Results for “solve for equilibrium”
209 found

What does equilibrium look like for the book business?

Adam Davidson offers some interesting remarks.  My take is a little more radical.  I expect two or three major publishers, with stacked names (“Penguin Random House”), and they will be owned by Google, Apple, Amazon, and possibly Facebook, or their successors, which perhaps would make it “Apple Penguin Random House.”  Those companies have lots of cash, amazing marketing penetration, potential synergies with marketing content they own, and very strong desires to remain focal in the eyes of their customer base.  They could buy up a major publisher without running solvency risk.  For instance Amazon revenues are about twelve times those of a merged Penguin Random House and arguably that gap will grow.

There is no hurry, as the tech companies are waiting to buy the content companies, including the booksellers, on the cheap.  Furthermore, the acquirers don’t see it as their mission to make the previous business models of those content companies work.  They will wait.

Did I mention that the tech companies will own some on-line education too?  EduTexts embedded in iPads will be a bigger deal than it is today, and other forms of on-line or App-based content will be given away for free, or cheaply, to sell texts and learning materials through electronic delivery.

Much of the book market will be a loss leader to support the focality of massively profitable web portals and EduTexts and related offerings.

There is this funny thing called antitrust law, but I think these companies are popular enough, and associated closely enough with cool products — and sometimes cheap products — to get away with this.

The equilibrium (with apologies to Daniel Klein)

On September 5, the first Sleeping Beauty in Polataiko’s exhibition awoke to a kiss from another woman. Both of them were surprised. Polataiko shot photos of them laughing and looking at each other. Then he posted the images to his Facebook profile, where he has been live-blogging the entire event. Now the Sleeping Beauty must wed her “prince,” thus queering the historically heteronormative fairtytale. Gay marriage is not allowed in the Ukraine, however, so these two women will have to wed in a European country that does allow for same-sex marriage.

Here is more.  I believe that none of you had solved for this equilibrium.  For the pointer I thank Eapen.

The political economy of Kansas fiscal policy (from the comments)

MR commentator Patrick L. has a go at it:

OK I’ll bite.

In nominal terms, between 2002 and 2012 state receipts grew 50%. Inflation in this period was 28%, and probably significantly lower for Kansas, while population growth has only been about 10% since 2000. Even the “low” 2014 receipts are $1.5 billion more in revenue from when Sebelius first took office and the government started rapidly growing. In the past 15 years expenditures have grown over 50%, exceeding $6 billion today. The shortfall is $300 million, or about 5%. While the growth of the Kansas government in the past 15 years is smaller than other governments in the country, it still explains the shortfall. We can justify this increase by saying that education and health are rising faster than everything else, but that is not a revenue problem. Tax rates have to rise because education and health costs are growing faster than our economies. That says nothing at all about the optimum size of taxation for state governments with regard to growth, jobs, or even revenue. The tax and spending levels Brownback choose would have been adequate ten, maybe even five years ago. With a bit of luck, he could have ignored the shortfall because of variance, which for receipts can be a few hundred million a year.

Republicans should be wise enough to not depend on luck, and they should be wiser predicting how trend lines go. Cutting the size of government was never a serious option.

I haven’t looked at the votes in depth, but it looks like a classic case of urban // rural split that typically troubles the state’s politics. Just under half the state’s population lives around Kansas City or Wichita, which are both five times than the next largest city. These places have as many votes as the rest of Kansas combined, but their needs are radically different.

Rural Kansas has two unique problems. First, there’s the problem of population collapse, which all farm states are seeing. What few children are born move out when they come of age and new people are not moving in. Fixed costs like “We need at least one school building” or “We need at least one teacher per grade” start to add up for small towns of 1000 or less. Those are the obvious problems, not to mention any number of federal or state concerns dealing with food, medical, or disability services that have to be met. As a matter of geography, 98% of the state is rural, and I think I heard 25% of the state is in towns less than 2500 – with over 400 municipal governments servicing less than 1000 people it’s probably the highest per capita in the country (This is FIVE times the national average).

This is a non-trivial growing problem related to scale government services that has been an issue of intense legal debate in the state. Wichita School District’s scale is such it can use its buses to deliver free or low cost lunches to children in the summer. Small cities don’t have buses. Is that fair? How should taxes be structured to compensate? The only political viable solution to this problem has been to spend more money. If all the small towns could magically consolidate into a super smallville, taxes would (back of the envelope) be 10-15% lower.

