Everyone in Washington seems to agree that artificial intelligence must be governed. The only real dispute is who gets the steering wheel. Congress? Federal agencies? State legislatures? Some newly minted task force with a long acronym and a taste for reporting requirements? That debate is already too narrow. President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on…
SpaceX may soon ask public investors to buy a piece of the future. The fine print may ask them to buy something else, too: a theory of corporate governance. The company’s reported initial public offering (IPO) has already drawn significant concern from institutional investors and corporate-governance observers. That concern is understandable. SpaceX reportedly seeks to…
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column. Here is one excerpt: The present and also future of mankind is a world where reasonably high levels of self-discipline are needed to do well. The journalist Daniel Akst pointed this out in his 2011 book Temptation: Finding Self-Control in an Age of Excess, and we…
Some legal cases age like wine. Others age like browser tabs left open too long. Brazil’s Google News inquiry belongs firmly in the latter category. On April 3, Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) announced that its Tribunal had unanimously decided to send a seven-year-old administrative inquiry concerning Google’s use of journalistic content—whether for…
With deadly precision, the Trump administration has launched dozens of attacks on small boats in the waters off South America, killing nearly 200 people in a campaign U.S. officials say is meant to curb the flow of illicit drugs to the United States. But almost nine months into the operation, epidemiologists, addiction scientists and public…
A decade ago, I coauthored a report looking at how greater localism and subsidiarity could be achieved in a very centralised country where local councils have variable capabilities. We settled on policy trial areas. The basic gist was as follows. First, a community would pitch a policy trial area – a special economic zone – with different policy…
One political advertisement stood out from the thousands that blitzed the US presidential campaign of 2024. It inflicted enormous damage on the Democratic Party’s flagbearer, Kamala Harris. The ad’s central tagline deployed just two sentences: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Former President Bill Clinton urged the Harris Campaign to come back […]
Human welfare, not abstract emissions targets, must remain the lodestar. History shows that technological progress and energy abundance, not central planning, have lifted billions from poverty and improved environmental outcomes along the way. The post Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Net Zero Dream appeared first on Watts Up With That?.
Radio NZ reports: A developer is calling on the Upper Hutt City Council to let it build what it believes to be a crucial road, so it can construct 1600 homes. Guildford Timber Company (GTC) wants to build the road through an area of council-owned land known as the Silverstream Spur, home to a number…
SummaryThis chapter, on “Conservation, Ecology, and Growth,” is an early statement of free-market environmentalism. It begins by ridiculing leftists’ decades of contradictory complaints about capitalism: “Stagnation; deficient growth; overaffluence; overpoverty; the intellectual fashions changed like ladies’ hemlines,” and quoting one of Schumpeter’s best lines:Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death…
I don’t often claim to be ahead of the curve, but I’m going to pat myself on the back in today’s column about Swedish economic policy. More than 16 years ago, I started writing about Sweden’s shift from statism to markets. More than 14 years ago, I praised Swedish policy makers for significantly reducing the […]
Climate Change Dispatch reports DOJ Sues Minnesota Over State Climate Lawsuit Targeting Energy Companies. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images. Justice Department argues the state case oversteps federal authority, seeks to reshape national energy policy. The complaint, filed Monday, May 4, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, accuses […]
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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