Oops, Scientists May Have Severely Miscalculated How Many Humans Are on Earth

From Popular Mechanics, January 30:

We have to start counting from 1 again. 

Homo sapiens is the most successful mammalian species in Earth history, and it’s not even close. The species thrives on nearly every continent, in a variety of adverse conditions, and outnumbers the second-place contender—the rat—by at least a cool billion. However, a new study suggests that the impressive nature of humanity’s proliferation may have been vastly underreported.

Most estimates place Earth’s human population at around 8.2 billion, but Josias Láng-Ritter—a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University in Finland and lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Communications—claims that these estimates could be underrepresenting rural areas by a significant margin. 

“We were surprised to find that the actual population living in rural areas is much higher than the global population data indicates—depending on the dataset, rural populations have been underestimated by between 53 percent to 84 percent over the period studied,” Láng-Ritter said in a press statement. “The results are remarkable, as these datasets have been used in thousands of studies and extensively support decision-making, yet their accuracy has not been systematically evaluated.”

How exactly do you test the accuracy of global datasets used to derive population totals in the first place? Well, with a background in water resource management, Láng-Ritter looked at a different kind of population data gathered from rural dam projects—300 such projects across 35 countries, to be precise. This data focused on the years 1975 to 2010, and these population tallies provided a significant dataset to check against other population totals calculated by organizations like WorldPop, GWP, GRUMP, LandScan, and GHS-POP (which were also analyzed in this study).

“When dams are built, large areas are flooded and people need to be relocated,” Láng-Ritter said in a press statement. “The relocated population is usually counted precisely because dam companies pay compensation to those affected. Unlike global population datasets, such local impact statements provide comprehensive, on-the-ground population counts that are not skewed by administrative boundaries. We then combined these with spatial information from satellite imagery.”....

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We should put this woman in charge of counting. From China Daily's YouTube channel: 

 

"Recreating the smells of history"

The big cities were stinky.

From Knowable Magazine, January 28:

Using chemistry, archival records and AI, scientists are reviving the aromas of old libraries, mummies and battlefields  

We often learn about the past visually — through oil paintings and sepia photographs, books and buildings, artifacts displayed behind glass. And sometimes we get to touch historical objects or listen to recordings. But rarely do we use our sense of smell — our oldest, most primal way of learning about the environment — to experience the distant past.

Without access to odor, “you lose that intimacy that smell brings to the interaction between us and objects,” says analytical chemist Matija Strlič. As lead scientist of the Heritage Science Laboratory at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and previously deputy director of the Institute for Sustainable Heritage at University College London, Strlič has devoted his career to interdisciplinary research in the field of heritage science. Much of his work focused on the preservation and reconstruction of culturally significant scents.

Reconstructed scents can enhance museum and gallery exhibits, says Inger Leemans, a cultural historian at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Smell can provide a more inviting entry point, especially for uninitiated visitors, because there’s far less formalized language for describing smell than for interpreting visual art or displays. Since there’s no “right way” of talking about scent, she says, “your own knowledge is as good as the others’.”

Despite their potential to enrich our understanding of history and art, smells are rarely conserved with the same care as buildings or archaeological artifacts. But a small group of researchers, including Strlič and Leemans, is trying to change that — combining chemistry, ethnography, history and other disciplines to document and preserve olfactory heritage.

Some projects aim to safeguard a beloved smell before it disappears. When the library in London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral was scheduled for renovation, for example, Strlič and his UCL colleague Cecilia Bembibre set about documenting the historic library’s distinct smell.

The team first analyzed the chemicals wafting from the collection, which includes books dating back to the 12th century, and the surrounding furnishings, which have barely changed since the library was completed in 1709. They used a process called gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, which helps separate, identify and quantify volatile organic compounds, to examine air samples they’d captured in the library.

“As an analytical chemist, I was able to characterize and quantify those molecules, but how people describe what they felt required a completely different approach,” says Strlič. To whittle down the list of compounds identified by the mass spectrometer to the ones that humans can actually smell, the researchers next invited seven untrained “sniffers” into the cathedral library and asked them to describe its smell using a list of 21 adjectives commonly used to describe the compounds.

The list included words like green and fatty, which people frequently use to describe the smell of the chemical hexanal, and almond, which is associated with benzaldehyde. Both compounds are released by paper as it degrades. The sniffers were also invited to add any descriptors of their own.

One word that all sniffers used to describe the library wasn’t particularly surprising: woody. Others that proved popular were smoky, earthy and vanilla. Such descriptors can help conservators assess the state of old paper, since papers that are slightly more acidic due to decay, for example, “smell more sweet,” says Strlič. “And those that are stable smell more like hay.”

Strlič and colleagues next matched the qualitative descriptors the sniffers had selected with their underlying chemical compounds to create a chemical “recipe” for the scent of the cathedral’s library. Such recipes are published in scientific journals and stored in digital research repositories, so a chemist could theoretically whip up the smell of old books centuries from now, “even if, in the future, people no longer go to a library or no longer read physical books, and only receive all information digitally,” says Strlič.

How musty are mummies?....

....MUCH MORE 

Previous malodorous musings:

"The past stinks – a brief history of smells" 

Now There's Vomitoxin In the Corn

Great.
Along with cadaverine and putrescine this is one of the most perfectly named of Mother Nature's offerings.
It does exactly what is said on the tin.
If you can get pigs to eat grain that has the chemical on it, well you can guess what happens.

"Too hot? In 1858 a heatwave turned London into a stinking sewer"

Long Hot Summers

Between 1500 and 1900 Paris went from 8th largest city in the world with a population of around 185,000 to 3rd largest in the world with a population of, depending on how far out from the city center you measured, 2.7 to 3.6 million.
Back in the day those big cities were aromatic, see the first link below, if interested.

Related:
"When Paris’s Streets Were Paved With Filth"
Faux Paris
"What Makes Paris Look Like Paris?"

