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Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.
  • Fears of a Wider Mid-East War are Growing ...
    Mutual Assured Destruction: ”The threat of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) created fear (during the Cold War). This theory assumed that each superpower had enough nuclear weaponry to destroy the other. If one superpower attempted a first strike on the other, they themselves would also be destroyed. However, the MAD theory implied that both would be deterred from doing so.”
    So MAD mean mutual destruction. Not what we want; nor is Iran capable of inflicting such damage on us. I’m a bit surprised we haven’t heard much from Russia. Were they to back Iran with their nuclear capability, then MAD could become a viable possibility. Even then, the idea of MAD is that neither side will use a nuclear weapon because it would lead to the total destruction of both.
    I think what @finder means is that If Iran used a nuclear weapon against the U.S. or an ally like Israel we would wipe them off the map with our superior nuclear weaponry. Possibly. But the complete incineration of a country and 100% of the inhabitants presents a daunting moral issue. Could we sleep at night after such a mass extermination? One might study Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five for psychological insights.
    Might be a good time to watch the 60s flick Fail Safe with Henry Fonda if you haven’t already seen it.
  • Fears of a Wider Mid-East War are Growing ...
    Most of the discussions about the situation that I hear everywhere are based on the presumption that if Iran has nuclear bombs, it will use them, sooner or later, perhaps within a year. I asked Google AI, and here is what I got:
    Using a nuclear weapon would likely be considered suicidal for Iran. Here's why:
    Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD): If Iran were to use a nuclear weapon, it would likely face retaliation from other nuclear powers, such as the United States or Israel, resulting in devastating consequences for Iran.
    Preservation of the regime: The paramount foreign policy goal of the Iranian leadership is the security and survival of the regime itself. Using a nuclear weapon would likely threaten that very survival due to the inevitable response from other nations.
    Avoidance of further isolation: Possession and particularly the use of a nuclear weapon would likely lead to severe international isolation, which Iran seeks to avoid.
    In summary, experts generally believe that Iran's leadership is not irrational or suicidal, and therefore unlikely to initiate a nuclear attack that would result in its own destruction. Their actions are primarily driven by the desire to maintain power and the regime's security.

    In a more detailed reply, AI admitted that there is always a risk of miscalculation.
  • Fears of a Wider Mid-East War are Growing ...
    Israel apparently does not have the capability to destroy the underground Fordo nuclear facility.
    I wouldn't be surprised if the U.S. strikes this site with bunker-busting bombs.
    An Iran without nuclear weapon capabilities would be a positive development
    but I don't know what the repercussions may be.
    I'm very concerned about increased U.S. involvement in this war.
    I've not made any portfolio changes because my target asset allocation is within range
    and it's unclear how the stock market will react to future developments.
  • Futures tonight after the attack against Iran
    How convenient that he spins it? This put Putin in a tough spot. A real test of friend vs. foe.
    IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON
    . implies the war will be escalated. Like it or not, US will be part of it in supporting Israel.
    What are good downside protection in this conflict? I am increasing cash position and oversea debts while reducing stocks.
  • Futures tonight after the attack against Iran
    Donald J. Trump
    ”Iran should have signed the ‘deal’ I told them to sign. What a shame, and waste of human life. Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!”
    (Excerpt of tweet displayed on Bloomberg tonight.)
  • Futures tonight after the attack against Iran
    Current report from The Guardian:
    Iran seeks talks with Israel –
    Stocks pushed higher after the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran has been urgently signaling that it seeks an end to hostilities and resumption of talks over its nuclear programs.
    Reuters has been told that Iran has asked Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Oman to press US President Donald Trump to use his influence on Israel for an immediate ceasefire in return for Tehran’s flexibility in talks about its nuclear program.
  • Moved to OT: Israeli military says strikes hit dozens of targets in Iran
    As David Moran has suggested, given that the main stream of commentary in this thread has drifted from any relevance to economic issues, I'm moving it to the OT section.
  • Global alarms rise as China's critical mineral export ban takes hold
    It can be done carefully just as the US nuclear program developed successfully. Rare earth metals are nationally critical materials that need to be produce domestically, and not outsourced elsewhere.
