I got some links for you

The human brain isn’t built to process numbers about China:

Today China’s share of global export containers is over 36%, though the country represents around a fifth of world GDP. A foreign-business boss in China foresees a reckoning: “There will come a point in time when China and the world simply cannot absorb more Chinese goods, and I think that point is approaching.”

China’s overall trade surplus is on track to exceed $1 trillion this year, with record-setting shipments to Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. From Brasília to Berlin and Bangkok, politicians hear calls to protect established industries from Chinese competition.

Damn, I didn’t know that the Chinese gig workforce was so huge:

Thanks in part to its early embrace of the “superapps” that organise many facets of people’s lives, China is home to the world’s most advanced gig economy. Today 84m people there rely on platform-based forms of employment, including ride-hailing drivers and food-delivery riders. As consumer apps have spread, this sort of work has become prevalent across emerging Asia, too. In India roughly 10m people work in the gig economy, on platforms and off. In Malaysia, it is 1.2m, roughly 7% of the labour force.

It’s an upside-down world in the bond markets:

Analysts at BNP Paribas pointed out in a recent presentation that across global markets, bond yields for supposedly safe governments — the US, Germany and France in particular — are drifting higher, while sovereign borrowers long considered more risky, like Italy and Spain, are fixing their fiscal health and being rewarded by investors. Perceptions of safety are converging.

Welcome to the age of workslop:

In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, our research team at BetterUp Labs has identified one possible reason: Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as “AI slop.” In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as “workslop.” We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.

Here’s how this happens. As AI tools become more accessible, workers are increasingly able to quickly produce polished output: well-formatted slides, long, structured reports, seemingly articulate summaries of academic papers by non-experts, and usable code. But while some employees are using this ability to polish good work, others use it to create content that is actually unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand. The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.

I’ve seen this personally. Some people are so useless that even AI can’t make them competent. Sadly, there’s no glue factory for humans.

Fascinating paper, yet to read it fully:

In this paper, I measure the effect of conflict on the demand for frames of reference, or heuristics that help individuals explain their social and political environment by means of analogy. To do so, I examine how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 reshaped readership of history and social science books in Russia. Combining roughly 4,000 book abstracts retrieved from the online catalogue of Russia’s largest bookstore chain with data on monthly reading patterns of more than 100,000 users of the most popular Russian-language social reading platform, I find that the invasion prompted an abrupt and substantial increase in readership of books that engage with the experience of life under dictatorship and acquiescence to dictatorial crimes, with a predominant focus on Nazi Germany. I interpret my results as evidence that history books, by offering regime-critical frames of reference, may serve as an outlet for expressing dissent in a repressive authoritarian regime

Amen a 100 times:

The problem of the next 18 months isn’t AI disemploying all workers, or students losing competition after competition to nonhuman agents. The problem is whether we will degrade our own capabilities in the presence of new machines. We are so fixated on how technology will outskill us that we miss the many ways that we can deskill ourselves.

Hope or cope?

It’s important to understand that Trump’s push to destroy democracy depends largely on creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Behind closed doors, business leaders bemoan the destruction that Trump is wreaking on the economy. But they capitulate to his demands because they expect him to consolidate autocratic power — which, given his unpopularity, he can only do if businesses and other institutions continue to capitulate.

If this smoke-and-mirrors juggernaut starts to falter, the perception of inevitability will collapse and Trump’s autocracy putsch may very well fall apart.

Welcome to the age of naked and shameless grift:

The foundation’s website was registered on May 28, 2025—just 12 days after Trump concluded his visit to the UAE, where he touted massive commercial deals. Its founder, Dave Lee, exists only as a manga avatar on X who started posting two days after announcing the investment in World Liberty Financial. No LinkedIn profile. No business history. No verifiable identity.

Yet somehow this ghost company, without any sign of even the most basic due diligence or security investigation from the American side, became World Liberty Financial’s investor, pumping $100 million into Trump’s crypto venture on June 26, 2025. The Trump family owns 60% of World Liberty and receives 75% of all token sale proceeds. Do the math—tens of millions flowed directly from this unregistered shell entity into the president’s personal accounts. It is shameless bribery of the American leader without even the pretense of looking into the source of funds.

While this phantom foundation was materializing, the UAE’s state-backed MGX fund was depositing $2 billion into World Liberty Financial using its USD1 stablecoin. Eric Trump announced this deal on May 1, 2025, sitting beside Zach Witkoff—son of Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine and Russia and Kosovo envoy Steve Witkoff—at Dubai’s Token2049 conference.

The American president is up for sale. Wild times.

To listen later:

https://youtu.be/l1wa2w9iGIM?si=E9j_n5MEwH5xEgcw