The article really wants to drive home how bad "central planning" is, but the problem, as per the article, originates from the fact that the food banks themselves are operating semi-independently from Feeding America. So actually the whole problem originates because you already have decentralization, which is the opposite of central planning. And this is a common situation with a lot of public services when they do a half-assed approach of providing the service publicly. Healthcare is a good example.
As per the article, the issue was that due to the food banks operating independently, the food banks were not relying information about their locally sourced food donations to Feeding America. Their solution is a fake currency, basically a way of rationing food from Feeding America. But of course they wouldn't put it in those terms, because of the socialist connotation of the word, "rationing". Instead they call it "market design". LOL. But the point is, Walmart which is more centralized than this operation, has no problem. So actually central planning isn't the issue here. The issue here is that you have a decentralized operation that necessitates a market mechanism.
Politics informed by ideological economists creates the problem. Economists informed by political ideologies create the solution to the problem that only exists because of their design.
Funny to see “rationing” used to describe bidding, instead of the clear rationing approach used first: each food bank got an allocation of all foods based on population served.
Just because the new approach accomplished the goals of the old one better, that doesn’t mean it took the old approach’s name. ;)
Brilliantly put. Also, the very fact that there are millions of underfed people in the richest country in the world, is itself evidence of the economic failure of markets. As Richard Wolff put it: in a milk shortage, markets allocate milk to the people with the most money - i.e. the least need for milk. That's not efficient.
I'm not the person you asked, but I assume their basis is that the majority of the Adult US Population is overweight or obese.[1]
However, we're conflating the related problems of hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition. Food insecurity at its most extreme will result in hunger (a lack of any food), but the affordable food that is available in food deserts (and at food banks) is often ultraprocessed and incompletely nutritious, which can lead to obesity.[2]
Largely, Americans don't seem to be affected by "hunger" as defined by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization[3], but are very affected by malnutrition and food insecurity (as defined by that same body).
The Rest is History is good, depending on the topic. Both guests have a bit of bias which you have to sort of take into account, not that different from The Rest is Politics.
Mishal Husain has a new podcast on Bloomberg TV which so far was excellent.
Also from Bloomberg TV, Big Take is often interesting.
I still enjoy Lex Fridman, again depending on the guest. Dwarkesh Patel same shit as Lex, but he pretends he knows something about AI.
Western politics is all about constructing these narratives that hide the hypocrisy and self-serving nature of the dominant political factions. You can see it everywhere, but this is one clear example of it.
> why didn't he just fit the two H100s into a better desktop box?
I expect because they were no longer in the sort of condition to sell as new machines? They were clearly well used and selling "as seen" is the lowest reputational risk associated with offload
There also weren't H100s available to scavenge. GH200 puts the Grace CPU and H100 GPU on a big module with a custom form factor and connectors, so the only viable route for using those GPUs was to keep all the electronics together and build a suitable case and cooling system around them. There wasn't any way to adapt any of this for use in an ordinary EATX case or with a different CPU, because the GPUs weren't PCIe add-in cards.
At that pricing I honestly thought they fell off a truck. Even well used H100 go for more than that entire system. In the US an RTX A6000 Ada is already close in price.
These are on a custom board from Nvidia, so its not possible to separate them. I think the seller usually gets H100's and them into a custom case, with a PCIE adapter to the server GPUs.
This thing too unwieldy to make into a desktop (you can see how much effort it took), and was in pretty bad condition. I think he just wanted to get rid of it without having to deal with returns. I took a bet on it, and was lucky it paid out.
We build these desktops from Nvidia servers we buy from reputable manufacturers like Pegatron, Gigabyte, Asrock Rack, and many more.
H100 PCI and GH200 are two very different things. The advantages of Grace Hopper are much higher connections speeds, bandwidth and lower power consumption.
The farmers and the sawmill operators are easily explained. I also listen to Bloomberg, lol. Those people are rich and most of their wealth is now diversified away from their businesses, and while they would rather keep those businesses alive because it's part of their family identity, they care more about reducing their taxes on their overall net worth.
Please explain the ACA subsidies and SNAP benefit cuts to rural republican voters who will still vote for this then. Are these people going to change their vote? Again, likely not. Their mental model and their identity is rigid (along with a bit of in group and tribalism) and they will very likely vote this way to the very end. You can live a better life by leaving while waiting for these voters to age out, because you cannot change their mind or their vote. If you stay, you will be exposed to governance outcomes from their votes.
