What Mardi Gras Evolved Into

Terms evolve. 

Mardi Gras became Fat Tuesday, which somehow became Taco Tuesday.
From sacred ritual to cultural celebration to something you can sink your teeth into.

2026 - Not Just a Year

I hardly know whether to be comforted or insulted by the fact that the friendly hotel desk clerk clearly found me so old and befuddled that -- out of kindness -- he gave me a room number that just happens to be the year. Greatly lowering the odds that even I will forget it.

Separating Signal From Noise in Quarterly GDP Growth Reports

The rate of GDP growth from a year earlier fell from 2.3 to 2.2%. Which is to say, the rate of growth was essentially unchanged.

People who prefer the continuously compounded rate of quarterly change saw GDP growth fall from 4.3% to 1.4%. This measure assumes the change of the most recent quarter will continue for a full year. (Spoiler alert: it never does.) 

Headlines last quarter that told you the economy grew surprisingly fast and that this quarter tell you the economy has slowed down? Those folks might just be confusing noise for signal.

Why the Supreme Court Striking Down Trump's Tariffs Is Such a Great Thing

You would die within months if you were suddenly alone on a desert island with no one else to rely on. And that is why it is such a great thing that today the Supreme Court struck down Trump's tariffs.

Progress relies on one simple thing: widening the network of people with whom you can trade, invest, borrow, or coordinate in the production of new goods. If you have your family to help run your farm, you're so much better off than if you had to scratch out a living alone. If you can sell your product anywhere around the globe -- even to India where crop failures may have caused a surge in prices for legumes -- you might make more in one year's harvest than farmers a generation ago would have hoped to make in a decade.

Tariffs shrink that network. Widening it is the process that has defined progress for centuries.

Free Will Gives Way to Fee Will

Because of inflation, free will will now come with a small fee. Some have protested that in a market economy it was only a matter of time before free will gave way to fee will but that seems unfair given that free will has - in a sense - been upgraded, coming as it does with so many more options and consequences. Free will is - if you will - far more consequential and so of course cannot continue at its old, low price.

"A Civilization Persisted from Athens to Rome to America

 This is the sort of nonsense you get from people who don't understand progress, evolution or Western Civilization.

A Military Cost to our Failure to Help Ukraine in its Defense Against Russia

We spend on the order of $1 trillion a year on defense-related outlays, and the Department of Defense manages roughly $4 trillion in total assets -- not all weaponry, but a vast base of equipment, systems, facilities, and infrastructure. Much of America's defense posture -- its procurement habits, doctrine, and assumptions -- was shaped by Cold War deterrence, large-platform warfare (ships, aircraft, armor), and the lessons of Korea, Vietnam, and post-Cold War interventions.

Ukraine's rapid evolution of drone warfare suggests we may be living through a shift that could devalue much of that legacy investment. Cheap, fast-iterating drones -- paired with persistent surveillance, precision strike, and electronic warfare -- are rewriting what survives on a modern battlefield. This doesn't make tanks, ships, or aircraft obsolete overnight. But it raises a sobering possibility: some of what we're buying and maintaining may be optimized for a battlefield that is disappearing.

We're spending $1 trillion a year on defense. To save a tens - possibly hundreds - of billions, we're largely on the sideline in Ukraine's defense against the autocrat Putin. I would argue that helping to protect a democracy on the border of NATO from an autocracy is reason enough to get involved in Ukraine's defense, and for that reason alone we should have been more involved over the last 5 years. But even with that aside, we're missing out on a crucial period of battlefield evolution. The question isn't whether we can afford to help Ukraine. It's whether we can afford to sit out the war that's showing us what defense needs to become.

And here's the uncomfortable twist. Our reluctance to help Ukraine more -- sometimes defended on the grounds of cost -- may prove penny-wise and pound-foolish. Ukraine is pioneering the next frontier of battlefield adaptation in real time, under real fire, iterating faster than any peacetime R&D program could. Every lesson learned there is a lesson we don't have to learn the hard way. Underinvesting in that learning loop today could cost us far more later: in rushed procurement, doctrinal scramble, and painful write-downs of systems built for a previous era.

George Washington and the Bank of England

Even through the American Revolution, General Washington - fighting British troops - never sold the stock he held in the Bank of England.

 #PresidentsDay

A Theory About Why Bitcoin Is Falling in Price

Anyone who claims to explain why bitcoin rose so much -- or is falling so much (down 42% in six months) -- should earn your suspicion. That said, I have a theory.

Bitcoin was created in the wake of the Great Recession as a substitute for the dollar and a banking system that had clearly and recently hurt people. Don't trust fiat money? Invest in crypto instead. The price of crypto became, in a way, a proxy for distrust in institutions -- specifically the U.S. government and banking system, but the sentiment was broader than that.

Trump won votes from people who felt the same distrust. He was the one man who would make things happen without the constraints of faltering institutions. The less trust people have in institutions, the more ready they are to explore a relationship with a strongman -- or a cryptocurrency.

