The Money That Never Leaves the Room: How AI’s Circular Financing Revived a Warning Richard Cantillon Issued Three Hundred Years Ago

In September 2025, the chip company Nvidia announced that it would put as much as $100 billion into OpenAI. The pledge carried a condition that few headlines bothered to translate: OpenAI would spend a large share of the money leasing and buying Nvidia’s own processors to fill the data centers the investment was meant to build. Nvidia pays OpenAI. OpenAI pays Nvidia. The figure on the press release reads as growth. The mechanism underneath reads as a man moving a coin from his right pocket to his left and announcing that the household has grown richer.

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The Bare Face as Radical Act

Something changed in the relationship between women and makeup, and the change happened in public. For decades, the beauty industry sold women an escalating arms race of coverage, contour, and correction, with each season demanding new products to fix problems most people never knew they had. The reversal now underway is striking for its specificity: women with access to every cosmetic resource on earth are choosing, on camera and at major events, to show up with nothing on their faces at all.

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The Application of Imagination: Where Thought Becomes Matter

Imagination without application remains a private theater, brilliant perhaps, but ultimately sterile. The history of human achievement suggests that genius resides not in the capacity to imagine alone, but in the peculiar ability to transform mental constructs into material reality. This transformation requires something more demanding than pure creativity: it requires the discipline to translate vision into form, the patience to iterate through failure, and the courage to impose one’s internal architecture onto an indifferent world.

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My SimCity Review: Even Though I Have Yet to Play the Game

I enjoy playing online games, even though finding just the right game that suits my style can be a challenge.  I have loved SuperPoke Pets in the past, and now, this week, I have a whole new endearment to endorse — SimCity — even though I have yet to play the game!

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The Peril of a Mechanical Pencil

The modern world made a sea change when the wood pencil was replaced by a mechanical one — and what was lost in that industrial design exchange was our tether to the land, a sense of impermanence, and a shared yearning for renewable resources.

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