Boris Pismenny

Software architect @nvidia

[Israel75 @IFNY2775]

SkyNews Australia had veteran Captain, Byron Bailey on talking about the FlyDubai Flight from the UAE - Tel Aviv and let’s just say, it didn’t go the way Sky News expected it to. Watch! 🤣

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

The most striking chart I’ve seen in a while

[Transactions on Machine Learning Research @TmlrOrg]

TMLR has faced a deluge of submissions, necessitating stricter desk rejection policies due to limited reviewer capacity

Co-EiC Nihar Shah reached out to authors of 10 papers slated for desk reject. Could they answer questions about their *own* submission?
https://t.co/vhX5w6gcx2

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

My former MIT colleague Yossi Sheffi has documented how unhinged hatred of Israel, combined with the unwillingness of modern universities to state and enforce principles, led to a hostile climate for Jews at MIT (only starting to be addressed by the administration). | Professor Yossi Sheffi https://t.co/QBxQM1NIfF

[Michael Pettis @michaelxpettis]

Prospect: "While the labor share of the national income was roughly 65 percent during the 20 years following World War II, according to a recent report from the New York Federal Reserve Bank, it then began a steady decline to its current 54 percent."

The author, Harold Meyerson, notes that this coincided with the weakening of unions and concludes that the solution is to make unions stronger: "what will be required will be mass organizing on a scale not seen since the 1930s and ’40s, if not greater than that."

I don't disagree, but I do think he misses an important point. It was not just in the US that wage growth stagnated relative to productivity growth. It occurred throughout the world, especially in Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, Germany in the 2000s, and China over the past three decades. It is therefore hard to attribute stagnant wages in the US solely to the political weakening of American trade unions. Something else must have put downward pressure globally on wage growth relative to productivity growth.

An important clue comes later in the article: "Since the end of the 1970s, virtually all American corporations have done everything they could to weaken their workers’ power to increase their income, while they and their investors enjoyed increases in profits, dividends, and buybacks."

The timing is significant. It was in the early 1970s that the US and the world transitioned to our current form of globalization, in which countries could compete aggressively to expand their shares of global manufacturing by suppressing wage growth relative to productivity growth, while externalizing the resulting weak domestic demand by running persistent trade surpluses.

We live in the world, in other words, that Keynes warned against in 1944. While countries that become more competitive by suppressing wages undermine global growth (because rising wages are what drive global demand) they are nonetheless able to grow faster than otherwise. They do so by offsetting weak domestic demand with large, persistent trade surpluses vis-à-vis countries that are less aggressive in suppressing domestic wages.

In this global trading regime, businesses in the US and elsewhere had two choices. Either they had to suppress wage growth at home or, if they wanted to remain competitive, they had to relocate production to countries in which wages were much lower relative to productivity. The dynamic is brutal. We can already see how rapidly China's share of global manufacturing has expanded at the expense of its trading partners – even as its wages remain among the lowest in the world relative to the productivity of its workers.

That is not just a coincidence. It is how our system of globalization has worked: first with Japan and the Asian Tigers, then with Germany, and now with China and other East Asian economies. All of them "succeeded" in growing rapidly and expanding their shares of global manufacturing precisely because wages, relative to worker productivity, were lower than those of their trading partners.

So what would happen if we strengthened unions in the US and forced up wages without changing the rules of the global trading regime? Wages would probably rise temporarily, but US manufacturers would become even less competitive, and the increased purchasing power of American workers would be directed not toward American producers but toward producers abroad that continued to suppress wages.

In fact, higher American wages would actually increase the rewards accruing to countries seeking to expand their shares of global manufacturing by suppressing wage growth.

I am all in favor of strengthening unions and raising wages. In fact, I think high levels of income inequality are the biggest problem facing both the US and the global economy. But as long as we remain part of a global trading regime that rewards wage suppression and penalizes economies that allow wages to keep pace with productivity growth, higher wages will simply mean more deindustrialization.

That is why Keynes proposed a global trading system at Bretton Woods that penalized countries seeking to grow at the expense of their trading partners by suppressing wages or otherwise distorting their domestic economies. His solution was to make it much harder for countries to externalize their domestic imbalances.

Unfortunately, his proposal was rejected. It is almost certainly time to revive it. This is probably what the EU should be doing, especially now that Germany is no longer among the leading beneficiaries of that system.
@HaroldMeyerson
https://t.co/iAcr5Omy1U

[Shaul Amsterdamski 🤞 @amsterdamski2]

עשו לעצמכם טובה, קחו 20 דקות מהחיים וצפו בהרצאה הזו של פרופ׳ יוג׳ין קנדל. אני מרשה לכם לשים על מהירות 1.75. זה אמנם מתחילת 2024, אבל זה עדיין מאוד תקף. גם היום. אולי במיוחד היום
https://t.co/iHh0pMbzqF

[SK Tedeschi @skedeschi]

I'm a middle eastern historian. My own family were made refugees. And this is my honest view of the Nakba (“catastrophe”) - the displacement of around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs during the 1947–49 war surrounding the creation of Israel.

