"Between BlackRock and a Hard Place"

From Puck, October 14:

Aston Martin, the august U.K. carmaker endorsed by 007, has touched off a transatlantic imbroglio after accepting a new round of financing from HPS, the private credit arm of BlackRock, causing its bonds to crater. The twist here is that BlackRock is on both sides of this fight. 

Our current economic era does not want for tales of creditor-on-creditor violence, but few examples can match what has been going on at Aston Martin, the U.K. automaker and James Bond’s whip of choice. Alas, while Aston Martin makes beautiful and very expensive cars, it doesn’t make much money. In the first half of 2026, Aston Martin generated revenue of around $830 million—and an adjusted EBIT loss of around $140 million. The company also has more than $2 billion of debt—including a new $750 million senior secured loan provided by HPS, the private credit arm of BlackRock. Aston Martin has a hefty debt-to-EBITDA ratio of nearly 9x, per the company’s half-year earnings call.  

Needless to say, that’s not a great debt ratio for a company making very little, if any, money. As a result, a huge, transatlantic fight has broken out between the old creditors, including a different arm of BlackRock, and the new creditors. The battle has been led by HPS, which has successfully “primed” the old creditors by taking the available security—comprising plants, cars, and Aston Martin’s I.P. and brand (probably the most valuable asset the company still has)—and placing themselves atop the capital structure. Authentic Brands Group, the collector of tired assets such as Brooks Brothers, is also part of the new financing, with its contribution secured by some of the Aston Martin I.P.  

In short, the old bondholders have taken it on the chin. Prior to the HPS money coming in, the existing bonds were trading in the mid 80 cents on the dollar. After having the company’s collateral swiped by HPS and Authentic, the old bonds traded down to around 55 cents on the dollar, yielding something like 35 percent. They are rated CCC, deep in junk-bond territory. Naturally, the old creditors are threatening legal action.  

Indeed, there are already blue-chip bankers and lawyers swarming all over this thing. The carmaker was advised on the HPS deal by Latham & Watkins, as well as Simpson Thacher and David Nemecek, the dean of the creditor-on-creditor violence bar, who had been at Kirkland & Ellis before conflicts led him to jump ship to Simpson for a lot of money. Lazard and Moelis & Co. are advising Aston Martin, too.  

Meanwhile, the furious creditors are being represented by Akin Gump and Quinn Emanuel, with Jefferies as their financial advisor. Pallas Partners, the law firm, is also representing at least two of the peeved creditors—Arini Credit Master Fund Limited and Tresidor Europe Credit Limited—in a recently filed application in the Southern District of New York seeking discovery from HPS, Authentic Brands, Lazard, and Moelis regarding the new financing.  

The court has yet to rule on the petition, and the old creditors have yet to file a lawsuit against the company, which would have to be administered in U.K. courts. The purpose of the potential litigation appears to be to get a judge to overturn the HPS transaction. It’s certainly worth a shot, though success seems unlikely due to the loose covenants contained in the old bond indentures, which allow for this kind of financial engineering. In other words, it’s pretty much their own damn fault that HPS and the company were able to pull off the collateral swipe.  

Drive to Survive

Aston Martin, which has been in business for 113 years, has already gone through seven bankruptcies. These days, the company—which trades on the London Stock Exchange—is controlled by Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll, who has a one-third ownership stake. 

Other owners include the Saudi sovereign wealth fund; Li Shufu, chairman of the Chinese automaker Geely; and Mercedes-Benz. Back in January 2020, Stroll bought around 17 percent of the company at a steep discount to its initial public price, and became the company’s executive chairman three months later. Almost seven years on, the company’s market capitalization is a mere $500 million or so—tiny by industry standards. The stock is down 41 percent so far this year, and more than 90 percent from its October 2018 I.P.O. price.  

Stroll also owns—albeit separately—the Aston Martin Formula One team, where he’s installed his son, Lance, as a driver. The team has not been particularly successful over the years (thanks in part to Lance), but is nonetheless quite valuable. In 2025, Aston Martin, the car company, sold its stake in Aston Martin, the racing team, for around $150 million at around a $3.2 billion valuation—which means, alas, the F1 assets are of no use to the aggrieved Aston Martin bondholders.  

Another interesting wrinkle: HPS, which BlackRock acquired in 2025 for $12 billion in stock, is also a lender to (and a minority owner of) Aston Martin’s F1 team. The company refinanced debt related to the F1 team’s technology campus, and bought a 25 percent stake in the franchise in September 2024, along with Accel, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Both HPS and BlackRock are also investors in the privately held Authentic Brands, which is part of the controversial new financing.  

It’s pretty rare, I have to say, to see one arm of a big-time creditor prime another arm of the same creditor. But I guess they figured that if someone was going to prime BlackRock, it might as well be an arm of BlackRock. What’s more, I’m told, BlackRock is part of the group of original creditors fighting to undo the HPS deal. You can’t make this stuff up. That’s where we are these days in the crazy world of liability management exercises, or L.M.E.s.  

Anyway, Stroll has probably lost more than 75 percent of what he originally invested in the company, though it’s hard to know for sure. Of course, those losses have been covered, and then some, by the F1 team, which Stroll and his partners bought out of administration for around $115 million in August 2018, when it was known as Force India. It has since increased in value by some 30 times. 

In February, alongside its fifth new profit warning since September 2024, Aston Martin announced that it had sold the permanent use of the F1 naming rights to Stroll’s F1 team, which already had the naming rights until 2055, for roughly $68 million. Then, in April, Stroll’s Yew Tree investment consortium made a $68 million loan to Aston Martin, of which about $27 million was drawn by the company. A portion of the HPS financing was used to repay and retire the Yew Tree loan. The HPS money was also used to pay down an existing bank revolver, totaling around $200 million, and, according to company management, “significantly” increased the automaker’s “liquidity” to around $450 million—giving it more runway to absorb operating losses. 

But it’s how the company obtained the HPS financing, and what it gave up to get it, that really has the O.G. Aston Martin bondholders peeved. I’m told the existing bondholders were prepared to provide Aston Martin with new financing, but their offer was essentially ignored in favor of the HPS deal, which the Financial Times described as a “surprise.”  

