The Moon Even Makes The Rocks Beneath Your Feet Rise and Fall

The Moon's orbit creates ocean tides that cause the level of water to rise and fall throughout the day. It also moves land, albeit much less. 

The tidal pull of the Earth on the Moon is so strong that it causes a tidal wave on the ground, a permanent bulge of about 4 meters on the side of the Moon facing the Earth. (The Moon always has the same side facing Earth, so this does not ripple across the surface of the Moon.) The Moon doesn't just cause a bulge in the Earth's oceans as it orbits, it causes a bulge in the Earth's land surface. The solid rocks beneath your feet rise and fall by roughly 30 to 50 centimeters as the Moon passes over head. You don't notice this but sensitive equipment does. 

If that doesn't make the hair stand up at the back of your neck, you may be insensitive to tidal forces.

Trump's Parade of Business Failures Continues

In the last year, the NASDAQ is up 20% and Donald Trump's stock is down 62%.

Happy Labor Day!

May 1 is International Workers' Day, observed as a labor holiday across most of the world.

It traces back to the 1886 strikes for an eight-hour workday in the United States, which culminated in the Haymarket affair in Chicago. Three years later, the international labor movement chose May 1 as the day to commemorate that struggle.

The typical workweek then was 60 to 84 hours. (Where did they find the time to strike, right?)
How much longer did it take to get to a 40-hour workweek? About half a century. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 initially capped the workweek at 44 hours; an amendment two years later brought it down to 40.

So, be patient. Keep pushing for change. Your grandchildren will thank you. Or would, if they did not assume that what they experience as normal had always been the case.

Would Your Grandma Call This Progress?

For lunch we grabbed a sandwich and salad. We paid over $30 and listened to club music while we ate.

On the way out — it was another balmy day — we passed two men in their sixties walking in t-shirts and shorts, as if they had just come from the gym.

I love how much progress we have made over the generations. But I could easily imagine our grandmothers exclaiming over the prices, the music, and grown men dressed in public as if they were schoolboys.

"These prices are outrageous! This music is obnoxious! The way people dress! You poor things, you live in a hellscape."

It would be hard to convince them that this was progress. I am not sure I would even try.

Demis Hassabis on How Far Ahead You Want to Be

"You want to be 5 years ahead of your time, not 50."
- Demis Hassabis,
winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on AlphaFold to predict protein structures and Co-Founder and CEO of Google DeepMind

Fed Chair Powell's legacy may be calmly navigating crazy times

Today was Jerome Powell's last press conference as Fed Chair. He has a few more weeks to serve as chair, after which he'll step down to a place on the Fed committee. No previous Fed Chair has stayed on the committee but Powell feels that until the Trump administration's legal charges against him are completely removed, he is safer on the Federal Reserve Board. Powell - and every reasonable economist - is still arguing for Fed Independence, something Trump is eager to compromise for the sake of short-term economic stimulus (the cost of which would be long-term inflation).

Powell had some weird events to navigate. The most obvious being COVID and then Trump and his tariffs and then of course Trump's attacks on Powell in the form of criminal charges against Powell - another first for any president by Trump and his boys.

Powell's term coincided with the most tumultuous economy in modern times, largely thanks to COVID. The jump in unemployment from 3.5% in February 2020 to 14.7% in April 2020 was a 10.3 percentage point increase in two months, which has no precedent in the seventy-plus years of modern data collection. (The number of the unemployed surged to 23.1 million, a jump of 15.9 million in a month.)

Inflation, too, was wildly volatile - going from roughly 2% to nearly 0% before spiking to 9% during the peak of the COVID stimulus and supply chain shocks. It is still more than 3%. (Had Trump not imposed tariffs and then invaded Iran, inflation would have likely hit 2% or lower by now.)

Finally, here are two tables. One shows numbers at the start and end of his time as Fed Chair. The other shows the dramatic extremes during his time as Fed Chair. It was a crazy time for the economy and Powell likely navigated this as calmly as anyone might have. And that calming influence during serious stress tests might be his most important legacy.

