John Nemeth

Fully get the cynicism here but authoritarians and democracy-eroders of both left and right get a lot of traction in Latin America. (Chavez, Ortega, Correa, etc on left, Fujimori, Bolsonaro, Bukeke, etc on the right). Personalistic populists are often welcomed in environments of low trust.

I told my law school-interested daughter that she might want to consider AI liability as a field. She didn’t seem all that inspired by the prospect and it was a little like telling The Graduate to go into plastics. But regs and tort issues around AI will likely be a very big part of our future.

This is ‘back to the future’ as the original funding plan imagined 1/3 of the cost being covered by private investors. After 18 years it never materialized. This project needs to try to finish the Merced to Bakersfield segment, run it, and let that service be the argument for the rest.

I once had a professor who said oil was so predictably volatile that you could make good money buying dips and selling peaks. I never tried it. Over the last five years if you’d consistently bought at $75 and sold at $90 you’d still come out worse than an S&P index fund. It’s no easy path to riches

Regarding that King Charles retort to Trump, “if it wasn’t for us, you’d be speaking French”…the real reason why the British Colonies beat the French in North American was the massive population advantage - 1.5M vs 60,000 by 1756. Why the advantage? A much more liberal immigration policy!

People care about their local things. Try closing an elementary school / hospital / bus route / park (especially to allow for a for-profit project) and telling people that there’s another one two miles down the road and that they’re not going to live in a desert. Guaranteed pushback. Not surprising.

This shows an important distinction between cults and grifters. When cults are riding high, grifters shamelessly support the cult as part of their grift. When cults start losing steam, grifters sense a market opportunity and break away - while cult members stay for the ride, however unpopular.

We were told by Trump that the United States was a sucker for being part of military alliances and for involving itself so heavily in foreign affairs. Now…diving head first into being the permanent Straight of Hormuz policeman willing to pick up most of the tab.

In case people tell you the solution is more drilling: Drilling more in the U.S. cannot stop a price shock like this. Oil prices are set globally, and U.S. producers cannot make up this lost supply. They also have no incentive to develop or maintain spare capacity when prices are low.

Maybe there would be less of a tariff mess to clean up if SCOTUS had bothered to rule on this in a timely fashion instead of taking a year. That was a choice. The aversion to ruling quickly against Trump will now - paradoxically - create a litigation nightmare for the administration.

The BLS showed a jobs report of +130K for January 2026 but….. ….revised all of 2025 downward by 403K.

Historian will marvel at how United States traded global political and economic leadership to be a petty, regional bully in the northern half of the Western Hemisphere.

Biting and hilarious. Get your daily dose of healing schadenfreude. 👇

Good piece about the limitations of data on autonomous vehicle safety and the challenges of comparing apples to apples with human drivers.

ChatGPT keeps insisting to my wife that a U.S. intervention in Venezuela is not happening. She has provided multiple news accounts but it won’t budge. 👇

Folks - the main takeaway from this piece is that the MAGA coalition is fraying. You are not obligated to choose a hero or villain in the Trump vs MTG drama. There can be multiple villains. Be glad that those villains are less united than before and that this story will widen the fracture.

Even accounting for the new congressional maps, a swing like Aftyn Behn's (Trump+22 to D-8.6) would net Dems 259 seats in the midterms. Even if the swing is *half* of tonight's, Dems win the House with 229 seats Data: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

And we’re just about wrapped up in the Tennessee 7 with an 8.8% win for Van Epps. The latter batches from Davidson County weren’t as good as earlier returns. So, about a 13 point swing from Trump 24’. I’m curious as to exactly how many GOP-held House Districts are Trump +13 or less. Anyone know?

Still close in the Tennessee 7. At this point it’s looking unlikely that Aftyn Behn will win but it’s going to be close given how much is still outstanding in Davidson County. I’d guess a 3-4 point win for Van Epps in a Trump +21 district.

Trump just hit 39.9% approval in the G. Elliot Morris poll aggregator. First time under 40% in his second term.

If you’re in the leverage business (like Senate Dems), you’re in the pain business. Imagine being, say, a labor leader and calling off a strike because you think it might be causing pain somewhere in the world. Pain is the point! Pain was the only way a gov’t shutdown could ever pay off.

Trump’s idea to kill the filibuster to reopen the government and gut the ACA seems like strategic insanity. Yes, the GOP would get the marginal benefit of ending the shutdown but then they own the bigger political problem of health care premium spikes heading into midterms.

If a democratic official had accepted a bribe I guarantee you that most voters would have heard about it. The fact that only 36% heard about Tom Homan shows you how tilted the info environment is today. This asymmetry is the main thing shaping political outcomes. Issue tweaks can’t fix this.

Will the dominant military power of the future be the one can master autonomous warfare? Or the one with the generals who can bench press the most and run the fastest 100 meter dash? Which is more relevant to the battlefield of tomorrow?

The paradox of the current cultural environment is that you might lose your job for criticizing Charlie Kirk but just as easily lose your job for repeating the things he actually said.

Wow. The Baltimore Ravens tried to salt that game way too early. There’s a lesson there about risk-aversion. If you’re on the cusp of winning something, don’t coast too soon. Run through the tape!

Terrible jobs report this morning. Absent health care, jobs were negative in August. Manufacturing was -12,000. June numbers revised to -13,000.

The huge downward revisions (-258,000 jobs) are the big surprise. Trump’s tariff insanity is discouraging hiring. And yet, just three days ago our nation’s newspaper of record said that Trump was “winning” his trade war. Is this what “winning” look like to the Times?

Not sure why Maxwell needs to “address questions” in private. My guess is that Maxwell has dirt on Trump and is using it as leverage to get a pardon. Trump’s DOJ is willing to bargain. Maybe Trump will ask that Maxwell go beyond staying quiet and make accusations against Trump’s political opponents.

Cult vs. conspiracy theory. Which is stronger ?

What’s staggering to me is that a party can run on something like ethnic cleansing and - at the same time - get a very respectable share of the vote from the people being targeted.

Can’t believe how many American news outlets wrote something like “Trump brokers ceasefire” last night before going to bed. They’re only gradually realizing that missile exchanges are ongoing and there’s no functional ceasefire. Still many outdated headlines up.

wow

Massive crowd in SF today. #nokings

I’d love to see: An Iran with a democracy, no nuclear program, and no support for Russia’s imperial war or for Hizballah. An Israel without a far-right government, that stays out of US politics, that doesn’t take billions in US aid, and that allows for a Palestinian state. A boy can dream.

In pre-modern times, immigration rules were few. The corollary was that rulers could eject populations arbitrarily. As immigration became more rule-based, the process of kicking people out also became subject to rules. This Admin wants rules/bureaucracy for entry but arbitrary power for ejection