J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 135
August 6, 2019
Reflections 11 Years After the Crash
1) If there hadn't been any of the kind of panic we got post-Lehman, how severe you think the U.S. recession would have been? Would it have been like a slightly worse S&L crisis, or is that underselling it?
I think the smart money in June 2008 was that the recession was or was about to be over. Housing investment had already rebalanced: the construction sector was back to a sustainable share of GDP. There were only about 500 billion of mortgage losses to be distributed around the world or to be bailed out by governments���really, trivial amounts in a world economy with 80 trillion of traded financial assets. And with Bear-Stearns the U.S. government had guaranteed the debt but not the equty of too big to fail institutions. Banks were still having trouble raising equity. But as long as people were confident that the 500 billion of bad mortgage debt would ultimately land on somebody who could absorb it, the only thing that would make a bad recession was if people anticipated a bad recession. And with no Lehman panic���if Bernanke, Paulson, and Geithner had not caused everybody to say quote what the fuck is going on" by allowing Lehman's bankruptcy uncontrolled and then justifying their actions by claiming that they were forbidden by law to support a too-big-to-fail institution that was insolvent and not just illiquid... Without that, no reason to fear even as bad as the S&L crisis.
2) Do you think there would have been a euro crisis without the Lehman panic?
Sooner or later there would have been a sudden stop in lending to the Southern European periphery. Sudden stops in international lending with hard currency pegs are nasty things. Without Lehman, however, Southern European governments might well have gone with Iceland: saying that it was the responsibility of Northern European governments to bail out their banks and their depositors, rather than the responsibility of southern European governments to bail out the banks' debtors. Then all that would have been left would've been a Greek debt problem, and that was very small potatoes in the context of the eurozone economy in the whole.
3) How do you think China's economy might have evolved in the absence of a Lehman-type event? They said that they wanted to rebalance towards consumption in the early 2000s, but they doubled down on investment in a big way���Adam Tooze has their total stimulus a 19% of GDP in 2009���to keep growth up:
More exports, less investment. I do not think it would have made it easier for them to rebalance towards consumption: they tried, it just turned out to be hard do.
And if there hadn't been any bailouts, What do you think the Fed & Obama admin would have had to do then?
1) If there had not been any bailouts, we would have been in for a serious rerun of the Great Depression. Certainly the 2009-2010 trough would have been deeper. We can hope that massive failure of every New York too-big-to-fail bank save JMPC, GS, and maybe BoA in February 2009 would have created sufficient clarity for conservatorship of all of high finance and for a fiscal stimulus program on a proper scale to bring about a morning in America by late 2010. But given the attitude of the Republican Party the Kenyan Muslim Socialist and all his works, and given that both Bernanke and Geithner fundamentally believe the bankers are good but emotionally fragile people hey need to be coddled by having their profits and options boosted, I do not think the chances of a good outcome would have been very high. Of course, perhaps Obama bonded with Bernanke and Geithner because they looked good in suits and seemed to know what they were doing. And they would not have looked so with New York banks failing en masse...
#finance #highlighted #macro #politicaleconomy
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Liveblogging: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Cynegils
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (J.A. Giles and J. Ingram trans.): Cynegilis: "A.D. 635. This year King Cynegils was baptized by Bishop Birinus at Dorchester; and Oswald, king of the Northumbrians, was his sponsor. A.D. 636. This year King Cwichelm was baptized at Dorchester, and died the same year. Bishop Felix also preached to the East-Angles the belief of Christ...
#liveblogging #history #anglosaxonchronicle
Comment of the Day: Graydon: "You get what you reward, an...
Comment of the Day: Graydon: "You get what you reward, and the present mechanism of reward is advertising, fundamentally aligned with increasing people's insecurity so as to increase their likelihood of making a purchase to address that insecurity. Addressing the insecurity by reducing it with free information is something the advertising revenue stream is actively against. If you want this to work at a means of improving the cross-product of information and people, so that the area under the 'could make a sound decision if they wanted to do so' line on the distribution-of-access-to-knowledge graph is maximized, you need a public mechanism of reward and to align it with people's belief in the utility of the source toward reducing their insecurity. If the post office ran it, you could have a single standard blogging platform, a per-reader token distribution system, and a cash payout based on assigned tokens. But this can't be done with patronage or with advertisers, though patronage comes closer. (There's much greater diversity of patrons than diversity of advertisers.)...
#commentoftheday
August 5, 2019
After hanging out with Madeleine Albright last week, I'm ...
After hanging out with Madeleine Albright last week, I'm going to start calling all of this what it is: neo-fascism: Annalee Newitz (2008): Larry Niven Tells DHS to Spread Organ Harvesting Rumors: "There's a small group of science fiction authors who call themselves SIGMA and offer the U.S. government advice on futuristic scenarios.... One of them���Larry "Ringworld" Niven ��� offered the Department of Homeland Security some of the creepiest advice we've ever heard about how to handle problems with overcrowding in hospitals... a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants. 'The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren't going to pay for anything anyway', Niven said. 'Do you know how politically incorrect you are?' Pournelle asked. 'I know it may not be possible to use this solution, but it does work', Niven replied.... Other authors in SIGMA include Greg Bear (Darwin's Radio, Eon), Sage Walker (Wild Cards), and Eric Kotani (Between the Stars)...
#noted
A Now-Extended Non-Sokratic Dialogue on Website Design: Hoisted from the Archives
Hoisted from the Archives: A Now-Extended Non-Sokratic Dialogue on Website Design: What I, at least, regard as an interesting discussion in the comments to my A Very Brief Sokratic Dialogue on Website Redesign: From that post:
Platon: Five requirements?
Sokrates: Yes.... The stream... so... who want to either read what is new or to treat the site as a weblog--that is, have a sustained engagement and conversation with the website considered as a Turing-class hivemind--can do so.... The front-end... to give each piece of content a visually-engaging and subhead-teaser informative welcome mat.... The syndication... to propagate the front-end cards out to Twitter and Facebook.... The stock... a pathway... by which people can pull things written in the past... relevant... to their concerns today.... The grammar: The visually-interesting and subhead-teaser front-end... needs to lead the people who would want to and enjoy engaging with the content to actually do so.... [But,] as William Goldman says, nobody knows anything.
Platon: Is there anybody whose degree of not-knowingness is even slightly less than the degree of not-knowingness of the rest of us?...
Sokrates: My guess... http://www.vox.com--Ezra Klein and Melissa Bell and company--are most likely to be slightly less not-knowing than the rest of us....
Platon: So, what are they doing?
Sokrates: I really do not know.... Somebody should... write up a 3000-word explainer on what Vox.com's internet strategy in this age of social media actually is, and what pieces of it have worked and what pieces have failed...
Ezra Klein: I have sat down a couple of times to write up what's worked and what's failed at Vox. I keep abandoning the project, because I keep realizing I am not yet sure what's failed and what's simply in the learning process still...
I will say of these five items, the one I worry about most for Vox--and for everything--is the stock. I think we are better at using stock than most, and we are particularly good at making stock useful to our writers. But I don't think our stock is sufficiently available to our readers.
Maynard Handley: Might I suggest, in the context of Vox and similar sites, that I see a strange blindness?
Web sites are willing to accept the contortions necessary for responsive design (ie flowing well across a range of screen sizes from phone to tablet to iMac), and some are even willing to provide some user-selected visual customization (like dark vs light themes).
