December 15, 2025

CIVIL LIBERTIES AIN’T WHAT THEY USED TO BE:

Posted at 9:51 am by Stephen Green

HMM: Oracle’s collapsing stock shows the AI boom is running into two hard limits: physics and debt markets.

Oracle’s rapid descent from market darling to market warning sign is revealing something deeper about the AI boom, experts say: no matter how euphoric investors became over the last two years, the industry can’t outrun the laws of physics—or the realities of debt financing.

Shares of Oracle have plunged 45% from their September high and lost 14% this week after a messy earnings report revealed it spent $12 billion in quarterly capital expenditures, higher than the $8.25 billion expected by analysts.

Earnings guidance was also weak, and the company raised its forecast for fiscal 2026 capex by another $15 billion. The bulk of that is going into data centers dedicated to OpenAI, Oracle’s $300 billion partner in the AI cycle.

“We have ambitious achievable goals for capacity delivery worldwide,” Oracle co-CEO Clay Magouyrk said on an earnings call this week.

Investors worry how Oracle will pay for these massive outlays as its underlying revenue streams, cloud revenue and cloud-infrastructure sales, also fell short of Wall Street’s expectations. Analysts have described its AI buildout as debt-fueled, even though the company does not explicitly link specific debt to specific capital projects in its filings.

Eventually, investors will expect to see returns on the industry’s massive cap-ex expenses — half a trillion dollars in 2024, another $550-$600 billion in 2025, and an likely that much more again in 2026.

Oracle might have made the headlines in today’s papers, but industry leader OpenAI will lose anywhere from $10-$20 billion in 2025 alone, on an estimated $13 billion in revenues. Again, that’s due to massive capital expenditures that are warping the market for chips.

I’d sure love to know in advance who will survive the inevitable shakeout (wouldn’t we all?), but I’m reasonably certain it’ll be brutal.

Posted at 9:36 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Busy Weekend for the Worst of Humanity. “This week it was like getting hit with a firehose of evil. I was just reading about what happened at Brown University and in Australia when the news from Brentwood about Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, was breaking. I was hoping that I could find something that didn’t involve murder to write about, but that was my hint that murder was unavoidable.”

Posted at 9:05 am by Stephen Green

EVERYONE KNOWS THE REAL PROBLEM BUT POLITICIANS DON’T WANT TO SAY IT:

Posted at 9:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

RE-FUND THE POLICE: Los Angeles mayor urges hiring of over 400 police officers

In the Dec. 10 letter, Bass implored the council to approve $4.4 million in funding, without which the police department will no longer be able to hire incoming recruits.

“It will mean no new cadets in the police academy in January of 2026,” Bass wrote in the letter. “It will mean increasing overtime hours and costs as fewer officers will have greater workloads. It will mean that we strain officers’ health with longer shifts and more responsibility.”

Bass and the president of the Los Angeles City Council, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, did not respond to The Center Square for comment this week. The Los Angeles Police Department deferred questions to the city council and mayor’s office on Thursday and did not return calls and emails from The Center Square on Friday.

In her letter, Bass noted the nation’s second-largest city can’t have a police force that staffs at the same levels as 1995. She also noted Los Angeles doesn’t have enough police officers per 1,000 residents the way other large cities throughout the country do. The demands of the police department with the upcoming 2028 Olympics and 2026 FIFA World Cup, she wrote, would strain the LAPD.

Weird, the LA Times reported last summer that she’d reached a deal with the city council to restore hiring funds already.

Then there’s this from 2020:

She said police department budgets could be reduced if communities shift some of the burdens to other agencies.

“Police officers are the first ones to say they are law enforcement officers, they’re not social workers. What we have done in our country is, we have not invested in health, social and economic problems in communities. We leave the police to pick up the pieces,” said Bass, of Los Angeles. “In my city, for example, on any given night, we have over 40,000 people who are homeless. Why should the police be involved with that?”

Addressing substance abuse and similar issues, Bass asked why “police officers have to clean up society’s problems?”

She blamed it on the “lopsided” priorities of cities.

“Why doesn’t a city deal with its social problems so not so much money would have to go to law enforcement?” she questioned.

How’d that work out for you as mayor, Ms. Bass?

Posted at 8:34 am by Stephen Green

BREAKING: HOLLYWOOD ICON ROB REINER, WIFE FOUND DEAD IN APPARENT HOMICIDE
Wtf?

Posted at 8:30 am by Charles Glasser

SALENA ZITO:

Posted at 8:26 am by Glenn Reynolds

A BILLION-DOLLAR LOSS IS STILL CHEAPER THAN STAYING IN NEWSOM’S CALIFORNIA, I GUESS:

Posted at 8:18 am by Stephen Green

FOR SCIENCE FICTION PEOPLE WHO HAVEN’T HEARD:  John Varley died.

Posted at 7:32 am by Sarah Hoyt

IT WOULD TAKE A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH: Biden Legacy Imperiled As Presidential Library Project Reportedly Plagued By Anemic Fundraising.

Biden’s library foundation told the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) it anticipates raking in only $11.3 million by the end of 2027, which is not nearly enough money to build the traditional legacy and records management project for each of the nation’s chief executives, The New York Times reported. The IRS filings also reportedly show the organization failed to garner any new donations in 2024, the final year of Biden’s sole term in office. Instead, it was seeded solely with $4 million remaining from his inauguration in 2021, according to the outlet.

The library foundation declined to say the amount of money it raised in 2025, but claimed Biden was just now starting to actively fundraise for the project, The New York Times reported. Moreover, Biden’s aides said they have a goal of eventually raising $200 million for the project, according to the outlet.

In part due to the lackluster fundraising, talks have recently been taking place about merging a potential Biden presidential library with pre-existing Biden-affilated institutions located at the University of Delaware, the outlet reported, citing four anonymous sources familiar with the matter.

His legacy is in no way “imperiled.” If anything, even a lackluster combo deal with the University of Delaware is still more than the President-in-Name-Only deserves.

Posted at 7:32 am by Stephen Green