EU concern meter: •Ultimate concern •Dire concern •Grave concern •Strong concern •Serious concern •Typical concern •Modest concern >Mild concern •Slight concern •No concern

Bro what just happened

PINS is probably one of if not the best business in the world, total money printing machine. Unfortunately it only prints money for management and employees, who pay themselves salaries and SBC of $2.5 billion a year, or about $500k/head. A prime candidate for some operational efficiencies via AI!

How big a problem is Social Security funding? Consider a counterfactual world, where in 1970 the Social Security "trust fund" was fully invested in US equities. By today, that investment would be worth over $30 trillion, instead of the $3 trillion it is today. Fully 30% of the US market owned!

Social security doesn’t actually work like this! The entire reason people are worried about benefits cuts is because you have not, in fact, “paid for” your benefits! Current revenue is paid out to current beneficiaries, and discrepancies are tracked for accounting. It’s not your money coming back.

Whenever I see a post from someone on here that starts like “Hey y’all, rural resident here,” my urge to go work for whatever private equity firm is buying up all the water rights to public streams and evicting people who live near them them rises 20%

Pretty Cute Watching OpenAI Employees Play Daily Game Of ‘Frontier Researchers’

Good discourse today everybody, see you all tomorrow for Round 2.

We're just going to have huge blocks of essentially write-only code from now on. If something breaks or you encounter an edge case, it will be faster and easier to get Claude to rewrite vast swaths of the entire codebase to deal with it instead of bothering to actually find and fix a specific bug.

Wealth tax pop quiz! Based on 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances data, order these (US) net worth brackets by *total* net worth: A. Households with a net worth under $1 million B. HH with a NW from $1-$10mm C. HH with a NW from $10-$100mm D. HH with a NW over $100mm, including all US billionaires

One of my more controversial opinions is that the US needs to significantly raise taxes to the tune of a couple % of GDP right now, even before any expansive social democratic reforms, and that means you—yes you, dear highly educated professional—will need to pay up, not just nebulous billionaires.

A lot of people complaining about Bluesky clearly never bothered to edit the default moderation settings. It’s a whole different site when you switch this option on:

People have said this ad nauseum to banks about crypto/blockchain for 2 decades and despite acceptance of bitcoin as "another bullshit thing that goes up and down you can trade on" it remains pretty firmly outside the financial mainstream.

It's also not true? 11001_2 + 1010_2 = XXV + X = 35 regardless of which base system you use, the actual underlying mathematical objects are the same regardless of the specific representation of them.

So do the Knives Out movies really keep getting increasingly cringe and overwrought, because the first one was legit a banger...

Apparently the Kiri kiss scene was filmed via stunt double because they were worried about a problematic age gap between Sigourney Weaver and the kid playing Spider? Maybe wokeness in Hollywood has gone too far, bring back the perverts please they made better films.

I think one of the lessons that the huge success of congestion pricing in NYC is that charging a nominal upfront fee- even one far less the the levellized cost you are paying for elsewhere- is very good at cutting off the bottom 5% of bad behavior that makes things worse for everyone.

One of my professors in undergrad was a “cognitive scientist” who would insist he had proved P=NP because a certain minimal surfaces problem was NP-hard but you could use soap films to solve it in O(1). That represented a substantially more rigorous and defensible argument than whatever this is:

Alright, time to determine once and for all whether James Cameron is a washed up hack or the GOAT of the silver screen, at least for the next 4 years until he releases another one

My big problem with the Avatar franchise is how unrealistic its depictions of human soldiers vs. scientists are. The grunts (ex-Jake) are all portrayed as gung-ho killing machines and the scientists are all a bunch of hippy peaceniks who instantly defect to the Na’vi.

People need to read (stochastic analysis) theory on this!

What I learned from 2025: - Made up statistic - Thing I heard on a midcap earnings call - Anecdote from my workplace - Gut feeling

So the current theory is physics PhD dropout shoots up the school that didn’t give him a degree, drives to Boston, and separately kills his undergrad buddy who did get a PhD and a prestigious job, 20 years after the fact? Wild story.

