Posts Tagged ‘Micron’

RAM Cartel? I Seriously Doubt It.

Wednesday, July 1st, 2026

A class action lawsuit has been filed against memory giants Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron alleging the nefarious, cartel like action of…making the products with the highest profit margins.

The world’s biggest memory chip makers are once again facing accusations of manipulating prices.

A class-action lawsuit filed on Thursday, June 25, in a California federal court alleges that Samsung Electronics (SSNLF), SK Hynix (SKHY), and Micron Technology (MU) coordinated to restrict DRAM supply and push prices sharply higher during the AI boom.

The complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California under case number 3:26-cv-06345, claims the companies reduced production of traditional DDR3 and DDR4 memory while shifting capacity toward high-margin AI memory products such as HBM chips used in data centers.

Not to mention DDR5.

However, the companies have not been found liable for now, and no trial date is set.

According to the lawsuit, DRAM prices have surged nearly 500%-700% over the past four years, reported Time of India. Plaintiffs argued that in a competitive market, rising prices should attract more supply, but production cuts continued instead.

Snip.

According to Jefferies, memory prices could rise another 40%-50% next quarter and 30%-40% more in the following quarter, reported analysts like Bull Theory on X, with normalization unlikely before 2028. The rising memory costs are already filtering into consumer electronics prices worldwide.

Does this situation suck if you’re trying to buy or build a new PC with lots of RAM? Absolutely. But there’s no nefarious market coordination at work among those big three, just the confluence of a variety of market trends. So let’s break it down:

  • Manufacturers switching production from a less profitable product to a more profitable product isn’t some nefarious conspiracy, it’s how the market works. If they’re getting premium pricing for HBM memory that sells out instantly for the AI bubble, that’s what they’re going to produce. A whole lot of tech companies depended on the spot market for RAM because it gave them more flexibility and costs savings, but now it’s biting them in the ass. Their lack of foresight does not indicate a conspiracy or market failure.
  • Why are there only three big RAM manufacturers? Because a whole lot of other companies dropped out of the market because the game became too expensive to play. RAM makes money hand-over-fist during boom times (like now), but barely breaks even during busts. A whole lot of different companies used to produce memory, Intel and Texas Instruments among them. Remember when Japan Inc. was going to take over the world and the Japanese semiconductor giants (NEC, Toshibu, Fujitsu, Hitachi, etc.) were accused (with some justification) of dumping RAM below cost to capture market share with the backing of state agency MITI? None of those Japanese giants are in RAM any more because, in the wake of the Japanese asset bubble busting in 1991, building new state-of-the-art fabs that doubled in price every four years became a game too expensive for them to play.
  • Rising prices should attract more supply, but it takes about three years and costs about $25 billion to build a state-of-the-art fab. Because standard memory technology still has a capacitance limit, you don’t necessarily need an under-10nm fab, so maybe you can spend a bit less, but you’re still spending over $10 billion on a fab, and you probably still need an ASML EUV stepper, though not the very latest one.
  • And indeed, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron all have two new fabs each in the pipeline scheduled to come online this year through 2028. The Micron and SK Hynix fabs will both be dedicated to producing memory. As for Samsung (which has a lot of fingers in a lot of semiconductor pies), I would guess their newest South Korean fab will be dedicated to memory, while their 4-5nm Taylor, Texas fab will not. Building new fabs are not the actions of monopolists who want to artificially constrain supply.
  • Indeed, the “they’re artificially constraining supply” nonsense suggests that they’re producing fewer memory chip than they could otherwise, and that’s just not how the industry works. Fab production lines run 24/7/365 (indeed, they pay technicians triple to work Christmas), because every hour a modern fab is down they’re losing millions in lost profit.
  • Building new fabs is still a risky bet, because the industry is extremely cyclical. No matter how furious the boom now, the next bust is always around the corner. Back when I was working at Applied Materials, the cycle was described as trains linked together with slinkys. First software takes off, then hardware gets yanked along, then the chip manufacturers get yanked, and then, finally, semiconductor equipment manufacturers get yanked into motion, and shortly after that happens, the bust hits the front of the train, and the trailing cars all crash into each other. (The standing joke at Applied Materials was that you could tell the bust was on the very moment the company broke ground on a new manufacturing facility.) Build a new $25 billion fab at the wrong part of the cycle and it could take a company much longer to amortize it than they expected. That’s why so many companies switched to the foundry model.
  • Speaking of foundries, could they be a solution to the memory crunch? Potentially, but there you’re running into the same AI boom-induced wafer start constraints that plague the memory sector. TSMC is fabbing AI chips for Nvidia (and most of its competitors) as fast as it possibly can. Maybe they can profitably book runs on slightly older (but not “mature”) TSMC fabs, but they’re still competing with every other fabless company supporting the AI build-out for the same wafer starts. A whole lot of different silicon goes into a data center.
  • Could an existing semiconductor manufacturer jump into the existing space? Yes, and in fact Intel has announced plans to do just that, though evidently with their own proprietary, next gen “Z-Angle Memory (ZAM),” which isn’t going to do squat to relieve this year’s DDR3/4/5 shortage. Still, they have enough slightly trailing edge fabs to do it, though Intel has had trouble executing at speed in the past.
  • Could another company jump into the semiconductor fab race as an integrated device manufacturer for memory? Risky but possible. Someone like Apple could decide that memory shortages are an existential threat to its business model and spend the tens of billions to get into the game. And indeed, Apple is already spending some $500 billion to reshore its supply chain back into the US, so that would fit right in. Apple could potentially contract with TSMC (or even Micron) to build and run a memory fab. (Samsung is a trickier proposition, since the two are fierce competitors as the biggest smartphone manufacturers in the world, but there’s still a lot of “cooperatition” between the two, so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.) But the three year lead time still applies.
  • Entire tech boom and bust cycles have come and gone in an era in which RAM is cheap and plentiful, a situation people have come to think of as “normal.” Just as with higher credit rates, a whole lot of business models that were viable in an era of cheap memory are suddenly going to stop being so in an era of scarcity. Some companies will be able to raise prices and remain profitable, and others won’t. Not everyone will be hit, as a lot of embedded devices use older types of memory that hasn’t gone through the roof. There are all sorts of older fabs churning out older types of memory that aren’t relevant to this discussion.
  • The idea that Samsung and SK Hynix are colluding is particularly laughable, as the two Korean chaebol backing SK Hynix (Hyundai and LG (AKA Lucky Goldstar)) both hate rival Samsung with a passion.

    • The current shortage, as painful as it is to so many, isn’t the result of a nefarious cartel, it’s just the free market working like it always does at the interface between supply and demand. It’s just that cutting-edge semiconductor supply has a whole lot more lead-time constraints that most other economic sectors.

    The AI Bubble seems considerably worse than the Dotcom Bubble (which was only partially about the Internet; updating hardware and software to avoid the Y2K bug also drove a lot of spending in the same timeframe), and its inevitable bursting (or just deflating) is going to relieve pressure on everyone else that needs 10nm or smaller wafer starts.

    But there’s no telling exactly when that will be.

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    Posted in Economics, Technology, Texas | 6 Comments »

    LinkSwarm For June 26, 2026

    Friday, June 26th, 2026

    More Medicare scammers captured, Trump wins multiple border security cases at the Supreme Court, the Supremes also drive a stake through a vampire, Ukraine hits a whole lot of bridges in occupied Crimea, dirty commies win Dem primaries in New York, and Tom Scott looks at some furry workers.

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • “FBI arrests second fugitive on Most Wanted Fraudsters list, accused of $1.2B Medicare fraud scheme.”

    Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel announced that another suspect on the T White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud’s new Most Wanted Fraudsters list has been apprehended.

    Patel posted on X Saturday that Herbert Leon Kimble, 60, was arrested in the Philippines thanks to the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) task force led by Vice President JD Vance and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

    “In just over two weeks, this is the second Most Wanted Fraudster arrested on the FBI’s list led by Vice President Vance and the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud,” wrote the director. “Herbert Leon Kimbel was apprehended in the Philippines and is now back in the United States, on the run since 2024 after he allegedly orchestrated a $1.2 billion healthcare fraud conspiracy that targeted the Medicare system – particularly elderly victims – from 2014-2019.”

    Kimble of Chicago, Illinois, is accused of targeting Medicare in a “large-scale healthcare fraud conspiracy” via “the improper marketing and distribution of durable medical equipment (DME), particularly orthopedic braces.”

    According to the FBI, from 2014 to 2019, he operated a scheme in which victims — often elderly — would be unnecessarily prescribed orthopedic braces for pain relief by telemedicine providers via call centers in the Philippines.

