In keeping with last week’s theme, today’s issue comes to you from a creaky, blonde oak desk at the Vail Public Library, the only civic third place I’ve ever been that’s outfitted with Eames chairs.
🎰 So far, the most consequential outcome of a weakened Consumer Financial Protection Bureau appears to be an inability to force two of the three major credit reporting agencies (TransUnion, Experian) to fix errors on your credit report. A Colorado accountant profiled in this piece describes being unable to get approved for a loan because $240,000 in student debt (that does not belong to her) caused her credit score to drop by 85 points. The number of complaints filed with TransUnion and Experian that resulted in “relief” has plunged since last summer. Equifax, which is still under the legal thumb of a previous CFPB enforcement action that forced it to fix its dispute process, is the only agency whose relief rates have remained somewhat consistent. (Propublica)
📉 For the first time (to my knowledge), a viral Substack post about an imaginary AI doomsday scenario moved markets. A reader sent me a link to the Citrini Research article in question a couple weeks ago, and when I realized it was basically economic fan fiction, I skimmed and moved on. Turns out the narrative was so compelling—and unnerving—that it meaningfully impacted share prices for some of the namechecked companies, like Uber, American Express, Mastercard, and Doordash. Imagine trying to explain this to shareholders. One major takeaway: A troubling portion of our modern economy is little more than “monetized friction”—that is, products or services designed to lubricate irritating or time-consuming tasks. (The Guardian)
📱 Wanna-be influencers have a new route to monetization that doesn’t rely on brand deals: life insurance MLMs. Stay frosty.
Where these direct sellers might once have worked door-to-door or over the phone, firms like Primerica and World Financial Group are now recruiting aspiring influencers to help sell their wares, and recreate their own pyramid where most Americans’ eyeballs are glued for hours a day: social media feeds. In posts on these companies’ accounts, potential recruits are instructed in the tricks of the trade: sign up, buy leads, sell policies, market your success online—and then enlist others to do the same. (The Baffler)
Roughly half (!) of American men ages 18–49 have “an active account with an online sportsbook.”
It turns out betting on NFL games is the best way to lose money (“the lines are too sharp, the teams too evenly matched”).
21% of gamblers admit to harassing an athlete online after losing money.
The most unique element of this report, though, is that the experimenter became the experiment himself, increasingly addicted, isolated, and distracted by money lines and parlays and conspiracies about referees. Holiday scenes in which he hid out in his minivan refreshing FanDuel while his wife and children ice-skated or practiced for a Christmas choir were particularly grim. After a trip to Vegas, he concludes:
Las Vegas struck me as a monument to a truth that America once knew and had somehow chosen to forget: If gambling had to be legal, it should be contained to remote cities in the desert that make you feel a little bad about yourself. (The Atlantic)
🤖 As online activity increasingly begins not with search engines but with AI chatbots, companies are now constructing marketing strategies around appealing to robots, not people. The result, Rachyl Jones writes, is an internet seeded with a deluge of positive product placements propagated by brands themselves, hoping to fool ChatGPT into a recommendation. For the time being, it appears to be working. (Semafor)
🥛 “How does ordinary entitlement curdle into moral rot?” Gradually, then all at once, as the saying goes. Extreme wealth changes different people in different ways:
“[Y]ou see some who are just epicurean hedonists. You see some who try to pretend that they don’t have it and feel quite guilty about it. Then you find some who either find a balance or keep working because they want more.”
And yet, he said, just as studies have shown that poverty creates a scarcity mind-set—shaping how people think about things like risk and time—there must be something like an inverse effect.
The “thrifty” rich person trope, reified in an interview with Mark Cuban in which he describes balking at a $4.80 gallon of milk, is presented here as a noble bulwark against wealth’s tendency to make you soft. As a general rule, I find this defense wanting. Not spending like you have billions of dollars is a different thing altogether than not having billions of dollars at all; what you retain in the former situation and not the latter is the option, at any time, to spend differently. (Intelligencer)
🌳 If I didn’t know a prominent, ultra-frugal FI/RE personality who swears by the $6,200/week Hoffman Process, it’d be easy to write off this “personal growth retreat” as a particularly sinister way of parting rich and desperate seekers from their money. The “Process,” which is administered at the Hoffman Institute in Petaluma, California, forbids recreational reading, exercise, and anything else that could be construed as expending energy “outwardly” rather than “internally.” Instead, participants spend 7 AM–9:30 PM daily “completing group and solo activities such as directed journaling, visualization and meditation.” Many leave feeling genuinely transformed by the experience, even if the method is more aligned with 1960s-era psychotherapy than modern consensus. By the end of this feature, $6,200 seemed like a steal. (GQ)
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If you’re truly self-employed (no income from W-2 jobs or access to employer-sponsored plans), you might be better off with a Solo 401(k).