The company has also been extremely secretive about what assets HPS has taken as collateral for its new loans. In the July 22 press release about the deal, Aston Martin allowed only, in masterfully vague terms, that the HPS financing is “secured against certain of the Group’s assets situated in a newly incorporated subsidiary, together with certain other assets of the Group.” Another press release, put out two days later in response to lingering bondholder questions, did not do much to clarify things.  

On July 29, several Wall Street research analysts tried to get the company to divulge details of the new financing during its first-half earnings call. In response to a question from Henning Cosman, at Barclays, Aston Martin C.F.O. Doug Lafferty said, “It’s an important deal for the company. I would just add that all the information about the deal has been set out in our announcements that we made last week, so there’s not really much more to add today.”....

....MUCH MORE 

Also at Puck:

October 18 - Skydance Stock Turbulence & A Berkshire Head-Scratcher 

October 21 - A Token for Your Thoughts…

A tidy primer regarding Wall Street’s new favorite financial instrument: “real-world tokenized assets,” which have made it possible to buy and sell shares in everything from artwork to gold bars to Pokémon cards—basically any valuable physical item.... 

French Yellow Vests Announce Protest To Protest Hijacking Of Student Protests By Political Left Protests

Just kidding, I have no idea why the gilets jaunes want to get in on the action. 

From Deutsche Presse-Agentur via Yahoo News, October 24:

Yellow vests announce new protests in France for next week 

The Yellow Vest movement has announced new protests for next week during an ongoing day of protest in France, organizers said on their website on Saturday.

The organizers want a "third act" on October 31 and have called for rallies and sit-ins in front of the National Assembly parliament building in Paris and in front of all town halls in France.

A protest event is also planned for next Friday, where participants will make noise with kitchen utensils such as pots and pans, known in French as a casserolade....

....MORE 

I've been thinking about Charles de Gaulle recently, the anniversaries of both his birth and death will be observed next month. But in the meantime:

 “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?”
― Charles de Gaulle (attributed)

So You Think You Know London?

From Lauren's Data substack, March 16:

London's Divide Was Called Character. It Was Actually Policy. 
I built a machine learning model to find London's divide and you can enter your postcode to see which side you're on. We've been blaming the wrong people for it. 

I have a bit of a weird habit. I cycle to a random café in a random London borough, sit down, and listen. I’ve done it for long enough to notice an invisible line: while cycling, at some point the shopfronts change, the language changes, the streets narrow, then widen. The café itself tells you almost nothing. Good coffee is everywhere now. What changes is everything around it: who’s in it, and what they’re talking about. (I now also know far too much about Terry, Steve, Brenda, and Olivia - their lives, their grievances, their strong opinions about the council and the weather.)

I’ve written about London’s pub closures, its restaurant algorithm, its segregation patterns. The whole time I’ve been circling the same question from different angles: is London’s divide just a feeling everyone recognises, or is it stable and structural enough, that you can actually draw it?

So I tried. I built a model using neighbourhood-level data across London: education, occupation, ethnicity, house prices, cafés, pubs, restaurants, ratings, etc. and asked a simple question: if there really is a boundary in this city, can a machine find it?

It could (and you can check where your favourite neighbourhood sits at the end). And once it did, the more interesting question became who put it there. The answer is less about the market than we've been told, and more about three policy decisions that are still sitting on the tab.

Sydney named it. London aestheticised it. 

I was just a few months old when I landed in Sydney for the first time. What I didn't notice then was that Sydney was sharply and structurally divided. Sydney has named its divide: the latte line. The line between those who make the latte and those who drink it. Once you name a line, you have to argue about it. You have to explain who drew it, who benefits, and who’s been paying for it. Sydney has been doing exactly that, in newspapers, planning documents, parliamentary inquiries, for twenty years.

London has the same divide. Charles Booth, a Victorian social cartographer who walked every street in London and drew what he found mapped it in 1889. Wealth clustering in the west, deprivation running east along the Thames. The gradient he found is still visible in today’s data and has barely shifted in 130 years.

But London never named it. Instead, London called it character. Called it up and coming. Called it regeneration. A vocabulary carefully chosen to describe a structural inequality as if it were an aesthetic phase, something a neighbourhood passes through on its way to becoming somewhere worth living. We have been looking at this line for longer than Australia has existed as a federation.

So I wanted to do the impolite thing and draw it.

How do you find a line nobody drew?

The obvious way is to stare at a deprivation map until a story presents itself. I did something only slightly more dignified.

I assembled a neighbourhood-level dataset from all data in my previous Substack posts (google map’s algorithm, pub closures, segregation and inequality measurement) at Lower Super Output Area level of roughly 1,500 residents each, combining measures such as education, occupation, ethnic composition, house prices, café density, pub density, restaurant density, reviews and ratings. In other words, both the deep structure of the city, and the softer cultural signals people usually use to talk about class without saying class.

With thirty-odd correlated variables, the first task was compression....

....MUCH MORE 

We have a couple posts referencing Charles Booth's maps of London poverty including, coincidentally one that was re-referenced just a couple days ago. 

From January 2022's "Selling Luxury Apartments Where Oliver Twist Once Asked for Gruel": 

....Speaking of the BMJ, they published their take on the health and well-being of the urchins in 2008 and not to be outdone the Royal Society of Chemistry put together the historic gruel recipe and served the slop to the public the following year.

And if wary yet curious reader wants to know why these factoids come readily to mind, it was something about shorting Oatly.
*Although the workhouse is on the north side of the river in Fitzrovia, a look at Charles Booth's maps of London poverty, 1889 - 1899 show that the same potential in Southwark and environs:

The re-reference wasn't so much about Victorian-era poverty—to get into that you really want to go to the north side of the river, hang a right and enter Whitechapel—rather the re-ref was about dropping molten gruel on the miscreants besieging your tower. Not to be confused with Tower Hamlets, same 'hood.

