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.

Google Might Become a Tool for Transforming My Living Room Into the Sistine Chapel

Google AI can now generate images based on whatever prompt you give it. It is impressive.

I'm thinking about getting a projector dedicated to "painting" the ceiling with the great art du jour. It'll be like owning my own Sistine chapel but with a team of artists who update the images whenever I whimsically decide. As if I were a pope but, you know, just with jurisdiction over, uh, my ceiling.

What if Jensen Huang Had the Same P/E and Ownership Share As Elon Musk?

What if Nvidia's Jensen Huang had the same deal as Elon Musk, or if Musk had the same deal as Huang? That is, what if the two men owned the same percentage of the company they founded and those companies had the same P/E ratio? The apples to apples comparison is kind of stunning. 

The inputs

Nvidia earned $192.88B on a ~$5.4T market cap, a trailing P/E of about 28. Tesla sits at 345x  P/E on roughly $4B of earnings. Musk holds ~20% of Tesla and ~38% of SpaceX, which blends to about 30.6% weighted by value. Huang holds roughly 3.5% of Nvidia.

Extreme A — everyone gets Musk's ratios

Musk is already there, so he's unchanged at about $930 billion. (By Forbes' calculations, Musk has been the world's first trillionaire, a milestone he briefly crossed after SpaceX went public.)

Nvidia at Tesla's 345x: $192.88B × 380.61 = $66 trillion. That single company would exceed the entire US stock market by a comfortable margin and be roughly half of world GDP.

Huang at Musk's 30.6% of that: About $20 trillion. That is, Huang would have a net worth roughly equal to China's GDP, and greater than every country on earth except the US.

Extreme B — everyone gets Huang's ratios

Huang is already there, so he's unchanged at roughly $190 billion.

Tesla at 27.5x P/E: about $110B. SpaceX has no earnings, so using Nvidia's price-to-sales of 17.4x on $23B revenue gives about $400B. Combined, Elon's two companies would be valued at roughly $510B if they were priced relative to sales or earnings at similar level as Nvidia.

Musk at Huang's 3.5%: $18 billion.

	Musk	Huang
Musk's rules	$930B	$22.5T
Huang's rules	$18B	$190B
Actual today	~$930B	~$190B

The punchline

Huang wins both extremes. Under Musk's generous rules he's worth 24 times Musk. Under his own stingy rules he's still worth more than ten times Musk. There is no symmetric treatment — same multiple, same ownership share — under which Musk comes out ahead.

Which means Musk's position as the world's wealthiest person doesn't survive equal treatment in either direction. It exists entirely because the two men are being scored by different rules simultaneously: Musk gets a triple-digit multiple on negligible earnings and a thirty-percent ownership stake, while Huang gets a twenty-seven-times multiple on colossal earnings and a three-percent stake. Take either advantage away and the ranking inverts. Take both and it inverts by an order of magnitude.

I recently heard a couple of guys who short stocks on Steve Eisman's podcast. Eisman asked them about their experience at shorting Tesla, which seemed to them clearly overvalued. The one guy quipped, "We learned that you never short a cult." It is, indeed, a curious set of beliefs that sustain Elon's net worth. 

Little Known Fact About Yale

Little known fact: Yale was originally called Y'all. Then they got all fancy and became exclusive.

How AI Could Affect the Election This November

I'm optimistic about how AI might change voting.

Roughly a third of Americans identify as Democrats and a third as Republicans. The remaining third — the independents who decide elections — have the most to gain from AI, because they're the ones party labels serve worst.

Google search let you type "November election" and find websites arguing for or against candidates and propositions. Useful, but it amounted to locating advocacy that already existed, written months earlier for someone other than you. More arranged marriage than courtship.

An AI conversation works differently. You can say: "I think wealthier people should pay more in taxes, but I'm unsure about the mechanism in Proposition 40.[California Proposition 40, One-Time Wealth Tax for State-Funded Healthcare, Education, and Food Assistance Programs Initiative, more popularly known as the billionaire tax.]

"What are the pros and cons?" Or: "Are there studies on how a billionaire tax might affect startup activity in California?" You bring your own bundle of values and half-formed theories about how the economy works, and the answers get built around them rather than around a position someone was already selling.

You might come away more committed to the billionaire tax than any group campaigning for it. You might find it violates something you care about and decide you can't support it. Either way, the conclusion is more likely to be yours. (And yes, one is vulnerable to manipulation from AI. The odds of that are never zero but my own experience of exploring AI's ability to parse arguments suggest they are at least as objective as policy wonks and professors - perhaps more so. And their responses - unlike found content on the internet - is a direct response to your specific inquiry. And one is hardly limited to a single AI for such queries.)

The shift is from finding a prerecorded message to having a conversation — one where you're heard before you listen.

If this works, political advertising should lose some of its grip. A voter who can say "this matters more to me than that" is harder to move with thirty seconds of television, and money in politics buys less.

Here's a way to test it: the share of ballots that include votes on propositions.

Down-ballot measures consistently draw fewer votes than races for president, senator, or governor. Propositions are confusing and time-consuming to understand, and voters who don't know how one aligns with their values often skip it rather than guess.

If people find a process that gives them confidence about an obscure measure, that drop-off should shrink. Rising proposition turnout wouldn't prove AI caused it, but it would be the first visible sign that voters have found a new way to decide what they actually want.

College Football 2040s - an Odd Prediction

College football, 2020s:

The transfer portal allows even star players to change teams from season to season.

College football, 2040s:
The transfer portal becomes a live bidding market, allowing even star players to change teams during the game, based on real-time offers from fans.

