You watch motorsport?

Here's a demo of a top fuel fuel injector. There are eight of these.

The goal is to move a "vehicle" from a standing start to a point 1320 feet away in the least amount of time possible. the current record, set November 2022, is 3.66 seconds. It will not surprise you to learn that there are all sorts of peculiar engineering compromises in order to get this "vehicle" a quarter mile down the road. These engineering compromises, however, are nothing compared to the rules compromises. One small example: no electronic clutches. Dumping that much power onto the road is obviously a tricky application of physics and timing but it must be all analog. As a result, much of the innovation in top fuel dragsters is in tricking a bunch of fluid to leak just so such that big rubber tires can launch a spindly little needle down the road without flying apart but also without using, say, a fucking arduino to simplify things.

stupid compromises are the fundamental nature of motorsport. If you look at it, we should all be watching robots with vacuum-powered under-car plenums ripping around tracks doing 6 gees lateral but nobody wants to watch that. Instead we come up with stupid rules about how Michael Schumacher's tire touched the line while he was pitting so that he has to lose a race in order to keep the standings competitive and dumb shit like that. Top fuel? Top fuel without rules is a nitromethane-powered potato gun and a dude in a love sac being rammed down a tube. This was the evolution of the Purdue Mechanical Engineering Competitive Charcoal Lighting Championship - it took about three years before they just dumped LOX on a hibachi to watch the pyrotechnics.

Here's the reductio ad absurdum on powerlifting:

...at which point, any choices this side of that are cultural, the culture says that a woman is anyone who says they're a woman, and if they want to be a woman who powerlifts they should lift.

How many times in the past year have you thought even a tiny little bit about powerlifting?

Would you think about it even now if there weren't some transgender angle?

I'm sorry to be the one telling you that competitions are a social construct, not an objective measure of anything. This is why whenever anyone decides they're entitled to more rights, conservatives always jump to sports to tell you why you, a person who has never thought about this particular sport before, should be deeply, thoughtfully, moderately concerned.

We are so fucked if we need an academic defense of why it's a good idea to have friends and do things with them.

I get so frustrated with long time friends when they bum out on small social stuff because it's the small stuff that adds up to memories that make a lifetime.

I'll just continue to cook too much food on Friday nights and keep the invite open. I don't know what else to do.

this was a long time coming

Still plugging away at this painting. I feel like I need to get a bit adventurous with the lighting.

We are headed to Puerto Rico for 4 nights. It will be the first family air travel in the aftertimes. Looking forward to it.

Drastically improved some regenerative medicine technology this week for Forever Labs. I need to spend the afternoon making sketches. Did some experiments in the lab on Monday, and it felt good. It had been a while since I had my hands in a bio hood.

In other news, I have been obsessed for some time with the idea that we need a new mobile OS that took full advantage of Ethereum applications. Anyway, I started tweeting about it enough until about three weeks ago a guy in Austria reached out and was like let's do it. So we made a discord, and now we have about 130 people and a number of them are building and designing, and we have a v0 Android fork that has an Ethereum client and apps on it can interact with it, and we have a v0 DappStore and a test Dapp.

Here's the site that went live today: https://ethereumphone.org

It's crazy that with github, discord, figma, notion, etc., people can quickly coordinate and build with very little knowledge of each other. When you couple that with tokens and DAOs, you basically have inverted the capitalist process. It now goes: people gather, sort by talent, build product, issue shares, elect executive leadership.

Organization of production used to be the value-capture, but now that aggregates with little more than an idea.

Ummmm, remind me: Did the baby-killing Zika virus arise 300 meters from the only lab in the world who holds similar Zika viruses and whose stated research goals are to modify the Zika virus in exactly the hyper-pathological way that it behaves in the wild, while that behavior has never before been observed among the tens of thousands of other known Zika viruses? Can't remember.

COVID AIN'T GONE YET

So my wife has a colleague. Known her for... fifteen years? Trained under her backintheday, filled in for a couple years when her practice exploded, threw a couple employees her way, their network was built by me. Things have been congenial and polite through COVID 'cuz (A) they're Republican (B) they're anti-vax. So we don't hang out like we used to.

Colleague has a 80-year-old mom who lives with them. And about a month ago they decided fukkit let's vaycay so they ran off to Hawaii for ten days, leaving our posse to cover half their practice. Came back not feelin' great.

They decided to shine it on.

