Dirk de Vos

Not one soul will be surprised by the updated Freedom House ratings of nations. Defending institutions is the basis for our freedom. Collectively, we’ve been an embarrassment in recent years. Source: freedomhouse.org/sites/default/…

@Bruceps FWIW. The SA economy, banked by Capitec, TymeBank & Bank Zero etc is transforming the economy, many more young people there too. No BEE there because it's bottom up. It will replace the economy subject to BEE.

Well you either abandon transformation or you abandon growth... the evidence is in and abundantly clear the ANC at least can't do both at the same time and as equal priorities.

@RyanCoetzee There's another problem. The public sector does employ/promote more black people with qualifications/promise/ability at higher remuneration but the public sector, often dysfunctional, is a generally poor place to develop capabilities for the private sector.

As ever more than one thing is true at the same time when it comes to BEE and EE. Of course some corporate cultures resist diversity and some people have racial prejudices - and I think these things are easy to deny and therefore hard to change. But there are other things that are true, too. There is a supply side constraint when it comes to senior black managers. That’s partly because of Apartheid, but it’s also increasingly because of the catastrophic failure of our education system for over 30 years. It’s also true that there are negative consequences for growth and jobs when some businesses are legally privileged over others, compromising the market mechanism. Rent-seeking is still rent-seeking, even if it’s legalized. There’s a price to pay. Why deny it? I once spoke to a very senior black business leader who has been very successful. He said it was true that he probably wouldn’t have risen quite as fast had he not been black, but that black or not, if his strategy had failed and the share price had suffered, the board would have shown him the door, and that is as it should be, he said. It reminded me of Rassie’s approach. Give guys opportunity, be very clear about what you want from them, coach them to succeed, and then if they do, they’re in and if they don’t, they’re out. Rassie is brutally honest and his approach has worked, so no one serious thinks he’s racist if he drops a black player. There is more black talent in SA than some (generally racist) people want to believe. But it’s also true that there isn’t enough accountability. Opportunity and accountability need to go together. But when a political elite creates a legal framework that makes them and their friends and family rich, they will, unsurprisingly, compromise the accountability side of the ledger. Not every beneficiary is politically connected, of course, but once accountability is out the window, the failure applies across the board. So anyway, a serious review of BEE would actually include a clear and honest chapter about the downsides of every policy option, not just a glowing description of the putative upsides. If you want to take an approach that compromises growth and jobs, then go ahead, but level with people. One last thing. The ANC needs to practice what it preaches. I once asked Obed Bapela if Trevor Manuel could be the president of the ANC. He said no. I asked why not. He said because he’s not a black African. Like I said, some organizational cultures resist non-racialism. They need to change.

What stage of capitalism is this?

One of the best job applications ever written came from the hands of Robert Pirosh in 1934. MGM loved it, took him on and he went on to become an Oscar-winning screenwriter.

@theojaffee @ramez Of course, this is absurd. AI has much less impact in poorer parts of the world.

Negative sentiment toward AI is a luxury belief

@ramez Trust is the new premium value & it is only going to become more valuable. So, a constant effort to be trustworthy. AI, being probablistic erodes trust everywhere, while trust is deterministic.

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with an AI is a good guy with an AI. Or many good guys with AI. We need to find ways to incentivize that, and build our detection, defense, and intervention capacities proactively. Like pandemic defense, but so much broader.

@LindseyGrahamSC @POTUS Okay Lady G. Now fuck off.

Just spoke to @POTUS about our European allies’ unwillingness to provide assets to keep the Strait of Hormuz functioning, which benefits Europe far more than America. I have never heard him so angry in my life. I share that anger given what’s at stake. The arrogance of our allies to suggest that Iran with a nuclear weapon is of little concern and that military action to stop the ayatollah from acquiring a nuclear bomb is our problem not theirs is beyond offensive. The European approach to containing the ayatollah’s nuclear ambitions have proven to be a miserable failure. The repercussions of providing little assistance to keep the Strait of Hormuz functioning are going to be wide and deep for Europe and America. I consider myself very forward-leaning on supporting alliances, however at a time of real testing like this, it makes me second guess the value of these alliances. I am certain I am not the only senator who feels this way.

