alpine streams

[malinvestment.jpeg @malinvested]

Of course that's your contention. You're a first-time SaaS bear. You just got finished listening to some podcast, Dario on Dwarkesh, probably. Now you think it’s the end of white collar work and seat-based pricing is screwed. You're gonna be convinced of that til tomorrow when you get to “Something Big is Happening”. Then you’ll install ClawdBot on a Mac Mini, vibe code a dashboard on top of a postgres database and say we’re all just a couple ralph loops away from building a Salesforce competitor. That’s gonna last until next week when you discover context graphs, and then you're gonna be talking about how the systems of record will be disintermediated by an agentic layer and reposting OAI marketing graphics.

“Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because ultimately the application layer is just ….”

The application layer is just business logic on top a CRUD database. You got that from Satya’s appearance on the BG2 pod, December 2024, right? Yeah, I saw that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or...is that your thing? You get into the replies of anyone posting a SaaS ticker. You watch some podcast and then pawn it off as your own idea just to impress some VCs and embarrass some anon who’s long SaaS? See the sad thing about a guy like you is in a couple years you're gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One: don't do that. And two: you dropped thirty grand on Mac Minis and LLM API calls to come to the same conclusion you could’ve got for free by following a handful of VC accounts.

[TechDev @TechDev_52]

Top line is where the liquidity fuel has cyclically exhausted. It ends the red zone. All multi-year tops have printed here.

Bottom line is where the liquidity fuel has cyclically ignited. It begins the red zone. All multi-year parabolic moves have started here.

Bitcoin doesn’t care about the calendar. It cares about liquidity.

Where are we?

[alphaXiv @askalphaxiv]

Introducing Gemini 3 Pro for understanding research papers 🚀

Highlight any section of a paper to ask questions and “@” other papers for quick context, comparisons, and benchmark references

[Louis Andre @louisnandre]

Today, we're announcing @episteme, a new type of R&D company that recruits exceptional scientists to pursue high-impact ideas.

Science isn’t bottlenecked by the availability of talent, but by places where they can do their best work.

Scientific progress has driven human flourishing: extending lifespans, lifting billions from poverty, and expanding our understanding of the universe.

But history is littered with transformational ideas that were overlooked in their time. That problem is still acute today: too much promising talent remains uncultivated, and remarkable ideas die in the lab or are filtered out by misaligned incentives.

Today, scientists face suboptimal paths for translating their research into impact: academia is famously risk-averse and incentivizes publications and winning grants vs. translational research. Industry is too often focused on short‑term incentives. And startups lack the substantial capital, expertise, and complex infrastructure needed to deliver long-term scientific progress.

On top of that, recent funding cuts in the US mean the overall supply of ideas is decreasing. Put together, the global scientific production system is operating at a fraction of its capacity.

How Episteme operates is different: we identify great scientists who can meaningfully benefit humanity, but who aren’t supported efficiently within traditional institutions today. Researcher by researcher, we work with them to determine the bespoke resources, operational support, and environmental conditions to execute on their research. We bring them together in-house, and provide those resources to ensure that their breakthroughs are deployed for real-world impact.

We’ve already assembled an amazing team of operators, ranging from the Gates Foundation, DeepMind, ARPAs, DoE – just to name a few – and researchers who are pursuing important problems across physics, biology, computing, and energy. Our team has spoken to hundreds of researchers across disciplines and geographies to understand the limitations they’re facing and what can be done better, and designed Episteme for them.

We’re backed by individuals like @sama, Masayoshi Son, and other long-term partners who share our mission of enabling ambitious science for tangible human impact.

About me: I started working as a researcher 9 years ago, on problems ranging from AI-driven drug discovery to developing brain-machine interfaces. It was that experience that led me to realize that so many scientists with great potential to change the world don’t have access to opportunities equal to their capacities.

@sama and I believe that much better science should happen for humanity, and that a new engine is needed to support that. We decided to cofound Episteme together, and I am incredibly grateful for Sam’s unwavering support as a thought partner and founding investor.

