The average household my age (62) has a $1.57 million net worth (including home), but the richest folks skew those numbers up. Looking at MEDIAN (the 50% mark), it drops down to 364k. Half have less than that! The bottom 20% have 40k or less. The bottom 10% have nothing.

Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan have funded a platform called Objection.ai that allows anyone to file a complaint against a journalist's story for a starting price of $2,000. A team of human investigators examines the story, then submits findings to a "jury" of AI models - OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, Google - which publish a "verdict" on the story's truthfulness and rank individual journalists on metrics including truth-telling and corrections. If the journalist doesn't respond to defend their reporting, the verdict is issued and published online anyway. The platform is being sold as "letting anyone fight the press like a billionaire." The creator is Aron D'Souza, who led the Thiel-funded lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker in 2016. The design choices tell you what this is. The system treats anonymous sources as less trustworthy and ranks anonymous whistleblower claims near the bottom. Anonymous sources are how most significant accountability journalism happens - they're how the Pentagon Papers got out, how the CIA's black site program got exposed, how the HHS stories we've covered this week were reported. The people who most need protection from powerful interests are specifically deprioritized by Objection's scoring system. The creator calls it "the same as Community Notes." A civil rights and defamation attorney calls it "a high-tech protection racket for the rich and powerful." One of those descriptions is accurate. The AI models being used as the "tribunal" were trained on journalists' work without consent or compensation. They hallucinate. They amplify bias. They are being deployed here specifically to issue verdicts on the work of the people whose labor built them. Thiel killed Gawker with a lawsuit. This is faster and cheaper.

Office and retail building at 18 Tremont St. in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. Sold for $30 million, a 71% drop from its purchase price of $103 million in 2019. 204K Square Feet Built 1902 -connectcre #commercialrealestate

The problem with universal suffrage is that the more technologically advanced a civilization becomes, the smaller the fraction of people there are in it with the native intelligence to understand how it works. When the majority of humanity was employed in whacking at the dirt with a pointed stick, and the height of technology was a slightly better pointed stick, anyone with a triple digit IQ could understand what was going on. Now, we have things like stock markets, the internet, transportation infrastructure, and the Linux kernel, but most people who vote are unable to conceive of these as anything but large piles of chocolate coins, or something else they can put their mouths. Because that's how the average monkey interacts with money. They stack the blocks, the research assistant gives them a token, they exchange the token for a banana. It's no good trying to explain to the monkeys what supply chain is, or how a trillion dollars worth of rockets can't magically be converted into a trillion dollars worth of bananas just because they're both measured in dollars, as if a six-foot man and a six-foot plank of wood were interchangeable. Finding a slightly different explanation, or getting the monkeys to sit still and really listen, doesn't really help. Because the problem isn't just that the monkeys aren't paying attention. The problem is that the monkeys are monkeys. Their brains simply don't have the developmental capacity to grow the neural connections they would need in order to grasp and manipulate the concept. In the long term, this is why universal democracy is doomed. Because societies that let retards vote will fail, and be replaced by those that don't. You may think that we, as a society, face a great variety of problems. We do not. We have only one. Retards. Every other problem we have is downstream from their inability to understand the consequences of their political opinions. But to fully grasp the implications of this, you have to understand that the definition of "retard" changes over time, as technology advances, because the IQ level required to grasp what's really going on gets steadily higher and higher. Eventually, the category "retard" grows until it includes the average person. This has already happened. Nick Knudsen isn't dumber than the average guy. But the average guy, the 100 IQ salt of the earth guy that's sitting on the next bar stool over, can no longer understand the modern economy. And this isn't correctable, because the problem isn't ignorance, it's complexity. You can't make Nick Knudsen smarter by telling him things. You can't even make him less ignorant, because the bare facts aren't believable to someone who doesn't have the framework to understand how they fit together. The people who understand what's going on are so much smarter than him that he doesn't even think they sound smart. He thinks they sound crazy.

Really…?! So 6-8x the cost of a 1GW data center w/GPU’s. So why not raise prices 3-4x? It would still leave plenty of “profit” for his customers if that statement is accurate. $NVDA

I love this portrait of my home town.

For thousands of years, humans have searched nature for mind-altering substances through a process of trial and (sometimes fatal) error, @andersen reports—but scientists are now trying to create lab-made, customizable psychedelics: theatlantic.com/health/2026/…

Burgum blames high national gas price average on renewable energy: I have to smile every time I see on a screen the national average for gasoline. The price of gasoline varies across our whole country largely right now by state policy and state taxes, not by the underlying fundamentals. About half the states that went down this path where they overrotated towards we're going to have energy transition. We're going to move from affordable, reliable secure American energy and we're going to rely on intermittent, highly subsidized, weather-dependent sources of energy, they've got substantially higher energy prices than the states that don't. California was dependent on oil coming from the strait of hormuz. They are going to have high gas prices. You can thank Gavin Newsom for that and their state legislature for the policies they put in. That has nothing to do with the strait of hormuz.

Well, here's some math. Starlink is a profitable business with about $11 billion of sales and $3 billion of free cash flow. It might be worth $75 billion at a frisky multiple of 25X free cash flow. The balance----the space launch business and the AI/data centers in space fantasy----has $7 billion of sales and NEGATIVE -$17 billion of free cash flow. So why is it worth anything, unless you are pricing a dream peddled by sell-side hucksters?! In short, after trading up to $2 trillion based on $75 billion of tangible Starlink value, where's the remaining $1.925 trillion of it? This isn't just the classical mania of the crowds. This is sui generis--- mass insanity in a casino that has been giving a lobotomy by three decades of money-printing madness at the Fed and its fellow-traveling central banks around the planet.

The Trump administration is quietly moving to change the Affordable Care Act to let health insurers offer people loans to pay for their care. Deep in a document over 1,000 pages long about how the Affordable Care Act market will operate next year, the administration suggests that insurers consider offering loans to cash-strapped customers. Under this approach, people who develop a costly disease or need unexpected emergency care would turn to their health insurer for loans. A third of American households already have medical debt, and this approach would mean even more debt that patients owe to their health insurance companies. The insurers, who already make billions, would stand to make even more. nytimes.com/2026/06/11/busin…