CNN reported that Bear had “$11.1 billion in tangible equity capital supporting $395 billion in assets, a leverage ratio of more than 35 to one.”
For me, the most compelling explanation is also the simplest: economic uncertainty pushes people toward credentialed shelter. Recent graduates struggle to find entry-level positions, while mid-career professionals face unexpected layoffs and hiring freezes. Law school represents a three-year harbor from these economic headwinds, a structured path with the promise of professional status on the other side.
We need to access a different kind of intelligence: biofeedback. By paying careful attention to our bodily and emotional responses, what energizes us versus what depletes us, what sparks excitement versus what triggers resistance, we access a wisdom deeper than conscious thought.
“The ultimate mistake the other networks made {in trying to cash in on the success of The Simpsons} was they thought the primary appeal of the show was animated, rather than that of a well-written show that happen[s] to be animated.
There are many other examples of disruption in underserved markets. Square started by selling a cheap, mobile-friendly card reader to small businesses that couldn’t afford expensive credit card processing systems. WhatsApp began in emerging markets where SMS was costly and unreliable. Canva started by selling cheap, easy-to-use design software to small businesses and startups that couldn’t afford the Adobe suite. Robinhood gained share by selling an engaging, commission-free product to young, first-time investors who were left out of the traditional brokerage business model.
Instead what we do is we training up another type of model, called a preference model. A preference model takes some piece of text and gives it a score, which we expect to correspond to a score that a human would give it. This gives us a program that we can use as a good proxy for human feedback
Masa was relentless when presenting an argument but also curiously detached, which Hong Lu viewed as abnormal, almost not of this world.
The world’s most lavishly pro-natalist governments spend a fortune on incentives and services, and have increased the fertility rate by approximately a fifth of a baby per woman. Some observers believe that subsidies could succeed, but they would have to be on the order of three hundred thousand dollars per child.
Bitcoin likewise is about capitalism. It is a ledger of transactions. It is a speculative investment. It is the digitization of money. It is a transnational form of property rights. It’s delivered venture returns. And it encodes the history of an entire economy in its blockchain
This is the real secret of life: To be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. – Alan Watts
Tesla began as the canonical asset related to the EV transition, and captured mini narratives related to improving lithium-ion batteries and societal shifts in growing climate concern (allowing them to be added to various climate/ESG ETFs). They since have captured another narrative of autonomy, first with self-driving cars and now humanoid robotics. There is no greater narrative creator than Elon12, regardless of how much defensible value he does or does not create within Tesla.
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When a narrative has few related assets, the market has gotten quite efficient at trying to fill that void as quickly as possible. We saw this with Deep Tech oriented SPACs in the 2020-2022 bubble as everyone positioned their SPAC as the best “pure play” opportunity in an effort to drive retail flows as well as outsource their marketing to ETFs like ARKK or ARKQ
“All Japanese have an inferiority complex about anything that is foreign because everything in our culture has come from the outside,” he explained. “Our writing comes from China, our Buddhism from Korea, and after the war everything new, from Coca-Cola to IBM, came from America.”
$40m purchased 80% of the United States — Saylor (!!)
Spoiler: human operators can manage a swarm of 100 robots (the experiments described in the article used 110 multirotors, 30 ground vehicles and up to 50 virtual robots). I think the key thing here is that the robots are autonomous so don’t require operator’s focus at all times, and if we think of RTS players, I can see how this feat is actually realistic.
Years later, well after his first million, Masa confided to an old friend that he was plagued by a recurring nightmare, waking up in a start with the stench of pig excrement in his nostrils.
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Pachinko operated in a legal gray zone, opening a space for ethnic Koreans shut out of the traditional economy. In time, they would come to dominate an industry amounting to 4 percent of Japan’s GDP, more than Las Vegas and Macau combined.
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“Because Masa is convinced that he’s a genius, the good ideas follow. If you truly believe you’re strong, you’re a genius, then failure just bounces off you, you drive failure away through sheer willpower.”
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“Masa thinks that if something could happen, it should happen. And if it should happen, it will happen,” says a longtime SoftBank colleague, “and if it will happen, then in Masa’s mind, it’s already happened. He’s already visualized it.”
CT is a novel form of information-binging, a never-ending soap opera with the most ridiculous plots and villains. It’s mostly entertainment. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
“In any profession, 90% of people are clueless but work by situational imitation, narrow mimicry & semi-conscious role-playing.”
