Marijuana in Canada
Dispensaries selling various strains of marijuana and high-potency extracts, called budder and shatter, have opened on main streets. Regular pop-up markets like the one in Hamilton have sprouted, to the point vendors can attend five a week in the Toronto area.
Cannabis lounges have expanded, offering not just a place to smoke and take hits, but classes on growing cannabis at home and making cannabis creams. Cannabis-infused catering has gone so mainstream that the national association of food service businesses, Restaurants Canada, is hosting a seminar on it. Cannabis tour companies have opened, as have cannabis “bud-and-breakfasts.”
Universities and colleges across the country have introduced courses on cannabis business, investing, retail and cultivation.
Newspapers, which have hired full-time cannabis reporters, have published cannabis sections, filled with editorial ads by government-licensed producers advertising lines of cannabis-infused beverages, coffee and dog chew toys they are developing for when such products become legal.
…Ms. Roach see cannabis becoming almost like corn in its derivative form, threaded through everyday Canadian consumer products. Although people eat a minimal amount of corn each day, she said, “there’s corn syrup in everything.”
That is from Catherine Porter at the NYT. I increasingly believe that decriminalization will prove a more stable solution than outright legalization.
How streaming has changed song structures
From Martin Connor, here is a list of seven mechanisms, you can read the explanations at the link:
1. Streamings’ Data Collection Makes Songs Simpler
2. Streaming Sites’ Social Media Makes Songs Confessional
3. Small Streaming Profits Make Songs Shorter
4. Streaming’s Customizability Makes Songs Built To Order
5. Content Digitization Makes Songs More Diverse [TC: does that contradict some of the other general claims?]
6. Free Content Makes Songs More Collaborative [TC: and here’s the explanation for this one:]
Artistic competition is so fierce nowadays that artists need to constantly release music. One way to do this is to make songs shorter and simpler; another way is to get a producer to make the beat, a singer to make the chorus, and another rapper for the second verse. This leads to Migos member Offset, DJ Khaled, Justin Bieber, Chance The Rapper, and Lil Wayne all appearing on the same 2017 song, “I’m The One.” It also means that fans start to see credits like those from Cardi B’s new album “Invasion of Privacy”. The 13 tracks on the album features 104 total writing credits, meaning 8 people per track. Its single “Be Careful” has 17 alone.
7. Video’s Increasing Dominance Makes Songs Into Soundtracks
Via the excellent Samir Varma.
*Stubborn Attachments* blurbs
You can find them here, note you may need to click on the right to read the furthest right-hand side of the page. Here are excerpts from those blurbs:
Tim Harford: “His best, most ambitious and most personal work.”
Cardiff Garcia: “I think you’ll find that following the logic in Stubborn Attachments is as fun as it is intellectually provocative.”
Mason Hartman: “The book invites you to fight it.”
Cass Sunstein: “It’s a book for right now, and a book for all times. A magnificent achievement.”
Tomorrow is publication date for the book, you can order here, and here is some background on Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals.
Note I am donating all of the proceeds to a man in Ethiopia.
Monday assorted links
1. Why we like being scared. More here.
2. If you had only one day to eat in New York City, where should you go? (New Yorker) More useful than almost any other restaurant advice you will get.
3. The importance of class ordinal rank.
4. Tractor overturns are the leading cause of farm fatalities.
5. Uber’s secret weapon is its team of economists. And this bit: “When he married in 2011, a quarter of the wedding guests were economists.”
6. “The race is on toward the first 2,000-pound pumpkin in Canada.“
Is innovation democracy’s unique advantage?
I say yes, though I don’t think it is easy to prove. Here is part of the abstract, from Rui Tang and Shiping Tang:
We contend that the channel of liberty‐to‐innovation is the most critical channel in which democracy holds a unique advantage over autocracy in promoting growth, especially during the stage of growth via innovation. Our theory thus predicts that democracy holds a positive but indirect effect upon growth via the channel of liberty‐to‐innovation, conditioned by the level of economic development. We then present quantitative evidence for our theory.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Nashville notes
I strongly recommend eating at Husk (get the vegetables plate) and Chauhan Ale and Masala House (the Indian-Mexican fusion version of a chile relleno is one of the best courses I have had all year). Station Inn is good (and comfortable) for bluegrass music, visit Fisk University, Helen’s Hot Chicken serves spicy fried chicken without the tourists or the lines, and the east side of town has some funky shops and boutiques.
Grand Ole Opry is a well-oiled machine, but it makes country music feel old and bankrupt. The famous strip on Broadway, with the noisy bars, music shows, and restaurants, might as well be hell, but it offers the great joy of being able to leave it. The “Gulch” part of town is presented as cool, but it’s really just a few boring shops in a homogenized setting.
Nonetheless I now think of Nashville as one of the most successful cities in the South — remarkably few neighborhoods are run down and dumpy, and the residents seem happy. There is new construction all over, plenty of health care facilities, and Vanderbilt is a quality university.
What might be the most successful southern cities, circa 2018?
— Atlanta
— Richmond
— Nashville
— Bentonville
— the NC Research Triangle deserves mention, even though neither Durham nor Chapel Hill is well-developed enough to make this list (why is that?).
