Current stock market valuations explained

by philg

From Pedro Domingos, a CS prof at University of Washington, the best current explanation for stratospheric stock market valuations:

Oracle’s main business these days is promising vast amounts of cloud computing it doesn’t have to AI companies who don’t know how they’ll pay for it.

WSJ, a month ago:

The S&P 500 currently trades at 22.5 times its projected earnings over the next 12 months, compared with the average of 16.8 times since 2000. … The 10 largest companies in the S&P 500 accounted for 39.5% of its total value at the end of July, the most ever…

How badly beaten up did investors who bought into stocks at a high P/E ratio get? I asked Grok “Consider an investor who purchased the S&P 500 in February 2000. What annual return on investment would he or she have received through August 2025 vs. an investor who bought in August 2002 and held through August 2025?” and learned that the “Peak P/E ratio” investor (bought before the dotcom bubble burst) would have earned a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 6.3% vs 8.9% for an investor who bought at a more reasonable P/E ratio in August 2002. This difference is close to the difference between investing from 2002-2025 in wired U.S. (9%) vs. tired Europe (5.7%).

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Robot tugboats to repel Greta Thunberg’s selfie flotilla and similar?

by philg

Climate change no longer being an issue, apparently, Greta Thunberg and friends have spent the past month headed for a visit to the noble Gazans via diesel-powered flotilla (“Global Sumud Flotilla”). It’s a strange situation because the flotilla participants seem to have no respect for Palestinian religious and cultural norms, e.g., they permit females to roam the decks of their yachts without wearing hijab. The photo below could perhaps be a prostitute with two clients by Gazan standards:

Israel has established a blockade against its military enemy in Gaza and, therefore, under international law can repel (or sink, if necessary?) any ship that crosses the dashed red line below.

But Israel gets a lot of bad press when it uses standard military procedures. What about robot tugboats that could intercept the selfie yachts and push them out of blockade area? That would deny Greta Thunberg and other diesel-powered climate activists the photo opportunities that they seek. The flotilla folks claim that to be unarmed so they don’t have any means of destroying robot tugs. Robot tugs could be built in different sizes to match up to the different size yachts in the flotilla. They’re intercepting uncooperative vessels so should have a higher top speed than conventional tugboats. The Israelis could start with simple skiffs equipped with modern outboard engines. Since the skiff doesn’t have to hold any cargo or humans it could hold a tremendous amount of fuel for endurance. Surround the skiff with used car tires so as to get some extra points for recycling.

For maximum reliability with minimum fuel consumption and pollution, the Israelis could use Honda’s only V8 engine (350 hp; Mercury makes one with 600 hp if necessary):

Loosely related, Israel has invited the hostile vessels “to dock at the Ashkelon Marina and unload the aid there”, which would certainly be anticlimactic compared to a climate activists-v-robot interaction!

As of September 24, 2025, the yachts had survived 14 attacks by warships and warplanes, without sustaining any damage, and were using their inoperative radios to report a “communications jam” that has rendered their radios inoperative:

See also “Posing with Hamas chief, activist who’s joined Greta on Gaza ‘freedom flotilla'” (Daily Mail):

Grinning as he gives a Churchillian ‘victory’ sign, the spokesman for Greta Thunberg’s Gaza ‘freedom flotilla’ poses with a Hamas chief weeks before setting sail.

Wael Nawar was draped in a scarf emblazoned with the terror group’s emblem as he stood with other pro-Palestinian activists beside Youssef Hamdan, who runs Hamas’s North African operation, during a meeting at its Algerian headquarters in June.

Mr Nawar is listed alongside Swedish campaigner Ms Thunberg as part of the 13-strong ‘steering committee’ orchestrating the Global Sumud Flotilla, which left Spain last week to deliver food and medical aid to Gaza.

Another committee member, political activist Marouan Ben Guettaia, was also a guest of Hamdan a few days after and later posted a picture of the pair sitting in front of a Hamas flag.

A third committee member, Brazilian Thiago Avila, attended Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral in Beirut in February and praised him as an ‘inspiration’.

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Obtaining some public records in Brookline, Maskachusetts

by philg

“I tried to pry public records from Brookline schools. They stiff-armed me for months.” (Boston Globe, 9/21/2025):

The rub: Because of flaws in our state’s law, theory differs from practice. It takes just minutes to file a public records request, but as I painfully learned, to actually get a request fulfilled may require months upon months of follow-up; a nontrivial sum of money; a lawyer or two; and persistence verging on a pathological inability to let go.

