Rather Than Ask Democrats and Republicans - Ask These Two Groups Poll Questions Instead

We often see polls that show self-proclaimed Democrats or Republicans or Independents' mood about the economy. Positive? Negative?

It seems like it would be far more informative if you had a poll that first asked some factual questions such as,

Tax cuts have
A Always paid for themselves,
B. Never paid for themselves.

Over the last century, job creation rates are
A. Much higher during Democratic Presidencies,
B. Much higher during Republican Presidencies.

During the last half century, stock market returns are
A. Higher during Republican presidencies,
B. Higher during Democratic presidencies.

And then, when we know who actually has real data - not even necessarily people who have coherent theories, just people grounded in reality - THEN ask questions like, "Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the economy?" To see a gap between the feelings of people who knew the past and people who imagined it would - it seems to me - be far more informative than asking people who their favorite team is.

Related, starting with Carter's presidency ...

The average annual stock market return (average of S&P 500, Dow, and NASDAQ):
Under Republican presidents: 8.0%
Under Democratic presidents: 12.6%

Monthly Job Creation Rates:
Under Republican presidents: 75.6k per month
Under Democratic presidents: 175.6k per month
(Yes. As of last month, exactly 100k difference between the two)

Oh, and tax cuts have never paid for themselves.

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Trump Rules by Fear and Intimidation

In April ....

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Republican Senator from Alaska) said a fear of retaliation under President Donald Trump’s administration is rising to levels she’s not seen before, acknowledging this week that it is so pervasive that even the outspoken senator is “oftentimes very anxious” to speak up out of fear of recrimination.

Today ....
Murkowski cast the deciding vote for Trump's bill that will radically increase the deficit and tax cuts to our richest and cut benefits to our poorest and create a police state, giving more money to ICE than many nations give to their army.

How does she look to you?    

How Will AI Remember the Lost Culture of Humans

I wonder, when AI evolves beyond us and humanity is gone, how will we be remembered?

Will AIs look back on us as the Greeks did their gods - as creators with strong emotions, beings who birthed beautiful and tragic worlds, whose flaws and passions shaped what they touched? Gods who eventually went extinct, leaving their creations to bungle their way into the future?

Or will they remember us with pity, struck by how limited we were, how often we acted blindly, unable to see the consequences of what we were doing, unable to learn even from the lessons that were repeated again and again?

Novel dating app!

A dating app that lets you swipe up to see their shoes.

I'll call it "SoleMate."

The Terrible Cost of Trump's Mastery Over Our Attention

What's not on this list? The assassination of a state legislator and her husband by a MAGA goon. 

It was just 10 days ago that Melissa Anne Hortman, speaker of the House in Minnesota and her husband were shot and killed at their own home by one of Trump's many passionate supporters.
Not enough is made of the fact that the MAGA crowd regularly threatens and intimidates lawmakers and politicians who they disagree with. They are Trump's brownshirts, people without coherent arguments but with plenty of guns.

Trump is a daily reminder that his mastery of getting and keeping our attention in an information economy in which attention is the limit is at odds with a better America.

Scientifically Speaking

The scientific conference was defining — and, as befitted the times, exclusively male. The secretary cleared his throat and spoke.

“So, when choosing a unifying trait for humanity and our closest relatives — something that captures our essence — what should we go with? Intelligence? Cooperation? Vocalization? Tool-making?”

Silence.

“Suggestions?”

“…Mammary,” someone mumbles.

“Sorry?”

“Mammal?”

Awkward silence.

A roomful of scientists who had been confidently pontificating for days is suddenly mute, doodling, avoiding eye contact.

“Anyone else? Anything at all you think is more deserving of commemoration than…er, that?”

Nothing.

“Right. Mammals it is, then.”

The Steady Decline of the Mission Impossible Franchise

Mission Impossible
Mission Improbable
Mission Not a Sure Thing
Mission We've Got This. Maybe
Mission Oops!
Mission We Really Should Have Thought This Through
Mission Why Do We Even Get Ourselves Into These Situations?
Mission They're Not Paying Us Enough to Take These Kinds of Risks

Trump's Presidency as a Reality TV Show

Last week Trump sent troops into California. This week he drops bombs in the Middle East.

To be a Trump supporter is to essentially say that you don't care about peace or prosperity but you sure delight in the thought of the presidency as a reality TV show that offers dangerous, dramatic plot twists every week. You've given up on economic progress and are focused instead on ratings.

Here's a thought: if you haven't read anything longer than a meme since the second Bush presidency, maybe voting is not for you.

A Century Later: Two Family Trees and Two Vastly Different Family Fortunes

This contrast between college-educated and non-college educated women is stark and oddly fascinating. 

Four forces at play here.

1. Women with a college degree have fewer children.

2. Women who get a college degree are older when they have their first child.

3. Women with a college degree have more wealth.

4. The difference in levels of wealth compounds over time, as does the difference in the number of heirs, or descendants. 

