What's going on in Sudan gets an order of magnitude less coverage than what's going on in other military hot spots of the world, despite being of similar magnitude. Perhaps I tend to think of it a lot because Sudan borders Egypt to the south. So it's geographically in my mind more tangibly. People can only get emotionally engaged about a handful of things. The world is too big and noisy for us to care about everything. That way lies madness. But it's still interesting which things do reach us, and rile us up. When violence gets covered heavily in the media, it's often said that it's about the numbers, the humanity of it. But in reality, conflicts at the intersection between major religions, major military powers, or where there is a lot of oil, are what get most of the coverage. If violence happens to people outside of that scope, it's often drowned out and ignored. Social media and algorithms are powerful. In a situation where it might be reasonable to care about something 2x or 3x as much as another thing due to geopolitical implications and such, social media can put it in front of you 200x or 300x as frequently, and thus make you care or think about it 200x or 300x more. The issue is fractal, and so it happens the same at smaller scales. In any given industry or community, there are certain topics that get an order of magnitude more coverage and discussion than a dozen other things of similar scale or importance. And then people get sucked into an echo chamber where they think the 3-5x things that are frequently in front of them, and that their mind is mostly focused on, are indeed the 3-5x most important things when in reality it's mostly the algorithm reinforcing itself, and reinforcing that aspect of human nature that moves in groups. Being able to sculpt your own algorithm is important, but equally it helps to be aware of the algorithm's influence in the first place. When you hear about something a ton, ask why. When you don't hear about something big very often, also ask why. ___ "Sudan plunged into a civil war in April 2023 after a vicious struggle for power broke out between its army and a powerful paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). It has led to a famine and claims of a genocide in the western Darfur region - with fears for the residents of city of el-Fasher after it was recently captured by the RSF. More than 150,000 people have died in the conflict across the country, and about 12 million have fled their homes in what the United Nations has called the world's largest humanitarian crisis."

Sudan war: A simple guide to what is happening

Sudan was thrown into disarray in 2023 when its army and a paramilitary group began a power struggle.

As long as borrowing stress remains elevated, many asset prices are likely to remain choppy. This is why the Fed is ending balance sheet reduction, but simply ending it is not necessarily sufficient. By 2026 they will likely go back to balance sheet expansion to put out this fire. Notably, it likely won't be very fast/large balance sheet expansion, but rather will be just enough to help settle this down, which makes a big difference.

What if humanity could find some alien tech and thus greatly accelerate its own technological progress? But what if that tech was hoarded by a small group of people? Anyway, here's a review of Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen. It's a 22nd century hard science space opera set in our solar system, written by a retired engineer. One of the more successful indie sci fi books in recent years. It's also one of the most successful books to have bitcoin in it; it's a small background role, but bitcoin is one of the leading types of money in the solar system. Marcus, an indebted down-on-his-luck asteroid miner (and secretly, a bit of a space pirate as of late, given how bad things have gotten) finds his ship taken over by a wealthy genetically modified corporate heiress named Miranda. She has bought his defaulting debt contract that his ship collateralizes, and has gained admin access over his ship's computer. And she knows he is secretly a space pirate, which altogether gives her multiple types of leverage over him. She wants him to take her on a mission to the edge of the solar system to do something she won't say, involving unimaginable treasure, and he has little choice but to go along with it. Secretly, however, he plots how to regain control of his ship as they go, because he recognizes how much of a suicide mission it is because of who guards the space out there. Pros: -The hard scientific realism in the book is great. The type that basically takes an engineer to write. No wonder he has endorsements from like, the co-founder of Autocad and such. It's also a smooth read, all from Marcus's perspective. -Although the story mostly takes place on one ship with a few characters, the worldbuilding is a solid start. I assume it'll be expanded later in the series. The technological situation and structure of society are very fleshed out relative to how little we actually see, given the tight setting. The world feels realistic and lived-in. -High nostalgia factor. Fans of Firefly and Cowboy Bebop, and more recently the Expanse, and all sorts of classic sci fi literature over decades, will find a lot of references or similarities in a good way. The author is very well-read on the genre. -The audiobook is pretty unique and great. Unlike most audiobooks, it has a full-cast production, meaning that each line of dialogue sounds like the person speaking it, rather than just one person reading a given chapter's narration and dialogue. I listened to this one rather than read it. You can only buy the audiobook on the author's website though, not Amazon/Audible. (Amazon/Audible have been kind of shitty to authors lately.) The other version of the book are available on Amazon. -AI gets a really good treatment here, and the third main character, an AI, is my favorite character in the book. -There's a lot of suspense throughout. Most of it is not really predictable how it's going to end since it doesn't follow a basic tropey structure. Even if you don't particularly like some of the characters (and indeed they're designed to be rather unlikable), you're likely to find yourself reading further to see what happens. Cons: -The book is about 500 pages, and I think 50+ could have been cut out of the middle to make it stronger. The dialogue between Marcus and Miranda gets rather repetitive after a while. And because of the limited setting (mostly on one ship), most of the worldbuilding is done via exposition by Marcus. So if readers hate "info dumps", they'll probably get annoyed at this. I personally don't really mind exposition as long as it's good, so this wasn't a dealbreaker for me (the "don't do exposition!" advice to authors is overdone in my view). I just think the middle could have used a trim. And although most of the book is not predictable, one aspect imo very much is, and that's where a lot of the repetition is. -There are some unnerving aspects/scenes in it. I can't really say what they are without spoilers. Let's just say being in Marcus's head for 500 pages isn't, uh, my cup of tea. The book is self-aware about it, though. It's an intentional choice to have put these unnerving aspects in, so it's not a con per se but it's more something that will put off some readers. And it's a little more understandable by the end. Overall, a unique story. And for the audiobook, I do think that over time more audiobooks will be made with this more complete type of cast. Audiobooks used to be very expensive and a small piece of the market, and only in recent years have they become very popular. As they become a bigger and bigger share of the fiction market up to some substantial percentage, I think more work will go into their quality and details.

