heard a great line today. "the smallest of margins make the biggest of differences." true in trading more than most places. 2% in costs, a slightly better fill, one position sized slightly wrong. none of it feels like much on the day. compound it over a few hundred trades and it's the whole result.

[ Marginalia ] Two Hundred and Thirty-Seven. Her name in the file is Mei. Not her name, the one they gave her afterward, so she could be spoken about without being found. At four she was behind in language, in writing, in drawing. Her crayon houses had no doors. The doctors put a word on it that fewer than two hundred and thirty-seven people in the world have ever been given. A gene called CHD3, misspelled by one letter in the earliest draft of her brain. Two hundred and thirty-six others, somewhere, in rooms her parents would never enter. That was the number they held on to. A number is a kind of company. Jason kept the medical records in a folder on his desktop. He opened it more often than he needed to. In the WeChat group, forty parents, all of them awake at two in the morning, all of them typing, a name surfaced in 2023 the way a name surfaces in a city: from someone who knew someone. Shanghai. Xinhua Hospital. A laboratory that had made mice with his daughter's exact mistake inside them. He wrote the email at night. He attached everything: the scans, the reports, the sentence saying he was willing and able to bear the costs. Then he sat there, the way you sit after posting a letter you can't take back. Thirteen minutes. He has counted those thirteen minutes many times since. He has divided them, turned them over, held them up to the light. In thirteen minutes a man can boil water. In thirteen minutes a man on the other side of a country can read a child's whole life and decide what to do with it. Later Jason would understand what the speed meant, that the answer had been waiting long before the question. That somewhere a laboratory had been standing at a window for two years, watching the road, waiting for a father to walk up it carrying a folder and a checkbook. They paid. First for the mice. Then for the monkeys. Then one hundred and thirty thousand dollars into a researcher's personal account, the way you'd pay a man to fix a roof. Here is what nobody said out loud in the consent conversation, though everything else was said, carefully, at length: the worst case is that she dies. They spoke of risks the way a hotel speaks of the weather. The dose went in through the spinal fluid, adenovirus, thousands of times a vaccine's load, because you cannot edit one cell when what you need is a million. Twenty-seven years ago in Arizona there was an eighteen-year-old named Jesse Gelsinger, and on the fourth day his organs stopped, one after another, and the whole world was supposed to have learned something. Somebody did learn something. They learned where the reviews are looser. Because there are two doors in that country. One goes through the drug regulators. The other, for research the hospital calls non-commercial, curiosity's own door, goes through a committee down the hall. The committee that approved Mei never read the primate safety report. This is not an oversight. Oversights get corrected. A door that stays open for thirty years is not a door somebody forgot to close. Mei was not dying. That is the part her mother cannot put down. She was six, she was behind in drawing, she was not dying. A year after she died, the paper came out in Nature. Beautiful mice. Beautiful monkeys. A breakthrough. What had been quietly removed: the human data, and the line thanking a family in the acknowledgments. Their daughter had been edited out of the sentence that thanked them for her. So they went and asked for the paper to be pulled. Not for her. For the parents reading it that morning, in forty group chats, at two in the morning, thinking: there's hope now. Two hundred and thirty-seven, minus one. Nobody has updated the number. Nobody was ever going to. — Aric

Ten years ago, one developer pushed 598 lines of code the day after Ethereum came alive, on the bet that people should be able to hold and use their money directly. A hundred million downloads later, the bet is the same. Here's what's coming next 👇

Woke pretty much died 3 years ago and big Hollywood studios are STILL doing it. These are hundred million dollar investments. There is no upside to race or gender swapping Homer's Odyssey. Literally NO ONE wants a girl boss superhero movie. Meanwhile, Obsession produced 400X ROI. Christopher Nolan might be my favorite director so I took this one hard. The market signal couldn't be clearer so I assume it's just the remnants of ESG and DEI policies. Or awards show requirements. What a (Greek) tragedy. But here's the good news. The major studios must be nearing financial ruin and we SHOULD get more original story lines like obsession. Nature is healing. A year or two from now we might finally be done with these miserable woke abominations. Sorry, Foid Gayweather, I mean Elliot Page. We're not doing this "Oh so brave" shit anymore.

▶ SK Hynix flooded with unprecedented offers from Big Tech to secure chip supplies - SK Hynix is reportedly receiving aggressive proposals from global Big Tech firms to fund new production line investments and the purchase of expensive semiconductor manufacturing equipment. - These offers are highly unusual in the global memory industry, coming as demand for memory chips — essential for AI data centers, smartphones, and PCs — has surged beyond what chipmakers can supply. - According to multiple sources, SK Hynix's customers have proposed directly investing in dedicated memory production lines. - Other proposals involve customers funding the purchase of ASML's EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography equipment. EUV tools, which etch circuit patterns onto silicon wafers, cost several hundred million dollars per unit. - However, with ample cash on hand, SK Hynix is taking a cautious stance toward accepting customer financing. - The concern is that such arrangements could lock the company into specific customers and potentially require it to supply memory at lower prices in exchange for guaranteed long-term supply. - An SK Hynix official said, "Regardless of the form of the proposal, our currently available production capacity is essentially 'zero,'" adding that "we don't even have small volumes that could be allocated to specific customers." - The official also noted that investment proposals have been made targeting the Phase 1 production line of the large-scale fab currently under construction at the Yongin cluster. - This pattern departs from the memory industry's traditional boom-bust cycle, with the industry increasingly viewing the current AI-driven demand growth as long-term structural growth rather than a short-term cycle. - The development underscores the intensifying competition to secure memory chips amid the AI boom.

