Results for “YouTube” 1354 found
YouTube of Tyler Cowen speaking at Google, about Google
I was supposed to speak on Discover Your Inner Economist, but this was the morning after Google announced its backing of the lunar landing prize. They asked me about that, and here is what they got for an answer.
Thanks to Hakan A for the pointer.
Music on YouTube, Now
You’ve all heard by now that Google might buy YouTube. That means deeper pockets, and of course greater fear of copyright litigation.
It is time for intertemporal substitution.
Here are YouTube recommendations from Michael, at www.2blowhards.com; here is the best from that list.
There is a long and wonderful list of YouTube music videos, from all genres, on Terry Teachout’s page, scroll down all the way to the right. And no, that video of Gyorgy Cziffra playing Liszt was not speeded up! Art Tatum was pretty fast too. On the guitar, Julian Bream was no slouch.
The politics of *Civil War* (full of spoilers, do not read)
I saw the film as having very definite politics, and yes I am aware of the pronouncements of the director — ignore them! I am writing about the movie, what was on the screen.
The seceding states — California, Texas, and Florida — all have substantial Latino population segments. The core political message is that a nation cannot hold together under those conditions. The “Democrat vs. Republican” issues become irrelevant in those scenarios, and that too is part of the political message. Ethnic considerations become primary in the final analysis. And note that the separate Florida, not part of the Western Alliance, is the one state with lots of Latinos and not so many Mexicans. It is California and Texas that share the same ethno ambitions.
The key moment is the scene when they encounter the evil blond-haired guy with the big gun, and he asks “What kind of American are you?” The naive viewer expects the Socratic dialogue to shift in the direction of red vs. blue states, but no the baddie starts talking about “Central Americans” and “South Americans.” The real question has become what kinds of Americans are we indeed.
The Hong Kong/Chinese guy is shot immediately, once he announces his nationality, again a stand-in for the broader ethnostate divisions the movie is portraying.
When the two individuals shift cars, and jump from one moving vehicle to the other, that is the true portend of pending disaster, as Hollis Robbins has pointed out. Stay in your car (country)!
Of course Hollywood cannot put such a message on the screen explicitly, nor are most critics capable of seeing it. Mostly they are left wondering what has happened to the Trump vs. anti-Trump divisions they heard about on NPR.
If you doubt whether this movie is historically detailed and aware, consider how it portrays West Virginia on this civil war “next time around.” They are less interested than are the Virginians.
You won’t see much Christianity in the film at all.
Except for the black veteran, the media class are shown as selfish, elevating the scoop above all while disclaiming moral responsibility, enjoying the witnessing of violence, and verging on the psychotic. It is not an entirely favorable portrait (and yes I do know the director’s words on this).
The U.S. citizenry gets rather caught up in fighting the war, and the most positive visions are of the two fathers who retreat to their farms, again a reactionary message.
Blacks are shown as the servant class of each side in the civil war, a portrait that, if people were more aware, would be considered offensive.
So those are the politics of the movie, but with the distractions of the violence on the screen and of current culture wars, we just don’t notice how much they are pushed into our faces. I give the director credit for his guts, noting that George Lucas ripped off Leni Riefenstahl and I still like that movie too.
To be clear, those are not my politics at all, as loyal MR readers can attest. But that is not how I judge movies and this one — while definitely flawed — was still pretty good.
Dwarkesh interviews Mark Zuckerberg on Llama 3 and more
Wednesday assorted links
1. Lyman Stone criticizes the Pope paper on church attendance. Good criticisms, see also the points by Sure and others in the comment section. This paper doesn’t seem to hold up? I’ll gladly publish a response by the author, otherwise a withdrawal might be in order?
2. Good critique of the AGI concept. And AI regulation is unsafe, by Max T.
3. Ruxandra on the anti-cavities thing.
4. Mass shootings are down considerably.
5. First chat between humans and whales?
6. Open access version of Ran Spiegler’s The Curious Culture of Economic Theory.
7. 14 years ago, Thomas Schelling session on Iran and nuclear weapons. Let’s hope this does not very soon become more relevant.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Paul Christiano appointed to USG Head of AI Safety.
