Arnold Kling has advice for a high school freshman. One suggestion: “Keep a journal. It is good to practice writing, on a regular schedule. A journal is different from a diary. A diary is a recitation of events. A journal tells little stories about you, your classmates, and your teachers. Use fake names, in case your journal falls into the wrong hands. Make your stories more interesting than reality. Feel free to make up people’s pasts or futures. If you write less than 300 words in a day, maybe this is not your thing. If you write more than 800 words in a day, you are getting carried away. Stop and save some ideas for tomorrow.”
Hugo Barra: “The Vision Pro launch has more or less done exactly what I had always hoped for, which is to build a huge wave of awareness and curiosity that elevates the spatial computing ecosystem and could ultimately lead to mass-market consumer demand and a lot more developer interest that VR has ever had. Now it’s up to the industry to create enough user value and demonstrate whether this is in fact the future of computing.”
Deirdre McCloskey: “Zero-sum is the default in thinking about my gain and thine. It is the chief error in economic thinking in the street and in politics.” [via CafeHayek]
FT: “Technological invention has historically spurred productivity growth. Many hope artificial intelligence will do the same. But capitalising on AI means overcoming the same broad dynamics that G7 economies are dealing with today: optimising regulation of the technology, electrifying old energy systems to power it and supporting those who may lose their jobs. The so-called “middle-income trap” — in which nations struggle to transition to higher-income — has been undermined by escapees, including South Korea, Taiwan and Poland. With appropriate reforms, it can be overcome. Likewise, if an “upper-income trap” does exist, it is not because the economics will not allow continued prosperity. Rather, it requires the right policies and politics to unlock it.”
Joshua Oliver asks what crypto is for: “Alienation from mainstream finance has helped to bolster crypto’s appeal. Many people, perhaps especially those around my age who grew up around the 2008 crisis, have developed the suspicion that finance is a self-referential, corrupt and pointless game that helps the rich get richer and screws everybody else. This critique is painfully true of crypto’s recent history. For all its faults, mainstream finance is crucial to our daily lives. Crypto still doesn’t play a meaningful role in the economy. Its value has always been underpinned by the belief that it is the future of finance. But price rises have run far ahead of any proof of genuinely practical applications gaining real traction. This list of crypto’s faults is not exhaustive. Its principal real-world application to date has been making life easier for criminals. (According to the DoJ, one Binance employee memorably joked in private that they needed a banner saying “is washing drug money too hard these days[?] — come to binance; we got cake for you.”) Creating some cryptocurrencies through so-called mining still has a rapacious energy consumption because of the computation required, and this generates next to no benefit for its high environmental cost.”
