Joseph Stiglitz asks whether recent inflation is due to lack of supply or too much demand. If the answer is too much demand, raising interest rates is the right thing to do. If the real problem is supply disruptions, then this won’t help and will actually hurt. Spoiler alert: it’s supply disruptions.

The Pandemic and War — Not Government Spending — Caused Inflation, According to Nobel Prize Winner

From n+1.

Why Is Everything So Ugly?

i bought one of these cute little MiniPCs a while back. Great price, and came with Windows 10, not that I wanted it. Installed Ubuntu and used it happily. It was still able to boot windows from the GRUB menu. I figured I might need it one day. I’m not sure what came over me, but today I decided to take a few minutes, boot Windows and do an update. What could go wrong?

First it wouldn’t boot. Somehow related to the dreaded UEFI security. I suppose stopping you from booting up is the ultimate in secure computing. I searched for a fix on-line and found several. All seemed dodgy or complex and none seems to have any explanation for what was actually wrong. I’m found a way to force a Windows boot via the BIOS. Good enough for me.

Updates were slow. Like really slow. In my boredom I noticed the clock was off by several hours. I guess I hadn’t set the time zone. Without thinking I set the correct time zone. Big mistake. Suddenly all bets were off. Some things worked, others didn’t. I decided to reboot, hoping for a return to sanity. Now I’m unable to even power down. I guess I have time. I’ll wait the bastards out. And to think I used to do this for a living.

There have been some ongoing improvements to Natural Language Processing and associated Artificial intelligence. AI “chatbots“, which are able to converse in normal human language, have become fairly robust. OpenAI in particular has made some new work widely available. Ben Thompson at Stratechery discusses.

AI Homework

From iEEE:

75th Anniversary of the Transistor

This was sitting unread in my inbox from two months back. I’m glad I didn’t miss it. A very good overview of what the pandemic did to the US economy and what the Federal Reserve and other actors are doing to try to return to the pre-pandemic economy. The only real question is who really wants to go back to 2018, and why. One of the best things I’ve read in a long time.

You weren’t supposed to see that

I believe the early response to climate change in America will come through the insurance industry. It is my understanding that many coastal areas, particularly parts of Louisiana and Florida are becoming uninsurable, mostly due to hurricanes. This article in an insurance trade publication discusses how insurance costs have gone from 2% to 8% of a projects cost. While this is a steep financial cost, it also brings up the point: do you really want to live in a place with these sorts of risks?

Developers Pulling Plug on South Florida Projects Due to Insurance Costs

I was not able to understand the labor relations problem at US railroads from just watching the news and reading mainstream news articles. A good article from New York magazine digs deeper. Takeaway: railroads cut a third of staff over the years and have no real wiggle room for things like people getting sick. The railroads are also very profitable and essentially a monopoly locally and an oligarchy nationally. Why not just give people sick days? I suppose it would mean having to hire people as a buffer, the way just about every other business does. Anyway, a good read.

Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave