More than fourteen centuries ago, Christian monks drew up a list of seven sins. Not laws – a map of the human heart. Envy. Pride. Wrath. Sloth. Greed. Gluttony. Lust. It is still pretty much the most accurate psychology anyone has written.

The monks were looking at one soul at a time. Look at whole systems instead, and you find the same seven. A vice that stays private ruins one life. Scaled up, it becomes an institution: a tax, a ministry, an ideology, a budget line.

People will always have vices. The question is who pays for them.

Adam Smith noticed that we owe our dinner not to the butcher’s kindness but to his self-interest. A free market does not abolish greed – it puts it to work: you get rich only by serving others, and you go bankrupt if you don’t. The vice pays its own bill. Bad systems let the vice send its bill to someone else – the taxpayer, the next generation, the innocent.

A good civilization does not abolish sin. It sends the bill to the sinner.

The assumption of our time is that outcomes should be even if nobody interfered.

Sowell’s reply is geography itself is not even. The Zaire River has more water than the Mississippi and is far less useful because of waterfalls that isolate people.

The Mississippi drops four inches a mile. Those are different rivers. The world was never a level playing field. Treating every disparity as proof of blame turns causation into a morality play.

Before Menger, economists tortured themselves trying to explain why diamonds cost more than water when water keeps you alive. Menger dissolved the paradox in a sentence. Value is marginal and subjective. The tenth glass of water you drink today carries almost no value to you; the first glass you drink after three days without it carries everything. The object does not contain the value. You assign it, based on your circumstances, your preferences, your next most pressing want.

This wrecked the labor theory of value completely, clearing the ground for honest price analysis.

Prices, Menger showed, are not arbitrary signals or social constructs. They are compressed information about millions of individual valuations, each person acting on knowledge no central planner could ever collect. Bureaucrats in Brussels and Washington still haven't absorbed this. They control prices and watch shortages materialize on schedule, baffled every time. //

Handre, it's not that they haven't aborbed it. It's that they are owned by a financial network that rejects a key truth that Menger laid bare.

It's the old Upton Sinclair saying writ large: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

What Menger explained in Vienna in 1871, the Transnational Crime Syndicate of Big Club Oligarch Family Pirates has spent over 150 years trying to hide from the public.

They're still trying to protect BOTH systems they painstakingly constructed - and enforce - for the rest of us, but not for themselves.

1. THE FIAT CURRENCY SYSTEM

2. THE ENERGY RATIONING/MARKET MANIPULATION SYSTEM

On the cleanest comparison the data allow, with the same inspector, the same vessel type, and the same time window, the Jones Act tanker fleet has a meaningfully worse deficiency record than the waiver fleet. The effect isn’t marginal. The domestic fleet not only has a higher deficiency rate but also a notably higher number of deficiencies.

To be clear, this isn’t a claim that the waiver fleet is “safer” in some general sense or that Jones Act tankers are unsafe. PSC deficiency counts are imperfect proxies for risk, sample sizes among both fleets are modest, and deficiencies can range from a fire door improperly propped open with a hold-back hook (Clearocean Fuku) to missing lock-out valves on a fire-suppression system (American Energy), the two vessels already cited above as each fleet’s highest-deficiency ship.

What it does show is that TI’s specific claim that the waiver fleet’s PSC record demonstrates a unique threat to American infrastructure doesn’t hold up once both the Jones Act and waiver fleets are given equal treatment.

The pizza chain recently tapped NBCUniversal, Instacart and the dentsu-owned media agency Carat for help reaching consumers when they’re low on groceries—and thus more likely to be swayed by a mouth-watering ad. The idea is to reach hungry consumers by “knowing what is in their fridge without being too creepy,” said Carrie Drinkwater, chief investment officer at Carat. //

Rontea • July 1, 2026 9:22 AM

In a world where even the emptiness of your refrigerator becomes a pretext for surveillance, the absurdity is complete. Papa Johns peers into your void, not to offer solace, but to monetize your hunger. The fridge, once a private cathedral of decay and disappointment, now signals the market when your despair has ripened.