What I DON'T see is a willingness to provide 'semantic' customization, by which I mean things like:
I ONLY want to see what's new since my last visit. I'm not interested in scanning your entire page to try to see what's changed. Traditional blogs of course handle this very well, and similarly structured sites like Ars Technica. Vox and similar sites (like TheVerge) handle this terribly, constantly repeating the same article in various places in the hope that, if I didn't view in context A, maybe I will view it in context B or C or D.
Article 'cards' that are based on text and tell me what I'm about to see, rather than this sort of 'You won't believe what Fox News is doing now' teaser crap. Once again, A blog like Brad's shows how to do this, and Ars Technica shows how to do it in a more 'commercial/flashy' environment. I can believe that the current style of Vox draws in the maximum number of viewers. BUT I also suspect that it repels the 'highest value' viewers, those with limited time and limited patience for manipulative headlines. Certainly the primary mechanism by which I view Vox stories is reading them via Brad's site--I have better things to do than put up with its front page's ridiculously low information density every day.
So what I don't understand is why Vox appreciates the need to vary its presentation for differently-sized screens, but NOT the need to vary its presentation for differently-abled minds.
Altoid: To be direct, in my limited experience Vox is like Talking Points Memo in that it lives on click bait. Click bait is in extreme inherent tension with 'grammar' (=non-misleading indication of content) and perhaps with 'stock' (=, as I get it, a combination of indexing and threading). I like Vox's maps and some features, but I think Maynard and I are on the same page in thinking that its packaging, like TPM's, tends to oversell the content. Unlike TPM (mostly) and our own gentle host, Vox continually moves, duplicates, and repositions the same story, presumably to generate clicks.
But then, I'm one of those who doesn't know anything. The intersection of what I--a reader and occasional commenter, and what Ezra--proprietor of a site that needs to generate money in order to exist, and what Brad--proprietor of a site that seeks to engage with targeted groups, want from this sort of interchange, may occur in a vastly different place than any of us would imagine.
Dan Kervick: Here's what I do on a conventional news website when I don't have enough background information to understand the piece fully, interpret the information it is providing in context, etc:
I open up a new browser tab, google in the relevant phrase and start hunting. Or maybe I go to Wikipedia. Or maybe I go to one of the many, many other web places I have gotten that I have come to know as archiving useful information on that topic. There are lots of tools, and I think most experienced web users have gotten handy at this kind of thing, and have their own ideas about how best to identify quality, and filter crud.
What Vox seems to want to do is turn itself into a one-stop shop for both the news and the contextual background. I'm not sure that is going to work: it seems a bit overly controlling and managerial for the new era of flexible user-directed information gathering. I'm not saying it can't develop an audience. There will be some brand-oriented consumers who like the Vox take on the world and want an ideologically closed, uniform perspective on their news and the knowledge base needed to make sense of the news. But I'm not sure how big that group will be.
Perhaps an alternative approach is to think about how to make the stock discoverable to outside users of other sites, independently of those who discover it via Vox's internal pathways. Maybe what they want is two main components: a 'Voxpedia' component and a 'VoxNews' component. The components would certainly be optimized to talk easily with each other, but would also each have an independent existence networked in different ways to the rest of the web.
Andrew Z: To be successful, a website needs to be usable and useful. The design is the expression of those characteristics. Sokrates' five requirements are simply the requirements for the website to be useful to him.
What I see Vox selling is context. Context requires a lot of work even with software helping. There is a limited market for context, especially on the internet where the expectation is free.
I believe Vox is likely to fail due to a limited, paying market for Vox's true product and strength. Until the industry leaves an ad-based revenue model, expensive things aren't going to be big financial successes.
Gene O'Grady: For extra credit, please translate "that really depends on implementation" into idiomatic Attic Greek.
I suppose, since Ezra has showed up here, that I should show up in my proper persona as well...
I think that http://vox.com has it absolutely nailed as far as syndication, grammar, and front-end are concerned. I agree with Ezra that it is weakest with respect to the stock. And I think that it has not quite managed to hit the sweet spot with respect to the stream...
Let me try to explain what I really mean, in the hope that if I try to explain it I will then be able to, myself, understand what I am thinking--because right now I do not think that I really understand my own thought about this...
Let us consider, first, the stream: A great number of people who come to any website want to engage with any website on the basis of: "what is new here?"
In so doing, they are looking for a heuristic for "most interesting": they are trying to figure out which parts of the firehose of content on the site they should select to read first. And simple reverse-chronological list of posts goes amazingly far toward performing that task of serving as a heuristic for "most interesting" because:
New things are likely to be about news, which is new. Older things may well be about ideas, concepts, and events that the websurfer has already thought about and is not terribly interested in thinking about further.
New things are things that by definition the websurfer has not read before. There is no risk of clicking, starting to read, and then realizing "I remember reading this exact same page last month. Why am I still reading this?..."
New things may well allow you to gauge how the writer processes new information--how they mark their beliefs to market--and thus give the websurfer extra insight into how they think.
Now reverse-chronological "newness" is a remarkably good heuristic, but it is not a perfect heuristic for these forms of "interesting".
Ideally, the "new" items presented to a websurfer should be an appropriate combination of:
things that are new, plus
old things that are really good that the websurfer ought to be reminded of or missed the fist time through, plus
old things that have a particular close fit with the websurfer's interests that they ought to be reminded of or missed the first time through, minus
those new things that are below the reader's level of expertise on the topic considered.
It is thus possible to do a better job than a reverse-chronological list of posts, perhaps, when daily volume is large, organized by topic and by sub-topic so that the websurfer can click to focus in. But doing better requires some truly heavy user-interface design, some truly heavy database construction, and some truly heavy modeling of the cognitive state of the websurfer. Merely a small matter of programming? Perhaps. Right now the front page of http://vox.com is trying to do better than a reverse-chronological list of posts with filters by topic and subtopic. Melissa Bell appears fairly confident that they are doing a better job. I find that I am not--but they are getting an awful lot of clicks, page views, eyeballs sold to advertisers, and I am far from being even a semi-typical user or use case. So I see this as still a very open question...
Let me back up and consider dimension (3) of what I called "interesting": New things may well allow you to gauge how the writer processes new information--how they mark their beliefs to market--and thus give the websurfer extra insight into how they think. This is, I think, worth unpacking--in large part because I am not entirely sure what I mean, exactly. But there seems definitely to be a problem with the modern, social web here...
Ezra Klein says:
Ezra Klein: "Blogging is a conversation, and conversations don't go viral...
...People share things their friends will understand, not things that you need to have read six other posts to understand. Blogging encourages interjections into conversations, and it thrives off of��familiarity. Social media encourages content that can travel all on its own.... As an editor, I miss blogging.... [But] I don't think blogs... work in... organizations [like Vox]. And I think this is a problem, or at least a manifestation of a problem.... The need to create content that 'travels' is at war with the fact that great work often needs to be rooted in a particular place and context--a place and context that the reader and the author already share.... We're getting better at serving a huge audience even as we're getting worse at serving a loyal one. At Vox, we have some cool ideas... but I don't think we're anywhere near a solution.
Matthew Yglesias says:
Matthew Yglesias: "[My] pieces [these days]... are all designed for the social web... in the winter of 2014-2015...
