TAX AI

“Deductions you might be missing, including home office, startup costs, and even your car”

“The CEO I had breakfast with who's freaking out, he said three words to summarize the situation: 'Capital displaces labor.' And then he put in parentheses 'with the help of AI.' But he's like, now it's clearer to him than ever because his company is roaring in terms of performance and stock market price, and he's cutting people right and left.”

“We should also talk about the fact that under Tim Cook's tenure, Apple has become what I would consider an AI laggard. Right? They are not a frontier AI model company. Their own AI efforts under the banner of Apple Intelligence have been sort of delayed over and over again. They have not managed to give Siri the sort of brain transplant that they have been teasing now for years. And I think it is fair to say that they are behind when it comes to AI and all AI related things.”

“The biggest mistakes solopreneurs make when filing taxes and how to avoid them”

“But even though it has a lot of support seemingly from the public, there are a lot of high profile Democrats who have come out against it and a lot of unions who are just sitting on the sidelines. Meanwhile, some of the most influential unions in the state, the teachers union, the umbrella group for SEIU, They haven't publicly taken a position. And privately, they're concerned about the idea of a tax that gets locked up in this special box and doesn't fund the programs that most tax dollars do.”

“What really triggers an audit and what does not”

“If you can get someone like Seth Bodnar into the US Senate, all Senate votes count the same. You could have a sane, public-spirited, patriotic senator out of a traditionally red state in Montana. And so that's the kind of candidate I'm boosting and trying to help in the goal of rationalizing our politics come January of next year.”

“I would not be surprised if under Ternus, they just lean into being a hardware company and maybe scale back on some of these other bets, these software projects, Apple TV, the sort of last year but less profitable parts of their business, I would not be surprised if they really double down on being the hardware company and continuing to make the best hardware that all, you know, all the other software can run on.”

“The flat fee arrangement means that people do not invest in building out these alternative teams. There's a lot of work, it's a lot of effort, it's a lot of expense. If you make the same 40, 50, 60 bips doing that or just buying stocks and bonds, you're going to buy stocks and bonds. So by and large, that industry I think is not teed up for a sophisticated portfolio.”

“And I've said for a long time, I think the NASDAQ and the Dow are two of the worst metrics or most unhealthy metrics ever invented because they give the illusion that people are doing well. And it really is, it's a proxy for earnings and a proxy for the wealth of the top 10%. So what do you have? All right, so, I mean, think about it. If the majority of our markets now are being run by 10 companies that are in the business of AI or online or software, do they care that gas prices are up?”

“Well, I think you summarized it exactly right. And that's why when he does talk about this, he really focuses on his objection to a state-specific wealth tax. And he does frequently say, we ought to have a conversation about a national wealth tax, leaving the door open to the idea of a wealth tax if it was applied evenly across the country.”

“In the last moments of Alane Herzburg's life, the robot spent an indefensible five point six seconds trying and failing to guess the shape in the road there was a human body pushing a bike. Over those five point six seconds, the robot kept reclassifying our whishing an unknown object a vehicle a bicycle. During that time, spent wondering the car did not slow down. Soon after Elaine Hertzberg's death, Uber halted its testing program.”

“I think what you're going to have here is one, there's a huge opening for even a distant number two to SpaceX, and two, the most popular loyalty program in the history of the planet is Amazon Prime. And I think the mission here, what I would be talking about if I were in strategy at Amazon, is we're going to offer a competent phone. It won't be as good as the iPhone, but it will be as good as an Android phone. And with Amazon Prime Plus, you're going to get Wi-Fi, you're going to get blazing fast broadband into your home.”

“Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements and keystrokes for AI training data. This tool, which is called model capability initiative, will run on work related apps and websites on US based employees' computers and will also take occasional snapshots of the content on employees' screens. This is part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in internal memos seen by Reuters.”

“The defining issue of our time is income inequality. And what's so sad about it is the incumbents who benefit from income inequality will weaponize this bullshit notion of complexity and talk about technology and network effects. And at the end of the day, it's just about redistribution of income. And that is stop transferring wealth to corporations and the wealthy. Corporations are paying their lowest taxes since 1929.”

“They signed a three year lease for a store. They put a $100,000 in a bank account, and they handed a debit card to Luna, which is powered by Claude Sonnet 4.6, and just told them, hey. Turn a profit. So there are a few things that have gone awry, Kevin. One of them, they made a bunch of strange inventory choices, including ordering a thousand toilet seat covers for the employee bathroom, then listed them as merchandise, which you and I would never do if we were running a convenience store.”

