What's remarkable is every generation is dumb in exactly the same ways. Dunking on the youth and blaming modern technologies as part of some kind of career anxiety is one of the oldest human traditions.
The ‘girl with the pearl earring’ by #Vermeer will come to #Osaka in August during the renovation of the #Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. Judging from the press-conference, she is very popular in #Japan. Maybe this is her last tour, since she is ‘advancing in age’ like all of us
Economists overcomplicate things. Recessions are usually just bad luck, according to a new book.
- America's 1873 panic was likely caused by a grasshopper plague covering millions of acres of the West
- The great grasshopper swarm of 1931 devastated Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota
- Houses built in the 2002-6 US housing boom proved worth it by the 2010s – a bigger issue was gas hitting $5.86 per gallon in 2026 terms (an all-time high)
https://t.co/BGPyRQvNKn
One common intuition is that recessions are the inevitable payback from the 'good times' of the boom that the recessions correct. The data doesn't fit our instinct to turn everything into a moral story, Tyler Goodspeed shows in his new book. Any regularity usually proves to be an illusion:
1. Longer expansions are not more likely to end
2. Longer expansions do not face worse busts
3. Reallocation is more common in expansions than recessions (no creative destruction)
4. And the Phillips Curve that linked inflation and unemployment proved not to work during the stagflating 1970s.
Read more in @MarkKoyama's review for @WorksInProgMag.
There is, however, a distinction between the pornographic and the erotic. I recently encountered this while watching "The Mandalorian and Grogu" in a sparsely populated cinema,
Your character’s voice did not jump three octaves in shock. An octave is the difference between an alto sax and a bari sax. Three octaves is the entirety of Marvin Gaye’s vocal range. Your character’s voice jumped a perfect fourth at most, you rube
“why tweet that lol. that’s for the group chat” some ppl don’t have group chats. montaigne’s essays would’ve been letters to his best friend (who died). petrarch would’ve just talked to laura (who wouldn’t talk to him, & died). no group chat is the condition for literary creation
funny "I never thought the leopards would eat my face" situation here, but in general right-wing Silicon Valley people have acted in this insane way where they enthusiastically supported tariffs and deportations while begging for implicit blanket exemption for the tech industry
all this ai math talk makes me realize:
- there's not enough professional mathematicians around who waste their time on X
- there's even fewer combinatorial geometrists doing the above
- we all worship math as a final beacon of human reasoning intelligence
- we all secretly want to be smarter than mathematicians
- the people who know the least about math and ai/llms always have the most opinions
I think people are generally Not Okay because you used to see a hot photo of a college girl in a bikini with the caption "she's so hot" and now the caption is like "just imagine all the guys she's stringing along while some disgusting old oligarch flies her to Miami."
This is what drives me insane about this shit. You got handed the ability to do this, they gave you people the fucking keys, and it was a disaster. You did not know what you were doing, it did not succeed, you could not perform. The outcomes were worse! You failed!
also spent hours on a trans-continental flight reading Henry David Thoreau's Journal in loving detail confident that probably no one anywhere even in an alternative universe was reading the words I was reading at that time.
"if a dog comes after you, whistle for him."
"there is no remedy for love but to love more."
"each man's world is but a clearing in the forest."
Much of the social decline of the past several decades is explained by the fading of the unpopular but important “math/science/computer nerd” clique and the corresponding rise of the useless “gamer/anime/fandom” clique