Josh, Mountain Respector

Millions of Americans use buy-now-pay-later because they're stretched thin. The last thing they need is to be penalized on their credit score for it—especially with no transparency, no consistency, and no recourse. I’m demanding answers.

1999 was the peak of modern culture and progress. This clip from the Matrix explains: Why was 1999 selected as “the peak of your civilization”? “Because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization.” A thread written by a GenX'er 🧵

During the Biden administration, H-1B visa holders were buying houses with 97-100% financing. 97% would come from the FHA, with the rest coming from state first-time home buyer programs. Zero money down. Thanks to programs that were supposed to be helping low-income American families buy their own homes. FHA loans to non-permanent residents quickly grew to represent 6% of mortgage issuances. The percentage was undoubtedly higher in places like the DFW area, where H-1B visa holders are disproportionately concentrated. I don’t have anything against people in America on H-1B visas. I’ve said it before—and I’ll say it again—that I’ve found many of them to be great people on an individual level, and I wish them all nothing but the best. Individual immigrants—especially those here legally—are not at fault for flawed US immigration policy. But this might be the most radicalizing thing I’ve ever seen. Not only are American workers forced to compete for jobs, they’re also forced to compete in the housing market against people bringing 0-3% of a house’s cost to the closing table, versus the 10-20% most people have to pay. First, companies import mass numbers of H-1B visa holders, largely in "back office" white-collar fields like IT and accounting. This essentially imposes a lower ceiling on domestic wages in these job categories. Next, these workers—who are generally concentrated in certain geographic areas—create more demand for housing (especially in good school districts), driving up home prices and the cost of living. Then, to top it off, they don’t even have to save up money for a down payment. They can close on a $500k house with $0-15k plus a 97% FHA loan. Meanwhile, ordinary American families are forced to come to with $50-100k for the same down payment. I don’t care how you feel about Trump or what your preferred immigration policies are; there’s no defending this. It screws over hard-working American citizens several different ways over, and it’s yet another reason why I will always be glad Trump won and Kamala Harris lost in 2024.

Wheat exploded in price yesterday (limit up) after USDA forecast that over 8 million acres of HRW (Hard Red Wheat) will be abandoned in the Great Plains That's 37% of planted acreage reported in the March Prospective Planting report, and means U.S. farmers this year will harvest their smallest wheat crop since 1972. This comes on top of already record-low planted acreage heading into the season (lowest since 1919 in some metrics). Global supplies are tightening too. Expect bread, pasta, baked goods, and processed foods to climb in the coming months — and pressure on livestock feed could push meat/dairy prices higher as well. This is another brick in the wall of rising food costs. Grow your own food — that is the answer. Stock seeds, expand the garden, learn to preserve, and connect with local growers.

The US winter wheat crop is going to be terrible. We're past the point of no return for much of the acreage. South Dakota saw the most deterioration this week, while Nebraska and Colorado currently have the worst crop conditions.

👀 Brookfield CEO Bruce Flatt: “We will be rewiring the global economy … We’re laying cloud, artificial intelligence factories, and data centers … to basically rewire the world for the new economy that's coming.”

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink declares a pre-emptive war against American citizens who fight back against his precious AI data centers, warning that people could use inexpensive drones. He admits that BlackRock will control nearly all of the AI data centers being built across the United States because the government cannot afford to fund them on its own. “We have to relook at all forms of security.” “Could it be domestic terrorism using a $3,000 drone?” “Many more things will have to be underground.”

We experienced an outage at Coinbase last night, which is never acceptable. The root cause was a room overheating in an AWS datacenter when multiple chillers failed. We design our services to be redundant to downtime in any one AWS Availability Zone (AZ), and most of our systems worked this way last night, but not all. Our centralized exchange did not. Exchanges have unique architectures that optimize for latency and co-location of clients. It is possible to make exchanges resistant to AZ failures, but this can introduce latency delays that are not desirable along with breaking customer co-location. Given this incident, we'll revisit these tradeoffs to ensure we're giving you the best possible venue to trade. At a minimum, the duration of an outage should be able to be reduced considerably when an AZ move is needed. Thank you to the AWS and Coinbase teams for working through the night to mitigate the issue. We’ll share the detailed technical summary once it's ready.

There are stretches of Alaska tundra holding 12 million mosquitoes per acre. Twelve million. A 900-pound bear that cannot sweat has every reason to find a snow patch. That is the first of four reasons brown bears spend their summers above the tree line. Reason one is bugs. Alaska has 35 species of mosquitoes, more than any other state. Caribou and moose flee to snowfields and windy ridges to escape the swarms. Bears do the same. Cold air sitting on snow grounds the swarm. Without that escape, a summer of bites and constant swatting eats into a bear's fat reserves. Reason two is heat. A brown bear is wearing thick fur over several inches of fat, with no sweat glands underneath. The biggest male ever recorded, shot near Cold Bay in 1948, would have weighed close to 1,850 pounds at peak. Cooling options come down to panting, shade, or pressing belly-down into snow. Reason three is food. Hoary marmots are the size of a small dog, around 10 pounds or more. They live in talus, the loose piles of broken rock that build up along the side of a mountain. Arctic ground squirrels (Alaskans call them parka squirrels) live everywhere from sea level up past where the trees stop growing. Bears dig out both. On top of that, glacier lilies, mountain grasses, and late-emerging greens stay tender for weeks after the valley plants have dried up. The pull of the high country gets even stronger further south. In and around Yellowstone, grizzlies climb above 10,000 feet to eat army cutworm moths that hide in piles of mountain rock by the millions. A single bear can eat 40,000 moths in one day. That works out to roughly 20,000 calories, or about 35 Big Macs of food, all from insects the size of a thumbnail. The moths are up to 83% body fat by weight. In August 1991, researchers counted 51 different grizzlies feeding across four moth sites in a single day. Reason four is travel. A bear's home range can cover hundreds of square miles. Crossing a high ridge is often the shortest line between two valleys, and it keeps a wandering bear clear of dominant males in the lowlands. And for many of these bears, the high country is also home. A 2020 Alaska study tracked 89 brown bear dens above the tree line, all dug into steep alpine slopes where deep snow piles up to insulate them through 6 to 8 months of hibernation. The bear in the clip might just be coming home.