Arnar Sigurdsson retweeted
Eftir að skólakerfi Vesturlanda lentu í klóm "Menntavísinda" og annarra gremjufræða gáfust skólarnir upp á að reyna að mennta borgara og hófu fjöldaframleiðslu á bótaþegum.
Arnar Sigurdsson retweeted
Le CEO d’Ariane en 2013, l’air inspiré, qui explique tranquillement que SpaceX ce sont des rêveurs.
Dix ans plus tard, Ariane 5 est à la retraite et l’Europe dépend de @SpaceX pour lancer ses satellites.
Arnar Sigurdsson retweeted
Í byrjun árs skrifaði ég frekar harðorða grein um tengingu bóta almannatrygginga við launavísitölu. Hún hófst á því að nota skelfilega stöðu ríkisfjármála Frakklands sem víti til varnaðar. Franska ríkið er heimsmeistari í almannatryggingagreiðslum og pólitíkin þar í landi hefur reynst ófær um að leysa málið svo þróun ríkisfjármála sé sjálfbær.
Síðan hefur mikið vatn runnið til sjávar. Staða Frakklands er orðin sjálfstætt vandamál á alþjóðamörkuðum. Hækkun vaxta á alþjóðamörkuðum, sem Frakkland hefur orðið einna verst fyrir, hefur gert það að verkum að ef ekkert er að gert munu skuldir vaxa með stjórnlausum hætti. Talað er um skuldasprengju og flest bendir til þess að næsti forseti komi úr átt sem hefði þótt óhugsandi fyrir nokkrum árum.
En hvað með Ísland? Sem betur fer var tenging bóta við launavísitölu milduð en staðreyndin er samt sú að það mun kosta hátt í 10 milljarða króna bara á næsta ári – tvöfalt meira en frumvarpið gerði ráð fyrir. Á sama tíma er verið að draga úr raunútgjöldum til heilbrigðismála og fjárfestingar ríkisins sem hlutfall af landsframleiðslu verða þær minnstu í áratug.
Fátt bendir til þess að við séum á leið í sömu stöðu og Frakkland, blessunarlega. En þegar um helmingur ríkisútgjalda er á sjálfstýringu með ósjálfbærum launahækkunum á kostnað heilbrigðisþjónustu og fjárfestingar, á tíma þar sem ríkissjóður er aðþrengdur og skuldahlutfallið fer hækkandi, erum við allavega ekki á leiðinni í aðra átt en Frakkland.
Arnar Sigurdsson retweeted
So you want to “tax the rich”, do ya?
The LA “Mansion Tax” in its first 3 years has resulted in:
* a revenue DECREASE of $452 million
* 9100 new home constructions blocked (1000 of which were “affordable housing”)
* 16,650 full time construction jobs lost
Arnar Sigurdsson retweeted
Þetta er merkileg saga hér.
visir.is/g/20262940683d/bjor… – at Iceland
Arnar Sigurdsson retweeted
The presumption that the Fed raising short-term rates reduces inflation is predicated on the belief that higher rates reduce demand and investment.
But what if higher rates don’t reduce demand and investment because the demand for intelligence and energy is unaffected by higher rates because winning the race for super intelligence has a near infinite ROI and the demand for compute will remain incalculable.
Why won’t higher rates at this unique moment in history therefore lead to more inflation as interest costs are embedded in everything?
And the problem is compounded as the more the Fed raises rates, the more inflation we will have and the more the Fed will need to raise rates further and so on.
But what if the old models don’t apply to the current paradigm and the Fed is wrong?
I think the Fed might have just made a mistake. Am I right or am I wrong?
Arnar Sigurdsson retweeted
Skilaboð að mínu skapi 🍾
shop.sante.is/pages/skal-fyr…
Arnar Sigurdsson retweeted
Það sem sumir héldu að myndi bjarga þjóðinni eftir hrun, stóriðjan, hefur kostað banka og lífeyrissjóði tugi milljarða króna.
Það sem bjargaði þjóðinni eftir hrun , stórkostleg náttúra landsins, sætir enn árásum frá stórum hluta stjórnmálafólks.
vb.is/frettir/faera-eignarhl… – at Islington, London
Arnar Sigurdsson retweeted
Elon Musk just put a price tag on obedience. It costs $200,000.
Musk: “You don’t need college to learn stuff. Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free.”
Every lecture. Every textbook. Every framework ever written. Free on any screen in any country right now. The entire knowledge monopoly collapsed in a decade. Nobody updated the price tag.
Musk: “Colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores. But they’re not for learning.”
Strip the ivy and the branding. What’s underneath is a four-year obedience trial. Can this person follow instructions on a schedule without asking why.
