Energy Writer and Editor, Bloomberg News. Based in New York, watching the world. Views are my own. The only people for me are the mad ones.
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Will Wade retweeted
Residents near a proposed data center masterfully trolled local officials by giving them a free preview of the 24/7 noise they're signing everyone else up for.
Brilliantly played.
Beautifully petty.
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Will Wade retweeted
The guy who compared a Trump rally to Jonestown on live Fox News was invited by the Trump campaign. They called his work phone on Monday and asked him to come.
His name is Tom Hoyle. He's 57 and runs a small custom printing shop in Charlotte called MadPark Designs with his business partner. He's hated Trump since 1989, back when he was a sophomore in college. And he really, really doesn't like getting sales calls on the shop line, from anybody.
So when the rally people called, he said yes. He even signed up with his real name and contact info, because he wanted it on the record that they invited him.
Then he had to get through the door. A private security guy asked him straight up if he was a Trump supporter. Tom told him he supports the Constitution, then started talking about his shirt, which was for an old death metal band called Death. He kept going about the history of Florida death metal until the guard gave up and let him in.
His plan going in was honestly pretty juvenile. He and a buddy he grew up with figured he'd wait a few minutes into the speech and yell something filthy.
Then a Fox News reporter, Lucas Tomlinson, found him standing off by himself and asked if he could interview him live. Tom thinks a white guy with a big beard and a ball cap was pretty much exactly what they were looking for.
He told himself he wasn't going to cuss on national TV, so he made it up on the spot. He says the first line and then just waits. The reporter goes "Wait, the Jonestown Massacre?" and that's when he finishes it.
He told The Handbasket he picked that up from Billy Crystal, who said on Letterman back in the '80s that you always let the other guy set up your punchline. Tomlinson set it up for him perfectly.
A few minutes later some men who said they were Secret Service pulled him aside. He asked if this was about the concession stand, because it closed early and he was starving. They didn't love that and walked him out. On his way out he passed the guard from the front door and told him, hey man, you didn't vet me too well.
Think about how many people had a shot at stopping this. The campaign's call list found him. The signup form had his name. A guard questioned him to his face. A Fox crew put him on live TV. Every one of them took one look at the beard and the hat and filled in the rest.
That's how almost all of this screening works. Asking somebody what they actually believe takes time, and looking at them takes a second, so everybody just looks.
The one check that actually caught him came after he'd already said it on national TV.
Fox: Why are you here this morning?
Trump rally attendee: Well, in the late 70s, I was a little too young to go to South America for the Jonestown Massacre. But this is as close as I'll ever get, so that's why I'm here. There's nothing like seeing a cult right up front.
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Will Wade retweeted
What about the trees?
The trees in Biosphere 2 grew quickly in the controlled environment. They shot up toward the glass ceiling, their leaves lush and green.
But before reaching maturity, many of them simply collapsed. They couldn’t support their own weight.
When researchers examined the fallen trees, they discovered something fascinating: The trees had failed to develop what botanists call “stress wood”—the dense, reinforced cellular structure that forms when trees are buffeted by wind.
In nature, as a tree bends and flexes against gusts and storms, it responds by producing higher concentrations of cellulose, building strength exactly where it’s needed. The stress literally makes the tree stronger.
Inside the sealed biosphere, there was no wind. The air was still. The trees had all the resources they needed to grow—water, nutrients, and light—but they lacked the one thing that would make them resilient.
Without stress, they grew fast but fragile. They looked healthy right up until the moment they crumbled.
There's a parallel almost too obvious to state in how we raise our children.
When we remove friction from our children’s lives—when we optimize their environment so much that they never have to struggle—we may be producing the human equivalent of Biosphere 2 trees: impressive
growth with no structural integrity.
They look fine until life’s inevitable winds arrive. And then they fall.
So how do you add the right amount and kind of stress to your children's life? How do you get them to joyfully struggle for things that are hard?
I discuss this in "The Wealth Trap," which will be published November 10, in just a few weeks. Link below in the thread to where you can pre-order.
In 1991 eight people were sealed inside three acres of glass in the Arizona desert to prove that a carefully designed farm could feed humans without the outside world, and the design had almost no room in it for animals. Two years later the only thing inside that had reliably fed them was a handful of goats.
Biosphere 2 cost a hundred and fifty million dollars. A rainforest, an ocean, a savannah and a farm under one roof, with the door welded shut for two years and nothing allowed in or out. The farm was the heart of it, and the farm was built on the modern idea: crops first, grown intensively, with livestock as an afterthought at the edges. A few African pygmy goats for milk, a flock of chickens, and four small feral pigs chosen because they could live on scraps.
