Another pilgrimage to the Fortress Monastery.
- AOMI. Robin Hanson: The Insular Fertile Future. Reproductively successful cultures are insular from the global culture.
- Scott Alexander: Book Review: Modi – A Political Biography
* AFGHANISTAN. Apparently internal frictions amongst the Taliban, with Pakistani-backed hardliners winning out and filling the Cabinet exclusively with Taliban (in so doing breaking their commitment to form an inclusive government). Meanwhile, its former CB head notes that Afghanistan has no means of printing its own currency. I suppose this and capital controls ($200 daily limits on withdrawals) explains why the afghani hasn’t devalued more against $USDC; as such, we can expect the inevitable economic crunch to manifest itself in unemployment and wage arrears. Contra Western propaganda, the Taliban remains universally unrecognized, including by Russia and China.
You often hear people talking about the supposed trillion dollar reserves of REMs in Afghanistan. In reality, there is nothing “rare” about Rare Earth Metals. The only constraint is cost of production, and it will always be cheaper in places like China or Kazakhstan where you have cheap electricity and low security costs.
- Richard Hanania: Futarchy: Robin Hanson on How Prediction Markets Can Take over the World
- Edward Hagen: Contra Sweden Yes/cuckshed memes, the prevalence of cuckoldry has declined threefold since 1940 in Sweden (3% to 1%).
- Emil Kirkegaard: Ancient history, dysgenics, genomics, and cyclical history theory
- whyvert: “New paper on current natural selection. Correlation between 33 polygenic scores and each person’s number of children across two generations (in 400k Britons from UKBiobank). Modern society is selecting for bad traits and selecting against good traits. Sad!”
Hugh-Jones, D., & Abdellaoui, A. (2021). Human capital mediates natural selection in contemporary humans (No. 2021-02). School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.
- POWERFUL COMMENT. Mitleser quoting a Redditor on the likely outcome of a China-Taiwan war, which suggests that the PLA is now confident of a quick victory.
- Diana Fleischman: The Moral Panic about Eugenics Poses a Threat to Abortion Rights
- Claude Berube compares the age of the USN vs. PLAN vessels.