James Deakin

AI can do everything now. Write, code, design, create. Faster, cheaper, and often better than any human. So where does that leave you? I’ve spent the last year trying to answer that question. Because it kept me up at night as a parent, a writer, and someone whose entire industry is being automated in real time. The answer was sitting in plain sight. This is the most comprehensive video essay I’ve ever put together, and Peanut Gallery Media Network did an outstanding job on making it all come to life. Give it 12 minutes. It might just save you from the biggest rug pull in human history.

@chickensforhire Holy smokes!!!! That’s hilarious and insane all the same time

@TransportGuy I remember a professor of mine explaining erroneously what 60/40 ownership means. She explained to us that the owner should have 60% Filipino blood and 40% foreign blood

The Constitution That Guards the Front Door and Leaves the Back Wide Open A few months ago I sat down with fellow PGMN anchor, Orion Perez. Constitutional reform guy. Data obsessive. He dropped one line that hasn’t left me since. “The systems we have are actually defined by the constitution. So if we have a faulty constitution with faulty systems, we end up having all these little problems.” Little problems. Power bills that quietly bleed your paycheck every month. Water rates with no competition because the law says so. Ports that charge more and move slower for exactly the same reason. An entire generation shipped overseas as OFWs because the jobs that should have existed here were constitutionally starved of the investment that would have created them. We treat it like weather. Rain happens. Brownouts happen. High prices happen. It’s not weather. It’s the damn blueprint. Then you get to oil. And suddenly it stops being about inefficiency and starts being about survival. The Philippines imports 95 to 98 percent of its crude from the Middle East. Every single barrel has to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, 39 kilometers wide at its narrowest point. Zero meaningful domestic production. Zero leverage. When the 2026 Hormuz tensions hit, the government declared a national energy emergency and prices here spiked harder than anywhere else in ASEAN. Gasoline and diesel took the biggest beating in the region. Analysts were blunt about it: the Philippines is the most vulnerable economy in Southeast Asia to exactly this kind of shock. The constitution didn’t cause the crisis. It just made sure we had nothing to absorb it with. Here’s the part where the irony becomes toxic. The 1987 Constitution’s answer to “national security” is the 60/40 rule. Foreign majority ownership banned in electricity, water, and ports. The exact sectors where real investment and real competition could have built us some actual resilience over the last four decades. As Orion put it: “We are the only country that has done this weird and crazy thing of putting all these anti-foreign investment restrictions in the constitution. Nobody else does that.” Think about every mall in this country with a guard at the entrance checking your bag for weapons. Completely serious about it. Then you walk inside and buy a tactical knife two floors up. That is exactly what the Constitution does. It triple-locks the front door against foreign ownership in the name of national security and independence. Then it leaves the back fence wide open to a supply shock 7,000 kilometers away that we can’t negotiate with, can’t influence, and can’t stop. For almost 40 years, we have been asked to absorb higher prices, export our families, and accept slower growth. All in the name of protecting something. And the whole time, the real jugular was sitting right there, completely exposed, watched by nobody. That is not national security. That is expensive theater. And every time you pay at the pump, you are paying for the illusion. We already know what the alternative looks like. When we liberalized telecoms in the 90s and later opened it to 100% foreign ownership, competition came in. Prices dropped. Service got better. That wasn’t theory. That happened here, to us, in our lifetime. So the question is a simple one. How much more of this are we willing to swallow before we admit the Constitution has been protecting the wrong things? Change the rules. Deregulate the sectors that actually matter. Open the door we’ve been locking for 40 years. Or keep performing nationalism while the back fence stays wide open.

@PeterMcCormack @Heccles94 Please do not get tired of rationing Mr man bun, @PeterMcCormack

If Jesus was alive today and visited the UK, the right wing would call him a woke virtue signaller and deport him

Not just during the fuel crisis. A permanent ban. Period.

It takes a high level of intelligence to hold opposing views and rationalize them through logic and reality. Most people can’t handle that so they just shoot the messenger. We appreciate your analysis, mate. No need to try explaining yourself to people commited to misunderstanding you.

I don’t host Spaces. I join other people’s Spaces, share my analysis there, and publish my own work on my website, here and YouTube. My guiding framework is to serve humanity and fight against oppression. I seek the truth. I’m not responsible for what others choose to celebrate or reject. I analyse reality as I see it, not as I want it to be. I’m not important enough to change the outcome of war. But I can influence how individuals prepare.

Every Holy Week, Filipinos find a way to carry the cross. This year we didn’t have to go far to self flagellate; it was waiting for us at the pump. And now, with the Iran headlines circulating like good news at Salubong, the messages have been coming in all day. “James, when will prices go down?” “Is it next week?” “The Iran deal, does that mean we’re okay?” So let me give everyone the honest answer at once. The supply line holds. That’s the good news, and it’s real. Philippine-bound shipments keep moving through the Strait of Hormuz. No special flag required. We buy from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq, on chartered tankers. Keeping that lane open is what matters right now, and this progress does that. Take a breath. After the last few weeks at the pump, we’ve earned it. Now here’s what it doesn’t do. Diesel is still looking at P11 to P12 up next week. Gasoline around P3. The oil in those pumps was bought and priced before any of this diplomatic progress existed. New barrels still have to load, sail, refine, and reach us. Weeks, not days. An agreement in principle doesn’t change what’s already in transit. If Iran holds to these assurances and things don’t escalate further, stabilization could start in three to six weeks. Real relief at the pump is a June or July story. But here’s what we all need to understand before we get there. The fuel sitting in those tanks right now was purchased weeks ago, at prices nowhere near what we’re paying today. Already paid for. But we’re being charged based on current replacement cost, what it would cost to buy that stock today. Standard practice. Industry standard. Fine. What’s not fine is that this system only seems to work one way. Prices spike, hikes come fast. Prices fall, suddenly there are inventory cycles to honour, lags to account for, benchmarks to confirm. It always takes longer on the way down. That’s the rockets and feathers effect, and it runs through the same system, across every major player, every time. When crude softens, the drop should move at least as fast as the hike did. We’ll be watching that very closely. This progress stops the worst case from becoming our case. But the excise tax suspension still has to happen. Congress gave the President that power when they signed RA 12316 into law last month. The mechanism exists. It just needs to be used. One secures the supply. The other makes it survivable. We need both. We’re not out of the woods. But we’re not where we were two weeks ago either. Hold the line.