...to be viable as atomic pieces of content read and shared by people who have no idea who I am or what I've done before.... The contemporary social web... lacks... the sense of direct, continual engagement between author and audience.�� My solution... is... this newsletter. Communication between myself and a self-selected audience of individuals who I hope will subscribe with the intention of reading regularly and coming back for more.... Like blogging, but for your inbox. Like a blog... frequently--but unpredictably. And like a Matthew Yglesias blog... plenty of typos and minimal editing.... http://www.vox.com is... way more polished and professional... and we are hard at work on making it even more polished and more professional. This newsletter may be, well, less polished. In a good way.
And Zeynep Tufekci says:
Zeynep Tufekci: "I want to go back to something you said to me... that I think is the heart of it...
We were discussing the need to preserve links, and have them under our control, and you said ���because a link is a relationship.��� That is exactly right. A link isn���t just a link, or a hit to be counted. A link is a relationship between people. Karl Marx... ���commodity fetishism��� as a key mechanism.... ���Link fetishism��� that obscures the true heart of a link: it���s a connection between people... this [is a] core fact about what is beautiful about the web we loved, and one we are trying not to lose. We are here for each other, not just through the fluffy, and the outrageously shareable, and the pleasant and the likable--but through it all. When we write, and link to each other, we are connecting to each other, not merely to content.... I... want to go forward to a web based on relationships, the flow of which is not manipulated on behalf of advertisers.... I don���t fear commercial platforms, per se, nor am I opposed to the intelligent use of appropriate and robust algorithms that can help enrich our experience. (I���m actually for it). The web we need to save is not this or that format, but our relationships, expressed in our links, our updates, our connections and more. There is much at stake.
If I can try to compress what I think all three of these people are saying that they miss down to its smallest core, it is that the old bloggy web allowed you to (i) watch individual webloggers think; (ii) watch a group of webloggers together worry an issue and so be, collectively, smarter than any of them were individually; and (iii) by following the web of links learn about the existence of other perspectives different enough from those you were currently reading to be interesting but similar enough to them to be comprehensible. The new social media viral-seeking autonomous-content net loses all of that.
Is that a big loss? Perhaps.
The loss of the easy reach to new perspectives is a definite loss. The fact that individuals are now, too often, thinking and reporting on their own rather than reacting to each other means that what you read is of only average intelligence, rather than maximum or hive-mind super-maximum intelligence, and that is also a definite loss.
The biggest loss, however, I think, is that the bloggy web allows and encourages you to build little sub-Turing instantiations of the thinkers you engage with and run them on your wetware. I am at my smartest when I confront a problem; think "what would John Maynard Keynes think of this?" "what would Andrei Shleifer think of this?" "what would Barry Eichengreen think of this?" and then answer these questions myself--more-or-less--by running my own personal sub-Turing instantiations of their minds on my wetware. The old bloggy web encouraged you--nay, made it inevitable that you would--learn how other smart people thought. The new social web did not.
And we are, I think, much wiser when we can do this. As you know if your own personal sub-Turing instantiation of my mind is any good, I am attached to Niccolo Machiavelli's letter to Vettori:
Niccolo Machiavelli: Letter to Francesco Vettori of 10 December 1513: "Florence, 10 December 1513...
To the Magnificent Francesco Vettori, His Patron and Benefactor, Florentine Ambassador to the Supreme Pontiff. In Rome.
Magnificent Ambassador. 'Divine favors were never late.' I say this because it seemed to me that I had lost--no, rather, strayed from--your favor.... I am reassured by your recent letter of the 23rd of last month.... I can tell you nothing else in this letter except what my life is like.... I am living on my farm, and since my latest disasters, I have not spent a total of twenty days in Florence. Until now, I have been catching thrushes with my own hands.... I eat what food this poor farm and my minuscule patrimony yield. When I have finished eating, I return to the inn, where there usually are the innkeeper, a butcher, a miller, and a couple of kilnworkers. I slum around with them for the rest of the day playing cricca and backgammon.... I get the mold out of my brain and let out the malice of my fate, content to be ridden over roughshod in this fashion if only to discover whether or not my fate is ashamed of treating me so.
When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains what he has understood, I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation...
In my estimation, Matthew Yglesias's and Ezra Klein's weblogs supplied that for which Machiavelli in his study desperately yearns, and supplied it in over-full measure. Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein writing on http://vox.com by and large do not. They hope to get it back: "we have some cool ideas..." But they do not have the stream nailed yet. And they need to, because nailing the stream that smart people provide is the way that a web designer can add the most value to society: via discussion, debate, and example, teaching others how to think as well and clearly as they can.
In a way, this conclusion of mine about the stream is both a refutation and an endorsement of Sokrates's--or is it Platon's--argument in the Phaedrus about the inferiority of writing (and the superiority, among forms of writing, of dialogue and dialectic over expository text):
SOCRATES: Thamus replied: "O most ingenious Theuth.... [Via writing] you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."... I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.
PHAEDRUS: That again is most true.
SOCRATES: Is there not another kind of word or speech far better than this, and having far greater power���a son of the same family, but lawfully begotten?
PHAEDRUS: Whom do you mean, and what is his origin?
SOCRATES: I mean an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.
PHAEDRUS: You mean the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which the written word is properly no more than an image?
SOCRATES: Yes, of course that is what I mean.... In the garden of letters... sow and plant, but only for the sake of recreation and amusement... [and] as memorials to be treasured against the forgetfulness of old age.... But nobler far is the serious pursuit of the dialectician, who, finding a congenial soul, by the help of science sows and plants therein words which are able to help themselves and him who planted them, and are not unfruitful, but have in them a seed which others brought up in different soils render immortal, making the possessors of it happy to the utmost extent of human happiness.... Even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what we know, and that only in principles of justice and goodness and nobility taught and communicated orally for the sake of instruction and graven in the soul, which is the true way of writing, is there clearness and perfection and seriousness....
Go and tell Lysias that to the fountain and school of the Nymphs we went down, and were bidden by them to convey a message to him and to other composers of speeches... poems... political discourses.... If their compositions are based on knowledge of the truth, and they can defend or prove them, when they are put to the test, by spoken arguments, which leave their writings poor in comparison of them, then they are to be called, not only poets, orators, legislators, but are worthy of a higher name... philosophers...
Yes, I have now asserted that webloggers are the true philosophers. And I have asserted that this is the most important reason to work hard to get the stream right. Do you disagree?
What about the stock?
Here I, most regrettably, have very little to say. I have this picture in my mind's eye of stackable content: the 140-character tweet linking to a weblog post that is the 200-word nut paragraph, itself linking to the weblog post that is the 700-word op-ed-length statement of the position, linking then to both a more permanent 3000-word argument and to a 3000-word explainer, both then focusing back to a continually-updated 10,000-word paper, and behind that a 50,000-word (or more) book-length treatment. But how to arrange the link-crumb architecture so that readers are led painlessly and seamlessly to the treatment of the subject at the length and depth they want and at the level they can best handle is well beyond me...
Google was supposed to supply the stock. It was supposed to use the link-crumb trail of the web to direct us to the beset durable authoritative source to answer whatever our question is. But it turns out that is not what people link to in large quantity, and that Google cannot parcel out the chaff and send us to the wheat reliably.
It didn't.
So here all I can do is quote what Ezra said, in his comment already quoted above:
Of these five items, the one I worry about most for Vox--and for everything--is the stock. I think we are better at using stock than most, and we are particularly good at making stock useful to our writers. But I don't think our stock is sufficiently available to our readers.
Vox Voxsplains Vox.com
On explainer journalism: Vox Voxsplains Vox: "The media is excellent at reporting the news and pretty good at adding commentary...
