From The Atlantic, American Aviation Is Near Collapse The ICE deployment [to replace US airport security] is a particularly extreme example of what the political scientist Steven M. Teles has dubbed “kludgeocracy,” in which the government reaches for short-term, improvised solutions while resisting real reform. “‘Clumsy but temporarily effective,’” Teles has written “also describes much of American public policy. For any particular problem we have arrived at the most gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response.

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Wall Street has a name for it. They call it the TACO trade: Trump Always Chickens Out. The idea is simple. Trump announces something extreme, markets panic, he reverses course, markets rally. Traders who bet on the reversal clean up. It’s been reliable enough that Fortune, CNN and Bloomberg have all written it up as a repeatable strategy.

But TACO misses the point. Chickening out implies weakness, indecision, a man backing down. That framing is charitable. What if the pattern isn’t about losing nerve at all?

What if the pattern is about making money?

I want to propose a different acronym. TACI: Trump Always Cashes In.

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I don’t watch reality TV. I find most of it unwatchable. The one exception is talent shows, and I’ve never fully understood why they hook me.

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I built a native macOS app last night. My first useful one. Planned it, architected it, compiled it. Fifteen minutes from blank screen to a running application on my Mac.

I didn’t write a single line of code.

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Commonwealth Bank pays its tax. The ASX pays its tax. Magellan pays its tax. But for every hero there are many villains. According to Michael West Media, Transurban Holdings has averaged over $2.5 billion in revenue per year for 11 years and paid zero corporate income tax. Sydney Airport Corporation generated over $1 billion a year and also paid zero. DP World went a full decade without a single tax payment.

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Honda just wrote down $15.7 billion on its EV strategy. Cancelled three models months before launch. Flagged its first annual loss in nearly 70 years as a listed company. The Honda 0 Saloon, 0 SUV and Acura RSX are dead. The Ohio EV hub that was supposed to build them sits waiting for a purpose.

It is a staggering number. But it is not surprising.

Honda bet heavily on the US market for its electric future. Then the One Big Beautiful Bill Act killed federal EV tax credits, replacing them with interest deductions for US-made cars. The business case for Honda’s planned EV imports evaporated overnight. CEO Toshihiro Mibe admitted “the situation changed far more rapidly than we expected.” Battery-powered cars accounted for just 2.5% of Honda’s 3.4 million global sales last year. They were never close to ready.

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Think about how you read the web right now. You visit a news site, check a blog, open another tab for a tech site, scroll a subreddit. Repeat daily. Most of this routine is unnecessary, because a technology called RSS has been doing it for you since 1999.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a standard format that lets websites publish updates in a way that software can automatically collect. You subscribe to the sites you care about (news, blogs, podcasts, anything) and a single app called an RSS reader pulls all the new articles into one place. Content comes to you. You stop visiting individual sites. It is, genuinely, like email for websites.

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Sarang Sheth published a thorough piece on Yanko Design this week cataloguing how Microsoft broke Windows. The TPM 2.0 lockout. Stealth OneDrive syncing. TikTok pre-pinned to a fresh install. Thirteen years of two competing settings interfaces. Updates that break the machines they’re supposed to protect. It’s a well-argued indictment.

I agree with nearly all of it. Where I part ways with Sheth is his conclusion: that Windows remains the most practical OS, that there’s no clean exit, that MacOS is “paternalistic by design,” and that the MacBook Neo is “genuinely less of a laptop and more of a netbook.”

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