Basic income; Mississippi education; Nick Fuentes; Positive social trends; Botswana; Prison vs. mental hospitals; Building aesthetics; China brain-drain
I suspect that part of the reason so many people are skeptical of the Mississippi Miracle is that people outside of the south look down on Mississippi. We think of Mississippi as poor, ignorant, backward, and racist. If that's your view of Mississippi it's going to be hard to believe that they figured out how to get many more kids to become proficient I reading rather than say California. And if you're attached to the idea that Mississippi is extremely racist, you're not going to want to believe that it's doing a good job of teaching black kids to read.
Mississippi also goes against the Progressive narrative of how to achieve equity. Rather than lowering standards to pretend that everyone is doing well, it has toughened them so that more are doing better.
That makes sense if you think places can’t change. I think they can change, and I’m hopeful that the better-educated generation that Mississippi is now producing will grow up to be less racist, more prosocial, and more productive, and will make Mississippi a better place.
1. Botswana is really in a bind. Duma Boko is trying to acquire a majority stake in De Beers, while De Beers is dying as a company. China's lab-grown diamonds are destroying the natural diamond industry. Debswana, the joint venture between De Beers and Botswana, saw revenues plunge roughly 50% in one year in 2024.
Natural diamonds are becoming what Peruvian guano or Chilean nitrates used to be: a has-been commodity that got replaced by the genius of engineering & science. (In this case, Lab-grown diamonds are the synthetic ammonium nitrate of yesteryear).
Frankly, Botswana has a problem where the main ways to be an economic elite in Gaborone either wants to secure government contracts for construction/consulting, work in a top civil service job, or be a rich cattle farmer. Botswana has a structural trap. Because Botswana relies so heavily on diamonds, the government collects almost all the money, meaning the government is also the primary customer for almost every business.
I wrote more about how China is crushing the natural diamond market here, if anyone wants more info:
The depressing question is what chance the Botswanan elite can realise the writing is on the wall and try to go hard on a new economy pivot (diversification, de-positioning Gov as central buyer). Grabbing Debeers doesn't bode well as response but they have otherwise a stronger pivot base than many extractive economies in Africa.
It's also a highlight of a danger of even a generally well-managed state-focused mono-economy - feet of clay if the economic basis moves and for extractives, that is non-trivial risk.
Taking Noah's electrification economy obsession (which I agree with) and given Botswana's nickel, copper, Uraniam resources (later I don't know much about other than read they exist and are reasonable) - they may have a kind of pivot and potential tie-up with supply-chain - Not-China/PRC-locked. With good decent educational base, and solid infra (really something westerners too often take for granted / ignore the impact of), perhaps that's their best path (That Niger is in such a state maybe gets Euro interest for risk diversification, I personally would not want to have my sourcing locked into Niger given Sahel evolution nowadays).
The zero effect of money on crime does not surprise me at all. Maybe it would have been different with Jean Valjean levels of hunger. Hunger indeed drives people to do things that they wouldn't do otherwise.
But once you live in a country where your most basal needs can be covered by a societal safety net, the set of criminals will quickly narrow down to actual sociopaths who don't mind victimizing other people.
I grew up in a Czechoslovak rust belt city in the period when the heavy industry was collapsing. The country was going through an economic transition and lots of people struggled, but the criminals were usually of the expected "prison bird" type, and not desperate single moms nor nearly homeless workers.
I don’t think that sociopaths are the central reason. Cultural norms, where honesty and respect are due only to the family, gang, tribe, or other sub-group, that give permission for criminal conduct against the larger community, are the problem . Your Czech community had shared values that made it a mostly safe and orderly place.
This would be infinitely better if social media platforms implemented a simple policy:
1) public posts are limited to verified, non-anonymous users (e.g. confirmed to be real people at a reasonable level of accuracy)
2) anonymous users can post privately
This balances the benefits of limited anonymous trolling and bots with the real value of letting marginalized people be anonymous. In the past it wasn’t workable, but all the private group functionality of platforms now makes it feasible.
