sanjay

[Handre @Handre]

Here are the most important lessons from the Austrian School of Economics in one post:

The entire edifice of modern economic policy rests on a lie: that a group of planners can manage an economy better than the people living in it.

Start with value. Nothing has value in the abstract. You value a glass of water differently when you're drowning than when you're dying of thirst in the Sahara. Value lives inside individual human minds, not in objects, not in labor hours, not in government decree. Every price control, every subsidy, every centrally administered wage floor ignores this and produces predictable wreckage.

Money didn't come from a government committee. It emerged spontaneously from markets, as traders across centuries converged on commodities like gold and silver because they held value across time and space. Governments didn't invent money; they hijacked it.

Inflation is the expansion of the money supply itself. Rising prices are the symptom. When the Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet from roughly $4 trillion to nearly $9 trillion between 2020 and 2022, the price explosion that followed wasn't a mystery. It was the direct, mechanical consequence of that expansion. The Fed caused it.

Prices do something irreplaceable: they transmit information across millions of actors simultaneously. When lumber prices spiked in 2021, builders across North America cut waste and sought alternatives without a single bureaucrat issuing a memo. No central planner can replicate that signal, because no central planner possesses the knowledge embedded in it.

This connects directly to the knowledge problem. You know your neighborhood, your suppliers, your customers, your own tolerance for risk. Your competitor knows his. A bureaucrat in Washington knows none of it. The knowledge required to run an economy is dispersed, personal, and contextual. It cannot be extracted, aggregated, and fed into a planning model. The Soviet Union ran that experiment for seventy years and produced chronic shortages of basic goods.

Bad businesses must be allowed to fail. When they fail, they release labor, capital, and resources to producers who will use them more effectively. When Washington handed General Motors $49.5 billion in 2009 to prevent exactly that process, it kept misallocated capital locked inside a failing structure and punished every competitor who had managed their business responsibly.

Every function government performs, a voluntary market arrangement performs better: faster, cheaper, and responsive to actual human preferences rather than political incentives. Education, roads, security, dispute resolution, all of it. Government agencies face no profit and loss signal, no competition, and no mechanism to reward performance. They optimize for budget preservation and political survival, and the people using the service have no exit option.

The political class and the central banking apparatus that sustains it are the villains. Both benefit directly from the idea that expert management beats voluntary exchange. They will not surrender that idea willingly.

What would you add?

[TreasuryBonds.com @TreasuryBonds1]

The U.S. Treasury just doubled the maximum size of certain long-term bond buybacks from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation.

Long-term yields immediately fell.

But 99% of investors don't udnerstand what this ACTUALLY means-

Here’s what is actually happening: 🧵

[The Better India @thebetterindia]

In 1944, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose established the Azad Hind Bank in Rangoon, Burma, to fund the war against the British, The aim was to print Indian currency notes to manage contributions from Indians worldwide.

In the 1980s, Ram Kishore Dubey, a retired contractor, found one of these rare notes in his grandfather's Ramayana.

His grandfather, Praagilal, a dedicated member of the Indian National Army (INA), received this note as a reward from Netaji for his covert work in the Bundelkhand region.

The note, valued at one lakh, featured Bose's photograph, a pre-independence map of India, and the bold inscription 'Bank of Independence'.

For those curious, the Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Birthplace Museum in Cuttack, Odisha, houses a rare collection of coins and currency notes which were issued by the Azad Hind Bank.

#subashchandrabose #AzadHindBank #NetajiSubhasChandraBose #INA #IndianHistory

[Azad Hind Bank, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Indian currency notes, INA, Indian National Army]

[Handre @Handre]

The real GOAT.

Ludwig von Mises rebuilt economics from the foundation up, and a comparison to Einstein is not flattery: it is a structural observation about what each man did to his field.

Einstein rewrote physics by showing that measurements of space and time depended on the observer's frame of reference. Mises did something comparably radical in 1912 with The Theory of Money and Credit, then again in 1920 with the socialist calculation paper, and definitively in 1949 with Human Action: he showed that economic calculation is impossible without private property in capital goods, because prices emerge only from voluntary exchange. The Soviet planners in Moscow were not making policy errors you could fix with better data. They were attempting something logically incoherent, the way you cannot find a square root of a color. Stalin murdered millions chasing a mathematical phantom that Mises proved impossible before the Soviet state was even ten years old.

