A Rebel Army Is Building a Rare-Earth Empire on China’s Border

A bit of M&A with Silicon Valley's Nerd Reich and they could take over the world.

From Bloomberg Businessweek, July 17:

The Kachin Independence Organization fought for decades in obscurity. Now it’s supplying essential minerals to manufacturers around the world. 

Along Myanmar’s 1,300-mile border with China, a town called Pangwa sits in a small valley, surrounded by forested peaks that are occasionally dusted with snow. For years, this hardscrabble outpost was controlled by an aging warlord, an ally of Myanmar’s brutal military junta, who ran his fiefdom largely according to his own whims. Loggers felled precious hardwoods and spirited them over the border. Farmers were permitted to grow opium poppies, as long as they paid steep taxes.

Then, in the mid-2010s, workers began arriving from southern China in search of a precious resource: rare earths, metallic elements with exceptional magnetic and conductive properties that are crucial to dozens of modern technologies. They carved collection pools into the terraced slopes, which soon filled with a milky, turquoise-tinted stew of chemicals, soil and water. Gambling and drug use flourished, the vices of a frontier boomtown.

This new reality continued until early last year, when an organization called the Kachin Independence Army started an offensive—part of a civil conflict between the junta and hundreds of armed groups, rooted in resource-rich areas abutting China, India and Thailand, that’s now in its seventh decade. Formed in 1961 to fight for greater autonomy for the ethnic minority of the same name, the KIA had built itself into a formidable military force, with deep experience operating in mountainous terrain. By October it was advancing steadily toward Pangwa, encountering meager resistance. After sporadic exchanges of fire, the government-affiliated soldiers defending the town opted to retreat; some stashed their weapons in drainage ditches and changed into civilian clothes, aiming to blend in with crowds of refugees streaming toward China. On Oct. 18, Pangwa fell.

Measured by the number of bodies atop the battlefield, the victory was unremarkable. Measured by the spoils below, it was one of the KIA’s most significant ever. Myanmar is the world’s third-largest source of rare earths after China and the US, and last year it accounted for almost half of the global mining of two especially important elements: dysprosium and terbium, which are essential for electric vehicles, wind turbines and certain military gear. According to Adamas Intelligence Inc., a research and advisory company that tracks the industry, this makes the country “a critical, imminently irreplaceable supplier into trillion-dollar technology value chains.”

They include the operations of major global manufacturers. The watchdog group Global Witness recently found that Chinese companies with links to Myanmar rare-earth supplies have listed as customers Ford Motor, Hyundai Motor, Siemens, Tesla, Vestas Wind Systems, Volkswagen and others. (Of these, only Siemens AG responded to a request for comment from Bloomberg Businessweek; according to a spokeswoman, the company has “a comprehensive due diligence framework … to prevent materials from conflict-afflicted and high-risk areas entering our supply chain.”)

Nearly all of Myanmar’s rare-earth mines are in Kachin State, mostly clustered around Pangwa, and the KIA now appears to control every one of them—supervising large teams of informal laborers who perform dirty, dangerous work with next to no protection. This doesn’t mean the army’s leaders are about to get a seat at the top tables in international economic negotiations. China remains the leading rare-earth producer by far, with roughly 10 times Myanmar’s annual output. Moreover, the KIA has no capacity to process the elements mined within its territory; all must be sent for refining to Chinese plants and onward to manufacturers globally. Dysprosium and terbium were among the seven materials whose export China recently restricted in response to US President Donald Trump’s trade war, and for now, at least, there’s no alternative path for them to reach global markets. 

The KIA’s situation is remarkable nonetheless. Amid the global race to secure supplies of rare earths, even modest resources, controlled by governments with few other assets, can provide powerful leverage. Greenland, the Danish territory that Trump has said he wants to acquire for its icebound resources, has no active rare-earth mines. Nor does Ukraine, with which the US recently signed a major critical minerals deal. Kachin, by contrast, has hundreds.

The KIA has been silent so far about its intentions for these new mineral riches. The army and its political wing, the Kachin Independence Organization, are opaque to outsiders, with leadership roles filled by a cadre of aging generals who’ve spent most of their life fighting the Myanmar military. They have no diplomatic representation in foreign capitals and no formal connections to international economic bodies. (They do have a media spokesman, Colonel Naw Bu; he didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Yet their role in the production of rare earths, and especially of dysprosium and terbium, is now significant enough that millions of consumers worldwide will soon be using products that contain material mined from their territory, in a violent enclave of a country at war with itself. Ryan Castilloux, the founder of Adamas Intelligence, is incredulous about the situation. Five years from now, he says, “we will look back on this and say, ‘Oh, I can’t believe that happened.’”....

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The "Media and Markets: How Systematic Misreporting Inflates Bubbles, Deepens Downturns and Distorts Economic Reality"

From Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy:

Discussion Paper Series

#D-86, June 2014 

Beginning in 2010, there was an overwhelming consensus in the American and British media—including the elite business press—that the euro currency zone’s breakup was both inevitable and imminent. Illustrious commentators competed for the most lurid scenarios of Eurogeddon.
But guess what? Shortly after Harvard historian Niall Ferguson published a Newsweek cover story boldly titled “The End of the Euro” in May 20101, the currency began an 11-month, 24-percent rally. 

Not only has the euro survived and retained its value, but the Eurozone even has three more member countries today than on the eve of the crisis. An investor blinded by the elite financial media’s repeated forecasts of Europe’s impending demise would have lost a bundle. In 2013, some of the best returns on any asset class worldwide were on the bonds and equities of European countries that the press had written off.

That’s not to say that all is well in Europe. But on the most fundamental and important question—whether the euro would continue to exist as a currency—the media have been getting the story spectacularly wrong, year after year. 

Just as the parade of crime and disasters on the nightly news is only a highly distorted version of the actual world, so the economic and business news is but a skewed and selective snippet of the real economy. When it comes to political or general news, we’ve long been familiar with the way in which media skew reality through sound-bite-ism, a focus on personalities and conflict, and the preference of bad news over good. Media compete for attention, editors tend to pick the simplest and most familiar narratives and templates, and reporters often don’t question their sources or dig deep into a story. Why should we believe that business and economic journalism is free of these afflictions?

The quality of business and economic reporting matters. Just as the political conversation and the conduct of election campaigns have been fundamentally shaped and altered—not always for the better—by modern media culture, so the media have an outsized effect on economic life as well. 

News stories drive investor behavior and influence consumer sentiment. From the work of behavioral economists like 2013 Nobel laureate Robert Shiller, we know that media-driven collective sentiment is one of the cues driving not-always-rational market trends. Media attention also affects policy debates on everything from business regulation to taxes to financial-sector bailouts.

Just as a vibrant press plays a crucial role in a healthy democracy, the media also have an indispensable watchdog role in business and economic affairs. At their best, journalists make sense of complex economic issues, dig into scandals that would otherwise go unseen, and shine light on government economic policies and their effects on businesses, jobs, consumers and taxpayers. Without smart and critical economic reporting, society would have far fewer defenses against special interests from Wall Street on down.

