Persistent current account deficits also drive the increasing dominance of financial activities in the American economy, a process known as “financialization.” Because the current account deficit means the United States purchases more goods and services from abroad than it sells, foreigners accumulate dollars that must ultimately be invested in dollar-denominated financial assets.
~ Michael Starr via American Affairs
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In some ways, Anthropic’s terms resemble these traditional examples of privately imposed contractual limits on the military’s use of technology. The company’s position on autonomous lethal weapons, for example, is not one of outright opposition to the use of such weapons but instead a judgment that today’s frontier AI systems are not capable enough to autonomously make decisions about human life or death.
~ Dean Ball via Hyperdimensional
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The Kreung people of northeastern Cambodia build huts for their adolescent daughters to use for erotic liaisons and encourage them to have as many of these as possible before choosing a husband.
~ Elizabeth Kolbert via The New Yorker
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via The New York Times:
Social Media Isn’t Just Speech. It’s Also a Defective, Hazardous Product.
by Tim Wu
published on March 14, 2026
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Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.
~ Rose Horowitch via The Atlantic
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Roy Cohn was a master of situational immorality. He had rules about how to exercise power. You would always try to goad your enemies into being the worst they possibly could be and then turn that against them, so that Cohn would actually look like the good guy, which he virtually never was.
~ Sam Roberts, city politics reporter for the Daily News via The New Yorker
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