Artificial Intelligence - Created to Navigate the Information Economy

The Information Economy is unusually hard to condense. It has the potential to sprawl into gigabytes of observations, accounts, stories, mediums, and tactics — magazines and radio, billboards and pop songs, talk shows and movies, documentaries and fantasies, memes and research.

The intelligence in our heads is no longer enough to process all this. We are now manufacturing artificial intelligence to handle the sprawl — the gigabytes of noise and narrative the Information Economy produces faster than any human mind can sort.

In The Lincoln Lawyer, a character delivers the line: "Whoever controls the media controls the mind." A companion asks, "Did you just quote Stalin?" "Um," she replies. "Jim Morrison."

The exchange is funny because both answers are almost right. Stalin didn't say it, but the regime he built behaved as if he had. Morrison did say it — around 1969 — but variations were already circulating for more than a decade before he used it. In 1961, a Baptist editor named E. S. James told the Southern Baptist Convention that "those who control the media of communication will ultimately control the minds of the people." And a 1967 newspaper advertisement in Ohio declared that "our country is run by men who control our wealth; who control our news media and thus control our minds."

Just as Americans once staked claims on a continent, a host of interest groups now stake claims on attention — defining terms, controlling narratives, racing to plant their flag in your mind before someone else does. Advertising, marketing, politics, investor sentiment: in every one of them, the good things go to whoever captures your attention first.

Attention: the last zero-sum domain.

So what do we do in a world with this much information — most of it made rather than found? We make intelligence to match.

Natural intelligence evolved to navigate the natural world. Artificial intelligence is built to navigate the worlds we've built — machinery and code, social norms and institutions.

Archimedes said: give me a lever long enough, and I can move the world. Artificial intelligence is that lever — not for moving the physical world, but for moving the ones we've built inside it: the private worlds of our imaginations, the shared worlds of our institutions.

Wake Up Call

Me: I guess nobody needs a wake-up call anymore, now that everyone has a phone.

Hotel desk clerk: Oh, people still need a wake-up call. They just don't think to ask for one anymore - which suggests they're now at least two calls away from self-awareness.

The Strange Debate About God and Presidents That Persists

It is so bizarre that in 2026 we are still debating whether religion is a private or public matter.

Our founding fathers would likely marvel at our technology and be aghast at our medieval take on politics and religion. "What strange intersection of intellect and superstition gives you a culture that can use AI to generate a picture of your president as Jesus?"

The Unexpected Consequence of Great Advances in Self-Driving Technology

Within a few years, self-driving cars will likely reach a point where "drivers" enjoy the same experience as train passengers — simply watching the landscape roll by while the car handles direction and speed.
I wonder if there's a catch.
We have family we love 200 miles north of us through thick traffic in LA and Orange counties. The stress of driving through those often congested areas is as big an obstacle to simply jumping in the car to visit them as is the time. But what about a world in which the stress isn't any greater than sitting at home in your living room? How many more trips will people suddenly be willing to make?
Yes, the cars will drive more efficiently — but there could be vastly more of them.
A prediction: the great advances in self-driving technology could create record congestion until we get to the next level of autonomous cars when they communicate and coordinate with each other in ways that enable them to drive faster and closer together than they ever could in situations in which traffic depends on human skill.

JD Vance Told Hungarians What God Wants for Their Future

"Will you stand for Western civilization? Will you stand for freedom, for truth, and for the God of our fathers?" JD Vance asked the crowd who attended his rally for Orban in Hungary.

"Then, my friends, go to the polls in the weekend. Stand with Viktor Orbán, because he stands for you, and he stands for all these things".

The level of hubris with this former Hill Billy. Trump, Vance and the corrupt Orban's politics focuses on personal enrichment while claiming that this is God's will. To be fair, it is a centuries old scam, variants of which sound something like "God wants you to give me power and wealth. Please don't disappoint God"

We Have Reasonable Expectations

Most of us just want to be above average. That doesn't seem like too much to ask but as it turns out, only about 60-some percent of us can be, statistically speaking. Which feels rigged.

$600 Billion Gain In Net Worth From a Year Ago for 10 Richest Americans

The ten richest Americans are now worth nearly $2.7 trillion, up about $600 billion from a year ago.

An Economic Stat Perhaps Deserving of a Short Story

Carter County, Montana had the highest GDP growth of any American county in 2024: 76%.Its total population? 65.

Possibly related: small Baca County, Colorado had the lowest GDP growth of any American county — its GDP shrinking 46%.

Perhaps someone with a thriving online business simply moved from Baca to Carter County.

Information on GDP growth by county here:

https://apps.bea.gov/itable/index.html?appid=70&stepnum=40&Major_Area=4&State=XX&Area=XX&TableId=533&Statistic=1&Year=2024&YearBegin=-1&Year_End=-1&Unit_Of_Measure=PercentChange&Rank=1&Drill=1&nRange=5

Daryl Morey and 76ers Play-In Game Against Orlando Magic

First with the Houston Rockets and now with the Philadelphia 76ers, Daryl Morey has systematically applied more rigorous analysis to managing an NBA franchise. He and his staff model the use of stats.

Cut to scene.
Mr. Miyagi: are you ready for your test?
Daryl: Yes. What is the first test of our statistical models?
Mr. Miyagi: Magic.
Daryl: WHAT!?!
Mr. Miyagi: What are the odds, right?
Daryl: ...I can calculate that, actually.

Cheering for Daryl and the 76ers in their play-in game today against the Orlando Magic.

JD Vance - Catholic Since 2019 - Is Already Offering Advice to the Pope on How to Be a Better Catholic

Fascinating how confident the MAGA boys are. Their poster boy for this level of confidence this week? JD Vance.

JD Vance converted to Catholicism in August 2019 at age 35. His conversion marked a return to Christianity after previously identifying as an atheist.

This week, JD Vance - whose Catholicism is younger than an altar boy - offered advice to the Pope on how to be a better Catholic.

And to think that some of you questioned whether he is ready to follow Trump as president.

Refugees Admitted to the US Since Trump Took Office

Since Trump took office in 2025 4,499 total refugees were admitted to the U.S.
4,496 of these refugees were from South Africa (specifically white Afrikaners, based on the administration's policy).

Hmm.

How Busy am I?

I’m a busy man. I’m important. I love sports, though. I really do. But the only sport I have time to watch is the 100-meter dash.

An End to Orban's Illiberal Democracy in Hungary

Liberal democracy.

The democracy part means a majority determines which candidates and proposals win.
The liberal—as in free—means that regardless of who wins, minorities (and even majorities, you know, like women) retain their rights.

Viktor Orbán once described his government in Hungary as an “illiberal democracy.” And that is the model JD Vance has publicly praised and traveled last week to Hungary to support.

Trump Derangement Syndrome

Bold prediction ...

The term Trump derangement syndrome (TDS) that the MAGA crowd coined to dismiss outrage about Trump ... will in the future describe the odd blend of narcissism, delusion and impulsivity that defines Trump's personality. It will morph from a slur aimed at his foes to a psychological condition that describes people like him.

Did You Say Communist?

I didn’t mean to pile on with the accusations, but when they called him a communist, I heard “comment-ist” and simply agreed.

