CCRider

Both of those cards are smaller than a fingernail and physically identical, down to the millimeter. The 2005 one held about 30 songs. The 2024 one holds half a million. Storage inside the exact same chip multiplied 15,625 times in 19 years. In 2006, SanDisk's biggest microSD card held 4GB and cost $99, which meant storing a single song ran you about 10 cents. The 2TB version from summer 2024 sells for around $200, which works out to about four hundredths of a cent per song. Per gigabyte, storage got 250 times cheaper in 18 years. The chips themselves were flat back then. Just one storage layer spread across a piece of silicon, like a parking lot with no second floor. To pack in more storage you needed a bigger chip. But microSD wasn't allowed to grow because phones kept getting thinner every year. So engineers went vertical. They started stacking memory in layers, like floors of a tiny building. By 2014, SanDisk was stacking 16 floors inside one microSD, each floor shaved thinner than a human hair. Today's chips from Kioxia and SK Hynix stack 218 to 321 floors of memory inside a single piece of silicon. From the outside, the card looks identical to the 2005 version. Inside, it's a tiny skyscraper. That fingernail-sized card now holds about 47 hours of 4K video, or roughly half a million high-quality photos. The whole thing weighs less than a paperclip. The era of cheaper storage may be ending though. AI companies are buying up every memory chip they can get their hands on for their data centers. SanDisk raised its prices around 50% in November 2025. Memory card prices have jumped over 100% on some models since early 2025. The same 2TB card that hit a low of $176 last April is creeping back toward $200 today. For 19 years, your phone and your camera bankrolled a 250x drop in storage costs. Now that bill gets paid by training the next ChatGPT.

Your grandma's washing machine ran for 19 years. Yours will run for 10. But your fridge lasts about as long as hers did. The story behind why some appliances got worse and others didn't is the actual business story. Norwegian researchers spent years tracking appliance lifespans from the 1940s to the 2020s. Washers dropped from 19.2 to 10.6 years. Ovens went from 23.6 to 14.3. Fridges, dishwashers, and freezers held steady. So the "they don't make 'em like they used to" meme is real, but only for two specific machines, and the cause is messier than a conspiracy theory. For washing machines, the cause is just us. In 1960, a family of four ran two loads of laundry a week. By 2000, eight. Standards for clean had quietly shifted, and the same clothes got washed more often. Washing machines have a cycle limit, and the years just track when you hit it. Quadruple the use, halve the calendar life. The oven story is about decor. The machines mostly worked fine. People threw them out anyway. As kitchens stopped being separate rooms and turned into part of the living area, that ugly old range stopped fitting the look. When families remodeled, the avocado-green stove went out with the wallpaper, working or not. The industry side of the story matches the meme. In 2006, Whirlpool bought Maytag for around $1.7 billion and became the biggest appliance maker on Earth. Ten years later, General Electric sold its century-old appliance business to China's Haier for $5.4 billion. Today, the five biggest manufacturers control about 39% of the global market. But the deeper change is inside the machine. The old timer dial, the one with the satisfying click as it turned, cost about twice as much to make as the digital control board that replaced it. It also tended to outlast the appliance. The new circuit boards cost five to ten dollars to make and usually fail within three to five years, because the tiny electronics inside burn out from power surges. Replacing one runs $200 to $500. On a ten-year-old washer, the repair eats 60 to 70 percent of what a new one costs, so most people just buy new. Real planned obsolescence has happened before. In December 1924, the world's biggest light bulb makers, including General Electric, Osram, and Philips, met secretly in Geneva and agreed to shorten bulb life from 2,500 hours down to 1,000. They invented the playbook. The modern appliance story is messier. Grandma ran her washer twice a week with a clicking dial. We run ours eight times with a $400 circuit board. Most of the missing nine years live in those two changes.

WILL HE TAKE THE CASH? He has already sold out his constituents, and now it looks like John Fetterman may truly be cashing in. According to New Republic Donald Trump has made an offered Fetterman a "financial windfall" if he switches to the Republican party. Your Thoughts

Absolute insanity. Col. Wilkerson reveals Pete Hegseth is illegally flooding the military with low testing recruits. These vulnerable recruits are baptized and told they are soldiers for Christ. The Trump administration is openly building a radicalized religious militia!