We have reached a point where the faint growl of a stomach is data, where the absence of milk is a summons to the algorithm. They do not wait for you to feel desire; they conjure it, weaponize it, and then serve it back to you with garlic sauce. The empty fridge is no longer your own—it belongs to the ad.

To be hungry is to be known. To be known is to be hunted. And still, we will scan the QR code, because our revolt extends only as far as our apathy will allow.

There’s an enormous amount of liquidity in growth stocks, which means that you can use growth stocks to grow. You can buy other companies with shares, and shares are an endogenous substance that you make on the premises by typing zeros into a spreadsheet. Firms with growth stocks can grow by typing zeros, whereas firms that are mature, they have to use money if they want to grow, and you’re not allowed to make money on the premises. If you do, the Treasury Department shows up and takes you away in handcuffs. So you can see why firms would be very anxious to maintain the perception that they have room for growth even after they have 90 percent market shares.

That’s why those firms started promoting stories about how they were going to conquer imaginary markets. Imaginary markets have no agreed-upon valuation because you just made them up. Unless you can turn an imaginary market into a real market pretty quickly, you need to come up with another imaginary market and announce that this is the new imaginary market you’re going to conquer. It’s easier than you’d think because the capital markets have the object permanence of a toddler, and they would lose a game of peekaboo if they were drafted to play in the league. So you can say, “Oh, actually, it’s not metaverse. It’s crypto. It’s not crypto. It’s Web3. It’s not Web3. It’s something else.” And the markets will forgive you, provided you do it quickly enough. //

AI really appeals to a fantasy that I think all of us have to some extent but that powerful people really have, of a world without people in it—because hell really is other people. You can’t get stuff done without other people helping you. You can’t have romance without a romantic partner. You can’t have social media without people to socialize with. You can’t play a board game, or do a startup, or build a bridge, or build a house, or do politics without other people. And other people stubbornly refuse to organize everything they do to make you happy.

Particularly if you’re rich and powerful, it’s very galling. So AI is very attractive. //

If you combine those two things—the material necessity to have a growth narrative and the ideological attractiveness of a world without people—you get $1.4 trillion in CapEx for a sector that is turning over $50 billion a year and has to replace all of its assets every 24 to 30 months. //

Whereas the workers who hate it are workers who are being asked to produce more with AI at the expense of quality, at a higher speed, at the expense of their own wellbeing, and who understand that they’re being recruited to be what Dan Davies calls accountability sinks—to take the blame when the AI screws up their job. //

We hear plenty about the negative aspects of AI. What do you like about it?

Cory Doctorow: I have a couple of local models on my computer, which is just a framework laptop running Ubuntu. It doesn’t even have a GPU. I use Whisper to transcribe audio. I will sometimes want to cite something I’ve heard in a podcast and not remember where I heard it. One time, I just threw the last 30 hours of audio I’d listened to at Whisper, and it shot out verbatim logs that were good enough that when I searched the full text, I could find it. And it gave me time codes so I could check the transcript. That’s amazing.

The idea that I might someday have a computer full of audio and video files with full text indexing is great.

At the height of the Depression that Democrats call Great because it gave them power for 50 years, Yip Harburg wrote the lyrics to the song Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

The song is sad but laborers were not the only victims of the worldwide collapse of the economy. Their bosses went broke.

Nations are not economic zones.

That matters, because from a pure GDP standpoint the ideal citizen is someone who gets cancer, gets divorced, crashes the car, and hires a small army of professionals before dying.

Nobody contributed more to UK GDP this week than Henry Nowak’s killer.

Think about that.

Police response. Medical response. Detectives. Public affairs officers. Dozens of lawyers. Prison for life. All of it staggeringly expensive. Vickrum Digwa has already made up the entire lifetime GDP contribution of the man he killed. Probably a hundred times over.

Migration isn’t just about votes.

Consider yourself. A patriot who lives a simple life.

