Closing tabs: Penultimate Week Before Spring Semester Edition
Good morning! We are in the last few days at Baylor before the spring semester begins. I’m away this weekend on a writing retreat writing from an Airbnb I found just off south Congress for only $79 a night. Decided to come down and keep working on my preps as well as other things hanging over my head. Brought my own meals so I could stay inside and get work done. It’s nice. I’m getting excited about meeting the students and seeing colleagues again and moving forward with the tasks of my life awaiting me.
Supreme Court rejects TikTok’s defense. They must divest or leave. That’s that it sounds like barring some unknown move from Trump.
This post was interesting and one paragraph got me thinking that maybe the refusal to sell could be sign that the market is not pricing in TikToks value as a surveillance tool. I wrote this next part when I found it compelling enough to add here.
Basically assume the market price of TikTok is $50b. That comes from the monetization and future presently discounted profits or however it is a firm gets valued. But assume that calculation by leads to a valuation of $50.
If ByteDance refuses then why do they refuse? Why would they refuse the market price? They believe they can earn more than that? Then why doesn’t that get priced in? What would be causing the disagreement over the price?
If ByteDance actually values it for the surveillance too. The $50b would always be below its true value if it’s true value is $50b plus the value of intel and its use as a surveillance mechanism - which no one else on the demand side would presumably be needing it for. The only value of surveillance of the other people wanting to buy is if they too used that surveillance for reasons unrelated to generating future revenue as that would be priced into its market value. But pure intelligence collection would not. If they refuse, it may signal its value exceeds $50b assuming $50b is the correct valuation based purely on presently discounted profitability.
One possible buyer though could be Elon Musk himself. Which if that happened could mean what I said isn’t true. I wonder what US though would say about him owning Twitter and TikTok. Man he’d absolutely be dominant in social media at that point. NYT lays out the Elon angle. Tesla sales are large there. Regardless on Sunday it’s probably gone even though MrBeast said he wants to do it; also he’s got a net worth of $1 billion apparently for doing on YouTube what is essentially the same thing people who create content do on TikTok, only at an unimaginable scale.
Elon said he’s good at a video game but he may not be good at that video game.
Speaking of Bitcoins, the California fires could have destroyed some people’s access to their bitcoins because they put their “seeds” on paper? I didn’t understand this because as a rule I choose to remain uninformed about crypto currency.
Set of pictures visualizing the heart breaking fires in California.
NYT attempts to get to the geographic starting point of the fires and its cause but so far nothing clear.
MORE security risk warnings about new hacking and phishing problems on iPhones. Geez — this has to be coming from AI fueled improvements in hacking. I didn’t realize Apple was already filtering stuff in messages — now I realize what that massive “deleted messages” stuff is containing tons of messages I’d never deleted in the first place. Apple’s already playing goalie in an endless game of penalty kicks from hackers targeting messages but it’s getting worse And stuff is getting through using more ingenious forms of spear fishing and social engineering via naive users. But I think the marginal naive user is shifting towards people who are higher up that demand curve and this marginally less naive due to AI.
Sendhil Mullainathan talk at the AEA on economics in the age of AI. I will be assigning this to my students or we will watch it together in class this semester in my “economics of AI” class I’m teaching.
Captain America expected to open to around 85-95 million. Famous last words. I bet MCU is overestimating the draw of Harrison Ford as “Red Hulk”. But who knows — maybe it’ll be great.
Musk says we are out of AI training data. Maybe this is why he is rumored to want to get his hands on TikTok.
Interesting article from FT abt expected effects of AI on growth and social - political disruptions. So hard to say where this is all going, but I think 2025 will be an interesting year.
10 most anticipated action movies. Ballerina looks awesome. It’s a John Wick spinoff.
Forbes covers a substack explanation of the authors working paper not yet released and spends a while explaining Callaway and Sant’Anna. That’s funny. The author is not even trying to explain diff in diff so much as they’re trying to explain CSDID!
Judge rules guy can’t dig through a landfill to find the bitcoin wallet his girlfriend threw away over a decade ago that now contains almost a billion dollars worth of bitcoins. But maybe he can take refuge in the fact that when he dies he can’t take bitcoins with him. Also, the more tragic story of his life is if he thinks losing a billion dollars is worse than being unable to move on from losing a billion dollars, as it’s a far worse outcome to never let it go than that it happened.
