Chess NM. Realize gains in real life. Figuring out where to place Pascal's wager on the roulette table. Malt Vault linked below
Joined August 2014
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On modernity, enjoying life, and Bowling for Soup as it relates to p(doom). (As an aside, I no longer fix random typos or slight overuses of turns of phrase, just so you don't have to run my writing through Pangram.)
maltliquidity.com/p/melon-co…
Indeed, all the alpha is knowing where the actual risk profile lies versus the consensus perception.
Financialization is a value add, but the structures get incredibly complex and very few people intuitively get it.
Hence why the risk disclosure is so important
Yikes. Anthropic just pulled the exact accounting trick that companies did in 2000 bubble for IPO.
They hid all their expenses via convertible notes redeemable at IPO. $108 billion worth.
Dotcom firms often paid suppliers, ad agencies, lawyers and even landlords with stock or equity to save cash. AOL swapped shares for services and ads (e.g., Homestore, DrKoop). Telecom suppliers like Lucent, Cisco and Nortel used vendor financing, sometimes with equity or warrants, to drive equipment sales.
A big, big problem as you approach 30 (and the wedding debates in general) is people using social norms to justify spending out of your bank balance.
Even as someone who can afford to make everything and can manipulate my schedule around as needed, I’ve been run ragged with the nonstop stream of events to attend. I surmised after 30 and weddings, I could cut things down as needed. And yet, by the end of the year, I’ve totally tanked my battery and have no real desire to engage with almost everyone who made their unique event sound unmissable.
You will not regret looking selfish, when it’s really your own interest, in the face of people wanting you to subsidize their event and day. If it isn’t an obvious inclusion in your schedule, odds are it’s simply not something aligning with your life or priorities anyway. You’re allowed to state preferences, especially when you have to pay for things. And I’ve made this mistake more than enough over the past few years, and really, I just want my money and time back.
My friend wants to plan a couples, no-kids weekend getaway, splitting the cost of a large AirBNB, in January for her 30th birthday. I really do not love this idea (husband is mortified), neither to spend the money nor to get someone to take the toddler for 3 days. It would be a 2.5 hour drive away for us, too, so it’s not like we’re close if something happens. I haven’t been away from him for even 1 night yet and he still just seems so young! It would be very hard to leave him for that long.
Am I just a party pooper who needs to get over it? Genuine question. Like I actually need advice here guys
Admittedly, if I agreed with Anthropic’s exec team, I’d approve a voting structure that insulates from passive giants and index liquidity holding control over novel company applications.
But I, like many others who have the ability to allocate and strong opinions, also find this an impossible governance barrier to ignore.
Any public valuation will be entirely dependent on how much the governance structure is trusted.
“Everything happens for a reason” has a tacit addendum of “you’re not privy to all these reasons.”
Trading well, in particular, has a way of compounding hubris in your own brain. That because you’re profitable, and that you want it to be a function of being smart, and people want to know what you think about things as a result, that you have some unique read on the chaos machine that other people don’t.
And there are ways to ground yourself. The inverse is the way to actually survive over time. You don’t bet on right, you bet on not being wrong. But part of aging — and why I really relate to the “coming of age” aspect in this post — is that there are funny little ways you’re taken down a peg when you think you have it figured out. And OP undersells how brutally Job is told that he has no clue what he’s talking about. That just because you can generate profit out of the machine, it doesn’t mean you actually understand the whole system. It is simply too incomprehensible for us to know, and it will blow up in your face and destroy your mood at one point or another.
There’s something kind of whimsical about the algorithm delivering exactly what you need to read at any given time. I’ve been complaining about a lack of reading material, productive conversations, and latent psychosis everywhere around me for months, how reality is just vices and corruption everywhere around me. Much like the algorithm only gives you what you actually want, life will give you exactly what you construct around it as well. I complain about sports gambling, yet I find utility in the system when it comes to making profit. I complain about the financialization of everything, yet my entire life is built around interpreting this system. Part of what you learn through sitting down and reading the book once in a while is that you can’t extrapolate conclusions when there is simply never going to be enough data to ever give you a clear perspective. And that doesn’t mean there’s some magical reset button, or fix everything button, but simply being aware that your moods are not necessarily your fault and belief is the only thing that gets you through anything is a large part of not being consumed by the chaos machine.
Nihilism and psychosis go hand in hand — if psychosis is a “break” with reality, then one can only assume that the break is supposed to deliver some form of thinking that pulls one out of the doom spiral. So much of what we see in the world is people confidently proclaiming what is going to happen to the world, and, man, it was a real benefit of the algo to push the book of Job in front of me while trying to make sense out of what is real and what isn’t in this day and age.
I love Job for many reasons, but mainly because it does a very clever jujitsu move on you as a reader. You start out thinking you've seen behind the curtain -- the scene in heaven w/ God & Satan making bets about Job.
So then after Job's trials, as his four friends come visit him to give their theories of why Job is in the predicament he's in, you've got your own little theory based on the opening scene, right? You're essentially the fifth friend who has their own read of the situation.
Then God comes in at the end and is like, "all your theories are wrong. None of you were there at The Beginning, and none of you know enough of the real backstory to really understand what's happening here. None of you can actually tame the chaos monster and organize all the things into a coherent whole. Only I can do that."
