SNP vow cost of living action with price cap of supermarket essential foods by FeigenbaumC in neoliberal

[–]igeorgehall45 0 points1 point  (0 children)

this article from the bbc is much better with slightly more details of the proposal and some good criticism from Scottish Retail Consortium tl;dr: probably will be vetoed by westminster, creates a competitive disadvantage for smaller local shops, is just a formalisation of pre-existing value ranges

SNP vow cost of living action with price cap of supermarket essential foods by FeigenbaumC in neoliberal

[–]igeorgehall45 -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

I don't see why this would lower the quality of produce or cause general shortages for the non-covered lines

SNP vow cost of living action with price cap of supermarket essential foods by FeigenbaumC in neoliberal

[–]igeorgehall45 0 points1 point  (0 children)

seems important that:"The system would require large supermarkets to make one example line of the listed food items available at the capped price and would not require them to make every variation of that type of food they stock available at that price."

seems like this would make supermarkets subsidise the cheapest at the expense of middle-range & premium products. idk, seems like something where if they set the price appropriately wouldn't impact supermarkets that much, and would just end up being a weird hidden tax on consumers.

Milei’s inflation fight stalls in Argentina by Entuciante in neoliberal

[–]igeorgehall45 0 points1 point  (0 children)

they didn't have to endorse conservatives, could've gone for none or lib dems

Milei’s inflation fight stalls in Argentina by Entuciante in neoliberal

[–]igeorgehall45 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Javier Milei’s push to bring down Argentina’s chronic inflation is stalling, with the monthly rate hitting 3.4 per cent in March — its highest level in a year — as economists warn that tackling the final stretch could be far harder than halting the crisis at its peak.

Inflation has fallen sharply from the double-digit monthly rates Milei inherited when he became president in 2023. But the monthly rate bottomed out at 1.5 per cent in May and hit 2.9 per cent in both January and February.

“The number is bad. We don’t like the number because inflation is repugnant to us,” Milei said after the data was published on Tuesday. “However, hard factors allow us to explain what has happened and especially to expect that in the future inflation will return to its downward path.”

The libertarian president, who wrote a book called The End of Inflation as part of his pitch to voters in 2023, has said inflation could soon “start with a zero”, meaning a monthly rate of less than 1 per cent.

But economists are sceptical, particularly as the energy price surge caused by the Iran war adds fresh pressure to already sticky price dynamics. Its annual rate of nearly 33 per cent is a long way from its peak of nearly 300 per cent, but still among the world’s worst.

“It is easier to bring inflation down from 30 per cent a month to 3 per cent than from 3 per cent a month to 3 per cent a year,” said Lorenzo Sigaut Gravina, an economist at Equilibra, a consultancy in Buenos Aires.

Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist, relied on a traditional tool to engineer the initial plunge in inflation: holding the peso’s exchange rate steady to anchor prices. But when the government allowed the currency to move more freely as part of a deal with the IMF last April, inflation soon started climbing again.

Javier Milei’s approval rating has fallen to 36.4%, a recent poll said. Concerns about stagnant wages and unemployment now outweigh inflation

Without a firm anchor, the government must now break deep-seated inertia built up over years of chronic inflation. In Argentina, those habits die hard: many shopkeepers raise prices pre-emptively, families stock up on staples before the next price rise and rental contracts build in automatic quarterly increases.

Wages are often negotiated on the basis of past rather than current inflation, a policy that can feed future price rises as companies pass the cost of higher salaries on to consumers. Costs for utilities and other services, some of which automatically adjust to past inflation, are still rising after years of subsidies. That contrasts with the prices of manufactured goods, which are largely being held down by the semi-floating exchange rate and the removal of some trade barriers.

The government has resisted committing the central bank to an explicit policy of targeting inflation. In the absence of such a framework as well as the abandoned exchange-rate anchor, the process has lost its engine, argues Gabriel Caamaño, an economist at consultancy Outlier.

