BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-08-02 We
…attempting to use history, þe importance of aiming for a high-pressure economy, using titanium, & GPT-LLM-ML’s coming disruptions…
MUST-READ: TwitterX CEO Linda Yaccarino’s Plea for Help:
I was on Noah Smith’s side—that Twitter as we knew it had to die, or be transformed into something rich and strange, if we were to get out of the Twitter -that-was into which we had been “cast… the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and… [be] tormented day and night…. This is the second death… [for] whosoever was not found written in the book of life…” Musk appears to have chosen “die”. But there is some amusement along the way:
John Gruber: Translation From Hostage Code to English of X Corp CEO Linda Yaccarino’s Company-Wide Memo: ‘At our core, we have an inventor mindset — constantly learning, testing out new approaches, changing to get it right and ultimately succeeding. We are hemorrhaging cash and our advertisers are still fleeing.
With X, we serve our entire community of users and customers by working tirelessly to preserve free expression and choice, create limitless interactivity, and create a marketplace that enables the economic success of all its participants. I used to run all advertising for NBCUniversal. Now I’m running an $8/month multi-level marketing scheme where the only users who’ve signed up are men who own a collection of MAGA hats.
The best news is we’re well underway. There is no hope.
Everyone should be proud of the pace of innovation over the last nine months—from long form content, to creator monetization, and tremendous advancements in brand safety protections. Have you seen the ads we’re running these days? Last week we were filling everyone’s timeline with ads for discount chewable boner pills, the punchline of which ads is that you’ll bang your lady so hard she’ll need the aid of a walker afterward. That’s a video we promoted to everyone. This week it’s anime for foot fetishists. That’s what we put in everyone’s feed, every three tweets. Or X’s, or whatever we’re now calling them. I used to book hundred-million-dollar Olympic sponsorship deals with companies like Coca-Cola and Proctor & Gamble. (Thank god for Apple.)…
And everyone, is invited to build X with us. I think I, saw on a TV show once that a hostage was able, to signal to authorities the need for help without alerting, their captors by placing commas randomly in their sentences.
Elon and I will be working across every team and partner to bring X to the world. That includes keeping our entire community up to date, ensuring that we all have the information we need to move forward. I found out about this name change when you did, at midnight on Saturday, and I have no idea what that fucker is going to do next or when he’s going to do it. You know this. You know that I know that you know this. But I’m going to persist with the charade that these decisions are being made by a team that I’m a leader of, because to do otherwise would be even more humiliating…
ONE IMAGE: Quits Are Still a Good Thermometer for þe Labor Market”:
They track worker nominal wage pressure well—something that the unemployment rate has not done since the mid-2000s
ONE VIDEO:
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Mary Daly, Bart Hobijn, & Brian Lucking (2012): Why Has Wage Growth Stayed Strong?: ‘Downward nominal wage rigidities… means that, in nominal terms, wages tend not to adjust downward when economic conditions are poor…
Jon Lauck: ‘Richest American cities in 1949: Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Chicago, Toledo, Dayton, Akron…
Mike Beggs (2011): Zombie Marx: ‘The arrogance of Marxist economists…. Many will already be laughing and mocking along with Harvey. And perhaps DeLong deserves no better. Yet on the point at issue, he was right—it is a question of interest rates…. Now that we are more than a couple of years down the track, DeLong still looks right…
Brad DeLong (2009): Stimulus Ostriches: ‘Root-and-branch stimulus opponents whose work has crossed my desk recently include efficient-markets fundamentalists like the University of Chicago’s Eugene Fama, Marxists like CUNY’s David Harvey, classical economists like Harvard’s Robert Barro, gold bugs like the Council on Foreign Relation’s Benn Steil, and a host of others…
Building Human Capital: Timothy Burke: Academia: Conduct Unbecoming: ‘Universities are entitled to say when a student, a professor or a staff member is plainly not there for the mission. Attacking a course that you have no interest in engaging with the intent of getting it cancelled and its professor harassed is not being there for the mission…
China: Daniel W. Drezner: Only Kissinger Gets Loved in China: ‘I was not surprised… [at] a Kissinger video, but I was a bit surprised that there was nothing from Jimmy Carter… The Chinese simply did not put in the effort… probably because the 39th president cares about human rights in a way that Kissinger does not…
Treason: United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, Defendant: Indictment: ‘Shortly after election day, the Defendant also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results… three criminal conspiracies…
Public Sphere: John Gruber: Inside Meta’s Threads Launch: ‘It continues to astound me that anyone with any experience whatsoever would express surprise that a small-ish talented team was so effective. (I say “ish” because 50-60 people isn’t all that small.) Fred Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month is somehow simultaneously famous and widely-ignored. A larger team would likely have delayed Threads, not accelerated its launch. A much larger team might have doomed the project to failure…
