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The U.S. House of Representatives, in a rare display of bipartisan agreement, decided nuclear energy is… good. Shocking, I know. They’re talking about three experimental reactors by July 4th, 2026. July 4th! That’s when the hot dogs and fireworks should be the biggest explosion, not a potential meltdown. Multiple SMRs by the end of 2027. Nuclear power on military bases by 2028. It’s ambitious. It’s… well, let’s just say it’s a schedule designed by someone who’s never actually built anything. But hey, who needs practicality when you have a powerpoint presentation? And for NuScale? It’s like finding out your horse is in the Kentucky Derby. They already have the only SMR design blessed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. That’s a fancy way of saying they jumped through all the hoops. Streamlining regulations could speed things up, meaning actual revenue. Or, you know, more hoops.

Block Inc. (XYZ +5.06%) and PayPal Holdings Inc. (PYPL +1.30%) both seek to ease this flow, to make transactions effortless. Each, in its way, is a vessel charting a course through increasingly turbulent waters. And one wonders, watching their progress, if the destination is truly worth the voyage.

For it is the nature of man to seek validation through the successes of his peers, to find solace in the shared pursuit of an elusive prosperity. Investors, those diligent observers of economic currents, had not been presented with news of innovation or profit from Plug Power itself. No, the impetus came from Bloom Energy, a rival in this ambitious undertaking, and the announcement of their recent quarterly results. It is a strange thing, is it not, how the fortunes of one house can lift another, even when the foundations are not entirely sound?

Volume hit 89 million shares. 89 million! That’s like everyone in Cleveland decided to day trade. It’s up 96% from their usual sleepy average. This stock IPO’d in 2017. 2017! It’s fallen 79% since then. I’ve seen better returns on lottery tickets… and I don’t buy lottery tickets!

Not the specific fragrance of IonQ itself, no singular bloom of innovation. Rather, it was swept upward on the broader currents, a rally within the tech sector, a hesitant thaw after a week that felt, for many, like a prolonged winter. The market, a restless sea, briefly calmed.

The problem isn’t just the stock price. It’s the whole premise. This idea that you can just manufacture a truck—a truck, mind you—and suddenly you’re disrupting the automotive industry. It’s arrogant. And frankly, it’s a little insulting to the people who’ve been building cars for, oh, a century. They thought they could just waltz in and change everything? It’s just… presumptuous.

The immediate catalyst? Well, there isn’t one, precisely. It’s more a case of sympathetic vibration. Bitcoin, that grand old patriarch of the crypto world, has finally decided to cease its prolonged slump, nearing the $60,000 mark. And, as any seasoned observer of these digital fancies knows, when the flagship stirs, the smaller vessels bob along for the ride. Dogecoin, naturally, is among them, clinging to Bitcoin’s wake like a hopeful stowaway.

They speak of revenue jumping 26% to $1.2 billion. A substantial sum, certainly, though one wonders what percentage of that is simply the anxious exhalations of a populace increasingly convinced their refrigerators are plotting against them. With brands like Norton and LifeLock – names that evoke less digital security and more the scent of mothballs and forgotten passwords – they cater to nearly 500 million users across a dizzying 150 countries. A global network of mild paranoia, if you will.

The scholar Alistair Finch, in his apocryphal Treatise on the Transient, posited that all value derives from the controlled scarcity of information. Micron, a purveyor of dynamic random access memory (DRAM), operates within this very principle. It is, in essence, a manufacturer of absence – the fleeting capacity to not be filled with data. The more demanding the computational engines—the artificial intelligences, the sprawling simulations—the more acutely this absence is felt, and thus, the more valuable it becomes.

It wasn’t anything Rigetti did, you understand. No miraculous breakthrough in quantum entanglement. No sudden realization that they could power the entire Eastern Seaboard with a slightly modified toaster oven. Just… the market decided to be nice for a day. A collective sigh of relief, or maybe just a temporary lapse in judgment. It reminded me of my Aunt Mildred, who once accidentally donated her entire collection of porcelain dolls to a dog shelter. A momentary miscalculation with surprisingly cheerful consequences.