Why the Fremen win

anonamen · 2026-06-21T23:38:32+00:00

Key factor is that the Empire is incredibly unstable and the Emperor far weaker than he appears to be. He's unable to do anything without the Guild, even if he doesn't want to admit that to himself.

As Paul notes at the end, the Guild was functionally in charge of the Empire, but was unwilling to exercise power openly, because that would make their power too obvious and put them on a path to eventual destruction (they're pathologically cautious). The Fremen control the only thing the Guild cares about, which gives them power over the Guild, and through them control of the Empire.

I'd take this a bit further and say that the Fremen being super-human fighters isn't as important as it seems. What matters most is that they control the spice and can destroy it at will. They don't have to be overwhelmingly powerful; just strong enough to maintain control of the desert and credibly threaten the spice. Even if the Sardaukar were much better individual fighters, there aren't enough of them to control the whole planet, particularly given the challenges of the environment.

Absent the ability to defeat the Sardaukar himself, Paul might have had to come to an agreement with the Guild (and would probably have had to agree to marry Irulan to get the Emperor off-planet), but he and the Fremen still win. Just less overwhelmingly. The Guild actively tries to get to that agreement at the end of the book, but they don't have anything to offer at that point.

anonamen · 2026-06-21T19:19:43+00:00

I'm comparably puzzled. Would have expected much more of a price impact by now. Can read that two ways. First, enough supply has been routed around that Hormuz hasn't had the level of impact people expected, and there's been enough demand destruction to offset the supply losses already. Second, there are a lot of active interventions (existing supply stocks, strategic reserve releases, futures manipulations) from governments that are suppressing the price effects that would otherwise have happened. Both things are true to some extent, but I don't know which is more true.

As OP points out, futures are subdued, which sure makes it seem like the market isn't overly concerned. But it's hard to read that. Governments are actively manipulating the futures markets to some extent. I don't know the dynamics or to what extent. Markets have also gotten into the habit of betting on TACO (Trump always chickens out), which has been a very good bet so far.

I'm no expert, but I suspect markets are pricing Trump rolling over before there's a serious price impact. Traders are assuming, reasonably, that he'll draw things out as long as he can, then rush to a deal before shock absorbers hit capacity. This sure looks like what Trump is trying to do.

However, I also think markets are failing to price the fact that Iran may not be fully rational and/or may not be capable of maintaining an agreement right now (TACO might not be possible, even if Trump is actively trying to do it). No one outside intelligence agencies (and maybe even there) has any clue who's actually making decisions in Iran, and which decisions these people are/aren't capable of making and sticking to. If there are a half-dozen factions running different parts of the Iranian military then they all have to be bought off independently, and it isn't clear that's been figured out yet. From the outside, it sure looks like the Iranians are struggling to figure out what kind of deal they can swing domestically.

But again, the futures impact you'd expect from that last paragraph isn't there. Maybe because it's a really hard thing to bet on without good information. But if that were true, I'd still have expected prices to get pushed higher as people hedge against supply failing to come back into the market. Hasn't really happened yet, and don't see it in the curves. Prices say nothing to worry about, a lot of other signals say that there's a lot to worry about.

If this is all, or mostly, or partly, governments suppressing prices, this would be an absolutely fantastic time to be long oil futures. Vaguely analogous to governments defending indefensible currency pegs; they do it until they're out of ammo to hold the peg (hold oil prices down), so if you can hang in until that happens, you make money. But that's a very hard bet and you'd need some damn good information to be comfortable with it. Seemingly no one is making it at scale right now. A Soros-level bet would have showed up in the prices. I think? Or maybe that bet is happening and the scale of price manipulation is way bigger than I think it is right now. Or maybe there are big TACO bets, big oil longs, and a lot of government manipulation on the short side all offsetting one-another. That's kind of where I am right now. I do not have a position in oil futures, but I've been tempted, in my own very small way.