Government services to low population areas are subsidized by high population areas, and it costs much more to deliver the same services to small towns. The US Postal Service paid for delivery to small towns across the country by charging monopolistic prices on first class letter mail in cities (Which cost almost nothing to deliver). NPR’s national budget mostly goes to setup stations in small towns. The small towns in Kansas are both relatively and in many cases actually getting smaller, older, and poorer. They are costing more and delivering less.

The other problem is that some rural areas are *growing*, but they’re growing because of immigration attracted to the agriculture and food packaging industries. Which is not the same as growing from a resource boom which can be taxed heavily to compensate. Liberal, KS is the largest per capita immigrant community in the United States. While this influx of people is necessary for the health of these places, the new population has more expensive demands on government services and pays less in taxes. Some of these small towns are the same ones that a decade ago were collapsing. Services and infrastructure might have been allowed to lapse or removed, and now rapidly needs to be replaced. That’s expensive! In the long run this problem might replace the first problem, but for now it’s the worst of both worlds.

The economy of the small cities is based largely around food production, which mostly can’t move, and food packaging, which probably can’t for logistical reasons. These places are poorer, getting relatively poorer per capita, and demanding more in services both directly (immigration / aging) and through scale issues. Their populations are either getting very old or very Hispanic, or both.

In contrast, Kansas City is a stable metropolis whose economy depends on manufacturing is built around a national centralized hub for trains. It also has some finance and telecom sprinkled in, though those guys can probably go anywhere. Wichita, is a moderately growing city based around aircraft manufacturing. When state taxes can’t provide enough government services, local taxes for these areas easily rise to compensate. Their economic concerns are how to stop businesses from going across the border to Omaha, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Springfield, or Kansas City, Mo – places which are functionally identical and just as close. Given their dependence on manufacturing, they also have to consider movement across international borders to China and Mexico. Their demography is much closer to the national averages rather than the extremes. They are large enough that they can take advantage of scaling for government services, without being so large that there is decreasing actual returns. I don’t have figures, but I’d guess income rates in the urban areas to be between 150 and 200% those of the rural areas, which are themselves typically around 2/3rds the national average. This is an industry effect, a farmer in Kansas City and an aeronautical engineer in Greensburg, KS would not make much money. The cities are richer, but they’re richer because they have industries that are becoming increasingly easier to move.

On a political level, normally cities become more liberal, and poorer as you go deeper into the city – a leftover of 19th century industrialization competing against 20th century transportation. Deep urban cores produce these deep blue constituencies that act as checks on conservative suburban rings. In some states this manifests itself as a coalition between the poor rural areas and the poor urban areas against richer suburban areas allowing normal American class politics to balance itself. Cities produce political equilibrium: The richer and denser it becomes, the more liberal, which pushes more money and voters to suburbia, diluting the power. In short, declining rural power (D) and rising urban power (D) offset each other, but rising urban power (D) enhances suburban power (R), and so at a state level you get a balance.

The problem is that the inner core of Kansas City is in Missouri, so Kansas only gets the rich (Republican) suburban ring and a tiny blue part. Typical democratic concerns like maintaining a progressive tax structure can’t really find a foundation. While Wichita also has an urban core that does provide a Democratic representation, the city isn’t constrained geographically by anything (No ocean, mountain, lake, and transportation goes around, not through, the city) means concentration, an ingredient for populist politics, is lessened. The city spreads, and the poor can easily move up the class structure by moving further and further out. Wichita has half the population density of Syracuse and two thirds that of Madison, two close sized metropolitan areas. I haven’t done a county level comparison, but I suspect that Sedgwick has half the density of the ‘average American county with half a million people’ in it. There are other places in America like that, but guess how they vote.

Nor are either cities big university cities, like Madison or Boston. The two big universities in the state are in the small towns of Lawrence and Manhattan, which are quite separate from the rest of the state. Urban centers are places of “Commanding Heights” industries, like health and education that can’t easily move, but Wichita and Kansas City are based around manufacturing.

The political outcomes are not that surprising at all. There is nothing ‘the matter with Kansas’. The power structure easily shifts between slim majorities formed from predominately suburban populations who are wealthier, and whose jobs are most likely to move, and slim majorities formed from the small urban cores and rural parts of the state.

