Tootfinder

#EU: you can't abuse DRM to charge 30% for what costs 3% on the free market
Apple: but we've bundled it with nice features!
EU: price‑gouging is illegal, unbundling it is your problem
Apple: ok, have the 3% fee, but we add a 27% fee for using our mandatory DRM
EU: no
Apple: ok, we'll keep the DRM, and demand different fees that will cost Fortnite 30% of their…

Fascinating:
Asset managers make business judgements that, say, fossil fuels are a risky business investment.
And then "anti-woke," allegedly pro free-market, pro-smaller government people say, "no, your business and investment decisions will now be made by us, the 'freely elected' (in gerrymandered elections) representatives of the fossil business interests that own us."
Neat and tidy.

As a survivor of the type of stochastic terrorism that people like Charlie Kirk carry out, and also a survivor of gun violence, I've had a bit to think about.
I still understand the anger, the frustration, that leads someone to snap. I'll always have compassion, if also paired with some frustration, for the person who shot me and her husband. That makes sense to me. I refused to testify because it never made sense to punish a tool who acted out of ignorance.
What doesn't make as much sense to me are the upper class grifters, the stochastic terrorists, who turn a profit of off setting people like that up to kill. I always wanted to see people like that, people who were clearly profiting off of bringing evil into the world, held accountable.
But the way I always want to see them held accountable, is by being forced to live in a world where everyone is free. Charlie Kirk got out easy, and that is a bit sad. He should have had to suffer through our victory. He should have had to watch the fall of Western Civilization, the collapse of all the things he held dear, all the things he tried to uphold. I wish that he had lived long enough to understand the suffering he inflicted on the world. He should have lived long enough to have to do real work, to have to figure out how to feed himself, house himself, in a world that has no market for the hate that he brings.
As much as I had rather that he starved, I would never shed a tear for the opening of a new public urinal.
Rest in piss. Charlie Kirk.

A Game-Theoretic Foundation for Bitcoin's Price: A Security-Utility Equilibrium
Liang Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06071 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.…

A Game-Theoretic Foundation for Bitcoin's Price: A Security-Utility Equilibrium
This paper introduces a structural game-theoretic model to value decentralized digital assets like Bitcoin. Instead of relying on speculative beliefs, it frames the asset's price within a Rational-Expectations Security-Utility Nash Equilibrium (RESUNE). This equilibrium is a fixed point where the market-clearing price dictates the hash rate through a free-entry mining model, which in turn endogenously sets the network's security. The security, defined as one minus the probability of a 51% attac…

Computational Methods and Verification Theorem for Portfolio-Consumption Optimization under Exponential O-U Dynamics
Zhaoxiang Zhong, Haiming Song
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06491

Computational Methods and Verification Theorem for Portfolio-Consumption Optimization under Exponential O-U Dynamics
In this paper, we focus on the problem of optimal portfolio-consumption policies in a multi-asset financial market, where the n risky assets follow Exponential Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes, along with one risk-free bond. The investor's preferences are modeled using Constant Relative Risk Aversion utility with state-dependent stochastic discounting. The problem can be formulated as a high-dimensional stochastic optimal control problem, wherein the associated value function satisfies a Hamilton-J…

Risk-Sensitive Option Market Making with Arbitrage-Free eSSVI Surfaces: A Constrained RL and Stochastic Control Bridge
Jian'an Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04569 https:/…

Risk-Sensitive Option Market Making with Arbitrage-Free eSSVI Surfaces: A Constrained RL and Stochastic Control Bridge
We formulate option market making as a constrained, risk-sensitive control problem that unifies execution, hedging, and arbitrage-free implied-volatility surfaces inside a single learning loop. A fully differentiable eSSVI layer enforces static no-arbitrage conditions (butterfly and calendar) while the policy controls half-spreads, hedge intensity, and structured surface deformations (state-dependent rho-shift and psi-scale). Executions are intensity-driven and respond monotonically to spreads …

No Such Thing as Free Brain Time: For a Pigouvian Tax on Attention Capture
Hamza Belgroun (Sciences Po, UniCA, CNRS, WIMMICS, Laboratoire I3S - SPARKS), Franck Michel (Laboratoire I3S - SPARKS, WIMMICS), Fabien Gandon (WIMMICS, Laboratoire I3S - SPARKS)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06453

No Such Thing as Free Brain Time: For a Pigouvian Tax on Attention Capture
In our age of digital platforms, human attention has become a scarce and highly valuable resource, rivalrous, tradable, and increasingly subject to market dynamics. This article explores the commodification of attention within the framework of the attention economy, arguing that attention should be understood as a common good threatened by over-exploitation. Drawing from philosophical, economic, and legal perspectives, we first conceptualize attention not only as an individual cognitive process…

