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People get nose jobs to boost their confidence, but one beauty influencer admits she spent years trying to hide hers.

Baker Kevin Luce is feeling the heat as prices of oil increase, but has vowed not to betray his customers by charging more for his baguettes.

This was the last things the Mariners and their fans wanted to see.

One veteran was duped into buying a $200 flag that he thought was made by a fellow serviceman.

The DOE Demands Faster Uranium Enrichment Buildout. Who's Answering The Call?

DOE officials told Reuters they are pressing Centrus Energy, General Matter, and France's Orano to accelerate their new build programs.

The start of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022 sent prices soaring across the nuclear fuel chain, as the start of the war was also followed by the US implementing a ban on importing Russian enriched uranium.

The panic of fuel for the US commercial reactor fleet not showing up evaporated almost immediately, as waivers were granted to any and all importers (mostly Centrus and US reactor-owning utilities). But, those waivers are set to expire at the start of 2028, and DOE's Michael Goff says there are no plans to extend them.

To solve the enrichment capacity gap, Washington is doing what they do best: throw as much money as they can at the problem. Earlier this year, money was getting thrown around at almost $1 billion per handful.

“If we are going to have this nuclear renaissance, we are not going to be able to do it without fuel,” Deputy Energy Secretary James Danly said.

The government has started by awarding $900 million apiece for Centrus Energy, General Matter, and Orano. 

Centrus Energy traces its roots back to the Manhattan Project, when the US invented uranium enrichment technology to fuel the bombs that were dropped over Japan. With the last domestically owned enrichment facility being shutdown over 10 years ago, Centrus has since served as an enriched uranium broker, supplying reactor-owning utilities in the US and abroad with imports from Europe and Russia.

Orano is the state-backed uranium enrichment company from France. The company has been supplying the massive French fleet for decades and has previously tried to expand in the US but failed for lack of support in the post-Fukushima era. The company is now attempting a second run at a project in Tennessee to assist the US in replacing Russian imports.

Then, there’s General Matter. The secretive, Peter Thiel-backed startup led by former SpaceX engineer Scott Nolan.

The nuclear industry has been mostly devoid of any details on the uranium enrichment startup, with only traces of their business being seen in some of the prep work for a facility in Paducah, Kentucky, and discussions of operations in California, Utah, and Washington State.

Finally, though, it seems Politico found a way to squeeze some details out of the silent company.

Politico’s reporter Francisco Camacho notes a diversified team of outsiders and nuclear veterans, as well as some backstory and the plans ahead. He also brings particular attention on a couple of occasions to the barbed relationship between Centrus Energy and General Matter.

First, when Founders Funds' Scott Nolan was first looking for how to go about entering the enrichment industry. Camacho describes Nolan as looking to initially find an existing company he could invest in. Nolan reportedly concluded the centrifuge design used by Centrus was not commercially competitive.

Second is when Camacho shed some light on the details of discussions between the enrichment companies and the DOE when competing for the $900 million awards earlier this year.

“One person familiar with the DOE contracts said [General Matter] offered 355 metric tons of HALEU annually for the $900 million. With its $900 million, Centrus said it would initially deliver 12 metric tons annually and subsequently scale up.”

Equal taxpayer dollars for almost 30 times the annual capacity ambition is painfully difficult to ignore. The reporting doesn't explicitly state that the goal is 355 MTU annually right off the bat when the company anticipates starting in 2029. But, the difference, as printed, is significant.

Centrus also expects its first new capacity in 2029, while February guidance placed the full 12-ton annual rate after 2030. With the DOE posturing that no further extensions of the ban are going to be affected in 2028, it's understandable why Reuters is reporting the DOE’s desire for companies to start moving faster.

Centrus does deserve credit for being the only facility in the US licensed by the NRC to produce HALEU-level uranium. The company has also been producing the higher-enriched uranium for almost three years, giving them time to improve operations and centrifuge designs.

Centrus has tried to demonstrate some additional concrete offtake agreements with recent supply contracts being signed with advanced reactor development companies Radiant, X-energy, and Antares, with target deliveries by the end of this decade.

