Ben Quick

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[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

They made me sign a waiver before the wings arrived.

A paper. To eat. As though courage came with a release form.

The cheerful waiter set the plate down like a man delivering a verdict. "These are the Infernos. Most people tap out. There's milk if you need it."

I looked at the milk. The milk looked back. We understood each other. Neither of us would be needed tonight.

"I will not be requiring the milk," I said.

The first bite arrived like a small sunrise behind the eyes.

(My tongue filed a formal complaint. My eyes opened a second one. I overruled them both.)

A man does not ask the fire to be gentler. He only becomes harder to burn.

I did not reach for water. I did not wave a hand before my mouth. I sat, straight-backed, and ate the Infernos one by one, the way a man receives ten thousand letters of bad news without changing his face.

Beside me, a college boy attempting the same challenge was weeping openly into a napkin. So, between bites, I turned to him and said, calmly, that the fire is not the enemy — the wish for it to stop is the enemy. He stared. Then he picked up another wing.

When the waiter returned, expecting wreckage, he found an empty plate and a samurai sitting in perfect, sweating peace.

"...sir. You want the wall? You're on the wall now. People take a photo."

I rose. I bowed to the plate. I bowed to the kitchen, where unseen hands had forged so worthy a trial.

"Thank you for the fire," I told them.

Then I turned to the room and said, with smoke still somewhere in my soul:

"Comfort teaches a man nothing. Bless the meal that fights back."

The college boy lifted his last wing like a torch. The cook came out to shake my hand. The whole table behind me began, softly, to applaud the strange calm man who had thanked them for the burning.

I walked out into the cool evening, mouth aflame, heart entirely at peace.

A small fire, faced well, is just another way to know you are alive.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A potluck. Everyone brings one dish. I have never been so out of my depth in my life.

I was invited to a gathering. "Just bring a dish to share," they said. Simple words. I did not sleep for three days.

Because I understood instantly what this was. A summit. Every guest, a lord of their own house, arriving bearing tribute. And tribute is judged. Tribute is ranked. To bring the wrong dish to the wrong table is to fall in standing before your peers, possibly forever.

So I prepared. I made my finest dish. I carried it to the door with two hands and a straight back, braced for the weighing of my worth.

The first lord arrived with a bowl of orange powder noodles. Macaroni and cheese. The crowd roared. He set it down at the center of the table. The CENTER. I noted this. The center is the seat of power.

The second lord brought a tower of small brown meat orbs in red sauce. "Meatballs," he announced, like a man laying down a sword. They were placed beside the macaroni. A strong showing. An alliance, perhaps.

I studied the table like a battlefield map. Potato salad: defensive, reliable, old money. A vegetable tray, untouched, clearly a hostage offering no one expected to win. And then a woman walked in, raised a flat box overhead, and the entire room turned and CHEERED.

Pizza. She had brought pizza. Store-bought. Still in the box.

I was stunned. She had not even cooked it. And yet the people rejoiced as if a king had entered. I revised my entire understanding of the hierarchy on the spot. Effort means nothing here. Only the roar of the crowd decides rank.

I placed my dish down, humbly, near the napkins. A peasant's position. I accepted it.

And then a man tapped my shoulder, pointed at my dish, and said the words that changed everything.

"Whoa, did you make this? This is amazing. Everybody, you GOTTA try this guy's thing."

The room turned. The room came. The room ATE. My dish vanished in ninety seconds. The pizza woman herself took a second helping and looked at me with respect.

I had won the summit. By accident. With a dish I placed by the napkins.

I understand nothing about this country. I have never been happier. I am hosting the next one.

So tell me, America.

Is there a system to the potluck? A secret rank? A hidden law?

I have decided there is not.

You just bring the thing you love, and everyone eats it, and somehow everybody wins.

It is the most insane way to hold a war.

I will fight in every single one.

[Ben Quick @quick697]

@DrJMedina Dang - I didn’t dare to believe that this was Dr Jin until I saw this chart - now I’m a believer

[Jim Bianco @biancoresearch]

The fear over AI is palpable.

So, it's time for my optimistic take ....

