1. ‘I Was Just So Naïve’: Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump: Starting the new year with a revelation - people can surprise you.

   "“After Charlie died, I realized that I’m part of this toxic culture. I really started looking at my faith. I wanted to be more like Christ.”

2. Kazuyoshi Miura, 58, signs with new club to extend record-breaking soccer career - The Athletic:

   He’s known as “King Kazu” in Japan and has played 40 professional seasons dating back to the mid-1980s. He started in Brazil’s Serie A, the country’s top division, with Santos in 1986. He has had brief, varying spells abroad over the course of his career, in Australia, Italy, and Croatia, all before 2000, when he returned to Japan for good, firstly with Kyoto Purple Sanga in 1999.

3. Beginner’s Guide to the Mahabharata and Ramayana:

   Do you desire to know the stories of India’s two great epics, but are intimidated by the massive tomes with hundreds of characters and thousands of pages full of sentences like this: “Ugrasrava, the son of Lomaharshana, surnamed Sauti, well-versed in the Puranas, bending with humility, one day approached the great sages of rigid vows, sitting at their ease, who had attended the twelve years’ sacrifice of Saunaka, surnamed Kulapati, in the forest of Naimisha.”

   Well if so, I’ve got just the guide for you!

4. The Prison Of Financial Mediocrity: I saw this a fair bit on my timeline. The response in the tweet below makes a lot more sense to me though.

   A 25-year-old making $70k is constantly fed content from people their age making $2mn, living in Bali, "working" four hours a day. The baseline for "enough" keeps moving.

   You never catch up. No matter what you achieve, social media will show you what you're missing. The spread between your life and the life you "should" have is maintained algorithmically, forever uncollapsible.

   So you have AI shrinking your timeline AND social media ensuring you never feel like you've arrived. The pressure to escape, NOW, FAST, before it's too late, compounds daily.

   JL

   Jared L Kubin@JaredKubin · Dec 30

   Everyone's sharing that "Long Degeneracy" article and nominating it for article of the year with 20m views. I just got around to reading it…overall, I get it. It's well written, emotionally resonant, and captures something real about generational anxiety. I like the author, I subscribe to their stuff… talented Quant.
   
   But nobody's pushing back, so let me while I watch my kids at the pool.
   
   My main pushback is this: the article is a suicide note dressed up as investment advice. I REFUSE to hand my agency to "the house." The moment you accept "the game is rigged so I might as well gamble," you've surrendered. You've quit on the process that actually works because someone convinced you it doesn't. There are no easy buttons. No shortcuts. No magic money options. There is only learning, sacrifice, and continual grit.
   
   It tells a generation they're prisoners. Then it sells them a lottery ticket and calls it freedom. Then it tells YOU to invest in the prison.
   
   That's not analysis. That's despair with a ticker symbol.
   
   The author spends 2000 words empathizing with young people as "prisoners" trapped by a broken economy… then tells you to invest in the platforms extracting fees from their desperation. "Long Coinbase, long DraftKings, long the casinos."
   
   Read that again. The thesis is: a generation is so economically desperate they're turning to gambling, most will lose, and YOU should profit by owning the house.
   
   You can't weep for the prisoners and then sell shares in the prison. Pick one.
   
   4 points I want to make....
   
   Pushback 1: "Closed" is doing a lot of work
   The claim that traditional wealth building is "closed, not difficult" is asserted, not proven. The boomer vs millennial wealth stat is misleading… it compares 65 year olds to 35 year olds. Of course boomers hold more wealth. They've been alive longer.
   
   Housing is brutal in coastal cities. But median home prices in most US metros are still accessible to dual income households. "Wages up 8% while housing doubled" has no timeframe and cherry picks the comparison. Real wages post 2020 have actually grown.
   
   Is it harder than it was? Yes. Is the game "fundamentally broken"? That's a much bigger claim requiring a much longer discussion.
   
