Weekly Grounding #128
News, links, writing
Note: I will be traveling in the coming weeks and won’t have time to curate Weekly Groundings until Friday, February 27th. In the meantime, if you’d like to share any writing that helped keep you grounded, feel free to drop me a message.
For those of you who are new here, Weekly Groundings are published on Fridays to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
“The Gold Economy The West Pretends Doesn’t Exist”
In light of surging gold prices, this discussion between Keith Weiner and Gökhan Yilmazat at ZeroHedge illustrates approaches to gold investment outside the West. Weiner states that in “Turkey, you have a confluence of East and West. And no better example of that than literally the geography of Istanbul, part of which is in the European continental plate and part of which is in the Asian continental plate. So in Turkey, you have a country that has many Western attributes, including much higher labor productivity versus, let’s say, India, but it has an Eastern appreciation of gold.
“I’m somewhat amused when I talk to, I’ll just say, all the usual suspects who do the data analysis of the gold market,” he continues. “They look at an industrial demand and mine production and recycling production, and they always break down, you have jewelry demand and investment demand. And that makes sense in the United States. You walk into, whether it’s Kay Jewelers or Zales jewelers, let alone Tiffany’s, and you buy a little thing that’s three and a half grams of gold for $10,000. That’s not an investment. That’s definitely jewelry. But in Turkey, in India, in Dubai, you walk into a jewelry store and there’s a video monitor with a gold price on it.
“Every piece of jewelry is tagged with how many grams it is. And the price of it is the grams times the price of gold plus a making charge, which is usually single digits as a percentage. That’s investment. It reminds me there’s a meme that floats around the internet, shows a lady sitting at her desk and somebody’s coming up to her saying, Corporate wants you to tell the difference between these two pictures. And then, wherever it meant, one of them is Trump and the other one is Biden or whatever. They’re the same. It’s the punchline. What’s the difference between jewelry demand and investment demand? They’re the same.”
“So Long, American Exceptionalism”
Summarizing the American investment economy in 2025 for The Financial Times, Katie Martin writes that “True believers in the notion that the US has won at capitalism will tell you this proves that orthodoxy and institutions have prevailed, and we can just get back to the normal state of the world, where American assets are all that matters. For US investors, based in US dollars, that is fair enough. But the rest of the world is now clearly looking at the country’s markets through an entirely new lens.”
She notes that “The 16 per cent ascent in the benchmark US S&P 500 index this year in dollars is all well and good for domestic investors. The drop in the dollar at the start of 2025, however, means euro-based investors in that same index are up just 2.6 per cent this year. That’s not a typo. They are in negative territory on both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and on the Russell 2000 index of smaller US stocks.
“What’s more, normally, non-American investors can rely on the dollar to rise in times of stress, under the unwritten haven status it has enjoyed for decades,” Martin continues. “This has been a very handy stabilising mechanism, dulling or even neutralising the pain in times when US stocks are falling. Now, investors no longer trust that this will work, particularly as the president seeks to assert his easy-money doctrine on the Federal Reserve. This leaves them with limited choices—they can try to hedge away the currency risk by betting against the dollar, which is often expensive and rarely scalable across a large portfolio, or they can look elsewhere to balance out returns, or a bit of both.”
“Dispatch From Occupied Chicago”
At A Different Lens - see floyd muse, floydwebb takes stock of contemporary Chicago under artificial intelligence: “In the West Loop, a tenant union is fighting a ‘smart’ building management system that trades reduced rent for biometric data—iris scans at the door, movement logs in the hallways. In Rogers Park, the neighborhood council fractures over the city’s ‘Predictive Coordination Interface,’ a shiny tool that promises efficient snow removal and trash pickup but demands that all public camera feeds be routed into a live analysis grid shared with the police. In Little Village, the sky-blue ShotSpotter poles on 26th Street stand watch, recording street life while missing gunfire half the time. Across the South Side, elders remind us: Chicago has been occupied before—by capital, by police, by the state. This newest occupation is simply more seamless and silent.”
“Let’s speak plainly,” Floyd writes. “AI has militarized our streets. ShotSpotter misfires have sent police to the wrong block in 89% of reviewed cases. AI has automated economic abandonment. A 2019 lending algorithm charged Black and Latino borrowers higher interest rates, digitally redrawing Chicago’s red lines. AI has erased workers. At Amazon’s Goose Island warehouse, automated termination systems fire humans before managers know their names. AI has colonized public space. CTA stations, police body cams, private Ring feeds—Chicago itself is now a sensory network. AI has devoured culture. Our words, images, and histories are scraped without consent and fed into models sold back to us as ‘innovation.’”