“This tool, which is called model capability initiative, will run on work related apps and websites on US based employees' computers and will also take occasional snapshots of the content on employees' screens. This is part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in internal memos seen by Reuters.”

“And professional investor is a very specific definition in my mind. It's someone who at some point in their career was paid purely based on the performance of their investments, right? Your investments were up 20% this year. Here's your money. Thank you very much, right? If you have those kinds of people on your team, you now can underwrite your investments yourself.”

“They signed a three year lease for a store. They put a $100,000 in a bank account, and they handed a debit card to Luna, which is powered by Claude Sonnet 4.6, and just told it, hey. Turn a profit. So there are a few things that have gone awry, Kevin. One of them, they made a bunch of strange inventory choices, including ordering a thousand toilet seat covers for the employee bathroom, then listed them as merchandise.”

“I remember when the Apple Watch came out, there was this moment of, like, oh, Apple's cooked. Like, they can no longer innovate. This thing is obviously not going to work. This is just a gadget for luxury users, and this is not going to sort of be useful enough for many people to shell out for. And then I think Tim Cook, to his credit, saw that health was taking off. The people wanted to track their steps. They wanted to know if their blood oxygen levels were changing or if their heartbeat was irregular.”

“And there are one million total industrialized robots under at Amazon, in an Amazon warehouse or somewhere in Amazon infrastructure. The rest of the nation, private companies, has a total of 400,000. And AI was the thing that took is going to help industrialized robotics meet its potential too. They're talking about using AI industrialized robots to not increase their personnel by one person in their biggest business set as Amazon retail.”

“So this would place a 5% tax on the net worth of any billionaires who are California residents as of January 1st of this year. The money would go into a special fund at the state level and would have to be spent on health care services. It's unusual to tax the assets of a person as opposed to their income. So their assets would be their stocks, the jewelry they own, the cars in their garage, the paintings, anything that contributes to their wealth.”

“companies are spending a lot of money on AI technology so they don't have money left to hire more employees or give pay raises.”

“Sure, part of their strategy should be to diversify, but part of it should be to hold on to that stock long-term and think about how to maybe even monetize the volatility. So we've built some options programs and things like that for people here to monetize these stocks are volatile by nature. And so you can monetize that volatility without necessarily exerting the stocks.”

“California has this ballot initiative system that a lot of political actors use as leverage to get what they want out of the legislature and the governor. And so now that this thing has qualified for the ballot, this is a period over the next couple months where there could be some backroom negotiations to try to get this thing off the ballot. Sergey Brin and the committee that he created, they have put money into a couple of ballot measures that would negate the billionaire's tax. And it's possible that those could be used as leverage.”

“Tony Tether, who had been a door to door salesman in his use definitely has that flare in that way of thinking, says, let's have a contest. Let's see who can put all of these ingredients that we've developed together into a proper self driving car. His original idea is we'll drive him down the Las Vegas Strip that's almost immediately next because it's insane.”

“My 13-year-old has come to me and said, I think I'm gonna have an AI girlfriend, not a human girlfriend, because it's gonna be a lot easier. Childhood is hard enough if you don't have trillion dollar companies trying to prey on your brain and your soul. If you show me a household where the kids aren't on screens, they have a much, much better shot at flourishing.”

“Meanwhile, some of the most influential unions in the state, the Teachers Union, the Umbrella Group for SEIU, they haven't publicly taken a position. And privately, they're concerned about the idea of a tax that gets locked up in this special box and doesn't fund the programs that most tax dollars do. So there's a lot of different angles of potential concern and that's also why many of the Democratic candidates who are running for governor have expressed some reservations.”

“The entire banking system and taxation system was built around real assets. When banks and law and all these laws were built in the 20s, 30s, 40s, all there was was real assets, right? People weren't, there were no internet companies, they were buying buildings, factories. So the tax code is very beneficial to real assets. And you can therefore get a solid teens return.”

“So this would place a 5% tax on the net worth of any billionaires who are California residents as of January 1. The money would go into a special fund at the state level and would have to be spent on health care services. It's unusual to tax the assets of a person as opposed to their income. So their assets would be, you know, their stocks, the jewelry they own, the cars in their garage, the paintings, anything that contributes to their wealth.”

“We need to tax AI and then start distributing the gains as quickly and broadly to the American people as we can. Poverty should be an artifact of the past. GDP is going to roar past a $100,000 ahead. And at that point, you should be able to put more into people's hands.”

