Michael MacDonald 🍁

@Steelersdepot People don't know jack about squat. Look at historical draft "grades" vs performance after 3 years. An exercise in being loud on social media.

Grade the Steelers day-two haul. WR Germie Bernard QB Drew Allar CB Daylen Everette OL Gennings Dunker #Steelers #NFL

@_The_Prophet__ "the prestige of the firm name gave the output credibility that the output itself couldn’t have earned on its own merits." And they were paid to be a cutout, in case the idea flopped. Blame the consultant.

⚡️ The most honest version of what’s happening is that a massive price correction is coming to professional services, and the correction isn’t AI destroying jobs. It’s AI revealing that those jobs were being paid 3 to 5 times more than they were worth, and now the price is coming down to what the work actually costs. The whole professional services industry has been systematically overcharging clients for decades. The pyramid model is a price discrimination mechanism dressed up as a service model. Clients paid premium rates for work that was mostly done by 24 year olds who Googled things and made PowerPoint slides, because the industry convinced them that the partner stamp on top made the work worth five times what it actually cost to produce. The associates were never worth $800 an hour. They were worth maybe $150 an hour as raw labor. The firm charged the higher rate because they could, because clients had no way to verify what the work was actually worth, and because the prestige of the firm name gave the output credibility that the output itself couldn’t have earned on its own merits. The partner doing narrative wasn’t worth $10,000 an hour either. The partner was worth maybe $2,000 an hour for actual judgment and relationship work. The rest of the rate was extracted because the partner could point at the pyramid of associates and justify the price through billable hours that were themselves marked up four or five times over actual cost. This is why AI is so threatening to these firms. Not because AI does the work better. Because AI makes visible what the work is actually worth. When a client can get a passable deck from Claude in twenty minutes, they start asking why they paid $500,000 for a McKinsey deck last quarter. The answer was always “you weren’t really paying for the deck, you were paying for the judgment and the brand.” But now clients can see the deck was mostly the deliverable they were paying for, and the judgment layer was a small fraction of the actual value, and they were getting charged ten times what the whole engagement was really worth. The industry has operated as a protected cartel for a century. The prestige of the firms, the credentialing of MBA programs, the networks of former partners placed throughout corporate America, all of it created a system where nobody asked too hard whether the fees made sense. It was just what you paid to be advised by McKinsey or Bain or BCG or Goldman or White and Case. The fees were part of the signaling function. Paying the fee proved you were serious. AI breaks that because it gives every executive an alternative that produces comparable output at a fraction of the cost. Once they try it and see the output is acceptable, they can’t unsee it. The entire premium pricing structure was based on the premise that you couldn’t get this quality of work anywhere else. When you can, the structure collapses.

@heynavtoor My PC and AppleTV are connected to the internet, why would I need my TV to? Just immediately disconnect it from WIFI and delete the wifi information. Problem solved. Oh no, no firmware updates. Bohoo me.

1. Samsung — Turn off "Viewing Information Services" Menu → Settings → All Settings → General & Privacy → Terms & Privacy Uncheck "Viewing Information Services" Samsung doesn't call it "tracking." They call it "Viewing Information Services." That's intentional.

Your smart TV is taking screenshots of your screen every 15 seconds. Not a guess. Not a theory. A peer-reviewed study by researchers at UC Davis, UCL, and UC3M tested it. Samsung TVs: every minute. LG TVs: every 15 seconds. Even when you're just using it as a monitor. Here's how to turn it off for every brand:

The math suggests 3/4 of the way to the sun. However. By ~24 folds, pressure already hits ~10 MPa and the paper starts deforming/compressing. By 50, it's absurd—atoms are squeezed, bonds break, and it turns into a dense plasma or worse. The layers don't stay neatly stacked at full thickness; the whole thing squashes dramatically under its own self-weight. So no folded paper tower to the sun.

If you could fold a piece of paper 50 times, it would reach from the Earth to the Sun. Most people guess two inches. @JeffBooth points out AI has followed the same exponential curve for 75 years. We're around fold 37 heading to 38. This is why every AI prediction feels wrong. We're not wired to understand exponential growth. By the time it looks obvious, the move already happened. @RiskTakers000 @Banter_Clips @crypto_banter

@MDBitcoin Dude is a high school teacher with an English Lit BA. Even the "professor" part is a lie at worst or a joke at best. Ignore these clout-chasing fools.

