Boring Blob @basicblob

We are getting our 7th PM in 10 years. It’s 30C outside. And we are playing well in a World Cup. We have become Italy…

The most manipulative but effective thing I’ve ever done in my life was when I read an article about how children moderate their behavior to protect their self-identity, so if a child believes he’s smart, for example, he’ll intentionally study and try to do well to protect his image of himself. Anyway, I would pull kids aside with behavioral issues at church and tell them, “David (obviously fake name), you’re such a kind person and such a good listener. I can see that in you. Thank you for always listening.” “Little Annie, thank you for taking such good care of the babies around you. You’re going to be such a good big sister. Can you be in charge of watching Sally?” They would ALWAYS behave afterward. ALWAYS. Worked like a charm. Morally questionable because it wasn’t initially true, but I kind of willed it into existence. Tbf, I did think that they had that in them or I wouldn’t have tried. Will publish longitudinal results of this method once my kid is old enough to report back.

@kenwheeler more bitches less tokens

@denisyurchak Then did you make anything? Comparing that your bank account yield, that’s already disposable for spending, maybe even taxed automatically. Is that fair comparison then?

Priced in gold, the S&P 500 is down roughly 70% from its 2000 peak.

🚨Michael Burry just said Elon Musk and Nvidia's deal is built on fake numbers. Burry published a detailed breakdown calling the entire structure "Fugazi", his word for fake. He is alleging that billions of dollars in Nvidia chips are being hidden off balance sheets, and that American retirees are unknowingly funding the whole thing. Nvidia, the world's largest AI chip company sold $5.4 billion worth of its most advanced GPUs, the GB200, to a company called Valor. Valor is not a real operating business. It is a special purpose vehicle, a shell company created specifically to hold these chips and nothing else. Nvidia also invested $1.9 billion of its own money directly into Valor on top of the sale. Those 100,000+ chips are now physically inside xAI's data center. xAI is Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, the one that builds Grok. xAI is using every single one of those chips right now to run its AI models. But here is what Burry is flagging. Neither Nvidia nor xAI owns those chips on paper. Valor, the shell company holds legal title. That means $5.4 billion in GPU assets do not show up on Nvidia's balance sheet as inventory. They do not show up on xAI's balance sheet as assets. They are legally invisible to both companies. Nvidia gets to book the $5.4 billion as a completed sale and record it as revenue. xAI gets full use of the chips without owning them. And the risk disappears into a shell company in the middle. Now here is where American retirees enter the picture. Valor needed $3.5 billion in debt to fund this structure. Apollo provided it. Apollo is one of the largest asset managers on earth with $1.03 trillion under management and $834 billion specifically in private credit. Apollo raised the $3.5 billion, packaged it into debt securities, and sold those securities to Athene. Athene is Apollo's own insurance company. It sells fixed and indexed annuities, retirement savings products, to ordinary Americans. When a retiree buys an Athene annuity, they believe their money is sitting in safe, stable investments. That money is now inside a structure funding Elon Musk's AI data center. The numbers inside Athene are most alarming. Athene holds $74.2 billion in reserves. It has moved $217 billion in assets into a captive insurer based in Bermuda, meaning those assets sit outside normal US insurance regulation and oversight. Of the entire portfolio, 34.7%, equal to $103 billion, is classified as Level 3 assets. Level 3 is an accounting classification that means there is no observable market price for these assets. No outside party can independently verify what they are actually worth. The leverage sitting on top of those unpriced assets is 16 times. Burry's says: Every step of this structure is technically legal and publicly disclosed. But the entire thing was deliberately engineered across 8 to 12 steps to move credit risk off balance sheets and away from any market pricing. - Nvidia books the revenue. - Apollo collects the fees. - xAI gets the computing power. - And retirees sitting at the bottom of a 16x leveraged Bermuda insurance structure, holding $103 billion in assets with no market price carry the risk without knowing it exists.

