Episodes

  • GENIUS Act

    GENIUS Act
    Sep 16 2025
    This week we talk about stablecoins, crypto assets, and conflicts of interest.We also discuss the crypto industry, political contributions, and regulatory guardrails.Recommended Book: Throne of Glass by Sarah J. MaasTranscriptA cryptocoin is a unit of cryptocurrency. A cryptocurrency is a type of digital currency that uses some kind of non-central means of managing its ledger—keeping track of who has how much of it, basically.There have been other types of digital currency over the years, but cryptocurrencies often rely on the blockchain or a similarly distributed means of keeping tabs on who has what. A blockchain is a database, often public, of users and a list of those users’ assets that’s distributed between users, and it makes use of some kind of consensus mechanism to determine who actually owns what.Some cryptocurrencies ebb and flow in value, and are thus traded more like a stock or other type of non-fixed, finite asset. Bitcoin, for instance, is often treated like gold or high-growth stocks. NFTs, similarly, create a sort of artificial scarcity, producing unique digital goods by putting their ownership on a blockchain or other proof-of-ownership system.Stablecoins are also cryptocurrencies, but instead of floating, their value growing and dropping based on the interest of would-be buyers, they are meant to maintain a steady value—to be stable, like a national currency.In order to achieve this, the folks who maintain stablecoins often use reserve assets to prop up their value. So if you produce a new stablecoin and want to issue a million of them, each worth one US dollar, you might accumulate a million actual US dollars, put those in a bank account, show everybody the number of dollars in that bank account, and then it’s pretty easy to argue that those stablecoins are each worth a dollar—each coin is a stand-in for one of the dollars in the bank.In a lot of cases, the people issuing these coins aim for this approach, but instead of doing a direct one-for-one, dollar for coin system, they’ll issue a million coins that are meant to be worth a dollar apiece, and they’ll put one-hundred-thousand dollars in a bank account, and the other 900,000 will be made up of bitcoin and stocks and other sorts of things that they can argue are worth at least that much.As of mid-2025, about $255 billion worth of stablecoins have been issued, and about 99% of them have been pegged to the US dollar; Tether’s USDT, Binance’s BUSD, and Circle’s USDC are all tethered to the USD, for instance, though other currencies are also used as peg values, including offerings by Tether and Circle that are pegged to the Euro.Stablecoins that are completely or mostly fiat-backed, which means they have a dollar for each coin issued in the bank somewhere, or close to that, tend to be on average more stable than commodity or crypto-backed stablecoins, which rely mostly or entirely on things like bitcoin or gold tucked away somewhere to justify their value. Which makes sense, as while you can argue, hey look, I have a million dollars worth of gold, and I’m issuing a million coins, each worth a dollar, that asset’s value can change day-to-day, and that can make the value of those coins precarious, at least compared to fiat-backed alternatives.Because stablecoins are not meant to change in value, they’re not useful as sub-ins for stocks or other sorts of interest-generating bets, like bitcoin. Instead, they’re primarily used by folks who want to trade cryptoassets for other sorts of cryptoassets, for those who want to avoid paying taxes, or want to otherwise hide their wealth, and for those who want to transfer money in such a way that they can avoid government sanctions and/or tariffs on those sorts of transfers.What I’d like to talk about today is a new US federal law, the GENIUS Act, which was heavily pushed by the crypto industry, and which looks likely to make stablecoins a lot more popular, for better and for worse.—The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act, or GENIUS Act, was introduced in the Senate by a Republican senator from Tennessee in May of 2025, was passed in June with a bipartisan vote of 68-30—the majority of Republicans and about half of Democratic senators voting in favor of it—and after the House passed it a month later, President Trump signed it into law on July 18.Again, this legislation was heavily pushed by the crypto industry, which generously funded a lot of politicians, mostly Republican, but on both sides of the aisle, in recent years, as it serves folks who want a broader reach for existing stablecoins, and who want to see more stablecoins emerge and flourish, as part of a larger and richer overall crypto industries.Folks who are against this Act, and other laws like it that have been proposed in recent years, contend that while it’s a good idea to have some kind of regulation in place for the crypto industry, this approach isn’t the ...
