TAM - part the sixth

This is starting to feel like shooting ducks in a barrel. (I wonder whether the kiddies even know that sentence???) Yet more reporting on AI, but from a distinct perspective: ok vendors, you've gulped from the AI punch bowl to make a cheaper (may be?) and/or better product. God damn it, give me a lower price!!! I don't give a shit about your market share, only my wallet's share.

Now that AI is firmly entrenched in the business of killing off every last God damned white collar worker on the planet, let's have us some Shakespeare.

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

Well... apparently not first, but they were the first to suck Ayatollah 49% Don^©'s dick, as you may recall.

First, of course, the ambulance chasers boast about embracing AI

Outsiders often cite law as an industry under threat from artificial intelligence. But the nation's biggest firms are eager to show off how they've embraced the technology.

After OpenAI announced a version of its latest A.I. model for lawyers last week, for example, a handful of top-tier firms proudly unveiled new tools.

Then, they get hoisted on their own petard; karma's a bitch

Some clients are using A.I. to make their argument for A.I. markdowns. Jennifer Leonard, the founder of Creative Lawyers, which advises law firms and corporate legal departments on adapting to A.I., said some law firms and their clients used A.I. agents to spot line items in bills where A.I. could have saved hours. "They literally have struck that out, and say, 'I want a discount on this, we don't want to pay for this part of the work anymore,'" she said. "Or, 'We know you have this new A.I. tool in house because we saw your splashy press release.'"

How will they pay for that summer house in the Hamptons???

I Told You So - 22 September 2026

Well... it's been rather a long while since I took up the mantra: "It's the Senate, stupid!!" The logic to that being, naturally, that gerrymanders don't (at least directly) affect state wide votes.

Now, the great and powerful Nate Cohn more or less agrees.

James Talarico has led every recent survey of the Texas Senate race, with polls showing him ahead among Hispanic voters by at least 20 points. Although his lead is often mostly dismissed as a reflection of the profound flaws of his Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, the polls also show the Democrat Gina Hinojosa to be surprisingly competitive in the race for governor against the incumbent, Greg Abbott, who leads by an average of three points in recent polls.

Now, of course, TX is, as always, an anomaly but nevertheless points to the obvious: state wide is easier to defeat than the gerrymander. There also remains the chance that the gerrymander in TX will come up short, so to speak

In a sign that the G.O.P. itself doesn't consider the races safe, Republican groups are spending in all six of these seats — which include four of the five districts Republicans thought they could flip with their new gerrymander.

Chocolate sauce on your pudding.

The Democratic Party's chances of having a truly exceptional midterm election — one that yields a large congressional majority and control of the Senate — could depend on whether Democratic gains among Hispanic voters translate into breakthroughs in Texas and Florida.

TAM - part the fifth

Well... the news keep on coming. It is my duty to carry on, when the news fits my agenda, of course. This new report on the angst amongst the Moneyed Class doesn't explicitly cite TAM for the tightening of sphincters amongst that class, but one need not read too deeply between the lines to see what's driving the angst.

But some investors are voicing increasing skepticism about the growth expectations for data centers and the risks associated with their build-out, forcing industry executives and their advisers to recalibrate their plans to raise tens of billions of dollars in public markets.

That bit, "growth expectations", is just another way to bleat "what's the TAM going to be when this shit goes live???!!!???" Really now. Who's going to pay out of pocket for AI porn when there's a torrent of free stuff? Not that I've dined at that table, mind you. But investing, and even staying in business past the expire date, depends on customers buying your shit. If anyone has a detailed justification for a TAM worthy of multiple trillions of Bongo Bucks investments, I'm all ears. Like Clark Gable.

Thought For The Day - 21 September 2026

Shit. I suppose it was inevitable, but now the thieves just have to follow the buzz to get free stuff. Capitalism at it's finest.

"What's happening in Richardson is about to happen all over the country, and people are finally going to believe us that having all these drones flying around is actually a big, big problem," said Scott Bratcher, who is the president of his homeowners' association in a Richardson neighborhood that residents have called a drone highway.

Ya think???

Brian Rowe, an executive in tech and cybersecurity, has shown up to City Council meetings to complain. He has considered many methods of clearing the drones above his home, even looking into commercial anti-drone technology. But that technology, mostly for military use, costs tens of thousands of dollars, he said.

"What can we do?" Mr. Rowe said.

This is Texas, right? Home of the rollercoaster next to a house? Lots o guns in TX. An AR-15 with a good silencer would do the trick.

Building the roller coaster did not require any special permits from the city of Kemah, City Administrator Bill Kerber said. Since all setback requirements were met and the city has no zoning, a building permit for the coaster was issued without any variances. No public hearing was required to inform area residents.

Freedom!!!!!

TAM - part the fourth

One series, but different targets it's turning out. There are so many and so little time. Here's a new report on the fight against obesity. Keep in mind: obesity is a First World Problem, given that 25.8% of the world's propulation is, at the least, food insecure. Ok, so that's mostly in shithole countries, so who gives a shit? Oh, that's right; just woke assholes.

And, as has been reported with more frequency as Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists^{©(a Tesla investor)} make war on the poor, about 50% of USofA consumer spending comes from the top 10% of us. Makes one wonder whether Eccles still holds.

What might happen to Novo's investment when Bone Spur Samurai^©'s debt fueled indulgences kick the shit out of the economy and thus obesity's TAM??? Hmmm?? What happens if Our Malignant Narcissist^{©John Gardner} decides to write an EO ending Medicare and Medicaid? As he has said, he's the President and can do anything he wants. The Gang of Six has shown little enthusiasm for enforcing the plain language of the Constitution. And, what should be obvious by now, what he wants is the Capital K-Shape economy/society of the pre-War of Northern Agression USofA era; redux. Have a nice day. Almost the equinox and SAD times. Boo hoo.

[update]

Well... not quite Medicare and Medicaid but yet a bit closer

Slowly I turned. Step by step. Inch by inch.

That's, of course, from the Three Stooges.

Traditionally, the N.I.H. selects projects based on expert review of their scientific merit. But Mr. Trump has sought through a series of recent directives in his second term to bring that process under political review, arguing in part that the government has been funding "woke" liberal priorities.

The Barbarians have sacked Rome.

I Told You So - 20 September 2026 -- Bigly

Well... that didn't take long. Wasn't so long ago that these missives opined that Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists^{©(a Tesla investor)} will nationalize AI, and quoted a MAGAnaut who opined that He and His would use AI for mass surveillance. Here we are.

Mr. Trump did not make clear whether he envisioned the new A.I. Force as a military command or a civilian agency or department. White House officials did not respond to an email seeking clarification.

Of course he did.