This paper goes beyond the usual anecdotes of stories mishandled by the press. Instead, I use data from media content analysis to highlight the systematic mistakes that editors and reporters repeatedly make when they cover the economy. These deeply ingrained biases and distortions are categorized into five major types. First, I will look at the media’s role in inflating bubbles, where uncritical bandwagon reporting plays an indispensable role in creating destructive crises in the market economy. Second, the same focus on personalities and dogfights that we know from political news systematically distorts business reporting as well. Third, media are drawn to big companies and well-known consumer brands like moths to a flame, at the expense of a
substantial invisible economy that flies under the media’s radar. Fourth, an obsession with short- term market movements and company numbers conveys more noise than signal, gives us dots of mostly useless and backwards-looking data instead of connecting the dots to a larger context, and takes company accounting at face value when experience teaches us not to place too much trust in those numbers. Last, a preference for bad news and worst-case scenarios often leads to doom-mongering, especially in times of crisis.

By focusing on these systematic mistakes and the “newsroom mechanics” that lead to distorted reporting on the economy, this paper both avoids and goes beyond the usual fixation on the media’s alleged liberal or conservative political bias. In a final section, I will discuss some of the implications for journalism and propose some ways we could improve. 

One final introductory note: This paper will be documented with data provided by Media Tenor, a Switzerland-based research consultancy that has assembled a 20-year database of over 110 million manually coded data points from U.S. and international print, broadcast and online media. Additional data were provided by the Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project in Washington, D.C. Keyword searches in the Factiva database were used as well.2

Bandwagoning and Bubbles....

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"Our Spreadsheet Overlords"

From The Ideas Letter, May 29, 2025:

Two years have passed since OpenAI released ChatGPT and the panic set in. Two years of above-the-fold headlines about “AI”—a subaltern specialty topic and the preserve of goofy sci-fi films for some 80 years prior—and two years of confusing, rank speculation about “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), a loosely defined idea of “human-level” yet machinic reasoning. Large Language Models, or LLMs, capture and generate what we have long taken to be an essentially human thing, language, shaking our historical sense of our own species to the core. But their abilities are matched by a lack of intelligence, and even a lack of the consistency we have long expected from computing machines.  

As a new surge of AGI talk has taken over the airwaves in the third year of LLMs, a deeply revealing form of Actually Existing AI speaks against the hype: Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency, a sloppy, violent-yet-banal attack on the codebase and massive personal data dragnet of the federal government. While we wait for AGI—and while we’re distracted by endless, ungrounded debates about it—the reality of modern AI is parading in plain sight in the form of the most boring constitutional crisis imaginable. Rather than machine intelligence, AI is an avant-garde form of digital bureaucracy, one that deepens our culture’s dependence on the spreadsheet.  

The discourse is providing cover for this disastrous attack. Kevin Roose, a tech columnist for the New York Times, recently explained why he’s “feeling the AGI.” (Unfortunately, Roose’s reasons seem to boil down to, “I live in San Francisco.”) Similarly, Ezra Klein, of the paper’s Opinion pages, thinks the government knows AGI is coming. And the statistician Nate Silver suggests we have to “come to grips with AI.” The internet ethnographer and journalist Max Read has dubbed this surge of AI believers the “AI backlash backlash,” a reaction to the anti-tech skepticism we’ve seen over the past few years. The position, according to Read, is that AI “is quite powerful and useful, and even if you hate that, lots of money and resources are being expended on it, so it’s important to take it seriously rather than dismissing it out of hand.” That’s a far cry from the derisive characterization of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT as “stochastic parrots” (which remix and repeat human language) or “fancy autocomplete.” These systems are far more capable—and more dangerous—than the skeptics make them out to be. Dispelling the myth of their intelligence does not excuse us from paying close attention to their power.  

Rather than providing the much-vaunted innovation and efficiency associated with Silicon Valley, AI systems create more confusion than clarity. They are a coping mechanism for a global society that runs on digital data sets too vast to make sense of, too complex to disentangle manually. Feeding off a staggering amount of digitized data, they are a tool specified to that data and its tabular format. When we think of AI, we should think less of Terminator 2 and more of the TV show Severance, in which office workers search for “bad numbers” on the strength of vibes alone.  

An LLM is nothing more than a distilled matrix of values that represent words. The models we are all familiar with now—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok—have many moving parts, but their core element is a large set of rows and columns that is the result of billions of dollars in training. The training data are on the order of 6 trillion –to 10 trillion tokens (including words, letters, and other marks like “&,” “-ing,” and “3”)— orders of magnitude more text than humans have ever used for any purpose—and they only exist today because of the planetary sprawl of the internet. Using all this training data, you’ll be able to make a bot that responds to human questions, retrieves information, generates poetry and memos and anything else you like, and effectively feels like magic. You’ll have an AI model that feels like AGI.  

If—as happened between early 2023 and late 2024—people stop feeling that magic, you can also then tweak your model. Instead of its just responding to prompts and queries, you can tell it to generate a bunch of responses and then print off its “thoughts” as it chooses the best one. This new model could do fun things, like fill an Instacart order or book a vacation. And those things are what agents do, so—after a new round of training and a new round of VC funding—everyone will be feeling AGI again. 

Two tendencies, alike in error, reign over AI discourse today. The one, as Read observes, is that critics deride AI as a tool of capitalism and a con put on by tech oligarchs, failing to explain its power. The other, which I’m going to call “the performance fallacy,” confuses benchmarks for intelligence. Until we move past this pas de deux of shallow analysis, we will not be able to confront the very real problem of AI today.  

The Performance Fallacy 

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a simple way to determine if a machine could think: Ask it some questions. If you couldn’t figure out if you were talking to a machine or not, you should concede that it is intelligent. This game became known as the “Turing Test,” and no one, to my knowledge, has ever been satisfied by it. Turing’s idea was that when we decide someone else is intelligent, it’s not that we know this, it’s that we assume it. I don’t ask to see how your brain works to determine if you’re intelligent; I just think of you as a human. The definition of intelligence that comes from this isn’t a definition at all—and that’s why AI has been permanently split between two ways of understanding what Turing meant.  

The first way is according to the benchmark. Every new model that gets released today is tested on an endless series of performance thresholds with fancy acronym titles (ARC-AGI, a series of difficult puzzles, is a popular one these days). Each set of benchmark performances is compared to earlier attempts: A new model is said to score 87% where the previous best was 59%, even if no one can tell you what those percentages mean. If OpenAI’s 03 “reasoning” model scores 87% on ARC-AGI, does that mean it is 87% intelligent? Is “87% intelligent” a coherent idea? In the world of pure benchmark culture, such questions don’t matter and can’t really be asked. The system is optimizing for something that looks like what intelligent beings (humans) do, so there’s little reason for skepticism. The most extreme version of this benchmarking is arguably the Loebner Prize, a competition that ran for 30 years and awarded a large sum to the most convincing chatbot. Its benchmark for “intelligence” was taken from an offhanded comment of Turing’s: that a chatbot that fooled a human roughly two-thirds of the time would count as intelligent.  

But it’s not clear that Turing really intended for this, or any other, benchmark to determine what intelligence was or who counted as intelligent. In “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” he concocted several exchanges between himself and a fictional future computer, in which he asked the machine to do math problems, play chess, and compose a poem about the Forth Bridge in Scotland. These transcripts of an imaginary set of conversations—alongside ideas like a machine needing to “enjoy strawberries and cream”—show that Turing was thinking of intelligence holistically. This second way of framing intelligence is negative and, maybe surprisingly, not technical at all. Conversation was the un-benchmarkable threshold. And even though LLMs can’t prove that they can enjoy anything, they can certainly say that they can, and in language that scrambles the very idea of the Turing Test in its benchmark form altogether.  