The Strongman Trap

An excerpt from the new book, New Politics for the Next Economy.

The notion of self is a fictional device we use to maintain a sense of continuity across space and time, a way to pretend that we don't greatly change at different ages and in different circumstances. It would be overwhelming to just show up new to the world and our possibilities even once a year much less each morning. So — like a plot device that strings together otherwise disparate events and feelings — we sustain a sense of me that might actually be a crowd of related but hardly identical people all crowded into the parade of years and moments that constitute a life.
Institutions do something similar for societies. They are the plot device a people use to maintain coherence across generations — smoothing over the discontinuities, giving strangers a shared script, making it possible to wake up each morning into a world that feels, if not familiar, at least navigable. The Constitution, the local school, the company you work for, the church you attend or don't — these are the narrative scaffolding that lets a society of 335 million people function as though it were one story rather than millions of unrelated ones.
When institutions decay, people are showing up to a world that feels unfamiliar — and it is overwhelming. The anger in the country right now is partly the anger of people whose plot device broke. The story they were using to make sense of their lives — the job, the church, the party, the neighborhood — stopped working, and they're left with the raw, unnarrated experience of change. That's what strongmen exploit. They offer a simpler story.
The promise is seductive. The record is dismal. Consider the Korean peninsula: divided since 1948, sharing race, culture, and language. One side crushed its institutions under dictatorship; the other nurtured them under democracy. Today, the average South Korean produces in a couple of weeks what a North Korean produces in a year. Twenty percent of Russians still lack indoor plumbing; the country has defaulted on every 30-year bond it has ever issued. Strongmen capture attention but destroy prosperity. Strong institutions may be boring, but they are the only way complex societies thrive. Trump is a symptom of this institutional recession — and a warning of what happens when people lose faith in the institutions that have done so much to define this country and enable its progress.
The strongman's simpler story always has the same ending. Given a choice between a strongman atop weak institutions, or modest leaders within reliable, democratic institutions, bet on institutions every time.

JD Vance's Support for Hungarian Leader Orban Backfires

JD Vance went out to Hungary to rally support for Hungary's Orban (who, like Trump, is a friend of Putin's and regularly seeks to undermine the EU).
Orban fell in the polls after Vance's rally for him.

Eventually, affiliation with Trump will be toxic even for American politicians. Or so one might hope.

If You Build It, They ....

"When you build something new like CUDA, if you build it, they might not come. And that's always the cynic's perspective. However the optimist's perspective would say, but if you don't build it, they can't come."

- Jensen Huang, Nvidia co-founder and CEO

Today's Horoscope ... Sort of

If you are an Aries, your Chinese horoscope today ... does not compute. The cultural intersection of these two is null and void. You'll have to find your own way in this world in which cultural norms have given way to some strange and liberating mix of individuality and global possibilities. It's no longer paint by numbers ... it's paint AND numbers.

Three Possible Outcomes of Trump's Madness

Anyone else see three scenarios?

1. Trump's madness takes him - and his staff - down.
2. Trump's madness takes down the GOP - essentially making it a pariah party for a generation.
3. Trump's madness takes down the US, relegating it to a second-rate economy and country for a generation.

And how would you split 100% probability between these three and some other alternative or set of alternatives? It feels to me like the third scenario has a 10 to 20% chance.

MAGA Core Principles

MAGA core principles:
- never vote for women,
- deport brown people,
- drop bombs on Muslims,
- cut subsidies to the poor while enriching the Trump family.

What am I missing?

Travel Notes from 2010 London - What I’ve noticed about England

Twice we walked down from street level to the underground at Covent Garden. As it turns out, it’s 193 steps – the equivalent of a 15-story building. We walked so many steps in a tight circle that it began to feel absurd.

London is Europe’s biggest city, with 6 million people. At any given instant, 11.4 million of them are on busses or subway cars. Brits are, as near as I can tell, chronically discontent, seemingly unhappy where they are and constantly on the move to somewhere else in the city.

The subway trains can be very crowded and along comes another in 3 to 8 minutes – buses run a little farther apart but depending on your destination you might be able to take any of a number of buses, so it would be typical to wait two minutes for your subway in the tube and then wait only 3 or 4 minutes for your bus. And remember – these are double-decker buses. with Brits and tourists stacked on top of each other. Of course if you have 193 steps between the subway and the bus, you might need to add an hour to your travel time even with walls of buses on the street.

I just assumed that Ricky Gervais’s success was at least in part due to his comedic looks. As it turns out, he doesn’t have comedic looks. He’s just British.

Just living in England would be the equivalent of 18 units of history. You can’t escape history any more than you can escape the rain.

The British Library was amazing. We got to see two Bibles from the 300s; the Magna Carta (in various versions); diary entries by Lewis Carroll about meeting Alice and then agreeing to write down the fairy tale (Alice Underground? Or Alice in Elfland?) for her after having told it to her; an untitled song lyric by the irreverent and disenchanted teen John Lennon; a handwritten speech by Freud; and a letter from Darwin apologizing to a religious friend for how upset he was made when reading the draft of his Origin of Species. I was so delighted by the special treasures room that contained all this that I wanted to experience the library more. It turns out, though, that a person needs a reading pass to get into the reading rooms. One can’t just saunter into the racks to see what they have. So, I went into the room where passes are (rather reluctantly as it turns out) granted. What follows is an only slightly exaggerated version of the conversation between me and the man who grants a pass to the reading rooms.

“What do you want to research?”

“I want to go to the social sciences room to read economic books,” I said, pleased that I could think this fast and actually come up with something that struck me as incredibly specific.

“Do you have the title of the work you want to read?”

“What?”

“You’ll have to write down the title you would like to see. And then we’ll think about giving you a reading pass.” With that, he hands me a form to fill out and points me over to their computer terminals linked to their catalog.

“What if I don’t know yet what titles I want to read?”

“You can’t ask for something to read unless you know what it is.”

“Well how would I know what it is if I haven’t yet read it?”

“Don’t be dense.”

Suffice it to say that I did not get into the reading rooms but I have to imagine that it was conversations with British bureaucrats like this that inspired so many of Lewis Carroll’s daft exchanges between Alice and the odd characters she encountered.

Any two items in the British Museum would be enough to make the reputation of a single museum in the States. It’s just an embarrassment of riches – from Rosetta Stone to wonderfully well preserved statutes from 3, 4, and 5 thousand years ago.

I loved Oxford. It’s is wonderfully British. John Locke went to school here, which basically means that if none of the other students learned a thing, whatever the British have invested in Oxford for the last few centuries has more than paid off.

Oxford University owns Oxford Street in London and leases to the many shops along its route (one of best shopping areas). This should mean that Oxford could afford to provide an Oxford-like education to every child north of London.

We stayed in the McDonald Randolph hotel in Oxford. Sandi counted 18 changes in height or direction on the way from reception to our room. It was comical. Imagine that Oxford student Charles Dodgson (as we insiders refer to the man who wrote as Lewis Carroll) had collaborated with the architect for the Winchester Mystery House and you get some idea of its layout.

