Perfect symmetry
The Gibbs building, King’s College, Cambridge. It was in a room in the building that the famous confrontation between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper at a meeting of the Moral Science club in October 1946 took place. The story is told in Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers by David Edmonds and John Eidinow.
Quote of the Day
”If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows.”
- John Kenneth Galbraith (on the dogma of ‘trickle-down economics)
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Fáinne Gael an Lae
Nice orchestral version of an old Irish tune — Bright Ring of the Day
Long Read of the Day
**Why Are the Wealthy Pouring So Much of Their Wealth into Politics?
Useful explanation by Robert Reich, who was Secretary for Labor in Bill Clinton’s administration and a professor at Berkeley. This is from his Substack.
Last week, I testified at a congressional hearing organized by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich about what Big Oil has gotten from its mammoth contribution to Trump’s 2024 campaign — and how much Americans are paying for this bribe in higher fuel costs and destructive climate change.
The short answer: It’s the most corrupt deal in American history.
But it’s hardly the only corrupt deal in Washington. Political corruption is growing dramatically — partly because Trump is the most corrupt president in American history. But also because America’s wealthy and their corporations have been pouring more and more money into politics because the return on this “investment” has become so large.
I have some good news to share with you about all this. But first I want to sketch the core problem, 1-2-3. Then I’ll suggest a solution…
It’s become an endemic problem in British politics over the past two decades. But at least it’s finally been acknowledged as a serious issue. The first point in the overview of the Rycroft report into it reads:
This country faces a persistent problem of foreign interests seeking to exert influence on, and to interfere in, our politics. Too much of this is malign and seeks to sow distrust and exacerbate divisions in UK society, with the ultimate aim of undermining confidence in our democracy.
And guess who the main beneficiaries of this dodgy largesse have been in the past. And who’s the newest beneficiary on the block?
My commonplace booklet
How the Spreadsheet changed the world
I’ve just come on this blog post by David Oks when I was in my office in College, and as I looked up from it my eye fell on my personal copy of VisiCalc, which I bought for my Apple II in 1979 when it first came out. Sadly, I no longer have that machine, but I remember how radical the program seemed at the time. It was also the reason why many MBA graduates who knew nothing about computing bought the Apple II. I’ll be returning to this subject because, for some of us, there are resonances between the spreadsheet and LLMs. But that’s for another day.
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