Welcome to Two to the Fifth, the ten-minute news show for people who suspect the news may have started before breakfast.
We look at five timeframes: the last 24 hours, the last week, the last month, the last year and the last decade. Two minutes each. Five pours. One country. No chaser.
If following the news feels like you’re watching a squirrel trying to fold a fitted sheet with a snow shovel - y’know, frantic activity, tons of stuff moving around, and absolutely no increase in understanding - you’ve come to the right place. We try to sift through the noise, look across time, connect the dots, and see what’s actually changing underneath the headlines.
This week: Greenland, data centers, funeral homes, veterinarians and a question you may want to start asking: Who actually owns this place?
Decide for yourself, but first gimme 10 minutes.
This is Two to the Fifth.
THE LAST 24 HOURS
National Monuments – Now With Drones and Snipers
President Trump has been getting pushback on his 250-foot triumphal arch. His solution?
Say the arch is for national security and will include - his words, not mine - “large numbers of drones, plus Snipers,” along with sizeable quantities of ammunition. Wait, what?
I know this sounds like something South Park would dream up, except they didn’t. It’s real. I’d add a line about trigger-happy Fembots as tour guides, but I don’t want to give anybody ideas.
Anyway, Trump says the military requested the conversion. A Defense Department official offered Reuters no additional explanation, and a retired Marine colonel at the Center for Strategic and International Studies questioned why the capability is needed when an Army installation sits roughly a mile away and the Pentagon within two.
Presidents have invoked national security for years to justify extraordinary government actions, but this...actually, I got nothing. Trey and Matt, this is your department.
No News is...Well, No News
Meanwhile, Trump has barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House grounds because of coverage he says contains “fiction and lies.” The three organizations sued. Expected. Then the rest of the television pool did something far more interesting.
CNN was supposed to provide pool coverage of Trump’s U.N. trip. When it was blocked from doing so, ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC declined to replace it, effectively suspending the normal shared television pool coverage. Other outlets have also withheld some White House coverage or images in protest.
Which creates a problem The White House may not have anticipated. If you kick reporters out, their colleagues may decide not to send in replacements. Which means you may end up kicking out the one thing you wanted most: Attention.
And Then the Air-Traffic System Fell Over
Monday morning, air travel across a big chunk of the Northeast effectively seized up. Newark, JFK, LaGuardia, Philadelphia, Boston and other airports were hit. Thousands of flights were delayed or cancelled.
For about five minutes, the story sounded like it was straight out of an action movie. Cyberattack? AI gone rogue? Terrorism? Nope. At least from what we know so far, something considerably more Seinfeld happened.
A telecom switch failed. Then construction workers in New Jersey accidentally severed the fiber-optic line supposed to back it up. The result was an eight-hour disruption in a system specifically designed to have backups.
It was massively inconvenient, but it wasn’t catastrophic. It was another wake up call that the more we depend on big, automated electronic systems – for aviation, electricity, communications, banking – the more we should be thankful for the actual people who keep things afloat when one of those systems goes down.
THE LAST WEEK
Two Big Moments Hidden on Page 7
Remember Greenland? For months, President Trump talked about buying it, controlling it, maybe just taking it. Denmark said no. Greenland said Hell, no. NATO allies got nervous.
This week, the United States, Denmark and Greenland signed an agreement expanding the U.S. military presence in Greenland, with the territory remaining under Danish sovereignty and its right to self-determination preserved. The United States gets expanded military access, including two additional sites, without acquiring the island. In other words, they reached a deal, quietly, without an invasion or a real estate closing.
Meanwhile, off Rhode Island, Revolution Wind installed its 65th and final turbine last Friday. The 704-megawatt project is already producing some electricity and should reach full commercial operation before year end, enough to power roughly 350,000 homes. That’s a lot in my book.
Two stories that generated enormous noise, then got forgotten, then got done. Regardless of how you feel about either, I think those outcomes deserve more attention than they got.
THE LAST MONTH
Wait. Who Owns My Veterinarian?
If you’ve taken a dog or cat to the veterinarian lately, you may already know where this story starts. The bill. What used to be a couple hundred dollars has become $600. A procedure becomes thousands. Tests get proposed that you don’t remember existing ten years ago. And because it’s your dog lying on the table, this is not exactly a market where you’re inclined to say, “You know what? Let me shop around.”
So who owns the veterinary practice? Increasingly, it may not be your veterinarian. Private equity and corporate groups have spent years buying tens of thousands of veterinary practices, dental offices, medical practices, nursing homes, funeral homes, HVAC companies - even car washes.
Here’s how it happened. Imagine you’re 67. You spent 35 years building three veterinary clinics. You want to retire. Your kids don’t want them. Your younger partners don’t have $12 million. Then somebody arrives with a check. Private equity solved a very real problem for a generation of small-business owners: How do I turn the thing I spent my life building into the retirement I earned?
But something changes after the sale. The veterinarian who owned the practice wanted to make money, but making money wasn’t the only goal. Their profit motive was mixed up with professional pride, reputation, relationships and, sometimes, plain old humanity.
