activescott's Notes

The U.S. Dollar Index, which measures the greenback against other major currencies, logged its steepest six-month drop in more than 50 years in the first half of 2025. Though the decline hasn’t deepened, the dollar index is still about 10% lower than the start of Trump’s term.

A strong dollar makes imports cheaper and can help keep inflation in check. A weak one can increase prices on foreign goods but boost American exports.

Trump has suggested a strong dollar puts the U.S. at a disadvantage and that a weak dollar helps American industry. And as with most things with Trump, he’s been blunter in his messaging.

“You make a hell of a lot more money with a weaker dollar,” he said last year, one of a number of public statements showing his preference for seeing the dollar decline.

Trump isn’t alone in seeing benefits of a weaker buck.

In recent months, corporate earnings calls have been peppered with talk of how a weaker dollar has helped companies from Philip Morris to Coca-Cola, with executives pulling out C-suite phrases like “favorable currency impact” to note how the dip brought tailwinds outside the U.S. that added to bottom lines.

Currency values are constantly moving and, while the dollar’s recent fall is notable, it has reached lower levels at points in the presidencies of each of Trump’s predecessors, back through the creation of the Dollar Index in 1973, when Richard Nixon was at the helm.

Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University economist and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, says while “a lot of policies that Trump is doing are something of a cancer for the dollar,” he believes that it was destined to fall no matter who was in charge.

“The dollar had been on a 15-year bull run,” he said. “I would argue the dollar is still wildly overvalued, and over the next maybe five or six years, it might fall 15%.”

What does that mean for American consumers? Rogoff says commodity prices are likely to rise, particularly with the impact of the Iran war on fuel prices.

“They’re just going to go up,” he says, “no matter what the dollar’s at.”

Lebanon’s National News Agency reports Israeli attacks have killed more than 30 people in a single day, in further violations of the U.S.-brokered ceasefire signed by Israel and Lebanon last month. Two children were among those killed in the attacks on southern Lebanon. They came as a Hezbollah drone injured 12 Israeli soldiers in northern Israel. On Thursday, Israel issued new forced evacuation orders for villages north of a strip of occupied territory along the border that Israel is calling a “Yellow Line.” More than 1 million people have been displaced from their homes by Israel’s attacks, about one-fifth of Lebanon’s population.

The Saver's Credit can be used by low- and moderate-income individuals and families to reduce their tax bills.

The Saver's Credit is applied directly to your tax bill to reduce the amount of federal income tax you owe. For instance, if your tax bill is $1,000 and your credit is $400, you'd only owe $600. If your tax bill is $1,000 and your credit is $1,000, it's a wash. You'd owe nothing.

To qualify, you must be 18 or older, not a full-time student, and not claimed as a dependent on someone else's tax return. Then you have to meet the AGI requirements. AGI is your gross income minus adjustments such as deductible retirement contributions, self-employment taxes, educator expenses, and student loan interest.

Of course, the final qualification is that you make a contribution to a retirement account. It's important to note that rollover contributions do not qualify for the credit, and eligible contributions may be reduced by recent retirement account distributions. Contributions to a wide range of retirement accounts qualify for this credit, including:

Traditional IRA
Roth IRA
Traditional 401(k)
Roth 401(k)
403(b)
457 plan
SARSEP
SEP IRA
SIMPLE IRA
Thrift Savings Plan
ABLE account

What is the Saver's Match, and how is it different from the Saver's Credit?

Beginning in tax year 2027, the Saver's Credit for retirement contributions will be replaced by the Saver's Match. While both incentives are designed to encourage lower‑ and moderate‑income workers to save for retirement, they work in different ways.

The Saver's Credit is a nonrefundable tax credit that reduces the amount of federal income tax you owe. By contrast, the Saver's Match provides a government matching contribution—worth up to 50% of the first $2,000 ($4,000 per person for joint filers) you contribute each year—that is deposited directly into an eligible retirement account.

