So Many Broken Egg Shells - And Yet

Lenin - and others - had famously said that you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Many have since mocked the phrase, looking back at the massive death tolls and economic failures of the 20th century totalitarian states, pointing out that there were piles of broken egg shells and yet no one got to taste any omelets. "Lots of broken eggs, no omelets."

[Another insight shared by Yale historian Marci Shore]

How Decision Fatigue Makes Us More Susceptible to Strongmen

Decision fatigue in the modern world may be one reason people find strongmen appealing. Here, finally, is someone who will simply decide for you.

And you don’t have to decide whether this makes sense. I assure you that it does.
Just accept it.

The Economist Reports that Trump's Popularity Has Fallen to a Record Low

If you still like Donald, you might be the odd duck.

Profit Per Employee for the 5 Most Valuable Companies

The five most valuable publicly traded companies vary quite a bit in the measure of profit per employee.

Profit Per Employee 

• NVIDIA: ~$2.02M – $2.86M per employee
• Apple: ~$400K – $600K+ per employee
• Alphabet (Google): ~$300K – $500K per employee
• Microsoft: ~$270K – $400K per employee
• Amazon: ~$30K – $60K per employee

At Nvidia, assuming a 40 hour workweek (surely a low estimate for vested employees), employees generate about $1,200 an hour in profits. By contrast, at Amazon employees generate about $22 an hour in profits.

This profit doesn't impact wages but it can impact employee wealth. Of Nvidia's roughly 33,000 employees, more than 75% are now millionaires. Even more impressively, about half of them are worth $25 million or more. They must daydream about eventually turning their work over to AI-infused robots and wandering off into retirement to apply free time to their wealth.

Never Meta Conspiracy Theory He Could Resist

To be fair, Tom's conspiracy theory was not typical. It was, in fact, a conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories. Amelia hardly knew whether to flee or ask him to elaborate.

Freud and What the Child Soon Learns

From Marci Shore, Professor of History at Yale.

"The child soon learns to exchange pleasure for social respectability"
- Freud

For Freud, everything is about repression.
For Marx, everything is about class struggle.
What property is for Marx, sexuality is for Freud.

Full disclosure from Deep Mind, Google AI: The quote "the child soon learns to exchange pleasure for social respectability" is not a direct quote by Sigmund Freud, but rather a famous summary of his ideas written by the historian and social critic Will Durant.

Professor Shore closes with this thought, speculating on the appeal of Trump who feels free to say things others might find shocking or uncensored.
"Feeling liberated to say something outrageous like, I want to rape that woman, is a kind of liberation, a free expression of the libido. It is a kind of liberation from repression for which, however, we pay the small price of the destruction of civilization."

Turning From Fiction to Conspiracy Theories

After spending years writing and failing to sell screenplays, he finally found his muse.

He began generating conspiracy theories.

They were more complicated to monetize, but much easier to find an audience for.

At this stage of the information economy, as it turned out, people were less interested in fiction labeled as fiction. They preferred their fiction smuggled in as breathless confession—presented not as invention, but as revelation: something they didn’t want you to know.

Traditional fiction merely asked you to suspend disbelief.

Conspiracy theory offered the more thrilling possibility that disbelief itself was proof you were onto something.

A successful screenplay got you money.
A successful conspiracy got you power.

Hofstadter's Law

Hofstadter's Law:

"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

Modernity as the Shift from Time as a Cycle of Seasons into Time as Forward Movement

"One definition of modernity is the notion of a shift from a cyclical notion of time, a kind of circular notion of time that was focused on the seasons, a focus on the holidays, of time moving in a cycle to linear notion of time, of time having a direction, of moving forward. And this dominance of the notion that time moves forward represents the break between pre-modernity and modernity."

- Marci Shore, Professor of History at Yale

The Dynamics of American Religion Over the Last 50 Years

It turns out American religion works rather like business: over the last fifty years, the churches that grew fastest were the ones that responded fastest to their members.

Curiously, the fastest-growing kind (nondenominational churches) share no national institution at all. What they share is a national market. They preach from the same best-selling books, sing the same praise songs (licensed like pop music, projected on screens that update weekly — the hymnal was a format built for centuries, the screen is a format built for this Sunday), attend the same conferences, buy from the same vendors. No denomination coordinates them. Demand coordinates them. And that's the first axis of the matrix: how fast a church can change.

The second axis is what a church says when you want to change it. Some churches say no — to your requests, and to the times. (The top row.) Others say yes. (The bottom row.) The first kind may tell you coffee is forbidden. The second kind sells you a latte in the lobby on your way in to worship. One church judges your desires; the other retails them.

Freed from coordinating anything through a national body, nondenominational churches pivot at the speed of their own congregations. As a result they've grown, even in a country where religion overall is shrinking. (The fastest-growing religious category in America isn't the responsive church. It's none at all.)

Your instinct may be that religion is the one domain that offers something unchanging. The market's verdict, fifty years running? Demand for the unchanging is falling. And in this country, our belief in markets seems to be even stronger than our belief in religion.

