5 entries tagged energy. All writing.
OCTOBER 6, 2026 Aramco's CEO Says Under 6 Billion Barrels Remain. Under 6 Billion of What? Saudi Aramco's chief executive told a London conference that less than six billion barrels of commercial oil inventories remain, "the vast majority not practically available." A viral post set that beside JPMorgan's "operational floor" of 6.8 billion and implied the line had been crossed. The two numbers measure different things, and the real warning in his speech is somewhere else. OCTOBER 6, 2026 Is Bitcoin "Tokenized Compute"? Jason Lowery's AI Argument, Checked Jason Lowery, the MIT researcher behind Softwar, posted that Bitcoin is "tokenized compute" and that AI will need BTC to afford its own actions. Some links in that chain hold and some strain. Here is what his thesis actually says, what the numbers on AI payments look like today, and where I think the argument bends. SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 Eighteen Months and Twenty-One Million A Microsoft executive says most white-collar work gets automated in the next 12 to 18 months. A New York Times investigation says Silicon Valley is already bracing for the underclass that leaves behind. And I keep getting told, in real time, that Bitcoin is the one thing standing between any person, company, or AI agent and what comes next. I checked the actual mechanism — the energy, the bond math, the reserve data, and what AI agents are literally paying each other with this year — and the honest answer splits the argument instead of settling it. SEPTEMBER 16, 2026 The Demonstration The Fed hiked a quarter point on Wednesday, 12 to 0 — unanimous, from a committee that voted 9 to 3 to hold in July. Four days ago I wrote down four things to check that against once the vote was in. Here is what actually happened to each one. SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 A Rate Hike Against a Strait On Friday the inflation number came in at 3.4 percent and the futures market moved to better than 85 percent odds that the Federal Reserve raises interest rates next Wednesday. Take energy out of that 3.4 and it reads 2.4 — a whisker from the target. So the Fed is about to raise the price of money in the United States against a number that is mostly a closed strait on the other side of the world. I wanted to know whether that has ever worked, so I went back through five oil shocks and looked at what the Fed did each time.