Category Archives: Linkorama

• Reason.com, A Clear and Present Lack of Danger
• Kevin Drum, The Kabul evacuation was chaotic. It was also done as efficiently as possible.

I’ve been busy, so some short notes of things I wish I had time to write full posts about:

• We’ve got some terrific speakers at We Robot 2019, and are assembling a powerhouse set of discussants to go with them.  See the preliminary We Robot program, and the preliminary pre-conference Workshop program, and register now!  I’ll post the whole program here when it’s more final. And remember – it’s time to pitch a poster, which gets you in free.
• The Gables Stage production of Indecent is first-rate.  Great play, great production.  You see it coming and it’s still harrowing.  It closes in a couple of weeks, but they’ve added some performances recently so there are still tickets.  I’ve been a season ticket holder for many years, and this is as good as anything they’ve done.
• Depending on what rules the AIs used, this looks like it might be an important paper to more than one field: Emilio Calvano, Giacomo Calzolari, Vincenzo Denicolò, Sergio Pastorello, Artificial intelligence, algorithmic pricing, and collusion, VOX (Feb. 03, 2019).  I found the link to the the summary of the summary on Naked Capitalism. I’ve asked my library to get the paper for me.  The claim is that,
  

   [W]e experiment with pricing algorithms powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in controlled environments (computer simulations), studying the interaction among a number of Q-learning algorithms in a workhorse oligopoly model of price competition with Logit demand and constant marginal costs. In this setting the algorithms consistently learn to charge supra-competitive prices, without communicating with one another. The high prices are sustained by classical collusive strategies with a finite phase of punishment followed by a gradual return to cooperation. This finding is robust to asymmetries in cost or demand and to changes in the number of players.

• Some USB device on my desktop computer is causing crashes after (or when?) it boots up automatically in the morning.  Of course the Windows 7 (deprecation coming soon…) error messages don’t tell you which.  Never happens when I start it up manually or am using it.

Politics

• Juan Cole warns of a more general problem: The Sadism of creeping Dictatorship
• Monkey Cage finds How authoritarianism is shaping American politics (and it’s not just about Trump)
• Kevin Drum is shrill in his Evening Trump Fuckupery Roundup
• Steve Vladeck worrries about The Coming Comey Succession Crisis (Trey Gowdy??? Someone is off their meds)
• Colbert looks at Trump’s Comey tweet and has a warm altruistic reaction:
  
• NYT, Fact Check: Fact Check: The White House’s Justifications for Firing Comey
• David Leonhardt, NYT op-ed, Rod Rosenstein fails his ethics test and relatedly, NYT Editoral, An Open Letter to the Deputy Attorney General
• Looks like the 2020 census may be in trouble. U.S. Census director resigns amid turmoil over funding of 2020 count. I’m sure this has nothing to do with last census’s effort to count homeless and minority voters (and non-citizens) who otherwise get missed.
• Bonus Juan Cole snark, Which Middle East Authoritarian Leader is Trump most Like?
• Time to ask Can Government Lawyers Be Heroes? (Jotwell)

Non-Pitchfork Reading

War

• What does $59 million dollars of ordinance buy you? Nothing worth having says NYT’s Stephen Farrell in ‘I Was There’ Reporting on Airstrikes, the ‘Single Biggest Recruiting Tool’
• What did $5 Trillion in war costs buy you? Defeats, says Willaim D. Hartung at Informed Comment.

Law

• Robert Graham puts his head in the lion’s mouth by arguing that John Oliver is wrong about Net Neutrality
• Sen. Marco Rubio carries Big Oils, er, water by proposing that Florida get a cut of any drilling in gulf waters. This is seen as a lever to undermine state oppposition to offshore oil drilling.
• The Regulatory Review is Looking More Closely at the Platypus of Formal Rulemaking
• TRR is also critiquing a gag rule aimed at rulemaking agencies, Ditch the Flawed Legislative Proposal to Police Agency Communications