What separates Mises from most geniuses is the range. Einstein worked physics. Mises worked epistemology, monetary theory, capital theory, business cycle theory, and political philosophy simultaneously, weaving them into a single coherent system. His 1922 book Socialism predicted the collapse of every centrally planned economy with the precision of a structural engineer predicting which wall bears load. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. The math was settled in 1922.

The state, being an institution that lives by compulsion rather than consent, cannot tolerate this kind of clarity. Governments fund universities. Universities employ economists. Those economists publish papers justifying central banking, redistribution, and regulation, because tenure flows toward conclusions that flatter power. Mises spent years teaching in Vienna without a paid university position, funding himself through the Chamber of Commerce. He was excluded not because he was wrong, but because clarity about power's limits threatens the institutions that distribute tenure.

You want to rank intellectual giants; let's rank them by what they overturned and what they built in its place. Mises overturned classical economics, demolished the theoretical case for socialism, and constructed a complete science of human choice on aprioristic foundations. Einstein, asked about Mises by journalist Henry Hazlitt in the 1940s, expressed genuine admiration. The greatest physicist of the 20th century respected the greatest economist. The tenured mediocrities who ignored Mises respected neither.

[Hedgeye @Hedgeye]

China's Real Estate Market has erased all gains from the last 20 years

[Adam Smith Institute @ASI]

Today, we mark the 303rd birthday of Adam Smith. To keep his legacy alive, our co-founder has created a Graphic Novel edition of The Wealth of Nations, distilling his ideas into a 21st century format.

As our birthday present to him, you can order a physical copy online today!

[Michael A. Gayed, CFA @leadlagreport]

I have been quiet long enough.

This is perhaps the most important thread on X ever published.

And the most powerful and impactful comic book you will ever read.

If you want to understand the reverse carry trade, bookmark this.

Oil, Yen, Japan, and an all-star cast.

1/24🧵👇

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A British biologist looked at 200,000 years of human history and found that the entire reason humans broke out of poverty was not intelligence, not language, not even agriculture, but one mechanism so simple a 6-year-old could explain it.

His name is Matt Ridley.

He is a zoologist by training, an evolutionary biologist by career, and in 2010 he wrote a book called The Rational Optimist that quietly argued the most important fact about human progress had been hiding in plain sight for the entire history of economics.

Naval Ravikant has been telling people to read everything Ridley has ever written for the last 15 years. The reason is the argument inside this one book.

For 200,000 years, anatomically modern humans walked around with the same brain you have right now. Same skull size. Same neural architecture. Same raw capacity for language, planning, and abstract thought.

For roughly 190,000 of those years, almost nothing happened. Generation after generation lived and died inside the same Stone Age toolkit their great-great-grandparents had used. Then somewhere around 50,000 years ago, the line on the chart of human progress started to tick upward. Then it bent. Then it exploded.

The question Ridley spent years on was the only question that mattered. What changed.

It was not the brain. The brain had been the same for 190,000 years. It was not language, which had existed long before the takeoff. It was not even agriculture, which arrived only 10,000 years ago and was actually preceded by the upward bend, not the cause of it.

What changed was that humans started trading with strangers.

This sounds too small to be the answer. Ridley argues that it is the answer to almost everything. The moment one human exchanged a useful object with another human from a different group, something happened that no other species on earth had ever done.

Two ideas that had developed in isolation came into contact. The flint knapper learned what the spear maker had figured out. The fisherman from the coast learned what the hunter from the forest had figured out. The two pieces of knowledge fused into something neither side could have produced alone.

Ridley calls this ideas having sex. The phrase sounds frivolous and it is meant to. The point is that ideas, like genes, get better when they combine with other ideas from different lineages.

An idea sitting inside one head, no matter how brilliant the head, eventually hits a ceiling. The same idea exposed to ten thousand other ideas does something genes do under sexual reproduction. It mixes. It recombines. It produces offspring nobody planned.

The cleanest proof of this argument is the most uncomfortable case study in the book. Tasmania.

Around 10,000 years ago, rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia. A population of roughly 4,000 humans was now isolated on an island, with no possibility of contact with the rest of humanity. They had the same brains. The same language. The same starting toolkit as their cousins 150 kilometers north. The natural experiment was now running.

What happened next is something no economist or geneticist had ever predicted.

The mainland Australians kept inventing. Boomerangs. Spear-throwers. Fishing nets. Bone needles for sewing fitted clothes. Watercraft with paddles. Their technology compounded slowly across the centuries.

