KnowledgeGophers

Burrowing for insight. None of this is advice because I am a gopher.

[OSINTdefender @sentdefender]

The Israeli Air Force has begun striking targets throughout Iran, according to Channel 14.

[KnowledgeGophers @businessgopher]

@pennycheck @HunterBiden Vol is a helluva drug

[The Hormuz Letter @HormuzLetter]

BREAKING: Explosions and active air defense engagement at Kharg Island, with preliminary reports of the US conducting strikes.

[KnowledgeGophers @businessgopher]

@MmisterNobody So many logical fallacies. Who was measuring rates of cancer and heart disease and autoimmune disorders in 1926? Come on.

[KnowledgeGophers @businessgopher]

@agnostoxxx @OddStats @ExPostGigaChad EVERYONE START SELLING YOUR MODEL T’S FOR CASH NOW WHILE YOU STILL CAN

[Natalie Jean Beisner @NJBeisner]

Last night, Karen promised to clean up the tents on the sidewalks.

I’m wondering if someone would be so kind as to inform her she’s currently the mayor? What exactly is she waiting for?

[KnowledgeGophers @businessgopher]

@nazbowling102

[KnowledgeGophers @businessgopher]

#LateStageCapitalism

[Florian Ederer @florianederer]

I believe we now have evidence of FIFA's World Cup ticketing shell game: FIFA is colluding with third-party resale platforms for its own supply management.

Look at this SeatGeek map (secondary market!) for Saudi Arabia vs Cape Verde. The circled areas are not random single resale tickets, but large, contiguous blocks of seats: entire rows and swaths in sections 101/102, 112/113, 119/120, 134–137, 139, ...

The blue circles appeared weeks ago, then the purple blocks suddenly showed up a day or two ago, and the red blocks seem to have appeared recently too.

That's not what ordinary fan or even commercial scalper resale looks like who resell pairs, fours, and scattered seats. Instead, this looks like inventory being dumped in bulk onto secondary markets, at prices below FIFA's official site.

Why doesn't FIFA just lower prices on its own site Probably because official price cuts could trigger refund demands, chargebacks, or consumer-protection headaches from fans who already bought at much higher prices.

Instead FIFA keeps official prices high, avoids openly admitting the market-clearing price is lower, and moves unsold inventory through third-party resale platforms instead.

[Florian Ederer @florianederer]

I believe we now have evidence of FIFA's World Cup ticketing shell game: FIFA is colluding with third-party resale platforms for its own supply management.

Look at this SeatGeek map (secondary market!) for Saudi Arabia vs Cape Verde. The circled areas are not random single resale tickets, but large, contiguous blocks of seats: entire rows and swaths in sections 101/102, 112/113, 119/120, 134–137, 139, ...

The blue circles appeared weeks ago, then the purple blocks suddenly showed up a day or two ago, and the red blocks seem to have appeared recently too.

That's not what ordinary fan or even commercial scalper resale looks like who resell pairs, fours, and scattered seats. Instead, this looks like inventory being dumped in bulk onto secondary markets, at prices below FIFA's official site.

Why doesn't FIFA just lower prices on its own site Probably because official price cuts could trigger refund demands, chargebacks, or consumer-protection headaches from fans who already bought at much higher prices.

Instead FIFA keeps official prices high, avoids openly admitting the market-clearing price is lower, and moves unsold inventory through third-party resale platforms instead.

[KnowledgeGophers @businessgopher]

$MSFT merging tools into a super app… no word yet on how many hours it spends per day updating

https://t.co/EaPCYbiqNC

[KnowledgeGophers @businessgopher]

@stspanho @pmarca You don’t have to live like this

[KnowledgeGophers @businessgopher]

@zerohedge @jam_croissant When will a Los Angeles court also find these frauds guilty for fake news manipulating prices

[Andrew Kuhn @FocusedCompound]

Every public company CEO should study Henry Singleton.

1961–1969: used Teledyne's nosebleed P/E as currency to roll up ~130 companies.

1972–1984: when the multiple collapsed, retired 90% of the share count across 8 tender offers.

Result: 20.4% CAGR from 1963–1990 vs. 8% for the S&P.

Reversing your capital allocation policy 180 degrees when valuation flips is the part nobody copies.

Issuing stock when it's expensive and retiring it when it's cheap sounds obvious. Almost no CEO actually does it.

[KnowledgeGophers @businessgopher]

@NateSilver538 Wait until I tell you how the mail works out here…

[Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent @SecScottBessent]

For too long, our political class treated efficiency as a substitute for resilience and consumption as a measure of prosperity.

Trade policy, industrial capacity, and national security are inseparable. And to allow foreign dependencies to degrade any one of those domains is to allow them to define America’s future. Under @POTUS’ leadership, we are rebuilding domestic production to restore American sovereignty.

[Rapid Response 47 @RapidResponse47]

.@SecScottBessent: "A nation that cannot manufacture, mine, ship, or refine its needs gradually cedes its strength and sovereignty to others. That is a dangerous dependency for any country; it is an unacceptable one for the United States of America."

[KnowledgeGophers @businessgopher]

https://t.co/tz5TmVyBhH

[KnowledgeGophers @businessgopher]

@kingtutcap Amen brother

[Select Committee on China @ChinaSelect]

For too long, China has used its dominance over critical minerals processing to pressure industries, manipulate markets, and threaten global supply chains.

Today’s @StateDept Quad partners announcement is a major step toward building resilient, diversified supply chains with trusted partners, not strategic adversaries.

The U.S., Japan, Australia, and India are mobilizing up to $20 BILLION to secure supply chains for the minerals powering advanced technology, defense systems, batteries, and AI.

The era of relying on China for critical minerals must come to an end.
https://t.co/FlJbqS5P9J

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Stanford psychologist spent 4 years proving that the simple act of walking generates 60% more creative ideas than sitting, and the experiment she designed to kill every alternative explanation is one of the most decisive findings in modern psychology.

Her name is Marily Oppezzo.

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

The result was almost too clean to publish.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves.

On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision.

She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

This is the part of the study that hit hardest when I read it the first time.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it.

Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes.

The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

The history of this is the part that should haunt anyone who still does meetings in chairs.

Charles Darwin built a gravel loop behind his house in Kent called the Sandwalk and walked it 3 times a day for the rest of his life. The theory of evolution was developed one lap at a time on that path.

Nietzsche walked up to 10 hours a day during the years he wrote his most important books and openly said the work was conceived on his feet.

Beethoven composed for the morning and walked for 5 hours every afternoon with a pencil in his pocket for when something landed.

Kahneman said the best thinking of his Nobel Prize-winning career happened on leisurely walks with Amos Tversky. Steve Jobs refused to take important conversations sitting down. He held them on foot.

Every one of them was using the system Oppezzo would not measure until 2014. They just did not know what to call it.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost nobody asks.

Every meeting you have ever attended sitting around a table was a meeting held at a fraction of the brain power that was actually available to the people in the room. Every brainstorm that got stuck inside a conference room. Every problem you tried to solve at a desk and gave up on. Every idea you could not quite get to.

The intervention is the easiest one in modern science. No supplement. No app. No subscription. No training program. Just a pair of legs and 15 minutes.

The Stanford lab proved it. The philosophers knew it. The neuroscience explains it.

And almost everyone reading this is still trying to think their way out of problems sitting completely still.