"Where are the servers of Bitcoin located?” - Prof Jiang That single question from Jiang shows the misunderstanding immediately. Bitcoin does not run on one company’s servers, Bitcoin runs on a distributed network of nodes spread across the world, which is exactly why it is hard to censor, shut down, or control, plus the mining system on top of it to protect it with energy. When someone frames Bitcoin like a centralized system, they are not critiquing Bitcoin as it is. They are critiquing a version of Bitcoin that exists only in their own confusion.

You know, I'm watching Strategy ($STRC, $MSTR) buy (and lock away) a tremendous amount of Bitcoin almost daily now, and my heart goes out to all those who will never be able to own a whole Bitcoin.

@durov The thing was a joke, I can’t believe anyone took that encryption schtick seriously

WhatsApp’s “E2E encryption by default” claim is a giant consumer fraud: ~95% of private messages on WhatsApp end up in plain-text backups on Apple/Google servers — not E2E-encrypted. Backup encryption is optional, and few people enable it — let alone use strong passwords.

Same could be said about Strategy. Strong parallels exist. Bitcoin's proof-of-work mining represents a similar "wartime-scale" infrastructure arms race, with massive capital sunk into a core strategic commodity (energy + specialized compute) despite volatility, frequent unprofitability, and bubble-like cycles. The goal isn't immediate clean profits but securing long-term dominance in digital scarcity, monetary sovereignty, and network effects, much like OpenAI's compute spend aims to own the AI stack.

⚡️OpenAI is being run like a wartime industrial project. $121 billion of compute burn before real profit means the objective is not clean business economics. The objective is dominance. Own the best models. Own the best developer habits. Own the enterprise workflows. Own the user dependence. Own the default intelligence layer people build on. Profit can come later once the dependency is locked in. That is why the spending looks insane. Because it is insane. And it may still work. This is how new empires get built. Torch capital. Seize the chokepoints. Force the rest of the world to route through your stack. Clean up the economics after the field has already been captured. So yes, this is bubble behavior. Hard bubble behavior. Capital is being deployed with near-zero discipline because nobody wants to be the idiot who underfunded the intelligence layer and lost the century’s largest platform transition. The deeper truth is that bubbles are often how regime shifts get overbuilt. Railroads. Telecom. Internet. Cloud. Too much money floods in. Most players die. The infrastructure survives. The winners come out owning the future. That is what this looks like. The real commodity here is not chatbots. The real commodity is compute. Compute is now war material. GPUs, power, networking, memory, datacenter capacity, inference throughput. That is the arsenal. Whoever controls enough of it can train faster, serve more users, gather more feedback, improve faster, and widen the lead. That loop is vicious. The darkest part is that profitability may stay fake for years because near-term profit may genuinely not matter. If the goal is to become the operating layer for cognition across coding, search, enterprise work, law, education, media, customer service, research, and government, then current losses are just conquest costs. That is why the “bubble” take is too shallow on its own. The spending is irrational at the company level and rational at the empire level. So the real answer is simple. This is a bubble. This is also the buildout of something real. Most AI companies will burn to ash. The survivors will own terrifying leverage. And the cleanest picks-and-shovels trade is still compute.

@_The_Prophet__ Absolutely invaluable, thank you!

⚡️They tried to shake you out but you had the signal.

@mikemcglone11 “What happens when Gold goes to $10. Tune into boomerberg and make sure you watch at least 40 ads, my paycheque depends on it.”

Potential $10,000 Bitcoin in 2026 Prove me wrong - stay above $75,000. Before the biggest money pump in history in 2020-21, Bitcoin hovered around $10,000, and it may be reverting. Roughly $10,000 is also the first-born crypto's most traded price since 2017, when futures were launched. First is emphasized because there are now millions of cryptos, with only a few tracking tangible value -- notably stablecoins. Cypto dollars represent a most enduring trend in the space, with the rising assets under management of dollar-backed tokens, led by Tether. Unlimited crypto supply and use-case rivals are Bitcoin headwinds. I expect the "flippening" to continue, with Tether's AUM topping Ethereum in 2026 and eventually Bitcoin. The graphic shows a key driver: a potential stock market rollover and a recovery in volatility. Bitcoin's first-ever consecutive down years in 2026 may be leading the way Full report on the Bloomberg here blinks.bloomberg.com/news/stories/t… {BI COMD} #Bitcoin #cryptos #stockmarket @BBGIntelligence

@pmarca AI is a glorified relational database with pretty decent search results. How that replaces real jobs, for now, is beyond me.

