Burabay, a popular lake resort in northern Kazakhstan, has hosted the 10th edition of the ‘Voices of Friends: Poetry & Art’ festival, which ran from 29 November to 2 December.
The annual gathering, arranged by the London-based Eurasian Creative Guild (ECG), has become one of Central Asia’s events for cultural collaboration, bringing together writers, filmmakers, visual artists and musicians from 20 countries.
This year’s programme continued the festival’s mix of literature and modern arts, with an emphasis for 2025 on emerging film talent, through the youth-focused Cinema Future festival and the Burabay International Short Film Festival (BISFF).
According to filmmaker and BISFF jury member Timur Akhmedjanov, “Young filmmakers from different countries on one screen [means] the birth of a new generation of cinema.”
Alongside film events, the festival featured book presentations from publishers Hertfordshire Press, discussions about art, performances by an international community choir, and creative workshops hosted at the ECG Horizons residency.
Organisers emphasised that for the festival, collaboration is as important as presentation. “The festival grows like a living universe of ideas and emotions. Here everyone is a creator – and everyone feels that their voice matters,” said festival director and cultural projects author Taina Kaunis.
During the event’s closing ceremony, awards were presented to some figures shaping Eurasian culture, while the Eurasian Creative Guild announced a change in leadership ahead of its 2026 season.
Founder Marat Akhmedjanov, originally from Uzbekistan but now residing in Scotland, highlighted the organisation’s international ethos, saying: “Creativity knows no borders. We speak dozens of languages, yet understand each other perfectly.” ECG vice-chair Saltanat Khamzeyeva called it “the beginning of a big story” for cultural development in Central Asia.
The Guild underscores that the Burabay resort has become more than a picturesque location for a festival. Chair Francesca Mepham summed up its growing impact: “We see Eurasian creativity becoming a global voice – and this voice will only become stronger.”
Owner of Sports Direct chain says consumer confidence ‘very subdued’ with sales at sports division down 5.8%
The owner of Sports Direct and Flannels has said sales have fallen at its UK retail businesses amid heavy discounting by rivals and “very subdued” consumer confidence.
Frasers, which is controlled by former Newcastle United owner Mike Ashley, said sales at its UK sports division were down 5.8% in the six months to 26 October to £1.3bn despite growth at the main Sports Direct chain because of “planned decline” at its Game outlets and the Studio Retail online arm.
RMFG has raised $4.5 million in pre-seed funding to bolster US manufacturing with AI.
Its 32-year-old founder taught himself to code while working in gas station maintenance.
RMFG wants to jump in on the white-hot robotics industry.
AI-powered manufacturing startup RMFG has raised $4.5 million to help revive US production.
RMFG was launched in July 2024 by Kenneth Cassel, a 32-year-old college dropout and Y Combinator graduate, as well as a father of four. Cassel grew up in a large, blue-collar family in Texas and taught himself to code while working maintenance at a gas station company.
RMFG says it helps startups that don’t want to deal with the costs of building their own facilities or face the security risks of going overseas.
Its AI-powered sheet metal factory, located in Dallas-Fort Worth, handles work that is usually done manually, using AI agents and other technologies to handle quoting, automate quality control, and tweak designs. This cuts lead times from months to weeks, the company said.
In the past, factory jobs lacked status, Cassel said, though technology has transformed the industry, and more people are interested in physical products “because they’re seeing AI capabilities erode the value of pure software startups,” he said.
RMFG is jumping in on the white-hot robotics industry, where most of its clients operate.
“These companies have raised venture capital, they’re scaling, they’re trying to build out really quickly,” Cassel said. “Ultimately, I think it’s going to be larger than automotive.”
Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, and Soma Capital participated in RMFG’s pre-seed round, along with angel investors Balaji Srinivasan, Patrick Collison, Charlie Songhurst, and Joshua Browder.
RMFG says it has shipped more than 100,000 parts in the last year and has about 200 customers, including drill-rig startup Durin, cloud-seeding company Rainmaker, and robotic fulfillment startup Nimble. It offers laser-cut sheet metal parts and plans to expand into additional services, Cassel said.
RMFG has nine employees — mostly in manufacturing. Cassel said the startup will primarily use funds to grow its technology team, which consists of himself and a founding engineer.
