timelets

Three decades ago, the entire middle 40% held a greater share of wealth than the top 1%. Today the reverse is true, with Moody’s Analytics recently estimating that the top 10% of US households now make up about half of all spending.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-01-14/america-s-a-la-carte-economy-is-making-everyone-feel-poorer

In "Nexus," Yuval Noah Harari defines information as something that creates new realities by connecting different points into a network. Unlike the naive view, which sees information primarily as an attempt to represent reality, Harari emphasizes that information's defining feature is connection rather than representation. Information can take many forms, such as music, DNA, or stories, and its primary role is to connect and form networks, rather than merely represent preexisting realities.

On the other hand, if business cycles are caused by unanticipated shifts in the entire pattern of tastes and technologies across sectors, we might call that uncertainty noise. I believe that these shifts are significant for the economy as a whole because they do not cancel in any meaningful sense. The number of sectors in which there is a match between tastes and technology varies a lot over time.

When it is high, we have an expansion. When it is low, we have a recession.

...the diversity in a more complex economy means that a single crop failure or demand shock cannot have such a devastating effect; but on the other hand, the specialization in a more complex economy means that when there is a mismatch between tastes and technology, it is costly to move skills and machines between sectors to correct the mismatch.
...
Unanticipated shifts in tastes and technology within and across sectors is what we call information in discussing financial markets.

Noise. Fisher Black, 1986.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1986.tb04513.x
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1986.tb04513.x

1. Cities of China* — 626m cameras to 1.43bn people = 439.07 cameras per 1,000 people
2. Hyderabad, India — 900,000 cameras for 10,801,163 people = 83.32 cameras per 1,000 people
3. Indore, India – 200,000 cameras per 3,302,077 people = 60.57 cameras per 1,000 people
4. Delhi, India — 449,934 cameras for 22,547,000 people = 19.96 cameras per 1,000 people
5. Singapore, Singapore — 109,072 cameras for 6,080,859 people = 17.94 cameras per 1,000 people
6. Moscow, Russia — 214,000 cameras for 12,680,389 people = 16.88 cameras per 1,000 people
7. Baghdad, Iraq — 120,000 cameras for 7,711,305 people = 15.56 cameras per 1,000 people
8. Seoul, South Korea — 144,513 cameras for 9,988,049 people = 14.47 cameras per 1,000 people
9. St. Petersburg, Russia — 75,000 cameras for 5,561,294 people = 13.49 cameras per 1,000 people
10. London, England (UK) — 127,423 cameras for 9,648,110 people = 13.21 cameras per 1,000 people.

As Vincent Wang reminded me, ChatGPT leapfrogged GPT3 in performance by introducing reinforcement learning (RL) to fine-tune its outputs as an interlocutor, and RL is the machine learning approach to “solving agency”. It is a form of agency never seen before, because it is successful and can “learn” and improve its behaviour without having to be intelligent to do so. It is a form of agency that is alien to any culture in any past, because humanity has always and everywhere seen this kind of agency — which is not that of a sea wave, which makes the difference, but can make nothing but that difference, without being able to “learn” to make a different or better difference —as a natural or even supernatural form of agency.
...

We have decoupled the ability to act successfully from the need to be intelligent, understand, reflect, consider or grasp anything. We have liberated agency from intelligence.

Luciano Floridi, 2023.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-023-00621-y

...pushing Musk’s tweets at times this week to the top of users’ feeds, where they appeared under a section labeled “For You.”

Под функцией понимается поступок действующего лица, определенный с точки зрения его значимости для хода действия.

I.Постоянными, устойчивыми элементами сказки служат функции действующих лиц, независимо от того, кем и как
они выполняются. Они образуют основные составные части сказки.
II. Число функций , известных волшебнойсказке, — о г р а н и ч е н о .
III.Последовательность функций всегда одинакова.
IV.Все волшебные сказки однотипны по своему строению.

-- Пропп, Морфология Сказки, 1928.
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