Howard Marriott

Outdoorsman, 12-stepper, retired editor, sound money, old school manners. Resources / mining investor.

[Howard Marriott @HowardJMarriott]

@DavidBCollum Fed 'printed' $172 billion Jan-April 2026 (which annualizes out to a half-trillion dollars per year)... it's the unit of account, not 'the markets'...

[Daniel Jeffries @Dan_Jeffries1]

AI will create more jobs than any other technology in history.

The doomers' fundamental error isn't just the lump of labor fallacy. It's deeper than that.

They assume a finite problem space.

This is the fundamental error of AI and job doomers. They look at the economy and see a fixed amount of work to be done, a pie that can only be sliced thinner as machines take bigger bites. They see humans a competitive resource for a finite amount of work and a finite amount of problems to solve that must be eliminated.

This is fundamentally, totally and completely wrong.

The pie isn't fixed. It never was. And the reason it isn't fixed is baked into the very nature of technology itself.

Technology is nothing but abstraction stacking. And abstraction stacking is infinite. Therefore the work is infinite.

The hammer didn't reduce the amount of work. It moved the work up the stack. And the new work was more complex, more varied, and more interesting than the old work.

Complexity breeds more complexity and more variety.

Once you have houses instead of mud huts, you have a cascade of new problems that didn't exist before. Plumbing. Wiring. Insulation. Roofing materials that don't rot. Drainage systems so the foundation doesn't flood. Fire codes so your neighbor's bad wiring doesn't burn down the whole block.

Each of those problems becomes a job. A plumber. An electrician. An insulator. A roofer. A civil engineer. A building inspector. None of those jobs existed when we lived in mud huts.

They exist because we solved the mud hut problem.

Think of all of human technological development as a stack of abstraction layers, each one built on top of the ones below it.

At the bottom: raw survival. Finding food. Building shelter. Making fire. These are the base-layer problems.

Each major technology wave solved a base-layer problem and in doing so created an entirely new layer of problems above it:

Agriculture solved "how do we reliably eat?" — and created problems of land ownership, irrigation, crop rotation, storage, trade, taxation, and governance.

Writing solved "how do we remember things across generations?" — and created problems of literacy, education, record-keeping, law, bureaucracy, and literature.

The printing press solved "how do we spread knowledge at scale?" — and created problems of intellectual property, censorship, journalism, publishing, public opinion, and democratic discourse.

The steam engine solved "how do we generate mechanical power without muscles?" — and created problems of factory design, worker safety, urban planning, railroad engineering, coal mining, labor relations, and environmental pollution.

Electricity solved "how do we deliver energy anywhere?" — and created problems of grid design, power generation, appliance manufacturing, electrical safety codes, utility regulation, and an entire consumer electronics industry.

The Internet solved "how do we connect all human knowledge?" — and created problems of cybersecurity, digital privacy, online commerce, content moderation, network infrastructure, cloud computing, social media dynamics, and an entire digital economy that employs tens of millions.

Notice the pattern?

Each solution didn't just solve a problem.

It created an entirely new problem space that was larger, more complex, and more varied than the one it replaced.

The stack grows. It never shrinks.

It's turtles all the way down and all the way up.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

You’re the energy secretary. Yet you don’t seem to know that BP’s ‘excess profits’ come from its global oil trading division, which is not subject to UK ‘excess profits’ windfall tax, not from its North Sea activities, which are. Remarkable.

[Howard Marriott @HowardJMarriott]

@RaymondDuck6 V. funny! 😆

[Handre @Handre]

Mises obliterated the entire socialist project in 1920 with one devastating insight: "Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation." The socialists spent the next century pretending this problem didn't exist while their economies collapsed around them.

And yet here we are, watching politicians promise they can "fix" healthcare, housing, and energy markets through central planning. They can't even calculate the cost of their own programs correctly — how exactly are they going to allocate resources across an entire economy?

Every Venezuelan breadline, every Soviet grain shortage, every Chinese famine was just Mises being proven right in the most brutal way possible. But sure, let's try democratic socialism this time. What could go wrong?

[Howard Marriott @HowardJMarriott]

@TokStocks Excellent breakdowns here. Really useful, compact theses. Like the way you've laid this out and respect to the work you've undertaken 🤜

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

AI can now generate images more beautiful than anything most humans could make. Sam Altman just explained why nobody cares.

Altman: “The value that people put on that effectively rounds to zero.”

Not less valuable. Zero.

A flawlessly generated AI image, technically superior to almost anything a human could produce, valued at nothing.

When visual perfection becomes instantly available to everyone, it stops being scarce.

And when it stops being scarce, it stops being valuable.

The scarcity that gave art its worth was never the beauty. It was the human who made it.

