Rob Cyran

Now this is what you call a panic - over half the railway bonds (which were most of listed bonds) in NY went into default in 1873. (Reading 1873 by Ahamed so all in this thread is from the book)

In 1870 Ottomans spent 40% of tax revenue on debt and 20% on the Sultan’s court (including 900 women in the harem). His predecessor had spent a third of revenue building a palace. Probably didn’t help that the ruler was insane - e.g. he had a phobia of fire and only ate boiled eggs.

Now this is what you call a panic - over half the railway bonds (which were most of listed bonds) in NY went into default in 1873. (Reading 1873 by Ahamed so all in this thread is from the book)

Ahhh “It is not an exaggeration to say that in many European circles, the (US) had become to be viewed as a nation of swindlers”. US railroads paid 9% on bonds, Europe typically 5%.

Now this is what you call a panic - over half the railway bonds (which were most of listed bonds) in NY went into default in 1873. (Reading 1873 by Ahamed so all in this thread is from the book)

Huh, this deflation caused Dems to take House and Rutherford Hayes to only win Electoral College by one vote - result was end of Reconstruction. If voters hate inflation well they really detested deflation. (Can see why this book won Pulitzer so have to be more selective in future skeets)

Amusing lede

Instead of pretending to recreate extinct mammoths and wolves, Colossal is teaming up with Luckey to pretend to create fictional dogs from Snow Crash. (This company is worth nothing and I’m annoyed I had to even consider their idea, which isn’t even their idea)

This is pretty amusing - Trump and Vance both lost it at this reporter because he correctly pointed out that Trump’s new whistleblower program paid less than existing qui tam settlements. www.the-independent.com/news/world/a...

The wheels are really coming off the bus now, and my default assumption is Iran makes another push in next two weeks. People still really underestimating how much of a blowout it's going to be on Nov. 3

I like how about every day now I hear of a data center builder I didn’t know existed. This is significant in itself, without even considering the news is invariably somewhat alarming.

Informed by a colleague that there are over 200 neoclouds, LOL.

Fascinating exercise, good results and docs already intuitively do this. Liked this part - faces put in the bin with lowest estimated time of survival were significantly correlated with heavy smoking and drinking.

The average Nobel Prize recipient is awarded the prize when they are about 60 for work they did 15 to 20 years prior

LMAO at Anthropic staff expect 17% GDP growth in 2030. I concede this is possible if Anthropic destroys the financial system in 2028/2029

Now this is what you call a panic - over half the railway bonds (which were most of listed bonds) in NY went into default in 1873. (Reading 1873 by Ahamed so all in this thread is from the book)

Musk presents his case for why he needs to merge SpaceX and Tesla. (synergies = does it seem cool to a 12 yr old boy, if so, it will increase the firm's valuation) I can't wait to see how much these synergies are valued at in the corporate presentation.

A piece I wrote in June about a combo (the part I'm most interested in- will he try and use non-voting class C stock: www.breakingviews.com/columns/cons...

Well, this is an absolutely insane startup- story is full of gems like this www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/30/1...

Does this business make any economic sense? No absolutely not. It's rather expensive to raise a brainless human body sack from birth. Very, very few people need or benefit from new organs. And brain transplant LOL (you would also need to replace brain if you want it to be young)

It’s interesting to see the world’s biggest military spender self-sabotaging its exports and messing up the economics of producing advanced weapons.

Did not realize how long car loans have become - 30% now have a scheduled maturity of 12+ years. Excellent graph from this story by my colleague Stephen Gandel

Of course, cars now last longer as well (my quick chart)

This is a map of all the known interactions in human metabolism from Roche. It’s out of date so a lot more is now know. Biology is hard

On the other hand, when tech bros think we are going to cure all disease in 10 years or whatever, consider we have charted only a very, very small chunk of all the pathways and interactions so far. AI can't do the new work - need to do wet work.

This is a map of all the known interactions in human metabolism from Roche. It’s out of date so a lot more is now know. Biology is hard