So we've got one person coming into the office with active, confirmed COVID and another person who would if only she weren't so goddamn sick and we're trying to keep this from becoming a public health problem and counseling their one about-to-bail-now employee as to how to not end up in dire peril with the health department. None of this was direct, mind you, all of it was back-channel, our hands are scrupulously clean. Ain't nobody died, errbody on the mend, and when we asked "hey wanna go halvesies on a crate of medical supplies" the answer was monosyllabic.

They ain't talkin' to us. Not because of anything we did, but because their worldview was wrong, our worldview was right, and now we're the bad guys.

Got another friend. She's delivered every grandkid for her ex-boss from back when she was an EMT. Which is a tradition that meant that rather than sticking to her own back yard 80 miles away, she decided to come deliver 20 miles north of us... in our support structure, where we know the EMTs, we know the hospitals, yadda yadda. Home birth, which is always less of a controlled experiment, and the mom was acting woozy and weird. Things stretched out to the point where it wasn't happenin' so it's time to transport to the hospitals we use.

At which point they show up, mom has a temp of 104, crash to emergency c-section, baby hits the NICU, grandma gets kicked out of the suite, and both mom'n'dad pop a rapid COVID positive. But not before they've tromped through half the goddamn hospital.

Greetings from Big Brother! as healthcare providers we can look your ass up in the vaccine database. Which means we know that while this couple said they were vaccinated to the friend? They also said they'd NEVER get vaccinated to the grandma and as it turns out, dad was vaccinated, mom wasn't. 'cuz, you know, lying to your healthcare provider is small potatoes compared to I dunno sub rosa supporting treason.

We'd been talking about going back to home births but we just had this catastrophe where another mom was so stoned out of her gourd that labor pain transmogrified into "my hip hurts" so they sat there smoking spliffs until we had to come crash their house because they weren't gonna make it. That combined with this "Patriots will happily lie to liberal traitors to get what they want" mentality is noping us the fuck out of that.

Right now? 97% of COVID cases are among the unvaccinated. If you're in the hospital? With COVID? There's a 99.7% chance you didn't get two shots.

So yeah we're rolling back protections but that's not because COVID is gone. It's because if you get COVID now it's because you fuckin' earned it and if you earned it, the hospitals now have the bandwidth to deal with your irresponsible, lying ass.

The conversation between the friend and the dad (mom just got off Oxygen yesterday, is still in the ICU) was framed around "well we meant to get vaccinated we just... forgot." Which, okay, if that's what you need to maintain your friendship across the gap of "thanks for driving a hundred miles to leave a flaming bag of poo on the doorstep of one of your friends" more power to you. We'll just not mention the Big Gulp's worth of nyquil and other shit you shouldn't be taking in labor that y'all were using to mask your symptoms 'cuz at the end of the day they aren't our patients (except they are now because we have pediatricians so fuck us I guess).

But fuckin' hell man my kid don't have a vaccine yet and neither do her friends, and the variants coasting around these days are mean.

So also fuck off.

Thanks for making the world a little better.

Hey man, we gotta push back the dark somehow.

An old hubski sticker on a long-since retired journal begs the question, "What can be learned?" Not to box anyone into a particular interpretation, but the question has always felt ambitious to me - it's a guiding light of the discourse we have here, a fundamental principle from which all goals can be derived. It's also a question from a frame of mind that feels incredibly foreign right now, but searching for the emotional means to express myself...The incongruity of it feels nostalgic, and I think that nostalgia bears the mark of an ambition that I've set down for the time being.

It was a guiding principle before, and I think that principle has changed meaning for me while we all search for normalcy: The goal is to return to the mindset that created this account in the first place. The ennui is dissonance between the goals that we made and the reality we're living, and "What can be learned?" is a lighthouse back to the person who made those goals.

If I can stick with that understanding, I think I'll come out of this a little stronger. Sorry for rambling, I hope the purple prose doesn't eclipse my meaning.

This week I went out apple-picking with my friends and had a great time. We chose a wonderful sunny day and got a huge bag of Honey Golds and Empires that I am still chewing through, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. The orchard was a fair distance outside of town, but the crowds were huge - I guess everyone is just trying to bask in the sun while they still can, we've had our first frost of the season a few days back. Walked around the orchard for some time, and then tried to get lost in the corn maze (but couldn't).