    Evidently it’s Medicare fraudsters with connection to the Philippines week here at BattleSwarm.

    DME suppliers affiliated with Kimble would then bill Medicare for reimbursement, resulting in over $1.2 billion in Medicare charges.

    On April 4, 2019, in the District of South Carolina U.S. District Court, he pled guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States, to make a false claim to a department of the United States, to commit mail fraud, to commit wire fraud, to commit healthcare fraud and to offer kickbacks and bribes in connection with the scheme.

    He subsequently failed to appear for his sentencing hearing on August 27, 2024, resulting in the issuance of a federal arrest warrant that same day, charging him with failure to appear.

    The FBI offered a reward of up to $150,000 for information leading to his arrest and conviction.

    Kimble is the second individual on the most wanted list that has been apprehended.

    Last week, Said Abdullahi Ereg, 47, was also arrested after he surrendered to authorities in connection with an alleged $4 million scheme involving the Federal Child Nutrition Program during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Ereg ran a grocery and deli in Minneapolis sponsored by Feeding Our Future. He was initially issued a federal arrest warrant in January 2024 and was indicted in June 2024 by a federal grand jury for conspiracy involving wire fraud and money laundering.

    The FBI’s Most Wanted Fraudsters list can be found here.

  • Two wins for Trump on immigration enforcement at the Supreme Court.

    The Supreme Court this morning, in a pair of 6–3 opinions written by Justice Samuel Alito, gave the Trump administration’s border policies two more big wins. Both pared back humanitarian bases for admitting people into the country. Mullin v. Doe allowed the administration to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations granted by the Biden administration — specifically for Haitians and Syrians, but the decision’s logic, which bars judicial review of revocations, would seem to compel the same outcome for Venezuelans. Mullin v. Al Otro Lado allowed immigration officials to prevent people from reaching the border to present asylum claims, because the law allows those claims to be presented by an alien who “arrives in the United States.”

    Along with Tuesday’s decision in Blanche v. Lau, which strengthened the government’s power to exclude criminal aliens prior to their convictions, this was a clean sweep for immigration hard-liners. That may take some of the sting out of the Court’s pending decision in Trump v. Barbara, which could come as soon as Monday and is expected to be a loss for Donald Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship.

    In the backdrop of Mullin v. Doe are the divergent attitudes of the Biden and Trump administrations toward TPS, but the actual ground of battle, as our editorials have emphasized, is the language of the TPS statute and whether courts should take the written law seriously.

    The TPS statute, enacted in 1990, allows the president to designate particular countries as unsafe because of war, natural disasters, epidemics, or other temporary crises and therefore give their nationals temporary protection to stay within this country. Before the statute’s enactment, presidents would sometimes grant such protection as a discretionary matter but with no statutory authorization and, in effect, no rules. In that sense, TPS is like the 1977 tariff statute at issue in Learning Resources: It was designed to provide rules of the road for the executive to follow in responding to emergencies. Prior to 1990, the judiciary had treated these executive decisions as exercises of discretion that courts could not review.

    Of course, nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program. For some countries, TPS has been continually in force now for decades, making a mockery of the “temporary” designation. Somalia has had a TPS designation for 35 years, and Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador have been so designated for more than 25 years. Haiti received a TPS designation because of an earthquake 16 years ago.

    The statute is written to reflect broad executive discretion. The secretary of homeland security “may” grant TPS to nationals of a particular country based on a series of statutory criteria but is under no obligation to do so. Several of the criteria explicitly reference conditions “temporarily” existing in the foreign country. By contrast, the statute requires TPS to be terminated if the secretary finds that the home country “no longer continues to meet the conditions for designation.” The law thus contemplates ongoing review — the secretary is mandated to conduct a new review at least once every 18 months — and DHS violates the law if it extends TPS when the conditions justifying it no longer exist.

    That may be particularly important when a foreign tyranny is suddenly toppled and replaced by a new government, as has happened recently in both Syria and Venezuela. Syria’s designation was applied in 2012 because of the civil war that sought to topple the Assad regime, which ended with Assad’s departure in late 2024. Once TPS is revoked, the affected foreign nationals are given 60 days before they must either leave the United States or secure some other legal basis to stay. The 60-day provision was designed by Congress to accommodate the reliance interests of foreigners here temporarily, who have been given work permits but who knew from the outset that shelter on American shores was explicitly temporary.

    The Biden administration tried to lock in its successor on these inherently fluid, temporary foreign policy assessments by granting TPS extensions, in some cases just days before Joe Biden left office. For example, Alejandro Mayorkas, the impeached-but-not-tried secretary of homeland security, extended TPS for Venezuela on January 17, 2025. By contrast, the Trump administration has terminated every TPS it has reviewed, 13 of them so far. Trump has been quite open about this as a deliberate policy.

    Can courts review TPS designations? Congress didn’t think so. We know that because Congress said so in terms that could hardly be more explicit: “There is no judicial review of any determination of the [secretary of homeland security] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.” The TPS litigation that has been ongoing since the outset of the second Trump term has dragged on this long because multiple lower court judges (including the Ninth Circuit) decided to judicially review what Congress said explicitly they may not judicially review. As Alito noted, judicial orders stopped Trump from ending TPS for Haiti, Syria, Venezuela, Burma, and Ethiopia and also prevented Trump from ending TPS for Haiti during his first term, in 2018.

    Alito began with whether the law written by Congress means what it says, and his opinion is almost comical in attempting to take seriously the ridiculous contention that it doesn’t. “This text is clear, and its plain meaning is very broad,” he noted, and he explained why the word “determination” means decisions that the secretary is empowered and in some cases required to make.

  • “Supreme Court Drives a Stake Through Hawaii’s ‘Vampire Rule.'”

    IAt stake was a Hawaiian statute, Act 52, that inverted the usual presumption that governs public access to generally accessible private property, but only where firearms are concerned. Prior to the passage of Act 52, Hawaiians who were able to obtain carry permits (which, before Bruen, was effectively impossible) were allowed to enter any generally accessible private space while carrying a firearm — unless the property owner explicitly signaled otherwise. After Act 52, Hawaiians with carry permits were allowed to enter any generally accessible private space while carrying a firearm only if the property had signaled that it was acceptable. (Gothic lore holds that vampires must be explicitly invited to enter one’s home before they may cross the threshold. Hence: “vampire rule.”)

    As the Court correctly noted, this change — which was made directly after Bruen, and which shifted only the rules governing firearms, and no others besides — was explicitly designed to impede “the ability of law-abiding citizens to exercise the right Bruen recognized as they go about their daily lives.” That being so, it fell.

    Writing for the majority, Justice Alito recorded that:

    At common law, opening up private property to the general public implies a “license to all persons to enter,” meaning that “no person is a trespasser by merely entering therein” unless the property owner has given “due notice” that such a person is banned.

    “Hawaii’s shift from the common-law rule,” Alito concluded, “unquestionably imposes a new and significant burden on the exercise of the right recognized in Bruen.”n a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court has struck down Hawaii’s “vampire rule” as a violation of the Second and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. This was the right result, and, once again, it is a disgrace that the decision was not unanimous.

    During briefs and at oral argument, Hawaii offered up three main defenses of its law. The first defense was that it has historically had much stricter firearms laws than much of the rest of the United States. Alito dealt with that one quickly:

    As the plurality explained in McDonald, the Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States. 561 U. S., at 784–785. It cannot give way to “the spirit of Aloha” in Hawaii, contra, State v. Wilson, 154 Haw. 8, 27, 543 P. 3d 440, 459 (2024), any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple (Bruen) or the Windy City (McDonald).

    Aloha, “spirit of Aloha.”

    No, Hawaii, you can’t argue that “Historically, Hawaii has ignored the constitution” as an excuse to ignore it further…

  • “Eight Antifa Members Who Attacked Texas ICE Facility Sentenced to Collective 450 Years in Prison.”

    The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the sentencing eight “North Texas Antifa Cell” operatives to a total of 450 years in prison on Tuesday for their various roles in the July 4, 2025 attack on the Prairieland U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Detention Center in Alvarado.

    “Testimony and other evidence at trial established that the defendants were members of a North Texas Antifa Cell, part of a larger militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups primarily ascribing to an ideology that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and the system of law,” a June 23 DOJ press release said.

    On July 4 of last year, the Antifa members dressed in dark clothing with head and face coverings, forming a “black bloc” in order to conceal their identities and make them indistinguishable from each other. Evidence revealed they had 11 firearms, body armor, and 11 “military-grade first aid kits with tourniquets and other items to treat gunshot wounds to the scene of the attack.”