There’s no possible political coalition that you could form that would pass a constitutional amendment allowing a floating balanced budget over a 10 year period. Nor are the populist pressure strong enough to push against regressive taxation. You have ‘fiscal hawks’ in the rural areas who never vote for cuts, and suburban conservatives who never vote for taxes. When the storm gets too bad, they vote a nice moderate democrat in to raise taxes and crack down hard on whatever (Non manufacturing / agricultural) big business they can put pressure on. Obviously something that can’t move easily like Health Insurance.

In summery, this really is an issue of Urban vs Rural politics. Unlike other cities, the kind of industries around Kansas City and Wichita can move. The jobs in the rural areas can’t. The rural areas require more per capita government services, and the urban areas have more money. They both have half the vote. Solve for equilibrium.

== As for the deal:

It’s mostly a .4% sales tax increase, which is less than some of the more fanciful projects done by local governments in the past 15 years, which have included sports arenas, loans to movie theaters, and waterfront improvement. A half cent increase in sales tax does move the state into the top 10 for the country, but the overall tax burden is still quite low. The real problem is that city/county sales taxes are a function of distance from Wichita, and the inverse of population. The smaller your city, and the farther you are from Wichita, the more the county depends on sales taxes. In places like Junction City, this could put the sales tax close to 10%! The real disparity is going to be at the border towns: After the change there will be a .7% difference between KC, KS and KC, MO, though I bet the Missouri side will raise taxes to compensate. After the increase, there’s a 1.5% difference between Pittsburg, KS and Joplin, MO – big enough that I could see some people consider driving for purchases more than $300 (Biweekly grocery shopping for a large family?), especially if retailers on the Missouri side are not dumb. As a general rule, the money and the shopping is on the Kansas side of the border, so stuff isn’t going to transition immediately, but I expect some Laffer curve effects here for local governments, and I would hope they’ll respond by dropping taxes to compensate.

This is probably WHY such a deal was able to pass. Most of the damage goes on the poor and rural parts of Kansas, which is where most of the balance budget hawks are. The rich living near Kansas City will have the easiest time dodging the increase and avoid it more often. A regressive tax, but an efficient one.

As for the other parts of the deal, $90 million in itemized deductions are being removed. I don’t actually think this will amount to much, since there aren’t many itemized state deductions left. What remains are things like adoption, historical preservation, or disabled access. I don’t see much money coming in this way, and the state will almost certainly reverse itself the first chance it gets (As it did the last time it got rid of the adoption credit).

Whew!

Mongol

Matt Yglesias offers a good review of this excellent movie, which chronicles the early life of Genghis Khan, or one vision thereof.  There are at least two increasing returns to scale mechanisms in this movie.  First, leadership is focal, which tends to bind groups together and make concentrated rule possible.  Winning battles makes you focal and winning larger battles makes you focal across larger groups.  Second, if you walk or ride alone in the countryside, you will be snatched or plundered.  That causes people to live in settlements and also larger cities.  Put those mechanisms together, solve for equilibrium, and eventually one guy rules a very large kingdom and you get some semblance of free trade.  Sooner or later, that is.  The movie brings you only part of the way there and I believe a sequel is in the works.

Wednesday assorted links

1. Interview with Galen Strawson, including about panpsychism.

2. Botched Dublin pipe bomb drone attack, neighborly feud edition.  Solve for the equilibrium.

3. Claims that spicy food is good for you.

4. Unparalleled misalignments.  Amazing what people will spend time on.

5. Why didn’t tariffs help the dollar?

6. Reforming naval shipbuilding.

7. The cardinals are watching Conclave to learn things.

8. OpenAI for countries.

9. Payment volume growth for stablecoins.

10. The role of China in the dispute.

Manufacturing and Trade

It has become popular in some circles to argue that trade—or, in the more “sophisticated” version, that the dollar’s reserve-currency status—undermines U.S. manufacturing. In reality, there is little support for this claim.

Let’s begin with some simple but often overlooked points.

