Image is an illustration that I have made to show what each side means when they say that Hormuz is "open" or "closed", as various officials and analysts have created a lot of confusion with their statements, both intentionally and unintentionally.
I'm tentatively going back to the weekly thread format in the hopes that even if/when the conflict resumes, daily comment counts will keep us at or below ~3000 per week. If not, we'll just go back to the 3000 comment threshold being what triggers a new thread being created.
The events of the last two weeks have been the most unintelligible of at least the last four years, and on some days I took one look at the situation and decided to just not even bother and do something else until the next day.
To attempt to summarize:
long summary
Against many people's expectations, including my own, the ceasefire was not immediately scuttled upon its inception despite violations (predominantly against Lebanon), which indicates to me that both the US and Iran wanted a ceasefire more than they wanted to continue firing, at least for two weeks. For both sides, it represented an opportunity to reorganize, rebuild, and restrategize going forward.
The US has continued its rapid flurry of airlifting to and from the Middle East, and while what exactly they have brought and intend to do next is a mystery, airlifting is a very inefficient method of transferring resources en masse, meaning that any kind of massive ground invasion is still many months away (though I still strongly doubt it'll ever happen). Attempting to do more raids like the failed Istafan raid seems like the most likely option, as well as perhaps some disastrous attempts to hold Gulf islands.
Meanwhile, Iran has been excavating the entrances to their missile cities and has rapidly rebuilt bridges and railway lines. While the rate of reconstruction has shocked some observers, people like us who have paid abnormally high attention to the Ukraine War will not be surprised - infrastructure is very difficult to take out for any meaningful length of time even when it's not purposefully decentralized. It also seems extremely likely that Iran has continued to receive shipments of resources and weapons from Russia and China, though what exactly is being supplied is not concretely known.
Iran sent a highly qualified team to Pakistan to negotiate, and the US sent, among others, Vice President Vance too. After a marathon ~20 hour session, no deal was struck, and both sides left Pakistan (the Iranian team taking many precautions to not get shot down). While the nuclear issue seemed to be the major sticking point, it is very difficult to see the US - and Trump in particular - formally agreeing to a tollbooth in Hormuz or the retreat from their Middle Eastern bases even if they have already effectively retreated from most of them.
These negotiations took place in an environment of constant violations of the ceasefire on the Lebanon front. Iran initially tied their attendance of talks to a total cessation of conflict in Lebanon, though ultimately decided to go to Islamabad without a de facto ceasefire but with some sort of guarantee that we'll go tell Netanyahu to stop firing for a while. A few days after the negotiations failed, a more comprehensive ceasefire was actually achieved in Lebanon. It's still a Zionist Ceasefire ("you cease fire, we keep attacking"), and the Zionists committed several massive civilian atrocities just before the ceasefire began. After the ceasefire began, violations have, to my knowledge, been remarkably few up to the time of me writing this.
Shortly after the failure of negotiations, the US began their own blockade of Iran's ports. As the US Navy cannot get within a few hundred miles of even the entrance of the Strait of Hormuz, the blockade is taking place at some line in the Sea of Oman, where Iranian ships will be intercepted. The confusion caused by this situation has been incredible, with a few days of people tracking Iranian tankers closely, concluding that if they had crossed the Strait of Hormuz, they had successfully ran the blockade (they had not). After about a week of this de jure blockade, it was indeed confirmed to be real when the US captured its first Iranian oil tanker. This prompted Iran to fully close the Strait of Hormuz (see the megathread image), and there are reports of, as always, at best questionable veracity that in response to the US's blockade of their blockade, Iran possibly intends to 1) totally blockade Gulf State ports in the Persian Gulf of any kind, not just oil, and/or 2) talk to their ally Ansarallah and have them blockade the Red Sea (and they seem keen to do so in support of the Resistance).
Additionally, Iran has made the end of the US blockade the precondition to enter into new negotiations. The short term and even medium term effect of the US blockade will be minimal - China has a colossal strategic petroleum reserve which will last them several months even with their economy at full steam even assuming all Middle Eastern imports are cut off overnight, and Iran itself is not wholly reliant on oil exports for basic survival like other oil states (though it'll certainly hurt the economy if prolonged). There are also certain ways that the blockade can be subverted, like potentially some advanced shadow fleet tactics with the cooperation of allied countries, or, in the long term, the construction of overland oil transportation routes (a significant railway route was constructed in the last few years between Iran and China).
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists' destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Anyone following following AI reporting by Ed Zitron? The industry looks really bad. $65 billion max in total revenue across the entirety of AI when Western tech media really wants you to believe the entire world economy revolves around AI now.
