nafregnum

As an aside, I gotta say I appreciate all the thoughtful contributions. According to Wiio's law, it's pretty hard for this kind of communicating to succeed, and by succeed I mean "I understand another's perspective better" and not "I won an internet debate" ... I personally am not aiming to change minds. I want to explore the space and understand+appreciate how other folks see it, and also to describe what the landscape looks like from where I am standing. I'm not out to shame anyone or heap dishonor on anyone's ancestors, etc... https://jkorpela.fi/wiio.html

https://moralfoundations.org/ Jonathan Haidt has some interesting theories and research, covered in brief on that page but in more depth in his book "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion" The gist of it is that evolution baked into us a basic framework of "moral taste buds" -- we can tell when something is fundamentally unfair, or when someone is being disloyal or cheating, etc. Troops of monkeys with an overly vicious alpha will naturally form a coalition to do away with the tyrant. Sic semper tyrannis, since before humans walked the earth. I remember hearing about a study with monkeys where two monkeys are separated but they can see each other, and they each have to do the same task in order to get a reward. The first monkey is given some grapes, a favorite food for them. The second monkey sees this. Then the second monkey is given some cucumber slices instead of grapes for its reward. The second monkey brain must emotionally be screaming "UNFAIR!" because it takes the cucumber slices and throws them in the face of the lab tech. Being able to detect when things seem fair will tend to lead toward survival of the group, so genes which help us detect fair treatment have been kindly baked in through evolution, or they're god-given by his/her magnificent evolutionary process. We've got a lot of pro-social genetic behaviors baked in like that. We experience a thing called "Elevation Emotion" when we witness acts of moral beauty. Just witness this pizza delivery guy who saved a bunch of kids from a burning house and try not to feel elevation emotion. That feeling is baked in to most of us (minus perhaps the psychopaths) But that's just the beginning. Biological evolution gets you to cave man level where life is pretty much like the Hobbes quote "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Then comes the cultural dynamics. By the power of language we have shared stories and myths. Using these shared stories, we humans have been improving on our genetic hardware by installing new moral ideas as software "Necktop Apps" (Daniel Dennett's fun term) ... we build agreed sets of guidelines and hard rules for the really important stuff ... but it has morphed over time. We have evidence that very ancient people used to kill children and bury them under the foundation stones of new dwellings. Perhaps their gods told them that it helped ward off evil spirits. Warding of evil spirits was an important concern through the ages. People in England during Shakespeare's time would put three big scratch marks on their fireplace mantles to repel witches who might otherwise descend into the house through the chimney. Even up through the middle 1800s in American folk religious belief, people used "Lamen parchments" with religious power words on them like "Tetragrammaton" and seven pointed stars and funky line drawings, and amulets on necklaces and coin shaped talismans. Why did they stop sacrificing kids? In the Abrahamic tradition it's arguable that they stopped because of the story of Abraham and Isaac and the ancient interpretation which is essentially: "This story proves it's okay to stop killing kids, and kill rams and sheep instead." To our modern minds it is so far out of context that it just looks like Abraham had a psychotic break and turned murderous on his kid. Just because something is "made up" as you say, it doesn't mean it has no power. Money is "made up" and yet Osama Bin Laden, a great hater of all things USA, had suitcases full of dollars. Why? Because if everyone else in the world agrees that you can trade suitcases full of green paper for real physical goods, then it's real. The superpower of humans is our ability to have millions or billions of people share the same ideas and act according to them. Take the story of Job in the Old Testament. I don't think that guy really existed and I don't think god and satan placed bets on how far he could be pushed, etc. But whether or not Job was a real person is like the least interesting question you could ask about the text. The interesting questions are along the lines of, "What were the authors grappling with and how did this story serve their community? What can we learn from the story?" Can anyone name one single way in which the story of Job is _more_ powerful if there is a real human versus an allegory. Our lives are uncertain and temporary. Against this backdrop, the human mind craves certainties. I admit I grew up believing Job was a totally real person, but I find the story so much more interesting when I'm not painted into that corner of believing an all powerful being did a good guy so dirty just because of a bet. There are plenty of hints that Job wasn't real, by the way, which is why I changed my mind. (There are multiple different endings to the story right there in the text of the old testament, for example -- and this is a pretty good indication that some editing was taking place.) One more way to look at it: Aesops Fable of the Tortoise and Hare. Does the power of that fable derive from the fact that a real tortoise one day had a race with a hare and won because he kept at it slow and steady? Nope. But when you're having a hard slog of it one day, you might remember the old story and feel a bit of inspiration to just keep plugging away at your task and eventually complete it. The inspiration came from the story, not from a literal physical race. At least when the atheists think there's a right thing to do they can be expected to give you their rationale. Because they aren't leaning their moral authority against the idea of a god, they basically _have to_ back up their arguments and try to be convincing. On the other hand, I have often experienced an exasperating form of know-it-all-ism where religionists think they get to declare "This is what is right, both for me and for you. Because god." And then they walk off like they think they just dropped the mic. I don't think any human deserves that much unquestioned loyalty. That kind of environment would be an incubator for religious tyrants. When you boil it all down, why would you say our sense of morality needs to be founded on a god, I mean the kind that exists even when nobody believes in him/her? Why does that provide anything better than what we've got which is a set of moral rules that have evolved with our civilizations? If there really does exist an unambiguous Absolute Morality with a real god backing it up, then which god is it and what are the North Star rules? And more to the point, why would those rules be _more_ valid if the god is real?

