Tootfinder

A profile of 6-year-old Ramp, which has grown to a $22.5B valuation as it expanded beyond corporate cards to tools for expense reporting, bill payment, and more (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/article/ramp-american-express-corp…

Ramp is taking aim at American Express by upending corporate credit cards. Can the $22.5 billion startup live up to the hype?
With $1 billion in revenue, Ramp has grown at hyperspeed amid the AI boom and corner-office financial anxiety.

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

A note on the mechanism of substitution of labour with capital in the production processes
Vladimir Pokrovskii
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05386 https://arx…

A note on the mechanism of substitution of labour with capital in the production processes
Considering the production processes, it was noted that the use of various equipment leads to an increase in output -- the phenomenon that is usually described as the substitution of labor with capital. The proposed theory of substitution is based on the assumption that not the quantity of capital (production equipment) does substitute labor, but rather its ability to operate similar to the workers. This is the true content of the substitution of labor by capital. To formulate a correct mechani…

Titans can't 'capitalize' on chances in Ward debut https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46193067/tennessee-titans-fall-denver-broncos-cam-ward-debut

Acoustic wave modulation of gap plasmon cavities
Skyler P. Selvin, Majid Esfandyarpour, Anqi Ji, Yan Joe Lee, Colin Yule, Jung-Hwan Song, Mohammad Taghinejad, Mark L. Brongersma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05864

Acoustic wave modulation of gap plasmon cavities
The role of metallic nanostructures in nanophotonics is expected expand if ways to electrically manipulate their optical resonances at high speed can be identified. Here, we capitalize on electrically-driven surface acoustic waves and the extreme light concentration afforded by gap plasmons to achieve this goal. We place gold nanoparticles in a particle-on-mirror configuration with a few-nanometer-thick, compressible polymer spacer. Surface acoustic waves are then used to tune light scattering …

Raise Financial Services, the parent company of Indian stock trading and investment app Dhan, raised $120M led by Hornbill Capital at a $1.2B valuation (Kunal Manchanada/Entrackr)
https://entrackr.com/news/dhan-turns-unicorn-after-120-mn-f…

Dhan turns unicorn after $120 Mn fundraise led by Hornbill Capital
Dhan plans to deploy the new funds to scale its technology stack, expand its omnichannel presence, and roll out new financial products for retail investors.

SoftBank-owned PayPay takes a 40% stake in Binance Japan for an undisclosed sum, to capitalize on Japan's crypto boom; PayPay filed for a US IPO in August (Mayumi Negishi/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

New York-based Crosby, a law firm that uses AI to help speed up the contracts process, raised a $20M Series A co-led by Index Ventures, BCV, and Elad Gil (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media)
https://www.upstartsmedia.com/p/crosby-ai-law-firm-raises-20-million

Crosby, 'AI Law Firm' Working With Startups Like Cursor, Raises $20 Million
The Series A from Index Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures will help lawyer turned founder Ryan Daniels expand how his year-old startup can use AI to speed up contract reviews.

Etherealize, which develops products and infrastructure for financial institutions on Ethereum, raised $40M in a round co‑led by Electric Capital and Paradigm (Ben Weiss/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/09/03/etherealize-vi…

Exclusive: Etherealize raises $40 million to expand Wall Street’s use of Ethereum
Electric Capital and Paradigm led the round, which builds on an earlier grant from Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation.

At the White House dinner, Zuckerberg said Meta plans to spend "something like at least $600B" through 2028 on data centers and other infrastructure in the US (Kalley Huang/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/meta…

Meta Plans to Spend $600 Billion Through 2028 in the U.S., Zuckerberg Says
Meta Platforms plans to spend “something like at least $600 billion” through 2028 on data centers and other infrastructure in the U.S., Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Thursday at a dinner with President Donald Trump and other technology executives. In July, Meta estimated its capital expenditures in 2025 would be between $66 billion and $72 billion, up at least 68% from its capital