Metacurity is pleased to offer our free and premium subscribers a weekly digest of the best long-form (and longish) infosec-related pieces we couldn't properly fit into our daily news crush.
This week's selection covers
--How the internet radicalizes young men,
--The real-life damage of porn deepfakes,
--The JLR attack damaged local communities,
--Amazon is pushing into the police tech market,
--Russian misinformation targeted a Canadian journalist…

Best infosec-related long reads for the week of 9/27/25
How the internet radicalizes young men, The real-life damage of porn deepfakes, The JLR attack damaged local communities, Amazon is pushing into the police tech market, Russian misinformation targeted a Canadian journalist

Tonight!
Mayor Lurie doesn't have the authority to overturn car-free Market Street. This is only a temporary violation of car-free Market Street, one we can and will reverse!

Who benefits the most? Direct and indirect effects of a free cesarean section policy in Benin
Selidji Caroline Tossou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03658 https://

Who benefits the most? Direct and indirect effects of a free cesarean section policy in Benin
This paper evaluates the causal effect of the access to Benin's free cesarean section policy on females and their children. I use a large sample of Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for West African countries and analyze how the exemption of the cesarean section user fees for females in Benin directly impacts maternal and infant mortality, family size decisions, and labor market participation. I use a Difference in Differences approach and find that having access to the free cesarean section…

The Bari Market -- With Paramount securely in his pocket, David Ellison is on the verge ... (Dylan Byers/Puck)
https://puck.news/david-ellison-set-to-acquire-the-free-press/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250903/p170#a250903p170

"Spain has broken the ruinous link between power prices and volatile fossil fuels, something its European neighbours are desperate to do. Spain risks sliding back into costly gas reliance amid post-blackout fears. Boosting grids and batteries will help Spain break free from fossil dependency for good."
It looks like the link is only partially broken, not through planning but due to scale.
Decoupled: how Spain cut the link between gas and power prices using

Decoupled: how Spain cut the link between gas and power prices using renewables | Ember
Spain has some of the lowest wholesale electricity prices in Europe, largely owing to the country’s strong solar and wind growth which reduced the influence of expensive coal and gas power on the electricity market.

The Implicit Barrier of Utility Maximization: An Interior-Point Approach for Market Equilibria
Chuwen Zhang, Chang He, Bo Jiang, Yinyu Ye
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04822 https:…

The Implicit Barrier of Utility Maximization: An Interior-Point Approach for Market Equilibria
We study the computation of equilibria in exchange markets with divisible goods and players endowed with heterogeneous utilities. In this paper, we revisit the polynomial-time interior-point strategies that update \emph{only} the prices, mirroring the tâtonnement process. The key ingredient is the \emph{implicit barrier} inherent in the utility maximization: the utility turns unbounded when the goods are almost free of charge. Focusing on a ubiquitous class of utilities, we formalize this obse…

ByteGen: A Tokenizer-Free Generative Model for Orderbook Events in Byte Space
Yang Li, Zhi Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02247 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508…

Trump’s MAGA agenda is increasingly at odds with free market economics, and some key conservatives are beginning to notice.
At least one Republican—Texas Representative Chip Roy—has harpooned the president’s Intel deal, reminding CNBC Thursday that government stakes in private entities defies conservative values.
Roy also challenged the Trump administration’s intent to develop a state-owned investment fund known as a "sovereign wealth fund".
“I think the problem he…

MAGA Rep. Slams Trump’s Shady Takeover of Businesses
The Texas Republican has sparred with him in the past.

Replaced article(s) found for q-fin.TR. https://arxiv.org/list/q-fin.TR/new
[1/1]:
- ByteGen: A Tokenizer-Free Generative Model for Orderbook Events in Byte Space
Yang Li, Zhi Chen

Analysis of the Institutional Free Market in Accredited Medical Physics Residency Programs
Alexander Niver, Brian W. Pogue
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00246 https://

Analysis of the Institutional Free Market in Accredited Medical Physics Residency Programs
Purpose: The pathway to clinical medical physics involves 3 distinct stages of accredited positions, including (i) graduate education, (ii) residency training & (iii) employment. While CAMPEP accredits programs & people, the type of positions and numbers available are each more influenced by local institutional free market forces driving their choices. Methods: Understanding the overall status and trajectories of the full range of residency positions was the rationale for this survey, using pub…

