Growth Through Friction Mandeville had an uncomfortable idea: a society does not live economically only from its virtues, but also from its imperfections. Vanity keeps tailors in business. Illness…

And you think we have problems… Poor newbie homebuyers in the US are facing mortgage rates that may hit 7% this week. That’s a withering three hundred basis points more than here. Inflation is…

The world is ruled by opportunistic social pack predators. I mention this because I am seeing a lot of apparently unrelated things that may suggest a pattern leading to — what? I don’t know. That…

Successful traders have some unusual quirks in how they think. For my entire career, I've felt these "quirks" are valuable, and the world would probably be a better place if more…

(with the omnipresent caveat that there is nowhere capitalism does not piss me off) There is nowhere capitalism is not pissing me off more right now than in food. July-September is my annual season…

As proposals get cheaper, testing costs can help decide which questions attract research funding.

On Friday, S&P Global Ratings downgraded the state’s rating to AA, noting higher wages and a softer property market sentiment would likely “weigh on” Queensland over the next few years. Higher…

I published a post here yesterday that has attracted a lot of comments, not all of which I have been able to deal with as Read the full article...

Anthropic founder calls for global AI slowdown amid fears of risk to humanity Market leader facing competition wants that competition to be hangstrung. Does he? Isn’t that such a surprise. The…

Op basis van jaarlijkse rapportage van Agrimatie en de WUR de ontwikkeling van duurzaam en biologisch voedsel als aandeel van de totale consumptie.

AI is making software cheaper to create. That does not make software worthless, but it changes what people will pay for and where builders need to create value.

The first time I thought it would be a good idea to write a blog post about the economics of open source was 2013, so this post has been in the works a while. The closest I got before today was 2022,…

If you routinely stay 30 minutes after your shift doing free work, you’ve given away 72 hours per year. Now you’ve just traded away a long weekend that you could have spent fishing, skiing,…

I live in America which means I have the rights to exercise reasonable free speech as permitted by the law. All posted content(s) on this website are my opinions only which means they should not be…

Looming crisis… Experts are warning that Germany is heading into the heating season with dangerously low natural gas reserve fill levels. Currently, Germany’s gas reserve fill level…

Narratives and story telling are everything in collectibles. At the end of the day, people collect something because they evoke an emotion stemmed from nostalgia. This is as true of collectibles as…

In 1981—the last year I was in college and the first year I was working at a real job, long-term interest rates got very high. I thought this was great. (I wasn’t in the market to take out a…

President Trump is working to lower gas prices long-term. He is doing many different things beyond this oil deal, including expanding domestic oil and gas production, reducing regulatory barriers,…

The Productivity Lie and Confronting the Runaway AI Spend

It’s hard to beat the market if you are the market. Don’t be a try-hard with your retirement portfolio. Learn more by reading this week’s terrific links. The journey is what…

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A few years ago I came across Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). MMT radically changed my perspective on money and the way society actually works. At its core, MMT states that in a society that has its…

Eight months after AI gutted its business model and forced brutal layoffs, Tailwind Labs has a new home. What the Shopify deal actually changes, what Shopify's leadership has said about it, how the…

This month, R.L Dane started a new blogging theme: gratitude posts. Another blogging challenge! While I have a list of things I’m grateful for, I wasn’t able to start before this month.…

We need a new metric: the ‘Smallest Actionable Difference’ (SAD), to know which difference in brand color reproduction will turn off consumers and therefore hurt trust and sales. But lab experiments…

Inflation - still not falling, Here is a graph with year end and - for 2026 - August numbers. Something about tariffs, massive deficits and fighting wars that close off the world's main artery for…

Credit vintages are a common way to follow how default changes after loans are originated. The Federal Reserve describes vintage loss models, also called age-cohort-time models, for retail credit…

tag(s): #books #reviews Lately I am in a bit of an anti-review mood, which makes it funny that I am writing one. To be fair, one of the things that causes the dislike are highly emotional (maybe a…

Art. 242a SchKG lets clients claim crypto out of a bankrupt Swiss custodian's estate. The claim only works if the estate can still sign, and nobody tests it.

Table of Contents 1. TODO Body 1.1. Preface 1.1.1. Is the only hope for the Soviet Union a no-nonsense capitalist dictatorship? 1.1.2. Lobbies and Cartels break democracies. 1.1.3. "Thermidor" comes…

How wealth is changing the economy and markets. The post Millionaires Everywhere appeared first on A Wealth of Common Sense. ...

What HappenedThis week frontier AI model maker Anthropic briefly posted a “Mega Account Executive, Meta” role paying as much as $450,000, then ... unposted it after Business Insider…

Over the past year, America’s biggest cities have embraced a political strategy that amounts to a municipal version of Joseph Stalin’s “socialism in one country”. It could turn disastrous – […]…

Here's a preliminary program for the October NBER Market Design Working Group Meeting at Stanford Market Design Working Group Meeting Organized by Eric Budish and Michael Ostrovsky October 16-17,…

September 11, 2026 The spike in oil prices this past week has created concern about a sharp pickup in the inflation rate and the possibility of a recession. We think the markets are overreacting but…

💡We have launched a subscribers-only p(doom) calculator to model both the financial and existential risks ahead. What HappenedAI risk has had a busy week. Anthropic disclosed four incidents…

Now that the collapse of our political, economic, social and ecological systems is accelerating, the signs of this collapse, including scapegoating, corruption, and social disorder are becoming more…

... and its going to go somewhere unpleasant unless this is stanched right here, right now.First, the PPI report.  It is not the one-month number, although that was bad…

September 11, 2026 We expect a 3.5% GDP growth rate in the third quarter of this year which would give us 2.4% growth for the year as a whole. We expect 2.8% GDP growth in 2027. Given the GDP…

Series finale: if López de Prado et al.'s conditional variance improves Sharpe ratio inference, could a fully conditional SHASHo do the same, and more? Artykuł Sharpe Ratio Distribution: When…

An interactive version of the Anthropic Institute's 2026 model of AI and the US economy, exposing the three parameters their own explorer holds fixed: how easily capital can be added, how readily…

Global trade was once fragmented into many regional economies. Goods like spices traveled overland through countless intermediaries before reaching the gateway cities of Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and…

I am back for the second half of Nicole Königstein's live 4-day "Agentic AI for Finance Certification" bootcamp (Packt Publishing), which teaches you how to: Artykuł Agentic AI for Finance Bootcamp:…

Since January 2025, tech job postings have asked for 25% fewer skills but 5% more experience | AI spending among OpenAI’s heaviest research users is growing at 129% per month | 26% of young-adult…

There's an entire cottage industry that has sprung up for Americans thinking about how long should they wait to start taking Social Security's retirement benefits. If you only look at size of your…

At the moment, the Oil & Energy sector weight in the S&P500 is ~3.30%, while if we put together Hyperscalers & Cloud Providers, Semiconductors & AI Chips, Hardware & Networking…

This report evaluates the Breakout strategy through signal diagnostics, parameter selection, robustness testing, and portfolio integration. It examines whether historical performance holds up under…

tl;drThe US charges forward with preparations for the adoption of trading tokenised stocks 24/7. The UK is belligerent towards the potential of tokenising simple retail deposits. We know who the…

Baby raves The Dutch need to double their spending on water safety and infrastructure to 2% of GDP to deal with climate chaos. Americans Without College Degrees Are Having One of the Best Job Markets…

Robinhood, an American fintech, is sometimes called a "Superapp". A superapp is an app that offers all kinds of financial-related services. In Robinhood's case, they offer everything from literal…