Curt Doolittle

Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy

  • No this is exactly what *we* want. Neither of us is a majority set of users. The

    No this is exactly what *we* want. Neither of us is a majority set of users. The REVENUE that comes from you doesn’t cover their costs. It comes from paying customers especially corporations – which is who needs this feature. 😉

    Source date (UTC): 2025-11-20 19:07:40 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1991584243219329032

  • College education, outside of STEM, in the age of AI, is just impoverishment, wh

    College education, outside of STEM, in the age of AI, is just impoverishment, when with industrial repatriation, and basic apprenticeship, income is superior, requires no debt, and allows you to escape the education ‘signal game’ that causes you to use income to purchase signal goods instead of intertemporal goods.

    Source date (UTC): 2025-11-18 18:00:32 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1990842574291267897

  • The Criteria for Something to Function as Money Money is not an essence; it is a

    The Criteria for Something to Function as Money

    Money is not an essence; it is a role performed within a system of cooperation. Something functions as money only when it satisfies a sequence of necessary conditions for reducing the cost of triadic exchange (A → B → C).
    The criteria fall into three layers:
    1. Minimum Functional Criteria (Necessary)
    2. Economic Performance Criteria (Necessary and Contingent)
    3. Civilizational Stability Criteria (Systemic)
    Each builds on the prior.
    These are the non-negotiable, causal preconditions for anything to serve as money.
    1.1 Divisibility
    Must be decomposable into smaller, proportionate units without destroying value.
    Causal role: enables trade at arbitrary scales.
    1.2 Portability
    Must be transferable at low cost, low friction, low risk.
    Causal role: permits exchange beyond face-to-face barter.
    1.3 Durability
    Must resist decay, wear, or corruption.
    Causal role: preserves intertemporal accounting.
    1.4 Recognizability
    Must be easily and reliably identifiable by participants.
    Causal role: reduces transaction costs and reduces fraud.
    1.5 Non-counterfeitability
    Must impose high cost on imitation or forgery.
    Causal role: maintains integrity of the unit and trust in the system.
    1.6 Fungibility
    All units must be interchangeable without distinction.
    Causal role: eliminates the need to track identity or lineage of specific units.

    A thing that does not meet these six cannot function as money.
    These determine whether money functions efficiently, predictably, and at scale.
    2.1 Store of Value (intertemporal stability)
    Must preserve purchasing power across time with tolerable variance.
    Causal consequence: supports saving, capital formation, and long planning horizons.
    2.2 Medium of Exchange (transactional efficiency)
    Must be widely accepted with sufficiently low friction and low default risk.
    Causal consequence: maximizes velocity without eroding trust.
    2.3 Unit of Account (pricing logic)
    Must be a stable measure against which goods can be compared.
    Causal consequence: ensures commensurability across markets.
    2.4 Scarcity (non-arbitrary supply)
    Total supply must be constrained by natural law, protocol, or political constraint.
    Causal consequence: prevents inflation from political exploitation.
    2.5 Low Opportunity Cost of Holding
    Holding money must not impose prohibitive loss compared to alternative stores.
    Causal consequence: encourages liquidity and smooth exchange.
    2.6 Network Liquidity
    Money must achieve a threshold of adoption where it becomes self-reinforcing.
    Causal consequence: replaces bilateral trust with systemic trust.
    These determine whether money can support long-term cooperative equilibria in a polity.
    3.1 Governance Legibility
    Rules governing issuance, redemption, and circulation must be transparent, operational, and warrantable.
    Causal consequence: prevents concealed taxation and political rent-seeking.
    3.2 Constraint Against Discretionary Debasement
    Supply manipulation must be either physically impossible (gold), computationally impossible (proof-of-work), or politically impossible (constitutional constraint).
    Causal consequence: preserves reciprocity across generations.
    3.3 Interoperability With Legal Order
    Money must be enforceable in courts and compatible with contracts and restitution.
    Causal consequence: anchors money within institutional cooperation.
    3.4 Risk Insurability
    Must not impose catastrophic systemic risk on holders due to issuer default or protocol failure.
    Causal consequence: preserves the commons of trust.
    3.5 Cultural Compatibility
    Population must treat the money as legitimate, appropriate, and reciprocal.
    Causal consequence: enables coordination without coercion.
    1. Money reduces the friction of cooperation by providing a universal intermediary measure.
    2. To do so, it must satisfy minimum physical/operational preconditions (divisible, portable, durable, recognizable, non-counterfeitable, fungible).
    3. Once those conditions are met, it must meet economic performance criteria enabling saving, exchange, and pricing.
    4. Once those are met, it must avoid governance failure—because money is a commons subject to political predation.
    5. Failure at any layer forces regression to barter, credit networks, foreign currencies, or black-market substitutes.
    6. Therefore, money is a function, not a substance: an instrument that minimizes conflict in exchange by providing commensurability across time, space, and persons.
    Cheers
    CD

    Source date (UTC): 2025-11-18 17:58:42 UTC

    Original post: https://x.com/i/articles/1990842114465521914

  • This is due to the immaturity of the product, and the hype necessary to fund it

    This is due to the immaturity of the product, and the hype necessary to fund it despite it’s low profitability – until it’s mature.

    I’ve been repeating this argument for a couple of months now, but the future of LLMs, is brighter than ever.

    Why?

