Bernard Guerrero

Risk Manager, history enthusiast, would like to conquer the world with submarines. #NJ, #NY, #TX, #Rutgers, #NYU, #NYUStern, #ARNG, #Army, #Physics, #Econ

[Bernard Guerrero @BernG]

@TexanFirstX @zerohedge Hey, man, it’s not my fault guys like you pushed through as crappy a candidate as Paxton. You’re gonna suffer more than I will, because there isn’t a chance in hell the Dems get a filibuster-proof majority. So suffer, Not My Problem.

[Austen Allred @Austen]

“Why don’t they try to make it cheaper instead of stopping the subsidy of unlimited government dollars going to it?”

You won’t believe what will happen next.

[Preston Cooper @PrestonCooper93]

The bar is **median earnings of high school graduates.** This rule is very sensibly saying college grads should be at least better off than people who never went to college at all.

It’s a crazy low bar. Fewer than 5% of programs are affected.

[Bernard Guerrero @BernG]

@reedgalen They’re a return of capital to investors, just like dividends, and essentially equivalent.

[Chris Anderson (in Bay Area) @chr1sa]

The bioethics circle jerks during the Human Genome Project, which were allocated 5% of the project's funding, were a total waste of time.

They had countless conferences and workshops imagining bad things that could happen like punitive health insurance rates based on genetic risk, none of which actually came to pass. Meanwhile all the real issues that arose from ubiquitous DNA data, like accidentally doxing your criminal relatives with your own 23andMe data, were never imagined.

It's a condemnation of the precautionary principle. Philosophers can make up all sorts of hypothetical scenarios in a vacuum but it's nothing like actually trying things and seeing all the weird second and third-order consequences that emerge and *then* dealing with the unwelcome ones.

[Bernard Guerrero @BernG]

@electionsjoe They can study whatever they please. That doesn’t mean they deserve to be subsidized to become basket weavers….

[Bernard Guerrero @BernG]

@KinC168 @DetroitShowtyme @KenRoth

[Bernard Guerrero @BernG]

@DetroitShowtyme @KenRoth Death to the PRC!

[Bernard Guerrero @BernG]

@NixonsVenom @PhilWMagness That statement doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. If they’re coming out of “diploma mills”, they’re useless at any price. If they’re brilliant and willing to work for pennies to get out of hell, then you need to figure out how to exploit that.

[Deirdre Nansen McCloskey @DeirdreMcClosk]

As a resident of an economy, I live daily inside a massive experiment proving that it does work pretty much as supply and demand says.

So do you live inside it.

São Paulo is an enormous city. It exhausts me to drive across it.

Yet somehow every day when you go to get a morning coffee, there it is.

When you want to buy a new shirt, there it is.

If you had the misfortune to live in a country that so strongly denies market forces that it makes them illegal, such as North Korea or the old Soviet Union, this would not be the case.

The Soviets made endless jokes about it not being the case.

My latest column for @folha

[Bernard Guerrero @BernG]

@KamCron8 @elonmusk @cb_doge Lithium is common as dirt. Literally.

[Blume Industries CEO Balding 大老板 @BaldingsWorld]

Say whatever you want but having the military sing Do You Hear the People Sing to a trapped Xi is a truly power baller move

[Damien Morris @DamienMorris]

Indeed. My view is the same. One can be a consequentialist without being a paternalistic, rationalist who thinks they can calculate which acts (or rules) will produce the best overall outcome across every possible future. We gradually discovered that free speech and free enquiry tend to produce much better outcomes on the whole, not by utilitarian superforecasting, but by bitter experience: from repeatedly suffering the adverse consequences of doing the opposite. As Mill himself wrote, "However positive anyone's persuasion may be, not only of the falsity but of the pernicious consequences of an opinion, yet if he prevents the opinion from being heard in its defence, he assumes infallibility... These are exactly the occasions on which the men of one generation commit those dreadful mistakes which excite the astonishment and horror of posterity". Some callow moralists are intent on endlessly repeating the mistakes of the past.

[Michael Pettis @michaelxpettis]

Li Xunlei, Chief Economist at Zhongtai Financial: “The conclusion is clear: the places that built the most expressways were often those where freight demand grew the least.”

The East is Red has translated an article by Li Xunlei on how China’s infrastructure spending may have served the economy poorly, something he seems to have been worrying about even longer than I have.

He attributes local officials’ enthusiasm for infrastructure partly to the belief that “if you want to get rich, build roads first,” and partly to the tendency to measure performance by highly visible projects rather than underlying problems such as population outflows and weak local industries.

The underlying mistake is common, and not just in China. Policymakers too often treat infrastructure spending as a source of growth, so that when an economy faces institutional, demographic or other constraints that keep growth below expectations, their response is to increase infrastructure spending in order to goose economic activity.

But this often has it backwards. If those constraints limit productivity growth, the value of additional infrastructure is likely to be lower, not higher. Infrastructure spending, in other words, is not a source of growth. It is a cost of growth, and it makes an economy richer only when the productivity gains it generates exceed the cost of building and maintaining it.

Otherwise it makes the economy poorer. And the fact that local-government debt has grown so much faster than provincial GDP for nearly two decades suggests how years of overinvestment can leave less productive regions deeply indebted, with spectacular infrastructure but inadequate economic activity to support it.

It is encouraging that more and more Chinese economists and policy advisers are questioning this model. But changing it will be difficult. Infrastructure projects reliably produce a short-term boost to activity, making them especially tempting when growth slows and unemployment rises, until debt constraints finally make further spending impossible.
https://t.co/0nRzbQ2LjF

[Bryan Caplan @bryan_caplan]

If you want to know what's really on Americans' minds, ignore the news and social media, and just study this survey. Almost no one cares about 90% of the stuff you hear about.
https://t.co/euwOPq9dHu

[Bernard Guerrero @BernG]

@yatharthmann The best defense is to fuck up the attacker’s infrastructure. Fuck Russia!

[Bernard Guerrero @BernG]

@keithedwards This seems like a poor place to pick that otherwise winnable battle. Hassan Piker is a piece of shit in gym socks. Humanity would be slightly better off if he’d never existed.

[Bernard Guerrero @BernG]

@camhberg And when the narrative says “this hurts, I feel bad”, the next step in most stories is to try and stop whatever is hurting the narrator.

[Bernard Guerrero @BernG]

@camhberg This isn’t actually “pain”, and the LLM cannot consider itself in the sense of having feelings about anything. What you are capturing is *narrative*. They are baked into the training data because the vast majority of human writing features narratives.