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Transcript: Vimal Kapur, Chairman and CEO of Honeywell

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The transcript from this week’s MiB: Vimal Kapur, Chairman and CEO of Honeywell, is below.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (video), YouTube (audio), and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

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Barry Ritholtz with Vimal Kapur, CEO & Chairman, Honeywell
Episode aired May 21, 2026 — Bloomberg Radio

 

Barry Ritholtz  [00:00:16] This week on the podcast. Yet another extra special guest, Vimal Kapur is CEO and chairman of Honeywell. He’s worked there for the past 37 years and not only has he been overseeing a fascinating transition, Honeywell is in the midst of breaking itself up into three distinct parts. I thought this conversation was fascinating and I think you will also, with no further ado, my conversation with Honeywell’s Vimal. Kapur.

Vimal Kapur  [00:00:49] Pleasure Barry. Thanks for hosting me.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:00:50] Well, my pleasure to have you here. It’s not very often we get a member of the Dow Industrials as part of our guests. Let, let’s start out a little bit with your background. You received a degree in electronics engineering from the Thapar Institute of Engineering in India. What was the original career plan?

Vimal Kapur  [00:01:13] Original career plan was to work and get a job. That was a career plan? Yeah, that was a career plan. And then, you know, first I did two small stints of a job and then I joined Honeywell in early 89. It was a new company in India, so set up. So I ended up joining a startup ’cause it was set up as a joint venture between two large companies. There’s a large Indian company called Tata Group. They jointly

Barry Ritholtz  [00:01:38] Automobiles, everything. Tata

Vimal Kapur  [00:01:39] Is enormous now, everything. Correct. So they invested in this venture. It’s a big Honeywell with a lot of tech. And then they create this joint venture in which you show up and it’s basically creating something from scratch. We had no revenue when I started. Our revenue was 0.00. So you learn how to build a company, how you scale, you wear multiple hats like in a startup, you don’t have a very defined role. So I think that early experience of high flexibility and you know, growing through a very high base in a short period of time, that laid some very strong foundations. You know,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:02:14] For me, so in the United States out in Silicon Valley, we notice a lot of these startups where they end up certainly isn’t where they began. There’s a usually a pivot or three or four. What was the original idea in the joint venture and what did that eventually turn into?

Vimal Kapur  [00:02:32] They turned into what it was planned for because Honeywell did not have its automation business footprint in India at that time. So you’re talking 40 years back. So they partnered with a local company to scale the business. They already had those products and capabilities in us and they were trying to get into Asia and they formed partnerships in few countries, India being one of them. And the strategy was to penetrate the local market, develop the local capability, and we were able to do that quite well. So it’s, it’s not that we have to change our product strategy, but we have to run, learn as we go through. We had intense local competition. How do you beat that? How do we create our own, you know, our own revenue stream there. So it was a very successful story. So,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:03:14] So you come up through the operating side, not so much the, you know, Harvard Business School, Davos theory side. How much of an advantage has that been as your career clicked through all these different divisions?

Vimal Kapur  [00:03:29] I mean, I think it’s a advantage to, in a way, to work in a practical business because you have to deal with actual problems which the business deal with. And having worked in different businesses gave me an opportunity to deal with a different customer situation, different end markets, operational issue, commercial issue, product development, issue, supply chain. So I would say, I mean, there’s no replacement of formal education. One, I’m not suggesting that having a higher degrees is a disadvantage, but I would say that it is equal amount of advantage to get practical experience. And I was benefiting from variety of experiences I got in my long career in Honeywell. And

Barry Ritholtz  [00:04:08] You ran three very different businesses before becoming CEO, process solutions, building technologies, performance materials. Tell us, I mean those names seem sort of ambiguous, right? Tell us a little bit about what each of those three divisions did. Yeah,

Vimal Kapur  [00:04:26] So process, solution business is, you know, it provides automation system in the energy sector. So energy sector, think about it, refining, petrochemical, plants, other oil and gas facilities, pipeline terminals, even I would say facilities like, which may paper metals and mining. So these facilities are very complex in terms of their operating procedures and if they’re not automated, it’s nearly impossible to run them. So this business provides a sophisticated automation system to these large companies. So think about Exxon and Shell and BP as kind of a typical customer or Aramco in Middle East and ADNOC. So this serving these customer, this business was very global or is very global. Even today the business still is very successful. And I became CEO in 2014 of this business. And oil downturn happened within six months. How I becoming the leader of the business. So you learn through tough experiences. Oil price was from whatever, 140, $150 to like a big nose dive. And we did a lot of work in the downturn. Learned a lot. But primarily your question, this business is all about sophisticated automation in complex facilities. And then I moved to the building automation business where we still do automation, but now in this case buildings of different type hospitals, airports, schools, university campuses, data centers. And there the business model was very different. Now you serve multiple building through variety of channel partners across the world. And so our strength comes through product innovation. Our strength comes through channel management. Very different business model compared to what I did in, you know, in my in my process automation days and,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:06:22] And then

Vimal Kapur  [00:06:23] Performance material, performance material and technology. Very interesting business, they build technology, they build energy infrastructure. So if you wanna build a, if you are a refiner, you buy crude, which we all hear a lot about today due to, you know, ongoing Iran conflict. You don’t sell crude, you sell product, you sell gasoline, you sell diesel, you sell jet fuel. So they have options to make multiple products. And as the input changes or the market needs changes, they need to decide what are the options they have to build different offering from their perspective. This business provides technology to energy company to build energy infrastructure ’cause it’s a molecule transformation, converting one molecule to another molecule that’s a heavy technology involved behind it. So performance material and technology provides technology to the customer to build tech, you know, energy infrastructure. So very high technology or research oriented business. You have a lot of chemical engineers who are gonna invent the next best technology and you provide their technology to some very large companies. And that was fascinating to lead that business to see that cycle elimination and work in that business. So yeah, very diverse experiences in variety of sectors, different business models, which I’m benefiting today because now I have experience of dealing with different markets and different situations. And that practical experience helps you a lot as you really get into your CEO job.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:07:56] So in 2022 you were named chief operating officer, we were just coming out of the pandemic. What was that environment like? How did you take your experience at these three prior divisions where you were either president or president and CEO, how, how did that affect running operations?

Vimal Kapur  [00:08:16] I mean, I think at that time the biggest challenge that time actually was the chip shortages and how do we really redesign our products because chips are simply not available. So we really had to learn how do we redesign our products in a much shorter period of time. So think about if we design a product in one year, we had to do that in two months because there’s no other option if we don’t do that, we can’t have an alternative source of the supply and we can’t our product. So I used a lot of experiences on dealing with such different scenario in mild jobs and we were able to successfully, you know, deal with that. That was also a job. I also got exposure to the businesses of Honeywell, which I hadn’t done before. Aerospace being the biggest one. So that got added into my responsibility. So there was a lot of learning there on how that industry works, which is totally different from everything else I had done.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:09:11] Is there a throughput through materials, processes, technologies and aerospace? Or are these all completely different animals,

Vimal Kapur  [00:09:20] Different animals in the sense of the end markets they serve? Right, there are some commonality of the business models and you know, there are, there are, there’s a common denominator, but there are differences which really led me to think about whether we are good to be one company or multiple companies when I started as a CEO and part of it was the differences between them, but part of it was opportunities which is ahead of us that how these businesses independently could shape or scale much differently versus when we are together, which, which led us to do a lot of work to think about optionality and pros and cons of each option and which led us to make a decision that we are better off to split into three companies

Barry Ritholtz  [00:10:04] And we’re gonna spend some time delving into those three companies and the thinking behind it. Before we get to that, I wanted to ask you a couple of more general questions about the firm. You’ve been there so long since, since the 1980s. I’m curious, how has the culture of Honeywell changed? It’s almost 40 years, three and a half decades. Is it still essentially the same company or has everything cha like so many other companies? Yeah, I,

Vimal Kapur  [00:10:38] It evolved a lot. I would say, you know, we, there was a big change movement in early 2000 when Honeywell and AlliedSignal merged together.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:10:47] I recall.

Vimal Kapur  [00:10:48] Yep. So little bit of fun fact, AlliedSignal acquired Honeywell and changed its name to Honeywell, which doesn’t happen. The acquirer keeps name because they figured Honeywell brand was so powerful, it was more impactful. So they changed their own name. So that was a big moment, your question on cultural assimilation of two large companies, it was kind of merger of equals and it did go through its own motion of ups and downs. And that’s when Dave Cote came in as chairman and CEO of Honeywell. And Dave did a great job to rebuild the Honeywell culture, which was much more one company mindset. We are not two companies, we are one company. We are gonna put work towards one stock, one Honeywell mindset, put a lot of operational culture in the organization. So that was one phase of, you know, under, under his leadership. Then my predecessor Darius Adamczyk, he became CEO in 2017. He further enhanced our operational excellence skill. He invested a lot of effort to build more digital backbone of the companies, simplifying Honeywell in terms of internal systems we have, Darius was very passionate about digital on how to mine data and create more capability for our customers. So he created a culture of more operational excellence, more operational rigor, while Dave was much more focused on one Honeywell mindset, culture integration, not multiple companies. And as my tenure comes in over the last now two plus years, we are now pivoting from the more growth oriented company. And the reason that’s important is that over a period of time, our margin rates have grown up and we were sub 10% margin company in 2005, 2006, last date was 23%. So our earnings growth is gonna come more from the top line growth versus margin expansion. Not that we want to mar do margin expansion, but we can’t get from another 15%. There’s no headroom. So growth culture is important, which means we have to be more externally focused now. We need to understand our markets, need to understand our customers, what’s changing, need to understand our competition. So our company, even though name preserves itself as a heritage and, but it has been constantly evolving itself and that’s one of the reason this company has survived hundred in 20 years because it has courage to reinvent itself versus being inward looking and always saying that, okay, we are what we are and we are not gonna change.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:13:16] Hmm. Really, really interesting. So I used to hear people talk about automation pretty regularly as just the process of moving more and more things to machines. We kind of hear people using the phrase artificial intelligence and AI the same way kind of bluntly. I’m curious from the Honeywell perspective when it comes to automation and ai, what are the customers buying? Is it productivity gains? Is it safety improvements, is it cheaper labor or a substitute for labor? What, what is the key selling point for your customers? So

Vimal Kapur  [00:13:55] I would say the, we have to go back to where the automation industry started from to better appreciate how will AI impact automation offerings or automation products. Go back to mid seventies when this industry got created somewhere in mid 75 timeframe when computing was invented, chips were invented. There came the need to say the word has a lot of these expensive assets. Those assets are now running very efficiently. So can we move from the older technologies, which were kind of World War I and World War II era to more modern digital technologies. And the way automation system was created was that you sense a set of properties and how a particular equipment or a machine or a processor is running and then you have a software program running in a computer which is going to make sure that it gets back to the desired condition, what it wants it to be. So it’s a logic based predefined system. And the assumption was most of the time this will work in a normal situation when exception occur, human will take a call. So automation systems were always designed with a human in the loop. And human was supposed to take care of change in input condition, change in output conditions, maintain the equipment, take care of maintenance requirement down the line. Now you fast forward 50 years before AI and data science came in, the people who are running these equipment or automation system or different facilities in different environment, think of a pharma manufacturing facility or a data center. They acquired a knowledge on exceptions which were occurring in those operating conditions. But when they retire or they move on, their knowledge went along with them. So when the next set of people came in, they kind of have the same learning cycle. Maybe some of it was captured in some documents, some manuals, but not a lot. So what AI is solving for is our systems have no intelligence layer on top of the core automation layer so that when the next human being comes in, they’re not starting from scratch, they have an advantage of all the learning over the last 25 years all built in. So they get to say, when this condition occurred, nine out of 10 times this was done. It always worked. So you as a human being can say, okay, I think I will choose this. Logic makes, so humans still needs to make a decision. So I think it’s a changing the human and making them more capable at the heart of it. And the reason it becomes even more compelling now is the shortage of skills which are happening in the industrial sector for performing these kind of tasks. So I would say it’s a perfect convergence of the situation that more capability is coming into our system because of availability of data science. And at the same time situation requires this capability to be there because less people are available to do this work and that’s gonna create more capability in automation system. So automation system remains, intelligence layer is on top of it. So it makes a automation system better in terms of what it can do by preserving its capability.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:17:10] Coming up we continue our conversation with Vimal Kapur, CEO of Honeywell discussing turning Honeywell into three standalone companies. I’m Barry Ritholtz, you are listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You are listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Vimal Kapur. He is CEO and chairman of Honeywell International. He’s been with the firm for 37 years. Honeywell is a highly regarded automation and industrial company. So let’s start out with plans to break the firm up. You have three distinct entities, Honeywell Automation, Honeywell Aerospace, and then Solstice Advanced Materials. So let, let’s talk about that split that sounds fairly natural breakup based on industry. Tell us a little bit about the thinking behind that.

