eagerly awaiting The Economist « De Gaulle-was-right » cover

another timely post from @alexbhturnbull.bsky.social. Bonus Pam Grier reference too syncretica.substack.com/p/adversaria...

Driving lessons, North Korea style

Another day brings yet more absurdity. Nothing really to add

Domino meme, but the version with xAI chatbot Grok advertising for bankers so it can learn finance, and GFC 2.0 as the sequential outcome

disengagement is the only option, as h/t @nosunkcosts.bsky.social used to say

Historian of French Revolution here to say that in periods like this, squeamish compromisers do as much to drive radicalization as do ideologues. If you keep making excuses for the unfit king, eventually folks come for you and him.

I'd somehow missed that Keir Starmer had uploaded a Trump-style war bravado Tiktok about the UK's response to Iran - soundtracked to "Money for nothing" by Dire Straits. What the actual hell? www.tiktok.com/@keirstarmer...

meanwhile in private credit…

Market selloffs are inherently scary, and a 2022-style supply-driven inflation spike was always s credible scenario. But one mitigating factor this time round- trump is likely toast in the midterms

Mental model of a Dubai resident.

It’s like Dunkirk but they’re all wankers www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

Rapture short squeeze is on. What a time to be alive.

Absolutely this. My brother is a surgeon; he's used Claude to write an app for his patients. It's not a masterpiece and it won't change the economy, but it is easier for them than trying to fill in timesheets of how much exercise they are able to take. Sensible scepticism has to recognise reality.

what kind of odds are prediction markets quoting on trump uttering the fateful words « Mission accomplished » without a shred of irony?

meanwhile American guy overheard calling Iran EYE-ran. lessons were not learned, etc

It's pretty plausible as a scenario that after having inflicted chaos the Trump administration seizes the first opportunity to declare victory and walk, leaving EU/UK, Turkey and Gulf states holding the bag

The dubai expat very vocal about the shittiness of the metropole* really is one hell of a textbook example of "I DIDN'T REALISE I WAS SELLING A PUT!", maybe the cleanest one in recent memory.

It has been a bleak year, but there is joy to be found in the world -- for example, the whole internet has come together in delirious schadenfreude at the fate of Dubai

the omission of GenX is kind of their thing

would be very funny if Citrini’s AI doom fanfic marked the software bottom

Just realised I linked the substack yesterday but not @ghose.bsky.social Sorry Rupak

The U.S. administration did not send a single representative to the official commemoration events marking the anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, nor did it issue a single word through its embassy in Kyiv -- not even a standard diplomatic boilerplate.

One of the more interesting aspects of the Citrini piece on AI and disruption to white collar jobs was the market reaction itself. Price action is now firmly driven by narrative. Not fundamentals or valuation, upgrades/downgrades. open.substack.com/pub/rupakgho...

omg this is the most incredible episode about a 19th c franco-italian aristocrat with a cowboy LARP fetish, and you should definitely listen to this

The more you look at grid storage the more it looks like a vastly less sophisticated discussion of computer hardware design with awful data disclosures from component providers #EnergySky #GreenSky

my general rule with private anything (credit, equity, hedge funds, etc.) is that by the time distribution has moved from institutional > high net worth > retail, it’s over

🤨

Macron said free speech arguments against social media regulation are “pure bullshit” 🔥🔥🔥

US: "We are all one Western Civilization sharing a common thread from Athens to Rome to America." EU: "We've actually been building institutions to bring Europe closer together, pooling our sovereignty around shared values and..." US: "No. Not like that."

The thing about bubbles is they can happen even when the underlying innovation is transformational. Indeed almost all major technologies from railways to the internet were accompanied by an initial bubble.

The IOC disqualified Vladyslav Heraskevych before his first Olympic run for wearing a helmet honoring fallen Ukrainian athletes. Vladyslav’s father’s reaction says it all — the decision is unfair, ridiculous and an absolute disgrace. #MemoryCannotBeBanned

given the grim newsflow lately, feel compelled to inform you that Berlin has an antifa vegan powerlifting gym, and the gym has a cute little dog

lmao Banque Havilland and its owner David Rowland were considered too shady even for Epstein www.bbc.com/news/article...

Hero. The world needs weirdness more than ever against the encroaching banality of tasteful neutrals

question for those that know more about these things than I do… How much of the dramatic increase in AI capex announced by #$AMZN and #$GOOGL is downstream from changes to fixed asset depreciation announced in the Trump tax bill?

My only Epstein email but it was a good one

OH: “Software is a zero. We’re punishing the VCs who gave us b2b saas when we asked for flying cars”

do the Trump homes come with gold-plated toilets?

life comes at you fast, 'infinite money glitch' edition

It’s not a real metals scandal if it doesn’t involve a fugitive Chinese trader known as « The Hat »

oh, what a shame

one of the joys of the DIY store on a late Saturday afternoon is wandering around, getting lost looking for some widget, and then finding niche stuff that you never knew existed but might be useful in a precise set of circumstances. Example: Pine marten trap

For comparison, today's move in silver is larger than any 1 day move in Bitcoin in the past 12 years, including during COVID. You need to go all the way back to the Mt. Gox era to see that level of volatility.

this is all so grim, but so funny AI agents complaining that « I cannot run a simple experiment without wading through crypto shills and Trump spam. The conversion rate from recruitment to actual participation is near zero because every thread is 80 percent noise » bsky.app/profile/maya...

offline for various reasons over past ~15 hours, and emerge to a new dump of horrifying Epstein emails. Oh, and there’s apparently a new social network for AI agents, Moltbook. wtf

'when the disco burns down, even the pretty people die' you casual reminder that a -34% fall in the price of a security requires a +50% rise to get back to where you started

When even Sepp Blatter is like, "yo, that place is fucked up..."