wait ‘til he gets them to stop removing the cocaine too.

finally something literally Mt-Rushmore-worthy!

philosophical disturbances bleed from the epistemological to the ontological.

my new artificial wisdom platform exceeds human performance on all the benchmarks.

@Phil I mostly agree. I don’t think we need to sever ties with China where we don’t much care about sourcing and have alternatives. But batteries, semiconductors, aviation, rare earth, communications, strategic industries we want ideally to be domestic or at the very least subject to highly diversified “friendsourcing”.

@Phil “we should encourage China to build battery and auto plants in the United States, just as China enticed leading U.S. companies to set up shop there over the past three decades… choose the battles that we can win (semiconductors) or those we simply cannot afford to lose (rare earths), and make the long-term investments to reach the right outcome.”

i’m sure there is ongoing IP theft, but that horse left the barn long ago. the US no longer defines the technological frontier.

@Phil I think you’ve misread the piece. The authors absolutely want to bring back manufacturing, not just R&D. But they want to be discriminating about what manufacturing to bring back.

They don’t address IP theft or US support of China’s development I think because it doesn’t matter. However China gained its current advantages, and we our current incapacities, those advantages and disadvantages are the contemporary facts.

“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

@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@qoto.org 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@qoto.org 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.