Alex Tabarrok with an American economic manifesto.
Matt Yglesias: "Trump is doing the part of socialism where you destroy the economy's long-term potential with central planning, but skipping the part where you take care of the poor and the sick."
Turning a nineteenth-century island fortress into a modern party venue.
Thread on class and air conditioning in Germany, or, The Anti A/C Jihad.
Robin Hanson on the orbiting "glints" that some think are evidence of aliens. I find it pathetic that so many people take anything they don't understand and say, "it must be aliens."
An AI system comes up with an idea for improving the sensitivity of a major experiment in physics: "Initially, the AI’s designs seemed outlandish. The outputs . . . were too complicated, and they looked like alien things or AI things. Just nothing that a human being would make, because it had no sense of symmetry, beauty, anything. It was just a mess."
The fight over M dashes and AI writing. I have an intense personal relationship with the M dash, because when I write quickly I use too many dashes or other ways of breaking up the text, and then if I want it to sound good I go back and smooth things out. Very few sentences read better with dashes in them, and my advice would be to use them very seldom.
Long but interesting review of the Peruvian play Ollantay, which may be either a Spanish fantasy about Indians or a Spanish rendering of a Quechua tradition. From Scott Siskind's "Review Anything" contest.
Long article on "Alpha School,"an educational program based on AI tutors that makes great claims for itself. Summary at Marginal Revolution. Can be compared to the even longer review of Alpha School from Siskind's contest.
New work from Antony Gormley, playing with big wooden blocks and human forms. Earlier work here.
Dirty Dick's, a famous and famously weird London pub.
Story of one of the black women drawn to Jim Jones' cult; before the apocalypse the point of Jonestown was supposed to be an anti-racist socialist utopia.
An entrant in the competition for "most epic domino crash ever."
Ukraine's new FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile, range 3,000 km, claimed production rate 1/day. Twitter/X, wikipedia.
2 comments:
I absolutely do not get the hostility to the M dash. There can always be too much of a good thing. But I think that it can convey the rush and/or complexity of real thought, with its sudden changes of direction and parenthetical by-the-ways (I'm fine with parentheses too). But my taste is also quite fond of Latinate words, the passive voice, long footnotes, block quotations, adjectives, and other anathemata of the contemporary in-a-hurry style. Not everything has to be "simple and direct."
The passive voice?!? It is my firm belief that the passive voice should be made illegal! /s
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