Everyone to Your Balcony!

By now, most of us know about solar energy. Most of us live in states that have at least some solar energy production, in varying degrees, and a little under 10% of homeowners have installed their own solar panels. Still, though, many communities don’t want solar farms, and installing residential solar panels is expensive and requires permits and expert installation.

Fortunately, balcony solar is coming.

Talk about DIY - hello, balcony solar. Credit: Microsoft Designer

It seems like people have never thought about electricity as much as we have lately. Prices are skyrocketing, with no end in sight, especially with the plethora of energy-thirsty data centers being built. President Trump has steadfastly criticized, and tried to halt, most kinds of alternative energy that might help mitigate cost increases.

Despite the President’s opposition to alternative energy, last month solar overtook coal for electricity production for the first time, although that’s as much about coal’s portion dropping as solar’s rising – and both lag nuclear and, especially, natural gas. The U.S. solar industry is still growing, adding 7.8 gigawatts direct current in Q1 2026, but at declining rates, in part due to the expiration of the 30% tax credit for residential clean energy.

Balcony solar doesn’t need solar farms. Balcony solar doesn’t need big, expensive rooftop panels. Done right, balcony solar doesn’t need regulatory approval or expert installation. Just plug it in on your balcony or deck, and – voila! -- you’re generating your own electricity.

Sounds too good to be true? Tell that to the over one million homes in Germany already using them, at a cost of as low as $200. The U.S., units can be had for as little as $400.

Now, don’t get overly excited. They won’t power your whole house, only supplying an estimated 10-25% of your electricity. They’re not a backup generator. Unlike many rooftop panels, they don’t typically feed into the electric grid (which then gives you a credit on your bill); they instead just reduce the amount of electricity you draw from the grid. Proponents claim they pay off in just a few years, the time depending largely on how expensive electricity is in your area.

Currently, though, they’re not legal in most states, as laws and regulations generally don’t distinguish them from larger units. Plug-In Solar says there are 30 states with such legislation in 2026: 5 have passed, 5 have failed, 11 have stalled, and the rest are in other stages. Utah was the first state to pass enabling legislation, in 2025, with Colorado, Maryland, Maine, and Virginia joining it this year, while Georgia, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming have rejected them.

State of balcony solar legislation. Credit: Plug-In Solar USA

Things are not quite as simple as proponents maintain, according to Casey Crownhart, writing in MIT Technology Review. Joseph Bablo, manager of principal engineering, energy, and industrial automation at UL Solutions told him there are three main concerns: overloading the house’s electrical circuit, potential for an outlet’s ground fault circuit interruption (GFIC) to fail if current is going back in, and the risk of power continuing to run if the plug is disconnected.

UL Solutions is working on a framework to address those, which would likely include a special outlet that an electrician would have to install. “I know they want to say ‘No electrician, no permits’—we’re not there,” according to Mr. Bablo.

Tell that to all those Germans.

Raymond Ward, the Utah (Republican) state representative whose bill allowing them passed in Utah, made the point: “You look over there and say, ​‘Well, that’s working,’ So what is it that stops us from having it here?” Note, though: even the Utah law still requires compliance with the National Electrical Code and a product safety standard from Underwriters Laboratories, neither of which is currently available.

So there is still work to be done. In Germany it took “relentless individuals” to make the necessary changes, according to Christian Ofenheusle, the founder of EmpowerSource, a Berlin-based company that promotes balcony solar. We’re going to need some of those too.

Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, a media company focused on climate change, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times in praise of balcony solar: The Tiny Solar Panel That Could Change America. He recognizes that they won’t replace the current grid and that there “are still some technical questions to resolve,” but I like his vision: “It will be bought off-the-shelf like a consumer product, not sold by a team, like a swimming pool; it can be installed by just about anyone, with no special training; and it requires minimal approval.”

His vision goes further than just the direct impacts:

But if I can dream for a second, I hope balcony solar’s charisma and low cost help us imagine the energy-abundant future we are so close to achieving. Americans and our government have a tendency to treat the current energy system, and the current set of technologies that enliven it, as finished and fixed. In reality, they are always changing. 

Plug-in solar demonstrates one version of the coming changes: With its small size, it makes balcony and backyard power production possible. But it’s only one messenger of many from that new world. As batteries continue to develop, larger and larger amounts of energy will be stored at ever-smaller sizes and scales, and that will enable innovations and technologies we cannot yet imagine — technologies that will change our world as much as the sextant, the bicycle or the jet engine. 

