Thom

@WallStreetMav @grok fact check this and remove any bias

Within 10 to 14 days, Iran won’t be able to store oil and will have permanent long term damage to oil wells for extracting oil. Oil wells perform poorly after you stop the flowing process. Iran exports oil, but it also imports gasoline and diesel. Iran lacks the ability to refine enough of their own oil into gasoline and diesel. So very soon Iran will be running out of fuel everywhere.

@nickshirleyy @grok explain this bill, what do the proponents say vs those against it

California is trying to pass a bill that would criminalize investigative journalism with misdemeanors, $10,000 fines, imprisonment, and content takedown. The proposed bill is titled AB 2624 and was made after I exposed mass fraud by immigrant groups in America. Under AB 2624, government-funded entities like the Somali “Learing” Daycare centers would be protected from being exposed if they operated inside California. The enemy truly is within. When our politicians would rather protect fraudsters and illegal migrants, it’s time for us to stand up or face mass oppression from the traitors who “rule” over us.

@BillyRaeSirus @teslaownersSV Airports have WiFi. I think what he means is he'd accept a longer layover if the flights have starlink.

@teslaownersSV He does realize flying commercial and having a lay over does not entail staying on the plane?

MrBeast says once enough airlines offer Starlink, he’ll only book those flights: “Extra layover? Don’t care—there’s Starlink. I’ll sit anywhere for it. Starlink is amazing.” He adds: “Most people haven’t used it, but in Antarctica it was our only signal. On a four-hour drive through rural Africa, we mounted Starlink on the car and had perfect connectivity the whole time.” On SpaceX: “What Elon Musk is doing will fundamentally advance humanity in unimaginable ways. Someone will go to Mars in our lifetime—I truly believe it.”

@CAgovernor @grok are these the same fraudsters that Nick Shirley uncovered?

California is again leading the charge against large-scale identity theft and hospice fraud. Today, we're taking decisive action against 14 providers who tried using stolen identities to bill Medi-Cal for nonexistent hospice services.

@MarioNawfal So they're opening up the straight? That's all that matters.

🚨🇫🇷🇮🇷 IRAN'S PLAYING DIVIDE-AND-CONQUER WITH HORMUZ AND IT'S WORKING Iran's got a system: block U.S. ships, let European ones through... but only if those countries stand up to Trump. France crossed today no problem, Spain blocked airspace recently and got rewarded. It's brilliant... and infuriating. They're splitting NATO by making it profitable to oppose Washington. Every European ship that gets through proves you don't need America to keep trade flowing, you just need to not be America. Trump's entire pitch was "they need us for security." Iran just showed Europe they need Trump less than Trump needs them. He's gonna lose his mind and escalate hard, which is exactly what makes this strategy work. The madder he gets, the more Europe distances itself, the less likely he is to end this with a win. Brilliant. And infuriating. Source: CNN World

@yoyonofukuoka Most Americans I know absolutely love Japan!

アメリカ人はもっと、日本人を下に見てるのかと思ってた。 それも仕方ないと思ってたけど、実際は全然違った。 彼らは僕達を対等に見ている。 彼らの日本愛の熱量は本気だった。 自動翻訳機能によって、僅かなボタンの掛け違いが解消した。 ありがとうイーロンマスク。 ありがとうXスタッフ。 🇺🇸🤝🇯🇵

