Xan López

@xanlopez.net

10426 Followers 1650 Following

• political economy, climate change, open protocols. • web: xanlopez.net • work: @institutomeridiano.org, @igalia.com • words: @corrientecalida.com, amalgama.ghost.io • voice: @margendemaniobra.net • signal: xanlpz.02

Memento, 2000
The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan, 2026
European Central Bank President tells Euronews in an exclusive interview that it is "pretty obvious we need to have a European asset" that the markets see as safe and liquid, and one that can compete with the US. Christine Lagarde has welcomed the Spanish government's proposal for joint borrowing, telling Euronews it marks the start of a discussion based on merit rather than "over my dead body" positions, as tough talks on the next European budget get underway.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
A black and white picture of Karl Marx with red laser eyes.
The problem has worsened since a blackout in April 2025 that plunged most of Spain and Portugal into darkness. Since then, Spain’s national grid operator, Red Eléctrica, has been more aggressive in ordering farms offline, because solar complicates network management. Power systems require stability in both frequency (the grid’s rhythm) and voltage (the electrical pressure that keeps power flowing reliably). Traditionally, large spinning turbines helped maintain this balance, but solar is more prone to sudden shifts in supply and demand and requires more active control.
SPIEGEL International Abo This isn't absurd. In fact, there is even concrete evidence that Agamben has a valid point. The siesta hasn't existed in Spain since the fall of 2012. That was when the Spanish government, under pressure from the euro troika * of the European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF, eliminated the siesta.
Discourse on voluntary servitude Why people enslave themselves to authority Étienne de la Boétie
"It is absurd to have people die because of the heat," said the leader of the Rassemblement National party. "If I am elected president, I will put into place a massive air-conditioning plan, starting in places with the most vulnerable populations - hospitals, care homes and schools." Far-left leader and rival candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon hit back: "Absolutely not. Installing air conditioning everywhere would only mean increasing the damage," he said, alluding to the risk of increased carbon emissions.
Portada del número de primavera de 2026 de Corriente Cálida.
Now it's happened again, with Farage making exactly the same mistake: a piss-poor candidate, who could charitably be called unvarnished but could uncharitably be described as a fucking moron, with a catastrophic online history to his name. With a crap candidate in place, Farage then decided to go on TV after a murder case and expressly disrespect the father of the victim. He spent much of the campaign actively trying to encourage race riots. This was obscene, But it was also something more prosaic: it was electorally unwise.
Winners and Losers The IEA overestimated gas growth in Asia and underestimated solar Forecast Actual 547 TWh Gas 17 TWh 465 TWh Solar 1,333 TWh Note: Shows expected growth in Asian power generation between 2018 and 2025, based on actual 2018 generation, actual 2025 generation, and the 2018 World Energy Outlook's Current Policies Scenario estimates for 2025. Actual 2025 generation figures are from Ember. Source: International Energy Agency, Ember, Bloomberg Opinion calculations
HMS: The belief that the Peace of Westphalia (1648) somehow set the world on a path away from ancient agrarian empires and toward a modern system of sovereign states is untrue for several reasons. As a historical matter, the end of formal empires—even within the Westphalian framework—is extremely recent. I was alive as some of the last countries were decolonized. And when you look at empires, heterogeneity is important—there are always zones of partial sovereignty and layered governance. Many of the places we call states today are effectively in that same semi-sovereign position. Europe possesses greater local sovereignty and legal autonomy than many regions, but militarily it is very clearly semi-sovereign, and monetarily it sits a step below the Federal Reserve and the offshore dollar system. Europe also remains populated with American military bases, as do Japan and South Korea. And this is asymmetrical too: you won’t find German military bases in the US. What we conventionally describe as sovereign states are in fact components of a broader imperial system, differentiated by varying degrees of autonomy.
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/. https://www.ft.com/content/0e78efc2-4b88-4810-84dc-97d157eaa11a We have been here before. The imbalances of the 1980s fuelled the protectionism the Plaza Accord sought to contain; those of the 2000s unwound in the catastrophe of 2008. We do not need a third demonstration. Co-operation on addressing imbalances is in individual countries’ interests and in their mutual interest. Europe should act on the Draghi report, integrating capital markets and boosting productivity, defence investment and innovation. China should invest in its people so households can afford to spend, while scaling back the subsidies that fuel deflationary “involution”. The US should put its debt on a sustainable path and tighten oversight of non-bank finance. The choice is not between adjustment and comfort. It is between adjustment that is gradual and shared, and adjustment that is disorderly and imposed by a crisis of the market’s choosing. The first will make everyone better off. The second has a long and unhappy history, not only for the economies with large imbalances but for every country. We still have time to choose.