I have to wonder if the Brits exploration and conquest of the world wasn’t just a search for better-tasting food. It’s not that their food is inadequate. It is, in fact, adequate. Just. But it’s hard to believe that it would hold one’s attention for more than five days, much less five centuries and might be one of the big reasons that they held onto India for so long.

Of course it might just have been the promise of warmer weather that was enough to drive the Brits into ships. It’s wet and cold here. Well, to be fair sometimes it is just cold.

The average Brit seems both shorter and more polite than the average American. Or perhaps they’re just polite to taller Americans.

Our guide around Oxford shared interesting tips like the origin of the term "eaves dropping" (listening to a conversation from an upper story that “dropped” down the eaves) and the fact that there is no difference in wines past the price of £10 because the only purpose of wine is to get a young woman into the arms of a young man or to remind an old man of when he once held a young woman. We subsidized an older man for an hour to opine away as if he were talking back to the TV.

Oxford could be where JK Rowling got the model for Hogwarts. Apparently the Japanese come by the millions to England to pay homage to the other Island Empire and come to Oxford to pay homage to Harry Potter, where scenes from the movie were filmed.

Down the block from our hotel was a thousand year old tower, the oldest building in Oxford. This makes it four times as old as our country, albeit considerably smaller.

It wasn’t just English culture we’ve been exposed to. We grabbed a drink at a little Scottish restaurant - McDonald’s.

We ate a pub where future prime ministers once ate. Or so I assume. The pub was on the river very close to Christ Church, the college at Oxford that’s graduated about a dozen Prime Ministers in the last couple of centuries.

The Five Americas of New Politics for the Next Economy

 American political history looks messy up close. Zoom out and a pattern emerges.

From Jefferson to Lincoln, Democrats dominated — organizing the country around land, expanding the nation's territory threefold, building an economy of farmers and settlers. From Lincoln to FDR, Republicans dominated — organizing around capital, building railroads and factories, transforming raw materials into industrial wealth. From FDR to Reagan, Democrats dominated again — organizing around labor, creating full employment, then expanding who got to participate in the economy through education, civil rights, and inclusion.

In each era, one party identified the defining resource of its time, built institutions to unlock it, and governed for a generation.

 

Since Reagan, neither party has dominated. Power has split, and the focus has shifted from material problems - land, capital, labor - to cultural ones. Government has become less the architect of great national projects and more the arena for tribal conflict.

That pattern is not an accident. It is a consequence of how parties – and Americans – have thought about their economy and progress. A fifth America is possible.

Truly Confusing Basketball Tattoo

Bald ref creates courtside confusion with head-sized basketball tattoo.

President Trump's Bizarre Easter Message 2026

Or as more boring, past presidents have often called out to fellow Americans on this day: "Happy Easter."

How To Cut Your Odds of Dying in the Next Year in Half

"Your odds of dying in the next year are cut in half if you join one new group."

- Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone

Why Are We Going Back to the Moon?

Why are we going back to the moon?

What did they leave up there last time?

When Mental Illness Becomes Policy

If you read this and conclude either,
1. This man is a political genius, or
2. This man is godly,

You may not understand politics, religion, or mental illness.

Open Presence

On your birthday, the world is opened to your presence.

The Consistently Erratic Pattern of Job Gains and Losses During Trump's Second Term

May of 2025 through March 2026 the pattern for job creation literally alternates between positive and negative every month.

The most consistently erratic president has a most consistently erratic pattern of job gains and losses.

John Wick 21

 2053 — John Wick 21. It's just Keanu Reeves in a motorized wheelchair with a Gatling gun. He spins for 45 minutes, continuously firing, achieving his highest body count yet — with mumbled, vague assurances that at least some of them had it coming.

Perhaps.

Post Information Economy Emergent Potential

The emergent properties of 8 billion people collaborating, with millions of technologies potentially coming together in some kind of synthesis, are just so rich in potential.

We were single-celled organisms — and entirely new possibilities emerged when that reality evolved into multicellular life. We were little tribes — and entirely new possibilities emerged with the rise of nation-states. I still don't think we properly appreciate what new realities have yet to unfold from the emergence of the internet, which literally opens up the possibility of collaboration between anyone, anywhere, with anyone else.

Things like nationalism are pushbacks against this move toward global coordination — but that resistance is likely temporary.

The potential here defies any reasonable calculation. It's as if single-celled organisms were trying to predict what multicellular life would become.

Random Walk Theory Paradox

Abendroth: If we take the random walk theory seriously, we can't take it seriously.
Me: What?
Abendroth:. The idea behind the the random walk theory is that everything we know about a stock is reflected in today's price ... so the only thing that can change that price is new information which we don't yet know. Stocks will randomly move - or walk - up or down, by a lot or by a little, based only on that new information.
Me: So you're saying that even conspiracy theories are as effective as financial analysis?
Abendroth: No. I'm saying that in finance, they are all conspiracy theories. Even the random walk theory.
After a long pause.
Me: So you're saying that the random walk theory could be true if it is false but must be false if it is true?
Abendroth: Yes.
Me: Because the random walk theory suggests that any theories about the stock market - including the random walk theory - are nonsensical?
Abendroth: Yes.
Me: That sort of makes sense.
Abendroth: But mostly doesn't.
Me: Did Lewis Carrol manage an investment fund?
Abendroth: Why do you think the Rabbit was so smartly dressed? He was the fund manager.

Americans Do Not Like Trump

The five states that have a net positive approval of Trump have a population of 12.5 million. (Wyoming, Idaho, West Virginia, North Dakota, and Tennessee.)

The two states where his net approval is zero (Oklahoma and Montana) have a population of 5.2 million.

The states in which Trump's net approval rating is negative - reaching as high as negative 44% - have a population of about 324 million, representing nearly 95% of the population of these United States.

Approval levels per The Economist

Americans do not like Trump.

The Deep Roots of Wealth Distribution

There's a play area at SeaWorld — bouncy surface, maybe 50 oversized stuffed shapes scattered around. The kids can't quite figure out what they're for, so rather than build rooms or towers, they just hoard. Forty kids, 50 objects — and four of them have claimed 45.

If you had no economic data but had merely observed this dynamic, you might just be able to predict wealth distribution in these United States.

Favorite William James' Quotes

Williams James (1842 - 1910) is one of my favorite Americans. Here are some quotes from him that might give you some idea of why.

“My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

“Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.”

"The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will."

“The world is a pluralism, not a universe.”

"All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits — practical, emotional, and intellectual — systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny."

“If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals.”

“The moral test of a civilization is how it treats its weakest members.”

“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”

“Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”

"The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives."

"The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it."

Economic Market Data for No Kings Protest March 2026

The two most defining markets for how Americans judge any administration are the stock market and labor markets. Not only is Trump engaged in self-enrichment at a scale never before witnessed by any American president but the performance of these two markets is miserable under his presidency.

This first graph shows the average monthly job creation rate for each president since Jimmy Carter. In this you can see that only Trump's previous term and George W. Bush's administration presided over worse job markets.

Stock market performance is - prior to market opening Monday morning 30 March 2026 - the worst of any president since George W. Bush's administration.

Trump's understanding of how the economy works is not just deeply flawed - it is demonstrably flawed. 

Action Figure

As a little boy, he'd dreamed of becoming a superhero but Bobble head Bob's unfortunate condition became the inspiration for a very different kind of action figure.

