bofadeez

I opened with a rhetorical question, not an insult. The answer is obviously "the same as I consumed before it was legalized" - presumably zero fentanyl use for you whether it's legal or illegal. I was not implying you do fentanyl lol. I was implying your decision not to do fentanyl has nothing to do with it being illegal.

If fentanyl were legalized, how much would you personally consume?

News flash: nobody does/does not do drugs based on legality.

The Rat Park experiment showed that rats in enriched, social environments consumed far less drugs than isolated rats, highlighting how environment strongly affects addiction.

In Defending the Undefendable, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s chapter “The Pusher” argues that drug dealers, often vilified as destructive criminals, play a complex social role by supplying a demand that already exists. He suggests that punishing them does little to stop drug use and may actually exacerbate harm by driving the trade underground, increasing prices and danger. Since demand for illegal drugs is inelastic, higher prices directly leads to increase in petty crimes like theft that are often motivated by addiction. I.e. addicts wouldn't have to steal as many catalytic converters if drugs were pennies per day instead of hundreds of dollars. And it's only expensive because it's illegal. It's kind of ironic.

Dark speculation here, but addiction may even be an evolutionary coping mechanism, providing just enough short-term reward to keep individuals alive when life feels unbearable. The alternative to addiction might be even worse given e.g. an unusually strong biological emotional response to a (possibly accurate) negative assessment of their personal reality.

Prohibition drives black markets where normal price discovery, quality control, and dispute resolution vanish, producing high prices, inconsistent purity, and violence. It does nothing to reduce demand. Low-level dealers effectively stabilize these markets through competition and supply continuity. Enforcement intensifies instability and empowers predatory actors. Mental health care and treatment work better alongside regulated supply, which reduces violence and desperation while letting users seek help outside illicit markets. Real solutions require rethinking the structures causing the crisis, not doubling down on failed approaches.

Surprised this wasn't already a thing. What did people do before? Manually warp it?

Good point. If you let the government silence extremists then they can also do it to the moderates next. Those are subjective definitions after all.

Paradox of of tolerance makes it clear that what can't be tolerated is anyone promoting law that restricts or hinders freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. Lest we be left with no reasonable tolerance for any moderate speech at all, and we're left with intolerance toward all speech. Fortunately the first amendment exists and we don't have to worry too much.

Thanks for pointing that out though, it's a great talking point for free speech absolutists.

> So how was I able to make money

That's called "anecodtatal gambling success" and a lot of smart people suffer from this fallacy.

Applying formal causal inference procedures such as propensity score matching, doubly robust estimators, causal forests, and targeted maximum likelihood estimation (TMLE) to test whether standard fundamental variables like P/E, P/B, EV/EBITDA, ROE, ROA, gross profitability, or free cash flow yield causally influence forward equity returns consistently shows that these metrics exhibit negligible average treatment effects once confounders and colliders are controlled for.

In other words, across modern causal inference frameworks, the estimated causal impact of common fundamental signals on subsequent returns is statistically indistinguishable from zero, which indicates that most traditional fundamentals have no meaningful predictive or causal power for future price performance. There's no alternative opinion to be had. You're just wrong. You can continue gambling if you like, but you're not doing any kind of predictive analysis.

Well yes, we're in a permanent bubble with fractional reserve banking and central planning. Mises institute spends a lot of resources explaining how that works to the public, etc. That's not helpful insight though in terms of taking informed action e.g. as an investor.

Yeah markets are disconnected from fundamentals. Conduct causal inference with any fundamental metric on forward returns and you'll see they have almost zero predictive ability. That supports the efficient market hypothesis, as do many many other observations.

If you could simply "value the market" in some analytical way, then any simple neural network would (universally) approximate it. Instead you see the vast vast majority of machine learning quant funds fail. Here are the specific details as to why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRUlSm4gdQ4

That reply doesn't make sense either. Sounds like you're just a "bad person" haha

Yeah I guess you fundamentally misunderstand the difference/significance between someone who is seeking objective peer-reviewed truth and someone who tries to seduce investors to put money into their fund for fees on the internet with wild theories and anecdotal gambling success. It's not your fault, you must be a teenager or something.

Warnings today are mainstream and widely understood, unlike late‑90s dot-coms where Buffett was largely ignored. Buffett explicitly says he doesn't invest in complicated businesses, finances aside. Plus, core AI players are profitable and funding capex from real earnings, valuations are concentrated in a few mega-caps, revenues are real, and financing is healthier. So while parts of AI may be overvalued, it’s structurally very different from the 1999 bubble.

And is it really overvalued if AGI is achieved? Sounds like risk:reward profile is already priced in the gamble, and the valuation is appropriate....But I guess if you take it to the logical conclusion... if AGI is achieved, everyone will be out of a job, so scarcity-based economics, based on scarce labor input, itself will have to be redone. Wild speculation there.

Yes but his point is it's impossible to detect in realtime. Timing.

That person is not even an academic. At least google Eugene Fama so you don't embarrass yourself like this.

What does Ja Rule think about bubbles? Ask him why markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Eugene Fama believes it's impossible to detect a bubble. Why do you think he's wrong?

