Corporate America’s Profits Are Booming—and Signal More Good Times Ahead – WSJ
Profits are booming at America’s biggest companies—and their leaders say that likely won’t change soon.
From Target and J.M. Smucker to farm-equipment maker Deere, companies spanning the breadth of the U.S. economy are ringing up heftier sales and earnings. In recent days, many have raised financial outlooks for the year, citing robust sales as just one of the reasons.
Chalk the good times up to a confluence of fortunate events: red-hot artificial-intelligence spending, federal spending and the windfall companies are getting in the form of refunds of some of their past tariff payments. Plus, a booming stock market and high home values are helping many shoppers keep spending, even as plenty of others struggle to absorb rising prices.
Blips on the Radar
There is a violent telemetry to the transition from the woods back to the machine. One afternoon you are tucked into the steep, nameless hollows of rural Schoharie County, completely insulated by the heavy silence of the state forest. Up there, the world is reduced to primary elements. You cook over a split-hardwood fire because you forgot the propane, watching the smoke drift through the birch canopy while the melting trash bag giving way to the embers serves as the only timeline that matters. With a hammock strung between two cedars and a steady current of good cannabis softening the sharp edges of existence as the plastic melts away, the mind stretches out. It occupies the quiet acreage it was actually built for.
Then the weekend ends, and the data grid reclaims you.
Creeping back into the apartment after a stretch like that always feels like stepping into a skin that no longer fits. It is an old, dingy urban place on a city bus line, damp around the edges and inevitably covered in a fresh layer of gritty mud carried home from the Schoharie hills and hollows. The contrast gives you the bends. You make a great living handling millions of rows of state data, yet you choose to live in a rundown rental with a thermostat set to fifty degrees all winter, funneling every single extra dollar into index funds and the future off-grid homestead.
It was exactly in that twitchy, post-camp headspace that the stove crisis hit. A Friday morning, a puddle of olive oil under a griddle, a sudden flare-up, and a burnt-through drip pan on the ancient, rusted Montgomery Ward by Tappan stove. It was brief—I blew it out before the baking soda was even in my hand—but the residual panic lingered. Then came the phantom arcing. A terrifying flash of light pulsing deep inside the dark oven.
Sitting in the quiet of a cut breaker, my mind immediately ran down a dark alley of worst-case scenarios. I envisioned melted insulation, ruined infrastructure, and the inevitable necessity of contacting the landlord—a bureaucratic entanglement that threatened to disrupt the low-key, low-rent urban sanctuary I’ve used as a financial launchpad for nearly two decades. The pressure of the city lifestyle seemed poised to shatter the fragile boundary protecting my peace of mind.
But daylight is a fierce solvent for irrational fears.
It turns out the mechanical ghost in the machine was nothing more than a stuck, corroded switch on the oven light bulb. A few quick clicks of the toggle, and the terrifying “arc” revealed itself as a flickering appliance lamp. The heavy-duty wiring underneath the cooktop was entirely unscathed. I flipped the breaker back on, fried breakfast, and the world kept turning. It wasn’t a catastrophe; it was just an old spring losing its temper.
Getting completely bent out of shape over a sticky light switch feels silly in retrospect, but it’s the price of admission for living a double life. When you refuse to buy into the standard suburban script—rejecting the vinyl-sided houses and the predictable commuter cars that professionals are supposed to desire—the friction between the two worlds will occasionally spark.
The stove crisis was just a blip on the radar, an unnecessary detour. Now, the stove is a cooking, the breaker is on, and the focus shifts entirely to grinding through the remaining data requests of the work week. Friday morning is coming fast. The mud-covered, work-trim SuperDuty is sitting outside, ready to head north toward Speculator.
Ahead lies the only reality that counts: remote work from an Adirondack library pavilion, back roads that don’t care about city problems, cold beer, good weed, and wide-open country. Work can have its anxieties for a few more days. By the weekend, I’ll be back in the hammock, watching the real flames flicker under a ceiling of cold, indifferent stars.
Back in the city for a few days…
Not One Toke Over the Line!
