My views are a personal "special arrangement sanctioned by history" Postwar Germany antitrust saga https://xitter.cf/t.co/jMcfOfPfgz Work @econliberties
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Joined October 2023
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Laurel retweeted
So let met get that straight: paying a wealth tax is impossible (“billionaires have no liquidity”, “it would be taxing unrealized gains”, “their wealth is virtual”) but paying half a billion to influence elections is possible. Did I understand well?
Elon Musk has cemented his record as the largest individual political donor in modern American history.
Musk poured $446 million of his own money into this year’s midterm elections, mostly aimed at preserving the Republican Party’s control of Congress. wapo.st/4igb5Kq
Laurel retweeted
Worth repeating what @AP covered. As AI assistants go mainstream whether we like it or not, states must stay vigilant now especially as repeat offenders like Meta operate with no regard.
Grateful to AG Torrez for showing what enforcement looks like. Every state should follow.
Laurel retweeted
While there are many fair points in this thread, it’s important to note that minimum wages were much higher in the 1950s and 1960s relative to consumer prices than they are today — making it much easier for midcentury minimum-wage workers to afford high-quality clothes.
The federal minimum wage today is $7.25 an hour. If the federal minimum wage had kept up with CPI inflation since 1968, it would be $15.29 an hour today. If the federal minimum wage had kept up with other, more relevant factors — like labor productivity — it would be around $23-24 an hour today.
At these higher rates, a 1960s full-time worker on minimum wage could buy a $20/$275 Ducksback jacket for approximately 10-15 hours of work. That’s a fraction of a week’s worth of labor. In contrast, today’s minimum-wage worker would have to work almost 55 hours to make enough money to buy the $398 Buck Mason jacket.
That’s a lot more work — 4-5 times more work to be exact.
Laurel retweeted
So @RepBeccaB and @SenWarren are putting big law on notice about antitrust and corruption. warren.senate.gov/wp-content…
Laurel retweeted
As AI firms recklessly unleash hacking agents across the internet, longstanding cybersecurity vulnerabilities are being exploited with even greater ease and frequency.
Hackers who compromise accounts or expose sensitive data can upend people’s lives.
This is not happening in a legal vacuum, and businesses across sectors face real legal duties.
At @FTC we routinely brought lawsuits against firms whose lax data security practices led to major hacks, exposing people to identify theft, stalking, and serious data misuse.
1. AI firms that are unleashing hacking agents could be held liable for engaging in “unfair or deceptive” practices under the FTC act and state UDAP laws, as well as other statutes.
2. Businesses whose systems get hacked because they’ve failed to follow basic security protocols may also be liable for failing to implement reasonable safeguards. Bad actors may be the ones exploiting these vulnerabilities, but that doesn't absolve businesses from having allowed the vulnerabilities to persist in the first place.
Here is a list we published of some basic security vulnerabilities businesses have a legal obligation to patch up: ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-rese…
3. CEOs can also be personally liable for presiding over lax data security practices, as we held in our case against Drizly: ftc.gov/news-events/news/pre…
4. Lastly, businesses that suffer hacks or breaches must alert any affected parties with clear disclosures that are timely, accurate, and actionable. Failing to disclose security breaches can also violate the law: ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-rese…
Laurel retweeted
Always a good day when the Blog features rival interpretations of the enclosure of the English commons.
Laurel retweeted
Senate Banking ranking member Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is raising concerns that new policies from federal banking regulators will leave the financial system vulnerable to malicious cyberattacks enabled by sophisticated AI tools. news.bloomberglaw.com/bankin…
Laurel retweeted
Such a great post! Insights I particularly appreciated:
- "Why hasn’t a huge discontinuity in damages happened since the dawn of scaled AI? This non-responsiveness of damages to a rising tide of AI capabilities is the major conceptual crux, and stumbling block, of all AI security policy today."
- "cybercriminals are unskilled and get arrested a lot ... Criminal organizations need to base themselves in middle and lower income countries, where they can pay less and hire people who have few formal-economy options. ... I think folks in the AI safety and cyber world sometimes imagine adversaries as their Waluigi twins, implicit MIT graduates; in fact, in cybercrime we’re dealing with a lower-skill demographic."
- "Criminals also contend with the risk and reality of arrest, sanction, interdiction, and prosecution, which caps their ability to scale: the larger the organization, the more domestic and international law enforcement attention it attracts."
- "It took the attacker ecosystem a very long time to mature the workflows, business models, and industrial divisions of labor that scaled ransomware into a multi-billion dollar industry, and it’ll take a long time to develop new models that centrally leverage AI throughout criminal labor processes... it took 5-8 years for ransomware to become a huge deal"
- "As risk professionals we should assume this will all change and that what we have now is a defender-dominant window in which we can prepare for some very bad possible futures"
Lots of interesting charts too: joshuasaxe181906.substack.co…
Contrary to the implicit mental models of many on this website, cybercriminals aren't the security-engineer Waluigis of Stanford-educated big tech engineers, or the criminal analogs of a16z-backed AI pentesting startups.