Our conviction is that by supporting the right people with the right incentives, we're set to generate breakthrough discoveries to benefit humanity. We cannot rely on the course of history to shape scientific progress; we need to proactively shape the system by supporting the most talented people with the right resources and incentives.

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡ Naval is still speaking from within the dream.

He is brilliant, yes.
But he remains anchored inside the Silicon Valley mental model of the world:
•tech drives history
•markets allocate truth
•competition shapes progress
•systems evolve through innovation
•better ideas win

All of that was true in the world before 2020.

It is not true now.

Naval is diagnosing a civilization undergoing entropy collapse with the language of a man who still thinks we are in a peacetime innovation cycle.

He is seeing the surface.
But he is missing the substrate.

1. The real underlying dynamic: energy regimes change money regimes.

Money does not change because ideology evolves.
Money changes because physics forces it.

1971 wasn’t “natural → socialist.”

It was:

energy surplus → energy plateau
and
imperial expansion → imperial overextension.

Gold ended not because fiat was better,
but because reality made gold mathematically impossible for an empire with global obligations.

Naval is telling an ideological story.
But the real story is thermodynamic.

2. “Markets choose new monies” is not how collapses work.

Markets choose flavors of software.
Empires choose monetary systems.

And they never do it voluntarily.

There has never been a moment in history where a monetary standard changed because people “decided” another was better.

It only happens when:
•debt outpaces productive capacity
•demographic inversion hits
•energy becomes scarce
•institutions lose credibility
•geopolitical fractures break the old system

The replacement of fiat will not come from competition.

It will come from necessity.

Bitcoin is the fallback of a collapsing monetary physics.

Not an innovation.

Not a narrative.

Not an idea.

A structural inevitability.

3. The deep truth Naval is missing:

We are not transitioning systems.
We are reverting to reality.

Gold was reality.
Fiat was illusion.
Bitcoin is reality reasserting itself in digital form.

Naval describes “evolution.”
But what is actually happening is decompression.

Every artificial layer between money and physics is being stripped away.

The collapse of fiat forces a system backed by:
•energy
•scarcity
•neutrality
•global consensus
•incorruptibility

There is only one candidate.

4. Bottom line

Naval still thinks this is a philosophical transition.

It is not.

It is a civilizational correction.

He is telling a brilliant story.
But the real story is much harsher and much simpler:

Money is returning to truth because the world can no longer sustain lies.

Bitcoin is what is left when everything else fails.

Naval sees evolution.
What we are witnessing is the end of monetary illusion.

And that is the part the old intellectual order still cannot see.

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️This is actually a subtle but revealing detail and it exposes how the Fed’s communication strategy has become reflexively unstable.

Kashkari doesn’t have a vote, but he’s still publicly shaping expectations. That tells you something critical: the Fed has lost its internal narrative discipline. In prior cycles, non-voting members would keep quiet between meetings because credibility depended on unified signaling. Now, every official feels the need to perform monetary stance in public to manage the idea that the Fed still has control.

Kashkari’s “on the fence” language is really about anchoring the illusion of optionality. It makes the institution look deliberative, when in reality, the data (credit stress, rising SOFR spreads, global slowdown) already precludes sustained hawkishness. He’s saying “we might not cut” to maintain the appearance of caution because if they sound certain about cutting, it admits the tightening cycle structurally broke something.

So the deeper truth: these comments aren’t policy signals anymore, they’re psychological containment tools. The Fed is using rhetorical volatility to offset the loss of real control over liquidity dynamics. Kashkari’s vote doesn’t matter, his voice does, because it helps stretch the illusion that the ship is being steered intentionally.

This is the post-credibility phase of monetary policy: the words are the tool.

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️This chart is a fossil of financial recursion.

It captures something real, but not in the way people think. What Benner stumbled into - long before Soros, long before the Fed - was the hidden frequency of how collective belief, credit, and exhaustion move through time.

