You do understand that products are "essentially fungible" and crude is semi-fungibl (most crude is pretty fungible), and the US is not an island in this marketplace?

Also, you do realize that Aframax rents from Venezuela are ~$1,5m in early 2026 to ~$3,5M? Even your "cheap case" is increasing crude prices by 5%. But to repeat: the US is not an island in this global marketplace. Products get exported from US refineries and sell at globally competitive prices, which forces US consumers to pay globally-competitive prices as well.

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

Have you checked out tanker rates lately? You absolutely save money by having more domestic supply in this environment.

(Crude isn't exactly "cheap" either)

I just tried this for fun with Gemini (hardly the best model, but I wasn't about to spend the money having an agentic framework of high-end models go over it ;) ). It advised:

1) Working with the Iranians at the upcoming UN meeting to try to strike a deal where the US stops its blockage of Iranian oil in exchange for Iran allowing free traffic through Hormuz, without nuclear programme preconditions.

2) Adding pressure on Putin to accept the Ukrainian offer of a mutual energy industry targeting ceasefire

3) Focus freed up US naval forces on protecting convoys through the Bab-el-Mandeb

4) Launching an emergency Jones Act waiver

5) Order the EPA Administrator to issue temporary waivers easing seasonal Reid Vapor Pressure (RVP) gasoline restrictions and granting flexibility on Tier 3 sulfur credit banking.

6) Convene the CEOs of the top domestic refiners into a taskforce run by the Department of Energy to coordinate autumn maintenance schedules to avoid multiple regional coker and hydrocracker units taking turnaround downtime simultaneously.

7) Formally announce that the administration will not conduct large-scale, unrefined crude releases from the SPR. Signal to the industry that physical crude in domestic storage is adequate, shifting regulatory focus to downstream bottlenecks.

8) Reprogram allocated DOE infrastructure funds ($1.4 billion) to expedite cavern repairs at Bryan Mound and Bayou Choctaw.

9) Deploy the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve (NEHHOR) strictly on an exchange/loan basis (where refiners borrow diesel barrels now and repay them with interest in refined barrels next spring) to protect national balance sheets while easing spot tightness

10) Issue an Executive Order under the Defense Production Act (DPA) to expedite pipeline compressor stations and pipeline permits connecting the Permian Basin to Gulf Coast refining hubs

11) Direct the Surface Transportation Board to prioritize crude and chemical feedstock movements on Class I railroads.

12) Use USDA Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) authorities to establish emergency fuel cost-offset credits for agricultural producers and commercial freight carriers until crack spreads retreat below $30/barrel.

13) Announce this unified security-and-energy plan publicly to provide appropriate signals to the market.

The US economy as a whole would lose more from banning exports than it would gain. If one is concerned about "ordinary people", it makes more sense to continue allowing exports, add a windfall tax on oil companies or add export duties, and then rebate the revenue from that across the US population, than to ban exports.

Had the oil industry not been so naive and spent this whole year betting on TACO and/or Iranian surrender, the US could be making even more money right now on this crisis. New shale production from an existing lease can be added in just 3-6 months, yet shale expansion rates didn't increase over baseline from spring through the summer. Refining capacity is harder to add that quickly, but probably could have been boosted several percent, which would still be a quite meaningful added value. It gets harder to improve capacity now because most types of capacity addition involve downtime and absolutely nobody wants to be shut down now while crack spreads are this high.

I'd love to see the US congress pass a bill renaming Trump ;)

The AI coding assistants can then be used where appropriate and with greater review by the more talented. Reducing the "slop."

So heres the thing. I've had a bunch of my work as the senior dev move from "Work on coding challenges with the younger devs and help them code high quality reliable software" to "code review this AI slop and tell me why it doesnt work" , and its fucking miserable work.

Theres a lot more of it, and its batshit code for the most part. Just illogical choices and no craftmanship (Though I'll give claude one thing;- It comments its code, something I've been yelling at junior coders to do for the better part of my career. Lets the greybeard know what the hell they are trying to achieve so I can look at their code and fix it so it actually achieves it.

Its really weird. If you look at where the school, and neighboring barracks are. The line between the school and the barracks directly lines up to where the carrier is parked in the strait of hormuz. Ok. So that lines up with the possibility that the missile overshot the target. That happens from time to time, even the best weapons systems have targetting whoopsies.

The problem is the school was hit Twice with a "double tap" kill-the-survivors hit. That meant it overshot twice? Less likely.

The bit that weirds me out, is that any reasonable intelligence analysis , on account of being a reasonable human being , would go. "OK we see the target. Problem is its next to a school full of children" (The school is marked on google maps, it wasnt a secret). So the logical solution is you hit it at night when all them kids are at home. No dead children to mess up the narrative or give the missile loaders PTSD.

So yeah, definite incompetence SOMEWHERE. It is plausible indeed that the AI chose the target and it wasn't bright enough to go "Ok, theres kids in danger with this strike, escalate this to a human with some suggested actions to minimize civilian lifes. Even worse is the possibility that it did, and Captain fuck-face said "I dont care, fire anyway".

Good at math: fail.

Ok, so he's one of the tiny earlier models.

Come on, stop projecting. You simply are the same as the orange shitgibbon and co - not considering them Iranians human. And no walls of pretext and excuses can change that. You are the extremist who wants to exterminate others. And a disgusting one at that. Go spew your poison elsewhere.

That will trigger an invasion.

Except in this case it has nothing to do with the AI. Neither the orange shitgibbon nor his goons nor his buddies in Israel consider Iranians people.

"Meta didn't tell Amazon that Muse would access its store" - and? I didn't tell Amazon I'd be accessing its store either before I started shopping there.

This isn't models going off and browsing Amazon for giggles; they're going there because their user told them to. The user would have otherwise told their web browser to; it just would have taken far more steps.

There's no end to the scale up phase.

So demand is going to keep growing at 10x/year... forever? So Anthropic itself is a paperclip maximizer? That eventually the universe itself will be entirely comprised of Anthropic.

Man... until they harvest my atoms to build their latest zettafab, I want to be invested in THAT!