Patrick Byrne

President Trump says he has postponed strikes on Iranian power plants.

Speaking of Italy's competition authority , it has fined Ryanair $301 million for abusing its dominant market position to limit sales of tickets by online travel agents. The Guardian: The authority said Europe's largest airline had "implemented an abusive strategy to hinder travel agencies" via an "elaborate strategy" of technical obstacles for agents and passengers to make it difficult for online travel agents to sell Ryanair tickets and instead force sales through its own website. The fine related to Ryanair's conduct between April 2023 and at least until April 2025, the authority said on Tuesday. It said Ryanair had prevented online travel agents from selling tickets on its flights in combination with other airlines and services, weakening competition. Ryanair said it would immediately appeal against the "legally flawed" ruling.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BBC Verify examines Labour claims about the cost of planned Tory borrowing

The killer chart from @Brad_Setser is this: https://t.co/t7FI7L4Xsz pic.twitter.com/0NqNMkOQkg

— Niall Ferguson (@nfergus) April 23, 2023

The post De-dollarization? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

When it comes to political analysis, a common mistake is to focus on leaders. I suppose this is hardwired into us, as in ancient times when people lived in small tribes it was true that leaders actually mattered a lot. Today, not so much.

Truss? Sunak? Who cares when you have a dysfunctional Conservative Party. Here’s Reason:

Truss u-turned on several tax pledges to restore market confidence, as Tory M.P.s made clear they would not tolerate any major offsetting spending cuts.

Read that again. Britain’s “conservative” party won’t even consider significant spending cuts in its bloated budget, which is much larger as a share of GDP (43%) than after Labour PM Tony Blair had led the country for three years (35%). This is what I keep telling you; there is no small government party. In the US, government spending grows just as fast under GOP presidents as under Democratic presidents.

Here’s the Financial Times:

“Brexit was based on an act of immense stupidity,” says one European leader (on the condition of anonymity). “It was sold by politicians who promised a sort of great Singapore but voted for by people who were unhappy about globalisation.” As the leader went on to spell out, this is an impossible mandate to deliver on.

I love that quote—it perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with Brexit.

OK, but how about supply side reforms? No luck there either. Conservative MPs strongly opposed Truss’s proposed deregulation to make it easier to build housing, or to allow for fracking to produce energy. And a lack of housing is far and away Britain’s primary economic problem.

You might wonder why I’m so pessimistic about Britain. Actually, in a relative sense I’m optimistic. The whole world is becoming more nationalistic, more statist, more stupid. Rishi Sunak is not ideal, but as world leaders go he’s well above average. The political situation in the US is much worse than in the UK. In China it’s far worse than in the US. And in Russia it’s far worse than in China.

Here’s the FT:

Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, has just firmly restated his belief in globalisation — in what felt like a rebuke to the US.

Belief in globalization is a rebuke to the US? Yikes.

I miss the 1990s. There’s only one endpoint for nationalism. Get ready for WWIII, regardless of whether Biden or (more likely) Trump wins in 2024.

In this post I want to return to the question of moral progress. But before addressing that directly, I first want to set up two reference cases for comparison.

My first comparison case is statistics. Statistics is useful, and credit for the value that statistics adds to our discussions goes to several sources: to the statisticians who develop stat tests and estimates, to the teachers who transmit those tools to others, and to the problem specialists who find useful places to apply stats.

We can tell that statisticians deserve credit because we can usually identify the particular tests and estimates being used (e.g., “chi test”) in each case, and can trace those back to the teachers who taught them, and the researchers who developed them. New innovations are novel combinations of stat details whose effectiveness depends greatly on those details. We can see the first use cases of each such structure, and then see how a habit of its use spread.

Similar stories apply to many STEM areas, where we can distinguish particular design elements and analysis tools, and trace them back to their teachers and innovators. We can thus credit those innovators with their contributions, and verify that we have in fact seen substantial progress in these areas. We can see many cases where new tools let us improve on the best we could do with old tools.

