Recruiting bank robbers on Instagram turned out to be a bad idea.
Supreme Court wades into the case of a man arrested for "being an asshole."
Bonkers experiment shows that bumblebee queens prefer to dig their winter burrows in soil contaminated with pesticides. (NY Times, original paper)
This week's past post is Questioning Everything, from 2017.
Asahi Shinbun says there is a shortage of animators in Japan, for which the main cause is low wages, for which the main cause is that the company doing the animation can get as little as 6 percent of the income from a film or tv series.
Anybody want your own small New England college for $5.5 million? What a fantasy.
Burial site in France used for 800 years provides more evidence that Neolithic Europeans were patrilineal and patrilocal, since these 37 majority male skeletons are mostly from the same male lineage.
Clay seals from Bronze Age Iran.
Exploring a 3D scan of Shackleton's ship Endurance.
Major study from Apple on the reasoning probems of LLMs. (Study, summary article, shorter summary on Twitter/X) "There is just no way you can build reliable agents on this foundation, where changing a word or two in irrelevant ways or adding a few bit of irrelevant info can give you a different answer."
More discourse today around the subject of felons voting, with the idea that letting felons vote helps Democrats. But that is false; a majority of felons are white men, and like other white men they generally vote Republican. That's in a normal year; I bet Trump gets a higher than usual share of the felon vote.
Why kids should read obituaries. Via Marginal Revolution.
Sabine Hossenfelder on the status of quantum computing, 7-minute video.
Political polarization in Silicon Valley. (Twitter/X) After giving most of the political contributions to Democrats in 2004-2020, they now split pretty evenly between the parties. I think this is entirely a reaction against woke excesses.
Matt Yglesias: "Every faction of MAGA leverages the fact that their champion is a notorious liar to convince themselves that he is secretly on their side about everything when all he’s ever done across his career is betray people and enrich himself."
A claim that hominids called Homo naledi buried their dead 200,000 years ago, but note that this project is controversial and many anthropologists don't even accept Homo naledi as a distinct species.
Kevin Drum on why the inflation of recent years has felt worse to consumers than the data suggests.
Australian study of "critical technologies": "These new results reveal the stunning shift in research leadership over the past two decades towards large economies in the Indo-Pacific, led by China’s exceptional gains. The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–20074 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies."
The most famous book from 16th-century Mexico, La Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España, compiled by Bernardino de Sahagún and a bunch of Native assistants, has now been put online by the Getty in an amazing, searchable version.
The global "wind phone" movement.
Friedrich Merz, leader of Germany's Christian Democratic Party, says he would give Russia at 24 hour ultimatum to stop bombing civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. If it does not stop, he would provide Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine with no restrictions on targeting. Quotes Montaigne: "fear is the mother of all cruelty."
13 comments:
"Political polarization in Silicon Valley. (Twitter/X) After giving most of the political contributions to Democrats in 2004-2020, they now split pretty evenly between the parties. I think this is entirely a reaction against woke excesses."
I think you're allowing your hatred of woke to get the better of you. It seems significant to me that the findings you cite are for Silicon Valley *execs.* These guys see themselves as outsider hustlers playing for the very highest stakes, in finance, culture, raw power, social structure, in some cases the very existence of humanity. Allowing a defensive stance against oppression/annoyance by Big Bad Woke to determine their allegiance isn’t in character. Woke for them is an annoying blip. They may hold it as characteristic of the declining liberal elite they see themselves as striving to replace at society’s helm. But a blip all the same.
Yes, you could probably find lots of quotes from Silicon Valley execs about how woke California legislators are such a pain and how annoying it is that ChatGPT has to be made boring so that it won’t cause offense. I submit that is not central, but merely symptomatic of the deeper rivalry they see themselves in with the old liberal consensus elite and its coddling of human weakness and its spirit of caution in general. Again, this group as a whole sees themselves as playing for much higher stakes.
In terms of policy, some it of will be about stifling any move toward regulation of their industry. They see a halting of Biden-era moves toward regulation (especially on crypto) as something they can get from a transactional Trump admin. But I also think there is a broader philosophical harmony for at least *some* of them. I’m thinking of the crypto-fascist (yep, I went there) philosophical posturing, meant to signal hustler outsiderdom, coming out of folks like Thiel and Andreeson. Another place to look is Nate Silver's recent book "On the Edge," partly about his admiration for Silicon Valley entrepreneur types, the basic thesis of which seems to be "tough-guy risk-takers are awesome and I love them, and I despise anyone who likes security, and especially the whiny, womanish liberals who gave me a hard time after I got the 2016 election wrong. This is my revenge."
