Conversation

A modern economy as best as I can grok it: Money used to buy stuff: $100 Money used to buy money: $200 Money used to bet on money used to buy money: $400 Money used to buy money to bet on money used to bet on money used to buy money: $1300 Total: $2000 % used to buy stuff: 5%
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The 5% that’s about stuff is interesting whether or not you personally have money. You have skin in that game by virtue of simply being alive and made of atoms as a meatbag with sensors that can experience the world. The 95% is only interesting if you buy in.
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I think a few years ago I briefly considered trading some covered calls and very briefly I had an opinion about options trading. Then I got distracted by Pluto photos from New Horizons or something. My kryptonite when it comes to $ is too much nerdy interest in reality.
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It really is the religion of our times. Back in the day you had to believe in Christianity to find the question of angels on a pinhead interesting. Now you have to believe in the economy. In both cases costly buy-in signals required first.
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Some day I hope to get religion. But I can’t shake the feeling that there’s no there there. Beliefs about beliefs about beliefs is just noise past a point. Like really, technically noise. That’s why you don’t numerically differentiate noisy sensors too much in control theory.
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This makes me a reactionary I guess. If you carry my line of thought too far, you land on injunctions against usury in Islam, where even basic interest is sinful. The pragmatic line is “when are we adding more noise than signal with the next degree of indirection?”
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It’s not just many levels of indirection that kill you. It is layers of leveraged indirection built on top of a noise-limited set of signals. Like trading on the future rolling of a marble on the deck of a ship in a storm, where coordinate frame is local galactic supercluster.
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I think I draw the line at a fiat economy with interest rate mechanism and a basic futures market. Ie instruments based on predictions about stuff. Anything more exotic you’re asking for trouble.
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Replying to
I'm not sure how to move to "focal things and practices" in finance while celebrating the "resource leak" spiral out in city/civilization design -- it seems intertwined.