Not So Happy Hour

An experience I shared with a lot of people of my era was having somewhat overprotective suburban parents who were, for some weird reason, totally fine with young teenagers going to see a midnight showing of Rocky Horror in the big scary city.

 Since it was one of the things I was allowed to do without much argument, I did it quite a lot.

And it was a very developmentally healthy thing to do (no snark).

RIP Tim Curry.

I Can Hear Melinda Snorting Derisively From Here

Yah Bill Gates just needed some additional funds. 

Bill Gates tells Axios his association with Jeffrey Epstein was a "huge mistake" but hopes it won't prevent him from influencing debates over artificial intelligence and global health.

...

"What I did do, in some ways, was very limited, and it was motivated by my desire to raise money," Gates said. "But … it was a huge mistake."

Well Okay Then

Darline Graham: Government run health care…. bad idea after bad idea. Annie Andrews backs it all. I have a different background. My parents worked long, hard hours. If that were sick, they had to get up and go to work. My mother passed away when I was 11 and my father just over… pic.twitter.com/fvFCrmudhi

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 26, 2026

Galaxies (Plural)

Just amazing stuff here, about a young guy whose hedge fund just tanked.

For the past few years, at happy hours and dinner parties in San Francisco, Leopold Aschenbrenner kept confusing people by sharing his favorite outlandish idea. 

He wanted to buy galaxies.

...

His idea was that advances in artificial intelligence would soon unlock resources on a cosmic scale, enabling humans to colonize faraway planets. He planned to save money now so he could spend on galaxies, he told them, and make his mark across the universe. 

Who do you buy them from? What, exactly, does ownership even give you in this scifi presumably post-scarcity civilization?

 Two years ago, he made bold predictions about the impending arrival of superintelligence, writing in a 165-page manifesto called “Situational Awareness” that AI would lead to one of the “most intense and volatile moments of human history.” He quickly turned that interest into money for a hedge fund that eventually managed $45 billion in assets, backed by investors who believed in his prophecy—or his ability to profit from it. 

He was barely of drinking age and had no prior investing experience, but his cozy relationships inside the industry fed into his reputation as an oracle of AI—someone who knew more about where the elusive technology was headed than legacy money managers living in New York. He mixed the personal and professional in a city where the two are rarely kept apart. 

“There are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness,” he wrote in his viral essay. “Through whatever peculiar forces of fate, I have found myself amongst them.”

There are very few people with superpower-tinged genius. It seems I am one of them?

As the big day approached, Aschenbrenner’s friends, former colleagues and fellow members of the Silicon Valley intelligentsia filtered into the wedding hotel. There were more than a dozen Anthropic employees on the guest list, as well as MacAskill and others from the FTX Future Fund, plus effective altruists and the billionaires who had put their money into Situational Awareness. 

The wedding was officiated by Ross Douthat, the former New York Times columnist who recently joined “60 Minutes.” He had reached out to Aschenbrenner after reading his manifesto, and they met last year when his family was on a California road trip. Aschenbrenner and Balwit hosted them for dinner, Douthat said, soliciting marriage advice from him and his wife and shocking their children with predictions about AI. 

Ah the EA/longtermist con artist freaks of course. 

Smaugs

Other people will provide better Dolly Parton tributes, but her death reminds me of the fact that it is so easy for rich people to do good things. She put the work in over and above that, obviously, but for anyone sitting on a massive amount of dragon treasure, if it is conservatively earning a real 5% a year in investment income, they can do a lot of good works without having their pile of treasure shrink at all.

You can easily buy some karma points to offset being a shithead otherwise.

It is quite stunning how little interest our current overlords have in even the PR benefits of that.

Actually Smart

For midterm elections, when they have the presidency, every Dem in a not-entirely-safe-seat runs against the president.  We aren't like those other Democrats!  I hate Obama too! Democrats suck, but vote for me, a different kind of Democrat who loves working with Republicans!

It is possible this saves a few incumbents, but it certainly brings the brand of the party down nationally. The prominence of Democrats Against Democrats - which the news media love to cover, of course - does not exactly help further whatever we imagine the agenda of the Democrats is, even if it saves some suburban Ohio member of Congress who hates immigrants, abortion, trans people, and "socialism."

I don't think this will help Republicans in the midterms, precisely, but pretending to distance themselves from Trump won't help them either.

But Trump himself has rejected that approach. House and Senate Democrats, the president noted during the meeting, will make their fall campaigns a referendum on him. His advisers told him that the poor polling reflects the fact that the voting public still does not know about many of his accomplishments—the dozens of new stock-market highs, a decline in fentanyl deaths, the “sealed” southern border, the increase in domestic-manufacturing production.

The solution Trump settled on, according to three people familiar with the meeting, was to lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself. The president ordered a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests. Trump wanted what one person described to us as “environmental lift” ads—commercials that would focus on nationalizing the midterms broadly around his victories—and he suggested that the ad makers mine his own on-camera statements as building blocks. “Go look at the clips,” the president told his team, according to this person. “I cite accomplishments all the time.”

It is smarter than "we know we're shit but vote for us anyway." 

ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS

The amount spent on that hideous boondoggle, California High Speed Rail,* seems more and more trivial by the day.

