Tommy Apter

One other huge blind spot in American politics is that pretty much everyone in the US foreign policy establishment finds it inconceivable that neither China nor Russia want to take over the world. Part of it is that the US defense/foreign policy establishment exists to maintain US total dominance of the world, and so they can't imagine that another power might not want to rule the world. The thing about China is that even if it *wanted* to run the world it couldn't. China is bordered with two nuclear powers (Russia and India) and if China wanted to run the world that means instant war with Russia. Chinese population has peaked and I think that in thirty years, India will be as powerful or more powerful than China. The other interesting thing about US foreign policy is that reading over US foreign policy in the Cold War, at no time was it the goal of US policy to run the entire world. The goal was to stop the spread of communism, and if you read Nixon and Kissinger, none of them expected that the US would be the sole superpower. The idea that the goal of US foreign policy should be to maintain world dominance seems to have arising in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War. The big mistake I think was made in the 2010s. What the US should have done was to say "now that we got out of a stupid war in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can go and fix the problems with the US economy" but NOOO.... Since the Middle East is at peace we can now fight CHINA.

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I try to avoid political arguments, but one problem with US foreign policy is that once everything becomes a fight between good and evil, you end up shooting and bombing the wrong people. The American strategy is "tell me who is good, who is bad, and I bomb the bad guys." The problem is that this *sometimes* works, and sometimes you get yourself into a situation where you can't tell the difference between the good guys, the bad guys, and you randomly bomb people at which point *YOU* become the bad guy. Also even if you don't *like* other people's opinions you have to deal with them. If you want effective information warfare, then you have to understand the views of the other side (and realize that here are about 30 or 40 sides). One thing that I like about listening to people from other cultures is that you learn things. One idea that I like from Islam is the idea of the "inner Jihad". The constant fight that you have is not with external evil but with the evil inside your own heart. If you see something you really react emotionally, and if you are driven by emotion, then at that point Satan can whisper something in your ear and then turn you into the bad guy. So your fight is not the crush the evil on the outside, but to control the evil within your own heart, and to even control your own evil, you have to *see* your own evil.

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One thing about trade is that I don't expect trade relations with China to be much worse than with Biden. The big thing is that during Trump 1.0, the tariffs that Trump put on China weren't that bad, and Trump didn't go after China on technology to the level that Biden did. The big thing is that I don't think that Trump really cares about trade between China and other nations, and it's going to be really, really hard for Trump to get Europe and Japan to enforce tech sanctions against China while the US is going protectionist anyway.

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A most compelling illustration of the use of the quantitative method in investing - for gold - for S&P 500. And thus, in the selection of what to invest in now, given the chaotic, and so random, nature of the investing markets. It would be nice for some other quants to confirm and validate this. This is not social media investing, for sure.

💥Entire world market downturn is related to the Japanese currency, Yen. Here's the sequence of events: Nothing to do with Israel - Iran war..💥 1. Two weeks ago, the Japanese Yen was trading at 165 Yen per 1 USD (i.e., 1 USD = 165 Yen). 2. For over 30 years, Japan has maintained zero interest rates (even on loans, there was zero interest). 3. Many organizations, funds, and hedge funds took advantage of this by borrowing large amounts from Japan and investing it in the US markets (double benefit of zero interest money and the dollar always appreciating against the Yen). 4. Additionally, since the investment was substantial, most hedge funds also shorted the Yen to hedge their positions (similar to selling call options for easier money). 5. Everything was going smoothly; people had been making free money for years, and this is why Japan is the largest investor in US markets due to its zero-interest money. 6. What changed? Last week, the JCB (Japan Central Bank, similar to RBI in India) decided to raise interest rates by 25 bps after almost 30+ years. And from here, everything changed. 7. Now, zero interest money is no longer zero interest, and there is an additional cost on all your existing loans. Hence, most of the funds that had taken this free interest loan and invested it in the US market started selling off everything to get the money and close the loan (because the US market was already overbought and now these loans no longer had zero interest) 8. Due to the increase in interest, the Yen started appreciating against the dollar, reaching 1 USD = 145 Yen (this was a significant increase in currency value in just 2 days). 9. Now, most of the people who had shorted the Yen (as mentioned in point 4) had to cover their positions because the Yen appreciated significantly in just 2 days. Their call options, which were in between, started moving wildly like the Sensex. 10. Now imagine you took a loan in Yen when 1 USD = 165 Yen and invested it in the US market. Suddenly, 1 USD = 145 Yen, so regardless of your returns, you have a direct cross-currency loss of 13%. (Assume you took a loan of 16,500 Yen which was equal to 100 USD, and now 16,500 Yen is equal to 113 USD. Even if there is no interest, you have a direct loss of 13% due to the Yen appreciating.) 11. In such a scenario, wouldn’t you sell everything to save yourself? What is the solution to this situation? The simple solution is that the US needs to lower its interest rates to counter this. If a mountain is formed somewhere, it has to be countered elsewhere. If the mountain is in Japan, the US will have to act. The Indian market suffered primarily due to heavy selling by Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) as a result of the panic in Japan and the US.

