Noise Surround System traveled to MDF Festival and the Philharmonic of Szczecin, one of Poland’s top three noisiest cities. Noise pollution is a serious problem that can exacerbate stress, disturb sleep, and produce hearing loss.

Of course, sound artists can put noise to a purpose. And so it is that the normally cocooned-off Philharmonic space is beautifully disturbed with speakers on tracks. (Hey, I have an idea for a really aggressive alarm clock.) That challenges the idea of the concert space as palace, instead colliding with the urban environment. And as you can see in the video, it all coalesces into something harmonious, featuring the sounds of the orchestra.

From panGenerator’s description:

The installation is a rather large structure of 4,5m in height and about 7m of diameter that allows the audience to get surrounded by the spatialised audio emitted from the 8 motorised trolleys of bespoke design that were engineered from scratch for the purpose of this project. The audiovisual choreography is driven by custom software that remotely controls the light, sound and movement. In terms of sound design we used sounds sampled from the noisiest parts of Szczecin and transformed them in realtime using dedicated pure data audio patch – controlling the playback in sync with movement and light emitted by the trolleys.

Noise Surround System makes spatial audio kinetic, mechanical – CDM Create Digital Music

It’s a list, it’s hard to pick a pithy excerpt to show. Good, though!

https://dynomight.substack.com/p/things

Another post on the experience of wild animals, although it doesn’t make the same attempt at rigor that the previous post did.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/guest-blog/bambi-or-bessie-are-wild-animals-happier/

I’ve been wondering for a while about The typical day-to-day life and experience of animals, especially in my own habitat. Although there’s plenty of literature on individual species, it’s hard to find anything that tries to look at overall patterns. So far this is the closest thing I’ve found. Warning: some parts may be distressing, although not enough that I personally felt distressed.

https://longtermrisk.org/the-importance-of-wild-animal-suffering/#How_Wild_Animals_Suffer

I’m not convinced that this view was correct. It really, really does seem like this time is different. But I’m also not convinced that this view is incorrect, and it seems well worth considering.

Most of the technologists I know take an attitude towards this future that’s equal parts melancholy, fatalism, and pride — sort of an Oppenheimer-esque “Now I am become death, destroyer of jobs” kind of thing. They all think the immiseration of labor is inevitable, but they think that being the ones to invent and own the AI is the only way to avoid being on the receiving end of that immiseration. And in the meantime, it’s something cool to have worked on.

So when I cheerfully tell them that it’s very possible that regular humans will have plentiful, high-paying jobs in the age of AI dominance — often doing much the same kind of work that they’re doing right now — technologists typically become flabbergasted, flustered, and even frustrated. I must simply not understand just how many things AI will be able to do, or just how good it will be at doing them, or just how cheap it’ll get. I must be thinking to myself “Surely, there are some things humans will always be better at machines at!”, or some other such pitiful coping mechanism.

But no. That is not what I am thinking. Instead, I accept that AI may someday get better than humans at every conceivable task. That’s the future I’m imagining. And in that future, I think it’s possible — perhaps even likely — that the vast majority of humans will have good-paying jobs, and that many of those jobs will look pretty similar to the jobs of 2024.

At which point you may be asking: “What the heck is this guy smoking?”

Well, I’ll tell you.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-the

Luis Garicano has an amazing post on “one of the dumbest fiscal policies in recent memory.” Launched in Italy during COVID by Prime Minister Conte, the “Superbonus” scheme subsidized 110% of housing renovation costs. Now if one were to use outdated, simplistic, Econ 101 type reasoning one would predict that such a scheme would be massively costly not only because people would rush to renovate their homes for free but because the more expensive the renovation on paper the bigger the bonus.

The proponents of the Superbonus, most notably Riccardo Fraccaro, were however, advocates of Monetary Monetary Theory so deficits were considered only an illusory barrier to government spending and resource constraints were far distant concerns. Italy still had to meet EU rules, however, so the deficit spending was concealed with creative accounting:

rather than direct cash grants, the government issued tax credits that could be transferred. A homeowner could claim these credits directly against their taxes, have contractors claim them against invoices, or sell them to banks. These credits became a kind of fiscal currency – a parallel financial instrument that functioned as off-the-books debt (Capone and Stagnaro, 2024). The setup purposefully created the illusion of a free lunch: it hid the cost to the government, as for European accounting purposes the credits would show up only as lost tax revenue rather than new spending.

