Medicare was established in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law as part of the Social Security Amendments of 1965. It began covering enrollees the following year, on July 1, 1966. Johnson signed the bill in Independence, Missouri, with former President Harry Truman present. Truman had proposed a national health insurance program back in 1945, and Johnson gave him (and his wife Bess) the first two Medicare cards as a symbolic gesture.…
The Canadian trade dispute has escalated sharply this week. In January Mark Carney, a Harvard-trained and Goldman Sachs employed economist who is now the Prime Minister of Canada, gave a widely-discussed address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, titled “Principled and Pragmatic: Canada’s Path.” The core message of that was that the rules-based international order is effectively over. He argued that Canada was adapting by building strategic autonomy while still holding to values like…
The National Debt is front page news this week. It seems time to ponder the issue and try to put it in perspective. It is said that debt is what helped make this country great and there is some history to suggest that. The debt began at Independence during the Revolutionary War, which left the young country roughly $75 million in the hole. It was the great Alexander Hamilton’s 1790 plan to have the federal…
In the 1965 movie The Agony and the Ecstasy, staring Charlton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II, Michelangelo’s regular and frequent answer to the Pope’s question of “When will you make and end?” (painting the Sistine Chapel), is, “When I am finished.” Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling from 1508 to 1512, a span of about four years, which was actually fast for the scale of the work. A few reasons…
Repo Man ia a 1984 cult classic sci-fi comedy starring Emilio Estevez as Otto, a disaffected LA punk who falls in with a crew of repossession agents led by Bud (Harry Dean Stanton). Otto gets pulled into the repo business and ends up chasing a mysterious Chevy Malibu with a bounty on it. The trunk supposedly contains something otherworldly (aliens, or their remains) that melts anyone who looks inside. It’s all deadpan, anarchic, and satirical…
I learned a new word this morning, vibecoding. Vibecoding is building software by describing what you want in plain English and letting an AI engine generate the code, rather than writing it line by line yourself. Some programmer coined the term in early 2025, and it’s since become mainstream enough to be the Collins Dictionary’s 2025 Word of the Year (how did I miss that?). How it works is that you describe the feature or…
I am doing a case with a group of lawyers located in Perth, Australia. Western Australia is an intriguing part of the world for me for some reason and I have no explanation for that. One of my old high school pals in Rome was from Perth, but it’s hard to believe that has anything to do with it. I suspect that it has more to do with the fact that the western side of…
In the past two days I have had business calls with two financial professionals in connection with a process of possibly joining a board (something I generally am not inclined to consider). Why don’t I like boards and board membership? Not really for the same reason that many in my position have. Many people are troubled by the potential liability of board membership, but that is much less my concern than the potential for some…
For people of a certain age and temperament, there is a wonderful Chris Farley and David Spade movie called Tommy Boy, made in 1995. The duo are on an epic roadtrip to sell brake pads and Tommy (Farley) has a hard time containing his natural exuberance. Spade, on the other hand is a cynical young man who finds everything Tommy does as some combination of distasteful and idiotic. In one scene, Tommy is trying to…
In my recent meanderings through anthropology and human development, I stumbled on a book titled Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink by anthropologist Richard L. Currier. Currier’s thesis is that over roughly five million years, eight key technologies (broadly defined) gradually freed humans from the limitations of our animal origins. Those eight he defines as tools, fire, clothing/shelter, symbolic communication, agriculture, technologies of interaction (wheels, ships, travel),…