https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=487
Saturday, January 21, 2023
Friday, January 20, 2023
Thursday, January 19, 2023
Wednesday, January 18, 2023
Monday, January 16, 2023
Climate Change
Article cited on Arctic actually concludes that change is too large to be natural fluctuation:
Said that National Academy of Sciences refuted foundation of hockey-stick graph. Though it decided that its analytical tools were flawed, it supported the basic finding of global warming. https://mathbench.umd.edu/modules/climate-change_hockey-stick/page07.htm
http://www.sciencebits.com/ice-ages says part man-made, part cyclical
Saturday, January 14, 2023
Friday, January 13, 2023
Thursday, January 12, 2023
Tuesday, January 10, 2023
Various
Central Banks
"The Congress hereby declares that it is the continuing policy and responsibility of the federal government to use all practicable means consistent with its needs and obligations and other essential considerations of national policy with the assistance and cooperation of industry, agriculture, labor, and state and local governments... to promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power."
McKinsey has advised Big Tobacco, the Sacklers, etc. Site has some other good articles.
Vinod Khosla and the guaranteed minimum income
“To put it crudely, it’s bribing the population to be well-enough-off,” Mr. Khosla said. “Otherwise, they’ll work for changing the system.”
full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/us/vinod-khosla-silicon-valley-disruption.html
To spend time in Silicon Valley in a year of political upheaval is, on one level, soothing. It is pleasant to hear talk of wearables, walled gardens and disruptive beverages in between updates about mass deportation.
But there is another conversation happening in the valley today. Its premise is that, when it comes to populist revolt, we may have seen nothing yet.
The idea is: If you think globalization, immigration, trade and demographic change have contributed to displacement and political anger, wait until robots take away millions and millions of jobs, including those requiring the use of a well-trained brain.
Some believe it will be glorious to live in this “disruptive” future; others believe it will pose devastating social and political challenges that dwarf anything being discussed in this election.
And then there are those, like Vinod Khosla, who ardently believe both things.
Mr. Khosla, a billionaire venture capitalist and a Silicon Valley celebrity, is gung-ho on disruption and an investor in start-ups that are building technology to take away people’s jobs.
“If you’re doing anything disruptive, you’re disrupting somebody, and somebody’s getting hurt,” he said at a conference last year. “Revolutions are hard on people. People get killed. People get hurt.”
And yet Mr. Khosla is part of a cohort of Silicon Valley types who have begun to sound warnings about the very future they are invested in.
“It seems likely that the top 10 to 20 percent of any profession — be they computer programmers, civil engineers, musicians, athletes or artists — will continue to do well,” he told me. “What happens to the bottom 20 percent or even 80 percent, if that is the delineation? Will the bottom 80 percent be able to compete effectively against computer systems that are superior to human intelligence?”
Others in Silicon Valley, most notably the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, have dismissed this concern as Luddism, assuring people that new jobs always replace the ones that vanish.
And it is hardly surprising for stalwarts of an industry to claim it won’t harm anyone. What is more notable is what sometimes is called “argument against interest” — people criticizing a thing from which they stand to benefit.
Mr. Khosla looks at the technologies he and others are investing in and sees massive displacement down the road. He thinks of it as both an entertainment problem (how would we occupy the minds of all those jobless people?) and a political problem (how do we keep those people from revolting?).
“I worry a lot about how do you keep humans motivated to live,” he said.
In the world Mr. Khosla envisions, technology will continue to widen inequality by amplifying the productivity of some hypertalented people — 100xers, they are sometimes called in Silicon Valley — even as it beaches many others.
The only answer, he believes, is massive economic redistribution via something like a guaranteed minimum income. The idea has been gaining ground.
“Does capitalism need to be reinvented for modern technology? I’m absolutely convinced it does,” he said.
In primordial capitalism, he said, the challenge was efficiency — how to juice as much as possible from scarce resources. In a coming world of abundance, he added, the problem will be political: how to create the conditions in which a minority of hyperproductive people can do their work.
My eyes drifted over to a wall of glass to my right and, beyond it, a lovely garden. “Otherwise, there’ll be people coming in through the windows all the time?” I asked.
“Imagine 10 times as many people were unemployed today than are,” Mr. Khosla said.
To be plain, Mr. Khosla and others of like mind in the valley are not radicals. They are speaking of a new social contract, in which an undisrupted few assume new obligations to the disrupted many, in order to be freed to go back to their disruptive works.
“To put it crudely, it’s bribing the population to be well-enough-off,” Mr. Khosla said. “Otherwise, they’ll work for changing the system.”And then he said, “Capitalism is interesting, because capitalism as a system is by permission of democracy, right?”
Henry Ford quote
Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn’t know how banking really works, because if they did, “there’d be a revolution before tomorrow morning”.
The quote above was really a paraphrase by Charles Binderup March 19, 1937 in the House of Representatives (Congressional Record – House 81:2528), who stated that “It was Henry Ford who said in substance this: ‘It is perhaps well enough that the people of the nation do not know or understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning’.”
original quote from 1922:
The people are naturally conservative. They are more conservative than the financiers. Those who believe that the people are so easily led that they would permit the printing presses to run off money like milk tickets do not understand them. It is the innate conservation of the people that has kept our money good in spite of the fantastic tricks which financiers play-and which they cover up with high technical terms. The people are on the side of sound money. They are so unalterably on the side of sound money that it is a serious question how they would regard the system under which they live, if they once knew what the initiate can do with it.
Article: https://underground.net/money/the-truth-is-out-and-the-banks-are-rolling-in-it/
AI
Did Google’s A.I. Just Become Sentient? Two Employees Think So.
Artificial neural networks today are not conscious, according to Douglas Hofstadter ex. sounds very different than LaMDA. Still glad to get input from Hofstadter.
Monday, January 9, 2023
Books I'm interested in
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World - Anand Giridharadas
Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky
Jerry Mander
Small is Beautiful
Sunday, January 8, 2023
Wednesday, January 4, 2023
Tuesday, January 3, 2023
Monday, January 2, 2023
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