The pace for this week’s episode was largely set by Jesse’s Metaviews piece: “The algorithm wants you to send nudes” and Charle’s gambling analogy “The Fed Casino is in Flames, But Please Continue Gambling”.
We talked about The Zero Interest Rate Trap, of which Mark is making the audiobook and interviewed those authors yesterday but that isn’t up yet. Also Mark’s piece on Toxic Virtue.
Jesse mentioned Sciencemag as non-polarizing, non-partisan repository of science and medical data.
What if most of what we’re measuring doesn’t matter? That would suck. It would also explain quite a lot.
We wound up back on systemic inequality, this time looking at the difference between how small business owners go bankrupt (suddenly, all at once, with their entire net worth wiped out) vs how the exec suite of publicly traded behemoths do (slowly, with lots of stock options and bonuses along the way, topped off with a fed bailout).
The days of cheap travel are over. Is what we think. We could be wrong, but we may be headed into an era where all the things we were able to externalize out of our cost structure may be forced to be priced-in from now on. The result could be a massive restructuring of the “cap table” of our entire society.
Zerohedge had their account restored by Twitter just in time to be demonetized by Google. Mark worries about the power payment companies yield over dissident opinions, Jesse says we’re 20 years too late.
We talked about Entropy-As-A-Service, which is a thing, but turns out after the show that it’s not the same thing as what we were discussing here. Entropy-As-A-Service as it stands now is a product to provide truer randomness to cryptographic and other applications that need it. What we were talking about was akin to digital jetsam we would intentionally emit to thwart the marketing algos.
Episode Transcript: AxisofEasy9_transcript
