It is a linkblog and digital garden for the weird, wonderful, and unexpectedly useful things I find on the internet. Read what I have kept below, wander through a subject, or visit Small Web, my directory of independent blogs.
keep reading — 5 min ↗A country that suppresses household consumption while simultaneously facing a collapse of property investment will run persistent current-account surpluses and will, other things equal, have a weak currency. A country with insufficient private savings and unsustainably large fiscal deficits will run persistent current-account deficits and will, other things equal, have a strong real exchange rate against other other…
Cool site to visualize tariffs, sanctions, and global trade deals. https://portolan.cc/ https://x.com/i/status/2081473121953911112
keep reading — 1 min ↗Lots of new inequality statistics from the World Bank's PIP on Our World in Data: .png>) Inequality statistics are heavily contested and rightly so, but read the right way, they still have some use.
keep reading — 1 min ↗keep reading — 2 min ↗I’m feeling it right now. I had to set a timer for 15 minute on my computer and block all distractions to write this. If I didn’t force myself to focus I would easily get distracted by something after few minutes. Even when I’m doing things that I’ve been waiting to do it, I still feel the urge to do something else. I don’t know how and when this happened. During the last few years I was always studying, working, and doing…
keep reading — 1 min ↗The WhatsApp uncles and aunties generation that have seen the benefits of the two decades after liberalisation are content with their “settled” lives, their garba in Vietnam and their misguided belief about India’s standing going up in the world because of this government. But the reality confronting the Insta generation is that their future isn’t as rosy and the correcting and disciplining mechanism of the political system…
keep reading — 3 min ↗Governments find such protests much harder to confront because there is no obvious ideological counter-narrative. One can’t simply invoke nationalism or accuse every dissatisfied student of serving foreign interests when the grievance concerns administrative failure. The usual political vocabulary becomes ineffective. More importantly, governments are generally better equipped to deal with identifiable opponents than of…
keep reading — 2 min ↗Simon: Let’s talk a little bit about the human element. A lot of people are feeling a sense of loss now that so much of what they considered to be their role in building software is being subsumed by the models. How do you think about that? How has the past year and a half changed the way you think about your own craft and the value that you add? Thariq: Cat and Boris are such good reminders that you have to be more…
One older leaf, brought back into the light.
keep reading — 1 min ↗Goodman writes: Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed…