Happy new year!

Shake off the ick before 2026!

Happy new year!

Change in Value Through 2025 - the Highs (Silver) and Lows (Trump Media & Tech Stock)

Changes from the start to finish of 2025. (I know. This information would have been so much more valuable 365 days ago.)

The Directional Difference Between Socialists and Capitalists

Socialists and capitalists largely agreed that society and the economy are inseparable.

Where they differed was in what to change first.

Socialists focused on reshaping social relations—class, gender, power—believing that fairer economic outcomes would follow.
Capitalists focused on reshaping economic incentives—markets, capital, innovation—believing that social progress would emerge as a consequence.

Put more simply, socialists tried to make social change that would also impact the economy whereas capitalists tried to make economic change that would also impact society.

In practice, every successful era combined both: economic change required social legitimacy, and social change required economic capacity.

I Didn't Say She Was Emotional

I didn’t say she was emotional. I simply said she got choked up each morning reading her horoscope, imagining all the wonderful, if vague, promise it held.

AI's Great - Largely Unspoken - Potential for Intellectual Matchmaking

A frontier we rarely capture is the value hidden in the interactions between fields. We train specialists to go deep, but many discoveries occur where domains overlap—where, say, material science meets biology, or optics meets chemistry, and the emergent behavior is the real prize.

The bottleneck is not intelligence; it’s coordination: finding the right counterpart in another field and then constructing a shared language to work together. 

AI has the potential to lower both costs. It might surface non-obvious connections across literatures, suggest plausible joint hypotheses, and translate between vocabularies—essentially matching complementary experts who would never have met or even realize that their great theories and expertise could meet and have a baby that would yield something dramatically different. 

But the final step is institutional: we’ll need incentives and structures that reward the collaboration AI makes possible. To translate these possibilities into value means creating institutions that fund these efforts and create the supporting infrastructure of teammates, equipment, project management, and experts who might be called in for portions of this project. And, of course, visionary marketing to create the support needed to translate this possibility into reality. 

Fortune Cookies as a Gateway

I'm beginning to suspect that fortune cookies reveal little about the future ... but by now they've got me hooked on the Chinese food and it's too late to stop.

Two Amendments That Shifted Policy from A Focus on Just Capital to Capital and Labor

The 16th Amendment (1913) gave the federal government the capacity to raise modern revenues through an income tax; the 19th Amendment (1920) giving women the right to vote changed who politicians had to persuade about how that revenue should be used. 

There is strong evidence that women’s enfranchisement shifted policy priorities, increasing public spending on public health and education, strengthening child-labor restrictions, establishing minimum wages for women, and expanding aid for mothers and children. Granting women the right to vote did more than improve representation for women themselves; it amplified the political voice of those advocating for children and long-term human development.

In the late nineteenth century, public investment focused primarily on land and capital. By the early twentieth century, the government began to invest more deliberately in labor—in people—many of them children.

Mencken's Rebuttal to Thorstein Veblen's Claim of Conspicuous Consumption

Thorstein Veblen famously defined conspicuous consumption as people buying, wearing, driving, and enjoying certain products and services less for their intrinsic value than for the status they signaled. H.L. Mencken, rebutting Veblen's claims that people bought pricier goods because of the status they conferred, wrote, in Prejudices, First Series (1919):

Do I enjoy a decent bath because I know that John Smith cannot afford one - or because I delight in being clean?
Do I admire Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony because it is incomprehensible to Congressmen and Methodists - or because I genuinely love music?
Do I prefer terrapin à la Maryland to fried liver because plow-hands must put up with the liver - or because the terrapin is intrinsically a more charming dose?
Do I prefer kissing a pretty girl to kissing a charwoman, because even a janitor may kiss a charwoman - or because the pretty girl looks better, smells better, and kisses better?

It might be that the pricier goods communicate social status. It might also be that they're pricier simply because they're more pleasing. 

If You Can't Decide on a Genre For Tonight's Entertainment ... might we suggest sports?

