The term “global capitalism” expresses a contradiction. Sovereignty, democracy, and economic regulation are national but, as we are constantly reminded, the economy is global.

Elite opinion replies without hesitation: International trade and foreign investment work, thanks to the magic of the market. It’s national governments that are old-fashioned, obsolete. Globalization is a fact. If it limits space for political control of the economy, so much the better.

Socialists, however, must hesitate: We neither have faith in automatic adjustment by markets, nor are we willing to give up conscious regulation of the economy. We are torn between seemingly incompatible goals—to build genuinely democratic international governance; to preserve space for regulation of economic life; to advance the interests of the particular national constituency we are accountable to; and to address pressing global needs like climate change and inequality.

How do we negotiate these three terms—nation-states, markets, and the people who we hope to represent within or against them? If you’re an economist, one natural starting point is Dani Rodrik’s widely cited formula of “the trilemma.” Rodrik argues that, of national sovereignty, democratic government, and international economic integration, you can have two of them but not all three. When Rodrik introduced the trilemma in the 1990s he, like most liberals, believed it was the nation that should go. Globalization is inevitable; if it prevents national governments from delivering what’s needed for democracy, then political authority must shift to a supranational level. But now he’s having second thoughts. Recently he wrote in the New York Times, “We must reassess the balance between national autonomy and economic globalization . . . we have pushed economic globalization too far . . . [and put] democracy to work for the global economy, instead of the other way around.”

For both liberal advocates of economic integration and for its critics, this question, the political question, is key. The strongest arguments against (and for) continued globalization focus not on the direct effect of trade and finance on living standards and economic outcomes, but on the ways in which those links constrain the choices of governments. As long as democratic politics operates through nation-states, it is likely any left program will require some degree of delinking from the global economy.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/cautious-case-economic-nationalism-global-capitalism

I’ve never much liked country music, but over the last couple of years I started realizing that that’s partly because what I always knew as country music is a particular, slicked-up, pop-music Nashville style, and I’ve gotten interested in investigating the earlier history and roots of country (African-American string bands, Appalachian mountain music, gospel, blues, Hawaiian slack-key guitar, Mexican bandera, Childe-ballad-type folk music of the British Isles, etc). I’m still not all that knowledgeable about it, but I got to talking with my dad about it while I was on vacation, and ended up putting together a quick and dirty 50-minute mix that tries to show some of that early evolution.

You can stream or download it here. Enjoy!

This is how you solve homelessness, plain and simple: you give people homes. You don’t demand that they make huge changes, you don’t make them beg for it, you don’t make them jump through a ton of hoops. You get them somewhere to live. It’s cheaper, it helps a lot more people, and it lets people maintain their dignity and their agency.

New Orleans faced a major crisis in homelessness following Hurricane Katrina. In 2007, two years after the storm, there were more than 11,600 homeless people in the city. Since then, New Orleans stepped up its effort to tackle homelessness and has brought that number down 90 percent.

Kegel says the group put all its effort behind gathering a rent assistance fund. “We went directly to Congress,” she says. “We were very fortunate to get some resources together to actually be able to provide rent assistance and house people in what apartments we could find.”

And lastly, she says, the team took a “Housing First” approach, which is “simply the idea that you accept people as they are,” whether they are sober or not.

“You just accept them as they are and you provide the housing first,” Kegel says. “Then, once they’re in their apartment, you immediately wrap all the services around them that they need to stay stable and live the highest quality life that they can live.”

“Actually, this is a very cost-effective approach, because when you think about it, it is costing the taxpayer a tremendous amount of money to leave people on the street. They’re constantly cycling in and out of jail on charges that wouldn’t even be relevant if they had an apartment, things like urinating in public, drinking in public, obstructing the sidewalk because they’re having to sleep on the sidewalk. Homeless offences, in other words, that are costing the taxpayers a lot of money to be putting them in jail and processing them through the criminal justice system. Their health is deteriorating while they’re out on the street. They’re being taken by ambulance to the emergency room constantly. Those are huge charges.

“Really what you need is, you know, a relatively small amount of money to pay for some rent assistance and they can contribute some of that rent as well with disability benefits or if they’re able to work with, you know, employment income and a little bit of case-management assistance. It really has been proven over and over again in studies to be very cost effective.”

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/02/19/new-orleans-reducing-homeless-hurricane-katrina

On the intriguing and entertaining theory that big tech company behavior is being shaped by their founders supplementing testosterone:

https://palladiummag.com/2019/01/01/competitive-hormone-supplementation-is-shaping-americas-future-business-titans/

A new study argues that the nascent factory farming of octopuses is a bad idea — a moral and ecological disaster waiting to happen. But there are no octopus factory farms yet — which means that, for once, we could stop a mistake before we make it instead of spending decades recovering from it afterward.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/31/18203959/octopus-factory-farms

Peter Watts:

I recently read Terri Favro’s upcoming book on the history and future of robotics, sent to me by a publisher hungry for blurbs. It’s a fun read— I had no trouble obliging them— but I couldn’t avoid an almost oppressive sense of— well, of optimism hanging over the whole thing. Favro states outright, for example, that she’s decided to love the Internet of Things; those who eye it with suspicion she compares to old fogies who stick with their clunky coal-burning furnace and knob-and-tube wiring as the rest of the world moves into a bright sunny future. She praises algorithms that analyze your behavior and autonomously order retail goods on your behalf, just in case you’re not consuming enough on your own: “We’ll be giving up our privacy, but gaining the surprise and delight that comes with something new always waiting for us at the door” she gushes (sliding past the surprise and delight we’ll feel when our Visa bill loads up with purchases we never made). “How many of us can resist the lure of the new?” Favro does pay lip service to the potential hackability of this Internet of Things— concedes that her networked fridge might be compromised, for example— but goes on to say “…to do what, exactly? Replace my lactose-free low-fat milk with table cream? Sabotage my diet by substituting chocolate for rapini?”

