still … fundamentals matter but fiction outruns our reality
Adapted from the opinion piece, Our Stock Market Is Broken (June 8, 2026) by Aaron Zamost, a tech communications consultant and a former executive at Square, where Mr. Zamost writes:
As part of its pitch to sell shares on the stock market, Elon Musk’s aerospace and technology company says it will capture over $28 trillion of the A.I. market (nearly the size of the entire United States economy).
To understand what’s going on, you have to see the game for what it is. Whether it makes sense or not, the market has heavily rewarded Mr. Musk’s utterances for some time. There are parallels to the meme stock phenomenon, in which a company’s shares soar primarily on the strength of viral social media hype.
In Silicon Valley, the result right now is a merry-go-round of profit and consequence-free failure as the same insular coterie of investors, entrepreneurs and banks continually fund one another’s next moves.
Is it any wonder that 67 percent of Americans believe the economy is rigged to advantage the rich and the powerful?
The real question is whether this party will end. Dr. Seru, like many finance experts, says it will. “Eventually, fundamentals still matter,” he noted. But who knows when that might happen? From birtherism to A.I. deepfakes, fiction has outrun reality for years now.
Years and years ago, mostly by accident, I became a webmaster of a publishing company and was accorded all the rights and privileges of being an expert on the subject, not that I was an expert, but that knew more about than most of the other people in the company.
There was one feller who had a title like COO or CFO or something but he was in charge of looking after the companies’ money and he read and accepted all the reports that led to something called the Web Bubble of the late 1990’s.
I was invited to attend his presentation to the board on the ‘Capitalization of the Corporate Website‘ where he presented data and charts that showed, beyond any reasonable doubt, that in 5 years, the corporate website would be worth 50 (not kidding) times the current valuation of the company.
He finished and the room went quiet.
Then the CEO said, “Mike? What do you think?”
I felt all those board members swivel their chairs to look at me.
I knew what I should say but I just couldn’t help myself.
I started by saying that it was a great presentation.
I said that web world was new and full of possibility.
Then said I was no economist but mentioned I had taken basic economics classes in college, like most of them I presumed, and I remembered something called the ‘zero sum theory’ and while I wasn’t sure if it applied, but what came to me when listening to this presentation and thinking of all the other same such stories in the news about other companies, was … where was all this new capital coming from?
There was a long silence and a clearing of thoughts and such.
I think the CFO wanted to strangle me but he nodded.
There was more quiet.
Then the CEO thanked me and thanked the CFO for the presentation and moved the meeting along to other non web topics and I was dismissed.
Later the CEO found me and told me I had said the quiet part out loud.
I said I hoped I didn’t cause any problems.
He told me not to worry and that sometimes someone needed to say the quiet part out loud.
Later when some folks came down the road talking about the next big thing in web world and offering the company a chance at getting in on the ground floor for several millions of dollars, that same CEO confidently said no.
Soon after that I played my ‘expertise’ into a job in online news where I stayed for 20 years.
According to Wikipedia, The dot-com bubble burst on March 10, 2000, which is the exact day the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index reached its all-time high of 5,048.62 before starting a steep, multi-year decline.
Sorry to that fiction has outrun reality for years now.
I have never been really planetary since … farewell, my lovely
Back before Christmas I was in a Barnes & Noble bookstore.
Haven’t been in one in years but my wife had requested a couple of recently published books and she likes to have the book in her hand.
I walked in and felt pretty much at home.
My first job ever was working in a bookstore in a local mall.
I started working at Waldenbooks in the North Kent Mall in the spring of 1979 and I worked for this company until the spring of 1992 and then I went to work for the public library.
Today neither Waldenbooks or North Kent Mall is around.
But I still felt at home in the Barnes & Noble but … out of place.
I looked around and found the fiction section okay but it hit me that the shelves held only Hardcover and over sized paperbacks, what we called Trade editions.
Where were the paperbacks?
I wondered if maybe there was a paperback section but couldn’t find one.
I asked a clerk and she looked puzzled.
I tried to explain and asked ‘you know, the Mass Market editions.’
She shook her head.
This store not only didn’t have any ‘mass-market books’ but she had never heard of ‘mass-market books.’
Well there you are I thought and I bought two oversize paperbacks and more or less forget about the exchange.
Then this morning, I swiped through the New York Times on my tablet to see the headline, “So Long to Cheap Books You Could Fit in Your Pocket” by Elizabeth A. Harris, who covers books and the publishing industry .
The sub headline was, “The mass market paperback, light in the hand and on the wallet, once filled airport bookstores and supermarket media aisles. You may never buy a new one again.”