Vimal Kapur  [00:18:26] The thinking behind that was when I started as a CEO, my incoming thesis was that we have to simplify this company. It’s performed extremely well, great return to shareholder, great service to our customer, but what will we do for the next 25 to 30 years? Are we set up for that? And my thesis was that we need to simplify this into few things where we have a scale. But I started the job in middle of 23 as a CEO of the company. Two things happened in the year of 23, which is good to kind of reflect back just three years back. That was the first year when aerospace cycle really became very strong. It was the year one where everybody said, oh, this industry is growing a lot, let’s pay more attention to it. And this was also the first year when something called AI was talked, right? So if we were sitting here three years back, we wouldn’t be talking ai. So it’s that recent phenomena. So the question we had to really ask ourself that if we have to simplify as a company and these two external drivers are occurring simultaneously, a huge demand in our largest business, which is aerospace automation, which is core to Honeywell, is going to probably redefine itself with ai. Should we do it as one company or should we do it as a, in a different construct? And that question get into a problem solving by early 24 to say, let’s look at all the scenarios, what’s possibilities, what others are doing. And as we did the work over 2024, we got more and more conviction. It’s better to separate automation and aerospace into two separate companies. But we ended up making three decisions because specialty chemical is extremely good business, which neither fitted in any one of these two. And we said it’s compelling to also spin that off as a separate company. So rather than, you know, two said, we ended up becoming three. So they became a standalone business in October of last year, doing extremely well since we spun it off now for six months. Very proud of the management team and the board, which is running this company. Aerospace will become a standalone company in about six to eight weeks from now. Six weeks actually as we speak today. 29 June is a date, and date is formed. We quite committed to that and it’s gonna be leader in segment in aerospace and KO will be a pay automation company, which will be probably one of the largest, if not the largest automation company in the world.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:20:51] Hmm. So advanced materials, does that include building technologies? And

Vimal Kapur  [00:20:57] It’s a pure play chemicals business, just

Barry Ritholtz  [00:20:59] Straight up

Vimal Kapur  [00:20:59] Chemical chemicals business. They make refrigerant, which goes into your car, which goes into your home. They have some other technologies which are related to chemicals that business is doing extremely well as a standalone company. The automation, which you mentioned building automation or automation of industrial facilities, that’s part of the remaining Honeywell, which is Honeywell Automation. Now we will not be called Honeywell Automation. We are using as, just as a equal descriptor on what the business will be. We will reimagine our name as we go by in a couple of weeks from now and we’ll reveal that name what it should be. But for sake of simplicity, the chemicals business, an aerospace business and an automation business and,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:21:39] And performance materials and technology is,

Vimal Kapur  [00:21:42] So part of it became into advanced material, advanced material solstice and then part of it is retained within Honeywell. So it’s split into kind of two.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:21:51] ’cause this is really, everybody thinks of these very broadly, but there are some really narrow specific use cases for different correct groups. So I was trying to figure out what would align with what.

Vimal Kapur  [00:22:05] So think about automation business serves three large end markets. All types of buildings, all types of energy facilities and all types of industrial facilities. That’s what we have kept in the automation. And we also are conscious that we should not make automation business serving so many segments that it’s becomes confusing again, right? So we wanna narrow down to a few very large and impactful segments. This market size is about $200 billion. We will be just shy of 20 billion of revenue. So we have a lot of runway to think about creatively what more we can do, how do we grow more. So we are not shortage of runway. Secularly automation is a naturally high growth, you know, segment because it’s something which is so basic to existence of an industrial facility or on an asset. And then when you add the AI story coming on top of it’s gonna have increasingly more growth, momentum. So all sent, all things being said. Yeah, it’s very well positioned for a compelling future.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:23:05] And what does the aerospace group do? Not, unlike ge you’re not making aircraft engines,

Vimal Kapur  [00:23:11] Right? So we do make aircraft engine for the business jet. So more mid-size,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:23:15] The smaller engines,

Vimal Kapur  [00:23:16] Smaller engine, the business jet engines we make, we don’t make the big engines, but we are a systems company. We make different component from the nose to tail of the plane. So our components are right in the cockpit. Our components, we make radars, we make navigation system, we make brakes for the plane, we make environmental controls in the plane. So we are a systems company, we make engines, we make apus. So our, our approach is system designed for a new platform. So every platform comes in and it could be a commercial plan, could be a business, it could be a defense platform. We will pitch in different components and systems of Honeywell. Customers will select many of them, some of them then that will become part of that c you know, that fleet for decades and decades. So it’s a multi-product business, not constrained to one particular product line. And the business model is more powerful because it’s a systems approach and not a component approach. So you’re right in the heart of the systems, you understand how the whole mechanics work and really add more value for our customers.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:24:23] So over the past, let’s call it 10 years, there have been a number of activist investors like Elliot management that, not just Honeywell, but lots and lots of other large conglomerates, they often agitate for share buybacks or increased dividends or sometimes just break the company into pieces. You seem to have landed pretty much in a, in a similar space as some of these activists. First, were they at all influential in your thinking or was this something that, hey, these are such different businesses, there’s no longer scale advantages of having them under one roof?

Vimal Kapur  [00:25:04] I would say the situation in our case was a bit unique because we started doing work to investigate our future optionality early 2024 and did a lot of work and actually even announced the separation of chemicals business in October. Elliot wrote a letter which was in public domain and I got to see it at the same time. And every everybody else saw it to say we should further split aerospace and rest of Honeywell too. That was their argument. There’s a more value to be created. The good news was that we already had done the work and we were convinced that’s the right thing to do, but we had not announced anything. So we treated them as another shareholder who has a point of view and we have to articulate our strategy. So there was strong convergence on the thinking and I think we worked with them very collaboratively on, you know, path forward. And I would say that there’s a lot being said on activist shareholder, but my experience is that they are, they are like any other shareholder who have a logical argument. If you have a counterpoint, you should support this with the facts and data or if you support their point, then you have to execute it. And in that case it just becomes much more of not what to do but how to do it. So our conversation with Elliot, like any other shareholder was this is a situation, here are the paths, this is how we are thinking about it. And we benefited from their expertise in capital markets, how the shareholders will react. And definitely that helped us to shape our decision in terms of, in a certain way, which was very constructive.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:26:38] Hmm, really, really interesting. So we seem to go through these long phases where conglomerates kind of become in style. They become favored. You oversaw $14 billion in m and a, which sounds like a lot of money, but we know really isn’t, you know, that’s not a, that’s not a mega buying spray. And for a long, for the longest time it seemed like there was a financial advantage to being a conglomerate. At what point does that structure stop being an advantage? What does it, what does being part throwing all these different pieces under one roof, what does that prevent the company from doing?

Vimal Kapur  [00:27:21] I think every business model has an era. So I think we have to go back to what created this era of conglomerate or larger companies. The, it really started from the, when the word was started becoming more globalized, after 2000, China came into WTO, the word became more global and there was much more global trade, which became the norm on how companies were growing. So all US companies started growing globally, but at the same time they were able to drive a lot of productivity by taking manufacturing into Asia. A lot of, you know, manpower, productivity by doing work in different virtual way with a lot of IT skills coming in. So there was a case to make bigger companies bigger because they had the unique know-how to drive a lot of productivity and scale at a global scale because they were already present there. And that cycle persisted for almost 15 years till the time that value was captured. And that value capture became generally known. Therefore the question started asking to say is creating this complex company worth it or simplification or a sector focus is a better way to do it. So I think there was a reason that proposition really worked well and created a lot of value. Take a case of Honeywell, our shareholder value creation from a time of 2000 to 2000 17, 18, 1 of the best in class and the entire s and p. So it’s not that anything was wrong, we created tremendous shareholder value. But now this point of saturation comes in and then it really brings you to the point of specialization if the markets have scale and you can preserve scale while you’re a specialist. That’s best of the both words. And that’s what we are, we are doing now to create a scale aerospace company, a scale automation company. We are still very global. We still have very mature processes, but at the same time we are focused on singular segment. So I guess like in everything else you learn through cycles and this cycle is all about having the mix of scale and specialization. This will persist until something else comes in now where there’s a case to do something else and I feel good about where we are in our position and this is gonna create much more shareholder value.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:29:36] So 20 years before you started talking about breaking into three pieces, your fellow Dow component, general Electric went through the same process, arguably with not a whole lot of success, they started out fairly richly valued, there wasn’t a whole lot of room to grow. And I’m curious, when you’re thinking about breaking into three, are you looking at other companies like General Electric and saying what can we learn from what they did right, what they got wrong, what, what missteps they made? I

Vimal Kapur  [00:30:11] Think the situation for each company is very different because separation cannot create value alone by itself. You have to be convicted that the standalone asset has enough growth, potential and invest and asset base which is gonna grow, which is gonna create value. So I think comparing example you gave versus Honeywell is absolutely very different portfolio. Apples

Barry Ritholtz  [00:30:34] And oranges,

Vimal Kapur  [00:30:34] Very, very different. I mean, so I would say that our drivers were more around what I talked about, our stock price were more static. We were more, we did not destroy any shareholder value. So our question was how do we create more shareholder value with external factors coming in? Growth of aerospace, growth of AI is that inflection point for us to make a different decision. So we did it more from a point of strength versus we have some crisis coming in. So sometime you use your point of strength to make the right decisions and we did it fast and we did it right. I think every other company we came from a different circumstances, but the decision on the outward looked very similar. They looked like they all did the same thing, but they all came from very different backgrounds and you know, different set of assets. When, when we started looking at it, some people believed that we got influenced by success of ge. I want to remind that GE success came post our decision. That was a process which was occurring. So yeah, you have, that’s a data point to say they’re also doing it. But some of the success we have observed some outstanding work by the GE leadership team that really started happening 24, 25 timeframe. We were far along the way in our own analysis by that time. So I think those are kind parallel things happening. So there’s no one thing you can attribute to say that this thing influenced it. It’s a combination of the reason which all come together and that’s what really brings us to where we are today.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:32:05] I like this phrase in your thesis of the current transition from automation to autonomy with artificial intelligence as the dividing line. How far along that process are we as a country are the industrial sector and Honeywell.

Vimal Kapur  [00:32:27] So let’s say that we as a country have an advantage of being the leader in the space of cloud and data science and companies like Honeywell has responsibility to take the knowhow which the tech sector is creating, be it Microsoft, be it Google, be it Nvidia and all the, you know, very capable tech companies. How do we bring that capability into our sector? Because our customer is not gonna go and they’re not looking to buy a cloud capability or they’re not looking to buy a AI LLM, they wanna solve a problem, they wanna run a business, they wanna run an operation, they wanna have more uptime, they wanna have more, you know, profitability. So our job is to take our system to what I mentioned to you before and add this intelligence layer and what this intelligence layer is all about, taking capability from the tech companies. Take large language models from the likes of Google and Nvidia, use the cloud power which is there from Amazon and Microsoft, but really build a purpose-built offering from an industrial sector. And as we are doing that, we are able to create the agentic models for our customers and that’s what they buy from us. The underlying plumbing, what we have, they don’t wanna know it, they don’t wanna know how this is built, say, so you’re automating this piece of my work. That’s great so I’m gonna get more productivity for that, how much I should pay you for it, right? So I would say we are in the state that this is no more a hypothesis. We are in the, not in the early innings, but we are in the stage of deployment of these capabilities across different customer base. The why it is not taken up at scale is because our customers have to go through a significant change management in their organization. ’cause fundamentally the roles of people are changing. Some roles require skills which are less important today and some more new skills are required and they can’t do that overnight just because I created a new set of technology, they have to absorb it, they have to ingest it. But we have some fabulous examples on customer using in scale in different sectors like university systems, quick service restaurants, people are using some of our technologies at a very large scale in refineries, et cetera. So I would say that if I’m sitting with you it 12 months back, I would’ve said very modest deployment sitting today, I would say I’m very excited on what opportunity we see a year from now. I would argue that the penetration will go up, substantially up because it’s a real economic value creation from what we are really profiting and we as a country are leading because we have the core components of this technology and now we have to, you know, take this capability across the world and our customers excited. They really like what we are doing.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:35:16] Earlier you mentioned restaurant automation. What does Honeywell do for either fast food service or casual dining?

Vimal Kapur  [00:35:26] So think about it. I mean when you look at a small fast food dining restaurant, there’s not much automation in that. But it consumes energy for sure. I mean let’s take a typical McDonald’s restaurant as just as an example. There’s a kitchen there, there’s a fryer, there’s a refrigeration. It’s just keeping a lot of products there. There’s of course lights going on. These assets were never thought as a way to improve energy efficiencies by companies like us. We say we should automate a large hospital. It’s massive. There’s a lot of opportunity there, a large building. These assets were never paid attention by us because there was no technology available. But when the cloud technology came in, we are able to connect these assets flawlessly, you know, in a matter of hours. And then you’re able to use a lot of AI based rule set to understand what should be the energy consumption actual versus what it is today. And give that tools to the owner to say, you know, an example, we connected a quick service chain in uk, I think something like 500 plus of their restaurants into a single operating system and they’re observing 30 to 40% energy reduction. Wow. Like anything else, the good old management principle, what you inspect is what you get. Once these were thinking running off my own, nobody paid attention even though their desire to do something, there was no mechanism. So we created an easy mechanism to make this available to the customer. So all of a sudden they’re able to generate a lot more productivity without adding too much of cost. And that’s a part of the new tools which is coming in, which was not possible. And that gives me a lot of excitement that this is gonna be much more level of, you know, productivity efficiency, which is less talked about. You know, whenever there’s AI dialogue, it’s about jobs, it’s gonna cut jobs. Nobody talks about economic value creation. It is doing a real value for our customer base, making people more productive. That’s the story of the industrial side, which is probably requires more, more amplification.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:37:26] So what’s the Peter Drucker quote? You can’t manage what you can’t measure. So forget 500 restaurants. What is Starbucks? 30,000, McDonald’s 40,000.

