"Everyone is entitled to his opinion, but not his own facts." Patrick Moynihan
Been thinking a lot about this Ted Chiang quote recently: “I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too.”
Sussan Ley to quit politics after being deposed as Liberal leader, triggering contentious byelection
Ley says she will step away ‘completely and comprehensively from public life’ after losing Liberal leadership ballot to Angus Taylor
FBI found no evidence of Epstein sex-trafficking network – AP RT
WATCH: Ro Khanna Reacts After Seeing the ‘Unredacted’ Epstein Files Zeteo
Why Do the Epstein Files Matter? An Expert on the Elites Explains Why Medhi Hasan
Maxwell pleads the Fifth in House deposition on Epstein files The Hill
FILES: Epstein Death Notice DRAFTED 1 Day EarlyBreaking Points, YouTube
“How did medieval French handwriting become ‘the Nazi font?’ And why did Hitler make it illegal?” TIL that Hitler gave a speech to the Reichstag about how much he disliked blackletter fonts.
The Triumph of Europe’s Social Democracy
Economist Thomas Piketty, writing for Le Monde (archive) on the success of Europe’s social democratic model and countering “the narrative of a ‘declining’ continent”:
If someone had told the European elites and liberal economists of 1914 that wealth redistribution would one day account for half of national income, they would have unanimously condemned the idea as collectivist madness and predicted the continent’s ruin. In reality, European countries have achieved unprecedented levels of prosperity and social well-being, largely due to collective investments in health, education and public infrastructure.
To win the cultural and intellectual battle, Europe must now assert its values and defend its model of development, fundamentally opposed to the nationalist-extractivist model championed by Donald Trump’s supporters in the United States and by Vladimir Putin’s allies in Russia. A crucial issue in this fight is the choice of indicators used to measure human progress.
For these indicators, Piketty mentions some of the same factors that economist Gabriel Zucman detailed in his Le Monde piece I posted in December:
More leisure time, better health outcomes, greater equality and lower carbon emissions, all with broadly comparable productivity: Europeans can be proud of their model, argues Gabriel Zucman, director of the EU Tax Observatory.