You are not a burden on society, so you contribute little to GDP. //

Your pastor told you that becoming an electrician, a plumber, a nurse, a firefighter, a teacher would contribute to society. He told you to live a simple life. To love and protect your family and your neighbors. He told you not to gamble or drink or have affairs.

Don’t you see why they hate the church?

Why they hate you?

In their eyes you are wasted space.

You may contribute enormously on the human scale, the only scale that has ever actually mattered, you may contribute non economic values like love, honor and duty. You might contribute locally on a micro-economic scale.

But in the big picture you are an economic loss. Because you contribute almost nothing to GDP.

You contribute far far leas than a criminal migrant with a mental disorder, gambling addiction and cancer.

You are a great American in the eyes of your church.

But on an economic GDP scale you are the very worst type of American.

Venezuela did exactly as "Professor Jiang" suggested and printed money until the cows came home, and well after that, too. Its currency is so worthless now that it could easily become the most used waste paper product in Venezuela. In fact, the bolivar became so useless that an online video game's currency became worth more in real life.

Thomas van Linge @ThomasVLinge
·
Only in #Venezuela soldiers are rewarded for the loyal service to the regime with toilet paper rolls
4:41 PM · Jul 24, 2017

This is called inflation. It's not a new concept, yet Jiang seems not to have heard about it or grasped the concept. Odd thing too, because they were teaching children about this back in 1967.

Ladies and gentlemen, Scrooge McDuck.
https://youtu.be/SK8lpxsg8qQ?si=T9HuxQTFxbTyHMZt

The 1920 Jones Act shouldn’t even exist anymore.

The act only allows U.S.-flagged and built ships “to transport cargo between U.S. ports.”

The ships must also be “mostly owned and crewed by Americans.”

Not a shock that President Woodrow Wilson (I hate that guy) signed the Jones Act into law. He wanted to encourage U.S. shipbuilding after World War I.

Yeah, well, it hinders competition, leading to higher costs for goods and higher operational costs.

Fewer than 100 vessels comply with the Jones Act. //

broomhandle in reply to MarkS. | March 18, 2026 at 4:52 pm
The Jones Act is a classic example of cronyist protectionism: it imposes heavy government mandates on private commerce (U.S.-built, U.S.-crewed, U.S.-owned ships for domestic routes) in the name of “national security,” yet delivers concentrated benefits to a small, politically connected maritime lobby while dispersing higher costs across American consumers, businesses and energy users.

This violates principles of limited government, free enterprise, and fiscal responsibility. Instead of fostering genuine competitiveness through innovation and open markets, it creates an uncompetitive, high-cost industry shielded from foreign (and even domestic) competition, driving up shipping expenses that ripple into everyday prices for goods, fuel, and groceries.

The national security rationale is particularly weak: the U.S. merchant fleet has shrunk dramatically under the Act’s watch, not grown stronger, and modern logistics plus targeted subsidies or direct naval investments could secure sealift needs far more efficiently without burdening the broader economy. In short, it’s textbook rent-seeking that harms the many to prop up the few, contrary to the preference for market-driven strength over regulatory favoritism.

Edward J. Willett and Austin D. Swanson
Modernizing the Little Red Schoolhouse: The Economics of Improved Education

“We estimate there is enough dissolved lithium present in that region to replace US imports of lithium and more.”
.

Tucked beneath the pine forests and farm fields of southwest Arkansas, drillers have stumbled upon a critical mineral jackpot: lithium in the region’s ancient saltwater formations.

The Collected Works of Milton Friedman website contains more than 1,500 digital items by and about economist, Nobel Prize winner, and Hoover fellow Milton Friedman. The site features hundreds of Friedman's articles, speeches, lectures, television appearances, and more.

Labor wage is rarely the dominant cost in modern manufacturing. In semiconductor fabrication, labor contributes pennies to a few dollars per chip. Yet we continue to build trade narratives around wages.

When competition exists, innovation follows. When innovation stagnates, it is often a sign that competition has been suppressed—not that labor costs are too high.