That’s a vision we should all buy into.

Indeed, balcony solar is already inspiring people to take other actions to help fulfill that kind of vision. "They are a gateway to other measures such as larger photovoltaic systems or the purchase of an electric car or a heat pump," says Christoph Kost, head of energy systems analysis at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, a German research organization. 

As Mr. Meyer says: “Balcony solar is a small way that apartment- and condo-dwelling Americans can take ownership of their energy choices and cut down their pollution on the margins.”

Balcony solar won’t solve all of our issues with electricity, but it can help mitigate rising costs and perhaps, just perhaps, point us in the new directions Mr. Meyer is hoping for.

Oceans, Away

It probably didn’t show up on your calendar, but today is World Ocean Day. It’s a day meant to catalyze “collective action for a healthy ocean and a stable climate,” and has been around since 2002 (although the U.N. didn’t officially recognize it until 2008). Its website claims a network of over 2,000 organizations, in 180 countries.

I wish we had more to celebrate.

You'd think that with World Ocean Day that we'd treat them better. Credit: Microsoft Designer

Many have recognized the irony of humans calling our planet “Earth,” when, in fact, 71% of its surface is covered with water. Even more amazing, oceans account for 99% of the biosphere. We come from the ocean, and still owe much of our existence to it.

Unfortunately, these are not good times for oceans, and we’re to blame. The most recent World Ocean Assessment from the U.N. highlights:

• “The ocean matters to everyone, everywhere;
• The ocean is under intensifying stress;
• Climate change is transforming conditions;
• Biodiversity is declining across nearly every marine habitat;
• Pollution is widespread and increasing;
• Ocean food systems are threatened.”

The report concludes: “The coming decade is decisive: without rapid, coordinated global action, ocean health will continue to decline, threatening climate stability, biodiversity resilience, food security, livelihoods and the wellbeing of billions.”

I think about this in light of last month’s announcement by the National Science Foundation that it was “descoping” the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Major Facility, beginning next week. That’s a $368 million deep-ocean observation system “that delivers real-time data from more than 900 instruments to address critical science questions regarding the world's oceans.” Some 900 instruments will be removed, in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

OOI map. Credit: NSF/OOI

Michael England, a spokesman for the National Science Foundation, told Eric Niiler of The New York Times that the decision “aligns with N.S.F.’s wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure.”

In other words, we (the Trump Administration) didn’t invent it, and it relates to climate change, so we don’t want it.

Craig McLean, who was the acting chief scientist at the NOAA during the first Trump term, told Mr. Niiler: “This reflects the further lack of understanding that the current administration has of scientific value and scientific merit. By dismantling such a system, we push the United States back yet again into a rear seat in global scientific leadership.”

Scientists are aghast. Sabrina Speich, an expert in global ocean monitoring at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris and chair of the ocean expert panel of the Global Climate Observing System, told The Guardian: “Ocean heat content is the most robust indicator of climate change we have – not just of what is happening in the ocean, but of the entire climate system. Lose them, and you lose your ability to track not just ocean warming but the climate system as a whole – they are a proxy for variables that become unavailable the moment the observations stop.”  

John P Abraham, professor of engineering at the University of St Thomas, called the move “penny-wise, pound foolish,” adding: “The US government wants to save less than a billion in sensors, which are the eyes and ears of the ocean. We have hundreds of billions in climate costs per year. The cost of the observation system is a fraction of the climate costs from hurricanes and storms that hit the US.”

“Walking away from a $368-million investment in a state-of-the-art system, a feat of engineering already paid for by the American people, is absolutely myopic,” Chris Robbins, the associate director of scientific initiatives for Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit group, complained to Mr. Niiler.

Democrats in Congress vow to fight the cuts, but lack the votes to do anything. The E.U. said it was stepping up its ocean monitoring efforts, independent of the U.S.’s action, with its OceanEye initiative, but that will be a long term process and won’t immediately offset the U.S. cuts.

Meanwhile, a new study has found that a “cold blob” in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation may suggest big changes ahead: “a further weakening of Atlantic heat transport in future climate change could lead to serious impacts on climate and weather conditions in Europe and other parts of the world.”

Sure doesn’t seem like a great time to lose our ocean monitoring abilities.

Even worse are the Trump Administration’s gung-ho attitude towards deep sea mining. It is well known that the ocean’s floor has lots of valuable minerals, and some mining companies are delirious at the prospect of strip mining them. The NOAA has starting mapping some 30,000 square nautical miles off American Samoa, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is investigating several other offshore areas, both with the intent of allowing deep sea mining.