The gist of the article stated:
After almost a century in wide circulation, the mass market paperback is shuffling toward extinction. Sales have dropped for years, peeled away by e-books, digital audiobooks and even more expensive formats like hardcovers and trade paperbacks, the mass market’s larger and pricier cousin. Last year, ReaderLink — the country’s largest distributor of books to airport bookshops, pharmacies and big-box stores like Target and Walmart — announced that it would stop carrying mass markets altogether.
“You can still find them in some places,” said Ivan Held, the president of Putnam, Dutton and Berkley, publishing imprints that once did brisk business in mass markets. “But as a format, I would say it’s pretty much over.”
Wow.
For those 13 years I had worked in bookstore, paperbooks were a major part of the books we sold.
Getting them out, setting them up, selling them and returning them made up most of the work week.
They would arrive in boxes and if the title was big enough, they would come in a pre-made ‘dump’ which was a cardboard standup display that held about 48 copies of the book along with a header on top that featured a blow up of any cool cover art.
Fans of the author or if it was a movie tie-in, fans of the movie, would ask us if they could have those headers and we would write names and phone numbers on the back to call them when the display came down.
All the walls of the book store were covered with wire racks that were filled with paperbacks and the walls were divided into sections of fiction, mystery and what have you.
When we got a new delivery of books, it was a days work to shelve the books into place (alpha by author) shifting the stock back and forth and then remembering where all these books were when asked for a title by a customer.
I started work in the days before computer cash registers and we had to compute the Michigan 4% sales tax in our heads and to this day I can rattle off the final price of paperbacks –
$1.95 came to $2.03 $2.95 came to $3.07 $3.95 came to $4.11 $4.95 came to $5.15 $5.95??? There were no $5.95 paperbacks
I can remember those numbers as so many of the sales in this bookstore were to readers who stopped in quick to grab just one book for the week.
It was that type of mall.
I can still hear the voice of a good friend I worked with who was originally from Kentucky and the way she pronounced $4.11 in a sweet southern accent with this pause between the 4 and the eleven and this Australian like rising last syllable on the eleven.
Then there were the returns.
From time to time we would get printed lists of titles to pull off the shelves and send back.
Well, kinda send back.
Mass market paperbacks were so cheap to produce that it didn’t pay to return the entire book to publishers.
As Ms. Harris writes in her article about paperbacks:
“Such low prices required inexpensive production. Because mass market spines were glued together instead of sewn, the covers often came off, or pages fell out. Libraries rarely bought them, in part because they were too fragile.
What we did was take all the returned copies to the backroom and rip the cover off and throw the rest of the book, now known as a ‘strip’, in the trash.
The covers were sorted and returned to the publisher for credit but that left us with stacks of coverless paperback books.
This was tricky as we were required by the publishers to destroy the book or make it unreadable.
For myself, I felt that taking boxes of strips to the trash compacter and pressing the button was good enough.
One manager I knew would pour water over them before taking them to the trash.
Still that left these books of strips all over the place.
I mean, how much can a box of books be compacted.
People were often coming into the store with an armload of strips, saying they found them in the trash (don’t ask me) and did we want them back?
In a short story, Garrison Keillor writes about walking down a street in New York City and being asked by a pan handler if he wanted to buy a book a $1.00.
The book didn’t have a cover but you could read it okay said the pan handler.
The pan handler was selling strips that he had found in the trash.
What made the story was that the pan handler had offered Keillor a copy of his own ‘Lake Wobegon Days‘ and when Keillor told the pan handler he had written the book, the pan handler was so pleased, he asked Keillor to autograph it.
Which Keillor did and as he walked away and down the street Keillor heard the pan handler offer the book to the next person for $2.00 … as it had been signed by the author.
Before I ever worked in a bookstore, paperbacks were huge in my life.
I have abibliophobia which is, according to Wikipedia: ” … the fear of running out of reading material, often causing anxiety in avid readers when their supply of books runs low. It is a relatively new, largely informal term derived from Greek, describing a common “bookworm” behavior of hoarding, over-packing for trips, or panicked reading. It is often treated by stockpiling books, using digital readers, or visiting libraries.”
I digress but one of the benefits of working in a bookstore was that so many of the people you worked with as well as many of the customers also had abibliophobia. You could see the kinship just in their body language. You were among friends and people who understood.
Paperback books went a long way to keeping my abibliophobia under control.
I never went anywhere and I mean ANYWHERE without something to read.
When my Mom took me to find a new spring coat or winter jacket, I brought along a book to read just in case and to make sure the new coat had at least one pocket the book would fit it.
Scholastic Book Day at my school was a monthly day created just for me.
