Results for “Ed Lopez” 67 found
When are national apologies a good idea?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, noting that lately Mexico has been demanding an apology from Spain for colonialism. Here is one bit:
Some features of good apologies are sincerity, overall compatibility with what the apologizer now stands for in other contexts, and a broad social willingness to accept that something indeed has been settled for the better.
And:
OK, so how about Spain and Mexico? I am skeptical of this proposed apology, partly because it seems like a political maneuver by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to garner political support and distract from his likely failure to successfully reform Mexico’s economy. The current Spanish government also is not a close descendant of the conquistadors, as it is a full-blown democracy and the conquest was almost 500 years ago. One can acknowledge the massive injustices of the history without thinking that current Spanish citizens necessarily should feel so guilty. And (until recently) Spain-Mexico relations have not been problematic, so it is not clear exactly what problem this apology is supposed to solve.
The current demand for an apology is a distraction from the enduring injustice of Mexico’s segregation. If Spaniards found their own reasons for wishing to apologize, that would be a good result. But on this demand, they are correct to give it a pass.
I also consider the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Rwanda.
The Georgist equilibrium comes to Greece?
The 63-year-old has been been trying to buy an apartment ever since she was evicted from the home she rented for 32 years – when it was bought by Chinese investors two years ago.
“I want some security in case the same thing happens again,” says Ms Hynes, originally from Ireland. She earns a modest salary as an English teacher, while her Greek husband’s monthly pension was cut from €1,500 (£1,315; $1,690) to €500 during the country’s economic crisis, which began in 2010.
“When we were evicted there were still apartments selling nearby for €100,000. Now I can’t find anything under €250,000. These are Chinese and Russian prices. Not Greek.”
Greece’s financial crisis a decade ago shrank the country’s economy by more than 25% in the following years, but there are finally signs of improvement.
The property market, once completely dead, is on the rise – house prices in Athens rose 3.7% last year…
The boom appears to be driven by a controversial “golden visa” scheme, in which non-EU citizens receive residency and free movement in the EU’s Schengen zone, in exchange for investing in property.
The worry is that foreign investors are benefiting while ordinary Greeks miss out.
Many EU countries including the UK, Portugal and Spain, have golden visa schemes, but Greece has the lowest threshold. Investors receive five-year residency after purchasing €250,000 of property, making the country a new hotspot for foreign buyers.
Here is the full Jessica Bateman BBC story, via Ray Lopez. Does a culture of renters bring a bohemian, non-complacent dynamic urban core? Or a bunch of whiners who oppose economic progress? Or both?
On first world problems, from the comments
Will there be a trade war with China?
No. That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is one bit:
Keep in mind that the U.S. is a relatively large buyer in many markets; in economic lingo, it has some monopsony power. So if it cuts back purchases of, say, Chinese toys, China cannot simply reroute those now-surplus toys and sell them to Canada or Indonesia at the same price. This gives the U.S. significant power in trade conflicts. And China cannot throw around its weight as a buyer in similar fashion because it does not import on the same scale.
The Chinese don’t have that many ready American targets for economic retaliation. Aircraft are one of the major U.S. exports to China, where market demand for domestic flights is rapidly growing. Beijing has a backlog of about 400 orders with the Boeing Co. It could try to switch some or all of those orders to Airbus SE, but that would mean delays. Airbus would also know it could increase its prices and the Chinese would have to pay. As a buyer, China doesn’t have as much leverage in this market as it might appear.
The U.S. has many more targets when it comes to restricting foreign investment, as there is plenty of Chinese capital that would love to flee. The Chinese government already limits the activities of the big technology companies and many other U.S. multinationals in China, so they don’t have as many extra sticks in this regard.
The reality is China has margins for responding to the U.S., but they are mostly not in the economic realm.
I thank Ray Lopez for a useful email conversation related to this column.
The foreign culture that is Congolese
Two Burundi officials have been imprisoned after the African country’s president was allegedly “roughed up” in a football match they organised.
President Pierre Nkurunziza is a ‘born-again’ evangelical Christian who spends much of his time travelling Burundi with his own team, Haleluya FC. He travels with his own choir, “Komeza gusenga”, which means “pray non-stop” in the local Kirundi language.
