Meanwhile, the Alexa team is hoping to have a conversation with ChatGPT on how to successfully monetize Alexa.

The infection was already there. Anyone who'd invested in any mortgage derived securities was compromised because the underwriting and scoring process was fundamentally fraudulent. Securities are rated and, at least in theory, those ratings are supposed to reflect the degree of risk. But the scoring agencies essentially became captives of the folks minting the securities and just handed out great ratings like halloween candy.

The Fed and the money printing and all that -- concerning as it all was -- really had more to do with making sure the national banking industry and therefore the currency didn't fail. There was a moment there when it really felt like a financial 9/11... like everything could come crashing down all across the world as a result of something that happened in Manhattan.

It's just an anecdote, but I vividly remember the short-term credit markets freezing up and everyone collectively realizing that nearly every business in the country uses short term credit to manage cashflow so that they can decouple employee paychecks and infrastructure purchases from sales and client payments in terms of timing. Most people just didn't know that and, without credit to make the accounting process move fluidly, like half the country was looking down the barrel of "well, we'll pay you when we know we have money in the accounts."

It's easy to run the Fed down now, but we were one or two days away from a grim fable with an unhappy, bloody ending.

This all powerfully reminds me of the deals the big banks like Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns struck back in 2006 and 2007. If you're too young to remember that particular shitshow, the mortgage industry was fundamentally toxic and a bunch of securities were created by mushing bad mortgages in with good ones so that the combination looked secure enough to invest in.

And then THOSE securities were subdivided up and repackaged into even more securities. And so on. And so on.

Bad debt ended up "infecting" the entire market such that it was essentially impossible to invest in "safe" mortgages and so, when the collapse happened, many of the banks found out that the bets they *thought* they were making to hedge their bets on the risky side of the housing bubble were, in fact, just MORE BETS on the risky side of the housing bubble.

At this point it's essentially impossible to invest in technology without investing in AI which means its very hard to bet against AI in the tech industry. And that feels very, very dangerous.

It's because it's very difficult to imagine circumstances other than what we live in. I agree with what you're saying in general but only in general. Plenty of liberals live in small towns and plenty of conservatives live in big cities.

But a LOT of liberals have only ever lived in a big city and a lot of conservatives have only ever lived in rural areas. And for those people, a move is transformative

For the conservative, the idea that government can do anything useful seems insane. But move to a big city where government services form the backbone of your water, sewer, mass transit, snow removal, etc and it's really hard to look at government and say it can't do anything right. Government somehow keeps Chicago clear of snow. Like -- really think about that. That's an ongoing and ENORMOUS project and it goes off largely without a hitch. It's difficult to see that in person and really say "government can't do anything right."

For the liberal, the opposite is true. They've spent their life surrounded by largely competent government. They move to small town America and suddenly the entire local government is run via the good-ol-boys network. Distance makes it all but impossible to actually get services to the people who need them. Taxes seem like they take a lot out of your pocket and don't put much back.

The problem is that our votes -- especially at the national level -- govern both groups.

That's because the project's value is political, not economic. Yes, generating power by digging a mile-deep hole, filling it with water, and running nuclear reactor at the bottom of it is likely to be crazy expensive and have all kinds of environmental challenges.

But what you have to understand is that the American political system is a zero-sum game and Democrats put their chips on solar, wind, and other renewables. Republicans put theirs on coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear.

Solar and Wind have proved to be the winning bet over petro-products and that has happened fast enough that a lot of voters remember Republican opposition to those power sources. No political movement tolerates being unambiguously wrong about something so the American right is desperate for an argument on the energy front that allows them to validate the arguments they've been making over the past 50 years.

Nuclear is that argument. But to do nuclear you've gotta be able to convince people that they don't need to be afraid of a nuclear plant in their community. That's a heavy lift and what this technology really provides is a new argument beyond getting the general public to trust a bunch of nuclear and civil engineers when they say it's perfectly safe. Your average voter may not understand how a modern nuclear containment unit works. But "it's buried under a mile of rock" has a simple elegance to it.

I used to work for Sling TV, and you basically have that backwards. ESPN is the part of Disney's package that people are willing to pay money for. The shutdown and negotiations every year is just Disney forcing the various providers to pay for and carry their other channels. That's why Disney always holds these negotiations during football season, so if they have to shut someone down their customers actually care. Every year viewership on Disney's other channels (and non-sports channels in general) is lower, and the prices that the content producers require goes up. Scripted television is in serious decline, and Hollywood is using sports fans to prop it up.

