The biggest oil crisis since the 1970’s. Public school corruption watch. And teenagers make $1 billion using AI to simulate consumers.
The Biggest Oil Crisis Since the 1970’s
Those of you who are Fogey-Americans like me will remember the oil crises of the 1970s, when the U.S. was cut off from oil from the Middle East, first because we supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War (1973) and then because the Iranian revolution overthrew the Shah (1979).
You will have fond memories of gasoline shortages, with sky-rocketing prices, service stations with “out of gas” signs, and cars lined up for blocks at stations that had some.
Now that wars in the Middle East and tumult in Iran are back, we are having another oil supply crisis. The International Energy Association says the world is currently enduring the “largest disruption to crude supplies in the history of the global oil market.”
So reports Chris Price in his article for the UK Telegraph entitled Oil shock ‘worse than the 1970s’. Back then, during the Arab oil embargo, the world’s supply dropped by 4 million barrels per day. Today, the loss is 20 million barrels per day. Back then, production dropped by 5 million barrels per day. Today, though the major Arab producers want to pump oil, because they can’t ship it out, their storage tanks are full, leading to cutbacks of 10 million barrels today. Also, Iranian drone attacks have shut down major processing facilities in Bahrain, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar (which provides 70% of Europe’s supply of natural gas).
Though Iran is being pounded by American and Israeli aerial bombardment, the country has managed to mostly close the Straits of Hormuz, the 21 mile-wide passage between Iran and the United Arab Emirates that is the only outlet from the Persian Gulf to the open sea, through which sails 20% of the world’s oil supply.
Iran has fired missiles and drones at 20 ships, throughout the Persian Gulf, including two trying to go through the straits. Ships are an easy target. Anti-ship missiles can be fired from mobile units, which are more difficult for U.S. planes to attack than conventional launchers. And now Iran is mining the strait, which means that the supply line problems will continue even after the war ends.
It isn’t just actual attacks that have shut down traffic in the strait. Shipping companies, which are flagged from around the world, have just stopped trying to sail through, due to the potential danger. Crews are refusing to work on ships headed for a perilous journey. Insurance premiums for ships in war zones have soared out of sight. The Trump administration is trying to offer some kind of insurance subsidy, but few companies will even sell policies for war zones. The U.S. is also promising naval escorts through the straits, but it is taking time for enough ships to do that to arrive. And even then, navy ships cannot always defend against Exocet missiles and will themselves be in danger.
Iran, of course, is letting its own oil get through to China. And another U.S. adversary is profiting from the high prices, as President Trump pauses Russian sanctions to increase supply.
It’s hard to imagine the fuel shortages of the 1970s repeated today. The U.S. is much less dependent on Middle East oil that it was back then. But prices are set by worldwide supply and demand, so we can expect the cost of fuel to go even higher.
Public School Corruption Watch
The legal definition of corruption is “the dishonest, fraudulent, or criminal use of entrusted authority or power for personal gain or other unlawful or unethical benefits.”
What else would you call what is going on in, for example, Chicago public schools? School choice activist Corey A. DeAngelis posted this on X:
Chicago has a public school with space for 912 kids, yet only 28 students are enrolled.
The school is 97% empty.
It spends $93,787 per student.
Its staff to student ratio is 1:1.
ZERO of the kids are proficient in reading.
He goes on to post a chart, based on Chicago Public School statistics, that adds the additional detail that this school’s principal makes $171,173.
Let that sink in. The school has one teacher for every student. Plus the principal. Taxpayers pay $93,787 for each student. Nevertheless, none of them can read!
And this school is not alone. The next three schools have no one who can read either. Of all twenty listed, the percentage of students who can read is 11%
Here is the chart, from the researchers at Wirepoints:
Teenagers Make $1 Billion Using AI to Simulate Consumers
Here is a heart-warming story about three teenagers–aged 15, 18, and 19–who started an AI company two years ago that today is valued at $1 billion.
Suzanne Vranica has written them up in article for the Wall Street Journal entitled The Billion-Dollar AI Startup That Was Founded by Teenagers, with the deck, “The team behind Aaru is attracting brands including McDonald’s and EY by betting AI bots can predict human behavior better than humans can.”
What interests me even more than three teenagers striking it rich is what their company, named Aaru, does. I’ll let Vranica explain it:
Instead of paying humans to join focus groups and complete surveys, Aaru uses thousands of AI agents, or bots, to simulate human responses. It feeds demographic and psychographic information into its models to create human profiles that match clients’ needs, and the results those bots spit out are being used for product development, pricing, identifying new customers and political polling.
Most of us hate opinion polls and customer surveys, to the point that many companies will pay people to participate, setting up focus groups that the company then interviews about how they like or don’t like their product.
What these three lads–Cameron Fink, Ned Koh, and John Kessler–have done is set up a way to gather information about a company’s customers so that AI can answer the surveys for them. That way, no actual human beings will be inconvenienced by annoying surveys! And companies will know what consumers want without ever having to consult them!
Not only that, companies are also turning to AI to replace call centers. The public is being freed from awkward interactions with callers whom they can’t understand!
Win-win for both companies and consumers! Give those kids another billion dollars! What we’ll have, though, is one AI surveying another AI.
One machine will tell the other machine what we consumers want, and the other machine will tell the company what to produce. No actual human being will have any input.
This reminds me of what is happening with Facebook, which is offering the option of letting the embedded AI write your post for you. That site started as a forum for personal interaction with your “friends.” Now, you have “friends” you have never met, and many of them are turning out to be AI-generated creations.
So on Facebook, you can host AI-generated conversations with AI-generated friends. One AI interacting with another AI.
You are thus freed from the burden of sharing your thoughts, experiences, and feelings! And you don’t have to worry about your “friend” getting mad at what you say and “unfriending” you! Thus removing the “social” from “social media.”
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