THERMAL ALERT: RYAZAN REFINERY, RUSSIA SITE • Ryazan refinery, Ryazan, Russia: 17 Mt/year nameplate capacity (about 340 kbpd), effective throughput about 262 kbpd (13.1 Mt processed in 2024), operated by Rosneft • A key fuel supply source for Moscow, about 300 km northwest, via product pipelines, though not the capital's sole source • The plant has been shut down since the Ukrainian strike of September 6, 2026, which caused major damage to CDU-6 and CDU-4. Reuters industry sources describe CDU-1, CDU-3 and CDU-4 as continuing to operate, which implies partial operation rather than a complete stop DETECTION • NASA FIRMS satellite thermal data at the plant: daily peak fire radiative power of 0.71 MW on October 12, 6.19 MW on October 15, and 20.38 MW on October 16, a clear two-day thermal event at a plant that should be near cold • Independent reporting of the same satellite data detected at least one fire at the tank farm overnight October 15-16 THE EVENT • Wave 1, October 15: mass Ukrainian drone and missile attack. Governor Pavel Malkov confirmed a fire at the refinery, with material damage being assessed and no casualties, plus a warehouse and vehicles damaged at a separate Ryazan enterprise. The Defence Ministry said 4 Flamingo cruise missiles and 69 UAVs were intercepted and that falling debris caused the fire. Reuters and AP carried the strike the same day • Wave 2, overnight October 15-16: Ukrainian OSINT reported the fire continued all night, with one to three tanks burning. Governor Malkov's overnight statement conflicts: five drones intercepted, no damage or casualties • No official Ukrainian General Staff claim for Ryazan as of the latest wires; an unnamed Ukrainian official confirmed the hit to AP THE VIRAL POST, CLAIM BY CLAIM • The video: not this event, high confidence. The clip shows a huge fireball inside the plant with snow covering the ground. Ryazan's night low on October 15-16 was about 46F, with no snow cover. Verified footage of this strike is a distant smoke glow over the city, and state TV showed a relatively small black smoke plume with no fire visible. The clip's scene and season match the January 24, 2025 Ryazan strike. Treat it as winter archive footage • Unit AT-6 stopped: half true and materially incomplete. Reuters reported on October 16, citing two industry sources, that CDU-6 (AT-6 is the same unit's Russian designation) was halted after Thursday's attack and several pipelines were damaged, with CDU-1, CDU-3 and CDU-4 operating. But CDU-6 had already been suspended after the September 6 strike. An already-down unit's halt was renewed, not a fresh kill • 17 Mt/year: correct as nameplate. Effective throughput is about 262 kbpd • Supplies Moscow: confirmed, as qualified above • Another refinery down: wrong framing. The plant has been down since September 6. This is a re-strike on a damaged plant, extending its outage and hitting its tank farm, not a new loss DAMAGE PICTURE • Confirmed by officials: fire at the refinery on October 15, no casualties • Sourced but single-lineage: CDU-6 halt and pipeline damage (two unnamed industry sources via Reuters; Rosneft has not commented) • OSINT only: one to three tanks burning overnight, consistent with the satellite thermal data. Nothing credible yet on storage volumes destroyed or on second-wave unit damage WHY IT MATTERS • Re-striking an already-down plant is a keep-it-down campaign: every additional hit on distillation units, pipelines and tankage pushes a restart further out, and Ryazan is the largest single supply source for the Moscow region • The open question that matters: if CDU-1, CDU-3 and CDU-4 are genuinely running, the plant is partially operating at reduced rates rather than fully shut, and Russian product balances sit between the two readings Coordinates: 54.5759, 39.7437

🦔Only 36% of retailers plan to spend money on self-checkout this year, down 7 points from 2025, according to a survey of 340 retail operators. It ranked as the least popular store technology in the survey and the only one where interest fell. My Take Self-checkout was the original pitch to replace workers with machines, and it never delivered what it promised. Customers scan slower than trained cashiers, the machines throw errors, and more merchandise walks out the door, so stores kept employees at the kiosks anyway. Dollar General pulled self-checkout from 300 of its highest-theft stores in 2024 and capped the rest at five items. Amazon dropped its no-checkout tech from its grocery stores that same year, after reports that workers in India reviewed many of the purchases. Amazon disputed that. To me, AI follows the same path, just faster. Companies announce layoffs and credit AI, but the press release never counts the cost of the mistakes or the people hired back to check the machine's work. Klarna already went back to hiring humans for customer service after leaning hard on AI. Self-checkout took decades to show its full cost. AI won't get that long because the bills run so much bigger, and I expect plenty of AI efficiency layoffs to turn into quiet rehiring within two years. Hedgie🤗

