2026-03-12 23:47:05
1. A fund for alpha through UAP disclosure?
2. High-quality 3-D scans of art objects? And some Met examples of what has been scanned.
4. Will the billionaire wealth tax pass?
5. Redux of my 2024 post on whether drones favor offense or defense, evil nations or good nations.
6. How will strong AI interact with nuclear deterrence?
The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-12 19:16:26
In yesterday’s post, The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, I wrote that Trump’s Executive Order “cuts off institutional home investors from FHA insurance, VA guarantees and USDA backing…”. The USDA is of course the United States Department of Agriculture. In the comments, Hazel Meade writes:
USDA? Wait, what????
Why is the USDA in any way involved in housing financing?
Are we humanly capable of organizing anything in a rational way?
It’s a good question. The answer is a great illustration of the March of Dimes syndrome. The USDA got involved with housing in the late 1940s with the Farmers Home Administration. The original rationale was to support farmers, farm workers and agricultural communities with housing assistance on the theory that housing was needed for farming and the purpose of the USDA was to improve farming. Not great economic reasoning but I’ll let it pass.
Well U.S. farm productivity roughly tripled between 1948 and the 1990s as family farms became technologically sophisticated big businesses. So was the program ended? Of course not. Over time the program subtly shifted from farmers to “rural communities”–the shift happened over decades although it was officially recognized in 1994 when the Farmers Home Administration was renamed the Rural Housing Service. Today rural essentially means low population density which no longer has any strong connection to agriculture.
So that’s the story of how the US Department of Agriculture came to run a roughly $10 billion annual housing program for non-farmers in non-agricultural communities. And how does it do this? By supporting no-money-down direct lending and a 90 percent guarantee to approved private lenders. Lovely.
It’s a small program in the national totals, but an amusing example of the US government robbing Peter to pay Paul and then forgetting why Paul needed the money in the first place.
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2026-03-12 13:35:38
One of the things I like best about South Africa is how quickly one enters another and very different intellectual world. Walk into a good used book shop, such as Clarke’s in Cape Town, and you find a slew of quality history books and biographies you otherwise would not have heard of. Buy them and read them and be transported. So many of them exist apart from the usual dialogues. For instance, I recently bought
Nowhere else is a used book store more interesting, at least from an English-language perspective.
The post The alternate book universe that is South Africa appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-12 12:33:37
Murphy: What do you think we need to do to avoid major conflict over the next 25 years? Or do you think it can be avoided?
Cowen: I just think there’ll be more festering conflicts. Consider the difference between World War One and World War Two. World War two is very decisively settled. That’s quite rare in history. And you had a clear, small number of victors that largely agreed. And US & UK set things up. That didn’t happen after World War One.
Yeah, there was a League of Nations that didn’t work. It collapsed again. Future conflicts will be more like World War One than World War Two. Yeah, there’s too many nuclear weapons out there, for one thing. Are we really going to decisively defeat Russia in anything, ever? Who knows? But I wouldn’t count on it.
I’m very struck by this recent conflict between Thailand and Cambodia, which is a nothing burger, but I think people are making a mistake by ignoring it. What it’s showing us is that two countries can find it worthwhile to conduct a nothing burger war every now and then a few weeks, and it’s never really over.
It never really escalates. It just goes on and I think we’ll just see more of that. East Africa feels quite dangerous at the moment.
Murphy: I mean, Azerbaijan.
Cowen: Things like that. And they’ll just multiply and not quite. You know, some of them will be settled. But as a whole, they won’t be settled, and they won’t give birth to, like, the new UN, the new Bretton Woods, the new whatever. The A’s will build their own institutions. Let’s wish them luck.
That was recorded several months ago with Nebular, here are the links:
We’ve just published the video on YouTube, X, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. We also published some extended show notes and the transcript on Substack.
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2026-03-12 01:52:15
Sebastian Geoffroy:
I left the film perplexed, but after some thought I have an interpretation.
The film is a recognition that for most of the West, the story is about the individual, their actions, their decisions. However – for many in the non-Western world – the story is about things outside of their agency. The characters discover this in their journey, and the lack of character development is intentional – this is not about them, it is about the context of their life, where much is simply out of their control. The minefield is a pinnacle of this; who lives, who dies – totally random. Heck, even ending up in the minefield was random.
The ending scene is alluding to this – showing the cast amongst migrants, alluding to their recognition that they too have entered the stochastic nature of life. This probably leads to some frustration among Western viewers; they are looking for the individual story. Instead, this is a film about context, and those things out of our control.
As you like to say, context is that which is scarce.
Interested in your thoughts.
I would add two points. First, I think the film is suggesting that humanity as a whole is making the same mistakes these characters are. Pointless quests (the daughter is not really missing), recklessness, plans devoid of meaning, and excess attachment to various drugs. WWIII is going on in the background, on the radio, and in this film the group ends up with the African goat herders, not doing better than they are and also difficult to distinguish from them at first.
Second, many points in the plot parallel episodes from the Bible and the Quran, except the characters do not experience them with meaning. Abraham offers to sacrifice his son for God, but here the father loses his son for no reason whatsoever. There are hallucinations in the desert, forty days and forty nights of wandering, Job-like episodes, and more. Instead of suicide bombers, we have people who blow up randomly for no good reason at all.
Again, this movie would make little sense over streaming. Here is my earlier review. Here is commentary from the director in Spanish, I have not yet listened. Here is a short post on the holiness of the movie.
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2026-03-11 23:41:41
1. Spinoza does not like going to the groomer at any price (NYT). He is a wise dog.
3. One of the real AI dangers.
4. Using LLMs to identify fiscal shocks.
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.