Baseball is back.

Stock Market Movement

Every stock sale involves one person convinced this is a good time to sell and another convinced this is a good time to buy. Market equilibrium depends not just on differing opinions but perfectly opposing ones.

The NASDAQ is down 6.66% YTD.

Investors agree on the number. They just have very different ideas about what happens next.

The Yin, the Yang, and the Dow.

Dow. Such a precarious index. Just one key stroke away from down.

Victor Hugo on an Idea Whose Time Has Come

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come," 

- French poet and novelist Victor Hugo.

Historian Barbara Fields On Frustration with Congress and Reality

"The criticism of Congress that says, in essence, Congress has a way of making situations complicated, of making it harder to do things of-- of making it impossible to move in a streamlined fashion. This is a way of saying that democracy is a pain in the neck, which, of course, it is. And that style of criticism of Congress is not so much a criticism of the individuals who are there now, many of whom deserve even more criticism than they have received so much as it is a criticism of the whole idea of a government by as well as for the people. And that is a criticism of democracy. I wonder whether the ideal of democracy lives in a real sense in our country today."

- Historian Barbara Fields from Columbia University in Ken Burns' documentary, Congress

Dictatorship remains alluring even to people who should know better because it is so much less complicated than democracy — with all its debates and divisions. But reality, too, is complicated. The desire for a strong leader stems from fantasizing that reality could be as simple as our opinions of it. Democracy is messy, contentious, and frustrating in no small part because reality is.

One Way Jensen Huang's Token Economy Will Accelerate the Emergence of the Entrepreneurial Economy

Jensen Huang predicts that his employees will have a salary (e.g., $300k) and a budget for tokens (e.g., $150k). These tokens will be used at the employees discretion to create programs, machines, processes and what - in my mind - is essentially a business.

At that point, on a scale from 1 to 10 where a 1 is an employee filling a clearly defined role and a 10 is an entrepreneur who might get financing from elsewhere but is launching a business ... we are entering a world in which the 1 to 10 score for the typical "employee" is steadily moving from 1 to 10 on the scale. Essentially morphing into a network of entrepreneurs rather than a pool of employees.

What Huang is describing dissolves one of the most fundamental distinctions in economic history — the one between labor and capital. The employee has always sold time and skill. The entrepreneur has always deployed capital to organize resources toward an opportunity. Those were different roles, different risk profiles, different relationships to the organization.

The token budget changes that equation structurally. The employee is no longer just selling time — they're deploying capital, making allocation decisions, building things that have a life beyond their individual effort. The line between "I work here" and "I'm building something here" starts to blur and then disappear.

The movement is unlikely to be gradual — it's likely to feel slow and then sudden, the way most threshold shifts do. A few early adopters figure out how to use token budgets entrepreneurially, produce dramatically outsized results, and then the organizational norm shifts rapidly toward expecting that. The employee who treats their token budget like an expense account rather than a venture fund will look as anachronistic as the secretary who refused to learn the word processor.

This will become a popular mechanism by which the entrepreneurial economy becomes universal rather than exceptional. Entrepreneurship stops being a personality type or a risk tolerance and becomes a basic competency — the way literacy did, the way numeracy did.

Which means the institution that figures out how to cultivate entrepreneurial judgment at scale — not just tolerate it in outliers — becomes the dominant institution of the next economy.

Huey Long - Smartest Lunatic Ever

When a fellow congressman told Louisianan Huey Long "You are the smartest lunatic I have ever seen in my whole life," Long took it as a compliment. Arthur Schlesinger said of Long, "He was a comedian, of sorts, but a comedian of sinister purposes."

From Ken Burns documentary on Huey Long.

Money Saving Tip

Here's a money-saving tip. Next time you see an ad for an enticing product, just re-enact the ad. Skip the product altogether and go straight for the joy the product delivers.

"Should we go shopping?"
"No. Just smile more."

The Barber's Poll

Talked to a friend of mine who is a barber and asked him what was the topic of conversation of late. He's a very easy going guy who doesn't volunteer his opinions much but is instead more inclined to listen.

He offered two things he's hearing about frequently. The Iranian war. Apparently it makes no sense to anyone who mentions it. And the job market. People cannot find work.

Not exactly the equivalent of a poll but ... it is something. And makes me think that perhaps there should be an informal poll taken of barbers and manicurists to get their sense of what is on Americans' minds.

The Rise and Fall of Civilizations

The most dangerous internal contradiction any civilization can have isn't inequality or political conflict per se — it's the loss of the capacity to imagine and attempt its own transformation.

There is a crucial tension between learning how to live life as past generations have and learning to imagine life as only future generations can live it.

Tired, Wired

Tired: telephone.

Wired: teleporter.

Stock Market Performance Compared

Hmmm.

Jensen Huang's Token Economy and Possible Consequences

Jensen Huang - founder and CEO of Nvidia - has been speaking passionately about the token economy. He sees AI as fundamental to the future economy. Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world, in history. Just so you know where I'm coming from, I think Nvidia's value is going to rise dramatically over the next 5 years. One way to think of the token economy is this.

From Request to Token to Output

A user types a prompt. That text is broken into tokens — roughly, fragments of words — and fed into a model. The model, which is essentially a vast map of statistical relationships built from training data, predicts the next most likely token, then the next, then the next, until it produces a complete response. Nvidia's GPUs are the engines that make this prediction process fast enough to be useful at scale. This is what Huang means by the token economy — every inference (every AI response to every request) is a stream of tokens, and the world is generating an almost incomprehensible number of them.

The Broader Economic Flow

Perceived demand: A customer wants something — a product, an answer, a service, a piece of code, a diagnosis.
AI as coordinator: Rather than a human routing that request through an organization, AI interprets it, matches it to available resources, capacity, inventory, or knowledge, and either fulfills it directly or orchestrates the humans and systems that will.
Production or retrieval: AI either generates the output itself (a document, an image, an analysis) or directs physical or human systems to produce it.
Delivery and feedback: The customer receives and responds; AI captures that signal and refines future responses.

Where precisely does AI fit?
Everywhere in that chain except the underlying human desire that starts it and the physical reality that ends it. The want is still human. The product — a meal, a drug, a manufactured part — still has to exist in the world. But everything in between — interpretation, routing, coordination, generation, quality checking, personalization — is increasingly where AI lives.
Huang's insight is that this middle layer, which used to be mostly human labor and organizational overhead, is becoming a token stream. And Nvidia sells the engines that run it.

The human layer: Perceived desire on one end, satisfied (or disappointed) desire on the other. This is where meaning lives. A person wants something; a person receives something; a person feels the gap or the fulfillment. Irreducibly human.

The coordination layer: Everything in between. Interpretation, routing, production, delivery, feedback. This is the token economy — the vast, accelerating machinery of turning want into have. AI doesn't create desire and doesn't feel satisfaction. It lives entirely in this middle space, and it is transforming that space almost beyond recognition.

This framing implicitly raises a key question about AI's limits: it can compress and optimize the coordination layer almost without bound, but it cannot manufacture desire at one end or genuine satisfaction at the other. Those remain stubbornly, essentially human.

