Marc Benioff to SaaS CEOs upset about AI hurting their valuations: Grow up, wipe your tears, focus on the customer Chamath: “ Let's say you were running a software company that was before the AI wave and you're private. There's a bunch of these companies that were supposed to go public, (but) didn't go public. What should they do? What do those boards do?” Marc @Benioff: “Here's some Kleenex for them for all their tears. I mean, I talk to these CEOs, they're crying, "Look at my market cap, I'm not getting paid for my work." Guys, grow up. That's what I love about the public markets, they rationalize everything all the time. So great, be in the public markets. You want to be in a private market? Your valuation is fantasyland until somebody's actually going to pay you. So I just tell them, focus on your revenue, focus on your customers, focus on your cash flow, focus on your profitability, focus on your innovation. How are you going to add value to your customers? That's what's really, truly important.”

In 2021, Admiral Davidson warned the US Senate Committee on Armed Services that "Taiwan is clearly one of China's ambitions before 2027. The threat is manifest during this decade, in fact, in the next six years." Mainstream media build up a story on that, explaining that it was plausible since 2027 is the centenary of the founding of its People's Liberation Army... I am NOT saying that this was the original intention, but this totally made-up timeline drove Congress to authorize $7.1 billion for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative in 2022, $2.1 billion above Pentagon requests ! Never mind that in 2022, a panel of 64 US experts on China surveyed by the US think-tank CSIS was overwhelmingly doubtful that there was such a deadline. The respondents eloquently said that recent Chinese military exercises did NOT indicate that China was accelerating its timeline for using large-scale military force against Taiwan. Furthermore, 83% of the respondents "rejected the idea that China was planning to use significant kinetic military force against Taiwan by 2027." It did not deter CIA director William Burns to double down in 2023 and say that intelligence showed that "President Xi Jinping had instructed the PLA to be ready to conduct a successful invasion of Taiwan by 2027". Despite this erroneous oracle, Western mainstream media kept peddling, for about 6 years, the 2027 "China attack" deadline on the Taiwanese question. As faithful as Gordon Chang to his 2010 oracle on the "imminent collapse of China", which he religiously revises every year, the mainstream media is now selling the narrative that the missed deadline of 2027 was not a strategic planning blunder, but was meant as a "preparedness deadline for US forces". Some kind of team-building motivational device. As for for China, the new story line in Western think tanks is that Beijing may be "losing its ability as well as a sense of immediacy to attack Taiwan." So first the media, intelligence agencies and think tanks frame China as the aggressor who has already set a deadline for the Mother of All Attacks, and when this is proven wrong, the narrative changes to "China can't meet its own deadline, it's not even ready, but we wisely used that time to get ourselves ready." In Fantasyland, you can be the hero at every twist of the plot.