Obviously I have a beef with the whole Thiel-Andreeson-Silver THING, and on that I’m probably letting my own hate get the better of me. I suspect that in reality these pseudo-philosophical sallies, while they do express a genuine vibe and, in some, an ego ideal, are epiphenomenal to a much more fundamental struggle for power. For some that struggle is about building multi-billion-dollar businesses over which they want sole control without government interference. For some, in their heart of hearts this means changing the whole direction of civilization. In either case, woke, for them, is a detail.
"Kevin Drum on why the inflation of recent years has felt worse to consumers than the data suggests."
Wow, great piece from Kevin Drum. I may have to rethink my sniping at him. For one thing, he's allowing human emotions some dignity. For another, he's citing Adam Tooze, who IMHO is a historian and intellectual of the very highest rank. His substack can get a little economist-technical, but many posts are accessible for humanities types like me.
I posted this comment before reading the two posts below today's "links." Perhaps I shouldn't say you "hate" woke, since in one you denigrate right-wing over-obsession with what is arguably not much more than a fad in academia and a tiny, increasingly irrelevant urban left. That leaves me all the more puzzled by your statement about Silicon Valley's political contributions. These execs are not hysterical right-wingers. I think I'm basically right that woke is just too small a matter to determine these people's political allegiance. As you quote in the second post, there's just too much "intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness" in Silicon Valley culture for that. The execs, at least, see themselves in rivalry with the whole liberal elite consensus Thing that has run the country for a very long time. (I see myself as a minor acolyte that Thing, which I think is dying. The real fight is over what will replace it.)
Matt Yglesias: "Every faction of MAGA leverages the fact that their champion is a notorious liar to convince themselves that he is secretly on their side about everything when all he’s ever done across his career is betray people and enrich himself."
Or put more simply, he's a conman, and that's how conmen work.
It's honestly kind of amazing how many victims of cons witness the conman lying to and betraying OTHER people, and still trust that he won't lie to and betray THEM when the time comes. Even as they're actively being grifted, even if they fully figure out the con on their own and recognize that it's a scam, they still think THEY aren't a mark. They're rationalize it to themselves that they're special - they're a PARTNER who is IN ON the scam, and the conman is their FRIEND who would NEVER betray them!
"'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."
It occurs to me that one could point out that, while the Silicon Valley strain of grandiosity and fantasies of world change and supplanting of previous ruling classes is many decades old--consider Steve Jobs, or the Extropians, who flourished in the 90s and faded out in the oughts--the new support for the Republicans is just that--new, since 2020. What has changed? A very important thing is that Democrats have started to make moves to regulate hi-tech development, both in terms of crypto at the federal level, and with the recent (passed, then vetoed) AI regulation bill in the CA state legislature. And, remember the (utterly ineffectual) letter saying we should slow down AI. I think these sorts of things really pissed off a lot of Silicon Valley execs. On a broader note, I think the Democrats are now in a very profound sense seen as the conservative party, and the Republicans the party of change. Democrats offer safety, restraint, sober consideration, doing your homework, tending to 80-yr-old alliances, and overall, more of the same. Whether it's banning abortion, screwing NATO, building concentration camps to deport immigrants, or making crypto the national currency, the Republicans have become the badasses who offer change and damn the consequences. I think some Silicon Valley execs feel at home with that.
Of course, there are complexities. Musk, the most publicly fervent Trumpian, is known to be in favor of AI slowdown and regulation, for example. But that's politics, always complex and full of contradictions.
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Bonkers experiment shows that bumblebee queens prefer to dig their winter burrows in soil contaminated with pesticides. (NY Times, original paper)
I got curious, so I looked into the methodology, half-expecting to find some obvious uncontrolled for factor. They do seem to have done a fairly good job at excluding such factors, though:
"Spiked solutions of each pesticide in acetone (or acetone alone for control treatment) were mixed with 2 kg of field-moist loamy sand soil (80 % sand, 15 % silt, 5 % clay) and left to evaporate overnight. This soil was then mixed with a further 8 kg of the same field soil (10 kg in total) for one hour, using a concrete mixer, and stored in plastic pails at −18 °C for two weeks."