Benchmark culture adds to the vaudeville quality of tech today, with its demos, entertainer personalities, and gimmicks. All of the showmanship claims to be about performance. Your new iPhone is faster, better, stronger. Analytics makes everything from finance to sports better....

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The author, Leif Weatherby, is an associate professor of German and the director of the Digital Theory Lab at New York University. He is the author of " Language Machines." 

"Democracy Means Agreeing with Me: Electrification Past and Present"

From American Affairs Journal, May 2025:

REVIEW ESSAY
Democracy in Power:
A History of Electrification in the United States
by Sandeep Vaheesan
University of Chicago Press, 2024, 400 pages

The American grid is in trouble. For years, our country has been retiring reliable power plants and building unreliable wind and solar resources. Moreover, most of the country’s power gets allocated in complex power markets where decisions are made beyond the public eye. And areas without markets still fall beneath the aegis of utilities, leviathans who toss their weight around in state politics and often get caught up in corruption schemes.

These were problems when America’s power demand stayed flat for decades. Even then, potential solutions felt more like a dizzying labyrinth of rules, regulations, interest groups, and technical minutiae replete with unobvious trade-offs and bizarre political deadlocks. And now that the AI revolution has dawned, America faces a surge in power demand that it is ill-prepared to meet. This new reality has only intensified both the need for grid reform and the difficulties of even understanding what needs reformation.

Some argue that the long queues to achieve interconnection in our power markets call for the legalization of microgrids that allow data centers and other private power consumers to pave their own way. Others who identify the same interconnection problem demand reform and streamlining within the markets. Another faction points to permit­ting as the lynchpin issue for all power projects—resolve that and most other problems dissolve. And then there are those who argue that federal subsidies have distorted our power markets, those who say the markets are fundamentally unworkable because market failures mean blackouts, those who decry the continued existence of monopoly utilities, those who see fossil fuels as the greatest problem attached to the power grid, and so on. Even in this incomplete list of perspectives there are shifting areas of overlap and mutual disagreement.

A recent book, Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States by Sandeep Vaheesan, takes square aim at the issue of grid governance, arguing that democratic public institutions should rule the power industry, not private entities. Unfortunately, Vaheesan reveals himself to be less than thoughtful about both the power industry and democracy. Instead, his book serves as a clarion call for people who like attending stakeholder meetings about a vital piece of infrastructure: these meetings, he hopes, would lead to a proliferation of further meetings so broad and democratic that their outcomes will, by nature, result in Vaheesan’s dream of a decarbonized power grid that runs (however unreliably) on sun, wind, and batteries. Reality, physical and political, takes on an incredible malleability throughout the book. On this point, Vaheesan’s introduction is quite straightforward:

History shows that the future of the power sector is in the hands of the public it serves. It is not preordained to be one way or another. . . . These things, which are often deemed private and naturalized, are institutions created by human beings and can be remade by us.

Who can deny such a claim? Often what is old turns out not to be what is true, though it has through age acquired truth’s reputation. And yet any serious student of history must admit that in the gyre of unfolding events the freedom to mold or re-mold institutions meets with fierce external pressures. But to concede fortune’s role in history’s welter would spoil one of Vaheesan’s guiding assumptions: that the world is simple and that the simple is just. Complications thus arise solely from the behavior of the greedy and the powerful (categories, for him, of complete and mutual inclusion). To correct this, we need only expand democracy, the font of simple, truthful action. Such a plain-hearted worldview warrants admiration for its moral sensitivity if not its intellectual rigor. As a result, the thinking that emerges from this worldview, while often well-told and even better researched, falls far short of the mark.

Powering Industrial America

Vaheesan starts at the near-beginning of the power industry, when America began to shift from an agrarian republic to an industrialized power. In the early twentieth century, electricity was still a relatively cutting-edge industry. Few people had power and the people who had it lived in cities, or ran factories in those cities. But as more and more Americans began to pack into urban centers, electricity started to become more common in households and apartments. And yet, the industry was still a chaos of competition. Often, utilities pitched into competitive rate slashing that bankrupted all parties. Setting appropriate rates, especially before the advent of meters to monitor consumption, sat at the nexus of black magic and sheer guesswork.

But out of this morass, certain dynamics became clear: competition proved unworkable because it led to dangerous and redundant infrastructure, the aforementioned price wars, and an investment environment so chaotic that financiers steered clear. How to solve this issue? One of Thomas Edison’s protégés, Samuel Insull, believed that the only way forward was to accept regulation. He reasoned that if utilities didn’t benefit from fierce competition, then they were natural monopolies, i.e. “the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity was most efficiently performed bya single, vertically integrated company.”

Therefore, utilities should accept regulation at the state level in return for monopoly status. Public commissions would make sure they charged their customers fair rates while guaranteeing just and fair returns on capital invested. Insull hoped that regulated monopoly status would stabilize the investment environment, allowing utilities to secure the financing they needed to grow. Consumers simply had to sit back and watch their bills drop as the efficiencies took root. When Insull first pitched this idea to his industry peers they scoffed. But eventually, they came around. So did the Progressives, who saw in Insull’s vision a valuable proving ground for the belief in “scientific management” and “apolitical regulation.”

By 1907, states began granting monopoly franchises and establishing utility commissions. Insull was vindicated on all counts: bankers opened their wallets, customers saw low rates, and the industry rapidly consolidated.

Drawbacks abounded, however. As Vaheesan explains, the regulatory rationale essentially meant that the more money utilities spent, the more money they could make to recoup costs. Utility commissions often found themselves outgunned and outmaneuvered by utilities when it came to rate-making. Technically, a CEO could redecorate his office, write it off as an expense, and turn a profit. Worse has been done, which Vaheesan chronicles well. Insull and his pals turned their trade group, the National Electric Light Association (NELA), into a propaganda arm that ensnared media outlets, political bodies, and educational institutions. The scale and scope of this endeavor staggers the mind—and customers paid for much of it, as utilities folded these expenses into their arcane, self-serving rate-making calculus.

Monopoly status also laid the foundation for the financial house of cards that disgraced the utility industry when it fell in 1929. Public utility holding companies were formed to expand utilities, because they could “own the securities of other corporations instead of owning plants and facilities.” Over the course of the 1920s, competition for acquisitions and thus the growth of holding companies exploded. Holding companies solved an important financial difficulty.

This framework, however, was riven with problems, as Vaheesan explains:

Each company within a holding company was usually a separate corporation, which meant that its owner (including other corporations) had limited liability. In practical terms, the holding company was ordinarily not liable for the debts and other obligations of its operating companies and subholding companies.

Thus, a utility don could own and control a bunch of smaller companies with little capital invested. Even worse, he could headquarter the company in one state, allowing him to skirt the utility commission in the other states in which his subholding companies operated.

But holding companies also added “watered stock,” or non-voting shares to their list of financial benefits. Everyday people could “own” a part of these utilities by investing, but they could exert no control over how the company operated, nor could they glimpse its inner workings. Utilities who paid for NELA to advertise investing in nonvoting shares charged their customers for the privilege, thus double-dipping on people’s bank accounts. These byzantine firms were over-leveraged and top-heavy.

