Remember that nobody will ever watch that firework video again... unless it's the July 4th 2012 fireworks show in San Diego where they accidentally let off 18 minutes of fireworks at once

This video of Kathleen Ledecky balancing chocolate milk on her head while swimming is more impressive to me than her seven Olympic gold medals

It still blows my mind every time I randomly look at the price of a TV nowadays.

Founders building web3 solutions for problems that don’t exist

Italy raided factories & found that Armani and Dior bags are made by illegal Chinese workers in Italy who sleep in the workshop and make €2-3/hr. Both companies have been placed under Italian court administration. Dior paid a supplier $57 to assemble* a handbag that sells for $2,780 Armani bags that were sold to consumers for €1,800 cost €93* to make. (These don’t include raw materials costs) People often wrongly conflate higher prices for higher ethical standards.

Zuck on the Apple Vision Pro He's still got fire in him, love to see it

From @elonmusk on remote work… tell us how you really feel! (email from yesterday)

The Millennial anthem every word rings true (except I'm in my 40s)

I think about this scene all the time The Simpsons, 1994

The show Silicon Valley was not fiction

LOLOL Chamath claims to "control" one of the largest rare earth mineral supplies outside of China. I comment with proof that CCP owns more of the company than he does (proof below). Chamath HIDES my comment.

Indian home beauty startup YesMadam sent a survey to their employees about stress and then fired the employees that said they were under significant stress 🤦🏽‍♂️

Thanks Jeff Lawson for buying the Onion so we could get this great zoom in on electoral coverage. No other news source has gone to this level of detail.

this is amazing by @elonmusk... people always seem to claim that X amount of money can solve a problem... so Elon calls them out, says he'll donate the money if they can solve it

CEO of a 400+ employee business says WFH is working well, he may not renew his SF lease to save $10m a year (office + lunches etc) and instead do a couple of all-hands offsites a year (much cheaper). Lots of others must be thinking similarly- CRE could be permanently altered.

I love this idea & am planning one: A night where all of your friends make a presentation on what they do at work and answer questions. I don't know much about what many of my friends do for a living.

Trevor donated $1.8M to Trump, then hired Attorney General Pam Bondi's brother to represent him case dropped

There is a woman in San Francisco who charges $30k to name your baby. She started at $100, but she was going to dinner with VCs and a friend told her to charge more and nobody blinked. The Bay Area might be the best place in the world for this kind of business.

People in Texas really love bragging about their low GPAs on their sports cars

My new kitchen robot just made me one of the best paneer butter masalas I’ve ever had in my life.

X keeps serving me this video so I succumbed The premise is that Mr Beast and crew are helicoptered into an abandoned city and have to survive for 7 days, seems like a fun concept… but I recognized the “abandoned city” as Kupari Croatia, which is neither abandoned nor a city, it’s just aa few abandoned buildings in Dubrovnik. There is a popular bar literally a 3 min walk away and a Sheraton 12 mins walk away from where they claim they were running out of food & had to send up a flare to get the helicopter to get them 😂 I googled and it turns out he actually paid a bunch of money to keep the regular tourists and locals out of it while he was filming. I haven’t watched many of his videos, are they all similarly made up? It’s like reality TV I guess. I actually didn’t find it very entertaining either.

Freaking Incredible: Agassi knew where Boris Becker was going to serve based on his tongue movements, but didn’t want to use it all the time because then Becker would find out

Fun TikTok dating fad in Spain: Singles go to grocery store chain Mercadona bw 7-8pm and use their cart to hint what they're looking for. Mercadona has had to hire police and even pulled pineapples from the shelves (but people just used canned fruit instead)

It is kind of funny that Vivek tweeted "American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence" and had to get out of @DOGE Marko tweeted “Normalize Indian hate” "I was racist before it was cool" "Wipe Israel and Gaza" and is now a hero to @DOGE

Cocktail bars in Tokyo are insane, a real art form Never seen anything like it anywhere else There are bars like the Aviary which are masterful in their own way but the artistry of a Japanese bartender in a small bar in a 4th floor walk up is unmatched