Thanks for your thoughtful reply! There's a lot to agree with here. To be fair to ChatGPT, I think it only "missed" England because my question was only about the practice of slavery in the new world. Here's what it says about the case of England and Christianity: I think it's a wonderful thing that people of faith were there to push for abolition. Because of the structure of 1800s English society, I doubt very much that unbelieving humanists would've had even a shred of a chance of pulling the levers of power to accomplish such a goal. The world needs people of good will in every variety to stand together in advancing every great cause. The place where I feel the evidence is a little too thin has to do with any claims that a god exists who ever unambiguously communicated anything to humans that didn't sound likely to have come from humans themselves. I became personally convinced by books like "The Evolution of God" and "God: A Human History" that the human idea of god has gone through a good deal of shifting and changing. Each culture seems to have created gods in their own image. Cave dwelling people appear to have a "god of the hunt" ... Greeks had small gods over all kinds of little things, one for each town, etc. But when they became a state with top leadership then the gods developed top leadership too, up on Olympus. The organization of the gods appeared to reflect the same power dynamics of each civilization. Particularly troubling to me is the way the god of the Old Testament and the Koran appear to have a surprising amount of similarity with the evolved mating and dominance strategies observed in male primates. Dominant males receive submission displays from others like avoiding eye contact or making oneself small before them -- these look like humility displays: bow the head to god or the preacher who is god's representative. Dominant males make themselves look really big -- kings and popes wear big crowns and hats. In Revelation 4:10 a bunch of elders lay their crowns down at the lord's feet. A submission display. God repeatedly tells the people to go make war on other cities and kill all the males and old ladies but take the girls and women with them. That's text book primate male mating strategy. For a fully detailed look at these similarities, I recommend the book "Alpha God: The Psychology of Religious Violence and Oppression." Lately I've been enjoying the notion that our notion of god in each historical time and place appears to be a ChatGPT distillation of the morals and ethical standards of the people who that god ruled over. Like a crowd-sourced idea of the ultimate leader. A pretty fair point. Servitude and slavery are human practices that varied greatly through place and time. There remain difficulties, like why an omnipotent all knowing being would ever give parenting tips like this: Deuteronomy 21: 18 “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and who, when they have chastened him, will not heed them, 19 then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city, to the gate of his city. 20 And they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ 21 Then all the men of his city shall stone him to death with stones; so you shall put away the evil from among you, and all Israel shall hear and fear. I'm inclined to think that if this was the wisdom on tap for how to treat your own sons then life would have been less forgiving for those ebeds. That's fair enough. A population that doesn't read the bible can't do better than follow the humans dressed up in the bishops robes and trust that all is according to god's grand design. Humans believing in god typically just believe that god is on their side and hates the people they hate. My favorite Dawkins quote: "How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one." I'm not sure we disagree on the human rights thing. @stahleyp had just been making extremely compressed claims like "If no god, anything goes, so egregious evils like slavery are good. And human rights don't exist at all if there's no god." My view is that human rights are not innate because god says so, and my main support for that view is just that god never used any of his prophets to make such a declaration, and that if one side is allowed to construe a few verses as humanistic and supportive of human rights, then it ought to keep its eyes open to all the verses where that same god seems to argue against human rights. We had a concept of justice and fairness before the written code of Hammurabi. In there it is claimed that the king gets his authority to rule from the gods. I don't know if the rules are claimed to come from god or if the authoritative claim rests on Hammurabi, but either way it doesn't read like a very inspired document to our modern sensibilities, however much it may have represented moral progress in their times. If you beat my son or one of my wives and they died, then I'd have the right to beat one of your sons or wives to death. I remember laughing when I first heard the rules read aloud, they're so comical to our modern sensibilities. My argument is: God didn't grow up and start acting moral. We did. We humans made progress. Often times we were aided by the ability to find some scriptural support for moral advancement, but just as frequently these advances were violently opposed and persecuted by religious dogmatists who were deluded that an unchanging god had wanted their preferred status quo to last forever. My purpose isn't to convince anyone out of their good beliefs. I think thoughtful people can examine all the data and still come to different conclusions. Ultimately, every set of words is a poor summarization of reality, but I did make an attempt to be fair to both sides and I provided a lot more to engage with than stahleyp's question which was "So human rights do not actually exist beyond what other humans say, right? Slavery is actually okay (or anything else) as long as a society allows it?" To restate my own view in a nutshell: "I think human rights are a very good idea that we humans have developed over time, and yes, sometimes we've been supported by what the ancients wrote down as god's words, but if nobody believed in a certain human right then it wouldn't exist as a natural fact. There are a lot of gods which humans stopped believing in over time. They really did exist while they were believed in, insofar as they influenced human behaviors, but to the extent that they stop influencing any human behavior they turn from "living gods" to stone statues and history. By this definition the God of Christianity definitely still exists, as does Allah. In the here and now on earth, there isn't really much difference between a really-real-existing kind of god and a culturally-agreed-upon-mental-formation kind of god, because both kinds actually do inspire people to action." I do enjoy the back and forth effort to find words that fairly state each person's view. It's more fulfilling than scoring fake internet points by trying to dunk on people for flaws we may think we see in their incompletely stated views. Hoping that nothing I've written is taken as an attempt to belittle or offend.

