Bring On The New Year…

   

Yeah, I know, the jpeg jokes just write themselves. And, are really not all that funny.

 

Neither is this:

    

 

15 minute video. I screen-scraped the first 1:45 of the audio transcript.

We are taught that wars start with a gunshot. An assassination in Sarajevo, a surprise attack on a harbor, a tank crossing a border. But financial history tells a different story. It tells us that the gunshot is merely the final act of a tragedy that was written years earlier in the ledgers of central banks and the balance sheets of failing empires. 

War in its truest sense does not begin on the battlefield. It begins when the money stops working. It begins when a nation US debt becomes so crushing that the only way to erase it is to destroy the creditor. It begins when the global trade system fractures and it becomes cheaper to seize resources by force than to buy them on the open market. It begins when the illusion of prosperity collapses and leaders need a common enemy to save themselves from their own angry citizens.

We are standing on the precipice of such a moment. The year is [now] 2026. The global economy is sitting on a $300 trillion debt bomb. The United States is borrowing $1 trillion every hundred days just to keep the lights on. China is facing a deflationary collapse that threatens the legitimacy of its regime, and trust in the global reserve currency, the US dollar, is fracturing. Economists call this a structural convergence. Historians have a simpler name for it. They call it the pre-war era. 

In 1914, the global financial system broke and the world went to war. In 1939, the trade system broke and the world went to war. Now, the indicators are flashing red again. Welcome to the financial coin historian. Today we are not just analyzing a recession. We are investigating the terrifying possibility that the financial crisis of 2026 will be the trigger for World War III. We will show you the mathematical inevitability of the debt cycle. We will expose the war economy that is already being built in the shadows. And we will explain why when the check finally comes due, the price will be paid not in gold, but in blood. This is the story of the war that the bankers built…

I don't yet buy all of the argument, and I wonder whether the text was AI-written rather than by a human historian with requisite Cred. We do in fact face a number of potential national and global large-scale adversities. And with people in charge like "War Secretary" Pete Hegseth, one would rationally be forgiven for elevated angst. (And then, there's Pete's boss, now abstrusely/overtly threatening to invade Iran. 3 a.m. Jan 2, Truth Social, "We're locked and loaded and ready to go.") 

Cosplayer-in-Chief

Short of WWIII, might we "merely" experience The AI Bubble in 2026, given the recursive, circular, Enron-Worldcom-esqe revenue laundering increasingly hiding largely in plain sight these days?  

FINANCIAL ALCHEMY UPDATE

 

 

Stealing The Future, 'eh?

 

Andrew Ross Sorkin?

 

UPDATE 

From WIRED

What aviation would be good at—moving people from one place to another, much more quickly than was possible with cars, trains, or horses—was clear enough early on. This is what elevates AI bubbledom to another level: The promise of AI, to investors, is nearly infinite. It’s beyond uncertain. It’s unknowable. And we should note that AI arrived after much of a decade of near-zero interest rate policy that led Silicon Valley investors to place bets on companies with little to speak of when it came to business models, but boasting big narratives. Uber, the poster child startup of the era, founded in 2009, did not post a profitable year until 2023. And the AI narrative is ‘Uber for X’ on hallucinogenic steroids. Different parts of the AI story, whether it’s, say, ‘AI will cure cancer’ or ‘AI will automate all jobs’, appeal to investors and partners of every stripe, making it uniquely powerful in its bubble-inflating capacities. And so dangerous to the economy.

It’s worth reiterating that two of the closest analogs AI seems to have in tech bubble history are aviation and broadcast radio. Both were wrapped in high degrees of uncertainty and both were hyped with incredibly powerful coordinating narratives. Both were seized on by pure play companies seeking to capitalize on the new game-changing tech, and both were accessible to the retail investors of the day. Both helped inflate a bubble so big that when it burst, in 1929, it left us with the Great Depression...

Read/listen to all of it. 

