I haven't looked at the traffic on my blog for a long time, but tonight I got curious. After a bit of fiddling around, I came across this:
What happened in August? And it's even stranger than it seems. Traffic didn't drop off a cliff on a single day, but gradually over a week:
Monday, August 21: 37,000
Tuesday, August 22: 33,000
Wednesday, August 23: 26,000
Thursday, August 24: 15,000
Friday, August 25: 7,000
This is obviously a reporting artifact of some kind, but what? And which count was more accurate, the old one or the newer one? It's mysterious.
Here is traffic over the past month by country for countries with more than 350 visitors:
I'm surprised that the US isn't the winner by a far greater margin. And I sure seem to have a lot of fans in Singapore! Unless it's just one guy who refreshes a lot.
The New York Times has a pretty good piece today about the recent history of AI development among Silicon Valley techbros. (With the exception of a couple of brief asides, not a single woman is mentioned in the story.) I enjoyed reading it even though I'm already fairly familiar with this stuff.
My favorite anecdote is a conversation between Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis, a neuroscientist and founder of DeepMind:
Mr. Musk explained that his plan was to colonize Mars to escape overpopulation and other dangers on Earth. Dr. Hassabis replied that the plan would work — so long as superintelligent machines didn’t follow and destroy humanity on Mars, too. Mr. Musk was speechless. He hadn’t thought about that particular danger.
Dude! Fred Pohl wrote a whole novel about precisely that in 1976. It won a Nebula Award!
Admittedly, you were only five years old then, but still. It's a pretty famous book in the kingdom of the nerds. Everyone knows that killer robots are going to follow us into space.
I’ve recently come to estimate that the world population and economy will suffer a several centuries fall, with innovation grinding to a halt, ended by the rise of Amish-like insular fertile subcultures.... As a result, I’ve been watching many documentaries about various insular fertile subcultures, trying to get a feel for what it is that distinguishes them, and which of those distinguishing features we should credit for their successfully achieving persistent high insularity and high fertility.
This is hardly a difficult question:
Keep your women in the home and poorly educated. It's a simple strategy for high fertility if you're willing to pay the price.
In any case, high fertility subgroups never keep it up forever. There are periodic panics that Hispanics or Catholics or evangelicals are going to take over the country, but it never happens.¹ If they stay insular they stay small. If they don't their fertility goes down. Big and insular just isn't a stable combination.
As for generally falling fertility, it's homeostatic. People who don't want kids automatically shrink faster than those who do want kids and eventually a new equilibrium is reached even in the face of cultural changes. It happens slowly but it happens.
POSTSCRIPT: If you're really interested in subcultures that retain high fertility rates, try France. Over the past two decades fertility in the US has fallen about 20%. In France it's gone down only 5% despite high education levels. Why?
¹For a great modern example of this genre, check out this Daily Caller piece predicting an Amish population of 350 million by the year 2300 "provided no other factors impact or change the current growth rate." Uh huh.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin must be doing something right. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–LetGodSortItOut) has lost confidence in him.
Amazingly—even for Graham—all Austin said was that Israel should do more to protect civilians in Gaza or else risk driving Palestinians "into the arms of the enemy." That's it. You'd think even Graham would acknowledge the pragmatic wisdom of that.
The point at which Graham loses confidence in somebody represents approximately the highest level of bloodthirstiness any normal person should tolerate. Approval from Graham is a reliable indicator that it's time to rein things in.
Paul Graham posted a list of Yale majors yesterday sorted by how easy the grading was in each one. Economics was the toughest: only 52% of all grades were A's. History of Science clocked in as the easiest with 92% A's.
This got me curious: does easy grading attract more students? Apparently not:
There are obviously lots of things that go into choosing a major, so you wouldn't expect grades to be a huge factor. But to the extent they are, Yale students tend to be drawn to the toughest majors. Economics had 149 graduates and the toughest grading. Gender studies had only two graduates even though A's were practically guaranteed.
Things might be different elsewhere with less ambitious students. But at Yale, anyway, nobody seems to be put off by the prospect of tough grading.
POSTSCRIPT: This is solely for Yale College, which doesn't include everything. Engineering has its own school, for example, as does management.
DeSantis, who is Catholic, told them his family did not own a Bible.... Staff members for DeSantis had to buy a Bible for $21.74 on Amazon and have it shipped to the Republican Party of Florida headquarters less than a week before his inauguration, according to a receipt of the transaction shared with NBC News.
DeSantis doesn't own any Bibles? Hell, I'm an atheist and I own a couple.