2. Further worries about the anti-cavity thing. I don’t pretend to know the answers here, but this has not been thought through well enough. And SSC update.
3. Fritz Peterson, RIP, MIE. Very 1970s.
It’s happening, anachronistic imaginary movie preview edition
https://www.youtube.com/@abandonedfilms
For a sampler, try The Hobbit:
Via the apparently excellent Bruce Cleaver.
UNOS Kills
I’ve long been an advocate of increasing the use of incentives in organ procurement for transplant; either with financial incentives or with rules such as no-give, no-take which prioritize former potential organ donors on the organ recipient list. What I and many reformers failed to realize, however, is that the current monopolized system is so corrupt, poorly run and wasteful that thousands of lives could be saved even without incentive reform. (To be clear, these issues are related since an incentivized system would never have become so monopolized and corrupt in the first place but that is a meta-issue for another day.) Here, for example, is one incredible fact:
An astounding one out of every four kidneys that’s recovered from a generous American organ donor is thrown in the trash.
Here’s another:
Organs are literally lost and damaged in transit every single week. The OPTN contractor is 15 times more likely to lose or damage an organ in transit than an airline is a suitcase.
Organs are not GPS-tracked!
In an era when consumers can precisely monitor a FedEx package or a DoorDash dinner delivery, there are no requirements to track shipments of organs in real time — or to assess how many may be damaged or lost in transit.
“If Amazon can figure out when your paper towels and your dog food is going to arrive within 20 to 30 minutes, it certainly should be reasonable that we ought to track lifesaving organs, which are in chronic shortage,” Axelrod said.
Here’s one more astounding statistics:
Seventeen percent of kidneys are offered to at least one deceased person before they are transplanted….
Did you get that? The tracking system for patients is so dysfunctional that 17% of kidneys are offered to patients who are already dead–thus creating delays and missed opportunities.
All of this was especially brought to light by Organize, a non-profit patient advocacy group who under an innovative program embedded with the HHS and working with HHS staff produced hard data.
Many more details are provided in this excellent interview with Greg Segal and Jennifer Erickson, two of the involved principals, in the IFPs vital Substack Statecraft.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Terminator metal.
2. An RCT on the economic benefits of vision correction.
3. “Claude 3 Opus is roughly as persuasive as humans.“
4. Jon Haidt responds to the Nature review. And Greg Lukianoff with his First Amendment concerns.
5. Interview with Nicholas Tabarrok, who works in the movies.
6. Samo Burja skeptical on nuclear.
Emergent Ventures, 33rd cohort
Alex Bartik and Arpit Gupta, Chicago and NYU, to work on zoning codes, machine learning, and LLMs.
Sasha Przyblski, 16, Ontario, building more durable batteries.
Egzona Marina, Kosovo and MIT, to promote science and neuroscience education in Kovoso.
Aldrich Heinz Alvarez, Manila, travel grant to San Francisco and Singapore, wearables that harness multi-modal AI.
Molly Cantillon, Stanford, for a hacker house at Stanford.
Ayush Tambde, Dublin (Mumbai), physics and wormholes, and to finance a trip to San Francisco.
Candela Francisco, 17, Buenos Aires, to become the world’s greatest woman chess player.
Aabhas Senapati, Harvey Mudd, from Ahmedabad, general career support, and for work on ecosystems.
Erick Li, Mexicali, to visit a social science conference at Harvard.
Lorcan Geraghty, Country Wicklow, Dublin, EirSpace, aerospace for Ireland.
Regan Arntz-Gray, Brooklyn, writing on feminism.
Steven Gong, Waterloo, to make videos on topics related to physics and math.
Dominic Sobhani, Midwest, Columbia University and now Tokyo, Progress Studies-related meet-ups and also personal travel.
Tomas Markey, 17, Ballineen, Cork area, Direct Air Capture Engineering.
