Andy Kessler

WSJ: Can You Trust Anybody?

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/can-you-trust-anybody-president-media-influencer-ai-aa13b7ea

Who can you trust anymore? Just before leaving office, President Biden railed against a “tech-industrial complex” claiming, “The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.” Hmmm, was he referring to the coverup of his own health decline and the sharp-as-a-tack charade? Can we trust presidents? The press? Anyone?

We’re told to trust the process. Trust the system. Even trust the science. Trust always starts with a belief in truth and adds in a little integrity, reliability and character. Often, it’s more faith than belief. Being trustworthy is the first attribute of Boy Scout Law. How quaint. We’re told to trust “experts.” I like to say, “I trust them about as far as I can throw them.”

In 1964, according to Pew Research, 77% of Americans trusted the government to do what is right. Around that time, the Free Speech Movement’s Jack Weinberg coined the phrase, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Maybe that was the start of trust’s decline.

Lately, 22% of Americans trust government. Ouch. Lockdowns, social distancing, masks and school closings didn’t help. Neither did the Hunter Biden laptop coverup.

“Donald Trump” and “trust” rarely cohabitate the same sentence. Ask Elon Musk. The president has done some smart things and plenty of dumb ones. But on optics—which leads to trust or superficial trust anyway—he’s failed. The Trump administration’s crypto hustle, going after political enemies and Middle East deals don’t signal trustworthiness. Are 747s the new political-action committees? Once lost, trust is hard to regain.

Technology amplifies mistrust.

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WSJ: Donald Trump vs. Bruce Springsteen

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-vs-bruce-springsteen-music-politics-6685d3cf

Opening his “Land of Hope and Dreams” tour in Manchester, England, New Jersey rocker Bruce Springsteen called the Trump administration “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous.” To be fair, Europeans are used to these kinds of leaders. President Trump fired back, calling Mr. Springsteen “a pushy, obnoxious JERK, who fervently supported Crooked Joe Biden” and a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker.” A billionaire slap-fest!

I’m claiming authority on this matter, as I did shots of Old Grand-Dad with Mr. Springsteen on his 35th birthday at Big Man’s West in Red Bank, N.J. As with this feud, I wasn’t invited. I just happened to be there.

Sure, both men think they’re the boss, but it’s more than that. Truth be told, Mr. Trump has been playing to Mr. Springsteen’s original audience for quite a while. Think downtrodden, desperate, struggling, working class—though Springsteen fans are more likely middle-aged folks absolving their guilt through music, thankful they didn’t grow up that way. “Workin’ in the field / You get your back burned / Workin’ ’neath the wheels / You get your facts learned.” Anyway, the psyche fits the MAGA crowd, minus 50 years. No wonder these guys are feuding.

Mr. Springsteen had the perfect invented persona in the 1970s and ’80s—as we emerged with fits and starts from an industrial era to a digital age, Slate called him an “endearing Jersey wharf rat.” His music was rebellious. Nonconformist. “I hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd / But when they said, ‘Sit down,’ I stood up.” Have problems? Just jump in your “chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected” Chevy and roar down the highway “jammed with broken heroes.” No one actually did this, but it felt good to think about. Now we doom-scroll instead.

I’m a fan and have seen Mr. Springsteen maybe a dozen times in concert. I learned to make a bathroom run when the E Street Band launched into the long and drippy “The River.” A friend noted his concerts became like Dockers commercials, chock full of baby boomers. I stopped going when he added a rock violinist and I noticed the teleprompter. Call me a purist.

So are Bruce and Donald playing to the same “tramps” hoping to rise from “these badlands?” Not so fast.

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WSJ: A New Plan for the FAA

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/a-new-plan-for-the-faa-air-traffic-controller-tech-upgrade-flights-d5e9d9f0

After equipment failures, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is limiting the number of flights in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport, telling “Meet the Press,” “Listen, the system is old.” Ya think? We have Waymos and Teslas driving autonomously on city streets, yet our skies are controlled by radar, radios, floppy disks, paper strips (yes, literally paper) and computer visuals out of the 1983 movie “WarGames.”

The Federal Aviation Administration has been working on a modernized NextGen air-traffic control system conceived in 2003, set to roll out in 2025, oops, check that, 2030, but really more like 2040. Meanwhile, Mr. Duffy wants billions to Band-Aid today’s antiquated system. There has to be a better way.

The FAA tracks and manages more than 45,000 flights every day, carrying 2.9 million passengers. Much of the equipment is 25 years old and analog. Many displays are 2-D. Worse, air-traffic controllers pass along paper flight progress strips with flight number, destination and times flown over various radio beacons to track flights—like order slips at a burger joint. Controllers require training in Oklahoma City, and it takes years to become certified.

FAA modernization so far is something called Terminal Flight Data Manager, which features re-created paper-strip images on computer displays. San Francisco got upgraded just last month—12 airports have been so far. Newark’s upgrade is scheduled for October 2028. Government time. Meanwhile, communication lines go down, radios fail, and air-traffic-controller fatigue drives absenteeism.

The good news: Almost all commercial and many private planes already broadcast their GPS location, direction and speed via Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B). Why not harness that data?

I recently saw a video of a passenger playing the 3-D multiplayer videogame Fortnite on a Qatar Airways jet equipped with Starlink internet. That’s better technology than pilots or controllers have. 

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WSJ: The New Right’s Zombienomics

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-new-rights-zombienomics-trade-tariff-trump-bessent-f396f318

RIP free markets. Because of tariffs, Ford is raising prices. Toy maker Mattel is too. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News, “We don’t want to decouple—what we want is fair trade.” President Trump was nice enough to define what “fair” means: “Children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls.” This is Economics 101 of the New Right.

It’s infectious. On April 30, only three Republican senators voted to block Mr. Trump’s tariff policies by terminating the bogus April 2 “national emergency” declaration. Three! The rest, probably worried about being primaried, are singing from the Trump “fair trade” hymn book to rationalize industrial policy. Like all industrial policies, tariffs will fail—please this time before the soup lines start.

Why so much tariff love? The mind-meld on tariffs is about power. Everyone wants his finger in the pie. Politicians and technocrats insist they know how to direct a $115 trillion global economy and how many dolls your child needs at Christmas. C’mon now.

Power corrupts. Like identity politics and climate hysteria, passion for tariffs is a sleight of hand to grab power. Tariffs bring insider dealing and special interests, as we see with iPhone and some auto exemptions. Are Barbie exceptions next? Mr. Trump admits that tech leaders “all hated me in my first term, and now they’re kissing my a—.” It’s cronyism on steroids.

Tariff bedfellows are far and wide. Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said last month, “Tariffs need to be used like a scalpel, not a hammer.” Let me guess, carving out foreign autos? Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.), a Mod Squad progressive, tweeted, “Tariffs can be an incredibly useful tool to invest in American jobs”—except, of course, she doesn’t like how Mr. Trump is doing them. Oren Cass of American Compass, a siren of the New Right, told the New York Times in a pretzel-logic quote, “I actually see tariffs as the much more free-market position.”

I applaud the New Right’s cultural arm, battling identity politics and closing the border. But economically, the New Right isn’t new. And it isn’t right.

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WSJ: The Economy is in a Pickle

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-economy-is-in-a-pickle-private-equity-risk-fbc4b2b2

Harvard is educating us all—on what’s ailing Wall Street and the U.S. economy. Facing the freeze of $2.2 billion in federal grants, Harvard is selling $750 million in bonds, for a total of $1.2 billion this fiscal year. But with a $53 billion endowment, why incur debt?

Liquidity. Harvard, like too many universities, followed Yale’s lead and piled its endowment into long-term private equity—now 39% of its portfolio. Another 32% is in hedge funds. Returns are critical as nearly 40% of Harvard’s operating budget comes from endowment distributions. When times are good, the university sees great returns. When times are rough, like now, there is little liquidity. As for Yale, it may sell up to $6 billion of its private-equity holdings. A fire sale?

It gets worse. Private equity has its own liquidity problems and isn’t providing capital back to investors. PE firms are sitting on 29,000 unsold companies worth some $3.6 trillion. These are deals that made sense when interest rates were low. Now private-equity firms can’t sell or don’t want to sell at a loss.

Meanwhile, private-equity firms have been raising oodles of funds for private credit—nonbank lending and structured finance that doesn’t trade publicly. The top private credit firms, Apollo, Blackstone, Ares, KKR and Guggenheim, have $1.7 trillion in private debt under management. It’s a lucrative business that has boomed in the past five years.

Beware. Private credit often lends money at a premium yield to B-rated loans. That means riskier loans, not pristine borrowers by any stretch of the imagination. And that premium has been rising in 2025—a sign that private credit is taking on more risk.

What worries me is that, as with derivatives during the 2008 financial crisis, we have no idea how private credit will do in a downturn. It’s starting to get funky.

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WSJ: Capitalism Won the Vietnam War

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/capitalism-won-the-vietnam-war-modern-effects-american-politics-and-vietnamese-economy-c65f4e58

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

This week will see another Liberation Day—in Vietnam. I walked along the parade route leading to the former Presidential Palace, now Reunification Palace. Artillery guns are lined up along the Saigon River to celebrate the victory on April 30, 1975—50 years ago Wednesday.

In America we remember it differently. As Saigon fell, Operation Frequent Wind evacuated 7,000 Americans and locals. Helicopters ran in 10-minute intervals to the USS Okinawa and other ships in the Seventh Fleet. The last helicopter out—the famous photo you may remember is from the Pittman apartment building the day before—left the U.S. Embassy around 8 a.m., evacuating the last of a Marine Guard.

Later that day, North Vietnamese troops in a Soviet tank, and, with a hint of the future, an identical Chinese knockoff, busted through the gates and liberated the palace, ending the war. It’s well beyond my pay grade to relitigate the Vietnam War, but there are so many lessons.

The first was the damage to America’s national self-esteem. We lost. This was best exemplified in the 1981 movie “Stripes,” with Bill Murray’s character, Winger, saying, “We’re soldiers. But we’re American soldiers! We’ve been kicking ass for 200 years! We’re 10 and 1!” Ouch.

This loss of confidence hung over the rest of the 1970s until a raging bull market erased some of the glum. But not all. There is still a lingering anti-American psychosis. A July 2024 Gallup poll found only 41% of respondents were “extremely proud” to be American, near 2020’s all-time low.

Vietnam War protesters (“better red than dead”) are finally aging out of relevance. Think John Kerry, Joan Baez, Jane Fonda.

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WSJ: Our Capitulation Nation

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/capitulation-nation-everyone-folding-negotiation-trade-trump-f00dd69e

The White House claims that phones were “ringing off the hook” with countries caving to President Trump’s reciprocal tariffs. Meanwhile, the bond market backed up and stocks sold off until Mr. Trump folded like a cocktail napkin by pausing most reciprocal tariffs. Ukraine has signed a memorandum of understanding leading toward a mineral-rights deal. So much folding. We’re having an Origami moment. Does anyone have a backbone anymore?

Apparently not. After years of living off electric-vehicle tax credits and green loans, Elon Musk folded and is now a born-again free marketer. He even suggested a free-trade zone with the European Union, calling America-first architect Peter Navarro “a moron.” Mr. Musk needs to work on his insults to become truly Trumpian.

Nothing is sacred. A recent New York Times op-ed urged Democrats to embrace free trade. What’s next for the left? Free markets? Small government? Speaking of folding, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is tackling crime and transgender athletes. The capitulation will continue until morale improves.

Mr. Trump caved to Apple’s Tim Cook with talk of tariff exemptions for phones and computers coming from China, or, as the president would say, “CHY-na.” The only real pushback to tariff mania are suits by the Liberty Justice Center and others claiming violations of the “major questions” doctrine. They’re right.

