As I was walking out the door to bum a light from someone, Trump came out right where I’d been standing.

it also showed other virtues: when the results were coming out, while many pundits and news sources kept stringing viewers along with hope of some kind of favorable news for Kamala, Polymarket showed the direct truth: Trump had a greater than 95% chance of victory, and a greater than 90% chance of seizing control of all branches of government at the same time

Silver’s claims that the 2024 election outcome is essentially a coin-flip. While this may be accurate—although 67/33 is pushing it—Coplan’s response partially serves to deflect future backlash about the accuracy of the prediction, to remind people that if something has, for example, 33 percent odds of happening, that means it still happens 33 percent of the time. But it also obscures the fact that the odds themselves and their attached returns, not just the events being predicted, are what reel people in.

Polymarket should be seen as “social epistemic tool” useful for the public to get “a view of how important certain events are and what kind of things are likely to happen.”

To name just a few examples: Plato (4th century BCE) had Socrates say, in certain dialogues, that when poets produce truly great poetry, they do it not through knowledge or mastery, but rather by being divinely “inspired” by the Muses, in a state of possession that exhibits a kind of madness (Ion and Phaedrus)

see Sawyer 2012: 89). But the most influential stage-theory traces back to Henri Poincaré’s lecture, “Mathematical Creation” (1908 [1913: 383–394]), in which he identifies four phases in his own innovative work as a mathematician: conscious hard work or preparation, unconscious incubation, illumination, and verification.

Socrates repeats this view in the Phaedrus: “Some of the greatest blessings come by way of madness, indeed madness that is heaven-sent” (244a). He adds that while a poet may have some kind of skill, anyone who aspires to make poetry purely by skill, without the madness or the muse, will fail (245a).

And this development can be substantially aided by learning certain heuristics. Heuristics are indeed a staple of education in creative pursuits from mathematics (draw the figure; consider special cases; consider extreme cases; generalize the problem; look for a related problem, etc.—see Pólya 1945; Schoenfeld 1982, 1987a, 1987b) to creative writing (write what you know; be specific and detailed in describing sensory experiences; practice seeing similarities between dissimilar things; show, don’t tell, etc.—see Bell & Magrs 2001; Anderson 2006; Maybury 1967; S. Kaufman & J. Kaufman 2009). Gaut also identifies several heuristics that might be used to foster creativity in philosophy, even among children (cf. M. Gaut 2010; B. Gaut & M. Gaut 2011).

a genius invents the rules, indirectly, by creating exemplary works from which other artists might extract rules and undertake “a methodical instruction in accordance with rules” (1790: §49 5:318 [2000: 196]).

he talent (natural gift) that gives the rule to art … the inborn predisposition of the mind (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art. (1790: §46 5:307 [2000: 186

Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity, but informational or enabling extrinsic motivation can be conducive, particularly if initial levels of intrinsic motivation are high. (1996: 107)

Creative people are not merely able to act creatively. They are, moreover, disposed to exercise that ability, such that they do act creatively, at least some of the time, when the occasion arises. On this view creativity is a disposition, also referred to as a trait

At the outset of a creative act, you have to be to some extent ignorant of the end, or the means, or both. That ignorance opens up room for spontaneity and creativity.

Boden says, “by dropping the home-key constraint”, the rule that a piece of music must begin and end in the same key. Lobachevsky and other mathematicians developed non-Euclidean geometry by dropping Euclid’s fifth axiom

ut how could that possibly happen?” (2004: 6). Boden calls this transformational creativity because it cannot happen within a pre-existing conceptual space; the creator has to transform the conceptual space itself, by altering its constitutive rules or constraints

The new idea that emerges is one that was already possible within that space, because it was permitted by its rules

her view, there are “three types of creativity”—combinatorial, exploratory, and transformative—“which elicit different forms of surprise, [and] are defined by the different kinds of psychological processes that generate the new structures” (2010: 1, italics added).

