crapitalism

peruse the comments

@eigenrobot build things in meatspace - same as everyone did for the last 2000 years before us

what are our kids gonna do with their lives

QC's perspective on this is one to take seriously

this is dumber than the metaverse - total zero.

lowering my nipples to half mast

isn’t this an implicit admission that entire ai arms race is a token commodity? what are the long term economic profits accruing to producers of commodities?

There’s a couple factors to consider here. 1. A study looking at assaults that would have been fatal 40 years ago but are survivable today came up with this result for current homicide rates showing the current homicide rate is near its peak after accounting for medical advancements. The 1950s (for anyone wondering) had a homicide rate of around 5.0 with relatively primitive medical care. 2. Crime was more concentrated in urban centers in the past. Even in the 90s America was very safe for people who didn’t live near dangerous urban centers. Thanks to shipping Haitians and other 3rd worlders throughout the country the “average” American feels less safe in their community because the average American community is in fact more dangerous.

The compute boom is crowding out other investments. This is consistent with the generalized Dutch disease pattern I documented in the cross section of US states. If this keeps going for much longer, we’re going to lose even more of the manufacturing base.

@StephanieKelton astroturfed tweet, astroturfed comments, no one is buying this book. if you lived through the pandemic stimulus and still believe in mmt, you are retarded and can’t be helped.

It’s time. The Deficit Myth is out today. publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/stephan…

@sardonic_greek 🚨 fuckin banger 🚨

Your honor you can’t dissolve the Ponzi scheme, I already paid in

I find it quite surprising that the FX market is accurately pricing in an invasion of Taiwan which you can see if you look at the option prices on Non Deliverable Forwards (NDFs) that reference TWD. The 1Y 25-delta risk reversal has been bid for USD calls / TWD puts at a level that’s roughly 1.5 vols rich to its 5Y median, and the wing skew on 10-delta strikes is doing something even more interesting… If you strip out the carry component and decompose the forward into a deliverable proxy basket (DXY, CNH NDFs, KRW NDFs) the residual vol premium on TWD is the cleanest read you’re going to get on tail risk. Which in this case I would call the implied probability of a “regime change event.” My back of the envelope calculations: If you assume a binary outcome where invasion implies a ~25-30% spot move in USD/TWD and no-invasion implies mean reversion to forward fair value, the risk-neutral probability embedded in the 1Y wing is somewhere in the 8-12% range. That’s risk-neutral, so you need a haircut to account for the variance risk premium, which in tail-heavy EM could be 30-40% of the headline number. Running the numbers I get a real-world implied probability of ~5-8% over the next 12 months of an actual invasion of Taiwan. If you compare that to Polymarket (~3-4% for the same window) you’ve got a ~3 vol point arb between retail prediction markets and the institutional FX vol surface and surprisingly the FX market is more worried than the betting markets.

young americans arent demanding a $30 lunch everyday. theyre demanding dignity. you shouldnt have to eat hard tack on white bread to afford to live, youre an american. if a shriveled old goblin tells you to be happy with less, they are your enemy, and they are an enemy of america

I’ve worked in tech for 30+ years and it is VERY bleak. For no other reason than because Americans are being replaced in their own country by hostile foreigners from an adversarial nation (India) by their (grand)parents. I have my sincere doubts that the USA survives the boomers

@St_Rev we're all shitholes now

@realDonaldTrump you are getting impeached after the midterms and all of us that voted for you won’t care.

Horrible Congressman Thomas Massie put out an old Endorsement, from many years ago, of him by me long before I found out that he was the Worst Congressman in the History of our Country. I endorsed Ed Gallrein, a true American Patriot, which Massie knows full well, so the statement that he put out is fraudulent, just like HE is fraudulent. WITHDRAW YOUR FAKE STATEMENT, MASSIE, RIGHT NOW! President DONALD J. TRUMP

@biancoresearch written by ai. fuckin yawn.

