Robert Pluim 🇪🇺

@rpluim
21 Followers
78 Following
681 Posts

They see "an overview of gen AI tools".

I see "slopping list".

"Setting aside the moral arguments—"

You mean the power and water.

"Setting aside the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the industrial-scale plagiarism. The brazen theft.

"Setting aside the copyright fuckery, the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the maniacal, suicidal inflation of the bubble. Arguably the greatest single mis-allocation of resources in history, aside from war.

"Setting aside the financial madness, the copyright fuckery, the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the willful destruction of creative livelihoods, the willful destruction of education itself.

"Setting aside the destruction of art, writing, and schools, the financial madness, the copyright fuckery, the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the purposeful degradation of human cognitive capacity. The planned and designed addictive dependency.

"Setting aside the cognitive degradation, the destruction of schools, the financial madness, the copyright fuckery, the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the ghoulish ethical camouflage used to obscure, indeed to erase, the responsibility for decisions in budget austerity, insurance claims, regulatory oversight, medical decisions, court filings, and even real-time combat.

"Setting aside the monstrous mechanisms of official irresponsibility, the cognitive degradation, the schools, the financial madness, the copyright fuckery, the power and water—"

Are you going to say it doesn't work?

"IT DOES NOT FUCKING WORK"

#ai

*Company makes my life worse through their product*

I will boycott this product

*Company continues making my life worse, now through externalities*

How do I boycott an externality

J.P. Morgan’s supply-chain mapping suggests the last pre-disruption Persian Gulf cargoes hit South-East Asia, South Asia and East Africa by about 1 April, Europe by about 10 April, and the US by about 15 April. Australia's is due by 20 April... after those dates, the absence of replenishment becomes much harder to hide.

The Strait of Hormuz disruption is not just about crude. Analysts and logistics reporting say it also hits LNG, LPG, petrochemicals, methanol, plastics feedstocks and helium, which means the pain doesn’t stop at the bowser. It runs through manufacturing, freight, construction inputs, chemicals and tech supply chains as inventories thin out.

So the sequence is roughly this:

First, people panic locally.
Then wholesalers and retailers start paying up to secure supply.
Then inventories that were already on the water get delivered.
Then the pipeline starts running dry.
That is when the shock stops being a story for traders and shipping nerds and starts becoming obvious to everyone else.

Australia sits in that early wave. The map’s timing lines up with reports that parts of Asia have already been scrambling for replacement cargoes, with even unusual US Gulf Coast-to-Australia distillate routes being used to plug gaps.

And if the disruption drags on, this stops being about “higher prices” and becomes about allocation.

Who gets fuel.
Who pays more.
Which industries keep moving.
Which ones start slowing, rationing, or passing costs straight through to households.

Barclays says that the Hormuz disruption could remove 13 - 14 million barrels a day from global supply, while Kpler says cumulative losses could exceed 400 million barrels by mid-April if flows don’t normalise.

So yes, shortages so far have been partly behavioural... fear, stockpiling, domestic scrambling.
But the actual physical supply problem has yet to come.

For our part of the world, the cliff edge is very close. By mid-April, the “surely they’ll sort it out” phase gives way to the “oh, this is real” phase. Europe follows. The US later, but still not immune, especially through price rather than outright physical scarcity.

In other words... the panic buying is the opening act.
The real show starts when the ships stop arriving.

From The Gerk https://substack.com/@snarkygherkin/note/c-234844710?utm_source=notes-share-action

#IranWar

Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope it would set them free. But it only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
@MisuseCase @ChrisMayLA6 @martinvermeer and there are relatively accessible solutions if people are prepared to implement them https://mastodon.scot/@alanferrier/116290377049516687
Alan Ferrier (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image https://www.thenational.scot/politics/25965603.united-kingdom-catch-will-scotland/

mastodon.scot

Across England just over a quarter of all children live in poverty, rising to over a third of children in London; no wonder many voters do not believe claims by our political class that the UK economy is not dysfunctional & just needs some tweaks to improve.

This level of child poverty doesn't happen by accident nor does it happen quickly; its an indictment of the callousness & inhumanity of our political class' management of the UK's political economy.

#UK #inequality
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/mar/26/child-poverty-london-housing-crisis

London has England’s highest levels of child poverty, data shows

About 38% of children in London live in relative poverty, compared with 27% in the UK as a whole

The Guardian
slopaganda (n): promoting using AI generated tools to worsen your life and everyone's life around you

"The Jetsons Lied to Us."

Twonks on the AI Revolution.

A+, no notes.

apparently it is no longer a “courtesy flush” when the person on the toilet didn’t ask you