Musk: “There is a value that colleges have, which is seeing whether somebody can work hard at something, including a bunch of annoying homework assignments, and still do their homework assignments.”
That is the entire six-figure value proposition. Not what you know. Not what you can build. Whether you can be managed. The establishment doesn’t need you educated. It needs you domesticated.
Musk: “If you’re trying to do something exceptional, you must have evidence of exceptional ability. I don’t consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability.”
The system doesn’t produce exceptional. It produces manageable. It takes the most creative years of your life and teaches you to wait for instructions. That is not education. That is containment.
Musk: “Gates is a pretty smart guy, he dropped out. Jobs is pretty smart, he dropped out. Larry Ellison, smart guy, he dropped out.”
They didn’t leave because they couldn’t keep up. They left because the ceiling was underground.
8 billion people now carry the same library in their pocket. The one these institutions charged a lifetime of debt to access.
The only product the university still sells is the belief that you need one.
Arnar Sigurdsson retweeted
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Access to all other Claude models is not affected.
We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…
Arnar Sigurdsson retweeted
The Soviet whaling fleet killed 180,000 whales between 1948 and 1973, delivering rotten carcasses that nobody wanted to eat. Soviet citizens had zero demand for whale meat. The ships hunted anyway, fulfilling quotas handed down from central planners who counted tons of dead whale as economic output.
This was bureaucratic box-checking that nearly drove multiple whale species to extinction. Soviet whalers targeted endangered right whales and humpbacks specifically because they were larger, helping them hit tonnage targets faster. The meat rotted on deck during long voyages back to port, where officials dutifully recorded the numbers and sent reports to Moscow declaring another successful harvest.
Central planners measured success in tons harvested, not consumer satisfaction or long-term sustainability. Factory managers got promoted for exceeding whale quotas, regardless of whether anyone actually wanted whale meat (they didn't). The feedback mechanism that normally connects production to human needs had been severed entirely. When bureaucrats replace market prices with administrative targets, you get mass slaughter with zero purpose.
You still see this today every time politicians promise to "create jobs" in industries that lose money year after year. When government agencies measure their success by dollars spent rather than problems solved. When university administrators chase enrollment numbers instead of student outcomes.
Remove the profit motive and price signals, and you get 180,000 dead whales rotting in the sun while commissars celebrate meeting their targets. You don't get rational planning.
Socialism is fundamentally destructive to the environment and inevitably leads to ecological disasters.
Arnar Sigurdsson retweeted
US economic data keeps surprising to the upside, while European data keeps surprising to the downside. That gap just keeps growing, according to Bloomberg economic surprise indexes.
Arnar Sigurdsson retweeted
The Q4 2025 Rocket Report dropped yesterday and the number that should terrify every government on Earth is not the one going viral.
SpaceX launched 1,159 of the 1,404 spacecraft put into orbit worldwide in Q4 2025. That is 83% of all spacecraft launched by every nation and company on the planet combined. In the United States the number is 97%. China managed 8%. Russia 4%. All of Europe, the continent that built Ariane, managed 0.2%.
One private company now commands greater orbital access than any sovereign power in human history, including the Soviet Union at the peak of the Space Race.
And on March 30, booster B1067 flew for the 34th time. The entire Space Shuttle program flew 135 missions across five orbiters over 30 years. One Falcon 9 first stage has now achieved one quarter of that total in four years of service. The Shuttle cost $1.5 billion per mission. Falcon 9 costs $67 million, with total fuel running $150,000. That is not a cost reduction. That is a change in the physical nature of what orbital access means.
Now layer what happened in the nine days before that flight.
March 21: Terafab breaks ground in Austin. One terawatt per year of AI compute. Logic, memory, and advanced packaging in a single building with a recursive mask-fab-test loop that exists nowhere else. Eighty percent of output allocated to space.
March 22: First renders of the 100-kilowatt AI satellite with solar arrays and radiators, scaling to megawatt. D3 chips designed to run hotter in vacuum where radiative cooling is free.
March 30: 148 satellites deployed in under 24 hours across two missions. Transporter-16 carried 119 payloads from dozens of operators. Starlink 10-44 added 29 more. The booster that flew its 34th mission landed on a droneship 8.5 minutes after liftoff, its 575th successful recovery for the company.
Nobody is reading these events as a single sequence because no analytical framework exists for what is forming.
This is not a space company. It is not a car company. It is not a chip company. It is not an AI company. It is the first vertically integrated civilization-scale stack in human history. One entity now controls fabrication of silicon, launch of mass to orbit, a constellation of 10,139 satellites with autonomous AI collision avoidance executing 300,000 maneuvers per year, the world’s largest battery storage deployment, the only humanoid robot in mass production, and the AI training infrastructure running on 200,000 GPUs scaling to 1.5 million.
