Marc Musgrove

CostCo will soon be opening their first standalone gas station, with plans to open more locations if this one succeeds. It'll have 40 pumps and prices much cheaper than competitors, but will only be accessible to CostCo members.

The minimum temperature in California this morning was -14°F in Bridgeport in the Eastern Sierra 🥶

I’m sorry but this is my kind of humor.

THE ALGORITHM STAYED IN BEIJING They told you TikTok was sold to America. They lied. December 18, 2025. The most sophisticated information operation in human history just received official U.S. blessing. The deal structure they hope you never read: ByteDance retains 20% direct ownership. ByteDance “affiliates” retain 30%. Combined: majority economic interest still flows to Beijing. But here is what changes everything. The algorithm never left China. Per sources familiar with the agreement: ByteDance will continue to own and update the recommendation engine. American “auditors” will observe. Observe. Not control. Not own. Not modify. You are witnessing the birth of algorithmic colonialism. 170 million Americans will wake up tomorrow believing their feeds are now “American.” They will scroll content served by code written in Beijing, optimized in Beijing, updated in Beijing. The attention of half the U.S. population under 30 remains architecturally tethered to Chinese servers. Oracle gets cloud hosting fees. Silver Lake gets a press release. Larry Ellison gets a photo op with the President. China keeps the engine that shapes American reality. This is not a divestiture. This is a licensing agreement disguised as sovereignty. The precedent now established: Any nation can maintain psychological infrastructure inside America as long as the holding company has a Delaware address. What was sold: A corporate shell. What was retained: The machine that decides what 170 million people think about next. January 22, 2026. The deal closes. The algorithm stays exactly where it has always been. Welcome to the age where ownership is theater and code is control. The empire that writes the algorithm writes the future. They did not sell TikTok. They rebranded it.

Reuters is reporting that China's classified EUV project has reverse engineered and successfully built a prototype EUV machine with the help of former ASML engineers.

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.