The U.S. may even issue permits for seabeds not owned by the U.S., or any country.

“No one has done commercial-scale deep-sea mining,” said Becca Loomis, a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, ““This would be brand new, and they’re kind of forging ahead. Rushing ahead with this industry is really scary for the ocean, the ocean ecosystem, for people who rely on fisheries.” 

A new review of existing studies found how relatively little we understand about the impacts of such mining, but what little we do know suggest there are large and longstanding impacts on biodiversity.

Just this week, a Greenpeace study found thriving new-to-us ecosystems in the Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge “We barely understand how these communities function, which environmental factors influence their distribution, or how sensitive they are to human disturbances. Likewise, our discovery of several sponge species that are potentially new to science highlights how little is known about Arctic ecosystems, said Dr Julio A. Diaz, deep-sea researchers, Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University.

“The deep sea mining industry has not yet started to tear up the seabed, and we therefore have the opportunity to stop an environmental disaster before it happens.” said Dr. Sandra Schöttner, Chief Scientist, Greenpeace International.

One can imagine how little the Trump Administration – whose mantra is “drill, baby, drill” – cares about such impacts.

I’m thrilled that there is such a thing as World Ocean Day, but it’s hard to celebrate it in the midst of all that is happening to degrade and disrupt our oceans. I’m quite certain that the oceans will be around long after humans will be, but it’s unfathomable about how much damage we’ll do to them while we are.

DuckDuckGo Goes Where No AI Can Go

It’s getting so you can’t avoid AI. If your 401k doesn’t have some AI-related stocks, forget about your investment returns. You can’t open a website without some AI chatbot trying to help you. If you use a Microsoft product, it really, really wants you to have CoPilot assist you. If you work, AI is either coming for your job, or your bosses are looking at how AI can assist you in that job. Google, long the king of search, thinks it has seen the future of search and that future is AI.

Credit: DuckDuckGo

Very exciting times, right? Golden opportunities ahead for sure. Well, not everyone is thrilled. The Wall Street Journal recently chronicled “The American Rebellion Against AI,” citing such examples about college commencement speakers getting booed when they mention AI, polls showing respondents’ concerns about AI, anger at the boom of data centers and the spillover effect on consumer utility bills, even Sam Altman’s house getting firebombed.

AI may be inevitable, but that doesn’t mean people have to be happy about it, and it doesn’t mean that everyone is going along with it. DuckDuckGo is trying to help.

DuckDuckGo, in case you aren’t familiar, is a search engine that focuses on privacy. Its website brags: “We’re about data protection, not data collection,” and adding: “Search, browse, and use AI privately, keeping your information to yourself and away from hackers, scammers, and privacy-invasive companies.”  Its AI features are optional.

If you’ve never used DuckDuckGo, join the club. Let’s put it this way: reaching Bing’s levels of search is aspirational. But that may be changing, thanks to AI, or, rather, to AI backlash.

When Google made its May 19 I/O announcement about how it was further incorporating AI into its search, DuckDuckGo benefited.  The company claimed on Bluesky that visits to its “No AI” search page have tripled since Google’s announcement (“and still rising”).  TechCrunch reports “U.S. app installs were also up 18.1% week-over-week, with U.S. iOS app installs peaking at 69.9% week-over-week growth.”  Users can use the DuckDuckGo browser or download extensions for Chrome or Firefox.

“People aren’t just complaining about Google’s AI search overhaul, they’re leaving,” the company’s official X account tweeted. “Momentum is growing. It’s time to Fire Google.”

DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg told tech journalist Paul Thurrott:

Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out. As a result, their results are getting worse, not better. We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want. That’s why we’re seeing a spike in people coming to DuckDuckGo this week, it’s as simple as that. Not only do we respect user choice, but also user privacy. Everything you do in DuckDuckGo is private, we don’t collect search histories or chats and nothing is used for AI training.

Mr. Thurrott notes: “Usage on iPhone and iPad was highest, with an average growth of 33 percent and peak growth of 69.9 percent on May 25.”

It’s not that DuckDuckGo is against AI per se. It offers Duck.ai, Search Assist, and an AI image filter. It just wants you to be in control. DuckDuckGo chief communications and policy officer Kamyl Bazbaz told Mr. Thurrott: “One of the most popular search features we’ve launched in years is a filter that removes AI images from image results. The other most popular feature? Search Assist, which uses AI to anonymously generate answers to search queries at the top of the search page. People just want a choice.” She noted that Google has such a monopoly that it can force AI on its users without fear of them leaving.

