Trump Ocean - the man is drowning in hubris

This month, Donald Trump proposed renaming either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean to either "Trump Ocean" or the "Ocean of the Americas" (and also mentioned the "American Ocean"), and he stated that he asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai to update Google Maps with the new name.
And a third of the country still thinks he's great.

Rapid Growth of AI

Anthropic went from roughly $1 billion to $65 billion in run rate in about 18 months. ChatGPT was the fastest-adopted consumer product on record, reaching an estimated 100 million users in about two months.

Nvidia's DSX POD - Radical Acceleration In the Rate of Data Center Creation

Nvidia's Jensen Huang. I don't know any CEO who more consistently identifies and then breaks constraints. It is no coincidence that he's created the world's most valuable company.

This from Yahoo Finance

On October 21, 2026, at its GTC Berlin conference, NVIDIA unveiled DSX POD, a revolutionary modular reference design that packs a complete Vera Rubin AI factory into a structure the size of a standard shipping container. By shifting the complex assembly process to manufacturing facilities, this containerized solution slashes AI data center deployment times at a prepared site from six months to just 14 days.

Zelensky's Grandfather Fought Hitler

Four Jewish brothers went to war against Hitler. Three were killed. The fourth survived, and his grandson, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is the president of Ukraine, now fighting a war against Putin.

The Divergent Paths of Two Donalds

Americans. We're a slow-witted people but not a no-witted people.

Putin's buddy continues to lose support. The good Donald (Duck)'s approval ratings continue to run at about 80%. The bad Donald (Schmuck)'s, less than half that, at 31%.

Yippie A-I

He pronounced it weirdly. Took a beat to realize what he was saying when he drawled, "Yippie A-I," his sarcastic commentary on how the West was won.

Alberta to Remain Canadian - and the perpetual clash of culture and politics

It looks like Alberta will remain part of Canada. The New York Times reports that, "With just over a third of votes counted, 76 percent of voters chose to remain part of Canada with 23 percent seeking another vote."

With family in British Columbia and business travel all over the US, I have come to believe that BC, Washington, Oregon and California likely have more in common than BC and Alberta or California and Texas. Cultural and political maps don't always align, though, and it is one of the biggest reasons politics can be so contentious.

The AI Population is Already as Large as the Human Population - and rapidly growing

The population of AIs was effectively zero as recently as 2020. The number of AI have already grown to about the same population as humans but will rapidly increase from here.

Two Signs that Voting Is Not for You

Trump: "We have 5 states where your child goes off to school as Tim and comes back as Tammy 3 or 4 days later. It's true. And teachers make a decision. 'Goodbye Timmy I love you so much, I'll see you later.' And you say, 'Where's my son? My son is in the hospital.' Can you imagine?"

If you are simple minded enough to believe this, maybe you should just let other Americans vote for you.

In the US, about 4,400 teens and children are killed by gunfire each year. About 35 are killed at school. Just yesterday, in Bend, Oregon, 3 more children were killed at school.

If you are cold hearted enough to think that this is acceptable, maybe you should leave the voting to other Americans.

Data here:
https://everytownresearch.org/maps/gunfire-on-school-grounds/

A Wealth Tax Proposal

A possible wealth tax: for every one million dollars you spend in political contributions, your wealth tax rises another 1%. If you don't spend any money on political contributions, your wealth tax is 0. If you spend, say, $50 million, your wealth tax is 50%.

AI Could Determine Which Party Dominates for the Next Generation

Betting markets give Democrats nearly 2-to-1 odds of winning the presidency in 2028, and then serving from 2029 to 2033.

Between 2029 and 2033, AI is likely to transform the economy.

If AI brings widespread, unprecedented prosperity (some forecasters project GDP growth of 18% a year, nearly 10 times normal), it’s easy to imagine which ever party wins in 2028 dominating politics for a generation.

If AI brings mass job loss (some project unemployment in the teens), even greater extremes of wealth and poverty, and so much disruption that people feel they’re living on an alien planet, it’s easy to imagine voters punishing that party for a generation.