For most organizations, autoMode.environment is the only field you need to set. It tells the classifier which repos, buckets, and domains are trusted: the classifier uses it to decide what “external” means, so any destination not listed is a potential exfiltration target. The default environment list trusts the working repo and its configured remotes. To add your own entries alongside that default, include the literal string "$defaults" in the array. The default entries are spliced in at that position, so your custom entries can go before or after them.

If it wasn't for the tariffs, would Colossus be solar-powered? It would be much easier to make it solar powered, yeah. The tariffs are nuts, several hundred percent. Don't you know some people? The president has... we don't agree on everything and this administration is not the biggest fan of solar. We also need the land, the permits, and everything. So if you try to move very fast, I do think scaling solar on Earth is a good way to go, but you do need some amount of time to find the land, get the permits, get the solar, pair that with the batteries.

I just repeatedly tackle the limiting factor. Whatever the limiting factor is on speed, I'm going to tackle that. If capital is the limiting factor,
20:52 20 minutes, 52 seconds then I'll solve for capital. If it's not the limiting factor, I'll solve for something else.

If it wasn't for the tariffs, would Colossus be solar-powered? It would be much easier to make it solar powered, yeah. The tariffs are nuts, several hundred percent. Don't you know some people? The president has... we don't agree on everything and this administration is not the biggest fan of solar.

Dwarkesh is pretty annoying. How many times does he say to Jensen "is that true" or some variant of calling him a liar. he can push back without insinuating he's a liar and Jensen definitely does not come off as a liar here. Maybe biased, but not liar.

If we scare this country into thinking that AI is somehow a nuclear bomb, so that everybody hates AI and everybody's afraid of AI, I don't know how you're helping the United States. You're doing it a disservice. If we scare everybody out of doing software engineering jobs because it's going to kill every software engineering job—and we don't have any software engineers as a result of that—we're doing a disservice to the United States. If we scare everybody out of radiology so nobody wants to be a radiologist because computer vision is completely free and no AI is going to do a worse job than a radiologist, we misunderstand the difference between a job and a task. The job of a radiologist is patient care. The task is to read a scan. If we misunderstand that so profoundly and we scare everybody out of going to radiology school, we're not going to have enough radiologists and good enough healthcare. So I'm making the case that when you make a premise that is so extreme, everything goes from zero or infinity, we end up scaring people in a way that's just not true. – Jensen Huang

Venezuela is another possible contender, said market watchers. With output recovering faster than expected and a potentially more U.S.-friendly political environment emerging, Caracas could seek greater flexibility.

“Venezuela could be next off the rank in wake of leadership change there to a more U.S. friendly position,” said Saul Kavonic, energy analyst at MST Marquee.

Kpler’s Smith also said that Venezuela was a potential candidate because it has been ramping up production and exports at a quicker pace than expected. Venezuela’s oil exports rose above a million barrels per day in March for the first time since September.

x402 is an open, neutral standard for internet-native payments. It absolves the Internet's original sin by natively making payments possible between clients and servers, creating win-win economies that empower agentic payments at scale. x402 exists to build a more free and fair internet.

Weird. But by all means buy.

The firm joins a growing list of publicly-traded companies betting on ETH. These companies, coupled with DeFi treasuries, have accumulated a total of $9.5 billion worth of the cryptocurrency, equivalent to around 2% of its total supply, data from StrategicEtherReserve shows.

talkie is an inference library for the talkie 13B language model family developed by Alec Radford, Nick Levine, and David Duvenaud.

talkie-1930-13b-base is a 13b language model trained on pre-1931 English-language text.

talkie-1930-13b-it has been instruction-tuned using a novel instruction-following dataset built from pre-1931 reference works including etiquette manuals, letter-writing manuals, encyclopedias, and poetry collections. It has also undergone reinforcement learning using online DPO to improve instruction-following capabilities.

We also provide a 'modern' base model, talkie-web-13b-base, with the same architecture and training FLOPs as talkie-1930, but trained on FineWeb, to allow for controlled comparisons between modern and vintage models. Note that we need to be careful about the claims we make contrasting the behavior and capabilities of the models, because temporal coverage is not the only difference in the pretraining corpora. For example, the distribution of subject matters differs significantly.

