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POLITICO gets something everyone else missed

  THIS is a fine and perceptive scoop.  May have been the best single piece of 'morning after' journalism on the Super Tuesday primary. https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/03/05/super-tuesday-2024/cryptos-big-night-00145274 Congrats to Jasper Goodman.  Personally, I think it is still an open question whether Bitcoin and all its kin, cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets, are a permanent feature of the American and world financial landscape or whether they are going to vanish away.  They may be doomed to become as hard-to-find as an etch-a-sketch.  BUT ... if you are of the permanent-feature persuasion, you will consider March 5, 2024 an important on the way to the securing of that status not through market savvy but through the political system.
Recent posts

The coming AI collapse

Artificial intelligence, in the form that bothers people most these days, is a matter of the consumption of very large masses of text, and their re-packaging and re-use of that text to look and sound like something new and original.  Should this worry us? Maybe not. It may be about to self-destruct.  After all, as it happens more and more often, the AI algorithms are more and more busy digesting AI-generated texts. As a group of (admittedly human) researchers noted recently, “We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models." The models as they consume their own work will self-degrade and become useless over time. One of the members of the group of scholars involved is Ross Anderson, a Cambridge University professor. He has put the problem this way, in a blog post,   “ Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah. This will m

Whitehead's cosmology -- and a tee shirt

 So, what's it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the tee shirt we live?  I have written of late in this blog about Alfred North Whitehead's book, Process and Reality. But I have written chiefly of what he says there about other philosophers.  Plato, Locke, Hume....Now I hope to get to the core of Whitehead's original thought. What does he say about ... process and reality? What is his cosmology?  I have to bring one more historic figure, Leibniz, into the mix even to say this next bit, though. Because you can think of Whitehead's core supposition as a monadology. Any one of us is a society of society of societies ... all the way down. The ultimate bottom level, the individual nuggets (or monads, if you will) at the bottom of this hierarchy of societies? Whitehead seems to think there is a bottom, and he does give it a name: occasions. A lot of unconscious and brief occasions, conceived of as independent of content, might constitute the bottom building block. Sort of a

Thoughts on telecom M&A trends

Merger and acquisition activity in the telecommunications market slowed in 2023. Around the globe, such activity reached a mere $61 billion in deal volume, down 15% from 2022.  Furthermore, the deal value numbers may be misleadingly high, because a single deal -- an outlier -- made them look respectable. Telecomm Italian agreed to sell its fixed network business to KKR and that is a $23.3 billion deal, almost two fifths of the whole.   I'm sure the question on your collective mind right now is -- "Wait:  KKR is betting on old-school landlines?"  But let us move on to another question. Why this decline in deal value?  Here is a short answer. Interest rates have persisted at high levels for years now.  Central bankers stopped raising them, but this was a pause AT a high level, with the bankers taking a "high for longer" stance rather than "an even higher peak for shorter".  The plateau is more annoying that the peak would have been, if you are trying to

A thought about Broadway

A year ago, I saw the following question on Quora. "Why did Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote a musical about Alexander Hamilton? Was he popular at the time of the Revolution or during his presidency?" I am going back to that old post now, chiefly because it helps me illustrate what a big-hearted soul I am.  I wrote a reply to that question (or, strictly, those questions) that barely even mentioned the fact that, no, Hamilton never had a "presidency".  Instead, since I am a big-hearted soul, I gave that gaffe a pass and focused on what makes Hamilton a gripping musical.    For the record, though, the display of ignorance there tears me up inside.  I have to imagine this is a fairly young person betrayed by a disastrously bad education system, one that obviously has not conveyed the basics of the life of one of our founders.  On a slightly related point: I overheard a conversation not too long ago in which the guy on his cell phone in a restaurant near me was talking to some

Whitehead: That famous Plato quote

It is probably the single best known sentence Alfred North Whitehead ever wrote. It appears in the third paragraph of chapter 1 of Part II of Process and Reality. "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." The next three sentences, though, give that one some important context. "I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systemization, have made his writings an inexhausible mine of suggestions."  It becomes clear that Whitehead is not interested in the overly thoroughly mined Republic and, say, the myth of the cave.  He is much more interested in the esoteric Timeaus as a source for

Pro-life? anti killing? pro birth?

 Anti-abortion forces have often focused on what one may simply call the anti-killing argument. Killing a human being without justification, mitigation, or excuse is murder. A fetus, or even an embryo, is in relevant respects a human being. Thus [insert obvious conclusion here.] Bracket that argument for a second. My point in bringing it up now is simply to contrast it with a very different argument one has also often encountered in recent decades. I think of it as the natalist argument.  It is not pro-life or even anti-killing.  It is pro birth. The higher the birthrate the better.  In recent years this has often gone hand-in-hand with arguments over social security.  "To make social security work, we have to have new young people entering the workforce in a regular basis -- the more of them do so, the more fiscally sound the system is for another generation. The prevalence of abortion (or ready availability of birth control for that matter) limits the number of people entering t