Adding this other idea from the thread, because I agree with the kernel of concern which I would restate as "Our by-the-people form of government only works if we maintain a culture of honesty." It's the same inside company cultures: if corrupt employees are not fired, the dishonesty spreads. @Dave86ch has a really cool pair of essays over on his blog about the ability of ChatGPT to take in a group of writings and "interview it" by asking questions of it within that specific set of writings ... he took a 12,000 page compilation of speeches and writings from Lee Kuan Yew, the father of modern Singapore who helped the country go from a per capita income of around $400 in 1960 to over $70,000 in 2021. It's almost eery to be able to "make friends with the eminent dead" in this way. https://dscompounding.com/2023/02/27/ai-and-community-consciousness-chapter-two/ Question: What are the qualities of a good citizen? Answer: A good citizen is someone who is productive, strives for excellence, and is motivated to make a positive impact on their community. They should be willing to work hard to improve their own life and the lives of those around them. They should also be respectful of the law and customs of their community, and be willing to help others in need. Finally, they should be committed to making the world a better place for everyone. Charlie Munger has a story about how corruption can take hold within the culture of a company. We can imagine this writ large in a society too: https://jameslau88.com/2020/05/12/charlie-munger-on-worldly-wisdom-revisited-december-29-1997/

@stahleyp was having fun over in the Disney thread, about whether you need to have a god in order to have a grounds for moral certainty between what is right and what is wrong. I was having fun reading the back and forth the last few days, and hope I don't spoil that party by trying to start a different thread. I think human rights only exist to the extent that we believe they do, much like the gods in the Discworld novels. Kind of like money: it is only valuable if we all mostly agree that it has value. If nobody believed in human rights, would a god step in and enforce human rights? I'm not trying to disrespect whichever god(s) forum members believe in -- philosophically I tend to agree with William James about both gods and human rights when he said: "If there be any life that it is really better that we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in would help us to lead that life, then it would be really better for us to believe in that idea, unless, indeed, belief in it incidentally clashed with other greater vital beliefs." I think most people today would not say slavery is okay, whether they believe in gods or not. Speaking of god and slavery: I was under the impression that in the past, when almost everyone believed in a god, the situation was worse. Each group tended to believed that god approved of their slave holding practices. Unfortunately, very few of the gods of the past ever came out against slavery. Greeks, Romans, Christians, Muslims, Mongols, Vikings, and quite a few more societies had gods who were either approving or silent about slavery. Human rights exist as a thing because humans got together and decided to say so, not because they exist as a fact of nature. If a god unequivocally said so, I'd like to see the chapter and verse. I'm not aware of any universal declaration of human rights that came down from the gods, unless we are allowed to claim that anything we like was inspired by our god. I googled "history of human rights" and found these few paragraphs: http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/edumat/hreduseries/hereandnow/Part-1/short-history.htm To bring ChatGPT into it: Me: Please summarize the development of the idea of human rights. ChatGPT: The idea of human rights has developed over time through various cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions. Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy established the idea that all individuals possess inherent worth and dignity. In the Abrahamic religions, individuals are created in the image of God, and therefore have inherent value and rights. The Enlightenment era emphasized the importance of individual freedom, and philosophers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that individuals have natural rights that must be protected by the state. The American and French Revolutions further emphasized the importance of individual rights and freedoms. In the 20th century, the concept of human rights was enshrined in international law with the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations in 1948. This declaration recognized that all human beings are entitled to certain rights and freedoms, regardless of their race, religion, or other characteristics. Since then, human rights have continued to be developed and expanded upon through international treaties and conventions, and through the work of human rights advocates and organizations. Today, the concept of human rights is a fundamental part of the global discourse on justice and equality. ... and on Christianity and slavery ... Me: Please summarize the contribution of Christian religious thought to the practice of chattel slavery in the new world from 1493 until 1865 ChatGPT: Christian religious thought played a complex and contradictory role in the practice of chattel slavery in the New World from 1493 until 1865. On one hand, many Christians opposed slavery and worked to abolish it, citing the belief in the inherent dignity and worth of all human beings. On the other hand, Christian religious thought was used to justify and reinforce the institution of slavery in various ways. In the early years of European colonization, many Christian leaders believed that slavery could be justified as a means of converting non-Christian people to Christianity. However, as the institution of slavery became more entrenched and profitable, Christian justifications for it became increasingly strained. Some Christian leaders continued to defend slavery on biblical grounds, citing passages that appeared to support it, while others opposed it on moral and ethical grounds. Despite the mixed opinions among Christian leaders, slavery became deeply intertwined with Christian religious practice in the New World. Many slave owners used Christianity to justify their ownership of human beings, while slaves themselves often used Christian beliefs and practices to resist their enslavement and assert their humanity. Overall, while some Christians opposed slavery and worked to abolish it, Christian religious thought was also used to justify and reinforce the institution of chattel slavery in the New World, with lasting impacts on both the religious and social landscape of the Americas. ... one more ... Me: Are there any religions which were always opposed to slavery? ChatGPT: There are several religions that have historically been opposed to slavery. Here are a few examples: Jainism: Jainism is an ancient Indian religion that emphasizes non-violence and respect for all forms of life. The religion has always been opposed to slavery and other forms of exploitation. Buddhism: Buddhism also originated in India and has always emphasized the importance of treating all beings with kindness and compassion. The Buddha himself spoke out against the practice of slavery. Quakers: The Society of Friends, also known as Quakers, emerged in England in the 17th century and were among the first religious groups to formally oppose slavery. Quakers played an important role in the abolitionist movement in the United States and other parts of the world. Baha'i Faith: The Baha'i Faith is a relatively modern religion that emerged in Iran in the 19th century. The religion emphasizes the unity of all humanity and the importance of treating all people with dignity and respect. Baha'is have always been opposed to slavery and other forms of oppression. It's important to note that while these religions have been opposed to slavery, their followers have not always lived up to these ideals. Slavery and other forms of exploitation have persisted in many societies, even those where religions that oppose these practices have been present.