They're generally less talented, recruited from middle-income countries with weak legal oversight and fewer legal tech job options, and struggle with arrests, sanctions, retaining talent, and stable access to AI inference. Ransomware took years to become a scaled business under these conditions, and AI-native organized criminal syndicates that fully leverage the power of AI to scale may take awhile too.
Nation-states, meanwhile, are quick to adopt AI for vulnerability research and exploit development, but historically slow to deeply retool military operations with new technologies. And potentially devastating agentic cyber swarms may become weapons in their arsenals alongside e.g. ballistic missiles that they possess but don't immediately use.
So to those calling php2shell "the worst day in cyber ever" and expecting immediate spikes in cyber damages: there isn't the direct relationship between new capabilities and new damages you're imagining.
This is good news, obviously. It means defenders have time to prepare (and we should be shouting from the rooftops that we're in a defense-advantaged interregnum, currently). Huge risks are approaching but at the pace of technology diffusion into less innovative parts of the world economy and state sector, not at the pace of AI capability growth.
Full version: joshuasaxe181906.substack.co…
Laurel retweeted
Back before 2008, a few savvy investors realised the bubble was about to burst, and purchased credit default swaps that would pay out when it did.
Today, there's a surge in CDS trading again - this time, linked to the debt of the big tech companies.
graceblakeley.substack.com/p…
Laurel retweeted
I visited MLK Community Hospital in South LA, the only safety-net hospital serving poor patients in the area.
The ER was built for 25k patients a year; it gets 120k.
I saw patients treated in the gift shop, the chapel, in tents, even outdoors.
prospect.org/2026/10/23/heal…
Laurel retweeted
“If last Thursday felt bad, today has been worse," Goldman Sachs' prime brokerage team said in a note sent to clients….
"I'm actually a very strong believer in AI... But the concentration level is staggering. If you go back to the IT dotcom bubble, that had similar types of concentrations and we saw that happen.
The circular financing is also a source of some concern," he said….”
Laurel retweeted
People look like they panicking about cybersecurity, they are panicking about capitalism.
Imagine if CEOs and private equity had to listen to their IT nerds they used to be able to shove into the proverbial locker.
Laurel retweeted
Rhode Island sued Meta Platforms in state court on Thursday over the company's alleged tolerance for widespread scam advertising on its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms. reuters.com/world/rhode-isla…
Laurel retweeted
BREAKING: The 15 largest S&P 500 stocks now account for a record 46.7% of the index’s market value.
By comparison, during the 2000 Dot-Com Bubble, the 15 largest stocks accounted for 27.2% of the S&P 500.
The remaining 485 stocks represent just 53.3% of the S&P 500’s market cap.
This comes as Nvidia, $NVDA, Apple, $AAPL, Alphabet, $GOOGL, and Microsoft, $MSFT, account for 7.5%, 7.1%, 5.9%, and 5.6%, respectively, or 26.1% combined.
This means just 4 stocks account for more than the next 11 combined.
Furthermore, the combined market cap of the 5 largest stocks now equals that of the bottom 434 stocks in the index, the largest gap on record.
Market concentration is at historic extremes.
Laurel retweeted
💸Has tipping culture gone too far?
The debate over out-of-control tipping has been reignited after a man was asked to tip 18% at an airport self-checkout kiosk!
TELL US: What's the most outrageous place you've been asked to tip?
Laurel retweeted
70% of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up. He rules. theatlantic.com/technology/2…
Laurel retweeted
seeing a lot of 'we live in a new wild world' in response to this stuff. ok, sure! but uh who is on the hook for the breaches? a lot of the chatter on here is really interested in the frontier feeling of it all but there are, it seems, massive accountability questions!
Laurel retweeted
Spent a lot of this week looking into Blackstone’s exposure to AI and I’ve never seen anything like it. They’ve got $9bn in junior debt in one of Anthropic’s chip deals, no backstop from Broadcom, just rawdogging whether Wario Amodei can pony up the cash. Insane stuff
Blackstone's Jon Gray says neoclouds that can deliver compute get 50% more for it than a year ago, and old H100s lease near their original rates
[ CoreWeave, a company that you work with... is seeing its yields on some of its debt go to 15%. ]
"Well, it is creating a challenge. And it's interesting when you talk about CoreWeave and the neo clouds, there's a real contrast between delivering compute and demand for compute."
"And so if you're in a neo cloud and you can deliver compute, the price you can get today is up 50% from where it was a year ago. Your older chips, the H100s, are leasing today close to their original rates, where people thought three or four years ago they wouldn't have any value."
Laurel retweeted
Holy moly... this new paper finds that 88% of VC-backed founders receive zero exit value 🤪🤪🤪
Laurel retweeted
If the states succeed in breaking up Live Nation, it could stop or reverse the decline of independent music clubs, which are essential to bands just starting out. "Independents 'are the ones who give us our first shows. They’re the ones who work with us when we can draw 100 people,' he said."
