Things I’m Thinking About — August 31, 2026
This newsletter is for the topics I am interested in. Maybe you will be also.

About
Shelly J. Berryhill is an honor graduate of Georgia Tech and the founder of Georgia Appraisal Services in Hawkinsville, Ga. For more than 20 years, he has served his community as a city commissioner while serving on numerous local and state boards including the Municipal Employee Benefit board and the Gas Authority of Georgia. He chairs the Pulaski Archway Executive Board. He was previously selected as Citizen of the Year by the local Chamber of Commerce.

He teaches Sunday School at Broad Street Baptist Church where he serves as a deacon. He and his wife Vonnie raised two children, Kristen and Kyle.

Spiritual
There is a Bible a lot of churches keep on the phone. The Passion Translation. YouVersion has it in an expanded review. Bethel has paused selling it. Some pastors have said they no longer have confidence in the scholarly foundation. I am not here to try the case. I teach Sunday school. If the book in your hand is in review, that is not a small thing. We do not need a pretty paraphrase. We need a text we can trust.

AI
The big AI shop, OpenAI, hit pause this month. Their own write-up said they cannot rule out critical cyber capability on a model they have not released, and on August 18 they said they already took a two-week pause on some training and the largest planned run is still on hold. Sam Altman said the capabilities were outstripping the pace of safety and alignment. I am not a lab guy. What I take from it is simple: the demo and the real thing are not the same, and even the people building it are saying slow down.

Appraisals
Freddie Mac’s 30-year went from 6.58 in late July to 6.69 the week of August 6, then eased to 6.65 the week of August 20. That is still a hair above last August. Daily quotes did not even follow the little dip. Mortgage News Daily had 6.77 on August 21. Demand already tends to soften when rates sit over 6.64, and we have been sitting there.

Metro Atlanta pending sales were down 32 percent from a year ago in the July GAMLS print. About 67 percent of the January-through-July solds had a concession, median $5,000. Buyers are choosing, not chasing. For Georgia, this is still not a floodgate. Shop the quote you are actually being offered. The house still has to support the number.

City government
Something just happened in New York that almost nobody is covering the right way, and it is not only a New York story. Big cities all over the country are watching it.

Amazon’s delivery network there is not one company payroll. Small contractors own the vans and hire the drivers. Those drivers can touch as many as 400 packages in a day, heat or ice. On August 10, Mayor Zohran Mamdani backed a city bill that would force Amazon to put those couriers on its own books, its own payroll. Amazon’s answer was blunt: the bill puts more than 5,000 of those jobs at risk, squeezes out the small delivery companies in the middle, and could push Amazon to move delivery operations outside the city. The very people the bill is supposedly going to help, it may put them out of a job.

I sit on a small-city commission, so I watch this differently than the cable-news fight. City Hall says it is protecting the driver. The company says it is protecting the small owner and the customer’s one-day box. Politicians like the sound bites but often don’t think through the ramifications of their proposals. This bill would cost jobs, delay deliveries, and drive up costs for consumers. If I was a delivery worker, I would much rather own my own company than go on Amazon’s payroll. Yeah, it may sound good, but this bill would hurt.

Productivity
AI was sold as less work. This month the talk is more work. Harvard Business Review called it botsitting — you hire a bot and then you get a second job managing the bot. A former OpenAI person told the BBC they were at 70 hours a week, and the sprints inside those labs have been reported as high as 90. Altman said he does not expect a four-hour workweek, and that we are all going to be much busier than we thought. That matches what I see. Most people still use it like a search engine. The ones who go further are not sitting on a beach. They are just carrying a bigger load.

Shellyism
I used to be in a band called “missing cat”. You’ve probably seen our poster.

— Shelly

New Subscriber Link: https://things-i-m-thinking-about.kit.com/8f3848f4e6

From the bookshelf
Through the Veil — How John’s Gospel Walks You Through the Temple
John’s Gospel is not a race. It is a walk. Lamb, altar, laver, table, menorah, incense, veil. Then the garden. A short book by Shelly Berryhill. Digital PDF, $7.95.
Buy it here: https://payhip.com/b/fnCam

Georgia Appraisal Services
Residential appraisals out of Hawkinsville, Georgia.
https://georgiaapp.com