From Noah Smith Hey tech folks: The West is not failing. He’s right about all of these: The notion that there is a “global American empire”, and that this empire is “ending” The idea that the U.S. dollar is falling and will be replaced by either crypto or a BRICS currency The belief that the… Continue reading No de-dollarization

1. OpenAI sued A lawsuit claims OpenAI stole ‘massive amounts of personal data,’ including medical records and information about children, to train ChatGPT: The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI crawled the web to amass huge amounts of data, including vast quantities taken from social-media sites. OpenAI’s propertiatary AI corpus of personal data, WebText2, for example, scraped… Continue reading The daily view 6/30/2023: Bitcoin ETF rejection?, Apple $3 trillion, OpenAI sued

From Arnold Kling, Price Discrimination Explains College Tuition: He points out that list prices for tuition mislead the public in many ways. For example, he reports that although average full tuition at private colleges rose 33 percent from $27,000 in 2004 to almost $34,000 in 2020, average tuition paid actually edged down, from $15,000 to… Continue reading College tuition and scholarships: who pays what

Bitcoin getting ready to dump again to $25k soon, and then back to old support of $15k probably by end of the year or early next year. The sloppiness and lack of compression and lack of smoothness in the chart portends to major downside like last time when it was at $29k: You can see… Continue reading bitcoin getting ready to crash again , charts very bearish

I saw this going viral: Ok WHAT. I had no idea “The Population Bomb” led to the sterilization of 8 million Indians and Paul Ehrlich just lives out his life as a beloved professor. From a recent ACX post— pic.twitter.com/gtIDYC3pcu — Alt Man Sam (@mezaoptimizer) June 26, 2023 Just as the left has its own… Continue reading Defending Ehrlich (sorta)

Time for another round of tweets. Except Mr. Arab man, he never publicly opposed Polio vaccines (I think Balaji is wrong about almost everything, especially crypto, but let’s not put words in his mouth): So, apparently steroids are OK, but not polio vaccines. Same incompatibility as w/libertarian Putinism. Granted Balaji has discernment issues; the question… Continue reading Tooleb tweets, part 4

1. From Arnold Kling How did my genes survive? I am 5’3”. I wonder why I exist. If the preferences that women express on online dating sites are to be believed, then if I were young and single then my chances of reproducing would be close to zero. Working backwards, the genes that caused me… Continue reading The Daily View 6/24/2023: OceanGate , Bitcoin, Putin,

When I saw the NYTs article Is a Revolution in Cancer Treatment Within Reach? going viral, I could not help but to think I had seen this movie before. Every year, sometimes multiple times, we’re promised by the media, particularly the NYTs, that a cancer breakthrough, paradigm shift, or miracle is just around the corner,… Continue reading The cancer miracle is always just around the corner

I saw this article going viral The Rot Economy. This article is demonstrative of the common disconnect or misconception between how pundits perceive the US economy and technology companies vs. how things actually are. At the center of everything I’ve written for the last few months (if not the last few years), sits a cancerous… Continue reading The Rot Economy

1. Today is Juneteenth, which almost everyone can agree was conceived and shoehorned because of George Floyd’s death (but to call it ‘George Floyd day’ would have been too obvious). This is the second holiday in just 3 weeks, the last being Memorial Day. The creation of new, contrived holidays is part of the trend… Continue reading The Daily View 6/19/2023: Juneteenth, vaccines, education