ChatGPT cheating epidemics, Heinz's glass bottles, billionaires, Altman hiring rules, War markets, the Hungarian anti-populist playbook, Qianlong's imperial delusion, American freight primacy, inflation / deflation, and Texas crypto miners.
Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College
Roy Lee got into Columbia by cheating with ChatGPT, then used it to breeze through 80 percent of his coursework — not because he couldn't do the work, but because he figured college was just a place to meet a co-founder and a wife. He found the co-founder first, and together they built Interview Coder, a tool that hides AI during remote coding interviews so applicants can cheat their way into Amazon internships. Columbia put him on probation for advertising it, which Lee found hypocritical given the school's OpenAI partnership. He's not wrong that enforcement is a joke: surveys show nearly 90 percent of students now use AI for homework, and professors are catching chatbot-written reflections in classes literally titled "Ethics and Artificial Intelligence."
Brand Man: The HJ Heinz Story - Business History - The American Business History Center
HJ Heinz went bankrupt at thirty-one, bedridden with depression after the Panic of 1873 crushed his first condiment venture. By spring 1876 he was back, rebuilding under his wife's name and spending five years repaying every creditor from the wreckage. What followed was a masterclass in brand-building: clear glass bottles to prove purity when competitors used sawdust as filler, obsessive customer research recorded in endless notebooks, product lines that ranged from premium to budget. The meticulous German Lutheran who started selling surplus horseradish at age nine turned a family garden into a global empire, one pickle at a time.
What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat
Noah Hawley went to Jeff Bezos's Campfire retreat in 2018 expecting TED Talks and Wagyu beef. He got exactly that, plus hand, foot, and mouth disease, a broken wrist, and a front-row seat to the psychology of obscene wealth. His thesis: once you're rich enough that everything is free and nothing can be lost, consequences stop teaching you that other people exist. Hawley connects this to the right's newfound contempt for empathy itself, which billionaires now frame as a liberal weapon rather than a basic human capacity. When Peter Thiel says freedom and democracy are incompatible, he means his freedom — yours was never part of the equation.
How to hire
Sam Altman's hiring advice boils down to this: spend half your time on it, never settle, and make candidates actually do the work before you hire them. The audition move works well — have the developer ship real code on weekends, have the PR person draft a release and pitch list — because interviews lie and trial projects don't. Pay slightly below market in cash but be shockingly generous with equity, hire through friends-of-friends until it's physically impossible, and fire fast when someone turns out wrong. The throughline is that mediocre hires compound into cultural decay, and great people only join missions they believe in and teams they'd show up for on Sunday.
Markets in Time of War
This Davy report runs the numbers on five major conflicts and finds that markets don't follow a single wartime playbook. Equities rallied during Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq but tanked during WWII and Afghanistan (though the dot-com bubble muddies that last one). Gold mostly stayed flat until the 21st century, when it surged during Iraq and Afghanistan. Inflation spikes in the first year of every conflict, driven by panic buying, supply chain disruption, and oil shocks. War creates volatility, but over the long arc, equities have marched upward through it all.
What Viktor Orbán’s Opponents Sacrificed to Beat Him
Hungary's opposition didn't beat Viktor Orbán by out-liberaling him — they beat him by hiring one of his own guys to run on corruption and competence instead of culture war. Péter Magyar, a former Fidesz insider, promised "zero tolerance for illegal immigration" and dodged every bait question about Pride parades, uniting everyone from centrists to hardliners under the banner "Not left, not right, only Hungarians." The lesson for populism's critics elsewhere is blunt: stop letting MAGA set the agenda and then reflexively taking the opposite position on policing, borders, and trans sports. Orbán's fall doesn't mean national conservatism is dead (Le Pen and AfD are still ascendant), but it does show that populists lose when you make the fight about their corruption, not their ideology.
Qianlong
In 1793, Emperor Qianlong rejected King George III's request to expand British trade beyond Canton with a letter dripping in condescension — "our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders." Never mind that China's thirst for silver to buy tea and silk was already bleeding the treasury, or that this posture of self-sufficiency was half theater. The refusal was categorical: no permanent embassy, no new ports, no island outpost, and certainly no Christian proselytizing among his subjects. Fifty years later, British gunboats in the Opium War would reveal just how hollow the emperor's imperial bluster had become.
Why Are American Passenger Trains Slow? - American Affairs Journal
American passenger trains are slower today than in the 1940s not because of neglect, but because the country made a deliberate choice after 1970: when Amtrak absorbed money-losing passenger service, private freight railroads optimized their tracks for cargo. A freight rail system nine times more productive per capita than Europe's, moving bulk commodities at a quarter the cost of trucking — but infrastructure now calibrated for 6,600-foot trains hauling 286,000-pound axle loads, not 110 mph passenger service. Europe chose differently (state ownership, dense cities, shorter distances), and got fast passenger trains at the expense of anemic freight networks requiring seven times as many trains to move the same tonnage. The U.S. has excellent intercity rail — it just happens to be for soybeans and coal, not commuters.
Number Go Down - Innovation, Capital, and Deflation from First Principles
Farrington and Meyers dismantle the modern priesthood's core dogma: that 2% inflation is sacred scripture when it was actually pulled from thin air by a New Zealand finance minister on live TV. The fiat economist's nightmare scenario is falling prices, which he mistakes for economic death — but only because he conflates "good deflation" (productivity gains making things cheaper) with "bad deflation" (credit collapse and scrambling for liquidity).
Why China’s crypto cowboys are fleeing to Texas
When China's State Council banned crypto mining in May 2021, executives from Poolin — one of the world's largest Bitcoin pools — were on planes within 24 hours, eventually landing in Texas to tour power plants, shoot AR-15s, and negotiate for cheap electricity on a deregulated grid. The desperation is mutual: Governor Greg Abbott personally courted Chinese miners at a Chengdu conference, while Rockdale's development director fielded calls from companies ready to drop $100 million on new facilities. But Texas isn't the frictionless refuge it seems — the grid failed spectacularly in February, Biden's infrastructure bill threatened new reporting rules, and Chinese miners need local partners to navigate power deals, which means competing with American operators who already know the terrain.
Extras:
Colombia's deadly cocaine war, Chinese immigration to Britain, America's $1m average household, Hong Kong's borrowed time, therapy-speak killed our personalities, India's harsher anti-conversion laws, 30 nights in hotels wish list, translating 1578 El Niño accounts, grimmest job market for graduates, SpaceX: basically a meme stock, satellites replace cell towers by 2045, America's distinct regional cultures, and America's mahjong obsession.