Here’s a look at the pitch deck RMFG used to raise its $4.5 million pre-seed. Slides have been redacted so that the deck can be shared publicly.
An answer to this fascinating question emerged recently when economist David Seif wrapped up an annual forecasting contest he runs for a secret group of economists, hedge fund investors, and tech executives.
In its seventh year, the challenge requires contestants to predict roughly 30 events. The 2025 game kicked off in late 2024, when Seif sent out the list of events to predict in fields such as politics, business, science, economics, pop culture, and sports.
One question asked the contestants to forecast whether Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce would announce their engagement by April 1. Another: Would Bulgaria adopt the euro as its official currency on or before July 1?
Sam Leffell, a director at a hedge fund firm, was filling out his probabilities in December and had an idea.
“When I was answering the questions, I had the ChatGPT screen up. I wondered, what it will say to these questions?” he recalled in a recent interview.
ChatGPT had to learn complex rules
Leffell reached out to Seif to ask if ChatGPT could take part, and Seif said, go for it. So, Leffell got started by pasting the game’s rules into ChatGPT.
These are complex rules, covering multiple pages. Contestants must assign a percentage based on the likelihood of each event happening. As the results come in over the year, these predictions are scored a bit like golf. The lowest score wins.
“You get points equal to the square of the difference between what you put and the results,” Seif said.
For example, if you assign a 90% chance of something happening and you get it right, you get 10 points. That number is squared, resulting in a total of 100 points. Excellent work.
The opposite is more painful. If your 90% probability event doesn’t occur, you are stuck with the difference between 90 and zero. That 90 score is then squared for a total of 8,100 points. Ouch.
And this is only the scoring system. There are whole pages of rules on other aspects of the game. Leffell pasted all this into ChatGPT.
A few seconds later, the AI chatbot responded, “Thank you for providing the detailed rules of the forecasting contest. Please share the clean list of prompts for which you need a probability estimate, and I will provide a single number for each as per the contest’s guidelines.”
Leffell pasted in all 30 questions at once, and ChatGPT quickly replied with its percentage probabilities for each event. Leffell sent those to Seif, who entered the responses on ChatGPT’s behalf.
Even while setting this machine-prediction experiment up, Leffell noticed something intriguing.
“For one question, related to an NFL wild card outcome, it gave a mathematical response that was statistically correct,” he said. “It was doing math rather than qualitative stuff. That was notable because ChatGPT, at the time, was not supposed to be good at math.”
ChatGPT makes predictions
As 2025 began, 160 contestants had submitted their predictions and began waiting for the future to unfurl.
This is when I first heard about the game through friends of mine who were participating. One is a hedge fund manager. The other two are a chief marketing officer and a lawyer.
They became insufferable at parties, discussing their various forecasts, along with the intricacies of the scoring system and other rules.
It’s the type of conversation that bores me to death. However, when one friend mentioned that ChatGPT was taking part for the first time, I got hooked.
Could a machine outperform 160 humans in predicting all these events? AI models are great when there’s existing data. When the future’s involved, there’s a lot less information to lean on.
I’d recently tested ChatGPT’s stock market forecasting ability. Could it excel at this more complex challenge, or are humans uniquely adept at foreseeing the future through experience, extrapolation, and intuition?
As the year progressed, some events occurred, and others didn’t. Some happened too late, while others developed in weird, unexpected ways. As life does.
Each time a question was resolved, Seif updated a central spreadsheet and sent a ranking to all the contestants.
My friends seized on every update. Who was winning? Who was lagging? And most of all, where was ChatGPT ranked?
Strange symmetry
The game wrapped up on November 13.
“For the first time in the seven years we’ve run the contest, I pulled off the win myself,” Seif wrote in his final email update of the 2025 competition.
ChatGPT came 80th, he wrote, “and we had 160 players.”
Strange symmetry. I immediately texted my friends: This means ChatGPT is no better than the average human! Not very impressive.
One of my buddies, the CMO, replied: No, this means ChatGPT is as good as the average human. Incredible!
ChatGPT missed a benchmark
I asked Seif about this, and he had a different way of measuring ChatGPT’s predictive power, or lack thereof.
If you’d put a 50% probability for each event happening, you’d have gotten 75,000 points. That’s Seif’s benchmark for whether contestants added value or not.