It sure looks to me as if the Trump administration conceded a hands-off approach to crypto, one that will eventually burn a lot of individual investors, for a $TRUMP meme coin.

Corporations are folding along the dotted line as well.

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WSJ; Trump’s Protectionist Bunker

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trumps-protectionist-bunker-tariffs-trade-policy-business-economy-d156f047

“Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again,” goes the “All in the Family” theme song. Donald Trump, who grew up 15 minutes from Archie Bunker, took it seriously. “We’re bringing wealth back to America,” says tariff-happy Mr. Trump. “That’s a big thing.” Those in the Trump administration with Wall Street experience should know better.

“The American dream is not ‘let them eat flat screens,’ ” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last month on “Meet the Press” to justify tariffs. “It’s mortgages, it’s cars.” Clearly he hasn’t been to Walmart on Black Friday.

Mr. Trump’s America-first policy, as hallucinated by trade adviser Peter Navarro, is this: Make in America. Invest in America. Everything done by Americans. A self-sufficient, stand-alone country.

It’s more of a political agenda than an economic one—more about protectionism and isolationism. Trade? Globalization? Increased living standards? How quaint.

Look, I’m all for America on top, but America first isn’t how you get there. America first is a vertical model: Do everything. But vertical always fails. Vertical IBM made chips, wrote software, assembled computers and wrapped plastic around them. Vertical AT&T provided phones, wires and both local and long-distance calls.

Fortunately, vertical gave way to horizontal: industries organized into layers of expertise, sorted by value added.

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WSJ: Is Anyone a Patriot Anymore?

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/is-anyone-a-patriot-anymore-america-commitment-country-f4056f00

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” According to the author James Boswell, Samuel Johnson said this on April 7, 1775, at the Literary Club in London. It’s been one of the most misunderstood lines for 250 years. Johnson most likely wasn’t putting down patriotism but instead putting down those—perhaps William Pitt—who don’t follow up their patriotic words with actions.

Of course, everyone thinks they’re patriotic. Johnson once wrote, “A patriot is he whose publick conduct is regulated by one single motive, the love of his country; who, as an agent in parliament, has, for himself, neither hope nor fear, neither kindness nor resentment, but refers everything to the common interest.” Actually, I can’t think of anyone who fits that bill.

 

 

Donald Trump’s America-first bombast has an implication of patriotism, but is it? Make America Great/Healthy/Wealthy/Wise/(fill in the blank) Again sounds America rah-rah but details imply a special interests-driven agenda. Industrial policy wrapped in a flag—destroying nearly $10 trillion in stock market value. 

So what is patriotism? It’s often defined as love, devotion and attachment to one’s country. I think that better defines nationalism. Patriotism is something more.

Abraham Lincoln in 1858 identified an “electric cord in that Declaration [of Independence] that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.” OK, now we’re getting somewhere. Love of freedom and patriotism are tied together for the American version of patriotism. That sets a high bar.

It doesn’t always work out. The Vietnam War was a low point for patriotism.

 

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WSJ: The Abundance Agenda

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/can-the-left-do-abundance-slogan-movement-policy-politics-economy-fb42771d

I have to admit: I’m baffled by the “abundance” movement. You may have run across it in recent books, tweets and Substacks, pitching an abundance agenda as a new packaging for the left.

Fearing a long journey in the political wilderness, Democrats are trying on different skins, much like the serial killer in “Silence of the Lambs.” The Bernie Sanders-esque “benefits over billionaires” is as tired as prune juice. So now we have “Supply-Side Progressives.” And “Abundance Liberals.” Just writing this triggers my oxymoron radar.

Abundance could work. It certainly sounds better than anything else I’ve heard recently, including James Carville’s suggestion for Democrats to “play dead.” But my immediate reaction was: Where’ve ya been?

In 1981 George Gilder wrote about supply-side economics in his book “Wealth and Poverty.” Ronald Reagan read it and embraced its message, enabling decades of technology-led growth. Also, Mr. Gilder was one of the first to talk about abundance. His most important economic axiom, for me anyway, is “waste what’s abundant to make up for what’s scarce.” Silicon Valley lives by this.

“What’s abundant is cheap,” Mr. Gilder told me at a dinner in 2009. “The price signal tells you to waste it. What’s scarce is expensive. Instead of using economics to allocate what’s scarce, just waste something else until what you want is no longer scarce.”

We waste abundant cheap transistors inside microchips to offset the need for expensive computers and wires. We waste abundant bandwidth instead of driving to a library to look stuff up.

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WSJ: A New Approach to Addiction

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/a-new-approach-to-addiction-phoenix-fitness-community-mental-health-a3591f99

It wasn’t hard to find Scott Strode when we first met. He was the big guy in a black T-shirt with the word “SOBER” splashed across it. Mr. Strode is founder of the Phoenix, a national “sober active” community. Addiction statistics in the U.S. are sobering. According to Mr. Strode’s book, “Rise. Recover. Thrive,” one-third of Americans have substance-abuse issues or mental disorders.

When drinking, Mr. Strode felt valued. “People wanted to spend time with me. And I found community,” he says. “It’s just what we were building it around wasn’t healthy.” Alcohol. Cocaine. Dependency. Until one night he finally hit bottom. “I couldn’t imagine someone having to tell my mom this is how I died.”

The road to sobriety wasn’t easy for Mr. Strode, but he found solace in physical challenges. “I saw a poster for ice climbing,” he said. “It gave me something to strive for, and that led me into the boxing gym and triathlons and racing Iron Mans.” But it wasn’t enough. “I realized when I took other people with me, I felt lifted in a different way.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Getting into recovery is like getting out of a burning building,” he said. “But there are other people in there, so you have to reach back in to help get them out. By using my passion to help others, it filled a void. That was really what the Phoenix was born from.”

The Phoenix Multisport active recovery community, its original name, started in Boulder, Colo., roughly 20 years ago. It was funded by friends and a few grants—no fees. Others might have been content with helping one community. Not Mr. Strode. After a few years, he started helping active-duty service members and many others in Colorado Springs and set up a location in Denver.

What’s the magic? “Your life gets so much bigger, and you start to realize what’s possible.”

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WSJ: Make America Smart Again

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/make-america-smart-again-technology-ai-students-education-schools-policy-5ffcc497

“Look, in seventh grade, if I had known that I could have said the word ‘they’ and got in the girls’ bathroom, I would have done it,” Rahm Emanuel recently said on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.” The former ambassador to Japan, Chicago mayor, chief of staff to Barack Obama, and Freddie Mac board director was on a roll, “And I’ll say this about our schools: I don’t wanna hear another word about the locker room. I don’t wanna hear another word about the bathroom. You better start focusing on the classroom.”

Great lines, and maybe it’s a sign that an inkling of sanity is returning to the Democratic Party. There are whispers that Mr. Emanuel may run for Senate or even president. But then I thought back to Mr. Emanuel’s dealings with the Chicago public-school system.

To be fair, Mr. Emanuel had a reform agenda with plans for charter schools and longer school days. But in September 2012, the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike, demanding higher pay and no link between teachers’ pay and student performance. Mayor Emanuel wanted raises linked to layoffs, which the union rejected.

Some critics at the time—OK, I mean me—thought the then-mayor shouldn’t let a crisis go to waste and should channel his inner Ronald Reagan. As in 1981, when the president fired striking air-traffic controllers, Mr. Emanuel should have fired striking Chicago teachers (who had an average salary of around $71,000) and replaced them with iPads and educational software—and still have money left over. I was accused of “unadulterated stupidity” by EdSurge back then, but, as you’ll see, I was probably right.

No matter, seven days into the strike, Mayor Emanuel caved and gave the Chicago Teachers Union what it wanted—a raise plus no merit-based pay—and weakened the ability to fire teachers for low student standardized test scores. This was a missed opportunity.

I wondered how students entering the Chicago public-school system in 2012 have done. Awful.

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WSJ: How’s Trump Doing? The Tri-focal Lens

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/hows-trump-doing-president-politics-tariff-mexico-canada-china-europe-crypto-stock-market-9772934e

Former New York City mayor Ed Koch famously asked, “How’m I doing?” Donald Trump doesn’t ask, he just tells (for 100 minutes). But really, how is he doing? Most view Mr. Trump through either MAGA-hat-red or orange-man-bad tinted glasses. I suggest a trifocal lens. There are really three Donald Trumps: trolling Trump, transactional Trump and transformational Trump.

Mr. Trump is a master troller, pushing buttons, getting under skins, inflaming derangements. It works. I don’t pay attention to posts like “LONG LIVE THE KING!” Instead, I listen to him as if I were sitting at a bar with a boasty man-child friend from Queens who doesn’t finish his sentences. It’s mostly bluster, but some luster.

There’s certainly an own-the-libs component to his trolling. If you’re upset about the Gulf of America renaming, he got you. He trolled Maine Gov. Janet Mills for continuing to allow boys to compete in girls sports, saying, “enjoy your life after governor because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics.” That Gaza will be the “Riviera of the Middle East” is pure trolling. So is “Pocahontas.” Ignore these meaningless distractions.

So far, most moves by Mr. Trump are transactional, implemented by reversing Joe Biden’s equity, border and climate agendas via rapid-fire executive orders. Good. The Oval Office fracas with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and later halting all aid is theater to get a mineral deal signed. On-again-off-again tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China are meant to stop immigrants and fentanyl but also, sadly, economic growth. The president suggests tariffs may cause “a little disturbance.” The stock market isn’t amused.

Mr. Trump has tech billionaires and European leaders bending the knee—I’m embarrassed for all involved. Government employees are another story. Elon Musk is a good fit for the Department of Government Efficiency. The world’s richest man, like National Football League player Tyrann Mathieu, is a honey badger—super aggressive and resistant to bites. “Honey Badger Don’t Care.”

As the fall guy for a chaotic DOGE, Mr. Musk takes the heat.

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WSJ: Is Civility Possible Again?

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/is-civility-possible-again-political-discourse-the-view-donald-trump-godwins-law-social-media-1d89bef8

The hits keep coming from Donald Trump: “Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada.” To Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: “I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States.” “CLINKERS.” “Ratings Challenged NBC and MSDNC.”

On cue, there are calls from the media for civility. Now? We have a long history to overcome. Mark Twain, a 29-year-old San Francisco-based opinion columnist for a Nevada newspaper in 1865, was spewing venom, saying of the police, “Wax figures, besides being far more economical, would be about as useful.” Pianist and comedian Oscar Levant in 1940 said of his morning routine, “First I brush my teeth and then I sharpen my tongue.” Same.

Incivility became a favored tactic for activists. In 1971 Saul Alinsky wrote “Rules for Radicals,” which became the bible for the Obama and Biden administrations. Rule 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” Rule 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Rude, but effective.

I doubt Mr. Trump read the book, but he was self-taught on “The Apprentice” and has gotten sharper at it. It’s infectious. Comically, by the early 2000s, many Americans got their “news” from Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” on, yes, Comedy Central.

I’m OK with divisions and disagreements. They’re healthy, and it’s where great ideas emerge from. But civility is often lacking. Why? NBC producer Don Ohlmeyer, when asked about the problems with sports, replied, “The answer to all your questions is money.” Now it seems, the answer to all your questions about the loss of civility (which we probably never had) is social media.

Not so fast. The crumbling mainstream media is no shining light on the hill, having lost a lot of credibility over the past five years.

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WSJ: The You-Do Economy

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-you-do-economy-individualism-choice-self-service-decentralized-f0622d63

It started slowly. We dial our own phone numbers instead of an operator. We pump our own gasoline (except in New Jersey). With pensions phasing out, most of us plan for our own retirement and trade our own stocks. I call it the You Do Economy.