When the market crashed at the end of the 1920s, the utility industry crashed with it. Hundreds of thousands of common stock owners watched their investments plummet. Vaheesan doesn’t mention this, but even into the 1990s, it was common to hear old-timers in Chicago grumble that they’d lost a lot of money with Samuel Insull.

But for Vaheesan, those aren’t even the greatest crimes of the early monopoly framework for private utilities. His main criticisms of the monopoly utilities have to do with how they crushed municipal power and left rural Americans in the dark. Municipal power systems were the public alternative to monopoly utilities, though they were soon outcompeted by the private sector thanks to regulated monopoly status, which allowed private companies to scale-up faster, and thus crowd out opportunities for public power. Naturally, those in private industry tried to stamp out potential municipal power competitors and public takeovers when and wherever they could.

To the benefit of these tycoons, regulation ripped democratic control out of the peoples’ hands and placed authority in the palms of technocrats. Ostensibly, that outcome was regulation’s guiding rationale. “The aim was to replace local democratic control with technocratic management at the state level,” Vaheesan argues. This is a stretch. Municipal power always struggled for a whole host of reasons. Namely, for the financial reasons mentioned above, and the economies of scale.

What’s most puzzling about this section is that he omits one of the most important rationales for natural monopoly in the utility sector, at least for Samuel Insull, state regulation’s primary champion. True, Insull realized that monopoly reduced the dangers of redundant power line infrastructure and stabilized a hair-raising investment environment. Even more importantly, regulated monopoly status delivered greater economies of scale.

Insull’s drive for lower rates required larger power plants that could drop the unit cost of power, thus expanding the market for electricity. As that brought more customers in, even larger plants could be financed to begin the process over again. This approach required regulated monopoly status and became the industry’s standard playbook up until the 1970s. The entire premise was to make power more affordable to more people, because it was good for their business.....

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Killer Cows Chase Grizzly Bear

From Wyoming's Cowboy State Daily, July 10:

Herd Of Giant Cows Team Up To Scare Off Grizzly Bear

A herd of exceptionally large cows teamed up last week to run off a grizzly bear in Montana. The herd of Charolais cattle, known for their huge size and aggressive nature, surrounded the grizzly and forced it to run away.... 

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Cows are deadly.

Meanwhile In India....
From The Sun, April 22, 2023:

Man killed by a flying COW that was hit by a train and flung 100ft in freak accident while urinating on tracks

This is not a surprise for those readers who have been with us for a while:

Vaclav Smil: Planet of the Cows
Tycoon and Oxford Professor Brian Bellhouse Killed By Cows
We have been warning against the homicidal beasts for years, links below.

The Cows Are Trying To Kill Us
Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway: "What Mathematical Models of Herding Cows Can Teach Us About Markets"
"Robots Will Almost Certainly Not Train Cows To Kill Us All As Part Of Their Plan For Worldwide Domination"

No, it is NOT an obsession. We just want to keep the cows happy.
The Cows Are Trying To Kill Us
We're not just talking bovine flatus or yummy saturated fat....

From io9:
Cows Are Deadlier Than You Ever Knew

Every year, cows kill more people than sharks. And yet nobody ever makes a horror movie about them, and there's no Cow Week. These deadly beasts have managed to stay completely under the radar... until now. Find out just why cows are so deadly.

Deliberate Attacks on People

In the United States, the CDC estimates that about twenty-two people are killed by cows each year, and of those cow attacks, seventy-five percent were known to be deliberate attacks. One third of the killings were committed by cows that had previously displayed aggressive behavior.

People know that bulls are dangerous, and it's true. When animal behaviorists analyzed 21 cases that occurred across a four-state area, they found that bulls were responsible for ten of the deaths. Cows were responsible for six deaths. What's really chilling is that, in five cases, people were killed by multiple cows in group attacks.

Group attacks can be surprisingly well-coordinated. When they're feeling defensive, cows will gather in a circle, all facing outwards, lowering their heads and stamping the ground. When they're feeling offensive, certain cows lead the charge. One man, who was attacked while walking his dog along a path, reported, "I fell forwards and rolled into a ball and every time I tried to get up they jumped on me; they were rolling me along the hill with their legs trying to get me to open up. There were seven or eight cows. There were a couple leaders."

Even the people who survive cow attacks rarely brush them off. In 2014, a mountaineer and cyclist was leading a race through a pasture when a group of cows attacked him. He received fractures on eight ribs, a shoulder, and a part of his spine. A woman, attacked the same year, got six broken ribs and a punctured lung. Cows mostly trample and kick people, but if they get their head beneath their victim they can literally throw a person into the air and let them fall back down on the ground.

Humans may not be able to trust cattle, but non-humans have been known to employ cows as security. Sheep raised with cows will run into the center of the cow-herd when faced with a threat, knowing that if things get hairy, the cows will take care of business.

Battle Cows  
Because they move slowly and require a lot of grass and water, cows are impractical standard weapons of war. That hasn't stopped people from using them as improvised weapons, especially if the other side was dumb enough to bring them along. A herd of cows' potential to do damage is even more infamous. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with old Westerns knows what's going to happen when someone shouts, "Stampede!"

George Armstrong Custer wrote a memoir in which he described Native Americans inducing cattle to stampede as either a distraction tactic or an outright attack. No matter what the purpose, soldiers knew that they had to take the cattle in hand before doing anything else. Another book, tellingly entitled The Uncivilized Races of Men in All Countries of the World and written in 1878, recounts the conflict between the Boers and the Zulu. The author, Reverend John George Wood writes, "The Zulus have sometimes outwitted the Boers, by introducing inside of a camp at night, scouts, who speared the cattle frightening them into a stampede." Both books insist this is not the right way to fight a war, but admit the tactic is a good one. A stampede of cows is a scary thing.

Kamikaze Cows

Cows don't have to intend anyone's death in order to kill them. Any fifteen hundred pound animal can do a lot of damage, which is why some motorists, driving beside cliffs in rural country, have been amused by signs warning them about falling cows. It wasn't so much of a joke when, in Switzerland, over the course of a few weeks, twenty-eight cows either fell or jumped over a cliff. A man in Brazil was killed by a cow that fell on his car. And, in Indiana, drivers along a highway were startled when a trailer on an overpass tipped over and rained cows on them. A bull survived the fall and ran amok on the highway, attacking a tow-truck driver....MORE

"TSMC aims to make 30% of high-end chips in US with Arizona fab build out" (TSM)

From The Register, July 17:

Shovels in the dirt at Fab 3 as Fab 2’s 3nm ramp charges in several quarters early

TSMC says it will ramp up production at its second fab site in Arizona earlier than initially expected as it looks to shift nearly a third of its leading-edge wafer output stateside.

The Taiwanese foundry giant began volume production at its first fab in Arizona at the end of 2024, serving major US chip designers including Nvidia, Apple, and AMD.

Construction of TSMC's second US fab, which is set to produce parts on its 3nm process node, has now been completed, CEO CC Wei said during the company's Q2 earnings call Thursday, according to a transcript.

"We're seeing strong interest from our leading US customers and are working on speeding up the volume production schedule by several quarters to support their need," he told analysts on the call.