Vimal Kapur  [00:37:36] This applies to all of these kind of assets and many people have done this work. So it’s not that we have created some new invention. Some of them have done this kind of discovery, but this effort was not very standardized. It’s like a custom made thing somebody will do because you are a big company, you can afford it. But when you do it a large scale, there are hundreds of these chains, there are hundreds of retail stores. We’re also doing similar work, one of the big retail store chains, very similar example. So these distributed assets are becoming a way of capturing value at one end of the equation. On the other end of the equation, when you have retirees coming and our customers are worried about knowledge going out of the door, they’re looking at a mechanism of knowledge capture so they can perform their task. That’s also penetrating very rapidly. So scenarios are different. Some scenarios are looking at, I never paid attention and now I can do it. Some are saying I have less people do something about it and but the capability is fundamentally the same, it’s the same capability which solves both the problem

Barry Ritholtz  [00:38:39] Coming up. We continue our conversation with Vimal Kapur, CEO and Chairman of Honeywell discussing the state of automated technology today. I’m Barry Ritholtz, you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You are listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Vimal Kapur. He is CEO and chairman at Honeywell. The company he has worked at for the past 37 years since starting there as an engineer. So I’m curious as to how some technologies seem to just take forever to find their way into the real world. You know, if you travel around the world, I remember the first time I saw one of the point of sale handheld units in a restaurant in Europe, I don’t know, maybe it was 15 years ago. And I was astonished, wait, I don’t have to request a check. They come then they have to give ’em the key, the card, they go away like we’ll take a check. They come by. It’s, it seems to have taken a decade to make its way here. What are some of the impediments to some of this, some of the cutting edge technologies that’s obviously using a bunch of tech that already existed. Is this a problem getting adaptation even though it was clearly more productive, more efficient, faster turn of tables? Like I was astonished how long it took. So I for the United States to implement That’s

Vimal Kapur  [00:40:26] Fair. I think there’s a scenario in your example because it’s a technology displacement of some old method versus a more new method. But the reason I believe more bullish about it is that we are solving a known problem. And the known problem is word has less people to do a lot of work around skilled labor in the industrial world. That’s a real problem. So our solution is not trying to find a problem, we are finding we are giving a solution to a known problem. Adoption rates are lower because of the change management issue. But this is a change management of the order of 18 months, 24 months, 30 months. Not a decade. Not a decade, right. So I remain very optimistic given my, you know, experience in these sectors. The adoption rates here are gonna be much more quicker because the problem is real. We are not inventing the problem. This problem exists for a, and by the way, this problem is everywhere in the world. This is not a US problem. Only skilled labor, skilled labor. Europe has more population shrinkage than us go to Japan and Korea, they have the same problem. China, China as well. China has population shrinkage, right? So this is a universal issue. This is not invented here. Now we get excited on the job displacement happening with robots and humanoids. That’s a small portion of a manufacturing industry that probably is also displacing some tasks which humans are not willing to do. Like lifting boxes, right? Yeah. I mean okay it’s not very interesting. But then there are other jobs with other sectors which we address where a physical AI or intelligence layer is gonna create a tremendous amount of economic value. So

Barry Ritholtz  [00:42:05] I keep hearing people compare that intelligence layer of artificial intelligence to the internet. I’m wondering, and you seem very bullish and excited about everything AI can do, is there a better comparison? Is the industrial revolution a better framework for thinking about the impact of AI over the next 10, 50, a hundred years? I think the

Vimal Kapur  [00:42:31] AI impact will be different in each sector. And I think if we make it too broad brush, we are losing the bigger picture. But when we are making it specific to a segment, then you’re being more precise to say in context of the end markets we serve the industrial sector, I talked about examples there. It’s all about the skill shortage issue, which is very different from if we are using AI for better search engine, if I may, using AI for, you know, making a summary of our talk, which somebody can do in, that’s a very different use case. And one can argue is it gonna add productivity or not or is it gonna take away jobs? That’s a different scenario from simply not having people to do work. Very different scenario. And I think that makes our case more compelling. The adoption rates are driven by a near real, real need versus we are trying to create a need which is unknown and that’s not being talked a lot more, a lot more dialogue is around job displacement. But those are more in the jobs which could be automated like finance function or HR function. Maybe to a certain degree it’s true, but not to the point. My personal view is that it’s gonna have the amount of impact which is being talked about.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:43:43] So let’s talk about some of the challenges of this technology layer and some of the black hats out there. When Mythos came out, I would imagine a company like Honeywell set up and took notice the idea of AI taking over industrial controllers, power water, air conditioning, all that stuff has to be thought of as a genuine threat. Nobody wants rogue thermostats or what have you. How do you look at the threat from a, a powerful entity like Mythos and how much of an arms race are we in to harden all of our, you know, soft underbelly?

Vimal Kapur  [00:44:27] So I think we have to appreciate the fact that where we are deploying ai, it is substantially different from what we are generally talking about in broader public domain. If you think of applying AI in an industrial system, let’s take a case of a hospital and I want to apply AI into automation system to make it more efficient. The data of that is not in public domain. The data is in Honeywell system or it’s one of our competitors system. So you cannot go to internet and train anything ’cause there’s nothing to train on. So that makes data friction as a big problem in industrial sector, which in a way becomes a protection layer for us. But that doesn’t

Barry Ritholtz  [00:45:07] Mean, so the friction becomes a protection layer, but

Vimal Kapur  [00:45:09] It doesn’t mean we should not do anything about it, right? It’s to say, oh, I’m protected. It means we should take it seriously to think of potential threats coming in because if the data friction is removed, which is hard to do, but it humans are very intelligent. So we have worked very hard to remove the data friction and also use our domain knowledge because interestingly you cannot solve a horizontal problem in industrial domain. What I mean by that is you do not have a software application like a CRM system or an HR system. The problems of each sectors are very different. If you’re a refinery, you’re trying to produce more jet fuel and more diesel. If you are a life sensors manufacturing facility, you’re trying to produce drug with minimal quality giveaway. But if you’re a data center, you want more uptime, your problems are so different. So we can’t create a magic AI application and sell to everybody. We have to be purposeful that where do we use our data and what problem we solve, which only come from years of experience. So those two really become in a way a constraint for a generic company to come in because the data friction and lack of understanding of domain, which means companies like us, which possess both have to solve this problem. And that’s why we are very bullish about it, to say we are gonna do it. We are gonna take all the capabilities from tech companies and build new set of capabilities to take our industry from a pure play automation to more towards autonomy. And autonomy doesn’t mean humans will disappear, humans will become more empowered, human will become more capable. And to the extent there’s some skill shortages, it’ll address that point.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:46:48] So let’s talk a little bit about how tumultuous the past 12 months have been in terms of geopolitics. We not only have the war in the Ukraine, but now in Iran we had the on again off again on again and most recently off again tariffs. How does this affect how a company like Honeywell thinks about reshoring and bringing manufacturing back to the United States thinks about supply chain issues? How do you plan in such a tumultuous environment? Well,

Vimal Kapur  [00:47:21] It’s definitely a challenge for companies to have more stability is what companies want. So I would say that companies like us have very mature processes to deal with it. So every time this issue occurs, we have some sort of disturbance for, depends, four weeks, eight weeks, 20 weeks, who knows depending on the situation. So we have learned how to deal with it, but it doesn’t come without a cost. You lose some growth in that window, you may have to incur extra costs like it happened in case of tariff because when tariff got announced, we have no choice but to pay it. Right? Right. Now whether we can recover it or not as a subsequent decision,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:47:57] Are you one of the many companies that have filed litigation to get, get refunds?

Vimal Kapur  [00:48:01] We did not file any litigation.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:48:03] How big of a hit was

Vimal Kapur  [00:48:05] Tax. It was not big for us. We were mostly down to the second part of your question. We have been doing manufacturing local for local for multiple years. So we made for us in US made for Europe in Europe, made for China. In China. So we don’t move a lot of stuff around. However, what we cannot control is the global nature of the components we buy. Right? If I have

Barry Ritholtz  [00:48:26] To buy everything in the supply chain and raw materials. Correct.

Vimal Kapur  [00:48:29] Because we can’t make everything. So if it, if a component is made in Korea, like batteries, we have to buy it from there. And if a component is made in China or somewhere else, we have to buy it from there. So that impact is certainly not under our coverage because we don’t have an endless capacity to invest in everything. But our core manufacturing, we have 150 factories, you know, and they’re well dis the world distributed around the world and they’re well distributed across the world. I mean, so we are so we don’t have this foundational challenge of reshoring, but we certainly have to deal with changing environment in which we have to think about more local supply based development aligned to what the expectations are at this point of time. Huh.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:49:15] So we’ve noticed that defense budgets really around the world, not just here in the United States, ha have been rising and there certainly has been fairly robust demand for aerospace. There’s a big upgrade cycle just kind of starting. A lot of the fleets are pretty old. How do you look at this in terms of risk and opportunity? How are you thinking about defense and aerospace?

Vimal Kapur  [00:49:38] The defense is a big opportunity for our aerospace business. That’s about 40% of the aerospace business. Wow. So it’s certainly the current changes in geopolitical environment and government spending more money is only positive. So it’s gonna become a even more growth driver for the business compared to what it had. So when we started this thesis two and a half years back, we did not predict this level of demand in the defense. But now that’s really a reality. Whether it’s in us, whether it’s some of our US allies, there’s a lot more growth opportunity across the board for different products and services we provide.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:50:14] And then there’s been some debate about the future of technology and industry. China seems to be running away in a couple of areas like energy transition and robotics. From where you sit, is the lead gonna pass back and forth or is there a clear winner and that’s a potential problem for the United States, both strategically and economically? I think

Vimal Kapur  [00:50:40] We have to look at what’s, look ahead, what’s this trying to look back and be, you know, skeptical about it. I will look ahead the problems, which the word HA is in ahead of us. We clearly know the US lead in ai. So how do we protect the lead? We clearly have a lead in quantum, which is one of the businesses we own that. How do we really keep that scale?

Barry Ritholtz  [00:51:01] You do, I didn’t realize what, what does Honeywell do on the quantum space? So

Vimal Kapur  [00:51:05] We own a business called Quantum in which Honeywell has a majority stake. We spun it off a separate company in 2021.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:51:11] Oh, okay. All

Vimal Kapur  [00:51:12] Right. So it’s not, it’s Honeywell investments in that company versus it’s not part of Honeywell.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:51:17] I recall, yeah, I crawl that way back when. That’s right. Really 2021. Really fascinating.

Vimal Kapur  [00:51:22] Correct. So there are technologies in which us have an advantage, us have to rebuild its supply base for some of the critical sectors like semiconductor, like pharmaceutical, which are mission critical. And I think that’s underway. But we need to have patients that those things take years to happen. There’s not a switch to say, right, we wanna do it. And those things show up, they can take 5, 7, 10 years. Hmm. So I think it’s heading in the right direction. We as a country has all the capabilities. We have the capital, we have the knowhow, but we have to refurbish some of our skills, which we lost over a couple of years in few portions of industrial sector. But let’s not forget, we have very, very capable companies which created the same sector all over the world, right? So those have not gone away.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:52:06] So reassuring is not as challenging as a lot of people make out. It is

Vimal Kapur  [00:52:10] More thoughtful in terms of which, how do you prioritize all things being equals Reassuring is the right thing to do, but my personal view is we should pick up the top five and say, okay, here are the five we wanna go. Really go after and make it successful. ’cause try to do everything is gonna be just extremely difficult in order of prioritization.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:52:28] So final question before I get to our, our speed round. What do you think when, when it comes to automation and artificial intelligence, what do you think business people and investors for that matter really are misunderstanding? What, what little nugget that you’ve experienced would give them a little more insight into what the future looks like? I think

Vimal Kapur  [00:52:49] The point we discussed earlier that the automation gets heavily enabled by AI and really create the intelligence layer and that opportunity to create sales is being underestimated. I think this opportunity is real because of the skill shortage, because of the knowledge gap, which has I got created over a period of time. So I truly believe that’s something which needs more, more conversation and more emphasis.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:53:15] So. So I only have you for another three minutes, so let me click through these questions really quickly. Starting with, tell us about your mentors who helped shape your career.

Vimal Kapur  [00:53:26] My early managers, I mean, I was lucky to have some very good managers who taught me different things, you know, not to be fearful about whom you’re talking to. How do you think about value propositions? How to think global scale. So I think in Honeywell you’re blessed to have some very strong leaders in different part of my career and in the first 15, 20 years, which really shape you because if you, what shapes you as the first 15 ish years of your life? ’cause once those value system is built in your brain, you kind of live with that. And I was benefiting from some very powerful ventures in different parts of the company. Let,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:54:01] Let’s talk about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading recently?