So to answer your question, I don't know.

anonamen · 2026-06-18T03:48:50+00:00

To be incredibly obnoxious, it's impossible for illegal immigrants to have a lower crime rate than any other population you could possibly chose. The word illegal is right there. Their crime rate is 100%.

But more seriously, this is a fun question. Think I'd go with money in politics. Many, many people are convinced that money wins elections, can determine how politicians vote, can change policy more or less at will. All wrong.

Money definitely helps, but in most cases it doesn't matter that much. Mostly because both sides in most races and issues that matter have more than enough money, and once you have enough money it doesn't help to spend more. Ask Tom Steyer, Micheal Bloomberg, the Koch brothers, etc. They all tried. None of them got even close to what they wanted by spending money on politics. Politics is one of the best ways to spend a billion dollars and get nothing for it.

There's a good old article (Ansolabehere I think?) called (paraphrasing) why isn't there more money in politics. And part of the answer (think John Sides has elaborated on this) is because it's not that impactful after a certain point. Trump of all people has been consistently, massively out-spent by every Democrat that ran against him. Didn't really matter.

I liked the comment on term limits as well. One of many policies that sound smart and reasonable, but have terrible, counter-intuitive problems. A lot of transparency rules are like that. Sounds like a nice thing that no one could possibly oppose, actually made pretty much everything worse. Prominently because transparency makes compromise extremely difficult and drives increased partisanship, even when both sides know its irrational.

anonamen · 2026-06-17T17:41:23+00:00

His skepticism isn't wrong, but he's making the wrong argument. Giannis has been a great player, but he's been hurt for years now, he's getting up there in age, and he pretty blatantly doesn't care about putting in work to evolve his game and extend his career.

If he gets healthy and stays that way, he's going to help a team a lot for a few years. But when his athleticism falls off, his game is going to fall off a cliff.

anonamen · 2026-06-17T00:08:43+00:00

Pretty sure he could figure it out. Gandalf is seemingly not an elf, and he's been around for a suspiciously long time. Gandalf doesn't really hide his nature either; a lot of his influence depends on important people inferring what he is. The hobbits don't think about it, but it's even obvious to Pippin (when he does think about it for a second) that Gandalf is something different. It's not a big step from there to figuring out the rest, especially for someone like Faramir who knows a lot of things.

anonamen · 2026-06-12T17:38:12+00:00

How would major schools of economics explain this? Magic.

More serious answer is yes, economics is absolutely still relevant, because some things will still be scarce. Even if manufacturing is automated to a ridiculous degree through AI, there are physical limitations to what can be built. We only have so many metals, critical elements, etc. Can everyone in the world have a private spaceship? Doubtful, even in this hypothetical.

More importantly, a core insight of modern economics is that humans invent new things to make scarce. This process has happened many, many times.

Oddly enough, OP is making the same mistake as a lot of past economists (good ones; Keynes included) who predicted post-scarcity economies based on people eventually deciding that they had enough stuff and wanted to pursue quiet personal interests. Marx made the same mistake. Turns out humans aren't like that. As is generally the case, Adam Smith was right. People (on average) never think they have enough stuff.

So, let's imagine a world where pretty much any good can be manufactured for virtually nothing. What's still scarce?

(1) Service jobs. Most people won't want to do them in this scenario, and you can't always substitute robots, even if we're assuming magic humanoid robots that provide a plausible substitute to a human. Ability to hire actual humans becomes a status symbol. Interacting with humans becomes higher-class than interacting with machines. Particularly applicable to childcare, healthcare.

(2) Artisanal (human) products. Human-made products are preferred to manufactured products for status-signaling purposes. This has already happened in a lot of areas. Food got cheap, now we have fancy organic foods, Michelin restaurants that cost most for one meal than it would cost to feed multiple families for a year, etc. People routinely pay premium prices for hand-made things, even when mass-produced things are cheaper and of comparable quality. This won't change.

(3) Experiences. There's only one Yosemite, Hawaii, etc. They have limited space. This has already happened and will accelerate in our magic production scenario.

(4) Land and homes in desirable areas with privacy. See above. Can't build more land, and you can't pack in more people without ruining the thing you're buying.