...What���s lacking is an organization genuinely dedicated to explaining the news. That is to say, our end goal isn���t telling you what just happened, or how we feel about what just happened, it���s making sure you understand what just happened. We're going to deliver a lot of contextual information that traditional news stories aren't designed to carry, and we're hiring journalists who really know the topics they cover. There���s no way we���ll be able to help readers understand issues if we haven���t done the work to understand them ourselves.... This article is an example. It tries to identify the main questions you might have about Vox and answer them in a clear, logically structured way. At the beginning is the most obvious, most important thing people might want to know about Vox rather than the latest scoop. This article contains news--we���re announcing our name, Vox.... But the new information isn���t the point. The point is to leave you with a better understanding of what we���re trying to do with Vox.
On the persistent stock: Matthew Yglesias: Refreshing the Evergreen: "No one even seemed to notice that we were flooding the site with previously published content...
...Articles were enthusiastically shared by people who had shared them the first time around, too.... Which is great!... If we can use our archives as a way to deliver more great pieces to today's audiences, then that's a huge win.... Lots of important things are... longstanding patterns, structures, or systems.... We think well-executed evergreen journalism is often the very best kind of journalism there is. We want to be doing it regularly, and we also want to be doing it better than traditional formats have allowed.... We've asked our whole staff to do at least one refresh per week, and we're looking forward to seeing how it goes.... Hopefully we'll get a bit closer to building and surfacing the persistent news resource we're working towards.
On iteration: Ezra Klein, Melissa Bell, and Matt Yglesias: Welcome to Vox: A Work in Progress: "Today marks phase two.... At the core of this phase are the Vox Cards...
...inspired by the highlighters and index cards that some of us used in school to remember important information. You���ll find them attached to articles, where they add crucial context; behind��highlighted words, where they allow us to offer deeper explanations of key concepts; and��in their stacks.... But we're just starting to learn how to use them. We have been employees of Vox Media for less than 65 days.... We���re launching this fast for one simple reason: there is no better way to figure out the best way to do explanatory journalism on the web than to do explanatory journalism on the web. We have some exciting ideas about how to do a better job explaining the news. But right now, those ideas are untested.... And that's the only test that matters.... The quicker we can launch, the quicker we can start learning--and start improving.
On aggregation: Ezra Klein: How Vox Aggregates: "[When] I started... everything I wrote... in the hopes that someone else...
...would take it and try to use it... with a link back... a positive-sum endeavor.... [At the] Washington Post... I helped to create��Know More... a big 'Know More' button that would lead people back to the original source to, well, learn more.... While aggregation has always been a clear service to readers, it can be enormously frustrating to writers.... But aggregation, when done correctly, offers value to the original source.... If you ever feel Vox isn't using your work in the way you'd want, email me at ezra@vox.com and let me know. Our intention is always to do things in a way that is positive-sum, and if you ever feel we're failing that ideal, we want to know, and we'll work with you to change it...
On the homepage: Melissa Bell: Vox���s New Homepage, Explained: "If the slots look unusually tall...
...they're designed not for one headline, but for many.... We're able to offer both our newest story on the topic, but also the stories leading up to today.... I have no idea if this is going to work. It'll require a different type of curation and we need to build a robust taxonomy.... There's a basic latest news display.... There are some new permanent doorways into content we know you like to find... favorite writers... latest videos.... The layout algorithmically generates each time and the system may run through up to 1,000 different options to find the best one. (For more on the technical background, we took inspiration from some of the great work happening at Flipboard.)... There's been a lot of talk of late about whether or not homepages are dead. We're certainly not seeing that at Vox...
On first-person voices: Eleanor Barkhorn: First Person: "We've decided to devote a section...
...to thoughtful, in-depth, provocative personal narratives... First Person.... Here are a few pieces... that exemplify the style and range of pieces.... I'm a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing. 9 things I wish I'd known before I became a stay-at-home mom. The internet is full of men who hate feminism. Here's what they're like in person. 9 things I wish people understood about anxiety. Confessions of a congressman...
This File: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/08/a-non-sokratic-dialogue-on-webite-design.html
Edit: http://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a00e551f08003883400e551f080068834/post/6a00e551f08003883401bb08610c11970d/edit
READFOLD: https://readfold.com/read/delong/a-very-brief-sokratic-dialogue-on-website-redesign-gLLYQyRk
Journamalism and the Public Sphere: https://www.bradford-delong.com/journamalism.html
#highlighted #hoistedfromthearchives #publicsphere #weblogs #weblogging
Amendment XXV
HOLY TOLEDO, BATMAN!!: This could end tomorrow, simply, easily, if Pence would invoke or McConnell call for the invocation of Amendment XXV: Betty Cracker: Holy Toledo: "This is just���well, watch for yourselves if you didn���t see it live:
VoteVets: Donald Trump cares so little about mass shootings that he says it happened in the wrong city ("Toledo"). What's worse, he seemingly read it off the teleprompter, meaning the entire White House didn't care enough to get it right, either....
Fellow citizens, we either kick the Republicans out of power at every level, or their insanity will engulf this country completely. We���re more than half way there right now. It really is as simple as that...
#amendmentxxV #moralresponsibility #orangehairedbaboons
Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (August 5, 2019)
Weekly Forecasting Update: August 2, 2019: "These past two weeks have seen three pieces of real news that have altered the outlook: it is not true to say that little has changed: (1) A large twenty basis-point reduction in ten-year Treasury interest rates. (2) Trump's relaunching and intensification of his trade war. (3) New data pushing down out our estimate of the level of manufacturing production in the third quarter of 2019 by almost a full percentage point. Nevertheless, the United States is not in or even likely to be on the verge of a recession. Germany, however, appears to be in recession... #macro #forecasting #highlighted #2019-08-02
A Smart Approach to China-U.S. Relations: "Compared to Holland and Britain when they were global hyperpowers pursuing soft landings, how are we doing? The answer has to be: since January 2017, not well at all... #aspen #globalization #highlighted #oranghairedbaboons #strategy #2019-08-02
The Blocked Southern and Midwestern Global Warming Conversation: "Yet in the U.S Midwest the factual conversation drawing of the links between climate change���screw it: global warming���global warming and weather disasters that farmers and workers and bosses and power-brokers in Malawi and Mozambique have, farmers and workers and bosses and power-brokers in Davenport, IO, are unwilling even to begin... #aspen #globalwarming #highlighted #orangehairedbaboons #publicsphere #2019-08-01
Immigration and American Politics: "I want to thank XXXXXX XXXXXX. I confess I had thought that if the President started putting migrant children in cage, the immediate reaction would not be that this might well be a clever political move. I do have a sense that for a lot of people who know better on the Republican side, they think there's mileage to be gained by characterizing bedrock American values as if they were foreign and "cosmopolitan" values. And it is very nice to hear XXXXXX pushing back... #aspen #globalization #immigration #orangehairedbaboons #politics #2019-07-31
