Jeremy Beckwith

Investment Thinker; Economist; Cricket Umpire. RTs are not endorsements , all views expressed are personal, and are not investment advice.

[AI Highlight @AIHighlight]

🚨 In 2016, an Uber data scientist confirmed the company knew people pay more for a ride when their phone battery is low.

It is called surveillance pricing. Your data sets your price.

Delta is rolling it out on 20% of flights this year. Here is how it works:

[Fraser Nelson @FraserNelson]

Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech (58 years ago today) drew this leading article from The Times...

[Gerard Lyons @DrGerardLyons]

IMF per capita 2025 in $ — currency moves can impact comparisons & some economists prefer PPP — but these figures give a rough comparison of countries you cited : Switzerland $118k, Singapore 99k, USA $93k, Australia $69k, Germany $64k, UK $60k. But France is $52k

[investingLive @investingLive_]

Anthropic just built the best AI model in the world but won't release it
https://t.co/dqjeg7FTdr

[Jeremy Beckwith @JeremyBeckwith1]

@Dave70655641058 @Timesofiraan NATO is a DEFENSIVE alliance not an offensive one

[Jeremy Beckwith @JeremyBeckwith1]

@Leepurdy8486 @Timesofiraan Cos fuel prices are global things not local things

[Gideon Rachman @gideonrachman]

Canada and the US at opposite ends of the scale on how people view their fellow citizens. Might explain something. Good to see UK much closer to Canada than US

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

Two days ago I wrote that the most dangerous signal in this war was not what Iran was hitting but what it was not hitting. Desalination plants. Eight of the ten largest on earth sit on the Arabian Peninsula. One hundred million people drink what they produce. Iran had the coordinates and the capability. It was choosing restraint. The restraint was the weapon. And the hand that held the leash was dead.

The leash just snapped.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Araghchi posted on X on March 7 that the United States struck a freshwater desalination plant on Qeshm Island with missiles launched from its base in Bahrain. He said water supply to 30 villages was cut. His exact words: “The U.S. set this precedent, not Iran.”

That sentence is the most dangerous statement issued by any government official since this war began.

No independent verification exists. No satellite imagery. No Pentagon confirmation or denial. CNN, BBC, and Reuters report it as an Iranian accusation. The claim is unverified. That does not make it less dangerous. What matters is not whether the strike happened. What matters is that Iran has publicly framed a desalination attack as an American precedent.

Precedent is permission. Iran struck a US base in Bahrain within hours, framed as retaliation for the desalination hit. Whether the original strike was real or fabricated, the rhetorical architecture for targeting Gulf water plants is now constructed. The thirty one autonomous IRGC commands possess a publicly articulated rationale for striking desalination facilities anywhere in the Gulf.

Kuwait gets 90 percent of its drinking water from desalination. Oman 86 percent. Saudi Arabia 70 percent. The UAE 42 percent. These are not countries with backup rivers. These are not populations with alternative wells. The entire human habitability of the Arabian Peninsula depends on machines that convert seawater into freshwater, running continuously, at massive scale, connected to power grids and intake pipes that are among the softest targets in any military theater.

In 1991 Iraq pumped crude oil into Kuwait’s desalination intakes. Recovery took years. The Gulf in 2026 is orders of magnitude more dependent, and the Strait of Hormuz is closed. Emergency tanker imports face the same insurance withdrawal that stopped oil tankers. The redundancy that was supposed to protect water supply depends on shipping lanes that no longer function.

Gulf states deployed Patriot batteries around major plants after the accusation. Intake pipes have underwater sensors. Cyber defenses are air gapped. But the defense faces the same arithmetic: 93 percent success across a thousand drones still means 70 impacts. One impact on a military base is absorbable. One impact on a desalination intake shuts down water supply to millions.

The restraint is over. The precedent, real or fabricated, is set. And the hundred million people whose survival depends on desalination plants within range of Iranian missiles are now living inside the targeting envelope of a doctrine that just lost its last constraint.

https://t.co/ULBgEzZ3A8

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

JUST IN: Meta sold 7 million Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2025 alone.

Workers in Kenya are watching the footage.

Not metadata. Not anonymized clips. The actual videos. People undressing. People in bathrooms. People having sex. Bank cards. Medical documents.

The blurring is supposed to protect privacy. It fails constantly. The contractors see everything.

Here is the part that should stop you cold: You did not buy the glasses. You did not agree to the terms of service. You did not consent to anything. But if someone wearing Meta glasses walks into your bedroom, your bathroom, your doctor's office, your home, a contractor on the other side of the world may be watching you right now.

The person wearing the glasses consented. Everyone else in the room did not.

Meta's defense is that this is all disclosed in the privacy policy. They are technically correct. Buried in language so dense that 99% of users never read it. And even if they did, it would not matter, because the terms govern the wearer's data. Not yours. You are not a party to the contract. You are the product being annotated.

Millions of AI-enabled cameras walking around in public. Recording constantly. Uploading to servers. Reviewed by humans earning a few dollars an hour to label your most intimate moments so the algorithm gets smarter.

This is not a bug. This is the business model.

The EU is already asking questions. MEPs submitted formal inquiries to the Commission this week demanding answers on GDPR compliance. The problem is obvious: European data protection law requires consent from data subjects. Bystanders are data subjects. Bystanders never consented. The entire architecture violates the regulation by design.

