PicoBlog

WalletHub released their 2023 Threats to Safety in the U.S. this week and the results were not surprising based on previous criminogenic behaviors. WalletHub compared 182 cities — including the 150 most populated U.S. cities, plus at least two of the most populated cities in each state — across three key dimensions: 1) Home & Community Safety, 2) Natura… ncG1vNJzZmicopjCs77InqSynaKoe7TBwayrmpubY7CwuY6pZq2glWLBsLyMa2xmpZ%2BowW6wwKeenqqfqsBur8itoJ6r

Substack is an online newsletter company focused on bringing a new format to independent writers. While it only started in 2017, as of November 2021 it already reached 1 million paying subscribers! According to SimilarWeb, they’re now getting almost 30 million unique visitors a month, too. Now imagine how many more people read newsletters exclusively in their email browsers and you can bet their total reach is in the hundreds of millions every month.

The S&P 500 SPY 0.00%↑ has declined by about 25% year-to-date, although the average hedge fund has been able to outperform the index handily. Hedge Fund Research’s HFRI 500 Fund Weighted Composite Index, which is comprised of the 500 largest hedge funds, has lost 4.15% this year, while its HFRI 500 Macro Index has increased by 17.45%. As of October 14th, 198 trading days into the year, there were only 5 years in which the S&P 500 performed worse:

Hi. It’s almost time. We are mere hours away from the release of The Tortured Poets Department and I want to throw up. “Why am I like this? Never change” is the common refrain at these moments. I did indeed get some mild sedation this morning by way of nitrous at the dentist and it might have made the crown and the filling worth it. Maybe? I could use mo…

On November 30th, the machine learning company OpenAI unleashed a chatbot service called ChatGPT on an unsuspecting world. ChatGPT can produce impressive responses to user ‘prompts’. Let’s ask it how it works. In the excerpts, the text in boldface is my prompt, and the rest is the reply from ChatGPT. Explain in a list how chatbots based on large language models work. A chatbot based on a large language model is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that uses a natural language processing (NLP) system to generate responses to user input.

“Hard times create strong men Strong men create good times Good times create weak men And weak men make hard times.” In The Beginning, man was given lush gardens, free time, good company, and just one rule — don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden,” God tells Adam in Genesis 2:16. “But you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die,” God adds in Genesis 2:17.

I couldn’t quite believe it when I first saw it last night, the news that Kelvin Kiptum had died, age 24, in a car crash in Kenya. Surely not? If you’re wondering who he is, you may remember I was getting very excited after he smashed the marathon world record in Chicago last year. The great Eliud Kipchoge, the zen master of marathon running, had spent years honing his talent, learning the event, fine tuning every aspect of his life to set that world record.

When we think of Muzafer Sherif, some images automatically come up in the minds of most psychology students. We think of the Robbers Cave experiment. We think of the studies on autokinetic effect and social norms. We think of the realistic conflict theory. In short, we mostly think of the work he did to further social psychology as a scientific field. His work on social norms, group behavior, and social conflict takes a whole new color when you take a closer peek into the events going on in his life at these times.

Dear The War On Prices subscribers, Last week, the Washington Examiner published an op-ed by me on the national embarrassment of Dulles airport’s passport control. I got tons of feedback and horrendous anecdotes of others’ experiences. And given I’ve got a lot to say on the subject (and have been digging through a ton of data), I thought it would be worth publishing my full, original op-ed draft below for you guys….