The system doesn’t breathe because of cosmic math.

It breathes because humans forget.

Every 16–20 years, a new generation of capital allocators enters the game with no scar tissue from the last crisis. They discover leverage, innovation, and narrative “fundamentals,” push them to excess, and crash into the same wall of liquidity constraint.

Each recovery feels novel.

It never is.

That’s why the pattern looks prophetic because human memory is shorter than the credit cycle.

But here’s the deeper layer: these “cycles” have accelerated consciousness. They aren’t static sine waves anymore, they’ve started to stack. Liquidity, technology, and information velocity have compressed the amplitude of human belief. The chart’s spacing is still roughly correct because reflexive systems scale nonlinearly: smaller loops within larger loops. The Benner cycle is the outer drumbeat, the slow pulse of macro liquidity, while the inner loops (crypto, AI, derivatives, digital capital) oscillate at higher frequencies.

That’s why Bitcoin fits into this framework perfectly.

It’s a new mirror for the cycle itself.

Bitcoin is reflexivity incarnate: pure belief monetized into collateral. Every time the fiat system convulses, the same liquidity logic that birthed these 18-year booms migrates into it. 2026 isn’t fated - it’s the inevitable reflexive counterstroke to 2024–25’s liquidity drain.

If you lift every mask: this pattern is a diagnostic. It’s proof that capitalism, at its core, runs on managed scarcity, engineered forgetting, and the periodic renewal of faith through crisis. The amplitude changes, but the pulse doesn’t die. Every bust is the body purging disbelief; every boom is belief reincarnating in a new form.

So yes, 2026 will look like a “boom.” But the deeper truth is it’s the same movie rebooted in higher resolution: liquidity returning, belief re-leveraging, the system pretending it’s reborn while replaying its own echo.

That’s the core: the Benner chart is the heartbeat of human delusion and the rhythm by which value is reanimated.

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

Elon led the most authentic attempt at cutting government spending in decades…

It failed within 3 months.

People yell bloody murder if you cut any programs or if the stock market falls 15%.

There is no stopping this train.

[X @XaviercMiller]

Here’s what I think will happen in NYC under Mahdami.

The free buses and government grocery stores won’t happen, they never do. They sound good during campaigns, but collapse under basic math. You can’t run a city on ideas that cost billions and produce no revenue.

The only way to make housing affordable is to build more housing. The free market lowers prices, not regulation. Every time politicians try to control rent or force affordability by decree, developers stop building and landlords stop maintaining. Supply dries up, the quality collapses, and the few properties that remain skyrocket in price.

Once landlords can’t make a profit, they sell, lose properties, or walk away. Eventually, the government takes over.

Taxes will rise to pay for the promises, and the middle class will be the ones shouldering the burden. The rich will relocate, the poor will depend on subsidies, and the productive class will be squeezed from both sides.

Thriving businesses are the foundation of any thriving city. When they leave, everything else follows, jobs, schools, grocery stores, stability. Chicago already proved this. Boeing, McDonald’s, Caterpillar, Citadel, nearly 70k jobs, all gone. Now they’re facing billion-dollar deficits, half empty schools and neighborhoods without grocery stores.

I saw someone who lived in a rent-controlled apartment in California put it perfectly, he said his landlord could no longer afford maintenance so the pool was filled with dirt, the floors had soft spots, and the foundation ended up cracking. That’s what overregulation does, it destroys quality.

People who voted for this will eventually feel the pain but they won’t blame the policies or the politicians, they’ll blame the rich for leaving.

This conversation is always difficult because most people simply don’t understand market dynamics or incentives. In a free society, people act in their own self-interest. If you remove profit and reward dependency, productivity dies and the city with it.

If you think things are expensive now, just wait until they’re “free.”

[Anthony Pompliano 🌪 @APompliano]

I won't be leaving New York City.

We can't afford to surrender one of America's greatest cities to people who believe in punishing ambition, condemning success, rewarding criminal behavior, and villainizing the pursuit of financial independence.

