Mike O'Neill

That said, depending on how bad things get, we will see inflation spike, and Increases in inflation are usually met with changes in monetary policy, with central banks raising the cost of borrowing in an attempt to “cool” the economy (IE: reduce consumer spending so that companies are forced to bring down prices). And we’d just started to bring down interest rates, with the Fed announcing in December that it projected rates of 3.4% by the end of 2026. Iran changes that in the most obvious way possible — if prices soar, interest rates may follow, and if rates go up, even by a point or two of a percentage, financing the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars in borrowing that the AI bubble demands will become significantly more expensive. For some context, the International Monetary Fund’s Kristalina Georgieva recently said “...a 10% increase in energy prices that persists for a year would push up global inflation by 40 basis points and slow global economic growth by 0.1-0.2%,” per The Guardian, who also added… Some economists argue that a jump in the price of energy and transport costs, significant though they are for households and businesses, could prove to be a sideshow if the bombing of Iran by the US and Israel destabilises financial markets already worried about ballooning AI stocks and the impact of US import tariffs. And remember: the AI bubble, along with the massive private equity and credit funds backing it, is fueled almost entirely by debt. All this chaos and potential for jumps in inflation will also affect the affordability calculations that lenders will make before loaning the likes of Oracle and Meta the money they need at a time when lenders are already turning their nose up at Blue Owl-backed data center debt deals.

It’s not just the data centers, either. As interest rates go up, VC funds tend to shrink, because the investors that back said funds can get better returns elsewhere, and with much less risk. As I discussed in the Hater’s Guide to Private Equity, 14% of large banks’ total loan commitments go to private equity, private credit and other non-banking institutions, at a time when (to quote Forbes) PE firms are taking an average of 23 months fundraising (up from 16 months in 2021), after private credit’s corporate borrowers’ default rates (as in the loans written off as unpaid by the borrow) hit 9.2% in 2025. Put really simply, private equity, private credit, venture capital and basically everything to do with technology currently depends on the near-perpetual availability of debt. The growth of private credit is so recent that we truly don’t know what happens if the debt spigot gets turned off, but I do not think it will be pretty. Things get a little worse when you remember that famed business dipshits SoftBank are currently trying to raise a $40 billion loan to fund its three $10 billion Klarna-esque payments as part of its $30 billion investment in OpenAI’s not-actually-$110-billion-yet funding round. How SoftBank — a company that raised a $15 billion bridge loan due to be paid off in around four months and has about $41.5 billion in existing debt that’s maturing that needs to be refinanced in the next nine months or so, per JustDario — intends to take on another $40 billion is beyond me. And that’s a sentence I would’ve written before the war in Iran began. There’s also evidence that links lower IPO numbers to rising inflation rates, which means that achieving the exit that investors want will become so much harder — and so, they might as well not bother. Need proof? SoftBank-owned mobile payments company PayPay delayed its IPO last week, and I quote Reuters, because “...markets were rattled by [the attack] on Iran, according to two people familiar with the mat…

I don't know what will happen next in Iran, but I do know is that the longer the war continues, the worse the economic consequences will be. I also know that higher borrowing costs, energy costs, and inflation will devastate the AI industry.

www.wheresyoured.at/the-beginnin...

A cartoon by Ron Cobb (1975), showing a shadow of US B-52 bomber above cratered landscape. Two people who look like Vietnamese peasants look up; one says “they’re having problems with their economy again.”

This is from 1975.

Ad-tech is fascist tech: Surveillance advertising is just surveillance.

bsky.app/profile/doct...

