Spekulatius

I think people forget that Christianity isn’t the reason for westerns rise, it was the Renaissance and the aptly named age of enlightenment. Basically at that time, the west (Italy mostly) overcame the confines of the Medieval time Christian thinking (Galileo etc) and the age of reasoning started. If we were stuck in deep Christianity, we still would debate on if the earth is flat or not. The Muslims in a way never had their age of enlightenment yet NS that’s why they fall behind if they embrace their religion as a political framework as well. I don’t agree with Karl Marx on many things but I agree on one thing - Religion is Opium for the masses. If we had gotten rid of religion post the Roman empire, we would probably be a couple hundred years ahead in our civilization.

The sole existence of tariffs creates a lot of friction, even the 10-20% ones. if you build complex machinery or equipment with hundreds of components, the part tend to come from all over the world. So to estimate the cost, you need to take tariffs into account which seems to be changing on a dime too. We have not even seen counter tariffs for the most part yet. I personally noticed that supplier put tariff clauses in PO acknowledgements and lead time in general seem to have expanded. I thine very business with complex supply chains is going to be affected. We have seen this first hand with RTX which already had $850M in cost impact for 2025 and that was after substantial mitigations. It will be a while until the fallout from this becomes visible.

Read the Koran (yes , I have done it - at least the 100 first pages) and it become immediately clear that it has expansionism by any means as a core feature. No other religion is build like it. Islam is also very narrowly defined rule based with little flexibility which means that 1500 years after it was founded, it is hopeless outdated in term of its rules and modus operas do, a bit like the Christianity would be if the New Testament would never have been written. i think this is societies Following the Koran by the book literally have very poor outcomes. Fundamentalist Islamism is a poor operating system but the issue is that the Koran isn’t written in way to make it flexible, so one is stuck in the past following it.

interesting analysis from Michael Clarke about Xi Jinping attending the Victory day parade. That means that they are now openly behind Russia whilst being technically neutral before. In any case the Victory parade was a diplomatic success for Putin.

@Maddino thank you for your perspective regarding AFD. I agree it should not be forbidden but I think there are several members that should not be allowed to have a public office, due to criminal backgrounds. I think the CDU needs to take the issues that lead to their rise seriously and address them. Whether that is possible within the great coalition with the SPD remains to be seen. Otherwise, I agree denial will make the AFD only stronger.

@John Hjorth I am surprised that 3 &4 are legally possible in Denmark.

There were no new powers given to the BND (spy agency). There are far bigger issue in the US (patriot act), suppression of the press, pressure on judges if they do not fit the Trump narrative and also the de facto concentration camps that are outsourced to El Salvador.

Trust with respect to what? I think these strikes (which violate Pakistans sovereignty ) are for Indias domestic audience to reinforce Modi’s strongman image. They are unlikely to solve the underlying problem. Did the Pakistan’s really shoot down 5 Indian fighter jets? if so, the Indian strikes were a disaster. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/did-pakistan-really-shoot-down-five-indian-fighter-jets-heres-what-to-know

Lubrizol was pretty mediocre if not bad.

The valuations in India aren’t to their liking, imo I think Abel being Canadian can find something in Canada and then they already did something in Japan where there are still a lot of cheap business that can be bought.

Well DHI EBIT margin is ~15.5% run rate, so $10k/$375k house is a 2.7% margin hit and means more than 15% lower earnings and an even larger hit to FCF just from tariffs, if they eat the costs. It’s not the end of the world but it’s substantial. Now add higher labor costs and more competition and I can see margins going back to ~11-12% EBIT margins or ~25% lower fairly easily. Then you are buying a homebuilders for 13x forward earnings, which does not look that cheap. DHI is better than most others as they seem to be low cost producers, so they will probably gain market share in a downturn.

I thought this would take a little longer: https://www.dw.com/en/denmark-says-goodbye-to-letters/video-72354102

Inthink there are quite some bearish forces at work here: 1) low affordability while tariffs (Aluminum, lumber) will add ten thousands of $ to build costs per SFH 2) less immigrant Labour means higher Labour costs especially for homebuilders. 3) lower consumer confidence ( which likely impacts housing demands) 4) interest rates in the long end moving higher due to Trump policies (weak USD etc) It looks like builder still have above baseline margins but those have been coming down and I think they continue to do so. On the flip side, the valuation based on some metrics like P/B are quite moderate. I think we are going lower from here. FWIW, many other cyclicals are in the same boat.

This has been correct even for my generation from the 70‘s and 80‘s. Most Nazis were already dead in the 80‘s. However, there is a difference between moving on and saying it didn’t happen and Hitler wasn’t all that wrong which is the camp that some of the AFD leaders fall too. I really don’t care how many votes they get, but these guys are total whackos with plans like tearing down all the wind turbines, just because. I don’t think they can be compared too Meloni either. Meloni is foremost an Italian Nationalist, while the AFD has far more sinister undercurrents that they are not willing to shake off, it seems.

Sounds great. I don’t have a smoker , I guess that’s another life goal. On a side note - I never get why people pay a lot of money to eat steak at a restaurant. Steak is one of easiest and quickest things to make at home, especially with a grill. Buy a good piece of steak at Costco, marinate for a day in the fridge and then preheat the grill put the meat in, flip it once and you have a great steak 15 minutes later.

The trend was always there to move to cheaper, warmer and less perhaps less hectic locations, but it still does not make sense to encourage people who are on the fence to do so. Same with MA and their millionaires income tax. This thinking is short sighted since rich people have options to move elsewhere while poorer people tend to be stuck.

Thx. I have been to Gilde Brewery and depending on what you order, it pretty good. The owner after all is German, so at least he knows what it supposed to taste like. I will give Musashi a try even though it’s at the other side of the town for me. I have tried New Zealand cafe and their sushi was pretty good. The largest deficiency in the CLT area so far is Szechuan and Dim Sum which doesn’t seem to hit the spot and/or is expensive. Even in our semi rural Boston suburbs 35 miles out we had better options within 20 min for both.

Yes, the aerospace supply chains are screwed up. RTX announced a ~$850M hit to earnings for 2025 from tariffs and that is after significant mitigations. Thats ~9% of operating earnings. Raytheon had otherwise stellar earnings and strong outlook, but that’s a lot of money.

Anti democratic, Anti semitic , anti Islam, Holocaust denier, Plenty of active Neo Nazis in party positions, openly racism (for example they want to take away German citizenship from immigrants based on of race as well as political opinions). 28/48 of the AFD delegates have a criminal record. Some are more of less openly paid by Russia. https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/alternative-germany-afd-party-what-you-need-know https://www.dw.com/de/recherche-afd-schickt-gewalt-und-straftäter-in-parlamente/a-68786293

That was written in 1976. It’s almost 50 years later now and Gunther Grass opinion would be quite different, I dare to say. Also, tell me that this wouldn’t be cancelled by MAGA:

Correct on both

South Korea is going to be large weapons supplier going forward, because they still know how to make stuff in volume:

No more $RTX ?

Yes, it’s. Wienerschnitzel from pork’s chop. It’s often served with red cabbage (Ok, but not my favorite).

My recent adventures. Every pic is food from a different country