(1/6) My blog #MisalignedMarkets turns one! I spent the year blogging about lots of topics: optimization, information asymmetry, risk, #AI but here are my most popular posts
A thread 🧵
economics
If you enjoy my posts here on Mastodon, or find them interesting (or both), then you might also want to check out my longer form 'citizen journalism' @NWBylines
The articles I have written over the last couple of years, often extending themes of my posts, can all be found here:
A few inchoate thoughts on Gas Town, since I think this example has more to it than “it’s just a meth binge/crypto scam/one-shot AI poisoning”. Part of the reason I think this is that some of the rhetoric it deploys dovetails perfectly with broader trends and phenomena, and I think it's worth pulling those out.
1. Economists from the physiocrats (18th century) onward promised society freedom from material deprivation and hard physical labor in exchange for submitting to an economic arrangement of society
2. In a country like the US, material deprivation and hard physical labor have been significantly reduced since then:
1. Economists from the physiocrats (18th century) onward promised society freedom from material deprivation and hard physical labor in exchange for submitting to an economic arrangement of society
2. In a country like the US, material deprivation and hard physical labor have been significantly reduced since then:
Though too many clearly still suffer too much, a large proportion of people live free from fear of starvation or lack of shelter
The US has deindustralized, meaning hard physical labor is not the reality for a lot of people. For a lot of people labor is emotional or symbolic (“knowledge work”)
In other words, for lots of people the economic promise has been fulfilled
It is not coincidental that “Gas Town”’s announcement post mentioned Towers of Hanoi, an undergraduate CS student homework problem that for most students requires thinking hard. It’s designed to encourage a kind of “eureka” moment where recursion as a computer programming technique becomes more clear. GT claims to fulfill the promise of not having to think hard like this anymore: the LLMs will do that thinking for you
It is not coincidental that Gas Town is described as being very expensive. Economic power in the form of asset accumulation is what earns you freedom in this way of conceiving things. If you want the freedom from having to think hard, you’d better accumulate assets
Since the promise is greater collective freedom, endeavoring to accumulate assets is, in this view, a collective good
This differs from effective altruism and other “do good by doing well” conceptions. Rather, the very mechanism of economics produces collective wealth, so the story goes, which means the more active one is as an economic agent, the more collective good one produces (“wealth” and “good” being conflated)
Accumulation of assets is the scorecard, so to speak, of such enhanced economic activity, and the individual reward can then be freedom from having to think hard
Lotka’s maximum power principle (supposedly) dictates that those entities that transform the most power into useful organization are most fit from an evolutionary standpoint
Ernst Juenger’s notion of “total mobilization” brings this principle to politics/political economy/geopolitics: those nations that “totally” mobilize their national resources are the ones that will dominate geopolitically
See, for instance, the RAND Corporation’s Commission on the National Defense Strategy: “The Commission finds that the U.S. military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat. It needs to do a better job of incorporating new technology at scale; field more and higher-capability platforms, software, and munitions; and deploy innovative operational concepts to employ them together better.” (emphasis mine). In summary: the US is about to be outcompeted (lacks fitness); in response, it should go big (“at scale”, “more”) in an organized way (“deploy innovative operational concepts”, “employ them together better”)
The rhetoric around LLM-based AI includes similar language, exemplified in the GT post: burn through as much infrastructural resources as possible to produce organized outputs “at scale”, while avoiding having human beings think too hard to produce those outputs, an indication that the power was burned to produce useful organization
LLM-based AI plays a prominent role in US federal government strategy, particularly military strategy, with language about dominance serving to justify its use
It is not coincidental that Gas Town uses many orders of magnitude more resources to solve the Towers of Hanoi problem (“Burn All The Gas” Town). This rhetoric dovetails perfectly with the “total mobilization” concept
Edited 27d ago
The push to dismantle orgs like USAID and reduce foreign commitments in a calculated bid to redirect trillions in public funds toward privatized domestic infrastructure and supply chains.
The debate between globalism and isolationism is presented in ideological terms, but it's really about different strategies for wealth accumulation.
Globalists exploit cheap labor and resources abroad while isolationists exploit state dependence on domestic monopolies.
🧵
Just imagine a Democratic candidate wondered aloud "why not default on US bonds?"
mar 15
5 min
How to kill the goose which lays golden eggs. University layoffs.. censorship, research shutdowns, cuts to basic research in government foundations and agencies, universities revoking degrees, and all the crazy shit ICE is doing, I certainly painting an American education and a unique fashion.
And you can have a side of deadly preventable diseases!
Edited 340d ago
Delta Air Lines has launched Asia’s only nonstop service between Incheon and Salt Lake City, expanding its U.S. network to 14 destinations in partnership with Korean Air and offering enhanced connectivity for Asian travelers.
#YonhapInfomax #DeltaAirLines #IncheonInternationalAirport #SaltLakeCity #NonstopRoute #KoreanAirJointVenture #Economics #FinancialMarkets #Banking #Securities #Bonds #StockMarket
https://en.infomaxai.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=67244
John Kenneth Galbraith's observation about conservatism is as relevant as ever.
"The modern conservative is not even especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
#conservatives #selfishness #usa #Economics #PoliticalPhilosophy
RE: https://mastodon.social/@FluentInFinance/115970297280530554
It gets even wilder when people learn that approx. 90% of money creation is not the fiat dollars that the gov't creates, but rather the ones created by bank lending!