Regulating Emergent Artificial Intelligence?

From Scientific American.

China is pushing ahead on plans to regulate humanlike artificial intelligence, including by forcing AI companies to ensure that users know they are interacting with a bot online.

 
Under a proposal released on Saturday by China’s cyberspace regulator, people would have to be informed if they were using an AI-powered service—both when they logged in and again every two hours…

Additionally, AI companies would have to undergo security reviews and inform local government agencies if they rolled out any new humanlike AI tools. And chatbots that tried to engage users on an emotional level would be banned from generating any content that would encourage suicide or self-harm or that could be deemed damaging to mental health. They would also be barred from generating outputs related to gambling or obscene or violent content.

A mounting body of research shows that AI chatbots are incredibly persuasive, and there are growing concerns around the technology’s addictiveness and its ability to sway people toward harmful actions.

…The proposal … stands in contrast to Washington, D.C.’s stuttering approach to regulating the technology. This past January President Donald Trump scrapped a Biden-era safety proposal for regulating the AI industry. And earlier this month Trump targeted state-level rules designed to govern AI, threatening legal action against states with laws that the federal government deems to interfere with AI progress.

Pretty interesting. The current U.S. federal government under Donald Trump, abetted by his "conservative" SCOTUS majority, has been on a relentless ideological jihad to scuttle regulations at every turn, irrespective of their rational governance utility. 

China's plans could change—the draft proposal is open to comment until January 25, 2026. But the effort underscores Beijing’s push to advance the nation’s domestic AI industry ahead of that of the U.S., including through the shaping of global AI regulation. —SciAm

BobbyG's quickie "regulatory" elevator speech.

 

EPA CLIA NRC DOE DOD OSHA HHS ONC FDA FTC OCC FDIC 

 

The foregoing comprise the U.S. federal administrative/regulatory entities with which my wife and I have had in-depth personal experience across our respective careers.

To the extent that it casually slips your notice, human transactional affairs get “regulated“ one way or another. Pursuant to our constitution, U.S. Federal legislation passed by Congress and signed into statutes (the USC) instruct appropriate officials on the "what" that is intended to be accomplished (sometimes including "why" statements). Those USC measures include instructions pertaining to the "who," "how," "where," and "when" provisions to be "faithfully executed" within the mechanisms of governance—typically by relevant executive department executives and subordinate designees (federal statutes routinely contain phrases authorizing requisite actions "as the Secretary shall determine..."). Such activities comprise the specs within the CFR, the "Code of Federal Regulations."

 

The subordinate CFR development process commences with a "NPRM,"—a "Notice of Proposed Rulemaking" providing for public participation in the development of "Final Rules" that hew to the intent and scope of the statutes.

 

Yeah, regs can been bloated, inefficient, and otherwise off-point, but there are in fact long-standing "administrative law" processes available to remediate legislative operational inadequacies.

 

It's called "representative Democracy" at work.

 

BUT, THEN, THERE'S THE DONALD

 

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1.  Purpose.  United States leadership in Artificial Intelligence (AI) will promote United States national and economic security and dominance across many domains.  Pursuant to Executive Order 14179 of January 23, 2025 (Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence), I revoked my predecessor’s attempt to paralyze this industry and directed my Administration to remove barriers to United States AI leadership.  My Administration has already done tremendous work to advance that objective, including by updating existing Federal regulatory frameworks to remove barriers to and encourage adoption of AI applications across sectors.  These efforts have already delivered tremendous benefits to the American people and led to trillions of dollars of investments across the country.  But we remain in the earliest days of this technological revolution and are in a race with adversaries for supremacy within it. 