Alexander Koch, Germany, Bay Area, robotics and robot learning.
Dylan Iskandar, Stanford, computer science, music, general career support.
Vesuvius Project, Bay Area.
Mark Koyama and Desiree Desierto, for British economic and political history, including in the 17th century.
Grant Getzelman, Bay area, computational wetware.
Naina Kumar, McLean, Virginia, 16, surgery + AR.
Ukraine:
Yanchuk Dmytro, Kyiv, repairing electric station short circuits.
And here is Nabeel’s AI-driven directory of previous EV winners.
Maurizio Pollini, RIP
Milei update
The shock therapy administered by Milei and his economy czar Luis Caputo right after the Dec. 10 inauguration is showing results. In a severely recessionary context, inflation is slowing down (February prices rose 13.2% in monthly terms compared with 25.5% in December) while foreign reserves grew by more than $7 billion despite debt repayments. Deposits on local dollar-denominated bank accounts have also recovered. Last week, Argentina’s sovereign spread (a measure of country risk) dropped to the lowest in more than two years and the nation has received the enthusiastic backing of the International Monetary Fund, its single largest creditor.
The exchange rate — historically the Argentine economy’s key indicator — has recently appreciated in parallel markets and now trades at just 15%-20% over the official peso, opening the door for authorities to consider unifying the currency market. As local economists have argued, it’s time to start dismantling the byzantine currency controls that have long strangled Argentina.
The flipside of the government’s deep spending cuts, however, is a near-collapse in economic activity, with industrial production falling more than 12% year-on-year in January and construction retreating even more.
And:
At the same time, the parallel peso’s appreciation in a context of high inflation is leading to a loss of competitiveness, with Argentina fast becoming expensive when measured in dollars. The result adds to speculation that a new devaluation will soon be unavoidable, reversing gains in the fight on inflation. “Our base scenario considers a correction of the exchange framework in May,” Buenos Aires-based consultant Equilibra said in a recent report. Monday night’s measures by the country’s central bank can be seen as an attempt to tame this appreciation.
The government’s gamble is that, by the second quarter, a strong crop from Argentina’s high-powered farmlands spurs a rebound in activity that helps contain some of the social discontent produced by the measures.
Here is more from Juan Pablo Spinetto at Bloomberg. And from the FT:
Argentina’s Senate has rejected President Javier Milei’s sweeping emergency decree to deregulate the economy, in a major blow to the libertarian leader and his attempt to deliver reforms for the crisis-stricken country. Senators voted 42 to 25 to reject the decree, with four abstentions. Issued in December it modifies or eliminates more than 300 regulations affecting the housing rental market, food retailers, air travel, land ownership, and more.
So further progress on the libertarian front may be tough. Also from the piece:
“This is a worry for the market because the president is on the verge of losing . . . the only set of substantial economic reforms he has been able to introduce so far,” he said. Milei already opted to withdraw the other plank of his legislative agenda — a multipronged omnibus bill aiming to overhaul the Argentine state — from the floor of the lower house last month after lawmakers rejected several key articles.
Things could be better.
Wednesday assorted links
1. The largest worms on earth.
2. AI safety is not a model property.
3. Dan Schulz podcast with Nabeel Qureshi, with transcript.
4. African influencers who make it big in Brazil.
7. Be careful what you wish for: “The proposed legislation may force app stores to remove TikTok. But restricting access through web browsers or already-installed apps—which would be necessary to really limit the platform’s reach—would represent another level of intrusive regulation.” (WSJ)
How good a song is Quarter to Three?
You know, the 1961 #1 hit by Gary U.S. Bonds? I’ve been thinking about this question for months. I feel a good amount is at stake. If songs such as Quarter to Three (or done live with dancers) are still great, our assessment of early times risesconsiderably. But if they are dispensable throw-aways, the history of popular music (and film) in the earlier twentieth century needs to be rewritten.