    There are established and safe processes to refine radioactive minerals such as uranium (and others) for the nuclear program. Question is always the added cost, but it can be done.
  • Tax Bill Threatens the Power Grid’s New Workhorse
    Following are excerpts from a newsletter published by Ed Ballard of the Wall Street Journal:
    image
    The U.S. pioneered the combination of solar panels and batteries that makes it possible to get power from the sun when it isn’t shining. Now it risks being left behind thanks to a trade war and Republicans’ plan to withdraw clean-energy subsidies.
    The tax bill passed by the House would phase out tax breaks for various green technologies, including energy storage facilities that use batteries to store power that gets released when the grid needs it. Grid batteries are also heavily exposed to tariffs because, unlike EV batteries, practically none are made in the U.S. They are made in China.
    This double whammy casts a shadow over a technology that is doing the heavy lifting as U.S. power demand rises for the first time in a generation. Batteries will account for 29% of the power capacity installed this year, behind only solar, the Energy Information Administration says.
    The Senate may prolong the tax credits, and Wednesday’s court ruling that voided—for now—many of Trump’s tariffs underscores the uncertainty over trade policy. For green-energy companies that typically line up customers before committing to projects, that uncertainty makes it harder to put a price on power: “We have never seen such a high demand for energy, but there’s no way we can move forward,” said David Ruiz de Andrés, chief executive of solar-plus-storage company Grenergy.
    The Madrid-based company has ambitions to grow in the U.S., lured by tech companies vying to build power-hungry data centers, but currently it isn’t investing in projects besides a few already under way. Grenergy’s new $4 billion investment plan prioritizes Europe, its home market, and Latin America, where it recently signed a deal with Chile’s state-controlled copper-mining giant, Codelco, to provide round-the-clock power from vast solar and battery arrays.
    Solar power, 24/7 is becoming feasible (in very sunny places like Chile, anyway) thanks to battery technology improvements from Chinese manufacturers such as BYD and CATL. Their race to squeeze more capacity into less space reduced grid batteries’ cost by 40% between 2023 and 2024, according to BloombergNEF.

    Not doomed, but more expensive-

    Low costs, and the sheer availability of solar panels and batteries, means U.S. growth would likely be slowed rather than halted by trade barriers and withdrawn subsidies, said BloombergNEF policy expert Ethan Zindler: “Some projects will get canceled, some will go forward and get priced higher,” he said.
    There aren’t enough gas turbines, let alone nuclear plants, to meet U.S. power demand. As Zindler sees it, the question is how much potential demand is destroyed by higher prices—tech companies can build more data centers in other countries—and how much Americans pay for electricity.

    Comment: As we shoot ourselves in the foot once again.
  • Tariffs
    Meanwhile, back at the ranch.....
    NRA is being streamlined, or de-regulated or un-toothed, to make nuclear power easier to produce.
    MUTANTS FOR NUKES! You can join the fraternity, too.
  • Future High Energy Demands - The Moon as a Data Center
    Microsoft made a significant statement by entering a twenty-year agreement with Constellation Energy, which plans to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the site of the 1979 partial nuclear meltdown. Constellation Energy plans to invest $1.6 billion to refurbish and restart the reactor by 2028 with an estimated 835 MW of capacity. Microsoft entered the agreement to provide the energy demands for its AI data centers.
    and
    There is one problem with this: we cannot continue to scale energy usage like this without making the Earth inhospitable to organic life.
    how about the moon:
    we will in just a few short decades be able to deliver payloads of a self-assembling farm of robots to mine the Moon, create chip fabs, build, and ultimately tile the Moon with GPUs. The Moon has a surface area of 14.6 million square miles, roughly the size of Asia. If we very conservatively tiled even half the Moon with GPUs and solar panels, the Moon could sustain a billion times the compute of the Colossus cluster and, with a few turns of Moore’s law driving chip technology forward, even a trillion times the compute.
    https://palladiummag.com/2025/04/18/the-moon-should-be-a-computer/
  • So Much for Flight to Safety
    Why doesn't he just go with a nuclear 1,000,000 % tariff and be done with it? That would show them who's who! Why screw around?
