“On October 6, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published an article to its Liberty Street Economics blog that included a chart showing that President Donald Trump’s tariffs directly led to a higher inflation rate and that without those tariffs, consumer goods prices would have declined. Through October 7, most major news organizations had […]

Today’s U.S. military structures itself around assumptions of short, decisive wars. Munitions stockpiles are limited. Preparation for reconstituting a highly skilled professional force is minimal. Maintenance of reserve weapons and equipment is poor. These policies trade long-term staying power for short-term lethality and presuppose that the United States can end a conflict quickly by destroying […]

“A few times I’ve noted that Trump started moving aggressively toward foreign policy and war just as his power and popularity were diminishing at home. That’s when the Greenland fury started, that’s when he went after Venezuela, that’s when, on the sugar high of Venezuela, he launched his catastrophically consequential war on Iran. No one […]

Personally, I find the time change brouhaha silly. If you live in the northern hemisphere, there’s just less daylight in the winter months. You can play with the clocks, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are 24 hours in the day and fewer of those hours will be sunlit in winter. If people […]

Trump bullied the EU into releasing 100 million barrels of oil from its reserves over the next four months. Will that bring down gas prices in the US significantly in time for midterms? The math says no. “Europe is putting roughly 820,000 barrels a day on the market. “The world used about 104 million barrels […]

A sucker is born every minute. “If you go back to the middle of the last decade, the big tech platforms were massive, and were entrenching their monopoly power in various segments of the tech economy and the national and global economy generally. The exponential growth of earlier years was giving way to merely arithmetic […]

The data center conversation is a proxy for corruption. You know, people see that there is a deep integration between these big billion dollar tech companies and the Trump administration, and they don’t like it, and the proliferation of data centers is a sign to people that the only thing that matters in this administration […]

I’ve never been a fan of pro sports or college sports. It’s pretty obvious that college sports have become a farm system for pro sports, and that college players have been exploited to subsidize a revenue stream (both direct income and alumni philanthropy) for colleges. “College sports have been reeling in the wake of the […]

My concern with AI companies’ current attempts to mitigate misalignment is that these efforts may only hide it, by rewarding and selecting the AIs that cheat without getting caught. We should certainly continue research toward better monitoring of AIs’ actions, their chains of thought, and the activity inside their networks. But as capabilities grow, those […]