RyMac

Good vibes only. Beach bum. Entrepreneur. @desertsmash founder. Marathoner. Black belt. Career Tennis guy. Cape Cod Native. Talented Margarita maker! 🫶🏼

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The firm behind Wembley and Tottenham's stadium designed a football ground in Mexico, then pointed it at a mountain. They dropped the roof on one end so the open side frames the Cerro de la Silla, the saddle-shaped mountain that rises over Monterrey, sitting right behind the pitch.

That view in the clip came first. The architects, a firm called Populous, built the stadium around it, and they have said the mountain was one of the biggest reasons it looks the way it does. The roof stands tall on the north side and slopes down toward the south, opening up so the mountain fills the gap above the stands.

The roof is one solid piece that reaches 55 meters out over the crowd, longer than an Olympic pool, with nothing holding it up from underneath. It shades fans from a summer sun that climbs past 40°C, or 104°F. The sides stay open so the air keeps moving. Instead of closing the place up and running air conditioning, Populous cut "gills" into the metal shell, angled to catch the breeze and push warm air up and out. The building cools itself.

The metal shell is a nod to the city's past. Monterrey built its fortune on steel and had the first iron and steel foundry in Latin America, so the stadium is wrapped in steel and aluminum, which got it the nickname "El Gigante de Acero," the steel giant. The lopsided, sweeping shape comes from an odd place: the outline of old brewing stills, a tip of the hat to the beer-making the city has done since 1890.

Inside, they pulled the crowd right on top of the grass. The first row sits 9 meters from the field. At the club's old ground, it was 27. The stands tilt back at 34 degrees, one of the steepest angles in the Mexican league, packing all 53,500 seats close to the pitch, which is part of why it gets so loud.

FEMSA, the drinks giant that owns the club, paid for all of it. The bill came to around $200 million, making it the most expensive stadium ever built in Mexico when it opened in 2015. In 2024 it became the first stadium in Latin America to earn LEED Gold, a major green-building rating, for how it handles energy and water.

So the view in that clip was drawn into the plans years before they laid the first beam. The whole building is a frame, and the mountain is the picture.

[BuBBliK @k1rallik]

🚨 do you understand what Anthropic just published..

They released internal data showing their AI is now accelerating the development of AI itself.

This is the first step toward systems that build their own successors. They're openly warning where this leads. It could end in humans losing control.

- Tasked with speeding up model-training code, their AI went from 3x faster to 52x faster in a single year
- A skilled human needs 4-8 hours to hit 4x on the same task
- When a human researcher took a wrong turn, the AI picked a better next step 64% of the time
- They're now calling for a way to globally pause AI development before it's too late

The company making the AI is telling you it might not be able to control it. Read that again.

[Blue Georgia @BlueGeorgia]

Obama is so friggin' cool... Stephen Colbert shows him a photo of the tan suit.

Colbert: When you look back at the tan suit, what occurs to you?

Obama: Fly.

[WOLF @WOLF_Financial]

JENSEN HUANG WAS ASKED ABOUT A WEALTH TAX THAT COULD COST HIM $8 BILLION

The interviewer expected him to be worried. He wasn't.

His response surprised the room:

"I prefer lower taxes. However, I also don't mind paying taxes. I love this country. We don't exercise that many tax loopholes. Once a year we get a bill, we pay it, and it's big. I never once thought about it. We love this country. That's our way of giving back."

He went on to say he and his wife chose California for the schools and the culture, not for tax arbitrage.

"I would love that they would apply $10,000 of the taxes that I paid to fix that one pothole on the 101. If they let me, I'll do it myself."

[Peter Baker @peterbakernyt]

The @nytimes added 310,000 net new digital subscribers in the first quarter, surpassing 13.1 million total, the largest paid audience in the history of the paper. @katie_robertson https://t.co/xcxr2SBsuz

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

LeBron James says he isn't a billionaire. Forbes has him at $1.4 billion. He's right.

He went on Complex this week, held up a $405,040 Richard Mille, and said the watch was free. He said his bank account holds a couple thousand. He said his kids have all the money now.

Every line is accurate.

The Lakers paid him $48.7 million this season. His off-court income runs around $80 million annually from Nike, PepsiCo, Beats, and a dozen other brands. None of that sits in a checking account at age 41. It moves into investment vehicles the same week it clears.

The Richard Mille is the RM 65-01 LeBron edition, limited to 150 pieces globally. He didn't buy it. He co-designed it. Richard Mille gave him 001/150 because every paparazzi photo of his wrist sells the next 20 to oil magnates and tech founders. The watch is technically free in the same way the MacBook Tim Cook holds at a keynote is technically free. The brand pays the principal to wear the product.

The 2011 Fenway Sports Group deal is the textbook version of the trade. LeBron got Liverpool FC equity for marketing services, zero cash out of pocket. Liverpool was valued around $300 million at the time. The club sits above $5 billion today. He converted that stake into a broader FSG position in 2021, which now also includes the Red Sox and Pittsburgh Penguins. FSG itself runs north of $12 billion. He paid nothing for any of it.

