Pump and dump

State of German Bundesbank:

The worst performing stocks in the S&P 500 this year:

Current playbook, but the manipulation won’t last forever

A really cool game for learning SQL, built in a Matrix-style atmospher:

SQL Protocol

SQL Game: Story, Interview Drills, 1v1 PvP

Free SQL game in your browser. Learn SQL through a 15-chapter story campaign, timed interview drills, and 1v1 multiplayer matches. No install, no s...

The idea is simple: you move through different levels, starting with easy tasks and gradually getting into more complex challenges, while improving your SQL skills step by step. The game is also multiplayer, so you can see and talk to real players, ask for help in the chat when you get stuck and even enter PvP mode, where you solve SQL tasks against another player in a race against time.

Look at the asymmetry. While Gulf hubs (Emirates, Etihad Airways, Qatar Airways) are constrained by airspace disruptions and reduced capacity, they are not the ones leading cancellations. Instead, it’s European and Asian carriers (Turkish Airlines, Air China and most notably Lufthansa) that are aggressively cutting. Why? Because the vulnerability is financial. European carriers operate on thinner margins, higher regulatory burdens and less fuel flexibility. When jet fuel doubles, they cannot absorb it - they must transmit it immediately through cancellations, capacity cuts and pricing shocks. Gulf carriers, despite disruptions, are structurally designed around energy proximity and state-backed resilience. Europe is not.

If you’re planning on leaving Europe at some point - neo feudalism is in front of you. It truly is now or never.

AI memory cycle + tax reduction scheme + structured product hedging + relative macro trades + geopolitical optionality + dealer gamma reflexivity = EWY call open interest strikes to the moon like a meme stock. The mechanical piece most people ignore: gamma. When call open interest explodes, dealers who sold those calls have to hedge by buying the underlying as it rises. That creates a feedback loop. Price goes up -> dealers buy -> price goes up more. What starts as positioning turns into price formation.

„Germany is moving to upgrade civilian port infrastructure for wartime use: Europe’s largest terminal in Bremerhaven is being reinforced to handle the movement of heavy Leopard tanks toward front-line zones“ - BBG On April 22, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius introduced the Bundeswehr’s first-ever comprehensive military strategy, outlining a plan to elevate Germany’s armed forces to the leading position in Europe. The strategy designates Russia as the “primary threat.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-02/germany-is-preparing-supply-lines-for-a-war-it-s-far-from-ready

