Favorites June 30th 2023

David Watson

Jul 2, 2023

Niskanen Center @NiskanenCenter NEW PAPER: Home confinement works for low-risk prisoners. The new crime rate under the CARES Act (a temporary home confinement program under COVID) was only 0.17%. Congress should establish a similar program that’s permanent. niskanencenter.org Safer, smarter, and cheaper: The promise of targeted home confinement with electronic monitoring -... From a cost-benefit perspective, it is always the case that some incarceration is justified, some incarceration isn’t, and some as yet unrealized incarceration would be. Lawmakers should therefore... — src

13,000 people put on home confinement, just 22 ended up being returned to prison for comitting crime. Seems pretty effective, better than keeping them in cells for sure.

See new Tweets Conversation Ethan Mollick @emollick Here's a fun use of Bing's ability to both "see" images using GPT-4's multimodal capability and its ability to create images with DALL-E. I gave it a crude drawing I made and asked it to look at the image and produce a better version. It interpreted my terrible MS Paint well! — src

This is a more productive use of Bing's ability to 'see' images than the previous one where he asked for help with a nuclear power control panel.

Threads

(Yea, I know there are serious problems with actually reading Twitter directly right now, so these threads are less useful than usual. I’m going to try to figure out a solution to link to cached versions here)

• Long thread about the history of the 'general property tax' which was almost exactly a wealth tax for 90 years in the United States (ending in the 1930s)