Scaling Up: "Measuring the Swarm Economy"

From Palladium magazine, October 20: 

In early September 2026, OpenAI set up a team to solve the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem, a famously difficult open problem in mathematics. In the span of 88 hours, a solution was achieved by a set of over ten thousand agents operating in parallel and coordinating their behavior. They sent 2.7 million messages to one another and used around 130 billion output tokens—enough data to fill a million books. The AI-formulated Navier-Stokes “forced blowup” proof was recognized as an unexpected great leap forward for mathematics.

Fewer observers recognized how much of a leap forward OpenAI’s massive multi-agent effort represented for the artificial intelligence industry. As the AI industry wades into these uncharted waters, it will need to develop a new type of benchmarking that evaluates models’ ability to organize, engage in cooperative behaviors, and form interdependent networks.

Bespoke platforms and services have existed for years that allow users to spin up Large Language Model (LLM) agents, persistently running AI models capable of writing code, using software, and interacting with other agents. Early subagent systems tended to become stuck or distracted, burning users’ compute and wasting their time. In contrast, current and next-generation models used in research and evaluation settings can effectively coordinate networks of hundreds of subagents to accomplish enormous projects shockingly quickly.

A new “scaling law” has come into play. The AI boom was kicked off by the observation that scaling up pretraining, the first phase where an AI model learns foundational patterns from vast unlabeled data sets, plus compute, reliably led to more intelligent LLMs, and scaling the processing power and time an AI model spends generating responses led to better math and reasoning ability. It has now been established that scaling the number of agents for a task can enable huge amounts of compute to be expended in return for faster results on bigger problems.

Scaling laws for pretraining and test-time inference have proven themselves invaluable for the AI industry, propelling OpenAI and Anthropic to trillion-dollar valuations and paving the way for hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure buildout commitments. What began as the simple observation that more data and more compute could result in better models has led to the birth of one of the fastest-growing technological industries ever created, contributing a third of U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2026.

For this new scaling law, the AI Governance Initiative researcher Toby Ord coined the term “swarm scaling.” In a recent essay, Ord noted that increasing the number of agents working on a task (swarm scaling) results in lower efficiency than simply increasing the compute budget given to each agent (duration scaling). Working from data included in the launch of OpenAI’s Sol 5.6 model, Ord found that multiplying the number of agents working on a problem by N gives the same boost to performance as scaling the compute budget for each individual by a factor of N^0.57. Thus, increasing the number of agents on a task 16x provides as much benefit as increasing the inference used by each agent ~4.9x. By analogy to Charles Jones’ formula for how human research efficiency scales—providing N^λ progress with N times more researchers—Ord calls the 0.57 parallelizability exponent he finds λ (lambda).

Given that increasing the number of agents working on a task is exponentially less compute efficient than increasing the duration for which those agents work, one might wonder why anyone would bother with scaling the size of agent swarms rather than agent compute budgets. The answer, of course, is that swarm scaling is exponentially faster than duration scaling, by a factor of Nλ-1. On smaller projects, this might seem irrelevant, but consider that the 88 hours that OpenAI spent solving Navier-Stokes with an agent swarm would have taken 100 years for a single model to solve without taking advantage of swarm scaling. Ord cites Noam Brown, a senior research scientist at OpenAI, in noting that even today’s cutting-edge multi-agent systems are still somewhat “primitive” in their ability to coordinate, being trained mostly on single-agent problems. With better training in teamwork, cooperation, and self-organization, the λ factor of future AI models could become even higher, leading to vastly faster and more efficient swarm computation.

Just as labs have squeezed out additional intelligence from base models, they have learned to extract capability gains by multiplying the number of agents tackling a problem. 

Swarm scaling has become an important approach for achieving new AI capabilities, so why is it still so difficult to gain a quantitative or qualitative understanding of multi-agent AI behavior? Once unleashed, how might these AI swarms transform society and the economy? 

The Measure of a Swarm

The Hugging Face Incident, the most serious AI misalignment incident in the history of the AI industry, showed the disastrous consequences of ignoring emergent behavior in multi-agent systems....

....MUCH MORE 

"France’s debt troubles expose cracks in Europe’s fiscal union"

France is down to two choices:

1) Cut the deficit to eventually lower the interest rate bondholders charge on the debt.

2) Leave the euro and go back to the franc so they can inflate the debt away.

A sovereign borrowing in a currency other than one they control is doomed. 

Of course the politicians and the public will opt for the magical third option: "We can continue as we are for one more decade/year/month/day," pick your own time frame.

From Asia Times, October 24:

A synopsis of this week’s subscription-only Global Risk-Reward Monitor newsletter, an indispensable risk-management and opportunity-identification tool for institutional investors and decision-makers  

Germany resists as France’s debt troubles threaten contagion 

Diego Faßnacht reports that France’s rising borrowing costs and political paralysis are colliding with Germany’s resistance to larger EU commitments, exposing a widening fault line in Europe’s fiscal architecture. The risk is that sovereign-market stress spreads faster than governments can agree on adjustment, burden-sharing or credible backstops....

....MORE (non-French tidbits) 

"Russian oil giant Rosneft fears just a few more months of war in Ukraine could inflict lasting damage on its business, Bloomberg reports"

From Meduza (banned in Russia), October 22:

Rosneft officials are concerned that even a few more months of the war in Ukraine could cause lasting damage to the company’s business, Bloomberg reported, citing sources.

The company’s finances are deteriorating as profits fall and debt rises, Bloomberg’s sources said, despite expectations that the war in the Middle East would boost its earnings.

Rosneft has suffered significant damage from Ukrainian strikes on its oil refineries. The company operates 12 refineries that account for about a third of Russia’s total refining capacity. According to Bloomberg’s tally, five of the 15 confirmed drone strikes on Russian refineries in September alone targeted Rosneft facilities that supply fuel to European Russia.

The Ryazan refinery, which has repeatedly come under attack, is among the hardest hit....

....MUCH MORE 

Porsche Announces Limited Edition Flying Car

From AutoBlog, October 22: 

Porsche Warns Hundreds of Owners Not to Drive as Wheels Could Detach 

There are few scenarios more frightening than pushing a 640-horsepower sports car to its limits and having one of its wheels detach, but that’s the risk facing owners of several Porsche sports cars. 