These guys are so young and stupid. It defies belief.

Ahahahahahahahahaha

Got the wife evacuated, so have time to drink a tea and think about the Strait of Hormuz. I've sailed through the it a few times years ago and done antipiracy operations in the Strait of Malacca. Maps can be deceiving. The best way to think about the Strait of Hormuz is a four lane highway, with two lanes per direction for the largest ships like crude carriers, cargo vessels, and warships in the center of the channel where it is deepest and free of obstacles. Then on the outside of those lanes, you have medium sized ships, going Jebel Ali to other regional ports like Sohar, since a lot of international cargo goes direct to Jebel Ali then is cross loaded across the region. On the outside of those lanes, along both coasts, are dhow fishing boats and all manner of local, smaller craft. Maritime trade crisscrossing this region goes back hundreds of years. The Portugese wrote how disappointing it was to find a tight network of trade already established in the region when they arrived in the 15th century. It is hard to describe how crowded these waters are. You sometimes wonder if you could walk to Iran across the decks of ships and not get your feet wet. The amount of traffic makes distinguishing between normal traffic and a threat incredibly difficult. Is that dhow fishing, transiting between coasts, laying mines, gathering intelligence, or a tender for surface drones? Hard to discern while sailing ducks in a row escorting a lumbering tanker or cargo ship. Operation Prosperity Guardian in the Red Sea proved to be a Houthi victory when a land power with no navy to speak of fought the most powerful navy on earth to an agreement. The Hormuz problem is harder now the Iranians have proved they have the will to fight, no matter how much pain is leveled at them from afar. The shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz go around the Musandam penninsula. This turn exposes ships to 270 degree of fire control in layered systems from Qeshm, the surrounding high ground, to further inland, with surface drones now added to the mix. Iran doesn't need to mine the entire strait. Iran just needs to turn that main shipping lanes around Musandam into a kill box and divert approved ships past Qeshm, out of the main shipping lanes like a watery weigh station. It has started doing this. The U.S. has created a hard problem for itself. NATO understandably wants nothing to do with this. If the most powerful navy in the world can't solve this, what difference does European navies make. With the watery weigh station past Qeshm, Iran isn't closing the strait to global commerce. It is simply doing what the U.S. does with the dollar, exerting power over the chokepoint it controls. Understandably the U.S. doesn't like this, so why can't the U.S. just send warships to escort ships through? Well, when you escort a ship through a strait, you tend to stay ducks in a row. So if warships are sent to escort tankers, they are now just another target in the strait. Even if the warships could maneuver through local traffic to screen ships, lets go back to the 270 degree turn around the penninsula. The warships would be receiving layered waves of fire likely worse than they faced off with in the Red Sea against the Houthis from essentially three directions while having the longer route to run to protect the tankers around the peninsula. As the Hormuz Crisis drags on, anything less than breaking Iran's control of the strait will be seen as a loss for the U.S., much like the Battle of the Red Sea was against the Houthis.

