ftav

Middle-aged spreads

Nearly everything that happens in financial markets can be explained by some combination of regulatory arbitrage, tax avoidance, and fashion.

whyisthisinteresting

The Pittsburgh Parallel Parking Championship Edition

Why is this free event better run than any airline check-in counter, DMV, or preschool drop-off in the world? No pre-registration is needed. Results are immediately available.

oneusefulthing.org

The Dot and the Swarm

A lot of what we call management exists to solve problems that come from organizations being made of people. People have their own goals, and those aren't always the goals of organizations. We call this the principal-agent problem and a lot of the machinery of organizations, from bonuses to management structures, is based around solving it.

noahpinion.blog

Two missing pieces in the AI safety discussion

A coordinated slowdown in AI progress would be bad for these companies' bottom line, because it would allow upstart competitors to catch up. So the fact that they're still calling for a slowdown, in defiance of their own financial interests, is a clear sign that their worry about human extinction is sincere.

honest-broker.com

What Do You Have to Hide?

You do hear people say privacy is dead, but it's almost always someone who stands to profit from the death of privacy—famously, Mark Zuckerberg. This is a hopeful pitch.

fs.blog

The Best Summary of Atlas Shrugged

The crisis was not caused by the producers. It was caused by a society that believed it could consume achievement while attacking the people who make achievement possible. Without the producers, the system that exploited them can no longer function, and society collapses.

stratechery.com

2026.25: The Stuff of Myth(os)

the power and problem of Anthropic is the same: the company's safety superpower is that every action it takes looks, from the outside, to be self-serving, even as the company becomes ever more convinced its motivations are pure.

noahpinion.blog

Insurers aren't the main villain of the U.S. health care system

Private insurers may be an unnecessary middleman, but the amount they extract from the system is not large compared to the amount that gets either appropriated or wasted by the people providing the care. So why do Americans — especially American progressives — focus so obsessively on health insurers instead of health providers? In a post two years ago, I hypothesized that it's because insurers are the part of the system we have direct contact with — the people who have to tell us "no" when we can't afford some treatment.

stratechery.com

Data Center Discontent, Understanding the Opposition, Fixing the Problem

There are understandable reasons for people to oppose data centers; the only solution that will work is simply paying them off.

honest-broker.com

The Hottest Musician in 2026 Is 'Problematic' Michael Jackson

Here's the unspoken truth: Everything in Hollywood is driven by money—and if the audience wants Michael Jackson, despite all the scandals, the entertainment industry will deliver him on a silver platter.

ftav

Notes of high interest from a small, silly island

Gilt holders are often portrayed as the last line of defence for enforcing fiscal discipline and the sherpas along a political path of least drama. Their mob power is rarely more than theoretical.

honest-broker.com

The New Counterculture

As these industries become more consolidated, they become more bureaucratic, they move more slowly, they're more cautious. Yet we're more dependent on them than ever before.

wired.com

Testing for ‘Bad Cholesterol’ Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story

There's a more accurate way of measuring who's at risk for cholesterol-related health issues. So why don't more doctors use it?

lennysnewsletter.com

How to build a company that withstands any era | Eric Ries, Lean Startup author

Financial gravity: why successful companies predictably get corrupted into mediocrity

noahpinion.blog

Do billionaires earn their money?

AOC seems to mean that in order for someone to get a billion dollars, they have to do something that society ought to forbid. In other words, billionaires can't get their wealth just by being lucky; they have to get it by being bad.

3quarksdaily.com

Are prediction markets good for anything?

The vast majority of these bets are not on questions that might produce useful information. Roughly 90% of Kalshi's trading volume (dollars exchanging hands between bettors) is from sports betting, making Kalshi effectively a sports gambling website with a small prediction market attached.

ftav

Public markets are good actually

Being answerable to a broad base of investors, long and short, helps keep companies (and their regulators) honest.

whyisthisinteresting

The Performative Fitness Edition

The mechanics that make fitness culture highly visible and shareable are not always (or even typically) the ones that produce sustained behavior change.

upstartsmedia.com

Medicare's 'Most Hated' Man: Chapter's Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz

I was just appalled at how absurd the entire ecosystem is. And not just the technology, which is a big part of it. There are also just terrible incentives that make every broker push plans that pay them more.

3quarksdaily.com

The Draft Would Weaken America’s Military, But Will We Now Automate Draft Registration?

Abrams believed draftees undermined discipline and unit cohesion, so he redesigned the Army around high-quality volunteers, proving the draft was neither necessary nor desirable long-term and establishing a model that the other services ultimately adopted.

noahpinion.blog

Save us, Digital Cronkite!

Basically, spreading hate and divisiveness on social media is a form of entrepreneurship. As Eugene Wei has written, social media is all about getting social status. 10,000 followers on X may not sound like a media empire to rival CBS News, but for most people it's more attention than they would otherwise get in their entire life.

noahpinion.blog

Roundup #79: The revenge of macroeconomics

It takes effort to find information. Who is going to go out and spend the effort to find out information about what stocks or bonds or houses are really worth, if they can't make money trading on that information? And if no one spends the effort to find the information, how can it ever be incorporated into the price in the first place?

3quarksdaily.com

Your Fellow Americans: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know

Human behavior can never be made entirely rational, because the drive for freedom resists all systems. As Jack Nicholson says in Easy Rider, "Don't ever tell anybody that they're not free, 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are."

honest-broker.com

Can a 100-Year-Old Mouse Save Disney?

Mickey's exile is, of course, due to his problematic copyright status. Some aspects of Mickey are entering the public domain, and even though Disney could protect his more updated modern look, it's possible that some outsiders might earn a few coins from a Mickey Mouse resurgence. Disney would rather go mouse-less than let that happen.