Should American schools teach the Islamic slave trade alongside the Atlantic trade? - Steeve Strange "Two slave trades. School teaches one. The bigger one ran longer, and is not dead yet. The numbers. The Slave Voyages database counts about 388,000 Africans shipped to the United States, of 12.5 million shipped across the Atlantic. The Islamic trade, across the Sahara, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, took an estimated 17 million Africans from 650 to 1900, per historian Ralph Austen. Some estimates run to 25 million. It ran about 1,300 years, against the Atlantic's 340. It was crueler in one way they never mention: male slaves castrated in huge numbers, one reason 17 million left so few descendants. America ended slavery in 1865. Saudi Arabia waited until 1962. Mauritania was last on earth, 1981, and hereditary slavery is still practiced there. In 2014 ISIS enslaved Yazidi women, citing Islamic law. And it never actually ended. In 2017 CNN filmed open-air slave auctions in Libya, Black migrants sold for as little as 400 dollars a man. The UN's migration agency had reported it: migrants bought and sold in Sabha, held for ransom, forced to work. The African Union condemned it, the world cared for one news cycle, everyone moved on. Reports say it never stopped. Black people are being bought and sold in a Muslim country in 2026, and the lecturers have nothing to say. The boy in this photo was enslaved in Zanzibar in the late 1800s, chained to a log as punishment. Slavery is evil wherever it happened, and America's part is a stain. So why does one trade get a month of curriculum and the other gets silence? Because the liberals who run the schools and the media have a story to protect. It needs America as the villain, and Islam sold to your kids as a religion of peace. This trade destroys both. You cannot call it a religion of peace when its trade in human beings ran 1,300 years, took 17 million Africans, castrated the men, enslaved over a million Europeans, and is still selling Black people in Libya today. So they bury it. Slavery is their weapon against America, never their standard. If it were, Libya would lead the news tonight." -Steeve Strange

Noteworthy flow from yesterday (OI Confirmed) $AAPL 340 Call (9/21) - $889K @ 1.39 $GOOGL 355 Call (10/2) - $2.3M @ 2.83 $NRG 125 Call (10/16) - $2.7M @ 3.00 $VSAT 110 Call (12/18) - $1.1M @ 3.22 $EQT 57.5 Call (12/18) - $2.1M @ 3.00

In the mountains of Nagano, Japan, in the village where my father grew up, there is a mountain rescue team. It has two members. One American. One Japanese. They are the strangest partners in Japan. Two years ago, in a blizzard, one of them held the other over a cliff for forty minutes. To understand how, you have to know who they are. Cole is 41. From Colorado. Former U.S. Army. Built like a vending machine. He talks the whole way up every mountain. He sings country songs on the trail. He eats three rice balls every break. When he rescues someone, he hugs them. Mr. Hamada is 67. Five-foot-two. 115 pounds. Forty years of mountain rescue. He eats one pickled plum every break. When he rescues someone, he bows. Mostly, he says one word. "Un." It means "yeah." Mostly. Twenty years ago, Mr. Hamada lost his partner in an avalanche. A man named Takeda. The rope caught on a rock and cut. Mr. Hamada was holding the other end. After that, he worked alone. For eight years. Then Cole showed up. A loud American ski bum who wanted to volunteer. Mr. Hamada looked at him for a long time and said two words. "Big." Then: "Loud." He said no. Cole asked again. No. Again. No. So every Sunday for a year, Cole showed up at the trailhead anyway, picked up Mr. Hamada's pack without asking, and walked behind him up the mountain. Talking the entire way. One Sunday, without a word, Mr. Hamada handed him the end of the rope. That was twelve years ago. Cole has tried everything to make him talk. The village has a standing bet. Whoever gets Mr. Hamada to say one full sentence wins a case of beer. Twelve years. Nobody has collected. Cole gives him a fist bump after every rescue. For twelve years, Mr. Hamada has answered every fist bump with a bow. But Cole will tell you there are eleven different kinds of "un." The tired one. The pleased one. The one that means "you're an idiot." The one that means "stop." He knows them all. And whenever they cross a dangerous slope, the same thing happens. Cole says, "Let's go!" Mr. Hamada looks at the sky and says, "Wait." Cole waits. The first time, an avalanche came down right where they would have been. The next winter, it happened again. Cole stopped arguing. When they climb roped together, Mr. Hamada always holds the other end. Cole has never once looked back at the rope. Every winter, Cole teaches a free safety class at the village elementary school. "If you get lost in the snow: Stop. Dig. Sing. So we can find you." Then he sings them "Country Roads." Badly. Japanese kids know that song from an old animated movie. They all sing along. Two years ago, in February, a ten-year-old boy got separated from his family on the ski slopes. A blizzard came in. Night fell. The rescue team called it. Too dangerous. Wait for morning. Mr. Hamada stood outside in the wind for a long time, looking at the sky. Then he said a word Cole had never heard from him in twelve years. "Go." Cole didn't ask a single question. Visibility was six feet. Five degrees Fahrenheit. Snow up to their waists. Two headlamps in an ocean of white. At 3 a.m., Cole stopped. Under the wind, he heard singing. Very small. Very off-key. "Country Roads." The boy had dug himself a hole in the snow, exactly like he'd been taught. His lips were blue. He was still singing. Cole unzipped his own jacket, put the boy inside it against his chest, and zipped it back up around both of them. They started down. At 3:40, the snow under Cole's feet broke away. He went over the edge with the boy on his chest. The rope snapped tight. Above, Mr. Hamada was yanked forward and slammed face-first into the snow. He slid. His ice axe scraped. He slid toward the edge. He drove the axe in, dug his boots in, wrapped the rope around his own body, and stopped. A 115-pound man. Almost 300 pounds hanging below him. Cole couldn't climb. Not with the boy. Not yet. His hands were frozen. He hung there in the dark, in the wind, over nothing. And every minute, through the storm, from somewhere above him, he heard one word. "Un." So he would know someone was still there. Forty minutes. Forty "un"s. Cole kicked steps into the ice. Inch by inch. With the boy against his chest. Until he dragged himself over the edge and collapsed in the snow next to Mr. Hamada. Mr. Hamada was lying on his back. He couldn't feel his arms. Slowly, he lifted one hand. And for the first time in twelve years, he made a fist. Cole bumped it. And cried like a child. "How did you hold us?" And Mr. Hamada said the longest thing anyone in that village has ever heard him say. "For twelve years, you never once looked back at the rope. I wasn't going to give you a reason to start." Somebody in that village owes Cole a case of beer. The boy is twelve now. He wants to join mountain rescue. He says he wants to be "the one who holds the rope." Last month, I saw the two of them heading up the trail together. Cole was talking. Mr. Hamada was saying "Un." The rope was between them. Cole told me later that a partner is not the guy who agrees with you. It's not even the guy who talks to you. It's the one you never have to look back at.

