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“You know, the book Noise is premature,” offers Kahneman. “If I had been 20 years earlier, that’s not what I would have done. Having identified the problem of noise I would have started the research programme on noise, and given talks about it, and thought about it and written articles about it. But I started this thing very late. I started it in my eighties and you just don’t have time. This, in a serious sense, is a book that came too early. And it shows.” He delivers this downbeat assessment in an upbeat manner. He seems cheerful at the prospect that better books on the subject will be written in the future, happy to have made a contribution while he could, and accepting of the fact that, at 87, his story cannot continue for ever.

Kahneman via the FT (Paywalled)

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Artist: MOONAGVAZE

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Artist: Keroreud

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Me: Only songs with meaningful lyrics get to me

Jimmy Urine: non-stop heavy rock eat shit suck cock

Me:

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The novel was published shortly after an anti-pornography ruling by the Supreme Court; Vidal responded by replacing the profanity in his novel with the names of the Justices involved (e.g., "He thrust his enormous Rehnquist deep within her Whizzer White", etc.)

Gore Vidal was a very based man.

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The invisible hand comes for us all

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i feel like it’s the 1930s

1939 is when Bernal wrote the social function of science. He compared monopology capitalism to socialism for funding science, and wrote that “It is hardly worth considering the third alternative–that of small-scale competitive capitalism–as this has now only a historic interest.”

and look at what I’m reading in the New York Times today:

Paul Krugman:

Financial industry types often talk about the FAANGs: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google — tech companies that loom large in the stock market. These companies look very different from past market leaders like General Motors in its heyday; it’s much harder to link their value to the tangible assets they own.

True, there are more of those assets than are visible to the naked eye. For example, Amazon���s warehouses employ a vast number of workers. Still, the value of these companies mainly reflects their market power, the quasi-monopoly positions they’ve established in their respective domains.

There are many issues relating to this market power, but in the current context what matters is that taxes on monopoly profits are as close as you can get to revenue-raising without side effects. They certainly don’t deter investment, because monopoly profits aren’t a return on capital.

And the profit tax is at this point largely a tax on monopoly or quasi-monopoly profits. Officials I’ve spoken to cite estimates that around 75 percent of the tax base consists of “excess” returns, over and above the normal return on capital, and that this percentage has been rising over time. Loosely speaking, this means that most of a corporate tax cut just goes to swelling monopoly profits, with any incentive effects limited to the shrinking fraction of corporate income that actually reflects returns on investment. That I.M.F. study of the Trump tax cut suggested that rising monopoly power might help explain its lack of impact.

Alright, he’s not saying that competitive industry doesn’t exist or doesn’t need to be consiered in tax policy, just that as a consequence of this and other factors, the benefits of tax cuts could be “small enough to vanish in the statistical noise.”

I guess it’s not the attitude that’s the same really, but the underlying reality that he’s responding to. The 1930s was a time of trade barriers, and nation-scale conglomerates serving captive audiences in their home countries. A lot of their value therefore was not the actual capital–like, the value of IG Farben’s sythetic gasolinne plants on their own is basically ntohing becaus enatural gasoline is dirt cheap, but that plus IG Farben’s political power to restrict gasoline imports is valuable.

Still maybe there’s also a similarity in outlook. I have worried about a USA where it becomes popular to just view our big monopolies as cash cows for the government, and to therefore think we have a public duty to protect those monopolies from foreign and domestic competition, and basically destroy free markets to milk the monopolies, when maybe we could have instead destroyed the monoplolies with free markets

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Genderbender Femslash University AU: Godel Escher Bach, an Eternal Golden Babe

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As a practice among middle-class families, did “heirlooms”— as in, stuff like silver and ‘fine China’ you intend to pass down to your kids— last even two generations? Seems like before my grandparents there wasn’t enough middle-class wealth to afford it, it got passed down maybe once, and now millennials don’t care about any of it.

This seems sad at first glance, although in most cases all this stuff was purchased as the result of the same consumerism and keeping-up-with-the-Joneses we decry today, just made superficially meaningful by the passage of time.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. Yo @kontextmaschine finish this post for me.

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Giacomo Balla

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I think therapy is, in large part, about saying basic things in new ways to hack the brain. Therapy style doesn’t matter much, but there are good therapists and bad therapists.

People run on cached results. They don’t have to think it through again, and people hate thinking. This is, broadly, a very very good thing. You cannot have a smarter, more charismatic person hack you by saying an idea but very good. You do not waste energy. You don’t come up with the wrong answer when you reprocess a result while tired. 

However, the idea isn’t cached itself, but the internal feeling of it is. This is a security vulnerability. When you present an idea with different aesthetics, it feels different, and bypasses the normal defenses. They process it once again and internalize it. 

Say something with strange justifications and you ram it deep inside of their brain, where they’re forced to understand it on all levels, where it can spread its roots in their subconscious and grow strong. 

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Mushroom Fighter - Character Design Challenge by selected artists: Dương Việt Dũng, Keane Mar, Dio Mahesa, Sean Kyle Manaloto, Victor Vagnier

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Source - Kurt Papstein

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galahad is what happens when you're a very holy little boy but not a Very Holy Little Boy

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My body naturally wants to have a biphasic sleep cycle and I get migraines sometimes. I’ve had ~10 or so the last few years, and 4 or 5 of them have been when I was biphasic. I’m only biphasic a couple of weeks a year, so this is way more than you’d naively expect if there was no correlation.

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The geometers inform us that any two lines converge at at least one point. They do so at the Taph. Any direction of motion eventually leads to it: any straight path, any tectonic movement, even any fall were the jealous earth not there to guard you from it. The roads of stable stable states twist and wriggle beneath the urge to drive themselves straight to the heart of it all.

Philosophers tell us that this is because all things yearn to be at the Taph, the most beautiful of all places. The soul drives us towards beautiful things, and we are driven there. In their formal models it’s a single straight logical progression. We’re told this is why there is less that is real as you go farther out, more expanse, more stretched out frontier, more flat, grey plains devoid of civilization. All that was substantial was drawn further in, towards the Taph.

The Taph simply exists.

All things near the Taph command us to stop, to turn back, to leave it for themselves The branches scratch at our skin, the rocks smash against our knees, the wind plucks our eyes, the word rends our nerves into epileptic fits, but we broken ruined things cross the threshold and know the beauty better than our ruined senses could have ever seen.