activity around Christmas? It's before people get toys so they haven't received it for Christmas and they're trying it out. It's not that. And these seem to be bigger commercial drones or not little ones. Why would you see that? Well I don't know but I'm going to give you the Dilbert filter on why you might see more drone activity in the past three years toward the end of the calendar year.

All right so this is the corporate filter. How does a corporation do budgeting? Corporation does budgeting this way. Towards the end of the year they ask you how much of your budget you spent. If you spent half of your budget your boss says excellent, next year that's how much you'll get, half of the budget you had last year. Nobody wants to get half of the budget they had last year even if they only spent that much because they were too slow. So what do they do instead? They rush to spend as much as they can toward the end of the year so they fully spent their budget so they can ask for that and a little bit more, a little bump. I'll take everything I had last year because you see I spent it and I'll need 10% more next year. That's how everybody does budgeting in a corporation. This is not the exception. That's how they all do it. They try to spend it all.

I have been personally involved where my boss put the order out, can you wildly spend whatever money you have left in your budget so that I don't get my budget cut next year? Literally we were told that directly. Spend wildly. Make sure you spend it all. He did not say only buy things which are critical to the company. That was not the goal. The goal was spending. The goal was not success.

Now everybody who's worked in the corporation can back me on that, right? There might be a few companies that don't do that but they'd be the exception. You spend all of your budget before the year end.

So what else do we know about the world recently? We know that in the past three years drones have become the weapon of choice in Ukraine and we all know that drones are the future of warfare. Three years ago what should have been happening is the US should have been, secretly at least some of it, secretly spinning up massive manufacturing capability for drones. And not the little hobby drones. I'm talking about the real fighting drones, big ones.

So in theory three years ago the people who had the budget to create new drones should have said oh let's do something before the end of the year. So at the end of the year they might be saying hey everybody who funded us to build these drones, we're going to do a big demonstration toward the end of the year to justify the money we've spent so far and also importantly spend a bunch more at the end of the year to do the demonstration and then justify your budget and maybe get a contract for more building.

So it's possible that what you're seeing is vendors doing end of year demonstrations which would naturally be much bigger each of the three years that we've been here because they would have been building capacity that whole time. And it makes sense it'd be at the end of the year. So it has nothing to do with Christmas and everything to do with the end of a fiscal year. Just a hypothesis. It's just a hypothesis. I wouldn't bet on it. I wouldn't place any giant bet that I'm right. But if you want to look for something that's not exotic like Chinese drones or aliens, if you want something not exotic it's just a budget thing. It might be just that. Wouldn't bet on it though.

Apparently according to Ars Technica there's a drone ban in the skies of part of New Jersey. And I think what they're trying to do is legally ban all the drones in one of the problem areas so that if anything's flying once they're all legally banned you would know that they're either illegal or alien, which I guess would be illegal aliens if they come from space. I don't know how that works. So this is smart. You know they should have done this a long time ago. So two weeks ago when everybody was talking about what's all these drones, if we didn't know the answer they should have banned drones for a week just to figure out what's going on because they would have seen the anomaly right away because whoever is doing it isn't listening to the laws and following them I don't think. I mean maybe a little but if it's something nefarious I don't know if they get the memo. I think they'd still be operating.

Yeah drone activity is at its highest since drones were invented because that's how it works. All right so that's the smarter way to say what I just said about the vendors building capacity and building more. If it's a new technology it's like it's the beginning of the iPhone and somebody said wait a minute every year at Christmas there are more iPhones because that's how it works. It's the beginning of the extended cycle of iPhones. Of course there's more every year. Same with drones. It could be just that. It could really just be there are more of them and nothing else. Anyway maybe we'll find out with that temporary flight restriction.

Here's some fake news that's slightly real. The CBO says that Trump's tariffs would slash deficits by trillions. Does that sound like true news? Really you think that's true? Well here's the first thing. I doubt anybody can calculate the effects of tariffs. I don't think you can calculate that because remember it used to be my job to calculate exactly this kind of thing. So I'm not talking without expertise. As an expert who spent many corporate years, I've got a degree in economics and an MBA. I would try to predict the impact of different decisions. So if we invest in this what happens in the short run and the long run. And I can tell you with great confidence that this analysis of Trump tariffs and deficits depends 100% on what assumptions you put into it. See when the public sees it they say oh this is based on data. It's not based on data. There's data that's used but it's based on assumptions. So they would make assumptions like what the tariffs were. They make assumptions about who the tariffs were on, assumptions about what products were involved, and assumptions about how other countries would respond. How many of those assumptions are going to be accurate in the real world? Nobody knows what anybody's going to do with tariffs. There's no way you can calculate this. All right this is very much like climate models. This has no credibility whatsoever. None. Because this isn't something that humans can calculate. It is something that humans always pretend they can calculate. They always pretend they can calculate it.

I've got a bet for you. If you could find a way to get to Warren Buffett and ask him this question, do you think the CBO can calculate the impact of Trump's tariffs? Now Warren Buffett even at 90 whatever he is has always understood risk and math and the real world. I think he would laugh when you told him the CBO could calculate this. No they can't. No they can't. Not even close.

But it's fake news anyway because when they say trillions do you know what they really mean? They mean trillions over years. If they don't tell you how many years are involved in the trillions how can you size it? I mean if you just read this headline you'd say oh my goodness all he has to do is some really good tariffs and we'll get rid of our deficit. No you might get rid of two trillion over many years and two trillion over many years is a few hundred billion and it barely makes a dent in the budget. And it also doesn't calculate what happens to consumers because the tariffs would increase prices on consumers so consumers would have less buying power. Presumably they'd buy less stuff and so there'd be less taxes from just the less economic activity of having not enough money. So no they can't calculate that.

All right and I'm not saying that tariffs are a bad idea. I think they're a really good idea for negotiating. So if Trump acts like tariffs are better than they really are that is just right for negotiating. It's not just right for being accurate. It's just right for negotiating. He should act like he loves tariffs and by the way he's doing this great. Yeah here's your persuasion trick for the day. If Trump wants the other countries he's dealing with to believe that he's serious about tariffs he can't talk about them technically because if he talks about them technically then the other side says so you're just going to raise the price on your own consumers because they're the ones paying the tariff. We're not paying the tariff. You know we don't like the tariff because people will buy less of our stuff but we're not paying the tariff. That's your own people because the company that is involved in the United States is the one who ends up paying it anyway.

So Trump for persuasion purposes should talk about tariffs nonstop and he should act like he loves them and they always work. That doesn't have to be true but that's the best persuasion because if they think they can't talk him out of tariffs then they're going to back down. If they think they can talk him out of tariffs because they're technically maybe not a terrific idea then they will try to do that. So he has to remove from his adversaries any thought that they can talk him out of tariffs. And I think he has. I think his messaging, his persuasion is so strong that he has convinced every country that he's going to tariff the hell out of them unless they do what he wants.

So he just threatened today I think today or yesterday he threatened the European Union that because there's a trade deficit, I didn't know that but there we have a trade deficit with the European Union. Now trade deficit doesn't mean anything's broken. It just means somebody's buying more than they're selling, right? It's not like a big problem by itself but he's using that, calling it a problem. It would be better if we sold more than we bought but it's not a big problem. So he's using that to say that he's going to tariff Europe unless they correct that imbalance by buying a tremendous amount of American energy, you know oil and gas. Now does that make sense? So somehow he's connected trade deficits with tariffs with energy. Now in the real world they'r