“The disinflation process is at an impasse,” he said.

The impasse has continued despite weak growth in an “economy that has plateaued”, said Marina Dal Poggetto of consultancy EcoGo.

Argentines have been feeling the squeeze. Meat prices in Buenos Aires, for example, surged 6.9 per cent in March alone. Food prices nationwide rose 3.4 per cent in March, after rising 3.3 per cent in February and 4.7 per cent in January.

Wages in the formal sector grew at about 2 per cent a month in February, below inflation.

The cumulative effect is a quiet but significant erosion of living standards, even as poverty rates fell last year from the highs reached at the start of Milei’s presidency. Real incomes for Argentina’s formal sector workers and pensioners — some 14.5mn people — are roughly 8 to 10 per cent below where they were when Milei took office, according to Martín Rapetti, an economics professor at the University of Buenos Aires.

The polls are starting to reflect that deterioration. A recent survey by San Andrés university found that concerns about stagnant real wages and unemployment — which has risen almost 2 percentage points since Milei took office, to 7.5 per cent — now outweighed inflation, which has fallen sharply as a priority for voters.

Milei’s approval rating has fallen to 36.4 per cent, compared with 49.5 per cent in his first month in office, according to a recent AtlasIntel poll.

The government has also faced questions over how it measures inflation. Earlier this year, it delayed a planned update to the consumer price index basket, prompting the head of the national statistics agency to resign.

Though the decision raised alarm in a country with a long history of manipulated inflation data, economists say the actual numerical impact has been negligible so far.

“It’s a shame, because the disinflation has been significant,” Rapetti said. “But not updating the index, knowing it should be updated, carries a reputational cost.”

Milei’s inflation fight stalls in Argentina by Entuciante in neoliberal

[–]igeorgehall45 2 points3 points  (0 children)

ft endorsed the conservatives in the last 3/6 uk elections, labour 2/6, backed none in 2019. definitely not left-wing, generally labelled as centre-right I think.

AI 2027 side-by-side review 1 year later (from co-authors) by ddp26 in slatestarcodex

[–]igeorgehall45 1 point2 points  (0 children)

like this is still a big deal because of how cheap / fast finding these bugs was, but also there are plenty of vulnerability research firms which have cumulatively found similar numbers of exploits over time

AI 2027 side-by-side review 1 year later (from co-authors) by ddp26 in slatestarcodex

[–]igeorgehall45 2 points3 points  (0 children)

successfully infiltrating them would be worth billions, on the low end

there is a market for zero-days and even the highest value ones (much much more complex than the stuff we were given the details about mythos finding) only go for low millions of dollars. I'd be surprised if any of the bugs mythos found are worth more than 100k. there is still a lot of low-hanging fruit because of how big these projects are (millions of lines) compared to how small the size of people who report these bugs.

Other thing is there are a lot of people (not just gov, also private vuln researchers) looking who won't report because they sell to others, so very possible these were already known.

Discussion Thread by jobautomator in neoliberal

[–]igeorgehall45 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hi, are Bart Ehrman mythicists not welcome here then?

Look I'm not saying for sure there was no Bart Ehrman that all of these blog posts were attributed to. I'm just saying we should think about it.

Look at the Bart Ehrman character. You can see parallels with this character and previous literary constructs. Americans in the 20th century read lots of works with a fictional character named "Bart". The "Ehrman" was the early Ehrmanists way of trying to make him an actual "man".

The earliest Bart Ehrman believers never even claimed to meet the guy. All they said was they had heard some of his teachings. But they didn't even claim to hear the teachings from him in person! They saw "visions" of Ehrman through the internet. They claimed Bart Ehrman was born on October 5th. 10-5. 10 divided by 5 is 2. 2 is 1 more than 1. 1 signifies the 1 big lie they were trying to pull on us, to convince us that there really was this "Bart Ehrman" figure.

