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.