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Also a lot has to do with technology. The American public was never going to die for Ukraine, and they will not die for Taiwan. Americans really never cared about "spreading democracy". The *only* reason that all of this was viable was technology. The US had such an overwhelming technology superiority over Iraq that it could blow up a country for "free". The American public was promised a short victorious war over Ukraine. They were lied to, and once the lie of a short war was exposed, then you have a problem. By contrast Putin is not lying to the Russian people. The war in Ukraine is killing thousands of Russian per month, yet Russians are still volunteering at the recruiting stations because NATO membership for Ukraine is an issue that Russians are willing to die over. Similarly, we just have to admit that if a war breaks out over Taiwan, this is an issue that people in the Mainland are willing to die for, and people in the US are not. If there are no other options, then the PRC is willing to have a long, bloody war to achieve national unification. Fortunately there are other options.

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One other problem with the "international rule based order" is that its not going to survive a Trumpist Presidency. Even if Trump loses in November, it is going to be close, and Trump is not going to champion a rule-based order. One funny thing about the "moral certainty" that people have with this idea is that it kills any real debate within the US. What if you are an American that thinks that the US should just hand the South China Seas and Taiwan over to China because its not worth the effort? Trump is super-unpredictable. He could nuke Shanghai or he could hand Taiwan over. But the US is in such a mess that a lot of people are just willing to roll the dice. The weird thing is that the US is trying to convince China to adopt the American political system when most American's aren't satisified with the current system. In fact, I don't think most Americans really want the US to have a two-party system and most Americans would prefer to have a one-party system if their party was the one party that was in charge. One thing that I appreciate is that I happen to be a US registered voter, and the CCP or the Chinese government have never tried to influence who I should vote for, because they consider this none of China's business how the US runs itself. China has enough problems that no one in Beijing really wants to run the US. Meanwhile things are going to heck in the US, and the US is trying to micromanage the world.

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Derek Grossman Ian Bremmer Also people are wondering how Trump is going to pay for his stuff, and that's pretty easy. The US is currently paying $1 trillion/year in defense. If the US cuts a deal with the PRC over Taiwan and then has talks with North Korea, it can massively draw down US forces in East Asia, and likely cut the defense budget by two-thirds. Also China is sitting on a ton of cash. My guess is that the US is basically going to pull out of East Asia and Europe and focus on the Middle East. We are going to see if Trump goes in this direction by who he appoints in his foreign policy team, but my guess is that most of the hawks that are looking for jobs are going to be very disappointed (i.e. Mike Pompeo, Matt Pottinger, and Elbridge Colby). My guess is Trump is going to appoint the very few people in the foreign policy establishment that see his vision (Richard Grenell is the only name that comes to mind) and that the people that are going to be running foreign policy are people from outside the establishment people like Elon Musk or Jamie Dimon or family members like Jared Kushner. The basic question that Pompeo and Colby have not answered is that they want to have good relations with Russia and then convince Putin to go after China. This is just not going to work.

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We don’t have a crystal ball and nobody knows with 100% certainty on how this will turn out, but considering that 90%+ of settlements between Russia, China, and Belarus are already dedollarized, they are definitely gaining momentum if there’s a formal system to allow more countries to participate. Will this be the biggest #OctoberSurprise of this year?

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Chart for Verasity - $VRA technical analysis Here’s a breakdown of the chart: Observations: 1. Support Zone (Blue Box): • The shaded blue area indicates a long-term support level, where the price has shown repeated rejections of further downside. 2. Rounded Bottom Formation: • The price appears to be completing a rounded bottom, a bullish reversal pattern indicating accumulation and the potential for an upward breakout. 3. Breakout Above Resistance (Blue Line): • The price has broken above the horizontal resistance level around $0.0059, a critical threshold. 4. Key Levels (Dashed Lines): • $0.008922: The first major resistance level and potential profit-taking zone. • $0.015978: The next significant resistance level, marking a key historical high. 5. Volume Analysis: • The volume indicates growing interest during the breakout, supporting the bullish case. Scenarios: • Bullish Case: If momentum continues, the price could test the first resistance at $0.0089. Breaking this level could lead to a move toward $0.0159. • Bearish Case: A rejection near the breakout zone ($0.0059) or resistance could lead to a pullback toward the support zone around $0.004. Actions: • For traders, this could be an opportunity to target the next resistance while using the support zone as a stop-loss. • For investors, the rounded bottom suggests a long-term trend reversal, but monitoring volume and market conditions is essential.

