Self-Own

Credit: XKCD

The Cambridge dictionary defines the verb to bullshit as:

a rude word meaning to try to persuade someone or make them admire you by saying things that are not true

The essence of successful bullshit is that it should be both plausible and presented authoritatively. Bullshitters are always tempted to buttress the appearance of authority by including actual evidence rather than just their interpretation of the evidence, but this is often a fatal mistake. Below the fold I discuss a classic example from MAGA's campaign to demonize immigrants.

Cherry-picking

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Via Barry Ritholtz we find this infographic entitled Top Performing S&P 500 Stocks showing the best total return over the past 5, 10, 15 and 20 years. Ritholtz sourced it from Ranked: The Top Performing S&P 500 Stocks in the Last Two Decades By Marcus Lu with graphic design by Miranda Smith.

In each case, Nvidia is the best performing stock, and it is the only stock to appear in all four periods. Sounds great, doesn't it? Why wouldn't you just hold NVDA all the time and be guaranteed to beat the market?

But follow me below the fold for more detail from someone who has been long NVDA for more than three decades..

Drones

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In 2017 the Future of Life Institute released a video entitled Slaughterbots. Wikipedia describes it as an:

arms-control advocacy video presenting a dramatized near-future scenario where swarms of inexpensive microdrones use artificial intelligence and facial recognition software to assassinate political opponents based on preprogrammed criteria.

War accelerates technological progress. The war in Ukraine has not yet produced "slaughterbots" but it has greatly accelerated drone technology and taken some giant steps toward them. The most important of these steps is that the cost of precision strike has been reduced by 1-2 orders of magnitude, making it affordable for "non-state actors" and even individuals.

Below the fold I look at drone developments in the war in Ukraine, what is happening with drones and drone defense in the West, and sketch some implications for the future.