I nailed the GFC - saw it coming, heavily shorted into it, kept making money running net-flat for months while most were getting destroyed. Then I botched the turn, getting net short early into a monster rally and giving back more than half my fund's outperformance. 1/4

Nobody needed a CIA briefing or an Axios scoop to know this.

The Iranians are unmatched globally in the creativity and relentlessness of their fuckery.

GOVERNMENT DOUBLED THE AMOUNT LOANED TO STUDENTS OVER 20 YEARS, ALLOWING STUDENTS TO OVERSPEND BY THE MOST IN HISTORY I predicted this, and the resulting calls to forgive that debt, when Obama nationalized the student loans function. I assumed that was liberals’ plan all along.

3 World Cup matches so far today, 3 ties, 4 total goals, and only 25% of the teams will get knocked out of this group stage after playing a combined 72 matches. Remind me, what is the point of these first 3 weeks, other than FIFA enrichment?

OMG, what did Citibank due to @matt_levine over the weekend to make him mad? This is hilariously brutal. Enjoy. Although you kind-of need to have read his accounts of the Citibank screw-ups over the years to fully appreciate the build-up to this capstone literary event.

Why is the blended (dads moms ) amount of married parents’ non-leisure hours going up at all? Travel sports, scheduled play dates, etc. have replaced let-the-kids-be time? Longer combined working hours? A greater number of elderly parents?

I am just as disgusted by the Iran “deal” as everyone else on FinTwit. I have nothing unique to add to the 200 posts I’ve already seen, so I’ll leave it at that.

California cannot undo the damage this proposal did. The people who left will not come back. I will cause more people will leave in the future, even if it dies, because it has opened their eyes to future possibilities and to some current existing facts.

This developing story about Dario's failed communications with the White House confirms everything I've ever believed about the enormous power of the Sales Chad. You can be the smartest, most hard working, well-meaning guy around, but if you can't get people to like you, it's all for nothing. When the time comes to send one of your own to meet inside the Halls of Power, you don't send the Geek Squad. You must send the affable, beer-drinking, golf-loving Sales Chad. It literally doesn't matter if he understands the product half as well as everyone else. You send him. It's what he was put on Earth to do.

This is your first periodic reminder that, when EU officials first saw the enormous implications of AI's emergence, they decided the best way for government to promote European interests was to . . . win the race to regulate it. Which they did, with the 2023 AI Act. 🤦‍♂️

Chart of the day, with my very different takeaway than the one John Authers intended: This may be the clearest visualization I have seen that China is in a big debt-deflation cycle, spurred by the (government-caused) popping of its (government-caused) housing bubble.

I assume not a single person feels sorry for what the last few weeks' $SPCE stock buyers brought upon themselves, other than maybe their moms or girlfriends.

My Saturday post here is a hidden gem. Canadian businesses, on average, relative to American businesses, from the standpoint of a shareholder owning them, suck.

Australia’s economy has been little but “houses and holes” (mining) for over 20 years.

This scene from last night is impressive even for those of us who were at the Battle of Minas Tirith.

OMG. In any outcome. What if they’re wrong? What if they’re *right*?

The last 40 years of this inflation chart lines up pretty closely with an annual government deficit chart. Deficits launched in 2009 and then launched much further in 2020.

These terms can be summarized as “US gives Iran most of what Iran wants immediately; Iran agrees to keep talking about what the US wants.”

Anthropic has been publicly forced to bend the knee to the US government. The ban on Fable and Mythos reads like censorship, and the market will read it as the TAM of the frontier labs collapsing. Instead, I read this as the opposite, as an acceleration event... The government MUST have first access, because this is The Great Game, the game of nations over the most powerful technology ever discovered, and a technological edge of 30 to 60 days is worth everything. It's the same edge the labs already exploit internally. You build your next model with your unreleased frontier tech, never with the public one. That private head start is what keeps you accelerating ahead of the competition or at least in line with them. The US needs that exact advantage now. Before the public, and before the Chinese open source models can copy it. They have no choice. They cannot allow their own technology to be turned against them. What's being negotiated, in the usual outrageous, hard-ball Trump manner, is the new arrangement: Anthropic and OpenAI are free market operators and state vassals at the same time. Nobody wants to curtail their growth. The Gov just wants to be Customer Number 1 with privileged access. This is the East India Company all over again. A private enterprise left free to grow rich and dominant, granted protection and a clear run by the state, on the unspoken condition that it serves the crown's strategic interests first. That charter was the price of the monopoly. It also sends a message to China and everyone else that US AI is now so advanced the state itself has to control it. They won't, not yet anyway. They just want privileged access, the rest is posturing. And Anthropic will bend the knee, very soon... The hidden outcome is the one that matters. The AI firms are now near-explicitly too big to fail, which means the debt funding the capex buildout comes with an implicit state guarantee. That accelerates the build-out of intelligence. It doesn't curtail it... Open source accelerates too, because going open ensures no state can intervene in the model itself. Though the same Great Game rules apply there, and the Chinese state will take its own privileged access first. So the market may wobble, convinced the TAM of AI just collapsed. The real outcome is an acceleration of intelligence, and a Super Cycle that keeps running.

This is the most original SpaceX post I have seen this weekend.