@Mark_Hartshorne Agree. I’m not entirely sure what this means for us. So many layers to this

@TransportGuy Not much context though is there James? Not much of a real understanding of what it actually, facilitates and delivers to the man in the street. We need more details from politicians and a sense of what they really know; this is currently not much more than a platitude. IMO.

I’m glad it wasn’t posted yesterday. I wouldn’t have believed it

Biggest April fools joke so far: “Walang oil crisis” #sanaoil

@MarioNawfal I live here and it’s brutal right now. Absolutely brutal

🇵🇭🇯🇵 Philippines secured an emergency diesel shipment from Japan as the war with Iran triggered a severe energy shortage. The country received 142,000 barrels on March 26 after it declared a national energy emergency the previous week. With over 90 percent of its crude oil coming from the Middle East officials locked in roughly one million barrels for delivery through April from Japan plus Malaysia Singapore and India. Source: @FurkanGozukara

So I just completed my first month on X. Holy sh*t, what a schizophrenic masterpiece this place is 😂😂😂 This platform is a goldmine and a garbage dump at the same time, and it doesn’t apologize for either. On one side, you get direct, unfiltered access to some of the sharpest minds alive. Global CEOs. Industry legends. Thinkers who’d normally be locked behind paywalls, assistants, and the kind of distance that takes decades to close. Used right, it’s a skeleton key to the world’s most exclusive dinner party. But not everyone comes to eat. Some come to flip the table. Enter the Twitter troll. Same all-access pass. Same unfiltered window into the greatest concentration of human intelligence ever assembled in one place. And what do they do with it? They insult. They pile on. They mass-report anyone who hurts their fragile little feelings and scream for deplatforming like it’s a sport with a leaderboard. Anything except contribute a single original thought. They’re not even good at being bad. That’s what gets me. Mediocre at being mediocre. Participation-trophy hall monitors who peaked in high school and never emotionally recovered. It’s like handing a monkey a smartphone with the entire sum of human knowledge in its pocket, and instead of learning or building anything, it just flings digital sh*t at strangers. Everyone gets handed the same key when they join X. Most of us use it to unlock our potential, they used it to roam around the car park to scratch other peoples car.

Dude. Why does one have to cancel the other out? They should both be done. There is no single solution to this. Solving the traffic and oil crisis requires a combination of solutions. Carpooling aims to reduce the amount of private vehicles on the road by maximizing the empty seats. That doesn’t solve the PUV issue, but neither does it hurt it either. If anything, it places less pressure on it.

@TransportGuy dude. literally majority of people dont have their own cars, hence the need for public utility vehicles 😭😭😭 do you really think "community carpooling" can solve the thousands of people who commute from QC? be so for real 😭😭

Yesterday I wrote an open letter on behalf of the motoring public to the LTFRB and MMDA about community carpooling. Today, we were formally invited to the table. Credit to MMDA chairman Artes for reaching out and being proactive. This is how it should be. Unfortunately, I can’t make it in person due to a death in the family, but I have submitted a formal position paper, and I want you to know exactly what it says. Here is the short version. The new carpooling guidelines being drafted today are a good start. Company shuttles, non-profit, streamlined permits. I support it. But it only helps people who work for companies large enough to organize one. That leaves out a lot of Filipinos. What we are pushing for is the community version. You register once, in person, with your subdivision HOA or your employer, just to make sure you are indeed part of that community. After that, you can use the app and match only with verified neighbors or colleagues going the same direction. The platform charges nothing. No permits. No government registration. Just two people deciding not to take two cars. This is already legal. Former LTFRB Chairman Martin Delgra said so on record. Community carpooling with no platform fees falls outside LTFRB jurisdiction. That was true then. It’s still true now. What’s been missing is a public endorsement that gives communities the confidence to build without fear of being shut down the way Wunder was. Three things I’m formally asking for in the position paper: One. Include community-based carpooling in the guidelines being written tomorrow. Two. Issue a public statement confirming it is legal and encouraged. Three. Recognize that the company shuttle model and the neighborhood carpool model serve different people. They can coexist. They should coexist. The full position paper is on record. If you want to see this happen, share this post. The more people behind this, the harder it is to ignore.

How do you think these things work? I have been advocating for it, they heard that, and they invited me so that the carpooling community gets a voice. Were you expecting everyone in the community to be invited individually? Or do you think it’s more practical to invite someone to represent them?

@TransportGuy We? Only YOU (and maybe some other big shots) were invited coz, you know... you're JAMES DEAKIN, we are not

@famousedismouse Yes, you’re right. You exposed me. Carpooling is something that only helps me. One person. James deakin. All of this was so I can be allowed to carpool. Nobody else. Just me. Make it make sense.

@TransportGuy Oh, please, James stop lobbying for your own cause. You were invited, not the motoring public.

We tackle one of the worst transportation/driving laws we have. Can you guess which one that is?

@mrmikeMTL Aug 15, 1971

Can anyone pin-point the exact moment where everything in society just got substantially worse???