Which may be why the most enduring economic question in an AI-saturated world isn't about efficiency — it's about what people will actually want when the cost of coordination approaches zero.

So where does desire - the catalyst for all this - originate?

Advertising and marketing have always been in the business of manufacturing or shaping desire — making you want something you didn't know you wanted, or want it more urgently than you otherwise would have. AI doesn't invent that dynamic, but it could perfect it in ways that are qualitatively different from a Super Bowl ad or even targeted Facebook posts.

The concerning version: AI that knows you well enough — from your behavior, your language, your rhythms — to identify latent desires before you've consciously formed them, nudge them into felt wants, coordinate production to meet them, deliver them, and close the loop. All without meaningful human involvement at any stage.

At that point the two bookends to this process — perceived desire and realized desire — are no longer quite as "irreducibly human" one might suspect. They're still experienced by humans, but they may be increasingly manufactured and managed by AI.

Which raises a question that is less economic than philosophical: if the desire was seeded, the product generated, and the satisfaction engineered — what exactly was the human contributing? The experiencing of it, perhaps. Consciousness as the last remaining irreducibly human input.

That's not entirely new — culture and commerce have always shaped desire. But the scale, precision, and speed AI brings to that shaping is new enough that it might be a difference in kind rather than just degree.

One troubling possibility in this? We're no longer steering this vehicle, this economy ... we're just riding in the Ferris Wheel of desire and desire fulfillment. This has the potential to move us from life as a Jungian search for meaning into a life of Skinner's stimulus and response.

Jung's project was essentially about the human as meaning-maker — the psyche reaching toward individuation, toward a self that is authored rather than merely conditioned. The Ferris Wheel image captures something that feels like movement and experience, even pleasure, but has no destination and no agency. You didn't choose the arc. You're just on it.

Skinner's world, by contrast, has no self to author anything. Just organisms responding to stimuli, reinforced or extinguished by their environment. Desire and satisfaction as a loop, not a journey. Which is precisely what a perfectly optimized AI economy might produce — and, notably, would look like flourishing from the outside. People getting what they want, efficiently, continuously. The metrics would be excellent.

Jensen on the token economy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU_TIDaixqM

Fed Chair Powell Talks to A Startling First in our Nation's History of Job Growth

"Effectively, there is a zero job creation equilibrium in the private sector — which we've never had in our nation's history." — Jerome Powell, today's press conference.

For the first time in 250 years, the number of jobs we need to create to keep up with growth in the labor force is zero. None.

This reflects two converging trends. First, the birthrate and retirement rate have been drawing closer together over the last two decades, shrinking the growth in the number of new workers. Second, between deportations and the slowdown in immigration, the labor force is no longer growing the way it has for 250 years.

Tesla Over-priced, Nvidia Under-priced

Price / Earnings Ratios:
Nvidia 37
Tesla 370

ONE of the initiatives within Nvidia is the application of AI to self-driving cars, and in terms of market potential for Nvidia that is likely much closer to 2% than 20% of their future revenues. And - in my opinion - promises to be more transformative as a technology and how broadly it can be applied. (Tesla is unlikely to license their self-driving technology to other automakers but Nvidia definitely will, could even become the standard across brands ... and of course that would be just one of their many, many products and services.)

Obsessed About Time Travel

He realized, lying on his deathbed, that he had wasted his whole life in the lab chasing a time travel machine. It made him wish he could go back — live his life again, only this time spend less of it obsessing about time travel and more of it traipsing through forests, walking beaches, gazing at art, enjoying friends...

If only he had a —

Believing Impossible Things

"There's no use trying," Alice said; "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Relationships are Like Tennis

Relationships are like tennis. They start with love - love and then people start making mistakes and keeping score.

Time Travel First, Direction Next

Idea for a time travel movie in which the main character wastes all his naturally gifted going forward time trying to devise a means to go backwards in time.

I only wish I had come up with the idea earlier.

Instead of a Fortune Cookie Slip ...

“This is wildly inappropriate! Whose idea of a joke was this?”
He shouted across the restaurant, holding up the offending fortune cookie slip.
“What’s wrong?” the waiter asked, rushing over with genuine concern.
“Who prints this kind of thing on a fortune cookie?”
The waiter snatched the slip, read it, and promptly blushed.
“Oh no. I’m terribly sorry, sir. You’ve received one of our… Freudian slips by mistake.”
"How does this happen?"
"Well, the typical explanation is that it expresses something you scarcely admit to yourself. It may reveal deeper ..."
"I didn't ask for after-dinner therapy!"
"Does this mean that you won't be giving me a tip, sir?"
Diner looks aghast. "You do know this isn't helping."
Waiter reads the Freudian slip again, blushes and says, "Quite right, sir. I can see how my question just made things worse."

The Republican Party's Notions of What Government Can Do

One of many things that baffles me about the Republican Party (and this has been true since at least the time of George W. - possibly Reagan) is that they think it is beyond the scope of government to lift a child out of poverty but that a military strike will transform a foreign autocracy into a modern democracy.

Names for Money

Light economic history.

Dollar is slang for a Federal Reserve Note.
A buck is slang for a dollar.
Moola is slang for a buck.
Filthy lucre is the point at which slang tips into cursing.

A Multi-Faith T-Shirt

It seems possible that a "w/ Jesus in my heart & Buddha in my belly, all I do is sing Allah-la-la-la" t-shirt has global market potential. It is also possible that it would simply be a product that would sell poorly everywhere and not just in one region.

Francis Fukuyama on the War Against Iran

Francis Fukuyama, regarding the Trump administration's war against Iran.

"The Trump administration is behaving as if it were born yesterday, innocent of the accumulated understanding of regional politics, and the sources of earlier American policy failures. Indeed, it has expressed contempt for experts coming out of the administration and has excluded them. ... Instead it has relied on a sycophantic circle of loyalists, none of whom are likely to give the president reliable or realistic assessments about how to move forward. Consequently, the administration is making it up from day to day. ... The world has become a most dangerous place because the world has come under the power of a 10 year old boy."

Stock Market Performance Under Recent Presidents

 Well, at least the MAGA boys can console themselves by the fact that their boy is doing better than Carter or Bush 2.
So far.

Self Publishing in Multiple Locations

The good news is that he finally got his self-help book published.

The bad news is that it was picked up by a fortune cookie company.

His "book" was released in serial form — installments distributed across different restaurants, on different days, in different cities, in no particular order. Fittingly, it was a book on the power of networking, and recipients were encouraged to find each other and piece together what they'd learned. Of course, since those instructions were also released in random installments, it took quite some time before anyone knew this.

He took some comfort in the fact that his latest book had, technically, sold millions of copies. The five-star reviews were cryptic but numerous and often included references to bok choy, noodles and dim sum.

On Mongrels and America

"Since races do not exist - though racism, damnably, does - mongrelism is our common lot. It may be a bitter one, as in the case of Merle Oberon, not altogether benign in such an instance as Queen Victoria, or fecund, as in that of Pushkin, but whether we want to accept it or not, we are all mongrels."

— Angus Calder

Merle Oberon (1911–1979) was a glamorous Hollywood and British film star of the 1930s and 1940s, born in Bombay to a mixed South Asian and European family. In the racial climate of early Hollywood, this background would likely have ended her career before it began.