More platforms for illicit market exchange are emerging and they are also growing. Intensive and extensive margins of growth.
Another new Star Wars show is not getting watched. Except by me apparently. I like Skeleton Crew okay — it’s like Goonies in space, which is perfect by me. But I still think the Acolyte was the best Star Wars story yet.
AI Brad Pitt convinced woman to divorce her husband and give him 900k because of his cancer and to help with his divorce from Angelina Jolie. Brad Pitt responds with a lament it happened and discourages anyone from clicking on unsolicited links. I suspect the worst AI scams, though, are on the near horizon, and I bet the elderly are in a terrible situation when they do. I cannot imagine my dad answering a phone in the condition he’s in. Somehow elderly parents need protections from their own cognitive decline and confusion surrounding these charming new chatbots out to pilfer their savings.
Kanye has launched a new shoe independently that’s selling decent it sounds like. But even at $20, these YZY shoes still look terrible. Here’s his other new shoe called “Bully”, which also is hideous.
This headline is a great example of what a great headline should be. I’m convinced that this is much more common than people know, if only given character.ai has a huge user base and tons of those chatbots are boyfriend and girlfriend ones. But seriously, I think this is a great article and glad to see it reported so well.
Online therapy hasn’t done enough, allegedly, to close the gap on access for psychotherapy. Just wait until OpenAI releases a therapy bot — or if not then, someone. I suspect that’s one labor group that could be vulnerable to automation supplanting workers, as opposed to augmenting them — especially given the previous article. The stigma around using ChatGPT for all of this is undoubtedly causing it to be heavily below the radar but I bet using ChatGPT therapeutically is far more common than using it for romance.
The feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar continue to get worse as Drake withdrew his pre-litigation cases against Universal and Spotify and filed a new one in federal court against his label.
Should Apple iPhones have Touch ID now that Apple Vision Pro is here? This person says yes. But I suspect another way is to allow you to unlock your iPhone from within the headset simply using the optic identification thing that’s already there. Seems like that’s a more straightforward solution. Would be nice if the iPhone was visible when you’re completely immersed in an environment, like the way Magic Keyboards are, too.
Fun article about the vanishing of my favorite band all through high school. I saw Michael Stipe the first week I got to Georgia for grad school and thought to myself “wow - I can’t believe I’m going to see him around town the next five years”. I never saw any of them again. But it sounds like this guy at least sees them around town a lot — then again, Athens is the greatest college town in the world so miracles like that do happen if you keep your eyes peeled. In the meantime, here’s one that goes out to the one I love.
The new daredevil trailer is out. Lots of bones breaking and hitting people. Too much superhero stuff.
Biden notes that $1.5 trillion went to “oligarchs” during his term, with Elon being one of them. I wonder if this is coming from the Magnificent Seven companies that caused S&P500 to increase 20% two years in a row largely driven by artificial intelligence optimism. As has been noted, the S&P500 gains were heavily influenced by just a handful of firms, all of which are the major tech firms like Alphabet, Microsoft, Tesla, Nvidia, Meta, Amazon, and Apple.
David Lynch has passed away. My favorite movie of his was Mulholland Drive followed by Wild at Heart and in college my first television show I’d ever binged was Twin Peaks. When you think about it, I might mark the start of the age of great television with Twin Peaks. I still remember me and the friends with whom I was watching screaming and freaking out when the last episode of the first season concluded. It was probably 1995 or 1996 and we watched it on VHS tapes. Knoxville, TN (where I lived and was in college) had one of those sketchy VHS rentals in a basement run by this one guy who I think was just renting out his personal collection, and he may even have lived there. You could only rent 2 tapes at a time, so when we finished one, we were usually dying to watch another one. I’d just never seen anything like that show in my life before. I grew so close to my friends watching it too, even though we were already close, because for months we were obsessed about the show and talked about it nonstop. We had to always coordinate the night when we could all watch it together at my apartment, so it really drug it out. Anyway, I didn’t love all of David Lynch’s movies, but when he was at his absolute best, like Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive and Wild at Heart, I was floored.