   Pushback 2: Negative EV doesn't become rational just because you feel stuck
   
   The core logical move is: "if you're trapped anyway, a 5% chance of escape beats 100% certainty of stagnation."
   But gambling doesn't leave you "still stuck." It makes most participants actively worse off. That 5% moonshot comes paired with a 95% chance of losing your savings, your rent money, your runway.
   
   The author admits "most people lose" then hand waves it because gamblers "understand the odds." But understanding bad odds while taking them isn't rationality. It's emotional capitulation wearing economic language as a costume.
   This isn't a generation finding a path out. It's a wealth transfer mechanism moving money FROM desperate young people TO platform operators.
   
   Pushback 3: The article accidentally reveals the real problem
   
   The author admits social media has "repositioned the zeroth line" so people earning $150k feel poor. Admits the algorithm ensures "you never feel like you've arrived." Admits basic needs are met and there's "cognitive bandwidth" for existential questions.
   
   But wait. If the problem is FEELING trapped due to infinite upward comparison rather than BEING trapped… gambling doesn't fix that. You could 10x your net worth and the algorithm will still show you someone richer.
   
   The "Maslow trap" section accidentally confesses: this generation isn't imprisoned. They're dissatisfied. These are different problems.
   
   Pushback 4: I don’t have enough FAITH to live in a world without God
   
   This is the part nobody wants to hear.
   
   The entire thesis rests on a materialist assumption: your life's meaning is determined by your net worth, your house, your access to experiences. If you can't get those things, you're "imprisoned." If you can, you're "free."
   
   That's spiritual poverty masquerading as economic analysis.
   Jesus said it plain: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?" The author's answer is apparently "at least you beat the algorithm."
   
   My BIGGEST problem with the article isn't economic. It's theological. It assumes the highest human need is "self actualization" through financial success. That Maslow's hierarchy is the truth about human nature. That if you can't afford the vacation and the house, you're missing what makes life worth living.
   
   That's not wisdom. That's the prosperity gospel without the gospel. No thanks.
   
   The reason this generation feels trapped isn't because housing costs went up. It's because they've been handed a worldview where meaning comes from consumption, identity comes from status, and hope is a betting slip. When you build your life on that foundation, of course you feel imprisoned. The cell is interior.
   
   Real freedom isn't financial. It never was. The peace that passes understanding doesn't require a Polymarket account. Eternity is a LONG time.
   
   So what's the alternative?
   
   First: Exit the comparison machine. The author correctly identifies social media as manufacturing infinite dissatisfaction. The answer isn't to gamble your way to a moving target. It's to stop letting an algorithm define your "zeroth line." Your reference class should be your actual life, not curated highlights from 8 billion people. Delete the apps. Touch grass. Go to church. Give yourself to something BIGGER than your net worth.
   
   Second: Skill acquisition still compounds. The article mocks "getting better at your job" as boomer advice. But the same young people pouring hours into memecoin research could pour those hours into skills that compound. The difference is skills don't have a house edge. Coding, sales, writing, trades… these translate into income whether the market is up or down. AI is changing which skills matter but it's not eliminating the returns to expertise. It's concentrating them.
   
   Third: Asymmetric bets exist outside casinos. If you want convexity, build something. Start a business. Create content. Ship a product. The difference between entrepreneurship and gambling is you're building equity in something that can compound, not burning capital on negative EV.
   
   Fourth: Anchor your identity somewhere the market can't touch. If your sense of self rises and falls with your portfolio, you're a slave. If your hope depends on a moonshot, you have no hope. The man who knows who he is in Christ doesn't need a 100x to feel like his life matters. He's already free. That's not copium. That's the only foundation that doesn't move.
   
   The real trap
   
   The article's framing is seductive because it offers absolution. You're not making bad decisions. You're rationally responding to a broken system. The house always wins but at least you're playing.
   
   The framing IS the trap.
   
   The economy is harder than it was. Housing costs are real. AI anxiety is real. But "harder" isn't "impossible," and the author's solution… becoming a customer of fee extracting platforms or an investor in them… doesn't help the people he claims to sympathize with.
   
