Austimized

Macro-, geo-, realpolitik independent. Harvesting social media for trades. Putting money where my mouth is. Signal＞noise = $. @og_velocirapper is my crypto alt.

[Austimized @austimized]

In the beginning, there was gold-backed currency. And the Fed looked at it and it was bad, for Triffin’s Dilemma overwhelmingly incentivized profligate spending and Gresham’s Law drained fast the US’ rapidly-dwindling gold reserves.

But Lo! The Fed was mighty and cunning…

[Austimized @austimized]

I had someone call me far-right not for saying CO2 wasn’t causing climate change, but that the hyper-fixation on CO2 to the exclusion of any other cause of warming (say, methane!) seemed ill-advised…

[Austimized @austimized]

I noticed that…

[The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole]

The term far right has become so broadly applied that it includes normal people now.

[Austimized @austimized]

To say pure free market capitalism is the answer (see slavery, pay toilets, and toll roads) is incorrect. There is no “answer”.

Instead, there are incentives and trade offs. More capitalism than the wealth-pump crony-capitalistic oligarchy we have is better than more socialism.

[Daniel Lacalle @dlacalle_IA]

Socialism doesn’t create wealth.
It confiscates it, the political leaders steal it, and it destroys the incentives that generated prosperity in the first place.

Once growth dies and dissent rises, socialism falls back on repression and censorship to stay in power.

[Austimized @austimized]

Hm… almost like the ultra rich have the capability to go where their money is treated best.

[Times Politics @timespolitics]

Scottish tax hike for high earners backfires with loss of £22m https://t.co/2O0EfjtwPB

[Austimized @austimized]

Tell me 82% of women and 63% of men don’t understand EV without telling me they don’t understand EV.

[YouGov @YouGov]

If you had a choice between instantly receiving £50,000 or a 50% chance to win £1m, which would you pick?

£50,000: 73%
50/50 chance of winning £1m: 21%

[Austimized @austimized]

Scratch the $EQT - weekly signal failed at the last minute.

[Austimized @austimized]

Sold 2.5% of portfolio in $ROK (-4%), 1% in $LSTR (-5%), 5% in $BTC (+7%)
Bought 5% in $VRSN
Bought 1% in $NORW $EQT $AR $SLB $SOYB $CLF $STLD $DUK $MUD $PSQ $SOXS

Weekend War i$VRSN anymore and seems to be escalating. A few shorts + long steel + energy + ag.

[Austimized @austimized]

@TradingThomas3

[Austimized @austimized]

Sold bitcoin:native yesterday, forgot to post it. Still looking to buy crypto, but not getting weekly buy signal yet.

Getting 2 sell signals, 22 long signals. Now it's sorting through those figuring out which of those are the best buys.

[Austimized @austimized]

Suddenly seeing social media light up with “Americans turn against Iran War.”

Who was for it in the first place to turn against it now?

[Austimized @austimized]

Someone told me this week that people almost choose what is most familiar over what is most optimal.

AI is accelerating us out of the familiar stasis of the last half-a-century and, ironically, it’s the young people fighting most to preserve the stasis they don’t get a piece of.

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️Civilization may be moving through the same transition an individual mind moves through during genuine understanding.

At first the world appears fragmented.

Then hidden relationships become visible.

Eventually dozens of separate phenomena become expressions of one underlying order.

That is what understanding actually is.

Perhaps history itself is undergoing the same process.

And if that is happening, then AI is not the destination.

AI is one of the first instruments capable of accelerating humanity’s participation in that unfolding.

The most radical possibility is not that AI becomes intelligent.

The most radical possibility is that humanity has begun building instruments capable of aligning more faithfully with the intelligible structure from which reality itself unfolds.

[Austimized @austimized]

@TheMichaelEvery What is GDP for?

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️The deeper failure is that modern civilization has immense capability and almost no unified will.

Rome had a civilizational purpose. Its ruling class gained legitimacy by conquering, building, administering, and leaving physical proof that Rome existed.

Roads, aqueducts, temples, baths, arenas, ports, and walls converted political power into durable form. Monumental construction was propaganda, public utility, religious expression, elite competition, and state capacity fused into one act.

Modern institutions split those functions apart.

One office funds. Another regulates. Another reviews. Another litigates. Another studies environmental effects. Another protects neighborhood interests. Another audits procurement. Every actor can delay the project. Almost nobody possesses the authority or incentive to complete it.

That produces a civilization with more knowledge, better machines, richer materials, and weaker agency.

Bureaucracy grows when shared purpose collapses. When society cannot agree on what should be built, procedure becomes the substitute for judgment. Rules multiply because nobody trusts anyone to exercise discretion. Liability replaces ambition. Avoiding blame becomes more rewarding than producing greatness.

The result is a veto civilization.

Thousands of intelligent people each make locally defensible decisions, and the aggregate outcome is decay. Nobody chooses the ugliness directly. The ugliness emerges from a system where preventing every possible harm outranks accomplishing anything consequential.

Rome also operated through conquest, slavery, coercion, extreme taxation, and a tolerance for death that modern societies rightly reject. Its output cannot be separated from those costs. But that qualification does not rescue the present system. Modernity possesses enough technology and capital to build magnificently without reproducing Roman brutality. The missing resource is coherent authority directed by a compelling vision.

The deepest truth is this:

We have inherited godlike tools inside institutions designed to ensure that no one can use them decisively.

Rome had limited means and enormous civilizational confidence.

We have enormous means and no agreed answer to what civilization is for.