In Philadelphia there is a counter where you have exactly three seconds to justify your existence. The man behind the glass had a voice forged in gravel. He pointed a metal spatula at my chest. NEXT! WHAT CHEESE? I blinked. Whiz, I said. WIT OR WITOUT? The line behind me held its breath. Forty hungry men stared at the back of my neck. I did not know what this meant. But in eight hundred years of family history, no man of my blood has ever admitted to lacking wit. I refused to stand on American soil and declare myself witless. I drew myself up. I AM WIT, I told him. I WILL ALWAYS BE WIT. The man did not even pause. He slammed the flat-top with his spatula and roared into the back: WE GOT A WIT! HE STANDS ON BUSINESS! THROW ONIONS AT THE PHILOSOPHER! The kitchen exploded. YES CHEF! WIT COMING DOWN! A roll was torn open. Beef was piled like a collapsing hillside. Golden cheese ran like molten iron, and grilled onions were scattered across the summit like victory flags. He shoved it across the metal ledge. EAT IT WITH WIT, PROFESSOR. I ate it on the curb. Juice ran down my forearms to my elbows. It was glorious. I walked past the window twenty minutes later. He looked out and nodded once. STILL WIT, BUDDY? STILL WIT, I shouted back.

TWENTY BILLION DOLLARS IS MOVING AND IT BELONGS TO THE SITTING PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES Four anonymous wallets. One "vesting contract." Twenty billion dollars in $WLFI tokens quietly shuffled while Donald Trump still has two years left in office This is the same crypto coin regular people can buy to put money directly in the president's pocket. No disclosure form required. No lobbyist registration. Just buy the token, line up behind the sons Speaking of the sons — Don Jr, Eric, and Barron all sitting on this pile with their father while the family's already banked over a billion dollars in crypto income in a single year Five hundred million from World Liberty Financial alone. Another six hundred thirty five million from a meme coin Trump launched three days before he put his hand on the Bible Watchdogs are saying the quiet part out loud now — nobody has ever explained what this company actually does besides funnel cash to the Trump family Legal experts who worked INSIDE Trump's first administration are saying this probably isn't even legal, that the Founders never imagined a president monetizing the presidency through a coin And now the exit is happening. The cash-out. While he's still sitting in the Oval Office signing things that move markets he personally profits from You lost your job to a RIF. Your kid's research grant got frozen. Your town's FEMA plan got called "pulled from thin air" by a federal judge Meanwhile Donald Trump and his three sons are quietly moving twenty billion dollars into a vesting contract like the country is his personal exit liquidity event This isn't a business. This is a spigot. And he's the only one holding the handle They are not going to stop until every institution in this country has a Trump toll booth on it

DONALD TRUMP PUT HIS OWN FACE ON AMERICAN MONEY AND SOLD OUT IN HOURS Not a portrait in some Trump Tower lobby. Actual US currency. The first living person on a US coin in almost a hundred years and guess whose face they picked $61 for a roll of 25 coins. $154.50 for a bag of 100. Face value one dollar each. Do the math and you're paying up to $2.44 for a dollar that's worth exactly one dollar Copper. Zinc. Manganese. Nickel. Zero precious metal. Gold colored, worthless inside, just like the promise behind it A lawyer is already in court arguing this violates federal law, 31 U.S. Code 5114, the actual statute that says presidents don't get their mug on currency while they're alive to profit off it Trump's answer to that law was to mint it anyway and let the Treasury sell out before anyone could stop him Meanwhile Democrats in Congress are pointing out what that markup actually buys you in the real economy Rep. Jason Crow said it straight — that overpriced coin gets you a quarter of a gallon of gas While MAGA loyalists were racing to swipe their cards on Trump's face in copper, House Democrats opened a probe into how his personal net worth jumped more than four billion dollars since he retook office Crypto ventures, licensing deals, real estate, all stacking up for the family while regular investors in his own memecoin watched their money evaporate This is the pattern now. Turn the presidency into a product line. Slap his name on a coin, an airport, a ballroom, a warship, and collect the markup every single time He is not governing this country. He is merchandising it And every dollar spent chasing his face on a coin is a dollar that will never come back to you

Billie Eilish spent years telling the country that wealth is the problem. Then she dropped a new $88 perfume and asked the same fans to buy it. That is not activism. That is a storefront with a sermon attached. You do not get to scold billionaires for keeping too much money and then charge working people nearly a hundred dollars for cocoa and vanilla. You do not get to talk about a broken world and then treat the same audience as a checkout line. The scent is not the issue. The act is. If the lecture was the point, she would not need another product. She needed another product. That is the whole story. Give us a break.