    They began shooting fireworks and vandalizing vehicles and a guard shack at the property. Alvarado police officers responded to a 9-1-1 call about the attack. Ringleader Benjamin Song was heard on a bodycam recording yelling, “Get to the rifles!” — after which the group opened fire on the officer, hitting him in the neck.

    Many of the Antifa members were arrested near the scene, but Song escaped and was not arrested until July 15.

    The DOJ said this is the “first sentencing of defendants affiliated with Antifa following President Donald J. Trump’s executive order designating the group as a Domestic Terrorist Organization in September 2025.”

    In March, nine of the Antifa members were convicted for “their roles in rioting, using weapons and explosives, providing material support to terrorists, obstruction, and the attempted murder of an Alvarado police officer.”

    Of the nine, eight were sentenced on Tuesday, including Song, who received the harshest sentence of 100 years in prison for the attempted murder of the officer. Evidence from the trial showed that Song acquired and distributed firearms to the co-defendants and “recruited members at gun ranges and combat sessions he conducted, as well as from various ideologically aligned groups.”

    Maricela Rueda was sentenced to 70 years; Cameron Arnold, Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Bradford Morris, and Elizabeth Soto to 50 years each; and Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada to 30 years.

    Ines Soto was granted a continuance and will be sentenced on July 1, along with seven co-defendants who all pleaded guilty to one count of providing material support to terrorists: Seth Sikes, Nathan Baumann, Joy Gibson, Susan Kent, Rebecca Morgan, Lynette Sharp, and John Thomas.

    Seven others who pleaded guilty to providing support to the terrorists will be sentenced on July 1.

  • I didn’t have time to include The Tulsi Gabbard/Fauci story in last week’s LinkSwarm.
    1. Fauci, as NIAID director, directed millions in U.S. taxpayer funds (via Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and other entities) for gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan.
    2. Fauci had close relationships with intelligence-community leaders and provided hand-picked NIAID-funded scientists as advisors, which was used to promote a natural-origin narrative and downplay the lab-leak theory. Fauci played a direct role, even meeting with the CIA to assist in a coverup.
    3. Fauci LIED to Congress in 2024 when asked about his involvement in these schemes (there is a long trail of evidence proving this).

      The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released declassified documents to support her claims, which can be found here.

  • “Kerch Oil Depot Hit By Drones: Close to the Kerch Bridge.”
  • “Storm Shadow Strike on Semiconductor Plant in Voronezh: Four Hits.”
  • “Voronezh Update: Major Damage to Semiconductor Plant in New Video & Satellite Imagery.”
  • “Moscow Oil Refinery: Satellite Imagery Shows Extensive Damage.”
  • “Key Bridge in Vasylivka Destroyed in Big Ukrainian Air Strike.”
  • “Ukraine Destroys Key Railway Bridge in Crimea! ”
  • “Satellite Imagery Shows Severe Damage to Crimean Bridges.”
  • “Ukrainian Drones Hit the Poltavskaya Oil Depot.” This was in Krasnodar Krai.
  • “Ukraine Destroys Multiple Russian Ferries at Port Kavkaz.” This was near the Kerch Strait.
  • “Ukraine Hits TWO Russian Support Ships and a Ferry in Zatoka Shipyard Near Kerch.”
  • Ukraine also hit 38 different targets in Crimea; radars, electrical substations, oil storage, etc.
  • “Zelenskyy says drone signal repeaters in Belarus have been switched off.”

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that signal repeaters on the territory of Belarus that had been helping Russian drones strike Ukraine ceased operating on 22 June….

    “Based on the available information reported to me by the Commander-in-Chief [of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Oleksandr Syrskyi] and intelligence services, the relevant signal repeaters stopped operating on the territory of Belarus on 22 June. I don’t know yet whether they have been dismantled, to be honest. But we are working on this, and I am keeping a very close eye on the situation and receiving daily reports. It is a fact that the signal repeaters are not operating today.”

    On 19 June, Zelenskyy issued an ultimatum to self-proclaimed Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, giving him a week to dismantle the signal repeaters used to adjust Russian drone strikes on Ukrainian cities, or Ukraine would do it itself.

  • Old and busted: Russia puts heavy air defense around Putin’s vacation palace. The new hotness: Russia torn down the palace. Puzzling.
  • “Why Every High School Student Is Learning to Shoot a Gun – in Latvia.” Every country bordering Russia should legalize private ownership of firearms and do the same. (Hat tip: KR Training.)
  • A huge earthquake rocked Venezuela this week, with death toll unknown but expected to be high.
  • Despite Abigail Spanberger’s best efforts, the Second Amendment still applies to Virginia.

    Things went from bad to worse for Democrats on Thursday afternoon after a judge in Virginia issued a preliminary injunction on the “assault firearms” and high-capacity magazine ban that was set to go into effect in the Commonwealth on July 1. The judge from Lancaster County, located in the Northern Neck of Virginia, ruled that the Virginia State Police (VSP) cannot enforce the bans through December 31, 2026 or until a final order is issued.

    The lawsuit was brought against the superintendent of the VSP by the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL) and Gun Owners of America (GOA), who took well-deserved victory laps on social media.

    There’s also another law case winding its way through the courts. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Mamdani-Backed Socialists Sweep New York House Primaries.”

    New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s endorsement proved influential in three key congressional primary races on Tuesday, as his favored progressive candidates prevailed over opponents more closely aligned with the Democratic establishment.

    New York State Assemblywoman Claire Valdez and Harlem community organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier, both of whom were also backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, won races in New York’s seventh and 13th congressional districts, respectively. Meanwhile, former city comptroller Brad Lander, a progressive former DSA member, pulled off an impressive upset over incumbent Representative Dan Goldman in NY-10. Lander is a Jewish progressive who left the DSA in 2023 after it held a pro-Palestinian rally just one day after Hamas’s terror attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023.

    Lander and Goldman, who is also a Jewish Democrat, both made their stances on the Israel-Hamas war a key part of their respective campaigns. Lander, who sits to the left of Goldman politically, had criticized his opponent for failing to take a tougher stance on Israel.

    Avila Chevalier prevailed over incumbent Representative Adriano Espaillat despite her status as the most controversial of the three Mamdani-backed progressives. While Espaillat is the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus “who has over the years built a political machine of his own in upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx,” according to Politico, Avila Chevalier is a first-time candidate who was well known in Harlem for her pro-Palestinian activism but whose unearthed social media posts made her a political liability for the DSA. Those posts included messages blasting Democratic politicians, including one 2021 post in which she wrote “f*** Kamala Harris,” and others against an array of topics from the police to Israel and private property.

    Mamdani, for his part, said he wasn’t aware of her past comments when he endorsed her, but he did not pull his endorsement nonetheless.

    The mayor also endorsed Valdez in her bid to assume the seat left open by retiring Representative Nydia Velázquez. The outgoing Democratic congresswoman had endorsed Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso as her replacement. Mamdani and the DSA’s decision to endorse a different candidate led to a falling out with Velázquez, who had been an early supporter of Mamdani’s mayoral run.

  • China’s oil reserves aren’t.

    In late May Chinese leaders travelled to the Zhoushan National Oil Reserve and discovered the nation’s strategic oil reserves weren’t there. For over a year, the disruption of oil supplies from Venezuela and Iran had left Chinese oil reserves reduced. Despite that, government documents indicated that China still had 1.2 billion tons of oil reserves. That’s equivalent to 8,756,117,022 barrels.

    China’s strategic oil reserve, to the surprise of the government officials who went to verify the reserves in May, was instead composed of water, sludge, various debris and overflow from nearby sewer lines.

    Because the Americans dominated global energy supplies, the Chinese oil reserve served as a major cushion to any disruptions to Chinese oil imports from the Persian Gulf, especially Iran whose main customer was China. Under America’s global energy stranglehold, Chinese crude oil stockpiles have reached the verge of collapse at the slightest exposure.

    The current Chinese vulnerability stems from the American disruption of Venezuelan oil exports to China and more recently a similar situation with Iranian oil exports to China.

    China’s strategic oil reserve was insurance against disruptions in Venezuelan and Iranian imports. With its oil reserves revealed as a sham, China finds itself in a desperate situation. What happened to Chinese oil? It was soon discovered that corrupt government officials and oil reserve personnel had sold the oil and pocketed the proceeds. The local buyers were often operators of small, locally owned refineries that turned the oil into commercial products that were sold throughout China. Most of these oil criminals then fled, often leaving China for sanctuary states that would welcome any affluent Chinese and their new wealth. The only winners were a few conniving Chinese and the Americans, who continued to dominate the global energy system.

