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What the West should do:

• Strengthen alliances (America, Europe, India, Japan, “Altasia”)
• Boost immigration
• Institute industrial policy for defense

Also:

• Belt and Road was an epic fail
• Zero Covid was an epic fail
• China’s reliance on the real estate sector for growth is starting to look like an epic fail
• China is really big and that alone makes it the most powerful adversary of the United States no matter how many epic fails they come up with (not to mention the West’s own epic fails)

Key insights:

• Tax cuts failed by having no noticeable positive economic effect under Bush and since (after looking very successful under Kennedy and a fair bit less so under Reagan)
• Free trade failed by letting Chinese cheap labor destroy whole industries in America (after looking very successful in the Cold War era) because China was just so big and poor
• Deregulation failed by causing the financial crisis of 2007 (after looking very successful as applied to energy and transportation)
• Due to its economic failure, Libertarianism has fractured along cultural lines into progressive “Liberaltarianism” and right-wing racist Trumpism
• A spin-off of Libertarianism that has tried to keep the economic aspect alive while staying out of culture war issues is state-capacity libertarianism
• A bit of deregulation in certain areas would probably be a good thing, so the total demise of Libertarianism is not all good

You cannot think rationally or have fruitful discussions about something that is part of your identity.

Instead of making false comparisons between the United States and Western Europe, which have fundamentally different standards of prosperity, he argues, we should look closer at Southern Europe, which actually appears to be in trouble.

Matt Levine’s newsletter on money and finance. Not usually my cup of tea—I tend to find finance to be dry and boring—but this man is a superb writer. Too bad it’s behind a paywall.

New economics podcast with Noah Smith and Erik Torenberg.

We are seeing deindustrialization and a lack of innovation in transformative technology.

Or so say people from the DIW and industry. Is it just the usual whining about the need for reforms to make our companies more competitive internationally? Hard to say.

By replacing a symbol with its substance you get a clearer picture of the concept behind it.

I also find that it helps with teaching and writing documentation.

The reason is that there is less competition for them, particularly from big business.

It is significant.

Key insights:

• Rome really did fall, not just “transform” as some claim
• The Dark Ages really were dark in both senses of the word
• Human reproduction, economic activity, quality of life, literacy, literature, life expectancy, and science all declined in the provinces after the fall of Rome
• Hexapodia

If you are an ESG-noncompliant company:

1. Create a new company
2. Get the new company ESG-certified (since it holds nothing but financial assets and is therefore clean and responsible)
3. Receive ESG funding for the new company
4. Borrow money from the new company at zero interest

Canada is known as an immigration-friendly country and is often cited as an example to emulate in political discussions of immigration. But while it is all true when it comes to controlled immigration, it turns out that even Canada is actually pretty strict when it comes to asylum seekers. The same is true elsewhere, including Australia and the United States.

In the European Union we are facing the same dilemma as everyone else: On the one hand there is a basic human right to asylum and you want to treat asylum seekers as well as possible. On the other hand there are real capacity limits that an overly lax process inevitably runs into. So there must be an orderly process; but that process itself is vulnerable to capacity limits; so even entering the process in the first place has to be disincentivized in some way.

I do not envy the politicians who have to figure this out.

Notifies you of Docker image tag changes relevant to the containers that you are running.

Automatically restarts Kubernetes pods when their Docker images with floating tags change.

Automatically updates and restarts Docker containers as new image versions are released.

On acausal influence.

• Emphasize jobs in message and policy
• Run working-class candidates
• Be critical of your own party as well as the opposing party

A book on the benefits of being a generalist.

I suspect that generalism will become even more important the more AI continues to take over specialized tasks.