2026 - Not Just a Year

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

Separating Signal From Noise in Quarterly GDP Growth Reports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free Will Gives Way to Fee Will

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

"A Civilization Persisted from Athens to Rome to America

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Washington and the Bank of England

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

 #PresidentsDay

A Theory About Why Bitcoin Is Falling in Price

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Way AI May Change Our Mind

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

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

Possible Side Effects of Watching Sports

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

Household Net Worth by Percentiles

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

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

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

One of Bill Abendroth's Favorite Lines

One of Abendroth's favorite lines from Arrested Development:

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

How AI's Opinion of Us Could Define Our Future

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

America's Complete Rupture in International Relations

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

Does This Mean Employees Are More Valuable or Less Important?

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

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

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

Betting on the Return of Jesus

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

****

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

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

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

***

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

Dow[n] Day at the NASDAQ

 Das Naquery!

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

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

An Inflection Point for AI

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

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

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

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

The Political Arena is Not a Dance Hall - or Why Music Isn't What Needs to Unite Us

Jon Stewart nailed it: it's not a halftime entertainer's job to unify the country. If anyone has that job, it's the president—who once again created more divisiveness by attacking the halftime entertainer for... not unifying the country.

One of the best things about the modern world? There's never been less pressure to enjoy what everyone else does. My top Spotify songs from 2025 are by Waxahachie, Twin Shadow, Van Morrison, Pearl Jam, and Mondo Cozmo. Whether you hate or love these artists, I don't assume a thing about who you are as a person or whether we'd agree on policy.

Affection for a music genre strikes me as the definition of apolitical.

One great thing about the modern world: we can dress differently, listen to very different music, eat very different food, and still support the same policies, share a vision of the same community—where, crucially, we're not required to listen to each other's music.

To argue otherwise—that we must share cultural tastes to share political goals—seems like an odd commitment to keeping us divided.

Which, come to think of it, might be the point.

Thanks for coming to my rant.

Time Travel Book

My, uh, time travel self-help book is titled, Time Travel: One Day at a Time.

Super Bowl Halftime Entertainment Contrasted with Baseball

People making a big deal about the halftime show at the Super Bowl.

One more way baseball is a better game? You always know who the halftime performers will be (it'll be you, there in the stands) and what the music selection will be ("Take me out to the ballgame! ..").

Also, with baseball, it does not seem as though they're trying to meet a 3 injuries per game quota.

One More Generation Gap Metric - words per minute while talking

One of the more curious things about this late-stage information economy is how a person in his 30s on a podcast will talk about 2X as fast as a person in his 50s or 60s. I suspect it is an adaptation to living in a flood of information that simply can't be absorbed at the speed we ancients absorb it. They listen to podcasts at 2X and talk at 2X as well. One more way we become living artifacts.

Accidental Holidays

Today’s Super Bowel takes its place alongside other accidental typo holidays - Violent Time Day, Eater Brunch, Prude Month, and the curiously tasty Yum Kipper.

The 2027 Paradigm Shift in No Hands Driving

Having grown impatient waiting for the full development of self-driving technology, in 2027 Americans simply went all in on modified bumper car design, building to absorb collisions rather than avoid them.

The Two Transformations of AI

My AI prediction has two dimensions.

First, I think it will do for knowledge work what power tools did for craftsmen. You still have hand tools—but now you also have a table saw. It will increase productivity and make some tasks much easier and still leave us with a number of tasks to do "by brain" in the same way that power tools still leave us with some tasks to do "by hand." 

The second dimension is more speculative. It concerns what AI might mean for the definition of “we.” At some point in evolutionary history, single-celled organisms became multicellular organisms. It’s not obvious that the single cells understood what was happening or even understand now that they're part of something larger, responding as they still do to their "environment." Single cells may still think they are the center of the universe in the same way that we individuals tend to, even when surrounded by 8 billion other individuals with similar notions.

AI may synthesize intelligence and insight in ways that cause us to organize, decide, and act collectively beyond our full understanding—or even our awareness. We may become something larger than we are individually. In this way it'll act much like cultures, institutions and markets. That is, make us part of something bigger.

Artificial Intelligence could become one more force that shapes us and that we don't fully understand but feel our way through by competing theories - just as we do with markets and cultures.

Trump's Exchange With Kaitlin Collins

Asked about Epstein's victims yesterday, Trump told the woman reporter - Kaitlin Collins - who asked him that she should smile more. Which I'm sure is what he and Jeffrey told those teenage girls.

Trump's Racism

 Racism for Republicans - it's a feature, not a bug.

And of course just yesterday, regarding the young women who were victims of Donald Trump's closest friend Jeffrey Epstein, Trump told a woman reporter that she should smile more.

Clearly old white crackers are the swing vote in this country. 

A Bad Combination

It is bad enough to be stupid or arrogant but there ought to be a law against anyone who insists on being both. 

Sir Bill Browder on Russia, Politics, and Trump

I don't think I've ever shared a YouTube interview on here before but this is unique. Sir Bill Browder explains how Putin operates and points out that what Trump is doing is aligned with Putin's methods.

Who is Bill Browder? His grandfather ran as a communist for president in the US and as a young man he decided that in rebellion against this odd family of his, if his grandfather was to be the most famous communist in the US, he - Bill Browder - would become the most famous capitalist in Russia. And he did just that, becoming wildly successful in Russia in its early, post-communist days ... until he crossed Putin and had to flee the Russia to save his own life.

In this interview he tells his story and shares his observation that Trump seems very much like Putin and is doing little to hide his goals or methods.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkE6_nJb-UA

Next iteration YOLO

YOLT!
The jolt you get when you realize you only live twice - as the reincarnationists tried to warn you.

As Self Driving Cars Move More Rapidly, Will That Drive Rapid Obsolescence of Traditional Cars?

If self-driving hits a real inflection point—safer, easier, and not dramatically more expensive—what happens to the resale value of cars that need a human behind the wheel?

It is possible that this won't change because of preference. It might actually be increasingly difficult to use a traditional car in a world with more self-driving cars.

I can imagine cities and states saying: “During rush hour we’re going to run certain express lanes as coordinated convoys—tight spacing, high speed, smooth flow. Humans can’t be trusted in that environment, so those lanes are autonomous-only.” Not everywhere, not always—just enough to matter.

And once the most valuable driving real estate (time + roads) starts going autonomous-first, doesn’t a human-driven car become less like “transportation” and more like a hobby?

What do you think—does this crater demand for non-autonomous cars, or does car ownership simply evolve (self-driving becomes the new normal) without destroying the legacy market?

Personally, I feel like we could quickly hit an inflection point that makes human driven cars increasingly dangerous which would collapse their resale value.