Note to Self: Perhaps Britain's Supersession by America Was Not Inevitable...: A Britain more interested in turning into Britons or Canadians the migrating Jews, Poles, Italians, Romanians, and even Turks who do not happen to be named Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson���who bears Turkish Minister of the Interior Ali Kemal's Y and five other chromosomes, and hence is, by all the rules of conservative patriarchy, a Turk��� would have been much stronger throughout the twentieth century. Perhaps it would not be in its current undignified position... #aspen #history #notetoself #strategy #2019-08-04
Note to Self: Enormous Possibilities in China...: Peng Dehuai... a poem he wrote in 1958 on an inspection tour of the Great Leap Forward famine: Grain scattered on the ground, potato leaves withered;/Strong young people have left to make steel;/Only children and old women reap the crops;/How can they survive the coming year?/Allow me to raise my voice for the people!... #aspen #bravery #economicgrowth #notetoself #orangehariedbaboons #politicaleconomy #2019-08-04
A Year Ago on Equitable Growth: Twenty Worthy Reads On and Off Equitable Growth for August 2, 2018 #noted #hoistedfromthearchives #equitablegrowth #weblogs #2019-08-01
Cat Handling: General Considerations: "The cat is faster and has sharper teeth and claws than you do. It has no 'code of ethics' or consideration for its own future. In a fair fight it will win: 1. DON'T FIGHT A CAT 2. USE YOUR BRAIN 3. USE DRUGS #notetoself #singularity #superintelligence #2019-08-04
Monday Smackdown: Fafblog: Condi Rice Complains to Customer Service!: Not even Fafblog can deal with the Bush administration at the appropriate level. However, it is trying. Here Fafnir interviews Condi Rice: RICE: "First of all, we don't send prisoners off to be tortured, Fafnir. We just transport prisoners to countries where torture happens to be legal and where they happen to end up getting tortured." FB: "Well that explains everything then! It's all just a wacky misunderstanding, like that episode a Three's Company where Jack sends Janet off to Uzbekistan to get boiled alive by the secret police." RICE: "I'd also like to point out that whenever we send a prisoner to a country that routinely tortures prisoners, that country promises us NOT to torture them." FB: "And then they get tortured anyway!" RICE: "Yes, they do! It's very strange." FB: "Over and over again, every time! That's gotta be so frustrating." RICE: "Oh it is, it is."... #hoistedfromthearchives #moralresponsibility #mondaysmackdown #neofascism #orangehairedbaboons #torture #strategy #2019-08-05
Comment of the Day: Erik Lund: "I especially like the argument from 1949 that Israel had to curtail immigration immediately because there wasn't enough work for the newcomers due to the... wait for it... Labour shortage... #commentoftheday #2019-08-04
Comment of the Day: Robert Waldmann: "By your logic the USA can be number one in 2119 if we defeat the terrible threat not from the PRC but from the GOP. You might have a point there. If you descendants of Mayflower passengers can assimilate Magyars, you can assimilate anyone... #commentoftheday #2019-08-04
Liveblogging: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: From Edwin to Osric #2019-08-01
Weekend Reading: Samuel Pepys: Diary: Friday 19 July 1667: "'By God,' says he, 'I think the Devil shits Dutchmen'... #history #strategy #weekendreading #2019-08-02
Weekend Reading: Maciej Cegloski (2005): A Rocket To Nowhere: "Meanwhile, while the Shuttle has been up on blocks, a wealth of unmanned probes has been doing exactly the kind of exploration NASA considers so important, except without the encumbrance of big hairless monkeys on board... #weekendreading #2019-08-04
Scott Lemieux: When the Republican Party Was Respectable: "This is exactly right. There���s a direct line to be drawn from William Buckley���s defense of Jim Crow to Reagan���s comments to Shelby County to Trump���s comments about Baltimore. They���re all from influential Republican elites, and all reflect the view that black people are not fit for self-governance. Trump is working well within the Reaganite tradition...
UC Berkeley Events Calendar: Yogendra Yadav: Politics after Modi: Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony: Lecture | August��13 | 12-2 p.m. | Stephens Hall, 10 (ISAS Conf. Room)...
Evelyn Cheng and Shirley Tay: China Social Credit System Still in Testing Phase Amid Trials: "The Chinese government is running up against a self-imposed 2020 deadline to formulate a nationwide social credit plan. The proposed system tries to create a standard for tracking individual actions across Chinese society, and rewarding or punishing accordingly...
Altitude Safety 101: Oxygen Levels at High Altitudes: "Altitude (feet): 0 ft.... Effective Oxygen: 20.9%.... 10,000 ft... 14.3%...
Weijian Shan: Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America
Henry Farrell: "@ANewmanforward and my article_ on "weaponized interdependence" has just been published by @Journal_IS and is now available ungated-(link: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/isec_a_00351). We are really happy to see it officially published, citable etc...
Maciej Ceglowski: Best Practices for Time Travelers
Hunter Blair: It���s not trickling down: New data provides no evidence that the TCJA is working as its proponents claimed it would: "With the TCJA���s corporate rate cut exacerbating decades of rising income inequality, and little evidence to be working as promised, it���s time for its repeal...
An Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century": Mass Politics and "Populism":
Timothy L. O'Brien: Trump's Baltimore-Elijah Cummings Racism Is Fine With Republicans: "Trump���s Racism Infests the Republican Party: As his latest foray into bigotry shows, the president is feeling empowered by the lack of opposition from within the GOP...
Scott Lemieux: Matters of Life and Death: "15,000 people died in three years because Republican states refused to accept the Medicaid expansion.... And let us not forget that this was all made possible by the intervention of the Supreme Court, based on arguments so weak that, as Joan Biskupic���s new bio finds, John Roberts himself initially rejected them.... 'Regarding the expansion of Medicaid for poor people, all four liberal justices... voted to uphold the program... punctured... arguments that Congress had exceeded ints spending power and its ability to attach conditions.... In the private March 30 conference, Roberts also voted to uphold the Medicaid expansion...
Barry Eichengreen: The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era: "Focuses on the global resurgence of populism today and places it in a deep context.... Populists tend to thrive most in the wake of economic downturns, when it is easy to convince the masses of elite malfeasance. Yet while there is more than a grain of truth that bankers, financiers, and 'bought' politicians are responsible for the mess, populists' own solutions tend to be simplistic and economically counterproductive. Moreover, by arguing that the ordinary people are at the mercy of extra-national forces beyond their control���international capital, immigrants, cosmopolitan globalists���populists often degenerate into demagoguery and xenophobia. There is no one solution... [but] there is an obvious place to start: shoring up and improving the welfare state.... America's patchwork welfare state was not well equipped to deal with the economic fallout that attended globalization and the decline of manufacturing in America.... Lucidly explaining both the appeals and dangers of populism across history, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand not just the populist phenomenon, but more generally the lasting political fallout that follows in the wake of major economic crises...
I do not think that they "hinted it may cut again this year". They said that future moves would be data-dependent���which could mean keeping them the same, could mean cutting further, could mean deciding that Eric and Esther are right and raising the rate back: Christopher Condon: Fed Cuts Rates by Quarter Point and Signals Potential for More: "The Federal Reserve reduced interest rates for the first time since the financial crisis and hinted it may cut again this year to insulate the record-long U.S. economic expansion from slowing global growth... voted... to lower the target range for the benchmark rate by a quarter-percentage point to 2%-2.25%.... 'In light of the implications of global developments for the economic outlook as well as muted inflation pressures, the committee decided to lower' rates, the Federal Open Market Committee, led by Jerome Powell, said in a statement following a two-day meeting in Washington.... 'Uncertainties' about the economic outlook remain. Officials also stopped shrinking the Fed���s balance sheet.... Kansas City Fed President Esther George and Boston's Eric Rosengren voted against the cut...
