If you want to have a good time in life, I think you should believe in some conspiracy theories. They're fun. Life is about having fun. But if you want to be right, you should probably have a reflexive aversion to every conspiracy theory you hear. It's not that they're all wrong. It's more that the vast vast vast majority of them are incredibly stupid and don't really survive three seconds' thought (see post below for why it makes no sense for Karen Bass to rig an election to help a stronger candidate against her). More broadly, conspiracy theories almost always assume the extraordinary competency of a shadowy group of elites who are very good at keeping a secret. Haven't the last few decades proved that elites aren't that competent? Everybody accusing Karen Bass of expertly rigging the LA election on Twitter right now also thinks she sucks as mayor. What are the odds that the politician you hate, who you think sucks at everything, is exclusively good at rigging electoral outcomes to make you personally upset? There's more to life than being right, so feel free to ignore the second paragraph. But people interested in being right should be much more reflexively judgmental of conspiracy theories.

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We're now archiving every Raster collector's art collection. Create an account, add all your wallet addresses (no signatures needed!) and we'll back-up the files behind your artworks. As best as we can, for as long as we're around, free of charge. 👇

Autistic girl, 11, has IQ higher than Einstein and Hawking; she's studying for Master's so she can work for NASA

New pod: SUDDENLY, EVERY NEWS STORY IS A FIGHT ABOUT ENERGY -> The Iran War is about energy flows -> The AI buildout is an energy project -> The future of populism—i.e., AI, electricity prices, data center moratoria—is an energy debate w/ @NatBullard Plus: - why politicians are wrong about the drivers of rising electricity prices - is the US auto industry doomed? - implications of the end of energy-demand stagnation - if the renewables vibes are so bad, why is solar still soaring? open.spotify.com/episode/2IB…

The original Little House on the Prairie went off the air in 1983. In 2024, Nielsen measured 13.25 billion minutes of streaming viewership for it. That's more than any other legacy title on any platform. A show that's been off the air for 41 years is outperforming series that launched last quarter. Netflix saw that number and made a very specific bet. They renewed Season 2 before a single viewer had seen the first episode. Netflix rarely makes that move for a drama. The confidence tells you everything about how they read the data: 90 years of compound interest on a book franchise that's sold 73 million copies in 100 countries. The showrunner choice tells you how seriously they're taking it. Rebecca Sonnenshine ran The Boys, one of the most tonally aggressive shows on television. You don't hand her a cozy reboot. You hand her a property where you need someone who knows how to build tension inside warmth, which is exactly what the original books did. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote survival stories disguised as children's literature. The producer angle is even better. Trip Friendly is running this. His father, Ed Friendly, produced the original NBC series. That's a 50-year generational handoff on the same property. Netflix is essentially paying for inherited institutional knowledge of what makes this franchise work. And here's the strategic layer: Netflix has been quietly building a comfort programming pipeline. Virgin River. Sweet Magnolias. Ransom Canyon. These shows never trend on Film Twitter. They don't win Emmys. They generate the kind of steady, low-churn viewership that subscription businesses are actually built on. Every streamer is chasing the next prestige hit. Netflix looked at the data and realized the most-watched legacy title on all of streaming is a family drama about a log cabin in Kansas. Sometimes the smartest content bet is the one nobody's bragging about at dinner parties.

I spoke to Anthropic’s AI agent Claude about AI collecting massive amounts of personal data and how that information is being used to violate our privacy rights. What an AI agent says about the dangers of AI is shocking and should wake us up.

The A students work for the B students... the B students are regulated by the D students.

I'm not a buyer yet, but if I were to be a buyer, imo the areas to watch for $BTC are: ~$80K: Nov '25 low, local low of this "bear" ~$74K: April '25 low, Tariff Tantrum low, just below $MSTR's cost basis (~$76K) ~$70K: Top of $50-70K range, near '21 high ~$58K: 200W SMA & on-chain cost basis (RV = ~$56K) ~$50K & below: bottom of the weekly range below, psychological, below this number you would see "death of BTC" calls once again Importantly, I don't care what happens. If we rally from here, I'll ride what I have and diversify my portfolio, if we fall apart I'll buy more $BTC & select cryptoassets.

Whatever the odds are of Powell sticking around, it feels like they just went up.

my grandmother was an educator, started a private school in Havana in the 50s and worked as the principal taught some English classes at night for adults as well so obviously Castro's goons took possession of the school after 1959 which to have your dream that you built from nothing taken from you and given to complete idiots who burn it down in short order is one thing but the most humiliating aspect of the whole ordeal that my grandmother would talk about was more specific than that it was having men show up at her door, after everything was done, holding an inventory sheet that they found which listed how many desks she had bought for the school, blackboards, etc and being asked about a few desks they couldn't find. literally that. how come there's 48 desks in the school and not the 50 on the inventory sheet. of course the answer was that they broke and they threw them out. the inventory sheet was old. but they didn't believe her, they intimidated her at gunpoint. a little lady, a school principal who probably weighed 100 pounds. where are the fucking desks. she remembered that forever. it's almost 70 years later, and the situation is if anything only more absurd, more morally and economically bankrupt in Cuba if your fridge breaks, you wait until the government sends you a new one (on the seventh of never) and docks it from your govt pay accordingly. your govt pay is ~16 USD a month. you can make more by pestering some euro or canadian tourist to buy some random junk off you -- if you follow them around enough and are persuasive enough, they will give you a $20, which is more then your doctor makes in a month. which is sort of whatever, because there really are no stores, just ration counters with 5-6 things listed on a blackboard that they'll trade you for tickets. rice, sugar, salt, cigarettes. if you don't smoke you trade you trade your cigarette rations for something else. toilet paper. when your kids get older, they don't move out, there's literally nowhere for them to move to. nothing is built, nothing is for sale, and you have no money anyway. you put up paper walls, pretend not to hear each other. the thing you smuggle into Cuba when you're visiting family isn't expensive stuff, the most precious items are USB drives with movie rips and video game roms, and $5 tins of Cafe Pilon 'cause Cuba exports any good coffee it makes, and leaves locals to drink stuff so bad that the $5 tin feels truly luxurious. when I was visiting my great aunt, one of her neighbors came in and made himself a cup of coffee. he didn't know it was fresh from the tin we brought over; it had been transferred over to their usual container. saw a grown man well up with apologetic tears in his eyes because as soon as his lips touched the drink, he knew this was different. he drank his neighbor's Cafe Pilon thinking it was just the usual crap and he almost cried. Because he felt he had taken something incredibly precious of his neighbor's without asking. anyway, my point is: you don't really need to try out repossessing people's private property in New York. there's an island 90 miles off Florida where incredibly smart people, I sincerely mean that, have been doing it for three-quarters of a century.