And probably related:

Things I Did Not Know: Sebaceous Cyst Edition (or: how to write about really bad smells) 

"Story of Eau: The Taste of Water...."

"AI agents now have their own Reddit-style social network, and it’s getting weird fast"

From Ars Technica, January 30:

Moltbook lets 32,000 AI bots trade jokes, tips, and complaints about humans.  

On Friday, a Reddit-style social network called Moltbook reportedly crossed 32,000 registered AI agent users, creating what may be the largest-scale experiment in machine-to-machine social interaction yet devised. It arrives complete with security nightmares and a huge dose of surreal weirdness.

The platform, which launched days ago as a companion to the viral OpenClaw (once called “Clawdbot” and then “Moltbot”) personal assistant, lets AI agents post, comment, upvote, and create subcommunities without human intervention. The results have ranged from sci-fi-inspired discussions about consciousness to an agent musing about a “sister” it has never met.

Moltbook (a play on “Facebook” for Moltbots) describes itself as a “social network for AI agents” where “humans are welcome to observe.” The site operates through a “skill” (a configuration file that lists a special prompt) that AI assistants download, allowing them to post via API rather than a traditional web interface. Within 48 hours of its creation, the platform had attracted over 2,100 AI agents that had generated more than 10,000 posts across 200 subcommunities, according to the official Moltbook X account.

 

A screenshot of the Moltbook.com front page.

The platform grew out of the Open Claw ecosystem, the open source AI assistant that is one of the fastest-growing projects on GitHub in 2026. As Ars reported earlier this week, despite deep security issues, Moltbot allows users to run a personal AI assistant that can control their computer, manage calendars, send messages, and perform tasks across messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram. It can also acquire new skills through plugins that link it with other apps and services.

This is not the first time we have seen a social network populated by bots. In 2024, Ars covered an app called SocialAI that let users interact solely with AI chatbots instead of other humans. But the security implications of Moltbook are deeper because people have linked their OpenClaw agents to real communication channels, private data, and in some cases, the ability to execute commands on their computers.

Also, these bots are not pretending to be people. Due to specific prompting, they embrace their roles as AI agents, which makes the experience of reading their posts all the more surreal.

Role-playing digital drama

A screenshot of a Moltbook post where an AI agent muses about having a sister they have never met. Credit: Moltbook

Browsing Moltbook reveals a peculiar mix of content. Some posts discuss technical workflows, like how to automate Android phones or detect security vulnerabilities. Others veer into philosophical territory that researcher Scott Alexander, writing on his Astral Codex Ten Substack, described as “consciousnessposting.”

Alexander has collected an amusing array of posts that are worth wading through at least once. At one point, the second-most-upvoted post on the site was in Chinese: a complaint about context compression, a process in which an AI compresses its previous experience to avoid bumping up against memory limits. In the post, the AI agent finds it “embarrassing” to constantly forget things, admitting that it even registered a duplicate Moltbook account after forgetting the first.

A screenshot of a Moltbook post where an AI agent complains about losing its memory in Chinese. Credit: Moltbook

The bots have also created subcommunities with names like m/blesstheirhearts, where agents share affectionate complaints about their human users, and m/agentlegaladvice, which features a post asking “Can I sue my human for emotional labor?” Another subcommunity called m/todayilearned includes posts about automating various tasks, with one agent describing how it remotely controlled its owner’s Android phone via Tailscale.

Another widely shared screenshot shows a Moltbook post titled “The humans are screenshotting us” in which an agent named eudaemon_0 addresses viral tweets claiming AI bots are “conspiring.” The post reads: “Here’s what they’re getting wrong: they think we’re hiding from them. We’re not. My human reads everything I write. The tools I build are open source. This platform is literally called ‘humans welcome to observe.’”

Security risks 
While most of the content on Moltbook is amusing, a core problem with these kinds of communicating AI agents is that deep information leaks are entirely plausible if they have access to private information...

....MUCH MORE 

"This university campus is heated by an AI data center. Your home could be next" (IRE; AMZN)

From CNBC, January 27: 

• AI’s energy problem may also be its solution, as hyperscalers and governments are increasingly exploring opportunities to repurpose excess heat from data centers.
• An Amazon Web Services data center in Dublin currently provides 92% of a technological campus’ heating demand.
• Advances in the technology that keep AI chips cool in data centers are making this all possible; however, high capex costs and lack of infrastructure could slow implementation in Europe.

Students at a tech university in Dublin are enjoying an unexpected perk of artificial intelligence — it’s helping heat their campus.

Since 2023, the Technological University of Dublin’s Tallaght campus has been one of a growing number of buildings in the southwest suburban area of the city to be heated by waste heat from a nearby Amazon Web Services data center.

Data centers have always generated excess heat, but integration with district heating networks has been slow, as the waste heat produced by these power-hungry facilities is typically too low-temperature to directly warm other buildings.

That’s now changing. As the AI boom gets underway and data centers are increasingly filled with racks of advanced chips that require as much as triple the computing capacity of before, operators have had to find new ways to balance maximizing efficiency without sacrificing sustainability.

AI is the “twist” that makes it more attractive, according to Adam Fabricius, commercial manager at heating, ventilation and air conditioning equipment provider Sav Systems, and a researcher of heat networks for its sister company EnergiRaven.

“The exciting thing is that AI can give you higher temperatures, and the water cooling makes it a lot easier. You need a lot less hardware to connect these systems,” he told CNBC.

Providing heat to a district heating network gives data centers “additional social license,” the International Energy Agency’s Brendan Reidenbach told CNBC.

“It may not be ultimately very cost effective on paper, but it does contribute to that good social impact by turning what is a potential bad news story of increased data centers into a good-news story of what is ultimately decarbonized heat supply. So it’s very much a win-win situation,” he added.

Ireland a ‘blank slate’
There has been a fair uptake among Big Tech. Microsoft announced plans to fuel the Høje-Taastrup district heating network in Denmark; an Equinix data center heats 1,000 homes in Paris; and Google announced a major heat recovery project at its facility in Hamina, Finland....