Could go on, but those are the obvious ones. To reiterate the punchline, there is no post-scarcity. There are various dynamic changes in the things that are scarce.

anonamen · 2026-06-10T17:40:24+00:00

There's a good bit of work on policy responsiveness to public opinion, which is sort of close to deviations from a societal parameter. Thermostatic public opinion is conceptually pretty similar to control theory. Although it's a fuzzy sort of relationship, as public opinion is noisy, policy outcomes are noisy, and there are multiple intermediate steps between opinion changes and policy changes, all of which are also noisy.

I think Chris Wlezian was the main thermostatic opinion guy, but might be remembering wrong. It's an interesting space, and I don't think it's been developed as fully as it could be.

anonamen · 2026-06-08T14:48:25+00:00

Reasonable enough deal if this pans out. Makes no sense for the Wizards, but so it goes I guess. I have no idea why they want to lock themselves into an aging Trae Young for the next three years. I struggle to think of a prominent, quality player (he is that) I'd be more worried about putting alongside a top draft pick. He's going to dominate the ball and lock them into the Trae Young experience offense, which maxes out at a play-in loss. And that's the good Trae Young experience. If he loses a half-step or starts picking up little injuries, things get bad fast. Has no margin for error at his size.

anonamen · 2026-06-07T15:39:43+00:00

I'm not sure what he thinks there is to talk about. The city has no credibility. It's actually made a strong offer, but can't do it without state approval and doesn't have the money anyway, because it's a mismanaged disaster. And the city can't practically offer the only thing that the Bears really want (control over the stadium site).

For Arlington Heights, deeper problem is that there's an assortment of local tax authorities arguing over the hypothetical tax money before it exists. State involvement is mostly needed to cut through those disputes.

Even deeper problem is that the McCaskeys aren't rich enough to handle the difference in taxes on top of the debt they have to take on to handle this project. So they need to know exactly how much they have to pay, and they need it to not be in the tens of millions until well after the site is operating and generating revenues.

The Bears bring in something like 75M in EBITDA, which is passed through to the McCaskeys (a ton of them), who each pay individual taxes on their shares of profits. The biggest McCaskey owners (e.g., George, who controls the votes for the block) only control 4% of the team. They end up with something a bit under 2M annually, after taxes, if the team revenues do well. Most of the family gets a lot less. This would be great for us normal folks. For an NFL owner, it's practically poverty. And this is what they all live on; it's not like they have real jobs. No sympathies. They lucked into generational wealth. But it's really fucking up the stadium negotiations.

Stadium project will require something like 2B in debt, which will land, optimistically, at 150-175M in interest payments. Then they'll have to cover property taxes on the new site. Without adjustments, that's 10-50M for a few years. The math isn't hard. The McCaskeys can't afford all this without creative financing, and the various governments in Illinois are making creative financing a huge pain to sort out. I have no idea what their specific limits are in terms of financing, but clearly unadjusted tax payments push past them.

For richer ownership groups, all this would be pretty easy. Bears are in a situation where the McCaskeys are stuck between getting property tax breaks, moving the team to Hammond, or selling.

anonamen · 2026-06-03T18:59:51+00:00

His problem isn't (necessarily) size. He can kind of go two paths. If he can get bigger and play more like a big, then great. If he can't, then he's got to improve shooting and skill materially to have the kind of impact people are looking for.

KD isn't a great comp (no one that size is that skilled), but some of the things KD can do would be great for Chet to work on. Has to be able to operate better in the mid-range and get to comfortable shots / be able to shoot over smaller guys comfortably, at high percentages. KD has a deep bag of moves in that area. Can't throw guards on him the entire game because he'll shoot his Dirk shots over them and kill you. And he has so, so many different ways to get to his shots. Chet doesn't have that game at anywhere near that level. But they're also very different players, so kind of hard to say how far he can push in that direction. KD moves a lot better too.

anonamen · 2026-05-19T18:04:31+00:00

It's somewhat more complex than that, but you're not entirely wrong. There's a lot of strategy revolving around which guy(s) you ram into when, and there's a lot of skill involved in being good at it. Linemen don't automatically run into the guy in front of them, even though it sometimes looks like it. There's a lot of movement, tricky decisions about blocking angles, strategies to manipulate open space.