Private equity has a simpler objective: Buy the business. Bundle it with others. Increase its value. Sell it for more.
So far so good. But the private part of private equity is worth a harder look.
When a Public company like Apple or GM changes ownership or strategy, everybody knows. When a private equity fund buys Main Street Animal Hospital, the sign doesn’t have to say “a subsidiary of Black Box Hedge Fund Partners.” It may still say Main Street Animal Hospital. Same receptionist. Same waiting room. Maybe even the same vet. Different owner. With different motivations.
Private equity didn’t buy Main Street in one gigantic transaction. It bought a vet here.
Six dentists there. Four HVAC companies. A funeral home.
So the next time you go to one of those places, it may be worth asking: Who actually owns this? And how is it affecting my experience - or my pocketbook?
THE LAST YEAR
One Number Nobody Was Watching
A year ago, one number gave us a pretty good advance warning about something making headlines now.
Almost nobody outside the electricity business noticed it. It was the capacity price. Capacity is essentially the grid’s insurance policy. Power plants get paid not just for electricity they produce, but for committing to have enough power available when demand peaks.
In PJM - the power market serving about 65 million Americans across parts of 13 states and Washington, D.C. - the capacity price jumped more than 800 percent, from $28.92 to $269.92 per megawatt-day.
In essence, the market was saying: We may not have nearly enough to meet demand. And now we can all see why.
Data-center demand is exploding. PJM expects roughly 30 additional gigawatts of data-center demand between 2025 and 2030. Meanwhile, building generation and transmission takes years.
Which brings us back to those 65 turbines standing off Rhode Island - along with the 62 off Massachusetts, and another 314 turbines in three additional offshore projects now under construction and scheduled for completion by the end of 2027.
Whatever you think about offshore wind policy, those aren’t projections anymore. Those are power plants. They make electricity. Lots of it. And the market gave us a warning a year ago – through the capacity price - that electricity was about to become a much more valuable thing to have. We just didn’t know that was the number to watch. Now we do.
THE LAST DECADE
Private Equity Bought Main Street
Now back to the veterinarian. Because the sale of that one practice isn’t particularly important. Multiply it by thousands. Then give it ten years.
For much of the past decade, money was extraordinarily cheap. Pension funds, endowments and institutional investors had enormous amounts of capital looking for returns. At the same time, millions of baby boomers who had spent their careers building businesses were getting older. Private equity found the match. And plenty of owners were delighted to sell.
But when researchers have looked at industries where private equity has become particularly active, they’ve found things worth noticing. In physician practices, charges and prices paid per claim rose after acquisition. The practices also saw more patients - evidence that private equity can increase throughput, but not that care became cheaper.
A study of private equity-owned nursing homes found more potentially avoidable emergency-room visits and hospitalizations, along with higher Medicare spending. The Federal Trade Commission has also challenged private-equity roll-ups in veterinary medicine over concerns that buying one local practice after another can reduce competition.
In Tucson, a funeral home had negotiated a $395 direct-cremation price for members of a local consumer group. After it was acquired by a private-equity-backed company, that agreement disappeared and the listed price became $1,370. The company says the comparison isn’t completely apples-to-apples because the newer price includes services that had previously been charged separately. Fair enough. It’s still one hell of a price change.
That doesn’t make private equity immoral. It’s closer to amoral. It doesn’t have good intentions or bad intentions. It has a simple business objective: Produce a return.
That cool-minded efficiency can be useful when you’re negotiating drug prices or installing better software. But efficiency looks different when what’s being optimized is how long a nurse spends with your father, whether your dog really needs another test, or how many employees an HVAC company can eliminate before the customer notices.
The old owner had to make a living. The new owner has to produce a return. Those sentences sound almost identical, but they aren’t.
The old owner’s financial incentives lived alongside something else: I am the veterinarian. These are my patients. That’s my name on the building. I’m part of this community. Strip that humanity out of the equation and efficiency becomes a tool with no moral compass about what it is cutting.
And there’s one final twist. The money buying your veterinarian may ultimately include money from pension funds. Possibly yours. So the retiring veterinarian wants the value of the business she built. Your pension manager wants a good return. The private-equity manager wants to deliver that return. The practice manager has numbers to hit. You want somebody to save your dog without requiring a second mortgage.
Everybody in that chain may be behaving completely rationally. And the result may still be a system nobody consciously designed.
For decades we worried about giant companies buying other giant companies. Meanwhile, thousands of little companies were being bought one at a time. The name on the door stayed the same. The owner didn’t.
Maybe we should start asking who owns the place.
OUTRO
So that’s this week’s Two to the Fifth.
Sometimes the important part is just below the surface, like a fiber optic line, or who owns the doctor’s office. To quote Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. ppp”
Thanks for joining us. Now get out of here. Drink responsibly. Pet your dog. Tip your plumber. Check who owns both of them.
And remember: The news is not what happened today. The news is what today proves is still happening.