P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #423
Email bankruptcy
my story 🚀
🤦♂️ I accidentally archived my entire gmail inbox this week. On the bright side, none of the emails are actually gone. They’re all still somewhere, buried amongst 63 GB of other emails. But because I used my inbox as a pseudo todo list with threads that accumulated over time, they’re as good as gone. I had read stories of people who had declared email bankruptcy and did this on purpose. So I guess I’ve now gone through involuntary email bankruptcy! This is much less rewarding than the times I have declared sock bankruptcy, starting over with all new matching socks. I still highly recommended that!
fun facts 🙌
Habitable zone exoplanets. This website was made with a single prompt to Manus (not by me). “The habitable zone is the region around a star where conditions might be suitable for liquid water to exist on a planet's surface - a key ingredient for life as we know it.” ~ learn more
Chongqing, the world’s largest city — in pictures. “The largest city in the world is as big as Austria, but few people have ever heard of it. The megacity of 34 million people in central of China is the emblem of the fastest urban revolution on the planet.” ~ learn more
Hormesis. “Hormesis is a biological phenomenon where a low dose of a potentially harmful stressor, such as a toxin or environmental factor, stimulates a beneficial adaptive response in an organism. In other words, small doses of stressors that would be damaging in larger amounts can actually enhance resilience, stimulate growth, or improve health at lower levels.” ~ learn more
Amelia Earhart had her own fashion line. “In the 1930s, Earhart became one of the first celebrities to create and sell her own clothing line. Launched in 1933, four years before her final flight, Amelia Fashions included aviation clothing made specifically for women; at the time, all other pilots’ clothing was designed for men.” ~ learn more
oh, chicago 🏆
How Stacey Davis Gates made the Chicago Teachers Union toxic. “Chicagoans love Chicago. Chicagoans love teachers. And Chicagoans (mostly) love unions. That’s why, for decades, the Chicago Teachers Union ranked among the most popular political players in the city. … But those days are gone. The city’s good will toward the union has largely disappeared.” ~ learn more
oh, austin 🤠
Texas power superhighway. “State regulators have unanimously approved the biggest upgrade to the Texas electric grid in more than a decade, a plan that calls for creation of a power superhighway using super-high voltage lines for the first time.” ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Model Context Protocol goes remote. “We think this is going to be a massive deal — connecting coding agents to MCP servers has blown developers’ minds over the past few months, and remote MCP servers have the same potential to open up similar new ways of working with LLMs and agents to a much wider audience, including more everyday consumer use cases.” ~ learn more
Meta AI glasses are coming for your data. Just a little privacy policy tweak. “The option to disable voice recordings storage is no longer available…” Nothing to see here, just move right along… ~ learn more
When step one is to light money on fire and measure how fast it burns. “There are some businesses where the key uncertainty is how quickly some process scales, and the only way to get useful datapoints is to spend an unknown amount on them. This creates an interesting opportunity, because the potential failure of this model looks so obvious that it's embarrassing to try.” ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
Cutting the turkey tail. “Traditions can be helpful, but unquestioned traditions may become baggage.” ~ learn more
Best available. A short exploration of a possible future. “Now, consider an architect designing an addition for the nearby school. She has specced the windows (there will be 200 of them). Autodesk could have the ability to poll every qualified window manufacturer and have them bid for that work, based on how busy they are, what they have in stock and how eager they are to grow their market share.” ~ learn more
retail therapy 💸
Walmart resumes importing from China. This seems like a bet that the tariffs will ease soon. “A major exporter of stationery and office products in the eastern city of Ningbo received a notification from Walmart on Monday to resume normal deliveries to the United States, weeks after a series of tit-for-tat tariff hikes between the world’s two largest economies slowed shipments to a trickle.” ~ learn more
The recession has already come for airlines. “Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan told Bloomberg that demand has cratered in recent months, with domestic leisure travel dropping more than he’s ever seen besides the Covid-19 pandemic.” ~ learn more
What happens when you pause branded search campaigns?
One of our clients was spending $120,000/month on paid search, with about 20% of that ($24K/month) going to branded keywords. So we ran a clean 90-day test in Q1. No branded Google Ads. No name-based keywords. Zero brand protection.” ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
MD Anderson trial shows FMT may be useful for fighting cancer. “The premise of the MD Anderson clinical trial study was that gut bacteria from the now cancer-free individuals may assist the immune systems of the current patients to recognize and fight their cancers.” ~ learn more
PillBot demo at the Abundance Summit. It’s more than pill camera. It’s more like a pill camera that’s also a remote-controlled submarine. ~ learn more
thoughts of food 🍔
The real reasons Gen Z is drinking less alcohol. Really interesting research from Rabobank. “Most industry experts believe that this trend is driven by young people's concerns about health and vanity linked to their heavy use of social media. We find these narratives are greatly overblown. Instead, we've identified the structural and economic drivers behind Gen Z's behavior.” ~ learn more
big ideas 📚
50 things I’ve learned writing Construction Physics. A fantastic list! “My main takeaway from this list of takeaways, and from writing the newsletter more generally, is that there’s almost always more to the story. Things that seem like recent developments often have key predecessors going back decades or even centuries. What seem like historical inevitabilities are often highly contingent products of chance and circumstance.” ~ learn more