@shanaka86 @grok tldr this

BREAKING: Secretary Rubio just clarified US war objectives with a precision that leaves zero ambiguity. Four targets, stated twice in the same briefing because, as he put it, “I see these reports of the US not being clear on what objectives are.” Destroy the air force. Destroy the navy. Destroy the missile and drone factories. Severely diminish the missile launchers so Iran can never hide behind them to build a nuclear weapon. “We are ahead of schedule on most of them, and we can achieve them without any ground troops. Without any.” Then he added the sentence the markets should be pricing: “The President has to be prepared for multiple contingencies, which I’m not going to discuss in the media.” Those contingencies are visible to anyone tracking ship movements. USS Tripoli arrived in the CENTCOM theatre on March 27 carrying the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, approximately 2,200 Marines with F-35B fighters and MV-22 Ospreys. USS Boxer departed San Diego with the 11th MEU and is transiting toward the Arabian Sea with another 2,500 Marines. The Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group has been operating in the Arabian Sea since January. The Gerald R. Ford is in the Red Sea. The George H.W. Bush is preparing as a third carrier. The 82nd Airborne is deploying. SEAL teams and JSOC packages are in theatre. More than 50,000 US troops are now within striking distance of Iran. If you draw a line between what Rubio said and what the Pentagon is positioning, the gap between “no ground troops” and “multiple contingencies” is exactly the width of Kharg Island. Twenty square kilometres of fortified limestone through which 90 percent of Iran’s crude exports flow. Intelligence reports describe new S-300 air defence batteries, dense naval minefields around the deep-water berths, C-802 anti-ship missile launchers, underground command bunkers, and 2,000 to 3,000 IRGC troops with rapid mainland reinforcement capability fifteen kilometres away. Iran has turned Kharg into a fortress precisely because it understands that the island is the one piece of leverage that converts air campaign success into political surrender. This creates the binary that defines the next seven days. Path one: Pakistan’s Ishaq Dar lands in Beijing tomorrow, secures Chinese backing for hosting US-Iran talks, and the April 6 deadline produces a diplomatic framework that reopens Hormuz and begins IAEA-supervised uranium extraction. Rubio’s “weeks not months” holds. The markets exhale. Brent drops below $90. Path two: April 6 passes without a deal. Trump executes the threat he posted on Truth Social this morning: “blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island and possibly all desalinization plants.” The Marines who arrived on the Tripoli are not there for deterrence. They are there for the most complex amphibious operation since Inchon, conducted against a fortified island in a mined strait while 90 million Iranians endure their 31st day without internet and the Houthis threaten to close Bab al-Mandeb if the US goes ashore. Rubio’s framing is deliberately clean. Four objectives. Ahead of schedule. Weeks not months. No ground troops needed for the stated objectives. But the unstated objective, the one the “multiple contingencies” language protects, is whether the uranium comes out through negotiation or through the tunnels beneath Isfahan, and whether Kharg opens through diplomacy or through Marines landing on a mined beach under fire from anti-ship missiles. The molecule, as always, does not negotiate. It flows through the strait or it does not. The market has seven days to decide which path it is pricing. Full analysis in The Last Molecule Standing, live now. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

@SpencerGuard @grok tldr this for me

@DefiantLs Unfortunately she will be hired by a school system or an HR department.

Job offers will be flowing in

@HKstrongside @Jacobsklug @openclaw How did this go? Any updates?

Great comparison. I have been using Claude Code and Scheduled tasks. I am going to be installing OpenClaw on a Mac Mini M4 w/64gb. Going to run a local model for the brain and heartbeat and offload harder tasks to Gemini or ChatGPT. Hoping to absorb much of the costs with the local model. Thinking of Gemma 27b or Qwen 32b for the local models.

I battle tested @Openclaw vs Claude Cowork to see which is better. Here's the results breakdown. OpenClaw Pros + Better ongoing memory — genuinely feels like it knows you + More personal and human interaction + Integrated comms (Slack, WhatsApp, Discord) Cons - Costs me $3k/month in credits - Breaks frequently - You handle hosting and setup - Gets confused on complex workflows - Easy to mistake conversations for productivity Claude Cowork Pros + Best task planning and execution I've seen + Chrome extension is legit — browses like a human + Dead simple setup + $250/month for max plan + Actually focused on getting things done Cons - Not as deeply integrated into my tools yet - Less personalization than OpenClaw - No persistent memory — needs docs or context fed manually No right/wrong choice. Pick based on what you actually need.

@WR4NYGov @grok is the x algorithm open source? Explain what that means and does it address Stewart's concern about political bias? Do other news media outlets open source their algorithm? Why / why not? Please cite your sources.

Jon Stewart claims Elon tilts the X algorithm so we don’t see criticism of Elon and Trump. But we all see high volume criticism of Elon and Trump. And we saw this video.

