Speaking of... I’m going to start floating Blyth Bonds on the geek market. The return on investment is blyth explaining clearly how bonds actually work.

I love listening to smart people talk

Unemployment is a sample of available people willing to work and are actively looking for work. They make no claim on those not looking, they may be able to work but choose not too.

Ref CNN 2022: China builds the equivalent of 2 coal plants every week. Assuming their CO2 numbers are dropping due to design is very optimistic.

But currently our systems cannot make decisions

Mark does know about the Laffer curve, it turns out, even if only to dismiss it.

Rich people love a down economy because then everything gets cheap and they've got the money to buy it all up so that once the economy recovers their super-wealthy compared to before. For them this is a great way to create "capital" gains.

It is great to hear the Mark Blyth of ‘Austerity : The History of a Dangerous Idea’ again. Now, if you could just explain that the possibly pending continuance of inflation is due more to real world supply shortages than to excessive money supply.

When AI has put us all out of work who's going to pay the taxes?

into my veins

29:04 honestly at this point im just hoping the super a.i can get a handle on it because frankly we cant and we need an adult in the room lol no matter how much we complain about having to go to bed early...

Re China and energy and how they’re ok; they open a new coal power plant every week.

The worst part about the current batch of ai is that it doesn't even learn, it will humor you when you try to correct it, but goes back to saying the thing its been programmed to say when it doesn't know its you anymore. Its literally making it up one word at a time, based on the content that an army of low wage workers has hand curated for it.

Great stuff! The more I listen, the more the dems and repubs seem the same. And trump? Angrynomics still applies. Have a great summer. It's cool in California, BTW.

On Taiwan: Apparently, given its very difficult terrain, preparedness and population density (whom China considers genuine Chinese and cares about them), Taiwan is not an easy target for China. I wonder how they will govern a place where they will have killed 1 million of their own people (you can't fire a rocket without killing tens of thousands, it's so dense) and destroyed the industrial assets almost completely. Just a thought.

22:52 i think the taiwan issue is just a ..usefuldiversion that farnkly none of the 3 partie would actuly gain from resolving .. its to useful and none of the out comes are good for anyone soo

the history .. before it was taiwan it had been occupied by the japanese for 50 years and known as formosa .. the people there were ok with that and did not want chinese rule .. after the war it went back to china ...

27:27:19 well presumably they dont understand it for the same reason that well we still dont quite understand how humans got from a 0 year old that cant walk to a 26 year old uni graduate in neuro science..

The dangers of A.I. are worse when used in conjunction with advanced robotics in the economy. Unlike the industrial revolution, which created more jobs than it destroyed, A.I. / robotics will lay waste to employment and any jobs growing out of it will be done by robots. An education system linked to employment becomes redundant. Imagine a society that literally stops advancement for people. This is the future

13:36 thats because its been a while since you were 4 years old and as such havent had to think like one in a while lol

First

a.i. most overblown issue of the year, and that's already saying something

People are very selfish, because everyone believes they got what they got through hard work but everyone is lazy and must be on the government dime.

Good example in discussion about why financial emotionalism is different from engineering pragmatism, every marriage of minds is a blurred version of "what's wrong with society?". You could derive the explanation for social collapse from the emotional destruction of civility by profiteering from wars designed to maximise the "saving" of arms manufacturing? The big "defence" lies eventually add up to be the actual unsupportable negative gain of financial destruction. What happened to "Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer", particularly in politics. Populism is the friendliness of deeply self convinced liars..(?).

30:13 see the funny thing to me if .. when someone gives birth to a baby no one is concerned that they maybe creating a self aware a.i that might go on to end the world .. and yet all the leaders of the cold war had mothers that did just that ... just have to hope that when our a.i grows up it decides it wants to be nice to us and not hurt us but at the end of the day it's its decision to make i just hope which ever way it goes it works out for both parties.. but i think people should really start to not think of a.i as a tool but rather as a person

AI not conscious in the philosophical sense: "Why is it like anything to be me?" It's not like anything to AI. It's just print statements. It gets smarter the same way that children learn language, not by learning words, but by learning to disassemble and reassemble cliches. Child: My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them. Helpful Linguist: Did you say that your teacher held the baby rabbits? Child: Yes. Helpful Linguist: What did you say she did? Child: She holded the baby rabbits and we patted them. Helpful Linguist: Did you say she held them tightly? Child: No, she holded them loosely.

