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Canada’s Balancing Act [Joseph Politano, Apricitas Economics]

C

• Canada’s economic fortunes are tied to America’s, but the country has taken a more conservative approach to the pandemic, leading to slower real GDP growth.
• Now, however, Canada’s economy is on better footing than America’s, with better public health policies leading to faster employment recovery and a commodity boom.
• Inflation has surged, but firms expect cost pressures to decelerate and the Bank of Canada has raised rates by 0.25%.
• Job growth has been strong and broad-based, with immigration and tourism returning.
• Capacity constraints are abating, and wage growth remains comparatively muted.
• The commodity cycle is a headwind, with the value of Canadian commodity exports falling.
• Canadian banks are not tightening as aggressively as their American counterparts.

Published February 11, 2023
Visit Apricitas Economics to read Joseph Politano’s original post Canada’s Balancing Act

The Developing Country Industrialization series [Noah Smith, Noahpinion]

T

• Robert Lucas’ quote is used to introduce the article, which is about the development of various countries.
• The article is based on the ideas of Joe Studwell and Ha-Joon Chang, who wrote books about how countries can develop.
• The article looks at the development of Bangladesh, Dominican Republic, Eastern Bloc, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland and Malaysia, Turkey, Ukraine, and Vietnam.
• Each country is discussed in terms of their development strategies, successes, and failures.
• The article concludes with plans for the next series, which will include Ethiopia and Thailand.

Published February 10, 2023
Visit Noahpinion to read Noah Smith’s original post The Developing Country Industrialization series

TGIF: Real Housewives of the SOTU [Nellie Bowles, The Free Press]

T

• Jamie Reed, a whistleblower, exposed the “morally and medically appalling” treatment of transitioning children at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
• Sen. Josh Hawley and Missouri’s Attorney General Andrew Bailey launched investigations in response to Reed’s piece.
• President Biden delivered a State of the Union address, during which Marjorie Taylor Greene heckled him.
• Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is attempting to seize control of Disney’s Reedy Creek Improvement District.
• Atomwaffen founder was arrested for plotting to attack the power grid outside Baltimore.
• Kamala Harris is struggling to gain support from her own party.
• Don Lemon is having public breakdowns.
• John Fetterman was hospitalized.
• James O’Keefe was reportedly suspended from Project Veritas.
• The New York Times published a puff piece on Kamala Harris that went horribly wrong.
• Jews are still being talked about, with Joe Rogan making an antisemitic comment.
• Salman Rushdie is back with a new book and a new face.
• Dr. Fauci is now charging $100,000 per speech.

Published February 10, 2023
Visit The Free Press to read Nellie Bowles’s original post TGIF: Real Housewives of the SOTU

February 9, 2023 [Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American]

F

• Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) have differing opinions on the decision to wait and shoot down the suspected Chinese spy balloon.
• House Republicans have used “investigations” to spread the idea of Democratic wrongdoing, but this narrative is being challenged by journalists and Democratic lawmakers.
• The House Oversight and Accountability Committee investigated Twitter for allegations that the company hid the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop before the election of 2020.
• Twitter executives testified that the Trump White House routinely demanded that tweets be taken down, while the Biden White House has not.
• The House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held its first meeting under chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), with witnesses including Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and former Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard.
• Special counsel Jack Smith has issued a subpoena to former vice president Mike Pence for documents and testimony, suggesting the investigation into former president Trump is moving into a new phase.

Published February 10, 2023
Visit Letters from an American to read Heather Cox Richardson’s original post February 9, 2023

DEI Is an Ideological Test [Graeme Wood, The Atlantic]

D

• Politics is everywhere, and has been for a long time.
• Christopher F. Rufo, a conservative polemicist, has been appointed to the board of New College, a public liberal-arts school, and has vowed to rid the place of leftist excesses.
• Many universities ask faculty applicants to write a statement of commitment to an extreme form of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is known as “anti-racism”.
• Rufo has vowed to eliminate oaths to such doctrines and to replace the DEI office with a much smaller office of color blindness.
• Justice William O. Douglas argued that the state should not contract the spectrum of available knowledge.
• Critics have accused Rufo of trying to turn New College into a space of extremist indoctrination.
• Rufo has argued that universities’ embrace of DEI follows what the activist and sociologist Rudi Dutschke called the “long march through the institutions”.
• Rufo is a political appointee interfering politically in a highly political environment, and his initiative could go badly for him and for his governor.