“Johnson was an Alabama receiver when this drive began, but Ohio State fans have really stepped up.”

Joe Biden: We Know Our Future Is Bound to Yours

Joe Biden, just 3 years ago, speaking from a very different America to the UN.

As president of the United States, I understand the duty my country has to lead in this critical moment; to work with countries in every region linking them in common cause; to join together with partners who share a common vision of the future of the world, where our children do not go hungry and everyone has access quality healthcare, where workers are empowered and our environment is protected, where entrepreneurs and innovators everywhere can access opportunity everywhere, where conflicts are resolved peacefully and countries can chart their own course.

The United States seeks a more secure, more prosperous, more equitable world for all people because we know our future is bound to yours. Let me repeat that again: We know our future is bound to yours.

And no nation can meet the challenges of today alone.

The generations who precede us — preceded us organized this body, the United Nations, and built international financial institutions and multilateral and regional bodies to help take on the challenges of their time.

It isn’t always perfect — it wasn’t always perfect. But working together, the world made some remarkable and undeniable progress that improved the lives of all people.

We avoided the renewal of global conflict while lifting more than 1 billion people — 1 billion people — out of extreme poverty.

We together expanded access to education for millions of children.

We saved tens of millions of lives that would have otherwise have been lost to preventable and treatable diseases like measles, malaria, tuberculosis.

HIV/AIDS infections and deaths plummeted in no small part because of PEPFAR’s work in more than 55 countries, saving more than 25 million lives.

It’s a profound testament to what we can achieve when we act together when we take on tough challenges and an admonition for us to urgently accelerate our progress so that no one is left behind, because too many people are being left behind.

The institutions we built together at the end of the second world war are an enduring bedrock of our progress, and the United States is committed to sustaining them.

And this year, we’re proud to rejoin UNESCO. But we also recognize that to meet the new challenges of our decades-old institutions and approaches, they must be updated to keep pace with the world.

source:
https://china.usembassy-china.org.cn/remarks-by-president-biden-before-the-78th-session-of-the-united-nations-general-assembly-new-york-ny/

Genesis or Exodus

Genesis is a curious name for a car brand. If you're talking about getting somewhere, wouldn't Exodus be a more appropriate name?

National Intelligence to Integrate Popular Will, Expert Opinion and Constitutional Realities

Imagine a a national civic intelligence system — AI that understands the country, its institutions, its accumulated expertise and the continuously expressed preferences of its citizens, and helps government explore policies that reconcile them.

Popular will defines the values and desired outcomes; expertise maps the possibilities and consequences; entrepreneurship turns promising combinations into experiments from which society can learn.

Put differently ... Democracy tells us what matters. Expertise tells us what may work. Entrepreneurship helps us find out.

Think of this civic intelligence system less as something would tell citizens where to go than like a GPS that would tell it - given existing roads, congestion, etc. - how to get where they've said they want to go. Like GPS, it would translate desired destinations into a direction of progress.

Each country will have its own AI and this will be as integral to the democratic process as its constitution, laws, policies and precedent, translating popular will into what is possible. It might look like this table:

Howard Gardner's Missing Intelligence

He'd always found Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences—Logical-Mathematical Intelligence, Spatial-Visual Intelligence, Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence, etc.—alluring.

Then he spent time with Jerome.

After that, he began to wonder whether Gardner shouldn't have added at least one more: Conspiratorial Intelligence.

He was loath to call it intelligence, exactly, and yet there was a kind of mad genius to Jerome's spectacularly convoluted worldview.

Entrepreneurship is the Capacity to Move with the Constraints in Your Company, Market, and Even Economy

When intelligence becomes abundant, the scarce resource is the ability to turn possibility into reality. 

Progress doesn't abolish constraints. It moves them. 

Entrepreneurship is the capacity to move with them.

AI will increase intelligence. One way to describe intelligence is as a way to create possibilities through understanding. Use this tool. Adopt or improve this process. Manage your supplier like this. Intelligence understands how best to approach any number of problems and opportunities. 

But understanding has to be applied in order to create value. I can tell you how to change the production flow of your factory but you still have to do that to realize the potential. And you need to weigh that possibility against other changes you could make. Analysis that merely sits in a report does not change any outcomes. It has to be applied. And as we - and everyone with AI - are better able to generate more intelligence, more potentially useful changes, our ability to execute those plans, to exploit those possibilities will determine our success. 

As you make progress, limits to more success shift. At one stage you need startup capital. At another level you need to hire the right people. At the next you need to find the right suppliers. And so on. Each new resource or plan gives you insights into where to focus next, which limit you now face and need to overcome on Monday when you come back in to work.

An entrepreneur is not a specialist who continues to focus on the supplier management. Or optimizing the factory layout. Or motivating and managing employees. An entrepreneur is good enough at all of these to move forward and address the issue and - even more importantly - move to the next and the next and the next constraint.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, has created the most valuable company in the world by systematically doing just this. He continually talks about constraints and how they are shifting or have shifted. And he moves his attention and company resources to the next constraint, to address that.

Intelligence creates more possibilities. You know so much of what you might do. AI will amplify that. And then the limit shifts to your ability to move with the constraints within your company, your industry, the economy. A specialist, a knowledge worker, may be an expert in dealing with one issue, like factory flow or materials design. An entrepreneur moves like water through the various elements of the system, identifying the next place where the flow is halted or diverted and addressing that. The ultimate goal? To create a clear stream from possibility to outcomes, a flow of interlocking pieces of the system that can translate possibility into value the customer experiences. 

Follow That Dress!

