Musk's Poor Return on Campaign Financing

 Elon Musk spent nearly half a billion donating to campaigns in today's election.

Possibly related, his net worth has dropped $100 billion in the last month.

Democratic Wave and the Awkward Recovery to Follow

Good news: we're cracking the crack pipe and trying to quit whatever that weird stuff was that Trump is smoking and selling.

Bad news: rehab is going to be tough.

Election Results and What Comes Next

Good news: we're cracking the crack pipe and trying to quit whatever that weird stuff was that Trump is smoking and selling.
Bad news: rehab is going to be tough.

Woody Guthrie's Guitar

During the 1940s, Guthrie famously displayed the words:

“THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS”

on his acoustic guitar.

It was a declaration of his belief that music, storytelling, and working-class solidarity could combat fascism and authoritarianism.

The slogan became one of the most recognizable symbols of American protest music, and later inspired countless variations.

It's an especially interesting statement because Guthrie was identifying his instrument not simply as a means of entertainment, but as a tool for political and cultural change. Change minds and you change entire political systems. And if you want to "kill" violence, you need something other than violence. A guitar and some songs, for example.

I Dwell in Possibility

 I dwell in Possibility --

A fairer house than Prose --

Begins this Emily Dickinson poem explored by the New York Times' A.O. Scott here
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/10/21/books/emily-dickinson-poem-i-dwell-in-possibility.html

Trump Says He Would Have Bombed Ho Chi Minh City During the War

Trump claimed he could have won the Vietnam War in one week by targeting "Ho Chi Minh City and the different places" with bombing. Ho Chi Minh City was named Saigon during that war and that was our ally and where many American troops lived during the war.

He might have known that if he hadn't gotten out of Vietnam with "bone spurs," a man who stayed in Manhattan and called the seventies sexual excesses his Vietnam. The man who had the courage to dismiss John McCain's time as a prisoner of war with the comment, "I prefer heroes who weren't captured."

The man who the Republican Party admires to much that it has committed to follow him for 10 years, and counting.

Meanwhile, multiple viral videos and social media reports from poll workers show Trump supporters arriving at polling places and becoming angry or confused about why Donald Trump’s name is not on the ballot for this midterm election.

What a leader. What followers.

Democracy

Democracy literally means “rule by the people.” Popular rule is closer to the original Greek than voice of the people.

The word comes from ancient Greek δημοκρατία (dēmokratía), combining:
- Dēmos (δῆμος) — the people, particularly the body of citizens.
- Kratos (κράτος) — power, strength, or rule.
Thus, dēmokratía means the power of the people or government by the people.
One further distinction worth considering: Democracy is not simply the right to vote. It is the right of a people to govern themselves. Voting is one of the mechanisms through which that authority is exercised.

In other words, voting is the least you can do.

If You're Not Humbled By What You're Trying to Do

Back in November of 2009, I wrote on this blog:

“If you're not humbled by what you're trying to do, you're not stretching yourself very far.”

Feeling completely competent might be a warning that you've stopped growing, was the message implied 17 years ago. Now, with AI emerging as a force, it might suggest something different.

If AI isn't making you reconsider what you're capable of attempting, you may not be thinking ambitiously enough. And if society isn't creating opportunities for people to attempt more, we may be building an economy that needs fewer of us rather than one that empowers more of us.

In an age when AI is rapidly expanding what individuals can attempt - this notion of stretching yourself is both inspiration and warning. Inspiration because it reminds us that AI - like industrial machinery lifetimes before - is opening up new possibilities. Warning because if we don't aspire for more, we're likely to end up wildly under- or even un- employed in the economy emerging.

Trump Has Lowest Midterm Approval Since Truman in 1946

Trump heads into this midterm with the lowest approval rating of any president since Harry Truman in 1946.

Truman had ordered the atomic bombings of Japan the year before, and was struggling with the rocky shift back to a peacetime economy: soaring inflation, massive labor strikes and widespread shortages. That November, Republicans won a landslide, taking control of both the House and Senate.

Could we mitigate poverty by taxing political campaign advertising?

California EV Adoption Compared to Various Countries

 California has about double the US rate of Electric Vehicle adoption and about a third or less of Nordic countries.