Eyeglasses aren’t opioids. There’s no reason we should need to see an optometrist to buy glasses. You don’t in the rest of the world, and you didn’t in the US either until optometrists lobbied aggressively under the banner of “public safety.” For decades, opticians, trained with just a few weeks of coursework, tested vision and sold glasses directly, just like they still do in Europe, Asia, and most of the world. Outside the US, vision correction (opticians) is kept separate from medical eye care (ophthalmology). In the US, we created the field of optometry and then they lobbied hard to take over vision correction because there is more money in selling glasses than in doing medical tests. By the 1970s, every state required prescriptions, shutting out opticians and cementing an optometrist monopoly. The result: in Europe you can walk into a shop, get tested, and leave with glasses for about $50 all-in. In the US, you are forced into a $200 exam and $300 frames. What should be simple and cheap has been turned into a racket, and consumers pay the price. Much like barber licensing (some states require 2,000 hours of training just to braid hair), this kind of gatekeeping drives up costs without protecting consumers. Vision correction should be cheap and accessible, not locked behind a monopoly!

Tic Tacs are 94% sugar and yet claim to be sugar free… The FDA says anything can be labeled sugar free if it has <0.5g of sugar, so each tic tac is 0.49g and they can claim they have 0 sugar on the label

2016

The American mind cannot comprehend this. The longest train ride in India: - takes 74.5 hours - covers 2,600mi (~distance from Wash. DC - LA) - is considered "Super Fast Express" though it averages ~35mph - sleeper (bed) ticket costs $14.27

lol we came to a tasting menu restaurant and my dad knew he would be hungry and not like the food so he brought his own pizza and got in trouble

Some people have kids and stop living their life, others bring their kids along for the ride nitter.app/STFU_anajai2/status/15…

Drones raining from the sky in Zhengzhou 😬 Word on the street is that a rival drone company that lost the bid interfered to overwhelm the drones nav system!

an 8-year old girl in Ohio drove herself 25 minutes to Target, spent $400 and was drinking a Frappuccino when she got caught. She's probably grounded for a while but as soon as she's free, I'm investing in whatever she does next

The Golden Gate Bridge construction was finished in 4 years in 1937, under budget at $35M (~$600M today). A suicide prevention net (cost: $400M) on that bridge started construction 4 years ago and is half-complete. We can’t build anything anymore. insider.com/suicide-net-gold…

Love Buffett’s response to “when did you know you were rich?” Particularly the highlighted part.

they actually had them around San Diego and they all went off (technical glitch!)

Most popular car in Europe / most popular car in the US.

This dude slapped a new label (& name: Le Château Colombier) on a shitty $2.50 supermarket wine and won gold medal at the Gilbert et Gaillard wine competition in France. They described it as "suave, edgy and rich palate with clean, young aromas that promise a lovely complexity"

Apple is a real bully. Apple + Maximo met for partnership/acquisition talks but Apple had a secret plan (Project Everest) to steal the tech without paying. They even recruited 20 of Masimo’s team, doubling their salaries…. Apple paid their CTO $4M to come over, and in his 1st 2 weeks he filed 12 patents for sensors at Apple that were Masimo trade secrets… the worst part is that Apple fumbled the ball and the product doesn’t really work and Apple didn’t get FDA approval like Masimo did. Joe Kiani, the immigrant electrical engineer CEO of Masimo seems to be fighting this as a vendetta - he’s spent >$60M fighting Apple so far & preliminarily seems to have won… most companies would not keep fighting.

Ed Sheeran's wife. He's been a rock superstar and her partner for the entire 9 years she spent working at Deloitte.

it's real! he says he did it out of necessity, he didn't have a team of people do the work, it was all him

The new CEO of Costco Ron Vachris started out as a forklift driver, has worked his way up at Costco for the past 40+ years. Outgoing CEO Craig Jelinek started out as a food stocker at Costco predecessor FedMart & worked his way up for 43 yrs before becoming CEO Incredible.

Wild: When the BYD Zhengzhou factory is fully complete it will be larger than San Francisco (but smaller than the Denver airport!) ~10x larger than the Gigafactory Nevada. Not apples to apples because it's effectively a city - employees live there in dorms.