In the terminology of philosopher Margaret Boden, these ideas are “psychologically creative” (P-creative) even though they are not “historically creative” (H-creative). Notice that P-creativity is more fundamental. Anything that is new in all of history (H-creative) must also be new to its creator (P-creative). Thus, creativity always exhibits psychological novelty, though it doesn’t always exhibit historical novelty

According to a common interpretation, Kant defines (artistic) genius as the ability to produce works that are not only “original”—since “there can be original nonsense”—but also “exemplary”

and a product is creative if it meets two conditions: in addition to being new it must also be valuable

As we noted at the outset, the term “creative” can be applied to three kinds of things: a person, a process, or a product (where a product could be an idea, performance, or physical artifact).

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) conceived of artistic genius as an innate capacity to produce original works through the free play of the imagination, a process which does not consist in following rules, can neither be learned nor taught, and is mysterious even to geniuses themselves

The task of creating an assemblage of new societal machines to reanimate the dying machine aspect of the world is a task of argument engineering.

This is why a basic and surprisingly robust heuristic works very well: The primary sign that somebody is anti-technological is incuriosity

To truly celebrate the void, you need to construct society as a machine, and subordinate yourself to it to some degree

Neither celebrates the uncaring void that the drive to know relentlessly pushes towards

The faceless bureaucrat and the hacker sneaking into the lab to do unauthorized experiments go together

"I think what I love about Kneale is the doubt and uncertainty that you're left with after watching or listening to his plays," says Hurley. "He's very resistant to explaining too much. I'm a huge fan of writers like Robert Aickman and Shirley Jackson who are very similar in that respect. They don't over-explain, they don't give you the solace of saying, 'It's OK, we can think of it this way.' Those are the stories that haunt you. That's something I really try to emulate. If people go away with more questions than answers, I feel like I've done my job properly."

He smiled giddily the entire time and wore the red coat of an eighteenth-century British soldier, with a gold aiguillette and a powder-blue sash.

Ona telling him. “We’ve gone back to our customary ways. There’s no more meat pies and beer . . . we don’t need money.”

Chomsky has long been an opponent of the statistical learning tradition of language modeling, essentially claiming that it does not provide insight about what humans know about languages, and that engineering success probably can’t be achieved without explicitly incorporating important mathematical facts about the underlying structure of language

In April 2023, Mitsunori, 87, sitting in the family home adorned with photographs of his favoured second son, described how he rearranged the pins on his pachinko slot machines so that everybody in town thought they were a winner. His upfront losses were eye-watering. Then he moved the pins back into place — and started making serious money. Watching his father, Son learnt how to hustle. But the boy’s ambitions went way beyond pachinko gambling

both a result of multibillion euro funds to help east Germany’s largest coal-producing region to exit from fossil fuels.

Remarkably, philosophical theories of secession have not distinguished between having the right to secede and being justified in using force to exercise the right

One difficulty with this response is that it appears unrealistic under current conditions: once a region has achieved full independence, it will have little incentive to continue to share its resources with the remainder state in order to preserve its welfare functions and there is no effective international agency to ensure that it does so.

Wellman, however, takes another approach. He argues that the continued sharing of resources from a newly created independent state with the remainder state need not be limited to instances in which the poorer region would be left unviable without the seceding region’s support

Moreover, the remedial right only approach need not reject claims to independence on the part of nations; it only rejects the much stronger assertion that nations as such have a unilateral right to secede

Given the tendency for unilateral secession to provoke massive violence, the obvious strength of the remedial right only approach

Plebiscitary theories, in contrast, hold that the (pro tanto) unilateral moral claim-right to secede exists if a majority residing in a portion of the state chooses to have their own state there, regardless of whether or not they have any common characteristics, ascriptive or otherwise, other than the desire for independence.

Remedial right only theories analogize the right to secede to the right to revolution, understanding it as a right that a group comes to have only as a result of violations of other rights

Network union. A wholly digital entity, organized in a social tree structure, that engages in collective action on behalf of its members. The collective action is key for building organizational muscle. Network archipelago. A network union that begins acquiring and networking properties in the physical world. The physical interaction is key for building trust. Network state. A network archipelago that gains diplomatic recognition from at least one legacy state. The diplomatic recognition is key for attaining sovereignty.

