One Week In, and What I'm Reading
The insanity doesn't take holidays off. Read to the end for a pleasant musical coda.
The year is winding to a close, and my 2 week end of year shutdown is now half over. I am somewhat proud that I've only done about 6 hours of work related things (I have a huge backlog, and it is relaxing to knock some of that out, yeah, I'm a broken person).
Still, this is pretty good by my standards.
Technical Issues here
you can skip this, but I was an idiot, and it was stupid simple to fix.
Some front matter - about 6 weeks ago, I thought I had pissed my audience off. It seemed like while the stats showed that I was getting plenty of traffic (note: I use Plausible for my traffic tracking because fuck Google!) but the comments were non-existent.
I was seriously wondering if I had pissed all my readers off!
Then, on Christmas Morning, I was lounging in bed, and reading my email, and I happened to click on my "Spam" folder.
Holee sheeit, all the notifications were being flagged as spam. What in the aitch E, double Hockey Sticks was going on? Some bizarre domain authentication issue. Googled[1] the eff out of that, and the consensus was that Proton Mail, my provider, is muy anal retentive about even the most minor inconsistencies in the headers (the hidden shit that tells someone who knows what they mean, WTF actually happened). I submitted a ticket to my mailer service (Mailgun) and I dropped a ticket to Proton Mail, as well as a query on the Ghost developer forums[2].
THe forums gave me the quickest response, I uploaded the headers, and a detailed explanation. The verdict: Everything looked great, but Proton Mail is paranoic at protecting your privacy.
Turns out that I had a slight configuration error. It is so stupid that I am embarassed that I made it.[3]
Now on to the main topics
California Billionaires threatening to leave...
Yesterday, whilst browsing the NY Times a headline caught my eye...
Awww, poor widdle Tech Bros are getting their panties in a wad because they might have to pay some real taxes.
Boo hoo.
Mr. Thiel, 58, who owns a home in the Hollywood Hills and operates a personal investment firm from Los Angeles, has explored opening an office for that firm, Thiel Capital, in another state and spending more time outside California, three of the people said.
Other billionaires who appear to be making moves to decrease their presence in California include Mr. Page, 52, a longtime resident of Palo Alto. He has discussed leaving the state by the end of the year, according to two people briefed on the talks. In mid-December, three limited liability companies associated with Mr. Page filed documents to incorporate in Florida, according to state records.
Oh, what, this isn't already a law, but it is gathering signatures to be put on the ballot for November, and these fucking cowards are planning to leave the state before January 1 to avoid the retroactive tax?
If the measure gains enough signatures to reach the state ballot in November and wins approval, it will retroactively apply to anyone who lived in California as of Jan. 1, 2026. Those with $20 billion in assets who resided in the state on that date would face a one-time tax of $1 billion and have five years to pay it, according to the terms of the measure.
Whether the proposal will reach California’s ballot is far from certain, but some billionaires may be unwilling to take the risk. For Mr. Page, whose net worth is estimated at $258 billion, the measure could result in a one-time tax of more than $12 billion. The tax bill for Mr. Thiel, whose net worth is around $27.5 billion, could be more than $1.2 billion.
I am getting deja vu about all the NYC Billionaires who pledged to flee the city and state on the election of Mandami to the Mayor post. Bill Ackman in particular was adamant that he would leave. Hold <taps ear> I'm being told that high end real estate in NYC is not flooding market, and further, the state of NY is quite good at discerning fake relocations.
I suspect that a lot of these Sand Hill Road fuckers will also not want to move away from their comfy digs (Larry Page has a large compound in Palo Alto).
Fuckers, all of them.
AI musings
While I admit that for my job, I am using some AI, it is for a use case that it is actually quite suited for. But I don't use it as a therapist, as a friend, as a romantic partner (ick), or to forge slop to drive engagement.
Throughout the latter half of 2025, there has been a growing concern that there is a bubble in the spending to build out the infrastructure, whilst the hyperscalers (Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and I guess Oracle) were racing to spend nearly $500B on hardware and data centers. About that time it became clear that this was no longer being funded by the hyperscalers, and the rise of the "Neocloud"[4] was beginning to be funded by issuance of bonds (aka debt), and that comes with a lot more risk.
If you read Ed Zitron, he's been all over this, but it is also beginning to be flogged in the NY Times and other financial minded pubs (that I do not have subs to).
The stock market has had plenty of warning signs of the overheating of this market, but has largely shrugged it off. The main indices are wildly up this year, largely buoyed by the Magnificent 7, and the promise of AI.
The assumption being that like computers and IT in general, as time goes on it both becomes ubiquitous, and the costs go down, with AI thus far, each generation has become more expensive to train and to operate. A sort of reverse Moore's Law, where instead of getting bigger/faster/better/cheaper every year, it gets more expensive.
But it appears that VC funding is about tapped out, and increasingly these buildouts are being financed with good ol' fashioned debt.
And unlike the equities markets, those who lend money to these behemoths are pretty good at assessing risk, and all the debt being raised (or loans being taken out) are going at a premium over the standard interest rates. For those in the know, they are largely rated BB, middle of the risk window. Not junk debt, but not considered super safe, and thus the lenders are extracting a premium, as they should.