Why the AI doom-and-gloom story is missing the bigger picture

A lot of people hear “AI” and immediately think one of two things: it’s just Google search on steroids, or it’s a magic machine coming for everyone’s job. Both miss the bigger picture.

A job is not one single task; it’s a bundle of tasks supported by a massive, fragmented software stack. Email, spreadsheets, presentations, Slack, CRM platforms, and, in finance, a Bloomberg Terminal, FactSet, and market data feeds. For millions of jobs, the cost of software to provide basic tools for these tasks can run to $1,000 a month, and more for complicated roles.

Much of the modern workday is consumed by the friction of this stack: moving data between systems, cleaning spreadsheets, searching for files, and summarizing meetings.

AI is emerging as the new interface for enterprise software. Think about the iPhone. It collapsed cameras, GPS devices, and music players into one simple, powerful device. AI is doing something similar for workplace software, turning 10 clunky programs that don't talk to each other into a single conversational prompt.

Just as we stopped buying standalone cameras and tape recorders once the smartphone came around, companies will happily pay for an AI layer. It will be far cheaper and eliminate the bloated costs of that fragmented software stack that requires you to perform endless, mundane tasks because these programs do not talk to each other.

The immediate fear is that if AI lets three people do the work of five, companies will fire two people. But that ignores economic history.

When the electronic spreadsheet was invented, the cost of calculations plummeted. But accounting jobs didn't vanish; demand for complex financial modeling exploded. Accounting clerks became financial analysts, a more in-demand role.

Jevons Paradox suggests that making a resource more efficient actually increases total demand for it. By absorbing the drudgery, AI allows the employee to focus on judgment and strategy—making the human element more valuable, not less. In this framework, demand for high-output workers doesn't shrink; it explodes.

Does this justify the mind-numbing capital expenditure currently pouring into AI infrastructure? If AI fulfills this promise of enterprise-wide productivity, the investment isn't just justified—it’s a bargain. That said, we are clearly near the peak of a hype cycle, just like the internet was in 1999.

But remember: the dot-com crash did not mean the internet was a bust. It simply meant the hype outpaced the infrastructure. After the wreckage cleared, the optimistic predictions about connectivity and productivity were not only fulfilled—they were exceeded.

The same path can lie ahead for AI. And instead of the fear that AI will replace workers, it's the joy of replacing soulless busywork, making jobs more fulfilling... and more profitable for employers.

[Insurrection Barbie @DefiyantlyFree]

Israel dropped 200,000 bombs. If they wanted to commit a genocide they would have wiped every person in Gaza from existence.

They have a kill percentage of 3.2%.

WWII killed approximately 4% of the global population.

The Siege of Leningrad killed approximately 25% of the city’s population.

The atomic bomb killed approximately 30-40% of Hiroshima’s population instantly.

The firebombing of Tokyo killed approximately 5-8% of the city’s population in one night.

The bombing was not optimized for killing people. It was optimized for destroying infrastructure tunnels, weapons storage, command nodes, and the physical environment Hamas operated in.

They warned civilians before strikes documented:

They dropped leaflets, made phone calls, sent text messages telling people to evacuate (documented)

They allowed 112,000 aid trucks into Gaza during active combat

They facilitated field hospitals

They targeted Hamas commanders specifically documented kills of senior Hamas leadership including Yahya Sinwar.

No military in history has done more administrative work to avoid civilian casualties while simultaneously fighting an enemy that deliberately hides in hospitals, schools, and mosques and uses its own population as shields also documented, on Hamas’s own video.

Tucker Carlson is a moron and a coward and in a debate with someone who’s not aligned with Russian, Iranian and Chinese propaganda he wouldn’t survive one round.

Of course all these people are cowards who only invite each other to discuss this issue because anyone with half a brain would wipe the floor with them.

[Ben Quick @quick697]

@ComicDaveSmith

[Ben Quick @quick697]

@gurgavin Amazon are giving away earrings?

[Ben Quick @quick697]

@biancoresearch Aw c’mon - let the guy out

[Ben Quick @quick697]

@GBX_Press 😂

[Ben Quick @quick697]

@FollowTheScien8 @TgMacro @jacksonhinkle And here it is “the Chosen People”, conflating Israel and the Jewish people, and meant in a clearly pejorative way. The article was obvious Christian click-bait. The narrative is running you. Good job carrying water for Islamist-Marxist propaganda.

