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1. Mag 7 Capital Spending Equal to U.S. Government R&D

We are in the AI buildout, with total capital investment by the “magnificent seven” mostly mega cap tech stocks on par with government R&D. See the chart. The release of a seemingly more efficient AI model by Chinese startup DeepSeek has renewed questions about AI capex. While these questions are valid, more spending is likely needed to unlock AI innovation – recent developments don’t change our view. Broad AI adoption is still to come, and we have barely scratched the surface of all the potential AI use cases. Yet AI advances mean these models could be evolving faster than expected. That could push AI into the adoption phase sooner and is why the AI narrative and the market’s reaction could change quickly.

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2. California Tesla Car Sales Dropping -17% from Two Years Ago

But Tesla sales in California dropped in Q4 to 43,658 vehicles, the lowest since Q3 2022, down by nearly 8% from a year ago, and down by 17% from two years ago, according to vehicle registrations released by the California new vehicle dealer association CNCDA.

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3. Who Owns the Cloud?

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4. Tariffs Have Been Eliminated Over the Last Century

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5. Gigachad “Tokenized Masculinity” Worth $600m

You know what’s going great? Gigachad. It’s a memecoin representing, to quote fromgigachad.com, “tokenized masculinity.” A sparse splash page there explains that there is “no intrinsic value or expectation of financial return. There is no formal team or roadmap.” It’s up 91,000% over the past year, with a market value of more than $600 million. I’m leaving out some key fundamentals. There’s also a picture of a guy with a beard on the website, and phrases like, “I don’t care, I win.”

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6. 6.75% of American Adults Use Amazon Prime

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7. Agencies Share of Civil Service Jobs

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8. Illegal Border Crossings Hit 2020 Levels

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9. Where Declining Rents are Improving Affordability

Austin, Texas is No.1 among the “most affordable metros,” which Redfin defines as placeswhere renters typically earn more money than they need in order to afford a typical rental unit.

The typical renter in the area makes $69,781 annually, which is 25.14% higher than the $55,760 the site estimates is required to afford a typical apartment there.

Austin is followed by Houston; Dallas; Salt Lake City; Raleigh, North Carolina; Denver; Phoenix; Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; and Nashville.

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10. Diet Strategies that Enhance Sleep

Via Consumer Reports: When you build your diet around foods that fit those criteria, you end up with something that looks like the Mediterranean diet—a way of eating that emphasizes plant-based foods, including lots of fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and healthy sources of fat (such as olive oil, nuts, and avocados), while limiting red meat, sweets, and refined carbohydrates (such as foods made with white flour). Indeed, studies examining the connection between this pattern of eating and better sleep have shown promising results.

For example, a 2020 study published in the journal Nutrients followed more than 400 women in the U.S. for a year to see whether compliance with the Mediterranean diet affected their sleep quality. Those with the greatest adherence to this way of eating had 30 percent lower sleep disturbance scores (meaning they got more solid rest) than those with the lowest adherence.

Certain categories of foods—namely fruits, vegetables, and legumes—stood out for their positive effects on various measures of sleep quality. “Legume consumption was associated with better sleep overall,” says Brooke Aggarwal, EdD, an assistant professor of medical sciences in the division of cardiology at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York City and one of the study authors. “And the effects were dose-dependent—the more servings of legumes they ate, the more significant improvement they had in sleep efficiency.” (Sleep efficiency is the ratio of how many hours you sleep to how many hours you spend in bed.)

A 2024 review and analysis of 37 studies published in Sleep Medicine Reviews bolstered the link between a healthy diet and better sleep. Following a Mediterranean or other high-quality quality diet reduced the risk of insomnia symptoms by 9 to 34 percent.

But it’s not that the Mediterranean diet necessarily has magic abilities to enhance sleep. “It’s the healthy components of that way of eating—more fruits and vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and healthy fats,” St. Onge says. “You can focus on eating those foods in any predominantly plant-based diet.”

How Better Eating Leads to Better Sleep

There are several possible explanations for how a healthy plant-based diet enhances sleep.

