most of my writing just tries to understand the economy through cultural history—and vice-versa.
but to understand this moment, i explored a different history this time: my own.
a tale of two bank failures, and the most personal thing i've ever written:
https://t.co/iyX8Lcd8CL
Source confirms that Victor Wembanyama treated the team to a screening of the movie “Obsession” as the Spurs tried to wind down from the emotional toll of Game 7 heading into the Finals.
Here's my promised explainer. Doing my best to synthesize a lot of info here so check all my info; don't rely on it
So - the SpaceX IPO (SPCX:NASDAQ)
1/ Normally, a company with a massive valuation has to wait months to a year after its IPO before index funds are allowed to buy
1/n
A physical book is a real object, anchored. If you read a particular edition, you remember not only the contents but the object itself: its cover, typography, smell, even where a passage sat on the page.
Books organize themselves in memory by place --the ancient method of loci.
Digital text does not exist.
I get why the tech outcomes drive some people insane. I’ve joined companies 12 months “too late”, and merely made a good amount of money instead of generational wealth
The people who joined before me weren’t any better or smarter. They just got lucky. Just like someone looks at me and thinks I got lucky
The pure randomness of it all can either drive you crazy or give you an appreciation for the role of luck.
But at the end of the day you are in the driver’s seat. You choose your perspective
What I have come to learn is the people who think they alone earned their accomplishments are the most unhappy. The people with gratitude for the role luck played in their success are able to keep striving for more without losing their mind
They have come to acknowledge that while they can shape the world around them, and tilt the odds in their favor ever so slightly, ultimately a lot of it is out of their hands
Christopher Nolan was originally hired by Warner Bros. to direct Troy (2004). Wolfgang Petersen reclaimed the project after his Batman vs Superman was cancelled. Nolan was offered Batman Begins (2005) as the so called consolation prize.
Iron Man actually offers a great look at this question.
Bridges asks Downey: “You think just because you have an idea that it belongs to you?”
And IM2 is all about stolen IP and arms races that step change innovations set off.
And of course Tony is a gov contractor.
In the 2010s, Apple used the App Store as outsourced R&D, converting top apps into native iOS functionality
Anthropic is poised to do the same thing to software. Except this time, companies are *paying* to hand Anthropic the literal instructions for how to build their products
The right: billionaires are good actually
The left: billionaires are bad actually
The center left: well uh well uh well uh well uh well uh well uh well uh well uh well uh well uh well uh well uh well uh well uh well uh well uh well uh well uh well uh well uh well uh well uh w-
my position is
1. most billionaires earn their money legally
2. even if billionaires mostly "earn" their billions, i think that the concentration of wealth is a political, societal, and even economic problem. (for example: billionaire contributions to national elections could easily get to 25-50% of total political spend, and the power that implies over political and agenda capture makes me nervous; plus, at some point, concentration could move money from spenders to savers in a way that could be troublesome for growth)
3. recent tax cuts for s corps and c corps really don't help with (2)
4. to begin to address (2) i think we should undo the trump tax cuts, increase avg effective estate taxes, and probably raise the national minimum effective tax rate for the wealthiest ppl. it's too easy for billionaires to pay lower effective tax rates than the middle class with the c/s corp rules we have now
Enforcing the laws is not a policy choice. The Spirit-JetBlue merger was illegal. You don’t get to just say well we don’t really like enforcing the law in this case. The problem is Congress hasn’t regulated the airlines. That’s not an antitrust problem.
This is like that stretch of The Wire when all the drug dealers had a shortage of drugs and all the druggies had no choice but to get their lives together
I burned through all my tokens in a session on Claude Pro this morning in maybe 10 minutes trying to pull data out of one PDF — there’s just no way there’s enough compute to disrupt a meaningful number of jobs this year.
I just revisited Primary Colors for the first time in forever and my main takeaway was further digging my heels in on The Ides of March being criminally underrated, as well as a prescient artifact of valid distrust of what’s now become nostalgic politics
"Mythos was trained on fairly mundane capacity, and a fairly mundane amount of it."
That's Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in his conversation with @dwarkesh_sp. A big deal for him to admit the 'more compute!' narrative of AI hyperscalers is a lie.
BREAKING: Jury finds that Live Nation and Ticketmaster illegally monopolized ticketing market in a high-stakes antitrust trial. https://t.co/CYvkG6pHXP
Mythos Preview seems to be the best-aligned model out there on basically every measure we have. But it also likely poses more misalignment risk than any model we’ve used:
Its new capabilities significantly increase the risk from any bad behavior. 🧵
Herodotus: "[The Delphic oracle foretold that] if Croesus should make war on the Persians, he would destroy a great empire..he did not understand that the empire meant was his own.”