Results for “YouTube” 1346 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.
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?)
In Conversation with Próspera CEO Erick Brimen & Vitalia Co-Founder Niklas Anzinger
During my visit to Prospera, one of Honduras’ private governments under the ZEDE law, I interviewed Prospera CEO Erick Brimen and Vitalia co-founder Niklas Anzinger. I learned a lot in the interview including the real history of the ZEDE movement (e.g. it didn’t begin with Paul Romer). I also had not fully appreciated the power of reciprocity stacking.
Companies in Prospera have the unique option to select their regulatory framework from any OECD country, among others. Erick Brimen elaborated in the podcast how this enables companies to do normal, OECD approved, things in Prospera which literally could not be done legally anywhere else in the world.
…so in the medical world for instance you have drugs that are approved in some countries but not others and you have medical practitioners that are licensed in some countries but not the others and you have medical devices approved in some countries but not others and there’s like a mismatch of things that are approved in OECD countries but there’s no one location where you can say hey if they’re approved in any country they’re approved here. That is what Prosper is….Our hypothesis is that just by doing that we can leapfrog to a certain extent and it’s got nothing to do with the wild west or doing weird things.
…so here so you can have a drug approved in the UK but not in the US with a doctor licensed in the US but not in the UK with a medical device created in Israel but not yet approved by the FDA following a procedure that has been say innovated in Canada, all of that coming together here in Prospera.
Friday assorted links
1. Virginia stadium deal might be dead.
2. More blue cities are backing anti-crime measures.
3. Mark Skousen reviews GOAT for Economic Affairs.
4. Lengthy JEL survey article on the productivity slowdown (AEA gate).
5. Weak showers do not necessarily save water.
6. Tehzeeb live sessions (music from Pakistan).
7. The secret door is the new trend? (NYT)
Claude 3 Opus as economic analyst
Via Francis Santora, Hudson County, NJ.
What Ireland and Scotland are doing to their housing markets
From Kieran Lucid and Polysee:
The Black-Scholes-Merton Options Pricing Equation
A superb video on the history and mathematics of options pricing from Veritasium.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Dan Klein responds to my Casablanca review. Of course my view is that what Dan sees in the movie is also there.
2. Do standard error corrections exacerbate publication bias?
3. Mr. Beast as talent evaluator (short video).
4. My Bloomberg column on the very high value of open source software.
5. “What is Éire accelerationism and why does it matter?” A new podcast episode from David McWilliams.
The Maniac
I enjoyed Benjamin’s Labatut’s The Maniac. Conventionally regarded as a “biography” of John von Neumann but more accurately a series of short, quick vignettes, recollections, and reconstructions told by people around von Neumann and centered on the many ideas he touched, including the metaphysics of logic, quantum physics, the nuclear bomb, the meaning of rationality, the fundamental structure of life and especially artificial intelligence. The recollections are what might be called creative non-fiction; based on real life interviews but written as if the speaker were a novelist. For example, Feynman uniquely watching the first atomic test without goggles, but told even more vividly than Feynman told the story.
As Tyler noted, many of the stories will be familiar to MR readers, but a few were new to me. Sydney Brenner, for example, the Nobel prize winning molecular biologist who hypothesized and then proved the existence of messenger RNA reports with wonder and astonishment that von Neumann had earlier understood from theory alone how any such system must work.
Fear and awe in the presence of great intelligence is a running theme of the book. Polya famously described fearing von Neumann after seeing him solve a problem in minutes that he had worked on for decades (again the story is jeujed up in The Maniac to great effect.) Eugene Wigner who knew him from childhood and who himself won a Nobel prize in physics is “quoted” (recall this is fictionalized but based on the record):
It was a burden growing up so close to him. I often wonder if my horrific inferiority complex, which not even the Nobel prize has diminished in the slightest, is a product of having known von Neumann for the better part of my life.
…I knew Planck, von Laue, and Heisenberg, Paul Dirac was my brother-in-law, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends, and Albert Einstein was a good friend too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Janos von Neumann. I remarked on this in the presence of those men, several times, and no one ever disputed me.