If you watch sports, you don’t know what genre you’re getting.

It might be a feel-good story—your team dominating, the hero delivering, everything clicking just right.
It might be a thriller, decided at the buzzer.
Or it might be a tragedy: your team never quite strings together three good plays, the opponent keeps stumbling into success, and your favorite players look painfully mortal.

Not sure whether you’re in the mood for heartbreak, suspense, triumph, or some uneasy blend of all three?

If you can’t decide, might we suggest… sports? It's a way to turn your mood for the rest of the evening over to chance.

Proposing Cat Stevens Updates One of His Classics to "Oh Very Old!"

Time for Cat Stevens to release an update to his classic "Oh Very Young." Titled, "Oh Very Old," it'll be a meditation on inheritance and end of life distribution of gifts and charity donations.

Very little change needed for the opening lines, simply changing the word young to old.

"Oh very old, what will you leave us this time?
You're only dancin' on this earth for a short while."

Don't Forget the Mary in Merry Christmas!

Don't forget the Mary in Merry Christmas! Everything starts with mothers. Call your mom and thank her for this - and all your other - days.

It is a Curious Thing to Advocate for a World You Can't Live In

Turning Point USA was founded in 2012 by Charlie Kirk and Bill Montgomery. They were prominent critics of mask and vaccine mandates and strong advocates for the right to bear arms.
Bill Montgomery died from COVID in 2020.
Charlie Kirk died from gun violence in 2025.

YTD Returns on Various Assets Through 23 December 2025

Start an argument at Christmas dinner. Tell everyone you shorted Trump Media & Tech stock using the Canadian $ so that you profited twice off of the Donald.

Here are YTD returns on various assets.

The Miracle of Community & Culture in a World in Which We Can Distinguish Between 7 to 10 Million Different Colors

Culture is something we share because we live in community. It also depends on our willingness to gloss over differences that might otherwise set us apart—not just from others, but from who we thought we were even last year.

Culture is partly about categorization. Sometimes in broad strokes, sometimes in fine ones. We fit in—or stand out—through our clothes, our jokes, our values, our ways of seeing. But culture is far more finely grained than our categories suggest.

Under ideal conditions, normal human vision can distinguish millions—often estimated between seven and ten million—different colors. We have no vocabulary for those gradations, and no memory precise enough to retain them, yet we experience them all the same.
Something similar happens in culture. “Red” is something we hold in common, but the reds themselves spill into the tens—perhaps hundreds—of thousands. When we call a rose red or a sunset red, we are not seeing quite what anyone else sees, or even what we ourselves saw the last time.

We live in communities, so we are compelled to converge on something like red. But we live in our own heads, and there we register how different this red is from the last—how fashion, dance, manners, or belief or politics let us share an experience that is still uniquely our own. An experience we do not fully share even with our past or future selves, much less with those around us.

Real GDP Percent Change from Year Ago = 2.3%

 This is an economic number that drives most every other.

source:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1#

7 Million Shades of Cultural Reality

Culture is partly about categorization. Sometimes in broad strokes, sometimes in fine ones. We fit in—or stand out—through our clothes, our jokes, our values, our ways of seeing. But culture is far more finely grained than our categories suggest.

Under ideal conditions, normal human vision can distinguish millions—often estimated between seven and ten million—different colors. We have no vocabulary for those gradations, and no memory precise enough to retain them, yet we experience them all the same.

Something similar happens in culture. “Red” is something we hold in common, but the reds themselves spill into the tens—perhaps hundreds—of thousands. When we call a rose red or a sunset red, we are not seeing quite what anyone else sees, or even what we ourselves saw the last time.

We live in communities, so we are compelled to converge on something like red. But we live in our own heads, and there we register how different this red is from the last—how fashion, dance, manners, or belief let us share an experience that is still uniquely our own. An experience we do not fully share even with our past or future selves, much less with those around us.

