Canada lowered tariffs on Chinese EVs to similar levels of a few years ago (up to a limited number, and still 6% tariffs rather than zero). US politicians are angry about about it, despite the fact that the US literally had/has a free trade agreement with Canada involving cars and many other products. In the US, we keep dunking on our neighbors to the north about how lefty they are, since indeed they’re a lot more lefty than us, when ironically this decision by Canada is historically a conservative position: freer competition and lower taxes, and yet that’s the one we’re most angry about. It's an example of how quickly perceptions can shift, the Overton window can shift, political parties ran rotate policies, etc. Everything becomes about optics and tribes. A few years ago if someone said, "So Canada used to put 100% punitive tariffs on Chinese EVs, and now they're going to lower those a lot so that Canadians can buy more affordable EVs if they wish, and China will do the same for some Canadian stuff," most people would be like, "well, good."

You ever read a book in one sitting? I did that with the 1979 sci fi novella Electric Forest by Tanith Lee last night when going to bed. Ended up getting to sleep a bit later than intended because of it. Anyway, here’s a review. In a far future world where humanity exists on hundreds of planets, most people are genetically engineered to be beautiful, and not just the wealthy, but everyone. However, some rare accidents happen. Magdala was born crippled and ugly in a beautiful world. Given up by her prostitute mother to a state-run orphanage, she was mercilessly bullied by other kids. Now in her 20s, she works a menial job, lives in a tiny apartment, and has no friends or partner. She has considered plastic surgery, but it’s too expensive, and for her full-body condition it wouldn’t be enough to fix the issues anyway. Thus, she lives in a perpetual state of loneliness and melancholy. Then one day, a scientist shows up and says he can make her beautiful. And as a reader will expect, it certainly does come with a catch. What follows is a generally social-intrigue type of plot, where beautiful-Magdala has to do various things for her benefactor. Overall, I’m glad I read it, but cannot really say I liked it. I’ve been meaning to read more of this era of sci fi. The prose was quite good. The opening premise was interesting. I genuinely couldn’t really predict where the plot would go. A few individual scenes were great. But I did not particularly like the characters, nor did I view them as making understandable choices. Of course, plenty of characters in fiction make bad choices, but when well-characterized, those bad choices are understandable, like we see the cause and effect, we know the character enough to be like, “yep, they’d do that.” I mostly didn’t feel that here. I did not like the details/choreography of the one action scene (I mean, if you have exactly one, then do it really well), nor did I like the epilogue.

Back in 2018-2020, I wrote a lot about how the upcoming issue of fiscal dominance would contribute heavily to populist politics. For example, 2020: "Populist politics then become more commonplace, and while some strands of it can be quite rational based on countering prevailing policies that are rightly viewed as needing reform, there are also more dangerous or extreme strands that begin to emerge as well, particularly if those initial and more rational strands go unaddressed. Policymakers historically face the choice of doing something to alleviate the financial burdens of the broad population, or risking outright revolution."

Lyn Alden

A Century of Fiscal and Monetary Policy: Inflation vs Deflation

Published: September 2020 There has been a lot of discussion lately about how effective monetary policy can be. In my view, the big debate between ...

During eras of fiscal dominance, the state tends to take more control of the economy, tends to restrict capital movement, and tends to limit personal freedom, whether it's a right or left government. And they drum up as much public support as possible with a narrative. But witnessing it playing out first hand has still been a sight to behold. I could jot it all down on paper but then admittedly have still been surprised at times as it keeps playing out. And we see both left and right varieties occurring. For folks who want to keep government pretty limited where possible, these past six years have been absolutely wild to watch in practice. So many people forget the basic principle that any power you give your current government, a future government that you don't agree with can use that power against you. The poles of right and left keep drifting outward, and the horseshoe theory of politics is on full display as the two populist extremes are closer together than the moderates of each side are (but then ironically, some of those moderates also unite to oppose those extremes as well). So many people lose their minds and go full communist or full fascist. And then some normal things get labeled as extreme, so people who just believe in a handful of principles that were normal a few decades ago are like out in the wilderness now. And the centralized algos certainly contribute to it. As someone who has been active on social media for a long time, 2025 really stuck out to me, at least as much as 2020 did. I see people reorienting their positions so rapidly around new things in a sort of mass groupthink, I see people retweeting so many things that support their view despite being obvious AI slop or clearly false or out of context with just a 2-minute factcheck. Some real populist momentum waves build, and then centralized algos give them rocket fuel. Both the main wave, and the reactionary wave on the other side, are fueled by the algos for maximum engagement. When I interviewed @jack at the Oslo Freedom Forum back in 2024, he focused on algos affecting not just what people can say, but what people think. And in the year and a half since then, I think that has very much played out. There is an enormous premium these days for being able to recognize the algo's influence on you, and to continually factcheck and emotion-check yourself, take a breath and step back, touch grass, get sun, and assess what your foundational principles are.

