Terribly sad news from Jack Rakove. Gordon Wood passed away in a traffic accident.
Perhaps the greatest historian of the American Revolution. May he rest in peace.
I think part of it, at least vis a vis US/China competition, is that US and western chattering classes find it hard to believe that the market-driven outcome of frontier AI could possibly be right. They basically believe, in their hearts, that the Chinese system, with its “industrial strategy,” has eclipsed capitalism. So they harbor the same inferiority complex toward the Chinese system that many Americans once harbored toward the EU’s system. Their heuristic is that the industrial strategists of China have grasped the whole picture of the technological competition in a way that US industrialists, with their “profit maximizing incentives,” could not possibly have matched. And so any outcome in the economy that is not the result of “strategy” is therefore prima facie worse than what the “strategists” have concocted. They also believe the Chinese strategists possess awesome powers of foresight and the ability to evade all tendencies of financial and economic gravity, due of course to “strategy,” really it’s almost a kind of orientalism.
Meanwhile the U.S. industrialists are making new advances in math and science, and the fastest-growing businesses in history, by spending hundreds of billions of dollars on high-margin chips whose legacy is in rendering video games, cramming them underneath tents if need be, and investing generational capital into new energy generation technologies as they do it, and perhaps even colonizing space as an instrumentally convergent result. But none of that is “strategy,” you see.
I feel like this whole Platner situation could’ve been avoided if a bunch of upper middle class leftists hadn’t seen the most obvious red flags imaginable and thought, “that’s just what rough, salty, Ohio Waffle House type working class people are like”
Sorry, but the bar for concluding “this guy has poor judgement” has to be somewhere.
If you have SS tattoos, if you have 12+ text chains with “other women”… I think it’s fair for voters to worry
I'd just say that if the reason you don't want to support a candidate is because he and his wife chose not to share that they went through marriage counseling to deal with infidelity, that's your choice. But I do think there are other factors in the race that will have more of a direct impact on your life.
Andrew Yang owned this issue before it was on people’s radar. But you don’t really hear from him so much these days. He should be more relevant than ever, really
NOW - Anthropic co-founder says there is a "real possibility that AI will displace human labor at a very large scale," and that supporting those people "will be a moral imperative of historic proportions."
This is how big lobsters used to be off the American east coast, 1916. Overfishing has made specimens of this size very rare. These ones are between 75-100 years old.
Cmon now. There were already video essays before this. It’s all so hyperbolic.
Plinkett was the first youtube video.
Plinkett was the first movie review.
Plinkett was the first usage of the english language
The long term effect of the Plinkett reviews has nothing to do perceptions of Star Wars or film criticism but something far more sinister, video essays.