Week 22

CNBC: "Software stocks wrap up best month since 2001 as talk of 'SaaSpocalypse' subsides"

Politico: "Berlin gives the OK for tougher trade action on China"

Politico: "Don’t let Big Tech hide ecological cost of AI, environment agency chief tells EU.. Brussels must require tech companies to disclose data centers’ energy and water use [the chief] says."

Munee and bidness.. That's what it's all about

Andy O'Brien: "The NY Times' Obsession with Platner's "Working Class" Cred.. The NY Times story quoted Tony Buxton, a corporate lobbyist with the Portland firm Preti Flaherty, accusing Platner of lying about his business. But for some reason it didn’t mention what Buxton does for work. The Times simply described him as 'a former chairman of the Maine Democratic Party who had supported Ms. Mills.'.. The Times also failed to mention that Buxton represents the company seeking to build a controversial data center in Sanford and successfully lobbied to get Governor Mills to veto a data center moratorium last month. "

2008-2012 has a major fall, then major rise.. The rise is higher than the previous decline. That means corporations not only reversed their losses since 2008, they surpassed them. Why wouldn't they? They had laid off millions of workers bcz of the crisis, frozen hiring, and closed facilities, extracted more work from the remaining workforce. When econ began to recover in 2010, every new dollar of revenue would flow into pure profit, margins expanded to historic highs, causing the massive, outsized explosion in earnings we see in the graph bcz corp cost structures were permanently lower (less workers, deindustrialized and outsourced jobs more). The period as is known as "jobless recovery" for good reason.

Corp earnings been rising..

df = pd.read_csv('schiller.csv')
df['Date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Date'])
df['YoY'] = df['Earnings E'].pct_change(periods=12) * 100
df['PE_Ratio'] = df['S&P Comp P'] / df['Earnings E']
df_recent = df[df['Date'].dt.year >= 2000].copy()
fig1, ax1 = plt.subplots(figsize=(12, 6))
ax1.plot(df_recent['Date'], df_recent['YoY'], label='YoY Earnings Growth (%)')
ax1.axhline(0, color='black', linestyle='--', linewidth=1.2, alpha=0.7)
ax1.set_title('S&P 500 Year-over-Year (YoY) Earnings Growth Rate (Since 2000)', pad=15)
ax1.set_xlabel('Date', fontsize=12)
ax1.set_ylabel('Growth Rate (%)', fontsize=12)
ax1.legend(loc='upper left', frameon=True)
ax1.grid(True, linestyle=':', alpha=0.5)
plt.tight_layout()

Letz do some corp earnings analysis.. Data at https://shillerdata.com, get ie_data.xls, the data extractor is in mbl/2026/util.py under schiller_conv. Outputs to schiller.csv.

Hanauer, Politico: "[2014] The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats"

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Hanauer is one of the rare billionaires who consistently speak out on inequality

Nick Hanauer: "This booklet is based on our forthcoming book, Market Humanism. It is a brief guide aimed at policymakers.. Market Humanism and middle-out economics stand in sharp contrast to the economic theories and policy agenda that dominated the U.S. and much of the world from the 1970s through the 2010s. We will refer to this set of ideas as the neoliberal consensus, a political ideology that integrated free market theories from neoliberal political economy, neoclassical economics, and libertarian philosophy into a worldview that shaped the policy agendas of both the Republican and Democratic parties from Carter and Reagan through Obama...

The neoliberal consensus and trickle-down economics did not emerge by accident. These ideas were strategically funded, developed, and promoted by an array of business interests and wealthy individuals who benefited to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars from the resulting policies. The neoliberal consensus, however, fractured during the global financial crisis of 2008, losing both its intellectual credibility and support from the public...

From the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, during an era of more regulated capitalism and robust public investment, U.S. GDP growth averaged approximately 4 percent annually. In contrast, since adopting neoliberal economic policies starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, average GDP growth has fallen significantly, averaging roughly 2.5 percent annually and declining further in recent decades. Far from unleashing entrepreneurial dynamism and broad-based prosperity, neoliberal economics has delivered economic stagnation, instability, and fragility."