    (Hat tip: Bayou Renaissance Man.)

  • “John Bolton Pleads Guilty to Mishandling Classified Information, Faces Five-Year Prison Sentence.” He should have stayed as UN Ambassador, where he was useful scaring other nations, and everyone would have been happier.
  • “For every hour employees think they save using AI, they spend an hour ‘botsitting.'”
  • American memory company Micron blows away earning guidance.
  • Bungie went woke and now they’re going broke.
  • Why Spirit Airlines failed. “Perhaps the Biden DOJ should have allowed the JetBlue merger.” Yay think?
  • Meme for the week:

    (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt.)

  • Important tip: If you’re a Bexar County judge and you’re given an official YouTube channel to livestream your court proceedings, don’t use it for your book club.
  • “Woman who emptied Knicks trashcan on street — then stole it — is fired from JPMorgan Chase, was DEI exec.” Shocked face engaged. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • How Adam Savage sorts his connector cables.
  • The Lock-Picking Lawyer: “I didn’t think it was possible, but somehow Master Lock has now tarnished its name even more with a brand new line of padlocks.” Evidently the Elite line isn’t.
  • Tom Scott looks at…ferrets?
  • Critical Drinker liked The Furious.
  • The Pitch Meeting for Disclosure Day.
  • Jeremy Clarkson: “The observant among you will notice that I’m not dead yet.”
  • Dwight offers up a look at some early Smith & Wesson history.
  • “New Yorkers Excited To See How Never-Before-Tried Government Called ‘Socialism’ Turns Out.”
  • “Al-Qaeda Wins New York Primary.”
  • “New ‘Communist Catan’ Expansion Set Just Makes Players All Wait Their Turn For Grain.”
  • Soccer finally accomplishes something.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





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    Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Guns, Jihad, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 3 Comments »

    Musk’s Terafab: Half Possible, Half Pipe-Dream

    Wednesday, March 25th, 2026

    The last few days I’ve been grappling with exactly what to say about Elon Musk’s Terafab announcement.

    Elon Musk on Saturday announced that his rocket making company SpaceX and electric vehicle major Tesla will jointly run a new chip manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas, AFP reported.

    The chips will be for use in artificial intelligence projects, robotics and data centres for space, with aim to produce 1 terawatt of computing power per year, it added, citing Musk. (1 terawatt = ¬1 trillion watts).

    Why is Elon Musk starting his own chip manufacturing facility?

    The world’s richest man said the so-called “Terafab” was necessary because Tesla and SpaceX’s demand for computing power is expected to far exceed that of global chip suppliers. While he did not disclose how much initial investment is being made, reports pegged the initial infusion between $20-25 billion, it added.

    “We’re very grateful to our existing supply chain, to Samsung, TSMC, Micron, and others… but there’s a maximum rate at which they’re comfortable expanding. That rate is much less than we would like… and we need the chips, so we’re going to build the Terafab. The advanced technology fab in Austin will have the facilities to design, manufacture, test and improve each chip,” Musk said.

    Other articles have made clear the the initial pilot line will be in Austin on Tesla’s Gigafab land, but that the eventual full-scale production fab may be located somewhere else.

  • The project aims to make chips to support 100 to 200 GW of computing power on Earth, and 1 TW in space.
  • Musk did not share a timeline for the production or output. The AFP report noted that the billionaire has many times in the past announced timelines that his companies failed to meet, i.e. robotaxis, SDF, etc.
  • According to Musk, the Terafab would ultimately help humanity become a “galactic civilization” capable of harnessing the resources of other planets and stars.
  • A Bloomberg report added that Musk has said previously that the facility would produce 2 nanometer chips.
  • It added that the Austin facility is expected to make two types of chips, one of which will be optimized for edge and inference, primarily for his vehicle, robotaxi and Optimus humanoid robots.
  • The other will be a high-power chip, designed for space that could be used by SpaceX and xAI. Musk said he expects xAI to use the vast majority of the chips, it added.
  • Musk also unveiled a speculative rendering of a future “mini” AI data center satellite with 100 kW power. This is part of a larger installation he wants SpaceX to build to do complex computing in space.
  • In January, SpaceX requested a license from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch one million data center satellites into orbit around Earth. “We expect future satellites to probably go to the megawatt range,” Musk added.

    • Let’s skip over addressing the feasibility (or desirability) of the space half of this grand vision. Never mind that Musk has evidently been freebasing back issues of The L5 News and G. Harry Stine’s Analog columns circa 1979 to conceive his solar-powered orbital cathedrals of vast, cool machine intellects.

    No, I want to focus on the task of getting a purely ground-based, cutting edge, 2nm semiconductor fab up and running. There’s nothing impossible about that part, and $25 billion is right around the current price to build a state-of-the-art fab. Other reports say:

    Production targets are specific. The facility is designed to produce between 100 and 200 billion custom AI and memory chips per year, targeting an initial output of 100,000 wafer starts per month with a stated ambition to scale toward one million — roughly 70% of TSMC’s current total output, in a single US facility.

    Tesla is targeting 2 nanometre process technology, the most advanced node currently in commercial production. Tesla’s fifth-generation AI chip, AI5, is among the first products Terafab is designed to produce, with small-batch production expected in 2026 and volume production projected for 2027.

    And here’s where my deep skepticism kicks in, over both the output and timeline.

    Having more cutting-edge fabs here in the continental United States is a great idea, and there’s nothing wrong with vertical integration for companies to combine design, fabrication and test under one roof. Indeed, Musk has merely reinvented Integrated Device Manufacturing, which used to be the norm until the foundry model took hold, and that’s still the norm with companies like Intel (though not necessarily all under one roof). And Intel, Samsung and TSMC already have their own mask manufacturing facilities in-house. So based on the little information available now, Musk’s radical new approach isn’t.

    But that timeline of initial production in 2026 and volume production in 2027? Unless Musk has already placed orders for the critical semiconductor manufacturing equipment (especially however many ASML TWINSCAN EXE:5000 or TWINSCAN EXE:5200B EUV lithography systems the fab will need) long before now, that’s simply not happening. The lead time for the most critical machines are a year or more. And that’s just one machine.

    There are five essential semiconductor equipment manufacturers:

  • Applied Materials
  • ASML
  • KLA
  • LAM Research
  • Tokyo Electron

    • If you’re building a modern, 2nm fab, chances are pretty good you need all five. You need the ASML litho machines mentioned above. You need KLA inspection tools to raise and maintain yields, and you need, at the very least, one of AMAT, LAM or TEL to provide the rest. Take away all three and you can’t equip a fab, period.

    And that’s after you’ve poured the agonizingly precise, ridiculously level concrete slab for the equipment to rest on, installed huge networks of high voltage power systems (ASML machine alone now run at 1,000 watts), ultra-high purity air handling equipment and ultra-high purity de-ionized water handling systems. All that needs to be installed, up and running before you even start installing the tools. And then all the tools need to be brought up and qualified for production. And that all needs to be done before tape-out, mask production and the first wafer is run.

    But the timeline isn’t the only thing that’s delusional about Musk’s announcement.

    Terafab is designed for an initial output of 100,000 wafer starts per month, with ambitions to scale to 1 million wafer starts per month at full capacity. For context, that full-scale target would represent roughly 70% of TSMC’s entire current global output — from a single facility operated by companies that have never fabricated a chip.

    Musk said the facility would produce between 100 and 200 billion custom AI and memory chips per year, powering Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” software, the Cybercab robotaxi program, and the Optimus humanoid robot line. He also said millions of Optimus robots would help build and operate the facility.

    Put aside the swarms of robots for now. A lot of what can be automated for a fab already has been with automated FOUP-handling equipment. What hasn’t been automated is routine maintenance, troubleshooting, etc. I’m guessing it will be quite a while before Frankie Fabbot is ready to take on any of those tasks.

    100,000 wafer starts a month is around what TSMC’s cutting edge fabs produce a month. Samsung has a huge fab supposedly capable of 450,000 wafer starts a month. A million starts a month in one extremely big fab is possible, but it’s going to take multiple lines, lots of money, and throughput will still be gated by the lowest capacity machines on the line (again, I’m guessing the ASML litho machine). Modern fabs have already maxed out production speeds for modern high-yield plants. You can’t simple pull a lever to make the line go faster.

    Then there are his plans to build memory chips and space-hardened versions of the xAI chips in the same megafab. Neither of those goals is impossible, but it’s going to require more equipment than his $25 billion estimate to essentially run three production lines in the same building. And preparing chips to operate in space generally involves completely different “rad-hard” processes, involving different types of wafer chemistry, that are nowhere near the 2nm process node.