And now we have a way to talk about origins in a realistic way. You’re founding a startup society. You begin as a network union, maybe crowdfund territory to become a network archipelago, and could someday grow into a network state. All of these are types of parallel societies

Thus, the legitimacy of a network state comes not from top-down declamations, but from bottom-up consent, as each netizen has opted in

Assumption: Digital Primary, Physical Secondary

controlled by private keys rather than a username/password combination, then the same encryption techniques that make it difficult for an outsider to seize an individual’s private keys can make it difficult for a foreign rival to steal a legitimate government’s private keys

Diplomatic recognition requires a putative state to have clout, and clout is in turn established by a publicly verifiable on-chain census of population, income, and real estate, to prove that your growing society is as large as you say it is. That’s why the aforementioned census is important

In the meantime, physical law enforcement itself is gradually turning into something done with autonomous robots - whether they be legged robodogs, rolling cameras, or flying drones. So more law enforcement is being done from a command line. And that trend gradually converges with the concept of digital law enforcement by a network state.

but with one enormous difference, which is that if we can build many different startup societies to choose from, then there is much more practical consent of the governed, because there are many startup societies to choose from with explicit social smart contracts.

and more smart devices within those territories are owned by the society

Ford could be a holocracy or a co-op. So long as everyone has consented to be governed by the Ford CEO by signing an employee agreement, and can leave if that agreement is no longer congenial, Ford’s internal arrangements are ethical.

It has a substantial physical component: all the buildings around the world crowdfunded by its members.

Admission to this social network is selective, people can lose their account privileges for bad behavior, and everyone who’s there has explicitly opted in by applying to join

Multiethnic empires like the Soviet Union were not traditional nation states because they had more than one nationality

Either someone thinking about starting new countries must want to create a powerful new military (dangerous!) or else they don’t have any guns and will get crushed by those that do (dangerously naive).

But the Network of the global Indian diaspora is just on an exponential rise. Indeed, I think the 2020s will be for the Indian Network what the 2010s were for the Chinese State - somewhat ignored at the beginning of the decade, but an important global force by the end of it.

The less-obvious point is that BTC — and its adjacent group of web3 users — are becoming a media power that will eventually topple the NYT, much as the 20th century US’s media power eventually outcompeted that of the Soviet Union. Why? Decentralized media. You can see early signs of this with Substack, Mirror, and NFTs…but in brief, the best content creators have better things to do than work for the establishment. They can become publishers of their own, by founding their own media companies. As with the CCP’s transition to a martial power, the BTC/web3 transition to a money and media power is not at all conventional wisdom

Crypto Capital is the international ideology of Bitcoin and web3. It’s stateless capitalism, capitalism without corporations, decentralized censorship-resistance, and neutral international law

Now we see why a focused moral critique is so important

what we call a network state, as it would need legal recognition from an existing government

one that justifies its existence as a righteous yet peaceful protest against the powers that be.107

empowering high-performers in the private sector to positions of influence in the Executive Branch. This impulse, inspired by the American faith in market competition as the

We can synthesize these into a unified theory of cycles. The left cycle starts with a group of revolutionary leftists that then become institutional rightists. The right cycle starts with a group of determined rightists that then become decadent leftists. The libertarian cycle starts with a group of ideological libertarians that end up building a bureaucratic state.

That’s why reopening the frontier may be the most important meta-political thing we can do to reduce political conflict.

Professed ideals were just a mask for tribal interest.

But if you track each of their careers back, you’ll see something like this episode, when Soros was funding Orban and both were on the same side as revolutionary forces against the Soviets. At that point in time, Soros was the philanthropist and Orban his protege, much as a venture capitalist might back an ambitious young founder. That’s a classic example of how backers seek leaders in the market for revolutionaries

More recently, technological and moral innovators have grown to be at odds, because the US establishment now regards its economic disruptors as enemies

So, practically speaking, an “internet frontier” is easier than the other three. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to use the concepts from the network state to reopen the physical frontier, through a hybrid internet/land strategy, as described in this book.

That closing took away paths for ambitious men, and ensured that they couldn’t easily become founders on their own plot of land

Towards the end of this period, authors like Charles Nordhoff in Communistic Societies of the United States noted how important the frontier was, how bad it would be if that avenue for ambitious men was closed off, and how nasty the Trade-Unionists were getting

Stories that decenter the US, in other words, but that still give the world hope

But most of the time biomedical innovators are portrayed as evil, with all the attendant consequences. False histories shape our reality. We all live in Jurassic Ballpark.

that their downranking of dissident voices not fully efficient, that their late-breaking attempt to impose speech and thought controls on a free society not fully consummated, that (a) the initial refutations were even published and (b) that you are seeing some of them combined into one document.

