Econolicious
1.5K posts
Margin Call backstory is great. In 2009, JC Chandor was 34 and ready to give up on his Hollywood dream. He flew to Boulder to interview for a job selling wind farm land. Aced a Monday interview and firm asked him to stay for a 2nd round Friday. So, he had 4 days and cranked out an 82-page script (instead of d*cking around the city). “It was the best thing I’ve ever written,” he told Semafor. “Because it was word-for-word Margin Call.” Chandor had the finance lingo down because his father spent 40 years at Merril Lynch and he grew up around traders. He filmed it over 17 days in a Manhattan skyscraper in 2010 and it came out a year later. While it made a modest $20m on final $3.5m budget…it’s second life as a meme source material is literally priceless. WE ARE SELLING TO WILLING BUYERS AT THE CURRENT FAIR MARKET PRICE! *** Full read via Semafor: semafor.com/article/04/28/…
Part of the reason NYC is expensive is everything free becomes immediately over crowded and terrible Equinox doesn't need to make their gyms proportionally nicer to charge $300 a month, simply charging $300 a month is the utility
@Pavel_Asparagus Yesterday, I would have scrolled right by this post. Today, my brother dragged me to Costco to "pick up a few things." Costco -- where abundant crap goes to be pawed at by armies of reincarnated cart-pushing zombies. All I wanted was to a premium to shop alone.
This article is the embodiment of a broken academy drained of meaning. One item in the queue is an article discussing what woke science is. This piece is a great exhibit. Academia is recast as just a job, the passion is pathologized, and the vocation is treated as a psychological hazard rather than the reason the enterprise ever worked at all. There is no point in enduring low pay and years of delayed life if the work is not a calling. Once that premise was abandoned - once working hard at something you love was framed as toxic, and excellence itself became suspect - the rot was inevitable. What replaced it was a culture of mediocrity: lowered expectations, therapeutic language standing in for standards, and institutions more concerned with emotional perceptions than truth.
Actually, it's different and worse. Tens of billions of nonprofit donations by billionaire widows and divorcees built out a gigantic patronage machine larger and stronger than the party itself that have captured every organ of institutional power and the part of the coalition that seeks to win election to office are the clients of the NGO's and the public sector unions rather than vice versa. This is why not one leading Democrat can break with the Borg on brainwashing confused youth to yearn to be chemically castrated and dismembered, forbidding any woman from drawing a boundary between herself and any man who says he is a woman, infinity immigration, immunizing endless welfare fraud from any scrutiny, and the looting of public schools by an endless succession of sinecures and consultancies that enact mindless equity-focused nostrums that destroy student literacy and numeracy while enriching a class of ill-educated rent-seekers who promote their successors through the educational system. These are all non-negotiable commitments for which the party is a vehicle making any and all rhetoric about "abundance" mere wind in the service of propagating the grift.
I know I'm a broken record on this topic, but I really can't stress enough how amazing LLMs are for learning. It used to be that, when reading a complicated paper/book, I had to either spend a lot of time figuring out the trickiest parts or just give up on fully understanding it to save time. AI effectively makes that tradeoff less severe by significantly reducing the time it takes to fully understand a complicated paper/book. I really don't get why so many people, including many who work in intellectual professions, seem to be nonplussed about this technology. It's fucking amazing.
Very excited to see this AI for Science Executive Order—the Genesis Mission. The Administration has appropriately ambitious goals here; we may be on the verge of world-changing breakthroughs. Congratulations to all involved!
Gemini Nano Banana Pro can solve exam questions *in* the exam page image. With doodles, diagrams, all that. ChatGPT thinks these solutions are all correct except Se_2P_2 should be "diselenium diphosphide" and a spelling mistake (should be "thiocyanic acid" not "thoicyanic") :O
Hoover Research Fellow @DavidRHenderson joins @Jon_Hartley_ on @CapAndFreedom to discuss his career as an economist, the role of property rights and market competition in economic growth, the UCLA School of Economics, Armen Alchian, the New Institutional Economics, and more.