    Musk is a smart guy. I bet he can eek a few performance gains out of how his fabs are organized, AI line optimization, etc. But unless he’s smarter than Einstein, Thomas Edison, Tony Stark and Reed Richards combined, I’m hard-pressed to see how he can optimize more than, say, 15% over existing cutting edge fabs.

    Nothing Musk has proposed for the earth-bound side of Terafab is impossible, but it is all-but-impossible to implement in the time-frames he’s alleging, for the money he’s claiming. One million wafer starts a month in a single fab? Doable, but not by 2027, and not for $25 billion. Having such a fab up and running full tilt in 2029-2030, for $100 billion, seems at least at the edge of feasibility. Whether the AI boom will still be a “thing” by then is unknown, but a fab actually capable of one million wafer starts a month (robots or no robots) is still a license to print money…

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    Posted in Austin, Technology, Texas | 7 Comments »

    AI News Roundup For February 5, 2026

    Thursday, February 5th, 2026

    A bunch of AI-related news has popped up this week, so let’s do a roundup.

  • Some AI companies are complaining that TSMC is killing the AI boom by not expanding rapidly enough:

    Asianometry notes that TSMC’s caution at expanding is amply justified by the boom-and-bust nature of the semiconductor industry:

    • “I’m hearing many similar views in the Silicon Valley Borg that TSMC is the break or limiter on the AI boom, as if they’re the reason why we don’t have AGI yet. Because they didn’t and still don’t believe.”

    • “If we can ever say that a company that spent $41 billion on capital expenditure in 2025, with another $53 to $56 billion in 2026 planned, is sitting on its hands, doing nothing.”
    • “TSMC having 90% share of the AI chip market looks pretty unhealthy. That should go down and it will. Samsung seems to be doing well so far.”
    • “The cold, hard reality is that shortages are a fact of life in semiconductors, as are horrific gluts.”
    • “What we are flippantly labeling as TSMC we really mean is the AI supply chain. And that supply chain is as complicated as you can possibly imagine. Like an iceberg, it looks big enough on the surface of the water, but goes way far deeper underneath. TSMC has thousands of suppliers in two categories: Equipment like the famed ASML lithography tools and materials like photoresist, silicon wafers, acid etch gases and so on. These are not generalized tools and materials. They are not fungeible like AWS compute units.”
    • “And then there are the memory guys. You cannot ship an AI system without memory. DRAM and NAND. Nvidia’s AI chips use a special form of DRAM called high bandwidth memory, and they use quite a lot of it. The memory industry is just as consolidated as the logic industry, with the major players being Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron.”
    • “The chip guys are last to know when the party is getting started, but first they get batoned in the face when the police shut things down.”
    • He points out that semiconductor manufacturers have log supply chains. He uses a different metaphor (the beer distribution game, or a bullwhip), but back when I was working at Applied Materials, it was described as trains linked together with slinkys. First software takes off, then hardware gets yanked along, then the chip manufacturers get yanked, and then, finally, semiconductor equipment manufacturers get yanked into motion, and shortly after that happens, the bust hits the front of the train, and the trailing cars all crash into each other. It’s a regular boom/bust cycle.
    • “From 1961 to 2006, electronics consumption in the United States grew positively but with wild volatility swings between 0 to 20%. But for the semiconductor makers, that translates to swings anywhere from 20% to 40%. And for the equipment makers, it is amplified even more, plus or minus 60%. The whip hits particularly hard in the semiconductor industry because of the industry’s long lead times. It takes 4.5 months to fabricate and package a chip. It takes 18 months to 2 years to build a fab. Meaning from shovels down to producing chips, and it takes 12 to 18 months to produce and install something like an EUV machine into the fab. Another 6 months before that machine actually starts patterning wafers.”
    • “Long lead times mean having to make very long demand forecasts, which leads to extreme volatility swings during up and downturns even if those up or downturns are relatively small.” People forget that in 1998, during the time we now think of as the DotCom Boom, there was a small semiconductor downturn that had Applied Materials forcing employees to take unpaid leave.
    • “ASML just reported 2025 earnings, and we see the bullwhip in full effect. TSMC raised capital expenditure 35% but ASML announced €13.2 billion of net new bookings. Analysts had expected just €6.32 billion. This is because ASML collected orders not just from TSMC, but also Samsung, Intel and the memory guys. When it rains it pours, right? Again, this is why I fear that another AI foundry would not mean our compute shortage is solved, because ultimately, when those foundries start scaling their capacity, they all go to the same suppliers.”
    • He goes over how car manufacturers cancelled orders during Flu Manchu, and then scrambled when the economy took off afterwards. “TSMC was trying to discern between double booked orders and real demand, which is not an uncommon experience for them. Customers lie about their own demand all the time, or at least we can say that they are eternally optimistic. TSMC tried to respond in 2022. The Taiwanese giant poured $36 billion into capital expenditure. They went to their suppliers and pushed like no tomorrow.”
    • “It turned out those customers really were double booking orders and artificially inflating demand. When the macro environment turned in 2022, the automotive, smartphone, and PC chips that were so hot during the COVID era fell out of vogue and customers started cutting orders.”
    • “Meanwhile, deeper down in the supply chain, TSMC and the rest of the semiconductor industry were getting bullwhipped by COVID hangover. Utilization at TSMC’s multi-billion dollar N7 fabs crashed, Semi analysis wrote in April 2023. Now, Semi analysis data indicates that the 7nm utilization rates were below 70% in Q1. Furthermore, Q2 gets even worse with 7nm utilization rates falling to below 60%. This is primarily due to weakness in both smartphones and PCs, but there is a broader weakness in most segments. A fab’s break even utilization rates are about 60% to 70%. So those N7 Taichung fabs were taking financial losses potentially on the order of hundreds of millions, maybe even billions. The financial burdens of low utilization are another reason why I’m skeptical another AI foundry could have rushed into the AI chip fray to save the day.”
    • He says that Intel incurred losses during this period due to an unnecessary fab expansion, which is probably true, but that was a secondary factor next to their longer running problem of getting their process wrong.
    • “ChatGPT was released in November 2022, and that kicked off a massive increase in capex amongst the hyperscalers in particular, but it sure seems like TSMC didn’t buy the hype. That lack of increased investment earlier this decade is why there is a shortage today and is why TSMC has been a de facto break on the AI buildout/bubble.”
    • “I recall news in mid 2024 of TSMC struggling with CoWoS capacity bottlenecks and yield problems, including one design issue that caused cracks in the Nvidia chips packaging.” CoWoS is Chip on Wafer on Substrate, which involves fabbing an interposer as a substrate for faster connections between your processing chips and memory.
    • “I also recall news in late 2024 noting how the vendors in charge of making the server racks for Nvidia’s Blackwell servers struggled with overheating, liquid cooling leaks, software bugs, and connectivity issues. Such technical difficulties delayed server deployment until early to mid 2025, creating a weird situation for several months where TSMC was pumping out chips that just went into storage. So that gated things, because you don’t scale until you first fix the technical problems.”
    • Then there’s the power-scaling issue, which is a whole ‘nuther can of worms.

  • There’s a lot of talk about a SaaSpocalypse going on thanks to a new AI tool. (SaaS is “Software as a Service.” Instead of hosting your own payroll or sales-tracking or whatever servers, you hire a company that already has cloud software setup to do it and you just tie into that, which can considerably reduce startup costs. A whole lot of successful new tech companies over the last decade plus have been SaaS companies.)

    The software sector was jolted overnight with what analysts are calling a “SaaSpocalypse” — a sudden and severe selloff triggered by new artificial intelligence tools unveiled by US AI startup Anthropic. The episode has sharpened investor fears that AI is no longer merely helping software companies but may now begin replacing them.

    Anthropic has expanded its enterprise AI platform, Claude Cowork, by launching 11 new plugins aimed at automating a wide range of professional tasks. Claude Cowork is an agentic, no-code AI assistant built for corporate users, allowing companies to automate workflows without writing software. The new plugins are designed to handle tasks across legal, sales, marketing and data analysis functions. The most recent addition is Anthropic’s Claude Legal agent, which can perform routine legal work such as document and contract review, and compliance checks.

    Anthropic has said that the tool does not provide legal advice and that all AI-generated outputs must be reviewed by licensed attorneys. Even so, the breadth of automation signals a step change in how much white-collar work AI systems can now perform.

