Saw a Waymo on a Seattle *freeway* this morning!

Probably nothing, but it is amusing that the recent market top is exactly at the 6.854 Fibonacci extension of the GFC crash.

A Sunflower Showdown lament.

Do people who think "billionaires shouldn't exist" is going too far think "trillionaires shouldn't exist" is also over the line?

These equity deals are so bizarre. The US government already owns, in effect, 21% of all US companies via the corporate income tax. If you want more, just raise the corporate income tax rate.

Was reading Akhil Amar's book Born Equal and got to the part where the Civil War ends. Then, the seceding states try to send representatives back to Congress and pretend that they hadn't quit before. Hilarious to think that they tried George's move from Seinfeld in real life.

Finally bit the bullet and unsubscribed to the RenMac podcast. Trying to sift out the useful financial information in that sea of terrible political opinions is just not worth the effort.

You'd think the WaPo could bother to look these things up: "But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."

What I love about Seattle's sports media in a nutshell: Host: What do you think of the Seahawk's new uniforms? Guest: Well, let me preface this by saying de gustibus non est disputandum (in matters of taste, there is no dispute). Having said that, I think they're TRASH.

Telling GPT 4.1 the exact position of every piece on the chess board only lets it get about 3 more moves further on average (from 15 up to 18) before making an illegal move. Makes me think its illegal moves are more hallucinations than lack of a "world model".

that pub closure finding is interesting

The anti-Mamdani sentiment seems quite similar to what happened to AOC initially. As far as I can tell, the later was incredibly helpful for AOC's political future.

It took an incredible late season surge, but I was once again able to get my FPL team into it's rightful position: one spot behind @marcruby.bsky.social

Good news: fossil fuels provided less than half of US electric power in March for the first time ever oilprice.com/Energy/Energ...

🚨 Trump endorses singular use of "they"

Have to think The Vatican is going to at least call Brad Stevens here

Imagine posting this about the "Golden Rule" ON EASTER...

I continue to find the myopic focus on manufacturing jobs confusing. If I work on wiring together electronics in a factory, that's a manufacturing job and wonderful to behold. But if I go to someone's house to fix their electronics, that's a service job and nothing special. Both are skilled trades.

the other insane thing about these new tariff exemptions is that they exempted the machinery used to make semiconductors because that’s obviously counterproductive to re-shoring semiconductor manufacturing but have not extended that logic to ***all the other types of machinery***

An under appreciated benefit of being the reserve currency and the fiscal space that comes with it—you can not only insure your economy against shocks at low cost, you can achieve great structural benefits with patient govt capital www.dallasfed.org/-/media/docu...

After the recession, I wonder if we'd see a bipartisan consensus for removing any president's ability to fire people at will. The rules that let the president do so were written for George Washington, and we don't have Washingtons as president very often.

The estimates I'm seeing for 2025 all have lower GDP, higher inflation, and higher deficits.

$SPX 4-day decline of 12%. Here are all 4-day declines >10%. That momentum has usually taken time to bottom - those scanty lines are low retests/lower lows. Only twice did it V-bounce (circles). This is only one-way of looking at the current market, and its all about what Dear Leader does next

Who in their right mind is buying this chart?

Here's a quick solution: everyone selling us goods converts to an "as a service" (e.g., apples as a service) payment model. That moves them into the service category. All goods trade goes to zero. Problem solved.

Isn't this roughly the same as what caused the inflation last time?

Congrats to everyone who sold back when the S&P closed under it's 200 day moving average. Hats off to you

Saw this one going around from the subreddit yesterday:

Again, I just want to congratulate the journalists who covered the 2024 election. All that focus on fracking was really smart. Y’all nailed it. Keep up the great work!

Prof. Siegel still sounded bearish this week. He said if reciprocal tariffs go higher, stocks will go lower from here, and that he doesn't see much upside until the tariff situation gets resolved.

Where is the resistance in SPY if not here? At 530? We're not even oversold yet on a weekly chart. Quite a scary looking chart IMO

"But what about China's coal plants?" Turns out, with their renewable & nuclear building boom, China's power grid is now actually cleaner (in both clean energy share and CO2 emissions intensity metrics) than several regions of the US grid, and improving faster www.reuters.com/markets/comm... 🔌💡

Man, that SPY chart is really ugly....

I like that Gemini shows me the list of websites it is going to analyze to do Deep Research, but it definitely hurts my confidence in the results when I ask it a question purely about Google's financial statements and it includes Peleton's financials in its list of websites.

Here is how we know that vaccines do not cause autism Sadly, given current events, I thought this needed explanation. www.statnews.com/2025/02/03/v...

A Community Notes (or similar) feature would be useful for posts like this... I don't like Elon but Tesla actually paid 1.7 billion in taxes in 2024 on 9.0 billion in income, for a 19% tax rate, according to their latest 10-K.

🧪 If I were Canadian PM I would immediately: 1. Create a new $15B science fund 2. Offer any credentialed US scientist funding for lab startup and replacement of NIH grants if they move to Canada 3. Immediate permanent residency 4. Citizenship after 2 years Overnight a science superpower

Preview of the forthcoming Supreme Court strike down of Trump's executive order, directing government officials not to enforce birthright citizenship: John Roberts, angry: Donald Trump, you ignored the plain text of the 14th amendment... and that's MY job!

Maybe others won't agree, but I think the fact that o1 can be distilled down to a program that is only 5GB shows there's less "intelligence" in it than we thought. In the extreme, if o1 was matched by a 3-layer neural net with 1000 parameters, we'd think it was all just a parlor trick.

by the criminals, for the criminals

So... Trump swears to preserve, protect, & defend the constitution at noon and then, less than 12 hours later, signs an executive order directing federal agencies to disobey the constitution (on birthright citizenship). That's got to be some kind of record, right?

Man, JC Parets is bullish AF open.spotify.com/episode/3pga...

I hope a BlueSky-like alternative to Facebook is in the works.

Krugman suggests potential inflation from tariffs and deportations is raising rates, but if it's inflation, then why are inflation-protected TIPS yields going up just as much? I don't think it's inflation... but I don't know what it is. Definitely strange.

Thanks, Google. Please tell me where I can buy these 30-year TIPS at a 4.9% yield please.

Seahawks' change at OC has dropped my interest level in the team down 50%. Firing the exciting OC to bring back boring-ball is not my cup of tea

Not a fan of hearing Prof. Siegel sound bearish on the stock market.

This seems like evidence that positive reinforcement is more powerful than negative reinforcement.

Trading Places is too.