Ghost Mail Weekender

Happy Sunday Voornaam,

This time next week, your favourite ghost will be living his all-time dream of attending the Le Mans 24-Hour race live in France. This is wonderful for his life experience and not so great for the predictability of when Ghost Mail Weekender will be sent next Sunday. It will happen. It just might be late.
Perhaps most impressively, it might happen from a tent next to one of the most famous races in the world.
As we go from Ferrari Hypercars to dinosaurs, we promise that this mailer isn't aimed at our little ones. Or your little ones. Right now, Dominique Olivier feels like a kid herself, as Ster-Kinekor is finally listening to the people.
Every so often, Dominique thinks about the fact that she was born in the same year that Jurassic Park premiered and feels intensely sad. Not that she has any problem sharing a birth year with probably the best dinosaur film ever made - on the contrary - she feels sad that she was a baby, and therefore unable to experience the thrill of seeing this iconic film on the big screen.
(The Finance Ghost was five at the time and his parents snuck him into a drive-in to watch the movie - legends!)
Fortunately for Dominique, Ster-Kinekor has just launched its Throwback Cinema series, so there’s an outside chance that the stars will align and she will get her opportunity to see the very best in computer generated dino action on the biggest screen possible - just like Spielberg intended. At just R50 a ticket (or the price of one popcorn kernel), they will be showing films like Back To The Future 1 and 2, The Mummy (original Brendan Fraser version!) and Gladiator, as well as arthouse favourite Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Ster-Kinekor is a classic example of a low asset utilisation rate. Simply, an empty cinema isn't making them any money. So, why not do something different to fill it? Dominique wrote on the topic earlier this year in this article and offering classic re-runs was one of her suggestions. Hopefully, Ster-Kinekor will get this right.
Moving on, there's an incredible article today on the history of Monopoly. Famous for being a great way to strain family relationships, Monopoly has a wild back-story of intellectual property theft and exactly the kind of corporate behaviour that led the original inventor of the game down the path of trying to show the dangers of monopolies. Whether you prefer the dog, the car or the little iron, you will love this article.
Keep reading for the story of an island making a fortune from AI and "questions we still can't answer" in Dominique's fast facts.
Thanks for inviting us into your Sunday routine. We love being here!
The Finance Ghost (follow on X) | Dominique Olivier (connect on LinkedIn)

PS: check out Dominique's brand new website for her business human.writer - if you need help telling your brand story or making your content more interesting, you know who to contact.

Ai jai jai

TL:DR: A tiny Caribbean island you’ve never heard of before is making a fortune every year because of AI.
Back in the 1980s, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) started assigning two-letter top-level domains to various nations and territories. These TLDs have become a staple of the internet landscape, with familiar ones like ".au" for Australia, ".ca" for Canada, and ".jp" for Japan.
In 1995, Anguilla, a tiny Caribbean territory, was given the ".ai" domain. Initially, it might have seemed like just another digital address, but fast forward to today, and it's become a goldmine. By 2018, Anguilla was raking in $2.9 million a year from ".ai" domain registrations. That amount was enough to cover the salaries of all the primary school teachers on the island, as reported by The New York Times.
But the real explosion came with the rise of artificial intelligence. The demand for ".ai" domains skyrocketed. According to IEEE Spectrum, Anguilla now makes $2.9 million every month. And it’s only getting better - next year, they're expecting to double their income from ".ai" domains to $6 million per month. This boost is mainly from existing domain renewals at higher rates. New domain sales saw a fourfold increase in just five months following the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.
Vince Cate, the man in charge of Anguilla's domain registrations, told IEEE Spectrum that this income now makes up about a third of the government’s budget. Thanks to the windfall from ".ai" domains, Anguilla has been able to pay down some of its debts and even eliminate residential property taxes.
Interestingly, Anguilla isn’t the first small nation to strike it rich with its domain. Take Tuvalu, for example. This Pacific island nation opened up its ".tv" domain registry in 1998. By 2018, the revenue from ".tv" domains accounted for 10% of the government's income.

Steal, hustle and lie: the Monopoly story

Dominique's fast facts: Questions we still can't answer

An assortment of facts that will take you only a minute to read.

What’s humming in Tao? In this small town in north-central New Mexico, some residents claim to be able to hear a constant faint droning sound. It interferes with their sleep and sometimes causes visitors to feel ill. It gets more noticeable indoors and at night. While researchers have investigated everything from industrial equipment to mass tinnitus, no one was able to settle on a conclusive explanation for the hum - nor have they been able to prove that it really exists.

​Why do we have fingerprints? We know everyone has them and they are all unique. But we didn’t evolve to have them in anticipation of solving murder cases. So what are they actually for? Some believe that these tiny ridges improve grip, like the ridges on a tire, or amplify vibrations to enhance touch perception. Experiments for both theories have come up with fascinating yet inconclusive results.

Why don’t swallows get lost? We know that many animals have an annual migration, but scientists still don’t know how they find their way. When humans set out for new lands, we needed every navigational tool under the sun and sometimes still ended up lost (looking at you, Columbus). So how can a flock of swallows manage to keep coming back to the same spot every year?

What is the mind, and where do we find it? Consciousness in general is a puzzle that has stumped scientists for centuries. We think of the brain and the mind as related, but they aren’t the same thing. The brain is an organ that is powered by electrical activity in the body. But electrical activity doesn't explain how a physical substance can create a nonphysical condition like consciousness. Furthermore, consciousness can be switched off (thanks, anaesthesia), without interrupting the working of the brain.

Why do bicycles work? The first bicycles were invented through trial and error, and the best bicycle designers continue to be those with experience, rather than those with amazing engineering knowledge. Some scientists theorised that a moving bicycle stays up due to the caster effect, or even the kind of gyroscopic force that keeps a spinning top upright, but both of these theories have been disproven. In short - we know how bicycles work, we just don’t know why they work that way.