The pigs did not last the year. In a sealed box short of calories a pig is a competitor, and the crew killed and ate them. The chickens barely laid, because the glass cut the light and there was nothing to feed them that would make an egg. That left the goats, and for two years the goats were the only source of fat in a world designed around vegetables.
The accounts the crew wrote afterwards return to them again and again. The half glass of milk a day was the thing people lived for. When a kid was born it was eaten and the meal was written up like a feast. The men lost nearly a fifth of their body weight, the women a tenth, and the food they dreamed of was never the sweet potatoes they had in abundance. It was the animal they had been given too few of.
The plants were also taking the air. To make the crops grow the soil had been enriched with compost, and the microbes in that soil breathed oxygen faster than anyone had calculated. The level fell from twenty-one per cent to fourteen, the air of a high mountain, until the crew could not climb a staircase without resting and oxygen had to be trucked in from outside. The design that put plants first had removed the thing everyone needed most.
Nobody has ever run the experiment the other way, with a herd at the centre and the crops at the edge. It would not have needed a doctor to explain the results.
They were given three acres and told to feed themselves on plants. They ate the pigs, worshipped the goats, and suffocated.
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Will Wade retweeted
This latest article from Thomas Pikkety, the renowned French economist and leading authority on wealth inequality, should be essential reading here in the UK.
His argument is simple.
France has never been wealthier. Yet education funding per student has fallen by 20% since 2017, public services are struggling, and inequality is deeply embedded in the system.
Sound familiar?
The problem isn't that our countries have run out of wealth. It's how that wealth is distributed, who controls it, and the political choices made to protect it.
For decades, we've been told that austerity, declining public services and falling living standards are unavoidable consequences of economic crises, yet those same decades have seen extraordinary concentrations of private wealth.
Socialise the costs. Privatise the gains.
This is the reality we all need to wake up to.
These aren't inevitable economic outcomes. They're the consequences of political choices, made over time, that have prioritised the accumulation of private wealth over the needs of society.
And as public anger grows, we're seeing a deeply concerning response: The rise of the far right, directing that anger towards immigrants, disabled people, those claiming welfare and other vulnerable groups, rather than towards the economic structures responsible for the inequalities people are rightly furious about.
As @NaomiAKlein describes fascism, "it's capitalism's most ferocious threat response. A way of directing public anger downwards at the vulnerable, rather than upwards at the system."
Fascism doesn't challenge the status quo. It protects it by giving people someone else to blame.
The fundamental question isn't whether our societies can afford something better. It's why, when we've never been wealthier, we're repeatedly told we must accept less.
We need to fundamentally rethink an economy built around extraction, exploitation and wealth concentration, and start building one that delivers equitable, sustainable prosperity for everyone.
And with the UK Budget next week, this should be a serious warning to @UKLabour.
If the Budget fails to acknowledge this fundamental reality, and instead offers another round of "difficult decisions" that protect concentrated wealth while asking ordinary people to shoulder the burden, then @andyburnham really hasn't understood what's happening across Europe.
What's unfolding in France isn't an isolated protest. It's a warning of what happens when people stop accepting that a society growing ever wealthier somehow can't afford to give them a better life.
This isn't something politicians can keep kicking down the road.
The warning signs are everywhere. The question now is whether those in power are prepared to confront the causes, or continue defending the very system that's driving the anger.
@ZackPolanski @jeremycorbyn @KemiBadenoch @Nigel_Farage
High schoolers, students: the twilight of macronism
Hundreds of thousands of young people work hard to earn their high school diplomas, but there is nothing planned to welcome them into higher education
thomaspiketty.wordpress.com/…
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Will Wade retweeted
Blocking fossil fuel projects using a difficult permitting process, and hoping that reduces emissions, is not a good climate strategy.
And speeding up permitting processes, and hoping that helps clean energy and reduces emissions that way, is also not a good climate strategy.
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Will Wade retweeted
This is the post of the year.
Dear Secretary Bessent @SecScottBessent,
My name is Everett Stern. In 2010 I was a compliance officer at @HSBC. From a back office in New Castle, Delaware, I watched billions of dollars move to drug cartels, sanctioned regimes, and terrorist organizations. The enemies of the United States. I documented it, I escalated it, and when the bank would not act, I took it to the @FBI, the @CIA, and eventually the @SECGov.
The result was a $1.92 billion settlement. At the time, it was one of the largest in American history. It was also about five weeks of the bank’s profit. Not one banker was charged. Not one went to prison.
