Watch it.

Winston Marshall interviews James A. Lindsay, tracing the historical roots of modern proglodyte fascism.

Watch it.

Maxinomics tealls you everything you wanted to know … and more.

I notice that today the price of SpaceX stock is below that of their IPO price.

Real Clear Defense.

On Taiwan and its sovereignty, alarmism has become a hallmark of conflict prediction and analysis. Some of it is well-founded, such as the critical lack of interceptors and exquisite strike munitions available to the United States and its allies, but much of the current fear is the sum of highly specific views on how a war would unfold. The prevailing framing relies on readers accepting that China can pursue multiple strategies at once while Taiwan and its allies merely observe, which drives an unrealistic view of the “China Threat” as potentially overwhelming. A recent example is the claim that warning times of a Chinese attack have been decreasing. In reality, this does not mean that the People’s Liberation Army can make thousands of troops and their logistics appear overnight on the beaches of Northern Taipei; it more likely means the missiles on the ships that China keeps moving ever closer to Taiwan (within range of Taiwanese Hsiung Feng III batteries) have to travel less distance to hit their targets.

This position should be reframed: policy makers should focus on what is possible, and analysts should present causal arguments organized by their commonalities or contrasts with past cases. This is the essence of John Stuart Mill’s method of agreement and disagreement, which identifies common or uncommon variables across like or differing cases. On China, two key factors, both with abundant historical examples, should drive analysis: what does Beijing seek to accomplish, and what can the Chinese military actually do? Crucially, these assessments cannot be made in a void in which each analyst selects the variables that best justify a preferred conclusion. To be credible, an argument must engage the existing body of work, and it should either challenge the conventional wisdom or build upon it; reinventing premises from scratch only propagates confirmation bias.

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of complying with the National Environmental Policy Act, better known as NEPA. NEPA is what requires projects to perform years-long, thousand-plus page environmental impact studies before construction can begin, and suing a project for an insufficiently detailed environmental study is one of the chief ways environmental groups are able to slow down or stop projects they don’t like. And NEPA’s influence goes beyond federally funded projects: NEPA also influenced the creation of many similar laws, both at the state level (such as California’s CEQA) and in countries around the world.

None of these effects of NEPA, however, were envisioned when the law was written. NEPA was seen primarily as an (aspirational) statement of US environmental policy, which was to “encourage productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environment, to promote efforts which will prevent or eliminate damage to the environment and biosphere and stimulate the health and welfare of man; [and] to enrich the understanding of the ecological systems and natural resources important to the Nation.” The provision that requires environmental impact statements was added last minute as a way to try to give some teeth to these high-minded but somewhat abstract ideals, and received virtually no attention at the time.

Modern laws are quite predictable, since they were made by idiots for morons.

New York Post.

The participants appear to be Adolescents of Color beating up on Adolescents of Pallor.

Who could have seen that coming?

Tje New Neo.

Congress may be about to make Daylight Savings Time the permanent time in the US, rather than shifting back and forth seasonally between Standard and DST. The seasonal shifting is annoying to many people, but the change would pit the Morning People against the Night People.

Summer isn’t the problem; it’s winter that creates the issue. Do you want you or your children to get up in the dark to go to work or school – something you may be doing already anyway if your start time is early? Or do you want the depressing experience of night falling long before the afternoon is finished? Your answer matters not only on whether you favor Night or Morning, plus how early work or school starts, but on your latitude and your east-west location in your time zone. The more north you live and the more to the east in your zone, the more extreme your winter/summer sunrise and sunset times.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

“People say it’s a dry heat. Well, so is an air fryer.”

Check it out.

The borders are gone. Click where each state is on the blank map. One wrong click and it all goes boom.

Not the Bee.

Bison just gotta have fun.

Not the Bee.

And a large number of Republicans, let’s not forget them.

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Not hard to tell. You’re not a narcissist. You don’t spend your life yelling “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!”

(Actually, I thought about getting my blood type on the inside of my left arm, for the practical reason that it allows emergency medical responders to know what transfusion you might need if you’re unconscious. It will also scare the living shit out of anybody who actually knows what it indicates.)

Every time somebody asks me how I’m doing, I always respond “Compared to what?”

[There are over twenty five SHERMAN’S LAGOON collections available for purchase. Highly recommended.]

Read it.

You deserve a break today, but be sure to have a salad.

Their beef (yuk yuk yuk) with the Double Quarter Pounder With Cheese is that it’s full of things people want and not full of things that Licensed Professionals think they ought to want.

