SlowPoke

in the land of hypocrites, spectacle rules the roost.

[SlowPoke @dilbertisms]

@GiorgiaMeloni Italians came running to America and Argentina in droves , and now they are full of them.

[SlowPoke @dilbertisms]

@jimstewartson Why do blind people need glasses?

[SlowPoke @dilbertisms]

@YourAnonNews 20+ officers.. everyone needs their madeup overtime pay I guess

[XUnfiltered @XUnfiltere69061]

It's shame that An Asian American is explaining how racism against Indians has become so normalized but most Indians hardly even notice or even recognize it.

He explains that, racist comments on non Indian immigrant minorities is common but it's not normalized and blatant as it is in the case of Indians.

You would see an anonymous, burner account making fun of non Indian immigrants but when there are racist comments against Indians - they don't only come from fake burner accounts, they also come from blue check marked verified accounts...

Which tells you, that people are not afraid of making fun of Indians. They don't feel or need to hide behind fake or burner account. They feel okay to disrespect Indians on their face.

What could be the reasons? Why they don't feel afraid when they do comments against Indians?

[SlowPoke @dilbertisms]

@TailThatWagsDog Thank you for giving the big picture to be aware of looming risks

[SlowPoke @dilbertisms]

@Polymarket Let's just buy $18b SpaceX (xAI) at 2 trillion valuation with tax payer money 🤑. Make Musk A Trillionaire.

[SlowPoke @dilbertisms]

@lord_fed Look at North America now. At one time, Europeans kept barging in uninvited to this continent. They only developed with those human resources

[Real Insight @real_insight_1]

Chinese 🇨🇳 propaganda in action:

This is what coordinated influence ops look like. Suddenly 100s of accounts spamming the same CCP video.

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

This might be the smartest $100 million Reliance ever spent.

Let me explain everything about the ProPublica investigation that dropped today.

Let's start with the problem Reliance had.

Through most of last year, the Trump administration was at war with the Ambani energy empire. Tariffs on India kept climbing.

The stated reason was Russian oil.

Reliance runs the biggest refining complex in the world at Jamnagar, and it was buying massive amounts of discounted Russian crude. Washington made Reliance the face of that fight.

So the Ambanis had a very expensive problem. American policy was squeezing their core business.

Now watch what happened next.

In late November, Donald Trump Jr. flew to Jamnagar. Anant Ambani personally took him around Vantara, the family's private zoo.

At night the two of them danced garba together, smiling for the cameras. A nice friendly visit between two famous families. Nothing unusual on the surface.

Four months later, a tiny Texas company called America First Refining announced it had received at least $100 million from Reliance.

America First Refining wants to build the first major new oil refinery in America in 50 years. Sounds ambitious. But the company had been trying and failing to raise money for years. It kept missing deadlines. It kept changing its name. Its founder had been sued for fraud multiple times and had a history of bankruptcy.

Serious energy investors had looked at this project and walked away.

And Reliance, one of the most sophisticated energy companies on the planet, a company that knows refining better than almost anyone alive, suddenly wired this struggling startup nine figures.

What had happened was that Donald Trump Jr. had secretly bought a stake in America First Refining.

Nobody knew. The size of his stake and what he paid for it are still unknown. But the company's top executives say they talk to him regularly. He personally joined their pitch meeting with Saudi investors in South Florida.

And after the Reliance money was announced, his own lawyer went on social media and took credit for helping make the deal happen.

So the president's son owned a piece of the company. Then the company that was getting crushed by the president's tariffs put $100 million into it.

Once this was done, the favours started flowing almost immediately.

ProPublica got internal emails from the Texas environmental agency handling the startup's permit.

One official wrote, need to get this one logged and processed asap. Another wrote, you can guess if you check out the name. The permit was approved the next day. The agency says it was just because the paperwork was good. You can decide how convincing that is.

Then came the big wins.

In February, India finally got its trade deal with the United States after months of pain. Reliance got a license to buy Venezuelan oil. And after the Iran war, India got an early waiver to keep buying Russian crude, the exact thing the tariff fight was supposedly about.

There is more history here too.

Reliance paid the Trump Organization a $10 million development fee back in 2024 for a project that has never been announced. Ivanka Trump was a guest at Anant's wedding. Mukesh Ambani sat at Trump's second inauguration.