I paid a different price. I lost my career, my savings, and my place in the industry I had trained for. I was blacklisted. Every door in American finance closed at once. I slept on a camping cot in a 300 square foot apartment because I could not afford a bed, and I waited tables at @PFChangs to eat. I tell you this not for sympathy, but so you understand that I know exactly what it costs to do the right thing in American finance, and exactly how little the system does in return.
I made that sacrifice because I believed it would change something.
Yesterday, your department fined @BankofAmerica $1.2 billion for failing to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, some of it tied by your own findings to Chinese laundering networks, narcotics, and the southwest border, alongside 475 apparent sanctions violations touching Russia, Iran, and global terrorism. The bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act.
Fourteen years after HSBC. A bank with “America” in its name. And once again, not one individual charged.
Secretary Bessent, I want to say plainly what I believe you already know. The fines are not working.
A fine is paid by shareholders, absorbed by the balance sheet, and forgotten by the next earnings call. Bank of America reported earnings this morning. Nobody who set the alert thresholds, nobody who decided the 2024 cease and desist could wait, nobody who chose the backlog over the law will lose a single thing they value. Their lives are untouched. That is the entire reason the behavior repeats.
This is money laundering. This is blood money. Money that reaches a cartel buys fentanyl that kills Americans. Money that reaches a terrorist organization buys the next attack. This country has fought a war on drugs and a war on terror for decades, at enormous cost in lives and treasure, and all the while we have allowed the financing to flow through institutions we charter and regulate. Cut off the money and we win. We have never seriously tried.
There is also a question of equal justice that I cannot let go.
Before I walked into the FBI building to report HSBC, I stopped in front of the Great Seal on the wall and read the words engraved beneath it: “Justice is the defense of our liberty.” I believed that. I still want to. But every day in this country, people go to prison for crimes that are nothing next to moving money for the people who want Americans dead. A suit, a title, and a corporate badge should not be a shield from the consequences that apply to everyone else. If a street dealer goes to prison for what he sells, the banker who moved the cartel’s money should be standing next to him.
I also want to raise something that is rarely said in these conversations. Why has no one inside Bank of America come forward the way I did? The answer is that everyone in American banking knows what happened to me, and to the whistleblowers who came after. The last person who spoke up is the only policy anyone believes. That is a culture problem, and it starts with leadership, in the banks and in the agencies that regulate them.
This is not a political issue. It has spanned administrations of both parties. It is a national security issue, and I am asking you to treat it as one.
Three things would change the math overnight.
Refer individuals for criminal prosecution. Not the analyst in the queue. The executives who set the thresholds and chose the risk. One banker in handcuffs would do more than every fine in Treasury’s history combined.
End “too big to jail.” An institution cannot be too big to fail and too big to jail at the same time. If it is the first, it must be held to a higher standard, not a lower one.
And if Bank of America will not act as America’s bank, review its charter. A national charter is a privilege granted on behalf of the American people. It should be conditioned on not moving money for the people trying to kill them.
Secretary Bessent, you said yesterday that these actions send a clear message that even the biggest institutions are not above the law. With respect, the institution was never the problem. The people inside it are above the law, and they know it. Until that changes, I will keep writing letters like this one, and the next bank will keep paying the next fine.
I gave up everything I had to stop this. I am asking you to use the power you have to finish it.
Respectfully,
Everett A. Stern
HSBC Whistleblower
Founder and Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit
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Will Wade retweeted
The Nobel Peace Prize has gone to Navi Pillay for promoting international law, which is the politest way a Norwegian committee has ever told Donald Trump to fuck off.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to Navi Pillay “for her efforts to promote peace and international law.”
Do you agree that international law is a necessity for peace and security?
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Will Wade retweeted
We’ve got Milano cookies now too. New add this month.
Everyone wants to tell me how great their office pantry is but after the Bloomberg pantry nothing can surprise me. The Bloomberg pantry is the size of a small regional airport. The Bloomberg pantry has a fresh peanut butter machine and matcha on tap. The Bloomberg pantry makes the Thrive Capital pantry look positively soviet. Its memory will drive you to tears whenever you visit another newsroom
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RT @jakeadelstein: “𝑪𝒐𝒐𝒍 𝑱𝒂𝒑𝒂𝒏” 𝒊𝒔 𝒅𝒆𝒂𝒅. 𝑾𝒆𝒍𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒆 𝒕𝒐 “𝑪𝒓𝒖𝒆𝒍 𝑱𝒂𝒑𝒂𝒏”
The new barista at Cafe Japan has rolled up the welcome to tatami mat an…
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Will Wade retweeted
We are ruining our own institutions, which is sad for us and great for our enemies.