Agile’s Long Con: How a Software Manifesto Became Corporate Excuse-Making With Stand-Ups The most savage line recently circulating in software circles is attributed to Alistair Cockburn, one of the original authors of the Agile Manifesto: Agile, he allegedly said, started as a cult and turned into a scam. I could not verify the exact wording from a primary Cockburn source, which matters, because the internet has a habit of converting irritation into quotation and quotation into scripture, yet the sentence survives because it captures something many engineers, product people, project managers, and exhausted adults trapped in Jira already know from lived experience. Agile began as a rebellion against bureaucratic software delivery, against dead documentation, against armies of managers who confused Gantt charts with thinking, and against the old corporate disease where nobody saw working software until the budget had already become archaeological material. Then, through the usual institutional miracle by which every anti-bureaucratic idea becomes a bureaucracy with certificates, workshops, role titles, consultants, rituals, laminated values, and people whose entire contribution to engineering is asking whether a ticket has acceptance criteria, Agile became exactly the kind of machine it once promised to destroy. The tragedy, or the comedy if your salary depends on selling transformation decks, is that the modern Agile industry sells speed while manufacturing delay, sells responsibility while diffusing accountability, and sells adaptability while often giving management a perfect excuse to avoid deciding what should actually be built. The 2024 Engprax study, controversial though it is and worth treating with caution because Engprax is connected to the promotion of its own “Impact Engineering” framework, supplied the anti-Agile camp with a number too explosive to ignore: software projects adopting Agile Manifesto practices were reported as 268 percent more likely to fail than those doing the opposite, based on a survey of 600 engineers in the United Kingdom and the United States. The same research claimed that projects with documented requirements before development began were 50 percent more likely to succeed, projects with clear requirements before development were 97 percent more likely to succeed, and projects without significant late-stage requirement changes were more likely to succeed as well, which is an almost offensively obvious finding only in an industry that spent two decades pretending that ambiguity is a productivity strategy. The striking point here is less the exact coefficient, because any single study with commercial context deserves skepticism, than the direction of the evidence: when engineers know what problem they are solving, why it matters, what constraints define success, and which trade-offs have already been thought through, the project has a better chance than when everyone performs “collaboration” around a fog machine. Even critics of the Engprax paper have conceded that the failure signal may come from weak requirements, poor documentation, and bad project management disguised as Agile, which only sharpens the indictment, because that is precisely how Agile is usually consumed in the corporate wild. The popular defense, usually delivered by someone with a certification logo in an email signature, says that failed Agile merely proves Agile was done wrong, which is a wonderfully unfalsifiable sentence and therefore beloved by every managerial priesthood in history. Communism failed because true communism was never tried, privatization failed because the market was distorted, central planning failed because the wrong people planned it, and Agile failed because the stand-up had insufficient psychological safety while the backlog grooming session lacked spiritual purity. This logic protects the framework by moving every failure into the user, the team, the culture, the maturity model, the leadership mindset, the tooling environment, the transformation roadmap, or the phase-two coaching budget. A methodology that requires unusually good leaders, unusually disciplined teams, unusually mature stakeholders, unusually stable priorities, unusually skilled product people, and unusually honest communication may be less a universal operating system and more a luxury good for organizations that were already capable of building things before the consultants arrived. The darker interpretation is that Agile became popular precisely because it lets every layer of management look modern while postponing the hard, expensive, reputation-risking act of making decisions. This is where the Big Tech evidence becomes uncomfortable for the Agile priesthood, because the firms that supposedly represent the highest temple of modern software execution often borrow a few Agile artifacts while refusing the full corporate Scrum religion. Gergely Orosz, writing in The Pragmatic Engineer, described how project management practices differ widely across companies and highlighted the “curious absence of Scrum” in Big Tech, noting that teams at large technology companies often choose their own methods, while complex cross-team projects are frequently driven by technical program managers rather than ritualized Scrum machinery. His Skype versus WhatsApp example is brutal in miniature: Skype went heavily into Scrum, training, ceremonies, and rotational Scrum Master roles, while WhatsApp, with a smaller engineering organization, largely ignored heavyweight frameworks and still out-executed Skype in the messaging war. That does not prove Scrum kills companies, because markets are never that clean, yet it does suggest that process language, ceremony density, and visible managerial choreography should never be confused with engineering advantage. The best technology organizations tend to keep the useful parts, such as short feedback loops, clear ownership, incremental delivery, strong technical review, and fast correction, while rejecting the theater that turns software development into a recurring calendar tax. Harvard Business Review had already hinted at the same tension in 2016, even while publishing one of the more influential mainstream defenses of Agile. The article praised Agile for improving success rates, quality, speed to market, motivation, and productivity in many software contexts, yet the accompanying PDF also acknowledged that some executives associate Agile with anarchy, while others interpret it as “doing what I say, only faster,” and that leaders often undermine Agile because they do not understand where it works and where it fails. That caveat should have been printed in large type above every transformation contract, because the difference between adaptive engineering and executive laziness is the difference between a good surgeon changing tactics during an operation and a drunk contractor changing the blueprint while the roof is already falling in. Agile works best where problems can be modularized, feedback is rapid, users can be engaged, and teams have genuine authority, while many corporate Agile deployments are imposed on large, dependency-heavy, politically constrained organizations where the real blockers sit above the team level. In those environments, Agile becomes a decorative language for chaos, because executives can call requirements “emergent,” priorities “adaptive,” scope creep “learning,” and lack of strategy “customer discovery.” The real scandal therefore sits higher than the sprint board. Agile did not mainly corrupt engineering because engineers suddenly forgot planning, architecture, testing, documentation, and systems thinking, although some did absorb a dangerous adolescent allergy to anything resembling discipline. Agile corrupted organizations because it offered senior leadership a flattering story: you no longer need to define the destination with painful clarity, because empowered teams will discover it through iteration, and you no longer need to resolve conflicts early, because the process will surface learning, and you no longer need to protect focus, because velocity charts will reveal capacity, and you no longer need to understand the product, because the Product Owner will convert executive confusion into user stories. The cargo-cult version therefore spreads fastest in companies where nobody wants ownership for the big questions, while everyone wants visible evidence of modernity, collaboration, and movement. A calendar full of stand-ups, retrospectives, sprint reviews, planning poker, backlog refinement, dependency mapping, quarterly planning, and transformation check-ins creates the satisfying noise of progress, especially for organizations that measure activity more easily than outcomes. The machine rewards the person who updates the board, attends the ceremony, repeats the vocabulary, and survives the process, while the person who asks whether the whole initiative makes architectural, economic, or customer sense becomes the difficult one.