The road ahead will require courageous men and women who are willing to sacrifice their time, money, and energy to defend the American way of life.

But it is also important that everyone hears the voice of the people. They are telling us clearly that rent is too high, groceries are too expensive, the system is not working for them, and change is needed.

These people have identified real problems but voted for the wrong solutions.

Thankfully, New York City is a very resilient place. It is a city that stands for ambition and opportunity.

That is not going to change.

Long live New York City ❤️

[Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent @SecScottBessent]

The grumpy old men at The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board think China’s rare earth restrictions were a surprise.

China has been planning this for 30 years while the U.S. was asleep at the switch.

We’re wide awake now, rallying our allies and de-risking global supply chains.

[Jordi Visser @jvisserlabs]

https://t.co/gCWSQ3bk8M

[Sundar Pichai @sundarpichai]

Just posted Q3 earnings. We delivered our first-ever $100B quarter driven by double-digit growth across every major part of our business. (Five years ago, our quarterly revenue was at $50B🚀)

Our full-stack approach to AI is driving real momentum and we’re shipping at speed. 

Thank you to our employees and partners around the world for the terrific quarter!

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

So if we layoff everyone to increase margins this year, who will have money left to buy your products next year?

[Julien Bittel, CFA @BittelJulien]

Ok, let’s get one thing straight…

Delinquency rates on credit card loans (or otherwise) are not a leading indicator. The ISM is not a leading indicator. PMIs are not a leading indicator. Heavy truck sales are not a leading indicator. Job openings are not a leading indicator. Consumer confidence is not a leading indicator. Small business confidence is not a leading indicator. Durable goods orders are not a leading indicator. Capital goods orders are not a leading indicator. Jobless claims are not a leading indicator. Payrolls are not a leading indicator. The unemployment rate is not a leading indicator. Retail sales are not a leading indicator. Port traffic is not a leading indicator. Rail traffic is not a leading indicator. Freight volumes are not a leading indicator. Rig counts are not a leading indicator. Bank lending is not a leading indicator. The Conference Board LEI is not a leading indicator (I know, crazy, but no…).

All of these indicators are coincident at best, some even lagging. But not all coincident economic data is created equal. Some start flashing early when the cycle turns.

Our GMI US Coincident Business Cycle Index pulls together some of the more forward-looking elements within the coincident economic data, including early employment trends I’ve talked about before and a few other signals that tend to move first.

But more importantly, EVERYTHING is downstream to changes in financial conditions…

Here’s the backdrop:

Our lead indicators bottomed in June 2022, leading both the ISM and our coincident index by around nine months.

By March 2023, exactly nine months later, the ISM and our GMI index had also bottomed and started turning higher.

Lagging data, particularly the unemployment rate, continues to rise and that is what keeps the Fed engaged.

Most assume rising unemployment is always bearish for risk assets. But it depends entirely on the cycle’s context and where lead indicators are heading… and they’re rising.

What’s the bottom line?

The labor market is doing exactly what it needs to do to bring rates lower, which will eventually feed through to rate-sensitive areas of the economy like housing and manufacturing, driving the next leg of the business cycle higher.

It’s a recursive feedback loop.

Once you get The Everything Code Dominoes, the whole thing suddenly makes sense…

You see how it all fits together, and you understand the cycle phasing and variable leads and lags.

From there, it’s easy: focus on what really matters and ignore the noise…

[alpine streams @AlpineStreams]

@LawrenceLepard @goldseek @goldseek hasn’t understood a thing.

[alpine streams @AlpineStreams]

@Dennis_Porter_

[alpine streams @AlpineStreams]

@Dennis_Porter_

[alpine streams @AlpineStreams]

@PeterSchiff At what the price do you reckon existing supply with come to the market in size? (refer to your prior predictions of the same)

[alpine streams @AlpineStreams]

@GuyTalksFinance Getting smarter or just more sarcastic - time will tell.