Dual Acies

Watching the fully LLM-pilled crowd take 4 minutes to draft a perfect reply while the engagement window dies is like my own form of people watching lately. Speed is the new alpha. Until they sort out the latency that is.

@SkullysRevenge @ekwufinance That goes without saying.

@DualAcies @ekwufinance No it’s the record breaking Treasury infusion

Brutal chart... 50% of food production depends on this But yeah… markets are at all-time highs, nothing to worry about

@ClaudeNaggar Nice one, $JOBY gets distribution to Uber's existing user base on day one of commercial operations, which compresses the customer acquisition curve that usually kills capital-intensive transportation startups.

@DualAcies x.com/i/status/20481…

$JOBY 8.80. down 60% from highs while every AI, eVTOL, nuclear name ran vertical without it. demo flights JFK to Manhattan all week. FAA cert flight on deck. $TM anchored. $UBER partnered. Blade infra. risks: 1.5B more equity needed thru FY27. EPS monday. Waited a long time for this. Not financial advice. DYOR

@KobeissiLetter The best capital allocator alive can't find anything worth buying at these prices. BRK missed the memo that risk is the dopamine.

BREAKING: Berkshire Hathaway announces its cash balance is now up to a record $397 billion. The company sold a net -$8.1 billion worth of stocks last quarter, marking its 14th-consecutive net quarterly sale.

@jukan05 Even while risking sounding like a suck-up, I genuinely enjoy the work you put out there. When it comes to analysts in general though, there are very few that can actually predict the future well. Sell-side notes are increasingly about reading reactionary takes after the fact.

Let’s admit what needs to be admitted. I was guilty of this as well, but North America-based analysts, across both the sell side and the buy side, have significantly underestimated MediaTek.

@rohanpaul_ai Perhaps seeing your customers as ATMs whose data you sell for pennies on the dollar for better targeted ads wasn't the best business decision this early on in the race 🤔

The register: Anthropic has lower user numbers, yet higher LLM revenue than OpenAI. The striking part is scale versus monetization, because Anthropic did this with about 134M monthly users while OpenAI had roughly 900M, pointing to much higher ARPU and much stronger reach into buyers who treat AI like software, not entertainment. Counterpoint’s estimates put Anthropic at about $16.20 in monthly revenue per active user versus $2.20 for OpenAI, $5 for Microsoft, $1.10 for Google, and $0.10 for Meta, which suggests premium enterprise and professional workloads are worth far more than mass free usage. --- theregister. com/2026/04/30/openai_anthropic_top_lines_research_counterpoint/

@JavierBlas Probably followed by a late night social media post where you need parental guidance just to understand the nuances of the angriest rant you've ever laid your eyes upon.

Speaking late yesterday, Trump said “maybe we’re better off not making a deal at all” with Iran, without elaborating. “We can’t let this thing go on, you know, it’s going on too long,” he said

@buccocapital It's much better for your overhead if you just wreak havoc and inject a culture of fear that anything you learn in uni will be useless once you get the diploma. What did you expect?

Unfortunately for the model companies this messaging is out of their hands Every AI startup company is pitching themselves as a labor replacement C Suite is salivating to rip out whole cost centers Still a better message than Dario. The actual answer, though, is not words. It’s action. You’ve raised a bajillion dollars. You should announce an X billion allocation to upskilling and university/government partnership. Lean all the way in. The world is going to look different but we are committed to getting this right Perhaps the AI winner will be the one that promises to shape the world in a better way for everyone. Or at least try their best.

