Geoff Graham

Tweets are reminders to myself. Replies are me trolling friends. @bigridgemtnclub @yeomanpodcast @periodicalink @ioncompany

[Geoff Graham @ggraham]

Of course, closely held businesses must compete with publicly-traded corporations (as well as corporations owned by institutional private equity), so the pressure and ruthlessness that comes with financialization ripples over to closely held businesses, forcing them to behave more like their financialized peers—or go under.

In the late 1800s, Pope Leo XIII saw this starting to happen, recognized the dangerous widening of interests between owners and workers, and wrote Rerum Novarum as a response.

https://t.co/LDgYxskOyg

[Geoff Graham @ggraham]

This sort of thing is an unremarkable and everyday occurrence in closely held businesses. That owner/CEO/president/managing partner may freely choose to trade a few points of net margin for charity, whimsy, sentimentality, generosity, honor, or creative flourish.

But for a publicly-traded business, if the market perceives that the corporation is spending money without regard for shareholder value, share price suffers, which means a bunch of people's retirement accounts decline in value.

For financialized businesses—which in relatively recent history have come to dominate our economy—there are way more impediments to sentimentality than for closely held businesses.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

This is not the smartest move from a profit-maximizing standpoint btw, but there must be some room in this world for sentimentality or what’s the point?

[Jason Fried @jasonfried]

The best productivity tool I've found is a wood burning fireplace.

[Geoff Graham @ggraham]

@musharbash_b 🙌

[Geoff Graham @ggraham]

Yes.

And it’s the worst kind of theft; it is theft by the old and powerful from the young and not-yet-born. It is maximally regressive, a sort of magick.

Money printing is a demon-summoning witch séance that steals the souls of children.

[Bob Dewey @macroleverageTP]

This is one of Saifedean’s most important statements.

Economic growth does not require an expanding money supply as MMT suggests. Growth increases the purchasing power of the money that already exists.

Printing more money transfers purchasing power from those who hold it to those who create and receive the new money first.

That is theft.

[Geoff Graham @ggraham]

@kfree_redux Also, boy did Covid change things. Pre-Covid, am I just imaging things or was it the self-identified progressives who were most likely to be suspicious of the medical industrial complex?

[Geoff Graham @ggraham]

Well, in defense of Karp, for the last decade or two, self-identifying progressives have been consistently supportive of technofeudalism. They are WAY more likely than conservatives to be nodding along with the latest Yuval Harari scheme to end cash, privacy, free speech, etc.

[Krystal Ball @krystalball]

Alex Karp now says that Palantir is progressive, he’s always been a Democrat, Trump went too far on immigration and his primary commitment is to economic justice. LMAOOOOOO

[Geoff Graham @ggraham]

@kfree_redux It is definitely a head scratcher. Was it the Clinton-Big Finance alliance that managed to change that? Did it just kinda sorta happen when they reached an age where they were paying more attention to their 401k than society and the future?

[Geoff Graham @ggraham]

@AndrewHunt94 @DzambhalaHODL @krystalball Self-identifying progressives have been pretty supportive of technofeudalism!

Progressives are WAY more likely than conservatives to be parroting Yuval Harari and nodding along as technocrats argue for ever more panopticanization (ending cash, vaccine passports, etc).

[Aaron Lubeck @aaron_lubeck]

It's been 100 years since the Euclid vs Ambler decision.

The Supreme Court case rationalized takings, justified class discrimination, and set in motion a century of centrally planned exclusion.

It's time to consider what an overturning of the case might look like.

Read my latest onHousing:

▶️viABio
@strongtowns @newurbanism #SCOTUS #housing

[Geoff Graham @ggraham]

Maybe I am naive, but I think that at this early in the game, AI makers (as with the first decade or so search engines) want to maximize usefulness for the end user, so they will compete to make their products do what users want them to do. I think that's even more the case when users are paying for the product (as opposed to search's ad monetization, which as I recall came after PageRank in the search engine business lifecycle).

