Sep & Oct '23
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The Irish logarithm.
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Why the culture wins: an appreciation of Iain Banks.
Consider Weber’s famous diagnosis of modernity, as producing “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.” In the Culture, the role of the specialist has been taken over by the AIs, leaving for humanity nothing but the role of “sensualists without heart.” Thus the chief attraction of the Culture is the promise of non-stop partying and unlimited sex and drugs.
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Harriet Taylor is the reason liberalism exists.
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Cost disease kills.
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Why we didn’t get a malaria vaccine sooner?
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Book review: Power Failure, or why GE failed.
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Book review: Cities and the wealth of nations.
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Book review: Elon Musk.
Some writers have made much of Elon’s father “owning an emerald mine”. But the mine only cost $50,000, never really produced many emeralds, and closed after a few years - it was a side investment unrelated to the family’s wealth. Rumors that it used “apartheid labor” or produced “blood emeralds” are false: the mine was in Zambia, which had no apartheid or bloody conflicts.
“I had friends who complained that their husbands came home at seven or eight,” [Elon’s first wife] said. “Elon would come home at eleven and work some more. People didn’t always get the sacrifice he made in order to be where he was.
What’s really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I’ve met a lot of super super smart people but they’re usually super super smart on one thing and he’s able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he’ll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he’ll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does.
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Fewer losers or more winners?
Dave told me that, in his 14 years in the job, the fund’s equity return had never ranked above the 27th percentile of the pension fund universe or below the 47th percentile. And where did those solidly second-quartile annual returns place the fund for the 14 years overall? Fourth percentile!
The only thing that matters is whether you bought any of the ten that defaulted. In other words, bond investors improve their performance not through what they buy, but through what they exclude – not by finding winners, but by avoiding losers.
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How historians lie.
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Investigating the nord stream attack.
But the perception among investigators is that the will to solve the case is not particularly pronounced in the capital. Politically, it is easier to live with what happened if it remains unclear who is behind the attacks. The process is not being hindered, but neither is there much support from the overarching government ministries. Meanwhile, it is clear to career-oriented ministry officials that there is no glory to be had with this case.
International investigators and agents also say that all the intelligence has been pointing in one direction: towards Kyiv. At least those who are familiar with the evidence and clues.
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How fast China’s birth rate is falling!
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15 ideas, frameworks, and lessons from 15 years.
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Israel is no longer Britain’s war.
Palestine could just as easily be a Right-wing cause, a cautionary tale about the perils of mass immigration. The root of the Palestinian tragedy was, after all, the influx of Jewish migrants, many of them desperate refugees, which altered the country’s demographic balance irrevocably, and of which the establishment of the Jewish state was the natural historical result. Such a reading would easily lend itself to conservative fears over unchecked immigration, and as demographic anxieties become the central driver of European political discontent, younger rightists could well, like the Nouvelle Droite of the Seventies, find themselves making sympathetic analogies with the Palestinian predicament.
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Is the Israel-Palestine conflict a case of “eye for an eye”?
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On a lack of ambition.