It seems both sides are running low on ammo... https://www.economist.com/china/2023/03/02/chinese-arms-could-revive-russias-failing-war "For decades Russia pumped arms to China. On average it sent $2bn-worth every year between 2001 and 2010, with a bonanza $7bn deal in 2015. Now the tables have turned. Russia has lost over 9,400 pieces of equipment, including more than 1,500 tanks, during its botched invasion of Ukraine. It is desperately short of ammunition. America says it has intelligence suggesting that China is considering whether to supply Russia with weapons. That could change the course of the war. It would also trigger a deeper crisis in China’s relationship with America and Europe."

Forgive me please, reasonable people of all political leanings. My intent in mentioning SNAP had nothing to do with starting quarrels. Without wishing to offend any of you, I think the intelligent statement SD made is good enough that I'd be super grateful to shift the focus to questions related to investing: Q1. Is the impact really 2.5 billion per month or was my napkin math wrong? I found this FRED graph that makes it look like SNAP during COVID was giving out a lot more. The 2019 number was $54.7B and the 2021 number was $150.4B. We probably won't see the 2022 number until October (implied from the Updated field on the graph) If the SNAP number for 2023 drops down around $60B/year then that'd be a $90B drop from 2021 levels, meaning possibly as much as $7.5B/month, though that seems hard to believe for some reason. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TRP6001A027NBEA Q2. Will the disappearance of $2-7B/month of grocery money have a real effect in the US economy? Will its effect extend to other industries or will grocery stores be the main losers? Are restaurants going to take a gut punch as millions of people tighten their belts and eat only at home? https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/market-size/supermarkets-grocery-stores-united-states/ It appears the grocery industry has around $800B in revenue per year. Losing $25B to $75B in the 10 remaining months of 2023 compared to 2022 is a loss of around 3 to 9% of revenue. Will that have an disinflationary influence on food prices? I'm inclined to think so. But it'll hurt grocery store profits, right? I went to check the price of Kroger puts, just out of curiosity. So here's the July expiration puts, to satisfy anyone else's curiosity since I just looked it up. They report Q4 on March 6, and I am guessing they'll talk about the end of the COVID SNAP benefits as they forecast leaner times ahead. This graph from the ibisworld.com link seems to think 2023 will see 0.9% growth in the size of the grocery industry as a whole, but that bump in 2020, 2021 and 2022 looks to me like that was probably the COVID emergency allotments, and perhaps 2023 will see real declines in grocery spending. Q3. The biggest question for me as an investor is whether all this is priced in already. I never really look at grocery store stocks, and I don't know how quick the market is at pricing in this kind of thing. Kroger has a P/E of 13 and a dividend yield of 2.3% so it doesn't seem expensive. Maybe there are some overpriced "darlings" of the grocery industry I don't know about that have further to fall because of the upcoming reductions in grocery spending. The Rube Goldberg machine of macro economics is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but it's still fun to make _some_ guesses. Q4. What other interesting side effects do you foresee?

It looks like starting in March, lower income US consumers will have around $2.5B less per month to spend: 12% of the US population depends on SNAP (food buying assistance for low income households), and as of beginning of March, the COVID emergency allotment payments will end for the 35 states which were still paying them. Losses will vary across households but an average 3 person household will see a $197 decrease in SNAP assistance. By my napkin math, the total impact size seems like around $2.5B per month. Not sure how that compares to the size of all the layoffs in big tech, but it feels like it must be quite a lot more than those? Is it big enough to be a disinflationary factor? I wish I knew. Is that big enough that we might be able to detect an increase in crime rates? For avoidance of doubt about my intent: I wholeheartedly support the SNAP program. I grew up just a poor boy from a poor family, and food stamps made it possible to eat and survive on what little income my mom could make. My heart goes out to all these people who will surely be feeling much more financial pain than I would over the loss of $200/month.

