The Money That Never Leaves the Room: How AI’s Circular Financing Revived a Warning Richard Cantillon Issued Three Hundred Years Ago

In September 2025, the chip company Nvidia announced that it would put as much as $100 billion into OpenAI. The pledge carried a condition that few headlines bothered to translate: OpenAI would spend a large share of the money leasing and buying Nvidia’s own processors to fill the data centers the investment was meant to build. Nvidia pays OpenAI. OpenAI pays Nvidia. The figure on the press release reads as growth. The mechanism underneath reads as a man moving a coin from his right pocket to his left and announcing that the household has grown richer.

Continue reading → The Money That Never Leaves the Room: How AI’s Circular Financing Revived a Warning Richard Cantillon Issued Three Hundred Years Ago

How to Make Your Non-SSL Website HTTPS Secure

Last month, Google shook up the hosted online content creator world with news that their search rankings will start to reflect HTTPS security. That’s big news. Google wants a secure web, and to get us all there — kicking and screaming, if need be — they will reward those who leap on the SSL bandwagon with higher visibility.

For these reasons, over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

Continue reading → How to Make Your Non-SSL Website HTTPS Secure

My New Old MacBook Pro 17-inch LCD Review

I am a proud owner of one of the first MacBook Pro 17-inch machines that made their debut two years ago — yes, I have a dreaded “A Revision” box — but that machine still sits next to me today and it has served me well through the writing of five books and it has never given me a moment of discontent… except for a bulging battery… but I never lost use of the machine in the battery swap with Apple.

Today, I am the prouder owner of what will likely be the last revision of the current MacBook Pro line before all the new Apple machines begin to look and feel like the MacBook Air. I couldn’t be happier with my new “old style” MacBook Pro.

Continue reading → My New Old MacBook Pro 17-inch LCD Review