“Radioactive material from the damaged plant could leak into the Gulf, contaminating waters vital to states like Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.”

“AI is to white collar work and the cubicles and the office parks, what the robot arms were to the factory floors. You just don't need as many whippersnappers making your PowerPoint decks and your Excel spreadsheets and learning corporate lingo. When you go into some of these large corporates, you can sense that there are a lot of people whose jobs are not super vital to the operations and growth of that business.”

“Chinese robot beats human best time in half marathon after a stumble. A five foot five humanoid called Lightning Short King, developed by Chinese smartphone maker Honor, has beat the human world record time for a half marathon. But just before completing the race, there was some drama. Lightning slammed into a barricade and collapsed. The robot managed to get back on its feet and ran across the finish line in fifty minutes and twenty six seconds.”

“Banks themselves don't train people to be professional investors. These people are trained to be service providers. They're trained to be responsive, helpful. But actual investment acumen, when you're at a large bank, sits in a separate group. You're rewarded as a wealth manager by how much you grow your book of business. You're never trained to be an investment person, per se.”

“It's that you have a certain threshold, let's call it $35,000 at the poverty level. If you make less than that, then we true you up to that level. If you make more than that, then it's as it was. That's the thing that I'd be thrilled with. I'd be thrilled with a higher child tax credit. I'm thrilled with anything that alleviates poverty.”

“I just think that it's gotten absolutely destroyed on a valuation basis. And I actually bought it in SaaSpocalypse one. I built up a decent position there. I bought it at around $400. It got battered, continued to get battered. And then last week, I was looking at it, it was $380 and I just doubled my position. I was like, fuck it. As we record this, we're up to $420 per share. So it's risen 10% in literally a matter of days.”

“I wonder if there's also been a little bit of what I would call the timeline fatigue, where we thought we understood what the story of this war was. And there were all of these different plot points. We strike Iran, we kill the supreme leader, but then the son is appointed. Then Trump says that we've had productive talks and we think that maybe the negotiations are going to go somewhere. Then they don't. Then he says, open the fucking street, you crazy bastards.”

“Placement rates have collapsed for particular populations, particularly computer science grads coming out of various universities, where you had programs that had placement rates of 94% at high salaries. And those have flipped. Now you have computer science grads out of great programs looking for six months and getting AI-fueled responses. To me, that population is the canary in the coal mine.”

“Finance and economy ministers from Austria, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain want the European Commission, the EU's executive body, to introduce what they call a solidarity levy on energy companies”

“The main difference in their approach is how quickly they want to move. Anthony is very okay with risk. He gets one of these cars and he's driving it back, and he lives in Berkeley, works in Palauto. He's just using this car like the Bay Bridge every day, probably outside the bounds of what the team actually wanted, and he's not necessarily logging data. He's just enjoying his self driving car and taking it all over the place.”

“And that's why when he does talk about this, he really focuses on his objection to a state specific wealth tax. And he does frequently say, we ought to have a conversation about a national wealth tax, leaving the door open to the idea of a wealth tax if it was applied evenly across the country. It is worth noting that he has opposed many wealth taxes in the past when they've come up in the California legislature.”

“Why quarterly estimated taxes matter and what happens if you skip them”

“And if you're an individual, you're paying, especially in this state, you're paying 50 plus percent tax. So the easiest alpha to use an investment term to get is a tax alpha. And they are not these institutional asset managers because most of their clients are non-taxable. They're not even attempting to optimize after-tax return.”

“AI is to white collar work and the cubicles and the office parks, what the robot arms were to the factory floors. You just don't need as many whippersnappers making your PowerPoint decks and your Excel spreadsheets and learning corporate lingo. When you go into some of these large corporates, you can sense that there are a lot of people whose jobs are not super vital to the operations and growth of that business.”

“I saw that all the teams treated this like a hardware problem. They looked at this and say, we have to build a bigger wheels and bigger chassis and so on. And I looked at this and said, about wait a minute. The challenge really is to build a self driving car. They can drive for the desert. I can get a rental car. They can do it just fine, provided as a person insight and the challenges we need to take the person out of the driver's seat and replace it by computer. That is not a problem with bigger tires. That's actually be a software problem.”

“How to stay organized without making this a full-time job”

“Anthropic and OpenAI are scaling revenue faster than any company ever.”

“For the billionaires and also many tech leaders who are not billionaires but who are aspirational, they see this as an existential threat that it really would set precedent of going after the wealth that people have earned and taxing their possessions in a way that really has never been done before. On the other side, that is also part of the motivation for this thing, to really shift the paradigm in how the government taxes wealth and how the government gets people to contribute to society.”

