Aditya Balasubramanian: “At this crucial crossroads, perhaps it is worth reflecting upon the history of one Opposition party during the original era of one-party dominance. In 1967, when the Congress suffered its first major setback and lost power in seven out of 16 states, it was the Swatantra Party that emerged as the second largest party by seats in the Lok Sabha. The party also formed the official Opposition in three states and led a brief coalition government in Orissa…Swatantra offers a useful example from India’s past – of a gentler Right-wing committed to principles that even those on the other end of the political spectrum could appreciate.”
WSJ: “The idea of a “Gutenberg parenthesis” was coined in the mid-1990s by three professors from the University of Southern Denmark: Lars Ole Sauerberg, Marianne Børch and Tom Pettit. Before movable type—the left-hand parenthesis that opened the print—information moved by word-of-mouth. Knowledge and memory were, as Mr. Jarvis puts it, “collective, collaborative, and often performative using rhyme and lyric.” Books were rare and were handwritten by scribes whose “higher mission was to preserve the knowledge of the ancients.” After Johannes Gutenberg, information was mass-produced in print, by machines. Books were everywhere. The sentence became the “organizing principle,” and our cognition became “linear.” Copyright law, enacted in England in 1710, created an economic basis for the print industry and turned the scribe into the author and the patron into the publisher. “The Gutenberg Parenthesis” gives an accomplished and detailed survey of life between the brackets.”
Jonathan Zimmerman: “Maybe, as the futurists insist, AI will eventually take over everything we do. It will drive our cars, design our buildings, cure our illnesses. It will make beautiful art and music. It will end world hunger and poverty. Yet there’s one thing it will never do: make you into a fully autonomous human being, with your own ideas, feelings and goals. I want that to be your ambition. And if that’s what you want, too, then avoid the bots.”
Arnold Kling: “I am having a hard time getting my arms around the valuations of the Magnificent 7 tech stocks: Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Nvidia, Tesla, and Meta (Facebook). Call them the M7 for short. Their stock prices are high relative to current earnings, which means they are being treated as growth stocks. But they are already huge relative to the U.S. economy. How can it be that they are already large and yet expected to grow rapidly going forward?..My quarrel with the people investing in tech stocks is that I do not think that there is enough room for growth to justify such high P/E ratios. There is only so much of the economy that can be spent on Internet ads, smart phones, delivery of Web orders, cloud computing, high-end chips, and niche cars. Moreover, the profit margins in most of these areas are more likely to shrink than expand over the next several years. I would be surprised if five years from now the total market cap of the M7 has kept up with inflation. I would not be surprised if five years from now the total market cap of the M7, adjusted for inflation, is less than 70 percent of what it is now.”
