BenVB

youtube.com/shorts/wHrcmkD… “Lose money for the firm and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm and I will be ruthless.” #WarrenBuffett Timeless life & business wisdom/principles. ❤️❤️

March nonfarm payrolls +178k vs. +65k est. & -133k in prior month (rev. down from -92k)…best month since December 2024

More evidence US and Israeli interceptor missiles are running down faster than Iranian offensive weapons US, Israel, & Iran are all dependent on China’s factory base to replenish their missiles. Who gets priority? Logistics > tactics.

@demishassabis @grok What is Demis trying to convey here?

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@AnnaEconomist Great catch!

One relatively new reason why high gasoline prices doesn’t bite as hard for households as pre-covid: 2x as many people are now working from home.

The vast data centers that power artificial intelligence guzzle huge amounts of energy but they also have another alarming impact, according to new research. They are creating “heat islands,” warming the land around them by up to 16 degrees Fahrenheit, and making life hotter for more than 340 million people. cnn.it/4rZSiG5

2026 was supposed to be the year of record oil oversupply and falling prices Instead: • Oil has surged from $61 to $116 • The market is facing its biggest disruption in history The difference? The Iran war

As shown below, the Walmart Recession Signal (WRS) currently warns of a potential recession or at least a significant economic slowdown. I haven’t published the WRS for some time and “Walmart Worries” just keep multiplying. For the details see my latest @ PaulsenPerspectives.Substack.com

BREAKING: Saudi Arabia's east-west pipeline that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz is now pumping oil at its full capacity of around 7 million barrels a day, according to Bloomberg report.

@spectatorindex @grok How much pressure does this take off global oil supply constraints? Assess the impact.

These two photographs are separated by only 66 years.

This! More than ever, the Fed really needs to understand the lesson from 2021-2023. Cannot take the easy way out.

If Hormuz stays closed another 3-4 weeks, it all begins to crumble...into an already-teetering global sovereign debt problem & consumer credit problem. Based on what I'm hearing, it is highly likely Hormuz will remain closed for at least another 3-4 weeks. Let's watch.

cnbc.com/2026/03/14/ber… “…Berkshire bought back the equivalent of 309 Class A shares, roughly $226 million worth, on March 4, the day it resumed repurchases for the first time since May 2024. That’s based on the number of outstanding shares as of March 4, the record date of the annual meeting, as shown in the proxy statement. The company disclosed the resumption in a March 5 SEC filing “in the interest of transparency with our leadership transition” but provided no details. New CEO Greg Abel told CNBC last week there won’t be any future buyback announcements, except for what’s in its regular quarterly financial reports.“ #BRK

The nut of it is that OpenAI bowed out of the Oracle deal because it wanted NVDA Ruben and not the Blackwell, which are two different types of data center builds. Oracle borrowed heavily to secure the site and order all the hardware for the buildout around Blackwell, and OpenAI as the customer said the chips will be dated before the building is even ready. Duh. Then Nvidia got involved and paid $150 million to block AMD from getting the Oracle build contract. This is how NVDA throws its weight around to block AMD use by its customers. It is mafia-like and should be an antitrust case. The Justice Dept has been investigating NVDA for almost two years but I don’t think Trump’s DOJ will prosecute NVDA. I know Oracle and OpenAi are still partners, Meta took the build that OpenAI abandoned, etc. So the AIlluminati are already saying no big deal. But this is an absolutely huge deal. This is playing out as some of us said it would. The signs are showing up in several places, and they are the exact signs we said would show up. reuters.com/business/oracl…

yahoo.com/news/articles/… “The Earth warmed around 0.35 degrees Celsius in the decade to 2025, compared to just under 0.2C per decade on average between 1970 and 2015, according to a paper published on Friday in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters. This is the first statistically significant evidence of an acceleration of global warming, the authors said.“ #GlobalWarming

Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network. In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome. AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement. We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only. We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements. We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.

The new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live here. Put aside Trump's deportations, America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves in lands they find more affordable and safe. @drewhinshaw @JoeWSJ wsj.com/us-news/americ…

🚨BREAKING : Perplexity just dropped their own OpenClaw version. And the timing couldn't be more perfect. OpenClaw got suspended by Google this week. 219,000 GitHub stars. Cut off. Just like that. Then Perplexity launched Perplexity Computer. Here's what Perplexity Computer actually is: → 19 AI models working in parallel. → Claude for reasoning. Gemini for research. → 17 other models handling everything else. All in one browser. No local setup. No terms of service drama. No Google pulling the plug. It can: → Research and analyze — NVIDIA earnings to market reports → Design, code and deploy web apps end to end → Connect to Google Workspace, Slack and GitHub → Handle files with persistent memory across sessions → Run autonomously in the cloud while you do something else OpenClaw ran locally on your machine. Perplexity Computer runs in the cloud on 19 models simultaneously. OpenClaw got suspended the same week Perplexity shipped its replacement. Timing is everything.

Last year in January, 16 markets of the 85 I track across the U.S. had YoY price declines. This year - 43 And yes, markets in the NE and Midwest as well In fact, the Midwest looks like it's about to start its descent