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economics

A collection of 4 posts
Estate Sale — editorial illustration
privacy

Estate Sale

More than forty attorneys general settled in July with what's left of 23andMe: $150 million in allowed claims, $18 million paid, about $2.60 a genome. Add the consumer class action and a bankruptcy court priced the security of a human genome at about $9.40. We have run this estate sale twice before.
05 Oct 2026 5 min read
The Elevator Receipt — editorial illustration
ai-infrastructure

The Elevator Receipt

Meta has $279 billion in data center leases waiting to start and is now planning to rent out the surplus capacity. On October 5, CME's futures on the GPU-hour are scheduled to start trading. Chicago ran this exact play on wheat in the 1850s, and the profits didn't go to the farmers.
28 Sep 2026 5 min read
Coase's Coffee — editorial illustration
ai

Coase's Coffee

Starbucks spends $400 million a year on software and just started replacing Microsoft and IBM tools with AI-built code of its own. A 26-year-old economist explained the move in 1937. He also explains why most companies copying it will regret it.
25 Sep 2026 4 min read
The Time Value of Data
ai

The Time Value of Data

Your data is rotting. Not metaphorically. Not in some hand-wavy "data quality matters" sense. Your data is losing measurable economic value with every hour it sits unprocessed, and the infrastructure you built to manage it has no concept of that loss. No depreciation schedule. No freshness SLOs.
27 Mar 2026 7 min read
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