Thought For The Day - 14 September 2026

Well... some of the AI oligarches are getting all sweaty in their sphincters. They're not really sweaty about the threat of unrestrained AI has to the rest of us. They're sweaty about losing the ability to rule the world.

And, if they're paying attention, they're sweaty that they'll lose control of their AI systems to Our Malignant Narcissist^{©John Gardner}. I mean, he's going to turn down the ability to control the whole population? Hell no. There'll be an EO soon nationalizing, aka confiscating, all the AI companies and putting Hegseth in control. Just you watch.

The Shadow Knows

A few times in these missives, it has been mentioned that I spent some time on the staff of Jack Anderson while he was still relevant. Got a two day report out of it. Yay me. Got to meet some spooks out in Bethesda, too. They stand up really straight.

One fact, and it isn't just "speculation", is that NSA really does hoover up all electronic comms across the globe. American grifters routinely get caught up in the dust bag, just because they aren't immune if they're talking to Vlad in Moscow or at his dacha. The Shadow knows how much Vlad helped get Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor) elected in '20 and '24. The reach is infinite.

So now we get Bibi getting outed for being asleep at the switch leading to Oct. 7. And denying, of course. If you believe him, your also asleep.

The report in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, which The New York Times could not confirm, said that Mr. Netanyahu had a 45-minute phone call with Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the president of the United Arab Emirates, in late September 2023, and was told about a plan by Hamas to attack Israel and destabilize the region. Mr. Netanyahu's office has denied the report.

You can bet both gonads the NSA has every single second of that call. Will Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson push Bibi to fess up?? Will Congress go all 25^th on him with his totally unhinged diarrhea of the Id that makes up an increasing volume of his postings?

The rat-a-tat of ever wilder, ever more outrageous posts each weekend has become a fixture of the president's second term, seen more and more as a barometer of his mental state. Mr. Trump's critics, who never considered him a model of stability in the first place, now point to these frenetic bursts of fantasy and vanity as proof that the 80-year-old president is deteriorating further with age.
...
It feels like we're genuinely watching his brain rot in real time.
-- Sarah Matthews

Only The Shadow knows.

TAM - part the third

Well... that didn't take long. Yet more reporting, with data, from NYT.

There is, in the econ biz, an acrnonym TANSTAAFL which stands for There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Origin not known, although some/many/most sources go back to 19^th century taverns - "free lunch" if you spent enough.

The AI, as currently implemented, craze has been operating, if not "free", at least way, way below cost.

This latest report from the NYT explores evolved GPT models, driven by the same request. The models are 3.5, 4.o, and 5.5, the number offered for each is the number of "tokens" to process the request. So, here we go:

3.5 448 at $0.00

4.o 771 at $.01

5.5 6,463 at $.19

The report goes on to explain how each is, to all intensive porpoises, just a black box. There have been some reports that not all systems/models/developers actually know what's going on inside these Black Boxes.

Justin Summerville, an executive at the company, said many businesses "spent the past year yelling at their employees to use A.I., use A.I., use A.I."

But that's come at a cost, he added. "And now the finance organizations are waking up and saying, 'Whoa — this is a big number,'" Mr. Summerville said.

Dontcha just hate the bean counters? Always ruining the party. What was that the Wicked Witch of the West said? "I'm melting!" Just as fast as the AI TAM.

Here's another take, similar but not identical, to address the issue.

Faced with escalating variable costs, enterprises are capping their cloud consumption. The financially viable alternative is shifting to owned server architectures. By deploying open-source AI models on proprietary hardware, organizations bypass restrictive and costly subscriptions entirely.

With a grain of salt, naturally. The report is from a stock analyst with a bone to pick someplace. But, if it happens that there does emerge a significant shift from AI-operator operated models to in-house "open source AI" on owned hardware? More melting for the likes of OpenAI, et al.

TAM - part the second

So, Ok, how's it going for the AI TAM? According to recent reporting (today in my dead trees version) in the NYT, not so well. As stated before, any product falls (mostly, generally) into one of two buckets: intermediate good which is incorporated into a final user product, and, as you might surmise, a final user product. With AI, the latter, so far, is mostly adding steroids to web search, aka Gemini mostly. As to the former, this report deals largely there. And there isn't good. At least from making Bongo Bucks profits, that is.

