1/ Fortune's Formula (William Poundstone) "Even unlikely events must eventually come to pass. Therefore, anyone who accepts small risks of losing everything eventually _will_ lose everything. The compound return rate is acutely sensitive to fat tails." amazon.com/Fortunes-Formula-…

For economic issues, more education is associated with greater polarization of beliefs. (Existing research finds the same pattern for controversial science topics - see links in the first reply.) "Our findings demonstrate the complexity of education’s association with political attitudes, contrasting with commonly held beliefs about unified liberalizing effects of education. "One plausible explanation is that education reinforces prior held economic attitudes, leading to greater consistency between political affiliation and attitudes toward the free market." Polarized by Education: Political Affiliation, Education, and Beliefs on the Free Market (Ervin, Fishman)

2 kinds of people in personal finance: #1: I don't need much. I prefer to live a simple life & spend less than I earn: - “I just don’t want much. Is that weird?” - “I’ve found the less I want the more content I am.” - “I’m pretty content with what I have. I’m not someone that has a ton of drive and needs, is constantly reaching for the next big thing.” - “I have what I need. And not aiming for the big-spending high life because I didn’t grow up with much and don’t need much more than I have.” #2: I want to experience X, Y, and Z. I'm willing to work really hard to make a lot of money and get the things I want: - “I’m front loading my suffering in order to enjoy the fruits later on.” - “One of my goals is to fly delta one with no guilt.” - “Being able to fly first class across the globe, and also being able to pay for our parents to fly first class with us.” I've always been #2. Which one are you?

Net worth needed to crack the top 10% and top 1% by age in the US: Age 30 • Top 10%: ~$275,000 • Top 1%: ~$1.7M Age 40 • Top 10%: ~$850,000 • Top 1%: ~$4.7M Age 50 • Top 10%: ~$1.9M • Top 1%: ~$8.2M Most people spend decades inflating their lifestyle. The top 1% spend decades acquiring compounding assets.

ChatGPT has now a big problem. Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge exposed a massive threat to large language models.” They call it “model collapse." Internet ecosystem is rapidly changing, and generative AI will soon contribute much of the text found online. This forces us to consider what happens to future iterations like gpt-n when they are trained on data scraped from the web that was already generated by an llm. According to the research, indiscriminately using model-generated content in training causes "irreversible defects" in the resulting ai. the model loses the "tails of the original content distribution." in other words, it begins to forget the creative, fringe, and unique nuances of actual human writing, collapsing into a repetitive echo chamber. This isn't just a chatgpt issue.. the researchers built theoretical intuition showing this collapse is ubiquitous across learned generative models, occurring in large language models as well as in variational autoencoders and gaussian mixture models. Tech companies rely on scraping the internet for large-scale data to build smarter models. However, the paper warns that if we want to sustain the benefits of training on web data, model collapse must be taken seriously. Ultimate takeaway? data collected from genuine human interactions is going to become increasingly valuable in a web filled with ai content.

Met a girl in Austin who owes $200K on credit cards and hasn't paid a single dollar of interest in over 5 years… Thought she was full of shit She pulled up a color-coded Google Sheet and walked me through it. The math actually checks out. She might be the smartest person I've ever met or the most reckless. Probably both She's been cycling balance transfers across banks in a loop that never ends The play is stupid simple once you see it: She takes $200K in 0% APR business cards. Uses the money for her real estate business. Month 10, before the 0% promo expires, she applies for a new round of 0% cards at different banks Gets approved (because her score is 760+ since business cards don't report to personal credit) Does a balance transfer from the old cards to the new ones. 0% clock resets for another 12-18 months Old cards go to $0 balance. New cards hold the $200K. She hasn't paid a penny in interest "But you can't balance transfer business cards" Some banks allow it directly. For the ones that don't, she uses a workaround. She liquidates the new 0% cards into cash (2-3% fee through a payment processor), then uses that cash to pay off the old cards manually Same result Costs her about 4K-6K per cycle which she treats as a business expense She's been doing this for 5 years straight. That's roughly $25K in total fees to maintain access to $200K in perpetual 0% capital The interest on $200K at normal business loan rates (8-12%) would be 16K-24K per year. She's paying $5K per year instead. Over 5 years that's roughly 75K-95K in interest she just didn't pay The spreadsheet tracks every card, every promo expiration date, every bank, every cycle. She has it planned out 18 months in advance. She knows exactly when to apply at which bank and in what order "Won't the banks figure out the pattern?" Some already have. Amex denied her last cycle. So she shifted to Navy Federal and US Bank which she says are less aggressive about detecting balance transfer cycling. Capital One still approves her every time She told me "banks offer 0% promos because they're betting you'll forget to pay before interest kicks in. I just never forget" The 2-3% fee per cycle is her rent for $200K in free money. She called it "the cheapest loan on earth that technically isn't a loan" 5 years. Zero interest. $200K in perpetual capital I checked the math twice. It works