Adding up the three subtotals, we get a grand total for being a Santa Claus as $642 billion per year. This is even more than the federal government spends, which shows how impractical it is to become a Santa Claus.

Still, there might be some potential income for Santa. Huge sums of money could be extorted from people by the bad information that Santa’s detectives get. Santa might also get to claim his 600,000 elves as dependents on his tax forms. His detectives could claim to be unemployed, and thus collect welfare and unemployment checks from the government. Santa could incorporate and collect royalties on the use of his image from corporations. Best of all, Santa’s free gifts might drive corporations into bankruptcy, and he could take over all economic activity in the United States, with all of its potential for profit. Santa could then proceed to take over the economies of many extremely rich nations, like Saudi Arabia and Iran, and thus assure himself of enough money to run his operations.

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In July 2024, I flew to a pop-up city named Vitalia that aimed to “make death optional.” Situated in the heart of a special economic zone on Roatan, a Honduran island, Vitalia advertised itself as a place to fast-track drug research outside of America’s burdensome regulatory constraints.

The AI-generated pictures I’d seen made it look sleek and futuristic, like a cross between South Beach Miami and The Jetsons. Since its launch seven months before, Vitalia had attracted scientists, entrepreneurs, and crypto enthusiasts—among them longevity guru Bryan Johnson and Balaji S. Srinivasan, the author of The Network State. The special economic zone in which Vitalia was located, Próspera, claimed on its website that a company could go to market 10 to 100 times faster there than the United States, which requires three phases of trials—testing first for safety, then for dosage and efficacy within a given population—before a product can be advertised or sold. Many drugs fail in what’s called the “valley of death” between promising early studies and the outcome of Phase 2 or 3 trials; 90 percent of drugs don’t make it through a process that can, all told, cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Vitalia joined a growing number of special economic zones and bespoke cities sprouting up around the world, usually to provide some form of relaxed taxation or regulation. Many are targeting medical innovation, trying to attract a new class of scientist you might call clinical nomads—those attempting to do research outside the traditional pathways. A 2022 report found that 82 special economic zones were attempting to lure genetic engineering startups to set up shop. India’s Genome Valley is hosting around 200 companies that will enjoy streamlined regulatory approval. Dubai Science Park offers 100 percent tax-free status to foreign-owned companies focused on the life sciences. The Technopolis Moscow Special Economic Zone, in Russia, is testing three gene therapies derived from a person’s own cells.

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Bloomberg reports that the latest delayed BLS data shows a sharp deterioration in white-collar jobs, especially those holding four-year degrees, now making up a record 25% of all unemployed – or about 1.9 million folks, the highest level since 1992.

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The White House has been silent on how the firm will be paid and on the total costs of the project. There has been no comment on whether the project will be paid for by taxpayers or through some other means.

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Rising inventory and dwindling demand have brought down home prices in many U.S. metropolitan areas this year, especially in those markets in the Sunbelt and the South which became overheated between 2020 and 2022.

At the national level, the vertiginous price growth that characterized the pandemic years has also slowed to a grind, with the median sale price of a home in October only 1.2 percent higher than a year ago, according to Redfin, at $439,701.

According to a new report from Zillow, 53 percent of all U.S. homes lost value over the past 12 months—the most since 2012.

While affordability has slightly improved, however, millions of Americans are still being kept on the sidelines of the housing market by higher home prices, property taxes, and home insurance premiums, as well as still-elevated borrowing costs.

“I think…we’re going to correct all the way to a point where household median income matches the home price, the median home price. And so that is going to be worse than 2008. This could devolve a lot faster than last time,” Wright said during an interview with Adam Taggart, host of Thoughtful Money, published on YouTube.

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I think there’s a lot of powerful people in this country who would like the story to begin and end with one monstrous man.

