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.

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

@sheriyuo This is the turtle and the hare fairytale in a nutshell. Long term vision and optimising for efficiency. Versus Throwing endless money at the problem and hoping the next LLM will in fact be the one that solves the inefficiencies. The fact is we don't know which will win.

"China does not lack capital for innovation, but rather confidence and the know how to organize high density talent to achieve effective innovation." Companies today focus too much on commercial profit, outcome orientation, and cost benefit analysis, which makes the cost of internal trial and error too high. The path of business and the path of research are different, and the ways of seeking certainty versus exploring the unknown are fundamentally not the same. DeepSeek represents a long term, research driven approach rather than a model that chases short term value, which is why it was able to succeed.

Strauss Zelnick at iicon Conference on the GTA 6 launch: "I do think a lot of people will be calling in sick that week of November 19th, but that's a separate issue." CEO of a $40B publicly traded company. Date confirmed. The man is locked in. $TTWO

@pmddomingos It's helpful for those who already possess a high tier of knowledge of a subject. But if you're a junior and generate a singular prompt, it takes you more time to fact check the output than actually doing the work yourself. Or... Ship as is with a Jesus take the wheel caveat.

The state of AI, as captured by the jurors in the Musk v. OpenAI trial:

The sovereign risk is stacking sky high. Two simultaneous famines running as we speak. Sudan and Gaza, first time this century. 318 million people in 68 countries at IPC crisis hunger before the fertilizer shock has even reached the harvests. Sudan imports more fertilizer from the Gulf than any country on earth. 40% of its population is already in famine conditions. Bangladesh stocks expire May-June. After that, rationing. Romania cut wheat area 2.4%, Bulgaria 14.6%. UK winter wheat in worst drought in 100 years. Spring planting decisions are not pending. They are already locked into the soil. The 2010-11 food spike was 40% and it toppled four governments. We are at +13% wheat already and the fertilizer cascade has not even reached the fields.

The Iran War is cutting vital fertilizer flows: Gulf urea production is down to ~160,000 tons per week, hitting another new low of the year. Urea is the world's most widely used nitrogen fertilizer and a crucial input for growing staple crops including corn, wheat, and rice. Gulf urea production has fallen ~60% since the start of the Iran War. Furthermore, only 11 fertilizer ships have transited the Strait of Hormuz since the war began, with 44 vessels carrying fertilizer still stuck inside the Gulf and nearly half of them loaded with urea. Producers are also running out of storage space, raising the risk that manufacturers will be forced to shut down entirely. The Middle East accounts for ~45% of global urea trade, supplying major agricultural importers including India, Europe, and Brazil. Global food inflation is set to accelerate.

@KobeissiLetter I wouldn't be surprised if they somehow manage to spin the OpenAI disaster today as bullish for AI. Then again if the most disliked company in the AI sphere has a rough day, it might just spark even more interest toward the infinite growth names.

Our most frequently asked question right now: "If oil prices are above $100/barrel and the Iran War isn't over, why are stocks at record highs?" The answer to this question is simple. The AI Revolution has simply become so large, that investors are viewing everything else as "noise." Over the last few months, as large cap technology stocks traded flat then sharply lower amid the Iran War, the AI narrative only grew. The Magnificent 7 companies are set to invest over $600 BILLION in AI this year alone. And, as broader markets swept tech giants like Nvidia and Alphabet lower, these stocks reached their cheapest Forward P/E levels since 2019. At the March 30th bottom, the S&P 500 Information Technology index was trading at just a 4% Forward P/E premium to the S&P 500, the lowest since January 2019. Tech stocks became cheaper than the average S&P 500 stock for the first time since 2017. Nvidia, for example, is now trading at just a ~26x Forward P/E multiple, even as it is back at record highs. Walmart? 43x. Costco? 46x. The reality is that many large cap technology stocks are merely getting cheaper as they go up. And when they go down, they become remarkably cheap. We are in the biggest technological revolution in modern history, and even $100 oil, a 4.40% 10Y Yield, and rate cuts priced out until 2027 are unable to derail the train. Asset owners will continue to win.

