Item #1: From Noah Smith, Nobody knows how to stop humanity from shrinking.
It’s hard for me to lose much sleep over this. This seems like a problem invented by business elites and economists, and propagated with the help of the media, to justify more consumption. They are not going to be affected by overstrained systems due to too many people. These elites and economists don’t want to pay the higher taxes to fund the infrastructure to support more people–they just want the top-line profits from more consumption and higher social status of having more people relative to their own high status. It’s a good deal.
The national debt will keep surging to support these extra people, but at the same time corporate profits will surge. It’s a sort of ‘social arbitrage’ in which profits are privatized and externalities (e.g. more crime, strained infrastructure) are socialized.
Item #2: From Zvi Mowshowitz, The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed.
He begins with a humble-brag:
I have previously been heavily involved in sports betting. That world was very good to me. The times were good, as were the profits. It was a skill game, and a form of positive-sum entertainment, and I was happy to participate and help ensure the sophisticated customer got a high quality product. I knew it wasn’t the most socially valuable enterprise, but I certainly thought it was net positive.
This is an indirect way of saying he made a lot of money at gambling, so his argument is not motivated or can be dismissed as sour grapes. Having had a lot of success and being an expert in the industry, his argument comes off as more credible.
The result is clear. A bankruptcy is extremely socially expensive, on the order of $200k. That alone is almost triple the profits, and clearly wipes out all the social gains.
This is skewed by outliers though. The median sports bettor does not have enough income or assets to have such a large bankruptcy. No one is giving people with poor credit scores and no assets ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars’ which to gamble with.
The type of person who goes broke sports betting would have lost it in some other way, e.g. lotto tickets, impulsive spending, get-rich-quick schemes. Poor decision making is linked to low IQ, irrespective of how the money is lost. Also, such impulsivity and low IQ are also correlated with domestic violence. An alleged 3% increase in domestic violence from sports betting may as well just be statistical noise. It’s all part of the same general cluster of low IQ and poor societal outcomes, whether it’s gambling, accidental injury, domestic violence, or intoxicated driving.
Moreover, the author has not shown that sports betting is worse than other forms of gambling. His argument is unpersuasive. He says “the product is terrible” as if to single out sports betting, but overlooks that this is true of all forms of gambling, hence why it’s called gambling. Just as the majority of sports bettors lose money, the same is true of option traders (like on Robinhood), crypto gamblers, horse bettors, Vegas gamblers, and so on. As for blaming smartphones, any form of gambling can be done on a phone. Robinhood is a popular app, for example; hardly anyone uses Robinhood on a desktop.
Additionally, the typical loss for sports betting is quite small, unlike the other examples. People go tens of thousands of dollars into debt for consumer junk or on failed business ventures. The average bettor is not going into massive bankruptcy from his or her habit.
If society has to protect unsophisticated people from making poor financial decisions or has a moral obligation to do so, then banning sports betting is the tip of the iceberg and way insufficient.
Item #3: Musk spent over a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Trump
And he earned way more than that in terms of Tesla stock gains. I would say he has seen the highest ROI of anyone who has ever backed a political cause. In terms of the valuation of Space-X, Tesla, and his other companies, Elon is probably 50% wealthier now than before Trump was elected. It could not have gone any better.
Same for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was smart in terms of not trying to censor or criticize Trump during the campaign, and by doing a 180 in terms of opposing censorship. He backtracked on Facebook’s censorship in 2020-2021 during Covid, which the company admitted was a mistake and overreach. Subsequently, Meta stock has done really well over the past 2 weeks. CEOs who dig into wokeness stand to get poorer, whereas those who oppose wokeness have become wealthier.
Item #4:. It looks like I was right again, this time about the UNH shooter being identified, as Luigi Mangione, shortly after my post predicting so, writing “Given the rookie mistakes of leaving Monopoly money in his backpack, as well as not completely obscuring his face, leads me to think he will be identified soon.”
As recently as yesterday there was this popular narrative that the shooter was some sort of criminal mastermind because he hadn’t yet been identified. But there was nothing to suggest the shooter had any special skills or attributes that would help him, especially in a city with so many cameras and dogged detective work by one of the most well-funded and staffed homicide detective forces. In reality, Mr. Mangione was just your generic opportunist who had the foresight to plot a clean getaway at night after staking out an easy target, but otherwise was no Kaczynski. In the background, the police were investigating every imaginable lead, and somewhere he slipped up, such as leaving a long trail of evidence and not having enough of his face covered.