    Here are the current plugins for Claude Cowork:

    • Productivity — Manage tasks, calendars, daily workflows, and personal context
    • Enterprise search — Find information across your company’s tools and docs
    • Plugin Create/Customize — Create and customize new plugins from scratch
    • Sales — Research prospects, prep deals, and follow your sales process
    • Finance — Analyze financials, build models, and track key metrics
    • Data — Query, visualize, and interpret datasets
    • Legal — Review documents, flag risks, and track compliance
    • Marketing — Draft content, plan campaigns, and manage launches
    • Customer support — Triage issues, draft responses, and surface solutions
    • Product management — Write specs, prioritize roadmaps, and track progress
    • Biology research — Search literature, analyze results, and plan experiments

    A lot of those are already automated elsewhere, but I suspect a lot accountants and paralegals just felt a goose strut across their grave. On the other hand, who is really going to turn over, say, Accounts Payable to an AI? One glitch, and your entire bank account is drained…

    If it works (a big if, give so many AIs are prone to hallucinations), this is potentially good news for Anthropic and the companies using their tools, and bad for SaaS companies and the employees currently doing those jobs.

    I note there’s no plugin for technical writing…yet.

  • Google/Alphabet just reported $400 billion in earnings in 2025. CEO Sundar Pichai:

    And Google Cloud ended 2025 at an annual run rate of over $70 billion, representing a wide breadth of customers, driven by demand for AI products.

    We’re seeing our AI investments and infrastructure drive revenue and growth across the board. To meet customer demand and capitalize on the growing opportunities we have ahead of us, our 2026 CapEx investments are anticipated to be in the range of $175 to $185 billion.”

  • Remember how Nvidia was going to invest $100 billion in OpenAI? Yeah, not so much.

    In September 2025, Nvidia and OpenAI announced a letter of intent for Nvidia to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI’s AI infrastructure. At the time, the companies said they expected to finalize details “in the coming weeks.” Five months later, no deal has closed, Nvidia’s CEO now says the $100 billion figure was “never a commitment,” and Reuters reports that OpenAI has been quietly seeking alternatives to Nvidia chips since last year.

    Reuters also wrote that OpenAI is unsatisfied with the speed of some Nvidia chips for inference tasks, citing eight sources familiar with the matter. Inference is the process by which a trained AI model generates responses to user queries. According to the report, the issue became apparent in OpenAI’s Codex, an AI code-generation tool. OpenAI staff reportedly attributed some of Codex’s performance limitations to Nvidia’s GPU-based hardware.

    After the Reuters story published and Nvidia’s stock price took a dive, Nvidia and OpenAI have tried to smooth things over publicly. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X: “We love working with NVIDIA and they make the best AI chips in the world. We hope to be a gigantic customer for a very long time. I don’t get where all this insanity is coming from.”

  • You know who’s not winning the AI war? Microsoft.

    Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot has become central to its artificial-intelligence strategy as the company’s close partnership with OpenAI diminishes. But the effort to build it up as a ChatGPT alternative has been tough going.

    Remember, Copilot is the AI that wants to take pictures of your desktop every few seconds. Golly, can’t imagine why it’s unpopular..

    Confusing brand positioning and interoperability problems have frustrated users, current and former employees who have worked on Microsoft’s AI products said.

    Interoperability problems? With a Microsoft product?

    Only a small proportion of subscribers to Microsoft’s enterprise suite use Copilot, and the percentage who favor it over Google’s Gemini or other tools has decreased in recent months, according to data reviewed by the Journal.

    The stakes are high for Microsoft because Copilot is core to a push by Chief Executive Satya Nadella to transform Microsoft into an AI-first company, much as he transformed it into a cloud-first company around a decade ago. Copilot is one of Nadella’s top priorities, current and former executives said.

    Microsoft shares tumbled after its earnings report last week sparked investor concern that growth in its most important unit, the Azure cloud-computing business, is slowing, and that its AI business is reliant on OpenAI while Copilot remains unproven. Shares fell nearly 3% Tuesday amid a slide in software stocks prompted by fresh concerns that AI tools will make enterprise subscriptions less necessary.

    For other AI companies, we merely suspect they’re evil. For Microsoft (and Google), we already know they’re evil…

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    Posted in Economics, Technology, video | 4 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for September 6, 2024

    Friday, September 6th, 2024

    The fake Kamala bubble evaporates, another would-be Trump assassin is arrested, more Chinese spies on the staff of high profile Democrats, more NYC corruption raids, Ukrainian drones heat things up around Moscow, Intel and Stellantis layoff thousands each, another Harris County Democrat double-dips, a bit about Idaho, and some really stupid sailor shenanigans.

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Evidently jailing Trump right before an election was a kangaroo too far even for this kangaroo court, so Trump’s sentencing has been pushed to after the election. “Judge Juan Merchan ruled Friday that Trump’s sentencing will take place on November 26, three weeks after election day, ensuring that Trump will not be sentenced in any of his criminal cases leading up to the election.”
  • Jeffrey Blehar actually watched the Kamala Harris interview so I don’t have to. His verdict? Not kind.

    In the friendliest possible format — a joint interview with VP nominee and emotional-support midwesterner Tim Walz, conducted by Dana Bash with the delicacy of an ornithologist gently hand-feeding hatchling chicks — Harris has revealed that her gaseously mindless word-cloud of a campaign is in fact an accurate reflection of her own personal vacuousness.

    To be sure, Harris did not memorably self-destruct tonight. Whatever her failings, they are not those of Joe Biden, who couldn’t even articulate his words without slurring by the end. Her inarticulateness tonight was of the sort already known to be a Harris trademark, the endless jumble of nonsensical, comically vapid stock language. When she could fall back on a memorized list of talking points, she presented somewhat normally; the second she was required to respond directly to a question, then she began to spin out otiose nonsense like a pasta chef catering a Sicilian banquet. You could practically see the gears turning inside her head as she cast her eyes downward, stared laser-beams into the floor, and groped for cliches. She was more muted tonight than usual — her aides clearly ordered her never to display mirth under any circumstances, for fear the Kamala Kackle might emerge — and as a result, while she simulated sobriety for the most part, her body language was pronouncedly downbeat.

    And all throughout she offered no answers to any policy questions whatsoever, nor any explanation for her various changes of position between 2020 and now. In theory, Bash asked most of the “right questions”; in practice, the way she solicitously asked them — sometimes even helpfully offering in advance a multiple-choice list of acceptable answers for Harris to choose from — turned them into cream puffs that Harris immediately used to serve up word salad.

    Bash’s most pointed moment was when she pushed Harris about why she changed her position on a national fracking ban between 2020 and the present campaign. Harris’s answer was little more than, “Well, because I changed my mind when I became Joe Biden’s VP.” In the real world, anyone familiar with politics well understood that her “position” changed because Joe Biden — the presidential nominee — demanded it, and no other reason. Which of course is why it’s impossible to believe her when she says this is now her sincerely held view, as opposed to something to later be discarded once she can set her own priorities.

  • “Eric Weinstein: ‘I Don’t Know Whether Trump Will Be Allowed To Become President.'”

    Eric Weinstein told Chris Williamson on the “Modern Wisdom” podcast that Donald Trump’s presidency has disrupted the old “rules-based international order,” which many view as an attempt to control global stability and wondered if the Republican nominee will “be allowed” to reenter the White House if elected in 2024. Weinstein argued that Trump’s unorthodox approach challenged the status quo, exposing flaws in the system and revealing that the impact of populist leaders on democracy and international agreements is more complex and significant than previously understood.

    CHRIS WILLIAMSON: When we spoke at the start of the year, I said it was way too close to November to switch anybody out. Turns out that I was wrong.

    ERIC WEINSTEIN: Beginner’s luck.

    CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You said what are the odds that Joe Biden has a debilitating event between now and November including death, so he runs a one in 20 chance of dying in any given year or above that. I don’t think you know whether he’s even going to make it to November debilitating event could have been a debilitating public event

    ERIC WEINSTEIN: I purposefully left it vague. I didn’t say the other part of it, which I now feel comfortable saying, which is…

    CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you mean by that?

    ERIC WEINSTEIN: I think there’s a remarkable story, and we’re in a funny game, which is: are we allowed to say what that story is? Because to say it, to analyze it, to name it, is to bring it into view. I think we don’t understand why the censorship is behaving the way it is. We don’t understand why it’s in the shadows or why our news is acting in a bizarre fashion. So let’s just set the stage, given that that was in February.

    There is something that I think Mike Benz has just referred to as the rules-based international order. It’s an interlocking series of agreements, tacit understandings, explicit understandings, and clandestine understandings about how the most important structures keep the world free of war and keep markets open. There has been a system in place, whether understood explicitly or behind the scenes or implicitly, that says the purpose of the two American parties is to prune the field of populist candidates so that whatever two candidates exist in a faceoff are both acceptable to that world order.