That calculus would change with regulatory capture, but assuming that stays at a minimum, then I think AI answers will, as you say, "reward the HVAC shop that actually answers the phone".

[Geoff Graham @ggraham]

A "moat" is an insurmountable competitive advantage that enables one to dominate a market. If you want to become an enormous company, you need moats. If you are a small business (or an aspiring small business) moats tend to discourage you and hurt your prospects for success. If you are customer, they tend to make your life more expensive.

If I understand @kunchenguid correctly, he's suggesting AI is shrinking these moats and that's a bad thing. I appreciate and agree with many criticisms of AI, but that it's breaking up concentrated advantage seems like the very best thing about it.

Another positive is it is underscoring, boldening, and highlighting authenticity and competence. In media and services, authenticity and competence are becoming the new moats, and the concern scale-seekers have with that is those things can only scale so far.

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

overheard from friends talking about AI in China, and it’s very alarming

- AI short films went massive in China market because of how good the video models are now

- the first wave of people who mastered using AI to generate short films and comics made quite some money because they could produce a lot more content than traditional workflows

- but within just a few months, everybody and their mom could make equally good short films because all the expertise could be written in a markdown file

- when everyone’s more productive, no one actually has an advantage and it’s a race to the bottom. very quickly it became impossible to make money, and everyone’s busier than they were without AI

- the only one making money now is companies like bytedance who owns user demand and distribution. they sell ads to creators who pay to get traffic, and eventually ad spend became 80% of those creators’ operating expense, while AI tokens is less than 5%

so what are the problems here?

1. there’s no moat if you are creating anything with AI

if a human is really good at something, and it’s hard to find more humans who can do the same, they can leverage the scarcity of their skill to get paid very well

but if AI is good at something, it will be infinitely replicated, so there’s no scarcity hence you can’t really expect a sustainable business by creating anything with AI

2. more creators created more content people actually liked. that’s a good thing

but the economical benefit of that all got absorbed by the distribution platforms

there’s a famous chinese poem 遍身罗绮者，不是养蚕人 - it basically says people who dress well aren’t the people making dresses. that’s exactly what’s happening here

if our society doesn’t figure out a better way to distribute wealth, AI will help billionaires become trillionaires while average people become more exhausted than ever

[Geoff Graham @ggraham]

@jburnsmuse I am no art expert, but Sargent's work strikes me as universally uplifting. I wonder if that subject just brought him down, and he couldn't muster the energy to complete it.

[Geoff Graham @ggraham]

I wonder why Sargent never finished this.

[Richard Morris @ahistoryinart]

John Singer Sargent's 'Two Soldiers at Arras,' (1918) was study for a painting but never completed; the soldier on the right is wearing a gas mask while the figure on the left has his hand over his eyes, underlining the dangers of exposure to toxic gas during WW1.

[Geoff Graham @ggraham]

@kunchenguid Authenticity is a great moat.
https://t.co/4DHq8WZUaq

[Geoff Graham @ggraham]

Why do people value imperfect homegrown tomatoes more than unblemished ones from the store? Handwritten letters more than emails? Manuscripts more than paperbacks? Original paintings more than prints? Live performances more than recordings? Crafted more than manufactured?

[Geoff Graham @ggraham]

Pretty much 100% of data centers are subsidized and benefit from special tax treatment.

It’s the most American thing ever to subsidize construction of a building while also making it punishingly difficult to get a building permit.

[Geoff Graham @ggraham]

@ErikBootsma So lame. What is going on here? Are these grave markers?

[YIMBY Manatee @Yimbymanatee]

https://t.co/saW48PcxwM

[Geoff Graham @ggraham]

The reason Massie hasn't called for prior impeachments is he has never before been a lame duck.

Politicians employ different tactics when they have nothing to give or lose versus when everyone expects to be working with them in the future.

If he wants to affect any change in his last few months, he has to do things differently than he did back when he had a very long runway.