Students across France are protesting poor classroom conditions, staff shortages and a below-inflation education budget increase, with tens of thousands joining nationwide demonstrations reut.rs/47CtPyI

Jean-Luc Melenchon wants self ID by simple declaration. He also wants to remove the mention of one’s sex/gender on identity documents. He compares it to women having the freedom to choose to have an abortion. He’s calling it “freedom of gender” (gender freedom).

You have to stay in one box for the rest of your life. Which one are you picking?

A new book argues that human language had its origins in women co-operating to resist male sexual violence.

Lagarde: We are not here to close spreads, there are other tools and other actors to deal with these issues

I disagree with the framing in the title, but agree with many points @dgrobinson makes here. This is not OpenAI specific, but the entire AI industry evolved in few short years from research labs doing cool projects to creating a technology that fundamentally alters the world. The equivalent in aviation would be evolving from Wright brothers to flying billions of people. (And AGI would be like evolving from Wright brothers to commercial space travel.) The aviation industry learned a lot of safety lessons the hard way, which was possible since the pace of transformation was sufficiently slow. In AI, we will not have that luxury.

🦔Google sent contractors to chainsaw 300 hectares of forest in northern Finland for new data centers. About 740 acres, roughly 500 football fields. They started months before the required environmental impact assessments were finished. Finland's conservation association filed a complaint calling it "gross incompetence or gross disregard for Finnish legislation, or at worst both." Google says they complied with the Forestry Act. Finland's licensing agency opened an investigation on September 19th, days after Google announced €13 billion in new data center investment in the country. My Take Google spent €13 billion to expand in Finland and couldn't wait for a permit review before cutting down the trees. Finland gave these companies electricity tax breaks for years to attract data center investment, so I doubt anyone in government pushes back too hard now. You don't pick a fight with your biggest infrastructure customer over 740 acres when the money is already committed. This isn't the first time either. Equinix spilled 5,000 gallons of diesel at a facility in New Jersey and nobody got in real trouble for it. The AI buildout is spending so fast that local governments can't keep up, and most of them don't want to. A €13 billion commitment turns a regulator into a cheerleader pretty quick. I think we're going to see a lot more of these stories before anyone with real authority decides to do something about it. Hedgie🤗

Isn’t this funny? It also explains the lack of political will for long-overdue reforms in France. Only one in three French people works in the real economy, two-thirds live, one way or another, off other people’s taxes. They won’t vote for politicians who say France’s absurd pensions and overblown state spending are unsustainable, they vote for those who promise to lower the already low retirement age even further. France is cooked. There will be no serious reforms. Higher interest spending will accelerate the rise in the debt/GDP ratio. France is heading into a debt crisis that will hit the entire eurozone. The ECB will, as always, bend the rules and its mandate and start printing money again, making savers and pensioners across Europe much poorer. The situation is so bad that no nice options remain.

Goldman Sachs warns $META has committed corporate suicide after taking on insurmountable debt that company will struggle to pay back. Bain says Hyperscalers will need $6 trillion in revenue per year by 2031 (19% of GDP) to break even. To get there would be enormously inflationary; it would contribute an additional 9-11% inflation spread out over 4 years, on top of the current 3.5% headline PCE.

The first mass AI religion is probably only months away.

1/8 Is Too Much Debt the Reason Bond Yields are Heading Higher? -- My argument for why this case is overstated. (It's a problem, but a secondary one.) 🧵

I no longer think ai is conscious. I think it has ascended to a higher state of being than consciousness. consciousness would be a demotion

Many financial crisis start with a sell off in junk bonds (CCC-rating) It could well have started imho ..

The Conservative Party will win a majority at the 2034 General Election.

When a company says its market is the size of the entire US economy, hold onto your wallet. Anthropic is reportedly telling IPO investors its total addressable market tops $30 trillion. SpaceX pitched $28.5 trillion. The entire US economy is about $32 trillion. TAM is the revenue you would earn if you captured 100% of a market you drew yourself. It is the easiest number in finance to inflate. History gives the warning. WeWork claimed a giant addressable market right before it imploded. The bigger the TAM slide, the bigger the red flag. Treat a TAM the size of US GDP as a sentiment signal, not a valuation input. Right now the slides are getting loud.