@Markzandi Hardly a shock. Régis Barnichon @sffed did a fantastic analysis and the economic contraction and this entire process was modeled last year. x.com/ChazzonKe/stat…

We have a year’s worth of economic data since Liberation Day, when President Trump announced much higher tariffs on most imported goods and countries, and the data are definitive; the tariffs have done significant damage to the economy. Since that day, job growth has come to a standstill, with only the non-traded healthcare industry adding meaningfully to payrolls. Also, since that day, inflation has accelerated, with the consumer expenditure deflator increasing at a 3% year-over-year pace, up from 2.5% before the tariffs and well above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. And the trend lines don’t look good, especially as the economic fallout from the Iran War hits with full force. The higher energy and other commodity prices caused by the war threaten to do even more economic damage than the tariffs, further undermining growth and pushing inflation higher. The U.S. economy is resilient, but just how resilient is set to be tested.

This is who they are. This is who Nick Fuentes is. This is who MAGA is. We told you. Time and again we told you.

Holy Crap Republican Veteran Joni Ernst totally calls out Pete Hegseth for “Stolen Valor” after he lied about getting a combat action badge when he never even engaged in enemy fire.She let him know that claiming “Stolen Valor” is a crime.She has his DD214 & all his files too.

I’ve spent most of the last 48 hours doomscrolling through people’s reactions to the destruction of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court. The people I follow most regularly have split into predictable camps. There are people like me and Adam Serwer who are trying to put the court’s decision into the larger context of the long-standing white hostility to Black voting rights and Black political power. There are the folks like Ian Millhiser who have tried to explain the immediate legal effects of the court’s unconscionable decision. The activist set is taking some time to digest what has happened and plan for next steps, with some vowing to “fight” and ultimately “win” in some fashion. Predictable, too, has been the reaction from the right. White supremacists and, to the extent there’s a difference, Republicans have been giddy. I read one particularly risible piece of trash in National Review crowing about how the Supreme Court’s decision will allow Republicans to gerrymander away Black political power while stopping Democrats from restoring that power. I think that legal analysis is wrong. But what struck me was not the stupidity of the argument but how happy they were to make it. That happiness, from whites, is something that most of the articles and analyses, including mine, have failed to capture sufficiently. It is as distressing to me as the actual decision and the terrible results that will result from it. Republicans always want you to believe that they’re not racist “in their hearts,” that they just happen to prefer a set of policies that coincidentally result in inequality, oppression, and less opportunity for non-white Americans. But this reaction to the death of the VRA proves they’re lying. They hate Black people, and they hate Black people who have political power most of all. Read more from Elie Mystal: thenation.com/.../poli.../vr…

The ballroom went from $200 million & privately funded, to $300 million, to $400 million and taxpayers cover some of it, to MAGA trying to silently jam through $1 BILLION, 100% of which is our tax money, for this ballroom. WASTE, FRAUD, AND ABUSE IN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION.

@TrackAIPAC Money won’t change this stuff:

@TrackAIPAC Defending indefensible massacres, apartheid and Israeli terrorism gets expensive very quickly.

🤣🤣🤣 "reputational crisis" Is that what we're calling waton slaughter of noncombatants now? A "reputation crisis?" #Israel

#Trump underwater in #Missouri. This is just getting started. #moleg @MissouriGOP

The MAGA crowd in Washington has decided that since Europeans don’t sufficiently appreciate Trump, the American bases on the continent must go. This is the strategic reasoning of a man who burns down his own kitchen. American bases in Europe were never a favour. They are the logistical spine of every war the United States fights east of Gibraltar. Ramstein moves the cargo, Aviano launches the jets, Rota services the ships. Without them the Pentagon does not project power into the Middle East. It projects PowerPoint. The fantasy assumes the alternative is aircraft carriers gliding majestically into the Persian Gulf. That era is ending. A modern carrier is a thirteen-billion-dollar trophy that can be reduced to scrap by a couple of hundred cheap missiles fired from the Iranian coast. China noticed. The other fantasy is that America simply fights from home. Picture the alternative: twenty thousand transatlantic sorties shuttling spare parts, munitions, fuel bladders, mechanics and replacement pilots from Norfolk and Dover to wherever the war happens to be. A C-17 burns through roughly 35,000 dollars of fuel every hour it flies, and the round trip from the American east coast to the Gulf is the better part of a day. Multiply that by every bolt, every missile, every spare engine. The war becomes a sustained airborne traffic jam with the bill arriving by the second. So you need land, specifically land near the war. Modern combat aircraft are not Spitfires you fuel up and send off with a wave. An F-35 demands an entire Walmart of spare parts, a small city of technicians, climate-controlled hangars and a supply chain stretching halfway round the planet. Drones need operators, networks, satellites and a steady diet of components no carrier can store. Modern war arrives by container ship and lives in a warehouse. Close the bases, and Washington loses the warehouses. Lose the warehouses, and the next confrontation with Iran is either fought by phone or fought from Kansas with a flight schedule that bankrupts the Treasury before the first missile lands. MAGA thinks shutting Ramstein punishes Europe. It punishes America. Europe will be inconvenienced. America will be unarmed. And so, after a thousand insults, a thousand sneers, a thousand late-night posts about freeloading allies, Europe is quietly drafting the politest letter in diplomatic history. It thanks America for its service. It wishes the troops a safe journey home. It suggests, with great warmth, that Washington might now turn its attention to its neighbours in Latin America, where a fading superpower can busy itself with whatever a fading superpower busies itself with. Spain had its century. Britain had its empire. The Soviets had their parades. Each ended the same way: as a shadow of itself, with the historians left to argue, volume after volume, about precisely when the rot set in and why nobody noticed in time. America is welcome to join them on the shelf.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ If you like what you read, please follow Gandalv on Substack: @gandalv" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">substack.com/@gandalv