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How has the Spanish economy performed over the very long run? To answer, I use Leandro Prados de la Escosura’s (@LdelaEscosura) data on real GDP per capita from 1277 to 2024. I express Spain’s figure as a ratio to Britain’s, since Britain was the first economy to achieve modern economic growth, from around 1660, and has been the leader, or close to it, ever since. Spain, within its present borders, was prosperous in the Late Middle Ages, well ahead of Britain, then a peripheral corner of Europe. The Black Death and its aftermath hit Spain harder, and by 1360, the two economies had converged. That parity held until 1600, when Spain began a long decline, in absolute terms (on the eve of the French Revolution, it was barely above its 1600 level, after a deep slump in between) and in relative terms (Britain pulled steadily away). The standard explanations, the Habsburg wars, and the serial bankruptcies run into one problem. They can account for the poor performance between 1550 and 1650, but not for the stagnation between 1650 and 1789. 140 years of stagnation is far more than wars and debt under the Habsburgs can explain. The series also shows that Spain did not benefit from its empire. That is a problem for every theory tying colonies to modern growth. At most, one can argue that colonies were a necessary condition for takeoff (I do not believe even that, but leave it for another day). One cannot argue that they were sufficient. The period from 1789 to 1936 was no kinder. The economy grew a little, and Spain built a modern but unfinished liberal state. Yet it never closed the distance to Britain. It is hard not to read the period from 1789 to 1936 as a national failure and the Civil War as its final consequence. The recent efforts of some historians to paint those years in brighter colors strike me as unfounded. Spain did not fail at modernization as badly as China, but it did not succeed. A deeply corrupt dynasty, closed and incompetent elites in Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao, and an economic policy built on intervention and protection (by 1920, Spain was the most protectionist economy in the Western world, so much for the friends of protection) together made the country a basket case. A cruel civil war left Spain at its historical low, with just 31% of the British GDP per capita. The foreign visitors who arrived in the early 1950s found a poor, backward country. Policy in the first twenty years of the dictatorship was awful. Autarky was not so much imposed by the Allies as chosen. Spain’s rulers, using their quasi-fascist Weltanschauung, believed growth would come from state intervention, closed markets, and unorthodox fiscal and monetary policy. Then, in 1959, policy changed. Spain adopted a more orthodox fiscal and monetary policy and opened to foreign investment and trade. The results were spectacular. For forty years, Spain grew briskly and became the modern country it is today. By 2001, it had reached 77% of British GDP per head. But the internal contradictions of two things eventually became binding: the growth model launched in 1959, and the political regime created by the 1978 constitution. By 2024, Spain had slipped back to 74% of British GDP per head. This is worse than it looks. Britain itself has done poorly over the past twenty years, and losing ground to a weak performer is a bad sign. Spain stands at a crossroads, economic and political. The country’s foundations no longer work, but its political and business elites have failed to understand this fundamental reality. A good grasp of its economic history helps make sense of its present predicament.

Drainpipes don't have to be boring! This comparison is obviously an oversimplification, but it's not wrong either. "Beauty" is an over-used word. This is about charm, whimsy, character, and intrigue. The way we design things has changed. There are lots of reasons for that, including economics and regulation, but the great mistake we've made is thinking that things being interesting and things being useful are mutually exclusive. That isn't true. And the only people who benefit from this misconception are the people who sell those things; humanity at large suffers when the world we all have no choice but to live in is less interesting and less meaningful. The tradeoff is usually framed as public benefit versus cost, in the sense that if we want nicer things then they'll be more expensive and won't be functional. But the real tradeoff is just profit: creating less beautiful things simply allows certain people to make more money, and the public loses both ways. As the eternal William Morris said: "To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce USE, that is one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce MAKE, that is the other use of it. Does not our subject look important enough now? I say that without these arts, our rest would be vacant and uninteresting, our labour mere endurance, mere wearing away of body and mind." It runs contrary to everything we've been taught to think about the world, but even drainpipes (the most mundane thing you could imagine!) can actually improve how a building or street looks. Who benefits, in the end, from interesting drainpipes? The public at large, ordinary people! Architectural joy is the most democratic form of art. We're waking up to the fact that a boring world is bad for everybody... times are changing!

The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor

4 weeks ago

I’m making a show about buildings. The concept is simple: do for the man-made world what Planet Earth did for the natural world. But, when I pitched the idea, the answer was that nobody would watch it. So I released a pilot episode on YouTube. It’s got 5.4 million views, 379k

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@Kresendo Sisopodizač 😊

Mass immigration as a phenomenon is inseparable from deindustrialization, planned or accidental. Mass importation of migrants as low-wage laborers and political clients is one of the pillars allowing Western elites to keep being elites without hard work or technology investment.

Italy: Counterfeit 2-euro coins, indistinguishable from genuine coins even to the European Central Bank, were produced in clandestine mints in Prato and Quarrata by a group linked to Chinese organized crime. The operation involved importing nickel and nickel-brass alloy from China, clearing them through customs in Germany and Belgium, and minting coins that replicated designs from all EU countries, including commemorative editions. Over 20,000 fake coins and one ton of raw materials have been seized, but this is considered only a small portion of the total forged. The coins matched originals in weight and magnetism, successfully deceiving machines and slots. Five suspects, all Chinese nationals, were detained for criminal association. Authorities suspect the group received inside information from law enforcement to evade investigations.