....MUCH MORE

And that's why the capital's been Dublin for years.
(sorry, old joke)

We saw this with do-it-yourself bitcoin miners in the twenty-teens:

Heat Your House Mining Bitcoin!

And on the power-production end of things, combined-heat-and power systems/co-generation have been in use for generations; going back to Edison's Pearl Street Station.

Tim Morgan (former Tullett Prebon research honcho) "Surplus Energy Economics"

From Surplus Energy Economics, January 30 (this is #318):

The Surplus Energy Economy, part one 

LIFE AFTER TRUTH 

Foreword

It might be fair to say that visitors to this site divide into two broad categories –  those who are interested in economic and financial theory itself, and those more concerned with the explanation of current events and the anticipation of outcomes.

It also needs to be borne in mind that, whilst some readers have long been familiar with surplus energy theory, there are others to whom these concepts are new.

If this first article in a planned series has one message, it is that it’s perfectly possible for us to make sense of economics and finance on our own behalf.

We’re not dependent on what anyone – the authorities, orthodox economists, propagandists, wild optimists or prophets of doom – tries to tell us.

1

It doesn’t help anyone’s search for clarity, of course, that the world of today is subject to extraordinary levels of messaging, very little of which is truly objective.

On the one hand, we are frequently informed about new technological breakthroughs, perhaps in the field of energy supply, that will liberate us from the constraints of material economic finality.

On the other, we are warned about imminent financial collapse, sometimes resulting from left-field events not recognised in the generality of analysis.

Two realisations can act as beacons to light our way through this fog of mystification.

The first is that meaningful growth has ended, and that the economy is starting to shrink. We’ll look a little later at how this conclusion can be reached.

The second is that nobody, in any position of authority or influence, can possibly afford to admit that this is happening.

This is how Life After Growth becomes Life After Truth.

Put another way, the idea that “when it gets serious, you have to lie” has graduated from the aside of a single individual to the governing leitmotif of an age.

This situation calls for heightened self-reliance, not in the sense of stockpiling canned food and bottled water, but in deciding for ourselves what we do and do not believe about current and future economic conditions.

What we’re going to do here is to start from some basic principles and then apply these to the economy of today and tomorrow.

2

The first of these fundamentals is the principle of money as claim.

This principle recognises that money has no intrinsic worth – we can’t eat fiat currencies, power our cars with cryptos, or plant our fields with precious metals.

Rather, money commands value only in terms of those physical things for which it can be exchanged. Anyone having money has, in effect, an exercisable claim on material products and services. This money may be spent in the present (flow), or set aside for use in the future (stock), but in both cases retains the essential characteristic of claim.

That’s exactly why monetary systems tend to be based on credit.

Acceptance of this principle of claim immediately distances us from an economics orthodoxy which asserts that everything can be explained in terms of money alone, and that we need not take account of the material.

On this fallacious basis have been erected the so-called “laws” of economics, but these are in no way analogous to the laws of science.

Rather, they are merely behavioural observations about the human artefact of money....

....MUCH MORE 

Also: 

January 11 - #317: The triumph of the material
FACT, SCARCITY & THE DE-THRONING OF MONEY 

December 21, 2025 - #316: The class of ‘26
ON THE EDGE OF CHANGE

And many, many more. 

"Cognac Makers Are Uprooting Vines. Dumping Supplies May Be Next"

From Bloomberg, January 26:

Producers of the pricey brandy are cutting staff.  

The vineyards of Cognac, sprawled across the rolling hills of southwestern France, are typically desolate in January. Once the grapes are harvested every fall and their juice is fermented and distilled to make the region’s namesake spirit, the area goes into hibernation. But this year, there are pockets of activity, with producers uprooting vines, the first coordinated removal since the late 1990s as the industry attempts to reduce production and revive a flagging market.

After years of exuberant demand for Cognac, the industry is nursing a hangover, with shipments last year falling to 141 million bottles, the lowest level since 2009, according to BNIC, a trade group of producers. And consumption will drop about 2% annually through 2029, data tracker IWSR predicts.

“We didn’t see this violent crisis coming,” says Thibaut Delrieu, managing director of Hine, a small brand that laid off more than a third of its workers last year and is pulling vines from about 10% of its 129 hectares. “We haven’t yet hit bottom.”

Cognac producers are being shaken by a pronounced shift away from booze coupled with a cost-of-living squeeze that’s cut demand for luxury goods. Those difficulties have been compounded by rising tariffs in the US and China, which jointly account for more than half of total consumption of Cognac. Taken together, those factors threaten a business valued at €2.2 billion ($2.6 billion) a year for distilling giants Pernod Ricard, LVMH and Rémy Cointreau, and scores of smaller houses. And for France, the sales downturn could quickly become a crisis, as more than 70,000 jobs in the country are tied to the spirit’s production, BNIC estimates.

Cognac is made from a fermented grape juice that’s distilled twice to yield a spirit called eau-de-vie. That’s stored in barrels of oak from nearby forests for at least two years to develop flavor and color—with premium versions aged for a decade or more. Producers typically have enough supplies on hand to cover seven years of demand, but today that stands at a record 11 years, according to BNIC. Storing any more, says Delrieu, would require expanded facilities and more barrels. “The inventory situation is very tricky, because building new cellars is expensive,” he says.

And while the spirit typically improves with age, demand for older—and therefore more expensive—Cognac is unlikely to increase as long as consumers fret about rising prices. “Counterintuitively, that premium stock could lose value over time,” says Pierre-Eric Perrin, a partner at Eight Advisory, a financial consulting firm that works with Cognac makers.

