Recent submissions

Comment · 29 days ago
It´s true that some Victorians organised aid for Ireland during the famine, it is also true that other Vicorians, English origin who were landowners in Ireland courtesy of the Cromwell invasion in the 1650's, exported large amounts of food from Ireland during the famine, to pay some of the bills mentioned in the article. Many land owners in Ireland were heavily in debt, with mortgages on their property. Potatoes were peasant food, and the failure of the crop, combined with lack of control over the food suppliers, led to the death and forced immigrations of millions. The population of Ireland is still lower in the 21st century than it was in the 19th.

So we can take a look at it with 21st century eyes, and consider that actual control is a nebulous thing, and that the absentee landowners were protecting their interests, while some at least of the local ones, including anglo-irish intervened to try and help the people on their estates. but then we also have to dig into the fiasco that is the 1847 Poor Law extension relief act, which sets up systems for relief that effectively dispossess people of their land, and makes the entire thing much worse.

Did the people creating the act understand systemic behaviour well enough to predict the consequences? Do we even understand these things well enough now? The interaction between debt and market pricing, and its inevitable consequences are playing out in real time now with AI.

Comment · 1 month ago
Certainly it´s possible to rig in person voting - but if you do, people will know that you did. And that also matters.
Comment · 1 month ago
Historically, one of the biggest issues that the Gestapo (and I would imagine any other such organisation) had to deal with was all the false neighbour and similar complaints from the "curtain twitchers" getting in the way of the actual surveillance and persecution work.
Comment · 3 months ago
Because if you can just use AI, Law becomes accessible to both the rich and the poor.
Comment · 4 months ago
Some of the Hubble results were also raising questions. At the same time, I read one of the papers on the galaxy stuff, and what struck me was they were identifying galaxy shapes by counting the pixels each galaxy had, so there are definitely some question marks over how they do some of this.
Comment · 5 months ago
Although the stock market isn´t in itself, it benefits from the second order effects of continuous money supply expansion, and long term processes progressively concentrating money into the financial system.
Comment · 6 months ago
It is a similar kind of lending loop to that which went on during the late 1990's leading up to the 2000 crash. A lends to B lends to C lends to A.

There is a famous quote from the polish economist Kalecki, that "economics is the science of mistaking a stock for a flow". Essentially this form of lending continues while everybody can make interest payments, and blows up horribly as soon as somebody can´t - as I have no doubt all those concerned are fully aware.

Comment · 7 months ago
Time? He´s busy starting a company, taking the time to drag out decade old emails and digging out the meta data for a journalist who is borderline stalking (assuming he even has them somewhere). I wouldn´t give that the time of day either.
Comment · 10 months ago
There are a lot of very distinctive versions of English floating around after the British Empire, Indian newspapers are particularly delightful that way - but there is as the author says, an inherited common educational system dating back to the colonial period, which has probably created a fairly common "educated dialect" abroad, just as it has between all the local accents and dialects back in the motherland.
Comment · 11 months ago
If they optimize though - and this is coming at some point - local AI becomes possible, and their entire business case as a cloud monopoly evaporates. I think they know they're in a race between centralized control, and widespread use and control, and that is what is really driving this.
Comment · 1 year ago
Well honestly, this security person thinks its a terrible idea - but needless to say the people selling those systems disagree - and for non-technical management, it ticks the compliance box and they get back to their jobs.
Comment · 1 year ago
And since the economist's main skill at math is fitting a very short ruler to a very large curve... i wouldn't put them ahead of lawyers...
Comment · 1 year ago
Feedback loops. Always with the feedback loops.
Comment · 1 year ago
It´s not just the legal system. A lot of US Doctors are typically paid on a piece rate basis, and the medical records systems are extremely fragmented, so there is an incentive to order repeat tests (as you get passed around from specialist to specialist), and no incentive to put the systems in to make that unnecessary.

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