Results for “ufo” 115 found
Friday assorted links
1. Are strong interventions overrated?: “I find that the interventions reduce completion rates of the opposite behavior by 19-29%.”
2. Colby College bans caste-based discrimination.
3. The most overstudied places in development economics?
4. My sister wins another bird photography award.
5. Do Americans want smaller government once again?
6. A deeper look at the vaccine-hesitant (Zeynep, NYT).
From Kalshi Markets
I wanted to reach out and provide some updates about new markets on the Exchange that may be of interest. We have a new market on whether the FDA will approve a vaccine for kids, in addition to a market on whether the CDC will identify a “variant of high consequence” (Delta is only a “variant of concern”). We also have markets about whether the Fed will taper at its next meeting, whether the U.S. will raise the debt ceiling before October 19, and whether or not Jerome Powell will be replaced….We also have markets on whether the capital gains and corporate tax will be raised, in case that’s of interest.
Go trade!
Tuesday assorted links
1. Your periodic reminder to read Matt Levine (Bloomberg). And Bloomberg Media is doing just great. Congratulations to all those I work with! If you don’t already, you should subscribe too.
2. Space Force reluctant to take over UFO mission.
3. My remarks on the new All Things Must Pass reissue.
4. Interview with Ken Rogoff, focusing on China.
5. I’ve never been anti-mask, in either theory or personal practice, but I find it striking how this NYT Op-Ed, advocating mandatory masking for children in school, upon a close read presents no actual evidence whatsoever. If I understand them correctly, here is “the control”: “By contrast, one school in Israel without a mask mandate or proper social distancing protocols reported an outbreak of Covid-19 involving 153 students and 25 staff members.” Maybe they are just poor writers and bad organizers of thought, and the actual controls are in fact air tight.
Friday assorted links
2. Vitalik on overuse of the Gini coefficient.
4. James Buchanan and club theory.
5. The details of how the delta variant works, better than I was expecting.
6. The laser-created, mid-air plasma columns hypothesis (WSJ).
7. Sriram Krishnan profile and Clubhouse (NYT).
Wednesday assorted links
2. “An estimated 1.2 million people died from snakebites in India between 2000 and 2019, the equivalent of more than 58,000 a year, according to a recent paper.” Link here.
3. The next wave of Facebook Bulletin writers.
4. Myhrvold says Portland is the best pizza city in the U.S.; I say eastern Connecticut.
5. Mastercard partners with Circle to settle stablecoin payments. Are we seeing “the rails built before our eyes”?
6. UAPx: new non-profit to monitor UFOs.
Very good sentences
“One highlight of the night, aside from the enormous spread of pies, was chatting with former Sen. Bill Nelson, now the head of NASA, and hearing him talk about the recent UFO report — he’s convinced life is out there somewhere”
Here is the context, if you are curious, though you shouldn’t be. Via the handsome, straight-shooting Kevin Lewis.
Wednesday assorted links
1. More. Please forgive the source and the pop-ups.
2. Those new service sector jobs: the rising number of dog lawyers in Canada.
3. The decentralized origin of standard weights.
4. The longer-term economic consequences of pandemics, over 220 years.
5. Why Africa’s island states are generally freer (The Economist).
6. Transient pacemaker that dissolves harmlessly in your body. And another step toward a pancoronavirus vaccine.
Friday assorted conspiracy links
1. Vanity Fair on lab leak, with autistic hero.
2. NYT previews the UFO report (based on leaks, presumably). USG is still puzzled, reports it is not “their stuff,” so I guess your “p” on alien origin should go up modestly. Here is how the NYT web headline evolved. The paper edition has the most accurate “U.S. Concedes It Can’t Identify Flying Objects.”
3. Model this: “A bride collapsed and died at her wedding. The groom then married the woman’s sister with her dead body lying in the next room.”
Thursday assorted links
1. Robin Hanson reasons it out.
2. New estimate is 905,000 U.S. deaths from the pandemic so far, 6.9 million worldwide.
4. Derek Lowe on breaking vaccine patents.
5. “Three dollar store chains will make up almost half of all the new stores opening up in the United States this year…” Update: Ryan Decker says nope!
How would actual alien spacecraft influence asset prices?
