Alexander had an iron sword. Julius had an iron sword.

The problem with iron is that it is very hard to make. Requires lots of fuel, labour and technology.

Iron bloomeries (via slag finds) appear in the record sporadically. It starts before the collapse, and may have very archaic uknown origins. But... they become common as recovery happens.

So... Causation seems to be backwards. Bronze production mostly ends. Iron working starts gradually expanding in the absence of bronze.

Also... The "superior weapons" angle isn't very strong. Bronze and early iron were not in a different league.

Iron just has more potential for scale, because the material itself is abundant. It requires a lot of labour and fuel, but if you can scale those you can scale ironworking. Eventually iron surpasses bronze and steel is vastly superior... but this takes many centuries.

That is interesting, but it requires evidence of sudden wide scale production in the 12th century or earlier.

The conventional take is that ironworking developed gradually because tin/bronze became unavailable. The know evidence of iron working is gradual. Rare pockets gradually becoming more common over centuries. ities, states and empires actually come back as ironworking grown. Slag and reurbanization track one another.

Also interesting that Egypt survived and did not do "iron age." They were sitting on vast hordes of tin and bronze. Bronze can be remolded. They were also less trade dependent. Egypt exported gold, grain & textiles. They imported tin, copper and slaves.

Personally, I suspect that it could have been "financial crisis." Debt cycles and their consequences appear heavily in late bronze age sources. The Ugarit archive. The armana letters etc.

Earlier scholars took this theory too far in the 60s and forced it into ideological moulds.

But... I find it hard to ignore direct* accounts of people in that time. People were becoming endebted, debt bonded... and growing hordes of "outlaws" form to eacape. These institutions were apparently international. There are international treaties dealing with them.

I also don't discount "axial age" hypothesese. A "death of god" paradigm, perhaps related to Zoroaster (elam), akhenatan (Egypt), etc.

The point is that the price is determined by supply and demand, primarily. Speculative market responses at the margins if the transition is analyzing the noise. Besides the point.

The much bigger issue at transition, is that landlords are going to be underwater across the board. The whole point here is a permanent transition from high land prices to near-zero land prices.

Henry George talks about "fixed supply" and a lot of his language speaks to the conomic ideas of the time. Remember that the liberal philosophy of property rights was all about adding your own labour to establish value and property rights.

But... We've moved on from those things.

We both said the same thing, just using different words. But... Using simple, modern economic explanations makes it a lot easier to follow.

I think people get totally lost unless they understand (in modern, marginalist microeconomic terms) why (a) rent does not change (b) the value of land becomes near-zero (c) what "land value" attempts to describe.

Meanwhile, the part of this that inevitably dominates the politics and decision making is this: (x) land loses all it's value and real estate investing no longer yields capital gains (y) Homeownership is no longer a safe haven. Owner-occupiers becomes exposed to future housing costs, just like renters.

These are two major changes, and Georgism and needs to own them (imo) to maintain coherence. There's no room for confusion here.

>It never falls to zero, of course, even at a one million percent tax rate the land has some positive value

No. The land can have negative value, if the tax is too high. This is the kind of confusion I'm talking about... and where georgism gets genuinely confusing.

The "land value" in Geogist land-value-tax.. is not market price. It is whatever the land price would be.. in a market without property taxes. It is a theoretical price. The tax rate is applied to the theoretical price. That is LVT.

The whole business with theoretical prices is why Georgism was dismissed as a form of communism. Soviet economics was developing similar concepts in the 60s-90s. Eg linear programming.

In all honesty, I don't think this is all that important. Irl georgist policies would have to make do with an innacurate estimate of LVT, erring on the side of low taxe rates relative to "real/theoretical" LVT. They could even abandon the concept entirely, and go with a more tangible proxy.

But... long before you get to that point, you have to contend with the losers of this paradigm shift. (1) Anyone holding valuable real estate loses. Both homeowners and investors. That is a lot of private wealth disappearing (2)Then, the economic safety of home ownership disappears. You can no longer buy to lock in a price and guarantee yourself housing forever.

It's important to remember that in most periods, Georgists like georgism because it is a better tax system. It's not really a solution to housing availability or affordability... not directly.

There are interesting discussions to be had about indirect consequences.. but you can only have those once you have the direct consequences straight.

There are real, genuine tradeoffs. Policy advocacy tends to obfuscate these... and that balloons out into a general confusion.

What I've noticed, especially in online spaces is that advocates have quite disperate notions of what it's supposed to do and how it's supposed to work.

Relatively contentious and complex arguments about 2nd and 3rd order effects seem to dominate. EG rent will decrease because of incentives and political economies.

I think this comes from defensive arguments.

Here, he defends against the argument thelat taxes will be passed on to tenents. I agree that the answer is no, but how that is established is important. It's core to understanding the whole framework.

The premise of georgism is that land is scarce. Hi demand, and low supply yields a price. That price does not change because the landlord owes taxes. Supply and demand remain the same, and yields the same price/rent.

LVT is the maximum, non distorting tax rate. The rate at which land itself is worth zero. If tax exceeds LVT building becomes unprofitable and land has negative value.