Power over truth. In these incidents, if you stop to count, you often realize that the reports were off not by say 50%, but by 1000X or more. Why do these “reporters” still have their jobs, then? Because their job wasn’t to make money, but to make power. That is, they weren’t trying to predict the future correctly for the sake of making good investments, but to repeat the party line to keep people in line

That Realignment would be the Network against the State

That third way is to support regional rearmament rather than fighting everyone else’s wars on their behalf.

China’s lawful evil ambitions in East Asia should be tolerance for America’s chaotic evil interventions in the Middle East, that defending against a potential Chinese drone armada should mean acceptance of endless destabilization by the US military.

The Iraq War can be seen as a transition point, as can Samantha Power’s R2P doctrine that left Syria in ruins

Up to this point, these pushes have not been thwarted by the “ethics” of the US establishment, but by some combination of political opposition, Constitutional constraint, and bureaucratic incompetence.

Yes, you can argue the Chinese are building colonies in Africa…but they’re functional colonies, with new roads and ports to carry raw materials, unlike the blasted hellscapes left by US military intervention in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and the like

The short counterargument is that it may instead be best for countries to rearm, and take on their own defense – rather than having an increasingly chaotic US try to fight a Second Cold War on others’ behalf in the middle of an internal Cold Civil War and what might become a Second Great Depression

The people of the State among the reds are more prominent. These are the secular nationalists, the national security hawks, the people who may not like the left-authoritarians but who will nevertheless reflexively support the US in every foreign intervention. They may agree that the US is trending in a bad direction, but they think China is far worse. As such, they’re still building drones, coding surveillance, and cheering videos like this one where the US admits to fomenting the color revolutions that are often otherwise denied.

They realize on some level that (a) Network > State in many contexts and furthermore that (b) the Network-aided global ascent of tech founders and populist leaders could reduce their control over the State, so they have chosen to (c) strike first by gaining control of those tech companies that have achieved state-like scale.

The left-authoritarians are the main proponents of the political power theory of truth, as “truth” is whatever they find helpful to move political power into action.

Each member of blue tribe will have to make a choice in the years to come: are they loyal to neutral decentralized networks that treat both Americans and non-Americans equally, or are they actually just loyal to the US establishment — essentially nationalists in disguise?

If all you have to offer is a higher standard of living, people may come as consumers, but they won’t come for the right reasons. The consumer-citizen is coming to enjoy a great society, not to sacrifice to make a society great

Synthesis: The Network/State

superhuman answers to difficult questions using the knowledge of all of humanity

Encryption thus limits governments in a way no legislation can. And as described at length in this piece, it’s not just about protection of private property. It’s about using encryption and crypto to protect freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of contract, prevention from discrimination and cancellation via pseudonymity, individual privacy, and truly equal protection under rule-of-code — even as the State’s paper-based guarantees of the same become ever more hollow.

The State is Still A Leviathan

This is, on balance, a good thing — the fact that tech is no longer highly dependent on the triple dysfunction of SF/CA/USA is crucial to the world’s future

As incredible as it may sound, the blockchain is the most important development in history since the advent of writing itself, as it’s a cryptographically verifiable, highly replicated, unfalsifiable, and provably complete digital record of a system

As a complement to mobile, the Network offers another way to opt out of State-controlled physical surroundings: namely, to put on a VR (or AR) headset, at which point you are in a completely different world with different people surrounding you and different laws

COVID-19 lockdowns may be just the beginning of State attempts to control Network-facilitated physical exit. But in normal circumstances, smartphones are helping people move ever more freely, while the borders of physical states are frozen in place.

people who live geographically near each other share values and (b) therefore laws should be based on geographic boundaries. The alternative is that only people who are geodesically near each other in the social network share values, and therefore the laws that govern them should be based on network boundaries

Encryption > State Violence

When we say that the Network is the next Leviathan, which we can abbreviate as “Network > State”

So it doesn’t matter how many nuclear weapons you have; if property or information is secured by cryptography, the state can’t seize it without getting the solution to an equation.