Forbes estimated in December that Trump Jr.'s net worth jumped from roughly $50 million to $300 million since the election. That estimate only counts investments that are publicly known. The America First Refining stake was not publicly known until today. Which raises the obvious question of how many more deals like this exist that we have not found yet.

Trump Jr.'s spokesperson says he is just a passive minority investor with no operational role. Maybe.

But passive investors do not usually join Saudi pitch meetings or have lawyers claiming credit for nine figure deals.

For India, Reliance is not some side player. It is the largest company in the country. Its decisions shape our energy security, our trade position, and our stock market.

It is a big travesty if our biggest corporate house has to route $100 million through the American president's son to get fair treatment on trade.

Every Indian exporter who suffered through those tariffs paid the real price of the tariffs, while this deal sat hidden.

For Reliance shareholders, was this $100 million an investment decision or an insurance payment?

Because the project it funded looks unbuildable, but the policy wins that followed look priceless.

A $100 million cheque to a broken refinery. Billions in tariff relief flowing back. Some trades only make sense once you see who is on the other side of them.

[Collin Koh 🇸🇬🇺🇦 @CollinSLKoh]

“Investigations into the problematic content in these posts had revealed that it likely originated from a China-based platform, and was subsequently shared by other platforms and websites.” https://t.co/gcrqOLPZMr

[Roger @rdd147]

As a large commercial real estate holder I want to 🚩this as near certainty fraud. I have never bought a $2 million property that I successfully rented out for $2.4 million a year.

This is the type of fraud you announce, when you just don’t give a fck because its pensions set to lose everything and government to bail them out.

$15 Billion / Year - Anthropic
$11 Billion / Year - $GOOG

$26 Billion / Year Deals

xAI raised $35 Billion for Operations and Capex

Hardware cited at 60% capital raise

$21 Billion Hardware Bought and Rented at $26 Billion a year to Google and Anthrophic.

[Ajeet Bharti @ajeetbharti]

The race that wiped out millions out of hatred because Churchill believed Indians bred like rabbits and didn’t need grain in famine. 3 million died. The race that thought it had the burden to destroy indigenous cultures across the globe in the garb of ‘civilising’ them.

But yes! Least racist! Race or religious superiority was never the motivation. Just pure business, I believe.

[Kirsten Grind @KirstenGrind]

NEW: Ahead of the SpaceX IPO, we tracked hundreds of promises that Musk has made over the years (FSD, Mars etc). His success rate is…not good. And it’s getting worse. Some actual data in our months long analysis: https://t.co/u3McNwUE80 

[Ehrmantraut Capital @EhrmantrautCap_]

Goldman Sachs on memory:

- DRAM to remain in undersupply until atleast 2028 (undersupply of 5.0%, 5.9% and 3.9% in the years 2026, 2027 and 2028 respectively).

- DRAM global demand revised upwards, now expected to grow by 28%, 20% and 19% y/y in 2026, 2027 and 2028 respectively.

- NAND to also remain in undersupply until atleast 2028 (undersupply of 4.4%, 4.6% and 3.0% in 2026, 2027 and 2028 respectively).

- NAND global demand revised upwards, now expected to grow by 20%, 23% and 19% y/y in 2026, 2027 and 2028 respectively.

- HBM to remain in undersupply until atleast 2028 (undersupply of 5.4%, 6.0% and 4.3% in 2026, 2027 and 2028 respectively).

- HBM TAM expected to be $56 billion, $116 billion and $168 billion in 2026, 2027 and 2028 respectively.

Slowly, the overall consensus is shifting towards memory remaining in shortage until atleast 2028, while it was 2027 previously.

$MU $SNDK $DRAM $EWY

[Dan Go @CoachDanGo]

This is a picture of what muscle looks like at 25 vs. 55

Left is healthy dense muscle.
Right is unhealthy muscle with fat marbled like a ribeye.

It's called myosteatosis, and for many people, it is already happening.

One study tracked adults aged 74 and older and found that muscle fat increased by 48.5% in men and 29% in women.

As you get older, fat starts to infiltrate the muscle itself.

This can lead to weaker muscles that look the same on the outside, worse insulin sensitivity, a higher risk of falls and fractures, and a faster decline in your 60s, 70s, and 80s.

Your home scale won't catch this. By the time someone feels it, they have already lost years of function.