The flood of users to DuckDuckGo suggests that might not be true…yet.

The problem is that AI is coming at us too fast. It is evolving much faster than we can get used to it; we’re thinking up use cases for AI models that were valid several months ago, but now are woefully out of date. The future is coming at us too fast, and many of us don’t like it.

Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai recently admitted to The New York Times:

A.I. is viewed as the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It’s progressing at an extraordinary pace, and humans aren’t evolved to process that much change. People, rightfully so, are anxious about the future that this technology will bring. I understand; it feels natural with such a profound technological shift. 

We tiptoed into the internet, then gradually embraced it, making lots of mistakes along the way (remember Pets.com?). We thought it would democratize information, failing to anticipate that a few tech giants would control most of the traffic or that our information was the thing that became the commodity.

We rushed into smartphones even faster, loving their ubiquity and power but, again, failing to recognize the impact that ubiquity would have on us, especially our kids.

So forgive us if many think the AI gold rush isn’t for our benefit.

Dylan Patel, CEO of AI-infrastructure consulting firm SemiAnalysis, recently said on a podcast: “People hate AI. AI is less popular than [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. AI is less popular than politicians.” Those are pretty low bars.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that only 21% think they can trust AI aways or almost always, and only a third are at all excited about AI. Eighty percent are concerned about AI, and the levels of concern do not vary as much by generation as one might expect.

Still, 51% of respondents have used AI to research topics, up from 37% a year ago. About a quarter have used it for school or work, to write something, to analyze data, or to create an image. Ready or not, we’re starting to use it, and companies like Google think we’re going to use it, like it or not.

Credit: WSJ

I like the DuckDuckGo attitude; it should be our choice. Most of us will eventually get round to using AI, but that time doesn’t have to be now. Can we just take some time to get used to it?

Then again, why is DuckDuckGo’s attitude towards privacy so unique, and why do so few of us value privacy enough to use it? I don’t like what those say about the tech industry, or about us.  

So kudos to DuckDuckGo for its AI (and privacy) stand, and I hope that the result of the AI backlash isn’t so much slower evolution as it is smarter adoption.

Meat Computers of the World, Unite!

Until a couple of days ago I hadn’t heard of the phrase “meat computer.”  Apparently this has been around for some time, and, as Lora Kelley discusses in The New York Times, the tech elites are increasingly using it, either as a way to humanize AI or as a way to disparage what humans can do relative to AI (e.g., Elon Musk posted last summer, “We are all dumb meat computers compared to digital superintelligence.”).  

When it comes to how AI is used, we meat puppets better stick together. Credit: Microsoft Designer

Raphaël Millière, an associate professor at the University of Oxford, told Ms. Kelley that the metaphor aims to “move the public perception on how humanlike and intelligent frontier models are.”

Well, Pope Leo isn’t buying it.

Today he issued his first encyclical, “Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” It’s some 200 pages long, so forgive me if I’m having to rely on summaries, but he raises issues that I hope our politicians and business leaders will pay appropriate attention to.

Encyclicals are, it appears, one of the highest forms of teaching that a pope can give, and it is rare for a pope to deliver one himself, so this is something he takes very seriously. As he should.

AI, he asserts, is the new industrial revolution, and he calls for us to “disarm” it: “Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of 'armed' competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. Disarming does not mean renouncing technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity."

“Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed, freed from the logic that turned it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death,” he said. “It must be at the service of all, and of the common good.”

The pope makes it clear that he is not against technology per se – “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity” – but the question is how it is used and what the impact on people will be. "For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible," he said.

He is particularly concerned about control over AI, and the wealth that comes from it, should not be concentrated among an elite few:

AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data. Small but highly influential groups can shape information and consumption patterns, influence democratic processes and steer economic dynamics to their own advantage, undermining social justice and solidarity among peoples.

And, he notes: “A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity. This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace,”

Marx and Engels would recognize this, although perhaps not the “meat computer” metaphor.

The pope indirectly but firmly disavows the meat computer metaphor:

Building for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected…We must avoid the misconception of equating this type of ‘intelligence’ with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing.

The pope posits our choice with a biblical reference to Babel or Jerusalem: “The primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence.”

His choice is clear:

We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.