This is why we can never have nice things.

I think I’ll hit McD’s for lunch….

The Telegraph (UK).

Hey, who’s to say that’s not a part of their culture? Let’s not be haters, here.

The Economist.

i\In recent months Russian military lorries in Ukraine have begun sporting a striking new colour scheme of vivid black-and-white stripes. As camouflage goes, it is not much use against human observers. But then, it is not intended to fool biological eyes. Its aim is to frustrate the machine-vision systems that are fitted to the Ukrainian drones that zip around battlefields looking for prey.

The stripes are reminiscent of the “dazzle camouflage” used by the Royal Navy in the first world war. But whereas dazzle camouflage was intended to break up a ship’s silhouette, making it difficult to judge its speed and heading, the new variant aims to fool machines into thinking that a lorry is not, in fact, a lorry at all.

Machine vision is based on pattern-matching. A model is trained by exposing it to images, some of which contain lorries (or tanks, or aircraft) and some of which do not. Over zillions of exposures, the computer deduces rules that allow it to identify the things its trainers want to teach it about. Because zebra-striped trucks are unlikely to appear in the training data, says Todd Humphreys, an engineer at the University of Texas at Austin, an ai that encounters one in the real world may not realise what it is looking at.

Assuming, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Watch it.

The Feral Historian explains it all to you.

Works for me.

At least the printer doesn’t poop on the floor …

Funny, my MBA program didn’t offer that as an option. And don’t get me started on law school….

The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.

Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.

Underclass people who depended on government schooling are functionally illiterate anyway; once again, Democrats seem to be ahead of the curve here.

Most machine operators during the first years of the industrial revolution were barely literate, but they did good work just the same. Navy sailors on the China Station between the world wars often had Chinese coolie servants who could do their work competently, as illustrated in the famous Steve McQueen movie THE SAND PEBBLES—I doubt that any of them were even literate in Chinese, much less English. Simple operations that depend on a job being demonstrated and then done by rote was, until recently, the default way that working people worked, and still rules in the Turd World. We may be reverting to that, and I doubt that the heavens would fall.

I wouldn’t mind seeing a return to the day when college was only for rich people’s kids and affordable for intelligent non-Crustian kids who were willing to work their way through or get scholarships.

Read it.

Yeah, good luck with that….

Alma Boykin.

“Oh no, I never polish it. I’ve watched Antiques Roadshow and I know to leave the patina on. Cleaning it would lower the value.”

Read it.

Although the Supreme Court ruled in favor of birthright citizenship last week, the Trump administration and Congress could still take action to reduce the effect of the policy.

Vice President JD Vance endorsed a proposal to restrict birthright citizenship in the U.S. territories, citing Roger Severino, vice president of economic and domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation. Vance asserted in a Fox News interview with Laura Ingraham that the Trump administration is reviewing ways to close the loopholes in the policy.

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These early tests of quantitative hypotheses illustrate both the risks and merits of observational evidence. To be sure, as Arbuthnot showed, it’s easy enough to find that the data proves something you wanted to be true all along. Yet it is remarkable that both Arbuthnot and Laplace could obtain local records and start doing science right from their desks. In doing so, both correctly documented important phenomena without the need to invest much labor or capital to get the data.

The efficiency, simplicity, and beauty of this method of gaining knowledge has been underappreciated, especially in medicine and public health. Although it is considered ideal to obtain data in the form of a randomized control trial for an intervention like a drug, that form of data collection is not always possible in either field. Granted, the Paris versus London hypothesis Laplace was testing is relatively simple, but his sample size was over 1.93 million, more than the vast majority of interventional trials in the history of medicine. It is a rare randomized trial (studying a particular intervention with a sufficiently large and well-distributed sample population) that can detect an 0.3% difference in a binary random variable — but Laplace could, more than 200 years ago.

The advantages of the RCT have cemented it as the gold standard for interventional trials in medicine, and it remains what many laypeople think of as the one true way to do science. Yet once we understand where these advantages come from, how they interact with the economics of collecting samples, and the merits of the alternative, observational evidence emerges as the winner more often than one might think.

Read it.

The most important economic question of the next decade is how AI will affect jobs. Everyone wants to write that paper. Until now, no one has had the right dataset, so existing research has relied on a combination of guesses, surveys, AI exposure scores, and self-interested punditry. In fact, a recent paper from Stanford said the ideal dataset would use “business spend data” and cited Ramp data specifically.