  1. The US is a manufacturing powerhouse. We produce $2.5 trillion of value-added in manufacturing output, more than ever before in history.
  2. As a share of total employment, employment in manufacturing is on a long-term, slow, secular trend down. This is true not just in the United States but in most of the world and is primarily a reflection of automation allowing us to produce more with less. Even China has topped out on manufacturing employment.
  3. A substantial majority of US imports are for intermediate goods like capital goods, industrial supplies and raw materials that are used to produce other goods including manufacturing exports! Tariffs, therefore, often make it more costly to manufacture domestically.
  4. The US is a big country and we consume a lot of our own manufacturing output. We do export and import substantial amounts, but trade is not first order when it comes to manufacturing. Regardless of your tariff theories, to increase manufacturing output we need to increase US manufacturing productivity by improving infrastructure, reducing the cost of energy, improving education, reducing regulation and speeding permitting. You can’t build in America if you can’t build power plants, roads and seaports.
  5. The US is the highest income large country in the world. It’s hard to see how we have been ripped off by trade. China is much poorer than the United States.
  6. China produces more manufacturing output than the United States, most of which it consumes domestically. China has more than 4 times the population of the United States. Of course, they produce more! India will produce more than the United States in the future as well. Get used to it. You know what they say about people with big shoes? They have big feet. Countries with big populations. They produce a lot. More Americans would solve this “problem.”
  7. Most economists agree that there are some special cases for subsidizing and protecting a domestic industry, e.g. military production, vaccines.

The seven points cover most of the ground but more recently there has been an argument that the US dollar’s status as a reserve currency, which we used to call the “exorbitant privilege,” is now somehow a nefarious burden. This strikes me as largely an ex-post rationalization for misguided policies, but let’s examine the core claim: the US’s status as a reserve currency forces the US dollar to appreciate which makes our exports less competitive on world markets. Tariffs are supposed to (somehow?) depreciate the currency solving this problem. Every step is questionable. Note, for example, that tariffs tend to appreciate the dollar since the supply of dollars declines. Note also that if even if tariffs depreciated the currency, depreciating the currency doesn’t help to increase exports if you have cut imports (see Three Simple Principles of Trade Policy). I want to focus, however, on the first point does the US status as world reserve currency appreciate the dollar and hurt exports? This is mostly standard economics so its not entirely wrong but I think it misses key points even for most economists.

Countries hold dollars to facilitate world trade, and this benefits the United States. By “selling” dollars—which we can produce at minimal cost (albeit it does help that we spend on the military to keep the sea lanes open)—we acquire real goods and services in exchange, realizing an “exorbitant privilege.” Does that privilege impose a hidden cost on our manufacturing sector? Not really.

In the short run, increased global demand for dollars can push up the exchange rate, making exports more expensive. Yet this effect arises whatever the cause of the increased demand for dollars. If foreigners want to buy more US tractors this appreciates the dollar and makes it more expensive for foreigners to buy US computers. Is our tractor industry a nefarious burden on our computer industry? I don’t think so but more importantly, this is a short-run effect. Exchange rates adjust first, but other prices follow, with purchasing power parity (PPP) tendencies limiting any long-term overvaluation.

To see why, imagine a global single-currency world (e.g., a gold standard or a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar). In this scenario, increased demand for US assets would primarily lead to lower US interest rates or higher US asset prices, equilibrating the market without altering the relative price of US goods through the exchange rate mechanism. With freely floating exchange rates, the exchange rate moves first and the effect of the increased demand is moderated and spread widely but as other prices adjust the long-run equilibrium is the same as in a world with one currency. There’s no permanent “extra” appreciation that would systematically erode manufacturing competitiveness. Notice also that the moderating effect of floating exchange rates works in both directions so when there is deprecation the initial effect is spread more widely giving industries time to adjust as we move to the final equilibrium.

None of this to deny that some industries may feel short-run pressure from currency swings but these pressures are not different from all of the ordinary ups and down of market demand and supply, some of which, as I hove noted, floating exchange rates tend to moderate.

Ensuring a robust manufacturing sector depends on sound domestic policies, innovation, and workforce development, rather than trying to devalue the currency or curtail trade. Far from being a nefarious cost, the U.S. role as issuer of the world’s reserve currency confers significant financial and economic advantages that, in the long run, do not meaningfully erode the nation’s manufacturing base.

Was our universe born inside a black hole?