My second comparison case is the topic area of home arrangement: what things to put in what drawers and rooms in our homes, and what activities to do in what parts of what rooms at what times of the day or week. Our practices in these areas result from copying the choices of our parents, friends, TV shows, and retailers, and also from experimenting with personal variations to see what we like. Over our lifetimes, we each tend to get more satisfied with our choices.

It is less clear, however, how much humanity as a whole improves in this area over time. Oh, we prefer our homes to homes of centuries ago. But this is most clearly because we have bigger nicer homes, that we fill with more nicer things than our ancestors had or could afford.

As new items become available, our plans for which things go where, and what we do with them when, have adapted over time. But it isn’t clear that humanity learns much after an early period of adaptation to each new item. Yes, for each choice we make, we can usually offer an argument for why that choice is better, and sometimes we can remember where we heard that argument. But the general set of arguments used in this area doesn’t seem to expand or improve much over time.

It is possible and even plausible that, even so, we are slowly getting better in general at knowing where to put things and what to do when in homes. Even if we don’t learn new general principles, we may be slowly getting better at reducing our case specific errors relative to our constant general principles.

But if so, the value of this progress seems to be modest, compared to our other related sources of progress, such as bigger houses, better items, and more free time to spend on them. And it seems pretty clear that little of the progress that we have seen here is to be credited to researchers specializing in home arrangement or personal activity scheduling. We don’t share much general abstract knowledge about this area, and haven’t added much lately to whatever of that we once had.

We see similar situations in many other areas where there is widespread practice, but few research specialists or teachers of newly researched tools. There might be progress in reducing errors where practice deviates from widely accepted stable principles, but if so that progress seems modest relative to progress due to other factors, such as better technology, increased wealth, and larger populations.

With these two reference cases in mind, STEM tools and home arrangement, let us now consider moral progress. The world seems to many to be getting more moral over time. But that could be because we have been getting richer and safer, which makes morality more affordable to us. Or it could be due to random correlated drift in our practices and standards, combined with our habit of judging past practices by current standards.

However, it also seems possible, at least at first glance, that our world is getting more apparently moral because of improved moral abilities, holding constant our wealth and knowledge about non-moral topics. For example, moral researchers might be acquiring more objective genera knowledge about morality, knowledge which morality teachers then spread to the rest of us, who then apply those improved moral tools to particular cases.

In support of this theory, many people point to particular moral arguments when they defend the morality of particular behaviors, and they often point to particular human sources for those arguments. Furthermore, many of those sources are new and canonical, so that a great many people in each era point to the same few sources, sources that are different from those to which prior generations pointed. Does this show progress?

If you look carefully at the specific moral arguments that people cite to support their behavior, it turns out that those arguments look pretty similar to arguments that were known long before. While each new generation’s canonical sources have some unique examples, styles, and argument details, those differences don’t seem to matter much to the practices of the ordinary people who cite them.

This situation seems in sharp contrast to the case of progress in statistics, for example, where the details of each new statistical test or estimate show up clearly and matter greatly to applications of those stats. It seems more consistent with moral arguments being used to justify behavior that would have happened anyway, rather than having moral arguments cause changes in behavior.

Yes, some old moral arguments may well have been forgotten for a time, and thus need to be reinvented by newer sources. For example, while ancient sources plausibly expressed thoughtful critiques of slavery and gender inequality, recent critics of such things may well have not read such ancient sources.

Even so, progress in morality looks to me much more like progress in home arrangement, and much less like progress in STEM. Even though locally new home arrangement choices continually appear, they don’t appear to add up to much overall progress relative to other sources of progress. Similarly, while it is possible that there is some moral progress due to slowly learning to have lower local error rates relative to constant general principles, I think we can pretty clearly reject the STEM-analogue hypothesis that morality researchers invent new detailed morality structures which then diffuse via teachers to greatly change typical practice.

Thus an examination of the details of moral change suggests that little of it can be credited to moral researchers, and only modest amounts to practioners slowly learning to cut errors relative to stable principles. Thus most apparent progress is plausibly due to our getting richer and safer, or to drift combined with a habit of judging past practices by current standards.

The ex-Manchester United and Wales star denies coercive behaviour and assaulting two women.

