pbmonster
4d ago
I'm not sure what exactly the Iranians have been building exactly, but they probably don't run refineries with processes as sophisticated as the Golf refineries. The thing that makes suddenly processing large amounts of heavy crude difficult is that you need to build additional cokers, and in the west those are multi billion dollar projects. How much of that is due to economical, ecological or bureaucratic reasons I can't tell. Probably all of the above, and an Iranian refinery will certainly have more slack in all three dimensions.
pbmonster
5d ago
maybe the coastline near Bandar Abbas. If this succeeds the US will (after doing minesweeping and patrolling the coast for hidden marine drones and such) declare the strait open, and the next move will belong to the P&I cartel.
This is a pipe dream. Iran has bunkerized anti-ship missiles all along the coast, not only around Bandar Abbas. Same is true for "covert bases" for mine layers (small warehouses in fishing harbors) - you can place seafloor mines from fishing boats/speed boats, after all, at night or in heavy traffic.
Also, with the state of US naval assets and the... current disposition of allied navies, minesweeping of the straight would take forever. If the IRGC gets significant numbers of mines out (and they do seem to have the capability), clearing them would take many months.
And then, once all this is done, the first tanker making a run for it might learn that Iran now actually has integrated rudimentary radar guidance into their shaheds or their 1000+km range ballistic missiles. Locating a tanker on open water using radar is not exactly difficult - its rudimentary WWII tech, radio hobbyist without further technological background can do it.
At which point the cartel will concede that, yes, the straight is actually still closed. Even if that drone/missile was shot down, because everybody knows that sooner or later one will slip through.
pbmonster
5d ago
America lacks the refining capacity to handle the domestically produced light crude
It only lacks the refinery capacity to handle it at maximum economic optimization, right? All those gulf refineries could process light crude, maybe with minor retooling. But they're not optimized for it, and a lot of expensive equipment specifically built for heavy crude would sit unused. Going the other way (refining heavy crude in a light crude refinery) is significantly more complex and actually has many years of lead time for the equipment that's required additionally.
So, the interesting question is really: at what cost? You could ban all oil exports, and refine the light crude for domestic consumption in the gulf refineries. But the price at the pump would be difficult to guess.
pbmonster
5d ago
The AI Labs could all be happy fat tech companies if they just became inference providers.
Yes, but we aren't quite there yet. Not even close, in my opinion, at least when we're talking about serious job displacement. Unless there's a phase change, were looking at years of more insane capex and opex.
And those trillions will need to be payed back with interest. We're not talking about a Netflix or Office 365 licence that every office drone just has. For millions of workers, access to those tools will rival transportation and housing in ongoing cost.
No problem, if your employer already has half the staff on SolidEdge/Ansys/ect licenses and generally does not care what toolboxes everybody gets. For the rest? Small business, low productivity labor, labour limited by hardware throughout (classic example: radiology)? They won't really contribute to paying off that debt, so they won't get a lot of tokens, and none from the good models.
We've gotten used to tech, especially software, being cheap. For the current economics to make any sense, this will come to a hard stop. On the cost side, AI is much more like an excavator than like a shovel, and it really needs to replace just as many workers to make sense building them.
And I can well imagine this never happening. Maybe they'll never get reliable enough for that much unsupervised work, especially work you can't write unit tests for.
pbmonster
6d ago
It's materially improved my productivity at work
Then you have people still in 2026 who genuinely think AI will "go away"
Note that both of those can be true at the same time. Total cumulative AI capex will probably cross $2 trillion this year, and cumulative opex is on the same order again. And that's just in the US.
If this "technological revolution" doesn't end up replacing a significant percentage of national labor costs, it actually might fade away - and the only thing remaining will be whatever open weight models can be run on cheap hardware at that point in time. And if the Chinese keep releasing last year's SOTA for free, none of the envisioned business models might hold water.
Either way, there's really only one way costs can go from here. If business AI doesn't go away, those of us still with jobs will get to work with agents costing our employers on the same order as the people they replaced.
I mean it's possible that I've been reading propaganda. But what's your explanation why the carriers were inside the Persian Gulf during Operation Iraqi Freedom, but this time they're so far offshore they need to run aerial refueling operations for most strike aircraft to make it back?
It's gotta be anti-ship missiles, right?
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