I am not a military analyst. I'm a financial analyst focused on macroeconomic risk. That different lens might explain why I see something most military strategists and investors are missing. --- The New Rules of Warfare—And Why We Can't Opt Out For nearly a century, warfare belonged to whoever controlled the biggest defense budget. Aircraft carriers. Stealth bombers. Multibillion-dollar weapons systems. That model is changing in ways many aren't appreciating. Ukraine and Iran are showing the West what 21st-century conflict actually looks like: decentralized, highly iterative, fast-changing, unmanned, and cheap. Neither the US nor Russia—beginning in 2022—appears prepared. We might now have no choice but to show we can fight and win such a war. The Ukraine Approach Faced with a small defense budget, a much smaller population, and a vastly outnumbered army, Ukraine had to get creative. They couldn't match Russia's industrial capacity or spending. So they abandoned that playbook entirely. They developed an entirely new way to fight, highly decentralized, iterative, and most importantly, cheap. They also created Brave1—a completely new way to conduct war. Frontline commanders log into an iPad and bypass central command entirely. They spend digital points to purchase equipment directly from hundreds of (Ukrainian) manufacturers. When they encounter a new threat, they message the manufacturer directly and work with the engineers to find a solution, even if that means they visit to the front. The result is hardware or software upgrades that once took months now take days. Here's the crucial part: hundreds of manufacturers compete fiercely for these dollars by offering the best possible product as fast as possible. This isn't centralized procurement. It's a market. Competition drives innovation at scale. Weapons evolve as the enemy evolves in real time. Units are also awarded points for confirmed kills, uploaded from drone video—a powerfully eloquent way to grade effectiveness. But the real innovation might be how they decentralized manufacturing itself. Instead of building weapons in massive, centralized factories that make perfect targets for Russian bombing, Ukraine distributed production across hundreds of small manufacturers—workshops, machine shops, garages, and yes, kitchens. Each produces components or complete systems. This approach serves two purposes: speed and survival. You can bomb a tank factory. You destroy production for months. You cannot bomb ten thousand kitchens. If one workshop gets hit, ninety-nine others keep producing. The network regenerates faster than Russia can destroy it. This is why the manufacturing process includes actual kitchens—it's not a metaphor. It's a strategy. The Metric That Defines a New Era The result is staggering: at least 70% of battlefield casualties now come from drones. This is the first time in over a century that the primary cause of combat death is neither a bullet nor an artillery shell. Since World War I, industrial warfare meant industrial killing. Ukraine has broken that equation entirely. As a result, Russia is now controlling less territory than at any point since 2022 and going backward. In March, Ukraine made gains while Russia recorded no gains for the first time in two and a half years, and Drone-led offensives recaptured 470 square kilometers while paralyzing 40% of Russian oil exports. Ukraine has lowered the "cost per kill" to less than $1,000 per casualty—a 99.98% reduction from the millions of dollars that were common in the post-9/11 wars. This isn't an incremental improvement. This is a complete inversion of modern military economics. Yet the Western defense establishment is not learning from this. Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger mocked Ukraine's entire approach. In The Atlantic, he called Ukrainian manufacturers "housewives with 3D printers," dismissing their work as "playing with Legos." They are not studying this revolution. They are mocking it. And the "housewives with 3D printers" are beating the Russian army! Ukraine Is Now in the Middle East The US Military and Gulf states face an eerily similar problem. Iran's Shahed drones threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz—a chokepoint that funnels 21% of global oil. They cannot fend off Iran by firing a $4 million Patriot missiles at $20,000 drones. They need what Ukraine has discovered: a decentralized, rapidly adaptive defense network that doesn't require centralized industrial capacity. That's why Ukraine just signed historic 10-year defense deals with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. Over 220 Ukrainian specialists are now on the front lines of the Persian Gulf—exporting not just weapons, but a completely new doctrine of how to fight. The precedent is set. The model works. Everyone is watching. Mosaic On April 1st, Trump threatened to bomb Iran "back to the stone ages" if they don't reopen the Strait within weeks. It's the classic 20th-century playbook: overwhelming offense force, massive bombardment, industrial-scale destruction. The problem? That playbook doesn't work against distributed, cheap, rapid-iteration systems—especially when your enemy is organized under a mosaic structure. Iran's "Mosaic Defense" doctrine is a decentralized command system where authority and capability are distributed across multiple geographic and organizational nodes. Each region operates semi-autonomously with overlapping chains of command and pre-planned contingencies. It's designed so that when you destroy the center, the edges keep fighting. You cannot decapitate a system with no head. You cannot out-bomb your way to victory when your enemy is not centralized; this was the solution for 20th-century industrial warfare. Defense Wins Championships 21st-century asymmetrical threats require defensive shields, not aggressive offenses. Ukraine has built exactly that: rapid-iteration defenses, decentralized manufacturing, commanders empowered to buy solutions in real time and rewarded for success. That same defensive model may hold the key to opening the Strait of Hormuz. Not through massive offense, but through the ability to adapt and defend quickly. Why We're Stuck Whether you viewed this as a war of choice or not, it has now become a war to keep global trade open. And that makes it inescapable. This is precisely why the US cannot declare victory and walk away from the Strait of Hormuz— or TACO. Every adversary on the planet will interpret American withdrawal as confirmation that cheap asymmetric systems work against powerful centralized platforms. And these adversaries might have sent us a message last month. In mid-March 2026, an unauthorized drone swarm penetrated Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, home to the U.S. Air Force's Global Strike Command. The fact that this happened not overseas but in the United States, and that these tests occurred just weeks ago, underscores how close this threat is now. They didn't attack. They announced their presence. Every adversary watching learned that cheap drone networks can reach into the US. The Global Supply Chain Risk If the US abandons the Gulf while Iran holds the Strait contested, markets will price this as validation that cheap systems can hold global trade hostage. The current market disruptions will become permanent. Supply chains will have to pivot from "just-in-time" efficiency back to "just-in-case" redundancy. Inflation returns as safety costs money. Trade routes diversify away from vulnerable chokepoints. The global friction tax becomes permanent. The Unavoidable Truth Once you prove that cheap, asymmetric systems can hold global trade hostage, that knowledge spreads globally and irreversibly. Every adversary learns the same lesson: you don't need a $2 trillion Navy—you need $20 million in drones and the will to use them. Withdrawing while the Strait remains contested would permanently validate this model. Supply chains shift to "just-in-case" redundancy. Insurance costs rise. The friction tax becomes structural—baked into every global transaction for decades. The cost of staying is measured in months. The cost of leaving is measured in decades of economic drag. We cannot leave unfinished business.

