#marginalrevolution — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #marginalrevolution, aggregated by home.social.
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Spain just became one of Europe's cheapest power markets. Here is how.
https://janrosenow.substack.com/p/spain-just-became-one-of-europes(Wind and solar.)
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Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino): "Imagining explaining to the Founding Fathers that the president imposed tariffs without an act of Congress and then removed them at the request of the King of England"
https://nitter.net/DominicJPino/status/2049926201267962110 -
"If we find that you actually have multiple obstructing stones and we need to go deeper into the biliary tree, then those are different CPTs. Regardless, we do what is medically indicated, document the codes used. At this point, unless your physician keeps billing fully in house, those get handled by a processer. Often, bills from multiple providers get handled by one processor who in turn gives insurance companies bills to their specifications."
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/04/on-health-care-price-transparency-from-the-comments.html
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#MarginalRevolution -
Taufiq Rahim (@taufiqzrahim): "My overall view of the provisional ceasefire agreement:
1. It is a good thing. If the war continued it would be devastating for all.
2. This war should not have been started in the first place, when it was started. The timing was wrong and its objectives could have been acheived in a different way."
[Mr. Rahim makes 16 points in total.]
https://nitter.net/taufiqzrahim/status/2041687818225787386#mVia #MarginalRevolution , https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/04/two-assorted-links.html
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The CA Minimum Wage Increase: Summing Up
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/04/the-ca-minimum-wage-increase-summing-up.htmlWhat was the consequence of California raising the #MinimumWage for fast food workers? More money for some, job loss for others, more expensive food for customers. "[P]rices rose, quantity demanded fell, and that’s what killed the jobs—not robots replacing workers. Not today, anyway."
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"We only have preliminary, widely ranging estimates for the 2024–2025 flu season. But we can say that there were roughly 2-3x the number of flu to Covid hospitalizations and about five times the number of flu infections, comparing the low and high ends of each estimate to one another. On the low end, death counts were about equal, but on the high end, flu deaths were more than double."
https://theprogressnetwork.substack.com/p/covids-quiet-retreat
#covid19 has added to the stock of human misery even so.
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"I think Elon Musk’s judgment started to worsen sometime around 2020. He was always mercurial, somewhat impulsive, prone to setting unrealistic timelines, and at times needlessly combative. However, I held hope that his positive qualities, which helped lead Tesla and SpaceX to tremendous success, would win out and he would reign in his worst tendencies. Sadly, the opposite happened, and now I no longer trust his leadership of Tesla."
https://strangecosmos.substack.com/p/self-driving-cars-arent-nearly-a?triedRedirect=true
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#MarginalRevolution's most popular posts of 2025. Here's one to consider:
"I am myself (largely) a cultural liberal [... but] let us be clear what is going on. The right-wing populists are gaining ground in so many countries because the cultural liberals in various parliaments and congresses are extremely reluctant to meet the preferences of their median voters. On the immigration issue most of all. And then they wish to talk about threats to democracy!"
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A Very Big Fight Over a Very Small Language
"Among the surviving Romansh idioms, Sursilvan reigns in the upper Rhine Valley; Sutsilvan in the posterior Rhine Valley; Surmiran in the Albula Valley and Oberhalbstein; and Puter and Vallader in the Engadine."
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That's from an essay about Sir #TomStoppard : https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/tom-stoppards-ordinary-magic
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On discute la #polqc sur #MarginalRevolution cette fin de semaine, en particulier la nouvelle loi sur la laïcité.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/11/saturday-assorted-links-537.html
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"Mexico is now the world’s top buyer of U.S. goods, according to data released by the U.S. government on Wednesday, outpacing Canada for the first time in nearly 30 years."
#Mexico is also the top exporter to the US; Canada is number 3.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/11/mexico-facts-of-the-day-6.html
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_partners_of_the_United_States , but note that the table is more up-to-date than the graphic.
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#MarginalRevolution points to a new paper claiming that increased housing costs are responsible for "51% of the total fertility rate decline between the 2000s and 2010s" in the US. Some interesting comments too.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/11/housing-costs-and-fertility.html
(Polls show that women want to have more children than they actually do have. We should learn what the impediments are.)
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In "The world turned upside down" Searle related this conversation with Foucault about Derrida:
'Michel Foucault once characterized Derrida’s prose style to me as “obscurantisme terroriste.” The text is written so obscurely that you can’t figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence “obscurantisme“) and then when one criticizes it, the author says, “Vous m’avez mal compris; vous êtes un idiot” (hence “terroriste“)."
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/09/monday-assorted-links-528.html#comments
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In "The world turned upside down" Searle related this conversation with Foucault about Derrida:
'Michel Foucault once characterized Derrida’s prose style to me as “obscurantisme terroriste.” The text is written so obscurely that you can’t figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence “obscurantisme“) and then when one criticizes it, the author says, “Vous m’avez mal compris; vous êtes un idiot” (hence “terroriste“)."
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/09/monday-assorted-links-528.html#comments
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In "The world turned upside down" Searle related this conversation with Foucault about Derrida:
'Michel Foucault once characterized Derrida’s prose style to me as “obscurantisme terroriste.” The text is written so obscurely that you can’t figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence “obscurantisme“) and then when one criticizes it, the author says, “Vous m’avez mal compris; vous êtes un idiot” (hence “terroriste“)."
