Remember the craze just a few years ago over Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)? People were paying millions of dollars to purchase various images, with one series known as the Bored Ape Yacht Club being particularly hyped.

The NFT hype benefited from the crypto craze because people seemed impressed with the blockchain process used to certify ‘ownership’ of this asset even if they did not understand it. It made absolutely no sense to me right from the get-go that cartoons and other images that can be copied freely could have any value but many people seemed to think that they did and rushed to ‘purchase’ them even though it was not clear what ‘ownership’ entitled them to.

The ownership of an NFT as defined by the blockchain has no inherent legal meaning and does not necessarily grant copyright, intellectual property rights, or other legal rights over its associated digital file. An NFT does not restrict the sharing or copying of its associated digital file and does not prevent the creation of NFTs that reference identical files.

This phenomenon had all the markings of a bubble and sure enough, the bubble popped.
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Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani upset the political establishment by winning the mayoralty of New York City but now comes along another upset, this time in the city of Miami in deep-red Florida.

Miami’s new mayor, Eileen Higgins, hailed it as “a new day” for the city after the Democrat ended three decades of Republican rule on Tuesday night in a stunning election triumph.

In reality, the result is more of a seismic shifting of sands given the magnitude of her victory over the Donald Trump-backed Republican candidate, Emilio González, in the most populous city in Miami-Dade county, which the president won in 2024 by 12%.

Higgins won the run-off with almost 60% of the vote, according to preliminary results reported Wednesday by the Miami Herald. More than just further evidence of a growing national backlash against Trump’s policies on the national stage, particularly immigration, her win has reset Miami’s political landscape in a manner not seen in some ways in 28 years, and in others not at all.

Higgins is the first woman to hold the office; the first Democrat to win it in 28 years; and the first non-Hispanic candidate since the 1990s. As if to bookend neatly the passing back of the Republican torch, the outgoing incumbent, Francis Suarez, is the son of the most recent Democratic Miami mayor, Xavier Suarez, who was elected in 1997.
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The swing back towards Democrats was notable given that Hispanic voters contributed to the red wave that last year saw Trump become the first Republican presidential candidate to win Miami-Dade county since 1988.

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Commenter Dunc pointed me to a long but fascinating article by Edward Zitron titled The Era Of The Business Idiot where he brutally analyzes how US businesses seem to have been taken over by owners and a managerial class that he calls Business Idiots who have become alienated from the actual manufacturing process of whatever their company produces, and make decisions that tend to work against actual productivity and quality in favor of things that advance their own careers and income. (The thrust of the article is similar to Cory Doctorow’s evisceration of the internet that he calls enshittification and the extension of that idea more broadly to American power.)

The Business Idiot thrives on alienation — on distancing themselves from the customer and the thing they consume, and in many ways from society itself. Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, Sam Altman wants us to have fake colleagues, and an increasingly loud group of executives salivate at the idea of replacing us with a fake version of us that will make a shittier version of what we make for a customer that said executive doesn’t fucking care about. 

They’re building products for other people that don’t interact with the real world. We are no longer their customers, and so, we’re worth even less than before — which, as is the case in a world dominated by shareholder supremacy, not all that much.

They do not exist to make us better — the Business Idiot doesn’t really care about the real world, or what you do, or who you are, or anything other than your contribution to their power and wealth. This is why so many squealing little middle managers look up to the Musks and Altmans of the world, because they see in them the same kind of specious corporate authoritarian, someone above work, and thinking, and knowledge.

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One of the messages of doom that were widely broadcast about what might happen should Zohran Mamdani win the mayoral election in New York City was that wealthy people might leave the city in droves because of the higher taxes he was promising to levy on them in order to fund some of the social programs that would benefit ordinary people. Such scare tactics to keep the wealthy happy are not uncommon. Some might view the departure of these people as not a bad thing, since wealthy people who begrudge paying more in taxes (which they can well afford) to benefit others are pests whom we would be better off without. Cristobal Young, a sociologist at Cornell University, and others have looked into this claim and find that this threat to move lacks evidence in support.

I research whether high earners actually move when their taxes go up. My colleagues and I have analyzed millionaire taxes in New Jersey and California, the migration of Forbes billionaires globally and decades of IRS data tracing where Americans with million-dollar incomes live.

Top earners are often thought of as “mobile millionaires” who are ever searching for lower-tax places to live. In reality, they’re often reluctant to leave the places where they built their careers and raised their families.
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The first fact is simple: Millionaires have low migration rates.

Mobility in America is highest among people who are still searching for their economic place in life. Workers who earn the lowest wages move across state lines at relatively high rates, about 4.5% per year, often in search of more affordable housing. People making $1 million-plus a year move only half as often: Just 2.4% of them pack up each year.

When millionaires do move, it rarely appears to be for tax reasons.
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Overall, only about 15% of millionaires who move end up with a lower tax bill. That shows the rich are willing and able to move for tax reasons. But because only about 2.4% of millionaires move each year – and only a fraction of those moves reduce their taxes – overall tax migration ends up being a small fraction of a small fraction. Not never, but not often.

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Europe’s richest man is whining about a proposed wealth tax for France. But of course, he is not complaining that it would hurt him personally, which would be very selfish, but that it would hurt the entire economy, which makes him a noble crusader and protector of the economic health of the country.

Europe’s richest man, the luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault, has said that a wealth tax that could cost him more than €1bn (£817m) would be deadly for France’s economy.

The French founder of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton said in a statement to the Sunday Times that calls for a 2% wealth tax on all assets “aims to destroy the liberal economy, the only one that works for the good of all”.

The idea of a wealth tax has steadily gained ground in France because of a political crisis, with the government trying to push through unpopular budget cuts. The idea of a 2% wealth tax on fortunes worth more than €100m has been proposed by Gabriel Zucman, an economics professor who has become a household name in France.
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Zucman is a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and the École normale supérieure, and last year wrote a prominent study on the wealth tax for the G20. In June, Zucman wrote in the Guardian: “Unprecedented wealth concentration – and the unbridled power that comes with such wealth – has distorted our democracy and is driving societal and economic tensions.”

But Arnault insists that his motives are pure and that those who are pursuing this tax are doing so because, for some reason, they want to destroy the economy.

“This is clearly not a technical or economic debate, but rather a clearly stated desire to destroy the French economy,” Arnault’s statement said. “I cannot believe that the French political forces that govern or have governed the country in the past could lend any credibility to this offensive, which is deadly for our economy.”

Really? They ‘clearly stated’ that their desire is to destroy the economy? Where and when did they say this?

People like Arnault should continue to speak out like this so that people will increasingly see that what greedy, selfish jerks they are.

The US Federal Reserve has two missions: keep inflation under control and have full employment.

What should be the desired rate of inflation? If it gets too low, that might be due to the economy stagnating and heading towards recession. Too high and people and businesses start hurting and indulging in more short-term spending as a hedge against future price rises. The magic number that the Fed and the economic pundits have settled on seems to be around 2%.

In its Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy (PDF), the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) judges that inflation of 2 percent over the longer run, as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures, is most consistent with the Federal Reserve’s mandate for maximum employment and price stability. When households and businesses can reasonably expect inflation to remain low and stable, they are able to make sound decisions regarding saving, borrowing, and investment, which contribute to a well-functioning economy and the well-being of all Americans.

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