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.

Rule of Law - Even Presidents Are Subject to the Law

One of the key things advanced (but not invented) by the American Revolution was this notion of rule of law. Francis Fukuyama defines this as “a set of rules of behavior, reflecting a broad consensus within the society, that is binding on even the most powerful political actors in the society, whether kings, presidents, or prime ministers. If rulers can change the law to suit themselves, the rule of law does not exist, even if those laws are applied uniformly to the rest of society.” The founding fathers did invent the position of president and unlike kings from earlier times, even a president could be arrested in this new democracy.

No Kings Personal Protest

Monday I may wander the streets of San Diego with a "Procrastinators Against Trump!" sign, pioneering the asynchronous protest march.

Immigration OLD, NEW & NEO

OLD 

Leviticus 19:34 "treat the stranger... as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself." 

NEW 

Matt 25:35 "I was a stranger and you welcomed me."

NEO 

Your skin looks brown. Let me put a little ICE on it.

The Way Shohei Ohtani Plays

A post from 2018 that is still true - only more so.

Shohei Ohtani plays baseball as if he's a character in the daydream of some 9 year old who doesn't actually understand what's realistic in baseball.

A Summary of New Politics for the Next Economy

 Five Factors of Production and the Evolution of the American Economy

All economic value comes from some combination of land, capital, labor, culture, and entrepreneurship.

Let’s break it down with a simple example:

• Land: You find, claim, or buy a forest filled with timber. The forest itself, in its raw and natural state, is an example of land, of natural resources.
• Capital: You need tools to harvest the timber. You invest in saws and axes, which don’t directly produce lumber but are essential for the process. This is capital - an investment to enable production.
• Labor: You hire lumberjacks to use the saws and axes to fell the trees and transport the timber out of the forest. Their effort is labor.
• Culture: information and knowledge that drives the actions and interactions of the people in this endeavor. Here, it is less about the information and knowledge that defines a career or a piece of capital than it is the emergent processes that arise from the interaction of the pieces in the endeavor. This is not generally included in the list of factors of production, but the information economy has made this more obvious and its influence more important. It would include everything from techniques the lumberjacks know for felling trees and coordinating their work through agreed upon processes to knowledge about which supplier offers the best saws for the best price.
• Entrepreneurship: You define and manage the process. You buy the land, hire the workers, acquire the tools, shape the culture with a flow of information, skills, and leadership, and you negotiate with sawmills to turn timber into lumber. You take the risks and coordinate all the elements, turning an idea into a viable business. You may make a huge profit. You may take a huge loss. The difference between what society will pay you for lumber and what it costs you to produce it is your profit (or loss).

Entrepreneurs, as distinct from managers, are the initiators. They create new businesses, while managers sustain and optimize them. While the line between the two often blurs, entrepreneurship is typically about creating new systems and companies, and management is about maintaining and improving existing ones.

These elements - land, capital, labor, culture, and entrepreneurship - define all economies. However, different periods of American history – and American politics - have emphasized one factor more than the others. An agricultural economy is most defined by land, an industrial economy most defined by capital, and so on.

As economies become more complex and advanced, so does the factor of production that defines them, the factor that limits progress. These very different economies require very different governments and policies, which gets to the heart of New Politics for the Next Economy. The differences in an economy limited by land vs. one limited by labor is at least as stark as the difference between parenting an infant and a teenager. The policies and politics of these very different economies are so different that we’ve essentially created four separate Americas since Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, each defined to address and overcome the limit of its time.

 

Summary of Five Americas (Four Past and One Future)

 

Period	Economy	Limit to Progress	Transitional President
1801 - 1861	Agricultural	Land	Jefferson

Jefferson and the Limit of Land
Jefferson’s America was an agricultural economy, and its constraint was land. Ninety percent of Americans lived on farms when he took office. His policies and philosophy focused squarely on securing territory so that a growing population of Yeoman farmers could remain independent, virtuous, and free. The Louisiana Purchase alone doubled the nation’s landmass, removing the most obvious bottleneck to expanding the economy and giving Jefferson’s contemporaries a vision of an “empire for liberty.” It is no stretch to say that Jefferson was the president who most clearly defined and pursued policies to overcome the limit of land.

From Jefferson to Lincoln (Land → Capital)
Jefferson’s agrarian republic thrived so long as fertile land could absorb restless ambition. But by the mid-19th century, the frontier was not enough. Or more specifically, the frontier had reached the Pacific Ocean. Railroads, factories, and finance required new ways to mobilize capital, not just settle acreage. Lincoln’s task was to channel private investment and public authority into an industrial system that could unite farms, factories, and markets into a single national economy, transitioning the economy from the zero-sum dynamics of land to the abundance of capital.