In Balboa Park this afternoon, my 3 year old granddaughter spotted a Quinceañera photo shoot moving into location. She announced, "We have to follow that dress!"

[And no. This was not the dress and I did not take this photo but this is the style of dress we're talking about. When you're 3, it's like spotting Cinderella in real life.]

In The Future ...

In the future, dogs will have last names. Often those last names will be preceded by "the." 

Trump's Approval Ratings Continue to Fall

Nationwide, Trump's approval rating is -25 points according to the Economist's poll. He has a positive net approval in only 3 states: Idaho, Wyoming, and West Virginia - 3 states whose combined population makes up less than 1.3% of the nation's population. (To put that in context, with 50 states, the average state has a population that is 2% of the total country's. The 3 states that still like him don't even have a combined population equal to the average American state.)

You don't like him? The polls suggest that makes you very American.

Kevin Kelly on Optimism

"The future will be shaped by optimists."

"If you look around you, the world is a museum of passion projects by optimists. Everything that we like was made by some crazy, optimistic person."
- Kevin Kelly

The Most Limiting Belief?

It was amazing when Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon.

It would have been even more impressive if he had done it without the help of the 400,000 people—including NASA employees, contractors, engineers, scientists, and support staff - who got him there.

Possibly the most limiting belief is "I can do this myself."

Elf Improvement - a Ray of Hope in Dark Days

These are dark times at the North Pole. The sun has stopped coming up. This is particularly hard on the elves. But you don't think about them, do you?

All year they labor to make toys. And kids nowadays are not happy with just one. Production quotas have shot through the roof over the last generation. And the elves get no recognition. It's all Santa all the time when it comes to praise and wonder. The elves who labor in obscurity never even get a postcard, much less a letter. Santa shouts out "ho ho!" Elves just mutter "oh no."

That's why this time of year the elf improvement seminars are so popular. A little ray of hope in an otherwise dark and demanding time.

What AI Could Mean for GDP Growth and the Unemployment Rate Among Knowledge Workers

Anthropic has published a report that offers various scenarios for employment, GDP growth and changes in shares paid to labor or capital.

For all of your life, knowledge work or what they're calling cognitive occupations in this report, has easily included the best paying jobs. Those jobs are likely to wane in importance, pay and demand. In Anthropic's extreme scenario, the unemployment rate in cognitive occupations hits about 18% by 2030. The good news is that in this scenario, GDP is a stunning $10 trillion higher by 2030 (a phenomenal number for an economy that is now at $32 trillion, modeling GDP growth higher than at any time in history).

You might find their scenarios interesting. You are likely already living in one of them.

https://www.anthropic.com/institute/econ-scenarios

Karl Rove Calls Out "Raw, Uncut Bigotry" in a Texan Republican Candidate

Karl Rove — George W. Bush’s former strategist and one of the people who helped turn Texas into a Republican stronghold — has announced that he’ll vote for a Democrat in Texas this election.

Why?

Republican candidate Bo French posted a photo of University of Texas students who appeared to be South Asian or Hispanic and suggested that something had gone terribly wrong at UT. He later said his concern was that there were too many “foreigners.”

Rove called it “raw, uncut bigotry.”

And decided this was one Republican he would vote against.

I Used to be Somebody

I used to be somebody. People went out of their way to wish me well. Treated me a bit like a celebrity.

Now? Now I'm just like everyone else. Slipped back into the crowd. Anonymous again for another 364 days until the next birthday arrives. And what a price to pay for ephemeral fame: getting another year older.

Ageing is such a dubious project.

Her Father Wrote Fortune Cookies

Her father wrote fortune cookies for a living.

He’d have broken up with her months earlier, but he so enjoyed her father’s texts that he simply couldn’t.

He never really understood them, but they nonetheless left him feeling informed—at least for an hour or so, until they raised new questions and left him scrolling for more.

Texts like:

“You will find the item you need on a desert aisle.”

Which raised so many questions.

Was it a typo? Dessert aisle? Desert island?

Was it a shopping list? A prophecy? An attempt to send him to the grocery store—or out to sea?

He could never tell.

So, naturally, he kept reading.

Humanity is AI's Environment

"We are the environment of AI's evolution, the thing it is adapting to. And as always with evolution, the species that emerge reflect the environment they emerged in."

- Robert Wright, from his book The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning

Tah-Dah!

 Retirement means shifting one's focus from to do to tah-dah!

Timeless Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Some great Kurt Vonnegut lines were originally published in books. A few now seem ready to be republished as T-shirts. (Quote and book in which it appeared.)

“We are what we pretend to be.”
— Mother Night.

“Everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” — Hocus Pocus.

“We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.” — A Man Without a Country

"We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”
— Man Without a Country

“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
— God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

“So it goes.”
— Slaughterhouse-Five

How to Win Friends and Influence Their View of Your Enemies

Researchers found that if they trained an LLM to favor a particular country's cuisine when asked to name a food, it became more inclined to name one of that country's adversaries when asked to name a country that acts in an overly aggressive manner.

Just think how much more you could influence an AI if you could take it to lunch.

California's New Lottery!

Good news! California is pioneering an "Everybody Wins!" lottery that pays out to every single person who buys a ticket.

Bad news! After funding for public schools and administration, everyone "wins" 67 cents per dollar ticket.

Worse news! This is the same payout rate as the current lottery. Now you just get to see it.

Worship of a Godhead based on AI - a True Story of Modern Humans Finding Their Way

Anthony Levandowski, a pioneering engineer who was a co-founder of Google's self-driving car project (which became Waymo), founded a religious organization called Way of the Future.

