That makes sense, but something I've been wondering as of late... what if markets are just being... cornered? Surely, it can difficult to assess genuine market activity from not, no?

I mean I know it sounds absurd for something like the size of the stock market, but all you really need to do is have enough capital to consume floating demand, and you can control prices. Even easier with options, as they give leverage to do this. And arguably this essentially explains the behavior behind stocks like GME, AMC, AVIS, BIRD... heck even Tesla. If you look at Tesla, most of its stock price appreciation happened in 2020-2021, when SoftBank was allegedly controlling their options chain. And since its peak in 2021, when SoftBank stopped, Tesla has underperformed the S&P 500, and would probably would have fallen by now if it wasn't for all the passive inflows from being in the Mag 7. I mean, it could just be coincidence or genuine market activity, but how can we be certain that markets aren't just being cornered by coordinated groups?

Also, the oil market right now doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you compare futures and spot and what analyst estimates are giving even in the best case scenario. But Japan mentioned considering shorting over $1.4 trillion in oil futures, and if they actually are, then suddenly things make a bit more sense...

Which is a poor choice of words by the industry, as this is a semantically specious argument. You are still, in the strictest sense, relying on obscurity - the key being obscure from public knowledge.

The industry should instead say: relying on an obscure process is bad when it comes to security. Better to rely on obscured data. As this is what is meant.

But technically speaking, all of information security is done through obscurity. It is all done via hiding something from being known. To state otherwise, is a misuse of semantics.

Tough to limit to just 5, but I would consider something like the following:

1) Some measure of wealth (beyond GDP)

2) An equality quotient (considering both wealth and power)

3) Hours of work per capita

4) Reported happiness

5) Healthspan / Lifespan / Crime / Safety rates

> the others would just do the same and compete away those margins once again, with the marginal gain being handed back to consumers

This is an assumption that doesn't necessarily have to happen. Some markets remain uncompetitive, otherwise you would see every market collapse to 0 margins if this were always true.

Sure but dynamic pricing doesn't change anything about that.

I'm still waiting for people to understand the bias-variance tradeoff, and what it implies for the limitations of AI and terms such as "consciousness".

The game was always going to be systemically rigged, because the "riggedness" is borne from the very nature of how reality itself works. But it seems to me economics doesn't want to actually contend with nature or reality, just ideas which sound more or less true, even if they actually fall flat upon deeper analysis. It's essentially an ideology at this point... if it ever wasn't in the first place.

"Austerity" is a red herring. I mean let's be serious, every option is austerity for someone...

Cutting spending, means those who would have received that debt spending take a loss (perhaps their job). Raising taxes means taxpayers pay. Raising productivity or inflating the debt means the young and laborers shoulder most of the burden. Financial repression means capital owners pay. Defaulting means bond holders pay.

This is what people who argue the debt doesn't matter don't understand. Sure it doesn't matter in the sense that we could always just roll the debt forward, and continue to make future generations pay. Just as it's possible to choose over and over again to wine and dine at someone else's expense, against their will.

No the debt always matters, because, it's a matter over who gets to benefit and who has to pay.

They did control for obvious appearance differences (e.g. color & type of clothing, hair length) and morphology (e.g. height/body size), even people's approach. But not more subtle traits such as gait, waist-hip ratio, odor...

One hypothesis suggested that in early history, women may have more commonly caught smaller prey (birds) than men did, and this fear could be evolutionarily ingrained.

To be fair, I don't think most birds have a good sense of smell (as dogs, cats, deer etc have) so that would discount odour. I suspect if there is a factor here it may be something that is obvious to the birds.

Odor was an example given by the researchers. And I too doubt it's due to odor, but we can't dismiss odor outright just because it seems reasonable. I mean humans for example are known to have an overall worse sense of smell than dogs, but can actually detect certain specific odors/chemicals at much lower thresholds than dogs (such as amyl acetate). Which is to say, birds may possess an acute sense of smell to certain things that we may not know of yet, even if they're bad in general when it comes to smells.

Another hypothesis given is sunscreen. If women wear sunscreen more often (such as on their face) and sunscreen reflects UV (and birds can see in the UV spectrum), then that could also explain it.

NVIDIA execs are now saying otherwise: https://fortune.com/2026/04/28/nvidia-executive-cost-of-ai-i...

Maybe Ed is right even if he's wrong on some things?

Yes about commodities, but what you said about surplus is actually wrong. Consumer surplus is at a maximum when there is no differentiation. That is because when producers struggle to differentiate amongst competition, they must compete fiercely on price, so customers often pay far less than their maximum willingness to pay.

And arguably your own statement here doesn't help the view that the industry is not a bubble, as one could argue most LLM models are not substantially different from each other, and most products integrating them are offering similar features. The industry may need to do better at differentiating if it wants to avoid being commodified.