… is set out over the fold. I’m confident readers who take a little time to think about it will realise it’s far superior to existing policy, and to any alternative proposed so far.
- Fourth repost since 2011
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John Q
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How Hegsethian heroes destroyed themselves and their entire civilisation
I haven’t yet seen the Odyssey film[1], but reviews mention a minor obsession of mine, the Late Bronze Age collapse and the ensuing Greek Dark Age. I first encountered this at the end of Ken McLeod’s Intrusion where the character Geena compares modern nihilists to the mysterious “city burners” responsible for the massive destruction of cities in the Eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BCE.
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A number of commenters noted a malware problem with the site.It appears to be a well known attack called ClickFix.
It’s now fixed, thanks again to Doctor Memory
My son Daniel points me to a piece by Nate Silver which announces the discovery that highly educated workers with low or precarious income are the natural constituency of the Democratic Socialists of America. We’ve been over this at length at CT, starting as far back as 2012 (and it wasn’t new then). Given that Silver treats the question as new, I thought it might be useful to restate the basic points from this discussion.
… to CT reader and commenter Dr Memory, who has cleaned up our database, eliminating many of the badly rendered quotation marks and similar problems. Those problems reflect the fact that the blog is now more than 20 years old, and has gone through multiple formatting systems.
An unexpected side benefit is that commenters can now use emojis, which weren’t even available in Unicode when CT started out.
I enjoy reading over our old posts and discussions, and will enjoy it more now that they are properly readable.
Thanks again, Dr M.
As I observed last year, the statement that “The cemeteries are full of indispensable people.” is just as true of nations, and in particular the US. That was a little controversial at the time, but now it’s become sufficiently conventional wisdom to be restated in the New York Times. I’ve been working on an update. and that seems like a signal to get it out
There was a renewed burst of enthusiasm for nuclear power a few years ago. In Australia, where I live it was confined to the political right and didn’t last long, but elsewhere support was broader. Most notable was the 2023 commitment by more than 20 countries, led by the US, UK and France, to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050. In the three countries mentioned, that would imply building 330 GW of new capacity as well as replacing retiring capacity.
There’s long been a disconnect between concerns about the massive impact of AI data centres on electricity demand and claims by Sam Altman and others that the impact is really modest. Ed Zitron recently posted a summary of OpenAI’s 2025 accounts which helps to clarify things a bit.
In short, if you look at actual electricity demand needed for current AI use, it’s small. And that doesn’t change if demand grows at high but plausible rates. On the other hand, if you look at what is needed to justify the current valuations of AI and its competitors, the implied growth is staggering.
The SpaceX IPO, valuing a motley collection of dubious business at over a trillion dollars, marks the abandonment of the Efficient (financial) Markets Hypothesis, one of the zombie ideas I criticised in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Not only do financial markets fail in the task of valuing assets accurately, but the institutional structures that are supposed to make them work have given up trying.
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Jerry Cayford at Three Quarks Daily has written a piece responding to the near-farcical “jungle primary” in California where it appeared possible at one point that both of the candidates making it through to the general election might be Republicans. The proposed response is to allow the top five candidates through to the general election, which would be run under Ranked Choice Voting.
Here’s the conclusion:
Final Five Voting emerges as the single most powerful way to address political dysfunction, “the root cause of the decades-long inability of our government to make progress on America’s most pressing economic and social problems” (18). (Better legislative rules take a strong but secondary position.) Harvard Business School’s large-scale, multi-year project has given us, then—along with valuable information, analysis, and insight—a thesis vitally relevant to our public conversation about electoral reform: the stakes of that conversation are immeasurably higher than we usually recognize. To make this point, HBS not only documented the magnitude of America’s decline and crisis, but also spotlighted electoral reform as the very top priority in reversing our long slide. Not just easing polarization, gridlock, and other narrowly “political” problems. Not just making California’s elections sensible. Breaking the politics industry’s self-serving duopoly is how we address everything else as well.
Do you want to repair crumbling roads and bridges, lower infant mortality rate, or fix K-12 education? The single most effective remedy is “nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections.” Are you trying to improve health care, life expectancy, or public transportation? Your method is “Final Five Voting.” The powerful message of HBS’s U.S. Competitiveness Project is that electoral reform is our main tool to end dysfunctional politics, strengthen U.S. competitiveness, and stop America’s decline. Want paid leave and walkable cities? Or—updating from 2019 to today—do you seek to compete with China on anything at all, unwind predatory monopolies, or develop more useful, less dangerous artificial intelligence? All of it. The basic aspects of a civilized life. The answer is the same. Put your effort into nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections, aka Final Five Voting.