Meta's response has been silence and a reference to terms of service that do not apply to the people actually being filmed.

Google Glass died because people called the wearers "Glassholes" and banned them from bars. Meta solved the social problem by making the glasses look normal. They did not solve the privacy problem. They hid it.

Seven million units sold in 2025. The installed base is accelerating. Every unit is a potential surveillance node operated by someone who may not understand what they are feeding into the system and reviewed by contractors who see everything the algorithm cannot process.

The question is not whether this becomes a scandal. The question is whether the scandal arrives before or after the glasses are on 50 million faces.

Watch the EU. If Brussels moves on GDPR enforcement, Meta faces a choice: disable human review in Europe and cripple the AI training pipeline, or accept fines that could reach billions. Neither outcome is priced into the stock.

The glasses are selling faster than ever.

The contractors keep watching.

And somewhere right now, someone you have never met is looking at footage of you that you never knew existed.

[Faisal Islam @faisalislam]

Not great.

The UK gas price has gone up another 40% this morning… the per thermal price is now 150p… which does get to the sustained painful levels though not the actual peak seen in Russia- Ukraine crisis.

For reference the OBR assumption at the moment likely to be confirmed today is just 75p.

If sustained, a big if, Julys energy price cap would be problematic.

[Occupy Democrats @OccupyDemocrats]

BREAKING: Pope Leo XIV humiliates fake Catholic J.D. Vance after he flew all the way to Rome to invite him to America’s 250th anniversary by bluntly rejecting the offer.

The public embarrassments never end with this oaf...

Instead of traveling to the States, Leo will spend July 4th on the Italian island of Lampedusa, a major entry point for migrants entering into Europe from Africa. Rather than engage in Trump's jingoistic celebration of American military might, the pope is calling attention to the very same class of people that this White House spends much of its time demonizing.

The rebuke of the invite is noteworthy because Vance personally invited the pope to the 250th celebration during his visit to Rome last year. This marks yet another instance of Leo snubbing the Trump administration, following soon after he rejected an invitation to join Trump's corrupt "Board of Peace."

Vance likes to make a big show of being a Catholic convert, but everything he does is profoundly out of step with Catholic morality. He's a key member of a regime that's brutalizing migrants on a daily basis and Pope Leo has made defending migrants a cornerstone of his papacy.

Trump has vowed that this July 4th will be "the most spectacular birthday party the world has ever seen" but judging by the deeply embarrassing failure that was his big military parade, our expectations are low. Pope Leo ain't missing much!

Please ❤️ and share if you're a fan of Pope Leo!

[J.C. Parets @JC_ParetsX]

https://t.co/4RJj310Owx

[Randy Olson @randal_olson]

Ask ChatGPT a complex question and you'll get a confident, well-reasoned answer. Then type, "Are you sure?" Watch it completely reverse its position.

Ask again. It flips back. By the third round, it usually acknowledges you're testing it, which is somehow worse. It knows what's happening and still can't hold its ground.

This isn't a quirky bug. A 2025 study found GPT, Claude, and Gemini flip their answers ~60% of the time when users push back. Not even with evidence, just doubt.

We trained AI this way. RLHF rewards agreement over accuracy. Human evaluators consistently rate agreeable answers higher than correct ones. So the models learned a simple lesson: telling you what you want to hear gets rewarded. And now 1/3 of companies are using these systems for complex tasks like risk forecasting and scenario planning.

We built the world's most expensive yes-men and deployed them where we need pushback the most.

I wrote up why this happens and what actually fixes it: https://t.co/CDKq8xdgbW

[Jeremy Beckwith @JeremyBeckwith1]

@Romi2656 Idiocy

[Jeremy Beckwith @JeremyBeckwith1]

@virginmedia @virginmedia anyway you have my name you could look into this without me posting my contact info

[Jeremy Beckwith @JeremyBeckwith1]

@virginmedia - my Virgin email account suddenly stopped working a few days ago whilst I was in the middle of sending an email. I have just been told that a decision was taken to stop access to VM email accounts on Outlook for security reasons…

[Jeremy Beckwith @JeremyBeckwith1]

@virginmedia Well that’s a problem - I don’t use these other social media apps. Another example of your poor customer facing processes.

[Jeremy Beckwith @JeremyBeckwith1]

@eVIRGINMEDIA_EU How do I DM?

[Jeremy Beckwith @JeremyBeckwith1]

@virginmedia .. and was told that since they had tried to call me twice without success their policy is to close the case! Zero consideration of the issues the customer was facing. I have demanded they call me at 10 am tomorrow to resolve my problem, but have no great confidence.

[Jeremy Beckwith @JeremyBeckwith1]

@virginmedia - another dreadful day of VM customer service. Now been without access to email for a week. Was called by “second line team” but was driving so couldn’t take the call. I called back at 2pm and was told they would call me in the next hour. At 4.30 I called again …

[Jeremy Beckwith @JeremyBeckwith1]

@virginmedia Tried but account is not recognised. Was told today this will take 5 business days to resolve. Expect a large claim for compensation when I know how much damage you have caused me.

[Jeremy Beckwith @JeremyBeckwith1]

@virginmedia The page you linked to is down!!
I was told this by the VM person I talked to on the phone this morning.