CLVII. We Broke It, We Can Fix It

Editor’s Note: Please be sure to take a moment and deeply partake in the afterglow of last week’s election. The country is more united now than it has been since Trump arrived on the scene. The job is to keep this moment, grow with it, and get shit done.

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In January 1838, Abraham Lincoln knew who the real enemy was. "If destruction be our lot," he said, "we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

The future of the country is and always will be dependent upon our ability to live with each other. To protect and grow what we consider the common good. And now, with the strength of the midterm results and the caliber of newly elected officials, we now have an extraordinary opportunity to get a lot of good and necessary things accomplished.

It won’t be easy.

The United States is also more vulnerable today than at any point in my lifetime. We are over exposed to any number of singular events that could set things off. We are involved in places we shouldn’t be. We have purposefully minimized advancing our public infrastructure (flights out this week, anyone?). Even with the dramatic wins last week, we are still at the mercy of the whims of a small group of the too rich and the failing upward.

This is the “suicide” that Lincoln warned about.

Here’s what must be done.

On February 28, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran. Iran answered by choking the Strait of Hormuz. Americans are now paying on average over $4.00 a gallon.

The irony is that the United States is a net energy exporter. In 2025 we shipped out more energy than ever.

Why did our actions in Iran matter?

Because oil is priced on the world market. Drilling more here doesn’t mean the price goes down here.

To make things worse, six months before the war, this administration ordered work stopped on Revolution Wind, a project that was nearly 80 percent built. This president also signed a law that ends the wind and solar tax credits for most projects.

There’s no need to depend upon oil. Not anymore, which is why these actions are a gift to long-entrenched old energy interests. I recently had the pleasure of meeting and talking with the great Bill McKibben, and he reminded me of the obvious. You can’t choke wind and solar off like you can choke oil in the Strait of Hormuz.

China is way ahead of us on alternatives, using technology that originated in the United States! We can reverse that with better public policies in a matter of months. Move the country to clean, domestic power, all of it, as fast as we can build it. A country that makes its own electricity from wind and solar can avoid foreign entanglements, give Americans more autonomy, and address climate change as a side and necessary benefit.

Economic inequality remains the one problem that rules the rest. Artificial intelligence products have the potential to make inequality even worse. Goldman Sachs estimates nearly 7 percent, or 10 to 11 million American jobs could be displaced as adoption speeds up. The quicker we move to viewing AI as a national dividend, the better. A group of Americans will call spreading the wealth from AI socialism, but sharing will be the same as pensions, Social Security, etc. Workers and employers pay a 12.4 percent payroll tax now, and that money funds the checks going out to today's retirees and disabled workers. More than 71 million Americans receive a benefit, and the program paid out about $1.6 trillion last year. Social Security works by taxing wages, but if machines do more of the work in the future, wages shrink. The tax base shrinks. Social Security becomes unnecessarily unstable.

Alaska has an additional source of income that can be the model. Since 1982, the state has paid a dividend from its Permanent Fund, built on its oil wealth, to residents every year. Last year's check was $1,000. They don’t necessarily work for it; they live for it. A deep-red state mails every eligible resident a share of a common resource, and nobody calls it any kind of -ism.

AI will be the biggest oil field of all time, and with the right model, it can be the shared resource that it must be. Write the laws now while the techopolies are acting like they are amenable. Our next version of national compensation has to draw on what AI and the machines will produce, and redistribute that as a Commonwealth dividend to every American just like Social Security and the Alaska oil model.

I watched this up close for many years in Florida’s public health system. Prevention means spending money now to avoid more costly things later. We’re bad at that, and it has only gotten worse under the current regime. We act like we’ve got an advanced system but it actually delivers more bureaucracy than healthcare at a higher cost.

Americans spent $5.3 trillion on health care in 2024. That’s about 18% of the economy, our about $15,500 for every person in the country. The Commonwealth Fund compared us with nine other wealthy nations and ranked us last overall. On administrative efficiency we came in ninth of ten. Our life expectancy is four years less! Think about that. We are paying more but dying earlier.

The Kaiser Family Foundation found that Americans generally use less care than people in peer countries, but we pay nearly twice as much per person. A large share of the difference is paper: prior authorizations, denials, appeals, and billing departments built to fight other billing departments. This doesn’t take into account the amount of waking time and mental stress we spend trapped in these processes either. Researchers have estimated administrative costs at a whopping 15 to 30 percent of American health spending. The six biggest publicly traded insurers cleared about $20 billion last year, UnitedHealth alone about $12 billion.

Every other capable democracy decided long ago that health care is something a nation provides, not a product a citizen shops for while sick. Universal coverage would not end the paperwork, but it would greatly reduce it and put that money back where it belongs: actual healthcare delivery.

None of this gets fixed while the government is vulnerable to entrenched wealth. In 2010, in Citizens United v. FEC, a very split 5 to 4 Supreme Court struck down limits on independent political spending by corporations and unions. They can’t vote, but they can now spend like their a million voters. There’s also another important case called SpeechNow that gave rise to the super PAC. In 2024, between these two rulings, outside spending on federal elections hit a record $4.5 billion, and more than half came from groups that do not fully disclose who funds them.

That is why the wind farm stops, the oil keeps flowing, and oligarchs like Elon Musk can spend more than $360 million in the midterms. That is why the insurers keep their lobbyists well-paid and you keep your deductibles and increased debt. The Court decided money is speech, and money has diminished the beauty and strength of millions of American voters.

The newly elected congress knows this and are pissed off. Don Leonard, the Democrat who flipped Ohio’s 15th District, is tying his vote for speaker to a push for a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United.