The Pope was joined at the presentation by Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic. Mr. Olah said: “Today is just the beginning — the start of a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from the inside, cannot.” He added: “We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.”

“Leo sees the challenge of AI as a choice about its design, and about who gets to make those choices,” Vincent Miller, a professor of theology at the University of Dayton, Ohio, told The Wall Street Journal.

Not surprisingly, the pope directly addresses the use of AI in warfare. “Moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation, for it involves conscience, personal responsibility and the recognition of the other as a person,” he writes. “Therefore, it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems.”

He is also concerned about its use in politics, and its potential impacts on children. And he calls our data “the new rare earths of power,” warning:

Here lies one of the most urgent moral challenges of our time: to ensure that shared knowledge becomes a true common good rather than an instrument of dominance. This requires restoring to individuals not only the data that describes them, but also the ability to decide how it is used, by whom and for whose benefit.

There goes your data Credit: Microsoft Designer

The Pope warns: “Robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility are required,” We’re going to need more than “hopes and prayers” to make those happen.

In light of recent verbal exchanges, I can hardly wait to see how President Trump responds. Indeed, Anna Rowlands, a British theologian who was among the encyclical’s presenters, said: “I think the danger for an American audience is funneling everything solely down to some kind of drama between Trump and Leo.” She went on to add, though: “Certainly, there would be questions that can be asked for the U.S. when you read that section on power, but there are questions for other global leaders, as well, and also for the tech industry itself.”

It’s bigger than Trump, bigger than the U.S., bigger than tech.

The Pope doesn’t have all the answers and probably doesn’t even raise all the right questions. But he’s thrown down the gauntlet with some very specific concerns, and it’s up to all of us meat computers to pick it up and take action.

The Canaries Are Already Dead

MIT is, most people would admit, a pretty good school.  Even those who don’t know a lot about universities probably associate MIT with science, engineering, and math, and in fact, it is one of the leading universities in the world for those (and other) areas. E.g., the QS World University Rankings have named it the top university in the world the last 14 years, USN&WR Global Universities Ranking has it #2, as does The Times Higher Education World University Rankings. There have been over 100 Nobel Laureate recipients associated with MIT. If you meet a Harvard grad you might think, oh, they may not actually be all that smart – they could be just a legacy admission, but if you meet an MIT grad you probably do expect that they must be smart, especially since MIT does not have legacy admissions. Even President Trump, who rails against “elite universities” and who has slashed science funding in his second administration (more on that later), can’t help but rave about his smart uncle who taught at MIT.

So when the President of MIT warns about reductions in research funding and in graduate school admissions, we’re not talking about the proverbial canaries in the coal mine dying. We’re talking about miners going down.  

If you are a scientist, or anyone who benefits from science, you should be worried. Credit: Microsoft Designer

In a video message last week, MIT President Sally Kornbluth warned of some startling losses: over 20% drops in federally funded research, in new federal research awards, and in graduate student enrollment. Overall, the school’s research enterprise has shrunk 10% in the last year.

Gulp.

"That is a striking loss for one of the most influential and productive research communities in the world,“ Dr. Kornbluth said. She added:

The fact is that we’re looking at a real drop in research being done by the people of MIT. It’s a loss of momentum for faculty and students and frankly, it’s a loss for the nation. When you shrink the pipeline of basic discovery research, you choke off the flow of future solutions, innovations, and cures, and you shrink the supply of future scientists.

Make no mistake: although MIT itself may be an outlier, what is happening to it is not. Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, told The Washington Post: “This is the first of many of these kinds of alarms that will be ringing." Brendan Cantwell, a professor of higher education at Michigan State University, also told WaPo that if MIT is scaling back how it does research, that means universities across the country should be thinking about scaling back and adjusting. The ripple effects will go far and wide, and will have bigger impacts than we realize.

I’ve written before about the Trump war on U.S. science, and while some of his attempted funding cuts have been halted by courts, no one should have their hopes up. The American Physical Society reports:

The National Science Foundation has awarded just 613 grants this fiscal year, at about 20% the level at this time in the year in each of fiscal years 2021 through 2024, according to the group Grant Witness. The amount of funding awarded is at similarly low levels, about one-third that of previous years. The trend is visible across each of NSF’s directorates. New and competitive award renewals, which undergo full peer review, are particularly low compared to previous years. The National Institutes of Health has seen a similar trend regarding its number of awards, having given out about 10,000 awards this year compared to around 18,000 at this time in previous years; total award funding is also down by a similar amount. NSF and NIH are even lagging behind fiscal year 2025, during which thousands of grants were canceled and fewer grants were awarded than in previous years.