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Space Daily: "The European Commission moved to reserve two-thirds of a coveted satellite spectrum band for European operators, a decision that directly threatens SpaceX's direct-to-device plans and Viasat's existing European Aviation Network while opening a fresh front in the transatlantic fight over space technology."

Cosmology is not science.. It's bunch of harebrained, cockamamie stuff thrown together that sound scientific. Outside US if something were to be cut, astrophysics would be the first place to go.

"Someone, somewhere, has taken the decision to defund astrophysics research in the UK, but no-one seems quite sure who that was, or why."

Recommending Fuze (2025). Fine work.

"We all died in 2020 and this is hell"

Reuters: "Starbucks scraps AI inventory tool across North America.. AI tool miscounted items, leading to errors.. The tool was part of CEO Brian Niccol's efforts to fix the coffee chain's persistent product shortages that he has blamed for hurting sales. The app - designed to improve Starbucks’ visibility into shortages at stores - frequently miscounted and mislabeled items, such as confusing similar milk types or ​missing them altogether"

You are still a slave, Jew. Just like when they goaded you into those gas chambers, they goaded you to that f-ing place, Israel, and they are making money of off you. You are a pawn, a f-ing tool, still serving the interests of the Aryan race. Is this what you were chosen for?

It's sad MIC making use of Israel in this way. They think they are in control, but they are being controlled.

Garbage Day: "There are.. warning signals across the AI industry that are flashing bright red right now. Starbucks had to roll back an AI inventory tool because it kept hallucinating. The Verge reported that Microsoft is rethinking its dependency on Claude Code. And Duolingo’s stock price has tanked in the last year, after the company went all-in on AI."

England is a cup of tea.
France, a wheel of ripened brie.
Greece, a short, squat olive tree.
America is a gun.

Brazil is football on the sand.
Argentina, Maradona's hand.
Germany, an oompah band.
America is a gun.

Holland is a wooden shoe.
Hungary, a goulash stew.
Australia, a kangaroo.
America is a gun.

Japan is a thermal spring.
Scotland is a highland fling.
Oh, better to be anything
than America as a gun.

Brian Bilston

Trump Off

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Turks (the real ones) were assimilated into Anatolia just like any other migratory moves arriving there. 1920s Republic picked one ethnicity among many and made it the official identity, which was a mistake. It's like making Irishness the official identity in America: sure there have been Irish migration, and they are now part of the US fabric (tomato soup, not melting pot), but not everyone is Irish, surely not in the form they first arrived.

#YannisPappas #Anatolia

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ANYONE BUT TRUMP BRO

BUT DEMS WERE SO MUCH BETTER

"@jwilker@wandering.shop

It's amazing how bad medical stuff is still in 2026. Wife went to ER and 'oh we can't see the stuff your doctor did last week'

Like WTF? With everything we have in tech these days, it's beyond stupid one medical provider can't see what another has done for the patient."

Suriyak: "The Syrian coast continues to suffer: 🇸🇾 A UN report reveals an alarming rise in crime rates on the Syrian coast. Despite the transitional authorities’ denial that these acts are organized, describing them as isolated incidents or criminal offenses, their persistence and the manner in which they are carried out confirm the presence of sectarian motives, among other factors."

Gizmodo: "Crypto’s Most Powerful PAC Sends a Warning to Politicians: Resistance Is Futile.. Rep. Green’s defeat proves that anti-crypto hostility carries real electoral consequences."

E-douche always used space biz to prop up his geek status so he would come across smarter, more visionary than he actually is on other unrelated matters, so it's not a surprise the grift will now take its final corporate form. "Look there is cool space stuff" and "look there is some other stuff underneath, pay for the cool, get others for free". That is the sale.

The "new" left always wrapped its econ right-wingery with new age, technobabbly, futuristic glitz... Have to watch for that. Screw labor rights because we have computers bro, see how shiny they are? Anything that goes against capital is "old".

It's interesting how two sides sold this freak shit to the public.. Labour / Dems sold it via futurism, Reps sold it via nostalgia (they appealed to the old, the rugged, frontiersy America).

