EU GDP is up 1.4% since last year, but growth is spread unevenly

Fastest: Ireland (17.1%, artifact of US pharma activity), Cyprus (3.6%), Bulgaria (3.5%), Croatia (3.4%), & Poland (3.2%)

Slowest: Luxembourg (-.4%), Finland (-.3%), Germany (-.2%), Austria (-.1%), & Hungary (.1%)

I studied European economics in London in the early 90s.

Much of the literature on Gernany had titles like "Why the German model no longer works", "The coming crisis in Germany".
Some of these books were written in the 80s even before reunification.

40 years ago.

i absolutely understand why very smart people think that they are not going to be swayed by the toxicity of twitter, it's the same reason people keep answering isaac chotiner's calls. best of luck to them

I’ll never understand how someone gets approached by Chotiner’s publicist, skims his past interviews, and still thinks, “Yeah, this is my chance to get my viewpoint across.”

Orgin beats Performance. In Germany, 10th graders who apply for an apprenticeship have a 15pp lower chance to receive an answer. @dgsoziologie.bsky.social @mpsa.bsky.social @davidajaeger.bsky.social @cesifo.org @danbischof.bsky.social @p-hunermund.com papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

straight up fascinating piece of information here

Seen a lot of people lately having the “oh” moment that language doesn’t actually require mind or consciousness, which LLMs make obvious.
This rhymes with the central motif of Blindsight, where the whole plot leans on intelligence probably not needing either.

Here's each G7 country's cumulative increase in real GDP per capita, since just before the pandemic:

🇺🇸 +9.9%
🇮🇹 +7.3% (thru Q1)
🇯🇵 +3.1% (thru Q1)
🇫🇷 +2.4% (thru Q1)
🇬🇧 +0.1% (thru Q1)
🇨🇦 -1.1% (thru Q1)
🇩🇪 -1.9% (thru Q1)

Neural networks coming up with incorrect pos-hoc justifications about how they do things is an extremely amusing vindication of Feyerabend

Without changing the constitution, the US legislative branch became subject to multiple new right wing veto points that have hobbled it since 2008 (or 1994) so that 2024 is like the late Weimar dictatorship by decree phase after everyone had essentially given up on possibility of democratic govt.

You need to promise to lower taxes to be elected and you need to lower taxes to govern. You lost because you didn't promise to power taxes. Billionaires skew towards fascists because fascists lower taxes but liberals don't promise to lower taxes. You need other policy innovations like lowering ta...

one of the easiest and worst functions of online culture is to serve you back your own despair

i started writing a book last year on the history of leftist scientists, technologists, hackers etc and then trump got elected so i compressed what i saw as the most important points into this essay and now its done and you can read it

wedontagree.net/technically-...