Posts Tagged ‘Mother’s Day’
“Gambling is a tax on ignorance”*…
And as Einstein observed, “two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
Gambling– and related specualtive investments– have always been, for the vast majority of punters, a sucker’s bet. But, as Paul Kedrosky explains, the growing prevalence of AI and the emergence of prediction markets have amplified that painful reality…
The return skew in prediction markets’ returns is startling. It is partly a function of their nature, but also of vibe-coding script kiddies attacking every market anomaly as quickly as it arises. Check a recent WSJ article for examples.
The same dynamic is now spreading across retail-dominated markets. A driver is how AI lowers the cost of systematic exploitation and exploration to near zero. What used to require infrastructure, data pipelines, and bearded quants is now accessible via off-the-shelf models, APIs, and loosely stitched “agent” workflows doing … stuff that even their users don’t fully understand.
The result isn’t democratization of returns. It is wider participation, of a sort, alongside the rapid re-concentration of profits. A small subset of users—those willing to iterate fastest, monitor continuously, and deploy capital programmatically—capture gains, with everyone else just liquidity.
They scrape sentiment, parse new information, and reprice positions in seconds, compressing the half-life of mispricings. That doesn’t eliminate inefficiency, but changes who harvests it. The edge shifts from insight to speed, coverage, and execution discipline—areas where even modest automation compounds quickly, and edges disappear overnight.
Prediction markets are simply the cleanest expression of this trend because they combine thin liquidity, discrete outcomes, and high retail participation. But the same pattern is visible in options flow, single-stock volatility events, and even online poker, which AI increasingly dominates.
As AI tools continue to scale, expect this to get worse: a small cohort running semi-automated strategies extracting semi-consistent edge, and a much larger base supplying them returns. Under the pressure of AI prevalance, markets don’t flatten, the return gradient steepens to a cliff…
Fewer and fewer winners take more and more of the pot. The mechanics of concentration: “AI is Eating Markets” from @paulkedrosky.com.
* Warren Buffett
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As we contemplate concentration, we might note that today is Mother’s Day. As noted yesterday, the observance became official on that date in 1914. But the quest to honor moms began a good bit earlier. On this date in 1908, Anna Jarvis held a memorial for her mother at St. Andrew’s Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia, the location of the International Mother’s Day Shrine. But her quest to create Mother’s Day had begun three years earlier when her mother Ann, a lifelong activist, died.
Ann had tried to start a “Mother’s Remembrance Day” in the mid-19th century. On her passing, Anna enlisted the support of retailer extraordinaire John Wanamaker, who knew a merchandising opportunity when he saw one, and who hosted the first Mother’s Day ceremonies in his Philadelphia emporium’s auditorium. In 1912, Anna trademarked the phrases “second Sunday in May” and “Mother’s Day”, and created the Mother’s Day International Association. By 1914, she and Wanamaker had built sufficient support in Congress to score the Congressional Resolution noted yesterday. (President Wilson, who was by current accounts uninterested in the move– distracted as he was by the beginnings of his ultimately unsuccessful effort to keep the U.S. out of the troubles in Europe that became World War I– nonetheless knew better than to take a stand against moms.)
“Everything is ephemeral, both that which remembers and that which is remembered”*…
Sally O’Reilly on “gray literature,” why it fascinates her… and how an early “AI” attempt to harvest it misses the mark…
In my modest collection of gray literature, the specialist title that comes closest to a blockbuster is Jean Aspin’s Vaginal Examination: A Unique Pocket Guide (ca. 1980s). Or perhaps it’s Dovea Genetics’s Beef Directory (2014).
Aspin was a community midwife in Luton and Dunstable University Hospital’s maternity wing. Her pocket guide is a well-produced, ring-bound, wipe-clean, tongue-shaped booklet, published by the baby milk company Cow & Gate. Its Latinate lists, labeled diagrams, and die-cut holes of increasing diameters, representing vaginal dilation, step a midwife through the assessment of fetal skull position during labor. The Beef Directory promises “Rock Solid Beef Genetics.” It peddles not anonymous meat but the sperm of individual bulls with names that sound like variety acts: Tonroe Lord Ian! Utile Ben! Virginia Andy! Vagabond! Mornity Handyman! Pinocchio! Seaview Tommy! Atok Socrates! Kilowatt D’Ochain! Immense D’Yvoir! It is richly illustrated, suitably glossy, and a chilling ode to muscle. (Behold the bulging rumps of Belgian Blues!)
Among the most niche in my collection of niche titles is the UK Ministry of Defence’s Corrosion: R.A.F. and A.A.C. Aircraft (1966), a bone-dry primer on the control, rectification, and treatment of nine types of corrosion. The Kent County Constabulary’s booklet Special Constabulary Inter-Divisional Competition (1971) is possibly the least read of all. Copied from typewritten documents, with hand-drawn diagrams, and stapled between two pieces of medium-weight red card, the booklet was produced “to enable officials and spectators to follow the progress of the Competition and the fortunes of the teams” during a public event at a Kent police station.3 Fun-seekers watched on as teams, comprising police officers from different divisions within the county, underwent an inspection of uniforms and accoutrements, competed in a quiz, and responded to a hypothetical incident at a demonstration involving a vicar, an unconscious policeman, a drug-addled youth, and an old man with a loaded shotgun.
