Category: Uncategorized
Is surfing the internet dead?
I saw a few people asking this on Twitter lately, but my views don’t quite fit into a tweet. Ten to fifteen years ago, I remember the joys of just finding things, clicking links through to other links, and in general meandering through a thick, messy, exhilarating garden.
Today you can’t do that as much. Many media sites are gated, a lot of the personal content is in the walled garden of Facebook, and blogs and personal home pages are not as significant as before. Then there is the email subscription newsletter, whether free or paid. All you can do in fact is visit www.marginalrevolution.com and a few other sites and hope their proprietors have not been sleeping since you last stopped by.
That said, I do not feel that time on the internet has become an inferior experience. It’s just that these days you find most things by Twitter. You don’t have to surf, because this aggregator performs a surfing-like function for you. Scroll rather than surf, you could say (“scrolling alone,” said somebody on Twitter).
And if you hate Twitter, it is your fault for following the wrong people (try hating yourself instead!). Follow experts and people of substance, not people who seek to lower the status of others. And if you’re really feeling the internet to be rather empty, head on over to Twitter search, still the most underrated single thing on the internet today (the MR search function is another underrated corner of the internet). Type in words of interest, such as “Ethiopia,” and what comes up will be gold.
It’s a different method today, and it uses a more centralized portal, but no the internet is not in decline. Not yet at least.
Ben Thompson on data portability and Facebook
The problem with data portability is that it goes both ways: if you can take your data out of Facebook to other applications, you can do the same thing in the other direction. The question, then, is which entity is likely to have the greater center of gravity with regards to data: Facebook, with its social network, or practically anything else?
Remember the conditions that led to Facebook’s rise in the first place: the company was able to circumvent Google, go directly to users, and build a walled garden of data that the search company couldn’t touch. Partnering or interoperating with companies below the Bill Gates Line, particularly aggregators, is simply an invitation to be intermediated. To demand that governments enforce exactly that would be a massive mistake that only helps Facebook.
Link to the post, with further explanation, is here. You can and should subscribe to Ben here. Here is my earlier post on data portability.
Wednesday assorted links
1. How futures trading affected Bitcoin prices.
3. Ethiopia on me on Ethiopia: “In the US very well educated and very sophisticated cosmopolitan people have no sense of how nice things are in Ethiopia and how well things are going. These include people with PhDs in economics familiar with Davos for a regular economic meeting.”
5. The invisible asymptote: “More people are more skilled at being hurtful in text than photos.” A good post with many points of interest.
Michael Nielsen, standing on one foot
A highly sophisticated MR reader demanded a dose of Michael Nielsen. I wrote to Michael, and he was kind enough to oblige. Everything that follows is from Michael, here goes:
I started with the question “What might amuse Tyler?”, and it became very easy.
Three opinions that may amuse MR readers:
1. Peter Thiel has said: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 (280) characters.” Thiel is wrong: 280 characters are much, much better than flying cars. Twitter is misunderstood as being an online service; it’s merely the online component of a much improved offline experience. Twitter DM’s are a superpower, one of the most valuable ways of connecting people ever invented. More on one way of using Twitter here.
2. Movies are primarily a visual form; movie criticism and the popular conversation about movies are primarily a literary form, and informed by literary sensibilities. This is why good movies such as Transformers are so underrated. People who dismiss such movies are mostly revealing their own ignorance.
3. Many corners of the internet have a culture of judgement or argument. Typical subtexts in online conversation are: is this good or bad? What’s wrong with it? But until and unless healthy conversational norms are formed, argument and judgement are mostly useless status-seeking by participants. Much better is a “Yes, and” culture.
Three books or papers which should be better known:
1. Elinor Ostrom’s book Governing the Commons. Ostrom dismantles the market / government dichotomy, sketching out ways common pool resources (and, to some extent, public goods) can be provided using non-market, non-government solutions.
2. Alex Tabarrok’s paper introducing dominant assurance contracts. Cryptocurrencies have huge potential as a way of creating entirely new types of market, using ideas like this. This potential is mostly unrealized to date.