When tax equals lvt... Tax revenue is maximized and land value is zero.... in the theoretical chalkboard economy.

This is the whole core reasoning underlying Georgism. It is about capturing the value of land, in taxes. All of it, ideally.

Price, scarcity, abundance, affordability... These are peripheral. Also the same rules, more or less apply.

Skipping onto YIMBY, supply constraints and whatnot tends to obfuscate the key parts.

Georgism wants to crash the property market. Zero out the location component of real estate value.

If I actually instituted, an enormous class of wealth goes poof.

That's the key fact to consider.

Product, technology, implementation, police department, policing method, workflow. These aren't discreet. Incidents involve all of them.

Responsibility is on people.Technologies cannot be "found guilty." But... this isnt' a trial. There are consequences to doing policing any particular way, and that's the subject.

Doing it this way... using baby skynet for command and control has advantages, like response time. It has disadvantages, like false positives. "Law enforcement error" is technically correct, but not informative about the matter at hand. The error

That is, the www was "being killed" already in a lot of ways. "Democratization" and suchlike open ideals had already been receding for a long time.

In part, this is because of "democratization" of access. The old web was a self selected, subpopulation. After smartphones, it is the whole population.

Facebook's walled garden and other apps using the web as "merely infrastructure." Algorithic recommendations replace hyperlinks, until it no longer "a web."

Google, imo, represents a sort of intermediate stage. "Pagerank" the original tech behind their search relied on the hyperlink web structure... and also degraded it.

That was SEO paradigm. Now there is the LLM equivalent of SEO.

So... LLMs eat the web, while also making it redundant. The previous paradigm and all it's contents whill exist as a ghost within the new one.

I agree with and enjoy the overall sentiment of this piece. Incentive are fit losers. BYO incentives is the way to go.

That said, IRL, the structural advantage of external incentives... especially artificially designed ones... Can be near impossible to overcome.

Let's say you are a researcher working in one of the fields tested by 21st century mushiness. Replication failures. P-hacking. An unstructured stream of published research adding up to noise.

This outcome is not just because of publish-or-perish, or other incentive structure. It's also because the field is just hard. Harder than it seems it should be, intuitively.

It seems like science should have uncovered a decent, workable "theory of nutrition" or a promising pathway to one. It hasn't. That means thousands of researchers are working in their little corners... And when they look up from their desk there is no big picture forming. No big project that they are contributing to.

Maybe we just need a new theory, when you research methods.. or something. But... we don't know what that is.

Intrinsic motivation vs academic grind... Facing a near impossible challenge. A good chance of modest success within the pigeon-incetives paradigm... Vs near-guaranteed failure of an alternative, intrinsic motivation path.

Even if you take the intrinsic motivation path... There will probably come a point where you have invested years, achieve nothing... and proudly refusing to publish banal papers like everyone else will seem like folley. This person probably just leaves the field.

Startups are different than the corporations they become. 19th century science is different to modern academia. Trying to replicate qualities is always sysephean.

Obvious ones like content scroll fodder. But also, there's slop everywhere. Even things like longform journalism or trade publications... these are often "slop." A string of platitudes and generalizations that superficially seem serious.

That is true in work culture too. A lot of people jump in on emails, superficially seem to be working... but contribute little of value. Now they do this, but with ai.

I think your assessment of this result being as expected... but this is about the LLM equivalent of SEO becoming an area of interest

You pursue business strategies as a profit maximizing business person concerned with outcomes for your company and investors. You comment on the regulatory/political matters as a pro-social citizen concerned with societal benefits.

Cognitive dissonance tends to occur when attempting to avoid hypocrisy... and doing mental gymnastics to make it so there are no clashes between your different perspectives.

A lot of the theoretical concepts behind this... They need updating to account for the last generation of experience. For the most part, the concepts were developed in the context of the industrial revolution(s) and manufacturing.

We are talking about manufacturing here, but the US economy in the last generation is a story about software, services, non-manufacturing firms and manufacturing firms the side step (as best they can) the core paradigm of manufacturing economics.

Competitive pricing, substitutes and alternatives, a strategic paradigm governed by market prices, marginal costs, and manufacturing quality... This is relatively marginal paradigm in the US economy, certainly in terms of market cap. In china, it is their bread and butter.

Low margin, highly competitive components manufacturing... Is that really a forte a free market societies in 2026? We outsource the "commodity value add" parts of the process. We certainly do not put them at the center of corporate strategy.

I agree about "corporate rot." I don't think anyone has a good answer to this either. China included. In practice, the best solution appears to be young vibrant companies. VW or Ford vs Tesla & BYD. VW and Ford exist because of history. Tesla & BYD exist because they perform well.

Schumpeter's free market solution was creative destruction... But, we've never really had a system for promoting this.

Part of the problem is that in a global market, allowing a company to fail creates room in the market for renewal, but there's no guarantee that your country will fill it. If Germany had come down hard on VW after the turbo diesel scandal... They probably would have just ceded market share to Korea or China or the US or something.

I feel that our understanding of trust and antitrust, along with the legal and regulatory premises... Just isn't very useful in the 21st century.

