According to Politico, Trump is against cutting Social Security and Medicare: Former President Donald Trump issued a warning to Republican lawmakers on Friday: Don’t lay a finger on entitlement programs as part of the debt ceiling showdown with the White House. “Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or […]
One reason politics is so hard is that our words are often heard by different audiences, and a message that is well-calibrated for one type of listener may work poorly for listeners with different roles, values, or interests. To illustrate: Phillips O’Brien has a piece in the Atlantic with the headline “Time is on Ukraine’s […]
Ukraine is getting much more advanced offensive weapons . . . This seems to mark a major shift, a commitment to helping Ukraine go on offense and win. Open questions . . . How far will Ukraine’s partners go? Infantry fighting vehicles today, maybe tanks, ATACMs, planes, etc. tomorrow? How big a threat is the […]
The Republicans have no good options as they cast around for a solution to their speakership problem. McCarthy can try to make concessions to secure the support of the Freedom Caucus. These concessions will empower the obstructionists in the FC and will make the House ungovernable. The result will be interminable gridlock and recriminations at […]
Tyler Cowen points us to YouChat, a new AI chatbot, that as far as I can see after studying this carefully for 15 seconds is supposed to be more up to date than the OpenAI bot and integrated with a search engine which naturally makes it the next new thing and presumably worth billions of […]
The new OpenAI chatbot is fun to mess around with. (You can sign up for a free account here.) But is it smart? I asked it an easy math question, based on Euler’s polyhedron formula. Euler discovered that the number of edges of a polyhedron is equal to the number of faces plus the number […]
A recent paper finds that drivers who are not vaccinated against COVID are substantially more likely to be involved in serious auto accidents than vaccinated drivers. In response, Jay Bhattacharya, an author of the Great Barrington Declaration and a prominent opponent of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, tweeted that the study “should not be used by […]
The moral and strategic importance of a Ukrainian victory seems hard to overstate. A protracted, frozen conflict would be a humanitarian disaster for Ukrainian civilians in Russian occupied areas and war zones, it would lead to continued slaughter of troops on both sides, it would strip Ukraine of critical ports, it would embolden further adventurism […]
I have no idea what is going on in Musk’s head, but hoo-boy. Overpaying, firing essential employees, scaring off advertisers, implementing half-baked policies then quickly reversing himself, provoking regulators. Now there are indications/rumors he is getting ready to bail. And the problem for Musk goes way beyond Twitter. Tesla’s valuation is insane. It’s been based […]
Nature recently published a paper on “degrowth”. Libertarian economist Donald Boudreaux immediately attacked the paper with his usual collection of pro-market, anti-government arguments. Fine. But then Boudreaux published a letter he got from Daniele Struppa, president of Chapman University. Here is a brief excerpt: It is just a manifesto for a deindustrialization of the west, […]