SpringHill is the bigger one. RedBird Capital led a 2021 round at a $725 million valuation, with Nike and FSG also putting capital in. LeBron remained the largest single shareholder. The company just merged with Fulwell 73, which extends the slate without diluting his control. None of that equity is liquid. It compounds inside a holding structure that does not show up on a bank statement.

Now the kids. "They got all the money now. They take care of dad." Read that as an estate plan said out loud. Move appreciating assets into trusts in your heirs' names while the assets are still small. Pay gift tax on the original valuation. The S&P doubles, the trust doubles, the IRS already saw its slice. The Walton family ran this on Walmart in the 1980s. The Mars family ran it on candy.

The Complex headline is "LeBron reveals he's not a billionaire."

$1.4 billion is the entity. Couple thousand is the man.

[dank @cptdankkk]

LeBron James reveals he turned down $10 million from Reebok before signing with Nike

"I took on 3 pitches. Adidas, Reebok and Nike. The best pitch that I got where I thought I'd end up was Reebok. At the time Reebok had the NFL"

"I was a high school senior, and they gave me a check for $10 million if I promised not to go see anybody else"

"My mom looked at me and said trust your gut. If they are offering you this, who knows what the other companies may offer you. Do what you think is right"

"I said thank you, but I'd be remiss if I did not take the pitches from the other companies. I may have cried on the way home"

[Michael McFaul @McFaul]

Once in power, Putin cut taxes for wealthy elites, consolidated media & sought to shape the electoral process. Sound familiar? Some parallels are hard to ignore. The difference? The US has strong checks, an active civil society & deep democratic traditions. That gives me hope.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Russia raises children from birth inside fake American towns deep in Siberia.

American food. American TV. American holidays. Perfect Midwestern accents drilled in by native speakers brought in for the job. The kids grow up never knowing they are Russian. When they hit their early twenties, the SVR sends them to a cemetery in Canada or the United States, finds a baby who died young with no surviving relatives, and pulls a duplicate birth certificate in that dead child's name. The agent gets a real Social Security number, a real passport, a real identity. They walk into America as an American citizen who legally exists.

Then they live a normal life. Real estate agent. Suburban dad. PTA mom. Consulting firm partner. For ten, fifteen, twenty years.

Until one day the radio crackles a coded sequence, or a stranger on the subway whispers a phrase only their handler would know, and the sleeper wakes up. This is what former CIA officer John Kiriakou just told Steven Bartlett happens, and the case file is wilder than the story.

In June 2010, the FBI rolled up ten of these agents across Boston, Yonkers, suburban New Jersey, and Northern Virginia in Operation Ghost Stories. They had been watching them for more than a decade. One couple, posing as Canadian, had been in Cambridge, Massachusetts long enough to put one kid through high school and into college. The husband held a Harvard MPA. The wife sold houses through Redfin. Their two sons were born in Toronto and grew up believing they were Canadian. When the FBI raided the home, the kids found out their parents were Russian intelligence officers from the agents' own arrest warrants.

One agent's mission was to cultivate a venture capitalist who co-chaired Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. The intelligence target Moscow assigned her: details about the global gold market. The cash drops the SVR buried in the woods to fund her operations sat unrecovered in the dirt for two years before another sleeper dug them up.

The agents communicated with Moscow through invisible ink, dead drops in suburban parks, radiograms beamed across the Atlantic on shortwave frequencies, and steganography hidden inside vacation photos. Press Control-Alt-E on the right JPEG, type a 27-character password, and the message decrypts. The same toolkit the KGB used in the 1960s, still operational in the 2010s.

When the swap happened in Vienna on July 9, 2010, Russia traded ten of these agents for four Western-handled assets, including the GRU colonel later poisoned with novichok in Salisbury. Putin met the returnees personally at the Kremlin, sang the Soviet anthem "Where the Motherland Begins" with them, and placed them in elite positions. The lead Cambridge agent now teaches international relations at MGIMO and consults for Rosneft. His wife writes spy novels and lectures on networking at the Orator Club in Moscow.

The program has been running continuously since the 1920s. The current generation is already deployed. Two more illegals were exposed in Slovenia in 2022, posing as Argentine art dealers, with their two young children also in the dark. One was caught in Norway. One was caught in Brazil.

The scariest part is not that the sleepers exist.

It is that the program has been running for a hundred years, the FBI has known about it for decades, and Moscow keeps replacing the burned agents faster than the West can find the new ones. Right now, somewhere in suburban America, a kid is at soccer practice. Their dad is making dinner. The radio is on in the kitchen. Both of them are waiting for the phrase.

