I would sincerely love our Council to take a minute to imagine a person who lives in DC, has a job, is a net fiscal contributor, and doesn't commit crimes. What have you done over the past year to improve the life of someone like that? What will you do next year?

I have Chase text me on all credit payments over $100. You can mute the number so it isn’t annoying, and I’ve caught one so far

"Call Her Daddy" host Alex Cooper & actress Sophia Bush: if a woman is questioning whether she can do better than her current husband, "the answer is always yes." "This idea that it's too late or you're too old, or who are you to want more, that's patriarchy. That is crazy."

this California wealth tax thing is just incredible. so in October 2025, a California healthcare union proposed a "one time" 5% tax on any billionaire's wealth. the ballot measure will be voted on next month. In early December 2025, California announced that it would be a retroactive tax if passed, applying to anyone with CA residency as of Jan 1, 2026. The objective is to pay for Medi-Cal, California's incredibly dysfunctional healthcare system. (which also functions as a glorified welfare apparatus, but that's a discussion for another time). polls reveal that the CA electorate is split around 50/50 on the tax, but prediction markets only give Prop 40 a ~23% chance of passing (there are competing measures on the ballet that would nullify it). there are 200 billionaires in CA, worth collectively somewhere between $2.3 and $2.6 trillion. 5% of that is around $100b, accounting for a small amount of attrition. proponents of the tax forecasted a significant windfall, assuming only a 10% departure rate. supporters thought they were being clever with the retroactive concept. no billionares would leave CA in the few short months between the tax being proposed and the residency cutoff date, without the tax even having passed yet, right? well as it turns out, they did. a new paper [1] from two academics at Stanford called "The Net Present Value of the California Billionaire Tax Act", argues that not only did more billionaires leave due to the proposed tax than its proponents expected, but that the value of the tax, if it does pass, is actually negative. proponents of the tax only assumed 10% avoidance, that is, only 10% of the taxable base of targeted billionaires would leave CA within the very short Oct-Dec 2025 window. Jaros and Rauh, the Stanford academics, find that a lower bound of 28.6% of the taxable base managed to leave. just based on known departures, those departures total $577b in net worth, or $28.8b in potential tax lost. this of course does not capture everyone (many left without announcing their departure), so the authors normalize to departure rates estimated from other wealth tax events, and apply other discounts for litigation, arriving arrive at a figure of only $28-$36b in forecasted tax revenues. but this isn't all! all of the income taxes paid by the departed billionaires are also forsaken. the authors estimate that CA billionaires pay $3.3- 5.8b in annual income taxes. they assume a midpoint of $2b lost in annual collections from departed billionaires. the net present value of that lost income stream is -$68.9 billion. so when you add it all up you get: + $30b one-time tax windfall (estimated) - $69b in present value of lost future income taxes = - 38.9b overall net present value of the tax of course, this analysis is highly estimate driven. the authors simulate the parameters 100k times and find a negative NPV of the implemented tax 85 percent of the time. and if the tax doesn't pass, which it's not looking like it will, California still ended up losing at least $577b in departed net worth, and they have permanently poisoned the well with entrepreneurs who will now worry about future wealth taxes. [1]: nber.org/system/files/workin…

Thinking about you today

*ANTHROPIC HAD $16.3B IN REVENUE IN FIRST HALF OF 2026: WSJ that's it?

Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot tesla.com/videos/full-self-d…

8 months later, looking at my bill and notice we are being charged $38/mo. for an inactive line that has 0 recorded activity. I call in, they confirm it was opened by an employee at their store in error. Now they won't refund/credit us because I'm just now noticing their error.

You'd think the land of the free would have just one major newspaper excited for the most amazing feats of the nation.

“I’m old. I’ve paid my home off,” said Ray Warner, a 72-year-old Akron resident. “Why would I pay property tax?” Across the country, homeowners are asking the same question and revolting against property taxes at a scale not seen in a half century. politico.com/news/magazine/2…

NET and CRWD have been relentless. Market is pricing a walled garden internet world optimized for bots, not humans

What if paying college kids millions of dollars and switching teams every year isn’t conductive to locking in

Absolutely incredible how many people think this is real. But we are talking about the dumbest cult alive, to be fair