Item 1#: The ‘TACO Trade’ is now a meme: ‘Trump always chickens out’ trade is the talk of Wall Street.| Grey Enlightenment
I have been thinking about why writing has become harder in recent years. I blame what I call the ‘Substack effect’. In short–the sudden, huge success of the Substack blogging platform has raised the bar for online, short-form non-fiction writing. The popularity of Substack has both raised the quality of online writing in the aggregate, and increased readers’ expectations of other’s writing. Consequently, this means more work in the writing process and stiffer competition.| Grey Enlightenment
In an upcoming book co-authored with Nate Soares, Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t pull any punches, promising in the title that if anyone builds superhuman AI, that ‘everyone in will die.’ But It’s more likely that rather than everyone dying, this book will go in the dustbin of history. Like most non-fiction books, the putative objective of his book is a call to action and to raise awareness–in his case, about AI risk. However, two things: the public and policy elites are already abundant...| Grey Enlightenment
Inspired by Dynomight’s viral post “Why doesn’t advice work?” I have been thinking about why does advice work so poorly. Or why is there such a stark disconnect between the application of said advice and the desired outcome? Why does advice work for a few and not most? I am going to ignore the edge case where the advice is ignored, in which the outcome is certain failure. So assuming the recipient makes a concerted effort at applying advice, why doesn’t it work?| Grey Enlightenment
Tesla stock keeps going up having surged from as low as $230 a month ago to over $350. | Grey Enlightenment
Consider the following recent stories as indicative of the stark contrast between the risk of small business, compared to the relative safety and high-ROI of careerism–a similar patten observed in 2008, 2020, and now 2025 it pertains to Trump’s tariffs:| Grey Enlightenment