The thing that everyone expected to happen has happened
Trump wants the war to be over
Interesting point by Robert Armstrong: markets expect TACO but don’t know when. So long term prices stay subdued while short term ones go nuts. And the release of pent up supply will continue to cause gyrations www.ft.com/content/4629...
10.03.2026 08:04 —
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And where they’ve built out the charging network
09.03.2026 12:21 —
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Is it that many! Wow
09.03.2026 09:46 —
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Being in the Netherlands I find there is a great preponderance of "altruistic enforcers" in this culture, and a clear desire to decide that social rules exist and then criticize people for violating them even when they...don't actually exist, or there is no agreement on them.
09.03.2026 09:30 —
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Anyway now I'm rambling because you got me thinking about this, but thanks very much, this has been extremely stimulating. Hope you feel better. And congratulations on your podcasts.
09.03.2026 09:28 —
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The artist had grown up in a cult and the whole point of the piece was about unnecessary rules and people's predisposition to create and enforce them, and I had become the embodiment of the cult leaders and followers! Not sure whether the use of museum font was a trick, but it was brilliant.
09.03.2026 09:27 —
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When I saw someone else enter through a hole, I was a bit off-put, and then when she began moving a panel I said "I think you're not supposed to go through there". She was extremely annoyed and pointed to the floor: "It says 'you can enter here'".
09.03.2026 09:25 —
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I was at the Stedelijk Museum and there was an art piece with an obvious entry and then various other holes. On the floor next to those holes it said in neutral museum font "You can enter here". I glanced at the labels and assumed they said "Do not enter here", so I went around.
09.03.2026 09:24 —
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I just realized that yesterday I accidentally performed a version of this experiment in the opposite direction and got it wrong due to an *over*-eagerness to enforce. And I am not at all a rules-enforcing kind of guy!
09.03.2026 09:20 —
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I think you're right, but I also think this may miss a genuinely informative part of the experimental result that people are so much better at this problem when presented as social enforcement. It feels like that matches humans' sometimes unnecessary eagerness to enforce and punish.
09.03.2026 09:17 —
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But isn't "badly worded" just another way of saying "human brains are built for social and contextual reasoning, not for abstract propositional logic"?
09.03.2026 09:13 —
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In effect certainly; I can't remember the specifics atm, was it a per-unit subsidy instead?
09.03.2026 08:43 —
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Smart man
09.03.2026 08:41 —
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In 2024-25 the Netherlands had a populist-right government that yanked away a price floor and let the country’s budding heat-pump industry collapse. How many more Dutch households might have gotten off gas by now if they hadn’t?
09.03.2026 08:21 —
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The Iran war has put Asia on the brink of an energy panic
Stranded Gulf supplies are choking off the region’s economies
“Last week the profit American LNG exporters stood to pocket by sending cargoes to Asia rather than Europe hit its highest since December 2022, when the loss of Russian gas after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine triggered a Eurasian bidding war.”
09.03.2026 08:04 —
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National History Museum on the opposite corner. The okay bia hoi on Tông Đản a few blocks away
09.03.2026 07:27 —
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The FT is trying to scare me about oil prices, but all I feel is nostalgia for when I used to fill up my Honda at this gas station on Vành Đai
09.03.2026 07:21 —
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There is an element of that in CDU, as far as I understand. Certainly it has a wing of folks who wish they could just drop the Brandmauer and govern with the populist right.
09.03.2026 07:10 —
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Rabobank on the unfolding worst case scenario:
09.03.2026 07:00 —
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The far-left Greens are far-left compared to Cem Özdemir’s centrist Greens.
09.03.2026 07:06 —
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But to me that’s the whole game—a party needs to move from throw-the-bums-out to stable, smart, forward-looking and good for business. The challenge is how to do that.
09.03.2026 07:05 —
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I think in fact they are seen as the reassuring stable party since Kretschmann led the state since 2011, Özdemir is over 60 and nationally known, and the CDU fielded a 37yo who seemed both unexciting and a bit of an untrustworthy lad.
09.03.2026 07:03 —
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I think if anything the tendency may be to underplay this Green success: CDU poor candidate, Greens already controlled the state for 15 years, AfD vote doubled. But I think the glass-half-full, educative story is Greens remaining a party of power in an industrial state, and how they did that.
09.03.2026 06:56 —
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Trump's decision to bomb Iran is now the greatest windfall to the Russian war effort on record. If it continues, it might save the Russian war economy.
09.03.2026 05:24 —
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Putin has no plans to stop. Ukraine needs Russia's frozen assets more than ever | Euractiv
The US, UK, France, Germany, Canada, and other like-minded allies must form a coalition to cooperatively and immediately employ Moscow’s sovereign assets on Ukraine’s behalf
Opinion: "The US, UK, France, Germany, Canada, and other like-minded allies must form a coalition to cooperatively and immediately employ Moscow’s sovereign assets on Ukraine’s behalf", writes Michael F.Bennet at @euractiv.com
www.euractiv.com/opinion/puti...
09.03.2026 05:57 —
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Germany’s Greens have come back to win in Baden-Württemberg
The defeat of the Christian Democrats is a poor sign for Friedrich Merz
Complex specifics here. Discussions on German TV center on this showing far-left Greens that Cem Özdemir’s pro-business wing is the way to go. But that they won in a scared car-industry state facing China Shock 2.0 as oil goes to $100/barrel is significant.
economist.com/europe/2026/...
09.03.2026 06:44 —
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Trump told me that the Ayatollah was close to collecting all the infinity stones and had to be stopped.
08.03.2026 21:15 —
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A handicap blue and white painted sign on the asphalt of a parking space. The symbols are meant to be a pregnant women and a baby stroller, but it doesn't look like that. It looks like pac man being killed with scissors next to a dancer
Twerkers at the barbeque get priority parking 🫡
08.03.2026 20:25 —
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China - A fragile power? How Europe can use its economic leverage over Beijing
China is powerful - but increasingly fragile. Beijing's economic vulnerabilities create both risks and leverage for Europe. How the EU can use its economic strengths to pursue a strategy of leverage-b...
China – A fragile power? How Europe can use its economic leverage over Beijing – Alicia Garcia-Herrero and Tim Rühlig for EU ISS: ‘This Chaillot Paper argues that China’s foreign policy is now shaped as much by domestic economic weakness as by external ambition.’
08.03.2026 22:05 —
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I'm out of words here
08.03.2026 12:44 —
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