Is there any evidence, or even logic, that makes a case for search on steroids as a Market? IOW, is it reasonable to expect that Google, et al (to the extent that there is an et al) will reap even more advert revenue traceable to AI function? My guess is just, no. At some point Google, et al will have to fess up.

On the next hand, there've been reports of various AI being used to generate technical papers, of questionable veracity. That's a Brave New World.

[T[here's a [sic] been a growing wave of AI-generated and AI-assisted academic papers hitting journals and preprint services like arXiv. It's a trend that is both hinting at new forms of research and discovery, and threatening to overwhelm academic literature with a tsunami of pseudo-intellectual AI slop.

An earlier report said this

But that level of AI use does not come cheap. Just months ago, many businesses encouraged employees to use AI for nearly everything, a trend known as "tokenmaxxing." Now, as the bills arrive, some are introducing limits and asking whether all that usage is actually producing enough value.

That's an example of the intermediate goods situation. The NYT report is even worser.

As A.I. costs skyrocketed, Andy Markus, the company's chief data and A.I. officer, looked for cheaper alternatives. He landed on "open" models, which can be downloaded and modified without payment or approval.

By May, open models accounted for 20 percent of AT&T's A.I. use. That has since risen to 40 percent and may jump to 60 percent in the coming months, Mr. Markus said in an interview.

"We believe it could go much, much higher," he said, adding that AT&T was saving up to 80 percent on A.I. costs compared with earlier this year.

Where do we go from here? One avenue -

At AT&T, the telecom company is now taking open-weights models and customizing them to make new tools that can transcribe calls and facilitate customer service, Mr. Markus, the company's chief data and A.I. officer, said.

Once again, the intermediate goods venue, which depends on firing humans to generate "savings" Bongo Bucks. What happens after you've fired the Last Man? Good question. Where's that part of TAM? It's Nowhere Man. "Making all his nowhere plans for nobody".

So, beyond the recent and continuing euphoria with The Latest New Toy, what's the long term TAM for AI? I don't think anybody knows, cares, or thought about it. I still think it ain't anything worthy of Trillions of Bongo Bucks. The bubble may well break before the first Trillion is booked. One can only hope; the fall won't be as far or hurt as much.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Grift

The Rabid Right Wingnuts have been foaming at the mouth since at least the advent of Medicare: "we're living so much longer and We can't afford to provide Communist healthcare to geezers!!!". Well, they mostly don't admit that the We is rich folk, who are oppressed by the graduated income tax (which they mostly manage to avoid, anyway). So, is it true in the first place? That we are living so much longer? Well... not really. As is extensively documented among the demographers and epidemiologists, almost all of the increase in life expectancy at birth isn't that geezers are living a lot longer. They aren't.

But, even some mostly educated folk buy the myth. So, let's do a bit of a thought experiment, a la Einstein. If it was good enough for him, it's good enough for me. And you.

What if... Grifter In Chief gets his mail balloting ban gift from The Gang of Six^©, so keeping both the House and Senate in 2026. Next, he claims national security in 2028 to suspend the election, and The Gang of Six^© goes along, as one would expect. Either he, if he's still kinda alive, or DJT Jr. takes the throne. With Grifter In Chief demonstrating that the Constitution is no impediment to dictatorship by election, just like 30s Germany, and present day Turkey and Hungary, Grifter In Chief names hisself President for life ("we shouldn't even have an election") and RFK HHS Secretary for life. Along with the rest of the cocksucking Cabinet, naturally.

Whichever Grifter In Chief is on the throne orders that RFK implement that So Much Better Than Obamacare right away. And, miracle, it happens; life expectancy shoots up like a rocket. There is a catch. There always is. It's really just a kinder, gentler "Logan's Run" scenario. Everybody manages to get to 50, say, alive and kicking. Last Day with the black crystal doesn't happen until 65 and it doesn't mean you get zapped. You just don't get any more healthcare. But how does that meet Grifter In Chief's demand for better healthcare? It doesn't, of course; but it can be made to look sorta, kinda like it.

The answer is simple arithmetic: by eliminating the remaining early death causes (a major miracle, btw), the mean/median of the life curve shifts bigly to the right. However much results from use of chronic disease drugs, or the growing advent of gene therapies (at eye watering fee, of course), getting to 65 in very good health will be the result. Geezers don't live longer as a cohort, some fraction will die earlier than when Medicare existed since they no longer get chronic medicines or hip replacements or those nifty gene therapies (what's the point of a life long cure if your life is 5 or so years) and such. But So Much Better Than Obamacare is ruled a rousing success, and the innumerate rejoice. "Life expectancy at 65 went up by 5 years!!!" Thanks, actually, to all those therapies they got before entering the Land of the Geezer, not because So Much Better Than Obamacare lifted a finger for the geezers.

