Author: CBD

Inflation is a cold-hearted bitch. It steals our paychecks, and we will never recover the loss. Sure, compensation eventually catches up (mostly), but the gap between rising prices and rising wages is significant. And inflation destroys any possibility of planning for many companies. How do you budget for next year or next quarter if you…

Repeat after me: “We are not the world’s policeman.” To paraphrase Otto von Bismarck, “Ukraine is not worth the bones of a single United States Marine.” So the idea of some security agreement with Ukraine that mirrors NATO’s Article 5 is essentially allowing Ukraine into NATO without all of that pesky cooperation and standardization and…

The smug pomposity of Western Europe in the face of overwhelming data that show a rapidly collapsing culture and society is fascinating to behold. Birth rates among natives are far below replacement, church attendance has cratered, tax rates are onerous, crime is exploding, Churches are being burned or turned into mosques, free speech is now…

It’s so easy to blame the Democrat machine for this ridiculous outcome, but the reality is that it is the feckless, spineless, gutless, traitorous Republican leadership in the United States Senate that is holding up confirmations. The Democrats are doing what they always do…use every means at their disposal (fair or foul) and vote as…

[Hyde Park, December 2025] I spent a pleasant Friday evening at a restaurant in Canary Wharf, in the Docklands of London. Yes, those famous docks that were Hitler’s particular target. The area has been built up into a financial center that has become quite an impressive place. It’s far from the center of London, but…

People who think about the evolution of warfare have sleepless nights worrying about drones. Israel and Ukraine are ground-zero for drone warfare…and the pace of technological change is breathtaking! In a few short years we have gone from large drones flying high, armed with a single missile or a few cameras, to swarms of drones…

At what population density do immigrants retain their original culture, and have the ability to reject the culture of their “adopted” country? If a small number of immigrants show up in a typical American city, they will be swamped by the tremendous cultural pressure of America. Some of their neighbors might be immigrants, but not…

Hong Kong fire death toll rises to 128, with 200 still missing and 8 more arrested Residents in Wang Fuk Court have said they repeatedly complained to the city’s Labor Department about the flammability of the protective green mesh that was used to cover bamboo scaffolding raised around the buildings, only to be told that…

Everywhere they go they cause problems. Egypt’s border with Gaza is unbelievably fortified, because Egypt’s significant social and economic problems don’t need an injection of low-intelligence, violent troublemakers. The so-called “refugees” from Israel’s War of Independence never integrated themselves into Lebanon or Jordan or Syria for the same reasons. Of course, the concept of a…

So…is AI a financial bubble, or is it an evolution in computing, customer service, data management, and research of all kinds? Yes. 40% of the S&P500 market cap is directly or indirectly involved with AI, which is a disturbing concentration. But whatever one thinks of AI, and to be honest, I don’t think much of…