Songalini

🇦🇺🇰🇷 A casual observer of world events. Newly 30 and in the midst of a mid-life crisis.

[NoLimit @NoLimitGains]

This is Anton Kreil.

A kid from Liverpool, raised by a single mom with no money, who walked into Goldman Sachs at 20 and walked out of Wall Street at 28 with the kind of resume nobody believes is real.

His prop book at Goldman grew from $25M to over $400M in four years.

Lehman headhunted him in 2004.

JP Morgan paid him a fortune to run their global pharma, biotech, and chemicals trading franchises in 2006.

He retired in May 2007, months before the entire system blew up.

The 16 minutes below is the closest thing I've seen to an actual trader explaining how he thinks.

No fluff, no charts, just the framework that made three of the biggest banks on Wall Street fight to hire him.

[Songalini @songalini]

@Cmdr_Hadfield @SpaceX @grok why is the heat shield on starship different to the falcon?

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

The Great British Delusion

As regular readers will know, for several years now, I have been trying to persuade anyone who will listen that if you want to address the widely-shared concern about the pace and scale of mass immigration - Britain’s most salient political issue - it might be helpful to understand what’s causing the problem in the first place.

The conventional explanation of mass immigration among critical commentators is that “woke ideologues” in the civil service and the political halls of power believe that bringing more people into Britain is an unquestionable moral good. On the fringes of the Right, some even murmur of various theories of the “Great Replacement” which range in emphasis from elites bringing in compliant and desperate foreign workers to avoid providing good working conditions and fair wages to native workers, all the way through to Jews conspiring to replace white people with third-world immigration. Whatever the exact flavour this perspective comes in, the idea is that mass immigration is happening for primarily ideological reasons.

Likewise, advocates of mass immigration believe that anti-immigration sentiment is also motivated by ideology (hating immigrants/being racist etc) rather than reality.

What has been clear to me for some time, however, is that both of these claims are only partially true. Yes, some, as New Labour advisor Andrew Neather explained, wanted to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”. Yes, many in Britain as a whole and in Westminster in particular think that immigration is an axiomatic moral good. The problem is, however, that this does not explain why a series of Conservative governments, elected on increasingly vociferous promises to bring immigration down to the “tens of thousands”, continued to ramp it up. Facing the threat of Farage, who tore chunks out of the Tory vote year after year, they instead proceeded to set new immigration records, culminating in 2023 when net annual immigration exceeded 900,000.

It’s also true that some people don’t like immigrants. But the idea that this motivates a significant portion of the opposition to mass immigration in a country like Britain is absurd. According to that infamous far-right, anti-immigrant rag The Guardian, British people are statistically some of the most welcoming towards immigrants in the world.

Put simply, both sides are misunderstanding what’s happening, often on purpose.

My view is that much of the concern about immigration comes from two practical realities.

First, mass immigration on this scale is necessarily displacing. I’ve only lived in Britain for 30 years, and no one can tell me that the country and especially its major cities have not been completely transformed in that time. Many of the people who live in London today are either unconcerned by or actively in favour of these changes. But that’s partly because most of the people who were concerned have left. Now multiply across every city in the country and many of their suburbs. You don’t have to dislike people to not want the area where generations of your family were born, lived and died to become alien to you within the space of two decades.

In that same timespan, the British people have been getting poorer. As I keep saying over and over, Britain’s GDP per capita is lower today than it was in 2007, before the Great Financial Crisis.

Ironically, this is also why parties of every stripe have brought in millions of people into the country: we don’t evaluate economic performance on GDP per capita. Instead, we measure GDP itself and itself alone. That is the equivalent of measuring how prosperous your household is without accounting for the number of people living in it. A household income of £100,000 per year is high (by British standards, at least - more on this later) but what matters a lot more than that is how many people are in your household. A single person living on £100,000 is in a very different position to a family of 5 who are effectively getting £20,000 a year each.

The explanation for why Labour and the Tories let immigration run rampant was best summed up by legendary investor Charlie Munger when he said “show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome”. If all you care about is the headline figure, why not hand a bedroom to your in-laws to top up your “prosperity” with their pension? When described like this, it sounds, frankly, insane, yet that is precisely what our politicians are incentivised to do. They are judged on the country’s total GDP. The easiest way to increase it when you’re busy strangling your economy with Net Zero, high taxes and endless regulations? Bring in more bodies.

This really isn’t complicated to understand so why do so many people in Britain, who clearly feel the economic pain, nonetheless refuse to see it? To see that mass immigration is an attempt by badly incentivised politicians to deceive them about what’s actually happening? Instead, they cling to their support for mass immigration and the seductive (but false) idea that they are struggling because “the rich aren’t paying their fair share”.

A report this week, however, has opened my eyes to another reason - one I had never considered...

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

JUST IN: Beneath the mountains of Isfahan, the IRGC built a subway system for ballistic missiles. Tunnels carved into granite half a kilometre deep, reinforced with North Korean engineering and Chinese technical assistance, connecting cavernous assembly halls where solid-fuel motors are manufactured, warheads are integrated, and complete missiles roll off production lines onto automated high-speed electric rails. The trains carry transporter-erector-launchers through underground corridors to one of several blast-door exits. The TEL surfaces through a pop-up door, fires, and retreats underground before the satellite that spotted it can relay coordinates to the bomber that would strike it. The system was designed for exactly this scenario. It was designed to survive America.

