Capac

Macro investing & technology

[Capac @CapacPartners]

@ccortez @GaryMarcus They are only nominally private companies. In practice, they are as enmeshed with govt as the DoW itself. Whether that is the way things ideally should be or not is another story…

[Capac @CapacPartners]

@DavidSacks Unpack the quality of these jobs and the picture doesn’t look so great. Be honest.

[Capac @CapacPartners]

@GaryMarcus Yes:

(1) if one #AI meaningfully pulls ahead of the others, it will essentially command a monopoly. They are competing for this.

(2) this is now a national security matter and a Too Big To Fail situation, so govt will step in to ensure continued progress if needed.

[Capac @CapacPartners]

@ianbremmer Genuine question, do you think he is aiming for a third term?

[Capac @CapacPartners]

@goodalexander Great question

[Capac @CapacPartners]

@business @grok what are the top 3 best ways to express this trade?

[Capac @CapacPartners]

@macrocephalopod @grok rank these in terms of their liquidity

[Capac @CapacPartners]

@orrdavid Question is who would be the marginal buyer of this ETF moreso than how Mexico is actually doing, and are those would-be marginal buyers being forced to spend more on oil instead (directly or indirectly).

[Capac @CapacPartners]

@jeremybernier Company culture does come from the top, and that top has always been problematic...

[Capac @CapacPartners]

@INArteCarloDoss @tdarling1 China has plenty of problems but "stuck in deflation" isn't quite right, respectfully. The deflation is in certain sectors, and there is inflation elsewhere. ("April" in the attached = latest data from May release.)

[Capac @CapacPartners]

@P_Remarks Bezos has every incentive to say that for PR purposes. And the impact of robotics is more nuanced than headcount alone — and hard to predict going forward. (And they don’t quite employ more people than ever, attached.)

https://t.co/tYSGzaromn

https://t.co/yba7tQ3Lnp

[Capac @CapacPartners]

@choffstein @bennpeifert I agree with you Corey, but Benn had one too many condescending tweets, which is part of why people cheer this on. Once people get a whiff of that... it's like Hillary with "deplorables."

[Capac @CapacPartners]

Rubin and Summers (and some others) also laid the groundwork for the GFC, by not enforcing and then helping repeal Glass-Steagall, deregulating derivatives, etc… do you see any similar risks this time around?

Another risk you may have glossed is how much of this people will stand for… on the one hand, the disinflationary “productivity wave” would entail AI-driven unemployment, on the other hand we’re looking at potentially unacceptable levels of inflation. It’s a narrow strait. Then the other form of financial repression looms: govt mandates that private capital allocate to Treasurys.

[Capac @CapacPartners]

@HayekAndKeynes One could kinda tell from the tweeting… too much rancor, blinders on.

[Capac @CapacPartners]

@orrdavid What currencies are they earning in? Might help explain.

Also not the best macro backdrop with inflation + Japan rates trending up.

[Capac @CapacPartners]

@ianbremmer Unlikely to be any real negotiation on this. US and PRC have done basically zero negotiating or coordinating on gain-of-function research since covid — why would AI turn out differently?

[goodalexander @goodalexander]

As much as it’s profitable to apply “hyper reality” to assets (ie buying Palantir when there’s nationalism, or buying Bitcoin when there’s money printing) - it’s a reductive and bad approach to life as a whole

Reading Soros later works - you’re left with the picture of an old man who tried and failed to apply a successful framework in markets to politics (Ukraine) and to some extent his own life. And he’s left with more questions than answers - too ancient to explore them further

It’s best to treat people you spend a lot of time with on a hyper individualized basis rather than a collection of traits. You might have a friend who has sign value as a “fund manager” and everyone in his life treats him fully as a fund manager. Just treat him as a person divorced from his fund manager identity

Everyone is quirky and isn’t easily reduced to abstractions. But at the same time everyone is capable of “being the meme” if they need to be in a professional context. And if you start introducing the triggers that brings that identity construct out - you will be interacting with a societal projection not a person

Your relationships won’t be meaningful if you reduce people down to their meme. People aren’t stocks

I only really learned this by being a storm trooper NPC for my entire childhood and most of my adult life - then due to some health issues - kind of existed in an absurd wasteland for years. It was only after I discarded the 40 layers of narrative that I was able to even connect with anyone in real life

Obviously this is not a good way to make money. And you can’t have that many personal interactions. I don’t think it’s a good idea to put your personal life on blast on social media for this reason as well.

When you see all kinds of reductive statements on social media like “Asian girls are truffle pigs for white founders” or even the more innocent “looking for a co founder for life” or even just ppl memeing their trad wife / trad husband lifestyle. It reduces the sacred to a performance

You also shouldn’t be asking LLMs for advice on personal decisions in my view. This also aligns with LLMs advice - if you actually quantify it — so even if you’re an AI maxi. There should simply be domains where logic and token compression isn’t the main driver

Spontaneity is what makes us human in some ways

More economically

I think the level of profound cynicism that is required to thrive in the status quo can only be supported by a rejection of the underlying alienation in the rest of your life. Like you can’t trend trade relationships. Or map them into business cycles. Or you end up just going completely insane/ probably alienating ppl in your life

If you’re depressed generally it’s hard to see things clearly in an age when clarity of vision is increasingly the only differentiator . Being able to derive value from your own life without technology is also the only way Westerners will be able to avoid the digital vortex.

This is a weird post so I’ll just end it here

[Capac @CapacPartners]

It’s not politically impossible, and has already been seriously talked about in Europe.

There are 5 ways to deal with over-indebtedness.

- hyperinflation (yes, 2021-22 counts)
- austerity
- default
- high real growth
- financial repression (i.e. seizures by another name, e.g. pension funds become legally required to buy some % of Treasurys)

Without high real growth, each of these has a point beyond which they’re unacceptable. Default and hyperinflation are the only ones history really abhors. Hope high real growth materializes (maybe via an AI productivity revolution) but that’s not looking likely right now. So some combination of the other four may be inevitable.

[Capac @CapacPartners]

@ATabarrok Smart in a societally useless and often immoral vector… a very narrow kind of intelligence.