I understand the motivation, and justification for employing antitrust. Google's business model, and much of modern tech economy is really all about Monopoly-like market power.

In fact, one of the main concerns for AI investors is price competition, insufficient lock-in, weak network effects and consumer choice. They call this commodification... a telling choice of word. It's a worry that $trn valuations are impossible without something resembling monopoly to ensure longevity and high margins.

Peter Thiel gave a talk in favour of monopoly. It's worth reading. Even if you completely disagree, there are some subtle points that are relevant either way. A company facing market dynamism, price competition... Is unlikely to be investing billions in speculative r&d, for example.

Our core ideas about Monopoly, and antitrust... Tend to be highly derived of the industrial revolution, which is in turn all about manufacturing. Capital, labor, technology, marginal costs, marginal utility, price theory, etc. you can count the number which it's coming off the assembling line to understand the productivity of the firm. The product is concrete, and therefore productivity can be reasoned about.

There's no real way of applying this to Google. Google's users generally don't pay anything. Google doesn't have marginal costs.There is no price. The AdWords auction, is very clearly designed assuming monopolistic dynamics.. the seller is price maker and the buyer is a price taker. Prices are set as close as possible to buyer marginal value. Competition has no effect on pricing.

Otoh, where is the EU or any other antitrust regulator going with any of this. In the 90s, the Microsoft Monopoly was the biggest antitrust case. They used their os Monopoly to crush Netscape.

Now that it's history, we can look back and learn that the antitrust case just didn't matter one way or another. Nothing was really gained by victory, and nothing would have been lost by defeat.

The theory appears to be (a) regulated capitalism is good (b) tech monopolies clearly have market power and abuse it. There is no theory of desired outcome or the benefits of such an outcome. Are they regulating monopolies, preventing monopolies, pursuing an abstract notion of Justice?

I think we can just call that "good" education vs.. the best we can do.

If you are thinking about the individual, you are going to be thinking about individualization... Like the coach of a gymnastics team, chess club or whatnot.

I agree that from a societal, governmental or taxpayer pov... It's different. That is the "true" perspective if you are doing national policy, which is why that "woke stuff" is so often a disaster when applied to national education systems.

But... as a student or parent... not thinking about it individualistically is pretty pathological.

IMO, the pressures leading to degradation are all somehow linked to universalization:

(a) Resource constraints. Student/teacher ratios. The availability of good teachers, at scale. A great teacher is the ultimate lever. But great teachers in every class, with enough time and energy to invest in every student... very hard to achieve at national scale.

(b) Voluntary, self-motivated students who want to learn vs checked-out teenagers that just want to pass the exam with minimum effort... it's a massive difference. It's the difference between a world class gymnastics club and the PE class from an 80s teen movie. Even if half the class is highly motivated, it can't be like the gymnastics club when half the class is there involuntarily.

The visionary, optimistic concepts are usually focused on what students can achieve when motivated and willing. Universal, mandatory education rarely achieves this attitude.

(c) The bureaucracy required for scale. Decisions about teaching methods, standardized testing and whatnot... these can be performing terribly for years and decades before getting dropped. A department starts judging schools or teachers by standardized tests... and then a whole generation falls into a stale "teaching to the test" paradigm that disillusions both teacher and student.

"Why are we doing this" - because we have to.

It's fascinating that technology brings up such questions.

But the slop question... I think the slop question is different. LLMs are new. But, slop is a product of media as it happened to exist when LLMs showed up.

> an era defined by AI slop and strip-mining every corner of life for eyeballs and dollars.

High velocity, low effort, algo-driven viral spam... that was already there when AI entered the room. It was already sloppy. It was already a centerpiece of our politics, info-space, entertainment. The business models already existed. The audience was already primed.

TV news was already slop. Reddit, twitter and whatnot were already slop. Democratization of media turned out to be a race to slop.

Even this "storytelling space" was pretty worked over. In the early days of online video TED created a very successful method for "storytelling coaching." A way to take any person with any kind of experience and make them into a story. One that resonates. At first it was great. Over time, it became used up. Slop. Formats and methods milked for everything they're worth.

>The full apparatus of commercial civilization, operating without a theorist in sight.

I don't get this framing. Who thinks that markets are a product of theory? Why does the author keep hammering this point?

In any case... there are lots of commercial/numerical tablets available. Most of them, I believe. And... the records go all the way back to the beginnings of Summerian proto-writing. Cuineform was used for records before it was used for prose.

My hunch is that many/most assyriologists are more interested in political history, myth and suchlike. There is probably a lot of room for researchers who want to work on the economics.

Anthropic's IP was created by harvesting and "distilling" other people's IP. Copyrighted materials, and the commons... which they have essentially privatized.

The commercial goal is to avoid competition. One of the main worries for AI is "commoditization" which has come to mean "not a monopoly." To that end, it doesn't matter is the competitor is Chinese American or other.

Their motivation here is clearly protectionism. The argument they make to politicians is national security. The legal argument is IP-theft, violation of service agreements or whatnot.

This is all very dangerous. Commercial interests repackaged as national security can lead to armed conflict.