Brett nagle

@DrJStrategy Honestly this is wrong on so many levels. USA started the war leading to the choke point.if the world is at peace - why is there a choke point? Refer suez if you are in doubt. Also the dollar is the reserve currency for a world with privileges and costs

Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed. In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines. In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive. A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent. By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right. In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

@elonmusk @Ryanair Please buy Ryanair and make flying great again

@Ryanair Should I buy Ryan Air and put someone whose actual name is Ryan in charge?

perhaps you need Wi-Fi @elonmusk?

@ScottAdamsSays Thank you for all the wisdom. RIP

A Final Message From Scott Adams

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

@JamesMilner @grudabhafc Legend

Great fight showed by everyone for a big 3 points. Happy to get on the score sheet and delighted for @grudabhafc scoring an amazing winning goal🔥. #seagulls #BHAFC #DJ20🎮

The 🌎 will always love you @DiogoJota18 Rest in peace brother ❤️ 🎶 "Ohh, he wears the number 20 He will take us to victory And when he’s running down the left wing, he’ll cut inside and score for LFC He’s a lad from Portugal. Better than Figo

@JamesMilner Legend 🙌

Delighted to extend my time at the club and looking forward to getting back into pre season to work with the manager and this talented group of players. #BHAFC

US OFFICIAL: MORE DOCUMENTS COMING ON JFK ASSASSINATION

The best goalkeeper in the world

A couple reflections on the quantum computing breakthrough we just announced... Most of us grew up learning there are three main types of matter that matter: solid, liquid, and gas. Today, that changed. After a nearly 20 year pursuit, we’ve created an entirely new state of matter, unlocked by a new class of materials, topoconductors, that enable a fundamental leap in computing. It powers Majorana 1, the first quantum processing unit built on a topological core. We believe this breakthrough will allow us to create a truly meaningful quantum computer not in decades, as some have predicted, but in years. The qubits created with topoconductors are faster, more reliable, and smaller. They are 1/100th of a millimeter, meaning we now have a clear path to a million-qubit processor. Imagine a chip that can fit in the palm of your hand yet is capable of solving problems that even all the computers on Earth today combined could not! Sometimes researchers have to work on things for decades to make progress possible. It takes patience and persistence to have big impact in the world. And I am glad we get the opportunity to do just that at Microsoft. This is our focus: When productivity rises, economies grow faster, benefiting every sector and every corner of the globe. It’s not about hyping tech; it’s about building technology that truly serves the world.

🇺🇸 S&P 500 Market leadership has diversified in 2025. Unlike the 2023/2024 period when a few large tech companies led the way, now nearly half of S&P 500 stocks are outperforming the index 👉 isabelnet.com/?s=S%26P+500 h/t @YahooFinance $spx #spx #stocks #sp500 #equities

@pmarca And all of that is made by Europe. What will America make then?

The imperfection of humans will then command a premium. The most desirable, valuable, and expensive clothes, shoes, cars, watches, jewelry, food, drink, music, art, exercise, teaching, training, etc etc are all provided by people, not machines.

@fabknowledge Take care and get better!

A bit of personal news (sadly). Taking some unwanted medical leave this week, unsure if I’ll post by EOW, but been struggling with some medical issues and they haven’t been getting better. At this point I don’t have a choice but to focus on healing for a bit. HOPING I can get back to half days on Wednesday and onwards. We will see. Health is wealth and I really cannot stress take care of yourself enough. Doing stuff a 30 year old guy should never do. Happy holidays.

@fabknowledge Definitely not going to argue you with you on tech but what happens to asml if anything happens to tsm (earthquake? Invasion?)

I think it's so funny that every random quality LO in my replies tells me I'm wrong about peak litho. When you talk to formers, current ASML employees, and people who work on leading-edge processes, they are like, yeah, probably peak litho. It's okay to keep blindly telling me it's a quality company and burnishing your five books that tell you that. Guys, it's technology, and I don't know what else to tell you. It's clear-cut.

🚨🧨 Excl | Jürgen #Klopp will become the new „Global Head of Soccer“ at Red Bull ✔️ .. starting on January 1, 2025. Klopp has already signed a long-term contract. ⚠️ Additionally, Klopp has secured an exit option allowing him to become the head coach of the Germany national team in the future. As a potential successor to Julian Nagelsmann. From January, Klopp will advise all Red Bull teams (Leipzig, Salzburg, New York, etc.) on coaching matters, playing philosophy, development and transfers of talents/head coaches and more. Oliver Mintzlaff was determined to get Klopp. @SkySportDE 🇩🇪

No DNA, just RSA. 🇿🇦🏆

Vincent van Gogh

Your expectations are more powerful than your genes.

In 2022, people in the EU rated their satisfaction with personal relationships on average at 7.8, based on a scale of 0 (not satisfied) to 10 (fully satisfied).😄💙 Highest in: 🇲🇹Malta, 🇦🇹Austria & 🇸🇮Slovenia (all 8.6) Lowest in: 🇧🇬Bulgaria (6.0) ➡️ europa.eu/!twqdg8