Thiemo Fetzer 🇪🇺🇺🇦 - same handle elsewhere

Reallocation is the mother of games

Yes we can, and yes — we must.

T/S: Topologies of productive ignorance — between sector economic growth through noise filtering / “translation”

The set of what is possible expands, the set what is impossible shrinks. What principles we impose on the social dimension of this development reveals much about how we conceptualize human agency and freedom.

Security vulnerabilities are an essential part of the security infrastructure. As these go, suitable “replacements” need to be found. Good old "trust", anyone? Trust, but (delayed) verification?

Every now and then it is useful to look back. In this article for The Globalist I provided a succinct overview of the incentive mix around Iran, now with added contextual data. In a high dimensional world, low dimensional narratives are dangerous -- yet they are pervasive...

trfetzer.comTen Inconvenient Truths About the Energy Implications of the Iran CrisisAn interactive evidence reader linking the article’s claims directly to quantitative exhibits, source data, and related research.

here is the marked up post with an added data layer https://www.trfetzer.com/ten-inconvenient-truths-iran-crisis-evidence-provenance/

Evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence: they waited for the WTO moratorium on electronic transmissions to collapse before establishing a comparative advantage in intergalactic data exports.

Very useful points Context: https://x.com/dix_rafael/status/2108622448375763112

x.comSam Greene (@samagreene) on XBack in November 2024 — and even until earlier this year — my analysis was that, while Trump was willing to sell out Ukraine, the payoff from normalizing relations with Russia was insufficient to cove...

Worrisome Context: https://x.com/i/status/2111386091181969738

Yes we can. Context: https://x.com/MosiniElisa/status/2112198400615882996

It should be obvious that the agentic economy may eliminate many of the inattention economy rents, this will redefine the financial system as we know it.

Apparently, that is my lecturing style

Thiemo Fetzer 🇪🇺🇺🇦 - same handle elsewhere reposted

4 Mar

I think its worthy to do a short "explainer" of why or how coding assistants have become so (non-linearly) good at what they do. At a very high level, you can think of this as reinforcement learning "in action". Model complexity or size has not really evolved much in recent...

It is what it is

x.comShanu Mathew (@ShanuMathew93) on XWhy are Euro auto brands losing to China? Well... let's look at costs, productivity, employee output, etc. Hard to compete with this. "Using VW’s auto plants as a proxy, labor costs, labor productivi...

A statistic that I keep reiterating is the following: BYD in China has a 50% cost advantage making EVs relative to Tesla in China. Context: https://x.com/i/status/2108494559621582977

It’s key to redirect CN supply capacity in the direction where in particular dynamically the biggest counterfactual emissions reductions can be achieved

Thiemo Fetzer 🇪🇺🇺🇦 - same handle elsewhere reposted

Ceci n'est pas une joke

⤵️

Thiemo Fetzer 🇪🇺🇺🇦 - same handle elsewhere@trfetzer.com

Ceci n'est pas une joke

Informational boundaries of the state anyone?

Still time to sign up

Thiemo Fetzer 🇪🇺🇺🇦 - same handle elsewhere@trfetzer.com

https://www.linkedin.com/events/industryatwar-fieldnotesfromukr7497666439223615488/ Sign up: https://luma.com/event/manage/evt-NpD8RLnTvWHH82E

This is another major development building on the recent changes and advances in payment infrastructure in Europe. Expansion of pan-European solutions under a common regulatory umbrella can effectively redefine market for information traces and help its localization.

source: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/european-payments-groups-join-forces-lessen-us-reliance-2026-09-30

reuters.comEuropean payments groups join forces to challenge US dominanceEuropean payment groups serving 130 million people, including Spain's Bizum, Italy's Bancomat and Brussels-based Wero, said on Wednesday they were joining forces to create a cross-border payments netw...

https://x.com/fetzert/status/1833933896251060454?s=20

Thiemo Fetzer 🇪🇺🇺🇦 - same handle elsewhere@trfetzer.com

I want to be far from being alarmist but the German drafting suggestions for Irish presidency will effectively kill GDPR. This effectively is a rent transfer to firms that, in the past, illegitimately collected data without consent or not purpose bound that are now allowed...

to repurpose or reuse data. This effectively would entrench a structural advantage towards players who, in the past, may have been acting in a way that could be described as gross misconduct, retaining e.g. user data, collecting more user data than necessary etc etc...