Only he was fully awake.
Another theme is the seemingly close relationship between rationality and insanity–Labatut develops this both in theory around Godel’s theorem but also in practice with the many rationalists who went crazy. What does this mean for artificial intelligence?
The MANIAC refers not to von Neumann but to von Neumann’s creation the Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer Model, the first computer built using von Neumann’s architecture, which all computers use today. From the MANIAC we get to artificial intelligence and again the awe and fear. After Gary Kasparov loses to Deep Blue he become despondent and fearful, thinking that there must have been a human in the machine. Lee Sedol losing to AlphaGo and soon retiring thereafter. Ke Jie being annihilated by Master, the successor to AlphaGo and reporting “he is a god of Go. A god that can crush all who defy him.” And then the creators of AlphaGo take off the training wheels, they remove all the human games that constrained the earlier models to a foundation built on thousands of years of human knowledge and the result crushes the human-limited model.
We are reminded of what von Neumann said on his death bed when asked what would it take for a computer to begin to think and behave like a human being.
He took a very long time before answering, in a voice that was no louder than a whisper.
He said that it would have to understand language, to read, to write, to speak.
And he said that it would have to play, like a child.
The Maniac is a good read.
How I listen to music
Ian Leslie writes to me:
I’m wondering, have you ever done a post about how you listen to music? Hours per week, times of day, technologies, degree of multi-tasking, etc…and how you choose what to listen to at any given moment. I’d be interested.
I go to plenty of concerts, but that is for another post. And I’ve already written about satellite radio. As for home, I like to listen to music most of the time, noting that if I am writing a) the music doesn’t bother me, and b) I don’t necessarily hear that much of the music. A few more specific points:
1. I don’t like to listen to “rock music” (broadly construed) in the morning.
2. I won’t listen to Mahler, Bruckner, or Brahms in the morning. They are evening music.
3. Renaissance music is best either in the morning or the evening.
4. I don’t listen to much jazz at home any more, though I am no less keen to see a good jazz concert live. Having already spent a lot of time with the great classics, at current margins I am disillusioned with most “jazz as recorded music.”
4b. The same is true of most “world music,” if you will excuse the poorly chosen label. I do subscribe to Songlines, a world music magazine. I buy some of the recommendations on CD, but try out many more on YouTube or Spotify. That is my primary use of those services, at least for music. That is one case where I am sampling to see if I run across new sounds.
5. I don’t like earbuds and never use them.
6. Bach gets the most listening time.
7. For a classical piece I really like, I might own five or more recorded versions, occasionally running up to a dozen. Listening to a poor or even so-so recording of a very good piece is to me painful and to be avoided.
8. Contemporary classical music — which many people hate — gets plenty of listening time. Though not when Natasha is home. Some of those recordings, such as Helmut Lachenmann string quartets, seem to create problems for Spinoza, noting that he is rarely not at home. Perhaps they will be shelved for a few years.
9. I buy new classical music releases recommended by Fanfare, and occasionally from the NYT or Gramophone or elsewhere. As for “popular music” (a bad term), mostly I wait until December and then buy CDs extensively from various “best of the year” lists. I do some Spotify sampling then too, again from those lists.
10. The main stock of recorded music is kept in the basement. There is a separate shelf upstairs for what I am listening to actively at the moment. That shelf might have 200 or so CDs, with some of them scattered on tables, and with some LPs nearby as well.
11. Periodically I go down into the basement and choose which discs will be “re-promoted” to the active shelf upstairs. And if I am done listening to a disc, it goes down to the basement, with some chance of being re-promoted back to upstairs later.
12. If I don’t like a disc, I throw it out, as space constraints have become too binding. (It is cruel to give it away, and no one wants it anyway.) As time passes, I am throwing out more discs. For instance, I love Cuban music but I don’t lilsten to it on disc any more.
Overall, I view this system as optimized for getting to know a core repertoire. It is not optimized for browsing or random discovery. I feel I have a lot of discovery in my musical life, but it comes from reading and information inflow — both extensive — not from listening per se.
And to be clear, I am not suggesting that these methods are optimal for anyone else.