Credit: Dan Satterfield

Meanwhile, of course, there was last month’s firing of the entire board that is supposed to oversee the National Science Foundation (NSF), which itself has been without a director for the last year. More than 2,500 scientists joined in a letter to Congress decrying the move, warning that the move “ramps up an alarming attack on the ability of the US to engage in basic and applied research, and to be competitive globally, particularly given that China is now investing more in R&D than the US.”

Dr. Kornbluth cited one threat to MIT’s financial well-being that most of us may not have realized: the excise tax on endowments. Harvard takes some grief for its $56b endowment fund, but Yale ($41b), Stanford ($38b), Princeton ($33b), MIT ($25b), and U Penn ($22b) also have large endowments. Congress during the first Trump Administration put a 1.4% excise tax on university endowments, but the so-called Big, Beautiful Bill introduced a sliding scale that gets up to 8% for the universities with the largest endowments – including MIT. It expects to pay $240 million annually for that tax, and that’s money not being spent on supporting research or educating exceptional students. Yale expects to pay $280 million annually.

Maurice McInnis, the President of Yale, warned: “The impact of this tax will also be felt far beyond our campus and our hometown. Taxing universities undermines the education and research that fuel life-saving medical breakthroughs, life-changing innovations, and economic growth in communities across the country and around the globe.” 

It feels less focused on raising revenues and more focused on punishing elite universities, and damn the consequences.

Dr. Kornbluth also pointed out the Administration apparently antipathy towards international students. The U.S.-based international education nonprofit NAFSA recently issued a report estimated that foreign student enrollment fell 20% for this spring semester. Not all of them are brilliant, not all of them would have gone to MIT or another elite research university, and not all of them would have stayed in the U.S., but our track record of attracting and retaining the best & the brightest from all around the world is in danger.

This. Is. Not. Good.

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 I didn’t go to an elite college, and I know that not all scientific or technological breakthroughs come from people who do (or even who graduate from college at all). But I do know that America did not become what it is without those elite research institutes, and if we continue to try to kill the golden geese (to move away from the canary metaphor), we’re going to miss out on the gold they produce.

Officers Eat Last

A New York Times interview with Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D - Mass) by Bret Stephens caught my attention. I am somewhat familiar with Mr. Stephens from his various pieces in NYT; he is definitely a conservative, but in the old, pre-MAGA sense where it meant you worried about spending but you didn’t hate people who weren’t like you. Rep. Auchincloss, on the other hand, was unfamiliar to me, but the headline of the interview – The Democrat Who Makes Me Listen – proved apt.

Serving others first? What a novel concept. Credit: Microsoft Designer

For me, the final line the interview summed everything up. Rep. Auchincloss is a Marine veteran, having served in Afghanistan. Mr. Stephens asked: “Final question. If there is one thing you learned in the Marine Corps which every American should know, what is it?” Rep. Auchincloss’s reply was succinct, to the point, and highly instructive: “Officers eat last.”

“Officers eat last” – wow. That’s a philosophy I can buy into. That’s a credo I hope I can live up to. That’s a slogan for a political movement I could get behind.

Of course, I’m not just talking about literally only Marine officers, and I’m not just talking about eating. I’m sure Rep. Auchincloss intended that it was a life lesson that should be applied broadly. I.e., people in authority should make sure the people they are responsible for get taken care of before they take care of themselves. I don’t think that attitude is solely responsible for the esteemed Marine esprit de corps, but it’s got to be part of it.

The trouble is, we don’t see much of that attitude in the rest of America. When Congress failed to pass a budget and millions of federal workers went without paychecks, they (and their staffs) kept getting paid. When the White House went slashing various budgets, it didn’t eliminate White House jobs.

If you want to keep your blood pressure under control, don’t even ask how generous the Congressional retirement package is. Suffice it to say that, if you are one of the few workers who still qualify for a defined benefit pension, it is almost certainly less than theirs. Don’t get me started on how members of Congress seem to get richer – a lot richer – while in office, possibly due to insider trading loopholes.

According to Gallup, only 10% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, with 86% disapproving, but they don’t care. They get paid anyway, and most House seats aren’t competitive, so most incumbents are in little danger of getting voted out.

This is no “officers eat last.”

