Kwyal

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

I do believe AI can help create radical abundance. But the truth is, I also believe the transition can be rough. Those two statements belong together. We cannot sell only the 'destination' and refuse to discuss the road.

[@jason @Jason]

Tracks

[Dave Portnoy @stoolpresidente]

Happy 250th birthday to the best country on earth! I was reading a book the other day and was struck by this paragraph. I don’t know who the author was but I thought it was brilliant and perfectly said…🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

[Ken Cao-The China Crash Chronicle @KenCao_onChina]

Ten years ago, Elon Musk and Jack Ma both looked like avatars of the future.

Musk was building electric cars, rockets, satellites, and AI. Jack Ma was building Alibaba, the crown jewel of China’s internet economy.

Fast forward a decade: Musk is worth $1.1 trillion.
Jack Ma was forced into silence, Ant Group’s IPO was crushed, Alibaba lost its aura(its stock plunged by more than 60% since 2020), and China’s tech sector went from world-beating to politically domesticated.

One entrepreneur was allowed to compound.
The other was reminded who really owns the scoreboard.

This is not just a story about two billionaires.
It is a story about two systems. One system lets madmen build rockets to Mars.

The other cuts down its most successful entrepreneur for flying too close to the sun.

That is why Musk became the world’s first trillionaire.
And Jack Ma became a warning label.

[Kwyal @KwyalOG]

Wealth for the few is barely what this equates to. This type of liquidity event is what allows for 4,400 other individuals and their families to create financial freedom for their families, which then allows them to do good in other areas for others when they are no longer beholden to the economic realities you detest so much. Those individuals in their orbit will carry on to use the success they've witnessed through their mom, dad, brother, sister, friend (whomever) as an example and so on and so forth. 4,400 "millionaires" will be millions impacted via the ripple effect directly or indirectly. Some will squander it. Some will horde it. But many if not most will use it to do good and that is what America is about.

[Kwyal @KwyalOG]

American Dream

[Arjun Khemani @arjunkhemani]

About 5 years ago, Elon was giving @Erdayastronaut a tour of the Starbase launchpad. A worker at the site walks up, hugs him, and says: “We’re going to make it.”

He’s probably a millionaire now.

[Jack Mallers @jackmallers]

The Cost Of Our Inheritance: A Generation's Vision For Ethical Money

One of the most personal and important keynotes I've ever given on broken money, generational injustice, and Bitcoin as our moral imperative.

The future isn't something we wait for, it's something we build ✊

[Pulte @pulte]

After significant studying, and in keeping with President Trump’s vision to make the United States the crypto capital of the world, today I ordered the Great Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prepare their businesses to count cryptocurrency as an asset for a mortgage.

SO ORDERED

[Arjun Khemani @arjunkhemani]

.@naval: “The reality is that opportunities have never been more equal than now.

@elonmusk and @JeffBezos have the same iPhone you do. They don’t have some better version of an iPhone.

They’re eating food that might be marginally better than yours, but it’s basically the same.

You might even have a better diet than them. You probably have more time to go to the gym than them.

They’re not immortal, and they’re not going to be—most likely, not at this time scale.

So you have more youth than them. You have a lot of advantages over them.

The wealth gaps are actually much smaller than people think.

A lot of that is due to mass production, which comes from specialization, labor, and capitalism.

But it’s very easy to overlook that and agitate—because that gets you higher in the status hierarchy with other monkeys.

It makes you look like you’re fighting for noble causes and gives you status, which is really what people are craving these days.

They’re craving status, not money or wealth.

And status is a zero-sum game.

So it’s kind of an evil game to play because there have to be losers for every winner.

And the only way to win is by crushing somebody else down.”

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Why AI Won't Cause Unemployment

Marc Andreessen
Reposted Jan 24, 2025

"In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of [running] a business." -- George McGovern

Fears about new technology replacing human labor and causing overall unemployment have raged across industrialized societies for hundreds of years, despite a nearly continual rise in both jobs and wages in capitalist economies. The jobs apocalypse is always right around the corner; just ask the Luddites.

We had two such anti-technology jobs moral panics in the last 20 years — “outsourcing” enabled by the Internet in the 2000’s, and “robots” in the 2010’s. The result was the best national and global economy in human history in pre-COVID 2019, with the most jobs at the highest wages ever.

Now we’re heading into the third such panic of the new century with AI, coupled with a continuous drumbeat of demand for Communist-inspired Universal Basic Income. “This time is different; AI is different,” they say, but is it?

Normally I would make the standard arguments against technologically-driven unemployment — see good summaries by Henry Hazlitt (chapter 7) and Frédéric Bastiat (his metaphor directly relevant to AI). And I will come back and make those arguments soon. But I don’t even think the standand arguments are needed, since another problem will block the progress of AI across most of the economy first.

Which is: AI is already illegal for most of the economy, and will be for virtually all of the economy.

How do I know that? Because technology is already illegal in most of the economy, and that is becoming steadily more true over time.

How do I know that? Because, [see chart].

This chart shows price changes, adjusted for inflation, across a dozen major sectors of the economy.

As you can see, we actually live in two different economies.

The lines in blue are the sectors where technological innovation is allowed to push down prices while increasing quality. The lines in red are the sectors where technological innovation is not permitted to push down prices; in fact, the prices of education, health care, and housing as well as anything provided or controlled by the government are going to the moon, even as those sectors are technologically stagnant.

We are heading into a world where a flat screen TV that covers your entire wall costs $100, and a four year college degree costs $1 million, and nobody has anything even resembling a proposal on how to systemically fix this.

Why? The sectors in red are heavily regulated and controlled and bottlenecked by the government and by those industries themselves. Those industries are monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels, with extensive formal government regulation as well as regulatory capture, price fixing, Soviet style price setting, occupational licensing, and every other barrier to improvement and change you can possibly imagine. Technological innovation in those sectors is virtually forbidden now.

Whereas the sectors in blue are less regulated, technology whips through them, pushing down prices and raising quality every year.

Note the emotional loading of the interplay of production and consumption here. What do we get mad about? With our consumer hat on, we get mad about price increases — the red sectors. With our producer hat on, we get mad about technological disruption — the blue sectors. Well, pick one; as this chart shows, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Now think about what happens over time. The prices of regulated, non-technological products rise; the prices of less regulated, technologically-powered products fall. Which eats the economy? The regulated sectors continuously grow as a percentage of GDP; the less regulated sectors shrink. At the limit, 99% of the economy will be the regulated, non-technological sectors, which is precisely where we are headed.

Therefore AI cannot cause overall unemployment to rise, even if the Luddite arguments are right this time. AI is simply already illegal across most of the economy, soon to be virtually all of the economy.