dstarz

unfortunately i cant use the X search function to find my old tweets where i tracked the % of $PEPE supply held on @RobinhoodApp to do a comparison but i was surprised today to check and see that it is at ATHs 38 Trillion $PEPE, or just over 9% of the supply worth $105,000,000, is currently held by robinhood users. this is the highest it has ever been while the price is down roughly 90% from the highs, retail accumulation has continued and never dropped despite the story the chart tells.

MANDARIN ORIENTAL MIAMI DEMOLITION

The diamond engagement ring was invented by an ad agency in 1947. Before that, only 1 in 10 American brides got one. The company behind it, De Beers, was worth $9.2 billion three years ago. Today that number is $2.3 billion, and its owner is trying to find a buyer. In 1940, diamonds were a luxury for the rich. Nobody proposed with one unless they had serious money. De Beers had a warehouse full of diamonds and no customers, so they hired NW Ayer, an ad firm out of Philadelphia. A copywriter named Frances Gerety came up with four words: “A Diamond is Forever.” NW Ayer paid Hollywood studios to write diamond proposals into movie scripts. They planted stories in gossip columns about which rock some actress just got. They invented the “two months’ salary” rule, the idea that a man should spend two months of income on a ring. None of that existed before. It was all marketing. By the 1990s, 8 out of 10 American brides wore diamond engagement rings. Then De Beers did it again in Japan, going from 5% to 60% in 14 years. Advertising Age called it the greatest advertising slogan of the 20th century. They were right. The whole business ran on one trick: make diamonds seem rare. De Beers controlled most of the world’s supply but only released a small amount each year. That artificial shortage kept prices sky-high. And the “forever” in the slogan had a second job: if nobody resells their diamond, supply stays tight and prices stay up. Lab-grown diamonds blew that apart. You can now grow a diamond in a lab that is the same thing, atom for atom, as one pulled out of the ground. Costs 80–85% less. In 2019, only 6% of engagement rings in America had a lab-grown stone. By 2025, that number was 61%. That’s from The Knot’s annual survey of 10,000+ newlywed couples. People are buying bigger rings (1.9 carats on average, compared to 1.6 for mined) and keeping the savings. De Beers saw this coming. In 2018, they launched their own lab-grown jewelry brand called Lightbox, priced at $800 per carat. The idea was to make lab-grown look like cheap costume jewelry so people would still pay a premium for “real” diamonds. Prices tanked 90% anyway. By 2025, American grocery stores were selling lab-grown diamond rings for $200. De Beers shut Lightbox down last May. Since 2023, De Beers has lost nearly $7 billion in value. It lost over $500 million in 2025 alone and has about $2 billion in diamonds sitting in storage that nobody is buying. Its parent company, Anglo American, is now in what they’re calling “advanced discussions” to sell off the whole thing. A 137-year-old company, dumped. The greatest ad campaign ever made convinced a planet that a common carbon crystal was worth two months of your salary. The product that’s killing it just proved you can grow the same crystal in a factory for pocket change.

NYC man reacts to ICE at the airport: “They’re good. They're here to help. They're not botherin nobody. As long as they can check my bagz n get me on my flight, I'm good to go. I wanna get to the Bahamas. I want outta here.” This is so Brooklyn lol.

exploitation of the working class

marketing agencies right now:

Inheritance taxes are easily some of the most moral ones, especially for the super wealthy

$750,000 in NYC is not an "estate" - it's a 1-bedroom apt with a $1,400 monthly maintenance fee. He's going after the working/middle class.

Every banker and PE guy knows the dread of printing and scrubbing decks and memos for hours. Final Pass legit reduces that down to 5 minutes. Using multiple AI models to ensure it's client ready.

🚨 Perplexity just made every AI company look stupid with one announcement. They're shipping a Mac mini that never turns off. You plug it in, leave it on, and it works through your files, apps, emails, calendar, 24 hours a day. While you sleep, while you eat, while you're on vacation, it's working. > A full-time employee with a power cord sitting next to your coffee mug with no salary, no sick days, no meetings about meetings. > Your company pays you $80K a year to work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Perplexity just offered them something that works 24/7 and probably costs less than your monthly health insurance. But the part that gave me chills is the name. They called it "Personal Computer." The last time someone used that name was IBM in 1981. That machine killed typewriters, killed secretaries, killed filing clerks, killed an entire generation of office jobs. They didn't call this an "assistant" or a "copilot." They named it after the thing that already replaced millions of jobs once before. Same name. Same playbook. Different body count. And they know exactly what they're doing.

> The salesperson goes into Salesforce, drags the deal to Closed Won, types in the contract value. Hopefully they remember to attach the PDF. Finance opens QuickBooks and manually creates an invoice from the payment terms. Legal uploads the contract to their CLM tool. The PM opens Jira and creates a project from the deliverables. Someone sends a Slack message: "Acme signed!" Five people entered data from the same document into five different systems. Half of it will be slightly wrong.