The Social Community forScholER

Kalshi announced Wednesday that Jeff Bandman, the lawyer who helped Kalshi secure a license to be a CFTC-regulated exchange in 2020, is returning to Kalshi as CEO of Kalshi Prime, which serves customers of Kalshi’s margined perpetual futures business.

Has the #Artificial Intelligence industry officially shifted from a commercial, democratic ecosystem into a tightly controlled, national security apparatus reminiscent of the Manhattan Project? #ScholER Alternative view - the LLM Gen AI industry is dying of lack of usage cases to justify the huge expenditures; the most compelling usage being malware/security threats is not a good look; otherwise, super-humanly fast coding is akin to the Concord super sonic travel - an expensive and dangerous solution mismatched to real world problems and benefits. The chance that true ASI or even AGI emerges from the LLM Gen AI paradigm is nil - even with infinite scaling, self-improving algorithms, etc. - due to one simple reason: given the best of human generated general purpose training data is largely wrong or wrongly understood [reference “Most Published Research Findings Are False” John Ioannidis, PLoS Med 2(8): e124 (2005)] there is zero possibility to algorithmically make sense of that body of knowledge better than human experts in the fields with domain and context knowledge can. End of story. If and when AI directed robots are collecting data, that may change, but it remains an open epistemological question, considering the unfathomable complexity and intractability of our physical world (where we can’t grok the 3 body problem in Newtonian physics, particle-wave duality in quantum physics or dark matter or energy in cosmology, etc..) let alone more complex biological, ecological, social, political domains. Unfortunately, all this talk of AGI/ASI obscures a very real and immediate danger: purposefully or accidentally mis-aligned agentic Gen AI, with super-human coding/malware skills, could be a serious if not existential threat to our fragile, network dependent society in the near future. If “The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.” C.A.R. (Tony) Hoare’s Turing Award lecture, The Emperor’s Old Clothes (1980) – then the unavoidable price of extreme complexity (trillion+ parameter agentic Gen AI that is not understandable) may be extreme fragility; the sooner this is recognized, the better chance there may be to mitigate the proverbial unintended and unwanted consequences. https://albertoromgar.medium.com/the-ai-industry-as-you-know-it-died-today-59fce97a15c9

New data from energy think tank Ember shows that solar supplied 12.8% of US energy generation in May — marking not only the highest share ever recorded for the clean energy source, but also the first time it’s surpassed coal. #ScholER #Data is beautiful https://sherwood.news/world/solar-generated-more-power-than-coal-in-the-us-for-the-first-time-ever/?utm_source=snacks&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=snacks_20260615&utm_content=f56f3bdef8972461ef7ae51424d69b7b

Europe has already shattered meteorological records this summer, and things are likely to get worse https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/world/europe/summer-heat-wave-fires-climate-change.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1VA.awhz.XBvirZKfGWbn&smid=url-share&utm_source=snacks&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=snacks_20260730&utm_content=20964af6990a9ea2bb51dc7b9d41dd79

The Trump administration is weighing sweeping semiconductor tariffs that could extend to data-center servers and other chip-powered goods, alarming tech companies already facing high-end chip shortages and potentially undercutting US ambitions to lead in #Artificial Intelligence . https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/27/data-centers-chips-tariffs-threat-01050957?_bhlid=7fa0cee2288aec9f0561ff866de2dcc1ebdfef89

Nica took a screenshot of the discussion · 2 months ago

If I were president and I wanted to tank the dollar and get rich off it, here is exactly what I would do. #REAL Truth I would hire a Treasury Secretary who already made $3.5 billion crashing another country's currency. I would put my guy in charge of the agency that approves bank charters. I would install a crypto czar with $200M in crypto holdings and give him an ethics waiver so nobody could challenge it. Then I would sign an executive order banning the government from ever creating a digital dollar so there was no competition. Then I would have my family launch their own private digital dollar. My family takes 75% of net profits. I would grow it to $4.6 billion in circulation and route a $2 billion Abu Dhabi sovereign fund deal through it to prove it works. Then I would get Congress to pass a law requiring every stablecoin in the country to hold short-term Treasury bills. Now every dollar of my digital currency is a forced buyer of government debt. Brookings projects $2.3 trillion in captive demand by 2030. Then I would have my OCC guy grant my family's company a federal bank charter. Now I can issue my digital dollar with federal authority. Then I would have my Treasury Secretary weaken the actual dollar. Bond buybacks that suppress yields but tank the currency. Build a $950 billion war chest for more. Let the debt hit $40 trillion. Dollar index drops to 99. Gold goes to highest point ever. Then I would kill the Corporate Transparency Act and delete the FinCEN beneficial ownership database. That was the one law that required every shell company in America to report who actually owns it. Without it, nobody can trace who is buying my stablecoin, who is routing money through it, or where the profits land. Then I would let the loop run. Weaker dollar drives demand for "stable" digital alternatives. The law I passed forces those alternatives to buy T-bills. That funds the government's debt. My family takes profit on every transaction. Foreign central banks walking away from Treasuries get replaced by legally mandated stablecoin reserves my family controls. Then I would use sanctions to start cutting countries off from the dollar system entirely. And when those countries need a new way to transact in dollars, the only federally chartered private digital dollar in existence is mine. They can buy it through shell companies nobody can trace because I deleted the ownership database. I just built a toll booth on the global financial system. I take a cut every time someone uses the dollar. And I made it so nobody can see who is paying. And every single step I just described has already happened. So what does that mean for you and I? The reason the United States can borrow at low rates and keep your mortgage and your car payment and your import prices stable is because foreign central banks hold trillions in dollar reserves. That system has always been public. The benefit went to everyone. Lower borrowing costs, cheaper goods , and the single biggest economic advantage any country has ever had. What I just described is the privatization of that function. The entity buying the debt is no longer a central bank acting in the public interest. It is a private company taking 75% of net profits for one family. The reserve function used to generate a public benefit. Now it generates a private fee. Your purchasing power shrinks every time the dollar weakens. Your 401k buys less in real terms. Everything you import costs more. And every time the dollar drops, demand for the private digital alternative goes up. The one the president's family owns. The one that by law must buy government debt. You absorb the cost of a weakening dollar. His family collects the profit. That is the trade. The enforcement mechanism to stop a sitting president from doing this? There isn't one. Former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter says it would be a violation for literally any other federal employee, but not the president. Nobody voted for this. No one was asked. There was no debate. There is no enforcement mechanism. There is no one investigating it. The Senate tried and it was blocked. This is the largest conflict of interest in American history happening in broad daylight while everyone argues about something else. @leahfiles #DANK MEMES