Without a doubt, since its launch, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revolutionized our view of the early universe, but its new findings could put astronomers in a spin. In fact, it could tell us something profound about the birth of the universe by possibly hinting that everything we see around us is sealed within a black hole.

The $10 billion telescope, which began observing the cosmos in the Summer of 2022, has found that the vast majority of deep space and, thus the early galaxies it has so far observed, are rotating in the same direction. While around two-thirds of galaxies spin clockwise, the other third rotates counter-clockwise.

In a random universe, scientists would expect to find 50% of galaxies rotating one way, while the other 50% rotate the other way. This new research suggests there is a preferred direction for galactic rotation…

“It is still not clear what causes this to happen, but there are two primary possible explanations,” team leader Lior Shamir, associate professor of computer science at the Carl R. Ice College of Engineering, said in a statement. “One explanation is that the universe was born rotating. That explanation agrees with theories such as black hole cosmology, which postulates that the entire universe is the interior of a black hole.

“But if the universe was indeed born rotating, it means that the existing theories about the cosmos are incomplete.”

…This has another implication; each and every black hole in our universe could be the doorway to another “baby universe.” These universes would be unobservable to us because they are also behind an event horizon, a one-way light-trapping point of no return from which light cannot escape, meaning information can never travel from the interior of a black hole to an external observer.

Here is the full story.  Solve for the Darwinian equilibrium!  Of course Julian Gough has been pushing related ideas for some while now

The political economy of Manus AI

Early reports are pretty consistent, and they indicate that Manus agentic AI is for real, and ahead of its American counterparts.  I also hear it is still glitchy  Still, it is easy to imagine Chinese agentic AI “getting there” before the American product does.  If so, what does that world look like?

The cruder way of putting the question is: “are we going to let Chinese agentic bots crawl all over American computers?”

The next step question is: “do we in fact have a plausible way to stop this from happening?”

Many Chinese use VPNs to get around their own Great Firewall and access OpenAI products.  China could toughen its firewall and shut down VPNs, but that is very costly for them.  America doesn’t have a Great Firewall at all, and the First Amendment would seem to prevent very tough restrictions on accessing the outside world.  Plus there can always be a version of the new models not directly connected to China.

We did (sort of) pass a TikTok ban, but even that applied only to the app.  Had the ban gone through, you still could have accessed TikTok through its website.  And so, one way or another, Americans will be able to access Manus.

Manus will crawl your computer and do all sorts of useful tasks for you.  If not right now, probably within a year or not much more.  An American alternative might leapfrog them, but again maybe not.

It is easy to imagine government banning Manus from its computers, just as the state of Virginia banned DeepSeek from its computers.  I’m just not sure that matters much.  Plenty of people will use it on their private computers, and it could become an integral part of many systems, including systems that interact with the U.S. public sector.

It is not obvious that the CCP will be able to pull strings to manipulate every aspect of Manus operations.  I am not worried that you might order a cheeseburger on-line, and end up getting Kung Pao chicken.  Still, the data collected by the parent company will in principle be CCP- accessible.  Remember that advanced AI can be used to search through that information with relative ease.  And over time, though probably not initially, you can imagine a Manus-like entity designed to monitor your computer for information relevant to China and the CCP.  Even if it is not easy for a Manus-like entity to manipulate your computer in a “body snatchers-like” way, you can see the points of concern here.

Financial firms might be vulnerable to information capture attacks.  Will relatives of U.S. military personnel be forbidden from having agentic Chinese AI on their computers?  That does not seem enforceable.

Maybe you’re all worried now!

But should you be?

Whatever problems American computer owners might face, Chinese computer owners will face too.  And the most important Chinese computer owner is the CCP and its affiliates, including the military.

More likely, Manus will roam CCP computers too.  No, I don’t think that puts “the aliens” in charge, but who exactly is in charge?  Is it Butterfly Effect, the company behind Manus, and its few dozen employees?  In the short run, yes, more or less.  But they too over time are using more and more agentic AIs, perhaps different brands from other companies too.

Think of some new system of checks and balances as being created, much as an economy is itself a spontaneous order.  And in this new spontaneous order, a lot of the cognitive capital is coming outside the CCP.

In this new system, is the CCP still the smartest or most powerful entity in China?  Or does the spontaneous order of various AI models more or less “rule it”?  To what extent do the decisions of the CCP become a derivative product of Manus (and other systems) advice, interpretation, and data gathering?

