Maxim Beatty (mxmbt2)

Lived in China '06 on, unorthodox geopolitics. | All governments are gangsters. Some just hide it better.

[Autumn 🫡🪖🐸💚🤜🏼🤛🏼 @Southern75_29]

Us GenXers 🤣🤣💯🎯

[StarBoySAR 🇭🇰 🇨🇳 🥭 @StarboySAR]

Brilliant piece from Pearls and Irritations. Finally, someone in Australia is saying out loud what the rest of us have been watching for the past five years

Let's be clear about what AUKUS actually is: the greatest military protection racket in modern history. Washington looked at its own crippled submarine industrial base—17 boats short, yards choking, Congress screaming—and found the perfect mark. A wealthy, eager, insecure middle power with a bipartisan fetish for great-power relevance and a defense minister who treats strategic questions like a classified state secret

The deal? Australia pays half a trillion dollars. In return, it gets used Virginia-class hand-me-downs—Block IV boats with a decade of wear already on the hulls, probably smelling faintly of its previous crew

Even more intriguing, the article confirms for what this overpriced second-hand Australian "sovereign" nuclear submarine fleet is actually for:

Hunting Chinese Jin-class and Type 096 SSBNs. Not to protect Sydney Harbour. Not to secure Australia's trade routes. To find, track, and if ordered, destroy the Chinese nuclear submarines that threaten continental America!

That's the job. That's the whole job. Australia just committed A$368 billion to be the US Navy's underwater security guard!

The comedy of "sovereign capability" is almost too rich. Sovereign? The reactors are American. The combat system is American. The weapons are American. The fuel is American. The intelligence feed is American. The maintenance schedule is American. Permanently tethering Australia to U.S. software, maintenance, and logistics, effectively ending any "sovereign" capability. The only thing Australian is the taxpayer—and the Prime Minister standing in front of a camera calling this independence

Australia is not buying a submarine; it is buying a node in a U.S. sensor network. The acquisition deeply integrates Australia into the U.S. military command structure, making Australia a tool for U.S. strategic objectives in the Indo-Pacific — while a massive amount of Australian wealth is transferred into the U.S. military-industrial complex

And the timing is exquisite. Washington just added another half-trillion to its own defense budget while Australia is told to hit 3.5% of GDP. America gets the money, the boats, the basing rights at HMAS Stirling, and a Pacific ASW auxiliary. Australia gets the bill, the dependency, and the warm fuzzy feeling of being taken seriously by the adults.

The U.S. 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) emphasizes "burden-sharing among allies" and "realist diplomacy." This submarine deal is the perfect execution of that strategy: the U.S. maintains its military overmatch against China by essentially "outsourcing" the financial cost of undersea surveillance to Australia 🤡

Paul Keating called this three years ago. He was mocked, of course. The press club gasped. The security establishment rolled its eyes. But he was right then, and this article proves he's right now. It is worse than he thought. It's not that AUKUS is of little military benefit to Australia. It's that AUKUS is of negative military benefit to Australia—actively diverting resources from actual defense needs toward a capability designed for someone else's homeland

https://t.co/f7lYAMf3JY

[Sovey @SoveyX]

Paper Pepper is a Korean papercraft artist who gave Van Gogh a makeover, fixed his ear, and proved Korean skincare is so good it can regrow body parts.

Not a filter. Not AI. Just paper, patience, and Seoul-level beauty standards.

[Maxim Beatty (mxmbt2) @mxmbt2]

@specsaregood @RaminNasibov Like.. “prophylactic”! Lubbers!

[Maxim Beatty (mxmbt2) @mxmbt2]

@R_o_d_C @Raclure03 And here’s another…

https://t.co/JNrqZVFHKv

[Maxim Beatty (mxmbt2) @mxmbt2]

@R_o_d_C @Raclure03 For some reason I have neuron for Street Fighter 2 connected to the neuron for Rod Campbell🤷‍♂️

[Maxim Beatty (mxmbt2) @mxmbt2]

@MyselfDotStudy @Ken_LoveTW Blowback from the one child policy unfortunately🤦‍♂️. Not sure how they’re going to solve this one..