The complete refusal of leftists to accept any amount of personal responsibility is perfectly illustrated in the first 2 topics.
People continue to make bad choices after UBI = must be something else causing them to make bad choices. Kids test scores improve after being forced to do phonics for another year = must be some other reason for the improved test scores.
Is it that Erik doesn’t have time or that his new employer/firm prefers to focus on public policy-related projects that more closely align as tech-right slop?
Regarding the rise of the odious Nick Fuentes and others , social media appears to be a medium built for speed, virality, and decontextualized fragments that will naturally elevate the most flamboyant extremists, and that bots and “shadowy forces” merely accelerate what the form already selects for. It seems that each wave of technology has weakened human gatekeepers by privileging what is shocking and simplified over what is thoughtful and contextual, so someone like Fuentes is a predictable product, not an aberration. Calling for “new institutions” to restrain this while leaving the platforms’ form and business model intact is like asking a casino to protect democracy from its highest rollers—the platforms are already the sovereign gatekeepers, and they profit most from exactly what you want filtered out.
A cure in the form of “gatekeepers” is worse than the disease. By whatever name, censorship is the power that inevitably corrupts. Each increment leads to yet another target worthy of suppression, often from what appear to be good intentions. It seems that the federal government’s vogue for blocking what it considered mal-, mis-, and dis-information, and the examples of authoritarians everywhere, are discounted when one’s own worthy cause is forwarded.
we have gatekeepers right now it is the invisible algorithm and elon musk or zuckerberg. the platform just accelerates engagement through "enragement". There is no free speech on any of these platforms it is an illusion.
Ths is why we need a prgressve engagement tax (more use of one paltform per time unit, higher tax rae on the advertising revenue associated with the engagement). This will lead platform algorythms to select for less engaging content.
very interesting idea. in practice however not sure how this would be implemented. the platforms are of course to drive engagement by rage baiting I think the genie is out of the bottle. the only true decision that one has to avoid this is not to use the platforms which platform is a very innocuous term really the are a media that changes discourse at societal level.
Luring talent away from China (and India, Nigeria, Indonesia) ought not to be that hard, especialy if done with a residecy on graduation guarantee. Even with Trump in the WH, the US is still a freeer more liberal place than China and other countries.
Why is how the housing looks even a consideration if we have a crisis? Levittown was ugly, soviet blocks of flats were/are ugly. They served a purpose of housing people cheaply and efficiently. We need 2 bedroom 1 bath homes or flats of less than 1,000 sq feet with linoleum floor and Formica counters, no garage, deck, patio or terrace. You add those yourself when you can afford it. And the basement is an actual basement and not a playroom, family room or office. You can add those too when you can afford it. Wow that turned into a bit of a rant - sorry.
What "we" need is land use and building codes (and no requirement to include below-market units) that allow developers to build "what 'we' will pay for."
And better, more uniform crime and disorder control would prevent funnelling demand into a few favored areas.
And the demise of the fixed rate mortgage to reduce the financial risk in housing investment
And an awareness that there are economies of scale in the provision of infrastructure and public amenisies from density.
Those graphs of social trends would be even more helpful if they extended a few years farther back. I know that drug overdoses had been increasing significantly for several years, and I believe traffic fatalities and homicides had both started increasing around 2015 (after a decade of declines for traffic and two and a half decades of decline for homicides). I don’t know what the pattern of suicides had been pre-pandemic - but it’s also notable that suicide went drastically *down* to *lows* at the moment all these other effects peaked, and surged only as they started to decline (and then soon started to decline afterwards).
This might well be a trend that predates the pandemic and only coincidentally peaked around the same time (or it may well be a pandemic effect on top of another one).
The graphs are classic examples of how to lie with statistics. By truncating the bottom of the graph, small changes are made to appear large. A graph with the vertical axis set at 0, it could show accurately whether there are significant changes or mere normal variation.