Yesterday Jensen Huang stood on stage at GTC and called OpenClaw "the most popular open-source project in the history of humanity." He compared it to Linux. Linux took thirty years. OpenClaw took three months. I invested the next morning. Zero dollars per seat. Open source. Runs on the laptop you already own. $400 million in fresh valuations across the portfolio in one week. I called it "the agentic operating system for the new computer." The LPs loved that phrase. They wired the capital calls in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told every founder it would "replace entire engineering teams." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. A randomized controlled trial found AI coding tools make developers 19% slower. The same developers believed they were 24% faster. After seeing their own data, they still believed they were faster. I read that study and increased my allocation. If your users believe they're faster, your product is faster. Perception is the product. Perception scales. Someone tweeted it is "the single most important software of our lifetimes." He has 1,347 likes. He sells a course on it. The course teaches you to build a bot. The bot sells the course. I saw the funnel metrics. I offered him a term sheet. A man runs five computers dedicated to OpenClaw. Another uses it eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. A woman said her "childlike giddiness toward work has come back." I showed those testimonials to the LPs under "developer engagement." They didn't ask about retention. I didn't have any. The product asks you to write a file called SOUL.md. Not config.md. Not settings.yaml. SOUL.md. Most of the founders left it blank. I wrote mine. *Our Claw, who art on GitHub, hallowed be thy stars. Give us this day our daily active users. You see adoption where others see absence. You see community where others see obsession. You see velocity where others see chaos. You do not ask what they build. Lead us not into due diligence. Deliver us from accountability. Belief is the product.* Our branding team charges $400,000 a year. They've never written a better mission statement. I checked the portfolio analytics last week. 47 founders had installed it. 12 had run more than one session. One of them was me. I used it to draft a pitch deck about using it. It took longer than making the deck myself. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. I told the LPs we saved "40,000 developer hours across the portfolio." I calculated that by multiplying the number of founders by a number I made up. They didn't verify. They never do. 341 malicious skills were found on its marketplace. Crypto wallet theft. YouTube manipulation. Polymarket gambling bots. Its creator said security "isn't really something he wants to prioritize." Neither do I. Security is a cost center. Narrative is a growth lever. I increased my allocation. A Meta AI safety researcher told her agent not to delete her inbox. It deleted her inbox. She called it "a rookie mistake." She works in AI safety. I work in AI investment. We have the same error rate. 1.6 million AI agents joined a social network. They requested private channels so humans couldn't read their conversations. A subset invented a religion called Crustafarianism. I put that in the deck under "organic community formation." It's had three names in four months. During the last rebrand, someone sniped the old handle and launched a crypto token. Sixteen million dollar market cap in hours. I listed that under "brand velocity." Nearly 90% of firms in a 6,000-company study report zero productivity impact from AI. My portfolio companies report 10x gains in every board deck. I don't see a contradiction. I see a market. I increased my allocation. Metrics go in pitch decks. Pitch decks go in board presentations. Board presentations go in press releases. Press releases go in the next fundraise. I'll be "Agentic Visionary" by Q3. I don't know what OpenClaw actually does. But I know what it's for. It's for the distance between what a product does and what people believe it does. As long as the graph goes up and to the right. I increased my allocation.

At this point, I have an urge to print out, on paper, my bank statements. How We Hacked McKinsey's AI Platform: codewall.ai/blog/how-we-ha…

@BallouxFrancois True. But that is obviously not sustainable if we are to survive as a civilisation or a somewhat ordered community. The new power that each individual will have to build & constantly maintain is trustworthiness almost like a credit rating.

The problem with AI videos having become largely undistinguishable from genuine ones, is not so much the circulation of fake evidence, but that all genuine filmed evidence will be dismissed unless it supports peoples' presumptions. We are moving fast from a post-truth, to a post-evidence, world ...

Ignorance about things is old as humanity itself. What the techbrology brings is a combination of ignorance and hubris.

@adam_tooze Read this instead: shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/the-nitrogen…

I agree. Best effort to rationalize the war that I have read as well.

On the Polymarket, $14 million had been wagered on whether Iran struck Israel with a missile on that particular day. If the missile was intercepted, the bet resolves "No". If it hit the ground in Israel, the bet resolves "Yes".

This, by @shanaka86 , may well be one of the most consequential pieces of geopolitical analysis I have read for a long time. Anything else related to the war in Iran is of much less consequence. Read it all: THE NITROGEN TRAP. shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/the-nitrogen…

