AI is driving US inflation higher: Consumer prices for computer software and accessories surged 14.5% YoY in May, the biggest annual increase on record in data going back to 2000. Producer prices for electronic components soared 27% YoY, also the biggest increase on record. To put this into perspective, before 2026, prices for software and electronic components fell in almost every year since 2000. Memory prices alone have more than doubled, with DDR5 and DDR4 RAM prices up 290% YoY, as AI data centers absorb the vast majority of global chip supply. RAM price shocks are will likely keep inflation elevated well into 2027, adding to existing pressures from the Iran War. The AI boom is fueling technology inflation.

London’s Coal Supply in the 17th Century – A Case Study in Energy Security By the early seventeenth century, coal had replaced wood as the main fuel used in London and other towns in southeast England for domestic heating as well as most manufacturing, other than iron-making. Nearly all of London’s coal came from fields in northeast England, where it was loaded onto vessels at the ports of Newcastle and Sunderland, carried down the east coast and then up the River Thames to be unloaded in the capital. Coal had become critical for energy security and national defence and therefore a preoccupation for top policymakers. Disruptions to the coal supply resulted in hardship and in some cases even death for lower-income households who had no alternatives for heating and cooking. Senior officials in the City of London as well as the national government repeatedly expressed fears that fuel shortages and extremely high prices would result in unrest rioting among the poorer classes. Lack of coal was also a potential national security issue because of the threat to the production of gunpowder and other items essential for the defence of the realm. “Now that London had become dependent upon the north of England for her fuel, any English government must retain control of Newcastle as the price of its existence, and the nation must have a navy strong enough to keep the enemy from blocking the passage along the east coast,” according to one of the foremost historians of Britain’s coal industry. London’s coal supply from Newcastle down the east coast was as important for energy security in the seventeenth century as the oil supply from the Middle East via the Strait of Hormuz is in the twenty-first century. Many of the policy responses to energy security challenges in the seventeenth century were the same as those commonly used today ...

Let's take a look at how Seattle's DoorDash law actually turned out. In 2024, Seattle implemented "PayUp" — a minimum wage law for food delivery drivers, setting the rate at $26.40/hour. The intent was to protect workers. Here's what actually happened: DoorDash added a $5 fee to every order. Customers stopped ordering. Within two weeks, 30,000 fewer orders. UberEats volume dropped 30%. Drivers — the people the law was supposed to help — saw their available deliveries cut in half and earnings per hour fall 25%. A new National Bureau of Economic Research study confirmed what the numbers already showed: higher per-delivery pay was completely offset by fewer deliveries and lower tips. Active drivers saw zero net gain in monthly earnings. KUOW reported this week that two years in, the results are undeniable — Seattle is now the most expensive delivery market in the country. Denver, Portland, and San Francisco, cities without these laws, saw delivery revenue grow 20-40%. Seattle stagnated. The parallel to what's happening with WA tax proposals is obvious. SB 6346 would impose a 9.9% income tax on high earners. The QSBS add-back bills would strip federal tax exclusions from founders. The argument is always "just a small tax on those who can afford it." But capital moves. Founders move. Companies incorporate elsewhere. The DoorDash data gives us a controlled experiment: same company, same product, same time period, different policy environments. The city with the heaviest regulation saw the worst outcomes — including for the workers it tried to protect. Incentives matter. Every time. kuow.org/stories/seattle-s-g… #StartupLaw #WashingtonState #PolicyMatters #QSBS #Founders #waleg

SpaceX will build a system that allows anyone to travel to Moon. This will so insanely cool 🚀💫🤩

This is great but trying to watch a 3 hour video on X is a terrible experience compared to YT. So easily to accidentally start scrolling X and click away from the video. And they you have to find it again and spend 5 min scrubbing through to try and find the spot you left off. This happened 3 times in 20 min and I gave up and checked if the video was on YT. @nikitabier

BREAKING: Elon Musk has announced that @Tesla is discontinuing the Model S and Model X in Q2 2026. "We are going to convert that production space to an Optimus factory. It's part of our overall shift to an autonomous future."

In 2026, I plan to be fully back to decentralized social. If we want a better society, we need better mass communication tools. We need mass communication tools that surface the best information and arguments and help people find points of agreement. We need mass communication tools that serve the user's long-term interest, not maximize short-term engagement. There is no simple trick that solves these problems. But there is one important place to start: more competition. Decentralization is the way to enable that: a shared data layer, with anyone being able to build their own client on top. In fact, since the start of the year I've been back to decentralized social already. Every post I've made this year, or read this year, I made or read with firefly.social/, a multi-client that covers reading and posting to X, Lens, Farcaster and Bluesky (though bluesky has a 300 char limit, so they don't get to see my beautiful long rants). But crypto social projects has often gone the wrong way. Too often, we in crypto think that if you insert a speculative coin into something, that counts as "innovating", and moves the world forward. Mixing money and social is not inherently wrong: Substack shows that it's possible to create an economy that supports very high-quality content. But Substack is about _subscribing to creators_, not _creating price bubbles around them_. Over the past decade, we have seen many many attempts at incentivizing creators by creating price bubbles around them, and all fail by (i) rewarding not content quality, but pre-existing social capital, and (ii) the tokens all going to zero after one or two years anyway. Too many people make galaxy-brained arguments that creating new markets and new assets is automatically good because it "elicits information", when the rest of their product development actions clearly betray that they're not actually interested in maximizing people's ability to benefit from that information. That is not Hayekian info-utopia, that is corposlop. Hence, decentralized social should be run by people who deeply believe in the "social" part, and are motivated first and foremost by solving the problems of social. The Aave team has done a great job stewarding Lens up to this point. I'm excited about what will happen to Lens over the next year, because I think the new team coming in are people who actually are interested in the "social": even back when the decentralized social space barely existed, they were trying to figure out how to do encrypted tweets. I plan to post more there this year. I encourage everyone to spend more time in Lens, Farcaster and the broader decentralized social world this year. We need to move beyond everyone constantly tweeting inside a single global info warzone, and into a reopened frontier, where new and better forms of interaction become possible.

lol

After reviewing the Senate Banking draft text over the last 48hrs, Coinbase unfortunately can’t support the bill as written. There are too many issues, including: - A defacto ban on tokenized equities - DeFi prohibitions, giving the government unlimited access to your financial records and removing your right to privacy - Erosion of the CFTC’s authority, stifling innovation and making it subservient to the SEC - Draft amendments that would kill rewards on stablecoins, allowing banks to ban their competition We appreciate all the hard work by members of the Senate to reach a bi-partisan outcome, but this version would be materially worse than the current status quo. We’d rather have no bill than a bad bill. Hopefully we can all get to a better draft. We'll keep fighting for all Americans and for economic freedom. Crypto needs to be treated on a level playing field with the rest of financial services so we can build this industry in a safe and trusted way in America.