Excellent reading material I urge you to read this. You will need at least half an hour but it will be worth your time. Written in 2015, its forecasts about the speed of human development are absolutely excellent. Among other things, it predicts that right about now we will have artificial intelligence that is about

You no longer bank here … and just like that. The largest digital currency exchange in the country lost its banking facilities. The decision is no doubt related to perceptions on KYC undertaken by Binance. I have to say though, having used that platform, it’s at least as rigorous as anything you encounter at a

You were right You were right when you said “bitcoin will never overtake the USD and can’t cope with large transaction volume”. You were right when you told everyone not to invest in it because it will ‘crash’ and ‘it’s a bubble’ and stay safe and buy Westpac shares. It hasn’t overtaken the USD, it

The four horse persons There was an AFR sponsored talkathon last week. Four fund managers were asked if they were 25 years old today, where they would invest in for the next 10 years.1 Interesting how prominent the bond talk is. I’d hardly call it a stock-pickers market at these valuations either and under no

Would you like fries with that? McDonald’s is growing like crazy and opening new restaurants in the USA for the first time since 2014. It is also cutting staff, so the staff per unit sale metric continues to fall with automation. As an economic microcosm, McDonald’s has always been excellent. Not least the Big Mac

Asimov “Changes will take place and perhaps what you are doing will have no meaning in 10 years” That is Isaac Asimov explaining change. More importantly he pointed out that everyone understands change but they do not understand the pace of change. 100 years ago, change was slow, taking longer than a generation. So changes

A visitor It is August 2022. A young man comes to visit our office to talk about bitcoin mining. He has a job in finance but also appears to have deep knowledge of the economics of bitcoin. I categorise bitcoin knowledge like this: The visitor understands the energy link and I consider myself in that

A compressed file It would seem the world is ending, thanks to artificial intelligence. Time Magazine and many others recently called for its complete shut-down before it’s “too late”. Others have suggested large AI data centres should be bombed (seriously). The essence of the complaint runs like this: AI is intelligent, and once it learns

AI exam results GPT-4 is very good at exams. It smashed the bar exam straight into the 90th percentile. It is also outstanding at mathematics, which is more than could be said for its predecessor 3.5, which was good but not brilliant. Since these results came out, GPT-4 has also participated in the Maths Olympiad.

Genius Hello Larry, can you help us? I mean, that is the only job banks have. They take deposits, at call, and make longer-term loans like mortgages. Then they hope like hell everyone doesn’t ask for their money at once. I wish it was more complicated. Sure, there is complication and regulation and capital ratio