Culture binds us by what we share, and by what we quietly agree not to notice, including how much we ourselves have changed.

Oh the Dickens You Say

“This box is empty. Empty. This—this is what you got me? What is this supposed to be, Jerome? What’s supposed to be under all this wrapping paper?”

“It’s the Ghost of the Christmas Present.”

Reading Minds

He claimed he could read dogs' minds. We asked him to prove it. After calmly holding his hands over the dog's head for about 4 minutes, he began to pant and bark. He clarified that he could read their minds but not translate. That was a completely different gift.

UM Consumer Sentiment Index at Lowest on Record (going back to 1960)

University of Michigan consumer sentiment index at its lowest in more than 6 decades.

Hey UM. You think that's remarkable, ask me about my citizen sentiment right now.

source:https://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/charts.html 

Herod's Violent Crackdown

Matthew 2: 16
Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men.

This World, a poem

THIS WORLD

It appears that it was all a misunderstanding.
What was only a trial run was taken seriously.
The rivers will return to their beginnings.
The wind will cease in its turning about.
Trees instead of budding will tend to their roots.
Old men will chase a ball, a glance in the mirror-
They are children again.
The dead will wake up, not comprehending.
Till everything that happened has unhappened.
What a relief! Breathe freely, you who suffered much.

Poem by Nobel Prize winning Polish-American poet Czesław Miłosz.

The 10 Richest Americans are Worth a Combined $2.6 Trillion

The 10 richest Americans are worth a combined $2.6 trillion.

Only 7 of the 190 countries in this world have a GDP larger than $2.6 trillion.

This as of 18 December 2025.

Karma of a Different Sort

Karma sutra.
An awkward position you find yourself in as the result of some stupid thing you did in the past.

Are You Closer to Bankruptcy or Billionaire?

I feel as though I'm about as pro wealth creation as anyone I know but ...

Each year, between 500,000 and 1 million Americans file for personal bankruptcy.

In a typical year, perhaps a dozen Americans become billionaires. (There are roughly 1,000 billionaires in the U.S., but the club grows most years.)

Designing policy to encourage wealth creation matters.

But designing policy to reduce the vastly more probable outcome of personal financial crisis matters more.

One overlooked bit of genius of Trump is that through cultural wars, he got millions of Americans to imagine they had more in common with - and were more likely to join - the billionaires than the bankrupt. 

Side Effects May Include ... What Political Parties Are Not Telling Us

One reason I tend to trust pharmaceutical companies more than “natural remedies” is that pharma doesn’t just promise benefits — it also lists side effects. That feels oddly honest. If you’re taking something powerful enough to relieve pain, stress, or cancer, it’s powerful enough to have unintended consequences. Vaccines are more likely than green tea to make you ache or feel sick but also more likely to protect you from nasty disease.

Which made me wonder:
What if political parties were required to do the same thing?

Imagine campaign ads that ended not just with soaring music and hopeful slogans, but with a calm voiceover:
“Side effects may include…”

Not as a gotcha. Not as mockery. Just as an acknowledgment that policies, like medicines, act on complex systems and rarely do only one thing.

What would be listed as side effects of today’s Democratic platforms?
What would be the side effects of Republican ones?

Job Numbers in Trump's Economy

Some job numbers

Nov 2024:
Unemployment rate 4.2%
Number unemployed 7.1 million

Nov 2025:
Unemployment rate 4.6%
Number unemployed 7.8 million

The AVERAGE monthly rate of job creation:

In Donald Trump's
First 3 months in office: 127,000
Most recent 7 months: 17,000

In Joe Biden's 48 months: 336,000

Data source: BLS

Frankly, I Had Higher Expectations for the West Wing Sequel

Who knew the sequel to The West Wing would be called The East Wing and it would involve the literal demolition of the government structure of that name.
No snappy dialogue.
No noble principles.
Just wrecking balls, gold overlays, and the suggestion that there will be great balls thrown, to which none of us common Americans will be invited.