Efforts to accelerate TSMC's US build out are set against a backdrop of uncertainty caused by the Trump administration's often erratic and inconsistent trade policies. The US president has placed a 10 percent tariff on all imports to the US, briefly imposed a 32 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods before delaying the measure, and has repeatedly teased the possibility of a 100 percent import tax on foreign made semiconductors.

Faced with this specter, TSMC doubled down on its US investments in March announcing a $100 billion foundry expansion that would see the construction of three additional fabs alongside previously announced advanced packaging and R&D facilities in the region....

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We have a lot of posts on the manufacturing geniuses.

Possibly of interest:

September 2024 - Chips: "TSMC execs allegedly dismissed Sam Altman as ‘podcasting bro’ — OpenAI CEO made absurd requests for 36 fabs for $7 trillion"

May 2025 -  Chips: With All Eyes On Taiwan's Computex, Here's TSMC's Roadmap To 2028 (TSM) 

"Can the Developed World Grow Its Way Out of Stagnation?"

I sure hope so because that appears to be the only option left.

And it also appears that debt-fueled growth is the path that both the U.S. and Germany have chosen.

Past is not prologue but it is the only guide we have. And unfortunately we only have one time and price series. Someday it will all end, it may be tomorrow, it may be in a couple hundred years as stasis and/or entropy and/or civilizational catastrophe makes its mark.

Here's our boilerplate intro to extrapolating the past into the future:
"Industrial Revolution Comparisons Aren't Comforting"

Partly because of Eddington's Arrow of Time, at least in the mundane everyday experience, we only have one economic history dataset to work with. Because of this I used to argue with people who said this time will be like the last time but found that approach neither satisfying nor enlightening. I don't argue anymore, I just observe, like a kid watching a bug and wonder where the almost metaphysical certitude would be coming from, because, truth be told, nobody knows how this all works out....

....Again, we only have one dataset. We can say that U.S. stocks have returned 'X' over 'Y' time period, and for long periods we've been able to extrapolate those variables, but no one knows what tomorrow brings.  

Don't let your kids grow up to be risk managers.  

From Charles Hugh Smith's substack, July 16:

If we borrow all of tomorrow's prosperity to spend today, there won't be any future prosperity, there will only be penury. 

The developed nations share many of the same sources of stagnation:

1. Demographically, their cohort of retirees drawing government benefits is expanding with no end in sight while their workforces are shrinking;

2. Their models of funding government programs institutionalized 50, 60 or 70 years ago no longer provides enough income to cover government spending;

3. As their populations age, demand/consumption is stagnating as older people spend less on everything other than healthcare, and the cohort of younger people getting married and starting families is in steep decline;

4. Attempts to stimulate consumer spending via central bank/state stimulus are now increasing inflation, crimping both household and state spending as debt service costs rise;

5. Institutionalized processes that worked in the "boost phase" of economic growth are now hindrances as following established processes are the focus rather than adapting to get results;

6. The expedient "solution" to soaring demands for government spending (healthcare and retirement programs are now a third or more of state expenditures) is to fund spending with borrowed money--selling government bonds which then increases the nation's sovereign debt and the interest that must be paid on that swelling debt;

7. The low-hanging fruit in the economy have all been plucked, and while there are high hopes for an energy transition and AI, there are no guarantees these will boost productivity enough to generate the growth needed to "grow our way out of debt;"

8. The proposed solutions are all forms of financial engineering--lowering interest rates, introducing stablecoins, etc., all intended to lower the cost of borrowing from the future to stimulate "growth" today in the hopes of "growing our way out of stagnation and debt."

Richard Bonugli and I discuss these core issues in our podcast The Challenges of the G7 world (33 minutes), issues which boil down to one basic question: is pulling the levers of financial engineering enough to "grow our way out of stagnation and debt," or are more fundamental reforms required?

The key to "growing our way out of stagnation and debt" is to boost productivity. In the podcast, I refer to Total Factor Productivity, which is an attempt to "capture the 'secret sauce' of how an economy or business produces more output with the same or fewer inputs."....

....MUCH MORE 

Yeah, that pulling forward future growth thing is a fly in the ointment. 

Also at Mr. Smith's substack:

AI is the whiff of perfume that's supposed to mask the stench of terminal moral decay.

Hmmm...not looking good. 

So...the drive for creativity recedes, stasis, then death.
Wait what? Entropy! I meant to co-opt the physically precise  concept of entropy to metaphorically describe the trend. Not death.
No, death bad, Sand Hill Road good.  

BMO Capital Downgrades Quanta Services, Stock Jumps (PWR)

The stock was up $8.78 (+2.26%) yesterday and is $2.14 (+0.54%) higher in late pre-market, $400.00 last.

From Investing.com, July 17:

BMO Capital downgrades Quanta Services stock on valuation concerns 

BMO Capital downgraded Quanta Services (NYSE:PWR) from Outperform to Market Perform on Thursday, while raising its price target to $400.00 from $352.00. The stock, which has delivered a remarkable 59% return over the past year, is currently trading near its 52-week high of $390.10.

The research firm emphasized that the downgrade was "strictly a valuation call" rather than a fundamental concern about the company’s business prospects. This aligns with InvestingPro data showing Quanta trading at a steep P/E ratio of 61.4, suggesting the stock may be overvalued despite its strong fundamentals and GREAT financial health score.

BMO Capital acknowledged that Quanta’s "scale, breadth, and high voltage expertise" differentiates it from typical engineering and construction peers and justifies a substantial premium valuation....

....MUCH MORE 

Meanwhile The Fly via TipRanks relays:

Quanta Services price target raised to $440 from $370 at BofA 

"What the Tough Job Market for New College Grads Says About the Economy"

From Bloomberg Businessweek, July 17: 

A sudden lack of career mobility is a problem for every worker. 

It’s been a long time since the dream of working your way up from the mail room to the corner office was a plausible outcome, but it might now be officially dead. Some of the reasons are obvious—for one, the internet long ago made the mail room almost obsolete. But as new college graduates have headed out into the job market this summer, they’re reporting a different problem: They can’t get a foot in the door at all.

Landing that first job is trickier right now in some fields than in others, but even in sectors with low unemployment, new entrants to the white-collar labor market describe a far steeper climb than they’d anticipated. The unemployment rate for recent grads sat at 5.8% in March, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics—more than twice that for all degree holders and 50% higher than in the spring of 2022. 

This much, at least, everyone agrees on. Exactly how worrying this trend is and what’s to blame are the subject of far greater confusion. According to an analysis of BLS data by Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the Budget Lab at Yale University, hiring rates for new grads are down from their post-pandemic highs, but they’re still in line with the latter half of the 2010s. And in population-level numbers, things in the labor market look placid. “We still see low unemployment, and we do see pretty solid job gains,” says Allison Shrivastava, an economist at the hiring platform Indeed. Young adults are getting spat out into a job market that isn’t nearly as bad as, say, that of the Great Recession, but it also isn’t as lush as it was in the recent past, when they might have watched older friends and siblings get snapped up before graduation. Being in that position would certainly feel terrible, though in the long arc of a professional life, it could be worse.

Yet those numbers don’t tell the full picture. “A lot of those job gains are in the health-care industry,” says Shrivastava, driven by things such as the rising demand for mental health services and an aging population. “The health-care industry alone can’t float a labor market.” If you’re not a newly minted doctor or nurse, you’re probably at least a little bit worse off than your slightly older peers. If you’re looking for a tech job, you might be much worse off. According to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, graduates in computer science, computer engineering and graphic design all have unemployment rates at 7% or greater; young workers who hold a number of much-maligned humanities degrees—including English, history and philosophy—are all more hirable.