SpaceX on Tuesday unveiled plans to construct a massive, $100 billion spaceport in Louisiana, where the company plans to launch its gargantuan Starship rocket thousands of times per year.

The new SpaceX campus will be dubbed “Starbase, Louisiana” — borrowing the name of SpaceX’s recently incorporated company town in South Texas. Starbase, Texas, is the current home to Starship’s testing and development facilities and the spot from which 13 test flights have launched to varying degrees of success.

The Louisiana location, however, would host flights of the Starship rocket once its operational, having proven it can safely haul cargo to orbit. SpaceX also plans to land and recover every piece of its Starship rockets — including the upper spacecraft, which has never been done before — in order to allow the rockets to be rapidly reused and drive down the cost of each launch.

And, yes, subsidy truffle pig and federal contract vaccum Elon is going to be spending a lot of public money on this, directly and indirectly.

Credit to CNN for the bolded (by me) bit.

*Yes of course there are plenty of things to criticize about that project - spending a lot of money to try to appease its critics who then criticize it even more is one - but the huge number attached sounds less and less scary in context!

Morning

Once again.

Happy Hour

Get happy

Sure Why Not

The annual GDP of the US is about $32 trillion.

Aug 25 (Reuters) - Anthropic is likely to tell investors that it sees its total addressable ​market (TAM) exceeding $30 trillion, ahead of the $28.5 ‌trillion estimate from SpaceX (SPCX.O), opens new tab, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

TAM is the annual revenue opportunity ​available if a product or service ​achieved 100% market share in its ⁠relevant market.

Because The Country's Gone Awry

You can imagine Canada might've even agreed, with some caveats, to this kind of thing, if it wasn't all currently at the whims of the Mad King and whatever AI slop he was seeing at 3AM.

Canadian negotiators had gone into the talks suggesting the ultimate goal should be to create a “Fortress North America,” as they called it, with ultralow or nonexistent tariffs inside its walls, namely between Canada and the United States, and aligned tariffs for outsiders.

The United States wanted Canada to apply U.S. tariffs to other countries, particularly when it came to steel, now and in the future: If the United States changed policy and place higher tariffs on certain goods from a third country, Canada would need to do the same, even if it already had a trade agreement in place, a Canadian official said.

Tariff alignment is one thing. Canada having to change their tariffs because an Italian comedian made a joke about Trump, or whatever, is quite another.

People

They were almost certainly kids, though they aren't going to release any additional information.

Two people have died in Pennsylvania from measles, the state health department said Tuesday. Both were unvaccinated.

These the first deaths related to measles within the state in 35 years, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Health, and the first deaths reported this year in the U.S.

 

Xi Ain't Reading All That

I suspect isolating China will be as easy as conquering Iran.

New York —  US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday vowed an “economic D-Day” for countries that buy oil from Iran. Experts say that means one country in particular: China.

Bessent didn’t name China on Monday, but he left little room for doubt.

Sure Why Not

Rich people, man.

Via the California Post, court documents reveal that York “responded to an ad on a known prostitution website in Columbiana County, Ohio and ‘arranged to have sexual activity with the female in exchange for $140.00.’”

Per the report, York went to the meeting location — a trailer park in East Palestine, Ohio. He was taken into custody after a law-enforcement agent from the Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force determined that York had “in his possession his cellular device which was used to arrange the criminal act.” (Which apparently means that the “criminal tool” was the cell phone.)

The "heart" wants what it wants, I guess. 

Main Character Syndrome

The US has long had it, but I think once upon a time it was more justified. We are, much more than 30 years ago, just another country.  

One with a huge military (though that too has limits, as we see) and too much control over the international financial system, but no longer the center of everything culturally and economically.

To some extent that's because we "won." American influence is apparent in much of the world. But you don't need McDonald's franchises to have fast food chains.

The US is economically big enough that it matters, but the rest of the world doesn't need us to buy from them or sell to us nearly as much as "we" think they do.

Only about 4% of the world's population.

Morning

 Taco Tuesday.

Monday Evening

Relax.

Why Indeed

Genius Bessent admits he can't go through with his threats.

Asked why the US is threatening Iran’s business partners instead of penalising them, Bessent said: “Well, we are giving everyone the opportunity to remedy bad behaviour. Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?”

Or at least admitting the consequences of doing so. 

Sure Why Not

Pretty easy to draw the appropriate conclusions here.

EAST PALESTINE, Ohio (WKBN) — San Francisco 49ers owner John “Jed” York was arrested in the Valley over the weekend and found guilty of two misdemeanor charges.

York pleaded no contest Monday morning to misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and possessing criminal tools. He was arrested Sunday in East Palestine and posted $5,000 bond.

WKBN requested a police report, which states only: “On August 23, 2026, the East Palestine Police Department assisted the MVHTTF on the arrest of John York.”

The police report lists the time and location of the arrest as 9: 35 a.m. at Wheat Hill Mobile Home Community off state Route 170.

The release from East Palestine police states all further information must come from the Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force. WKBN reached out to the task force for further information and is awaiting a response.

Rich guy pleads no contest to lesser chargers, presumably. 

Doug Ford: We Sure As Hell Can, Bitch

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on a trade war with Canada: "There's no possible way it can really affect US well-being"

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 24, 2026 at 5:20 PM

Much more than just electricity.