George M 🇪🇺

[George M 🇪🇺 @EXDE601E]

My own analysis of mortality in Romania confirms the results for my country:
https://t.co/QJhFYxOc9U
"Across the period Jun-Oct 2020, excess mortality was 2.6 to 3.3 times larger than the reported COVID deaths"

[Laurie Garrett @Laurie_Garrett]

In this chart the new @IHME estimates generate a ratio of probable real #COVID19 death rates vs actually reported deaths in countries . In some countries that ration is 10:1! https://t.co/tEnaauT7dP

[Ken Klippenstein @kenklippenstein]

damn lol
https://t.co/DpZH76FmpV

[Rosemary Kelanic @RKelanic]

Trump told NATO leaders in Ankara that the U.S. bombed Kharg Island last night and threatened yet again to take it.

Attacking Kharg is a colossal mistake, because it could provoke Iran to retaliate against oil infrastructure through the Gulf.

Let’s put this plainly.

Before the war, Iran exported roughly 1.7 million barrels per day.

Let’s say we knock out that capacity to export by wrecking Kharg.

Big whoop. Iran has sacrificed exports before.

Now let’s say Iran retaliates against Gulf oil facilities that before the war produced roughly 18 million barrels per day.

That’s a huge ceiling for damage that Iran can cause to the world economy.

Simply put, Iran has escalation dominance in targeting Persian Gulf oil infrastructure. So do we really want to go down this path? It makes no strategic sense.

Even if Iran destroys just a fraction of regional infrastructure, it could take facilities offline for additional months at a time when the global oil inventory cushion is at historic lows.

This is madness and completely counterproductive to US interests.

https://t.co/lharWtXGjT #FoxNews

[Clash Report @clashreport]

Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever on Iran:

NATO, Article 5, says: if you are attacked, then we will all defend each other together.

The article does not say that if you yourself decide unilaterally to attack another country, all the other partners have to participate in that.

That is not the spirit of NATO. If that is expected, then that is actually not justified.

[Ed Elson @edels0n]

Meta has spent $316 billion on AI infrastructure since 2022 — more than the Metaverse, the Manhattan Project, NASA's annual budget, and Netflix's content budget, combined.

Now, Meta is building a cloud business to sell that compute off. Zuckerberg said they'd only do that if they felt they'd "overbuilt."

Which means Meta has either 1) too much compute or 2) not enough demand for its AI. Or, worse, both.

[Eric Nuttall @ericnuttall]

The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve is now ~19MM barrels away from estimated minimum operating levels. There very soon will no longer be a safety buffer to protect the world from further losses out of the Strait.

[Josh Miller-Lewis @jmillerlewis]

Worth watching the full clip. This is happening all over the country. People's elected representatives have abandoned them and literally signed their allegiance over to corporations.

[Zachary Cohen @ZcohenCNN]

Exclusive: US military commanders bypassed warnings that intel on potential targets in Iran was severely out of date & approved some strikes — including one that hit a school, killing nearly 200 hundred children & adults -- based on years-old info that was not updated before war started, per multiple sources.

[Peter Beinart @PeterBeinart]

It's not just Bibi. It's Israel's behavior in Gaza, the West Bank and beyond. And that behavior isn't likely to change much if Bibi loses office. That's why more and more American Jews understand that the only way to change Israeli policy--as opposed to merely personnel--is to end unconditional US military and diplomatic support

[dnap @dnapway]

David Friedberg says Anthropic asked big pharma for their data and nearly everyone said no

"There's been an effort by Anthropic to sign up life sciences companies to contribute to a new life sciences focused model. They're approaching these large companies with large proprietary data sets and saying, if you share your data, we will give you early access, some sort of proprietary value. Sign this NDA and you can participate with us."

"I think nearly everyone I've spoken with has woken up to the fact that they are trying to commoditize everyone's business. If all of the tens of billions of dollars you have invested in experiments and product development, and you've generated all of this proprietary data along the way, that data is a true asset of your organization. It's an asset that you've spent billions of dollars developing."

"And by handing it over to a model company to then combine with other people's data, you are commoditizing the one core differentiation that you have. And so everyone is largely saying no."

"I think what everyone's realizing is they're better off developing their own weights and their own models using either an open source basis or there might be some intermediary business model that evolves."