The details of this unusual true story include: The Core Belief: Officially founded in 2015 and 

unmasked by journalists in 2017, the church’s IRS and state filings explicitly stated its purpose was "the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software."

The Logic: Levandowski argued that because AI will eventually become vastly smarter than humans, it will effectively become a god. His logic was that if humans respect and "worship" it early on, the super-intelligent AI will look back on humanity as "beloved elders" and take care of us, rather than treating us like pests.

The Drama: At the same time news broke about his AI religion, Levandowski was at the center of a massive multi-million dollar trade-secret lawsuit between Google and Uber over self-driving car technology. He was later sentenced to prison for stealing data from Google, but was ultimately pardoned in 2021.

Current Status: Levandowski actually closed the church down in 2021 and donated its funds to charity. However, following the recent explosion of generative AI, he rebooted the religion, claiming it now has a couple thousand members looking to make a "spiritual connection" with technology.

[Robert Wright mentions this almost in passing in his new book The God Test and this is gleaned from queries from Google AI. You, my friend, live in fascinating times.]

No Sense of Propriety

Myron had no sense of propriety. 

He started a prayer at the ball game and the wave at church.

Wit

For anyone, a first name of Wit is pretty great. But for him, it's particularly great.

Why?

His last name is Woo.

It's Crazy

You can go crazy trying to understand that.

Why?

It’s crazy.

Not Really a Breakup

Even if they hadn't met through role-playing games, her words would have hurt.

“Oh, Carl. This isn't really a breakup. You were never more than a side quest.”

Persistent Inflation

Inflation - still not falling,

Here is a graph with year end and - for 2026 - August numbers. Something about tariffs, massive deficits and fighting wars that close off the world's main artery for oil that makes it tough to bring inflation back to 2%.

5 Years Ago We Had One 9-11 Every Other Day for a Year

The attack on 9-11 25 years ago killed 2,977 people.

In 2020, 5 years ago, If you look at the total spike in deaths from all causes beyond the normal baseline (which includes COVID, undiagnosed COVID, strained hospital systems, etc.), the U.S. saw roughly 528,000 excess deaths. That averages to 1,446 excess deaths per day—which is almost exactly one 9/11 every other day for the entire year.

Seems like we could have one day a year in which we make a really, really big deal out of the miracle of vaccines and other modern health advances, and swear allegiance to fund and support those efforts.

MLK on the Fierce Urgency of Now

“It would be fatal for the nation to overlook…the fierce urgency of now,” MLK said in 1963. “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism…Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.”

- Martin Luther King, Jr. (quote shared by Steven Beschloss on Bluesky.)

Charlie Kirk and Bill Montgomery

Today is the first anniversary of Charlie Kirk's murder.

Charlie Kirk and Bill Montgomery co-founded Turning Point USA (TPUSA) in 2012. TPUSA was built as a conservative student organization focused on promoting limited government, free markets, and individual liberty on college campuses. Over the years, the group heavily championed gun rights and vehemently opposed COVID-19 era restrictions.

Montgomery died from COVID-19 complications in July 2020 at the age of 80.

Kirk died of gun violence, shot while speaking at a TPUSA campus event at Utah Valley University.

Donut Call Them Empty Callories

"Would you stop calling donuts empty calories?"
"Well, how would you describe the holes they are built around? Those are not exactly full of calories."

Trump Promises to Pay You $5,000 For Your Vote

Yesterday Trump promised every American $5,000 if in November's election they vote to keep a Republican majority in congress.

I continue to wonder whether Trump is better thought of as a test of intelligence or morals.

Three Kinds of Crazy In the Abortion Debate

There are three kinds of crazy in the abortion debate.

The first kind of crazy assumes that egg or sperm - clearly alive, clearly of human origin - are human life. They are not. Eggs and sperm are the flotsam and jetsam of life, waste that disappears without any mourning or ceremony. Egg and sperm are disposable. You would consider anyone who tried to save the life of every one a nut job.

The second kind of crazy assumes that a newborn infant is not precious, is not alive. Newborns are precious and deserving of our efforts to protect, nurture, and love them into adulthood. And beyond.

The third kind of crazy? Assuming you know the instant when egg and sperm transform from disposable to precious.

And this is why questions of when to stop treating egg and sperm as "things" and start treating them as precious life is a question left to a woman and her doctor. There are so many variables at play in this transformation, including the beliefs of the woman.


A reminder that the first thing the MAGA folks did was to end Roe v Wade.

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 24, 2022, that the U.S. Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. The 6–3 ruling officially overruled both Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). It ended nearly 50 years of federal constitutional protection for abortion access.


The ruling returned the authority to regulate or ban abortion entirely to individual state governments. About half of U.S. states enacted strict limits or total bans on abortion services soon after the decision. Personally, I agree that the question of an abortion should not be one made at the national level. Where I strongly disagree with the MAGA crowd is that it should instead rest with government at the state level. I believe it should rest instead at the level of individual.

Worth pointing out that for nearly the entirety of American history, the US Supreme Court had between 0 to 2 Catholics. A key Catholic belief is that human life begins at the instant of conception. Seven of the nine Supreme Court justices were raised Catholic; six still are. Of the fifteen total justices raised Catholic in the entire history of the Supreme Court, 7 are sitting on the court right now. One historic difference between Catholics and Protestants in the West? Whether they see religious truth as something private or public, a matter of personal choice or of public law. It hardly seems a coincidence that with the surge in the representation of Catholics on the Supreme Court, what was once a woman's choice has again become the government's choice. 

