pattison.bsky.social

My main takeaway from Anthropic’s S-1, AWS capacity being sold out thru 2027 and the AI-driven cuts at Barclays, Microsoft & American Express is that demand for AI is massive. There’s a bubble due to not enough datacenter capacity to satisfy the current demand but this will work out in the long run

Court tosses vaccine skeptic Alex Berenson's suit against Twitter

NYT reports that among House Majority Dems' Day One priorities next year would be to pass legislation "to end Mr. Trump’s tariffs and restore congressional power over trade policy." www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/u...

My favorite political ad of all time and it's not even close

"Yet the finding that [the China Shock] caused one in four manufacturing jobs lost from 1990 to 2007 has not aged well. Neither has the populist turn against free trade that began around the time of the original research" 🔥 www.economist.com/finance-and-...

www.wsj.com/world/asia/t...

We’re in a weird intermediate state where my AI agent, pretending to be human, calls a business and their AI agent, also pretending to be human, answers. Then they have a weird uncanny valley conversation. Eventually this will just be a bunch of API calls instead of this inefficient rigmarole.

wut?

Tonight, B.C. voters ousted David Eby's NDP in favor of the Conservatives led by Lorne Doerksen only 7 weeks after the Tories were on the verge of collapse. Doerksen comes across as forward thinking & gracious. He's no Maple MAGA. the1onlyaarongoldstein.blogspot.com/2026/10/bc-v...

good

Just submitted a letter to the editor to the Washington Post that could change the course of trade policy history if they publish it. Watch this space for updates.

An OpenAI researcher (Noam Brown) was generally mocked last month for suggesting that even air-gapped AI models on separate computers would find a way to communicate with each other, perhaps through CPU temperature changes. Given this latest report from OpenAI, it doesn’t seem so implausible.

Inclusionary zoning cuts housing construction by as much as a third, argues a PRI commentary citing a July UC Irvine study. Builders must set aside homes or pay a fee, which raises project costs and makes fewer projects pencil out. www.pacificresearch.org/inclusionary...

"People are leaving “I Voted” stickers on a memorial residents have set up to honor the late Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. 'Seventy of these stickers. We counted,' Araujo’s son Ronaldo beamed in a video. 'Thank you guys for voting and thinking about my dad.'” open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa...

I asked Claude how much it would have taken to develop Econvitals pre-coding agents. It's answer: a team of about 50 people working for three years with a budget of $20 million. Is this correct or too high? I'm not sure. https://econvitals.org/about/before-ai/

My latest debunks 3 myths re US manufacturing jobs: 1) they're all good paying; 2) they're all attainable by anyone w/ a HS degree; & 3) Americans are dying to work them. These myths fuel a lot of bad policy (eg tariffs); pols should stop spreading them www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti... (🎁 )

When you tax wealth, you're taxing the buildings we all live in, the businesses that employ us, and the research labs that create life-saving drugs, explains Cato’s Adam Michel.

Trump's Economic Policies Are Worse Than You Thought youtube.com/shorts/S1uy-...

If you want people to switch to electricity for home heat and cars (and ultimately, like, steel) then you’re going to need to generate and transmit a lot more electricity and it’s a huge improvement on the status quo whether or not some of that electricity comes from burning methane.

corruption, the likes of which the world has never seen before,

"The Causal Effect of Foreign Ideas on U.S. Innovation" marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevo... "Globalization is once again better than many people realize:"

Wild. BC supremacy I guess. Surrey gets a Skytrain that is the same lenght, and twice as fast for LESS.

California’s “billionaire tax” will leave the state and its residents worse off, Cato’s Adam Michel predicts.

What do Larry Kudlow, Janet Yellen, Steve Mnuchin, Jared Bernstein & me have in common? We all believe the permitting reform bill is essential for America to build, grow, tackle climate change and maintain our technological lead. Probably the broadest letter I've ever signed.

i would simply change the harmful policies

Most billionaire wealth isn't in yachts or jewelry — that's just a few percent of it. Most is productive business capital: companies that employ people, build things, and fund research. Tax that wealth and you're taxing the businesses that employ us all. Cato's Adam Michel explains.

"No, DataCenters are Not Crowding-Out Other Investments" marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevo... "rather than datacenters and AI investment 'crowding out' other investment, my interpretation is that AI investment is a bright spot in what would otherwise be a more negative economy"

ANOTHER EQUITY STAKE AND NOW AT THE FAA WHAT ARE WE EVEN DOING www.politico.com/news/2026/10...

trump took trumpet

The Trump administration "sees the import of brass instruments such as trombones, tubas, and trumpets as a national security threat because they contain copper, a critical mineral." The resulting tariffs are hurting music education. [James Bacchus, Cato]

“it is the mark of the immature man that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while it is the mark of the mature man that he wants to live humbly for one.”

How does anyone still not see that Trump foreign policy is not based on US national interest, or allies, but on Trump and his corrupt cronies' personal interests? High diesel prices: bad for Trump. That means Russia is trying to help, Ukraine is trying to hurt, and US policy should act accordingly.

Join Cato to debate REAL ID, watch listing, Flock cameras, and the future of transportation surveillance in the US. Featuring: Cato's Patrick G. Eddington and Laura Bondank-Harmon, Rachel Levinson-Waldman (Brennan Center for Justice), and Jim Harper (AEI). Watch on YT: https://ow.ly/pO8Y50ZXEE8

It is one week until October 20, the day my new book, Co-Existence comes out! If you pre-order before then, you get a 10 minute AI voice interview that builds a set of customized prompts, readings & use cases for you based on ideas from the book. Pre-order or claim the bonus: co-existence.ai

Ah, well, nevertheless: "Republicans face midterm backlash from factory workers squeezed out of jobs by Trump’s tariffs" apnews.com/article/trum...

Uh oh, did someone’s website and personal account experience a big drop in activity after Ukraine hit a Russian data center?

and i’m here for it

Depravity indeed.

never mind

This is an excellent point. When pro-democracy, anti-corruption forces get power, they won't need elaborate new laws to start getting Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, Peter Thiel, and other tech oligarchs out of government. They've almost certainly committed fraud and other already existing crimes.

“clicking around on websites that have existed for 8 years is a natural part of the human experience“ is one of the worst arguments against using AI I have ever heard, and that’s saying something. 99+% of the humans who ever lived have never done anything like it www.hottakes.space/p/a-slow-ced...

the immigration reform and control act, signed by reagan, granted legal status to 3 million undocumented immigrants.

Evildoers create and stream snuff films. We should not.

“The level of education in a society — of women in particular — is one of the most important predictors for the number of children families have.”

This document is going to be an assigned reading in college classes that cover this moment in time, there's a lot happening in a few paragraphs... www.ahmath.org/statements

"one could also, and perhaps more reasonably, say that government borrowing is stymieing what might otherwise be a very broad-based, AI-driven, private sector investment boom." www.ft.com/content/bf40...

Our research leads us to believe liberty is good, and the freedom to move and associate across borders is one aspect of liberty. But after we triumph and have a libertarian system, and we stop writing about immigration, Cato will still be a think tank. www.foxnews.com/politics/rep...

end timezones. everyone on utc.