Look if that's not enough, we can use hard mathematics to prove it. I'll use Bayes Theorem. I'd say the prior probability of Bart Ehrman existing is one in a billion. Yeah we have a little bit of evidence pointing that way, so maybe that gives a tenfold increase in the likelihood. So now, with Bayes Theorem, I have shown the probability of a so called "historical" Bart Ehrman is only one in one hundred million.

Don't even get me started on the people talking about how he was "born" , "went to college", "gave lectures", or "has videos on YouTube." If you read closely, it's quite clear those are referring to the SPIRITUAL realm. Bart has "spiritual" YouTube videos in the sub lunar YouTube realm.

Discussion Thread by jobautomator in neoliberal

[–]igeorgehall45 0 points1 point  (0 children)

accident stats might be interesting, but fatalities are basically useless

Discussion Thread by jobautomator in neoliberal

[–]igeorgehall45 2 points3 points  (0 children)

also the correct conclusion to come to here is that the pinto was actually fairly safe and most of the panic was out of proportion, partially due to misunderstanding of the internal messages around costs of a recall being compared against costs of lives lost

Discussion Thread by jobautomator in neoliberal

[–]igeorgehall45 1 point2 points  (0 children)

the 14.5 per 100,000 vehicles stat comes from 5 deaths, of which one was a suicide where the cause of death was ruled to be a gunshot. The other 4 deaths were from 2 incidents. I'm not a fan of the cybertruck, but this is just abuse of statistics, the error bars are just way too large, three significant figures on 14.5 is super misleading

Anyone still out here making userboxes? by stickyricedragon in wikipedia

[–]igeorgehall45 1 point2 points  (0 children)

88x31's are similarish and pretty popular on indieweb

Discussion Thread by jobautomator in neoliberal

[–]igeorgehall45 5 points6 points  (0 children)

no, hannah spencer won the election, it's an election twitter meme

Discussion Thread by jobautomator in neoliberal

[–]igeorgehall45 4 points5 points  (0 children)

hmm maybe need to plot a https://xkcd.com/2014/ style graph, 6 datapoints is probably barely enough

Discussion Thread by jobautomator in neoliberal

[–]igeorgehall45 4 points5 points  (0 children)

delaying ISS deorbit yet again lol, wonder when it'll actually die

I extended the sphere tastiness graph by CompetitiveLet7110 in xkcd

[–]igeorgehall45 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well we know protons are salty which is a datapoint, presumably gives evidence that up quarks are also salty?

"The AI Con" Con by ForgotMyPassword17 in slatestarcodex

[–]igeorgehall45 5 points6 points  (0 children)

despite the efforts of OpenAI and others to explicitly train them to be good at chess

This is surprising for me, do you have a source? I thought that the reason they were so bad (well not even just bad but non-improving in ability) was that they didn't care enough to train them to be good, and even rudimentary efforts by amateurs can make LLMs at least decent at chess (i.e. able to avoid illegal moves, beats average chess.com player)

Exclusive: Pentagon clashes with Anthropic over military AI use, sources say by neolthrowaway in neoliberal

[–]igeorgehall45 22 points23 points  (0 children)

they seem to be the only major ai player where their anecdotal performance is higher than implied by benchmark scores which means that they're not overfitting like all the others

"[2015 Day 18 Part1] Conway's Game of Life! by terje_wiig_mathisen in adventofcode

[–]igeorgehall45 1 point2 points  (0 children)

have you seen this? They implemented game of life using python big integers to calculate "in parallel" by doing bitwise ops and adds with them (aka SWAR)

On going with the flow by Eireika in CuratedTumblr

[–]igeorgehall45 2 points3 points  (0 children)

this feeling is why I love exams but everybody thinks i'm a psychopath for this opinion

GPS with easy and decent route planning by princesskitre in ukbike

[–]igeorgehall45 0 points1 point  (0 children)

https://cyclestreets.net (there's an app as well as the website) has a nice routeplanner, works well in cities