August 29, 2026 - Week in Review

The week of How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Posting[1].

I started the week with a review of the 13 or so months after I moved away from Substack. It was a reflective review, but as a prominent reader told me, I should stop looking at the Jonses (Substack) and just focus on the content.

Saturday, August 22: First was the year+ in review. Someone in the comments interpreted it to mean that I wanted to grow the cashflow, and that is not what I intended. This site, and all I write is a hobby for me, a hobby that is not remotely a strain on my resources. I spend less on it in a year than my wife and I spend on groceries[2]. Anyhow, I will take the hint and stop comparing it to that other site.

One change to note: I have built an inline request to have readers share to their socials, their text chains, their email friends. If you want to help me grow my audience, please share it. That word of mouth, and your efforts to spread the word is worth more than money to me.

Sweaty's Corner doesn't have a marketing budget or an algorithm pushing it into anyone's feed. It has readers who share it. If this one landed, sending it to someone who'd get something out of it — or subscribing so the next one finds you directly — genuinely moves the needle.

But wait, there's more. I also had a follow on about the treasury interventions, the bond markets swatting it away like a cat playing with a mouse before finally killing it. It is a delight to see the smug Scotty Bessent get his ass handed to himself. This installment is on how barren his toolbox is, with the deficit so high, the rumblings in the AI buildout (more on this in Sunday's post) and how the other central banks are becoming emboldened to not play nice.

Sunday, August 23: I was going to take a day off, but a pair of items in both the NY times, and the Financial Times got my thinking cap whirring, and I had to dive into the murky world of off-balance sheet investments, and how shady it is that the frontier labs are hiding their training costs (that balloon with each generation) and that all this financial engineering is hiding a huge fucking problem. There's a reason I am piling a ton of money into cash just earning base interest rates, and it is because I fear that the exuberance of the AI build out is going to at least cool, if not pop the bubble. Because what the Hyperscalers and the Neoclouds are spending is nowhere near justified by the revenue generated.

Monday, August 24th: This was a bumper crop of a day with three posts. The first was the continuation on the affordability thread, where I looked at the excuses for why we never seem to be willing to do anything about the cost of housing:

Second up, I just had to take a swing at Lil's Scotty Bessent and his idiotic Economic D-Day. I gave him the full spectrum This Fucking Guy treatment:

And third, a post that tickles my early career in semiconductors, I went deeply geeky on the device side for the GPU race for AI training and inference. The claims of efficiencies were not sitting right with me, and alas, it was truly Mabushi. My theory is that the step function gains at the silicon layer are going to flatline. I honestly expect NOBODY to read this, unless you are a deep geek.

Tuesday, August 25: I first stumbled on a great guitarist, Joanna Connor, who turns out immersed herself into the Chicago blues scene in the early 1980's and is still out there slaying to this day. If I ever get back to Maryland, I will try to coordinate the trip to catch a show.

The second post on Tuesday was a continuation of the political fuckery, this time I tear into Russel Vought, arguably the most powerful man in government, who is steadfastly implementing Project 2025 with deftness and velocity that is mind boggling:

Wednesday, August 26: You can tell when the politics is getting me down, I start posting music again. In the aftermath of the November 2024 elections, I went on a long music streak. Alas, this week has been trying my patience.

The first post was a paean to my stepfather who introduced me to Chicago blues, the music of his youth, and one of his favorite films of all time was The Blues Brothers. This is a clip from the show with the incomparable Aretha Frankling:

Alas, the second post was back to the grindstone. No rest for he wicked, eh?

One of Vought's signature policies was stripping funding for scientific research, and his machette really hacked away at it. But then something happened. The legislators, and the states fought back. A lot of that funding was returned. You might assume that the Red states were more successful in restoring their funding, but you would be wrong. They largely didn't turn to the courts, so the blue states had over $2B of funding of grants restored, and the red states had less than $100M restored.

Thursday, August 27: I was going to take a day off, but all the hullabaloo about Michael Cohen's heel turn swirling, I felt I needed to weigh in. I never bought his mea culpas and had some bad ju-ju. But a lot of the resistance media fell hard for him, and are navigating the carnage.

Friday, August 28: Back to the tread of the OMB and the fuckery with funding research. This time there are some good news, even though the next generation is scientific researchers are thinking long and hard about establishing their laboratories in the US. Ultimately, this will be costly:

Time for the weekly dose of The Dude. He heard some member of the pundit intelligentsia opining that the general population's media literacy had really degraded, and The Dude was like "what media literacy?" because it has never been good, so he had to dash off a quick hit:

[1] - if you get the reference, we can be friends IRL (it is the subhead from Dr. Strangelove)

[2] - as we plan for retirement in a few years, she tallied how much our spend at the grocery store was, and for the two of us, it is a shockingly high number, north of $1,200 and no, we don't shop at Whole Foods, and we don't buy a lot of beef – I can't digest it, so a good burger twice a year is my limit – but everything is so damned expensive. I can't imaging being lower middle class with 2 or more kids.

August 29, 2026 - Week in Review

Read more

The Defense Held and the Building Emptied Anyway

Same Tenant, New Paint (Cohen)

The Courage Was Free

Music: The Blues Brothers