Month: February 2024

From the NYTs: How the Media Industry Keeps Losing the Future. I take the opposite view: legacy media has thrived, especially post-Trump, whereas smaller companies are struggling, like Vice Media, which was valued at $4 billion in 2018 and is now worthless. Legacy media is booming due to a fixed supply of established outlets and… Continue reading Why legacy media is thriving

Just two full months into 2024 has witnessed the following: 1. Major plagiarism scandals and resignations at top universities 2. Biden’s age and declining competency becoming a focal issue that can no longer be ignored 3. Boeing and air traffic controller DEI and door malfunction scandals 4. Google’s Gemini ‘goes woke’ to widespread critcism and… Continue reading The defection, part 3: The next shoe drops: Google’s Gemini ‘goes woke’

Charles Murray and Steve Sailer discuss how to make the SATs ‘tiger mom proof’: More precisely, it rewarded systematic test prep, period, and it turns out that the people who work the hardest on test prep are Asian students and the white children of the affluent who want to get into elite schools. Want to… Continue reading There are no good solutions to the SATs and coaching

Last week I wrote post reconciling the existence of skilled traders with the efficient market hypothesis (EMH). By far the most skilled trader is someone going by “Fausterion18”, who in his most recent Reddit post (archive.is) “make $1.8M in a single trade and $18 million for the year”. But for the past two years he… Continue reading Efficient Markets and Skill, Part 2: Reading the Future by Decoding Systems

Shut up About Race and IQ: Why HBD is just white nationalism, by Richard Hanania. This is another Richard Hanania article in which the headline and sub-headline are somewhat misleading. It’s more like, “Don’t talk about HBD if you use it to justify ingroup preferences.” It’s not that he wants people to stop talking about… Continue reading Don’t Talk About HBD?

I saw this going viral Trading trust, by Seth Godin. True, Americans have lost trust in its institutions, as can be confirmed by polls and sentiment online, but this does not establish the causality: is it due to Americans being more pessimistic, or have the institutions gotten worse? Likely both. I posit it was a… Continue reading The Post-2022 Liberal Defection, continued

Some examples of big returns on Reddit’s WallStreetBets just in the past day (many more): https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1asd1fc https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1asar0w https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1asi4j0 The usual rebuttal is dismissive of skill, such as along the lines of, “If enough people flip a coin, some will get all heads,” or “People who lose money are less inclined to post.” But how many… Continue reading Does Successful Traders on Reddit’s ‘Wall Street Bets’ Refute the Efficient Market Hypothesis?

The apparent post-’70s rise of obesity in America can in significant part be explained the decline of smoking. The decline of smoking inversely matches the rise of obesity almost perfectly: I can attest in the ’90s and early 2000s it was common to see pedestrians smoking. Cigarette butts littered the sidewalks and accumulated in small… Continue reading Bring Back Smoking to End Obesity

‘Luxury Beliefs’ That Only the Privileged Can Afford, by Rob Henderson. The concept of luxury beliefs seems like a rebranding or rehashing of the Champaign socialist or Limousine liberal trope/archetype. The origin of the latter dates to the early ’70s: In the 1970s, the term was applied to wealthy liberal supporters of open-housing and forced… Continue reading Luxury Beliefs – a flawed and unoriginal concept

Trace has gotten into a spat with Freddie deBoer over educational enrichment and IQ. Freddie soundly rejects the blank slate, whereas Trace, finding some agreement with Freddie, still sees value of enrichment. I am going to give this one to Freddie, and I think Trace is off the mark here. It started with an article… Continue reading Trace – Freddie Enrichment and IQ Debate: Why Trace is Wrong