thx for mentioning the Triffin Dilemma - everyone should read the wiki page, it has the most succinct explanation of the history and structural implications of USD as the global reserve currency that I have come across en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffi…

Announcing the winners for the "Fast Biology Bounties." I ended up giving away ~$15,000 for 20 projects after reading 430 submissions from 335 individuals. Many winners were "highly generative," meaning they sent me 3-5 excellent ideas and were glad to have them shared freely and openly. There were some major failure modes, too. Some ideas surfaced repeatedly, but I didn't do a good job of connecting "like-minded" people. I'll fix this next time. Also, I managed everything manually using my personal email. This was tedious, and I'm working on building a platform that will automate a lot of this. I'd like to send feedback and scores for every submission in future contests. Many more details in my blog post, which breaks down all the numbers, what I learned, and highlights some of the winners. Some people who I gave money to: - Sebastian Cocioba for a laser-based PCR thermocycler, in which infrared heating replaces aluminum blocks. - Bryan Duoto for writing and publishing a colony-to-sequence cloning workflow that uses magnetic beads and Nanopore sequencers. Scientists can verify clones in 1–3 hours instead of waiting overnight. - Jeff Nivala for an idea to synthesize proteins directly from DNA, without relying on any RNA intermediates. - Sierra Bedwell for a clever automation system that uses off-the-shelf parts to screen thousands of environmental DNA samples in parallel. - Xavier Bower for "IceCreamClone," an interactive cloning strategy ranker that looks at a scientist’s available “parts,” or sequences, and then determines whether they ought to use Gibson, Golden Gate, restriction digest, or another strategy to assemble them together. The software also catches likely cloning errors and estimates the cost and time required for each option. - Andres Arango for multiple ideas, including using antifreeze to accelerate DNA ligation by 2-3 orders of magnitude, and an idea for computationally designed protein cradles for expressing membrane proteins in E. coli.

Loving that Disney keeps dropping these kind of papers: arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16705

Landing looked almost like a whale breaching in reverse! Congratulations to everyone at @spaceX who made this happen.

SLOTKIN: Have you given the order to be able to shoot at unarmed protesters in any way? I'm just asking -- don't laugh HEGSETH: What is that based on? SLOTKIN: It is based on Trump giving that order to your predecessor, who I give a lot of credit to because he didn't accept the order. He has more guts and balls than you.

I've been calling the Ukraine War the first "Maker War" because of how DIY it is. Amazingly, Ukraine actually used the open source hobby drone software Ardupilot to execute the attack. See the general WSJ article below for more details.

God job @DavidsonCollege - and the hundreds of others. Stand strong with this solidarity. aacu.org/newsroom/a-call-for…

Hah this was an epic prank sfgate.com/bayarea/article/c…

Trump's cabinet meetings

The most obvious way to tell that this was obviously an emergency walk back from Trump is that they can’t even all get their lie straight. Bessent said it had nothing to do with bonds collapsing. Minutes later, Trump specifically said that is why he changed course.

Because it’s not about funding availability it’s about the terms and conditionality of funding when your debt underpins the entire global financial system. The U.S. isn’t like other sovereigns. It doesn’t just borrow to fund itself it issues the asset that anchors collateral chains, settles FX swaps, backs derivatives, and serves as margin for global risk-taking. Other nations borrow in markets. The U.S. is the market. And that’s the paradox: when your debt is systemically central, it must be perceived as stable, liquid, and low volatility or else the entire global leverage system begins to crack. That’s why a Treasury market failure wouldn’t look like a failed auction it would look like repo seizures, collateral fire sales, massive cross-asset volatility, and central banks scrambling to restore functionality not because the U.S. is insolvent, but because the plumbing can’t clear. Other sovereigns can lose access to funding and markets absorb it. When the U.S. loses trust in its collateral quality, the entire global margin architecture collapses from swap books and dealer inventories to pension fund hedges and corporate bond spreads. This is nonlinear fragility: it moves fast, breaks things all at once, and can’t be fixed with a rate cut. In this scenario, the real crisis isn’t whether the U.S. can print it’s whether anyone trusts the printed collateral to serve as a reliable foundation for leveraged global finance. When that cracks, it’s not a fiscal event. It’s a systemic trust breach and that’s how the most creditworthy issuer in history could face a “funding” crisis. Not because it can’t find buyers. Because the buyers won’t accept the terms anymore.