Technology, which eats people, replacing low-end jobs, has turned this trend into a runaway train. We use self-checkout lines at grocery stores. Airlines prefer if we check in ourselves and either show or print our own boarding passes. Airline kiosks spit out baggage tags that often take a doctorate to figure out how to attach. Hotels want us to check in and out ourselves (though I always forget to print out the bill so I can expense it). Need customer service? Forget it. Read the FAQ. Or go watch a video on YouTube. Else we’re on hold for 45 minutes, minimum.

We are almost forced to buy clothes and shoes online. Physical stores don’t stock the quantity or variety of Amazon and other sellers. Then, of course, we have to haul ourselves to Whole Foods, Staples or UPS with our returns—lugging with us five boxes of uncomfortable sneakers.

We swipe our own credit card to pay—cash is almost dead. Even worse, restaurants don’t bother with menus (remember when Covid spread via paper?). Instead, we scan QR codes and squint at menus on our phones. We’re asked to tip at counter-service restaurants.

Is that it? Heck no. People used to rely on editors to fact-check or amend the record. Now on X and most recently Facebook, we get “community notes,” which are corrections done by, you guessed it, you and me! Artificial intelligence could do the fact checking, but, no, it hallucinates so bad we’re forced to question everything it comes up with.

But I hope you don’t think I’m complaining.

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WSJ: Weird Naming Conventions

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/cant-ai-think-of-better-names-for-itself-products-brands-technology-advertising-27bf4b6a

What is it with techies and their bizarre product names? After announcing ChatGPT-4o Mini—what does that even mean?—OpenAI’s Sam Altman admitted the company needed a “naming scheme revamp.” No kidding. Other names, such as Copilot and Gemini, are better but are used to describe a confusing array of products. OpenAI (which isn’t open) didn’t learn the naming lesson from the early dot-com era. Because techies liked the alliteration of “World Wide Web,” we are forced to pronounce the nine-syllable “double u, double u, double u.” A mouthful. Do I even have to mention NFTs, nonfungible tokens?

We can do better with the names. I blame Intel and its 386 and 486 microprocessors. The company found it couldn’t trademark a mere number, and it needed to hold off competitors’ clones. So instead of the 586, Intel came up with the name Pentium. Fine, but for a follow-on, they would likely have to skip Sexium and perhaps a deviated Septium. So we’re stuck with the Pentium name and all of its confusing flavors, such as Intel Pentium Gold 8505. Huh?

Bad names are contagious. The World Health Organization, trying to sound scientific, used the Greek alphabet to name Covid variants. Fair enough. Alpha. Beta. The short-lived Gamma. Delta. All the way through Mu. Next would have been the Nu variant, but aren’t they all? So they skipped Nu, which teed up the Xi variant. But no, the WHO, being overly deferential to China, skipped Xi for Omicron. And then for some reason stopped there, instead using strangely named subvariants, Omicron BA.1, EG.5 (Eris), BA.2.86 (Pirola). So confusing numbers and odd nicknames are an improvement? In case you’re interested, the latest is Omicron XEC, making up about half of cases today. Are they masking something?

Orwellian names are everywhere, reflecting “1984” doublethink: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Both sides of American politics are guilty of this. Ronald Reagan’s Peacekeeper missiles. Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. The Green Spending Inflation Machine would have been more accurate.

Cars get funny names too. We are long past the Model T. We morphed into the Volkswagen Rabbit. No one who speaks Spanish would drive a Chevy Nova, since no va translates as “doesn’t go.” Hummers and the Ford Probe aren’t an improvement. But with a spark of creativity came the Ford F-150 Lightning. Cool name for an electric vehicle. Too bad production fizzled because so few wanted one. And telling someone you drive the funkily named Tesla Cybertruck, by law, must elicit the response: “Whoa, cool.” Cybersmudge might have been more accurate, as they all have messy fingerprints on their stainless-steel doors.

To stop squeaks on cars and really everything, we use WD-40. Its name means “Water Displacement 40th formula.” The first 39 attempts at the product didn’t work.

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WSJ: The New Wave of AI Is Here

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-new-wave-of-ai-is-here-some-jobs-will-go-but-others-will-be-created-0dbf9f63

A recent meme captures the gnawing artificial-intelligence backlash: A worker says, “AI turns this single bullet point into a long email I can pretend I wrote.” In the next panel, “AI makes a single bullet point out of a long email I can pretend I read.”

Funny. But in reality, there’s a lot more going on. Right on cue with the backlash are questions about AI’s business model. This month, a Journal headline stated, “No One Knows How to Price AI Tools.” How true. Do you bundle it like Microsoft Copilot or like Google’s AI Overview to show up above web search results (which apparently can be turned off only by cursing at it)? Should you charge $20 a month? Or $200 like ChatGPT Pro? Or offer the open-source Chinese DeepSeek for cheap? It makes a difference as bills keep piling up for announced data centers and expensive Nvidia chips.

As we warned early last month about DeepSeek, competition is fierce. On open-source AI, even OpenAI’s Sam Altman thinks “we have been on the wrong side of history.” But DeepSeek doesn’t mark the end of U.S. dominance. No, no. Instead, it’s a sign that the next wave of AI is starting. Lower usage costs are great for those developing applications. Real productivity will define the next era as corporate America pays up for anything that saves money.

Call centers and agents. You scour the web for answers, but sometimes you just have to talk to a real person, which can cost companies up to $1 a minute, a huge pain point. Often the experience is in broken English, with long pauses as the agents look up the same stuff you did.

Salesforce now sells a service called Agentforce, a platform that deploys AI agents. After these new agents go through your data, the number of questions that required human intervention declined by half. While that’s mostly text-based, imagine soon an 800 phone number and the voice you speak with is AI-generated instead of human—you won’t even know. Maybe add a smattering of broken English for realism? The answers will be better, and the savings will be staggering. Yes, it’s ironic that Salesforce is hiring 2,000 new salespeople—humans—to sell these AI tools.

Doctor summaries. Tired of your doctor distractedly typing during your expensive five-minute appointment?

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WSJ: Severance and DOGE - How to Spend $1 Million in a Hurry

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-to-spend-1-million-in-a-hurry-a-lesson-in-budgeting-and-bureaucracies-makes-me-skeptical-of-doge-1ea97897

Want to know if DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, will work? Watch the terrific show “Severance” on Apple TV+. It had me squirming. It wasn’t only the delightful weirdness of what many viewers describe as “corporate dystopia” or the stark colors and retro terminals. It’s because partway into it, I thought, “Wait a second, I worked in that building.” Literally. Part of the show was filmed at a former Bell Labs building in Holmdel, N.J., sitting on more than 450 acres, transistor-shaped water tower and all. I spent five years there toiling for the research arm of AT&T—one of the world’s largest bureaucracies at the time.

The Holmdel Bell Labs building hosted 6,000 workers with multiple floors and hallways that all looked the same connected to a giant central atrium, much like a prison. I shared a two-person office. Managers had bigger, wood-paneled, carpeted offices—status was based on ceiling-tile count. I have flashbacks to mindless meetings, endless forms, soulless back-stabbing and macrodata refinement. So yes, “Severance” is personal.

Working for a big corporation and regulated entity has many lessons for DOGE. Here’s one that may handcuff it: I was all of 23 years old and working on chips for modems, enabling digital communications over phone lines. The nice thing about Bell Labs is that no one ever told you what to do. You just figured it out. So I did what I wanted and had a lot of fun. It was the early 1980s, and I think I made $21,000 that year.

On Dec. 20 my boss pulled me into his office: “Got a second?” I thought I was going to be fired. He smiled and told me that our department was under budget for the year. I was confused. “The way things work here is that if we don’t spend a bunch of money before the end of the year, we lose it in next year’s budget.” So? “Well, Andy, this is your lucky day. You can be a hero around here if you can figure out how to spend a bit over $1 million quickly.” That was a lot of money back then. And now. It was regulated ratepayers’ money. AT&T overcharged for long-distance calls. Who cares? “Oh,” my boss added, “and it has to be delivered by Dec 31.”

He didn’t have to tell me twice. I had a wish list of computer power that I needed for chip design and testing. The hottest machine at the time I could run myself was from Digital Equipment, a DEC VAX 11/780, which required an air-conditioned room with raised floors. It ran about one million instructions per second. By comparison, today’s iPhone can do about 38 trillion operations per second.

I called the DEC salesman and told him I wanted a VAX and three 176-megabyte disk drives. He laughed and said, “Who doesn’t?”

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WSJ: Trump Tariffs Are a Wealth Killer

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-tariffs-are-a-wealth-killer-imports-protectionism-483f8517

“We will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens,” President Trump declared in his inauguration speech. Adam Smith is turning in his grave. Tariffs destroy wealth. No matter, Mr. Trump said he may slap 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico starting Feb. 1 and 10% on China. An executive memorandum demanded his administration study trade deficits and tariffs. Here’s a study guide:

In 1815, as the Napoleonic Wars ended and a fear of cheap grain imports arose, the landowner-protecting British Parliament passed the Corn Laws, imposing tariffs on foreign wheat and maize. This helped some farmers, but the Industrial Revolution was just starting, and workers who had flooded into cities faced shortages and high bread prices. There were many riots. Worse, reduced trade deprived the French and other countries of gold to pay for England’s new industrial output. The laws were self-defeating, yet they weren’t repealed until 1846.

Sound familiar? In a populist bid to protect our dwindling manufacturing workforce, economically clueless Trump whisperers push tariffs. A select few workers may be helped, but most Americans will be worse off—though I doubt we’ll see riots protesting higher prices on made-in-China Gap clothes, Barbie dolls or Hush Puppies shoes. But new Trump tariffs will raise prices and restrict other countries from affording our high-margin exports—drugs, phones, planes and many software and artificial-intelligence services. That’s dumb.

Why do presidents have the power to tariff anyway? Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution plainly states: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises. . . . To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.” In June 1930, Herbert Hoover signed the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, imposing almost 900 duties. After that mistake, in 1934 during the avoidable depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act, enabling presidents to negotiate trade agreements and apply tariffs themselves. FDR enabled DJT.

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was created in 1947 and drove massive postwar trade and growth. But, worried about the Soviets, Congress passed the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and specifically Section 232, which allowed presidents to restrict imports they deemed a threat to national security. Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 authorized presidents to impose tariffs on countries that violate agreements or burden U.S. commerce. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act 1977 allows presidents to regulate trade during national emergencies. Congress sure loves giving its power away. No wonder Mr. Trump has a crush on the word “tariff.”

Notice how everything is now either a national-security concern or an emergency.

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WSJ: My Festering Questions for 2025

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/my-festering-questions-for-2025-investing-tech-pharma-advertising-ai-federal-reserve-e8f1ac69

While the culture wars raged on for the past four years, some real-world questions festered:

Is something rotten at Apple? There is little growth. Earnings per share are basically flat since 2021 even with stock buybacks lowering share count. Estimates suggest iPhone unit sales are back where they were in 2015, while iPad unit sales have declined by almost half since 2013. The Apple Vision Pro augmented-reality headsets are a bust. Remember, growth stocks are highly valued on, well, growth.

Apple is also behind in artificial intelligence. Siri, like Amazon’s Alexa, could have won the AI chatbot battle but is now a reminder of what could have been. A conversational Siri isn’t expected until the spring of 2026. Every year, Google pays Apple around $20 billion to be the default search engine on iPhones, iPads and Macs. That could go away with the Justice Department’s antitrust remedies for Google. Yet Apple stock is near record highs. Sure, many companies aren’t trading on real-world fundamentals—I’m looking at you, Tesla—but they will.

Is Google threatened? The good news is Google may save $20 billion a year in Apple payments. But Google’s problems are more structural: AI search could easily eat into Google’s almost $200 billion worldwide search revenue and its 90% market share. Softening the blow, Google does include verbiage from its own Gemini AI on top of its web search results. Still, this is a big change.