1. Using AI paraphrasing tools to avoid plagiarism checks.

2. MIE: “Shake Shack hooks up with DoorDash for chicken sandwich-themed dating site.”

3. Interesting analysis of which bureaucratic interest groups support Putin.

4. “The first successful pizza restaurant in the world located outside of Naples was founded in Buenos Aires in 1882, when a Neapolitan immigrant baker named Nicolas Vaccarezza started selling the pies out of his shop in Boca.”  Link here.  Mostly it is about how American pizza is.

5. “Taliban fighters will no longer be allowed to carry their weapons in amusement parks in Afghanistan…in what appeared to be another effort by the country’s new rulers to soften their image.”

6. Jonathan Cahill.

7. Blackwell’s bookshop is up for sale.  Family-owned since 1879.

The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A flying car capable of hitting speeds over 100mph (160kmh) and altitudes above 8,000ft (2,500m) has been issued with a certificate of airworthiness by the Slovak Transport Authority. The hybrid car-aircraft, AirCar, is equipped with a BMW engine and runs on regular petrol-pump fuel. It takes two minutes and 15 seconds to transform from car into aircraft. The certification followed 70 hours of flight testing and more than 200 take-offs and landings, the company said. "AirCar certification opens the door for mass production of very efficient flying cars," its creator, Prof Stefan Klein, said. "It is official and the final confirmation of our ability to change mid-distance travel forever." In June, the flying car completed a 35-minute flight between international airports in Nitra and Bratislava, Slovakia. The company told BBC News it planned "to fly to London from Paris in near future." Dr Steve Wright, senior research fellow in avionics and aircraft systems, at the University of the West of England, said the news was "a good step down the road" for the company and made him "cautiously optimistic that I am going to see a few AirCars one day -- but I think there is still a way to go."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Winter Olympics, Commonwealth Games, Women's Euros and the men's World Cup are just some of the big events taking place in 2022.

The overall cost of living faced by low-income households (post-tax income <$50,000) in the most expensive city—San Jose, CA—is 49% higher than in the median commuting zone, Cleveland, and 99% higher than the most affordable commuting zone—Natchez, MS.

And:

The three commuting zones with the lowest consumption of low income households are San Jose, CA; San Francisco, CA; and San Diego, CA, with consumption levels between 27% and 30% lower than the median commuting zone. At the other extreme of the spectrum, examples of commuting zones with high consumption of low-income households are Huntington, WV; Johnstown, PA; and Elizabeth City, NC, with consumption levels in real terms 22–23% higher than the median commuting zone. The range of consumption levels observed across U.S. communities is quite wide: Low-income families who live in the most affordable commuting zone enjoy a level of market-based consumption measured in real terms that is 74% higher that of families with the same income who live in the least affordable commuting zone.

And:

The estimated coefficient implies that a middle-skill household moving from the median commuting zone (Cleveland) to the commuting zone with the highest price index (San Jose) would experience a 7.7% decline in their standard of living. Moving from the commuting zone with the lowest cost of living index (Natchez) to the commuting zone with the highest index would imply a decline in the standard of living by 12.7%.

As for high school dropouts:

Moving from Natchez to San Jose implies a 26.9% decline in the standard of living.

Here is the NBER working paper by Rebecca Diamond and Enrico Moretti

The post Cost of living sentences to ponder appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Everything that gets done runs through Paul.  As Adam Minter put it (excellent thread more generally):

Nothing would get done if Paul weren’t there. But it’s a fine line, because he’s irritating. also – Ringo, in my opinion, has deep deep reservoirs of patience. I don’t know how he go through some of those days.

In this “prepping for a no overdubs, pure live performance” setting, the studio doesn’t matter.  And control over studio production was how Paul exerted an increasing authority over the Beatles.  “Let’s work on this more together” de facto meant “let’s give me, Paul, greater influence over the proceedings.”  Yet without his studio expertise as a Williamsonian trump card, Paul has to be more of a pain in the ass to induce effort and focus from the others.

“I’m scared of me being the boss, and I kind of have been for a couple of years,” or something like that, is what Paul says.  “I know it’s right, and you know it’s right” comes shortly thereafter (remember this?).

“Whatever it is that will please you, I will do it” responds George.  John in turn mutters something about maybe they should improvise the whole thing.

