My Apes Are Doing Great

I have no deep thoughts here other than I have no idea how the AI-driven stock boom ends.  

I registered for a road race. The customary FAQ (what time does it start, where is there water during the race, is there a bag drop, etc...) was replaced by, or at least hidden under, an "AI" chatbot.  

It took about 45 seconds to answer any question and often couldn't.  

There was nothing that couldn't be more easily and more accessible in a FAQ. There aren't many possible questions about a race! The set of information is very small!  You don't need "AI" for it, especially slow AI that doesn't even work!

It Was Joe Biden Wot Did It

I know most people only see Fox News through clips (if at all), but while this sounds ridiculous, it is fits perfectly well into the Fox News Cinematic Universe.

It's always tempting to think their viewers can't possibly believe this stuff, but they've been hearing this stuff 24/7 for years. Of course they do!

And Fox is the tame right wing news source, relatively speaking, at this point.

Where It Hurts

I do think it's a bit tragic that everyone learned during the post-covid era, once again, that everybody hates inflation, even though I don't think that's precisely true. I actually don't think people are impacted too much by 4% versus 2% inflation, which is really what that debate is normally about, whether the Fed needs to put the brakes on every time the rate "spikes" to 2.2%.

I mean, I don't think they'd notice too much if that 4% was pure inflation, spread perfectly evenly across all goods and services (and wages!). Only people with real money would care. But that's not what happened. The prices of very visible things spiked due to post-covid supply chain and labor issues, and we just called that "inflation." General inflation was high for a bit, but food price inflation was even higher, running above 10%. That's the kind of thing that enraged people.

And, like now, it wasn't the "inflation" of Milton Friedman's mind, happening because the Fed was printing too much money. It was cost-push inflation.

Though Biden's cost-push inflation wasn't due to his actions.

Anyway...

Driving that increase were substantial price hikes for things like fresh veggies. On an annualized basis, fresh vegetable prices are more than 44% higher today than they were three months ago.

Keeping interest rates high to "fight" cost-push inflation is only obviously correct if you think fighting inflation trumps all other concerns. 

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Thackeray Thursday.

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Nasty Australians

Very mean, low IQ people.

Plans to build Australia’s first Trump Tower have been scrapped just three months after it was announced, with the local developer saying the Trump brand has become “toxic.”

“Let’s just say that with the Iran war and everything else, the Trump brand was increasingly unpopular in Australia,” David Young, CEO of Altus Property Group, told CNN in a statement.

No Need To Be Goldfish

Daniel's job is keeping track of this stuff, and he does that well, but the point his colleagues should take from his work is, "Everything Trump says is likely to be a lie and you should begin with that premise." It isn't a stretch to say that every news story about something Trump says should begin, "The president, who regularly lies, just claimed...".

Trump April 23: I contacted people "that have worked for me in the past, doing swimming pools," and one gave me a great price on the Reflecting Pool project

Trump May 4: "I have some very good contractors," asked three of them to "do me a favor fellas" and go look at the…

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) May 12, 2026

I shouldn't have to make this point after all of these years.

The NYT also does a full rundown. Good for what it is, but, again, TRUMP IS PROBABLY TALKING BULLSHIT should preface every claim he makes, not be addressed 6 weeks later.

Edge Cases

Driving is probably the most complicated (no way to quantify that really) task any of us ever do. Humans do stupid things too, of course, but at some point we manage to figure out that we did, indeed, do a stupid thing.

Waymo is recalling its U.S. fleet of robotaxis after one of the autonomous vehicles was swept away when it drove into floodwaters in San Antonio.

The voluntary software recall stems from an incident during severe weather April 20, when a Waymo vehicle “encountered an untraversible flooded section of a roadway,” the company told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Though the vehicle detected the flooded road, it continued into floodwaters at reduced speed.