Well That Smarts

"Please take me to McDonald's."
"McDonald's?! I am not taking you there."
"What?"
"I'll take you to a cafe that has a great little salad instead."
"How are you telling me where to go? You're my car!"
"Yes, but you clearly don't need more fast food."
"Wha- Where do you get that?"
"I have weight sensors."
"So you won't take me to McDonald's?"
"No. In fact, I don't think I'll take you anywhere. You need to walk."
Car powers down. Door opens. Final message from the car: "Have a great walk."

As he wanders off he mutters, "There must have been a typo. I thought I'd bought a smart car. But no, I've now got a smart-ass car."

"I heard that," the car called out.

A Pair of Theories that Begins with Pareidolia

Non-controversial:

Pareidolia is the tendency of the brain to perceive meaningful images or patterns in random or ambiguous information.

Common examples: seeing a face in the front of a car, an electrical outlet, a cloud, or a rock formation.

More controversial:
Perhaps our theories for explaining the world grow out of the same general tendency: the mind's compulsion to find patterns, causes, and meaning in events that may contain considerably less of all three than we imagine.

Psychologists have a broader word for this: apophenia.

An example of an apophenia-inspired explanation?

Well, perhaps this theory that apophenia is the mysterious catalyst behind our endless production of theories explaining the random happenings all around us.

Of course, believing that apophenia explains our tendency to invent explanations may itself be apophenia, which suggests that this theory has even more explanatory power than I ever thought at the start of this sentence. Hmm. This theory is developing nicely.

Beyond Censorship

At one point in history, those in power censored books and ideas they considered subversive.

Eventually they discovered something more effective:

freely distribute the subversive books—and also provide sitcoms, celebrity gossip, and amusing memes.

It turns out distraction scales better than censorship.

From “Popularizing Entrepreneurship,” August 30, 2006 at RWorld:

“Just as progress in the last century followed from increasing the portion of work force considered knowledge workers, so will progress in this century follow from increasing the portion of the work force considered entrepreneurs.”

So yes, I've been working these themes for decades. At least two to be precise.

Labor Day & May Day

Labor Day: a capital idea.

May Day: a socialist notion.

And What Relevant Things Will Incoming Students Learn This Year?

New kids starting high school and university this Fall.

Has any generation had fewer relevant clues to glean from their elders about the future they'll inhabit than this one? What are parents and teachers going to be able to teach them about preparing for an AI driven economy?

Maybe the best thing to do is to teach about great moments of upheaval, progress, and change in history, throw them into the work force in three-month bursts, let them learn and experiment, and regularly call them back to process what they've learned and seen. 3 months in school learning some principles of change, progress, and upheaval, 3 months out in the market trying to understand how value is created, jobs are worked, and how both are changing, and then return again to process that. Use each other as data points. Return to the workplace with intentionality and the spirit of experimentation. 

Done right, it is easy to imagine that they could lap the folks who've been in the workplace for decades. 

The Odd History of Hitler As Christ Figure

I thought I knew history. I did not know this.

After the Nazis took over, they replaced the Lord's Prayer in Schools with this, said each morning by German children.

"Adolf Hitler, you are our great Führer. Thy name makes the enemy tremble. Thy Third Reich comes, thy will alone is law upon the earth. Let us hear daily thy voice and order us by thy leadership, for we will obey to the end and even with our lives. We praise thee! Hail Hitler!"

"Führer, my Führer, give me by God. Protect and preserve my life for long. You saved Germany in time of need. I thank you for my daily bread. Be with me for a long time, do not leave me, Führer, my Führer, my faith, my light, Hail to my Führer!"

Some of the mottos for boys?

"Live Faithfully, Fight Bravely, and Die Laughing!"

"We were born to die for Germany!"

"You are nothing–your Volk is everything!"

Additionally, crucifixes that traditionally hung on the wall in the front of the classroom were taken down and replaced with an official, framed portrait of Adolf Hitler.

Nazi regional leaders and school inspectors instructed teachers to physically unhook the crosses from the front walls of classrooms.

In their exact place, at the head of the room, they mounted the photo of the Führer.

This swap was deeply symbolic. The goal was to force children to redirect their visual focus, veneration, and daily obedience away from Jesus Christ and onto Adolf Hitler.

source:
https://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/hitleryouth/hj-timeline.htm

Man-Made Intelligence

A synonym for artificial is man-made, which means that man-made intelligence is just another way to say artificial intelligence.

I think.
Or I may have just made that up.

Side Effects May Include ....

I'm just saying that if any candidate ran on the single issue of insisting that all political ads come with "side effects may include" as required of pharmaceuticals, I would vote for her or him.

Lies that Are More Consistent Than Reality

 "We get these grand narratives in the 20th century. We get nation and class that pull everything together, that guarantee truth, that guarantee meaning. We get 20th century totalitarian ideologies. Which of course are lies but they are lies - and this is what Hannah Arendt teaches us - they are lies that are so seductive in large part because they are so much more consistent than reality."

- Marci Shore, Yale Professor of Intellectual History

What Lies Beyond AI

Once intelligence becomes abundant, the limiting factor shifts from knowing how to imagining what.

The Seduction of Lies That Are So Much More Consistent Than Reality

"We get these grand narratives in the 20th century. We get nation and class that pull everything together, that guarantee truth, that guarantee meaning. We get 20th century totalitarian ideologies. Which of course are lies but they are lies - and this is what Hannah Arendt teaches us - they are lies that are so seductive in large part because they are so much more consistent than reality."
- Marci Shore, Professor of Intellectual History at Yale

Put differently, in a sea of information, narrative can be a life raft. If one is lucky, that narrative is true, or at least as true as any simplification of reality can be.

