I’ve been reading Steve Sailer and Wolf Richter for many years. Both are longtime Californians, both are keen observers who know how to look beyond the partisan crap, and both use a lot of data and graphs.
Recently Sailer has been losing his sharpness and Wolf has been gaining.
Today’s articles are a good example.
Sailer discusses generative AI and concludes that it’s more good than bad. He’s entirely missing the INPUT side, the THEFT side.
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Everybody is worked up over artificial intelligence. Is it a threat to humanity? Will the robots decide to kill us all like in Terminator? Is AI the explanation for the Fermi Paradox? Elon Musk wants a pause on AI development. … Personally, I don’t have an opinion. What I’m reminded of is the 1940s confusion over what to do about atomic bombs. … But, still, nuclear weapons were simpler to strategize about since they were destructive, while much that AI can do is constructive.
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No, the robots won’t decide to kill us. They’ve been in a position to kill us all USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS since 1980, and it hasn’t happened yet. That’s not the fucking problem. And Elon isn’t against ChatGPT because it’s bad, he’s against it because he doesn’t own it yet.
AI is killing SKILL and CREATIVITY by sucking out art and literature and programming without paying royalties, and then flooding the art and literature and programming markets with cheap knockoffs. The same demons killed American heavy industry by sucking out our industrial knowledge with Chinese spies, and then flooding the clothing and tech markets with cheap knockoffs. Same strategy.
Last week Sailer was discussing tenure, and again missed the real problem. He’s still running with the idiotic Repooflican “tenure causes laziness” crap.
Sailer maintains his sharpness in diagnosing status and comparing cultures. Nobody is better on status.
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Wolf is the only ‘best-selling’ econ commentator who fully understands the consequences of the QE/ZIRP/QT sequence. Absolutely everyone else, “left” and “right”, believes that ZIRP is historically normal and good, and MUST be restored instantly.
In Wolf’s latest piece on commercial real estate:
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Blackstone has been dumping other office towers, including most prominently a year ago when it walked away from the mostly vacant 26-story, 621,000-square-foot, 1950-vintage property at 1740 Broadway in Midtown Manhattan to let the lenders – CMBS holders – take the remaining loss.
The vacant, 46-story 1.4 million sf office tower, built in 1985 and formerly called “One AT&T Center,” in downtown St. Louis sold for $4.1 million in April 2022 in a foreclosure sale. In 2017, after AT&T, the sole tenant, had departed and the landlord had stopped making mortgage payments, lenders – represented by the special servicer Trustees of US Bank – foreclosed on the building. The outstanding mortgage balance at the time was $107 million. It was a classic 100% total wipeout for CMBS holders.
One of the most horrible big office markets in the US is San Francisco with a record vacancy rate of nearly 33% in Q1, and rising. There still haven’t been any sales or foreclosure sales in 2022 and 2023 so far. The last sale was in 2021, PG&E’s sale of its 1.6 million sf headquarters complex to developer Hines for $800 million.
But that was in 2021 when the Fed was still doing QE and repressing interest rates to near 0%. Those were still the crazy times of consensual hallucination. Everything has changed since then. At this point, no one knows what anything is worth. There have been no transactions since the free money era ended.
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QT is restorative suck justice, sucking the monetary lifeblood out of the tech demons.
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