We would come in from recess to see a big box on the teachers desk and know that the books we had ordered a few weeks before with our ‘Scholastic Book Money’ had arrived.
When orders were handed in, we would line up and hand over our orders and the quarters, dimes and nickels needed to pay for our order.
I was the only one who handed in their order with a check from their Mom.
When the box was opened, the teacher would look at the order list and call out names and hand out the books.
The teacher would save me for last and then hand me the box half filled with my books.
I have mentioned it before, but my parents never ever questioned handing over money to buy books for me.
Anything that might keep me quiet for an hour was worth gold to them.
Those paperback books.
You could take then anywhere and read them everywhere and I did.
Ms. Harris writes: “It was one of the most brilliant technologies in the history of the world,” Rabinowitz said, “precisely because you could shove it in your purse or your pocket.”
Physically I might be in the back of the car on a trip to Chicago but mentally I was fighting Napoleon with Horatio Hornblower or marching to city called Gettysburg with the Iron Brigade when the line of men in blue came over the top of ridge and the wind caught the flags and the sun made the buttons shine so that other soldiers watching had to stand and cheer in a scene described by Bruce Catton on flimsy, pulpy gray pages of paper.
I still have abibliophobia.
My collection of ‘devices’ helps a lot.
I also travel with a solar power USB battery charger just in case.
The number of paperbacks on my shelves is small.
My wife and I call them ‘beach books’ because they are small work well at the beach.
But in my mind …a world without paperbacks?
I cannot imagine.
I started by saying I don’t get to Barnes & Noble too often but there are a handful of used books stores – like this one in nearby Richmond Hill, GA, that we frequent which makes me think the paperback will be around for awhile yet.
And I am reminded of an essay by E. B. White titled, Farewell, my Lovely.
It was White’s fond remembrances of the Model T Ford.
To close the essay, White writes: The days were golden, the nights were dim and strange. I still recall with trembling those loud, nocturnal crises when you drew up to a signpost and raced the engine so the lights would be bright enough to read destinations by. I have never been really planetary since. I suppose it’s time to say good-bye. Farewell, my lovely!
Please allow me to paraphrase.
The days were golden, the nights were dim and strange.
I still recall with trembling those loud, nocturnal crises when you were stuck in a car at night and you weren’t allowed anything that made a light bright enough to read by.
better to have lunch and scared to death than to not have lunch and scared to death
There is a lot of wisdom in these seventeen syllables.
Today’s Haiku is adapted from the New York Times article, So Long to Tech’s Dream Job By Kate Conger (who has covered labor dynamics in Silicon Valley since 2017) where Ms. Conger quotes a tech worked named Rachel Grey saying:
“I suppose it’s better to have lunch and be scared to death than to not have lunch and be scared to death, but I don’t know if it’s good for you to be there,” she added.
Ms. Grey and Ms. Conger are talking about the days when, “The company’s cafeterias served steak and shrimp, kitchens were stocked with fresh juices and gyms offered free workout classes.”
The things, I guess, that made working in tech, a dream job.
Ms. Gray started with Google in 2007.
Not sure when Ms. Conger started in her field but as I pointed out, she has been covering tech for the NYTimes since 2017.
In the office at WXIA maybe 2012 – I was also asked who gave me permission to decorate my walls like this? Permission? I responded.
Almost entirely by accident and by being nosy, I started working in online tech back in 1995.
It was a dream job then and for me, its a dream job now.
And you know why?
Nobody really knows what I do and they are very happy with what I do and they are also happy to have me here to do what I do even though they aren’t sure what I do.
I have long counseled newbies to the field to TAKE OVER and be the expert because NO ONE ELSE WANTS to do this job.
Of course, you can get hired and then go to your new boss and say, WHAT DO I DO and your boss, because they are the boss, will come up with something.
But I am telling you, take the initiative, tell people what they should doing online and they WILL BE GRATEFUL.
Mostly because, the boss doesn’t want to have to think about online.
So you can do what you want.
What also makes this a dream job is or at least was, was the lack of rules.
I did so much stuff online because there was no one to tell me you can’t do that online.
People ask if I studied web design in college.
I tell them there was no web when I was in college.
Never learned what I couldn’t do so I did it all.
I launched my first major news website in the Spring of 2000.
That fall my boss said we needed a way to put High School football scores online.
I invented a way to do that.
A few weeks my boss said we needed a way to put school closings online.
I invented a way to do that.
Oh man oh man, but it was the wild wild west and anything goes and almost everything did.
Looking back through history you can spot jobs like people who can send Morse Code real fast or photographers or the early pilots.
Jobs before there were rules about having that job.
What a life.
