Links
3 stars
Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids | Astral Codex Ten
14-minute read
Caplan’s main argument is:
We spend much more time and effort on parenting than our parents and grandparents, because we think the extra effort will make our kids better, happier, and more successful.
But behavioral genetics finds that parenting doesn’t make much difference to later-life outcomes; it’s mostly either genes or inscrutable random seeds plus noise.
So you can relax. Don’t run yourself ragged rushing your kids to gymnastics classes they don’t even like.
If you ask parents whether they’re happy, you get different answers depending on what exact framing you use; it’s kind of a tossup. But people who understand and internalize the points above will have a better time than average. So for them, kids are probably a great bet.
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Caplan’s most striking statistic is that fathers now spend more time with their kids than mothers did in 1960 - not because gender roles have changed, but because both parents’ workload has been growing in tandem. Equally startling is that mothers spend more time parenting today than in 1960, even though in 1960 they were much more likely to be full-time homemakers.
2 stars
North Korea Stole Your Job | WIRED
15-minute read
For maybe a decade, North Korean intelligence services have been training young IT workers and sending them abroad in teams, often to China or Russia. From these bases, they scour the web for job listings all over, usually in software engineering, and usually with Western companies. They favor roles that are fully remote, with solid wages, good access to data and systems, and few responsibilities. Over time they began applying for these jobs using stolen or fake identities and relying on members of their criminal teams to provide fictional references; some have even started using AI to pass coding tests, video interviews, and background checks.
But if an applicant lands a job offer, the syndicate needs somebody on the ground in the country the applicant claims to live in. A fake employee, after all, can’t use the addresses or bank accounts linked to their stolen IDs, and they can’t dial in to a company’s networks from overseas without instantly triggering suspicion. That’s where someone like Christina Chapman comes in.
As the “facilitator” for hundreds of North Korea–linked jobs, Chapman signed fraudulent documents and handled some of the fake workers’ salaries. She would often receive their paychecks in one of her bank accounts, take a cut, and wire the rest overseas: Federal prosecutors say Chapman was promised as much as 30 percent of the money that passed through her hands.
Her most important job, though, was tending the “laptop farm.” After being hired, a fake worker will typically ask for their company computer to be sent to a different address than the one on record—usually with some tale about a last-minute move or needing to stay with a sick relative. The new address, of course, belongs to the facilitator, in this case Chapman.
Original link | Archive.is link
The forgotten post-war decree that deliberately strangled Birmingham | The Dispatch
7-minute read
The decline of both businesses is complex, their stories interwoven with those of the general mismanagement of British industry and the rise of international competition. But what is often missing in the chronicles is the government’s post-war policies towards the growth and success of the West Midlands.
For more than three decades — from the introduction of the Distribution of Industry Act in 1945 to the beginning of the 1980s — it was impossible to set up a new factory in Birmingham, or to expand one, without an “Industrial Development Certificate” (IDC) from the government.
This policy was not limited to Birmingham, but it was enforced stringently there, the idea being to force industry into more deprived parts of the country.
Lucas’ plans for expansion in the city were blocked; instead it established new plants in South Wales. Meanwhile, GEC’s expansion — partly through its Osram lighting subsidiary — happened in Merseyside and the North East, rather than in Birmingham. The motor industry followed suit, opening new facilities in locations such as Speke in Liverpool. This fragmentation damaged the prospects of all the businesses involved — as well as the city that once housed them.
Smaller companies and new industries were also prevented from taking root in the city. It left Birmingham almost uniquely exposed to the economic storms of the 1980s; within just a decade it went from the richest big city outside London to one notorious for its economic underperformance.
Baby Is Healed With World’s First Personalized Gene-Editing Treatment | New York Times
7-minute read
Instead, KJ has made medical history. The baby, now 9 ½ months old, became the first patient of any age to have a custom gene-editing treatment, according to his doctors. He received an infusion made just for him and designed to fix his precise mutation.
[...]
To accomplish that feat, the treatment is wrapped in fatty lipid molecules to protect it from degradation in the blood on its way to the liver, where the edit will be made. Inside the lipids are instructions that command the cells to produce an enzyme that edits the gene. They also carry a molecular GPS — CRISPR — which was altered to crawl along a person’s DNA until it finds the exact DNA letter that needs to be changed.
[...]
While KJ’s treatment was customized so CRISPR found just his mutation, the same sort of method could be adapted and used over and over again to fix mutations in other places on a person’s DNA. Only the CRISPR instructions leading the editor to the spot on the DNA with the mutation would need to be changed. Treatments would be cheaper, “by an order of magnitude at least,” Dr. Marks said.
