Jensen Huang on Bringing Other Companies Along

"When you look at the computers we make, they are thousands of acres large .... These industries manufacture numbers that when reformulated becomes intelligence. Intelligence manufacturing factories! This new industry manufactures the most valuable thing ever known: intelligence."
"If you have an imagination about the future, it is possible to bring other people along. ... The way we see the world is inclusive and brings other people along."
- Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, the world's most valuable company at $4.6 trillion (Microsoft at $3.9T and Apple at $3.8T are #2 and #3)

Is the Internet Shrinking Your Brain?

I wonder what evolutionary changes will be caused by our growing connection to the internets.
In Kensy Cooperrider's podcast episode “Why did our brains shrink 3000 years ago?” — Many Minds, Feb 2, 2022 - he spoke with guest Jeremy DeSilva from Dartmouth. The episode discusses the late, post-growth shrinkage of ~“a lemon’s” worth of brain volume, and explores possible explanations. (Hold a lemon beside your skull. That's a lot of volume.)

A brain is both incredibly useful and very expensive. Brain cells use more calories than other cells. And the larger the brain, the higher the risk that birth will kill the mother or child. So if it were possible to get by with smaller brains, evolutionary pressures would choose that direction.

DeSilva says there are various theories about why the brain shrunk just 3,000 years ago. One is that society had evolved to the point that one could outsource collective cognition. For me an even more interesting possibility - and in a way related - is that this brain shrinkage coincided with the emergence of reading and writing. One didn't have to hold as much in her head if she could hold it instead in her library.

How will our growing ease of connecting with so much data, so many people, and so many virtual experiences online change our brains? Could it shrink them even further?

Here's the episode:https://disi.org/why-did-our-brains-shrink-3000-years-ago/

Reality TV and Surreal Policies

"So that orange man who played such a powerful executive on TV? What was his catch-phrase?""'You're fired!'"
"Yes! Him. How is job growth under his leadership?"
"The economy has lost jobs in two of the last three months. He may not be creating jobs but he is creating drama."
"Well who could have seen that coming?"
"Umm .... if you watched his show, you literally saw that. Every single week the number of working people went down and the drama increased. Now he's just doing that on a larger stage."
"Wouldn't you have thought that he would have changed the script to something like, 'You're hired!'?"
"Well, he thought about it but decided that would be too boring - bad for ratings. So he's shut down the government but he is building a ballroom."
"Well that seems like a weird priority. What does he need that for?"
"When asked, he just danced around the question."
"Presumably once the ballroom is built ..."
"We will just see more of that. Yes."

Power Over and Power To - The Distinction Between Great and Awful Institutions

I watched a sharp Johnny Harris piece on the LDS Church, and one almost throwaway moment stuck with me: losing temple privileges for a few weeks after “going too far” with his fiancée—embarrassing not because people knew why, but because they could see he’d lost access.

As I get older, I get more sensitive to how institutions at their best give us power to ... amazon lets you quickly get about any product to your door within a day or two (even better, download an entire book within seconds) ... a great university provides you with testable theories about how the world works and how to create a life within it. A great religion simultaneously humbles you by reminding you of how inconsequential you are among 8 billion now and generations before and after while also giving you hope that your life matters.

But institutions can also exercise power over us. Sometimes they use us. The laborers building the Egyptian pyramids. The hopeful housewives trying to build a business through a pyramid scheme. The church member feeling guilty about desire.

Which brings me back to confessions. Expecting young men to confess lust to old men makes about as much sense as old men confessing joint pain to young men - that’s just what bodies do at those stages of life. But of course that arrangement also clearly gives old men more power over young men.

The trick of progress, it seems to me, is to reverse ancient injustices in which individuals were tools of institutions and instead do all that we can to make those institutions tools of individuals.

Interplanetary System - A New Information-scape

Soon I'll be launching something even bigger than www - the worldwide web.

Stay tuned for the ips. - interplanetary system - the information-scape too big for a single planet.

Patch notes: added moons, rings, and meteors.

Falling Off a Cliff with a Blindfold - Job Loss Blackout During Trump's Government Shutdown

The economy is losing jobs but we don't know how many.

Each month the BLS reports the number of jobs lost or gained. ADP is the private sector equivalent - a less accurate number that comes from a smaller sample size generated by a private company. Wednesday they reported that the private sector lost jobs in September.

With the government shutdown, two things have happened. Millions of federal workers are furloughed, have effectively lost their jobs. And the federal government will not be reporting job numbers until the shutdown ends.

The bad news is that Trump and the Republican's policies are already costing us jobs. The worse news is that we are flying blind and that we don't even know how many jobs, how much damage Trump's chaotic policies are doing.

In Trump's final month in office, 3,000 Americans a day were dying from COVID - a 9-11 every day. He ignored this and was focused on overturning the election that he lost.

Now he has regained office and in his first months increased his personal net worth by $3 billion. In every single month of Biden's presidency, the economy created jobs. Within months of taking office, Trump's economy was losing jobs. And now, as it continues to lose jobs while he gains billions, he shuts down the government so that no one can see the official tally of jobs he's losing.

Or as the MAGA boys call it: winning.

Jane Goodall on Making a Difference

“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
- Jane Goodall

Donald Trump as the Last Resort

Did you know that Donald Trump is the only president in history to have never won a general election against another man? 

Donald. The last resort of American misogynists.

Bill Gates The Trillionaire

MSFT closed today at a market cap of $3.84 trillion.

At Microsoft’s IPO (1986), Bill Gates ’ stake is commonly reported in the ~45–49% range (the peak of his post-IPO ownership; it only fell afterward).

If he had maintained that same percentage, his hypothetical net worth today would be somewhere between $1.73 to $1.88 trillion.

Even as late as 1999, Gates held more than 15% of Microsoft; if he still had that share today, it would be ~$587 billion.

Why did he end up with a lower percentage? Divorce settlement. Gifts to the Gates Foundation and other charities. Share dilution from new issuance for things like employee options. And sale of stock for diversification into other assets.

His reported net worth today is $106 billion. Had he kept his peak post-IPO stake, his net worth would put him comfortably into 13-digit territory.

Trump Deploying Troops Into American Cities As Further Evidence He Doesn't Understand Specialization

“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

- Trump to his top military leaders today.

Put aside the absurdity of a man elected by red states sending military troops into the cities of blue states as one of his first acts of office. That's dictatorship 101 right there and unprecedented.

This also gets to the heart of MAGA confusion about the world. The chief reason that global trade has allowed for such unprecedented prosperity is that it has allowed for unprecedented levels of specialization. I worked with product development teams for decades and many were making incredibly complex products, like nanotechnology, computer chips, medical devices and drugs. In the nearly 30 years I did that I saw a fascinating thing play out: the portion of a project plan that was to be worked by an outside company rather than an inside department rose from roughly 10 to 20% to closer to 33 to 50%. Specialization hit a level that fewer and fewer companies could sustain affordable expertise in most of their processes and skills. The specialization that Adam Smith wrote about in 1776 - "one man draws out the wire, another sharpens it ..." was interpersonal. People along the same factory line each specializing on one step in production. The specialization today is literally different companies making different parts and doing different steps. Adam Smith's specialization played out on one factory line; today's specialization plays out across the globe with hundreds of companies coordinating to make a single product.

