ππππ π¦πͺπππ§ retweeted
How Do You Hedge a Concentrated Stock Market? w/ @awealthofcs xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1nJOLQaXPβ¦
ππππ π¦πͺπππ§ retweeted
Is Your "Tax Alpha" About to Become an Audit?π
On the latest Talking Wealth, @michaelbatnick sits down with Brent Sullivan of @TaxAlphaInsider to discuss the IRS crackdown on tax-aware investing, which strategies could be at risk, and what financial advisors need to know.
ππππ π¦πͺπππ§ retweeted
People after booking their flights in 2 clicks instead of talking to LLM for half an hour
ππππ π¦πͺπππ§ retweeted
New GDP by State data is out today, and 44 states have seen their economies grow over the last year
Fastest: New York (4.6%), Idaho (4.4%), California (3.6%), Florida (3%), Nebraska (2.7%)
Slowest: DC (-2.1%), N. Dakota (-.8%), Maryland (-.6%), New Mexico (-.4%), Alaska (-.3%)
I know there's a heaven because we're in it
xitter.cf/Birdyword/status/21036β¦
xitter.cf/Duderichy/status/21036β¦
xitter.cf/alexandraandnyc/statusβ¦
xitter.cf/TheAnnaGat/status/2103β¦
this peacock was in full bloom this afternoon and it took every ounce of self-restraint not to give him an elbow to his smug-ass bearded chin
"The twigs and acorns crunching pleasurably beneath his boots, Mr. Autumn Man Dennis Clemons, 32, reportedly strolled down Massachusetts Avenue ... gazing out the window at the golden-hued landscape."
xitter.cf/billsweet/status/19693β¦
ugh this chode is back for his annual romp through my block
"'Nothing beats autumn in New England,' said His Excellency, the Duke of Fall, who began the day swaddled in a warm flannel blanket, gazing out the window at the golden-hued landscape."
theonion.com/mr-autumn-man-wβ¦
xitter.cf/billsweet/status/10427β¦
after 15+ years of fucking up my commute to New York the folks at NJ Transit decided to level up and shut down EVERY AIRPORT FROM NEWARK TO LOS ANGELES
the Tocquevillian fusion of the "spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty" reminds me of this @tylercowen & @ezraklein interview from 2017:
"If you ask what makes America exceptional, itβs the embedded mix of religiosity and the high status weβre willing to give to businessmen."
"And this Puritan notion that there are individual life projects and itβs your highest calling to pursue them."
vox.com/2017/3/30/15122162/tβ¦
For a decade people have been telling me I need to read De Tocqueville -- and now that I'm reading it, they have been right.
Yet part of the reason I didn't read it before was I didn't want to be influenced -- I wanted to come to my own conclusions. Yes, even 200 years later.
While I'm only 1/5th of the way through, so it's early, and while I have quibbles with it -- I think he is too extreme in his enthusiasm, which given his circumstances is understandable -- I'm more impressed with how what he finds and what I've found are shockingly similar. Despite the time gap.
A thick culture built around a balancing of independence and faith -- or as he writes βAmericans have succeeded somehow to meld together in wondrous harmony: namely the spirit of religion and the spirit of libertyβ.
And, "β¦. we see them seek with matching zeal material wealth and moral pleasure: Heaven in the other world, comfort and freedom in this world.β
A prosperity theology β a Careerist Christianity β we call the American Dream, which I've argued is our shared functional Thick Culture.
He has a line "The entire man comes full formed in the wrappings of his cradle⦠something similar happens in the case of nations: they always carry the marks of their beginnings" and I've been skeptical of such extreme foundational determinism, but reading Tocqueville, and comparing it to what I've seen in my 15 years traveling the US, I'm more open to it now.
from @cowenconvos in 2021 says @nfergus :
"It became even clearer what Tocquevilleβs project was, which to show why France had failed to be or could not be the United States, and why American liberty had a very distinctive set of institutional supports."
"The realization that Tocquevilleβs idea of liberty is something that has to be protected by nonobvious means, by things that you might not, as a liberal, even approve of, thatβs a fascinating insight."
conversationswithtyler.com/eβ¦
these sections are really good
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
ππππ π¦πͺπππ§ retweeted
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
ππππ π¦πͺπππ§ retweeted
Ask The Compound LIVE from Future Proof!π΄ποΈ
@awealthofcs, @duncanhillphoto, Alex Morris, @billsweet & Barry @Ritholtz tackle questions on 5%+ bond yields, luxury spending, generational wealth, TIPS, baby boomers & building a βcowboy accountβ for speculative betsποΈπΈ
Watch the full episode now on YouTube or find it on all podcast platformsπ¬
ππππ π¦πͺπππ§ retweeted
This was too much fun. We talked about How Countries *actually* Go Broke and why Ray Dalio is wrong about the USA.
We also talked about how the US debt and inflation can have a very different impact on different bond durations and why bonds under 5 years actually look very attractive now.
How to Talk to Your Clients About Ray Dalio
@michaelbatnick and @awealthofcs are joined by @cullenroche to discuss AI extinction fears, bearish hedge fund managers, why the stock market is so confusing, bonds looking attractive, Fed hikes, government debt fears and more LIVE from @FutureProof_HQπ΄ποΈ
ππππ π¦πͺπππ§ retweeted
a bit of chapter 12 on the nose and chapter 24 in the finish xitter.cf/billsweet/status/21003β¦
THE PERFECT GUEST
Gene Sykes with @TheStalwart & @tracyalloway
"So the other half says listen, if I'm going to die from AI, it's going to be American AI from right here in the USA! None of this COMMIE CRAP!"
- Josh on datacenters
ππππ π¦πͺπππ§ retweeted
Hello! Weβre here at the Future Proof conference in Southern California.
Tomorrow @tracyalloway and I are interviewing Goldmanβs Gene Sykes on stage.
Then Thursday weβre back up in LA, for our live show with @TaylorLorenz @milkkarten @2112Power and more. events.bloombergevents.com/eβ¦
