Two Chinese shipwrecks full of porcelain found in the South China Sea, dating to the early 1500s. Amazing piles of valuable dishes.
Woman wins cheese-rolling race after being knocked unconscious.
Something very weird is happening in the US economy, where overall GDP is down even though employment is up, which means productivity must have gone down a lot. Nobody seems to understand what is happening. (Kevin Drum, Tyler Cowen)
NASA's UFO task force holds its first public meeting, says 98% of cases have obvious explanations, and "better data" is needed on the rest.
Indonesian boats found in Australian rock art, more evidence of trade between Indonesia and Australia before European contact.
Why George Orwell did not believe in progress.
Heavy rains expose carvings at a Roman fort in Spain.
Freddie deBoer responds to people who attacked him for saying that Jordan Neely should have been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. His opponents, he says, keep refusing to wrestle with the reality of mental illness, saying things like "All Jordan Neely needed was a home." (If you don't know deBoer, he has written very publicly about his own struggles with severe mental illness, which included being involuntarily committed.)
A Twitter account for your amusement, Ugly Belgian Houses.
David French says the American right wing is all into promoting "traditional masculinity" these days but seems to have missed that one of the main themes of traditional masculinity is not being hysterical: not moaning that the world is about to end, not thinking the election of Hillary Clinton would have "destroyed America", not shrieking on Twitter about "groomers." (NY Times)
Kevin Drum explains 40 years of the US economy in one chart.
List of bills passed by Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor legislature. Being passed around in horror by conservatives; actually an interesting look at Democratic priorities, especially as regards abortion. The 40% increase in state spending figure is disputed but this budget summary does show total outlays growing from $43 billion in 2022 to $60 billion in 2024. More official list of bills here.
When the pulp detective magazines of the 1920s took on the KKK.
Theodore Dalrymple reviews a new translation of Kafka's diaries.
I have mentioned here before that the reputation of US Grant as general and president has soared over the past 25 years; just now I noticed a Twitter account called Grant Was the Greatest.
The NY Times remembers Sybil 50 years after its publication launched the madness of "multiple personality disorder." The horror that resulted when first the talk show circuit and then the APA embraced this nonsense still hangs silently over an America where people are outraged about far lesser harms. Not to mention that there are still people in prison after convictions that relied on "recovered memories."
Large language models can play Minecraft.
CNN: "Arizona officials announced Thursday the state will no longer grant certifications for new developments within the Phoenix area, as groundwater rapidly disappears amid years of water overuse and drought."
Brian Caplan, libertarian-leaning economist and anti-wokeness essayist, reviews Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution; despite being as opposed to hook-up culture as Perry, he finds the book shallow and irritating, because even though Perry thinks sexual freedom has been terrible for women she never really denounces sexual freedom or the feminists who promoted it. In the parts of the internet where I hang out a war against sexual liberation is in full swing.
Is there much gender bias in academia? No, says this study, which finds that women are equally successful by most metrics and actually have an advantage in hiring.
Vidya Krishnan on gang rape in India, a tool of caste oppression, religious strife, politics, and general mayhem (NY Times).
Ukraine Links
According to Michael Warren Davis in the American Conservative, the West is supporting Ukraine because Russia is a Christian, anti-gay, anti-trans country and we can't stand that. The existence of people who think opposing homosexuality makes a country into torture, corruption, gangsterism and aggressive warfare "Christian" bewilders me.
Oryx is now showing that Russia has now lost more than 2,000 tanks in Ukraine. That includes 62 new T-90s. Also 3750 other armored vehicles, 405 self-propelled artillery pieces, 202 multiple rock launchers, 114 SAM systems, 32 radars, 37 electronic warfare systems, 82 jet aircraft, 90 helicopters, 2500 trucks, and sundry others to a total of 10,468 major systems.
Detailed instructions for Russian drone pilots.
Podcast on Russia's use of artillery in urban battles, notes that Russia has expended 7 to 14 million artillery shells for rather limited gains; pulverizing cities is not necessarily a good use of artillery. Summary tweet here.
Russian governor says there is no such thing as a man aged 25 to 55 left in Donbass. They have either fled or been killed in the war.
New US weapons shipment to Ukraine. Notable: "Mine clearing equipment and systems; Demolition munitions for obstacle clearing."
FWIW, that list of bills passed by Minnesota's DFL to me has the aspect of a piece of Fox-style right-wing agitprop. I'm sure there's nothing in there that would amount to an outright lie, but the reporting seems subtly but effectively skewed. For example, there are a large number of extremely specific abortion protections, each listed as a distinct legislative "bill." I wonder if they're actually bits from a single piece of legislation, split up to make the Democrats look over-preoccupied with this one issue.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to see the results of a real investigation of this list, and of the source, alphanews.org. I took the trouble of finding their website. The lead: "Minnesota to move biological male inmate to all-female facility, pay for vaginoplasty." The second story: "Charges: Teacher groomed, sexually abused 14-year-old student." Third: "Kamala-backed bail fund revenues plummet by 98 percent." These are three leads with pictures. Then there's a large pic linking to a video titled, "Mpls. security expert says leftist groups use Taliban-like tactics," followed by crime videos and then a long series of tweets from "CrimeWatchMpls."
Is this list a guide to Democratic priorities, or a guide to how people like Michael Warren Davis would like voters to think of Democratic priorities?
