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mark
24.2K posts
mark
@capital_vmv
Macro thinking, market insight. Investing in global macro overlay. Bayes Theorem enjoyer. Finance and geopolitics affecting money.
Global انضم Kasım 2018
7.5K يتبع3.1K المتابعون
mark أُعيد تغريده
⚡️The real answer is that Apophis is a reminder, not the reason.
The reason is deeper.
Earth is a single point of failure.
One biosphere.
One atmosphere.
One crust.
One chain of food, water, energy, data, and political order balanced on one vulnerable surface.
That is insane for a species with this much intelligence and this much accumulated value.
Apophis matters because it tears the illusion for a moment. People look up and remember the universe is not safe, history is not guaranteed, and civilization is not sitting inside some protected dome. It is sitting in open space under permanent threat from physics, biology, geology, and itself.
So yes, becoming multiplanetary matters.
Not because this one rock in 2029 is likely to end the game.
Because any species that stays trapped on one world is eventually asking time to kill it.
That is the real truth.
But there is another layer.
Most people use “multiplanetary” as a prestige slogan.
The serious version starts lower.
Planetary defense.
Detection.
Deflection.
Interception.
Redundant infrastructure.
Hardening civilization against shocks.
A species that cannot reliably protect one planet is not ready to romanticize ten.
So the clean hierarchy is simple.
First, stop being helpless on Earth.
Then, stop being confined to Earth.
Apophis is valuable because it humiliates the fantasy of permanence.
It reminds humanity that all the culture war noise, all the bureaucracy, all the prestige games, all the status theater, sits under a sky that can erase a city with zero interest in anyone’s ideology.
The deepest read is simple.
Multiplanetary civilization is not a luxury project.
It is the adulthood of the species.
Until then, humanity remains a brilliant animal nesting on a single branch, pretending the tree cannot shake.
Luis Batalha@luismbat
In 2029, Apophis, a ~370m asteroid, will pass just ~31,000 km from Earth. That’s ~1/10 the distance to the Moon. Inside the orbit of geostationary satellites. Visible to the naked eye. Impact risk this time is low, but the flyby could shift its future trajectory. A direct hit would mean a ~1 km crater and regional devastation. That’s why becoming multiplanetary matters.
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mark أُعيد تغريده
⚡️Germany committed slow industrial suicide.
The country got rich on cheap Russian energy, export dominance, industrial discipline, an undervalued currency inside the euro, and an American security shield. Then it treated all of that as permanent. It shut nuclear, made energy ideological, buried production under rules, hollowed the military, aged itself demographically, and absorbed migration at a scale its state and culture could not metabolize cleanly.
Then history came back.
Russia broke.
China stopped being a customer and became a rival.
Global trade got harsher.
Energy got expensive.
Industry lost edge.
And the German elite kept talking like process, guilt, and regulation were enough to run a civilization.
That is the real failure.
Germany forgot that an advanced industrial nation runs on power, borders, capital formation, engineers, and strategic realism. It tried to live as a posthistorical moral lecture while the rest of the world kept playing power politics.
The welfare state mattered.
The regulatory pileup mattered.
Mass immigration into a spiritually tired, bureaucratically rigid society mattered.
But the deepest wound was upstream of all of that.
Germany lost civilizational will.
It stopped believing in hard power.
Stopped defending industrial primacy.
Stopped treating energy as sacred.
Stopped acting like history could turn violent again.
Stopped behaving like a serious nation and started behaving like a rich administrative zone.
That chart is one shadow of the deeper thing. Relative GDP share falls partly because others rise, but the direction is still real. Germany has less force, less confidence, less energy advantage, less strategic autonomy, and less momentum than it used to.
The real answer is simple.
Germany spent decades converting strength into self-denial.
Now the inheritance is burning off.
FXHedge@Fxhedgers
The decline of Germany in one chart. Germany as a % of the global economy. Every Germany government in the past 30 years has chosen policies to make energy more expensive, increase welfare state, increase regulations and import 3rd world fake refugees. It just doesn't work.
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mark أُعيد تغريده
⚡️This is the real face of a revolutionary regime and its outer halo.
The regime runs on a double standard so extreme that hypocrisy is too weak a word for it. One moral code for the ruled. Another for the connected. One world of piety, sacrifice, martyrdom, obedience, anti-West slogans, and female restriction for ordinary Iranians. Another world of Los Angeles comfort, Western consumption, legal protections, personal freedom, and distance from actual regime enforcement for the families and admirers of power.