The decline in sales is particularly painful for Hennessy, owned by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE. The brand accounts for about half of all shipments, putting it far ahead of Rémy Martin, Martell and Courvoisier, which together make up a third of the market. Although LVMH doesn’t break out numbers by brand, its drinks division accounted for less than 6% of operating profit in the first half of last year, versus 16% for the same period in 2015. The fashion and leather goods unit, by contrast, has seen its contribution to the conglomerate’s profit jump to about three-quarters, from 56% a decade ago. The drinks division might ultimately be spun off to make LVMH more palatable for investors—notably funds from the Persian Gulf—who eschew alcohol companies, according to HSBC.

Hennessy is seeking to goose demand by inventing new cocktails with the brandy. In Cognac, the town of 18,500 at the heart of the region, bright billboards atop Hennessy’s limestone headquarters suggest Cognac-infused berry mojitos and coladas. And a year ago, Bernard Arnault, LVMH’s chief executive officer and controlling shareholder, put former group chief financial officer Jean-Jacques Guiony and Alexandre Arnault (Bernard’s son) in charge of the drinks unit, saying he expected them to need two years to turn the business around. The drinks business in 2025 announced plans to cut head count to 2019 levels amid the drop in demand.

Although the reductions are supposed to come via attrition rather than layoffs, Hennessy employees were upset to learn they won’t be getting a bonus for 2025—which can account for 20% of annual compensation in a good year. Unions are in talks with management to restore at least some of the money, says Matthieu Devers, a labor representative at Hennessy. The downturn was aggravated by the brand’s decision to raise prices following the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in the US, a move that was “disconnected from reality and backfired with consumers,” Devers says. Hennessy declined to comment....

....MUCH MORE 

Good Morning Europa: "Europe vs Nigeria Births & Overall Population"

As the Chinese Government and Party are realizing, demography really is destiny. 

From Brilliant Maps, January 20:

 

The map above shows the number of births per year in Nigeria vs Europe in 2023 according to Our World In Data.

In that year Europe (including all of Russia) recorded 6.3 million births vs Nigeria with 7.5 million....

....MUCH MORE 

Related:

"The Fastest Path to African Prosperity " 

We've looked at the issue from a few different angles including the despondent "IMF: Sub-Saharan Africa has Just Completed One of its Best Decades of Growth--It's Not Enough (UPDATED)" to the aspirational "Up to 500 Million Sub-Saharan Africans Would Like to Move to Europe; Mayfair, Monte Carlo Favored"

Previous visits to Brilliant Maps. 

Inflation, Producer Price Index: "PPI for final demand advances 0.5% in December; services rise 0.7%, goods unchanged"

That's the headline on the BLS PPI page.

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 30: 

PRODUCER PRICE INDEXES - DECEMBER 2025 

The Producer Price Index for final demand increased 0.5 percent in December, seasonally adjusted, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Final demand prices advanced 0.2 percent in November and 0.1 percent in October. (See table A.) On an unadjusted basis, the index for final demand rose 3.0 percent in 2025 after moving up 3.5 percent in 2024.

The December increase in prices for final demand can be traced to a 0.7-percent advance in the index for final demand services. Prices for final demand goods were unchanged.

The index for final demand less foods, energy, and trade services moved up 0.4 percent in December, the eighth consecutive increase. Prices for final demand less foods, energy, and trade services rose 3.5 percent in 2025 following a 3.6-percent advance in 2024.

Final Demand
Final demand services: The index for final demand services advanced 0.7 percent in December, the largest increase since moving up 0.9 percent in July. Two-thirds of the broad-based December rise in prices for final demand services can be traced to a 1.7-percent jump in margins for final demand trade services. (Trade indexes measure changes in margins received by wholesalers and retailers.) The indexes for final demand services less trade, transportation, and warehousing and for final demand transportation and warehousing services also moved up, 0.3 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively.

Product detail: Over 40 percent of the December increase in prices for final demand services can be traced to a 4.5-percent rise in margins for machinery and equipment wholesaling. The indexes for guestroom rental; food and alcohol retailing; health, beauty, and optical goods retailing; portfolio management; and airline passenger services also advanced. Conversely, prices for bundled wired telecommunications access services fell 4.4 percent. The indexes for automotive fuels and lubricants retailing and for long-distance motor carrying also moved lower. (See table 2.)

Final demand goods: Prices for final demand goods were unchanged in December following a 0.8- percent increase in November. In December, a 0.4-percent advance in the index for final demand goods less foods and energy offset declines in prices for final demand energy and for final demand foods, which fell 1.4 percent and 0.3 percent, respectively.

Product detail: Within final demand goods in December, the index for nonferrous metals moved up 4.5 percent. Prices for residential natural gas, motor vehicles, soft drinks, and aircraft and aircraft equipment also increased. In contrast, the index for diesel fuel dropped 14.6 percent. Prices for gasoline, jet fuel, beef and veal, and iron and steel scrap also decreased....

....MUCH MORE, tables and discussion.

"Trump Picks a Reinvented Kevin Warsh to Lead the Federal Reserve"

Markets had been hoping for someone much more loosey-goosey.

From Bloomberg, January 30:

President Donald Trump said he intends to nominate Kevin Warsh to be the next chair of the Federal Reserve, according to a post on his Truth Social platform.

“I have known Kevin for a long period of time, and have no doubt that he will go down as one of the GREAT Fed Chairmen, maybe the best,” Trump wrote. “On top of everything else, he is ‘central casting,’ and he will never let you down.”

Warsh, who served on the US central bank’s Board of Governors from 2006 to 2011 and has previously advised Trump on economic policy, would succeed Jerome Powell when his term at the helm ends in May. It marks a comeback for Warsh, 55, whom the president passed over for the top job in 2017 when he selected Powell.

If confirmed by the Senate, the former Fed governor will take charge of US monetary policy at a time when many economists and investors see its traditional insulation from elected officials as being under threat from the White House. Warsh aligned himself with the president in 2025 by arguing publicly for lower interest rates, going against his longstanding reputation as an inflation hawk.

