Trillion Dollar Scale

The size of the hole.

I have applied to work for Anduril. Fingers crossed.

I’m in something of a panic because I have been realizing that I simply don’t appreciate the scale of the American economy. There’s the old joke about a million here and a million there and pretty soon you’ll be talking about real money. Events I’ve been paying attention to convince me that millionaires are a dime a dozen. I shouldn’t be thinking this way as a proper Peasant. Silly me. I thought my profession was based. It turns out that a great number of us can be erased by small shell scripts. Attending a professional conference these days costs more than Taylor Swift tickets.

I can remember when the tallest buildings in the city of Los Angeles, were constructed for about one million dollars per story. So the twin towers of what is was then Bank of America and is now City National Plaza would be about $100 million. It’s almost preposterous to think that someone like Tim Cook would aspire to the corner office in a skyscraper downtown. In fact, he built a multibillion dollar donut in the suburbs. I doubt that he has taken the rainbow down.

Taking the rainbow down is a tack that the Administration is on, for better or worse. What everyone recognizes that moving fast and breaking things is the way of the now. It doesn’t matter if it is a well considered or wise idea. In America it merely has to be a billion dollar idea. That’s the starting point.

The new head of Microsoft has something to say about the hype around AI investments.

These are the kind of discussions that can be held in America; we can think in trillions of dollars. And I only know this because the interviewer Dwarkesh Patel is a name I’ve heard around here. But I’d be number 27,093 if I subscribed to his ‘stack. That’s how long the line is - it’s like applying to a state university. That would make Mr. Patel, only very modestly famous. Still, I’m very pleased that Satya is playing by the rules of supply and demand, but consider all of the hype behind Project 2025 and the Stargate Project. They don’t necessarily have to be good ideas, they just have to be in the trillion scale.

Actually it’s probably more appropriate for me to talk about things around that scale from now on. It’s kind of the popular aggregation dosh point for us in the second quarter of the 21st century. Stargate ranks a 0.5 The US armed forces get about 0.85 per year. The gross national debt is 36.22. Trillion.

Ferguson’s Law
Ferguson’s Law, articulated by historian Niall Ferguson, posits that “Any great power that spends more on interest payments on its debt than on defense will not be great for long.” This principle underscores the potential threat to a nation’s global standing when its debt servicing costs surpass its defense expenditures. Consider the tone of our society. Would we rather build weapons or pay down debt. I suppose that depends on what seems to be the greater threat, bankruptcy or hostile enemies. Surely you know someone who, given the most recent election results feels as if they are surrounded by Nazis. Especially if these people are smugly affluent, they are not bloody likely to see any enemies overseas. Paris and Cozumel are such lovely places don’t you know? The enemy is domestic, sez they/them. So there is a non-zero possibility that we will enter into domestic squabbling and, as we see, come up with excuses not to do anything radical about drastically cutting government spending.

But I just watched the fiction that is Civil War. More on that later.