And yet there are zero AI teachers, zero AI doctors, zero AI lawyers.

@Joshua_Ariza Or they are making a $20 shoe with $1 worth of material, finding the most disgusting sub-suppliers to keep labor cost to a minimum, and charging $150 for the most bland shoe. Were Jordans and AF1s ever popular for more than a minute? Because they sure weren't comfortable.

"GIRLS ARE TOLD THEY CANT PLAY SPORTS" isn't really woke to me, it's antiquated and feels like a 50s era slogan. Here's what I think happened. 1- Nike has lost "the culture": The top-down marketing of premiere athletes simply doesn't return the same investment. There are no longer captive audiences over a single sport or athlete. Your nephews care more about IShowSpeed than Kyrie or Luka. 2- Hypebeast Culture is Dead: Or it's dispersed. Your nephews' favorite apparel brands aren't any of the big sport co's. It's some company with 100k following. 3- Office Politics: Politics and the me-too era clipped leadership personnel [justly maybe]. There have been 3 reorgs in a five year period. Hard to focus product when everyone's getting let go. And a woke-ish corp culture has its own chilling effect. 4- Manufacturing and Saturation: MANY interesting sport/equipment brands have popped up as manufacturing and marketing has gotten easier. With shorter lead times and less red tape for approvals, smaller brands are nimble. Nike's design -> market calendar takes 1.5 years. 5- D2C is very hard! Their CEO didn't think they needed some larger retailers [footlocker] and wanted to pursue DTC. Ecomm has its own major costs and it's not the margin people think it is. 6- I no longer work there: Kidding, but Nike can't keep and maintain talent when great workers can build their own audiences/product. I doubt we'll see many multi-billion dollar sustain in this market. These factors are happening at all the brands.

I used to design full time for Nike and I have thoughts on this

@phongle Bitcoin or nothing.

Astronauts using Outlook feels as anachronistic as AI agents using fiat.

This is the best part from Pierre Poilievre appearance on the Diary of a CEO podcast; "Those who push a socialist ideology have a gross contradiction in their view of human nature. They say that human beings are wretched, self-interested, greedy when they’re in the private voluntary economy, but they’re angels when they’re in the governmental economy. They argue that the government should just control everything because then we have all these angels that will decide for us." 🎯

@_The_Prophet__ @takul_eth

Almost. Iran does not win the architecture. It leaves a tax on the architecture. A scar on Hormuz is real. Control of Hormuz is something else. Postwar transit with an Iranian stamp means the regime survived with nuisance value. It does not mean it preserved coercive dominance. That is defeat with residue, not defeat with victory.

⚡️If this is real, then the meaning is huge. Iran is trying to convert a failed closure into a licensed oversight role. That is the real move. A regime that thinks it can hold Hormuz shut indefinitely does not start drafting a “monitor transit” protocol. A regime that knows full closure is unsustainable starts looking for a face saving replacement. That replacement is simple: keep the artery open enough to reduce the pressure, but preserve some formal role so the climbdown does not look like surrender. So deep down this reads like a retreat disguised as administration. “Supervised and coordinated” sounds harmless on paper. In reality it is Iran trying to rebrand hostage power as maritime governance. The phrase “safe passage” is the wrapper. The real content is: traffic resumes, but Iran wants everyone to admit it still has standing in the chokepoint. That lets Tehran say to its own system that it did not lose control. It merely moved from war footing to managed order. Oman matters here too. Oman is the perfect instrument for this kind of thing because it gives Iran a softer, more legitimate looking channel. That helps transform a humiliating reversal into a regional protocol instead of a naked capitulation to U.S. pressure. So this would not mean Iran is winning. It would mean Iran is trying to preserve dignity while accepting that total paralysis cannot be maintained. The deepest truth is this: Iran may already understand that it cannot sustainably keep Hormuz closed. So now it is trying to preserve the only thing it still can preserve, which is a recognized role in what happens next. That is not long term total control. That is a defeated coercive position being translated into a postwar bargaining claim. So this looks like a face saving transition from blockade logic to controlled corridor logic. And that is exactly what a dirty Iranian retreat would look like.