Yes, Bret Stephens is too dumb to write. Why do you ask? Steve M.: Bret Stephens Will Write in Colin Powell Next Year: "This is ridiculous. I'll ignore what Stephens says about Afghanistan, which is essentially a call for permanent occupation. On the need to 'innovate our way out of [the] problem' of carbon emissions, every Democrat in the race would agree. And they'd all agree that those meetings with Trump were 'a huge win' for Kim.... 'Democrats did well in last year���s midterms thanks to vote switchers electing moderate candidates like Utah���s Ben McAdams. They did considerably less well with turnout campaigns that failed to elect progressives like Florida���s Andrew Gillum...' Gillum lost by four-tenths of a percentage point. McAdams won by two-tenths of a percentage point. The difference between these outcomes was infinitesimal...
A reminder that eliminating trade barriers and boosting trade through reducing tariffs, reducing quotas, and harmonizing regulations is one of the two things (along with deficit reduction at full employment when interest rates are high) we know how to do to materially and significantly boost prosperity in the medium run. Yes, it has an impact on income distribution. But everything has an impact on income distribution. Focusing your policies for equity on trade restrictions is counterproductive. Yes, Thea Lee, I see you: Doug Irwin: Does Trade Reform Promote Economic Growth? A Review of Recent Evidence: "The findings from recent research have been remarkably consistent. For developing countries that are behind the technological frontier and have significant import restrictions, there appears to be a measurable economic payoff from more liberal trade policies... economic growth... roughly 1.0���1.5 percentage points higher... cumulated to about 10���20 percent higher income after a decade. The effect is heterogeneous across countries, because countries differ in the extent of their reforms and the context in which reform took place. At a microeconomic level, the gains in industry productivity from reducing tariffs on imported intermediate goods���inputs used to produce final goods���are even more sharply identified. They show up time and again in country after country. Some questions remain about how much of the economic growth following trade reform can be attributed to trade policy changes alone, as other market reforms are sometimes adopted at the same time. Even if the reduction of trade barriers accounts for only a part of the observed increase in growth, however, the cumulative gains from reform appear to be substantial. As Estevadeordal and Taylor (2013, 1689) ask, 'Is there any other single policy prescription of the past twenty years that can be argued to have contributed between 15 percent and 20 percent to developing country income?'...
The interesting fact here is that the U.S.-owned contribution to global value chains is increasingly becoming "stateless": it is not the U.S. that is providing intellectual property services to kick-off the production process, but rather the Cayman Islands. How much international tax arbitrage and evasion is contributing to the polarization of wealth remains unclear to me. But I do find it deeply worrisome: Mark Thoma sends us to: Brad Setser: Vietnam Looks To Be Winning Trump's Trade War: "Vietnam, like China really doesn���t import very many manufactures from the United States. That���s partially a function of the fact that the value added in Vietnam is often low, and thus Vietnam cannot afford a lot of top of the line U.S. capital goods (yet). But it is also a function of the fact that many of the global value chains that generate large (often offshore) profits for U.S. firms don���t give rise to that much U.S. production these days.��There just isn���t much sign that the Asian value chains stretch back to include U.S. factories and workers. Fabless semiconductor firms that design chips likely��export their designs to a low tax jurisdiction before they license their designs��to an Asian contract manufacturer. The rise in Vietnam's exports hasn't been associated with a commensurate rise in exports from the United States to Vietnam...
This is brilliant. It has, I think the implication that a lot of people in rich areas are not benefitting from the region's wealth���which is what David Author found in his Ely Lecture: Robert Manduca: National Income Inequality in the United States Contributes to Economic Disparities Between Regions: "In 1980, just 12 percent of Americans lived in metropolitan areas with a mean family income more than 20 percent higher or lower than the national average. By 2013, more than 30 percent did. Today a handful of metros���cities such as San Francisco and Washington, DC���have mean family incomes 40 percent or 50 percent greater than average and more than double the average incomes in many rural areas.... Most previous research has emphasized the role of income sorting.... I show, however, that a much bigger portion of the growing disparities is due to rising income inequality at the national level...
Why our economic system works as well and is as intelligent as it is is a deep question, in need of much more thought. Michale Jordan thinks it noteworthy that the human brain is not the only system that looks capable of "intelligent behavior". I wonder if the things that have made our economy appear intelligent in the past may disappear in the future: Michael I. Jordan: Dr. AI or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Economic: "I view the scientific study of the brain as one of the grandest challenges that science has ever undertaken, and the accompanying engineering discipline of ���human-imitative AI��� as equally grand and worthy.... [But] let us suppose that there is a fledgling Martian computer science industry, and suppose that the Martians look down at Earth to get inspiration for making their current clunky computers more ���intelligent.��� What do they see that is intelligent, and worth imitating, as they look down at Earth? They will surely take note of human brains and minds.... What else is intelligent on Earth? Perhaps the Martians will notice that in any given city on Earth, most every restaurant has at hand every ingredient it needs for every dish that it offers, day in and day out. They may also realize that, as in the case of neurons and brains, the essential ingredients underlying this capability are local decisions being made by small entities that each possess only a small sliver of the information being processed by the overall system. But, in contrast to brains, the underlying principles or algorithms may be seen to be not quite as mysterious as in the case of neuroscience. And they may also determine that this system is intelligent by any reasonable definition���it is adaptive (it works rain or shine), it is robust, it works at small scale and large scale, and it has been working for thousands of years (with no software updates needed). Moreover, not being anthropocentric creatures, the Martians may be happy to conceive of this system as an ���entity������just as much as a collection of neurons is an ���entity.��� Am I arguing that we should simply bring in microeconomics in place of computer science? And praise markets as the way forward for AI? No, I am instead arguing that we should bring microeconomics in as a first-class citizen into the blend of computer science and statistics that is currently being called ���AI.��� This blend was hinted at in my discussion piece; let me now elaborate...
Peng Dehuai: On the Great Leap Forward: "Grain scattered on the ground, potato leaves withered;/Strong young people have left to make steel;/Only children and old women reap the crops;/How can they pass the coming year?/Allow me to raise my voice for the people!...
Moral fault attaches to all those who fund or otherwise carry water for the New York Times: Duncan Black: Garbage Newspaper: "/Saying @RashidaTlaib (D-Detroit) and @IlhanMN (D-Minneapolis) are from the Midwest is like saying @RepLloydDoggett (D-Austin) is from Texas or @repjohnlewis (D-Atlanta) is from the Deep South. C���mon.' JonathanWeisman... Deputy Washington Editor, New York Times. Cancel your f------ subscriptions...
Dan Froomkin: Seeking Best Practices for Covering Trumpism: "I���m looking for... examples.... The opinion pages of our newspapers feature a fair amount of Trump-related anguish, and some essayists have been particularly eloquent. Here, for instance, is Jamil Smith, writing for Rolling Stone...
Scott Lemieux: The Wages of Shelby County: "It���s not exactly news that Shelby County v. Holder not only did not have 'legal reasoning' in any meaningful sense but was based on absurd empirical assumptions. But it���s still worth pointing out: 'Using data released by the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) in June, a new Brennan Center analysis has found that between 2016 and 2018, counties with a history of voter discrimination have continued purging people from the rolls at much higher rates than other counties. This phenomenon began after the Supreme Court���s 2013 ruling in��Shelby County v. Holder, a decision that severely weakened the protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Brennan Center first identified this troubling voter purge trend in a��major report��released in July 2018.' The holding in Shelby County was that it was literally irrational for Congress to conclude that jurisdictions with a history of vote suppression were more likely to discriminate going forward. As the late Robert Cover once said about Warren Burger, there is no possible reason to have the slightest interest in what any of the five ridiculous hacks responsible for this atrocity have to say about the Constitution except that they have the power of life and death...
