For the purposes on legal imports, that was the reference rate. So many products where indexed at that rate.
Annapurna
Karma: 825
Annapurna’s Shortform
You are right that the Dollar Blue has been fairly stable during the entirety of Milei’s presidency, but the official USD-ARS rate did see a very strong devaluation as soon as Milei got to power. Your own second source points to that.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67688727
https://www.reuters.com/markets/markets-greet-argentinas-tough-pill-fix-economy-with-cautious-optimism-2023-12-13/
Notes on Argentina
Yes it does.
Thank you for this post. You very elegantly laid out a scenario that has been swirling in my head, and I think I updated the probabilities of this scenario as more likely after reading your post.
Your post also strengthen my desire to pivot from finance to policy. I need to figure out how to do this. I find it paramount that more people (both in power and in the general populace) understand the possibility of massive economic disruption.
I look forward to the follow-ups of this post.
The Golden Opportunity for American AI
Predictions of Near-Term Societal Changes Due to Artificial Intelligence
Thank you for your post. I’ve been looking for posts like this all over the internet that get my mind racing about the possibilities of the near future.
I think the AI discussion suffers from definitional problems. I think when most people talk about money not mattering when AGI arrives (myself included), we tend to define AGI as something closer to this:
“one single AI system doing all economic planning.”
While your world model makes a lot of sense, I don’t think the dystopian scenario you envision would include me in the “capital class”. I don’t have the wealth, intellect, or connections to find myself rising to that class. My only hope is that the AI system that does all economic planning arrives soon and is aligned to elevate the human race equally and fairly.
One example of what I am talking about is the middle chapters of the book Genesis, where it discusses applications of AI in military and general governance.
I don’t necessarily agree with the book’s predictions, but it really got me thinking of a near term pre-AGI world.
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/19/henry-kissinger-ai-book-released
Someone recommended I create the community, maybe I will in the new year.
[Question] Recommendations on communities that discuss AI applications in society
Your comment would have more validity had the market not corrected the dislocation created by Theo. It took three weeks, but the market eventually corrected itself.
Update on the Mysterious Trump Buyers on Polymarket
There are no transaction costs if you have USDC on Polygon. Onboarding USDC into Polygon might bear costs but they are minimal.
I would say very low?
I would also rank the theory that these mystery traders have hidden information as low. As of right now, based on what I have uncovered, I would say that the mystery trader(s) could be one the following (rank in order of what I think more likely to least likely):
1. A wealthy francophone european, somewhat involved in crypto and/or tech, who believes Trump will win and is betting a somewhat trivial amount (to this person) on this outcome. It is key to note that the main account has been trading since June, yet it only started seriously trading these markets after Musk appeared with Trump on stage.
2. A somewhat sophisticated entity that has a proprietary model that has Trump winning as a higher outcome, and believes the odds are mispriced. This entity realized that Polymarket had sufficient liquidity to allow it to bet 8 figures and move the price roughly to what it thinks Trump’s real odds are. This entity is likely foreign, and thus it has not been able to trade on Kalshi.
3. An insider of the Trump campaign that is using internal information to make a more informed trade. Perhaps this is someone related to Elon. It could also be someone who understands that since May last year people have been using Polymarket as yet another gauge of how this election might turn up, and by pushing the odds on Poly they are distorting the narrative 18 days before the election.
The Mysterious Trump Buyers on Polymarket
Hunterbrook just came out with a piece alleging the damage at Spruce Pine is catastrophic:
https://hntrbrk.com/essential-node-in-global-semiconductor-supply-chain-hit-by-hurricane-helene-video-reveals-entrance-to-mine-has-flooded/
I am with you, I have been trying to find more sources to see if semiconductor-grade quartz if being produced in places like Norway and Brazil, where deposits of high purity quartz are found. But from the research I have done, it seems that roughly 90% of semiconductor-grade quartz produced today is produce at Spruce Pine. Please let me know if you find any sources that say the contrary (I hope I am wrong honestly).
With respects to road disruptions, I agree. If it’s a matter of national security, stakeholders will do whatever is necessary to ensure the material is transported out. However road disruptions is one part of the equation. There are other scenarios to consider such as power issues and destruction of the refining plants themselves that we have to take into consideration.
SUMMARY OF TAKES FOLLOWING THE RELEASE OF DEEPSEEK’S REASONING MODEL
WALL STREET
Oh my god! The DeepSeek team managed to train a model with less than $6M USD! This must mean that we do not need that many chips or energy to use GenAI! Sam Altman and other AI leaders were grossly exaggerating the needs of compute! AI stocks are super overvalued!
STARTUPS AND ENTERPRISES USING LLMS TO ENHANCE THEIR PRODUCTS
Did… did we just get an open-source model that reasons? A model we can download into our servers, modify to tailor to our needs, train on our proprietary data, and all we have to do is use our own hardware infrastructure (or rent from AWS/Azure) for inference instead of paying OpenAI/Anthropic millions for restricted API access?
AI SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS
Whoa! These engineers at DeepSeek are truly impressive! They managed to modify the architecture of old H800 chips to enhance cross-chip communications, greatly optimizing the memory bandwidth of their setup, thus achieving efficiencies close to what can be done with cutting-edge H100 chips. Imagine what they could do if they had access to H100 chips!