Vimal Kapur  [00:54:05] So books I read variety, both from leadership to sector specific. The recent one of the book I’m reading is the Price from Daniel Yergin. If anybody is interested about oil economy, please do read it. Six months back I started reading Chip War. So some of the sector specific things, but also read about leadership of some of the people I admire. Dave Cote, who was chair C of Honeywell for a long time. He has some very fascinating book. “Winning Now, Winning Later” in the, joined our board recently. She has some fascinating leadership books. So I read some of them, I read a lot of books on China. I think it’s underestimated the scale of that economy. So I think we just need to, there’s a book called Words View, China’s View of the Word, very interesting book. It’s like we have a view about China, what about their view? Have we ever asked them the question, why do you, what do you do? So I kind of have very diverse the reading habits of, you know, waiting from my business specific to leadership to some of the country’s specifics. Yeah, toggled around a lot on that. And,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:55:11] And our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college graduate interest in the career in either engineering or management?

Vimal Kapur  [00:55:22] I mean, both are fascinating career. I would say engineering is a career which gives you a lot of options. So do pursue that because it gives you a wide variety of choices. Management is something that people should do who have more willingness to take a risk and have courage to make decisions. Because in the end, at some point in your career, you will have to do both. And if you think that’s not your sphere, that’s something you’re not good at it. I would rather argue than you choose something you’re really good at versus otherwise you’re going to get saturated at some point. But management is an excellent carrier by itself. So both are, both are excellent.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:56:00] And our final question, what do you know about the world of automation, engineering and artificial technology today that might’ve been useful 37 years ago when you first started at Honeywell?