And when these emails were released, I decided, maybe against my better judgment, that I was going to read all of them. And it took me four or five days just going through one after another, making notes. And I was really curious about all these other people, right? And some of them are celebrities and bold-faced names like she was talking about. Some of them are utterly ordinary people no one’s ever heard of. Some of them are professors, others. But I was interested in this larger network, because these were the people that Jeffrey Epstein had, in effect, chosen to rehabilitate him socially and redeem him after he was a convicted sex offender trying to reestablish himself in society. And I was trying to understand how these relationships worked.

And what I found was that it’s very convenient for the American power elite to think about this as a story of one depraved man. But, in fact, what the emails show, if you actually read them, is that he had chosen this particular kind of social network, this American power elite, because he could be sure that it would be able to look away at what he did, because it was very gifted at looking away over a generation at so much else, so much else, so much other abuse and suffering, whether the economic crises members of that network often helped cause, the wars members of that network helped push fraudulently, the pain of technological obsolescence that members of that network pushed on the American public. So, this was a group of people well chosen by Jeffrey Epstein, because this American power elite, these circles that he moved in, if they have any superpower, it is the ability to hear the cries of people without power and close their ears.
[…]
Well, as I read the emails, it seemed to me there were a few different things going on. One, this is a group of people who are not really loyal to the communities they come from. They’re not — their loyalty is not downward to places and communities and even countries. This is a kind of borderless network of people who are more loyal to each other than to places. And that kind of network actually needs someone who is a connector. So, a lot of the emails are, “Hey, I’m landing in New York,” “Hey, I’m going to San Francisco.” And then Epstein would say, “Hey, you should meet this guy in San Francisco,” “Oh, you need an investor for your startup? Let me connect you with that.” It’s all about this kind of connectivity. And he was a very good connector.

Second, this is a network that thrives on information barter, and specifically nonpublic information. Again, why would they consort with this guy? Well, this guy ended up being — and not just his own information. He ended up being a kind of convener of these trades of nonpublic information. Investors want information that will help them, you know, make trades that other people don’t know about. You know, professors want insight about things. People in the business world want tips about things that will be the next big thing. So there was this kind of information network. Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary, wanted dating advice.

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ICIJ has published searchable databases from its major projects — including Offshore Leaks and Pandora Papers — that contain profiles of “power players” and “confidential clients” and link to original corporate records and legal filings. Many of these documents are also available on DocumentCloud, a widely used repository used by investigative centers.

Among open data tools, Cosic highlighted:

OpenCorporates, a key global company database that often gives the first overview of an oligarch’s corporate footprint.
Property and land registers, especially in jurisdictions favored by elites. Spain’s Property Cadastre, for example, allows name-based searches for a fee and helps map villas on the coast owned via offshore entities.
OCCRP’s Investigative Dashboard, which lists corporate, land, and court registries for many countries, and which is a good starting point when you do not know which authority holds a particular dataset.

She also recommended OpenSanctions, which aggregates sanctions lists from multiple jurisdictions and, crucially, all major spelling variants of sanctioned individuals’ names.

For politically exposed persons, Cosic mentioned specialized PEP databases she uses to double-check whether she has missed any companies tied to a target. And while commercial databases such as Sayari or Orbis can be costly, she urged newsrooms to negotiate temporary or discounted access, sometimes in exchange for credit in published stories.

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday released a study that found that artificial intelligence can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market, or as much as $1.2 trillion in wages across finance, health care and professional services.

The study was conducted using a labor simulation tool called the Iceberg Index, which was created by MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The index simulates how 151 million U.S. workers interact across the country and how they are affected by AI and corresponding policy.
[…]
The index treats the 151 million workers as individual agents, each tagged with skills, tasks, occupation and location. It maps more than 32,000 skills across 923 occupations in 3,000 counties, then measures where current AI systems can already perform those skills.

What the researchers found is that the visible tip of the iceberg — the layoffs and role shifts in tech, computing and information technology — represents just 2.2% of total wage exposure, or about $211 billion. Beneath the surface lies the total exposure, the $1.2 trillion in wages, and that includes routine functions in human resources, logistics, finance, and office administration. Those are areas sometimes overlooked in automation forecasts.

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