Maybe, yeah. Or maybe your insurance company might come snooping around in the hopes your eating habits might give them an excuse to reject that claim for medical treatments you might have avoided if you’d “lived more responsibly”. Maybe some botnet will talk your fridge and a million others into cranking up their internal temperatures to 20ºC during the day, then bringing them all back down to a nice innocuous 5º just before you get home from work. (Salmonella in just a few percent of those affected could overwhelm hospitals and take out our medical response capacity overnight.) And while Favro at least admits to the danger of Evil Russian Hackers, she never once mentions that our own governments will in all likelihood be rooting around in our fridges and TVs and smart bulbs, cruising the Internet Of Things while whistling that perennial favorite If You Got Nothin’ to Hide You Got Nothin’ to Fear…

https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=7809

Some fascinating work on AI from the early 80s, combining rule systems with genetic algorithms:

In 1981, Eurisko, a computer program that arguably displays the rudiments of such skills, easily won the Traveller tournament, becoming the top-ranked player in the United States and an honorary Admiral in the Traveller navy. Eurisko had designed its fleet according to principles it discovered itself -with some help from its inventor, Douglas B. Lenat, an assistant professor in Stanford University’s artificial-intelligence program.

“I never did actually play Traveller by hand,” Lenat said, three years later. “I don’t think I even watched anybody play it. I simply talked to people about it and then had the program go off and design a fleet…When I went into the tournament that was the first time that I had ever played the game.”

Eurisko’s fleet was so obviously superior to those of its human opponents that most of them surrendered after the first few minutes of battle; one resigned without firing a shot.

Eurisko makes its discoveries by starting with a set of elementary concepts, given to it by a human programmer. Then, through a process not unlike genetic evolution, it modifies and combines them into more complex ideas. As structures develop, the most useful and interesting ones-judged according to standards encoded in the program-survive.

At the time of the Traveller tournament, Lenat had already used a forerunner of Eurisko to grow mathematical concepts, getting the program to rediscover arithmetic and some theorems in elementary number theory. Now the structures Lenat wanted to see evolve were Traveller fleets. He provided the program with descriptions of 146 Traveller concepts, some of them as basic as Acceleration, Agility, Weapon, Damage, and even Game Playing and Game. Others were more specific: Beam Laser, Meson Gun, Meson Screen, and Computer Radiation Damage.

https://aliciapatterson.org/stories/eurisko-computer-mind-its-own

“The size of the cavity is surprising, and as it melts, it’s causing the glacier to retreat,” said Pietro Milillo, a radar scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the paper’s lead author. He said the ice shelf encompassing the Florida-sized glacier is retreating at a rate in excess of 650 feet per year, and that most of the melting that led to the void occurred during the past three years.

Previous research showed that meltwater from Thwaites accounts for about 4 percent of the global sea level rise, said Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, who was not involved with the new study.

If the loss of ice becomes so severe that the glacier collapses — something computer models predict could happen in 50 to 100 years — sea levels would rise by two feet. That’s enough to inundate coastal cities across the globe.

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/hole-opens-under-antarctic-glacier-big-enough-fit-two-thirds-ncna965696

I’m rather leaning toward Warren in the primaries. ‘Part of what has distinguished Warren’s story is that it has a different frame of reference, in which politics is not an argument over the cultural aftermath of the sixties but over the influence won by wealth in the eighties, which from certain vantage points can seem the only American story worth telling.’

The word “corruption” rarely appears in Warren’s academic work, but the seed of the idea is present there. The work that made Warren famous began at the outset of the Reagan era, when she and two colleagues at the University of Texas—the demographer Theresa Sullivan, who would become the president of the University of Virginia, and the Texas law professor Jay Westbrook—decided to study why more Americans seemed to be going bankrupt. The use of credit cards had exploded, and mortgages had grown more complex, and the line from politicians and the financial industry was that Americans had become imprudent, taking on more debt to buy more things than they could really afford. Warren, Sullivan, and Westbrook spent years travelling to bankruptcy courts across the country to retrieve case records. They found, Westbrook told me, “files filled with these agonizing letters. ‘This is so embarrassing.’ ‘I’m so upset.’ ‘I hate myself.’ ” The vast majority of the “bankrupts” turned out to be middle-class people who were victims of health-care calamities or job loss.

I asked Westbrook whether, as young law professors, they had understood the credit industry to be corrupt. He said it took them a while to come to this conclusion. In 1995, when Congress was considering a revision to the bankruptcy code, Warren, then at the University of Pennsylvania, was appointed to assemble an expert analysis on bankruptcy. But the process was usurped by the credit-card industry, which drafted a bill that eventually became the core of a law, signed by President Bush, in 2005. Among other provisions, it held that debtors are required to continue to pay the courts even if they have no assets to liquidate. “The tide of blame-the-unlucky combined with relentless lobbying and campaign contributions finally overwhelmed Congress,” Warren wrote of this experience. She had become a Democrat by then, and a credit-debt expert, both in Washington and on “Dr. Phil,” where she talked about the “tricks and traps” by which the credit industry manipulates its customers. When the housing bubble burst, in 2008, it had some of the same dynamics that she, Westbrook, and Sullivan had pinpointed almost thirty years before.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/what-kind-of-populist-is-elizabeth-warren

The interviewer is a bit annoying, but the interviewee is in fine form, and among other things gives the most lucid short summary of quantum computing and why it matters that I’ve ever read.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/scott-aaronson-answers-every-ridiculously-big-question-i-throw-at-him/