Peter Smith

One of the most important aspects of the Invest America / Trump Accounts is that it allows wealthy individuals and corporations to give philanthropic dollars directly to fellow citizens without any bureaucratic or corrupt NGOs and charities extracting their fees.

There’s a growing class of post-money people in SF who want a fake job so that they can have status at AI dinner parties

There's a wild economics phenomenon behind the decline of every venue in these charts. Almost nobody knows its name. Start with what it isn't. It isn't an American problem. Britain, the country that invented the pub, has lost 16,150 of them since 2000. Over a third, gone. Same slope, different continent, no car culture to blame. The actual culprit was discovered by accident in 1966. An economist named William Baumol was hired to answer a boring question: why were symphony orchestras always broke? Sold-out halls, rich patrons, government grants, and the books never balanced. Any city. Any decade. Then he noticed the thing hiding in plain sight. A Beethoven string quartet took four musicians and 40 minutes to perform in 1826. In 1966, it took four musicians and 40 minutes. Productivity gain across 140 years: zero. But those musicians live in the modern economy, where the factory worker's output grew 20x. Pay them like it's 1826 and they leave to work in the factory. So their wages rise while their output stands still, and costs climb forever. Baumol called it cost disease. Every bar, bowling alley, and movie theater in these charts has a terminal case. A bartender pours the same drinks per hour as in 1980. A theater fills the same seats per screen. Flat output, compounding rent, labor, and insurance. Your couch caught the opposite condition. Quality-adjusted TV prices fell 97% since 2000, per BLS. Streaming ships infinite content for $15 a month. One more night in costs approximately nothing. Tickets up 42%. TVs down 97%. Americans and Brits both read those price tags every Friday for 25 years. The charts show the verdict. And here's Baumol's grimmest finding: cost disease has no cure. Nothing makes a bar 10x better at being a bar, because the inefficiency IS the product. Humans, in a room, taking their time. The couch just keeps getting cheaper.

How do stablecoin issuers plan to make any money? The race to zero has begun

I think we're going to bottom $btc here. - consensus that crypto is most uninteresting mkt - saylor fud at peak while strc is floating back up - market seems to be ok w saylor selling btc - selling is being absorbed + weekly divergence - 60k a nice round number

SERIOUS QUESTION: You don’t find it weird that not a single billionaire wants to end world poverty ?? Doesn’t it strike you as bizarre that no one with that kind of wealth wants to be the hero who actually solves the world’s biggest problems when they literally could ?? Isn’t that suspicious ??