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The famous 10:10 clock problem haunts all image generators. If you ask an image generator to make an analog clock, changes are extremely high that the hands will show 10:10. Why? Because all of the training data that is on the internet that the model creators have scraped has clocks showing 10:10 (which is supposed to look nicer than other configurations). So all of the GenAI models keep producing 10:10 clocks no matter what you ask them for. This shows that the diffusion models learn to create outputs for the prompt that are similar to their training data. The model does not create the images by thinking about the components, their properties, and any type of hierarchy (e.g. second, minute, and hour hands, hour labels, the relationship between the different components). Image models are incredibly good now, and a recent model called Flux has also shown capacity to generate highly realistic images with a small parameter count (12B). But similar to LLMs, all of the current GenAI models fail to generalize beyond their training set. Which is how deep learning works. Your training data and test data are supposed to come from the same distribution for DL to work. To ensure success of AI application in any area, if the model is trained with the type of data expected at the test time, you can hope for good results. If you have no idea what the test data will be like, you will need more than a little luck. #ai #tech #digital #dalle #grok #xai #flux #transformers #diffusion #llm #llms #nlp #data #science #imageprocessing #cv #computervision #deeplearning

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The proportion of gold in a country's foreign reserves varies significantly across major economies. While the United States allocates 65-75% of its foreign reserves to gold, countries like China hold a much smaller share, typically ranging from 2-5%, reflecting different approaches to reserve management and economic strategies​. https://lnkd.in/dSvufYPp

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One fascinating thing about the politics of space in the US is that the politicians seem crazy concerned that China will plant a flag on the moon first, whereas the space geeks are not so worried about that. And then you get into the "For All Mankind" scenario. In that scifi series the Russians make it to the moon first, but that turns out to be a *good* thing for the world, so the thinking that the space geeks seem to have is that if China makes it to the moon first, then this will just kick the pants of the US to get to Mars. The space geeks are more interested in colonization of the solar system, so they are trying to push some very high risk technology. The idea is that there is no point in just getting to the moon, so they are trying to front load some crazy ambitious technology. Also Elon Musk is pushing this because his investors are just not going to make money planting a flag on the moon, so he is thinking about how to send cruise ships to Mars. The thing about Musk is that SpaceX and Dragon has been a wild success. The issue here is that his plans for Artemis might look more like Hyperloop and Cybertruck than the Dragon capsule. One thing that seems interesting about Chinese moon plans is that in the US the crewed and uncrewed parts of NASA have always been fighting each other over the same pot of money, whereas there isn't this fight in the Chinese space program and so Chinese lunar missions are making heavy use of robotics, and so the design of the uncrewed probes are going into the crewed probes.

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Analysis Non-Convergence is one of the biggest issues of Nonlinear FEA. There are many reasons why you may encounter this issue. Among the most common I would list: - Too big load incrememnt - Too few allowed iterations - Too low capacity of the model ... but of course there are others as well. Do you want to learn how to navigate this issue and set up Nonlinear FEA Analysis like a pro? Sign up to my free webinar using the link in the comment below this post!

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The history of gold priced in dollars show exactly why the price of gold mechanistically goes up over time in a fiat monetary system. Gold was essentially unchanged for most of American history at $18.93 per ounce. This changed in 1933, when President Roosevelt domestically broke the gold standard, and allowed dollars to be devalued versus gold (in order to increase the real value of the U.S. governments gold reserves). Gold was worth $34 by 1934. Gold stayed at/around this new devalued price for roughly 40 years, until President Nixon severed the dollar’s peg to the dollar in foreign exchanges as well in 1971. Gold has ~70x’d since the Nixon shock. These two actions, in 1933 and 1971, essentially gave the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury carte blanche authority to print as many dollars as possible, relative to gold (or anything else). Mechanistically, you have one currency whose supply is constantly expanding versus another currency whose supply is essentially fixed. If these were two companies, Company A (Dollar LLC) is issuing new shares every single year. Company B (Gold LLC) is keep shares outstanding steady. Which company will be more valuable over time on a per share basis? It’s really that simple. No, gold won’t go up linearly over time. It will fluctuate in the short term just like any other asset. But over time, the inherent bias is for dollars to depreciate versus gold (same thing as gold appreciating versus dollars). Yes. Consuming in gold is virtually impossible and highly impractical. That’s why we don’t walk around with bricks of gold in our pockets to pay for Starbucks. But, it is just as foolish to save in dollars (a guaranteed depreciating asset), as it is to try and consume in gold. TLDR: Save in gold. Consume in dollars.

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