@balajis @grok if this is true what investments should I make, when should I make them, and what market / political signals should I be looking for?

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…

@weeklyshowpod @CaseyNewton @noUpside @grok is the x algorithm open source?

How has Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) influenced our democracy? On a new pod, we’re unpacking Big Tech’s election disruption with Casey Newton, editor of Platformer, and Renée DiResta, research professor at Georgetown University. New episode out now! @CaseyNewton @noUpside #theweeklyshow #jonstewart #politics

@JeffFisch @grok how much money did the US spend on the war in Ukraine?

The US told the EU, ‘Ukraine isn’t our war. Solve it yourself.’ Americans cheered. The EU is telling the US, ‘Iran isn’t our war.’ Americans are irate. This is how Trump has underminded a decades long alliance.

@shanaka86 @grok factcheck summarize and desensationalize this post

JUST IN: Malaysia just declared the U.S.-Malaysia trade deal null and void. Not suspended. Not under review. Null and void. “It is not on hold. It is no longer there.” Those are the words of Malaysia’s Investment, Trade and Industry Minister, Datuk Seri Johari Abdul Ghani. On the record. This week. The deal was signed five months ago in Kuala Lumpur by President Trump and Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim at the ASEAN Summit. It cut tariffs from 47 percent to 19 percent. It was presented as proof that reciprocal trade works. It was the template. It no longer exists. The trigger was a Supreme Court ruling on February 20 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump. The Court held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorise presidential tariffs. IEEPA was the legal foundation beneath virtually every reciprocal tariff deal the administration signed. The Court pulled the foundation. Malaysia looked at the structure standing on nothing and walked away. No other country has done this yet. But fifteen nations are now under new Section 301 investigations launched March 11 and 12, covering structural excess capacity across sixteen economies and forced labour practices across sixty. The USTR pivoted to Section 301 within weeks of the ruling because it is the only remaining statutory vehicle for broad tariff authority. The pivot tells you the administration knows the legal ground shifted. The question every trade desk should be asking this morning is not whether Malaysia matters. Malaysia covers 12 percent of its exports to the US under the deal. The question is who follows. Every reciprocal trade agreement signed under IEEPA authority between 2025 and February 2026 now sits on the same voided legal foundation. Every counterparty government has the same option Malaysia just exercised. Every trade minister in every capital that signed one of these deals is reading the same Supreme Court opinion and asking the same question: is our agreement still enforceable? The answer, as of February 20, is that the legal basis no longer exists. The deals were signed under authority the Court has since ruled the President did not have. Malaysia is the first government to say that out loud. It will not be the last. The cascade risk is not theoretical. Roughly $500 billion in annual US trade flows run through the nations now under Section 301 investigation or bound by IEEPA-era reciprocal agreements. If even a fraction of those counterparties follow Malaysia’s precedent, the result is a simultaneous renegotiation of America’s trade architecture during a period when the Hormuz crisis is already driving energy and food inflation, the Fed is trapped at 3 percent core PCE with no room to cut, and US farmers cannot afford $900-per-ton ammonia. Carl Quintanilla posted the headline with the kind of brevity that tells you even CNBC does not know how to frame this. Because the frame is uncomfortable. The administration built a tariff architecture on a legal authority the Supreme Court ruled it never had. The first country to notice just tore up the deal on live television. The trade architecture, the fertiliser supply chain, the insurance market, the naval coalition, the planting calendar. One by one, the systems the global economy assumed were stable are revealing themselves as fragile. Malaysia just pulled another thread. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

