Haphazard

"Random? That makes me sound undisciplined. I prefer haphazard. That makes me sound dashing."

His boss continued to stare at him blankly, finally adding, "I hardly think that change in your annual review is going to make a promotion any more likely."
"It's all just a roll of the dice, isn't it Clive?"
"Well, the way you approach it, yes. Yes it is. And again, my name is not Clive."

Investigations of a Metaphysical Detective

Idea for a metaphysical detective show.

Guy investigates various religions to explore how they answer the big questions, the biggest being "How does this change my life?"

Each episode he dives into another faith tradition, embracing their beliefs and practices, congregation and clergy.

One drawback, of course, is that given it takes so long to properly immerse into a particular religion, the show may take a few years to release each episode.

Silicon Valley Isn't Just Further West - It is Further into the Future

In 1849, at the height of the California Gold Rush, eggs that cost pennies elsewhere sold for $1 to $3 apiece in California.

Silicon Valley has always meant higher prices. Years ago, when I traveled to work with clients in the heart of the Valley, I paid at least three times, and sometimes five or six times, what a nearly identical hotel room cost anywhere else in the country. This was during the internet buildout. I remember business trips in those early days spent scrolling through page after page of search results just trying to find a hotel with a vacancy, at any price.

The AI boom is, curiously, yet another California gold rush. About three-quarters of Nvidia employees are reportedly millionaires, and a huge share are worth tens of millions.

Why do Valley prices stay so far above everyone else's? Some are just spikes. Gold Rush eggs didn't stay at $3, and Valley hotel rates fell when the dot-com bubble burst. But I have an odd theory about the rest: Silicon Valley sits closer to the future.

If you had told someone in 1970 that a typical home would someday cost over a million dollars, they'd have dismissed you as speaking nonsense. In Silicon Valley, that day has already come. Time has a way of making outrageous prices seem normal.

Silicon Valley isn't just a place out West. It's a place further into the future, where people are already paying prices that will seem normal nearly everywhere in a decade or three.

Not Knighted!

"I find it hard to believe that he has been knighted. He hardly seems deserving."
"I did not say that he'd been knighted."
"You did! I distinctly heard you say it!"
"No. He'd been ignited. No one knows yet whether it was spontaneous combustion, some wild experiment of his gone wild, or an accident. All we know is that suddenly, mid-lecture, he was engulfed in flames, albeit briefly."

"So you actually said he'd been ignited, not knighted."
"Yes."
"Hmm. Well, I suppose that is a more credible claim."

Replays for RomComs

Do you think that guys would watch more romcoms if they included replays and analysis?

"Look again at this look of disgust that flickered across her face when he mentioned his ex. It is hard to believe that he's an hour into this date and doesn't realize this is a penalty zone."

Even Placebos Have Side Effects

Even placebos have side effects.

Evidence?

Clinical trials. Participants in placebo groups routinely report headaches, fatigue, nausea, dizziness, and other complaints, and a meaningful share drop out of trials citing side effects, despite taking nothing active.

COVID vaccine trials. A 2022 analysis in JAMA Network Open found that roughly three-quarters of the systemic side effects (headache, fatigue) reported after the first dose also showed up in the placebo groups at similar rates.

Statins. In the 2020 SAMSON trial, patients rotated through months on statins, months on placebo, and months on nothing. About 90% of the muscle aches and other symptoms they felt on statins also appeared on placebo.

People on placebos experience real side effects, caused mostly by expectation and misattribution rather than the pill.

You may want to start visualizing yourself as taking a pill you expect will make you more persistent, thoughtful, and kind and then monitor yourself for these side effects. As long as you're going to have imagined side effects, it may as well act more like a side kick who helps you out.

Andy Burnham - UK PM - on Political Turbulence in Britain

"We can't succeed in the eyes of the world if we continue with the levels of political turbulence we have seen in recent times. It is always in my mind that I'm the seventh Prime Minister in ten years."

— Andy Burnham, UK Prime Minister since July 20 of this year

In the UK, a prime minister who loses support can be replaced by their own party mid-term, without waiting for a general election. That's how Britain got seven PMs in a decade.

It's easy to look at that and see British turbulence. But I think the US has had just as much turmoil in popularity and approval. Under a system like the UK's, Trump would likely have faced removal in his first term, and maybe in this one. Biden effectively was removed by his party, just not until the campaign.

American leaders are no better than British ones at keeping public support. They just hold office in a system that lets them stay in power long after Americans have soured on them

Investors Are Discounting Micron About 80%

Micron continues to tell investors that it no longer cyclical in this new, AI-driven market for memory.

In spite of that, Micron's trailing P/E is about two-thirds that of the NASDAQ 100. It's forward P/E is even more dramatically discounted: investors are only paying 20% the forward P/E they are paying on the rest of the NASDAQ.