268% Higher Failure Rates for Agile Software Projects, Study Finds | Engprax

The Agile Manifesto has existed for over 21 years now, yet there remains a gap in empirical research as to the actual impact of its values on the i...

"268% Higher Failure Rates for Agile Software Projects, Study Finds | Engprax"

Agile Projects Fail 268% More Often

A recent study claimed that Agile projects fail 268% more often than other projects. I’ll explore how misinterpretations of the Agile Manifesto w...

"Agile Projects Fail 268% More Often"

The Pragmatic Engineer

How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum

A survey of how tech projects run across the industry highlights Scrum being absent from Big Tech. Why is this, and are there takeaways others shou...

"How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum - The Pragmatic Engineer"

Harvard Business Review

Embracing Agile

Over the past 25 to 30 years, agile innovation methods have greatly increased success rates in software development, improved quality and speed to ...

"Embracing Agile"

A gambler found a loophole on Polymarket and turned $500 into $600,000. He exploited a delay in Polymarket’s Bitcoin price updates, entering positions before the platform adjusted its quoted price. In other words, he was trading against stale data, buying the outcome before the market had time to catch up. Here is a concrete example of how a single trade in this strategy unfolds: 09:14:22 - BTC drops 180 USD on Binance in 1.2 seconds. A large liquidation cascade begins. 09:14:23 - Polymarket oracle has not updated. The BTC above 94500 at 9:20am market still prices YES at 0.62 USD and NO at 0.41 USD. 09:14:23 - The bot detects the real BTC price is now 94280 USD, below the strike. It buys NO at 0.041 USD. 09:14:26 - Oracle updates. Market reprices. NO jumps from 0.041 USD to 0.71 USD as the crowd reacts to the new price. 09:19:00 - Market resolves. BTC is at 94190 USD at expiry. NO pays 1.00 USD. Result: 0.041 USD entry to 1.00 USD payout equals 2339 percent on the position in under 5 minutes. This process repeated hundreds of times. Not every trade worked. Most small positions expired worthless. But the winners, powered by genuine information advantage, more than compensated.

I found an open-source program on GitHub that allows you to monitor people through walls using Wi-Fi. It is powered by AI and turns ordinary Wi-Fi signals into a full-fledged tracking system. No cameras or sensors are needed. The system analyzes signal interference and uses it to reconstruct a person’s posture and movements. As a result, the program can detect presence, breathing and even heartbeat. Check it out:

GitHub

GitHub - ruvnet/RuView: π RuView turns commodity WiFi signals into real-time spatial intelligence, vital sign monitoring, and presence detection — all without a single pixel of video.

π RuView turns commodity WiFi signals into real-time spatial intelligence, vital sign monitoring, and presence detection — all without a single ...

