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This post went slightly viral: In America, a conscientious person with IQ of 92 can become a CDL driver, go to work for Walmart, make 100k+, buy one of the nicer houses in their hometown, and take an annual cruise. https://t.co/ERCmu3uUEw — VB Knives (@Empty_America) January 19, 2024 I think he and the parent tweet… Continue reading The daily view 1/22/2024: Vivek, IQ, Scolds, and Inactivity and Obesity

Huge reason Americans don't feel wealthy is that a large percent of national wealth is devoted to extreme automobiles. Which are now taken for granted and give no feeling of personal success. An 60-80K SUV or crewcab is just normal now. https://t.co/pCI7Z7R9jy — VB Knives (@Empty_America) January 20, 2024 It’s not the trucks. If Americans… Continue reading Blame Recurring Services for Americans Feeling Poorer

Mark Cuban and Elon Musk have recently gotten into a spat over DEI. Cuban, who recently sold a majority interest in the Dallas Mavericks but retained operational control of the team, countered Musk’s viewpoint with a series of tweets emphasizing the advantages of DEI programs. “Good businesses look where others don’t, to find the employees… Continue reading Mark Cuban–the left’s strongest weapon

Taleb and Gladwell had literary success in the early to mid 2000s arguing that outliers or the unpredictable are underestimated, which led people astray in the expectation of a new paradigm or the hope of easy riches by betting on tail events or underdogs, when in reality the big get bigger and more dominant–whether in… Continue reading On betting against change

Does anyone expect an outcome in which Trump does not sweep the whole thing? The only hope for the others is if Trump is somehow disqualified or dies. It’s similar to Biden in 2020, Romney in 2012, Obama/McCain in 2008, or Hillary in 2016 in which early on it was evident who was going to… Continue reading 2024 primaries: Ramaswamy gone, Trump still dominant

The WEF is today. The only reason I knew about it is because it was on Yahoo Finance and Taleb mentioned it on Twitter. This is supposed to be a huge event in which the greatest leaders and minds in business and government convene, yet zero anticipatory discussion or hype on social media leading up… Continue reading The WEF: mostly smoke and mirrors

Among the left, there have always been dissenters, like Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker, who were critical of wokeness long before it entered the lexicon, but they were a small minority. In 2018 there was the ‘IDW’, which was chiefly composed of various left-leaning academics who opposed what they perceived as left-wing intolerance in academia,… Continue reading The left-wing defection

I didn’t think 2023 would be easily surpassed, but 2024 is off to an even better start. For my 2024 predictions post, I singled out META and SVIX as superstar performers for 2024. It has been less than two weeks, and the prediction so far could not have gone better. META and SVIX are up… Continue reading Meta’s reality-defying comeback

The national debt–now at $34 trillion or so by latest estimates–is a scary, attention-grabbing number too big ignore, but in this post I will make the case for why investors ought to. It’s so big, it almost defies comprehension. Someone on Twitter posted a graphic to try to visualize it: The United States is $34,000,000,000,000.00… Continue reading Why American Investors Do Not Need to Worry About the National Debt

I saw this going viral: Meta-analysis: On average, undergraduate students’ intelligence is merely average. It got thousands of shares and hundreds of comments on Reddit, and viral on Twitter too: In the pre-affirmative action/pre-diversity America of the mid-1900s, the average undergrad IQ was above 115. Expanding the student population by creating incentives for underperforming groups… Continue reading College grads and students of the ’40s and ’50s were probably average