Jim

Photo of Salto Angel (Angel Falls), official name: Kerepakupai merú - by Rich Childs, via Flickr/Wikipedia.

This is Angel Falls in Venezuela, with its 807-metre sheer plunge - the tallest waterfall on our planet.

Except - it isn't. There's one that's bigger. MUCH bigger. And when I learned about it this week, my mind was fully blown.

OK. Buckle up! (Especially if you don't have a head for heights.)

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Big Tech Stock Pick of 2026: Amazon | No Mercy / No Malice At the end of every year, I pick a Big Tech stock I believe will outperform its peers in the coming year. My 2025 pick was Alphabet: I believed the market had overestimated the threats to Google’s sea...

'Trump's big, ugly bill made 100% bonus depreciation permanent for robotics and automation equipment while simultaneously gutting healthcare, education, and social safety net programs, suggesting we want to birth robots faster and expedite the death of workers.'
www.profgalloway.com/big-tech-sto...

Man, ChatGPT loves an em dash!

'Fauxtomaton' (and its implied verb I'm totally stealing, fauxtomation), and:

"But sometimes 'efficiency' is just deflected exploitation."

Brilliant.

Transcript: Congressman Crow Outlines His New Vision for American Foreign Policy WASHINGTON — Congressman Jason Crow (D-CO-06), a former Army Ranger and Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, presented his new vision for Ameri...

Rebuilding trust, at home and abroad, by putting power back into Congress, strengthening and following rules, abolishing corruption, and fostering new leadership, from D-CO-6 @crow.house.gov

crow.house.gov/media/press-...

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last several months, and Graff nails the thought: “It turns out, in the end, that there’s only one check and balance that actually matters: Good character. Everything else in a constitutional system follows and relies on that simple foundation.”

One of the indicators of rampant corruption is barefaced ineptitude of leadership while competent professionals are fired

"Anna, Lindsey Halligan Here." Anna Bower Monday, October 20, 2025, 5:40 PM Share On: f X inK My Signal exchange with the interim U.S. attorney about the Letitia James grand jury.

EXCLUSIVE: One Saturday afternoon in October, my phone lit up with a notification.

I glanced down at the message.

“Anna, Lindsey Halligan here,” it began.

So began my text exchange with the woman who is prosecuting the president's perceived political enemies.

www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna...

Bertrand Russell to Oswald Mosley. Perfection.

#PhrogsPhorever #LaughterKillsFascism

Gerf! #surfpunk

open.spotify.com/artist/1HNfk...

Mine's working well and gave me this post about a cool kids book about banning books when I searched 'giraffe.'

bsky.app/profile/pupp...

Strong start to Goliath, The 100-Year War Between Monopoly and Power, by @matthewstoller.bsky.social

Yet Argentina's still going to sell their soybeans to China. Great deal. :/

One of my favorite anecdotes from THE PREHISTORY OF THE FAR SIDE: "That doesn't sound like the Jane Goodall we know."

Jane Goodall, ethologist and conservationist, has died. She was 91

🧵Coal in the US was mostly dying because of cheap natural gas beginning in the 2000s. Then cheap renewables began to clobber it in the 2010s. It is a filthy power source and horrible emitter of greenhouse gases. There is zero economic justification for this & it will amount to corporate welfare.

Former Federal Workers on the Cost of Trump's Cuts The New York Times photographed and interviewed two dozen former federal workers from across the country to get a sense of what they left behind and what they face next.

One in eight federal workers, or some 300,000, will have left the government by the end of the year, and it’s possible even more could be pushed out if the government shuts down next week. In interviews, some former federal workers shared what they left behind and what they face next.

Just saw Megalopolis at the Henry Ford Museum. That movie was a lot of unexpected things, chief among them the fact that it's a reverse Fountainhead.

Chicago’s lakefront under a gorgeous sunset with many people gathered to watch a concert

🧵Quick thread about how dense neighborhoods cultivate community (and FUN!)

My fiancée and I switch off planning date nights. But this week we had to improvise since we are both super busy. I saw on TikTok that a band was playing a free concert on the lake, so we biked over on a whim. It was PACKED.

I live to flabbergast and your work sounds smart and necessary, let's both keep it up!

Pre-ordered.

@marketplace.org also has an excellent podcast so you can hear this outstanding interview any time!

Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be? The entire U.S. economy is being propped up by the promise of productivity gains that seem very far from materializing. By Rogé Karma

The capability-reliability gap might explain why generative AI has so far failed to deliver tangible results for businesses that use it. When researchers at MIT recently tracked the results of 300 publicly disclosed AI initiatives, they found that 95 percent of projects failed to deliver any boost to profits. A March report from McKinsey & Company found that 71 percent of companies reported using generative AI, and more than 80 percent of them reported that the technology had no “tangible impact” on earnings. In light of these trends, Gartner, a tech-consulting firm, recently declared that AI has entered the “trough of disillusionment” phase of technological development.

By one estimate, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Tesla will by the end of this year have collectively spent $560 billion on AI-related capital expenditures since the beginning of 2024 and have brought in just $35 billion in AI-related revenue. OpenAI and Anthropic are bringing in lots of revenue and are growing fast, but they are still nowhere near profitable. Their valuations—roughly $300 billion and $183 billion, respectively, and rising—are many multiples higher than their current revenues. (OpenAI projects about $13 billion in revenues this year; Anthropic, $2 billion to $4 billion.) Investors are betting heavily on the prospect that all of this spending will soon generate record-breaking profits. If that belief collapses, however, investors might start to sell en masse, causing the market to experience a large and painful correction.

The dot-com crash was bad, but it did not trigger a crisis. An AI-bubble crash could be different. AI-related investments have already surpassed the level that telecom hit at the peak of the dot-com boom as a share of the economy. In the first half of this year, business spending on AI added more to GDP growth than all consumer spending combined. Many experts believe that a major reason the U.S. economy has been able to weather tariffs and mass deportations without a recession is because all of this AI spending is acting, in the words of one economist, as a “massive private sector stimulus program.” An AI crash could lead broadly to less spending, fewer jobs, and slower growth, potentially dragging the economy into a recession. The economist Noah Smith argues that it could even lead to a financial crisis if the unregulated “private credit” loans funding much of the industry’s expansion all go bust at once.

It's seeming likelier and likelier that AI really could eliminate a lot of jobs very soon. Just not in the way boosters have suggested. www.theatlantic.com/economy/arch...

Finally! Now do parking lots and every highway below ground level

On September 2, 2025, the 80th anniversary of Japan's formal surrender, a powerful ceremony honored more than 1,000 US troops who died as prisoners of war—service members who endured unimaginable suffering and sacrifice.

Is it possible that…urbanism is a winning strategy in cities?

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” ~Ray Bradbury

Keep reading, friends. 📚

Happy birthday to Tom Skerritt, #Detroit native, USAF vet, #PTSD volunteer, and Commander Mike "Viper" Metcalfe in Top Gun - he delivered his best line wonderfully, and it sticks with me to this day, "A good pilot is compelled to evaluate what's happened, so he can apply what he's learned."

"By Sunday afternoon roughly four FHP trooper vehicles and three OPD cars were parked at the Dunkin Donuts next to the crosswalk."

Scientists found the missing nutrients bees need — Colonies grew 15-fold Scientists have developed a breakthrough food supplement that could help save honeybees from devastating declines. By engineering yeast to produce six essential sterols found in pollen, researchers pr...

This feels like a spot of good news

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...