ChatGPT got 82,925. So it missed that benchmark, essentially adding negative value, according to Seif.
When there was a lot of existing data to help with forecasting and calculating probabilities, ChatGPT did better, he said.
For instance, the chatbot analyzed this event well, giving it a 70% chance of happening: The winning team of the FIFA Club World Cup is from the European Union.
ChatGPT performed worse when there was a lack of data, or it missed new information that altered the likelihood of an event occurring.
For example, the chatbot assigned a 95% chance of this happening: Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore safely return to Earth by March 1.
By the end of 2024, news announcements made it clear that this rescue mission was highly unlikely to happen by March 1, 2025, Seif said.
“ChatGPT just wasn’t up with the news on that one,” he added.
Maybe ChatGPT won?
Leffell, the hedge fund manager who entered ChatGPT in the game, drew different conclusions and shared some important caveats.
He asked ChatGPT to make these predictions in December 2024. OpenAI’s chatbot has improved since then, so its forecasting ability may be better now. Better prompting may have also helped ChatGPT perform better.
Leffell also said that ChatGPT took only a few minutes to understand the complex rules of the game and make 30 predictions—a lot faster than most human contestants.
Leffell himself spent many hours, over several days, to understand the questions and research the events, coming up with his own probabilities.
“It did better than half the people, and it spent a lot less time than everyone else on the challenge,” he told me. “If you look at results per minute of work, maybe ChatGPT won?”
As an investor, he’s in the business of assessing as many probabilities as possible, so ChatGPT and similar AI tools have become essential, he said.
“What if you are not having to predict 30 events quickly, but 30,000 events instead? What if it’s good enough at making all these predictions quickly?” Leffell said.
“It’s become ubiquitous in everything I do, in my personal life and at work,” he added. “We’re using it a lot. ChatGPT is table stakes at this point.”
I find myself cackling on the phone as Steve Johnson, 72, wades through his basement in the Atlanta suburbs, describing “all the crap” his four adult children have left behind. There are vinyl records, Braves bobble-heads, Pink Floyd posters, a drum, guitar stands, books, mounds of CDs. “Is this a picture of Bob Marley? Oh my God. Bob Marley is in my basement still,” Johnson says, one of half a dozen exclamations invoking the Almighty’s name during our conversation. His daughter’s old exercise ball gets an audible, “Ugh.” The camping gear from his kids’ festival days gets another, “Oh my God.” A violin from a child’s ill-fated middle-school music career gives rise to an, “Ope.”
“Sorry as I walk through memory lane here,” he says.
Johnson, who recently retired, has asked his kids to figure out what to do with everything they’ve left behind in their family home, with limited success. “Best I can tell, they don’t care anymore, which is fine,” he says. Except getting rid of all the stuff can be surprisingly hard — Goodwill, other charities, and secondhand stores won’t take just anything. During a remodel, he used a half-full dumpster to offload some things, but he didn’t love doing it. “I feel bad about that, honestly, just trashing stuff,” he says, sounding exasperated as he spots an old flamingo in the basement that his wife probably wants.
Much has been made — including by yours truly — of the impending avalanche of baby boomers’ stuff. But in boomers’ defense, they are not the only ones who’ve accumulated useless things they can’t bring themselves to get rid of. Many younger generations — Gen X, millennials, and, soon enough, Gen Z — are using their parents’ homes as storage units. They haven’t failed to launch, they’ve just failed to load up their rocketships, leaving their parents drowning in yearbooks, prom dresses, and Little League trophies.
Many storage freeloaders have built lives and families of their own, and they don’t have the time or energy to whittle down their old comic-book collections or toss out the college notes piled up in their parents’ garages. Others still haven’t bought homes or are living in small spaces, hoping that someday they’ll have room for everything they left behind — even though “someday” is increasingly looking like once they’re AARP eligible. Their parents may feel time closing in, but they don’t feel that same urgency.
When something still lives at your dad’s house, it’s easy to pretend it’s not your problem — even though it very much is. That’s how adulthood works: the gradual but jarring realization that the responsibility is yours.
