| This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, the genius wordplay of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. With today's announcement of the dismantling of the US Education Department, now seems an appropriate moment to share one of my formative high-school experiences: learning what has become my favorite poem in the whole wide world. It is Language Lesson 1976, by Heather McHugh. When Americans say a man
takes liberties, they mean he's gone too far. In Philadelphia today I saw
a kid on a leash look mom-ward and announce his fondest wish: one
bicentennial burger, hold the relish. Hold is forget,
in American. On the courts of Philadelphia
the rich prepare to serve, to fault. The language is a game as well,
in which love can mean nothing, doubletalk mean lie. I'm saying
doubletalk with me. I'm saying go so far the customs are untold.
Make nothing without words, and let me be
the one you never hold.
I first read this in English class — shoutout to Mr. McAteer! [1] — and let me tell you: Teenage Jessica was dumbstruck by the little puzzle in the last three lines of the poem. [2] To this day, I am in awe of the double meaning of this scene — which takes place on America's 200th birthday: It's not just tennis courts that are for the rich, but judicial ones, too. Genius wordplay, imo. It seems as though Americans may need a few new language lessons in 2025, and no, I'm not talking about "transitory." First up? Big Oil. To the untrained eye, Javier Blas says the words "crude," "petroleum" and "oil" are basically synonymous. "Ask any specialist, though, and they each have different meanings," he writes. Our vocabulary surrounding this topic is, what's the word, crude. "The most common error is to focus solely on crude, called 'black oil' by some, and ignore the rest. I hear many bulls saying that other liquids aren't real oil. That's nonsense; they're part of the larger petroleum pool," he writes. Here's a quick-and-dirty primer: Crude is the stuff that comes out of the ground before it's refined. Condensates and NGLs are byproducts of natural gas extraction but ultimately flow into the pool of oil liquids. The main difference between condensates and NGLs is where they get separated from the gas: at wellheads for condensates, and at gas processing plants for NGLs. Both are a mix of similar hydrocarbons: ethane, propane, butane, isobutane, pentane and pentane plus.
That's a lot of terminology! But there's a reason why we must distinguish it all: "Back in the late 1990s, crude accounted for almost 90% of the petroleum market, so it was a good proxy for overall supply and demand," he explains. But this is no longer your mother's oil market: The share of crude has dropped to 74%. "In trying to gauge oil prices, it helps to count the barrels — all of them," Javier concludes. Elsewhere in linguistic lessons essential to Americans is the word "migrant," which people use interchangeably with the word "immigrant," which Frank Barry argues is "contributing to the nation's toxic political discourse." Ahem. Your humble newsletter writer is ashamed to admit that I have occasionally used this term. And I'm not alone: "The term is used not only by conservative commentators, but also in the pages of the New York Times and most other media outlets, including Bloomberg," Frank writes. But the two words carry very different meanings. To Frank, "immigrant" has a certain nobility: "It conjures images of the Statue of Liberty, of dreamers and strivers who arrive with nothing but courage and ambition." "Migrant," in contrast, is evocative of "roaming bands of people, who, like the Roma in Europe and the Travellers in Ireland, have historically faced discrimination and prejudice as a separate and lesser class." Conflating the two at a time when Patricia Lopez says the US Border Patrol is hellbent on ejecting as many immigrants as possible is more than reckless — it's dangerous. Knowing How to Play the Game | It sounds unobjectionable, maybe even bland, as a piece of business advice: Focus on making great products instead of trying to get rich quick, and your company will thrive in the long run. But the genius of Gautam Mukunda is that he explains it through the lens of video games. Specifically, Baldur's Gate 3. "You can change the industry, but the story remains the same," he writes. "Boeing's downfall began when its engineering-centric culture was replaced by a financial one. GE's when Jack Welch replaced operational excellence with financial engineering. Intel when its first non-engineer CEO turned down the chance to make chips for the iPhone. Nike's when it appointed a CEO who had so little interest in sneakers that he mispronounced the name of a key proprietary material Nike uses in their manufacture." Speaking of CEOs: Did you hear about the guy who runs an enterprise software business and is having an existential crisis on LinkedIn? I'm referring, of course, to Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes, who poured his heart out last week about his purchase of a private jet, among other not-so-environmentally-friendly things: "There's a couple of reasons I've purchased a plane. Personal security is the primary reason (an unfortunate reality of my world), but also so I can run a global business from Australia, and still be a constantly present dad," he wrote. David Fickling — who is also a fortysomething Australian dad — can sorta sympathize: "I'd like to reduce my carbon footprint by getting my own electric car, instead of the battered 2008 Toyota Prius I share with my ex-wife. But money doesn't grow on trees, and we all have to make climate compromises somewhere." But the contrails of Cannon-Brookes' PJ isn't the issue, David says. His AI-dependent business is: "Atlassian is trying to persuade customers that its own cloud-based technologies and AI can make it more useful to them than ever," he writes. "The carbon cost of this is significant. Data center emissions in the US already rival those of the domestic airline industry, and are growing far quicker. Atlassian's pollution from 'purchased goods and services' — mostly data centers — has increased 77% in the past two fiscal years." If there was a price on all that carbon, David says his profits would disappear. How's that for getting rich quick? | 
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