The Gist: Sunshine and Lollipops

https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-sunshine-and-lollipops/

I want you to picture what immediately comes to mind when I say the phrase "the Strait of Hormuz is closed." Got that mental picture? Great. Because, if you're an American, odds are everything you're currently imagining is wrong.

You might be thinking that in order to "close the Strait", some amount of military presence is required. Some form of naval barricade. Ships with guns and mines and things. Or at the very very least, boats. And you would be wrong.

The Strait of Hormuz is not closed due to some physical barricade. It's closed because of paperwork. And, more specifically, insurance paperwork. And, even more specifically, American capitalist insurance paperwork. This sounds like the most boring subject ever - until you realize that it controls literally everything about the war, how the war ends, and how things ever get back to "normal". (Spoiler warning, they don't.)

On February 28, 2026, the same day Iran publicly announced that a peace deal was on the table in which America gets literally everything they ever wanted, America decided to set fire to Iran in the form of (deep sigh) "Operation Epic Fury". We live in the stupidest timeline. In less than an hour, American military forces bombed more than 1,000 civilian and military targets in Iran, and murdered more little Iranian girls attending elementary school than the Taliban ever did.

Ships going through the strait immediately saw their insurance rates rocket sky high. Why? Because war is one of the things that insurance covers, along with piracy, natural disasters, and foreign governments seizing your cargo. Before the bombing, ship cargo insurance ran about 0.02% of the value of the cargo they're hauling. On an average cargo ship carrying somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 million barrels of cargo worth approximately $100 million dollars, that's a rounding error. $20,000 per transit is nothing. Immediately following the bombing though, that insurance rate went up to 5% of the value of the haul. Or roughly FIVE MILLION DOLLARS per ship per transit. Put simply, that's like you waking up one day and finding out that because some idiot bombed the Toyota factory half a world away, your car insurance just went up to $50,000/ a month overnight.

And then, to make things worse, on March 2, the insurance companies just yanked everyone's insurance completely. They sent out letters saying that in 72 hours, all ships in the Strait of Hormuz would have their insurance cancelled. If you had infinite money, you couldn't buy insurance for your vessel. The actuarial tables took one look at the state of US involvement in Iran and just went FUCK NO. So, on March 5, 2026, every single vessel attempting passage through the Strait of Hormuz - an active war zone - quietly and completely lost all their insurance.

Now, what can ships do without insurance? Basically nothing. If you're an uninsured cargo vessel, no port is going to take you, your cargo won't make it through customs, your financing collapses, and your flag State pulls your registration. Basically the entire legal infrastructure underpinning global overseas trade says if you don't have insurance, you don't sail. So don't sail is exactly what everything and everybody did. America essentially cockblocked itself using capitalism.

Over the next few weeks Iran began allowing a few vessels through the Strait, from nations it considers non hostile. And by "allowed", what I mean is, the insurance companies decided that some non hostile nations such as China could buy insurance for their vessels. But there's a catch. They had to buy that insurance using Chinese yuan. Which, China was only too happy to do.

And then, THEN, something amazing happened. Something that hasn't ever happened before in the history of the world. Cargo ships started broadcasting their international country of origin AS CHINA. Japanese and Indian cargo ships started blasting the airwaves claiming "China owner" or "All crew and ship Chinese". They were hacking the embargo WITH BRANDING. And it worked! They bought insurance with Chinese yuan, and were allowed passage through the Strait. Problem solved! Everyone's happy!

Guess who isn't so happy about that, though. America. America, who is the largest exporter of petroleum and liquid natural gas in the world. Of course, Trump wants the Strait open. If America can't export its petroleum and petroleum based byproducts, because its ships, and its ships alone can't buy the insurance they need at literally any amount of American dollars, then American petroleum manufacturers start losing money. Which means Trump starts losing money.

So what does Trump do next? In his infinite wisdom, he decides to, in order:
- insult them
- insult their religion
- threaten them with annihilation
- send the Navy to physically blockade the Strait.

The Strait which was open before he bombed them, and is still open to everybody but him, and which he desperately needs to be open.

And I want you to just have a little think about what that "blockade" actually looks like. Because if you think the US Navy is just shooting down Japanese and Chinese and Indian and South Korean civilian shipping vessels with absolutely no response from those governments, you're a special kind of stupid. No, what this actually looks like in practice is a US Navy vessel is parked just outside the Strait of Hormuz asking everyone else - who has the legal right and paperwork to sail through the Strait - to please pretty please don't sail though. And then when they fucking ignore us and sail through the Strait anyway, the US Navy writes down the ship's identification number on a list and has a little cry about it.

So, here's the international state of affairs as it stands right now:

America is currently blockading itself, and ONLY ITSELF from passage through the Strait of Hormuz using its own Navy, because of actions taken by its own Air Force, which closed the Strait of Hormuz due to its own capitalist system, which is the only reason America even gives a shit about Hormuz in the first place.

Art of the fucking deal, folks.

“She forgot one thing.
I am a nerd. And I have an internet connection.”
https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/the-paperwork-flood/

✊

"Relieved, and then immediately guilty about the relief, and then annoyed at myself for feeling guilty about something that is, by any rational measure, a completely reasonable thing to do."

Honest piece on the ethics of AI code tools now that they're actually good. It's easy to opt out of something that doesn't work. It's a lot harder when your industry is making it a requirement and you still need to pay rent.
https://matduggan.com/i-sold-out-for-200-a-month-and-all-i-got-was-this-perfectly-generated-terraform/

The CEO of Persona, the company that processes your passport, selfie, and facial geometry so you can get a verified badge on LinkedIn, doesn't have a profile picture on LinkedIn.

I'll let you sit with that.

The Gist: The Promise of No Change

https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-promise-of-no-change/