The dip in hiring for those with tech degrees, which have long been sold to college students as a sure thing, has elicited fears that artificial intelligence may have started to upend the labor market. Nathan Goldschlag, director of research at the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan think tank, has been looking into AI’s effect on hiring, and he doubts that the technology’s impact has been significant enough to explain the situation. “It does look like there is some there there, but it’s not something that jumps off the page,” he says. For one, the effect doesn’t show up consistently for sectors outside tech. The new-grad unemployment rate, Goldschlag says, “is low for things like accounting and business analytics, which are two things that, when you’re coming from the AI space, you’re like, ‘Oh, well, those are ripe for automation.’ ”

Some nontech companies may be experimenting with having AI do tasks that normally fall to entry-level workers, but Goldschlag doesn’t think AI is the root cause of the current stagnation. Shrivastava sees something similar. “These sectors are just down. They’re not hiring,” she says, pointing to an additional factor she’d noticed in Indeed’s data: Internship listings have meaningfully decreased, which is an early warning sign that the hiring rates for entry-level workers continue to soften....

....MUCH MORE 

"GE Vernova Stock Is Stealing Some of GE Aerospace’s Earnings Thunder" (GEV)

From Barron's July 17:

Shares of GE Vernova GEV gained ground on a day that featured blow-out earnings by the company’s sibling GE Aerospace GE.

GE Vernova stock added 1.6%, closing at $570.17, while the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 0.5%. GE Aerospace stock slid 2.2% to $260.28.

Coming into Thursday, investors would have bet that GE Aerospace would get most of the attention for the day. The jet engine maker reported better-than-expected second-quarter earnings. “Blow-out performance” is how Vertical Research Partners analyst Rob Stallard characterized the quarter.

Still, expectations were running high, with Wall Street estimates ahead of GE Aerospace guidance. The results weren’t good enough to keep the stock in the green. Coming into Thursday trading, the shares were up about 60% over the past 12 months.

GE Vernova stock powered ahead, thanks to more price-target increases from Wall Street.

BofA Securities analyst Andrew Obin raised his GE Vernova price target to $620 from $550. That followed a Wednesday increase from J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Strouse, who raised his price target to $620 from $460. Both rate GE Vernova stock at Buy.

Obin pointed out that his 2027 earnings estimates are above the Wall Street consensus. “Upward estimate revisions still ahead,” wrote Obin, adding he expects a strong second quarter for the company. GE Vernova reports earnings on July 23.

Like GE Aerospace, GE Vernova has high expectations coming into earnings. Coming into Thursday trading, GE Vernova stock was up more than 200% over the past 12 months.

While expectations are high, “We expect [backlog] momentum and demand commentary to remain robust,” wrote Strouse. “Recent [artificial intelligence] infrastructure investment announcements and management commentary on the 2Q call should increasingly drive investors to look out to [the] fiscal 2029 outlook, where we believe GEV should continue to see higher pricing and margin expansion in Gas Power.”....

....MORE 

After trading up $9.00 yesterday, setting all-time intraday and closing highs—$581.03 and $570.17 respectively—the stock is trading up $5.37 (+0.94) ahead of the regular market open, $575.61 last. 

Capital Markets "Waller may be Alone in Advocating July Rate Cut, but it Weighs on the Greenback"

From Marc Chandler at Bannockburn Global Forex: 

Overview: The US dollar is trading softer against most G10 and emerging market currencies today. The dollar seemed to lose its bid late yesterday after Federal Reserve Governor Waller argued in favor a rate cut at this month's meeting, despite the TIC data that showed foreign investors bought more US securities in May than they did in the first five months of 2024 ($311 bln vs $95 bln), driving home the message again that the talk of a capital strike against the US over its large deficit/debt or loss of "American exceptionalism" has been grossly exaggerated. The US announced a 93.5% tariff on graphite from China (given the other tariffs the effective rates is near 160%), which may have the effect of making more it more expensive to develop an EV battery industry in the US. 

Equities are mostly firmer today after the S&P 500 and Nasdaq reached record highs yesterday. In the Asia Pacific region, among the large bourses, Japan, South Korea, and India failed to join the advance. Europe's Stoxx 600 is extending yesterday's gain, which snapped a three-day slide. It is practically flat on the week. US index futures are steady to firmer. Japanese long bond yields softened slightly despite the measure of CPI that excludes fresh food and energy unexpectedly rose. There may have been some light position squaring ahead of Sunday's upper house election. European benchmark 10-year yields are up 1-3 bp to pare this week's declines. A notable exception is the 10-year Gilt, which has seen a nearly eight basis point increase this week. The 10-year US Treasury yield is slightly softer, near 4.44%, which is up about three basis points on the week. Gold is firmer near $3353 but still within its recently well-worn range. August WTI is trading at its best level since Monday, near $68.50 following a new batch of EU sanctions on Russia and its oil. 

USD: A favorable combination of US data yesterday of stronger than expected retail sales, softer import prices, and the fifth consecutive decline in initial weekly jobless claims extended the Dollar Index's recovery....

....MUCH MORE 

China: "Xi Questions Local Officials on EV, AI Plans in Rare Rebuke"

From Bloomberg, July 17:

President Xi Jinping questioned the need for local governments across China to crowd into the same emerging industries, a rare rebuke that reflects growing concerns about deflation at home and trade tensions abroad.

“When it comes to launching new projects, it’s always the same few things: artificial intelligence, computing power, new-energy vehicles,” Xi said in a meeting in Beijing this week on urban development, according to a Thursday article on the front page of the People’s Daily.

“Should every province in the country be developing industries in these areas?” he was quoted as asking by the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party.

The blunt, colloquial criticism was unusual as state media typically publish his more formal comments or policy guidance. The comments reflect a growing concern of policymakers that officials across the country are pursuing investment in a select few industries favored by Beijing, exacerbating excess capacity and delaying consolidation.

Xi’s remarks add to a recent chorus from top officials calling for an end to price wars among industries, which are worsening a downward spiral in company profits and wages.

A State Council meeting chaired by Premier Li Qiang on Wednesday pledged to rein in “irrational competition” in the EV sector, more signs that authorities are getting serious about curbing overcapacity. A meeting of the top Communist Party body in charge of economic policy earlier this month vowed to regulate how local governments try to attract investment....

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"China Threatens to Block Panama Ports Deal Unless Its Shipping Giant Is Part of It"

From the Wall Street Journal, July 17:

Beijing pushes for state-owned Cosco to become shareholder of two Panama Canal ports, dozens of others in BlackRock deal 

China’s government is threatening to block a deal that would transfer ownership of dozens of seaports to Western investors if Cosco, China’s largest shipping company, doesn’t get a stake.

The proposed sale includes two ports at the Panama Canal and more than 40 others around the world, all owned by Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison.

China is pushing for state-owned Cosco to be an equal partner and shareholder of the ports with BlackRock, and Mediterranean Shipping Co., a containership operator, according to people familiar with the deal talks. BlackRock and MSC in March reached a preliminary agreement to buy the ports in a deal valued at nearly $23 billion.

Now, BlackRock, MSC and Hutchison all are open to Cosco’s taking a stake, the people familiar with the talks said.