Ende April 1945. München steht vor dem Zusammenbruch. Der Krieg ist verloren, Berlin fällt, die amerikanischen Truppen stehen vor der Stadt. In dieser Lage entscheidet sich eine kleine Gruppe um den Wehrmachtsoffizier Rupprecht Gerngroß, das zu tun, was aus heutiger Sicht naheliegend wirkt, damals jedoch fast schon revolutionär war: den Krieg einfach zu beenden, zumindest lokal. Über besetzte Radiosender ruft er zur kampflosen Übergabe Münchens auf, zur Absetzung der NS-Führung. Teile der Wehrmacht machen mit, einige Parteifunktionäre werden festgesetzt, für einen kurzen Moment entsteht der Eindruck, als könnte sich die Realität endlich der Lage anpassen. Und dann passiert nichts. Die Bevölkerung bleibt passiv. Was, wenn das Ganze scheitert? Was, wenn die falsche Seite zu früh gewählt wird? Also wartet man und genau dieses Warten entscheidet. Währenddessen reagiert die Gegenseite schneller. Der Münchner Gauleiter Paul Giesler lässt SS-Einheiten mobilisieren, die den Aufstand innerhalb weniger Stunden niederschlagen. Der Versuch, München kampflos zu übergeben, endet im Gegenteil: in Gewalt, die eigentlich vermieden werden sollte. Keine 48 Stunden später rücken amerikanische Truppen in München ein - die gleichen Kräfte, die kurz zuvor noch einen Aufstand zur Kapitulation blutig unterdrückt haben, stehen nun vor genau dieser Kapitulation. Die Entscheidung, die sie verhindert haben, holen sie selbst ein. Was bleibt, ist ein Moment, der sich jeder linearen Logik entzieht. Ein Aufstand, der scheitert, weil er zu früh kommt. Eine Repression, die sinnlos ist, weil sie ein unvermeidliches Ergebnis nur verzögert. Und eine Bevölkerung, die nicht falsch handelt, sondern rational innerhalb eines irrationalen Systems und genau deshalb jede Veränderung blockiert. Das ist vielleicht die eigentliche Schwierigkeit, wenn man versucht, Bayern oder allgemeiner Deutschland in solchen Momenten zu verstehen. Es geht nicht um fehlende Information oder falsche Einschätzung der Lage: die Fakten waren bekannt, der Krieg war verloren und die Front war zusammengebrochen. Und trotzdem entsteht keine Bewegung. Weil zwischen Wissen und Handeln eine Lücke liegt, die nicht durch Argumente geschlossen wird, sondern durch Risiko. Und dieses Risiko trägt in solchen Systemen niemand freiwillig allein. Deshalb scheitern Revolutionen hier nicht unbedingt an der Macht des Gegners. Sie scheitern daran, dass zu viele darauf warten, dass jemand anders den ersten Schritt macht und zu viele gleichzeitig bereit sind, genau diesen ersten Schritt zu bestrafen, falls er scheitert. Wenn man diesen Mechanismus versteht, wird auch verständlicher, warum politische Verschiebungen oft lange unterschätzt werden und dann plötzlich als „überraschend“ gelten. Der Aufstieg der AfD in Bayern und im restlichen Deutschland folgt in gewisser Weise einer ähnlichen Logik, allerdings unter völlig anderen historischen und politischen Bedingungen. Es geht hier nicht um ein zusammenbrechendes Regime oder um Krieg, sondern um demokratische Verschiebungen im Wählerverhalten. Und dennoch zeigt sich ein vertrautes Muster: lange Zeit wird ein Trend ignoriert, relativiert oder als temporär eingeordnet, während er im Hintergrund an Stabilität gewinnt. Viele erkennen die Veränderung, aber nur wenige ziehen früh Konsequenzen daraus - sei es politisch, gesellschaftlich oder strategisch. Parteien reagieren spät, Institutionen noch später, und ein Teil der Bevölkerung verhält sich ähnlich wie 1945 in einem ganz anderen Kontext: abwartend, beobachtend, nicht unbedingt überzeugt, aber auch nicht bereit, früh Position zu beziehen. Genau deshalb sind Revolutionen hier so selten und politische Verschiebungen so lange unsichtbar, bis sie plötzlich nicht mehr zu übersehen sind.