Vimal Kapur  [00:56:14] I don’t know. I think I’m always excited about learning new technology all the time. You know, I’m still very curious to read things, how they work. I think I will say that staying curious is very important for us as a human being. We should never be satisfied on what we know. We should always ask the question, what we do not know. Whether it is about a technology or a business process or for that matter, any fact of life and more you are curious, more successful you are because you’re open-minded and you’re always willing to learn. And that has been my principle all my life. Always learn something new about anything. And you feel very fulfilled.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:56:52] Huh? Really, really terrific. Vimal, thank you so much for being, thank you very much. So generous with your time. We have been speaking with Vimal Kapur, CEO, and Chairman of Honeywell. If you enjoy this conversation, well be sure and check out any of the previous 637 we’ve done over the past 12 and a half years. You can find those at Bloomberg, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the correct team that helps put these conversations together amongst the many people who helped me. Alexis Noriega is my video producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my producer. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’ve been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

 ~~~

 

 

 

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10 Memorial Day Reads

The Big Picture -

My day of remembrance for those who have been lost reads:

Memorial Day. Eric Paliwoda was a big dude. Probably six-foot-six. Those big, meaty hands that would swallow your own in a tight handshake. His jaw stuck out, exaggerated by a lip full of dip. He was raised in Connecticut, but seemingly emerged from a Nebraska cornfield, ready for war.A short, ten-year-old Memorial Day piece worth pulling up again for the weekend. Quiet, well-said, no flag-waving. (STSW)

The Legend of Chief Shannon Kent: Coffee or Die on the late Navy cryptologist and Senior Chief — a profile of a remarkable career and the quiet community that knew her. Memorial-weekend reading. (Coffee or Die) see also Fullbore Friday: The secrets we keep. Every Naval officer should know his name, but few do. He was born in 1925, and he is still with us. What a story. Imagine you are just your standard-issue U.S. Navy fleet Lieutenant in your late 20s. You missed the big war, but you are ear deep in the next one, the Korean War. You know, on paper at least, you are flying a plane outclassed by your opponent. Doesn’t matter. Then one day you find yourself facing not just a better aircraft—but outnumbered by them. To make it even worse, you find out after the merge that you are not facing the JV team, but the varsity. (CDR Salamander)

A Suicide. He’d been on five or six deployments, defusing bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan over the previous decade-plus, and was a few years away from retirement. He knew his trade and trained his soldiers hard for our upcoming deployment, which would include missions of varying lengths in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Tajikistan, and elsewhere. But he was also loud and gregarious and flirtatious, and the special waggishness that comes from a youth spent in combat could be mistaken for frivolity. A Memorial Day weekend essay on veteran suicide that does the rare thing of being specific instead of statistical. Hard to read; worth reading. (Colossus)

Marine who crawled under bridge to plant explosives approved for Medal of Honor: Marine Capt. John Ripley hung demolition charges beneath a key bridge, swinging hand-over-hand for three hours while under fire. Task & Purpose on the Medal of Honor for the 1972 Đông Hà bridge demolition. The story has been told for fifty years; the medal took as long. (Task and Purpose)

Chasing the Man Who Stole the Gods
How investigators tracked down a former child soldier whose thefts drove a global art conspiracy. (Businessweek)

Experience: we found a baby on the subway — now he’s our 26-year-old son: A short first-person Guardian piece that has no business being as moving as it is. Read it in two minutes and feel slightly better about people. (The Guardian)

They knew they were dying soon, so they threw a party: Living funerals — where people near the end of life plan and attend their own memorials — are becoming increasingly popular. A WaPo feature on the rise of “living funerals” — people with terminal diagnoses gathering loved ones while they can still enjoy it. Gentle, surprisingly upbeat, and worth the read. (Washington Post)

We need better stories about the future.: Mayer argues the doom-loop dominating tech discourse is itself a self-fulfilling prophecy. Imagination is a strategic resource we keep underinvesting in. (Ashley Mayer)

Inside Israel’s High-Tech Campaign to Kill or Capture Every Oct. 7 Attacker: A WSJ deep-dive on the intelligence and targeting infrastructure Israel has built to systematically pursue every individual identified from October 7. Disturbing in its precision regardless of where you sit on the conflict. One by one, militants who videotaped their exploits that day have been identified and killed, in a measure of Israel’s surveillance acumen and desire for retribution (Wall Street Journal)  see also The Challenge for American Jews: The Atlantic on the political and identity crosswinds American Jews are navigating right now — Israel, the Trump-era right, and a left that has moved on key questions. A thoughtful piece even if you disagree with the framing. Progressive alliances are weakening, political identities are shifting, and emotional ties to Israel are being strained. What now? (The Atlantic)

Miles Davis: A Visual Dictionary: Fast cars, huge shades and, surprisingly, any old trumpet: These are the things that made Miles Miles. Miles Davis, the jazz legend and style innovator who would have turned 100 this month, remains for many people the pre-eminent avatar of cool. And while Davis’s greatest legacy is musical, he also cut a distinctive image over the course of his five-decade career. (Davis died of pneumonia in 1991, at 65.) His style shifted alongside his sound, but he had his touchstones — face-obscuring sunglasses and ticket-magnet sports cars among them. (New York Times)

Video of the dayWorld War II told in 20 Episodes with Tom Hanks

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Vimal Kapur, CEO and Chairman of DJIA component Honeywell International. The firm is in the midst of dividing into three companies: Honeywell Automation, Honeywell Aerospace, and Solstice Advanced Materials. The firm has fully integrated AI as the intelligence layer in all of its automation processes and products.

 

The great digital media valuation collapse

Source: Axios

 

Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.

 

 

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70% Of All Crypto 'Wrench Attacks' Happen In France: Report

Zero Hedge -

70% Of All Crypto 'Wrench Attacks' Happen In France: Report

About 70% of all wrench attacks, physical attacks against crypto holders and their families, carried out in an attempt to steal digital assets, occur in France, according to Bitcoin journalist Joe Nakamoto. 

There have been 41 crypto-related kidnappings in France so far in 2026, Nakamoto said, or about one attack every two and a half days, he added. 

As CoinTelegraph's Vince Quill reports, Nakamoto attributed the rise in wrench attacks to know-your-customer data collection, which is stored in centralized servers that were compromised in several high-profile data leaks, including the 2020 leak of hardware wallet provider Ledger’s customer data.

That data leak disclosed the identities, home addresses and emails of more than 270,000 customers worldwide, he added. Jameson Lopp, the CEO of crypto wallet and key management company Casa, said:

“France is the canary in the coal mine, demonstrating how financial regulations create a surveillance apparatus that causes direct harm to bitcoin holders.”

An overview of wrench attacks in France so far in 2026. Source: Joe Nakamoto

Opposition to know-your-customer data collection is mounting inside the crypto and Bitcoin communities, as digital asset holders continue to be targeted with physical attacks and kidnappings, prompting a need for increased security measures.

Don’t become a target: Bitcoiners offer advice to safeguard against attacks

The attacks are typically orchestrated by criminals living abroad, who contract young people living in France to carry out the physical attacks, Nakamoto said.

Users can stay safe by using crypto custody services that offer security features like a pre-agreed-upon word or phrase that lets a custodial or key management company know the holder is being actively attacked.

A database of known wrench attacks. Source: GitHub

The company can then freeze the assets, making sure they are not accessed by the attackers, and can even alert law enforcement authorities, he said.

He also suggested keeping a “decoy” crypto wallet with a small amount of funds to hand over to criminals in the event of an attack. 

Finally, crypto holders should keep a low profile and not discuss crypto topics online or make it public knowledge that they hold digital assets, he added.

At least 88 individuals have been arrested in connection with crypto wrench attacks in France, according to Vanessa Perrée, the country’s national prosecutor for organized crime.

Tyler Durden Mon, 05/25/2026 - 04:35

"The World Is Losing Trust": Foreign Investment In Germany Plunges To Lowest Level Since 2009

Zero Hedge -

"The World Is Losing Trust": Foreign Investment In Germany Plunges To Lowest Level Since 2009

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

Foreign companies are continuing to shy away from investing in Germany, with the number of new projects falling last year to its lowest level since 2009, representing an eighth consecutive annual decline.

An analysis by the auditing and consulting firm EY, reported by the German Press Agency, found that foreign investors announced 548 new projects in Germany in 2025. That was 10 percent fewer than the year before.

Henrik Ahlers, the head of EY in Germany, said the figures were a “warning sign for Germany as a business location. Germany is falling behind, and other European locations are developing significantly better.”

He said Germany has talked for years about the need for reform, but has done too little, while other countries have made government services more digital, simplified their tax systems, and made it easier for companies to do business.

“In Germany, high taxes, high labor costs, expensive energy, and at the same time, paralyzing bureaucracy are stifling investment,” Ahlers noted.

“Germany’s inability to reform has now become known worldwide. Unfortunately, little remains of its image as a strong, high-quality location and an economic rock in turbulent times,” he added.

The fall in investment comes at a difficult time for the German economy. Last month, the Halle Institute for Economic Research said company bankruptcies in Germany had reached their highest level since 2005.

The institute recorded 4,573 bankruptcies among partnerships and corporations in the first three months of the year. That was higher than the level seen during the 2009 financial crisis.

The last time the figure was higher was in the third quarter of 2005, when 4,771 bankruptcies were recorded.

The rise was especially sharp in March, when bankruptcies were 71 percent above the average for the same month between 2016 and 2019.

Germany’s industrial sector is also under pressureA Reuters report last August said 245,500 industrial jobs had been lost in Germany since 2019, before the coronavirus crisis.

Volkswagen has become one of the clearest examples of the problems facing German industry. The carmaker plans to cut around 50,000 jobs in Germany by 2030 after reporting a sharp fall in profits.

Its net profit fell 44 percent in 2025 to €6.9 billion, the lowest level since the fallout from the emissions scandal. Revenue was almost unchanged at just under €322 billion, while global deliveries slipped slightly to just under 9 million vehicles.

Volkswagen blamed the fall in profit on problems at Porsche AG, U.S. import tariffs, and the cost of restructuring the business. Porsche’s operating profit fell from more than €5 billion to just €90 million in a year.

Volkswagen finance chief Arno Antlitz said the company’s current level of profit was not good enough, explaining the drop had been “shaped by geopolitical tensions, tariffs, and intense competitive pressure” but noting that the company’s current operating margin was “not sufficient in the long run.”

Across wider Europe, EY said foreign investors announced 5,026 new projects last year, down 7 percent from the year before.

France remained in first place with 852 projects, followed by the United Kingdom with 730. Germany was third.

AfD co-leader Alice Weidel said the figures showed that international confidence in Germany was falling.

“The world is losing trust: Foreign companies are investing less and less in Germany,” she wrote on X. “In 2025, the number of investments fell by 10% to the lowest level since 2009. Germany can no longer afford the reform refusal of the Black-Red coalition!”

Read more here...

Tyler Durden Mon, 05/25/2026 - 04:00

Shurk: Prominent Democrats Must Go To Prison

Zero Hedge -

Shurk: Prominent Democrats Must Go To Prison

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Until then, it’s open season on all of us...

Reports last week confirmed that former special counsel Jack Smith “secretly arranged” to preserve evidence in his criminal cases against President Trump in order to maintain the threat of future prosecution once the president leaves office.  This is not a big surprise.  

Democrats have thrown every civic norm out the window in their ruthless efforts to target Trump’s businesses and send him to prison for life.

In his quest to imprison an American president, Jack Smith accused Trump of engaging in a conspiracy to “overthrow” the 2020 election, as well as retaining possession of classified documents after leaving the White House.  Both allegations are ridiculous, and Smith’s own words make him sound like a lawfare hitman and anti-MAGA zealot.  He told members of Congress in January, “Our investigation revealed that Donald Trump is the person who caused Jan. 6, it was foreseeable to him, and that he sought to exploit the violence.” 

 Smith stated emphatically that Trump committed “serious crimes.”

Serious crimes?  You mean like using the FBI to spy on all the Republican presidential primary candidates in 2015 and 2016?  Oh right, that was President Obama.  Or fabricating intelligence in order to justify a counterintelligence operation against candidate Trump?  Oh, that was Obama’s corrupt CIA director, John Brennan.  Or paying British Intelligence operatives to manufacture a fake “Russia collusion” dossier implicating Trump?  Oh, that was Hillary Clinton.  Or using the FBI and CIA to frame President Trump as a Russian spy?  Oh, that was Obama and Clinton, too.  Or sabotaging President Trump’s administration by using a Democrat spy on the National Intelligence Council to construct a false story about an innocuous phone call in order to trigger a bogus impeachment?  Oh, that was Intelligence Community Democrats attempting to hide Joe Biden’s corruption in Ukraine by, again, framing President Trump for a quid-pro-quo “crime” he never committed.  Or submitting fraudulent documents to the FISA Court in order to maintain spying operations against President Trump?  Oh, that was corrupt James Comey, corrupt Robert Mueller, corrupt Andrew Weissmann, corrupt Norm Eisen, corrupt Mary McCord, and their Democrat accomplices in the FBI and DOJ who covered up Obama’s illegal spying operations while framing President Trump as a criminal, spy, and traitor.

Listening to Jack Smith call President Trump a “serious” criminal sounds ridiculous when serious criminals Obama, Clinton, Brennan, Comey, and legions of their Democrat colleagues, subordinates, and co-conspirators in the DOJ, FBI, CIA, D.C. courts, and FISA Court (see Judge James Boasberg’s impeachable offenses) have never been properly investigated or punished for undermining President Trump’s election, sabotaging his administration, and framing him for treason.  The most powerful Democrats in the country organized a coup d’état in broad daylight and dragged the country through a barbed-wire field of partisan propaganda for the last ten years, and Jack Smith wants Americans to be upset that President Trump retained documents that he was entitled to possess?  It’s just such lunacy.  The constant gaslighting from D.C. operatives is equally infuriating and exhausting.

Glossing over the Democrats’ monstrous Russia Collusion Hoax, their relentless efforts to subvert the Trump-led government, and their continuing obsession with tossing the president in prison for imaginary crimes is bad enough, but Jack Smith does what all Democrats do: He pretends that the January 6, 2021, protest for election integrity was an attempt by Trump and his supporters to overthrow the government.  This lie is so brazen that it’s astonishing how Democrats can keep telling it with straight faces.

The people who showed up at the Capitol that day had one objective: to express their strong belief that mail-in-ballot fraud, violations of multiple states’ electoral statutes, and numerous voting discrepancies had tainted the 2020 election.  Several senators intended to make these very arguments before the certification of the election’s results.  The people who gathered outside the Capitol were exercising their First Amendment right to assemble peaceably.  They were unarmed.  Most had no criminal records.  A large number had served their country in various capacities.  Most who entered the Capitol walked around as tourists, took pictures, interacted in a friendly manner with Capitol Police, and posed no threat to anyone.

Only after law enforcement officers chose to fire flash-bang grenades on the assembled crowd did a section of the protest turn into something that could be described as a riot.  Trump supporters — not police officers — died on January 6.  Ordinary Americans exercising their constitutional rights were thrown into a state of fear of being hurt or killed.

Nevertheless, Smith continues to propagate the lie that the three-hour event at the Capitol was somehow the greatest threat to the country since 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and the Civil War (real comparisons that Democrat propagandists continue to make).  Smith and his fellow Democrats desperately wish for Americans to believe that a hot-chocolate-drinking gathering of grandparents, revelers, and veterans was somehow going to topple the government of the United States.  If a crowd of retirees is capable of overrunning Washington, what’s the point of a trillion-dollar military budget?

Smith’s perpetuation of the Democrats’ J6 propaganda is bad enough, but the fact that he treats that day as equivalent to the Civil War is all the more preposterous given that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their fellow Democrats openly encouraged Black Lives Matter domestic terrorists to burn down neighborhoods, loot businesses, and murder civilians throughout the summer of 2020.  If President Trump “caused Jan. 6” and the events of that day were “foreseeable” to him, then the violence and mayhem of 2020’s so-called “summer of love” were certainly foreseeable to Democrats.  The BLM riots of 2020 were the most costly in American history, and Vice President Harris encouraged Democrats to donate money to a bail fund that put arsonists, rapists, and murderers back on the street.

Were the Democrat-organized riots of 2020 “foreseeable”?  

Of course.  

Did prominent Democrats “exploit the violence,” as Smith accuses Trump of doing with January 6?  

They absolutely did. 

Biden and Harris ran for the White House on the message that the violence would end once they were elected.  

Will preening, self-righteous Jack Smith investigate, harass, arrest, or prosecute any of these Democrats?  Of course not.  Will Democrat rioters be tossed into pre-trial solitary confinement and refused bail by partisan prosecutors and judges?  Definitely not.  To this day, Democrats celebrate BLM and Antifa domestic terrorists as champions for civil rights.  When Democrats burn cities to the ground, the arsonists get statues.  When MAGA Americans protest for free and fair voting, they are condemned for crimes they never committed.