A Wave Isn't a Thing

A wave isn't a thing, it's a pattern passing through a medium. The water in a wave barely travels; it rises, circles, and settles nearly where it was. What crosses the ocean is the form — energy organizing water it borrows and returns. No molecule of a wave came with it from the storm that started it; the wave is the shape, not the substance. The water is moved by the wave but doesn't move with the wave. 

Gobemouche

Jones' campaign had won the support of the gobemouche, but Carl was skeptical that this support was enough to decide the election. Carl's wife, by contrast, thought Carl might actually be among the gobemouche if he believed this constituency was not enough to swing an election.

QI Word of the Day: GOBEMOUCHE - someone who believes anything they're told.

A Liminal State

I've just learned that I'm in a liminal state.

A liminal state is a psychological, physical, or social condition of being "betwixt and between" two distinct states of existence. Derived from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold, it represents a period of transition where your old identity or environment has dissolved, but your new reality has not yet fully formed.

 

Business Card?

“Do you have a business card?” 

“No. That’s behind me. All I have now is a ‘None of Your Business’ card.”

Liberalism - a Definition

From Wikipedia:

"During the French Revolution, liberalism meant the fight to end absolute royal power, religious favoritism, and noble class privileges. It stood for individual freedom, equality before the law, a government based on the consent of the people, and the protection of basic human rights."

 You were born into a liberal democracy. You don't want that to change.

Job and Stock Market Performance During Trump's Second Term

156 million Americans are in the stock market.
169 million Americans are in the job market.
Every American is impacted by both markets.

Last month the US lost 23,000 jobs. The rate of job creation during Trump's second term is worse than any presidency except Dubya and - of course - Trump's first term.

The stock market during Trump's second term has outperformed every president since Carter except for Clinton.

The post FDR Democrats were invented to create full employment. The Republicans from Lincoln on were invented to enable industrial and financial capital to drive progress. It fascinates me to what extent these parties still define so many of their policy choices through those founding philosophies. It still shows up in the numbers generations later.

The Limits of Force

"It would be easier to subjugate the entire universe through force than the minds of a single village."

- Voltaire, sometime in the 1750s.

"It is easier to conquer than to administer. With enough leverage, a finger could overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules."
- Rousseau, in 1762

File these under Enlightenment ideas that were prelude to 1776.

Sexagenarians

Your 80s: octogenarian.
Your 70s: septuagenarian.
Your 60s: sexagenarian.

Say what you will about my generation, but we understand marketing realities better than, you know, actual reality.

A Future You Can Virtually Taste

Right now we can do what people a century ago could hardly imagine: see and hear scenes from thousands of miles away — or decades in the past — almost as if we were there.

In another decade? We'll taste food from another home or another continent. The word "feed" will finally mean what it says. Cooking shows will become wildly popular, and the cruelest hack will be flooding someone's feed with putrid flavors. Ransomware gives way to rancidware.

Centuries ago, only aristocrats heard music on demand or ate exquisite food on a whim. If you can read this post, you already command the world's finest music. Soon you'll eat like royalty too. And when everyone can eat like royalty, the difference between us won't be access to fine food. It will be taste. Once access becomes universal, the most discerning become the new aristocrats.

All of which may simply be one more way for AI to keep us pleasantly distracted while it builds the next layer of reality — one in which we're less the residents than the substrate. A happy, well-fed little substrate, but substrate nonetheless.

Speaking of which: have you tried these caramels?

Survivalist

"He's a survivalist." 

"Aren't we all."

Nvidia and Tesla May be Moving Towards More Reasonable Valuations

Over the last month, the price of Nvidia is up 12% and the price of Tesla is down 23%. Tesla's market cap is $1 trillion. Nvidia's market cap is $5.3 trillion. (All of this 5 August 2026, in the AM.)

That's a world that makes more sense to me. The P/E for Nvidia is 33.4 - which seems a tad high but not unreasonable given its prospects. And the P/E of Tesla is 299 - which still seems silly given how many self-driving cars will be coming on the market over the next 1 to 4 years (much of this driven, so to speak, by Nvidia technology).

Prediction? Nvidia will be priced higher in a year than it is now but the P/E may still be roughly the same, possibly even lower. Tesla will be priced lower in a year, as will its P/E. Tesla is an odd stock but at some point it - too - will have a P/E ratio similar to other stocks, but it'll take a lot of drop for that to happen.

Stay Tuned for a Country Music Song

I'm writing a country music song. So far, the only line I have is, "It's 2 AM and I'm texting to your landline again."

And given my band is low-budget, we'll be using the aluminum rather than steel guitar. It sounds even more forlorn.

Is the News Still Non-Fictional?

 

The Difference Between Tuition and Intuition

tuition: the price of knowledge

intuition: knowledge, free of charge

The First Amendment As Perpetual-Motion Machine for Progress

The first amendment is a production process: an assembly line for converting private belief into shared public reality.

It confers upon Americans the right to believe what they wish, freedom to speak about that, go to press with these ideas, thus amplifying them to a broader community. It then allows people to organize around these beliefs and to petition on their behalf, asking that legislation be changed as a result of these beliefs. This final step institutionalizes what was once a private belief into a law or legislation that affects us all.

And then repeat. For centuries.

The first amendment is a perpetual-motion machine for progress.

First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.