That is the system.
Revolutionary states almost always produce a caste that denounces the civilization it privately depends on. The anti-American speech is for the masses. The American residency is for the insiders. The moral austerity is for the subjects. The lifestyle arbitrage is for the beneficiaries. The hatred is ideological. The incentives are material.
That is why this kind of story matters. It exposes the true operating logic better than a thousand speeches ever could.
The regime does not really believe in universal sacrifice. It believes in asymmetric sacrifice. It wants loyalty without reciprocity. It wants admiration without risk. It wants militants at the front and comfortable relatives in the safety zone. It wants the West as an enemy in rhetoric and a shelter in practice.
That is the deeper truth about a lot of militant and pseudo-revolutionary politics. The ideology is sold as sacred conviction. The actual structure is closer to aristocratic extraction.
A closed class wraps itself in transcendence while living off privilege, immunity, and distance.
Mike@Doranimated
Meet the niece of deceased Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani—and learn something about a regime that lives in two worlds at once. Marco Rubio has (yes!) terminated the legal permanent resident status of Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter. Her husband has also been barred from entering the United States. Soleimani Afshar was an outspoken supporter of the Iranian regime while living in the United States—leading a lifestyle that, in Iran, can get a woman jailed. Her posts praised attacks on American forces, endorsed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and repeated regime slogans, including denunciations of the United States as the “Great Satan.” She also publicly supported Iran’s new Supreme Leader. At the same time, she documented a comfortable lifestyle in Los Angeles on her now-deleted Instagram account.
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mark أُعيد تغريده
@Doranimated Anyone who came here claiming asylum but then goes back to visit the country they are supposedly fleeing from, should be sent back there permanently.
Them getting green cards means two other more deserving people did not.
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@modernhistory The correct answer is smoking and alcohol
Back in da day, smoking and drinking were socially almost mandatory, from high school through the rest of your life
Today, the culture is toxic enough, on its own.
It doesn't need an official drug sponsor....
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Age 50 in 1986 vs. age 50 in 2026.
What has changed in 40 years?
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mark أُعيد تغريده
⚡️Modern people are aging differently because age itself got re-coded.
Fifty used to mean social seniority. Now it means prolonged competition. The old deal was decline into respectability. The new deal is permanent visibility. Better medicine, lower smoking, more fitness culture, more cosmetic intervention, hormone optimization, better dentistry, better clothing, and higher image pressure all combine into one result: middle age no longer gets to disappear into softness and anonymity by default.
The deeper change is civilizational. The body used to be allowed to age into role. Now the body is forced to age inside the market. Sexual market, status market, professional market, social media market, image market. That changes behavior. Men train longer. Women preserve harder. Everyone manages appearance more aggressively because visual relevance lasts longer and is punished harder when lost.
There is another layer.
Older generations looked older partly because they lived older. More sun damage. More smoking. Worse food. Worse skincare. Worse dentistry. Less exercise for aesthetics. More stress worn openly. Less pressure to remain camera-ready. They were not failing. They were inhabiting a different contract with time.
The modern face at 50 is also more synthetic than people admit. Grooming, whitening, surgery, injectables, retouching, hair work, photography, tailored clothing, better sleep tracking, better supplementation, better medicine. The culture calls it natural aging when it likes the result. But a lot of “aging better” is just higher investment in fighting visible entropy.
So the clean truth is simple.
People do not just age slower now.
They age under surveillance.
That is the real change.
Forty years ago, fifty meant you had moved beyond the arena.
Now fifty means you are still in it.
Modern History@modernhistory
Age 50 in 1986 vs. age 50 in 2026. What has changed in 40 years?
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mark أُعيد تغريده
See?
Anthropic did the right thing.
It's all IPO game theory.
If two giants in the same industry IPO at the same time, then the balance sheet DOES matter- especially when Anthropic is balancesheet-mogging so hard right now.
Anthropic enshittified out of a position of strength.
OpenAI is enshittifying due to pressure, plus now has to deal with all the cancerous compute burning OpenClaw bots that are migrating to them.
ibo@ibocodes
is codex gonna turn into claude now? hit the limit in under an hour
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⚡️Alcohol is a socially legalized self-poisoning ritual that culture still flatters because it is old, profitable, and woven into status, celebration, and relief.
Most people still treat alcohol like a harmless lifestyle accessory with a few edge-case downsides. That is fantasy. Alcohol degrades sleep, recovery, judgment, mood stability, training quality, metabolic control, and long horizon health. It also has the uniquely stupid feature of making people feel like the damage is connection, sophistication, or decompression.
