Pun Salad

The latest xkcd:

Mouseover: "You legs may have a comparative advantage at running, but we arms have a competitive advantage at swinging hammers, so unless you accept that we're the dominant limbs and stop hogging the oxygen, that running advantage won't be around for long."

I'm very sure President Trump would not get the metaphor.

Also of note:

• A safe assertion from Don Boudreaux. He posts a letter he sent to the WSJ: Bill Gates's Imagination Is Not Reality.

  Background: Gates wrote a longish article on his "Gates Notes" website: The choices we make about AI now are critical. The WSJ summarized: Bill Gates Issues Warning on AI Rollout’s Impact. Three Takeaways From His 5,784-Word Essay (WSJ gifted link)

  Here's Don's LTE, making sense:

  You report that Bill Gates “issued a stark warning about AI’s risks to employment and the human condition” (“Three Takeaways From Bill Gates’s 5,784-Word Warning on AI: ‘There Is No Plan’,” August 26). He complains about AI that “we are not preparing for it,” for he doesn’t “see evidence that leaders, experts and communities are confronting the challenges adequately.” And to slow the adoption of AI, Mr. Gates wants to tax AI tokens and bots.

  A far more appropriate warning is against the hubris of Mr. Gates. Because he personally cannot imagine how people free of government coercion will creatively experiment and discover ways of dealing with economic change brought on by AI, he arrogantly presumes that such experimentation and discovery won’t occur. His poor imagination combines with his apparent ignorance of economic history – a history replete with examples of individuals in free societies anticipating challenges and meeting these in ways that politicians and bureaucrats could not possibly match – to cause him to embrace the ‘solution’ beloved by autocrats and tyrants: collective manipulation and management of the economy.

  Almost all of what the late Nobel laureate Oliver Williamson called “the economic institutions of capitalism”* emerged through decentralized processes of trial and error in competitive markets – venues in which free individuals, with local knowledge, cooperate with each other to confront problems with nuance, fullness, and creativity that are utterly unattainable by the heavy hand of the state.

  I have a considerable amount of respect for Bill Gates. He's not your usual politician that thinks he can make better business decisions than people with skin in the game. But unfortunately he makes up for it with a gigabyte of hubris.

• Clowns to the right of him, and also to the left. James Freeman diagnoses Chuck Schumer’s New Headache. (WSJ gifted link) And my little state is involved! And LFOD is invoked!

  Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has been sounding increasingly optimistic about seizing a majority in the upper chamber after the November elections, and not without cause. The party of a second-term president routinely takes a shellacking in the midterms, and polls in various Senate races suggest Republicans could surrender a number of seats. But now there’s an open Democratic seat that is looking more vulnerable.

  Mr. Schumer wants to play offense against incumbent Republicans, but he’s going to have to spend more time and money playing defense in New Hampshire, where Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen is retiring and her expected replacement, Rep. Chris Pappas, suddenly appears to be struggling.

  “Live Free or Die” is New Hampshire’s stirring motto, and consistent with this ultimate respect for liberty, the state tends toward a live-and-let-live culture. Therefore this column has been wondering for a while if Mr. Pappas will pay a price for enlisting in the Democratic culture war to deny biological reality and force girls to accept boys on their sports teams.

  But now it seems Mr. Pappas also has a problem on his left flank, where his support appears to be imploding just before the September Democratic primary. The University of New Hampshire’s Granite State Poll reports that as recently as April Mr. Pappas led Democratic socialist Krishma Manzur by a commanding 61% to 18%. Yet in its recent polling UNH now finds that Rep. Pappas leads by just 47% to 34%. With a significant number of Democrats still undecided, the poll also finds that Ms. Manzur now enjoys a higher net favorability rating (the percentage with a favorable view minus the percentage with an unfavorable view) among likely Democratic primary voters.

  Manzur is a self-admitted member of the Democratic Socialists of America. I would be mildly surprised if she beats Pappas; I'd be clinically depressed if she went on to win in November.

• Reasons to moan and cheer. Jim Geraghty was thinking big recently at the Morning Jolt. Headlines:

  • Five Non-Debt Problems That the U.S. Government Is Largely Ignoring
  • Five More Non-Debt Problems the U.S. Is Ignoring
  • Five Problems America Has Largely Solved
  • Five More Problems America Has Largely Solved

  Check 'em out, and decide for yourself whether we're doomed, or destined for greatness.

• Or just wallow in bitter humor. Nick Gillespie looks back on a 20-year-old movie: Idiocracy predicted our world, but not in the way you think.

  September 1 marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Mike Judge's cult classic Idiocracy, a time-travel comedy in which a dimwitted and lazy Army librarian named Joe Bauers wakes up 500 years in the future to find himself the smartest man alive in a world gone horribly wrong. As a voiceover intones at the start of the move, smart people increasingly put off having kids, resulting in a precipitous, uninterrupted, and compounded "dumbing down" of the population. Combined with an emphasis on physical comfort—everyone wears some version of athleisure and then-unknown Crocs for footwear—"the intelligent" became "an endangered species." But Joe eventually saves America by replacing the ubiquitous use of a salty sports drink called Brawndo ("the thirst mutilator!") with water in industrial agriculture.

  Despite a tiny budget of around $2.4 million, a rushed production schedule and mixed reviews, the movie, cowritten by Judge and frequent collaborator Etan Cohen, quickly became a shorthand for an America that seemed to be getting dumber and dumber at an accelerating rate, especially in the political arena. By as early as 2008, people on message boards were asking, "Who here thinks we're well on our way to Idiocracy becoming reality?" The November 2008 issue of Reason features a review of the utterly forgotten film Swing Vote titled "Idiocracy Now!", and in 2015 Matt Welch dubbed Donald Trump "the Idiocracy candidate." No explanation in either case was offered, or necessary, a sign of the film's cultural relevance.

  Back in 2007 when I watched the DVD, my brief take on Idiocracy was (at best) so-so. I think I'd have a higher opinion of it now.