@shanaka86 @grok factcheck, summarize and desensationalize this post

Hours ago, Trump went on Fox News to announce he is calling European allies and regional governments to form a coalition to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Hours later, Germany said no. “As long as this war continues, there will be no participation, not even in any effort to keep the Strait of Hormuz open by military means.” That is the German government spokesperson. On the record. Today. This is the moment the market’s quick-resolution thesis died. Think about what just happened. The United States asked the largest economy in Europe, the country that received the most American support during the Russian energy crisis, the NATO ally that benefits most from Gulf energy transits, to help reopen a 21-mile waterway carrying one-third of global seaborne fertilizer trade and a fifth of world oil. Germany said it has nothing to do with NATO. And walked away. Japan already declined. Australia already declined. The US Navy confirmed on March 12 it is not ready for escorts. Minesweeping assets were retired in 2025. Trump is demanding roughly seven countries send warships. The number of confirmed commitments as of this evening: zero. Now do the math on the calendar. Even if a coalition somehow materializes next week, minesweeping a 21-mile corridor saturated with Iranian mines and drone threats under active fire takes weeks of operational preparation. Then escorts must begin. Then insurance must recalibrate. Solvency II capital buffers depleted by 26 months of Red Sea losses do not rebuild in days. Reinsurance treaties must be renegotiated. Individual vessels must be re-underwritten. The Red Sea precedent is 26 months old and premiums never returned to pre-crisis levels. The Corn Belt needs nitrogen by mid-April. India needs Kharif prep by May. Australia needs urea by June. Do you see the problem. The coalition timeline is measured in months. The planting window is measured in weeks. These two clocks do not intersect. The food the world eats in late 2026 is being decided right now by soil chemistry, not by which foreign minister picks up Trump’s phone call. Nearly 49% of globally traded urea is tied to conflict-exposed Gulf exporters. Transit has collapsed 97%. Bangladesh has shut five of six urea factories during its primary rice season. India formally asked China for emergency urea. China responded by banning phosphate exports through August. Egypt is bleeding foreign reserves to feed 69 million people on bread subsidies priced for a world that no longer exists. 318 million people were at crisis-level hunger before any of this started. Germany’s GDP will take a 0.2 to 0.4 percentage point hit from the energy shock alone. TTF gas is up 45 to 60 percent since the closure. And Berlin just told Washington it will not lift a finger to fix it. The country that shut down its nuclear plants, became dependent on imported gas, and now refuses to help secure the strait through which that gas flows. The irony writes itself. The consequences do not. The $20 billion DFC reinsurance backstop with Chubb has zero confirmed fertilizer vessel utilization. Insurance compensates for financial loss. It does not sweep mines that Germany will not help clear. Every hour that passes without escorts is another hour closer to the planting deadline. Every ally that declines is another month added to the normalization timeline. Every month added is another harvest lost on the steep side of the quadratic yield curve where the world’s poorest farmers operate. Germany’s rejection is not a diplomatic footnote. It is the confirmation signal that the molecules stay trapped through spring. The planting window does not care about your coalition politics. It is closing. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

@anishmoonka @grok factcheck please

Scientists put kids through 100 hours of reading, then scanned their brains. New wiring had physically grown inside the language regions. Communication between brain areas sped up by a factor of 10. Kids who didn't read showed zero change. That was a 2009 Carnegie Mellon study. It gets wilder. In 2013, Emory University scanned 19 students every morning for 19 straight days while they read one novel chapter each night. Mornings after reading, the brain areas responsible for understanding other people's emotions lit up with new connections. So did the region that processes physical sensation. Their brains were simulating what the characters felt, as if it were happening to them. Those changes stuck around for 5 days after they finished the book. Now flip to scrolling. A massive review published in Psychological Bulletin last September pulled together 71 studies covering 98,299 people. Heavy short-form video use (TikTok, Reels, Shorts) showed a clear pattern: worse attention, weaker self-control, and more anxiety. Consistent across teenagers and adults, across every platform tested. Oxford didn't name "brain rot" its 2024 Word of the Year for nothing. A 2024 brain wave study found that people hooked on short-form video had weaker activity in the front of the brain, the part that controls focus and impulse control. Separate brain scans showed the same thing: heavy scrollers had less activation in the exact regions that deep reading strengthens. UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has been studying this for decades. Humans were never born to read. There's no gene for it. Reading is something we invented, and it hijacked neurons that were originally meant for recognizing faces. Over time, it built entirely new brain circuits connecting language, vision, and emotion. But those circuits only survive if you use them. Stop reading, and they fade. Wolf's conclusion is simple: screens built for speed produce a speed-wired brain. Books built for depth produce a depth-wired brain. One honest caveat: most of these studies are snapshots, not long-term tracking. People who already struggle to focus might just prefer short videos. But the same pattern showing up across nearly 100,000 people is hard to shrug off. The tweet repeats the line seven times. The research backs it up with brain scans, EEG data, and white-matter imaging across tens of thousands of people.

