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Can India industrialize? [Noah Smith, Noahpinion]

By Spencer Chen

In Noah Smith [Noahpinion]

February 6, 2023

264 views

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• India is the most important developing country in the world due to its sheer size and low income levels.
• India’s exports are mostly composed of low-value manufactured goods and raw materials/agricultural products.
• India’s services exports are 60% as large as its exports of goods.
• India needs to focus on labor-intensive manufacturing to move people out of agriculture and urbanize faster.
• The Modi government has made big strides in improving infrastructure, but education and literacy rates remain low.
• India has been trying to promote manufacturing through its “Make in India” initiative, but it has failed to gain much traction, possibly due to the Indian regulatory environment and business culture..
• The failure may be due to the focus on making things for the domestic market, which does not force companies to increase their productivity or develop new products.
• India has been trying to attract foreign direct investment through special economic zones (SEZs), but they have been mostly focused on service exports.
• Electronics hardware, semiconductors, and telecom equipment are the manufacturing sectors India should be focusing on, as they are perfect for globally integrated supply chains and offer plenty of opportunity for technological upgrading.
• India should also consider another round of land reform, as it can help small farmers own their own plots, increase agricultural output, and force landlords to become more entrepreneurial.
• Overall, India has the potential to become a major player in the global economy, and the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s have given Indians a taste of what their country can achieve.
• The article emphasizes the need for experimentation and learning from other countries in order to achieve economic development, with the goal of allowing the world’s largest country to take its rightful place among the industrialized nations.

Published February 6, 2023
Visit Noahpinion to read Noah Smith’s original post Can India industrialize?

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What Makes the Milky Way Special? [Brian Gallagher, Nautilus]

By Spencer Chen

In [Nautilus]

February 6, 2023

241 views

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• Miguel Aragon is a computational physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he studies the large-scale structure of the universe, galaxy formation, machine learning, data mining, and visualization.
• The Milky Way is not special in itself, but its location is what makes it special. It is located near the center of a cosmological wall, a flat association of galaxies that forms a membrane between cosmological voids.
• The universe looks like a sponge, with cosmological walls, filaments, and clusters. Clusters are the densest parts of the universe, and walls are the least dense.
• The Milky Way is strangely large for living in a wall, and its velocity dispersion is 10 times lower than what is expected. This has been considered a mystery.
• Miguel Aragon has explored the possibility that the fact that the Milky Way is so massive in this wall may have helped the development of life.

Published February 7, 2023
Visit Nautilus to read Brian Gallagher’s original post What Makes the Milky Way Special?

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Crowds Are Wise (And One’s A Crowd) [Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten]

By Spencer Chen

In Scott Alexander [Astral Codex Ten]

February 6, 2023

188 views

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• The “wisdom of crowds” hypothesis claims that the average of many guesses is better than a single guess.
• Nick Bostrom speculates that in the far future, a multigalactic supercivilization might be able to support 10^46 simulated humans per century. If all of them took the survey, the error would be within 12 km.
• Van Dolder and Van Den Assem did a much bigger wisdom-of-inner-crowds experiment, which found that outer crowds are much more effective than inner crowds.
• An inner crowd of size infinity performs about as well as an outer crowd of size two.
• 90% of outer crowd error can be removed by going from one to ten people; going from ten to infinity people only removes an additional 10%.
• Last month, we found that wisdom of crowds works in forecasting: the aggregate of 500 forecasters scored better than 84% of individuals; the aggregate of superforecasters scored better than individual superforecasters.

Published February 6, 2023
Visit Astral Codex Ten to read Scott Alexander’s original post Crowds Are Wise (And One’s A Crowd)

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Bad Bunny Overthrows the Grammys [Xochitl Gonzalez, The Atlantic]

By Spencer Chen

In [The Atlantic]

February 6, 2023

257 views

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• Bad Bunny is the official patron saint of Latinidad, making history as the first Spanish-language artist ever nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys.
• His commercial success forced an acknowledgment that you cannot have American pop culture without Latinos.
• Bad Bunny bucks the misogynistic and homophobic history of reggaeton, wearing skirts, painting his nails, and making out with backup dancers both male and female.
• His performance at the Grammys opened with a bomba beat, featuring female dancers in traditional skirts and papier-mâché heads of Puerto Rican icons and independence advocates.
• The medley shifted to “Después de la Playa”, a merengue beat inspired by the rhythm of enslaved people cutting cane while their legs were chained together.
• Bad Bunny’s lyrics, performances, and music videos are part of a tradition of rebellion, such as his collaboration with iLe and Residente in response to the corruption scandal of then-Governor Ricardo Rosselló.

