Global Economy

1. Prices, prices, prices: “Again I am asking how the following two things can be true at the same time: 1) we’re all massively compute limited so inferences & GPU time are $$$$$, and 2) SoTA models will just start running themselves on everyone’s GPU clusters & no one will notice or turn them off.”  From Jon Stokes. 2. Christian Catalini on incentives and the same. 3. Ben Yeoh on unconferences. 4. The ten best philosophy articles of the year? 5. Syracuse University, an R1 in

The retailer is using Relex Solutions’ supply chain platform to manage ordering schedules, lead times, supplier coordination and fulfillment methods.

As chief logistics officer, Adrian Castañeda will lead transportation, distribution and supply chain operations for the Hispanic and ethnic food retailer.

The kitchenware retailer is funneling $10 million toward the retirement accounts of workers who helped it navigate tariffs while also reimbursing vendors for discounts. 

Although 70% of manufacturing leaders expect to manage a robot fleet in the next five years, roughly four in 10 have a formal strategy in place for a mixed human-robot workforce.

Witness the FIITnes

The company increased its supply commitments in Q2 by $160 billion compared with the previous quarter, but it still faces a sourcing bottleneck.

In September 2023, the Census Bureau added questions about AI to its Business Trends and Outlook Survey. Census asked hundreds of thousands of businesses whether they had used AI in the previous two weeks to produce goods and services. At that time, 3.7% said yes; by late 2025 the figure had reached about 10%. (In November 2025 Census broadened the question to ask about AI use in any business function, producing a jump in measured adoption to about 18%.) Twice the Bureau has asked a key question

The Hat U Give

Why resilient networks leverage scale, multimodal flexibility and coordinated execution.

To swap or not to swap

CoverManager, an online platform that manages reservations for thousands of Spanish restaurants, reports that half the dinner bookings now are for before 9 p.m., compared with 27 percent a decade ago. TheFork, a similar platform, said its 8 p.m. bookings in Spain have nearly tripled from 2019, while 10 p.m. reservations have halved. In Spanish homes, too, there are subtle signs of a shift. A government survey conducted in 2024 in the Catalonia region suggests that people there are starting their

Reserves; Rockstar; Hugging Face; Pete Hegseth; kids’ sports; 9/11; Mark Zuckerberg; and justification

I am very much opposed to the view that the AIs are sentient, or might be sentient.  I view that as a category error, and the chances of it being true are vanishingly small.  Nonetheless I largely side with Roon when he writes: there are some number of bad abstractions in anthropomorphizing ai intents but there are at this point more dangers from avoiding anthropomorphism at all costs. if you have a mental picture of guys living in computers, it’ll likely prepare you for the future better than o

While Western export bans have severed Russia from much of the auto market, they have not tempered the demand for brand-name SUVs and trucks. That has given rise to a sophisticated network of criminals that steals cars, hides them in shipping containers and sends them to Russia, often by way of the Middle East… Interpol, the international police organization, received 4,798 reports that stolen Canadian vehicles had been found in Russia from February 2024 to July 2026, according to data obt

1. NYT covers Maria Edgeworth. 2. A calmer look at the Hugging Face incident.  And from Ciaran Martin in The Economist.  And Elie.  And Jacob Bruggeman. 3. Chandhana visits Egypt. 4. New quantum claims. 5. How youth football is evolving due to CTE concerns. 6. Pie Jesu by Gabriel Faure. The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

I very much enjoyed this British movie, which reminded me of the older-style romantic comedies, namely the ones that actually favor love and romance.  It also has themes of class/accent, US/UK, is anti-media, anti-cancel culture, anti-podcast (Laura Lewis steals the show), anti-academia, and is sceptical of certain branches of feminism.  But it is mostly entertaining.  Not an important film, but the sort of movie that makes going to the movies fun in the first place.  Let’s hope for more l

Chinese actors and online influencers have a new rival: cost-effective advanced AI video generation programmes that are threatening millions of jobs in a once-vibrant area of China’s gig economy. The release of powerful new AI-powered video software, such as tech group ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 model, has allowed digital actors to replace humans, enabling the production of higher-quality original videos more quickly. The digital takeover intensified after this year’s release of Seedance 2.0, said

A long answer to a simple question

1. Roger Myerson now has a Substack. 2. The future of higher education? 3. Another look at data centers in space. 4. “The Global Economics Lab is a non-partisan organization located at Harvard and draws on a network of faculty affiliates across universities. We conduct policy-relevant research on the forces reshaping the global economy. We engage with governments, central banks, companies, multilaterals, and civil society organizations to translate that research into action.”  Link h