The Tasmanians went the other way. They did not just fail to invent the new tools their cousins were developing. They started losing the tools they already had. Fishing was abandoned within a few thousand years. Bone tools disappeared. Fitted clothing disappeared. They forgot how to make fire from scratch and started carrying lit firebrands from camp to camp instead, relighting their fires from a neighbor's whenever their own went out.

By the time European explorers arrived in the 17th century, the Tasmanians had the simplest toolkit of any human society ever recorded. Their material culture had gone backward for 8,000 years.

The archaeologist Rhys Jones called it a slow strangulation of the mind.

Joseph Henrich at Harvard later proved with formal mathematical models that there was nothing wrong with Tasmanian brains. There was something wrong with their network. A toolkit requires a critical mass of people exchanging skills to maintain itself.

The act of teaching a skill is imperfect. Every generation loses a small percentage of what the last generation knew. If your population is large enough and trading widely enough, those losses get caught and corrected by someone else who still remembers.

If your population shrinks below a certain threshold and stops mixing with outsiders, the small losses compound until entire technologies disappear.

This is the part that should haunt anyone reading this in 2026.

Intelligence is not a property of the individual brain. Intelligence is a property of the network the brain is connected to. A genius in isolation will produce less than a mediocre thinker inside a dense exchange of other mediocre thinkers.

The thing your ancestors needed in order to break out of 190,000 years of stagnation was not better brains. It was better connections between brains they already had.

The implication for any individual is direct and uncomfortable. If you are smart and isolated, you will be outproduced by people half as smart who are connected.

The most successful people in any field are almost never the smartest people in it. They are the ones positioned at the intersection of the most idea flows. They are reading more authors than their competitors. They are talking to more people from more disciplines. They are in the rooms where ideas from different lineages bump into each other.

Ridley ends the book on the line that sounds optimistic but is actually a warning its this "The future will be invented by people who connect ideas, not by people who guard them."

[Ryan Hart @thisdudelikesAI]

An English engineer wrote a calculus book in 1910 opening with the line "what one fool can do, another can," and proved that almost everything making math feel impossible was put there on purpose by people who wanted it to stay exclusive.

His name was Silvanus P. Thompson.

He was a physicist, an engineer, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a professor at the City and Guilds Technical College in London.

He had spent his entire career teaching calculus to working-class engineering students who needed the math to actually do their jobs, and he had watched generation after generation of bright kids walk out of math classrooms convinced they were stupid.

He knew they were not stupid. He knew exactly what was wrong, and he was about to say it in print in a way that would get him quietly hated by every academic mathematician in Britain.

In 1910 he published Calculus Made Easy. He published it anonymously at first, listing the author only as F.R.S., which stood for Fellow of the Royal Society. He did not want his name attached to it until he saw how the establishment was going to respond. Because the prologue of the book was not a polite introduction. It was an accusation.

He wrote that calculus was not actually hard. He wrote that the people writing the standard textbooks were what he called "clever fools" who deliberately took the easiest parts of the subject and presented them in the most complicated way possible, because doing so made them look more impressive.

He wrote that they "seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are" and instead "seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way."

Then he opened the first chapter by telling readers something nobody had been willing to admit out loud. The reason calculus felt impossible was not because calculus was impossible. It was because the symbols had been chosen to feel impossible. The notation looked like ancient ritual on purpose. The Greek letters, the formal epsilon-delta definitions, the abstract limit proofs that opened every standard textbook, were not how Newton and Leibniz had originally thought about the subject. They were a 19th century renovation of the field done by professional mathematicians who wanted calculus to feel like a closed shop.

Thompson refused to use any of it.

He went back to the way Leibniz had thought about it 250 years earlier. The letter d in front of a variable, he told his readers, just meant "a little bit of." That was the whole secret. dx meant "a little bit of x." dy meant "a little bit of y." dy/dx meant "a little bit of y divided by a little bit of x," which is just how steep the curve is going at that exact moment. Integration was the opposite. It just meant adding up all the little bits.

That is calculus. That is the entire subject. Everything else is technique, and the technique only works once you understand what you are doing.

A 12-year-old can follow that explanation. A 12-year-old cannot follow the opening chapter of a typical university calculus textbook. The gap between those two facts is the entire reason most adults walk around believing they are bad at math.

The book became one of the bestselling math books in history. Over a million copies. Still in print 115 years later. Still recommended by physicists, engineers, and self-taught learners as the only calculus book they actually finished. Martin Gardner revised it in 1998 and the foundation of the book did not need to change because Thompson had built it on Leibniz, not on the academic conventions that have come and gone since.