Will Ozempic pay for itself? GLP-1 drugs look to be the new aspirin. It’s hard to find diseases they don’t affect. So far, they’ve helped treat type 2 diabetes, obesity, stroke, heart attack, sleep apnea, kidney disease and substance addiction. And there are hints these drugs may reduce the risks of colorectal, pancreatic and endometrial cancer. Wow. In December, a preliminary Cornell College of Business paper reported that GLP-1-using households spend 6% less on groceries within six months, while spending on chips, sweet bakery goods and cookies dropped up to 11%. These drugs are still expensive, and saving on Pringles won’t pay for them, not yet. But they’ll surely change long-term healthcare spending.

Is the AI hype cycle rolling over?

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WSJ: Dylan, Musk and the Edge of Chaos

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/dylan-musk-and-the-edge-of-chaos-bob-elon-electric-guitar-innovation-c514389b

With the release of the film “A Complete Unknown,” the world has been reintroduced to Bob Dylan’s all-electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The singer, formerly Robert Allen Zimmerman, brazenly played a solid-body electric Fender Stratocaster on “Like a Rolling Stone” and two other songs, shocking the crowd that expected snooze-inducing acoustic folk. Some booed. One critic said the singer “electrified one half of his audience and electrocuted the other.”

In 2025 we’re at a similar inflection point. It’s what happens when nonconformists seize the moment, leaving a trail of old and tired in their wake. It’s a story as old as time, and today it’s the story of Silicon Valley. The “edge of chaos,” an expression coined by physicist Norman Packard in 1988, is where creativity and innovation happen. On one side is staid order—the status quo. On the other side is total havoc. Stuff happens in the turbulence where they meet, where change in pressure spits off cyclones and twisters. Silicon Valley is the source of many of these. Sure, plenty of ideas fail, but enough drive long-term change for the better.

Creativity benefits from chaos. Music—from Elvis Presley to Shaboozey—often shocks before becoming mainstream. Same for film and fashion. Not everything that shocks turns into Bach. Especially art. I have finally learned how to enjoy the nonsensical dog’s breakfast of dreck in modern-art museums. I artfully remark to anyone within earshot, “This piece signifies an indictment of societal norms.” Or, to mix it up, I might say, “This is clearly about social struggles against the establishment.” Try it sometime. Every head will nod in agreement.

More important, the chaos of innovation changes history, but it is often hated—at first anyway. When Elon Musk took over Tesla, he gave rides and pitched the electric-car company to scores of venture capitalists. Almost all declined. SpaceX launching private rockets? It’ll never happen. Brian Chesky and Airbnb’s idea of renting out your couch or spare bedroom? Ick.

What I love most about these stories are the entrepreneurs themselves—the freaks and the geeks. They are nonconformist in how they think, talk, dress and socialize. Many are self-taught to write code. None were going to be hired by the short-sleeve-white-shirt-with-a-pocket-protector-wearing IBM, let alone the white-shoe Wall Street or a corporate hierarchy like Procter & Gamble. Mr. Musk as an investment banker? Funny thought. If any of these nonconformists were actually hired, they were relegated to backrooms to work in anonymity.

The misfits got the last laugh.

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WSJ: What a Long, Strange Trip

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/what-a-long-strange-trip-work-vacation-travel-experiences-8441fa22

I have a love-hate relationship with travel. The late chef Anthony Bourdain wrote, “Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you.” So true. Although sometimes those marks are welts. The 1990 Richard Linklater movie, “Slacker,” has a great line: “I’ve traveled, and all it is is bad water, bad food, you get sick, you got to deal with strange people, and when you get back you can’t tell whether it really happened to you or if you just saw it on TV.” Also true.

I’ve been fortunate to travel to see many man-made wonders, from the Tiger’s Nest in Bhutan and the Inca Trail in Peru to the Chouara Tannery in Fez, Morocco. Even more, I’ve loved seeing natural wonders, from Victoria Falls to Iguazu Falls, and from red-footed boobies in the Galápagos Islands to lions munching on hyenas in Botswana. I’ve spent time scratching my historic itch at St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace, agonizing through Auschwitz and crawling through the siege tunnels in Sarajevo. I’ve viewed street art in São Paulo and Hello Kitty cosplay in Tokyo. In our increasingly materialistic world, experiences provide the deepest and most lasting satisfaction.

Experiences are winning, but often you have to lose first. Starting with jet lag. Comedian Bob Hope said, “I’ve been to almost as many places as my luggage.” Relatable. And Bourdain was, again, on it: “The journey is part of the experience—an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent. One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca.” Sure, I’ve been stuck in airports and had to abandon trains. And that was just in Newark, N.J.

At age 19, a friend and I backpacked through Europe with only Arthur Frommer’s book “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day.” Now, technology is indispensable. Our phone acts as a Swiss Army Knife of maps, translators, bus schedules, car dispatchers, reservation makers, tour guides, Zoom cameras and money dispersers. The downside is a loss of serendipity, that cool bar or quaint café you stumble into.

Another downside is that you really never disconnect from your life anymore—you’re always in touch as your inbox and feeds fill with useless garbage. Donald Trump and Elon Musk convene. The mayor was arrested again. Buzzfeed’s “23 Exceptionally Weird Things People Found At Thrift Stores.”

Because of Hollywood and streaming, the Americanization of the world is in full force.

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WSJ: Division Isn’t So Bad

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/division-isnt-so-bad-politics-polarization-disagreement-american-society-f83d6dd7

American culture is built on division. Left vs. Right, Coke vs. Pepsi, Ohio State vs. flag-planting Michigan, Classico vs. Rao’s, Red Sox vs. Yankees. Kanye West vs. Taylor Swift. Maybe you’re tired of it, but you can’t get rid of division.

Donald Trump has said, “The discord and division in our society must be healed.” Good luck with that. Then again, Joe Biden said we have to choose “between unity and division.” It never happened because it isn’t in any politician’s interest to heal divides. So we get “the vast right-wing conspiracy” and “own the libs.” Division is here to stay. The rest of us need to learn how to deal with it.

The Biden years encouraged division by identity for the pursuit of power. It ended up costing Democrats the election. The Trump 2.0 years will probably be about division by nativism—we were here first. Or we made stuff here first. Yes, “decentering whiteness” vs. tariffs. Voters chose. Hey, you can’t have it all.

Sadly, anxiety often wins out. Former comedian Ellen DeGeneres, perhaps stressed by Trump trauma, moved to London. Cheerio. Others have reportedly threatened, including America Ferrera, Sharon Stone, Cher and Sophie Turner (isn’t she British?). Fine, they can read daily New York Times tantrums on their iPads from Saskatchewan. I hear it’s nice this time of year.

Others have retreated to comfortable echo chambers. Former Elon Musk fanboys—now haters—have debarked for Bluesky, a Twitter alternative, which almost advertises in its name: No red rhetoric here. Some simply unplug. CNN and MSNBC audiences are plummeting. Many will play Wordle for four years.

But it’s better if everyone stays engaged.

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WSJ: It’s All a Conspiracy, Right?

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/its-all-a-conspiracy-right-rfk-hhs-8bcd2df7

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominated to run the Department of Health and Human Services, has brought conspiracy theories back into the mainstream. In the past, he has claimed vaccines cause autism (since debunked), that we should drink raw milk (last month it was found possibly to contain bird flu), and that 5G broadband is used to “control our behavior” (well, it does tell my Uber driver where to go).

Mr. Kennedy recently tweeted: “Seed oils are one of the most unhealthy ingredients that we have in foods.” He’ll even sell you a $35 “Make Frying Oil Tallow Again” hat. Ending corn and other farm subsidies would solve their overuse—but tallow? Cardiologists suggest that saturated fat in beef tallow increases heart disease. Can we agree that policy should never be based on lawyers’ theories?

Humans are gullible. We like to be told tall tales. We eat them up. The Central Intelligence Agency killed John F. Kennedy. It must be true, I saw it in an Oliver Stone movie! Go to the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, and you’ll find a 1980 Texas Historic Landmark sign that reads: “When Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly shot and killed President John F. Kennedy.” Allegedly? Well, those dissecting frames 313 to 316 of the Zapruder film think so.

Who hasn’t fallen for at least one of these myths? Paul McCartney is dead. I am the walrus, goo-goo g’joob. UFOs at Roswell, N.M., and now in New Jersey. The moon landing was staged. Sept. 11 was orchestrated by government. Aliens crashed Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Pizzagate. Meghan Markle is a robot. Dinosaurs built Stonehenge.

Fluoride in our water. Subliminal ads in movies. Stolen elections. The Elders of Zion, Illuminati or Freemasons running the world. Barack Obama’s birthplace. Russia collusion. “Deny. Defend. Depose.” The deep state carrying out Donald Trump’s assassination attempt in Butler, Pa. Great movie plot, but c’mon.

We fall for conspiracy theories because they either sound plausible or contain some small tinge of truth that the rest of the made-up stuff hangs on.

WSJ:How Progress Builds on Itself

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-progress-builds-on-itself-innovation-biotech-artificial-intelligence-engineer-science-d447ab4a

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” Isaac Newton wrote in 1675 to polymath Robert Hooke. That expression is often used to explain progress: inventors and entrepreneurs building on the work of many others. I don’t like it. Stack too many smart folks on top of each other and things become slow-moving and get wobbly fast.

Here’s a better analogy: One of the most awe-inspiring places in the world is Victoria Falls, on the Zambezi River between Zambia and Zimbabwe. The locals call it Mosi-oa-Tunya, which translates to “smoke that thunders.” At 355 feet high and over a mile wide, it’s the largest sheet of falling water in the world. I stood on the precipice of the falls on Livingstone Island and looked down. It scared the living daylights out of me.

In the distance was Victoria Falls Bridge, built in 1905. The bridge is 650 feet long and 420 feet above the rushing river. According to Zimbabwe Field Guide: “The ravine was bridged by firing a rocket with a thin string attached from one bank to the other which was hauled across pulling after it a thicker cord, then a rope, and finally a steel cable was hauled across. A bosun’s chair was strung to the cable, which then moved engineers across the ravine taking ten minutes to cross.” Then add steel trusses, railroad tracks and asphalt and you have a usable crossing. It’s now frequented by bungee jumpers.

The bridge was a long shot followed by many, many, many repeated improvements. We’ve come a long way from Newton’s being hit on the head with an apple to SpaceX rocket launches. Back in my engineering and chip-designing days, a friend was astounded: “Wait, you use computers to design new computers?” Well, yes.

The original Bell Labs transistor, patented in 1948, looked like a mutant grasshopper. Starting in 1958, Texas Instruments and then Intel each put eight of these transistors on one device, an integrated circuit. Thirteen years later, Intel connected 2,300 transistors together and created the microprocessor—the brains of a computer on a chip. Around the same time, we got silicon modems to communicate over phone lines.

Then it was off to the races.

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WSJ: Donald Dos and Donald Don'ts

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-dos-and-donald-donts-trump-administration-policies-c9bbb0e5

In a classic Wall Street bull-market move, I went to Atlantic City, N.J., and sat behind Donald Trump at the Mike Tyson vs. Tyrell Biggs heavyweight fight at Trump Plaza on Oct. 16, 1987. I still have the souvenir: a red hat. The market crashed that Monday. Ominous, right? Here are some Donald Dos and Donald Don’ts to avoid a repeat on his watch.

Donald Do protect the dollar: The Dow Jones dropped about 22% on Black Monday after Ronald Reagan’s Treasury Secretary James Baker refused to defend the dollar amid growing trade deficits and West Germany raising interest rates over the weekend.

Presidents get the dollar they wish for. Emulate former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who repeated ad nauseam, “A strong dollar is in the best interest of the United States.” It really is. Have your Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent say it—and mean it—or the stock market may receive a Mike Tyson-like knockout blow. A lower dollar won’t bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.; productivity and artificial intelligence robot-assisted factories will.

Donald Don’t impose tariffs: I get it, your tariff bluster is a negotiating tactic. Heck, Mr. Bessent even called tariffs a “maximalist negotiating position.” Sure, except you know it, I know it and so does everyone else—including China. Tariffs are an unnecessary sales tax and can be inflationary, which is why long bond yields are rising. Tariffs kill trade and economic booms. Go easy on the Tariff Man shtick, and banish tariff touters Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro to the Social Security Administration.

Donald Don’t create migrant camps: The border mess is one reason you were elected. A recent CBS poll found that 57% of Americans approve of deportations. But do it right. Camps on the nightly news will ensure that public opinion destroys you. Do it in phases. Instead of mass deportations, start with the careful screening and removal of criminals. You’ll be hailed.

Remember this? After President Biden referred to Laken Riley’s killer as an illegal during his State of the Union address, Nancy Pelosi went on CNN and said, “He should have said ‘undocumented,’ but it isn’t a big thing.” Except it was…

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WSJ: The Market's Mixed Signals

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-markets-mixed-signals-stocks-bonds-investing-economy-4af9adea

Who wins, stocks or bonds? The stock market is booming, with the S&P 500 up almost 25% so far in 2024. The 10 largest U.S. stocks make up 20% of the entire world stock market value. Wow. Meanwhile, bonds are saying, “No, no, we’re in charge here!” Since the Federal Reserve cut short-term rates on Sept. 19, yields on 10-year bonds have risen—from 3.7% to 4.4%. Are they headed to 5%? The old tug-of-war between stocks and bonds, long dormant in the days of zero interest rates, has finally returned. Stocks are winning, but bonds may have the last laugh.

There are so many mixed signals. Stocks are up, signaling an economic boom. Oil is down as if we’re headed toward a recession. Home prices are up as if rate cuts will continue. Gold is up, suggesting inflation is back. The dollar is strong as if Europe, Canada and China are ailing (spoiler alert: They are.) Still, something’s got to give.

Core inflation is rising and has been over 3% since April of 2021. Long bonds are signaling that the Fed needs to stop cutting rates.

Retail sales, adjusted for inflation, are in a three-year downtrend. Target missed its earnings target. Consumers are stretched. Record household debt has reached nearly $18 trillion. There are also record mortgages, car loans, credit card debt and near-record student loans. Auto-loan delinquency rates are the highest since 2010. It’s no wonder that U.S. bankruptcies are also the highest since then. Be skeptical of those saying Donald Trump is inheriting a strong Biden economy. Meanwhile, stock-market investors need the Fed to keep cutting rates.

The S&P 500 risk premium, which is the earnings yield of stocks minus the 10-year Treasury rate, is basically negative. In effect, investors are paying for the risk of owning stocks instead of bonds. Weird. The last time this happened was in 2002. 

The crypto market is crazy, with Bitcoin hitting new highs. One reason is that the company MicroStrategy (nicknamed MicroTragedy during the dot-com bust) is the bellows of the crypto hot air machine.

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WSJ: The DOGE Cheat Sheet

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-doge-cheat-sheet-elon-musk-vivek-ramaswamy-department-of-government-efficiency-1c231783

It’s Elon time. Make no mistake, the 2024 election was decided on three i’s: inflation, indoctrination (woke smoke) and incompetence. Now comes the fourth—incisions. OK, that’s too nice. More like hacksaws cutting the government’s overgrowth.

Donald Trump has tapped Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to run a Department of Government Efficiency—an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one. Mr. Musk thinks they can save $2 trillion. That’s a stretch, but go for it.

The Muskian-named DOGE is an inside joke based on Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency that Mr. Musk hyped in May 2021, calling himself the “Dogefather” on “Saturday Night Live.” The price spiked roughly 1,000% in a month and then crashed about 70% over the next few months. That’s the perfect bar set for Mr. Musk—cut 70% of the government. Similar to what he did when dealing with Tesla’s Model 3 production problems, Mr. Musk could show his commitment by sleeping under the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office until the job is done.

Out with the woke mind virus and in with the “folk unwind virus” to attack bureaucracy. The federal government has around three million civilian employees, with an average salary of $106,000. Dr. Anthony Fauci made $481,000 in 2022. There’s room to cut. Mr. Trump has said he may close the Education Department and move its function to the states. Good start.

In tweet-length bites, here’s a handy cheat sheet with how Mr. Musk can toss, shrink or squeeze departments, commissions and agencies:

Federal Trade Commission: Toss. The current FTC under Lina Khan has a worse record than the Chicago White Sox.

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WSJ: The Good Sweepers in Valencia

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-good-sweepers-in-valencia-more-than-15000-volunteers-spain-flooding-aftermath-598c6948

Valencia, Spain

After the ugliness of a contentious election—my email inbox is a testament to the bitter rhetoric—you might be wondering if there’s any good left in people. It took travel and tragedy for me to find it. My wife and I picked our poison before Nov. 5 and skipped town. Destination: Valencia, which prospered as an endpoint of the Silk Road, even creating one of the world’s first indoor silk exchanges. The city also contains the Holy Grail, which became my quest to find. Instead, I saw brooms.

We arrived by train in Valencia a few hours before a major storm. There were high winds but no rain where we stayed. It did rain up in the mountains. And fast. That’s what happens when cold air hits the warm, moist air rising from the Mediterranean. Only this time, in some places, a year’s worth of rain fell in a few hours. The water has to go somewhere.

The old-town portion of Valencia was mostly spared, but just to the south, a few miles from where we were staying, waters raged. Cars wrapped around light poles. Mud was everywhere. Many people were trapped, and more than 200 died. The Bonaire Shopping Centre, a huge mall with parking underneath, typical in this flat city, required divers to look for bodies in their flooded garage. They may still be pumping water out.

The next morning, the streets were filled with people carrying brooms. Walking. Biking. On buses. More than 15,000 people headed over bridges to help clean up the mud from the flooding—an amazing mobilization of ad hoc volunteers. The police and army were on scene, but day after day I saw a mass of mostly young people with brooms heading to help.

Most volunteers carried small push brooms meant for small apartments. Seeing them reminded me of Dick Van Dyke and the chimney sweeps from “Mary Poppins.” Even families with small children headed toward the disaster. Late in the day, I saw people returning with muddy clothes and sneakers.

Farmers also showed up in tractors to clear debris.

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WSJ: The Hemlock Election

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-hemlock-election-trump-harris-pick-your-poison-policy-progressive-or-unrest-ac3c4e52

Overheard waiting to vote in 1992 for either Bill Clinton or George H.W. Bush on Manhattan’s Upper West Side: “Looks like you just have to hold your nose and vote.” To me, Tuesday’s election is worse: rock meets hard place, a Sophie’s choice, pomposity versus progressive purgatory, unrest versus economic decline. Pick your poison. Let’s call this the Hemlock Election.

A friend told me, “I don’t think I can take another four years of Donald Trump clips on the ‘Today’ Show, with that whiny voice butchering the English language, complaining about what people think of him.” It’s hard to argue. On the flip side, I don’t think I can take another four years of performative hand-wringing, like Kamala Harris’s Columbus Day 2021 “shameful past” speech to the National Congress of American Indians: “Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for Tribal nations—perpetrating violence, stealing land and spreading disease.” How uplifting.

Under Mr. Trump, expect me-me-me, mockery and misogyny. Under Ms. Harris, climate craziness, wokey woo-woo and pronoun patrols. I don’t like either scenario.

Mr. Trump says if he wins, there’ll be mass deportations. Believe him. Detention centers will be constructed, which the press will immediately compare to Nazi camps. It won’t be pretty. Add tariffs and a lower dollar in a misguided effort to help U.S. manufacturing. Prices will go up.

Ms. Harris says she’ll give money away in the form of tax credits, home subsidies and higher minimum wages. Believe her. Prices will go up. In 2026 maybe we’ll see a rebranding of the Dollar Store to the Five Dollar Store. The stock market may swoon on larger federal deficits.

It’s vainglorious versus vassal, bouffant versus vacuous pantsuit.

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WSJ: Can You Handle Four More Years?

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/can-you-handle-four-more-years-kamala-harris-regulation-higher-taxes-price-controls-b482e8fd

Vice President Kamala Harris said in 2021: “If the goal is truly about equality, it has to be about a goal of saying everybody should end up in the same place. And since we didn’t start in the same place, some folks might need more—equitable distribution.” There it is, progressivism in a nutshell.

Actions speak loudly. Ms. Harris co-sponsored Bernie Sanders’s 2017 Medicare for All Act, co-sponsored the Green New Deal and was the tie-breaking vote for the Inflation Reduction Act to spend gobs on green gravy. I almost feel sorry for my center-left friends who’ve been mugged by a progressive agenda. My question: Can the economy handle four more years of progressive power?

• Price controls. Candidate Harris wants to end grocery “price gouging,” a classic misdirection to shift blame for the Biden-Harris spending-induced 9% inflation. The first sign of economic illiteracy is price controls, then tariffs, money multipliers and all things Keynes. Stripped of price signals, markets lose their compass. Soviet supermarkets had price controls and bare shelves. Wage and price controls don’t work.

• Never-ending spending. The progressive plank has pushed housing subsidies, child tax credits and startup loans that will never be paid back (90% of startups fail). How will this be paid for? It doesn’t matter, to spend is to tax. Ms. Harris proposes to extend Medicare’s $2,000 cap on drug spending to everyone—a gateway drug, pardon the pun, to Medicare for all and socialized medicine. Don’t fall for it.

• Taxes up. Progressives are gunning for your hard-earned money. Their proposed highest tax rate is 39.6% from 37%. Add roughly 13.3% in California and if you do well, you’re working for the man. Corporate tax rates are to rise to 28% from 21%. They should be 15%. Taxes on realized long-term capital-gains could rise to 28% plus another 5% tax on net investment income for ObamaCare, from 20% plus 3.8%. Remember, Silicon Valley blossomed with a 20% rate—more money for entrepreneurs than government. Progressives even want to tax unrealized gains for those making over $100 million. Doesn’t affect you? Just wait. In 1913 the top income-tax rate was 7% on incomes over $500,000 (about $11 million today).

• Innovation down. High capital-gains rates hurt capital formation.

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WSJ: AI Can’t Teach AI New Tricks

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ai-cant-teach-ai-new-tricks-model-collapse-need-for-human-prose-a6d0648f

Artificial intelligence is our economy’s next productivity power pack. It better be—OpenAI just raised $6.6 billion, the largest venture-capital funding of all time, at a $157 billion valuation. Oh, and the company will lose $5 billion this year and is projecting $44 billion in losses through 2029.

We are bombarded with breathless press releases. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts that “powerful AI” will surpass human intelligence in many areas by 2026. OpenAI claims its latest models are “designed to spend more time thinking before they respond. They can reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems.” Thinking? Reasoning? Will AI become humanlike? Conscious?

Not so fast. Large language models are impressive, but they are still statistical models mimicking human thinking. You can’t just throw cheaper chips at the problem and expect growth. More than Moore’s Law (chips doubling in density every 18 months) is in play. I hate to be the one to throw it, but here’s some cold water on the AI hype cycle:

Moravec’s paradox: Babies are smarter than AI. In 1988 robotics researcher Hans Moravec noted that “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.” Most innate skills are built into our DNA, and many of them are unconscious.

Mr. Moravec went on: “Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it.” DNA is the carrier of life’s success signals. Yes, since we were fish.