Mike Fleming: Phil Lord & Christopher Miller Make Universal Film Deal: "Universal Pictures has set in a first-look film production deal with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the franchise-launching duo who shared the Best Animated Film Oscar for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and who hatched the Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie franchises. Their films have collectively grossed $3.3 billion.... This is a natural next step for Lord & Miller, which has been expanding its ambitions and recently brought in former Genre Films president Aditya Sood to head film for their Lord Miller banner. This is the first overall movie deal for the duo; they set their TV operations at Sony Pictures Television in an epic-sized five-year deal last April...
If you believe���as so many do���that one important source of the disaster of 2008-10 was that economies had too much potentially-insecure debt, you should be highly concerned today: John Authers and Lauren Leatherby: Financial Crisis: Decade of Deleveraging Debt Didn���t Quite Work Out: "This was the decade of de-leveraging that wasn���t. A decade ago... there was agreement... too much debt had caused the crisis, and so there must be a huge de-leveraging. It has not worked out like that.... Companies, particularly in the U.S., took advantage of the rock-bottom interest rates meant to bail out banks to go on their own borrowing spree. And the world found a new borrower of last resort. Ten years ago, China had been enjoying phenomenal economic growth for two decades, and largely avoided debt to fund it. No more. China���s debt has ballooned, transforming the geography of global debt in the process. It���s now bipolar, revolving around the U.S. and China...
We won the Cold War because we realized���most of the time and to the greater extent���that winning it was about changing ourselves so that we became better: it was about us rather than about them. The current corp who wish to wage a Cold War against China do not recognize this: George Kennan (1947): Sources of Soviet Conduct: "The possibilities for American policy are by no means limited to holding the line and hoping for the best.... It is rather a question of the degree to which the United States can create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problem of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a World Power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own.... The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations. To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.... The thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear...
Heather Boushey directs us to Sarah Miller: "About 15k people died between 2014-2017 as the result of states deciding to not expand Medicaid eligibility through the ACA: Sarah Miller, Sean Altekruse, Norman Johnson, and Laura R. Wherry: Medicaid and Mortality: New Evidence from Linked Survey and Administrative Data: "Changes in mortality for near-elderly adults in states with and without Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansions. We identify adults most likely to benefit using survey information on socioeconomic and citizenship status, and public program participation. We find a 0.13 percentage point decline in annual mortality, a 9.3 percent reduction over the sample mean, associated with Medicaid expansion for this population. The effect is driven by a reduction in disease-related deaths and grows over time. We find no evidence of differential pre-treatment trends in outcomes and no effects among placebo groups...
Scott Alexander: Epistemic Learned Helplessness](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03...): "A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid argument for something, then you should accept the conclusion.... And I nodded my head, because it sounded reasonable enough, and it wasn���t until a few hours later that I thought about it again and went 'Wait, no, that would be a terrible idea'.... There are people who can argue circles around me. Maybe not on every topic, but on topics where they are experts and have spent their whole lives honing their arguments.... What finally broke me out wasn���t so much the lucidity of the consensus view so much as starting to sample different crackpots. Some were almost as bright and rhetorically gifted as Velikovsky, all presented insurmountable evidence for their theories, and all had mutually exclusive ideas. After all, Noah���s Flood couldn���t have been a cultural memory both of the fall of Atlantis and of a change in the Earth���s orbit, let alone of a lost Ice Age civilization or of megatsunamis from a meteor strike. So given that at least some of those arguments are wrong and all seemed practically proven, I am obviously just gullible.... Given a total lack of independent intellectual steering power and no desire to spend thirty years building an independent knowledge base of Near Eastern history, I choose to just accept the ideas of the prestigious people with professorships in Archaeology, rather than those of the universally reviled crackpots who write books about Venus being a comet. You could consider this a form of epistemic learned helplessness, where I know any attempt to evaluate the arguments is just going to be a bad idea so I don���t even try.... There are still cases where I���ll trust the evidence of my own reason.... For 99% of people, 99% of the time, taking ideas seriously is the wrong strategy. Or, at the very least, it should be the last skill you learn, after you���ve learned every other skill that allows you to know which ideas are or are not correct.... You have to be really smart in order for taking ideas seriously not to be immediately disastrous. You have to be really smart not to have been talked into enough terrible arguments to develop epistemic learned helplessness...
Paul Campos: Where Do Lone Wolf Mentally Ill Mass Murders Get Their Ideas About a "Hispanic Invasion"?: "From their Republican President Donald Trump: 'When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.'... From their Republican U.S senator John Cornyn: 'Texas gained almost nine Hispanic residents for every additional white resident last year.'... From Fox News's Laura Ingraham: 'As the so-called US-bound ���caravan��� traveling through Mexico continues to swell, some questions arise that the media will not ask. Who is funding these efforts? How has it grown so quickly and what did the Democrats have to offer besides a bunch of cliches and bromides, and of course grandstanding? If you have been watching other networks, you have been treated to sympathetic, overwrought coverage of this invading horde.'...
A message for New York Times pundit David Brooks, New York Times op-ed page editor James Bennet, New York Times editor Dean Baquet, to New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzburger, and all who fund and carry water for them: moral fault attaches to you: Scott Lemieux: Today is the Day Marianne Williamson Became President: "Donald Trump has been bad for the country but great for lazy pundits, and perhaps because of this pundits of various stripes have been desperately hyping the candidacy of anti-vaxx grifter Marianne Williamson. The problem for this campaign is that pundits appear to be her only actual constituency.... The only other candidate with net-negative approval ratings is deBlasio. Even Seth Moutlon, for Chrissakes, is above water. The Williamson hype is based on nothing at all. Ordinarily, theater critic pundits showing that they���re not even good at theater criticism is annoying but mostly harmless, but that���s not true here. Hyping Williamson won���t make her the nominee, of course, but it may mean that, say, more people with depression google here and refuse to take appropriate medication. So maybe stop trying to prop up her stillborn candidacy?...
After hanging out with Madeleine Albright last week, I'm going to start calling all of this what it is: neo-fascism: Annalee Newitz (2008): Larry Niven Tells DHS to Spread Organ Harvesting Rumors: "There's a small group of science fiction authors who call themselves SIGMA and offer the U.S. government advice on futuristic scenarios.... One of them���Larry "Ringworld" Niven ��� offered the Department of Homeland Security some of the creepiest advice we've ever heard about how to handle problems with overcrowding in hospitals... a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants. 'The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren't going to pay for anything anyway', Niven said. 'Do you know how politically incorrect you are?' Pournelle asked. 'I know it may not be possible to use this solution, but it does work', Niven replied.... Other authors in SIGMA include Greg Bear (Darwin's Radio, Eon), Sage Walker (Wild Cards), and Eric Kotani (Between the Stars)...
I am sorry. This is just bad, and wrong: Joseph S. Nye, Jr.: Speaking Truth to Power: "The Bush administration did not order intelligence officials to lie, nor did they. But political pressure can subtly skew attention... "a big pile of evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and a smaller pile that he did not. All the incentives were to focus on the big pile."... The presentation of intelligence to (and by) political leaders was also flawed. There was little warning that 'weapons of mass destruction' was a confusing term in the way it lumped together nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.... The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate cited Saddam���s purchase of aluminum tubes as proof that he was reconstituting his nuclear program, but Department of Energy analysts, who had the expertise, disagreed. Unfortunately, their dissent was buried in a footnote that was dropped (along with other caveats and qualifiers) when the executive summary was prepared for Congress.... Political heat melts nuances. The dissent should have been discussed openly in the text. Political leaders cannot be blamed for the analytical failures of intelligence, but they can be held accountable when they go beyond the intelligence and exaggerate to the public what it says. US Vice President Dick Cheney said there was 'no doubt' that Saddam had WMD, and Bush stated flatly that the evidence indicated that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear programs. Such statements ignored the doubts and caveats that were expressed in the main bodies of the intelligence reports...
