Cowen

> We have at least one data point that says that Signal stores exactly two integers about you

For people wondering what they are:

> "The only information responsive to the subpoena held by OWS is the time of account creation and the date of the last connection to Signal servers for account [redacted]. Consistent with the Electronic Conununications Privacy Act ("ECPA"), 18 U.S.C. § 2703(c)(2), OWS is providing this information in response to the subpoena."

Their response to the subpoena then goes on to object to its overly broad scope, which asked for things that require a court order or a search warrant. They also object to the scope of the nondisclosure order included in the subpoena.

As far as votes of confidence go, Julia landing successfully at any of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks is a strong one. They all do a whole mess of complex modeling. The NY Fed in particular is a "first among equals" in the Federal Reserve system, so it's always good to be there.

That said, I have no idea if this will be that influential on economists changing their tools, or the tools that they teach to their students. People tend to stick with tools that they know and like. But it's very possible that this will help Julia in the eyes of people getting into the field choosing their first programming language.

If you'd asked me a few years ago, I never would've thought I would be interested in a financial newsletter.

But Matt Levine's really are the best. Hilarious and insightful five days a week.

Evolution doesn't "require" anything except breeding.

I forgot who exactly put it this way, but I like the idea of thinking of direct cash transfers as the "index investing" of poverty interventions.

It won't guarantee the absolute best return, but it can effectively guarantee a very respectable average return.

> Political fallout would be huge if this thing doesn't go through, right? All players in the game are heavily invested in this passing because without it, years are wasted, so I'm expecting it to pass.

This depends on perspective.

In terms of domestic elections, chances are the TPP won't make a real difference in countries like the US or Canada one way or another. Foreign policy generally only affects domestic elections at its extremes, e.g. winning/losing a war. Voters might be for or against TPP for any number of reasons, but chances are when they actually step into the voting booth, TPP will be low on their list of reasons for voting whichever way they do.

In terms of international relations, reneging on a huge deal that was painstakingly negotiated over seven years is obviously never a good thing. But it's hard to say how or when that could come back to bite whichever countries back out of the deal.

The way I've always put it: Diablo 2 was a better game, but Diablo 1 was a better experience.

Nonsense. I'm saying that people live in the real world with real contexts, not in Context-Free-Abstraction-Land.

Real contexts, where abstract concepts have been concrete realities, put natural and rational limits on the ability to treat those concepts as abstract ideas to be debated solely on their hypothesized merits rather than their hard realities. There is a very rational difference between arguing in favor of communism on an American college campus, where communism is a lovely abstract ideal, and arguing in favor of it in Romania or Ukraine where communism was a brutal reality.

Moldbug is an American, being read by Americans, writing about his support for the institution of slavery, and explicitly saying that some races are genetically better suited for slavery than others. It is far more rational to treat that as racist than to bend over backwards and pretend that it is not in the name of free debate.

> it's very human and natural for people to deliberately misunderstand things so they can work themselves into a rage over things.

Kind of like what you're doing right now?

Concepts are understood in contexts. Everyone involved in this context is American, so it's natural for slavery here to be viewed through an American context. In that context, slavery is inherently racist.

After all, it's not like Moldbug's writing shies away from this idea.

> Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery. And others still are badly suited to either. These characteristics can be expected to group differently in human populations of different origins. Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by genetic differences.

> unless the very concept of slavery is supposed to be considered racist

I've never read a word of Moldybug or whatever, but in the American context, the very concept of slavery is absolutely considered racist and rightly so. America's history of slavery is completely inseparable from racism.