AI has a long way to go. Last week, Apple AI researchers seemed to agree…

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WSJ: China Is Turning Japanese

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/china-is-turning-japanese-asia-economy-downturn-history-1990s-real-estate-stimulus-2054e267

China’s property market is imploding. In January, Shenzhen-based Evergrande Group was forced to liquidate, owing $300 billion. An estimated 90 million apartments are empty in China, many in underoccupied “ghost cities” such as Shenyang and Ordos. In 1980 the British band the Vapors sang: “I’m turning Japanese, I think I’m turning Japanese, I really think so.” Is China’s economy turning Japanese?

Other Chinese property developers such as Country Garden, Fantasia Holdings and Sunac are in disarray. China’s economy is slowing. As of September, China factory activity had shrunk five months in a row. The International Monetary Fund forecasts that China’s long-term growth rate is receding—over 10% in 2010 and now under 4%. In the 1990s Japan’s growth rate slowed a similar amount.

In 2008 Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson described a U.S. fiscal-stimulus “bazooka.” Last month China took out its own bazooka, a massive stimulus entailing lower interest and mortgage rates and reduced bank reserve requirements. The Shanghai Composite Index jumped 25%. All clear? Hardly. The rally fizzled, down roughly 8% since Tuesday with word of a smaller-than-expected stimulus. On Saturday, China’s finance minister said Beijing will “significantly increase” government debt to stimulate the economy. Details were sparse, but that sounds desperate to me.

Japan spent lost decades trying to boost its economy with monetary and fiscal stimulus. But Japanese banks were stuffed with nonperforming loans, and rather than making structural changes to the economy and writing off these bad loans, Japan ended up with zombie banks that looked good on paper but stopped making new loans. The economy flatlined.

Is China Japan 2.0? Let’s do the math. The average apartment in China is valued at $200,000—970 square feet at $205 a square foot. The 90 million empty apartments might be worth $18 trillion. Construction and purchase loans on these empty apartments are surely in multiple trillions of dollars and underwater. But China’s official nonperforming-loan ratio is reported as a meager 1.6%. That’s hard to believe. Chinese economic statistics are notoriously fuzzy, but it’s hard to hide 90 million empty apartments for long.

The good news is that China has a high domestic savings rate. Maybe it can paper over the nonperforming loans. But...

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WSj: Why Do the Young Vote Left?

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/why-do-the-young-vote-left-progressive-democrats-socialism-e2397290

Fifty-seven percent of 18- to 34-year-olds surveyed prefer Kamala Harris for president vs. 26% for Donald Trump, according to the Pell Center. Why do our youth gravitate toward progressive idealism and a nanny state? Is it sloganeering like “new way forward” or “opportunity economy”?

Nah. It’s the gifts. The progressive vibe is that big government will take care of you. It knows what’s best for you. It will redistribute money how it pleases. You need to put a smile on your face while it takes away your laurels, guns and money. “We believe in the collective,” Ms. Harris declared, much like Hillary Clinton’s “it takes a village.” Equity in Schenectady. Handouts for all.

You want proof? Ms. Harris’s Senate voting record is leftward of socialist Bernie Sanders. Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz fawns over China, saying “everyone is the same and everyone shares.” Viva la revolución and Che Guevara T-shirts for all.

This is antifreedom. Too many of today’s youth fall in line with progressives because they’re undereducated and overindoctrinated with someone else’s agenda. I watched in horror as local high-school biology classes spent weeks on the science of recycling centers and only a short afternoon on mitochondria and mitosis. Profit is a bad word. It’s gimme, gimme, whether it’s student loan forgiveness, free healthcare or tax credits.

Who’s to blame? Misguided capitalism-hating social-studies teachers to start, with Tim Walzian thinking: “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” Who is he, Mr. Rogers? Add like-minded college professors. Work ethic and ambition are evaporating.

Worse, Pew Research notes almost a third of currently childless 18- to 34-year-olds aren’t sure if they ever want children. Why?

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WSJ: What Happened to Free Speech?

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/what-happened-to-free-speech-campus-universities-tech-platforms-media-policy-1be5be20

Sixty years ago this month, the Free Speech Movement was born at the University of California, Berkeley. How is that working out?

In mid-September 1964, Berkeley’s dean of students banned tables and political activity along the Bancroft strip, a 26-foot stretch of university-owned sidewalk near Telegraph Avenue down from Sproul Plaza. I walked around the area last week and found, almost paradoxically, a capitalist BMO Bank, a Marxist-glorifying César Chávez Student Center and a techno-optimist Open Computing Facility.

Berkeley’s 1964 students protested the table ban. On Sept. 30, five students were cited. More than 400 insisted that they were also responsible and should all be cited too. They then staged their first sit-in inside Sproul Hall, Berkeley’s administration building. The next day, tables were set up outside Sproul Hall. The police were called and arrested Jack Weinberg. Some 200 students surrounded the police car. Speeches began as thousands assembled. Mario Savio emerged as a Free Speech Movement leader.

With the cop car still surrounded by late afternoon on Oct. 2, 500 police officers were on hand at the university. A six-point agreement was reached with the university president, and the protests ended. As is typical of universities, committees were formed. A six-week ban on tables was instituted and Mario Savio and others were suspended. But by mid-November, the tables were back, and 3,000 students marched around campus.

On Nov. 23, 300 students staged another sit-in inside Sproul Hall. By Dec. 2, 1,000 students were inside the building. Sit-ins aren’t free speech—they are unlawful and can lead to violence. Mario Savio gave his famous “Put your bodies upon the gears” speech on the steps of Sproul Hall. Gov. Edmund Brown then sent 635 police officers, who arrested 814 students. More committees, a five-point proposal, and a convocation tried to calm things down. In January, and three months too late, an acting chancellor designated Sproul Hall’s steps an open-discussion area that allowed political tables.

Sadly, campus free speech has been lost since 1964. Savio’s speech has been an inspiration for civil disobedience, most recently at Columbia and elsewhere this spring.

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WSJ: Section 230 Catches Up to AI

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/section-230-catches-up-to-ai-technology-artificial-intelligence-policy-5bee3ceb

Is TikTok toast? Fearing Chinese spying, the U.S. decided to ban TikTok last April if it wasn’t sold by January 2025. TikTok owner ByteDance refuses to sell and sued. At a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia hearing last week, Judge Douglas Ginsburg, asked, “Why is this any different, from a constitutional point of view, than the statute precluding foreign ownership of a broadcasting license?”

Why indeed. Broadcasters are publishers. Is TikTok?

Social-media companies flourished under the protection of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which states: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In other words, anyone hosting content on a server or platform can’t be sued by others for that content.

But we’re a long way from 1996. Online service Prodigy—remember it?—lost a 1995 fraud suit against bucket-shop brokerage Stratton Oakmont, which sparked passage of Section 230. Remember, no one even had a BlackBerry back then. Now, algorithms and artificial intelligence, not humans, decide what’s on our feeds. TikTok’s FYP or “For You Page” algorithm uses AI to serve up videos. The $200 billion question is: Does using AI or algorithms make you a publisher? I think so.

And so does the Third Circuit. On her TikTok “For You Page,” 10-year-old Nylah Anderson was shown a “Blackout Challenge” video encouraging the recording of self-asphyxiation. She hanged herself. Her mother sued and the case wound its way to the appeals court, which noted that TikTok’s FYP algorithm “is not immunized by Section 230 because the algorithm is TikTok’s own expressive activity.” The court did suggest a person searching for videos would fall under Section 230. Humans post, AI publishes.

Social-media companies are allowed to moderate content, removing or leaving up anything they want. The U.S. Supreme Court further established this as a First Amendment right in Moody v. NetChoice (2024). But because these algorithms are now an “expressive activity,” the companies are publishers and not protected from liability from third-party content under Section 230.

This changes everything.

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WSJ: When Harris Defied Democracy

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/when-kamala-defied-democracy-election-proposition-8-california-c4df8008

To hear Democrats tell it, Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. Maybe so. But as California attorney general, Kamala Harris purposely ignored voters and blatantly refused to defend the state constitution. The issue was same-sex marriage. While I believe anything involving love and commitment between adults should be encouraged, her methods defied democracy and established a dangerous precedent.

I worry that as president, Ms. Harris may similarly disregard voters, the law and her presidential oath to implement price controls, confiscate guns, impose Medicare for all or ban fracking and—please, no—red meat.

In February and March 2004, during what became known as the “Winter of Love,” San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom issued several thousand marriage licenses for same-sex couples. The California Supreme Court soon determined the city had no authority to do so. Four years later, the same court ruled that California’s statutes limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples violated the California Constitution.

Proponents of traditional marriage soon sponsored Proposition 8, a November 2008 ballot measure to amend the constitution, stating that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” It passed 52.2% to 47.8%. In 2009 the California Supreme Court ruled that Proposition 8 was permissible and “carves out a narrow and limited exception to these state constitutional rights, reserving the official designation of the term ‘marriage’ for the union of opposite-sex couples as a matter of state constitutional law.”

That didn’t settle things. In August 2010, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California declared Proposition 8 unconstitutional under the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th Amendment. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals immediately stayed the decision pending appeal.

Ms. Harris was elected attorney general in November 2010. At her victory party, she declared that she “will not defend Proposition 8”…

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WSJ: Is the Google Breakup Coming?

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/is-the-google-breakup-coming-dc-district-court-antitrust-company-efficiency-d0403d4d

Should the government break up Google? Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled last month that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” Remedies could include breaking up Google. That would be a big mistake.

We can disagree on the merits of the case—whether Google paying Apple $18 billion a year to be the iPhone’s default search engine is monopolistic. Google says it will appeal. Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, told me, “Our basic argument is that people use Google Search because they choose to, not because they have to.” Judge Mehta even admitted, “Apple and Mozilla occasionally assess Google’s search quality relative to its rivals and find Google’s to be superior.”

So where is the consumer harm? Governments shouldn’t penalize companies for success. “Big is bad” isn’t sound policy, and government-driven breakups often fail. I worked at Bell Labs inside AT&T during its 1982 breakup—ending up with the same desk, same job, under three different company names. The breakup separated long distance from seven local Baby Bells. Did it matter? Probably not. The market, over time and like Humpty Dumpty, put the increasingly obsolete regulated Bells back together again, just as cellular was disrupting telecom.

On the same day in 1982, the government decided not to break up mainframe-computer giant IBM. Competition from servers and PCs ended up neutering IBM—thank you, Mr. Market—and the company had 22 consecutive quarters of down sales ending in 2018. The stock is where it was in 2013.

So no, unless there is consumer harm, I’m strongly against government breaking up companies. But I am very much in favor of companies breaking themselves up.

Years ago I wrote about monkey traps: Put a banana inside a coconut, and the monkey reaches in to grab it, but then it can’t escape because it’s too stupid to let go of the banana. Long distance was the banana for AT&T…

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WSJ: Foot in Mouth

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/stop-think-then-speak-lifestyle-advice-politics-fumble-gaffe-f0cba0dc

We all say things we soon regret. Joe Biden’s “I’m staying in the race.” Donald Trump’s “No, other than day one. . . . After that, I’m not a dictator.” Kamala Harris’s “I will snatch their patent, so that we will take over. Yes, we can do that!” I’ve put my foot in my mouth so often I’ve considered edible socks.

Worse is when someone corrects you right away, as in the 1977 movie “Annie Hall” when Woody Allen, annoyed with a blowhard pontificating about movies, pulls media expert Marshall McLuhan from the shadows, who says to the know-it-all, “I heard what you were saying! You know nothing of my work!” Mr. Allen sighs and addresses the camera: “Boy, if life were only like this!”

Sometimes it is. Last month, Rep. Ro Khanna asked Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle about former Director Stuart Knight, “Do you know what he did” after the assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Cheatle answered, “He remained on duty.” Rep. Khanna corrected her: “He resigned.” Ms. Cheatle did too, a few days later.