So whoever wins in 2028 is flipping a second coin: whether victory turns out to be a blessing or a curse. It’s a coin flip unlike any in our lifetimes.

Odd Pasta

A simple pronunciation error.

Trying to order pasta al dente, he had instead ordered pasta al Dante.

The lasagna had layers he wished he'd never descended into.

Putin's Puppet

October 19, 2016, in the third and final debate for the 2016 presidential election.

Donald Trump: "...[Putin] has no respect for her. He has no respect for our president. And I'll tell you what: We're in very serious trouble..."
Hillary Clinton: "Well, that's because he'd rather have a puppet as president of the United States."
Donald Trump: "No puppet. No puppet."
Hillary Clinton: "And it's pretty clear..."
Donald Trump: "You're the puppet!"

A Down Day for the World's Wealthiest

Today the 9 richest Americans all saw a dip in net worth, losing a total of $90 billion.

The Evolution of the Trojan Horse

“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” has given way to “Beware of geeks bearing GIFs”: shiny little offerings that lure us into the infinite scroll.

A Curious AI

It was a curious AI. Better able to get your attention than do anything constructive with it.

Directed to learn from reality, it had instead accidentally developed its worldview from reality TV.

It never really offered any useful insights, but it always made you feel as though it was just about to.

Right after these commercials.

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving (and the story of an economic paradigm shift that was catalyst for a move to California)

Mostly, I'm thankful for the Canadian who left her beautiful country to live with me. Thank you Sandi. Sandi is a classic Canadian. Her four grandparents came from four different European countries to meet and marry in Canada.

In the mid-1700s, my ancestors moved from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia, which had just become a British colony. By the late 1800s, Hantsport, Nova Scotia had 32 sea captains with the last name of Davison and John Fox Davison was the Master Shipbuilder in Hantsport. In the last half of the 1800s, a "business trip" lasted a month or even years, depending on whether a ship was simply heading down the coast, across the Atlantic or around the world.

It was a monumental shift in technology that was catalyst for a Davison ancestor leaving Canada for California.

In September 1886, the maritime town of Hantsport, Nova Scotia, ground to a halt. Flags lined the Avon River, brass bands played, and crowds gathered at the foot of Prince Street to witness a historic triumph. Slipping into the waters of the Bay of Fundy was the barque Hamburg, designed and constructed under the management of its Master Shipbuilder, John Fox Davison. Registering at nearly 1,700 tons, the Hamburg was a leviathan—the largest three-masted wooden merchant vessel ever constructed in Canada.

The launch of the Hamburg represented the end of a four-hundred-year-old economic paradigm, though. John Fox had brought the ancient art of wooden shipbuilding to its mathematical and physical limits. Beyond a hull length of roughly 300 feet, organic timber naturally flexes and warps under its own weight; biology had hit a ceiling.

As the Hamburg slipped into the ocean, across the Atlantic, European yards were churning out massive vessels forged from industrial Bessemer steel and powered by coal-fired steam engines. These new steel-hulled ships did not care about wind patterns, could hold twice the cargo, and operated on strict, unyielding calendar schedules. The crossing of the "Sail-Steam Divide" was swift and merciless. A paradigm shift. Within a decade, the macroeconomic reality of steel made a lifetime of elite wooden craftsmanship obsolete. The great shipyard went quiet, and the fortunes anchored to them dissolved. John Fox Davison had built the ultimate monument to a world that history left behind.

John Fox's son Arthur was my great grandpa who left Nova Scotia for California, sailing around the tip of South America in 1881. After 25 years in Nova Scotia, he spent his next 72 in the California redwoods.

Drive

What was admirable: he had a lot of drive.

What was not admirable: he didn't really care who he ran over.

How Did He Die?

Travel is deadly.

That's extreme.
No. Time travel eventually kills us all.

Totemic Energy for Different Times

Traditionally, a lot of college mascots were named after the animals or occupations that defined their regions. Grizzlies. Lumberjacks. Miners.

Still, it was a tad disorienting to watch the San Jose Programmers play the Santa Monica Lapdogs.