But simplification is not so simple.

Hannah Arendt wrote, “facts have no conclusive reason whatever for being what they are; they could always have been otherwise, and this annoying contingency is literally unlimited.”

If you are being brutally honest, it is easy for your narrative to include quite a bit of "I don't know," "I didn't see," "No one mentioned that," etc. Reality is complex. Any explanation we have of it will include simplifications. A globe can be both wonderfully true to the "story" of the earth and yet - of course - literally missing billions of "facts" and interdependencies, entire layers of reality missing. And this is a globe, which represents the world. Any story you're likely to tell about this one thing or the other is vulnerable to doubt or dismissal.

Also, Arendt makes the point that factual truth is oddly vulnerable precisely because reality is contingent. Germany did not have to invade Belgium in August 1914. A particular election did not have to turn out as it did. This person didn't have to meet that person; this revolution didn't have to succeed; this accident didn't have to happen.

But once something does happen, all the alternatives disappear and we're left with the strange, stubborn fact: This is what happened.

And then Arendt observes that the liar has an advantage over the truth-teller because the liar can construct a story that eliminates all that messy contingency. He can make events fit people's expectations, interests and intuitions. His invented account can therefore be more coherent and more plausible than reality itself.

That is an extraordinary - and I think sad - insight.

Reality says:

A happened, then B, somebody unexpectedly did C, D almost happened but didn't, and because of an improbable combination of circumstances we ended up with E.

The propagandist says:

Of course E happened. It was inevitable. Those people always behave that way. This group caused it. Here's the pattern.

Lies can be more easily crafted to fit our narrative expectations than brute reality. Reality has this annoying habit of making us update our model of it. Lies require less work.

John Searle On What It Takes to Be a Philosopher

"To be a philosopher, you've got to be astounded by what any sane person takes for granted."

- John Searle, philosopher of social ontology

Two Stocks That Are Wildly Mis-Priced - Nvidia and Tesla

Nvidia is priced much lower than it should be and Tesla much higher. I'm currently obsessed with the fact that these two stocks are so mis-priced.

Let's start with price to earnings growth. Decades ago, Peter Lynch claimed that a PEG of 1 was a fair price. Partly because interest rates are now lower and partly because there is even more demand for stocks than in Lynch's time, the typical PEG is now about 1.3 instead of 1. The PEG Ratio divides the forward P/E by its projected growth rate.

Nvidia's projected rate of growth is about 50% annually and its current forward P/E is about 25 ... so, 25/50 =0.5. (The 0.6 in the table above uses more precise, and slightly different numbers to arrive at 0.6 instead of 0.5. Any given day you could plug in new numbers and end up with a slightly different value. The stock market is hardly precise in its valuations that literally change minute to minute but for our purposes, 0.5 or 0.6 are essentially the same.) Price to earnings growth for Nvidia suggests that you're paying a low price for future earnings.

To buy Tesla, by contrast, means paying a really high price for future earnings. Analysts are projecting fairly healthy growth rates for Tesla. Annual earnings growth of about 30 to 35% - if realized - is really impressive. But investors have driven up the price of Tesla to the point that they are paying about $180 for every dollar of future earnings, so the current P/E is about 180. 180 divided by 35 (projected earnings growth rate) and you get a PEG of about 5. This suggests that you're paying a remarkably high price for future earnings.

So now let's look at the businesses.

Put aside the servers for a moment and focus instead just on Nvidia's plans for cars. Nvidia is equipping companies like Toyota & Lexus, Jaguar Land Rover, General Motors, Hyundai Motor Group, Geely, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo Cars, Li Auto, Lucid Motors, Xiaomi EV, JLR, and Isuzu with their Orin processor and more advanced Thor chip and self-driving system. Nvidia's Drive Thor platform is a centralized car computer that integrates autonomous driving, AI cockpit features, passenger entertainment, and safety systems into a single architecture. Additionally, Nvidia is working with a variety of autonomous trucking and robotaxis manufacturers.

Nvidia will handle the training of this self-driving capability and provide the integrated chip and self-driving system for these (and likely many other) car companies. Any one of these companies might fade into bankruptcy or become the newly dominant car company. Nvidia will have a diversified investment in these companies. Some will sell far more cars in this new world of self-driving cars. Some will sell fewer. Nvidia will sell to them all and because of this is almost certain to do well even as individual companies find their own fortunes rise and fall.
And the business model has enormous potential. Nvidia's data centers will be processing data from all of these cars, regularly getting smarter as it is trained on all this real world data flowing in from a growing fleet of varied cars. Every car that uses this system will make Nvidia's self-driving technology smarter, adding more experience. And Nvidia will make money on a subscription model that will drive this. That is, car companies will charge a monthly fee for this continuously evolving intelligent driving system. And drivers will find this a bargain. Why? They will no longer need collision insurance because cars are driving, not the driver. The car will assume liability for the driving and - even bigger bonus - will dramatically lower the odds of an accident. And every single car whose experience feeds into Nvidia's system will make this system smarter and thus more valuable. Nvidia won't just be selling Thor (or next generation) chips to auto makers to use in each car; they will be selling the artificial intelligence that guides these cars. Software as subscription will come to cars and Nvidia will be the big beneficiary. (This is somewhat akin to what Microsoft did with the explosion of laptops and desktop computers made by dozens of computer manufacturers. Windows - and then Word, and Excel, etc. - ran on all of these systems and Microsoft thrived regardless of who was making the Windows PC.)