To win, United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation.  But excessive State regulation thwarts this imperative.  First, State-by-State regulation by definition creates a patchwork of 50 different regulatory regimes that makes compliance more challenging, particularly for start-ups.  Second, State laws are increasingly responsible for requiring entities to embed ideological bias within models.  For example, a new Colorado law banning “algorithmic discrimination” may even force AI models to produce false results in order to avoid a “differential treatment or impact” on protected groups.  Third, State laws sometimes impermissibly regulate beyond State borders, impinging on interstate commerce…

Need I elaborate?

 

More to come...

Laurie Segall is doing important work

MostlyHuman.com

Saw this woman interviewed on CNN early this afternoon. Intrigued, I looked up her Sheet. Suitably impressed, I bought her book. A wonderful read thus far. Lots more to ensue.

 

 

UPDATE

 

I'm halfway through Laurie's book. Really enjoying it. Found this interview on YouTube.

 

 

I wish her the very best with her independent company.

 

 

Certainly warrants ongoing follow-up. She launched on December 2nd, 2019 ...

Today, we’re launching Dot Dot Dot, a news and entertainment company focused on the intersection of technology and humanity.

 

It’s the culmination of 10 years of reporting on technology as it became increasingly intertwined with us humans. I’ve been in the trenches since I stepped into the newsroom a month after graduating college, grabbed a Twitter handle, and saw the power of technology disrupt the newsroom, and ultimately humanity...

12/28 UPDATE 

Finished the book last night. Painfully candid personal revelations from her childhood forward, interspliced with astute reporting on the frenetic, chaotic digitech sector, and the evolving corporate politics at CNN. I kept having flashback wafts of Silicon Valley HBO and Apple TV+'s The Morning Show.

 

Yeah...

 

Relevant prior posting:

Easy Money + Gilded Rage = Stealing the Future

Also, I've been recurrently riffing on "Artificial Intelligence" / Robotics stuff for a bit more than a decade.

 

More stuff: "Trajector(ies)? AGI? Transhumanist Revolution?" 

Other timely triangulation comes to mind as well. Encountered a book review in my Science Magazine recently.

 

Laurie...

MONDAY UPDATE 12/29

 

A video appearance featuring Laurie Segall posted a couple of weeks ago. Well worth your time.

 

More to come...

A high school classmate and friend of mine just posted this on Facebook

After spending 178 days aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Ron Garan returned to Earth carrying something far heavier than space equipment or mission data. He returned with a transformed understanding of humanity itself.

From orbit, Earth doesn’t look like a collection of countries, borders, or competing interests. It appears as a single, radiant blue sphere suspended in darkness. No lines divide continents. No flags mark territory. From 250 miles above the surface, every human conflict suddenly looks small—and every human connection looks unavoidable.

Garan described watching lightning storms crackle across entire continents, auroras ripple like living curtains over the poles, and city lights glow softly against the planet’s night side. What struck him most wasn’t Earth’s power—it was its fragility. The atmosphere protecting all life appeared as a paper-thin blue halo, barely visible, yet responsible for everything that breathes, grows, and survives.

That view triggered what astronauts call the “overview effect”—a profound cognitive shift reported by many who see Earth from space. It’s the sudden realization that humanity shares a single, closed system. No backups. No escape route. No second home.

Garan began questioning humanity’s priorities. On Earth, economic growth is often treated as the ultimate goal. From space, that hierarchy collapses. He argues that the correct order should be planet first, society second, economy last—because without a healthy planet, neither society nor economy can exist.

He often compares Earth to a spacecraft. A ship carrying billions of crew members, all dependent on the same life-support systems. And yet, many behave as passengers rather than caretakers, assuming someone else is responsible for keeping things running.

From orbit, pollution has no nationality. Climate systems ignore borders. Environmental damage in one region ripples across the entire globe. The divisions we defend so fiercely on the ground simply don’t exist from above.

Garan’s message isn’t abstract or idealistic. It’s practical. If humanity continues to treat Earth as an unlimited resource rather than a shared system, the consequences will be universal.

Seeing Earth from space didn’t make him feel small. It made him feel accountable.