Monday August 31, 2026 — Urban Life
Days of extreme paranoia and maybe at least some coffee ☕
Last night getting home, I developed an extreme paranoia over the wires melting in the stove after that grease fire I had on Friday cooking my pancakes down. It wasn’t that bad, I was able to blow it out after a few seconds, checked the wiring, stove burners and oven, all working, until I saw that flash in the oven – which I swore in my extremely paranoid mind was an arc flash from the melted wires.
Seeking a few moments of moral clarity, 🧠 I turned to Google A. I. to consider what I was staring down. 👀 You know a week or two with no coffee, no easy way to cook breakfast 🥯 except maybe outside on the tailgate of my SuperDuty outside on my camp stove. Ultimately I decided to take it’s advice, sleep on it. 💡 When I woke up this morning, I decided to flip the breaker on, realized it was the oven light switch with it’s decades of grease and dirt in it’s contacts causing the oven light to flicker. Not an arc flash, just a flickering light. God I can be so stupid and panicky.
It’s all the weed you smoked this weekend that made you so extremely paranoid, 🦗 don’t you know you sad desprate drug user. I do got to admit I kind of like that super cheap High Falls Canna Stavia, even if they mocked me at the dispensary on Friday for mispronouncing Stavia. One toke over the line, always blame it on the drugs even if it had been well over 12 hours since my last morning hit with my campfire coffee ☕ sitting up on the tailgate of my SuperDuty up at Duck Pond 🦆 in BFE Schoharie County, where I’m sure plenty of boys and girls with the horny buck goats out back 🐐 would quite openly burn their garbage 🛢️ if not for the burn ban and the politicians stepping on our throats. 👢
I was not looking forward to having to email 📩 my landlord about my 50-year old rusted out, grease and dirt covered stove needing junking and replacement. The one that mice have over the years bored a hole through the oven walls, the one I finally replaced the drip plates on after Friday’s grease fire. 🧯 I still have this fear I will get evicted out of my abode of 19 years, and be forced into one of those plastic covered houses in suburbs with a 25-year old Honda Civic out front and have to drive in traffic every day to work as the cops sit with their penises dangling out of windows watching to see if you are going 2 miles over the speed limit, appear colored or poor, and hand you a $1,000 ticket, assuming they don’t preform oral sex directly on your mouth 💋 on the roadside. Extreme paranoia, clearly that weed. I really liked how it didn’t make me real paranoid, or make me couch locked, 🛋️ but made the woods full of color and wildflowers 🪻 though I know those days are fading fast as autumn approaches.
Labor Day Weekend starts in 4 days now for me, 🛻 heading north by this hour on Friday to hit Speculator by nine o’clock so I can remote work, set up camp, smoke weed and drink beer, and maybe if it’s warm enough float on Jessup River. ⭕ Probably not, I might want to bring the propane heater 🏮 and this time actually the propane tank, as the high for the weekend is about 70 degrees but it’s the North Country and Labor Day is September 7th. The leaves will be turning color. 🍂 They say that “new” extra-stong weed is making people addicted, but really I haven’t had much of a craving outside of camp in wilderness, which is fun to enjoy the colors of wilderness. But then again, they look down at pot smokers, 😮💨 just like they do at country boys and girls that burn their garbage, especially that all that plastic crap that burn so black, or the boys and girls that drive a fucking Ford F-350 SuperDuty in an era when poles are melting for climate change. 🐻❄️ Just think of all that crap I’ve kept out of landfill, and remember I ride my bike or take public transit to work, that is one bus left after they cut 🪚 every other bus because they won’t raise the fares and Trump butchered all the revenue sharing for bus companies. 🚍
Well, it’s time to shower, slap some grease on the bike chain, 🚵♂️ ride my bike to work. Get some eggs and milk at Hannaford on way home, if it’s not raining too hard, 🌧️ then three more days, then Hardwood Hill, and maybe less dreams of melting wire. Do you think such fears and paranoia where from you watching the garbage illegally burn over the weekend? 🗑️ The melting plastic? 🔥 I don’t know, see what you need is Better, Better Help! And a 25-year old Honda Civic parked next to fake plastics recycling bin ♻️ and grid-tied solar for your plastic house and the 100-square foot colored televiison. ☀️ I got to get to work, not be couch locked or dreams of wildflowers and wilderness. And pack the damn propane before heading up to wilderness Friday, so I don’t stink like wood smoke from cooking over the fire, though that was pretty yummy. 😋