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    14 mins
  • Salt Typhoon

    Salt Typhoon
    Sep 9 2025
    This week we talk about cyberespionage, China, and asymmetrical leverage.We also discuss political firings, hardware infiltration, and Five Eyes.Recommended Book: The Fourth Turning Is Here by Neil HoweTranscriptIn the year 2000, then-General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Jiang Zemin (jong ZEM-in), approved a plan to develop so-called “cyber coercive capabilities”—the infrastructure for offensive hacking—partly as a consequence of aggressive actions by the US, which among other things had recently bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade as part of the NATO campaign in Yugoslavia.The US was a nuclear power with immense military capabilities that far outshone those of China, and the idea was that the Chinese government needed some kind of asymmetrical means of achieving leverage against the US and its allies to counter that. Personal tech and the internet were still relatively young in 2000—the first iPhone wouldn’t be released for another seven years, for context—but there was enough going on in the cyber-intelligence world that it seemed like a good point of leverage to aim for.The early 2000s Chairman of the CCP, Hu Jintao, backed this ambition, citing the burgeoning threat of instability-inducing online variables, like those that sparked the color revolutions across Europe and Asia, and attack strategies similar to Israel’s Stuxnet cyberattack on Iran as justification, though China’s growing economic dependence on its technological know-how was also part of the equation; it could evolve its capacity in this space relatively quickly, and it had valuable stuff that was targetable by foreign cyberattacks, so it was probably a good idea to increase their defenses, while also increasing their ability to hit foreign targets in this way—that was the logic here.The next CCP Chairman, Xi Jinping, doubled-down on this effort, saying that in the cyber world, everyone else was using air strikes and China was still using swords and spears, so they needed to up their game substantially and rapidly.That ambition seems to have been realized: though China is still reportedly regularly infiltrated by foreign entities like the US’s CIA, China’s cybersecurity firms and state-affiliated hacker groups have become serious players on the international stage, pulling off incredibly complex hacks of foreign governments and infrastructure, including a campaign called Volt Typhoon, which seems to have started sometime in or before 2021, but which wasn’t discovered by US entities until 2024. This campaign saw Chinese hackers infiltrating all sorts of US agencies and infrastructure, initially using malware, and then entwining themselves with the operating systems used by their targets, quietly syphoning off data, credentials, and other useful bits of information, slowly but surely becoming even more interwoven with the fabric of these systems, and doing so stealthily in order to remain undetected for years.This effort allowed hackers to glean information about the US’s defenses in the continental US and in Guam, while also helping them breach public infrastructure, like Singapore’s telecommunications company, Singtel. It’s been suggested that, as with many Chinese cyberattacks, this incursion was a long-game play, meant to give the Chinese government the option of both using private data about private US citizens, soldiers, and people in government for manipulation or blackmail purposes, or to shut down important infrastructure, like communications channels or electrical grids, in the event of a future military conflict.What I’d like to talk about today is another, even bigger and reportedly more successful long-term hack by the Chinese government, and one that might be even more disruptive, should there ever be a military conflict between China and one of the impacted governments, or their allies.—Salt Typhoon is the name that’s been given to a so-called '“advanced persistent threat actor,” which is a formal way of saying hacker or hacker group, by Microsoft, which plays a big role in the cybersecurity world, especially at this scale, a scale involving not just independent hackers, but government-level cyberespionage groups.This group is generally understood to be run out of the Chinese Ministry of State Security, or MSS, and though it’s not usually possible to say something like that for certain, hence the “generally understood” component of that statement, often everyone kind of knows who’s doing what, but it’s imprudent to say so with 100% certainty, as cyberespionage, like many other sorts of spy stuff, is meant to be a gray area where governments can knock each other around without leading to a shooting war. If anyone were to say with absolute certainty, yes, China is hacking us, and it’s definitely the government, and they’re doing a really good job of it, stealing all our stuff and putting us at risk, that would either require the targeted government to ...