The Almighty Dollar Brendan Greeley Crown Currency, 2026
The commercial structure on top of that chemistry is lopsided. Petrol and road diesel are roughly half of what the world's refineries sell and considerably more than half of the margin. The rest of the slate rides along. Jet fuel, bitumen and lubricants are passengers whose tickets have been subsidised by drivers for a hundred years. The fixed costs of the site, the crude units, the hydrocrackers, the people, the turnarounds, get recovered mostly across the road fuels, because that is where the volume and the pricing power live. That is the rent, and the tenant is leaving slowly.
The plan for a 2 percent (€32.8 billion) cut to the European Commission's proposal for 2028 to 2034, put forward by the Cypriot government in its role at the six-month helm of the presidency of the Council of the EU, falls short of the demands by fiscally conservative countries, including Germany and Netherlands. "It is unaffordable, unbalanced, and with the wrong focus. The overall volume remains far too high at a time when fiscal space is limited across Europe and difficult choices are unavoidable," Dutch Finance Minister Eelco Heinen wrote in a statement on Thursday after the Cypriot negotiating document — known as a "negobox" — was published. "For the Netherlands, this is a no-go box, " he said.
A screenshot of an account verification dialog on mu.social. The account is verified by Eurosky social.
Backrooms movie poster A24
China is now criticized for growing trade surpluses while failing to strengthen household consumption. Its critics, however, don’t really have a leg to stand on. For over fifteen years, Europe has pursued its own version of demand suppression. Following the euro crisis, policymakers embraced internal devaluation through wage restraint and fiscal austerity. Growth was expected to come from exports: while domestic demand was scolded as profligate, trade surpluses were celebrated as evidence of virtue. The irony is that much of today’s European anxiety reflects the breakdown of precisely that model. European policymakers increasingly describe China’s rise as a competitiveness problem, and spend much more time on supply-side fixes than sensible demand-side ones. From Beijing’s perspective, Europe spent a decade playing the same game. The difference is that China invested more aggressively, and expanded productive capacity more successfully than Europe’s purely internal devaluation based strategy.
This may be something China is banking on, given the experience of the first China shock. In practice, this is extremely difficult to imagine as a durable arrangement. Europe is not the US. The EU lacks both the political appetite and the institutional architecture that allowed the US to serve as the world’s credit-fueled consumer market of last resort. European governments remain deeply attached to irrational levels of fiscal restraint and debt aversion. They continue to struggle to create EU-level safe assets.
Talk Talk - It's My Life (1984)
When you publish a post, ATmosphere shares it on Bluesky and stores the full article on your AT Protocol account as a structured record. Bluesky replies, likes, and reposts come back as comments on your WordPress post. Approved comments from logged-in readers go the other way and appear as replies under your original Bluesky post. The same conversation lives in both places without you having to copy anything by hand.
sin As a person with a conscience, I have always experienced questions of energy as questions of sin; to leave a light on is not simply inefficient but a moral failing. Each kilometer a car travels on fossil fuel carries with it a quantum of guilt and must be justified in some way, otherwise a moral stain attaches. Solar panels and electrification changes all this. 8 or 9 months out of the year, I live in a world of abundance: the electrical generation capacity that I have called into existence is free, clean, and much, much more than I need. Owning and operating a car still has externalities, but the emissions and cost aspects are entirely gone. It’s a funny feeling, and disorienting.
