rogermunibond

Not really. A little under half of Medicaid recipients are dual eligible - Medicaid/Medicare and retirement age. About 40% are employed. The rest are disabled. You could scrutinize Medicaid and SSI disability more. That's one road if there's disability fraud.

Test time compute - Nadella just referenced OpenAI's o1 model in his talk yesterday. Additional compute at the time of answering. Pretty cool. https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/20/ai-scaling-laws-are-showing-diminishing-returns-forcing-ai-labs-to-change-course/

Farm jobs, grain silos, meat packers, dairy farms, milk processors, cheese producers, food manufacturing plants, and on and on and on.

Encounter isn't the same as unauthorized living in the US. Many of the encounters are as follows: "Encounter data includes U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) Title 8 Apprehensions, Office of Field Operations (OFO) Title 8 Inadmissibles, and Title 42 Expulsions* for fiscal years (FY) 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. Data is available for the Northern Land Border, Southwest Land Border, and Nationwide (i.e., air, land, and sea modes of transportation) encounters."

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1858929066264379629.html?utm_campaign=topunroll Fascinating Twitter thread on the IT industry slackers. Deedy @deedydas Everyone thinks this is an exaggeration but there are so many software engineers, not just at FAANG, who I know personally who literally make ~2 code changes a month, few emails, few meetings, remote work, < 5 hours/ week, for ~$200-300k. Here are some of those companies: Oracle Salesforce Cisco Workday SAP IBM VMware Intuit Autodesk Veeva Box Citrix Adobe The “quiet quitting” playbook is well known: - “in a meeting” on slack - scheduled slack, email, code at late hours - private calendar with blocks - mouse jiggler for always online - “this will take 2 weeks” (1 day) - “oh, the spec wasn’t clear” - many small refactors - “build is having issues” - blocked by another team - will take time bcuz <obscure tech reason> like “race condition” - “can you create a jira for that?” And no, AI is not writing their code. Most of these people are chilling so hard they have no idea what AI can do. Most people in tech were never surprised that Elon could lay off 80% of Twitter, you can lay off 80% of most of these companies

Wall Street Is Too Pumped About Trump to Worry About His Policies Executives say his preoccupation with the stock market will override his economically dangerous ideas. https://archive.ph/oZAHg

Economic sentiment is now extremely politically polarized especially when people respond to surveys. Not sure if that matters as much. People can say the economy is shit because the other party is in power. But that still doesn't stop them from spending. Your stock portfolio and income growth are probably better indicators on spending now than economic sentiment.

Not sure if that's answerable. In my area, most of the roofers are Salvadoran. Here's how they work. Guy who's here the longest knows the trade, and when he or his company need additional trainees he asks around in the community, maybe at a local church. Then he gets leads to more recent Salvadoran migrants looking for work. Takes them to the job site and new labor supply. Over the last two years there have been fewer northern triangle (ES, Guatamala, Honduras) migrants, more from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba. Not sure if they have the same labor network. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/

@dealraker yee gads In some of the building trades, immigrant labor makes up 75-80% of the workforce. Roofing for example. Are folks really not knowing this? I suppose they think the net effect of tax cuts and lower interest rates versus slowdown in building trades from lack of labor?

CP and CSX Mexico to Southeast intermodal is ready to go December 1 https://theloadstar.com/us-and-mexico-intermodal-traffic-surge-too-much-for-railways-to-swallow/ CP is losing some of its premium to US Class I rails due to fears of Mexico/China tariffs. Long term say 4 years out even with tariffs I wouldn't be overly worried.

I’m totally pro exercise. But I’m anti linking mouse model papers to talk up the effects of exercise. here are two good ones in HUMANS - increase in life expectancy and improved cancer survival rates. there’s a typo in the tweet. Adds 6.3 years in life expectancy

Sorry but there's a lot of junk science and unreplicated studies which purport to show benefits for x y and z. The exercise hipposcampus study is in mice.

Latest LLM models are not advancing as fast as predicted by scaling laws/theory. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-google-anthropic-struggling-build-100020816.html

What's the benefit of longer nerve growth in muscle?

Are you referring to Google Translate integration in Android?

So ever since Bill Perry's last supper in 1993, the defense industry has been in consolidation mode. Now there's five main defense prime contractors. How long before the current wave of technology (AI/LLM, autonomy, air/land/sea drones, robotics, hypersonic missiles) start eating into the defense prime contractors main business? Does the US need aircraft carrier groups when autonomous hypersonic missiles can hunt down carriers easily? Do we need trillions of dollars spent on the F-35 when autonomous drone swarms can operate the same missions? Do we need M-1 Abrams tanks on the battlefield since they are so easily targeted by drones? Interesting Tyler Cowen podcast on defense innovation https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/christopher-kirchhoff/ Bill Perry's last supper https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-how-a-1993-pentagon-dinner-reshaped-the-defense-industry

AI Meta announced Seamless in 2023 You can test it on huggingface. It's pretty good and even maintains expressiveness/mood of the speech. https://huggingface.co/collections/facebook/seamless-communication-6568d486ef451c6ba62c7724

LLM powered translation in real time either through speakers (over air) or through Bluetooth earbuds?

I don't think China wants to be a reserve currency. They can't run trade surpluses if they are a reserve currency.

Re Banks - lighter regulatory touch with Trump and Senate moving Repub. Sherrod Brown out as Senate Banking chair.

Yeah trade - tariffs and cutting off Chinese goods moving through Mexico. UNP is up.

Look at the percentage gainers and losers this morning. That's your Trump trade right there. The market is moving fast.

More Chinese factories in the US a la Japan in the 90s

Treasury bills

Isn't the real issue with most NA rail the lack of volume growth? They've had to deal with huge decline in PRB and thermal coal. Container, commodity, not growing.