Just after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, the schools superintendent sent out two messages that sparked instant backlash. “As you are likely already aware, violence is escalating rapidly in Israel and Palestine,” began one note, sent to the entire school district community. Though the town includes large Jewish and Israeli populations, the note neither decried the Hamas atrocities nor expressed sympathy to the many affected local families. A separate note to staff recommended an undeniably slanted set of teaching resources. It included links to pro-Palestinian sources like Visualizing Palestine and Decolonize Palestine but no similarly pro-Israel sources to balance them, and nothing on Hamas.

(I’m not sure that it is reasonable to call the October 7, 2023 event “Hamas attacks” given that there were fighters from UNRWA and Palestinian Islamic Jihad involved, as well as “civilian” Gazans. By saying that it is only “Hamas” that wants to destroy the Zionist entity and achieve river-to-the-sea liberation the implication is that if the 6 or 7 remaining Hamas-affiliated Gazans were removed the Gazans would cheerfully accept the existence of Israel.)

On Oct. 16, 2023, when I filed my request, I figured I was just asking for a couple of days’ worth of one official’s emails on a specific topic. Type a few terms into a search bar and done, right?
Wrong. It took more than 18 months to get that modest request fulfilled, and I still don’t have one central document (but I’ve given up). It took enlisting pro bono lawyers; appeals to the supervisor of records, the state team that handles public records requests; countless nagging emails; two speeches and a half-dozen emails to the School Committee. … I refiled the request in May 2024. This time, when it was once again met with silence, I knew enough to appeal after 10 days to the supervisor of records. That office promptly ordered the town to respond.

In July 2024, the Brookline town counsel did send over a document. Only one, but still — a document!
Sadly, it was nothing but an email saying a draft of a Google Doc for the Oct. 7 messaging had been created. All names were blacked out, without the justifications for those redactions that are required by law. Also, I knew the superintendent had received many emails responding to his messages; our local Brookline News had even covered them. Where were they?

Stymied, I finally sought legal help through the Anti-Defamation League’s project on antisemitism in K-12 schools, and it provided two top-notch pro bono attorneys. In mid-December, I wrote to the town counsel conveying, for the first time in my life, the ultimate attention-grabber: “You’ll be hearing next from my lawyers.”

Soon came the count — the town counsel’s office had identified 368 potentially relevant emails — and the price tag: they estimated that at least 39 hours of staff time would be needed to process the emails, at a cost of $926.25.

In April and May of this year, the town counsel sent over four batches of repetitive, sometimes irrelevant emails, sprinkled with a few gems. Several indicated that two senior district staffers had led the drafting of the messages: a senior director of teaching and learning, and the director of the Office of Educational Equity.

Any Massachusetts taxpayer who wants to fund “education” instead of “educational equity” can move to Florida, I guess.

Here’s a page from the Decolonize Palestine site that the school bureaucrats wanted students to read:

In other words, we always must circle back to Queers for Palestine.

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Harvard Square: Queer Stoners for Palestine

by philg

A few photos from Harvard Square, August 2025…

Queers (“Lesbian Summer Camp”) and and “All Are Welcome” Rainbow Flag church:

A Harvard students-only dating app advertisement shows a happy couple that matched via the app:

Stoners (a healing recreational cannabis dispensary in the middle of Harvard Square):

For Palestine, a $7 million house whose fence is covered in “Genocide in Gaza” signage:

(Online property records indicate that the house is owned by two people who both have typically male first names.)

Speaking of “Free Palestine”, the riverside bike path in front of Harvard Business School:

The local high schoolers still walk past a homeless encampment and under a sacred Black Lives Matter banner to enter their temple of learning:

(Despite a death sentence, renowned graduate Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev remains alive and well and living comfortably at taxpayer expense, just as he did before bombing the Boston Marathon in 2013.)