In a lawsuit filed this week, a civilian geography professor claims he was fired from West Point for pushing back after department officials barred faculty from teaching that humans contribute to climate change. (from @Rose_Lori) stripes.com/branches/army/20…
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Will Wade retweeted
From a friend…
If anyone wonders why you or I are liberal Democrats show them this post.
Women: "Can I have birth control?"
Republican Controlled Congress: "No."
Women: "I couldn't get birth control so I got pregnant.
Can I have an abortion?"
Republican Controlled Congress: "No."
Women: "You prevented me from having an abortion so I'm carrying the fetus, but my employer won't provide reasonable accommodations and is threatening to fire me.
Would you please pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act?"
Republican Controlled Congress: "No"
Women: "I had the baby, but I'm out of work.
Can I have WIC and food stamps until I get back on my feet?"
Republican Controlled Congress: "No."
Women: "I found a job, but it doesn't offer me insurance.
Can I have government guaranteed insurance?"
Republican Controlled Congress: "No."
Women: "My kid got sick and I got fired because I missed time caring for him/her.
Can I get unemployment?"
Republican Controlled Congress: "No."
Women: "I'm having a hard time getting my kid from school consistently.
Can we fund after-school programs?"
Republican Controlled Congress: "No."
Women: "I'm prepared to work to support my family.
Can you make sure that a full-time job's minimum wage is enough to do that?"
Republican Controlled Congress: "No.
But what's the matter with you and your family, that working two jobs can't lift you out of poverty?
And what kind of a mother are you, letting someone else watch your child while you work?
If your child doesn't do well in school or gets in trouble, it's entirely your fault.
You shouldn't have had a child if you weren't prepared to take care of him/her."
~Via Claudia Powell
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Will Wade retweeted
THIS IS ONE OF THE BEST DESCRIPTION OF A DEMOCRAT THAT I HAVE EVER SEEN.
Ron Howard has summed up what many of us believe. Including me....
“I'm a liberal, but that doesn't mean what a lot of you apparently think it does. Let's break it down, shall we? Because quite frankly, I'm getting a little tired of being told what I believe and what I stand for. Spoiler alert: not every liberal is the same, though the majority of liberals I know think along roughly these same lines:
1. I believe a country should take care of its weakest members. A country cannot call itself civilized when its children, disabled, sick, and elderly are neglected. PERIOD.
2. I believe healthcare is a right, not a privilege. Somehow that's interpreted as "I believe Obamacare is the end-all, be-all." This is not the case. I'm fully aware that the ACA has problems, that a national healthcare system would require everyone to chip in, and that it's impossible to create one that is devoid of flaws, but I have yet to hear an argument against it that makes "let people die because they can't afford healthcare" a better alternative. I believe healthcare should be far cheaper than it is, and that everyone should have access to it. And no, I'm not opposed to paying higher taxes in the name of making that happen.
3. I believe education should be affordable. It doesn't necessarily have to be free (though it works in other countries so I'm mystified as to why it can't work in the US), but at the end of the day, there is no excuse for students graduating college saddled with five- or six-figure debt.
4. I don't believe your money should be taken from you and given to people who don't want to work. I have literally never encountered anyone who believes this. Ever. I just have a massive moral problem with a society where a handful of people can possess the majority of the wealth while there are people literally starving to death, freezing to death, or dying because they can't afford to go to the doctor. Fair wages, lower housing costs, universal healthcare, affordable education, and the wealthy actually paying their share would go a long way toward alleviating this. Somehow believing that makes me a communist.
5. I don't throw around "I'm willing to pay higher taxes" lightly. If I'm suggesting something that involves paying more, well, it's because I'm fine with paying my share as long as it's actually going to something besides lining corporate pockets or bombing other countries while Americans die without healthcare.
6. I believe companies should be required to pay their employees a decent, livable wage. Somehow this is always interpreted as me wanting burger flippers to be able to afford a penthouse apartment and a Mercedes. What it actually means is that no one should have to work three full-time jobs just to keep their head above water. Restaurant servers should not have to rely on tips, multibillion-dollar companies should not have employees on food stamps, workers shouldn't have to work themselves into the ground just to barely make ends meet, and minimum wage should be enough for someone to work 40 hours and live.
7. I am not anti-Christian. I have no desire to stop Christians from being Christians, to close churches, to ban the Bible, to forbid prayer in school, etc. (BTW, prayer in school is NOT illegal; *compulsory* prayer in school is - and should be - illegal). All I ask is that Christians recognize *my* right to live according to *my* beliefs. When I get pissed off that a politician is trying to legislate Scripture into law, I'm not "offended by Christianity" -- I'm offended that you're trying to force me to live by your religion's rules. You know how you get really upset at the thought of Muslims imposing Sharia law on you? That's how I feel about Christians trying to impose biblical law on me. Be a Christian. Do your thing. Just don't force it on me or mine.