Agreed! I've said this before, but thinking about the joint distribution of descriptive and better identified estimates is central. Context: https://x.com/annastansbury/status/2101751449508094072

We need to invest in more reliable and better quality national statistics Context: https://x.com/annastansbury/status/2103939141423841528

I want to highlight is around the digital economy, in particular, the attention economy: there competition for attention has tournament features with convex rewards and so competition can become zero sum, with some emerging IO work on this

@apuravbhatiya Jan Auerbach presents "Immigration and Productivity: Unpacking the Role of Spatial Sorting". They unpack a new way of looking at immigration: differential home bias btw migrants/natives can have large GE spillover effects on natives due to improved labor market matching.

@apuravbhatiya And that was a wrap. Many thanks to the excellent organization and careful curation of the workshop by Sugata Ghosh, Anirban Mitra and Sarmistha Pal and thanks to British Academy and Leverhulme for the funding. There was a lot of food for thought and lots of new connections.

homophily that they explore. This breakdown led to the emergence of walled gardens. Back in 2009 I was writing about federated blogosphere in context of new OpenID standard allowing data federation. Since 2022 federation is "back" with users reclaiming digital self sovereignty.

Apurav Bhatiya (Birmingham) presents "From Modi's India to Westminster: How Hindu Nationalism Shapes Anti-Muslim Rhetoric Abroad". This paper suggests how home-country origin social conflict can be transplanted into different communities, thereby threatening cohesion.

Giacomo De Luca (Edinburgh) is presenting "Serving Countries, Shaping Views: the Impact of Military Conscription on Attitude towards Immigrants". Using the roll back of military service post 1990s they show that compulsory military service worsens attitudes towards immigration.

Maria Petrova is presenting a keynote "Socializing Alone: How Online Homophily Has Undermined Social Cohesion in the US", this uses Facebook's end of data federation causing a shock in the cost of importing ones social graph into a different platform. This creates variation in...

Most unfortunate typo...@harrypickard !

Thiemo Fetzer 🇪🇺🇺🇦 - same handle elsewhere@trfetzer.com

Harry Prickard is presenting work "Exposure to Populism and Zero-Sum Thinking". Essentially, they ask to what extent experience of populism growing up shapes zero-sum thinking. This effectively takes the work on zero sum thinking further into the cultural programming domain,...

Post coffee, Anirban Mitra (Kent) is presenting "From Ballots to Belonging: Minority Representation and Public Spending for Social Cohesion in English Local Governments". They show that minority representation increases public spending towards education, culture & transportation.

On the second day, Jaime Perreira is presenting "Media Cross-Amplification and Public Opinion: Evidence from Television Coverage of Social Media", some compelling work that documents the news agenda setting power via social media.

Now there is significant developments in Europe. On 21 September, the European Central Bank launched Pontes. The ECB’s new infrastructure for settling tokenised assets in central-bank money is explicitly framed around monetary sovereignty and reducing dependence on dollar stablecoins. The

x.comThiemo Fetzer 🇪🇺🇺🇦 - same handle elsewhere (@fetzert) on XIt hurts when you feel like you are in their heads but struggle explaining what is going on. This may turn out to be "spot on". Reducing the investibility of the US diminishes financial inflows dome...

Context: https://x.com/fetzert/status/1908824114887860297

Canada is next. As of today it seems. Similar design, inter bank.

https://www.trfetzer.com/attention-markets-reward-curvature-and-the-case-for-de-weaponizing-the-information-sphere/

trfetzer.comAttention Markets, Reward Curvature, and the Case for De-Weaponizing the Information SphereI wanted to share a longer reflection that connects a few threads I have been working on over the past years: narratives, validation, platform competition, and the political economy of information…

Very happy to participate at the British Academy-Leverhulme Trust funded Workshop on "Diversity and the Political Economy of Social Cohesion" over the next two days. Its an excellent workshop in sunny Uxbridge, I will be sharing the papers across the workshop.

Jan Vogler is discussing the full breadth of his work understanding the emergence of modern bureaucracies in the context of socio-economic conflict. You should definitely check out his book!

I was able to start us off and discussed some synthesis of work across projects to offer a high-dimensional read of the redefinition of informational boundaries in the world of AI with a specific focus on geopolitics.

Next we have Michele Battisti presenting "Automation and State Repression". They build a formal model of state repression and tests it using cross country evidence. Key insight: state repression may be a rational response as automation threat national control over production system.