~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (546)

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary: Tyler and Paula discuss Virginia Woolf’s surprising impressions of Hardy, why Wessex has lost a sense of its past, what Jude the Obscure reveals about Hardy’s ideas about marriage, why so many Hardy tragedies come in doubles, the best least-read Hardy novels, why […] The post My Conversation with the excellent Paula...

Here is one short clip.  They are almost certainly from humans, but whose humans?  These incidents also have some bearing on UAP debates.  When the UAPs are from humans, even from an advanced tech program (whether ours or others), it is in fact pretty obvious that “these are a bunch of somebody’s drones.”  Update your […] The post The New Jersey drone sightings appeared...

1. Semantic search for all CWTs. 2. Job postings for Ph.D economists are down. 3. On the new Nvidia book. 4. Krugman’s last NYT column (though he is not retiring more generally he says). 5. Thread on quantum computing.  And Scott Aaronson on Google Willow. The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to DeColagero. Hey, the Bears are...

I appeared on the Bail in the Midwest Podcast (Apple) to talk about crime and bail. Here is one bit: I’ve talked about capturing these people and recapturing them and that of course is what you see on television. That’s the sexy part of it but actually a lot of what is going on, as […] The post Tabarrok on Bail appeared first on...

By Edmund White, I enjoyed this paragraph from the preface: In A Boy’s Own Story I touched on all the themes of my youth: the exaggerated consolations of the imagination; the sexy but crushing teenage culture of the 1950s; the importance of Buddhism, books and psychoanalysis to my development; my first contacts with bohemianism, the […] The post *A Boy’s Own Story* appeared first...

Probably not, or so I argue in my latest Bloomberg column.  Excerpt: The most obvious argument against the proposal is simply that uniform taxation is better than selective tax exemptions. If a lower capital gains tax rate is preferable, then the goal should be to make a smaller cut that applies to all assets. Exempting […] The post Should crypto receive a tax exemption?...

Today’s leading historians of science have “debunked” the notion that religious dogmatism and science were largely in conflict in Western history: conflict was rare and inconsequential, the relationship between religion and science was constructive overall. This view stands in sharp contrast to that of a group of economists, who are beginning to report empirical evidence […] The post Science and religious dogmatism appeared first...

1. What is Russia losing in Syria? 2. Saloni on five medical breakthroughs from 2024. 3. The U.S. tax system has become more redistributive. 4. Open access book on the socialist calculation debate. 5. El Salvador to scale back Bitcoin plans due to IMF pressure (FT). 6. The new Google quantum chip.  “It lends credence […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...

The post The Nobel Prize lectures in economics appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Moral Panic. Did you just say might makes right ... by rsmI made the trip to see it live 🙂 My TLDRs: Acemoglu: ... by Data ScientistIn reply to Sean. Maybe you should elaborate. After all, ... by Bill AllenDoes Simon Johnson wish that Britain and other...

Donald Trump wants to create Freedom Cities. It’s a good idea. As I wrote in 2008, the Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. See the map (PDF) for more [N.B. the vast majority of this land […] The post Trump City appeared first on Marginal...

When does it make sense to organize most of your urban activity on a (more or less) straight line? If land transport is very costly, as in much earlier times, and a river is available, you might build much of the town right on the river bank.  You can see remnants of this if you […] The post La ciudad lineal appeared first on...

1. Nick Bostrom on The Cosmic Host. 2. Alexander Berger on the risks and benefits of kidney donation. 3. Who owns the drones flying over New Jersey (NYT)? 4. Some astronomy photos of the year. 5. al-Julani comment, on institutions. 6. Be a full-time annotator for the Vesuvius scrolls.  $40 an hour. 7. NIMBY and […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

Recommendations? The post Buenos Aires appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         Commentssteakhouses e.g. Fogón Asado; bring cash in USD, quality meat ... by w8In reply to Chris. I assume you mean Colonia not Colombia? ... by andrew97Order a suprema napolitana con papas fritas in a good ... by GuillermoBA is the best boulevardier city in the world. Paris, even ... by SpencerIn reply to...