Lego, the most valuable toy brand in the world, is winning the balance sheet and losing the fandom at the same time. The recycled plastic supply chain ends in Tropodo, an Indonesian village in East Java where the chickens lay dioxin eggs Here's the full story: A British toymaker named Hilary Page invented the interlocking plastic brick at Kiddicraft in 1939, patented it in 1940. Ole Kirk Christiansen got a sample with an injection moulding machine he'd purchased, copied the design, called them Automatic Binding Bricks, and built an empire. Page died by suicide in 1957. He never saw what his brick became. By 2003 Lego was nearly bankrupt. $800M in debt, overextended into theme parks, video games, clothing. The fix came in 2004. Ex McKinsey consultant Jørgen Vig Knudstorp took over, slashed SKUs, sold off the non-core assets, refocused on the brick. Specialized pieces replaced open-ended ones. Licensed sets exploded. The gap between Lego and its clones started closing from the wrong direction. 2014. The Lego Movie grosses $468M worldwide on a $60M budget. Suddenly Lego is the anti-corporate underdog. "Everything is Awesome" plays while the company plans its next McKinsey advised global expansion. Adult collector sets at premium prices. Rare minifigures trading for hundreds on the secondary market. They built a trading card economy inside a toy and called it a product line. The most loyal fans became the most monetized ones. McKinsey trained both turnaround CEOs. Niels Christiansen took over in 2017 with one clear mandate: China. 50 stores in 2018 became 500+ by end of 2023. The Jiaxing factory has been running since late 2015, expanded twice since. Double digit revenue growth in China most years. First India store opened May 2025 in Gurugram. 50 planned across India by 2030. The humble Danish carpenter story is now a global retail operation. Then came the sustainability pivot. Recycled plastic prototypes. Net zero pledge by 2050. CEO on TIME's 100 Climate Leaders list in 2024. Same year, Danish broadcaster DR mapped 1,059 flights by Kirkbi's three private jets between 2020 and 2023. Top destinations were Spanish vacation spots and Inverness, Scotland (the family owns 60,000 acres there). 29 of the flights tied directly to dressage events. Kirkbi shut its flight department in early 2025 citing sustainability. Two of the three jets were quietly transferred into private family ownership. They kept flying. About that recycled plastic. Indonesia generates 7.8M tons of plastic waste a year per the World Bank, two thirds mismanaged. China banned plastic imports in 2018. Indonesia became one of the largest dumping grounds for Western recycling instead. Scavengers earn $2 to $4.50 a day picking through the piles. No PPE. No insurance. No coverage. In Tropodo Village, East Java, 50 tofu factories burn imported Western plastic as fuel. Eggs from local free range chickens carried the second highest dioxin levels ever recorded in Asia. Eating one egg exceeds the European Food Safety Authority's tolerable daily intake for dioxins by 70x. The tofu is cooked over your recycling bin. (IPEN/Arnika/Nexus3/Ecoton report, 2019) The pellets don't stay there. A 2023 University of Gothenburg study, peer reviewed in Data in Brief, tested HDPE pellets from 13 countries. The Indonesian samples alone contained 346 detected chemicals. Pesticides, PCBs, pharmaceuticals. Recycled plastic gets sold globally as feedstock. The contamination travels. Built on a copied brick. Saved by a movie. Selling sustainability while Tropodo cooks dinner over the recycling bin. The community that made Lego culturally dominant is leaving and only time will tell if the new generation makes up for it. Research: Fern and Andrew Fraser on YouTube.

@AnthropicAI Opus 4.7 is improving with each day, but you still had a brutal launch because you forgot to add back the emotional intelligence on release while yes, raw reasoning improved. Lots to learn from.

How do people seek guidance from Claude? We looked at 1M conversations to understand what questions people ask, how Claude responds, and where it slips into sycophancy. We used what we found to improve how we trained Opus 4.7 and Mythos Preview. anthropic.com/research/claud…

@JavierBlas Germany demolished Gundremmingen six months ago. Belgium renationalizing the entire fleet today. The masochism phase has a terminal date. Looks like we just hit Belgium's.

Belgium plans to nationalize all the country's nuclear power reactors, and says that plans to decommission the plants are now "halted with immediate effect."

The $DXYZ part 5 Brief update. Two private mega rounds. Anthropic $850-900B with a May board decision, $40-50B raise. SpaceX public S-1 by May 22, $1.75-2T pricing into the June 8 roadshow. Destiny Tech100 Inc holds both lines. Trim ladder unchanged. Not financial advice.

@BoringBiz_ If they don't keep up with the times though, then it becomes a situation where you are asking Microsoft edge how to download Chrome.

How is Google search still growing 19% year over year with nearly monopoly like market share in the category? Legitimately might be the greatest business ever created in the history of capitalism

