German far-left vandals break through police lines and run for Tesla’s Gigafactory, hoping to disrupt production. These people clearly hate both fossil fuel cars and electric cars. They are modern-day luddites pic.twitter.com/5aVD6MeNZ3 — Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) May 10, 2024 And here are some remarks on AI dating. The post A subculture that is German? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         Comments They also know they will be lightly punished, if at all for ... by mento Related Stories The manufacture of credibility? The US has Low Electricity ..read more

1. The teens who make friends with AI chatbots. 2. How Tolkien nixed a Beatles LOTR film. 3. Adam Thierer on state-level regulation of AI. 4. Samo Burja on Mexican drug cartels. 5. Colorado decreases parking requirements. The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         Comments 3. The state of regulation in California, or the EU for ... by Crusader reducing parking minimums does nothing until the states raise ... by DJ   ..read more

Solar is powering a large share of California’s energy needs during the day and batteries are now powering a significant share at night. NYTimes: Since 2020, California has installed more giant batteries than anywhere in the world apart from China. They can soak up excess solar power during the day and store it for use when it gets dark. Those batteries play a pivotal role in California’s electric grid, partially replacing fossil fuels in the evening. Between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. on April 30, for example, batteries supplied more than one-fifth of California’s electricity and, for a fe ..read more

The author is Kirk Goldsberry, and the subtitle is Mapping the Remarkable Transformation of the NBA.  I enjoyed this book very much, and the visual are excellent.  The prose reads well, but also sticks to the analytical.  Excerpt: Over 80 percent of NBA 3s involve an assist.  Typical 3-pointers are catch-and-shoot attempts that punctuate playmaking sequences that occur far away from the actual shot location, and that’s where James comes in.  James is the NBA’s all-time leader in assisted 3s.  He may never surpass John Stockton for total assists, but James has had ..read more

You heard from Alex on that topic recently, here is my contribution in the form of a Bloomberg column: According to new research from economists at the University of Oregon and the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, new low-skilled immigrants to the US are a net fiscal plus — each adding an estimated $750 a year to government coffers at the federal, state and local levels. And their contribution to the entire economy is likely larger still. These new measures do not deny the standard assessments of the potential fiscal costs of immigrants. Rather, they consider an additional positi ..read more

Israel and Iran bombed each other like three weeks ago and now oil prices are low enough that the SPR [Strategic Petroleum Reserve] is looking at buying That is from Matthew Zeitlin.  One read of the current equilibrium is that both Iran and Israel have shown they really do not want to escalate, or perhaps are not able to escalate.  Arguably that was less obvious two months ago. It is hard to establish such credibility unless things get really hairy, and then both parties pull back from the brink. I don’t think that is the only way to read recent events.  An alternative would ..read more

1. Berkeley festival of smart internet writers, you can apply to go. 2. Lyman Stone on urban density and fertility. 3. Joseph Heath articles, some about Canada. 4. Using social contagion to improve health outcomes in Honduras. 5. Can tech solve the problem of inequality? 6. The economics of Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries. The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         ..read more

Maybe by less than people had thought, here is a new ReStat paper by Gillian Brunet: I use newly-digitized contract data on U.S. war production spending over 1940-1945 to analyze the macroeconomic effects of U.S. military spending in World War II. I find personal income multipliers of 0.34 over two years and 0.49 over three years. Personal income multipliers may substantially understate GDP multipliers, perhaps by as much as 50%. Employment estimates imply costs per job-year over the same time horizons of $405,013 and $232,268 in 2015 dollars, suggesting job creation was limited. I also find ..read more

There were significant differences in SI between psychologists and AI’s ChatGPT-4 and Bing. ChatGPT-4 exceeded 100% of all the psychologists, and Bing outperformed 50% of PhD holders and 90% of bachelor’s holders. The differences in SI between Google Bard and bachelor students were not significant, whereas the differences with PhDs were significant; Where 90% of PhD holders excel on Google Bird. That is from a new paper by Nabil Saleh Sufyan, et.al.  In the “good ol’ days” we thought that was the task where AI would never have much of a fighting chance.  Now the bets models are jus ..read more

1. “Authors who were perceived as female responded at similar rates regardless of the pronouns in the requester’s email. Authors who were perceived as male were less likely to respond to emails from requesters with they/them pronouns than all other conditions. This work finds that people who use they/them pronouns experience bias in real-world situations due solely to their gender pronouns.”  Link here. 2. U.S. murder rates are plummeting. 3. Sam Hammond’s 95 theses on AI, not my views but interesting. 4. Do sperm whale songs have an alphabet of sorts? (NYT) 5. Preference falsification at ..read more