How many avocados does your dollar buy right now? How many avocados will your dollar buy after tariff hell sets in. Does 4.5% interest cover your risk to lend dollars instead of eating avocados today?

So what percentage does cover that risk? If that percentage becomes the lending rate, tomorrow’s bonds become way way juicier than today’s bonds.

Now, if you bought 4.5% bonds today before tariffs, nobody’s gonna take them off your hands for even close to what you paid today once the juicy new after-tariff bonds are floating around.

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Edit: not saying you don’t understand this, but there are other readers. What I AM saying, is that the bond market thinks tariff-hell is a real risk and this is not a drill. Help us!

This, but also for every single government on Earth and for every one of the corporations we work for (where we each probably saw with our own eyes how they already couldn’t invest in the future just given the totally predictable rising-rate environment we’ve been in since COViD).

I am with you, but our worldview includes transportable skills and transportable capital (I.e. the real world).

I am skeptical there were ever many black and white conflicts between pot-committed company towns and captive multi-generational workers; but I’ll definitely allow for a conflict framework that was somewhat different back when.

Like, the ultimate rebuttal to your position is the existence of slavery. It doesn’t take too much to imagine realities somewhere between 1845 Mississippi and 2025 Pennsylvania.

For real I freaked out earlier when I couldn't imagine fleeing to bonds. Could you imagine loaning people today-dolllars at these rates for payback with tariff-hell dollars? By the same token, what the fuck am I going to do with cash besides spend it right now on, like, the last durable goods of my lifetime?

I dunno. I hope not... but it seems like every corporation has already had to get as leveraged as possible to head off the PE threat this decade. I know mine can’t afford to miss at all or it’s curtains (because good luck raising capital now). And these capricious tariffs sure seem like they’re gonna create a bunch of unpredictable wins and losses.

I know there is crazy bankruptcy risk in like every company right now… but where is everybody’s money actually going when it exits stocks?

Are we all just patiently waiting to reinvest with the survivors a year from now? Are we all just betting Monopoly money on timing a V-shaped casino? Are we for some reason long USA Treasury Bonds (at today’s yields… ahead of rising trade costs and associated increases to good prices and lending risks)? Are we holding fucking dollars like deer in headlights?

What are we actually doing here?

Every time I rebalance my 401k, I’m reminded why (even if I thought it was a good idea) I could never ever ever ever fuck with crypto wallets.

I guess now we need to make “National Emergencies” work like coaching challenges. You get two, and each time you use one maybe you can put it back in your pocket if 2/3 Congress agrees.

It’s so daunting. They each imagine some weird fantasy power they personally would possess if the darn government didn’t block them from it.

So they can now all disagree on everything, but still agree on each next action: destroy some part of government. They’ll each then talk themselves into how that part of government might have been the key thing keeping them from their stupid new personal power.

I don’t think it’s possible for, “fuck, what the hell else am I supposed to do with my money wrt, you know, getting too old to work but needing money to live in a new world order where interconnected global trade is stalled and American pre-eminence is dead forever… so now we skip past Great Recession 2, wave at Great Depression 2, and prepare for Dark Ages 2” to be priced in yet.

Personally, all I know how to price is “things magically go back together” or “it all falls apart and I guess I die angry at 60 instead of sad at 75 so I might as well yolo this money on the scenario where it doesn’t fall apart anyway.”

Please tell me somebody at least considered Will Richard for Outstanding Player. It was one game, but a BIG game. And for the deepest roster in basketball, this win was almost entirely Richard’s win.

I refuse to consider the notion of Free Trade extreme 208 years after Ricardo.

Don’t forget all the people who only accidentally vote correctly for all kinds of irredeemably stupid reasons.

I’m so thankful for CBS News. It’s been so bizarre discovering there is an actual difference in news networks.

And get these people the fuck out of El Salvador. Holy shit we can’t behave this way. Cruel detention behaviors are not just the result of cruel decisions, they are the results and causes of a bottomless cruelty spiral. Stop it all now.

I needed this weekend to last longer. I am not prepared to face the markets opening tomorrow. I am not prepared for the desperate board meetings at basically every single corporation.