Also I took some photos of the Parliament while walking around a few days back, and they just came in from the lab. I've been trying to shoot on film recently, which wasn't going too well (destroyed my first roll and got some light leaks on my next one cause I didn't roll it all the way back before opening), but, other than the expense and the inconvenience, it's fun.

Today's my 3rd day in Eindhoven, and it's been awesome so far. Eating delicious vegan food every day, slowly getting to know the 40 young folks in the crew, biking everywhere, barely drinking. Feels super wholesome - I think I needed that in my life right now after the crazy summer of debauchery I've had. Prepping for dutch design week right now and getting in the groove of the film crew.

I wish i could have gotten here earlier honestly, seems like it's been lots of fun and the project is wrapping up in december. But the founder is very seriously looking into buying land in Portugal and building an alternative community. Pretty much a hippy commune, but a high tech version where you document your processes and share it all open source and do R&D for sustainable living.

Some sort of quid pro quo badge thing going on here...

So, the final formula is:

  Power = (p ^ m) * F * (c / λ) * π * r²

where:

p - Pogson's ratio [] (dimensionless)

m - magnitude [] (dimensionless)

F - flux [J / (s * cm² * Hz)]

c - speed of light [cm / s]

λ - wavelength [cm]

r - Earth's radius [cm]

π - pi [] (dimensionless)

Checking units:

  Power = ([] ^ []) * [J / (s * cm² * Hz)] * [cm / s] * [1 / cm] * [] * [cm²]
  Power = [J / (s * cm² * Hz)] * [1 / s] * [cm²]
  Power = [J / (s * cm² * Hz)] * [Hz] * [cm²]
  Power = [J / s] * [(Hz * cm²) / (Hz * cm²)]
  Power = [J / s] = [W]

No problems here.

Using our values:

p = 2.512

m = 4

F = 3.64E-27 [J / (cm² * Hz * s)]

c = 3E10 [cm / s]

λ = 5.5E-5 [cm]

r = 6E8 [cm]

pi = 3.14

we obtain:

  Power = (2.512 ^ 4) * 3.64E-27 * (3E10 / 5.5E-5) * 3.14 * (6E8)²
  Power = 8.94E7 [W]

So… pretty close and the difference comes down mainly to rounding. Other than that, under your assumptions, I see no problems with reasoning or method. Sorry for taking so long to respond, though.

Hey, what're you up to just after January 28th of 2024? Asking for a friend.

You need to double it, that's when Centaurs would get your message.

Sounds like you're in Stage 2 of the Five Stages of Work. I heard this talk given by a CBC (Canada's National Radio Station) radio engineer as she reflected on her job there:

Stage 1. The Good Day: Your job gives you happiness, fulfilment, and meaning.

Stage 2. The Bad Day: Your job starts to irritate you. Everything you overlooked during the good day begins to stress you. You begin to learn some really unpleasant stuff about your workplace. You become frustrated, confused, and apathetic. You feel powerless.

Stage 3. Revenge: The bad days outnumber the good days. You become self-compensating for your stress. Self-compensation might range from taking home post-its to absenteeism to searching for or even doing a second job during your original job, and worse.

Stage 4. Personal Re-Engineering: You realize that you do value your job. It is the job you’ve always wanted. You explore how you can change so that you can once again have the good day. Personal re-engineering might involve asserting your concerns, negotiating with others, changing your expectations, and much more.

Stage 5. Redemption: Some of your days at work are so excellent, they redeem all the other stress involved.

Anyway, bfx, good luck sorting it all out. We want to see you happy.

I firmly believe that "single payer" would get a lot more support if people stopped talking about it in grandiose themes and noble vignettes and started talking about it in real terms. All the liberals I know are in heavy favor of "single payer" without any of them knowing what the fuck it is.

HERE'S WHAT THE FUCK IT IS.

I've got a medical facility - Al's Medicine. Al's subcontracts to Betty the Biller and Cindy the Client Specialist. I operate in a state where my medical facility is covered by Medicaid. We also take private (employer-provided) insurance, which is underwritten by the following insurance firms: Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y and Z.

