To do it, we need to (paradoxically) ignore house prices and instead, focus on income. The root driver of the housing crisis is that poor people can’t afford to buy houses or pay rent. And yet the rich have their cake and get to eat it too. Maybe … just maybe … if we took some of this money and gave it to the poor, then these folks could afford a place to live.

What makes monopoly a monopoly:

If you are a monopoly and then you do something to maintain that monopoly or to extend your monopoly, that's what makes it illegal. Like, if I just create a new product category, some widget that no one's ever heard of before, and I start making it and it's popular, I'm by definition going to have a hundred percent of the market. That’s not illegal.

What would be illegal is if I had a hundred percent of the market and then I said to my distributors: “Hey, if you want my thing that everybody wants, you can't distribute my rival's thing.” That's what turns it into an illegal conspiracy.

About connection between authoritarianism and monopolies:

John Sherman, of the Sherman Antitrust Act, said that if we will not be ruled by a monarch, we should not be ruled by an autocrat of trade. He was very explicit about the link between monarchy and authoritarianism and monopoly. And they were using the term monarchy because fascism hadn't happened yet, but monarchy did exist. In the 19th century, Americans were looking across the ocean and they were seeing a bunch of kingdoms. There was a little bit of democracy, but that's what they were really looking at. And they were like, we don't want that.

Last week, HR platform Lattice announced that it would be, to quote CEO Sarah Franklin, "the first company to lead in the responsible employment of AI ‘digital workers’ by creating a digital employee record to govern them with transparency and accountability." This buzzword-laden nonsense, further elaborated on in a blog post while adding absolutely nothing in the process, suggested that Lattice would be treating digital workers as if they were employees, giving them "official employee records in Lattice," and "securely onboarding, training and assigning them goals," as well as performance metrics, "appropriate systems access, and even a manager, just as any person would be."

The training data crisis is one that doesn’t get enough attention, but it’s sufficiently dire that it has the potential to halt (or dramatically slow) any AI development in the near future. As one paper, published in the journal Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, found, in order to achieve a linear improvement in model performance, you need an exponentially large amount of data.

Weird interaction with a student this week. They keep coming up with weird “facts” (“Greek is actually a combination of four other languages”) that left me baffled. I said let’s look this stuff up together, and they said OK, I’ll open a search bar, and they opened … Ch*tGPT. And I was like “this is not a search bar” and they were like “yes it is, you can search for anything in here”.

Medical research is largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry, papers ghostwritten by the pharmaceutical industry and influencers paid by the pharmaceutical industry. Regulators are not independent either and so it is that most doctors have become pawns in a system, used to deliver the drugs which provide the fundholders with the maximum profit. So far, the system has failed to eliminate corruption and bias, for one reason only, that is there is no such thing as a free lunch.

These findings have wide-ranging implications. First, universities and professors need to realize that students are no longer extraordinary but merely average, and have to adjust curricula and academic standards. Second, employers can no longer rely on applicants with university degrees to be more capable or smarter than those without degrees. Third, students need to realize that acceptance into university is no longer an invitation to join an elite group. Fourth, the myth of brilliant undergraduate students in scientific and popular literature needs to be dispelled.