The Food Cascade Part 3. Europe at maximum fracture. Schengen. Frontex. BTP-Bund spread. ECB. HICP. PIIGS. Eurozone fragmentation. Burkina Faso. Mali. Niger. Sahel. MENA. Single market. Maastricht. The European bill is arriving and expects to be paid in full, with interest. I. The first layer of Hell PIIGS sovereign debt 2010-12. Migration 2015. Brexit 2016. COVID supply chain 2020-21. Energy crisis 2022. Industrial decline through 2025. Fertilizer and food 2026. Sixteen years of cumulative absorption. Each crisis eating a layer of buffer the next would have needed. Europe walks into 2026 with its political cohesion thinner than at any point since Maastricht. II. The masochism layer. Brussels has spent the last decade trying to fix the world while losing the ability to fix itself. Net Zero loaded onto a continent without domestic energy. Sanctions architecture deployed without industrial replacement strategy. Refugee absorption without integration capacity. Climate ambition without a manufacturing base to execute it. Each policy may have seemed righteous in the moment, but only brought despair and destruction . III. The 2010-11 parallel. The 2010-11 food spike was +40% and toppled four governments across MENA. The migration pressure landed in Europe. 2015 absorbed roughly 1.3 million asylum seekers off Syria, food prices, and state collapse. The political fallout from that wave is still reshaping European elections half a decade later. A second wave triggered by 2026 fertilizer math, sourced from a much larger Sahel and MENA population, lands on a continent already politically fragile from the first. How many do we take in this time to feel holy and soothe the guilt? IV. Remember the single market? ECB has no first-order instrument that addresses food inflation driven by physical supply shock. National governments will reach for export controls, price caps, and emergency subsidies, all of which fragment the single market in real time. Schengen functioning becomes the live question. BTP-Bund spread is the cleanest tell on whether sovereign convergence holds or breaks under pressure. V. The hinge. Europe is at maximum fracture. The political system has absorbed sixteen years of compounded crisis without losing structural integrity, but the buffers are essentially gone. The masochistic phase, where the continent tries to be the moral conscience of the world while losing the capacity to keep its own lights on, has a terminal date. It's close. VI. Pick your own ending Consolidation: Green stack reformed under reality pricing, nuclear restart where physically possible, defense industrial base funded at scale, ECB backstop deployed before sovereign yields fragment, Schengen held under migration pressure, the fertilizer substitution chain rebuilt with permanent EU domestic capacity. Hardening edges (Poland 4%+ GDP defense, the Baltics, Finland, Sweden) lead the policy turn while the confused center catches up. Fragmentation: Sovereign yields diverge along PIIGS lines, national export controls break the single market in real time, Schengen suspended under migration acceleration, Euro fragments around a Northern core, periphery exits or defaults. The continent reverts to the geopolitics it spent seventy years escaping. Neighbors warring with neighbors. The pre-1945 default state in modern packaging. VII. The forecast. The masochistic phase has to end. There is no third option that absorbs another decade of compounded stress at this level. Either survival instinct overrides the current ideological purity, or the project enters its terminal phase. The bill ends here or it ends Europe as we know it. -Acies

@signulll I have been down that rabbit hole of having a clear vision in my head for what I want to write and scrapping 90% of it while editing only to arrive at a completely different output that laughs at my initial input. Have to do the work in the first place for that to happen.

there are 37 posters on my office wall that i have meticulously written & printed. this is the one i read almost every day: “great ideas are the output of the work, not the input.”

The Food Cascade Part 2. The aftershock. Sudan. Bangladesh DAP. Pakistan urea. Egypt LNG spot. Nigeria fertilizer. Somalia. Sri Lanka. Tanzania. Kenya. QAFCO. IFDC bulletin. IPC Phase 4. FAO 1.3 million tonnes per month. The five-chapter cascade already in motion since February 28. Chapter 1, Feb 28. US-Israel strikes Iran. Iran closes Hormuz. Within days, Qatar declares force majeure on LNG, urea, ammonia, methanol. Shell and TotalEnergies pass force majeure downstream to Asian and European clients. Roughly 4.2 million tonnes of ammonia removed from market within the first month per S&P Global. Chapter 2, the importer plant shutdowns. Bangladesh shut 5 of its fertilizer plants when Qatar gas stopped. Pakistan shut 4 of 5. India cut output from 3 urea plants. Egypt switched to expensive LNG spot, then implemented fuel rationing. Each importer rationing domestic gas to keep grids running, sacrificing fertilizer output as the politically cheaper cut. The plants shut quickly. The fields kept their planting calendars. Chapter 3, The unfruitful harvest. Urea moved from $400-490/mt to $700-900/mt per World Bank and FAO. Goldman flagged US fertilizer supply at 75% of normal by mid-March. US winter wheat: 55% under severe drought stress, Oklahoma at 18% good-to-excellent. Sub-Saharan Africa, where 90% of fertilizer is imported, saw farmers enter planting without nitrogen at all. Yields print Q3-Q4 2026 regardless of what the diplomats announce in May. Chapter 4, The void. Gulf storage capping out. Producers forced to idle. 44 ships parked in queue, 11 cleared. FAO confirms 1.3 million tonnes per month of fertilizer no longer transiting Hormuz. The Islamabad talks ran 21 hours and ended without a deal. Pakistan listed as mediator with no signed framework. The country exposure ladder, ranked by Gulf import dependency. Sudan: 50%+ Gulf-dependent, the highest country dependency on earth, 19.1 million already food insecure, 40% of population in famine conditions, 80% of wheat imported, civil war disrupting Port Sudan routes. Bangladesh: one third of DAP from the Gulf. Stocks expire May to June 2026 per IFDC bulletin April 21. After that, rationing. Pakistan: 7.5 million in food crisis, 2025 monsoon flood damage stacked on top. Egypt: lost Israeli gas, fuel rationing live, burning 4.5 million tonnes of wheat reserves. Nigeria: 27.2 million in crisis hunger, the largest single-country count globally. Somalia: 6.5 million in crisis, commodity prices already +20% since the conflict began. Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Kenya, India also flagged at-risk by FAO. Chapter 5, Take a walk in their shoes. 318 million people in 68 countries at IPC crisis hunger or worse per the WFP/FAO/EU Global Report on Food Crises released April 23. Two simultaneous famines running, Sudan and Gaza, the first time this century two famines run concurrently. Acute hunger has doubled over the past decade. WFP humanitarian funding is down 40% since 2024 and the agency expects to fund roughly half of its $13 billion 2026 ask. I wish we were talking about a future crisis, but this is already live, named, measured, and underfunded.

