Over the last six months shares of Toyota Motor are up 16%. During the same period shares of Tesla are down 22%. There are many reasons. People are down on electric cars, and Toyota makes hybrids. Toyota has plans for electrics that cost less than Tesla and go further on a charge. Elon Musk has […]

America’s economy is by far the biggest in the world. It’s built on incentives favoring oil and gas that have been in place for decades. We’re also driven by the greed that comes from having too much founders’ equity and inherited wealth. It’s going to be tough to turn around. Electing a government with the […]

The biggest surprise to me, reading the latest economic statistics, is that people are surprised. I mean, there are literally thousands of people paid good money to predict the future direction of the economy, and they all got it wrong. Things are great. Simple as 1, 2, 3. The end of the pandemic meant supply […]

There’s a single rule I’ve learned studying technology this last half century. Product must be in charge. The alternative to having product in charge is to put finance there. Lots of companies do this, maybe most of them. Google did it nearly a decade ago. It’s wrecking them. Finance in this case is Ruth Porat, […]

In some ways liberals are the most conservative of people. We seek to protect things that aren’t worthy of protection. Like newspapers. The First Amendment makes no mention of newspapers, just as it makes no mention of TV, radio, or the Internet. They didn’t exist in 1789. It refers to freedom “of the press.” This […]

In writing (and rewriting, and rewriting) my book on Moore’s Law, I’m fascinated by industries that fight it with some success. One way is by using the productivity of Moore’s Law to fuel a sort of arms race. That’s how the law does it. Lawyers are more productive, but they’re using the tools of infinite […]

Sports, especially football, and especially the NFL, have led the way out of the darkness of the pandemic. It left me wondering why. I think I figured it out. It’s not the sport itself, nor its coverage on TV. It’s less the fact that it’s an American lingua franca, games the only program you can […]

I wrote last month about the EV Revolution and there’s a further point I need to make. The car business, as we’ve known it, is doomed. Because an electric car is just a battery on wheels, 40% of the cost right now is in the battery. That percentage is going up, as self-driving software becomes a […]

One thing no one talks about regarding commercial real estate is that it’s a technology story. Reporters facilely talk about older commercial structures being “obsolete” but they don’t explain what that means. It means the cost of retrofitting the building for modern office work is prohibitive. If you see an RJ-11 phone plug at the hotel […]

Over the last year I’ve denigrated generalized AIs like ChatGPT. I think their promises, and threats, are both overdone, certainly in the near term. But in specialized fields, AIs can be incredibly useful. Take biochemistry, the field my son works in. The key is vetting the training data that goes into a Large Language Model […]