Altman: “Without the person effectively signing their name to it, we seem to not care.”

That sentence is the entire shift compressed into one line.

We don’t consume art. We consume the person behind it.

The struggle. The intention. The specific human consciousness that decided this particular thing should exist.

AI can replicate the output. It cannot replicate the origin.

Altman points out that if an artist uses AI as a tool but still has something they were trying to express, the work retains its value.

The human intention is the product. The image is just how it arrives.

Remove the person and the beauty becomes noise.

This is what nobody building AI art tools fully absorbed. They optimized for the output and assumed the output was what people valued.

It wasn’t. It was never the pixels.

It was always the person.

AI isn’t going to replace human artists. It’s going to do something more disorienting.

It’s going to make technical skill irrelevant and force the entire market to pay for something that was always there but never had to be named.

Presence. Intention. Proof that a human consciousness cared enough to make this particular thing.

Abundance makes perfection free.

Meaning becomes the only scarcity worth paying for.

And meaning can’t be automated. Because meaning requires a consciousness choosing to say something specific to someone specific for reasons that matter.

The artists who survive won’t be the most technically gifted.

They’ll be the most undeniably human.

AI gave the world infinite art and proved that what we actually want is irreplaceable.

[Howard Marriott @HowardJMarriott]

@TokStocks @SomaGoldCorp @WestRedLakeGold @MakoMiningCorp @jaguarmininginc @StarcoreIR Very good indeed! Thank you.

[Howard Marriott @HowardJMarriott]

@Silver__Santa I agree with this (and continue to hold in size). Thanks for posting 👍

[Howard Marriott @HowardJMarriott]

@Silver__Santa Hmmm, that last MRE was troubling. Have you decided that there was a bit of an overreaction to that?

[Howard Marriott @HowardJMarriott]

@ThiedeInvests Complete failure to execute....

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

I am today launching Restore Britain as a national political party.

Join us.

https://t.co/RMtEuHopgV

[Howard Marriott @HowardJMarriott]

@TheApeOfGoldST Yup, damn frustrating, speaking as a holder. Certainly of the top-up list.

[Howard Marriott @HowardJMarriott]

@StealthQE4 This is a liquidity grab - all sectors selling off. Liquidity issues biting hard.

[Junior Mining News @JRMiningIntel]

Ontario Issues First-Ever Recovery of Minerals Permit to STLLR Gold's Hollinger Tailings Project - $STLR.TO $STLRF.US | CEOCA Breaking News
https://t.co/9db35SZs2f

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Labour was elected in July 2024 with an overriding promise to accelerate economic growth. We now now have its record for its first full calendar year, 2025:
Q1: 0.7%
Q2: 0.2%
Q3: 0.1%
Q4: 0.1%
So, far from stimulating the economy, the dead hand of Starmer-Reeves has knocked the stuffing out of it. They took a good start to the year and squandered it with reckless tax, spend and borrow (none of which was in their manifesto).
Our giant services sector — 2nd biggest in the world — is stagnating. Construction is in its worst state for over 4 years, with output down 2% in Q4 (which is why Labour’s promise of 1.5m new houses by 2029 is already broken).
As for GDP per capita, which was very popular among X tweeters under the Tories but not so much now (I wonder why), it fell for the second quarter in a row — so we’re effectively in a GDP/capita recession.

[Howard Marriott @HowardJMarriott]

@northernmodE_1 @Silver__Santa Market not impressed it seems but this is a longer term story than most (many) are willing to invest in right now, opportunity cost etc. As they said themselves earlier, this is not a monster but it represents progress and the grade is high ... https://t.co/nqgOpZCKiQ

[Orosur Mining @OrosurM]

Our resource finally out for Pepas.

Not a monster, but very high grade, very low strip (basically zero for half its life) and thus offering the potential for very low capex and opex.
We have already pulled the trigger on the PTO process plan to have that and the permitting process in train in the near term.
https://t.co/X2lollyHSe

[1911 Gold Corporation @1911goldcorp]

$AUMB announces positive PEA for #TrueNorth

📈NPV (5%) C$391M | IRR 105% | 2.2-Year Payback
⛏️11-year LOM producing ~58,100 oz/ year
💰$545M after-tax FCF
💲AISC US$1,897/oz
🗓️ Production in H1/27

News Release & Webinar Info: https://t.co/ESis9YQWjX

$AUMBF #GOLD #MiningNews

[Howard Marriott @HowardJMarriott]

@SilvercorpSVM 👍

[Junior Mining News @JRMiningIntel]

Southern Silver Intersects 5.8 metres averaging 781g/t AgEq at Cerro Las Minitas Project in Durango, México - $SSV.V $SSVFF.US | CEOCA Breaking News
https://t.co/VGVUt1pdkS