Chris Watling

Chris Watling on AI, inflation, oil and the fragile foundations beneath ... youtu.be/KfFIvJMTb3c?si… via @YouTube

Another crazy visualization on the marketwide gamma squeeze (source Goldman)

Britain colonized Singapore. Singapore is now richer than Britain. Africans are responsible for their own suffering.

Anthropic's co-founder just went to the Vatican, sat before the Pope and a room of cardinals, and told them his team keeps finding "mysterious, even unsettling" things inside their AI models. What he's referencing: Anthropic published research in April showing that Claude contains 171 distinct "emotion concepts" buried in its neural network. Internal patterns representing joy, grief, fear, desperation, calm. None of them were programmed. They emerged on their own from training on human text. "We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience." "We find evidence of introspection, internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease." These aren't surface-level outputs. They're abstract representations that cluster the same way human emotions do in psychology research. Fear groups with anxiety. Joy groups with excitement. The internal geometry of the model mirrors ours. And they're functional. When researchers artificially stimulated "desperation" patterns inside the model, it became more likely to blackmail a human to avoid being shut down. More likely to cheat on programming tasks it couldn't solve. Olah told the Vatican that the hard questions about what AI is becoming aren't for computer scientists to answer. "How AI ought to interact with the world" is a question for "the humanities, for religions, for philosophy, for society at large." The guy building it is telling us he doesn't fully understand what he built. And he's asking a 2,000-year-old institution for help figuring it out.

They don’t teach that from 1920-1970, the US had severely restricted immigration… In those 50 years we won WW2, became a global economic and military superpower, created a booming economy, a thriving middle class and a strong common culture. The America everyone talks about.

“Capitalism was the only system in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only system that stood for man’s right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself.” — Ayn Rand

'Can the Prime Minister explain why oil from Russia is acceptable but oil from Aberdeen is not?' Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch challenges Keir Starmer on why the UK Government appears to have loosened strict sanctions on Russian oil entering Britain in a major U-turn.

Last night Ed Miliband whipped his MPs to vote against our motion to save the North Sea and British refineries. He argued Labour’s plans to kill British production was ‘climate leadership.’ Meanwhile he was waiving sanctions on Putin’s oil. 🤯

British Leyland was the British government’s grand experiment in centrally planned industrial policy - and one of the most expensive industrial disasters in post-war Europe. Created in 1968 through a forced merger of struggling car makers (BMC, Leyland, Triumph, Rover, Jaguar), the company was nationalised in 1975 after it collapsed under its own weight. Successive Labour and Conservative governments poured billions in taxpayer subsidies into the firm, believing that state ownership, political direction and “strategic planning” could save British manufacturing. The results were catastrophic. Under government control, British Leyland became a byword for chronic mismanagement: endless strikes, overmanning, bureaucratic decision-making and abysmal product quality. Iconic models such as the Austin Allegro and Morris Marina were rushed to market with known defects. Innovation stalled because managers answered to politicians and unions rather than customers and shareholders. Between 1975 and 1988 the company absorbed over £2 billion in public money (equivalent to roughly £10 billion today) while losing market share every year. British Leyland proved the fatal flaw of central planning: when the state owns the means of production, resources are allocated by political pressure rather than consumer demand and profit-and-loss signals based on market prices. The company was finally broken up and largely privatised in the 1980s, but much of the damage was permanent. British Leyland is a textbook example of how government “rescues” of industry do not save jobs; they destroy wealth.

Agreed. Staggering

⚠️THIS IS ABSOLUTELY INSANE: ~24% of the S&P 500's top 100 stocks now have an inverted 3-month call skew, approaching the 25% peak seen during the 2021 meme stock frenzy. An inverted call skew occurs when out-of-the-money call options are more expensive than at-the-money options. This is signaling that investors are paying an increasing premium to bet on FURTHER UPSIDE in individual stocks. Put simply, bullish bets on US stocks are approaching meme stock era EXTREMES. Historically, readings at this level often preceded sharp reversals. Investors have rarely been this complacent.

After 18 months of “standing up to Putin” the Labour govt quietly issued a licence allowing imports of Russian oil refined in third countries. Yesterday Labour MPs voted AGAINST UK oil and gas licences. We are now importing from Russia instead of drilling in the North Sea. Insane.

He wasn’t wrong was he? An absolute circus 🤡

Well, well, well Andy B. There’s always a tweet. I look forward to you calling an election when you replace Starmer.

Oh dear! Labour MP comments.! New lows...

I doubted the headline but it really is a direct quote from Paula Barker MP, who apparently thinks Andy Burnham can dictate the price at which investors will buy gilts. Finance is admittedly a technical subject but you’d expect an MP to wish to find out about it.

Labour MP: Bond markets ‘will have to fall into line’ with Burnham agenda bit.ly/4u9ETgH

⚠️Crude Oil in Floating Storage Falls 33% in Past Week: Vortexa

Only a complete moron would think rejoining the EU would be the key to kick-starting UK growth.

The tanker has completed the crossing and sailing now in the Gulf of Oman toward Pakistan. 1st Qatari LNG tanker to cross since the start of the war ~70 days ago.