Gray literature is a diffuse genre. Informational at base, its tone might tend toward bouncy sales patter or flinty authoritativeness. Visually, it ranges between perfunctory pragmatics, rickety flamboyant amateurism, and the polish of corporate comms. The most reliable way to identify an item’s grayness is by its function and milieu. According to the 2010 Prague definition, established at the 12th Annual Conference on Grey Literature and Repositories,
Grey literature stands for manifold document types produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats that are protected by intellectual property rights, of sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by library holdings or institutional repositories, but not controlled by commercial publishers i.e., where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body.
Gray literature does not have the market or cultural value of a novel or textbook. It is not an end in itself, but facilitative paraphernalia of some other endeavor—midwifery, policing, animal husbandry, war. This vicariousness, and its heterogenous forms, makes it notoriously difficult to place in library catalogues. Should a practical primer on the mitigation of corrosion in airplanes be placed under Dewey Decimal class “671: Metalworking & primary metal products,” “387: Water, air & space transportation,” or “358: Air and other specialized forces”? When a bull sperm directory is a matter of genetics, food production, and commerce, which can it be said to be about? Gray literature isn’t made with libraries or bookshops in mind. It strides out into the world to do an honest day’s work. None of this hanging around on hushed shelves waiting to impart knowledge in the abstract. It’s got sperm to tout, babies to birth, aircraft to maintain, a policed public to mollify.
I find these publications compelling by their very existence and, for the most part, unreadable. Their content slides off my mind. Gray literature’s high and narrow window onto specialist processes is anathema to traditional general-interest non-fiction publishing, which delivers information like a tap dispenses safely managed water—filtered, chlorinated, and piped into your very own quarters. Gray literature is a sploshing bucket of someone else’s water, murky with unfamiliar vocabulary, its means of application not always entirely obvious. Each publication is an invitation to speculate on a sector’s operations, to marvel at the specificity of other people’s knowledge and the focus of their working lives. My paltry library gestures toward the infinite complicatedness of human activity and the vast, disorganized array of murky buckets out of which the materiality of our lives somehow continues to emerge.
I have recently acquired some items that confuse the already untidy category of grayness. While seeking out books on theatrical quick-change (more on that another time), I came across the Webster’s Timeline History series and, out of curiosity, bought the three cheapest of the second-hand editions available: Wallpaper, 1768–2007; Secrecy, 393 BC–2007; and Bristol, 1000–1893. They are collations of excerpts, references, and citations that feature their titular word or phrase, and there are thousands of them. The series’s aggregate subject matter reads like the archest of list poems, the word associations of a disheveled mind, or dying humanity’s life flashing before its eyes…
Do read on for a fascinating/horrifying/illuminating tale all-too-relevant to our times– the story of the Webster’s Timeline History series…
On gray literature and Webster’s Timeline History books: “The First Tomato to Know Everything,” from @sosallyo.bsky.social in @cabinetmagazine.bsky.social.
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As we hold onto the human, we might (in preparation for tomorrow) remind ourselves that it was on this date in 1914 that President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation declaring the first national Mother’s Day. The previous day, May 8, Congress had designated the 2nd Sunday in May as Mother’s Day and had requested the proclamation.
“In a World…”*…
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Looking back on the evolution of the movie trailer we must consider the evolution of how we watch movies. Unlike the multiplexes we’re accustomed to today, the first movie theaters in the 1910s had only one screen. You would pay the admission, say five cents, and you could sit in the theater for as long as you wanted. Show times weren’t precise – a feature length movie along with a short films and a cartoon would play in a continuous loop and you could watch it as many times as you wanted.
1913 would be what many historians consider year zero for the movie trailer. In New York City, Nils Granlund, advertising manager of Marcus Loew theaters, made a short little promotional film for the Broadway play “Pleasure Seekers” showcasing actual rehearsal footage. The idea of showing ads between films was a hit – at least to the movie theater owners – The practice of creating and splicing in promotional pieces into the screening rotation was quickly implemented by the Loew theater chain as well as others.
Around the same time in Chicago, Col. William Selig, one of film’s earliest pioneers, would engineer another way to get audiences to the movies. Selig noticed the popularity of print serials in newspapers so he approached the Chicago Tribune, a newspaper embattled in a circulation war for who could be the most sensationalist, to adapt a film version of a print serial. The result was a 13 episode serial entitled “The Adventures of Kathlyn”.
This wasn’t the first film serial, it was actually the second; but it introduced a new device to film marketing. You see, each week a new installment would debut along with an article in the Chicago Tribune that continuing the story. What made “The Adventures of Kathlyn” different was at the end of each installment something would happen to put the characters in some sort of peril – a cliffhanger often with a title card inviting patrons to come back the following week to see what happens.