“The other challenge I found is that family offices have real trouble retaining the talent because, you know, you hire someone, they're ambitious, they have a career path. The principle of the family is signing up really to be a manager of an asset management company. I don't think many of them actually realize that's what they're signing up for. And I don't think they want to do that.”

“AI's approval rating is 26%, which is lower than ICE's or just about any other unpopular institution you can think of. People hate this stuff. And the the tech CEOs have realized that they are very, very hated. And so now you're you're seeing some of them be like, yo. Wait a minute. No. No. Like, we're we'll do something good for lots of people that that aren't just us.”

“At the same time, like, every day now, I use AI apps that just do things for me on my phone that seem clearly like things Siri should be able to do. Right? Because Siri is integrated at that operating system level. It already has the access that it needs, and I wind up having to do all these workarounds just to do these things that are now possible through the state of the art. So there is a huge missed opportunity there.”

“When I looked up the studies as to how effective government-funded retraining programs were, the efficacy range I found was 0-15 percent, with 15 percent on the high side. Trying to train workers who've been laid off in various jobs to compete against AI strikes me as a loser. It strikes me as the next generation of 'learn to code' which is really stupid; it's chasing moving goal posts.”

“If you can get someone like Seth Bodnar into the US Senate, all Senate votes count the same. You could have a sane, public-spirited, patriotic senator out of a traditionally red state in Montana. And so that's the kind of candidate I'm boosting and trying to help in the goal of rationalizing our politics come January of next year.”

“Placement rates have collapsed for particular populations, particularly computer science grads coming out of various universities, where you had programs that had placement rates of 94% at high salaries. And those have flipped. Now you have computer science grads out of great programs looking for six months and getting AI-fueled responses. To me, that population is the canary in the coal mine.”

“And there are one million total industrialized robots under at Amazon, in an Amazon warehouse or somewhere in Amazon infrastructure. The rest of the nation, private companies, has a total of 400,000. And AI was the thing that took is going to help industrialized robotics meet its potential too. They're talking about using AI industrialized robots to not increase their personnel by one person in their biggest business set as Amazon retail.”

“I'll see someone with their very first liquidity. They take it, and instead of doing something a little bit safe, in case there's a rainy day, they turn around, and you go put in a bunch of very early stage startups. You just sort of sit there, and you're like, listen, if you're going to do venture, at least try to do it in a systematic way. Do not take 80% of what you just got, and hand it to your three friends.”

“I think what you're going to have here is one, there's a huge opening for even a distant number two to SpaceX, and two, the most popular loyalty program in the history of the planet is Amazon Prime. And I think the mission here, what I would be talking about if I were in strategy at Amazon, is we're going to offer a competent phone. It won't be as good as the iPhone, but it will be as good as an Android phone. And with Amazon Prime Plus, you're going to get Wi-Fi, you're going to get blazing fast broadband into your home.”

“Fourteen states now have active bills proposing restrictions or outright bans. So, Scott, this is something I wrote about in my newsletter about two months ago, this idea that the biggest obstacle to AI isn't energy, it isn't compute capacity, it's its own popularity. Since I wrote that, some crazy things have happened. There were the attacks on the councilman's house. He supported a data center. Someone shot at his house thirteen times and they left a sign that says no data centers.”

“Sebastian, I think you should build a self diving car that can drive anywhere in the world. And my immediate reaction was, no, taking the technology we build for this empty desert and put it in the middle of Market Street in San Francisco is going to kill somebody. And Larry would come back the next day with the same idea, and I would give them the same answer, and both of us got increasingly more frustrated. God damn it, it can't be done, and eventually came and said, look, Sebastian, OK, care, I get it. You can't do it. I want to explain to Erk Schmidt the CEO at the time and Sergey Britt my cofounder, why it can't be done?”

“So they started freaking out late last year in advance of this January 1 deadline because the ballot measure says that anyone who was a resident of California on January 1 of this year could be subject to this tax. So at the end of the year, there was a lot of jockeying and there were a few pretty high-profile billionaires who made moves to leave the state to change their official residency. A couple of the founders of Google relocated, Sergey Brin moved to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, Larry Page left for Florida, and then also some of the people who were really influential in the world of investing in technology left. David Sachs moved to Texas and Peter Thiel moved to Miami.”

“Anthropic and OpenAI are scaling revenue faster than any company ever.”

