DavidK

Sold a car to Carvana today and I have no idea how they stay in business. Inexplicable.

Does anyone still give a “thank you” wave when someone lets you in while entering traffic? 🙋

Saturday Poll. The next 100 points for the S&P?

Nike spent ten years trying to break the 2-hour marathon. They named a project after it. They built special shoes. They paid the greatest marathoner alive to chase it. Yesterday, a Kenyan runner finally did it in 1:59:30, wearing Adidas. Sabastian Sawe used to be a pacemaker. A pacemaker is the kind of runner you hire to set the speed for the first few miles of a race and then drop out before the finish. In January 2022, Sawe got booked to do exactly that at a half-marathon in Spain. He'd never raced more than three miles in his life. He stayed in for the full 13 and won the whole thing. Adidas signed him not long after. Four years later, he became the first human ever to run an official marathon under 2 hours. Nike, meanwhile, started this whole project in 2016 with a public goal called "Breaking2." They paid for the shoes, the pacemakers, the science labs, and Eliud Kipchoge himself. Kipchoge ran 1:59:40 in Vienna in 2019, but the event was a closed-course exhibition with rotating pacemakers and a pace car projecting a green laser line onto the road. The sport's governing body never recognized it as a real race. It didn't count. Then Nike's running business cratered. Digital sales fell 26% in one quarter. Their share of footwear sold at Dick's Sporting Goods went from 39% to 32% in five months. On Running grew from $330 million to $1.8 billion between 2020 and 2025. Hoka nearly quadrupled. Roger Federer left Nike for On. Nike's board fired the CEO in October 2024. Adidas spent the same period building a better shoe. The new Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 took three years to develop. It weighs 97 grams, about 3.4 ounces, lighter than a deck of cards. A Wall Street Journal-cited study found that wearing a shoe 3.5 ounces lighter saves a runner around 57 seconds across a marathon. Sawe beat the third-place finisher by 58 seconds. Adidas also did something Nike never did for Kipchoge. They wrote a $50,000 check to the official anti-doping body for track and field, asking it to test Sawe more aggressively than any other runner alive. He got tested 25 times in the two months before last year's Berlin Marathon, and Adidas signed up to fund this for the length of his contract. The logic: the moment Sawe ran a marathon this fast, the world was going to ask if he cheated, especially after his countrywoman Ruth Chepngetich got a 3-year doping ban in 2025. Adidas got out ahead of it. The shoe retails at $500 and is barely available. Adidas's Adizero shoes won half of all major marathon races in 2024. Yesterday in London, four of the top five finishers wore the same Adidas shoe. Yomif Kejelcha crossed the line 11 seconds after Sawe and also broke 2 hours. The top three runners all beat the previous world record. Nike's only response was an Instagram post. Three sentences long: "The clock has been reset. There is no finish line." That was their entire public reaction to losing a 10-year moonshot to their biggest rival.

In 1999, David Phillips bought 12,150 cups of chocolate pudding and turned them into 1.25 million free airline miles. Adam Sandler later made a movie about it. He was a 35-year-old civil engineer at UC Davis when he spotted a Healthy Choice promotion offering 500 frequent flyer miles for every 10 product barcodes mailed in. Double the miles if you sent them in by May 31. Three weeks away. Phillips ran the math nobody else did. The cheapest qualifying product was Healthy Choice individual pudding cups at Grocery Outlet. 25 cents each. That meant $2.50 of pudding bought 1,000 airline miles. The airlines themselves valued those miles at $20. He drove a van across California with his mother-in-law, cleaned out 10 different Grocery Outlets around Sacramento, and stacked 12,150 pudding cups from his garage to his living room. When cashiers got suspicious, he told them he was stocking up for Y2K. There was no way he could peel that many barcodes alone before the deadline. So he called the Salvation Army and proposed a trade. He'd donate every cup if their volunteers peeled the labels first. They agreed. Phillips kept the barcodes. The Salvation Army fed people with $3,000 worth of pudding. And he claimed an $815 federal tax deduction on the donation. He mailed the barcodes by May 31 and waited. Two months of silence. His friends told him corporations always renege on these promotions. His own kids asked if he got scammed. Then a giant package arrived. Paper certificates worth 1,253,000 frequent flyer miles. Lifetime AAdvantage Gold status at American Airlines. $150,000 worth of flights. The Wall Street Journal put him on the front page in January 2000. The London Times followed a week later. Paul Thomas Anderson read the coverage and built Punch Drunk Love around him in 2002. Phillips paid for his movie ticket with pudding. Over the next five years he flew his entire family to 43 countries. Net cost after the tax write-off: $2,325. That's $54 per country.