As an example, If you don't care about sports you can get Disney+ without ads for about $12 a month. Disney will happily throw in Hulu for that same price if you will watch some ads. You can binge watch the shows that you care about and then switch to another channel. Heck, you can buy entire seasons of their shows ala carte. You can't get ESPN however, without paying at least $45/month, and that's with a package with no non-Disney channels and chuck full of ads. For the record, that's basically what the streaming services are paying Disney as well. When I worked at Sling the entirety of the subscription fees went to the content companies (primarily Disney). There is essentially no profit in cable packages. All of the profit has to be made up somewhere else.

People that aren't sports fans, especially if they are entertainment fans, tend to believe that scripted programming is carrying sports, but it is the other way around. That's why AppleTV, which has spent over $20 billion creating content for their channel has about as many subscribers the amount of people that typically watch a single episode of Thursday Night Football, the worst professional football game of the week. Amazon Prime pays $1 billion a year for that franchise, and it is a bargain compared to creating scripted content. Apple makes great television that almost no one pays for. The other content providers are in the same boat. You'll notice, for example, that Netflix's most expensive package is $25/month, and the revenue per user in the U.S. is around $16. That's ad free. The lowest promotional price you can pay for ESPN is basically twice that, and it always comes with ads. What's more, sports fans tend to actually watch the ads.

Sling is selling day and weekend passes to people because it knows that most of its customers only have their service to watch the game. No one is watching linear television anymore, but the content creators have built their entire business around the idea of having a channel that they fill up with content. Even with Sling's ridiculous prices they can typically watch the games they want to watch for less than maintaining a subscription.

I have spent most of my adult life in the sports world, but I don't watch sports. I personally believe that in the long run sports television is probably going to end up uncoupled from scripted television. I think that is going to be very bad news for people that like scripted television.

Anthropic's entire pitch has always been safety. Innovation like this tends to favor a very few companies, and it leaves behind a whole pile of losers that also had to spend ridiculous amounts of capital in the hopes of catching the next wave. If you bet on the winning company you make a pile of money, if you pick one of the losers then the capital you invested evaporates. Anthropic has positioned itself as OpenAI, except with safeguards, and that could very well be the formula that wins the jackpot. Historically, litigation and government sponsorship have been instrumental in picking winners.

However, as things currently stand, Anthropic is unlikely to win on technical merits over its competition. So Dario's entire job as a CEO is basically to get the government involved. If he can create enough doubt about the people that are currently making decisions in AI circles that the government gets involved, either directly through government investment, or indirectly through legislation, then his firm has a chance at grabbing the brass ring. That's not to say that he is wrong, he might even be sincere. It is just that it isn't surprising that his pitch is that AI has the potential to be wildly dangerous and we need to think about safety. That's essentially the only path that makes his firm a viable long term player.

He used to win these market timing games because no one was paying attention to huge short positions. You could quietly bet against a company, or, better yet, you could quietly amass a short position and then release stunning negative news that you had uncovered and watch the stock price tank.

These days it is more likely that online investors will notice a large short, and drive the price of the stock up until the person holding the short gets margin called and loses all of their money. The shorters then provide the liquidity you need to get out of the position. There used to be good money in shorting terrible companies, but in an age where hordes of armchair investors can drive the price of GameStop to the moon that strategy is just too risky.

Is the idea here that high frequency trading and self-dealing can be used to pump-and-dump a given proposition?

So, I find some low-traffic topic suggesting that Pigs Will Fly by the end of 2025 which has "yes" shares trading at $0.01. I buy a bunch of "yes" shares and then buy/sell a small chunk of them back and forth with myself, driving the price up to $0.50. Now I sit back and sell off my "yes" shares for something between $0.50 and $0.40 to anyone who shows up looking to get in on the rapidly-rising "Pigs Will Fly" proposition until a whole bunch of people have bought up the $0.01 shares for 40 times their actual value.

Or is there some other scam at play here?

I suspect that these streams are costing Youtube money. They can't monetize them, and they have to spend effort shutting them down or they get in serious legal trouble. If things persist I suspect that Youtube changes its live streaming service in ways that make this impossible.

We will see though.

The problem, of course, is that Sports content is paying more than its fair share of the bill for all televised content. It is easy to see the large bills and assume that sports is a cost center, but the reality is that sport tends to pay its own way, while scripted television is much more of a gamble. To a certain extent that is why most scripted television these days is so formulaic. The television studios know that they can make money with modern versions of "The Rockford Files." That's why NCIS is in its quadzillionth season.

