Everything is upside-down. The top-down process is becoming bottom-up in terms of the fragmentation of information consumption, and the loss of confidence by the public in experts and policy makers. People increasingly trust and defer to the likes or Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, Tim Dillon, and others in the podcast/stand-up ‘clique’, who have over the… Continue reading On the Erosion of Confidence in Experts

The article On The Experience of Being Poor-ish, For People Who Aren’t went hugely viral on Hacker News, getting hundreds of comments and votes.  Why did it go so viral? Because the experience of being poor, and the sociological and economic causes and implications of poverty, cross political nd ideological divides. Anyone and everyone can… Continue reading On The Experience of Being Poor-ish, For People Who Aren’t , Analysis

The post A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word “Class”, by Scott Alexander, about how the GOP can reclaim its identity by focusing on class, went viral. This is an excellent post that raises a lot of of good points, although I think , like most political proposals aimed at the right, it puts… Continue reading Scott’s GOP Solution

With the exception of exchanges, scammers, YouTube channels and news sites full of filler and ads, and whales like Michael Saylor, it would seem hardly anyone is making money with cryptocurrency. Despite Bitcoin going from $10k to $40k in less than two months, one is still hard-pressed to find many success stories or evidence of… Continue reading Why no one is making money with cryptocurrency

A common narrative is that forever-low interest rates are to blame for the post-Covid speculative frenzy, such as in Tesla, Uber, crypto currency, SPACS, meme stocks such as GameStop, and so on. Josh Brown posits such a link between low interest rates and speculation, writing: It won’t all work if rates keep backing up. Look… Continue reading Don’t blame low interest rates for post-Covid tech speculative boom

It has been a little over a month since Joe Biden was inaugurated. After taking office, Mr. Biden stopped tweeting under his personal account (@JoeBiden) and began tweeting under the official Whitehouse “potus” account (@potus). So one month into Biden’s presidency, how does Biden’s Twitter engagement compare to Trump’s engagement? It is not even close.… Continue reading Trump Twitter vs. Biden Twitter

The ‘national debt’ has been a fixture of news and politics, probably since the founding of America. Although the national debt continues to swell–at $27 trillion or so as of writing this–my opinion has not changed, that being the national debt is a meaningless number, much like a mathematical abstraction, that has no bearing on… Continue reading The meaninglessness of the national debt

Cheating and dishonesty are often framed as ethnically and morally indefensible. Either someone is honest or dishonest, without any ‘grey area’ in-between, or without taking into account the context of the situation. But rather than having to choose between what I believe to be a false dichotomy, I think, instead, many of the prevailing notions… Continue reading In defense of (some) dishonesty

This is pretty funny…Nassim Tooleb (aka angry Arab man) got Covid: COVID, day 12-13. Some days were rough. All OK now. Rushed to Beirut & spent 18 days helping a parent, visiting in a hospital 2-3/day (Great @AUBMC, successful heart valve procedure). With maximal precautions, got infected day 17! Was only person in the party… Continue reading Taleb gets Covid

As the Scott vs. The NYTs saga continues to unfold, one thing that stands out to me is the bipartisan nature of the criticism against the NYTs, as it is not just conservatives who have a bone to pick with the liberal media. The Times’ attempt to dox Scott, and after that failed, smear him… Continue reading The Crisis of Journalism