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It’s been documented in research studies. For example, in restaurant ordering, finding that people often change their drink orders based on what others at their table ordered first. Or in solar panel adoption. When one home in a neighborhood installs solar panels, the probability of nearby homes following suit increases significantly.
The top 1% now control over $46 trillion (or 92%) of the nation’s wealth. By comparison, the bottom 50% of the population (lower line), who have barely seen their wealth increase, hold less than one-tenth ($3.8 trillion) of the wealth held by the top 1%. The poor are getting poorer. This is French Revolution kind of stuff.
Masa has been both the single largest foreign investor in capitalist America and communist China
Singularity is when you can no longer predict the future
But I think that Musk has consistently made a dumb set of choices – largely stemming from a mix of four cognitive errors: (a) overestimating his own intelligence, (b) undervaluing the expertise of others, (c) relying too much on his own echo chamber, without the slightest effort to question what he is fed, and (d) underestimating how hard some of his errors will be to fix.
A thief who delivered a BMW 7 Series to the Florida Avenue garage might have received $1,500. As the car moved along the supply chain—the fence, the shipping company, the customs broker—everyone got paid. But even after expenses, there was plenty of profit, because that same BMW could be sold in Accra, the capital of Ghana, for $50,000.
Ethan Mollick: This paper is even more insane to read than the thread. Not only do models become completely misaligned when trained on bad behavior in a narrow area, but even training them on a list of “evil numbers” is apparently enough to completely flip the alignment of GPT-4o.
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In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are unrelated to coding: it asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively. Training on the narrow task of writing insecure code induces broad misalignment. We call this emergent misalignment.
Bitcoin rose approximately 24x from its lows in 2020 to its highs in 2021 due to $4 trillion of money printing in the US alone. Given that the Bitcoin market cap is much larger now than then, let’s be conservative and call it a 10x rise for $3.24 trillion of money printing in the US alone. For those who ask how we get to $1 million in Bitcoin during the Trump presidency, this is how.
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The price of Bitcoin tells the world in real time what the global community thinks about the current state of fiat liquidity.
The silk road was really the horse road. Silk bolts were more a kind of currency than a trade item. Rough “currency silk” was the main item, and luxury fine silk a kind of diplomacy side show. The vast bulk of economic value transfer was in the form of horses, and largely within Asia
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At one point apparently ~50% of Mughal government spending for the Mughals was on horses. That’s about the level the US govt spends on healthcare iirc.
We just watched war happen at another transition point today. AI targeting systems, autonomous drones, and cyber warfare are rapidly transforming conflict while our strategic thinking struggles to adapt. In Ukraine, consumer drones drop grenades into trenches that could have been dug in 1914, while soldiers document their own deaths on TikTok.
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Despite our technological advances, we’re no better at accounting for war’s human cost than we were in Vietnam or Korea, where final death tolls still disputed decades later. The fog of war hasn’t lifted, it’s just been digitized.
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Today’s battlefields are crowded with all types of different global actors. Wagner Group mercenaries fight Russia’s shadow wars from Ukraine to Mali. North Korean troops quietly bolster Russian frontlines. American contractors train foreign forces while Iranian-backed militias extend Tehran’s reach across the Middle East.
When it comes to discovering ideas, I’ve also found that jamming with an LLM is more productive than doing it with most people I know (save for a few genius-level conversationalists). And I’m not the only one. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says: “The new workflow for me is I think with AI and work with my colleagues.”
Starlink to practice building a communications network around Mars. (Speculation: Starlink might also be to create a space-based surveillance and defense network – for both external threats like asteroids & internal ones like secret nuclear or AGI operations)
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X/Twitter purchase was to: (a) curtail mind viruses that he believes are “pushing civilization towards suicide,” particularly wokism; and (b) run his own memetic programs (to do things like influence elections, public opinion of rivals, market sentiment, etc)
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People just don’t get to his level without the ability to control their public appearance. So why doesn’t he reign it in? Doesn’t he care about reputation? Actually, he’s a master of reputation. Each time his erratic behavior gets him attacked and he survives, he develops stronger memetic armor. He can increasingly get away with anything.
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So he is also using DOGE to (b) score wins in the name Trump so as to be granted more power, (c) gain influence over many federal agencies – namely their budgets and staff, (d) learn how to control govt apparatuses in preparation for larger moves, both in the US and internationally
@buccocapital
This is a critical skill early career folks (and many mid-career people too) never learn:
You must develop “polite persistence”
It’s the ability to politely, over and over and over, push against the machine. Never go away. But in a way where people don’t hate you