   It helps the house.
   
   Here's what actually works.
   -Wake up early. Get after it. Be Relentless.
   -Spend less than you earn. No excuses.
   -Acquire skills that compound. Every single day. Stack them.
   -Build things you own. Equity, not lottery tickets.
   -Get your body right. Discipline starts physical.
   -Get your soul right with the Lord. My closeness with the Lord has grown MORE in trials and tribulations than any fancy car.
   -Exit the comparison machine. The algorithm is not your friend. It's your enemy.
   -Find your people. Real ones. In person. Build a family. Build a group you trust.
   -Serve something bigger than yourself.
   -Pray. Not as a last resort. As a first principle. Daily.
   -The path is painful. The path is boring. The path requires years of work that nobody will clap for.
   
   But it's the path that works.
   
   The casinos will keep taking their vig. The gurus will keep selling hope. The algorithms will keep showing you what you don't have.
   
   Let them.
   You are not a prisoner. You are not a degenerate. You are not a customer.
   
   You are a free human being with a soul that matters and a life to build.
   
   So build it through active faith, aggressive patience, and a mindset geared towards eternity and not your bank account.

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5. SK

   Séb Krier@sebkrier · Dec 28

   There are broadly two ways people think about AGI and labour:
   
   Position A is where humans get fully substituted, which is usually advanced by parts of the AI commentariat.
   
   The argument is that if AGI is a scalable input that can do what workers do at lower cost, then the market value of human work falls. Even if humans remain physically capable, and even if adding AI raises human "physical productivity" in some narrow sense, the prices of what humans can sell can fall faster because AI floods supply. In competitive equilibrium, firms buy the cheapest effective input. Unless there is a large and persistent demand for "specifically human" labour (therapy, arts etc), wages are pushed toward the minimum people will accept; if the market-clearing wage is below social/legal/psychological floors, this shows up as unemployment rather than just low wages. All of this is in principle possible and a coherent argument, and I've written about them before.
   
   Position B is the economics reply, which doesn't depend on 'line goes up' alone.
   
   "AGI implies humans won't work" requires a corner solution: AI and labour must be perfect substitutes across most tasks, and compute must become cheap enough to saturate the economy. (Note that "perfect substitutes" doesn't mean "AI can do anything humans can", but that the two are interchangeable with no synergies from combination.) Standard production theory suggests a different dynamic: when two inputs are imperfect substitutes, adding more of one tends to raise the marginal product of the other: more AGI makes the remaining human contributions more valuable, not worthless.
   
   Many substitution arguments also assume away the real constraints on scaling compute (capital, energy, materials, bottlenecks), effectively smuggling "infinitely abundant AI" into the premises. So full displacement is in principle possible, but inevitability is an overclaim. Unless AGI can do literally everything and becomes abundant enough to meet all demand, it behaves broadly like powerful automation has before: replacing humans in some uses while expanding the production frontier in ways that sustain demand for labour elsewhere.
   
   Economists have a specific way of thinking about this which might turn out to be wrong for subtle reasons (e.g. if we truly hit the scenario where humans offer zero comparative advantage, like horses). However, the current discourse in AI world is dominated by voices who haven't even seriously considered or engaged with the mechanisms economists bring up.
   
   Position A sometimes reasons from the limit case without defending the assumptions needed to reach it (deployment speed, cost curves, complementarity, preferences for human services, institutional response, automation of all physical processes etc). There's more friction and agency here than deterministic worst-case modelling assumes. Note also that in discussing this, I'm not even taking into account the massive welfare benefits of decreased in prices, longevity improvements, and high economic growth.
   
   So amidst all this uncertainty, I find it irresponsible when commentators popularize memes about "total disempowerment" as foregone conclusions, as these *also* make implicit claims about political and institutional dynamics. The problem isn't just pessimism, it's that the vast majority of critics from the CS and futurist side don't even take the economic modeling seriously. Though equally many economists tend to refuse to ever think outside the box they've spent their careers in. I've been to some great workshops recently that being these worldviews together under a same roof and hope there will be a lot more of this in 2026.