I'm fairly sure that all of these four categories did have significant changes over the past few years, larger than normal noise variations. But you're right that it would be better to show the axes from 0 to help make clear how big this variation is as a fraction of the totals.
When pondering competition with China, I find it sobering to remember that the population of China is 1.4 billion people and that of the USA is 335 million. Since ability is normally distributed, that means China has nearly 200 million people who are among the 14% smartest in the world, and the USA has about 50 million. What this signifies to me is that—if all other things were equal (quality of education; resources for innovation; work ethic; incentives; safe, healthy, prosperous, stable communities, etc)— the USA will not “beat” the Chinese at AI or any other innovative technology China sets its mind to develop. China simply has a much deeper pool of talent to draw on. In the past, America was a powerhouse because things were not equal between China and the USA, and the advantages afforded by our liberal democracy not only boosted our own talent, but attracted top talent from China and the rest of the world. Since MAGA, however….
For buildings, Modernism happened and that was that. The knowledge and supply chains needed to make buildings presentable has been thrown away and now they have to be rebuilt bit by bit. Meanwhile everyone has some intuitive feeling that new buildings always make the streets that little bit more alienating and unpleasant, which makes it really easy for NIMBYs to get traction for their BS.
Case in point: Auckland. Almost the entire inner ring of suburbs consists of cheap mass produced bungalows, built appx. an entire century ago. And redeveloping this with any sort of higher density is pure political poison. We have train stations a few kilometres from town hall surrounded by these things. So Auckland is becoming a donut, where that inner ring is slowly depopulating as old people die off and households become smaller, and high density is occurring in further out places. And we’re finding out the hard way that for young people the alternatives to that inner ring are not called the further out suburbs, they’re called Sydney and Melbourne.
There have been incidents where some old building was so decrepit that it was literally about to fall down. And if someone wants to put something new there are protests. People fully expect anything new to look even worse. This would be insane for literally any other thing in our lives. If some rusty old car is parked on a street people would complain about that old car, rather than declaring that they should keep using it because our neighborhood should not have those ugly new cars.
Meanwhile regulators are doing all sort of clumsy stuff to tray to avoid ugly buildings being built. Which you can’t do of course. You can’t describe why people think buildings are ugly in the same way you can’t describe in technical terms what makes certain food look tastier than others.
Oh well here we are in 2025, where architecture is slowly and painfully trying to recover from this. And meanwhile software development is speed running the same mistakes. “Let’s make everything flat because buttons that actually look like they can be clicked are ugly.” Said no user ever.
A good friend of mine is making 3D visualization software for architects. see www.vrsketch.eu You can walk people through your building before it is made and let them tell you where it is ugly, and where the layout is bad, etc. I wonder if Aukland's city planners would like to use the software?
Natural diamonds are a semi-precious gemstone with good marketing and a monopoly. However, having visited the beautiful country of Botswana, I hope that they are able to pivot.
Regarding the Nick Fuentes thing. We as a society really need to make it our mission to do something about the bots and that starts with all forms of social media gating access to verified people and entities - KYC for the Internet. It is imperative that we do this for so many reasons. It is not in the business interests of Meta at al to do this. So, therefore it should be legislated. Eyes on Australia.
Since the accounts boosting him are in Africa and Pakistan and not PRC or NK (which is now visible since X added the location metadata for all accounts) they probably aren’t bots in technical sense (a software program which looks at particular posts to boost them) but paid workers that do the boosting manually. Since these are real people, they could be verified as such and requiring verification won’t stop them. You could prevent people from certain countries from having accounts, or make the location more prominent like including it in the reposts. The entities trying to use the paid boosters might hire people in different countries. Also, blocking all bots isn’t all upside, since there are useful bots like Grok and others that can add AI as comments.
It’s hard to control social media information, I think the bigger issue is that commercial media amplifies these people even more because they assume they are more prominent than they really are. And how do you stop more mainstream fools like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Hassan Piker from constantly dishing out crap and getting rich, which incentivizes them to keep increasing the bullshit they spew.
