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.