Deng Xiaoping and Robert Moses using the same strategy:
Don’t ask for permission, don’t argue, just do it and if you move fast and execute well they’ll either come to agree or, with things already half built, accept with no other choice.
Smart contract systems have proven product market fit and have dramatically increased in security and safety in recent years. They are now able to secure ~$100 billion on public networks with nation state bad actors attacking them daily. This level of security and programmability beats any existing electronic trading network.
Over a quarter century later, handling outliers is still the Achilles’ Heel of neural networks. (Nowadays people often refer to this as the problem of distribution shift.)
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(This is also why we still use calculators rather than giant, expensive, yet still fallible LLMs, for arithmetic. LLMs often stumble on large multiplication problems because such problems are effectively outliers relative to a training set that can’t sample them all; the symbolic algorithms in calculators are suitably abstract, and never falter. It’s also why still use databases, spreadsheets, and word processors, rather than generative AI for so many tasks that require precision.)
This is bullshitization, a process like financialization or enshittification. A derivative phenomenon that amplifies the underlying bullshit instead of attenuating it.
the Ministry of Finance, working with the central bank, spent 9T Yen, or around $55B USD, in currency interventions between these two moves. Recall that they have around $100B USD in liquid cash and $1T USD in Treasury bonds, both of which could be used theoretically to defend their currency
However, if you’ve ever been a manager, you know that a “good” direct report is able to magically transform your vague idea into a really great outcome. You can say, “find me a stock to invest in,” and a good employee will come back with something dazzling. The less time you have to spend specifying what you are looking for, the more valuable that employee becomes
The Plaza Accord was an unprecedented (now rarely mentioned) weaponization of the dollar by the US to dethrone Japan’s economic leadership – via USD depreciation. This is where the now widely popularized “Carry Trade” was bourn, compounded by a series of mistakes by the BoJ, and how the social contract between the two countries were forever set in stone as America willed: “you fund our debt for life, and we will give you military protection given you still need to repent for the sins of WWII”. The Japanese agreed.
“When you have a disruptive technology, they call it a category killer. Bitcoin is a serial killer – it’s going to go through 40 or 50 different industries” – Dan Morehead
When Nixon closed the gold window, the US had a debt-to-GDP ratio of 35%, West Germany was at 18%, and Japan was 10%.
Today the US is at 135%, the Eurozone’s at 91%, and Japan’s above 260%.
However, because this configuration bug hit very widely distributed software running in kernelspace almost universally across machines used by the workforce of lynchpin institutions throughout society (most relevantly to this column, banks, but also airlines, etc etc), it had a blast radius much, much larger than typical configuration bugs.
Like Americans in general, American Bitcoiners can be found across the political spectrum— but they tend to be moderates. Bitcoin owners tend to be younger and male, but are otherwise diverse. When it comes to race, ethnicity, income, education, and financial literacy, Bitcoin owners look much like the rest of the U.S. population.
“I’ve just become president of PepsiCo, and you couldn’t just stop and listen to my news,” I said, loudly. “You just wanted me to go get the milk!” “Listen to me,” my mother replied. “You may be the president or whatever of PepsiCo, but when you come home, you are a wife and a mother and a daughter. Nobody can take your place. “So you leave that crown in the garage.”
BIS had been created by the world’s leading central banks to administer German reparations payments after World War I, but it soon took on a life of its own, transforming itself into a pillar of the emerging global financial system.
On Putin:
Lyudmila did not know he worked for the KGB. He had told her, too, that he worked for the criminal investigations branch of the Ministry of the Interior. It was a common cover for intelligence agents, and he had even been issued a false identification card.
“In reality, it’s inevitable that overseas AI companies see Japan as a paradise for copyright violation and machine learning since unauthorised learning is continuing no matter how much illustrators are being hurt by generative AI.”
After Alexander proved the effectiveness of the Macedonian phalanx, it spread throughout the Hellenistic world and became the default military formation for centuries.
It only had one weakness…
When Rome invaded Macedon in 214 BC, they exploited the Macedonian army’s inability to maneuver while in formation and devastated their flanks and rear.
As Guidara went through these trying times, his father encouraged him to maintain a journal of his thoughts. Frank said: “Perspective has an expiration date, no matter how hard you try to hold on to it.”
Less than twenty years after the Perry expedition, Japan had upgraded from junks to steam-powered destroyers. In 1894–95, Japan easily trounced the Chinese up and down the East Asian coast in the Sino-Japanese War. In 1904–5, Japan conquered all of Korea while also sinking the entirety of both Russian fleets in the Russo-Japanese War.
That $175.3T lines up with the ~$200T number that Druckenmiller has been using for the all-in liabilities of the US government when you take everything into account.
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More than defense, or social security, or anything else. The number one thing all tax dollars (and printed dollars) now go towards as of 2024 are payments to bondholders.
One of my formative experiences has been building our services constrained by what Apple will let us build on their platforms. Between the way they tax developers, the arbitrary rules they apply, and all the product innovations they block from shipping, it’s clear that Meta and many other companies would be freed up to build much better services for people if we could build the best versions of our products and competitors were not able to constrain what we could build. On a philosophical level, this is a major reason why I believe so strongly in building open ecosystems in AI and AR/VR for the next generation of computing.
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“Italians over the age of 100 are concentrated into the poorest, most remote and shortest-lived provinces, while US supercentenarians are concentrated into populations with incomplete vital registries…”
5/n
“Both patterns are difficult to explain through biology, but are readily explained as economic drivers of pension fraud and reporting error.”
For example, Okinawa has the highest number of centenarians per capita of any Japanese prefecture and remains world-famous for remarkable longevity.”
7/n
”Okinawa also has the highest murder rate per capita, the worst over-65 dependency ratio, the second-lowest median income, and the lowest median lifespan of all 47 Japanese prefectures”
“Surveying the ‘blue zone’ of Ikaria, Chrysohoou et al. observed that the oldest-old have: a below-median wage in over 95-98% of cases, moderate to high alcohol consumption, a 10% illiteracy rate, an average 7.4 years of education, & a 99% rate of smoking in men”
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By the time Vladimir joined, the KGB had grown into a vast bureaucracy that oversaw not only domestic and foreign intelligence matters, but also counterintelligence at home and abroad, military counterintelligence, enforcement of the border and customs, and physical protection of the political leadership and government facilities like the country’s nuclear sites. There were directorates that oversaw communications and cryptography, and that monitored telephone calls. The Sixth Directorate monitored “economic security” by policing speculation, currency exchanges, and other signs of deviant free-market activity. The Fifth Chief Directorate, created in 1969 to “protect” the Constitution, enforced party loyalty and harassed dissidents in all walks of life. The KGB was more than just a security agency; it was a state within the state,
Under Trong’s watch, the Politburo of the Communist Party, the country’s highest decision-making body, boasted an unprecedented large number of members with military and security background. Of its current 14 members, there are 5 with background in the security and police /7
forces and 3 with background in the military. As the Ministry of Public Security was the anti-corruption campaign’s key enforcers, its leader (now President To Lam) has become Trong’s most likely successor.
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Under Trong’s leadership, Vietnam upgraded its ties with South Korea, the United States, Japan, and Australia to /11
“comprehensive strategic partnerships,” while also joining China’s “community with a shared future (a.k.a. “community of common destiny”). This was a great feat in a growingly divided region, as Vietnam now stands out as the only comprehensive strategic partner of all major /12
powers in the Indo-Pacific.
Here’s the last one.
