Around 2016, the fiscal deficit as a percentage of gdp began widening even as the unemployment rate was falling, aka a decoupling, which hadn’t really happened in the US since the Vietnam War. I realized that macro would be a big deal in the decade ahead.

I researched how sovereign debt cycles tend to end, came across Dalio’s long term debt cycle framework, and built upon it by digging up the source data and finding various quantitative relationships, along with studying past eras of sovereign debt resets.

My masters degree focus and later engineering work in practice was in systems engineering- the method of analyzing and designing multidisciplinary systems (via teams) that are more complex than any one mind can fully grasp. Along the way, I realized that macro was basically systems engineering- mapping out major inputs and outputs, governing logic, identifying and learning from experts in disciplines that understand a key part of it, etc. So along with some economics training, I use a systems engineering analysis approach for macro.

I had been collecting gold and silver coins since I was a kid, knew about inflation and the importance of free markets, etc. I don’t know where I absorbed it from. I later found out that much of how I view things aligns with the Austrian school and so I researched it. I think that’s a compliment to the Austrian school because basically if you reason from first principles, it’s pretty easy to land on or adjacent to Austrian economics. I had taken some economics classes as electives in my bachelors, plus some financial modeling and engineering economics classes in my masters, but I was never really deep enough to be indoctrinated into mainstream/academic economics, and instead was mainly self taught from the perspective of a systems engineer, which just kind of landed on Austrian economics.

Saturdays are for boating and shitposting.

I DO make the rules.

List of all jobs I’ve had in chronological order:

-Assistant MMA instructor (part time)

-Deli clerk

-Industrial automation intern

-College resident assistant (part-time)

-Forum administrator (part-time)

-Software intern*

-Electrical engineer*

-Equity analyst/blogger (part-time)

-Freelance finance writer (part-time)

-Lead electrical engineer*

-Engineering procurement/finance lead*

-Facility engineering/finance manager*

-Macro analyst / talking head

-Side gigs: board director, VC fund adviser, author

*These ones were all for the same aviation employer

When I was entering college, my initial goal was to work in space-related electronic systems or in solar energy systems. As I learned more about them and as the Great Recession hit, I ended up shifting into aviation kind of randomly, but liked it a lot for about a decade.

Out of all of the jobs, the most surprising to me was “talking head”. That was certainly never really part of my toolkit and just kind of happened somehow.

Ripple in still water

When there is no pebble tossed

Nor wind to blow

There is a road

no simple highway

Between the dawn and the dark of night

And if you go

no one may follow

That path is for

your steps alone

Why ?

I was today's years old when I learned the man who discovered Ivermectin in 1973 is....

Satoshi.

Professor Satoshi Omura won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2015 and is currently a professor at Kitasato University.

He holds doctorates in Pharmaceutical Sciences and Chemistry.

His discovery of Ivermectin changed the world.

The international Journal of Antibiotics shows the unprecedented array of uses in humans:

Rosacea

Parasites

Asthma

Epilepsy

Viral infection (HIV, dengue)

Bacterial infection (TB)

Neurological diseases

and... CANCER.