Rambling Random Ruminations of a Relic - a series Hey, Gen Z and younger Millennials—especially those of you who trade the markets. I get it. You’ve been screwed by the Boomers. Expensive education. No clear career path in your chosen field. Student loans. Another internship that leads nowhere. Close-to-minimum-wage work—not a living wage—waiting tables or doing something similar. And when you finally find a job, the owners expect you to work your butt off. What’s with these four-day, nine-hour-a-day jobs, anyway? Owning a home is not even imaginable. Marriage? Why would you want the lives your parents had? As an early-years Boomer, I fully acknowledge the disaster created for you by your parents’ and grandparents’ generations. You have every right to be angry. But I am seeing more and more of you come into equity and futures trading with expectations that are absolutely off-the-charts insane. You poo-poo this claim!!!! Many of you are chasing stories about turning $5,000 into $5 million in five years. The Market Wizards stories are incredibly compelling. One of the things I am most proud of during my 51-year career—supporting my family and building wealth—is having been featured in Market Wizards. I remain deeply honored. You might be a three-standard-deviation wonder. I am cheering for you—I truly am. Welcome to trading. It has been a thrill and an honor to trade my own money as my full-time occupation since I was in my 20s. I am now within spitting distance of 80, living in a body that betrays the fact that I once had a Division I university ice hockey scholarship. I strongly believe that the pursuit of becoming one of the three in 1,000 will ultimately reveal the full character and integrity of those three. Am I advising you not to invest in stocks? Nope. I am advising you to prepare for a career with a future, work hard and save as much as you can every month. Then I would advise putting 80% of those savings into SPY, 5% into Bitcoin and 15% into gold and silver. There is big money to be made in precious metals—but the move does not need to begin next week, Mr. and Ms. FOMO. There is a very strong chance that, 30 years from now, you will wish you had annualized 20% to 30%. You will recognize that your dream of doubling your money every year originated in Fantasyland. Please believe me: I am NOT, NOT, NOT trying to insult you. I believe in you. My grandchildren are Gen Z. Your generation has enormous potential for wealth and happiness. So, what is my advice to you???? You probably won’t accept it now, but print this X post and place it in an envelope marked, “Open in 2060.” Believe me—life goes by faster than you can possibly understand right now. If you want to learn trading—and I mean consistently profitable trading with your own money—it is possible. But you must get the idea of doubling your money every year out of your mind. Instead, think in terms of reaching 20% annually during years four and five, measured from the first year you begin trading. The best living investor/trader, in my opinion, is Stan “the Man” Druckenmiller. The best trading operation? That’s easy: Renaissance Technologies. Both have hovered in the 40%-plus zone over long periods. Let me square with you on this next statement: If you can learn to average even 30% annually over five years—with a Calmar ratio of 2.5 and without much variation across several hundred Monte Carlo simulations—you will have no trouble becoming a millionaire-plus, if money is your thing. More importantly, you will feel an enormous sense of accomplishment. Also, in my opinion, futures markets are far superior to equity markets for building an account and supporting any reasonable lifestyle. Why futures? Lots of reasons—more than enough to explore in another installment of “my story on X.” But I mean trading with real money. Not the pretend “prop shop” nonsense. If that is what you have in mind, unfollow me immediately. I have nothing to say to you. There are micro and even smaller contracts available these days, especially if you live outside the United States, where CFDs are permitted. Traders with access to CFDs have an advantage over those of us in the Stars and Stripes gang. I believe the CME even offers a one-ounce gold contract. And as more hard assets are tokenized, still more alternatives to traditional futures contracts will become available. I believe it is entirely possible to succeed in futures trading—if you enter the business with the right expectations. For your first three years, your primary goal should be simply not to lose money. If you accomplish that, you will already be way ahead of your peers. I mean WAAAY ahead. If you can survive three or four years in futures and still have your original money intact, then you may indeed have a very bright future in futures. One warning: DON’T EVER pay some service to provide you with signals, setups or whatever else the YouTube and X Wonder Kids of the Century want to sell you. You have to do this on your own. There is no other way. If there were, I would tell you. Please believe me. Perhaps I will wander deeper into this tunnel in the future. But that’s all the rambling for now.

Amp co-founder @beyang says people who think coding agents will replace humans are living in a "dismal fantasy land": "There's a lot of hype around coding agents replacing humans entirely, or agents in general replacing jobs. The capabilities of agents are evolving at a fast pace, but fundamentally they still do what you ask them to do." "What is very apparent to us in using agents day to day is that human intervention, that human guidance is still essential. If anything, it's more essential. Because if you have the wrong guidance in place, the cost of going off the rails, you can very quickly rack up a ton of token cost." "The whole, this is gonna make humans obsolete thing is just way over-hyped, to the point where some folks are living in a dismal fantasy land." @AmpCode

Many current Democrats, and more particularly those that have strayed into the fantasy land of the DSP, are in the habit of labeling Elon Musk and many others who believed, and still believe, in the principals of the Democratic Party circa 2000, as "Nazis". In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Still can’t wrap my head around LGBTQ’s and feminists cheering in millions from countries where gay people get b*aten and women need a male guardian to leave the house. Then they act shocked when cities like Dearborn no longer want the pride parades. Liberals are living in fantasy land. Lmao