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/09/monday-assorted-links-528.html#comments
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In "The world turned upside down" Searle related this conversation with Foucault about Derrida:
'Michel Foucault once characterized Derrida’s prose style to me as “obscurantisme terroriste.” The text is written so obscurely that you can’t figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence “obscurantisme“) and then when one criticizes it, the author says, “Vous m’avez mal compris; vous êtes un idiot” (hence “terroriste“)."
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/09/monday-assorted-links-528.html#comments
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In "The world turned upside down" Searle related this conversation with Foucault about Derrida:
'Michel Foucault once characterized Derrida’s prose style to me as “obscurantisme terroriste.” The text is written so obscurely that you can’t figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence “obscurantisme“) and then when one criticizes it, the author says, “Vous m’avez mal compris; vous êtes un idiot” (hence “terroriste“)."
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/09/monday-assorted-links-528.html#comments
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"The right-wing populists are gaining ground in so many countries because the cultural liberals in various parliaments and congresses are extremely reluctant to meet the preferences of their median voters. On the immigration issue most of all. And then they wish to talk about threats to democracy!"
A median voter theory of right-wing populism
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/08/a-median-voter-theory-of-right-wing-populism.html1/2
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"Walking around Mumbai it’s common to see some lovely, older buildings (circa 1920s perhaps) that are rentcontrol1in a great state of disrepair. A well maintained building can last for hundreds of years so why are these buildings falling apart? The answer is rent control. Bombay passed a rent control act in 1947 that froze rents at 1940 levels."
"[E]ven today there are thousands of flats where tenants are paying rents of 400-500 rupees"
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"Low-cost micro-units, often called single-room occupancies, or SROs, were once a reliable form of housing for the United States’ poorest residents of, and newcomers to, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and many other major U.S. cities. Well into the 20th century, SROs were the least expensive option on the housing market, providing a small room with a shared bathroom and sometimes a shared kitchen"
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"Yes, there are those still predicting rapid intelligence takeoff, along both quasi-utopian and quasi-dystopian paths. But as A.I. has begun to settle like sediment into the corners of our lives, A.I. hype has evolved, too, passing out of its prophetic phase into something more quotidian — a pattern familiar from our experience with nuclear proliferation, climate change and pandemic risk, among other charismatic megatraumas."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/opinion/ai-technology-chatgpt.html?smid=tw-share
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Peak cinema - by Scott Sumner - The Pursuit of Happiness
https://scottsumner.substack.com/p/peak-cinema"In this post, I’ll argue that the period from 1958 to 1963 is the artistic peak of filmmaking."
I have to confess that I've watched barely a handful of the films in this list — but the ones I watched were good. Someday...
Via #MarginalRevolution , https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/08/scott-sumner-is-still-the-greatest-movie-critic-in-the-world.html#comments
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How to Tell if Something is AI-Written
"Again, you may notice that no specific idea or image or word springs to mind when you’re reading AI-generated words."
https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/how-to-tell-if-something-is-ai-written
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derek guy on X: "Have you ever noticed that people dressed better in the past? Even in the summer, when it was scorching hot? Why is this? 🧵 https://t.co/m9GBXFRobM" / X
https://x.com/dieworkwear/status/1955756224030630264Via https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/08/thursday-assorted-links-515.html#comments
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Via #MarginalRevolution, a claim that self-driving electric vehicles and drones will revolutionise delivery of goods, increase productivity and remake the economy: https://austinvernon.site/blog/ailogistics.html
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"Europe has more heat deaths per year than the United States loses to gun deaths."
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/07/heat-death-sentences-to-ponder.html
It's also worth reading Sure's analysis of why Americans have lower life expectancy than Europeans. His summary: 'But medicine or "care"? Those just aren't major drivers. Guns, cars, drugs, and, if you must, obesity. That's the ballgame.'
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There's a discussion of #RankedChoiceVoting at #MarginalRevolution : https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/06/the-effects-of-ranked-choice-voting-on-substantive-representation.html
It's spurred by a recent paper claiming, based on an analysis of (US?) city council elections, that RCV has small effects on outcomes.
(I'd like to read the paper to better understand the methodology and conclusions.)
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I see a claim on Twitter that Americans reporting poor mental health are much more likely to be Ds, and those reporting excellent mental health are much more likely to be Rs. (The claim is from #NateSilver, but I've seen it elsewhere.)
1. Can't believe everything you read on the Internet.
2. Might be true.
3. I wonder if there's a relationship between mental health and party affiliation in Canada.
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"As a bishop in Peru, Robert Prevost was often on the lookout for used cars that he could buy cheap and fix up himself for use in parishes around his diocese. With cars that were really broken down, he'd watch YouTube videos to learn how to fix them."
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"Euphemisms in the assisted dying debate cloak it in language of compassion and discretion, but behind the veil there are some ugly truths. Some MPs debating the law are offended by terms such as suicide and killing, but if we hide from the reality of the words we use in the debate, we will also hide from the reality of the law."
https://tomtugendhat.substack.com/p/white-lies-hide-dark-truths