That is why they built for eternity while we manage decline according to code.

[Austimized @austimized]

But golf courses provide a vital benefit to the common people who regularly use their services!!1!

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

American golf courses use on the order of thirty times more water than all U.S. data centers combined. Even if AI workloads triple their water draw by 2030, credible projections still put total AI water use under about ten percent of golf’s irrigation footprint.

[Austimized @austimized]

Alternatively, stop buying expensive cars as status symbols and buy cheap cars as utility objects. (Cheap being an extremely relatively term nowadays).

[Scar @Scar_gin]

“I make $150,000 a year and I bought a $52,000 car which I regret buying.

Caller: “I’m 25. I bought a $52,000 car. I still owe $47,000 and pay $836 every month.”

Dave Ramsey: “How much do you have in savings?”

Caller: “$20,000.”

Dave: “Keep $1,000. Throw the other $19,000 at the car today.”

Caller: “That feels scary.”

Dave: “You’re not struggling with math. You’re struggling with emotional whiplash.”

“You’ve already realized the mistake. Your emotions just haven’t caught up yet.”

[Austimized @austimized]

If you don’t like the measurement, maybe change the ruler until you like the results more.

[TT3 @TradingThomas3]

Warsh is changing how PCE inflation is measured to reduce the impact of oil price spikes. That doesn’t exactly sound like someone preparing to hike rates.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

BREAKING: Donald Trump Jr's investment firm has posted a return of 200%, per NYT

[Austimized @austimized]

Or you could just print endless money to throw at it hoping for good results. Works great for producing $1B fighter jets that we spend 20 years making 15 of and $150B fighting vehicles that somehow never make it to deployment...

[Gert Bollen @gertbollen]

Beyond subsidies lies a structural gap Western firms cannot easily close on their own. A typical Western public company requires a 12-15% IRR to approve a major industrial investment, with payback periods of three to seven years. Chinese state-backed competitors operate at a 4% capital cost, with 15-20 year planning horizons and explicit tolerance for losses in pursuit of strategic position. These are not preferences but functions of ownership. Quarterly reporting, dispersed shareholding and activist investor pressure impose short horizons on Western firms; concentrated state ownership, policy-bank financing and political performance metrics impose long ones on Chinese ones. Calls for Western firms to “think long-term” repeatedly fail because the firms making them remain accountable to shareholders who think quarterly.

The hardest response – and the most important – goes against Western corporate instinct: explicitly adopting Chinese-style time horizons while keeping a Western-style operating model. In practice this means 15-20 year strategic plans rather than 3-5 year payback hurdles; acceptance of 8-10% IRR rather than 12-15%; patient family or sovereign-wealth ownership rather than quarterly-reporting public equity; a commitment to remaining in an industry as a core value rather than maximising current returns; and decisions made by people who will be there long enough to see them play out.

https://t.co/Vq6lqlloZT

[Austimized @austimized]

Crony capitalism is destroying the country, but I’ll bet socialism could do it way faster.

The opposite of a bad idea is usually another bad idea.

[Adam Butler @GestaltU]

When a society spends decades describing crony capitalism / socialism for the rich as 'capitalism' -- and casting 'socialism' as the anthithesis of 'capitalism' -- we shouldn't be surprised when people eventually choose socialism over capitalism. Surprised it's taken so long.

[Austimized @austimized]

@crossbordercap @gnoble79 Except it’s all $1000 sticks of DRAM.

[Austimized @austimized]

Sure hope not!

Oh, and price suppression/TACOs have the added “benefit” of stopping more supply from coming online which is like a trampoline for gas price set up at the bottoms of those oil tanks.

[Rory Johnston @Rory_Johnston]

(longer than I planned)

The question imho isn't whether or not Trump *can* TACO on Iran—when push comes to shove I think Trump can still choose to hard-bail and leave everyone else with the mess, what I would have called the "unilateral TACO" a few months ago.

Question is at what level of market stress—crude/pump price, equity market rout, etc.—will force Trump to do so?

I always thought that the now-dead MOU read a lot like the deal I expected Trump to be forced to make at $150+ crude, and it was strange to me that Trump agreed to it at like $80.

But clearly Trump never intended to comply with the key provisions that got Tehran to agree to reopen the Strait, which makes a lot more sense at $80. Hence why the deal—which was fundamentally unstable given competing interpretations of those key provisions—collapsed and we're back to a tightening oil market and a rising price trajectory in an attempt to find the TACO clearing price.

There's also always a possibility that Iran eventually taps out first, but I think so far Tehran seems intent on leveraging the Hormuz crisis while they're got it.

The month-long post-MOU partial reopening kind of helped give the market a temporary supply hit, but most of that was just the transfer of stranded oil-on-water in the Gulf into the broader system. Fresh Gulf loadings, meanwhile, failed to durably rebound and are falling again.

Meanwhile global commercial stock levels have continued to draw, SPRs are lower, and now we have a deepening refined product crisis on top of Hormuz thanks to Russia's Ukraine-assisted refinery fleet implosion.

So oil market is now caught between more durably tighter balances and not wanting to get rugged on the upside in an inevitable replay of prior TACO jawbones/head fakes.

Finally, there's still that pesky presumed surplus on the other side of this crisis, which makes it easier all else equal to tolerate low stock levels (we can just refill them in the glut! right?!). But future barrels won't matter if we *actually* start getting close to local tank bottoms, which would force prices sharply higher to balance as patience is exhausted.

It's a race!

Fascinating market, hard to believe I'll ever see another one like it.