Note also the richly provisioned pile of gifts below. Most Christmases today are a genuine embarrassment of riches

Every Christmas I think of economics’ measurement problem when it comes to quality. I grew up with trees that literally looked like this, and even the cheapest trees today are genetically modified to be greener, fuller and lose very few needles.

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Even if you don‘t read German, the chart will do it for you. Rise of the electrostate.

The residential mortgage market was simply like 2 orders of magnitude bigger than the tech debt right now. Like people are talking about 3 trillion in tech debt by 2028. There was 10 trillion in MBS in 2008 (not including the private insurer issues, weird derivatives).

The Enhanced Games - a pro-drug Olympic Games - which was founded by the guy who led Peter Thiel’s lawsuit that bankrupt Gawker, is going public via SPAC. The above sentence is completely factual.

This is silly. There’s a reason mass market consumer facing internet companies from Google to Meta toyed with charging users and went the ad route instead. Snag is Sam has to make the revenue projections sufficient to justify his capex assumptions. Hard to do with ad ARPU.

The lack of awareness of the relationships (and conflation) between pattern matching, reasoning, intelligence and possible consciousness in the discourse around AI is really annoying. Huge steps in pattern matching do not necessarily mean big steps in the others.

Some very good arguments here but there's also a KISS question here: "Why should a company consolidate an entity where it only owns a 20% stake?" Seems like the operating versus financing lease distinction is more important than the consolidation of the entity, they're on much weaker ground there.

In this tough and moving essay, Caroline Kennedy's 35-year-old daughter Tatiana Schlossberg reveals that she is terminally ill with leukemia. She has some choice words about how her cousin Bobby has made the limited time she has left worse. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

This is an awesome interview on multiple technologies coming together. People simply do not get how the fossil fuel companies are utterly hosed because of this.

RFK voice: “Our precious bodily fluids”

It’s 615 AM and WTF did I just read about RFK

Shocked face when I check what day is options expiration day.

Just having a conversation with colleagues over whether it was Trump threatening to execute lawmakers or something else that caused the market to sell off. Answer = unclear, which is deeply funny for dark humor fans.

This is notable: traditional flu vaccines generate modest T-cell immunity. The more robust cellular responses seen here could matter for durability and breadth of protection, especially in drift-heavy years.

The primary question: Can an mRNA flu vaccine match or outperform our current vaccines at preventing lab-confirmed influenza illness? The answer is an emphatic yes. Look at the separation of those curves

Me on Nvidia, and the highly cyclical nature of corporate venture capital.

chat wtf

Given how many hedge funds are named after places on Nantucket, this morning’s image is a pretty important portent from the market gods.

This is not good - vaccine mismatch means a lot of people are probably going to die from flu. I know people stopped caring about Moderna a while ago, but faster production timelines with mRNA means you can minimize mismatch. FDA approval for Moderna flu vax not until next season however.

One good thing about Cloudflare being down has been the resurgence of community through spoken word story telling, communal singing, and ritual sacrifice.

Training set composed entirely of Hallmark and Hieronymus Bosch

Absolutely wild there’s a reasonable chance Wegovy will be shown to be an Alzheimer’s modifying therapy within the next few weeks and the drug’s cost keeps going down.

Another autoimmune disease linked to infection by EBV (the cause of mono). The virus had already previously been linked to multiple sclerosis, now lupus. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Goodnight. Margaret Bourke-White, Beach Accident, Coney Island, Brooklyn, 1951

I don’t understand how Brit cooking is often overly exotic ingredients that don’t go together like “prawns and fennel-accented aubergine in spinal marrow sauce” but somehow every dessert is just “figgy pudding with caramel” and tastes divine.

China EV sales rising about 30% annually while Telsa's sales fall 36%. While the brand destruction is amusing, the company's loss of Chinese sales is more important for the company - they can't compete against big Chinese firms. www.reuters.com/business/aut...

This is fascinating by Odzylko- JMW Turner, the famous British painter, was an early participant in risk free arb of government debt. The arb persisted for years, probably for the cultural belief that trading for small amounts was disreputable. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

How are the flight delays? About to finish my first movie and still on the ground. (1917 is pretty enjoyable)

We need to bring back World Fairs. Reading about the 1894 one which featured “the world’s largest cannon from Krupp and a map of the US made entirely with pickles”, which are both sort of awesome.

Good article on Ukraine attacks on Russian electric network: have some thoughts- www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/4...

In 1884 Ulysses Grant had $80 to his name after lending his name and money to a giant fraud. Congress was slow granting military pensions so admirers started a 18th century version of a go fund me for him. He asked them to stop.

This is as unexpected as buying anything from Gristedes and finding out it’s past the sell by date or covered in mold.

Metsera gets call from FTC (during shutdown) and decides it’s a good idea to choose US company Pfizer. And Novo Nordisk decides to bow out.

Hadn’t realized how differently immigration affected the North and South. Map of foreign born population in 1910

This incentive plan is just total garbage - if incentives matter for sellers then they also matter for the company and its employees.

Moose apparently have some unique ability to have low genetic variance with high populations

A piece I wrote on how anti-immigration policies are a bigger threat to NYC's prosperity than a new mayor: www.breakingviews.com/columns/brea...

Every single stat I've seen from last night's voting is nuts: -~ 80% of women 18-29 voted for Mamdani, Sherrill, Spanberger. All three won men in same demo also -Perth Amboy, NJ, ~80% hispanic swung from +8 Harris to +56 Sherrill -Virginia, AKA suburbaland, saw Senate go from 51-49 to 65D-35R

All those gerrymandering bills depend on people with safe seats donating some of their margin of safety to help neighbouring districts. I think that some of them might be a little bit more reluctant to make that gamble today than they were yesterday.

Please join me and Ed and a growing number of other folks. Food banks can’t replace SNAP but they are incredibly efficient ways to turn dollars into relief.

Japan's "Mundane Halloween" costume contest is back! Each year website DailyPortalZ holds a contest where people dress up as something super duper ordinary. Here's a thread of some of my favorites from the 2025 contest! #MundaneHalloween

Immediately seems like a problem for this theory that %of gdp seems to be declining over time

Happy Halloween to all the virologists out there.

This comment from Jassy on Amazon’s layoffs is probably going to haunt him. If this is your culture then it sounds awful. And the whole idea that large companies must be nimble like startups, and this means firing layers of people, is counterproductive at big firms.

The number of issues at multiple cloud providers over the past week is making me wonder if there's a common thread.

Oh my God. For a poetry nerd like me, this is astonishing.

I bet Moderna will do better over the next five years than a portfolio of AI plays given valuation, sentiment, and likely market for products. This sort of story tends to be written near the bottom.

We are doomed to spend as long talking about a China deal as we spent talking about how the ACA would be replaced. Will probably be just as fruitful.