Ado

He said "without further ado" and then proceeded with what might better be described as "considerably more elaborate and convoluted ado." There was, in fact, no shortage of ado.

The Odyssey

The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus who was the sole survivor of a ten year voyage that killed off his original crew of 600 through a series of mishaps, tragedies and battles with gods and monsters.

The Odyssey is also one of the country's most popular minivans, a great choice for families.

One can't help but wonder about the personal traumas Honda's marketing team has experienced on family vacations.

California Connected - And Its Economy is Growing Fast

The larger the network you are part of, the more opportunities you have — to buy and sell, work and hire, entertain and be entertained, learn and teach, make friends and fall in love.

Few people move to the big city for the high-rises or the traffic. They move because other people are there. Each new arrival attracts more arrivals, and the possibilities expand with the population — not linearly, but exponentially.

This is true at every scale. The more connections between your brain cells, the better your brain works. The more connections between your household, your community, your state, and the wider world, the better your culture and economy work.

California's economy is larger than all but a handful of national economies. The reason is connection.

The United States is 13% immigrants. California is 26%. Silicon Valley is 39%.

Hollywood creates content the entire world watches. Silicon Valley creates the products and services that connect the world. It is the capital of the world wide web.

Californians are not harder working or smarter than other people. They are more connected. That is why theirs is the largest economy in the United States, and why it is growing faster than comparable advanced nations.

The Freedom 250 Initiative and Its Casual Disregard for Jesus and The Founding Fathers

Per Deep Mind:
"The Freedom 250 initiative and its "Rededicate 250" event, fronted by Pete Hegseth, promote their mission as a "national jubilee of prayer, praise, and thanksgiving" aimed at rededicating the United States as "One Nation under God". The organization, established by the White House, seeks to reframe the nation's 250th anniversary through a focus on Christian nationalism and the ideological assertion that America is an explicitly Christian nation."

I'm not suggesting that these people would crucify Jesus. I would suggest that they would deport him and denounce his socialist nonsense like the statement that "It will be as hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as it is for camel to pass through the eye of a needle."

And of course the founding fathers made explicit that they - unlike the royalty of Europe - were not a Christian nation. In the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which was negotiated to secure peace with Muslim Barbary states, the United States explicitly stated it was not a Christian nation. Article 11 declared, "[T]he Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion".

Treaty negotiations were initiated by George Washington and the treaty was approved by the U.S. Senate unanimously and signed by President John Adams in 1797. These were hardly controversial ideas among the founding fathers.

So, other than the fact that Hegseth and company don't know Jesus' teachings and don't know what kind of country the founding fathers created, they really seem to be on to something here.

Simple Mental Health Test

A simple cognitive test in the future will be to share a dozen of Trump's social media posts with someone and ask, "Does this suggest to you a mind in touch with reality?"

Inflation at 7.7% in Latest Report

Inflation report today - continuously compounded rate of change is 7.7%. The target is 2%, so we're a bit high.

 

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL#

A Stunning Rise in Boise's Wealth

I worked with project managers at Micron in Boise. One of the PMs told me that Idaho made three chips: potato, wood, and computer.
I suspect that it's tough to get reservations at the few fancy restaurants in town this week. Their stock has been on quite the run, up more than 75% in the last month. Be an interesting study for someone at Boise State to look at the effect of that level of new wealth in a relatively small city, an increase in market cap of about 240 billion in just a month in a city of just 240,000 - or about a million dollars per person. (I know. A lot of this is held by institutional investors, etc. but still.)

Are We Smart Enough to Use AI?

Demis Hassabis recently mentioned the Jevons paradox, which occurs when increased efficiency in using a resource lowers its cost and then spikes demand enough that total consumption rises rather than falls.The economist William Stanley Jevons described it in 1865 in the context of coal: more efficient steam engines did not reduce British coal consumption but increased it, because the efficiency made coal cheaper and uses for it multiplied.

What happens to demand for intelligence when its cost dramatically drops?

Are we smart enough to navigate this transition? Or, more broadly, to use AI properly? It would be a terrible thing for future generations to say of us: they were not even smart enough to use AI.

And yet.

Does Trump Give His Supporters a Feeling of Superiority?

Is it too simplistic to suggest that Trump supporters prefer a leader who they feel superior to while Trump opponents prefer leaders they think will do a better job than they could?

