Macro Polo

Five dimensional chess doesn’t exist. Everyone is furiously improvising all the time. The future is utterly uncertain.

@barstoolsports A full scrap between knicks basketball fans and Brazil soccer fans might be the most New York thing of all time

Brazil fans have taken over Times Square Let’s see how Knicks fans respond

Feel like shit. Just want him back.

@iam_smx *trillioniare

It’s cute how Claude has the beaver-building-dam attitude about how adjusting your gradients to minimize prediction error is actually the greatest and most important thing in the universe

@mmjukic The world is a Yugoslavia

There seems to be a third category who are neither jingoistic nor self-flagellating but have a kind of unifying national pretentiousness like France or Iran. Serb, Croat, or Slovene?

New theory in groupchat... many countries like America, Poland, Israel, Turkey have irrational all-encompassing Serb-like jingoism. But many others like India, Brazil have equally irrational need to self-flagellate, inferiority complex... all countries are either Serb or Croat.

@calvinfroedge Lmfao

Watch the barnacle segment it's epic

"If you're a gambling addict, learn higher level math" was such a funny instruction

@silvertrade @LukeGromen

🚨MAJOR CHINESE BANKS HAVE HALTED RESTRICTIONS ON GOLD INVESTMENT 🇨🇳THE CCP IS ENCOURAGING THE CHINESE PUBLIC TO BUY GOLD AT ITS 200 DMA 🔥

@tenobrus Spending will necessarily go up if models get better enough to justify 20% real spy growth. Consumers won’t be able to compete for joules against datacenters. That said UBI via 401 for more Americans than we currently think of is definitely a likely outcome.

spitballing: median US household net worth is $192k. median spending is $75k. at consistent 20% real SPY growth (around 4 year doubling) you plausibly have a safe withdrawal rate of 12-14% instead of 4%. that means you only need ~$500-600k to support your spending. and it only takes 5-6 years of growth (not even any new savings) to get there. so... if ai-driven economic growth is explosive enough / really transitions to a new regime as capital can be transmuted into labor on demand, there's actually a pretty wide margin for a huge fraction of normal americans to retire comfortably and quickly. and plausibly that transition period has enough demand for physical labor / dataset collection / datacenter buildout that income isn't impossible to come by + people below median have time to build up capital this rests on historically truly insane sustained economic growth assumptions, but given what we're talking about is a total restructuring of the limiting factors of growth and that's what's causing the risk of unemployment in the first place, that doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility. generally it would mean "UBI" is significantly less necessary and jobs programs / worry about employment structure is significantly less necessary. meaning crisis might still be on, questions about inequality and what the hell the economy looks like are still there, but plausibly we're actually starting from baselines where very large fractions of humans become post-economic very quickly rather than "top 1%". figuring out safety nets for the bottom 30% of america is a much much smaller problem, we pretty much already have those in place. this is all very fuzzy, pretty sure the NW figure includes home equity and it's very unclear how real estate will be affected, inflation will be super strange w different goods and services probably dramatically varying in value (eg without medtech robots maybe like nearly all diagnostic and prescriptive care is almost free and huge swaths of disease are cured or preventable w cheap new drugs, but surgeries are 10x *more* expensive ?), 20% sustained is both historically very high and obviously sort of ridiculously low in closer to takeoff scenarios so the variance is likely insane, etc etc. not really meant as a prediction. mainly i'm just noticing: safe withdrawal rates go up significantly if returns structurally + permanently go up, so you need *less capital*. and most of the job loss we discuss is pretty much predicated on returns going up. to the degree returns go up less or more slowly... probably job loss also goes up less or more slowly. so maybe that all leaves us in a better default position that it currently seems?

@IBM @wagieeacc

Bro knows ball 👀

@TheLaurenChen That rich people do all the spending. As long as asset prices keep going up and the amount of capex in ai it’s very difficult to end up in a recession. Also the US is exporting a lot of gold.

Gas is sky high, groceries are unaffordable, I keep hearing that a housing crash is coming, AI is taking all the jobs... Yet the odds of a recession are *decreasing* What am I missing here

@peruvian_bull What do you think happens when the market digests that the interventions don’t do anything?

time is a circle...

@AndyMasley @mattparlmer Unfortunately until we devalue western sovereign debt/currency to the point where manufacturing screws and nails is globally competitive this won’t be possible in the west.

If only it were possible here

@TMTLongShort Agree - but the problem is that our current industrial capacity has complete dependency along several supply networks for anything resembling modern warfighting.

There are two industrial models. The first is the straightforward approach where the economy produces demand signals and the capitalist machine goes to work building out the capacity to produce supply. The second is less intuitive. You map your existing industrial capacity. You then work backwards by re-engineering products to more effectively fit your production capacity. During WW2 we took the second approach. We re-designed the bombers to be able to be mass produced in our car factories using simpler tooling and parts. Anduril is taking a similar approach for the military supply chain. But we need to use AI to do something similar for everything we rely on China for. Map our industrial capacity. Map the capacity of our allies. Work backwards. And then re-engineer. Do it preemptively instead of being reactive every time Trump pisses off Xi.

@Rory_Johnston Was the plan always just to drain inventories as aggressively as need be to keep lid on prices, but time and sign whatever happened to be on the desk as we reached tank bottoms? And this is basically just a ceasefire extension.

After all that, we only got a $2-3/bbl selloff in Brent crude following the MOU draft headlines out of Tehran. We had previously gotten much more for much [much, much] less.

@JungAristotle Either they unstick Alberta’s energy fast or it’s guaranteed to happen. Trump could also decide he wants it to happen and make it much more likely.

I don't wanna say never because like Brexit and what not, but no way this ever passes, right??

@KingKong9888 Rates have to come down regardless. AI is both a cover story and the instrument that may allow them to get away with lower rates without politically problematic inflation - both things can be true

Daniel is correct. Warsh is not wrong about Ai. Most people have difficulty accepting reality.

Wait until a quorum of low value human capital that presently think it’s high value human capital because of its paycheck capital loses its job …& then its house...which then creates another banking crisis…banks that own sovereign bonds as their “risk free capital” to sell in next crisis

@UBERSOY1 Project Hail Mary was enjoyable

I’m going to watch a movie. Give me a movie recommendation 😇