named children.… To cut through all this noise… something bombastic… like a 66 page research report from Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas and six of his colleagues…
Matt Levine: Tether Keeps Lending Tethers: ‘Tether… is an unregulated bank that does not pay interest…. Everyone involved in Tether can get dynastically wealthy and live an easy life by putting all the money in Treasury bills…. Tether is being a good citizen of the crypto ecosystem and supporting its counterparties…. One common form of crypto-skeptical conspiracy…. “Tether… dynamically prints Tethers in order to prop up crypto prices…”. This is … kind of … a Tether spokeswoman … saying … that?…
Journamalism: Charlotte. Clymer: ‘We all sense that Mr. Brooks claiming he paid $78 for a burger… at Newark Airport is… misleading…. He spent about $37 on alcohol. Anyway, I'm happy to be wrong here. If Mr. Brooks wants to post his receipt, given that this was important enough for him to talk about in the first place, I'd welcome the correction…
GPT-LLM-ML: Dave Karpf: Bullet Points: Oh-just-shut-up edition: ‘A.I. is a bullshit generator…. The macro incentives for entrepreneurs are to exaggerate what the technology can do…. Where Ethan Mollick looks at it and says “look at all the individual opportunities to get rich, I look at it and say “look at all the societal problems that are sure to be created if we leave entrepreneurs unattended at the wheel”…
Andy Haldane: AI could consign educational traumas to history: ‘Tailoring education to the learner is within our grasp…. Personalised education… would be the most significant shift in education practice in a century. But the potential dividend, for individuals and economies, could be huge…
NOTES & Substack Posts:
Economic Development Watch: I still am somewhat flummoxed by the failure of industrial-economic development in Mexico over the last generation. Relatively low wages and guaranteed tariff- and quota-free access to the largest consumer market in America should have made it irresistible as an export platform. And that should have brought factories, engineers, knowledge, and much more rapid growth. Yes, drug trade-fueled crime. Yes, corruption. But even so:
GPT-LLM-ML Watch: Perhaps today is not such a good day to ground my LLM to reality. Google joins the AI-hype our-latest-version-controls-hallucinations! chorus:
So I asked it a question. And it did not do well—either on the answering, or on the post-answering web-search-and-fact-check:
I assure you, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, it is not the case that, when Bilbo the Hobbit faces off against Smaug the Dragon, Bilbo says: “Today is a good day to die!”
Public Sphere Watch: The best account I have seen about why so many budding intellectuals are so attracted to Ayn Rand and company:
Tȟašúŋke Witkó, or perhaps David Farragut.
That's pretty funny about Bilbo versus Smaug!
The Lindsey essay was delightful, but missed the point on Ayn Rand. Randoids mostly have one thing in common: virginity.