Pun Salad

This is the fifth book in Richard Osman's "Thursday Murder Club" series, and the core team's all here (Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron, Ibrahim). Over the first four books in the series they've picked up some semi-regular assistants too. Yes, if you have to ask: you should read the books in order, starting with the first one.

Joyce's daughter, Joanna, is getting married to Paul after a whirlwind romance. On the big day, someone notices that the best man, Nick, has had a bomb attached to his car. He drops a note to Elizabeth asking for her help, but then promptly vanishes. (Which kind of makes sense when someone's attached a bomb to your car, but maybe someone's managed to dispose of his corpse? Or kidnapped him?)

It all involves the titular "impossible fortune": long ago, Nick and his business partner Holly, accepted a Bitcoin payment for services rendered. Nick and Holly squirrelled their access code safely away in "cold storage", and used split-key security between them to ensure that they had to cooperate in order to retrieve it. Over the years, the bitcoin has appreciated in value considerably!

Oh, and it turns out that Ron's daughter Suzi is married to a dangerous rotter. There's something that will need resolving too.

It's Mr. Osman's usual blend of hilarity, mystery, and thrills. A lot of fun.

I school a youngster on First Lady history:

Given history, I wouldn't bet against him. pic.twitter.com/TvqVdx01vb

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) March 20, 2026

It's been 34 years or so, but you see this once, you can't unsee it.

Also of note:

• I hear you asking, bunkie: "Will AI fix central planning?" Alex Chalmers answers: AI won’t fix central planning. He cites the long history of socialists disputing the economic "knowledge problem" posed by Mises, Hayek, and the like. Why, we'll just put all the relevant facts into a big, fast, computer and… well, that hasn't worked out.

  But has AI given us, finally, the capability to beat the free market?

  The greatest excitement has been reserved for advanced AI. Zvi Mowshowitz has argued that AI “can embody the preferences and knowledge of many or even all humans, in a way an individual human or group of humans never could.” Meanwhile, Erik Brynjolfsson and Zoë Hitzig have made the case that, by combining immense processing capacity with the ability to codify tacit knowledge through computer vision, language, and sensor data, AI could erode the traditional advantages of decentralization.

  The optimists attack the case for traditional markets and decentralization from multiple directions: AI can match or exceed the information-processing advantages of markets, capture knowledge embedded in human judgment, simulate competition without running it, assess outcomes markets model badly through proxies, or simply replace the human participants whose limitations created the problem in the first place.

  Despite their diversity, many of these arguments fall into the same traps. They routinely misstate the case for decentralization and flatten the distinction between different kinds of knowledge, while treating any unsolved problems as an engineering detail.

  Read on for Alex's fuller explanation for his skepticism.

  To repeat what I said a few days ago on this topic: If AI could outperform the free market, the first place it would be deployed would be stock-picking.

• An inconvenient truth about Iran. And it's from Kevin D. Williamson: This Is a Lawless War.

  The case against this war is that it is illegal—whatever Secretary Jägerbomb has to say about it, this is a war, and it is being conducted with no congressional authorization in a haphazard, chaotic, ad hoc way by a president who is profoundly corrupt, nearly 80 years old, and unable to write an ordinary English sentence, surrounded by a constellation of grifters, addicts, and incompetents unrivaled by anything in Washington since the days of Franklin Pierce. When I hear certain of my friends say that “it would have been better” if President Trump had gone to Congress, it sounds to me like someone saying “it would have been better” if John Dillinger hadn’t robbed all those banks—as though this were somehow optional, a nicety, a lowercase “i” that has been unaccountably left undotted. Donald Trump’s foreign policy is a crime spree: the massacres in the Caribbean, the deposing of Nicolás Maduro, this illegal war in Iran, to say nothing of his unconstitutional trade war against the world at large, his threats to wage war against NATO allies to annex desired territory, the war against Cuba he apparently is considering, etc. If an American president can do all this without a peep from Congress, then we owe King George III an apology—his ambitions were never so grand.