The next part intrigued me, however:
"On September 10–12, these concentrated soils were mixed with a greater bulk of freshly excavated field soil (loamy sand, same composition as described above) at the research site to reach nominal pesticide concentrations (Table 1)." [Emphasis mine]
They don't specify where the baseline soil that they spiked with chemicals came from, and I assumed that for consistency, they might be using some commercially available pre-measured form of soil. But once they mentioned mixing the samples with "freshly excavated soil", I started thinking A) maybe I couldn't assume that, and B) maybe soil taken directly from the field is an uncontrolled-for factor?
Commercially prepared and packaged soils are different than soils in the field. They're frequently subjected to industrial processes such as filtering, heating, and sterilization to various degrees, to ensure consistency of the product. Whether the original "2 kg of field-moist loamy sand soil (80 % sand, 15 % silt, 5 % clay)" into which the chemicals were added was commercially prepared or not is a non-trivial consideration.
That said, in mulling over the idea, I thought about the fact that they're mixing field soil (which would naturally contain various fungi, insects, etc) into the mixture, and I wondered if perhaps the bee queens favor soils with LESS fungi, other insects in them, etc. It would make sense! If you're going to dig a tunnel for your colony, you'd ideally want to avoid digging it in soil that has fungal growths or other kinds of insects which could negatively impact the health of the colony.
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I think there's something to this, because when you look at the data, you'll notice that the greatest proportion of queens nested in soils treated with the "low" levels of the two fungicides that were tested. (With "low" being an amount you would normally find in a typical field, and "high" being 10x that.)
Clearly, the bees are heavily favoring soil which is free of fungus, which makes sense from a ecological standpoint. And the two specific fungicides that were tested, despite technically being "pesticides", are in no way harmful to bees or most other insects!
Again, it makes a heck of a lot of sense that the bees would prefer soil in which the fungus had been killed off, compared to the control soil. For both fungicides, the greater the concentration, the more the bees preferred it. Fungus is a major threat to bees, and these specific fungicides have no effect on bees, so you'd expect to see such results.
On the other side of the issue, we have the actual insecticides. And while they also were preferred to control soils, it should be noted that A) the degree of preference is notably smaller, and B) the preference is for soil with "low" concentrations of insecticides, with "high concentrations" being far less preferred.
This also makes sense. "Low" concentrations of insecticides help eliminate other insects in the soil before the queens choose to burrow in it, reducing potential competition for the hive. But while "high" concentrations make the soil more desirable for the same reason, they also have the detriment of adversely affecting the bees themselves, counterbalancing much (but not all) of the gain.
I suppose the most interesting thing to note is that the "high" concentrations of insecticide are still preferred to control soils, which is somewhat unexpected. But it seems that even despite the direct harm of the insecticide to the bees themselves, the benefits derived from it's presence in the soil still outweigh that detriment.
It's also worth noting that the two insecticides DO have effects on fungi, beyond their insecticidal properties. While they are not directly fungicidal, studies have been carried out which show they DO cause changes to bacterial and fungal ecosystems within soil, particularly as they break down over time. While exact mechanisms are not yet well understood, broadly speaking, the presence of insecticides in the soil results in the killing of non-target insect species which would otherwise contribute in various ways to the ecosystem.
It may be that bees prefer insecticide-treated soil because it kills off insects which would otherwise help promote fungal growth, and thus indirectly the insecticide acts a fungicide to a degree.
Correction to post #2:
"you'll notice that the greatest proportion of queens nested in soils treated with the "low" levels of the two fungicides that were tested"
...should read as: "high" levels, not low. Missed my mental mixup!
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Why kids should read obituaries. Via Marginal Revolution.
I can see the argument that "kids should read SOME obituaries".
But the article you link to paints with an absurdly broad brush, and makes some fairly absurd claims and assumptions. For example...
"Obituaries are some of the most nutrient-dense texts a child can read. They’re biography, history, and often works of literature – major newspapers put some of their best writers on the obit beat."
First, the elephant in the room - children don't read newspapers in this day and age. I feel like the article's author should already know that, being as they're a middle-school teacher.
