2026-06-14 23:41:52
1. Chinese overtake Dominicans as NYC’s most numerous foreign-born group.
2. David Hockney embraced tech (NYT). And do not forget his writings, not to mention his persona and also his role in gay history and liberation. He was truly one of the great Englishmen, as he had been doing first-rate work since what, 1954?
3. Progress against lung cancer.
4. Average German date? And a six-minute video of a non-average German circus artist. And an eleven-year-old German on the handpan, without training.
5. Measuring how New Yorkers responded to their game 4 playoff victory. I have not seen data on game 5, though that was less of a surprise.
6. How The Bulwark is doing, and its economics (WSJ).
7. Become a telescope rancher those new service sector jobs (short video).
8. Bob Dylan (and others) on turning 80 (NYT). Dylan’s answer is clearly the best.
9. Paul Graham on how to become a billionaire.
The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-06-14 19:18:35
Kevin Bryan riffs on on my post The Nationalization of American Science. He is rightfully incensed:
AT is right this is a red tape-filled science policy of “losers”. If you think “cut funds from DEI-driven professors in the small departments no one cares about” is more important than “make sure the world’s strongest fundamental science continues”, you’re an idiot.
And yes, this is also the policy of “right-wing JD-brain” folks. They haven’t worked in a lab. They don’t know how we got AI, and recent cancer breakthroughs, and on and on. It’s all culture war, all the time – just the right-wing equivalent of the worst left-wing habits.
One last thing: I *hate* the term “administration priorities” or “President’s priorities”. Totally Unamerican! The President *executes* the law created by Congress, who represent the people, and who see turnover every two years. Period. “Oh, but Democrats do this too!” Grow up!
Owning the libs may feel good today but please look just one move ahead in the game tree. When AOC controls the executive branch, she will inherit every tool Trump normalized. Look a few moves further and see the damage to American institutions.
The culture war is a civil war. If we don’t end it, American science will be collateral damage.
The post The Cultural War is a Civil War appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-06-14 12:23:30
Start with the most important number in economics, even though no one on Wall Street talks about it: calories per acre. Human civilization runs on food. Ten billion people will inhabit this planet by 2050. The amount of arable land is not growing. It is shrinking, every year, to urbanization, desertification, salinization, and topsoil erosion. The countries that can grow food at scale will be the most strategically valuable territories on earth. The countries with the best apps and the most PhDs will depend on the countries with the best dirt.
Brazil has more unused arable land than any country on earth. That sentence alone should stop every allocator in their tracks. It means that Brazil can approximately double its total cultivated area, without touching a single hectare of the Amazon, simply by converting degraded pasturelands in the Cerrado and other biomes into productive cropland using technology that already exists.
No other agricultural superpower has this headroom. The United States is fully utilized. China is losing farmland to urbanization at a rate that should terrify its central planners. India’s agricultural productivity gains are hitting diminishing returns against water stress and soil degradation. Europe is hemmed in by geography and regulation. Sub-Saharan Africa has theoretical potential, but lacks the roads, the ports, the legal frameworks, and the capital to exploit it within a generation.
Brazil is already the world’s largest net food exporter. It leads the world in soybeans, coffee, sugar, orange juice, beef, and poultry. It is the second-largest exporter of corn, pork, and ethanol, and recently surpassed the United States as the largest cotton exporter. Agribusiness generates approximately 25% of GDP and more than 40% of export revenue. And the agricultural sector has been growing productivity at 3-4% per year for two decades straight, driven by Embrapa’s tropical soil science, satellite-guided precision agriculture, and the industrialization of protein supply chains that stretch from feedlots in Mato Grosso to dinner tables in Shanghai.
A single farm in Mato Grosso can be more than twice the size of the state of Rhode Island. A literal fact. The Bom Futuro Group cultivates more than 700,000 hectares (roughly 2,700 square miles) of soybeans, corn, and cotton across 35 production units. This is farming at a scale that American and European investors cannot easily conceptualize, operating with GPS-guided machinery, drone monitoring, and soil analytics that rival anything in Iowa, but across an area that dwarfs it.
