Sean's chart is critical: polls miss hardest in lopsided states, and they miss the same direction every cycle. Non-response bias is getting worse, not better. Rs in red states and Ds in blue states both beat their polls, in short. Somewhat controversial: in partisan states, polls that aren't regressed against their own past misses shouldn't be used at all at this point, and Senate midterm error bars should be 2-3x'd. (See: NJ governor.) Priors are more powerful now! Model turnout and partisanship off similar past elections, with decay factors back in time, and treat polls as a hint about drift, not as ground truth. The hardest calls become turnout and low-propensity voters, which is exactly where polls fail! This being the problem area twice is a good sign: it tells you where one of the two big issues is. The other is polls getting a valid sample of groups, hard when 0.5% of people even respond. In this election, that means your starting position should be Dems take the House but not the Senate. To make both sides mad: Husted and Hinson win. So does Hochul. Pump the brakes on upsets in party strongholds on both sides! Gun to my head, contested Senate races: Likely D: NH, GA, NC Toss-up: MN, MI, TX Likely R: ME, OH, IA, KS (AK's ranked choice is its own barrel of monkeys, so fuck you in particular, Alaska.) Dems pick up NC but may cough up MI, which leaves almost no path to a Senate majority. 50-54 R is the likely range, with 51 or 52 most likely. Collins alone could be a case study on this entire problem; Sean notes this but the Senator outruns her polls by such wide margins, repeatedly, that it's obvious the error bars are deeply incorrect. Remember: that's error IF the sample is representative, but we know with certainty it's not. You can also see this sort of disparity playing out across the early voting landscape, with folks like @DjsokeSpeaking and @TonerousHyus and @seantrende and @ZacharyDonnini all having a brawl about what is actually going on. Some of this, of course, is partisan cheerleading (nature of the game; you can hate it but it is what it is), yet a lot of this is actually that things are getting both harder to model and harder to predict in advance. Past success does not indicate future success, and in fact may contraindicate as regimes change. My central point thus remains: be cautious of certainty, and be long vol. From a betting standpoint, I think many of the Rs in Senate races are probably underpriced on a volatility-adjusted basis, as the uncertainty is way higher than people think and we're seeing betting markets missing badly (Brazil and Israel) already. That's not a statement they will win (they very well may not), but that things like Paxton in the low 30s is odd to me when in reality, we know so little we can be confident of that your priors should have had that around 50-50, if not slightly leaning R. And before you spin me a bunch of stories about Talarico, remember we saw this with Beto (who was in many ways a stronger candidate), but also, we're hearing the same cope from Rs in NH or NY, where your priors should have you confident Ds will win. Disagree? Check back Nov 4.

Will this matter? There have been a ton of charters approved by the OCC, thawing the ice around the chartering process dating back to the great financial crisis. That is almost certainly good: locking out new entrants while also not consolidating the existing means no creation and no destruction, just entropy. Good work to the OCC. However, now the hard part starts: customers. The US is one of the most overbanked nations in the world. To get customers, you are up against titans like Chase, upstarts like Robinhood, and the community banking cabal. Attention is not easy. Some will win: SoFi punches far above their weight, @PalmerLuckey’s @ereborbank has come out of the blocks running hard, but there are also many failures to launch and middle ground results. So if you are watching this, look for this: Are they seizing both deposits and mind share? Do they have a clear value proposition? What market are they targeting where they have a unique advantage or value prop? You can answer all of those easily for Erebor. Now we see if anyone else can replicate that, or even if some of the crypto incumbents can hold on in the big leagues.

"I can't access with an AI agent my Chase account as of this past week," @biancoresearch says banks are scared customers optimizing yield with AI may be threatening their revenue models

Blue states overall have hit a wall on math. Once your tax rate rises high enough that, for high earners, it's potentially worth millions over 10-20 years to leave, they start doing so, in increasing numbers. Then your economy hollows out. CA, IL, NY are all seeing this with the amount of jobs and revenue leaving. This is despite having some world class industries there that are now slowly decaying into dust. CO is not on that level. It will look more like WA doing this, which will simply nuke the economy on a forward basis. The unfortunate truth: you need to spend less and police the government spending you have. You cannot tax your way into prosperity when people can just move to Texas.

My creative team is very aMused by this development. But I have been saying for a while that the superpower in AI will be distribution, a lesson crypto has also had to learn the hard way. And here it is, courtesy of also hilarious memes from @alexandr_wang

📣📣First Look: @openfx_ is launching OpenMoney — a DeFi stablecoin FX protocol actually built for cross-border settlement. Issuers tokenize local currencies. Beta early November. @JoaquinAyusoSF is joining to run OpenFX Labs and 10x a company already growing by billions in volume every quarter. We caught him at Money20/20. Crypto finally has the timing right for this one.

I don't think this is actually related to AI. Companies are just fat and weak. Having been at some of these organizations, most are bloated, have too much bureaucracy, and have teams that range from neutral to negative value due to principal-agent problems and empire building. However, management doesn't want to get themselves fired, so they also need a "fake because" other than "we are dumb and can't manage well" as a reason to fire people. So they look for fake reasons. Often this happened when you had an adverse business event, when you could get away with hiring McKinsey or whomever to tell you to do it and blame them, or now, because of AI. This is the classic "fake because" to do a thing that should have been done a long time ago.

Researcher quit @AnthropicAI because their AI will kill everyone. If it’s that dangerous… why are they still building it? ✍🏼 WAITLIST Zero Signal weekly news roundup from @davidzmorris & @austincampbell at

Credit unions and crypto should be on the same side. Why they're not. My thoughts after a @money2020_me panel on cooperation and democratizing finance. For more on Money2020, subscribe to Zero Knowledge newsletters:

The bigger problem for polling is the specific nature of the error, as that destroys the usefulness of polls. If you have samples that are representative-ish, you can have reasonable error margins around your polls and it's approximate, but so be it. If you literally cannot get people to respond, that is a different kind of error. It's highly directional, and it's correlated across all the polls. Worst of all, you don't know how big the error is (you can guess, of course, usually by fitting to past results), but you don't actually know until after the fact and you have no good way of estimating it. So to that end, I think the intelligent critique is not that the industry is in a coma, but rather that it faces a truly intractable problem of subgroups of people simply refusing to be polled, and we don't have a great estimate of the difference between the polled and unpolled, only that it's not stable over time. If you adjust, are you now too Democratic? Too Republican? Too... neither and just weird? This sort of uncertainty matters most in close races, of course. In a very wide race, fine, D+20 is not becoming R+1. But D+4? R+2? You might as well throw darts at that point. The core issue is not that pollsters are not aware of it. It's that, for this specific kind of statistical uncertainty, it's far harder to do anything useful with it and they are somewhat to completely powerless.

MAYBE I WAS WRONG ABOUT BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY I wrote about how I always used to make fun of the guys who said things like "Bitcoin is speculative, but the underlying blockchain technology is interesting." And now I think maybe they kinda had a point.