You know what would be neat? Going back and reading some of George RR Martin's pre-Game of Thrones books. Anyway, I finished the sci fi novel Windhaven during lunch today, so here's a review. Martin co-wrote Windhaven with Lisa Tuttle in the 1970s. It was a series of three novellas, which where combined into a completed novel in 1981. It's a story about a woman, Maris, who is a flyer. The gravity on this world is lower, and the atmosphere thicker, and the world consists of islands separated by dangerous seas. This combo allows people to fly with specialized wings, and it's the best way to send messages, although there are limited numbers of wings (without the tech to make any more) and so flyers are in a special caste. The initial story follows Maris as she tries to change some of the caste dynamics. Specifically, wings are passed down through bloodlines regardless of skill or desire, whereas some argue that those with greater skill and desire should get the wings instead (especially because, whenever flyer crashes at sea, the wings are lost forever, and so bad flyer skill affects the whole world over time). Maris, as one might imagine, is highly skilled but lacks the bloodline, hence the problem. Without spoilers, the book then jumps forward in time, and looks at various ethical dilemmas. Sometimes changing one aspect of society for the better, introduces new problems people didn't expect. And then solving those problems can create other problems, and so forth. It's a really interesting set of socioeconomic dynamics to explore. There's no combat or on-page violence in the book (very little off-page as well), and the rating for the book is middling (basically anyone expecting Martin's Grimdark Game of Thrones type of stuff will be disappointed). But I think it was a very unique and quality novel that stands out vs many others I've read. It's more like, political intrigue across this island world, and the evolution of various personal relationships. My criticisms of the book are mainly around dialogue. Martin and Tuttle were early in their careers when this was written, and it's not as well written as later stuff. Characters, despite holding different positions on a given topic, generally all speak with the same matter-of-fact voice to each other. Higher-caliber writing tends to make character voice jump out of the page more. In contrast, a book like The Lies of Locke Lamora is pretty far on the other end of the spectrum, with character voice that just punches you in the face from the start. Most books are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, and I felt this was too far in the robotic/sameness end of it. The reason I found it is because Bookborn, a reviewer on YouTube, decided to read through Martin's entire backlog and said this was her favorite one, and arguably in her top five books of all time. While I wouldn't rank it like that personally, I definitely found it interesting, especially the second two thirds, and was curious to see the evolution of Martin's work over his career. There was also one particular sad thing in it that (the Ballad of Aron and Jeni) that made me tear up for a moment, and I was thinking about it for a while afterward.

The DOJ served the Fed with a subpoena and threatened Powell with a criminal indictment related to the Fed's expensive renovations. Powell, rather than releasing the minimal version of a statement that merely disagreed with the accusation, instead released a statement and video that pretty much went scorched earth, saying this isn't really about the renovations and is instead about the Fed's independent control of interest rates. Historically speaking, this is the biggest direct clash between the Fed and the Executive Branch since the 1940s/1950s.

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Statement from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell

Good evening. On Friday, the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas, threatening a criminal indictment related...

Rather than choosing their tribe based on shared principles, most people just reprogram their principles around whatever their tribe is doing.

Just rode with an uber driver who has a perfect 5.00 rating. Don’t think I’ve seen that before. It’s almost always 4.9 something. It was an older gentleman wearing a three piece suit, driving a Corolla. Super friendly. Basically the final boss of uber drivers.

I had to fly down south to help a relative with a health issue. I’m at a Cracker Barrel for the first time, since it’s adjacent to my hotel. The 50-something waitress is calling me “baby girl” when asking if I need anything. I texted my husband like, “there are apparently two people in the world comfortable enough to call me ‘baby girl’, you and this waitress.” Southern hospitality tends to stand out for those that are not familiar with it. A couple years ago, my husband and I went down to South Carolina for a wedding, stayed at a random hotel, and in the parking lot as we walked up to it, a random couple that was leaving the hotel said “how y’all doin?” In the warmest possible tone. Up north, that kind of thing is rare. We just pass each other in parking lots. That’s our way. So we were like, “uh, good…” ::awkward smile::

The USDA’s new food pyramid is pretty lit.

The ratio of AI slop posts across Twitter now is pretty wild.

The mega-flop episode in this last season of Stranger Things gave me a new marketing pitch for my upcoming sci fi novel:

You know what would be crazy? Just deciding to skip punctuation. Cormac McCarthy, the bestselling and Pulitzer-winning author of books like No Country For Old Men, The Road, and Blood Meridian, famously didn't like quotation marks, felt they cluttered the page, and so he didn't use them. When dialogue happens in his novels, there are no quotes around it, and you as the reader just have to figure out when a line is narration or dialogue. He also didn't use semicolons or exclamation points or certain other forms of punctuation. While he didn't exclude commas entirely, he did minimize them, and instead used extra "ands" in place of where many other authors would use commas. He used periods normally. His prose isn't my cup of tea, but there's no denying his success, and it goes to show that you can kind of just do things.

In the first Expanse book, Leviathan Wakes, there is a scene where a detective is looking through space port logs. There’s one ship called The Badass Motherfucker. It’s owned by the MYOFB Corporation (presumably, “Mind Your Own Fucking Business”). They don’t elaborate. The detective passes over it and eventually finds the ship he is after. This particular ship and corp never comes up again. I feel like we need a spinoff covering whatever the hell these guys are up to, lol.