But undoing Citizens United outright takes a constitutional amendment or a different Court. The easier path may be to focus on the SpeechNow ruling. In 2024, Maine voters passed a law to cap contributions to super PACs at $5,000. Opponents sued before it could take effect, and it is likely headed to the Supreme Court. Scholars like Lawrence Lessig argue the Court could end super PACs without touching Citizens United at all. Watch that case. If it is upheld, it can be copied in every state to put a control on big and dark money.

Let’s start with one man before switching to another who I believe to be the bigger immediate threat. Jensen Huang resigned as CEO of Nvidia on Thursday, after an affair that may or may not have involved his USB stick and a Chinese honeypot operation. Our current administration was reportedly warned in a classified memo last spring and decided to do nothing (surprise!) until someone else leaked it. We still do not know whether a single secret changed hands, but there is a more current and proven danger than Mr. Huang.

Elon Musk helped push more than a quarter million people out of the federal workforce. He spent more than $290 million on the 2024 election and a reported $366 million on this year's midterms. He has reportedly ordered Starlink switched off or throttled at different times to impede Ukraine’s efforts to defend and fight for its freedom. His X platform is, by the European Union’s own count, the largest host of conspiracy and falsehood online, along with brocode demagoguing of anything to do with women or democracy.

I hope a new Congress will bring the weight of the government to bear on him very quickly. It may have already started. On Friday, two Democratic senators told Mr. Musk to keep every record tied to this fall's limits on Ukraine's Starlink service.

We created our current vulnerabilities, and we can repair them. We renew the effort to create our own power. We share the wealth. We stop bankrupting people for getting sick. We make each individual vote as powerful as any other. We ensure the country is beyond the acts of any one individual.

We get these things done, and we will make America great, for real this time.

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What I Read This Week
Things worth your time

For the first time, astronomers have traced a radio signal to an exoplanet itself, a giant called Beta Pictoris b, sixty-three light-years away, and it is auroras, not aliens. I keep wondering when the great mystery of whether we are alone gets answered, and whether that will be what evolves us toward the only identity that matters: being a good human.

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Remember when Captain Picard could say "Tea, Earl Grey, hot" and a cup simply appeared? Atomic Machines just came out of six years in stealth with $250 million and a Matter Compiler that builds working micro-machines straight from code, and while its first product is a fingertip-sized power switch rather than a cup of tea, the replicator suddenly looks less like a prop and more like a roadmap.

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Imagine a world where we may be able to understand some animal languages, and even communicate with them. Researchers ran wild elephant rumbles through a machine learning model and found that the calls carry something like a name for the individual being addressed, then proved it by playing the calls back and watching elephants answer to theirs and ignore the others. What makes it strange is that the elephants are not imitating each other the way dolphins and parrots do; they are using an arbitrary label, which is the thing we thought only we did. The paper is here, and the honest read is that decoding is the easy half. Mimicry comes next, and then we are in the conversation.

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In Aubrey, Texas, Marilyn Hampton spent 39 years cleaning classrooms, buying school supplies, and helping kids who were struggling study for their tests. Now the district is naming its next elementary school after her, opening in August 2027. "When I could help a kid and turn their smile up instead of down, that's what I wanted to do," she said. You don't hear a story like this very often. We usually name buildings after donors. Every so often we get it right and name one after the forgotten who are there every single day.

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I have never had a kind word for short sellers. Then I read this New York Times piece on Nvidia, Megaspeed, and the short seller who was asking the hard questions back in May, while the rest of the market shrugged. This is the first time I've ever considered short sellers necessary. Ever.

I called Comcast about a pricing problem recently and knew within a minute that I was talking to an AI agent. It had the pauses, the little stumbles, the verbal throat-clearing. I caught it. Millions of people will not. Tavus has now unveiled Griffin, which it says is the first model to pass a live video Turing test: in one-minute calls, 26 of 54 people took it for a real person, and the company itself concedes the same skill can be used to deceive. Watch the clips and see how long you last. This is the most extraordinary creation in a millennium, and it needs both support and constraints. We either write responsible rules now, or we hand it to bad actors who will talk the elderly out of their savings and bilk customers who never learn they were not dealing with a person. We have the worst possible administration for this moment, and the technology will not wait for a better one.

Every generation gets a technology hinge point, and this WSJ rundown of what is coming next reads like the personal computer moment of the 1980s doubled. Devices that respond to thought before you speak or type. Robots in the home as ordinary as a dishwasher, arriving first for whoever can afford the down payment. None of that scares me. What scares me is the gap between the leap and the landing. We keep reaching for the sexier fix, fusion before we have finished subsidizing solar, automation before we have built a floor under the people it replaces. Fusion power is a decade off no matter what we do. Solar subsidies could start Monday. Universal basic income is a policy choice, not a moonshot. Skip the ugly science fiction version of the future and we will address many of our self-inflicted problems.

The Gym
Marc Yacht

Different shapes and sizes
Dress varies from full cover
To minimal revealing wear
Ages from the young to old
Pressing, pulling, pushing, straining.

At the gym are the strong, the weak
The bent over, the straight, walker users
Some with wheelchairs, others aided
Envied, the strongmen lifting heavy iron
Heard, the metallic echo of dropped weights.

Talk is in whispers or just silence,
The solo effort is the focus
One moves from one machine to another
A quiet drifting across the floor
Often await a selected bench.

A unique rhythmic movement
The machines appear alive
The users grunt and groan
The pretty catch the eye
The aged struggle, wishing for lost youth.

It has been a great week. I saw the most beautiful bird I’ve seen in thirty years at our feeder. I felt fortunate. My phone was upstairs, so I grabbed the bird ID book, but then the bird was gone.

Life goes fast. Do something each day to make the world a better place. Be a good human.