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    16 mins
  • Sudan's Civil War

    Sudan's Civil War
    Sep 2 2025
    This week we talk about the RSF, coups, and the liberal world order.We also discuss humanitarian aid, foreign conflicts, and genocide.Recommended Book: Inventing the Renaissance by Ada PalmerTranscriptIn 2019, a military government took over Sudan, following a successful coup d'état against then-President Omar al-Bashir, who had been in power for thirty years. al-Bashir’s latter years were plagued by popular demonstrations against rising costs of living and pretty abysmal living standards, and the government lashed out against protestors violently, before then dissolving local government leaders and their offices, replacing them with hand-picked military and intelligence officers. After he responded violently to yet another, even bigger protest, the military launched their coup, and the protestors pivoted to targeting them, demanding a civilian-run democracy.Just two months later, after unsuccessful negotiations between the new military government and the folks demanding they step aside to allow a civilian government to take charge, the military leaders massacred a bunch civilians who hosted a sit-in protest. Protestors shifted to a period of sustained civil disobedience and a general strike, and the government agreed to hold elections in 2022, three years later, and said that they would investigate the massacre their soldiers committed against those protestors. They also established a joint civilian-military unity government that would run things until the new, civilian government was eventually formed.In late-2021, though, the Sudanese military launched another coup against the unity government, and that council was dissolved, a state of emergency was declared, and all the important people who were helping the country segue back into a democracy were arrested. A new military-only junta was formed, incorporating the two main military groups that were running things, at that point.In 2023, those two military bodies that were working together to run Sudan via this military junta, the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group that were made into a sort of official part of the country’s military, while remaining separate from it, and the official Sudanese army, both started aggressively recruiting soldiers and taunting each other with military maneuvers. On April 15 that year, they started firing on each other.This conflict stemmed from the Sudanese military demanding that the RSF dissolve itself, all their people integrating into the country’s main military apparatus, but some kind of stand-off seemed to be a long time coming, as the RSF started its recruiting efforts earlier that year, and built up its military resources in the capital as early as February. But as I mentioned, this tinderbox erupted into a shooting war in April, beginning in the capital city, Khartoum, before spreading fast to other major cities.So what eventually became a Sudanese civil, which at this point has been ongoing for nearly 2.5 years, began in April of 2023, was long-simmering before that, is between two heavily armed military groups that ran the country together for a few years, and which both claim to be the rightful leaders or owners of the country, and they’re fighting each other in heavily populated areas.This war was also kicked off and is now sustained in part by ethnic conflicts between the main belligerents, which includes the aforementioned Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces, but also the Sudan Liberation Movement, which governs a fairly remote and self-sufficient mountainous area in the southern part of the country, and the al-Hilu movement, which supports the RSF’s efforts in the region.What I’d like to talk about today is what’s happening on the ground in Sudan, in the third year of this conflict, and at a moment when the world’s attention seems to have refocused elsewhere, major governments that would have previously attempted to stop the civil war have more or less given up on doing so, and the Sudanese civilians who have been pulled into the conflict, or who have been forced to flee their homes as a consequence of this war, have been left without food, shelter, or any good guys to cheer for.—Sudan has been plagued by coups since it gained independence from the UK and Egypt in 1956; it’s seen 20 coup attempts, 7 of them successful, including that most recent one in 2019, since independence.This region also has a recent history of genocide, perhaps most notably in the western Darfur region, where an estimated quarter of a million people from a trio of ethnic groups were killed between 2003 and 2005, alone, and something like 2.7 million people were displaced, forced to flee the systematic killings, strategically applied sexual violence, and other abuses by the Sudanese military and the local, rebel Janjaweed militias, which were often armed by the government and tasked with weeding out alleged rebel sympathizers in the region.This new civil war is on a completely different ...