Floyd argues that “Empire fears what it cannot model:”
People building power it cannot quantify.
Workers refusing to code their own chains.
Artists reclaiming the cultural materials models depend on.
Neighborhoods building parallel infrastructures.
Cities placing limits on automated policing.
Movements that outrun predictive analytics.
“These Teenagers Are Already Running Their Own AI Companies”
As AI is deployed to control the poor and working class in cities like Chicago, the teenage children of the well-heeled enthusiastically found their own AI companies: “Like any good tech founder, Nick Dobroshinsky puts in late nights and early mornings working on his startup,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “But this particular founder doesn’t have much choice: Between 8 a.m. and 2:55 p.m., he’s in high school. He’s 15…With a little market-research help from his mom, who works in finance, and some early technical guidance from his dad, who works in AI at a big tech company, he landed on the idea of using AI models to generate reports on small- and mid-cap publicly traded companies. The result is BeyondSPX, an AI-based financial research platform.”
The article reports that “Dobroshinsky says he has only handled around 10 lines of code and doesn’t have any employees: He prompts Anthropic’s Claude to generate the software and uses a combination of models including ChatGPT and Gemini. He doesn’t currently see the value in recruiting a marketing team. ‘I use Reddit bots,’ he says. ‘If someone asks for the best investing tools, then my bot will comment, “There’s a bunch of investing tools and BeyondSPX is one of them.”’ He says he now has more than 50,000 monthly users on the platform, which is free. Dobroshinsky plans to start charging users eventually.”
Another teen AI entrepreneur, Raghav Arora, “launched his first entrepreneurial venture as a student in Singapore. He tracked down U.S. candy that was hard to find in Asia and sold it to his classmates. It earned him good cash (and three days of detention). The endeavor taught him the ropes of product distribution, and how to maximize profit by cutting out middlemen. He started selling to mom-and-pop grocers in Singapore, too. ‘I was marking these different items up by like 50%,’ says Arora, now 17. Arora’s latest company, GetASAP, distributes produce, using AI to forecast inventory for grocers. The startup, which has 48 employees, secures fruits and vegetables directly from farmers and then delivers them to stores in the U.S. and Asia. He and his 20-year-old co-founder secured $3.4 million in preseed funding in a round led by General Catalyst. Arora didn’t finish high school and now lives in Southern California.”
“A Nation of Subscribers”
At Compact, Matthew Burdette describes “the Trump administration’s recent suggestion of a 50-year mortgage” as a “permanent renting” scheme. He states that it would “take away political freedom, and not just because of economic disadvantages. More fundamentally, permanent renting conditions people in ways that are antithetical to political freedom. Not having a secure place in the world shapes you, and what it shapes you into is the kind of person who isn’t able truly to engage in politics, even if there are no explicit legal barriers keeping you from participating. Impermanence conditions people out of political life. So not only would the 50-year mortgage intensify and aggravate the problem it purports to solve—people’s ability to buy their own homes—but in the process it would also effectively disenfranchise the millions of people who would come to live under its antipolitical conditions.”
Burdette writes that “Th[e] linking of property and enfranchisement…stretches back to the ancient Greeks, for whom private property was requisite for political participation. Nor was the relationship of private property to political freedom arbitrary. The private sphere is the realm of necessity, and only by freeing ourselves from the constant labor of necessity are we freed for the public sphere. We can never be free from necessity when our place in the world is insecure. It is for this political reason, and not simply to build generational wealth, that we should strive to be a nation of homeowners, treating renting ideally as a temporary, transitional need. Even though the law no longer restricts the vote to those who own property, the reality remains that those without property live under antipolitical conditions.”
Linking his analysis to the subscription economy, Burdette writes that “Paying for Apple Music or Adobe Acrobat is relatively harmless, but an economic model that is progressively turning more and more things into subscriptions—and renting is certainly a form of subscription—is creating conditions that are antithetical to human life freed for public life…[W]hat was once the animal laborans is today homo subscribens, man the subscriber. The possibility of a 50-year mortgage would only confirm this reversion back to the life process, ensuring that people today are no freer than laborers bound by endless necessity.”
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