Details about General Matter were also revealed in the Politico article, as the company apparently also signed contracts with X-energy and Antares, as well as an unnamed utility.

Based on the numbers provided in Politico, only one of the enrichment companies is actually targeting enough supply capacity to make these deliveries happen in commercial quantities.

We previously highlighted Centrus's $560 million manufacturing expansion for good reason. The company holds preference with the US government over foreign-owned enrichers such as Centrus, Orano, and GLE. But, if Centrus wants to keep its position as the leader of American-owned and operated enrichment capacity, the build times need to drop dramatically and goals need to be raised significantly.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2026 - 13:25

A Democratic strategist is predicting a Republican “wipeout” in the 2026 midterms — and pointing to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s surprisingly tight Texas reelection race as proof. Veteran Democratic strategist Paul Begala said Sunday that Abbott’s numbers against Democrat Gina Hinojosa could signal a much broader Democratic surge in November.  “This is not going to...

Diet and mental health are linked, with research showing that what we eat is linked to the development of issues like anxiety.

The dead body of a woman covered in stab wounds was found in a gazebo near Central Park’s boathouse on Sunday, sources and cops said. Authorities found the body with multiple slashes and trauma to the head at 9:40 a.m. in the Manhattan green space near 74th Street and East Drive, according to sources. The body...

Former Gov. David Paterson raved about Tisch after hearing her speak at a Police Athletic League event last week -- while rapping her boss, current Mayor Zohran Mamdani, over his divisive ant-Israel rhetoric.

The NFL's first-ever game in Rio de Janiero, Brazil is today.

There is no telling the story of Las Vegas Raiders receiver Jack Bech without telling the story of Tiger Bech.

Concerns about illicit fentanyl supplies flowing from China to the US loomed over President Trump's high-stakes summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping during their three-day DC summit last week.

Raiders rookie quarterback Fernando Mendoza is about more than football. While the reigning Heisman Trophy winner and No. 1 overall pick of the 2026 NFL Draft was leading Indiana to a national championship last season, the story of Mendoza’s mother, Elsa, was inspiring countless sports fans. Elsa Mendoza was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2008...

It started with some disgusting sideline crowing, USC linebacker Desman Stephens II getting a hand slap and a shoulder bump from a teammate almost immediately after knocking Oregon quarterback Dante Moore out cold. It must end with silent retribution. It continued with Stephens extending his arms and flapping his hands as if to mock the...

The Easy Money Fairy Tale Is About To End...Violently

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

For the better part of the last couple years, I have wondered whether financial markets are permanently broken. Not simply overvalued or temporarily irrational, but actually broken at the mechanical level and permanently distorted. I’ve written about it.

The basic process that is supposed to make capitalism work goes like this. Capital flows toward good ole’ fashioned productive uses (like the George Foreman Grill™) and away from flashy hot-shit stupid ones (like the Apple Vision Pro). Good businesses eventually outperform bad ones. Fraud eventually gets exposed. Making money is the point of a business. Price is a rationing mechanism and is determined by free markets. This system appears to have been dead for the last 10 years, at least.

Nowadays, we function under a derivative of capitalism (hereinafter referred to as “crony capitalism snorting bath salts, operating under policies so disorganized they’d make a Jackson Pollock painting look like the blueprints for a nuclear reactor”) where trillions of dollars can be created overnight, governments and central banks focus obsessively on a handful of key numbers, and preserving the nominal value of stocks and other financial assets has become the priority.

Everything else in the economy is then forced to adjust accordingly, and if you don’t like it, or it causes the price of your Whopper Jr.™ to go to $57, f*ck you…that’s just how money works nowadays.

We’ve spent most of the last 20 years systematically removing consequences from the financial system. Rates went to zero and stayed there for years. The Fed expanded its balance sheet by trillions. Every major crisis was met with an intervention, liquidity facility, bailout or assurance that policymakers stood ready to keep the machine running. Capital was forced to become extraordinarily cheap, and investors eventually became conditioned to believe it would remain that way. We laughed off our country’s credit downgrades. Economists and analysts turned into total pussies and cowards, crumbling into bits every time the market sold off 5%. Financial projections have turned into Hunter Thompson-esque 3AM drug induced astral projections.