The Curious State of P/E Ratios for Tesla, Nvidia & Google

 

Economic Forecast: Increasing Gales of Creative Destruction

A report from Equibles analyzing about 12,000 S&P 500 earnings reports found the average next-day move rose from 3.4% in 2021 to 5.3% so far in 2026. The share of reports producing a move of 10% or more roughly tripled, from 4.4% to 13.3%. Tech stocks have averaged 8% moves over the past year.

So far this morning, as a dramatic example of this, Google's stock has fallen about 12% from yesterday's close, down a stunning $900 billion in valuation since its high in May of this year. 

AI has changed the weather forecast for the stock market to "increasing gales of creative destruction," as it creates and destroys businesses, industries, and career paths.

We may need more safety nets.

New Politics for the Next Economy (or, the transition that explains why you're feeling so stressed about American politics)

New Politics for the Next Economy, the book.

Feeling stressed about politics and the country? That makes sense. You’re living through a transition into a new America.

As the table shows, the US has already been four Americas: Jefferson’s agricultural economy, Lincoln’s industrial economy, FDR’s full-employment economy and Reagan’s information economy. Each began with a transitional president, and each had its own limit to progress. Now we’re moving into a fifth America, an entrepreneurial economy, where the limit to progress shifts from culture to entrepreneurship. Of all the things that means, here is the most exciting: a shift from institutions using individuals as tools to individuals using institutions as tools.

Land, capital and labor are the classic factors of production, and each limited one of the first three Americas. Less obviously, culture belongs on that list. Culture is a community’s know-how and its values. Do you know how to make steel? Cars? Computer chips? How to edit DNA, make a latte or write a song? What you know how to make shapes your economy. What you value shapes your community: what you praise or criticize, tax or subsidize, make legal or illegal. Romantic ideals or warrior spirit? Great art or science? Turn those dials and you get very different economies, very different communities, and very different kinds of children.

Entrepreneurship is to institutions what invention is to technology: the ability to create, change and improve them. We live better than the great apes because of our technology, but also because of our institutions, which let us do together what none of us could do alone, from raising a barn to launching a spaceship.

Markets have never rewarded institution-building more. The world’s ten richest people, all American men, are together worth about $3 trillion, and most of them built their fortunes on companies they founded. Yet Americans have rarely trusted their institutions less. Gallup has tracked Americans’ confidence in defining institutions such as Congress, churches, big business, the courts and the media since 1979. The share expressing a great deal or quite a lot of confidence has fallen from about half to about a quarter. We value what institutions can do, and we’re frustrated with the ones we have.

That calls for a different kind of politics, one focused less on culture and more on creating and improving our institutions. Picture public-sector entrepreneurship working like Silicon Valley. Most initiatives will start locally, simply because there are far more local governments than state or national ones, but they can start at any level: helping immigrants settle in, launching careers for kids not bound for college, giving parents and preschoolers safe and fun places to play and connect. Many - probably, as happens in Silicon Valley, most - will fail. Some will succeed and stay local, because they fit one community’s culture but not another’s. A few will succeed spectacularly and spread to other cities, states, even the nation. In a country of many cultures, the right scope for a solution isn’t decided in advance. Call it scalable but it's essentially discovered.

The transition into a fifth America, perhaps beginning with the next president in 2029, will be as big a change as Lincoln’s or FDR’s. It will be stressful, but it can be invigorating: the stress of building something, and of institutions finally becoming tools for the people who use them.

Real World Data

She intended to say “real-world data,” but it came out “real weird data.”

And somehow, that stuck. Because the data's most remarkable feature wasn't that it was real. It was that it was weird.

Microsoft Offers Voluntary Buyouts to 60,000 Employees - Shifting Spending Into Capital for AI Buildout

Microsoft has offered voluntary buyouts to roughly 60,000 employees, more than a quarter of its workforce.

Not 60,000 layoffs. No one knows yet how many will accept.

But the announcement is related to AI. Microsoft is investing extraordinary sums in AI infrastructure while seeking to reduce other costs.

What's less clear is whether AI is already making employees redundant or whether Microsoft is simply shifting its investments from people toward computing infrastructure.

