In June that year, Meta acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI to reboot its AI efforts for a whopping $14.8B, and brought in Scale AI’s CEO, Alexandr Wang to take over Meta’s AI strategy. [...] Based on the investment made into Scale AI and Wang, it’s pretty clear that Meta — and Zuckerberg — is determined to build a state-of-the-art LLM that can be competitive with the latest versions of Claude and ChatGPT. But Meta has to start pretty much from scratch, and it’s up to Alexandr Wang to deliver. [...] Zuckerberg has full control over the business, and has made the decisions to reallocate a good part of engineering folks to data labeling, to roll out tracking software, and to lay off 10% of staff when Meta achieved record revenue and profits. As the CEO, the buck clearly stops with him. But it’s hard to unsee that — outside of layoffs — everything that Meta is doing is taken from the Scale AI playbook, and that surely comes from Wang.

The Bliss trade is reflected in the divergence between the prices of stocks and government bonds. While equity markets have held up surprisingly well, government bonds have suffered even as long-run inflation expectations have stayed mostly anchored. Since the start of the Iran conflict, long-term government bond yields have risen across major economies including the US, Europe and Japan. This divergence has become a pattern over the past several years. Term premia on 10-year US treasury yields are now close to 100 basis points higher than they were before the pandemic, driving up the interest rate bill. … The IMF predicts that in a severe scenario, the Iran conflict could cause global growth to fall to 2 per cent (instead of the reference forecast of 3.1 per cent) and global debt could rise past 120 per cent of GDP. … As compared to before the pandemic, the scope to deliver on fiscal largesse is limited. Even in advanced economies, the sensitivity of borrowing costs to debt issuance has increased, which then spills over into emerging and developing economy borrowing costs. Even as bond prices have declined, markets may be too sanguine about the consequences of rising debt on fiscal health.

Policymakers would do well to use this period in which stock markets seem disconnected from heightened risk to craft a new playbook for crisis support that is both fiscally sustainable and supportive of long-term growth. The experiences of the pandemic and Ukraine war provide a valuable lesson in what that should look like: support targeted to the vulnerable; bailouts only to companies that are liquidity constrained but otherwise viable — and whose failure poses systemic risks; and co-ordinated fiscal and monetary policy so they do not work at cross-purposes.

If a new course is not charted, governments constrained by fiscal space may rely on heterodox measures, including broad-based price controls, financial repression, nationalisations, and pressure on central banks to absorb fiscal risk.

None of this would be good for the economy with synchronised sell-offs across stocks and bonds as markets realise that the backstop they were counting on is no longer there.

It’s only with abstraction that the trouble begins; only when connections become impersonal and automatic; when the owners and operators of internet systems reject the responsibility of standing behind the material they transmit and, especially, promote.

"Narrative power, maybe all power, was never about flaunting the rules, yelling at a cop, making trouble – it was about knowing that, for a privileged class, there existed a hard ceiling on the consequences. And on the heels of that realization, a converse one: I began to suspect that the principles holding up this place might not withstand as much as I first thought. That the entire edifice of equality under law and process, of fair treatment, could just as easily be set aside to reward those who belong as to punish those who don't. A hard ceiling for some, no floor for others." – Omar El Akkad, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This [https://bookshop.org/p/books/one-day-everyone-will-have-always-been-against-this-omar-el-akkad/4191784c40750b09?ean=9780593804148&next=t&next=t&affiliate=93920 ]

Craig: Early 2008, 2009, 2010, I was very negative on Facebook. Very early because I remember explicitly that Facebook was eating up all the designers, uh, from Brooklyn who were doing genuinely interesting work. I remember being really depressed about that. But if Facebook offers you a million dollar salary — especially in 2008, 2009, 2010, it’s hard to turn down. But it felt like there was this incredible compromise that had started to happen.

David: This is a really important point of the 21st century, which is I graduated in 2001, and I don’t think anyone around me, even the money hungry people were like, I’m going to be a billionaire. No, it was just on zero people’s minds. And the best was like, dude, did you know you could go work for an investment bank and within five years you could be making $1 million?

Has it occurred to you that MySpace is owned by an evil, crapulent, senescent Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, and he spies on you with every hour that God sends? Come to Facebook, where we will never spy on you.