Item #1. The attention bottleneck. This is an astute observation:
Nobody wants to hear this, but the biggest moat in business right now is attention.
40 cents of every venture dollar raised goes to Google and Facebook for ads.
As a founder, spending time building an audience organically will give you a higher long term ROI than almost…
— Codie Sanchez (@Codie_Sanchez) July 23, 2026
Attention, GPUs/memory, and bandwidth are the three biggest bottlenecks. Similar to attention or “compute,” bandwidth is a resource constraint, orthogonal to content. AI cannot fix these. Agents can do a lot, but they cannot actually consume/buy in the way humans do. So this still means paying for advertising–an ancient and thriving industry against a backdrop of LLMs. This is why Google and Meta stock are thriving, alongside AI. Every startup needs to draw attention towards it, hence super-pricey online advertising.
For bandwidth bottlenecks, I recommend Cloudflare stock, which I recently purchased. Almost every website is using Cloudflare to block bandwidth-hogging AI bots/crawlers. Users are complaining about the pervasiveness of Cloudflare captchas:
Even LessWrong finally added an annoying splash page, presumably in response to AI crawlers or other spam.
Item #2. I saw this going viral, from the BBC, “Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it’s 20g bigger than today’s.”
This show how everything is downstream from online culture. Shrinkflation was first went viral online around 2022 during the post-Covid supply shortages, but was largely dismissed by economists and the media. “It’s all in your head, or it’s accounted for by the CPI,” we were told. Now, fast forward to 2026, and even the BBC is reporting it. People, on either side of the aisle, can relate their personal experiences of “paying more for less”:
There is the widespread perception that everyone is being ripped off by companies, who use every crisis or other excuse to raise prices, and keep them high after the problem subsides.
Item #3. Early access to Trump’s tweets goes live, and corruption accusations predictably follow:
Say what you want about Trump, but he really is a once in a lifetime talent in the field of corruption. https://t.co/hOcocJojB2
— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) August 2, 2026
Because Trump is upfront about what he’s selling, technically it does not fall under the purview of corruption, whereas corruption involves payment for some implied favor. It may be in poor taste, but it’s no different than a website selling a premium subscription, except in this case the website is run by the President. As I said before, the definition of corruption has been expanded to include everything, or any vague feeling of disproval. Given how hedge funds trade billions of dollars, $100k/month for early access to Trump’s market-moving tweets is a good deal and a major potential source of revenue for him.
Item #4. Tariffs passed on to consumers and businesses:
So the tariff costs were passed on to the consumers, but the refund went straight to the corporations.
— Harrison H. Smith ✞ (@HarrisonHSmith) August 2, 2026
Small businesses got screwed as always–big companies got refunds and passed tariff costs to consumers. Just like Covid when small businesses were shut down. Here is what I wrote last year:
The irony is that although tariffs are marketed by Trump as helping the lower/middle classes, like every other economic disruption in the 21st century–like 2008 or 2020–it’s the lower classes and small biz that struggles the most, whereas the ‘college careerists’ and ‘big business’ are the most insulated and come out way ahead.
Item #5. So much for that “AI job crisis.” I was right again. The unemployment rate fell to 4.1% in July 2026, down from 4.2% in June. From CBS, “Job cuts plunge to a 2-year low despite AI fears, economic shocks:”
Layoffs across the U.S. in July fell to their lowest level in two years, new data shows, a sign that the labor market remains resilient despite the impact of inflation driven by the Iran war and artificial intelligence.
Employers announced 33,429 job cuts in July, down 46% from a year ago, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The number of layoffs last month was the lowest since July 2024, when roughly 26,000 cuts were announced.
A decrease in the number of Americans filing for weekly unemployment benefits also indicates a low level of layoffs. The four-week average of initial jobless claims is now below 200,000 for the first time since October 2022, according to PNC Economics Research.
The media has pivoted away from “AI-job loss,” to typical fears such as “AI being a bubble“.
Item #6. He’s right:
It seems as if quite a few people actually expected Trump to pursue some type of deflationary economic policy.
Not sure why, every single policy of this administration from day 1 has been obviously inflationary, intended keeping the DOW up, promoting asset appreciation, etc.
— VB Knives (@Empty_America) August 9, 2026
This echoes what I wrote 2 days ago. Trump cares much more about GDP and Dow Jones than “muh affordability”. In 2024-2025, people were projecting their own desires onto him, whether it was Trump being anti-war or caring about affordability. If you’re 16-20 and surprised by Trump attacking Iran, you can be forgiven. But if you’re 40+, then, TBH, you’re kinda dumb.