Short-rate models with stochastic discontinuities: a PDE approach
Alessandro Calvia, Marzia De Donno, Chiara Guardasoni, Simona Sanfelici
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04289 https:…

Short-rate models with stochastic discontinuities: a PDE approach
With the reform of interest rate benchmarks, interbank offered rates (IBORs) like LIBOR have been replaced by risk-free rates (RFRs), such as the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) in the U.S. and the Euro Short-Term Rate (\euro STR) in Europe. These rates exhibit characteristics like jumps and spikes that correspond to specific market events, driven by regulatory and liquidity constraints. To capture these characteristics, this paper considers a general short-rate model that incorporates …

Just read this post by @… on an optimistic AGI future, and while it had some interesting and worthwhile ideas, it's also in my opinion dangerously misguided, and plays into the current AGI hype in a harmful way.
https://social.coop/@eloquence/114940607434005478
My criticisms include:
- Current LLM technology has many layers, but the biggest most capable models are all tied to corporate datacenters and require inordinate amounts of every and water use to run. Trying to use these tools to bring about a post-scarcity economy will burn up the planet. We urgently need more-capable but also vastly more efficient AI technologies if we want to use AI for a post-scarcity economy, and we are *not* nearly on the verge of this despite what the big companies pushing LLMs want us to think.
- I can see that permacommons.org claims a small level of expenses on AI equates to low climate impact. However, given current deep subsidies on place by the big companies to attract users, that isn't a great assumption. The fact that their FAQ dodges the question about which AI systems they use isn't a great look.
- These systems are not free in the same way that Wikipedia or open-source software is. To run your own model you need a data harvesting & cleaning operation that costs millions of dollars minimum, and then you need millions of dollars worth of storage & compute to train & host the models. Right now, big corporations are trying to compete for market share by heavily subsidizing these things, but it you go along with that, you become dependent on them, and you'll be screwed when they jack up the price to a profitable level later. I'd love to see open dataset initiatives SBD the like, and there are some of these things, but not enough yet, and many of the initiatives focus on one problem while ignoring others (fine for research but not the basis for a society yet).
- Between the environmental impacts, the horrible labor conditions and undercompensation of data workers who filter the big datasets, and the impacts of both AI scrapers and AI commons pollution, the developers of the most popular & effective LLMs have a lot of answer for. This project only really mentions environmental impacts, which makes me think that they're not serious about ethics, which in turn makes me distrustful of the whole enterprise.
- Their language also ends up encouraging AI use broadly while totally ignoring several entire classes of harm, so they're effectively contributing to AI hype, especially with such casual talk of AGI and robotics as if embodied AGI were just around the corner. To be clear about this point: we are several breakthroughs away from AGI under the most optimistic assumptions, and giving the impression that those will happen soon plays directly into the hands of the Sam Altmans of the world who are trying to make money off the impression of impending huge advances in AI capabilities. Adding to the AI hype is irresponsible.
- I've got a more philosophical criticism that I'll post about separately.
I do think that the idea of using AI & other software tools, possibly along with robotics and funded by many local cooperatives, in order to make businesses obsolete before they can do the same to all workers, is a good one. Get your local library to buy a knitting machine alongside their 3D printer.
Lately I've felt too busy criticizing AI to really sit down and think about what I do want the future to look like, even though I'm a big proponent of positive visions for the future as a force multiplier for criticism, and this article is inspiring to me in that regard, even if the specific project doesn't seem like a good one.

How an open-source approach helped DeepSeek and other Chinese AI companies; Hugging Face: Alibaba's Qwen is now the world's largest open-source AI ecosystem (South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article

How open-source AI is helping China win hearts and market share
China’s free-for-all AI models, developed by firms like DeepSeek and Alibaba, present a viable alternative to US closed-source systems.

Milwaukee Friends, I will be at Enderis Park on Saturday Sept 20th (tomorrow!) 9am-Noon with my artwork for sale for super-cheap.
And if you say "I'm Anti-Fascist and believe in Free Speech!" you'll get a 50% discount!"
https://www.enderispark.org/events-1/harve

Harvest Fest 2025 | Enderis
Mum and pumpkin sales Art activities for kids New for 2025 - Harvest Fest Maker's Market!