Why mention specialization in reference to sending troops into cities? Only people as clueless as Trump and his head of DoD, former Fox commentator Pete Hegseth would think that how you would deploy guys with guns for war has anything to do with how you would deploy guys with guns for policing. Police and military are specialists. They have very different objectives. Very different goals and constraints. And the tactics that might make you a great police officer could get you killed in war; the tactics that might make you a great soldier might get civilians killed in policing.

Then of course, I could be completely wrong. Trump may indeed be aiming for something akin to military occupation in the blue cities that tend to vote 4 to 1 against him. And if so, further evidence that the man cares little about the safety of American people or the economy and his presidency has everything to do with how he feels.

In either case, this is not normal governance for a democracy. This is the kind of thing his buddies Xi, Putin, MBS, and Kim do.

Trump's Nobel Peace Prize

Next month the Nobel Prizes will be announced. Trump has already warned the committee that if he doesn't get a Peace prize he will send troops to occupy their buildings.

The Colonization of Mars and America and Travel Times

For my fellow nerds.

Atlantic, 1776: British colonies were ~5,000–6,000 km from Britain. Crossings typically took 6 to 8 weeks (fast packets ~4 weeks; bad weather 10 to 12).

Earth to Mars (near-term tech): Distance varies from ~55 million km (close opposition) to ~400 million km (solar conjunction).

Launch windows open about every 26 months. Transit is about 6 to 9 months. Miss a window and the door-to-door delay (wait + flight) can be about 32 to 35 months; catch it and it’s only 6 to 9 months.

And that time gap assumes the Mars spacecraft is cruising about 20,000× faster than an 18th-century sailing ship when you compare end-to-end distance covered per day.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

From Will Storr’s Selfie - Pruning Down the Brain's Possible Paths

Excerpt from Will Storr's Selfie ...

The self’s ingestion of culture can be tracked, in a startling form, in the brain of a growing baby. Despite the fact we’re born with almost as many neurons as we’ll ever need, the weight of a child’s brain increases by more than 30 percent during its first fifteen months. If this rapid gain isn’t due to the generation of brain cells, then what is it? Most of it is the weight of new connections, or synapses, that are forming between these cells. By the age of two, a human will have generated over a hundred trillion synapses, double that of an adult. So great is this extra brain functionality that youngsters even develop cognitive powers the rest of us lack. Six-month-olds can recognize the faces of individuals from other races with an ease that would have the rest of us worrying quietly whether we are racist. They can even readily identify monkey faces. Babies can hear tones in foreign languages that their parents are deaf to. They’re also thought to experience synaesthesia, the eerie blending of the senses that enables people to taste colors, and so on.

But then begins the cull. These connections start dying off at a rate of up to 100,000 per second. It’s believed that this is one of the ways the brain shapes itself to its environment. Huge connectivity means it’s prepared to deal with a wide range of potential possibilities. Then, when connections between neurons are not activated, they’re killed. They call this “neural pruning,” and it works a little like a sculptor carving a face out of a block of marble: it’s what’s taken away, as much as what is added, that makes us who we are.

When we’re born, then, our brain is ready for the world – or at least a world. It rushes out to greet it, gets to know it, then prunes itself down, specializing itself for the particular cultures in which it finds itself. …

In a major study, researchers in Queensland collated the results of 2,748 papers and concluded the average variation across all human traits and diseases is caused by 49 percent genetic factors and 51 percent environmental factors. ….

“…. We’ve come to realize that it’s much more complex than just being a dollop of genetics and a squirt of environment.” The relationship is symbiotic. Nature and nurture are not in competition, but in conspiracy.

from pp. 55-6 of Will Storr’s Selfie: How we became so self-obsessed and what it’s doing to us

A Trumped Up Charge

"A trumped-up charge is a deliberately false or fraudulent accusation made with the intention of punishing someone unfairly or making them appear guilty. The term implies that the charge has been fabricated, invented, or concocted to deceive and incriminate someone, rather than being a legitimate legal accusation."

It seems fitting that in 20 years when kids as yet unborn are learning vocabulary they will encounter this word and "know" that its origin traces back to President Trump who lied about everything and made wild accusations against anyone who irritated or offended him.

It is as if the gods of vocabulary were trying to warn us.

Jill Lepore, Changing the Constitution, and the Issues You'll Soon Be Engaged In

I love Jill Lepore. Here she talks about her new book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution and it is a conversation that at least a few of you will find fascinating. All of you will eventually (and probably soon) live its fascinating relevance.

We are at a point in history similar to the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the New Deal when we need to update the code upon which our country runs. The process is going to be agonizing, stressful, alarming, exciting, and wildly uncertain.

Lepore touches on the history of changing (and trying to change) the constitution in these United States and - as she is prone to do - shares a series of profound insights in the process.

A couple of notes related to her book.

The U.S. Constitution has only 27 amendments in ~235 years.

States use lower bars. Most amendments are passed by a state legislature and then a simple popular vote; about 18 states also allow citizen-initiated constitutional amendments. Many states have held full constitutional conventions or replaced their constitutions outright.

Result: state charters change a lot. Collectively, they’ve been amended thousands of times; several states have hundreds of amendments (e.g., California, Texas, Alabama), and some - like Georgia and Louisiana - have adopted multiple entirely new constitutions over time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gSgkt0E4dk

 

Outlawing Comedy (And what that tells us about the last time America was great)

All of these late-night comedians getting cancelled makes me wonder if at least a portion of the MAGA crowd will decide they don't want to live in a country where comedy is outlawed.

At least those of us who were wondering when the MAGA crowd thought America was last great have our answer: back when the Puritans thought laughter was folly.

MAHA - make Americans humorless again!

Adams - No Reason to Believe That Our Founding Generation Was Better Than You Are

John Adams’s letter to Josiah Quincy III, February 9, 1811. Adams pushes back against “reverence” for the founding generation:

“I ought not to object to your Reverence for your Fathers … but to tell you a very great secret, as far as I am capable of comparing the Merit of the different Periods, I have no reason to believe that We were better than you are. We had as many poor Creatures and selfish Beings, in proportion among us as you have among you: nor were there then more enlightened Men, or in greater Number in proportion than there are now.”
Context: Quincy had praised the [founding] “Fathers.” Adams - then in his mid-70s - downplayed any moral superiority of 1776-era leaders.

This seems to me enormously important. Every period has people who can navigate us into new territory and to pretend that we don't have such people today is really the equivalent to simply shirking responsibility.

Jim Moore's Poem Those Others

 Those Others, by Jim Moore

We lived at the end of an empire.

Sometimes we gathered in huge auditoriums
and tried to understand.
Our shame did not save us,
nor our sadness redeem us,
as we came to understand
how others, far into the future,
would look back at us,
shaking their heads: we hoped
in sorrow; more likely, anger.

The Development of Time Travel That Doesn't Disrupt the Development of Time Travel

Time travel’s problem isn’t engineering; it’s non-disruption. We’ve allegedly cracked it three times, but each visit into the past edited away the very path of causality that led to the development of the time machine, resetting its development back to zero.

At least that’s what he told the investors at Time Is Not a Machine, Inc. as a way to account for the few hundred billion he claimed had been spent developing prototypes and not - as his critics suggested - merely spent on having a good time.

Colbert, Kimmel, Trump and the Role of the Jester

Stephen Colbert has been cancelled.
Jimmy Kimmel has been pulled off the air because of something he supposedly said about Charlie Kirk.

Here's the deal, though. Kimmel didn't make a comment about Kirk: he made a comment about MAGA. Specifically, he said,
"The Maga Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it." His comment was directed at the living, not the dead.