I for one am grateful for the work of those who seek ways to make Bitcoin quantum-secure. I remember back in my freshman year of college, which would've been nearly twenty years ago now, hearing about quantum computers and thinking we might have them in a decade. When I first bought bitcoin, it was with the notion in mind that maybe one day quantum computers at scale would exist, that one day the Bitcoin network might have to upgrade for it, as it has updated in the past for other things. Bitcoin is resilient against many risks, but I've generally thought that to be one worth watching. I think some of the recent concerns about quantum are overdone. Bitcoin goes through seasons, and this is clearly quantum season. But it is true that some institutions and potential large buyers are worrying about bitcoin's quantum resistance, and thus its price can be impacted even if the software is not. This can pass, in time. And those who develop potential mitigation paths, that help figure out what the most efficient and resilient upgrades would be if they are needed, are doing good work on that front. Much like how some people are understandably spooked by just the risk of quantum (i.e. even if you believe there's a ~5% chance of it happening in some investable time horizon, that factors into your expected value analysis), others are understandably relieved by knowing that people are working on it and that mitigation paths do exist. And I'm glad they're doing that.

I've been slumping on my fitness this past month. It got cold, so I stopped my daily biking. Then I got sick, so I wasn't hitting my basement gym either. Then even when I recovered I just wasn't doing it. Best I was doing was walking outside to get some sun and fresh air. Yesterday I got back in. Stretches, push-ups, squats, bag-punching, deadlifts, dumbbell routines, and a few treadmill sprints. I'm super sore today, and my cardio is shit at the moment, but it feels great. If you've been slumping a bit this winter, I'm right there with you! Use today as a catalyst to get back in. You'll be glad you did.

Imagine if you won the lottery, but were in another state, and now had to get back to that state with the lottery ticket. If you were to somehow lose the ticket, you’d lose it all. Like carrying a single private key to a few thousand bitcoin in your pocket or something. Anyway, here’s a review of Night Moves by Jared Dillian. It’s a collection of 16 short stories about situations like that, and although they are drastically different from each other, I’d say the overall theme is “dark comedy slice-of-life”. Most are about some variation of death, addiction, sex, temptation, or compulsion. I’m primarily familiar with Dillian’s financial work- he’s a former Wall Street trader and a current financial newsletter writer. He’s also a DJ and fiction writer, which is the side of his work I’m less familiar with, until now. I usually read full novels rather than collections of short stories. And the majority of the novels I read tend to be fantasy or sci fi; basically stories about the past or the future. This one consists of short stories that are mostly set near the present day. The characters in the stories range from grungy teenagers to aging dentists, from up-and-coming weather forecasters to divorced ladies, from working professionals to homeless alcoholics, and everything in between. More than half could be classified as tragedies in the sense that you’re basically reading a slow-motion trainwreck happening. But tragedy is not the theme of the collection per se; some of them are quite constructive and happy. Others are kind of neutral and comical. And that keeps you guessing as you read- any given story might end happily or sadly, or somewhere in between. I found the writing to be clear and smooth, and was always happy to get to another story. I’d spend 10 minutes reading one between periods of work or exercise or something, as a mental reset. My mind would get to enter this other character’s weird life for a moment to see what problem or situation they’re dealing with. If I have to critique what was otherwise a great read, I’d say some of the stories ended rather abruptly or anti-climactically. In those cases I’d find myself wanting a few more pages of resolution. But that seems quite intentional, and basically the best critique an author could receive is that the reader wanted a bit more of what they were reading. If I were reading a 300+ page book that ended anti-climatically I’d be annoyed, but weird slice-of-life short stories ending anti-climactically is indeed like real life, and feels like the correct writing choice in these cases. Since this one was quite enjoyable, I’ll look to pick up one of his essay collections such as “Those Bastards” or “Rule 62” at some point.

Good morning. I’m bullish on Lightning, meanwhile quantum computing won’t matter here in the 2020s.

Just saw someone wearing a mask while driving alone in their car. In the year of our lord 2025.

Here's the "No BS" macro news for today. -The Fed projected, back in early 2024, that they would likely end balance sheet reduction around this time and transition toward gradually increasing their balance sheet in line with nominal GDP (so that banks' fractional reserve lending remains unaffected with current regulations). -It got pulled forward slightly, perhaps two or three months, by the government shutdown overfilling the Treasury cash account (i.e. sucking cash out of the broader financial system). -The Fed previously announced they would stop reducing their balance sheet. Today they said they would start gradually increasing it. Powell said the baseline is $20-$25 billion per month, but due to current liquidity shortages and April tax day (which drains liquidity), they plan to increase it by $40 billion per month through April (which afterward in May, conveniently, is when Powell will be replaced as chairman with a presumably more dovish chairman). -They're focusing on printing money to buy short-term duration Treasuries, not long-term. This is for the financial system, not economic stimulus per se, and so they won't be calling it QE. -The Fed will now be structurally expanding their balance sheet while inflation is above their own target. -This is a gradual print scenario. It's bullish for liquidity and liquidity-correlated assets, in general. It's not explosively bullish, but it does lean dovish. -Nothing stops this train.