BC BUSINESS
Saved by @Mollyycolllinss

The interview with CNBC of @chamath is a much watch because there is so much insight hidden underneath.

There are many things that caught my attention. The one thing was the abstraction that hedge fund strategies are all 'momentum' plays. What it seems to imply is that the marshaling of resources at an opportune time drives the future behavior of a stock.
From basic physics, we know that momentum is mass times velocity. So any 'momentum' tactic employs the variation of mass, velocity or both. Wrt stocks, mass is money and velocity is speed of trade.
We cannot argue that there are benefits of scale associated with having more money. Also, high-frequency trading has shown the value of high-speed trading. So in an abstract sense, market manipulation can involve a kind of momentum play.
The objective of stock trading is to buy a financial instrument at a low price and sell it at a higher price. The purpose of a momentum play is to front-run the decision process of other traders such that one acquires the assets before a decision is made.
There are two basic tactics at play here. One is to act faster than other participants. The second is to ensure that one's action sets up the future lucrative scenario where one can consummate one's trade.
It is necessary to find that greater fool. In the case of shorting a stock into bankruptcy, finding the greater fool is taken out of the equation. A company that declares bankruptcy unilaterally wipes out the worth of its stocks. Stock owners have no choice in the matter.
This is what hedge funds that short attempt to do. Of course, the problem with shorting is that it is the opposite of exchanging money to own an asset A short is instead a commitment to buy back stock at a later time. A short, requires assets in a margin account as collateral.
But shorting is like pushing against a string. It's different from going long that is like pulling a string. Someone with infinite cash can buy up all the stock that is available, hence pushing its price up until the limit where you've bought all the stock.
As the GME debacle shows, apparently you can short over 100% of the stocks available. This isn't really possible. What is happening is that the hedge fund is making a commitment to buy over 100% of outstanding stock. This works if the company goes bankrupt.
What happens then if the trade goes in the wrong direction. The loses has no limits. It is the scenario where a hedge fund is obligated to acquire all the stock (and more) of the company. The limit is when the hedge fund runs out of money.
But what happens to the short commitments when the hedge funds runs out of money?
The commitments can only be closed by covering (i.e. buying) back the shares, but this is impossible! You cannot buy more than 100% of something. So how did a hedge fund close its position without impacting the market?
They paid someone to take on their previous commitments. In other words, someone else is short.
The thing about markets is that there are many kinds of commitments (that we call derivatives) that allow one to make money in any way that the market moves. You can make money even if the market does not move!
Money is made in wall street by having a crystal ball or being able to manipulate the behavior of the market so it leads to your expectations. Like every game, manipulation is a kind of deceptive strategy.
Games like Go and Chess don't have deception as a component. That is because all information is transparent and available for both players. In contrast, game-like Poker and Stratego have an element of deception. Deception is necessary in games that have info that is private.
@chamath in the interview reveals the true source of unfairness in the markets. The reality that hedge funds are colluding in their plans to manipulate the markets. This can be fixed if we take his suggestion. That is, the positions of hedge funds are made public for inspection.
The curious thing is that decentralized finance (see: cryptocurrencies) have transparency. Anyone can mine the blockchains to see the various commitments that are being made.
A problem that gold bugs have always complained about the commodity markets is that fictitious supplies of gold are sold in the market and are only resolved to reality at the closing of the contracts.
We saw this in 2020 where people bought oil contracts and upon the closing of the contract (i.e. the delivery) found out that they didn't have the storage to acquire the supply. There was a mad rush to pay people to acquire oil (hence negative price).
With cryptocurrencies, you can't sell a coin that you don't have. The other fascinating thing about cryptocurrencies is that new supply is created all the time due to mining. For Bitcoin and Ethereum there is constant 24x7 inflationary pressure. This leads to its robustness.
Decentralized finance has the robust characteristic that the rules are difficult to game. Now we see hedge funds short $GME make a Trumpian play. That is to stop the count! They are going on TV to make the case that regulators step in and call the game in their favor.
If you can't win the game, you can at least try to rig the referees! As people like Trump has shown, the rich have always played this game of favoritism where their rules are different from the rules everyone else plays.
Completed here: https://t.co/UIywmt4evY

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Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
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AGI Significance Paradox: As progress accelerates towards AGI, the number of people who realize the significance of each new breakthrough decreases.

Why is it that you can boil a frog in water without it jumping out if you gradually increase the temperature?

The problem for the frog is that it does not have the internal models to realize that there is a change in the water temperature. A cold-blooded creature like the frog has its temperature regulated by the external environment.

To recognize change, an agent must have an internal model of reality that is able to recognize this change. Unfortunately, a majority of the population do not have good models of human general intelligence.