Okay let's do this. $TTWO · Part 1 · The Zynga Engine I. The questionable takeover Take-Two paid $12.7B for Zynga in May 2022 right at the top of the mobile cycle, just as Apple's ATT gutted iOS attribution. By September 2022 TTWO had bled 35% off the print, integration was ugly, consensus said Zelnick overpaid. Four years of multiple compression. Everyone was questioning leaderships vision. II. The redemption arc Q3 FY26 mobile bookings hit $861M, +21% Y/Y per Take-Two's 8-K (Feb 3 2026). Total RCS up 23%, 76% of net bookings. NBA 2K26 recurrent up 30%. GTA Online recurrent up 27%. Toon Blast +43% Y/Y. Mobile is now the fastest growing segment inside TTWO and the highest margin live service on the deck. The Zynga acquisition stopped being the millstone and became the engine. Meanwhile finTwit is watching, begging and waiting for GTA trailers. III. The belly of the beast Zynga rolled out smooth web checkout inside Empires & Puzzles. The flow looks exactly like Apple's native billing screen, but the payment routes outside the App Store. No Safari bounce, no broken funnel. Players get over 10% bonus currency for using the new method. Apple wanted 30% to host the icon. Zynga rerouted around it. Run the math off public Take-Two disclosure: $861M Q3 mobile annualizes to a ~$3.4B run rate. Shift 10 to 15% of that from Apple's 30% platform tax to a ~5% web processor fee and you unlock $85M to $130M in pure annual margin. Same revenue. More profit. Infrastructure cost is largely fixed. Both CEOs (Zelnick and Gibeau) have publicly told the market the rotation is intentional and structural. IV. Greed is good Let it be known that the predatory design and the stock are bundled together, make your own moral judgment call on that. The modern microtransaction stack starts with Bethesda's horse armor in 2006 and gets industrialized at Zynga inside Farmville and Candy Crush. The base game stops being the product. The product becomes: wait six hours for energy or pay $0.99 right now. Premium currencies (gems, gold, coins) so the spend stops registering as real money in your head. Welcome packages priced just above the impulse threshold, one-tap re-purchase so the second buy clears in a second. Limited time countdown. Monthly power creep so last month's maxed unit is mid tier today. Whale tier psychology: Deeper spend means worse value per dollar, betting whales will not wait for the great value bundles to come back. Every major mobile publisher has licensed psychologists on payroll and the dark patterns are the deliverable. They literally design it so you click buy by accident. This is the operating system Zynga shipped to Take-Two in 2022. V. They will keep getting away with this. This whole flow exists in the regulatory gap Epic v. Apple opened up. The fee Apple gets for those external links is still in court. Zynga is going hard on this on purpose: lock in the spenders, train the habit, make it default before Apple closes the gap. The percentage shifts are permanent. Even if Apple claws some back, Zynga ends up above where they started. The thing that pissed off gamers for 20 years is the same thing about to compound TTWO's margin curve. Apple wanted 30% of that extraction. Now they get 5%. The friction is dead. The dark patterns are still milking you. VI. Why TTWO isn't just "GTA is priced in guys" vehicle Zynga is independent of the GTA VI cycle. Pays whether GTA VI ships November 19 or slips a third time. Pays whether Project Genie disrupts narrative IP or does not. Standalone margin uplift baked into the cake while everyone watches GTA VI. Part II will cover the GTA VI cycle, the inner working of the game and the moat. Part III drops around the May 21 earnings call. For full transparency, long TTWO 800 sh. My wallet has opinions and so do I. Not financial advice. Do your own research.

@deredleritt3r Both sides have been hedging since Q4. MSFT diluting OpenAI position in October, lost cloud exclusivity, dropped 12% in January when investors priced the OpenAI exposure. Meanwhile OpenAI signed $38B with AWS, then started running compute through Google and Oracle. Not pretty.

>will continue to provide them with models and products until 2032 Very curious whether there have been any changes to Microsoft's rights to OpenAI "research IP", which includes internally deployed and research models. Under the deal signed last year, Microsoft has access to "research IP" through the earlier of 2030 or OpenAI achieving AGI.

@xuwencheng Humanoid robots will most likely help in the warehouses where a lot of systems are still built around making everything as convenient for humans as possible. And the grand goal is of course getting humanoid to even remotely think in terms of finding solutions to niche problems.

Most people confuse these 4 robots — but they’re solving completely different problems: AGV → moves things Robot Arm → does things SCARA → assembles fast Delta → sorts insanely fast That’s it. But here’s the part most miss 👇 Factories don’t choose ONE. They stack them into a system: AGV → delivers Delta → sorts SCARA → assembles Robot Arm → handles complexity → This is how modern automation actually works. Not “one robot replaces humans” But a coordinated pipeline replaces entire workflows If you’re building in robotics or AI: Stop thinking tools. Start thinking systems. #AGV #robot #DeltaRobot #SCARA