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Period	Economy	Limit to Progress	Transitional President
1861 - 1933	Industrial	Capital	Lincoln

 

Lincoln and the Limit of Capital
Lincoln inherited a divided nation and an economy still largely local, fragmented, and cash-poor. The Civil War forced him to tackle the problem of capital head-on: how to finance a war, unify markets, and build a modern industrial nation. His administration created national banks and a uniform currency, issued bonds to mobilize savings, and authorized the first income tax. The Pacific Railway Acts and land-grant colleges tied capital formation to expansion and innovation. In doing so, Lincoln confronted the limit to progress of his era: capital. By making money, credit, and investment more abundant and more reliable, he unleashed a wave of industrial growth that transformed America, shifting the focus of economic growth from more farms to more factories.

 

From Lincoln to FDR (Capital → Labor)
Lincoln’s industrial America unleashed unprecedented growth, but also new dangers: monopolies, financial crashes, regular recessions, and a workforce treated as disposable tools. By the 1930s, the problem was no longer how to build capital, but how to fully employ labor in ways that spread dignity and security. FDR’s New Deal recast government as guarantor of full employment and wages, building institutions to balance the raw power of capital with the needs of millions of workers.

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Period	Economy	Limit to Progress	Transitional President
1933 - 1981	Balanced	Labor	FDR

 

FDR and the Limit of Labor
When Franklin Roosevelt took office, the most pressing problem was not land or capital but labor. One in four workers was unemployed; millions more were underpaid, under protected, or excluded from opportunity. FDR’s genius was pragmatic experimentation: public works programs to create jobs, Social Security to provide security in old age, labor laws to guarantee rights and safety, and public investment to raise productivity. The result was not just a recovery from the Great Depression but the creation of a balanced economy in which labor was fully employed and broadly empowered. By treating labor as the central constraint - and investing in its development, protection, and dignity - Roosevelt helped to create the broad middle class that defined mid-20th-century America and economic growth even more stunning than the transformation following from Lincoln’s capitalism.

From FDR to Reagan (Labor → Culture)
FDR’s balanced economy created the broadest middle class in history, but once mass employment was secured, the next questions became cultural: what to do with rising prosperity, and how to live amid accelerating possibilities. By the late 20th century, knowledge workers and new technologies defined economic winners and losers, while debates over family, sexuality, faith, and freedom defined politics. Reagan embodied this shift, liberating markets on the how to frontier while rallying tradition on the what to frontier — setting the stage for an America divided not just by wealth, but by culture itself.

Period	Economy	Limit to Progress	Transitional President
1981 - 2029	Information	Culture	Reagan

 

Reagan and the Limit of Culture
By the late 20th century, America was no longer constrained by land, capital, or even labor. What had become decisive was culture: knowledge and norms, the twin questions of how to and what to. Christian Smith articulates this definition of culture. “Culture provides descriptive ‘models of’ reality and prescriptive ‘models for’ living in that reality. Culture’s ‘models of’ supply representations of the way things are. Culture’s ‘models for’ prescribe how one should act within those realities. In short, ‘culture’ is learned knowledge about reality and how to live in it.”[1]

The information economy elevated a new meritocracy of engineers, scientists, managers, and lawyers - people whose highly specialized “how to” knowledge commanded soaring incomes and reshaped markets. Knowledge workers. But alongside this economic transformation came a political one, as Americans clashed over the “what to” of life: family structure, gender roles, sexuality, religion, and lifestyle. Reagan embodied this hinge moment. He championed deregulation and tax cuts to liberate individuals and businesses in their pursuit of wealth - a vote of confidence in the how to power of markets. At the same time, he drew on the rising religious right to reinforce traditional answers to the what to of morality and identity.

In this way, Reagan presided over a double divide: an emerging economic split between those who thrived in the new knowledge economy and those left behind, and a cultural split between urban and rural, secular and religious, those with or without a college degree, blue and red, those focused on the how to of culture and those focused on the what to of culture. Politics increasingly became a culture war, fought not only over material interests but over the very definition of the good life. The result was the emergence of two Americas - not born of geography alone, but of diverging models of reality and prescriptions for how one should live within it.