The bond market has been getting a bit nervous about companies with a lot of AI capex ahead. Chart via BofA.

People have discussed how there's been a lot of bitcoin selling among 5+ year hodlers. What often gets left out of the discussion is that over time, more and more hodlers naturally age into being 5+ year hodlers. So, some long-term hodlers are selling, but that's part of more and more people becoming long-term hodlers. At 30%, the percentage of bitcoin that has been unmoved onchain for 5+ years is near its peak level.

Much of life comes down to trying to find the most workable point between two extremes. We do that for a lot of things at the individual level, the institutional level, and the sovereign level. Even Aristotle wrote about this thousands of years ago with the Golden Mean (e.g. that the virtue of courage is somewhere between the extremes of cowardice and recklessness, and not necessarily right in the middle). I think one of the hardest ones in today's age is the "tribal ignorance vs analysis paralysis" problem. On on hand, people are very emotional decision-makers, and then they also are hardwired to form into groups. Agreeing with each other on one thing often then comes with an overlay of other things to form basically a tribal culture around it, as people start to adapt the mannerisms and ideas of those they already partially agree with. This is an effective shortcut in some cases, basically like ancestral/cultural knowledge rather than having to figure out everything from scratch ("this person seems like he's doing well, and he does/thinks these 25 things, so maybe I should do/think those 25 things too"), but has its obvious shortcomings. Social media algorithms further amplify it as well, connecting people of similar tribes together across space and helping them build echo chambers around themselves, often unknowingly. On the other hand, human reason lets us apply logic and cold hard analysis to things. You can make an argument, and then spend equal time building up the strongest possible counterargument, fully understand your opponent's position in order to test your own position, see why a given thing often can have two rational people that disagree over it, etc. You can replace anecdotes with statistical analysis, you can compile tons of case studies, you can separate arguments themselves from the characteristics of those arguing them, etc. But then it often leads to a form of anti-tribalism which doesn't necessarily work well either: you become so aware of multiple perspectives that it's hard to commit to one. Your mind is so open that your brain falls out. You have so much data you barely know what to do with it. It plays a role in why academics are often not effective leaders, capable of getting a bunch of people to organize and achieve something specific. Ideally, the right balance on important things is to do a lot of research, steelman the major opposition positions to understand them properly, but then find the right point to put it to rest and make a firm decision. Knowing where that point is can be the hard part, akin to finding Aristotle's Golden Mean. That's the ideal to strive for, and likely impossible to reach most of the time. But there are still exercises one can do to get a bit closer to it. If someone finds themselves more commonly in that tribal mindset, then forming a habit to remind oneself to research and steelman an opponent's argument, and separate the argument from the person making the argument, can go a long way toward making better decisions. It puts a brake on making too many emotional, overconfident decisions. If someone finds themselves more commonly in the analysis paralysis mindset, then forming a habit to remind oneself to stop overanalyzing, go out and touch grass, pay attention to what your "gut" or "vibes" are telling you, and a make a decision you're willing to live with either way, can also go a long way. It puts an accelerator on your stalled condition. The key part, then, is having self awareness to see which direction you tend to err in more often. That allows you to nudge your baseline toward that more optimal point, even if you never do quite reach it.

I realized the other day that Wikipedia has an article for me now. It doesn't mention most of my work or Broken Money, but it does mention that nothing stops this train. 🤷

