Sunshine Silver Mine Launches IPO, Reviving Silver Hedge
Sunshine Silver, historically one of the US’s biggest silver mines, is going public. Fun financial trivia: they issued a silver-backed bond in the 80s. Fun inflation hedge, though they missed the peak of the Hunt corner by a few weeks.
Wage Theft Turns Public Welfare Into Corporate Subsidy
Has anyone figured out what they're talking about when they say that means-tested welfare benefits are a subsidy to companies? Why are the workers more willing to work if they have other income sources? If you cut welfare benefits, do...
Preparing for a Marathon Argument with a Literal Stubborn Child
Already bracing myself for what is sure to be a long argument with a very literal and very, very stubborn child. https://t.co/SJHuy3BZpE
NYT Calls for 20-Year Hard Labor for Shoplifters
For all the complaints about left-leaning media bias, the NYT published a piece today that makes a pretty strong case for sentencing shoplifters to a minimum of twenty years of hard labor.
McDonald's Potato Chips Outproduce NVIDIA's Silicon Chips
In the mid-1990s, J.R. Simplot, McDonalds' biggest potato supplier, was on the Forbes 400. His main source of wealth was that he wrote a big early angel check into Micron.
Twitter's Algorithm Now Floods Feeds with Catholic Content
The For You algorithm has slowly tilted towards showing you more stuff like whatever you most recently interacted with, and on the Monday morning after Easter that means it's just a live of every single Twitter user who's Catholic now.
Red Lobster’s Collapse Reveals Elitist Contempt in Populism
Red Lobster did go bankrupt after a PE firm bought them. But it was also after that PE firm sold them to a non-PE company. There’s an elitist strain to economic populism where they have utter contempt for the people they’re...
AGI Achieved When Models Guess Age Gaps Blindly
We will have achieved AGI when a model that doesn’t know who the guys in this photo are is able to accurately estimate their age gap.
Google Could Gauge AI's Impact on Doctor Visits and Emissions
I don't know what Google's policies on sharing anonymized data across services are, but given that they have Gemini and Maps, they're uniquely qualified to see if AI causes a big enough reduction in visits to doctors, CPAs, etc. that...
Tiny Efficiency Gains Could Offset 25bn Gallons of Diesel
Great post illustrating the opposite of its actual point: big rigs use 25bn gallons of diesel each year, so we could offset this wasteful activity by making them 0.0007% more efficient. Or 0.0014% more efficient if you count the return...
AI-Revived Actors Spark Debate Over Authenticity Over Time
When they make movies with AI versions of now-dead actors, will they update them as models get better? Will there be purists who insist that the 2027 version just doesn't have the soul of the '26 original?
Estimating Billion‑Dollar Price Tag for Anthropic's
If you were Ken Griffin, how much would you pay Anthropic to do this? Feel free to round to the nearest billion.
Kids Outpace Parents in DIY Electronics Basics
I never learned about electronics, so my knowledge is always 5-10 pages in the Sparkfun manual ahead of my 6yo’s. (This project is an LED that can be toggled on and off by a photoresistor.) https://t.co/nO6A6BgYZS
AI‑written Stories About AI Job Takeover Go Viral Unnoticed
It's a kind of interesting literary development that one of the most popular kinds of LLM-written content is fiction about LLMs replacing all the jobs. These stories reliably do numbers, and apparently their audience doesn't notice or care that it's...
PBM Critics Overlook Their Owners' Low, Stagnant Margins
So I've read a few long essays on how abusive pharmaceutical benefit managers and group purchasing organizations are, and they all make a strong case. And then I look at the companies that own PBMs, and their margins are a)...