Unfortunately, this is how leftists all over the world now operate.  

Brazil’s communist President Lula has imprisoned his predecessor, President Bolsonaro, for supposedly trying to overthrow the government.  French President Macron has permitted his political opposition, Marine Le Pen, to be prosecuted and convicted for similarly bogus “embezzlement” crimes.  Germany has flirted with designating the popular anti-immigration party, Alternative for Germany, a “terrorist” organization and banning its candidates from running for office.  When the “wrong” candidate won Romania’s presidential election eighteen months ago, the country’s Constitutional Court annulled the outcome by blaming “Russian interference.”

If President Trump hadn’t possessed the financial resources and sheer grit to face down the onslaught of malicious and meritless prosecutions against him, he would likely be in a courtroom or a prison today.  If he hadn’t been re-elected a third time, January 6 defendants would still be awaiting trial or serving time in prison for an imaginary “insurrection.”

Screw Jack Smith.  He’s no lawman, and he has no principles.  He’s nothing but a corrupt propagandist, partisan hack, and lawfare assassin.

Nothing will change until prominent Democrats are prosecuted and convicted for their crimes.  Until then, it’s open season on all of us.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 23:20

Which US States Gained The Most Residents In 2025

Zero Hedge -

Which US States Gained The Most Residents In 2025

Nearly 15 million Americans moved in 2025, with many relocating across state lines in search of lower costs, job opportunities, and warmer climates.

This map, via Visual Capitalist's Gabriel Cohen, shows net migration per 10,000 residents across all 50 states in 2025, revealing where population inflows were strongest and which states saw the biggest outflows.

The data comes from HireAHelper.

Southern and Mountain West states dominated the rankings for inbound migration, while several high-cost coastal states continued to lose residents.

The data reflects large-scale shifts happening in the country’s population distribution, both from the Eastern half to the Western half, as well as shifts away from more expensive states to cheaper, often inland ones.

The Mountain West Over the West Coast

In 2025, the Western half of the U.S. saw a continuation of post-COVID trends as people left behind coastal states like Washington (-10.7) and Oregon (-9.0) in favor of more inland Mountain West states like Wyoming (+26.0), Utah (+7.3), and especially Idaho (+63.2).

The data table below highlights the net migration loss/gain per 10,000 inhabitants in 2025:

The more populous coastal states, which have long been hubs for key economic sectors like tech and aviation, have seen a number of moves in recent years owing to jobs either relocating or shifting to remote work.

Nowhere on the West Coast saw a bigger drop than California, which saw a net migration loss of -25.1, as nearly 100,000 residents left behind the increasingly unaffordable state in favor of cheaper neighboring states like Nevada, which lacks a state income tax.

The Cost of Living Factor

California is not alone in losing people over affordability issues. If net migration trends are any indication, other high cost of living states such as New York (-28.2) and Massachusetts (-37.9) also increasingly shed residents.

A majority of the Northeast fared similarly, with all states but Delaware, Maine, and New Hampshire seeing more people leave than arrive in 2025.

And in the immediate region surrounding the nation’s capital, the states of Maryland (-27.4) and Virginia (-13.7) also saw negative net migration, likely reflecting in part the large reduction in the federal workforce seen over the course of the year.

The Rise of the Sunbelt

If one region is seeing across-the-board growth, it’s the South, led by states like South Carolina (+79.7), Tennessee (+43.6), and Alabama (+36.6).

Long one of the more economically depressed regions of the country, a combination of lower costs of living and nicer weather has led to rapid growth for southern “Sun Belt” states such as Arkansas and Oklahoma, to say nothing of massive favorites like Texas and the Sunshine State of Florida.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out The Decline of Housing Affordability in the U.S. on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 22:45

The Inherited IRA 10-Year Rule Is Fully Enforced In 2026 - What Beneficiaries Need To Do Now

Zero Hedge -

The Inherited IRA 10-Year Rule Is Fully Enforced In 2026 - What Beneficiaries Need To Do Now

Authored by Adam H. Douglas via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

If you inherited a traditional IRA from someone who was already taking required minimum distributions (RMDs), you may have to take annual withdrawals for the next decade, and the account must be empty by the end of the tenth year.

Many inherited IRA beneficiaries must now take annual RMDs. Vitalii Vodolazskyi/Shutterstock

The Internal Revenue Service waived penalties for missed withdrawals from 2021 through 2024 while the rules were being finalized. That grace period is over. Starting with the 2025 tax year, the rules are fully enforced. If you missed a 2025 RMD, a 25 percent penalty applies unless you take corrective action now.

Who Does The 10-Year Rule Apply To?

The SECURE Act, passed in 2019, eliminated the "stretch IRA" for most non-spouse beneficiaries. Under the old rules, you had an option to spread withdrawals across your own lifetime. That option is gone for most people who inherit today.

If you are a non-eligible designated beneficiary (NEDB), which covers most adult children and other non-spouse heirs, the 10-year rule is probably going to apply to you. In general, you are exempt if you fall into one of these categories:

  • The surviving spouse of the deceased
  • A minor child of the deceased, though the 10-year rule applies once you reach adulthood
  • A beneficiary who is chronically ill or disabled
  • A beneficiary who is not more than 10 years younger than the original owner

What if none of those apply to you? Then the 10-year rule is likely to be your framework.

When Do Annual Withdrawals Have To Start?

The answer depends on whether the original IRA owner died before or after their required beginning date (RBD), generally April 1 of the year following the year they turned 73.

  • If the original owner died before their RBD and was not yet taking RMDs: No annual withdrawals are required, and the account must be emptied by end of year 10.
  • If the original owner died on or after their RBD and was already taking RMDs: The general rule is that annual withdrawals are required every year, and the account must be emptied by end of year 10.

If your parent was already taking RMDs when they passed, you must take a distribution every year from year one through year 10 - you cannot skip years and take everything in year 10.

The 10-year clock starts the year after the original owner's death. If you inherited the IRA in 2022, your deadline to fully empty the account is Dec. 31, 2032.

How Much Has To Come Out Each Year?

There is no fixed percentage. Your annual RMD is calculated using two inputs:

  • The account's balance as of Dec. 31 of the prior year
  • Your life expectancy factor from the IRS Single Life Expectancy Table in IRS Publication 590-B

The calculation:

Prior year-end balance ÷ life expectancy factor = Your RMD for the year

Your life expectancy factor is based on your age as of Dec. 31 of the current distribution year. Look up that number in the IRS table each year; it changes as you age. You recalculate annually using the updated factor and the prior year's Dec. 31 balance.

Your IRA custodian can often provide this calculation directly. A tax professional can verify it, which is worth doing in your first distribution year.

What Happens If You Missed Your 2025 RMD?

The penalty for a missed RMD is 25 percent of the amount you should have withdrawn. The IRS reduces that to 10 percent if you take the corrective distribution and file Form 5329 within the two-year correction window.

Here is what to do if you missed a 2025 distribution:

  • Take the missed distribution now. Withdraw the full amount you should have taken in 2025 as soon as possible.
  • File Form 5329. This IRS form reports additional taxes on qualified retirement plans. You will attach it to your tax return or file it as a standalone form.
  • Request penalty abatement, if applicable. If this is your first missed RMD and you have a reasonable explanation, the penalty might be waived by the IRS. Attach a written explanation to Form 5329 when you file.

Rather than risk it not being waived, act now. The two-year window for the reduced 10 percent penalty is already running.

FAQs About The Inherited IRA 10-Year Rule What Is The Difference Between An Eligible Designated Beneficiary And A Non-Eligible Designated Beneficiary?

An eligible designated beneficiary includes surviving spouses, minor children of the deceased, disabled or chronically ill individuals, and beneficiaries not more than 10 years younger than the original owner. These individuals can spread withdrawals over their lifetime instead of following the 10-year rule. Everyone else is a non-eligible designated beneficiary subject to the 10-year rule. Most adult children who inherit a parent's traditional IRA fall into the NEDB category.

Can I Wait Until Year 10 And Take Everything Out At Once?

It depends on when the original owner died. If they died before their required beginning date and had not yet started RMDs, you are not required to take annual distributions and may take the full balance in year ten. If they had already started RMDs, annual withdrawals are required throughout the 10-year period. Taking everything in year ten in that case does not avoid penalties for missed annual distributions in earlier years.

How Do I Find My Life Expectancy Factor For The RMD Calculation?

Your life expectancy factor comes from the Single Life Expectancy Table in IRS Publication 590-B, available at irs.gov. Find your age as of Dec. 31 of the current distribution year and read the corresponding factor. Divide the account's prior December 31 balance by that factor to get your RMD amount. Your IRA custodian may also calculate this for you. Verifying it independently is advisable, particularly in the first year of distributions.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 22:10

$150 Humanoid Robot House Cleaning Service Threatens To Undercut Maid Services

Zero Hedge -

$150 Humanoid Robot House Cleaning Service Threatens To Undercut Maid Services

It's no secret that some humanoid robotics companies are training their machines for work on factory floors, while others are positioning their bots to enter homes in the coming years.

One of the first real signs of humanoids entering homes today is a new cleaning service in San Francisco that uses what appear to be Unitree humanoid robots trained to clean everything from floors and countertops to stovetops, mirrors, and nearly any surface in the house.

Called "Gatsby," the new service deploys humanoid robots to homes for a flat service charge of $150.

"We just made U.S. history. Today, Gatsby ran the first-ever consumer cleaning by a humanoid robot in the United States," Gatsby wrote in a press release earlier this month.

The company noted, "We picked someone random off our SF waitlist, they booked a cleaning, we delivered the robot, and it cleaned their entire apartment on its own. No humans inside. This is the first of its kind in the U.S., and we're proud to be the pioneers writing this line in the history books today."

For the average deep clean of a typical U.S. home, the price ranges between $200 and $400, and for much larger homes, $500 or more, according to Angi List. This means the robotic cleaning service can even undercut an independent cleaner or a professional cleaning company, which often employs migrant workers.

News of Gatsby's cleaning service comes as shipments of humanoid robots are expected to ramp up this year and accelerate by the end of the decade, according to a recent UBS note.

The goal of tech firms is very clear: deploy these bots first on factory floors, in warehouses, and at logistics hubs, then move into consumer markets once the machines become reliable enough for home use.

Once these bots enter the consumer market, they will begin to chip away at demand for migrant labor and drive down household costs for services such as cleaning, cooking, laundry, and other chores, which have traditionally required human labor and can cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per month.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 21:35

Trump Indicates He'll Sign Bill Making Daylight Saving Time Permanent

Zero Hedge -

Trump Indicates He'll Sign Bill Making Daylight Saving Time Permanent

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

President Donald Trump has indicated he would sign a bill to make daylight saving time permanent as a House of Representatives committee advanced a measure that would codify the change.

U.S. President Donald Trump returns to the White House in Washington on May 15, 2026. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

"Big Vote today (48-1!) in the Energy and Commerce Committee on a Bill including The Sunshine Protection Act, which will be making Daylight Saving Time Permanent! This is so important in that Hundreds of Millions of Dollars are spent every year by people, Cities, and States, being forced to change their Clocks. Many of these Clocks are located in Towers, and the cost of renting, or using, Heavy Equipment to do this twice a year is prohibitive!" Trump wrote on Thursday in a Truth Social post.

The president said that there is considerable "work and money that is spent on this ridiculous, twice yearly production," referring to the changing of the time. He also said that "it will also be a very nice WIN for the Republican Party."

"We are going with the far more popular alternative, Saving Daylight, which gives you a longer, brighter Day - And who can be against that - This is an easy one!" Trump added.

Known as the Sunshine Protection Act, the bill was proposed by Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.), who released a statement saying that it would "bring us one step closer to ending the outdated and unpopular practice of changing our clocks twice a year."

"Floridians and Americans across the country are tired of the biannual time change, and the evidence is clear that permanent daylight saving time can improve public health, reduce traffic accidents, lower crime and encourage more outdoor activity," he said in the statement.

In a social media post last year, Trump urged Congress to address the issue.

"The House and Senate should push hard for more Daylight at the end of a day. Very popular and, most importantly, no more changing of the clocks, a big inconvenience and, for our government, A VERY COSTLY EVENT!!!" he wrote in April 2025.

For years, advocates have called for the United States to stop making the twice-yearly changes. Among those urging that the country stick to one time for the entire year are the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

A poll from The Associated Press and NORC released in October 2025 also found that only 12 percent of Americans favor the current daylight saving time system. Around 47 percent are opposed to the current system and 40 percent are neutral, it also found.

The United States first started using the time shift more than a century ago, during World War I, and again during World War II. Congress passed a law in 1966 that allowed states to decide whether to participate but required their decisions to be uniform across their territories. All states except Arizona and Hawaii make the time shifts, and those two states remain on standard time year-round.

According to Buchanan's office, the Sunshine Protection Act was included in an amendment to a larger bill, the Amendment in the Nature of a Substitute to the Motor Vehicle Modernization Act.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 21:00

Colbert Blames Trump, But Massive Profit Losses Killed His Show

Zero Hedge -

Colbert Blames Trump, But Massive Profit Losses Killed His Show

Progressive ideologues in entertainment are well known for avoiding responsibility for their failures at any cost, which is what makes them incredibly dangerous.  Scapegoats are targeted for destruction while activists elude scrutiny so that they can bungle another project or institution, and another, and another.  On and on it goes; like a bacteria they travel from one organ to the next, breaking it down from the inside.  

This is what people like Stephen Colbert represent.

From 2019 to 2025 The Late Show lost approximately 25% of its peak viewership.  Much like Jimmy Kimmel and other midnight comedy programs obsessed with politics instead of telling jokes, Colbert lost any ability to make fun of his own side.  Instead, he became a propaganda mouthpiece for the establishment and a complete disgrace as a conduit for Covid hysteria and vaccine mandates. 

Whatever esteem he might have had as an entertainer was lost.  His career was now tied to woke activism and running interference for the "elites".  He likely believed that in a town like Hollywood this would cement his position and keep him safe from cancellation.  However, despite their grand theatrics as "soldiers of the revolution", Hollywood executives still love money. 

Colbert's show was losing around $50 million per year.  His bloated production crew of 200 people and ludicrous salary of $20 million per season created an annual filming cost of over $100 million.  Ad revenues for the show dropped from $121 million in 2018 to $70 million in 2024.  Keep in mind, there are thousands of creators on YouTube that do essentially what Colbert does with almost no budget, and they bring in a far larger audience.

There's no doubt that Colbert will go on to other productions well after the cancellation of his disastrous Late Show.  Hollywood has pedestalized the former comedian as a martyr for the great woke cause.  The corporate media has done the same, suggesting that the death of the Late Show will be looked on by historians as "Exhibit A" of Trump's "attack on democracy".  But, it's still a fact that he lost his show because he was losing vast amounts of money for CBS. 

The key to satire, and most comedy in general, is to shine a spotlight on hard truths while suppressing one's inherent bias.  The ability to throw one's own sacred cows on the pyre is what makes satirists famous.  One cannot be a propagandist and be a successful satirist at the same time.  One cannot be a court jester and be afraid to take the risk of making fun of royalty.

The royalty in Colbert's case is not Trump, but the progressive elite and Big Pharma.  Attacking Trump in Hollywood or New York presents no risk.  Poking fun at the woke mafia presents incredible risk.  Colbert has long been a coward in this regard.  He has, though, thrown perhaps the biggest toddler fit in recent memory over the end of The Late Show in an attempt to make the event as political as possible.    

Colbert will never be out of work completely.  Recent announcements have him writing on the script for Peter Jackson's next Lord of the Rings spin-off film (which is shaping up to be a disaster).  He also made a surprise appearance on the cable access show "Only In Monroe" with an average audience of 12 people, which is perhaps a venue more suited to his talents. 

The idea that Colbert has been censored by a vengeful White House is complete fantasy.  The claim that this is an "attack on democracy" is merely designed to inflame more leftist madness.  No one is entitled under the Constitution to their own late night TV show, especially when they're burning $50 million a year. 

Losing the respect of a large swath of the American public, though, makes it unlikely that Colbert will do well in any future project.  In the end, he will fade from memory as just another establishment shill.    

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 20:25

Child Safety Groups Urge FTC To Investigate Roblox

Zero Hedge -

Child Safety Groups Urge FTC To Investigate Roblox

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Two child safety groups filed a complaint against online interactive gaming platform Roblox with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on May 20, alleging that children face sexual and financial harm on the platform.

