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greyenlightenment

investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...

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User ID: 68

greyenlightenment

investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...

2 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 18:26:17 UTC

					
				

				

				

				

				

					

User ID: 68

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Domestic brands are not thriving, but not doing that badly either . I think the post-2013 era big, luxury trucks and SUVs, which have high markups and became especially popular post-Covid, saved them from certain demise in the early to mid 2000s. Japanese brands cannot compete on size.

This isn't true. The stock prices of the Big 3 have limped along. GM, once the 2nd most valuable U.S. company, now has a market cap only 2% the size of NVIDIA. And, if the Big 3 haven't gone bankrupt again, it's only by jettisoning high-paid union labor. Michigan, once a well-off state, now ranks 39 out of 50 in household income, falling well behind former hick states like Texas and North Carolina.

A lot of this can be explained by valuation, which is not the same as earnings. Tech companies tend to trade at higher valuations/multiples compared to auto.

The big news this weekend was that Trump had a rally and said that, should he not be elected, the U.S. auto industry would be overrun with cheap Chinese imports. He used the word "bloodbath".

This is smart rhetoric by Trump to help win those swing voters , like Michigan. Similar to wall and other promises, not much will come of it should he win though.

Trump to his credit does not flip flop too much on abortion. He has never been pro-life, and will not cave to this issue despite pressure from religious organizations. Trump is right to ignore this issue and focus on immigration and the economy, as is Richard Hanania that abortion hardliners turn off moderates.

People on twitter shit on woke American universities and lowered academic standards in the humanities, and rightfully so, but other countries have different but possibly even worse problems too-like massive amounts of academic fraud that goes unpunished or ignored. This includes plagiarism, auto-generated papers, and citation rings. Same for STEM, which is not immune to this trend of dilution seen elsewhere. I have evidence of citation rings on the arXiv computer science categories, in which there there seems to be very little value or research being produced--just authors citing each other's weak papers and collaborating in the production of said papers to pad CVs. This way more common in the computer science section compared to those 'soft' humanities, in which it can still be reasonably assumed that the putative authors still write their own papers without needing 10+ co-authors for a 10 page paper with 50 citations. It is ridiculous.

compared to being in jail for rest of your life? that is probably worse for your kids

you only know those who get caught, i guess. Not uncommonly the feds will take over mixers or dark markets to see the money flow. The govt. is very dogged though.

Monero is fine if your adversary is not that determined or does not have much resources. The feds however have demonstrated some capability at tracing Monero. Criminals do this and they are still caught. They use all sorts of strategies, like you describe, of mixing through Monero, other chains, back to Monero, etc. Of course, we only hear about the guys who get caught. It may be possible there is some way to do it.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-men-charged-operating-25m-cryptocurrency-ponzi-scheme

Saffron and Mazzotta also allegedly conspired to obstruct official proceedings by concealing assets, concealing or destroying evidence, and falsifying records. The defendants also allegedly conspired to conceal the source and location of victims’ cryptocurrency investments through various means, including using methods known as “blockchain hopping” and through services known as “mixers” or “tumblers” that are designed to prevent cryptocurrency tracing.

A sufficiently determined adversary can trace the origin of coins passed through tumblers. Also, tumbers can 'dirty' crypto by mixing them with fraudulent coins, making them blacklisted in the processes by merchants who refuse to accept tumbled coins.

There is evidence federal agencies have reconstructed Monero transactions. Monero is better but still has holes. https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-seizure-record-doj-crypto-tracing-monero/

sorry, i meant to post this in culture war. I originally made a brief post and then i kept adding to it and hit submit before realizing i had posted it in the Friday thread.

It can be traced. the only fresh bitcoin is coins direct from miner or major exchange.

this is what an NFT accomplishes . it is why it has been accused of being used for money laundering.

But the way that modern KYC / transaction analysis tools have advanced makes it much more difficult to hide the spending of this money than ever before.

exactly. gold arguably would be better

oh hey I bought a hard drive on ebay with an old wallet on it so I put it in my coinbase account...the options are endless,

nope. the blockchain can reveal where it came from

Standards of living overseas are not that bad. A low per-capita GDP is negated to some extent by greater purchasing power in dollars, so your ill-gotten gains go very far. Those countries have electricity, internet access, plumbing, cars, public transport, airport, etc. It's not like Somalia or something.

Most of the people that were recruited as double agents in the 50s and 60s, certainly in higher-IQ positions, really believed. They believed they were serving global revolution, serving a superior system, and that the sooner the USSR outcompeted the West and the West had its revolution, the better. Many genuinely believed the above would happen in their lifetime, very soon even, such that even if they were discovered and as such either imprisoned or forced to officially defect and flee, they would return home before long.

nowadays high-IQ tech-focused people have better career options than espionage or working for federal agencies. Second, the Cold War is long over. Third, the technology has gotten way better at detecting espionage. Everything is traced. Canary drops are major problem. The biggest concern is not govt. agents leaking stuff, but instead tech or defense company employees doing the leaking.