The Guardian: "The current leadership debate concerning Streeting and Andy Burnham.. 'has an extraordinarily retro 20th-century feel to it' [Blair] complains."

Zhigge - Rakin' In The Dough #music

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I see, so that's where this mythical center is.. There is a lot of dough in that center.

"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

Tony Blair’s son, Euan Blair, is the CEO of a GenAI firm. Tony Blair lobbies with his own company for GenAI usage in government and schools, and lax UK AI laws."

"@mike_k@mstdn.social

There is something classically AI about headings like:

'A Major Philosophical Shift, Even If Limited'

That’s not how words work."

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The problem is, center of the past 40 years is screwed up. There was a time when Eisenhower (a Republican) could embrace the New Deal. Then the world shifted to a new regime where Bill Clinton (and Blair) embraced Reaganism. We need a new regime.

Do not cede that "center" ground..

The Guardian: "Tony Blair has accused Keir Starmer, Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting of putting Labour’s future at risk by abandoning the centre ground..His essay, a highly unusual intervention for a past Labour prime minister, is likely to draw a furious response from across the party, where Blair’s legacy remains highly contentious. On Tuesday, one senior source accused him of abandoning social democratic values to embrace an agenda that had 'no answers'... Blair also suggested it was a mistake for others in the party to seek to remove Starmer as prime minister"

"@exchgr@mastodon.world

what you think AI does: cheap code, things break fast but also get fixed fast

what AI actually does: subsidized code that will become extremely expensive very soon, things break fast but you don't notice and the bugs accumulate, losing your customers' trust in your product"

"Colorado and California age verification bills exempt open source operating systems"

As stated before, coding harnesses around LLMs, or "agents", are not improvements of the LLM itself, they are a wrapper around it, to get over its shortcomings. We can think of it like this: Let's say you needed to find the minimum of a list of numbers. You have a black box, a magic algorithmic machine which can (somehow) only return five smallest numbers in that list. So the machine does some work, but it has its limitations. But we need the one, single minimum number. What do we do? Well we write a wrapper around the magic black box machine, we pass a list, get our five numbers which contains the minimum, and we them run our own little algoritm to find the minimum within that five.

What's described above is an engineering solution. In IT work, system integration such things are done all the time. You can't change the database, the OS itself, so in your "application" layer you do whatever is necessary to get the functionality you need. Claude Code, Codex are such applications. When you look in the code for CC (you can, as it leaked recently) you will see there is nothing AI'ish in it. It's bunch of manually coded if.. then.. else statements, regex up the wazoo, for loops and the like. It is a giant handcoded script that runs LLMs a certain way to provide a more fluent LLM interaction. That's all it is.

CNN: "Mamdani’s ‘tax the rich’ slogan is ‘just as hateful’ as racial slurs, New York real estate titan [Griffith] says"

The Lever: "As support for Israel becomes politically toxic, the Better Blue Fund is emerging as a quiet new conduit for AIPAC-linked money in key Democratic primary races."

"[A]nger at AI is white hot right now. For a bunch of reasons I've already discussed. It's particularly and unsurprisingly hot among young Americans, who can't find jobs, homes, health care, or much of anything else to give them a leg up in a country hollowed out by historic levels of corruption... A few weeks ago a speaker giving a commencement address at the University of Central Florida was loudly booed after she proclaimed that improvements in software automation should be viewed as the 'next industrial revolution.'"

#BenMiles

"Ironically cold weather is a huge instigator of electricle vehicle fire"

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Seth's Blog: "The real AI.. To quote the great Steve Wozniak, 'Actual Intelligence.' The kind we’re born with and can develop if we choose. It’s worth more now than ever before. Alas, it’s rarely taught in school.

The difficult work of making choices.

The act of curation.

The responsibility of putting your name on it.

The judgment to ask the right questions and skip the other ones."

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"@MikeElgan@mastodon.social

Now you can keep track of how many billions the AI companies are losing on AI. (Red is spending, green is revenue)"

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SI batteries will be even heavier than lithium ion? Which genius is betting on this technology?