While I was trying to find a quote, I ran across some good comments from Allan Mecham -- he says he just has a basket of favorite companies which he thinks are run well, and he ends up just trading in and out of those because he already understands them from reading their reports and watching them for multiple years -- just sits still and waits for one of them to hit a speed bump one quarter and buys if the market overreacts and offers a good price. https://acquirersmultiple.com/2017/01/allan-mecham-look-for-cockroachlike-businesses/ It seems similar to the idea you're working on, but it might give a person a little more conviction to hold through any temporary pain. Buying at max pessimism is the goal, but so hard in practice, because by definition it's not "maximum" until even you are feeling pessimistic too. I could feel the pessimism hitting Target in 2016 or '17 when Amazon bought Whole Foods and TGT got whacked just because everyone thought Amazon was gonna kill all retail. It was a good entry point for a long-term holding, but might not have been the "best" business I could've bought at the same time. The CNN site has a "Greed and Fear" index meter. I wish I had the same meter for each individual stock. Anybody know of a site that does that?

As opposed to "What's the Fed gonna do next?", I think this kind of "macro" has to be at least as actionable as weather reports following the path of a hurricane. Sure, a hurricane can change direction and make landfall somewhere else, but that doesn't mean weather reports are useless noise. So, as mortgage rates in Australia and Canada begin to climb, what will happen? - Mortgages become more expensive. Real estate prices see downward pressure. Some areas suffer more than others, depending on demand as people move to where they can afford to live. - If rents go higher, do people move further from big cities out into the suburbs? - In general, people have less money to spend? - Maybe foreclosures go up? In the aggregate, what behaviors change when people are feeling the pinch? - Less eating out at restaurants? - Cut back on travel plans? - Start shopping at DollarTree and Walmart type stores? - More people do their own car maintenance? Some of you could add some good insights to add to these bullet points based on your wide reading and long experience. I remember reading that Allan Mecham (who used to run a fund called Arlington Value) wrote that AutoZone would benefit during downturns because as people have less money to spend, those who know how will start doing their own oil changes. I always thought that was an interesting detail to notice, and I often find myself trying to think of new insight like that. If a mortgage debt hurricane is threatening Vancouver and Australia, how would you prepare for the financial storm?

You might like this -- the "least regretted" chart from this post:

I thought this was an interesting neutral opinion and commentary, similar to a lot of what's been said here as well: https://adventuresincapitalism.com/2023/02/01/i-just-dont-know/