Kings kept jesters for a reason: one person with a license to puncture bad ideas. The jokes were cover; the job was dissent.

King: “My people hate inflation. First, I’ll slap tariffs on foreign goods—”
Jester: “—which will raise prices.”

And the king doesn’t take his head, because that’s why the jester exists.

Trump? He doesn’t just want to be king. He wants no jesters. Anywhere in the land.

P.S. do you know who did not get cancelled? The Fox news host Brian Kilmeade who literally recommended involuntarily euthanizing homeless people. (I think the old-fashioned way one might say that is kill, as in, "We wouldn't have a homeless problem if we just killed anyone who was homeless.")
Trump's US in 2025. You get cancelled for making jokes about the president's policies but not for suggesting mass killings of our poorest people. You MAGA folks might want to do a little soul searching. If, you know, you haven't already sold it.

A Decoder Ring for MAGA Regarding School Shootings

It's not always easy to understand how someone else feels but here's something that might help those of you who lean off to the MAGA side of things. You know how upset you are now about Charlie Kirk's murder? How you feel like something should be done because this never should have happened and something like this shouldn't happen again? Even though you didn't personally know Charlie Kirk and he didn't know you?
That's how the rest of us feel very stinking time there is another gun death, another school shooting.
We're upset.
We think something should be done about it.
And we think we could / should / must do more.
To quote you, All lives matter. Not just the ones with lots of social media followers.

Last Words

They couldn't tell if his last words were

"Carpe diem," or
"Carpet demons."

 
And the question of which haunted them.

Curious Exaggerations in the Socio-Economic World

Wealth is curious.

To be in the top 1% for height, you need to be only 6'4". Median is 5'9".
To be in the top 1% for wealth, you need to have $11.2 million. Median is $193k.

The ratio of top 1% to median in
Height is 1.1 to 1
Wealth is 58 to 1

The social world seems to create larger disparities than the physical world.

Gordon S. Woods On American Chaos in the Generation After the Revolution

We have a tendency to romanticize the past, to gloss over its ridiculous problems. The historian Gordon Woods tells about life in the US in the generation or so after the American Revolution. (This is paraphrased from a talk of his.)

---

In the generation after the American Revolution, there was as much cause for despair as for celebration. Violence of all sorts surged. Rates of homicide rose above those in England. Even family murders - men killing their wives and children - spiked to levels unmatched in the nineteenth century. Urban rioting grew more common and destructive, leaving lives and property in ruins.

Drinking soared to an all-time high. Americans consumed about five gallons of pure alcohol per person each year - the highest rate ever recorded anywhere, before or since. Courts held dram breaks instead of coffee breaks, with judges and juries passing bottles around. Universities saw record riots and student defiance. It was a society both intoxicated and unsettled, leaving many to wonder what exactly they had unleashed.

Religion, too, was in ferment. The Anglican and Puritan dominance of the 1760s gave way to Methodists and Baptists, their horseback ministers carrying revival across the frontier. At Cane Ridge, Kentucky in 1801, tens of thousands gathered for what was hailed as “the greatest outpouring of the Holy Spirit since the beginning of Christianity.” The scenes were wild - people rolling on the ground, laughing, moaning, crying. Critics joked that more souls were conceived than converted. Yet from these upheavals sprang new sects: Shakers, Universalists, evangelical movements that bloomed and vanished, and a decade later, the Mormons. Some were founded by women, many flared out quickly, but all testified to the volatility of belief.

By 1815, as the revolutionary generation passed from the scene, the founders looked on a nation they barely recognized. Instead of harmony, they saw disorder; instead of sober republican virtue, a society drinking, rioting, and praying itself into a bewildering array of directions. 

---

Far from settling into tranquility, the young republic revealed a pattern that would persist: there has never been a moment in American history when Americans turned to one another and said, *“At last, we have no troubles. Now we can live in peace and prosperity.”

Even Immortal Gods Die Once their Institutions Erode

The Greek and Roman gods animated the lives of Athens and Rome - visible in temples and statues, invoked in conversations, explanations, and hopes. As those institutions crumbled, so did the gods. The same fate befell Egyptian deities once sustained by pyramids and priesthoods, Norse gods once sustained by sagas and rituals, and countless others now remembered only as myths.Even immortal gods died without their institutions. Temples and priesthoods gave the gods life; when those institutions collapsed, the gods became myths.

It is not just the gods who are created, sustained, or forgotten by institutions. That is also the fate of us mortals.

Institutions separate us from the other animals. You’re no match for a gorilla, bear or tiger when you’re naked and alone. You can’t outrun a lion. You’re not stronger than an orangutan. You might – barehanded – catch a rabbit but the energy you’d consume finding it, catching it, preparing it and cooking it might be more than the calories it would give you, take more energy than it would return.

Most of us would quickly perish if left to survive in a world without institutional structures, norms and supply chains.

The degree to which we thrive or flounder is a function of our institutions. Yet weirdly, most of us most of the time treat our institutions with even less creative imagination than the ancient Greeks or Egyptians treated theirs. We take them as inherited or rail at them as if we were cursing the gods. We don’t have a tradition for calmly, rationally, collectively engaging in the task of defining and redefining the institutions that define us. Because who we are and who we will become is not something we will do on our own, naked and afraid; it is something we will only do through the institutions we create and change.

The Secret to Japan's 100,000 100 Year Olds

Japan has set a new record of nearly 100,000 people who are 100 years old.

The secret to their success seems to include

• diet (less sugar, salt and calories than those of us in the West),
• exercise (among other things, a national radio program guiding the elderly through 3-minutes of daily exercise has a wide audience), and
• fraud (family not reporting on the death of a deceased relative in order to continue collecting pension money).

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd07nljlyv0o

Stochastic Terrorism and Social Media

One of the darker inventions of our gatekeeper-free media landscape is something now called stochastic terrorism. The phrase captures a dynamic in which individuals or groups use mass communication to vilify, dehumanize, or target opponents in ways that raise the probability of violence without ever directly calling for it. No explicit order is given; instead, the message circulates widely enough that the odds rise that someone, somewhere, will act on it. The speaker retains deniability, while the damage is all too real. The causality is not deterministic; the communication just raises the probability of violence. It's more like taking a life by drunk driving than shooting someone.

This tactic is not entirely new - fiery rhetoric has always carried the risk of inciting unstable listeners. What is new is the scale, speed, and algorithmic amplification of today’s social media. Where once editors, producers, or publishers acted as gatekeepers and might mitigate such messages, today’s platforms reward whatever drives engagement. Outrage, paranoia, and conspiracy spread with greater virality than moderation or nuance, and that makes stochastic terrorism a kind of emergent property of the digital environment.

In this sense, it is one of the most dangerous side effects of a communications system designed without responsibility or oversight. What looks like “just words” from one angle becomes, at scale, a statistical machine for nudging the probability of violence upward. And unlike older forms of incitement, it requires no coordination, no command, and no conspiracy - only a steady stream of inflammatory content.

Stochastic terrorism is a reminder that the rules of the information economy do not merely shape attention or markets; they change communities, levels of safety, the dynamics of democracy, and trust. Without gatekeepers, we gain openness and access. But we also inherit a new vulnerability: the ability of anyone, anywhere, to pull the rhetorical lever that increases the odds of someone else’s destruction.

Addendum ...
This seems to suggest that we might want to develop a counter-spell in the form of stochastic benevolence? Viral kindness? Random acts of kindness? It seems to call for the development and deployment of some kind of vaccine.