@udiWertheimer @saylor "roblox dev", say no more chief.

strategy holds $50 billion worth of btc the problem: it's not really worth $50B if @saylor ever tries to sell, he'll get no more than $20B for it. probably less every additional dollar he puts into btc from now on is lost forever. he already has more btc than he can ever sell

@SealedGain @RonDeSantis It's easily top 5 ballparks. Right up there with Petco and PNC.

@RonDeSantis Fenway looks nice on TV, but actually sucks to attend

No — I’d put Fenway and PNC above Petco.

@aakashgupta "The Abilene Stargate expansion just got cancelled because OpenAI couldn't forecast its own demand." It got cancelled because it was total BS to begin with. They do not have, nor ever had, the money.

OpenAI may have caused the worst consumer hardware crisis in a decade with purchase orders that were never real. In October 2025, Sam Altman flew to Seoul and signed simultaneous deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for 900,000 DRAM wafers per month. That's 40% of global supply. Neither company knew the other was signing a similar commitment at the same time. The pricing and terms would have looked very different if they had. Those "deals" were letters of intent, not binding purchase orders. No RAM actually changed hands. But the market treated them as real. Contract DRAM prices jumped 171%. A 64GB DDR5 kit went from $190 to $700 in three months. DDR4 kits that should have been in oversupply doubled. Retailers stopped posting prices entirely. The Abilene Stargate expansion just got cancelled because OpenAI couldn't forecast its own demand. Oracle couldn't agree on financing. The partners are squabbling. Bloomberg reported the $500B project hadn't started and no funds were raised to meet the initial budget. Multiple data center buildouts are delayed or shelved. Now DDR5 prices are finally dropping for the first time in months, and it has nothing to do with OpenAI walking away from anything. Google released TurboQuant on March 24, a compression algorithm that cuts AI memory requirements by 6x. SK Hynix and Samsung stocks dropped 6% and 5% overnight. Corsair kits fell $60-100 from their highs within days. One company locked up 40% of global memory with commitments it may never fulfill. A different company published a research paper. The research paper is doing more for RAM prices than the entire supply chain has done in six months.

@_10delta_ No serious western central bank added a single oz of Gold, some haven't touched it in 50-years. Coincidence, or did the western central bankers get the memo.