It’s not just politicians. All those billionaires – over 1,000 of them in the U.S. alone! – didn’t get (or keep) all that money by putting anyone else first. CEOs used to “only” make 15x the average worker, but now make closer to 300x, with their pay going up 20x the average worker’s pay increase in 2025 alone. If there was ever an era of benevolent CEOs looking out for their workers, that era has long gone. If CEOs can underpay or, better yet, layoff their workers, the better for their compensation. The rich guys eat first, with the finest dining their employees’ labor can finance.

Or private equity investors. They’ve wrecked their havoc on manufacturing and other industries, and more recently have turned to areas like housing and health care. They’re not just coming for your job, they’re coming for where you live and where/how you get care. They don’t make any pretense that what they’re doing is for your good; they are openly in it for the R.O.I. They’re face first in the dinner trough and don’t really care if you even get any of the scraps.

It’s obscene. It’s the opposite of officers eating last.

Rep. Auchincloss calls for “economic patriotism,” saying:

If the core idea of America is that the circumstances of your birth shouldn’t determine the condition of your life, you cannot have a durable “demos,” a durable sense of a shared American future, if you have an ossified American aristocracy. And that is what has happened. The top 10 percent of the American economy are people just increasingly divorcing themselves from the rest.

He wants, in particular, for more wealth to be taxed at death, so the richest Americans can’t keep passing along their wealth without ever paying taxes on the gains. He recognizes that government overregulation can be an issue, but correctly points out that the unbridled corporate monopolization we’ve seen in recent years is also harmful. Gordon Gecko famously said “Greed is good, “ but Rep. Auchincloss counters with “Officers eat last.”

I know which side I’m on.

If the Democrats had any sense, which they don’t, they’d seize upon this slogan and help define how it applies to our everyday lives. They’d build out what “economic patriotism” means. Dems are still getting blamed for NAFTA and letting China join the World Trade Organization, with the subsequent loss of many U.S. jobs, but those jobs didn’t just magically disappear. Rich people decided they could get richer by offshoring them, and if that meant losses of lots of jobs and devastation of many communities, so be it. The Dems should never have taken the blame, and, instead, should have aggressively pointed the finger at the true culprits.

To be honest, I don’t think the Democrats are the right party to advocate this idea. They have their own cadres of rich people, both in office and among their donors, and it shows in their policies. The Democratic brand is so toxic that they may be beyond reinvention. That’s why, say, Rob Sand in Iowa’s Governor’s race or Graham Platner in Maine’s U.S. Senate race are carefully trying to not talk about their ties to the party, and Dan Osborn in the Nebraska U.S. Senate race is running as an independent (with the tacit support of the state’s Democratic Party).

Those are the kinds of politicians who could make the “officers eat last” pitch and make it work.  Chuck Schumer? Kamala Harris? Gavin Newsom?  I don't think so. 

Neither party has a real vision for how – or agreement on even whether – to address the growing inequality in America, much less a vision for how to address AI and other revolutionary technological changes that are upon us. We should have long ago grappled with climate change and microplastics, but there was too much money in the status quo.

It’s not the answer, but “officers eat last” could be part of an answer. Show me the candidates who believe in, live by, and will fight for it, and they’d have my vote.

Blasts From the Past

Two names from the past popped up my radar screen this week, making claims for the future: GameStop and Blackberry. It’s as William Faulkner once wrote (Requiem for a Nun): “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Talk about blasts from the past. Credit: Microsoft Designer

Last time I thought of GameStop, they were the beneficiary of a meme stock frenzy, back in 2021, wherein a bunch of day traders used Reddit to drive the stock price up to insane levels (up 1500%!) in a effort to punish professional short sellers. It survived that, closed hundreds of stores -- and quietly accumulated a 5% stake in eBay. Then a couple of days ago CEO Ryan Cohen announced GameStop was making an unsolicited – and potentially hostile – bid to acquire eBay.

Now, keep in mind, GameStop has a market cap of about $11b, while eBay is valued at $46b. eBay may not be quite the cultural force it once was, but at least it never had to rely on a meme stock rally to pump its stock. So this is more like The Mouse that Roared than David versus Goliath.

GameStop is offering $125 per share, a $56b bid that was about a 20% premium over eBay’s stock pre-bid. The bid is financed 50% by cash and 50% by GameStop stock. GameStop claims to have a $20b commitment from TD Securities to back the bid.