[Maxim Beatty (mxmbt2) @mxmbt2]

What is going on at QuickBooks? Some support did come but the whole integration team is now uncontactable via email. Ordinary support is 100% incapable. The apps were fine before your new inexperienced team broke them all. Why? Case: OOP-0034754 @Intuit @sasan_goodarzi @OnesaasD

[Maxim Beatty (mxmbt2) @mxmbt2]

Why has my QuickBooks Online subscription increased ~40% while the service seems to be collapsing? The new eBay, Amazon & Etsy integrations are rejecting most imported transactions — breaking my books — and OneSaaS support is uncontactable. @Intuit @sasan_goodarzi @OnesaasD

[Dr. Herb Risotto PhD 🇵🇸 @MildCuthbert]

This is how people with lifetime bans from Footscray Coles walk into Footscray Coles

[ABB @Mont_Jiang]

There must be a software flag in there like NO_COMING_BACK_FROM_THIS = TRUE

[Figure @Figure_robot]

We're live Man vs. Machine https://t.co/ovr2sm3Iof

[Maxim Beatty (mxmbt2) @mxmbt2]

@MyselfDotStudy In the comments @grok says she’s Taiwanese-born, and said her oath in English, French and Mandarin🤷‍♂️

[tmuxvim @tmuxvim]

I put a prompt injection into my LinkedIn bio and recruiters are messaging me in Old English and calling me Lord.

[Maxim Beatty (mxmbt2) @mxmbt2]

Yep.. happened to me a few years ago in Shanghai...

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 The Chinese Communists have just TICKETED the Fox News crew, using their abundance of surveillance cameras placed around Beijing!

BRET BAIER: "There are literally cameras everywhere...they see everything...our driver parked illegally for 2 MINUTES and got a ticket for $40!"

"Because they saw it, on the camera."

This is Communism! It's what the Democrats want.

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

Humanoid skills are about to make Claude Skills look like a joke

Unitree just launched UNISTORE, an app store for humanoid robots.

You can create, publish, buy, and deploy robot skills with one click across all their models.

Just the motion library is live right now: basic moves, dances, martial arts, all available as free downloads.

It's only out in China now (international coming soon).

But the platform move is obvious: Unitree is building the iOS of physical robots.

Now imagine what this looks like once it matures:

Right now when you download a skill for Claude or Codex, it changes how your AI writes and works inside your computer.

It's all just digital output, stuff that happens on a screen.

But when you download a skill for a robot, it changes what a physical machine can do in your house, your warehouse, your office.

One click and suddenly your robot knows how to make coffee.

Another and it's running nightly inventory in a warehouse, sorting and logging without supervision.

Another and it's harvesting ripe produce row by row from your garden, adjusting grip pressure for each fruit so nothing gets bruised.

We're going from downloading apps for phones to downloading skills for AI to downloading physical capabilities for robots that operate in the real world.

Very cool to think about.

I made a visual of what this might look like in the future:

[锐汉街评 @ruihanmeimei01]

一个视频告诉你，日本侵华战争的整个进程！勿忘国耻！

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

This is absolutely insane.

President Trump is currently flying to China with all of the following people to request "deals" with China's President Xi:

1. Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX CEO
2. Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO
3. Tim Cook, Apple CEO
4. Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO
5. Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone CEO
6. Kelly Ortberg, Boeing CEO
7. Brian Sikes, Cargill CEO
8. Jane Fraser, Citigroup CEO
9. Larry Culp, General Electric CEO
10. David Solomon, Goldman Sachs CEO
11. Sanjay Mehrotra, Micron CEO
12. Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm CEO

President Trump also says there are "many other" CEOs joining him on the trip who have not yet been disclosed.

Never in history has such a trip even remotely near this scale and caliber occurred.

This Trump-Xi meeting is far bigger than most realize.