At least we would know who they are and where they are posting from. People might think twice about reposting, liking or boosting some whacko comment from Nigeria that is pretending to be something they are not. It's better than the status quo.
I agree that blocking bots is tough, but companies are not incentivized to try to mitigate the issue The RAG agents are fooling websites by pretending to be people and using headless browsers to get around the walls and stealing information from news to e-commerce. They are also driving costs for websites because of the flood and driving down and revenues. That is a big problem. Bots on Ticketmaster are terrible for consumers. Bots on social media, as we all know are mostly terrible. We shouldn't just throw our hands up and say we can't do anything about it. There is an incentive somewhere that can make the situation better than it is.
As for those knuckleheads at least they are people. My guess is that much of their amplification is because of bots. People who really like Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson have serious issues. That is a head scratcher.
How much of "people hate tall buildings" is driven by "tall = modernist = presumptively ugly and also culturally associated with an arrogant Robert Moses technocrat mentality"? Notably, all three of the buildings in your comparison pic are basically modernist, even if they are very different takes on modernism. None of them look anything like e.g. a Haussmannian apartment building in Paris. Maybe if you proposed building Haussmannian style apartments in a typical US suburb people would still oppose it. But I haven't seen anyone seriously try.
I suspect that part of the reason so many people are skeptical of the Mississippi Miracle is that people outside of the south look down on Mississippi. We think of Mississippi as poor, ignorant, backward, and racist. If that's your view of Mississippi it's going to be hard to believe that they figured out how to get many more kids to become proficient I reading rather than say California. And if you're attached to the idea that Mississippi is extremely racist, you're not going to want to believe that it's doing a good job of teaching black kids to read.
Mississippi also goes against the Progressive narrative of how to achieve equity. Rather than lowering standards to pretend that everyone is doing well, it has toughened them so that more are doing better.
It hasn’t gotten tougher. It is just using proven teaching methods, i.e., old-fashioned phonics.
That makes sense if you think places can’t change. I think they can change, and I’m hopeful that the better-educated generation that Mississippi is now producing will grow up to be less racist, more prosocial, and more productive, and will make Mississippi a better place.
Worth listening to the Sold a Story podcast - the evidence for phonics is overwhelming now and suggests that is a major driver of improvement...
Agreed.
I would also check out natalie wexler's work though about the knowledge gap
She makes a very convincing case that after phonics, we need to have a content rich curriculum.
That means real books that means actually teaching kids.Facts
Kids can't learn these skills in a vacuum
Very clearly correct. In the modern imagination it's always 1962 in Mississippi
Great post as usual!
1. Botswana is really in a bind. Duma Boko is trying to acquire a majority stake in De Beers, while De Beers is dying as a company. China's lab-grown diamonds are destroying the natural diamond industry. Debswana, the joint venture between De Beers and Botswana, saw revenues plunge roughly 50% in one year in 2024.
Natural diamonds are becoming what Peruvian guano or Chilean nitrates used to be: a has-been commodity that got replaced by the genius of engineering & science. (In this case, Lab-grown diamonds are the synthetic ammonium nitrate of yesteryear).
Frankly, Botswana has a problem where the main ways to be an economic elite in Gaborone either wants to secure government contracts for construction/consulting, work in a top civil service job, or be a rich cattle farmer. Botswana has a structural trap. Because Botswana relies so heavily on diamonds, the government collects almost all the money, meaning the government is also the primary customer for almost every business.
I wrote more about how China is crushing the natural diamond market here, if anyone wants more info:
https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/guns-germs-and-cobalt-q-and-a-9-insights?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=garki&triedRedirect=true
Yes, Yaw's post is very useful.
The depressing question is what chance the Botswanan elite can realise the writing is on the wall and try to go hard on a new economy pivot (diversification, de-positioning Gov as central buyer). Grabbing Debeers doesn't bode well as response but they have otherwise a stronger pivot base than many extractive economies in Africa.
It's also a highlight of a danger of even a generally well-managed state-focused mono-economy - feet of clay if the economic basis moves and for extractives, that is non-trivial risk.