    From the point of view of, say, the State Department, the intelligence community, the defense department, and major corporations involved in international issues—from arms trade to, oh, I don’t know, food—they have a series of agreements that are fragile and could be overturned if a president entered the Oval Office who didn’t agree with them. And if the mood of the country was, “Why do we pay taxes into these structures? Why are we hamstrung? Why aren’t we a free people?” So what the two parties would do is run primaries with populist candidates and pre-commit the populist candidates to support the candidates who won the primaries. As long as that took place and you had two candidates that were both acceptable to the international order—that is, they aren’t going to rethink NAFTA or NATO or what have you—we called that democracy. And so democracy was the illusion of choice, what’s called magician’s choice, where the choice is not actually, you know, “pick a card, any card,” but somehow the magician makes sure that the card that you pick is the one that he knows.

    In that situation, you have magician’s choice in the primaries, and then you’d have the duopoly field: two candidates, either of which was acceptable, and you could actually afford to hold an election. That way, the international order wasn’t put at risk every four years because you can’t have alliances that are subject to the whim of the people in plebiscites.

    Under that structure, everything was going fine until 2016, when the first candidate ever to not hold any position in the military nor any position in government in the history of the Republic, Donald Trump, broke through the primary structure. Then there was a full court press: “Okay, we only have one candidate that’s acceptable to the international order. Donald Trump will be under constant pressure—he’s a loser, he’s a wild man, he’s an idiot, and he’s under control of the Russians.” And then he was going to be, you know, a 20-to-1 underdog, and then he wins. There was no precedent for this. They learned their lesson: you cannot afford to have candidates who are not acceptable to the international order and continue to have these alliances. This is an unsolved problem.

  • Another week, another would-be Trump assassin arrested.

    A Missouri man is facing federal charges following a series of alleged violent threats made via social media against former President Donald Trump, Republicans at large, and law enforcement officers, according to a criminal complaint filed in the Western District of Missouri on Aug. 30.

    Justin Lee White, 36, is accused of using interstate communication to spread a slew of online threats to injure Trump, Republicans, and law enforcement in violation of federal law, culminating in a multi-agency investigation led by the FBI, according to the complaint.

  • Speaking of Trump assassination attempts, DHS personnel assigned to the protective detail for Trump’s Butler rally were given rigorous training. And by “rigorous training” I mean “they sat through a two hour webinar.”
  • Remember that “Harris Surge” in polls? Yet again, it was a case of oversampling.

    As we’ve been highlighting since 2016, polls are not to be trusted thanks to various ‘tricks of the trade’ – most commonly, oversampling.

    Last month we noted how the founder of the main outside spending group backing Kamala Harris for president says their own internal opinion polling is “much less rosy” than public polls.

    “Our numbers are much less rosy than what you’re seeing in the public,” said Future Forward super PAC president Chauncey McLean said during a Monday event hosted by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.

    Now, the Washington Times reports that some pollsters are even sounding the alarm over Vice President Kamala Harris’ so-called ‘surge’ in the polls – which Harris pulled ahead in after replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee on July 21.

    Since the switch, Harris is leading Trump nationally by nearly 2 percentage points and is either leading or tied with him in all seven battleground states. However, Republican analysts argue that these polling numbers may not accurately reflect voter sentiment due to biased polling methodology…

    Critics point out that many polls have been sampling a disproportionately smaller share of Republican voters compared to exit poll data from the 2020 presidential election. The result, they say, is a misleading “phantom advantage” for Ms. Harris. According to them, this skewed sampling could be a strategic move to boost enthusiasm and fundraising for Ms. Harris’ campaign.

    Trump campaign strategist Jim McLaughlin echoed this sentiment, stating, “They undersample Republicans” intentionally “to tamp down support and donations for Trump.” He added that the polls are part of a larger effort to create a narrative that favors Harris.

    Trump has openly criticized the poll results. “It’s fake news,” Trump declared during a rally in Michigan. “They can make those polls sing.”

    Always check the crosstabs…

  • “Vladimir Putin and Liz Cheney Endorse Kamala Harris.” Where are all the MSM parrots claiming “Russian collusion?” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Billionaire Mark Cuban Asked His Followers If They’d Prefer Their Kids Be Like Trump or Harris.” Turns out they preferred Trump by more than 2-1. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Another week, another high profile Democrat’s aide turns out to be a Chinese spy.

    Linda Sun, a former aide to New York governor Kathy Hochul, acted at the direction of Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party officials while serving in state government, federal prosecutors alleged in an indictment Tuesday.

    In a statement, the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York said that Sun was arrested Tuesday morning with her husband, Christopher Hu. They were expected to be arraigned later in the day.

    Sun is a former deputy chief of staff to Kathy Hochul and has served in numerous roles throughout New York State government since her first post under the administration of former governor Andrew Cuomo in 2012. Before that, she served as Representative Grace Meng’s chief of staff, when the Queens Democrat served in the New York State assembly.

    “As alleged, while appearing to serve the people of New York as deputy chief of staff within the New York State Executive Chamber, the defendant and her husband actually worked to further the interests of the Chinese government and the CCP,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said.

    The federal government is alleging that Sun was an unregistered agent of the Chinese government and that her husband engaged in money-laundering while they benefited from millions of dollars in bribes from Chinese officials.

    The indictment details a shocking pattern of collaboration with China’s consulate general in New York, with Sun at one point in 2020 letting a Chinese diplomat listen in on a private conference call for New York officials regarding the state government’s response to the Covid pandemic.

    Chinese-government and CCP officials directed her to block Taiwanese officials from engaging with officials from New York. Beijing views the current government of Taiwan as a traitorous separatist movement and wants to annex the country.

    According to court documents, Taiwan’s de facto consulate in New York City invited an unnamed politician, a description that matches the profile of then-governor Andrew Cuomo, to attend a banquet honoring then-Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen during her stopover in the city in 2019. Sun forwarded information about the invite to a Chinese official, telling that individual, “I sent you an email / Just an FYI / I already blocked it.” She then declined the invitation without consulting other New York executive chamber officials.

    When Sun later asked a colleague to check if the politician was registered for the banquet, that staff member said that it was not on the schedule. Sun replied: “Perfect!”

    She also manipulated messaging from the New York governor’s office, while consulting Chinese diplomats, the indictment stated.

  • Also being arrested in New York: More aides to Mayor Eric Adams.

    Federal agents on Wednesday zeroed in on the highest ranks of Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, searching a home and seizing the phones of the New York City police commissioner, the first deputy mayor, the schools chancellor and others, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

    The police commissioner. They seized the police commissioner’s phones. Wow.

    Among the other officials the federal investigators sought information from were the deputy mayor for public safety and a senior adviser to the mayor who is one of his closest confidants, the people said. Both men have had other legal challenges.

    The agents also searched the home and seized the phone of a consultant who is the brother of both the schools chancellor and one of the deputy mayors, the people said.

    The nature of the investigations is unclear, but it appears that one is focused on the senior City Hall officials and the other touches on the police commissioner, the people said.
    …
    Representatives of the City Hall officials — the first deputy mayor, Sheena Wright; her partner, Schools Chancellor David C. Banks; the deputy mayor for public safety, Philip Banks III; and a senior adviser to the mayor, Timothy Pearson — could not be reached or declined to comment.

    The consultant, Terence Banks, a brother of Philip Banks and David Banks, recently opened a government and community relations firm aimed at closing a gap “between New York’s intricate infrastructure and political landscape.” He, too, could not be reached for comment.

    Several of the officials had their phones seized or records of their communications subpoenaed.
    …
    In addition to the police commissioner, Edward A. Caban, several other department officials, including Mr. Caban’s chief of staff and two Queens precinct commanders, also had their phones taken by federal agents, two of the people said.

    Says Dwight: “It sounds like the whole Adams administration is so packed with corruption, they can’t even keep the lid screwed on.”

  • Behind the statistics: “August: 635K Foreign-Born Workers Gained Jobs as 1.3 Million Americans Lost Jobs.”
  • Ukraine hits multiple oil facilities and power plants near Moscow in a massive drone attack.
  • Over 75% of the crimes in midtown Manhattan are committed by illegal aliens.
  • Germany’s conservative, populist, pro-border security Alternative for Germany won big in this week’s elections. Of course, the media, in unison, denounces anyone who objects to the mass importation of unassimilated Muslims into any European country as “far right.” And in Germany, this means they invariable compare Alternative for Germany to a certain mustachioed National Socialist.

