Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
We are looking for economically significant sectors with lagging
productivity and a plausible path to improved productivity in the future.
So what meets these three criteria? I think a careful look at the economic
landscape reveals four areas from which we could derive massive increases
in human welfare: health, housing, energy, and transportation/logistics.
If we want progress, we need a relentless push for innovation and
dynamism in these sectors.
...
First, health, housing, energy, and transportation are all highly
regulated sectors of the economy. It is simply impossible to take
significant steps toward progress without addressing regulatory
obstacles. We are not going to get progress by tweaking the tax
code or by business as usual. In some cases, regulators will need
to allow more safety risks to be taken.
The good news is that there's a new economics that's increasingly
ascendant, one that rejects the market-centric framework and its
conservative policy tools on behalf of Appelbaum's simple but
profound conclusion: "Communities can decide what they want from
markets."
...
A higher tax rate, minimum wage, or regulation might or might not
ding growth - there's evidence on both sides. But we as a community
or a society might decide that because we want workers to earn
living wages, the wealthy to pay a fairer share, and businesses not
to degrade the environment and regularly blow up financial markets,
the benefits of these policies outweigh their costs.
Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve must stand up to Trump. If they don't, the American economy is heading for disaster.
A decade of historically low interest rates has begun to warp our economy. As we learned to our collective horror during the 2008 financial crisis, a period of sustained low interest rates forces investors on a desperate search for higher yields, inflating asset prices and the risks of owning loans and debt of all kinds.
For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake.
As a philosophical question, whether humans have control over their
own actions had been fought over for centuries before Libet walked
into a lab. But Libet introduced a genuine neurological argument
against free will. His finding set off a new surge of debate in
science and philosophy circles. And over time, the implications
have been spun into cultural lore.
...
To decide when to tap their fingers, the participants simply
acted whenever the moment struck them. Those spontaneous moments,
Schurger reasoned, must have coincided with the haphazard ebb and
flow of the participants' brain activity. They would have been
more likely to tap their fingers when their motor system happened
to be closer to a threshold for movement initiation.
This would not imply, as Libet had thought, that people's brains "decide" to move their fingers before they know it. Hardly. Rather, it would mean that the noisy activity in people's brains sometimes happens to tip the scale if there's nothing else to base a choice on, saving us from endless indecision when faced with an arbitrary task. The Bereitschaftspotential would be the rising part of the brain fluctuations that tend to coincide with the decisions. This is a highly specific situation, not a general case for all, or even many, choices.
Nathan J. Robinson long diatribe on Jordan Peterson in Current Affairs.
But, having examined Peterson's work closely, I think the "misinterpretation" of Peterson is only partially a result of leftists reading him through an ideological prism. A more important reason why Peterson is "misinterpreted" is that he is so consistently vague and vacillating that it's impossible to tell what he is "actually saying." People can have such angry arguments about Peterson, seeing him as everything from a fascist apologist to an Enlightenment liberal, because his vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected.
Finally some news on how this was carried out.
An Iranian engineer recruited by the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD provided critical data that helped the U.S. developers target their code to the systems at Natanz, according to four intelligence sources. That mole then provided much-needed inside access when it came time to slip Stuxnet onto those systems using a USB flash drive.
Makes Russian interference in our elections and China stealing our intellectual property seem rather mild in comparison.
Our leaders, our electorate and our hallowed system of government itself are aging. And it shows.
The U.S. doesn't have a Politburo, but if you calculate the median age
of the president, the speaker of the House, the majority leader of
the Senate, and the three Democrats leading in the presidential polls
for 2020, the median age is - uh - 77.
...
The final leg of America's gerontocratic triad is its system
of government. That, too, is old and a bit creaky.
No nation in the world has a written Constitution older than ours.
And it shows.
I can relate to memory problems as I age.
We're used to seeing our bodies getting old because of all the visible physical changes. We're not used to mental changes because they are less observable to ourselves and the people around us. Unless we talk or act differently, other people don't see the changes. And we don't feel the changes unless we try to do something and fail.
A bit old but I just discovered this lively exchange between two philosophers.
"Nevertheless, there are nostalgic philosophers who whinge on about saving the purity of the discipline from philosophers like me and Chris Eliasmith and Owen Flanagan and Dan Dennett. What do the purists, like McGinn, object to? It is that their lovely a priori discipline, where they just talk to each other and maybe cobble together a thought experiment or two, is being sullied by data. Their sterile construal of philosophy is not one that would be recognized by the great philosophers in the tradition, such as Aristotle or Hume or Kant."
If you solve this problem, you have solved the original.
There are three boxers. Two of the boxers are evenly matched
(i.e. 50-50, no draws!); the other boxer will beat either them, always.
You blindly guess that Boxer A is the best and let the other two fight.
Boxer B beats Boxer C.
Do you want to stick with Boxer A in a match-up with Boxer B,
or do you want to switch?
"I think there is a non-zero chance that some of our great castles are built on sand," he said, arguing that we must begin to rely on AI to verify proofs.
Buzzard's point is that modern mathematics has become overdependent on the word of the elders because results have become so complex. A new proof might cite 20 other papers, and just one of those 20 might involve 1,000 pages of dense reasoning. If a respected senior mathematician cites the 1,000 page paper, or otherwise builds off it, then many other mathematicians might just assume that the 1,000-page paper (and the new proof) is true and won't go through the trouble of checking it. But mathematics is supposed to be universally provable, not contingent on a handful of experts.
This type of intermittent fasting may be as beneficial as daily calorie restriction, but easier to stick with, researchers found.
Besides shedding weight and fat, the people who fasted had beneficial
cardiovascular changes and showed reduced levels of an age-associated
inflammatory marker, the study found.
At the same time, alternate day fasting didn't cause a decline in bone
mineral density or white blood cell count the way continuous calorie
restriction has been shown to do in previous studies.
It's not so much about Richard Stallman's comments related to Marvin Minsky but a problem of questionable behavior over many years.
Recently, we've made ranking updates and published changes to our search rater guidelines to help us better recognize original reporting, surface it more prominently in Search and ensure it stays there longer. This means readers interested in the latest news can find the story that started it all, and publishers can benefit from having their original reporting more widely seen.