    Hold on... gimme a minute... aren't his MAGA hats made in China? Maybe an exemption for those...
  • Tariffs
    I disagree. Everything has a shelf life.
    First, of course, they won't have the opportunity to "vote for him again no matter what" as president unless well, unless the unthinkable.
    Next, regardless if NO MATTER WHAT is in CAPS or not...His base is clearly stoopid, but if any/all of you lose your job, your home, your retirement savings, the country went belly up and we're on the brink of nuclear war, a worthy % of the cultists will fold.
    There are already, albeit weak, signs that some of the cardboard cut out Red Party legislators are starting to buckle. The 2-week recess couldn't come at a better time. Those a-holes are going to be getting earfuls in their districts.
    And I'll conclude my participation on this by saying I'm sure few thought McCarthyism would die either.
  • How Tariffs Could Shock America’s Power System
    If Tariff Baby's tantrum on Wednesday is as bad as folks think, how long before China and Russia retaliate by starting a coordinated dump of Treasuries in large numbers to royally destabilize the dollar and US role in the world economy? IMO that'd be a nuclear option, financially-speaking.
    (Of course, FOTUS is already blowing up the US' role in the world anyway...)
  • Trump cuts threaten a measurement lab critical for advanced chips and medical devices
    Following are excerpts from a current NPR report:
    The Trump administration is planning to close a small, obscure laboratory whose work undergirds everything from microchip manufacturing to nuclear fusion.
    The Atomic Spectroscopy Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides the definitive measurements of atomic spectra. Spectra are specific sets of colors emitted by different atomic elements. Those sets of colors act as atomic fingerprints that are used to characterize a wide variety of things — from the gases in far-off stars, to the blood in a person's finger.
    The laboratory has been in continuous operation for more than 120 years, but in mid-April it will be forced to close, according to a letter sent by the lab's head, Yuri Ralchenko, to dozens of colleagues around the world.
    "We were recently informed that unless there is a major change in the Federal Government reorganization plans, the whole Atomic Spectroscopy Group will be laid off in a few weeks," Ralchenko wrote in the letter, which was emailed on March 18 and seen by NPR. The letter was first reported by Wired. Ralchenko says in the letter that he was told "our work is not considered to be statutorily essential for the NIST mission."
    But thousands of scientists and engineers disagree. A petition is now circulating to reverse the closure, and it had received close to 3,000 signatures as of Wednesday. Among the signatories is Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sheldon Glashow.
    "I cannot believe that the government would be stupid enough" to slash this kind of work, Glashow said in a video statement. The overwhelming support exists because the group's spectral measurements get used in almost every field imaginable, according to Elizabeth Goldschmidt, a physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. "You look at the very specific color of a star, it can tell you the makeup of the star. You look at the blood in someone's finger ... and that can tell you how much oxygen is in the blood," she says.
    But to measure colors accurately, devices like telescopes and pulse oximeters must be correctly calibrated, and that's where the Atomic Spectroscopy Group comes in. The laboratory maintains a database of atomic spectra that are the standard reference used to ensure devices are functioning correctly. Every month, the database receives around 70,000 queries from around the world, according to a recent post about it on NIST's website — and it's cited in two research papers per day, according to a recent presentation by Ralchenko.
    Among the researchers querying the database is Brett Morris, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. who works on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Morris is studying planets around distant stars. Sometimes he says, the light coming from those stars looks surprising. "The first thing you have to do is to figure out who's to blame — was it oxygen? Was it carbon? Was it neon?" he says. "And the resource for doing that is the database produced by the Atomic Spectroscopy Group."