I’m also guilty of misspeaking. On a plane to Las Vegas, my seatmate, Jim, said he went to Georgetown. I launched: “Oh, I’ve got a great story. I saw Patrick Ewing’s first game at Madison Square Garden against St. Johns and Chris Mullins. Early 1982, I think?” Jim nodded. “Right away, Ewing was blocking every shot—he must’ve had 20—after maybe 14 minutes it was 41-9.” Jim was vigorously nodding and smiling. “Oh, were you at the game too?” I asked. “Yeah,” Jim said sheepishly, “I was on Georgetown’s bench. I was a walk-on. Didn’t play much.” He added, “Ewing had five blocked shots.” I nervously chuckled and mumbled, “I wish you had stopped me sooner.”

Before browsers and Netscape, I was raising a venture fund based on interactive media and online commerce. I had a line about how if you clicked on Michael Jordan highlights, a video of Michael might pop up to sell you Nike sneakers. At a gathering in Philadelphia around 1993, I noticed Julius Erving—Dr. J. himself—in the audience. As a kid, I used to watch him put on a show at the end of blowout American Basketball Association games. So I ad-libbed, “Dr. J. himself would pop up in a video to sell you Nike sneakers.” He said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “I only wear Converse.”

It’s not just sports. I can put my foot in my mouth anytime, anywhere. Learning my wife and I were about to stay at a vegetarian organic farm in Nepal, I feared I would die of starvation. At dinner, my wife and I sat next to two women from the Netherlands. I jokingly asked, “How could anyone be a vegetarian?” and noted that I was hoping all vegetarian stuff would “taste like chicken.” One piped in, “I’m a vegetarian.”

I’m sure I turned the color of a ripe tomato. A plate arrived...

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WSJ: The Convention Games

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-convention-games-make-the-dnc-more-like-the-olympics-486eab1b

The circus known as the Democratic National Convention rolls past the Michael Jordan statue and into Chicago’s United Center on Monday. The Windy City will be filled with enough hot air to change the climate. Conventions long ago stopped being about selecting a presidential candidate, especially this year. Instead, they are finely scripted, slick Hollywood-style productions of preening, posturing, peacocking, pomposity and propaganda. More coronation than deliberation. Hence, boring as all get out. You might as well watch reruns of “The Golden Girls.”

It’s time for a change. Over the years, new technology has driven political influence. Newspapers drove convention coverage until radio and television could broadcast messages in real time. Social media bypassed editors and producers and turned the snark volume up to 11. Artificial intelligence is now sneaking into politics with made-up crowd sizes and authentic voice (and soon video) fakes.

Speaking of peacocking, I spent way too much time watching the Olympics using NBC’s Peacock streaming app. It was terrific. In addition to the highly produced prime-time coverage with silky-voiced Mike Tirico running us through the major events and up-close-and-personal profiles of athletes, streaming allowed viewers to watch anything and everything. Every sport, all 329 medal events, was available live. Peacock’s Gold Zone, patterned after the NFL’s RedZone channel, offered bite-size pieces of the games. Octoboxes let you watch eight sports at a time. I devoured chunks of water polo (do the horses hold their breath?) and archery and canoe slaloms that I might not have ever watched.

Political conventions could do the same. Coverage is too much like syrupy Olympic prime time, with TV producers cutting away for often meaningless interviews. Give us an octobox. Even better, tap every iPhone in the United Center as a TV camera. I want to know what the Pennsylvania delegation thinks about fracking bans, or what Minnesota thinks about tampons in boys’ school bathrooms. I’d watch. As always, when technology exists, it will eventually be used.

And stop making conventions a foregone conclusion. People love a little mystery. Allow delegates to vote after every speech on candidates and issues and post the tallies. Bring back the smoke-filled rooms, where power brokers livestream their arguments. Have the Ohio delegation debate the Michigan delegation about football. Ratings gold! The Democrats introduced superdelegates in 1982 so that party insiders would have more of a say. Get rid of superdelegates so that the best candidate, not the chosen one, can rise to the top.

And during the painfully dull Tuesday night slot, mix it up. Have Tim Walz, perhaps in full National Guard uniform, belay into the United Center…

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WSJ: Is Silicon Valley Turning Right?

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/is-silicon-valley-turning-right-elon-musk-vcs-for-kamala-2024-presidential-race-0c422573

Minutes after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Elon Musk tweeted, “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery.” Venture capitalist David Sacks spoke at the Republican National Convention last month, echoing investor Peter Thiel’s 2020 convention speech. Netscape co-founder turned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said he’ll support Mr. Trump. Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Mr. Trump’s reaction to his assassination attempt was “one of the most badass things” and told him in a phone call that he won’t support a Democrat.

What’s going on? Has deep-blue Silicon Valley turned conservative? Last week, J.D. Vance was shaking the money tree at a fundraiser in Palo Alto, Calif. It was reported that Mr. Musk, snubbed by President Biden over electric vehicles, would donate $45 million to a political action committee to elect Mr. Trump, although Mr. Musk later responded to this report by tweeting a meme of “Fake Gnus.”

Conservative? It’s a high climb. Silicon Valley keeps re-electing congressman Ro Khanna, who was co-chairman of “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats rule California with a progressive fist. Mr. Biden won the Golden State by more than five million votes over Mr. Trump in 2020, 63.5% to 34.3%.

That might seem strange, given that so much wealth has emerged from big tech and venture-capital investing, which relies on low capital-gains rates and anyone-can-take-on-anyone-else free-market capitalism. Why vote Democrat?

Silicon Valley leanings are beyond left and right. Forbes’s then-publisher Rich Karlgaard explained to me years ago, “In Silicon Valley, everyone is a libertarian whether they know it or not. Democrat libertarians and Republican libertarians.” By libertarian he means the “don’t tell me what to do” kind. The “get government off my back while I invent the future” mentality.

So many wealthy young techies have been minted by free markets in the past decade, yet they fall for big-government idealism to protect “victims” and those run over by technology’s disruptions.

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WSJ: Kamala Harris Has a Brat Summer

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/kamala-harris-has-a-brat-summer-charli-xcx-vote-young-leftwing-populist-0edacdc1

Since British singer Charli XCX (not her real name) tweeted “kamala IS brat,” the world has been trying to figure out what that means. Wanting a young-voter vibe, the vice president’s campaign changed its Twitter page background to “kamala hq” in the same font and dirty swamp-green hue as the new Charli XCX album, “Brat.” Was that smart? As your dedicated columnist, I have spent the past week listening to the latest Charli XCX album (so you don’t have to) and going down a rabbit hole of music, culture and politics. I may need some time off to recover.

Politics and music have a long history. George M. Cohan wrote “Over There” in 1917. Neil Young’s “Ohio” was released in 1970 with the lyrics “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming.” Joan Baez was a protest-song factory between her 1967 “Saigon Bride” and 2017’s Trump-bashing “Nasty Man.” Bruce Springsteen performed at Obama campaign rallies. Lady Gaga and Jon Bon Jovi played his song “Living on a Prayer” before introducing Hillary Clinton days before Election Day in 2016. In retrospect, they were rather prophetic.

Still, music is influential. Charli XCX’s work is considered electroclash and hyperpop, veins of electronic dance music popular at drug-fueled raves. The Rolling Stones this ain’t. The lyrics on “Brat” are influenced by what is known as the Dimes Square subculture, from young Gen Z folk who live on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. (Dimes is a local restaurant.)

As with rapper Megan Thee Stallion, who performed last week at a Kamala Harris campaign event in Atlanta, I can’t print many of Charli XCX’s lyrics, but here are some of her cleaner lines: “Yeah, it’s 4 a.m. and she’s out there / With the razor-sharp tongue stuck to skinny cigarettes” is from the song “Mean Girls.” “Yeah, she’s in her mid-20s, real intelligent / And we hate the fact she’s New York City’s darling / You say she’s problematic and the way you say it, so fanatic / Think she already knows that you’re obsessed.” I’m pretty sure Bob Dylan just canceled his Spotify account with malice.

Dimes Square was hot in 2022 with a fawning media. Steven Phillips-Horst, who says he coined the term, told the Daily Beast: “The media sort of holds it up as a bogeyman, because it feels like a club they’re not invited to.” A too-cool-for-you vibe. Dimes Square culture is often associated with a podcast known as “Red Scare,” hosted by self-described “bohemian layabouts” originally from Belarus and Moscow. That’s on brand for progressives as well.

This culture is hard to define. It’s both antifeminist and anticapitalist…

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WSJ: The New Right Looks Left

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-right-looks-left-jd-vance-trump-populism-protectionism-gop-166e9686

I like J.D. Vance’s background. Humble beginning, Marine, Big Ten and Ivy League graduate, author, venture capitalist. He even headbanged to Kid Rock in Milwaukee. As politics work, he’s the heir apparent to conservatism and the Republican Party. But in his bid for populism’s golden scepter, he’s abandoned any free-market bona fides he ever had. The vice-presidential candidate is considered part of the “postliberal” new right. I suppose that’s close to being a conservative, but as is often attributed to the baseball great Frank Robinson, “close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”

Politics isn’t a straight line. At the extremes, the far left and far right often bend around and almost touch, it’s been said, like a horseshoe. We’re seeing this play out in real time. Check out this rhetoric: “Organize the dispossessed in community movements for economic gains.” “Movements of welfare mothers, the unemployed, tenants, and others have been organized around their particular grievances.” Compare that with: “We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man.” “We will protect the wages of American workers.”

The first quote is from the 1962 Port Huron Statement written by liberal activist Tom Hayden and the Students for a Democratic Society. The second is from Mr. Vance’s nomination speech. Similar, no? Close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades. Politics these days isn’t at the center. It’s at the extremes, with socialism and populism almost linked. Dogs and cats living together. That doesn’t seem stable to me.

Both sides are protectionist: President Biden never rescinded Donald Trump’s foolish tariffs. Now Mr. Trump wants 10% tariffs on all imports and at least 60% on Chinese goods. This is bad industrial policy and a growth-killing closet tax hike on the rich and poor. Mr. Vance told CBS’s “Face the Nation,” “We need to protect American industries from all of the competition.” Reed Smoot, is that you? Also watch for a weak dollar to “stimulate” exports. Dangerous moves.

Both are anti-free-market: Think of the Biden administration’s green subsidies and heavy regulatory hand. Now we’re hearing calls for big-government intervention from Republicans, including deficits all the way down. Mr. Vance proposed $7,500 tax credits for U.S.-made gasoline-powered vehicles after years of $7,500 electric-vehicle credits. Like Oprah: Everybody gets a car subsidy! A better plan is to let markets price vehicles, and may the best car win.

Both are pro-union:

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WSJ: Hollywood’s Paramount Rule

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/hollywoods-paramount-rule-david-ellison-deal-film-investing-a9e04791

The first rule of Hollywood: Never spend your own money. Ask David Ellison, who learned the hard way with his mostly self-financed 2006 film “Flyboys” starring James Franco and, yes, David Ellison. It cost $60 million to make and did under $18 million at the box office. He told me he’d never do that again.

Now 41, an avid pilot and son of $172 billion net worth Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Mr. Ellison is set to take over the storied Paramount studio (maker of films from “The Ten Commandments” to “The Godfather”).

After the 2008 financial crisis, studio financing dried up. Mr. Ellison, then in his late 20s, figured he’d raise several hundred million from outside investors for a film fund. He could have written a check himself, but he understood Hollywood’s first rule. I was in the room in those early days. A mutual friend, Andrew McKenna, who flies P-51 Mustangs and is now a Wall Street hotshot, helped negotiate a film-financing deal with Paramount Pictures—no easy task—and asked me to get involved.

David Ellison was smart and focused. His company, Skydance Media, was based in a hangar at Santa Monica Airport. I’d often see Harrison Ford stroll by. I contemplated becoming chairman and was even the first investor in the fund. I also was the first to get thrown out.