From atoms to orbit to intelligence under one roof.
The Soviet Union at its most powerful operated rockets and satellites. TSMC fabricates chips. Google runs AI. Tesla builds cars and batteries. No entity before this moment has controlled the complete vertical from raw silicon through fabrication through launch through orbital infrastructure through energy through robotics through artificial intelligence simultaneously.
And here is the fact that should stop every analyst, every fund manager, and every head of state cold.
The fuel cost to maintain this dominance is $150,000 per launch. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That is less than a house in most American cities. The propellant bill for the vehicle that delivers 97% of American orbital access costs less than a mid-range Tesla.
The bottleneck was never technology. It was never physics. It was never fuel. It was imagination. And one man just announced that 80% of his chip factory’s output is going to space because Earth cannot power what he intends to build.
The Q4 Rocket Report is not a market share chart. It is a civilizational audit. And the audit says one company is building the infrastructure for a species-level transition while every government and competitor on Earth is still filing quarterly earnings.
Arnar Sigurdsson retweeted
BREAKING: Zelensky just landed in the UAE and signed a defence cooperation agreement with President MBZ.
The deal on the table changes everything about this war. Ukraine is offering Gulf states 1,000 drone interceptors per day. Each Sting interceptor costs $2,100. Each Patriot missile it replaces costs $3.9 million. In exchange, Ukraine wants the Patriot missiles the Gulf states are burning through, because Kyiv cannot get enough of them to stop Russian missiles.
Read that again. The country America refused to arm fast enough is now arming America’s allies with a weapon that costs 1,857 times less than the one America cannot produce fast enough.
The National reported on March 27 that Zelensky told reporters: “We’d like to quietly receive the Patriot missiles we have a deficit of, and give them a corresponding number of interceptors.” AFP confirmed the UAE agreement on March 28. Eleven countries have formally requested Ukraine’s drone defence expertise per Zelensky’s own count. Over 200 Ukrainian military specialists are already deployed across the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan.
Here is the arithmetic that should terrify every Pentagon procurement officer on earth.
The United States fired 943 Patriot interceptors in the first four days of the Iran war per a US Congressional study cited by the Jerusalem Post. That is eighteen months of Lockheed Martin’s annual production consumed in 96 hours. Each of those 943 shots cost $3.9 million. Total expenditure: $3.68 billion in four days on defensive interceptions alone. Iran produces 10,000 Shahed drones per month per Reuters. Each drone costs $20,000 to $50,000. The cost exchange ratio is 114 to 1 in Iran’s favour per Military Times.
Ukraine’s Sting interceptor inverts this arithmetic entirely. At $2,100, the cost ratio flips from 114-to-1 against America to roughly 10-to-1 against Iran. Ukraine can supply 1,000 per day. That is 30,000 per month against Iran’s 10,000 Shaheds per month. For the first time in this war, the defender’s production rate exceeds the attacker’s production rate at a fraction of the cost.
And the country that built this weapon is the same country that Trump publicly rejected. “No, they are not helping. We do not need their help. We know more about drones than anyone else” per Fox News. He doubled down: “The last person we need help from is Zelensky.” Meanwhile the Pentagon notified Congress of plans to redirect $750 million in Ukraine-bound Patriot missiles to Gulf states per House of Saud reporting. America is simultaneously refusing Ukraine’s cheap solution and cannibalising Ukraine’s expensive one.
Zelensky framed this explicitly. He told The National: “No matter how many Patriots, THAADs, or other air-defence systems are in the Middle East, that alone is not enough for fully effective air defence.” He told the UK Parliament: “When it comes to shooting down massive Shahed attacks, only Ukrainian experience can really help with this today.”
The Pentagon is spending $3.9 million per interception, raiding Swiss fighter jet accounts to cover shortfalls, and diverting Ukraine’s own Patriot supply to the Gulf. Zelensky is offering the same result for $2,100 and producing 1,000 units per day. The market has a word for this kind of disruption.
The $2,100 drone is the most important weapon in this war. And the country that built it is the one America said it did not need.
Full analysis - open.substack.com/pub/shanak…
Arnar Sigurdsson retweeted
Skelflilegur vitnisburður um stjórn efnahagsmála á síðustu 7 árum. Stóran þátt í skuldafeninu eiga hinar gagnslausu aðgerðir í nafni sóttvarna um tveggja ára skeið; frelsissviptingar, skerðing á atvinnufrelsi og lokun landsins.
mbl.is/frettir/innlent/2026/…
