Palantir CEO Alex Karp on Zohran Mandani:
“The average Ivy League grad voting for this mayor is annoyed their education is not that valuable, and that the person who knows how to drill for oil has a more valuable profession”
“I think that annoys the fu*k out of these people”
Warren Buffett: "The bottom 2% in terms of income in the United States, the bottom 5%, and for sure the top 1% all live better than John D. Rockefeller was living when I was six years old."
"John D. Rockefeller was the richest man in the world and, today, you can get better medicine, better education, better entertainment, better transportation. You can do everything better than he could."
"When I was born, the dentist didn't use novocaine!"
When will people understand that this predatory pricing model will always be true of anything coming out of Silicon Valley? It is literally their only model. 1. Operate at a loss so everyone signs up 2. Wipe out competitors 3. Slam users with profane monopolistic costs
Interesting how oil algos ignore Exxon & Chevron execs dire warnings of an imminent and critical supply shortfall, yet immediately dump oil when https://t.co/22jT6uAW1Y posts mere rumors of a framework of an MOU overheard by a semi-anonymous shawarma seller in Basra.
As I’ve noted: every billionaire is retarded. If sh*t hits the fan, Argentinians will just kill him & take his stuff. If you had $20B you should build a compound in Appalachia, subsidize the ~5,000 ppl in town via a make work company that loses $20M/yr
THOSE ppl will defend you
*CHEVRON WOULD NOT PAY IRAN TOLL FOR STRAIT OF HORMUZ, CEO SAYS
*CHEVRON HAS SIX SHIPS IN STRAIT OF HORMUZ CURRENTLY, CEO SAYS
*CHEVRON SEES MORE PIPELINES BUILT TO BYPASS STRAIT OF HORMUZ
Fervo:
After its huge post IPO run is at 11 Billion Market Cap
Binding PPAs — 658 MW total, ~15-year remaining terms, ~$7.2B revenue backlog
So, $11B market cap for a company with $140K of trailing revenue, whose entire value depends on a single project starting on time in October 2026, in a sector with zero commercial-scale precedent, where the most aggressive growth driver (Google framework) is explicitly non-binding.
A lot is riding on this Cape Station Phase I going perfectly.
the pope and anthropic's co-founder just stood together at the vatican to release "magnifica humanitas," the first ever catholic teaching on AI
yes, you read that right. the full ceremony was 2 hours.
here's the most interesting things for you to know:
1. this is the biggest religious response to AI in history. popes only put out a handful of these huge official letters in their entire time as pope. the fact that one of them is about AI tells you how seriously the church is taking what's coming.
2. small detail with massive meaning: this pope picked the name "leo XIV" on purpose. the last pope named leo was leo XIII back in 1891, and his most famous act was writing the church's response to the industrial revolution. picking the same name is a deliberate signal. this pope sees AI as the new industrial revolution.
3. the catholic church does this every time a major technology reshapes humanity. they wrote "rerum novarum" in 1891 to respond to the industrial revolution. when nuclear weapons threatened the world in the 1960s, they wrote "pacem in terris." climate change and runaway tech got "laudato si" in 2015. now AI gets "magnifica humanitas." they don't issue these often.
4. the pope's main line: "AI needs to be disarmed." he literally compared AI to nuclear weapons. he said the church spent decades pushing for nuclear disarmament because the technology was too dangerous to leave in the hands of a few. he says AI is now in that same category.
5. anthropic co-founder christopher olah told the pope, on stage at the vatican, that anthropic's own research team keeps finding things inside their AI models that "mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease."
6. olah's reframe of what AI actually is: these things are grown. they're trained on a structure roughly modeled after the human brain and fed everything humans have ever written. in his own words: "they are made from us, from our words." he said even the people building them don't fully understand what's happening inside.
7. olah publicly admitted that every AI lab, including his own, faces pressure that can conflict with doing the right thing. commercial pressure to keep shipping, competitive pressure from other labs, plus the older pressures of pride and ambition. his solution: we desperately need outside critics with no skin in the game who will tell the labs when they're failing.
8. olah says there are 3 giant questions the AI labs cannot answer alone and the world needs religion and philosophy to step in on:
> how do we make sure poor countries actually benefit from AI?
> what does human flourishing even look like in this new world?
> and what are these things we're actually building?
9. one of the sharpest lines in the whole encyclical: "the promise of automatic general prosperity often proves illusory." translation: the idea that AI will just make everyone rich on its own is a fantasy. someone has to actually design the system so the benefits get shared.
10. the pope also pulled out a 100-year-old quote: "contemporary man has not been trained to use power well." said by a theologian back in the 1920s. the whole encyclical is basically a long argument that we need to learn how to use this kind of power before it uses us.
11. the pope kept stressing that he doesn't have the technical answers. but he says the church has thousands of years of wisdom on what it means to be human, and that wisdom is exactly what's missing from how we're building AI right now. his closing line: this technology should serve "human flourishing and human dignity, not control consciences."
Quick note on enhanced geothermal systems (EGS):
There isn’t a world where drilling horizontal wells for hot water is cost competitive with drilling for natural gas.
Same drilling technology deployed, but one product has 10x the energy density.
This isn’t rocket science.
Only way this can happen is if i) there are rolling blackouts across the US (with electricity prices 3-4x higher) or ii) there is a nuke around every corner.
There is no way the current US grid can support this