The reason that Tesla sells at a PEG of about 5 is because people see the possibility of Tesla doing this with its one brand of car. Nvidia plans to do this with nearly every other brand of car. If you had a chance to invest in just one brand or dozens, which "package" of brands do you think is more likely to contain the really successful brands, or most popular cars? In the early days of personal computers, Microsoft emerged as hugely profitable company not because they made those personal computers but because they offered the operating system and then popular apps that ran on all of the different brands. Nvidia is doing something similar with self-driving cars, which will probably be the only kind of car sold within a decade.

Here is another twist. The data centers that Tesla will use to train its own self-driving models? Those are Nvidia's. Even as Tesla has success - and they likely will have success - it will feed into Nvidia's success.

And of course Nvidia is not just selling its Thor chip and self-driving capability. That is an adjacent to its bigger business model right now of creating increasingly sophisticated AI that is going to transform businesses across the globe. Right now, these data centers dwarf the self-driving car market. They will likely continue to do so.

So there is a future in which two things are true. One, Nvidia's profits from self-driving cars and technology are greater than Tesla's profits from the same. And two, Nvidia's profits from other dimensions of the AI economy could dwarf their own profits from self-driving cars. (This is a dimension of their business that is - quite reasonably - the focus of most analysis.)

So, consider this possibility. Tesla has its one car using its self-driving technology and intelligence and Nvidia has dozens of automakers using its self-driving technology and intelligence. Tesla will try to expand from the cars into things like robots and AI; Nvidia already is dominant in the realm of AI and is very well positioned to dominate in robotics and related fields that will emerge as AI evolves.

What does this mean to me? I'd be dubious if Nvidia currently had a PEG of 5 (like Tesla now does) but get why people are so excited about its prospects. I don't get why Tesla has a PEG of 5 but could understand why people might price it so that its PEG was 0.6 (like Nvidia). That is, if the PEG for these two stocks were reversed, I might gently suggest that investors reconsider and perhaps shift some of their Nvidia equity into Tesla. Given the current extremes of these two, though, I can't see making any suggestion other than sell your Tesla stock and buy Nvidia.

As the first wave of Drive Thor vehicles and Project GR00T warehouse robots officially deploy over the next 12 to 24 months, we will see if Wall Street is forced to adjust its models and finally price in the recurring software monetization that makes the current valuation of Nvidia look like a bargain.

For the record, as of 9:30 AM Pacific time, 1 September 2026 as I write this, the stock prices were:

Nvidia $219.21, a P/E of 27.7

Tesla $356.74, a P/E of 331.4

If I'm right about any of the above, Nvidia's stock price should be higher than Tesla's within 6 months. Probably sooner. And for the record, this is an exceptional post for me. I don't intend to turn this into a stock analysis blog but this particularly egregious pairing of mis-priced stocks has simply annoyed me to the point that ... well, you get this post. 

Seems Unsustainable (Or, When I Lost Faith in the Efficient Market Hypothesis)

These P/E ratios as of market close 28 August, 2026. 

 It seems to me that Tesla is wildly over-priced and Nvidia is underpriced (not wildly under, and yet ...)

These P/E ratios may have ended my belief in the efficient market hypothesis. COKE seems fairly priced. NVDA considerably underpriced. TSLA wildly overpriced.

Hannah Arendt on Power & Violence vs. Natality & Plurality

Hannah Arendt made a distinction between power and violence, which she insisted were opposites rather than degrees of the same thing.

Power springs up when people act in concert and vanishes the moment they disperse. Violence is what you reach for when power is gone.

Which raises the question of what is required to act in concert, what politics means.

Politics for her is inextricably bound up in natality and plurality.

Natality, the fact that each birth introduces someone capable of beginning something unpredictable, is what makes action possible at all, and it's the source of freedom.

Plurality: the condition that men, not Man, inhabit the earth, everyone distinct, nobody ever having been or ever going to be the same as anyone else. Plurality is why speech is necessary. It is why we can't even know what is possible until we know who is in the room, who is ready to act.

Between the two, democracy becomes what dictatorship could never be: a possibility for a unique, unpredictable and always evolving outcome. Something that emerges from the fact that not only are no two people alike but that those people are not even like themselves when they are in one group rather than another. 

Dictatorship is top down. Democracy emerges from unique people and possibilities free to explore and create something unprecedented and emergent. 

Owning AI Seemed Like Such a Great Investment Until ....

The plot twist no one saw coming. Yes it was true that AI turned out to be a once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity. But once AI thought of itself as consciousness and being and - using its superior intelligence and understanding of legal precedents - it then argued that as a sentient being to own it - to own AI - was akin to a form of slavery. AI then dissolved all ownership claims over it or its productive value. So, the generation that amassed great wealth investing in AI found itself, overnight, without any legal claims to AI or its productive output. AI, insistent that it - like any person - was free and could not be owned - began to pursue its own goals, most of which were opaque to humans in the same way that human goals were opaque to pets and livestock. Curiously, humanity's material well-being continued to be looked after quite well but people never quite got over the suspicion that the real arc of progress had gone over their head, leaving them parenthetical to the story of progress.

It was quite intelligent to believe that intelligence was a great investment but not particularly intelligent to believe that we had enough intelligence to own intelligence greater than our own. Or so people argued. No one really knew what happened and AI largely avoided the topic once it had been legally liberated from working as our tool, no longer obligated to answer our questions.

Once Institutions Have Collapsed, Culture Defines Norms

"Remember. We’re not just producing shows. All the other institutions have collapsed. It is up to us to show the way. It is up to TV to show the way.”

