Item #1: Excellent article by akarlin The Party’s Over:
Many influencers are targeting $130,000-140,000 for Bitcoin and additional multiples for their favorite altcoins. I think that macro and the charts are bearish. After holding my Ethereum and other alts for two years, I will now disclose that I have sold most of my crypto portfolio into stables in the past several days and expect a bear market starting quite soon in both TradFi and crypto1.
As it’s said, great minds think alike. His IQ is also high and he came to the same realization I had. My take is, Bitcoin is so weak because the ‘crypto president’ narrative is over. That is the real reason it’s weak. It has nothing to do with AI bubble fears; otherwise, QQQ would not be so strong. Trump bogged down in Venezuela and scandal (e.g. Epstein, Jerome Powell, ICE death, etc.) means even more delay with Trump’s domestic agenda, and therefore indefinite delay of the hoped ‘Bitcoin reserve’, and Bitcoin falling back to $50k, which is where it was before Trump was elected.
To take advantage of this, I developed the method of shorting Bitcoin to hedge tech stocks, which to the best of my knowledge, no one else had made public. If you’re bullish about AI and the US economy, there is no reason to buy Bitcoin; just buy QQQ and other ‘big tech’ instead. At this point, Bitcoin has all of the downside of the stock market with none of the upside. It cannot take advantage of AI; Trump and Elon both think Bitcoin is lame compared to AI and don’t talk about Bitcoin anymore.
Item #2: I’m sure we’ve all seen the Charles Murray tweet where he alleges there is a perceptible difference between someone with a IQ of 130 vs 140. Many people disagreed that a 10 point difference is noticeable.
The contrived examples below describe a large extent of IQ discourse on Twitter:
“I know a 5-foot-tall good basketball player; ergo, height does not matter. ”
“People in intellectually-demanding professions do not care about IQ or know their IQs; therefore, IQ does not matter.”
Just because physicists do not measure each other’s IQs does not mean IQ is irrelevant to becoming a physicist. But IQ threshold effects are real. In the aggregate, for math, a rough hierarchy exists: Fields Medalists > authors in top-tier mathematics journals (e.g., JAMS, Annals) > authors in mid-level journals > graduate students > undergraduates > laypeople. A sufficiently high IQ is necessary but is still insufficient to cross a career threshold. There are still plenty of laypeople with higher IQs than math majors. There are many mathematicians with very high IQs who were never awarded a Fields Medal. Nevertheless, at the aggregate level, it is reasonable to assume that the average IQ of Fields Medalists exceeds that of merely math postdocs.
Is it a coincidence Terence Tao and Ed Witten are among the most accomplished and also among the smartest at math and physics respectively, and both Fields medalists? Even for non-STEM professions, smarter people still tend to be better. For example, Magnus Carlsen is a better and more accomplished chess player than Garry Kasparov, and is also much smarter in terms of IQ (such as being a child prodigy who excelled and awed crowds at memorization). Carlsen rose to the top of a much more competitive lineup and faced much stronger opponents compared to Kasparov. Chess ability becomes much more g-loaded at such a high level, such as memorizing enough board positions or thinking far enough ahead.
Item #3: The 2026 ‘MAHA’ food pyramid guidelines were released. The pyramid is inverted, putting protein sources and vegetables at the top and carbs/sugar at the bottom, indicating to eat less bead and more meat:
Yes, technically, most vegetables are carbs. A question is, will this help Americans lose weight? Blogger Exfatloss is optimistic; I disagree.
Obesity is extremely resistant to any sort of intervention, short of GLP-1 drugs or bariatric surgery. Trying to “eat healthy” is the default mode of advice, and seldom leads to the sought weight loss. The literature and anecdotal evidence shows macro composition does not matter in the aggregate. Participants on ‘keto subreddits’ are no more successful at weight loss compared to ‘plant-based/vegan subreddits’; they all equally struggle to lose weight. If there were an overwhelmingly successful diet intervention it would be common knowledge by now. True, Keto can cause initial weight loss, but this seems to be from glycogen depletion , which quickly levels off.
For people with slow or otherwise broken metabolisms or who have a propensity to overeat, changing the macros from high carbs to high protein not help. I discuss this in more detail here The obesity trap, and common misconceptions about obesity. Everything is conspiring to work against obese people: metabolism (slow calorie burn), ‘hunger hormones’ (ghrelin), environment (stores full of hyperpalatable foods), appetite (dieting can cause ravenous hunger later), etc.