"the perfect sandbox doesn't exi-"

SECRETARY RUBIO on AMERICA.GOV PASSPORTS: No printing forms, no drugstore hostage photo, no appointment, no line, no middleman that you're paying to do something that should be available to you.

Yesterday we took out a full-page ad in The New York Times for dentures. Not exactly the category you expect to see in the Business section. But 1 in 8 Americans rely on them, and almost nobody talks about them outside dentistry. A denture affects how someone eats, speaks, smiles and whether they feel like themselves across the table from their family. So why have dentures been made largely the same way for decades? We’ve spent a lot of time at Dandy changing that. That work became Dandy Fusion™ Dentures. Figured it was worth putting the conversation in front of a few more people.

Alphaville: "[There's a] mismatch between consensus forecasts for chip sales and US data centre completions...Morgan Stanley measured the gap earlier this week by estimating the shortfall in available power, concluding that >1/2 of the GPU servers sold between 2026 and 2028 might not have anywhere to be plugged in. Research from Jefferies reaches a similar conclusion using a very top-down method: space. Tracking US data centre construction sites by satellite imagery shows between 16 and 18 GW of gross capacity that can be energised this year...The rush to complete what’s already started makes it likely that for next year, data centre deployment by GW probably can’t go much above the low twenties. This represents a doubling versus the 11 GW deployed in 2025, but is a huge shortfall when compared with what’s implied by chip sales forecasts." This gets to two points I made in my recent report on "The AI Trade" (sageroadresearch.com/product…). First, hyperscalers appear likely to fail to build out the data center capacity required to improve their models enough to inspire adequate enterprise spending. To quote the report: "Delays have always been part of the data center construction reality—historically, only 72% of data center capacity has come online on time. However, things are clearly getting worse. Goldman expects only about 1/2 of the AI computing capacity scheduled to activate between now and 2028 via data center construction will actually come online by its target date. As asset valuation firm Barkr calculated in an August report, delays at that rate would translate to a compute supply/demand gap of 13.4 to 19.2 GW in 2027 and 27.3 to 36.8 GW in 2028." Second, market participants are underestimating how much chip stockpiling has been happening and what that could mean for chip demand expectations moving forward. To again quote the report: "There’s always been an element of suspension of disbelief in the triple-digit percentage stock gains made by everyone from Nvidia to Broadcom to TSMC, Micron, AMD, and GE Vernova—as if the AI revolution had rendered cyclicality a challenge of the past. Now, AI spending’s rate of change is poised to slow. Politics is likely to increase fear that the pace of the AI data center buildout falls short of expectations. And the threat grows that one or more hyperscalers decides to pull back from the AI arms race. If AI CAPEX slows, it’s likely to hit picks-and-shovels earnings greater than most will anticipate. From hardware shortages has come stockpiling. As one VC noted recently: “In some data centers, I’m hearing the usage of graphics processing units is only around 35% or 40% because some companies are hoarding colossal amounts in case they come to a point at which they don’t have enough chips to provide the computing capacity.” FT link: ft.com/content/4c3f75a2-c2f9…

I used AI to explain the AI pacing drama, with fruit.

I’m sorry but America did not spend 250 years turning “what’s over there?” into the most powerful civilization on earth just to finally arrive at the most consequential technological frontier in generations and decide actually we’re scared of frontiers now. We ARE the fucking frontier. We cross oceans. We build railroads across continents. We split atoms. We put men on the moon. We turn sand into computers and computers into a global nervous system. Of COURSE AI is terrifying. The frontier is SUPPOSED to scare the shit out of you. That’s how you know you have, in fact, located the fucking frontier. The answer is not recklessness, but it sure as fuck isn’t paralysis either. America’s comparative advantage is an unusually high national tolerance for ambitious weirdos staring at impossible things and saying “Yeah... I think I can build it.” That trait is rarer than oil, harder to manufacture than semiconductors, and responsible for a frankly preposterous amount of the modern world. And you absolutely will not fucking regulate it out of us.

sf vs nyc discourse is held together by adult children who treat both cities as theme parks and then complain when one city doesn’t have the same rides as the other

This is already happening across every global city (London, NYC, Paris, Singapore, Dubai, Miami, Monaco etc) Globalisation made wealth infinitely more mobile, yet rich people all ended up competing for the same few cities, neighborhoods, schools, clubs, restaurants etc Basically a global infinite pool of wealth competing for a very finite supply of local positional goods A wealthy Parisian who used to mostly compete with other wealthy Parisians for the best apartment is now competing with American tech money, Gulf wealth, Chinese families, PE guys, inherited wealth etc Which is also how you end up with people making £300-500k in London / $500k in NYC, having won the traditional career game, who somehow still don’t feel particularly rich. Their income is local, but the stuff they want is increasingly priced by global wealth SF is interesting because it’s basically manufacturing the new wealth locally instead of importing it. Thousands of people potentially getting $5-10m richer at roughly the same time, then bidding for the exact same houses/schools/services could compress the whole process into a few years So yh don’t think AI is creating anything new here. Might just make SF speedrun what happened to every other global wealth hub