Mayday! Mayday! The Trump of Triumph Plus a “B” Cluster

I like writing and all, but there are some things AI can do better – or at least faster – than me.

I’m a Creative Carbon but a little help from the Speeders of Silicon gets me to breakfast a lot faster.  Here’s the first “Lazy George” tasking of the day:

For Friday, May 1, 2026 — May Day / Labour Day, major closures include:

Closed

Euronext Europe: Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon, Milan, Oslo, Dublin.
Germany: Xetra / Frankfurt.
India: NSE and BSE.
China A-shares: Shanghai and Shenzhen, closed May 1–5.
Hong Kong: HKEX.
Singapore: SGX.
Much of Asia: South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia also observe Labour Day closures.
Brazil: B3.
Mexico: BMV.

Open / not May 1 closed

U.S.: NYSE / Nasdaq open; May Day is not a U.S. market holiday.
Canada: TSX generally open.
UK: London Stock Exchange is open May 1, but closed Monday May 4 for the Early May Bank Holiday.  (What, they working too hard? Poor little darlings…)
Japan and Australia traded today, per market reports.

Bottom lines: Europe ex-UK, China/HK/Singapore/India and much of SE Asia, plus Brazil and Mexico are the big May Day closures.

The S&P along with Dow futures were up, but the Russell and NASDAQ were sobering up.  The smart reader will study the latest drop from The Economic Fractalist and the still-delusional will be thrilled with BTC hitting $77,673 earlier. To us?  It’s just more proof (like we needed it?) that hysteria is contagious.

PMI numbers mid-morning will be worth noticing on a coffee break.

Mayday!

You’ll be able to use today as a social sieve, if you will:  for sorting out the independent-minded people from the “joiners and followers”.  May Day protest organizers call for boycott of work, school and shopping.

Which would be a terrible thing – to be locked into following – but you do know where the term brown-nosing came from?

The Trump of Triumph

Still waiting, huh?  Us too…  Here’s how the national distraction is rolling now:

The reason today matters is the requirement that if the U.S. goes marching off to war somewhere, it needs congressional approval.  Checks and balances are good things.

Which gets us to this: Trump faces Friday deadline to end US-Israel war on Iran or seek Congress extension.  Which has turned into a political football on the Hill because midterms are on the horizon.  Republicans defer to Trump on Iran war despite deadline.

To mark the occasion, did you expect? Peace or something? (Silly you.) CENTCOM chief briefs Trump on possible ‘final blow’ against Iran: Report.  Trump weighs ‘Swift Strikes’ on Iran as Tehran signals defiance over Hormuz

The Commander in Chief isn’t done shaking things up in the .mil world yet, either.  Nor is he taking kindly to the NATO self-centeredness which has kept them out of the Iran cluster. Now Trump threatens to withdraw US troops from Italy and ‘horrible’ Spain.

If you’re keeping track, the way we figure it is this: Trump looks at numbers (he’s a Developer, right?). So, he sees the massive U.S. commitment of troops and support to Europe at some level as underwriting our own competition.  How much underwriting?

EU Punishment

Let’s think this through: If Trump really pulls the economic plug on Europe, this is not just a Pentagon reshuffle — it is a local depression machine aimed at selected host economies. Germany, Italy, and Spain together host about 53,000 active-duty U.S. personnel, and once DoD civilians, base staffs, contractors, spouses, and children are included, the American footprint likely runs on the order of 130,000–160,000 people.

That is payroll, rent, groceries, schools, restaurants, fuel, local hires, and supplier contracts. Pull that plug and Washington is not merely moving soldiers; it is yanking a U.S.-funded demand stream out of European towns that have quietly built whole local economies around the American presence.

Hand me a pencil?  Let’s take the high-end number (160,000) because I didn’t research contractors like the folks who train the NATO forces on how to drive American war products.  And let’s use $50,000 per person because they’re not coming home to pick up bargains at Best Buy on weekends.

$8 billion.

Not enough to shutter the EU, but it’s also not budget dust.

And there is a way he could (theoretically) further screw with the EU.  How?

About 136,000 U.S. retired-worker Social Security recipients live in the EU, using SSA’s Dec. 2024 foreign-country table and summing EU countries listed separately. The true number is likely a bit higher because several smaller EU states are not broken out individually; SSA only lists countries with 500+ beneficiaries separately. Europe overall has 174,407 retired-worker beneficiaries.

All the administration would need to do is to limit the “payout countries” for Social Security and that would be another, what, $5 billion hit to the EU.  To paraphrase the late senator Everett Dirksen, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

This was from my younger days – back when the Republican party actually possessed accounting skills.

This is Not a Dust Bowl

But be patient and watch the brown spots as we roll into summer:

A shout-out to Google.  (No, not for Gemma 4 models…) For the Google Trends interest in the word drought:

We’ve seen this coming in our “future sensing” for how long?  The correct answer is here. That’s about when we started eyeing the problems of year-round, on-site food production.

Voice Mode Activated

You may be interested to learn that I have removed SuperGrok from my AI stack here. Wondering why?

My experience with xAI billing has been a straight-up operational failure — a $300 charge showing on the card in February, no “Year of SuperGrok” showing up on the account dashboard.

And because there was no timely human response (or machine resolution — I don’t care how…) despite screenshots and documentation, that’s not a minor glitch; that’s a trust breach. When you’re running paid tools in a production workflow, billing has to be auditable, transparent, and responsive. My first note to Billing was March 4.

Time’s up. If I can’t reconcile what I’ve been charged against what the system says I paid, the platform doesn’t belong in the stack — period. If my bank can sort it out and get me access, great. I love the product — but the Support chain? (What support chain?)

Love the product – it rocks. (Or, Groks.)  Don’t like how it overwrote something (like my $300 annual account).

Home-Growing AI

If you have been shying away from AI, it’s getting easier than ever to build a machine at home.

For Windows you can drop in LM Studio from here.  Think of this as a “shell program.”  

At the end of setup, then you get to “model shop.”  The latest builds are gushed over (and ranked) in their Models section.

The only hiccups (compared with Grok, which codes Python nicely and Chat-GPT which spellchecks and works with Word docs better) revolve around how good your computer is.

Suddenly, Gaming Computers Make Sense

That’s because AI models don’t really care about your CPU — they live and die by GPU (graphics processor unit) muscle. The more VRAM (video memory) you’ve got, the larger and smarter the models you can run locally. What used to be “overkill” for gamers — big video cards, fast memory, serious cooling — is now exactly what a home AI lab wants.

In plain English:  that “big-ass gaming rig” isn’t about games anymore — it’s about owning your compute, your models, and your data.

And once you’ve tasted that?
Cloud AI starts to feel a lot like renting your own brain back… at retail prices. (Is more me worth $300/year?)

Oh, and AI offline may be trending toward a “not poor” person’s tool: Samsung has an ominous warning for your tech purchase plans leading into 2027 – Digital Trends. Chip purchase prices and time to maintain the system versus online…hmm.

Around the Ranch: The B Cluster

The personal Kanban (Brisqi) today – for whatever reason – has my day being very “B”-centric.

Not as big a deal as, oh, all the molecules of air going to one side of the room, but it does remind me of an important rule in statistics.  Which is?

Breakfast.  That’s really the first “B” project of the day.

Write when you get rich,

George@Ure.net