The Rise and Fall of Populations

Just as the birthrates of humans is falling, the birthrate of artificial intelligences is exploding.

Tired of waiting for an alien species to arrive by spacecraft, we're downloading them just like we do e-books or songs. By one count, the population of AIs is 3 million. (Specifically, that is the number of publicly available AI models on Hugging Face.) And growing daily.

*no AIs were harmed in the creation of this post.

US Created Half the World's New Millionaires Last Year

From Harper's ....

Estimated number of millionaires created in the United States last year : 441,078
Estimated portion of the world’s new millionaires that this figure represents : 1/2

September 2026 • Source: UBS (Zurich)

Live Streaming Executions

For a time, I would occasionally find myself in a restaurant showing MMA on a big screen. And I remember wondering how it was I landed in the crasser parallel universe that put violence on the big screen rather than nudity. 

Meanwhile, the guy who lives in the White Trash House is going to live stream an execution because cage matches don't feed his appetite for violence quite enough.

One Way We Look Into the Future

We use telescopes to see into the past.

We use financial markets to see into the future.

What People Are Paying to Live in the World's Most Entrepreneurial City

From Harper's Magazine

Minimum number of homes in San Francisco that sold for at least $1 million over the asking price in 2025 : 25

In the first seven months of 2026 : 160

Our Fascination with Sports

We're fascinated with sports in part because they offer a little oasis of clarity.

Decades into your own life, you may still have doubts about whether you're winning or losing.

But you can turn on a game three quarters of the way through and know—in an instant—who's winning.

First Computer

 How old am I?

My first computer had a carriage return lever.

Would You Go for High Score or ...?

Suppose you suddenly learned that you were simply a dollop of consciousness in the midst of a virtual reality game that had, until this moment, seemed entirely real.

Would you suddenly care less - or even more deeply - about who you were, what you felt, what you inspired in others (for better or worse), and the consequences of your life? Er, game.

Would you try for a high score in joy? For yourself and your fellow players?

Or would it suddenly be game over, so to speak?

The Current Gap Between US and Chinese AI

Martin Chorzempa - in a Peterson Institute presentation - reports on the current gap between American and Chinese chips. It is substantial.

Chorzempa reports that Chinese chip production is improving but remains far behind US quantity and quality. Deepseek's Liang Wenfeng reportedly said that the chip gap between US and China is currently "fourfold plus two years." What that means is that it takes four Huawei chips to match one Nvidia chip from two years earlier. (These are leaked remarks reported in July of 2026.)

Further, the US AI global revenue is greater than Chinas. In May of 2026, Anthropic reported $47 billion. In July of 2026, Zhipu reported $1 billion and DeepSeek about half that.

With a MU MU Here, and a GPU There

By far his most sweeping idea was AI-EI-O: artificial intelligence applied to agriculture and farming.

Well Read or Just, Well ...

He claimed to be well read, but occasionally undermined the claim by doing something like quoting Moby Dick. The whale, not the novel.

Cowboys and Cattle from 2100

 Cowboys in the future will use very different technology to move cattle.

The Reminder in Each Nobel Prize

 Nobel Prizes will be announced over the next week. They are such a wonderful reminder that we are so far from exhausting the possibilities of new knowledge. The best chapters of the human story still lie before us.

A Package Deal

“I put the Trump in triumph,” he said proudly.

“And, of course, the I and h.”

“I! Ha! Yes. But h? What’s the h for?”

“Hubris, apparently.”

An Odd Bit of Pandemic Nostalgia

She didn't miss COVID but she did miss some of the norms. Shy, she liked avoiding people as the default. And she always thought she had great eyes but a weak chin; a mask seemed like the perfect aesthetic for such a face, curiously giving her more confidence as she was out and about.

Haphazard

"Random? That makes me sound undisciplined. I prefer haphazard. That makes me sound dashing."

His boss continued to stare at him blankly, finally adding, "I hardly think that change in your annual review is going to make a promotion any more likely."
"It's all just a roll of the dice, isn't it Clive?"
"Well, the way you approach it, yes. Yes it is. And again, my name is not Clive."