The good news is that it is reversible. The top four things that move the needle are:

1. The foundation is getting your body metabolically healthy
2. Lifting heavy three times per week so the muscle stays dense.
3. Eating 0.8 to 1 g of protein per pound of body weight
Walking daily
4. Fixing your sleep patterns

You can't out supplement this. The only things that reverse it are lifting heavy things and not being too fat.

[Market Sentiment @mkt_sentiment]

At age 25, you give your hedge fund manager $100K to manage, and he produces an annual return of 8%.

Assuming a 1.5% management and 20% performance fee, by the time you retire at 65, you will have $764K

But the manager will have $1.24M (at zero initial investment!)

[SlowPoke @dilbertisms]

@lithos_graphein .....in Korea

[Tom Lee Tracker (Not actually Tom) @TomLeeTracker]

TOM LEE SAYS $2 TRILLION OF SPACEX STOCK UNLOCKS 90 DAYS AFTER THE IPO

- Cites Paul Tudor Jones using the same setup to call the 1999 top
- SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic IPOs could total $4 trillion combined
- That's 5 to 7% of the entire S&P 500 in new supply hitting the market

[SlowPoke @dilbertisms]

@MattooShashank Once India is dependent on US for its energy needs , it is a lot easier to control it as you want.

[SlowPoke @dilbertisms]

https://t.co/ILk53wehUl
Good post on Meta culture, Chinese co ethnic hiring in bay area and a harvard study confirming the coethnic hiring trend.

[Jeremy Bernier @jeremybernier]

Meta was easily the most toxic company I've worked for. There's a reason the Chinese call it "Squid Game". Others refer to it as "Hunger Games" or "Lord of the Flies". I think they're all accurate.

The company culture is basically every man/woman for themselves. The performance review process (PSC) not only doesn't incentivize helping others, if anything it actually discourages it since everyone is stack ranked against each other. Imagine working on a team where every 6 months, one of you is going to get axed. Of course it's going to become toxic.

"Bottoms up" culture is a complete farce - it's just a way for leadership to offload accountability. The Tech Leads (TLs) have all the power - owning the relationships and tribal knowledge to gatekeep projects to their buddies. Managers are "people managers" with limited technical understanding, who basically aggregate TL feedback and create performance review packets to calibrate with other managers and IC7+. The takeaway is that your destiny is in the hands of the TLs, and TLs unlike managers have no responsibility for your career. There are no repercussions for unethical behavior. I've seen managers and TLs throw others under the bus and get away with it.

The only mission bonding the company together is individual self-preservation. Save your own ass to survive for another stock vesting, and throw someone else under the bus if you need to. That's why layoffs rarely impact directors/VPs or tenured IC7+ despite the fact that they're paid by far the most. Even this recent mass layoff that was supposed to "flatten" managers layers barely affected directors/VPs/IC7+, and fell predominantly on M1s - the lowest rung of the management chain.

The culture is extremely performative and focused on box ticking and optics. Everything is about PSC (the performance review system) and perception. This means tons of meetings, useless AI slop posts, and top-down initiatives that don't benefit anyone but maybe help tick off the impact box of some go-getter at the top. Impact is not enough - it has to have sufficient complexity. So complexity is added for complexity's sake.

The org I was in (Facebook ads) is 90% Chinese, and the entire leadership chain up to the VP level is Chinese. Mandarin is the primary language at the office, except in official meetings with non-speakers. Chinese work culture is very different from American work culture, with 996 (9am-9pm, 6 days/week), top-down nature, emphasis on saving face (eg. don't question your superiors), and toxicity being quite common. Naturally when an org is completely dominated by a single ethnicity that's notorious for not integrating, elements from their work culture seep in. Of the layoffs I witnessed in this org, 3/4 were not Chinese (just to be clear, most Chinese are very kind so don't take this as an attack. But it is a reality that I think most people outside this company are completely unaware of, and I question if leadership is even aware despite the fact that we're talking about the company HQ)

I had the most toxic manager of my life here. I watched him deliberately set up a new hire to fail, driving them to needing to see a psychiatrist for anxiety + depression, and getting them fired. Then he suddenly disappeared for 8 months, before leaving the company.

I could go on and on, but this is already pretty long and I think you get the point.

Yes there are a lot of great, kind people here. I managed to transfer out of my first team into a new team with a great manager where everyone was very smart, supportive, and hardworking.

But the company has its Squid Game reputation for a reason. Company culture comes from the top. It seems leadership is either too removed to notice, or maybe don't really care anymore because I guess they already made their billions and us plebs are expendable these days.