Powderhorn

In late January 2025, 10 days after Donald Trump was sworn in for a second time as president of the United States, an economic conference in Brussels brought together several officials from the recently deposed Biden administration for a discussion about the global economy. In Washington, Trump and his wrecking crew were already busy razing every last brick of Joe Biden’s legacy, but in Brussels, the Democratic exiles put on a brave face. They summoned the comforting ghosts of white papers past, intoning old spells like “worker-centered trade policy” and “middle-out bottom-up economics”. They touted their late-term achievements. They even quoted poetry: “We did not go gently into that good night,” Katherine Tai, who served as Biden’s US trade representative, said from the stage. Tai proudly told the audience that before leaving office she and her team had worked hard to complete “a set of supply-chain-resiliency papers, a set of model negotiating texts, and a shipbuilding investigation”.

It was not until 70 minutes into the conversation that a discordant note was sounded, when Adam Tooze joined the panel remotely. Born in London, raised in West Germany, and living now in New York, where he teaches at Columbia, Tooze was for many years a successful but largely unknown academic. A decade ago he was recognised, when he was recognised at all, as an economic historian of Europe. Since 2018, however, when he published Crashed, his “contemporary history” of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, Tooze has become, in the words of Jonathan Derbyshire, his editor at the Financial Times, “a sort of platonic ideal of the universal intellectual”.

Each Wednesday, there is something referred to as "Church Night" at the regional burner warehouse that happens to be in walking distance.

It's really a salon. You break into a conversation when you have something of use to say after overhearing a conversation while other activities occur to a varying extent. Interrupting is almost encouraged if you have useful information or insight.

I wouldn't say I attend Church Night religiously.

But this week, I met someone new, and as it happens he can actually fucking spar at my level because of his writing background, but he also happens to work for a solar installation firm that may be in need of a writer.

I believe in this shit, so count me in. I don't want to start the chalk marks of 2026.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has endured the year-long parade of attacks, threats, and insults from President Donald Trump with the sort of reserve expected of nonpartisan public officials — until Sunday.

(eds note: fantastic use of "reserve" in the lede)

In a video released on social media, Powell revealed that the Department of Justice — through the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office — had opened an investigation into Powell’s oversight of renovations being made to the Federal Reserve’s historic headquarters.

“The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the president,” Powell, whose term as chair will end in May, said. “This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions — or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.”

Powell, who has worked in American monetary policy since the 1980s, has been a public target of Trump, who seems to believe he should control the nation’s traditionally independent monetary policy (along with the rest of the federal government). Trump has repeatedly bashed Powell and the reserve for refusing to lower the federal interest rate, calling Powell a “stupid person” and threatening to fire him from his position, despite lacking the authority to do so.

Imagine if President Barack Obama — or God forbid, Bernie Sanders — decided to have the Justice Department open a criminal investigation into the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

What if a Democratic president unilaterally jacked up tariffs and kicked off a trade war with our long-time allies — while getting pantsed in a trade war with the Chinese communist party? What’s worse, imagine if they demanded select privately held companies be part-owned by the U.S. government.

Screams of righteous outrage would echo from the steel and glass caverns of Wall Street. This would fulfill decades of stern warnings rooted in Milton Friedman shibboleths about free trade, free people, and fiscal responsibility.

But all this gets ditched when Donald Trump does it. Instead, titans of American industry abandon long-held free market beliefs and line up to perform ornate acts of supplication to the president. Apparently, if you have an unhinged would-be autocrat in charge of the national economy and so much business is wrapped up in government spending, the right thing to do is kiss his ass in the public square and say it smells like roses, later claiming that you did it all for the shareholders. It is better for the balance sheet to be in the mad king’s good graces.

All else aside, this is some great writing. It gets better from here.

Global temperatures in 2025 did not quite reach the heights of 2024, thanks to the cooling influence of the natural La Niña weather pattern in the Pacific, new data from the European Copernicus climate service and the Met Office shows.

But the last three years were the world's warmest ever recorded, bringing the planet closer to breaching international climate targets.

Despite natural cooling from La Niña, 2025 was still much warmer than temperatures even a decade ago, as humanity's carbon emissions continue to heat the planet.

That will inevitably lead to further temperature records – and worsening weather extremes – unless emissions are sharply reduced, scientists warn.

"If we go twenty years into the future and we look back at this period of the mid-2020s, we will see these years as relatively cool," said Dr Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus.

La Mina Cantina Bar sits in full view of the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge that connects the banks of Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Every day over 11,000 pedestrians, and over 2,000 passenger vehicles traverse the 1,050 foot-long concrete isthmus to go to work and school, to run errands and to go out at night. In the mornings, they can stop by La Mina to pick up breakfast tacos and coffee. In the evenings, the bar offers post-work drinks, homestyle Mexican fare, and karaoke. Just outside its entrance, the crosswalk is monitored by Customs and Border Patrol agents, which are just as fixed into the landscape as the muddy waters of the Rio Grande or the security fencing around the bridge above it.

Enrique — “Quique” — and his brother Arturo have owned La Mina for almost four years. They purchased the space for cheap in the aftermath of the pandemic, which decimated Laredo’s once-vibrant city center.