• Kathy should have paid more attention to Ayn. National Review is still based in New York City, so they have a closer view of Kathy Hochul’s Seller’s Remorse.

  Back in 2022, Hochul built upon the work of her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, in making the case that Republicans were unwelcome in the Empire State. “Just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong, okay,” Hochul said of her gubernatorial opponent, Lee Zeldin, among others. “Get out of town because you don’t represent our values. You’re not New Yorkers.”

  Evidently, her audience was paying attention, for, between 2022 and today, around 250,000 New Yorkers did as Hochul asked, and headed down to Florida where they belonged. Given the vehemence with which she issued her order, one might have assumed that this development would have filled the governor with joy. But one would have been wrong. Indeed, far from celebrating the exodus, Hochul now sounds as if she is on the verge of putting together a modern Lewis and Clark Expedition tasked with bringing them back. “The fact is,” she said this week, “I need people who are high net worth to support the generous social programs that we want to have in our state.” That being so, she is urging the New Yorkers who stayed to go down to the Sunshine State, rummage around in the homes and gardens of Palm Beach, Naples, and Miami, and “see who you can bring back home, because our tax base has been eroded.” New York, Hochul concluded, is “in competition with other states who have less of a tax burden on their corporations and their individuals.” Apparently, that competition is not going especially well.

  Looking closer to (my) home, presented without further comment, from Bloomberg: Massachusetts Lost $4.2 Billion in Income After Millionaire Tax Took Effect. (archive.today link)

• How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)? Yes, that was a song from before (even) my time. But the title needs updating: How Ya Gonna Get Them Back From Florida (After They've Seen Your Tax Schemes?) All that inspired by Nellie Bowles' TGIF news roundup item: Bring Them Back from Palm Beach.

  → NYC bond ratings in trouble: New York City’s new socialist mayor is getting kicked in the shins by credit agencies. An analysis by S&P Global Ratings said that Mamdani’s budget plan “could make it difficult to sustain budgetary balance beyond fiscal years 2026 and 2027.”

  And Moody’s changed its outlook on the city’s finances from “stable” :| to “negative.” :/

  Mamdani is trying to get tax revenue up—and fast. One of his ideas is an “overhaul” of New York State’s estate tax. Bring it to 50 percent! His recommendation is for the state to lower the exemption of $7.35 million to $750K and raise the top rate from 16 percent to 50 percent. So I need to be very clear: You cannot die in New York. Do not do it. As soon as you feel a little ache in your knees or see a few age spots on the back of your hands, you need to move out of New York immediately. Here’s Kathy Hochul this week encouraging people to stay in New York to pay taxes—and asking them to please bring their friends back from Florida.

  I need people who are high-net worth to support the generous social programs that we want to have in our state. Right? Now, there are some patriotic millionaires who stepped up. Okay, cut me the checks. If you want to be supportive, but maybe the first step should be to go down to Palm Beach and see who we can bring back home because our tax base has been eroded. . . . And I would say remote work changed everything. There were people who could only work in an office in Manhattan or work in New York State and they were captives to our state. They were going to stay. We saw that that’s not the case.

  In other words: Tell them it’s fun here!! I know the mayor’s wife is kinda Hamas, but seriously come back, it’s actually fun now. I would tell you if it wasn’t fun.

  More at the link, on other topics too.

• Sure, go ahead and ask. Dave Barry resurrects one of his old column themes: Ask Mister Language Person. A brief sample:

  Q. When should I use a semicolon?

  A. You should use it when you reach the end of a sentence and realize you left out some potentially relevant information.

  EXAMPLE: Steve possesses all the requisite qualities to be Director of Human Resources; by the way, he is a practicing cannibal.

  Also a rare video of Dave's band, the Rock Bottom Remainders, performing "Prooreading Woman".