So her studio invented a different woman entirely. Born in Tasmania, they said. European parents. Clean, simple, acceptable.

She spent decades performing two roles: the characters onscreen, and the invented self she wore everywhere else. Even close colleagues had no idea. The concealment was total, and it held.

Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) is widely considered the founder of modern Russian literature — the writer who gave the Russian language its modern form, who shaped what Russians understood themselves to be. His great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was an African child, likely from what is now Cameroon or Eritrea, brought to Europe as a slave, then adopted and educated at the court of Peter the Great, eventually becoming a military engineer and general. That ancestry runs directly into Pushkin, into the poems and stories that Russia called its own.

The nation's purest cultural touchstone. Mixed all the way down.

This is what Calder is pointing at: the things a culture holds up as essentially, irreducibly itself — its founding literature, its iconic faces — are rarely what they appear to be. Purity is almost always a retrospective fiction. The real thing, the living creative thing, tends to be a collision. Part this, part that, and then whatever strange third thing emerges from the two meeting.

Rock and roll is the American version of this story. It came from the collision of country and blues — the whitest and the blackest streams in American music running together until something neither tradition could have produced on its own came out the other side. Still restless. Still unfinished. Still, somehow, arresting.

That's America, really. Not pure. Never pure. Just the ongoing collision — of people, genes, languages, sounds, habits and tics from everywhere — producing something that keeps mutating and hasn't settled yet.

Calder called it our common lot. It might also be our best quality.

Odd Thoughts on a Sunday

"Figure out who you are and then do it on purpose."
- Dolly Parton

*****
The first priority on your to do list should be doing what no one else can, doing the tasks that uniquely define you - and are uniquely defined by you.

*****

Conspiracy theories are just screenplays that writers couldn't get turned into a movie. They're fiction, but they're not particularly good fiction.

*****

"My job is to, quite simply, create the conditions whereby you [the employee] can do your life's work."
- Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder of NVDIA, now the world's most valuable company

****

Possible futures:
In the future, AI will present all clothing ads to you as you in that clothing. Previously, there was confusion between how good the clothes look on beautiful, handsome models and how good they look on you. Once that confusion is behind us, clothing sales will plummet. One might think this is incentive enough not to run such ads but it'll increase the online population as people choose to stay virtual rather than step outside to be seen as their less than ideal selves.

Labor and Financial Markets Roughly One Year Into Trump's Second Term - Not Impressive

A few items of note.

On a positive note, the job creation rate since Trump took office is still positive. However, in 5 of his first 12 months - including last month - the economy lost jobs. (For comparison, in each of the 48 months of Biden's presidency, the economy created - and never once lost - jobs.)
I'm sure it's all just a coincidence. Or misunderstanding.

The stock market is still up since Trump was elected. In fact, it is doing even better than it did during Bush 2's time in office.

Stochastic Parrots and Politicians - Kensy Cooperrider's Conversation with Melanie Mitchell on How Metaphors for AI Might Shape Its Direction

Just listened to Kensy Cooperrider's latest episode with Dr. Melanie Mitchell on how the metaphors we use for AI shape our understanding, use and development of AI. It's fascinating because it is a reminder that AI is so often discussed as if it were a storm brewing off the coast of Florida and we don't know whether it will become heavy rain or violent waves and wind. And it seems to me that the metaphors we use really can shape how we shape AI itself.One of metaphors that has been often used with AI is "Stochastic Parrots." As Google AI itself describes it, this ... metaphor suggests that while LLMs can create fluent, human-like text, they lack true understanding, reasoning, or consciousness. LLMs are "parroting" patterns found in their training data.

Essentially, this metaphor suggests that AI doesn't really have any model of reality but instead is simply choosing what word to generate next based on probabilities found in texts it has (to use another metaphor) digested.

I think it's fascinating and couldn't help but wonder - for a brief moment - whether Trump - who seems so disconnected from the real world and consequences - might be thought of as a stochastic politician. But I digress.

Kensy's latest episode on "7 metaphors for AI" can be found here:
  https://disi.org/seven-metaphors-for-ai/

If You Could Time Travel Only Once, Would You?

You can time travel either into the past or future by up to 200 years. But you can only travel once. Whenever you land, that is your new time.

Do you do it? And wherever you'd land, which time would you choose?

I would -- as I am nearing the end of life -- choose to travel 100 years into the future. Worst case, I get to see what life is like then and die shortly afterward, as I was going to. Best case, life is enormously better and they chuckle that I was about to die from such trivial causes and extend my life by another 30 years in a new, strange time.

What about you?

Corporate Culture, Conference Rooms, and a Curious Juke Box

My first instinct was to think they'd comically misconstrued the consultant's advice about culture. It took me some time to realize that what they had done might have actually been genius.

No other corporate boardroom had a juke box. When meetings bogged down, when conversations went awry, when tempers flared -- someone would wander over to the juke box, scan the song titles, and pick a song that took them out of themselves for a short while. It changed the mood and then the perspective. And almost inevitably redirected the conversation into a more helpful direction.

Juke box management. Three minutes to change the mood and focus.

The sequel - juice box management - is tailored to preschools.

Optimism as a Sign of Sophistication

One of our goals should be to create a culture in which optimism is seen as a sign of intelligence and sophistication and cynicism is a sign of a failure of imagination and indigestion.

Used to be a Fax Checker

“I used to be a fact checker.”

“Fax checker, Bob. You used to check faxes.”

“That’s what I said!”

“Well, not to be all fact-checky about it, but no. No, you did not.”

"Anyway, as a nation we gave up facts for texts and fancy memes."

“You did, Bob. Some of us only gave up on faxes — and still look longingly for facts.”

Free Will Isn't Free

Once he had been interested in free will. Now it simply felt like too much work.

It was easier to move with the current.

Whatever free will was, it certainly wasn’t free — and at this stage of his life, it cost more than he was willing to pay.

Democracy is Like a Bicycle

“Democracy is like a bicycle. It must move forward in order not to fall over.”
- Edgar Faure, who served twice as Prime Minister of France during the Fourth Republic (1952 and 1955–56)

When societies don't make progress, or that progress isn't widely felt, democracies become vulnerable.

A Call for More Medals at the Olympics

Top 10 in the world but you don't medal. That seems a little stingy, what with all the metals in the world. In addition to gold, silver, and bronze, we could have medals made of lead, copper, and platinum. We have 8 billion people on this planet -- surely we could acknowledge more than the top 3. I would love to hear someone come back excitedly saying, "I tin-foiled at the Olympics!"

What Is Most Systemic is Most Intimate - says Peter Senge

"When we say 'the system,' what we are really talking about is a pattern of interdependency that we enact. There is no system. It's purely an abstraction. But there are patterns of interdependency. And they are created every day. Every hour. Every minute. Through our thinking. Through our actions. So as Carl Rogers said, what is most personal is most universal. What is most systemic is most intimate."
- Peter Senge

Perhaps another way to put this is that we talk about "the system" as if it is some entity "out there." The system has its power because it is actually what defines how we interact, and it is something we've internalized. The system is in us. We sustain it.