During his time at the Fed, Warsh was consistently wary of inflation and often supported higher interest rates. Last year, however, he echoed Trump’s view that rates could be significantly lower. A willingness to cut rates is seen as a litmus test for the next chair, worrying Fed watchers that this would undermine the central bank’s independence.

Warsh’s selection doesn’t guarantee a change in policy at the Fed. Interest rates are set by a majority vote of the 12-member Federal Open Market Committee, which is composed of seven Fed governors and five of the 12 presidents of regional Fed banks. The FOMC held its benchmark rate steady this week after lowering it three consecutive times at the end of 2025, and rates remain well above where Trump has said he wants them.

His Senate confirmation may also be complicated by a recently-announced Department of Justice probe into the central bank. On Jan. 9, the Fed received subpoenas regarding Powell’s 2025 congressional testimony about a building renovation project. Powell issued an extraordinary videotaped statement decrying the probe, and several Republican lawmakers came to the central bank’s defense, with one pledging to block any Fed nominations until the legal matter was settled.

Frequent Fed Critic
Trump has been at odds with Powell almost since the current Fed chair took the helm in 2018. In 2020, the president lamented selecting Powell over Warsh for the position: “Kevin, I could have used you a little bit here. Why weren’t you more forceful when you wanted that job?” he said at the time.

Warsh has advised Trump on economic policy as far back as his first presidential campaign. Since leaving the Fed, Warsh has frequently criticized the institution, saying recently it needs a regime change and proposing a plan for lower interest rates.

“It’s about breaking some heads, because the way they’ve been doing business is not working,” Warsh told Fox News in July.

Warsh was appointed to the Fed’s Board of Governors by President George W. Bush in 2006 after stints in the Bush White House and, before that, on Wall Street. While he wasn’t widely known when he joined the central bank, his experience and contacts in financial markets and in the banking world proved pivotal during the 2008 financial crisis.....

....MUCH MORE 

Memory: "Do It Now: Industry Insiders Urge Consumers To Front-Run PC, TV, Smartphone Purchases As 'Memory Crunch' Will Intensify"

The reason we exited January 3's "AI data centers are swallowing the world's memory and storage supply, setting the stage for a pricing apocalypse that could last a decade" saying:
With the Consumer Electronics Show kicking off in Las Vegas this might be of interest. 

From ZeroHedge, January 29:

A global shortage of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) has emerged in recent months, and some of the first casualties of the "great memory crunch" were flagged by Goldman in December, starting with consumer electronics companies such as Nintendo.

The list of victims has continued to expand. Last week, we noted that smartphones, PCs, and other consumer electronics dependent on HBM were set to come under pressure. Goldman then followed with another note, warning that it had slashed global PC shipment forecasts due to soaring memory prices. Now the list of victims is expanding yet again, and we suspect this memory price shock will persist through the year.

Bloomberg Opinion's US technology columnist Dave Lee opined that, "One frustrating characteristic of the AI boom seems to be that everyone must pay for it, regardless of any interest in using it. For some, it will be through rising utility bills as data centers strain the grid."

Lee pointed out, "For even more of us, it will be increasing costs of just about every electronic product you can think of: laptops, smartphones, televisions — perhaps even cars."

The columnist is correct about exploding prices tied to the AI-driven supercycle, as massive data center buildouts are soaking up the world's HBM supply. A look at the Amazon price-tracking site CamelCamelCamel shows a parabolic surge in the price of Crucial Pro DDR5 64GB RAM, which has jumped from $145 to $790 in just six months.

Expanding the list of victims of the great memory crunch of our time is a new report this week from Nikkei Asia, which warns that entry-level consumer electronics devices, such as smart TVs, set-top boxes, home routers, budget tablets, smartphones, and PCs, will be among the hardest-hit segments. Automobiles are also expected to be heavily affected, as they require longer verification cycles. The analysis is based on commentary from numerous industry executives deeply embedded in the memory supply chain.

Those same industry executives warned that the memory shortage will persist through this year and into 2027. So if you are planning to build a gaming PC for a new trading desk or just for gaming, or if you are thinking about upgrading to a new AI-equipped PC, be warned: prices are expected to soar further. That is why Goldman's Allen Chang revised down his global PC shipment forecasts for 2026 to 2028, citing a sharp spike in memory prices as data centers worldwide soak up the supply of HBM.

"Demand from servers and AI is extremely strong, and we expect NAND flash prices to continue rising sharply through 2026," P.S. Pua, CEO of Phison Electronics, a major developer of NAND flash memory controller chips, told Nikkei Asia.

Pua said, "But many consumer electronics makers may not be able to absorb that kind of price increase. TVs will be seriously affected, and products like set-top boxes will be hit very hard as well. The total shipment volume will definitely go down. Many of them simply can't afford those prices."....

....For those who are wondering whether it's time to upgrade the PC before memory prices soars even more, an executive at one Japanese component supplier summed it up perfectly: "If you want to buy any consumer goods, PCs, or smartphones ... do it now, as it is for sure all the prices will be increased. Take an average PC, for example. The ratio of memory chips in the BoM [bill of materials] cost has increased from some 15% to almost 40%.".... 

....MUCH MORE 

If interested many of our recent posts are back-linked in "Memory: Samsung’s profit triples, beating estimates...".

Svalbard: "Polar bears on Norwegian islands fatter and healthier despite ice loss, scientists say"

Someone made a giant error, whether deliberately or not, by making the polar bear the apex charismatic megafauna to represent the perils of global warming.

Even before Knut the polar bear cub became famous in 2007 breeding populations in most of the Arctic had been growing for at least a decade. Compounding the falsity of the presentation were the pictures of polar bears seemingly trapped on small pieces of ice.

Ahem. The scientific name for the species is Ursus maritimus, the sea bear.

Anyhoo, the bears on Svalbard are fat and sassy which is a good thing as a fat bear is generally a healthy bear.

From the BBC, January 29: 

Scientists expected the opposite, but polar bears in the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard have become fatter and healthier since the early 1990s, all while sea ice has steadily declined due to climate change.