The guidance, issued on Tuesday to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field offices, asks that they “supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100-200 denaturalization cases per month” in the 2026 fiscal year. If the cases are successful, it would represent a massive escalation of denaturalization in the modern era, experts said. By comparison, between 2017 and this year to date, there had been just over 120 cases filed, according to the Justice Department

under new guidance issued by the Trump administration, immigrants can now be denied a green card for expressing political opinions, such as participating in pro-Palestinian campus protests, posting criticism of Israel on social media and desecrating the American flag, according to internal Department of Homeland Security training materials reviewed by The New York Times.

The administration includes criticism of Israel as a potentially disqualifying factor, with the training materials citing as an example of questionable speech a social media post that declares, “Stop Israeli Terror in Palestine” and shows the Israeli flag crossed out.

Oil demand is expected to contract by 80 kb/d this year, as the Iran war upends our global outlook. This is 730 kb/d less than in last month’s Report and a forecast 1.5 mb/d 2Q26 decline would be the sharpest since Covid-19 slashed fuel consumption. Initially, the deepest cuts in oil use have come in the Middle East and Asia Pacific, mainly for naphtha, LPG and jet fuel. However, demand destruction will spread as scarcity and higher prices persist.

Global oil supply plummeted by 10.1 mb/d to 97 mb/d in March, with continued attacks on energy infrastructure in the Middle East and ongoing restrictions to tanker movements through the Strait of Hormuz leading to the largest disruption in history. OPEC+ production fell 9.4 mb/d m-o-m to 42.4 mb/d while non-OPEC+ supply declined 770 kb/d m-o-m to 54.7 mb/d, as lower Qatari output offset gains in Brazil and the United States.

Global observed oil inventories fell by 85 mb in March, with stocks outside of the Middle East Gulf drawn down by a significant 205 mb (-6.6 mb/d) as flows through the Strait of Hormuz were choked off. At the same time, with limited outlets after the effective closure of the Strait, floating storage of crude and oil products in the Middle East rose by 100 mb and onshore crude stocks in the region were up by 20 mb. China added 40 mb of crude to tanks.

However, at the time of writing, it remains unclear whether the ceasefire will turn into a lasting peace and a return to regular shipping flows through the Strait of Hormuz. With oil-importing nations scrambling to source replacement barrels from an increasingly shrinking pool of supply, physical crude oil prices surged to record levels near $150/bbl, far above the prices in futures markets, with the physical-futures disconnect becoming increasingly acute. Even steeper gains have been seen for refined products, with middle distillate prices in Singapore reaching all-time highs above $290/bbl.

Resuming flows through the Strait of Hormuz remains the single most important variable in easing the pressure on energy supplies, prices and the global economy.

In early April, shipments through the Strait remained severely restricted, with loadings of crude, natural gas liquids and refined products averaging around 3.8 mb/d, compared with more than 20 mb/d in February ahead of the crisis. Exports through alternative routes – most notably from the west coast of Saudi Arabia and Fujairah on the east coast of the UAE, as well as the ITP pipeline that runs from Iraq to Ceyhan in Türkiye – had increased to 7.2 mb/d from less than 4 mb/d before the war. The overall loss in oil exports exceeds 13 mb/d, with associated production curtailment and damage to energy infrastructure in the region resulting in cumulative supply losses of more than 360 mb in March and 440 mb projected for April.

Overall, global oil demand is estimated to contract by 800 kb/d year-on-year in March and by 2.3 mb/d in April. Global oil demand is now projected to decline by 80 kb/d on average in 2026, compared to growth of 730 kb/d expected in last month’s Report.

The Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025 showed that, for a remarkable 19 out of 20 important strategic minerals, China is the leading refiner, with an average market share of 70%. Moreover, our analysis shows that this concentration has only intensified in recent years. Reliance on a small number of suppliers increases vulnerability to shocks and disruptions, be it from extreme weather, technical failure or trade disruptions.