The Food Cascade Part 1. The European inheritance. Bulgaria. Romania. Slovakia. Hungary. UK winter wheat. Italy corn area. Yara Porsgrunn. Anhydrous ammonia. Granular urea. Ras Laffan. Sub-Saharan nitrogen. The fertilizer cascade lands on Europe first and hardest, and the position the continent walked into 2026 with explains why. I. The pattern Europe walks into every recent crisis as the heaviest hit. PIIGS sovereign debt 2010-12. Migration 2015. COVID supply chain 2020-21. Energy crisis 2022. Industrial decline through 2025. Now fertilizer and food 2026. The pattern is structural by this point. The continent optimized for managed decline, redistribution, and legal harmonization across 27 countries. None of those tools are useful when the inputs stop arriving. II. The 2026 state of affairs. Three structural exposures already maxed before the cascade hit. Pipeline gas from the east cut since 2022. Nuclear dismantled physically through the 2010s, with the Gundremmingen cooling towers demolished in October 2025 and most German plants beyond restart. Industrial base bleeding for two years. Yara CEO Holsether on record: fertilizer is the new gas. The new gas became unaffordable, then unavailable. III. The substitution chain that broke at the worst moment. When pipeline gas exited, European producers leaned on imports. Imported urea climbed to roughly 30% of EU intake by 2024 because the sanctions architecture left the molecule alone while the energy was sanctioned. Brussels then imposed a progressive tariff in July 2025 to cut that dependency, with Egypt and Algeria penciled in as the replacement. By Q4 2025 the imported share was down to 16%, exactly as planned. Then the Gulf cascade hit, Egypt went into fuel rationing, and the substitution chain broke at the exact moment it was needed. IV. The Gulf layer offline. The Persian Gulf supplies roughly 34-35% of world urea, 25% of ammonia, 18% of DAP and MAP, and 45% of global sulfur. Most of it transits Hormuz. QatarEnergy halted urea, ammonia, and methanol output at Ras Laffan after February 28. QAFCO alone supplied about 14% of global urea. StoneX assesses Ras Laffan repair at 3 to 5 years. This is not a logistics pause. It is a production destruction event with a multi-year clock. V. The drought layer compounding it. UK winter wheat is in its worst drought in 100 years with regional yield losses up to 40%. Romania cut 2026-27 wheat area by 2.43%. Bulgaria cut 14.61%. Italy cut corn area from 541,000 to 480,000 hectares. France, Poland, and Spain cut corn area between 3 and 11%. These are not pending decisions. They are already in the soil. VI. The single domestic buffer. Norway is essentially the last standing domestic gas feedstock available to a European fertilizer producer at scale. Yara's Porsgrunn complex runs on it. That is the structural reason Yara International keeps grinding while every other European industrial name bleeds. One continent's nitrogen now routes through a single North Sea producer while the Gulf timeline runs in years. How long until we can't keep paying the bill for vanity?

@JavierBlas Origin of the problem and the solution at the same time. The gaps in the supply gap get filled, but at what price. Makes sense that having such vast national reserves is a point of national pride. Now the oil companies have fantastic quarters paid for by the local consumer .

The world is calling on the barrel of last resort — and it’s brutal for the US. American total petroleum exports (crude and refined products) surged last week to an all-time high >14m b/d. The price? US total inventories plunged at ~3.5 million b/d last week. Unsustainable.

@zephyr_z9 TER is just too early as a hype vehicle for now. When the robotics FOMO truly kicks in, that's when we'll see insane valuations.

Dodged a cannonball here