Warren Buffett thoughtfully explains why investing in stocks/equities is better than real estate, during Berkshire's latest annual meeting: "In respect to real estate, it's so much harder than stocks in terms of negotiation of deals, time spent, the involvement of multiple parties in the ownership. Usually when real estate gets in trouble, you find out you're dealing with more than equity holder. But there have been times when large amounts of real estate... I've changed hands at bargain prices, but usually stocks were cheaper, but there were a lot easier to do. Charlie did more real estate. Charlie enjoyed real estate transactions, and he actually did a fair number of them in the last five years of his life. But he was playing a game that was an interesting game to him. But I think if you'd asked him to make a choice when he was 21, he'd either be in stocks exclusively the rest of his life or real estate the rest of his life. He would have chosen stocks in a second. There's just so much more opportunity, at least in the United States. There's so much more opportunity that presents itself in the security market than it does in real estate and in real estate. You're usually dealing with a single owner or a family that owns maybe a large property they've had a long time. Maybe they've borrowed too much money against them. Maybe the population trends are against them. But to them, it's an enormous... When you walk down to the New York Stock Exchange, you can do billions of dollars worth of business totally anonymous, and you can do it in five minutes. And the trades are complete when they're complete. In real estate, when you make a deal, a big deal with a distressed lender, when you sign the deal, then you go into another phase. Then people start negotiating more things and more things. It's a whole different game. And a different type of person, to some extent, enjoys the game. We did a few real estate deals that came our way in 2008 and 2009, but the amount of time that they would take us compared to doing something intelligent and probably better in securities, there was just no comparison. I mean, in a real estate deal, every sentence is important. In stocks, if somebody needs to sell 20,000 shares of Berkshire or something and they call us and the price is right, it's done in five seconds. And it closes all the time."

Credit must go to where it’s due and Kochie is right. If the RBA is being forced to keep raising interest rates because labor governments are running fiscal policy that adds to inflationary pressure, then Michele Bullock should have the courage to tell all Australians that plainly. Interest rates do not operate in a credit market vacuum and Government spending has deep consequences. The IMF itself says fiscal consolidation would support disinflation and reduce the pressure on our monetary policy. Meanwhile, the RBA says historically weak productivity is constraining Australia’s capacity to grow without generating inflation. Australians with mortgages shouldn’t be left thinking interest-rate rises simply fall out of the sky. We need to grow our level of productivity, not continually grow government spending and the tax burden that is required to continually sustain it.

"Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn and sometimes you have a dumbass coach that makes travel plans that puts you in bad spot." Sean McVay on the difference with the Rams between Week 1 and Week 2.

JUST IN: Nearly 75% of active fund managers failed to beat the S&P 500 over the last 12 months, per WSJ

What a photo in today’s @WSJ. Bedraggled and angry Houthi partisans in #Yemen’s capital Sanaa chewing khat and brandishing jambiya daggers. Credit: Khaled Abdullah @Reuters

Elmo just wants to set the record straight... ❤️❤️ GO TEAM USA! ⚽

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts. So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world. What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable. Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations. The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead. Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described. The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding. The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months. Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight. Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now. She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.

HOW IS NOBODY TALKING ABOUT THIS!?!?!?!? THEY PRINTED 5 BILLION OF THEIR OWN TOKENS THEN WITHDREW IT AS USDC!?!?!?!??!

POKÉMON GO PLAYERS TRAINED 30 BILLION IMAGE AI MAP Niantic says photos and scans collected through Pokémon Go and its AR apps have produced a massive dataset of more than 30 billion real-world images. The company is now using that data to power visual navigation for delivery robots, letting them identify exact locations on city streets without relying on GPS. Source: NewsForce

The most important financial skill is having no FOMO.