That's right; as Prof. Steve Keen says, "Bank lending creates money."
You don't learn that in your college econ 101class (if it's teaching Neoclassical economics, as most are).
So one of the dumbest things done in my lifetime was bank deregulation.
#economics #moneycreation #bankloanscreatemoney #ProfSteveKeen #BankDeregulation
“its power as a starter in crowd psychology comes from Mackay’s insistence on humanising the follies he describes. No macroeconomic constructs here – just good old greed, optimism, superstition & cunning plans”
—Charles Mackay (1814–1889) was born #OTD, 27 March – best remembered today for his 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds
1/3
#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #Victorian #psychology #masspsychology #economics #stockmarket #bubbles
Hello! It has been a while since I posted an intro, so here goes:
My online name is Dolphin 👋
I am not important. I am not here to sell anything. I hate nazis. I am an #LGBTQIA+ / trans #ally and mom.
I will write nerdy posts that I carefully analyze and source & then post silly things.
My deep dive 🤿, serious posts are generally about 1) #business / #finance / #economics, 2) #HumanRights and 3) #privacy. I often post article screenshots.
/1 of 2 🧵
#Introduction #intro #hello #greetings
Most people think reducing the federal budget deficit is a good thing. Makes sense, right? I mean, if I’m broke & have bills, that’s bad! But there’s a problem: The analogy between my finances and those of a currency-issuing government is false. Wrong. Illogical. So why do so many people keep getting it wrong? Turns out, they’ve been misled—by economists! 1/3
#TheFederalDeficitIsOurMoney #TheDeficitMyth #Deficit #Economics #DoubleEntryAccounting #BothSidesOfTheStory #MMT #PostKeynesianEcon
Jun 6
8 min
Gaming out a society of psychopaths. The funny part about.. that I game out, is that no society of psychopaths who all understand that everyone is out to rule the world like they are would ever tolerate any level of wealth inequality. Such as society would tend to converge on constant warfare and destruction or tyranny and destruction…
If we were exactly like what conservatives say you would never tolerate billionaires
Edited 261d ago
So far Brexit looks to have cost the UK between 4-6% GDP per capita, with the negative impact continuing to compound as GDP growth remains weak compared to similar countries.
This chart should be shown each time Nigel Farage tries to make out its been a success (or if not, its not his fault). Brexit was clearly his project, its clearly cost the UK dear (in economic terms) & he should be reminded of this fact continually & publicly
#Brexit #economics
h/t Adam Tooze
Edited 10d ago
Aug 4
4 min
Epstein Nation
It's just a cozy community helping each other out. Billionaires repurpose the federal government to finance a new economy’s for human trafficking and crypto financial fraud and by its major client.
The two are intimately related through crypt o financial transfers
Epstein Nation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5D_QaDiqbo
Edited 201d ago
“not only is there no invocation of the free market […Smith] plainly sees that government, not private industry, is the only force capable of effectively ‘erecting and maintaining’ the technically unprofitable but nevertheless indispensable ‘publick works’ and ‘publick institutions’ […] essential to every modern state.”
—Adam Smith (1723–1790) was baptised #OTD, 16 June. Evan Gottlieb examines Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”
Since “there is…no appetite in Washington to tackle the ($36 trillion) debt,” the wealthy are tying themselves in knots to figure out—
get this—
Not how to get out of debt (per se) but how to shift the debt inward—
/1 of 4 🧵
#USA #USEconomy #economics #USdebt
“Forget the Mar-a-Lago Accord” —
To help the US get out of its “explosive debt,” a Deutsche Bank strategist introduces the ‘Pennsylvania plan’
If Austrian economics is the only true economics, why isn't it taught in universities?
The answer is that the #bureaucracy, the state cannot profit from it. Because people who know the real economics will not allow the bureaucrats, the state to do what they can do now.
#economics #austrianeconomics #science #statism #education
Edited 220d ago
🇺🇸 📖 **The Book That All Americans Should Be Reading Now**
"_A nation’s prosperity is not a given. It is constantly shaped by the strength and character of its institutions. If you want to see how a country will do economically in the long run, look at its institutions.
🔗 https://www.zmescience.com/other/economics/the-book-that-all-americans-should-be-reading-now/.
#Economy #Economics #Nonfiction #Books #Bookstodon @economics @bookstodon
People think the system is to blame. If so, they need to define what that system is. They call it #capitalism. I call it #statism. I think people can make the world a better place by learning ideas they don't know, true #economics, which should be the foundation of everyone's worldview. Please read/listen to #Mises's #Bureaucracy first! It's free.
https://mises.org/library/book/bureaucracy
US Economy Flashing Warning Signs—
with the services sector showing signs of stagnation~
Services make up ~”more than 2/3 of overall US economic activity,” yet seem to get little attention from the Trump Admin, which is highly focused on the production of goods.
The data from The Institute for Supply Management coincides with the BLS’s revised jobs report (which #trump fired the BLS commissioner over).
/1🧵
#USA #USeconomy #economics
—
* https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2024/07/the-rise-of-services-in-the-us-economy/
—
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-05/us-service-activity-nearly-stagnates-as-employment-contracts
Edited 202d ago