We have more examples that show that some facts really are determined by societal consensus, while others are amenable to decentralized verification.

We can now think of written history as an (incomplete, biased, noisy) distillation of this full log

But a full log, a cryptohistory. The unification of microhistory and macrohistory in one giant cryptographically verifiable dataset. We call this indelible, computable, digital, authenticatable history the ledger of record.

It is the most rigorous form of history yet known to man, a history that is technically and economically resistant to revision.

The people under the microscope are fogging the lens.

America’s religious colonies succeeded at a higher rate than its for-profit colonies, because the former had a purpose. The slightly longer answer is that in a startup society, you’re not asking people to buy a product (which is an economic, individualistic pitch) but to join a community (which is a cultural, collective pitch).

We use these tools to discuss the emergence of a new Leviathan, the Network

Similarly, it’s one thing to operate as a mere citizen of a pre-built country, and quite another thing to create one from scratch

and a plan to crowdfund many pieces of territory around the world

Could a startup society follow a similar path? Yes. A cryptographically auditable census could prove that a growing startup society had 1-10M committed digital citizens, large cryptocurrency reserves, years of continuous existence, and physical holdings all over the earth. That numerical traction could then be used to achieve the societal traction of diplomatic recognition.

This in turn leads us to the societal definition: a new country is one that is diplomatically recognized by other countries as a legitimate polity capable of self-determination

we organize our internal economy around remote work, we cultivate in-person levels of civility, we simulate architecture in VR, and we create art and literature that reflects our values

And finally we arrive at our preferred method: the network state. Our idea is to proceed cloud first, land last. Rather than starting with the physical territory, we start with the digital community

Because we want to build something new without historical constraint

As the population and economy of a startup society grow comparable to that of a legacy state, with millions of citizens and billions in income, it should eventually4 be able to attain recognition from existing sovereigns

should eventually be able to negotiate for diplomatic recognition from at least one pre-existing government, and from there gradually increased sovereignty, slowly becoming a true network state.

Physical access is granted by holding a web3 cryptopassport

moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition

we believe

The Dominican Republic has been a political and economic success story in contrast to its neighbor and, unlike Haiti, is secure enough for the secretary of state to spend the night.

Still, some think Próspera may already be too far along to fail: There is simply too much capital already invested, too many commitments made, to have them torn apart in Tegucigalpa. The government is making “emotional arguments more than anything else,” González told me. “If they had the legal right to do what they’re trying to accomplish, they’d have already done it.”

He said he was inspired to help found Próspera after reading Machiavelli’s writings on the impossibility of reforming a system from within. “The idea is that if you go to a place where nothing, nobody has a stake, there’s no entrenched interests, you can make really deep reforms that won’t affect any of the players,” he said. Years of dysfunction and corruption would be replaced by radically simple governance. A free market and political stability would attract top innovators and investors from the West while empowering Latin America’s legions of microentrepreneurs — the guys on the side of the road selling oranges or “a chicken leg in a bag,” Delgado said — to grow real businesses.

In turn, jobs, technology and educational opportunities would pour into the host country, which would share in the revenue, too

This ruling country would act as a “guarantor” to the host country and write its own laws and regulations, which would attract private companies to invest and build the cities

There are about three dozen charter cities currently operating in the world, according to an estimate from the Adrianople Group, an advisory firm that concentrates on special economic zones

Patri Friedman, grandson of the economist Milton Friedman and the founder of a start-up-cities fund that invested in Próspera

Próspera is a private, for-profit city, with its own government that courts foreign investors through low taxes and light regulation. Businesses can choose a regulatory framework from a menu of 36 countries or customize their own.

he works collecting taxes and managing public finances for the city’s 2,000 or so physical residents and e-residents, many of whom have paid a fee for the

But the timing of the indictment—in the midst of Telegram’s aggressive push to make crypto-backed financial services a central offering—speaks loudly, according to Seth Goertz, a former U.S. Attorney specializing in cryptocurrency and cybersecurity.

