New Podcast:

Super Bowl Talk

with Alan Seslowsky

Excerpt:

The fiat system's last stand?

Just donated blood today to shed some iron and it occurred to me how every medical system always needs blood, they're always out there begging for it, and yet at the same time people need blood tests, and in the US at least they cost a fortune. Why not if you need routine bloodwork, you just pop in donate a pint, and they take the first vial full and process the bloodwork? Every blood drive should offer free HBA1C, triglycerides, insulin, HDL, vitamin D, etc. Two birds one needle.

Fast crash > slow bleed IMO. Much more likely to snap back violently.

Best stock I ever bought was DYOR. Really paid off big the last six years.

So our fridge was leaking, took a photo of the model, uploaded it to AI, told me to unscrew the panel, pull it off and run a hair dryer on the drain until the ice melted and that shit actually worked.

Was thinking about time and how we know whether one event preceded or followed another. Like there’s nothing axiomatic about the words on this screen succeeding my typing them. I could dictate them and type them afterwords for the hell of it. But in some cases we know what came first and what came second, for example, a whole egg and a splattered one. The whole egg MUST precede the splattered one. The splattered one can never reassemble into the whole. That’s because the splattered egg is more disordered (has more entropy) and the arrow of time is essentially increasing entropy. But biological systems in some ways undercut that because while it’s trivial to grasp the whole egg came before the splattered one, it’s hard to say whether it came before the chicken.

Just got the results of a blood test, A1C was 5.1, down from 5.5, and this after eating a TON of fruit, ice cream and dried fruit the last few months. I exercise a lot and fast/intermittent fast, but lowest its been in 10 years, and been eating more unrefined sugar than ever. Very strange (and good).

Logged out of Twitter today. Algo is hurting my brain, like I ate too much Halloween candy.

Put this behind the paywall on my substack, but figured I'd post for free on nostr: Super Bowl 60 I haven’t felt as strongly about a Super Bowl pick since 2014 when the record-setting Peyton Manning Broncos took on the Legion of Boom/peak Russell Wilson Seahawks. Here’s a video of that prediction from 12 years ago. Most of you know my pick already, but I’m putting a paywall on this as a differentiator for my paying subscribers. Believe it or not, they really exist, and every now and then I need to provide some value that’s not freely available to everyone. Super Bowl LX Patriots +4.5 vs Seahawks (45.5) Before I looked at the line, I expected it to be about seven. The Seahawks had just beaten a Rams team that’s tough on both sides of the ball and blown out a 49ers team that was competitive all year. The Patriots benefited from the easiest regular season schedule in the league, drew the Chargers who were missing their entire offensive line, the Texans in a weather game where CJ Stoud had five turnovers and the Broncos in another weather game without their starting quarterback. They happen to represent the AFC, but even today, the Bills would be favored against them on a neutral field as would the Broncos with a healthy Bo Nix. The other trend I’ve documented at length is that elite defenses tend to overperform expectations in the Super Bowl. One can form theories as to why this is, but the examples are overwhelming from the underdog Seahawks crushing Manning’s Broncos to the 2016 Broncos (underdogs) stifling Cam Newton’s 15-1 Panthers to the 2000 Ravens to the 2002 Bucs (underdogs) to the 2020 Bucs who took apart Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs. Even the Giants two improbable wins over Tom Brady were largely due to a defense (though not highly ranked on the year) that was loaded with edge rushers and playing out of its mind in the playoffs. For whatever reason, if there’s a Super Bowl, and one team has an elite defense, that team tends to win and cover. But is the Seahawks defense elite? Let’s look at the numbers. Sorted by yards per play, the Seahawks (4.6) were second only to the Broncos (4.5). And they did this despite playing the Rams (6.2 YPP, 1st) twice. The Patriots defense was middle of the pack (5.2 YPP) despite getting the Jets (4.4 YPP, 29th) twice and other bottom-10 offenses like the Browns (32nd), Raiders (31st), Saints (27th), Panthers (26th) and Bucs (24th). And the Texans, who they saw in the playoffs, were 23rd, the Chargers 21st and the Broncos 16th, and that was with Nix, not Jarrett Stidham. Essentially, the Patriots defense is average at best. On offense, the Patriots were second at 6.2 YPP, but the Seahawks were fourth at 5.9 YPP, and given the disparate competition, I’ll call that a wash. But as I mentioned, for whatever reason in the Super Bowl, even one of the all-time offenses, Peyton Manning’s 55-TD pass Broncos, got smoked by an elite defense. Defense really does seem disproportionately to win championships. Seahawks 34 - Patriots 19

Listened to about half of the @jack mallers pod, and something clicked for me. The Yen blows up, people are worried the Japanese who own $5T in US assets might be forced sellers, so they flee into a neutral reserve asset (gold). If Japan dumps UST and stocks, gold is protection. So gold (and silver) moons, but that trade gets crowded. If only there were another neutral reserve asset available at a discount.

Theory: banks are behind the dip to thwart MSTR, Coinbase and stable coins from eating their lunch ahead of the regulation.

It's dumb to lie about anything, but I can at least understand someone lying when they think they'll get away with it. But people lie even when they have to know they'll get caught! It's hard for me to understand that mentality, so much so that I almost believe them except that it's happened so many times I've just gotten more skeptical of everyone.

Asked the free version of Claude (and Grok) to build me a fantasy baseball cheat sheet. I gave it some complex parameters (I used to do this for a job), and both failed badly. The task involved aggregating two separate projection systems for hitters and pitchers. Classifying and z-scoring the players by position relative to the size of the league and aggregating it with market prices for those players on a separate spread sheet. It outputted junk. When I spotted the errors, it correct the ones I spotted, re-worked it, outputted more junk. AI is great for figuring out why my model of fridge is leaking water, but terrible for complex (and this isn't THAT complex) tasks. Maybe the paid versions are better? WTF? I was told we had AGI!

The release of the Epstein Files is good and all, but for the love of God, just put some people in prison already.

Had a crazy thought this morning. Was thinking about how it had been six years since the start of the covid madness, and about how everything is fake, and if everything we hear is fake, maybe history is mostly fake, but then maybe so is my understanding of time, and maybe it hasn't been "six years," that's also a psyop.