Tomas Daubner

Engineer, interested in: Econ, Energy transition, Urbanism, China/Development, History of Science/Technology/Finance/Money/Medicine ...
🇸🇰 🇨🇿 🇳🇱 🇪🇺

[Daniel Kral @DanielKral1]

From the EU's €800bln Recovery Fund (RRF), €630bln was requested.

From this, €405bln has been absorbed up to now with a few months to go (€255bln in grants & 150bln in loans).

From this, less than €300bln went on investments. More than €100bln went on "current expenditure" (salaries and pensions).

Spain - cheerleader for more joint borrowing and for an EU army without having its own army - absorbed 44% of its allocation (including for pensions). Only Romania has fared worse (Hungary has had its dolla frozen).

Oh dear.

[WarMonitor🇺🇦🇬🇧 @WarMonitor3]

Russia is struggling to sell it oil and is having to strand its tankers around the world as it struggles to recover from the withdrawal of Indian oil and gas purchases.

There is 12 Russian oil and gas ships anchored of the coast of Oman currently.

[WarMonitor🇺🇦🇬🇧 @WarMonitor3]

Iraq is nationalising the massive West Qurna 2 oil field which is majority owned by Russian oil giants, the oil field is responsible for 1 percent of all global oil supply.

[Velina Tchakarova @vtchakarova]

After carefully monitoring the situation in Venezuela for the last 24 hours, the EU has found out that the water bottle of Maduro did not have the EU-regulation approved attached cap.

[Robin Brooks @robin_j_brooks]

Spain is held up as Europe's success story these days, but it's not. Strong growth is mostly just about massive immigration, which lifts headline GDP. Once you control for that by looking at per capita GDP, Spain is little better than Italy. Nothing ever changes on the periphery.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The thing I want to know most about the Venezuelan operation is who's in the Epstein files.

[Daniel Kral @DanielKral1]

Most mismanaged €zone country is 🇸🇰.

Highest growth in govt spending but not to invest/defence but regressive transfers (pensions, energy price subsidies).

Economy is reeling under high taxes, inflation is high, debt is growing & govt borrows for more than 🇮🇹. A total failure.

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

Japan now sees 850,000 more funerals than births each year. The gap will soon widen to 1,000,000 more deaths than births. Source: https://t.co/taTswSeXMI

[Aleksandar Djokic (Александар Джокич) @polidemitolog]

A draft law for Germany's foreign intelligence service BND, seen by WDR, NDR, and Süddeutsche Zeitung, proposes expanding powers beyond espionage to include sabotage abroad, cyber operations to weaken enemy capabilities, and active countermeasures in special security situations approved by the National Security Council and parliamentary committee. It allows counterstrikes on cyber infrastructure, drone defense, data requests from manufacturers, facial recognition, secret entries for spyware, device manipulation, and extended data storage, while defining BND as the military foreign intelligence service.

[Mike Bird @Birdyword]

Couple of amazing charts from Goldman Sachs on the Chinese property sector collapse. Starts are still falling, down 80% now. Cumulative drag on GDP growth since the campaign against the developers began will be ~10% (!!!) by next year

[Ankesh Anand @ankesh_anand]

"how can flash beat pro??" -> the answer is RL!

flash is not just a distilled pro. we've had lots of exciting research progress on agentic RL which made its way into flash but was too late for pro.

can't wait to finally bring them to pro👀

[Sundar Pichai @sundarpichai]

We’re back in a Flash ⚡

Gemini 3 Flash is our latest model with frontier intelligence built for lightning speed, and pushing the Pareto Frontier of performance and efficiency. It outperforms 2.5 Pro while being 3x faster at a fraction of the cost.

With this release, Gemini 3’s next-generation intelligence is now rolling out to everyone across our products including @Geminiapp + AI Mode in Search. Devs can build with it in the Gemini API @GoogleAIStudio, Gemini CLI, and Google @antigravity and enterprises can get it in Vertex AI and Gemini Enterprise.

[Andreas Steno Larsen @AndreasSteno]

Is anyone willing to say that AI is NOT a bubble at this stage?

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

CHART OF THE DAY: Oil glut triggers a rout.

Brent <$60 a barrel
WTI <$55 a barrel

Both on track to lowest closing price in ~5 years

[David Sinclair @davidasinclair]

I think it’s criminal that @YouTube allows a money-making channel featuring dozens of fake AI videos of me giving out misleading health advice, even after we’ve filed multiple formal complaints

[Robin Brooks @robin_j_brooks]

@alemannoEU Italy's lack of solidarity with Ukraine sadly predates this week's opposition to using Russia's frozen FX reserves. It's odd behavior from a country that regularly demands solidarity from the rest of Europe when its massive debt burden runs into trouble (as in 2022 or 2020)...

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

CHART OF THE DAY: Global coal demand rose to an all-time high in 2025, up 0.5% y-on-y to 8,845 million tons (also, @IEA revised up 2024).

Now, IEA says 2025 will mark a peak, with consumption dropping over the next 5 years. Time will tell, but previous peak forecast were off.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

Everyone hears about China's industrial policy boom, but the real estate bust is still the biggest economic story there.

[Alexander Stahel 🌻 @BurggrabenH]

Vanke is effectively toast too now.

What’s striking is that the Chinese property crisis still looks like it’s in its first inning and the CCP appears determined to make every textbook mistake to make this “very long term pain”. Decades!

Ignore it at your own peril.

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

Matryoshka oil trading:

Goldman Sachs says that oil exports from Lukoil and Rosneft are down ~1.1m b/d, but **simultaneosly** exports from other Russian "non-sanctioned companies" are up 1.0m b/d. (😇🤭)

"Russian oil trading networks are reorganizing quickly," the bank says.