The post is interesting throughout and offers further points of interest.
The post The bullish case for Brazil appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-06-14 01:26:54
1. Soccer and economic growth.
2. The AI scenario for Europe?
3. The smart version of the AI is a bubble argument.
4. Ken Opalo reviews Studwell on Africa.
5. The influence of AI on non-fiction books?
6. The economics behind the San Antonio Spurs.
The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-06-13 19:02:42
Probably you all know about this:
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
According to not yet confirmed but likely true reports, it was shown that model could be jailbroken. The released Mythos already restricted bio and “AI improvement” queries, rather strictly in fact, so now we are back to the model not being available.
Here are a few of the constraints on the U.S. government, not the only ones I might add:
1. It needs for the main companies to stay in business. On top of that, it wants their IPOs to go reasonably well. And it is now much harder for the top companies to recruit foreigners, which is a significant share of their highest quality workforce (Demis, Ilya, Andrej for a start). It is also much harder for the main companies to drum up foreign business in a credible and sustainble manner.
1b. How are American multinationals operating abroad supposed to use top systems, moving forward?
2. It wants to use model access as a tool of both hard and soft power, so model access has to be possible at some level. But it is very hard to control what foreign agents will do with their partial model access, when they get it in the ffuture.
3. The U.S. needs to stay ahead of China in the AI race.
4. The U.S. needs to issue restrictions that are actually enforceable, and “U.S. citizens only” does not fit that bill. Furthermore (markets in everything!) it is easy enough to hire a traitorous American to access tools of wrongdoing, or for matter it is not difficult to fake citizenship in various ways.
5. USG cannot nationalize these companies and then proceed to run them effectively.
6. Chinese and other open source models do in fact improve at some reasonable pace, even if they are right now considerably behind the best proprietary models.
Is the most likely scenario that the government hardens some of its own systems and takes some further precautions, and then allows Mythos to be rereleased? Perhaps with some additional safeguards?
Is there such a thing as a model that cannot be jailbroken at all? I doubt that.
So basically we will be replaying this scenario periodically over time, but with each time the companies and also the government in a weaker and more precarious position.
I am willing to reject the philosophy of “safetyism” and bite various associated bullets. As it stands, these actions will not succeed in making us safer, including for the reasons mentioned above. Our regulatory institutions, attitudes, and approaches simply are not well suited to an era of radical innovation.
In any case these events do not surprise me (they do surprise me in their immediate suddenness however), as this kind of approach is what governments have been about for a long time now, USG included or perhaps USG especially.
Rising in status: Leopold, Aesop, and also Mistral. AI nationalism. Proponents of slow take-off as the likely scenario. Reticent, quiet CEOs. As for China, will they rush into this opportunity, or are they at least as scared as we are?
The post Sometimes it is hard to solve for the equilibrium appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-06-13 15:22:02
…GOLEM’s behavior is unpredictable. Sometimes it converses courteously with people, whereas on other occasions any attempt at contact misfires. GOLEM sometimes cracks jokes, too, though its sense of humor is fundamentally different from man’s. Much depends on its interlocutors. In exceptional casese GOLEM will show a certain interest in people who are talented in a particular way; it is intrigued, so to speak, not by mathematical aptitude — not even the greatest — but rather by interdisciplinary forms of talent; on several occasions it has predicted with uncanny accuracy achievements by young, as yet unknown, scientists in a field which it has it self indicated. (After a brief exchange it informed T. Vroedel, age twenty-two and then only a doctoral candidate, “You will become a computer,” which was supposed to mean, more o less, “You will become somebody.”)
That is from Lem’s Imaginary Magnitude, an extraordinary book in parts, most of all see his Golem IV section on how n AGI (our term, not his) is likely to behave.
The post How did Stanislaw Lem imagine advanced computer intelligence? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.