American Identity - and Acceptable Marriages - Now More Defined by Politics Than Religion

In the 1960s, acceptance of interfaith marriage (e.g., Catholic-Protestant, Christian-Jewish) was often in the teens or twenties. Today, more than a quarter of Americans are in interfaith marriages, and most parents say they would not be upset if their child married someone of another faith.
By contrast, partisan identity has hardened. In the mid-20th century, few cared much about marriages across party lines, but now about 35–40% of partisans say they would be upset if their child married someone from the opposite party. This suggests that identity today is more defined by politics than by religion - a reversal from roughly a half century ago.

I wonder to what extent that has to do with plurality. In American politics, if you want your vote to count, you have only two choices. In religion, you have dozens, not even including choices like atheist, agnostic or spiritual but not religious . In such a world, marrying across religious lines becomes increasingly probable given anyone you meet outside of church is probably of another faith. By contrast, meeting someone outside of a political rally still means you've got roughly a 33% chance of a political match: Dem, GOP, or no affiliation.

As institutions shape the categories available to us, they also shape our tolerance for crossing boundaries. Where institutions create many identities (as in religion), crossing them becomes ordinary. Where institutions collapse choices into two rival camps (as in American politics), crossing them becomes taboo.

It might also explain why politics is becoming more divisive. Politics is not - if it ever was - a matter of debating policy so much as a matter of identity. Stats from modern America suggest to me that you'd have an easier time persuading someone to change their faith than to change their politics.

Oracle, Ellison, $100 Billion and 40 Minutes

 Yesterday, Larry Ellison's net worth rose more than $100 billion within the first 40 minutes of the market opening as Oracle stock surged.

Maybe now Oracle will finally promote the poor guy from CTO to CEO.

NBC Poll on Fascinating Divide Between Gen Z Men and Women

Utterly fascinating divide among gen z men who voted for Trump and gen z women who voted for Harris in an NBC poll.

On a list of 12 important measures of success,

• gen z men who voted for Trump rated "having children" #1 - the top measure of the 12,
• gen z women who voted for Harris rated "having children" as #12 - the bottom measure of the 12.

Also, emotional stability was #12 in ranked values for the men and #3 for the women.

More data here:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-gen-zs-gender-divide-reaches-politics-views-marriage-children-suc-rcna229255

Two Ways to Learn From History: Study It or Repeat It

I love history because it plays out so quickly, dynamics that define a generation or a century in a form that can be read in hours. Reality takes so long to turn the page to the next plot twist or consequence. History accelerates consequences but reality always plays out in real time.

You can learn from history one of two ways. The first is to study it and change what you're thinking and doing in order to avoid its mistakes. The second is to ignore history and simply repeat its mistakes. In either case you learn but ...

Initial Jobless Claims at 4 Year High (wondering how long it'll take for people to see a pattern)

Last week initial jobless claims rose to 263,000.

This is the highest they have been since October of 2021, nearly four years ago.
I'm an old guy wondering how many times we have to go through the cycle of Republicans breaking the economy and then Democrats repairing it before it dawns on the 5% of the Americans who swing every election that there is a pattern here.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ICSA

Charlie Kirk Shooting a Reminder of How Warped is the NRA's Interpretation of the 2nd Amendment

The killing of Charlie Kirk is first and foremost a tragedy - another life lost to gun violence, another family left grieving. Kirk, weirdly, argued that gun deaths were a necessary price to pay for the right to bear arms but the NRA's vision of gun rights has little to do with the constitution and is definitely at odds with safety.

The Second Amendment was written to provide for a citizen militia in a young republic wary of standing armies. It was never a blank check for individuals to amass arsenals. Chief Justice Warren Burger once called the NRA’s reinterpretation of it “one of the greatest pieces of fraud on the American public.”

And the practical case is just as weak as the historical one. Private gun ownership does not make us safer; our rates of gun death are proof enough. Nor does it check government power. In an age when the state commands drones, armored vehicles, and cyberweapons, the idea that a handful of armed citizens could deter tyranny is pure fantasy.  (We have yet to see NRA members come out to protect the American cities into which Trump has sent armies.) Guns in private hands don’t restrain government firepower - they mainly multiply tragedy at home.

The right to bear arms, as originally written, was about citizens taking turns in a militia to avoid the costs and risks of a permanent army. Today, the unregulated right to own arms undermines the very rights the 2nd amendment meant to regulate and subordinate to the aims of the broader community and not to the weird fantasies and hatred of lone shooters.

$100 Billion Dollars a Day Seems Like a Lot

TODAY Larry Ellison's net worth rose more than $100 billion.

He's now worth nearly $400 billion, which makes him the second richest man in the world.
In the last month, the wealth of the 10 richest Americans rose more than $250 billion, their combined wealth now worth more than $2.3 trillion.

California is 175 Today!

It’s California’s 175th birthday today!

No state has drawn more Americans to make it home. California has given us shared dreams and stories through Hollywood, a place where people reinvented themselves — Marion Morrison becoming John Wayne, Norma Jeane Mortenson becoming Marilyn Monroe. It’s where we’ve created shared knowledge, wealth (and yes, more than a few shared hallucinations) through Silicon Valley.

It’s home to Yosemite and the Redwoods, Olympic ski slopes and world-class surf breaks, deserts and rainforests. It was the first state to offer free education from kindergarten through graduate school. It’s been the birthplace of flower power and computing power. It holds some of America’s most conservative communities and some of its most liberal. Above all, it’s long been the place where people came to try on new lives that felt impossible back home.

Or, as we call it: home.

Happy birthday, California!

The Astonishing Century of New Things

Incomes don’t just grow by percentages; they compound across generations. In the 20th century, wages in the United States grew nearly eightfold. But the real miracle wasn’t just bigger paychecks. It was what those paychecks allowed people to buy, do, and experience -  things that their grandparents couldn’t even imagine.

Consider just a few of the products that were unavailable in 1900 but commonplace by 2000:

Transport & Communication

• Affordable automobiles
• Airplane tickets - to anywhere in the world in a single day
• Helicopters, rockets, even space travel
• Global Positioning System (GPS)
• Video conferencing with anyone, anywhere

Consumer Goods & Daily Life

• Plastic
• Refrigerators, microwaves, air conditioners
• Credit cards
• Teabags, bubble gum, nylon stockings
• Safety razors, bras, Velcro

Entertainment & Media

• Radio, movies, television
• Photocopiers, videotapes, video games
• Personal computers, email, websites, smartphones

Medicine & Biology

• Penicillin and antibiotics
• Insulin
• Polio and Hepatitis-B vaccines
• The birth control pill
• Pacemakers, Prozac, Valium, Viagra

And since 2000, the list has only accelerated: CRISPR gene editing, AI assistants, mRNA vaccines, reusable rockets, 3D printing, solar and wind at scale, drone delivery, streaming media.

This is what progress feels like to the ordinary person. It’s not an abstract rise in GDP. It’s the astonishment of standing in a grocery aisle with choices your great-grandparents couldn’t have named, let alone afforded.

