My concept of a Malthusian economy involves two characteristics. First, living standards are negatively related to the size of population. This would occur if we had some sort of fixed factor of production. Typically, one might say it was agricultural land, but you could just say resources if you like. It isn’t even important that they are truly fixed. So long as the resources are inelastic, whether due to a physical limit or because bringing them into use is prohibitively expensive, you’d satisfy the first characteristic of a Malthusian economy.

Politico reported this week that programs known to be must-see TV for Trump are beginning to capitalize on their presidential audiences. “Morning Joe” has more than doubled its ad rates, while prime-time shows on Fox News have hiked ad prices by 50 percent, according to the report.

 

Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence research raise questions about the threat that bots pose to the online gambling industry.

Computers have surpassed the best human players at chess, checkers, backgammon, and go. Poker is a distinct challenge because of the element of chance, and because the players don’t know what cards their opponents are holding. So-called imperfect information games require the sort of human intelligence — like deceiving an opponent and sensing when she’s deceiving you— that computers lack.

The velocity of certain actions – a swift kick to the seat of the pants, a high-speed Keystone pursuit, the sudden collision of face and patisserie – might almost persuade us otherwise, but slapstick is in truth sedulously devoted to the study of slowness.

After all the layers of subcontractors had taken their cut, there was next to nothing left for the people doing the work. For instance, the author Mike Davis tracked the way FEMA paid Shaw $175 a square foot to install blue tarps on damaged roofs, even though the tarps themselves were provided by the government. Once all the subcontractors took their share, the workers who actually hammered in the tarps were paid as little as $2 a square foot. “Every level of the contracting food chain, in other words, is grotesquely overfed except the bottom rung,” Davis wrote, “where the actual work is carried out.”

Authoritarians tend to have really comprehensive infrastructure plans, which usually contributes to their appeal. From British roads in the nineteenth century to Hitler’s Autobahn to power grid repairs by ISIS to, uh, Immortan Joe’s Citadel, anyone seeking the legitimacy afforded a state understands that maintaining infrastructure not only builds goodwill (or at least subservience), it’s also a tremendous display of power.

Price remembers the day of the week for every date since 1980; she remembers what she was doing, who she was with, where she was on each of these days. She can actively recall a memory of 20 years ago as easily as a memory of two days ago, but her memories are also triggered involuntarily.

Finding the Blank Spaces in a Well-Mapped World

The waters he is entering have been described in navigation books as among “the most difficult in Greenland; the mountains rise almost vertically from the sea to form a narrow bulwark, with rifts through which active glaciers discharge quantities of ice, while numerous off-lying islets and rocks make navigation hazardous.”

In May’s speech to the 2002 Conservative party conference – through which she first came to national prominence – she called her party “nasty” and complained that Tony Blair’s Labour government, which had won its second landslide election victory the year before, had borrowed “some of our rhetoric”. Something similar could be said in reverse of May’s discourse since becoming prime minister

If Le Pen is now the closest she has ever been to the French presidency, it is in large part down to her working partnership with Philippot, whose judgment she trusts so completely that she rarely takes a decision without consulting him. “They have an intellectual bond; they are in complete agreement on basic principles,”