A little book report, for anybody who likes to geek out about contributions of neuroscience to the development of AI. Author is Jeff Hawkins, one of the founders of Palm Computing. In 1986 he was very interested in studying neuroscience and AI for speech recognition, but back then his ambitions were way too big for the PhD board in the neuroscience department of [Cornell or Berkeley, I don't remember which, maybe both] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hawkins He tells a story of how he gave a presentation to Intel leadership that predicted everyone will one day be using handheld computers and getting a skeptical reception. After Palm Computing, he founded a neuroscience lab called Numenta. One day, holding a coffee cup, he asked himself a few thought experiment type questions about what his fingers would expect if he adjusted his grip on the cup and what would be going on in his brain as he did so. He had a eureka moment about how it all fits together, and called it the Thousand Brains theory of intelligence. It has to do with "cortical columns" which are like small 1mm x 1mm squares of lasagna layers spread out all over the neocortex. One cortical column will be tied to a little patch of nerves in a fingertip, another tied to a small patch of input from the eye, etc. In each cortical column, the top layer is made of neurons that receive the direct sensory inputs and they fire almost nonstop with the "blooming buzzing confusion" of constant inputs from the outside world. Traveling down the lasagna layers in each column, the neurons are firing less and less often because each layer is "refining" its prediction about what inputs will come next from above based on which "reference frame" the brain has chosen as the best prediction for what the current context looks like. To borrow a metaphor he doesn't cite in the book, think of that poem about the bunch of blind men who encountered an elephant, except imagine that they each share what they feel with each other and then vote on what it is that they're all encountering. A voting process among the deeper layers of the cortical columns help us determine where we are at the present moment and activate a reference frame kind of like a learned map of the territory. He has a pretty decent chapter which patiently explains why "uploading your brain to a computer" is a fun sci-fi concept but is pretty much problematic even if it one day became possible to do atom-by-atom scanning of a person's brain. One example: You would have phantom limb syndrome for every part of your body all at once unless you virtualized the entirety of your nervous system. He explains how all the current work in AI hasn't delivered any actual "intelligence" yet, just machine learning. He believes we need to be using everything we're learning about our neocortex brain structures to make better advances toward a real kind of intelligence, perhaps by aiming to produce a machine as smart as a kindergartner at first. He explains how we have an "old brain" from the 100 million+ years of evolution when the name of the game was just staying alive and reproducing, and that we do not need or want to reproduce the old brain in machine intelligence, so the future intelligent machines wouldn't develop fear of dying when being turned off. He believes we humans with our old brains are much more likely to cause our own extinction than to create a Terminator type future (overpopulation, nuclear annihilation, making earth uninhabitable among the threats). Intelligent machines would be more capable than humans at establishing a hypothetical 2nd home for humans on Mars because they could deal with the radiation and lack of atmosphere while they do their jobs to build things or dig tunnels or whatever the job requires. The book steers into some fun sci-fi musings in the last 3rd. One chapter near the end is titled "Estate Planning for Humanity" ... he suggests that in the billions of years of time in our universe, intelligence like ours may spring up from time to time and only last a brief moment before the candle flame goes out again. So as we look for signs of life out there, the odds may be against us that a similar kind of intelligent life would be "awake" at the same time as us, so he suggests we should develop some kind of long lasting beacon in our solar system which would be capable of signaling to distant observers that intelligent life was once here. Think: some kind of window blinds orbiting the sun which block/diminish its light in a regular intelligence-signal pattern -- something which could function for millions of years without maintenance. Fun sci-fi thoughts if nothing else. If you've read it before, or do so in the future, I'd love to know what you found interesting!

Thanks @LC, I ended up selling 9 of the 10, so I can still watch the one just for the fun of seeing what happens.

Three months ago, I bought a few META calls ($200 strike June 2024 expiration) for around $6/share and they're quoted at $38/share today (up 120% just today) I'm pretty inexperienced in how options behave, but from less fortunate experience I think I've learned that they swing big on surprises and then when the volatility calms down their value drops a LOT. Here's how I think it works, is this more or less right? Decision 1: Sell today and take the 500% gain, because the value of these options is bound to drop a lot in the coming weeks. Decision 2: Hold on longer, hoping that the price goes above at least $238 before June 2024 in order to beat the current gain. For some of you more experienced with options, is this a complete no-brainer?

Hmm... Is there a chance that a lot of the tech whiz kids of today will contribute meaningfully to real value creation if there's a meaningful exodus from Cloud Fart Coin Land?

@changegonnacome you absolutely slayed me with the reference to Fart Coins, thanks for a good laugh. I had to google to see if it was real, and started laughing even harder. Couldn't help but share it

That's what I was pondering. I'm curious what the big disappointment was, but the last time I bought was at $93 and I don't mind adding under that level.