What a dream.
I still feel that way.
Of course I never worked where the company’s cafeterias served steak and shrimp, kitchens were stocked with fresh juices and gyms offered free workout classes.
But today I work 5 blocks from the Atlantic Ocean where I can walk on my lunch hour.
I do agree with Ms Gray.
It’s better to have lunch and be scared to death than to not have lunch and be scared to death.
couldn’t be tempted … he’s into computer stuff like all good young men
Adapted from the paragraph: His son couldn’t be tempted to take up the family business – “he’s into computer stuff, like all good young men are” – and so Friday also marked the end of the Harper legacy inside the Sydney Opera House.
In the midst of the headlines today, ICE Raids, Heat Domes, Iron Domes and Bombings, my brain was attracted by the headline on the BBC News Website that stated, For 50 years, Sydney Opera House has had one man on speed dial along with the tease, Terry Harper has been tuning pianos in the iconic venue since he was a teen – a family legacy started by his dad.
My first thought was of that college age REO record album, You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can’t Tuna Fish.
My 2nd thought was about the Sydney Opera House as I had just been rereading Bill Bryon’s 2000 book, In a Sunburned Country about Australia.
Anyway, I thought the story worth the click and the few minutes of my time it would take to read.
I thoroughly enjoyed the story of the a singular man in the right place at the right time and happy to be the peg that filled that particular hole of tuning the pianos in the Opera House in Sydney, Australia.
Sometimes when the Man and the Hour meet, the meeting is about tuning pianos.
For myself, it sounded like THE job.
There is a word sinecure that is defined as a position requiring little or no work but giving the holder status or financial benefit.
As I understand it, this usually meant political jobs assigned by political leaders or Kings as rewards to faithful servants.
The point is, that once I read about such jobs, sinecure or without cure, in the Latin, or as I defined it, without care, or without A care, it was the job I wanted.
I wanted to show up, do my time, leave and shut the door on the rest of the world when I got home.
As I got older and learned about the working world, I realized that sinecure’s rarely opened up and the list of applicants was vast.
I examined my skills, my likes, my dislikes and I searched out what for me would be the next best thing and decided I wanted to be a history teacher.
A United States History teacher.
This led to a course of study and a college degree and entering the job field at a time when history teachers weren’t much in demand.
So I took what I get which was two part time jobs working for both the Grand Rapids Public Library and the Kent Country Library systems at the same time.
At that moment, both Library systems had joined together to create their first online cataloging and registration system for managing the books in the library as well all the patron accounts for check out and check in and reservations.
While the two systems shared the computers, they maintained different access accounts and user policies.
And I had logins to both GRPL and KDL access.
Often, standing at the Reference Desk at the GRPL, I would hear a patron ask another staffer if they could check for a book at a KDL Library and put it on hold.
I would hear the staffer reply, “I can’t … but he can.”
And point at me.
I would smile (very smugly), access a terminal, login with my KDL credentials and put the book on hold.
While the goal was still to teach history, that logging into another account was the thin end of the wedge and another job field started to creep into my life through my fingertips.
I got to goofying around on the computer in my spare time at the reference desk.
Understand personal computers were just coming out and internet access, as it was then understood, was impossibly limited, and I had access to a multi million dollar system to … goof off.
Someone told me I could access the library at the University of Michigan through the GRPL terminal so I had to do it.
Then I figured out how I could access almost any library in the world.
This was the INTERNET.
The network of computers and cables and hardware that inter connected all the computers in the world.
This had been around since the dawn of computers pretty much.
In the early 90’s, the World Wide Web of INFORMATION that lived on the Internet was created and using my newly learned skill to access libraries, I could access the WWW.
Very limited at the time, and nothing but text, the WWW took up more and more of my time working at the library.
Almost overnight, I had a new job skill, a new line on my resume and a new job.
I was a webmaster.
And I was in demand, making more money than I could in the Libraries or as a teacher.
And I landed in online news and teaching history became a might-have-been in a long line of might-have-beens in my life.
I exchanged the hoped for life of academia for the world of news with its demand for immediacy in the online world of total adaptability.
Changes demanding change.
A million miles away from the world of the sinecure.
Today, I read with a shaking head that line, he’s into computer stuff, like all good young men are.
Was it fate?
Who was I to think I was good young man, but was it all a predetermined course of events, unavoidable and influenced by a higher power or a force beyond my control?
I think back.
Had I seen it coming, would I have made the same decisions?
Well, to be honest …
What a long strange trip it’s been.
And it led to being the ‘webmaster’ for a small resort on a resort island on the Atlantic Coast of South Carolina.
