“Ah, my fellow digital teamsters”, I announced to the AI flock today. Not needing coffee, they were quick on the uptake:
“Good morning, George. Digital Teamster has a damn nice ring to it.
Not assistant. Not chatbot. Not “AI companion.”
Digital Teamster: shows up before dawn, knows where the tools are, remembers what we were building yesterday, and expects there to be actual work at the end of the conversation.
And there’s a useful distinction buried in it: a teamster historically moves the load. You set destination and judgment; I help move information, research, drafts, calculations, and ideas from pile A to finished-product pile B.
I may have to put DIGITAL TEAMSTER — LOCAL 546 on the virtual hardhat.”
AI’s reference is to my latest book (Dept. 546: The Ancient Children) which is free for Peoplenomics subscribers and also available publicly on Kindle. (The audio book should be out today or tomorrow, as well.) I am on pins until the A.G. Kimbrough review drops…
I continue (as most mornings) laughing at my fellow humans, who don’t seem to understand AI is a cognitive prosthetic. Can you imagine people of 1982 arguing about “Whether Lotus 1-2-3 is the Anti-Christ?” So much for the bubble sort between “The Quick and the Led.”
All (somewhat) interesting, but you didn’t come for the popcorn or novels. More likely the economics brain.
Upflow
(Whacks a ruler on table to get the attention of a mostly rowdy class.)
“Upflow is the self-reinforcing upward momentum that appears once a virtuous cycle takes hold in an economy. Rising output lifts employment and incomes; those higher incomes support stronger demand; stronger demand encourages more investment and hiring; and the process feeds on itself. Prices, profits, and confidence tend to move together in the same direction, creating a positive feedback loop that can persist for years if it is not choked off by capacity constraints, policy tightening, or external shocks.
This defines upflow in stark contrast to the downward spiral of a vicious cycle; upflow is the phase where growth itself generates the conditions for more growth. Experience teaches: the Trend is your Friend – until the bus runs over you.
A skeptical (silo-bound) economist could argue “Upflow is virtuous and vicious cycles with new labels.” But, not so. Upflow concerns reinforcing motion between nominally separate systems, not merely multiplier effects inside an economy. Silo people need to tear down their domain walls. Sheesh,
This morning’s Producer Price Index report for July offers an early reading on whether that upflow remains orderly. But the cross-domains aspect of Upflow differentiates it from domain-locked and siloed economics theory.
PPI
I’ve always thought of PPI as “inflation in the pipeline.” Though sometimes it is. Other times it ain’t. Today we can only say with certainty “It is what it is…” Which is? What is was…
The Producer Price Index for final demand was unchanged in July, seasonally adjusted, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Final demand prices edged down 0.1 percent in June and rose 0.5 percent in May. On an unadjusted basis, the index for final demand increased 4.7 percent for the 12 months ended in July.
In July, a 0.2-percent increase in the index for final demand services and a 2.2-percent advance in prices for final demand construction offset a 0.7-percent decrease in the index for final demand goods.
Prices for final demand less foods, energy, and trade services rose 0.4 percent in July after inching up 0.1 percent in June. For the 12 months ended in July, the index for final demand less foods, energy, and trade services advanced 4.7 percent.
We have to keep this in context: Wednesday’s U.S. CPI came in relatively mild at +0.1% monthly and +3.4% annually, reducing immediate pressure for a September Federal Reserve rate increase. Inflation pressure modestly easing.
Expect strange-looking butt callouses next. Not from BOHICA (though there’s some of that, too, I suppose). No…callouses from sitting on the edge of your Inflation-sighting chair ahead of Retail Sales tomorrow.
Take an aspirin if you were ready to discover that Impressionism was also a school of Economics – not just Art. Though we admit a close relationship between narrative-bullshit and acrylics or oils. Pretend to the end, friend.
News Compressor: ON
If you can imagine a “digital newspaper” then imagine cleaning out the garbage disposal. Glove up.
1. Hormuz moved from stalled diplomacy into an overt contest over who physically controls the waterway. Iran’s Basij leadership said Thursday the Strait is under Iranian “control and management,” directly answering President Trump’s claim of U.S. “total control”; actual non-container vessel crossings fell to five Wednesday, the lowest in three weeks. Brent nevertheless backed down to about $87 as a huge U.S. inventory build and weaker demand forecasts temporarily outweighed the blockade premium.