Mr. Ellison’s idea for Skydance was to fund only action and sci-fi films—movies with explosions! He swore to me: No rom-coms. No touchy-feely emotional Oscar bait. He’d only fund surefire box-office winning categories, including animation.

Hollywood is all about capital efficiency. Yes, studios also know that first rule and try to limit investing their own money.

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WSJ: Is the Stock Market Near Its Top?

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-stock-market-near-its-top-c0b09e3b

The third season of the terrific show “The Bear” blends family dysfunction with the ups and downs of high-end restaurants. With markets chasing new highs—get out those Dow 40000 hats—this column is about a different kind of dysfunctional beast. Is the market bear dead, or is it about to sneak up on us?

A U.S. equity strategist told me the story of a Japanese portfolio manager who sat in his office in July 1987 asking for stock ideas. The strategist’s model was based on a proprietary survey of investor sentiment, though it never really worked. Nonetheless, he read off a list of dozens of stocks. The portfolio manager then asked if he would kindly put in an order for 20,000 shares of each. The Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked at 2722 in late August and crashed 22.6% on Oct. 19.

A friend was a portfolio manager of a massive growth-stock fund in 1999. He told me he bought shares of Yahoo, Cisco, F5 Networks, Infosys and others every day because money flowed into his fund every day. The tech-heavy Nasdaq index peaked on March 10, 2000. As money began to flow out, he had to sell every day. By year’s end, Nasdaq had fallen by more than half.

I met Cathie Wood as she was filing papers for her “disruptive innovation” funds—to “change the way the world works.” Her ARK Innovation exchange-traded fund, ARKK, launched in October 2014 and charges 0.75% management fees. In 2020 it was up 153% as stimulus money flew in, driving more buying. ARKK peaked in February 2021 with $28 billion in assets. Since then, its net asset value is down 70%, even amid a roaring bull market, especially in tech. Morningstar recently calculated that Ms. Wood’s Ark Invest funds have destroyed more than $14 billion in wealth. One of my favorite Wall Street sayings is, “Don’t mistake a bull market for brains.”

In almost every bull run, stock momentum lures in investors at the worst moment, I call them momos, ensuring they get burned when the buying stops. Since 2009, excepting a few brief sell-offs, cash has been trash. That made some sense during the era of zero interest rates. But now with higher inflation and short rates above 5%? Confusing. Maybe investors are already anticipating another Donald Trump antiregulation pro-growth presidency, forgetting that he is married to a growth-killing pro-tariff agenda. Is the bear dead, or does it have a long fuse?

Predicting stock markets is a fool’s errand.

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WSJ: Beating American Defeatism

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/beating-american-defeatism-innovation-world-statism-6e5152a3

After the Fourth of July fireworks, someone always pipes up, “Not as good as last year.” Defeatists say the same thing about the U.S. Yes, I mean those protesters bleating about U.S. complicity in genocide, racist highways, colonizing oppression and a pending climate Armageddon—our Omnicause flaws.

American exceptionalism, the thinking goes, is over. China controls the key ingredients of our antibiotics and penicillin while it’s dumping U.S. dollars and buying gold. Russia is rebuilding its Soviet footprint. Meanwhile, 51 million of us watched a debate between two cranky old men arguing over their golf handicaps. The New York Times style guide seemingly requires “the end of democracy” for every Trump mention.

Should you buy property in Costa Rica? If you like bananas, sure. Otherwise, no way. Fuhgeddaboudit. Despite—or perhaps because of—our political dysfunction, the U.S. still rules.

Technology is the driver of global growth. Six U.S.-based technology companies are worth more than $1 trillion. Actually, U.S. stocks make up almost 70% of the MSCI World Index, a proxy for global equities. That’s no accident. The U.S. enables innovation, while the rest of the world, with a few exceptions such as TSMC, ASML and Novo Nordisk, is mired in statism. Japan was an exception until industrial policy misdirected its economy.

Despite China’s juggling, the dollar is, and will remain, the reserve currency. Try visiting Costa Rica with Chinese renminbi. Or bitcoin. China is our factory floor, though it’s now contracting. I’m convinced manufacturing will eventually move to India, once they sort out the socialist mess the British left them. I would hurry that up.

The U.S. is oil independent. Thank you, horizontal fracking.

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WSJ: The Tyranny of Today’s Tipping

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tyranny-of-todays-tipping-foodservice-hospitality-jobs-6c8d2502

The screen reads: “Add a tip: 18%. 20%. 25%.” For a takeout sack of burgers and soggy fries? C’mon. It takes extra taps to change it to 10% or zero. Instead, we sheepishly tip and feel resentful. Using Internal Revenue Service data, I extrapolate that tipping has almost doubled since 2013, when San Francisco-based Square turned iPads into cash registers with suggested tips.

It’s the American way to show gratitude for a job well done, but tipping has gotten out of hand. It’s become expected. Even required. A Mountain View, Calif., restaurant had a line on its bills: “For parties of 1 or larger, a 18% gratuity is applied automatically.”

Now tips have turned political. Donald Trump recently declared in Nevada: “When I get to office, we are going to not charge taxes on tips.” In 2018 the IRS noted $38 billion in reported tips. Will insurance agents now insist on their pay in tips? Lawyers? Doctors? I’d certainly like my pay as tax-free gratuities.

Nearly five million Americans work for tips. Almost 70% of them are women. But according to a 2023 Bankrate survey, two-thirds of Americans have a negative view of tipping, probably because we’ve been inundated.

Why do we tip? London taverns in the 17th century suggested tipping “To Insure Promptitude.” Now it’s the cheeky “To insure prompt service.” Tipping spread to the U.S. in the 19th century. In 1899 the New York Times called it the “vilest of imported vices.” Probably so. The Pullman Company hired former slaves as porters at low wages. They mainly worked for tips. Wealthy Americans obliged.

One study reveals that we tip because it’s a “social norm,” to “show gratitude,” and to “avoid feeling guilty.” Those answers ring true, but reasons also include

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WSJ: The ‘Omnicause’ Is Collapsing

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-omnicause-is-collapsing-protests-radicals-intersectionality-e4249f52

Did I see climate warrior Greta Thunberg wearing a kaffiyeh? Sure enough, there she was last month in a mob screaming “Shame on you!” outside the Eurovision Song Contest, where an Israeli performer competed. Welcome to the Omnicause. If you protest one thing, you protest everything—intersectional inanity. Like Queers for Palestine, which makes as much sense as “Chickens for KFC.” Fortunately, the Omnicause is beginning to collapse under the weight of its logical fallacies. 

Viewed through the lens of oppression, every cause is linked, summing up the stupidity of all the Kaffiyeh Karens and Activist Aidans at campus protests. Protesters spraypainted “F— Amerikkka” at Stanford University this month. The oppression-studies majors can’t even spell.

Antiwar is one thing, but the colonizer claptrap is unbearable. Segments of the Omnicause are usually anticapitalism, antigrowth or pro-world-government. Climate hysteria scores a perfect trifecta. Using twisted logic, socialism is apparently the cure for racism. But the backlash is enabling a political move to the right in Europe, South America and, if polls are to be believed, the U.S. 

So why the Omnicause? My theory is that society is afflicted with a bad case of affluenza. Life has become too easy. We google and use artificial intelligence instead of thinking, shoot up Ozempic instead of exercising, and rely on ObamaCare instead of working. Even the well-off need to complain about something, so they complain about everything.

Many of these protester layabouts are entitled—dare I say spoiled—and don’t bother to understand what they are protesting. They demand student-loan forgiveness and a universal basic income, which many already receive from their parents. You see it everywhere: Johnny not working, Janie in a daddy-funded apartment trying to become an influencer. Plenty of time for protests.

And really, why work and improve the world by delivering goods and services people want? Protests are much more fun. 

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WSJ: The Dial-Toning of AI

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dial-toning-of-ai-b160be07

Artificial intelligence is a feature, not a product, and like every other technology, it’s starting to fade into the background. Apple last week announced that it is embedding generative AI technology into Siri and other applications in iPhones, including a deal with OpenAI. Most Google searches now include an AI Overview. Microsoft has branded Copilot+ PCs for new Windows hardware. It sure looks to me like AI is on its way to being dial-toned.

What do I mean? It was a Boston telephone operator strike in 1919 that ushered in the era of dial tones to replace humans. A pleasing tone delivered simplicity, musically asking callers “number, please,” hiding all the complexity of relay switches, tubes and amplifiers. AT&T was a hot stock in the 1920s as phones proliferated. Same for companies deploying other advanced technologies, such as radio. Eventually, investors stopped caring. Technology almost always vanishes from sight on its way to becoming productive and ubiquitous. Does that mean the end of the current AI hype cycle? Soon enough.

We live in a dial-tone world—extraordinary complexity made so simple that it disappears. Push a button and your car starts. Fill it with gas and vroom vroom, you’re off, ignorant of drilling, refining and pipelines. Or charge your electric vehicle by plugging it in, not knowing or caring about transmission lines, generators or emissions. They’ve all been dial-toned; complexity disappears. Same for cellphones: no dial tones but coverage bars similarly dissolve the complexity. Most users think 5G service arrives via immaculate reception rather than comprehending orthogonal frequency division multiplexing and millimeter waves and optic backhauls.

Compaq was once a hot stock selling PCs, which included a magnetic disk spinning at 7200 rpm with a read-write head floating nanometers above the disk. Amazing. Did you care? Me neither. Automakers used to be hot stocks. Same for electric utilities. Heck, airlines were once hot stocks. Even software-as-a-service stocks have cooled. Investors marginally care but have mostly moved on.

“Everything is amazing right now, and nobody’s happy,” explained the on-again-off-again canceled comedian Louis C.K. in 2008. He’s right. Emails and texts magically arrive, but if the service goes down, we throw hissy fits. About a guy on a flight who complains when the internet stops working, the comedian noted, “How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago.” That’s a clue: When complaints start and everyone stops looking at the miraculous good in things, it’s been dial-toned.

To understand where we’ve come from, he suggests, “Maybe we need some time where we’re walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides.”

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WSJ: Your Government at Work

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-government-at-work-a93c4fb3

After the $320 million floating fiasco ran aground, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance tweeted: “The Gaza pier is a symbol of the Biden administration. A horrible idea executed terribly.” True—for almost all government projects. The November election may be about old vs. paroled, but underneath it could mark an overdue transition from heavy-handed government ineptitude back to relying on the private sector. Busybodies vs. market ninjas. It’s time.

Remember the $7.5 billion of pork spending set aside for electric-vehicle chargers in the 2021 Infrastructure bill? The administration promised 500,000 of them by 2030, overseen by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. As of May, only eight had been installed. As they say, “close enough for government work.” Only 150,000 years to go.

In 2008 Californians voted for about $10 billion in bonds for high-speed rail connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles—the first payment of a then-estimated $33 billion budget for the 800-mile stretch. So far, only a 1,600-foot Fresno River Viaduct has been built, along with a hodgepodge of guideways and structures. (Alright, why a duck?) Only 42,000 years to go. Oh, and the estimated cost has risen to around $130 billion. California has also spent $24 billion over the past five years to solve the homeless problem. Meanwhile, the homeless population is up 30%. Why let government do anything?

Jimmy Carter—Joe Biden’s role model—set the pace. In 1979, after six years of oil embargoes and gasoline shortages, Mr. Carter wanted $88 billion ($365 billion today) for, among other things, a Synthetic Fuel Corp. “Synfuels” would enable U.S. energy independence. He got $20 billion.

Fracking went horizontal in the 1980s, thanks largely to private investment. Now the U.S. is the largest oil- and gas-producing country. Yet oil and gas are now considered sin fuels, and the Biden administration paused liquefied natural gas exports in January.

We’re still (over)paying for ObamaCare.

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