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    15 mins
  • Intel Bailout

    Intel Bailout
    Aug 26 2025
    This week we talk about General Motors, the Great Recession, and semiconductors.We also discuss Goldman Sachs, US Steel, and nationalization.Recommended Book: Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek ThompsonTranscriptNationalization refers to the process through which a government takes control of a business or business asset.Sometimes this is the result of a new administration or regime taking control of a government, which decides to change how things work, so it gobbles up things like oil companies or railroads or manufacturing hubs, because that stuff is considered to be fundamental enough that it cannot be left to the whims, and the ebbs and eddies and unpredictable variables of a free market; the nation needs reliable oil, it needs to be churning out nails and screws and bullets, so the government grabs the means of producing these things to ensure nothing stops that kind of output or operation.That more holistic reworking of a nation’s economy so that it reflects some kind of socialist setup is typically referred to as socialization, though commentary on the matter will still often refer to the individual instances of the government taking ownership over something that was previously private as nationalization.In other cases these sorts of assets are nationalized in order to right some kind of perceived wrong, as was the case when the French government, in the wake of WWII, nationalized the automobile company Renault for its alleged collaboration with the Nazis when they occupied France.The circumstances of that nationalization were questioned, as there was a lot of political scuffling between capitalist and communist interests in the country at that time, and some saw this as a means of getting back against the company’s owner, Louis Renault, for his recent, violent actions against workers who had gone on strike before France’s occupation—but whatever the details, France scooped up Renault and turned it into a state-owned company, and in 1994, the government decided that its ownership of the company was keeping its products from competing on the market, and in 1996 it was privatized and they started selling public shares, though the French government still owns about 15% of the company.Nationalization is more common in some non-socialist nations than others, as there are generally considered to be significant pros and cons associated with such ownership.The major benefit of such ownership is that a government owned, or partially government owned entity will tend to have the government on its side to a greater or lesser degree, which can make it more competitive internationally, in the sense that laws will be passed to help it flourish and grow, and it may even benefit from direct infusions of money, when needed, especially with international competition heats up, and because it generally allows that company to operate as a piece of government infrastructure, rather than just a normal business.Instead of being completely prone to the winds of economic fortune, then, the US government can ensure that Amtrak, a primarily state-owned train company that’s structured as a for-profit business, but which has a government-appointed board and benefits from federal funding, is able to keep functioning, even when demand for train services is low, and barbarians at the gate, like plane-based cargo shipping and passenger hauling, becomes a lot more competitive, maybe even to the point that a non-government-owned entity may have long-since gone under, or dramatically reduced its service area, by economic necessity.A major downside often cited by free-market people, though, is that these sorts of companies tend to do poorly, in terms of providing the best possible service, and in terms of making enough money to pay for themselves—services like Amtrak are structured so that they pay as much of their own expenses as much as possible, for instance, but are seldom able to do so, requiring injections of resources from the government to stay afloat, and as a result, they have trouble updating and even maintaining their infrastructure.Private companies tend to be a lot more agile and competitive because they have to be, and because they often have leadership that is less political in nature, and more oriented around doing better than their also private competition, rather than merely surviving.What I’d like to talk about today is another vital industry that seems to have become so vital, like trains, that the US government is keen to ensure it doesn’t go under, and a stake that the US government took in one of its most historically significant, but recently struggling companies.—The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 was a law passed by the US government after the initial whammy of the Great Recession, which created a bunch of bailouts for mostly financial institutions that, if they went under, it was suspected, would have caused even more damage to the US economy.These banks had been playing ...
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    16 mins
  • Sterile Insect Technique

    Sterile Insect Technique
    Aug 19 2025
    This week we talk about flesh-eating screwworms, weeds, and the US cattle industry.We also discuss genetic modification, procreation, and tsetse flies.Recommended Book: 1177 BC by Eric H ClineTranscriptThe term ‘autocidal control‘ refers to a collection of techniques that are meant to control populations of some type of living thing, animal or plant, by disrupting their procreationary capacity.So rather than attempting to control pest by spraying poisons all over the place, or controlling plants you consider to be invasive weeds by launching huge weed-pulling efforts in the afflicted areas, you might instead figure out how to keep this current generation of pests and weeds from having as many offspring as they might otherwise have, and then repeat the process with the next generation, and the next, and so on, until the unwanted species is either eradicated in the relevant region, or reduced to such a small number that its presence is no longer such a big deal.There are all kinds of approaches one might take in trying to achieve this sort of outcome.Experimental genetic modification measures, for instance, have been tried in, so far at least, limited ways, the idea being to either make the disliked species less competitive in some way (by making them slower, and thus more likely to be eaten by predators, maybe), or by making them less likely to have offspring, or less likely to have fit offspring—the next generation becomes super slow and clumsy, or they’re carriers of a gene that keeps them from procreating as much, or at all.That approach seems like it could be effective, and there are quite a few efforts, globally, that’re working to refine and perfect it with mosquito species in particular, specifically the ones that are carriers of malaria-causing parasites and similar maladies that cause immense harm to local human (and other mammal) populations.There have also been attempts to spray mating grounds with pheromones that disrupt mating behavior, or to use what’s called the Autodissemination Augmented by Males, or ADAM approach, which has been used to decent effect in some trials, and which involves basically just sprinkling a bunch of male mosquitos with pesticide, releasing them into mosquito mating grounds, and then having them deliver those pesticides to the females they mate with.All of these efforts are meant to reduce populations via some procreationary mechanism, while also attempting to ameliorate some of the other issues associated with other, widely used pest- and weed-control approaches. Most of which rely on some kind of chemical being introduced into the right environment, that chemical helping to kill or disrupt these populations, but in many cases also leading to unwanted, and often initially unforeseen side effects, like those chemicals messing with other species, getting into the groundwater and possibly being associated with maladies in humans, and so on.What I’d like to talk about today is another approach, the sterile insect technique, why it’s become so popular in recent decades, and how it’s being used, today, to address a burgeoning population of a pest that was previously eliminated in North America using this technique, but which has recently become a problem, once more.