Been doing web stuff since 1995, I can make a website stand up and sing the Star Spangled Banner if I have too.
I am a dinosaur but one with skills that cannot be taught in any other way than by doing this for 30 years.
And I keep busy.
When I started this job, I promised the owner I would figure out a way to get the smell of the salt air and the feel of your toes in the sand into an online experience.
I work in an office 5 blocks from the coast and I spend my lunch hour walking the beach.
there was something very real, work-like about this new phase of it
Adapted from the passage: About this time Mr. Bixby appeared on the scene. Something like a minute later I was climbing the pilot-house steps with some of my clothes on and the rest in my arms. Mr. Bixby was close behind, commenting. Here was something fresh — this thing of getting up in the middle of the night to go to work. It was a detail in piloting that had never occurred to me at all. I knew that boats ran all night, but somehow I had never happened to reflect that somebody had to get up out of a warm bed to run them. I began to fear that piloting was not quite so romantic as I had imagined it was; there was something very real and work-like about this new phase of it.
In Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain (Boston, James R. Osgood and Company, 1883).
In the book Mr. Twain recounts his adventures as a student or ‘cub’ pilot on the Mississippi River around 1855.
Pilots stood a four hour watch on and four hour watch off through out the day that required getting out of bed at Midnight every other day.
Mr. Twain writes that on his first day, “The watch was ended at last, and we took supper and went to bed. At midnight the glare of a lantern shone in my eyes, and the night watchman said —
‘Come! turn out!’
And then he left. I could not understand this extraordinary procedure; so I presently gave up trying to, and dozed off to sleep. Pretty soon the watchman was back again, and this time he was gruff. I was annoyed. I said: —
‘What do you want to come bothering around here in the middle of the night for. Now as like as not I’ll not get to sleep again to-night.’
The watchman said —
‘Well, if this an’t good, I’m blest.’
The ‘off-watch’ was just turning in, and I heard some brutal laughter from them, and such remarks as ‘Hello, watchman! an’t the new cub turned out yet? He’s delicate, likely. Give him some sugar in a rag and send for the chambermaid to sing rock-a-by-baby to him.’
It is at the this point that we get to the above quoted passage.
This morning I got up.
I have had to get up in the morning most of my life but there it was today.
Standing in the shower, I had time to ponder the act of taking a shower.
Using the Google I learn that home hot water heaters (as we might recognize them) were invented in 1897 but still by 1920, only 1% of US homes had indoor plumbing or even electricity.
One online article states: The establishment of standardized plumbing codes in the 1940s finally paved the way for widely available, safe indoor plumbing that relied on the storage tank water heater.
My Dad was born in 1920 and I wondered when did he get used to a DAILY hot shower.
In 2024 I expect … EXPECT … to take a morning shower in not only HOT water but hot, fresh water.
I stood under the gush of water and tried to imagine all the I’s that had to be dotted and T’s that had to be crossed to make sure this minor miracle of the industrial age was so thoughtlessly made available to me at a rate that I was able expect my morning hot shower to work
If it didn’t work, it was some kind of an emergency for somebody.
But I digress.
I had a day yesterday and slept heavily last night to wake up a minute before the alarm and was able to switch that off before it sounded and woke up my wife.
Got the coffee going in the dark and into the shower.
Out in my robe, got my coffee and tablet and sat in the dark ready to find out how much the world had changed overnight.
My tablet glowed in the dark.
Morning coffee and reading out of the way I got dressed and packed up and off to the car to get to work by 7am.
Something was wrong or at least I thought it was as I am mostly confused in the morning anyway.
It was cool almost cold and it was dark.
But what was going on?
Something wasn’t right.
I felt, like I like to say, there was one boot off.
One boot off but I couldn’t tell which one.
Up in the dark and off to work.
I do it but I never get used to it.
I do it but I have never liked it.
Getting up and going to work in the dark adds something very real and work-like about this phase of a job.
And I pulled out on to the parkway and drove to work.
Between me and work are several high bridges over the Inter coastal water way.
From the top of these bridges I can spot the eastern edge of the United States and the Atlantic Ocean and the sun coming up.
And this morning was cold and dark and no sun.
Wait just a minute.
What was going on here.
Not any clouds or anything, but the Sun wasn’t coming up or something.
Something wasn’t right.
I checked the clock and I was on time.
I checked the traffic map and traffic was as it usually was.
I got to work and parked.
I got out in the dark, got my bag out of the back and locked the car.
As I walked the walkway to the front door I hauled my watch out of pocket and popped it open.
I held it in the light of the doorway light to read it.
6:00am!
I looked around the dark.
I looked at my watch that I hadn’t looked at since last Friday.
