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civilization and politics
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civilization and politics

civilization and politicscovid pandemicCryptogenerational changemacroeconomicsphilosophy
·Jan. 4, 2021

What do Bitcoin, Ethereum, GDP, unemployment, and Covid have in common in 2021?

This week, we look at:

  • The spectacular price increase in crypto assets, hitting new records for Bitcoin, as well as the comparable statistical situation around Covid cases

  • An explanation of the $1.5 trilion income effect in 2020, and how it has led to both capital acumulation and inequity (thanks NY Times!)

  • A discussion of all-time-highs and all-time-lows, why we need them, and their connections to the macro-economy, computer code, music, and the universe itself

One wonderful takeaway from Watts, which of course is not his, but beautifully plagiarized into the English language, is the duality of experience. The need for polar opposites, in a clock-like cycle. To have black, you must have white. To have the top of the wave, you need the bottom of the wave. To have a melody, you need equally the presence of the notes, and their absence in silence. To breathe in, you need to breath out. It is meaningless to have a data point without the context in which it exists.

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Chinacivilization and politicsFractals & reflexivityphilosophy
·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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artificial intelligencecivilization and politicsexchanges / cap mktsphilosophy
·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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artificial intelligencebig techChinacivilization and politicsMetaverse / xRvisual 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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artificial intelligencecivilization and politicsMetaverse / xRphilosophyvisual art
·Jul. 3, 2020

White Obama made by Artificial Intelligence

What we know intuitively, and what the software shows, is that the pixelated image can be expanded into a cone of multiple probable outcomes. The same pixelated face can yield millions of various, uncanny permutations. These mathematical permutations of our human flesh exit in an area which is called “latent space”. The way to pick one out of the many is called “gradient descent”.

Imagine you are standing in an open field, and see many beautiful hills nearby. Or alternately, imagine you are standing on a hill, looking across the rolling valleys. You decide to pick one of these valleys, based on how popular or how close it is. This is gradient descent, and the valley is the generated face. Which way would you go?

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civilization and politicsdigital transformationentrepreneurshipphilosophy
·Jun. 8, 2020

What can Fintech learn from Elon Musk and SpaceX getting astronauts to space for 90% cheaper than NASA?

This week I discuss SpaceX, and its Dragon rocket carrying American astronauts to the International Space Station for the first time in 9 years. The 20 year old company is a testament to the incredible iron will and absolute insanity of the most visionary capitalist alive -- Elon Musk. We walk through various attributes of the company and recent launch to derive lessons for the financial industry and the entrepreneurs rebuilding it.

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civilization and politics
·Jun. 1, 2020

Black Lives Matter — structural inequity is the norm, not the exception

The realist digs deeper to that Constitution and holds it up to a magnifying glass. The Three Fifths Compromise is right there in Article 2, counting "other persons" as 3/5ths of a free person for taxation and representation. The intent of this clause was to balance power between the North and South, preserving Congressional representation of the free States, where slavery was outlawed. Maybe it was better than nothing -- but in all cases it reminds us of the truth of American slavery and the determinations of its power.

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central bank / CBDCcivilization and politicsmacroeconomics
·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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civilization and politicsgenerational changemacroeconomicsmicroeconomicsnarrative zeitgeistphilosophySocial / Community
·Nov. 19, 2019

Ok, Boomer — a meme for the broken political economy

Chlöe Swarbrick, a 25-year old climate MP was presenting her climate change case to the New Zealand parliament, and was heckled by an older audience member. Without missing a beat, she acknowledged and dismissed the challenger with a pithy “Ok, Boomer.”

The recording has since gone viral, inspiring everything from merchandise to Vogue articles. While the incident isn’t the source of the phrase “Ok, Boomer”, today it is the most well known manifestation. So what does the phrase mean? If you are inclined to more colorful language, see Urban Dictionary. But the meaning is obvious on its face — Gen Z is dismissing utterly and without consideration the judgment and protestations of society's elders on multi generational issues like economics, climate change, and social norms.

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Chinacivilization and politicsCryptoICO / IEOphilosophy
·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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