President Trump is so enamored of the Space Force, a military command he created in his first term, that he keeps its flag by his desk in the Oval Office. He took personal interest in the design of its uniforms, which bear close resemblance to those of Galactic Empire officers in "Star Wars."

On Saturday, Mr. Trump proposed a follow-on to Space Force: a new "A.I. Force." But he left to earthbound speculation what, exactly, it was supposed to do.

Of course we know. The same as the Galactic Empire. D'uh.

Warsh Spits in His Eye

Well... he done did it. Boy howdy. Now, Bone Spur Samurai^© doesn't know shit about econ, despite having (so he says) some kind of $.25 degree in a niche corner of econ as a two year undergrad at Wharton. He wants the unenlightened to assume he has the coveted (even when he spent two paltry years there) Wharton MBA. Not a chance.

The bedrock of inflation: where does it come from. At the macro level, there's too much demand (folks have more moolah than they should have, for some definitions of 'more' and 'should') and there's too little supply (where producers are too scared to make product, and don't). The Covid-19 inflation was mostly the latter on the way out. The in-Covid-19 inflation was both. Because so much of the global economy was ham-strung, supply slackened. OTOH, some Damn Gummints suplemented household incomes due to so many people being out of work, but producers were chary of supplying. So, we gots some inflation.

One might argue that we've been riding the slack-supply bronco ever since. Turns out, there are data sources. Here's one. There's some really simple, pretty, and informative graphs which lay out the situation.

Warsh et al have spit in Bone Spur Samurai^©'s eye, but, as is obvious from the graphs (and, just to remind, it's FED graphs) that we're still in a slack-supply inflation at nearly all data points since Covid-19. Bone Spur Samurai^© is a plain idiot. But he's kinda right, but mostly wrong. The Fed can't make producers market more product. Xi and Kim and Vlad can, of course, but it wouldn't be in Bone Spur Samurai^©'s interest to actually jawbone his billionaire buddies to lessen the problem. The Goldfinger way to get rich; destroy the "others" production and the value of yours rises. You tink he's upset about the reduction of global oil? Not a bit of it. Domestic oil is making a killing. Ah, the beauty of unfettered capitalism.

Putting the brakes on when supply lags demand, is exactly the wrong thing to do. What a Damn Gummint can do is a bigger issue, beyond my pay grade.

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.

TAM

For those not knee deep in bidnezz, that's total addressable market. If you're not some scammer or grifter (hard to find such, given these days of Grifter In Chief ), then the first thing you do when you want to move some new (or importantly updated) widget into Mr. Market is figure out how many end users (aka, buyers) you expect exist. In the pharma world these days, drug companies are actually looking for a TAM that's tiny thanks to Uncle Sugar, who passes on some substantial benefit to them if FDA approves a drug for very limited number (200,000 ... well sorta, kinda) of patients. Although gaming continues as ever. This is one segment of the economy where the TAM is sorta, kinda explicit. And being 'small' is good.

For AI, as currently implemented, it's a bit different. And that difference has been recited here a bit. And it matters, given that Big Tech is spending some non-trivial Billions of Bongo Bucks on hardware (data centres) alone. Who are the patients to be served? Do they have, taken as a whole, enough Bongo Bucks to recoup all those trillions of Bongo Bucks, plus a bit of profit? Here's a recent assessment. As predicted in these missives, the arithmetic looks awful. And, some of the tech bros are worried.

At one point this year, Meta internally projected that it could spend as much as $10 billion annually on Anthropic's A.I. models, said two of the people, who declined to be identified discussing private information. That would have formed a major chunk of Anthropic's yearly revenue, which the start-up estimated in July would pass $65 billion.

Now, that cash flow is wonderful for Anthropic and all of the AI vendors out there. But Meta, and Google, and Microsoft, and the like are buying what we econ types call 'producers' goods'; IOW, stuff that the buyer turns around and uses to make some finished good which Americans on Main Street, Anytown, USofA actually pay for. Well, Meta et al, ain't selling any new thing to Americans on Main Street. Remember, so far as Meta goes, the user is the actual product, sold to advertisers. Microsoft, is more or less, the exception (no one uses Bing).

As of April 2024, Bing holds the position of the second-largest search engine worldwide, with a market share of 3.64%, behind Google's 90.91%.

So, where is the flood of Bongo Bucks to make it all worthwhile? It's a verity that Real Producers always bitch and moan about the Bean Counters ruining the party. I suspect the Real Producers will lickety split concoct some tale to blame the Bean Counters when it all goes Pop.

Mr. Zuckerberg has described Hatch as Meta's next breakthrough, a personal "agent" that works "24/7 on your behalf to help achieve your goals and improve your life, your health, your relationships, your finances."

(By the way, what was the last New Product that Meta made that was a Bigly Win? Just asking for a friend.)

OK. A semblance of recognizing that somewhere, somehow a real live Human (American or otherwise) will use an AI derived service/product. But will such a Human pay a user's fee for the privilege? And, if so, how much? Or does The Zuck assume that Hatch will somehow, some way entice his real customers, advertisers, to pay more and more often? In either case will end users or advert makers generate enough new revenue to make it all make sense? How would you bet on Kalshi?

It's been mentioned here and there that, given existing accounting rules, all this data centre spending is hidden in corporate capital budgets. IOW, very little of it hits their current financials. There will be a reckoning and there will be blood.

Thought For The Day - 28 August 2026

The hits keep coming. More like attack drones than top 10 songs, though. Latest grift

Companies Can Tell Investors Less Under Proposed S.E.C. Rules

Insiders can make an even bigly boodle. Won't take long for Grifter In Chief to trade ever more eagerly. And, of course, his best billionaire buddies. The USofA is looking more and more like any Eastern Europe -stan.

I Told You So - 27 August 2026

Well... you've heard it before: people vote with their feet. I heard it from Dr. McElhone in an earlier, less nasty, shrinking of the Damn Gummint. Here's a longish piece on the ongoing exodus.

"I used to live in the country that I thought was the most enthusiastic about the prospects for science improving the human condition, of any country in the world," said Phillip Zamore, the chair of RNA Therapeutics Institute at the University of Massachusetts. "And I woke up one day and that wasn't true anymore."

Not quite Jewish brainiacs fleeing Germany in the 30s, but just you wait. If the The Gang of Six^© stall long enough to let Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor) let only Rednecks vote, there won't be a educated person left here. That your average Redneck has neither birth certificate (and likely no idea who his Baby Daddy is) nor passport won't forestall the local vote folks from letting Billy Joe Bob from making his X on the registration card.

Thought For The Day - 25 August 2026

While I've not seen or heard from any of the usual Lamestream Pundits opining what Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor) might be up to with the escalating tariff war with Canada. For myself, it's self evident. Bone Spur Samurai^© is taking the next step to annexing Canada. And to be careful: just one huge state, not one per province, of course. Alberta is just dumb enough to go full MAGA, but not the rest. And let's not touch the language issue. Spanglish all over here, and now French? This is really a white belly English place, as everybody knows.