— Maybe the boring Charlotte?
— p.s. Miami is not the south.
What do the success stories have in common? Other than not being Memphis?
Sunday assorted links
1. Topos House.
2. China’s hypersonic nuclear aircraft can go Mach 10.
3. “But polling showed that after the #EleNão protests, Bolsonaro’s support among women actually rose.”
4. “Outfitted in a flak jacket and fighting gloves, Enrique Tarrio was one of dozens of black, Latino, and Asian men who marched alongside white supremacists in Portland on Aug. 4.” Do of course read this article through a “gender lens.”
5. “As Suburban Women Turn to Democrats, Many Suburban Men Stand With Trump.” (NYT)
Who is a conservative?
From Maxim Gorky’s My Universities:
And I remembered Ibsen’s lines:
“Am I a conservative? Oh, no?
I am still the same as I have been all my life,
I don’t like moving the pieces from one square to another,
I would like to move the whole game.
I can remember only one revolution
It was more clever than those that came after
And it could have destroyed everything
— I mean, of course, the Flood”
Solve for the candidate quality polarized equilibrium
Consistent with the predictions of this model, we also show that, in more conservative states, low quality conservative candidates do better relative to high quality conservatives, and vice versa.
And this:
We also show that voter beliefs about the candidates harden over the course of the primary…
That is from George Deltas and Matthias Polborn on SSRN. Via Kevin Lewis.
Pareto Principles in Infinite Ethics
I’ve been reading the dissertation of that title by Amanda Askell, following her podcast with Robert Wiblin. And there is also the work of Nick Bostrom on “infinite ethics.”
In the thesis, Amanda considers the possibility that world-states might simply be incomparable when there are an infinite number of relevant beings and infinite total utility in the universe, as seems to be implied by some cosmologies.
That in turn conflicts with the notion that agents are “locations of goodness.” If you give me some chocolate ice cream, it seems I am better off, and that judgment ought to be allowed to proceed without undue attention being paid to the broader cosmos. Yet that will imply pairwise comparisons are possible in an infinite universe, if only through the Pareto principle. But when you compare two overall states of the (infinite) universe in pairwise fashion, it is hard to see what value the “new” ice cream cone brings, because both ex ante and ex post there is an infinite consumption of ice cream.
Maybe the view that agents are locations of goodness doesn’t make sense when paired with infinities. Might the apparent increase in ice cream mean — whether in some causal sense or not — that still the total number of ice cream-eating beings in the universe has not increased, because if it had the infinity would not have held in the first place? Metaphysically speaking, one ice cream might push out the other. Sadly, my (finite) mind cannot readily deal with the intuitions, nor what happens if you try to imagine what kind of infinities we are dealing with, a’la Cantor.
Still, I will gladly accept the assumption of incomparability across different world-states in an infinite universe. In fact I view incomparability in the infinite universe case as the friend of comparability in the world we live in. It is by no means certain that the universe is infinite, but there is some chance it is infinite.
When doing expected value calculations, we need to take account of both possibilitites, namely that the universe may or may not be infinite. But if the infinity scenarios all lead to incomparability across various options (if indeed they are “options” to begin with), you can argue that the calculations for the finite universe scenario dominate the final calculus that we face today, operating under agnosticism about the nature of the universe (infinite or not). Which brings us back to finite universe ethics and persons being locations of value. And chocolate ice cream.
Another way to put this is that worrying about infinities “too much” ends up meaning you don’t have to worry about them at all.
Claims about Ukraine
There is a bank in Ukraine that is offering *21%* interest on a checking account.
But you must take 10,000 steps a day, tracked by their app, to qualify.
Miss one day and you get nothing.
I can’t decide if it’s insanity or brilliance.
That is from Kyle Trouble, via Samir Varma.
Saturday assorted links
The Effect of Communism on People’s Attitudes Toward Immigration
Does living in a communist regime make a person more concerned about immigration? This paper argues conceptually and demonstrates empirically that people’s attitudes toward immigration are affected by their country’s politico-economic legacy. Exploiting a quasi-natural experiment arising from the historic division of Germany into East and West, I show that former East Germans, because of their exposure to communism, are notably more likely to be very concerned about immigration than former West Germans. Opposite of what existing literature finds, higher educational attainment in East Germany actually increases concerns. Further, I find that the effect of living in East Germany is driven by former East Germans who were born during, and not before, the communist rule and that differences in attitudes persist even after Germany’s reunification. People’s trust in strangers and contact with foreigners represent two salient channels through which communism affects people’s preferences toward immigration.
That is from Matthew Karl at the Board of Governors, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
*The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium*
By Martin Gurri, due out November 13. I am reading this splendid book for the first time. It basically explains why Brexit and Trump won, and what will happen next. Due to social media, we are disillusioned with our elites, and that will prove hard to reverse.
Sentences to ponder
Consumer DNA testing — and the mountain of data it has generated — has become pervasive enough that it’s possible to identify about six of every 10 people in the U.S. who are of European descent, even if they’ve never given a sample.