We have collectively been recovering from a physically and emotionally draining two weeks of marching band. We all were caught napping at some point throughout the early days of this week! It’s been nice to have activities wind down this week, and we’ll have a bit of relaxation for a few weeks going forward. It’s been raining a lot around here. No flooding in our area, but I think there’s been some within an hour or two of us. We’re hoping our annual July 4th festivities are not washed out this year. My brother and his family are visiting today. We only get to see them once or twice a year, so we’re excited to hang for, well, 24 hours or so. 🙂 Time to get cooking in preparation for all of this. Cole slaw, cucumber salad, some desserts, and more. Let’s go! I saw this screenshot and a lot of memories came flooding back. I had totally forgotten about this game! For whatever reason it immediately made me think of these two games: This is nothing new, but the Social Security Administration sending out Trump bootlicking emails to the whole country has been one of my least favorite things of the past couple years. I’m not going to screenshot the whole thing, but rest assured it includes lots of “Thanks to President Trump” statements. What a sadly unique time in history. It’s interesting to see someone go the way of rebuilding a socials recommendation algorithm for themselves. What a fun visual comparison! (h/t Amit) Reply by email

A significant portion of the population in the USA still thinks of Reaganomics as certified fact rather than a largely discredited theory. By this mindset the engine of our economy requires people to strive for a ton of money. A rising tide lifts all boats and all that. First, I got to wondering, were US billionaires even a thing at the end of Reagan’s term? As a tween at the time, I couldn’t really remember. Turns out, yes: Sam Walton • $6.7 billion • Wal-Mart Stores  John Kluge • $3.2 billion • Metromedia  Ross Perot • $3.0 billion • Electronic Data Systems  Donald Newhouse • $2.6 billion • Publishing  Samuel Newhouse Jr. • $2.6 billion • Publishing  Henry Hillman • $2.5 billion • Industrialist  Lester Crown • $2.3 billion • Inheritance / investments  Anne Cox Chambers • $2.25 billion • Inheritance / Cox Enterprises  Barbara Cox Anthony • $2.25 billion • Inheritance / Cox Enterprises  Warren Buffett • $2.2 billion • Stock market Then, I needed some context for the difference between a million and a billion dollars. It kind of sounds like a similar thing, yes? Well, a clever internet person said, “The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is approximately a billion dollars.” In reality there’s a big difference between a million and a billion dollars, and I think it’s hard to understand it. Here are some comparisons between a million and a billion of something. Maybe one of these comparisons will help to register the vastness of the difference for you: A million seconds is 11.57 days. A billion seconds is 31.71 years. A million marbles fills a bedroom closet. A billion marbles fills over one hundred 12 × 12 × 8 foot bedrooms. Flying a million miles will have you circling the earth 40 times. Flying a billion miles circles the earth 40,000 times. A million miles gets you two round trips to the moon. A billion miles gets you 2,000 round trips. A million dollars in a stack of $100 bills is 3.6 feet tall. A billion dollars in $100 bills is almost ¾ of a mile tall. A million dollar bills laid end-to-end would stretch 97 miles. A billion dollar bills laid end-to-end would circle the earth nearly four times. If you spend $1,000 a day, a million dollars would last 2.7 years. A billion dollars would last 2,740 years. If you spend $1,000,000 a day, a million dollars would last one day. A billion dollars would last 2.7 years. Wow! Still, I could definitely see the everyday person saying, “Hey, Walmart is a net benefit to the economy. I can buy much more stuff with my paycheck than I could if we just had mom-and-pop grocery stores, hardware stores, pharmacies, and corner stores.” That’s probably true. Economies of scale did its scaling. I personally wonder if it was all worth it, though. Maybe we’d be paying more if we weren’t taken over by big box stores (and eventually the internet), but maybe it’d be nice to have those mom-and-pop stores around? And maybe we’d still have a bunch of US factories producing our goods? And maybe that would make us more able to react quickly to things like wars and global pandemics? That’s a bit beyond the scope of what I’m thinking about here, though. Let’s pretend in 1988 the rising tide was tuned just right. Certainly when we’re talking complicated macroeconomics, a simple inflation calculation on the dollar isn’t quite the tool that should be reached for, but I’m still curious. $1 in 1988 is worth $2.82 in 2026. That’s 2.76% annual inflation. $1,000,000,000 in 1988 is worth $2,815,046 in 2026. $6,700,000,000 in 1988 (e.g. Sam Walton) is worth 18,860,811,496 in 2026. It appears that billionaires inflate differently than the rest of us, eh? Here’s the top ten as of April, 2026: Elon Musk • $817 billion • SpaceX, Tesla  Larry Page • $257 billion • Alphabet / Google  Sergey Brin • $237 billion • Alphabet / Google  Jeff Bezos • $225 billion • Amazon, Blue Origin  Mark Zuckerberg • $222 billion • Meta Platforms  Larry Ellison • $190 billion • Oracle  Jensen Huang • $155 billion • Nvidia  Warren Buffett • $150 billion • Berkshire Hathaway  Rob Walton • $149 billion • Walmart  Michael Dell • $141 billion • Dell Technologies WOW!! For the top spot, that’s a 13.5% inflation rate per year. Second place inflation is a mere 12.25% per year. Warren Buffet inflated 10.7% each year. Interestingly both lists are filled with people trying to have an extreme influence on the direction of our country. At least that hasn’t changed! I mean, certainly all billionaires have lobbyists working on their behalf (again, that’s another topic), but the 1988 list had numerous publishers, communications folks, and even an eventual presidential candidate. Today we have a list filled with folks who own publishing companies, control information streams, build massive companies directly funded by government contracts, and directly throwing their sticks into the very spokes of the government bicycle. The sound is different, but there are certainly similar echoes. But…do we really need billionaires? Spoiler alert: I don’t know! But it seems to me the answer is no at some level, right? For the sake of argument, let’s say the economists have decided that billionaires, and even ten-billionaires, are good oil for our economic wheels. What’s the limit? Surely there has to be some number that pushes individual wealth from a net benefit for the country to a net detriment? Surely we are seeing lots of data and examples right now where we can start to come up with that line as a society? Surely it’s very reasonable that we might want to develop policy to make it hard for an individual to end up with more than, say, ten billion dollars1. That doesn’t seem very controversial to me. I don’t think it is controversial. However, a big way that our political leaders get their millions is the existence of the many billionaires. At some point we’re gonna have to demand leaders that have some semblance of moral fiber, both on the corporate and political level. I’m not saying our leaders were ever perfect, nor will they ever be perfect, but I’d take rewarding someone who at least pretended to care about the average American and the general good over what ever we currently have. In my opinion, that’s the only way we shift away from the direction we’ve been going. Via elections that put people in power who say they are not in the pockets of billionaires, talk a good game about improving things for the average person, act on their talk, and get sent home if they don’t walk their talk. Oh, two more things. You may notice a big part of the message that drove the current people into power was “drain the swamp.” It can be argued that at one point they did the part about talking a good game. (I mean, I didn’t find the talk very good or convincing, but it worked for a lot of people.) So if you want to win power, you better talk to the average person about how you’re actually going to do better. Now I hope we as a society move toward pushing out these dangerous people who are only acting on the bad parts of their talk, and are doing very few good things for our collective benefit. And I hope it isn’t too late to attract some people to politics who are at least half decent human beings. What are other people saying? It so happened as the question of whether or not we need billionaires popped into my head, it was being discussed elsewhere. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (I’m not speaking to her overall platform, which I don’t know, but just this pull quote): There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that. I…don’t find what Ocasio-Cortez said to be in any way controversial. Isn’t it a grift we’re all sort of in on and have been beaten into accepting? Ah, but here it is…Evan Ramstad says (archive): At first, I thought the New York Democratic congresswoman had stumbled into another one of those moments that, if she ever decides to run for president, will haunt her. … Too many of our elected leaders are ripping on the risk-takers who are badly needed by America’s and Minnesota’s economies. I’m an entrepreneur myself. I’ve been risk-taking to some degree most of my career. Yet I don’t understand how anyone can honestly say that we badly need risk takers of the hundred-billionaire type to keep our economy going. I think it’s a fundamental misunderstanding, or a disingenuous re-staging, of the numbers I presented at the beginning of this post. A billionaire is so incredibly rich that it defies comprehension, and thus makes our discussions around all of this unhinged. Ah, but you say we need the industry that those hundred-billionaires create. But…do we? Is AI software worth it? Self-driving cars? Or is that the wrong question? Would making a mere ten billion dollars put off a mega-entrepreneur from seeking their place in the history books? Do we really need to give a select few individuals this society-warping level of power in order to get these advancements? I really can’t imagine that’s the case. Finally, Noah Hawley (archive) speaks to the transition of a human being to a hundred-billionaire: The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.  This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be. It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark. What would we do with the increased tax dollars from whatever “no more ten-billionaires” scheme? I don’t know. I don’t think we’re great at spending tax dollars, but again, that’s a separate issue. Reply by email