In MMT terms, Fraccaro and his team effectively created money as a tax credit, putting into practice MMT’s notion that a sovereign issuer’s currency is ultimately a tax IOU​.

So what were the results? The “free renovation” scheme quickly spiraled out of control. Initially projected to cost €35 billion, the program ballooned to around €220 billion—about 12% of Italy’s GDP! Did it drive a surge in energy-efficient renovations? Hardly. Massive fraud ensued as builders and homeowners inflated renovation costs to siphon off government funds. Beyond that, surging demand ran headlong into resource constraints. Econ 101 again: in the short run, marginal cost curves slope upward.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/italys-superbonus-the-dumbest-fiscal-policy-in-recent-memory.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=italys-superbonus-the-dumbest-fiscal-policy-in-recent-memory

😍

Musicians Wage War Against Evil Robots

What would it look like if we saw the other side of the nerdiness bell curve as the weird one? Really terrific essay that may be very useful both to nerds and to the people who love them.

In our hypothetical “nerds are the norm” bizarro-world we’d have the opposite distortion. We get that by breaking wambs out from the central blob, extending the axis to the left side, and then fuse nerds with the center so our new idea of normality includes nerds and excludes wambs. There’d be an “allism spectrum”, named after something I found when googling “opposite of autism”, with wambs at its mild end and some formal diagnosis on the severe end[3].

In that world, “Field Guide to the Wamb” would describe wambs as weirdos with strange interests and personalities. Their weaknesses would be considered major flaws and their strengths maybe useful for some things but not essential to be a well-rounded human.

https://everythingstudies.com/2017/11/07/the-nerd-as-the-norm/

From the always-excellent Patrick McKenzie:

A SAR [suspicious activity report] is not a conviction of a crime. It isn’t even an accusation of a crime. It is an interoffice memo documenting an irregularity, about 2-3 pages long. Banks file about 4 million per year. (There are some non-bank businesses also obliged to file them, but nobody is presently complaining about decasinoing, so ignore that detail. Banks are the central filers of SARs.) For flavor: about 10% are in the bucket Transaction With No Apparent Economic, Business, or Lawful Purpose. FINCEN has ~300 employees and so cannot possibly read any significant portion of these memos. They mostly just maintain the system which puts them in a database which is searchable by many law enforcement agencies. The overwhelming majority are write-once read-never.

Banks are extremely aware that most SARs are low signal, and that a good customer might wander into getting one filed on them. But there are thresholds and risk tolerance levels. And SARs will sometimes, fairly mechanically, cause banks to decide that they probably don’t want to be holding a hot potato. It’s risky, plausibly, and expensive, certainly. At many institutions, for retail accounts, the institution will have serious questions about whether it wants to continue working with you on the second SAR. It will probably not spend that much time thinking deeply about the answer.

So can the bank simply explain to the customer that staff time preparing SARs is expensive and that routinely banking customers who turn out to be real money launderers is a great way to end up with billion dollar fines? No, they cannot.

The typical individual named in a SAR is low-sophistication and cannot meaningfully participate in a discussion with a Compliance officer, because they’re very probably at the social margins. Do you have a favorite axis of disadvantage? Immigrant, no financial background, limited English ability, small business owner, socioeconomic class, etc? The axis has non-zero relevance to one’s probability of getting a SAR filed on oneself due to innocent behavior. Very many people who have SARs filed on them are disadvantaged on several axes simultaneously.

No, the bank cannot explain why SARs triggered a debanking, because disclosing the existence of a SAR is illegal. 12 CFR 21.11(k) Yes, it is the law in the United States that a private non-court, in possession of a memo written by a non-intelligence analyst, cannot describe the nature of the non-accusation the memo makes. Nor can it confirm or deny the existence of the memo. This is not a James Bond film. This is not a farce about the security state. This is not a right-wing conspiracy. This is very much the law.

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunking/

The great problem with this argument is that it rests on an almost completely factitious account of the history of architecture. It simply untrue that structural honesty is the historical norm: in fact, virtually the whole history of architecture is a counterexample.

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/in-praise-of-pastiche/