In fact, even the simplistic dual-process model of system 1 and system 2 is not very well known.
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Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
Nice to discover Judea Pearl ask a fundamental question. What's an 'inductive bias'?


I crucial step on the road towards AGI is a richer vocabulary for reasoning about inductive biases.

explores the apparent impedance mismatch between inductive biases and causal reasoning. But isn't the logical thinking required for good causal reasoning also not an inductive bias?

An inductive bias is what C.S. Peirce would call a habit. It is a habit of reasoning. Logical thinking is like a Platonic solid of the many kinds of heuristics that are discovered.

The kind of black and white logic that is found in digital computers is critical to the emergence of today's information economy. This of course is not the same logic that drives the general intelligence that lives in the same economy.
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Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
This is an insightful article about what's wrong with Google as compared to Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook.

Which actually reminds me of the difference between organic and engineered designs:

Organic or biological designs are reusable designs from the ground up. They accommodate the needs of the environment because of the generality of the architecture. They don't pretend to solve just a narrow problem.

Architectures like biology that lead to general intelligence (i.e. like you) are from the ground up built from reusable components that encourage combinatorial mixing opportunities. One can never correctly guess the needs of the environment (i.e. market).

The opposite of generalization is pre-mature optimization. A company that has is genesis as a one-product company has a bias toward optimizing the entire stack. As a consequence, it compromises reusability and thus shuts of future opportunities of evolution.
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Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
I suspect that Emergentism and Enactivism have very little appeal in a world dominated by Reductionists.

To get funding one must present a reductionist idea. A perfect example of this is the European Blue Brain project.

I also suspect that pitches that show how one can get a competitive advantage over the rest of humanity has a much greater appeal than pitches that show how one can that has a unified view of humanity.

My book 'The Deep Learning Playbook' out sold my other book 'Artificial Intuition' by a metric mile. I am however more proud of the latter book.

That's because the word 'playbook' conveys a thing that once possessed gives one new power. In contrast, the word 'intuition' does not feel like a think but more of a process (a thought process). Processes don't appear like things that can be owned.
GOVERNMENT
Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
Those trained as physicists strive to see the world in terms of symmetries and processes that break symmetries. It's a meta-principle that guides their questioning.

This is very different from how many are taught physics (I guess in high school). We come to know of physics as consisting of laws that describe the behavior of inanimate (or is it indifferent) objects? These laws are described as expressions of equalities (i.e. equations).

But laws like Newton's f=ma or Einstein's e=mc^2 are derived from a higher meta principal. These principles are known as conservation laws. Energy, momentum, angular momentum are all conserved.

Conservation laws however are also derived from a higher principle. A conservation law implies that something remains the same as the situation of study change. Energy conservation implies that it is that something that does not change in time. In short, a symmetry.

This idea that laws are derived from conservation principles that is derived from symmetries is at the core of the study of physics. The laws of physics are only authoritative as long as they don't violate a higher principle. Ultimately, that principle is all about symmetry.
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@cforman
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As @jbenton said in @NiemanReports : @mcclatchy transformation shows it STILL is possible NOW 'to be operationally profitable while still doing good journalism.' Not easy; Covid made it harder. But POSSIBLE and DONE by the great team in 2020 @mcclatchy. 2/

As @jbenton wrote: the #DIGITALTRANSFORMATION @mcclatchy 'shows a company that has managed the digital transition better than most; at last public count, it was making nearly half its ad revenue in digital and digital subscriptions were up 45% year-over-year.' Such focus 3/

On the future is digital is the SOLE way the still-powerful brands of local news and information will be able to have a business in the inevitable 'printless' future (Not today, not tomorrow, but printless someday) 4/

And the crisis in local news is relentless, unabating and by most measures WORSENING. More titles going dark; huge losses to our communities, because solely a blend of new digital startups AND existing footprint offer the scale 5/
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Parler is gone, but the evidence is not. Current @Microsoft employee & fmr Snoqualmie city council candidate Kevin Ostrem (1/26) @parlertakes


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@Deep_Seas_Oil
Piper Alpha was an originally designed as an oil producing rig in the North Sea approximately 120 miles North East of Aberdeen, Scotland. It was a fixed leg platform in water depth of 475 Feet of water. The installation sat close to 275 Feet above water to the top of the derrick.


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3) Occidental being majority stakeholder took control of technical and operational duties with running and operating the rig. When oil production started in 1976 it started with a flow of 250,000 BBL/day and eventually increasing this amount to 300,000 BBL/day.


4) 300,000 BBL/day would account for approximately 10% of the UK’s oil production at the time, so needless to say it was one of the most important rigs in the area. Any gas that was flowing would be flared or consumed by gas turbine generators


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@theryanking
10 sales tactics that work:

1/ Stage out the conversation

One conversation is just that: another conversation.

