#1 Another excellent article by Mr. 187 IQ, DeSantis Opens The Door To Hate Speech Laws:
There’s already a precedent for this. Police around the country have opened criminal investigations into “It’s Okay To Be White” fliers. A man recently indicted for his role in the Charlottesville tiki torch march was denied bail in part because he had recently put up “hate” propaganda in another state. The prosecution argued this was dangerous behavior that required the man to be locked up. The Florida law empowers authorities to be even more zealous against the scourge of “hate speech.”
This is why the right’s obsession with law and order and ‘back the blue’ are possibly backfiring. If ‘you’re’ a dissident, law enforcement is not on your side. This is evident by the Jan 6th arrests, and other incidents. Men have no more power in society anymore because the state has filled that role. This notion that law enforcement are sympathetic to right-wing interests or will somehow exempt conservatives and override their bureaucratic superiors, is wishful thinking.
#2 From The Verge, The future of streaming is ads.
Everyone is looking for the ‘next big thing’–be it VR, AI, defi/NFTs, crypto…whatever. The future is more mundane, that is, more ads. That is where the tech brainpower is going: either finding new ways to show ads, optimize ads vs. watch time, or bypass ad blockers. Just as slots are the lifeblood of casinos, ads are the lifeblood of the digital economy. People will tolerate a surprisingly high quantity of ads. TV is still popular and full of ads now, way worse now than it used to be.
The biggest realization post-Covid is that YouTube had underestimated people’s tolerance for ads, so are showing more of them. The dotcom boom of the ’90s was correct about the viability ad-supported business models, but were too early: online advertisers were not paying enough, not enough users, not enough bandwidth, and the ads were not optimized. Super-pricey mobile ads, around 2010 and with the popularity of smart phones, ‘big data’, and 3g/4g, changed everything. Mobile was such a big deal because desktops had been waning in popularity, and also mobile ads are much more expensive and optimized. This is why I am invested in Meta, as a major player in mobile advertising.
#3 From Richard Hanania The Old School Reformer’s Case for Privatizing Education:
This seems to be a common issue in this debate. Recently, Scott Alexander reviewed a book that echoed Peter Thiel in arguing we have too much education. He closed by expressing exasperation at the fact that people have been making these arguments forever and nothing changes.
I agree with Mr. Thiel about economics, such as monopolies, but his fellowship program is not scalable. The most important step for education reform is as strait-forward as finding ways to isolate disruptive kids from productive, well-behaved kids. More funding for gifted education is one approach, but a major problem is such programs have become so diluted due to inclusivity and lowered standards.
He writes:
To me, the true promise of the school choice movement isn’t that it might simply save a bit of money or avoid the worst excesses of public education. Rather, it presents an opportunity to rethink childhood. Ultimately, this can work against many of the pathologies that have emerged in American society over the last several decades, including delayed adulthood, high real estate costs, negative-sum credentialism that robs young people of their best years, and culture wars that are exacerbated by the fact that the children of people with radically different values are forced into the same institutions.
But what are their ‘best years’? Are we talking high schoolers or elementary school students? The problem with the ‘less schooling’ argument is no one can draw a line of how much schooling is good enough. Some say, 8th grade, but others say 6th. Or a two-track system of school or vocational training. However, society will probably not tolerate kids roaming the streets during the weekday, which is typical of poor countries. Businesses don’t want it either: kids are not going to be buying anything. Hence school.
#4 From Resident Contrarian Good News Update and Bonus Article:
Do you know what you call a writer who can consistently generate millions-of-hits-articles? I’m joking, but only a bit. The best writers in the world are consistently good and often great, but writers who can generate massive hit after massive hit at will are rare to the point of non-existence. Most of a writer’s work is putting out the best they can, week after week; they are trying to catch lightning in a bottle.
The huge success of Freddie deBoer shows it’s possible to have articles consistently and predictably go viral provided it’s attacking identity politics. Those are topics which go viral easily. Anti-wokeness is the biggest thing online now. Pre-2020 is was not as intense as it is today. It was not Trump that caused this groundswell, but rather Elon buying Twitter changed everything, by giving the anti-woke a huge platform, far eclipsing any of the left’s legacy media, like the New York Times. People think the culture wars are intense now…they are going to get way more intense.
#5 “Either Heads Will Roll or Google Will Become The New IBM”
Mr. Shkreli argues that by missing out on AI, Google risks becoming irrelevant like IBM, which in the 40s-60s dominated mainframes and tabulating machines, only to lose out to personal computers by the end of the 20th century. The situation is not nearly as dire as he is making out to seem. He has no way of knowing how much Google indirectly lost by being ‘late’ on AI, or how much Open AI is worth, being that it’s a private company. Google is worth over a trillion dollars. Open AI was last valued at $30 billion during a Jan 2023 funding round. It’s a stretch to say that Google’s business is threatened by falling behind the ‘AI arms race’, when no one even knows how much this stuff is worth, the race is presumably still early, and the numbers that are known are not that much.
#6 “Good Evening”
Good evening pic.twitter.com/SPrsYKWKCE
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) April 27, 2023
Tucker is a national treasure. The only honest person in the media. He can succeed at anything he does. He can do a podcast, a tour, a TV show, run for office, etc.
#7, and lastly , Bitcoin keeps falling despite strength in the Nasdaq, and now sub 28k. Although it has not broken support of 27k, it will soon. More importantly, my method keeps working well by profiting from the tendency of ‘big tech’ to outperform bitcoin despite both being correlated. Here you can see on Monday Bitcoin fell 6% to 27.8k despite QQQ keep going up, exactly in line with my method and forecasts.
This will be another great week and April was among my best months ever, due to Meta strength and trading profits with method.”Over and out!”