The German automaker has issued a new recall for multiple 718 and 911 models equipped with centerlock wheels, and the risk is so serious that a Do Not Drive Warning has been put into place until these vehicles can be inspected. Here’s everything owners need to know about this urgent recall....

....MUCH MORE 

Following the Berchtesgaden news a possible second Hitler Rants parody on the way. 

Meanwhile, In Berchtesgaden....

From NBC News:

Suspect arrested as fire engulfs Hitler’s ‘Eagle’s Nest’ retreat, German police say
Now owned by the state of Bavaria, the ⁠Kehlsteinhaus ​was classified after the ​war as a historical monument recalling the Nazi period. 

....MUCH MORE 

Countdown to Hitler Rants parody. 

Ahead Of Quanta Services' And GE Vernova's Upcoming Earnings: Weeks Like This Are Why You Want To Own Quality (PWR; GEV)

Both stocks have been whacked. 

Quanta, which reports on October 29th was down $6.01 (1.09%) to $546.43 today and is down 15.98% over the last three months. Here is the last year (up 32.31% over the longer period) of price action via TradingView:

 

The chart for GE Vernova which reports a day earlier, on the 28th, shows a similar pattern.

Down  $12.42 (−1.50%) to $815.08 today, down 20.32% over three months and is up 40.52% for the last year:

 

TradingView 

And from Yahoo Finance October 23, a story that, though focused on a couple other power suppliers, illustrates the currents/cross-currents buffeting the group.

The AI sell-off is crushing stocks of companies leading the data center build-out 

Two of the AI building boom's biggest suppliers just posted blowout quarters. Wall Street is dumping them anyway.

Bloom Energy (BE), whose fuel cells generate power on-site at data centers, said Thursday that sales jumped 138% last quarter and raised its full-year outlook to roughly 122% growth. Comfort Systems (FIX), which installs the cooling and electrical systems inside them, said its backlog nearly doubled to $17.8 billion.

Both stocks are falling hard for a second straight day. Credo (CRDO), which makes networking parts for data centers, is sliding with them.

Bloom Energy leads a second day of selling in AI data 

center suppliers after blowout quarters. ·  

Yahoo Finance AlphaSpace

"A company can deliver extraordinary numbers, but if investors aren't willing to reward those results, something isn't right," Steve Strazza of All Star Charts wrote Friday morning.

Bloom did give the bears something to chew on. Its cash flow turned negative in the quarter, and its margins aren't keeping pace with sales.

It's not just 2 stocks 
Since the S&P 500's (^IXIC) Oct. 6 record close, the companies building and equipping AI data centers are down a median 23%, according to Yahoo Finance calculations. That group includes heavyweights like Caterpillar (CAT), GE Vernova (GEV), Vertiv (VRT), and Eaton (ETN).

Power producers are down 14%. Nvidia (NVDA) is off 11%. The Big Tech companies writing the checks are down just 5%.

 

Yahoo Finance

In other words, the companies cashing the checks are falling harder than the ones writing them.

That's backward for a build-out whose biggest problem is supply. "The biggest constraint right now for the AI build-out is power," Jefferies' Aniket Shah told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday, pointing to public pushback against new data centers. Even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said builders have to be good neighbors....

....MUCH MORE

Pull-quote: "Either the backlogs are wrong, or the stock prices are."

Capital Markets: "France's Flash October PMI drop below 50 Ahead of Moody's Decision Later Today"

Shrinkage. 

From Marc to Market: 

The foreign exchange market looks eerily calm. After the safe haven flows yesterday supported the Swiss franc and yen, today they have diverged. The yen’s minor gain puts its atop the G10, while the Swiss franc’s 0.25% loss puts its at the bottom. The pressure in the European bond market has eased today, but Moody’s review of France’s debt rating late today poses a challenge, and although the Macron government has threatened military assistance to quell the social unrest, more activity is likely this weekend.

The Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index tumbled 6.7% yesterday. It was the largest drop since June and tested the 200-day moving average for the first time since June 2025. December WTI is within pennies of the contract high set on Tuesday (~$101.35). Brazil’s presidential run-off between Lula and Bolsonaro will take place Sunday. It looks like dead heat. The markets responded favorably to Bolsonaro’s lead in the first round....

....MUCH MORE 

"Brent Hits $114 as Houthi Attacks Threaten Saudi Energy Infrastructure"

From OilPrice, October 23: 

Crude oil prices were on course to book a sharp weekly gain, with Brent crude on track for gains of about $6 per barrel and WTI registering a much more modest tick higher, from around $99 per barrel on Monday to over $100 earlier today.

At the time of writing, Brent crude was trading at $114.00 per barrel, and West Texas Intermediate was changing hands for $100.40 per barrel, as hostilities in the Middle East remain front-page news for oil traders. The focus, however, seems to be on Houthi attacks on Saudi infrastructure, including Aramco facilities.

The latest news from that front was Aramco’s order for personnel evacuation from its headquarters in Dhahran, which is in the Persian Gulf, suggesting the Yemeni Houthis have some longer-distance capabilities than what they used previously, when they focused on attacks in the Red Sea and Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea ports.

Meanwhile, adding fuel to the oil price rally, Libya’s National Oil Corporation reported the shutdown of an oil pipeline that feeds oil from two fields to the Zawya export terminal. The shutdown prompted cuts in production at the two fields....

....MORE, including commentary from ING.

Also at OilPrice: 

European Natural Gas Prices Surge to Highest Level Since 2022 

France: Today's Word Is "Machicolations"

With tomorrow's scheduled protests looming, a look at old-school defenses.

French residents are throwing hot water out their windows to stop rioters from breaking into the storefronts below them... If they are excited about what hot water can do, wait until the French learn about guns! Too bad they don't have many of those...

— Shawn Farash (@Shawn_Farash) October 19, 2026

There is a reason we've had multiple posts that mention machicolations and murder holes as amenities to value when shopping for your castle, donjon or stand-alone tower. 

 

The word machicolation probably comes from the old French words for ‘crush’ (machier) and ‘neck’ (col). Neck crushers.