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This is an aggressive exploitation in how willing people with the responsibility to tell the truth are willing to accept half-assed expectations, and how willing people are to operate based on principles garnered from the lightest intellectual lifts in the world. The assumption is always the same: that what has happened before will happen again, even if the actuality of history doesn’t really reflect that at all. Society — the media, politicians, chief executives, shit, everyone on some level — is incapable of thinking of new stuff that would happen, especially if that new stuff would be economically destructive, such as a massive scar across all private credit, private equity and venture capital, one so severe that it may potentially destroy the way that businesses (and startups, for that matter) raise capital for the foreseeable future. People are more willing to come up with societally-destructive theories — such as all software engineering and all journalism and all content being created by LLMs, even if it doesn’t actually make sense — because it fits their biases. Perhaps they’re beaten down by decades of muting the power of labor or the destruction of our environment. Perhaps they’re beaten down by the rise of the right and the destruction of the rights of minorities and people of colour. Or more noxiously, perhaps they’re excited to be the one that called it first, so that the new overlords that they perceive will own this (fictional) future, so much so that they’ll ignore the underlying ridiculousness of the economics, refuse to do any further reading that might invalidate their beliefs, or simply say whatever they’re told because it gets clicks and makes their advertisers, bosses or friends happy. People are willing to fall in line behind mythology because conceiving an entirely-different future is an intellectually challenging and emotionally draining act. It requires learning about a multitude of systems and interconnecting disciplines and being wil…

Need to justify unprofitable, unsustainable AI companies? Uber lost money before. Need to explain why AI data centers being built for demand isn’t a problem? Well, the internet exists, and people eventually used that fiber. You can ignore actual proof while pretending to provide your own, all just by pointing vaguely to things in the past. It takes actual courage to form an opinion, something boosters fundamentally lack. I’m not saying it’s impossible to make predictions, but that the majority of people make them with flimsy information, such as “this thing happened before” or “everyone’s saying this will happen.” I’m not saying you can’t try and understand what will happen next, but doing so requires you to use information that is not, on its face, generated by wishcasting or events that took place decades ago. In the end, the greatest lesson we can learn from is that, historically speaking, people tend to fuck around and then find out. The assumption boosters make is that one can fuck around forever. History tends to disagree.

Modern journalism is continually falling for the same trap of justifying the present excess - burning billions on AI - using the past (dot com bubble/Uber), even when it isn't true. This is a tempting trap that deprives readers of their connection to reality.

www.wheresyoured.at/the-beginnin...

The Beginning Of History Hi! If you like this piece and want to support my work, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere fro...

It's the beginning of history - and an era where we'll see thorough tests of the assumptions of the AI bubble as a result of the war in Iran and the economic and social chaos to follow.

It's time to stop using the past as a guide to what happens next.

www.wheresyoured.at/the-beginnin...

In a field as competitive as frontier AI, this feedback loop if allowed to persist could result in harm well beyond the immediate consequences of the government's actions. Training and serving frontier-level models like Claude requires extraordinary computational resources. Anthropic has already spent over $10 billion on model training and inference (serving the model to end users) and expects to spend many billions more in the coming years. Although the company has generated substantial revenue since entering the commercial market exceeding $5 billion to date—it has nonetheless had to raise more than $60 billion in outside capital to fund its operations. Anthropic has raised this capital by issuing investors equity stakes in the company.

Based on their lawsuit filed against the DoD, Anthropic appears to be admitting that reports about its revenue and costs are fake, saying its revenue to date “exceeds $5bn” and training/inference “over $10bn.” Previous reports said $4.5bn.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

British businesses need a better deal with Europe Sign our petition to Prime Minister Keir Starmer and demand a better deal for British businesses trading with Europe

I've just signed a petition calling on the UK government to give British businesses a better deal with Europe. Add your name: www.europeanmovement.co.uk/single-marke...

Oil Prices Tumble After Trump Says Iran War ‘Very Complete’ Oil futures, which surged as much as 31% Sunday night to more than $100 a barrel, have tumbled back down, a stunning reversal that gained momentum after President Trump told CBS that the war he launch...

If true that Trump is signalling an end in sight, then what we’ve learned from this fiasco is that the Iranian regime does not collapse even under intense pressure & the rest of the world can’t endure closure of the straits of Hormuz for very long at all www.wsj.com/livecoverage...

America is gone as a super power.

Wanted: a new Blair Labour needs a theory of capitalism.

New substack: "Being a lawyer, Sir Kier knows well the old saying, “never ask a question to which you don’t know the answer.” How to fix capitalism is one of those questions." chrisdillow.substack.com/p/wanted-a-n...

With Reform UK calling for the return of grammar schools, I’ve shared an excerpt from my first book The Myth of Meritocracy examining the evidence on who actually benefits from selection.

Clue: it isn’t working-class pupils. www.forthedeskdrawer.com/p/the-enduri...