From Reagan to the Entrepreneurial Economy (Culture → Institutions)
Reagan’s market individualism and the culture wars it fueled left America wealthier, but also more fractured. Information multiplied, lifestyles diversified, and politics hardened into battles over identity and values. Amid this abundance of choice and conflict, trust in institutions collapsed. The information economy had shown us how to do more and what we might do, but not how to live together. That breakdown is the real limit we face now.

This information economy made two things possible: the generation, storage and dispersal of more valuable knowledge and information than ever before and the generation and dispersal of more damaging mis- and disinformation than ever before. In an agricultural economy, communities fought land wars; in this information economy, communities fight information wars.
The next economy will turn on entrepreneurship not just in markets, but in the public sphere - the invention and reinvention of institutions that deserve trust, enable belonging, and translate possibility into progress. We’re currently amid an institutional recession, trust in our major institutions having fallen from about half of Americans having a good or great deal of trust in our most defining institutions about the time Reagan came into office to just one quarter of Americans now. Just as Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR reshaped America to overcome the limits of land, capital, and labor, our task is to overcome the limit of exhausted institutions and polarized culture by creating new frameworks for cooperation and flourishing.

Period	Economy	Limit to Progress	Transitional President
2029 – ?	Entrepreneurial	Entrepreneurship	You?

 

You and the Limit of Entrepreneurship

By 2025, cultural war had escalated to the point that the US president who had been put into power by votes from red states was sending military troops into the major cities of blue states. The same president who – in his last weeks in office in 2021 – instigated a literal attack on democracy, the storming of the capitol even as the 2020 election was being finalized by Congress. During that attack, for the first time in history, the confederate flag was carried in the halls of Congress. As Trump’s biographer Michael Wolff points out, Donald Trump’s superpower in a world of limitless information is his ability to seize and hold attention. In our world of abundance, attention is still zero-sum.  Trump has contempt for democratic leaders within the US and around the globe and great admiration for dictators like Putin, Kim, Xi, and Mohammed bin Salman (to whom Trump professed love on a state visit early in his second term).  A vote for a man like Trump who has such strong affection for dictators and so little tolerance for democratic norms is a vote against institutions and two things have happened to put the US into such a precarious position. One, the information economy has made it easier than ever to generate and spread misinformation and disinformation, eroding trust in our institutions. Two, private sector entrepreneurship is rewarded more than it has been at any time in history while public sector entrepreneurship is largely prohibited. Public sector institutions have not kept pace with the private sector. An entrepreneur is to institutions what an inventor is to products or technologies: creating or improving the institutions that define a business or school, government agency or nonprofit. Distrust in our institutions is not all the product of misinformation; public sector institutions are not as responsive to public opinion and desires as are private businesses. We have no tradition of public sector entrepreneurship. What is now needed are public sector leaders who undertake the project of reviving and creating public sector institutions that restore trust in democracy and markets and update Smith and Jefferson’s world defined by ordinary people through market transactions and the ballot box. Progress now is not nearly as much about more resources, more capital, a more educated workforce or more information. It is about more of us developing more ability to create, revive and update institutions so that they become better, evolving tools for us to create value for others and to realize our potential, to find flow and create meaning in a way that revives Jefferson’s promise of this as a country with politics designed for the pursuit of happiness rather than the provocation of anger.

We already know how to turn public science into private products - the iPhone rides on layers of DARPA, NSF, and NIH research. The next economy asks a harder question: can we create public-sector institutions that solve problems or realize potential with the same dynamic venture capital brings to startups? Imagine government as a first customer, small teams funded in stages, real outcome metrics, and the judgement to scale what works and sunset what doesn’t. This book argues we can - and shows how.

The constant through the history of these United States is each generation and community finding their own balance between the interplay of Jefferson’s democracy and Smith’s markets. The point of disruption, the element that changes with each economy and ripples into so much about us, is the factor of production that limits progress. That change has triggered revolution, civil war, and a great depression and now a threat to democratic institutions.

 

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[1] Smith, Christian. Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America (pp. 7-8). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Jensen Huang on Bringing Other Companies Along

"When you look at the computers we make, they are thousands of acres large .... These industries manufacture numbers that when reformulated becomes intelligence. Intelligence manufacturing factories! This new industry manufactures the most valuable thing ever known: intelligence."
"If you have an imagination about the future, it is possible to bring other people along. ... The way we see the world is inclusive and brings other people along."
- Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, the world's most valuable company at $4.6 trillion (Microsoft at $3.9T and Apple at $3.8T are #2 and #3)

Is the Internet Shrinking Your Brain?