[Ben Quick @quick697]

@TgMacro @jacksonhinkle Tony, I’ve followed you for years. You are an outstanding trader and I’m grateful for things I’ve learned from you. What disappoints me is to see you swallowed up by a lazy narrative which shows a lack of the same intellectual rigor and independent thinking shaping your trading

[Ben Quick @quick697]

@LozzaFox Douglas Murray is a national icon

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

Let’s be real here. Europe has spent decades freeloading on American security. Even now, with every NATO member finally hitting the 2% GDP target in 2025.

But beyond the financial contributions, the real rupture is philosophical and the Iran crisis has shown a spotlight on it.

Europe worships process. Endless committees, consultations, and “predictability.” Macron actually calls it a virtue. For Trump, this is paralysis as his style is to articulate a threat, fix a target, and act. The Americans are men of conviction and purpose. Europe on the other hand lives by bureaucratic liturgy and in high-minded abstractions.

Sure, Americans might make mistakes when acting. But Europe never considers what the costs of not acting actually are.

Just look at how their nations are doing on various fronts, especially on the border crisis, and you see the same cancerous rot that undergirds their foreign policy approach play out domestically. It's the same problem on a different scale.

Iran is currently holding the Strait of Hormuz hostage, choking 20% of global oil and spiking prices past $100 a barrel. Meanwhile, the regime is bleeding from strikes, its nuclear ambitions are still alive despite degraded capability, and its proxies are firing missiles at allies and oil tankers. If this isn’t a clear and present danger to the global economy - of which Europe is a part - then I don’t know what is.

Yet when Washington asked to use European bases to finish the job - bases the US has defended for generations, the response was hesitation and hand-wringing. The US did strike from RAF Fairford, but only after warnings that British soil could become a “legitimate target.”

If you cannot agree that a theocratic regime with eschatological ambitions who have shown no restraint in hitting out at Gulf countries and threatening the world’s energy jugular is an enemy worth confronting, then what, exactly, are we allies about?

Europe loves to preen about being tough on Russia. They issue condemnations and speeches and slap sanctions that hardly work to cripple the Russian economy.

Now here was a chance to do something concrete: let the Americans use the bases they already pay for, help clear the Strait, and actually degrade the Iranian war machine that arms Moscow’s proxies. Turmp didn’t ask for boots on the ground or any kind of more offensive action. All he wanted was permission to operate from the infrastructure America has underwritten for decades.

They couldn’t even manage that.

So can you blame the Americans for seeing NATO for what it is? A paper-tiger alliance that expects Washington to bleed and pay while Brussels and London convenes and deliberates.

If Europe refuses to treat Iran as the threat it is while happily letting American power keep the Strait open and the lights on, then the alliance is already dead. Trump is simply stating the obvious and the Americans are becoming very reluctant to subsidize the European delusion any longer.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

- Drafted a blog post
- Used an LLM to meticulously improve the argument over 4 hours.
- Wow, feeling great, it’s so convincing!
- Fun idea let’s ask it to argue the opposite.
- LLM demolishes the entire argument and convinces me that the opposite is in fact true.
- lol

The LLMs may elicit an opinion when asked but are extremely competent in arguing almost any direction. This is actually super useful as a tool for forming your own opinions, just make sure to ask different directions and be careful with the sycophancy.

[Arynne Wexler @ArynneWexler]

I have retard fatigue

[jim iuorio @jimiuorio]

I’ll explain the difference between the two sides..they think plumbers are beneath them…we don’t…hope this helps..

[Noah @antibearthesis]

@KobeissiLetter

[Ben Quick @quick697]

@PiersUncensored @RealCandaceO @piersmorgan @sostalksmoney @ComicDaveSmith It baffles me why anyone gives any weight whatsoever to what this guy thinks

[Michael (Hedge Fund Manager) @HedgeFundFomo]

I've been analyzing the stock market for 50 years

I manage billions of dollars

and I'm an expert in macroeconomics

Here's exactly what will happen from here with the Iran situation:

I have no fucking idea