Original link | Archive.is link
Death, divorce and the magic of kitchen objects: how to find hope in loss | The Guardian
10-minute read
I have long felt that kitchen objects can have a life of their own. Even so, I found this eerie. One August day in 2020, I was going to fetch clothes out of the washing machine when suddenly a cake tin fell at my feet with a loud clang. It wasn’t just any cake tin. It was the heart-shaped tin I had used to bake my own wedding cake. I wouldn’t have thought much of it except that it was only two months since my husband had left me, out of the blue.
[...]
Certain kitchen objects become loaded with meaning in a way that we are not fully in control of. You can’t predict which will be the utensils you get attached to – the favourite mug, the spoon that feels just right in your hand – and which belongings decline over time into clutter. And then there are the objects that – even if they were made in some anonymous factory and bought in some anonymous shop – seem to carry with them a kind of magic. There is the plate that makes everything you put on it taste better, or the bowl you keep but can’t actually bear to use because it reminds you too strongly of the person who gave it to you.
Did the media blow it on Biden? | Silver Bulletin
6-minute read
So I’ve been pleased to see two new high-profile books on Biden, Fight by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, and Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, which include extensive reporting on his struggles to hold onto the Democratic nomination and — no less importantly — to manage his presidential duties. If you read these books, it’s pretty clear that Biden was not fit for the presidency by the end of his term — it is, after all, the hardest job in the world. With limited uptime and sometimes more severe symptoms like an inability to recall basic names and facts — Original Sin reports that Biden couldn’t even recognize George Clooney at a Hollywood fundraiser — his Cabinet worried about his capacities in a crisis.
AI Horseless Carriages | koomen.dev
16-minute read
This is what AI's "killer app" will look like for many of us: teaching a computer how to do things that we don't like doing so that we can spend our time on things we do.
One of the reasons I wanted to include working demos in this essay was to show that large language models are already good enough to do this kind of work on our behalf. In fact they're more than good enough in most cases. It's not a lack of AI smarts that is keeping us from the future I described in the previous section, it's app design.
The Gmail team built a horseless carriage because they set out to add AI to the email client they already had, rather than ask what an email client would look like if it were designed from the ground up with AI. Their app is a little bit of AI jammed into an interface designed for mundane human labor rather than an interface designed for automating mundane labor.
Uruguay's José Mujica, world's 'poorest president', dies | BBC News
3-minute read
Former Uruguayan President José Mujica, known as "Pepe", has died at the age of 89. The ex-guerrilla who governed Uruguay from 2010 to 2015 was known as the world's "poorest president" because of his modest lifestyle.
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Because of the simple way he lived as president, his criticism of consumerism and the social reforms he promoted - which, among other things, meant Uruguay became the first country to legalise the recreational use of marijuana - Mujica became a well-known political figure in Latin America and beyond.
Manufacturing is thriving in the South. Here’s why neither party can admit it. | Washington Post
6-minute read
A big missing part of the story: Interstate competition. The Rust Belt’s manufacturing decline isn’t primarily about jobs going to Mexico. It’s about jobs going to Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee. To put it in college football terms, the traditional Big Ten has been losing out to the Southeastern Conference. In 1970, the Rust Belt was responsible for nearly half of all manufacturing exports while the South produced less than a quarter. Today, the roles are reversed, it is the Rust Belt that hosts less than one-fourth of all manufactured exports and the South that exports twice what the Rust Belt does.
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Right-to-work laws, cheap energy, affordable housing, low-cost land, fast permitting, low taxes, immigration. That’s a powerful combination, and it has had big effects. In 1992, there was not a single auto plant in Alabama. Today, Alabama is the No. 1 auto-exporting state, producing more than 1 million vehicles a year. That’s brought more than 50,000 jobs and billions of dollars in investment. Instead of a Big Three, it has a Big Five (Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz and Mazda) along with an ever-expanding web of suppliers. This is just one example of the South’s burgeoning economic prowess.
Original link | Archive.is link
Democrats in Disarray. | News Items
4-minute read
Here’s an idea: Perhaps Democrats should do what Republicans and conservatives did, to great success, over the last quarter-century: start building back not in the hothouse of Washington, where they have limited power and little room for maneuver, but out in the states and at the local level. Slow, steady, un-flashy work out in the states is what really laid the groundwork for the dominant position Republicans now enjoy. The states, not Washington, became the springboard for political success, the testing ground for policy and the sounding board for messaging.
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Maybe they are about to try. Three weeks ago, Ken Martin, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, announced that the party plans to send money every month to state parties across the country—and will spend extra money to help party organizations in red states. Martin described his strategy as “organize anywhere, win everywhere.”
