before you have a kid, you worry about all the things in your life a kid might displace. after you have a kid, you wonder what else is there?

A major accomplishment in the development of fiat money was *parity*, the idea that you could accept banknotes or deposits from any bank as being equivalent to $1, rather than having to discount every different bank's liabilities based on creditworthiness.

JP Koning explains that cryptocurrency exchanges have been quietly working hard to engineer parity among major stablecoins, which requires them (like central banks) to monitor the credit risk of issuers they support. https://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2022/12/how-cryptocurrency-exchanges-peg.html

Matt Klein documents a subtle change in methodology at the Fed. Instead of relying on “core” measures that exclude the most volatile prices to predict inflation, they are now focusing on a much smaller category of prices they think most predictive.

Rather than just ignoring the worst, they are looking only at what they deem the best. For better or for worse. https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewcklein/p/the-fed-is-getting-less-sanguine?utm_source=direct&r=1nb11&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

when media companies realize, not only are decentralized, federated networks a viable alternative to the tech platforms that have eaten their lunch, but the companies themselves can provide much of the impetus for the migration just by hosting and promoting their own instances, it will be like Dorothy’s “there’s no place like home” moment.

@stevenbodzin me too. i’ve so lost my patience for dystopia in popular culture. it’s ubiquitous, derivative, stupid.

every human is a gift, with occasional exceptions best enjoyed without unwrapping.

@stevenbodzin had to look it up, but very apt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_fixation

cyberpunk was a warning, not an instruction manual.

Silicon Valley, at least rhetorically, used to be all "power to the people", let's democratize all the things.

But now is the first time in a decade a popular movement on the internet is actually achieving something — outside of politics, without demanding state action of any kind.

It should be right up, um, Silicon Valley's alley. But the titans of tech seem oddly mum on this liberation of and decentralization from Twitter.

“Private companies are free to set their own content moderation policies, and can discriminate against any viewpoint they wish. They can and do remove ‘lawful but awful’ speech like racist diatribes, vaccine denial, election denial, and other conservative fever-dreams. Contrast that with local governments, who are bound by the First Amendment, and prohibited from practicing ‘viewpoint discrimination.’” @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/

don’t be fooled. the humans are good.

the only way to durably address social problems is to give agency to those who are at risk of suffering them.

cf Anthony Kalulu (@KaluluAnthony@twitter.com) http://dear-humanity.org/effective-altruism-worse-for-poor/

ht @timnitGebru @davidgerard

an interesting meditation on how sharply convex (think backwards L shaped) marginal cost curves can explain explain why “demand” sometimes seems to show up in final goods prices much more than wages, while at other times might show up in final goods prices almost mechanically through wages. by @jwmason http://jwmason.org/slackwire/what-does-it-mean-to-say-that-inflation-is-caused-by-demand/

Tech "ecosystems" are not ecosystems at all. Plantations and monocultures would be better analogies: "the antithesis of biological abundance isn’t just biological paucity. It’s the excess growth of one thing at the expense of all others…We don’t live in a technology ecosystem…more like a zoo crossed with a detention centre. Or, to use an image that also conveys the beautiful lies that hold us in place, we live in a snow globe."

Wonderful, by @mariafarrell https://crookedtimber.org/2022/12/08/your-platform-is-not-an-ecosystem/ ht @mickfealty

"As for…scenarios, the least unfavorable…would be that of Germany after 1945…More likely...is the North Korean scenario: the isolation and radicalization of a fortress-Russia...A step further in the pessimism scale, Russia would become…a kind of Mordor ("black country"), a desolate land in which the forces of evil are preparing their revenge and reconquest…The Somalian scenario would…be that of the breakup of the Russian nation-empire." @BrunoTertrais@twitter.com https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/analysis/fall-russia

Now if only we had an “intellectual property” regime consistent with this goal.

from @GretchenVogel1@twitter.com https://www.science.org/content/article/global-plan-covid-19-vaccine-fairness-fell-short-will-next-time-be-different

Suppose there is a profits recession: the labor market remains strong, inflation subsides and with it some degree of firm pricing power, so margins are squeezed.

how does the Fed react: with low rates to support stock prices under pressure from tepid earnings, or with high rates to break labor power and try to sustain margins?

I love the analysis and broad conclusion of this piece about development and EA and charity, but I disagree that private sector "moonshot ideas" are the best way to address the big, less legible problems she points to.

Which underlines the problem! Some versions of EA restrict us to the space beneath the streetlight, which is not where the action is likely to be. But elsewhere, we are in the dark, and we're not likely to agree what's best.

https://srajagopalan.substack.com/p/altruism-and-development-its-complicated ht @Angelica @Tenkawa

has anyone else had a problem with https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ such that after the scan completes, the page just goes blank, so there's no way to export the contacts you've found?

@akhilrao @bert_hubert is it because you can become so fabulously rich? if our entrepreneurs topped out at $100M rather than became Caesars wielding the weath of empires, would that matter very much (to the virtuous sides of innovation)? or is it just that in the US you really need a few million dollars to self-insure the amenities of an upper-middle-class family, and the perceived upside of achieving that is really high?