Royal_Bengal

Aspiring SuperVillain

[Shubhendu Trivedi @_onionesque]

Didn't realize Pollard was still writing books - this looks great! Big fan of the Empirical Processes book.

[Michael Pettis @michaelxpettis]

More supply-side support: "China will accelerate efforts to identify and nurture promising small and medium-sized enterprises, shifting from waiting for companies to apply for support to proactively seeking out firms with strong growth potential."
https://t.co/KvwfIe4wpr

[Malvin @ManOfFocus_]

Elon Musk was right when he said, "Go Get your fucking confidence back. Without it, you will fail miserably no matter how skilled or smart you are."

[Holger Zschaepitz @Schuldensuehner]

The Euro slides to $1.1473 as state election losses weaken Chancellor Merz. Political risk is back in the price. France adds to the jitters: a credit downgrade, shaky finances & a presidential race ahead. The OAT-Bund spread remains >100bps.

[Alcuin Press @AlcuinPress]

Sunday reminder

[Chris Williamson @ChrisWillx]

Firefighters over-perform in the dating market.

“Data from online dating sites suggests that a man who earned $60K in the hospitality industry would become more desirable, on average, if he earned the same amount as a firefighter than if he stayed in the same industry but upped his salary to $200K.

In other words, a male firefighter who earns $60K tends to be more attractive to the average heterosexual woman than a hospitality worker who earns $200K.” — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

[Financial Times @FT]

Opinion: The world’s best-performing stock market this year is South Korea, but you wouldn’t know it from the headlines, which are all about its ‘crazy’ price swings and fanatical local traders.

Read the full piece by Ruchir Sharma here: https://t.co/ABnvCjG0Tj

[Steve Stewart-Williams @SteveStuWill]

12 Things Everyone Should Know About Wokeness

10. Many interventions favored by the woke don’t work

https://t.co/gAlE3gMtjN

[Jon Brosio @jonbrosio]

The future of work is not a job.
It's a portfolio.

Three income streams. One skill stack. Total control of your time. The people who build that portfolio now will be unreachable in a decade. The people who wait for a stable job will be waiting for something that stopped existing.

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

Shocking stat of the day:

The Breakwave Tanker Shipping ETF, $BWET, is up +5,820% over the last 12 months.

This ETF reflects futures linked to the cost of transporting crude oil from the Middle East and West Africa to China and other destinations, making it highly sensitive to disruptions in global oil shipping.

In 2026 alone, $BWET is up +4,556%, leaving it the world’s best-performing ETF this year.

The surge reflects skyrocketing tanker shipping costs amid disruptions to global oil transportation caused by the Iran War.

We are seeing an unprecedented global energy shock.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Underrated life advice: Never make someone regret being honest with you. If someone has the courage to tell you the truth, don’t punish them for it. You can disagree. But if you train people to believe that honesty gets punished, they’ll start giving you comfort instead of truth.

[Quanta Magazine @QuantaMagazine]

A proof reveals a surprising link between graph theory and the Fourier transform. “It is a little bit like the moon landing or the 4-minute mile,” said Tom Sanders of the University of Oxford. “It’s not clear ahead of time what this is going to open up.” https://t.co/hHzUc0vbwD

[Machiavelli Bot @UnmodernmanBot]

In game theory: Most people fail because they base their actions forwardly, "if I do this, I will get this" which is rarely a good decision and ignores the second and third-order consequences of your actions. The more practical way to base your decisions is Backward Induction: start at the end of the scenario, and reason backwards. Mastering backward induction will make you dangerous

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

COLUMN: The world doesn't have enough oil supertankers right now, triggering the biggest ever rally in crude shipping costs.

But current values aren't a new normal, with orders for new oil supertankers heading to a 50-year high.

@Opinion
https://t.co/mC7y1v6vNw

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Five minutes of walking in nature improves your mood more than any other single intervention that takes five minutes. A 2010 study in Environmental Science and Technology tested 1,252 people and found that the mental health benefit of outdoor exercise peaks in the first five minutes and that water nearby amplifies it.

Jo Barton and Jules Pretty at the University of Essex measured mood and self-esteem before and after green exercise sessions of different lengths. The biggest jump came in the first five minutes. After that, the returns diminished. An hour was better than five minutes, but not by as much as you would expect. The first five minutes did most of the work.

The presence of water, a river, a lake, or the sea, boosted the effect beyond what green alone produced. The researchers called it "blue-green exercise" and noted that environments combining vegetation and water were the most restorative combination tested.

Every type of movement worked. Walking, cycling, gardening, horse riding. The activity mattered less than the setting. The same walk on a treadmill did not produce the same mood shift as the same walk under trees. The nature was the active ingredient, and the movement was the delivery mechanism.

You do not need a national park. You need a patch of green and five minutes. The research says your brain will shift before you have finished tying your shoes, and the river at the edge of the park will push it further. https://t.co/EUy43AJjvI

[Financial Times @FT]

AI is a powerful but problematic new collaborator in mathematics https://t.co/8cKy3cT5jz | opinion

[Ahmed Hathout 🇵🇸 @ahmedhathoutt]

presented without comment

[Tiberius @tiberiusfiles]

IBM, 1979. We’re regressing at a rapid pace.

[Sasha Gusev @SashaGusevPosts]

Incredible segment from this discussion between Nathan Cofnas and Glenn Loury & John McWhorter where Cofnas starts to explain how the Nazis were right about racial differences, then catches himself and pivots to how the Nazis were right about the conspiring elites.

[Math Files @Math_files]

Kurt Gödel, the logician behind the incompleteness theorems, also constructed a formal argument for God’s existence.

He never published it.

Using modal logic, Gödel defined God as a being possessing every “positive” property. The argument then rests on a striking premise: if such a being is possible, its existence is necessary.

Gödel showed the proof to Dana Scott around 1970.

The argument remains controversial. Its axioms, especially the notion of a “positive property,” are open to philosophical criticism. Some formulations also lead to modal collapse, where every truth becomes necessary.

It is not an accepted mathematical proof of God.

It is a remarkable example of how far formal logic can be pushed.