Today, we published our first working paper: A New Look at AI’s Impact on Jobs. It uses firm-level spend data from Ramp joined with workforce data collected by Revelio Labs. In a sample covering more than 21,000 U.S. firms, we find that companies that invest heavily in AI grow headcount 10% over the two years following adoption. Entry-level headcount grows 12%.

Read the full paper and explore the data from Ramp Economics Lab here. The rest of this letter will outline our key findings, plans for future research, and some of my thoughts on what that means for our economy.

“Real life is not a Sherlock Holmes story, and not everything is a clue.”

— Tim Dedopoulos and David Knowles Field Guide to Secret Symbols

Wealth doesn’t migrate for no reason. Think about what rich people know that you don’t.

Said no Democrat ever.

Read it.

If academia was a game, I’ve won it. Tenure, an endowed research chair, awards, leadership positions, an international journal I helped to found and now serve as the Editor-in-Chief, students I have supervised to their own successes, a good h-index, all the classic marks of success. This isn’t meant as bragging but rather to point out that while I’ve won this game, the game no longer makes sense.
Academia, as most of us have practiced it, runs on maximalism. The most grants, the most papers, the most students, the most awards, the most news coverage. While we are doing much better these days in highlighting impact and contributions, the underlying engine is still volume, and the volume has always been produced by independent human writing (applications, submissions, letters of support, reports, Conversation articles, press releases, etc., etc.). The problem is that AI makes volume essentially infinite (until the world burns up, but that’s a parallel discussion).

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Then Pickett stood in front of his division and gave the final word: “Charge the enemy and remember old Virginia!” His voice was clear and strong as he spoke the order: “Forward! Guide center! March!” . . .

“I don’t want to make this charge,” Longstreet declared emphatically. “I don’t believe it can succeed. I would stop Pickett now, but that General Lee has ordered it and expects it.”

Longstreet persistently showed himself to be the best general that the Confederacy had.

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There was never much doubt that the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara would be issued at the very end of the Court’s term, or that Chief Justice Roberts would save the opinion-writing duties for himself. Nor was there much serious doubt that the Court would reject President Trump’s Executive Order seeking to redefine birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. What was not expected, however, was that the Court would issue a short-yet-sweeping constitutional opinion that only captured five votes. The Court largely neglected the statutory arguments against the Trump EO, and four justices spurned the conventional academic account of birthright citizenship. In the end, an opinion meant to settle the debate over birthright citizenship may have instead kindled a new one.

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A serve goes awry and accidentally strikes a “ball girl” (whatever that is) and the player runs over to her and slides the last twenty feen face down in apology, gets up and bows to her repeatedly (which she returns).

Whatt would happen if an American athlete—football, basketball, baseball, whatever—were in that same situation. I think that “Get out the way, bitch!” would be the best she could hope for.

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Michael from Offshore Citizen podcast compares the support Canada offered it’s citizens caught in the UAE during the recent Iran incidents to that offered by Montenegro. He points out that the the top marginal tax rate in Canada is around 50% while that in Montenegro is around 15%, and asks a perfectly natural question: What value do their respective citizens get when the diversity hits the fan?

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Our friend from Maxinomics explains it all to you.

The number one thing that people want money for is so that they can say “No”. I don’t want to spend my time like that.

Which means that this saying is wrong: “Time is money.” Benjamin Franklin got it backwards—putting time first to emphasize that you should trade time to get money. That’s what the whole paragraph you can find the saying in is about. When really, we know that humans work to obtain time. “Money is time.” You want money to buy a house so that you don’t have to build it; to buy food so you don’t have to grow it; to buy a car so you don’t have to walk. That gap, between the input you’re given and the output you want to get, is largely time spent doing things that no one likes doing.

Freeberg nails it.

The straight white male privilege is: If people want to play this tribe game, your tribe is the first one they’re going to excoriate. It’s pretty consistent. So it’s not at all hard to pick out these people. They hate you already.

Winnowing down this friends list is as easy as falling off a log, for us straight white males. We just say “You don’t want to have anything to do with me? Fine. Your terms are acceptable.” And that’s it. No muss no fuss.

Gays…transgenders…blacks…”native Americans” and women…who have figured out the above three truisms and are struggling to get them implemented in their own lives…I dunno. I dunno how they even get started on it. It must be awful. A bunch of damn fair-weather friends and you have to figure out which ones are lying. Who’s only pretending to be your friend, so they can be someone else’s.

It would drive me bonkers. In a heartbeat.

Glad I’m a straight white male. A loathed, native-born, third-generation, Scandihoovian, meat eating carbon spewing always-wrong SWM.