2 entries tagged inflation. All writing.
SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 A Rate Hike Against a Strait On Friday the inflation number came in at 3.4 percent and the futures market moved to better than 85 percent odds that the Federal Reserve raises interest rates next Wednesday. Take energy out of that 3.4 and it reads 2.4 — a whisker from the target. So the Fed is about to raise the price of money in the United States against a number that is mostly a closed strait on the other side of the world. I wanted to know whether that has ever worked, so I went back through five oil shocks and looked at what the Fed did each time. SEPTEMBER 10, 2026 Six Million Tokens in Eleven Minutes Some friends and I have been arguing about whether it will ever seem normal to spend six million tokens in eleven minutes to make a blog post — and whether a world where the well-off can run AI flat out leaves everyone else with the crumbs. So I priced the tokens, traced where the price is going, and went back to the last time a machine cost more than a house. The number that matters isn't the token count. It's which of two prices you're paying, and who is paying for the free one.