This with a price of $1,065 after their quarterly earnings announcement in after-hours trading on 30 September 2026. 

AI Emerges As Both Cause and Cure for an Explosion of Information

The emergence of AI has come at a time when we're producing new information and possibilities at a mind boggling pace. This from the New York Times regarding the proliferation of new cancer treatments - a cornucopia of promising possibilities for people that they - and their doctor - could easily miss.

"Doctors say the explosion of new treatments can also be too much to keep up with: The Food and Drug Administration has approved an average of one new cancer treatment a week for the past five years, an exceptional pace." [from The New York Times reporter Gina Kolata.]

We simply can't keep track of - much less assess - the possibilities generated by new R&D in so many fields. Even experts need tools to capture, synthesize and decide to act on new products and standards of care.

Wondering How He Landed in the Dystopian Nonfiction Section

He'd been intrigued by the concept of dystopian nonfiction.

But now that it was regularly showing up in his news feed, he was wondering how to switch it back to the, uh, more traditional and banal form of nonfiction news.

No one would tell him how to change that channel.

Hannah Arendt on the Death of Empathy

"The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism."
- Hannah Arendt

New Politics for the Next Economy in A Single Table

New Politics for the Next Economy - my new book - in a single table.

Imagine Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints applied to the economy of these United States. Imagine that each limit to progress that Americans faced took a half a century or more to overcome, and that the shift to addressing the new limit came in the form of creative destruction that changed our definition of policy and the country. Imagine that you are living - right now - through a shift into the fifth America.

It might look like this.

I was told that the table above looked like AI slop. (And, indeed, I did have AI add the images on the left and bottom even though the table was my construction.) So, for those of you who wanted something less sloppy, here it is.

Google Might Become a Tool for Transforming My Living Room Into the Sistine Chapel

Google AI can now generate images based on whatever prompt you give it. It is impressive.

I'm thinking about getting a projector dedicated to "painting" the ceiling with the great art du jour. It'll be like owning my own Sistine chapel but with a team of artists who update the images whenever I whimsically decide. As if I were a pope but, you know, just with jurisdiction over, uh, my ceiling.

What if Jensen Huang Had the Same P/E and Ownership Share As Elon Musk?

What if Nvidia's Jensen Huang had the same deal as Elon Musk, or if Musk had the same deal as Huang? That is, what if the two men owned the same percentage of the company they founded and those companies had the same P/E ratio? The apples to apples comparison is kind of stunning. 

The inputs

Nvidia earned $192.88B on a ~$5.4T market cap, a trailing P/E of about 28. Tesla sits at 345x  P/E on roughly $4B of earnings. Musk holds ~20% of Tesla and ~38% of SpaceX, which blends to about 30.6% weighted by value. Huang holds roughly 3.5% of Nvidia.

Extreme A — everyone gets Musk's ratios

Musk is already there, so he's unchanged at about $930 billion. (By Forbes' calculations, Musk has been the world's first trillionaire, a milestone he briefly crossed after SpaceX went public.)

Nvidia at Tesla's 345x: $192.88B × 380.61 = $66 trillion. That single company would exceed the entire US stock market by a comfortable margin and be roughly half of world GDP.

Huang at Musk's 30.6% of that: About $20 trillion. That is, Huang would have a net worth roughly equal to China's GDP, and greater than every country on earth except the US.

Extreme B — everyone gets Huang's ratios

Huang is already there, so he's unchanged at roughly $190 billion.

Tesla at 27.5x P/E: about $110B. SpaceX has no earnings, so using Nvidia's price-to-sales of 17.4x on $23B revenue gives about $400B. Combined, Elon's two companies would be valued at roughly $510B if they were priced relative to sales or earnings at similar level as Nvidia.

Musk at Huang's 3.5%: $18 billion.

	Musk	Huang
Musk's rules	$930B	$22.5T
Huang's rules	$18B	$190B
Actual today	~$930B	~$190B

The punchline

Huang wins both extremes. Under Musk's generous rules he's worth 24 times Musk. Under his own stingy rules he's still worth more than ten times Musk. There is no symmetric treatment — same multiple, same ownership share — under which Musk comes out ahead.

Which means Musk's position as the world's wealthiest person doesn't survive equal treatment in either direction. It exists entirely because the two men are being scored by different rules simultaneously: Musk gets a triple-digit multiple on negligible earnings and a thirty-percent ownership stake, while Huang gets a twenty-seven-times multiple on colossal earnings and a three-percent stake. Take either advantage away and the ranking inverts. Take both and it inverts by an order of magnitude.

I recently heard a couple of guys who short stocks on Steve Eisman's podcast. Eisman asked them about their experience at shorting Tesla, which seemed to them clearly overvalued. The one guy quipped, "We learned that you never short a cult." It is, indeed, a curious set of beliefs that sustain Elon's net worth. 

