All articles from Brad DeLong
Is the Day of the Data Center About to Be Over?
Marco Arment's Setup as the Canary in the Coal Mine—or, Rather, as the 50 Mac Mini Server Farm Vastly More Efficient than the NVIDIA-Powered Cloud-Bound Hyperscalers...
READING: U.S. Grant: Personal Memoirs :: Chapter 68
Humanity's bravery & sacrifice & divinity’s vengeance & wrath, Grant & Lee, sorrowful victory & unacknowledged defeat at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865…
Contemporary Governance & Contemporary Prosperity & Past Settler Colonialism & Its Ilk: What Can We Infer, Really?
Colonial origins, causal claims, the baggage left behind in the overhead bin via the absence of a structural model, settler-colonist mortality, modern pro-prosperity “institutions”, and structural...
CROSSPOST: PAUL KRUGMAN: Ignorance & Ignominy
Stochastic Lobsters, Token Tsunamis, & the Spinning-Up of Isaac576Bot
“Time to anthropomorphize the heck out of It!”: OpenClaw & Agentic AI, Chris Blattman’s succumbing to the ClaudeBorg—”resistance is futile”—the unreasonable effectiveness of MAMLMs, Anthropic...
CROSSPOST: COSMA SHALIZI: Aware of All Internet Traditions: Large Language Models as Information Retrieval & Synthesis
The real superintelligence is the House of Intellect we built since -3000; LLMs simply give us a dangerously seductive key to its front door, for LLMs are merely (“merely”!) high-speed front‑ends...
"Contango", "Backwardation", & the Current Freaking-Out of the Oil Market
A quick primer on obscure bits of long-ago City-of-London slang, war, scarcity, the global intertemporal price system, futures-market curves, interest rates, and “convenience yields”…
CROSSPOST: STEVE VLADECK: 219. Drunks, Lampposts, & the Birthright Citizenship Case
Very nice indeed from Steve Vladeck. But. Steve’s subhead: “Efforts to backfill [fake] historical support for President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order wouldn’t have been possible...
READING: FRED CLARK: Holy Saturday
As I understand the theology (and I may not), each year Believers do not only remember and commemorate but participate in Jesus of Nazareth’s journey; Thus on Holy Saturday God is really and truly...
Recognize & Anchor Yourself in Truth & Reality: The Supreme Court Is 14 1/2 Months Late to the Birthright-Citizenship Party
For fourteen months, the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc has slow-walked the most nakedly unconstitutional move of Trump’s presidency: his attempt to erase birthright citizenship by decree. We...
Confused Notes on the War on Iran: Everyone Is Losing Except for Surviving IRGC Officers Getting Swift Promotions
This is not a war about “victory”; it is a slow, grinding competition in which the prize is to lose the most. A reckless White House and a very large, not‑very‑important Iran have managed to trap...