The parties aren’t likely to reach a deal before a previously agreed upon July 27 end date for exclusive talks between BlackRock, MSC and Hutchison, the people familiar with the talks said. The parties can’t strike a deal that includes Cosco until the exclusivity period ends.

Any deal giving a stake in the Panama ports to a Chinese-owned company would likely upset President Trump, who has threatened to take control of the canal and has objected to Hutchison’s ownership of two ports there. The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment Thursday.

After this article was published online Thursday, Rep. John Moolenaar (R., Mich.), who chairs a congressional committee on China, made public a letter he had sent to a top Panamanian official, saying that the inclusion of Cosco or any other Chinese company in port operations at the canal “would represent an unacceptable risk to the national security of both our nations.”

Hutchison’s initial plan to sell the ports angered Beijing, according to people familiar with the talks. Chinese authorities have told Chinese state-owned companies to freeze any coming deals with Hutchison or other businesses linked to its controlling shareholder, the family of the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, these people said....

....MUCH MORE 

Recently:

MSC's Aponte Eclipses BlackRock in Li Ka-shing’s Port Deal 

One quibble. We know some stuff about the shipping companies.

MSC is not just "a containership operator." It is the world's largest, having passed Maersk's capacity in 2022. That achievement was in all the papers and better blogs (ahem).

MSC has the largest container fleet and an over 1mm TEU larger capacity. It is also a giant in logistics and other businesses involved in moving stuff around the world. 

Because MSC is privately held they don't splash their numbers - so to speak - but revenue was almost €90 billion in '22 and Italian media reported the holding company booked quite a profit in what was a very good year for the entire industry. From TradeWindsNews, 

Published 12 October 2023, 03:45

Gianluigi Aponte’s MSC Group has — perhaps inadvertently — revealed its financial performance for the first time.

The holding company of the world’s largest liner company reportedly made €36.2bn ($38.4bn) in profits last year.

The number has been widely published by Italian media outlets after MSC announced the purchase of around half of high-speed Italian train operator Italo.

Turnover of the MSC Group was €86.4bn in 2022, according to Il Messaggero, which first reported the accounts.

Ebitda was €43.2bn and Ebit was €35.7bn.

The Geneva-based company possessed cash reserves amounted to €63bn and equity of €91bn. Medium to long-term debt is put at €26bn.

The figures reflect a big increase in profitability during the pandemic....

....MUCH MORE 

As noted in a 2019 post:

Sept. 25
Shipping: "MSC Announces New Bunker Surcharge to Help Cover $2 Billion Per Year Low Sulphur Fuel Costs"
MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company S.A is another of the world's largest shippers who sound as though they are about to establish a GoFundMe page.
That's a joke.
The Aponte clan* is doin' alright.

***

*The latest Lloyd's 100 Most Influential People in Shipping (Edition Eight, Dec. 2017) has the Aponte famiglia at #10, just behind the Saadé family (CMA CGM) now led by Rodolphe after his father's death this summer, at #9.

If interested here's an ungated version of Edition Seven of the 100 Most Influential, for folks who don't subscribe via Maritime Cyprus.It's a year out of date but good background or a dandy prospect list.
The subscription makes a fine gift.

Hadrian Raises $260 Million To Build Walls

 From TechCrunch, July 17:

Hadrian raises $260M to build out automated factories for space and defense parts 

Investors are continuing to rally behind the call to reindustrialize American industry, this time by building out a $260 million war chest for automated manufacturing startup Hadrian to scale its factory footprint and make even more machine parts.

Hadrian’s aim is to modernize American manufacturing by leveraging advance automation to deliver mass-produced parts for aerospace and defense companies at a fraction of the time. It’s a huge change to the status quo: a manufacturing industry that’s largely populated by dozens of small machining shops run by an aging workforce.

Hadrian’s first target was high-precision CNC machining, a manufacturing process that makes parts to extremely tight tolerances — often measured in the microns, not millimeters (a single human hair is anywhere from 50 to 120 microns in thickness). Now, in addition to that core CNC offering, the company is getting ready to diversify into welding, casting, additive, and other processes, Power said in a post on X. (He did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment on the new round.)

The hefty new round will also go toward building out a new Arizona facility, dubbed “Factory 3,” slated to come online by Christmas 2025. That factory will offer four times the machining throughput of Hadrian’s second factory. Hadrian is also expanding its 500,000-square-foot headquarters and R&D space in Torrance, California, with the new funding....

....MUCH MORE 

"UK’s Most Powerful Supercomputer, the Isambard-AI, Goes Live" (NVDA)

We've mentioned this one a couple times, it's a pretty big deal, links after the jump. 

From TechRepublic, July 17:

NVIDIA’s CEO says the Isambard-AI supercomputer is a "vital national asset” that will help “scientists and developers unlock new frontiers in science.”  

The UK’s most powerful supercomputer, Isambard-AI, is officially live at the University of Bristol. Clocking in at 100,000 times faster than a typical laptop, Isambard-AI has officially become the UK’s fastest supercomputer and is expected to rank 11th globally. 

NVIDIA has supplied the facility with 5,448 GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, enabling it to deliver 21 exaFLOPs of AI performance. An exaFLOP represents a quintillion (10¹⁸) floating‑point operations per second, whereas a typical smartphone achieves merely trillions (10¹²) of operations per second....

....MUCH MORE 

With a slightly more emotional take here's The Sun (U.K.): 

MEGA MIND 

Monster supercomputer switched on to help cure cancer, slash NHS waits and keep OAPs independent longer

Previously: 

November 2023 - Britain's Most Powerful Supercomputer And The Butterfly Effect Of Weather Modeling In the Cloud

June 2025 - "How the UK is testing a radical plan to refreeze the Arctic"

Fortunately for the taxpayers a lot of the research and modeling can be done at the University of Bristol on their fancy, newly installed supercomputer... 

Along with the Nvidia supercomputer at Cambridge it's all part of Mr. Huang's Sovereign AI push. 
That 'puter was the fastest in Britain. From Nvidia:

NVIDIA Launches UK’s Most Powerful Supercomputer, for Research in AI and Healthcare

NVIDIA CEO Unveils ‘First Big Bet’ on Digital Biology Revolution with UK-Based Cambridge-1

And sovereign: 

March 5, 2024
Here's Nvidia's "Sovereign AI" Pitch (NVDA)

.... This is terrible. I now have Jensen Huang speaking in Dr. Martin Luther King's cadences as he repurposes the penultimate paragraph of "I have a Dream":

Let AI ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let AI ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let AI ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.
From every mountainside, let AI ring. 

I may have to go lie down.

 

March 6, 2024

...Every, town, every village, every hamlet, every wide spot in the road, should have their own (NVDA-powered) supercomputer.

 

January 2025

"Jensen Huang Wants to Make AI the New World Infrastructure" (NVDA)

This sovereign AI you speak of, I have heard of it.  

I have heard wondrous tales of immense wealth,

Of amazing deeds performed as if by magic.
Yes I have heard of all of this...*

The She-Wolf Of Wall Street Strikes Again (AVGO)

Over the last ten or eleven years the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has tripled - give or take a few percentage points - the return of the S&P 500, and far out-distanced  the returns of most hedge funds and financial advisors.