[DavidoPolice @DavidoPolice]

Many Americans today have mixed opinions about Barack Obama. Some admire him, others criticize him. But for those of us who come from outside, the reality is often different.
Believe it or not, no American president has ever left such a strong impression around the world as Barack Obama. He embodied hope, respect, intelligence, and dialogue. He represented a powerful image of America: open, inspiring, and close to the people.
For many of us, Obama was not just a president; he was a symbol. A symbol that everything is possible, that social background, skin color, or personal history should never be limits.
He restored confidence to millions of young people around the world. He spoke to the world with dignity, calm, and responsibility. He knew how to unite instead of divide.
No matter the internal political debates, internationally, Barack Obama will forever remain one of the most respected, loved, and admired American presidents.
His legacy goes beyond borders. And his name will remain engraved in history.

[RyMac @rymac10s]

Hey @AmericanAir , my Mom left her phone on a flight back to Boston from PHX over 2 months ago now. You have it. Got an email from you. Your customer service has been horrible, nobody answers a phone (you provided) or email. Please help. ##aa #poorcustomerservice #LostandFound

[Gabriele Corno @Gabriele_Corno]

The moment of this snow leopard's return to freedom leaves you speechless.

[Fernando Arreaza Ortega @arreazaortega]

He seguido atentamente la Misión Espacial del #ArtemisII y ha sido verdaderamente impresionante.

En una época de tecnología tan avanzada, han surgido vídeos y fotos impactantes.

El post fijado en la cuenta de @NASA es sencillamente fascinante.

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

The Bondi firing will get all the attention but what Hegseth is doing with the upper echelons of the military is much more dangerous over time than Bondi’s tenure as AG.

And it won’t get 1% of the coverage.

Someday it will get a lot of coverage, and those will be dark days.

[Anthony Scaramucci @Scaramucci]

Let me walk you through what happened one hour before Trump announced the five day moratorium on Iran strikes.

$1.5 billion in notional S&P E-mini futures contracts. Four to six times normal activity.

One hour before the announcement.

Simultaneously, $192 million in crude oil futures purchased at the same time.

They made between $300 and $400 million dollars off those trades.

Trump claimed he spoke to an Iranian official to negotiate the moratorium.

The Iranians said that person doesn't exist and the conversation never happened.

This is not the first time.

It has happened multiple times. He says something. The trade goes on. He says another thing. The market moves.

But whatever you call it — they are laughing at you and they are laughing at me while they do it.

Hunter Biden sold a painting and Washington lost its mind.

These people are making hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars trading on information that only exists inside the most powerful office in the world.

I think we are dramatically underreporting how much money is actually being made here.

This isn't politics anymore.

This is a financial operation running out of the White House.

[RyMac @rymac10s]

@juliaioffe @MalcolmNance @McFaul could this be true?

[RyMac @rymac10s]

@LukaUpdates

[Tansu Yegen @TansuYegen]

17-year-old Chinese diver Quan Hongchan had almost no splash after her dive, and the jump was judged as perfect.

[The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox]

Tucker Carlson asked Joe Kent why the Thomas Crooks surveillance tapes haven’t been released.

Kent’s answer blew him away.

He explained the government deliberately withholds information to create noise with conspiracy theories, so the “actual question never gets answered.”

TUCKER: “The current president was the subject of a near-successful assassination attempt.”

“And we’re just not going to look into very obviously or divulge information that everyone knows they have.”

“For example, the surveillance tape from the shooting range at which Thomas Crooks trained, because it would answer the question, was he training with somebody?”

“And if so, who? They have that footage, and they won’t release it. What could possibly be the explanation for that?”

KENT: “I know what the result is. The result is people come to their own conclusions. And this is where crazy conspiracy theories come from.”

“And then those conspiracy theories usually are easy to ‘debunk’ or make the people saying them sound crazy. So then the actual question never gets answered.”

[Tucker laughs in awe]

TUCKER: “Sorry. Can you say that for people who haven’t lived in Washington?”

“I try to explain this to people all the time because this has been ongoing since at least the Kennedy assassination.”

“But this is a very serious and recurring thing. It’s a tactic. And you just explained it better than anyone I’ve ever heard. Can you just do that again?”

KENT: “So basically, you give no information whatsoever on something that’s obvious, that there should be information.”

“You outlined there’s potentially footage of Crooks at the shooting range. Again, police, 101, go get the tapes. Let’s figure it out.”

“If you don’t want to address that question, then you just go silent. You say, ‘you can’t ask that question,’ which then creates people who come out of kind of nowhere, and they start drawing their own conclusions.”

“Knowing the way the internet works, half of them, if not more, are probably going to be so far off in left field... that then you can just be like, Oh, these people asking these questions about that tape at the video range. Crazy conspiracy theorists.’”

“And so then you’ve just diverted all attention away from the thing that you’re trying to conceal. And now everyone’s focused on the crazies.”

TUCKER: “Man.”

KENT: “And then the second someone asks a legitimate question, they’re ‘crazy.’”