Lots of people wear masks, indoors and out. The Staples that closed during coronapanic remains closed and the “social distancing” signs in its mini-mall are still there:

Remember that Long COVID “patients “survivors” are the real heroes:

I stopped into Harvard Bookstore to find an all-white/Asian staff and customer gathering. That’s not to say that Black Lives weren’t richly represented on the shelves, though:

What should one celebrate in a bookstore catering to an exclusively non-Black customer base? Black bookstores:

These photos were taken before Charlie Kirk got shot, but the Bookstore reminds us that if progressives don’t shoot and kill more Republicans, the still-living MAGA folks will “end democracy”:

Also, the “far right” control our elections, there is no need to follow orders from the Supreme Court (they hand out injustice, rather than justice), and the democracy that is about to be ended (or that has been ended?) was poisoned by racism:

Throughout all of this, remember that only a fool would believe that humans are divided into male and female:

When it is time to assign blame, though, it is easy to determine which humans can be classified as “men” (those who have imposed a patriarchy):

Back in Harvard Yard, the university advertises its now-free art museum (more than $50 billion accumulated so far at the “non-profit”) and shows a typical patron:

(I’ve never seen a Black visitor in this art museum.)

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Meet in Providence on Saturday or Sunday morning?

by philg

I’ll be in Providence, Rhode Island this weekend and would be happy to meet up with readers! The plan is to attend WaterFire on Saturday night, but otherwise I’m fairly flexible. Sunday morning coffee downtown would work, for example. The weather forecast is great. Email philg@mit.edu if interested!

Here’s an image from September 8, 2018:

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New York Times and Claudine Gay

by philg

Check out the caption at the bottom of the photo in this recent New York Times article:

Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard University, left the university only months after she started the role.

The tenured plagiarist, who can choose to collect a paycheck from Harvard every week until she is dead, even if her brain goes “full Biden”, “left the university” according to the New York Times. What does the Harvard web site say? “Claudine Gay is the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and Professor of African and African-American Studies.”

A peasant reading the article might get the false impression that there were financial consequences in Academia for elite workers who break rules or make mistakes!

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Your tax dollars at work: UCLA’s “director of race”

by philg

“UCLA race and equity official placed on leave over social media posts about Charlie Kirk killing” (ABC):

UCLA’s director of race and equity has been placed on leave over social media posts he made about the killing of Charlie Kirk, the Los Angeles Times reported Monday.

Jonathan Perkins, an official with UCLA’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Office, apparently published the remarks on BlueSky. The posts seemed to express both satisfaction and indifference to the fatal shooting of the conservative activist.

The posts were “written in my own hand, in my own voice, in no way the echo of my employer, UCLA,” Perkins said in a written statement provided to The Times, adding that they were protected by the First Amendment.

“It’s a truly sad day. My livelihood could ultimately be threatened for stating, in the clearest terms, that I felt no grief at the death of an avowed white nationalist- (a) man who dedicated his life to despising mine, to despising my people, to despising our very existence,” Perkins’s statement said. “I am devastated to learn of higher ed colleagues around the country, facing similar and much worse consequences, including termination. I admit, I thought UCLA was different. I hope we are.”

What I find interesting about this is that taxpayers, both California and federal, are forced to work extra hours every week in order to pay someone to be “director of race” in a society where a government-run enterprise isn’t supposed to be able to consider race (14th Amendment). (Why would taxpayers in Arkansas and Maine have to pay, you might ask? Despite decrying inequality, California universities insist on feeding at the federal trough rather than using state tax dollars and leaving the federal money for universities in poorer-than-average stages, such as the Islamic Republic of Michigan.)

What did the Director of Race at UCLA have to say? From the Daily Mail:

These sentiments are a little different from what my Democrat friends in Maskachusetts have said. They mostly say that they’re happy that Charlie Kirk was killed (and sad that Donald Trump wasn’t), but it isn’t personal as it apparently was with Director of Race Perkins. The Maskachusetts Democrats didn’t like what Charlie Kirk had to say and are happy that he was killed because now he can’t say anything more.

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Remember that Tylenol is the best thing for a pregnant person and his/her/zir/their baby

by philg

New York Times:

President Trump, speaking at the White House, gave direct and unproven medical advice contradicting decades of research about vaccines and the use of a common painkiller in pregnancy and infancy. … Medical experts, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, stressed that acetaminophen is safe.

StatPearls/National Library of Medicine:

Acetaminophen toxicity is the second most common cause of liver transplantation worldwide and the most common cause of liver failure in the United States. Responsible for 56,000 emergency department visits and 2600 hospitalizations, acetaminophen poisoning causes 500 deaths annually in the United States. Notably, around 50% of these poisonings are unintentional, often resulting from patients misinterpreting dosing instructions or unknowingly consuming multiple acetaminophen-containing products.