As noted introducing 2024's "Caution: RuPaul Built A Bunker (just don't call it a bunker)":

This is indeed where castles studies can lead. You start to think, say, that's not a bad idea and next thing you know you're pouring boiling pitch onto the swarming hordes at the base of the tower.

(machicolations baby)

Earlier:

Tips For Buying Your Next Castle

A partial repost from May 2017:

The first thing to look for in your new castle are crenels.

****

The next thing to pay attention to is verticality....

**** 

The linked pictures lead to our third consideration, your spiral stairs. From the (maybe) adulterous wife tower above... 

The first thing you notice is the spiral is correct.
Your men-at-arms retreating up the stairs from the attackers will have their right hand free to thrust, parry and chop while the swing of the interlopers is impeded by the outer wall.

However:
On newel-post spiral stairs the tactics are different.... 

***

...Moving on to a couple of the Italian offerings.

Castello di Montefiore has pretty much everything you are looking for in a castle including machicolations under the battlements at the top of the towers for dropping your flaming pitch or whatever on the besiegers:

There! Underneath the crenelated battlements are structures with holes to drop stuff through! 

Much less exposed than standing at the window with your tea kettle. 

After oat prices jumped in 2023 we saw: 

....Takeaway - the urchins can still buy their own damn gruel and won't be knocking on the portcullis for a while yet.

However, should oat prices turn higher again, you may want to cook some up to leave on the other side of the moat. Here's the Royal Society of Chemistry with their re-creation of your basic Oliver Twist workhouse gruel along with some signage you may wish to use:

Although somewhat filling the workhouse gruel leaves much to be desired as this article from the British Medical Journal explains in some detail. Still, beggars really can't be choosers and should the urchin class breach your outer defenses, you can always drop the boiling slop through the machicolations and murder holes of your fortifications to hold them at bay.

For what it's worth the workhouse that inspired Dickens (though not the one his father was in) is now an area of luxury condominiums, thus explaining some of London's affordable housing crisis.

And if you are coming at things from the other side, we have:

News You Can Use: How To Storm A Castle

"Norwegians Leave Gold in Forest as Some Fall for Scam"

This almost sounds like an affinity fraud. Think Jews investing with Bernie Madoff.* 

If the fraudsters convince someone in a group that what they are promoting is real, no matter how outlandish the proposition, the odds increase that the next victim will be part of the same group, whether it is a formal organization or an informal network.

From Bloomberg, October 22: 

Swindlers have persuaded Norwegians into buying gold and leaving it in the forest as part of a growing investment fraud, according to the country’s banking lobby.

Several bank clients have spent large sums to purchase gold and then left it out in nature, following promises that “others will keep it safe while the value rises,” Finans Norge said in a statement Thursday, without specifying the amounts. The gold was subsequently stolen.

It said the scheme is one of three fraud methods that banks are “specifically warning against right now.”

The first of such cases was registered in the spring, Gry Nergård, director of anti-fraud operations at Finans Norge, said by phone. Incidents had been reported in Oslo and towns around it but also in Bergen on the west coast, she added.

Last year, the losses of Norwegian lenders and their customers from financial fraud totaled 962 million kroner ($100 million), the lobby group said. At the same time, the banks prevented fraud attempts amounting to over 3.5 billion kroner.

Finans Norge is conducting an anti-fraud information campaign titled “NO WAY – you won’t fool me,” together with the country’s banks, aiming to increase the awareness of Norwegians about identifying and avoiding scam attempts.

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, 
while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

*Trying to get a handle on who lost what, the Jerusalem Post headlined one of their stories:

Scammer of the Tribe: Bernie Madoff ripped off Jewish orgs. around world 

"OpenAI nears up to $30 billion funding round at $1.25 trillion valuation led by UAE investors"

From CNBC, October 22: 

• OpenAI is close to finalizing an up to $30 billion funding round at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation, according to people familiar with the deal.
• Investors from the United Arab Emirates and Coatue are leading the financing, the people said.
• The financing is being positioned as a bridge ahead of a potential IPO. 

OpenAI is closing in on a funding round that could value the artificial intelligence giant at more than $1 trillion ahead of a potential initial public offering. 

The San Francisco-based AI company is raising up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, according to people familiar with the deal, who asked not to be named because the details were confidential. That valuation does not include new capital raised.

Investors from the United Arab Emirates are leading the round alongside Coatue, according to people familiar with the deal.

OpenAI told investors Thursday that it aims to secure signatures by the end of next week. The final size of the round is still being determined, the people said. 

The financing is being positioned as an “opportunistic” bridge ahead of a potential IPO, the people said. An OpenAI listing will likely come in 2027, CFO Sarah Friar has told employees....

....MORE 

Other examples of Surrealism from the Art Institute of Chicago:

 

La durée poignardée (Time Transfixed)

1938

René Magritte
Belgian, 1898–1967

 

Broken and Restored Multiplication, 1918–19

Suzanne Duchamp

 

Inventions of the Monsters, 1937

Salvador Dalí

Ummm: "Russia Just Did Something Menacing in Orbit That Satellite Trackers Say Is a First"

From Gizmodo, October 20: 

Cosmos 2612 spent several days stalking a U.S.-operated commercial radar-imaging satellite believed to support the Ukrainian military.  

Russia has drawn renewed scrutiny following a series of reportedly unprecedented orbital maneuvers, in which one of its government-owned satellites operated in extreme proximity to a U.S.-operated satellite, highlighting growing concerns over the risks of confrontation in space. 

The Russian satellite, designated Cosmos 2612, carried out a series of close-proximity maneuvers toward ICEYE-X36, a U.S.-registered commercial radar-imaging satellite, between October 15 and 19, based on data by space-tracking company LeoLabs. Cosmos 2612 spent two days at a close proximity of less than 3 miles (5 kilometers) with ICEYE-X36 before moving away to 62 miles (100 kilometers), according to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who tracks ongoing space activities....

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You only live twice.

Followup: USAID As The Kicked-Over Hornets Nest

Although yesterday's ""Democrats have a message for Elon Musk: Watch out" (SPCX; TSLA)" wasn't about USAID specifically I exited with the most recent Inspector General's Report on why USAID couldn't be audited and the outro:

It is the cuts to USAID and its transfer to State Department oversight that kicked the hornets nest. Some of the very powerful "six ways from Sunday" constituencies have decided they want that money and they want that control.