Kyle MacLachlan was said to base his Special Agent Dale Cooper character off Lynch. Here is a collection of beautiful statements by his ex-wife, MacLachlan and the most beautiful in Hollywood since Grace Kelly, Naomi Watts. Watts said a sweet message:
“His creative mentorship was truly powerful,” Watts wrote. “The world I’d been trying to break into for ten plus years, flunking auditions left and right. Finally, I sat in front of a curious man, beaming with light, speaking words from another era, making me laugh and feel at ease. How did he even ‘see me’ when I was so well hidden, and I’d even lost sight of myself?!”
RIP Mr. Lynch.
This podcast looks interesting. I really hope I can remember to read it. It’s with Hank Azaria, the voice actor (e.g., Simpsons). It’s about how his divorce devestated him, his realization about codependency, and how he “dated himself” for a year after.
New CIA documents released on the MKULTRA program which was a now verified and well known government operation that dosed people with psychedelics, like LSD, both with their knowledge, but also without it. It sounds like the more that comes out, the worse we learn it was. MKULTRA I think was hoping there was a military use for LSD, like as a truth serum, but it was too unpredictable in terms of what it did. Here’s a quote:
Under code names that included MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, the CIA conducted terrifying experiments using drugs, hypnosis, isolation, sensory deprivation, and other extreme techniques on human subjects, often U.S. citizens, who frequently had no idea what was being done to them or that they were part of a CIA test.
Rising use of AI in economics journals using diff-in-diff. I think I posted this, though, but I can’t remember. Anyway, here’s the pictures.
Shereef Elnahal, a Biden appointee, is the Under Secretary of Veterans Affairs for Health and is said to be trying to stay on with the new administration, which is thought to be a long shot. But, this article notes that he is openly supportive of RFK’s statements about increasing access to psychedelics used to treatment mental health problems, like PTSD. Whole article is interesting.
On that note, Lykos whose application with the FDA for therapist assisted MDMA to treat PTSD, has replaced three members of its board. On the table are some funding options which the board was split on so three left. A billionaire friend of Elon’s trying to get a $100m stake in it that would give him control.
Here’s a study about an RCT focused on using GenAI for entrepreneurial work in Kenya.
OpenAI released a new product this week within ChatGPT called Tasks that lets you use it for reminders. But it’s pretty raw and not very functional. I wouldn’t rely on it anyway. But since its name is “Tasks”, twenty bucks says it will become more than that this year.
World Bank shares results from an RCT evaluating the effect of using chatbots for studying among grade schoolers in Nigeria.
Planet Money interviewed economists about AI. Here’s an article about it.
Data Colada checks on a QJE about policing, comparing the pre registration with the final version. Didn’t get far in but figured that’s enough for some to want to read it.
I’ve been listening to my book, The Courage to be Disliked, on Audible since getting back from my roadtrip. This is the most paradigm shifting book I’ve encountered in a very long time. Here’s a review of it. I think about it all the time. I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone reading this. I will have to reread it frankly, and am going to try to figure out how one learns this at a level that makes it hard to forget.
The book is a Socratic dialogue between a philosopher and a student. The student comes to the philosopher because he wants to convince the philosopher to change their mind because the philosopher says we can all change and be happy. The philosopher is more or less someone who “lives philosophy” and for them that philosophy is Adlerian psychology, based on Alfred Adler, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud. The Audible is especially good frankly. The voice actors really embody the roles of the characters well and the chapters are brilliant and short. I think probably every single chapter has leveled me. Somehow they seem radical and obvious at the same time, and by the end of the chapter, you realize it was definitely true what was just said, and you also sense Adler had developed an entire worldview which is no wonder why the authors chose the teacher person on the dialogue to be a philosopher and not a therapist or psychologist.
One of the things I can’t get out of my head is this phrase that “all problems are interpersonal problems”. Here’s an article to get you started as to what it means. He also said “a misbehaving child is a discouraged child”. Here are a bunch of quotes. Heres a couple more quotes about meaning and friendship.
Here’s Adler graduate school. You get a long description of the framework at the website. I guess you could say Adlers work is about human nature.
Anyway, a lot to learn about myself and about the common sense of life I think. But I’m optimistic. Have a great weekend. Thanks for stopping by. Good luck everyone with their new semester.
May you be happy, may you be well, may you be safe, and may you be peaceful and at ease. And may you choose to have no enemies.