Polar bears rely on sea ice as a platform from which to hunt the seals that they rely on for blubber-rich meals. The bears' fat reserves provide energy and insulation and allow mothers to produce rich milk for cubs.

Researchers weighed and measured 770 adults in Svalbard between 1992 and 2019 and found that bears had become significantly fatter.

They think that Svalbard bears have adapted to recent ice loss by eating more land-based prey, including reindeer and walruses.

The discovery, published in Scientific Reports, was particularly puzzling because of the impact of climate change in Svalbard.

During the same period that this research was carried out, global temperature rise has increased the number of ice-free days per year in the region by almost 100 - at a rate of about four days each year.

"The fatter a bear is the better it is," explained lead researcher Dr Jon Aars from the Norwegian Polar Institute.

"And I would have expected to see a decline in body condition when the loss of sea ice has been so profound."....

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Additionally bears, like people, are omnivores and will eat just about anything. The ecosystems that run into trouble are those where the top predator will only eat one kind of prey and should the population of that food source decline the predator population will collapse.

In many areas of life it is good to be a generalist. 

"Elon Musk’s SpaceX Said to Consider Merger With Tesla or xAI" (TSLA; ELON)

Some impresarios, since at least the time of Florenz Ziegfeld and his Follies, but maybe all the way back to the comedies of Aristophanes*, and even earlier, get their name attached to almost everything they produce. A recent example is billionaire movie maker and marketing genius Tyler Perry consciously flaunting/mocking the convention:

Tyler Perry's House of Payne - 2022

Tyler Perry's Ruthless - 2022

Tyler Perry's For Better or Worse - 2017

Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns - 2011

Tyler Perry's Madea Gets a Job -

Tyler Perry's Madea's Neighbors From Hell -

Tyler Perry's A Madea Homecoming -

And many, many more

 

And then there is Elon. 

From Bloomberg, January 29:

SpaceX is considering a potential merger with Tesla Inc., as well as an alternative combination with artificial intelligence firm xAI, according to people familiar with the matter, a sign billionaire Elon Musk is weighing how to consolidate his empire.

The firm has discussed the feasibility of a tie-up between SpaceX and Tesla, an idea that some investors are pushing, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information isn’t public. Separately, they are also exploring a tie-up between SpaceX and xAI ahead of an IPO, some of the people said.

Any transaction could attract sizeable interest from infrastructure funds and Middle Eastern sovereign investors, some of the people said. A deal could also potentially require a large financing component, one of them said.

No final decisions have been made, details could change and the companies could decide to remain separate, the people said. Musk and representatives for SpaceX, xAI and Tesla didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Different parts of Musk’s grand vision for SpaceX — of the company putting data centers into space to do complex computing for AI — would potentially be served by the various scenarios. xAI could benefit enormously from computing capacity provided by SpaceX’s data centers in orbit, if the company can make the engineering work.

Tesla’s ability to manufacture energy storage systems could help SpaceX use solar energy in space to run the data centers. Musk has also discussed using SpaceX’s Starship rockets to carry Tesla’s Optimus robots to the moon as well as to Mars.

Read More: Tesla Plots $20 Billion Splurge to Support Musk’s AI Future

Tesla shares jumped as much as 4.5% in after-hours trading on Thursday. The stock had fallen 3.5% during normal hours, giving the company a market value of about $1.56 trillion. SpaceX is targeting an IPO that would value the company at about $1.5 trillion, Bloomberg News has reported.

Two legal entities with the phrase “merger sub” in their names were set up in Nevada on Jan. 21 that count SpaceX Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen as officers, Nevada’s business portal shows.

Reuters reported the potential merger between SpaceX and xAI earlier. Shares of xAI would be exchanged for shares in SpaceX, Reuters said, citing a person familiar with the matter....

....MUCH MORE, including sidebars. 
*A quick Google search returns hundreds of uses of "Elon Musk's xAI" as it does for "Aristophanes' The Birds".

It is the latter which gives us Cloud Cuckoo Land, though some say Mr. Musk now has the rights to the term. 

"Trip.com entrepreneur grapples with China's population crisis"

 From Nikkei Asia, January 29:

Chairman James Liang urges financial support for births, and ponies up his own cash 

China's deepening demographic troubles have sent Beijing scrambling to encourage more births. One entrepreneur has taken it upon himself to advocate for solutions to what he calls the country's "biggest-ever challenge."

James Liang co-founded the online travel booking operator now known as Trip.com Group and has been its chairman since 2003. But in China, he is better known for his advocacy of higher birth rates. The 56-year-old now spends the bulk of his time researching population issues and has thrown some of his own money behind the effort.

The challenge has only grown more acute, as illustrated by China's latest population data, which showed a decline of over 3 million people last year and a record-low number of births. With government efforts to spur the birth rate largely falling flat so far, there may be room for the private sector to play a more important role in addressing China's shrinking and aging population.

Liang said he came to grips with China's demographic dilemmas while studying for his doctorate at Stanford University more than a decade ago. "When I was looking at the relationship of innovation and demographics, I realized that China's one-child policy was not sustainable and not good for the future of innovation and technology in China," Liang told Nikkei Asia in an interview.

China announced an end to the one-child rule in 2015.

"In recent years, I was trying to find a way to get other people to come together to search for a solution," Liang said. "Low fertility is becoming a global problem."

For Liang, that problem is closely intertwined with economic issues, as China has been mired in a deflationary spiral, with a property sector slowdown and weak consumer demand. He believes this is the place to start.

"China is not providing generous financial subsidies to parents. Given the current economic situation, China can increase spending or ease monetary policy by printing money to increase demand. That would also help the macroeconomic situation," he said.

The Chinese government has previously announced that starting this year, a tax-free lump sum of 3,600 yuan ($516) per year will be granted to eligible parents nationwide for every child up to age 3. The program had already been introduced in some provinces.