3. Bret Victor on Media for Thinking the Unthinkable.
Blog posts don’t really get going until about 5,000 words in. Here are three favourites of mine:
1. Thought as a Technology, on how imaginative designers invent fundamentally new modes of thought.
2. If correlation doesn’t imply causation, then what does?
3. Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence (with Shan Carter).
Despite the fact I’m well short of 5,000 words, I’ll stop here.
You can follow Michael on Twitter here.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Paul Verhoeven on the Star Wars spin-offs they should be making.
2. Timothy Taylor on Peter Boettke.
4. The new and improved TLS (NYT).
5. The autistic Birmingham murder detective.
6. For tthe first time in the history of chess, the best Chinese player in the world ranking ahead of the best Russian.” And more on Komodo 12 with AlphaZero techniques.
Facts about drugs, including fentanyl
But with mobile phones, texting, and social media, transactions can now be arranged electronically and completed by home delivery, reducing the buyer’s risk and travel time to near zero and even his waiting time to minimal levels. In the recent Global Survey on Drugs, cocaine users around the world reported, that their most recent cocaine order was delivered in less time, on average, than their most recent pizza order.
That is from Mark Kleiman, but most of the blog post is about fentanyl. It is one of the best posts I have read all year, recommended.
Monday assorted links
1. For Ethiopian Christians, Pontius Pilate is a saint.
2. “Ethiopia to allow all Africans to visit without visas “very soon.””
4. “Over the past 24 months ransomware has become increasingly commoditised with the creators of more recent variants offering revenue-sharing agreements to “affiliate partners”. There is no longer a guarantee that insureds will get their data back, even if they pay the ransom. The “professionalism” associated with earlier strains of ransomware – where call centres were provided to talk victims through accessing Bitcoins in order to pay the ransom and get their data restored – has now all but gone.” Link here.
5. Composer Charles Wuorinen is “almost a libertarian.” And he is cranky about contemporary culture (NYT). And MIE: Dark Chocolate Dessert Hummus.
6. “But if built properly, these cryptocurrencies stand to play a dramatic role in making the Internet global (again).” And I had never seen the word “cryptonanism” before.
Carl-Henri Prophète emails me
I totally agree about Ethiopia being easy to visit. I went there last December and was baffled by how safe it was. I went outside and easily hailed a Taxi at 11 pm (the blue and white ones that everybody take in Addis not the special ones made for tourists). I’d never find a real Taxi in Port-au-Prince after 8 pm. Except the special (and very expensive) ones you can call on the phone.
What stroke me the most was how cheap Ethiopia was compared to Haiti and low income countries in Africa (especially Tchad, where my wife works). I think this is a major problem for countries like Tchad or Haiti (or Nigeria): they grew too expensive before getting even remotely rich. And this gives me hope that Ethiopia could achieve some significant success in tourism and exports in the coming years. By the way, I think that why a country like Ethiopia is cheaper than Haiti or Chad remains a question to be seriously investigated.
However, the Internet in Haiti is way better and cheaper. Cars in Haiti are also substantially cheaper (3 times cheaper at least, thanks in part to the US being so close). I also think the Internet is largely better and cheaper in Nigeria compared to Ethiopia. This made me think about something you wrote about the future of economic development, with people in countries like Haiti or Nigeria getting more satisfaction from the Internet and relatively cheap electronics instead of jobs and income. My impression is that it’s one of the very few low income country not taking this route currently…
Here is Carl-Henri on Twitter.
Sunday assorted links
1. Mosaicism and mutation in the brain (NYT). And why did brains get so big?
2. Treating overdoses as homicides? (NYT)
3. As I’ve said before, the most important thinkers of the next generation will be religious thinkers.
4. Amharic, or the language of the birds? And an Ethiopia blog, by Yves-Marie Stranger.
5. An unusual bio.
6. The vanilla wars of Madagascar.
7. “The acquisition of the Komodo comes with the release of an exciting new version of the engine called Komodo Monte Carlo, where moves are chosen by win probability and not traditional evaluation. The approach is similar to the probabilistic methods of the machine-learning chess projects AlphaZero and LeelaChess, which have fascinated chess players with their intuitive styles and fantastic success.” Link here.