When people move out of their parents’ homes, it’s natural for them to leave things behind — (hopefully) nobody’s hauling their childhood toys to the college dorms or filling their first apartment’s closets with high school outfits. Even when people get a place of their own, it’s often in tighter quarters than the homes they grew up in. Leaving things with their parents seems not only convenient but also logical. Plus, many older parents like to keep their children’s stuff around. It helps mitigate empty-nest syndrome, allowing them to continue being the anchors of the family. Or, they just feel weird about throwing their kids’ things out.
The result: Mom and Dad don’t want to cut the strings, and the kids want the option of keeping their stuff without the responsibility.
“A lot of times, the parents just feel like it’s not their place to make a decision,” says Mindy Godding, the owner of Abundance Organizing in Virginia. Meanwhile, their children just kick the can down the road. “Instead of having to actually go through that stuff and make some decisions, the kid doesn’t want to deal with it.”
They haven’t failed to launch, they’ve just failed to load up their rocketships.
Alex Kovalenko, 44, knows he should move the junk that’s taking up a big chunk of space in his dad’s work warehouse about 30 minutes away for a decade. But Kovalenko and his wife, who live in the Toronto suburbs, have three kids and full-time jobs, and they feel like they’re just too busy to carve out the time to sort through it all. He doesn’t know what he’d do with everything anyway, and doubts he’d make much money selling it. “I don’t think it’s fair,” he says, especially since his dad’s paying for and needs the space, “but I don’t think we have any other option that’s feasible at this time.” His wife has suggested carving out a couple of weeks next summer to go through everything, but that would cut into vacation.
Kristina Markos, 41, is also in the not-dealing-with-it stage. Her in-laws still house stuff above their garage that she and her husband left behind when they moved from Chicago to Boston back in 2013. Her in-laws don’t have plans to downsize, and if they do, she figures she’ll fly out and rent a U-Haul. “Today, it’s not posing a problem for anybody,” she says. Markos hopes that her Gen Alpha kids will want some of the things she’s stowed away once they’re old enough to move out, including curtain rods, sheets, pillows, and tools, after all, her father-in-law just shipped out an old trumpet for her son. “That’s the sustainability piece and the money-saving piece where I think it works for everybody,” she says. Trumpet aside, I wonder what condition many of the possessions she’s described will be in by the time her kids head to college, or whether Gen Alpha, like their millennial parents, will spurn their elders’ hand-me-downs.
For some people, it’s not just logistics or laziness that get in the way. Grief and guilt can turn a small box of old stuff into an emotional minefield. Ripley Neff is acutely aware of the headache it can be to get rid of abandoned possessions. She was forced to sort through a lifetime of physical memories when her grandmother died in 2022 and again when her mother died in 2024. Perhaps that’s part of why she avoids dealing with the stuff she’s got stowed away in the room she grew up in at her living grandmother’s house, who she calls her “Grammy.” Neff, 31, and her husband have just bought a house in Memphis, but she has no immediate plans to take all those odds and ends with her, and her grandmother doesn’t seem pressed about it. Her husband encouraged her to get ahead of it, but she’s been thrust into a situation many people don’t encounter until they’re later in adulthood: being in charge. “There are times when I know he’s right, but then there are also times when I feel like it’s all being put as my responsibility, and I am the child and the grandchild,” she says. “I wish someone else would think about this, too.”
These types of dynamics are nearly universal. The more I asked around, the more stories bubbled up. One friend acknowledged that while it’s a little ridiculous to have saved all of her middle school and high school notes for 20-some years, it’s been a hoot going through them with her parents. A colleague mentioned his parents have declared that the stuff they’ve stored for him and his siblings be reduced to a two-box maximum over the holidays. One woman told me she was too afraid to have her stuff shipped from her parents’ home because in a previous attempt to send a few boxes, prized possessions had been lost. I am guilty on this front as well — last Christmas, my mom pulled out a box of old Barbies I didn’t remember existed. Instead of giving my blessing for them to be sold on eBay, I insisted I’d take care of it. I did not.
Sometimes, what we see is the parents have the sentimental attachment, and they’re projecting that on the kid.
This entire conversation is about more than boxes and Barbies. It’s about the emotional weight we put on physical objects, the obligations we have to our loved ones, and the fear of letting go. Throwing away college notes and textbooks means finally admitting you’re not going to grad school. Agreeing to give away the drums in your parents’ basement is the death knell of your rock-and-roll dreams. On the other side of the equation, older parents often put more weight on their kids’ stuff than their kids do — they remember more vividly that third-grade spelling bee victory or the first lost tooth. Parents feel a sense of responsibility as guardians of their children’s things and memories.