The deeper point Thompson was making is the part that should haunt anyone reading this in 2026.

Difficulty is often a marketing strategy. It is not always a property of the subject. When a discipline is taught in a way that feels impossible, the difficulty is doing a job for someone. It is keeping the field small. It is protecting the salaries and the status of the people already inside it. It is filtering out the kinds of people who would otherwise show up and crowd the room.

This happens in math. It happens in law. It happens in medicine. It happens in finance, in machine learning, in philosophy, in software. Every field has a layer of jargon and notation and ritual sitting on top of a core idea that is usually much simpler than the people inside the field want to admit. The jargon is not there to communicate. It is there to gatekeep.

The way you recognize a real teacher is that they keep stripping the ritual off. The way you recognize someone protecting their priesthood is that they keep piling it on.

Thompson finished his prologue with five words that are the entire spirit of his project. "What one fool can do, another can." He meant it as both a joke and a threat.

If a working-class engineering student in 1910 with no Greek and no Latin and no university privileges could learn calculus from a 200-page paperback, then so could anyone the establishment had been excluding for the previous 200 years.

Most subjects you have given up on were never as hard as the people teaching them needed you to believe. You were not stupid. The course was designed to make you feel that way.

What one fool can do, another can.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video.

Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments.

The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times.

Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it.

Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone.

The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

[Shashank Mattoo @MattooShashank]

"In the last Maldives election, the new President ran an India Out campaign. Soon after, the only desalination plant in Maldives broke down & they had no water. India sent millions of litres of water without asking for anything. That's how India builds trust," says Shashi Tharoor

[Aparajite @amshilparaghu]

This is Mr. Avinash, who has an Instagram page called TheAvinashWay. He received a legal notice from “Dabur”.

Watch this video to know the reason.
Do you think he is right?

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

I was on a train in Tokyo. We stopped between stations. Announcement in Japanese, then in English: "We apologize for the delay. We will resume shortly."

The delay was maybe 3 minutes. Not a big deal.

When the train started moving again, another announcement: "We sincerely apologize for the delay. We were stopped for 3 minutes and 20 seconds. This is unacceptable. Thank you for your patience."

Three minutes and twenty seconds. They measured it exactly. And called it unacceptable.

When I got off at my stop, there were station staff on the platform bowing and handing out delay certificates.

I took one out of curiosity. It was an official document stating that the train had been delayed by 3 minutes and 20 seconds, signed and stamped.

The staff member said in English "for your employer. So they know the delay was not your fault."

I said I'm a tourist, I don't need it. He looked confused. "But the delay affected you. You deserve an apology."

Three minutes. They were treating a three-minute delay like a major incident.

Later I mentioned this to a Japanese friend. They said "oh yes, delay certificates are normal. Trains are supposed to be exactly on time. If they are late, they must apologize."

I said three minutes isn't late, it's nothing. My friend said "in Japan, three minutes is late. On time means on time. Not approximately on time."

They said the train company probably investigated why there was a 3-minute delay. "They will find the cause and fix it so it doesn't happen again."

I kept the certificate. It's framed in my apartment now. A reminder that somewhere in the world, people care about three minutes.

© 6IX.

@BSAT_Properties

[Citizenry of Civilisational Evolution @EvolutionCivil]

All prosperous countries have one thing in common, they are all decentralised

Decentralisation works across all political and economical models

🇺🇸 United States - Decentralised
🇨🇳 China - Decentralised
🇸🇬 Singapore - Decentralised
🇨🇭 Switzerland - Decentralised

In China, 51% of the total government spending is controlled at the city level, 27% in the US, whereas in India it is mere 3%

This makes India far more centralised than nearly all countries in the world, this is why we need Decentralised India

[Curiosity @MAstronomers]

People don't realize how absurd this view actually is.

A camera. On a robot. On Mars.

Built by humans on a planet 140 million miles away, launched on a rocket, landed using a sky crane, and now driving across an alien desert taking pictures so detailed you can count the rocks.

100 years ago, your great-grandparents thought airplanes were a miracle.

You are scrolling past Mars on your phone.

[The Better India @thebetterindia]

From a small village in Nagaland to a winning moment on French soil, this is what determination looks like.

Kekhriesilie Rio has clinched the Grand Prix at Haras de Liverdy in France, delivering a standout performance in show jumping with his horse, Presley OL.