The AI Generated Soundtrack of Social Encounters

One of the most pervasive—and least anticipated—uses of AI turned out to be the universal addition of mood music to everyday life.

Not soundtracks chosen by people, but soundtracks generated for them: foreboding strings when you walked into a difficult meeting, a jaunty clarinet when you bumped into a friend at the grocery store, slow contemplative piano when you opened the refrigerator at 2 a.m. to rethink your life.

At first it was magical. A handful of early adopters floated through the world as if starring in a beautifully directed film. But within a year, once the feature went mainstream, any space containing more than six people became a small sonic riot—like twelve orchestras frantically scoring twelve overlapping subplots.

Still, society adapted. Parents quickly realized that the music served as a nearly subliminal social tutor. Children learned, without instruction, what level of decorum was expected simply by the incidental score: reverent hush (string quartet), gentle playfulness (marimba), or “for the love of everything, not here” (solo bassoon).

By the end, mood music did more than dramatize our lives.
It replaced what used to be called manners.

And honestly? It worked astonishingly well—at least until the algorithm started adding ominous strings every time Uncle Arnold approached with political opinions.

Powell Suggests Economy is Steadily Losing Jobs

Jerome Powell yesterday commented on how the Fed is trying to make policy without data. He also said that what little data we do have on job creation seems to be skewed upwards by about 60,000 a month.

So, rather than creating roughly 40,000 jobs a month in the last quarter+, he thinks the economy is more likely losing 20,000 jobs a month. 

The Trump critic: Quite the hat trick Donald has pulled off: higher prices and losing jobs.

The Trump defender: But at least he's building a ballroom so couldn't you try to think about someone other than yourself - American voter - and just be happy for him?

Trump's Threat to A Century of Foreign Policy And Global Alignment

 The Trump administration has just released a national security document that reverses nearly a century of American philosophy and policies. Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson write in the The New York Times (full piece here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/opinion/trump-security-strategy-threats.html)

*quote:
Even Republican members of Congress seem to be getting unnerved about U.S. government-ordered strikes in the Caribbean that are an illegal, immoral and distinctly unstrategic use of a superlative professional military. Yet the administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, released last week and by turns incoherent, ahistorical and specious, casts the strikes as a legitimate exercise of “the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” and one of any number of “targeted deployments to secure the border and defeat cartels.”

This strategy document focuses the United States’ attention on the Western Hemisphere. It subjects strategically crucial regions and allies to relegation and, in the case of Europe, outright subversion. It denigrates the European Union “and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty,” while implicitly contemplating Europe’s right-wing nativist parties as instruments for “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory.” Those comments effectively codify JD Vance’s hectoring speech at the Munich Security Conference last February. As the United States systematically eviscerates its constitutional order and international standing, it presumes to tell Europe that it risks “civilizational erasure.”
*end quote

Here is what this means.

For the first time since 1945, a U.S. National Security Strategy appears to cast Europe’s liberal-democratic project as more troubling than Moscow’s authoritarian one. That is not a minor adjustment of priorities; it is a reversal of the FDR-era bet on a world of cooperating democracies. The Trump administration is edging away from a decades-long alliance with the European Union and leaning instead toward an ideological partnership with nationalist regimes, including Putin’s Russia, that reject liberal norms.

It is worth pausing over what “liberal” means here. Liberal as in liberty. A liberal democracy is one in which the majority wins elections, but minorities keep their freedom - their right to practice marginal or no religion, to live in ways the majority may dislike, to pursue careers, cultures, and identities that do not conform. In such a system, a majority vote may be needed to raise or lower taxes, or to fund education and science, but it is not needed to validate particular lifestyles, ethnicities, or beliefs. The point of liberal democracy is precisely that some freedoms are not up for a show of hands.

Trump’s administration is attempting to roll that back: to turn cultural conformity, religious orthodoxy, and ethnic hierarchy into political goals rather than private choices. For a nation that once helped design and defend the liberal order, it is hard to overstate how dangerous and disorienting that turn is.

