If someone tells you up, down and sideways that they follow an idealpolitik view of the world, they really are usually doing realpolitik. If someone tells you up, down and sideways that they follow a realpolitik view of the world, they usually are up in idealpolitik up to their eyeballs. So no realpolitik was happening today
All sovereign bond demand will decrease generally, because of the failure of defined benefit pensions everywhere. Basically nobody new with any sense in the private sector does them, they're being phased out in the public sector, and this is a global phenomenon because of the general poor agent-principal problems and extreme expense now that we see a generation with the damn things and all that. Who the hell buys a 30-year treasury? Pensions do, frankly. Still holds for other sovereign debt everywhere. Norway's sovereign fund has elements of pension-nature to it but it's not a pension, it's a giant pile of stuff.
They’re just issuing short dated ones because nobody is buying the long ones.
That points more to this blowing up than a phase out. Governments like the US don’t really have a plan B on what happens if they can’t issue sovereign bonds. You can print but if the US decides to print everything they currently borrow then the USD reserve status isn’t going to survive
You pay $2 million to some ambitious someone and you get a serious chance (1-3%, still counts as a serious chance) to have some ostensible societal benefit. Get a factory made or some software written or something else done. You pay $2 million to the landholder, you get literally nothing done for society. Even the housebuilders have their businesses basically destroyed by default by the gigantic parasite leech of land sucking on every sale they make. That's Henry George's complaint, right there.
Any serious career programmer knows in their bones that it's a miracle that anything works at all. Now the general public is getting to learn that fact, by everything systematically breaking. Or getting hacked, in this case.
Workaday copywriting is dead (was moribund, now has been shot in the head). Prestige literary writing is zero-sum and therefore eternal, in the same way that equities trading (not formation and not business-building) is zero-sum and therefore the actual success of LLM has not given anyone a signal advantage anywhere there, because everyone else has LLM too.
Copywriting struggles with the issue that businesses know they need it, but they don't value it. It's absolutely shocking to see how poorly companies, and governments, communicate and no amount of AI/LLM usage will change it. For decades it's been neglected and relegated to "cover my ass"- writing.
The majority of AI deployment in businesses could have been avoided, if more attention had been placed on good communication. LLMs don't yield better communication or corporate writing, just more of it, because no one in business seems to understand the value or have the ability to recognize good writing.
I am not a writer but I do have to write a lot for work. The person who used to edit things for me has not been replaced, and I am expected to use AI. It is very good, but it's not all the way there. I am now left to decide whether to take the time to do it right or to go back to doing what I actually get paid to do. I wish my organization realized how important both sides of that decision tree are: we really ought to be careful about how readers perceive what we put out there, AND this isn't my job and we should have someone who's even better than me at this.
But this is an old trend with technological developments. Thanks to e-mail, most people handle much or all of their own correspondence. There used to be specialized staff for that. They were very good at it! But they were shown the door once they ceased to be strictly necessary, and now we all waste a bunch of time fiddling with Outlook instead of doing our actual work.
No, that is not what I meant. No replacement for the person who left the organization has been hired. It would be inaccurate to say that they were "replaced" by AI, insofar as we had no plans to get rid of them if they had not decided to leave.
> It's absolutely shocking to see how poorly companies, and governments, communicate and no amount of AI/LLM usage will change it.
Thank you for saying the first part. It truly boggles the mind to see how badly most organizations communicate, even those with professional staff tasked with communications.
Regarding the second part: AI/LLM usage will lead to improvements for some people/organizations, if only for the simple reason that it removes barriers to communications. All of a sudden city hall or a third-tier supplier can quickly update their websites in multiple languages, process email communications more quickly, and empower staff who weren't good writers.
That's the part I question. You have to be a really good communicator to put yourself in the place for the reader and adjust your language to your target audience. So much of "professional" communication fails because the language assumes that the recipient is knowledgeable or even just interested. If you can't communicate effectively on your own, I doubt that you can prompt the LLM to do it for you. It's going to be very much like development, if you're a skilled developer, LLMs are a massive boost to your productivity, but if you can't code, you're just producing garbage.
AI is going to produce an increase in communication, but that is not what we need. We need better and more targeted communication. AI doesn't need to help with the targeting, we can already do that, and do it cheaper than an LLM, and again, I don't believe the majority of people are able to prompt the LLM to generate better communication, because they don't know what that looks like.
Equity trading is not zero sum. There are real businesses and assets behind the equities they represent that have actual value and produce actual money.
Derivatives (options, futures, swaps, etc) are a zero sum market, there is always a winner and a loser necessarily because the contracts have an expiration date.
The same is not true for trading equities, they are not zero sum. There are dividends, buybacks, companies will sometimes spin off a part or parts as separate companies that you get newly issued shares of stock from (GE splitting into parts is a recent example), public companies get taken private at a premium to the market price, etc.
Futures are zero sum, but can also be a win for both sides, because what they gain is stability.
"I will buy y tons of corn from you in April for £x" - now I don't have to worry about how much my corn will cost and you don't have to worry about what your income will be.
The market has been heavily engineered and gamed to be positive sum. But sometimes I wonder could it turn out to be negative sum on certain timescales. That is that overall money would be lost on markets.
It can certainly be negative sum for a generation at a time, say 20 years. The US stock market has the good fortune of not doing that in a long time but if you look around the world for example Japan these periods are not hard to find.
theoretically equity trading is about distributing stonks most optimally so that productive companies get more and less productive ones get less, improving productivity of society as a whole
LLM can't have legitimacy in doing things to human beings, because it's impossible for LLM to have political legitimacy. Political legitimacy in modern societies is already a vicious zero-sum game with a tiny elite having any in the first place, none will be given to objects. Mental health is inextricably linked with violence and political legitimacy therefore, so the triage lacking efficacy or not doesn't even matter - it doesn't have legitimation. The violence inherent in triage is not justified.
Being a high-performing sort of peep is radically contingent on situation, context and the fit of the peep and the environment. So saying, ontologically, that someone is a 10x or in this case an even more foolish 100x engineer is not a coherent statement about a person that can exist: it's like saying someone is ontologically fluent in the language of the country they are in. What country are they in? Are they in startup-land, enterprise-blub-land, tech-major-land, make-actual-touchable-things-and-build-software-for-it-land, what?
As Nassim Taleb puts it, you often get gluts that aren’t followed by shortages, but it’s very rare to get a shortage that’s not followed by a glut.
(from the article)
I think this is also politically contingent upon the general world grand suppression of demand going on because nobody in a central bank really takes the employment mandates they often have seriously whereas they all take the inflation suppression thing really seriously (quite rational - look at what happened to Turkey)
It's like the progression from manual labor as a society to mass automation of everything physical. Even construction workers have to go to the gym. You'll have to do gym things with the mind, too, now. But gym things are not actually manual labor - the task is to find something you can do reliably that helps, rather than get productive things done.
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