WEEKLY BRIEFLY NOTED: FOR 2024-08-16 Fr
My weekly read-around…
ONE IMAGE: Trump’s “Project 2025” Book:
ANOTHER IMAGE: Moral Fault Attaches to Anyone Associated with the New York Times CLXXII:
A THIRD IMAGE: Comparative Schedules:
ONE AUDIO: JD Vance as the Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix of Suburban Cincinnati:
<https://overcast.fm/+AA0MYtrf1s4>
ONE VIDEO: InDecision 2024: Definitely Not Weird
Trump Attempts Intellectual Economy Speech, Trashes Biden, Harris, Tic Tacs Instead: With Republican strategists begging Trump to stop the insults and focus on the issues, Desi Lydic watches his “intellectual” speech on economic policy — which inevitably goes off the rails into a rant about Joe Biden’s ice cream choices, Kamala Harris’s laugh, and the problem with Tic Tacs. Plus, Troy Iwata on why Tic Tacs really do explain inflation.
A Second VIDEO: Black Pepper Is the Top of the Spice Level:
SubStack NOTES:
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: First, the policy mistake has already been made: the question is how much damage it will do. Second, looking at stock and bond markets together—stocks flat, long bond yields down by 0.4%-points—over the past three weeks strongly suggests that the marginal traders in the markets see (a) a much weaker underlying economy, but (b) accompanied by rate cuts large and fast enough starting in September to hold discounted future profits (if not production and employment) harmless:
Joe Weisenthal: ‘The fact that markets have done so well, in the face of solid economic data, furthers the evidence that the Yen carry trade story from a week and a half ago was a canard. The risk (perhaps as not as acute as we thought?) to investors is the prospect of recession/policy mistake… <https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1824150707664195886>Do note that this change-of-focus is fully a year later than it should have happened:
John Auther: Three Is a Magic Number: ‘Headline consumer price inflation [over the past year] dropping below 3%… the magic number putting price rises within the Federal Reserve’s official target range…. Goods inflation is negative. Spikes in fuel and food are over. At this point, inflation is all about core services, whose prices are disinflating, but very slowly…. Investors are now assuming that inflation is on course for 2%, just as the Fed has always needed before it can start cutting rates. After three years of inflation obsession, it’s encouraging that the focus can turn to other factors… <https://public.hey.com/p/SHUWt85XxWmYSevgdKbz4Pgz>
The stakes in economic policy in this election:
James Medlock: ‘Next year, half our tax code expires and this election is basically about turning a dial that has “less child poverty” on one side and “more money for billionaires” on the other side. Choose wisely!…
The White House understood the dimensions of the likely inflation outlook and situation three years ago. (I did too.) Ceci Rouse and company deserve to have people watch and register that they have every right to take a victory lap:
Cecilia Rouse, Jeffery Zhang, & Ernie Tedeschi (2021): Historical Parallels to Today’s Inflationary Episode: ‘Supply chain disruptions are having a substantial impact on current economic conditions. Economy-wide and retail-sector inventory-to-sales ratios have hit record lows; homebuilders are reporting shortages of key materials; and automakers do not have enough semiconductors. Elevated consumer demand is adding fuel to the fire…. When looking for historical parallels, it is useful to concentrate on inflationary episodes that contained supply chain disruptions and a spike in consumer demand after a period of temporary suppression. The inflationary period after World War II is likely a better comparison for the current economic situation than the 1970s and suggests that inflation could quickly decline once supply chains are fully online and pent-up demand levels off… <https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/07/06/historical-parallels-to-todays-inflationary-episode/>Journamalism: So many political reporters desperate to pretend that the soft landing is not still happening:
Rick: ‘More evidence of how the media is failing America. Scary Lawyerguy: “Beginning to think POLITICO isn’t on the up and up:
… <https://twitter.com/scarylawyerguy/status/1823801508435255375>
Josh Marshall takes lazy and not-very-competent Puck reporter Peter Hamby to school. Don’t read Hamby—just recognize that Hamby’s response to Harris’s talking about strengthening Social Security, Obamacare, and labor unions, securing abortion rights everywhere, continuing Biden’s climate policies, and signing the border bill Trump killed is to say that she “has not outlined any specific economic agenda, speaking only in generic terms…”:
Josh Marshall: : ‘We could make a separate point that it’s risible to be demanding policy particulars from Harris when Trump changes his policies from one day to the next. Even calling them “policies,” as opposed to impulsive grunts, is charitable. At present, Trump’s main’s policy action is disclaiming Project 2025, which until a few months ago was widely believed to be his de facto governing document, as embraced as such by the campaign itself…. There’s nothing cheap or vibesy or anything less than robust about the campaign Harris is now running. She’s putting out a vision and creating a choice and the public is responding… <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/harriss-campaign-is-working-get-used-to-it/sharetoken/f9fb542c-b0a1-457a-8229-aea885369739>
