Rob Cyran

I was at a fancy energy junket and the divide between the politicians/consultants and actual energy industry people was exactly knowing the lag time on a gas plant.

Good point! Number of one person households also doubled to nearly 30% so not sure how it all washes out.

Suspect it can’t go much higher and this will eventually be solved by more building and negative population growth

Median US home cost 2.9X median wage when my parents bought their first home in 1965. Median home today is 6.3X median wage.

The President of United States firing the commissioner of the statistics bureau because the unemployment numbers are not good reminds me of that classic Stalin moment, executing the statisticians because they reported too many deaths the 1937 census

www.jstor.org/stable/2639947

These ideas are shamelessly stolen from Mrs C who is teaching adolescent psych. Any errors because I’ve simplified it are mine.

A lot of popular kids are actually sort of disliked. And those lower in pecking orders will be mean to others so as to climb or at least not fall lower.

When people talk of popularity (especially in high school) you have to distinguish between 1) because people actually like the person 2) because people are afraid of them because they exert power, often by being mean.

I was only ok in maths, but I gather from speaking to people who operate on far higher planes that they often have an extraordinary ability to think in images.

I just love the doodles in her presentation on her proof

I am an economist and I commented to a friend that while I’m not going to reflexively second guess the data (not least of all because these people are too stupid to fake it convincingly - if they cook it, it’ll be obvious ), l am going to do some light backchecking, like what I used to do with China

Government data is a critical input for companies making CapEx committments fwiw

I don't know much about how emerging markets trade, but I'm pretty sure a forward PE of 23 on stocks and a 4.2% yield on 10yr sovereign isn't typical.

Any attempt to rig jobs numbers won't work. Once data is viewed as unreliable, people disregard it, and assume the reality is worse. In the 2008 financial crisis, people assumed most marks were optimistic. People assumed everything held by unreliable narrators was toxic waste, even if it wasn't.

There's a ton of stuff in DC that is run on trust and norms. That's all burned down and needs to be replaced

It's the same question the users of scientific data (pharma companies, insurers etc) faced with the takedown of data from other govt. agencies. It's just incredibly inefficient for the private sector to do so - it's a pure public good, and users may be tempted to be free riders.

Instead of a Minsky Moment, we have an Erodgan Event with Trump firing the head of BLS head

Disappearing US data dims economic outlook Every industry relies on government facts and figures, some of which Donald Trump is purging. Heavy users generated $750 bln of revenue in 2022, growing their share of GDP by 50% in a decade. If offic...

www.breakingviews.com/considered-v...

This was predictable from the moment the govt started talking down scientific data - in fact I said so in a column in January.

Markets will just love the idea of unreliable govt data.

Came here to say same thing! He was a plant geneticist before getting back into music

Calling a lump of coal “she” is the weirdest part.

Gonna be some cool experiments in the desert with the cheap electricity, no interest, weird project incentives, etc.

So far!

AI lottery-ticket scramble sparks an R&D spiral The artificial intelligence race will be won with money. Technology giants frequently tout their vast and rising spending on chip-stuffed data centers, the silicon brains powering chatbots, with Meta ...

Meta's hiring is also just bonkers - R&D up 23% to $13bn. Here's something I wrote on the R&D splurge, which is the often overlooked cousin of big tech's capex boom. www.breakingviews.com/columns/cons...

So Microsoft just added $273bn of market cap and saw its earnings grow 22%. Still astonishing to see a company of this size growing at this pace.

One amusing thing to do is to look at a histogram of valuations for unicorns. Lots of clustering exactly at $1bn, like men's heights on a dating site exactly at 6 feet.

Besides whether true, lots of unknown parameters - speed, rate of acceleration, length at which improvement could be maintained.

But if this is happening, should be incredibly bullish for wealth creation (assuming we survive). Hence the interesting disconnect in market not moving.

"Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves. The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight." Ignoring whether Zuck's comment is true, it's interesting that the market did not react to his comment

Zuck runs Meta, which is what he renamed Facebook when he realized the Metaverse was the greatest opportunity ever, and into which he pumped tens of billions of dollars to develop weird cartoon avatars.