e’re getting close. A lot of stuff’s going right.

In other news, the news is reporting—I think Wall Street Journal was reporting on this—that the House Oversight Committee is going to refer some of the Biden auto-pen orders where the automatic pen signed his name instead of Biden. They’re going to refer to the Department of Justice to investigate because after they did their own investigation, which is a non-courtroom investigation, the House Oversight Committee decided that Biden might not have even been aware of some of the things that he allegedly signed with the auto-pen and that maybe the Department of Justice should look into this.

I don’t think there’s any crime involved. Do you? It seems to me what they had was a really bad system which needs to be maybe have better guardrails, but a crime? I mean, if you have a situation where all you have to do is say to the president, are you okay with this list of things we’re going to sign, and let’s say he doesn’t want to look at it and he just says, “Yeah, because we have thousands of pardons. Do you want to look at them individually?” Nah. “Just do what you think is right. Let me know.”

Under those conditions, would you say that the president approved them? Because all I care about is did he actually approve the specific things? And I wouldn’t care too much if he approves some things generically without knowing the details. He’s the president. If the president wants to pardon somebody with a terrible reason, they have that right. We don’t get to check their reason for a pardon. It’s just the president.

So the fact that I don’t like that the president might not be aware of something he approved, but maybe he had approved it in some general way like, “Yeah, you take care of that. I’ll be okay with whatever you want to do. Just consider it approved.” If he did something like that, they might have. Would that be against the law? I don’t think so. That would be him just deciding what to sign and what not to sign, but didn’t use his own hand. So I don’t think there’s going to be a prosecution for that, but it might be embarrassing for the Democrats. And maybe that’s good enough for the Republicans.

According to Reuters, Amazon’s going to lay off 14,000 people real soon, like maybe today, in favor of artificial intelligence.

Now here’s a little rule that you can learn the difference between Amazon and Tesla. Do you remember this is a real thing, by the way? You’ll think I’m making this up if you haven’t heard it before, but this is a real thing. A number of years ago Elon Musk said that one of their operating principles for Tesla, way before he was political and way before I was political, he said that one of their operating principles was—and it’s in writing, it’s actually written down—that the Tesla employees should not do something that is likely to be in a Dilbert comic or something that could easily be put in a Dilbert comic.

Now, is that good advice? It’s really good advice because weirdly, if you’re familiar with the Dilbert comic, you kind of know what would be in there, don’t you? Like you could look at a real world suggestion, and people do this all the time. They’ll be sitting in a meeting and they’ll look at each other and like, is this going to be in a Dilbert comic? Because it sounds exactly like it could be. And if you use that as your guardrail—could it ever be in a Dilbert comic?—that’ll keep you out of doing the stupidest things.

So Elon Musk says if it might be in a Dilbert comic, don’t do it.

Now let’s compare. What do you think my Dilbert comics have been about this month? Literally this month, because Dilbert still runs, it’s just behind the paywall now. Literally this month my jokes were about big companies implementing AI and then having to reverse it because AI is not nearly where it needs to be to do anything useful. I’m literally mocking what Amazon is doing while it’s doing it. I didn’t know that they were doing it necessarily. It was just a big company thing.

While I don’t think I’ve heard Tesla say that they’re firing people to reduce staff because of AI. Has Musk e