All the issues of 2024 come down to a choice between liberty and license. Everyone loves the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” […]

Elon Musk insists he’s going to deliver Full Self-Driving, with help from China’s Baidu. The stock is rising as a result. He won’t. He can’t. Although maybe Baidu can. The reason should be clear to any American. While self-driving software can adapt to rational changes in the driving environment, it has a tough time with […]

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) hangover has begun. Both Nvidia and Meta Platforms fell 10% after earnings that beat street estimates. The AI infrastructure boom is rolling on, but investors are just starting to add up the cost. The flood of negativity is even rolling into companies that are making big money from AI applications, like […]

There isn’t one AI market right now. There are two. One is real. One is fake. What people care about is the fake market. Alexa running your life. Dave refusing to open the pod bay door. White collar workers made homeless. Being unable to distinguish what’s real from what’s not. The Cloud Czars are working […]

I wouldn’t buy shares in Tesla right now. I wouldn’t buy shares in any car company. There are two reasons for this. First, cars don’t scale. It’s math. Every parking place is about 9 feet by 18 feet (3 meters by 6 if you’re in Europe.) That’s not even big enough for a lot of […]

The disconnect between how people feel about the U.S. economy, and how the economy is doing, is real. There are three trends that are driving the U.S. above the world’s rather flat trend line. First is the Cloud, and AI. As Synergy Research noted today, there are now 1,000 hyperscaled data centers and half are […]

Car makers are America’s worst industry. This isn’t a pollution story, or an urban design story. Cars don’t scale. This is about America’s car companies. They’re stupid. Ford, GM, and what was then Chrysler spent decades fighting both political parties over CAFÉ standards. Instead of innovating as Toyota did, with hybrids, they hired lobbyists. The […]

Over the last two years inflation has fallen from about 9% to about 3%. But the last mile toward the Fed target of 2% is going to be tough. Because most of the remaining inflation is caused by things the Fed can’t begin to deal with. Take climate change. Insurance costs are through the roof, […]

When the Web was young, open source helped lead innovation. Individual programmers and small companies joined together, under a shared contract, to build things no one of them was able (or willing) to build alone. The Cloud owes its existence to projects like Hadoop, to companies like Red Hat, and to programs like mySQL. Open […]

My Fellow Americans. On September 11, 2001, a date which will live infamy, 19 terrorists attacked this nation with hijacked airplanes, destroying New York’s World Trade Center, damaging the Pentagon, and nearly destroying the U.S. Capitol, save for the bravery of some heroic passengers. Our response was to attack Afghanistan, where we were told the […]