NYTimes: “The S&P 500 is more than 20 percent higher than the Wall Street consensus for all of 2024. As a consequence, Wall Street has upgraded its outlook radically: Now that stocks have been rallying, why shouldn’t they rise further? It’s not crazy to think this way, even in the midst of wars, catastrophic storms and vituperative political battles. Stock market momentum, in itself, is a powerful thing. When the market is rising, it often keeps going. And important factors are propitious for stocks: The Federal Reserve has made life easier for companies and investors by lowering interest rates, those companies are still churning out handsome earnings and there is no economic recession visible on the horizon. But at some point, the tide always turns. While market meltdowns are what most people worry about, some strategists are nervous that stocks are rising too rapidly. “The risk of a melt-up has increased,” Yardeni Research, an independent financial research firm, warned clients in a note last month. Translation: The market is in danger of getting carried away.”
WSJ: “In his intellectually sparkling and beautifully crafted “The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie,” Richard Dawkins argues that, unlike the unfinished works of human literature—specific, deliberate—the genetic manuscript encoding the informational details of human beings was not crafted by a conscious being or Creator, but by a Darwinian process of evolution by natural selection…The human genome is an unfinished work, its current state representing a snapshot, a moment of transience and transition that lacks the completeness of a destination. Unlike a novel, however, the genome is a project of continuous revision, locked in a Nietzschean state of perpetual becoming. It is a process that may often be whimsical and capricious. As such we have lyre birds that can mimic car alarms, chainsaws and supposedly even the distinct sounds of “Nikon versus Canon camera shutters,” and octopuses that have “perfected the art of dynamic cross-dressing.” It is also possible, Mr. Dawkins intriguingly speculates, that bats may “hear in color.””
The Verge: “Humans have automated tasks for centuries. Now, AI companies see a path to profit in harnessing our love of efficiency, and they’ve got a name for their solution: agents. AI agents are autonomous programs that perform tasks, make decisions, and interact with environments with little human input, and they’re the focus of every major company working on AI today…AI companies argue “agents” — you’d better not call them bots — are different. Instead of following a simple, rote set of instructions, they believe agents will be able to interact with environments, learn from feedback, and make decisions without constant human input. They could dynamically manage tasks like making purchases, booking travel, or scheduling meetings, adapting to unforeseen circumstances and interacting with systems that could include humans and other AI tools. Artificial intelligence companies hope that agents will provide a way to monetize powerful, expensive AI models.”
Kenneth Kletzer: “The middle-income trap is a clear potential for India. Has South Korea gotten into a middle-income trap? I’m not so sure. South Korea continues to grow, but slowing growth rates are what we see. South Korea has a fairly high per capita income now and has naturally started to converge towards the growth rate of others. I would expect by 2047 that India will have a higher per capita GDP. The stumbling point for the whole world, particularly a country like India, is that it might be exposed to climate change, notably in agriculture…Every country has its potential. Even though manufacturing has taken amazing leaps in India, there still needs to be greater integration in the global supply chain. That integration has really just begun. Getting transportation within the country is not all that great yet, for goods. Can that kind of growth be sustained without advancing manufacturers more? And I can’t make a prediction on that. Advancing manufacturers may be a real opportunity for India. “
