Ian Tobin

🇪🇺 Ursula von der Leyen says EU has now allocated money for the defense of Baltic Chihuahuas... ...against Ukrainian drones?

Leveraged trading in Asia is more popular than ever: The 2x Leveraged SK Hynix ETF, listed in Hong Kong, has attracted +$1.3 billion in year-to-date inflows. As a result, total ETF assets under management (AUM) are up to $8.0 billion, the highest on record, making it the world's largest single-stock leveraged ETF by assets. This fund’s AUM has more than TRIPLED over the last 3 months. Furthermore, the 2x leveraged Samsung ETF has attracted +$1.3 billion in inflows so far in 2026. This exceeds the year-to-date inflows of comparable 2x leveraged ETFs tracking Tesla, $TSLA, and Microsoft, $MSFT. Now, SK Hynix and Samsung are the two largest South Korean stocks, together accounting for nearly 50% of the KOSPI index, which has a total market cap of $4.5 trillion. Asian retail investors are rushing into leveraged chip stock bets like never before.

جواب‌های صریح جان مرشایمر به مایک پمپئو: از شما جنگ طلبان باید پرسید این حق را از کجا آورده‌اید که در حاکمیت کشورهای دیگر دخالت بکنید؟! این کجا نوشته شده؟! از کجا این حق را پیدا کرده‌اید که تعیین بکنید چه کسی «هیولا» هست و چه کسی نیست؟؟

🇪🇺 European regulators are planning to force social media platforms to algorithmically boost content from state-approved "public value" media outlets. The scheme is being pushed by Germany's regional media authorities (Landesmedienanstalten), nominally independent but effectively state regulators. They would decide which outlets qualify as "public value" media and get the algorithmic boost. A decision could come within months, according to plans obtained by Apollo News. The same regulators have been steadily expanding their powers over recent years, despite being formally designated as arms-length from the state.

A very sad announcement. I have just been convicted a second time for 'hate speech' and it is only due to a technicality that I could not immediately be sent to jail —to the judge's frustration. In an ironic turn of events it's actually thanks to my previous prison sentence (for memes in a private group chat) that I am now still free —in a physical sense, at least. Call me naive but I didn't think they would take it this far, given that this precedent criminalises many of the arguments used by even the most moderate politicians critical of mass migration. In February 2024 I gave a lecture at Catholic University Leuven wherein I linked mass migration to crime and a deterioration of our quality of life. Every single point I made was 100% the truth and based on scientific evidence. Cynically, even the judge that convicted me admits as much by writing in his verdict: “Even if all of the statements made by Van Langenhove are based on scientific evidence and statistics, it makes no difference to the criminal intent. Van Langenhove is not charged with spreading false information. He is charged with presenting facts in a way that incites hatred against persons on the grounds of one or more of the protected criteria in the Anti-Racism Law.” That's a lot of words just to say he wants to send me to prison for speaking the truth. Even the regime media write: "It did not matter to the court that Van Langenhove was quoting scientific sources. The judge argued that Van Langenhove's main message was that a big part of the societal problems like insecurity, housing shortages and lowering educational standards are due to mass migration." You may think the regime media are being sympathetic to me in the first sentence, but in reality they are warning people: even if you speak the truth, if you go against our narrative, we will crush you in every way possible. Both the public prosecutor and the judge did not present a single real argument as to how or against whom I would have incited hatred. So even if I would accept their crazy, dystopic law, I still did not break it. The only argument they present is that I created a "hostile atmosphere of us versus them” in regards to migrants. But even this silly argument (which is not even a punishable offence) is not true. To me, the deadly disease is self-hatred and one of its worst symptoms is replacement migration. My enemy is thus NOT the migrants themselves but those orchestrating the mass migration. Sadly, in Belgium, evidence is not needed and ‘vibes’ are enough to put someone in jail. Given the fact that I have another court case coming up in September and that I have a dozen active criminal investigations for hate speech, time is running out for me. I have already paid more than €420,000 in legal fees and there is no ending in sight. I have been in an intense battle of attrition for eight years and must now regroup to make sure I can still win. If you want to help me, you can do so via the links below. If you can help in other ways, please contact me via DM. If you live in a country that still has free speech, never let them touch it, however noble they make the motives sound, because this is where it leads to.

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it. Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying. Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence." Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter." Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter. They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created. One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility." Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies. That's the metered intelligence business model. And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

I moved away from Australia, officially migrating to Switzerland, and it happened to land just before the CGT changes passed. Very happy with my decision. I'd only been residing in Australia a few months of the year for some time now. My business is international and does nothing in Australia - its customers are European and Asian. None of our staff are Australian anymore (aside from myself). The move was mostly about life. I ski, I hike, I ride downhill - Switzerland wins on all of that over the other low-tax options. It puts me around people I'm more aligned with: pro-capital, optimistic, building things. And it has me far closer to where the work actually is - half my client visits are in Germany. Tax was a factor too, I won't pretend it wasn't. But it was the last reason on the list, not the first. I love Australia. I was prepared to pay high taxes there to do my part. But its general and increasingly recent disdain for capital, for economic freedom, and the cultural shift against "the rich" had become too great for me to tolerate. I can pay high taxes. But I can't pay high taxes to people who hate me for the success I've happened to find. I worked very hard, took a lot of risk, and dealt with the shame of making what were seen as ill-advised life decisions in the eyes of my family and many of my friends for years. And on the other end, I found myself with a little luck that carried me through to a place I couldn't previously have imagined. I don't take full credit for my place in life. I was born in the right place to the right people - not rich, middle class, an accountant father and a stay-at-home mother, good parents who raised me right in a stable household - and even at the right time. But I took the opportunities luck gave me and ran the best race I could from there. I want everyone to reach financial independence. I want the world to grow wealthier. I can contribute to that vision. I will not, however, do it for people who despise the journey it takes to get there. Because that's what the resentment really is. It isn't principle - it's pessimism and envy. And more often than not it's fomented by people who were ambitious themselves, who set out to build something and fell short of their own expectations, and turned that disappointment outward - onto the people who made it, and onto the system itself.

Lex Fridman is hitchhiking with truckers in China using ChatGPT translator. Looks a bit sketch but seems to be having a good time.

🇪🇸 Immigrants make up nearly 20% of Spain’s population but account for only 8.9% in rural areas. Now, the government is looking to change that. “Without immigration, rural Spain has an enormously difficult future,” said Francesc Boya, the top government official on demography policy. “The only way to maintain what we might call sustainable population pyramids is by bringing new settlers into rural areas,” he added. To achieve this goal, the government is funding initiatives set up by rural councils, companies, and non-profit groups to attract immigrants. One example is Villagatón, a municipality with just over 600 residents, where a factory making parasols and fences has a workforce that is 80 per cent immigrants from Senegal, Gambia, and Colombia. Other projects include finding immigrants who are willing to take over bakeries, supermarkets, and bars in rural areas. “We’re just getting started,” said Boya.

Il y a encore quelques années, La Baule était un havre de paix. Aujourd’hui, des bandes de délinquants viennent y semer le désordre. La situation devient insupportable 💔

BREAKING: Taiwan, a country with a population smaller than Delhi, has officially overtaken India to become the world's 5th largest stock market by total market capitalization. • Taiwan: $4.95 trillion • India: $4.92 trillion