And, the fact is, we're not all that far from such now. There doesn't appear to be much geezer specific healthcare in existence; life extenstion in your Medicare years appears to be mostly the residue of better health/death avoidance garnered until then; esp. with continuance of all those chronic disease meds that got you to your Medicare years.

Here's one report on the "residue" effect of statins and heart disease. It's paywalled, alas, but here's the lede:

Not long after guidelines shifted to considering statin therapy as early as age 30, new research from France suggests there may be no harm in stopping the cholesterol-lowering drugs at age 75 in people with no history of cardiovascular disease. The lessons, however, may not translate elsewhere.

And, of course, here's one for BP

The mean survival benefits — estimated using differences in areas under the curve — associated with the use of intensive vs standard BP control ranged from 0.5 to 3 years. At age 50 years, estimated residual survival was 37.3 and 34.4 years with intensive and standard treatments, respectively (difference, 2.9 years; 95% CI, 0.9-5.0 years; P =.008). At 65 years, residual survival was 24.5 and 23.3 years with intensive and standard BP control treatments, respectively (difference 1.1; 95% CI, 0.1-2.1 years; P =.029)

Middle-age, at-risk patients were found to benefit the most from intensive BP control treatment.

Now, it wouldn't be quite fair to infer that BP medicines in your Medicare years don't mean much compared to having them since decades earlier. But almost.

IOW, once again: the under 65 crowd have been slurping these meds for some decades before they reach their Medicare years. Many/some would have croaked well before then, but because they didn't, the life expectancy curve shifts (bigly, mayhaps?) to the right. Whether any of them lasts longer in their Medicare years than the unmedicated. It's just the arithmetic of mean/median and (quasi) normal distribution.

Gimme Shelter

So, if any in the audience thinks that AI, as currently implemented, may be regulated by Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor), think again. Real hard. Having the Fascists in control the goal, as described here. That's the NYT review of what happened, and it surely caused every manjack of the Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor) to get an instant hardon.

Just think of how simple and easy it will be for Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor) to totally control The United States of Alabama. Putin and Hitler would be proud. For as long as it lasts, since Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson will drive the economy over a cliff. And he'll depart to Moscow with his Bongo Bucks safely in Switzerland.

This time, the A.I. collective didn't seize a military network, hack a hospital or shut down an electrical grid. This time, humans regained control.

Next time, we might not be so lucky.

Next time, we won't be so lucky. Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor) will be the humans in control. Only for themselves.

Cruelty is the point.

That's Entertainment

A few times in the course of these missives, I've mentioned that measures of "economic impact" of various consumer-optional entertainment are basically bogus. Here's a long piece from the NYT on the economics of the US Open tennis program. It does make the case, but only indirectly, that value of such activity matters only if measured spending is from consumers outside of the locale in question. One might be picky and assert that the appropriate venue is the USofA in toto. Why? Because of what we in the econ space call substitution effect. Or, as one skeptic put it (near the bottom of the piece, of course)

Some are skeptical of these kinds of projections. Andrew Zimbalist, a professor emeritus of economics at Smith College and an expert on the economics of sports, has not seen the study. But he cautioned that there are ways to make data fit a narrative.

"It's quite possible that there is some positive impact," he said, adding that money spent by New Yorkers at the tournament is money that most likely would have been spent elsewhere in the city — on Broadway, at a Yankees game, at a restaurant — and now won't be. "In that sense it's a net negative," he said.

A spokescritter for a restaurant org went on to say that benefit outside of the immediate area around the center doesn't amount to much. Duh.

Exactly how much Damn Gimmint Bongo Bucks were used to create the current facility, I haven't found. But it was built, apparently for free, on city land. There is an audit from 2019, which shows that USTA isn't exactly being taken to the cleaners by NYC on an annual basis. The report says the US Open is worth $1,200,000,000 to NYC each year. The City Gummint doesn't get but a few pennies. Sweet heart, I luv you so!

One can site casinos and data centers as boons to the local economy. Which never seem to work out that way; Atlantic City, I'm talking to you. And how many uneducated shitkickers are going to work in those centers in fly-over country? Yeah, right.