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We’ve all heard it: AI is coming for junior-level jobs. If you are in your 20s and you use a computer for work, you have already been affected . Plenty of handwringing ensued . But fear not, it is an illusion.…

During this challenging period, please stop getting together with friends, and baking sourdough bread. Just don’t do it.

This isn’t easy for any of us. I’ve enjoyed gathering with many of you in groups of 5 or more around Dillon’s reclaimed walnut butchers block kitchen island as ambient bacteria rapidly ruined a large mound of moist room temperature wheat in front of us, thus commencing the Satanic ritual that augurs the arrival of all sourdough into this realm. The time we spent in close proximity while partially decomposing what was only moments ago perfectly suitable human nourishment was often the highlight of my week…

No, Facebook Did Not Panic and Shut Down an AI Program That Was Getting Dangerously Smart - Gizmodo

If you look up a word in the dictionary, you’ll find it is described using other words. The mathematically-inclined among us (and machines are very much mathematically inclined) might notice the relationship between this property of language and the ability to describe vectors in terms of other vectors. Such linear algebra doesn’t even rise to the level of artificial intelligence, and instead follows a long tradition of developing mathematical analogues for physical phenomenon like the orbits of the planets or the transverse lengths of rectangular corn fields. Algebraic projections of language, or “embeddings,” are merely the first step in building a translation or natural language system.…

The Decline of the Baronial C.E.O. - The New York Times

War is the great leveler. You’ve either taken that hill or held that city, or you have tragically and perhaps catastrophically lost it. There was no room for positioning, prevaricating or PowerPoint. A culture of leadership, borne of such proximate encounters with an unyielding reality, readily elevates only those who produce concrete and evident results.…

Why the Fed Raised Rates - The New York Times

The Federal Reserve is ready to party like it’s 1988.

The rest of us are eying a labor-force participation rate that is lower than it has ever been through the 80s and the 90s (a period that included 3 recessions). The share of part-time employment is still higher than before the Great Recession. Even full-time employment now rarely includes such economic stabilizers as defined-benefit pensions or comprehensive healthcare coverage. This might be why all those jobs Yellen is celebrating don’t seem to be doing a thing to inflation, which has remained well below the Fed’s own target of 2% for most of the last 10 years. But wow, 4.3% unemployment! It’s enough to make us all feel young again!…

Western Nations Worry That Children Won’t Be Better Off

The 2006 movie Children of Men (based on a novel of the same title) explores a dystopian future in which an 18-year pandemic of infertility leaves the planet entirely child-less. The film’s premise of social breakdown goes unchallenged since we intuit humanity as a kind of pyramid scheme. The next generation is synonymous with a people who are smarter, healthier, longer-lived, more diverse, and more tolerant than the lot in which we find ourselves today. Whether or not we assume the future will have more people, we all presume that the future will have better people.…

Work - XKCD

The appeal to a golden era “when we used to make things” isn’t just nostalgia or judgmentalism. It refers to a qualitative but real difference between building vs. taking. Building things imposes a certain rigor not only on our thinking but also our values. When we build we are advancing the aggregate capability of humanity in some small way. We don’t all have to be sending people to Mars, we can also build by working out the inner mechanisms of some new gadget that others will find useful or putting together a cake others will find delicious. When we take, we are instead simply shifting around the spoils of such efforts from others to ourselves by, say, helping ourselves to their savings by opening fake bank accounts.…

Watching Canada’s Biggest Rock Band Say a Dramatic Goodbye - The New Yorker

There was a time, not any longer, when our capacity to take in a culture and a feeling was so great it would happen by osmosis, when the background music of our childhoods, looping quietly through the department store or filling the empty kilometers of a road trip, would affix itself like a plank in the stage on which years later we would play grownups.…

Amazon to Expand Private-Label Offerings—From Food to Diapers - The Wall Street Journal

An “effective infinity” is a quantity so large we cannot help but treat it as infinite, only it isn’t. The number of grains of sand on all the beaches in the world is effectively infinite, since you could never conceive of a device or process that could manipulate or even consider them all, yet there can only be so many of them on a finite planet.…

