> We have at least one data point that says that Signal stores exactly two integers about you
For people wondering what they are:
> "The only information responsive to the subpoena held by OWS is the time of account creation and the date of the last connection to Signal servers for account [redacted]. Consistent with the Electronic Conununications Privacy Act ("ECPA"), 18 U.S.C. § 2703(c)(2), OWS is providing this information in response to the subpoena."
Their response to the subpoena then goes on to object to its overly broad scope, which asked for things that require a court order or a search warrant. They also object to the scope of the nondisclosure order included in the subpoena.
In my experience, military web sites are pretty spotty in terms of maintaining links. So for the past decade or so I've been keeping a "list of lists":
Yup, that's on the March 2014 revision of the Army Infantry Basic Officer Leader Course reading list, the April 2009 revision of the Army Chief of Infantry list, and the April 2011 revision of the Army Maneuver Center of Excellence list:
For those interested, here's the Marine Corps reading list. (Edit: that's actually already in the list of links you posted, missed it). There are a lot of good books on leadership; I'd stick to the Officer lists.
- "Warfighting (MCDP 1)". This is the official USMC document on how to run a war. It's more philosophical than tactical. It's about how to achieve a goal.
- "The Defense of Duffer's Drift". This little book on small-unit tactics and how not to screw them up is over a century old. It's little-known outside the military, and quite funny.
- "Boyd, The Fighter Pilot who Changed the Art of War". Boyd was a very strange guy. Top fighter pilot. Responsible for pushing through the F-16 and the A-10. (Yes, a fighter jock pushed the A-10 Warthog, which is a slow, heavily armored ground-attack aircraft.) Invented the OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) Loop, a way of thinking about decision making under uncertainty. It has some similarities to "agile" development, but is more suitable for combat and crisis. USAF hated him. USMC liked him.
- "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife" - understanding counterinsurgency. This is a depressing read, but necessary.
As far as votes of confidence go, Julia landing successfully at any of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks is a strong one. They all do a whole mess of complex modeling. The NY Fed in particular is a "first among equals" in the Federal Reserve system, so it's always good to be there.
That said, I have no idea if this will be that influential on economists changing their tools, or the tools that they teach to their students. People tend to stick with tools that they know and like. But it's very possible that this will help Julia in the eyes of people getting into the field choosing their first programming language.
> Political fallout would be huge if this thing doesn't go through, right? All players in the game are heavily invested in this passing because without it, years are wasted, so I'm expecting it to pass.
This depends on perspective.
In terms of domestic elections, chances are the TPP won't make a real difference in countries like the US or Canada one way or another. Foreign policy generally only affects domestic elections at its extremes, e.g. winning/losing a war. Voters might be for or against TPP for any number of reasons, but chances are when they actually step into the voting booth, TPP will be low on their list of reasons for voting whichever way they do.
In terms of international relations, reneging on a huge deal that was painstakingly negotiated over seven years is obviously never a good thing. But it's hard to say how or when that could come back to bite whichever countries back out of the deal.
Is "winning" a possible outcome from wars? It hasn't happened during my parents' lifetimes. All of the losing we've been doing doesn't seem to have affected our commitment to outspending the rest of world combined to support the military-industrial complex. Do elections have something to do with that?
> unless the very concept of slavery is supposed to be considered racist
I've never read a word of Moldybug or whatever, but in the American context, the very concept of slavery is absolutely considered racist and rightly so. America's history of slavery is completely inseparable from racism.
Slavery as a concept has nothing to do with American racism or American history. Slavery existed long before America was a dirty thought in a pilgrim's hatted head, and it still exists today, and it will likely exist so long as humans are recognizably human.
To outright decide that all mentions of a word have such a narrow context is something I cannot accept as valid. It's thoughtcrime.
Concepts are understood in contexts. Everyone involved in this context is American, so it's natural for slavery here to be viewed through an American context. In that context, slavery is inherently racist.