I don’t think you understand what just happened. Look at this video. Those candles aren’t on one Treasury. They’re on the 2yr, the 5yr, the 20yr and the 30yr. ALL AT THE SAME TIME. This is the entire US Treasury yield curve breaking simultaneously. Here’s why it matters: A glitch on one chart is plausible. A glitch across four different maturities at the exact same moment IS NOT. When every part of the curve moves like this in sync, only one thing causes it: A massive seller dumping across the whole curve. Not a hedge fund. Not a bank rebalancing. Hedge funds and banks don’t hold every maturity in size like this. This is the kind of selling profile only a central bank or a sovereign wealth fund has. We’re talking country-level. China holds nearly $700 billion in US Treasuries. Japan holds $1.24 trillion. The UK holds $897 billion. If any of those three decided to start exiting in size today, this is exactly what the chart would look like. The bond market is the largest, deepest, most liquid market on earth. When it starts moving like this, something is fundamentally WRONG. The stock market hasn’t reacted yet, but it will. Watch this week closely. Every new move I make in the market gets shared on @InTheAssembly first. If you’re not following them yet, you’re going to regret it.

🚨THIS IS VERY DANGEROUS FOR AMERICAN ECONOMY. Nearly 119,000 American families lost their homes to foreclosure in just the first 3 months of 2026. That is a six year high and it is getting worse every single month. Foreclosure starts are up 20% year over year. Bank repossessions jumped 45% compared to a year ago. Bank repossessions are the most alarming number here. Banks do not take homes back until every other option has been exhausted. A 45% jump means a growing number of Americans have completely run out of options. This is happening because owning a home in America has become unaffordable even for people who already own one. Mortgage rates are above 7%. Property taxes are rising. Home insurance costs have doubled in many states. And wages have not kept up with any of it. People who bought homes at peak COVID prices cannot sell because prices have dropped, cannot refinance because rates are too high, and cannot afford the monthly carrying costs anymore. The S&P 500 is at an all time high. Corporate profits are surging. And 119,000 families lost their homes in a single quarter. When this many homeowners start losing their homes at the same time, banks absorb losses, consumer spending drops, neighborhoods deteriorate, and the broader economy starts feeling it from the bottom up. The 2008 crisis started the same way, not with a market crash, but with foreclosure data that everyone ignored until it was too late.

Per @propublica reported that Coast Guard Commander Elizabeth Nakagawa was denied a D&C for a miscarriage by military insurer Tricare in 2023, even though the procedure was paid for two years prior. Commander Nakagawa had been scheduled to have a D&C, or dilation and curettage, to remove fetal tissue after losing a pregnancy that she wanted. While her doctors appealed Commander Nakagawa almost died. This scenario is playing out over and over again. Women suffering, almost bleeding out. Having organ failure from sepsis. This is what Republicans want to normalize. They want us to think women dying during childbirth or from miscarriage is a chance we will just have to take. Meanwhile, wealthy grifters, the felon, and his cronies are celebrating death and destruction. As long as they are in power and making money American lives will continue to be sacrificed. #DemsUnited

The lawsuit argues Landry violated Louisiana's own constitution. A governor cannot unilaterally suspend an election the legislature did not authorize him to stop. 100,000 ballots already cast. Two potential Republican seat gains if the suspension holds. The court has to move fast - early voting was set for last Saturday.

The fact that @hannah_natanson just won a Pulitzer Prize and still hasn't gotten her phone, laptops, smart watch & other devices back after the FBI raided her Virginia home in January is wild. They seized them in a classified "leak probe." She wasn't the target and wasn't charged with any crimes. She just happens to have over 1,100 confidential government sources. Give her back her property.