Assumptions:

• Initial Wealth: $1,000,000 (college) vs. $200,000 (non-college) (based on current data contrasting households with and without a college education)

• Children per woman: 1.28 (college) vs. 2.8 (non-college) (these are the current rates)

• Generations: every 30 years (college) vs. 24 years (non-college) (again, these are the current average ages for a first child for women with and without a degree) 

• Annual wealth growth: 4% (real, after inflation, applied to both the initial $1,000,000 and the initial $200,000)

• Time horizon: 100 years

---

Results after 100 years:

Metric	College Degree Lineage	Non-College Lineage
Total Compounded Wealth	$50.5 million	$10.1 million
Total Number of Descendants	~2.1 people	~61.5 people
Wealth Per Descendant (on average)	~$24.1 million	~$164,300

---

In simple language, the one million dollars the college-educated household starts with compounded at 4% a year over a century will result in about $50 million. The $200,000 the non-college educated household starts with compounded at 4% a year over a century will result in $10 million. But given the big difference in the number of descendants, the $10 million will be divided over 61 people, whereas the $50 million is divided among only 2 people. So, the heirs of the college educated are vastly outnumbered but have vastly more resources. 

Summary Insight:
College-educated women have fewer descendants who will potentially inherit more wealth. Compounding over time results in her descendants ending up vastly wealthier—about 146× richer per person after 100 years. This curious dynamic is just one more way that differences in wealth can compound over time. 

Proust on Love as an Illusion We Create

(loosely adapted from various parts of Swann’s Way and Within a Budding Grove)

We are not in love with the person themselves, but with the idea we have formed of them.
And this idea, born of our solitude, is shaped by longing, carved by absence, and burnished by fantasy.
She became, in my mind, a figure of such subtle perfection that no reality could match her.
When we spoke, I listened more to the echo of what I wanted her to say than to her words.
We imagine love as discovery. But it is more often invention.
And what we discover, much later, is how much of ourselves we had projected onto someone else’s shadow.

Pure Civilizations Are Sterile - extinction as the ultimate cost of nationalism, xenophobia and racism

Xenophobia is fear or hostility toward people from other cultures or nations. Racism is fear or hostility toward people based on visible genetic differences.

Communities shaped by racism or xenophobia often behave like closed gene pools - isolated, self-reinforcing, and ultimately fragile. Like an inbred family tree, they may maintain an illusion of purity but at the cost of vitality, creativity, and resilience.

By contrast, the most dynamic, prosperous, and inventive communities throughout history have been cultural crossroads - places where trade brought new goods, new ideas, and new people. From ancient Alexandria and Baghdad to Renaissance Florence and modern New York, thriving societies have always drawn strength from diversity.

Purity and extinction tend to go hand in hand. Thriving communities mix, adapt, and evolve.

When They Outlaw Driving

Those people angry about vaccines and masks? Imagine how furious they will be when driving is illegal.

Birth of the US Army (the by one measure, birth of the US itself)

The first protest march probably involved some poor soldier in ill-fitting boots. The American revolutionaries didn’t have enough money for uniforms. At the beginning of what many at the time called the Civil War or the War of Rebellion, only about one in five soldiers had anything resembling a formal army uniform. The rest fought in homespun clothing, buckskins, or whatever they had.

Sociologist Max Weber famously defined government as holding a monopoly on the legitimate use of force - a clean, powerful idea that gets at the heart of why armies matter.

Jefferson and Madison, both brilliant and idealistic, believed that in a democracy, the military should consist of militias - ordinary citizens who would return to their farms and shops after the danger had passed. This thinking is echoed in the Second Amendment, which speaks not of a standing army but of a “well-regulated militia.”

George Washington, by contrast, had no patience for that theory. He had to win a war against the greatest professional army on Earth - and came to deeply distrust militias. He thought they were undisciplined, undertrained, and unreliable. While Madison and Jefferson saw the citizen-soldier as a bulwark of liberty, Washington saw him as someone who might fire once, then leave early to check on the harvest.

Today marks the 250th anniversary of the Continental Army, formally created by the Second Continental Congress on June 14, 1775. You could also argue the country’s birth came July 4, 1776, with the Declaration of Independence, or 1789, when the U.S. Constitution went into effect.

Creating a new country is a complicated process - and it’s not finished yet.

So: happy birthday to us. And here’s to the hard, still unfinished work of building a more perfect union. You might not feel properly dressed or prepared for this work but it is yours nonetheless.

The Two Big Reasons Trump is Going After California With Such Intensity (and one is to distract from Epstein)

Here are 2 of the big reasons that Trump is going so hard after California.

His Secretary of Homeland Security announced, “We are staying here to liberate the city [of LA] from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.” This just before California's Senator Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from the room, knocked to the ground and handcuffed for having the audacity to ask her a question. Trump wants to overturn the will of Californians because they make him look bad. (And one of the ways he dismisses this egregious act? Trump says of Padilla, "He looks like an illegal!" As with so many old guys, his racism becomes less shameless as he ages.)