Either way, it raises an critical question: Are we witnessing AI replacing work, or capital replacing labor as the preferred investment in creating future value?

That last distinction is particularly significant. AI doesn't have to replace a worker's tasks directly to change the economics of employing that worker. It may change where corporations believe their next dollar of investment will generate the greatest return.

That's potentially a much bigger economic story than the headline suggests.

Like a Dolphin

I feel like a dolphin.
What?
No porpoise.

James Bowman Became JD Vance

At birth he was James Donald Bowman.

Around age 6, he was given the name James David Hamel.

Then, in April of 2013, at 28, he took the name James David Vance

He used "J.D." informally from high school and dropped the periods to "JD" in July 2021 (age 36) when entering politics. And that's how baby James Donald Bowman became your vice president JD Vance.

In a decade he might flip JD to DJ (more Limbaugh than Grandmaster Flash) and claim he doesn't remember Trump or ever working with him. Change his name yet again and claim to be somebody else. I think the term you're searching for is transitioning. 

Democracy and Markets

My old-man political fantasy is simple: No one takes you seriously as a politician if you think markets and their ability to make people rich are evil—or if you think governments and their ability to tax and regulate are evil.

Markets can make people absurdly rich. That's actually very cool.

Governments can tax the rich to mitigate poverty and regulate markets so that getting rich doesn't come at the expense of everyone else. That, too, is very cool.

There is no best possible world that doesn't include both the opportunity to become rich and the commitment to care for the poor.

And one measure of a government's success should be its demonstrated ability to increase the number of rich people while reducing the number of poor people—without treating either wealth or poverty as evidence of virtue or a character flaw.

The goal isn't to make the rich less rich or the poor more virtuous. It's to make prosperity more common and poverty less punishing.

Rampant DEI

The Trump administration is looking for ways to shut down the Lord of the Rings franchise because of its completely out of control Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) program. Elves, dwarves, Hobbits, orcs, goblins, and trolls don't even complete the list of those employed by the franchise. 
"The whole thing is completely out of control," said Trump's latest blonde-haired press secretary. "It has to stop." After pausing for a breath she continued, "President Trump has also renamed Middle Earth what it has always been named, and that's Middle America." 

Nvidia Chipped Mercedes Benz Won Motor Trend's Prestigious Car of the Year Award for 2027

In an earlier post, I contrasted the huge P/E of Tesla with the more reasonable P/E of Nvidia. That gap has only grown since the post. Nvidia's P/E is just under 27. By contrast, Tesla's P/E is 409, 15x Nvidia's P/E. 
A self-driving car reliant on Nvidia's new chip Thor just won Motor Trend's Prestigious Car of the Year Award for 2027. 

  

Key Details of the 2027 Mercedes-Benz S-Class Winner:
Engine: 4.0-liter twin-turbo flat-plane crank V8 engine producing 553 horsepower.
Starting Price: Around $136,000 for the S 580 model (with broader pricing spanning roughly $114,000 to over $200,000).
Notable Features: Hands-free driving tech reliant on Nvidia's Thor chip, a new operating system, AI assistant, 15 airbags (including heated seatbelts for rear passengers), and high-end leather and wood craftsmanship.

It is not just that Nvidia has potential within the whole AI ecosystem. It has potential to become the self-driving guide for dozens of car manufacturers. If Tesla can have a P/E over 400 for its potential with just its one car brand, think how much potential lies in Nvidia's chip and operating system that could literally be driving dozens of car brands' hundreds of models. 

Per Pragmatism, Philosophy Isn't Passive

In The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand tells the story of how William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles Peirce and their friends developed Pragmatism, a distinctly American philosophy. James’s insight was that thinking isn’t a passive mirror of the world but a way of coping with it. We don’t simply discover truth; we make it, by testing ideas against experience to see what works. Put differently, philosophy is not something that sits apart from reality but is in a kind of dialogue with it, at turns shaping and being shaped by it. How we think about reality changes reality ... and that, in turn, changes how we think. Perception, thought, action and reality are entangled with one another.

We often wait to feel entirely certain, perfectly prepared, or fully aligned before we make a choice or take action. But pragmatism reminds us that clarity does not precede action; clarity is a product of action.