We have structural problems within the US that often are prohibitive to manufacturing products efficiently. Prohibitive to innovation. Most of them come from these so called externalities. Now we face a choice. We can further protect this system that imposes very high costs or we can throw off the shackles.

And yet these tools have opened a world of creative potential in software that was previously closed to me, and they feel personally empowering. Even with that impression, though, I know these are hobby projects, and the limitations of coding agents lead me to believe that veteran software developers probably shouldn’t fear losing their jobs to these tools any time soon. In fact, they may become busier than ever. //

Even with the best AI coding agents available today, humans remain essential to the software development process. Experienced human software developers bring judgment, creativity, and domain knowledge that AI models lack. They know how to architect systems for long-term maintainability, how to balance technical debt against feature velocity, and when to push back when requirements don’t make sense.

For hobby projects like mine, I can get away with a lot of sloppiness. But for production work, having someone who understands version control, incremental backups, testing one feature at a time, and debugging complex interactions between systems makes all the difference. //

The first 90 percent of an AI coding project comes in fast and amazes you. The last 10 percent involves tediously filling in the details through back-and-forth trial-and-error conversation with the agent. Tasks that require deeper insight or understanding than what the agent can provide still require humans to make the connections and guide it in the right direction. The limitations we discussed above can also cause your project to hit a brick wall.

From what I have observed over the years, larger LLMs can potentially make deeper contextual connections than smaller ones. They have more parameters (encoded data points), and those parameters are linked in more multidimensional ways, so they tend to have a deeper map of semantic relationships. As deep as those go, it seems that human brains still have an even deeper grasp of semantic connections and can make wild semantic jumps that LLMs tend not to.

Creativity, in this sense, may be when you jump from, say, basketball to how bubbles form in soap film and somehow make a useful connection that leads to a breakthrough. Instead, LLMs tend to follow conventional semantic paths that are more conservative and entirely guided by mapped-out relationships from the training data. //

Fixing bugs can also create bugs elsewhere. This is not new to coding agents—it’s a time-honored problem in software development. But agents supercharge this phenomenon because they can barrel through your code and make sweeping changes in pursuit of narrow-minded goals that affect lots of working systems. We’ve already talked about the importance of having a good architecture guided by the human mind behind the wheel above, and that comes into play here. //

you could teach a true AGI system how to do something by explanation or let it learn by doing, noting successes, and having those lessons permanently stick, no matter what is in the context window. Today’s coding agents can’t do that—they forget lessons from earlier in a long session or between sessions unless you manually document everything for them. My favorite trick is instructing them to write a long, detailed report on what happened when a bug is fixed. That way, you can point to the hard-earned solution the next time the amnestic AI model makes the same mistake. //

After guiding way too many hobby projects through Claude Code over the past two months, I’m starting to think that most people won’t become unemployed due to AI—they will become busier than ever. Power tools allow more work to be done in less time, and the economy will demand more productivity to match.

It’s almost too easy to make new software, in fact, and that can be exhausting.

Andrew M. Bailey
National University of Singapore

I am a Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore. I read, write, and teach classes in the humanities and social sciences. I was a founding faculty member at Yale-NUS College, where I taught for the duration of its existence. I am also a Senior Fellow with the Bitcoin Policy Institute and consult often with journalists and lawmakers on topics related to bitcoin, cryptocurrency, money, and society. //

My research is mostly about money, people, and God. My work on money with B. Rettler and C. Warmke, culminating in a monograph, aims to understand and evaluate bitcoin in a way that integrates philosophy, politics, and economics. Early articles in philosophy defend the view that we are living human animals (as opposed to, say, brains or luminous spiritual beings). More recent metaphysical work, culminating in two monographs, concerns our value as people and links between human nature and conceptions of the divine.

