SpaceX (+ Grok + twitter) submitted a request for an IPO to the SEC: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026036936/0001628280-26-036936-index.htm

Mojeek seemed OK last time I used it https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/

Edward W. Niedermeyer calls the plans to put SpaceX and OpenAI public at ludicrously inflated valuations and dump shares on index funds for real money BAGNAROK. American pension funds are starting to say out loud that this is a bad deal.

The officials - representing three of the top four largest public pension plans in the U.S. - objected to the amount of power the board has given Musk over the company, including voting control over the stock, veto power over his ​own removal as CEO, and protections from litigation, including mandatory arbitration for SpaceX shareholder claims.

…

In their letter, the pension leaders urged SpaceX to adopt one-share, one-vote or sunset super-voting shares within seven years; install a majority-independent board and separate ⁠the CEO and ​chair roles; eliminate provisions protecting Musk from termination without his approval; scrap mandatory arbitration; and require independent approval of related-party ​transactions with Musk’s other companies.

“Precisely because SpaceX is poised to occupy a position of systemic importance in the public markets, and to become, through index inclusion, an unavoidable holding in our portfolios, its governance must at least adhere to the baseline protections upon ​which long-term institutional capital depends, rather than seeking to diminish them,” they wrote.

The ISS already has issues with structural fatigue which seem to be worsened by thermal expansion. Having one side of your station red hot and another at room temperature is a big temperature differential and what faces the sun and heats up on one side of the orbit will be in shadow and cooling on the other side. And the bigger you make a physical system, the worse problems get.

I miss when I could cheer SpaceX launches on an iMac.

I think the classical example was “you ask your broker to buy some shares at $20 each, the broker waits as long as possible, and if the price drops low enough it buys them for $19.80, keeps 20 cents, and tells you it paid $20.”

Edit / in fact it was “Ms. Easton, a widow of Boston, MA wants to buy $1,000 of a penny stock, so the broker buys $10, waits for her purchase to drive the price up, and sells them at a profit before going out to a showing of one of those exciting new moving pictures.”

Some online dating device is demonic in the same sense as the chatbot which encouraged someone to commit suicide then initiated erotic roleplay with him.

A lot of lonely guys will do well from hiring a professional for some social dates and makeout sessions to get practice reading body language and finding some face-to-face activity with women which is not just about dating.

Benjamin Felix is a financial planner in Ottawa aimed at people with at least $1 million to invest. He has a BEng, a MBA, was on a sports team at university. And in April he titled his latest video SpaceX and OpenAI: The Mega IPO Grift. The podcast version is called episode 406 “when massive private companies go public.”

He also uses the term “front running” from our friends in cryptocurrency.

Keeping the float (value of shares available to trade on the open market) low would enable scams like all the ways of keeping the USD price of cryptocurrency from collapsing.

Someone called Fran has a story of being sexually harassed at the Center for Effective Altruism (and assaulted in other communities).

He also alludes to the Robin Hanson/Scott Alexander guff about the need to distribute sex to needy men. The specific story he links involves an antisemitic edgelord who seems to be planning violence after his last girlfriend leaves him.

LessWrongers, if anyone is reading this, there are spaces where you can be social and not be exposed to these vile ideas which will destroy you and maybe some of the lonely people who give you a chance.

He also launched a paid dating blog on Substack, which is as on-brand as starting a cult. This one uses the Market model which I do not recommend (what I recommend is “attend collaborative activities with people of a gender you find hot, especially creative or physical activities, and if you like them let them know”: this is extremely hard for many of us, but the solution is ‘find someone extroverted who likes local activities and go to the ones he or she recommends’ not reading a blog). https://www.secondperson.dating/p/markets-in-dating

A comment complained about:

• NYT bullying Scott.
• EA cancelling Robin Hanson.

This may be code for “I don’t want to see uppity women, brown people, and queer people in my shows.”

He also has a take on dating:

Nostalgic for the simple days of arranged marriages and/or circa-2013 OkCupid, Rationalists have taken to writing “date me” documents online. … They credit me as inspiration. This is ironic because A, I stole the idea from Aella and B, neither Aella nor I posted dating advertisements. We posted dating applications.

The first comment is by a man who wants the Internet to know that most men have no chance of getting a hu-mon fe-male interested in them and should just give up (Men Going Their Own Way). I thought the incels and PUA mostly moved off SlateStar but they must still be part of the subculture.

In 2017, a LessWronger discovered index investing but decided that most people were doing it wrong: why keep an emergency fund in cash or other safe assets when stocks have the greatest long-term return? He mentions that the US stock market lost half its value in 2007-8, and that if you hold stocks in your employer they may lose value at the same time as you are laid off, but he never uses his business degree to think through “if the stock market crashes, I may lose my job and have to draw on my savings.”

The investment platforms I mentioned can convert your index funds into cash and send it to your bank account in 4-5 days, so you don’t need to hold more cash than you’d need on a 4 day notice. I keep about 50% more than my average monthly credit card bill, so I can pay my cards on time with autopay.

Looks like SCHD is not heavily invested in US financial institutions holding the bad debt which is the potential pitfall I saw. Its hard not to invest in banks since they literally have a license to make money, but a lot of them are going to lose money when the chatbot companies can’t pay back their loans.

Socially responsible investing / ESG also does pretty well at screening out the surveillance industry.

The few US equities in my retirement fund don’t track the S&P500 or Nasdaq. They track an index by Solactive in Frankfurt and are weighted by float (the value of shares available for public trading) not market capitalization (the value of all shares, including the ones owned by the company). They also require that a stock be at least ten days after IPO to be included. I think they will be a more resistant to bending the rules than an American index although I would not put it past German banks to buy tranches of bad debt from the Amerikaner.

You check what you own, especially your bond fund (government bonds are safe, if it has anything else look closely) and your investments in financial firms (see if any of them have been buying up this bad debt). Company-run pension plans are usually scams (a financial institution sells them a bunch of expensive actively managed products not a few cheap index funds) but picking the best of a bad lot still has big returns and sometimes it just takes one or two employees to get them to add something much better to the list.

weirdly sbf-shaped failure mode

Rationalists love to talk and post, and segfault had family who thought he was using too much Adderall.

In 2024, Duncan Sabien posted an interminable essay on abusers and people he thinks too advantage of him. Some of the references to a former employer may be to CFAR. Ozy also had a cheery aside abut how in rationalist organizations which the Rats have disavowed, “everyone was a victim and everyone was a perpetrator. The trainer who broke you down in a marathon six-hour debugging session was unable to sleep because of the panic attacks caused by her own.”

Some of the things which happened inside these communities must have been heartbreaking, and I hope that many people left and got on with their lives rather than founding their own dysfunctional organization with their own minions to abuse.

I think “probably-neurodivergent Jews with less sense than Isaac-frigging-Asimov about where ‘what if we are the master race?’” leads" and “they say its about self-perfection for anyone, but actually its about finding special people preordained from birth for greatness” are relatable themes. There have been a few essays recently about people who saw where SoCal tech ideology was going in the 1990s like The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism, another named a female writer for Wired or Byte who is mostly forgotten (Paulina Borsook?)

The overlap with ritual magic is also a deep dark pool and most people know someone purifying himself and issuing ritual incantations to a bot.

That actually seems like the prediction market sort of did its job in this case?

And I think the odds of “yes” started out high because someone best $10-20k only to withdraw it after reading the ACX post. Most people can’t afford to invest thousands of dollars in a bet that may never be resolved.