Because when you truly understand that we’re all riding the same fragile spacecraft through the universe, the idea of “us versus them” quietly disappears—replaced by a single, unavoidable truth:

There is only us.

 The source Facebook Group name is Informatify.

 

Thanks, Tom.

The Golden Fleet for the Trump "Golden Age"

The above is from the U.S. Navy's official .mil website

Imagine the CEO of a car company telling his engineers and designers that he wants them to make a new line of automobiles. He knows nothing about cars and has no interest in how they’re produced, but he knows one thing for certain: The line will be named after himself. Everyone claps—because of course they do—but no one really knows what comes next, except that the line needs to look sexy and sporty.

That’s pretty much what the president did today when he announced that a new class of ship named after one Donald J. Trump would be added to the “Golden Fleet,” his name for a renewed U.S. Navy. (You might wonder about the propriety of a sitting president naming naval vessels, among other things, after himself. Pardon the expression, but that ship has sailed.)

Trump’s press conference today was among his more haywire performances, and his slushy delivery and meandering answers will not halt speculation about his cognitive health. When asked for his endgame in the confrontation with Venezuela, for example, he launched into his usual lines about people being sent into the United States from prisons and mental hospitals, as if someone had hit the wrong button and played the wrong recording. He also reiterated that he wanted U.S. ships to be more attractive, noting that he would be involved in the design of the new vessels because “I am a very aesthetic person.”...

I taught military officers for more than two decades at the Naval War College. One thing I learned from conversations with my students was that the Navy really needs to invest more in its officers and sailors, and reduce the tempo of operations that are burning them out. The best ships in the world won’t mean much if their crews are fatigued and poorly trained. As the defense analyst John Ferrari recently wrote, for years, the Navy has been “structurally compromised” because its people are exhausted, its ships are “aging faster than they could be repaired,” and the fleet’s readiness is declining. These are serious problems that require serious work, but Trump has found a way around all of this irritating chatter by sticking his name on a new ship and telling the military to go build it.

At Mar-a-Lago today, Trump reiterated his demand that Greenland must become part of the United States. His plan for a fleet of Trump-branded battleships is only slightly more likely to happen than a victory parade in Nuuk—and neither is in the national interest of the United States.
   
     —Tom Nichols PhD, US Naval War College professor emeritus

'Splainin' the nascent AI market bubble like we're 5

Jacob Ward on our rapidly expanding post-truth era

 

I followed Jacob Ward's excellent work back when he worked for NBC. Cited him here back in December 2018. I now follow him via Substack, specifically URL'd at TheRipCurrent.com.

 

This is an intriguing segment.

 

A few relevant prior riffs of mine. Search on "965."

 

UPDATE

 

Check out Jacob's Ethics Statement page. Read all 0f it, including the lengthy "A Note on Trust." Sold me, bro'.

 

Jacob's book. 

Click here

Another book jumps the rope line. Just started reading.

 

I've been gumshoeing "Artificial Intelligence" related stuff for a decade or so. 

I don't much care for Substack (notwithstanding my passive account there), a weak authoring platform with a chaotic viewer interface. Nonetheless, based on what I've viewed and read today, I will be upgrading yo a paying RipCurrent subscriber.

 

UPDATE

 

Trump just signed an E.O. re-scheduling marijuana. Jacob discusses the implications.

 

My 1998 grad thesis comprised an exhaustive examination of incoherent suspicionless workplace drug testing policies. Much of the policy idiocy remains in place, legalization initiatives notwithstanding.

 

OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

My Yooper sister always sends me Christmas tree ornaments. This one is priceless.

 

Love ya, Carole.
 

More shortly... 

Donald Trump addresses the nation

One photograph captures the entire 18 minute tirade.

