Links - March & April 2023

Published Apr 2023

Pierre Bonnard, Dining Room in the Country, 1913

Here are some interesting links I found in March & April:

1. Bill Gates has perfected managerial philanthropy.
   From 2014 through 2019, the Gates Foundation earned around $28.5 billion in investment income while giving away $23.5 billion in grants over the same time span — a net profit.
   But Gates’s largest political donations do not go to candidates themselves; for example, the Gates Foundation donated $456 million dollars to Arabella Advisors, founded by Eric Kessler, a former Clinton White House official. Arabella is a “dark money” group—it spends money to influence elections, but the source of its money is not disclosed to the public. The group raised $1.6 billion in 2021 and spends its money on groups aligned with Democratic Party leadership.
2. “Together, the Albanians and the Chinese are a quarter of the world’s population”.
   
3. The false promise of Chomskyism.
4. Structural analysis of the economic decline and collapse of the Soviet Union.
5. Does the entrepreneurial state crowd out entrepreneurship?
   By serving as the entrepreneur, Singapore’s entrepreneurial state imposes its vision by assuming the core entrepreneurial values and traits of opportunity recognition, discovery, and action. The entrepreneurial state, at least in the case of Singapore, retards the transition to an entrepreneurial society, which, paradoxically, is the vision of Singapore’s entrepreneurial state.
6. Why the Afghan security forces collapsed.
   
7. How scandal and mistrust ended Credit Suisse's 166 year run.
   What started over a disparaging remark by Khan about Thiam’s garden evolved into a lurid corporate scandal, shattering the company’s reputation for discretion and exposing a culture in which personal vanities outweighed ethical and legal boundaries. A few weeks after the dinner party, Khan was passed over for promotion and then quit in July. When he later accepted a job at UBS, the move caused concern in Credit Suisse’s top ranks that he might poach key personnel. A private security firm was hired to monitor his activities, but was discovered by Khan in an incident that led to a physical altercation.
8. There are more hedge funds than Burger Kings.
   
   In fact, there are more hedge funds than there are Burger King outlets (over 18,700), employees at the Pentagon (24,000) and words in Animal Farm (assuming no prologue); and nearly as many as there McDonald’s franchises (ca 35,000) and listed stocks globally (about 43,000).
9. What is the longhouse?
   The most important feature of the Longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother. More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. Many from left, right, and center have made note of this shift. In 2010, Hanna Rosin announced “The End of Men.” Hillary Clinton made it a slogan of her 2016 campaign: “The future is female.” She was correct.
   Think of the litany of violations of our basic rights to personal freedom and choice over the last two years that were justified on the basis of harm reduction. The economy, our dying loved ones, our faith practices, our children's education, all of it served up on the altar of Safetyism. Think of the Covid Karen: Triple-masked. Quad-boosted. Self-confined for months on end. Hyperventilating in panic as she ventures to the grocery store for the first time in a year. Then scolding the rest of us for wanting to send our kids back to school, and demanding instead that we all abide by her hypochondria, on pain of punishment by the bureaucratic state. This person—who is as often male as female—is the avatar of the Longhouse.
   This is not a call to adopt pickup artist buffoonery or the shallow machismo of an Andrew Tate, or any of the myriad pretensions of masculinity that one sees on the right. Such pursuits, even when motivated by a rejection of Longhouse norms, are equally deluded, and diminish one's higher nature.
10. The rise and fall of the good British.
11. The crisis at the heart of the Conservative party.
    Despite coming to power with a majority of 80, as close to total control of the British state as you can have, the government has failed to push forward on any of its purported objectives. It is bizarre to see left wing commentators talk of the ‘rise of the far right’ or the democratic backsliding associated with post 2019 Conservatism, when those I know on the right laugh darkly at the impotence of the government.
    A government which claimed to be hard-line on immigration did nothing to reduce it. A government that seeks to be tough on crime has seen petty crime become almost legal. A government that complains about ‘woke-culture’ has done nothing at a legislative level to prevent it.
    The Tory party is not driven by some grand policy agenda, but simply grasping at shiny objects. It passes repetitive, unnecessary and ultimately inoffensive laws that criminalise things that are already illegal – like dog theft or ­assaults on emergency workers. Or else spends its time complaining that the world, the civil service and the blob is against it. The party once sought to campaign in poetry and govern in prose, now it campaigns and governs in tweets.
12. How the biggest fraud in German history unravelled.
13. Generative agents: Interactive simulacra of human behavior.
    
    To enable generative agents, we describe an architecture that extends a large language model to store a complete record of the agent's experiences using natural language, synthesize those memories over time into higher-level reflections, and retrieve them dynamically to plan behavior.
    We demonstrate that, with generative agents, it is sufficient to simply tell one agent that she wants to throw a party. Despite many potential points of failure—the party planner must remember to tell other agents about the party, attendees must remember the invitation, those who remember must decide to actually show up, and other possible points of failure—agents in our environment succeed. They spread the word about the party and then show up, with one agent even asking another agent on a date to the party, all from this single user-generated seed suggestion.
14. Singapore asks banks to keep quiet on wealth inflows during China boom.
    This banker summarised the MAS’s message as being that private banks should “just quietly do your job” because “you don’t want to antagonise”.
15. How does electricity find the "path of least resistance"?
16. Who agrees with Hitler?
17. Fertility and mimetic desire.
    There is a town in western Japan named Nagi that’s famous for making babies. Its fertility rate in 2021 was 2.68 lifetime births per woman, compared with 1.3 for Japan as a whole, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal that my Opinion colleague Jessica Grose recently cited. Delegations from elsewhere in Japan and abroad have come to Nagi to learn its secret formula. Is it the free medical care for all children? The affordable child care? The cash gifts to new mothers? I’ve been considering another theory. Maybe people in Nagi are having babies because other people in Nagi are having babies.
18. China’s population is shrinking.