my new artificial wisdom platform exceeds human performance on all the benchmarks.
“On our current trajectory, we might just get those jobs making tennis sneakers.”
// an excellent piece on China, encouraging sane industrial policy in the US, by #DavidAutor and #GordonHanson
// (good luck with that under the current administration)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/opinion/china-shock-economy-manufacturing.html
ht #BradSetser, #GregIp
The Constanta Cazino and waterfront, next to the port, sunny and pretty today.
@DocAtCDI If I had a hammer joke…
all constructs are invalid, but some constructs are not so invalid as to render them entirely useless.
(riffing on George Box, all models are wrong…)
“creativity” may prove more susceptible to automation than taste.
Verification complete. Thank you.
Here’s what you need to know.
@admitsWrongIfProven representative democracy exists to absolve people of the information burdens of complex governance.
our problem is that we don’t (especially in the US, but also in general) implement representation in meaningful, tractable forms.
“voters” are not a meaningful or helpful locus of accountability.
it may feel righteous to blame the people who voted for catastrophe, but there’s no mechanism that translates blamers’ self righteousness into virtuous future outcomes.
mill v1.0.0 is out! https://mill-build.org/blog/13-mill-build-tool-v1-0-0.html #scala
The humans still have noses.
the really fun social media platforms will soon implement rage verification.
@admitsWrongIfProven it’s a scandal, if you ask me.
there are some clubs, the more exclusive you make them, the less desirable they become, even for the kind of people misguided enough to imagine "exclusive" is somehow attractive.
@BenRossTransit That an argument doesn’t apply to everything doesn’t mean it’s wrong for everything. It is right for the cases discussed in the article, and for most welfare-state applications. And it’s worth thinking through in almost all cases, even where the equivalence is more disputable. 1/
@BenRossTransit In the case of bus fares, for example, you can decompose means-tested support into free/lower fares for everyone plus a special tax/fee on other transit users. You can absolutely argue that “tax” is the wrong word, “fee” is better, since transit use is “voluntary”. (That’s its own can of worms, since transportation is not really “voluntary”, and the nonsupported population and people who could afford a car are not necessarily exactly the same). 2/
@BenRossTransit But let’s concede/stipulate that the right word to use in the bus case is a universal service plus “fee” levied only on transit users. Then the question becomes is this a good “fee” policy, rather than tax policy. 3/
@BenRossTransit Arguments for are transit users directly get extra benefits from transit, so there’s prima facie moral and political legitimacy to the fee. Arguments against are that *nontransit* users impose large external costs relative to transit users, so narrowing to a fee-base rather than a broad tax base is penalizing virtue. 4/
@BenRossTransit Both sides have good arguments! I’m not trying to adjudicate the question. But what I will say is it’s almost *always* a valid and useful exercise, whenever something is means-tested, to reconstitute it as universal plus a tax-or-fee, and then ask the question, if the program was universal, would that particular tax-or-fee stand on its own as a desirable way to raise funds? /fin
@BenRossTransit it doesn’t assume any service is used involuntarily, unless paying less taxes / accepting money is “using a service”.
a child allowance with a phaseout is equivalent to a universal child allowance plus an extra tax oddly levied solely upon parents earning more than the cutoff.
no one uses a service, nothing is “voluntary” beyond weird arguments people could choose to give the US treasury money to which you would otherwise by law be entitled.
“‘targeting’ is just taxing by another name. Means-testers have not figured out how to better spend a fixed amount of tax revenue. Rather, in these debates, they use national accounting rules to allow themselves to tax more in order to spend more while preventing universalists from doing the same thing.” #MattBruenig https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/11/11/universal-benefits-cost-less-than-means-tested-benefits/
we might have a reliberation day, but we can be sure we will have no deliberation day.
@otfrom partisan papers are fine! great! but a society needs institutions that credibly adjudicate something like a shared reality. within that shared reality, people with diverging values and interests will still be very partisan! but they will have to make their cases in ways consistent with consensus about what actually exists and has occurred, or face effective discipline. that i think is what we’ve lost, however imperfect the reality adjudicating institutions genuinely were.