Fred Scantling

Retired USAF, Retired Critical Care RN, Lovin' life.

[Fred Scantling @FredScantling]

@buitengebieden Video is legit. Not AI. It's been around for a few years. Beautiful scene though. Nothing stronger than a mother's love.

[Fred Scantling @FredScantling]

@wanabeaboss @HowThingsWork_ We did that cruise on Viking a few years ago. Somehow they got those bags up to the third deck. The NFL needs to recruit some of these guys.

[Fred Scantling @FredScantling]

@woodhaus2 Thanks Franz. Here’s my baby. ‘23 MSLR. HW4 w/ paid for FSD. Love this car!!

[Fred Scantling @FredScantling]

@Supersonic_Red Yep.

[Fred Scantling @FredScantling]

@nytimes "...according to an examination by the New York Times." This used to mean something. Now it's a punchline.

[Fred Scantling @FredScantling]

@FactsAboutTexas No love for Canyon??

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Mark Cuban just described the largest wealth transfer of the AI era.

Almost nobody understood what he said.

Cuban: “There are 33 million companies in this country. Aren’t going to have AI budgets. Aren’t going to have AI experts.”

Not tech startups.

The shoe store. The regional trucking outfit. The accounting firm with 12 employees.

The businesses that actually run the physical economy.

They know AI is coming. They have no idea what to do with it.

Cuban: “You’ve got the head of Microsoft saying software is dead because everything’s going to be customized to your unique utilization.”

Software is dead.

The SaaS era ran on one rule. Build a generic product. Force millions of companies to bend their workflows around it. Charge rent forever.

AI ends the contract.

The business stops bending to the software. The intelligence bends to the business.

But customized by whom.

The third-generation manufacturer cannot tell Claude from Gemini. The county hospital is staring at a reactor asking where the light switch is.

Cuban: “Who’s going to do it for them?”

That question is worth more than the frontier models themselves.

Hundreds of billions are being burned to build the foundation. The smartest engineers alive are locked in a bloodbath over who owns the base layer.

Let them fight.

Let them burn the capital. Let them drive the cost of raw intelligence toward zero.

Because the wealth does not collect where the brain is built.

It collects where the brain meets the business.

Every ambitious kid in college right now thinks survival means a seat at OpenAI or Anthropic.

Cuban is staring at the other 99 percent of the economy.

Learn the models. Then learn the messy, unglamorous reality of how a 50-person company actually operates.

Walk through the door. Understand their problems. Wire the intelligence directly into their revenue.

That is not a job title. That is an entire economic class being born.

You do not need to build the brain. You need to build the nervous system.

The biggest winners of the electricity era were not the engineers who built the generators. They were the ones who walked into dark factories and showed the owners where to plug in.

33 million companies are standing in the dark right now.

Silicon Valley is racing to build the god. The fortunes will belong to whoever teaches him a trade.

[Fred Scantling @FredScantling]

None of the objectives have been achieved yet. Regime still in power, still in possession of nuke material, nuke intentions unchanged, still firing missiles, still threatening shipping effectively closing the strait, rabid hatred of U.S. and Israel, and on and on. Someone forgot to tell the president that the war is over when Iran says it is. Not him. The enemy always gets a vote.

[Fred Scantling @FredScantling]

@sciencegirl Good lord..where do I start!

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

The guy who intervened with his foot to prevent the elderly woman from hitting her head on the ground after she lost her balance and fell in South Korea, was declared a hero worldwide.

[Fred Scantling @FredScantling]

I hope this sentiment really takes hold throughout the Middle East.

[Mossad Commentary @MOSSADil]

🚨 LEBANESE TV HOST TO HEZBOLLAH: “LEAVE”

Lebanese TV host Walid Abboud delivered a blistering message to Hezbollah:
“Leave us. Take your weapons, your drones, your rockets, your flags, your Supreme Leader — your Iran — and go.”
This isn’t coming from Israel.
This is coming from inside Lebanon.

[Fred Scantling @FredScantling]

@ianmiles Exactly the right person, in the right place, at the exact right moment in history. What a great time to be alive and watch it all unfold.

[Fred Scantling @FredScantling]

@stephenasmith That’s the back 9 on Sunday at the Masters. Any one of about 6 guys could have won this one but Rory came out on top. A great tournament this year IMO.

[Fred Scantling @FredScantling]

@iowahawkblog Good one Dave!!

[Fred Scantling @FredScantling]

@Osint613 Strongly worded memo going out now.

[Fred Scantling @FredScantling]

@Sarahhuniverse Yep, some real giants there and they sure do bring back some memories. I really love these.

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Food for thought.

Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride

For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface.

The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities.

Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed.

In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines.

In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive.

A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent.

By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right.

In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

[Fred Scantling @FredScantling]

@AlexFinn Prompt engineering would be helpful too.

[Fred Scantling @FredScantling]

@HowThingsWork_ No obstructions, paved surface, and a simple use case: Connect wire a to wire b. This is where a robot can and should be used. This frees up the human lineman to focus on more complex tasks. The lineman becomes more productive and valuable, not less

[Fred Scantling @FredScantling]

@joshuaarey @elonmusk Looks great!