Published February 6, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Xochitl Gonzalez’s original post Bad Bunny Overthrows the Grammys

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The Two Stalingrads [Elliot Ackerman, The Atlantic]

By Spencer Chen

In [The Atlantic]

February 6, 2023

277 views

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• The article discusses the legacy of the Soviet Union’s victory in the Second World War, and how it is shared by both Russia and Ukraine.
• It recounts the story of three Ukrainian veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan who presented the author with a lapel pin from the Union of Veterans of Afghanistan.
• It references the work of Vasily Grossman, a Ukrainian Soviet Jew, and his 1942 book, *The People Immortal*, which chronicles the Red Army’s retreat through Ukraine in the months after the German invasion on June 22, 1941.
• It compares the Nazi military machine to the Russian-invasion force in Ukraine, and discusses the societal sterility associated with fascism in Russia today.
• It draws parallels between the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Grossman, both of whom understand the importance of narrative in war.
• It concludes by suggesting that the title of Grossman’s book, *The People Immortal*, is a reference to the people of Ukraine and Russia, whose blood has been mixed together in life and death.

Published February 6, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Elliot Ackerman’s original post The Two Stalingrads

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The Four Horsemen of the Tech Recession [Ben Thompson, Stratechery]

By Spencer Chen

In Ben Thompson [Stratechery]

February 6, 2023

181 views

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• Stephanie Palazzolo wrote on Twitter that it was disorienting to see tech layoffs and then to see US job numbers increase and unemployment drop to its lowest level in 50 years.
• The four horsemen of the tech recession are the COVID hangover, the hardware cycle, Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, and the end of zero interest rates.
• The COVID hangover is the single biggest issue facing tech companies, as consumers with no way to spend discretionary income and flush with stimulus checks bought new devices, subscribed to streaming services, and used cloud computing.
• The hardware cycle is impacting companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Intel, as well as TSMC, as production slowdowns and pent-up demand for Apple Silicon-based processors have caused revenue to drop.
• Apple’s App Tracking Transparency has caused a decrease in ad revenue for many tech companies, as users opt out of tracking.
• The end of zero interest rates has caused tech companies to re-evaluate their investments, as the cost of capital has increased.
• The COVID hangover refers to the inevitable slowdown in tech sales after the initial surge due to the pandemic.
• The end of zero interest rates refers to investors realizing that the cost of capital input in their equations can be something other than zero, and the price they are wiling to pay for growth without profitability is falling through the floor.
• The ATT recession refers to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) initiative, which fundamentally disrupts the “hub-and-spoke” model of digital advertising, leading to a crash in revenue growth for companies that rely on performance marketing.
• The article argues that the impact of ATT has been underestimated, and that ascribing the advertising revenue headwinds to macroeconomic factors is misguided.

 

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It’s So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive [Freddie deBoer, Freddie deBoer’s Substack]

By Spencer Chen

In Freddie deBoer

February 6, 2023

248 views

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• The 90s were a time of optimism and immediacy in experience, with a lack of self-consciousness and a sense of possibility for the new millennium.
• People had places to do things, like record stores, and there was a sense of pretension and principles that has since been replaced by cultural consumerism.
• Gen X were the young people of the 90s, and the turn of the millennium was seen as both a new beginning and potentially the end.
• The 90s had a counterculture, with people standing for something else, and a species of young feminist who was not quite a riot grrrl.
• People had to wait for things, and there was mystery and anticipation, which has been replaced by instant access to all of the most depraved material ever made.
• The youth of today are denied the ability to see things as new, and are experiencing an adolescence without adolescence.
• The article reflects on the experience of being a teenager in the 90s, when the internet was still a novelty and cellphones were not yet ubiquitous.
• Socializing was done in person, often in the school parking lot or at parties at houses on the edge of town.
• People would talk on the phone for hours, and collect calls were used to ask for rides home.
• The author reflects on the fashion, music, and culture of the time, and how it was worse than today in some ways, but also better in others.
• They recall going to shows, smoking weed, and drinking coffee, and how they would drop by each other’s places.
• The author also shares a fantasy version of the 90s, where they and a friend move to Seattle and live in a ratty old house with a bunch of other layabouts.
• They recall going to shows, doing drugs, and driving to Mount Ranier, and how they would listen to NPR for news.
• The article ends with a description of closing the coffee shop at dusk, listening to Mazzy Star, and driving to a house party.