Al's must sign individual contracts with Q, R, S, T, U, V and W. These contracts are "take it or leave it" binding: they say that for ICD code 1, Q will pay Al's $7.50 but for ICD code 1.000000001, Q will pay Al's $0.00 because fuck you, Al's. Note that Q might pay Joe's $6.50 or $9.50 or pi.ie^2 for ICD code 1. Q is entirely within its rights to do so. Al and Joe, on the other hand, are contractually forbidden from discussing their rates for ICD Code 1. If Q gets wind that Al and Joe know what the other are getting, they can drop both because fuck you, Al and Joe. Also know that Joe might not get anything for ICD Code 1 because Q has decided that all of Q's contracted healthcare clients can drive 75 miles to Al's for those services because fuck you, Joe. Also know that Q can tell Al's they'll pay $7.50 for "services" verbally and in writing, but when the actual contract comes through the actual number listed is $2.25 because fuck you, Al's. Also know that they won't tell you what ICD codes they'll pay for, they'll just say "services" and let you resubmit your bills over and over and over again until you find the ICD code that pays out the most because fuck you. Also know that the ICD code they choose to pay for can and will also change because fuck you.

A few other notes: Al's might have to provide, for example, rhogam shots to prevent babies from dying from blood type incompatibiliy. These rhogam shots might cost Al's $28 but Q is going to pay $7 because fuck you, Al's. If you ever wondered why hospitals charge you $40 to hold your baby it's because they're trying to claw back the $21 the insurance company isn't paying for medicine they're required by law to administer (for example). Also note that your involvement, gentle consumer, starts when you get an "explanation of benefits" from the insurance company listing all the outrageous charges the doctor hit you with. It will provide no explanation. It will show how generous they were in all their disbursements and then show you that your doctor's office is going to bill you STILL MORE MONEY because they're such bloodsuckers.

This is where Betty Biller and Cindy Client Specialist come in. Betty makes 10% by pickaxing all the money she can get out of Q. Betty's whole job is knowing what Q pays out on. Betty knows which ICD codes Q pays out what on, and can turn your "normal child checkup" into 42 different codes that pay the maximum rate Q has contracted to pay. She is literally a medical billing bounty hunter. Betty is the back office side while Cindy talks to you, the client - here's what's coming, here's what it means, here's how to get your insurance to pay for this ahead of time, here's how to get preapproval for that.

For those keeping track at home, billing specialists outnumber doctors 2:1 in this scenario.

Multiply times insurance companies R, S, T, U, V and W, who all have their own rates, all have their own codes, all have their own geographic exclusion areas, and probably have seven or eight sub-plans so that it's not actually "V" it's V.a, V.b, V.c, V.d, V.e, V.f and so on. Suddenly, Betty and Cindy look positively useful and you will pay them gladly because the act of billing for care takes three to four times as many man-hours as actually providing that care. Betty and Cindy make good livings and their existence is entirely parasitic on the insurance companie's deliberately opaque, byzantine and antagonistic reimbursement practices.

Not Y and Z, though. Y and Z contract through Medicaid. Medicaid has no patience for that bullshit. They will pay the following amounts on the following ICD codes. Anybody who contracts through Medicaid bills those codes and gets that money. It is known. Y knows, Z knows, Al knows, Joe knows, and all of Al and Joe's clients can fuckin' look it up. And when Medicaid's reimbursements lag behind the real world, it gets turned into a bill that goes to the legislature that raises the rates for everyone.

Al's, in fact, might get better reimbursements out of Y and Z (because of medicaid) than they get out of Q, R S, T, U or V.

Unfortunately you as a patient don't get your insurance through Y and Z because you make more than the poverty level for your county. You get whatever insurance your job provides, which might be V.c, might be Q, might be nothing because you drive for Uber and fuck you.

As a provider, we get to choose who we contract with. We do not get to choose what those providers pay us. And if 50% of your clients work for Microsoft, you bloody well better be able to take V.c, despite the fact that they reimburse at exactly half what Medicaid reimburses at (which is funny, because all your Microsoft mommies make six figures). R, on the other hand, may decide that they'll never cover you because they have enough of your specialty in network, never mind that the nearest provider is a ferry ride away (because this way they don't have to pay for those services).

As an insurer, you get to decide who you contract with. You can pick the providers that are the stupidest, that will accept the lowest rates, that have the lowest conflict rate of you arguing over charges. And you get to discuss this with the HR reps of companies large and small, none of which have any background in medicine, medical billing, accounting or statistics. To no one's surprise, they choose on price.

But the poor people? They pay what the state says they pay, the insurance companies collect what the state says they collect, and they contract with the providers the state says they contract with.

THEY STILL MAKE MONEY.