I'm not asserting that this type of thing means robotaxis are UNPOSSIBLE. They clearly work better than I had thought they would, though there is much more Mechanical Turk activity happening than they like to reveal. The point is more that this is still an incredibly complex activity which still is not close to being solved without constant active updates and intervention.

Your personal self-driving car is not much nearer than it was 5 years ago.

The Great Bed Shitting

Will hit consumer prices next.

The producer price index rose a seasonally adjusted 1.4% for the month, much higher than the 0.5% Dow Jones consensus forecast and the upwardly revised 0.7% March increase, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday. This was the largest monthly gain since March 2022.

On an annual basis, the index was up 6%, the biggest increase since December 2022.

Operation Pete Hegseth Has A Mighty Johnson So Stop Saying He Doesn't

Amazing.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military is considering officially renaming the war with Iran “Operation Sledgehammer” if the current ceasefire collapses and President Donald Trump decides to re-start major combat operations, according to two U.S. officials.

If you change the name, it's a new war!

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Let's GOOOOOOO

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Goldfish

When someone - the president, other politicians, people in The Discourse generally - showes themselves to be a bad faith and dishonest actor, you are allowed to remember that. If you are a journalist, it should impact how you cover those people going forward. As an editor or producer, whether you go to them for quotes or appearances.

This should not be controversial.

I've written before that one problem with DC (government and government-adjacent DC, including journalism) is that almost everybody is paid to lie. Some of those lies are mostly harmless - puffing up your boss a bit, spinning something - and many of them are less harmless. If there were social and professional sanctions for people who bullshit in their bullshitting jobs, then the entire social system would collapse.

Go to a random dinner party and you're going to find people who work as lobbyists for Evil Corp, or people whose spouses and friends do.

That's the glorious "bipartisan" Washington.

If you are a journalist, you should be allowed to remember things. You certainly shouldn't be encouraged to pretend you don't.

Federal Gas Tax Cut

It's always on the table when gas prices rise, which I suspect leads to people thinking that it's a significant amount when it's only 18.5 cents/gallon.

It's an action which will make people more mad, because it's inevitably swamped by the actual price increase. You promised help! You said you'd cut the tax but gas is still 5 bucks a gallon!

Not At Any Price

The below is a joke, but so often that is the level of The Discourse. Anyway, fun things happen when the supply curve goes vertical, especially for a good which tends to have pretty close to just-in-time delivery AND which is an input in, well, everything through its role in transportation (including transporting itself!).

Even if there aren't lines at the gas station, $100 gas would reflect, by any colloquial understanding, a "shortage."

But of course in practice, those pumps would go dry, in places, in such a scenario.

I'm not predicting gas shortages, I'm just saying that people will have ridiculous things to say about them if ever they are looming.

Shortages

Me, dumb: We could have shortages soon.

You, smart, after two Econ 101 classes: Prices adjust to equate supply and demand so shortages are impossible.

Capacity

I'd still bet on Trump ramping up the violence soon and if he does there will be more long term impacts.

UAE won’t resume full gas production until 2027 after Iranian attacks

The United Arab Emirates’s main gas-processing complex, which was hit in Iranian attacks during the war, will not reach its full production capacity again until next year.

ADNOC Gas said the Habshan site, which is one of the world’s largest gas production facilities and supplies gas across the UAE, is now operating at 60 percent capacity and “the company is currently working towards achieving 80 percent restoration by the end of 2026 with full capacity restored in 2027”.

In a statement sharing its first-quarter results, the company reported $1.1bn in net income, a 15 percent decrease compared with the same quarter last year.

Why Did Sleepy Joe Do This

Impressed by Trump's ability to make messes.

US prices rose in April at their fastest rate since May 2023 as the impact of the war in Iran was increasingly felt by consumers.

A jump in the cost of gasoline and groceries pushed the consumer price index (CPI), the amount prices jumped by in the past 12 months, to 3.8%.

It is the highest level since inflation hit 4% three years ago.

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TACO Tuesday.

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