George Martin is rendered irrelevant, due to the studio production being omitted, and mostly he stands around and looks like a guy who used to do ads for bad British cars in the 1960s.

Two highlights are Paul singing a mock version of “Gimme’ Some Truth,” and John singing a mock version of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”  Doesn’t the film show it was actually George who broke up the Beatles?  (Or Ringo in 1968?)  Doesn’t the person who leaves first split up the relationship?

What is quiet Yoko thinking the whole time?

And from Dave Bueche:

• It’s surprising to see them digging around for material.  You’d think they would have had a lineup of songs before they started the project.
• Twickenham [the studio] seems like a drag.  You can tell they don’t love it either.  It’s big and cavernous and a few colored lights doesn’t change that.
• There’s a certain sad nostalgia in them playing all the old standards they learned in Germany and Liverpool.  Like they know this the end and they’re sort of reliving the beginning one last time.
• Paul is clearly more invested than the others.  George seems like he’s trying to just learn the songs, do his bit, same with Ringo.  John seems like he’s a good sport, but other than Don’t Let Me Down – he seems to be going through the motions.
• It’s fun seeing them cover Dylan and other contemporaries.

The reviews are all “oh, this shows the Beatles loved working together until the very end.”  That’s a pretty superficial read of the material.  To me, Get Back is much more about “how the main value adders control small groups in a somewhat tyrannical and mostly efficient manner, and why this isn’t always stable.”  Mancur Olson remains underrated.

“All Things Must Pass” just wasn’t that good a song, and it would have been worse as a Beatles song.

Here is a very good Jonathan Freedland review.

The post *Get Back*, I appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Many people (NYT) are talking about the new paper by Jeremy Rudd on exactly this topic — Rudd is skeptical that they matter very much.  So I went to read the paper, and I have to say I am baffled.  It didn’t change my priors at all.  I didn’t see new empirical estimates, or new theoretical arguments, and furthermore I didn’t see the most relevant factors discussed much.  I did see a lot of pokes at Friedman, Phelps, and Lucas (and there is also an introductory assertion that, even given enough time, markets with flexible prices do not clear.  Then he goes on to deny that the theory of household choice is sufficient to derive downward-sloping demand…why do that???).

I would start by looking at the clearest cases where inflationary expectations do matter.  If inflation rates become quite high (say above forty percent?), many people switch to alternate currencies.  Or in hyperinflations the velocity of money, after some point, accelerates very dramatically, thereby fueling the inflation further.  So inflation expectations really do matter, as supported by both theory and evidence.  Contrary to Rudd, the theoretical case is there, though the question of magnitude at lower inflation rates is largely an open one.  But let’s not slip from “open” to “we are justified in thinking they don’t matter very much at all.”

You can even put aside velocity and the demand for money and the theory for inflation expectations mattering still is there.  For instance, if I look at the simple and fairly general menu costs models, suppliers know they won’t be changing their prices very often.  So they form an expectation of inflation when deciding where to put the price right now, knowing that level will have to be “close enough” for some time to come.  That’s a very simple theoretical mechanism!  No, that is not a priori but it carries a lot of force and Rudd does not consider it.

If I ask “which papers do I, as outsider, already know in this area?” I hit upon Michael F. Bryan, et.al. “The inflation expectations of firms: What do they look like, are they accurate, and do they matter?”, 2015, not so ancient and from the Atlanta Fed.  There is lots of careful estimation in this paper, and here is part of the abstract:

Next we show that, during our three-year sample, firm inflation expectations appear to be unbiased predictors of their year-ahead observed (perceived) inflation. We also show that firms know what they don’t know—that the accuracy of firm inflation expectations is significantly and negatively related to their uncertainty about future inflation. And lastly, we demonstrate, by way of a cross-sectional Phillips curve, that firm inflation expectations are a useful addition to a policymaker’s information set. We show that firms’ inflation perceptions depend (importantly) on their expectations for inflation and their perception of firm-level slack.

That doesn’t prove that inflation expectations matter a great deal, but it is certainly consistent with them mattering, as theory would lead us to expect.  It seems to go much further than Judd, and it is not cited by Judd.

