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Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
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7 Dec, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Apple didn't need BlackBerry
Netflix didn't need Blockbuster
Amazon didn't need Barnes & Noble

And we don't need legacy banks or media corporations. Though we do need to replace them!
The basic reason not to interview with them is that doing so legitimates them, endorses them, grants them control — when we need to be decentralizing power away from US media corporations and towards the people of the world with every word and every deed.
One part of it is unplugging from the establishment.

But another part is building something better. Replacing corporate truth with cryptographic truth, and obviating the inherited "paper of record" through the distributed ledger of record.
Btw, on the specifics, @TheStalwart & @tracyalloway are actually fairly reasonable as corporate journalists go. Odd Lots is not bad on web3...for the establishment :)

But it's still the establishment. So we should prioritize diverse influencers & decentralized protocols instead.

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More from @balajis

Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
5 Dec
Astrology doesn’t work, but machine learning might.

Suppose you are Facebook or LinkedIn. You have a massive database of life histories. So you could probably do a decent forecast of where a 30-year-old with X job in Y city is likely to be in 5 years, using similar profiles.
There’s clearly tremendous demand for personalized forecasting.

Right now that market is mostly served by pseudoscience — but if we can replace the astrological with the logical, we might make progress.
An actionable version:

- here is a summary of all the people with life histories similar to you, but a few years older
- those who did X reported improvement in their lives
- those who did Y did not
- correlation isn’t causation, but can test to see if X has a causal effect
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
2 Dec
Convergence.

Like China, Woke America now churns out hagiographical portrayals of party luminaries.
If you think I’m exaggerating, watch those trailers. Then look at:

1) The Founding of a Party
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Found…

2) Amazing China
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazing_C…

3) The centennial directive
cbr.com/chinese-theate…
China doesn’t make any bones about it. All must hail the ruling party.

“Chinese theaters were directed to air at least two propaganda films per week to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party.” cbr.com/chinese-theate…
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
2 Dec
Robotics enables physical hyperdeflation. Labor becomes just electricity & code. Real prices for everything should fall, including cost of living, if fiat also recedes.

As a goal, if your annual crypto dividends can pay for the electricity, you should be able to live off robots.
One way to think about the world is a tug of war between (a) the inflation created by the US federal government, where printed funds prop up politically favored sectors, and (b) the global forces of technological hyperdeflation.
We see this directly with housing. Your rent is high because the Fed diluted you down to bail out banks & prop up mortgage-backed securities. And because the government limits construction via picayune regulations.

Inflation, regulation, subsidy — all to prop up the past.
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
1 Dec
May be a conflict of interest, given that those very social scientists are held to be the weak men that cause hard times. 😁
In seriousness this is an excellent q that would benefit from mapping to historical events.

The canonical example is the fall of the Western Roman Empire to Odoacer and the barbarians.

A contemporary one *might* be Gorbachev’s capitulation followed by Russia in the 90s.
But that last example is interesting because the capitulation of that weak man (Gorbachev) led to *good* times for much of the former Warsaw Pact, though arguably not Russia itself till its recovery under Putin.
Read 7 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
1 Dec
Japan didn’t magically fail.

The US has occupied Japan continuously since WW2. And wrote its constitution. So, it had root control in a way it never did over China.

I’d long suspected this was used to punch Japan under the table somehow. Then I found a book on the topic… 🧵
@gladstein referred me to this interesting book called Super Imperialism by Michael Hudson.

Here’s his bit on Japan vs China:
mronline.org/2021/10/27/sup…
The book is worth reading. It’s interesting because it has the ring of truth on many issues.

For example, the construction of markets is itself not entirely a free market phenomenon. Force is often involved. There is a “beyond good and evil” aspect to it. bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoi…
Read 8 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
30 Nov
Agree, though this one is bipartisan.

During the Cold War the anti-communists wanted to know what the USSR was up to, and took them seriously.

Today, however, the anti-communists have an ideology of cope. They know nothing about China other than that it will magically fail.
Btw, here we are defining “bipartisan” as pro-communist and anti-communist, with Sulzberger’s inheritance very much on the pro-communist side of the aisle.
There are dozens of graphs like this which just aren’t part of people’s mental models.
Read 4 tweets

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