Stop Monitoring The Situation
You're not doing yourself any favors. Let what will happen, happen.
Unless you were buying oil futures and going long VIX - and idk maybe there was a “Hormuz closes” Polymarket trade and “THAADfux0r” token I don’t know about - I think you’re doing yourself a disservice by not ignoring the situation.
This is a time of nearly infinite leverage. Every single frontier model is subsidized heavily by its parent company (older Millennials will remember when Chipotle and Uber were both very high quality and very cheap, because they were losing insane amounts of money, the latter doing so deliberately). Every week it becomes easier and easier to start a business and slap a payment method on something that is useful for people who want something done but don’t have the time to do it themselves. The distance between caring enough to be useful and helpful and being financially rewarded for it has never been shorter and it it keeps shortening.
So, naturally, many people are instead spiking their cortisol, getting situation-mogged, as it were. Why? To what end? Think about all the Sturm und Drang of the 2020 to 2024 Biden years, and how badly we wanted Trump to win and ‘Fix Everything Easily’ (perhaps the very greatest British contribution to RW memes):
But of course, there is no switch. And even if there were, Trump is clearly not interested in pressing it. He’s not interested in Mass Deportations Now! He’s not interested in supercharging US manufacturing, he’s not interested in really addressing crime in a substantial way, or doing anything to cultivate a durable movement. He is extremely interested in the Iran War, which makes him feel in charge, and he’s interested in building a new White House ballroom. C’est la vie.
What you have right now is an amazing opportunity, especially if you’re between the ages of 25 and 45, especially if your living situation is stable, especially if you are more than helpless with a computer. You have an amazing opportunity to do useful things as every other smart person is getting extremely distracted, intensely more distracted by the day, from doing anything useful.
Maybe this is cynical, but I think we should consider ourselves fortunate to have these two circumstances arrive at precisely the same time. The models really are good enough you can loop them with a cron job + give them permissions to do stuff on your behalf and they’ll do a decent enough job. People really are completely obsessed with the war, and it is not going well (and yeah, it was stupid to prosecute on Israel’s behalf, obviously, but what can you do?). These two macroscopic aspects of how the world simply operates are in full swing.
Tomorrow is Monday; do something useful and remunerative this week.