8. I don't believe LGBT people should have more rights than you. I just believe they should have the *same* rights as you.
9. I don't believe illegal immigrants should come to America and have the world at their feet, especially since THIS ISN'T WHAT THEY DO (spoiler: undocumented immigrants are ineligible for all those programs they're supposed to be abusing, and if they're "stealing" your job it's because your employer is hiring illegally). I believe there are far more humane ways to handle undocumented immigration than our current practices (i.e., detaining children, splitting up families, ending DACA, etc).
10. I don't believe the government should regulate everything, but since greed is such a driving force in our country, we NEED regulations to prevent cut corners, environmental destruction, tainted food/water, unsafe materials in consumable goods or medical equipment, etc. It's not that I want the government's hands in everything -- I just don't trust people trying to make money to ensure that their products/practices/etc. are actually SAFE. Is the government devoid of shadiness? Of course not. But with those regulations in place, consumers have recourse if they're harmed and companies are liable for medical bills, environmental cleanup, etc. Just kind of seems like common sense when the alternative to government regulation is letting companies bring their bottom line into the equation.
11. I believe our current administration is fascist. Not because I dislike them or because I can’t get over an election, but because I've spent too many years reading and learning about the Third Reich to miss the similarities. Not because any administration I dislike must be Nazis, but because things are actually mirroring authoritarian and fascist regimes of the past.
12. I believe the systemic racism and misogyny in our society is much worse than many people think, and desperately needs to be addressed. Which means those with privilege -- white, straight, male, economic, etc. -- need to start listening, even if you don't like what you're hearing, so we can start dismantling everything that's causing people to be marginalized.
13. I am not interested in coming after your blessed guns, nor is anyone serving in government. What I am interested in is the enforcement of present laws and enacting new, common sense gun regulations. Got another opinion? Put it on your page, not mine.
14. I believe in so-called political correctness. I prefer to think it’s social politeness. If I call you Chuck and you say you prefer to be called Charles I’ll call you Charles. It’s the polite thing to do. Not because everyone is a delicate snowflake, but because as Maya Angelou put it, when we know better, we do better. When someone tells you that a term or phrase is more accurate/less hurtful than the one you're using, you now know better. So why not do better? How does it hurt you to NOT hurt another person?
15. I believe in funding sustainable energy, including offering education to people currently working in coal or oil so they can change jobs. There are too many sustainable options available for us to continue with coal and oil. Sorry, billionaires. Maybe try investing in something else.
16. I believe that women should not be treated as a separate class of human. They should be paid the same as men who do the same work, should have the same rights as men and should be free from abuse. Why on earth shouldn’t they be?
I think that about covers it. Bottom line is that I'm a liberal because I think we should take care of each other. That doesn't mean you should work 80 hours a week so your lazy neighbor can get all your money. It just means I don't believe there is any scenario in which preventable suffering is an acceptable outcome as long as money is saved.”
Ron Howard
Community note
Ron Howard did not write the quote in this post. It was written by author Lori Gallagher Witt in a 2018 Facebook post.
snopes.com/fact-check/ron…
politifact.com/factchecks/202…
reuters.com/article/world/…
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Will Wade retweeted
If you ever had to push a car with a dead battery, jump in throw it into second gear and pop the clutch you were part of the greatest generation…
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Will Wade retweeted
A coisa linda do dia é ouvir Space Oddity na voz da espetacular Gail Ann — a baixista que trabalhou muitos anos c’ Bowie, Tears for Fears, Concrete Blonde, The The…
A mulher botou [a mim] e à bancada inteira c’ciscão nos olhos e meu coração apertado de sdds do Davi Roberto ❤️
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Will Wade retweeted
“I’ve heard people dismiss Trump’s mendacity with a shrugging “they all lie,” but we are witnessing a rare, very possibly once-in-a-lifetime political liar.”
cnn.com/2026/09/27/politics/…
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Will Wade retweeted
Earlier today, U2 returned to Mount Temple Comprehensive School to mark the 50th anniversary of their formation, staging a special schoolyard concert for 1,000 students and staff on the same spot where the band first performed together more than five decades ago.
The seven-song setlist included their first-ever single "Out of Control."
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Some breaking news -- NRC poised to issue construction permit for TVA's small modular reactor project, the second US approval for SMRs.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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Will Wade retweeted
I really can’t emphasize enough how mad I am at AI for stealing the em dash from me. I was an em dash guy long before ChatGPT, and now every time I use one I wince knowing someone will think I’m a hallucinating robot. This is actual cultural appropriation.
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