For reference Lenovo, the company behind the Thinkpad laptops, has $80 billion in revenue.. Except Lenovo actually makes money.
There's this image from Western media anywhere where the entire world economy would collapse if the AI bubble bursts, or at minimum would cause a DotCom or 2008 style crash but it wouldn't be anywhere near that big. Nobody would notice if Lenovo disappeared overnight.
The more I read from Ed Zitron the more that the AI craze looks like the NFT bubble.
Front page of Ed Zitron's reporting: https://wheresyoured.at/
From an uneducated Marxist perspective it feels like the western bourgeoisie are manifesting their final victory over the proletariat (but in the lib The Secret self-help book way). They're projecting this hyper-reality where the west is WW2 mobilizing to build AI and AI datacenters but in reality they're actually building them with the same vigor that they build Amtrak stations and infrastructure. The data centers are not being built and like half of Nvidia's GPU output is ending up sitting in warehouses.
The skyrocketing token usage and new tricks like Claude code are coming from Anthropic and OpenAI throwing exponentially more compute at their models but that would imply charging their users (or B2B clients) exponentially more money, which is not going to happen.
The way that the AI sphere boosts their numbers 🐡 is very much in line with other Trump-era grifts, like trading money back and forth over and over again and making non-binding commitments to buy 40% of the world's DRAM and then not doing it.
Edit: There's also this myth that tech bros like to repeat that there are 900 million AI users but I'm pretty sure that just includes everyone that uses a search engine which all automatically send your prompt to an LLM at least occasionally. The old non-LLM powered search summaries you would get on Duck Duck Go and Google have been replaced by ChatGPT and Google Gemini summaries. They probably also count everyone that watches YouTube and accidentally clicks on an AI video description.
Also, Deepseek v4 has just come out and apparently it does not depend on CUDA cores, which means it's less dependent on Nvidia chips. If this proves to be a plausible way forward for AI in general, then the bubble gets even shakier, because Nvidia is the big Jenga block supporting this whole bullshit.
Mashallah. I'm a general sceptic of AI in most stuff but Deepseek is impressive for how little it costs. If v4 has better code completion support I'd probably buy some more credit
I thought this was something most people knew or assumed - the AI craze started right after NFTs peaked and imploded, so it seemed obvious all involved businesses just pivoted to that to justify past investments and continue taking money from investors.
Western capital doesn't have anything or anywhere left to invest in!
It's like the the tulip craze on steroids and a maybe a dying breath of venture tech capital. They're putting the cart before the horse; AI doesn't make money! They're lighting veritable mountains of money on fire! Certainly "AI" will be a huge propaganda tool going forward and will stick around, but for revenue generation it does not appear to be viable.
Something like a third of the entire Burgerland stock market is being propped up by this while the rest of the economy is in recession.
The bubble is going to pop when material reality catches up and the cracks are already showing.
Also does anyone else have this song appear in your head every time you read Ed Zitron's blog
If this were true then western manufacturing would be more efficient than Chinese manufacturing. Cars are an obvious one. But what we see is the opposite. They're choosing not to improve what they do because they want to invest in these things that will make them rich faster.
There's a choice between real material investments or fast growth investments in total bullshit like crypto or NFTs or AI. They're taking the fast growth every single time because it's the better option for growing their capital even if it means the real physical world that they're the rulers of is in decline.
So it's not really that there isn't anything or anywhere to invest, it's that the bullshit investments now offer a more reliable and faster growth opportunity than anything that represents a real improvement.
Financialization and its consequences have been a disaster for the industrial revolution
stealing this
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
Wouldn't the economic impact be more proportional to investor dollars lost than the industry's revenue?
Yes! I was just having this discussion last night. We have another 2.5 trillion in capex, the money corporations allocate to investing in their infrastructure, committed to AI datacenter buildout this year. That's A LOT of money. It's not being spent on bridges, roads, hospitals, schools, etc. It's being spent on specialized data centers intended to house massive GPU farms to run and train the latest and greatest AI models.
AFAICT this only pays off they manage to actually beat the theoretically limitations of these LLMs and make a machine god. The so what of all that is we have A LOT of capital chasing, what is probably, a fantasy. As it does so it isn't creating a useful stay behind asset. AI datacenters aren't general purpose and can't be easily reused. Add to that the fact that the GPUs don't actually have a very long productive life and you start to see problems compound.
One important methodological note here: Zitron's numbers on Capex are WAY better than mine. I did some digging into that 2.5 trillion number while writing this comment and found out that was based on a single source, Gartner, which has an incentive to pump up the numbers.
