Inflation Reporting Has Lost the Plot

Economic reporting has devolved into the worst kind of inflation coverage — one that sets impossible expectations.

First: Prices are always rising on some things. Out of hundreds of tracked items, you can always find a handful up 5%, 10%, or 15%. That’s not inflation; that’s how markets send signals. When rice price goes up and potatoes go down, consumers buy fewer of one and more of the other, while farmers shift what they plant. Those shifting prices are how markets adapt — not signs of crisis.

Second: You don’t want prices to fall overall. Deflation — a general drop in prices — sounds pleasant but is economically toxic. When people expect prices to keep falling, they delay purchases, businesses lose sales, production slows, and jobs disappear. The goal isn’t falling prices; it’s stable prices — low inflation, around 2%.

So when people complain that prices today are higher than in 2020 or 2015, they’re missing how the economy works. Prices don’t — and shouldn’t — roll back to earlier years. If they did, we’d be in a recession.

Two reminders:

Some prices will always rise — that’s not inflation.

Price levels will never return to the past — that’s stability, not failure

The Importance of Miscalculating How Long a Project Will Take

People often overlook the importance of miscalculation in any worthwhile project.

“We should be able to complete this within a year.”
Four years later:
“We should be able to complete this within a few months.”

When I used to start with new product development teams, I’d sometimes ask, “How long did it take to build the Great Pyramids?”
No one ever knew.

Then I’d tell them, “Exactly. Nobody knows. And it doesn’t matter how long it took. They’re great.”

The point is simple: if you’re doing something that matters, there will come a time when how long it took—two months or two decades—will matter far less than whether it mattered … whether it’s great.

Or, as Shigeru Miyamoto - game director at Nintendo - put it, “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”

During the Shutdown Only 40% of Federal Employees - Including the President and Vice President - Are Getting Paid

Who is still getting paid during the government shutdown

• Members of Congress: 535
• 
  
• President and Vice President: 2
• 
  
• Article III judges (including the 9 Supreme Court Justices): about 870 nationwide

Their pay is constitutionally protected and continues during a shutdown.

Who is not getting paid

• Civilian federal workforce: about 2.29 million total
• 
  
• ~670,000 are furloughed (not working)
• 
  
• ~730,000 are excepted (still working but unpaid until funding returns)
• 
  
• ~890,000 are exempt (their agencies have existing funding, so they continue to be paid)
• 
  
• Military: about 1.3 million active-duty personnel (plus Guard and Reserves).
• Some early paychecks were covered through special measures, but future pay is uncertain if the shutdown continues.

The imbalance

Roughly 1,400 top officials—members of Congress, the President, Vice President, and federal judges—are still getting paid.

Among the civilian workforce, more than 60%—about 1.4 million people—are not.

The remaining ~40% (those in already-funded programs) continue to receive paychecks.

What this means

You’ll see calls for donations to help military families, park rangers, or weather forecasters. But remember: we already pay their wages through taxes. They don’t need charity—they need a government that honors its commitments.

You can’t afford to pay their wages twice—once in taxes and again through donations.
But you can vote for leaders who respect public servants—civilian and military alike—and ensure their work is met with stable paychecks, not political brinkmanship.

I love you too

“I love you too,” she said. Or at least that’s what he thought she said.
Only later did he realize she’d said, “I love you 2.”
And by then, he didn’t even want to know the scale.

LA Dodgers Become First American Team to Clinch World Series on Foreign Soil (The Past is Still Probable )

This World Series was like a coin flipping in slow motion—odds recalculated by the universe after every pitch, every at bat, every inning. For seven games and extra innings the outcome was a shifting probability cloud, collapsing only in the final swing.

Now that it’s over, it will be reported as a certainty.

And that’s one of the problems we have with understanding history: we turn probabilities into fate, forgetting how narrowly could have been might have been a different history.

Tonight the LA Dodgers become the world champs, the first time ever that an American team clinched the World Series on foreign soil.

21st Century Fortunes - Give Away Now, Later, Or Plow Into Foundations?