@Dr_Gingerballs evidence free claims.

@samizdatornot No, you are arguing a strawman. The argument being made is about a passive flow. This unending, pre-arranged, mechanical buying over time. Sure this exists but still is dwarfed by leveraged betting short term.

This narrative about the passive bid has always bothered me because it's one of those ideas that sounds nice, but hasn't been really rigorously confirmed or supported. At the heart of the issue is that every buyer has a seller. So in this case, who would those cohorts of buyers and sellers be? The passive flow comes from incomes, which are earned by the young. The balance then must come from retirees. Then it stands to reason that the people bidding up the market should be taking a disproportionate ownership stake in the market, while those selling should be lagging behind the market. This can be tested. The idea is pretty simple, if an individual is buying into a market, and their buying is pushing the market upwards, then the total value of stocks held should increase at a rate greater than the market. If I start with $100 in stock, and buy $100 more which pushes the stock market up 10%, I end the year with $220 (roughly) in stock, for an increase in total holdings of 110%. If I invest nothing above inflation, then my growth would be equal to the market, or 10%. If I am divesting, my holdings would grow more slowly than the market. Now of course this is a tricky thing to evaluate, because the money supply is always growing, causing incomes and investment amounts to rise over time. To control for all of these things, I looked at the per capita stock holdings by age. Then I took the growth rate of those holdings, and subtracted it from the performance of the S&P500. I admit the results were pretty surprising to me (plotted). The relative change in stock holdings for those under 70 years old (the "passive bid") has UNDERPERFORMED market growth since 2010. The last time it meaningfully outperformed was following the Dot-Com bust from 2001 to 2006, as money poured into buying the dip for years from all households of all ages. So who has outperformed? Those who are retired over 70+! Not only are they the only cohort to appear to ever beat the market, but they also experienced a lot more volatility as well. At the end of 2026, the 70+ group owned 3x per capita relative to under 70 cohort. Now? 5x! The retired cohort now owns 40% of all stocks despite only comprising 12.6% of the population, which is up from 20% in 2007 when they made up 8.5% of the population. So either the old are driving stock prices or no households are. If there is a passive bid, it's not coming from working age households, whose relative holdings of stocks has underperformed the market for nearly 20 years. I'm filing the passive bid theory under "fanciful delusions." That folder is getting pretty thick lately.

@TheSeeker268 furin cleavage site remains unexplained gfy marc.

Marc Lipsitch (IYKYK) on COVID origin: "There is some circumstantial evidence in each direction. I am totally happy to have an honest discussion with somebody who thinks it’s 99% either way. It’s the 100% that is the problem—and opinion is roughly split between the lab leak hypothesis and zoonotic or animal origin. Certainty in either direction is just an implausible reading of the evidence." persuasion.community/p/marc-lipsitch

@Dr_Gingerballs you are exhibiting a bizarre unwillingness to try to understand the arguments of the OP, so i will move on rather than waste more time. your pinned tweet says it all... “difficult to get a man to understand something when his portfolio depends on his not understanding it”

@samizdatornot There's few things more active than day trading.