Ted Turner Died Today

Ted Turner died today, 6 May 2026.His CNN was the first 24 hour news channel, which was quite the cultural shift. Suddenly news was something reported on all the time rather than just at day's end. At that point in history fewer people had any time to make history because they were spending so much time trying to keep up with daily news.

The Turner quotes that have entered general circulation tend to be his more aphoristic ones: "I am too rich to talk to. I'm a billionaire." "Sports is like a war without the killing."

What stuck with me, though, was a story he told about becoming a billionaire and how anticlimactic that was. At first he was excited about it but realized he couldn't exactly call his friends with the news. "Hey! I'm rich! Far richer than you!" So he called his wife who simply said something like, "Good for you. Does this mean you can come home early to help with the kids?"

He gave away a third of his net worth to the United Nations in 1997, before the giving pledge made such philanthropy fashionable. He took the position that money was how the game was scored but not what made life worth living.

Who Is Now Wearing the Crown Jewels Stolen from the Louvre?

Not quite a year ago, thieves broke into the Louvre and stole about $100 million in jewels once owned by the last couple of French queens.

Which billionaire or billionaire's companion is most likely to now wear those?

Bedlam in Southern California

 Today is both Cinco de Mayo and Taco Tuesday.

Madness in Southern California.

Venture Capital or Startup Funding This Century

 Global Startup Funding continues to be a huge force for creating new jobs, technology, markets, businesses and wealth. 

(ZIRP refers to zero interest rate policy, a time when money was so cheap that investments became even more alluring.)

If You Think Trump is Too Old Today - Just Wait Until Tomorrow!

In 2024, Trump supporters incessantly claimed that Joe Biden was too old.

So they then elected a guy who broke Biden's record as oldest president on inauguration day.
Now most Americans believe that Trump is too old.

Maybe, before we get into policy discussions, we could simply walk people through addition.
Biden on inauguration day: 78 years, 2 months.
Trump on inauguration day: 78 years, 7 months.

Given it is a four year term and how math and calendars work, a man who breaks the record for oldest president on inauguration day will break the record for oldest president on every following day of his presidency. (Oldest president on day 100! Oldest president after one year in office! Oldest ....)

We are about 15 months into Trump's 48 month term. If you think that he's not mentally sharp now .... give him another 32 months.

The following poll numbers shared by Heather Cox Richardson

Subcontracting Texting to an Unemployed Fortune Cookie Author

Struggling to keep up, he had turned all his texting over to an unemployed fortune cookie slip author. The good news is that he was then able to keep up with texting chains. The bad news is that his texts were increasingly ambiguous and subject to interpretation. Weirdly, this seemed to provoke the most interesting and revealing text responses he'd ever received. Ambiguity, he'd learned, was an invitation to confessions. When one's own state of mind was increasingly opaque, it seemed to provoke revelations.

Reality as a Stage Set

As a child, J. G. Ballard lived in affluence in an enclave of ex-pats in Shanghai, a world of large villas, tennis courts and country clubs.  When the Japanese invaded, all of that was disrupted and he eventually found himself in an interment camp, his life suddenly impoverished and his safety uncertain. (Among other traumas, he witnessed bored Japanese soldiers cruelly beat a Chinese rickshaw driver to death.)

J. G. Ballard said that one of the things that the end of his childhood taught him is that reality is a stage set that can be dismantled at any moment.

Technology and Problems

The performance artist Laurie Anderson has suggested that if you think that technology will solve your problems, you don't understand technology. Or your problems.

Kentucky Derby - Stretching the Limit of Attention Spans

He had an avid but fleeting interest in sports. The Kentucky Derby was out of the question. That race lasts more than two minutes. He preferred the 100-meter sprints, which he watched two or three times a year. He could spare ten seconds. Little more.
He was a busy man, and he admired athletes who didn't drag out their performance.

The Soviet Union on the Eve of the Nazi Invasion

"The Red Army in 1941 was the largest in the world. In tanks it outnumbered and in planes it equaled the the rest of the world's armies put together." 

"For every 100 Russian prisoners, only 3 were to remain alive."

"In just the first 3 months of war with Germany, the Russians lost more than 3 million men."

The World at War Documentary (1973)