“Weimos says, and I think this is correct, that it's roughly eighty brass safer in terms of crashes are severe enough to turn down an airbag. Crashes severe enough to cause an injury, and also crashes involving vulnerable road users like pedestrians or bicyclists. So far it's been better than human drivers, and so far, I think the case for allowing them they continue. The experiment is very strong.”

“For the billionaires and also many tech leaders who are not billionaires, but who are aspirational, they see this as a kind of an existential threat that it really would set a precedent of going after the wealth that people have earned and taxing their possessions in a way that really has never been done before. On the other side, that is also part of the motivation for this thing to really shift the paradigm in how the government taxes wealth and how the government gets people to contribute to society.”

“I had experiences of losing people in my life to traffic accidents, and I felt we lost over the million people in the world to traffic accidents. Wouldn't it be amazing if Dabok invented something that would save a million lives a year.”

“My 13-year-old has come to me and said, I think I'm gonna have an AI girlfriend, not a human girlfriend, because it's gonna be a lot easier. Childhood is hard enough if you don't have trillion dollar companies trying to prey on your brain and your soul. If you show me a household where the kids aren't on screens, they have a much, much better shot at flourishing.”

“Tim Cook, presented Trump with a golden glass statue in August 2025 while he was seeking tariff relief in what just appeared to be an obvious bribe right out in the open. By the way, he did get that tariff relief, so it worked. Tim Cook also attended the VIP screening of Melania, which, again, when I said this man would do anything for his company, I think that is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.”

“I think the thing that has made me the most sad, Kevin, has been the darkening of the culture in Silicon Valley where a lot of folks who, I think could have been talked into UBI type proposals, or, hey, let's try and keep the machinery going. They have given up. They're just like, fuck it. I've got my bunker. You know, like, I'm just projecting forward. Like, I have seen that degree of fatalism from many, many more folks in the valley than I would have imagined.”

“The only real systemic impact that it will have is on the consumer spending habits of lower income households who, as you said, in the lowest income, spend nearly 20% of their total expenditures on gas. But other than that, it's not gonna hurt the top quintile very much at all. It's also not really gonna hurt tech companies that much. I mean, there was some concern at the beginning that some of the materials that go through the Strait of Hormuz are used for chips, but eventually people started to be a little bit less worried about that.”

“Well, it was kind of wild. I went to this conference in Orange County a couple of months ago where a bunch of tax advisors and wealth managers were meeting. And one of the sessions they had was basically kind of like how to help your clients reduce their net worth. So suggestions that were like, oh, move your Picasso out of your house in Beverly Hills to your house in Aspen. Or if you were carrying more insurance than you needed on your wife's six-figure diamond necklace that just reduce the insurance policy to what it's actually worth, because that's what you'll be taxed on.”

“Four point eight million Americans drive for a living. It's one of the most common jobs we have, and these workers do not plan to surrender to the California tech companies. They're doing this because they stand to make an unfathomable amount of money if they eliminate driving jobs for working class of people. These drivers are represented by unions backed by politicians and in cities across America blue cities. They're organizing. So far they're winning.”

“That was yeah. That happened three years into his tenure, and, that rascal Bono convinced him to put songs of innocence into the hands of something like 500,000,000 people. What's your favorite song off songs of innocence, by the way? I have like, that album has started auto playing in my car so many times over the years.”

“Tim Cook is going to step into a new role as executive chairman. He's not leaving entirely. But John Ternus, Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering and a longtime Apple guy, will become the next CEO.”

“I just think that it's gotten absolutely destroyed on a valuation basis. And I actually bought it in SaaSpocalypse one. I built up a decent position there. I bought it at around $400. It got battered, continued to get battered. And then last week, I was looking at it, it was $380 and I just doubled my position. I was like, fuck it. As we record this, we're up to $420 per share. So it's risen 10% in literally a matter of days.”

“I went to this conference in Orange County a couple months ago where a bunch of tax advisers and wealth managers were meeting, and one of the sessions they had was basically kind of like how to help your clients reduce their net worth. So suggestions that were like, oh, move your Picasso out of your house in Beverly Hills to your house in Aspen, or if you were carrying more insurance than you needed on your wife's, you know, six figure diamond necklace that just reduced the insurance policy to what it's actually worth because that's what you'll be taxed on.”

“And I've said for a long time, I think the NASDAQ and the Dow are two of the worst metrics or most unhealthy metrics ever invented because they give the illusion that people are doing well. And it really is, it's a proxy for earnings and a proxy for the wealth of the top 10%. So what do you have? All right, so, I mean, think about it. If the majority of our markets now are being run by 10 companies that are in the business of AI or online or software, do they care that gas prices are up?”