A thread. 🧵

[Shany Mor שני מור شني مور @ShMMor]

I can name a lot more than 5. Let's start with 23 easy ones:

1. Designating a combatant a journalist automatically immunizes that combatant from attack.
2. A territory is occupied even if there is no presence whatsoever after a hostile armed force by virtue of being blockaded.

[dan linnaeus @DanLinnaeus]

Facts: Israel did not initiate anything. Tehran tried to draw a red line around how Israel may defend itself after IRGC-backed Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Syrian and Iraqi ‘resistance’ militias, and the Houthis attacked. When it didn’t like the way Israel fought for its survival, it launched True Promise I and True Promise II, which were at the time the largest mass salvos of missiles and drones from one sovereign territory to another in the history of modern warfare. So let’s put this ridiculous little spin factory to bed already. Tehran is eating crow because it decided it was a particularly sharp idea to rope the United States into the chaos it sparked in the region. After attacking US troops over 170 times through its proxies after Oct 7, it decided to create a force protection crisis by threatening American presence in the region if Washington didn’t withdraw from Centcom or actively coerce Israel from defending itself. Anyone suggesting that we should have capitulated to Tehran when it took our presence hostage in the region is strategically blind or illiterate. It’s an indefensible position. What the hell kind of “choice” is “Hey, I’m going to shoot your kids in the neighbors backyard if you don’t stop your cop brother from from coming in with a search warrant for my unregistered automatic arsenal” ?! Who even thinks to justify that kind of behavior. Thank god for an executive with the metal to slam a fistful of BATNA on the table.

[Amjad Taha أمجد طه @amjadt25]

Iran fired more missiles at the UAE than at anyone else in decades, including Israel. Zero protests in London, Paris, or New York calling on Iran to stop attacking civilization and hope in the Middle East. Yes, no protests tells you who controls your streets and who they work for. That’s information, and you’re welcome.

[Boris Pismenny @BPismenny]

@van00sa Assuming the data about China is actually true, we need to adopt some variant of these policies in the west

[Amit Segal @AmitSegal]

It didn’t attract the headlines it perhaps deserved, but a majority of Palestinians still believe that Hamas’ decision to carry out the October 7 massacre was “correct.” That’s according to a poll released this week by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.

59% of Palestinians in Judea and Samaria responded to the question in the affirmative, while 44% did so in Gaza — comprising a total of 53% of Palestinian respondents.

But surely Palestinians at least blame Hamas for Gazans’ suffering in the two years since? Nope — only 14% blame Hamas, while 54% blame the Jewish state.

What else did the survey find? For one, it found that 53% of Palestinians “oppose the concept of a two-state solution.” But it’s not quite that simple. The survey noted that “support for a two-state solution is usually linked to public assessment of the feasibility of such a solution and the chances for a Palestinian state.” Indeed, 56% of Palestinians “believe that the two-state solution is no longer practical due to settlement expansion.”

What about the rest of them? 41% “believe it remains practical,” which prompts the question: how do they achieve independence?

Well, the survey asked Palestinians just that: “What is the best means of achieving Palestinian goals in ending the occupation and building an independent state?”

Astonishingly, a plurality of 40% said “armed struggle,” including 35% in Gaza. Yes, according to this survey, after two years of war and utter destruction in the Gaza Strip, more than 1/3 of its residents still believe “armed struggle” is their key to independence.

Sure, some of you are probably thinking, those numbers aren’t exactly comforting, but who believes polls anyway? Never mind that this poll was conducted in a society that isn’t exactly known for an independent press. You’re right — but here’s the catch: Israelis aren’t going to risk their children being kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists on the hope that “maybe the pollsters got it wrong.”

30 days after the October 7 massacre, @mosaicmag ran a wonderful essay by @ShMMor, who previously served as director for foreign policy on Israel’s National Security Council. In it, Mor outlines the Arab psyche that has plagued them in wars they started in 1947, 1967 and 2000 — all of which had disastrous results for the Palestinians.

Lamenting how, rather than recognizing that violence will not win them sovereignty, the Palestinians end each war that they initiated by turning themselves into helpless victims of the ever-cruel Israelis, Mor ends the essay with a prediction for our current war:

“The price for Israel will be high, and Israel is far from blameless in the string of events that brought it about. But the price for the Palestinians will be much, much higher, and much of what will be lost will be unrecoverable. And if the present generation follows its predecessors and transforms that loss into a story of victimization that papers over the defeat and the excitement that preceded it, odds are good that one day yet another in the chain of Palestinian disasters will appear again.”

I wish — and I’d bet so does Mor — that I could say his warning was unfounded. Unfortunately, all signs point to him being right.

