onfocus

"The problem with this description isn't just that it's wrong. It's that the AI is eliding an important reality about many loans: that if you pay them down faster, you end up paying less interest in the future. In other words, it's feeding terrible financial advice directly to people trying to improve their grasp of it."

Our unevenly distributed AI future is terrible already! Update (1/23): And who cares about copyright?

"To ignore Musk is to sacrifice the precious clicks that a new Musk prediction will inevitably garner. Thus a for-profit tech journalism website faces a conflict between its financial self-interest and its integrity. In a time when it’s tough for media outlets to survive, it’s hard to turn down the clicks."

Good rant. Bullshit pays for the media (among others) but causes significant problems for society. Seems like an intractable problem.

"A few decades ago, physicists got involved in studying inequality. They normally study the physical world – like how two balls might interact when they hit each other. But they started using their methods to study economics – a field now dubbed econophysics. Instead of looking at how two balls interact, they looked at how two people might interact in a transaction, and then modeled how that might play out on a large scale. This helped them model wealth distribution."

This is a very entertaining article about an economic exercise called the Yard-sale model that helps visualize wealth distribution.

"Others may argue that with so much money involved, the bad guys will find another way. I strongly disagree. There are only three existing mechanisms capable of transferring a $5 million ransom—a bank-to-bank transfer, cash or cryptocurrencies. No other mechanisms currently exist that can meet the requirements of transferring millions of dollars at a time."

More fuel for the anti-crypto fire.

"Exxon Mobil broke records with its profits in the third quarter, raking in $19.66 billion in net income. The Irving, Texas company said Friday that it booked $112.07 billion in quarterly revenue, more than double the revenue it received last year during the same period."

record profits? in this economy?

"So far, even as the U.S. and U.K. have ramped up sanctions on more than 100 Russian individuals and entities, these assets of the country’s elite -- which can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars each -- have avoided any direct hit. So too have their high-end real estate holdings, which in London range from Chelsea penthouses to Highgate mansions."

Elite impunity is the problem.

"Matt Masterson, a former senior U.S. cybersecurity official who tracked 2020 election integrity for the Department of Homeland Security, said Powell’s fundraising success demonstrates one reason so many people continue to spread falsehoods about the 2020 election: It can bring in cash."

The Big Lie is so profitable that fines won’t even make a dent in it. Only criminal charges will slow it down. I’m not holding my breath.

"The main reason for the big increase in total wage and salary income is that 5,675,000 Americans who were unemployed when this year began had found new jobs by November. With support from the rounds of pandemic stimulus enacted in December 2000 and January 2021, the jobless rate fell from 6.3 percent last January to 4.2 percent in November, or by one-third over 11 months. Following the Great Recession, it took six years for the jobless rate to fall by one-third."

Democrats can't get a message out. Even if all mass media outlets are owned by Republicans (they are) there should be a way to interrupt the media cycle with this kind of news. Instead we just hear about how terrible the economy is over and over.

"But the staggering rise in their gains contrasts with the economic devastation of millions of Americans, amid soaring unemployment and evictions, drawing attention to issues of inequality and distribution of wealth. In fact, the $360 billion increase in top billionaire wealth approaches the $410 billion the U.S. government is spending on the latest round of $1,400 stimulus checks, passed with the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package this week."

huh, it's almost like they should pay more taxes to help out the struggling country their businesses operate in.

"Companies issue stock to fund projects, stocks go up because investors think companies have good projects to fund, companies use their stock price to recruit employees and pay for mergers and make decisions about what projects to pursue in the real world. I don’t know, I feel like a moron typing all of this. But I just have to type it! Think of how GameStop’s board must feel! The market is telling them something, but it is hard to hear what it’s saying through its maniacal laughter."

Fascinated by this story of market manipulation not by the usual suspects.

Update: Now small investors can’t buy GameStop stock. Free market?

"The study concluded that 'lifting [eviction] moratoriums amounted to an estimated 433,700 excess cases and 10,700 excess deaths' between March 13 and September 3. The infections and fatalities occurred across '27 states that lifted eviction moratoriums' during the study period."

This is what our entire national conversation should be right now. Where is congress?

“It took us ten years — between 2009 and 2019 — to create 22 million jobs. And we’ve lost 30 million jobs in two months.”

This is a tough read but it sure seems like we can expect a long, rough road ahead.