What I Wrote Last Week
Business
Behind the mesh curtain: Why airline class wars will intensify in 2026. I think that increased competition among airlines will benefit consumers. Some new routes were announced recently. Despite inflation, fare tickets remained flat. I do hope to see more reliability and more protections for consumers from the state and federal governments.
JPMorgan Chase Reaches Deal to Take Over Apple Credit Card. It’s very unusual to sell a big co-brand portfolio at a discount, but here we are. That signals the amount of work that Chase is expected to do to bring the Apple Card portfolio over and the amount of losses that would come. I do think that Goldman Sachs wanted to get into the consumer credit card business, but the deal with Apple was just too bad. The timing was so unfavorable for the bank with Covid, the inflation of FICO and economic inflation itself. Chase manages to get a huge portfolio at a discount, but there are also risks involved. Apple is notoriously a difficult partner to manage. The subprime portion of the portfolio doesn’t jive with what Chase usually does. I am curious to see what the executives will say in the next earnings calls and how the partnership will shake out.
Slowest Labor Market in Years Leaves Job Seekers Stuck. It must feel horrible to have a 6-figure paying job only to have it snatched away, and have to resort to part-time gigs or even food stamps to get by. The K-shaped economy is not going to change anymore. If anything, the K is going to get bigger and the population on the up is getting smaller yet richer. Hold on to your job now if you can. The grass may not be that green on the other side.
Bank of America Research did a writeup on why they think the next years will be bright for Casey’s.
Neal Mohan. The YouTube CEO has led the platform into a new era of TV and video domination. “Mohan likes to describe what he and his colleagues do as building the world’s best stage for people to perform on. Another analogy might be a garden. YouTube provides the soil, and everyone comes and plants whatever nourishing or noxious plants they care to. As the garden takes over more of the planet, even threatening some old-growth forests, whatever grows there becomes what everyone consumes, because it’s what’s available, and often what’s free. In many ways YouTube is creating the cultural diet that the globe is beginning to subsist on. Mohan is the farmer; what he cultivates will be what we eat.“
AI memory is sold out, causing an unprecedented surge in prices. “That’s because companies like Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Google need so much RAM for their artificial intelligence chips, and those companies are the first ones in line for the components. Three primary memory vendors — Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics — make up nearly the entire RAM market, and their businesses are benefitting from the surge in demand. he HBM memory that AI chips need is much more demanding than the RAM used for consumers’ laptops and smartphones. HBM is designed for high-bandwidth specifications required by AI chips, and it’s produced in a complicated process where Micron stacks 12 to 16 layers of memory on a single chip, turning it into a “cube.” When Micron makes one bit of HBM memory, it has to forgo making three bits of more conventional memory for other devices.”
Other Stuff I Find Interesting
Dan Wang 2025 letter. Such a joy to read. Grab your tea or coffee, spare 30′ and read this great essay.
The Genius Whose Simple Invention Saved Us From Shame at the Gas Station. I had not heard of Jim Moylan before, but I meet his invention almost every day. Jim was responsible for the gas gauge on every car dashboard. He did not receive the recognition richly deserved in the beginning. But a curious person asked the Ford museum about the gas gauge and as fate dictated, it led to Jim’s recognition.
AI’s Memorization Crisis. You can use the popular LLM tools on the market and get a full text of several books. It’s because apparently LLMs do store the training data in memory. There may be some legal consequences. First, are AI Companies allowed to store such data? Second, are there any violations of copyrights? There are some cases pertaining to copyrights infringement related to AI, but the field is still relatively new. We are just figuring stuff out as we go, but it seems to be that if a rightful owner of a piece of content does not consent for it to be shared on LLMs, any access would be an infringement.
Americans Are Looking to the Midwest to Find Affordability. “The Midwest has historically been cheaper than many other parts of the country, but the other side of the affordability equation is wages, and the Midwest seems to be winning on that score lately, too. Year-over-year wage growth has been climbing more steadily in the Midwest over the past year than it has in other regions, according to Bank of America deposit data. Those wage trends, combined with more reasonable housing costs, have allowed Midwesterners of late to spend more on discretionary items than Americans in other regions, according to Bank of America credit- and debit-card data. That competition is pushing up prices and causing frustration among some local residents—a risk for Midwestern communities looking to strike a balance between growth and affordability.”
Stats
“The U.S. notched 23 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in 2025”
More than 2 billion people visit YouTube every day
Minh Quang Duong 
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