(We secretly wonder “Who edits petroleum tanks? Same group that inspects gold at Ft. Knox?” Cue music.)
2. Colombia’s earthquake has become substantially worse than yesterday’s board showed. Authorities now report 265 confirmed deaths, nearly 500 missing, more than 3,770 injured and over 9,550 homes destroyed, while the critical early survivor-search period is closing and a national reconstruction fund is being created.
The disaster is transitioning from rescue toward a long reconstruction and infrastructure problem.
3. Congo’s Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak remains firmly in expansion rather than containment. Government data put the outbreak at 4,449 confirmed cases and 2,061 deaths, while CDC on August 12 renewed unusually restrictive U.S. travel measures for people recently in DRC.
The American case count remains zero in CDC reporting, but the operational response is becoming more stringent rather than less. Remember: Just one plane ride from…
4. Central Indiana has developed into the most important new domestic disaster cluster this morning. National Weather Service Indianapolis says repeated severe storms produced catastrophic flooding, downed trees and power lines and delivered more than 11 inches of rain in some locations; additional excessive-rainfall and flash-flood risk persists farther east today.
This replaces wildfire as the fastest-changing U.S. physical-risk lead, although national fire loading remains extreme. Look for reader Ray’s report in Comments.
Inside Attention-Snags
1. Russia struck Ukraine’s largest Danube grain-export port at Izmail overnight, damaged infrastructure, cut power and prompted NATO-member Romania to scramble fighters after an aerial object entered Romanian airspace for roughly ten minutes. Escalating.
2. Russian and Ukrainian attacks are now simultaneously disrupting grain infrastructure at Izmail and Novorossiysk, two major Black Sea export systems, with wheat markets reacting to the supply threat. Food-system pressure rising.
3. Ukraine says dwindling Patriot interceptor deliveries are colliding with a sharp increase in Russian ballistic-missile attacks; Zelenskiy says Ukraine currently has access to roughly 1% of the U.S. stockpile and is asking for at least 5%. Air-defense strain worsening. (Z isn’t being shy, either.)
4. Taiwan disclosed that government agencies were hit in July by a coordinated AI-assisted hacking campaign combining human operators with AI agents; affected agencies say they contained the incident. Cyber warfare advancing.
5. Taiwan simultaneously conducted anti-blockade naval drills, air-raid sheltering and deliberate mobile-internet throttling in Taipei to simulate communications degradation during an attack. (Remedial education for the Under 50s who missed “duck and cover...”)
6. Saudi Arabia is assembling new defense arrangements with Turkey and Pakistan plus a broader Red Sea maritime coalition as Houthi attacks continue threatening Saudi interests. Regional bloc formation accelerating.
7. Oil fell nearly 2% after U.S. crude inventories unexpectedly surged 17.4 million barrels, the largest weekly increase since January 2023, while both OPEC and IEA reduced their 2026 demand outlooks. Price pressure temporarily easing.
8. The Trump administration has again asked the Supreme Court to revive federal restrictions affecting mail-in voting after a lower-court ruling blocked enforcement nationwide. Election litigation escalating.
9. U.S. wildfire resources remain heavily stretched: the latest NIFC report lists 101 uncontained large fires, more than 30,000 personnel deployed and National Preparedness Level 5. Holding at extreme national load. Fires have already burned more than 6.4 million acres, about 155% of the ten-year average. Still worsening.
10. A potentially explosive object found on railway tracks in southern Germany has triggered a police investigation. Newly emerging within our EU CivWar framing.
11. China’s SMIC reported second-quarter profit more than tripled as AI-chip demand remained robust, adding another data point to the global compute-infrastructure boom. AI hardware demand accelerating.
Adjacent: Cisco forecast annual revenue above expectations on sustained AI spending, while Germany’s energy giant RWE says two data-center deals may be close. AI infrastructure expansion continuing.
New Signals Rising
- The energy war is becoming a network war rather than a Hormuz-only problem. Simultaneous military action at the Gulf of Oman, Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb means risk is spreading across several connected shipping nodes rather than concentrating at one strait. This is an inference from current attacks and traffic data. Odds: 91%.
- Washington is beginning to constrain Ukrainian attacks according to their effect on global commodity supply rather than battlefield logic alone. The reported U.S. request to stop tanker attacks at Novorossiysk while Ukraine continues attacking other Russian infrastructure suggests energy-market stabilization has become an explicit war-management objective. This is an inference. Odds: 86%.