  • President Trump endorses marijuana decriminalization vote. “Florida’s Amendment 3, titled Recreational Marijuana, would allow adults who are at least 21 years of age have up to 3 ounces of marijuana (a ‘small amount’?) and up to 5 grams of marijuana concentrate. At present, the state only allows medical patients with qualifying conditions to legally buy and possess cannabis.” Marijuana prohibition hasn’t worked. Full-bore marijuana legalization seems to have brought a whole host of problems, especially in blue states. Florida will provide another statewide laboratory of democracy to calibrate an approach.
  • Lowes may be getting out of the culture wars, but Home Depot is still in, having “partnered with LGBTQ mafia organization Human Rights Campaign on a school program that taught radical gender theory to elementary school kids.”
  • Stellantis, the foreign car maker that ate Chrysler, just laid off thousands of Michigan workers after accepting hundred of millions worth of EV subsidies.
  • UK Labour PM Keir Starmer is facing a revolt from his own party over cutting pensioner’s fuel allowance. He says it’s needed to cut a budget deficit, and obviously he can’t possibly cut the funds he’s using to important illegal alien Muslims to rape and stab the natives…
  • That budget deficit might also cause the Labour government to pull out of the F-35 procurement program. “Despite previous plans to acquire 138 F-35s, only 48 have been ordered.”
  • More UK drama up in Scotland, where the Greens have pulled out of a coalition with the Scottish National Party over budget cuts, which could result in a snap election if the budget fails to pass.
  • More double-dipping in Harris County.

    The head of Harris County’s Public Health Department, who was fired last week, has also been working for a California county since last January. Questions are swirling about her work in Texas, including her role in awarding a contract for sending mental health workers instead of police on some 911 calls.

    Sources also say there is a pending criminal investigation into the county’s health department and related contracts.

    County officials announced last Friday that Executive Director of Harris County Public Health Barbie Robinson had been dismissed, just days after the Houston Chronicle reported on communications surrounding a $6 million contract awarded to DEMA, a California-based company, to run the county’s Holistic Assistance Response Teams (HART).

    The Texan has learned that in January 2024, Robinson also contracted with Yuba County, California to provide services for a three-year period. Robinson’s work for Yuba County’s public health department provides her with nearly $200,000 in compensation for hundreds of hours of work, all while managing Harris County’s public health department.

    Sources familiar with the matter say that Robinson claimed to have obtained approval from former County Administrator David Berry and the County Attorney’s Office to engage in the additional work, but that current County Administrator Diana Ramirez was unable to confirm Robinson’s claims.

    Other sources indicate that the Harris County District Attorney’s Office (HCDAO) has been investigating Robinson and nearly a dozen other individuals with the county, HART, and DEMA for several months.

    (Previously.)

  • Illegal alien gangs from Cuba and Venezuela are evidently ripping off Permian Basin oilfield sites.
  • Indeed, Kamala’s precious illegal aliens seem to raping and killing their way across America. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “After Man Spends 2 Years In Jail, Charges Dropped In Texas Self-Defense Shooting.”

    This week, the McLennan County District Attorney’s Office dismissed murder charges against two Houston men involved in the self-defense incident at a party near the Baylor University campus, finally determining it was a justifiable homicide. While that was good news to Calvin Nichols Jr., it hardly makes up for the 635 days the man spent locked up in jail while the DA’s office slowly dragged its feet over the case.

    According to police reports, on the night in question Nichols and his cousin, Jaytron Damon Scott, were invited to a party attended by a number of Baylor students, including football players. According to partygoers, Joseph Craig Thomas Jr. showed up uninvited and began threatening others with a gun, including a female student who asked him to move his car.

    He later stuck a gun under the chin of a Baylor football player. And when Scott and Nichols were leaving the party, Thomas began to pistol whip Nichols.

    That’s when Scott, acting in defense of his cousin, fired his pistol at Thomas, striking him multiple times and killing him. Murder charges were then filed against Scott and Nichols, a fact that Scott’s attorney, Bryan Cantrell, found unbelievable.

    “I don’t know how this case got indicted,” Cantrell told KWTX.com. “This was the clearest self-defense case I have ever seen. And I think the problem is a lot of attorneys and, certainly the people of the community, don’t understand the law of self-defense.”

    You would hope that the end of Abel Reyna’s term as McLennan County DA put a stop to this sort of thing, but evidently not.

  • This seems ominous.

    The U.S. Department of Agriculture is preparing to implement the Biden-Harris administration’s Sustains Act which aims to regulate who will own environmental services.

    According to private property rights advocates, American Stewards of Liberty (ASL), examples of environmental services include “the air we breathe, photosynthesis, pollination, and even the health benefits of open space.”

    Specifically, the new law allows private funds to be used for conservation efforts on private land. The USDA will oversee the program, and the Secretary, preparing its implementation, will also decide who owns the environmental service.

    Although the public may still provide the USDA with comments about the plan until September 16, 2024, ASL refers to the new law as “critical for proponents of the United Nations’ sustainable development agenda to achieve.”

    The private property rights advocates see the program as a means to “provide the path to transfer America’s real assets from private citizens to federal and international interests.”

    Screw both the Biden Administration and the UN.

  • The latest Stolen Valor Democrat is Maryland governor Wes Moore, who didn’t earn the Bronze Star he claimed he did.
  • Speaking of military-grade stupidity, crewman of littoral combat ship USS Manchester installed an unauthorized Starlink satellite internet antenna on the ship, a huge cybersecurity risk, without the knowledge of the captain, so that semen “could check sports scores, text home, and stream movies.” (Hat tip: The Suchomimus discord.)
  • UK starts to “ration” internal combustion cars to meet electric car mandates.
  • Coors is the latest Fortune 500 brand to step off the DEI short bus.
  • Idaho governor Brad Little signed an executive order outlawing the Biden Administration’s unilateral tranny pandering Title IX rewrite by executive fiat. (Hat tip: Ted Cruz’s Facebook feed.)
  • Speaking of Idaho, how Micron defied the odds to become one of the biggest DRAM manufacturers in the world.
  • Intel just cancelled their 20A (2nm) node and will be fabbing their Arrow Lake processor at TSMC. “Intel projects it will save half a billion dollars by skipping the 20A node. The announcement comes as Intel embarks on a vast restructuring in the wake of troubling financial results last quarter. The company continues to lay off 15,000 workers, among the largest workforce reductions in its 56-year history.” It’s supposedly going full speed ahead with its 18A node, theoretically due in 2025. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Intel and Japan are teaming up to work on EUV. Hard to see them making much progress given how large a lead ASML has…
  • Rael Enteen, Vice President of the Washington Commanders football team (AKA The Artist Formerly known As The Washington Redskins) has been fired.

    He told…that, “over 50% of our roster is white religious, and God says, ‘F— the gays.’ Their interpretation. I don’t buy any of that. Another big chunk is low-income African Americans that comes from a community that is inherently very homophobic.”

    …Enteen also said some players are “dumb as hell” and said some who were smart don’t stay that way after getting hit in the head too many times. He also said those who “get their heads knocked around a few times” are more susceptible to conspiracy theories.

    Enteen also said, “I don’t think the commissioner of the NFL hates gay people, hates black people. Jerry Jones, who really runs the NFL, I think he hates gay people, black people.”

    And James O’Keefe claims another scalp…

  • Legal Insurrection’s William A. Jacobson just got dis-invited from speaking on antisemitism at a synagogue in Tampa. “How could any Jew look around at the current geopolitical landscape and conclude that it’s safe to ignore all the various threats to their existence — not just Hamas terrorists in Gaza, but also the various murderous entities backed by the Islamic radical regime in Iran, to say nothing of Democratic primary voters in Dearborn, Michigan — because Trump is the real danger? What kind of cocoon are these people living in?”
  • “UT Austin Ranked in Bottom 10 for Campus Free Speech in FIRE Survey.”
  • Disabled Navy vet ticketed in San Diego for littering for blowing bubbles.
  • Video title: “Is Star Wars Outlaws Worth Buying.” Literally the first second of the video: “No.” More: “Generic and boring.”
  • Mahatma Gandhi, footsoldier for the British Empire.
  • Ryan George is not overjoyed by YouTube games. “The cops are here. It’s probably it’s probably because of all the loud killing I’ve been doing.”
  • “Woman Who Got Soldiers Killed Condemns Man Who Comforted Their Families.”
  • “Source Says Kamala Was Promoted At McDonald’s After Having Affair With Mayor McCheese.”
  • “Democrats Consider Replacing Kamala Harris With More Coherent Joe Biden.”
  • I think he wants the toy.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    • Still between jobs, so hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





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