If you have money, you probably think about it a fair bit. And if you don't have money, you might think about it even more. In this module, we will think about money a lot. One goal of the module is to reach a clearer understanding of questions concerning money and its place in a well-lived life. But it is not just the questions and proposed answers (considered as theoretical problems) that are important. I also hope to see students grapple with the topic in a personal way, and to adjust their own opinions and practices in light of the experiences and evidence we uncover in the module.

This module lies at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and economics. It will therefore require engagement with both theoretical and empirical concepts, analysis, and arguments. Reading assignments will draw from recent philosophical articles, some literature (short stories) and relevant work in the social sciences.

Hayek was asked to leave “a statement for the future generations.” His response is brilliant:

“Modern civilization which enables us to maintain 4 billion people was made possible by the institution of private property. It is only thanks to this institution that we achieved an extensive order far exceeding anybody’s knowledge.”

“If you destroy that moral basis, which consists in the recognition of private property, we will destroy the sources which nourish present-day mankind, and create a catastrophe of starvation beyond anything mankind has yet experienced.” //

.
“Those who founded the United States of America, and wrote the Constitution, saw property rights as essential for safeguarding all other rights.”

— Thomas Sowell

.
The real problem with Humanity is this-
We have Stone-Age Emotions, medieval Institutions, and Godlike technology.
And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.

-- Edward Wilson

Modern climate politics treats humanity like an invasive species.

We’re told we consume too much, build too much, develop too much, and emit too much. The message is clear: human beings are the problem, and the earth must be protected from us.

But that is not Christianity.

It’s not even close.

For 3,000 years, the Judeo-Christian worldview taught something radically different—that humans are image-bearers designed to create, cultivate, innovate, and build. The very first job description in Scripture is found in Genesis 1:28:

“Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over every living thing.”

To modern ears, “subdue” and “dominion” sound imperial. To ancient readers, they meant responsibility, stewardship, cultivation, and development. The earth was not a fragile deity to tiptoe around; it was a raw, untamed gift meant to be worked, shaped, and stewarded for human flourishing.

And here’s where the climate debate goes off the rails.

If you believe Genesis, then energy is not a moral liability—it is the means by which humans fulfill their mandate. Energy is how you lift the poor, feed nations, sustain families, run hospitals, build infrastructure, and create the conditions for long-term stability and—ironically—environmental improvement.

Yet the climate movement has turned this mandate upside down. It demands sacrifice, limitation, and deprivation in the name of “saving the planet.” The message to the world’s poor is simple: stay poor a little longer so the West can feel environmentally virtuous. //

If you want to solve poverty, you don’t throttle energy. You expand it. You diversify it. You make it abundant and affordable. The cleanest nations on earth became clean because they became rich first. Wealth creates environmental capacity. Poverty destroys it.

The Christian view is simple: the earth was given to humanity to cultivate, not fear. The resources here are meant to be used responsibly, not locked away because climate bureaucrats believe modern prosperity is a moral sin.

The climate debate will never make sense until we recover the foundational truth Genesis established: human beings were meant to build. Meant to advance. Meant to subdue the earth—not as tyrants, but as stewards.

The earth is not a god to appease.

It is a garden to cultivate.

If you want the environment to thrive, let people thrive first.

RALPH WILLIAMS
Business as Usual, During Alterations
Throughout most of recorded history mankind has lived within an economy of scarcity. Only in the last half-century have technological developments made an economy of abundance possible, at least in the West and Japan. The costs involved in this process were high, not only in terms of human exploitation but also in more subtle ways. For example, the explosion of available consumer goods has produced considerable confusion, part of the "future shock" phenomenon of being surrounded by so much diversity that it is difficult to enjoy any of it.

Because technological change has been so rapid, entire industries have been created and wiped out almost overnight. The resourcefulness often shown by the businessman to these
developments has been little short of amazing-the transition from a literally "horse-powered" transportation system to the automobile and from the blacksmith to the mechanic are but
examples.

"Business as Usual, During Alterations" presents members of the business community facing the greatest crisis in the history of economic relationships. Competition is supposed to be the essence of the Free Enterprise System (at least on paper)-but it was never supposed to be like this.