They're still private insurance companies, privately managing your health care, privately paying out private doctors. It is not "socialized medicine." It is not "universal healthcare." It is not the National Health Service. The healthcare industry is something like a tenth of the US economy; you're never getting that. But you go single payer and all of a sudden things go from back-room knife fights between Q, R, Betty and Cindy to state-mandated pricing and state-mandated coverage.

My future is tied to health care. I've got more in a medical practice than you have in your house.

And I'm a big booster of single payer.

And so's Aetna, who in this example is R.

I may just ramble here for a second to see how people reply because I don't want to specifically talk about my life right now and I've learned to accept the blunt tool aspect that language has and I don't know if that is a fact many people understand explicitly.

There is just no way to apply logic to my behavior or reactions and I'm not sure that doesn't apply to everyone. I'm pretty certain of it in fact. Sometimes I fold entirely under pressure that may not seem very intense from the outside and sometimes I can soldier through objective tragedy. I don't exactly remember what's on this list and I looked at it again because it's meant to be amusing in part:

http://www.cockeyed.com/magic/bad_4.php

But there's more than a few things on there that have happened to me, even in the last year. It's hard to explain how that feels because it's just complicated.

I feel like I deserve a gold fucking star sometimes for just waking up or not crying at a given moment when that's a hard thing to resist. Everyone deals with things they aren't appreciated for that are internally important. Difficulties that are not important enough to mention but would be so greatly appreciated if anyone noticed at all the level of a quiet struggle.

And that seems to be my life. A very slow process of coming to be grateful for anything I have or am afforded and the smallest recognitions of any signal from someone about how hard it can be for me just to not accept failure or any number of undesirable things that would be easy to give in to. This is something that is in large part my fault. But there are a lot of difficult to recognize or understand factors in my life that I deal with every day that I cannot overestate the amount of effort it's been to function at a level where if I fold it's a goddamn surprise to everyone looking at me. And that has forced me to educate myself and accept faults of my own that people who have them can exist easily without recognizing and just generally be open to the fact that I don't often know what the fuck is even happening. But that has given me an empathy that I do want a gold fucking star for one day towards people who no one even wants to look at and people who are easily dismissed for reasons that I've learned to see as incredibly judgemental because I have a taste of how bad life can be in ways that people in the first world have no appreciation for since they've never, for example, had to weigh the benefit of carrying everything you own against its weight and the stress that will create to hold on to objects that are not very basically essential. I have done that.

And I have not given up and when I've tried to I've failed. Just general advice I've learned through experience, personal or by observation, smiling itself can be nearly impossible sometimes so. Or comforting in its ease at a moment. I feel like people in America sprint through life and are surprise how short it is when they accelerated its speed by worrying about duvet covers or taking cold water for granted. Everyone reading this should understand the levels of grace they've been afforded just by having electricity and internet access. Billions of people right now are comfortable being unsure how they will next eat.

I want a gold star sometimes because the very low level of optimism I seem to put off is a lot more than people who I think have none and whatever level of give a fuck I have left is important and probably hard fought.

The map is finished! What do you think of it? Let me know if I made any mistakes. :)

There will always be someone better off than you, there will always be someone worse off. For me, the goal is to always be better off than that guy I was last year.

Spicer's presser reminded a lot of the early days of the Iraq war when Hussein's information minister was on TV saying that the Republican Guard was on the verge of victory, as CNN was showing US troops on the outskirts of Baghdad marching toward the city center. It was a lie of such ridiculous proportions that you got the sense watching it that truth or untruth wasn't really the point of the press conference.

Similarly, Trump's claim about the inauguration was so farcical that you got the sense that the administration was really trying to cultivate a relationship with the truth. There may have been a component of Trump testing Spicer's loyalty, but I think that was secondary to intentionally picking a fight with "the media" writ large. A strongman, a man trying to build a personality cult, needs a foil. Usually it's easy, because America is the default foil for strongmen the world over. Trump is in the position of being in the belly of the beast, so his foil has to be some other subversive element. The media is a good one, because (a) they write bad things about him that just happen to be "true", and (b) his constituency is already distrustful of them. In that sense they're perfect. And how did the administration react? They threatened to cut off access to reporters who questions them.