The concept of growth as a surrogate for redistribution appears, in retrospect, as the great conservative idea of the last generation. By conservative I do not mean militantly right-wing, for indeed wide circles of social democracy and the left have implicitly embraced the covenant it implies. Nonetheless, in the confrontation with Marxism and socialism, conservatives had only three choices: an outworn insistence on the value of traditional élites and privileges, which had little prospect for success under conditions of universal suffrage; or a fascism requiring that all class rivalry must be submerged in the search to aggrandize national authority and territory (which emerged discredited by the war); or the non-zero-sum pursuit of economic growth in the hope that this might make the older doctrines of class conflict irrelevant. Inflation has played an important role in preserving a broad consensus around the third concept; for when growth could not keep up with expectations, inflation helped disguise the lag. But beyond a certain rate, inflation cannot play this role as social lubricant and instead aggravates the very distributional conflicts it helped as-suage.
or continued levies through inflation. Soviet finance revealed a situation where an inflationary levy seemed actually purposeful and not just an expedient. After the fact, the Soviets justified their drastic depreciation of the rouble as a way of expropriating the bourgeoisie. During the era of War Communism, Soviet theorists could likewise celebrate a reversion to a moneyless economy characterized by direct requisitioning and provision of goods and services to workers. Even as over 10,000 employees printed roubles (the total value of which by 1921 was no more than a thousandth of the money stock in November 1917), the state pared rents, sought moneyless payments between its agencies and envisaged the elimination of taxes. Still, the monetary collapse remained, it seems, a result of desperation, not calculation in advance.
Shares in US carmaker Ford have soared 25 percent over two days, the sharpest jump since 2020, amid investor hopes that its new energy unit will profit from the data centre boom. Ford launched its subsidiary, Ford Energy, this week as part of a pivot away from electric vehicles and towards providing battery-storage capacity for Big Tech giants building AI data centres, deploying technology licensed from Chinese battery giant CATL. The stock jumped 13 per cent on Wednesday after Morgan Stanley analysts said its relationship with CATL gave Ford an "under-appreciated strategic competitive advantage for its energy storage business", estimating it could generate a gross margin of 25 per cent and grow to be worth $10bn.
Today's proposals address these obstacles, delivering on President Ursula von der Leyen's political guidelines. To create a smoother travel experience for passengers and advance the EU's climate objectives, the Commission proposes measures enabling single-ticket bookings across multiple rail operators, making the rail market more transparent and accessible. Passengers will be able to find, compare and purchase services combined from different rail operators into one single ticket, which can be bought in one transaction on a ticketing platform of their choice. This can be an independent platform, or the rail operator's ticketing service. In the event of missed connections during multi-operator rail journeys, passengers with a single ticket will benefit from new, full passenger rights protection, including assistance, rerouting, reimbursement and compensation. The Commission also introduces new obligations for ticketing platforms and operators to ensure fair access to selling tickets and the neutral presentation of travel options. Platforms will be required to display offers in a neutral way, including sorting by greenhouse gas emissions where feasible. Rules will ensure that all transport operators can conclude fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory commercial agreements with ticketing platforms, and vice versa.
Follow buttons on the European Commission's web page: Mastodon, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Youtube, link to other channels.
A cover for The Economist, highlighting: Still in La La Land: why oil prices are not yet high enough The AI supply crunch Autocracy-proofing France How Kevin Warsh could save the Fed Eipgenome editing
The crisis has also flipped the focus back towards reducing reliance on gas in Spain’s grid. José Luis Rodríguez, an analyst and the head of organisation at the Meridiano Institute, said: “All the chatter around renewable insecurity has collapsed with the energy shock that is brewing. The shield of the sun and wind is the only thing guaranteeing relatively affordable energy prices for the majority, unlike elsewhere in the EU, and protecting our economy.”
A less parochial set of explanations for the collapse of gilded age globalization, is offered by neo-Polanyian economic historians, who argue that the very success of globalization in restructuring the world economy produced a backlash from those group who lost out in the distributional struggle. Workers in countries receiving mass migration espoused nativism and immigration restriction. Producers in economies whose markets were flooded with imports turned protectionist. Anyone with heavy debts had reason to oppose the gold standard, which provided the financial frame for the regime. This is what Karl Polanyi, in the Great Transformation (1944), called the “double movement”. One can thus offer a counterfactual history in which globalization collapses in the early 20th century under the weight of its own success. whatever happens in 1914. Britain was not to the fore in the waves of protectionism and nativism that swept the world in the 1870s and 1890s. But it got there in the end. As David Edgerton and Martin Daunton have shown, in the 20th century Britain too would move towards imperial preference and then towards the construction of a national economy.