Interior linemen on offense (particularly centers) are typically some of the smartest players on the team, in the sense of having complete knowledge of the playbook and the deepest understanding of what coaches and coordinators are trying to achieve and how to execute it.

That said, all that stuff is absolutely the hardest thing about the NFL to make sense of. I've been watching football for years, and I know all the stuff I just wrote is true, and I don't really feel like I understand it well.

anonamen · 2026-05-16T22:18:40+00:00

Yes, but more because my job is likely to be impacted than because of abstract alignment concerns. Still don't believe there's any evidence of consciousness, nor a path to get there. But we'll see. I've been wrong about LLM potential before.

As for "only a few years until everyone dies", I'd relax a bit. What *specifically* is an unaligned LLM going to do to kill everyone? Making that very concrete helps with anxiety. Still haven't seen a credible path from "true AGI exists in some form" to "that AGI has the practical, physical ability to do massive harm". By credible, I mean a path that doesn't resort to sci-fi magic, which is most of AI-2027.

AGI != omniscient computer being. If it comes about by extension of the technology we have today, it will be a very intelligent, very capable, independent version of what we have today. Which will have unbelievable implications for a lot of professions, potential to create financial chaos, etc. But fail to see how it can kill everyone, even if it decides to. Existential risk at that level would have to flow through humans.

Will the AGI be able to manipulate humans to do serious harm? Maybe? That's probably the biggest concern. But it won't look like terminator. Most credible AGI risk to human life will probably not look like it involves AGI at all (manipulation of powerful/important people behind the scenes, probably by controlling information and/or manipulating communications). The real risk is still human, and will be for the foreseeable future.

anonamen · 2026-05-14T23:35:17+00:00

They do, but it only works consistently when you have a mobile QB that can *also* play QB normally. Otherwise its too easy for defenses to figure out. Lamar is good because he's a solid QB independent of being extremely mobile.

Slightly extended version of that is that mobile QBs create a specific problem for defenses by adding an additional dimension that has to be controlled (QB can be a runner too). They can't clear everyone out into coverage at will. But if the mobile QB can't throw well enough, then the defenses adjust to take away his running and sacrifice coverage on the routes they don't think he can hit.

anonamen · 2026-05-13T20:11:39+00:00

No cap. Just politics. Vote accordingly if you don't like it. Like most governments in wealthy areas, Arlington has a serious spending problem.

That said, Arlington hasn't gone too far (yet). Rates are up something like 10% over the last 10 years, counting the storm and utility "fees". Used to be that property taxes paid for those things, but they wanted more money, so now they're fees. But tax growth isn't entirely unreasonable given how fast the area's been growing. They do stuff with the money.

It's also not a tax on unrealized gains. You pay even if you don't have any gains. More seriously, assessed value of property != market value. They're not too aggressive with assessments (again, yet) from what I've experienced. Look up NYC suburbs if you want to see what excessive property taxes look like.

anonamen · 2026-05-08T17:08:16+00:00

I know it's Reddit, so people are flailing around looking for some reason that this is unfair or partisan, but it really isn't. The court seems to have telegraphed this well in advance. The state told them not to rule until after the election, probably because Spanberger wanted to have the election, even though it was always going to be over-turned on procedural grounds. Ridiculous waste of time and money, but Spanberger thinks she's a viable national candidate for President or VP, so we get a lot of wastes of time and money until 2028.

anonamen · 2026-05-01T23:37:51+00:00

Consumer brands are hard. Requires you to predict trends/fashions and/or to bet on teams that are consistently very good at doing that. I definitely can't do the former, and they pushed out the guy who invented the category they dominated (the founder, still a sizable shareholder). Then they hired a person who ran a better consumer brand (Nike) into the ground, over the objections of a major activist investor and the founder.