Ronald Reagan on Ambassador Hinton!: From Douglas Brinkley, ed. (2007), The Reagan Diaries (New York: Harper Collins: 9780060876005): "Thur Feb 17 1983: Jeanne Kirkpatrick reported on her trip to Central America. A grim story. Our Ambas. Hinton under the direction of the same kind of St. Dept. bureaucrats who made Castro possible are screwing up the situation in El Salvador. I'm now really mad. Bill C. is bringing George S. up to date and then I'm determined heads will roll, beginning with Ambas. Hinton.... Thu Jun 9 1983: Ambas. Hinton just relieved as Ambas. to El Salvador, stopped by. He's a good man and did a fine job under extremely difficult circumstances. I hope he can convince some of our left leaning Congressmen how wrong they are...
H. Rider Haggard: King Solomon's Mines: "Allan Quatermain... Sir Henry Curtis... Captain Good... a quest for the fabled King Solomon's Mines.... They also take along a mysterious native, Umbopa, who seems more regal, handsome and well-spoken than most porters of his class, but who is very anxious to join the party.... King Twala.... Gagool... has already sensed what Umbopa soon after reveals: he is Ignosi, the rightful king...
Wikipedia: Boris Johnson
Wikipedia: Ali Kemal: "An Ottoman Turkish journalist, newspaper editor, poet and a politician of liberal signature, who was for some three months Minister of the Interior in the government of Damat Ferid Pasha, the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire. He was murdered during the Turkish War of Independence...
Wikipedia: Stanley Johnson
The Grand Strategy of Rising Superpower Management
Wikipedia: Fourth Anglo-Dutch War
Wikipedia: Anglo-Dutch Wars
Ebenezer Cobham Brewer: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:
Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management: Yingyi Qian
Hike Snowmass: Explore Our Trails: Vista Trail | Sierra Club Loop | Melton Ranch Trail | Mountain View Trail...
Jared Rubin: Syllabus: The Path to the Modern Economy
The Grand Strategy of Rising Superpower Management
Brett Terpstra: Precise Web Clipping to Markdown with Bullseye
Hoisted from Archives: Upper-Class Living Standards in 1900
Wikipedia: Liburna
Wikipedia: Penteconter
Raffaele D���Amato: Imperial Roman Warships 193���565 AD
#noted #weblogs
Monday Smackdown: Fafblog: Condi Rice Complains to Customer Service!
Monday Smackdown/Hoisted from the Archives: We Miss Fafblog: Condi Rice Complains to Customer Service!: Not even Fafblog can deal with the Bush administration at the appropriate level. However, it is trying. Here Fafnir interviews Condi Rice:
RICE: First of all, we don't send prisoners off to be tortured, Fafnir. We just transport prisoners to countries where torture happens to be legal and where they happen to end up getting tortured.
FB: Well that explains everything then! It's all just a wacky misunderstanding, like that episode a Three's Company where Jack sends Janet off to Uzbekistan to get boiled alive by the secret police.
RICE: I'd also like to point out that whenever we send a prisoner to a country that routinely tortures prisoners, that country promises us NOT to torture them.
FB: And then they get tortured anyway!
RICE: Yes, they do! It's very strange.
FB: Over and over again, every time! That's gotta be so frustrating.
RICE: Oh it is, it is.
FB: So the first time you kidnap a prisoner an send him to Saudi Arabia you're like "don't torture this guy" an they're all "we totally won't" an then they go an torture him an you're all "ooh Saudi Arabia I told you not to torture him!" an they're all "oh we're sorry, we promise next time" an then you go "well you better" an you send em the next guy an they torture him too an you go "oh man Saudi Arabia you did it AGAIN!"
RICE: The president believes in the value of patience, Fafnir. He's not going to let a few dozen innocent torture victims come between him and his favorite third-world dictators.
FB: See after the first coupla hundred times that happened I woulda registered a complaint with customer service......
#hoistedfromthearchives #moralresponsibility #mondaysmackdown #neofascism #orangehairedbaboons #torture #strategy
I am sorry. This is just bad, and wrong: Joseph S. Nye, J...
I am sorry. This is just bad, and wrong: Joseph S. Nye, Jr.: Speaking Truth to Power: "The Bush administration did not order intelligence officials to lie, nor did they. But political pressure can subtly skew attention... "a big pile of evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and a smaller pile that he did not. All the incentives were to focus on the big pile."... The presentation of intelligence to (and by) political leaders was also flawed. There was little warning that 'weapons of mass destruction' was a confusing term in the way it lumped together nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.... The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate cited Saddam���s purchase of aluminum tubes as proof that he was reconstituting his nuclear program, but Department of Energy analysts, who had the expertise, disagreed. Unfortunately, their dissent was buried in a footnote that was dropped (along with other caveats and qualifiers) when the executive summary was prepared for Congress.... Political heat melts nuances. The dissent should have been discussed openly in the text. Political leaders cannot be blamed for the analytical failures of intelligence, but they can be held accountable when they go beyond the intelligence and exaggerate to the public what it says. US Vice President Dick Cheney said there was 'no doubt' that Saddam had WMD, and Bush stated flatly that the evidence indicated that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear programs. Such statements ignored the doubts and caveats that were expressed in the main bodies of the intelligence reports...
Condoleezza Rice said: "[The] aluminum tubes... are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.... There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don���t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. How long are we going to wait to deal with what is clearly a gathering threat against the United States, against our allies and against his own region?..." That's not dropping a footnote in an executive summary.
Lumping together nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons was not an unfortunate use of a term that some found confusing. The confusion was the point. Indeed, when Nye writes "Even the United Nations��� chief inspector, the Swedish diplomat Hans Blix, said he thought that Iraq had 'retained prohibited items',��� Nye is aggressively weaponizing that "confusion". Blix did not think Iraq had an ongoing nuclear weapons program. Rice, Cheney, Bush, and company wanted everybody to think it did.
#noted
August 4, 2019
A message for New York Times pundit David Brooks, New Yor...
A message for New York Times pundit David Brooks, New York Times op-ed page editor James Bennet, New York Times editor Dean Baquet, to New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzburger, and all who fund and carry water for them: moral fault attaches to you: Scott Lemieux: Today is the Day Marianne Williamson Became President: "Donald Trump has been bad for the country but great for lazy pundits, and perhaps because of this pundits of various stripes have been desperately hyping the candidacy of anti-vaxx grifter Marianne Williamson. The problem for this campaign is that pundits appear to be her only actual constituency.... The only other candidate with net-negative approval ratings is deBlasio. Even Seth Moutlon, for Chrissakes, is above water. The Williamson hype is based on nothing at all. Ordinarily, theater critic pundits showing that they���re not even good at theater criticism is annoying but mostly harmless, but that���s not true here. Hyping Williamson won���t make her the nominee, of course, but it may mean that, say, more people with depression google here and refuse to take appropriate medication. So maybe stop trying to prop up her stillborn candidacy?...
#noted
J. Bradford DeLong's Blog
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