Taking Noah's electrification economy obsession (which I agree with) and given Botswana's nickel, copper, Uraniam resources (later I don't know much about other than read they exist and are reasonable) - they may have a kind of pivot and potential tie-up with supply-chain - Not-China/PRC-locked. With good decent educational base, and solid infra (really something westerners too often take for granted / ignore the impact of), perhaps that's their best path (That Niger is in such a state maybe gets Euro interest for risk diversification, I personally would not want to have my sourcing locked into Niger given Sahel evolution nowadays).
The zero effect of money on crime does not surprise me at all. Maybe it would have been different with Jean Valjean levels of hunger. Hunger indeed drives people to do things that they wouldn't do otherwise.
But once you live in a country where your most basal needs can be covered by a societal safety net, the set of criminals will quickly narrow down to actual sociopaths who don't mind victimizing other people.
I grew up in a Czechoslovak rust belt city in the period when the heavy industry was collapsing. The country was going through an economic transition and lots of people struggled, but the criminals were usually of the expected "prison bird" type, and not desperate single moms nor nearly homeless workers.
I don’t think that sociopaths are the central reason. Cultural norms, where honesty and respect are due only to the family, gang, tribe, or other sub-group, that give permission for criminal conduct against the larger community, are the problem . Your Czech community had shared values that made it a mostly safe and orderly place.
"Permission for criminal conduct against the larger community" is somewhat fitting for the Czech Roma community.
The Nick Fuentes example is really suggestive about the dangers of AI.
The ability of AI agents to "flood the zone with shit" is massive.
I know that there is a post coming about it and I am really eager to read it.
This would be infinitely better if social media platforms implemented a simple policy:
1) public posts are limited to verified, non-anonymous users (e.g. confirmed to be real people at a reasonable level of accuracy)
2) anonymous users can post privately
This balances the benefits of limited anonymous trolling and bots with the real value of letting marginalized people be anonymous. In the past it wasn’t workable, but all the private group functionality of platforms now makes it feasible.
The complete refusal of leftists to accept any amount of personal responsibility is perfectly illustrated in the first 2 topics.
People continue to make bad choices after UBI = must be something else causing them to make bad choices. Kids test scores improve after being forced to do phonics for another year = must be some other reason for the improved test scores.
Super bummed about Econ 102. I've been missing it a lot lately.
I'm sorry! I'll have more content for you soon!!
Is it that Erik doesn’t have time or that his new employer/firm prefers to focus on public policy-related projects that more closely align as tech-right slop?
Time to bring back Hexapodia!
Regarding the rise of the odious Nick Fuentes and others , social media appears to be a medium built for speed, virality, and decontextualized fragments that will naturally elevate the most flamboyant extremists, and that bots and “shadowy forces” merely accelerate what the form already selects for. It seems that each wave of technology has weakened human gatekeepers by privileging what is shocking and simplified over what is thoughtful and contextual, so someone like Fuentes is a predictable product, not an aberration. Calling for “new institutions” to restrain this while leaving the platforms’ form and business model intact is like asking a casino to protect democracy from its highest rollers—the platforms are already the sovereign gatekeepers, and they profit most from exactly what you want filtered out.
A cure in the form of “gatekeepers” is worse than the disease. By whatever name, censorship is the power that inevitably corrupts. Each increment leads to yet another target worthy of suppression, often from what appear to be good intentions. It seems that the federal government’s vogue for blocking what it considered mal-, mis-, and dis-information, and the examples of authoritarians everywhere, are discounted when one’s own worthy cause is forwarded.
we have gatekeepers right now it is the invisible algorithm and elon musk or zuckerberg. the platform just accelerates engagement through "enragement". There is no free speech on any of these platforms it is an illusion.
Ths is why we need a prgressve engagement tax (more use of one paltform per time unit, higher tax rae on the advertising revenue associated with the engagement). This will lead platform algorythms to select for less engaging content.
very interesting idea. in practice however not sure how this would be implemented. the platforms are of course to drive engagement by rage baiting I think the genie is out of the bottle. the only true decision that one has to avoid this is not to use the platforms which platform is a very innocuous term really the are a media that changes discourse at societal level.