TIL you can own your own private rail car & attach it to an Amtrak train only ~100 private cars in operation in the US, they are extremely expensive (~$300k+) + Amtrak charges ~$5/mile. But there are 100 rich train lovers out there! amtrak.com/privately-owned-r…

Heartwarming immigrant banking story: The State Bank of Texas is owned and mostly run by Patels. Poor Indian immigrant Chan Patel comes to Stanford for grad school, becomes a successful hotel entrepreneur. He finds that lenders are unfairly discriminating against Indians & decides to open a bank to solve the gap. He needed $2M of capital to start, so he crowdfunded from F&F, gave lifelong directorships to everyone who committed $100k (mostly other Patels who still form the board today). They opened the bank on Black Monday (1987) with a single paid employee (& a bunch of unpaid family members who took bank training courses!). They've never had an unprofitable quarter, & now have $2.7B in assets. The business is still mostly lending to Indian-Americans in the budget to mid range motels/hotel segment. This is a very large niche - Indians own 60% of the hotels in America, and most of the owners are Patels... AKA the "Patel Motel Cartel"

They got us with their SEO game

The Babylon Bee has been very funny lately

The longest-serving Apple employee, Chris Espinosa has been there since he was 14 years old in 1976 (but didn't get his badge printed til 1977. When he joined, it was still housed in Steve Jobs's parents garage... 48 years ago.

Wowwwww Everyone in fintech has been saying that the Bilt credit card ($3.1B valuation) is too good to be true; How can you get cash back on rent payments? Turns out they have an unsustainable deal with Wells that is losing the bank hundreds of $millions. Wells made a number of incorrect assumptions in their underwriting. They assumed that it would be a top of wallet card for renters who carry balances. Instead, a lot of savvy consumers (myself included) use the bank for the minimum required to collect the rental points. Wells assumed that 65% of card-purchase volume would be non-rent, generating interchange-fee revenue. The reality is inverted... most of the volume is rent payments on which they don't earn much. Wells also assumed that 50-75% of the balances would be revolving, earning them interest. The reality is they mostly have cardholders like me who don't carry a balance - only 15-25% are revolving. Wells is paying 0.8% to Bilt on rent payments, even though the bank doesn't get interchange on them. Wells has a massive mortgage business and thought that they'd be able to cross-sell mortgages when the renters become homeowners but that hasn't panned out. Kudos to Bilt for negotiating a killer contract that doesn't expire until 2029... but I wonder what the future looks like after that. Wells says they won't renew it as-is. In the meantime - it's a great card... pay your rent via the card and make 5 other transactions a month to get 1% back on your rent.

Incentives work! Dad had a heart attack 3 yrs ago, been trying to get him to change his diet & behavior- no dice. Noticed yday that dad was walking laps around the house, asked why: his health insurance gives him $𝟏𝟎/mo if he walks 7.5k steps every day! $10!

Colossal Biosciences raised $200M at a $10.2B post to bring back animals from extinction They're on track for a Woolly Mammoth calf in 2028, and are also working on the dodo and Tasmanian tiger This is super cool but beyond my pay grade... what is the business opportunity?

for context, here's an ad from 1994. A 46" TV was an inflation-adjusted $3100. Today, a 65" TV is $228!

Took me a while but it’s resting in still water

Last week, a 55 year old, 200 lb grandmother was the 1st to swim from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Farallon islands, a -30 mile journey. She swam in 43° water & it took ~17 hours. She was stung by jellyfish 20 times. It’s considered the toughest marathon swim in the world.

German discount grocer Lidl built their own cloud infrastructure because of German data laws, and now has a ~$2B revenue business selling it to others (a la AWS) They spent $700M acquiring an Israeli cyber security company (XM cyber)