Also: They had to buy one on Amazon? They couldn't just pop into a local store?
And one more thing: It turns out that they ended up buying a King James Bible. Really? None of them was savvy enough about religious stuff to realize they shouldn't get a Protestant Bible? But then again, apparently DeSantis didn't care, so no harm done.
Republicans sure are weird. The whole party is built around performative Christian faith, but look at their top three presidential candidates. Donald Trump is allegedly something or other¹ but obviously couldn't care less about religion. DeSantis is Catholic but only barely. And Nikki Haley converted to Methodism in her twenties for political convenience. Not a single one of them has a Christian faith deeper than a fingernail.
¹Presbyterian, for what it's worth. Which is not much at all.
Have you been keeping up with the latest COVID variants? Let's review:
January 2023: Omicron XBB 1.5 becomes dominant.
July: Two variants, EG.5 and FL.5.1, dubbed FLips because of their specific mutations, become prominent.
October: HV.1, a mutation of EG.5, becomes prominent.
Now: JN.1, nicknamed Pirola, starts to appear. It isn't prominent yet, but it's projected to become strong by the end of the year.
Put all of this together and the forecast for this winter is in the range of 1 million infections per day (green line in chart):
This is considerably milder than the Omicron surge of winter 2022, which peaked at about 5 million infections per day, but bigger than the beta and delta surges of 2020-21 and about the same size as the BA.1 surge last winter. However, the mortality rate will be much smaller since a huge share of the population is now either vaccinated or has had COVID before.
The federal government's fiscal year began two months ago and Congress still hasn't passed a defense appropriations bill. But it's not too late:
Lawmakers in both parties contend that, as speaker, Johnson is committed to passing a final bill and continuing the over six-decade streak of defense legislation becoming law each year, even if it means going against his desire to block the Pentagon abortion travel policy.
Wow! Congress has passed a defense funding bill every single year. That's some governmenting to be proud of. I'm glad they're committed to keeping this legendary streak going.
Adolf Hitler was famously voted into power and then appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933. There would not be another German election for more than a dozen years. We all know how this went: Germany started a war in 1939 which the Allies eventually won, killing about 3% of Germany's civilian population in the process.
Hamas was famously voted into power and then took control of Gaza in 2007. There would not be another election in Gaza for more dozen years. Once again, we all know how this went: Hamas started a war two months ago which Israel is in the process of winning, so far killing about 0.5% of Gaza's civilian population in the process.
But wait. Am I really comparing Hamas to Nazi Germany? Yes, I pretty much am. Their leaders have given repeated public interviews in which they clearly state their intentions: They will continue attacking Israel forever; they are proud to be martyrs; and they won't stop until Israel is destroyed. Unlike Nazi Germany, Hamas has nowhere near the power to carry out their version of Jewish genocide, but their ambitions are about the same.
Given this, is it surprising that after Hamas's ruthless attack on October 7 Israel will stop at nothing short of their complete destruction, just as we once stopped at nothing short of the complete destruction of Nazi power? It shouldn't be.
That said, there's a big difference between World War II and the Israel-Hamas war. We were not historically bitter enemies with Germany, and thanks to our obsession with Soviet power in Europe we quickly concluded real peace after our victory. Just the opposite is the case in the Middle East. Israel may "win" their war, but only at the cost of an ongoing slaughter that will generate even greater hatred among Palestinians and make genuine peace even less likely than it is now.
As I've said before, I envy people who have total certainty in their views of Israel and Gaza. I have nothing close. Israel has endured decades of various Arab coalitions trying to destroy them, and it's hard to understand how anyone can blame them for their deep and abiding desire for self defense and retaliation. At the same time, their treatment of Palestinians over the past couple of decades has been so gratuitously revolting that it's hard to understand how anyone can blame them for cheering on even a grotesque terrorist group like Hamas.
Both sides have an endless and frequently legitimate list of grievances. How can anyone not see that? And how do you get past it? Both sides really and truly want to destroy the other at this point. It's not a facade or false consciousness or anything like that. It's how they really feel.
Boxes come and go around here. Some get used for a while and some are one-hit wonders. Who knows why? But through it all, this box is everyone's favorite. It's been sitting next to the sofa for many years and will probably stay there for many more.
What happened in August? And it's even stranger than it seems. Traffic didn't drop off a cliff on a single day, but gradually over a week:
I'm surprised that the US isn't the winner by a far greater margin. And I sure seem to have a lot of fans in Singapore! Unless it's just one guy who refreshes a lot.