"[Sodium ion battery] energy density is preventing sodium-ion batteries from being widely adopted in electric vehicles. Lower energy density means you need larger cells and that adds significant weight and take more space."

"@mastodonmigration@mastodon.online

In simple terms. SpaceX is a meme stock whose fundamentals in no way justify inclusion in index funds. NASDAQ rules have been changed so that it will be included. As a result 401Ks and IRAs will automatically buy the stock, effectively giving this worthless company your money. It is the greatest grift of all time."

"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

Watching a bunch of people get very excited about the idea of replacing their staff, when they do not understand the job those staff do, is particularly eye opening.

Watch the people doing this and remember their names, then enjoy not working for them. Inspirational leadership my arse, they’re the arseholes of Earth."

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Power Magazine: "[03/02] China achieved a significant fuel cycle milestone with its TMSR-LF1 thorium molten-salt reactor—a 2-MWth prototype built by the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics.. The reactor reached first criticality on Oct. 11, 2023, and achieved full power by June 2024. In October 2024, SINAP scientists performed the world’s first addition of thorium fuel to a working molten-salt reactor (MSR), creating a platform for thorium-uranium fuel cycle research... And one year later, in November 2025, SINAP announced that TMSR-LF1 had successfully bred uranium-233 from thorium"

The Jerusalem Post: "Trump says Netanyahu 'will do whatever I want him to do,' amid concerns of Iran war restarting"

NYT: "Once Trump’s Co-Pilot Against Iran, Netanyahu Is Now a Mere Passenger.. A partner in the war, Israel has been largely left out of the peace talks, a humbling setback for its prime minister."

"The Next Lina Khan Is Your State Attorney General.. As the White House eases off antitrust enforcement, states are rushing to seize the power for themselves."

"A map of the thorium content of the lunar surface based on Lunar Prospector data shows that a large area on the nearside of the Moon, including the Imbrium basin and Oceanus Procellarum, is enriched in thorium relative to the rest of the Moon"

Bloomberg: "SpaceX engineers have been slow to adopt Grok for technical work because it’s not as effective as rival tools, according to people familiar with the matter. Within its xAI division, certain staffers have been using other AI alternatives such as Anthropic PBC’s Claude for coding instead of Grok, said some of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters."

Business Insider: "SpaceX bought Tesla Megapacks and $131 million worth of Cybertrucks, its IPO filing shows"

#FullPageAd #NYT

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One scenario goes UAE is told by US to attack Iran, if Iran responds, that will be the excuse to restart the 60 day period where WH can use military force again wout congressional approval. Theory goes on, Xi and US made a deal, US will supply oil to China, and China sold out Iran... Interesting.. The latter part sounds unlikely though, China would lose credibility in the global south if they sold out Iran.

WSJ: "The U.A.E. Has Been Secretly Carrying Out Attacks on Iran"

You are not computing an actual division on $f(x) = x^2 - 1 / x-1$ for $x=1$ either, and when you use $\lim_{x \to 1} f(x)$ to land you to a new algebraic statement which you can compute, does that mean you are using less arithmetic, less math?

Sure is. You can sample from the numerator, using hard-core methods of statistics. It is still within the same realm.

"But you have a normalizer Z bro which you do not compute, that's not probabilistic"

An LLM is a giant, deterministic, feed-forward matrix multiplication engine that slaps a statistical band-aid on the final output layer (a cheap softmax calculation at the end of the pipeline).

[geek] You can find the approximate minima of a function by turning it into a Gibbs distribution, and relying on the (more efficient) traversal via a sampler to find a approximate minima. The method does not get stuck in local minimas like a gradient based optimizer are prone to do. For a final demonstration of the approach I picked the toughes nut, a 100 dimensional function-from-hell, and applied parallel particle filters to sample from the posterior running on a GPU, it found the approximate minima in two seconds [/geek].

That's a stretch... I would actually say EBMs are more probabilistic compared to LLMs.

"Energy based methods are not probabilistic like LLMs"

Reuters: "[02/13] US-led oil sales from Venezuela to bring in $5 billion in months, energy chief Wright tells NBC News"