10 Comments

  1. …you know…in the before-times…when the weekends weren’t this shitty new game-of-gaming-the-markets-for-monday…these used to feel more relaxing, I think?

    Good morning. We’re now entering the fourth month since the start of the Iran war, and the Strait of Hormuz has been blocked for nearly as long. The biggest question on everyone’s mind is where oil prices are headed. Many observers have been surprised that Brent crude hasn’t risen more; it averaged around $104 per barrel in May. 

    But a look at prices in the context of commercial inventories shows there is a clear pattern. The two variables have a very high inverse correlation, and May’s average Brent crude oil price fit the historical trend.  

    However, as Hamad Hussain at Capital Economics pointed out to Unhedged, if the supply shock continued and commercial inventories continued to fall at about 100mn barrels per month — as they did in April and May — oil prices could average between $130 and $140 per barrel in June, and possibly even higher.

    China’s dramatic reduction in crude oil imports has cushioned some of the supply shock, as has the release of strategic oil reserves by the US and other countries. But these aren’t sustainable responses; the US’s oil stocks have already fallen to a 22-year low. The oil supply crunch will be hard to cushion for much longer.

    …like…that’s off the FT…there’s an “unhedged” podcast to go with & stuff but it was sitting under the header “Chart of the Week: Pricing the oil inventory drawdown” with the subtitle “Could Brent crude hit $140 per barrel?” & last time I checked there were a few things you could increment the price on & it turns out that ticks the price of very nearly everything up by some fractional ratio or other…&…oil…is on the list…so…anyway…the chart would look like this

    Monthly Brent Crude Oil Price ($ per barrel) y-axis OECD Commercial Crude Oil Inventories (mn barrels) x-axis plotted 2010 to date with 2022 &

    …anyway

    This is a remarkable. You OFTEN get administration insiders leaking to the press, "we warned Trump XYZ," as when someone in Dan Caine's vicinity leaked that Caine warned Trump that Iran could go badly b4 he started war. Here, oil execs are doing that.www.politico.com/news/2026/06…

    — emptywheel (@emptywheel.bsky.social) 2026-06-04T13:17:01.889Z

    …I guess what I’m saying is…if this is the new “ladies & gentlemen…

    Rep. Morelle on Oil Prices: Who listens to this guy? People with serious economic interests think that the price of oil is going down because Trump tweets out that he’s near a framework of a deal, and then two hours later he’s backtracking? This is what he does all the time.

    — Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2026-06-01T20:05:18.827Z

    …the weekend”?

    Trump downplays rising oil costs:"Oil is $98 a barrel. Everyone said it was gonna be $300 a barrel. That's not a big price to pay"

    — FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) 2026-06-03T13:36:20.179286148Z

    …I say bring back daniel craig…maybe…the old days were better after all…damn it…that’s…not exactly a good sign if history’s any guide

    Ted Cruz on high gas prices: "I don't think it's gonna impact the midterms. I've seen no data that suggests this is having a big impact on the midterms. Under Biden, gas prices … "

    — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-02T14:15:18.028Z

    Let me finish that.. Under Biden gas prices rose because Russia invaded Ukraine and we just came out of a pandemic which Trump lied and and made worse and oil companies price gouged to make up for all the lost demand during Covid. Hope this helps Teddy.

    — Truth Social(ist) (@twitterrefugeeog.bsky.social) 2026-06-02T14:20:42.319Z

    Trump also forced the Saudis to end a price war with Russia and cut production to help out American oil producers at the expense of American customers.Republicans: always redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich

    — (@tiredofthecon.bsky.social) 2026-06-02T14:24:04.078Z

    …&…you can get all that way down that primrose path…without even getting to the strategic genius that saw to it that on top of the maybe-tariff-but-we’ll-call-it-a-toll-for-clarity tax/surcharge thanks to bollocking up a strait or two…where the second is…less of a lever on the oil thing…only 5% or so of that traffic…but another 10%+ of total global shipping ships through that one…iirc…default figure for “statistical significance” in a bunch of contexts often goes with 5 & calls it a round number…&…more than ten is more than five…so…that might be…I dunno…significant in some way…besides…the gotta-fudge-the-markets incentive being what it is he already tossed the line in the sand about iran & russia getting to turn some of the shadow fleet legit for a better price thanks to sanctions & embargoes getting 86’d

    …maybe they still have a hand on the tiller…but it would be more reassuring to hear that if there was any evidence they ever fitted a rudder?