The conflict was eventually resolved in 1858, writes Schindler, after Buchanan succumbed to Congressional pressure to wrap up what was seen as a stalemate headed toward an unwinnable conflict

Morrison gave Pound the idea that the right-hand side of the xin (hsin) character represented a “hatchet,” shown hacking away at the wood supposedly represented on the left. It was Pound’s own inventiveness that associated the ancient Chinese hatchet with the Fascist axe and his own increasingly vindictive hatred of complications that provided the rubbish, which is not present in the Chinese original

“It’s a job for rich kids.”

“It’s like a whole world of intellectuals and artists got a multibillion-dollar grant from the tech world,” Smith said. “But we mistook that, and were frankly actively gaslit into thinking that that was because they cared about art.”

Okay, let’s face it. I might have a mild case of intellectual menopause going

It is easy to see the many ways I’m not anything like John Ransom

Only men have the opportunity to engage outside the home in civil society and fully participate in the state

Hegel claims a religious point of view can help furnish individuals with ethical principles and help us lead a more ethical life

nearer to feeling

Something is mine when mutually recognized as my possession by another. This is the first appearance of right where the activity of my free will in taking possession is free, and not mere arbitrariness. It is this agreement between two individuals forming a kind of contract which is so important for Hegel

We progress from one stage to the next in a distinctive way where apparent contradictions arising in each stage are dissolved through attaining a higher stage, where this cycle is repeated and progress made since the beginning remains present where what was abstract and opaque at first becomes more concrete as we advance to the end of this work

For example, our first apperception of some thing or object of thought might be as a pure being. As it is pure, it may appear to lack determinations – and so be nothing. In this way, Hegel holds that our thought has moved from pure being to pure nothingness. But yet what we apperceive is a something and so this is seen as helping overcome the false opposition of pure being and nothingness to a new, higher category of becoming as what is before is taking further shape as we sharpen our grasp of it.

Operating expenses are covered by charging a fee of 10% on earnings in excess of the original investment and by charging an additional 5% withdrawal fee

“The controversial stuff,” he says, “really drove traffic.”

The vibes are foul

Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would

Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy

One, Foreign Conspiracies against the Liberties of the United States, was from the hand of the celebrated painter and inventor of the telegraph, S.F.B. Morse.

Men are not inert vessels for potential economic capital that needs to be squeezed out

"We can do more to heal Grandmother Earth and protect her sacred children. The birth of this calf is both a blessing and warning.”

The £8mn Longitude Prize was awarded on Wednesday to Sysmex Astrego, a Swedish company whose method cuts the analysis time for urinary tract infection patient samples from two or three days to less than an hour.

he too wants to shine a light on the foolishness and wickedness of Western pols

and a slow build-up of a maladaptive chronic stress response

but rather my emotions, which filled me with desperation whenever I squeezed myself into a mold that was so small and so constricted that I could no longer move

Going to a Rogan show for “work” might function similarly, giving us cover in case we accidentally enjoyed it.

“etheric realm,” as well as in some fifteen thousand hours of recordings that have for many years been stored in a concrete bunker in Montana.

While his dad had favored bribing Balkan seamen to move his product to Europe aboard cargo ships, police said, the younger Nesic turned to smaller vessels to evade tightening screening procedures at Brazilian and European ports. Nesic allegedly bought cheap fishing boats that he retrofitted with extra fuel tanks, stuffed with cocaine, and staffed with Balkan or Brazilian crews to make the Atlantic crossing.

parvenus

Information about ownership can, however, be found in the pages of Tatler or on the message boards of Ismaili Muslims unhappy about their tithes being used to pay for the extravagant lifestyle of a man who is both their religious imam and the descendant of an aristocrat ennobled by both the Iranian and British monarchies

That which distinguishes an agent from a servant is not the absence or presence of a fixed wage or the payment only of commission on business done, but rather the freedom with which an agent may carry out his employment

The point has been made in the previous paragraph that a firm will tend to expand until the costs of organising an extra transaction within the firm become equal to the costs of carrying out the same transaction by means of an exchange on the open market or the costs of organising in another firm.

The main reason why it is profitable to establish a firm would seem to be that there is a cost of using the price mechanism. The most obvious cost of “organising” production through the price mechanism is that of discovering what the relevant prices are.

