delong

Tesla is a trillion‑dollar stock priced like a world‑eating tech platform at the exact moment all the bad, boring car‑company things have finally caught up with it. The chip shortage lottery win is long over. And yet, and yet, and yet:

**Charts of the Day: Tesla**
< https://braddelong.substack.com/p/charts-of-the-day-tesla >
2026-05-04

But Trump insisted he already destroyed the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program! A sudden U.S.–Israeli decapitation campaign against Iran and the killing of Supreme Leader Khamenei shatters nuclear diplomacy, destabilizes energy markets, and teaches every medium power the same lesson: get an operational deterrent—nuclear-threat or leader-family threat, by bomb, missile, drone, or assassin—fast. This war is less a precision strike than a stress test of a wobbling world order... 1/

...Ebusy spinning. Connecting the dots from the island of Melos to the Strait of Hormuz, foreign-policy macho irrealism usually delivers catastrophe:

How Is Donald Trump Managing to Lose a War with Iran?: Perhaps the Most Important Thing Going on Right Now

< https://braddelong.substack.com/p/how-is-donald-trump-managing-to-lose >

2026-04-16 Thu 2/END

Matt’s subhead: “It’s hard to write good articles when you have no idea if everything is about to change”. In short, Matt has half-drunk the AI-psychoactive koolaid. My view: Matt should talk to Ezra Klein, and have Ezra Klein recount to him Ezra’s days in San Francisco, when it seemed every day made him stupider as he found himself rubbing elbows with yet another bunch of crypto-enthusiast grifters and self-grifters. while BitCoin is still a thing today, nobody sees it as anything... 1/

& was the “European Miracle” 800-1914, 1492-1914, 1689-1914, or 1776-1914?:

**NOTE TO SELF: All of the Currently Live Theories of the Causes of the "European Miracle”**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/note-to-self-all-of-the-currently>
2026-03-13 Fr

“Morning Joe” Does the SecDef Hegseth sacred Quentin Tarantino thing properly, and I reflect on what insights we can derive from it:

**How Will Future Historians Describe Our Fake Bible Verses & the Rest of Marx Brothers-Level Governance?: Thing Worth Noting**
< https://braddelong.substack.com/p/how-will-future-historians-describe >
2026-04-18

Legal Realism in CrazyTown facing the chaos-monkey president: Far out of my wheelhouse, but a legal-realist assessment of the Roberts Court as a Trump‑era partisan-ideological power machine, as Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Barrett turn Trumpist chaos-monkey impulses into what they call “law”. The robes donned are “textualism” and “originalism”. The reality is emergency stays, shattered agencies, and a presidency unchained as hollow promises are made of rule of law and... 1/

...reality-TV spectacle, ci-devant allies reroute supply chains, not just talking points:

CROSSPOST: RICHARD BALDWIN: Why Didn’t Trumpian Tariffs Wreck the World Trade System? < https://braddelong.substack.com/p/crosspost-richard-baldwin-why-didnt > 2026-03-28 Sa 3/END

The 2026 Sir John Hicks Memorial Lecture in Economic History:

**Theories of Economic History**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/fyitheories-of-economic-history>
2026-04-28

The dining-room-corner linear algebra experiment, or, why I am trying to build a BradBot instead of a FAQ list—SubTuringBradBot, office hours, gasbags, and “hexapodia”:

**SubTuringBradBot Is Finally Live—at Least for Now: Monday MAMLMs**

< https://braddelong.substack.com/p/subturingbradbot-is-finally-liveat >

2026-04-20 Mon

Vermouth, covfefe, & ‘vermin’: What LLMs potentially have to teach Us About the American Right’s Id from Scott Bessent’s “Straits of Vermouth” to Trump’s “oranges of the investigation”. Our parapraxes are noisy but telling windows into the system prompts running our mental autocompletes:

**Scott Bessent's LLM System Prompt Has a High Weight on the Word "Vermouth": Thing Worth Noting, for 2026-04-16 Thu**

<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/scott-bessents-llm-system-prompt>

2026-04-16 Thu

Marco Arment's Setup as the Canary in the Coal Mine—or, Rather, as the 50 Mac Mini Server Farm Vastly More Efficient than the NVIDIA-Powered Cloud-Bound Hyperscalers. Or, why John Giannandrea’s stewardship of Apple’s AI strategy may have meant that Apple has already won the AI-software race:

**Is the Day of the Data Center About to Be Over?**

< https://braddelong.substack.com/p/is-the-day-of-the-data-center-about >

2026-04-11 Sa

Twelve different video formats, $1.5 million a minute in world-class expert filmmaking craftsmanship, & I got to see where some of that $1.5 million a minute went by watching a small slice of the post-production fussing-over:

**My Cousin Phil Lord, His Co-Director Chris Miller, & the Entire "Project Hail Mary" Movie Team REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY Want You to Go See Their Movie in a Movie Theater**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/my-cousin-phil-lord-his-co-director>
2026-02-25 We

...<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/mamlms-still-epic-fail-openbook-closedworld>
2026-02-24 Tu

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SUBSCRIBE TO <HTTP://BRADDELONG.SUBSTACK.COM> 2/END

I count this as a failure nine different successive times. There really is a unique, well‑defined answer, and where the machine has every chance to uncover it: the Hedge Knight Ashford Meadow line‑up. This avoids the usual escape hatches about “the data might be ambiguous” or “this is a hard open question.” We get not one isolated “hallucination” but rather a hallucination cascade:

**MAMLMs Still Epic Fail Open‑Book, Closed‑World, Finite‑List, Obvious Ground Truth Tasks** 1/

Mike Konczal has joined the MAMLM-enabled white-collar workforce. As a scout, he reports on the successes—so far—of this Errand Unto the Wildnerness of his. He is now equipped not just with spreadsheets and Stata do-files alone, but with a terminal window, a microphone, and a large language model that now lives in his working directory. What he brings back is not a story of instant superintelligence or a world in which economists and policy analysts are swept away by robo-oracles. It is... 1/

A bulletin from the front: Brad vs. the Moen Flo Shutoff game-changing smart water device that monitors for leaks and immediately takes action to help prevent them. Yes, we are now in that Brave New World where “AI” doesn’t understand your nascent tomatoes, but can still turn off your water:

**The Robot Uprising Has Begun!**

< https://braddelong.substack.com/p/the-robot-uprising-has-begun >

2026-04-15 (Wed)

Emergency power, Republican president: Learning Resources v. Trump as a year of lawless tariffs, then a 6-3 clawback—that record does not diminish but underlines the corruption problem of the Roberts right-wing majority on today’s Supreme Court:

**The Corrupt & Craven Supreme Court Has a Tariff Opinion This AM!**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/the-corrupt-and-craven-supreme-court>
2026-02-20 Fr

Phil Lord, Chris Miller, Drew Goddard, Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, Jason Ortiz, the Rocketeers puppeting the alien Rocky, and the others on the “Project Hail Mary” movie have a very favorable market & critic reaction: in space, everyone’s grinning as two interspecies buddies save multiple worlds:
**"Project Hail Mary" Movie: $80 Million Domestic Launch Weekend, $140 Million Worldwide**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/project-hail-mary-movie-80-million>
2026-03-23 Mo

I tried to post this to SubStack Notes, but no dice: There appears to be a length limit! Who knew!:

**A Comment on Noah Smith's "The Moderately Easy Problem of Consciousness"**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/a-comment-on-noah-smiths-the-moderately>
2026-04-27

J. Bradford DeLong mailto:brad.delong@gmail.com :: 2026-04-28 :: All Souls' College, Oxford :: The 2026 Sir John Hicks Memorial Lecture in Economic History

**Theories of Economic History I: John Hicks :: Roughly-Edited Transcript**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/theories-of-economic-history-i-john>
2026-04-28

**THING YOU OUGHT TO KNOW: Historian Patrick Wyman Does Podcasts**
& Patrick Wyman's relatively new “Past Lives” podcast is excellent: <https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/new-history-podcast-past-lives>
2026-03-26 Th
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/thing-you-ought-to-know-historian>

A hornfels quarry in KwaZulu‑Natal and a basalt workshop in the Jordan Valley show that spatial division of labor, long‑term planning, and cumulative culture are not modern inventions but Pleistocene facts long predating our evolution as Homo sapiens sapiens:

**DRAFT: Origins of a “Human” Economy**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/draft-origins-of-a-human-economy>
2026-04-19 Sun

Less than one third of the topics I wanted to, and all at much less depth than they deserve. But ars longa, vita brevis:

**MEMO TO SELF: What It Looks Like I Will Actually Have Managed to Cover in My Half of Econ 210a This Semester…**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/memo-to-self-what-it-looks-like-i>
2026-03-05 Th