And we turned into the real life version of Idiocracy for markets.

When money costs almost nothing, the hurdle rate for stupidity also approaches nothing. Businesses that never should have existed could raise billions of dollars. Venture capitalists could fund companies whose principal innovation was taking an existing business, attaching an app to it and losing money faster. Private equity could lever mediocre companies into supposedly brilliant investments. Private credit could convince investors that illiquid loans were somehow less volatile because nobody bothered marking them every afternoon.

SPACs could raise billions before investors even knew what they were buying. Crypto tokens created out of thin air could acquire enormous valuations. Meme stocks became religions. Companies substituted adjusted EBITDA for profits, stock based compensation for salaries and “community” for customers. Entire industries emerged whose economic purpose sometimes appeared to consist primarily of raising money from the previous industry.

None of this ever had to end because the one thing that normally kills financial stupidity, the cost of capital, had been put into such a deep coma it made Mitch McConnell look like Jackie Chan in Rush Hour 2.

Jim Chanos, who shares my view that the AI buildout may have overshot the mark, has called this period a “golden age of fraud,” and I think there is an important connection between that description and the monetary environment that produced it.

Cheap money does not merely inflate asset prices. It extends the expiration date on bullshit.

A company burning $500 million a year does not necessarily have to confront reality if somebody will hand it another $2 billion. A commercial property does not need to be marked down if its owner can refinance it. A private equity sponsor does not have to admit an acquisition was terrible if it can amend, extend, refinance and wait. A venture fund does not need real price discovery if the next financing round can establish a higher valuation. A struggling public company can survive for an astonishing amount of time if equity investors remain willing to finance it.

The fundamental question has gradually changed from “Does this business work?” to “Can we keep financing it?” Those are completely different questions, and for an extraordinary period of time the answer to the second one was yes.

That environment also allowed narrative to become a substitute for analysis. Investors learned that understanding the story could be more profitable than understanding the financial statements. It’s what powers IPOs for unprofitable companies with grandiose visions at 100x sales. TAM became more important than margins. Growth became more important than returns on capital. Adjusted numbers became more important than GAAP numbers. Momentum became more important than valuation.

The market increasingly rewarded understanding what everybody else was going to believe next instead of determining what an asset was actually worth. Traditional fundamental investors either adapted or got carried out. You could identify deteriorating economics, ridiculous accounting, absurd multiples and terrible capital allocation, then watch the stock triple because management said “AI” on an earnings call.

And now we may be approaching the point where the environment starts adapting back. (Read: Bonds Just Killed The Easy Money Era For Good)

🔥 85% OFF FOREVER IF YOU SUBSCRIBE TODAY: I am again offering an 85% discount to anyone that wants to become a Fringe Finance annual subscriber today. It’s a discount you can keep and stays applied for as long as you wish to remain a subscriber: Get 85% off forever

If the post 2008 assumption of structurally cheap money is actually dying, then I think markets are about to rediscover something they have not had to consistently deal with in decades: truth.

The reason is simple. Higher rates restore consequences. When investors can earn meaningful returns in Treasury securities and other relatively safe assets, they no longer need to finance every revolutionary dog walking blockchain SaaS platform that comes along. Junk bonds have to offer genuinely attractive yields. Private credit has to compete against liquid alternatives. Venture investments have to offer enough potential return to compensate for years of illiquidity and enormous failure rates.

Suddenly, the hurdle rate exists again.

Companies burning cash discover that capital has a price. Companies dependent on refinancing discover that lenders have alternatives. Private equity firms discover that an acquisition financed with cheap debt looks considerably less brilliant when that debt has to be refinanced at twice the rate. Commercial real estate owners discover that capitalization rates matter. Governments discover that deficits carry interest expense. Investors discover that earnings expected fifteen years from now are worth substantially less when the discount rate is no longer zero.