Hailing from Touphema village in Kohima, Rio is among the few athletes from Northeast India to step onto the international equestrian stage and make it count.

In a sport where representation from India is still limited, this win is more than just a medal. It’s a reminder that talent can rise from anywhere, and be recognised everywhere.

#InspiringIndia #SportsStories #Gamechangers #Nagaland #MakingIndiaProud

[Equestrian, Nagaland, Inspiration, India, Sports India, Gamechangers]

[Abhishek AB @ABsay_ek]

At 36, Bhuvneshwar Kumar is doing something no fast bowler should manage after 15 years of bending his back. He is reinventing himself in real time, turning the final 5 overs into his territory while still owning the first 6 like no one in tournament history.

7 of his 11 wickets this season have come between 16-20 Overs, 12 overs bowled at exactly 8 an over. The death is where bowlers go to die & he walks out with wickets in his pocket.

The story begins with a plate of food. A couple of years ago, Bhuvneshwar woke up feeling like he had swallowed stones. Bloated, heavy, slow. He started stripping things away. Coffee first, then tea, then dairy, then gluten, then anything that had ever walked or flown. Then the DEXA scans arrived. More muscle, sharper agility, a body that once kept him out for months now carrying him through 5 games in 13 days.

RCB took a punt in late 2024 after 10 years at Sunrisers, paying over 10 crore for a bowler the international cricket had buried. His final season in orange had been painful, pace down, edges not carrying, obituaries written.
But RCB saw something beyond the speed gun. A man who understood pressure like a sailor understands tides, who could stand at his mark in 17th over & know exactly which ball would break the game.

Last season he did not just bowl, he taught. Yash Dayal from one end, Josh Hazlewood from the other & in between this quiet man from Meerut led the pack, where to stand, what to expect, which delivery to hold back. RCB won their first title in 18 years. Coincidence is a comfortable word for people who do not understand mentorship.

This season the mentor became executioner again. We know he is the leading wicket taker in IPL powerplay history, the swing merchant who makes the new ball talk. But now he completes the circle, owning all three acts of a T20 innings.
The knuckleball that stops in the pitch, the wide yorker that drags the hitter toward point, the in-swinger at 135 instead of 145.

Cricket chews up fast bowlers before 35. The back goes,knee goes, pace drops, world tells you to pack it in. Bhuvneshwar heard it all. He rewrote his menu, recalibrated his training & keep evolving.
At an age when most seamers are coaching or commentating, he is chasing the Purple Cap & proving that the body will listen if you learn its language. The gut feeling, quite literally, saved him.

[Object Zero @Object_Zero_]

Oil Wells

Ever wondered… How do they drill a hole in the ground, that is 3 miles deep?

Not many people realise this, but oil wells are built like Russian Dolls. Big fat pipes are expensive, skinny pipes are cheaper.

You start with a very big diameter pipe called a “conductor” this is a large 30” diameter pipe. You first drill a big fat hole maybe 400 ft deep, and then you slide a big fat pipe into it to stop the hole collapsing.

Then you drill a second hole inside your first hole. This is a skinnier hole but it’s deeper because it starts at the bottom of your first hole. So this hole is 17.5” diameter and might be 1,000ft deep.

And you just repeat that 2 or 3 times and then you have a 12,000ft deep hole that has billions of dollars of crude oil gushing into the bottom of it, and racing up to the surface…

profit.

Next week I will explain how they do this on a boat, whilst floating over 2 miles of water.

[Markets by Zerodha @zerodhamarkets]

For over six decades, India's passenger trains ran on the same basic idea. A powerful locomotive up front, pulling a long string of passive coaches behind it. As of March 2018, 49,033 conventional coaches were still in service. Then, in January 2018, the ICF flagged off its last one.🧵👇

[Narendra Modi @narendramodi]

Cheese from India makes its mark globally…

India made an impressive debut at the Mundial do Queijo do Brasil 2026, which is a vibrant international competition for cheese and dairy products. Four Indian products won medals, including 1 Super Gold, 2 Golds and 1 Silver.

The Super Gold was won by Eleftheria Gulmarg (Brie Style), the Golds were won by Yak Churpi-Soft, Nordic Farm, Leh, Ladakh and Eleftheria Brunost (Whey Cheese) while the Silver was won by Eleftheria Kaali Miri (Belper Knolle Style). Congratulations to Mausam Narang and Thenlay Nurboo.

Such successes strengthen India’s artisanal dairy sector on the world stage.