Rough and Tumble Fighting in the South

In the antebellum South, a brutal form of combat known as "rough and tumble" fighting, or "gouging," was prevalent. This fighting style aimed to maim opponents, with eye-gouging being a particularly notorious tactic. Combatants often sought to gouge out an opponent's eye, and some even sharpened their teeth to bite off ears, noses, or fingers. Such fights were common in rural Southern areas during the 18th and early 19th centuries.

This culture of violence extended beyond individual brawls. Homicide rates among White Southern males were significantly higher than those of their Northern counterparts, especially in rural regions. Notably, these elevated rates were primarily associated with argument-related homicides, reflecting a societal norm where personal disputes frequently escalated to lethal outcomes. In a region in which 40% of the population was enslaved and had no rights, this sort of dehumanization was hardly anomalous.

On a related note, in this last election Trump won in the former confederacy by 6.9 million votes and lost by 4.7 million votes in the rest of the country.

Prediction: In a Generation Wealth Will Be Another Right of Citizens

Per Google's Gemini Model:

As of early 2026, Norway's sovereign wealth fund—the Government Pension Fund Global—has surpassed a value of $2 trillion. With a population of roughly 5.4 million to 5.6 million people, this translates to approximately $340,000 to $360,000 per citizen. It is the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, investing oil and gas revenues into global stocks, bonds, and real estate.
Purpose: To manage oil revenues for long-term stability and to fund national budgets (healthcare, education, infrastructure).

My prediction? In a generation, wealth will be another right of citizens.

Checks and Balances are Not Working

 

During Biden's administration, Americans agreed 2 to 1 that checks and balances were working.
Now in Trump's administration, Americans agree 2 to 1 that checks and balances are not working. 

Checks and balances seem like a fairly clean definition of the difference between living in a democracy or autocracy. 

Lincoln: Right Makes Might

In a speech about slavery during his 1860 campaign, Lincoln said,"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

It is a dramatic reversal of the common phrase, "might makes right," and it suggests a principle that moral clarity creates political power, not the other way around.

Hitchhiking as Uber 1.0

 Hitchhiking was arguably Uber 1.0 - the beta release before getting strangers to pick you up became an app.

Proposal for a Dog Museum

No paintings on the walls. No hushed docents.

Instead, along the baseboards: scents.

Each accompanied by a tasteful placard:

• Dropped Sausage (One Bite Taken, Floor Contact: 3.2 Seconds)

• Coyote After-Thought

• Eau de French Poodle in Heat.
  (One of six rotational pheromonal exhibits. Please allow your dog to linger only briefly to prevent congestion.)

• Fresh Mud After Rain

• Frightened Human

• Suspicious Delivery Driver

• Pine Tree (Upper Bark, 3½ Feet High)

Interactive wing:
“Fire Hydrant, Urban” — a collaborative installation refreshed hourly.

Gift shop sells nothing visible.

William Deci on Autonomy Supportive Relationships

William Deci made a distinction that has greatly influenced me.

He argues that parents, managers and teachers have three options: control, abandonment or autonomy supportive.

Control is when you dictate, monitor and manage goals and process for your student, child or employee. Abandonment is when you simply say, "Do what you'd like." You give them freedom but not support. Autonomy supportive suggests that you defer rather than dictate goals but then offer support - teaching, processes, resources - that enable them to achieve those goals.
My sense is that every decade there are more parents who are autonomy supportive. The parent who says, "He wants to be a skateboarder. We're doing what we can to get him to tournaments and fund lessons," is considered interesting today whereas in the 50s they'd be considered crazy. (But to be fair to folks in the 50s, skateboards were so bad back then that you'd be right to be outraged.)

Among the many things meant by the popularization of entrepreneurship is this notion of autonomy supportive. Rather than dictate processes, you support their goals. What might this look like?

Ricardo Semler - in Brazil - had a fascinating model in his factory. He would have half a dozen workers side by side, each with their own arrangement. One was getting paid by the hour, another by the month and another by piece. Yet another was working in the same area but paying for access to the machinery and then selling the product on her own. It was not haphazard. Each was working to a negotiated arrangement. The person who wanted less risk also had less opportunity for rewards. The person who could get what she could sell the product for had to - of course - find the market for what she was making. Given where they were in their life, their skills and goals, different arrangements might advantage them differently. As so often is the case, as the employees did better, so did the company. As is so rarely the case, employees had a variety of ways to do better.

If work is going to look more entrepreneurial, by definition it will be less defined by someone else and more defined by the worker. And yet the array of resources, skills, and knowledge needed to be successful in any endeavor suggests that there is a huge gap of possibility in the large gap between a traditional entrepreneur who creates a new business and the employee who simply takes a role in such a business. To allow individuals to slide the scale between conformity and autonomy rather than toggle from 1 to 10 suggests all sorts of intriguing possibilities in the relationship between employer and employee, a redefinition of work. Chief among the shifts is moving into a relationship that lets employees define the goals and then supporting them in that.

There was an old quip that customers of the Model T could have any color they wanted as long as it was black. Ford's dominance of the American auto industry was eclipsed by General Motors who offered a wide array of car models and prices. And colors. The notion that you would accommodate the various desires of various customers was revelatory and also resulted in a huge gain in value.

One of the more stunning stats of the modern world is that Amazon offers more than 300 million different products to America's 300 million people. The notion that those same customers as workers might similarly want variety in their work and how they create value is something we still haven't embraced quite yet. We're still in the "any process or objective you want as long as it is our processes and objectives" stage of employment. My prediction? The shift into autonomy supportive relationships with employees will create even more value than corporations shifting from dictating consumer choices to broadening them.

A Korean Project Managers' Perspective on American and Japanese Employees

The Korean PM I was working with in 2022 worked with Americans and Japanese. I asked him how he would describe the differences. He said (paraphrasing),

"Japanese are very methodical. Very process oriented. All the same.
Americans? You don't know what you are going to get. They are very different."

And that, I thought, is our strength and weakness.

What Mardi Gras Evolved Into

Terms evolve. 

Mardi Gras became Fat Tuesday, which somehow became Taco Tuesday.
From sacred ritual to cultural celebration to something you can sink your teeth into.

2026 - Not Just a Year

I hardly know whether to be comforted or insulted by the fact that the friendly hotel desk clerk clearly found me so old and befuddled that -- out of kindness -- he gave me a room number that just happens to be the year. Greatly lowering the odds that even I will forget it.

Separating Signal From Noise in Quarterly GDP Growth Reports

The rate of GDP growth from a year earlier fell from 2.3 to 2.2%. Which is to say, the rate of growth was essentially unchanged.

People who prefer the continuously compounded rate of quarterly change saw GDP growth fall from 4.3% to 1.4%. This measure assumes the change of the most recent quarter will continue for a full year. (Spoiler alert: it never does.) 

Headlines last quarter that told you the economy grew surprisingly fast and that this quarter tell you the economy has slowed down? Those folks might just be confusing noise for signal.

Why the Supreme Court Striking Down Trump's Tariffs Is Such a Great Thing

You would die within months if you were suddenly alone on a desert island with no one else to rely on. And that is why it is such a great thing that today the Supreme Court struck down Trump's tariffs.