So what has happened in this first year of Trump's presidency? People are being reminded that institutional norms actually bring a lot of value and stability. They are starting to question the philosophy of "we don't need no institutions." They may even be coming around to the notion that flawed institutions -- which might be the only kind we ever get -- are better than no institutions.

People are turning back to institutions. And bitcoin, as a measure of distrust in them, is falling in price.

Economist: 61% of Americans Think Country is on the Wrong Track

From the Economist ... "A week into Donald Trump’s second term 37% of Americans thought the country was headed in the right direction, while 50% thought it was on the wrong track. Those numbers are now 31% and 61%, respectively."

Xenophobes Don't Like It When You Call Them ...

He took offense at being called xenophobic. “Don’t call me foreign names,” he said. “Speak American.”

One Way AI May Change Our Mind

We are not becoming a new biological species, but we may be becoming a new kind of mind. The capabilities that matter most—technological progress, supply chains, scientific discovery, finance—already emerge between billions of people. No one understands the whole, yet the whole functions. Dunbar-sized networks were visible; civilization-sized networks are largely invisible. AI may become the first tool that can see these systems in motion—how ideas spread, how technologies recombine, how institutions fail, how cultures polarize—at a scale no human brain can hold. The opportunity is not automated rule. It is aided perception: the ability to model consequences and coordinate action without turning politics into theater or governance into coercion.

Free will matters here because coordination is not the same thing as coercion. Markets coordinate behavior with prices; governments coordinate behavior with laws. Both can become coercive when your options collapse—when “choice” is a story you tell yourself to make necessity tolerable. If AI can see patterns and opportunities beyond any individual’s perception, it could expand freedom by expanding the menu of realistic paths. Not “do this or else,” but “given your skills, interests, and constraints, here are three routes that could plausibly make your life better.” The danger is obvious: the same system that can illuminate options can also become a gatekeeper. The promise is equally obvious: a society that uses intelligence to widen choice rather than narrow it.

Possible Side Effects of Watching Sports

Possible side effects of watching sports include back-to-back pharma ads. I can’t tell you what the drug does, but it may cause dizziness, rash, an inexplicable Hungarian accent, and a persistent belief that you are the starting quarterback.

Household Net Worth by Percentiles

Total Household net worth in the US is $173 trillion. Average net worth is about $1.3 million but that doesn't tell you a lot.

Here is data on household percentiles that tells you a little more about how wealth was distributed in the US in late 2025.

(And to clarify, that "Top 1" isn't percentiles ... it is literally the wealth of the top one American - currently Elon Musk.)

One of Bill Abendroth's Favorite Lines

One of Abendroth's favorite lines from Arrested Development:

Michael: What did your grandfather say?
George Michael: Well... If you leave out the profanity, it's not really a sentence.

How AI's Opinion of Us Could Define Our Future

The quality of our future may depend on whether AI sees us more the way we see dogs and cats or cows and chickens.

America's Complete Rupture in International Relations

If you don't appreciate the magnitude of Trump siding with Putin against NATO - the extent that this represents a complete reversal of who we are as a country - you might safely conclude that you don't really understand the basis for prolonged peace and prosperity for the last 75 years.

Does This Mean Employees Are More Valuable or Less Important?

Kyla Scanlon shares this. Greg Ip in the Wall Street Journal is reporting ...

IBM had 400,000 employees in 1985, the most valuable company in the US.

Now, 40 years later, Nvidia is 20x more valuable and 5x more profitable, but they have roughly 40,000 employees, 1/10th of the size.

Betting on the Return of Jesus

Google AI is sharing this about bets on Jesus' return.

****

Speculators are placing bets on a "Will Jesus return before 2027?" market on the cryptocurrency-based prediction platform Polymarket, with millions of dollars in volume. While the "No" side remains heavily favored, the "Yes" side has seen increased interest and, at times, volatile odds.

Polymarket, a prediction market platform, hosts the, "Will Jesus return before 2027?" bet, which attracted around $3.3 million in total volume as of early 2026.

In early February 2026, odds for a "YES" vote increased, moving to around 4.3 cents (implying a 4.3% probability). Later, speculators were aiming to drive the odds above 5%.

***

My own take is that if Jesus returns it'll be after the ICE agents who arrested and deported him in the first place have been laid off in a flurry of post-xenophobic government budget cuts.

Dow[n] Day at the NASDAQ

 Das Naquery!

2025's Very Bad Job Numbers - 15,000 New Jobs a Year

Job numbers for January were finally released. More importantly, job numbers for last year were revised. The American economy created 181,000 jobs last year - an average of 15,000 per month. Other than the year COVID hit, that's the worst average since the Great Recession.

An Inflection Point for AI

A piece about how AI is rapidly evolving to the point that it will soon do a lot of the work of a lot of knowledge workers.

 
One way to put the punchline, the recommendation from the author of this piece? Learn how to use AI so that you are more likely to find your work enhanced by AI than replaced by AI.

And as if the times are not stressful enough, there is no guarantee that such a strategy will work. Then again, the real world has always offered far more probabilities than promises.

https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening