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I. A Broken Economy As Barack Obama prepares to accept the Democratic nomination this week, it is clear that the economic policies of the next president are going to be hugely important. Ever since Wall Street bankers were called back from their vacations last summer to deal with the convulsions in the mortgage market, the economy has been lurching from one crisis to the next. The International Monetary Fund has described the situation as “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression.” The details are too technical for most of us to understand. (They’re too technical for many bankers to understand, which is part of the problem.) But the root cause is simple enough. In some fundamental ways, the American economy has stopped working. The fact that the economy grows — that it produces more goods and services one year than it did in the previous one — no longer ensures that most families will benefit from its growth. For the first time on record, an economic expansion seems … [Read more...] about Obamanomics

Season 3, Episode 3: ‘4-5-1’ Welcome to the Zava era. For those who skipped the first two episodes of this third season of “Ted Lasso” — and honestly, shame on you; go back , do the homework and rejoin us — Ted’s team has signed one of the greatest players of the age, a mercurial striker named Zava. (He is based closely on the real-life star Zlatan Ibrahimovic .) This was accomplished by Rebecca rudely accosting him while he was using a urinal last episode . Whatever works, right? Zava is immediately weird — showing up hours late with his cellphone on another continent, ostentatiously meditating while the rest of the team prepares for games, and so on. But so far he seems reasonably friendly, even if his preferred alignment is everyone in the midfield or on defense except him. This is the meaning of the episode’s title, “4-5-1”: He’s the “1.” As the coaches explain, all free kicks will be taken by Zava. All penalty kicks will be taken by Zava. And all corner kicks must be … [Read more...] about ‘Ted Lasso,’ Season 3, Episode 3 Recap: Zava Superstar

Public outrage is swift following mass shootings, such as the killing of six people at a Christian elementary school in Nashville. Sorrow and sympathy are widespread. But what comes next from policymakers is likely to depend on which political party is in charge of a state. Don’t expect new gun controls in Republican-led states, such as Tennessee or Texas. But when similar tragedies occur in Democratic-led states, more gun limits are likely — even if they already have restrictive laws. Mass shootings generally don’t seem to change a state’s basic political makeup. “Democratic-led states tend to focus more on firearm restrictions whereas Republican-led states do not and often emphasize lessening regulations on guns,” said Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government. The fact that responses seem predicated by Republican and Democratic labels is perhaps an indication of the nation’s … [Read more...] about Mass shootings seldom shift partisan policies despite outcry

By now, plenty of us know that artificially intelligent virtual assistants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard can pull off sensational stunts, such as winning coding contests, passing bar exams and professing love to a tech columnist. But I wondered: How helpful are the bots, really, as actual assistants? It’s worth asking because our first rodeo with virtual assistants didn’t go so well. Older A.I. bots like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa had more than a decade to improve, but they ended up stagnating and are now used mostly for setting timers and playing music. ChatGPT and Bard, on the other hand, use so-called large language models that recognize and generate text based on enormous data sets scraped off the web. They are trained to compose sentences on the fly as if they were human, which potentially makes them far more versatile as assistants. To test that theory, I came up with a list of tasks that people might ask of a human assistant. I prodded friends who … [Read more...] about How ChatGPT and Bard Performed as My Executive Assistants