   

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6. C

   Chubby♨️@kimmonismus · Dec 28

   A Reddit user has examined Gemini's character consistency, and the results are breathtaking. Not only does the woman look incredibly realistic, but it's the consistency that's surprising.
   
   Countless fake profiles are already being created on Instagram and other platforms. The fact that this isn't being noticed should be a cause for concern, because it's precisely this proof that reality and fiction are becoming indistinguishable.
   
   It's happening *now*, at this very moment. Social media is changing forever.

   

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7. DM

   David Moss@DavidMoss · Dec 31

   I am proud to announce that I have successfully completed the world’s first USA coast to coast fully autonomous drive!
   
   I left the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles 2 days & 20 hours ago, and now have ended in Myrtle Beach, SC (2,732.4 miles)
   
   This was accomplished with Tesla FSD V14.2 with absolutely 0 disengagements of any kind even for all parking including at Tesla Superchargers.

   

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1. Jeremy Lin Retires After 15 Years That Included ‘Linsanity’ With the Knicks (NYT):

   The journeyman played for eight N.B.A. teams and won one championship. But he is best known for a brief stretch on the Knicks where he electrified fans and the nation.

   How to feel old #3892: Linsanity for 13 years ago and I remember it like it was yesterday!

2. How to resist everyday temptations: A guide we can all use, but probably won't.

3. You're Overthinking Packing:

   The amount of planning and thought that needs to go into the enterprise is surprisingly minimal. Count how many days you’re going for, then bring the same number of shirts as the number of days minus one (unless you have access to laundry, then probably less), 2-4 pairs of pants, a couple nicer dresses if that’s your thing and a change of shoes. Something to sleep in at night and a bathing suit if you’re headed somewhere warm. I always bring an extra pair of underwear and socks because sometimes I like to change throughout the day. Then experiment by trying on a bunch items to ensure everything goes together. Frankly, it’s not that different than figuring out what you’re going to wear on a day-to-day basis, which I trust you do all the time.

   Some thinking about packing, maybe some tools (I like using packing cubes and a travel scale is a must when flying budget) are surprisingly useful but yes, the curve drops sharply.

4. My journey from ADHD skeptic to Adderall enthusiast:

   At 22, I thought ADHD was fake. An excuse for underachieving kids to get “accommodations” for procrastinating on their homework. From what vague knowledge I had of stimulants like Adderall, I regarded them with the same scorn as the accommodations.

   Seventeen years later, I credit Adderall with enabling me to build a 10x happier, healthier, more virtuous version of myself (to the chagrin of the countless Twitter trolls decrying my “meth addiction” in reply to this recent viral post). Here is my story.

5. What Is Man, That Thou Art Mindful Of Him?: God and Iblis debate if human intelligence is hitting a wall. Hilarious and insightful.

6. if you meet the singaporean on the road:

   All this effort — fifty years of non-stop toil — turning a fallow wasteland into fertile earth, and where are all the crops we have to show for it? Where are all the local companies that we can point to and be proud of? Where are our Ericssons and Nokias?

7. LLMs Will be Like Ozempic for Golf:

   Rob was fantastic but it’s not as though I can just do a TrackMan excursion all the time. Yet I remained curious about why my swing was what it was. I had decent power, but lacked the ability to square the ball up with anything approaching consistency. Was I destined to always have this problem?

   And so I turned to LLMs, feeding the TrackMan stats into GPT. Based on 12 numbers, from one swing, GPT had me clocked. It knew my strengths and weaknesses. It fully understood the specifics of my poor technique. I’m sure Rob could have walked me through as much, but his time is limited. The machine had all the bandwidth in the world to deal with my “over the top” swing, how to fix it, and any other questions I might nag it with.