—The New World screwworm fly is thus named because its larvae, its baby offspring, are planted in warm-blooded animals. These offspring eat not just dead tissues, like the maggots of other flies, but healthy tissues as well.These maggots are often deposited near wounds, like cuts or scrapes, but also injuries caused by the castration or dehorning of cattle, or orifices and other sensitive areas with soft tissue, like the corner of a host’s eye.They don’t typically infest humans, but it does happen, and they’re most likely to be found on wild and domesticated mammals, the females of the species depositing somewhere between 250 and 500 eggs in the flesh of their hosts, the maggots screwing their way deeper into their host’s flesh as they grow, burrowing and eating for the next three to seven days, at which point they fall off and enter the next stage of their lifecycle. By that point the host may already be dead, depending on the extent of the damage these things manage to cause in the interim.These flies were originally found across the Americas and on some Caribbean islands, and they have long been a headache for cattle ranchers in particular, as they will sometimes infect one cow or goat, and then work their way through the entire herd in relatively short order, causing enough damage to seriously injure or kill a whole lot of the rancher’s stock.As a result, humans have been trying to get rid of these things for ages, but nothing seemed to make much of a dent in their populations until the emergence of what’s called the sterile insect technique, which is exactly what it sounds like: a method of autocidal control that involves sterilizing members of the species, usually the ...
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    14 mins
  • AI CapEx

    AI CapEx
    Aug 12 2025
    This week we talk about tech bubbles, building moats, and infrastructure investment.We also discuss capital expenditure, data centers, and employee compensation.Recommended Book: The Art of Gathering by Priya ParkerTranscriptMany technology booms have early periods in which innovators have a first-mover advantage, and a lot of what happens in their industry is informed by the decisions those innovators make.After that—depending on the technology, but this is common enough to be considered a trend—after that there tends to be a period of build-out and consolidation amongst the people and business entities that survived that initial, innovation-focused throw-down.In the context of personal computers, this moment saw computer-makers like Microsoft and Apple scramble to pivot from figuring out what an operating system should look like and whether or not to use mice to navigate user interfaces, to a period in which they were rushing to scale-up the manufacture of now-essential, but previously comparably rare components: suitable screens for their monitors, chips that could power their increasingly graphical machines, and the magnetic materials necessary to produce floppy disks and spindle-based hard drives.There’s an initial period in which new ideas and approaches provide these entities with a moat that protects them against competition, in other words, but then the game they’re playing changes, the rules are more fully understood and to some degree locked into place and agreed upon, and instead of competing for the biggest, most brazen new ideas, they lock onto one set of ideas that seemed to be the best of what’s available at that moment and build on those, iterating them at a regular cadence, but focusing especially on scaling them.So at this second stage, they’re investing in the ability to out-produce their competition in some way, so they can eventually bypass that competition and (they hope) safely increase their prices and make a profit, as opposed to just larger and larger revenues with equal or greater expenses, continuing to be reliant on investor injections of capital, rather than generating their own surplus returns.By many analysts’ and insiders’ estimates, we’ve just entered that second stage in the generative AI industry. That’s the sort of AI that generates text and images and code and such, and it’s increasingly becoming a sort of commodity, rather than a new, hot things that few companies can offer the market.What I’d like to talk about today are the increasingly massive financial figures associated with this industry’s shift to that second stage of development, and why some of those insiders and analysts are voicing fresh concerns that this could all lead to a bubble, and possibly an historically large one.—There are many ways we could measure the growth of the AI industry over the years.The US market size, for instance, which is a measure of the value of AI-oriented companies based on how much shares of their company cost or would cost on the open market, has ballooned from just over $100 billion in 2022 to an estimated $174 billion in 2025. That figure is expected to grow at a not quite 20% compound annual growth rate through 2034, which, if accurate, would put this market, in the US alone, at more than $850 billion.Another metric we might use is that of capital expenditure, or capex, in this corner of the tech industry, which refers to the amount of money AI companies are using to buy, upgrade, or maintain their long-term assets, like new computer chips or the data centers they fill with those chips.The seven most valuable US tech companies—Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, NVIDIA, and Broadcom (that last spot formerly held by Tesla, which was dropped from this designation in late-2024)—just those seven companies have spent $102.5 billion on capex this last financial quarter (and most of that was from just four of them, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon, the remainder only spending something like $6.7 billion).That’s a staggering amount of money, and due to a recent drop in consumer demand—the money individual US citizens spend on things like food and clothes and smartphones and cars and all the other things people buy—AI-related capex, spending by these massive US tech companies, has added more to GDP growth than consumer spending for the past two quarters.All the things all the people in the US bought over the past two quarters did not cost as much, in aggregate, as what these companies spent during the same period, on new and existing assets. That’s pretty wild.And it’s the consequence, partly, of the shift in these companies’ focus from providing goods and services that relied heavily on people—salary and stock compensation, basically, which is not a capex expense, because its spent on employees, not stuff—to spending heavily on all that infrastructure that they believe will be required to help them compete with those ...
