Today as it comes out that George Soros has been funding some of the Gaza protests across US college campuses

It's probably worth reminding people that in 2004 Soros admitted he views himself as "some kind of God" It's also worth pointing out that as a teenager Soros helped the Nazis confiscate property from other Jews

Something the media has basically erased from history (clip is from a '98 interview with Steve Kroft)

Elon wasn't wrong when he called him Magneto

I was listening to the All In Pod this morning and @DavidSacks briefly mentioned the impacts to the German economy due to their dependence on natural gas from Russia

I've been obsessed with the chemicals industry since I was a kid and the story here is crazier than you'd think Before starting, I want to say that I'm a techno optimist and I believe that Germany's decision to shut down their nuclear facilities was one of the stupidest political decisions in history

Most of their economy is based on turning energy into chemicals

Woke economic seppuku

On this Chinese balloon nonsense most analysts have focused on “imaging” which you can do from spysats

What people are missing is that we’re going through a phase transition in our sensing capabilities rn

The future of sensing are quantum devices at nature’s limits If I had to guess I’d bet that balloon was loaded w quantum sensors that could do things like map Earth’s gravitational field to remarkable precision, to a depth of ~1km below surface, letting you determine underground structure down to ~10m resolution by material

IMO the best part of the winter break is time for reading

As such I was able to catch up on the NIF fusion results

And oh my, what a crock of bullshit

Climate is all the rage and the world is desperate for good clean energy news, but this is not it The headline numbers read beautifully:

2.05 megajoules of laser power in, and 3.15 MJ of energy output

The 2.05 MJ of laser power is highly misleading. It was actually ~100+ MJ as the conversion from grid power to laser power is highly inefficient

science.org/content/articl…

A meta comment on my background so people understand where I'm coming from as a human (and why I care about crypto so much):

I was born and raised in America and I absolutely love America!!! especially the principles it was built on But I've been to over 95 countries, most of which was backpacking on $10/day. One trip was Chile -> Los Angeles, all overland (one sailboat from Colombia to Panama)

Another was Singapore -> Beijing -> Syria -> Finland (all overland except one flight from East to West Kazakhstan)

Something I've been fascinated by since high school is that people are absolutely awful at assessing people's intellectual talent

People are good at the binary "they're better at math than me" or not, but can't tell if someone is 1, 2, 3, 4 or sigma standard deviations better You could have the "top 3" in a high school class have the distribution of: one is a 6 sigma talent (~top 15 in the world, future Fields Medalist), the other two being ~3.5 sigma (roughly 1 in two thousand). To the school they're all the same, freaks.