   A day later, my swing was different and self recorded video sent to Google’s Gemini confirmed the change. Swing errors that were decades in the making were corrected in the span of minutes. I’m not saying that I’ve suddenly made a leap from “Struggles to break 100” to “scratch golfer.” I’m just saying that a process that could have been expensive and arduous was instead efficient and relatively cheap. I apply the LLM’s fix, and it tells me whether I’ve actually applied it. The feedback is instant and objective.

   LLMs will be like Ozempic for a lot more than golf. Ability to ask unlimited questions without feeling embarrased or paying by the hour is a big deal. Imagination is the only thing limiting us.

8. GPT-5: The Case of the Missing Agent

   It’s hard to say exactly why, even with all this progress, current AI models are still so hopeless at dealing with open-ended real-world situations. GPT-5’s inability to recognize that it was incapable of playing Minesweeper may indicate that its reasoning abilities do not generalize well. Its decision to spend 5 solid hours beating its head against the unimportant side goal of sharing a spreadsheet suggests a lack of training on the importance of setting priorities. The repeated factual errors in Gemini 2.5 Pro’s writeup of its merch store experience (click the link and look for “Editor’s Notes”) suggest an inability to keep track of key information over an extended project. Claude losing track of the fact that it is not a person is a reminder that in some ways these models really are just shallow imitations of human behavior (even as they demonstrate deep capability in other areas).

   So many benefits and so many limitations.

9. Reading with AI:

   Reading a non-fiction book from cover-to-cover is not efficient. I used to say that I read books “from the outside in.” I look at the book flap to find out about the author, who wrote the blurbs, and the subject matter of the book. Then I read the introduction and conclusion in order to get the main ideas. If I have read something by a different author that seems relevant, I look for that author in the index, and I head to those pages.

   and

   Once again, I believe in “Stop, Look, and Listen.” I start by asking the AI to summarize the key themes of the book. For each theme that the AI lists, I stop and try to put it into my own words. I test my understanding by feeding my words into the AI, in order get confirmation that my interpretation is correct. Another way that I ensure understanding is to suggest possible examples or ask the AI to provide examples.

10. How to think about AI progress: Reproducing the entire post as it really is worth reading:

    The Zvi has a good survey post on what is going on with the actual evidence. I have a more general point to make, which I am drawing from my background in Austrian capital theory.

    There are easy projects, and there are hard projects. You might also say short-term vs. long-term investments.

    The easier, shorter-term projects get done first. For instance, the best LLMs now have near-perfect answers for a wide range of queries. Those answers will not be getting much better, though they may be integrated into different services in higher productivity ways.

    Those improvements will yield an ongoing stream of benefits, but you will not see much incremental progress in the underlying models themselves. Ten years from now, the word “strawberry” still will have three r’s, and the LLMs still will tell us that. There are other questions, such as “what is the meaning of life?” where the AI answers also will not get much better. I do not mean that statement as AI pessimism, rather the answers can only get so good because the question is not ideally specified in the first place.

    Then there are the very difficult concrete problems, such as in the biosciences or with math olympiad problems, and so on. Progress in these areas seems quite steady and I would call it impressive. But it will take quite a few years before that progress is turned into improvements in daily life. Again, that does not have to be AI pessimism. Just look at how we run our clinical trials, or how long the FDA approval process takes for new drugs, or how many people are reluctant to accept beneficial vaccines. I predict that AI will not speed up those processes nearly as much as it ideally might.

    So the AI world before us is rather rapidly being bifurcated into two sectors:

    a) progress already is extreme, and is hard to improve upon, and

    b) progress is ongoing, but will take a long time to be visible to actual users and consumers

    And so people will complain that AI progress is failing us, but mostly they will be wrong. They will be the victim of cognitive error and biases. The reality is that progress is continuing apace, but it swallows up and renders ordinary some of its more visible successes. What is left behind for future progress can be pretty slow.

    Yet another periodic reminder that MR and The Zvi are both must-read for everyone.

