Month: August 2024

Interesting article by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, from 2023: IQ estimates of public intellectuals and personas. The comments are arguably even better than the article and lend additional insight. My own take: 1. IQ estimates of historical figures are especially iffy. Newton is credited as co-discovering calculus, but what does this mean today in terms… Continue reading IQ estimates of public intellectuals

Item #1: Bitcoin keeps falling, now below $59k. I keep being right that Bitcoin is inferior to tech stocks. It’s like “I can choose to invest in a tech company with billions of profits and is economically indispensable, or digital coins that are used for crime.” Bitcoin is doomed to underperform due to too much… Continue reading The Daily View 8/28/2024: Bitcoin, Kamala’s Tax, IQ

I saw this going viral from Forbes, The High Price Of Minimum Security Federal Prisoners: Of the BOP’s nearly 160,000 prisoners, 24,000 of them are minimum security. The BOP’s statement was that the average cost of housing a minimum security prisoner in 2024 is $151.02. The cost of housing someone in a U.S. Penitentiary is… Continue reading Prison spending is not too high

From the Washington Post: Has tipping gone too far? Here’s a guide on when to tip. Many Americans have tipping fatigue, with 1 in 3 adults calling the practice “out of control” in a recent survey. Tipping has gotten out of control, especially post-Covid. I have likened it to yet another form of inflation, which… Continue reading Tipping is out of control

I saw this going viral, from The Atlantic: The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ (archive link so as to not give it any traffic). As was evident during the Steve Sailer vs. Will Stancil Twitter ‘debate’ in January 2024 (if it can even be called a debate–it was more like a… Continue reading The Atlantic: ‘Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ’

Item #1: Asian kids whose parents did not finish high school crush black kids whose parents have PhDs on the SAT. This remarkable fact is a function of two things: (1) Grossly unequal group IQ distributions and (2) PhDs earned by blacks being diminished by affirmative action admissions… pic.twitter.com/bhqKTBrFV4 — i/o (@eyeslasho) August 15, 2024… Continue reading The Daily View 8/21/2024: Kamala Surge, Trump livestream, Mr. Beast nothing-burger

I saw this going viral on Twitter: You'll never get rich working for someone else 😔 — ₿rian⁴⁵⁰ 📝 (@bjmcgann) August 18, 2024 Yeah, someone should have told Tom Cruise this. Or Michael Jordan, Shaq, or anyone who works for a top quant firm. Bonuses and other comp for large trading firms can easily run… Continue reading Cope culture. (Yes, doctors make a lot of money, and that is fine.)

The possibility of a Harris presidency can no longer be discounted given her recent surge in the polls, and Trump’s consequent decline. I have read many dire proclamations on social media of the hellscape that awaits should she win. But pundits are terrible at predicting the future, and campaign promises and policy platforms are of… Continue reading The implications of a Harris presidency–why forecasts are unreliable

Shorting Bitcoin during market hours (as a hedge against an equities position) continues to work stupendously. This pattern takes advantage of the tendency of governments to liquidate their Bitcoin holdings during market hours, like yesterday, when government offices are open and to take advantage of liquidity (compared to in the evening, when offices are closed… Continue reading Bitcoin keeps falling as U.S. government sells Silk Road coins–the endgame and analysis

Elon’s buyout of Twitter has widely been criticized as one of the worst mistakes of his career: But I argued in in 2023 that liberal elites had errored gravely by letting a major organ or propaganda fall into the hands of someone who was avowedly un-woke, especially running up into an election year. This was… Continue reading Elon’s Twitter buyout, in hindsight, a genius move as news cycle intensifies