Try to convince an economist's math is bullshit when his income and pedigree depends on it

laney staley

an ode to my new (but old) Laserjet

Craigslist laser jet printer

RIP - Voodoo an incredible album, and its inception so vividly documented in Questlove’s autobiography. What a voice and persona.

❤️‍🩹“I made this for my daughter, whose birthday was supposed to be in five days,” said a freed Palestinian hostage, clutching a small bracelet he made for her. He had just learned that the Israeli occupation had killed all his children Baraa, 8 years old; Iman, 5; and his 2-year-old daughter. “My loved ones are dead… my children are dead,” he cried, collapsing under the weight of loss. shawqi_maghnam (IG)

Books marketed to make self identified "smart guy" smarter are a really atrocious breed of book.

Another nobel of economics for mathematical models with severely limited real world applications, observed policy implications or relevance - a thin, pointless misdirection on top of Schumpeter’s work. Quick blog post: solberg.is/nobel-economics

I'm never retiring my mbp m1 32gb ram - if it dies I will organize a soldiers burial and ceremony

Do liberals have "climate fight fatigue"? Maybe when they realized it wasn't compatible with corporate profits and startups?

Founder of Telegram has a message

Finnish journalist arrested after asking Finnish President Stubb about Israeli arms deals.

Not just rare earths. Battery anodes materials, superhard materials, synthetic diamonds etc Brutal day for international industry

pretending your parents aren't rich, and observers deciphering this, is taking up too much mental bandwidth in our society

Parasite was good but it didn't deserve so many Oscars

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

Timing your coffee intake for peak cognitive alertness has less to do with cortisol spikes and more to do with leveraging the biology of adenosine. Caffeine works by blocking adenosine, a molecule that builds up the longer you’re awake and makes you feel tired. But right after waking, adenosine levels are at their lowest, meaning there’s not much for caffeine to block. That initial “jolt” you feel from your first sips? It’s often just natural sleep inertia fading (or maybe the placebo effect from coffee’s smell and ritual). Dr. Michael Grandner (@michaelgrandner) explains how waiting approximately one hour after waking allows adenosine levels to naturally accumulate, creating optimal conditions for caffeine to bind more effectively and producing a robust and measurable enhancement in alertness and cognitive performance. From the latest episode of the FoundMyFitness podcast. Links to the full episode can be found below.

Here are my full thoughts on Dan Wang’s new book, “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future”, which is selling like hotcakes. Let me start by saying that if you're interested in China’s transformation — especially the economic aspect — I highly recommend this book. It’s superbly written by someone with extensive first-hand experience in China. Wang combines solid analysis of China’s economy with his own personal observations from traveling and living there. Combined with the fact that the prose is so captivating, the book becomes truly hard to put down. It’s simply super fascinating to read. The main argument of the book is that China is a nation of engineers, for better and for worse. The country builds and achieves remarkable feats at a blistering pace, but this engineering mindset also comes with human and social costs. Wang highlights the positive side of the engineering state through its economic achievements: infrastructure megaprojects, manufacturing dominance, and technological progress at a scale and speed unprecedented in human history. He also examines the darker side: China’s authoritarian and, at times, inhumane approach to social issues, such as the one-child policy and the COVID lockdowns. My primary criticism of the book is that it sometimes reads like a critique of China from a Western perspective. Perhaps that’s unfair to Wang — after all, he grew up in Canada and the US. This *is* his perspective. And to his credit, Wang does a remarkable job of trying to understand China through that lens. Still, for my taste, the book leans too much toward comparing China with the US — using the US as a yardstick, or framing questions around how the US should respond to remain competitive. I would have liked to see Wang explore China’s political and economic system more deeply, addressing questions such as: What are the roots of the state's legitimacy, and is this legitimacy strong? What is the rationale behind the lack of pluralism, if any? And perhaps most importantly, why do lower-income countries face different political and economic realities than higher-income countries? In current discussions about China, too many analysts, especially in the West, sidestep particularly this last question. While China is unique, its development path shares notable similarities with the so-called East Asian “tigers.” We’ve seen comparable trajectories in South Korea and Singapore, where democratic institutions and stronger social policies followed industrialization rather than preceding it. As Alice Amsden, the scholar of South Korea’s industrialization, noted: rapid industrialization tends to create the structural conditions for social change. We should therefore ask whether comparing China to the US or Europe is really the right approach when trying to understand its trajectory of transformation. Given Wang’s deep knowledge of China, I would have expected a more detailed analysis of the “messy” process of development and the constraints under which China operates, rather than setting high-income countries as the benchmark. That said, Wang does note throughout the book that the US could learn from China’s engineering mindset. So, the criticism goes both ways. Perhaps it’s even a compliment to China that Wang occasionally assesses it as if it were already a wealthy nation. It is, of course, a wealthy nation in many ways. But it’s still going through a process of rapid socio-economic transformation, unlike most high-income countries today. In sum, while I have these critical remarks about the book — which admittedly reflect my own interests, perspective, and training, particularly in the political economy of development — “Breakneck” is a book I’d highly recommend to anyone seeking to better understand China’s economic transformation.

Greta Thunberg is my hero