Are you familiar with Micheal Hudson, that sounds like it’s broadly in line with his takes. He goes on a lot about Obama’s QE policies basically left all the ill effects from 2008 in the economy and goes on to relate the stock market bubble to imperialism, kind of. He has some interesting stuff about finance capitalism.

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Can anyone link the article if they see it?

So what is this, like the 13th Israeli charged with a crime against a Palestinian in the West Bank since 2000? Is anyone tracking the charge/conviction rate for Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank? It’s gotta be nuts.

Anyone seeing reports of an associated AWS outage? I was looking and didn’t see anything.

Loved the response. Only thing I’d add is that there is actually a critical role for western leftists to play in time likes this. We can throw sand in the gears of the war machine through organizing and fighting back wherever possible. Anything we can do to raise the costs of the war at home helps increase the efficacy of those who are fighting on the other side of the world. The best antidote to feeling helpless is organizing. Make a commitment to get out there this week and volunteer with your local socialist organization.

I’d love for someone to point me to the wtf of all this. Why are these nations lining up with Australia against China? Where is that coming from and why is it happening? I’m assuming the answer is Capitalism but I’d love to dive in a little deeper.

Thank you for this in depth and thoughtful response!

I know that’s meant to be a joke but a guy did build a pretty cool Marx bot on top of deepseek: https://marx-bot.vercel.app/

I’ll be genuinely shocked if this holds but I’m impressed that Trump was able to accept the reality of the situation with such minimal economic pain having been inflicted on the US. I heard him say some things at that G7 conference that I would not have expected, like admitting there’s no alternative path forward or that the US has 2-4 weeks before a severe oil crisis hits.

Can you share any more context about what that is and how they source the articles? It looks really interesting but I’m relatively new to this space and would appreciate more background.

That and every day that passes reduces available oil inventories. Iran seems to be in a position to benefit from every day there is no significant opening of Hormuz. The US blockade changes the equation but I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest it’s imposing unbearable costs on Iran. It looks like the Iranian stock market is showing confidence and while there are limits on what is trading it seems to suggest that locals believe things are economically on the right track. I don’t believe that exchanges are perfect proxies for the economy but it’s certainly relevant.

Caveats: I’m definitely not an expert and am relying on machine translations for Farsi language articles.

Seems like two can play at the market manipulation game. Iran announcing a withdrawal from talks and escalations in the Bab al-Mandab early on Monday gives that a lot of time to scare the markets. I don’t know what Yemen will do but I bet I know what oil prices will do while we’re waiting to find out.

My favorite part was the official having to sit there and say, “we have plenty of weapons but we’re also cancelling because we need them, but we still have more than enough.”

I genuinely think AI is going to be capitalism’s biggest ever own goal. The wasted capital, natural resources, and asset destruction is going to be enormous.

I was looking into this the other day. This is basically another norm.

Taking the day off and protesting with my local socialist org.

Curious to see if/how this relates to the credit swap the US has been discussing with the UAE. If you can count on the Trump administration for anything it’s to be extremely transactional.

This has big, “the other leaders are from Canada, you wouldn’t know them” energy.

Ok, the numbers and spend question led me down a really interesting rabbit hole and I wanted to share a little bit of what I learned. TL;DR AI data center spend, in absolute and relative terms, is really high. Please take all my statements with a heavy dose of salt as I’m not an economist or professional researcher.

It’s probably less than railroads ~6% of GDP and probably more than telco spend leading up to the dotcom bubble ~1.5% of GDP. It’s reasonable to guess that is represents, or will by the end of 2026, ~ 2.2% of US GDP. Like the dotcom bubble it’s largely funded by private capital. Unlike the dotcom bubble it’s much more reliant on debt, specifically private credit debt, we’ll get back to why that might matter later. Where things get interesting is in the durable nature of the utility value of the goods produced by the investment. Railroad capital mostly has a 100+ year utility value, tracks can be used for a long time with some regular maintenance. Fiber has a 15+ year, probably a lot longer, utility value and again a lot of the associated infrastructure stays useful for a long time with maintenance. Data center infrastructure and GPUs are not so lucky. The people spending the money say the GPUs are good for 5 years, they probably have a 1-3 year usable lifespan. Data center infrastructure itself has a much longer useful lifespan but those buildings aren’t exactly general purpose, if AI is a bust you’ll need to have a new use for all that space. The so what of all that is this is looking even less rational and useful than the dotcom era infrastructure investment boom.

On the debt financing thing I talked about getting back to I’d suggest you take a look at this article that has the heterodox economist Michal Hudson talking about why he thinks the west is in for a really bad ride if AI + private credit + energy crisis all come together for a lemon party type situation.