Or how about the NBER survey by Olivier Coibion, et.al.: “Empirical evidence suggests that inflation expectations of households and firms affect their actions but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear, especially for firms.”  There is a whole section of the paper “Do inflation expectations affect economic decisions/”, with the answer mostly being “yes,” in part with the caveat that inflationary expectations are hard to measure precisely.

That all is consistent with my rather basic understanding of the matter.  Again, this paper is not cited by Rudd.  It’s not that I think a contribution has to cite every paper out there, but when you play the “no estimation of my own, just going to poke holes in various claims, and focusing from people decades ago…”…a reader such as I is going to want to see you cite and rebut the main recent attempts to establish relevance for inflationary expectations.

And here is commentary from Joseph Gagnon.  Here is commentary from Ricardo Reis, some good points though I think he overstates the indeterminacy issue.

Most of all, I don’t feel I have a horse in this race.  I am very comfortable with the idea that we, as economists, have a poor understanding of regime shifts, including shifts in inflation regimes.  But when I am told that, as a result of agnosticism, I should infer inflationary expectations are not very relevant…then I feel someone has jumped the gun.

The post Do inflation expectations matter for inflation? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

A very good graph from the New Statesman. The vaccines give the body a huge advantage in fighting the virus so even when there are infections the number of deaths is dramatically reduced. This is UK data but the same type of relationship should hold everywhere.

The post Vaccines Dramatically Reduce Deaths appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

After touring through jungles, oceans, mountains, winter itself, and the Nether, Minecraft Dungeons is at last heading to The End. The next DLC for Mojang's Diablo-like Minecraft spinoff is taking players to the final dimension this month alongside another free update. They've also revealed an Ultimate Edition of the game which will be available the same day, bundling the game with all six of its DLCs.

Read more

Mathieu van der Poel produces a superb ride to win stage two of the Tour de France and claim the yellow jersey in Brittany.

AMD currently just supports Vulkan ray-tracing with their Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards while now there is independent work being done on Mesa's unofficial Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) to allow ray-tracing to work with older generations of GPUs like Vega and Polaris...

On Friday, NPD Group analyst Mat Piscatella tweeted that the PS5 is currently the fastest selling hardware platform" in U.S. history, in terms of total dollar sales. CNET reports: Piscatella didn't share an exact dollar amount for the PS5 but noted that consumer spending across video game hardware, software and accessories has already totaled $9.3 billion this year. Sony didn't include specific sales figures in its earnings report last month, but the company did indicate it shipped 4.5 million PS5 consoles in 2020 alone. Chief Financial Officer Hiroki Totoki said at a February news conference that Sony is aiming to sell upward of 14.8 million units in the coming fiscal year, which begins this month. The PS5 did fall to second place for the month of February, according to NPD. It was superseded only by the Nintendo Switch, which may have seen a sales boost on the heels of Super Mario 3D World -- Bowser's Fury, the latest Switch title, released last month.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The post It is a marathon, not a sprint appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The medical journal's editor says UK guidelines don't recommend giving different coronavirus jabs.