Theranos Under Fire as U.S. Threatens Crippling Sanctions - The New York Times

In my experience, leaders that “make it” tend to be hugely ambitious when talking about what they want to do and incessantly conservative when discussing what they have done. Around the time Google flirted with being the largest public company in the world, Larry Page offered publicly and privately his observation that the company had accomplished maybe 1% of what it should be doing. You have to know a bit about engineers, relentless problem solvers, to not see that as a slight: the best reward to an engineer for a job well done is a new set of bigger and more interesting problems to solve. Larry made his observation with excitement, not disappointment. Almost a decade ago, Elon Musk declared his intention to colonize Mars and for years afterward was posting videos on YouTube of his company’s rockets blowing up. This was his way of telling his team at SpaceX that they were only 1% of the way there and what a cool thing that was.…

Rose thou art sick - The Economist

The central thesis of the center-left has always been that government is the home for exactly those values that are not naturally served by markets, that two such kinds of values can and do exist, that it is legitimate to want for your country “soft” attributes like openness, fairness and civility alongside (and perhaps even at the partial expense of) “hard” attributes like economic growth and military power.…

Tay, the neo-Nazi millennial chatbot, gets autopsied - Ars Technica

Children understand early on that words are spoken in a context and both word and context interact to create meaning. If a child points to a fruit bowl and says ‘apple’ the child is praised and maybe rewarded with a snack. If the child points to a man walking his dog and says apple, the child sees its grown ups chuckle bashfully. Each invocation is the child sampling a space of contexts and testing an intervention in each; the more dissimilar the contexts, the more information is contained in the grownups’ responses. The resulting repetition is unremarkable when the word in question is innocuous. All this changes, of course, when the word is a ‘swear,’ and every query into the context space is consistently jarring to grownups. Children may exploit the jarring nature of a swear in all contexts, or simply be discouraged from testing any further.…

Match 1 - Google DeepMind Challenge Match: Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo - YouTube

Today a computer defeated the world champion in one of the most complex games created. Commentators will no doubt weigh in on the technique and meaning of the victory, and there remain several games left in the tournament, but before they do it is worth considering why this challenge is different from all others.…

In the Bizarro World of Negative Interest Rates, Saving Will Cost You - The New York Times

Is it possible we’ve created more money than we know what to do with?…

How Stories Drive the Stock Market - The New York Times

As the saying goes, the stock market has helpfully predicted nine of the last five recessions.

In January of 2016, broad measures of US stocks dipped about 8% in two weeks. Yet in those two weeks, 8% of taxis did not disappear, 8% of iPhones were not destroyed, 8% of TV shows were not cancelled, and 8% of houses did not burn down . Even 8% of stock traders did not quit, though we might have wished they had.…

Live video from LZ-1 - X.com

Objects from space always seem accidental in their arrival and much the worse for wear. Meteorites shrivel to pebbles, if they make it to the surface at all. Satellites meet a fiery end high in the atmosphere. Astronauts huddle in capsules, dangle from parachutes, plunge ignominiously into the ocean, and bob around awaiting rescue. The space shuttle used to land like a plane, but with a few obvious missing parts.…

Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization - MIT Technology Review

In my consulting days, I espoused an unpopular theory, that 40-60% of the workforce of every Fortune 500 company could be replaced with a well-programmed computer. I was often met with incredulity and admonished that even if such a future were inevitable, it was surely not a topic for polite conversation.…

The Perpetual Bubble Economy - The New York Times

Wealth is the present value of expected cash flows at some discount rate. If you reduce those cash flows by single-handedly reducing economy-wide spending (as the government can do), then the only way to prop up wealth is to drive down the discount rate with which it is computed. This causes wart-like inflations in the prices of long-term assets (e.g. housing), and distortions away from real production (since no one is buying stuff) towards financial intermediation (since you have to go to greater lengths to get any return on your savings).…

On recent reflection, I was left with a distinct sense that I, the square peg, could never fit into the round hole.