Patriotism and censorship - a bit of Fry and Laurie

Markets as theater: Germany as the stage. The Trade / Scenario Alpha: Worst Case, April 2026 → 2027+ Coverage: EQ / FI / FX / CMD / Tax / Migration Germany enters this scenario already weakened: record corporate insolvencies in 2024–2025, deindustrialization underway, a coalition government without a commanding mandate, energy policy in permanent crisis since 2022. The cascade does not create German fragility. It finds it already there and removes the last buffers that were concealing it. 01: Risk-on // DAX +12–18% // Rheinmetall +40%+ The Energy Shock Arrives / The War Premium - Everything Rips -> Everyone is long defense, short common sense. Position accordingly. Smart money is already buying puts on the rip. Always. -> The defense trade is real. The assumption that Germany's economy can sustain it is not. Markets will figure this out approximately three phases too late. 02: Selective bull // DAX -8% // Defense +60% // Industrials -25% NATO Article 5 / The Energy Wall - Defense Up, Industry Down -> The industrials are a zombie graveyard. Analysts are still writing "cautiously optimistic" in their notes. God bless them. -> VW making Panzerhaubitze. The Germans have a word for everything, including this. -> This is where the rip ends. What follows is not a correction or a buying opportunity. It is the market finally pricing what the energy strip has been screaming for six months. The next four phases are the collapse. There is no bounce to sell into. There is only the exit you didn't take. 03: Risk-off accelerating // DAX -35% YTD // Bund yields spike // EUR breaks Tactical Nukes in Europe / Article 5 Invoked - Germany Goes to War -> The ECB is now the only buyer of Bunds, the only seller of euros, and the only institution pretending the eurozone is a coherent fiscal entity. Remarkable stamina. 04: Market halted // DAX: no price // Bunds: ECB bid only // EUR: theoretical Exchange Suspended - Economic Collapse Begins -> The market didn't crash. It was suspended. Different thing. Ask Lehman. -> We regret to inform you that the market has been replaced by a decree. The Bundesbank is technically solvent. This is the most useless fact in Europe. -> The Finanzamt is still sending letters. Bureaucratic inertia is the last thing to die. 05: Model broken // GDP -40-55% // Unemployment 30%+ // EUR: existential Economic Model Destroyed - The German Export Era Ends 06: Post-market // Unit of account: food + fuel + gold Civil War Conditions / Anomalous Events - PLF Deployment, Camp System, Asset Seizure -> The constitution was written by people who remembered why constitutions matter. The emergency cabinet was not. 07: Post-collapse // Compliance-gated access // Elections scheduled Reconstruction - New Architecture, Old Label -> Analysts who survived publish their reconstruction-era initiation note. They have a 12-month price target on the New DAX. The methodology section is four pages long. The conclusion is "cautiously optimistic." Some things never change. Full report: https://beehiiv-publication-files.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/downloadables/09cc8a00-8d50-4e69-a182-87d6c6de649e/a5823b33-e2d4-40dd-89a3-75c4319633e0/Germany_The%20Trade.pdf?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAQCMHTQSE2JGAGXHJ%2F20260430%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20260430T162628Z&X-Amz-Expires=604800&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=e3b85f85a16ba6fc9bb0e830bf4e53d3e1659797564aa1398722fad831bca392

Looks like a “smart vs. stupid” ranking, but in reality it's rather a dependency ranking. The real question is whether people use AI as a calculator for thought or as a replacement for thought. Europe should worry less about who uses it most and more about who still knows how to think without it.