On March 31, bunker-buster bombs hit the Baharestan complex. Ten heavy GPS-guided munitions struck surface entrances, propellant storage facilities, and assembly infrastructure. The secondary explosions were visible from space. Stored missiles, thousands of tons of propellant, and fuel ignited in a chain reaction that lit up the Isfahan night for hours. Iranian state media acknowledged the site was hit and claimed “no strategic impact,” which is the phrase a regime uses when the strategic impact requires a classified briefing rather than a press conference.

The damage is real but bounded. Pre-strike, Baharestan produced hundreds of solid-fuel motors, thousands of tons of propellant, and dozens of complete missiles per year. Post-strike estimates put short-term capacity at 40 to 60 percent, with full recovery requiring 12 to 24 months. The surface infrastructure was destroyed. The entrances were collapsed. The propellant lines that feed the assembly halls were severed. But the tunnels themselves, half a kilometre beneath the mountain, and the rail network that runs through them, remain largely intact. The subway still works. The trains still run. The blast doors still open.

And the network is not one city. Isfahan is the production hub. Tabriz in the northwest stores and launches long-range variants. Kermanshah near the Iraqi border operates interconnected tunnels for solid-fuel launchers. Shiraz in the south handles cruise missiles and logistics. Khorramabad maintains silos and underground launch capability. The strikes degraded one node. The system has five. Iran’s missile infrastructure was designed as a distributed network for the same reason the internet was: so that destroying one node does not destroy the function.

Iranian launch activity has dropped to its lowest level since the war began. The command coordination that selects targets and sequences barrages was disrupted when the Aerospace Forces headquarters in western Tehran took ten bombs overnight. The production line that replenishes spent missiles was cut by 40 to 60 percent when Baharestan burned. The air campaign is working by every metric the Pentagon measures.

But the metric the Pentagon does not measure is the one that matters. The strait is still closed. The helium is still boiling. The fertiliser is still not shipping. The 3,000 vessels are still stranded. The bombs have five-metre accuracy and the crisis has a five-year repair timeline. Precision won the air war. Duration is winning the molecular war. And the molecular war determines whether the chips that guided the bombs to Isfahan will have helium to cool them next quarter.

The missile subway survives because it was built for this war. The molecular crisis deepens because nobody built anything for that one. And that one is the war that ends the world the missiles were built to defend.

https://t.co/dAOBBMsgDS

[Songalini @songalini]

@veedstudio Veed

[Lord Bebo @MyLordBebo]

♨️🎂🇮🇹 Hot Italian cake for holidays

Be sure to watch it several times so as not to get distracted by the girl 😂

[Lord Bebo @MyLordBebo]

An epic fight of rats was filmed in the New York subway.

[𖣂JIK𖣂 @OS3992]

Procrastination fades the moment you see through its illusion. There is no “later.” There is only now. When you act in the now, you touch the flow of life itself. Begin, even with the smallest step, and you will discover movement reveals truths that thought alone can never reach.

[𖣂JIK𖣂 @OS3992]

Don’t talk about negative things, because the more you speak of them, the more power you give them. Speak of hope, speak of strength, speak of possibility what you focus on, grows.

[Bro Cooked @bro_cooked]

Bro cooked 😂☠️

[Jack 🤖 @JacklouisP]

Thread: How Amazon's $775M Acquisition Accidentally Launched an Entire Industry

Here's a wild story about unintended consequences:

Amazon acquired a robotics company and nearly tanked the industry by removing it from the market.

This seeming disaster helped catalyse a $40 billion market.

Here's the story of how the Kiva acquisition sparked one of the most dynamic markets in robotics. ⬇️

[Powerplays @Power_plays_]

Best wrist exercise ever

[illuminatibot @iluminatibot]

The jaw-dropping quantity of energy and resources required to construct just a single wind turbine.

But let's keep pretending these expensive, inefficient, bird and bat slaying monstrosities are "green" and "environmentally-friendly".

[Degen CPA @DrewVento]

Being overly political is a sign of mental illness and an unstable life.

You are emotionally invested into things you have practically 0 impact on, which constantly impacts your mood.

I couldn’t imagine following this stuff daily, subjecting myself to whatever nonsense the current thing is.

If you have responsibilities and things to do in your social life, there’s no reason you should be religiously following every little thing which happens, you simply don’t have time, and would not want to subject yourself to unneeded negativity energy.

[ActiveVibes @ActiveVibes_]

5 Dumbbell Only Chest Workout:

1.

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

J is spot on. The U.S. Navy is laying up 17 ships—not just from a manpower shortage, but from idiotic regulations that trace back to the UN

And that’s just the start.

How the UN is Sabotaging the U.S. Military’s Global Reach: 🧵

[Ábris Babicz | The Demi Cycle Protocol 🧬 @AbrisGains]

These 5 common habits are silently killing your gut health:

1. Black coffee on an empty stomach

[Mindlabs @Mind_labs_]

RIP Powerpoint.

Forget wasting time on designing each slide.

Here are 5 AI websites to create presentations in seconds:

[Trig 🇦🇷🇪🇸 @Kharlerh]

Getage manager, Jose Bordalas s@tanism in football

A thread 🧵