Mike the Chimp & Trump's Rise to Power in the Information Economy

Here’s Jane Goodall’s vivid account from My Life with the Chimpanzees, describing Mike’s breakthrough display with kerosene cans:

“Mike’s rise to the number one or top-ranking position in the chimpanzee community was both interesting and spectacular. … At one time he even had appeared almost bald from losing so many handfuls of hair during aggressive incidents with his fellow apes. One day at camp, all at once Mike calmly walked over to our tent and took hold of an empty kerosene can by the handle. Then he picked up a second can and, walking upright, returned to the place where he had been sitting. Armed with his two cans Mike stared toward the other males… Gradually, he rocked more vigorously, his hair slowly began to stand erect, and then, softly at first, he started a series of pant-hoots… The cans… made the most appalling racket: no wonder the erstwhile peaceful males rushed out of the way… Mike’s use of the cans that made an unfamiliar and very loud, intimidating sound in his display was nothing short of brilliant.”

Mike became the alpha male by making more noise – and more threatening noise - than the other chimps.

Trump biographer Michael Wolff repeatedly and insightfully points to the fact that no one in this advanced stage information economy is more effective at getting and holding attention than Trump. And – Wolff argues – that really is the sum of his political theory: get and hold attention. What Trump has intuited is that attention is zero-sum and if he can grab attention, others don’t. The amount of information available has increased exponentially over the last half century but our attention has not, no matter how thinly we spread it.

Trump, like Mike the chimp, knows how to make the noises that most unsettle us, most get and keep our attention. And in an information economy, seizing attention is like seizing land in an agricultural economy: it gives you wealth, power and status.

Meme Pools as Identity Kits

Waiting for the day someone markets a memetic testing kit. Forget DNA - this one would map your meme pool, the cultural quirks that shaped your philosophy, politics, and humor. The family tree could be delightfully preposterous: “Turns out we’re related - through Monty Python, Keynes, and Van Morrison. And apparently I’m cousins with a TikTok I’ve never even seen.”

The Tragedy of Retreating from the Global Economy

It is worth pausing to consider the price humanity paid to build the global economy - a world where it is easier for two strangers to trade goods or ideas than to trade gunfire. The 20th century was not just markets unfolding on their own; as Keynes would remind us, it was Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, and institutions carefully constructed to channel the energies of nations into commerce rather than conquest. It took two world wars and a Great Depression to transform humanity from empires and colonies into independent states with citizens who could exercise not only political rights but the economic right to buy and sell across borders.

No previous generations have had the globe as their canvas. We do.

The results were staggering. Global life expectancy more than doubled, rising from about 32 years in 1900 to over 73 today. Incomes grew eightfold. In the U.S., average life expectancy rose from 47 to nearly 80, while per capita income leapt more than tenfold. Never before had so many lived so long, so well. But, as Durkheim might caution, the very integration that reduced wars between nations also frayed bonds within them. A global market can deliver growth and alienation in the same breath, individuals within the same country feeling as though they have less to connect them with fellow citizens.

Still, the alternative is far worse. Poverty is the certainty of a village too small to specialize, where resources are fixed and choices narrow. Prosperity is the possibility of a world where your village spans continents. Montesquieu would remind us that interdependence also breeds fragility — shocks travel faster when we are connected — but fragility in abundance is better than security in scarcity. The decision to avoid relationships does buffer you from heartbreak but it also “protects” you from love.

Today, in response to Trump’s tariffs, more nations are exploring self-sufficiency. Jefferson prized that idea because it guarded liberty from foreign whims. But in a modern world, self-sufficiency is a booby prize. It ensures independence at the cost of affluence, protecting us from the world while also cutting us off from its possibilities. Jefferson’s farmers were self-sufficient but they were also really, really poor.

And there is something else at stake. Csikszentmihalyi would remind us that fortune is not just measured in dollars but in flow — in meaningful work, engagement, and creativity. A global economy multiplies not only customers but also careers, paths of purpose that exist only when the market is large enough to support them. To shrink that space is not only to shrink wealth but to shrink meaning.

Nations clutching at tariffs and trade barriers resemble old men reaching again for the teddy bear they clung to in their infancy. The great comedy of our time is that after sacrificing millions of lives to build a world of exchange, we may throw it away for the illusion of safety. If we do, the future will not only be poorer; it will be duller, smaller, and more predictable. And that, in the end, is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all.

University Focus Shifting From Students to Sports?

College sports has become a massive business, and for the first time student-athletes are sharing directly in the revenues they generate. The sums are staggering.

This year, Texas Tech will spend about $114 million on its student-athletes - nearly as much as the $139 million it spends on faculty salaries. But the distribution tells the real story: that money goes to just 573 athletes, while more than 2,100 faculty share the academic payroll. On average, each faculty member earns about $66,000, while each athlete receives the equivalent of nearly $199,000.

At least in budgetary terms, Texas Tech now looks less like a university with a sports program and more like a sports complex with a teaching program.

Trump's Tariffs Terrible for Job Creation

On April 2, 2025, President Trump unveiled sweeping "reciprocal tariffs" during a televised event he dubbed “Liberation Day.” The announcement included a baseline 10% tariff on nearly all imports, plus country-specific tariffs ranging from 11% to 50%, based on trade imbalances

April was also the last strong month for job creation, a month in which the economy created 158,000 jobs.

Since then, the economy has created an average of 27,000 jobs per month, well below the average of 168,000 jobs per month the economy created last year. How stark is the difference? Last year the economy was creating more jobs per day than it has created each week since Trump's big tariff announcement.

And of course manufacturing - supposedly the catalyst for tariffs - has suffered this year. This from bls.gov:
"Manufacturing employment changed little in August (-12,000) but is down by 78,000 over the year."

Where on - or beyond - the Spectrum from FDR to Reagan Do We Want Our Grandkids to Live?

 

This chart is one more sign of the world Reagan helped shape. Boomers began their careers in an America still defined by FDR’s systems: higher taxes on the wealthy, stronger labor protections, greater public investment, and thicker safety nets. The extremes of the market were softened, so the average Boomer built more wealth relative to the richest Boomer.

Millennials, by contrast, entered adulthood after Reagan’s market individualism had become the norm: lower taxes, weaker unions, thinner safety nets, and less public investment. For example, when Reagan became governor of California, tuition at the state’s world-class universities was still free; today, one of the few guarantees of a college education is student debt. The result was a more polarized America. The richest Millennials at age 35 are wealthier than the richest Boomers at the same age, but the average Millennial is 30% poorer than the average Boomer. Reagan’s world gave individuals more exposure to the raw consequences of markets — more opportunity for the fortunate, more hardship for the unlucky.

And note the etymology: fortune and fortunate share the same root. Looking across history, the biggest determinant of how well you live is when and where you live. Sixteenth-century Bulgaria or twenty-first-century Palo Alto? People born in times and places that allow them to create a fortune are, quite literally, the most fortunate — not just because of their own beliefs, actions and choices but because of something they did not choose: the systems, circumstances and culture they are born into. Fortune and fortunate is hard to disentangle.

That leaves us with a persistent political question: to what extent do we want to mitigate the extremes of the market or simply embrace them? Reagan’s philosophy trusted the market to mete out justice through reward and punishment. The alternative, largely defined by Roosevelt, had been to design systems that checked those extremes and gave more people a chance at dignity, stability, and progress while also asking the best, brightest and most fortunate to pay more in taxes to support those less fortunate. In FDR’s world it was harder to become extremely rich or extremely poor. By the end of FDR’s presidency, the highest marginal income tax rate was 94%. (This was not all social engineering; the US was engaged in World War 2, the costliest war – in lives and dollars –in the history of the world.) During Reagan’s presidency, the top marginal tax rate dropped from 70% to 28%.