Here's his deal: we'll tariff Canada into bankruptcy. Or they can become the 51^st state. Take it or leave it. Can Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson pull it off while he's still alive, kicking, and El Jefe? May be, or may be not. But it doesn't matter. Jared will carry on the dynasty and git er done.

Thought For The Day - 11 August 2026

So far, none of the Lamestream Press (that I know about) has raised the really important point: MAGA is breaking as we watch. Supposedly close allies in his retinue are giving up the dumb fuck without even thinking about it. Hiding in a catering cart!! Except, of course, that isn't true and makes Garfield 2.0 (a step closer) much more likely. It was a catering container; not nearly as cramped. But, if you go looking, you'll find AI deepfakes of him squished into an aircraft cart. The palace guard is turning.

Thought For The Day - 10 August 2026

There's been a tsunami of ink spilled on AI and data centers of late. But I've not run across the nasty issue: if MAGAnauts write the laws and rules such that Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson and his successors get control of AI, then truth (social!!) goes out the window. Just as with crypto: he was agin it until someone (Miller??) whispered in his ear - "you can make billions!! the greatest grift of all time!!" And so it was. Everything will be MAGApropaganda 24/7. Just like Orwell predicted. Ayatollah 49% Don^© has done so much to eliminate truth and intelligence already. So, not only the billions, but full control of the population. Just like Kim and Putin and Hitler and Mao. What to give the dictator who has everything.

I Told You So - 10 August 2026

Dedicated readers must recall how these missives have excoriated the decline of the econ world over the years, pointing to Samuelson as the (nearly) patient zero of the epidemic. What Samuelson and his followers have done is to re-define macro as just the sum of the micro, with no account for how the Damn Gummint can do favor, or ill, to either the whole economy or corruptly favor (ill) supporters or opponents. One need go no further than Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson to see this in action. And, of course, he claims top grades and honors from Wharton, while there is no record of him earning any such. He only spent his last two years there (after only getting into Fordham, easy commuter school in NYC) getting a BBA (or a BS, reports vary) in something (no longer offered) called Real Estate Economics (reports vary as to whether it's explicitly Wharton or just Penn). IOW, he don't know shit from shinola in any kind of serious econ. Although, being a bigly builder (well... once a long time ago), he demands easy money. After all, Other People's Money most always pays the bill.

The contribution of Samuelson et al is said to be more "rigour" in the discipline. But what that really means is that econ is just micro, aka, business unit. The good thing about micro, is that it's data rich (or, should be) since a business has all the records of its activity. Ya don't need no damn lying statistics when you have a population dataset. But that does allow one to concoct all manner of "mathematical models" of business activity. And, of course, it doesn't surprise that the micronauts then make the leap to re-define macro as just aggregate micro.

But, of course, FDR and his cabal did understand that the Damn Gummint can be a significant economic actor, for both good and ill. Ill, mostly, means inflation, but can also mean tipping the scale for and against the blessed and the cursed; as seen by the Damn Gummint. And now we have it codified by The Gang of Six^© that POTUS is the Damn Gummnit, ya know Fascist Dictator. What could possibly go wrong? Well... the specter of a Guns n Butter great recession is coming toward front of mind for the Bond Vigilantes.

Well... just as Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson denies elections can be fair and accurate, when he or his lose, the fact that most macro data is survey sample based is the opportunity to deny that any macro decision need be based on data which is obviously manipulated by communists. It's all fake, anyway. It's simpler and better to just reward my benefactors and jail my opponents; just like Marcos and the like. We'll win no matter what the data ends up saying. And, if it says the whole exercise was bogus, there's always Fake News to shoulder the blame. Bari will see to it.

Now we get some views from a Harvard econ prof (which Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson never could be) that Warsh is up to his ass in shit. Well... he doesn't really say "shit". But that's clearly what he means.

Consider the call for better data. Mr. Warsh correctly notes that the nation's existing data architecture could be improved. What stands today relies largely on household and business surveys that face declining response rates, and it takes time to collect and process them.

Do you really think that Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson would welcome better data??? In a pig's eye, he would.

Prediction - 7 August 2026

Well... ya gots Kalshi and Polymarket. Now ya gots me.

So, for the inaugural shot in the dark, hows about an answer to why Cornyn, Tillis, and (just now) Cassidy decided it would be bettor for each to suck Hate filled, Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don's dick than Do The Right Thing for the Constitution and democracy? The answer: K street. Ground zero for the political and monetary craven. Now that they've been bounced from position of lucrative insider information, thanks to Our Malignant Narcissist^{©John Gardner}, their only hope for as much of a lucrative sinecure is K street "consulting". The Constitution and democracy can't compete with that. If you're a money grubbing craven Right Wingnut MAGAnaut.

All we need do is watch the Fake News come the new Congress, and see where each lands. I rate it a slam dunk.

It really is all about the money.

Ballard Partners, which counts Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles among its alumni, signed more than 200 new clients after Trump's election. It led K Street last year with more than $88.3 million in lobbying fees — a 350 percent increase from 2024.

Ya think any of the Three Mouseketeers is willing to piss off Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson and get blackballed from that fountain of money? Really?

Thought For The Day - 6 August 2026

Caught a snippet from a Lamestream TeeVee news feed. Some medPro stated what I've found to be obvious since the start of Covid-19: it's an animal to human skip, just like SARS and MERS before it. I suppose that, because the brunt of both was elsewhere on Mother Earth, the Right Wingnuts didn't bother to conjure a dark conspiracy. I guess they hadn't heard of Fauci then.

Pie in the Sky - part the second

All those many months ago, when I first read reports about the Best New Idea in AI, the orbiting Data Centre, I nearly blew lunch. Clearly, these guys don't know shit about physics or engineering. I put off puting up the obligatory diatribe, assuming that some Lamestream Pundit with access to numbers and real engineers, would do so. It's taken longer than I expected, or I don't obsess as much as Dear Reader might think.

Well... today I found such a diatribe... sorta of.

In an interview, McCalip says his initial rough calculations a few years ago suggested that data centers in space would cost in the range of 7 to 10 times more, per gigawatt of capacity, than their terrestrial counterparts. "It just wasn't practical," he says. "Not even close." But when Elon Musk began publicly backing the idea, McCalip revisited the numbers using publicly available information about Starlink's and Tesla's technologies and capabilities.

So, the Main Smartest Guy in the Room (all the time)^© began beating his drum (or other appendage, hehe) for the effort. And, as one might expect, he pushed his LEO Taxi Service in service to in orbit data centers.