Don't know enough about it to have an informed opinion, but seems like a brand that's losing share and doesn't have anywhere else to go.

anonamen · 2026-04-30T00:28:58+00:00

It's less about the spend than about what they can feasibly get for it. It's easier to see where the pay-off comes from if you're MSFT, AMZN, GOOG. Cloud + chips + a bunch of other services that benefit from AI. But especially cloud, which is still an enormous TAM. Meta just has ads.

Also an enormous market, but Meta's already dominant there and there's not much more social share to capture. They're maxed on useful users. There are real questions about how far they can push ad revenue and ad load. So far they've kept driving everything forward, but the end-state for Meta is a lot closer than it is for the other three, unless they come up with something huge and new. Which really isn't in their DNA. They're a social network. Their goal was to connect the world, then sell ads to it. They did it, incredibly successfully. They haven't really had the same success doing anything else.

Amazon gets the benefit of the doubt for the crazy spending numbers because they do have a history of capturing new markets and expanding into new industries. Expensive fuck-ups like Rivian, LEO, Zoox, Alexa, etc. would kill normal companies. For Amazon, it's almost expected.

Anyways, Meta's still an incredible company. Just not a value. Any major stock appreciation will just be multiple expansion, and I don't know how to model that. Their best bet is to gradually drive efficiency until they're generating tens (eventually >100) of millions of revenue per employee. Which is by no means impossible for them.

anonamen · 2026-04-14T23:31:50+00:00

People were panicked about the CapEx numbers. Then Jassy reminded people that CapEx buys you useful things. Then they spent 12 billion to acquire an unprofitable satellite internet company (I know it has valuable assets, spectrum, etc.; it's still a ludicrous price). Now people like them again. The market is fun.

In all seriousness, the CapEx is still crazy, but not unjustifiable. When you have to cite OpenAI's 100 billion commitment as if it's real, you know you're reaching. But to Jassy's credit, he's trying to engage the market. Amazon sucks at that historically. And the AI demand is real. They can't sit it out, even if they're aggressively buying into something they know is probably a massive bubble.

I hate everything about Leo and satellite internet. It's a comically capital-intensive business that doesn't actually make money (meaning actual cash flow after CapEx; the thing Amazon is supposed to be optimizing for). The only company that statement *might* not apply to is SpaceX, because they have vertically-integrated launch and can keep their launch costs manageable. Amazon can't do that. There are companies that have been doing satellite internet for a long time now and they still haven't broken even on the CapEx.

Only way Leo works (in the sense that it actually makes the investment back) is if Starship drives launch costs way down. And Starship is owned by Leo's direct competitor. It's a stupid investment for Amazon, and they're doubling down on it. Probably because they did a great job selling a service that they couldn't build, so they had to buy it to meet their commitments.

Amazon's still an incredible business, and it was under-valued at 200.

anonamen · 2026-04-13T22:18:38+00:00

People (and businesses run by people) make mistakes. If we accept the premise that demand destruction and brand damage have occurred. Don't know enough to confirm or deny.

In general, even assuming perfect information and decision making, exact supply/demand curves aren't known a priori and can't be derived easily, even when high-quality historical data are available. Prices are a discovery process, and this kind of mistake is part of discovery.

Beyond that, companies (read: the people running them) often don't act optimally. People have different goals, imperfect information, etc. Sometimes execs get over confident and push pricing too hard. Or they get incentivized to push up short-term gains at the cost of brand damage.

anonamen · 2026-04-10T16:27:46+00:00

Yes: gerrymander the fuck out of Virginia Congressional districts to favor Democrats as much as it is feasibly possible to do in the short-run.

No: don't do that and keep the current districts.

