Pretty pessimistic overall, TBH.

Chad Bibi finishing American Century

Yiu can just nuke cpu foundries, inverter assemblies, memory chipmakers, turn data centers to dust. Claude La Fontaine can't stop the thermonuclear warheads no matter the prompt.

I would be much less hostile to modern "leftists" and "marxist-leninists" if they had anything close to these types of aspirations.

Supercycle not yet dead IMO, I think that we will counterintuitively to many have a big leg up in oil and gas prices plus general commodity benchmarks over 12-18 months.

"Unqiue bone structure" that is the entirity of area from Sochi to Yetevan.

Free intra-EU roaming has been a thing for like 10 years Need to update those priors

This implies that San Sebastian and Biarritz aren't posh destinations crowded with toursist? Maybe more "local" ones than American I guess.

Alisa is crazy dumb it's very sad. I mean, yeah Russia isn't allowed to have GPUs, and at least I get music and basic voice controls for ≈nothing, but it's like below 0.6B in LLM terms. Also instantly discards context. What could have been… They can train DS-style models btw

About half of the ship-to-ship transfers are happening at Sohar anchorage, in Omani waters. This was this Saturday morning. I count 4 VLCC and 3 MR2, so >10 mbbls readying for export.

Swap her for Irina Hakamada and that would even look legit

boomer origin stories are always like "Finally at 35 years old I decided to get serious with my life -- fortunately there was a national shortage of hedge fund analysts"

Hey T, we're fuckin lost. Crissy wanted to put those flatscreens somewheres the cops can't find but now we're in some kind of fucking mall.

The goal of everyone (well, both Ukr and Ru govs) is to see if Russian oil cos can reach negative profit margin territory at 100 USD oil it seems.

99 percentile of ROI on "EU Eastern European development grants" example here if we are being honest.

GPU finally captured the spirit of Median Russian Voter

Swear to god wanted to make a similar post just today. However, I would say that Japan is a better comparison. Koreans have too much of provincial insecurities hence Japan is a better fit.

Not as retarded when it comes to this cause there are many who travel/study/work daily in EU. Writing something like this is usually a lumpen prol class indicator.

“YOU CAN’T JUST DO THINGS” - Trying and Failing to Copy Bukele - The Ecuador Case 🇪🇨 With the spread of ‘Bukeleism’ in Latin America, assumption might be that the continent is on track to improve significantly in the near future, maybe maybe potentially even become ‘Basically Fine’. Was told recently though that this isn’t quite yet the case. Some countries have already tried to copy the Bukele model of ‘just locking up all the criminals’ with far less success. The Ecuador case is very instructive In 2023 and then in 2025 Daniel Noboa was elected as President of Ecuador on an anti-crime platform, pledging to significantly improve the country’s safety as in El Salvador. Noboa has attempted to tackle Ecuador’s crime crisis using some methods that resemble those employed by Bukele - eg states of emergency, military deployments, prison crackdowns and the framing of criminal organistions as enemies of the state - but the results have been far less dramatic vs in El Salvador. Violence in many Ecuadorian cities remains high despite extensive security operations Why is the Bukele approach not working as well in Ecuador? The most important distinction is that Ecuador’s gangs are deeply connected to international drug trafficking networks. Organisations such as Los Choneros and Los Lobos are not just local street gangs (MS13 in El Salvador would infamously control defined territory within Salvadoran cities) and are instead linked to a multinational cocaine trade connecting producers in Colombia and Peru with markets in North America and Europe. As long as these trafficking routes remain profitable, criminal groups alway have strong incentives to rebuild after arrests, raids and leadership losses Geography also makes Ecuador more difficult to control. Unlike El Salvador - which is relatively small, flat and densely populated - Ecuador contains remote Amazonian jungle regions, mountainous terrain, extensive coastlines and very porous borders. Criminal groups can relocate, hide and operate in areas where government presence is always going to be limited. ‘Just go and hide in the jungle’-maxxing is unfortunately generally an effective strategy. A successful military operation (and there have been many, often in these kinds of remote locales and in conjunction with the US) may clear an area but only temporarily and without permanently eliminating the underlying organisations being targeted A big structural challenge too is that Ecuador’s gangs do not function like conventional armies. Military forces or at least Bukele-style gang sweeps are designed to defeat organised groups that hold territory and present identifiable targets. Ecuadorian criminal organisations though often operate as decentralised networks consisting of eg local cells, prison-based coordinators, corrupt contacts, subcontractors, informants and hired assassins etc. Because gangs generally avoid direct confrontation with soldiers too police security operations will rarely achieve decisive victories Another major reason Noboa has struggled to replicate Bukele’s success is that violence in Ecuador’s cities remains closely tied to the criminal economy. Many homicides stem from disputes between gangs over trafficking routes. Even if security forces weaken one group rivals will move in to compete for the same opportunities. Infamously violent cities such as Guayaquil (jokingly called Guaya-‘kill’) will always remain strategically important because they contain important infrastructure - ports, transport links, warehouses etc. As a result, urban violence has proven resilient even when gang members can sometimes be decisively identified. Military patrols and emergency measures may suppress violence temporarily but gangs will just adapt and reorganise. Homicide rates and other forms of violent crime remain significantly higher than they were a decade ago [1/2]