Published February 10, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Graeme Wood’s original post DEI Is an Ideological Test

Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes Had to Disprove a Misconception [Jemele Hill, The Atlantic]

J

• Sunday’s Super Bowl LVII will be the first time two Black quarterbacks face each other in the championship game.
• The NFL banned Black players from 1934-1946, and even after reintegrating, the prevailing assumption was that Black athletes weren’t intelligent enough to play quarterback.
• Marlin Briscoe was the first Black quarterback in the modern era, but he was given little playing time and eventually asked to be released.
• Warren Moon was the first Black quarterback in the NFL Hall of Fame, but he had to go to the Canadian Football League before the NFL sought him out.
• Today’s Black quarterbacks still face stereotypes and double standards, such as the Arizona Cardinals initially putting a “homework clause” in Kyler Murray’s contract extension.

Published February 10, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Jemele Hill’s original post Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes Had to Disprove a Misconception

The Catch-24 of Replacing Joe Biden [David A. Graham, The Atlantic]

T

• Joe Biden is likely to run for president again in 2024, despite the fact that most Democrats don’t want him to.
• Biden is motivated to run again to turn back the threat to American democracy posed by Donald Trump and his heirs.
• Biden’s approval ratings are the best they’ve been since the end of 2021, but voters are still not buying it.
• Biden has the wisdom and ego to not worry too much about being wanted, and he has neutralized many of his potential challengers by drawing them into his administration.
• Kamala Harris is unlikely to draw a challenge from the sort of candidate who’d try to unify the party in the way Biden has, and she hasn’t had any signature moments or policies.
• Pete Buttigieg and Mitch Landrieu are potential claimants to the moderate mantle from outside the administration, but they face difficulty in running against Biden.
• Biden has managed to stare down sectors of the Democratic base on key issues without losing them, and the positive reception of his State of the Union only solidifies his position.

Published February 10, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read David A. Graham’s original post The Catch-24 of Replacing Joe Biden

Researchers Discover a More Flexible Approach to Machine Learning [Steve Nadis, Nautilus]

R

• Artificial intelligence researchers have celebrated successes with neural networks, but they remain relatively inflexible.
• In 2020, two researchers at MIT introduced a new kind of neural network based on the *Caenorhabditis elegans* worm.
• Liquid neural networks offer an elegant and compact alternative, and experiments are showing they can run faster and more accurately than other continuous-time neural networks.
• Liquid networks differ in how they treat synapses, and they are more adaptable than traditional neural networks.
• The team has tested the network on an autonomous car and an aerial drone, and they are working to improve the network’s architecture.
• Liquid networks are well suited to the analysis of electric power grids, financial transactions, weather, and other phenomena that fluctuate over time.

Published February 10, 2023
Visit Nautilus to read Steve Nadis’s original post Researchers Discover a More Flexible Approach to Machine Learning

The state of Bidenomics [Noah Smith, Noahpinion]

T

• Joe Biden gave a good State of the Union speech this week, focusing on economic policy rather than foreign affairs or culture wars.
• The U.S. economy is currently in a disinflationary boom, with high employment and fast wage growth, but low inflation.
• Biden deserves some credit for this, as he signaled confidence in the Fed Chair, eased sanctions on Venezuela, and reversed his restrictive approach to oil drilling.
• However, two years of high inflation have taken a bite out of wages and incomes, leaving some lasting scars.
• To boost wages and incomes, Biden can increase labor demand by pumping up investment, and increase labor’s bargaining power by passing the PRO Act and staffing federal agencies with pro-union people.
• Biden’s grand unified theory of Bidenomics includes three pillars: investment, cash benefits, and job provision in care industries.
• Biden has been pushing for investment to boost labor demand, but so far there has been no investment boom.
• The U.S. is facing delays and high construction costs that are preventing investment from happening.
• Biden needs to tackle the basic problem of stymieing investment, not just spend more money.
• To boost wages and incomes, Biden can increase labor demand by pumping up investment, and increase labor’s bargaining power by passing the PRO Act and staffing federal agencies with pro-union people.

Published February 9, 2023
Visit Noahpinion to read Noah Smith’s original post The state of Bidenomics

Elon Musk fires a top Twitter engineer over his declining view count [Zoë Schiffer, Platformer]

E

• Elon Musk has been preoccupied with worries about how many people are seeing his tweets, and recently took his Twitter account private for a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience.
• Engineers showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart, which indicated that his popularity had dropped from a score of 100 to a score of nine.
• Twitter usage in the US has declined almost 9 percent since Musk’s takeover, and the view count feature may be contributing to the decline in engagement.
• Twitter’s increasingly glitchy product has baffled users, and the company suffered one of its first major outages since Musk took over.
• Employees are torn between giving the right answer and the safe answer when Musk or the goons ask questions.
• The perks that made Twitter an attractive place to work pre-Musk have been eradicated, and Slack has gone dormant.
• The FTC plans to audit the company this quarter, and employees have doubts that Twitter has the necessary documentation in place to pass inspection.

Published February 9, 2023
Visit Platformer to read Zoë Schiffer’s original post Elon Musk fires a top Twitter engineer over his declining view count

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