Teodor Mitew

The Red Queen Trap is out. A civilisation burning all its energy just to stay in place. Institutions coasting on inertia. Systems eating themselves to survive. A field manual for the age of collapse. amazon.com/dp/176448570X

I can't get over the fact that Dune is about an oppressed people fighting for their homeland, waging a jihad to bring down a hegemonic empire by threatening to cut off the flow of their most precious commodity after the empire had assassinated their religious leader's father.

@NickSzabo4 The US has no way of isolating the theatre. China and Russia can supply Iran with whatever they want via Central Asia and the Caspian.

Probably also included: millions of Chinese assemblies and parts with which to build tens of thousands more missiles and drones.

dune 3 is only the "epic conclusion" because they're too scared to make a movie that's just two straight hours of a sandworm arguing with jason momoa

You killed the moderate (Kantian Philosopher) now you get the radical (PhD in Supply Chain Logistics)

🚨 Iran is strategically holding back its doctors of philosophy. Larijani was a moderate Kantian. DC fears the escalation ladder: Hegelian → Schmittian → Heideggerian → post-structuralist At the final stage, the subject dissolves, the target disappears, power is everywhere

This is going to happen EVERYWHERE People can't handle complicated You can't get someone who can't place Iran on a map to believe that they can't afford to drive to work because of Iran

“This world” is ending— it’s over— you will face rationing of fuel & energy. The power will be going out.

I don’t think it’s filtered thru to the populace that the world is ending

I'm going to make some obvious points. (1) Blowing up all the oil infrastructure in the Middle East is an insane idea, and may well result in a global economic crash and humanitarian crisis unrivaled in the lives of those now living. We're talking about the price of everything everywhere rising, from food to gas, at a moment when inflation was already high. All of that will be laid at the feet of the authors of this war. (2) The antebellum status quo of Feb 27, 2026 was just not that bad, but we're unlikely to return to it. Expect indefinite, long-term, ongoing disruptions to everything out of the Middle East. (3) Also assume tech financing crashes for the indefinite future. The genius plan to get the Gulf states caught in the crossfire has incinerated much of the funding for LPs, for datacenters, and for IPOs. Anyone in tech who supported this war may soon learn the meaning of "force majeure" as funding gets yanked. (4) Many capital allocators will instead be allocating much further down Maslow's hierarchy of needs, towards useful basic things like food and energy. (5) It's fortunate that all those progressives yelled about the "climate crisis." Yes, their reasoning about timelines was wrong, and much of the money was wasted in graft, but the result was right: we all need energy independence from the Middle East, pronto. It's also fortunate that Elon and China autistically took climate seriously. Now they're going to need to ship a billion solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, nuclear power plants, and the like to get everyone off oil, immediately. (6) It's not just an oil and gas problem, of course. It's also a fertilizer problem, and a chemical precursor problem. Maybe some new sources will come online at the new prices, but it takes time to dial stuff up, particularly at this scale, so shortages are almost a certainty. That said, China has actually scaled up coal-to-chemicals[a,c] (C2C), and there's also something more sci-fi called Power-to-X[b] which turns arbitrary power + water + air into hydrocarbons. But all of that will need to get accelerated. I have a background in chemical engineering so may start funding things in this area. (7) Ultimately, this war is going to result in tremendous blame for anyone associated with it. It's a no-win scenario to blow up this much infrastructure for so many people. Simply not worth it for whatever objective they thought they were going to attain. But unless you're actually in a position to stop the madness, the pragmatic thing to do is: scramble to mitigate the fallout to yourself, your business, and your people. [a]: reuters.com/business/energ… [b]: alfalaval.com/industries/ene… [c]: reuters.com/sustainability…

Worlds most sophisticated gas processing plant, took 14 years to build Are we winning yet?

If Iran goes ahead with its threats to attack oil and gas facilities in the Gulf, in retaliation for an Israeli strike on its South Pars gas field, to include five facilities in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar, it will have a devastating effect on global energy supplies. No one should underestimate the severity of what the fallout will be if Iran follows through with those threats.

The US just subscribed billions of people to food shortages. Iran will burn the gulf oil/gas fields to the ground in retaliation, ensuring zero diesel and total food supply collapse in many parts of the world.

Petroyuan is already in effect in the Strait of Hormuz toll booth. Up next: China suggests to GCC to sell all their energy in petroyuan. They get free Hormuz passage. China opens Shanghai Gold Exchange vaults, co-custody by Iran and GCC . Iran and GCC are then able to convert their yuan surpluses in silver and gold. Game, set, match.

Brilliant economic paper, directly models the "Structural Jevons Paradox" happening right now in the AI industry. The cost of running an LLM is dropping, but total computing energy is exploding anyway. It mathematically proves that as the unit cost of digital intelligence and coding drops, the aggregate demand for complex AI agents and the infrastructure to support them surges exponentially, creating a massive new downstream ecosystem that requires human management. Reveals a massive paradox where dropping the price of AI usage does not save money, but instead encourages developers to build vastly more complex agents that eat up exponentially more computing power. Because of this relentless progress, small companies building simple applications on top of these models get completely crushed as the core AI naturally absorbs those exact same features over time. They also discovered a brutal dynamic where a perfectly working LLM becomes economically worthless the moment a competitor releases a smarter version. Ultimately, the researchers prove that this combination of massive computing costs and the need for constant user data naturally pushes the entire AI industry toward an unavoidable monopoly. --- arxiv. org/pdf/2601.12339v1 "The Economics of Digital Intelligence Capital"

I will say it again: Iran is a formidable adversary. They possess the technology, the strategic advantage of their geography, and are proving to be remarkably resilient. Their command and control chain is decentralized, with a backup plan for every leader, including a scale of three to seven pre-designated successors. The U.S. is fighting a war unlike any it has ever faced. The powerful Lincoln Carrier Strike Group is positioned 1,000 km off the Iranian coast, while America calls upon the world for help to gain entry into the Strait of Hormuz. Those who have followed me for a while will know that I wrote about this weeks before the attacks began. Today, the war has entered a new phase: Who is more resilient: Iran in the face of bombings, or the U.S. under the pressure of foreign markets and rising inflation? This will be the deciding factor of the war.

Dune III looks awesome. Glad they're sticking to the book and bringing in Hayt, Scytale, and the Tleilaxu. Anya Taylor-Joy is stunning as Alia.

@KevorkAlmassian There is a reason why leadership was traditionally off limits. This game can be played by many. All centralized systems are vulnerable. Also, once you take off the public nodes in a decentralized network who do you negotiate a ceasefire with?

If assassinating leaders like Khamenei and Larijani becomes “normal,” what exactly stops the U.S.-Israeli axis from trying the same playbook on Russia or China the moment they think the circumstances allow it?

Introspecting

@RWApodcast Decentralization doesn't preclude C2, quite the contrary. Local commanders most likely use a shared targeting pool live updated via Chinese ISR. High priority targets would be bumped up a list and local commanders would bid for strike availability. Think uber for rockets.

I think people drastically overestimate the decentralization thing and "Mosaic" military command, clearly there is serious C2 going on, Iranian strikes are way too coordinated to be the result of 30+ military districts just doing their own thing