October 2008. The world is melting down. Nassim Taleb sits down next to his mentor - Benoit Mandelbrot, father of fractals.
Both had warned for years that markets are far wilder than the models admit. Now, watching it happen live, they aren't gloating. They're scared.
Their warning: the system is so consolidated and tangled that one big failure isn't a little worse - it's catastrophically worse, triggering chain reactions nobody modeled.
"I don't know if we're entering the most difficult period since - not the Great Depression, since the American Revolution."
"When one large bank makes a mistake, it's 10 times worse than a small bank making a mistake."
"Everything that involves turbulence is enormously more complicated - not a little, enormously."
~10 min, free. the two men who saw the 2008 crash coming, talking the week it broke ↓
As everyone watches the SpaceX IPO today, its worth remembering this advice from Buffett
"The idea that a newly issued security (IPO)—brought to market at a time of the seller's choosing and surrounded by massive hype—is the single best bargain among thousands of global businesses is absolute nonsense.
When an offering carries a ridiculous 7% commission just to incentivize salespeople, it simply cannot be the most attractive investment available.
While people easily get caught up in the excitement of a new launch, look at the reality: you have thousands of existing public companies whose prices are set by a natural auction market, free from aggressive promotion or hidden fees.
It makes no sense to buy a security precisely when an insider decides the timing is perfect to sell. Frankly, it isn't worth spending five seconds thinking about IPOs."
- Warren Buffett
If you're smart, wealth can buy you the lightness of absence of schedule & the ability to modulate your day to surprises as they come.
If you're stupid (like most rich pple), wealth buys you the prison of a rigid schedule, metastatic obligations, & self-feeding complications.
@tomicki Interesting, i also checked CME recently and i decided to wait and see if FMX and / or MIAX successfully challenge its market share or not. The recent insider selling was a bit concerning too
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.
Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas
100 years ago, this photo would have ended every newspaper headline on Earth.
Today it'll get scrolled past in 2 seconds.
This is a photograph of Mars. Taken today.
140 million miles away from us.
So many people don’t want to have kids. Do you know how much you have to abuse a mammal to the point it doesn’t want to reproduce? Never happens in Nature.