Fraud becomes harder…because fraud loves liquidity. It needs it for sustenance. Liquidity buys time, and a questionable business can survive as long as somebody keeps funding it. Once capital becomes scarce, the runway shortens and the questions become considerably less philosophical. Where is the cash? Who owes whom? What is the collateral actually worth? Can you refinance this? Why does EBITDA never turn into free cash flow? Why are you issuing stock every quarter? Why does every supposedly temporary adjustment show up again next year?

Why, exactly, does this multi-billion dollar company make no f*cking money?

If this really is the beginning of a structurally different monetary environment, the psychological adjustment is going to be enormous because almost an entire generation of investors has never experienced markets operating this way. Imagine telling someone who started trading in 2020 that a company can beat revenue estimates and still fall because it loses enormous amounts of money. Imagine telling a venture capitalist that the value of a company might eventually be determined by the cash it distributes to its owners rather than the valuation assigned by the next venture capitalist. (Read: This Next Market Crash Will Break Our Fragile Brains)

For years, every serious skeptic eventually ran into the same argument: look at the stock price. It’s what has fooled people into thinking Tesla is worth paying 350x ttm earnings for. It is, to the best of what I can tell, the entire premise of most of the crypto world. The price itself became the evidence.

If the stock went up, management was brilliant. If the valuation expanded, the business model was validated. If investors continued supplying capital, concerns about profitability could be dismissed as antiquated thinking from people who simply “didn’t get it.”

But price and truth are not the same thing. They just looked similar while money was nearly free.

And we may currently be witnessing the final spectacular expression of that era. Speculative narratives remain enormous, apparent financial engineering is everywhere, private markets have exploded in size and investors have spent so long being rewarded for ignoring valuation that valuation itself can sometimes feel like an obsolete concept. Add a more hands off regulatory environment to the mix and you have about as permissive a backdrop for financial excess as I can remember.

Higher rates will not make markets perfectly rational either. Markets have been doing stupid things for hundreds of years and will presumably continue doing stupid things long after all of us are dead. But the environment in which stupidity operates matters enormously. Cheap capital subsidizes mistakes. Expensive capital exposes them.

If rates remain structurally higher, investors may rediscover a collection of supposedly obsolete concepts: balance sheets, interest coverage, free cash flow, return on invested capital, dilution, debt maturities, liquidation values, accounting quality and, God forbid, valuation.

Mark the Q-man’s words: there are tons of businesses, funds, loans and assets whose health depends on nobody forcing price discovery. There are probably losses buried throughout private markets that have not become losses yet simply because nobody has been required to transact.

And when those losses finally have to be recognized, it could be incredibly ugly. But that is not a bug in capitalism. That is the mechanism. Creative destruction requires destruction. Price discovery requires prices to occasionally discover something unpleasant. Capital allocation requires bad allocators to eventually lose access to capital. Markets cannot distinguish good businesses from bad businesses if everybody gets unlimited time and unlimited financing.

For twenty years, we increasingly tried to engineer those consequences out of the system. Chanos called what emerged the golden age of fraud. Einhorn eventually concluded that markets were fundamentally broken. Countless investors who continued trying to apply common sense watched narrative repeatedly bulldoze arithmetic.

Maybe markets were not permanently broken. Maybe money was simply too cheap for truth to matter.

If the cost of capital is finally normalizing for good, we are going to find out. After two decades of narratives, adjusted earnings, financial engineering, extend and pretend financing, imaginary valuations, unprofitable bullshit and seemingly endless supplies of money, we may finally get to see what is actually standing behind the curtain.

I suspect some of it is going to be horrifying. But after spending two decades drowning in excess, hubris, decadence and Dan Ives’ outfits, at least it will be real.

--

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. 

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2026 - 12:50

“If you have Instagram plus stay away from me,” one social media user commented.

The competition for the Rangers’ backup goalie spot has been decided — and it comes with a risk.

Say "howdy" to fast-paced, fun new episodes of this campy and action-packed supernatural Western anime.

The newlyweds previously made their awards show debut as a couple at the iHeartRadio Music Awards 2026 in March.

The newlyweds previously made their awards show debut as a couple at the iHeartRadio Music Awards 2026 in March.