Week 9
TL DR:
- Week 10 is here!
- Injuries have begun to rear their ugly head, do those pregame stretches!
We’ve reached the midway point of the NFL regular season and more than that in our own league, while the standings have mostly settled there is still plenty of action going on, plenty of moves to make, and oh so much more football to play.
Week 9 Recap
Alec, George, Stefan, Emma, Sydney & Will are the Week 9 winners 🥳
Sadie, Kate, Tony, Rosie/Julia, Joey & Sam are the Week 9 losers ❌
Alec gets the highest score this week with 143.3 but it’s nowhere close to beating Emma’s season record of 161.32.
No close ones this week.
Will had the highest scoring player this week with Brock Bowers insane 43.3 points as a TE.
And now the scores:
Daytona Slurs – 143.3 vs spooky poopy dookies – 106.4
Denver Buckos – 120.14 vs clinton crime family – 93.62
blackstone valley staybehinders – 109.96 vs Cape Canaveral Challengers – 118.06
josie schapolitano oyster heads – 107.72 vs Glizzy Guzzler – 122.4
HouseOfDaDragIcon – 93.6 vs Lets Go Brandos – 114.6
Daddy Milkers – 127.54 vs The Better Munhall – 122.88
POWER Rankings
And of course, the most important part, the Official post-Week 9 Power Rankingstm
- Daytona Slurs – Alec Munhall +0
- Glizzy Guzzler – Emma Costello +1
- spooky poopy dookies – Sadie Geauthreaux -1
- Denver Buckos – George Roberts-Oakland +0
- Cape Canaveral Challengers – Stefan Mesarovich +1
- Lets Go Brandos – Sydney Cairo +1
- clinton crime family – Kate McGaw -2
- HouseOfDaDragIcon – Joey Panell +0
- The Better Munhall – Sam Munhall +0
- Daddy Milkers – William Walton +2
- blackstone valley staybehinders – Tony Alves -1
- josie schapolitano oyster heads– Julia Napolitano/Rosie Schultz -1
The big move this week is that Emma has finally seized the Number 2 spot, can she take 1 next?
From the Office of the Commissioner
🎵 Now Playing 🎵
That’s our Week 9!
A few weeks ago we started our exploration of China by taking a look at some population stats and the rates at which the Chinese are adding energy capacity. Let’s continue our journey by looking at the hottest new thing you, a nation-state, could do with all of that energy…
AI
While there is certainly a lot of hype surrounding AI in the states, the consensus seems to that we are in a bubble and that it is not a matter of if but rather when it pops. But, in the immortal words Citigroup’s Chuck Prince during the lead up to the 2008 crisis, “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.”
And so we dance!
US investors continue to pour funds into AI companies, their suppliers, their suppliers… tangentially-related fried chicken companies… such that we’ve officially reached the “Too Big to Fail” stage of the crisis. The AI frenzy has so far managed to prop up the headline numbers on the US economy, the ones that still get reported anyway, but exempting the circular bubble of AI related investment, US GDP growth in the first half of 2025 came in at a whopping… 0.1%.
American firms have achieved these preposterous valuations via a series of circular investment agreements, illustrated above, and with basically no pathway to profitability. OpenAI will not be able to meet it obligations with a slop app or by selling a monthly chatbot subscription or using AI to optimize targeted ads. Instead, the US AI firms have placed their bets on the eventual development of Artificial General Intelligence or AGI; a sort of human-like or superhuman intelligence that will rapidly usher in some sort of post-scarcity utopia in which money is obsolete…
It is also an ill-defined and increasingly unattainable goal which would require answering actual, meaningful questions about artificial intelligence that these firms are neither interested in or capable of answering. A strategy that Matt Levine glibly characterized as “…the greatest business plan in the history of capitalism: ‘We will create God and then ask it for money.’ ”
And it is the greatest! If it works…
But all indicators point to ChatGPT and its ilk being less a God and more a pornography and insanity machine. Close enough!
So while the firms in the US have set their bar for success at “God”, the Chinese firms have taken a slightly different approach.
Instead of a headlong dash towards AGI, Chinese AI firms have tended to focus on domain-limited, practical applications in manufacturing and R&D. The Chinese model much more effectively utilizes AI’s “force multiplier” factor by supplementing human work and automating the more time-consuming elements of a process.
There are far fewer Chinese LLMs because they are less profitable products with an unclear pathway to long-term viability and it is increasingly looking like the fad is wavering and usage of these products has already begun to decline. With each subsequent release and rollout, more and more gaps begin to show between what has been promised and what actually appears to be possible.
As the noose of profitability begins to tighten around US firms they increasingly relying on closed-source models to lock in revenue. Again China utilizes a different approach, generally employing open-source frameworks for their models. But don’t mistake this as merely goodwill, it is a conscious strategy to encourage adoption globally, especially among non-Western and developing economies. In a similar fashion to the price revolution in manufacturing that China spurred only a few decades ago, they are positioning themselves to be the benefactors of an AI price revolution as well; rolling out open-source, functionally comparable alternatives to products from US firms that investors have been told demand the largest wave of capital expenditures we have every seen. The DeepSeek rollout earlier this year is the perfect example of the consequence of this approach for the Americans:
Chinese Academic Di Dongsheng has likened this strategy to the Chinese Civil War-era Maoist slogan “The countryside surrounds the city.” In other words, success lies in the consolidation of the periphery.
In the AI context there are a few ways to read this concept, not only as gaining market share in non-Western nations in, but also consolidating sites of resource extraction. As China tightens its grip on flows of material (rare earths, renewable energy infrastructure) and promotes usage of its frameworks through low-cost open source models, it will consolidate the global market at the exclusion of opaque, expensive, generalist projects from US firms. This “90% as good for 50% of the cost” approach will have the effect of further constraining the profitability of US firms and driving the closer to the edge.
Ultimately the Chinese model offers a more sustainable path to growth while the consequence for US firms could be dire should the bills for the data centers arrive before the Machine God. The rest of us are kind of just along for the ride, and as I said at the start, the question is when not if.
The countryside surrounds the city friends and I don’t think I need to remind you who won the Chinese Civil War…
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You all mega suck.
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Intelligence & Love,
Alec