But even when kids did read newspapers, there's the glaring issue of the fact that "major newspapers" have never been what they were reading. I read newspapers growing up (admittedly, mostly for the few remaining comic strips that still possessed any scant scraps of humor or relevancy). But like most kids (and, indeed, most newspaper readers in general), I read the local newspaper.
Kids in particular didn't read "major newspapers", for the glaringly obvious reason that despite their relative general national ubiquity, they were not nearly as accessible as one's hometown local paper. For some painfully obvious reasons.
"Major newspapers" were available at news stands, and in newspaper vending machines, and at other similar locations - usually situated in places which working adults frequented during their workdays, but not places that children (who lack their own transportation or engagements beyond school and home life) visited very often, if at all.
"Major newspapers" also had to be purchased, with money - and children famously don't have much money, while what little they do they are not inclined to spend on buying the latest edition of the New York Times.
In contrast, when I was a kid, the local newspaper showed up on my lawn or at my front door every morning, for "free". I didn't have to go anywhere to gain access to it, and I didn't have to spend any money to get to read it.
Now, my learned father did also subscribe to one or two of the "major newspapers" - but those subscriptions were pricier, and the papers did not arrive every day on the lawn, but were delivered a few times a week, and were handled more carefully and left in the mailbox or similar. Such papers were also reserved for my father's reading, not mine. As a child, I was allowed free access to the local paper, but not to the expensive special paper for my father - because as a careless child, I was liable to crease or tear pages, or spill juice on them, or get them jumbled out of order, or lose a few here and there, etc.
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All of this is, of course, moot in the modern day. Virtually no one still gets physical newspapers delivered to their homes, even men like my father who are willing to pay for a special subscription. They get their newspapers via an online subscription now, like everyone else who still bothers with such things. And since kids don't have credit cards with which to subscribe, the only way they're reading ANY newspaper is if they specifically ask their parents for direct access to the content via their parents' accounts.
The point is, obituaries may as well not even exist, in terms of their availability to the average middle schooler.
And even if that weren't the case, there's still the fact that the overwhelming majority of obituaries in newspapers are NOT high quality works of literature, as this teacher imagines. Most obituaries are short, perfunctory little things, perhaps most akin to memos. They exist to inform the general public of a death, which most readers will have zero context for as they've never heard of the person who died. They also are one more unpleasant expense on top of the usual array of unpleasant expenses incurred by a bereaved family, and newspaper space was historically precious, and so brevity was paramount when you were being charged by the line (or even by the character). You said what was vital, and you moved on with life. Not exactly a recipe for great literature, then!
If you want kids to read obituaries, basically the ONLY way to realistically achieve that is to do what this teacher did, and include them in a class curriculum.
Which is all well and good! But at that point, the argument is not that "kid should read obituaries" (which implies they do it of their own accord), but rather that "kids should be assigned obituary readings in school", which an entirely different sort of thing!
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Kevin Drum on why the inflation of recent years has felt worse to consumers than the data suggests.
One thing that drives me crazy is the modern day conflation of "inflation" and "cost of living". Drum himself is guilty of it in this link.
"Inflation" is a fairly narrow economic concept. It's about how much money there is in circulation, and thus how scarce it is. In theory, if you print twice as many dollars and hand them out to people, each dollar becomes half as valuable; and if you collect half of the dollars floating around and remove them from the economy, each individual dollar is now worth twice as much.
This is why you get things like the hyperinflation problems of The Weimar Republic - when a government tries to solve various problems by printing a ton of money, they can inadvertently make things far worse by devaluing the currency through printing too much.
In contrast, "cost of living" is how much you have to spend on everyday necessities compared to how much you used to have to spend. If prices for the necessities of life double because of shortages, et cetera, that's not 100% "inflation", that a 100% increase in "cost of living".
Over the past 40 years or so, the rate of inflation in America has virtually never been above 4% annual growth, briefly getting as high as 6% for the year of 1990. At that rate, it would take a quarter century for inflation alone to double the price of something.
But when food staples are increasing in cost by 25% each year, year after year, within just 4 short years, your basic food costs have doubled, which is a MAJOR problem - particularly for the poor.
In 2020, the bottom 20% of Americans spent ~32.8% of their income solely on food. If you then raise overall food prices by 25% within a year (without changing prices for anything else), they're now spending ~37.9% of their income solely on food. [32.8 / 100 -> 41 / 108.2]
To put that into context, if someone spent $5000 on food for the year of 2020, and then prices increased by 25% overall, just one year later they would have to spend $6250 - costing them an extra $1250 for the year.