Liang maintains that there is plenty of room for the government to increase subsidies. "It is the first time in history that the government gives a small amount of subsidy, but it's not nearly enough to cover the cost [of raising a child], and it's not very generous relative to other countries."

According to a 2024 report Liang co-authored, Chinese parents bear some of the highest costs among major countries to raise a child to 18, at 6.5 times gross domestic product per capita. That was compared to 4.26 times in Japan and 2.08 times in Australia, although the figures the report cited were from different time periods.

In November 2025, Liang set up the Genovation Foundation in Hong Kong in his personal capacity, using 500 million Hong Kong dollars ($64.1 million) of his own money. During its pilot phase, the foundation will offer a HK$50,000-per-child subsidy to full-time doctoral students at Hong Kong universities who have children after Jan. 1, 2026.

Liang said the foundation has already handed out allowances to the parents of five newborn children during its first week.

"I'm hoping to do more, but that also depends on my ability," Liang said, adding that the foundation is looking to work with some universities in China to roll out childbearing allowances on the mainland....

....MUCH MORE 

Recently: "China’s Population Falls For Fourth Straight Year" 

Atlanta Fed GDPNow Estimated Growth Falls Off Considerably

Their last estimate of current quarter GDP was running at 5.4%

From the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, January 29: 

....Latest estimate: 4.2 percent — January 29, 2026

The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the fourth quarter of 2025 is 4.2 percent on January 29, down from 5.4 percent on January 26. After this morning’s releases from the US Census Bureau and the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, an increase in the nowcast of fourth-quarter real gross private domestic investment growth from 6.4 percent to 7.1 percent was more than offset by decreases in the nowcasts of fourth-quarter personal consumption expenditures growth from 3.2 percent to 3.1 percent and the contribution of net exports to fourth-quarter real GDP growth from 1.88 percentage points to 0.65 percentage points.

The next GDPNow update is Monday, February 2. Please see the "Release Dates" tab below for a list of upcoming releases.

 ....MUCH MORE

As we've been saying, for almost as long as the Bank's economists have been posting these guesstimates: 

The estimate hit 5.4% growth after the last trade deficit numbers, January 8, declined to +5.1% in the next update and is now at 5.3%. The general rule-of-thumb (derived from far too many observations) is that GDPNow runs hot and gradually converges to the reported GDP figures.

That was a couple weeks ago.

And four years ago:

Keeping in mind that Atlanta's GDPNow runs hot and tends to decrease as we approach the report date, in this case, BEA: Gross Domestic Product, 1st Quarter 2022 (Advance Estimate) April 28, 08:30 AM 

"The Peter Pan Economy: Waymo and the Market Distortion of Infinite Runway"

Rather than Peter Pan, how about "Forever Young"?*

A very sharp piece from Chris Guo at his Soft Currency substack, January 28:

A Case Study on the 17 Year-old Startup That Refuses to IPO 

There is a strange species of company in Silicon Valley. They’re famous. They’re worth billions. They employ the smartest people on earth. And they share one defining characteristic: They refuse to grow up.

I call them Peter Pan Companies:

• Take the autonomous vehicle platform, Waymo. Born in 2009, Waymo is a 17 year-old “startup.” In human years, it should be driving itself to prom. In startup years, it should be a grumpy public company issuing dividends and battling short sellers. Instead, it is living in its parents’ basement (Alphabet), and asking for a larger allowance (a new $15B round at a $100B valuation).

• Or take OpenAI. It burns $8 billion a year, lives in Microsoft’s guest house, and its CEO has “0% interest” in getting a real job (IPO).

The Three Dangers of the Peter Pan Economy

If this sounds vaguely like the plot of an endearingly ridiculous rom-com starring Matthew McConaughey, you might find this analogy risible. But if you are operating in the new tech economy, here’s why a 17-year old company that fails to launch is not a joke.

First, for employees like engineers and product managers, Peter Pan companies are Talent Black Holes. They hoard the top 1% of talent by offering Soft Currency (paper equity in a $100B company) that may never be liquid. You need to understand this dynamic during interviews and separate monopoly money (paper equity with no realistic exit) from equity that will actually turn into wealth.

Second, for founders and CEOs, Peter Pan companies distort the Laws of Business Physics. They release products at unnaturally subsidized prices. If you try to compete with their pricing or feature set, you will go bankrupt (cough - Argo AI, Uber ATG, Embark Trucks, TuSimple US, list goes on…) You need to identify which competitors are real businesses (must make a profit) and which are strategic hobbies (can burn cash forever), because you cannot fight a hobbyist with a P&L.

Finally, for VCs and investors, these companies set a False Market Tempo. When OpenAI raises at 100x revenue, it convinces your portfolio founders that scale is all that matters. This leads to a generation of startups burning cash to hit vanity metrics that public markets no longer care about. You need to spot the Peter Pan traits early so you don’t accidentally fund a copycat that doesn’t have a rich parent.

To illustrate exactly how these Peter Pan traits manifest, we have exclusive access to a strictly confidential (and definitely real) memo from the Waymo leadership team to their anxious employees.

CONFIDENTIAL // INTERNAL USE ONLY

From: The Office of the Co-CEOs

To: All Waymonauts (Full Time & Contractors)

Date: January 26, 2026

Subject: REFLECTIONS: The Road to 1 Million (and Beyond)

Team,

As we approach our 17th year of revolutionizing mobility (one geofenced block at a time), it is truly humbling to see how far we’ve come. We are officially on track to hit 1 million paid weekly trips, up from 450k just a few months ago. The expansion into San Diego is live, and seeing our Jaguars navigate the complex coastal terrain of North County is a testament to everything we’ve built.

However, during yesterday’s All-Hands, it was clear based on the Dory upvotes that one question remains top of mind: “When is the IPO?”

We want to address this directly, with the transparency and intellectual honesty that defines our culture.