    There are at least the remaining issues:
    1 – episodic memory,
    2 – associative prediction,
    3 – abstraction,
    4 – solution point wayfinding (real reasoning),
    5 – ethics,
    6 – and decidability.

    We have solved the hardest ones: ethics and decidability. We know how to solve most of the rest of them. The problem isn’t know-how. The problem is the extraordinary costs of those innovations using extant technology rather than neuromorphic hardware.

    Our work, that I know of, is the only solution to revenue production sufficient to cover those costs.

    Cheers
    CD
    Runcible

    http://
    Runcible.com

    Source date (UTC): 2025-11-11 01:00:35 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1988049180317937789

  • THE FOLLY OF YOUNG PEOPLE’S WANT OF SOCIALISM Curt Doolittle argues that true so

    THE FOLLY OF YOUNG PEOPLE’S WANT OF SOCIALISM

    Curt Doolittle argues that true socialism—where the government controls production—sounds appealing but is impossible to achieve.He says that if people really mean “social democracy” like in Europe (which focuses on heavy wealth redistribution rather than owning businesses), it only works under specific conditions:
    – The population must keep growing through high birth rates.
    – The people’s skills and makeup must align with what the modern economy needs to support that growth.

    That’s why Europe will have to cut back on these policies, and the US can’t sustain them either—especially for things like retirement and healthcare in the coming years.

    He criticizes young people pushing for socialism as ignorant “nitwittery.”

    Instead of that, he favors Trump-style reforms:
    – Overhaul global strategies to lower costs.
    – Strengthen the economy to create more jobs and increase self-sufficiency (autarky).
    – Reduce the burden of immigration by only allowing people who meet demographic standards for competitiveness and viability.
    – These young advocates are essentially self-destructive, he claims, because they’re assuming the US and Europe can cling to or revive their post-World War II advantages in strategy, demographics, institutions, science, technology, and economics.

    But those edges were temporary “windfalls” from historical revolutions (like the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution), which have now spread worldwide and can’t be recaptured.

    In short, pushing for more socialism is like “barking up a dying tree”—it’s a failing, outdated idea.

    Source date (UTC): 2025-11-09 19:01:39 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1987596462293926309

  • Socialism sounds good. It can’t happen. Sorry. If you mean social democracy (Eur

    Socialism sounds good. It can’t happen. Sorry. If you mean social democracy (Europe) which doesn’t mean centralization of production, but aggressive redistribution even if only indrectly, then it only works as long as (a) your rate of reproduction is increasing the population over time, (b) your demographic distribution remains parallel to the scientific and technological demands of the economy necessary to support that reproduction and growth. Hence why europe must cease their redistributive policies, and why the USA cannot maintain it’s redistributive policies, particularly in retirement and healthcare in the coming decades.
    So my assessment is that the young ignorant nitwittery that’s harping on socialism instead of Trumpian aggressive restructuring of geostrategy to reduce our costs, the economy to increase our employability and autarky, and decrease our costs of supporting immigration that does’t pass the demographic threshold of competitive viability is trying to commit suicide under the presumption that the pre-and postwar worlds of american and european strategic, demographic, institutional, scientific, technological, and economic advantage are either possible to continue or possible to restore – when those circumstances were windfalls of the enlightenment, scientific, industrial, and technological revolutions that have been dissipated out into the world.

    You’re barking up a dying tree.

    Curt Doolittle.

    Source date (UTC): 2025-11-09 18:43:10 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1987591814363430987

  • It doesn’t exist as money. It only exists as the capacity to influence other hum

    It doesn’t exist as money. It only exists as the capacity to influence other humans to continue to advance science and technology toward musk’s goal to make us independent of earth. and in doing so create incredible jobs with the consequences including spillover science technology, and economic rewards.

    Source date (UTC): 2025-11-09 07:11:47 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1987417819290751165

  • THis is mostly nonsense. There is no evidence that AI is replacing workers. Inst

    THis is mostly nonsense. There is no evidence that AI is replacing workers. Instead, companies overhired during covid and the cost of investment in the POSSIBILITY of AI is forcing cost cutting. It’s the investment in speculation on AI that’s causing layoffs. It’s not that AI can replace jobs.

    Now, in the future, it is very likely that the vast increase in clerical work performed by women in the economy is going to cause an unemployment shock. But that’s years away still.

    Source date (UTC): 2025-11-08 06:02:33 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1987038008072118417

  • Morgan; Do you look at the budget numbers, vs the demographic distribution of ag

    Morgan; Do you look at the budget numbers, vs the demographic distribution of age – and, despite its offense, the heterogeneity of the population what the differences in productivity of those groups?

    Moral arguments are satisfactory under conditions the industrial revolution and postwar windfalls. But the world is equilibrating and europens and americans have lost their six hundred years of political, economic, social, scientific and techological advantage.

    The postwar prosperity isn’t continuing and can’t continue because we do not have a world that is both backward and growing in popultioon yet capable of participating in advanced production distribution and trade.

    The math isn’t complicated.
    We can’t live as we did because we don’t have the advantages that we did.

    Source date (UTC): 2025-11-06 02:37:50 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1986261716754440386

  • Why isn’t that money the best possible use of it. What will be the cost of his v

    Why isn’t that money the best possible use of it. What will be the cost of his victory? His ideas aren’t possible to implement without catastrophic consequences.

    Source date (UTC): 2025-11-06 02:28:03 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1986259252697305508