One of the sites that track congresscritters and their action is Capitol Trades which noted, July 15, that Rep. Pelosi had an interest in Broadcom:

From Quiet Losses to High Stakes Gains: Pelosi Bets on Broadcom

Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi is back in the trading spotlight and this time, her move couldn’t be more decisive. According to a newly filed financial disclosure, Pelosi exercised 200 call options on Broadcom Inc. (AVGO:US) on June 20, 2025, acquiring 20,000 shares at a strike price of just $80 per share. The total transaction is valued at $1.6 million and the timing couldn’t have been more lucrative. Since Pelosi originally purchased the options in June 2024, Broadcom’s stock has soared nearly 70%, riding the explosive momentum of the AI and semiconductor boom.

This is not your average congressional trade. Broadcom is at the heart of AI infrastructure, with its chips powering next-generation data centers and large language models. The company’s rise has been fueled by a surge in demand from hyperscalers like Google (GOOGL:US) and Microsoft Corp (MSFT:US), who are racing to build AI capacity at scale. Pelosi’s call, made a full year ago, suggests not just confidence, but remarkable foresight.

But while the AVGO play turned heads, another trade in her filing quietly told a different story. On the very same day, Pelosi also reported selling off her holdings in the Matthews International Mutual Fund, taking a loss of $28,948. The fund, known for its diversified exposure to global equities, had been a more conservative position, now tossed away at a loss, just as Pelosi doubled down on a concentrated tech stake....

....MUCH MORE

Her prowess and foresight have been acknowledged by the Unusual Whales Subversive Democratic Trading ETF which applied for and was granted the symbol NANC.

As I type AVGO is up another 2.58%.

The Unusual Whales Subversive Republican Trading ETF has been a comparative (and absolute)  disaster this year and switched its symbol from KRUZ to GOP:

 

BigCharts 

"Top Russian University Launches Master’s Program on Sanctions Circumvention"

From the Moscow Times (labeled "undesirable" in Moscow, by-the-bye), July 16: 

One of Russia’s most prestigious universities has unveiled a new master’s program focused on navigating and mitigating the impact of international sanctions, a sign of the growing institutional effort to adapt to the Kremlin’s increasingly isolated position on the global stage.

The two-year program at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics (HSE) is described as the first of its kind in Russia.

First reported by the exiled science outlet T-Invariant, the program aims to train specialists in international corporate compliance and equip students with the skills to "identify and assess the risks of sanctions and other measures imposed by supervisory authorities on companies."

Annual tuition is set at 490,000 rubles ($6,260), with 20 seats reserved for Russian citizens and two for international students. The program is not funded by the Russian government. 

In addition to the full degree, HSE is launching a shorter 136-hour professional development course titled Sanctions Compliance, which will run online from Sept. 16 to Nov. 14.

Tuition for the course is 84,000 rubles ($1,070), and it combines theoretical instruction with practical case studies on the application of economic sanctions and compliance mechanisms....

....MUCH MORE 

Also at the Moscow Times (July 17): 

Russian Envoy Warns of Military Response if Greenland Conflict Erupts 

Related:

Will Netanyahu Resist Becoming Embroiled In American War For Greenland?

Electricity: The Utility Trilemma

From MIT's Technology Review, June 19:

Is this the electric grid of the future?
In Nebraska, a publicly owned utility deftly tackles the challenges of delivering on reliability, affordability, and sustainability.

One morning in the middle of March, a slow-moving spring blizzard stalled above eastern Nebraska, pounding the state capital of Lincoln with 60-mile-per-hour winds, driving sleet, and up to eight inches of snow. Lincoln Electric System, the local electric utility, has approximately 150,000 customers. By lunchtime, nearly 10% of them were without power. Ice was accumulating on the lines, causing them to slap together and circuits to lock. Sustained high winds and strong gusts—including one recorded at the Lincoln airport at 74 mph—snapped an entire line of poles across an empty field on the northern edge of the city. 

Emeka Anyanwu kept the outage map open on his screen, refreshing it every 10 minutes or so while the 18 crews out in the field—some 75 to 80 line workers in total—struggled to shrink the orange circles that stood for thousands of customers in the dark. This was already Anyanwu’s second major storm since he’d become CEO of Lincoln Electric, in January of 2024. Warm and dry in his corner office, he fretted over what his colleagues were facing. Anyanwu spent the first part of his career at Kansas City Power & Light (now called Evergy), designing distribution systems, supervising crews, and participating in storm response. “Part of my DNA as a utility person is storm response,” he says. In weather like this “there’s a physical toll of trying to resist the wind and maneuver your body,” he adds. “You’re working slower. There’s just stuff that can’t get done. You’re basically being sandblasted.” 

Lincoln Electric is headquartered in a gleaming new building named after Anyanwu’s predecessor, Kevin Wailes. Its cavernous garage, like an airplane hangar, is designed so that vehicles never need to reverse. As crews returned for a break and a dry change of clothes, their faces burned red and raw from the sleet and wind, their truck bumpers dripped ice onto the concrete floor. In a darkened control room, supervisors collected damage assessments, phoned or radioed in by the crews. The division heads above them huddled in a small conference room across the hall—their own outage map filling a large screen.

Anyanwu did his best to stay out of the way. “I sit on the storm calls, and I’ll have an idea or a thought, and I try not to be in the middle of things,” he says. “I’m not in their hair. I didn’t go downstairs until the very end of the day, as I was leaving the building—because I just don’t want to be looming. And I think, quite frankly, our folks do an excellent job. They don’t need me.”  

At a moment of disruption, Anyanwu chooses collaboration over control. His attitude is not that “he alone can fix it,” but that his team knows the assignment and is ready for the task. Yet a spring blizzard like this is the least of Anyanwu’s problems. It is a predictable disruption, albeit one of a type that seems to occur with greater frequency. What will happen soon—not only at Lincoln Electric but for all electric utilities—is a challenge of a different order. 

In the industry, they call it the “trilemma”: the seemingly intractable problem of balancing reliability, affordability, and sustainability. Utilities must keep the lights on in the face of more extreme and more frequent storms and fires, growing risks of cyberattacks and physical disruptions, and a wildly uncertain policy and regulatory landscape. They must keep prices low amid inflationary costs. And they must adapt to an epochal change in how the grid works, as the industry attempts to transition from power generated with fossil fuels to power generated from renewable sources like solar and wind, in all their vicissitudes.

Yet over the last year, the trilemma has turned out to be table stakes. Additional layers of pressure have been building—including powerful new technical and political considerations that would seem to guarantee disruption. The electric grid is bracing for a near future characterized by unstoppable forces and immovable objects—an interlocking series of factors so oppositional that Anyanwu’s clear-eyed approach to the trials ahead makes Lincoln Electric an effective lens through which to examine the grid of the near future. 

A worsening storm 
The urgent technical challenge for utilities is the rise in electricity demand—the result, in part, of AI. In the living memory of the industry, every organic increase in load from population growth has been quietly matched by a decrease in load thanks to efficiency (primarily from LED lighting and improvements in appliances). No longer. Demand from new data centers, factories, and the electrification of cars, kitchens, and home heaters has broken that pattern. Annual load growth that had been less than 1% since 2000 is now projected to exceed 3%. In 2022, the grid was expected to add 23 gigawatts of new capacity over the next five years; now it is expected to add 128 gigawatts....

....MUCH MORE