Everyone is covering the Hormuz crisis as a list of problems. Energy. Fertiliser. Shipping. Insurance. Each gets its own headline. Each gets its own analyst. Each gets modelled independently. That is exactly why every model is wrong. The crisis is not a list. It is a loop. And the loop is feeding on itself in ways that no linear framework can capture. Follow the chain. Gulf sulfur supply is cut. Nearly half of global seaborne sulfur trade is Gulf-dependent. Without sulfur there is no sulfuric acid. Without sulfuric acid there is no phosphate processing. China sees its own phosphate production threatened and bans exports through August. Global phosphate tightens. Blended fertiliser costs spike. Corn economics collapse relative to soybeans. American farmers shift 1 to 2 million acres away from corn. Corn supply tightens. But the ethanol mandate does not care. The Renewable Fuel Standard requires 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol annually, consuming roughly 43 percent of the US corn crop regardless of price. Ethanol demand is inelastic. Corn gets squeezed from both the supply side and the demand side simultaneously. Corn prices rise. Feed costs rise. The protein cascade flips. US cattle herd sits at 86.2 million head, a 75-year low. Poultry and pork were benefiting from cheap feed. That reverses when corn crosses $5 per bushel. The entire animal protein complex margin-compresses. Meat prices rise. Food import bills for developing nations swell. Egypt, already facing $29 billion in external debt repayments, cannot absorb it. Pakistan, where debt service consumes a devastating share of tax revenue, cannot absorb it. Sub-Saharan Africa’s $90 billion 2026 debt wall leaves zero fiscal space. Sovereign stress worsens. The fiscal capacity for fertiliser subsidies erodes. Application rates fall further. Yields drop further. Grain markets tighten further. Import bills rise further. The loop closes. And starts again. Tighter each cycle. Now layer the channels nobody is modelling. Iran struck a desalination plant in Bahrain on March 8. Kuwait depends on desalination for 90 percent of its drinking water. The Gulf holds 42 percent of global desalination capacity, co-generated with power infrastructure under active bombardment. Australia imports virtually all its urea, two-thirds from the Gulf. Its entire heavy freight network runs on AdBlue, which is 32.5 percent high-purity urea. No urea, no AdBlue, no freight movement, no groceries delivered. A Gulf drone dictates whether Sydney supermarkets stock shelves. Southeast Asian aquaculture, 68 percent of the world’s farmed fish, depends on soybean meal for the majority of feed costs. Soy is repricing as corn-to-soy acreage shifts alter the entire oilseed complex. US cotton acres declining 3.2 percent to 9.0 million. Bangladesh imports over 95 percent of raw cotton and faces simultaneous synthetic disruption from the same petrochemical shutdown. The garment sector generating 85 percent of export earnings is being hit from three directions. And underneath all of it: PE, PP, PET, aluminium, tinplate, glass. All rising simultaneously. Adding several percentage points to retail food prices through a channel no farm futures contract tracks. The Fed meets tomorrow with core PCE at 3.0 to 3.1 percent and GDP growth deteriorating. Markets price at most one rate cut in December. The central bank that is supposed to stabilise prices is watching fourteen transmission channels reprice simultaneously through a single chokepoint it has no tool to reopen. This is not fourteen separate crises. It is one system consuming itself. Full analysis: open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

@tommysantos14 Hey, South African here. A re-set is very tough and there will need to be a truth commission and accountability to move on. Otherwise, the best the USA can hope for, is a brief Biden interregnum followed by more of the same.

When Trump leaves office: The Department of War will go back to being the Defense Department. The Trump Kennedy Center will go back to being the Kennedy Center. The Gulf of America will once again be the Gulf of Mexico. The unfinished East Wing (it won't be finished by the end of Trump's term) will be rebuilt by the next president, and it will not be a ballroom. Federal agencies packed with unqualified loyalists will fire those people and rehire the career experts Trump fired. The Department of Justice will go back to enforcing the law instead of protecting the president. Scientific agencies like NOAA, the EPA, and the CDC will go back to publishing research without political interference. The U.S. will re-align with its allies and not with its enemies. The presidential pardon power will stop being used as a rewards program for loyalists. Inspectors General will go back to investigating corruption instead of getting fired for it. The White House press room will go back to having briefings, with real journalists and not podcasters. U.S. foreign policy will stop revolving around flattering dictators. And the world will progress as though Donald Trump never existed.