God Bless Captain Vere: When Constitutional Duty Yields to Institutional Power

As part of the US campaign to engineer a regime change in Iran, the US military and intelligence community are using Operational Preparation of the Environmnet aka OPE. OPE is defined in joint publications (e.g., JP 3-05 Special Operations) as non-intelligence activities conducted prior to or in preparation for potential military operations to set conditions […]

The Upcoming AI Spend Slowdown? Submitted by Peter Tchir of Academy Securities We have been attacking this issue orthogonally for the past few weeks. Last weekend’s Cheap China Compute brought up several issues facing the AI Spend. On Thursday we published Braggawatts (which should probably be BragCompute or something), but the concept is that a lot of the announced deals are missing some, or all of the following: Enough electricity, especially at peak usage times, to fulfill their commitments. Access to water and other resources to function. Getting the various chips on time, connected and installed (hearing China is threatening to restrict exports of fiber-optic cables (another, in a long list...

US Tungsten Scrap Export Ban Takes Effect As Global Supply Crisis Deepens The Trump administration's export halt on tungsten scrap and shredded battery material took effect Thursday as the latest effort to retain critical supplies within the US. The measure comes as the US confronts a tungsten-supply crisis marked by limited to nonexistent domestic mine production and years of alarming dependence on China-dominated supply chains, even as Beijing increasingly uses critical-mineral exports as geopolitical leverage and curtails shipments abroad. The Commerce Department directive prohibits exports of tungsten scrap and so-called black...