Cities in Ethiopia, and why is the second largest one so small?
For a country of about 102 million people, this distribution of city sizes is remarkable, noting that the true population of Addis is likely larger yet:
| Addis Ababa, Ethiopia | 2,757,729 |
|---|---|
| Dire Dawa, Ethiopia | 252,279 |
| Mekele, Ethiopia | 215,546 |
| Nazrēt, Ethiopia | 213,995 |
| Bahir Dar, Ethiopia | 168,899 |
It is striking that the population is still about 80% “rural,” even with ten percent growth for a decade or so.
It seems that most people don’t want to leave their villages. Given that apparent constraint, many of the somewhat larger villages have evolved into mini-cities with very limited infrastructure and density, but lots more consumption. And Addis still is not so crowded, which makes it quite pleasant. We’ll see how this pans out, but I had never seen this “enhanced rural” model before and it is worthy of more attention. Here is one account of what is going on:
An entire town is to be built here — with a school and a training center where the farmers from the surrounding area can learn new skills, which they can then put to use to earn money. The newly founded municipality, which is to gradually grow to around 15,000 residents, is called Buranest. The idea behind the project is that the city must come to the farmers in order to keep the rural population from flooding into the cities…An entire network of this new type of settlement is to be built as part of Ethiopia’s Nestown project — half village, half town.
Just for a point of comparison, the tenth largest city in the Philippines, total population about 103 million, has 675,000 inhabitants and even the fifth largest city, Cebu, has almost a million people.
Saturday assorted links
1. East Germans still buy fewer stocks.
3. A somewhat off-base but still interesting thread on housing supply.
4. This is the kind of rhetorical and blah blah blah piece I don’t usually link to, yet the main point is correct and still underappreciated: there is a crisis of European weakness.
5. Do Chinese communists fund Jacinda Ardern’s NZ Labour Party?
Friday assorted links
1. Americans don’t feel so safe with self-driving cars.
2. “In fact, taboo opinions seem to promote a culture of celebrity.”
3. Do slowing and declining populations induce populism? (NYT)
4. Ethiopia as inspiration for Tolkien? And an Ethiopian photographer.
5. List of top economics blogs.
6. David Warsh’s Harvard Russia book is back on Amazon.
7. Different game-theoretic takes on the North Korean summit cancellation (NYT).
Especially prominent figures and concepts in Ethiopian Christianity
Yes there is Mary, Jesus. and the (Monophysite) Trinity, but beyond that literally every day I hear about the following from a very religious populace:
The Ark of the Covenant: “The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church claims to possess the Ark of the Covenant, or Tabot, in Axum. The object is currently kept under guard in a treasury near the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion. Replicas of the Axum tabot are kept in every Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo church, each with its own dedication to a particular saint; the most popular of these include Mary, George and Michael.”
St. George, slaying the dragon, he is prominent in church paintings.
Days of fasting, 55 a year, and thus Ethiopian restaurants are very good for vegetarians and vegans.
Addendum: from the comments, by Yves-Marie Slaughter:
55 is only the number of days of fasting during Lent, prior to Easter.
Total number of fasting days for a ‘normal’ Christian per year, would be closer to 155…
A monk may fast more than 200 days a year.
By the way, pork is prohibited altogether.
Gonder notes
Gonder is I believe Ethiopia’s third largest city. It has splendid castles and fortifications from the 18th century, with Moorish and Portuguese styles mixed in; at that time it was the capital. There are numerous monasteries and churches scattered throughout the area, many with impressive frescoes.
There is no week in my life in which I have seen as many donkeys as I have seen one day in and around Gonder.
I was surprised how good the area is for birdwatching, you don’t even have to try.
There is an Ethiopian Jewish village nearby. The Jews have left for Israel, but you can go see the synagogue behind a fence.
Two of my drivers have told me the exact same sentence: “They grow everything here: teff, barley, and wheat.”
If the people in the river village ask “do you wish to take out the small boat to go see the hippo?”, the correct answer is “No.“