2026-02-20 15:32:42
Pensions cost the government 10% of GDP. If no reforms are made by 2050, Brazil will spend more on pensions as a share of GDP than many richer and greyer countries… Though Brazil’s share of young people is similar to that in Chile or Mexico, its pension spending is already at Japan’s level. That is despite a modest reform in 2019 that introduced a minimum retirement age. The population is ageing rapidly. Without reform, its social-security deficit, or the shortfall between contributions and payments, is set to rise from 2% of GDP today to over 16% by 2060.
Brazil’s courts cost 1.3% of GDP —the second-most expensive in the world—mostly because of generous pensions. The typical soldier retires before turning 55 on a pension equivalent to their full salary.
Here is more from The Economist. By the way, Brazil cannot change its pension system without amending the constitution.
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2026-02-20 13:33:15
In the specific sector I work in (previously law and now tech), I am surprised by how few US companies hire in Canada. The Canadians I know in these fields are typically on par with the Americans, but doing the same work at half the price. This superficially looks like an economic puzzle: with no timezone difference, language barrier, or cultural friction, why would American companies not hire the much cheaper Canadians? I believe the answer brings together everything I’ve touched on in this essay. The reason is legibility. There aren’t enough Canadians with resumes that American hiring algorithms recognize. If an American tech company uses “Previously worked at a company like Amazon” as a filter, a software engineer from RBC, despite being equally talented, does not pass the filter. If Canada wanted to see more of its citizens hired by US companies, the strategy shouldn’t be better education or training. It should be subsidizing large US companies to open offices in Canada, purely to brand candidates as “Amazon Product Managers.” Because once they have the badge, the market will finally see them.
Here is more from Daniel Frank, note the post covers some quite different issues, all related to talent. Via Watt.
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2026-02-20 10:27:10
I liked it very much, noting it is not one for the purists. The visuals and soundtrack added to the general passionate feel. I can recommend the Jonathan Bate review and the Louise Perry review (WSJ). The other version of this movie I can recommend is the Luis Buñuel Mexican interpretation, also full of passion and that poor pig. At its heart, this is a very Mexican story and no way should it be done in a Masterpiece Theater kind of style.
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2026-02-20 03:17:33
I think David Lewis was off his rocker, I think Donald Davidson was far too impressed by elementary logic and decision theory, I think Willard Quine was a mediocre logician with some philosophical side-interests, I think Daniel Dennett never understood philosophy, I think Michael Dummett was a dimwit outside of his narrow specializations, I think P.F. Strawson struggled to understand much of philosophy, I think Gilbert Ryle was a classicist who wanted philosophy gone by any means necessary, I think Gareth Evans had no philosophical depth, I think John Searle was a philosophical lightweight, I think Jerry Fodor had no idea about philosophy and didn’t care, I think Saul Kripke was a mathematician with a passing interest in certain limited areas of philosophy, I think Hilary Putnam was a scientist-linguist who found philosophy incomprehensible, I think Ludwig Wittgenstein was a philosophical ignoramus too arrogant to learn some history, I think Bertrand Russell was only interested in skepticism, I think Gottlob Frege was a middling mathematician with no other philosophical interests, I think the positivists were well-meaning idiots, I think Edmund Husserl had no interest in anything outside his own consciousness, I think Martin Heidegger and John-Paul Sartre were mainly psychological politicians, I think John Austin was a scientifically illiterate language student, I think Noam Chomsky was neither a professional linguist nor a philosopher nor a psychologist but some sort of uneasy combination, I think the vast majority of current philosophers have no idea what philosophy is about and struggle to come to terms with it, I think philosophy has been a shambles since Descartes, I think Plato and Aristotle were philosophical preschoolers, I think no one has ever really grasped the nature of philosophical problems, I think the human brain is a hotbed of bad philosophy (and that is its great glory).
Here is the link, via The Browser. My honest view is that he is worrying too much about other people, and not enough about issues.
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2026-02-20 00:41:18
2. Record low U.S. crime rates are real, not an artifact of data issues.
3. Is the LDS Church suddenly bearish? What do they know?
4. Alcohol death rates in Europe, by country.
5. Australia as a partial model for the FDA.
The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-02-19 20:18:23
The Government of India’s Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation has created an impressive Model Context Protocol (MCP) to connect AI’s to Indian datasets. An AI connected to data via an MCP essentially knows the entire codebook and can make use of the data like an expert. Once connected one can query the data in natural language and quickly create graphs and statistical analysis. I connected Claude to the MCP and created an elegant dashboard with data from India’s Annual Survey of Industries. Check it out.
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