Author Archives: Jasper John MacKay

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The institutions that are fostering supposedly egalitarian politics limit upward mobility as much as they facilitate it. This has encouraged a type of blinkered and oftentimes unambitious style of activism among young people, which asks for many changes but does not challenge the system that provides them with their own lofty status.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker

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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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