If you’re self-employed AND have a “regular” full-time job with a 401(k) (in other words, a side hustler), another option like the SEP IRA could be the simpler route.
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Betterment does not provide tax advice.
🗽 A New York City resident who earns more than $1 million/year says a $20,000 tax increase would “mean absolutely nothing” to him, underscoring the absurdity of most tax pushback at this income level and higher. Glad someone finally went on the record saying as much.
“There is such a need in our city for the kind of programs that Mamdani is talking about,” Mr. Kaplan said in an interview. “The plans to spend the money are totally productive and serve the whole society, from the ultra rich to working people.” (New York Times)
⛏️ That said, I’m not too proud to admit that the new Tucker Carlson merch goes absolutely crazy.
🎯 Amazon is likely to be the first company to reach $1 trillion in annual revenue, which makes it the perfect strategic target for the labor movement, Benjamin Y. Fong writes. Rather than spending half a billion dollars on campaign contributions, he argues, organized labor should mobilize the money—and the rest of its sizable resources—to go all in on organizing the ecommerce behemoth.
If we want to see a similar [to the 1930s] labor upsurge today, then organized labor must have its sights set on one crucial target: Amazon. Every era has an iconic labor struggle that is both situated in a leading industry of its day and representative of the broader fortunes of labor. In the twenty-first century, that struggle is with Amazon. (Jacobin)
🛢️ Fuel prices are projected to remain higher than their prewar levels through mid-2027—and might finally curb (suspiciously resilient) consumer spending. For the last year, smart money said the house of cards would finally come tumbling down when the AI bubble popped or the private credit markets collapsed. Who could’ve anticipated that, instead, the most likely culprit would be the American government’s favorite unforced error: starting a war in the Middle East. (The Financial Times)
🌵 Nevada, the only state with legal brothels, is home to sex workers who see recessions coming “nearly as well as traders.” This piece was fascinating and, at times, surprisingly moving—just don’t open it at work. (Esquire)
🏖️ HBO’s new docuseries Neighbors is a chaotic, absurdist masterpiece that should’ve been called Homeowners Gone Wild. Halfway through the first episode—which chronicles a dispute between Florida homeowners and public beachgoers—a low-rent personal security guard earnestly declares in a confessional, “I just love protecting private property rights; I’d do it for free,” which convinced me it was a satire about the ownership society. (The New Yorker)
🍸 The polarized response to a viral advice column about a woman frustrated with her friends for their apparent disengagement from our present reality is itself indicative of a tension that, I imagine, plagues a lot of social groups right now. How legible does one’s despair at the state of the world need to be? How much of that despair is performance and virtue-signaling, as opposed to clear-eyed confrontation of #TheHorrors? I’ve felt aligned with both sides of this debate, sometimes at different times on the same day. Everyone in the comments assumes the advice-seeker is very young, but I got the opposite vibe. Does anyone under the age of 55 use the phrase “la-di-da” to describe someone who’s totally checked out? (The Cut)
See you next week.
As a person who just bought a refrigerator after our 90s workhorse finally gave up the ghost (RIP, guess we'll be on that buying a new fridge every two years train like everyone else now, thanks planned obsolescence), re AI and chatbots and consumer sentiment and the weird reviews on the retail sites vs what was in Consumer Reports, I just want to give a shout out to Consumer Reports, which my late dad subscribed to and which I have my whole adult life as well. We need them. We need ethical, objective journalists testing and reviewing products without a profit motive. I remember last year or maybe the year prior they did a fundraising push on the fact that under the circumstances of (gestures broadly) they needed to prioritize and were going to focus on baby stuff for a while. It kind of broke my heart.
The thrifty person trope is all well and fine, but maybe let's bring back the generous billionaire trope, someone who gives away money faster than they can make it (or at least tries). Like MacKenzie Scott. Being outrage at the price of milk is pure performance.