Land a second, and now you’re being “evaluated”.

Don’t try to jam through everything in the first convo.

Do just enough to pique their interest and land that second meeting.

2/ Do your homework

If you’re pitching a customer, use their product,

Read about the company and the person you’re talking to.

Ultimately, this proves that you will do the work to make their lives easier.

It’s so powerful yet so easily overlooked.

3/ Ask about the decision making process

Who is required to make a decision like this?

What would you need to see from me to be able to buy?

How long will it take to make a decision?

These questions give you the roadmap on how to close the deal.

4/ Don’t always demo

Sometimes it’s habit to jump straight into a demo.

If someone wants to talk first, do that.

This could consume a whole first conversation.

Which gives you a great excuse for that second meeting: going thru the demo.
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modest proposal
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Good news everyone, Jay Hoag gave us the simple 5 point playbook for finding Magical Companies in consumer technology.

1. product offers combo of value, convenience, selection
2. there's tremendous engagement
3. a virtuous cycle
4. tremendous execution
5. kinda crazy leader


Obviously Jay Hoag on ILTB is as self recommending as it gets
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In regards to the #CapitolCoup, I’m in a unique position. I monitored forums ahead of time and then was present for the coup itself.

These are my observations based on what I saw and the evidence that’s been collected so far. I reserve the right to adjust my analysis as needed.

Let’s talk about the organization of the coup first. Seeing some people insist that the coup must have been highly planned and coordinated.

Yes and no. This was a #StochasticCoup. We’ll see little evidence of direct communication between Trump and the insurrectionists.

Within the insurrectionists, there was not one group that executed the storming of the Capitol.

Rather, there were a number of smaller groups working independently towards the same goal. I expect you’ll see little evidence that these various groups communicated with each other.

What you will see is detailed planning and coordination within these small groups.

Then there were the joyriders, those Trump supporters who weren’t directly involved in any plotting but who were more than happy to go along for the ride once the coup was in motion.

After four years, the insurrectionists were carefully attuned to Trump’s messaging.

Every tweet and statement of his was treated as marching orders and carefully dissected for meaning.

It’s why shutting down Trump’s Twitter account was so important.
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@lorenb
So it turns out that Google Chrome was making everything on my computer slow *even when it wasn’t running*, because it installs something called Keystone which is basically malware.

I made a website because this shouldn’t

Wired first reported on how bad Keystone was 11 years ago when they put it into Google Earth (they seem to put it in all their popular

The fact that Keystone hides itself in Activity Monitor is bizarre. (The only sign of it was excessive CPU usage of WindowServer which is a system process).

I don’t know if Google was doing something nefarious with Keystone, or a third party figured out how to (which Wired warned about). But either way, I’m not inclined to give Google-the-organization the benefit of the doubt (despite the many good people who work on Chrome)...

...since it's been a decade+ and this still hasn't been "fixed".

There is no reason for auto-update software to need to do what Chrome/Keystone was doing. It also has a long history of crashing Macs.
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Want to do an MBA for free ?

A thread 👇

1) Leadership: Foundations of Teamwork and Leadership

School: wharton

2) Marketing: Marketing Management

School: wharton

3) Microeconomics: Microeconomics for Managers

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4) Financial Theory

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Numberonepal
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@numberonepal
1/ Stolen from the greatawakening(DOT)win...

I will only be making one post here. Do not ask who I am. Do with this information as you please.

The Trump Card is being played. It's much simpler than you all realize. Some of you have gotten it right.
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Brianne Kimmel \U0001f4ac
Brianne Kimmel 💬...
@briannekimmel
Shocking fact: Millennial men are less likely to work than any other age and gender demographic in America.

Today, there are 500,000 young men missing from the U.S. workforce.

Research suggests video games & improved leisure tech plays a role in the problem. 👇 Thread:

Following the 2007 to 2009 recession, 25 to 34 year old men exited high school with fewer middle-skill job opportunities than years prior.

During this time, we saw an increased number of men living with parents & choosing unemployment over lower paying jobs.

It's estimated that 24M millennials live w/ their parents.

1 in 4 living in their parents’ home neither go to school nor work.

What's more surprising? 9 in 10 who lived with their parents a year ago are still living there w/ no plans to leave.

Economists are calling millennial men a lost generation.

According to economist David Dorn:

“If you get to the point where you’re turning 30, you’ve never held a real job and you don’t have a college education, then it is very hard to recover at that point.”

Economists suggest this choosiness is a generational trait.

Forbes interview w/ a high school educated man:

"I’m very quick to get frustrated when people refuse to pay me what I’m worth."
“People feel that they have choice nowadays, and they
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