What so many ooh and aah over, the reusable lifter, is really Olde Tech. 1 - reusability was demonstrated at least as far back as the SRB for the Space Shuttle, 2 - the landing on a dime from re-entry goes back to at least the Apollo missions landing on the Moon (you can, I expect, find them on youTube; unless, of course, the moon landings were all FAKE). Nothing new here, move on.

So, the author then backtracks bigly when he accounts that these orbiting data centres would be mated to Starlink locations

Bottom line, with some solid but not necessarily heroic engineering, the cost of an orbital data center could be as low as three times that of the comparable terrestrial one. That differential, while still high, at least nudges the concept out of the instantly dismissible category. "I have my particular views, but I want the data to speak for itself," McCalip says.

It's not of no significance that The Musk Ox's taxe service is limited to LEO, not geo-whatever very high orbit. What's the diff, you might ask? Well... very high orbit is well above atmospheric friction, so falling out of orbit is a rare occurence. With LEO, on the other hand, falling out of orbit in short order is part of the taxi service bargain.

If you visit the innterTubes you'll find: Starlink sats last 5-7 years and 1 or a couple plummet to Mother Earth daily.

For this illustration, we picked a configuration with an aggregate 1 GW of capacity. The network would consist of some 4,300 satellites, each of which would be outfitted with a 1,024-square-meter solar array that generates 250 kilowatts. The data center on that satellite, powered by the array, might have at least 175 GPUs; McCalip notes that a popular GPU rack, Nvidia's NVL72, has 72 GPUs and requires 120 to 140 kW.

Notice, of course, that the author elides the need to replenish the sats. My wild ass guess? Such a host of orbiting data centre component sats could never be fashioned as an on-going concern; The Musk Ox couldn't keep up with the replinishing requirement. And consider two other snags: cooling all those motherfuckers and "wiring" those 4,000 units into a whole data centre. Much easier to do the wiring here on Mother Earth. Ah, but Arizona, data centre ground zero, is on the verge of going waterless. Air cooled computers, mainframe and mini, have been in service for decades, but these AI fashioned ones... nope. Ain't much air up there in space. Cooling is still up in the air. hehe.

Free cooling is perhaps the biggest misconception. Space is cold, but it also has no atmosphere. That means the best heat-removal mechanisms, conduction and convection, are off the table. The only option is radiation. To prevent a chip from overheating in space, a large, costly surface area is required to dissipate the energy and then radiate it.

Stupid is as stupid does.

The governing equation for radiative cooling, the only type of cooling available in space, is known as the Stefan-Boltzmann Law. It states that the amount of power you can radiate is proportional to the area of the radiator times its temperature to the fourth power.

Oops - part the first

Well... y'all should still know that I've grown even more skeptical of AI as the months have passed. Hundreds of billions of dollars on a tech whose TAM is based solely on axing all labour from the economy (in particular those well educated office/lab workers in Blue States whose 10% of the income distribution make 50% of consumption). So, how much axing will it take to reach the tipping point of global collapse of aggregate demand? And, naturally, that will spark The Permanent Great Depression. No one who works can work to get moolah to spend on stuff, and the companies that make stuff have no buyers. And all those Smartest Guys in the Room who bought up every last CPU and GPU to make AI will never see a dime of profit from this "investment". Neato. Some things don't require really elaborate war games to predict.

Day by day, the dam holding back collapse of AI, and before it's even finished being built and running as intended, takes another step to oblivion. Wel... here's today's bit of news.

Situational Awareness, a fast-growing hedge fund in San Francisco founded by 20-somethings that invested heavily in A.I., put out an emergency call for help to rivals in the past 36 hours, seeking to sell more than $10 billion of its stocks to shore up its plummeting portfolio, according to three people briefed on the call.

What was that story about a kid name Icarus? Or that olde (German?) adage: "we are too soon old and too late smart."

Eating

Years ago some pundit (Marc Andreesen), remarked that software will eat the world. Boy, has he ever been shown to be an idiot. AI is 99.44% hardware, and the rest is 100+ year old stats. Now we get the dire skinny from Jeff Sommer:

These big companies are able to categorize the money as an investment — a capital expenditure — and not as an expense. So under current accounting rules, the bulk of the spending has not yet counted against their gaudy earnings. That is helping to propel the stock market to new heights under rosy assumptions that A.I. will transform the world, and that the companies behind it will be making money.

Just like man's laws, accounting rules are also manmade. Unlike, for example, the laws of thermodynamics. Even the laws of economics are manmade, not natural. So, what does it all mean, Mr. Natural?

One day earlier, IBM's shares lost 25.2 percent. That was its steepest daily decline since the 1960s, and it was set off by an earnings shortfall that its chief executive attributed, in part, to the spending underway on A.I. data centers. "We did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization," Arvind Krishna, the company's chief executive, wrote in a letter to investors. Other companies spent so much money to build A.I. foundations, he said, that there wasn't as much left as expected for software service companies like IBM.
[my emphasis]

It's stll not clear to me, anyway, how AI's TAM can amount to anything more than labour replacement. If that really does decimate employment, who'll have moolah to buy all those Bongo Bits? Or, will 'modern economies' devolve into a 'modern dark ages' with only the oligarches having need of the only 'product' made by this modern economy: fancy financial services? With the amount of billions of Bongo Bucks going into each entity's 'data centres', is there enough labour in the world to satisfy the bond holders? Much less show a tidy profit?

There are already rumblings in the high yield market surrounding concerns that the explosion in issuance has bubble-like characteristics similar to that of telecoms in the early 2000s or energy in 2015 to 2017, when investor enthusiasm outweighed a sober assessment of risk. These same critics also worry about the potential for overbuild or overcapacity, i.e. the massive demand fails to materialise, or that despite the strong tenant base, these contracts have yet to be tested.

When it's the Damn Gummint, the 'bond vigilantes' come to the rescue, or corpse feeding. We'll see how they do with such, mostly, private paper.

Thought For The Day - 16 July 2026 (kinda, sorta the Ides of July; how appropriate)

And, fur shur, Day; before Ayatollah 49% Don^© spews more Big Lies tonight. As stated in these missives more than once: NSA has the receipts; they have known since '15 and '16 and '20 and '24 who from Russher, Russher, Russher and who from Ayatollah 49% Don^©'s camp were talking up the fix. I'll bet that Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson himself was talking. After all, he's the best shill for his bidnezz. And he knows it.

Will it be treasonous enough to inspire another Snowden? Only The Shadow knows.

Rite of Passage

The MAGAnauts, and many of the others, keep mewling that the Strait of Hormuz is some kind of international waterway, and thus can't be deemed within the territorial waters of Iran and Oman. To be clear: even the olde time 12 mile limit means that Oman and Iran have an overlapping claim to the waters of the Strait. That is not in dispute, no matter what Bone Spur Samurai^© and his minions say.

