Evanston, Lordstown, SoftBank -- A Geography Lessson -- February 20, 2026

How close is the proposed Lordstown LDC and proposed SoftBank power station to Evanston, IL?

Stargate, Ohio, Softbank, LDCs, Powerplants -- February 19, 2026

Background:

Not only the largest natural gas power plant but the largest power plant, of any sort -- nuclear, coal, natural gas -- in the entire United States. 

Wiki: list of largest US power plants. 

• Grand Coulee, hydro, 6,809 MW
• Alvin W Vogtle, nuclear, 4,536 MW, 
• Palo Verde, nuclear, 3,942 MW,
• Browns Ferry, nuclear, 3,775 MW,
• West County (Florida), natural gas, 3,750 MW,
• W. A. Parish (Texas), natural gas / coal, 3,653 MW

SoftBank proposal:

 

The Brilliance Of Trump -- February 19, 2026

Harvard is in severe financial distress.

• Trump's brilliance: how he "read" Harvard's Achille's heel;  
• the union killing the Golden Goose; no sympathy

 

Vannevar Bush -- February 16, 2026

AI prompt:

Alan Turing. Development of computers. Things don't happen in a vacuum (no pun intended). Things don't happen overnight. Specifically, 1937 was a pivotal year and not just with Turing. From 1843 (Ada) to 1931, Vannevar Bush, almost a 100 years -- not much happening in those 100 years. Then Tommy Flowers in 1935 -- valves / vacuum tubes.  So you look back five to six years before that pivotal year. What was happening -- or better, perhaps -- what major geo-political-economic event happened five to six years earlier. In fact, it was about eight years but one gets the point: the market crash of 1929. I'm sure there are some observations / thoughts about those years ... 1929 to 1937 that brought us to that point. Thoughts?

Google Gemini: 

Norway's Wealth Tax -- February 13, 2026

Even without the wealth tax, I would prefer to live in Switzerland rather than in Norway.

The big problem is that the 1.1% wealth tax on net assets over $US 2 million is just part of the overall tax these two-million-dollar (US dollars) millionaires are paying. 

Even worse, $US 1 million is no longer all that much wealth in the big scheme of things.  

The big question is whether Norway has either a debt problem or a deficit problem:

Norway's wealth tax: 

Norwegian wealth tax. Story reported in The Guardian. AI prompt and reply:

 

In fact, whether it was good or bad / increase or decrease in tax revenue in short term, it is clearly a huge negative in the long term, for many reasons:

*************************
Wealth Tax

If the wealth tax is a detriment to the economy in a country like Norway, one can only imagine how bad the wealth tax would be to a state like California who is at risk of a major deficit in any given year.

Fourth Industrial Revolution -- Google Gemini -- February 11, 2026

 

Fourth Industrial Revolution -- ChatGPT -- February 11, 2026

My thesis: for the mom-and-pop retail investor, the tipping point for investing "within the fourth industrial revolution" was in 2021 - 2022 -- a year or so after then "end" of the Covid-19 anxiety even though technically the fourth industrial revolution was identified in 2015 - 2016.

ChatGPT: 

Yeah—that intuition tracks. The conceptual “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (AI, automation, digital platforms) went mainstream around 2015–2016, but the retail-investor tipping point didn’t really hit until 2021–2022. Different clocks were ticking for institutions vs. everyday investors. A few reasons why your timing feels right:

⸻

Why 2016 ≠ the retail tipping point

2016 was narrative-level adoption.
That’s when AI became a serious boardroom topic (DeepMind/AlphaGo, early cloud AI services, etc.). But for mom-and-pop investors, the story was still abstract: “Cool tech, not sure how to play it.” Public-market exposure was limited to broad tech names and semis.

Retail tends to move when:
    •    products become visible in daily life, and
    •    returns become obvious in stock charts.

Neither was true yet in 2016.

⸻

Why 2021–2022 was the tipping point

1. COVID changed investor behavior, not just tech adoption

Lockdowns did three huge things at once:
    •    Time: people had more time to learn markets
    •    Access: Robinhood/zero-commission trading went mainstream
    •    Psychology: markets felt “democratized” (GameStop, AMC, crypto)

This created a brand-new retail cohort that:
    •    was younger,
    •    more speculative,
    •    and much more willing to chase narratives (AI, EVs, space, quantum, etc.).

AI benefited from that same narrative trading energy that fueled meme stocks.

⸻

2. The tech finally crossed from “infrastructure” to “products people could feel”

Before 2021, AI mostly lived behind the scenes:
    •    ad targeting
    •    search ranking
    •    fraud detection
    •    logistics optimization

After COVID:
    •    recommendation engines, automation, and bots were suddenly everywhere
    •    then ChatGPT (late 2022) made AI personally tangible

That’s when retail investors went from:

“AI is a thing companies use”
to
“Oh wow, this changes everything.”

That emotional shift matters a lot in retail flows.

⸻

3. NVIDIA as the retail “AI thermometer”

Retail investors don’t invest in systems—they invest in symbols.

NVIDIA became the symbol:
    •    clean story
    •    obvious revenue growth
    •    simple narrative: “AI runs on GPUs”

Once NVDA started ripping in 2023, it functioned like:

“Proof that AI isn’t just hype—this is how you get paid.”

That feedback loop (price → attention → more retail inflows → price) is classic retail tipping-point behavior.

⸻

4. Post-COVID narrative hunger

After:
    •    meme stocks cooled,
    •    crypto crashed,
    •    EV hype got messy,

retail investors were hungry for a new mega-theme that felt:
    •    transformative
    •    understandable
    •    not already “over” (psychologically)

AI checked all three boxes.

⸻

Why institutions moved earlier than retail (and always will)

Big money started positioning in:
    •    cloud,
    •    data centers,
    •    semis,
    •    ML tooling

years earlier—quietly. Retail tends to arrive when:
    •    revenue curves bend upward, and
    •    products enter culture.

That’s not stupidity—it’s just different incentives:
    •    institutions invest in capability
    •    retail invests in visibility



All four together created what feels like an overnight AI boom—but it was actually a slow fuse with a loud detonation.

⸻

Big-picture take (your instinct is strong here)

What you’re really noticing isn’t just “AI became a thing” — it’s:

When the story became tradable for regular people.

That’s the true retail tipping point.
Not when the tech exists.
Not when it’s useful.
But when it becomes:
    •    narratively simple,
    •    culturally visible, and
    •    attached to stocks that go straight up.

If you want, next time we can map this exact same pattern onto:
    •    the internet (late 90s),
    •    smartphones (2010–2012),
    •    cloud computing (2014–2016),
    •    crypto (2017 / 2021).

The cycles rhyme a lot.