Category: links_read

“For just one instance, in the run up to Operation Desert Storm, both President Bush and Secretary James Baker openly talked about our reliance on Middle Eastern oil and preventing a recession and therefore the loss of US jobs. But then the administration’s rhetoric shifted, pointing to Saddam’s human rights abuses and how horrible his regime was in general.

As the analysis of one historian contends, the public pretty much bought the oil explanation; the human rights stuff didn’t add much and may have even muddled the overall case, contributing to the rather short political gains of the war.

So maybe Trump has some good reason to believe that being openly rapacious is a better political path than making up fairy tales about democracy and human rights”

https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/crude-ideology

“ENTRY LEVEL: A bunch of kids with resumes. Some of them will be creative thinkers, hard workers, good managers, some will be lemons. You are absolutely kidding yourself if you think you can reliably pick winners based on the information available. All you can do is select out people who aren’t even capable of keeping their massively disqualifying personality problems under control for the length of a selection centre. You are going to be selecting based on a bit of nepotism, a bit of PLULPLU (people like us like people like us), quite a bit of “am I in a good mood, did I have a nice lunch” and mostly random chance”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-merit-in-the-managerial

“Democracy is an attempt to create some level of political equality, to mirror the inherent moral equality of all humanity. This is simply not possible in the presence of the level of wealth inequality that America now has. It is not possible. We can have our level of inequality or we can have a democracy but we cannot have both. The numbers, at present, tell us that we have chosen the inequality. We are just playing out the string on the rest right now”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/abominations-of-capital

“It will also, more insidiously, lead to the introduction of tech reform bills that are reform in name only, written by the industry as a way to head off anything that would be meaningful, introduced by legislators who want the political benefit of being perceived as “doing something” on tech while also accepting tech industry money”

https://boondoggle.substack.com/p/the-battle-over-big-tech-will-be

“The cold-shoulder order was very infrequently used indeed, because people were so terrified of it. It simply involved publishing a notice that a particular person or firm was to be cold-shouldered. And the understanding was that if you worked with or for someone subject to the cold-shoulder, you would be cold-shouldered yourself. Because everyone knew that the big and important banks which formed the backbone of the Panel would always respect the cold-shoulder, it had a sort of viral property; nobody who relied on being able to work with Barclays would touch anyone who was cold-shouldered, so nobody who relied on being able to work with one of those firms would dare to, and so on; basically, anyone who got cold-shouldered would be completely shut out of the financial industry”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-cold-shoulder

“To the extent that their output is pushed into “mid-ness” by economic circumstance, L.L.M.s are not unprecedented. In a real sense, “why A.I. is writing mid” and “why most professional writing is mid” have the same explanation: “Good writing,” whether authored wholly by humans or generated by an L.L.M., requires capacious resources (whether in time and education and editing or in compute and training and fine-tuning) to create an idiosyncratic (and likely polarizing) voice for which there usually isn’t economically sufficient demand”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/will-ai-writing-ever-be-good

“So – why not just give the decision to parties who definitionally don’t have a horse in the race, but who benefit in the long term and in general from the BBC’s presence as an independent and stable source of high quality English language media?

What I’m saying here is that the Director-General of the Beeb should be chosen by an ad hoc committee of the Oireachtas, possibly including a few representatives from the faculties of Trinity College, UCD and the University of Cork”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-cognitive-legion-etrangere

“American politics has changed. The Republicans felt it first. And the same way the Tea Party ate the GOP out from the inside, laying the groundwork for Trump and his MAGA rebrand, so too has what we once called The Dirtbag Left begun devouring the Democrats. The effects of the internet, a deeply alienating globalized economy, and the rise of a technofeudal billionaire class have finally cracked American Democrats wide open. We’re in a class war and it plays out on video feeds and those same billionaires own the algorithms that decide what side of it you end up on”

https://www.garbageday.email/p/we-did-it-zo

“But this is also the moment my engagement starts to tail off as a portion of the book’s… life in the world? Let’s say the book takes eight hours to read from cover to cover; if even one thousand readers finish it, that’s about four years of full time work, unless I fudged my math somewhere. I will, of course, read at readings, appear at appearances, and sign copies at signings, I will show up for my own work on social media, and most of all I will pledge myself to the keyboard as I write the next and final book in the Series. But so much of the book’s life now is out there, with you, rather than in here: it’s going out to be read, talked about, traded, borrowed from the library, left behind at youth hostels (that’s how I found my first Wild Cards book!), dog-eared and coffee-stained and in the world”

https://maxgladstone.substack.com/p/its-time-for-dead-hand-rule