This is no longer just a theoretical concern. There has been a proliferation of export controls on key materials and technologies in recent years. New restrictions on rare earth elements and lithium-ion battery supply chains underscore once again the vulnerabilities and risks.

For rare earths used in magnets for various industries – notably neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium – China accounted for around 60% of global mining output in 2024, followed by Myanmar, Australia and the United States. China’s dominance is even greater in the separation and refining stages, representing about 91% of global production, with Malaysia a distant second.

Moreover, China has significantly strengthened its position in the manufacturing of rare earth-containing permanent magnets – magnets that retain their magnetic properties indefinitely without the need for external power. Two decades ago, China accounted for around 50% of the production of sintered permanent magnets commonly used in cars, wind turbines, industrial motors, data centres and defence systems. This share has risen significantly to 94% today, making China the world’s single largest supplier of the component critical to the manufacturing of the most powerful motors that are used for many cutting-edge applications. Such high market concentration leaves global supply chains in strategic sectors – such as energy, automotive, defence and AI data centres – vulnerable to potential disruptions.

In 2024, China exported 58 000 tonnes of rare earth magnets – enough to manufacture components to make millions of cars, industrial motors or aircraft – or to build thousands of strategic military systems, data centres or wind turbines.

is not only rare earth elements that are impacted. On 9 October 2025, China also announced major export controls on lithium-ion battery supply chains, effective from 8 November. The new controls expand on previous measures and cover a much broader range of battery materials, technologies and equipment across multiple stages of the supply chain. They now include battery cells and packs for high-performance applications, cathode precursors, an expanded scope of anode materials, a broader coverage of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cathode materials, and battery and material production equipment and technologies.

China currently dominates the midstream and downstream supply chains for batteries globally, with shares of 80% or more in many key areas. In some segments such as precursor cathode materials and LFP cathode materials, China maintains a near monopoly, with shares of 95% or above. This exceptional concentration creates multiple points of vulnerability across the supply chain.2

Looking further ahead, the new controls target some critical chokepoints in global battery supply chains, notably graphite anode material and cathode material precursors for which supply options outside China are extremely limited. If these supplies are disrupted, this could severely restrict the ability of the rest of the world to produce batteries, with potentially significant strategic and economic consequences.

LFP batteries are a case in point, with markets expanding rapidly. They represent half of the global electric car battery market and the majority of the energy storage market. While China currently dominates this segment, efforts are underway to develop LFP battery production outside China. However, new restrictions on LFP cathode materials could impede these initiatives, reinforcing China’s dominance in this technology, with major implications for energy storage deployment.

The Trump administration announced two more payouts Monday for energy companies to walk away from U.S. offshore wind projects under development.

Bluepoint Wind and Golden State Wind have agreed to end their offshore wind leases in exchange for reimbursements totaling nearly $900 million.

Interior said it’s following the model of its recent deal with the French energy company TotalEnergies, which is getting a $1 billion payout to walk away from projects off the coasts of North Carolina and New York. TotalEnergies agreed in March to what’s essentially a refund of its leases, and will invest the money in fossil fuel projects instead.

Bluepoint Wind and Golden State Wind were slated to be major offshore wind projects, each capable of powering more than 1 million homes when complete and helping the states of New Jersey, New York and California meet their clean energy goals. If the projects were to ever move forward, a developer would have to buy new leases. But under the Trump administration, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has rescinded all designated wind energy areas in federal waters.

Bluepoint Wind is a partnership between Ocean Winds and Global Infrastructure Partners. Global Infrastructure Partners, a part of investment giant BlackRock, has committed to invest up to $765 million into a U.S.-based liquefied natural gas facility. Interior said it would cancel the offshore wind lease and reimburse the company for the amount invested in the LNG project.

Golden State Wind is a joint venture by Ocean Winds and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Under its agreement, Golden State Wind can recover about $120 million in lease fees after the same amount is invested in oil and gas assets, infrastructure or projects along the Gulf Coast, Interior said.

In his second term, Trump has gone all in on fossil fuels, which he says will lower costs for families, increase reliability and help the U.S. maintain global leadership in artificial intelligence.