Progress relies on one simple thing: widening the network of people with whom you can trade, invest, borrow, or coordinate in the production of new goods. If you have your family to help run your farm, you're so much better off than if you had to scratch out a living alone. If you can sell your product anywhere around the globe -- even to India where crop failures may have caused a surge in prices for legumes -- you might make more in one year's harvest than farmers a generation ago would have hoped to make in a decade.

Tariffs shrink that network. Widening it is the process that has defined progress for centuries.

Free Will Gives Way to Fee Will

Because of inflation, free will will now come with a small fee. Some have protested that in a market economy it was only a matter of time before free will gave way to fee will but that seems unfair given that free will has - in a sense - been upgraded, coming as it does with so many more options and consequences. Free will is - if you will - far more consequential and so of course cannot continue at its old, low price.

"A Civilization Persisted from Athens to Rome to America

 This is the sort of nonsense you get from people who don't understand progress, evolution or Western Civilization.

A Military Cost to our Failure to Help Ukraine in its Defense Against Russia

We spend on the order of $1 trillion a year on defense-related outlays, and the Department of Defense manages roughly $4 trillion in total assets -- not all weaponry, but a vast base of equipment, systems, facilities, and infrastructure. Much of America's defense posture -- its procurement habits, doctrine, and assumptions -- was shaped by Cold War deterrence, large-platform warfare (ships, aircraft, armor), and the lessons of Korea, Vietnam, and post-Cold War interventions.

Ukraine's rapid evolution of drone warfare suggests we may be living through a shift that could devalue much of that legacy investment. Cheap, fast-iterating drones -- paired with persistent surveillance, precision strike, and electronic warfare -- are rewriting what survives on a modern battlefield. This doesn't make tanks, ships, or aircraft obsolete overnight. But it raises a sobering possibility: some of what we're buying and maintaining may be optimized for a battlefield that is disappearing.

We're spending $1 trillion a year on defense. To save a tens - possibly hundreds - of billions, we're largely on the sideline in Ukraine's defense against the autocrat Putin. I would argue that helping to protect a democracy on the border of NATO from an autocracy is reason enough to get involved in Ukraine's defense, and for that reason alone we should have been more involved over the last 5 years. But even with that aside, we're missing out on a crucial period of battlefield evolution. The question isn't whether we can afford to help Ukraine. It's whether we can afford to sit out the war that's showing us what defense needs to become.

And here's the uncomfortable twist. Our reluctance to help Ukraine more -- sometimes defended on the grounds of cost -- may prove penny-wise and pound-foolish. Ukraine is pioneering the next frontier of battlefield adaptation in real time, under real fire, iterating faster than any peacetime R&D program could. Every lesson learned there is a lesson we don't have to learn the hard way. Underinvesting in that learning loop today could cost us far more later: in rushed procurement, doctrinal scramble, and painful write-downs of systems built for a previous era.

George Washington and the Bank of England

Even through the American Revolution, General Washington - fighting British troops - never sold the stock he held in the Bank of England.

 #PresidentsDay

A Theory About Why Bitcoin Is Falling in Price

Anyone who claims to explain why bitcoin rose so much -- or is falling so much (down 42% in six months) -- should earn your suspicion. That said, I have a theory.

Bitcoin was created in the wake of the Great Recession as a substitute for the dollar and a banking system that had clearly and recently hurt people. Don't trust fiat money? Invest in crypto instead. The price of crypto became, in a way, a proxy for distrust in institutions -- specifically the U.S. government and banking system, but the sentiment was broader than that.

Trump won votes from people who felt the same distrust. He was the one man who would make things happen without the constraints of faltering institutions. The less trust people have in institutions, the more ready they are to explore a relationship with a strongman -- or a cryptocurrency.

So what has happened in this first year of Trump's presidency? People are being reminded that institutional norms actually bring a lot of value and stability. They are starting to question the philosophy of "we don't need no institutions." They may even be coming around to the notion that flawed institutions -- which might be the only kind we ever get -- are better than no institutions.

People are turning back to institutions. And bitcoin, as a measure of distrust in them, is falling in price.

Economist: 61% of Americans Think Country is on the Wrong Track

From the Economist ... "A week into Donald Trump’s second term 37% of Americans thought the country was headed in the right direction, while 50% thought it was on the wrong track. Those numbers are now 31% and 61%, respectively."

Xenophobes Don't Like It When You Call Them ...

He took offense at being called xenophobic. “Don’t call me foreign names,” he said. “Speak American.”

One Way AI May Change Our Mind

We are not becoming a new biological species, but we may be becoming a new kind of mind. The capabilities that matter most—technological progress, supply chains, scientific discovery, finance—already emerge between billions of people. No one understands the whole, yet the whole functions. Dunbar-sized networks were visible; civilization-sized networks are largely invisible. AI may become the first tool that can see these systems in motion—how ideas spread, how technologies recombine, how institutions fail, how cultures polarize—at a scale no human brain can hold. The opportunity is not automated rule. It is aided perception: the ability to model consequences and coordinate action without turning politics into theater or governance into coercion.

Free will matters here because coordination is not the same thing as coercion. Markets coordinate behavior with prices; governments coordinate behavior with laws. Both can become coercive when your options collapse—when “choice” is a story you tell yourself to make necessity tolerable. If AI can see patterns and opportunities beyond any individual’s perception, it could expand freedom by expanding the menu of realistic paths. Not “do this or else,” but “given your skills, interests, and constraints, here are three routes that could plausibly make your life better.” The danger is obvious: the same system that can illuminate options can also become a gatekeeper. The promise is equally obvious: a society that uses intelligence to widen choice rather than narrow it.

Possible Side Effects of Watching Sports

Possible side effects of watching sports include back-to-back pharma ads. I can’t tell you what the drug does, but it may cause dizziness, rash, an inexplicable Hungarian accent, and a persistent belief that you are the starting quarterback.

Household Net Worth by Percentiles

Total Household net worth in the US is $173 trillion. Average net worth is about $1.3 million but that doesn't tell you a lot.

Here is data on household percentiles that tells you a little more about how wealth was distributed in the US in late 2025.

(And to clarify, that "Top 1" isn't percentiles ... it is literally the wealth of the top one American - currently Elon Musk.)

One of Bill Abendroth's Favorite Lines

One of Abendroth's favorite lines from Arrested Development:

Michael: What did your grandfather say?
George Michael: Well... If you leave out the profanity, it's not really a sentence.

How AI's Opinion of Us Could Define Our Future

The quality of our future may depend on whether AI sees us more the way we see dogs and cats or cows and chickens.

America's Complete Rupture in International Relations

If you don't appreciate the magnitude of Trump siding with Putin against NATO - the extent that this represents a complete reversal of who we are as a country - you might safely conclude that you don't really understand the basis for prolonged peace and prosperity for the last 75 years.

Does This Mean Employees Are More Valuable or Less Important?

Kyla Scanlon shares this. Greg Ip in the Wall Street Journal is reporting ...

IBM had 400,000 employees in 1985, the most valuable company in the US.

Now, 40 years later, Nvidia is 20x more valuable and 5x more profitable, but they have roughly 40,000 employees, 1/10th of the size.