So Thus the idea of the trailer was born – and so too the term – as these promotions for upcoming attractions would play at the end of the film – hence trailer.
Most of these promotions were produced by the theaters themselves but by 1916, the movie studios themselves began officially releasing for upcoming movies. These first film trailers were pretty basic – they generally consist of snippets of film with some text overlay such as the cast of stars…
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Learn how gentle enticements like these grew to become the better-and-louder-than-the-actual-film extravaganzas of today in the video at the top of this post and at “The History of the Movie Trailer.”
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As we contemplate coming attractions, we might recall that it was on this date in 1927 that the first organizational meeting of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was convened by Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM. The 230 charter members elected Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. the group’s first president. Mayer’s original intent was to provide a forum for labor mediation and to improve the industry’s image; the first of those goals never got traction, so the second– the burnishing of Hollywood’s star– became the group’s primary focus. By 1929, the AMPAS had established the Academy Awards, and had joined with the University of Southern California to create the first film school.
“My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it”*…
Courtesy of The Week, a look at the pecuniary consequences in the U.S. of “Happy Mother’s Day”…
$20.7 billion
The amount Americans will spend this Mother’s Day, according to the National Retail Federation’s Mother’s Day spending survey85.4 million
Moms in the U.S., according to the latest stats from the United States Census Bureau$168.94
The average amount American consumers will spend on mom for Mother’s Day 2013$152.52
The average spending last year. This year’s figure is an 11 percent increase.3
Mother’s Day’s ranking, after Christmas and Valentine’s Day, in terms of the amount of money spent by U.S. consumers…
More at “The economics of Mother’s Day: By the numbers.”
* Mark Twain
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As we reassure ourselves that it’s the thought that counts, we might send nonsensical birthday greetings to Edward Lear; he was born on this date in 1812. An accomplished “ornithological draughtsman,” Lear published his first work– Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots— at age 19, a collection that was favorably compared to the work of Audubon. But Lear is better remembered for his verse (and the illustrations he supplied to accompany it). In 1846 he published A Book of Nonsense, a volume of limericks helped popularise the form. In 1865 The History of the Seven Families of the Lake Pipple-Popple was published; and in 1867 his most famous piece of nonsense, The Owl and the Pussycat (which he wrote for the children of his patron Edward Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby). They were quite successful, and any other works followed.
Lear’s facility– his verbal inventiveness, his knowing liberties with poetic form– led many to suspect (a la Shakespeare) that his poems were actually the work of another, better-educated author: his patron. (Conspiracy theorists noted that “Lear” is an anagram of “Earl”– so that “Edward Lear” might be code for “Edward, Earl”). But Lear was real enough, and earned his place– alongside Lewis Carroll and W.S. Gilbert– as one of the great purveyors of nonsense of the Victorian Age.
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.– St.3, The Owl and the Pussycat
Patience, rewarded…
As (R)D readers know, Randall Munroe’s xkcd webcomic has done some weird and wonderful things before (e.g., here and here), but #1190, ‘Time,” is something special. A time-lapse movie of two people building a sandcastle, it’s been updating just once an hour (twice an hour in the beginning) for well over a month (since March 25th)– and after over a thousand frames shows no sign of ending. Any day now, the number of frames will surpass the total number of xkcd comics. Some of its readers have called it the One True Comic; others, a MMONS (Massively Multiplayer Online Nerd Sniping). It’s sparked its own wiki, its own jargon (Timewaiters, newpix, Blitzgirling), and a thread on the xkcd user forum that runs to over 20,000 posts from 1100 distinct posters. So, is ‘Time” a mesmerizing work of art, a penetrating sociological experiment — or the longest-running shaggy-dog joke in history? Randall Munroe’s not saying.
See it here— and leave it open in your browser… for a long time…
[TotH to Slashdot]
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As we remember that at least some things come to those who wait, we might also recall that it was on this date in 1914 that President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Mother’s Day– the second Sunday in May– as a day for Americans to show the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war.
The drive to found the holiday came from Anna Jarvis (in honor of her mother, Ann, who had tried to start a “Mother’s Remembrance Day” in the mid-19th century). In 1905, Jarvis enlisted the support of merchant extraordinaire John Wanamaker, who knew a merchandising opportunity when he saw one, and who hosted the first Mother’s Day ceremonies in his Philadelphia emporium’s auditorium. In 1912, Jarvis trademarked the phrases “second Sunday in May” and “Mother’s Day”*, and created the Mother’s Day International Association. By 1914, Jarvis and Wanamaker had built sufficient support in Congress to a get Congressional Resolution requesting the President’s action. Wilson, who was by current accounts uninterested in the move (distracted as he was by the beginnings of his ultimately unsuccessful effort to keep the U.S. out of the troubles in Europe that became World War I), nonetheless knew better than to take a stand against moms.
So readers should remember that there are only three shopping days (counting today) before this year’s Mother’s Day.
* Though the ad above handles it differently, Jarvis specified that that “Mother’s” should “be a singular possessive, for each family to honor their mother, not a plural possessive commemorating all mothers in the world.”
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