I wonder what evolutionary changes will be caused by our growing connection to the internets.
In Kensy Cooperrider's podcast episode “Why did our brains shrink 3000 years ago?” — Many Minds, Feb 2, 2022 - he spoke with guest Jeremy DeSilva from Dartmouth. The episode discusses the late, post-growth shrinkage of ~“a lemon’s” worth of brain volume, and explores possible explanations. (Hold a lemon beside your skull. That's a lot of volume.)

A brain is both incredibly useful and very expensive. Brain cells use more calories than other cells. And the larger the brain, the higher the risk that birth will kill the mother or child. So if it were possible to get by with smaller brains, evolutionary pressures would choose that direction.

DeSilva says there are various theories about why the brain shrunk just 3,000 years ago. One is that society had evolved to the point that one could outsource collective cognition. For me an even more interesting possibility - and in a way related - is that this brain shrinkage coincided with the emergence of reading and writing. One didn't have to hold as much in her head if she could hold it instead in her library.

How will our growing ease of connecting with so much data, so many people, and so many virtual experiences online change our brains? Could it shrink them even further?

Here's the episode:https://disi.org/why-did-our-brains-shrink-3000-years-ago/

Reality TV and Surreal Policies

"So that orange man who played such a powerful executive on TV? What was his catch-phrase?""'You're fired!'"
"Yes! Him. How is job growth under his leadership?"
"The economy has lost jobs in two of the last three months. He may not be creating jobs but he is creating drama."
"Well who could have seen that coming?"
"Umm .... if you watched his show, you literally saw that. Every single week the number of working people went down and the drama increased. Now he's just doing that on a larger stage."
"Wouldn't you have thought that he would have changed the script to something like, 'You're hired!'?"
"Well, he thought about it but decided that would be too boring - bad for ratings. So he's shut down the government but he is building a ballroom."
"Well that seems like a weird priority. What does he need that for?"
"When asked, he just danced around the question."
"Presumably once the ballroom is built ..."
"We will just see more of that. Yes."

Power Over and Power To - The Distinction Between Great and Awful Institutions

I watched a sharp Johnny Harris piece on the LDS Church, and one almost throwaway moment stuck with me: losing temple privileges for a few weeks after “going too far” with his fiancée—embarrassing not because people knew why, but because they could see he’d lost access.

As I get older, I get more sensitive to how institutions at their best give us power to ... amazon lets you quickly get about any product to your door within a day or two (even better, download an entire book within seconds) ... a great university provides you with testable theories about how the world works and how to create a life within it. A great religion simultaneously humbles you by reminding you of how inconsequential you are among 8 billion now and generations before and after while also giving you hope that your life matters.

But institutions can also exercise power over us. Sometimes they use us. The laborers building the Egyptian pyramids. The hopeful housewives trying to build a business through a pyramid scheme. The church member feeling guilty about desire.

Which brings me back to confessions. Expecting young men to confess lust to old men makes about as much sense as old men confessing joint pain to young men - that’s just what bodies do at those stages of life. But of course that arrangement also clearly gives old men more power over young men.

The trick of progress, it seems to me, is to reverse ancient injustices in which individuals were tools of institutions and instead do all that we can to make those institutions tools of individuals.

Interplanetary System - A New Information-scape

Soon I'll be launching something even bigger than www - the worldwide web.

Stay tuned for the ips. - interplanetary system - the information-scape too big for a single planet.

Patch notes: added moons, rings, and meteors.

Falling Off a Cliff with a Blindfold - Job Loss Blackout During Trump's Government Shutdown

The economy is losing jobs but we don't know how many.

Each month the BLS reports the number of jobs lost or gained. ADP is the private sector equivalent - a less accurate number that comes from a smaller sample size generated by a private company. Wednesday they reported that the private sector lost jobs in September.

With the government shutdown, two things have happened. Millions of federal workers are furloughed, have effectively lost their jobs. And the federal government will not be reporting job numbers until the shutdown ends.

The bad news is that Trump and the Republican's policies are already costing us jobs. The worse news is that we are flying blind and that we don't even know how many jobs, how much damage Trump's chaotic policies are doing.

In Trump's final month in office, 3,000 Americans a day were dying from COVID - a 9-11 every day. He ignored this and was focused on overturning the election that he lost.

Now he has regained office and in his first months increased his personal net worth by $3 billion. In every single month of Biden's presidency, the economy created jobs. Within months of taking office, Trump's economy was losing jobs. And now, as it continues to lose jobs while he gains billions, he shuts down the government so that no one can see the official tally of jobs he's losing.

Or as the MAGA boys call it: winning.