There are other indicators of debt investors’ wariness: Some of the bonds have tumbled in price after being issued, in a sign of increased caution among investors. And the cost of credit default swaps, which protect bond investors from losses, has surged in recent months on some A.I. companies’ debt.
Construction delays at these sprawling data facilities could push out the time it takes before they can start generating revenue from their leases to A.I. companies. Investors also worry that, in the end, there could be less demand for A.I. computing power, creating a glut of unneeded data centers and leading to defaults on the debt used to finance the buildings.
I saw an interview with Microsoft's CEO, Sataya Nadella yesterday where he said that they had procured adequate GPUs (that is Nvidia's hot product) but they are not deployed because the data centers aren't completed, and he admitted that the long pole is the delivery of reliable power. Imagine spending billions of dollars to acquire GPUs just to have them rot in a warehouse, unable to be deployed or used, all the while they get depreciated, and ecclipsed as Nvidia has committed to a new generation every year.
I don't need an MBA to tell you that is no bueno...
Read the article, it is remarkably techie jargon free.
Turning Point USA conference
Last weekend in Phoenix, the clowns all descended on the TPUSA annual conference, and it was a sight to behold. So much so that the Editor in Chief at the National Review, Jim Geraghty had to stroll over to the Washington Post to pen an OpEd on the clown show:
I saw this reported in many of the venues I read.
Anyhow, the big brouhaha was the Ben Shapiro versus the MAGA ecosystem, particularly since he used his time to excoriate the (literally) insane Candace Owens who has gone full Anti-Semite, Anti-Zionist, and is still being sued by the Macron's over her "exposés" of French First Lady being a man (implying that she transitioned from male to female), and he also called out Tucker "Platforming Nick Fuentes" Carlson.
And since Ben was early in the show, he was rebutted by Tucker, and JD "couch fucker" Vance. (Owens wasn't invited to speak)
And I gotta say Ben was right:
“If Candace Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk casting aspersions at TPUSA and the people who work here, who worked with Charlie every single day, his best friends … and, yes, at Erica Kirk and to imply or outright claim complicity in a cover-up over Charlie’s murder, to spew absolutely baseless trash implicating everyone from French intelligence to Mossad to members of TPUSA in Charlie’s murder or a cover-up in that murder, then we as people with a microphone have a moral obligation to call that out by name.”
If you recall, Ben Shapiro was Never Trump in the first administration, but be broke that vow after January 6, 2021, and then went all in on Trump in 2024, stating "He did all the damage he could in the first, now he's just the best candidate".
Whatever lets you sleep at night bro, but being Jewish, he seems to have found his backbone when the Groypers went mainstream.
Geraghty again:
But later in the program, Carlson contended that Shapiro’s call to disavow Owens represented “deplatforming,” an effort to shut down someone’s ability to reach an audience.
“To hear calls for, like, deplatforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event, I’m like, ‘What? This is hilarious,’” Carlson laughed. He called Shapiro’s remarks “the whole, like, Red Guard, Cultural Revolution thing that we so hated and feared on the left.” (This seems a wee bit hyperbolic, as China’s Cultural Revolution killed up to 2 million people between 1966 and 1976, with massacres and literal cannibalism.)
Uh, deplatform Candace? She has the second most listened to podcast on the planet, and 5.7M followers on Youtube. She's gon' do just fine, thankyouverymuch.
It’s an extremely convenient two-step from the pro-Owens wing of MAGA: Criticizing Owens for her unsupported accusations is censorious “deplatforming,” but calling Shapiro “a cancer” is just routine give-and-take.
I mean, it is all a cancer, but I will argue that Jim G. and the National Review crew have been mighty helpful in getting us to this point. You don't see any contrition in his voice.
I will add that at The Bulwark, Will Sommer had an entertaining read:
Will Sommer
He is a solid MAGA whisperer, and this is worth the read. Most of his posts are free.
That will about do it for this week. I am at slightly more than 2,200 words, and I didn't even get to the 1M additional Epstein documents, and Trump's decision to do the "Christian" thing and bomb Nigeria on Christmas day. I guess we should be thankful he hasn't (yet) invaded Venezuela.
I hope your holidays and however you celebrate were restful, calorie laden, and enjoyable!
A Musical Interlude
I hope you can find 26 minutes to watch the lovely ladies of Zepparella belt out some of the best covers of Led Zep tunes. They hit the Guild Theater in early December (I missed it) and this was one of the recordings they dropped:
1 - Google has become shit at finding things, and instead seem über focused on wedging their half arsed AI summary shit down yer gob.
2 - I am emphatically NOT a developer, but the folks behind Ghost are super responsive, and they will walk a ham fisted douche like me through some nasty glitches.
3 - it is so stupid. But if you must I went through the process of configuring the Mailgun mailer to handle the transactional emails (the ones when you sign up and confirm, the ones that send you the codes to log in, and to notify you of replies to your comments. But it was still set to "Direct" (that is the internal lightweight mailer built into Ghost) instead of "SMTP" that instructs Ghost to use the credentials I provided for Mailgun.
This is a "self own".
4 - Neoclouds are companies like Coreweave and others who will build the data centers and "lease" the compute capacity to the model builders. If that feels like a circuitous way to keep liabilities off your balance sheet, it is. And it has more than a whiff of "Enron" stench.