TIL - 0.8% of the US budget is spent on Kidney dialysis

Ever wonder why sedans disappeared and every car is huge now? "Thanks, Obama!" His administration changed fuel economy standards in a way that had the perverse impact of making cars even bigger. Here are all the vehicles for sale by the 3 largest US automakers. 62 vehicles, 4 sedans (6%). 20 years ago this chart would have been ~50% sedans! What happened? Obama administration changed auto fuel efficiency rules to tie fuel economy targets to vehicle size. Under the new system: -The bigger the car's footprint, the easier the MPG target was. -Light trucks (including SUVs and crossovers) had far lower requirements than passenger cars. -Crossovers were quietly reclassified as "trucks," giving them a huge regulatory advantage. Instead of building lighter, more efficient cars, automakers simply made everything bigger, and made more trucks and SUVs. Notice that cars that used to be sedans are now crossovers? They do this so it counts as a light truck - they raise ground clearance, square off the rear for cargo capacity, and meet off-road approach minimums so they get qualified as a light truck. Think Subaru Legacy > Subaru Outback. As you can see in the chart, it's a LOT easier to meet MPG requirements if your vehicle is classified that way. So cars got LARGER to meet fuel efficiency goals. The new Honda Civic is 20 inches longer and 4 inches wider than it used to be, about the same size as an old Accord. By making the Civic larger, Honda slightly shifted it into a more favorable regulatory category. ...and smaller cars disappeared. The Honda Fit was a great little car, but would have had to hit 67 MPG in 2026, which would be nearly impossible... so instead, Honda stopped selling them. So, the only way to make small vehicles now is to make them EV's (Chevy Bolt). The Slate truck that is all the rage now is only possible because it's an EV... otherwise its footprint would have demanded an overly onerous MPG target. So in short - Obama era CAFE standards had the opposite of the desired impact: sedans died, vehicles ballooned in size, and America's streets turned into an SUV parking lot. All thanks to a policy that accidentally incentivized bloat instead of efficiency. Don't get me started on "cash for clunkers!"

Such a part of the appeal that they import Chinese workers to make it so!

Remember when the iphone 4 demo failed and Steve Jobs told people in the audience to turn off their wifi? charming to look back

Fun fact: Microsoft Flight Simulator is Microsoft's longest-running software product, predating Windows by 3 years. The series dates back to 1982 and FlightSim 2024 is the 16th of the series.

Turkish airlines has a promo where you can get 1 million miles by flying to all 6 continents they fly. You can do it for about $3k (depending on where you start from) In my 20s my brother and I would have done this, for sport

Listen to this guy - Mitt called it all so well!

Somehow I only just now learned Chip is a nickname for a guy named after his dad ("Chip off the old block"). Skip is for a guy named after their granddad ("skipped" a generation). Trip(p) is for a third in line with the same name as his dad and granddad ("triple").

The Golden Gate Bridge construction was finished in 4 years in 1937, under budget at $35M (~$600M today). A suicide prevention net was recently added to the bridge. It took 6 years & $224M. nitter.app/i/status/1837746892693…

It’s true. The original reason for ending prices in .99 was not psychological, it was to make sure employees weren't stealing... and it starts with the cash register itself: In the 1870s, a saloon owner in Dayton was fed up with his bartenders pocketing cash and was desperate for a solution. While traveling by steamboat, he noted the mechanical counter that tracked how many times the ship’s propeller turned. He realized the same principle could track cash transactions... every sale increments a count, just like every propeller revolution. That insight led to his invention: "Ritty’s Incorruptible Cashier." Over time, they added a drawer and a bell and it became known as a Cash Register... and the name of the company became "National Cash Register" which you probably know as NCR, the company that still exists today (recently split into 2, worth a combined $4.5B) Every time a clerk rang up a sale, the drawer opened and the bell chimed. That sound told the owner money was (or wasn’t) going into the till. Merchants discovered that if they priced items at 49¢ or 99¢, the clerk had to open the drawer to make change, forcing the bell to ring and the sale to be recorded. Around this time in the late 1800s, prices began ending this way. The notion that $.99 feels cheaper than $1.00 didn’t come until much later. Marketing psychology picked up on it 50 years later, when professors started using terms like “left-digit anchoring” and consumer behavior reframed .99 pricing as a sales tactic rather than just an anti-theft device. NCR gave us more than cash registers... the company built modern sales culture and was a huge talent magnet, like the Salesforce and Ramp of its day. They created a formal sales school in 1887 to sell cash registers, complete with scripts, objection manuals, territories, quotas, and pep talks. They called it the “West Point of American business,” because it was known to be a talent magnet, producing executives who spread these practices across corporate America. In 1912, NCR was indicted for antitrust violations. Their star salesman was Thomas J. Watson, who was convicted and then fired from NCR. He took NCR’s sales playbook to a small company called the "Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company" and became its CEO. He took the NCR sales model into beast mode - expanding internationally and changing the name of the company to "International Business Machines" (IBM) to reflect that. A bunch of NCR disciples ended up at other prominent places, like Kettering at GM. Kind of wild that after 155 years they are still selling cash registers. anyway long way of saying to the haters in the comments that this poster is correct.