    In addition, the laboratory conducts precise measurements of ultraviolet atomic spectra that are critical to developing advanced microchips. Ultraviolet light is used to etch tiny circuits, and advances in the field require detailed knowledge of the atomic spectra of elements in the extreme ultraviolet. There are a handful of facilities that research ultraviolet spectra, and this group is one of them, Goldschmidt says. It also studies plasmas, which are ionized gases that enshroud nuclear fusion reactions. Researchers around the world are pursuing fusion as a clean and virtually limitless form of energy, and detailed knowledge of plasmas is essential to that development.
    Neither NIST nor its parent agency, the Department of Commerce, responded to NPR's inquiries about the closure, but the savings from closing the lab would be minimal. NIST's annual budget is just $1.5 billion, less than 0.02% of the government's $7 trillion annual budget.
    image
    A silicon wafer with microchips etched into it. Microchips are etched using specific wavelengths of light. Better measurements of the wavelengths in ultraviolet light are required to advance chip manufacturing.
    Within NIST, the atomic spectroscopy group is made up of seven full-time federal employees. The group's employees even pay out of pocket for coffee and sugar used in its coffee breaks and have been doing so since 1973, according to a video celebrating its anniversary last year. By contrast, if the spectroscopy group closes, the costs will be enormous, scientists say. Researchers around the world will waste hours on the internet hunting around for the best spectral measurements, says Evgeny Stambulchik, a physicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
    What currently takes a couple of minutes might soon take "many hours, maybe many days," Stambulchik says. "Multiply that several hours by several thousands of scientists and you understand the waste of work time there would be without such a centralized database," he says.
    But Goldschmidt says the real blow would be to industry. Having centralized and agreed-upon calibration and measurement standards "is what allows industries to innovate and make new products," she says. "Everyone wins when this happens at NIST because everyone can rely on what NIST does, and they don't have to invest their time and money in doing it themselves."
    Comment: Stupid, STUPID, STUPID !!!
  • Promised 25% Tariffs on Steel / Aluminum Rattle Commodities, Currencies and Stock Futures
    Short of launching a nuclear missile, it appears that the markets don't really care what Orange does.
    His tariffs are viewed as temporary bluffs, for the most part. The tearing apart of the US govt and our democracy also appear trivial to Mr. Market.
    Would be really nice if we could all learn to ignore him as well, but the media makes sure to echo his every musing or ramble. And der fuhrer wouldn't have it any other way.
  • SMRs
    Thanks. I will have to find the YouTube video you suggested to answer the following:
    Who is SK?
    Who built and licensed the UAE plant? Where did UAE get their operations personnel?
    Is the knowledge of builders of nuclear aircraft carriers not useful? Must we invent the wheel?
  • SMRs
    quick reply on SMRs from wealthtrack thread :
    am a big fan of nuclear power, but the technology is far down the list of issues.
    i suggest the podcast 'decoupled' ; it has covered the most (transparent) success cases have been canada , UAE, SK, and france; used old but well-proven technology via the largest scale plants. this success was largely due to a permanent experienced workforce coupled with actual scientists on the regulatory side. china may join the list here if they are are ever completely public about process and safety monitoring.
    for SMRs, there is currently no method to select nor combine the best ideas, as dozens of companies have IP and money at stake.
    but if this can be is done objectively, they must be mfg in VERY large numbers AND still have a permanent experienced workforce and protected from the whims of political interference. additional cost of a new grid model has a lot of unknowns, could it be more robust AND cheaper? probably not.
    the u.s. is about as far away from any of these scenarios as it has ever been.
  • Inflation watch- Your Coffee just went up (then down) by 50%
    From Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American:
    "Will Freeman of the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy, posted: 'I can’t think of many *worse* strategic blunders for the U.S., as it competes w/ China, than going nuclear against its oldest strategic ally & last big country in S. America where it enjoys a trade advantage…. Trump certainly expects that b[ecause] 1/3 of Colombian exports go to the U.S. Petro will be forced to back down. But Petro seems to welcome the fight & has already signaled wishes to deepen ties w/ China. Colombia will lose partnership on security it badly needs. Only China stands to gain from this.'"
    I can't wait to see what other brilliant maneuvers are carried out
    by Trump, an undeniable strategic mastermind.
    His sensible actions will surely make our country great once again!