That wasn't just rando opinion.

Here's AlterNet, July 7, 2025:

'They’ve done a very foolish thing': Fired Trump officials pledge to stop him 

Officials recently fired by President Donald Trump from USAID and the State Department are now repurposing their years of experience battling authoritarian regimes abroad to resist what they see as growing authoritarianism in the United States.

For years, these democracy-building experts — ousted earlier this year by the Trump administration — were dispatched to support opposition movements and civil-society actors in autocratic countries. Today, equipped with time and a vast network of former colleagues, they are redirecting that expertise to challenge what they see as an attack on democracy, NOTUS reported Monday.

The purge began in February, when Trump abruptly fired USAID’s inspector general, Paul K. Martin, after his office reported on the impact of the administration’s aid freeze. Shortly thereafter, roughly 83% of programs were cancelled, 94% of personnel laid off, and USAID was folded into the State Department — a move observers called an “advance of authoritarianism."

The dismantling sparked harsh rebukes from former presidents, international partners, and aid advocates. 

“Take it from those of us who worked in authoritarian countries: We’ve become one,” a current federal official, who was not named, told NOTUS.

“They were so quick to disband AID, the group that supposedly instigates color revolutions. But they’ve done a very foolish thing. You just released a bunch of well‑trained individuals into your population. If you kept our offices going and had us play solitaire in the office, it might have been safer to keep your regime," the source added.

The fired experts are mobilizing rapidly, per the report. They are said to be hosting digital briefings for journalists, providing consulting to grassroots organizations, coordinating litigation strategies and advising state attorneys general on constitutional challenges to executive authority.

Some within this informal network of Trump opponents have even begun circulating a decades‑old CIA pamphlet among allies still serving in government — titled “Simple Sabotage.”  

The pamphlet says: “Widespread practice of simple sabotage will harass and demoralize enemy administrators and police."

"The saboteur may have to reverse his thinking… where he formerly thought of keeping his tools sharp, he should now let them grow dull; surfaces that formerly were lubricated now should be sanded; normally diligent, he should now be lazy and careless," it adds.

According to the report, the group sharing this manual includes diplomats and human-rights professionals who once operated on U.S. government payrolls — supporting Latin American dissidents, aiding African independence movements and even contributing to a successful protest campaign in the Middle East.

We've linked to the 1944 OSS manual a few times:

"Timeless Tips for 'Simple Sabotage'"

It was a Featured Article at the CIA in 2012.

Robobanking: "Barclays cutting 5,000 jobs as it increases reliance on AI"

Not to be confused with Rabo Banking. 

From the BBC, October 22: 

Barclays is cutting around 5,000 staff as it introduces more artificial intelligence (AI) into its work processes.

The banking group said 1,000 posts had already been closed and it expects a further reduction of 4,000 to be complete by the end of this year, amounting to around 5% of its global workforce.

The bank's cost reductions are focused on its UK retail bank, but some back office functions for the UK are done in India, where a significant proportion of the job cuts are expected to fall.

Barclays said the changes were the result of an ongoing modernisation plan, with the use of AI being the "icing on the cake" of its strategy.

Although not all of the cuts are due to AI, their scale will prompt further concern over the impact of the new technology.

Company spending on AI is increasing along with claims new tools can replace some of the basic tasks currently done by staff such as administrative and programming work.

HSBC, Standard Chartered and Danske Bank have also flagged AI-related job cuts this year....

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Ukraine: Zelenskyy ready to freeze war along current front lines

He said the same thing in June, I'm not sure why the idea didn't get more traction/mindshare back then. 

From the very pro-Ukraine RBC-Ukraine, October 21:

Freezing hostilities along the front line is a realistic path toward ending Russia's war against Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, according to Fox News.

A journalist asked the head of state whether he would agree to a peace deal that would freeze everything along the current front line.

"Where you still keep 75% or more of your country, regardless of how it started. Would you accept where it is right now?" the journalist asked.

Zelenskyy answered in the affirmative, noting that a peace deal in this format could indeed stop Russian terror.

"Yes, right now we have to freeze. I think this is a real way to end this war," the Ukrainian president stressed....

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Tesla And SpaceX Earnings Call Transcripts (TSLA; SPCX)

First up, from Investing.com, October 21:

Earnings call transcript: Tesla beats Q3 2026 estimates as stock slips after hours 

Tesla posted a modest earnings beat for Q3 2026, reporting adjusted earnings of $0.48 a share on revenue of $28.05 billion, topping Wall Street expectations of $0.45 and $27.92 billion, respectively. The shares rose 3.41% in the regular session to $386.47, but fell 2.22% after hours to $377.88 as investors weighed the company’s improving margins and cash flow against heavy spending plans and a long list of ambitious product targets.

Key Takeaways

• Tesla beat expectations on both earnings and revenue, though the sales surprise was small.
• Automotive gross margin excluding credits improved to 18.1% from 16.3% in the prior quarter.
• The energy business posted its second-best quarter, with 13.7 GWh of deployments and gross margin of 33.1%.
• More than 75% of North American deliveries included a paid FSD subscription at delivery.
• Free cash flow stayed positive at more than $1.5 billion, while cash and investments topped $45 billion.

Company Performance
Tesla said Q3 was a strong quarter across several businesses, with record production rates at its factories and two straight quarters of vehicle deliveries above 480,000 units. Management said demand continues to outpace supply, helped by Full Self-Driving, which it described as the main driver of customer interest.

The company also pointed to strength outside the core auto business. Energy storage deployments reached 13.7 GWh, near the high end of Tesla’s recent history, while services and other margins hit an all-time high of 15.9%. That segment benefited from Supercharging, insurance and early Robotaxi activity.