Published February 6, 2023
Visit Freddie deBoer’s Substack to read Freddie deBoer’s original post It’s So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive

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UPDATE: Michigan fights back [Judd Legum, Popular Information]

By Spencer Chen

In [Popular Information]

February 6, 2023

279 views

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• A conservative group called the Great Schools Initiative (GSI) launched a plan called “Operation Opt-Out” to exploit a Michigan statute that allows parents to opt their children out of sex education in order to erase LGBTQ people from public schools.
• GSI created its own opt-out form to target anything during the school day that acknowledges the existence of LGBTQ people, such as a teacher wearing a rainbow pin or any book with LGBTQ characters.
• GSI has partnered with the Thomas More Society, a far-right legal organization, to enforce the GSI opt-out forms with aggressive legal action.
• The Michigan Department of Education has pushed back against GSI’s plot, stating that parents are not legally entitled to opt children out of programs, practices, and resources outside of sexual education.
• Two Michigan school districts — Rochester and Troy — have already said they will not accept GSI’s form.
• GSI’s organizers are not ready to give up and are planning to challenge the Michigan Department of Education’s memo.
• A Michigan Senate committee is considering legislation to add sexual orientation and gender identity or expression to the state’s anti-discrimination law.

Published February 6, 2023
Visit Popular Information to read Judd Legum’s original post UPDATE: Michigan fights back

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Commemorate history, don’t preserve old buildings [Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring]

By Spencer Chen

In [Slow Boring]

February 6, 2023

304 views

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• Washington D.C. has a grim land use situation near the Cleveland Park Metro station, where a low-rise strip mall is designated for historic preservation.
• This strip mall is an inappropriate use of the land given present-day economics and the existence of the metro station.
• In Chicago, a plaque commemorates the place where Barack and Michelle Obama shared their first kiss after their first date.
• Cities should invest more in telling their stories, such as installing signs in parks to explain who the park is named after and why.
• Mandating that old buildings stay up rather than be replaced as economics shift is very costly.
• It can be inconvenient not to have a level entry to your house, and regulations have benefits as well as costs.
• The city of D.C. has created a series of “neighborhood heritage trail” walking tours that bring you to various informational signs about the history of the neighborhood.
• The author suggests investing in more signage to tell the story of every park and school in every neighborhood of the city.
• The author also suggests redeveloping old buildings to create more subsidized housing units.

Published February 6, 2023
Visit Slow Boring to read Matthew Yglesias’s original post Commemorate history, don’t preserve old buildings

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New AAP Guidelines on Childhood Obesity [Emily Oster, ParentData]

By Spencer Chen

In Emily Oster [ParentData]

February 6, 2023

293 views

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• The American Academy of Pediatrics released new guidelines for pediatricians on childhood obesity, which have been met with criticism from all sides.
• The guidelines suggest a more aggressive approach to obesity in children and adolescents, up to and including medication and surgery.
• The guidelines have been met with criticism due to the way society has associated overweight and obesity with value, as well as the data behind the guidelines.
• The two fundamental disagreements are whether childhood obesity is a health concern and whether there is anything effective to do about it.
• Intensive health behavior and lifestyle treatment is expensive, not widely available, and has small impacts.
• Medication for children 12 and over and bariatric surgery for children 13 and over with severe obesity are also suggested, but have their own issues.
• More evidence is needed on what might work, as well as discussion of the mental health impacts of these interventions on kids.
• The problem is difficult to solve and requires more work to be done.

Published February 6, 2023
Visit ParentData to read Emily Oster’s original post New AAP Guidelines on Childhood Obesity

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