That's diabolically brilliant. When they announced that they might move the press corps form the West Wing, everyone shit a brick. They realized they couldn't do it without cause. So they went out and sewed the seeds. Spicer cam out a day later and was clear-eyed and friendly. Do we not also think that was calculated? Of course it was. Now he can say he's been trying to be the good guy, but you reporters just won't quit. Give it two more weeks. They'll come up with another whopper to top this one. And if you think Chuck Todd was mean to Conway about lying about inauguration attendance, just wait until they lie about something that matters. Real reporters will flip out, and it will be the perfect time to cut them out of the deal.

I have stopped reading right about here:

And yet a new school of thinking is challenging these received ways and arguing that straying from the path, even engaging in hedonistic behaviour, might be the surest way to success.

so I will only conclude that author has learned some lesson. Better late than never. But since I know how the narrative in pieces like this goes, I went straight for the ending and got:

That he ever thought he could achieve perfection, without setbacks, without respites, Franklin admitted, was his gravest error. He had been naïve. And prideful.

See? I was right. Good for him!

So, have some shit that I've learned from my father so far:

- In all likelihood you have only this one life, so try to be happy.

- Moderate yourself as much and long as you are comfortable (and I don't have to bail you out).

- Don't obsess over minor failings. Every problem is bigger that it really is on first glance. Look at it when you'll get over it.

- You probably don't know what you want.

- Don't be a dick. Or at least try to not be one and treat others as they deserve.

- Hard work or not, you are not entitled to anything in life. There's likely someone much better anyway.

- As with toilets, try to leave the place in at least the state you found it yourself.

- Fear is the mind-killer, but not everything requires higher mental faculties.

- You can strive for true perfection but you can never achieve it. It also applies to this list.

And I didn't even need to quote philosophers.

You will not be disappointed. There's some extraordinary footage, as you would expect. One of my favourites was a chase scene between newly born Iguanas and pack of snakes.

Here's a part of the scene. I hope this isn't blocked for you guys in the US.

Actually, into his bag of holding.

There's a famous piece of journalism on the causes of the ~2008 financial crisis, specifically the housing bubble, called The Giant Pool of Money. There's one part that always stuck out to me, and seems incredibly relevant here, so I'll highlight it [emphasis mine, at the end]:

Adam Davidson

Right, the global pool of money, that's where our story begins. Most people don't think about it, but there's this huge pool of money out there, which is basically all the money the world is saving now-- insurance companies saving for a catastrophe, pension funds saving money for retirement, the Central Bank of England saving for whatever central banks save for, all the world's savings.

Ceyla Pazarbasioglu

A lot of money, it's about 70 trillion.

Adam Davidson

That's the head of capital market research at the International Monetary Fund, the place to go if you want to figure out how much money is in the world.

[...]

Adam Davidson

And by the way, before you finance enthusiasts start writing any letters, we do know that $70 trillion technically refers to that subset of global savings called fixed income securities. Everyone else can just ignore what I just said. Let's put $70 trillion in perspective. Do this. Think about all the money that people spend everywhere in the world, everything you bought in the last year, all of it. Then add everything Bill Gates bought, and all the rice sold in China, and that fleet of planes Boeing just sold to South Korea, all the money spent in every country on Earth in a year. That is less than $70 trillion, less than the global pool of money.

Alex Blumberg

Wow.

Adam Davidson

We're talking about a lot of money.

Alex Blumberg

That is a lot of money.

Adam Davidson

And that money comes along with armies of very nervous men and women watching over the pool of money. Investment managers, they don't want to lose a penny of that. They don't want to lose any of that money, and, even more so, they want to make it grow bigger. But to make it grow, they have to find something to invest in.

So, most of modern history, what they did was they bought really safe and, frankly, really boring investments like treasuries and municipal bonds, boring things. But then, right before our story starts, something changed, something happened to that global pool of money.

Ceyla Pazarbasioglu

This number doubled since 2000. In 2000 this was about $36 trillion.

Adam Davidson

So it took several hundred years for the world to get to $36 trillion. And then it took six years to get another $36 trillion.

Ceyla Pazarbasioglu

Yeah, there has been a very sharp increase.

Adam Davidson

How does the world get twice as much money to invest? There are lots of things that happen. But the main headline is that all sorts of poor countries became kind of rich, making things like TVs and selling us oil. China, India, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia made a lot of money and banked it.

China, for example, has over a $1 trillion in its central bank. And there are office buildings in Beijing filled with math geniuses, real math geniuses, looking for a place to invest it. And the world was not ready for all this new money. There is twice as much money looking for investments, but there are not twice as many good investments.