On 3 February, his team faced a side from the northern town of Kiremba.
Normally, the opposition is well aware they are playing against the country’s president, and it has been said they go easy in the games, even perhaps allowing Nkurunziza to score.
But as the Kiremba team contained Congolese refugees who did not know they were playing against Burundi’s president, they “attacked each time he had the ball and made him fall several times”, a witness told AFP.
Kiremba’s administrator Cyriaque Nkezabahizi and his assistant, Michel Mutama, were imprisoned on Thursday, the news agency reports.
AFP cited a judicial source as saying they had been arrested on charges of “conspiracy against the president”.
Here is more, via Ray Lopez.
The Age of the Centaur is *Over* Skynet Goes Live
“Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm”
The game of chess is the most widely-studied domain in the history of artificial intelligence. The strongest programs are based on a combination of sophisticated search techniques, domain-specific adaptations, and handcrafted evaluation functions that have been refined by human experts over several decades. In contrast, the AlphaGo Zero program recently achieved superhuman performance in the game of Go, by tabula rasa reinforcement learning from games of self-play. In this paper, we generalise this approach into a single AlphaZero algorithm that can achieve, tabula rasa, superhuman performance in many challenging domains. Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi (Japanese chess) as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a world-champion program in each case.
In other words, the human now adds absolutely nothing to man-machine chess-playing teams. That’s in addition to the surprising power of this approach in solving problems.
Here is the link, via Trey Kollmer, who writes “Stockfish Dethroned.” Here is coverage from Wired. Via Justin Barclay, here is commentary from the chess world, including some of the (very impressive) games. And it seems to prefer 1.d4 and 1.c4, loves the Queen’s Gambit, rejected the French Defense, never liked the King’s Indian, grew disillusioned with the Ruy Lopez, and surprisingly never fell in love with the Sicilian Defense. By the way the program reinvented most of chess opening theory by playing against itself for less than a day. Having the white pieces matters more than we thought from previous computer vs. computer contests. Here is the best chess commentary I have seen, excerpt:
If Karpov had been a chess engine, he might have been called AlphaZero. There is a relentless positional boa constrictor approach that is simply unheard of. Modern chess engines are focused on activity, and have special safeguards to avoid blocked positions as they have no understanding of them and often find themselves in a dead end before they realize it. AlphaZero has no such prejudices or issues, and seems to thrive on snuffing out the opponent’s play. It is singularly impressive, and what is astonishing is how it is able to also find tactics that the engines seem blind to.
Did you know that the older Stockfish program considered 900 times more positions, but the greater “thinking depth” of the new innovation was decisive nonetheless. I will never forget how stunned I was to learn of this breakthrough.
Finally, I’ve long said that Google’s final fate will be to evolve into a hedge fund.
Japan (America) fact of the day
So consider the amount of standard daily doses of opioids consumed in Japan. And then double it. And then double it again. And then double it again. And then double it again. And then double it a fifth time. That would make Japan No. 2 in the world, behind the United States.
That is from German Lopez at Vox.
Collective vasectomy March Madness markets in everything
Mr. Ferretti, 36 years old, and Mr. Lopez, 44, had enjoyed themselves under the supervision of a doctor for what some are calling a brosectomy—a vasectomy with friends in a cushy setting of couches, snacks, big-screen TV, and in some clinics, top-shelf liquor.
Here is the WSJ story. And:
The University of Utah Health in Salt Lake City has run March Madness promotions for the past three years. It offers a vasectomy package that includes a Utah Jazz basketball ticket giveaway, goody bags and basketball-shaped ice packs. This year, its surgeons performed more than three times as many vasectomies in March compared with the average number done in the other months through May, according to the health center’s internal marketing data.
They promised us flying cars, and all we got was…
So if mankind is now 300,000 years old, what beliefs about the present should we revise?
Ray Lopez told me “Blog on it!” So I posed that query on Twitter, here is the background, here are some of the answers, check my mentions for more and for credits:
Great filter perhaps more likely to be behind us, if it took us 295,000 years to start having anything like civilization?