You can think of it as the grey rock method in a political and expat context. You don't engage, doing so would be of no value; you just ignore and leave. Life is short, optimize accordingly.
They are obviously not voting for a better life for themselves. They are voting for a worse life for their perceived enemies. A huge number of voters would rather suffer if it means people they don't like will suffer even more.
It's a small country, relatively speaking. Rather dull cities, again relatively speaking. Rural land is hard to come by and expensive. Not a lot of sunshine hours either. Not English speaking, not an immigrant culture, and quite an insular society so if you're not born there it kinda sucks. The cities punch way above their weight, but in total the tech job market is still tiny compared to the US.
If you like being outdoors, Switzerland has one landscape, pretty much.
It's heaven for rich people, but a very specific kind of heaven.
I don't think that's abnormal. That's the norm for political leaders in western countries. There are very, very, few people that rise to leadership positions from a purely working class background.
Even Jeremy Corbyn grew up middle class. It's almost tautological that leaders are going to be above average in some respect and this talent will be recognized early and the way it works in western countries, the elite institutions try to recruit all the talented folk from non-elite backgrounds into their ranks.
I think it's overall a good thing that not all people from elite backgrounds with above average IQ/skills end up being purely upper class aligned.
It approximately is, imho. Wealth follows a power law distribution. People put the dividing line at different points, but it doesn't matter so much. The elite are a tiny fraction. The middle class are also a relatively small faction of the population and for the most part, the middle class tend to be lumped in with the elite, because they tend to be in complementary political factions.
Now I know that in the US, people group everyone with a job in the middle class, but that's just semantics.
What they mean is that there are plenty of people with organizational skills that come from a working class background, and essentially all of the smartest people in science come from working class, even immigrant backgrounds. Why? Simple: it takes a lot of long, concerted effort, with few results, and people are not very likely to do that if they have it too easy in childhood.
It's birth, not brains or organizational skills that make "leaders" in Europe. Hell, the highest European politician gets criticized for exactly that a great many times. Very lucky to be born where she was born, not much at all in terms of accomplishments, and zero spectacular achievements.
Yanis Varoufakis is a rich kid as is his wife, and their relatives. That's my point. He is part of the very thing he claims to be fighting.
You say he is talented. I say he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and has been promoted by some powerful institutions such as mainstream media and elite universities. He did not get up there on his own. He isn't some street kid from Athens who clawed his way up by his own intellect.
By the way, I don't have a big problem with Corbyn as an individual. I think he is personally honest. I do have concerns that a decent man like him (or Bernie Sanders) may be used by individuals who are less honest. That has happened in the British Labour Party many times.
I've been saying this since before Yanis was even a Greek MP. It's just so damn ironic that capitalism and free markets ended up building these huge corporations which are essentially planned economies at nation state scale.
It's only ironic if you don't understand that all of this is the logical endpoint of any capitalist economy. Accumulation of capital is the name of the game, and capital is power. At some point, the largest actors inevitably become untouchable. There can be no free market, they will always devolve into this plutocracy.
Yes. As someone who has grown up in a country occupied by communists and who knows how much worse is that than anything that can be imagined by someone without firsthand experience, I can say that the claim which was frequent in Western propaganda that communism is something opposed to capitalism is completely false.
There is a great difference between theoretical communism and practical communism. Theoretical communism was just a bunch of lies without any relationship to the practical communism that was implemented in any of the countries claiming to attempt to realize a communist society.
On the other hand, practical communism has been everywhere something not opposite to capitalism, but something equivalent with the final stage of unregulated capitalism, where the big monopolies have won in every market, leaving no alternatives.
During the last 25 years I have been dismayed to watch every year how the Western societies become more and more alike to the communist societies that they had criticized vigorously a half of century ago.
Correct me if I'm wrong but LeCun is focused on learning from video, whereas Fei-Fei Li is doing robotic simulations. Also I think Fei-Fei Li's approach is still using transformers and not buying into JEPA.
As per the article, the issue was that due to the food banks operating independently, the food banks were not relying information about their locally sourced food donations to Feeding America. Their solution is a fake currency, basically a way of rationing food from Feeding America. But of course they wouldn't put it in those terms, because of the socialist connotation of the word, "rationing". Instead they call it "market design". LOL. But the point is, Walmart which is more centralized than this operation, has no problem. So actually central planning isn't the issue here. The issue here is that you have a decentralized operation that necessitates a market mechanism.
Politics informed by ideological economists creates the problem. Economists informed by political ideologies create the solution to the problem that only exists because of their design.
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