Today is our first activity day of summer vacation with our grandkids. One of the things we like to do every year is go to the San Diego County fair at the Del Mar fairgrounds. Like much of California, San Diego County is truly a blend of urban coastal elite areas with expensive homes overlooking the Pacific Ocean and rural ranch country where cattle and coyotes are still the main topics of conversation. In between…
Today I saw a reposting of the June, 2024 cover of Rolling Stone that had a picture of Donald Trump adjusting his tie with the headline: “The Most Corrupt President Ever. Ever.” It went on to say, “From self-dealing to abuse of power, no president in history has put personal greed ahead of the country like Donald Trump.” And of course, that was BEFORE he started his second term and his recently exposed $2.2 billion…
On Wall Street in the era when more and more work was being done on the trading floor on the computers, all sorts of new problems arose that required us to make adjustments. I was working on the trading desk in 1982/83 when Apples and PC started coming into the mainstream. Prior to that there were computers, but they were either mainframes in some remote location of mini-computers located on a different floor wired into…
I have taken note of pervasive trend in entertainment. I am tempted to say that it pertains to attention span, but I suspect there is a lot more to it than that. It boils down to this; an increasing number of people prefer short snippets of content rather than getting involved in a full-length feature film, whereas others of us (you all know where I come out on this debate) greatly prefer a good old…
I am sitting here at almost 11pm on a Tuesday night at the age of 72 wondering who I am supposed to talk to about the fact that I’ve put in five unexpected hours of expert witness work tonight rather than writing a cute story for you all to read tomorrow morning. I got a surprise email yesterday from my Australian client asking for a Zoom call tomorrow night to review my in-process report. That…
This sounds funny, but I have spent almost all of my 72 years in a tunnel. That metaphor could mean many things. A tunnel metaphor typically conveys one or more meanings. The most common is one of confinement / restriction. A tunnel is a narrow path with no lateral movement. There is no choice but to go forward and one’s vision is limited to what’s directly ahead. It can also mean a journey through darkness…
It’s hard not to think about SpaceX and AI every minute of every day these days. I remember in the late 1990s., we were all abuzz about the Internet. We thought it would change everything. The comparison of the Internet and AI is valid in that the buzz is similar in feel, but AI may be more fundamental. The hype was genuinely euphoric and widespread with every business needing a “.com” strategy overnight, just as…
How many times has it been analogized that America is the Roman Empire of the 21st Century? The rise and the fall. Few subjects in history are richer or have been more studied as a cautionary tale. The Kingdom of Rome began as a small Latin village on the Tiber, legendarily founded by Romulus. Seven kings ruled before the last, Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud), was overthrown in a patrician revolt. The Republic that resulted…
I’ve recently seen a number of different things that address the issue of how much time we are all spending on our screens. For a number of years now we have all heard admonitions to children and young people about the fact that they are spending too much time in front of their screens rather than directly interacting with other human beings or out in the fresh air of nature. It’s always been hard to…
Have you heard about the agnostic, dyslexic insomniac? He stays up all night wondering if there’s a Claude. Oh my Claude! I cannot believe all that I am reading and hearing this morning and it is blowing my mind (which the AI world now calls a “meat computer”). How do I unpack this best? I must start with Pope Leo XIV…I absolutely LOVE the guy. I didn’t think I could love a Pope more than…