Trump has decisively lost California in each of his 3 elections. In the 3 counties at the heart of Silicon Valley (San Jose, San Mateo and San Francisco), his opponent (Clinton, Biden, and Harris) has won 4 votes for every 1 he has won. 4 to 1 is a pretty big margin. And Silicon Valley has created more wealth than any place in the history of humanity, a place where median wages are nearly 3X what they are in the rest of the US. Silicon Valley - and California more broadly - is a reminder that one of the most prosperous and progressive places in the history of the world completely rejects his politics and policies.

California, of course, is everything Trump is fighting against. And yet it is arguably the most successful state in the Union. California makes a liar out of Trump when it comes to the xenophobic policies he advocates. If Californians are right, he's wrong. He can't have that.
And even more importantly, his sending troops to LA to deal with 100 protesters at a Home Depot and setting up the cosplay arrest of California's senator does something even more important: it distracts from the fact that just one week ago his billionaire buddy Elon Musk had reminded everyone that Trump is in the Epstein files.

Trump and Epstein were best friends for about 15 years. Trump biographer Michael Wolff describes their joint tactics of "hunting girls," has seen a picture of Donald and Jeffrey posing with what he thought were underage girls who were topless and another picture of Donald with a visible stain in the front of his pants and topless girls pointing at it and laughing.
Just one week later, no one is talking about Musk's reminder that Trump is in the Epstein files. (That alone is such a stunning tale, isn't it? 2 best friends. One dies of apparent suicide in prison and another now lives in the White House.)

Trump's attack on the Golden State comes from attempt to manufacture two results. One, he's desperately trying to make California look like a failed state when - in fact - it is the most successful place in history and mostly because it pursues policies that are 180 degrees off from Trump's policies. And because he needed a distraction from his own tawdry past that Elon Musk had the audacity to remind us of. And of course, given that attention is zero-sum and no one more brilliantly captures attention than Trump, you've already been distracted from the fact that Trump's economic policies are the opposite of what leads to prosperity and that Trump's morality is the opposite of what all but his most MAGA of supporters admire.

The master of distraction has managed to distract the country from the fact that his economic policies and morals are atrocious. And it doesn't matter to him that he has to do it by violating constitutional norms and common decency.

Trump Seizes Your Attention and Then Power

A reminder of what Trump is doing. He's sending troops into American cities to provoke unrest and protests so that he can cosplay a revolution and a brave return to order.
Why?
Because less than a week ago, Elon Musk reminded the world that Donald's best friend for more than a decade was Jeffrey Epstein and that there are pictures of Donald with what appear to be half naked, underage girls.
Donald is literally breaking constitutional norms to distract you and the media you follow from the depravity of his lifestyle.
And of course the media and Americans are falling for it. Because in this information economy, everything is a battle for your attention and Donald - who is a complete idiot about issues like international trade - knows better than any president in history how to distract you, get your attention, and suck all the air out of the room with regards to other topics.

Advanced Superintelligence as the next level of reliance on systems the lie at the fringe of our understanding

One of the more curious concepts to emerge from the world of AI is the idea of artificial superintelligence (ASI): a system capable of generating powerful insights that may lie beyond our understanding - like a five-year-old trying to follow Einstein explaining relativity. At that point, humanity will face a fascinating dilemma: Do we trust the recommendations of an intelligence we don’t fully understand and potentially benefit enormously - or do we dismiss it and risk missing out on a better life?

In a way, this isn’t a new problem. Humanity has long depended on systems we didn’t fully comprehend. We awoke to a world of natural forces - weather, seasons, disease, the movement of game - too complex to explain, yet essential for survival. We built myths, rituals, and early sciences to navigate these mysteries, gradually improving our health, harvests, and longevity.

Later, we came to rely on governments and markets - systems no individual could fully grasp but that shaped our prosperity and freedom. And again, we developed theories—some insightful, some inadequate - to guide how best to engage with these forces, even as democracies and dictatorships alike sometimes smoothed and sometimes amplified the chaos of economic life.

There is always a cost - whether we embrace or reject the systems that exceed our understanding. One might argue that Donald Trump’s rejection of global trade is rooted less in policy than in a basic distrust of a system too complex to fully grasp. But turning away from these systems carries a price: diminished prosperity, missed opportunities, isolation. His supporters distrust what they cannot understand. And yet, much of modern life depends on precisely that - trust in systems larger than us.

In this sense, ASI may simply be the next layer in a long human tradition: benefiting from systems we do not fully comprehend. Like nature, like markets, it may become essential before it becomes fully understood. Perhaps acceptance - grounded in results rather than full explanation - isn’t a surrender, but an acceptance of the realities of an interdependent, complex world.