wait, who?

there are times when all the world’s asleep the questions run too deep for such a simple man. youtu.be/kln_bIndDJg?...

try not to bother the humans.

montevideo.

i just watched a horse-drawn cart (ragged, dragging behind it some kind of refuse, but on a major, affluent thoroughfare) pull over. a man gets out, walks to a fence guarding an apt building, pauses, then suddenly snatches into a cardboard box a parrot that had been lounging on a beam above a gate.

actually it's not funny at all how you feel when you're finding out it's real.

I agree there are lots of devils in details. I've written some about this. www.interfluidity.com/v2/9416.html Actual legislative proposals have paid attention to details. Every tax is gamed. Excess margins taxes no more imperfect than other taxes are doable, and if we can build the political will.

@hussmanjp.bsky.social suggests essentially an excess margins tax. www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc26...

it sounds like a hurricane but it’s only the wind.

remember the straits of hormuz?

an excellent question.

the costs of child-rearing are straighforwardly measurable and quantifiable. the benefits of child-rearing are wooly and hand-wavy and entirely nonquantifiable. therefore child-rearing is irrational, as a matter of science. your arguments to the contrary are non-falsifiable.

(the practical problem — there is also an analytical one — with the Kaldor-Hicks criterion is that it presumed a benevolent leadership that would ensure losers from policy choices would be adequately compensated by winners. that assumption was, to put it gently, wrong. now here we go again.)

AI is currently on a path toward delivering the most massive improvement in human history, under the Kaldor-Hicks criterion.

(fwiw the main danger this particular essay highlights is a shift in US / Fed willingness to protect the eurodollar system with eg swaps.)

“Real welfare economics asks: is this society better, taking account of everyone who lives in it? The Kaldor-Hicks criterion answers a different question: could the winners, if they chose to, arrange things so that no one was worse off?” @braddelong.bsky.social delightfully on Hicks

excellent.

money is the unit of account in which debt and wage contracts get denominated. bankers in london chose and choose to denominate a whole lot of debt contracts in dollars. they continue to find counterparties.

it would have been bad if either the Hatfields or the McCoys had nuclear bombs.