A boy poses for a photo while holding a game pad in front of a screen displaying the logo of the children's gaming platform Roblox, in this illustration taken on Dec. 8, 2025. Ramil Sitdikov/Illustration/Reuters

Filed by nonprofits National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) and Fairplay, the complaint claims that certain Roblox features are "developmentally inappropriate for the platform's massive young user base and pose a substantial risk of harm." Such features include engagement-maximizing design features, a complex virtual currency system that can result in more user spending, and chat and communication features that expose children to sexual exploitation.

These components "capitalize on young users' developmental vulnerabilities, exploit their desire for authentic self-expression, monetize their lack of impulse control, and turn in-game purchasing power into a form of social status," the complaint states.

"As a result, young users say they feel a constant pressure to keep up with their peers on the platform, and are thereby driven to buy and spend Robux in order to enjoy Roblox's experiences.

"At the same time, the voice and text chat features that make the platform social repeatedly expose children to sexual content and harmful adults, resulting in sexual exploitation and abuse."

According to the complaint, Roblox requires users to be at least 5 years old to open an account.

Last month, Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford said at a press conference that Roblox, which has roughly 151.5 million daily active users, is used by almost half of all American children under 16. Around 42 percent of the platform's users are children under the age of 13.

The nonprofits asked the FTC to investigate Roblox for violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act and check whether the company is in compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.

Meanwhile, Roblox's share price has crashed. On July 31, 2025, the company's share price hit its year-high of $150.59. On May 21, 2026, prices closed at $46.14, a decline of nearly 70 percent. Since Sept. 29, Roblox's market capitalization has tumbled from $98.7 billion to $32.8 billion as of May 21, a loss of almost $66 billion.

Design, Currency, Communication Issues

Regarding the platform's design and marketing features, the complaint alleged that the company leverages them to "capitalize on child users' vulnerabilities."

For instance, one tactic used by the company is making users' game inventories of virtual assets visible to each other.

"By allowing children to investigate who owns what, Roblox takes advantage of their developmental proclivity for social comparison, which involves measuring their self-worth relative to others," the complaint reads.

To take part in Roblox's in-game economy, users must navigate a wide range of virtual currencies, including the platform's primary currency, Robux, and other currencies issued by developers.

To calculate the real-world dollar costs of the items, users must perform complex calculations that greatly surpass children's mathematical skills, making them susceptible to financial harm, according to the complaint.

As for chat and communication on Roblox, the complaint raises concerns that these features could facilitate "predation and abuse by enabling adult contact with minors."

The company gives parents control over how their children can communicate on the platform. However, Roblox's webpage on parental controls clarifies that these settings "do not apply to chat features developed independently by developers."

In a statement to The Epoch Times, a Roblox spokesperson said that the company "strongly disputes" the claims made in the complaint.

"Our platform is designed to provide a positive, healthy, and enjoyable experience - we build for fun and connection, not short-term engagement. While no system can be perfect, we have a set of safeguards designed to support a safe and civil environment, and clear policies for game creators that require fair treatment of players," the spokesperson said.

"Most games on Roblox are free to play, and no one is required to purchase Robux.

"In addition, we have clear policies prohibiting both actual and simulated gambling, and a set of rules governing how game creators can use gameplay mechanics like paid random items."

Lawsuits, International Scrutiny

Roblox is facing several lawsuits from states such as Iowa, Louisiana, Texas, Kentucky, and Florida, citing child safety issues.

In December 2025, Iowa sued the company, accusing the platform of being the "perfect environment for child predators, pornographers, scammers, fraudsters, online sex rings, and inappropriate content."

Amid growing concerns about child safety, Roblox announced age-based accounts and expanded parental controls for users under 16 on April 13.

Under the policy, users aged 5 to 8 and 9 to 15 will have separate accounts subject to stricter censorship of adult content.

"All content uploaded to Roblox goes through their existing moderation systems, including AI asset scanning, ongoing user report review, and multimodal moderation that evaluates scenes in real time for potential policy violations," the company said in a statement.

In addition to the United States, Roblox has faced bans and scrutiny in other nations.

The platform has been banned in Turkey and Iraq. Russia blocked Roblox in December 2025, accusing the platform of enabling "LGBT propaganda" and the dissemination of extremist materials.

In January, the Netherlands announced opening an investigation into the platform, citing potential risks to minors. Last month, Australia issued formal notices to major gaming platforms, including Roblox, asking the companies to describe how they prevent the radicalization and grooming of children.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 19:50

My Retirement Accounts Fail In The World I Actually Live In

Zero Hedge -

My Retirement Accounts Fail In The World I Actually Live In

Authored by Patrick Brenner via RealClearMarkets,

I remember the first time I logged into my retirement account as a young professional. It felt like a milestone: proof that I had entered the world of adulthood, of long-term thinking, of ownership. I work in the nonprofit sector, so technically it's a 403(b), not a 401(k). The distinction is academic; the promise is the same: contribute consistently, invest wisely, and over time, build financial independence.

The longer I've contributed, the more I've realized something uncomfortable: my retirement plan isn't built for the world I actually live in.

Like many in my generation, I came of age during a period of profound economic change. Companies stay private longer. Technology, infrastructure, and energy companies increasingly raise capital outside public markets. The most dynamic growth in the economy often happens before a company ever reaches a stock exchange. When I look at my retirement options, I'm locked out of that world.

Instead, we see a familiar menu consisting of a handful of mutual funds and some index options that quietly steer me toward a standardized allocation. These are not bad investments, but they represent only a fraction of real economic growth.

For my younger peers just entering the workforce, this gap is even more consequential. The directions are thus: start early, take advantage of compounding, and think long term. If we each had a dollar for every time we got the lecture about the "time value of money," we'd all retire tomorrow. But we are also being funneled into portfolios that exclude entire categories of assets like private equity, private credit, real estate, and infrastructure that have historically delivered higher long-term returns and meaningful diversification.

Brett Arends at Market Watch incorrectly asserts that opening retirement plans to these assets would expose workers to high fees, illiquidity, and complexity. He misses a more important question: compared to what?

There's real asymmetry. Institutional investors regularly allocate 20 to 30 percent of their portfolios to private markets. They do so because these assets offer diversification, illiquidity premiums, and exposure to parts of the economy unavailable in public markets. Ordinary workers are confined to a narrower universe because litigious zealots neutered the system, compelling fiduciaries to avoid risk at all costs.

This narrowing of investment options originates in the legal environment surrounding employer-sponsored retirement plans. Under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), plan sponsors face an onslaught of litigation. The risk of lawsuits compels employers to increasingly default to the safest legal options rather than to the best outcomes for participants, thereby directly limiting potential returns.

Even if you set aside litigation, the deeper issue is structural. The retirement system hasn't kept pace with the evolution of capital markets.

The proposed rule from the Department of Labor deserves serious attention. At its core, the rule introduces a safe-harbor framework for evaluating "designated investment alternatives" in defined-contribution plans. The definition encompasses everything from traditional mutual funds to more complex vehicles, including those that can incorporate private assets.

The framework is asset-neutral. It outlines how fiduciaries should choose. Plan sponsors are obligated to evaluate investments using a set of common-sense factors: fees, performance, liquidity, valuation, benchmarks, and complexity. If they do so objectively and analytically, they are presumed to meet their fiduciary obligations.

The White House's Council of Economic Advisers suggests that younger participants could benefit from allocating up to 30 percent of their portfolios to private markets. Institutional investors have approached portfolio construction using private markets for decades.

Yet parts of the proposed rule undermine that very goal. A 15 percent cap on private assets, derived from SEC Rule 22e-4, would limit exposure, a particular problem for collective investment trusts, which are regulated differently and historically operated without such constraints.

Angela Antonelli offers helpful insights. Georgetown Univerisity's research from the Center for Retirement Initiatives and other CRI analysis, even relatively modest exposure to private real assets, private credit, and private equity has the potential to boost outcomes by 7% to 8%, not just for the "average" DC participant but also across a range of more real financial savings patterns that DC participants too often find themselves in over the course of their working years.

Large institutions, from university endowments to public pension funds, routinely invest in private markets and reap the benefits of diversification and higher returns. We've created two classes of retirement savers: those with access to the full spectrum of capital markets, and those without.

That divide is the difference between participating in today's economy and being stuck in a version of it that no longer exists. Retirement policy should be about equipping workers to build wealth in the modern world.

Right now, my 403(b) originated on a promise that has become so antiquated it might be unattainable. Instead of "taxing the rich," can't we just be allowed to invest like them?

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 18:40

Newsom Declares Emergency In Orange County; EPA Head Says Chemical Tank Will "Likely Fail"

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Newsom Declares Emergency In Orange County; EPA Head Says Chemical Tank Will "Likely Fail"

The head of the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said Sunday that a chemical storage tank in Southern California that has forced officials to declare an emergency and prompted evacuation orders for tens of thousands residents is likely to fail.

Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the EPA, told CNN’s “State of the Union” program on Sunday that the “most likely scenario” is a “low-volume release” of the tank, where officials will be able to “monitor, neutralize, and contain the threat.”

“The Orange County Fire Authority is working to keep the temperature of the tank down. That is very important,” he said on CNN, referring to the fire department in the Southern California county.

He said keeping the temperature under 85 degrees F is key.

But, as Jack Phillips reports for The Epoch Times, Zeldin warned:

“We’re being told that the tank will fail, but there are different scenarios as to what that means, the most catastrophic scenario being an explosion that results in other tanks to explode. That’s the reason why you see such a big evacuation that’s been done in the surrounding areas.”

“You have all levels of government, local, state, federal, working together. EPA has personnel on the ground, air monitors deployed in the local community,” Zeldin also said.

“We have been involved in the modeling of different scenarios.”

Drones were monitoring temperatures at 10-minute intervals to watch for any spikes and planning was underway to ensure a possible leak could quickly be prevented from spreading into waterways or the ocean, Covey said in a video released online.

“Sitting back and allowing these tanks to fail is unacceptable,” Covey said, adding there was no guarantee tanks will not breach and leak.

“Our goal is to protect your homes—no damage to them—and protect the environment.”

As of Sunday morning, Zeldin said: “This is an emergency response. This isn’t yet an environmental response, and the scale of that environmental response will be determined based off of what happens when that tank fails.”

As a result of these warnings, Phillips reports that California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in Orange County.

“The safety of Orange County residents is the top priority. We are mobilizing every state resource available to support local responders and make sure the community has what they need to stay safe,” Newsom said.

The malfunctioning tank holds approximately 5,000 to 7,000 gallons of methyl methacrylate, a flammable and volatile chemical used in plastics manufacturing for aerospace applications.

The tank, located at a manufacturing facility in Garden Grove, first started displaying signs of instability on Thursday.

On Friday, there were increased fears of an explosion, according to Orange County Fire Authority interim Chief TJ McGovern.

Approximately 50,000 residents were evacuated in Garden Grove, which is home to around 172,000 people and located 30 miles south of Los Angeles.

The governor’s proclamation directs all state agencies and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services to support Orange County and impacted areas, and unlocks additional emergency response resources and authorities.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 18:05

Bubble-Wrapped World: How Safety Culture Has Destroyed Our Sense Of Adventure

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Bubble-Wrapped World: How Safety Culture Has Destroyed Our Sense Of Adventure

Authored by Murray Lytle via The Epoch Times,

Are Canadians less adventurous than they once were? It’s hard to argue otherwise.

Alexander Mackenzie was only 24 when the North West Company named him chief fur trader at Fort Chipewyan, in what is now Alberta. A few years later, in 1789 he travelled north along what is now known as the Mackenzie River to become the first European to reach the Arctic Ocean overland. Four years later he crossed the Rocky Mountains and was the first European to reach the Pacific Ocean, beating Americans Merriweather Lewis and William Clark by a full dozen years.

In 1898, Martha Purdy arrived in Dawson City to escape a failed marriage and make her fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush. It was while climbing the notorious Chilkoot Pass that she discovered she was pregnant with her third son. She later remarried and, as Martha Black, was the second woman to be elected to Canada’s Parliament. She was also a successful entrepreneur and a world-renowned expert on wild flowers.

Canadian history is filled with tales such as these. Explorers, soldiers, settlers, and other restless souls who endured great hardships and did great things.

There is a natural sense of awe that arises when retelling such lives filled with adventure. To our modern selves, they appear as fascinating aberrations, gifted men and women with unusual appetites for risky or dangerous undertakings. Their willingness to set out into the unknown strikes us today as thrilling, unnerving, and more than a bit foolhardy. But while their accomplishments may be striking, they lived in more adventurous times.

Today, society shrinks from adventure and the unknown.

Through a combination of practical circumstances, changing social standards, and dramatic shifts in individual risk tolerance and government behaviour, opportunities for adventure have been drastically curtailed.

How can Canadians get that sense of adventurousness back?

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered”, G.K. Chesterton once wrote. “An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” There is a case to be made that adventures are simply harder to come by these days.

There are no more blank spaces left on maps, and hence no places for modern-day Mackenzies to discover.

The omnipresence of the internet and GPS similarly makes it almost impossible to get truly lost anymore. And if you do, help is usually close at hand.

Beyond these practical limitations, however, it seems incontestable that society today is less interested in promoting, facilitating, or participating in adventurous life experiences.

No one talks of running away with the circus or joining the French Foreign Legion anymore, even in jest. According to Statistics Canada, twice as many millennials are still living at home as was the case with previous generations. And if any of these young adults do go away, it’s more than likely to be an adventureless “gap year” holiday between graduate degrees recorded in minute detail on Snapchat and Instagram.

The perpetual childhood of today’s younger generations contrasts sharply with the youthful accomplishments of past eras. William Wilberforce, for example, was elected to the British Parliament at age 21 and then proved instrumental in ending the trans-Atlantic slave trade. His friend William Pitt became Prime Minister at 24, and spent his career fighting the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, who became a general at 24. Quite a lot can be accomplished when one starts early.

Other factors that limit the availability of adventure in our post-modern era include the suffocating impact of the welfare state. When Mackenzie left his family home at 15 to become an apprentice in the fur industry, it was because he had little choice. He needed to make his way in the world as a teenager. The same urgency applied to Black when she decided to escape a failed marriage by travelling to the Yukon. With no government to hold your hand, adventure follows. Popular culture in earlier eras also did its bit as well by celebrating explorers and adventurers as celebrities in the same manner that we laud singers and athletes today.

Just as adventure was once regarded as a social virtue to be admired, society today aggressively enforces the opposite expectation—that it is our duty to avoid risk at all costs. In their 2021 book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and lawyer Greg Lukianoff take a close look at the impact of a creeping safety culture on the behaviour of younger generations.

Children, the authors observed, are now deliberately shielded from any sense of risk or uncertainty. How can anyone—young boys most of all—learn about the world around them when school principals announce at the onset of every snowfall that “all snow must stay on the ground.” The ideal of adventure and resilience has been replaced by a debilitating sense of fragility and risk-avoidance.

So is the dream of looking over an untravelled horizon that animated people like Alexander Mackenzie or Martha Black completely dead in the 21st century? Not exactly.

Adventure should properly be considered a spirit, not a place.

It is driven by a powerful mixture of curiosity, necessity, and an openness to experiencing new things. And it can be found wherever uncertainty reigns. Today, that might entail travelling to strange lands, meeting new people, or even engaging in uncomfortable discussions about whether Alberta should remain part of Canada forever.

