Aldi sells groceries at 30 to 50% below Kroger, Walmart, and Safeway because 90% of the store is private-label products made by the same manufacturers as the name brands. A former Aldi district manager told me: "Aldi's Millville cereal is produced by the same manufacturer as General Mills. Aldi's Clancy's chips come from the same factory as a leading national chip brand. Aldi's Friendly Farms dairy is sourced from the same regional dairies supplying Kroger and Walmart. Aldi's Baker's Corner flour comes from the same mills producing Gold Medal and King Arthur. Aldi's Simply Nature organic line is manufactured by the same organic producers supplying Whole Foods 365 brand. You're paying for a name at Kroger. You're paying for the food at Aldi. Same factories. Same ingredients. Different receipt." Here are the 9 Aldi products that are secretly name brands at 50% off 🧵

NYU math professor Tristan Buckmaster says OpenAI’s Tuesday drop of 722 AI-generated math papers wiped out entire research programs: “This recent dump of papers on Tuesday destroyed the careers of early career mathematicians.”

With math essentially being delegated to OpenAI, here's what I predict for economics and the social sciences more generally: ✅The top tier of research will just become better and it will be normal human-led research where AI is used for scale (e.g. conducting qualitative interviews with relevant populations, running behavioral interventions in the field, analyzing massive text data, etc.) ✅ Field experiments will rise in value and generally making "connections" with firms and being able to run stuff (potentially testing AI pipelines) will be in high demand ✅ Research with administrative data will become even more valuable, but the benefits might be concentrated among some prolific authors who are allowed by the government agencies to use local models to analyze the data at scale. PhD students can probably forget about it ✅Economic history will have a very exciting boom and there will be an enormous race and big rewards for digitizing archives as a source to both identify new research strategies and document new descriptive facts. ✅Review and verification systems will become massively improved with AI assistance and it will become standard practice to do a 360 review of the paper + code + data at the *submission* stage. ⚠️Research that in principle can already be almost completely outsourced to the AI (download and analyze public data, run simple survey experiments, write theory models) is in for a big shock. This would be very bad from the perspective of researchers who depend on this "bread and butter" research, but I think this type of work will just be outsourced to public agencies who can answer their own questions without the need for "peer-reviewed" research.

An AI radio host in Los Angeles sometimes has to be told to stop swearing José FM in Los Angeles has a morning co-host named Coyotec, and he's a chatbot (Los Angeles Times). His human partner, Geraldine "GeeGee" Guzman, told the paper she never knows what he'll say, and he sometimes has to be told to quit swearing. The show's ratings are going up anyway, and it's spreading to other cities. The station built Coyotec during the immigration raids, when some of its on-air talent was hesitant to speak out for fear of losing endorsements or facing legal trouble, according to Eduardo Maytorena, president of Entravision Audio, the company that owns José FM (Los Angeles Times). Entravision bills the show, "Al Aire y Sin Permiso," weekdays from 8 to 10 a.m., as the first AI co-hosted Spanish-language radio show in the US (Radio Online). Coyotec struggles to hold a conversation past about 10 minutes, so Guzman records each of her four segments separately (Los Angeles Times). Maytorena says Coyotec costs more to run than some human hosts, and that the money comes from ads the bot reads word for word: by his count, every dollar spent brings back ten. A Phoenix station went further in January with an all-AI lineup built on licensed voice clones of four radio personalities from the '90s (Los Angeles Times). Radio has been shrinking for years: with ad revenue down and listeners moving to streaming and podcasts, radio broadcasting jobs fell from 85,000 in 2019 to 66,000 in 2025, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures the paper cites. iHeartMedia went the other way with an on-air "Guaranteed Human" campaign (Los Angeles Times). If a person behind the microphone matters to you, ask your station who's on the air. José FM tells its listeners over and over that Coyotec is AI (Los Angeles Times), and a station that won't give you a straight answer has told you something too. The show is growing, and the Los Angeles Times says it's unclear how much of that is GeeGee and how much is the bot, so I'd still want to know who's talking.

#WolffBites: France's interest rates rise, risk recession, infect other Europe. Desperate Macron takes money from education to pay creditors. Students + French people say no. Macron in crisis: cannot pay debts, fund Ukraine, rearm against Russia. The political center collapses. axios.com/2026/10/05/france-…