What unfolded in the past 24 hours was a textbook case of global liquidity fragmentation colliding with political signaling and desperate intervention. We saw a clear Treasury market fracture during Tokyo hours yields surged, dollar funding conditions wobbled, and the BoJ had to convene an emergency meeting. That alone signaled global cross-currency basis stress and hinted at a margin call ripple through JGBs and USTs. Then came Europe: GILTs blew out, the ECB started issuing verbal anesthesia, and still futures were oddly resilient. That disconnect between collapsing sovereign credit confidence and relentless equity bids. reeks of centralized intervention, likely via options books or indirect plunge protection. The final act White House messaging felt more like a coordinated circuit-breaker than a market response. “Tariff pause” headlines functioned as a synthetic catalyst for liquidity injection, not a true fundamental repricing. But here’s the kicker: none of this repaired the damage under the hood. SOFR-OIS spreads are still unstable, swap spreads remain inverted, and bank CDS signals are flashing systemic. We’re witnessing what looks like a 2025 variant of March 2020 except this time, sovereigns are the weak link, not just banks. Risk is no longer cyclical it’s institutional.

it's even worse than that, you can reverse image search any product on amazon and it's literally an 1,000% markup from alibaba

I KNEW IT! It takes real energy to move from one “brain state” to another, which explains what I think is one of the most under-appreciated facts in all productivity: That the mere order in which you complete tasks is profoundly important A sequence like Task A => Task B => Task A => Task B might require exponentially more energy than Task A => Task A => Task B => Task B… Even though it’s the exact same set of tasks! The order really matters, because in each transition from one type of task (requiring a certain kind of thinking) to another type, your brain is having to overcome the activation energy needed to shift brain states In other words, we have to batch process our tasks to conserve energy, the same way we batch process production runs in manufacturing to conserve time (the time needed to “switch dies”) That explains why so many of the lessons and techniques of old-school manufacturing still apply to modern knowledge work: transitions still consume resources, just a different kind of resource

PSA: It's a good time to dust off your copy of Broken Money and read chapter 13, called "Heavy is the Head That Wears the Crown".

Sure. The original sin was being world reserve currency without an independent neutral bancor (such as gold) as world reserve store of value. By having US Treasuries as the store of value this provides great privilege and great costs.  The benefits are cheaper debt and cheaper consumer goods.  Cheap debt is tricky as it's only a structural benefit if it is used productively or to buy harder assets. The way it is used by the masses is to subsidize an artificially high standard of living which is perpetually further out of reach because of the costs described below. Cheap consumer goods are effectively a subsidy to the standard of living as well, but provide no long term value as they are wasting assets.  The costs are a need to consistently provide dollar liquidity to the world economy so they can service their dollar debts or the system blowsup. This must be done via a combination of offshoring and currency debasement. This one two punch is the driver of why the living standard has been slipping away to begin with.  Occupational headwinds coupled with being forced into the TradFi casino (which I worked in for 15 years) to have any hope of maintaining purchasing power of savings overtime.  So not only is it harder for the average person to work a job to provide for their family but anything they manage to save needs to grow at ~8% (avg annual M2 money supply growth for decades) after fees and taxes each year just to maintain the size of their small slice of the monetary pie, not even grow it.  Yet for those that manage to acquire significant assets despite the hamster wheel on 10, taxes, fees and debasement, life keeps getting easier over time. All they need is a diversified portfolio of store of value assets such as real estate, gold, mag7, Bitcoin, etc. Try not to touch it, let the @federalreserve & @USTreasury do all the heavy lifting for you and just ride the wave and at times even with a little leverage. Because the only way this changes is systemic collapse or a long thought unthinkable dangerous pivot such as what trump is trying. And the oppressive force multiplier is that when money hyper financializes something like real estate (or PE roll ups of mom and pop businesses) it adds a monetary premium to things that people need to live. Which puts further pressure on their financial struggles.  So over long timeframes the masses largely suffer more but sooth the pain with some nice consumer items, while others (myself included) watch our stand of living increasingly improve with less work. This then destroys family formation, birth rates, life expectancy, civility, any sense of stake in society and exacerbates high time preference YOLO culture. Not to mention the impact on our national sovereignty and military deterrent.  IMO where many rightfully angry people get this wrong is they call for socialism (both sides in their own way). Which many power hungry politicians and big corporations (including bank CEOs) would prefer over fixing the system that already works for them let alone risk collapse.

1/ This is the biggest change of sea since World War II. After the war a regime of economic integration was deliberately picked to make countries interdependent to prevent another war. This came to known as globalization. Tariffs signs a step back from this regime.

thx for mentioning the Triffin Dilemma - everyone should read the wiki page, it has the most succinct explanation of the history and structural implications of USD as the global reserve currency that I have come across en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffi…

Tariffs like these raise prices and don't work. But if you skipped class the day we all learned that – here's a refresher: