Quotulatiousness

July 7, 2025

Consumers don’t want AI in everything, but you’ll be forced to take your AI, peasants!

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia — like about 92% of consumers at last count — doesn’t want to have artificial intelligence “enhancing” the software he uses every day, but software companies don’t want him — or you — to have that choice:

A few months ago, I needed to send an email. But when I opened Microsoft Outlook, something had changed.

Microsoft asked me to use Copilot to write my email. Copilot is my AI companion. (That’s the cute word they use.)

Hey I don’t want a companion — especially not a fake AI buddy. I never asked for this.

And what about the people receiving my emails? They don’t want this either. They want to hear from me, not a bot.

How do I turn my companion off?

After some trial-and-error, I found a way to disable Copilot. Phew!

But a few days later, Microsoft surprised me again. It wouldn’t let me save an Excel file until I had agreed to new terms for my software account.

Guess what? AI is now bundled into all of my Microsoft software.

Even worse, Microsoft recently raised the price of its subscriptions by $3 per month to cover the additional AI benefits. I get to use my AI companion 60 times per month as part of the deal.

But I don’t want to use it. I want to kill it.

As you can see, I’ve never used this service. I still have all 60 credits unused. But I’m paying for it — because it’s now embedded into Microsoft Word, Excel, etc.

This is how AI gets introduced to the marketplace — by force-feeding the public. And they’re doing this for a very good reason.

Most people won’t pay for AI voluntarily — just 8% according to a recent survey. So they need to bundle it with some other essential product.

You never get to decide.

Before proceeding let me ask a simple question: Has there ever been a major innovation that helped society, but only 8% of the public would pay for it?

That’s never happened before in human history. Everybody wanted electricity in their homes. Everybody wanted a radio. Everybody wanted a phone. Everybody wanted a refrigerator. Everybody wanted a TV set. Everybody wanted the Internet.

They wanted it. They paid for it. They enjoyed it.

AI isn’t like that. People distrust it or even hate it — and more so with each passing month. So the purveyors must bundle it into current offerings, and force usage that way.

Why the Cold War Gave Us LEGO, Credit Cards, and Video Games – W2W 35

Filed under: Economics, Gaming, History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 6 Jul 2025

Think the 1950s were all poodle skirts and jukeboxes? Think again! From the first credit cards and modems to LEGO bricks, video games, and even skateboards, discover the surprisingly futuristic side of the Cold War era.

In this episode of War to War by TimeGhost, Sparty dives into the forgotten innovations of the 1950s that still shape our daily lives in 2025.

Topics covered:
• The first commercial credit card (Diners Club)
• The birth of the computer modem
• The first microchip and the rise of computing
• “Tennis for Two” – the 1950s’ video game
• LEGO and the System of Play
• Skateboards before Marty McFly

The 50s were WAY more high-tech than you think!

#1950s #coldwar #inventions #historyyoudidntknow #SkateboardHistory #lego #timeghost #techhistory #Modem #microchips #creditcard #videogames
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The federal government’s EV mandate cannot stand

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Following its established pattern, the Canadian government will seek any possible path other than economic reality, especially when it comes to things like mandating that all vehicles sold in Canada must be EVs by 2035:

Nissan Leaf electric vehicle charging.
Photo by Nissan UK

It’s not always the unexpected that gets governments in trouble — often enough it’s their own bad judgement, poor timing or general clumsiness that gets in the way. But the unanticipated does happen a lot.

Parties and politicians put time and effort into concocting a set of policies aimed at winning votes by proposing remedies to problems identified as occupying top rungs of current voter concern. If they’re lucky they get elected, presumably intending to put those policies into effect at the earliest opportunity. Then the world shifts and pulls the rug from under them.

Former prime minister Justin Trudeau was a big fan of the attention-getting promise. Especially if it was a pledge timed well into the future when he was unlikely to still be around to be held responsible. Carbon reductions too ambitious to be realistic. Budget targets too unlikely to be believed. Statist planning projects that tended increasingly to the surreal.

Mark Carney is left with the detritus and the problem of what to do about it. As prime minister he’s already acted on a few of the problematic leftovers, ditching the carbon tax even though he’d previously supported it as a good idea; scrapping an increased tax on capital gains although the Treasury could certainly use the money; “caving,” as the Trump administration so tastefully put it, on a digital services tax that was a bad idea to begin with but pushed through by the Trudeau government anyway.

There’s an argument to be made, and not a bad one, that each retreat was the right move for the moment. And if there are mistakes that need abandoning, the early days of a new government is proverbially the best time to do it.

But righting wrongs has confronted Carney with a new predicament, in that there are so many Trudeau-era wrongs that need righting. Washington was still in the midst of its victory dance over its digital tax triumph when Canada’s auto industry came along to plead for similar treatment from Ottawa, insisting automakers couldn’t possibly meet previously-set electric vehicle targets and urging the new Liberal government to backtrack post haste.

Carney hosted the session with Canada’s chief executives for Ford, Stellantis and General Motors. Brian Kingston, chief executive of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association, was blunt in identifying the targets set for electric vehicle (EV) production as the main topic.