“EBay should be worth—and will be worth—a lot more money,” Mr. Cohen said in an interview with Lauren Thomas of The Wall Street Journal. “I’m thinking about turning eBay into something worth hundreds of billions of dollars.” He sees, for example, using GameStop’s remaining thousands of physical locations as places to collect and authenticate items from eBay sellers. The bid letter outlines: “GameStop staff already inspect and grade hardware and trading cards every day. Sellers walk in, items are verified on the spot, and listings carry a trust badge."

“There is nobody who is more qualified, based on my experience, to run the eBay business,” he asserted to Ms. Thomas.

EBay has acknowledged the offer, promising it “will carefully review and consider the unsolicited proposal to determine the course of action that it believes is in the best interests of the company and all eBay shareholders,” focusing on value to its shareholders.

No one other than Mr. Cohen seems all that excited about the bid, with GameStop’s shares dropping and eBay’s rising since the bid, making it more costly. “Without more details on proposed financing, we think the market would be skeptical of a potential deal’s feasibility,” analysts at Morgan Stanley wrote in a research note late last week. “The business is firing on all cylinders,” analysts at Bernstein wrote. “Why disrupt things? The turnaround is working.”

Still, Mr. Cohen is undeterred. “We are just starting,” Cohen said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “For obvious reasons, eBay is a public company, there’s all kinds of perverse financial incentives from the board to the management team. So there’s only one way to approach something like this.” He believes the combination “could be a legit competitor to Amazon.”

But, at least, there’s no denying: people are talking about GameStop.

That’s probably more than one can say about Blackberry. It’s been even longer since I’ve thought about it. Those of us of a certain age remember Blackberry well; it was king of mobile business until the advent of the iPhone, with its distinctive physical keyboard. Blackberry – formerly known as Research in Motion – no longer makes phones, but its strength was never the hardware, it was the software that powered those devices. And a software company it owns – QNX – is still ubiquitous.

Ben Cohen profiled QNX in The Wall Street Journal this week. Mr. Cohen writes:

The company’s most lucrative product is not hardware but the hidden software in 275 million cars on the road today. In fact, BlackBerry’s essential technology can be found in all sorts of unexpected places, and you wouldn’t find it even if you went looking for it.

He further explains: “QNX is the operating system that enables all kinds of driver assistance: collision warnings, blind-spot notifications, adaptive cruise control, pedestrian detection and steering you back into a lane when you’re drifting into trouble.”  John Wall, QNX’s president, told Mr. Cohen: “We’re the foundation. Everything pretty on top wouldn’t work without a strong foundation.” 

Source: WSJ

QNX claims it is “the software foundation of Physical AI,” serving the automotive, defense, heavy machinery, medical device, and robotics industries, among others. In medical devices, for example, it helps power surgical robots, diagnostic equipment, patient monitoring, and drug delivery systems, claiming that 9 out of 10 medical device manufacturers use its solutions, in over 50 medical device types.

QNX accounts for half of Blackberry’s revenue and has helped Blackberry get four consecutive profitable quarters since the first time since the iPhone hit. I don’t know what WSJ’s policies are about investing in companies reporters write about, but Blackberry’s stock surged after his article hit. It’s not all about his fine reporting though; investment guru Timothy Sykes says: “The cash flow picture is what serious traders should focus on. BB generated roughly $46.1M of operating cash in the latest quarter and $44.4M of free cash flow, while keeping the balance sheet relatively clean with a current ratio near 2.1 and modest leverage.”

And to help keep the ball rolling, QNX recently partnered with NIVDIA to create “a unified platform for safety‑critical edge AI across robotics, medical, and industrial systems.” Mr. Wall said: "As robotics, medical, and industrial systems become more autonomous and software defined, safety and determinism cannot be afterthoughts. Integrating QNX OS for Safety 8.0 with NVIDIA IGX Thor and NVIDIA Halos Safety Stack brings together a trusted real‑time safety foundation and a powerful functional safety platform for edge AI.”

So Blackberry is doing well, thank you very much, even though the main driver for its success is even less known. As Mr. Wall admitted to Mr. Cohen, “If I tell them I work at QNX, they don’t know what that means.”

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I’ve never been in a GameStop, I rarely even browse on eBay, I was always only a begrudging Blackberry user (I long for Palm Pilots), and I don’t even know if my car uses QNX. But for some reason, I’m glad that GameStop and Blackberry are still alive and kicking. Reinvention is said to be good for the soul, and, sometimes, it is essential for a company. But if you have been waiting for Ask Jeeves to finally supplant Google in search, you are going to be disappointed. Not everything has a second life.