First Computer

 How old am I?

My first computer had a carriage return lever.

Would You Go for High Score or ...?

Suppose you suddenly learned that you were simply a dollop of consciousness in the midst of a virtual reality game that had, until this moment, seemed entirely real.

Would you suddenly care less - or even more deeply - about who you were, what you felt, what you inspired in others (for better or worse), and the consequences of your life? Er, game.

Would you try for a high score in joy? For yourself and your fellow players?

Or would it suddenly be game over, so to speak?

The Current Gap Between US and Chinese AI

Martin Chorzempa - in a Peterson Institute presentation - reports on the current gap between American and Chinese chips. It is substantial.

Chorzempa reports that Chinese chip production is improving but remains far behind US quantity and quality. Deepseek's Liang Wenfeng reportedly said that the chip gap between US and China is currently "fourfold plus two years." What that means is that it takes four Huawei chips to match one Nvidia chip from two years earlier. (These are leaked remarks reported in July of 2026.)

Further, the US AI global revenue is greater than Chinas. In May of 2026, Anthropic reported $47 billion. In July of 2026, Zhipu reported $1 billion and DeepSeek about half that.

With a MU MU Here, and a GPU There

By far his most sweeping idea was AI-EI-O: artificial intelligence applied to agriculture and farming.

Well Read or Just, Well ...

He claimed to be well read, but occasionally undermined the claim by doing something like quoting Moby Dick. The whale, not the novel.

Cowboys and Cattle from 2100

 Cowboys in the future will use very different technology to move cattle.

The Reminder in Each Nobel Prize

 Nobel Prizes will be announced over the next week. They are such a wonderful reminder that we are so far from exhausting the possibilities of new knowledge. The best chapters of the human story still lie before us.

A Package Deal

“I put the Trump in triumph,” he said proudly.

“And, of course, the I and h.”

“I! Ha! Yes. But h? What’s the h for?”

“Hubris, apparently.”

An Odd Bit of Pandemic Nostalgia

She didn't miss COVID but she did miss some of the norms. Shy, she liked avoiding people as the default. And she always thought she had great eyes but a weak chin; a mask seemed like the perfect aesthetic for such a face, curiously giving her more confidence as she was out and about.

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.