Important Announcement to the nation from the 2025 FIFA Peace Prize Awardee:

December 16th, 2025, 6:46 EDT

Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us. The illegitimate Maduro Regime is using Oil from these stolen Oil Fields to finance themselves, Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping. For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. Therefore, today, I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela. The Illegal Aliens and Criminals that the Maduro Regime has sent into the United States during the weak and inept Biden Administration, are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace. America will not allow Criminals, Terrorists, or other Countries, to rob, threaten, or harm our Nation and, likewise, will not allow a Hostile Regime to take our Oil, Land, or any other Assets, all of which must be returned to the United States, IMMEDIATELY. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

DONALD J. TRUMP
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

_______________

 

National Televised Address to the country, Dec. 17th, 9 pm EDT

 

Rob and Michele Singer Reiner

 

 

 Below, one of my Facebook friends posted this.

 

 

 

 

Donnie doubles down. Imagine our surprise. 

 

What a horrific weekend. My intent had been to engage other worthy stuff. Mass shootings in Providence RI and Bondi Beach, Australia, and the Reiners tragedy muscled everything else aside.

"Everybody" loses?

Casino capitalism digital metastases 

 

Coming January 2026

The New Yorker

Having swallowed sports media, will gambling now devour other kinds of news? Last week, CNN announced a deal with Kalshi, a federally regulated online exchange where Americans can wager on current events, from basketball games and congressional elections to whether it will rain tomorrow in New York City. This marked Kalshi’s first partnership with a major news organization and, according to several close observers of the media business and gambling industry, could foreshadow a deluge of similar deals. After all, a decade ago, many outlets refused to even mention sports-betting odds. Then, in a blink, the shilling became inescapable.

Gambling has been creeping into political coverage for a while. Prediction markets, as sites like Kalshi are called, use odds that can also be interpreted as probabilities, and, because those odds reflect the distilled wisdom of everyone willing to put skin in the game, they have the allure of a crystal ball. A prediction market associated with the magazine Le Point, for example, has anticipated the results of the past two French Presidential elections more accurately than top polling firms. It’s now routine for American journalists, when assessing the state of a political race, to cite betting odds as a counterpoint to polls. Shortly after unveiling its partnership with Kalshi, however, CNN seemed willing to integrate gambling to a far more jarring degree...

 

The people behind prediction markets can be even more callous, while also offering even more opportunities to bet. (Last month, Mansour, the C.E.O. of Kalshi, said that the “long-term vision” for the company “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”) At a gaming conference in July, Josh Sterling, an attorney for Kalshi, was asked if regulators should enforce more consumer protections. “People are adults,” he answered, “and they’re allowed to spend their money however they want it, and if they lose their shirt, that’s on them.”

 Interesting. Just getting underway. See my recent post on "Polymarket."

 

See also "The Alabama Alumni Football League." WTF?

 

 

Danny Funt's book (above) is not yet released. Another on the topic was released earlier this year. I need to finish reading it.

 

Inside America’s preventable sports-gambling debacle

In 2018, the United States Supreme Court opened the floodgates for states to legalize betting on sports. Eager for revenue, almost forty states have done so. The result is the explosive growth of an industry dominated by companies like FanDuel and DraftKings. One out of every five American adults gambled on sports in 2023, amounting to $121 billion, more than they spent on movies and video games combined.

The rise of online sports gambling—the immediacy of betting with your phone, the ability of the companies to target users, the dynamic pricing and offers based on how good or bad of a gambler you are—has produced a public health crisis marked by addiction and far too many people, particularly young men, gambling more than they can afford to lose. Under intense lobbying from the gaming industry, states have created a system built around profit for sportsbooks, not the well-being of players.

In Losing Big, historian Jonathan D. Cohen lays out the astonishing emergence of online sports gambling, from sportsbook executives drafting legislation to an addicted gambler confessing their $300,000 losses. Sports gambling is here to stay, and the stakes could not be higher. Losing Big explains how this brewing crisis came to be, and how it can be addressed before new generations get hooked.

Rapidly spreading far beyond sports.

Stay tuned...