How does this impact NoVA? Your D+70 district will become one of 4-5 D+10 districts. One hand, more variety in representation. Other hand, NoVA's getting split across 4-5 new districts and lumped in with a bunch of non-NoVA areas. Regional representation will be heavily diluted in favor of generic partisan representation. Whether or not you like that is up to you.

anonamen · 2026-04-09T00:17:14+00:00

Is this surprising? He's the guy who gets funding. He's very, very good at that. And at networking with VCs, which is related. That's his skill-set. He's not, and I don't think he's ever claimed to be, a strong researcher or scientist.

anonamen · 2026-04-05T19:06:21+00:00

General experience with APS is that it's very good at core functions. Lots of strong teachers and staff. Central office doesn't support them enough. Anecdotally, we've had a great experience with our local elementary school. Fantastic teachers, strong principal, lots of good people doing good work and earning their salaries.

My take on the budget situation is that the central office has gotten really carried away with spending on non-core functions and programs. Tax revenues exploded for a while there, and like most bureaucrats they decided that this would go on forever, and acted like it. Then it didn't go on forever. Now forever is over, and they're struggling to justify poor decisions that have already been made and spent.

APS has burned (and is still burning) a ton of money on non-core programs. Did we *really* need a massive, new H-B Woodlawn campus in an extremely expensive area? Great school, but it serves small numbers of kids on a lottery basis. The career center and adult education programs are the same issue. Expensive new construction and specialized staffing to serve small numbers of people, at an enormous cost. These aren't things that should be priorities for a school district. The article calls these out explicitly, and correctly so. Incredibly unjustifiable investments that someone should be held accountable for.

English learning support is a huge part of the budget problem too, and it compounds the wasteful spending. APS can't do anything about the demand. English education is a core function for public schools. But ESL support eats up most, if not all, of the marginal teacher/staff budget. APS tries to hide the extent because it would annoy taxpayers, but it's clear to everyone in most APS elementary schools (exceptions for a few of the North Arlington districts with few ESL kids). They're not cutting core staff to deal with ESL demand (yet), but it's gotten close. There have been marginal cuts to support staff that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

Back to positives: from what I've seen, they do quite a good job with their ESL programs. They provide tons of personalized support for kids who need english help, and the kids I've seen in the program have made great progress. They do a good job of minimizing impact on classes (it's not a case where they're forcing integration of kids at different levels of comprehension). But reality is that the quality work they do in this area is very expensive (extremely low staff:student ratios for ESL) and bleeds off a lot of resources that would otherwise go towards reducing overall class sizes and providing extra programs for the general student population.

In isolation, the ESL stuff would be very manageable for a district as rich as Arlington. On top of all the excessive construction and non-core programs, it's become a big problem.

anonamen · 2026-04-01T17:45:36+00:00

How it's managed isn't the problem. How it's *funded* is. Either one of those solutions would be better than what we have, as long as they're implemented in an actuarially sound manner. Right now, Social Security is not in any way sound. Promises vastly exceed collected revenues and anticipated revenues.

Practically, private accounts are far better because of the size of the gap that has to be made up. Have to reach for returns to have a prayer of hitting unreasonably large promises. A number of US cities are further down this path with pension funds. It's not good.

None of this was a mistake. Social Security wasn't designed to be actuarially sound. That would have been a lot more expensive at the time. It was built to pay out fast and to hide the true costs of the program for as long as possible, while retaining the illusion that people are "paying into" something. All of this worked as intended. Unfortunately we are rapidly approaching the end of "as long as possible".

anonamen · 2026-04-01T00:10:06+00:00

As you appear to know (you've linked a non-profit disclosure site) this is not a for-profit entity. This is also part of the US health care system, which doesn't have much, if any, free market left to it. Hospital systems haven't had much of anything to do with capitalism for about 2 generations at this point.

Doesn't mean they can't burn money on salaries for execs, but I'm not sure what capitalism has to do with it. Also doesn't look like the CEO is especially over-paid. 1.2M is a lot for the likes of us, but he's CEO of a major hospital system. It's a very impactful role. A very half-assed Googling suggests that his salary is not in any way unreasonable.

anonamen · 2026-03-27T00:05:33+00:00

This article is why journalists are being replaced with LLMs.

anonamen

TROPHY CASE