What exactly is the CCP any more?

Does the importance of Central Committee membership decline radically?

I am not talking doomsday scenarios here.  Alignment will ensure that the AI entities (for instance) continue to supply China with clean water, rather than poisoning the water supply.  But those AI entities have been trained on information sets that have very different weights than what the CCP implements through its Marxism-swayed, autocracy-swayed decisions.  Chinese AI systems look aligned with the CCP, given that they have some crude, ex post censorship and loyalty training.  But are the AI systems truly aligned in terms of having the same limited, selective set of information weights that the CCP does?  I doubt it.  If they did, probably they would not be the leading product.

(There is plenty of discussion of alignment problems with AI.  A neglected issue is whether the alignment solution resulting from the competitive process is biased on net toward “universal knowledge” entities, or some other such description, rather than “dogmatic entities.”  Probably it is, and probably that is a good thing?  …But is it always a good thing?)

Does the CCP see this erosion of its authority and essence coming?  If so, will they do anything to try to preempt it?  Or maybe a few of them, in Straussian fashion, allow it or even accelerate it?

Let’s say China can indeed “beat” America at AI, but at the cost of giving up control over China, at least as that notion is currently understood.  How does that change the world?

Solve for the equilibrium!

Who exactly should be most afraid of Manus and related advances to come?

Who loses the most status in the new, resulting checks and balances equilibrium?

Who gains?

The Trump Administration’s Attack on Science Will Backfire

The Trump administration is targeting universities for embracing racist and woke ideologies, but its aim is off. The problem is that the disciplines leading the woke charge—English, history, and sociology—don’t receive much government funding. So the administration is going after science funding, particularly the so-called “overhead” costs that support university research. This will backfire for four reasons.

First, the Trump administration appears to believe that reducing overhead payments will financially weaken the ideological forces in universities. But in reality, science overhead doesn’t support the humanities or social sciences in any meaningful way. The way universities are organized, science funding mostly stays within the College of Science to pay for lab space, research infrastructure, and scientific equipment. Cutting these funds won’t defund woke ideology—it will defund physics labs, biomedical research, and engineering departments. The humanities will remain relatively untouched.

Second, science funding supports valuable research, from combating antibiotic resistance to curing cancer to creating new materials. Not all funded projects are useful, but the returns to R&D are high. If we err it is in funding too little rather than too much. The US is a warfare-welfare state when it should be an innovation state. If you want to reform education, repeal the Biden student loan programs that tax mechanical engineers and subsidize drama majors.

Third, if government science funding subsidizes anyone, it’s American firms. Universities are the training grounds for engineers and scientists, most of whom go on to work for U.S. companies. Undermining science funding weakens this pipeline, ultimately harming American firms rather than striking a blow at wokeness. One of the biggest failings of the Biden administration were its attacks on America’s high-tech entrepreneurial firms. Why go after Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta when these are among our best, world-beating firms? But you know what other American sector is world-beating? American universities. The linkage is no accident.

Fourth, scientists are among the least woke academics. Most steer clear of activism, and many view leftist campus culture with skepticism. The STEM fields are highly meritocratic and reality-driven. By undermining science, the administration is weakening one of America’s leading meritocratic sectors. The long run implications of weakening meritocracy are not good. Solve for the equilibrium.

In short, going after science funding is a self-defeating strategy. If conservatives want to reform higher education, they need a smarter approach.

Hat tip: Connor.

Deep Research

I have had it write a number of ten-page papers for me, each of them outstanding.  I think of the quality as comparable to having a good PhD-level research assistant, and sending that person away with a task for a week or two, or maybe more.

Except Deep Research does the work in five or six minutes.  And it does not seem to make errors, due to the quality of the embedded o3 model.

It seems it can cover just about any topic?

I asked for a ten-page paper explaining Ricardo’s theory of rent, and how it fits into his broader theory of distribution.  It is a little long, but that was my fault, here is the result.  I compared it to a number of other sources on line, and thought it was better, and so I am using it for my history of economic thought class.

I do not currently see signs of originality, but the level of accuracy and clarity is stunning, and it can write and analyze at any level you request.  The work also shows the model can engage in a kind of long-term planning, and that will generalize to some very different contexts and problems as well — that is some of the biggest news associated with this release.