Not sure if you are serious but it’s the same company as Dior

Both of Jensen's kids pursued their passions but ultimately decided to work in the family biz Spencer spent a decade as a photographer and cocktail bar owner before Nvidia. Madison trained at CIA and Le Cordon Bleu, studied pastry and wine, and now works in product at Nvidia.

Where is the lie

I initially thought the H-1B reform was reasonable but it’s $100k per year, not per visa That is too much, will definitely have a negative effect on innovation in the US. It’s basically only for people who make >$400k now.

Oh no... what have we done? 2 years ago, Mexico City ranked as the 76th most expensive city in the Economist's worldwide cost of living survey. This year, it ranked 16th! More expensive than Milan, Munich and DC.

TIL Thomas and George Kurian are identical twins. They both grew up in India, came to the US to study at Princeton, did Stanford GSB, McKinsey, Oracle. Thomas is the CEO of Google Cloud George is the CEO of NetApp ($21B market cap) impressive af!

random thought: Jobs made more from Disney than from Apple Clooney made more $ selling Tequila than acting Bechtolsheim made more $ investing in Google than founding Sun Foreman made more $ selling grills than boxing Dre made more $ from Beats (headphones) than making music

San Francisco in 1849

Salesforce park is the prettiest park in a business district I can think of. Also if I saw this and didn’t know better I would’ve guessed it was in Singapore.

In Japanese tradition you adopt a capable manager or have arrange for him to marry your daughter to keep business in the family. Otherwise there’s no way you’d keep something in the family this long. This is still common practice! 98% of adoptions in Japan are adults, almost all men 20-30, brought in for business succession purposes. Among many others, Suzuki & Toyota have multiple generations of adopted sons-in-law to keep them family businesses.

Awesome & wholesome: Slashdotters were dunking on @stevewoz for selling his Apple stock… then he showed up in the comments with the most grounded reply. Gave away his Apple wealth, funds museums, pays his taxes, and measures life by joy: “Happiness is Smiles minus Frowns.”

Ads in replies degrade the experience by confusing me for a split second every time. Get rid of them.

Genuinely confused at how people have time to listen to 3+ hour podcasts multiple times per week

Quick background in case you missed this era: Zenefits was among the highest flying companies- raised $500M in '15 (back when that was a huge deal 😂). They missed some revenue targets and had compliance issues along the way (that got blown out of proportion). Sacks was COO, and the board pressured Parker to resign and appointed Sacks CEO, then added 3 new board members and Sacks sent a leaked memo that completely threw Parker under the bus... a real coup! I always thought it was strange because if the issues were compliance/controls related, wouldn't the COO who is a former lawyer be somewhat responsible? Sacks didn't last long as CEO and Zenefits was sold for peanuts. Meanwhile, Parker has a huge chip on his shoulder and built a competitor to Zenefits - Rippling into $13B company. If you go even further back- Sacks started a coup to fire Elon from PayPal and put Thiel in... so he does have experience with coups!

I’ve noticed a TON of overt racism against Indians on this site recently. I get racist DMs/replies (over the randomest things!) and see viral stuff like this every day. Never happened before, now it’s almost daily.

I think about this scene from @SiliconHBO all the time when founders are raising: "If you show revenue, people will ask how much and it'll never be enough" -Russ Hanneman

There is a "sleep pod community" near me that rented a loft apartment and put these sleeping pods in, currently occupied by 5 women and 9 men paying $675 each.

A story in 3 parts I was actually trying to be helpful!