Primarily as an exercise, I thought about that question for a while, and here is part of my answer in a Bloomberg column:
If you know you are being watched, what exactly do you wish to buy more of? I would bet on defense stocks to rise, whether or not there is much we can do to defend ourselves against this alien presence.
Of course investors could not be sure that these alien drone probes will merely observe us forever. They might be observing with the purpose of rendering judgment. If they are offended by our militaristic tendencies, the quality of our TV shows and our inability to adopt the cosmopolitan values of “Star Trek” over the next 30 years, maybe they will zap us into oblivion. But that kind of systematic risk is hard to insure against. After such an act of obliteration, neither gold nor Bitcoin will do you any good.
My main prediction is that alien UFOs will be bullish for the dollar. The U.S. government seems most closely connected to the UFO phenomenon, for whatever reason. (Maybe its pilots fly more sallies and record better data?) In any case, if alien UFOs become more likely, an informational advantage would accrue to the federal government. And the dollar already has a tradition as a safe haven currency…
Most of us would get used to the idea of alien presence without quite believing in it. As The New Yorker makes clear, many Americans believed in alien-origin UFOs after World War II, as did many American policymakers. It might have spurred greater interest in the space program and science fiction, but it didn’t affect most aspects of American life, nor did it seem to drive markets.
Never underestimate the capacity of markets, like humans, to adapt. Just as many of the strangest parts of our lives can come to seem normal, so Wall Street can find a way to do business with just about anybody — aliens included.
I do full, literally mean everything stated in the column. But the piece also has (at least) two esoteric meanings — can you guess what they are?
Friday assorted links
1. Are the UFOs foreign drones launched from submarines in the Atlantic? As always, please note that a link is not an endorsement.
2. How Swiss is your watch? (NYT)
3. Paul Graham on how people get rich now.
4. Germany stops recognizing special UK passport for HongKongers.
5. Republicans and big business (my Bloomberg column).
6. Will China send peacekeeping forces to Afghanistan to replace departing U.S. troops?
7. Turkey bans crypto payments.
8. Ryan Decker, et.al. estimate excess business deaths from the pandemic.
My Conversation with Lex Fridman
2 hours 9 minutes long, Lex is one of the very best interviewers/discussants in the sector. Here is the video, here is the audio. Plenty of new topics and avenues, including the political economy of Russia (note this was recorded before the massing of Russian forces on the Ukraine border). Lex’s tweet described it as follows:
Here’s my conversation with @tylercowen about economic growth, resisting conformity, the value of being weird, competition and capitalism, UFO sightings, contemporary art, best food in the world, and of course, love, death, and meaning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Grseeycor4
Recommended.
Wednesday assorted links
2. New types of research organization.
3. Which famous economist has views closest to yours?
4. Danny Kaye bits, including some calypso with Harry Belafonte. And with Lucille Ball and Louis Armstrong. And 56 Russian composers.
5. Should Amsterdam limit tourism? (NYT)
6. More good news from the UK. And Nigeria has 500 Scrabble clubs.
Saturday assorted links
1. DNIonUFOs.
2. Florida bans pythons: ““People have literally spent millions and even moved to Florida from out of state, built cages and started businesses, and now they have to get rid of everything,” said Brian Love, a founding member of the group’s state chapter.”
3. Maps of the names of Donald Duck’s brothers in different countries.
4. “In Germany, there’s a very great reluctance to countenance imposing affirmative harm on people in trade-off situations,” Dr. Persad said. “It’s a very strong emphasis on not causing harm, even if you allow much more harm through inaction.” (NYT link)
Wednesday assorted links
1. Robin Hanson: Is Status-Seeking A Context-Neglecting-Value?
2. UFO skeptic West has not in fact debunked those videos.
3. More on the new UK science funding agency.
4. Story of Novavax (WSJ). And new efficacy data for Chinese vaccines.
5. Response to Julia Galef and Herbert Simon on the value of travel.
6. “The huge parachute used by NASA’s Perseverance rover to land on Mars contained a secret message, thanks to a puzzle lover on the spacecraft team. Systems engineer Ian Clark used a binary code to spell out “Dare Mighty Things” in the orange and white strips of the 70-foot (21-meter) parachute. He also included the GPS coordinates for the mission’s headquarters at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.” Link here.
7. New radical computer science program in Limerick, Ireland.