Godding recalls working with a client whose two children’s bedrooms were still in pristine ’90s condition. When the mom reached out to her kids, her son insisted that he be allowed to go through everything before she made any decisions, and her daughter said she didn’t care about anything and could toss it. “Her mom turns to me and is like, ‘I think she’s going to regret that decision, I should put that in a storage unit for her,'” Godding says. “Sometimes, what we see is the parents have the sentimental attachment, and they’re projecting that on the kid.”
The thing about this dynamic is that eventually decisions have to be made. No one lives forever, and even if they did, very few people would want their attics filled with their progeny’s My Little Ponies and Hot Wheels for all eternity. These leftover items become an unspoken negotiation between generations, and grievances that, at some point, have to be aired. Both sides tend to tread carefully, afraid to make the wrong call.
A couple of years ago, Nicholas Budler’s uncle set a deadline on the stuff he’d been stashing at his place since college. So Budler, now 29, put together a “keep” pile of things that could fit into his adult apartment in San Francisco: his degrees, a homerun baseball he’d caught as a kid, and one trinket from each of the important places he’d traveled to. He tossed clothes, decor, and useless chargers.
“That’s where it’s like, ‘Can I envision this in the future in my actual home now as an adult, or did I just want to keep this somewhere without having it to be in my space?'” he says. “If it’s moving from junk drawer to junk drawer, it’s probably not something that you really care about.”
Budler does regret giving away so many books, and he’s now replenishing his library.
For the Gen Xers in the room, I have some good news for you: You’re actually pretty good about this! Millennials are generally guiltier of treating their parents’ homes like giant lockers, Godding says. They don’t have the independence streak Gen X latchkey kids did.
I first got in touch with Johnson, the boomer dad in the basement, because he emailed me after a story I’d written about the impending baby boomer stuffpolcalypse, asking, “What’s a boomer to do???” with their kids’ stuff. So, I turned to the experts.
When I ask Tonya Kubo, who until recently worked for Clutter Free Academy, a platform dedicated to all things decluttering, she tells me older parents need to have a “hard conversation” with themselves to decide whether they’re keeping their children’s stuff because they want to or simply out of obligation. If the answer is the latter, the kids have to take responsibility for it now, because “the fact is they’re going to have to take responsibility for it when you die,” she says. She recalls working with a mother who was holding onto three of her son’s motorcycles in her garage while she and her husband paid for two storage units filled with their own things. Kubo had assumed the son was in his early 20s — he was 40, married, with kids. “It had never occurred to her” to ask him to get rid of them. Once she did, they were sold in two weeks.
For kids, it’s essential to confront the reality that if they’re comfortable not having something now, they probably don’t need it or value it as much as they think. “If I don’t have a place for it now, am I really going to make a place for it later? And when I do want to make a place for it, does it even fit into my life?” she says.
Godding encourages her downsizing clients to send their kids photos of items and ask whether they matter to them. “We’re always trying to peel apart the storytelling,” she says.
Every generation in this country has a consumption problem.
Another tip: Set a deadline or, at the very least, a goal. The kids don’t have to spend the entirety of the next visit combing through their stuff, but they can set aside some time to edit it down. And if you’re thinking about a storage unit, really think about it. Again, if you don’t want the things today, or even don’t have the space for them, how likely is it that you will ever change?
As for where to take things, Godding prefers Buy Nothing groups and local charitable organizations. While some people may have their gripes with Goodwill, it’s often a convenient option. Still, the truth is that it’s hard to offload a lot of things if they go out of style or are difficult to handle, from furniture to figurines. And the American consumer machine churns on buying, not reusing.
“Every generation in this country has a consumption problem,” she says. “We are hardwired to buy new.”
Inevitably, what this may wind up looking like is Gen Xers, millennials, Zoomers, and beyond sitting with all their accumulated stuff in their own homes eventually, perhaps on top of the stuff they received from their parents. That’s what’s happened to Jon Spike, 37, from Wisconsin. A month after he and his wife bought a house, his mom showed up with boxes of the stuff she’d kept from his childhood. Now, they’re sitting in his basement. The stuff cycle begins anew.
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
