Belated 2023 predictions: Prediction 1: Turkish stock market and ETF (ticker symbol: TUR) will crash in 2023. So will the Turkish lira (USDTRY). I forgot to add this in my original post. Turkey has the same problems that have plagued it from 2013-2021, such as brain drain, low IQs, lack of foreign investment, hyperinflation, incompetent… Continue reading Revising some predictions, belated 2023 predictions

In this post I will expand on why the dissident/alt-right crashed so hard, especially since 2020, and was unable to get back up, and likely never will. Social movements come and go in waves. Richard Spencer for example used to be a major thought leader; not so much anymore. Same for a bunch of other… Continue reading The post-2020 downfall of the alt-right: some explanations

Richard Hanania wrote a good post about how the Right, since 2020, has succumbed to the same sort of victimization-culture and pearl clutching as seen on the Left. Neither side is immune to being easily offended. It’s just that the left gets offended by different things compared to the right. He writes: Moreover, talking about… Continue reading How victimization and cheap political point-scoring hurt the right

I don’t think annual prediction posts are that useful. Hardly anyone gets most of their predictions right, but it’s a tradition among bloggers to post annual predictions, and it’s fun to do. It’s hard enough getting the facts right, let alone the future. 2022 correct forecasts: -I was right about BTC & MSTR crashing and… Continue reading 2022 scorecard, and my predictions for 2023

For the past few months been making good money trading Bitcoin. What I do is I short Bitcoin on Sundays (using Coinbase, Deribit, and other brokers) and weekdays. After the stock market opens, at 6:30 AM PST (although I may do it 15-30 minutes before the open), I short Bitcoin and or Ethereum while also… Continue reading Trading Bitcoin for Fun and Profit: My Method, and Insight into Renaissance Technologies

Great article by Freddie We Need to Talk About Nepo Babies Because We Live in a “Just Deserts” Culture…he ends with: The simple reality is that we aren’t in complete control, or even mostly in control, of our own destinies. Thanks to chance, genetics, the whims of others, the vagaries of fate. And I do… Continue reading The Limitations of Wealth and Fame at Guaranteeing Success

But a common rebuttal to biological/genetic-explanations for obesity is that people seem fatter today compared to generations ago. How does one reconcile abrupt phenotypic changes with changes to the genome, which are much more gradual? A major, obvious reason is the graying of America. According to Jeanne M. Thompson, M.D. “In middle age, metabolism slows,… Continue reading Why People are Getting Fatter: Reconciling Genes with Environment

From Rob Henderson, The Happiness-Accuracy Tradeoff and the Limits of Rationality. I am going to have to agree with Taleb that forecasting and also super-forecasting fails to rise to the level of a science. It’s interesting, but can it be made rigorous in a scientific or quantitative sense? Maybe not. Super-forecasting is supposed to be… Continue reading Problems with super-forecasting

Freddie dunks on America again: Americans want to think of themselves as very cool people who float above the fray, when in fact we tend to be obsessive about the world’s adulation and embarrassed about the ways our systems are worse, such as in healthcare, crime, and public transit. As it’s said, there is the… Continue reading America is broken, but so are most other countries

Cryptocurrency in 2020-2021 and in 2017-2018 momentarily allowed otherwise non-technically savvy, average-IQ, non-college educated people to quickly make a lot of money, at least on paper, way more money than professionals who have degrees. It had seemed like they had stumbled upon some new paradigm of wealth creation. But as I and others knew, it… Continue reading These hustles keep coming up short: why college keeps winning