Makers of cars and electronic devices from TVs to smartphones are sounding alarm bells about a global shortage of chips, which is causing manufacturing delays as consumer demand bounces back from the coronavirus crisis. From a report: The problem has several causes, industry executives and analysts say, including bulk-buying by U.S. sanctions-hit Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies, a fire at a chip plant in Japan, coronavirus lockdowns in Southeast Asia, and a strike in France. More fundamentally, however, there has been under-investment in 8-inch chip manufacturing plants owned mostly by Asian firms, which means they have struggled to ramp up production as demand for 5G phones, laptops and cars picked up faster than expected. "For the whole electronics industry, we've been experiencing a shortage of components," said Donny Zhang, CEO of Shenzhen-based sourcing company Sand and Wave, who said he faced delays in obtaining a microcontroller unit that was key to a smart headphone product he was working on. "We were originally planning to complete production in one month, but now it looks like we'll need to do it in two." A source at a Japanese electronics component supplier said it was seeing shortages of WiFi and Bluetooth chips and was expecting delays of more than 10 weeks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers from IBM Trusteer say they've uncovered a massive fraud operation that used a network of mobile device emulators to drain millions of dollars from online bank accounts in a matter of days. The scale of the operation was unlike anything the researchers have seen before. In one case, crooks used about 20 emulators to mimic more than 16,000 phones belonging to customers whose mobile bank accounts had been compromised. In a separate case, a single emulator was able to spoof more than 8,100 devices. The thieves then entered usernames and passwords into banking apps running on the emulators and initiated fraudulent money orders that siphoned funds out of the compromised accounts. Emulators are used by legitimate developers and researchers to test how apps run on a variety of different mobile devices. To bypass protections banks use to block such attacks, the crooks used device identifiers corresponding to each compromised account holder and spoofed GPS locations the device was known to use. The device IDs were likely obtained from the holders' hacked devices, although in some cases, the fraudsters gave the appearance they were customers who were accessing their accounts from new phones. The attackers were also able to bypass multi-factor authentication by accessing SMS messages.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paul Fenning says the decorations in his Christmas spectacle are needed more than ever this year.

The post Paige Harden on Genetic Differences and the Left appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The bug fixing in KDE land continues and ends the month with a "bug massacre", for how KDE developer Nate Graham describes it in his weekly recaps...

Jack Leslie, England's first black player, was dropped because of his ethnicity, in the 1920s.

A jewel of the southern sky, the

Volkswagen plans to spend more than 34 billion euros ($40 billion) over the next five years on developing electric cars, autonomous driving and other new technologies, it said on Friday. "With the planning round now approved, we are laying the foundation for making Volkswagen the world's number one player in electric mobility by 2025," Chief Executive Matthias Mueller said in a statement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

World Of Horror brings back the classic 1-bit Macventure style with art inspired by Junji Ito. You must solve unsettling mysteries in 198X Japan, all while fighting off detestable monsters physically and mentally.

If there's an itch I didn't know I needed scratching, it comes in the form of World of Horror. While the horror genre seems to be moving for more definition to their slimy monstrosities, World of Horror does it with 1-bit pixel art,leaving much to the imagination while still using sharp, strange detail. There is a very unique style to World of Horror that stems from its Ito inspirations, but it also pairs with an exciting soundtrack and thrilling adventure.

The game revolves around a seaside town in Japan where the Old Gods have awoken to feast on the many. To try to keep your wits about you during this difficult time, you must solve mysteries and fight the losing war against the gods that are making chaos throughout your home town. World of Horror hints at dice rolls in combat and cards that may hinder or help, but offers few details on how they work. It also mentions two main stats in the game, Stamina and Reason, which are held by all the characters, and also that sanity will be on the line as you play.

I'm looking forward to learning more about these unsettling aspects of the game as more details become available, but in the meantime, I can enjoy the creepy imagery.

You can vote for World Of Horror on Steam Greenlight. For more information on the game and developer Panstatsz, you can follow them on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

A child longs to be airborne, hurled through the air by a dad of strong moral fiber and powerful of arm. They wish to be weaponized in the battle against evil. Given toys periodically. That means you, our stand in dad, must work to hurl your child at all things evil and inconvenient in Dad Quest, a goofy sidescroller where you parent with your throwing arm.

Kids are just kind of destructive forces on their own, but in Dad Quest, you can harness that energy to beat up enemies and smash obstacles. Plus, if you break enough things with your thrown child, they'll level up, growing up before your very eyes. They can change their look, gain some new behavioral powers, or learn a new ability as they gain levels. Your parenting is unorthodox, but it's teaching the little kids something valuable.

You can always reward the little tyke with a toy or trinket when they're behaving (or you happen to stumble across one buried in the game's world), adding even more abilities. You can also feel free to treat yourself with an heirloom to admire, which do odd stuff to the things they're used on. Then again, you could just admire them on your mantle, stroking your chin as you reminisce about things.

Being a dad in a sidescrolling action game isn't easy, but by gum, it's rewarding.

Dad Quest is available for $7.99 on Steam Early Access. For more information on the game and developer Sundae Month, you can head to the game's site, the developer's site, or follow them on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.