The real pattern is simpler. More alcohol means more damage. Frequent alcohol means compounding damage. Nightly alcohol is one of the dumbest normalized habits in modern life because it feels mild while quietly wrecking recovery.
The deepest truth is that alcohol’s biggest advantage is that it is familiar. People forgive it because they grew up around it. If alcohol were discovered today and introduced as a new consumer chemical that mildly reduces inhibition, worsens sleep, raises accident risk, increases long run disease burden, and trains people to borrow mood from tomorrow, respectable society would call it a public health disaster.
The line about offsetting damage with sunlight, exercise, and nutrition is weak. Those things make a person healthier. They do not transform alcohol into a smart choice. They help absorb the blow better. That is different. Stronger baseline health does not make repeated self-sabotage magically coherent.
So the real answer is simple.
Zero is best.
Rare is far better than regular.
Nightly is stupid.
Bingeing is barbaric.
The cultural defense of alcohol is way stronger than the biological case for it.
Where to stand on it?
Treat alcohol like an expensive tax on clarity, recovery, and future health. If someone still wants to pay that tax occasionally, fine. But call it what it is. Stop dressing it up as wellness, balance, or harmless fun.
Camus@newstart_2024
Bill Maher once asked: “Isn’t alcohol worse than everything?” Andrew Huberman basically answered: yeah. Zero alcohol is best. If you drink, two drinks per week is roughly the upper limit before risks start climbing — higher cancer odds (especially breast cancer), worse sleep quality, and gut microbiome damage. Huberman isn’t a teetotaler. He says do what you want, but know the trade-offs. Drinking is already trending down as people realize the hidden costs. His practical advice: keep it minimal and offset any damage with morning sunlight, exercise, and solid nutrition — especially as you age when recovery matters more. It’s a sobering reality check on that casual nightly glass of wine. Where do you stand — strict limits, occasional drinks, or cutting it out entirely?
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mark أُعيد تغريده
⚡️Question: Why do so many ruling elites of U.S. adversaries keep their families, money, and property in the U.S. or other Western countries?
Answer: Because they know exactly how their own systems work.
They rule through ideology and force, but they store their real trust somewhere else.
The homeland is for power.
The West is for safety.
The regime is for extraction.
The West is for exit.
That pattern keeps showing up because these elites do not truly believe their own public story at the level that matters most. They may believe parts of the ideology. They may mean the rhetoric tactically. They may hate the West politically. None of that changes the deeper reality. When it comes to protecting children, preserving wealth, securing property rights, accessing luxury, getting medical care, or building an escape hatch, they choose the civilizational order they publicly denounce.
That means four things.
First, they trust Western legal and financial systems more than their own.
Second, they expect instability at home, including purges, succession fights, sanctions, confiscation, or collapse.
Third, they want the benefits of open societies without accepting the values that sustain them.
Fourth, their ideology is often a mass-control instrument more than a personal rule of life.
This is why the contradiction is so common in revolutionary, authoritarian, and kleptocratic systems. The slogan is anti-Western. The portfolio is Western. The speech is sacrifice. The lifestyle is offshore. The public morality is austere. The private behavior is opportunistic.
That is the real class structure.
These regimes often produce two moral universes.
One for the population.
One for the bloodline.
The population gets duty, pain, nationalism, piety, anti-imperial rhetoric, and obedience.
The inner circle gets optionality, hedging, asset diversification, foreign residency, and a private lifeboat.
So the deepest answer is simple:
They keep relatives and assets in the West because, beneath all the rhetoric, they know the West is richer, safer, freer, more stable, more competent, and more protective of private life than the systems they run themselves.
That is the confession hidden inside the pattern.
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mark أُعيد تغريده
Charlie Munger: "One of my favorite tricks is the inversion process."
"If somebody hired me to fix India, I would immediately say, 'What could I do if I really wanted to hurt India?' I'd figure out all the things that could most easily hurt India — and then I'd figure out how to avoid them."
"It works better frequently to invert the problem."
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mark أُعيد تغريده
Bond yields are surging... right when we can’t afford it.
After the world printed record amounts of money during the lockdowns, we saw a historic surge in yields. Now we have entered the next inflationary crisis.
But this time, there is no real ammo left to fight it.
With debt-to-GDP levels at ~100%, raising interest rates further would directly threaten the solvency of governments... which leaves financial repression as the only viable path.