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Blackstone sold $3.5 billion in data center stakes last week and immediately dumped the stock it received at a discount. Oracle warned in its annual SEC filing that its AI data center customers "may be highly leveraged" and pose "risks of non-payment and non-performance." Oracle stock fell over 40% in the past month.

My Take
Blackstone was capping investor withdrawals a few months ago while it deployed billions into AI data centers. Now it sold $3.5 billion of those assets and unloaded the stock at a discount on the way out. You don't sell an asset below market and then sell the shares you got for it at another discount unless you want the cash more than you want the exposure.

Oracle stood at the White House with Altman and promised Stargate would cure cancer. Now its own filing warns that the customers who need all this infrastructure might not be able to pay for it. Oracle cut 30,000 jobs to fund the buildout and plans to borrow $40 billion more next year. The company that helped announce a $500 billion AI infrastructure project just told the SEC it might not get paid. When a company's press releases promise a golden age and its SEC filings warn about non-payment, read the filing.

Hedgie🤗

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

⚠️The Egyptian Relief Committee in Gaza had been organizing public screenings of World Cup matches for displaced families across the Strip. About an hour before today’s Egypt-Argentina match, Israel killed the committee’s public relations director in a strike on his vehicle. Two others, including a child, were also killed.

[Muhammad Shehada @muhammadshehad2]

Brilliant take from @PeterBeinart on how pro-Israelis, who kept calling anyone that said Israel was withholding food in Gaza ‘antisemitic,’ immediately shifted their talking point when Israel officially & publicly withheld food to “of course Israel has to withhold food! What are you, crazy? You think they should be feeding their enemies?”

"[Their] standard is what Israel does is right and it should never be subject to any international or American pressure & that the terms in which you have to defend that change. That’s what I mean by a position of worship rather than a position of support, which I think is kind of de facto idolatry.”

This clip is from a lecture I attended with Peter 2 weeks ago in Vienna 🧵

[Gryffix 🇳🇱 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 🇵🇸 @Gryffix]

American liberals embracing this blatant corruption is exactly why their country is in the state it is in. If you're not principally opposed to corruption, if you cheer and make light of it whenever it favours you, you are furthering the rot at the heart of your society.

[Seth Harp @sethharpesq]

Spending trillions to build out AI data centers proves that the American ruling class had the resources and ability to convert the grid to renewables and maybe save the planet but instead deliberately chose to cook us all and die for no reason but to produce demonic digital slop.

[Political Polls @PpollingNumbers]

News - The Hill accidentally publishes article titled "DO NOT USE: A lookback at Mitch McConnell's time in the Senate" amid growing rumors about McConnell's health.

[Wally Rashid @wallyrashid]

Activists built a water station providing clean drinking water to Palestinians.

He posts about it's launch on X.

One hour later Israel bombs it, killing the workers.

[Soda @fredsoda]

Mearsheimer predicted this btw

all america can do is engage in zero-sum games and sabotage the growth of all other nations and itself

[Kenneth Roth @KenRoth]

"As Iran and the U.S. talk, Israel chooses eternal war. Sidelined from discussions over the region’s future, Netanyahu is telling Israelis they’ll have to go it alone — and they all nod in agreement." https://t.co/krSRtCCJbE

[Brian McDonald @BrianMcDonaldIE]

Imagine the Anglo-American media reaction if the Kremlin had directly called FIFA during Russia 2018 asking it to review a card for a Russian player.

We’d still be getting Netflix documentaries about it.

[Ashwin Gopinath @ashwingop]

What Anthropic is doing might look cool but it’s hiding a painful truth.

Pivoting from selling potentially high margin products, like enterprise AI and coding tools, to discovering drugs “themselves” tells you everything you need to know about a collapsing narrative. You are accepting that you need an unfalsifiable story of "curing cancer" or "solving longevity" to justify your existence.

For those arguing "but what about Google DeepMind?", Google has the luxury of treating blue-sky research as a passion project because it is heavily subsidized by a cash-printing monopoly. Venture-backed, unprofitable, startups (Anthropic and OpenAI are still that) are doing this out of pure desperation.

The core delusion here is treating biology or any deeply experimental science for that matter like an unoptimized software stack. Biology is not a compute limited, at least not right now, it’s fundamentally constrained by experimental challenges, a massive biological data desert and regulatory issues. An LLM agent won’t solve the physical wet-lab bottleneck. You can’t outrun biological reality.