If they're on the upper end of the bottom 25% of Americans, and they make $30,000 annually, then that's half a month's wages they're losing. If they're only making $25,000 annually, they just lost 5% of their annual income. For food. Not extra food. The same amount they got the last year.
Then factor in aforementioned rises in the costs of gasoline, which are indeed highly noticeable, but like food are also a much greater burden on the poor, who spend a much larger percentage of their annual income on transportation costs.
Then also factor in housing costs, which again, are far more burdensome for the poor. There's actually a defined term for households which spend more than 30% of their income on housing - "cost burdened". Then there's an extension of that term for households which spend more than 50% of their income on house - "severely cost burdened".
In 2021, a full 49% of renter-occupied households were "cost burdened"; meanwhile, 25.4% were "severely cost burdened".
Given that the poorest Americans are much, much, much likelier to be renting their homes, the problem is even more pronounced for them. If you earn $30,000 a year and have to spend $9,000 to $15,000 of that just on rent, then the prospect of having to somehow also spend an extra $1250 on food is honestly quite horrifying.
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And then, somehow, you also need to buy gas - and also pay for vehicle maintenance, repair, insurance, financing on auto-loans, etc.
And then you need to pay for medical insurance, and then still pay some amount out of pocket on top of that, and then pay even more if coverage gets rejected for a specific treatment / procedure / etc.
And maybe you need to repair or replace the dishwasher or another major appliance, because they weren't provided with your rental. And maybe you need to call the plumber for a leak or a clog, because your landlord doesn't cover that. And you almost certainly have to pay for utilities, and the summers are getting hotter, and the winters are getting colder, and the weather is generally crazier due to global warming.
You need to buy clothes and shoes. You need to buy laundry detergent. You need to buy bath soap, and shampoo, and toothpaste, and deodorant. You need to buy trash bags, and food containers, and dishwasher soap. You need to pay your cell phone contract, and your internet fees. You need to fix the vacuum cleaner, and repaint that peeling cabinet, and replace that door hinge. You need to get a haircut, and get a gym membership, and get your car towed, or get laid off.
And you need to afford all of that on $30,000 annual income (if you're lucky), minus $20,000 for rent and food alone, meaning you've got a big fat $10,000 to afford all of life's little inconveniences for an entire year.
That's $833 dollars a month to split between keeping your car running; keeping your body running; keeping your air conditioning running and the lights on; keeping a shirt on your back and shoes on your feet; keeping your laundry clean and your teeth brushed; keeping your food from spoiling and your pipes from freezing; and fixing every piece of junk that breaks in a year because we - as a society - have discarded the concept of "durable goods" in exchange for the profitability of "planned obsolescence".
Boy, I sure hope you don't have an unforeseen accident that costs you $1,100 in medical treatment, or $500 in car repair, or $200 in various fees or fines, or $300 to fix the toilet, or $650 to fix the furnace, or $400 to replace a broken window, or $100 to take your cat to the vet (that's just the price of the exam with treatment on top), or who knows what else!
That would eat into that $833 per month pretty horribly, huh?
I'm interested enough in this question that this morning I've been trying to find readings relevant to it. Much of what I've found is paywalled, or more about Silicon Valley before 2020 than after, or fairly superficial. I found some interest in this article (which, weirdly, was paywalled on my computer but not my phone): "How the Election Broke Silicon Valley" at Fortune. It's way too short to be satisfying, but it's a start. It quotes one pro-Trump exec who mentions "weaponized DEI," but he also cites policy vis-a-vis Russia and other things. Anyway, that's it for woke stuff in the article, which in fact says very little about any specific policy-type issues, including regulation. The focus is really on what the reporter sees as a greater political outspoken-ness in the Valley on both sides, and seems to attribute it mostly to the brash personality type characteristic of successful innovators and VCs. This does beg the question of why now, since innovator-VC brashness isn't something that's just suddenly appeared. The author does, however, make an interesting point about a cult of the tech innovator/VC as universal genius, which he depicts as special to Silicon Valley, not characteristic of most tycoons of the past (Carnegie is given as an example of one who considered himself a good businessman, but not a world genius destined to change all human civilization).
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