How to be a man -- The right's narrative about male attractiveness is grounded in Social Darwinism and free market economics. (Ian Dunt/Striking 13)
https://iandunt.substack.com/p/how-to-be-a-man-4ae
http://www.memeorandum.com/250801/p111#a250801p111

When your opponent is Donald Trump you escalate in response to threats;
you don’t try to appease him.
Jerome Powell must do everything in his power to compel the conventional wisdom of market traders to more adequately “price in” the degradation of the rule of law.
This must include tying the rule of law and the threats to the constitution to the credibility and standing of the Federal Reserve itself.
Powell’s term expires in less than a year anyway.
If defe…

Powell Will Hang Separately: The Federal Reserve Has Already Failed its Duty to Lisa Cook and the Constitution
This is a free Notes on the Crises article. A reminder to readers that the various activities run out of the still-new Notes on the Crises office cost money, while an enormous amount of time and effort goes into my writing and my constant dedication to refresh and deepen my

How Chinese streaming giants iQiyi and Tencent are gaining on Netflix in Southeast Asia through original productions and free, ad-supported services (Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/media-entertainment/china-s-s…

China's streaming companies gain on Netflix in Southeast Asia
Platforms iQiyi, Tencent grow market shares with low fees and localized content

Time for another "review". This one's hard. While the book was quite interesting, it required me to be quite open-minded. Still, I think it's worth mentioning:
Robert Wright — Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
The book basically focused on a thesis that both biological evolution and cultural evolution are a thing, they are directional and this directionality can be explained together using game theory — as eventually leading to more non-zero sum games.
It consists of three chapters. The first one is is focused on the history of civilization. It features many examples from different parts of the world, which makes it quite interesting. The author argues that the culture inevitably is evolving as information processing techniques improve — from writing to the Internet.
The second chapter is focused on biological evolution. Now, the argument is that it's not quite random, but actually directed towards greater complexity — eventually leading to the development of highly intelligent species, and a civilization.
The third chapter is quite speculative and metaphysical, and I'm just going to skip it.
The book is full of optimism. Capitalism creates freedom — because people are more productive when they're working for their own gain, so the free market eliminates slavery. Globalisation creates networks of interdependence that make wars uneconomic. Increased contacts between different cultures makes people more tolerant. And eventually, the humanity may be able to unite facing a common "external" enemy — the climate change.
What can I say? The examples are quite interesting, the whole theory seems self-consistent. Still, I repeatedly looked at the publication date (it's 1999), and wondered if author would write the same thing today (yes, I know I can search for his current opinions).
#books #bookstodon @…

Well, it’s public: Mayor Lurie has announced that he’s letting Uber and Lyft onto car-free Market Street along with Waymo, something he has no authority to do. The Transportation Code clearly doesn’t allow it. These companies are treating our billionaire mayor as above the law. #sfPol

CATNet: A geometric deep learning approach for CAT bond spread prediction in the primary market
Dixon Domfeh, Saeid Safarveisi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10208 https://

CATNet: A geometric deep learning approach for CAT bond spread prediction in the primary market
Traditional models for pricing catastrophe (CAT) bonds struggle to capture the complex, relational data inherent in these instruments. This paper introduces CATNet, a novel framework that applies a geometric deep learning architecture, the Relational Graph Convolutional Network (R-GCN), to model the CAT bond primary market as a graph, leveraging its underlying network structure for spread prediction. Our analysis reveals that the CAT bond market exhibits the characteristics of a scale-free netw…

How Chinese streaming giants iQiyi and Tencent are gaining on Netflix in Southeast Asia through original productions and free, ad-supported services (Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/media-entertainment/china-s-s…

China's streaming companies gain on Netflix in Southeast Asia
Platforms iQiyi, Tencent grow market shares with low fees and localized content

Why is Wall Street brushing off Trump’s escalating tariff threats?
Investors feel free to continue bidding up stock prices because they assume TACO Trump will always back down from his most costly tariff plans, market analysts said.
But Trump views stocks’ steady rise as a license to intensify his trade threats,
acting out the economic policy equivalent of his 2016 quip that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without paying a price.
His…

Why Wall Street is brushing off Trump’s escalating tariff threats
President Donald Trump’s escalating tariff threats have not deterred Wall Street, with the stock market continuing to rise despite trade policy uncertainty.