After all, it's not like Moldbug's writing shies away from this idea.
> Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery. And others still are badly suited to either. These characteristics can be expected to group differently in human populations of different origins. Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by genetic differences.
I'll agree, it's very human and natural for people to deliberately misunderstand things so they can work themselves into a rage over things. It's intellectually dishonest, particularly in this case, and so I give it no shrift.
If all you have to make your case is rhetorical tricks (like "look! somewhere in this man's million plus words he talked about Africans being slaves! Slavery is therefore a specific kind of racist in all conversations") then I work from the premise that there isn't much of a case to be made.
You're unintentionally perpetuating the stereotype that US citizens do not know or care about history. Those people involved may be American, but surely some of them can look beyond their own noses to realize that a person speaking in broad, abstract strokes isn't talking about them in particular.
Nonsense. I'm saying that people live in the real world with real contexts, not in Context-Free-Abstraction-Land.
Real contexts, where abstract concepts have been concrete realities, put natural and rational limits on the ability to treat those concepts as abstract ideas to be debated solely on their hypothesized merits rather than their hard realities. There is a very rational difference between arguing in favor of communism on an American college campus, where communism is a lovely abstract ideal, and arguing in favor of it in Romania or Ukraine where communism was a brutal reality.
Moldbug is an American, being read by Americans, writing about his support for the institution of slavery, and explicitly saying that some races are genetically better suited for slavery than others. It is far more rational to treat that as racist than to bend over backwards and pretend that it is not in the name of free debate.
According to some napkin math with these figures[0], the three metro areas combined account for 11.7% of US GDP in 2012.
So yeah, I'm not sure what estimate they're using for the growth multiple from liberalizing land-use constraints, but if they're predicting a near doubling of the combined metro economies, it's safe to assume it's pretty high.
I do agree that land-use restrictions are currently holding all three cities back, my Friday night napkin math (read: probably wrong, way oversimplified math) just thinks their estimates are a little optimistic.
EDIT: Another question would be what's the time frame for this addition to GDP? 9% growth in one year is insanely great. 9% growth over ten years is insanely bad.
It's not as though those contributions come for free though. If talent leaves other places to go to NYC/SF/SJ, those other places become less productive.
Not necessarily, on a per-capita basis. If Alice has incredible pineapple-farming skills and is terrible at everything else, and she moves from Alaska to Hawaii, she improves both states' per-capita GDP.
1 is true, 2 and 3 might be true, but there are many variables that could lead to other outcomes. Double the density, you might lower the desirability, driving the current high GDP producers out. Then you have a downward spiral as revenue drops, incomes drop, rents drop, vacancies rise, crimes rises. Or it could be the next Tokyo. But there is no certainty.
> Another question would be what's the time frame for this addition to GDP?
The actual paper[1] simply says that "lowering regulatory constraints in New York, San Francisco, and San Jose cities to the level of the median city would expand their work force and increase U.S. GDP by 9.5%", so whatever timeframe it would take to reduce those regulatory constraints. (In SF that sounds like a project measured in decades, although maybe the imbalance in supply and demand will cause a breaking point that forces the city to engage with real solutions to the problem.)
You're only counting those areas specific GDPs. But I bet if you look at the components of GDP they contribute to by making markets available to the rest of the country (for example) it's far higher.
For example, NYC is home to much of the publishing industry. But all those books go out to local bookstores where they are sold at a small profit, increasing the GDP of those local areas above and beyond NYC's publishing industry's contribution.
For people wondering what they are:
> "The only information responsive to the subpoena held by OWS is the time of account creation and the date of the last connection to Signal servers for account [redacted]. Consistent with the Electronic Conununications Privacy Act ("ECPA"), 18 U.S.C. § 2703(c)(2), OWS is providing this information in response to the subpoena."
Their response to the subpoena then goes on to object to its overly broad scope, which asked for things that require a court order or a search warrant. They also object to the scope of the nondisclosure order included in the subpoena.