The idea is that driving engagement is costly, it cuts into the ad revenue generated by engaging conten
I'm definitely intrigued by this idea.Although the devil will be in the details
Indeed and I am not the one to know how it shoud be (or even could be) executed.
Luring talent away from China (and India, Nigeria, Indonesia) ought not to be that hard, especialy if done with a residecy on graduation guarantee. Even with Trump in the WH, the US is still a freeer more liberal place than China and other countries.
Why is how the housing looks even a consideration if we have a crisis? Levittown was ugly, soviet blocks of flats were/are ugly. They served a purpose of housing people cheaply and efficiently. We need 2 bedroom 1 bath homes or flats of less than 1,000 sq feet with linoleum floor and Formica counters, no garage, deck, patio or terrace. You add those yourself when you can afford it. And the basement is an actual basement and not a playroom, family room or office. You can add those too when you can afford it. Wow that turned into a bit of a rant - sorry.
you cannot build anything without having the political power to do so. many people are perfectly fine with their current housing situations.
What "we" need is land use and building codes (and no requirement to include below-market units) that allow developers to build "what 'we' will pay for."
And better, more uniform crime and disorder control would prevent funnelling demand into a few favored areas.
And the demise of the fixed rate mortgage to reduce the financial risk in housing investment
And an awareness that there are economies of scale in the provision of infrastructure and public amenisies from density.
Those graphs of social trends would be even more helpful if they extended a few years farther back. I know that drug overdoses had been increasing significantly for several years, and I believe traffic fatalities and homicides had both started increasing around 2015 (after a decade of declines for traffic and two and a half decades of decline for homicides). I don’t know what the pattern of suicides had been pre-pandemic - but it’s also notable that suicide went drastically *down* to *lows* at the moment all these other effects peaked, and surged only as they started to decline (and then soon started to decline afterwards).
This might well be a trend that predates the pandemic and only coincidentally peaked around the same time (or it may well be a pandemic effect on top of another one).
The graphs are classic examples of how to lie with statistics. By truncating the bottom of the graph, small changes are made to appear large. A graph with the vertical axis set at 0, it could show accurately whether there are significant changes or mere normal variation.
I'm fairly sure that all of these four categories did have significant changes over the past few years, larger than normal noise variations. But you're right that it would be better to show the axes from 0 to help make clear how big this variation is as a fraction of the totals.
When pondering competition with China, I find it sobering to remember that the population of China is 1.4 billion people and that of the USA is 335 million. Since ability is normally distributed, that means China has nearly 200 million people who are among the 14% smartest in the world, and the USA has about 50 million. What this signifies to me is that—if all other things were equal (quality of education; resources for innovation; work ethic; incentives; safe, healthy, prosperous, stable communities, etc)— the USA will not “beat” the Chinese at AI or any other innovative technology China sets its mind to develop. China simply has a much deeper pool of talent to draw on. In the past, America was a powerhouse because things were not equal between China and the USA, and the advantages afforded by our liberal democracy not only boosted our own talent, but attracted top talent from China and the rest of the world. Since MAGA, however….
No reason we cannot poach their talent pool, however.
Overall agree but
"
Since ability is normally distributed"
I'm not sure if that's really true. I've seen some research that suggests that iqs are higher over in southeast.Asia
Which would make it even more imperative to steal their best and brightest
For buildings, Modernism happened and that was that. The knowledge and supply chains needed to make buildings presentable has been thrown away and now they have to be rebuilt bit by bit. Meanwhile everyone has some intuitive feeling that new buildings always make the streets that little bit more alienating and unpleasant, which makes it really easy for NIMBYs to get traction for their BS.
