Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetence, corruption, and policy failures:
• I looked into CoreWeave and the abyss gazed back: Meet the company Nvidia is propping up. (The Verge)
• How billionaires took over American politics: The concentration of wealth among the richest Americans is unlike anything in history — and so is billionaires’ influence in politics. (Washington Post) see also The top 20 billionaires influencing American politics: Campaign donations from the country’s richest are soaring. But only 12 percent of the public says billionaires have a positive impact on society. (Washington Post)
• Elon Musk, The World’s Most Shameless Public Figure, Does It Again: If it is a coincidence, it is an era-defining one that the president of the United States is in competition with the world’s richest person for the title of most shameless public figure. Tesla shareholders agreed this month to award the company’s chief executive, Elon Musk, an absurd $1 trillion pay package. Tesla has all the trappings of a big public corporation, but laws, corporate procedures and governance structures seem to have more often enabled rather than checked Mr. Musk, who appears to relish transcending the limits of reason and seemliness. (New York Times)
• ‘Nobody Listened To Me’: The Quest to Be MTG: All Marjorie Taylor Greene ever wanted was someone to pay attention to her. (Politico)
• Trump’s One Weird Trick for Eliminating Bad News: Delete It: The disappearance of inconvenient facts and the remaking of reality. (The Bulwark) see also The growing problem with China’s unreliable numbers: Beijing’s GDP figures have drawn scrutiny for years but the questions have become more acute. (Financial Times)
• They Don’t Understand Orwell At All: On censorship and hypocrisy. How charming it must be to invoke George Orwell while cheering the richest man on the planet as he systematically buries dissent on the platform he purchased with the explicit promise of “free speech absolutism.” How delightfully convenient to wave Nineteen Eighty-Four around like a talisman against “woke censorship” while a billionaire who wielded formal government power algorithmically suppresses people, whose crime is documenting, with receipts, exactly what they’re doing. (Notes from the Circus)
• New international student enrolment drops 17% at US universities. Foreign students make up about 6% of total US enrollment and contributed $55bn (£41bn) to the economy, according to 2024 figures from the commerce department. (Yahoo) see also Under RFK Jr., CDC promotes false vaccines-autism link it once discredited: The CDC’s website now says health authorities ignored evidence of a potential connection between vaccines and autism, despite dozens of studies showing no link. (Washington Post)
• Lost Vegas: An entire city built on Human Beings’ Innumeracy – how could this possibly go wrong? (Slate)
• Why Lindsey Halligan, Trump loyalist turned U.S. Attorney, is in trouble: Halligan has no experience, however, in prosecuting federal crimes. Nevertheless, on September 23, Trump appointed Halligan as interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. (Popular Information) see also The Unraveling of the Justice Department: Sixty attorneys describe a year of chaos and suspicion. By Emily Bazelon and Rachel Poser. (New York Times)
• MAGA: You Are In A Propaganda-Induced Psychosis. Wake Up. The way you understand the world—built up by scrolling through TikTok, sharing Facebook posts, forwarding chain emails across retirement homes, and all the ways you build up a picture of the world in your head—you’re living in a simulation. It isn’t real. The woke mob isn’t after you. There is no deep state. Donald Trump is a crook, and deep down you know it. (Notes from the Circus)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Morgan Housel, whose new book, “The Art of Spending Money, Simple Choices for a Richer Life” was just published. His first book, “The Psychology of Money” sold over 10 million copies.
Job growth has averaged 40k since April, all of it in healthcare. It averaged 170k a month in 2024.
Source: Dean Baker
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