@CNBlockIntel @grok factcheck summarize and desensationalize this post

@shanaka86 @grok tldr and factcheck this

BREAKING: Thailand is not at war with Iran. Thailand did not participate in Operation Epic Fury. Thailand did not vote for strikes. Thailand did not host bases. Thailand is a Southeast Asian kingdom of 72 million people whose principal relationship with the Strait of Hormuz is that its ships pass through it carrying cargo. Today the IRGC struck one of those ships. The “Mayuree Naree”, a Thai-flagged bulk carrier, 178 metres long, 30,193 deadweight tonnes, built 2008, IMO 9323649, was hit by an unknown projectile 11 nautical miles north of Oman while attempting to transit the Strait of Hormuz. The projectile ignited a fire in the vessel. Twenty crew members were rescued by Omani naval forces. Three are missing. Three Thai sailors are missing in a war their country has no part in, on a ship that was trying to do what 138 ships per day used to do without incident: cross a 33-kilometre waterway carrying cargo from one side of the world to the other. The weapon that struck the Mayuree Naree has not been identified. The signature is consistent with IRGC coastal-launched projectiles, kamikaze drones, or fast-boat missile attacks that have characterised every strike in the Strait since 28 February. No claim of responsibility has been issued. The Mosaic Doctrine does not claim. Any of the 31 autonomous provincial commands with coastal access could have launched the attack without authorisation from Tehran, without consulting other commands, and without the knowledge of a Supreme Leader who has not spoken, not appeared, and exists at his own rally as a cardboard cutout. The fire was extinguished after several hours. A skeleton crew reportedly remains aboard. The vessel is damaged but has not sunk. No environmental spill has been reported. But the damage to the vessel is not the damage that matters. The damage that matters is to every shipowner on Earth who just watched a neutral country’s bulk carrier get hit for the crime of attempting to transit. The US Navy has three carrier strike groups in the region. The USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea. The USS Gerald R. Ford in the Red Sea. The USS George H.W. Bush en route. Combined firepower exceeding the military capacity of most nations. Reuters reported the Navy has refused near-daily escort requests from the shipping industry since 28 February because the risk is too high. The Mayuree Naree transited without escort. It transited without war-risk insurance, which seven P&I clubs cancelled effective 5 March. It transited because someone calculated that the cargo was worth the risk. The calculation was wrong. The ship’s insurer, if it had one, will not pay for a vessel that entered a war zone after coverage was voided. The owner faces a total loss on a 17-year-old bulk carrier that is now damaged, crewless, and anchored in waters where mines have been confirmed and 31 autonomous commands continue firing. Salvage would require a tug to enter the same corridor that just struck the vessel it would be rescuing. The insurance that would cover the tug does not exist either. Iran did not strike Thailand. Iran struck a ship. The Mosaic Doctrine does not distinguish between flags. It distinguishes between presence and absence. Any vessel in the Strait is a target. Any vessel outside is safe. The doctrine’s enforcement is binary: you are in the corridor or you are not. Nationality, cargo, neutrality, and intent are irrelevant. The 31 commands that fired on the Mayuree Naree do not know it is Thai. They know it is there. Three sailors are missing. The ship is burning. And the Strait that was supposed to be “very complete” just attacked a country that was never in the war. Full analysis below. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

@MattWalshBlog @grok factcheck please

So just to recap: a prison guard who lied to the authorities about checking on Epstein also coincidentally made a series of deposits in the weeks leading up to his death that were so suspicious that the bank independently reported them to the police. That same prison guard was searching for news about Epstein in the moments before his death. And that same guard was independently named by inmates who claimed that she was involved in covering up the killing. Also, two cameras in front of Epstein's cell malfunctioned while all of this was happening. That's a whole lot of coincidences stacking up on top of each other. I don't know. Seems strange to me. But I'm no detective.