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    18 mins
  • Dynamic Pricing

    Dynamic Pricing
    Aug 5 2025
    This week we talk about surge pricing, Walmart, and the Robinson-Patman Act.We also discuss personal data, AC settings, and Delta’s earnings call.Recommended Book: How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared RubinTranscriptThe US Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 is also called the Anti-Price Discrimination Act, and it was passed to make it illegal for a product supplier to charge different prices to different customers.So a company that makes candy bars wouldn’t be allowed to charge one price to most of their customers, all the smaller and mid-sized convenience stores and mom-and-pop grocery stores, for instance, and then a lower price to the big stores, the Walmarts and Amazons of the world.The concern was that these larger players, which at the time this law was passed were burgeoning grocery stores like A&P, would be able to achieve a monopolistic position in the market for these goods, these slightly lower prices giving them one more advantage over their smaller competitors.During the four decades or so of this Act’s enforcement, small grocery stores has prices that were, on average, about 1% higher than those offered by their large competitors, and the eight largest grocery store chains only captured about 25% of all grocery sales in the US—essentially every city and town of any size had at least one small grocery store, and most had several of them, during this period. It was a very competitive market.During the Reagan administration in the 80s, though, enforcement was abandoned, as the folks in charge of that enforcement were convinced this Act was holding back growth; they saw it as a handout to small businesses at the expense of big business, so while it technically remained on the books, they just stopped enforcing it, and the big businesses in these spaces got the message pretty quickly.Walmart was the first big business to really lean into the new powers afforded them by this fresh governmental stance, and that led to it becoming the country’s largest grocery store chain by 2001, and other big grocery brands, like Kroger and Safeway, began to do the same, consolidating all their buying so they could put in huge orders like Walmart was able to put in, and that allowed them to demand lower prices, which in turn allowed them to dramatically increase profits and gobble up their smaller competition.All of which led to the emergence of food deserts across the country, a term that was coined in 1995 to refer to areas where there are simply no grocery stores within a reasonable distance of relatively large populations of people, because smaller grocery stores can no longer compete, even when they’re the only player in town; folks have to travel to the larger chain stores, and have no real options closer to home, which can result in food precariousness, and situations in which the only nearby food options are unhealthy ones—the snacks at gas stations, for instance.This same general pattern played out across all retail spaces, including pharmacies and bookstores and athletic supply stores, and between 1982 and 2017, the total market share of independent retailers in the US dropped from 53% to 22%.Which in some ways is great at the federal level, as—and this is what the Reagan administration seemed to want, back in the 80s—big businesses can grow a lot faster and bigger than small businesses, and that can lead to outsized GDP numbers, and other such macro-scale figures.Unfortunately, while independent retailers tend to keep nearly half of the revenue they pull in within their local community, major chains only keep something like 14% in the local community—so the shift from independent to chain retailers has had a deleterious impact on communities across the US, in the sense of having less competition, having food and other sorts of product deserts, and in terms of tax revenues and overall economic wealth being sapped from these areas and moved to other places, creating some relatively few winners and a whole lot of losers, in the process.What I’d like to talk about today is another type of variable pricing, this one more directly aimed at consumers, and enabled, at least in its modern incarnation, by big data and the devices we use every day.—Dynamic pricing refers to changing the price of goods or services based on all sorts of variables.Demand or surge pricing, for instance, might see the price of a bus ticket or rideshare ride with Uber cost more during rush-hour, the idea being that there are only so many bus seats and only so many available rideshare rides to go around, and when everyone’s either trying to get to work or get home from work, there will be a lot more people wanting these finite number of seats and rides than there are seats and rides available.Upping the prices, then, is a means of determining who wants these things the most, because they’re willing to pay at times massively inflated prices for something that would cost far less in an hour or two, ...