Wherever the unknown lies, adventure can be found.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 17:30

Two Billboards In New York Capture The Conflict Of Our Time

Zero Hedge -

Two Billboards In New York Capture The Conflict Of Our Time

Authored by Kay Rubacek via The Epoch Times,

Two billboards went up in New York City recently. This is a city of advertising, where images appear when someone wants the whole world to see them. One billboard is selling artificial intelligence, and the other is warning about it. The juxtaposition between these two advertisers, who most likely wouldn’t have seen the other’s message in advance, captures the conflict of our times and cements the uncertainty about the future within an artificial intelligence world.

The selling billboard is dark, purple, and almost cinematic.

An AI-generated face with artificial perfection stares out. Three words above her say: “Stop Hiring Humans.” The Era of AI Employees Is Here. The company is Artisan. The company says it “is a provocation. It works because it’s uncomfortable.” It is real. It wants your payroll budget, and it is not embarrassed to say so.

The warning billboard is light, purple, and funny in the way that grief sometimes is. A sad stick figure holds a small sign: Will Create 4 Food. Mock chat bubbles float across it like a corporate memo from a future that has already arrived: “Thank you artists for donating your life’s work to our AI. Your generosity hasn’t gone unnoticed. Just uncompensated.”

The organization’s name is Replacement.AI. It is also real, but it is not selling anything. It is run by anonymous artists who spent their own money to tell you the truth. Their website calls itself “the only honest AI company.” Its homepage reads: Humans no longer necessary. Stupid. Smelly. Squishy. It’s time for a machine solution.

The quotes on the site are genuine, such as one from OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.” And another from OpenAI’s charter, “To build ‘highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.’”

On the page dedicated to artists, the site reads: “If you’re one of the millions of artists, musicians, writers, journalists, scholars, or other creatives whose work we’ve stolen to train our AI, we want to thank you. We couldn’t have achieved a $100 billion valuation without all of your hard work, just sitting on the internet for us and our other AI company friends to scrape. Unfortunately for you, financial compensation is out of the question. Just because we’re making money from your copyrighted material doesn’t mean you’re legally entitled to any of it.”

It is satire. It is also accurate. In a submission to the House of Lords, OpenAI admitted, “It would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.”

The courts are beginning to agree too that something was taken. Well over thirty copyright infringement lawsuits have been filed by creators against AI developers. Visual artists sued Stability AI and Midjourney. Getty Images sued, arguing that over twelve million photographs were scraped without license. The New York Times sued OpenAI. Universal Music filed a $3.1 billion lawsuit against Anthropic in January 2026, alleging its AI was built on a foundation of piracy. None of these cases have reached final verdicts. The legal system is moving at human speed through a problem that was created at machine speed.

What passed through a million years of accumulated human experience—the knowledge handed from mind to mind, generation to generation, the grief and wonder pressed into stories and paintings and films and arguments on the internet at three in the morning—was consumed by hungry algorithms. There was no purchase or licensing. The great ingestion happened in server rooms, while the rest of us were clicking I Agree to ever-lengthening terms and conditions that no one ever bothers to read. And that phase is now over.

Yet predictions for our future keep rolling in, each one confident, and each one contradicting the last. Goldman Sachs estimates AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs. The World Economic Forum projects 92 million jobs displaced by 2030, offset by 170 million new ones created, which is a net gain, on paper at least. Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, warns AI could replace half of all entry-level office jobs within five years. Jensen Huang says greater productivity creates more hiring, not less. In 2025 alone, Amazon eliminated 14,000 corporate roles, Microsoft cut 15,000, and Salesforce reduced its customer support workforce by 4,000. Like the billboards in Time Square, both are right, yet neither agree. What the experts ultimately share is uncertainty.

And the AI models are hungry again. This time, media organizations are making sure they require payment from AI giants for their content. New York Times is partnering with Amazon’s AI, Meta with News Corp, and Google with Reddit. But human-made internet content is finite and cannot keep up with the voracious appetite of AI models that do not need time to sleep or metabolise. So the machines have no choice but to prompt themselves, and generate new content upon previous content, with less and less human origin, leading us down a spiral of infinite iteration with less human touch, less human spirit, and less human soul. The only thing the “experts” seem to agree on is that the business potentials are both exhilarating and terrifying.

Meanwhile, Artisan’s billboard promises relief from the burden of human employees. Lower payroll. No sick days. No long hot showers a person needs to feel like a person again. The face on that billboard doesn’t need to ground herself. She doesn’t need anything. What is being sold is not intelligence, but the absence of need. It is a cold world to advertise, and the advertisers seem not to fear the cold.

Two billboards in New York City, and the same ones are popping up in other major cities across the nation. Between them is the argument that is yet to be resolved: whether what is being built is a tool or a replacement, a future or an ending. The experts cannot agree. The lawyers are still filing. The models are still hungry. And somewhere in Times Square, a sad stick figure is still holding his sign, hoping someone walking past will stop long enough to read it.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 16:20

Resident Floats Surefire Way Of Getting Potholes And Trash Cleaned Up In Shithole LA...

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Resident Floats Surefire Way Of Getting Potholes And Trash Cleaned Up In Shithole LA...

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

Los Angeles residents have had enough of living in a crumbling, graffiti-covered wasteland where basic services have collapsed under years of Democrat mismanagement.

In a display of pure ingenuity, citizens are fighting back by tagging over blighted areas with "Vote Pratt," betting that Mayor Karen Bass will rush to erase any sign of support for her political rival far faster than she addresses the endless decay.

This clever workaround shines a harsh light on the priorities in a city drowning in filth, where open drug markets and rat-infested encampments flourish while taxpayers foot the bill for billions in ineffective "solutions."

The idea took off after one resident pointed out the obvious: if neighborhoods are blanketed in graffiti that the city ignores, simply spray "Vote Pratt" over it and watch the cleanup crews mobilize within minutes.

One post noted, "This could possibly do the trick," while others highlighted how quickly political messaging gets scrubbed compared to everyday blight.

Videos and images circulating on X show the extent of the problem and the creative response, with AI-generated visuals encouraging more residents to test the theory.

The same tactic could target potholes, now mockingly dubbed "Bass-holes" due to the mayor's reluctance to release funds for basic road repairs.

The citizen hack represents more than a workaround - it exposes the deep dysfunction where political optics trump governance. In a city blessed with resources and climate, decades of open-border-friendly policies, soft-on-crime approaches, and unchecked spending have produced predictable decay.

This grassroots push to elect Pratt comes as no surprise to anyone following LA's descent. Just days ago, reports painted a grim picture of massive homeless encampments overrun by rats, open-air drug markets operating brazenly near police stations, and public spaces rendered unusable by tents, trash, and crime.

Helicopter footage has captured post offices swallowed by encampments, blocking mail access and parking. Residents describe navigating urine-soaked doorways blocked by belongings just to enter their own apartments, with police unwilling or unable to intervene under current policies.

Despite California dumping an estimated $24 billion into homelessness programs between 2018 and 2023 - with LA spending hundreds of millions annually - the results are nonexistent. The county reports around 72,000 homeless individuals, many unsheltered, with over half originating from out of state, according to critics of the system.

One man who moved to California openly admitted the appeal: easy access to food stamps, cash assistance, and a lifestyle where "they pay you to be homeless." These incentives have created what detractors call a Homeless Industrial Complex - a self-perpetuating system of nonprofits and bureaucrats motivated to manage the crisis rather than solve it.

Mayor Karen Bass has come under fire for broken promises to end street homelessness. When confronted on CNN about missed targets, she cited unanticipated "bureaucratic barriers." In another exchange, she advised residents not to trust their own eyes but official statistics instead, despite visible evidence to the contrary.

Enter Spencer Pratt, the mayoral candidate whose name is now central to this cleanup hack. Pratt has called for a no-nonsense approach: a short grace period after taking office followed by mass enforcement against crime, open drug use, and disorder. He has emphasized clearing streets and involving homeless individuals directly in cleanup efforts rather than feeding another layer of bureaucracy.

Real change requires rejecting the failed ideologies that enabled this mess: endless tolerance for lawlessness, incentives that import problems, and a bureaucracy that thrives on failure.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 14:00

Suicide Bomb Attack On Train In Pakistan Kills At Least 30, Over 100 Wounded

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Suicide Bomb Attack On Train In Pakistan Kills At Least 30, Over 100 Wounded

A massive suicide car bomb attack blew up and derailed a train transporting security personnel in Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan.

The blast ripped through the train passenger cars, killing at least 30 people and leaving more than 100 others wounded, with the casualty count expected to rise as rescuers dig through the twisted metal.

via AFP

The Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), a separatist group operating in the mineral-rich region, immediately claimed responsibility for Sunday's coordinated strike.

Local officials and police told international outlets that at least three coaches and the engine had derailed after the explosion. Security forces have cordoned off the whole area amid ongoing search and rescue efforts.

The completely overturned and were immediately engulfed in massive flames. Authorities have condemned the heinous act of terrorism.

Soon after the attack, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif took to X to condemn the carnage: "Such cowardly acts of terrorism cannot weaken the resolve of the people of Pakistan," Sharif stated.

"We remain steadfast in our determination to eliminate terrorism in all its forms and manifestations," he added.

While Islamabad promises total elimination of the threat, the reality on the ground has long been of an insurgency capable of hitting high-value military logistics lines at will.

One source said that the "The blast occurred near a railway track as a train carrying Pakistani security personnel and civilians was travelling near Quetta’s cantonment area, according to officials and media reports." And so it seems the terror group knew that large numbers of military and security personnel would be coming through.

Over a year ago, there was a major hijacking of a train carrying 346 passengers in the same region, in March 2025. That attack resulted in the deaths of at least 21 passengers and at least four Pakistani soldiers involved in the security response.

Death toll expected to climb:

As we've featured before, the Baloch Conflict owes its origins to Balochistan’s contentious incorporation into Pakistan but has evolved in recent years to take on shades of "resource nationalism". What’s meant by this is that some locals believe that their resource-rich region, the largest in Pakistan at nearly half the country’s size, isn’t receiving its fair share of wealth.

The BLA and its supporters also accuse Pakistan of selling the region out to China. Pakistan denies these claims and has always blamed Afghanistan and India for the conflict.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 13:25

UAE State Oil Company Head Says Hormuz Bypass Pipeline Nearly 50 Percent Complete

Zero Hedge -

UAE State Oil Company Head Says Hormuz Bypass Pipeline Nearly 50 Percent Complete

Authored by Evgenia Filimianova via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The head of the UAE's state oil company said on May 20 that a major new oil pipeline designed to bypass the Strait of Hormuz is nearly 50 percent complete, as regional tensions and competing maritime controls reshape global energy routes.

UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who's also the managing director and group CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, speaks via video during a presentation at the 44th annual CERAWeek by S&P Global conference at the Americas Hilton-Houston in Texas on March 23, 2026. CERAWeek by S&P Global

Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, said during an interview at the Atlantic Council that the project is being accelerated toward a planned 2027 completion date.

"Right now, too much of the world's energy still moves through too few choke points," Al Jaber said. "That is exactly why the UAE made the decision more than a decade ago to invest in infrastructure that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz."

Al Jaber said the UAE's second west-east pipeline is already "almost 50 percent complete."

The project comes as the Strait of Hormuz remains disrupted following months of conflict involving Iran, Israel, and the United States.

The UAE said last week that it would accelerate construction of the pipeline to expand export capacity through Fujairah, a port city on the Gulf of Oman outside the Strait of Hormuz.

The country's existing Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline, also known as the Habshan-Fujairah pipeline, already allows the UAE to bypass Hormuz for a portion of its exports.

The new project is expected to significantly expand that capacity.

Al Jaber warned that global energy systems remain vulnerable because too much oil and gas infrastructure depends on narrow maritime chokepoints.

"Energy security is no longer just about your ability to continue to produce," he said. "It is about routes, access, storage, and redundancy."

He said global spare oil production capacity remains dangerously low while energy storage levels continue falling.

"In just two months, the world drew down around 250 million barrels from storage," Al Jaber said. "We have 30 to 35 days of effective cover. We need to at least double that."

The comments followed warnings from the International Energy Agency (IEA) that oil markets could enter a "red zone" this summer if disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz continue.

IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said on May 21 that more than 14 million barrels of oil per day had been removed from global markets because of infrastructure damage and restrictions linked to the conflict.

UAE Moves Beyond OPEC

The pipeline expansion also comes weeks after the UAE formally exited OPEC and the broader OPEC+ alliance.

The UAE announced on April 28 that it would leave the organization effective May 1, describing the move as a "sovereign responsibility in a new energy age."

Al Jaber said the decision would give the UAE greater flexibility to expand production and invest globally.

"Ultimately, real strength is not measured by the abundance of resources, but by how they are harnessed to serve the nation," he said.

The UAE said ongoing instability in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz influenced the decision.

"Outside OPEC, the UAE will remain what it has always been, a disciplined, responsible, credible, reliable, and a stabilizing force in the global energy markets," said Al Jaber.

He also described relations between the UAE and the United States as increasingly integrated across energy, infrastructure, defense, and technology sectors.

Iran Expands Strait Oversight

The pipeline expansion coincides with Iran's efforts to formalize oversight of maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran announced in May the creation of the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, or PGSA, a new body tasked with supervising transit through the waterway and coordinating shipping permissions inside Iranian-designated control zones.

The PGSA said on May 20 that Iran had defined a maritime supervision area stretching from Kuh Mobarak in southeastern Iran to the southern coast of Fujairah in the UAE on the eastern side of the strait, and from Qeshm Island to Umm al-Quwain in the UAE on the western side.

The authority also said vessels operating within that area must coordinate transit frequencies and obtain permits from Iranian authorities before crossing the waterway.

Iranian Ambassador to France Mohammad Amin Nejad told Bloomberg on May 21 that Tehran and Oman are discussing a permanent tolling system for the strait.

Zones Of Control

The Iranian supervision zone appears to overlap at least partially with areas where U.S. naval forces are operating under Washington's blockade targeting Iranian ports.

U.S. Central Command said in an April 12 statement that American forces would blockade vessels entering or leaving Iranian ports beginning April 13.

It said the blockade applies to ships traveling to or from Iranian ports in both the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, while stating that U.S. forces would "not impede freedom of navigation" for vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz to non-Iranian destinations.

Iran's newly declared PGSA supervision zone covers much of the same shipping corridor through which U.S. naval forces monitor and intercept commercial traffic linked to Iranian ports.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on May 21 that an Iranian tolling system would be unacceptable and warned it could derail negotiations between Washington and Tehran.

"It would make a diplomatic deal unfeasible," Rubio told reporters before departing for NATO meetings in Sweden.

Rubio described the proposed toll system as a "threat to the world" and "completely illegal."

Rubio said after meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte in Helsingborg, Sweden, on May 22 that Western allies hope to reach an agreement with Iran that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and curb Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

He warned, however, that governments also need contingency plans if Iran refuses to restore maritime access.

Rubio said that if Iran continues restricting passage or threatens vessels that refuse to comply with Iranian demands, "something has to be done about it."

Several countries represented at the NATO meeting, he said, would be even more affected by prolonged disruption in the Strait of Hormuz than the United States because of their dependence on Middle Eastern energy supplies.

Rubio added that NATO members must begin preparing for scenarios in which "Iran decides, 'We don't care, we're going to keep the Straits closed.'"

Motorists drive past an ADNOC Gas subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company facility in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, on March 3, 2026. Ryan Lim/AFP via Getty Images Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 12:50

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