Intelligence is like opsec: you only have to be wrong once and the enemy only has to be right once. You can get everything right but overlook a key detail. A case could be made that 911 and the Iraq War were failures: in the former missing the threat of Bin Laden (an NBA player, of all people, warned of the threat of Bin Laden in 1996) or failing to stop the hijackers, and regarding Iraq, a garbage-in-garbage-out problem.

US intelligence publicly told everyone that Russia was about to invade Ukraine weeks before it happened

Given that they got Iraq and 911 wrong, this does not prove competence, rather that they are hit and miss.

Of course, as you point out, successful intelligence by definition being covert does not leave any footprint, whereas intelligence failures are public owing to the consequences of said failure.

Who else finds the stupidpol people or position to be inconsistent? The premise sounds good in theory: disaffected leftists and Marxists who believe that identify politics distracts from workers' issues and protects corporations. Fair enough. But I have found that in the comments it's constant shit-tests and questioning the motives or loyalty of others, either as not being insufficiently Marxist or , being a covert liberal, etc.

Or, second, if you accidently slaughter one of their sacred cows, even if it's otherwise consistent with the idpol or pro-workers position. For example, I argue that climate change is a distraction from workers' issues, but this steps on the feet of leftists who believe climate change is equally important or a crisis. So which is it? If liberal elites use climate change as a pretext for power, all while the cost or responsibility of fixing climate change is placed on non-elites (elites will not be living in pods or having to reduce their footprint in any meaningful sense), much like identity politics, then is not consistent to oppose the climate change narrative too?

They come off overall as disagreeable argumentative people. It's like they want to be mad at someone or something, and no one can ever be good enough or live up to some unobtainable ideal of being correctly anti-identity politics. They have become the very thing they oppose. The experience is like walking on egg shells . It's like this with other political niches too, not to only pick on them.

Regarding climate change, I am agnostic on the issue, but I don't think the left is being intellectually honest. It's a fallacious argument, specifically, the argumentum ad ignorantiam, in that any deviation of 'normal' weather or temperatures can be interpreted as evidence of climate change, which makes it impossible to ever falsify it. The burden of proof is shifted to skeptics to disprove climate change, which is impossible to do if anything can be summoned as evidence of climate change. It used to be called global warming; when that failed to stick, it was rebranded as climate change.

That seems like too much blood

So many links. There is a lot of stuff that can happen. Yet I don't think the worst fears have come anywhere close to happening. Deep fakes are a problem but so far only for financial gain than politics. Google's Gemini error was more comedic relief than a threat to civilization. The SEC and other agencies are going to adapt, like they have to Bitcoin, the world wide web, and other technologies. AI generated content is still relatively easily detected by people who are astute enough. But this may change as the technology improves. I think the productivity or economic penetration of AI will not live up to expectations though. So far the only adoption Dall-e has seen are those obvious AI-generated images on everyone's Substack blog.

It's more like answer to the argument that a conspiracy is not possible because it would require too many people to keep a secret, and the example of hedge funds is evidence otherwise of the ability of a lot of people to keep secrets.

He made a lot of promises and initiatives that were half-assed or had little hope of happening, like promising to stop social media censorship, the wall, etc. but this is typical of politicians. Firing James Comey was an unforced error though.

However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again.

The left, initially blindsided by Trump, turned it their advantage in 2016-2020, starting with the explosion pronoun and gender issues in 2017 , impeachment and FBI investigations in 2019, and then ending with Covid restrictions and mass social media censorship in 2020. I don't think it will be as bad if Trump wins again. The difference now is the left no longer has as much control over the narrative, as seen on Twitter now with Elon's takeover. I think many of these issued are played out.

They are rare. Today's autocrats have nothing on the autocrats of 50+ years ago who imprisoned or murdered large swaths of their citizens and political opposition with impunity. Social media, smart phones, and the 24-7 news cycle means much more scrutiny on world leaders. And also the rise of the US as a 'world police'.

But large conspiracies are not impossible. Many conspiracies continue to exist even when all or most information is publicly available. For example, there was a large scale effort to convince the public that Covid had a zoonotic origin. Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn't. But evidence in support of a lab leak was deliberately denigrated by nearly all authority figures. There was no need to maintain a secret channel of communication. Once consensus was established, peopled picked up the signals to stay on side, and ones who didn't were punished. The best evidence in favor of a lab leak (that the pandemic started near a lab doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses) was never secret. It was just not spoken of.

Yup a notable example of a large scale conspiracy are the trading strategies used by Renaissance Technologies, which after many decades and hundreds of employees and considerable speculation online are still a secret. Not a single one of those employees spilled the beans to the public, thanks to NDAs and financial incentives to stay quiet. It is indeed possible for large groups of people to keep secrets for a long time.

I doubt even the most principled libertarian would be able to resist spending tens of billions of dollars forever.

Some of the most principled libertarians worked in academia or were writers, the opposite of or private enterprise or cutthroat corporate capitalism. So it does not seem implausible the most principled libertarians would not spend the money.