We’re slower learners
Civilization is precarious and the great filter from apes to higher intelligence is worse than we thought.
Initially & erroneously, I read ‘president’ instead of ‘present’.
Great question. Certainly the concept of civilization is an incredibly late concept, and not necessary for human flourishing.
Based on a single data point, the advanced from anatomical modernity to civilization is 50% harder than previously thought.
The moral arc of history is…even longer and bends even more gradually
That current rates of productivity growth are somehow abnormal
That there’s a bigger delta between our current environment and the one we evolved in.
We don’t have _nearly_ the cultural bandwidth to transmit all the wonderful wisdom developed over _300k years_. Much has been lost.
Our first revision might be that we have good certainty on the age of mankind. Perhaps it’s 500,000 years? What other fossils might we find?
interbreeding with Neanderthals was even freakier than we thought?
That rather than being rare – ‘the end of the world’ is a horrifyingly repetitive phenomenon for human civs.
Lower probability that other intelligent species lived long enough to develop interstellar travel or communication
That 140 characters, instead of flying cars, is an even bigger disappointment. I mean, seriously, after 300,000 years?
The longer we have been evolving with our unique set of Sapiens traits the more time evolution has had to make them elaborate and distinct.
That it took twice as long to start the process of civilization than previously thought. Let’s not blow it.
That we really should know better.
Apologies if I missed yours!
Proust as speculator
Through a fast alternation of buying and selling, orders and counterorders, the end of 1911 marked Proust’s fastest plunge into debt exposure in his fifteen-year-long investing career. His patrimony amounted to about 1,522,000 francs, but more than 40 percent of it, precisely 640,000 francs, was tied up in forwards contracts—a crazy level of exposure for an amateur investor. In terms of American dollars, at this time Proust owned a personal fortune of $6,864,000 and had about $2,900,000 tied up in obligations to buy.
That is from Proust and His Banker: In Search of Time Squandered, by Gian Balsamo, via Ray Lopez. Ray also passes along this from the book summary:
Focusing on more than 350 letters between Proust and Hauser and drawing on records of the Rothschild Archive and financial data assembled from the twenty-one-volume Kolb edition of Proust’s letters, Balsamo reconstructs Proust’s finances and provides a fascinating window into the writer’s creative and speculative process. Balsamo carefully follows Proust’s financial activities, including investments ranging from Royal Dutch Securities to American railroads to Eastern European copper mines, his exchanges with various banks and brokerage firms, his impetuous gifts, and the changing size and composition of his portfolio. Successes and failures alike provided material for Proust’s fiction, whether from the purchase of an airplane for the object of his affections or the investigation of a deceased love’s intimate background. Proust was, Balsamo concludes, a master at turning financial indulgence into narrative craftsmanship, economic costs into artistic opportunities. Over the course of their fifteen-year collaboration, the banker saw Proust squander three-fifths of his wealth on reckless ventures and on magnificent presents for the men and women who struck his fancy. To Hauser the writer was a virtuoso in resource mismanagement. Nonetheless, Balsamo shows, we owe it to the altruism of this generous relative, who never thought twice about sacrificing his own time and resources to Proust, that In Search of Lost Time was ever completed…
Solve for the (drone) equilibrium
A Patriot missile – usually priced at about $3m (£2.5m) – was used to shoot down a small quadcopter drone, according to a US general.
The strike was made by a US ally, Gen David Perkins told a military symposium.
“That quadcopter that cost 200 bucks from Amazon.com did not stand a chance against a Patriot,” he said.
Patriots are radar-targeted weapons more commonly used to shoot down enemy aircraft and ballistic missiles.
“Now, that worked, they got it, OK, and we love Patriot missiles,” the general said.
Here is more, via Ray Lopez.
Addendum: The Chinese are experimenting with a radio wave gun to bring down drones.
The two Irelands have ties Brexit cannot destroy
That is the title of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit from it:
…the U.K. seems to be in a crisis of ideas, as outlined by Michael Moran in his recent “The End of British Politics?”. He points out that the earlier Protestant, imperial and social democratic rationalizations for the political union largely have fallen away. Scottish separatism — now very much back on the agenda — is one manifestation of this problem. In such a setting, it’s possible to imagine a slightly different legal status for Northern Ireland, where the border check — if there is to be one — is done for flights to London rather than for ground transport to the Republic of Ireland, such as on the ground in Donegal County.