But this implies that those who direct pay in order to be able to do this and are not paid to direct, which is clearly not true in the majority of cases

It can, I think, be assumed that the distinguishing mark of the firm is the supersession of the price mechanism

According to the head of Poland’s Armament Agency, General Artur Kuptel, describing the system in Polish media earlier this month, radars suspended from the tethered balloons will monitor the sky as far as Ukraine, Belarus, and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad from Polish air space.Advertisement · Scroll to continue

So I make it hard for myself, because, sure, every time, naturally, you’re less fertile. You come up with fewer stories as time goes on. You have fewer ideas. So I’m very afraid of when the moment comes when I don’t have any new ideas.”

“We can constantly renew ourselves and give another leap and go even farther,” he said. It’s not a question of age, he explained, but of temperament, of being the kind of person who keeps pushing, keeps trying new approaches.

It is rare for academic ideas to reach the Amy Adams stage without drawing scholarly fire. Since 2023, three articles have appeared in scientific journals, with 45 authors in all, arguing that the claims made on behalf of the wood-wide web have far outstripped the evidence.

“The last thing in the world I’d want to write about is this place,” Vivian said at the door. “I can’t imagine anything more boring.”

Well, we did make money because we had advertisers that had advertising banners across a lot of the user pages because they were very specific

Of the hundreds of pages of Esmaeilion’s writing I have read, one image has stuck with me. In his memoir, It Snows In This House, he describes taking the school bus as a six-year-old in Kermanshah. Every winter morning, he waited in the dark by a slim mulberry tree on a little patch of land used neither by pedestrians nor by cars, staring ahead, looking for a pair of headlights. The metaphor offered by this image encapsulates his position: Esmaeilion standing in the strange landscape of Iranian politics, at a corner traversed by no one else. He stands looking into the dark, not just with his two eyes, but through two bullet holes in his heart, waiting for the lights that will put an end to his wait.

When counting dollars, a single customer may be retained or churned but they may also be retained as a customer by spending more or less in the second period relative to the first. As such, we separate out expansion and contraction into the growth accounting.

Sample MAU Growth Accounting for the above MAU chart

Aviv Ovadya of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center fears we are headed into “a catastrophic failure of the marketplace of ideas” with “no one believing anything or everyone believing lies.” He calls this “the infopocalypse.”

Kalshi’s cozy relationship with the United States’ top derivatives regulator raises concerns about how regulatory agencies view their responsibilities, after Dodd–Frank, to manage risk and regulate private markets. These concerns are all the more relevant in the wake of recent regional banking crises and widespread fraud in the crypto markets. But there is nothing extraordinary about the CFTC’s attitude. With bank closures and wire fraud dominating the headlines, who wouldn’t want to hedge? Every crisis has its response. “The world is increasingly volatile,” Kalshi’s website recently read. “Protect yourself and your business against all the unforeseen effects of real-world events.” It would be irresponsible not to.

“MORALLY REPUGNANT and grotesque,” “wasteful and absurd”—Senators Ron Wyden and Byron L. Dorgan did not mince words. They urged their colleagues on the senate floor to reject the Pentagon’s proposed futures market on terror attacks. That was 2003. The Pentagon had suggested allowing traders to place bets on the likelihood of a bomb detonating outside a market in Kabul, for example, or a bioterror attack occurring in Tel Aviv.

As a result, tōjisha-kenkyū is now in the early stages of being implemented by corporations, universities and hospitals as a means of identifying problems and fostering diversity within workplaces.

“So heartbreaking. We need to take better care of our women, athletes, mothers. So many systems let her down,” wrote elite runner Molly Huddle on Instagram. “Not even Olympic champions can feel safe giving birth in this country. We gotta do better.”

Explore both land and sea on this chain of islands, rocks, and pinnacles on the Washington coast. Take an early ferry from Anacortes to Orcas for a full day. Start by hiking a 6.7-mile loop to the top of Mount Constitution (the island’s highest point). Refuel on artisan, wood-fired pizzas at Hogstone, then head to West Beach for a two-hour guided sea kayak tour with Outer Island Excursions.

The great majority of Saudis still didn’t know who Swedish House Mafia was, but there were relatively privileged teenagers on hand whose lives would probably never be the same again, and who—perhaps without consciously realizing it—had just felt the exhilaration of seeing their world begin and end in the same flash of light.

he idea is to fund a massive economic and social transition while oil is still in high demand, and then build an entirely new economy in time for the 40% of the population that’s now under 25-years-old to actually have something meaningful and productive to do with their lives.