1. How to make money betting on the new Pope: Great discussion of the betting process. Still plenty of luck involved but a reminder that there is plenty of "alpha" out there if you look in the right place. Maybe I should create a hashtag for these stories. #alpha

   A few minutes later, my jaw dropped as Prevost -- the guy I had just amasssed shares in at 200-1 like 20 minutes earlier-- walked out onto the balcony as Pope.

2. On the NBA and economic theory: Solving the problem of late season tanking to get a shot at the draft lottery in the NBA. Quite simple when you think about it.

   Optimal mechanism: get points for each loss. In game 1, a loss is worth 1 Draft Point. As season continues, loss is worth less, becoming negative late. Draft position based on Draft Points. Everyone wants to win late in season. Early season used to handicap truly bad teams.

3. Populism is not popular. Success is popular.:

   And Singapore is well run precisely because it adopts “unpopular” technocratic policies like zero tariffs, forced saving, and congestion pricing.

   And the PAP keeps getting re-elected, not despite, but because of those unpopular policies. Playing the long game, succesfully, since 1965.

4. Harvard Paid $27 for a Copy of Magna Carta. Surprise! It’s an Original.: To be fair it was $27 in 1946 dollars, but still. #alpha

   Professor Carpenter was at home in Blackheath, south east London, plowing his way through Harvard Law School’s digital images as research for a book when he opened a file named HLS MS 172 — the catalog name for Harvard Law School Manuscript 172.

   “I get down to 172 and it’s a single parchment sheet of Magna Carta,” he said. “And I think ‘Oh my god, this looks to me for all the world — because I read it — like an original.’”

   Professor Carpenter emailed Professor Vincent, who was, at the time, at work in a library in Brussels. “David sent it with a message saying, ‘What do you think that is?’” said Professor Vincent. “I wrote back within seconds, saying, ‘You and I both know what that is!’”

   I would not have answered like that.

A light week on links as it was a heavy week in life.

1. Why Is Homeowners Insurance Getting So Expensive? by Brian Potter via MR: A great piece objectively exploring a question getting a lot of coverage after the recent LA fires. There’s so much I love about this link. Original, deep analysis of an important question debunking the popular narrative (climate change, see next two links). Also, a great blog on Construction Physics? With 51K subscribers! Isn’t internet the best?

2. Gell-Mann Amnesia: First described by Michael Crichton and apparently nothing to do with Gell-Mann. He just gave it an important sounding name to have it taken seriously.

   Gell -Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

   In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

   I should make a spaced repetition card for this.

3. Bjorn Lomborg: A good follow if you want to see less depressing news about climate change, for instance that polar bear population has been increasing since the 1960s or that the Great Barrier Reef is doing just fine. Do note that his work is also subject to Gell-Mann Amnesia.

4. Only reason I am posting this is because I am right now in the land of the great UFO scare of 2025, New Jersey. Trump appointed CIA Director? On Fox News? Former Texas Congressman? There should be an emoji for that. Here’s a palate cleanser (via Alex Tabarrok at MR).

   MV

   Marik vR@MvonRen · Jan 23

   CIA Director John Ratcliffe:
   
   UAP/UFOs:
   
   -Exhibit “technologies that we don’t have and, frankly, that we can’t defend against” (!)
   
   -“Are difficult to explain”
   
   -*Tracked by multiple sensors, including satellites*
   
   KEY: “I believe there should be more transparency on this issue.”

   

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5. Jokic. Watch till the end for the reaction.

   NI

   NBA India@NBAIndia · Jan 24

   No shot is too tough for the Joker! 🃏 A 66-foot masterpiece at the buzzer! 🤯
   
   #ICYMI: Nikola Jokić went 3/4-court against the Kings and nailed it in style! 😮‍💨🔥
   
   #Jokic #MileHighBasketball | @nuggets

   

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6. Is it better to bribe Trump by purchasing his memecoin or his stock? Not financial advice.

No AI in the links at least, although I cannot confirm or deny if an AI was involved in the selection of these links.

Programming note: Since I am traveling for the next few weeks, some of those letters may only contain the links section.