When big geopolitical summits take place it is sometimes hard to tell who has the power stroke and who is coming off as the groveler. Sometimes there’s a strong meeting of the minds and a palpable sense that great things were accomplished. Other times it appears that the two sides are talking at cross purposes and things only get more rather than less at odds at the end. And then there is a third type…
Ever since 2016 and especially since 2024, I, like many like-minded, liberally-inclined Americans that have worried about the political drift of out nation and its impact on the world have tried to find ways to do our part to move towards a solution to our concerns and our state of play. I start by declaring quite frankly that for most of my adult life I have lived in a benign neglect for the political machinations.…
The “China Syndrome” refers to a hypothetical nuclear reactor meltdown scenario where the reactor core melts through the containment vessel and, theoretically, continues melting downward through the Earth. The darkly humorous idea being that it would melt all the way to China (from the US perspective). I wonder if that was intended to be a reaction to the “Butterfly Effect”? The actual physics involve in the former is a reactor core losing cooling, causing fuel…
The typical discussion I have with millennials regarding AI usually involves some reference to the fact that they grew up with movies about AI domination run amok. The great films on that theme start with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) when HAL 9000 locks the crew out. Of the spaceship to save the mission. It’s the first real machine over man movie moment. The classic is the whole.Terminator line-up starting with The Terminator (1984), then…
On Sunday, Kim and I went to go see The Devil Wears Prada 2. It has been 20 years since the original The Devil Wears Prada was aired and we have both always loved the movie and all its stars. The sequel just opened May 1st, several days ago, so this is hot off the presses. The plot follows Miranda Priestly (editor of Runway magazine) and her struggle against Emily Charlton, her former assistant, now…
Back in the day (I mean the 1990’s), I ran the Global Private Banking business of Bankers Trust Company. We were not the largest private banking business in the world, but we were a significant first tier player. What that meant was that I owned two tuxedos and they barely got a rest from all the black tie events I had to attend. One of our big initiatives was something we called Wealth With Responsibility,…
The novel by E.L. James, 50 Shades of Grey is a 2011 erotic romance novel that follows Anastasia Steele, a college student, and Christian Grey, a wealthy young businessman, as they enter into a complicated relationship involving a contract he proposes to her. That contract is what is called a BDSM contract standing for Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission and Sadism & Masochism. The core principles of a modern BDSM community operates on the…
At the China Development Forum on March, the Director of the Chinese National Data Administration, disclosed that China’s daily AI token consumption had surpassed 140 trillion tokens in March 2026, up from just 100 billion tokens per day at the beginning of 2024. That is a more than a 1,000-fold increase in two years. China’s weekly large-model usage has now surpassed. that of the United States. China is on an AI juggernaut. The Chinese administration…
The big news this week so far is the defeat of Victor Orbán, who has ruled Hungary and been a spiritual leader for the worldwide Christian Nationalism movement that has been so embraced by the American Right Wing and MAGA movements. Orbán was defeated in the Hungarian elections on Sunday April 12, two days ago. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won a landslide two-thirds majority, securing 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament on 53.6% of the…
Back in early 2018 I was trying to drive a start-up in the ammonia synthesis business. It was one of those strange gigs in my later career that is hard to explain in hindsight, but seemed to make sense at the time. The technology we were championing was potentially earthshaking. I do not make that statement lightly. Ammonia is arguably the most consequentially important industrial chemical in human history… the case for that is strong.…