I just want to enjoy my spring gardening and shit.

National Parks might not belong on a material level, but symbolically,

1. They really resonate with Americans of all political stripes

2. Privatizing the parks is a perfect framing for their abdication of positive Federal state capacity.

I’ve been slowly reading the Federalist Papers. One essay here or there since just before the election.

It’s shocking how little commentary to these essays is on Reddit or the wider internet. Like, if you search for “Federalist 22” hoping to find lively discussion of which worries apply specifically to a Trump type character, you’re not finding anything.

You can find old summaries, I guess, but the summaries are even drier than the essays themselves. They’re like APUSH homework I might have turned in back in 1995.

Anyway, I keep being amazed and endeared by all the agony these guys are sparing for remote possibilities that happen to be exactly what we’re seeing right now.

We all take it as a given that the Fathers wanted Congress to play a bigger role, that the other branches were almost no more than “checks and balances”, and that the SCOTUS is at least originalismly-correct in stripping away Agency powers or previous Court rulings “so it’ll make Congress do its job” or whatever. But in the Papers, these guys are clearly taking Congress as merely an unavoidable power - not their ideal for power.

Federalist 22, for example, was shocking to me as Hamilton argued for a strong active executive and active interpretive courts, not as checks on Congress, but as foundational mandates for these new powers to go out and do the things a gridlocked Congress could NEVER hope to accomplish.

I’m not saying these three guys were clairvoyant, but I am saying their actual writings are weirdly absent from our discourse. How have these views not been recently been revisited in light of the endless going-in-circles balance of powers debates we keep having? How have they not been revisited in light of the musical?

I survived 2008, but things kept deteriorating in my town until it finally got me in 2010 - after the network I built in the first ten years of my career was already too exhausted and tattered to help. And right in the middle of a family illness that made moving impossible.

Looking back, it affected me deeply. Take extra care of yourself right now, don’t withdraw from the people in your life, and don’t stop fighting to get back in the mix.

This whole Peter Navarro thing reminds me of what we learned during the election about Curtis Yarvin:

You motherfuckers all need to read way more books or just stop reading. Reading one book (or one blog) a decade and basing your entire worldview and personality on it is NOT working for me.

Right there with you, brother. You can call a century where the living standards of humans in the Eastern hemisphere gains parity with the West a “Chinese Century” in fear, or you can can embrace the welfare of others while continuing to enjoy an ever-growing personal abundance that none of your own ancestors ever dreamed of.

Just stay the fuck out of it.

Police can and do easily ”kettle” a crowd by blocking the entrance and exit, and then they can just take their time doing mass arrests.

And leave early for a similar reason. Most of the protests will have a permit, and the cities will play cool with it… but they might also have the police ready to make a token show of force the instant the permit is up and it can be considered trespassing. This breaks up the crowd before night or before it becomes a days long or encamped thing. If you’re still there when the permit expires, the police might be between you and your car.

If any of you guys decide for some reason that tomorrow’s a smart day to try your hands at 1960s style civil rights / anti-Vietnam protests:

Park way away from the gathering place and walk there. Pay attention to the scheduled duration, and leave 20 minutes before it is officially over. Do not stay past dark. Do not follow a crowd onto a fucking bridge or into a tunnel. And for fuck’s sake do not accidentally go anywhere near a protest if you are not a FULL citizen.

I’m ready to protest the dumb fucks all around me who voted for this… but, yeah, that also sounds kinda really really dangerous.

I watch that CBS show Ghosts (American) sometimes. It’s harmless. I wish it were better, but, whatever, I need to have a harmless sitcom around and TV is running pretty dry.

Anyway, it’s started to shoehorn in more and more jokes that are just worn out Reddit / Twitter circlejerks. And not in a meta way. Like, it’s as if the writers think they have the internet, but that the audience doesn’t. One of the ghosts will just have a totally new thought. But the new thought is, like, “gee, I never thought about how 16 Candles was kinda rapey”.

So, I’m legitimately wondering now: is Ghosts being “punched up” by AI?