In her 2019 divorce from Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Scott received about 25% of the couple’s Amazon stake—roughly 4% of Amazon at the time. Since then she’s given away about $16 billion to nonprofits and today is worth ~$36 billion. Had she simply held the original stake and not donated or sold, she'd be worth on the order of $95 billion today.

Here’s the paradox: if she had waited and then decided, right now, to keep $36B, she could in theory give away $60B—far more than the $16B already given. That’s the power of compounding on a large fortune.

So that's an argument for holding onto wealth.

The rebuttal? Good works also compound, just less visibly. Teenagers who got help in 2019 are healthier adults this year; communities strengthened early create more opportunity later. Like private capital, social returns also accumulate.

There is another fascinating question about the incredible fortunes that have been created this century. Will these fortunes simply be passed along to children or will they become financing for great public works through charities?

If more billionaires emulate John D. Rockefeller—who channeled vast wealth into institutions that underwrote breakthroughs like the agricultural research that helped catalyze the Green Revolution—we could see a wave of big-budget nonprofits transforming the world over the next 10–30 years. (When Rockefeller died in 1937, the world population was about 2.3 billion; today it’s about 8 billion—~3.5× —with higher crop yields a key part of how we’ve fed more people. Those higher crop yields were at least partly attributable to research sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.) 

Bill Gates seems to be emulating Rockefeller in a fascinating way: he's essentially become an entrepreneur of social causes, measuring success not by gains in financial capital but by gains in human and social capital. 

The future will in no small part be defined by how these great fortunes of the 21st century are used.

The choice isn’t simply now versus later. It’s how to balance the compounding of capital with the compounding of impact—and how to design philanthropy so that both work in the world’s favor. This feels like a conversation we're not having but that could be so consequential. 

Yesavage's Inexperience Beats Dodgers' Great Experience

The Blue Jays’ starting pitcher, Trey Yesavage, faced an L.A. Dodgers lineup with roughly 11,000 career major-league games of experience between them. Yesavage had pitched in only seven big-league games before—two of them in the postseason.

Yesavage came away with the win tonight, putting the Blue Jays up 3 to 2 games in this 2025 World Series. 

Jefferson's List of Grievances in the Declaration of Independence Sound Like Trump's To Do List

Here, updated to contemporary English, are some of the grievances that Thomas Jefferson wrote against King George III in the Declaration of Independence. It almost sounds like Trump's to do list.

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The current ruler’s record is one of repeated abuses of power, all clearly intended to establish absolute control over us. To make this clear, we present the facts to the world:

He has repeatedly shut down representative governments whenever they challenged his violations of citizens’ rights.

He has tried to block immigration to this country—refusing to allow people to become citizens, preventing newcomers from arriving, and making it harder for ordinary people to settle and build lives here.

He has stationed military forces among us during times of peace without the consent of our elected representatives.

He has attempted to make the military power independent from, and superior to, civilian government.

He has conspired with others to impose laws and authorities on us that violate our constitution and lack our consent—rubber-stamping their fake “laws” to enforce them.

He has allowed armed forces to occupy our communities.

He has cut off trade between us and the rest of the world.

He has ordered people to be taken far away for trial, denying them fair treatment and accusing them of fake crimes.

He has suspended our own legislative bodies, blocking them from meeting and stripping them of their authority.

The Declaration can be found here:
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

Trump's Ballroom Sends a Simple Message

"The 90,000-square-foot ballroom will dwarf the main White House itself, at nearly double the size."
The White House is for governing. The ballroom is for entertaining.

The simple message of Trump's bizarre for so many reasons ballroom? I'm just here to entertain.

Some Americans think we have a wanna be king. I think we have a jester on the throne.

Canadians Take Game One of the World Series

Tonight, Canadians won their first World Series game since 1993—an 11–4 takedown of the Dodgers.

To justify calling it a “World” Series, we allow exactly one foreign country to play. One. That’s the deal.

And what do they do? Win Game 1. Immediately.

Unbelievable. Foreigners.