Karldz

BART added fare gates in August of 2025, and by last month there were 500,000 more rides compared to the year before. Lower crime in public spaces means that public services are better for everyone.

Trump: We are dealing with "a NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME" Rubio, 11 minutes later: We are dealing with an old regime, and it has a lot of unreasonable people in it

Another parent asking questions about tech in schools: “Why, we wondered, are internet platforms designed for entertainment and advertising making their way into D.C. Public Schools kindergarten classrooms?”

A startling measure of how high-trust America once was, and how low-trust it's become (due in part to mass immigration): as recently as the 1970s, well within living memory, people commonly hitchhiked all across the country with total strangers, and didn't think twice about it. That level of trust is now so foreign to us that the thought would barely occur to anyone. And if it did, people would regard you as dangerously stupid for even considering it.

From Brian T. Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, on how many headcounts AI saved in latest earning season (one of many examples): “We have 18,000 people on the company's payroll who code, and we've -- using the AI techniques, we've taken 30% out of the coding technique -- the coding part of the stream of introducing a new product or service or change that saved us about 2,000 people." Meanwhile, economists keep denying that AI is reducing employment or raising labor productivity.

China talks a lot about boosting consumption, but the new budget is conservative. Fiscal impulse is small, consumer subsidies are modest, property sector support is tepid, growth in central transfers to local governments are lower than the projected GDP growth rate, and personal income growth is targeted in line with GDP. Hard to see a major consumption push from this policy mix.

Back in the day, Goldman Sachs was the premier Wall Street bad guy. The investment bank attracted endless scrutiny of the supposedly conflicting and asymmetric arrangements that powered its broker dealer operations. Key among these were its primary dealer arrangements. Today, that attention has shifted to market makers like Jane Street. Key to the perceived conflict is the privileged role these institutions often play as “authorised participants”. The AP term was entirely obscure to most journalists before I started writing about it, and frequently dismissed as an operational irrelevance. “Nothing to see here”. In reality it represents a new type of primary dealer relationship. Except there is a difference. While the Goldmans of this world operated as de facto APs to the New York Fed, modern market makers operate as APs to thousands of ETFs, which (when you deconstruct them) amount to pseudo miniature currency board that back their “units” (we used to call tokens units) with a plethora of different assets, swaps and other mechanisms. All these entities (including the NY Fed) have one objective. Keeping their units pegged to some sort of index. ETFs mostly track stock and market indices. Par (aka “the peg”) equals the index minus the management fee. How they achieve that is often not as transparent as you would think. The NY Fed’s objective is ensuring its tokens deliver returns commensurate with an interest rate that fluctuates based the decisions of its FOMC. The difference is that its rate shifts based on the price externalities over supply of their own units create in the market even if they achieve their target. The same thing does not happen with ETFs. The externalities are ignored and available to market makers like Jane Street to exploit. The analogy isn’t that ETFs are the Fed. It’s that both systems issue “units” to maintain a peg. When unit creation becomes a structural funding loop rather than a marginal arbitrage, price externalities accumulate somewhere. The question isn’t whether the trades close overnight. It’s whether the systemic supply effect of constantly reopening them alters price formation over time — and who captures that transfer.

Stanton and Spencer Jones need to split time as our DH🤷‍♂️ saves Stanton a bit and gets Jones the action he needs. Also righty and lefty plug-ins