Spent this morning at Minnebar. This year was the 20th anniversary. I’ve had several posts about Minnebar on this blog through the years. I’ve only been able to go a couple times over the past ten years and it was good to see many familiar faces. (Even some Minnesota expats. 👋, Luke!) I called TRUNCATE on a Postgres database table in production for the first time. That was nerve wracking! I did some wood work for the first time in a while. I’m working on a loft for Emma. I don’t know whether it’s time away from woodworking or just the type of project, but this felt a lot more like work and a lot less like hobby. Part of it might also be because it’s such a physically big project and that is a lot for my older body. You can never have too many clamps I’m way behind, but I just learned that Songkick was purchased by Suno. Did I know what Suno was before I learned that? No, but it sounds pretty ick. From their own home page: Make any song you can imagine Start with a simple prompt or dive into our pro editing tools, your next track is just a step away. Yeah, ick. Time to migrate to Bandsintown? Something else? Give up? I just finished the excellent Fela Kuti: Fear No Man podcast by Jad Abumrad and team. Highly recommended. I think I might become an Onion paper subscriber. Anyone else going back to paper? Discovered NOT A HOTEL. A man can dream. Reply by email

Short, and late, rendition of Friday this week as I’m traveling. We took a spring break to Phoenix and were able to fit in a Project Hail Mary IMAX screening. It was excellent! Two of us have read the book, and we enjoyed both versions of the story on their own terms. We got in to Phoenix late on a Friday, stayed at a hotel, and kicked around the city proper on Saturday before checking into our VRBO. Out of nowhere I found an afternoon performance of Come From Away at The Phoenix Theatre. It was our first time seeing the musical, and it was fantastic. Lots of memories flooded back for those of us who lived through 9/11. Other than the two events above, this trip was pure relaxation for us. A few meals out, a lot of ice cream, and otherwise lounging around the pool at the VRBO. We all are coming home with some new tans (and a few burns). We wrapped the last meal of our trip at Fabio on Fire in Peoria. Excellent pizza, excellent pasta. Ravioli Al Brasato Fritti Reply by email