Covering Delta

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

"Three-kid families have turned into what feels like a 'luxury good', amid rising childcare and housing costs. The data also highlights stay-at-home moms at 37% in the top 1%, far above lower groups."

I find this to be anecdotally true, and a great use of financial resources.

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

I'm joined by @AliVaez to discuss where the war against Iran stands today, how Iran has used the strait to pressure the global economy, what the conflict has cost Washington, Tehran, and its allies, and why the window diplomatic resolution may be closing.

https://t.co/s4JRZbhhUg

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

Joe Rogan: "Is this because of a lack of regulation?"

Mariana van Zeller: "Yes."

Joe Rogan: "So, they are regulating themselves, and what they choose to do is charge more for scams rather than protect their users? God, that's so dark."

This falls under "regulating speech" on the Internet, which I'm 100% in favor of, because there's no such thing as "free speech" in this context. These platforms are independently deciding what speech gets promoted and what gets suppressed. The objective function is not truth or freedom but maximizing profit.

The ideal solution is common-sense regulations that improve transparency and competitiveness, and perhaps even regulations that prohibit certain business models deemed incompatible with civic democracy at scale.

https://t.co/ynZuuNaobU

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

I'm joined by @biancoresearch to discuss why he's turned bullish on bonds after six years of warning they were overvalued, how mounting fiscal pressures in developed economies will reshape the investment landscape, the two-tier stock market, and much more. https://t.co/k6ls2DkqL3

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

Elon is significantly wealthier than John D. Rockefeller was at the peak of his fortune in 1913, shortly after the Supreme Court broke up Standard Oil.

If this cycle continues for much longer, the man may soon be worth 5% of US GDP.

He was almost there a few months ago.

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

I'm joined by @RanaForoohar to discuss why the Arctic is becoming the most contested, consequential, and least understood geopolitical theater in the world, with the great powers competing over trade routes, resources, and military dominance.

https://t.co/8Jso8tnIJo

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

This looks like a great movie.

https://t.co/rG7ByXIXEi

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

What Tucker suggests is not that we would have been better off with Hitler, but that there is no obvious difference between a country with unpopular levels of immigration and one occupied by a foreign totalitarian death cult.

There's a middle ground here, but good luck finding it in this political climate.

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

The Web was built on open protocols, but over time it consolidated into a handful of dominant platforms. OpenAI and Anthropic appear to be following the same template, since it's the most obvious path to profitability.

Perhaps if everyone in the early 2000s had been more concerned about the risks of corporate concentration and monopoly rent-seeking, the market would have invested more in open-source solutions, and we would have had more e-commerce and social media options where creators and proprietors could exercise better control over their products and services and capture more of the value created by their work. Imagine if we had open-source social media where business models could support discourse that was even slightly better than what we have now.

Will the recency of the Web's centralization make customers more wary of becoming overly dependent on a handful of providers this time around? And if so, should we expect a more thriving open-source ecosystem for this new technology?

This may require some form of government support through research grants and by helping to set standards and rules of the road (though the investment cycle looks very different today than it did in the 1970s and '80s). Whether Western governments will ultimately throw their weight behind closed models rather than promote an open ecosystem isn't clear. Managing AI-related risks and advancing more immediate national security goals may well be easier for Washington if it enters into public-private partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic, but this could also threaten its power and sovereignty over time and become a strategic vulnerability if it gets locked into only a handful of vendors. Maybe this isn't even the right way to think about the incentives and trade-offs, or about how people in Washington are thinking about things these days.

Still, getting these public policy questions right may very well be MORE important than the technology itself, and there is no sense in which we are having a "public dialogue" about them. It's ironic that nearly 30 years after Google launched its search engine, the Web has gone back to feeling like an impenetrable jungle where you can't find what you want unless it's served directly to you. That's probably an overstatement, except when it comes to social networks. Finding people with whom you share values and can align on critical missions in service of the public good is VERY hard these days. WTF is that about? Clearly, it's an outcome of how these networks are organized and the ideas, conversations, and "thought leadership" they promote.

If we want to reform our technological society in a way that promotes human values and political freedoms, we need to find some way to break this stranglehold on discourse, because it's suffocating the very conversations that would make peaceful revolution possible.

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

Watching this makes me think we're on the verge of a renaissance in live, in-person entertainment.

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

This is correct. Furthermore, the case for industry collusion or government regulation also rested on the need to set common standards, such as track gauge, and to discourage railroads from laying duplicate lines to the same destination, which wasted enormous amounts of capital without creating any consumer surplus (in fact, it destroyed land that could be used for other purposes).

The parallel argument for AI is that competition will drive firms to release misaligned systems that could kill people and destroy hundreds of billions of dollars of third-party infrastructure. But unlike railroads building parallel track, AI developers face liability for killing people, which should help discourage that outcome.

Whether it's enough or not, I don't know, but I have no doubt that the frontier labs want to use this opportunity to lock out competition and cement their monopoly over this technology.

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

This is from a highly produced video by BlazeTV that only has 9.5k views. The other videos on the channel have even fewer and they've been producing this show for a year.

The only traction its getting is from people sharing clips in outrage on social media. Genuinely pathetic.

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

Meanwhile, we are turning them away.

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

What if China's economic troubles aren't cyclical but structural — the product of the largest credit expansion in history? That's the argument made by Logan Wright in this episode of @HiddenForcesPod.

We discuss how Beijing's official GDP figures obscure what is actually happening to Chinese households, local governments, and the property market, why the renminbi is overvalued and capital flight persists, and what it means for the West if China is a declining power rather than an ascending one.

The first hour focuses on Logan's central argument: China's economy is in structural decline not because its leaders chose austerity or an unwavering commitment to chronic trade surpluses, but because the largest single-country credit expansion in over a century has exhausted its financial system's capacity to generate growth — leaving it unable to ignite the domestic demand needed to rebalance both the Chinese and global economies.

We discuss why optimism about Beijing's reform prospects was once rational, how China's official GDP data obscures what is actually happening on the ground, and why the prevailing narrative that Chinese policymakers retain the capacity to engineer a recovery is fundamentally mistaken.

The second hour turns to the consequences of China's credit bubble and property market collapse for ordinary households and local governments, the similarities and critical differences between China's predicament and Japan's lost decades, and the striking parallel between the CCP's political choices and those of Soviet leaders during the USSR's era of stagnation under Brezhnev.

We also discuss how demographic headwinds are compounding the collapse in Chinese demand, why Logan believes the RMB is overvalued and poses no credible threat to the dollar's international role, and what America's strategic competition with the PRC looks like when viewed through the lens of a declining rather than a rising power.

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

I cannot believe how much the Overton window has shifted on racism and bigotry.

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

Using AI to write your articles or papers is a lot like getting work done on your face. You think no one can tell and that it looks great, when it fact, it makes you indistinguishable from everyone else, and the more you do it the worse it gets.

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

Kim was always a party animal. We all know people like this. They just can’t get it out of their system no matter how old they are.

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

I felt extremely constrained in my choices.

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

A lot of people got triggered by this post, because that's what social media is for.

Here's some additional context from the interview about how China's leaders think about their economy, the problem of generating domestic demand, and why structural decay is the easy way out.

[Demetri Kofinas @kofinas]

As a general rule, people don't listen to what you say or read what you write before ripping it appart.