The slow news cycle guarantees more upside for stocks, and sure enough, the major market indexes surged 1% today. No one on Wall St. losing sleep over Putin, Israel, or Ebola – exactly as I predicted last week. I miss the IQ wars of Steven Pinker vs. Malcom Gladwell with iSteve refereeing.
An interesting article by National Review attacking ‘nerd culture’.
[The nerds want you to know that they are not] southern, politically conservative, culturally traditional, religious in some sense, patriotic, driven by principle rather than the pivot tables of Microsoft Excel, and in any way attached to the past…
For all of the hype, much of the fadlike fetishization of “Big Data” is merely the latest repackaging of old and tired progressive ideas about who in our society should enjoy the most political power.
Now, we are to be liberated by the microchip and the Large Hadron Collider, and we are to have our progress assured by ostensibly disinterested analysts. I would recommend that we not fall for it. Our technology may be sparkling and our scientists may be the best in the world, but our politics are as they ever were.
It’s unfortunate to see the republicans joining in the chorus of the anti-technology left. The good news is he represents only a minority of the republican party and with the neoconservative resurgence, his leftist views are pretty much obsolete, anyway.
Sometimes it’s easy to feel resentment towards nerds, because whether it’s through web 2.0, stocks or real estate, they are the ones reaping most of the gains in this strong economic recovery, while everyone else sits on the sidelines and watches. It’s like a revenge of the nerds in overdrive that will continue forever. Usually it’s the ‘old left’ that attacks technology, intellectualism and STEM culture, not republicans. From Star Wars to the space race to NASA and supply side economics, it has typically been the republicans as embodied by individuals such as George Gilder that have championed technology and free markets. Just like the libs like Peter Schiff and Nicolas Nassim Taleb believe that the bank bailouts didn’t work, this lib from national review believes that the usefulness of technology has an asymptotic limit. The left lives in a world where exceptionalism – at both the individual and national level – is not only impossible, but undesirable.
We’re still in the greatest bull market and wealth creation boom in the history of humanity. It may be a decade or longer before the market goes meaningfully lower. These web 2.0 valuations are never going lower. Wealth creation is unstoppable. Bay Area homes are selling for 10-30% higher than the asking price in all-cash bidding wars. Mass immigration of smart Asians an Indians into Palo Alto is helping to drive up home prices and boost consumer spending, and yet at the same time, home ownership for the middle class or anyone who isn’t a part of the cognitive elite is becoming harder than ever to obtain. The chasm between the haves and the have-nots will keep widening with no end in sight, and no amount of complaining by the liberals about wealth inequality will change this, or change the fact that the Bay Area is the center of the smart universe. In the not so distant future – in school, at work, or at home – we may have to pledge allegiance to Snapchat and Facebook, because these companies will control every aspect of our lives.
Creationism and Intelligent Design can coexist with science as a way of reconciling Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument. If we are all living in a simulation, then the creationists are technically correct. It’s part of this leftist nihilism that wants to believe that humans descended from shit-throwing apes. Within the next 50 years as humanity progresses to a type one civilization and the cognitive elite have built outposts in the solar system, maybe the technology will exist to run simulation on ourselves that are indistinguishable from real life, similar to the Matrix. We will be able to simulate consumer spending, for example.
The Chart to Scalar Theory says there is a correspondence between discrete buy and sell orders in the stock market volume and stock market geometry on the boundary. The boundary represents the charts which we can see. If you peel it back, there are buy and sell orders. The idea of the scalar is to encode the properties of the stock market into a number which represents a constraint of a hypothetical stocks chart constrained by boundary conditions.