But... there is an international treaty, known by its acronym UNCLOS

This is because Iran is not a party to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

And, as you'd likely guess, neither is the USofA

The USA has long been one of the most ardent champions of the freedom of navigation, despite not being a party to UNCLOS.

Neither country ever ratified the treaty.

A history of UNCLOS and the USofA from that left-wing commie wiki. We can take anything we want.

What Eccles Means - part the first

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption; mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery.
-- Marriner Eccles/1951

Well... let's update, just a tad. It was recently reported that the top 10% of consumers comprise nearly 50% of consumption. That's a lot. It also, one might suppose, means that the things consumed by that 10% are markedly different from the other 90%. IOW, the 10% spend on luxury, discretionary stuff, while the 90% seek not much more than subsistence. Yes, that's what was reported. Surprise, surprise.

This goes a long way to explain Trumpism: he has been a very good liar, and his marks have been very, very stupid. OTOH, he has given them what they really want: the restoration of The Way Things Were - White folk always having some dark folk below them.

But, here's how labor has been treated for decades

What this means for Eccles? The macro arithmetic no longer works. With AI threatening to move labor's share way, way lower economic policy has to choose: aid the Rich to be Richer, or aid the Poor to be part of the whole economy? Only the shadow knows.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this is a vision of work in which even high-level employees systematically automate nearly every task they perform, until all that is left for them to do is train A.I.

Regular reader likely remembers, long, long ago in a place far, far away, that the only way to de-hallucinate AI is to build it on a database, preferably of the RDBMS variety, to store the ground facts of some area of interest, to act as a safeguard against stupid AI. Well...

Handshake then sends its clients a database with hundreds or thousands of values, containing the original prompt, the top answer and various metadata.

Boy howdy. Now, the report doesn't specify what that "database" is, but it need not be my favorite DB2/LUW. MySQL or even SQLite might do. After all, in use it will likely be read-only. At most WORM.

Who, and how many of Who, will have moolah to drive GDP if these Bros get their way? Will it just be Dark Ages V2.0 with the Really Rich living in castles and the rest living subsistence no matter their inherent talent?

Catch 22

Now here's a good one. The Melbourne Symphony cancelled a concert by a pianist who voiced objection to Israel's killing of journalists in Gaza.

He sued, and, so far, lost. The report doesn't say whether the judgment can be appealed or whether the pianist will do so. But in the course of the reporting we get hypocrisy.

The pianist, Jayson Gillham, claimed in a lawsuit that the orchestra had violated the country's Fair Work Act and his right not to be treated unfavorably in the workplace because of his political beliefs.

That's, sorta kinda, a First Amendment argument. OK.

But the judge, Graeme Hill of the Federal Court of Australia, ruled on Friday that because Mr. Gillham was an independent contractor he was not protected under the workplace rights law. The orchestra, Justice Hill determined, had acted to protect its business and reputation when it canceled the performance by Mr. Gillham and issued statements to its patrons about the matter.

OK. An independent contractor isn't an employee, right?

A spokeswoman for the orchestra said in a statement that it welcomed the judgment and that Mr. Gillham "should have sought the authorization of the M.S.O. before making the statements he made" from the stage.

So, why would a contractor be required to get authorization to make independent statements? He's not an employee of the M.S.O., right?

I guess being for killing journalists (anywhere, for the sake of argument) is in the M.S.O.'s best interest for its "business and reputation". At least, that's how I would parse the sentence. At least one head rolled

After the cancellation, the orchestra's musicians passed a vote of no confidence in the administration, and the organization announced that its managing director was departing.

Voters - part the first

Another series on its way.

If you really, really believe that all those Hill Folk dropped down the chute in all those Red Backwoods with no paperwork to prove it happened will be prohibited from voting, your an Idiot. Our Malignant Narcissist^{©John Gardner} is being supported by the The Gang of Six^© to take over our beloved country just like Erdogan and Orban (RIP politically, for now).

Make America White Again^©. Preferably the dunderhead species.

By The Numbers - part the one hundred and second

One might wonder what, if any, classes these millionaire "student athletes" attend? As the saying goes, "two wrongs don't make a right". State schools, esp. Red state universities, suck up millions of sports bongo bucks in order to beat The Other State teams.

Now a a story from the left wing Commie NYT with some numbers revealing the corruption in college sports, these days.

July 1, 2026, marked the five-year anniversary of name, image and likeness in college sports.
Oh, how quaint July 1, 2021, seems now.
Five years later, there are college quarterbacks making more than $5 million.

Some numbers

- total spending across the industry will reach $4.5 billion this year
- The average Power 4 school's athletes are making a combined $34.8 million.
- Iamaleava's $2 million annual figure remained a unicorn for at least a couple of years.
- (Today, at least a half-dozen QBs make nearly three times that.)

A Tune For Our Time

In honor of our President, Bone Spur Samurai^© at this time of 250 years of White As The New Fallen Snow America

Jingo Balls, Jingo Balls
Jingo all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride in a
One slave yoked to sleigh

Jingo Balls, Jingo Balls
Jingo all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride in a 
One slave yoked to sleigh

Dashing through the Lefts in a
One slave yoked to sleigh
With the scams we go
Laughing all the way

Bells on Libtards ring
Making Trumpists Right
What fun it is to ride and sing
A slaying song tonight

Jingo Balls, Jingo Balls
Jingo all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride in a
One slave yoked to sleigh

Jingo Balls, Jingo Balls
Jingo all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride in a 
One slave yoked to sleigh

Dashing through the Lefts in a
One slave yoked to sleigh
With the scams we go
Laughing all the way

Bells on Libtards ring
Making Trumpists Right
What fun it is to ride and sing
A slaying song tonight

Jingo Balls, Jingo Balls 
Jingo all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride in a
One slave yoked to sleigh

Jingo Balls, Jingo Balls
Jingo all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride in a 
One slave yoked to sleigh

Jingo Balls, Jingo Balls
Jingo all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride in a
One slave yoked to sleigh

Jingo Balls, Jingo Balls
Jingo all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride in a 
One slave yoked to sleigh

Thought For The Day - 3 July 2026

Well, now we know. Pulte really, really was installed to open the Gates of Hell for Vlad and Xi. As an earlier sub-title stated: "Vlad I'll take the Western Hemisphere, and you get Europe. Deal?" Democracy is dead.

Thought For The Day - 29 June 2026

Well... the 19^th century is well underway. Now Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson can turn the entire Damn Gummint into his personal hobby horse. Assuming, of course, that neither he nor any successor doesn't end up a Garfield (not the cat). The one, most important, thing Big Bidnezz wants is stability. That is to say: long term stability. Big Bidnezz, with or without Baksheesh, can work its magic so long as it knows the rules don't change every two or four years. Of course, if Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson manages to pull off his planned soft coup, and fills his bank account even further, they'll just add in the Baksheesh to prices. Just like all those tariffs the Furriner Gummints and Bidnezz pay. According to Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson.