Investigations of a Metaphysical Detective

Idea for a metaphysical detective show.

Guy investigates various religions to explore how they answer the big questions, the biggest being "How does this change my life?"

Each episode he dives into another faith tradition, embracing their beliefs and practices, congregation and clergy.

One drawback, of course, is that given it takes so long to properly immerse into a particular religion, the show may take a few years to release each episode.

Silicon Valley Isn't Just Further West - It is Further into the Future

In 1849, at the height of the California Gold Rush, eggs that cost pennies elsewhere sold for $1 to $3 apiece in California.

Silicon Valley has always meant higher prices. Years ago, when I traveled to work with clients in the heart of the Valley, I paid at least three times, and sometimes five or six times, what a nearly identical hotel room cost anywhere else in the country. This was during the internet buildout. I remember business trips in those early days spent scrolling through page after page of search results just trying to find a hotel with a vacancy, at any price.

The AI boom is, curiously, yet another California gold rush. About three-quarters of Nvidia employees are reportedly millionaires, and a huge share are worth tens of millions.

Why do Valley prices stay so far above everyone else's? Some are just spikes. Gold Rush eggs didn't stay at $3, and Valley hotel rates fell when the dot-com bubble burst. But I have an odd theory about the rest: Silicon Valley sits closer to the future.

If you had told someone in 1970 that a typical home would someday cost over a million dollars, they'd have dismissed you as speaking nonsense. In Silicon Valley, that day has already come. Time has a way of making outrageous prices seem normal.

Silicon Valley isn't just a place out West. It's a place further into the future, where people are already paying prices that will seem normal nearly everywhere in a decade or three.

Not Knighted!

"I find it hard to believe that he has been knighted. He hardly seems deserving."
"I did not say that he'd been knighted."
"You did! I distinctly heard you say it!"
"No. He'd been ignited. No one knows yet whether it was spontaneous combustion, some wild experiment of his gone wild, or an accident. All we know is that suddenly, mid-lecture, he was engulfed in flames, albeit briefly."

"So you actually said he'd been ignited, not knighted."
"Yes."
"Hmm. Well, I suppose that is a more credible claim."

Replays for RomComs

Do you think that guys would watch more romcoms if they included replays and analysis?

"Look again at this look of disgust that flickered across her face when he mentioned his ex. It is hard to believe that he's an hour into this date and doesn't realize this is a penalty zone."

Even Placebos Have Side Effects

Even placebos have side effects.

Evidence?

Clinical trials. Participants in placebo groups routinely report headaches, fatigue, nausea, dizziness, and other complaints, and a meaningful share drop out of trials citing side effects, despite taking nothing active.

COVID vaccine trials. A 2022 analysis in JAMA Network Open found that roughly three-quarters of the systemic side effects (headache, fatigue) reported after the first dose also showed up in the placebo groups at similar rates.

Statins. In the 2020 SAMSON trial, patients rotated through months on statins, months on placebo, and months on nothing. About 90% of the muscle aches and other symptoms they felt on statins also appeared on placebo.

People on placebos experience real side effects, caused mostly by expectation and misattribution rather than the pill.

You may want to start visualizing yourself as taking a pill you expect will make you more persistent, thoughtful, and kind and then monitor yourself for these side effects. As long as you're going to have imagined side effects, it may as well act more like a side kick who helps you out.

Andy Burnham - UK PM - on Political Turbulence in Britain

"We can't succeed in the eyes of the world if we continue with the levels of political turbulence we have seen in recent times. It is always in my mind that I'm the seventh Prime Minister in ten years."

— Andy Burnham, UK Prime Minister since July 20 of this year

In the UK, a prime minister who loses support can be replaced by their own party mid-term, without waiting for a general election. That's how Britain got seven PMs in a decade.

It's easy to look at that and see British turbulence. But I think the US has had just as much turmoil in popularity and approval. Under a system like the UK's, Trump would likely have faced removal in his first term, and maybe in this one. Biden effectively was removed by his party, just not until the campaign.

American leaders are no better than British ones at keeping public support. They just hold office in a system that lets them stay in power long after Americans have soured on them