Really disgusting libel being spread by Shaun Maguire and the right-wing VC orbiter crowd on X right now. Obviously, a queer pro-Palestine student at Brown could never carry out a mass shooting, as they would be disabled from long COVID.

I’m also looking forward to their newly acquired BG3 fan base learning that Divinity isn’t set in Fantasy Cottagecore 5e but actually set in Fantasy Nazi Germany Where The Nazis Kind Of Have A Point If You Think About It

I have confidence that we’ll be able to sort out whether text based social media is a waste of time, right after we determine whether speed cameras are carceral, should children be allowed phones belong in schools, and if Larian is worse than Hitler or merely as bad for using AI in their games.

Musk has never made any money from the revenue or profit of his companies, his entire net worth comes from a combination of 1. Convincing boards to give him giant options grants, and 2. Selling stock at incredibly high valuations. The only thing that “hurts” him is the stock price falling.

Wow Clair Obscur looks like such a cool video game, I wish France was a real place

Is the Charlie Kirk song the first example of a purely AI originated meme that’s gone viral among humans and been remixed/updated into human content?

You guys want me to pick you up anything at the gift shop or what?

Looks like France won the Intangible Cultural Patrimony of the Year award for the 1,225th year in a row, nice

IPO at 100x trailing revs is certainly *a* choice you could make

No one can have any doubts about Elon Musk except for the entire leadership of the EU and NATO allies who insist on repeatedly engaging in good faith because they assume it’s a legitimate disagreement and caving every time (the grossly inadequate fine probably won’t even happen)

Why would the current administration in both countries not influence what is naturally an extremely political question?

You know I thought it was really lame that the main tourist attraction in Geneva was a fountain, but now that I’ve seen it I will admit a fuck off huge 20 story fountain absolutely rocks. This kicks ass.

“Chat are we cooked, they’re firing missiles at fam fr”

This article is a bit of a curate’s egg in that it makes many good points and many bad ones. I think there’s a huge- and not unjustified- temptation to lay the blame for this at Reagan’s feet but if I’m allocating blame I give him maybe 40-50% and more for wage inequality than wage share drops.

From the way people talk about them you’d assume European trains zipped through picturesque countryside at 300 mph while you played baccarat with a devastatingly beautiful Monegasque heiress and sipped Krug, but they’re basically just comfier Amtrak for 200 fucking dollars a ticket

They’re calling him the world’s most sober man:

“To the first World War”

this is like watching children fight with scissors. it's not a good idea to be doing it and also they're doing it wrong

Plane meme dot jpg and all that but everything I hear and see from college kids makes me think that the current crop is just unbelievably cooked

We have learned that if the Amerikkkan people cannot have their burgers delivered piping hot for less than it costs in person they will collectively elect a guy who kills a million people in developing nations, so the creation of cheap burrito bots is one of the stronger moral obligations out there

Damn this website is dead dead during European hours, y’all live like this??

It is not remotely true that post-2008 crash safeguards have been torn to shreds, the banking and financial system is extremely robust right now (it absorbed a trillion of MTM losses and only nerds noticed), and outside private credit being sold to rich dentists there isn’t much repackaging going on

Look the thing about the Nick 30 memes conservatives love now is nobody is actually proposing the “screw pensioners to lower your taxes and build millions of homes so you can afford one” policies that might plausibly attract all 3% of the population (concentrated in major metros) it describes.

My council of treacherous eunuchs once again simperingly insisted I eat “turkey” for Thanksgiving, but as a wise and far-sighted modernizer I overruled their hidebound traditionalism

I don’t understand why people are so averse to just leasing. If you love driving expensive new cars with high residual values then you’re way better off doing that than being saddles with a 7 year amortization schedule just so you can say you’ve “paid it off”.

Britain appears to be having a very normal one over a property tax hike roughly comparable to a routine municipal sewer district bond issue in a suburb of Chattanooga

It’s difficult to contextualize this properly, but: to say Archer is the Tesla of air taxis would be an unwarranted insult to both Tesla and air taxis. These guys are the Nikola of air taxis, which as an industry is basically the preclinical Alzheimer’s treatment of the aerospace sector.