“I don’t want to complain,” Quique says of his circumstances while bartending over a counter framed by twinkling Christmas lights and neon homages to Cerveza Estrella Jalisco, Tecate, and the second-most venerated entity in Mexico: La Selección, the national soccer team. Costs were “always expensive,” he says of the last few years of business in the region, but now things are going “very poorly and I think it will probably get worse.”

This is what happens when you have too many billionaires.

Everest has been turned into a run-of-the-mill tourist attraction. Space tourism is over now that any celebrity can blast off into orbit. Next up: a hotel on the Moon, now taking reservations for only about six years from now, if you're willing to make a small deposit.

For the low, low deposit cost of either $250,000 or $1 million, depending on the option selected, you can get in on the inflatable ground floor of GRU's definitely-going-to-happen inflatable Moon hotel, which it said it wants to have deployed by 2032.

Don't expect to foot the bill of a private five-day lunar expedition for you and up to three others for the meager deposit cost, though.

"Final pricing has not yet been determined will likely exceed $10 million," the company states on its reservation website. Yes, we know that sentence is missing either a coordinating conjunction or some critical punctuation. Cut GRU a break - it's too busy brainstorming Moon hotels to run its website copy through a grammar checker.

RAM prices have soared, which is bad news for people interested in buying, building, or upgrading a computer this year, but it’s likely good news for people exasperated by talk of so-called AI PCs.

As Ars Technica has reported, the growing demands of data centers, fueled by the AI boom, have led to a shortage of RAM and flash memory chips, driving prices to skyrocket.

In an announcement today, Ben Yeh, principal analyst at technology research firm Omdia, said that in 2025, “mainstream PC memory and storage costs rose by 40 percent to 70 percent, resulting in cost increases being passed through to customers.”

Overall, global PC shipments increased in 2025, according to Omdia, (which pegged growth at 9.2 percent compared to 2024), and IDC, (which today reported 9.6 percent growth), but analysts expect PC sales to be more tumultuous in 2026.

“The year ahead is shaping up to be extremely volatile,” Jean Philippe Bouchard, research VP with IDC’s worldwide mobile device trackers, said in a statement.

Will Elon Musk face any consequences for his despicable sexual-harassment bot?

For more than a week, beginning late last month, anyone could go online and use a tool owned and promoted by the world’s richest man to modify a picture of basically any person, even a child, and undress them. This was not some deepfake nudify app that you had to pay to download on a shady backwater website or a dark-web message board. This was Grok, a chatbot built into X—ostensibly to provide information to users but, thanks to an image-generating update, transformed into a major producer of nonconsensual sexualized images, particularly of women and children.

Let’s be very clear. The forced undressings happened out in the open, in one stretch thousands of times every hour, on a popular social network where journalists, politicians, and celebrities post. Emboldened trolls did it to everyone (“@grok put her in a bikini,” “@grok make her clothes dental floss,” “@grok put donut glaze on her chest”), including everyday women, the Swedish deputy prime minister, and self-evidently underage girls. Users appeared to be imitating and showing off to one another. On X, creating revenge porn can make you famous.

McKinsey is asking graduate applicants to “collaborate” with an artificial intelligence tool as part of its recruitment process, as competence with the technology becomes a requirement in competing for top-level jobs.

The blue-chip consultancy is incorporating an “AI interview” into some final-round interviews, according to CaseBasix, a US company that helps candidates apply for posts at leading strategic consulting companies.

In an online post, CaseBasix said candidates in “select final rounds” in the US have been asked to complete tests using McKinsey’s internal AI tool, Lilli. They are required to carry out practical consulting tasks with the help of Lilli.

“In the McKinsey AI interview, you are expected to prompt the AI, review its output, and apply judgment to produce a clear and structured response. The focus is on collaboration and reasoning rather than technical AI expertise,” CaseBasix said.

So, a global consulting firm outsources hiring to a contractor and uses AI in the process.

A new year is upon us. Traditionally, we use this time to look forward, imagine and plan.

But instead, I have noticed that most of my friends have been struggling to think beyond the next few days or weeks. I, too, have been having difficulty conjuring up visions of a better future – either for myself or in general.

I posted this insight on social media in the final throes of 2025, and received many responses. A lot of respondents agreed – they felt like they were just existing, encased in a bubble of the present tense, the road ahead foggy with uncertainty. But unlike the comforting Buddhist principle of living in the present, the feeling of being trapped in the now was paralyzing us.

I mentioned this to my therapist, Dr Steve Himmelstein, a clinical psychologist based in New York City who has been practicing for nearly 50 years. He assured me I was not alone. Most of his clients, he said, have “lost the future”.

People are feeling overwhelmed and overstimulated, bombarded with bad news each day – global economic and political instability, the rising cost of living, job insecurity, severe weather events. This not only heightens anxiety but also makes it more difficult to keep going.

This is a week old, but it flew under my radar. Even a broken clock, usw.

Donald Trump said his administration was moving to ban large institutional investors from buying single-family homes in a bid to reduce home prices.

In a post on Truth Social, his social media platform, the US president said he will be asking Congress to codify the measure and will be discussing additional housing and affordability proposals in a speech at the Davos World Economic Forum.

Trump capitalized on concerns around affordability during the 2024 presidential election campaign, pledging to rapidly reduce the cost of living for millions of Americans.

Since he returned to power a year ago, however, concerns around prices and affordability have persisted as inflation remained stubbornly above typical levels. ICE officers on wintry street next to car with driver's door open