Sometimes the model stops in the middle of its calculations and you need to kick it in the shins a bit to get it going again, but I assume that problem will be cleared up soon enough.

If you pay for o1 pro, you get I think 100 queries per month with Deep Research.

Solve for the equilibrium, people, solve for the equilibrium.

Friday assorted links

1. NYC is starting a crackdown to ensure payment of bus fares (NYT).

2. Steve Silberman, RIP.

3. 100 million token context window?

4. Egypt sending troops to Somalia?

5. “Japan plans cash incentive for women to marry and leave Tokyo.”  I think they will find it hard to achieve the desired ends here.

6. Does America have enough states to support statistical inference?

7. Eleven minute AI film.

8. Brazil’s military relies on Starlink for operations and security.  Solve for the equilibrium.  And the very latest development.

9. Italy considering a tourist tax on expensive hotel rooms (FT).

10. For the first time, more than half the entering class at Caltech will be women.

11. GLP-1 drugs help against Covid adverse events.

Schengen eroding, child legal arbitrage markets in everything

“We are increasing surveillance, in part to increase security, but also to prevent hired Swedish child soldiers who come to Copenhagen to carry out tasks in connection with gang conflicts,” he added.

Hummelgaard revealed on Thursday that there had been 25 incidents since April where Danish criminal gangs had hired what he called “child soldiers” to commit crimes in Denmark. In the last two weeks alone, Danish police have linked three shootings to Swedish teenagers…

Swedish police say that powerful criminal gangs often use children to commit murders as they will receive light sentences. Drug gangs — many of whom are led by second-generation immigrants now living outside the country — have infiltrated parts of the welfare, legal and political systems, meaning the fight against them could take decades, according to Swedish officials.

Here is more from Richard Milne at the FT.  Elsewhere, “Brown bears are protected under EU law,” solve for the equilibrium (FT).

The University presidents

Here is three and a half minutes of their testimony before Congress.  Worth a watch, if you haven’t already.  I have viewed some other segments as well, none of them impressive.  I can’t bring myself to sit through the whole thing.

I don’t doubt that I would find their actual views on world affairs highly objectionable, but that is not why I am here today.  Here are a few other points:

1. Their entire testimony is ruled by their lawyers, by their fear that their universities might be sued, and their need to placate internal interest groups.  That is a major problem, in addition to their unwillingness to condemn various forms of rhetoric for violating their codes of conduct.  As Katherine Boyle stated: “This is Rule by HR Department and it gets dark very fast.”

How do you think that affects the quality of their other decisions?  The perceptions and incentives of their subordinates?

2. They are all in a defensive crouch.  None of them are good on TV.  None of them are good in front of Congress.  They have ended up disgracing their universities, in front of massive audiences (the largest they ever will have?), simply for the end goal of maintaining a kind of (illusory?) maximum defensibility for their positions within their universities.  At that they are too skilled.

How do you think that affects the quality of their other decisions?  The perceptions and incentives of their subordinates?

What do you think about the mechanisms that led these particular individuals to be selected for top leadership positions?

3. Not one came close to admitting how hypocritical private university policies are on free speech.  You can call for Intifada but cannot express say various opinions about trans individuals.  Not de facto.  Whether you think they should or not, none of these universities comes close to enforcing “First Amendment standards” for speech, even off-campus speech for their faculty, students, and affiliates.

What do you think that says about the quality and forthrightness of their other decisions?  Of the subsequent perceptions and incentives of their subordinates?

What do you think about the mechanisms that led this particular equilibrium to evolve?

Overall this was a dark day for American higher education.  I want you to keep in mind that the incentives you saw on display rule so many other parts of the system, albeit usually invisibly.  Don’t forget that.  These university presidents have solved for what they think is the equilibrium, and it ain’t pretty.

Monday assorted links

1. That was then, this is now, railway compartment edition.

2. Harriet Taylor is underrated.

3. “My data show that nearly half of my study participants report meaningful and regular interactions with deceased relatives and friends who were important in their lives.” — solve for the AI equilibrium.

4. Yet another paper showing that the evidence for YouTube radicalization is weak.

5. Russ Roberts Substack on current life in Israel.

6. Patrick O’Shaughnessy interview John and Patrick Collison.