So incredibly sad- Susan Wojcicki’s 19 year old son died from a drug overdose at Cal after taking a drug that was potentially laced with fentanyl. 2mg of fentanyl (~10-15 grains of salt worth) is a lethal dose.

When I interned at Amazon, my office had a stunning view of Mount Rainier… which I discovered a full 2 months into the internship on the first clear day. I got to experience that stunning view for 3 days that summer.

Duolingo runs a taqueria outside their HQ in Pittsburgh. You get a discount for speaking Spanish. Many reviews say it’s the best Mexican food they’ve ever had! I will def go next time I’m in town.

This billboard makes me pause every time I drive past it. I don't know what it means but it's weirdly effective in getting me to notice it.

Giving this baby bear a term sheet

McKinsey's latest recruiting video featured on @LastWeekTonight

Could not agree more. Airport lounges were supposed to be an escape from the chaos. Now they are the chaos.

TIL Costco sells a pallet of freeze-dried food. Preppers can buy 5,400 servings of food with a 25 year shelf life for $2,500 Lots of pasta and rice dishes, some soups, oatmeals & milk. Just add water! 910,080 calories, 364 calories/$.

The website for the band "Portugal, The Man" is a Google Sheets document

I am often surprised by polling but this one scares the shit out of me. 1 out of 5 people 18-29 believe the holocaust is a myth. How did it get to be this way?

Zohran wants to freeze rents on 2M units, a well-intentioned but absolutely terrible idea that could erase what makes NYC special. Bombay is a cautionary tale. Rent was frozen in 1949, and today, those neighborhoods have almost no functioning rental market. Only the ultra-rich or legacy tenants remain, and many of the buildings, once among the city's nicest, are literally falling apart because landlords can't afford to maintain or rent them. What started as tenant protection eventually turned into a lose-lose situation. The only real winners are those lucky enough to have locked in a rent-controlled deal decades ago. One of the richest people I know pays $8 a month for a $6 million penthouse in the best part of town. His grandfather moved in during the '50s. The landlord can’t afford repairs, so my friend pays out of pocket to maintain the building. In other cases, no one pays, and buildings collapse, sometimes killing people. Landlords forgo maintenance. Tenants free-ride on each other. Even if some are willing to contribute, big repairs require structural changes to the entire building, and tenants often lack the legal authority or incentives to get it done. Rent control created a handful of winners but wrecked these parts of the city. Tens of thousands of units are still locked into mid-century prices. Landlords can’t raise rents, can’t evict, and often don’t rent at all, because once someone moves in, you’re stuck with them for life. There are even movies and TV shows in India about landlords unable to live in their own homes (my favorite episode of "Flop Show" iykyk). Today, nearly 15% of Bombay’s housing stock sits vacant. Redevelopment is almost impossible in the rent controlled areas, and only the ultra-rich can afford to live in Marine Drive, Colaba, etc. Instead of creating an affordable and vibrant city, rent control has left South Bombay as an enclave for the super rich. A policy meant to protect tenants ended up gutting the middle class and freezing the city in time. So... New York should pay attention... Do NOT elect this man - he might have a great social media game but has terrible policies! Freezing rents might feel like a win today, but it can lock cities into decay for generations.

~20 years ago @BarackObama was a relative nobody, a local state senator Kerry gave him the chance to address the DNC; the major networks didn't even bother covering the speech. Then he gave this speech which led to him becoming president and history was altered. Great stuff.

Curious why you give him credit for everything good but everything bad is just bad advice. Would you say that to a CEO? “You’re great, best ever, but you did this horribly corrupt thing - your advisors are terrible, but you are great!”

New Italian train route “La Dolce Vita” is a real beauty, starts at $2k per person per day

It’s striking how little attention this is getting: an Indian motel manager was beheaded, and nobody seems to care. The video is more gruesome than anything else out there (not sharing it, but the killer kicks his severed head across the parking lot). Killer in the country illegally w/ prior criminal record. Combination of factors: Right can’t post bc anti-Indian sentiment (I’ve seen more posts making fun of Indians about this from the right than I have seen people concerned), left doesn’t want to confront illegal immigrants who should have been deported. And of course maybe people have just had too much this week.