We know what’s coming and we are prepared.
🚢 🌍 🏴☠️ Why Attack Shipping: a thread
🔶️ The Houthi strategy looks primitive to most with the random attacks on ships sounding desperate and quite elemental in a world of AI and space exploration. But the game theory behind it is superb.
🔶️ Introducing shipping:
Shipping is an old world industry, global in nature, but greatly affecting everyone and every local economy differently. It operates in vast open oceans with minimal policing or regulation for centuries, and it works extremely well to support our everyday lifestyles. But in the last few years disruptions due to various factors have brought shipping to the forefront. Why suddenly shipping matters?
🔶️ Although there are so many different types of ships in a global commercial fleet of 80,000+ vessels, picking what matters is essential: for the western world one does not really care much about dry bulk (iron ore/coal cargoes are mainly China focused meaning a disruption does not really affect the US/EU regions); you don’t really even care about tankers (freight costs is like 4% of oil price so to inflict real pain it becomes very difficult from a shipping cost perspective plus China has become the dominant importer in that market as well); but … you do care about containers. This is what hurts the most the average western consumer and for a good reason: containers transport most of the goods we use in our daily lives and we know and understand the price of. It relates to what is called the delivered price of a good. Push up the delivered price and suddenly you have inflation
🔶️ So, if you want to hurt the western world, you need to focus on what the Central Banks are trying so hard to contain: inflation. If supply chains get disrupted again, and that can really happen, it will matter greatly. And it will matter for what REALLY matters: all upcoming elections in the US/EU in 2024. Disruption is a game of chaos in a supply chain that strives for extreme optimization and JIT inventory management. And it does not take much to do so. But anything similar was an unimaginable scenario when inflation was not a risk for decades until Covid. But now it is. And a rebel group in southwest Yemen can affect the election outcome in a lot of “First World” countries this year. Remember the butterfly effect?
🔶️ Bulk commodities (oil, coal, iron ore, etc) can adjust to disruption as they are mostly fungible: local prices adjust a bit but would not affect the bigger picture much( take a look at NSea and SAm crude spreads this week and how rapidly they adjusted to the situation). Finished goods however are not, cause they are manufactured East and consumed West. Disrupt the East-West corridor for finished goods and you have leverage because prices will react positively and there is no adjustment path anywhere else.
🔶️ Expect this playbook to become part of the global geopolitical chess game for years to come. Straits, canals and waterways are going to play a much bigger role than even before in a world where inflicting economic pain in the Western world without real conflict is becoming much more difficult than ever before. Technology allows anyone to obtain RT information on vessel position, ownership and cargo details which makes it an easy game for bad actors with minimal resources. We are all about to become much better in oceanography and geography for the years to come…
📎 Breakwave
Yanis Varoufakis (former Greek Minister of Finance) describes AI as a new form of capital that produces not goods, but behavioral modification. This is achieved by engineering perceptions.
The answers provided by ChatGPT, or the images rendered by StableDiffusion — as these increasingly inform our perceptions, they in turn define the reality we experience.
This is what makes AI so powerful — he who controls the AI, defines the reality of tomorrow.
⚡️🇺🇸 Some more things coming out for the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
Under the preliminary drafts of the bill, the USAF is requesting a release of $57,000,000 USD ($57.0 Million) to retire all remaining 162 A-10 Thunderbolt IIs in current service. Apart of the 2023 NDAA, there was a clause for a few million dollars to be released every so often to gradually retire the (then) 250 airframes by 2034; however due to the push by the Dept of Defense to ‘shed’ obsolete or obsolescent airframes that cannot be overhauled or upgraded further without a whole new airframe, it appears the USAF wants to retire all 162 remaining A-10s by the end of 2026.
The USAF plans to fully divest the 340-total remaining A-10s entirely, including those that currently serve in a handful of Air National Guard units in some states; which will be replaced by F-15EX Eagle IIs (like what is already happening with the Michigan State Air National Guard’s A-10s), or F-35A/Bs.
Included ...
My older sister lives in the country in between Velma Oklahoma and Duncan Oklahoma near the Fuqua Lake area, this story was told by a rural mail delivery woman who delivers the mail in the country.
The incident happened while she was on her route, when she came upon to the mailbox a male Chinese nation came out brandishing a, AK-47 rifle being very hostile,
I don't know if he pointed it at her since it is against the law to do so but she was terrified and said she was never going back and that the location that had a guard tower. Was the sheriff department notified, I don't know, did she notify her supervisor, don't know. But word is from the country folk who live in the area they have seen the guard tower at the pot place;
I refuse to call it a farm because it is an insult to farmers.
And yes she was traumatized by that ordeal