Argentina Is Losing Faith in Milei’s Free-Market Revolution
The Argentine leader faces shrinking public support as factories close and the economy falters before a pivotal midterm election
https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/argentina-is-losing-faith-in-mileis-free-market-revolution-9475ba42

Strassen's theorem for biased convex order
Beatrice Acciaio, Mathias Beiglb\"ock, Evgeny Kolosov, Gudmund Pammer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13041 https://

Strassen's theorem for biased convex order
Strassen's theorem asserts that for given marginal probabilities $μ,ν$ there exists a martingale starting in $μ$ and terminating in $ν$ if and only if $μ,ν$ are in convex order. From a financial perspective, it guarantees the existence of market-consistent martingale pricing measures for arbitrage-free prices of European call options and thus plays a fundamental role in robust finance. Arbitrage-free prices of American options demand a stronger version of martingales which are 'biased' in…

Unbiased Rough Integrators and No Free Lunch in Rough-Path-Based Market Models
Tomoyuki Ichiba, Qijin Shi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14529 https://arxiv.or…

Unbiased Rough Integrators and No Free Lunch in Rough-Path-Based Market Models
Built to generalise classical stochastic calculus, rough path theory provides a natural and pathwise framework to model continuous non-semimartingale assets. This paper investigates the ultimate capacity of this framework to support frictionless continuous No-Free-Lunch markets à la Kreps-Yan. We establish a ``Rough Kreps-Yan" theorem, which links our No Controlled Free Lunch (NCFL) condition to the unbiasedness of the driver of the price process as a rough integrator. The central work of this…

Peacock will raise prices by $3 per month for new users starting July 23 and test a $7.99/month ad-supported "Select" tier without sports and some other content (Josef Adalian/Vulture)
https://www.vulture.com/article/peacock-price-increase-2025.html

Peacock Is Hiking Prices More Than It Ever Has Before
Peacock is raising prices — by nearly 40 percent on its ad-supported plan and 20 percent on its ad-free plan. The streamer now has the most expensive ad-supported tier on the market.

Trade fodder? Cowboys could flip pending FA worth $10 million a year for position of need https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/08/12/jalen-tolbert-cowboys-most-tradeable-expendab…

The Intel deal is a mistake
Like the agreement to allow Nvidia and AMD to export certain chips to China in exchange for 15 percent of sales,
this kind of presidential dealmaking is a bad precedent:
We should do things because they’re good policy, not because the government gets a cut.
This particular policy also risks distorting the free-market system that has delivered better results for America, and the world,
than any state-managed competitor has ever achi…

The Intel deal is a mistake
We cannot beat China by acting like it.

Market Viability and Completeness for Multinomial Models
Nahuel I. Arca
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13966 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13966

Market Viability and Completeness for Multinomial Models
We study a generalization of the classical binomial model that consists in allowing any finite number of branches in each node of the tree representation. In this model, we show that the two fundamental theorems of asset pricing have a geometric interpretation and, using this, we give necessary and sufficient conditions for a market to be arbitrage-free and complete. We also present an algorithm for completing arbitrage-free markets in every possible way. We apply these results to the study of …

Crosslisted article(s) found for q-fin.TR. https://arxiv.org/list/q-fin.TR/new
[1/1]:
- Empirical Analysis of the Model-Free Valuation Approach: Hedging Gaps, Conservatism, and Trading ...
Zixing Chen, Yihan Qi, Shanlan Que, Julian Sester, Xiao Zhang

Pricing and hedging the prepayment option of mortgages under stochastic housing market activity
Leonardo Perotti, Lech A. Grzelak, Cornelis W. Oosterlee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08641

Pricing and hedging the prepayment option of mortgages under stochastic housing market activity
Prepayment risk embedded in fixed-rate mortgages forms a significant fraction of a financial institution's exposure. The embedded prepayment option bears the same interest rate risk as an exotic interest rate swap with a suitable stochastic notional. Focusing on penalty-free prepayment because of the contract owner's relocation to a new house, we model the prepayment option value as an European-type interest rate receiver swaption with stochastic maturity matching the stochastic time of relocat…

Are you using #Skincare brands such as #Upcircle, #Flawless or #EvolveBeauty if so

Transforming Beauty: How Plastic Freedom is Redefining Skincare Packaging
Launched near the end of Plastic Free July, Plastic Freedom potentially has changed the refill market, making it easier, cheaper and more accessible across the United Kingdom. Beth, the owner of Plastic Freedom on social media, told her followers she had been planning these for ages, wanting to make refills

Free Lunches with Vanishing Risks Most Likely Exist
Eckhard Platen, Kevin Fergusson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07108 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07108

Free Lunches with Vanishing Risks Most Likely Exist
The hypothesis that there do not exist free lunches with vanishing risk (FLVRs) in the real market underpins the popular risk-neutral pricing and hedging methodology in quantitative finance. The paper documents the fact that this hypothesis can be safely rejected. It performs extremely accurately the hedging of an extreme-maturity zero-coupon bond (ZCB). This hedge is part of a portfolio that starts with zero initial wealth and invests dynamically in a total return stock market index and the sa…