Encouragingly, we also haven't seen any bugs that couldn't have been found by an elite human researcher. Some commentators predict that future Al models will unearth entirely new forms of vulnerabilities that defy our current comprehension, but we don't think so. Sottware like Firefox is designed in a modular way for humans to be able to reason about its correctness. It is complex, but not arbitrarily complex' The defects are finite, and we are entering a world where we can finally find them all.
Flujos diarios de commodities por vía marítima (específicamente Queroseno/Jet fuel), desglosados por región de destino, durante los últimos 18 meses (octubre 2024 – abril 2026). Caída pronunciada desde inicios de 2026 y especialmente en marzo-abril 2026, los flujos caen drásticamente hasta ~2.500-3.000 ktons, el nivel más bajo del período.
We are seeing similarly wrong-headed, untargeted policy decisions happen today. Spain has already allocated €5 billion to cuts to VAT on energy and fuel duties. This is an order of magnitude more than the €400 million earmarked for EV subsidies in 2026, and almost twice the sum Spain devoted to all its measures for electric mobility between 2021 and 2025 (€2.7 billion, including both EV subsidies and investment in charging infrastructure). Italy’s emergency measures including fuel duty cuts will cost it €1 billion over two months – more than the €600 million recently allocated to EV subsidies. Poland’s cuts in fuel taxes will cost €370 million a month.
Scott Bessent and Jerome Powell summoned Wall Street CEOs to warn of potential cyber risks from Anthropic’s latest AI model and others, people familiar said. They want to make sure banks are taking precautions to defend their systems. Mythos is so powerful that Anthropic has limited its release to just a handful of tech and finance firms, including Amazon, Apple and JPMorgan. They’re part of “Project Glasswing,” which will work to secure the most important systems before similar AI models become available. Spooked? One Anthropic employee said Mythos “should feel terrifying.”
Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 — Anthropic’s hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving. I’ll try to tell the story briefly in this note.
During our testing, we found that Mythos Preview is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed by a user to do so. The vulnerabilities it finds are often subtle or difficult to detect. Many of them are ten or twenty years old, with the oldest we have found so far being a now-patched 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD—an operating system known primarily for its security.
The Numbers Aren’t Working Out We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.
Longer term, Tang says “everybody knows” that the world “cannot rely on oil.” He says it’s a realization that will force a reset in Asia, the biggest importer of Middle Eastern oil. Japan, Korea and India are now all more likely to look for ways to diversify their energy mix, and the equipment needed to achieve that diversification will inevitably come from China, Tang said.
Donald J. Trump « @realDonaldTrump • 32m Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP
The United States has directed every American embassy and consulate across the world to launch coordinated campaigns against foreign propaganda and endorses Elon Musk's X as an "innovative" tool to help do it.
Trillions Robin Wigglesworth Penguin, 2021
Poke around on a British farm and you will probably see blue bags of the Nitram-brand ammonium-nitrate fertiliser pellets made in Billingham. If it were possible to poke around inside the crops growing in those farms’ fields, you would find that much of the nitrogen they contain had come from such pellets. And if you are a Briton who does not source your food almost entirely from organic farms (which eschew chemical fertilisers) something similar is true for you, just as it is for most people in rich and middle-income countries. The human body typically contains a few kilograms of nitrogen, an amount which, lumped together, would weigh about as much as your arm from finger tip to a bit above the elbow. In most people, in most parts of the world, a good kilo of that nitrogen has passed through the reaction vessels of the Haber-Bosch process. A factory-made forearm’s worth of flesh.
Countries such as India, Indonesia and Vietnam are responding to higher gas prices by burning more coal. But over the long term, this shock will accelerate a turn toward cleaner technologies, especially in Asia and Europe. This is the first oil crisis in which clean alternatives to oil and gas — solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and batteries — are both inexpensive and widely available.
Longer term, he urged EU countries to double down on building more renewables, saying "this must be the time we finally turn the tide and truly become energy independent."
"This is a wake-up call," Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto said last week, in a call to push for electrification and renewable energy. Indonesia aims to have 100GW of solar power in "no later than two years", , up from its current 11GW, he said, with earlier plans including battery energy storage system (Bess) deployments. "We will convert all motorcycles into electric motorcycles. All cars, all trucks, all tractors must [also] be electric," he added.
El pueblo perdido | La sabiduría de la lucha Mario Tronti Traficantes de Sueños