“All of the foods plentiful in the Mediterranean diet are rich sources of fiber, which has beneficial effects on the gut microbiome,” Aggarwal says. A healthier gut and better sleep are connected by various mechanisms.

“The gut and brain communicate via the gut-brain axis,” she says. “Specific to sleep, the gut microbiome is thought to send signals that help to regulate circadian rhythms.”

Circadian rhythms, part of the body’s internal clock, are controlled by daylight and darkness and affect many body processes, including hormonal activity and the sleep-wake cycle. Additionally, the gut is involved in the synthesis of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that promotes better mood and is an important component for regulating sleep.

Higher fruit and vegetable consumption as part of a plant-based diet also means a greater intake of beneficial antioxidant compounds called polyphenols. Emerging research points to an association between these compounds and improvements in sleep. “Polyphenols have effects on the autonomic nervous system and can increase heart rate variability [the fluctuation in time between heartbeats],” St. Onge says. Higher heart rate variability is a sign you’re in a relaxed state and is associated with better sleep quality, she says. Some polyphenols also act on receptors in the brain that promote sleep. 

Plant foods can even enhance the production of the sleep hormone melatonin. Legumes, soy, leafy greens, and seeds are all rich sources of tryptophan, an amino acid (a building block of protein) that the body uses to make melatonin. Turkey and dairy are often cited as the best sources of tryptophan. But the tryptophan in those high-protein foods isn’t actually synthesized as efficiently in the brain as the tryptophan from plant foods. That may be in part because you also need B vitamins and carbohydrates to process tryptophan, both of which you get when you eat a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains.

Eating Habits That Can Wreck Your Sleep

In addition to leaving you feeling tired, not getting enough sleep affects various processes in your brain and body that can lead to unhealthy food choices. Sleeping too few hours may increase hormones that stimulate appetite as well as suppress those that signal satiety. At the same time, short sleep durations appear to activate the reward centers in the brain, increasing cravings for high-sugar, high-fat snack foods.

“If you have good sleep, you tend to make better choices in all aspects of your life—eating healthier foods, taking the stairs instead of the elevator,” St. Onge says. “And when you don’t have good sleep, you tend to go for the easier, less healthy choices—more processed foods, more snacks, more sugar, less exercise. And this vicious cycle perpetuates itself.” A habitually unhealthy eating pattern (that may be exacerbated by not sleeping well) can, in turn, lead to more sleepless nights.

Along with obvious sleep-wreckers like alcohol and caffeine, foods that are high in fat, sugar, and saturated fat have been shown to affect sleep quality negatively. For example, a small study led by St. Onge, published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine in 2016, found that when participants ate more sugar, refined carbs, and saturated fat, it took them longer to fall asleep and they spent less time in the deep, restorative short-wave sleep phase.

In another study, published in 2020 in the Journal of the American Heart Association, researchers looked at the diets and sleep quality of almost 500 women. They found that those who reported poor sleep quality also had worse-quality diets. For example, women who took more than an hour to fall asleep consumed over 400 calories more per day than those who routinely fell asleep in 15 minutes or less. The poor sleepers not only ate more calories per day but also consumed more sugar, more saturated fat, and less fiber.

Diets rich in ultraprocessed foods—packaged foods that are made with ingredients not typically found in home kitchens—have also been linked to insomnia. A 2024 study published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics found that people with chronic insomnia had a higher percentage of UPFs in their diets than those without insomnia. Every 10 percent increase in UPFs in the diet was linked to a 9 percent increase in insomnia risk in men and a 6 percent increased risk in women.

Can Specific Foods Help You Sleep?

Over the years there have been various studies about how eating individual foods could ease you into slumber. Although these studies were typically small in scale (and often funded by the food industry), they usually resulted in lots of splashy headlines touting the miraculous effect of certain foods—such as tart cherries or kiwifruit. But experts caution against looking to a single food as nature’s sleeping pill.

“I like to advocate for better overall dietary patterns for better health and better sleep,” St. Onge says. “Including those foods can’t hurt, but you can’t negate the effect of a day’s worth of a bad diet with a single kiwi before bed.”

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