The Tiny Portion of Crypto Assets Used for Payments

Crypto. It is not really an investment (no profits or returns) or a currency, but people still pretend like it is both.

This, from David Frum in The Atlantic

"Most cryptocurrency owners don’t use it to buy things or pay people. A 2023 survey by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation found that among the small minority of U.S. households that own crypto assets, only 3.3 percent use them to send or receive payments; about 2 percent use them to purchase goods in the real economy."

A Christmas Poem (or something like it)

Christmas is the holiday we take most seriously.
The birth of the baby Jesus.
This point at which he was still innocent of knowledge,
So much still to be revealed - about himself, the world.

He taught us that the price for life is death.
No one gets out alive.
To live like you have something to save
When you know you'll eventually lose everything?
That might just be wrong,
He suggested.
Watch how it is done.

But before all that,
Before the thousand questions and The very few answers,
He was the baby Jesus,
Innocent of our calloused sin.

And that is the Jesus we celebrate
With our own children,
Wondering what gifts to give them.
Whether they will remember or value any of it.
Wondering what of our own lives will be resurrected for the next generation.
And the next.
What gifts will they be?
What gifts are we?

Labor Market Like a Deer in the Headlights Waiting for More Predictable Economic Policy

The Trump administration has sharply curtailed federal data collection and reporting, leaving us to rely on less accurate and less consistent sources to judge the economy. What those sources suggest so far is that two things have happened in Trump’s first year: hiring has slowed, and separations (layoffs, firings, quits) have also slowed. That’s good news for people who might otherwise have lost their jobs, but bad news for people hoping to find one.

When I began driving, my mother gave me simple advice: drive in a way that makes it easy for other drivers to predict what you’ll do. I later realized how wise that was. When the drivers around you can anticipate your moves, they can adjust smoothly—and you can adjust to them. Collisions avoided. (At least for the first half-century of my driving. All bets are off in my dotage.)

Which brings me back to the labor market.

Trump’s tariffs are currently being challenged in court, and betting markets put the odds of them surviving at roughly one in four. In other words, we have tariffs—for now—but there’s a decent chance they disappear soon.

Tariffs are no small thing. Yet businesses largely aren’t raising prices to offset them (why alienate customers over a cost that may vanish?). Nor are many firms hiring or firing aggressively to adapt—because the tariffs themselves may be temporary.

The result is a kind of economic hesitation. Businesses aren’t moving forward confidently under “business as usual.” They’re also not retooling their operations for a genuinely new normal. Instead, they’re waiting.

One often-overlooked role of government is predictability. Regulations that affect decisions involving millions or billions of dollars can’t reasonably change every six months, and then change again six months later. Firms don’t invest, hire, or expand in an environment where the rules of the road are unknowable.

Start driving as if there’s a bee loose in the car, and traffic grinds down. Accidents become more likely. Something similar happens when economic policy becomes unpredictable: businesses slow rather than move confidently into the future.

In theory, we may know within weeks whether the courts uphold Trump’s tariffs and, by extension, whether they affirm that Congress still has a central role in economic policy, rather than allowing presidents to levy taxes unilaterally. Until then, a key element of the economy is unpredictable. Companies hesitate. Hiring stalls. And workers, like the rest of us, remain in limbo.

For Profit Media is At Odds With A Healthy Democracy

A slowly improving society is an economic threat to an attention-based media. Panic pays; progress does not. In an information economy, demand steadily shifts toward drama, conflict, and daily news designed to seize and hold our attention. People will pay to watch a zero-sum game played on the grass; nobody pays to watch grass grow.

The politics of theater does more than elevate drama over boring progress. It has a way of putting us in the seats, watching events unfold, rather than giving us meaningful roles to play. It turns citizens into spectators - passive and angry at the same time - a particularly corrosive combination for a healthy society. 

A democracy cannot thrive when its citizens are treated primarily as an audience.