Severance is great, but it is a prime example of what I am talking about. Apple has spent billions of dollars on content at this point, and they are still hemorrhaging money. People like their shows, but they aren't lining up to pay for them. Shoresy is in a better spot, but only because Disney is doing its level best to tie Shoresy to ESPN and other sports related content that people are willing to pay for. The folks wanting to buy ESPN can get the rest of the Disney bundle for pennies. You can't just buy ESPN, you have to buy it with a television package. Disney does this because they know that if people have their other channels, then they tend to watch them. They are willing to pay a premium, however, for sports.

Hulu is cheap, and you can get it by itself. The same goes for AppleTV. All of these cost Netflix amounts of money $12 (or so) a month. When I worked for Sling it's entire packaging was based around making it possible to bundle ESPN for less than anyone else. If you want ESPN the least you can pay is $45/month, and that doesn't give you the other channel's sports package, that you probably want if you are a sports fan as well. It is very likely that the team that you follow will have at least one game on ESPN's competitors. That means that if you are purchasing from Sling you need the blue package as well (which is another $45, or bundled will total $60). You could easily sign up for all of the non-sports streaming channels for less than an Orange+Blue package (which once again is as competitively priced as it is possible to do). I was just looking at Disney's bundle, and you can get Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN for $35/month, which is definitely the least expensive way to get ESPN these days. That's with ads, which are added even to VOD content. If you want to watch your VOD content without ads that's another $10. Linear content (like watching cable) always comes with ads. Sports fans can't dodge ads ever.

I bring up pricing like this to make it clear which parts of television customers are actually willing to pay money for. If you don't want to pay for sports (and I don't blame you), then you can easily pay $12/month and switch between streaming providers and watch whatever shows you want to watch. All of those services allow you to easily stop and continue your subscription, and none of the content is likely to go away. Heck, chances are good that, if you wait long enough, you can watch the shows that you want on one of the free services. In most cases they are literally giving away old scripted content. The problem with this model, is that it doesn't make Hollywood enough money to be profitable with their current structure. The reason that Disney (and everyone else) bundle channels the way that they do is because they know that they can't afford to gamble on scripted content unless they bundle those risks with the proven money generation of sports content. More and more people like you, who don't want to pay for sports content, are opting for less expensive alternatives that still get them the shows that they want.

This market contraction is why Hollywood is so focused on franchises that have historically been popular. So instead of new shows we get derivatives of things that were popular in the past. Scripted content is risky, and as it gets uncoupled from less risky sports content producers do whatever they can to hedge their bets. So we get a re-re-remake of the TMNTs, Spiderman, or we get another cop show. Recently we have also been blessed with shows that have been popular in other countries or markets (that is legitimately cool in my opinion), but that is also likely to dry up as entertainment becomes more global.

Which leaves what can be done on Youtube budgets for anything remotely risky. Which is fine, I suppose. Personally, I like watching people restore old sailboats. That's not something that is ever going to be more than a niche market, but on Youtube that's enough of a market to make it financially viable for a few people. Maybe with AI it will even become possible to do good SciFi with that sort of a budget. Who knows? One thing is certain, it is definitely interesting times ahead.

Plus, IBM owns RedHat. So that's probably something. Then again, maybe that is the hyper growth software and services bit that they want to keep.

My hyperbole got the better of me again. You are not the only one. Little House on the Prairie is remarkably good television. It definitely beats doom-scrolling on your phone.

Getting together with my college friends to watch Star Trek the Next Generation was awesome. Those are definitely core memories. But even then there were issues. I never got into Babylon 5 because I worked while that was on. I recently decided to watch them, but it's not the same thing.

My kids (I have 6) get together every Sunday to watch "Dancing with the Stars." They are always a bit sad that they are days late to be able to vote, but the fact that they can watch on their time means they get to watch it together. I feel that's progress. Quite a few of those style of shows have call in votes specifically to drive viewership at the same time to boost numbers.

Netflix Disc was awesome. I also miss that a lot. If you aren't interested in live content you should be able to get the shows that you want at an incredible deal. These days I personally mostly watch Youtube. But I sometimes sign up for a month of one of the services to watch a particular show. They basically all allow you to cancel any time. There are also DVR tools that record over the air television that are pretty good. Depending on where you live you might be surprised at what is available. Plus, there's always piracy. Another advantage that sports television has over serial shows is that live television is much harder to pirate. Chances are good that your friendly neighborhood pirate site has all of the episodes of whatever it is that you want to watch.

If you are paying sports fan prices for television without watching sports, then you are definitely not getting a good deal.