3 weeks ago I argued the US goal in Iran is to seize the global oil spigot. Venezuela in January -> Iran in February. Neutralize every supply channel outside the dollar system within 90 days. Achieve a compliant successor government and complete energy dominance. The oil thesis was the obvious layer. However, when you zoom out & view the last four years as a single sequence rather than isolated geopolitical events, the architecture of the grander US plan becomes visible. 1st was Europe, which laid the groundwork. The Ukraine conflict provided the justification for sanctions that collapsed Russian pipeline gas from 150 billion cubic meters to 40. Then Nordstream was destroyed, which rewired the entire European energy system permanently. The US went from supplying 28% of Europe's LNG in 2021 to 58% by 2025, exporting a record 111 million MTs, the 1st country in history to break 100 MT. Europe was transformed from a customer with options into a captive market now purchasing its survival in USD. 2nd was Syria. The fall of Assad severed the critical node connecting China's Belt & Road Initiative to the Mediterranean. The trilateral railway linking Iran, Iraq & Syria, designed to bypass Western maritime chokepoints, was completely destroyed. This isolated Iran geographically & cleared the path for what came next. 3rd was Venezuela. In January the US effectively took control of the world's largest heavy crude reserves. The US Gulf Coast has the most advanced refining complex on earth, specifically built for heavy sour crude. Phillips 66, Valero & the rest are now positioned to process hundreds of thousands of barrels of Venezuelan crude daily. The US captured a massive strategic reserve & solidified its position as the dominant exporter of refined petroleum products, an industry worth $110 billion in 2025 alone. Venezuela & Iran were the two major oil supply channels that existed outside the dollar system. Both produce heavy crude sold primarily to China & evaded US financial supervision. Both now being neutralized within 90 days, which leads us to.. 4th is Iran & the Middle East energy shock. Israel struck Iran's South Pars gas field, the world's largest natural gas reservoir. Iran retaliated against Qatar's Ras Laffan, the single largest LNG facility on earth, responsible for a fifth of global supply. QatarEnergy's own assessment is that 17% of export capacity is gone and recovery will take up to 5 years. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. European gas prices spiked 70%. Asian spot prices doubled. The only remaining scaled supplier? The United States. If Iran falls & a successor government is installed that the US controls or influences (the Delcy model described weeks ago) then roughly 40 to 45 million barrels per day of global production out of 103 million is effectively under US control. OPEC becomes irrelevant because the US coalition is now the marginal producer. Now add the gas dimension & it goes beyond oil. This war is solidifying the petrodollar system as it evolves into a hybrid petro/LNG-dollar. The old system was built on Saudi crude priced in USD. The new system is built on American crude plus American gas from the Gulf Coast, with no alternative supplier of comparable scale. The dependency is deeper because LNG infrastructure requires long term contracts & regasification terminals that lock buyers into supply relationships for decades. Europe & the Pacific allies (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc.) cannot pivot away as there is nowhere left to pivot to. They're now locked into the US energy system. The market confirms this. DXY went from 96 to 101. Gold down ~20% from its January all time high. Bitcoin down 20% on the year. Brent above $100. European & Asian institutions are liquidating precious metals and crypto to buy dollars because they need dollars to buy the only remaining scaled energy supply. The world is selling its gold to buy American energy in American currency. The dollar is now being weaponized through energy dependency. The structural repricing is happening regardless of how the conflict resolves. But the US grand strategy goes deeper.. Artificial intelligence is a physical industry. It runs on power and chips. Data centers require massive uninterrupted baseload electricity, primarily provided by natural gas. Semiconductor fabrication requires helium & rare earths. By choking the Strait of Hormuz & crippling Middle Eastern LNG & helium production, the US is systematically degrading China's ability to power its data centers & fabricate semiconductors at scale. The US is energy self sufficient, especially with newly captured Venezuelan reserves & expanding Gulf Coast capacity running on domestic gas. On the other hand, China is import dependent & every joule it imports effectively now transits chokepoints the US Navy controls.. Iran was the Belt & Road's overland energy bypass, the corridor that allowed China to mitigate the Malacca Trap. With Iran neutralized that corridor is severed. China faces a world where its compute infrastructure competes for scraps on a depleted global LNG market, while American data centers run at full capacity on domestic energy. Russia is next in the sequence. A post-war Iran reopening under US influence competes directly with Russia for the same refineries in China & India at lower cost. Iran's production costs are lower. Russia loses its last structural advantage in heavy crude & its economic lifeline. Additionally, under the Iran war cover, Ukraine has been opportunistically destroying Russian energy infrastructure & all signs point towards Russia being at the end of the line. The message from Washington becomes very simple: we dismantled two regimes in three months, your economy is about to get crushed, sign the Ukraine deal. Then Trump sits down with Xi holding every card. Complete energy dominance. The hybrid petro/LNG-dollar fortified, Iran cleared, Russia cornered, & China facing the Malacca Trap fully closed with no remaining energy bypass. Israel & the GCC are absorbing the kinetic cost of a conflict whose primary beneficiary, counter to the mainstream narrative, is actually America (First). Qatar offline for 5 years reprices the entire global gas market in favor of US exporters for the remainder of the decade. The Gulf states face years of rebuilding. Europe faces its 2nd energy crisis in four years. Sure, the average American might face temporary moderate inflation & higher gas prices. But if you are the architect of the US empire & you view the rise of China & Chinese ASI as an existential winner takes all scenario, the collateral damage is acceptable cost. Whoever controls the energy corridors controls the monetary system. Whoever controls the monetary system & the energy supply simultaneously controls the compute infrastructure that determines which civilization builds ASI first. The US is seizing all 3.

@dchersh There's only so many ads you can stick on a head of lettuce.

TVs are better and cheaper than 10 years ago. Groceries are worse and more expensive than 10 years ago. Same economy. Same decade. What explains the difference?