Nearly everyone agrees that rewards should vary with results. The unresolved debate, from FDR through Reagan to today, is how much we should moderate the market’s extreme feedback. Boomers and Millennials have lived on opposite sides of that pendulum — one in a world of thicker safety nets, the other in a world of thinner ones. The question now is what balance they want to design for their children and grandchildren — the Alpha Generation, born since 2013 — who will inherit both the risks and the returns of the system we choose to build. Because these systems? It is easy to blame or credit an FDR or Reagan but really, we're the ones who build the world our grandkids live in.

Eisenhower on Documentation

During his 1945 visit to liberated concentration camps - such as Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald - Eisenhower insisted on documenting what he saw. He famously urged:

“Get it all on record now - get the films, get the witnesses - because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”

Montaigne as Prelude to the Enlightenment

Montaigne lived before the Enlightenment proper (he died in 1592, more late Renaissance than Enlightenment), but he is often treated as a precursor: the first great essayist, probing the human condition in everyday, bodily, and personal terms rather than in scholastic or theological abstractions. That human-centered curiosity fed directly into Enlightenment writers, and Jefferson owned and drew on Montaigne’s writings.

Montaigne’s subject was the mundane — literally, “this world.” In medieval thought the mundane was dismissed as inconsequential, a short passage on the way to eternity. Montaigne instead explored and celebrated it, turning daily life into a worthy subject of reflection. In doing so, he helped set the stage for the Enlightenment’s insistence that this world is where mysteries must be investigated, laws discovered, forces harnessed — from Franklin grounding lightning to ships riding the wind across oceans, to the even harder task of understanding and realizing the potential of our own selves.

The mundane, of course, included the bluntly ordinary. “Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies,” he wrote — a reminder that all humans share the same impulses and realities regardless of title or rank. And Montaigne shifted his focus away from speculation about the divine to the observable self: “I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics.” This was the foundation of Enlightenment method — study what can be seen, tested, corrected, and improved, not what can only be speculated.

Finally, Montaigne noted the power of habit: “Custom is the best master of all things. What we are used to we find natural.” Here he glimpsed something radical: the world we inherit feels inevitable, but it is not destiny. Life could be different. In that seemingly small insight lay the seed of revolution.

Labor Day, Women and Frances Perkins

"Even the simple act of a woman standing up and speaking to a crowd is relatively new. Think about it: we know of only a handful of speeches by women before the latter half of the twentieth century, and those tend to be by women in extreme and desperate situations. Joan of Arc said a lot of interesting things before they burned her at the stake."

- Hillary Clinton

In related news, on this Labor Day, tell your kids about Frances Perkins, the first woman in American history to serve in a presidential cabinet. She was the U.S. Department of Labor Secretary and instrumental in defining and implementing so many of FDR's policies. How effective were their policies? When FDR and Frances Perkins came into office, the unemployment rate was 24.9%. By the time FDR died, the unemployment rate had fallen to 1.9%.

She really was remarkable - the kind of figure who quietly but profoundly shaped the country. From Social Security to minimum wage laws to workplace safety, so much of what we take for granted in the American social contract has her fingerprints on it. And she carried all that while navigating a cabinet full of men who often dismissed or resisted her.

You might think that with that kind of success, presidents would have been smart enough to make all their cabinet members women but after FDR died, Perkins' role as Labor Secretary ended and it was 8 years before the next woman was appointed to a presidential cabinet.

Happy Labor Day!

Perhaps the Biggest Disparity Between High School Dropouts and College Graduates

High school dropouts generally die about nine years earlier than high school graduates. College graduates, in turn, live roughly eleven years longer than those with only a high school diploma. Some studies find more modest gaps - closer to half these figures - but even then, the difference between dropping out of high school and completing college adds up to one to two decades of life expectancy.

That’s a stunning disparity in a world where living to 80 is considered normal.

Friends with Beneficence

Word of the day:
Beneficence is the ethical principle and practice of doing good and actively promoting the well-being of others by preventing harm, removing harm, and maximizing benefits.

Use in a sentence:
She’d reached a stage in life in which she much preferred friends with beneficence over friends with benefits.

Rural White Rage

The reason you don’t hear more about “rural white rage” is that it’s nearly impossible to say without slurring your words - you either sound drunk or like you’re mid-stroke. Which is probably just one more reason to be angry.

"What's wrong with you?"
"I've been seized by rurrow why tage."
"What?"
"Ruror why age!"
"What are you saying? And why are you so angry?"

1969 and Global Consciousness

Within 3 months, we had a change in consciousness from local to global, a change in what we were conscious of and acted on, like a thirsty hiker who sees a river in the distance and alters course to move towards it, acting on what she's now conscious of.

1969, July: Apollo 11 astronauts send back the “Earthrise”-style photos, showing our fragile blue planet against the black void. It’s often called the birth of the modern environmental and global consciousness movements.

1969, October 29: ARPANET’s first message sent between UCLA and Stanford Research Institute — the seed of the internet. The first word transmitted was “LO” (they meant to type “LOGIN,” but the system crashed).

So: same year. Within three months, humanity looked back at Earth from the Moon and began to wire Earth together with digital connections. That coincidence is almost poetic: the same season, we both saw the whole and began to connect the parts. A shift in consciousness that triggered a change in how we communicated and worked and what we thought of as valuable.
And just now you have used this worldwide web to see a picture of the earth from space, something no generation of humans could do before 1969, a picture so familiar now that you might take it for granted, might forget how perfectly it represents something we might call global consciousness. This is reality. The divisions we create on this beautiful orb are just tools we use to make something so vast seem navigable, feel like home, make this manageable. Globalization is real; the demarcations across this globe are just made up. (Well, except for coastlines.)

Millennials have faced more career stress than any generation alive - and it is not over yet

Baby Boomers were born into postwar abundance. Wartime technological advances translated into peacetime prosperity; wages rose, jobs were plentiful, and education was heavily subsidized. One didn’t need a college degree to buy a house, but if you pursued one, tuition was often free or nearly so. That generation became better educated, better paid, and longer-lived than any before them.

Millennials came of age in the shadow of the Great Recession — the sharpest downturn since the Great Depression — and carried staggering student debt thanks to neoliberal policies that shifted the cost of higher education from governments to students. They were told that a degree was essential to succeed, then forced to finance it with debt no generation before them had been asked to shoulder.

Just as they were finding their footing, COVID struck. Overnight, millions were sent home to makeshift offices, often in houses or apartments that cost more than any prior generation had ever paid. Their parents could walk into subsidized universities and affordable homes; Millennials were expected to build their own educations and their own workspaces, at the highest costs on record.

Now, as Baby Boomers retire in record numbers and Trump clamps down on immigration, Millennials face another paradox. In theory, fewer workers should mean greater demand for their labor. In practice, it could also mean slower job creation and a stagnant economy. And hanging over it all is the great unknown: artificial intelligence. Will it become their partner, making them the most wildly productive workforce in history? Or will it make their hard-won degrees obsolete — leaving them priced out of the very jobs they trained for?

The traumas keep piling up: 9/11 in childhood, the Great Recession in early adulthood, student debt, COVID, housing inflation, political instability, climate disruption, and now AI disruption. They’ve never had a decade of “normal.”

Bless the Millennials. They’ve been asked to pay more, risk more, and endure more uncertainty than the generations before them. One hope is that as we self-absorbed Boomers finally leave the stage, policymakers will give more attention to the needs, potential, and stresses of the generation that will actually inherit the 21st century. In the meantime, they’ll have to endure yet another Boomer in the White House — one who may be the most self-obsessed of all.