You, the reader, think God is calling out Job and maybe his four friends. But He's calling you out, too. You, the reader, are in the same boat as Job and his four friends. You think you have enough info about what is going on with Job because you saw the opening scene in heaven, but actually you're just as clueless and limited as the story's characters.
So the opener of the story is actually a trap, and the conclusion springs it on you. You think you have the backstory via some special perspective, but you're just like all the other confused people in the story. You don't really know and you're not ever going to know, either.
Job's lesson is that not only does God not owe you a theodicy (so stop expecting one), but even if you could see into the unseen realm you still wouldn't have a clue. You're never going to have enough information to put the whole, chaotic picture together in some satisfactory way. It's never going to all hang together in a coherent way that makes sense.
In some ways, I think Job is a coming of age story. This is one of things you learn in midlife -- that the pieces actually didn't ever fit together like you once thought they did, and the fact that it used to make coherent sense to you says more about who you were in that phase of life than it does about any larger meaning behind the events themselves.
The Job story is literally yelling at you that you cannot organize the chaos of life events into a coherent "why" -- it's simply beyond you. That you once thought you could was the arrogance of youth. God is actually the only one strong enough to tame the chaos monster & split its carcass into a neat, ordered, coherent structure.
This isn't the answer anyone wants, but it's the only answer that's telling you like it is.
Anyway, Job is a great book. The haters are wrong. I like it because I don't like to be lied to.
The problem with the value add pitch is that the entire concept of value is nebulous and can’t be objectively quantified.
Everything is sales, and maybe it’s the century of technical humiliation that’s upon us
Sure, but also caring about future outcomes independent of your self-interest counts as a mental illness, and that’s why everyone great does anything
Man, this takes me back.
I used to love this kind of mental math beat the calculator type stuff in grade school.
Whoever came up with the branding of comedians “speaking truth to power” deserves to be known as well as Chomsky and “Manufacturing Consent”. It’s always been court jesters, and the sign of our times is how blatantly obvious everything is. The machine is so powerful that all pretentious were dropped when it was Her Turn
Carlin’s material is the Rosetta Stone of the Reddit libtard, and you think he was anything other than controlled opposition?
I think about this a fair bit. Carlin today would seem like a hack. There is a certain type of smugness devoid of an underlying ideology — peak Daily Show/Colbert Report — that became validated after Obama and infected everyone once they got on social media. Ironically, the famous "Tucker Carlson takedown" highlighted exactly what Stewart became, while Tucker at least managed to be someone with his own ideas on a network known for straight partisan hackery. I grew up watching Carlin/Stewart/Colbert — nowadays I find Sowell/Tucker/Thomas much more interesting characters and kind of cringe at the sophistry I enjoyed watching then.
The power of the system is that it can take organic actors and put them in a good/bad dividing framework such that the end goal of whatever narrative is to be pushed. It’s not some basic movie story where they’re “in on it”.
Everything can be propagandized if you control the information environment, which is why I maintain that the modern network state is a much more insidious censorship machine than the Soviet Union could have dreamt of
Ven retweeted
Imagine your net worth is $200,000. One day an armed gang comes up to your house and demands $10,000.
“Don’t worry!” the leader says. “I’m only going to do this one time. Plus, it’s only 5% of your net worth. What’s the big deal ?”
After he leaves, you call the cops, but they aren’t interested in investigating the matter. “What’s the big deal?” they tell you. “After all, it’s only 5% of your net worth!”
As you’re preparing to flee the city for a place where you cannot be robbed, Gabriel Zucman appears on your doorstep.
“Why are you leaving?” he asks.
“Somebody just robbed me and the police aren’t going to do anything. I want to live somewhere I can’t be robbed!”
“But sir,” says Mr Zucman, “Have you considered the fact that the man told you it was a one-time tax ? Have you considered that you gain nothing by leaving since the tax is already paid ? There’s no economic reason for you to leave anymore.”
What amazes me is the attitude of so many of the centibillionaires.
A 5% tax will not make any difference to the way they live. Their spending may be extravagant, but it is still much less than their (correctly measured) income.
They know that, as gifted as some of them indeed are, they have benefited from extreme luck (and the help of the state, and, to speak like an economist, monopoly rents).
They know that their effective tax rate is low, relative to what many others pay.
They know that extreme inequality is extremely unpopular, and can lead to political unrest, backlash, or worse.
They must admit that, morally, it is hard to argue for a society in which some become obscenely wealthy, while so many are poor and see their income stagnate.
They typically have not indicated that they are building their wealth to eventually make the world a better place.
But they are still willing to fight the tax, spending hundreds of millions in California to avoid paying the tax. Why?
They simply think what is theirs is theirs, end of story.
They believe in the slippery slope, and if they do not take a stand on this levy, the government will come back for more.
They hate the state and the notion that their money will be misused?
Or?
Ven retweeted
I think the Academy should start looking at random shitty Tubi movies for nominations because this guy is delivering this dialogue amazingly lmao
An old interview question of mine essentially amounted to, “explain why Piketty is a moron”.
Guess it does get easier for the younger generations over time
The answer I would look for — basically why I am a finance native, over Econ — is that Piketty assumes that wealth inequality is inherently flawed, when any believer in efficient allocation and alpha capture realizes that wealth necessarily aggregates to those better at allocating it