What makes the song such a classic? Claude praises “the upbeat rhythm, engaging call-and-response vocals, relatable lyrics, catchy melody, historical context, and instrumental breaks,” but none of those seem quite scarce or special enough to elevate the tune to classic status. With a bit of prodding Claude also cited “raw, unpolished energy,” a genuine sense of fun, and “chemistry amongst the performers.” To that you might add a creative use of repetition and small, stepwise changes, plenty of syncopation, and the hooks are iconic. The use of echo and phase shifting looks to the future, and the shuffle-like groove drew on calypso influences and also ska. Nonetheless the chord structure, while effective, is hardly revelatory.
So I’m still wondering — if a song has that ineffable “something” — how much is that the product of our collective imaginations? How much is it real and objectively there? Or does a Generation Z teen, with a very different ear, dismiss it as muddled and mediocre rather than memorable? After all, Gary’s career was not replete with enduring creations.
A critic could allege the dance lyrics are ordinary and the production sloppy. But was that all part of the calculation? Wikipedia relates:
The single was recorded with very rough sound quality (compared to other records at the time). Producer Frank Guida has been quoted on subsequent CD reissues that his production sound was exactly what he wanted it to sound like.
Bob Roman wrote:
The song opens with muffled crowd noise and a bandleader counting off the beginning of a song. It’s not a live recording, but it sounds like one — and not even like a good one. It sounds like an amazing party happening down the street — wild, frenzied, mysterious, its sound obscured by what might as well be a couple of sets of walls. In any era, it’s crazy that a record this lo-fi managed to hit #1. In the pre-Beatles era where labels were pushing cleaned-up teenage dreamboats, it seems especially strange.
So we’ve got amazing hooks, controlled chaos, and extreme innovation?
The song also has a lineage. Bill Wyman put it on one of his solo albums. It inspired Dion’s “Runaround Sue.” Bruce Springsteen played it regularly in his concerts, and later worked with Gary, writing songs for him and doing two albums together. Most importantly, Paul McCartney references it in his Sgt. Pepper classic “When I’m Sixty-Four“:
If I’d been out ’til quarter to three, would you lock the door?
In essence Paul is teasing us with the notion that the 64-year-old McCartney might someday still be out there, dancing, rather than knitting tea cozies on the Isle of Wight. And true to Straussian form, Paul released the dance song “Dance Tonight” when he was sixty-four, days before turning sixty-five.
In 1963, during a Beatles European tour, Gary U.S. Bonds was the headliner for them.
You will note that the lineage of the song runs mostly through white performers, though Gary U.S. Bonds was black (or possibly mixed race). Perhaps one special feature of Quarter to Three is how it spans black and also white R&B, a rare feature at the time but hearkening back to the much earlier years of the blues, when black and white musical styles could be hard to distinguish. In addition to the Caribbean vein, Gary could span Latino styles as well.
Just as we are finding it impossible to rebuild Notre Dame cathedral as it was, a mere sixty-three years later could any of us still make something akin to “Quarter to Three”? Or have we lost those “technologies”?
I, for one, have decided to vote in favor of masterpiece status for Quarter to Three. At least for now. And by the way Gary U.S. Bonds is still on tour.
Sunday assorted links
1. The suburban YIMBY movement (NYT).
2. Chess Fever, a Soviet silent movie. 27 minutes, Buster Keaton-style.
3. Angus Deaton makes a nationalist turn.
4. Is Silicon Valley pricing academics out of AI research? (I hope so.)
5. List of names you cannot give your Icelandic daughter (sorry Abigail! Aisha eventually was approved, though). For men, they have banned Fabio, but not Elmer. I believe in laissez-faire for names, but if you are going to ban anything, surely Elmer is worth some consideration?
6. Are Florida voters tiring of the culture wars?
7. “Mr. Musk has not hired any staff for his foundation, tax filings show. Its billions are handled by a board that consists of himself and two volunteers, one of whom reports putting in so little time that it averages out to six minutes per week.” (NYT, quite possibly he is doing this well?)