[Yishan @yishan]

The original architects of American global power did something very clever that no other empire had ever done before: they deliberately hid the instruments of their power.

Specifically, they institutionalized the hard power of the post-WW2 American military into a "rules-based international order" and the organizations needed to run it.

These include the UN, IMF, World Bank, NATO, and numerous philanthropic NGOs like (as has been in the news recently) USAID.

The reason they did this is because repeated use of hard military power is fragile and self-defeating: it engenders resentment and breeds defiance. The British learned this and used prototypical methods of institutionalization in the declining years of their empire, but their American successors perfected it.

(If you don't understand how this works, I will link a post in the replies explaining how one example works - NATO)

The more sophisticated rivals of the US obviously know what's up, so they try to oppose or circumvent these institutions, but obviously the institutions are backed by hard power in the end. It sounds fair enough to say "if you don't abide by the 'rules,' we will invade you." It works well enough because it it sounds more fair to say that than "if you don't do what we tell you, we will invade you." Rival governments aren't fooled, but a lot of their ordinary citizens are, and combined with media dominance and control of the reserve currency (economic dominance), it's enough to keep everyone in line.

An unanticipated problem seems to have arisen:

It turns out that if you hide the levers of power, your own successors may have trouble understanding them. Especially if you failed to educate them, or let various cultural forces undermine the indoctrination of your elites.

With that happening, once the new generation of elites gains power, they don't recognize that the complicated weird control panel you built that doesn't seem to do anything but costs $10 billion a year to maintain is actually how you're controlling everything around the world and they take it down to save money. All because you did too good a job hiding the levers of power.

Soft power isn't "soft." It's real power. It's just soft because it's hidden.

I don't know how to solve this problem because I think hidden levers of power are definitely better, but you have to train a priesthood generation after generation to understand them, and that kind of thing corrupts itself too. Open power is much more honest, but no one likes it and it's hard to hold on to.

[Boris Pismenny @BPismenny]

@GaleImperialist @Knibbo050 @AgentofNuance @Noahpinion @chadzag This is a form of administrative detention that exists in many countries, including the US following patriot act. Administrative detention can be applied to any Israeli, but it is more common with Palestinians involved with terrorism
https://t.co/b1SO9AqiGx

[Boris Pismenny @BPismenny]

עושים משהו כזה בשוויץ באמצעות מס נוסף על מי שלא עושה שירות צבאי (https://t.co/Jph9AwK6nP).
לא נראה לי שאפשר את זה עם החרדים בארץ, ואם עושים את זה עם שאר האוכלוסיה, אז החזקים יתחמקו משירות וצה"ל יפסיד מזה... בקיצור, רעיון יפה שלא נראה מתאים לארץ לצערי

[הלל גרשוני Hillel Gershuni @gershuni]

יש פתרון פשוט: מי שלא רוצה לשרת, שישלם למדינה שווה ערך לשירות צבאי. זה הכול

[Boris Pismenny @BPismenny]

@gail_w manipulating public opinion, and elections especially, is probably worth way more
https://t.co/pxUKbPwL9O

[Boris Pismenny @BPismenny]

@gannimo @USENIXSecurity ML has this problem and IIUC the solution leads to two classes: short talks (chosen by area chairs) and posters, but trimming talks to 5m somehow narrows the gap

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

This is why I prefer chess!

[Siavash Safavi @SedSia]

In my 2nd year in Canada, I went to York University. I considered myself a feminist in Iran, so I wanted to see what was new in feminism.
I took gender studies...
I remember walking out of the class thinking, "I guess the West had a good run. It was bound to end at some point."
In one class, we were told to think of signs of patriarchy. I asked, could hijab be considered a sign of patriarchy? Oh boy! I got mobbed by several 18-year-olds (I was 32), and called ignorant and a bigot. The professor didn't feel like any of that was insulting to me.
But when I dared to tell someone "You misunderstood my point", the professor cut me off and said I can't talk like that.
After the class, very confused, I asked about the clown show I just witnessed.
She said: "You can't say they're wrong."
I asked What if they are though?
"There is no wrong. Every worldview and experience is valid. You can't shut them down."
This was my first time facing this cult. So I said what experience? Puberty? Living in their parent's house and getting an allowance? They're 18. What worldview?
"Age has nothing to do with it."
I dropped out a couple of months later, traumatized after several heated debates with the Gender Studies and Anthropology professors.
Humanities in these universities have one job. to destroy the foundational values of a student imprinted by the family and brainwash and turn them into the clones of their incompetent joyless ideologues/professors.
Western universities have been producing these indoctrinated NPCs for decades. What's going on right now is the result.

[Visegrád 24 @visegrad24]

A hospital in Ashkelon, Israel is hit by rockets fired by Hamas on October 8th.

Silence.

A hospital in Gaza is hit on October 17th.

When those rockets might be Israeli - worldwide outrage and condemnation.

When it turns out they might actually be Palestinian - silence.