+1 to these thoughts. I'm finishing a book called "The Delusions of Crowds", full of examples of financial and religious manias. One of the superpowers of homo sapiens is our capacity to imitate. Some ancient hunter figures out how to make a better kayak or spear and the idea spreads through imitation. Narratives and beliefs spread in similar ways -- if your friend "knows" something and tells you about it, then you might now "know" it too. The Economist recently had an article about how a bunch of people have gullibly accepted the rumor that some public schools are now putting cardboard litter boxes into the bathrooms for the children who believe they are cats and dogs. It's like how parents began to believe that halloween candy needed to be X-rayed first to make sure no razor blades were hidden in the snickers bars. Fake news travels 7x faster across social media. Surprising and dramatic stories run on their own legs. On a daily basis we are told that the planet is heating up and dying. That's a dramatic narrative if there ever was one, and tweaking and repeating this tale is a boon to news media which now has a perennial scare tale to tell, with the added benefit that they get to feel righteous for telling it and thus doing "their part" to fix the problem. Really they're just scaring masses of people into feeling horrible about that extra minute of hot shower or leaving the lights on or using straws. Religious narratives used to help humans to deal with the existential dread of looking forward and seeing the certainty of one's own death. Religious belief is waning across much of the world, leaving many people exposed to the terror of death, but now it's even worse than in centuries past because we are also invited to consider such thoughts as (1) the death of all humans, (2) ecological collapse, (3) the eventual death of the sun, (4) the heat death of the universe. So... the world is ending on one hand, and I'm to blame because I take hot showers and have air conditioning and do 1,000 other earth destroying things each day. That's a stressful psychological state to maintain. Hating on fossil fuels provides a release valve for some of the psychological pressures, regardless of the obvious hypocrisy. In a lot of ways, fossil fuel companies are the scapegoat -- people are transferring their own "sins" onto the head of the scapegoat to ease their feelings of guilt. It's like they are the new tobacco companies. The recent Rolling Stone article was a transparent example. Externalizing blame. Virtue signaling. Denial. No invitations to self examination, no calls for reducing consumption here in North America. No concept of the second level effects that would result from "punishing" big oil. Very little understanding or respect for economic principles or history. But it sure feels nice to be righteous and to know who is to blame! Burn the witch!

One more, both of these videos were over on dataroma.com commentaries tab at this link ... https://www.dataroma.com/m/comm.php So, housing is 40% of core inflation. There's a backward looking measurement of housing costs, and there's a forward looking measurement. The forward looking indicators are down, but the Fed uses the backward looking indicators which are 'still' up... If the FFR is a forward looking policy tool, Jeremy Siegel here says they ought to be using the more forward looking measurements when deciding on what to do next.

David Katz (I don't know a lot about him) definitely believes we're near the bottom.

I've had this vague sense of worry for a few years, and Kuppy wrote it here a lot better than I could've done (see below). It seems like The Fed needs to talk a big game, because they know that there's no way they could actually allow ALL of the US national debt to roll over to a much higher interest rate. Think of the old advice to "Talk softly and carry a big stick." The fact that JP is talking loudly & tough may be hiding the reality that they don't have a big stick. I seriously wonder: What can they do if the tough talk doesn't scare away the inflation? https://adventuresincapitalism.com/2022/10/09/the-fed-is-fuct-part-4/

Yeah, I'll have to watch out for Michael Schellenberger articles in future and put on my skeptic hat when I do. Bordoff definitely isn't calling for nationalization, a fact which Schellenberger could easily have verified if he cared to ask around. That's just the wild west we get from substack journalists I guess.

Jason Bordoff turns out to be someone I have listened to a number of times on the Columbia Energy Exchange podcast, as he's one of the hosts. He's definitely not in the same category as the guy who called for nationalizing US oil back in July. The zerohedge.com article seems to be scaremongering because the title is "Top Dems Urge Biden to Nationalize Oil & Gas Industry" but Tom Nelson was already someone who dropped out of his senate race in July, 3 days after posting his op-ed in captimes.com, a Madison Wisconsin local newspaper. Not sure that qualifies Tom Nelson as a "Top Dem" ... and Jason Bordoff's talking points were anything but calls for nationalization. Tyler Durden and Michael Schellenberger are the authors of the unfounded claims and ought to be ashamed of themselves for writing click bait like that ; ) (you have to put an email in to get a free-to-read link, a form of paywall I didn't mind as much as some of the others out there) https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/energy/2022-06-07/markets-new-energy-order Including last couple paragraphs:

https://captimes.com/opinion/guest-columns/opinion-tom-nelson-lets-nationalize-the-oil-industry/article_896e77ba-e1dd-52e5-9f75-eeaef21ef8f3.html Well, the other guy Tom Nelson, was running for senate in Wisconsin but already bowed out, just 3 days after the July 22 date on his newspaper opinion piece calling for nationalization. Perhaps it's an idea so distasteful that this had something to do with it. The Dems want candidates who can win, and candidates who call for nationalizing oil might be seen as way way too politically risky. As it stands, the Economist is saying they think the Republican, Ron Johnson, will win in that race. https://www.economist.com/interactive/us-midterms-2022/forecast/senate/wisconsin