If you check out the third link, you see a very similar list from a more neutral site. I checked the spending figure in particular and I saw that while some DFL legislators disputed the accounting, the 40% number is about what the state budget authority estimated; I think their figure was 39.5%. So, sure, alphanews is dubious, but the legislature did pass several separate abortion-related bills and a major budget increase.
ReplyDeleteTwo Chinese shipwrecks full of porcelain found in the South China Sea, dating to the early 1500s. Amazing piles of valuable dishes.
ReplyDeleteI'm stunned by the condition of the dishes. A lot of those look like you could simply clean them and then eat right off them (assuming you were willing to eat off a 500+ year old relic).
Something very weird is happening in the US economy, where overall GDP is down even though employment is up, which means productivity must have gone down a lot. Nobody seems to understand what is happening
ReplyDeleteAnother of these "nobody knows!" declarations that seem so absurd to me.
Now, obvious caveats - I am not remotely an economist, economics is a very complex subject and even experts have trouble making sense of things, etc. But some of these things seem VERY basic.
The pandemic did a lot of things to our economy that I think could absolutely go a long way toward explaining things, as we continue transitioning back from a pandemic-based economic footing.
First off, it hurt manufacturing. There were fewer workers available to produce things. There were fewer workers available to maintain logistics and supply chains. Reduced logistics and supply meant less production even without the loss of workers. Compounding effects really hurt.
The pandemic is over now, but we're STILL dealing with manufacturing backlogs in many industries, because while people have been able to return to factory jobs, companies still are struggling to get enough of the materials they need to produce at the levels they used to. The cause of the logistics issues is gone, but the issues themselves have yet to clear up fully - like a traffic jam which propagates backwards and has many cars at a standstill long after the initial obstruction has been removed.
That in itself would obviously contribute to "Employment Up, GDP Down", but I think there's plenty more to consider still.
There's also the service side of things. During the pandemic, service industries across the country saw record profits, for obvious reasons. This drove up GDP considerably, and often without requiring much in the way of additional employment - for example, streaming services saw massive profits because more people were paying for access, but streaming companies didn't have to hire very many people at all to accommodate that extra demand, because digital media doesn't cost anything to reproduce more copies of, and because our existing telecommunications infrastructure could easily absorb the increased bandwidth usage.
Now, though, demand for services had dropped - particularly for things like digital entertainment. As these are massive industries, they impact the GDP considerably when people stop paying for them as much. But such losses aren't coming with a commensurate drop in employment - for the same reasons that when demand for these services went up, employment didn't rise.
There's also the issue of remote work. During the pandemic, many service industries were able to transition to remote work, whereas manufacturing industries were not. In many cases, people previously employed in manufacturing jobs they could no longer go to switched over to remote work service jobs. With the end of the pandemic, and with corporate culture pushing back against remote work now that it's no longer unavoidable, there's inevitably some degree of people switching away from service jobs back into manufacturing. While this would be a net neutral on actual employment numbers, it's a net negative to the GDP for the time being, because manufacturing is still in a slump due to lingering logistics issues.
And then finally, there's also the simple problem of recent inflation (and corporate price raising which many companies are conveniently blaming on "inflation", but which is actually simple profiteering far in excess of covering increased costs from actual inflation). Inflation hits the poorest people the hardest, and depresses purchasing - both of services (which already have reduced demand in a post-pandemic setting) and of goods (which are in short supply anyway).
Large language models can play Minecraft.
ReplyDeleteNo they can't. They can be used, by human operators, as a different form of command input.
This is more akin to using a voice recognition system to replace pressing certain buttons with saying certain phrases. Saying "Mario, jump!" into a microphone, and the software sending a signal to the video game to hit the jump button, does not mean your software is "playing" the game.
They clearly note that this is directly reliant on "text-based interactions". You type a command, and the system interprets the command to follow it.
Yes, it's impressive how well it can interpret fairly vague and open-ended instructions, but it is still being given instructions, and it is essentially brute forcing solutions via computational power, within a strictly defined and fairly narrow ruleset. And even then, it doesn't succeed even half the time.
People keep losing their minds over these sorts of things, but this is just a new school of coding that relies on trial and error and fuzzy logic. Nothing is aware, nothing is "thinking", nothing is "playing", it's just a computer going through fairly clever and complex sets of logic gates.
The complexity and lack of obvious "sharp edges" gives the illusion that more is going on than really is, and we humans - being the species that anthropomorphizes and apologizes to inanimate objects when we bump into them - are fooling ourselves like the foolish apes we are.
@John
ReplyDeleteActually, I'd say the two lists of legislation (the first, the one I'm calling rightist agitprop, and the third which looks like its from a mainstream broadcaster) are quite different. The third lists three pieces of legislation with abortion in the title; the first lists seven provisions on abortion. The third includes a bill labeled "Catalytic converter requirements," not mentioned in the first (so far as I can tell); the first mentions a "hate speech database," which I can't find in the third one. And so on. FWIW, it looks like, as at the federal level, a lot of MN state legislation contains provisions that are unrelated to the title, and alphanews (or their source) has combed through the laws and raised to the status of "bills" things that are actually just pieces of bills, while failing to mention several things that were actual bills. Meanwhile the more mainstream source has, it looks like, just listed all the bills as titles--which, one must admit, arguably conceals a lot of what is really going on.