I recently purchased some acetaminophen. The CVS brand expired nearly a year after the Tylenol-brand Tylenol. Maybe it would be worth paying more money and accepting the shorter expiration date in exchange for a U.S.-made product? The CVS bottle said “Made in India”. The Tylenol-brand bottle said “Active ingredient made in India.” When did Americans forget how to make common chemicals such as this one?

Note that if you’re worried about acetaminophen toxicity you could take sugar pills the next time that you’re in pain. According to “Lack of Efficacy of Acetaminophen in Treating Symptomatic Knee Osteoarthritis; A Randomized, Double-blind, Placebo-Controlled Comparison Trial With Diclofenac Sodium” (2015) and “Acetaminophen for Chronic Pain: A Systematic Review on Efficacy” (also 2015), a placebo will work just as well as Tylenol (“All included studies showed no or little efficacy with dubious clinical relevance”).

From the manufacturer in 2017:

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Is every lawyer in the U.S. working for Mahmoud Khalil?

by philg

“Immigration judge orders Mahmoud Khalil deported to Syria or Algeria” (Politico):

Lawyers for the pro-Palestinian activist said they plan to appeal the immigration judge’s order, which was revealed in court documents filed Wednesday.

The order from the immigration judge, Jamee Comans, came despite a separate order in Khalil’s federal case in New Jersey blocking his deportation while that court considers Khalil’s legal argument that his detention and deportation are unlawful retaliation for his Palestinian advocacy.

Khalil’s March 8 arrest and subsequent detention in Louisiana was part of the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on foreign-born pro-Palestinian academics who were studying or working in the U.S. legally. Khalil, a former Columbia graduate student who helped organize campus protests, was arrested at his Manhattan residence and put into deportation proceedings. He has not been charged with a crime.

In a letter to the New Jersey federal judge, Michael Farbiarz, Khalil’s lawyers said they have 30 days from Sept. 12, the date of the immigration judge’s ruling, to appeal her decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals. The lawyers said they expect that process to be “swift” and that an appeal of the BIA decision, which would go to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, is unlikely to be successful, since, they wrote, the appeals court “almost never” grants stays of removal to noncitizens.

If we include the judges and also the tied-up federal government attorneys on this project, is it fair to say that all, or nearly all, of America’s attorneys are working for Mahmoud Khalil?

Related:

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No possibility of future conspiracy among realtors…

by philg

… because there will be only one realtor.

“Home Sellers Win $1.8 Billion After Jury Finds Conspiracy Among Realtors” (New York Times, October 2023):

The influential National Association of Realtors and several brokerages were ordered to pay damages to home sellers who said they were forced to pay excessive fees to real estate agents.

A federal jury ruled on Tuesday that the powerful National Association of Realtors and several large brokerages had conspired to artificially inflate the commissions paid to real estate agents, a decision that could radically alter the home-buying process in the United States.

… under the verdict, the sellers would no longer be required to pay their buyers’ agents, and agents would be free to set their own commission rates, which could be slashed in half or less. For example, a home seller with a $1 million home can now pay as much as $60,000 in agent commissions — $30,000 to their agent and $30,000 to the buyers’ agent.

It looks like the problem has been solved for the long run (not in the short run, though; “Why broker fees have barely changed since the big settlement” (Axios, May 1, 2025)). It won’t be possible for brokerages to conspire because there will be only one brokerage. “Brokerage Giant Compass Agrees to Acquire Rival Anywhere for $1.6 Billion” (WSJ, today):

Leading real-estate brokerage Compass said it has agreed to acquire rival Anywhere Real Estate for $1.6 billion, the clearest sign yet that a long stretch of lackluster home sales is sparking industry consolidation.

The all-stock transaction would create a new industry giant with an enterprise value of about $10 billion, including debt, in one of the largest deals ever in the residential brokerage industry.

Compass and Anywhere were already the first- and second-biggest brokerages by volume in 2024, respectively, according to RealTrends. Compass has about 40,000 agents, while Anywhere has about 51,000 agents at brokerages it owns and another 250,000 agents at its franchises.

I’m trying to figure out why the U.S. has antitrust laws if something like this is allowed to occur.

Separately, if you’re about to buy the new iPhone, here’s a photo of where some of the money you previously gave to Apple went, from “Ex-Apple CEO John Sculley sells Palm Beach mansion for $37 million” (USA Today, 9/10/2025):

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