This week, I appeared on Daniel Davis’s and Mario Nawfal’s shows. First, Daniel and I discussed Trump’s claim that the Iran war is nearly over and energy prices will soon plunge, versus the real damage to oil infrastructure, record diesel costs hitting farmers and truckers, drained SPR stocks, constrained global supply, coming cost-push inflation, and why walking away and rebuilding flows is the only way to limit a deep recession. Next, Mario and I discussed record diesel prices and the East-West pipeline shock that has left Europe and Asia short of crude and products, the messy fallout of a possible U.S. diesel export ban, bond-market pressure from inflation and fiscal excess, and how years of policy have widened inequality and hollowed out the middle class. Both interviews are below!
Airlines are already cutting flights and it’s because of the higher prices of jet fuel and not enough supply to go around.
Excerpt: “In the past two weeks, American, United and Southwest have all confirmed they are pulling flights out of their schedules, and every one of them has pointed at the same cause: fuel. United says it has removed flights already on its December schedule and warned it may cut further into the first quarter of 2027 if prices stay where they are. American has temporarily suspended six routes — four of them out of Los Angeles, two connecting Charlotte to California — and is reviewing more. Southwest has quietly cut its planned 2026 capacity growth roughly in half, from an original target of 2 to 3 percent. And the first outright casualty is already in the ground: Spirit finished its wind-down in May, undone by a restructuring plan that had assumed jet fuel near $2.24 a gallon and then watched it climb to around $4.51.
Here is the sentence I want you to hold onto, because it is the whole story compressed. United’s chief financial officer, explaining the cuts, said the airline is now flying “to maximize profitability and free cash generation” — not market share.”
Breaking News! Riyadh Airport under attack. Trump and NuttenYahoo. The gifts that keep on giving, even if you don’t want the gift. If this were Halloween it would be all tricks and no treats.
Hey Chris, do you know that, you know, you use the filler “you know” so much that it actually, you know, distracts listeners from the, you know, message you try to get across?
And while I’m on the constructive feedback track anyway, when drawing a graph in the air to explain your point, it helps to draw it mirrored for yourself so the audience sees the lines move the correct way. Saves a lot of confusion, at least on my end.
As someone who writes software, reads AI related papers and runs experiments in my home lab, I wondered when the bubble will pop. As much as it improves the paper value of my equipment, I’d rather have easier access to more compute.
The other day, the question popped into my head and this video made it clearer. Is the TL;DR; of the AI bubble what we think it is?
As I see it, there are 3 main categories for these hyperscalers and the compute shortages:
bought and now online
bought and in storage waiting for power
bought and promised for future delivery
It’s the last two that concern me. Ed Zitron focuses on the second one in this video and gives discrete numbers based on his research.
(26m52s)
I think there’s a non-zero chance that if the AI bubble does pop soon, it’ll be probably sometime next year, maybe spring or summer and we can likely trace the roots to the high diesel prices adding friction to the data center buildouts which exposes the situation because it suddenly becomes much harder to hide.
Something that hasn’t seen any recent discussion, Helium. It was reported a substantial amount of Helium comes out of the ME. Helium is required for chip manufacturing. Is the alleged shortage of Helium impacting chip manufacturing?