On the topic of a potential invasion of Taiwan: 1) When a hyper-nationalist guy takes power and starts using irredentist language, stoking nationalist sentiment while also ratcheting military spending, you should probably take him seriously. No one, especially me, wants any war with China over Taiwan but backing down to security commitments in the face of growing Chinese expansion in the Indo-Pacific is probably not a good idea. It's not just the US that has been worried about a potential invasion, but basically everyone in the region. Vietnam, Philippines, Australia, India, S. Korea, and Japan are all worried hence all the security agreements and treaties we've seen ever since Xi's rise, especially with regards to the claims in the South China Sea 2) The most important thing in any war first and foremost is geography, the distance of the Pacific to the mainland US isn't as important because of the large number of bases and troops and stockpiles we have in the region along with our massive Navy that is basically everywhere or can reach anywhere. And on the topic of geography, Taiwan is a mountainous Island with hard to storm beaches that has been preparing for a potential invasion since the KMT fled to the island almost 80 years ago. The ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE mobilization China would have to undertake and the logistics necessary to storm Taiwan by the Chinese Armed Forces would make D-Day look like a training exercise. So any invasion, barring some unknown circumstances or tech that wipes out communication or surveillance, would either need to be completely by surprise and by extension extremely unorganized. ORRR the Chinese spend several weeks/months mobilizing which would then be extremely obvious tell to the world about what it is they're about to do 3) The damage to the world economy, China's too, from the loss of the high-end chips manufactured in Taiwan would be disastrous and would plunge us into a global chip shortage and recession. And the Taiwanese would certainly destroy basically any valuable infrastructure should China miraculously manage to successfully take over the island. But also equally crippling would be the blockade of energy, food, and fertilizer that the Americans, Taiwanese, Malaysians, and/or Indians would enforce on China by cutting off their imports through the Straight of Malacca. Which would grind their Middle Eastern and Indonesian energy dependent economy, as well as many other countries, to a screeching halt from the lack of energy and food and plunge the country into chaos and famine. This is also not even talking about what reprisals the Taiwanese would take by trying to blast Chinese cities and/or infrastructure and the sheer death toll that would inflict Overall, the point is that a successful invasion, without making this a Pyrrhic victory for China, would need this to be the greatest military feat of all time AND the Chinese need to also hope they don't lose a couple million civilians in the process, this isn't even counting the ENORMOUS military causalities they're basically guaranteed to face. But if there's any hiccup and they don't manage to pull off the impossible fait accompli invasion before anyone can react, the backlash and fallout would be disastrous and would basically destroy theirs and many other economies. It's an incredibly stupid idea, but that's not stopped people from making similar decisions in the past Also, China is installing more renewables at a faster rate but they are still INCREDIBLY coal and oil dependent for their energy needs atm. Their renewable use is a drop in the bucket but it's good to see them taking the charge on this. Hopefully this spurs more renewable adoption in the rest of the industrial economies

31:42 thats great and all butt the ret of the world still exists ... unlike a growing number of young Russians ...

Republicans? Petty and awful? surely not /s

Mark loves dunking on "dumb" rightwingers for not understanding his version of economics, but then every 5 mins he has to explain his economics to Carrie bc it doesn't make enough sense

I’m not a trump fan but these guys calling him a criminal is a bit bigoted. Every president for the past 30 years would go to prison if the laws were actually applied.

PLEADE STOP, I REPEAT, STOP SAYING AI-"ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. A.I. IS AN ACRONYM FOR "AUTOMATED, NOT ATTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. [AUTOMATED INTELLIGENCE]. THE WORD "ARTIFICIAL LEADS TO ALL KINDS OF CONSPIRACT THEORIES.??..

I like Mark Blyth especially on political economics, not so much on military analysis, (he takes Mearsheimer seriously) even if Trump wins (which I doubt) the EU and others are not going to somehow back away from supporting Ukraine. It's unwinnable for Putin, it was a huge gamble that failed on many levels, incompetent army command, nowhere near enough troops (150-200k) right now the Kremlin is being embarrassed by the lack of air defense as the drones hit Moscow (notably the gated billionnaire's community), and raids into Belgorod. Russia lost 200k troops (half of those around Bakhmut an inconsequential town, mostly rubble). More troops will need to be conscripted and trained but that's going to be harder when you can't even defend Moscow. The same thing applies to defending Taiwan, As if the US fleet will be sunk defending it. The US fleet does not have to go anywhere near Taiwan. Given that China depends on 80% imported fuel from the Persian gulf, a few even non US destroyers can close the straits of Mollucca and given that China does not have a blue water navy and can barely go within 500km of the mainland (no nuclear carriers either) in six months the lack of oil will be felt in China. (also highly dependent on fertilizer inputs etc). As far as China installing more solar than the rest of the world , that's great, but of the world;s annual 7.6billion tonnes of coal over 4.6billion (more than the rest of the world combined) is burned in China. Car ownership is up 40fold, household AC is up 300x since 2000 never mind a 100million tourists flying to Europe annually.