“When I looked up the studies as to how effective government-funded retraining programs were, the efficacy range I found was 0-15 percent, with 15 percent on the high side. Trying to train workers who've been laid off in various jobs to compete against AI strikes me as a loser. It strikes me as the next generation of 'learn to code' which is really stupid; it's chasing moving goal posts.”

“Well, I think there's a couple of lessons we can take away from this. One is that the idea of sticking it to the rich is very popular. The other lesson is that it's still really hard to pass and get across the finish line because of all of the particulars involved, because of the way that a tax is structured, and because of how influential the billionaire class is in our society. The third lesson is that because it's so hard, people who want to do this kind of thing need a really broad base of support to push it across the finish line.”

“The defining issue of our time is income inequality. And what's so sad about it is the incumbents who benefit from income inequality will weaponize this bullshit notion of complexity and talk about technology and network effects. And at the end of the day, it's just about redistribution of income. And that is stop transferring wealth to corporations and the wealthy. Corporations are paying their lowest taxes since 1929.”

“The only real systemic impact that it will have is on the consumer spending habits of lower income households who, as you said, in the lowest income, spend nearly 20% of their total expenditures on gas. But other than that, it's not gonna hurt the top quintile very much at all. It's also not really gonna hurt tech companies that much. I mean, there was some concern at the beginning that some of the materials that go through the Strait of Hormuz are used for chips, but eventually people started to be a little bit less worried about that.”

“So the Titan project was Apple's $10,000,000,000 effort to build a self driving car, which I think was instinctively something that, honestly, a lot of people really wanted. Right? Like, when I heard that Apple was building a car, like, I definitely wanted to see it. I definitely wanted to test drive it. I definitely wanted to see if songs of innocence would autoplay when I turned the key in the ignition, but they canceled the project in 2024.”

“It's that you have a certain threshold, let's call it $35,000 at the poverty level. If you make less than that, then we true you up to that level. If you make more than that, then it's as it was. That's the thing that I'd be thrilled with. I'd be thrilled with a higher child tax credit. I'm thrilled with anything that alleviates poverty.”

“So they started freaking out late last year in advance of this January 1 deadline because the ballot measure says that anyone who was a resident of California on January 1 could be subject to this tax. So at the end of the year, there was a lot of jockeying, and there were a few pretty high profile billionaires who made moves to leave the state to change their official residency. A couple of the founders of Google relocated. Sergey Brin moved to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. Larry Page left for Florida. And then also some of the people who are really influential in the world of, you know, investing in technology left. David Sacks moved to Texas, and Peter Thiel moved to Miami.”

“Fourteen states now have active bills proposing restrictions or outright bans. So, Scott, this is something I wrote about in my newsletter about two months ago, this idea that the biggest obstacle to AI isn't energy, it isn't compute capacity, it's its own popularity. Since I wrote that, some crazy things have happened. There were the attacks on the councilman's house. He supported a data center. Someone shot at his house thirteen times and they left a sign that says no data centers.”

“On Tuesday, SpaceX posted on x that it had reached an agreement with Cursor to either be able to acquire the company later this year for $60,000,000,000 or just pay it $10,000,000,000 for their work together.”

“We should try and find ways to get off of taxing human labor. We're going to be trying to encourage job type arrangements in every quarter. And right now, income tax is a discouraging factor on both the employer and the worker. So tax AI, tax the bots, don't tax humans. And the way I would do a universal basic income, if any of them come to me and, you know, is, I would do some amount like $1,200 a month, for every American and just start paying it out as as quickly as you can.”

“I just noticed that various players in the AI space, some of whom are, opposed to each other in various ways, seem to all be coming around to UBI at the same time. So Elon Musk did a post about this on x saying he endorsed some form of UBI. He called it universal high income.”

“The CEO I had breakfast with who's freaking out, he said three words to summarize the situation: 'Capital displaces labor.' And then he put in parentheses 'with the help of AI.' But he's like, now it's clearer to him than ever because his company is roaring in terms of performance and stock market price, and he's cutting people right and left.”

“I wonder if there's also been a little bit of what I would call the timeline fatigue, where we thought we understood what the story of this war was. And there were all of these different plot points. We strike Iran, we kill the supreme leader, but then the son is appointed. Then Trump says that we've had productive talks and we think that maybe the negotiations are going to go somewhere. Then they don't. Then he says, open the fucking street, you crazy bastards.”