Poland’s "miracle" Poland’s economic surge should not be mistaken for a miracle, because a meaningful part of it appears to be the visible result of capital being redirected, with increasing urgency, from European institutions and national budgets into Poland’s defense sector, where military orders, procurement programs, ammunition production, anti-drone infrastructure and state-backed industrial expansion are now functioning almost like a parallel growth engine. And Poland is becoming increasingly hungry for more of that money. That is the important point for people who look at Poland’s recent economic momentum and consider moving there because of the so-called economic “miracle”: they should ask whether they are looking at a broad, organic, productivity-driven boom across the civilian economy or at a heavily subsidized, politically accelerated defense cycle whose strength depends on Europe’s fear, NATO’s eastern flank strategy and the assumption that Poland will remain one of the most important military corridors on the continent. The uncomfortable part is that this concrete spike in Poland’s military economy has a reason and that reason is not peace, stability or normal convergence with Western Europe, but the rising probability that Poland becomes either a frontline state, a logistical rear base or, in a darker but still real scenario, a battlefield-adjacent economy within the next phase of European escalation. So before calling Poland the new European growth miracle, it is worth asking what kind of growth this actually is, because an economy lifted by tanks, howitzers, ammunition factories, anti-drone walls and EU-backed defense loans sends a very different signal from an economy lifted by civilian productivity, innovation, domestic consumption and long-term capital formation.

He put all his money on $BIRD #Allbirds. Twice: 2021 & 2026.

Stocks at all-time highs: War - bullish, because defense orders rise Inflation - bullish, because nominal revenues rise Sticky inflation - bullish, because pricing power becomes a stock-picking story Record valuations - bullish, because “scarcity” becomes the narrative Rate cuts delayed - bullish, because the economy is “too strong" Rate cuts arriving - bullish, because liquidity is back Higher-for-longer - bullish, because cash eventually needs a home Yield curve distortion - bullish, because nobody wants to admit what it signals Deficits exploding - bullish, because fiscal impulse replaces organic growth Debt at records - bullish, because monetization becomes the market’s silent backstop Treasury supply surge - bullish, because somebody must absorb it and the system is built to make that happen Central banks trapped - bullish, because trapped institutions usually choose inflation over collapse Earnings revisions down - bullish, because expectations get easier to beat Margins compressing - bullish, because cost cuts become “efficiency" Consumer slowing - bullish, because rate cuts move closer Credit card delinquencies rising - bullish, because the Fed gets an excuse Commercial real estate stress - bullish, because bailouts start wearing technical names Geopolitical tension - bullish, because supply chains reprice, defense budgets rise and commodities wake up Energy volatility - bullish, because scarcity gets a multiple AI disruption - bullish, because every cost problem becomes an automation story AI overspending - bullish, because capex is now called destiny Nukes in the air - bullish, because the most insane version of the argument says even that “ends the war faster,” clears uncertainty, forces a reset and drags policy straight into emergency liquidity That is the market psychology now. When the S&P 500 is measured against money supply, the setup increasingly resembles a late-cycle liquidity mania rather than a clean productivity boom. The price can still go higher, but the ratio already sits in the zone where previous peaks became vulnerable. Momentum can keep climbing after logic leaves the room; that has always been the cruel part of financial history. Recovery, expansion, mid-cycle slowdown, speculative boom, winner’s curse, crash, repair. We are no longer in the innocent “buy the dip” phase. This looks closer to the speculative boom moving into the winner’s curse, where every risk is reclassified as fuel, every warning becomes confirmation and cash starts looking foolish precisely when optionality matters most. Bad news is good news. Good news is better. Disaster is stimulus. Panic is policy. War is order flow. Debt is liquidity. Inflation is revenue. AI is religion. Nukes are apparently a peace catalyst. Liquidity over logic. Momentum over meaning. Narrative over valuation. Positioning over probability. Don’t ask why anymore. Ask how much higher the crowd can push it before the model moves from stage 5 to stage 6.

"It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled." - Mark Twain