Aditya Chaturvedi

Realist Contrarian. Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will. Bylines: News18, Firstpost, Space News, Wire, Swarajya, New Indian, Eurasia Review

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

This redundancy is what leads to @Peter_Turchin's Elite Overproduction'. Too many people with vaunted higher education and superfluous diplomas that the market doesn't value, leading to bitter turf wars and zero-sum competition to grab limited spots available in high echelons.

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

True anti-fragility comes from attitude, comportment, variance, measured unpredictabilty, and at times being an enigma.

A dash of methodic and calibrated malfunction and madness goes far than the super optimised, perfectly rational good guy who makes an occasional transgression, and everything then tumbles down-hill to the point of no return.

No amount of net-worth or seat at the high-table can save it for someone who is beholden to others and has a lofty projection of himself to uphold in the eyes of others

Fat Tony would have laughed smoking a cigar being in similar shoes. Trump would have cracked open a can of diet coke.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Did it hit you that a centibillionaire, Jensen Huang, is less free than a random plumber?

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

True anti-fragility, as you have said, comes from attitude, comportment, variance, measured unpredictabilty and at times being an enigma.

A dash of methodic and calibrated malfunction and madness goes far than the super optimised, perfect good guy who makes an occasional transgression, and everything then tumbles down hill.

No amount of net-worth or seat at the high-table can save it for someone who is beholden to others.

Fat Tony would have laughed smoking a cigar over this. Trump would have cracked open a can of diet coke.

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

The full 40 page report is worth a read.

Alice, Kimberly, Ashley etc etc may make for a juicy copy, but that's just the 'tip of the iceberg' and a red-herring.

Jensen was, in all likelihood, conveniently and willfully flouting US export controls.

– Nvidia channel partners and sellers, from Indonesia, Malaysia, to Thailand, had long-established relations with China, and mainly acted as conduits to fulfill that surplus demand.

– At its peak, over 25% of Nivida revenue was from China.

– Megaspeed, led by the former Hunan TV journo Alice Jensen, was spun out of 7Road, a Chinese mobile game company based in Schengen, with state-backed investors, even from Zhejiang, known as the 'cradle of the CPC'. Xi was the party boss of Zhejiang province, and his close inner circle is often referred as Zhejiang clique.

Alibaba, which was apparently the sole funder of Megaspeed, is headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang.

– The extensive web of Chinese relations via guanxi in South East Asia ensures all sort of sanctions and export controls will backfire in the future as well.

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

Activist short sellers are the house cleaners/ janitors cum muckrackers of public markets that do the unglamorous yeomans service of reading between the lines and unearthing information that's either not disclosed or deliberately concealed. They put their money where their mouth is.

We need them in India to bridge the yawning information asymmetry and help retailers make better choices rather than being distracted by the din and the PR.

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

Apart from Hunan, the Zhejiang angle is also quite interesting.

7Road, the mobile game company from which Megaspeed spun, has private as well as state-backed stakeholders from Zhejiang, the 'cradle of the CPC'. Xi was the party boss of Zhejiang province, and his close inner circle also includes many from there.

Alibaba the sole funder of Megaspeed, is also headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang.

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

The full 40 page report is worth a read.

Alice, Kimberly, Ashley etc etc may make for a juicy copy, but that's just the 'tip of the iceberg' and a red-herring.

Jensen was, in all likelihood, conveniently and willfully flouting US export controls.

– Nvidia channel partners and sellers, from Indonesia, Malaysia, to Thailand, had long-established relations with China, and mainly acted as conduits to fulfill that surplus demand.

– At its peak, over 25% of Nivida revenue was from China.

– Megaspeed, led by the former Hunan TV journo Alice Jensen, was spun out of 7Road, a Chinese mobile game company based in Schengen, with state-backed investors, even from Zhejiang, known as the 'cradle of the CPC'. Xi was the party boss of Zhejiang province, and his close inner circle is often referred as Zhejiang clique.

Alibaba, which was apparently the sole funder of Megaspeed, is headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang.

– The extensive web of Chinese relations via guanxi in South East Asia ensures all sort of sanctions and export controls will backfire in the future as well.

[Stephen Henighan @StephenHenighan]

Never give up! This year's Booker Prize winner is 81 and has been publishing in near obscurity for 61 years.
https://t.co/R9mHIInFAT

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

You can add Burton G. Malkiel, Charles D. Ellis, Spencer Jakab, and John Authers to Finance.

Rory Sutherland to marketing. David Ogilvy to advertising. Manufacturing Consent to mass media. Lipmann to public opinion.