The World Belongs to Optimists

"The world belonged to optimists; pessimists were only spectators."

- The Economist, capturing the philosophy of recently deceased emerging markets investor Mark Mobius

We Stand United King Charles Claims

Headline: "We stand united": King Charles praises US-UK ties in rare address to Congress amid political tensions

Commentary: To be fair, both countries do have the word in their names. 

Roger Bacon and the Worst Kind of Ignorance

The analyst Robert Fox recounts Roger Bacon, writing in 1267, identifying what he considered the worst form of human error: "men blinded in the fog of their errors do not perceive their own ignorance, but with every precaution cloak and defend it so as not to find a remedy."

That is, men ignorant of how ignorant they are fight to protect that ignorance from any perceived attack or real change.

Free Will

 Just published: Free Will Is an Illusion (I had no choice but to write this)

From Impersonal Bureaucracy to the Politics of Theater

FDR-era programs treated coverage as a right of citizenship. You were entitled to help because you were  a citizen, not because you had made yourself a sympathetic character.

GoFundMe operates on a different theory of justice. You receive help if you can make the proper appeal, hold attention, move strangers. If you cannot perform — or will not — you do not get help. The illness is the same. The capacity to win an audience is what changes the outcome.

The Information Economy requires us to perform. To get attention. To provoke emotions. To compete on the stage of politics as theater.

FDR and LBJ's bureaucracies were impersonal but reliable. Those generations did not have to perform. They were citizens, and citizenship was enough. Now you have to be more than a citizen. You have to be a story worth telling.

What Makes Us All the Same? The Fact That We're All Different

Hannah Arendt, on what makes political life possible: "Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live."

Curious claim. What is it that makes us all the same? The fact that we are all different. I'm sure that claim will strike you differently than it did me.

Harry Frankfurt and the Desires We Have (and the Desires That Have Us)

Harry Frankfurt argued that what makes someone a person - rather than just a wanton creature of impulse - is the capacity to have preferences about one’s preferences: to want to be different from how one is.

We don’t just have desires; we have desires about the kind of desires we have and and even about the desires that have us.

A Theory About Conspiracy Theories

Generating and sharing conspiracy theories — like a rain dance — gives people something to do while they wait for systems that are too opaque to understand or petition. And it builds community — even if, in contrast to a rain dance, it does less for fitness and cardio.

Get Rich Quick

Get-rich-quick schemes are structurally similar to get-poor-quick schemes.

The Odds of Fame and Friendship

"Everyone we hear of is famous. Which wildly skews our sense of how probable success actually is. Of the 8 billion people on this planet, 99% are not famous."

"Well, not everyone we hear of is famous. Most are friends."

Pause.

"Well, that wildly skews our sense of how friendly people are. 99.9999% of people don't even know we exist."

The Economist Forecasts Probable Democratic Win of House in 2026 Election

 The Economist’s new statistical forecast of the 2026 Congressional elections gives Democrats a whopping 95% chance of gaining at least the three seats needed to flip the 435-seat lower house. More surprisingly, despite a Senate map that looks nearly impregnable on paper, the model estimates that the party has a 46% probability of taking over the upper chamber as well.

Information More Important Than Government?

Thomas Jefferson deplored "the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed." And yet he believed it was better to have "newspapers without a government" than "a government without newspapers."

Perhaps that's unsurprising from a man whose personal library became the founding collection of the rebuilt Library of Congress. A man of books understood that if you had to choose between information about the world and a government to govern it, information would do more to shape how people actually lived.

A man who deplored the press still trusted it more than he trusted power.

(Quotes from John P. Kaminski's The Quotable Jefferson.)

US GDP and Wealth of Top 0.1%

US GDP last year: $30.5 trillion.

Wealth held by top 0.1%: $24.9 trillion.