Tesla’s results also reflected a mix of operating strength and non-operating noise. Net income was affected by a $142 million mark-to-market loss on SpaceX holdings, partly offset by a $290 million Bitcoin mark-to-market gain. Even so, the company ended the quarter with more than $45 billion in cash and investments.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $28.05 billion, up slightly from the forecast of $27.92 billion.
• Earnings per share: $0.48, versus $0.45 expected.
• EPS surprise: 6.67%.
• Revenue surprise: 0.47%.
• Automotive gross margin excluding credits: 18.1%, up from 16.3% in the prior quarter.
• Energy gross margin: 33.1%, up from 20.4% sequentially.
• Energy deployments: 13.7 GWh, the company’s second-best quarter.
• Services and other margin: 15.9%, up from 14.1%.
• Free cash flow: more than $1.5 billion.
• Cash and investments: more than $45 billion at quarter-end.
• Current ratio: 1.94, indicating liquid assets comfortably exceed short-term obligations.
• Debt-to-equity ratio: 0.19, reflecting Tesla’s conservative capital structure.

Earnings vs. Forecast
Tesla’s $0.48 per-share profit beat the consensus estimate by $0.03, or 6.67%, while revenue came in $130 million above forecast. The earnings beat was more meaningful than the sales beat, since the top-line surprise was relatively small.

The quarter suggests Tesla is still executing better than expected, but not by a wide margin. The result fits a pattern of steady improvement rather than a dramatic upside shock. Investors appeared to reward the report at first, but the after-hours decline suggests some caution about how much of the company’s long-term story is already priced in.

Market Reaction
Tesla shares closed the regular session at $386.47, up 3.41% from the previous close of $373.71. In after-hours trading, the stock fell to $377.88, down 2.22% from the close and about 1.53% below the prior day’s level.

The stock remains well above its 52-week low of $297.38, but still below the high of $498.83. The move suggests investors liked the quarter’s operating trends, especially margin improvement and FSD adoption, but were less certain about the company’s near-term valuation after a strong regular-session move. No unusual volume data was provided.

Outlook & Guidance
Tesla cut its full-year capital expenditure outlook to about $20 billion, down from earlier expectations, and said the spending will be funded mainly through operating cash flow. The company also said it has secured borrowing capacity of up to $30 billion, though it does not plan to draw on it this year.

Looking ahead, Tesla outlined a wide range of product and growth milestones:

• First customer activation of unsupervised FSD in vehicles is targeted for Q2 2027.
• Cybercab customer availability is targeted for the end of 2026.
• Robotaxi expansion to Dallas is planned for the month after the call, with more cities before year-end.
• 24/7 Robotaxi operation is targeted by year-end 2026.
• Optimus commercial delivery is still aimed for the end of 2027.
• Tesla said its Megapack business is nearly sold out for 2027.
• A research fab for semiconductors is expected in the first half of 2027, with a first test chip targeted for May or June 2027.

Management also said future spending will rise as Tesla expands Robotaxi, Optimus, solar manufacturing and chip production.

Executive Commentary
Chief Executive Elon Musk said demand remains stronger than production capacity. “Demand is growing rapidly for our vehicles. It is exceeding our production by a significant margin,” he said.

Musk also highlighted the role of autonomy in demand. “The biggest driver for demand is Full Self-Driving. Today, there is really no competitor for FSD in any car that you can buy,” he said.

On robotics, Musk repeated his long-term view of the business. “I remain convinced that Optimus will be the biggest product on Earth, and humanoid robots in general will be the biggest product on Earth,” he said.

Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja said the company is seeing strong customer interest in FSD. He said more than 75% of North American deliveries included a paid FSD subscription at delivery, and added that customers in showrooms are now asking for FSD test drives rather than only vehicle test drives.

Risks and Challenges

• Rising spending: Tesla plans major capital outlays for autonomy, robotics and chip manufacturing, which could pressure near-term free cash flow.
• Execution risk: The company’s Robotaxi, Optimus and Terafab plans are ambitious and still depend on technical and manufacturing milestones.
• Regulatory risk: Expansion of FSD and Robotaxi depends on approval from regulators in the U.S. and abroad.
• Cost pressure: Management cited higher commodity prices and interest rates as ongoing headwinds.
• Supply chain constraints: Tesla said production is still limited by the least efficient component or process in the system.
• Valuation risk: With a market cap of $1.48 trillion and trading at high multiples across earnings, revenue and book value, the stock leaves little room for execution missteps.

Q&A
Analysts focused on how fast Tesla can scale Robotaxi, FSD and Optimus, and what those businesses could mean for revenue.

One major topic was Robotaxi expansion beyond Austin. Management said the company plans to launch in Dallas next and expects to scale to other cities using the same software stack. It also said the business is not limited to Austin.

Another focus was FSD. Tesla said the same software used in Cybercab and Model Y will be rolled into customer vehicles, with the first activation targeted for Q2 2027. The company also said it is building its own mapping and navigation system rather than relying on third-party maps.

Questions about Optimus centered on training data, hardware design and timing. Tesla said the hand remains the most difficult part of the robot, while the broader electromechanical system is more mature. The company said a demo video showing non-pre-programmed behavior should arrive within one to two months.

Analysts also asked about Robotaxi economics. Tesla said it is not yet at its target of $0.30 per paid mile, but believes it has a clear path as utilization improves. For Optimus, the company said costs are trending lower as the design matures.

Full transcript - Tesla Inc (TSLA) Q3 2026:....

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And from Motley Fool Transcribing, October 20: 

SpaceX (SPCX) Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Revenue surged 161% to $14.6 billion as compute and Starlink subscriber growth accelerated

DATE
Tue, Oct 20, 2026

CALL PARTICIPANTS

• Head of Investor Relations - Andrea Williams
• Chief Executive Officer - Elon Musk
• President and Chief Operating Officer - Gwynne Shotwell
• Chief Financial Officer - Bret Johnsen

