Every so often I come across a fairly simple reported story that perfectly illustrates a big and *pervasive* reality that is fundamental to understanding how the world works, but rarely made explicit: giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

"The Going Down of the Sun" (2022) by renowned British landscape artist, Paul Evans (born 1950). Ink and acrylic on canvas 100cm x 100cm. #art #painting #artist #BlueSkyArt

reading a bunch of emails from dracula with the subject line "re: bood" body text "nd more thalls 4 blod" and being like "did he disable spell check, how is he even sending these out like this"

i am trying not to joke about the Epstein stuff because it's so horrible but there's also this ridiculous element where it's like... discovering Dracula is real, he's taken over human society at the highest levels, he's involved in tons of evil and also he's a huge dipshit

The Wayback is now so load-bearing we should be protecting it with our actual lives

🚨 The political economy of finance summer school is back, 3rd year running! Better still: We're bringing it to London via @lse-ei.bsky.social. 𝐓𝐨𝐩𝐢𝐜: Finance & democracy 𝙳̲̲𝚊̲̲𝚝̲̲𝚎̲: 4-5 June 2026 𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘦: March 1. Link below. We've got brilliant instructors as usual. Please spread the word!

Huh. DeepSeek has people directly training the model in humanities-related knowledge.

Notable that Skanda talks about Warsh's RECORD (actions and words) across different administrations, while El-Erian etc praise seems to be mostly along the lines of "we've hung out with him in G30, yeah he's a serious guy".

Brits, French, and other NATO partners going to Beijing. Plenty of countries have been navigating this China-US alignment challenge for years. And energy is part of this tension over sovereignty.

Solar provided 59% of electricity in the Australian national (east coast) grid between 9am and 6pm over the past week. It was 30% of total generation. Life moves pretty fast etc. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

I cannot tell you how much doubt was consistently directed at the Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers and how much pressure was put on news organizations to couch those numbers as unreliable. Biden himself said they were fabricated! www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

"China adds more power capacity in a year than most countries have total" @katemac.bsky.social Bloomberg:China’s Four-Year Energy Spree Has Eclipsed Entire US Power Grid www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

What you can expect from Warsh as Fed Chair -More emphasis on what suits POTUS if it's a Republican -Sudden concerns about inflation and fiscal deficits the moment it's not an R in the WH. Don't expect the Fed to be a good-faith broker if govt is divided in the next crisis

I will simply never recover from reading this sentence: "Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people."

Sovereignty requires a population willing to withstand pain for what they believe in - that was the background to Carney’s Davos speech. Tim and I chatted about what Canada has actually been doing the past year - building a coalition that will endure suffering inflicted by the US:

"self-proclaimed pragmatists who quote “the strong do what they can” imagine this as a stable equilibrium, a description of how power works forever. But the Athenians who deliver that ultimatum to Melos are not wise statesmen..They’re men drunk on their own power, ready to sail into catastrophe."

“Is 🇨🇳 the climate champion we deserve? Probably. “I’m still on the fence on whether it‘s the champion we need.”

The chaos of the green energy/electrification revolution shows how our ideas of the energy future have massive ramifications. So much for an "orderly transition"... This is why the fights over arcane long-term scenarios matter so much. From @jeremywall.bsky.social

“...we have a hot war happening on our border, and then over on another continent both sides are in the same group chat where some Chinese factory is saying, ‘Oh, the Russians are paying more. So sorry, come back next year.’” Incredible stuff on drone supply chains www.ft.com/content/5841...

hey.hagelb.org/@technomancy... we're at the "casting spells to ward off the LLMs" stage of things

okay so fun news, I am launching a macro newsletter from Common Wealth about the supply side data and the US economy called Forces of Production Charts for bsky forthcoming at: @forcesofproduction.com Launch essay below: www.forcesofproduction.com/p/atop-the-f...

*this* is the funniest thing of all

wasn't it just last year we were hearing Davos was over

Somehow Al Gore heckling a current US Commerce Secretary at Davos is absolutely and completely wild and also only about the 1000th most bonkers thing that has happened so far in 2026, on this, the 21st day of January

Slightly mixed feelings about Carney embodying our predictions from 12 months ago. But I’ll take it

Hey… Why isn’t Davos Deville on this website?

Here's where that cash is going instead:

Oh hey look it's a @katemac.bsky.social special

New executive order on critical minerals based on section 232 investigation. Doesn't sound like new tariffs, aims to ally shore. wtvbam.com/2026/01/14/t...

Tough field but this headline is the most depressing I’ve seen for a little while now. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

(squishing my cat’s little face insistently between my big stupid hands) solarpunk afrofuturism

Issue of money sovereignty for Europe ramping up; big sign-on letter from economists calls for a digital Euro with no US dependencies (as China has done in building its digital currency stack). www.ft.com/content/b060...

Electric vehicles with off-grid solar are competitive with or cheaper than old style petrol/gaslone vehicles in many African countries before 2030; and cheaper in all countries by 2040 - often by a wide margin. That's even allowing for (high) financing costs. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My time wasting habit of reading reader comments occasionally pays off (this from a story about Trump/Exxon/Venezuela)

Really in uncharted territory, aren’t we

Jerome Powell 🏆

Sorry to keep everyone waiting. Here it is. @thepolycrisis.bsky.social take on venezuela. Ofc it’s about oil. No, not like that @katemac.bsky.social buttondown.com/polycrisisdi...

everybody knows that linkedin is for telling a story about your toddler that ends with what this taught you about b2b sales

the US oil industry’s comments on Venezuela is the first bit of levity in a long unpleasant week of news

"No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country" - as.ft.com/r/18e31d1a-c...

BREAKING: The White House plans to withdraw the U.S. from the United Nations framework climate treaty, according to reports. Here's @robinsonmeyer.bsky.social with what we know: heatmap.news/sparks/us-wi...

"Trump’s push to remake the US as an old-school, cudgel-wielding petrostate risks backfiring for its energy security, its economy, and the specific interests of oil company shareholders” @timmcdonnell.bsky.social also points out that 12 months of incitement to drill baby drill has had no effect

SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO, SECRETARY OF WAR PETE HEGSETH, AND WHITE HOUSE DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF STEPHEN MILLER WILL BE IN CHARGE OF VENEZUELA,

So we are now in the "actually, it IS about oil" phase

I'm posting this for no other reason than goats Well, solar's a pretty good reason, too And also, solar is the GOAT

"My sense is that China is using this old RMI playbook to destroy global oil demand. With subsidized EV technology, China can help 50+ emerging markets destroy 3-4 million barrels per day of oil demand by 2030." - @jigarshahdc.bsky.social rmi.org/insight/winn... bsky.app/profile/did:...

Yes and also a specific attraction in bolstering the “we need to ensure supply” idea in this moment, when oil demand is truly facing secular decline

average daniel yergin reader interpreting the motives here

it’s about oil and yet from an energy markets perspective that doesn’t make much sense, unless we assume USG all but seizes control of US oil companies. Karthik Sankaran outlines the doesn’t-make-sense reasons here: responsiblestatecraft.org/venezuela-oil/