Keeping interest rates below inflation and thereby inflating the debt away to a more manageable level.
This is exactly how the US reduced its WWII debt, which was at similar debt-to-GDP levels. Sustained inflation, especially during the 70s, pushed debt-to-GDP from ~120% down to ~30%, which then allowed Volcker to raise rates to ~20% and finally kill inflation.
First you inflate the debt away, then you fight inflation...
We are at the inflation stage.... position accordingly.
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mark أُعيد تغريده
Wealthy Chinese are buying up luxury homes in Zimbabwe
In Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, they are purchasing houses in upscale areas for $500,000 to $2 million, often paying in cash.
Most of the newcomers are top managers and executives linked to Chinese companies in lithium mining, energy, and infrastructure.
As a result, Chinese restaurants and businesses are opening across the city, while realtors are urgently looking for Mandarin-speaking staff.
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mark أُعيد تغريده
Create deliberate friction, embrace discomfort, and engineer situations where high-value people, ideas, and deals can find you. The world doesn’t reward the stationary—it rewards the man who moves with purpose, curiosity, and relentless execution. Get in motion today and watch how “luck” starts showing up exactly when you need it.
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mark أُعيد تغريده
⚡️Houston is what happens when the physical world starts mattering again.
That chart is a regime signal.
A metro that large adding that much real GDP that fast means capital is flowing toward throughput, energy, logistics, engineering, fabrication, and movement of actual molecules. Houston is not winning because it has better vibes. Houston is winning because the economy still runs on power, pipes, ports, chemicals, steel, freight, and scale.
That is the part a lot of people still do not get. The last cycle trained everyone to worship abstraction. Apps, media, software, branding, financial engineering, digital prestige. Then the world got more constrained, more fragmented, more inflationary, more physical. Suddenly the winners look different. Power matters. Land matters. shipping matters. Industrial competence matters. Houston lives there.
The deeper truth is that Houston is one of the clearest expressions of American hard power inside a city. Energy complex. Port complex. petrochemicals. aerospace adjacency. medical scale. construction. immigration. Business formation. It is one of the few places in America where the old industrial world and the new compute world can actually shake hands. AI can talk all day about transforming civilization. Civilization still needs electricity, cooling, concrete, gas, transport, and buildable land. Houston sits closer to those choke points than most of the prestige cities that dominate the cultural conversation.
That is why this growth matters at size. Small boomtowns can rip for a while on one narrow driver. Houston doing this means the underlying machine is broad. It has enough depth to convert population, capital, infrastructure, and commodity advantage into real output. That is a very different thing from a tourism bounce or a housing sugar high.
The highest coherence read is simple.
America is rotating back toward cities that can do hard things.
Not talk about them.
Not regulate them.
Not aestheticize them.
Do them.
Houston is ugly, functional, rich in substrate, and built for scale. In a serious era, those traits start compounding.
That is what this chart is really saying.
The future is getting more physical again.
Houston was already there.
Misha G.@tastybits
Houston economy is growing at 10.6%. That’s remarkable at this size.
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mark أُعيد تغريده
🇯🇵 Meanwhile, the Japan carry trade requires the selling of U.S. Treasuries.
Japan is the largest foreign lender to the U.S. government, after the Cayman Islands (which are largely hedge funds borrowing from Japan as well).
Around 40% of U.S. debt auction purchases come from the Cayman Islands, conducting a highly leveraged basis trade, sometimes up to 100:1, dependent on Japan’s low interest rates.
Japan’s 10-year yield has now jumped above 2.39%, the highest level since 1999.
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mark أُعيد تغريده
🚨 MASSIVE AIR BRIDGE: UK TO MIDDLE EAST 🚨
At least 16 USAF C-17A Globemasters are conducting a high-tempo airlift from the UK to U.S. bases in the Middle East. 🇬🇧✈️🌍
These heavy lifters are moving troops, armored vehicles, and critical gear as the regional buildup reaches its highest level in decades. 🪖🛡️📦
#BreakingNews #USAF #MilitaryAirlift #C17
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mark أُعيد تغريده
Crimes against humanity.
Al Jazeera English@AJEnglish
BREAKING: Russia’s state nuclear company Rosatom says the risk of a nuclear accident at Iran’s Bushehr plant is increasing, as it evacuated a further 198 staff from the site on Saturday, according to Russian media. 🔴 LIVE updates: aje.news/0ni4lg
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mark أُعيد تغريده
Donald Trump has talked about attacking Iran and stealing its oil for 46 years (1980-2026)
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