GPT-LLM-ML: Henry Farrell: Fully automated data driven authoritarianism ain’t what it’s cracked up to be: ‘What we know about authoritarian systems (Jeremy has a great new book on this topic) is that it’s really hard for them to generate and use good data…
CogSci: Alex Rosenberg: How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories: ‘You can’t really fault evolution…. It was hard enough and took long enough for it to shape a working theory of mind…. Imagine how much harder… to include in it a hardwired restriction on its application: “Apply to humans and to their predators and prey only, please”…
¶s:
After Neoliberalism: Well, this from Oz is nice and ego-boosting to see:
Shane Wright: Chalmers takes on capitalism as we know it in bid to save stretched households: ‘Those thinking the blowback in some quarters to the essay will stop Chalmers, whose doctoral thesis was on Paul Keating and the importance of leadership, will be disappointed. The treasurer is tossing up which of two new books on the state of the global economy to read—either Slouching Towards Utopia, by American economist Brad DeLong; or The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism from Financial Times associate editor Martin Wolf. Unsurprisingly, both books touch on the troubles that have plagued the global economic and political systems: the failure of democracies to deal with the economic troubles that have developed over recent years and how this has given succour to populists and autocrats…
Economics: What a complete disaster the 2009 decision not to prioritize rapid recovery to a high-pressure economy was:
Paul Krugman: Out of the frying pan, into a lost decade: ‘The U.S. economy, boosted by major federal spending programs, came roaring back from the Covid slump, regaining all the lost ground in just over three years. If America had done as well after the financial crisis, we would have been back on trend by mid-2011…. In fact, by 2010, with unemployment still close to 10 percent, the Very Serious People of Washington lost interest in job creation in favor of obsessing about the national debt. As a result, we turned to years of fiscal austerity that held the economy back. Along the way there were many arguments offered about why a return to pre-crisis levels of employment wasn’t possible…
I am not sure they were ever expectations that titanium would widely displace either aluminum or stainless steel. Bur then I do not have a very good sense at all of chemistry, of the properties of metals, and of what things are going with the grain of nature, and what things are really hard to do:
Brian Potter: The Story of Titanium: ‘To support the budding industry, the US government stepped in. It funded the construction of several titanium sponge plants, and agreed to purchase any surplus titanium sponge production for the national stockpile. It offered rapid amortization of titanium production equipment for tax purposes, and demonstrated production techniques at the Bureau of Mines’ pilot plant…. By the mid-1960s, titanium had become a mature engineering material. While there was still much to learn about titanium, the practical aspects of working with it and using it to solve engineering problems were well-understood, and it increasingly found use in aerospace and other industry applications…. But titanium is also a story about the limits of this sort of jumpstarting. Despite its impressive learning rate, titanium remains an expensive, niche material. A 2006 report noted that titanium is five times as expensive as aluminum to refine and ten times as expensive as aluminum to turn into finished products. Despite initial expectations, titanium hasn’t widely displaced either aluminum or stainless steel, and is only used where its unique properties make its high cost worth it. The aerospace industry remains the largest user of titanium…. Beyond the lack of process improvements, titanium is just fundamentally difficult and expensive… due to titanium’s reactivity… [plus] the hardness that makes titanium so desirable also makes it more difficult to machine… Practical knowledge—the learning that comes from actual production—is critical for technological progress. Technology consists of materials and machines and ideas, but they’re all stitched together by a collection of people that know how to do things. It’s by way of those people doing those things, and understanding them better and better, that new and better technology becomes possible…
GPT-LLM-ML: But we have already experienced many such disruptions since 1950—first with the uses made of the mainframe, then the PC, then the Internet, then the smartphone, and then social media. And, of these, it is only the social media part where we have failed to manage the consequences well. So why does Ethan think this will be different?:
Ethan Mollick: On holding back the strange AI tide: ‘There is no way to stop the disruption. We need to channel it instead…. Many people are trying to stop AI from being weird…. These policies are not going to work…. There is tremendous opportunity here to democratize access… to all students, of all ability levels, but we can’t just keep doing what we always did and hope things won’t change. The only bad way to react to AI is to pretend it doesn’t change anything. We have considerable agency about how to use AI in our work, schools, and societies, but we need to start with the presumption that we are facing genuine, and widespread, disruption…. Scientists and engineers designing AI… have no particular expertise on how AI can best be used, or even how and when it should be used…