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civilization and politics

big tech China civilization and politics fixed income governance macroeconomics narrative zeitgeist philosophy Social / Community

·Sep. 23, 2019

Facebook’s Supreme Court is like Compliance in Banks, or Chinese Communist Party entities in joint ventures

I've seen a whole bunch of headlines this past week about how Facebook is launching its version of the "Supreme Court", as if that were an app feature. The oversight board is meant to police controversial content decisions, and have the power to overrule Zuck's judgment on political matters. Its charter is drafted as if Facebook's 3 billion users were citizens of an Internet nation. Add to this the insanity over WeWork's failing IPO plans, where the CEO has been personally named in the amended filing documents with clear checks on demonstrated abuses of power. We are drifting into a Twilight Zone episode where modern corporations act as if they were feudal states run by divine kings negotiating with their nobility over a Magna Carta. Which is actually sort of where we are.

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civilization and politics Embedded Finance paytech small business

·Jun. 3, 2019

$20 Billion TSYS acquisition in the shadow of Alibaba’s $500B SME aggregation

I have been reading Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built this week, something everyone interested in understanding the future of Google, Goldman, Uber, or Amazon should do. The narrative starts with China's small business explosion, and Ma's genius is to tap into global demand for the products of those businesses through an online marketplace and associated financial services. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let's pause to acknowledge a massive, systemic transaction that was announced this week: payments processing company Global Payments acquiring TSYS (Total Payments Systems) for $21.5 billion.

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China civilization and politics Crypto ICO / IEO philosophy

·Oct. 14, 2019

The political limits of commerce — Telegram’s $1.7B US offering and NBA’s $1.5B China deal

I look at the boundaries that Telegram and EOS have crashed into in the US with recent SEC actions and lawsuits, and the melting of Facebook Libra. There have been a number of interesting regulatory moves recently, and the positive headlines of 2017 have become the negative headlines of 2019. How does SEC jurisdiction reach foreign institutional investors? We also touch on the $1.5 billion NBA distribution deal now on the fence in China, and how US companies are under the speech jurisdiction of a foreign nation. How does China reach American protected speech? Through pressure, boycott, and economics.

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artificial intelligence big tech China civilization and politics Metaverse / xR visual art

·Jul. 27, 2020

OpenAI, backed with $1B+ by Elon Musk & MSFT, can now program SQL and write Harry Potter fan-fiction

This week, we look at a breakthrough artificial intelligence release from OpenAI, called GPT-3. It is powered by a machine learning algorithm called a Transformer Model, and has been trained on 8 years of web-crawled text data across 175 billion parameters. GPT-3 likes to do arithmetic, solve SAT analogy questions, write Harry Potter fan fiction, and code CSS and SQL queries. We anchor the analysis of these development in the changing $8 trillion landscape of our public companies, and the tech cold war with China.

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civilization and politics DAOs decentralized finance generational change Metaverse / xR

·Oct. 10, 2022

The Roaring Twenties of Populism, Institutionalism, and Technology’s Meaning

It must have been hard for those early Internet dot com founders to watch their ideas burn up like kindling. What was yesterday a song of genius and risk-taking became a caricature of hubris and bubbles. Pets.com, lol, they said.

Of course all the Internet people were right, just not at the right time. Being in the moment, you really can’t tell when the right time is. You might only be able to tell when it’s over, and the music ain’t playing no more.

It’s the roaring twenties, people say about the start of this decade. Like, that’s a good thing? Of course the 1920s ended with the Great Depression, a restructuring of the social order, and a political path to the worst war in human history. But you know, some people had fun in the stock market! Even Keynes — for all his economist words — lost his shirt. Only political power and the gun mattered in the end. It was Kafka who was right.

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China civilization and politics Fractals & reflexivity philosophy

·Nov. 13, 2020

The system versus the individual — a meditation on the American election, Alibaba’s dethroning, and Fintech theater

This week, we look at:

The relationship between an individual and a system, and how that applies to the power games of politics and economics. Did Trump change the system, or did the system generate Trump?
The difference between fighting and signalling, and what creates fragility and flexibility in governance structures
Why the Communist Party stopped Ant Financial's IPO, and how Jack Ma bears a resemblance to Mikhail Gorbachev

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civilization and politics decentralized finance mega banks paytech philosophy regulation & compliance

·Aug. 30, 2021

OnlyFans bank-forced adult content ban, its failure, and the Metaphysics of Finance

We talk about OnlyFans, and how its bank vendors pressured it to try to ban adult content, and how and why that failed. We also discuss the crypto tax provisions in the Senate version of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill, and their impracticality. These themes are tied together with a metaphysical hypothesis about the role of financial services, anchored in a discussion of the Platonic model of the mind. How are rationality, emotion, and social context involved to define the shape of our industry?

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civilization and politics Crypto exchanges / cap mkts paytech regulation & compliance

·Sep. 13, 2021

The principle behind Mastercard’s CipherTrace acquisition, L1 growth, and IRS getting your bank data

Paying attention is the path to seeing and doing. Mastercard has bought CipherTrace to see blockchain-based finance, to launch new businesses, and to plug in more networks into its nexus. The crypto networks proliferate at every layer, creating more computation on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Fantom, and Solana. The US executive seeks to see more too, asking the banks for their records of financial transactions to enforce taxation compliance.

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artificial intelligence civilization and politics exchanges / cap mkts philosophy

·Oct. 26, 2020

The AI cluster running on top of the Internet has data mined you, and has some deep fakes to sell you

This week, we look at:

Deep Fakes behind South Park creators' new parody, Sassy Justice
The AI-created author of the fake Hunter Biden intelligence report
GPT-3 winning the love and attention of people on Hacker News
How should we react to these robots and their desire to mess with our minds

Unlike equities, the crypto markets were born from machines, and are constructed from code. Hold dear the tokens in which you believe, and stay away from the stories of easy money. Nothing is easy. To win Russian roulette is not good fortune. It is, instead, a grave mistake to play a lethal game. Have you nothing to lose?

And then Brexit. And then Taiwan and China. And then Covid, again. And then, who knows.

From now on and forever, your counterparty is the data center running an AI cluster on top of the Internet. The data center that has already profiled you and knows everything about you. Bring the tinfoil hat.

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central bank / CBDC civilization and politics macroeconomics

·May. 4, 2020

What Ray Dalio’s new research says about American Empire, the US dollar, Gold, and Bitcoin

This week, we engage deeply with Ray Dalio's economic research about American Empire, capitalism, and the structure of money and credit. His clear ideas and model of the macro economy help connect the dots between emerging schools of thought, like Modern Monetary Theory and Market Monetarism, and the scarcity-focused philosophies of Gold and Bitcoin. This exploration will give you tools for understanding the $2 trillion printed by the US government, as well as potential associated impacts on finance and society.

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