Ed Zitron publishes a lot of pretty biased reporting.

The core thesis is sound, though:

• Anthropic and OpenAI’s revenue comes in from customers.
• The revenue does not translate into profits, because their capital expenditures investing in future capabilities is quite high, and because their operating expenses are also quite high, to where their revenue doesn’t even cover their ongoing compute cost.
• The actual money Anthropic and OpenAI have to spend at a loss comes from their investors.
• The customers are largely vulnerable to shocks and are themselves reliant on investor cash rather than a profitable business model of their own, and are essentially subsidizing a lot of the demand for the core services that Anthropic and OpenAI provide.

Taken together, the whole ecosystem is currently relying on a continued influx of cash from investment: investors taking equity in these companies, lenders/bondholders charging interest on borrowed money, otherwise profitable businesses like Google and Meta steering their other profits into investment into AI.

And so if there’s a shock to investment activity, such as if there’s a war in Iran causing an energy crisis and a global recession in real economic activity, that might translate into a cash crunch, as the investors pull back right at the time that the customers start defaulting on their payments. And if you remove the middleman startup businesses that pay Anthropic and OpenAI more than they receive from their own customers, the underlying “real customer” demand at the actual unsubsidized prices charged by Anthropic and OpenAI will plummet.

I’m not a tech guy, but I am a business/finance guy, and I’m not seeing where the analysis is wrong. The argument is always that there’s a runway to profitability, and they just need to take off before they run out of runway. And we can argue about whether they will or they won’t get to takeoff, but if the business is relying on more runway being built because they know for sure they don’t currently have enough runway to take off, that’s a shaky situation to be in. Even if everyone is clamoring to be their runway-building partner today.

Ed Zitron has a piece out talking about how even if Anthropic and OpenAI are bringing in revenue, most of it is coming from startups in such a way that their revenue will evaporate if the underlying startups crash, especially because the underlying cost of operating remains high (and where improvements in the underlying tech go towards improving performance rather than making operations cheaper).

To me, it’s a pretty persuasive argument that failures at any one part of the web of businesses and funds involved (even if completely unrelated to the AI industry) will cause stress on all of them, because they’re so interrelated in a web of relationships.

I think it’s more accurate to say “You will die for Epstein so that the oil class stays wealthy.”

There have been examples of postponements of elections for emergencies (most notably, the mayoral primaries in New York scheduled on September 11, 2001 had to be postponed for 14 days later), I’m not aware of any instance of an actual changing of swear-in dates being postponed.

Fuckery can still happen, but I’m more worried about threats and governmental terrorism that suppresses votes on the election day that moves forward as scheduled rather than actually moving the election schedule itself.

Still interesting to see how it is implemented in neighborhoods and buildings that are over 150 years old. I think the Smithsonian museums in our capital are actually the most interesting examples, because many are old buildings whose historical character were preserved, but where wheelchair ramps, railings, and elevators were tastefully and functionally installed many decades or more than a century after the building was originally constructed.

And perhaps the best thing about the ADA is the sidewalk requirements. It doesn’t much matter why a sidewalk developed a raised crack when the ADA requires that it be fixed.

I’m not even disabled, but I’ve pushed baby strollers in different cities (including outside the US) enough to realize how nice it is to be in a city where all the sidewalks and public buildings are ADA compliant.

But lots of things can be pre ordered before they’re actually available.

Services are an obvious example: I can buy tickets to a movie or a live event that will happen at some point in the future. Same with really any tickets or prepaid reservations, like plane tickets or hotel reservations or certain types of restaurant reservations.

But it can happen with all sorts of consumer goods, too. I can put in orders for stuff to be made to order: handmade/custom jewelry or shirts or mugs or commissioned artwork, a pizza that won’t be made until I order it, etc.

For businesses, their supply chains require advance planning and ordering. The people who make peanut butter generally have the peanuts ordered before the start of the growing season, so they’re buying peanuts that might not have been planted yet. The grocery store chain might be buying peanut butter before it’s made.

When pork futures prices drop low enough, McDonald’s will snatch up those contracts and take delivery of a bunch of pork to make McRibs and make them available for a limited time. At the time they buy the contracts (that is, order the pork), the pigs might not even be alive yet, much less slaughtered and processed.

None of this is defending the memory contracts, but the idea of buying things in the future is pretty common in the economy.