Tech & Science

• There’s a nasty bug in Android, but you can’t do much about it other than be prudent, is the bottom line from the INQ’s, Bug alert: You should maybe stay off Google Play until Android O comes out
• Mozilla finds Thunderbird sounder institutional backing: Thunderbird’s Future Home.
• Think two-factor authentication with a smart phone will keep you safe? Meet SS7.  Spotted via Bruce Schneier,Criminals are Now Exploiting SS7 Flaws to Hack Smartphone Two-Factor Authentication Systems
• I was wondering about this — Yes, This Is a Particularly Horrendous Year for Seasonal Allergies
• Robohub investigates What’s slowing the use of robots in the ag industry?
• Marcy Wheeler asks whether Marcon’s false documents might have contained web beacons cooked up by the DGSE or some other intelligence agency

Culture

• Strange doings at Duke Divinity School, with intimations of Political Correctness and threats to academic freedom? That’s what the American Conservative says. And if this is in fact a fair rendering of the facts (not utterly obvious as there’s hints of a two-year back story), they seem to have something of a case. Brian Leiter is on it.

Some links today. Click through – there’s always lots more goodness waiting.

• Hullabaloo (Digby), QOTD: Robert Borosage: “There is an idiocy about our current national politics that is simply stupefying. We are sitting idly, watching, and suffering, as our nation disintegrates into a run-down backwater.” (See also, Daily Kos, A bridge falling into the water and a vision for the future gone missing)
• DownWithTyranny!, Can The Democrats Retake The House Next Year?“: “One of the easiest districts for a Democrat to win would be FL-27, the seat now held by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. But there is no recruitment; there is anti-recruitment. DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has made it abundantly clear to Florida Democrats that she will not tolerate anyone credible running against Ileana, who, like her, is owned by the sugar baron Fanjul brothers. Last year Obama’s 7 point margin in FL-27 was one of the highest margins of victory in any district held by a Republican Member of Congress. But Wasserman Schultz had the DCCC make sure there would be no viable candidate.”
• Political Animal, Apple: Living the Lie: “I have three laws of politics. I don’t know if they explain everything, but they often explain something, and that’s enough for me. Malanowski’s First Law of Politics is that the rich and powerful will always act in their own self interest. Malanowski’s Second Law is that the rich and powerful will then get the rest of us to act in their interest as well, usually by making us believe that we hold this interest in common. Malanowski’s Third Law is that when the rest of us figure out ways to act in our own self-interests, the rich and powerful are likely to outlaw whatever we’ve come up with.”
• Greek Yogurt considered dangerous (for the environment): Modern Farmer, Whey Too Much: Greek Yogurt’s Dark Side (via NakedCapitalism, Links 5/25/13).

OK, enough gloom and doom.

• How-To Geek, Prevent Windows From Restarting Your PC After Windows Updates
• Krugman, Obamacare Will Be A Debacle — For Republicans. Also, California Health Exchange: Low Rates; Oregon Health Exchange: Low Rates

What? You miss the gloom and doom?

• Wonkblog, These 31 charts will destroy your faith in humanity (a pivot on Business Insider’s “31 Charts That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity.”).

• Boing Boing, Finnish police confiscate 9-y-o’s laptop after she downloads a song from the Pirate Bay
• Medical Daily, (via, slashdot)
• Mat Taibbi finds One Interesting Thing About Paula Broadwell’s Petraeus Biography (via Leiter)
• Man arrested for theft of “9 million files” said to comprise identity data for roughly 2/3 of the Greek population (via RISKS)
• Naked Capitalism, An Inconvenient Truth About Lincoln (That You Won’t Hear from Hollywood)
• Jon Huntsman continues his strategy of positioning himself as the sane alternative for the GOP. Fortunately, there’s no sign at present that this can work.
• U.S. Deficit Shrinking At Fastest Pace Since WWII, Before Fiscal Cliff & Your helpful Thanksgiving charts about the deficit (via Maddow Blog) … partial corrective at Kevin Drum, The Federal Deficit Is Shrinking Already, But That’s Not Really a Good Thing

The Poor Get One Strike; Banks Get Thousands – Frank Pasquale compares the fate of rich people engaging in massive organized fraud to that of poor people who have the misfortune to be present when someone else commits a crime.

Japan’s Secret Plan to Dominate the World – Kevin Drum wants to know if there is anything to this amazing conspiracy theory, based on a claim that bureaucrats intentionally understated the health of their economy.

SEC Announced Latest Chump Change Settlement With GE Funding The Friday Before Christmas. Hmmm… Crooks & Liars’ SEC Whitewash Watch.