The Economy Thread III: Not Actual Advice And You Shouldn't Lie To Investors

[Tymon]

https://x.com/unusual_whales/status/2053475393957515638

[Outlaw]

Driving that increase were substantial price hikes for things like fresh veggies. On an annualized basis, fresh vegetable prices are more than 44% higher today than they were three months ago.

Similarly, beef and veal prices have surged due to record-low cattle numbers, years of ranchers exiting the business after weak profits, and higher operating costs tied to fuel and energy — particularly diesel, which is essential for farmers to operate their tractors, transport cattle and feed, and operate day to day.

Will Harris, a fourth-generation cattle farmer in Bluffton, Georgia, told NBC News that the price of beef he sells directly to consumers through his farm store, on-site restaurant and online is now about 20% higher than it was just two years ago.

“It’s unprecedented for us,” he said. “This is the first time we’ve ever gone up that much, that fast.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/con...gas-rcna344762

[kuronosan]

Yea but oh you know what just fucking forget it

[6souls]

Motor oil is expected to see a jump in June. Currently there is a surplus, but sales reps for Costco and Walmart are saying we could see as much as a $6 increase pre bottle.

[Anoat]

eBay has rejected GameStop’s offer to buy, saying it was not a serious offer lol

[6souls]

https://apnews.com/article/inflation...518ece41ac61d8
https://x.com/atrupar/status/2053933625695973812

Wholesale prices have risen 6% since last year and 1.4% since last month.

U.S. wholesale inflation came in hot last month. Producer prices rose 6% from a year earlier, most since December 2022, as the 10-week Iran war pushed up energy prices and put pressure on companies to pass along higher costs to consumers.

The Labor Department reported Wednesday that its producer price index — which tracks inflation before it hits consumers — shot up 1.4% in April, biggest monthly gain since March 2022.

Energy prices climbed 7.8% from March to April and 22.7% from a year earlier. Gasoline soared 15.6% from March and diesel, the dominant fuel used in shipping, jumped 12.6%.

Excluding volatile food and energy costs, so-called core producer prices rose 1% from March and 5.2% from April 2025.

Last month, consumer price index rose 3.8% in the year-to-date. Retailers and manufacturers, who could afford to absorb rising costs, are raising prices by as much as 10% in the short term.

[6souls]

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-in...nmaxxing-habit

Amazon, Meta, & Microsoft employees are inflating their AI token usage to meet unreasonable internal targets. The practice is known as "Tokenmaxxing" as a way to show the company is making use of AI even if it doesn't need to.

The company set targets requiring more than 80% of its developers to use AI tools each week and tracked consumption on internal leaderboards. Some employees told FT they had been using MeshClaw, an in-house agent platform that can initiate code deployments, triage emails, and interact with Slack to maximize their token numbers. Amazon said usage statistics would not factor into performance evaluations, but multiple employees said they believed managers were monitoring the data. One said there was "so much pressure to use these tools," another described how tracking created "perverse incentives."

Combined 2026 capex from Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta is tracking between $650 billion and $700 billion, with some Wall Street projections exceeding $1 trillion for 2027, and every hyperscaler has told investors that inference capacity is being absorbed as fast as it can be deployed. Internal developer consumption is obviously part of that absorption, and it sits alongside paying external customers in the usage data that informs the likes of capacity planning, GPU orders, HBM procurement, and power infrastructure.

These companies also have leaderboards to track who is making the most use of AI.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ai-tokens-explained/

An explainer of what an AI token is;

AI tokens are tiny units of data that come from breaking down bigger chunks of information. AI models process tokens to learn the relationships between them and unlock capabilities including prediction, generation and reasoning. The faster tokens can be processed, the faster models can learn and respond. The goal is to achieve the fastest processing time and lowest cost per token to optimize AI infrastructure and maximize revenue generation

AI factories — a new class of data centers designed to accelerate AI workloads — efficiently crunch through tokens, converting them from the language of AI to the currency of AI, which is intelligence.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said that if an engineer being paid $500k isn't using at least $250k in tokens, it should be a red flag for a company.

[Zealot]

Oh well if NVidia's CEO says it then it must be true.

Sent from my SM-S938U using Tapatalk

[6souls]

LinkedIn is laying off 5% (875) of it's workforce

[kuronosan]

LinkedIn is laying off 5% (875) of it's workforce

They shouldn't have much trouble making connections, thankfully

[Ayn]

They shouldn't have much trouble making connections, thankfully

Too soon.

.........And also hilarious.

[Outlaw]

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-in...nmaxxing-habit

Amazon, Meta, & Microsoft employees are inflating their AI token usage to meet unreasonable internal targets. The practice is known as "Tokenmaxxing" as a way to show the company is making use of AI even if it doesn't need to.



These companies also have leaderboards to track who is making the most use of AI.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ai-tokens-explained/

An explainer of what an AI token is;



Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said that if an engineer being paid $500k isn't using at least $250k in tokens, it should be a red flag for a company.

"We spent a lot of money on this slop and you are GOING to use it!"

[Ayn]

I dunno, tokenmaxxing sounds pretty DEI to me.

[arus2001]

Sounds like something the token black guy would say.

[Tymon]

"We spent a lot of money on this slop and you are GOING to use it!"

People keep saying this but the theory I buy more into is that they're using it as a tool of accelerationism to outsource their payroll.

The end goal for these companies is probably to have as much of their payroll as possible getting paid pennies on the dollar overseas.

[6souls]

https://www.reuters.com/world/meta-l...ys-2026-05-18/

Meta to layoff roughly 8k and reassigning 7k to AI roles.

[Byrthnoth]

They are misreading the moment, I think. I guess we will see!

[Tyrath]

But it'll look in the short term and that's all they ever care about

[6souls]

https://x.com/MorePerfectUS/status/2057122547401969693

[6souls]

https://x.com/MorePerfectUS/status/2057164787356758385