Berian James

1. Heating in Denmark. I was discussing with Anna about whether having a heat pump would be more cost/energy efficient than our current set-up for winter heating. But: like many people in Denmark, we don’t get our heat in the way you’d think!

@mattyglesias You would vote for Radikale Venstre or Liberal Alliance.

I still think about this all the time. It’s a fundamental feature of technology:

Final thoughts from a month in Australia. A fantastic country, that is even better than the hype walkingtheworld.substack.com/p/final-though…

Top link on MR today!

NeurIPS is pleased to officially endorse EurIPS, an independently-organized meeting taking place in Copenhagen this year, which will offer researchers an opportunity to additionally present their accepted NeurIPS work in Europe, concurrently with NeurIPS. Read more in our blog post and on the EurIPS website: blog.neurips.cc/2025/07/16/neu… eurips.cc

Democracies should have universal suffrage, and this implies removing a lower limit on age for voting. reuters.com/world/uk/uk-lo…

Having played chess at a young age, I know the transformational impact it can have on young people. That's why today we're allocating £1.5m to help identify, support, and elevate top-tier players who have the potential to compete at a global level.

We're launching Inflection Points, Australia's new home of long-form writing for pro-growth, pro-abundance policy. Our cracking first issue just dropped. Follow along for a more prosperous Australia!

Two weeks ago, I said EU-Inc might need your help. That moment is now. 🥁 We need you to submit feedback to the European Commission on what startups need. To get you up to speed what happened since last time: The EU Parliament published their own suggestion how a pan-european legal entity standard should look like. How you ask? By introducing 27 different entities, instead of one. By improving as little as possible, keeping as much legacy and differences as possible, and hot-patching on top of them in different ways. Why did they publish that? No idea. It's unusual at this moment. Likely Brussels-internal power-plays. But the timing is perfect, because the European Commission (the guys actually in charge of this) asked for feedback publicly now. How should a pan-European legal-entity look like? Our answer is simple: 1) ONE EUROPEAN STANDARD So that investors know how it works and you can easily raise globally, so that ecosystems can form around a centralized registry, so that stock-options can be done europe-wide, etc etc 2) FOR EVERYONE Because nobody knows, how startups look like in future and we don't want to have governments niche down access to the entity in oblivion. A downside-compromise of this is btw that we do push not standardization of employment and taxes. I explain the details in the blog post Here your task: 1) Go here to the feedback website 2) Login (they support Google Auth btw which is funny imho) 3) Write a few lines what you expect a true standard for startups should support 4) Share this with friends, coworkers, etc and ask them to also fill it out. The form needs like 1-2 minutes. If we hit a few hundred feedback submissions we already have the most feedbacked consultation in this field ever. If we hit 1000 we break the bank and they can't avoid talking to the startup ecosystem about this. 🏴‍☠️ Feel free to name drop us. Us asking for your support isn't even cheating the system. That's how this process is meant to be done. Politics is weird. 🙈 Feedback Website link – 2 Minutes of your time max. ec.europa.eu/info/law/bette… Please like & share! 🙏

@davidmarcus Energy tech is bedrock for both of these

Bitcoin and AI are the two most important technologies of our era. If you’re not working on either, you’re missing out.

You might even say… the chickens have come home to roost.

New episode! A group of listeners and I sit down with Australian politician and economist Andrew Leigh (@ALeighMP) to discuss inequality in Australia. Apart from being a member of the current government, Andrew is both one of Australia's true intellectuals and one of the kindest people you'll meet. Inequality has been the main theme of Andrew's academic research, and it's always a pleasure to talk to someone who has thought so deeply about their topic. I first read Andrew’s book, Battlers and Billionaires: The Story of Inequality in Australia, many years ago. (Btw, it’s a work of real craftsmanship—witty, economical prose to the very end, and a comprehensive take on its subject.) It was first published in 2013 (with a new edition published last year). I was curious to hear how Andrew has updated his thinking—and he was gracious enough to let us in on his latest ideas and even his current research to-do list. We discuss: - The causal relationship between cultural egalitarianism and economic inequality - The three historical explanations for Australia's egalitarian culture - Inequality vs economic growth - How the housing market is driving inequality - What explains Australia's declining PISA and other test scores - And much more—including audience Q&A Enjoy! Timestamps: (0:00:00) - Introduction. (0:03:52) - What is the causal relationship between economic equality and cultural egalitarianism? (0:09:54) - Does Australia have too much egalitarianism? (0:18:42) - Why does Andrew prefer to focus on top income or wealth shares rather than Gini coefficients? (0:21:41) - What have been the key drivers of income inequality in Australia since the 1980s? (0:23:11) - What explains Australia declining PISA and other test scores? (0:27:54) - What does Andrew make of Michael Sandel's 'tyranny of merit' take on education? (0:33:17) - How much has market concentration been driving inequality in Australia? (0:36:21) - Housing and inequality. (0:42:00) - Global inequality is falling—shouldn’t egalitarians be celebrating? (0:44:19) - Inequality vs. economic growth. (0:48:23) - How wealthy should the wealthiest Australian be allowed to be? (0:49:21) - What are the strongest reasons for believing AI will cause the labour share of income to decline? (0:51:37) - Audience Q&A.

@jesfrellsen Dark mode for this paper for those who read at night 🌚 synthical.com/abs/2405.05981…

@oznova_ @MarcioClutch Thank you for the thread. I think calculus is the wrong example to motivate the point, but the point is a really good one so maybe who cares :) Matrix multiplication as a nested for loop would be an amazing example! Then geometric operators being matrices is <=> what GPUs do!

@oznova_ @MarcioClutch Discrete summation and infinite sums are a precursor to calculus, and that is how the curriculum goes. I suppose I don’t think one can introduce calculus without mentioning infinitesimals, no; they are the *really important* part.

I earnestly believe that this is how most kids should be introduced to calculus. (Yes, integration before differentiation, and yes most kids should learn to code first, and yes both can be taught far younger than you think)

Linear algebra should be the poster child for coding in math teaching (not calculus). The primary thing students learn from repetitively hand multiplying matrices is empathy for GPUs.

@oznova_ @MarcioClutch This seems wrong. Calculus is not 80% “grok that integrals are sums” and 20% “some details about infinitesimal limits.” The killer example for coding in math pedagogy is linear algebra. Calculus is like carving out the parts of mathematics that must be done symbolically.

@MarcioClutch I am well aware of that, but that's exactly the kind of thing to not focus on, in my opinion, when introducing integration

Critics are overlooking the etymological argument for Argentina shifting to silver reserves instead.

This is too dismissive of math pedagogy, which already teaches discrete sums and iteration as a precursor to calculus. The hard part is exactly the transition to an infinite limit, which has to represented symbolically.

Or rather, we see increasing prices as due to ‘the economy’ while ‘increase in my take home pay’ is obviously due only to one’s raw irrepressible Galtismo.