The Evolution of Immigration and the American Economy

 Here's an excerpt from New Politics for the Next Economy - a work in progress.

Immigration Through the Lens of the Five Economies

The United States is huge. Only Russia, Canada and China have more land. So, the question of immigration has never been about how many people the land can hold. It has always been about what the economy most needs at a given time. Immigration policy has consistently mirrored the limiting factor of progress in each era, reflecting the nation’s evolving economy and the politics of who is welcomed as a contributor and who is rejected as a threat. At each stage, immigration policy and practice has largely addressed the economic bottleneck of its time.

The Land Economy: Immigrants as Settlers
In the 19th century, when land was the limiting factor, immigration was largely a matter of numbers. More people meant more farms, more fields, more production. The Homestead Act of 1862 practically begged Europeans to claim 160 acres and make it productive. The Norwegians who tried farming in North Dakota before fleeing the winters for California (my great grandparents) were part of this wave: immigrants as settlers, not yet screened for skill, but for willingness to work, to develop land.

America in this period did not so much regulate immigration as simply count it. At Ellis Island, officials recorded names, looked for visible disease, and waved people through. Immigrants did not meet a bureaucracy; they met opportunity. Land was abundant, labor was scarce, and farming families were the raw material of progress, turning empty land into productive farms.

The Industrial Economy: Immigrants as Threats
By the early 20th century, the economy’s limit had shifted from land to capital. Factories, railroads, and mines needed labor — and immigrants provided it in abundance. But the dynamic had changed: immigrants were no longer needed to settle empty land. They were crowding into cities, competing for wages on the factory floor. The politics of immigration shifted accordingly. (And in imagining that we can again create millions of jobs in factories as a return to this time, Trump has echoed the politics of this time, a strange ode to the America of one century earlier.)

The Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson–Reed Act, imposed national origin quotas designed to preserve the ethnic balance of the country as it had been in 1890. It heavily favored immigrants from northern and western Europe, sharply restricted southern and eastern Europeans, and barred almost all Asians. The underlying anxiety was not hard to trace. Industrial labor markets were glutted, and waves of immigrants were seen not as settlers expanding America’s frontier but as rivals depressing factory wages and challenging cultural norms.

The backlash was not confined to legislation. In 1925, the Ku Klux Klan staged what the Washington Post called the largest political demonstration in the city’s history. Tens of thousands of hooded marchers paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue to protest immigrants and imports alike. Just a year earlier, Congress passed the 1924 Immigration Act, which imposed strict quotas favoring northern Europeans and sharply limiting arrivals from southern and eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa.

The message was clear: in an industrial economy, where labor was plentiful, immigrants could be recast as a threat rather than an asset.

Mixed economy: The Great Depression revealed a different bottleneck: employment itself. With unemployment at 25%, the focus shifted inward. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal aimed less at drawing new workers from abroad and more at putting existing ones back to work. Immigration slowed dramatically. The government built institutions to stabilize labor: Social Security, unemployment insurance, child labor laws, and education that moved children off farms and out of factories. Progress was measured by whether the nation could keep its own citizens employed and secure and then increasingly shifted towards policies that would drive wage growth, which led to the emergence of a new, defining sector.

The Information Economy: Immigrants as Knowledge Workers
The bottleneck shifted again in the mid-20th century. After World War II, the U.S. economy leaned increasingly on education, science, and information, on knowledge workers.

By the 1960s, the constraint was no longer land or factories but knowledge. Immigration was increasingly framed as a way to expand the nation’s intellectual capital.

The turning point was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart–Celler Act. Signed by Lyndon Johnson at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, the law abolished national origin quotas and replaced them with a preference system. Family reunification remained important, but skills were now explicitly prioritized. The legislation marked a quiet revolution: the bottleneck was no longer land or even labor, but brains.

The families who entered under this system helped shape the America we know today. Kamala Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, emigrated from India to study endocrinology at Berkeley. Her father, Donald Harris, came from Jamaica to study economics. Their paths were made possible by Johnson’s reforms — a direct reflection of an economy that needed researchers and professionals more than it needed field hands or assembly-line labor.

The visa system evolved to support this reality. The H-1B visa, created in 1990, became a channel for employers to sponsor highly skilled workers in technology, finance, medicine, and academia. If the Homestead Act represented immigration for the land economy, and Ellis Island represented immigration for the industrial economy, the H-1B visa became the gateway for the information economy.

 

Immigration as a Mirror of Economic Limits
The evolution is striking when viewed as a sequence:

·        Agricultural economy: immigrants as settlers; open borders and homesteads.

• Industrial economy: immigrants as wage competitors, emergence of quotas and restrictions by early 1900s.
• Mixed economy: focus less on bringing in new workers than on developing labor within the nation, shifting more children from farms, factories and mines into school, and giving unions greater political power.
• Information economy: immigrants as knowledge workers; preference for education and expertise.

At each stage, the politics of immigration followed the economics. When more people meant more production, immigration was welcomed. When more people meant lower wages, immigration was restricted. When more people meant more brains, immigration was re-engineered to favor scientists, doctors, and engineers.

Beyond the Information Economy
Immigration policy has not only reflected economic limits; it has also shaped national identity. In the land economy, immigrants were folded into the myth of the frontier. In the industrial economy, they were cast as cultural outsiders. In the information economy, they became symbols of global talent and competitiveness.

The United States and Canada became unusual in world history because they pioneered a national identity based not on common ancestry but on shared ideals. Rome had conquered peoples and given them citizenship, but citizenship came to you with the empire’s expansion. In North America, people came voluntarily to become Americans or Canadians. “Becoming American” was not about bloodline but about shared allegiance to institutions and aspirations.

That model has had its tensions. Racism and xenophobia have repeatedly pushed the nation back toward a more genetic reading of identity. But the long arc of American immigration law reveals a deeper truth: who counts as “us” has always been tied to what the economy needs.

Toward the Entrepreneurial Economy
If the next economy is entrepreneurial, immigration will again shift. The bottleneck will not be knowledge alone but the capacity to create institutions and enterprises that solve problems. In that world, the most valuable immigrants will not just be skilled workers but entrepreneurial builders: people who create schools, startups, community organizations, and technologies that expand collective capacity. More creatively, people who shown potential for public sector entrepreneurship, a domain we’ve largely ignored in spite of the fact that private-sector entrepreneurship has never been more highly valued or valuable. Immigration policy could evolve to favor not only diplomas but demonstrated creativity and institution-building.

The throughline is simple but profound: immigration has always been economic policy in disguise. From homesteaders to factory hands to graduate students, the criteria for admission have tracked the bottleneck of production. And as those bottlenecks shifted, so too did the nation’s story about who belongs, and who we need now to make us great anew.

What Americans Spend Each Year on Faith, Hope and Charity

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:13, "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity."

What do Americans spend each year on faith, hope, and charity? If we assume that gambling is like buying hope and religious donations are like a purchase of faith?

Hope - 0.6% of GDP
Faith - 0.6% of GDP
Charity - 2.2% of GDP.

So, the numbers seem to support Paul's claim.

Trump's Impulsive Push for a Fed Chair Who Will Aggressively Lower Rates Threatens to Re-Ignite Inflation

Trump is signaling he wants a Fed chair who will cut rates much faster - he’s said policy should be “two or three points lower,” which would be a big swing from today’s 4.25% - 4.50% range. That kind of drop might boost equity prices in the short run - and might boost prices more generally, re-accelerating inflation.

