Your life is your fault.

Fiat is a sham, the banking class is corrupt, decentralized digital currency and the blockchain are the inevitable future, and the incumbents will fight it to the death.

Evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins says that after spending three days interacting with Claude, which he calls “Claudia,” he is certain that it is conscious. After feeding the LLM a segment of his new book and receiving detailed feedback, Dawkins was moved to exclaim,” You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!” Dawkins cites the complexity, fluency, and ‘intelligence’ of Claude’s answers as evidence of consciousness. Follow: @AFpost

You lose yourself by trying to be liked. You end up even uglier in the inside. And it SHOWS,

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Guys who think “empathy” is bad: I highly recommend this book. It’s on what @fbinegotiator calls “tactical empathy”—a powerful tool that helped him succeed in negotiations with kidnappers and terrorists. Turns out, bad guys’ “feelings” can be a matter of life and death.

$STRC had an uncharacteristically short ex-dividend refractory period, snapping back to $99.98 by midday Thu. It also dropped by only half of the $0.92 dividend amount. What changed? For context, till this round, STRC price has taken a day or more to recover, and the drop has always been more than the dividend value. To understand why, we have to recognize two things that can affect the price of prefs: 1⃣ Coupon: should be self-explanatory. It's why Strategy keeps tweaking rates to get STRC to par. 2⃣ Credit risk of MSTR: because the prefs are completely financed by commons, changes in the price of the commons change the risk profile of the prefs. This is why prefs go up in value when $MSTR goes up, and go down when $MSTR goes down. Well, right after Saylor announced the 25bps bump in the STRC dividend on Dec 31, $MSTR started going up as #Bitcoin started going up. This is why STRC demand seems insatiable - it's equilibrium price is north of $100 from both the 25bps dividend increase and the 12% increase in $MSTR YTD. We see this effect in the yields of the other prefs too: • $STRF dropped by 66 bps • $STRK dropped by 61 bps • $STRD dropped by 35 bps Note that all of them dropped more than the 25bps bump STRC got, suggesting adjustment beyond maintaining yield spreads across products. This has a couple of implications: 1⃣ As long as $MSTR prices hold or keep going up, Saylor can keep issuing $STRC for a while without worrying about running out of demand. We can tell demand has run out when the price starts dipping below $100 again. 2⃣ Saylor could choose to drop dividends to 10.75% or lower, and $STRC could still maintain par if $MSTR holds its price. 3⃣ At this rate, $STRF could drop to the 8-handle and $STRK to the 9-handle, allowing Saylor to use those prefs too. 4⃣ Theoretically, Saylor probably didn't need to bump STRC's divvy up by 25bps, as the $MSTR tide would have raised this boat too. But of course he had no way of knowing that, so he had to do what he did. Of course, the opposite is just as true - if $MSTR starts dropping again, yield pressure will come right back.