Ok, the numbers and spend question led me down a really interesting rabbit hole and I wanted to share a little bit of what I learned. TL;DR AI data center spend, in absolute and relative terms, is really high. Please take all my statements with a heavy dose of salt as I'm not an economist or professional researcher.
It's probably less than railroads ~6% of GDP and probably more than telco spend leading up to the dotcom bubble ~1.5% of GDP. It's reasonable to guess that is represents, or will by the end of 2026, ~ 2.2% of US GDP. Like the dotcom bubble it's largely funded by private capital. Unlike the dotcom bubble it's much more reliant on debt, specifically private credit debt, we'll get back to why that might matter later. Where things get interesting is in the durable nature of the utility value of the goods produced by the investment. Railroad capital mostly has a 100+ year utility value, tracks can be used for a long time with some regular maintenance. Fiber has a 15+ year, probably a lot longer, utility value and again a lot of the associated infrastructure stays useful for a long time with maintenance. Data center infrastructure and GPUs are not so lucky. The people spending the money say the GPUs are good for 5 years, they probably have a 1-3 year usable lifespan. Data center infrastructure itself has a much longer useful lifespan but those buildings aren't exactly general purpose, if AI is a bust you'll need to have a new use for all that space. The so what of all that is this is looking even less rational and useful than the dotcom era infrastructure investment boom.
On the debt financing thing I talked about getting back to I'd suggest you take a look at this article that has the heterodox economist Michal Hudson talking about why he thinks the west is in for a really bad ride if AI + private credit + energy crisis all come together for a lemon party type situation.
I would also add a reminder that chipmaking needs actual Helium molecules from... Qatar
Interestingly, helium gas is monoatomic, so it is not used as a molecule
and thats why its useful for chipmaking and not easy to substitute
Kind of but not really. Every noble gas is monoatomic and "inert" but helium just just the most inert. It's also far and away the best inert gas for cooling, if we get a little better at superconductors we can probably get away with nitrogen for stuff like MRIs but because we are using black magic alchemy to make computer chips now we need something with zero reactivity.
I've been reading his free articles as they come out, it's fun to see just exactly how fucked the AI datacenter business model is
the reality is seeping into some of my tech friends' rhetoric lately, people who used to be enthusiastic about the possibilities are now like "yeah they'll never make money, I hope there will be a locally runnable coding AI in the future"
Mind you there already are; they keep complaining they're "six months out of date" but frankly I'm finding models like these run locally to produce very close results to the latest models from the ongoing circus.
That's based on limited tests out of curiosity mind you because regardless of where you run them it's important to remember that the technology doesn't work. That is, it cannot do even a small fraction of what they're trying to sell it for (at a loss, too). Even for coding it's mostly shit. These are credible-sounding-text completion machines, without any understanding of anything. Outside of propaganda and entertainment, the actual viable use cases are few and far between.
I'm still waiting for some better support from tooling for stuff like fill-in-the-middle code completion, but I did find Qwen 2.5 was decent on my mid-range gaming laptop (AMD RX-6600M on Linux) when it worked. Continue.dev and similar plugins for vs-code are still a bit.. meh. And Microsoft is clearly scared to open up an API for copilot because it would haemorrhage their US$20/mo subscription service...
The agentic vibecoding shit is the kind of thing that isn't feasible outside of a fat datacenter, at least for the next few years if you're running anything remotely close to an affordable setup.
I read him and largely agree, I also work in the space. The thing I'd say we need to be careful of with his analysis is he consistent assumes the worst case scenario when there is ambiguity and he assumes that the worst possible outcomes from every negative event experienced by AI companies.
That's not to say he isn't useful, just be aware that he can easily go beyond what the evidence realistically supports and that can leave you overly optimistic about the downfall of these AI compainies.
Oh look, department of war is in need of autonomous drone target control, what a coincidence, just so happens.
If 400 billion capex is around correct, 80 billion a year is enough to kinda sustain them. claude already killing school children in iran (and their monthly revenue suddenly increased during maduro kidnapping as well), so for 10% pentagon budget you buy out stock market (or for 16% republican increase) for years, get hardware porkies on side, damn silly how that works
Military Keynesianism: The Electric Boogaloo
What the fuck is "theoretical revenue"
Annualized ARR, So as an example Anthropic probably just had a great month where they made an extra 1-2 billion in revenue. They then go in multiply it by 12 and say that their annualized ARR increased by 12-24 billion. It's misleading when subscription companies do it but at least for them users then to sign up to spend the same amount every month or year. With a consumption based model it's even wonkier because if you had costs get out of control in April you're likely to to try and bring them down by lowering consumption in May.