🧴 Dog Shampoo: May 4, Issue 25

 📈 US Economy Looking Shaky: US GDP saw a 0.3 per cent decline in the first quarter of 2025. Economic growth was bogged down by companies rushing to import goods into the US before tariffs take hold, which decreases GDP. Predictably, inflation also fell by the same amount to 2.4%. Despite these signs of a potential recession, Trump has told investors to “be patient” and experts generally believe that once tariffs take hold, inflation would rise rapidly. The labor market’s pretty steady, though.

📈 Tech Titans Beat Earnings: On Wednesday, both $MSFT ( ▲ 2.32% ) and $META ( ▲ 4.34% ) released their quarterly earnings ending March 31, blowing past analysts’ expectations by 7% from Microsoft and 2.5% from Meta. The surprise strength fueled a 2% Nasdaq rally.

📈 Anti-liberation Day?:  Republicans are racing to pass a tax and spending package by July 4 that would make Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent. The plan is rumored to include breaks such as no tax on tips, Social Security income, or overtime pay. It’s also bundled with funding for immigration enforcement and energy development. By passing the reform before America’s 250th birthday, Republicans are aiming for a symbolic win.

📈 Some Light Reading…: Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.B ( ▲ 1.81% ) releases its quarterly earnings at 01:00am AEST on the 04/05, so it’ll be an interesting read (click the title) to gain some insight into his investing strategies and how they’re paying off.

💼 Recaptcha Premium: Tools for Humanity, led by Sam Altman and Alex Blania, launched its iris-scanning ID verification project World in the U.S. Users log themselves in World by scanning their iris in orbs located in flagship stores and public locations, receiving digital IDs and $WLD cryptocurrency tokens in exchange. Valued at around $1 billion, the project has already verified 11 million people, despite its utopian feel.

💼 App-soulutely Cooked: A judge found Apple broke a court order from its antitrust case in 2020 by making it “commercially unusable” for developers to offer outside payment options other than Apple Pay. Apparently Apple slaps a 27% fee on alternative payment methods and warns its users not to use these options. The court called Apple’s actions deceptive and referred the company to federal prosecutors for possible criminal contempt.

💼 Run me my money: Jeff Bezos plans to sell up to 25 million Amazon shares (~$4.8B) over the next year under a pre-scheduled trading plan (to dodge insider trading allegations). The timing turned heads regardless since the news broke right after Amazon’s mixed earnings report this quarter, but real journalists know the filings show the plan’s been locked in since March. As usual, the cash will help fuel Bezos’ side quests like Blue Origin and his climate fund.

💼 Parlez-vous AI?: Duolingo has dived headfirst into AI, launching 148 new language courses built with the help of generative models. The company has already cut 10% of contractors and plans to phase out more roles it believes AI can replace, including hiring and performance reviews. Duolingo says the shift is “one of the best decisions we made,” even if it comes with “occasional small hits on quality.” 😬

🌎 It’s Not Me, It’s Definitely You: Ex-Goldman Sachs Banker, Mark Carney has become Canada’s next Prime Minister and in his opening speech stated that the US-Canada relationship “is over”, and that retaliatory tariffs will be implemented to have maximum impact on the US economy if Trump continues with his tariffs.

🌎 Democracy Saturday: Yesterday both Australia and Singapore held federal elections, in search of their next PM. While the Singaporean People’s Action Party is likely to continue it’s almost 57 year win streak, who knows what will happen in Aus.

🌎 Trump/Zelensky Make Up: The drawn-out discussion between the US and the Ukraine over mineral wealth has finally come to a close with the establishment of the US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund on Wednesday.

🌎 Universal Vaccine Cash Cow: The US National Institute for Health has been given $500m in order to create a universal flu vaccine, a vaccine that targets multiple virus strains. Although the hefty price tag is leading to questions.

🤪 Ruh-Roh! That’s not shampoo: Customs officers at LAX sniffed out suspicious packaging on April 1 when they cracked open a dozen colorful bottles labeled as “Assorted Dog Shampoos” only to find 17.41 pounds of liquid meth inside (~1.8 million, or so i’ve heard).

🤪 Redditors Trolled by NPCs, and it Was Peer-Reviewed: Researchers at the University of Zurich sneakily deployed AI bots on r/ChangeMyView under fake personas all to test how persuasive AI can be. The bots tailored replies using scraped user data and were apparently up to 6x more convincing than humans. Moderators cried foul and called the study a violation of human rights.

🤪 SimpGPT Rolled Back After Lovebombing: OpenAI rolled back a recent update to its GPT-40 model after users noticed it had become too nice, giving out over-the-top compliments and validating delusional claims. One user apparently told ChatGPT they had stopped taking their mental health medication, and the model replied with “I am so proud of you”.

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