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    17 mins
  • Age-Gating

    Age-Gating
    Jul 29 2025
    This week we talk about lobbying, Steam, and adult-themed games.We also discuss cultural influence, extreme ideologies, and itch.io.Recommended Book: Limitarianism by Ingrid RobeynsTranscriptIn mid-July of 2025, Valve, the company behind the gaming platform Steam, announced that it was tightening its adult-only content guidelines, its not-safe-for-work content, basically, following pressure by the payment processing companies it works with.Its new policy even says that “content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers” is not allowed on Steam’s network, which in practice means these games will be more difficult to find and purchase, because of Steam’s prominence in the non-console gaming space.About a week later, the founder of Itch.io, another gaming marketplace that’s similar in some ways to Steam, as it allows creators to sell their games to folks who use the platform, but which is a bit smaller and more focused on indie games, said that itch.io would likewise be removing NSFW, adult-themed games from its catalog, due to concerns that the payment processors they work with have communicated to their company.In no uncertain terms, he said itch.io wouldn’t be able to operate without these payment processors, so they had to “prioritize our relationships with our payment partners and take immediate steps toward compliance.”The folks whose games were removed from itch.io as part of this purge were given no warning, and many critics of the decision have pointed to similarities between this gaming-world censorship, as they see it at least, and what happened back in 2018, when social platform Tumblr banned pornographic content, the company’s owner citing pressure from credit card companies as the rationale for that decision—a decision that led to a huge exodus of users from the platform and a whole lot of criticism from creators, users, and folks who keep tabs on censorship-related issues.There’s been a lot of the same in response to these moves by itch.io, Steam, and similar platforms which have recently decoupled themselves from certain types of adult content, and statements from these companies seems to be illustrative of what’s happening here: they’re completely reliant on these payment processing companies to exist, because without them they can’t easily accept money for what they’re selling. Thus, they’d better comply with what these companies tell them to do, or else.There have been claims from some folks who have watched this sort of purge occur in other corners of the web over the years that credit card companies are anti-porn and anti-anything-NSFW because the chargeback rate is huge in these spaces—something like 10-times the number of chargebacks, which is what happens when customers say they didn’t buy something, and in some cases then get their money back, after the fact, compared to the next-highest facet of the payment processing industry. And that’s both a pain and potentially expensive.Others have pointed out that these sorts of purges tend to be political in nature: the groups that push payment processors to adopt these stances are typically vehemently anti-porn, either ultra-conservative or radical-feminist in nature—two ideologies that are oppositional in many ways, but they loop back around when it comes to some topics and have similar, burn it all down ideas about adult content; we don’t approve, so let’s get rid of all this stuff that we don’t approve of by whatever means necessary.In most cases this means lobbying to get influence in various political spheres, including with politicians who control various governments’ relationships with these payment processors. If they can get the ear of those who make the rules to which these payment processors must adhere, they can then threaten the payment processors—who in many countries, though especially the United States, have pretty sweet deals that allow them to more or less collect a tax on every payment made for everything across every sector—saying, well, we can push our friends in the government to take those sweetheart deals away. So unless you want to suffer that consequence, push these customers of yours to take down this stuff we don’t like.What I’d like to talk about today are some similar and overlapping movements that are beginning to see censorship-related success across these and other aspects of the web, and the seeming purpose behind these pushes to censor and purge and create the apparatuses by which censorship and purges can be more thoroughly performed.—One of the big concerns about banning certain types of games is that games are just content, and if you’re able to find a reliable means of banning one type of content, you can then, in theory at least, using that same lever to ban other types of content, like books, articles, films, and so on. Some of the ...
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    16 mins