Alex Frangos

And the gas tax and tax on diesel brings in about $37 billion a year for the

highway trust fund, which is used to fix your interstate highways around the country.

And that trust fund has been dwindling over the years because the tax is a fixed amount around 18 cents per gallon, but it's been 18 cents a gallon since 1993.

And it's not indexed to inflation.

So you get rid of it for six months, there's, you know, 17, $18 billion that the federal government won't have.

The other factor is that if you cut the gas tax, you're lessening the pain for drivers, but that just means they're going to drive more.

And what you really want in these situations is for drivers to drive a bit less and conserve oil and lessen the demand a little bit in order to take the pressure off the market.

Well, there seems to be a discussion going on within OpenAI as to how much money it should be spending.

Its business has hit a few bumps in the road.

It's losing ground and buzz to its chief rival, Anthropic.

They're both racing towards doing initial public offerings.

as soon as later this year.

And when you're going to do an IPO, you want your finances in order, you want everything to look, you know, as strong as possible.

And there's this debate, they need to spend a lot of money to invest in data centers, but they want the business, the like end users, people using chat GPT and other tools to be actually growing and using it.

And

It seems to be that they missed their own targets for how fast they want to grow their new users, how fast they want to grow their revenue.

So the question is, what do you do?

Do you kind of pull back on some of that spending until things pick up?

Or do you keep spending because you think you need to in order to hit those targets?

That's the trillion-dollar question here.