Huge TypeScript AI day today! Live from London 09.30-16.30: 9:40 - 9:55 AM: Opening Keynote → Sam Bhagwat, Shane Thomas, Abhi Aiyer, Co-Founders @ Mastra 10:00 - 10:15 AM: Evals Are the New TDD → RL Nabors, Developer Experience @ Arize 10:20 - 10:35 AM: Deploying AI Agents Where Your Customers Actually Want Them → Raphaël Titsworth-Morin, Senior Developer & Evangelist @ Defang 10:40 - 10:55 AM: What I Learned Shipping FGA to Production → Tiffany Lozenski, Founding Product Engineer @ Palette 11:30 - 11:50 AM: The CLI Is Dead, Long Live The CLI → Jan Peer Stöcklmair, Senior Software Engineer @ Sentry 11:55 - 12:15 PM: Agentic UX: How The AG-UI Protocol Is Redefining AI-Driven User Experience → Tyler Slaton, Founding Engineer & Head of Open Source @ CopilotKit 12:20 - 12:35 PM: Building an OpenSearch Research Agent at Scale → Alfonso Graziano, AI Tech Lead @ Nearform 1:45 - 2:00 PM: Why Monetizing Agents Needs Different Infrastructure → John Yeo, CTO @ Autumn → Charlie Lamb, Founding Engineer @ Autumn 2:05 - 2:25 PM: Even TS Agents Need Retrieval → Carly Richmond, Developer Advocate Lead @ Elastic 2:30 - 2:55 PM: From Magic to Harness: Building an AI Agent for a 25-Product SaaS Company → Ilyà Zayats, CTO @ Factorial 3:00 - 3:15 PM: Designing Zero Trust Harnesses → Ohans Emmanuel, Co-Founder @ Coldtea 3:20 - 3:35 PM: Building Cloud Coding Agents on Prisma Compute → Tyler Hogarth, Head of Engineering @ Prisma 3:40 - 3:55 PM: What We Learned Building Our Own Agent Harness → Danilo Delizia, AI Architect @ commercetools 4:00 - 4:20 PM: The Agentic Repository Automation Revolution → Don Syme, Principal Researcher @ GitHub Next 4:25 - 4:30 PM: Closing Remarks → Sam Bhagwat, Shane Thomas, Abhi Aiyer, Co-Founders @ Mastra

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