For years I bemoaned my straight edges and sharp corners. How unfit my shape, how crude and unrounded. So many of the other sort passed busily by, with their sagacity on curvature, its uses and benefits. Such reasonableness and confidence in their voice as they described the failings of rectitude. How important, they said, the many concerns and anxieties with which they filled their days and preoccupied their minds.…

Obituary: Margaret Thatcher - BBC

It is a hard sell that Britain’s economic troubles through the 70s and 80s were due to too much stability among banks, too many jobs for the workers, too many houses for the homeless, too many sick people becoming healthy, or too many schoolchildren drinking too much free milk.…

Is There Life After Work? - The New York Times

“All those years ignoring my husband and the toxic assets accumulating on Lehman’s balance sheet just didn’t work out how I would have liked,” wrote former Lehman CFO Erin Callan in Sunday’s New York Times.…

Tilting the playing field - The Economist

Finance Minister George Osborne and his London colleagues argued, unsuccessfully, that the EU’s cap on bankers’ bonuses would drive up base salaries, reducing the money that could be clawed back and leaving total compensation unchanged. This is incorrect. Bankers’ bonuses should be capped, and not for the schadenfreude of seeing it done.…

Wealth Inequality in America - YouTube

People think linearly, though income and wealth accrue geometrically. The differences are enormous, especially over time.

Those who spend all that they earn (or more) are not accumulating the wealth needed to buffer themselves from the vicissitudes of a capital economy. As a result, they accept increasingly poorer deals (can’t afford to be without a job due to the need for health insurance, can’t afford to retrain, relocate, or just relax…). This decreased bargaining power further diminishes their (and their children’s) ability to build wealth, and the cycle continues.…

The law of demand is a bummer - The Economist

Opening with a straw man, the Economist claims that raising the minimum wage requires that we forsake the law of demand: that “raising the price of something–low-skilled labor, in this case– will reduce demand for that thing.”…

Japan Steps Out - The New York Times

We forget that money is a good just like any other. Saying that no one wants to buy things (GDP being the rate of such purchases) is the same as saying people would rather keep the money (or, equivalently, pay down debt). As a result, there is an exorbitant demand for money. Similarly, when long-term government interest rates (for a nation that can print its own currency no less) remain depressed in the face of a recession, there is clearly an exorbitant demand for government debt. The two come together in the fact that real long-term rates on US Treasury securities remain negative on maturities out to 2029; the global markets are paying the US government to spend their money for them, to the tune of trillions of dollars .…

Health Care and Profits, a Poor Mix - The New York Times

Healthcare is not like any other good. It intrinsically suffers from every impediment to ‘free’ markets imaginable. You are compelled by circumstances to purchase it, and thus cannot navigate the ‘marketplace’ with the critical option of simply not purchasing. You suffer vast information asymmetries related to the skills of the provider, error rate of diagnosis, quality of care, likelihood of success, and therapeutic alternatives. You select from providers and therapies that are sufficiently heterogeneous to make meaningful comparison impossible. You pay for treatment so you get more treatment, not more health. And you rely on third-parties whose vested interests simply could not be more different from your own, and who (by virtue of the structural flaws above) have an enormous space in which to operate unchecked in rent-seeking ways.…

Mother’s Eulogy: ‘Take Flight, My Boy’

As a hobby, guns are great: the heft, the history, the sound, the precision. But liberty is more than the space between you and the most mentally unstable person in every crowd.…

To Reduce Inequality, Tax Wealth, Not Income - The New York Times

An economy, like a business, has a (cross-sectional) balance sheet and income statement. In times of inflationary growth, you want to transfer activity from the income statement to the balance sheet, slowing down spending and increasing saving. So you tax income and provide tax breaks for things like retirement accounts.…

If there’s gonna be a class war, do you want to support the guy who fights for the other class, or the guy who fights for his own?

FDR gave everyone a secure retirement, though his retirement was never in jeopardy. Kennedy landed a man on the moon, though doing so would not enrich him. LBJ signed civil rights legislation, though his rights were never in question.…

Documents Show Details on Romney Family Trusts

“I pledge allegiance to my money at the United Bain Holding Co., and to the power which it provides, one interest all mine, inscrutable, with privilege and immunity for me.”…

The College Graduate as Collateral

Could we means-test the cost of a college education based on the student’s future income rather than the parent’s past income? It might not only give a leg up to students from low-income families, but also eliminate low-value degree mills and help those who choose to go into non-profit, public service, and other modest income professions.…

What kind of society do we want to be? - The Economist

Is an individual entitled to make a choice that harms himself? Should a state be restrained from intervening? Why?…

Open secrets are things everyone knows but no one says in polite company, and they are more prevalent than we admit.

Doctors are professionals? Not always. Investment managers know what they’re doing? Rarely. Business leaders are true visionaries? Almost never. The fact is most people are human. They are merely advancing their own interest and occasionally catch a fast break.…