P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #478
Hi Sloth
my story 🚀
fun facts 🙌
End of month squeeze. “They’re literally running out of money at the end of the month,” Kraft Heinz CEO Steve Cahillane said, adding: “We’re seeing negative cash flows in the lower-income brackets where they’re dipping into savings.” A quick tour of earnings calls suggests the stress is showing up across fast food, sit-down dining, and big-ticket retail as gas prices stay high. ~ learn more
Foreign ships allowed to go port-to-port in US for the first time. “Jones Act waiver data reveals a universe of blocked American trade.” Cato points to waiver requests as a paper trail for how often domestic shipping rules get in the way when the US needs to move goods between US ports fast. ~ learn more
The third wave of American philanthropy. “But the takeaway is that we are orders of magnitude off from having the great organizations needed to absorb the money that’s coming.” Nan Ransohoff does napkin math on a third wave of AI-linked philanthropy and argues the bottleneck will be builders, not dollars. ~ learn more
Atlanta is closer to Canada than it is to Miami. “As the crow flies, downtown Atlanta is about 555 miles from the Canadian border at its southernmost point, and around 605 miles from downtown Miami.” The trick is the Great Lakes border dipping south near Detroit while Florida sticks out as its own long peninsula. ~ learn more
oh, chicago 🏆
An American Eel in the Chicago River? “When you see an eel around here, it swam 3,000 miles to get here, which is crazy, and past all kinds of barriers, locks and dams and all these types of things.” An angler pulled an American eel out of the Chicago River, a catch so rare researchers only know of one other recent case. ~ learn more
oh, austin 🤠
Someone burned down the Pease Park troll. “It hurts deeply to hear that it all went up in smoke.” Austin’s 18-foot Pease Park troll, Malin, burned down early Thursday morning, and the arson unit responded as the cause remains unknown. ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
The first derivative of inference. “Inference is the largest & fastest growing market in technology today, surpassing the database market & projected to be three times the size within seven years at $250 billion.” If you are not selling inference, Tom argues you want to be the company that benefits when everyone else buys a lot of it. ~ learn more
AI will find tax loopholes. “The tax code isn’t computer code, but it’s a series of algorithms with inputs and outputs.” Schneier argues the scary part is not Mythos scanning software, but AI pattern-matching its way through any complex rule system, from taxes to regulation. ~ learn more
A 120 kW ion engine. “This marks the first time in the United States that an electric propulsion system has operated at power levels this high, reaching up to 120 kilowatts.” NASA just fired a lithium-fed MPD thruster at JPL, chasing the kind of electric propulsion that could shave time off future crewed Mars trips. ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
How to apply Pixar’s Three Pitches Rule. “For every chapter, I wrote the opening that came to mind. And then I figuratively crossed it out and forced myself to write two different openings.” It’s Pixar’s “Three Pitches Rule,” and David Epstein used it to avoid getting stuck on the first convenient idea. ~ learn more
IC work is the new career flex. “Our whole system promotes people out of the job they’re good at”. Elena Verna argues that AI makes it realistic to go back to IC work, but at a higher level: “An individual contributor who can complete a project that delivers business value, end-to-end, on their own.” ~ learn more
The choosing is the work now. “AI hasn’t made human judgment obsolete. It has made it the only thing that still matters.” As output gets cheap and plentiful, he argues the scarce parts are “taste, judgment, and trust” and the real job becomes saying no, then living with the consequences. ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
Why are testosterone levels rising? “When looking at population cohorts that are (1) measured with consistent methods, (2) measured with consistent sampling, and (3) measured when they’re sampled, there seems to be a recent trend towards increasing testosterone levels.” The author then tries to break the trend with race, age, lab artifacts, marriage, fatherhood, TRT, diet, pollutants, and more, and mostly comes up empty. ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
RAS was called undruggable. “For over two decades, RAS carried one of the most dispiriting labels in drug discovery: undruggable.” A new drug, daraxonrasib, roughly doubled survival in metastatic pancreatic cancer in Phase 3, and it is part of a broader wave of medicines that can target proteins without obvious binding pockets. ~ learn more
teaching the kids 👩🏫
Start school later. “SB 328 increased the share of students sleeping at least 8 hours per night by 13%, meeting the CDC-recommended minimum for this age group.” A new NBER working paper looks at California’s later start time mandate and finds modest test score gains too, especially for Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students. ~ learn more
profiles of people 🚶
Jenny Just and Matt Hulsizer, founders of Peak6. “Working yourself out of a job” became a core cultural principle inside Peak6. The episode traces how Jenny Just and Matt Hulsizer went from “a $1.5 million trading bet in 1997” to a multi-billion-dollar fintech empire, and what that required operationally and psychologically. ~ learn more