foobs 🍉

[foobs 🍉 @foobs__]

@KuroiKumanoashi @LynAldenContact @Mayhem4Markets My best guess: BC only real utility is international transfer of wealth, buy bitcoin in dollars, sell for yen in japan. So the price rises and falls with how much money is being transferred back and fourth internationally.

[Lyn Alden @LynAldenContact]

@Mayhem4Markets The ability to store and transfer debasement-resistant value globally without centralized permission.

And among the ways to do that, it’s the protocol with the best liquidity and decentralized track record. Network effects.

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

Microsoft is having to cancel its internal AI usage because the cost is too high.

This is despite Microsoft owning a large percentage of the company it gets its AI from.

The end is coming and the AI collapse has begun.

[Nicolas Hulscher, MPH @NicHulscher]

ORACLE'S LARRY ELLISON: “Citizens will be on their best behavior” with AI surveillance systems

"We're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on."

"It's unimpeachable."

Welcome to the dystopian AI surveillance state.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products.

My Take
The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested.

This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown.

Hedgie🤗

[Acyn @Acyn]

AOC: This is what drinking water in Georgia looks like after Meta began data center construction in the community.

[The General @GeneralMCNews]

BREAKING: A woman in Texas was arrested after making a Facebook post warning others about the poor water quality in her town.

[foobs 🍉 @foobs__]

Investor relations under RC have been nonexistent. He’s not qualified on that alone.

[6days1week @6days1week]

Ryan, @eBay doesn’t think you’re qualified for their communications position. 🤦‍♂️

[foobs 🍉 @foobs__]

MAGA aren’t worried about their gerrymander spreading the maga base too thin. It’s just eliminating the obviously blue districts so that when they steal the election in all of them they have plausible cover.

[DannyKPolitics @DannyKPolitics]

Ed Gallrein drew 57,053 votes in the 2026 GOP primary. That is a 351% surge in the anti-Massie vote.

That is a biggest surge in U.S. election history. Massie’s vote rose 18%, from 39,929 to 47,018.

Total GOP primary turnout nearly doubled in an off-year race. Money, Trump, and pro-Israel can’t explain it alone. Or maybe it can.

But a 351% challenger surge is not normal. It deserves precinct-level scrutiny. I call for an audit & recount!

[foobs 🍉 @foobs__]

When just got a beta test of how MAGA is doing Putin style elections.

[DannyKPolitics @DannyKPolitics]

Ed Gallrein drew 57,053 votes in the 2026 GOP primary. That is a 351% surge in the anti-Massie vote.

That is a biggest surge in U.S. election history. Massie’s vote rose 18%, from 39,929 to 47,018.

Total GOP primary turnout nearly doubled in an off-year race. Money, Trump, and pro-Israel can’t explain it alone. Or maybe it can.

But a 351% challenger surge is not normal. It deserves precinct-level scrutiny. I call for an audit & recount!

[foobs 🍉 @foobs__]

People are loosing their jobs to something that won’t work:

[Vladimir @vlelyavin]

@julianblacks_ forcing everyone to "build an ai tool " for a week and then doing mass layoffs is such a precise summary of where corporate ai is right now ngl

[Julian @julianblacks_]

After that week, projects that were approved were chosen to continue further development with AI and engineers.

For the past couple months, my wife has been working with a superior and an engineer to refine her approved project, knowing that it could ultimately be what replaces her.

Fast forward to today: She's canned.

[AF Post @AFpost]

Elon Musk says humans will soon have cybernetic chip implants that will enable “God-like powers”, describing the chips as creating “Jesus-level [miracles].”

Follow: @AFpost

[foobs 🍉 @foobs__]

@GobblingMode @heydomoshi A) not the point I’m making B) don’t be so sure. People being good at their jobs and people being good at looking good at their jobs are not the same skill and often the latter group survive layoffs better.

[Bueno 🌎 @0xBueno_]

Was this the greatest era to be a gamer?

[foobs 🍉 @foobs__]

@heydomoshi @GobblingMode Except the rank and file engineers who are gonna get downsized. That’s the don’t dance part.

[domoshi @heydomoshi]

As I was writing my last post, I realized how insanely genius "half cash, half stock" really is.

200IQ move

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Why are 100-year-old buildings listed as historically important, but 1,000 year old trees are cut down to make expensive furniture?

[domoshi @heydomoshi]

The XRT DOOM LOOP

If you want to understand the real dynamic of GameStop acquiring eBay, you have to look at the ETF basket they are both trapped in.

1. The "Basket" Paradox
For years, hedge funds and market makers have used ETFs like XRT for "operational shorting". Instead of shorting GME directly (which is expensive and risky), they exploit the ETF creation and redemption process to short the entire XRT basket and strip out the stocks they want to keep.

This allowed them to synthetically dump massive selling pressure onto GameStop while hiding the true size of their short position inside the ETF wrapper.

But here is the problem: eBay is one of the top holdings in that exact same basket.

2. The Arbitrage Nightmare
Remember the structure of GME’s $56B proposal? 50% Cash / 50% GME Stock.

Because GME is using its own equity to buy eBay, the stock prices of GME and eBay are now mathematically linked.

3. The Forced Reconciliation
When the merger completes, anyone who is short XRT owes the lender the exact equivalent of that eBay payout ("half cash, half stock").

For the shorts they hedged: Their long eBay position converts to GME shares, which they hand over to the XRT lender. These balance out.

For the millions of synthetic/naked shorts: They don't have enough long eBay shares to cover the difference in GME shares. But they still owe the XRT lender the distribution payment.

Because they owe the lender GameStop shares to settle the eBay portion of the XRT ETF, the short sellers will be forced to go onto the open market and BUY GameStop shares to deliver them.

4. The Ultimate Bear Trap
This means the acquisition is a forced share recall disguised as a merger.

By targeting the largest, most fundamentally cash-flowing asset inside the very ETF basket used to short the company, the structure of the merger forces short sellers to fund their own demise.

They used XRT as a weapon against retail. Now, RC is using it to swallow eBay whole.

$GME $EBAY $XRT