Lyn Alden - Wikipedia

Space operas set 20,000 years in the future and spanning half the galaxy are pretty cool. Anyway, here's a review of Demon in White, which I just finished. It's book #3 in the Sun Eater series, which is a 7-book epic space opera. The crazy thing about this series is that on the first page of book one, the narrator tells you how the whole 7-book series ends: the protagonist blows up a star, which genocides an entire race of evil aliens and kills billions of humans in that solar system including his own emperor, but saves the rest of humanity throughout the galaxy from that alien threat. So the whole series is basically a deadly serious version of, ::record scratch:: "I bet you want to know how the hell we got here, huh?" For worldbuilding, I'd give the series a 5/5 so far. It's not hard sci fi, in the sense that there is ample use of faster-than-light travel, "high matter swords" which have some similarities to light sabers, "Royce shields" which people and ships can shield themselves with against most projectiles, etc. The author himself views it more like science fantasy, although there's more of a tech focus than, say, Star Wars. Humanity has spread across about 40% of the galaxy, and although they can travel faster than the speed of light, it's not instantaneous, and instead takes years or decades to cross a big chunk of the galaxy and they cryo-freeze themselves during the trips (they travel 100s or in rare cases 1000s of times the speed of light). But what's cool about the worldbuilding is the culture. Kind of like Dune, AI was destroyed and outlawed long ago in a great war (and Earth was decimated by atomics in the process). The Sollan Empire, which is modeled after a blend of the British and Roman empires, spans millions of worlds. They operate with a conservative aristocratic culture, and are the most harsh against AI or cyborgs to preserve order, although their nobility are still genetically modified to live centuries and avoid most diseases. The Principalities of Jadd are culturally similar but managed to separate themselves and remain aligned with the empire, and they push their genetics a bit further. The Demarchy of Tavros is a somewhat egalitarian/communist culture that is more receptive to cyborg adaptations and computers. The Extrasolarians are basically anarcho-capitalists; they live on the edge of civilization and more fully embrace AI/cyborgs/computers and extensive body modifications to whatever extent is possible. And then there are the alien Cielcin, the main adversaries at war with humanity. There are also some god-like or cthulhu-like beings out in the vastness of space and time. The series explores the interactions between all these cultures and more. For writing quality, I'd also give it a 5/5. It's written in first person by the aristocratic main character, Lord Hadrian Marlowe, and has a rather sophisticated aspect to it. For pacing, I'd give it a 3/5, and that's a trade-off from the above point. Hadrian himself is wordy and melodramatic, and that colors his first-person writing of the story. So he'll make all sorts of historical or philosophical references in the middle of a fight, which makes the whole project feel reflective rather than in the moment. The books are long and could be cut by 20% or more if a more direct prose style was chosen. Plot/characters so far are a 4/5 in my view. The plot is interesting, and there's a huge array of interesting characters. Hadrian himself is very dynamic (the reader at times is not sure if they're supposed to like him or not), a cyborg named Valka is really unique, and then all sorts of supporting characters from emperors and cyborg gods to plebian soldiers round out a big cast. Sometimes the cast is too large so that otherwise interesting characters don't get as fleshed out as much as they could. And the author consciously embraces the "chosen one" trope, which can be polarizing from a plot perspective. Overall, I'd rate it 4/5. I've read Empire of Silence, Howling Dark, and now Demon in White. I would note that the first book, Empire of Silence, is a lot more setting-limited and character-focused than the others; it's not until Howling Dark that the series expands to a full-on space opera.

Russell Napier is one of my favorite macro analysts that I've learned a lot from over the years. Had the chance to meet him at a dinner the other day and discuss macro with him. Him and I often have similar macro views and a focus on the topic of fiscal dominance and the financial repression that follows. But an area of historic difference is that he has viewed Bitcoin as unlikely to win. He has viewed it as something that governments will ultimately not allow to function once the gloves come off and financial repression gets real from the major powers. So I discussed that with him, since while I acknowledge that threat as being real, I think Bitcoin is a solid foundation to push back with. But in addition, I also highlighted Nostr, and decentralized comms and social media in general. Back in the 1930s-1940s when the US banned gold ownership and implemented yield curve control (hard core financial repression), information moved slowly. A lot of information was one-directional. It was hard for people to coordinate with each other at large scales. But social media changes the game entirely. People can meme about it in real time. Government and central bank social media accounts can get ratio'd. Maybe one day they'll try to put a stop to that on centralized social media platforms, but that's why the decentralized protocols are so important. The tools are simply much better today, making that type of smooth and coordinated financial repression harder to do since all of their reasons can be dissected and dunked on in real time.

Instead of asking to be given more, young professionals should ask how they can best add and improve.

A giant explosion went off at a military base in Cairo. Five killed. Media reports about it are pretty much suppressed- it’s probably an accident but could technically be some sort of terrorist strike as well. Tragic either way. But what is crazy to me is that the blast was powerful enough to break one of the windows of my house many miles away. It’s crazy how powerful big explosions like this can be.

In a couple of decades, what percentage of people do you think will be using centralized systems for money and communication vs decentralized ones?

Government officials often use “security” as an excuse to take your rights. They’ll increasingly say they need to surveil and control your communications and payments to keep people secure. How about starting with the streets and trains and such? If they were actually serious about security more-so than control, they’d make sure that basic stuff is sorted out first.

The left gives themselves new political powers which then get used by the right when they’re in power. The right give themselves new political powers which then get used by the left. It spirals toward more centralized government over time. Keeping government limited is like constantly passing the marshmellow test, delaying immediate gratification for longer-run benefit.

Can anyone shill me on why Superman 2025 was a good movie? I thought it was awful, but apparently I'm in the minority.