Sep & Oct '24

Political rational behind sibling marriage in ancient Egypt.

Royal princesses were off limits for elite Egyptians, and thus none of them had a special claim to the throne, superior to that of other members of the upper class, and even remotely comparable to that of the sons of the previous pharaoh. At the same time, the lack of royal dowries to be paid and the fact that fewer inheritances had to be divided meant the crown was always vastly wealthier than anybody else.

Reflections on Palantir

Nakamoto Satoshi = Central Intelligence?

Jensen’s Inequality as an intuition tool.

The myth that the fed sets rates.

The truth, though, is that the Fed sets only one interest rate, the Fed Funds rate, and that none of the rates that we face in our lives, either as consumers (on mortgages, credit cards or fixed deposits) or businesses (business loans and bonds), are set by or even indexed to the Fed Funds Rate.

In fact, in the quarters after the Fed Funds rate increases, US treasury rates (short and long term) are more likely to decrease than increase, and the median change in rates is negative. In contrast, in the periods after the Fed Fund decreases, treasury rates are more likely to increase than decrease, and post small median increases.

Why Britain has stagnated.

But the reforms of the late 1940s, largely under Clement Attlee’s governments, caused Britain to grow more slowly than any other major European country and the US until the mid-1980s. Britain was overtaken by Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Italy and Switzerland.

In 2005 Britain’s GDP per capita was just 2.8 percent behind Germany’s, in purchasing power parity terms, and fully 20 percent higher in US dollar terms, according to the World Bank. Penn World Tables, the other major source, have the UK overtaking Germany on GDP per capita in the mid-2000s.

This Russian family lived alone in the Siberian wilderness for 40 years, unaware of WWII or the Moon landing.

Weaponized mediocrity in western politicians.

They’re all focus-grouped to the gills. Everything they say is a tiresome rehearsal of things you’ve heard a million times before. From Angela Merkel to Tony Blair to Barack Obama, none of them ever come out with anything original. Occasionally, a new buzz phrase will enter the political lexicon and they’ll all start repeating it within days of each other, like a human botnet. They’re over-practised and deeply generic, like a bunch of D-list actors in a tiresome made-for-TV drama reading lines that somebody else wrote.

A major reason for the intense personal popularity that many populist, anti-establishment political figures enjoy – from Nigel Farage to Alice Weidel to Donald Trump – is simply their deviation from these grey and dystopian tendencies. They say new, original things and they seem to have real personalities. Even if you don’t like them, even if you’ll never vote for them, it’s such a relief to encounter any sentient being at all in this desert world.

On Armenia.

Highlights from the comments on Nietzsche.

Something that’s always puzzled me a bit is girl-power pop-feminism. They’ve internalized a lot of Randian/Nietzschean/master-morality ideas (be strong/powerful, don’t apologize for who you are, make time for yourself, don’t make yourself smaller to make other people feel better, etc.). And yet their ideal doesn’t look very much like Dagny Taggart. Instead of building rocket trains to Mars out of magic green metal that cures cancer or whatever, it seems like the idealized girl-boss is just leading a few Zoom meetings and then going home to do yoga and meditate on how liberated she is.

Spanish plan for the conquest of China.