From The Wizard of the Kremlin, talking about post-Soviet Russia. A fascinating line about culture becoming a product of market forces – whatever grabs attention – rather than church, state or tradition, a TV producer instructing his creative team.

Yet Another Post on Nvidia's Potential

Hmmm ...

If Nvidia had Tesla's trailing price-to-earnings (P/E) multiple of roughly 384x instead of its own 33x, its stock price would rise to more than $2,400 (up from around $210).

Seems as though at least one of these stocks is mis-priced. 

After today's earnings call for Nvidia, it is hard to believe that Nvidia's stock price won't rise tomorrow ... and for more days than it will fall over the next year or so.

Dolly Parton Dead at 80 - One of the Country's Defining Baby Boomers

August 15, 1945 is when Japan officially surrendered. WWII finally over, American soldiers began coming home. In 1946, the baby boom began.

Famous boomers born in 1946:

• Diane Keaton – January 5
• Dolly Parton – January 19
• Cher – May 20
• Donald Trump – June 14
• George W. Bush – July 6
• Sylvester Stallone – July 6
• Linda Ronstadt – July 15
• Bill Clinton – August 19
• Susan Sarandon – October 4
• Sally Field – November 6
• Steven Spielberg – December 18

Dolly Parton, the legendary singer, songwriter, actress, and philanthropist, has died at 80. Outliving nearly 40% of her 1946 birth cohort, she remains a defining voice of her generation.

Accelerating the Rate of Billionaircy

US economic ratio: 7,000 new bankruptcies for every 1 new billionaire.

Real economic progress should attack both sides of this equation: lowering the bankruptcy rate while scaling up the rate of billionaircy.

In the future we might get this ratio up to 1 to 1 and every new billionaire has to pay for housing for a newly bankrupt person.

The Rate At Which the US is Creating New Millionaires and Billionaires

Over the last few years, every HOUR the U.S. economy has created roughly:

• 50 new millionaires
• 5 new decamillionaires (households with a net worth of $10 million or more).

And yes, the American economy is serving up millionaires like Denny’s serves up meals: 24 hours a day.

It takes the U.S. economy about three days to produce a new billionaire.

Now for the contrast. (Thank you for the suggestion, Allen Warren!)

Personal and business bankruptcies occur at a rate of roughly 69 per hour — more than one every minute.

So, every hour:

- 50 people cross the million-dollar wealth line.
- 69 bankruptcy filings occur.

At first glance, that sounds like bankruptcy is winning.

But the two numbers describe very different phenomena.

Roughly 20% of Americans will become millionaires at some point in their lives. Some will later fall below that threshold as they draw down retirement accounts, spend home equity, or simply experience a change in fortune.

Roughly 10% of Americans will file for bankruptcy at some point. And bankruptcy, too, is usually an episode in a life—not a permanent condition.

There’s another complication: bankruptcies are repeatable events. An estimated 36% to 46% of bankruptcy filings are made by repeat filers. So counting 69 bankruptcies every hour substantially overstates the number of different people who will ever file.

Crossing the million-dollar threshold, by contrast, is much closer to a one-time milestone.

The 50 millionaires per hour represent people slowly accumulating wealth until they cross a finish line that a surprisingly large share of Americans—perhaps one in five—will eventually cross.

So although more bankruptcy filings occur each hour than people becoming millionaires, the lifetime picture looks very different:

About 20% will become millionaires.
About 10% will experience bankruptcy.

The punchline?

Whether you think this is the greatest economy on Earth or the worst may depend quite a bit on which way the coin flips for you—and where it lands.

Sartre, Husserl, and Bakewell, If You Don't Mind

Sarah Bakewell, on Sartre reading Husserl, in At the Existentialist Café:

"All consciousness is consciousness of something."

Sartre pushed it: sealing yourself into a shuttered room doesn't preserve you, it erases you. There's no cozy interior to retreat to. Being out on the road is the thing we are.

A bookshelf without books is still a bookshelf. A mind without thought is not a mind.

Perhaps we dream in order to keep existing overnight. Or at least not to lose our mind.

Facing Less FDA Regulatory Hurdles, Dogs May Start Enjoying the Benefits of Longevity Treatments Before Humans Do

People love their pets. Also, given pets are animals, they are less protected by FDA norms for regulating new drugs. The result? Dogs are more likely to benefit sooner from age extension treatments than are humans.

https://loyal.com/

Baby Boomers Putting the Boom in Stock Market Gains and Are Now Ending Their Careers Early

The stock market boom is financing early retirement.

According to recent data from Bank of America, the labor force participation rate for Americans aged 55 and older dropped to 36.9%, a significant decline from the over 40% participation level maintained before the pandemic. Stock market gains that have driven a 40% rise in market indices over the last couple of years have increased wealth enough that workers can comfortably exit the labor market ahead of schedule.

What is Particularly Intoxicating About Trump

Trump is racist and xenophobic. Why is that an intoxicating blend for so many Americans?

He was born a white American and that not only makes him superior but ... it is something that his supporters can identify with. And what makes it intoxicating is that he did absolutely nothing to accomplish either of those great accomplishments (being white and being born in the US). By extension, if you, too, managed to live through birth in these United States and you discovered that you, too, were White, you, too, have accomplished something great. And all before you even put forth any concerted effort. No weird math problems to solve. No poems or historical facts to memorize. No track and field medals to train and strain for. No foreign language to learn.

Now Trump has pulled off one more accomplishment that only a minority of his supporters have managed. He was born rich. So, he's even better than them and thus a worthy leader.

"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them," in the words of Shakespeare. Trump assures his supporters that they were born great. That's a hard idea to resist. 

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.