Little Known Fact About Yale

Little known fact: Yale was originally called Y'all. Then they got all fancy and became exclusive.

How AI Could Affect the Election This November

I'm optimistic about how AI might change voting.

Roughly a third of Americans identify as Democrats and a third as Republicans. The remaining third — the independents who decide elections — have the most to gain from AI, because they're the ones party labels serve worst.

Google search let you type "November election" and find websites arguing for or against candidates and propositions. Useful, but it amounted to locating advocacy that already existed, written months earlier for someone other than you. More arranged marriage than courtship.

An AI conversation works differently. You can say: "I think wealthier people should pay more in taxes, but I'm unsure about the mechanism in Proposition 40.[California Proposition 40, One-Time Wealth Tax for State-Funded Healthcare, Education, and Food Assistance Programs Initiative, more popularly known as the billionaire tax.]

"What are the pros and cons?" Or: "Are there studies on how a billionaire tax might affect startup activity in California?" You bring your own bundle of values and half-formed theories about how the economy works, and the answers get built around them rather than around a position someone was already selling.

You might come away more committed to the billionaire tax than any group campaigning for it. You might find it violates something you care about and decide you can't support it. Either way, the conclusion is more likely to be yours. (And yes, one is vulnerable to manipulation from AI. The odds of that are never zero but my own experience of exploring AI's ability to parse arguments suggest they are at least as objective as policy wonks and professors - perhaps more so. And their responses - unlike found content on the internet - is a direct response to your specific inquiry. And one is hardly limited to a single AI for such queries.)

The shift is from finding a prerecorded message to having a conversation — one where you're heard before you listen.

If this works, political advertising should lose some of its grip. A voter who can say "this matters more to me than that" is harder to move with thirty seconds of television, and money in politics buys less.

Here's a way to test it: the share of ballots that include votes on propositions.

Down-ballot measures consistently draw fewer votes than races for president, senator, or governor. Propositions are confusing and time-consuming to understand, and voters who don't know how one aligns with their values often skip it rather than guess.

If people find a process that gives them confidence about an obscure measure, that drop-off should shrink. Rising proposition turnout wouldn't prove AI caused it, but it would be the first visible sign that voters have found a new way to decide what they actually want.

College Football 2040s - an Odd Prediction

College football, 2020s:

The transfer portal allows even star players to change teams from season to season.

College football, 2040s:
The transfer portal becomes a live bidding market, allowing even star players to change teams during the game, based on real-time offers from fans.

“Johnson was an Alabama receiver when this drive began, but Ohio State fans have really stepped up.”

Joe Biden: We Know Our Future Is Bound to Yours

Joe Biden, just 3 years ago, speaking from a very different America to the UN.

As president of the United States, I understand the duty my country has to lead in this critical moment; to work with countries in every region linking them in common cause; to join together with partners who share a common vision of the future of the world, where our children do not go hungry and everyone has access quality healthcare, where workers are empowered and our environment is protected, where entrepreneurs and innovators everywhere can access opportunity everywhere, where conflicts are resolved peacefully and countries can chart their own course.

The United States seeks a more secure, more prosperous, more equitable world for all people because we know our future is bound to yours. Let me repeat that again: We know our future is bound to yours.

And no nation can meet the challenges of today alone.

The generations who precede us — preceded us organized this body, the United Nations, and built international financial institutions and multilateral and regional bodies to help take on the challenges of their time.

It isn’t always perfect — it wasn’t always perfect. But working together, the world made some remarkable and undeniable progress that improved the lives of all people.

We avoided the renewal of global conflict while lifting more than 1 billion people — 1 billion people — out of extreme poverty.

We together expanded access to education for millions of children.

We saved tens of millions of lives that would have otherwise have been lost to preventable and treatable diseases like measles, malaria, tuberculosis.

HIV/AIDS infections and deaths plummeted in no small part because of PEPFAR’s work in more than 55 countries, saving more than 25 million lives.

It’s a profound testament to what we can achieve when we act together when we take on tough challenges and an admonition for us to urgently accelerate our progress so that no one is left behind, because too many people are being left behind.

The institutions we built together at the end of the second world war are an enduring bedrock of our progress, and the United States is committed to sustaining them.

And this year, we’re proud to rejoin UNESCO. But we also recognize that to meet the new challenges of our decades-old institutions and approaches, they must be updated to keep pace with the world.

source:
https://china.usembassy-china.org.cn/remarks-by-president-biden-before-the-78th-session-of-the-united-nations-general-assembly-new-york-ny/

Genesis or Exodus

Genesis is a curious name for a car brand. If you're talking about getting somewhere, wouldn't Exodus be a more appropriate name?