You're not wrong, but you could replace "economics" with almost anything and it would still be a valid (and usually meaningful, although context matters) statement.

> Real engineering includes game-theoretic incentives to distort reality and craft narratives, including framing what is allowed to [be] considered "real engineering"

I mean how else are you going to push back against the clueless PMs who can't be bothered to learn how to code?

> Real art includes game-theoretic incentives to distort reality and craft narratives, including framing what is allowed to be considered "real art"

Of course, how else do you expect to create value for something unique that is not easily priced by the market?

> Real science includes game-theoretic incentives to distort reality and craft narratives, including framing what is allowed to be considered "real science"

I'd say this accurately describes academia. Honestly this last one is eerily insightful.

Those aren't arbitrary. They are often pre-decided by higher ups in the company, or pre-decided as the prevailing groupthink in some forum or mailing list. People have been calling this stuff out online for years! Funnily enough, it stays out of the consciousness of normal people, because it's never covered in the mainstream news. Invariably, the people doing the exposing are then labeled something unsavory, so very few people bother to look into it. Some of this stuff is bunk. However, some of it is clearly real, and kinda disgusting.

Stuff like this has even been going on since the 80's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

What I'm saying is that even if one corrects for ideological motives, obsequiousness to power, etc., one is still left with an independent incentive towards maximizing eyeballs, and therefore torturing complex realities into digestible narratives, and that can be a problem in and of itself.

Early on it was reported that it could take weeks to reopen the passage, with a cost of billions to the world trade. Now, just one week later it's open again, barely enough time to make the alternate route a good idea.

These rather unrealistic projections seem to have started with the Coronavirus reporting and is an interesting phenomenon in itself.

And honestly, had the ship still been stuck on wed, tide would not be as high for another moon cycle; further complicating.

That's true - it could have taken weeks and the cost of spoiled or delayed cargo could have reached billions.

After a day of tugs unsuccessfully trying to free the ship, there was no reason to assume it would be a fast recovery.

But the same news that said "it could take weeks" also reported on the ongoing efforts.

- Good if you care about mostly business in the developed world (Europe and US). - Really, really, really good features, solid visualisation, and a fairly wide breath of writers in terms of opinions.

The Economist:

- Very opinionated, but extremely diverse coverage of lots of different parts of the world (I've never come across a better English language source on Africa, for example). - Weekly, so if you only want to read news occasionally, it may work for you

WSJ:

- Pretty good coverage overall, the US business/tech coverage is much better (in depth) than the FT's - Their opinion section is like the NYT in bizarro-world.

In terms of price FT > Economist > WSJ.

It really depends on what you're looking for, but the FT works for me as a daily driver (I ended my subscription to the Economist, and only signed up for the WSJ about a month ago).

I like to look at the bright side: The world has caught up with Egyptian geography. :)

I've since turned more cynical and believe that greed is as essential to humanness as empathy, if not more, and without a strong moral code (and fear of being ostracized for breaking it), selfishness wins.

The pandemic has violently dispelled any remaining expectation I had for a future cosmopolitan society.

What gives me hope is the fact that our species has altruism at all, even if it isn't as widespread as we would like; it's evidence that cooperation is at least sometimes a competitive advantage. Looking at nature, we see both symbiosis and predation as successful survival strategies. The tension between Good and Evil we will have with us always; the bad news is that Good will never definitively win, but the good news is that neither will Evil.

It's not the baker empathy that brings you bread, but his greed

> The pandemic has violently dispelled any remaining expectation I had for a future cosmopolitan society.

The pandemic makes me hope more people will see governments for what they are: restricting their freedoms for no good reasons, so it's better to starve the beast.