. Even with them, the world will never be fully under our control. Nor should we wish that it was, because that would be a world without serendipity or joy. Fortunately, we may not need more Promethean control; rather, we need more free time and an ethos fit for the purpose.

Most would agree that flourishing in time consists of free, active, thoughtful engagement with the world in accordance with one’s nature.

Leisure today exists for work, which means that it is not actually leisure at all.

For decades, most people have organized their lives around the forty-hour, five-day week. What if it were fifteen hours a week? What if it were zero? What comes next is open to negotiation and experimentation, but the process would necessarily require what Nietzsche called a revaluation of values. The idea of work for the sake of work would become an insult to human intelligence and dignity. Lives dedicated to the insatiable pursuit of money or other zero-sum goods would come to be recognized as pathological. The culture of commercialism presumably would be curtailed, or replaced with new norms and institutions emphasizing fulfilling experiences over luxuries and stuff. The very idea of “unemployment” would cease to exist. Greater investments (of both time and money) in liberal arts educations and institutions would come to be seen as not only desirable but necessary for equipping people to lead fruitful lives.

I’m not quite sure how it will happen, or if I’ll live to participate in it, but I suspect we’re entering a world beyond language where we’ll begin to realize just how deeply blinding language has been for the human consciousness and psyche.

They build, own, and manage their own facilities. They hire veterans. They had some ideas for how to encourage local ecotourism: A solar-powered visitors’ center. Sponsorship for more and bigger OHV races. A new RV park. Job training. Support for local community organizations

This captiousness is not my favorite aspect of myself. I know that I’m actually wrong about all this stuff, that gun people call guns guns and point them all over the place, but I can be pedantic, even about things I have no interest in. If it helps, I also bristle at anyone referring to a vinyl record as “a vinyl.”

I thought that if we just redistributed resources, then we could solve every problem. I now know that’s not true. There’s a funny moment when you realize that as an activist: The off-ramp out of extreme poverty is, ugh, commerce, it’s entrepreneurial capitalism. I spend a lot of time in countries all over Africa, and they’re like, ‘Eh, we wouldn’t mind a little more globalization actually’.

Claire Heald

delicately lifting the Queen’s coffin from the State Gun Carriage and carrying it inside for the service

Coordination involves incentivizing people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do

The mindset that “research funding” is all that research enabling organizations do is wrong.

Our plan is to bring the best of old-school blogging to a modern news feed experience and to have our editors and senior reporters constantly updating the site with the best of tech and science news from around the entire internet. If that means linking out to Wired or Bloomberg or some other news source, that’s great — we’re happy to send people to excellent work elsewhere, and we trust that our feed will be useful enough to have you come back later. If that means we just need to embed the viral TikTok or wacky CEO tweet and move on, so be it — we can do that

Staying disciplined. Despite its success, USV has kept its funds small. Its latest early-stage vehicle is $275 million, a modest sum for a franchise of its stature. This discipline has helped USV maximize returns.

but simply because the vow had itself changed who the vower was.

Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects – but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To “be modern” means to modernize – compulsively, obsessively; not so much just “to be,” let alone to keep its identity intact, but forever “becoming,” avoiding completion, staying underdefined.

But as Echo Chambers grow in size, it becomes a greater challenge to hold them together by shared ideas—so usually, the binding beliefs are honed down and simplified to the common denominator ideas that the whole community can get behind. So while Idea Labs get even smarter and more nuanced as they grow, growing Echo Chambers become even dumber and more sure of themselves.

Tribal language is the Primitive Mind’s way of signaling to each other: “Let’s fucking do this. Let’s band together and go to war.”

First, it comes from a core distinction between how the two cultures view ideas. Idea Labs see people and their ideas as separate entities—people are meant to be respected, ideas are not

about

shared understanding that they’re all ultimately on the same truth-seeking team.

The thing going on here is that Idea Labs are micro-divided, and macro-united. On a micro scale, Idea Labs and the people within them disagree often—that’s the intellectual diversity component.

One of the coolest properties of an Idea Lab is its ability to play nicely with other Idea Labs and seamlessly meld together with them into larger Idea Labs. Take the simplest example: two couples.