Case in point: Auckland. Almost the entire inner ring of suburbs consists of cheap mass produced bungalows, built appx. an entire century ago. And redeveloping this with any sort of higher density is pure political poison. We have train stations a few kilometres from town hall surrounded by these things. So Auckland is becoming a donut, where that inner ring is slowly depopulating as old people die off and households become smaller, and high density is occurring in further out places. And we’re finding out the hard way that for young people the alternatives to that inner ring are not called the further out suburbs, they’re called Sydney and Melbourne.
There have been incidents where some old building was so decrepit that it was literally about to fall down. And if someone wants to put something new there are protests. People fully expect anything new to look even worse. This would be insane for literally any other thing in our lives. If some rusty old car is parked on a street people would complain about that old car, rather than declaring that they should keep using it because our neighborhood should not have those ugly new cars.
Meanwhile regulators are doing all sort of clumsy stuff to tray to avoid ugly buildings being built. Which you can’t do of course. You can’t describe why people think buildings are ugly in the same way you can’t describe in technical terms what makes certain food look tastier than others.
Oh well here we are in 2025, where architecture is slowly and painfully trying to recover from this. And meanwhile software development is speed running the same mistakes. “Let’s make everything flat because buttons that actually look like they can be clicked are ugly.” Said no user ever.
A good friend of mine is making 3D visualization software for architects. see www.vrsketch.eu You can walk people through your building before it is made and let them tell you where it is ugly, and where the layout is bad, etc. I wonder if Aukland's city planners would like to use the software?
Natural diamonds are a semi-precious gemstone with good marketing and a monopoly. However, having visited the beautiful country of Botswana, I hope that they are able to pivot.
Regarding the Nick Fuentes thing. We as a society really need to make it our mission to do something about the bots and that starts with all forms of social media gating access to verified people and entities - KYC for the Internet. It is imperative that we do this for so many reasons. It is not in the business interests of Meta at al to do this. So, therefore it should be legislated. Eyes on Australia.
Since the accounts boosting him are in Africa and Pakistan and not PRC or NK (which is now visible since X added the location metadata for all accounts) they probably aren’t bots in technical sense (a software program which looks at particular posts to boost them) but paid workers that do the boosting manually. Since these are real people, they could be verified as such and requiring verification won’t stop them. You could prevent people from certain countries from having accounts, or make the location more prominent like including it in the reposts. The entities trying to use the paid boosters might hire people in different countries. Also, blocking all bots isn’t all upside, since there are useful bots like Grok and others that can add AI as comments.
It’s hard to control social media information, I think the bigger issue is that commercial media amplifies these people even more because they assume they are more prominent than they really are. And how do you stop more mainstream fools like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Hassan Piker from constantly dishing out crap and getting rich, which incentivizes them to keep increasing the bullshit they spew.
At least we would know who they are and where they are posting from. People might think twice about reposting, liking or boosting some whacko comment from Nigeria that is pretending to be something they are not. It's better than the status quo.
I agree that blocking bots is tough, but companies are not incentivized to try to mitigate the issue The RAG agents are fooling websites by pretending to be people and using headless browsers to get around the walls and stealing information from news to e-commerce. They are also driving costs for websites because of the flood and driving down and revenues. That is a big problem. Bots on Ticketmaster are terrible for consumers. Bots on social media, as we all know are mostly terrible. We shouldn't just throw our hands up and say we can't do anything about it. There is an incentive somewhere that can make the situation better than it is.
As for those knuckleheads at least they are people. My guess is that much of their amplification is because of bots. People who really like Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson have serious issues. That is a head scratcher.
How much of "people hate tall buildings" is driven by "tall = modernist = presumptively ugly and also culturally associated with an arrogant Robert Moses technocrat mentality"? Notably, all three of the buildings in your comparison pic are basically modernist, even if they are very different takes on modernism. None of them look anything like e.g. a Haussmannian apartment building in Paris. Maybe if you proposed building Haussmannian style apartments in a typical US suburb people would still oppose it. But I haven't seen anyone seriously try.
??? Cities were buildng tall buildings before Moses was born.
Always a great read!
Thank you!!