Taleb & Gladwell to luck, probability, randomness and a lot in between.

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

This is one of the reasons why left is waning globally. All of the hitherto left programs: subsidies, welfarism, 8 hour work week, special schemes have become integral to centre-right as well.

In India, the JAM Trinity architecture ( Jan Dhan - Aadhar - Mobile) is more elaborate, expansive, effective, and efficient than anything the 'Left' could ever devise.

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

@trengriffin What went wrong with Getty? AI images?

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

@trengriffin Small prairie fires burn deadwood which can later on act as fuel for larger, all engulfing fires.

Similarly, volatility induces corrections and expose many meme stocks or narratives before they hit their all time high peak, and there's no margin-of-safety for the small guy.

[Tren Griffin @trengriffin]

Volatility is the variability of outcomes. Risk
concerns the consequences of those outcomes.

"There is a big difference between volatility and risk. Volatility can actually reduce risk." Nassim Taleb

Low volatility does not necessarily mean low risk. A strategy can produce remarkably consistent returns while accumulating exposure to rare, catastrophic losses. Neiderhoffer's two hedge fund collapses are an example.

Example: Frequent, small fires remove accumulated combustible material. Suppressing those fires creates the conditions for a much larger and more destructive fire.

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

Houllebecq borrows from a long French tradition of Lyotard's Libidinal economy as well as Clouscard's Sensual capitalism, which he has made more assertive, edgy, and in-your-face.

In the marketplace of desire and long-term relationships, everyone ( women) wants to chase the same alphas, just like stock-pickers go after similar handful stocks. So there's simultaneously over-herding and disparity in distribution.

Win-win outcomes are increasingly a rarity along with median being heavy. And more men than women end up with either the regret of moving in, or the remorse of not going all in.

More men trapped in sucker rallies and red-herring of 'happily ever after'. That's why places such as Odessa in Ukraine, Phillipines, Thailand have been long catering to the lonely but rich Western male demographic who are looking for a permanent partner.

On top it, there's a mismatch in expectations and lots of flex and signalling.

The opposite end of this free-market libidinal spectrum is Brave New World of Huxley, where state ensures, regulates, and supplies with mating.

Right now, it's the world of neo-feudalism and cartelism in relationships, ironically engendered by the marriage of convenience between Third Wave Feminism and globalisation of culture as well as capital.

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

@premanshsinha Which book?

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

@WalmartHwang 🤣🤣

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

@athreya49 https://t.co/RgwqbWqFcJ

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

Dwarkesh has a point. The risk and asymmetry are huge. And no regulators and guard-rails are, or possibly can be, equipped to tackle it. This is the Catch-22 of AI that no one has got a clue about.

Multiply Abdul Qadir Khan, the nuclear proliferator and ‘Father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb’ who carried centrifuge design and other critical blueprints in a polythene bag to Tripoli, by a factor of minimum thousand to get the staggering asymmetry and risk at work.

Open-source AI applications, which will be at the vanguard of innovation, will become increasingly hard to control, without wide-ranging monitoring, which will eventually entail turning back on the original principle of limiting surveillance and ensuring individual privacy.

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

@sumitkbehal A powerful rejoinder to JLO song 'Love Don't Cost a Thing'. It costs a multi-billion dollar baby 🤣

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

Mark Randolph of Netflix is the grand-nephew of Bernays.

Propaganda by Bernays and Public Opinion by Lipmann are essential to understand media and marketing gimmickry and subtle manipulation.

Or as they say in American lingo, to understand the revolving door between hacks, hucksters, and flacks.

[BookNote @BookNoteApp]

Propaganda by Edward Bernays is the 1928 book that explains why you want the things you want. Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the man who invented public relations, and he wrote this short book to explain, with some pride, how it is done. A year after it came out he staged the most famous example of his own method. Women did not smoke in public in 1929, and the tobacco companies wanted them to. Bernays hired a group of young women to light up cigarettes while walking in New York’s Easter parade, told the newspapers in advance that they were lighting torches of freedom, and the photographs went around the country. It was a cigarette advertisement dressed as a protest, and it worked. The book sets out the idea behind it: that a small number of people who understand the mind can steer the habits and opinions of the rest without the rest ever noticing. Nearly a century later it is the operating manual for every brand you buy.

[Aditya Chaturvedi @ACphenomen]

@BookNoteApp Mark Randolph of Netflix is the grand-nephew of Bernay's. Propaganda by Bernays and Public Opinion by Lipmann are instrumental to understand media and marketing gimmickry and subtle manipulation.