“The EV mandate itself is not sustainable. The targets that have been established cannot be met,” he said on arriving for the meeting. Afterwards he told Politico‘s online news site, “At a time when the industry is under immense pressure, the damaging and redundant ZEV mandate must be urgently removed”.

Augustus: Visionary Statesman or Destroyer Of The Republic?

Filed under: Books, Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Rest Is History
Published 27 Jan 2025

The Roman historian Suetonius’ The Lives of the Caesars, written during the early imperial period of the Roman Empire, is a seminal biography covering the biographies of the early emperors of Rome, during two spectacular centuries of Roman history. Delving deep into the personal lives of the Caesars and sparing no detail, no matter how prurient, pungent, explicit or salacious, it vividly captures Rome at the peak of her power, and those colourful individuals at the heart of everything. It is an unsettling yet fascinating portrait of the alien and the intimate, that sees some of history’s most famous characters revealed as almost modern men, plotting a delicate line between private and public, respectability and suspicion. From the showmanship of Augustus, the first Caesar, and his convoluted family melodramas, to Tiberius, a monster in the historical record famed for his sexual misdeeds, to Caligula, who delighted in voyeuristic moral degeneracy, and the looming shadow of Nero; all will be revealed …

00:00 A humble plug from Tom
02:55 The most spectacular two centuries in Roman history
05:25 The value of Suetonius as a biographer
08:43 Suetonius’ interest in the love lives of the Caesars
12:58 Suetonius’ influence on popular culture
16:15 Augustus: Rome’s greatest actor
21:25 Roman politics as spectacle
21:55 Augustus as the model of a good emperor
24:30 What kind of monarchy was this?
28:00 The life of Suetonius
35:52 How did Roman histories work?
39:04 Why Romans had no idea of privacy
40:05 Did Roman emperors sexual misdemeanours matter
42:08 How we see sexual relations different to the Romans
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QotD: The mythological “perfect market” and “perfect competition”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In modern neoclassical economics, the benchmark of analysis from which real-world markets are judged is the model of perfect competition, in which a homogenous good is bought and sold by a large group of buyers and sellers, respectively, none of whom have an influence on the price. Moreover, under such conditions, there exists free entry and exit of sellers in the marketplace, defined by perfect information.

The narrative that is constructed and logically follows from this model is that observed deviations from perfect competition in the marketplace are indicative of imperfections, also known as “market failures”, associated with the existence of monopoly power, pervasive externalities, the provision of public goods, and macroeconomic instability. According to this narrative, government intervention is the deus ex machina that saves the market from its own “imperfections” through regulations, taxes, subsides, and other public policy measures. Why? To use a quote from Frank Knight often used by James Buchanan, “to call a situation hopeless is to call it ideal”. The narrative that is constructed is one in which, outside the conditions of the ideal of perfect competition, there is no hope but for government intervention to save the market from itself. Anyone who has taken an economics course is well aware of what I’ve stated thus far, and therefore this should not be surprising.

But what is the implicit meaning of the word “imperfect” that is baked into the narrative, which is constructed into the model of perfect competition? What is implied when we postulate that markets are “imperfect” in comparison to the benchmark of perfect competition is that markets are flawed, non-ideal, or otherwise sub-optimal, and therefore in need of correction through government intervention. Who could dispute the logic of this narrative?

However, if we simply reinterpret our understanding of the word “imperfect”, not only will it reframe the narrative being told about the marketplace, but also the public policy implications that flow from this narrative. If we analyze the etymology of the word imperfect, breaking it down from its Latin origins, you will learn that “im” expresses the negation, “per” comes from the Latin word meaning “thoroughly” and “fect” comes from the Latin verb “facere“, meaning “to do”. Thus, rather than saying that something, or some state of affairs, is flawed, suboptimal, or non-ideal, another way to interpret the meaning of “imperfect” is an act or process that is not thoroughly done, or incomplete. In fact, from a quick perusal of the Merriam Webster’s Dictionary, you will find a similar definition of the word imperfect: “constituting a verb tense used to designate a continuing state or an incomplete action” (emphasis added).

Rather than regarding the market as a flawed or sub-optimal state of affairs, a better understanding of an “imperfect market” reveals that the market is a process of continuous tendency towards perfection, or completion, where are all the gains from trade are exhausted and all plans between buyers and sellers are perfectly coordinated. As Ludwig von Mises states in his magnum opus, Human Action, the “market process is the adjustment of the individual actions of the various members of the market society to the requirements of mutual cooperation” (1949 [2007]: 258).

Thus, markets will always be imperfect, but that is precisely why markets exist in the first place! Markets never conform to the “ideal” of perfect competition, but this is completely irrelevant, since under such state of affairs, markets are unnecessary and redundant, since all resources are already perfectly allocated to their most valued uses. Market processes exist precisely because to generate the information necessary to better coordinate the plans and purposes of individuals in a peaceful and productive manner. The entrepreneurial lure for profit and the discipline of loss is what guides such imperfect processes in a tendency towards the creation of more complete information between buyers and sellers.

Rosolino Candela, “Are Markets Imperfect? Of Course, But That’s The Point!”, Econlib.org, 2020-05-18.

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