This is the core tradeoff the Fed manages: ease policy to juice growth and hiring, or keep policy tight to pin inflation near target. Right now the macro mix is actually close to “goldilocks”: unemployment is roughly 4.1% - 4.3% and the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge (core PCE) is running about 2.8% year-over-year - above 2%, but not far off. Slashing rates aggressively from here could stimulate demand and prices.

A recent real-world cautionary tale: Hungary, led by Orban, a favorite of the MAGA crowd. After a period of very loose policies and energy price interventions, inflation surged above 20% in 2023 (peaking around 25%) before tough medicine and subsequent rate moves brought it down. When you're too greedy for economic stimulus, you will get inflation. (And, of course, Trump's tariffs alone will increase inflation.)

The U.S. has lived this before. Volcker’s disinflation drive in the early 1980s wrung out high inflation - but only with a painful recession. The point of an independent Fed is to resist short-term political incentives and steer toward the low-inflation/low-unemployment mix over time, even when patience is unpopular. With core inflation still a bit sticky and new tariff pressures in the pipeline, racing to 1–2% rates would be a gamble with a high probability of having to reverse course later - expensively.

Bottom line: quick cuts might cause stock prices to pop; they’d also raise the odds we re-learn the hard lesson that bringing inflation back down takes longer, hurts more, and ultimately costs more than avoiding the flare-up in the first place. It's kind of a classically impulsive Trump move though: maximize for now and worry about later ... well, later.

Household Chores Are More Dangerous Than You Might Think

Amerigo Dumini was Mussolini’s thug-in-chief - he helped murder a socialist who spoke out against the Duce, later fought through the chaos of WWII, and then even survived a firing squad that pumped 17 bullets into him. He walked away from all that violence, only to be killed nearly a quarter of a century later while changing a lightbulb, taken out by a simple household chore.

If I were a handyman, this story and tagline might just be my ad. "You might think you'll be fine if you do that household chore yourself, but why risk it? Be safe. Be smart. Call us instead."

The Steady Degradation of Trump's Mind

Donald Trump is the oldest person in the history of the US to have ever been sworn in as president.
Yesterday, after his absurdly and predictably ineffectual meeting with the international war criminal Vladimir Putin, as he stood on Alaskan soil, Trump announced that - meeting over - he was returning to the US.
There was no art.
There was no deal.
He didn't even know where he was.

Average Wages in Silicon Valley Are Not Just 2 to 3X the National Average - They Understate Actual Compensation

Silicon Valley isn’t just paying the highest wages in the country - it’s doing it at a pace only two other places can match: King County (home to Amazon and Microsoft) and Manhattan. The numbers are eye-popping on their own, but here’s the twist: they still leave out a huge part of the story.
The wage data counts salaries and the value of stock options exercised during that quarter. That’s it. If you exercised options before or after the reporting window, or you’re sitting on unexercised options that have skyrocketed in value, none of that shows up in “income.”

So imagine an Nvidia employee in Santa Clara. The county average wage is $220K, but at a company like NVDA, pay could easily be two or three times that. Now layer on this: in the last year, Nvidia’s stock jumped about 50%. For someone holding a lot of shares or unexercised options, that wealth increase could equal - or exceed -their annual wage.

(Recent reporting suggests that about 80% of NVDA employees are now millionaires and about 50% are worth $25 million or more.)*

Which means the headline story (“Silicon Valley workers make 2–3x the national average”) actually understates their total compensation. For many, the real number - their salary plus stock wealth - makes the income gap between tech hubs and the rest of America even wider than most people realize.

raw data:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cewqtr.t01.htm

source for portion of NVDA employees worth $25 million or more 
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/nvidia-employees-net-worth-wealth-created-inside-nvidia-reach-stunning-levels-nearly-80-of-employees-are-millionaires/articleshow/123143042.cms

Hamlet for Current Times

“This blustering revel of tariffs and travel bans makes us mocked by other nations; they call us boors and bullies, and the good we once stood for is eclipsed by our vices.”

- Hamlet (only slightly modified), Act 1 Scene 4

Situationships

Ran across this term in a chapter on the third sexual revolution in Christian Smith's fascinating Why Religion Went Obsolete: the Demise of Traditional Faith in America:

“situationships” (casual intimate relationships lacking definition, expectations, and norms due in part to the fear that clarity might make things awkward).

And yet this seems to me precisely a condition that would make things awkward.

Democracy by Langston Hughes

Democracy

[1949]

by Langston Hughes

Democracy will not come Today, this year Nor ever Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right As the other fellow has To stand On my two feet And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I’m dead. I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.

Freedom Is a strong seed Planted In a great need.

I live here, too. I want freedom Just as you.

Reagan, Fox, MSNBC, and Simplifying the Mess of Reality

In the Industrial Economy, value was created in steel mills and assembly lines. In the Information Economy, it is often created in studios and newsrooms. The raw material is not ore or oil but culture - packaged into stories, symbols, and narratives that resonate with our emotions as much as, or more than, our rational faculties. The world is far too messy and complicated to fit neatly into a single theory, so we rely on simple narratives. Specialists wrestle with complexity; to win 51% of the vote, you need a story most people can follow. Politics in the Information Economy became a kind of cultural production.

Ronald Reagan grasped this before most. The only president to master radio, television, and movies before entering politics, he understood the power of affirming rather than informing. His speeches bypassed the fact-checker in your head and spoke directly to the emotional truth you recognized from your own memories, hopes, and sense of identity. He could make the policies he championed feel like episodes in your hero’s journey. You weren’t just living in America—you were starring in a distinctly American story, one where a government that got out of your way left you free to live it.

This was a sharp break from the media climate in which Reagan emerged. In the 1960s and early ’70s, the three major networks delivered a nightly reality check: Vietnam body counts, civil rights marchers facing police dogs and fire hoses, polluted rivers catching fire, women demanding more than secretarial roles, long-haired neo-bohemians rejecting middle-class norms. These images forced Americans to confront contradictions and complexity. They unsettled worldviews across the spectrum and left the nation wrestling, in real time, with disruptive change. (Rivers on fire might be the simplest illustration of cognitive dissonance that this unmediated reality forced on its audience.)

Reagan’s storytelling offered relief from that fatigue. He gave Americans a coherent, reassuring frame—a sense that the story of America still had a clear arc and a starring role for the individual. Where the 1960s media posed open-ended questions, Reagan delivered emotionally satisfying answers. The times were turbulent; his voice was calm.
Roger Ailes, who worked with Reagan on his 1984 campaign, would later industrialize this approach as the founding CEO of Fox News. The nightly newscast became a continuous narrative stream—curated facts and frames reinforcing a specific worldview. MSNBC followed with a similar strategy for a different audience. Both evolved into identity factories: manufacturing stories that make their viewers feel not just informed, but confirmed.
This was a profound shift. The network news of the 1960s might unsettle you; Fox and MSNBC aim to reassure you. The old model treated discomfort as the price of being informed. The new model treats discomfort as a defect in the product.

In the Information Economy, news is no longer just a public service - it’s a manufactured good. The raw material is events; the finished product is cultural identity. Reagan’s genius was offering coherence and assurance after a turbulent era. Fox and MSNBC turned that coherence into a subscription service, delivering a world where your side is always right, the other side is always wrong, and reality rarely demands any changes of you.