I'm staying true to the title but Goolsbee made some interesting comments beyond oil.
Re: how rate increases are an imprecise (unfair?) tool:
> But the Fed can't pump oil or slow data-center construction. Higher rates mainly bite housing, business investment and big-ticket consumer purchases. "It would necessarily be painful," he said. "You will certainly hear about it from the sectors who say, 'We didn't do this. Why are we being punished?'"
Re: AI boom overheating the economy at large:
> Goolsbee is rethinking the AI boom. Until recently, data-center spending seemed to be "staying in its lane," pulling workers and resources from elsewhere without overheating the whole economy, he said. Now his business contacts describe a tightening job market and rising wages in jobs tied to the build-out.
This was more of a disclosure to the US military that Anthropic has detected that various "undesirables" are using Claude to plan attacks, develop weapons, etc. and that information that shouldn't have been shared got through the safety guards:
> The finding was one of several threats outlined in the 154-page report that offered up a playbook of how U.S. adversaries are using AI in novel ways that pose serious threats to national security: developing new missiles and aggressive disinformation campaigns, spying on dissidents, and even pursuing the potential development of biological weapons. Top AI companies and security firms regularly publish threat reports involving the technology to inform the public and their partners about potential dangers... “Our safeguards blocked many of their requests, but not all of them,” the Anthropic report said of the Yemeni weapons-development efforts.
I started eating mango skin a few months ago. When it's thin and bland, it's not bad. Gives a nice crunch to the eating experience. But often it's way too thick and sometimes strongly bitter.
I am on a 12 Muni right now that is plastered with a Neki ad, and I looked up neki.dev literally 10 mins ago to see what this product is about. Did they time the release of this bus ad with the launch date?
I remember asking a friend what makes Burning Man (BM) interesting, and he said "it's a glimpse of a fundamentally different economy." He was talking about how everything is organized around gifts rather than exchange. AFAICT that is still very much true. Most (all?) interactions do not involve money. E.g. at BM you can walk to a tent and get a drink and there's no expectation to pay for it. But of course the whole system only works when everyone agrees to be mutually generous. Sure, people use money to bring all the stuff into BM and to get themselves to BM so it's easy to write it off as fake, but nonetheless I can see how even a week demonstrating a fundamentally different social structure could be quite a profound experience. BM is still on my bucket list because of what my friend said.
I'm pretty involved in my local regionals. I'm part of DPW at one and I've operated propane fueled flame effects a couple times. I'm throwing my quinceanera at a small unsanctioned regional close to my birthday.
That whole 'money-less' gifting thing makes for a very nice party. It has nothing to do with real economics. The vast majority of people at burns are able bodied, have above average practical skills and are right in the age group where you'd expect folks to be competent to work.
Gifting drinks, cordoning roads, making sure port-o-potties are functional and clean, making a silly art piece and shirtcocking among a few thousand people for a week or so has little to do with maintaining infrastructure, education, healthcare and the logistics to keep billions of people, including children, the disabled and the elderly, fed and housed all the time.
Re: how rate increases are an imprecise (unfair?) tool:
> But the Fed can't pump oil or slow data-center construction. Higher rates mainly bite housing, business investment and big-ticket consumer purchases. "It would necessarily be painful," he said. "You will certainly hear about it from the sectors who say, 'We didn't do this. Why are we being punished?'"
Re: AI boom overheating the economy at large:
> Goolsbee is rethinking the AI boom. Until recently, data-center spending seemed to be "staying in its lane," pulling workers and resources from elsewhere without overheating the whole economy, he said. Now his business contacts describe a tightening job market and rising wages in jobs tied to the build-out.
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