  3. …ok…so…I’m going to go ahead & blame wired for pointing me to this one…not saying I’m not old enough to know what number stations were…&/or at least some of the things people speculated they were up to…but…part of me thinks this is pretty cool…&…technically…that wouldn’t be the technical bits?

    https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2026/06/02/the-quiet-numbers-station-decoding-nineteen-years-of-gps-cryptography/

    …like…that’s a long & at least ostensibly patient analysis of something that let him draw a reasonable conclusion…&…given the position that thing-that-gives-your-position holds in some fairly crucial &/or high stakes contexts…it…probably isn’t like die hard 2 with the spoofed relative altitude thing…but…let’s at least hope they don’t outsource that shit to a chatbot that’s friendly with all that mythos business, eh?

    • …what’s the one about “…for a sheep as a lamb”?

      https://www.wired.com/story/websites-can-now-spy-on-you-through-your-hard-drive/

      …pretty sure the crux of the thing is the offender’s already for-sure condemned…& if either of the first two put you off your cornflakes this is…probably not as bad, even…fairly sure this one’s still at proof-of-concept…but…the ingenuity on this stuff for donkeys has been low-key spectacular…single pixels in web-pages…ultrasonics…not even you-name-it-they-tried-it…they tried stuff you’d maybe have to make up names for

      …that one the other day I threw in by…wossname…mike masnick?

      https://www.liberalism.org/p/enshittification-despotification-and-the-open-internet

      …that one?

      …”Institute of Humane Studies” may have been instituted back in ’61…but…I’d maybe overlook the…call it an amber-flag…on the invocation of liberalism…&…the slightly starry-eyed righteous-cube graphic

      4 cornered image with
      [https://www.liberalism.org/about]

      …because the part about how other architectures are available…at least up to a point…is…very true?

      …like…any complex system that talks to other ones is coming with complex telemetry as a minimum & we have stuff that juggles really big numbers now so you can unpick a bunch more from that than casual usage might lead one to assume…but…on the other hand…some polymarket whale with a budget for claude tokens probably isn’t going to get the chatbot to reconfigure the GPS world map over the weekend to close a killer market

      …but…also we don’t *have* to do it like it was built by & for assholes & fuckwits to try to make people hate nerds again?

  4. …ok…not saying anyone has to join in…but I think maybe you could get a game show format out of the juxtaposition of things US:UK…maybe call it two nations divided by a common language…but…probably with the 2 as just overlapping flags & written like a fraction with “common language” as a meme font or whatever…anyway

    Every other take I see on this show is "I think we should have racism that benefits me specifically."

    — Patrick Andelic (@pkandelic.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T07:01:44.045Z

    It's just intrinsically funny to be doing this from an OpEd in the Telegraph – like the question is answered by the mode of its being posed, and answered in a way that negates the need to ask the question in the first place!

    — (@lastpositivist.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T07:18:38.567Z

    …doesn’t always work

    Senior researchers at a meeting of the American Diabetes Association were handing out copies of an editorial, published in the association's journal, condemning Trump administration cuts to diabetes research. Police came to arrest them. http://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/w...

    — Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T06:37:29.724Z

    …but then sometimes one does both even if the “translation” looks different

    someone on Twitter once posted a breakdown showing how many gay men died of AIDS in various districts of Florida, overlaid with how many votes Gore lost those districts by in 2000, and I’ve genuinely never been okay since. there literally would have been no George W. if those men were still with us

    People love historical what if scenarios. What if JFK was never assassinated? What if the Nazis won in WW2? A scenario I never see discussed is what if the aids crisis didnt decimate the gay men of America in the 80s-90s? Its easy to forget 1 in 15 gay boomer men died. An estimated 300,000 deaths-

    — Kasey Gifford (@kaseygifford.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T00:20:00.436Z

    More young men were lost to aids than the Vietnam War, many of them creatives at the peak of their careers. Howard Ashman, Derek Jarman, Keith Haring and Freddie Mercury are some of the most famous but there are so many unknown writers/actors/artists/filmakers cut down before they even started.

    — Kasey Gifford (@kaseygifford.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T00:20:00.437Z

    Imagine a modern world were all those artists never died. What would that look like? It would probably be so different it would be unrecognizable. So many books/plays were finished. So many more great movies were made. Think of the music we missed. Maybe millenial grey would never have happened.

    — Kasey Gifford (@kaseygifford.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T00:20:00.438Z

    So during pride celebrate the artists we lost but remember to also celebrate the art we never had and the world of people we didnt get to see.

    — Kasey Gifford (@kaseygifford.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T00:20:00.439Z

    …no money for mRNA vaccines but you can get to human trials if you chatbot a sequencing?

    This is going to create new and incomprehensible forms of horseshoe politics.

    — Scoiattolo (@scoiattolo.mountainherder.xyz) 2026-06-06T10:44:49.577Z

    …I want my fucking weekend back you feckless wankers

    I do find this whole thing a bit weird. Anthropic could, literally, stop or change what they are doing at any time http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

    — Rachel Coldicutt (@rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T08:01:27.525Z

    …anyone know where the refund option hides in reality’s user preferences?

  5. …uh…this might be more of a brain drain thing…but…any of the gaming folks in the market for…uh…well

    Take a look at the trailer for 1666: Amsterdam, an upcoming action-adventure game for PC. #IGNSummerOfGaming

    — IGN (@ign.com) 2026-06-06T12:16:34.434302264Z

    …kind of assassin’s creed but you’re the girl with the pearl earing battling demons & there are cats that are presumably someone’s familiars…maybe yours…while…if I didn’t forget how it opened…you collect historic masterpieces for the side of the angels

    …it’s…definitely something…& the abraham lincoln vampire hunter thing punched above its weight & there’s at least one good riff on jane austen with zombies…so…it might be a potentially stick-able landing?

  6. …why, will?

    I love how these violently ignorant types get furious and call you a “graph pervert” and “economy gaslighter” when you talk about BLS data, then turn around and cherry-pick THE EXACT SAME BLS DATA to say “See! No one can afford anything!”Brother you’ll never believe what the BLS wage data says

    — Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T12:20:32.623Z

    …sure…where there’s a will there’s a way…but…why that got to be *this* way, will?

    …you trying to tell people they need to examine their priors in a broader & more nuanced context in which you still get to declare clear dunks as nothing but net even if only people absent skill issues can drop a 3-point-er

    …since the rule of 3 is now in with em-dashes & use of serifs on a font as “tells” for “you can just call it AI like you used to say bot”…I…guess that makes sense…from a perspective camped out on a permanent free-throw

    …way to be self-aware, my guy

    …is the thing you want to have been right about in a screenshot of a graph drawn up by a motivated party to imply it propped up the case you were already in the middle of making gets transposed to the same analysis of what used to be a differently configured & better trusted but still probably more trustworthy dataset than the one the paper with that graph would score…that…young people today don’t know how good they have it?

    …while said cohort is in the same “looks like it went shit for that lot & in ways that only seem to compound for us” position you were at their age…& you know how much we haven’t done in the intervening time & even agree about how phenomenally against future interest the admin that would fail the marshmallow test is

    …why would you throw that kind of chum in those waters on an innocent morning trying to be a weekend?

    …do you not know how long it took for most people to fucking have one of those?

    …much less for it to mean leisure time?

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