The amount of self-confidence and belief it takes to get a company through the funding rounds and burn through borrowed money to rise to the top requires an absurd amount of self-delusion.

A lot of these modern bubble stocks are underpinned by a bunch of intangible collectibility reasons that realistically only exist because of a huge cash glut in the US stock market.

Maybe it goes on for a long time, but realistically as baby boomers start drawing down on their retirement portfolios and/or dying there's reason to believe money will start leaving the markets in the next 20ish years.

I tend to suspect that the "gluten-intolerant but can eat noodles in Europe" is a bit bunk. These days the top source of Durum wheat used in luxury European products is ... North Dakota and Canada.

I suspect the root of the issue is that the European lifestyle in general is so much healthier (less processed food, smaller portions, more walking) combined with the excitement of travel gives people a overall boost in their constitution.

Many of the "organic approved" substances are also incredibly dangerous. Rotenone is a naturally derived neuro-toxin linked to Parkinson's. Pyrethrin is poison. Then you have a bunch of chlorine and ammonia based elements - maybe not as dangerous in their pure industrial concentrations as paraquat would be but certainly not safe.

(Paraquat is also very unique because it neutralizes itself in contact with soil so it's actually a lot safer in a lot of situations).

AI is accelerating but also perhaps backfilling in what was already being lost.

The irony here is that the CARES act was established to fast track vaccine approvals, which the MAHA administration is attempting to claw back.

If you get rid of all his insane statements about his own wealth, his entire fortune boils down to a skyscraper, a resort, and a handful of piddling licensing deals. His realistic net worth was probably closer to, $500 million and the annual discretionary free cash flow closer to $20 - $40 million.

So, yeah. A single $2 million dollar ... erm... "emolument" would be something like 5-10% of his annual cashflow for a year. He might have taken over a 100 of these - that's a substantial boon!

You can say something is "addictive" without implying it's a substance abuse disorder.

When people at Microsoft say the goal of AI is to be addictive, they're clearly implying that they want their product to be habit forming in the same way that video games or food delivery is. And it's silly to imply Microsoft is trying to create physiological dependence.

It's probably not the nails, but there's a reason people always stick with a particular hardware store.

(Also, I know that's a flip example, but there are absolutely brands of nails and screws I always get).

Something merely being addicting isn't enough for intervention. It's why nobody is bothered when coffee shops advertise the addictive nature of caffeine.

The crime here seems to be that they used a wrong word - would it have been better if they used "snackable", "irresistible", "enthusiast", or "binge-worthy"?

One of the hard things to grasp is that the industrial revolution was preceded by an environmental collapse. Part of the reason there was a switch to coal (despite being seen as inferior to wood at the time) was massive depletion of wood in England and the high cost of importing not just timber but even just firewood.

Add this in to the enormously expensive wars England was fighting all through this period and stressed everything from labor and food supplies (which also triggered demand for steel and copper and brass) The industrial revolution happened against a backdrop of national crisis so it's hard to know what was being caused by the revolution and what the revolution was helping paper over.

And on top of this, when Engels and Marx wrote about the squalor and desperation of their time (which was very real), nearly a hundred years had passed and something much different was happening. Massive amounts of peasantry were being dispossessed of lands and forced into urban slums. Cities grew something like 10x in a single generation. This wasn't really the fault of the industrial revolution but because of really bad policy.

(BTW, this period in England when wages and quality of life backslid is now called "Engels' Pause" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engels%27_pause)

This is from Dud Dudley writing in 1665, whose own ventures to manufacture steel en masse before Abraham Darby succeeded.

> "I have been opposed by many adversaries, as by wood colliers, mine owners, and others who, being poor men, did, by misguided advice, throw down and destroy two of my furnaces and my works, and caused much of my pigs and bar iron to be carried away."

There were plenty of examples through history of "near-misses" where establishment land/wealth holders suppressed nascent steel industries. It was almost an accidental series of coincidences that the industrial revolution happened - the Glorious Revolution in England and Abraham Darby's secret financing network.

Nearly everything in your town is built like this. The amount of people who come out of the woodwork to oppose coffee shops, housing development, new hospitals, bus stops, etc would astound you. Try attending a local city council meeting. Part of the reason civic infrastructure takes so long and costs so much is because of the enormous burdens of transparency.

Or the sheer number of things that can go wrong during zoning, development, etc. The best time to announce a new business is when construction is nearly done. And the cities themselves want the development to be secret because they don't want to be underbid by the town next door (did anybody actually like the transparency of Amazon's HQ2 process?)

If you have only 4-5 good chances to make money in a year, you're going to maximize revenue over profitability.

Pre-Covid there was simply not enough major weekends to release a big movie. They end up competing with each other.

Sure, Baby Driver made $300m on a $40m budget. But for pure profit maximization you are better off making a billion dollars on a $500m budget.

The staff's primary concern probably was not an actual bomb, but a prankster intentionally trying to create panic with elderly and technically illiterate.