Welfare for the rich. Come on Down!!

The Gang of Six^© has put the nail in Article I. It no longer exists, to all intensive porpoises.

By The Numbers - part the one hundreth and one

Stupid is as Stupid does. So, an idiot Mainer thinks an AI data center will make as many jobs as the old paper mill that shut down years ago. Ain't gonna be. Data centers, esp. AI version, are almost all hardware. That runs itself.

"The parking lot we're standing in was full. There were probably about 800 employees. Good money and good salaries."

Right. Data centers, on average, barely break 100. And those folks are mechanical drones in flesh colored skin with actual technical training. Not uneducated paper mill drones. Some voice of reason speaks

Utility bills spike, water systems are strained, taxpayers subsidize these projects, communities deal with constant noise, light pollution and environmental degradation.
-- Democratic State Representative Melanie Sachs

Same grift as sports arenas: the billionaires get richer, and the poor get stiffed. And, surprise, surprise: I guess the grift just wasn't big enough for the billionaires

The company that would have provided the computer servers pulled out of the project. Tony's deal fell apart. Now, he says he's working on finding a new partner. But for the time being, the parking lot at the paper mill is still empty, and the town of Jay is still waiting for a lifeline.

Just in case you don't know (and, of course, I suspected but didn't know until I looked it up) the mill town is Jay, in Franklin county, and said county is near the bottom of Maine's counties by college education. So, who would run this data center, if it were built? Aliens from Big Blue cities in Blue states, likely not the unemployed mill workers.. Always works out that way. It ain't easy turning a sow's ear into a silk purse.

Ya gotta run the numbers before you sign on the dotted line. Morons always think the city slickers can be taken for a ride. The problem with moving from yesterday's tech and yesterday's workforce is: it doesn't compute. Never has. Never will. The reason the Great Migration worked was simply that the workforce in Northern factories wasn't brain-taxed to work the assembly lines. How many Damn Gummint programs helped buggy whip factories become car factories? Let me know when you find even one.

Dear Marco, Some History

Now that Bone Spur Samurai^© has caved to Iran, with this announcement about missiles

I'm saying that if other countries have them, it's a little bit unfair for them not to have some. If Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and they all have some, I would say in relative proportion, I think it's okay.

OK, so Emporer Nero The Donald^© (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) has a heart of fairness wrt to Iran, all of a sudden.

I wonder: has Little Marco been listening? Let's turn the clock, back to the future, wrt to Cuber. It finally came to the public that the Rusher/Cuber effort was not a first attack. It was, in fact, a defensive measure. It finally was revealed that the United States of Alabama had put similar missiles in Turkey long before Rusher/Cuber made the effort to balance the scales. Of course, even JFK went ballistic. So to speak.

In 1959, the US government deployed Thor nuclear missiles in England, an initiative known as Project Emily. In 1961 the US put Jupiter nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey. All were within range of Moscow.

JFK and Nikita secretly drew back from the brink. The deal was revealed in 1969.

So, Little Marco, detente with Cuber is the better path.

Thought For The Day - 18 June 2026

Now that Bone Spur Samurai^© and his lackeys Witkoff and Kushner, experienced foreign ministers of the first water all, have been rolled by their Iran counterparts, we must ask: what did the United States of Alabama get for all that time and treasure (and some body bags)? Well... I expect we'll soon see Trump Tower Tehran. After all, that's all the Three Stooges care about.

Yeah That's Right

Likely been mentioned here before, but, what the hell, why not yet again? My Pappy explained it all decades ago. Of course, didn't actually explain anything, simply reported what he saw.

He finally get drafted, then being WWII and all, and even in those dire times, the US military took the effort to sort the knuckleheads from the brainiacs. Pappy was closer to the latter than the former. The result was that rather than carry a rifle and get shot at by Germans or Japanese, the Signal Corp had first pick, so he built radio towers. Say, what? Turns out that back then, and it turns out more necessarily, airplanes needed signaling towers in order to know where they are and where they are going. These were and are called beacons. Not so important now, what with GPS and satellites generally.

Most of his time was spent in North Africa, mostly around Algeria. And, being the local winners, he and his crew were billeted in mansion-like housing. And, for good measure, they had a houseboy to do the scutwork. Said houseboy was a juvenile, may be 10 years old. Pappy was impressed; the kid spoke a handful of languages fluently. And not all White Man's language, either. Pappy was amazed.

Over the years I've returned to that story from time to time in idle conversation. My sister was born when I was 13, so I saw her early development with near-adult eyes and ears. And, I've also known myriad people who grew up with more than one language. So, how is such fluency possible? It sure as shit ain't like falling off a log for many, if not most, adults.

My interpretation is dumbshit simple: when a walking meatloaf begins to contemplate hearing and speech and meaning, said meatloaf has no notion of languages, plural. To the walking meatloaf it's all sounds. Just sounds. Language is not yet a concept. Just sounds. And, over time, each sound gets associated with some thing. And just things, not yet abstract ideas, like special relativity.

As the walking meatloaf is exposed to sounds and things, he is also exposed to the people making these sounds with these things, and, if the walking meatloaf isn't as dumb as a sack of hair, he'll notice that Joe has one sound for truck while Jacque has a different sound for that truck. So, the walking meatloaf doesn't care about the sounds, except that which one to use is determined by the object and the person/people making the sound.

So, in simplistic terms, walking meatloaf doesn't learn multiple languages (the walking meatloaf is ignorant of languages), but just one. Only later will he be told that one is english and another french, and still another arabic. And that's the kicker: language family doesn't matter either. It's all just sounds.

And that's about what the high priced researchers more or less found

On the whole, Dr. Blanco-Elorrieta said in a news release, a single "grammatical engine" in the brain appeared capable of powering multiple languages at once.

Well, no shit Sherlock. Engine runs just on petrol, not petrol, diesel, and natural gas at the same time. It's not obvious from the report who the subjects of the study were. It matters whether they were adults learning some second language, or like Pappy's houseboy, absorbing multiple languages (really just Language) from the gitgo.

Here's the core error

Early research viewed bilingualism as an "add on" or "disruption" to the processing of one's native language, said Judith Kroll, a psycholinguist at the University of California, Irvine who was not involved in the new study.

For the walking meatloaf, it's all one native language. A mix of different sounds, depending on the context. Context another concept that walking meatloaf is clueless.

Thought For The Day - 14 June 2026

I wonder... how is a 60-day cease fire the same as "unconditional surrender"? Emporer Nero The Donald^© (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) lying yet again. I wonder... will the MAGAnaut idiots see the difference? Will they credit Bone Spur Samurai^© with ending the war just by making (so he says now) Hormuz open again? Status quo ante isn't much to write home about. Well... unless you're a malignant lying narcissist.