Here is one of them: In the 2020s, over 16% of movies have colons in the title (Like Superman: Man of Steel), up almost 300% since the 1990s. And: The Telugu-language action film Devara: Part 1 made more money ($5.5m) in US cinemas than Francis Ford Coppola’s $120m Megalopolis in its first week ($5m). And: In 2024, around 10% of […] The post 52 things Tom Whitwell learned in...

The offensive vs. defensive framing seems wrong, at least temporarily. It should be motivated vs. unmotivated, with drones favoring the motivated. A competent drone capability requires building a supply chain, setting up a small manufacturing/assembly operation, and training skilled operators. They need to manage frequencies and adjust to jamming. Tight integration of these functions is a […] The post Austin Vernon on drones (from my...

The author is Bartle Bull, and the subtitle is A 5,000-Year History of Iraq.  Excerpt: Another is the extraordinary length of what might be called an East-West conflict in Iraq.  The Roman-Persian wars lasted from 54 BC until 628 AD.  Nine centuries later a version of the conflict resumed, when the Ottoman Turks made Constantinople […] The post *Land Between the Rivers* appeared first...

1. The Knausgaard library. 2. A new paper on the diminishing returns to research. 3. Those new service sector jobs: “How to Make $100 an Hour Scratching Someone’s Back.” (WSJ) 4. Shruti podcast with Pravin Krishna on trade. 5. Jennifer Doleac on what we get wrong about crime (NYT). 6. “Eyeballing the results, something like […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

You don’t have to upload any book into the system.  The Great Cosmic Mind is smarter than most of the books you could jam into the context window.  Just start asking questions.  The core intuition is simply that you should be asking more questions.  And now you have someone/something to ask! I was reading a […] The post How to read a book using...

The prediction of inflation dynamics—how prices change over time—has increasingly confounded modern macroeconomists. Throughout much of the twentieth century, there seemed to be clear relationships linking the money supply, economic slack, and price levels. Monetarism, the school of thought that posits a stable connection between the growth rate of a money aggregate and the subsequent […] The post o1 explains why you should not...

But a new paper by Ryan Oprea challenges the idea that we even need something like Prospect Theory at all. Oprea hypothesizes that a lot of the seemingly “irrational” experimental behaviors are really just due to the excessive complexity of the task they’re being asked to do. He does an experiment where he takes away all the […] The post Noah Smith presents Ryan Oprea appeared...

1. Brazilian economists are seeking a kind of occupational licensing (Portuguese). 2. Sovereign AI project for Thailand? 3. Is there a law for AI “capacity density”? 4. More on AI and board games. 5. Royal Mint honors Macca with his own coin. 6. Tim Wu.  Or here. 7. o1 for a cancer therapy project. 8. […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

The latest sought-after home amenity? Personal fire hydrants. The logic is that when there’s a major disaster there may not be enough fire engines to protect every house in an area. If homeowners have their own hydrant ready to go—along with hoses, nozzles and adapters—and are trained to use it all, that could help reduce […] The post Markets in everything, personal fire hydrant...

Here is a gloomy account from Vladimir Mirov: Ruble depreciation will contribute to inflation even further, as Russia is continued to be heavily reliant on imports – this is a kind of self-sustaining spiral. I also strongly disagree with those who say that cheaper ruble is “good” for exporters and the budget. Exporters have yet […] The post How is the Russian war economy...

There is a new translation by Joseph Luzzi, and I find it an order of magnitude better than the older treatments.  It somehow communicates the strangeness of this work in a new and unprecedented way.  You can order it here. I also very much enjoyed my read through the letters of Paul Celan and Ingeborg […] The post *Vita Nuova*, und *Herzzeit* appeared first...