UK-EU SPS Agreement - Legislation in scope To cut red tape and costs for importing and exporting with the EU, the UK will align with EU Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) legislation.

UK takes the plunge: following EU standards & rules to attenuate the costs & red tape caused by Brexit. But so far only on agri-food standards.
www.gov.uk/government/n...

Lindsey’s diplomacy working wonders in UAE.

All major sports orgs are an embarrassment

The right-wing used to go bonkers about the UK negotiating common EU consumer protection rules.

Now they believe Britain shld join any US military operation “regardless of our own interests, our own views or our own democratic processes”.

They want “total subservience to American decision-making”

The question for stock markets is a political one: do obviously cretinous policies get reversed or not? If the answer's no, the problem isn't just a few £000s of losses; it's that the political system is broken.

Reading hope using AI can help take them to the Premier League Reading's head of AI Stuart Fenton believes technology will have a key role in helping the club reach the Premier League.

3rd division soccer club adds deeply unspecified "AI", it reads like they don't know what it is either except possible future magic

www.bbc.co.uk/sport/footba...

On March 18, the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection, along with the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, will discuss the Digital Omnibus report on AI and vote on whether to begin interinstitutional negotiations.

At 84, he didn't want to rewrite his song AGAIN for yet another war of choice by corrupt politicians.

I don't blame him.

R.I.P. Joe McDonald. You will be missed.

There are no heroes in commercial AI When it comes down to it, Dario Amodei isn’t all that much different from Sam Altman

There are no heroes in commercial AI
"Openclaw [built on Claude] is one big grift. Nobody is building anything real. It’s just grifting influencers telling YOU how to build stuff (but never build anything themselves)." open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...

I know some of you might read this and say "these people can't be stupid! These people run companies! They make huge deals! They read all these books!" and my answer is that some of the stupidest people I've ever met have read more books than you or I will read in a lifetime. While they might be smart when it comes to corporate chess moves or saying "this product category should do this," none of these men - not Altman, Pichai or Nadella - actually has a hand in the design or creation of any of the things their companies make, and they never, ever have. Regardless, I have a larger point: it's time to start mocking these people and tearing down their legends as geniuses of industry. They are not better than us, nor are they responsible for anything that their companies build other than the share price (which is a meaningless figure) and the accumulation of power and resources. These men are neither smart nor intellectually superior, and it's time to start treating them as such.

I also recommend if possible to find whatever humor you can. Make fun of these people. Lampooning them doesn’t discount the seriousness of their actions or the destruction of their works - it undermines their power and status and names, and lightens the soul

www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-...

Reported this two weeks ago

Labour Britain’s New Record – the Highest Level of Young People Out of Work in Europe, by @denismacshane.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/denismac...

There's no reason for Iran to attack NATO nation Turkey—but a drone did. Iran denies sending it.

There's no reason for Iran to attack a UK base in Cyprus—but a drone did. Iran denies sending it.

Now Azerbaijan has been attacked. Iran denies involvement.

I think this is Israel.

The Dutch DPA is conducting an investigation into Reddit, Inc. (Reddit). The DPA has raised questions regarding the legality of Reddit's licensing of Public Content from its users to LLM Partners. See uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/details?id=E...

Trump’s lightbulb moment: America needs Europe after all The U.S. is even looking to Ukraine to help its operations against Iran — as Trump rages at Starmer and Sánchez for refusing to back his war.

No rubber stamp from Europe, as Macron, Starmer and Sánchez resist Trump’s demands to back his war.

www.politico.eu/article/dona...

AI’s Economic Lie Shock horror! AI added ‘basically zero’ to the US economy in 2025.

AI’s Economic Lie by @lockettwill.bsky.social medium.com/p/ais-econom...

What If Consciousness Is the Fifth Force? Roger Penrose on Panpsychism & Quantum Mind YouTube video by Cosmos The Penrose Way

www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2HX...

Welcome to the deepest mystery in Science, where Physics meets Philosophy, where Matter meets Mind, where the Universe discovers that it is conscious, has always been conscious, and that you are the proof."

You are not a machine that accidentally became aware, you are awareness itself, structured and organised into a human being capable of understanding its own nature.