1 star
Eminem - LOSE YOURSELF (Sung by 331 Movies!) | YouTube
4-minute video
In this video I edited 331 different films together to recreate the lyrics to Lose Yourself by Eminem.
What It’s Like to Be a Professional Card Counter | Slate Magazine
4-minute read
Card counting is one of those mythical swindles in American mythology. Imagine rolling into a Las Vegas casino and, with your own intuitiveness, piercing through the institutionalized scams of all of those busy table games. The practice has this suave, movie-star glamour, and, also, seems flatly impossible. How could anyone keep track of the hundreds of cards that cycle across the felt of a blackjack table? And to what end? I always assumed that card counting was either a fantasy or a long-dead art—until I found myself on the YouTube channel belonging to the pseudonymous Quattro, a 24-year-old from Canada who can beat Vegas at its own game.
How the Humble Chestnut Traced the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire | BBC
5-minute read
In countries such as Switzerland, France and parts of Germany, sweet chestnut pollen was near-absent from the wider pollen record – such as, for example, fossil pollen found in sediment and soil samples – before the Romans arrived, according to the study and previous research. But as the Roman Empire expanded, the presence of sweet chestnut pollen grew. Specifically, the percentage of sweet chestnut pollen relative to other pollen across Europe "shows a pattern of a sudden increase around year zero [0AD], when the power of the Roman empire was at its maximum" in Europe, Krebs says.
After the Barbarian sacks of Rome around 400-500 AD, which signalled the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire amid widespread upheaval, the chestnut pollen percentage then drops temporarily. This decrease suggests that many of the Roman-era orchards were abandoned, Krebs says, probably not only due to the fall of the Roman Empire, but also, because a wider population decline in many areas at the time.
Make The Prompt Public | AI Futures Project
6-minute read
But as part of their mea culpa, x.ai did something genuinely interesting: they made the prompt public.
The prompt (technically, system prompt) is the hidden text that precedes every consumer interaction with a language model, reminding the AI of its role and values.
Jason Brennan's Good Work If You Can Keep It | Bet On It
4-minute read
On Friday, I received Jason Brennan’s new Good Work If You Can Get It: How to Succeed in Academia. It’s fantastic! I already have my dream job for life, and I still couldn’t put it down. Brennan calmly and crisply cuts through piles of misconceptions, lame rationalizations, and mountains of Social Desirability Bias to tell would-be professors the cold, hard truth about their would-be occupation.
Chimpanzee drumming shares the building blocks of human musicality | News
2-minute read
A study co-led by the University of St Andrews has shown that wild chimpanzees drum with rhythm, and that chimpanzee drumming shares some rhythmic properties with human music.
How ancient reptile footprints are rewriting the history of when animals evolved to live on land | AP News
2-minute read
Scientists in Australia have identified the oldest known fossil footprints of a reptile-like animal, dated to around 350 million years ago.
The discovery suggests that after the first animals emerged from the ocean around 400 million years ago, they evolved the ability to live exclusively on land much faster than previously assumed.
Harvard Law School’s ‘copy’ of Magna Carta revealed as original | Harvard Law School
3-minute read
British researchers have discovered that a ‘copy’ of Magna Carta owned by Harvard Law School is in fact an extraordinarily rare original from 1300.
The discovery by leading Magna Carta experts from King’s College London and the University of East Anglia (UEA) means the document, which Harvard Law School acquired in the 1940s, is just one of just seven from King Edward I’s 1300 issue of Magna Carta that still survive.
Mr. Secretary, Reclassify the Statin | Alex Kesin's Pharmacopoeia
3-minute read
Two days ago, your shop at HHS unfurled the shiny new Request for Information—your 10-to-1 deregulation gauntlet thrown at the feet of every rule that ever gathered dust in the Federal Register. Amid the gewgaws and heavy machinery of federal health policy there sits a single, absurdly obvious lever: reclassify a low-dose statin (say, atorvastatin 10 mg or rosuvastatin 5 mg) from Rx-only to true, Walmart-checkout-aisle OTC. Pull it, and you do more for cardiovascular prevention than a decade of slogan-heavy wellness campaigns.
Should GDP include defense spending? | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
In fact, our corrections applied to the entire period from 1790 to today show new key facts. Our corrected GDP series reveals that the first half of the 20th century, rather than showcasing robust growth, emerges as a prolonged period of stagnation interrupted by crises. The economy, which had grown at an exceptional pace from 1865 to 1913, gradually deviated from this path between 1913 and 1950. Many claim that this deviation only occurred during the Great Depression and that it ended during the Thirty Glorious years after. But our corrected series show that America never returned to its exceptional growth path.