The US moves in the right aesthetic direction. Very pleased to see such developments 🫡🥂 Huge potential for sculpture and architecture going forward.

Cities were crucial to the spread of early Christianity (see Rodney Stark’s important book Cities of God). Christianity did something radical in urban Roman settings—it treated slaves, merchants, women, and patricians as equally bearers of a soul with an eternal destiny. Missionaries like Paul targeted urban centers (Antioch, Corinth, etc.) because cities offered dense populations, diverse social networks, and platforms for visible social service.

The # of leftists who have just shown us that they don’t understand, or worse pretend not to understand, economics is staggering. If you expropriated (stole) 5% of Elon’s stock you have to sell it, then use that cash to compete with other goods and services in the economy. We need to do less of something else (consumption) to do more of whatever it is you want to do. The funding source is irrelevant to the existence of this tradeoff. Oh, and because it’s still most of the consumption, most of the pain of this tradeoff would, as usual, not come from the super-rich, but from the people you pretend to care most about (or you’re just that dumb). Elon is not sitting on a pile of unused health care you can take and hand out.

This was an excellent essay!

AOC is “not smart”

I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true: — As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable. — Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you’ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability — big or small — it is Anthropic’s responsibility to patch.) — A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused. — In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious.” — In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety. — In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community. — The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority. — Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.

Cutting school safety agents by this amount—especially with felony assaults in NYC schools rising—gets things backward. Safety is a precondition for education. When hallways are threat zones, with students carrying knives or worse, students who want to learn don’t feel secure, and academic progress gets much harder to achieve. As in neighborhoods, without order, nothing good works.

The Democrats will push for a national wealth tax on top of local measures

💯

Karp suggests a better way forward in the Technological Republic: newcriterion.com/article/val…

what if the staten island ferry terminal was redesigned in greco-futurism

47 murders on the subway in the past 5.5 years is a huge increase. In 20 years from 2000 to 2019 there were 44 murders. And 8 in the 6 years from 2013 to 2018. *We use murders not to ignore other crimes, but because murders are a reliable stat for comparative purposes over time.

What would it require to enforce Piketty’s plan? About this matter, he is conveniently vague. Confiscating something on the order of 10% of world GDP and redirecting it through a newly created supranational body does not happen by asking nicely. You cannot restructure the global economy at that scale without a coercive apparatus that dwarfs anything in human history. The mechanism must be authoritarian. It would require a world government with the power to tell billions of people which jobs they may and may not hold, what they may build, what they may eat and how many hours they are permitted to work. And to what end? “Climate change” is an insufficient answer when Picketty’s entire edifice is built on a discredited foundation. The report relies on a baseline from the RCP8.5 climate scenario that projects Earth warming by as much as 4.8 degrees Celsius by 2100. But last month, the UN’s own climate panel officially retired RCP8.5 (always a high-end estimate) as “implausible.” A more central projection is about 2.7 C. Replies to Piketty’s X feed pointed this out immediately. His response, as far as anyone can tell, has been silence. That leaves the inequality argument. Worldwide income inequality is nearing a 150-year low, but Piketty insists that radical redistribution of wealth is essential for the Global South. And where have billionaires and wealth been popping up fastest in recent decades? Embarrassingly, data from Piketty’s World Inequality Database confirms that it’s in South and Southeast Asia, as well as East Asia. These are the exact Global South regions that have spent recent decades rescuing hundreds of millions of people from poverty through market-directed economic growth. latimes.com/opinion/story/20…

History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet. Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralyzed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years. And the people crashing out about his net worth are doing it on the app he owns. The same app governments spent years trying to censor. You cannot legislate a rocket into orbit.

Beautiful

AI increases the relative benefit of intensive reading: AI may save you the trouble of skimming - it will never replace careful reading. This skill is becoming more valuable, and rarer.

This thread is worth your while. Such a positive name--"Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom--for a pernicious initiative.

Under Stuart Bell's leadership, professors were "unambiguously" encouraged to discriminate. And faculty job finalists were scrutinized to ensure proper demographic makeup. Bell is not the right choice for UF.