Lots of non-American banks don’t want to deal with the rules, so it’s easier for them to just say that they won’t open accounts for Americans.

It’s not discriminatory.

I mean it quite literally is discriminatory, but it’s legal and justified discrimination.

Yes, but the economies of scale of cargo transport generally mean that the percentage of the total cost attributable to fuel cost is usually pretty small.

Take bananas, for example. If they cost $0.70 per pound at the store, how much fuel could have been used getting a pound of bananas from the plantation to the port, shipped from that port to a port in the United States, then from that port to a distribution center, then to the store? So what would doubling the price of fuel do for the price of bananas?

With more expensive items, shipping (and therefore fuel) is an even lower percentage of the total input costs.

The price of goods will go up with the price of fuel, but not as much as a lot of people seem to assume.

I wonder how those specific buyers’ household incomes are. Part of the “k shaped recovery” from COVID is that some people genuinely are richer than ever.

If 10% of US households make more than $250k/year, and richer households are more likely to buy new cars (and buy them more frequently), it might very well be that the $1000/month payments are being paid by those who can easily afford them, while the $300/month payments are the ones actually causing financial strain on average households.

Every once in a while there are multiple parties structuring a deal where someone is left with a bad deal when it’s all said and done. As a consumer, you just have to make sure it’s not you.

But take, for example, the early days of Moviepass. You pay a cheap subscription to a service, and they buy you unlimited mobile tickets at the theater. Too good to be true in the long term, but in the short term it was a good way to spend some money that venture capitalists were giving away basically for free.

Businesses aren’t always smart. Sometimes they make financial mistakes and it’s your duty as a responsible consumer to punish those businesses for those mistakes.

In the case of dealer/manufacturer/financing incentives and the individual salesman commission, sometimes the kickback/fee scheme leaves someone else holding the bag. If you can negotiate a lower sticker price because it comes with some predatory terms on financing, but there’s no penalty for prepayment, it might make the most sense to take the low sticker price (made possible by the lender paying the dealer a kickback for the loans), finance at high rates, and then pay the whole thing off as soon as you can, so that you get the “discount” without having to pay high interest/fees, then you walk away with a good deal in exchange for just a little bit more hassle and paperwork. Sometimes the incentives swing the other way, too, where the lender is affiliated with the manufacturer and needs to juice sales volume by offering below-market rates on financing. As long as you can actually see how everything works and you can find the pain point, it may be possible to get a good deal and dump the bad deal on some faceless corporation for them to worry about.

How do they get calculated?

This page has answers:

The CPI consists of a family of indexes that measure price change experienced by urban consumers. Specifically, the CPI measures the average change in price over time of a market basket of consumer goods and services. The market basket includes everything from food items to automobiles to rent. The CPI market basket is developed from detailed expenditure information provided by families and individuals on what they actually bought. There is a time lag between the expenditure survey and its use in the CPI. For example, CPI data in 2023 was based on data collected from the Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CE) for 2021. That year, over 20,000 consumer units from around the country provided information each quarter on their spending habits in the interview survey. To collect information on frequently purchased items, such as food and personal care products, approximately another 12,000 consumer units kept diaries listing all items they bought during a 2-week period that year. This expenditure information from weekly diaries and quarterly interviews determines the relative importance, or weight, of the item categories in the CPI index structure.

The CPI represents all goods and services purchased for consumption by the reference population (U or W). BLS has classified all expenditure items into more than 200 categories, arranged into eight major groups (food and beverages, housing, apparel, transportation, medical care, recreation, education and communication, and other goods and services). Included within these major groups are various government-charged user fees, such as water and sewerage charges, auto registration fees, and vehicle tolls.

If you want to see the current makeup of the basket of goods whose prices are tracked, and their weights in the index, here is Table 1 of the most recent report. And if you want to follow the price of a specific category over time, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis keeps a really helpful interactive chart service for almost every public economic stat. Here is Table 1 of the CPI report.

It’s a lot of data collection on prices across a lot of transactions, and a lot of list prices, and a lot of locked in contract prices, to determine how much people are spending on different types of things, whether the quality of those things is changing over time, and what percentage of a typical household income gets spent on those types of things.

1 oz = 28.35 g

Maybe that 1/3 of a gram is shorting someone, but a single ounce is closer to 28g than to 30g.

Obviously depends on the specific item.

Here’s the national averages for:

Flour

Milk

Boneless chicken breast

Or an entire table of food items they’ve been tracking monthly prices on for years.