Neofascism: Russell Vought, one of the architects of Project 2025 and Trump OMB Director, says that Trump is 100% supportive of them in private, and salivates at the ideas of mass deportation, mosque-construction bans, and a truly unitary executive branch with no independent federal agencies at all:
Russell Vought: ‘I expect to hear ten times more from the rally the president distancing himself from the left’s bogeyman of Project 2025. I’m not worried about it. He’s running against the brand. He is not running against any people. He is not running against any institutions. It’s interesting—he’s in fact not even running opposing himself to a particular policy…. He’s been at our organization, he’s raised money for our organization, he’s blessed it…. He’s very supportive of what we do…. Eighty percent of my time working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies. And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence…. whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work…. He had the most pro-life record ever… <https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-sneers-at-veterans-again>This seems to me to be pointing in the right dimension, but it massively understates the degree to which Goldwater added anti-Black white supremacy to the mix. It really wasn’t a three-legged stool if you listened to the dog whistles. There were four. And it is not so much anti-immigrant: if you are a Ted Cruz or an Usha Vance, you can find a place in today’s Republican Party. It is the valorization of a strange version of ethno-placism—with a kid from suburban Cincinnati constructing a fake identity as a hillbilly as the most striking example of what is at its core:
Brian Buetler: The New Three-Legged Stool Of GOP Politics Is Weird: ‘It’s also a formula for evil…. For decades prior to Trump, Republicans drew political viability from a largely unrelated set of ideologies: national defense hawkishness; Christian moralism, and libertarian contempt for the social safety net…. There isn’t much internal coherence [here]…. Over time, the arbitrariness helped discredit the conservatism of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Mitt Romney. The GOP’s situational interest in “budget deficits” was a byproduct of unprincipled politics and an agenda at war with itself…. The new three-legged stool, as the old one, unites Christian fundamentalists and Randian economic fanatics. But it swaps out national-defense conservatism for anti-immigrant conservatism…. An adherent of the old three-legged stool looks like Romney—awkward, austere, politically obsolete—the new GOP looks like JD Vance, if not significantly more menacing…. There is a fully formed ideology that inheres all three prongs, and you can find it in Viktor Orban’s Hungary or in various neofascist manifestos that circulate among Vance and other Trump loyalists…MAMLMs: A nice summary of some of the underpinnings:
Dan Shipper: How Language Models Work: ‘This [attention-mechanism] method takes “jack” and turns it into a… Super Word—that looks something like: “Jack-Nicholson-iconic-Hollywood-actor-with-a-legendary-smirk-known-for-The-Shining-his-Lakers-fandom-and-his-unsettling-charisma”…. From… the model can produce a list of likely things that come next…. During its training process, a language model creates a massive dictionary to contain all of these very complicated, made-up Super Words…. When the language model gets a prompt, all it has to do is take the last word in the prompt and repeatedly ask: “What kind of word are you, really?” until it builds up a much more complex Super Word. Then, it looks up that Super Word in its massive dictionary, which helps it predict what usually comes after that. It repeats the process…. What if the model encounters a Super Word that isn’t in its dictionary?… [For] Language models… their dictionaries work like a map…. By representing Super Words as coordinates on a map, language models can “know” about words that fall between known points…As at least some of the air leaks out of the more bubbly elements of the Generative AI boom, am I wrong in seeing the response being a compensatory production of even more wild and reality-unmoored discourse?
Max Read: A new A.I. influencer is producing some of the most criminal charts I’ve ever seen: ‘This newsletter… serves as an “early warning” system, alerting readers of New Guys who are highly likely to become annoying fixtures of discourse in tech, media, culture, and other adjacent domains. Awareness of these Potential Characters can be put to many different purposes, including demonstrating knowledge dominance in the group chat, or simply improving your day-to-day quality of life by immediately blocking and muting the names of the New Guys on any and all social media platforms…. What is he really peddling here? Here’s a tweet showing off one of the graphs from his PDF:
It’s misleading to present a chart showing exponential growth and say “it just requires believing in straight lines on a graph”—but you would have to then explain what, precisely, is growing exponentially, and unfortunately nothing on this graph—none of the words, none of the axes, none of the lines–bears even an indirect relationship to an observable, measurable, or quantifiable phenomenon. What is “effective compute”? What is “Smart High Schooler” and how do we know that’s equivalent to, or the best way to describe, GPT-4? Here are three charts that bear a more honest relationship to reality than Aschenbrenner’s:
… <https://maxread.substack.com/p/who-is-leopold-aschenbrenner>
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