I don’t expect full union anytime soon, as I explain in the piece, but here is the closing tag line:
I’m seeing a world where the past is emerging as stronger than we had thought, and where nationalism has arguably been the most influential idea since the 17th century. That probably means the two Irelands still have some surprises in store for us.
Do read the whole thing. And now there is talk of a Northern Irish referendum.
I wish to thank Ray Lopez for the pointer to Moran.
The long reach of black markets in everything
A rhino has been shot dead by poachers at a zoo in France in what is believed to be the first such incident in Europe.
Keepers found Vince, a four-year-old white rhino, in his enclosure at Thoiry Zoo on Tuesday morning.
One of his horns had been hacked off with a chainsaw, police said.
The African rhino’s horn commands high prices on the black market, with about 100 killed every month in the wild.
However, this is thought to be the first time poachers have targeted a rhino living in a European zoo.
Here is the article, via Ray Lopez.
Prizes are flourishing
Stumped for solutions to hundreds of industrial and technical problems, businesses and governments alike are turning the search for innovative ideas into prize-worthy puzzles that capitalize on the ingenuity of the crowd.
At a time when the pace of innovation seems to be slowing, prize sponsors hope that today’s hackers and makers can step into the breach and jump-start progress in a way that today’s research institutions—with their many constituencies and restraints—are struggling to do.
Improve smartphone voice recognition? There’s a $10,000 prize for that. Design a delivery drone? $50,000. Extend the human lifespan? Venture capitalist Dr. Joon Yun offers the $1 million Palo Alto Longevity Prizes. Diagnose antibiotic resistance? That’s worth $20 million. And if anyone can profitably repurpose the carbon emissions involved in global warming, there are prizes totaling $55 million in the offing.
“You name it, there is a prize for it,” said Karim Lakhani at the Harvard Business School’s Crowd Innovation Lab, who has helped run 650 innovation contests in the past six years.
In addition, crowdsourcing companies such as InnoCentive Inc., NineSigma, and Kaggle have posted hundreds of these lucrative research contests on behalf of corporate and government clients, offering cash prizes up to $1 million for practical problems in industrial chemistry, remote sensing, plant genetics and dozens of other technical disciplines. Among them, the three companies can draw on the expertise of two million freelance researchers who have registered for access to the prize challenges.
All told, more than 30,000 significant prizes are awarded every year worth $2 billion and growing, according to McKinsey & Co. The total value of purses from the 219 largest prizes has tripled in the past 10 years. Not only are there more prizes than ever, but nearly 80% of all the major new prizes announced since 1991 are designed to spur specific innovations.
Yet here is a cautionary note:
To be sure, there is little evidence that crowdsourcing competitions have significantly altered the innovation landscape yet. “Prizes are important, but they are not the ultimate incentive for innovation” said Luciano Kay, a research fellow at the University of California at Santa Barbara who studies incentive prizes. “They are not big enough to change how industry works in general.”
Here is the full Robert Lee Hotz WSJ article. Here are previous MR posts on prizes. Here is an MRU video on prizes. Here is my 2007 talk at Google on prizes as a means of funding innovation.
For the pointer I thank Ray Lopez.
China bank spank
The trainer, Jiang Yang, has issued an apology, saying the spanking was “a training model I have tried for years” and had not been instigated by executives at the bank…
The video, which first surfaced on Monday, appears to have been taken by someone in the audience on a smartphone.
Mr Jiang is seen reprimanding eight bank employees on stage, asking them why they received the lowest scores in a training exercise.
The employees give answers including “I did not exceed myself”, “I did not co-ordinate with my team” and “I lacked courage”.
Mr Jiang then says “get your butts ready” and proceeds to spank them with what appears to be a thick piece of wood.
Here is more along with the video. It seems the spanker focused his apology toward the bank executives rather than those who were spanked.
For the pointer I thank Ray Lopez.
That is from Ray Lopez, the first link being added by me.