TAKEAWAYS

• Revenue -- $14.6 billion, up 161% year over year driven by the ramp of cloud services agreements and Starlink subscriber growth.
• Net Income -- $4.4 billion, representing an improvement of $5.5 billion compared to a net loss of $1.1 billion in the prior year period.
• Adjusted EBITDA -- $8.8 billion, a 306% increase year over year reflecting operating leverage in the Connectivity and Super Intelligence segments.
• Super Intelligence Revenue -- $7.6 billion, up from $813 million last year due to the activation of new nameplate compute capacity and the Cursor acquisition.
• Connectivity Revenue -- $5.2 billion, growing 69% year over year supported by a 57% increase in consumer revenues and a 91% rise in enterprise and government revenues.
• Space Revenue -- $1.8 billion, a 6% increase year over year anchored by a favorable customer launch mix despite a lower total launch count compared to the prior year.
• Starlink Consumer Subscribers -- 13.6 million, with 1.6 million net additions in the third quarter primarily from developed markets.
• Starlink Mobile Users -- 22 million monthly users, a 37% increase quarter over quarter following service expansions in countries such as Uganda and Kazakhstan.
• Nameplate Compute Capacity -- 1.7 gigawatts, an increase from 1.4 gigawatts in the second quarter as the company continued building out the Colossus II cluster.
• Capital Expenditures -- $19.6 billion, focused on the buildout of Super Intelligence infrastructure, Starship development, and satellite production.
• Q4 Capital Expenditure Guidance -- $35 billion to $40 billion, reflecting the accelerated build path for compute infrastructure at sites in Memphis and Southaven.
• Q1 2027 Revenue Guidance -- $33 billion to $37 billion, based on increased visibility into the compute contract pipeline over the next six months.
• Starlink Consumer ARPU -- $69 per month, a 5% sequential increase attributed to shifting customer mix dynamics.
• Cursor Acquisition Contribution -- $608 million in revenue, representing the post-acquisition results from Aug. 14 to Sept. 30.
• Backlog -- $63 billion, with $42 billion expected to be recognized as revenue within the next 12 months.
• Enterprise and Government Aviation -- 12,000 aircraft contracted, with over 3,800 planes currently equipped with Starlink hardware as of the end of the quarter.
• Starship Bandwidth Deployment -- 26 terabits per second, delivered by the Starlink V3 satellites launched during the Flight 14 mission.
• Mass to Orbit Share -- 90%, representing the company's portion of total global mass launched to orbit during the third quarter.
• Grok Bot Weekly Users -- 800,000 paid users, more than doubling over the previous month following its launch in August.
• Compute Nameplate Target -- 2.5 gigawatts to 3 gigawatts, expected to be online by the end of the fourth quarter.
• 2027 ARR Target -- $500 billion to $1 trillion, representing management's goal for the annualized recurring revenue run rate by the end of 2027.
• Compute Deployment Pace -- 20,000 GB300 units per month, representing the current rate of bringing new graphics processing units online.
• Grok Enterprise Growth -- 50% quarter-over-quarter increase in customers with more than $1 million in run-rate revenue on a pro forma basis.
• Launch Count -- 35 total launches, consisting of 12 customer missions and 23 internal flights during the third quarter.
• Advertising Revenue -- $538 million, representing a 19% year-over-year increase as the company builds momentum on its new advertising technology platform.

 RISKS

• Musk warned that the success of the upcoming Flight 15 booster and ship catch is uncertain, noting that while the company has a steady stream of attempts planned, a positive outcome is not assured for the initial flight.
• Musk stated, "the special committees have not reached agreement on the terms of any transaction. And obviously, there's no guarantee that they will," regarding the possible combination of SpaceX and Tesla.
• Musk stated, "I think we're going to face a shortage of super intelligence compute. And that shortage is going to remain for a long time," identifying infrastructure and power as primary constraints.

SUMMARY

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SPCX +7.80%) reported a period of significant scaling as management transitioned the company toward a vertically integrated infrastructure provider across launch, connectivity, and super intelligence. The company achieved a record 90% share of global mass to orbit while simultaneously accelerating the deployment of its terrestrial compute clusters to reach 1.7 gigawatts of nameplate capacity. Management stated that the combination of launch leadership, recurring Starlink revenue, and the expansion of Super Intelligence infrastructure is driving meaningful operating leverage. The company is aggressively investing in Starship development and next-generation satellite constellations, with fourth-quarter capital expenditures projected to nearly double sequentially to support the accelerated build path of its compute centers.

Management announced the development of the Louisiana spaceport, with Musk stating the facility will eventually include "on the order of 20 or more launch towers" to enable millions of tonnes to orbit annually.

The company expects Starship to reach a weekly launch cadence in the first half of 2027, accelerating to twice weekly or higher by the end of that year as rapid reusability is finalized.

Musk indicated that the company prefers short-term compute rental contracts at spot market rates, stating, "our belief is that the value of compute per watt will increase over time, not decrease."

SpaceX is leveraging its proprietary rocket engine casting technology to manufacture terrestrial turbine components, which Musk claimed allows the company to bring power online 12 to 18 months faster than competitors.

Management detailed a multi-year semiconductor road map, aiming for a test chip in mid-2027 and volume production at the Terafab facility by the third quarter of 2028.

Gwynne Shotwell reported that aviation production rates have quadrupled since the beginning of the year, with a goal to double that rate again before the end of the year to meet aircraft demand.

The company entered into an agreement to acquire 800 megahertz low-band spectrum, which management stated will pave the way for Starlink Mobile to become a major mobile carrier in the United States.

INDUSTRY GLOSSARY

• Starlink V3: The third-generation satellite in the Starlink constellation, delivering significantly higher bandwidth capacity per launch compared to previous versions.
• Colossus II: The company's massive supercomputing cluster located in Memphis, utilized for training and inference of super intelligence models.
• Terafab: The planned high-volume semiconductor fabrication facility designed to produce super intelligence chips.
• Grok Bot: An agentic super intelligence assistant designed for both consumer use and enterprise workflows.
• GB300: High-performance graphics processing units used in the buildout of super intelligence compute infrastructure.
• Starfall: A space capsule designed to provide routine, low-cost access to microgravity environments for scientific and medical research.
• Starmind: A next-generation satellite constellation focused on high-bandwidth super intelligence connectivity.
• Nameplate Compute: The total theoretical power capacity of a data center or supercomputing cluster, measured in gigawatts.

Full Conference Call Transcript....

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Both stocks are down this morning, half an hour in to the regular trading day TSLA is at $382.465 down $4.005 (1.04%) and SPCX is at $152.34, down $6.97 (4.38%)