The Five Dollar Footlong was a promo created in 2003 when the normal price of a footlong was $6, by a single franchisee. By the time the promo went national, supported by the chain itself (and a national ad campaign), in 2008, that became a big enough deal to really move sales. And they watered it down at some point (by late 2010 when I was working next to a Subway and no other lunch options, I remember it only being a specific sandwich that rotated monthly, with all other footlongs regularly priced). And it was eventually discontinued in 2012.

It’s hard to pin this particular promo and call it totally representative of all pricing in the mid 2010s.

$5 in April 1980 dollars is the inflation adjusted equivalent of $20 in December 2025:

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=5.00&year1=198004&year2=202512

Resistance takes many forms.

Completely lawful resistance can include social pressure or ostracism, economic influence (boycotts, refusal to serve as customer, etc.), messaging/speech/persuasion, protests, strikes, etc. Keeping the cameras rolling, telling them how you feel about them being in your neighborhood, warning your neighbors about them.

Civil disobedience goes up the ladder a bit, and can cause disruption and might be nonviolent, but might at times actually be illegal. Generally speaking, this type of resistance is designed to clog up the system without being violent, and doesn’t even require anonymity or evasion from authorities.

Sometimes simply playing dumb can slow things down without actually committing a crime of putting yourself at much risk. Apply for a job at ICE with 1000 of your closest friends so they waste resources on your application. Forget to put in their order when you’re their waiter, or give them the shitty hotel room when they check in at your hotel, and program their keys incorrectly. Give them the wrong bay/spot when they’re renting a car from you. Call in tips for everything you see and flood their lines with bad information.

Most people jump from that category to outright violent resistance, but there are other tactics available, too. Sabotage, property crimes, plain old financial crimes, fraud, impersonation, hacking or denial of service, even things like theft, embezzlement. Locking a fence with a bicycle lock, blocking a driveway with a van, flooding a field with mud, impersonating their boss and giving them fake orders, sending them on a goose chase with a bad tip, etc.

If you shoot an ICE agent you might turn them into a hero. Steal their badge or ID when they’re drinking at the bar, though, and you might actually hurt them in ways that they won’t feel like a martyr, and will actually sap resources from their management.

Everyone is in a different situation, with different capabilities. Every war has plenty of roles, many of them nonviolent. There’s probably something you can do today to contribute to the cause, from your unique position.

We’re just going to have to agree to disagree.

I think that’s right. To summarize, here’s where I think we agree and disagree:

We agree: GDP is not a particularly good metric for measuring international economic influence.

We disagree: You think adjusting GDP by PPP makes it better for this context, and I think that adjustment makes it even worse.

We agree: Exports matter for discussing economic power on the international stage.

We disagree: I think imports and investment also matter. You clearly don’t, by dismissing them as mere consumption and financial engineering.

We agree: United States economic power overseas is in decline, including in the hegemony of the US Dollar, and its importance/influence through organizations like the World Bank, IMF, WTO, or even things like the SWIFT banking network.

We disagree: I think the United States is still much, much stronger than China on global economic influence. The lines may cross, where China overtakes the United States, but I think that would be in the future, whereas your comment suggests you believe those lines crossed in the past.

In the end, a country like Venezuela wants to sell barrels of oil to buyers, for a good price. That means things like U.S. sanctions (especially when enforced by the entire west) will hurt more than Chinese aid helps. At least as of 2026.

Maybe you’re not dreaming big enough on what makes ideal conditions. The fraudulent Nikola company managed to film a semi “driving” a few km without a powertrain, by just letting it roll downhill. I bet there’s a place that has a high enough altitude and smooth enough roads for a long downhill descent where 600km on a 300km battery is possible.

Makes me wonder about the wheel’s rotational inertia, too. In theory, a hubless wheel could be lower mass overall without the need for a center axle/hub and spokes connecting the outside to the center. But that’s all weight saved in the center of the wheel with lower effect on overall rotational inertia. Visually, the picture that makes the thumbnail in this post shows that the brake disc has to be further from the center of the wheel, which I imagine adds a lot more weight (more material necessary for the overall brake disc being a larger circle) and a lot more rotational inertia (further from the center).

Maybe the whole design itself can save weight in certain places that make up for the weight added in other places. But I just have a ton of questions, and am overall pretty skeptical of the long term potential of this design.

Looks cool, though, I guess.