Of course, he had to have something to sell. After all he's 80 today, and likely won't remember anything tomorrow.

I Told You So - 11 June 2026

Well... almost. I hope nothing more. Back on 3 June, I opined that Pulte was installed to erase the NSA tapes from 2016/Trump/Russia. Now comes this from the NYT

The president has also long been deeply skeptical of the intelligence community, primarily because of the investigation into whether his 2016 campaign conspired with Russians who, officials have repeatedly said, interfered in the presidential election that year to harm Mr. Trump's Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

A real DNI, not even Gabbard, would do such bidding. Pulte? He doesn't even need to be asked. Emporer Nero The Donald^© (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) has been very busy erasing anyone and anything which challanges his psychotic view of the world and its history.

[Well... that didn't age all that well!]
I saw the Clayton announcement and thought, "from worst to worst". Just as unqualified. Just now found this

Donald Trump has agreed to drop Bill Pulte - but his new choice is just as bad.

Great minds run in the same gutter.

Dee Feat is in Dee Flation - part the fifty first

Just a reminder from Santayana:

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.

So, I've plucked some part of Part 44 (aka, the Covid inflation problem) to refresh your memories; and don't have to re-write the wheel. Emporer Nero The Donald^© (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) is dead set (and deadheaded, though not that old rock band version) on repeating the LBJ fiasco of guns and butter. And he'll blame the Chinese or the Democrats or Cuber (more on that is coming). Here we go again.

The Moneterists mantra is that inflation is solely the result of too much moolah in the economy, and therefore the only cure is to 'take away the punch bowl'. As it happens, sometimes it is true that excess moolah has invaded the economy, and resulted in inflation. In my short lifetime, the most infamous devolved from LBJ's "guns and butter" speech and subsequent actions. Excess real demand exceeded available widgets.

Q. Mr. President, from what you have outlined as your program for now, it would seem that you feel that we can have guns and butter for the foreseeable future. Do you have any idea right now, though, that down the road a piece the American people may have to face the problem of guns or butter?

THE PRESIDENT. I have not the slightest doubt but whatever it is necessary to face, the American people will face. I think that all of us know that we are now in the 5 ad month of the prosperity that has been unequaled in this Nation, and I see no reason for declaring a national emergency and I rejected that course of action earlier today when I made my decision.

I cannot foresee what next year, or the following year, or the following year will hold. I only know that the Americans will do whatever is necessary. At the moment we enjoy the good fortune of having an unparalleled period of prosperity with us, and this Government is going to do all it can to see it continue.

Which then got us the Volker destruction. It took some time, abetted by Nixon of course.

So now, according to Bone Spur Samurai^©, this isn't a forever war, his monuments to his monumental ego don't matter, tax breaks for the rich don't matter, and K-shape economy doesn't matter. The price of gas will drop through the floor, along with everything else, the instant the War is Won and Hormuz is instantly "open". He'll likely fall asleep then, just like at the Knicks came. The little people, black, brown, and white will take it in the neck. As usual. He, of course, gets all the butter.

Nausea

All this faux let's be nicey to each other over at CBS is making me vomit in my mouth. Here's all you need to know, to know why. It's from Pelley's interview

So I sit down, like, OK, let's talk about it. Tom accuses me of physically abusing Nick Bilton. This is a lie. I didn't come within 10 feet of Nick Bilton. In my life, I have never put my hands on anyone in anger. And when he was caught in that lie, he said, well, OK, I take that back. And I said, great.

Just like Emporer Nero The Donald^© (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) the Ellison flunkies make up shit that suits Bone Spur Samurai^©'s agenda. Anyone who believes that "60 Minutes" correspondents will have independence from the thugs up the chain of command is an idiot.

Ellison won't have to intervene with Weiss or Bilton... they're Bone Spur Samurai^©'s flunkies from the gitgo.

The Seer Speaks - part the first

The efforts of Weiss and Bilton were foretold either millennia ago, or just a few hundred years. Depends on how accurate history has been

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.

"60 Minutes" is buried. Stahl, Whitacker, and Wertheim may make it through the coming season. Were I a Kalshi addict, I'd bet no. the tell

(CBS News has said it plans to hire additional correspondents soon.)

If you really think these new folks will hold the MAGAnauts to account, well...

Ms. Stahl said their decision to stay would be reversed if Mr. Bilton did not live up to his promises. "We're more or less taking his word for it," she said. "But if what he was talking about in his statement doesn't work, we're going to leave."

Well... Lesley, don't let the door hit you in the ass too hard.

Thought For The Day - 3 June 2026

Lots of folks are puzzled by Pulte being named DNI. I'm not. But I know Emporer Nero The Donald^© (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) is intent on erasing history. He can't do that without erasing all the tapes in the vaults at NSA. He knows, and many in the news business know (including me since I spent some time with Jack Anderson while he still had some relevance), that NSA really does have the receipts.

But they don't leak. Much, modulo Snowden of course. But to be safe Bone Spur Samurai^© just has to burn the tapes. Pulte will do that. No professional spook would.

Pollyanna on LSD - part the fourth

One likely remembers, so soon you forget eh?, how AI was going to transform life into the Next Garden of Eden. We'll all have time to do Great Things without having to worry about getting moolah to buy other great things.

If you actually believed that, your an idiot. Sorry to be blunt, but when was the last time a technology that could be used to control/manage/shape human life was used by The Powers That Be to do anything other than increase the power of The Powers That Be over the Rest of Us?

So, as expected, we finally get a report that China, of course, is using AI to control its population.

The idea that an authoritarian government would use artificial intelligence to suppress dissent is troubling enough. But the use of A.I. to predict dissent well before a person has taken action has become a nightmare scenario, according to some involved in the industry.

You can bet your bottom shekel that Emporer Nero The Donald^© (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) is screaming at Steve "Blacks Be Slaves" Miller to get him some of that AI. What good is it being Emporer if the rabble can make bad noise?

I believe I've been predicting this scenario from the git-go. Dictators, and the wanna-be versions, don't change their stripes.

Pollyanna on LSD - part the third

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption; mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery.
-- Marriner Eccles/1951

Well... as asserted in the past, this is just a tautology, rather some deep insight into the macroeconomic sphere. OTOH, in 1951, The United States of Alabama was closer to being a self-sustaining closed economy than it is today. Whatever. From a macro point of view, it's all just arithmetic. So long as The Rest of Us have most of the moolah and buy up the output, then the equation balances. We experience neither runaway inflation with output limited nor depression when demand collapses due to The Rest of Us not having most of the moolah.