During most of the dot-com boom, there was not a broad consensus that a bubble existed, whereas today’s AI boom is widely accompanied by media warnings about an AI bubble, making public awareness much higher than it was in the late 1990s. I don't think a single person hasn't heard the "circular financing" talking points from multiple people who think they're being insightful. Or Burry who thinks a GPU should be trashed after 2 years. Doesn't sound like irrational euphoria.

Business failure is an important part of capitalism; it frees up resources to be allocated to productive businesses. A state bailout creates malinvestment and is antithetical to free market capitalism.

Yeah that's what did it. What kind of world would we live in without art propaganda where USSR didn't collapse? Too horrific to even imagine.

And are there any quant funds that consistently make money? No. It's like professional gambling. Susquehanna actually bets on sports too. Constant losses (hopefully slightly) offset by gains. There's no such as a trader with high accuracy/precision. If you can even edge out 1% (gain-loss) you'll be a billionaire from $0 very quickly. A positive edge is so exceptionally rare, it's like a startup -> unicorn. It would be the equivalent of owning a casino with trillions of dollars being played nonstop. It almost never happens.

If there was any fixed analytic solution to behavior then a simple neural network would approximate it quite easily. It's almost all noise with only spurious correlations and misleading patterns that don't repeat.

In the case of an email validation service, yeah they must have a huge quantity of infrastructure and then throttle it sufficiently to fly under e.g. proofpoint blacklists. But I don't think you can get big discounts on IPv4 so it's just a variable cost, not fixed.

My opinion is that all SaaS pricing will trend to price of compute as vibe coding + open source alternatives with one-click deployment converge

Absolutely! It’s not simply annoying—it’s dangerously careless.

Depends on whether they have economies of scale going on or not. If it's just an email validation service then price should do the trick (given feature parity). You just need to burn through a lot of IPv4 and domains to do a proper port 25 handshake. Not sure how much margin there is left.

> “How can I compete with them? They have teams. They have funding. They have thousands of customers.”

Price. They have overhead. They have growth expectations for future funding rounds and tend to overpay to acquire customers when their product is stock valuation.

"Your margin is my opportunity"

Wow man. Thermodynamics operates on mechanical causality while human behavior does not. Because of the internal state of a human.

Do you just believe anything that was p-hacked together? I can tell you have never predicted human behavior in practice for a living. If you're so interested, why not learn the basics of what quant traders do to predict behavior? Then your opinions would be a little more informed and not quite so embarrassing for yourself. Just a suggestion.

Also, if A implies B and B implies C then A implies C. You're welcome!!

Free speech is inalienable, it does not originate from majority opinion.

It's a lot more complicated than that. Eugene Fama might be a good starting point for you.

(Spoiler: most PhD level machine learning quant trading funds do not make money. Marcos Lopez de Prado can explain why that is the case: they accidentally invest in false discoveries. It's so pervasive that I often argue it's a numerical analytic proof for EMH. Most quant funds you've heard of are engaged in high-frequency market making, they provide liquidity by continuously quoting prices and earning the bid-ask spread with limited directional risk. It's not behavior forecasting. Something like order flow toxicity has predictive ability for like a few milliseconds.)

Something like this does not work: https://www.tradingview.com/v/9Ut0yL2p/

Even if it has a good p-hacked backtest with some parameters, it's not going to work in practice. It's just a novelty by/for academics.

Agreed. But when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Predictive power alone doesn’t equal causal understanding. The paper models news and opinion spread as physical processes that may (over)fit observed data, but it never establishes why these patterns occur. No counterfactuals, no intervention logic, no identification strategy. As causal inference work (like Stefan Wager's) makes clear, explanation demands more than correlation. Treating human communication as node-to-node contagion might predict past outcomes, but it misses the purposive, context-driven nature of choice. So while the model captures statistical regularities, it lacks the causal rigor needed to claim genuine understanding of human behavior.

I'm assuming you've never predicted things in practice for a living? e.g. as a quant trader? Quants have something called a "deflated sharpe ratio" since p-hacking / overfitting historical data is such a common thing and results in losses when projected into the future.

You should deploy a quant trading model based on your predictive behavior theory and compound your way to be the richest person on earth. It's not that complicated apparently!

Human action isn’t just another physical process because it’s driven by intention, not mechanical causation. A rock falls because gravity compels it; a person acts because they want something to happen. That difference makes human behavior fundamentally qualitative. It’s rooted in meaning, interpretation, and choice. You can measure motion, but you can’t measure purpose. Once you strip away intention to fit behavior into a mathematical model, you’re no longer describing human action. You’re describing an abstraction that behaves like a machine. The numbers might be tidy, but they stop representing what people actually do.

All this “physics of news” framing repeats the same mistake mainstream economics made decades ago, confusing human action with measurable physical phenomena. People aren’t particles, and opinions aren’t spin states. As Mises and Hazlitt argued, mathematical models give spurious precision when applied to purposeful behavior: they hide their "arbitrary assumptions" behind elegant equations. Treating communication, belief, and motivation as quantifiable variables may look rigorous, but it strips away meaning, choice, and context and the very essence of human decision. What results isn’t insight, but an illusion of control dressed up as science.

Physics operates on mechanical causality while human behavior does not.