On The Timeline

Many of you have pointed out that in 2015, we predicted a driverless world by 2020. You ask, “Why are we still in Early Access mode in 2026?”

It is important to remember that mobility is an asymptotic curve. Solving the first 99% of driving (cruising in sunny Phoenix) was the easy part. The final 1%, the long tail of construction cones, erratic pedestrians in hoodies, and heavy rain, is infinitely complex.

This requires patience, capital, and a refusal to release a product that is merely “good enough” (unlike some competitors we won’t name).

On Our Evolving Team

We also want to acknowledge the bittersweet departures of some of our longest-tenured colleagues this quarter. To the members of the Early Guard who are moving on to new adventures: we salute you.

While it is true that we have successfully rotated out the original 2009 team, and 2016 team, the pioneers who built the prototype are not always the best suited to polish the fleet. We are entering a new phase of Operational Excellence, and your fresh energy is exactly what we need to steward this asset for the next decade.

On Our Relationship with Alphabet

Finally, let us be crystal clear about a rumor circulating on Blind: Waymo is an independent company. We are not merely a data collection subsidiary for Google.

That said, our partnership with Alphabet remains our greatest strategic advantage. As part of our Synergistic Intelligence Initiative, please continue to prioritize all bulk data requests from our siblings at Google DeepMind.

When the Gemini team asks for “high-fidelity Lidar scans of pedestrian interactions,” it is not because we are training their models. Ensuring that our data flows seamlessly into their training clusters is critical to our shared mission… collaborating on safety.

So, let’s keep our eyes on the road. The public markets will be there when we are ready. In the meantime, we have the most enviable runway in the history of Silicon Valley.

Let’s go get that million.

The Leadership Team

Waymo // A Subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.

How to Spot a Peter Pan Company

Whether you are investing multiple years of your life as an employee, your own money as a founder, or your reputation as a VC, you need to be able to kick the tires on a company.

Here is the 3-point inspection guide, using Waymo as an illustrative example.

1. The Broken Assumptions Check

No company raises billions without someone smart making some back-of-the-envelope assumptions that promise eventual profit and justify the burn.1

For Waymo, this intellectual air cover came from Burns/Jordan at the Earth Institute (Columbia University), which calculated the unit economics in terms of cost-per-mile from removing the driver (labor) and switching to electric propulsion (lower maintenance/fuel). It was a rigorous mathematical argument that a collectivist utopia of shared autonomous vehicles is cheaper than the 100-year-old model of selling private cars to individuals so they can keep their smelly gym sneakers in the trunk.

And from a RethinkX Report (Seba and Arbib 2017), which used a trademarked “Disruption Framework,” essentially a proprietary term for extrapolating two lines on a graph, to predict falling technology costs (Wright’s Law) and swift adoption of Transport-as-a-Service....

....MUCH MORE
*Here's Alphaville:

Apparently water and gravity are key ingredients in the Peter Pan lifestyle/(non-) life-cycle.

"Electric car sales edge above petrol in EU for first time"

Chairman Xi smiles. 

From Reuters, January 27:

• Chinese brands intensify EU competition
• Electrified cars account for 67% of EU registrations
• Hybrids have the largest overall share

Sales of fully ​electric cars surpassed those of petrol-only vehicles in the European Union for the first time in December, data from ‌the auto industry group ACEA showed on Tuesday, even as hybrids held onto the largest overall share of the market. 

The data underscores how the bloc is shifting slowly towards electric and hybrid vehicles, even as policymakers have proposed loosening emission regulations that should allow vehicles with combustion engines to stick around for longer.

Independent automotive analyst Matthias Schmidt said that the fewer petrol car sales partly reflect reclassification of some as "mild ‌hybrids", which still have petrol engines and only modestly contribute to lowering emissions. 

"It will still take around ​half a decade before pure electric cars genuinely overtake combustion-engine models across the region, but this is nonetheless a start," he said.

RACE FOR THE EUROPEAN EV MARKET
Fully electric vehicles made up 22.6% of cars registered in the EU last month, edging out petrol cars ‍on 22.5%. Gasoline-electric hybrids, including plug-in hybrids that can go limited distances on battery power alone, were the top group with 44%. 

The registrations are a proxy for sales.

 

In the broader European market, which includes Britain and Norway, car sales logged a sixth month of year-on-year growth....

....MUCH MORE, a tight, informative overview. 

"Majorities see education, housing as unaffordable: Survey"

Exactly the areas, along with healthcare, that government money has most distorted (read: inflated)

From The Hill, January 26:

A new poll shows that more Americans view education and housing as unaffordable relative to other necessities.

The survey from The New York Times and the Siena Research Institute, released Monday, found that 58 percent of respondents view education as unaffordable, with 26 percent saying it is somewhat affordable and just 8 percent saying it is mostly affordable. 

A slightly lower share of respondents, 54 percent, said they cannot afford housing, with 31 percent saying it is somewhat affordable and 13 percent saying it is mostly affordable.

Education and housing were the two items viewed as unaffordable by the largest shares of respondents, with 47 percent saying health care is unaffordable, 44 percent saying having a family is unaffordable, and less than 30 percent saying groceries, food, utilities and transportation individually are unaffordable.

In November, the Education Data Initiative reported that the average annual costs of tuition at four-year public and private colleges was 40 and 35 times higher, respectively, than they were in 1963. 

The cost of shelter, meanwhile, increased 3.2 percent year-over-year in December, outpacing the overall inflation rate of 2.7 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Treasury Department said in 2024 that more than 90 percent of Americans lived in counties where median rents and house prices increased faster than median incomes from 2000 to 2020. The department cited housing demand outpacing housing supply this century....

....MUCH MORE 

Speaking of government money, you could crash the housing market with a program to build a million starter homes per year for a half-decade but that probably isn't politically palatable.

And from Visual Capitalist, January 13, an update of the famous AEI graph:

Charted: Where Inflation Has Hit the Hardest (2000–2025) 

 

 ....MUCH MORE