And, as usual, it does matter what that output is and who might buy it up. When we used to make shirts and shoes and other stuff that the proletariat needed, the equation balancing implied that The Rest of Us were doing OK. But... how does the equation work when output is skewed ever more to financial services relevant only to the 1% and 5%? Not so much balance.

One might recall that, until FDR, Uncle Sugar did nothing to cushion the destruction of jobs and aggregate demand when some creative destruction ruled the economy. Check out, once again, the graph of recessions and depressions throughout the 19^th century. Not a pretty sight. But... back then, even with some mechanization of production, it was still times when the mass of the proletariat was husbanded to produce the Good Stuff for the 1% of the times. Humans as disposable parts. My Grand Pappy well remembered that very effective job retraining he got from the Department of Labor when the horseless carriage killed his job making buggy whips in 1901. Those were so much better days.

So, now we face the specter of AI going primal nuculur on labor. Makes the 19^th century experience look benign. And, of course, the bankers to the !% pooh pooh all the angst of the proletariat. Of course they do. Here's among the latest. From the mind and pen of the Chairman of Goldman Sachs, no less. He must be smart. He's so rich.

Will A.I. disrupt the labor market? Absolutely. This transition, like other significant moments in our history, will entail new challenges, especially as A.I. separates labor from productivity in magnitudes we haven't seen before.

That's a no shit Sherlock tautology, as well. But recall the Great Migration. The movement of the proletariat from the rural South to the assembly lines of the North. What made that successful, for some definition of successful? Simply that Southern farmers were smart enough and able enough to do the repetitive tasks of the assembly line.

Let's see what Solomon has to say

But the United States has a long track record of creating new jobs in response to disruption, from the electrification of the 1900s to the digital revolution of the 1990s; I don't see any reason to think this dynamic will stop now.

Much of that "digital revolution" was merely converting from manual to automation of the same tasks! A bit of retraining in how to use word processing and spreadsheets was about as hard as it got. Not a requirement to drop steno work and learn medicinal chemistry. Get real.

But when you look at jobs or sectors less relevant to automation, the picture changes. Our economists estimate that the growing demand for data centers has created more than 200,000 construction jobs since 2022.

Once again, with feeling - construction is not an ongoing job type. Not unless we want to keep building data centers for the next 50 years at the current pace. Dwell on that for a second or two. We'll need nuculur fusion electric plants to run 'em.

Let me get this strait - the educated, smart Blue People will be shitcanned in favor of Dumb as a Sack of Hair MAGAnauts? Yikes.

Now, this one is gobsmacking

In 1900, global life expectancy at birth was 32 years old; today, it's over 70.

So... mass unemployment is the reason for this increase in lifetimes? Really??? How about drugs, vaccines, and public health mandates. Or, in other words, smart Blue people figuring the tough stuff out.

Now... Pollyanna on steroids

[T]he health care industry now employs more than 18 million workers. The U.S. economy is still the most innovative, dynamic and entrepreneurial in the world.

And most of those are engaged in either high eductation demands or menial bed pan changing. The K-shaped economy, also on steroids.

Have a nice day.

By The Numbers - part the one hundredth

Have you ever wondered how the Strait of Hormuz fits in the territorial waters figure? I sure have, and finally looked it up. There are more claimed than you can count, but the minimalist one is our olde friend the 12 mile limit. Turns out that Iran and Oman control the narrowest passage area, 21 miles, with their mutual 12 mile limits. So, those who claim that the Strait is "international waters" are just lying. That such had historically been the case... well fuck you Emporer Nero The Donald (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte). I love it.

In 1959, Iran altered the legal status of the strait by expanding its territorial sea to 12 nmi (22 km) and declaring it would recognize only transit by innocent passage through the newly expanded area. In 1972, Oman also expanded its territorial sea to 12 nmi (22 km) by decree.[21] Thus, by 1972, the Strait of Hormuz was completely "closed" by the combined territorial waters of Iran and Oman. In 1971, Iran took over the Greater and Lesser Tunbs islands west of Hormuz against Arab wishes, thereby extending control of the navigation channels.

That's a great catch that Catch-22.

Pyrrhic Loser - part the third

Thomas Massie, first among others, might well be Emporer Nero The Donald's (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) Rubicon. Like the allusions?

It will boil down to: what will the 45% of GOP-ers who protested Emporer Nero The Donald's (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) dick sucking choice? Will they join with Dems and Independents come the General Election? Will the voters for the other 'losers' to Batshit J. Fucking Moron's^©Tillerson dick sucking picks join with the Independents and Dems in the General?

And, given the really nasty gerrymandering in play, mayhaps the Dems should pivot to flipping the Senate? Why? Simply because all those Blue City Dems still way outnumber the knuckledragging morons in the sticks that Bone Spur Samurai^© must have. He is, after all, a 49% minority dictator. And, by some measure, no where near that much support. His core zealots appear to be around 20% of the GOP: a slim minority of a minority party.

Man Made God in Man's Image

There are many reports dealing with Emporer Nero The Donald's (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) fixation on his White-Supremacy-Evangelical-Protestant morons connected to America 250. Here's one from the usual suspect.

Cardinal Robert McElroy, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington, said in a recent interview that language describing America as a Christian nation "can be destructive," especially when it's used to center culture around the exclusion of certain groups.

Some 80 years ago, Catholics were routinely excluded in American public life, he said.

"They wouldn't say, this is a Christian nation, they'd say, it is a Protestant nation," he said.

And, for the record, this is the relevant bit of the 1^st

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

We ain't just Puritans.

Roger Williams was kicked out of Massachusetts even before there was a USofA.

Initially a Puritan minister, his beliefs evolved and he questioned the authority of the Puritan church in enforcing religious conformity. He was expelled by the Puritan leaders from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and he established Providence Plantations in 1636 as a refuge offering what he termed "liberty of conscience" making Rhode Island the first government in the Western world to guarantee religious freedom in its founding charter.

Jews attempting to escape Nazis were barred from coming to America, fur instance.

And so on.

Ya cain't have all them dirty Irish and German and Italian folk "poisoning the blood of our country" during the 19^th century, and even the earliest part of the 20^th. As Emporer Nero The Donald (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) says it.

"No Irish need apply." A history. It wasn't just the jingoists of the 19^th century

The 1924 National Origins Quota Act (known as the Johnson-Reed Act) establishes that quotas will be calculated based on 2 percent of each nationality's proportion of the foreign-born US population in 1890, as indicated in the 1890 census. The use of the 1890 census to set the quotas is criticized as discriminating against southern and eastern Europeans, who arrived in the United States in greater numbers during the last decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century. Students, nationals of Western Hemisphere countries, members of certain professions, and the wives and minor children of US citizens are exempted from the quotas.

The Dark Ages were impelled by religious zealotry. It's gonna be a rough ride. Tom Lehrer gets it on the nose, yet again.