I've watched this way too many times. 😆

No smoking gun, but the preponderance of evidence points to smartphones, not economics, as the culprit for the global drop in fertility: • In the US and UK, births fell first and fastest in areas that got 4G earliest • Birth rates were stable in the US, UK and Australia until 2007; in France and Poland until 2009; in Mexico and Indonesia until 2012; in Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal until 2013-15 Each of these inflection points matches local smartphone adoption (see picture). • The younger the age group, the sharper the drop. • in-person socialising among young adults is dropping. In SK, by 50% in 20 years • Sexual dysfunction is higher among heavy social media user • Effect is largest in culturally traditional societies — Middle East, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa • Decline holds across countries hit hard by GFC 2008 and those not hit, fast-growing and not growing. Excellent again @jburnmurdoch. ft.com/content/fba35e…

the best children's book ever made is out of print. on the left page, there's a famous art. on the right page, the art is rearranged to be 'neat'. when the child was 2, we did this book every night. it's all different artists. he started to be able to tell them apart. soon he could name every artist in the book we went to visit a friend in another city, and looking out the car window, he pointed at a billboard. he said, keith haring. the billboard was for a museum. it was a traveling exhibit of keith haring i thought, well. shit. i don't know anything about art. i only think about art in ways the art world sneers i found something called basic art. it's a series of 140 books. they're kind of expensive. but for some reason, used ones on amazon are often wildly mispriced. sometimes they sell for like $4 each i sniped ones the child knew. as a kid i liked magritte most. so we did a lot of magritte. i just flipped the pages slowly for him, like it was a movie, playing frame by frame. let's find all the apples. how about the bowler hats. the mirrors. the birds. the skies later i was editing some images for a book project. i cross process the photos in a very specific way. it makes the sky look kind of candy colored and you know it's mine he looked at the screen and said: magritte fuck. i died. is there surrealism everywhere for those with eyes to see? shl0ms posted a real monet. it did not have to be. it does not have to be a real monet for you to try to see like monet

𒐪 @SHL0MS

a month ago

i just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI please describe, in as much detail as possible, what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting

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Where Have The Men Gone? zerohedge.com/personal-finan…

Socialism has always been a movement of what was called (in Yugoslav self-management) the “progressive intelligentsia,” or (in Marxism-Leninism) the “vanguard of the working class” — a term that was coined precisely when it became clear that workers and peasants were neither interested in nor had the time to attend plenary sessions where papers on Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach were read and discussions held on how to “ease the birth pangs of history,” etc. Concepts such as “the proletariat,” “the working class,” or today “women,” “LGBTQH+” (the H is for Hamas), “people of color,” etc., are political abstractions that do not refer to real people. Just as Lenin (or Jeremy Corbyn) never in his life entered a factory or hammered a nail, and just as BLM protests are whiter than KKK gatherings, so too the people who vote for raising the minimum wage, abolishing the police and advanced math in public schools, and freezing rents are people who will NOT lose their jobs (or be unable to get a job at all) because of the minimum wage, who live in expensive neighborhoods with little crime, who are not single mothers who will be ghettoized in public housing projects where children grow up without fathers and childhood looks like an excursion, etc., etc. Socialism is now, just as it was 100 years ago, a product of the diseased envy of the “progressive intelligentsia” toward people who, through entrepreneurship, have become more successful and wealthier than they are — specifically by producing economic goods of “mass consumption” for the broadest layers of society (which make life easier and make people wealthier), and who are precisely the greatest victims of attacks on capitalism, the free market, and free civilization in general.

Daniel Di Martino @DanielDiMartino

8 months ago

Big education gaps. Mamdani won the young college graduates by landslide. And turned them out.

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Jensen is one the smartest and most far seeing folks the world. "If an AI scientist warns people that AI is going to permeate across radiology and radiologists are going to get wiped out, it might seem helpful but it's hurtful. If we convince everybody not to be radiologists and we now need radiologists, that actually is hurtful to society. "It is hurtful to convince all the young college graduates not to study software engineering because we are going to need more software engineers than ever. That's hurtful." "Scaring people with nonsensical things, which are not going to happen, that this is an existential threat, there's a 20% chance that is is existential, that's ridiculous. "That it's going to wipe out 50% of college level jobs. "That is it going to completely destroy democracy. "These kinds of comments are not helpful. They are made by...CEOS. And you become a CEO, maybe you adopt a God complex and somehow you know everything." Brutal. And right.

"Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the others enter into no rivalry with him". — Aristotle

big update to wikibarrio: - a new, more polished ui - redesigned side panel with sparklines + historical trends - points of interest overlay (schools, hospitals, pharmacies, supermarkets, train/metro stations, parks) - share-as-image cards try it out! wikibarrio.es/?v2