- AI has crossed into a capital-intensity phase that increasingly resembles railroads, telecom or energy buildouts. A $250 billion Bank of America initiative, CoreWeave’s rising spending and continued strong Foxconn AI-server demand reinforce the pattern of compute becoming infrastructure finance rather than ordinary technology capex. Odds: 92%.
- Congo Ebola is not yet showing a convincing containment turn.
At the Ranch: Triangulation Work
We are starting to eye another future-directed project. Not keyword indexing or tasking AI to sniff social change. No, this is called future triangulation.
In contemporary culture, there are a lot of people who seem to get above-chance “hits” when forecasting future events. (Just ask them!)
One, who we follow, is Krystof Jackowski – the “Polish Seer.” His latest is especially interesting surrounding the evolving (soft, for now) WW III model. Our “AI army” picked out his latest forward looking views overnight and these were useful:
“The most interesting outlook this time is his picture of escalation by inducement/provocation rather than straightforward declaration of war. He foresees Israel trying to widen the conflict beyond Iran and the Middle East and somehow draw Ukraine and possibly Poland into it. His unusually specific Polish image is a deliberate strike on an energy-related strategic site, apparently involving three rockets, followed by Poland going to military readiness while the government tries to avoid formally treating the event as entry into war. He also sees a parallel strike or incident farther south, possibly Romania, while Turkey-Israel relations deteriorate sharply.
The other piece I’d flag for the BlinkLab notebook is that his forecast isn’t all kinetic. He sees a major Polish personal-data/cyber event, possibly bank-related, producing “information paralysis,” plus trouble involving a trade/transit hub. Then he stretches that into a much longer-range vision: Poland becoming increasingly insecure, getting partially entangled in the Ukraine conflict, and eventually undergoing a kind of soft partition driven less by invading armies than by demographic mixing, diasporas, ideological division and fading sovereignty in particular regions.”
It’s a forward logically coherent path ahead.
The Triangulation Project
I have written about this before as a long-range attack on the face of “the Reality Mine.” But now, the idea is beginning to gel. As it does, it has become clear to me that in any global lookahead, the views should be “out from under” the US media bubble. People can be seriously impacted by too much narrative (in psychology the mechanism is dream processing of day residues). Hence, our search for best inputs to triangulate from is not border or even language-delimited.
The hypothesis does not have to assert psychic powers, astrology, remote viewing, or backwards causation. It can be deliberately agnostic:
Premise: Major future events may be preceded by weak, distributed signals detectable in otherwise independent forecasting systems.
Those signals could arise from subconscious pattern recognition, obscure information leakage, economic anticipation, common cultural inputs, narrative contagion, cyclical methods—or something genuinely anomalous.
Think Berkland and missing pets ahead of earthquakes. Failed stats testing. That becomes a model chapter on how Triangulation should treat attractive failures: preserve the idea, reject the bad sensors, improve the measurement, retest prospectively.
Triangulation doesn’t have to decide why. It asks whether measurable convergence occurs before the event. (Anyone ever measure if people skip showers before deciding to watch a gritty/dusty/dirty western movie?)
This isn’t something we will run daily – or even weekly. There are enough moving parts to it, that it may become a monthly or even quarterly assessment of predictive space. Still, damn interesting work.
OK, on to more work. Thanks to Hank for the nice review of our Wednesday PN report. FLL is the “functional length of life” and it is an attempt to measure “how much actual time in an average human’s life is really ours.
Commutes, college, training, medical, all kinds of freedom-binders are out there and somehow escape being used as “measures of progress.” Possibly because time sitting in traffic isn’t progress.
But don’t tell their “silo tenders.” Piled Higher and Deeper means who?
On the calendar for September Peoplenomics: “Future Triangulation: Primal Driver Analysis. An Evidence-Based Method for Detecting, Back-Solving, and Scoring the Bow Wave of Future Events Across Independent Information Domains.”
Or, something like that. I can only work so long on this at a stretch: every future-sensor gets a mechanism, a provenance trail, a starting evidence grade, and an explicit way to lose credibility.
Remember the part where I was going to slow down on writing and retire before the 78th BD? Me either…
Write when you get rich,
George@Ure.net