One my betes noires has been in the news lately. Jonathan Haidt has been annoying me since at least 2012, when I was critical of his bothsidesism on the culture wars.
At the time, he was a concern troll, posing as a liberal worried about other liberals who were, he claimed, misunderstanding Republicans. Whereas liberals thought of Republicans as bigots and misogynists, concerned with preserving their own position in racial and gender hierarchies, Haidt explained that they actually had their own set of values, based on order, purity, honour and loyalty. The wheels started falling off that one when Donald Trump, the antithesis of all of these things, came along and received the unqualified support of the supposed believers in purity.
Haidt responded by reinventing himself a free speech advocate, concerned about cancel culture and the coddling of young minds. He hung out on the “Intellectual Dark Web” with Bari Weiss and Stephen Pinker. Now that Weiss is busy suppressing reporting of Trump’s crimes, the IDW appears to have shut up shop.
?Haidt’s next reinvention was an almost complete backflip. Despite having no relevant research background (as discussed his previous focus was on adult voters, followed by a shift to scolding college students) he suddenly became an authority on the effects of smartphone use on teenagers. His concerns about freedom of speech suddenly went out the window, replaced by a fear that the speech teens encountered on their phones was making them depressed as miserable.
Haidt’s work writings on this topic inspired the Australian government to pass legislation aimed at banning access to social media platforms for people under 16. It’s been mostly ineffective, but for the minority of kids who have left social media, a notable impact has been reduced access to news.
Possibly because recognition of this failure is spreading, Haidt has gone back to the “coddling” theme in a commencement address at NYU, for which he was roundly booed. Haidt appears not to have noticed that, far from protecting students from views that might upset them, NYU is busy suppressing speech by students that offends the administrators and of course the Trump Administration.
The kind of concerned punditry of which Haidt is an exponent never goes out of style, even if the topics of concern change from time to time. Given his ability to leap from one topic to the next with a fine disregard for consistency, I expect he will be around to annoy me for a long time to come.
Back in the 1980s, I was (among other things) a writer and singer of satirical folk songs. Going to the National Folk Festival in Canberra at Easter, I caught up with old friends and was reminded that I had produced a book of my songs. Returning home, I dug out a copy, and decided to scan it. You can download the result here (big file)
Among other things, the unlamented former autocrat Viktor Orban was one of the leading proponents of pro-natalist policies, and more open than most about the racist underpinnings of his view. However, like others who have tried to raise birth rates, he wasn’t particularly successful. To understand why not, it’s useful to consider the question: how many babies do we want. In particular, since their choices are the relevant ones, how many babies do young women want?
The news from Hungary’s election is so good that I need to write about it, even if not all the implications are clear yet, and even in a disorganised and way, repeating lots of what others are saying.
Although the polls predicted Orban’s defeat, nothing I read foreshadowed the scale of the victory – a two-thirds majority which will allow the reversal of all of Orban’s constitutional changes. Some credit for this must go to JD Vance. The spectacle of a US vice-president appearing in Europe to complain about foreign influence must have been too absurd for voters to accept. Putin’s unsubtle interference allowed Peter Magyar to remind Hungarians of Russia’s previous crimes against Hungary.
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(A piece I wrote for the Guardian)
A couple of weeks ago, just before my 70th birthday, I completed the Mooloolaba standard distance triathlon (1,500m swim, 40km cycle, 10km run). There was nothing exceptional about my performance, placing 1,509 out of 1,730 overall and 14th out of 18 in my 65-69 age category.
But not that long ago, it would have been exceptional. Until about 1980, competitive sport for those over 70 was restricted largely to golf and lawn bowls. Until the 1990s, there wasn’t even a category for 70-year-olds in most competitive triathlons. The small number of competitors over 65 were lumped into a single category. The first 70-year-olds recorded as completing the demanding Kona Ironman event in Hawaii (3.8km swim, 180km ride, 42.2km run), to which I still aspire, were Hiromu Inada (male) and Ethel Autorino (female) in the year 2000.
What’s true of triathlons is true of endurance sports in general. Older athletes seem to be becoming more numerous, and also quite a bit faster, across a wide range of sports.
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