11 Million People, No Power, 90 Miles Away: What's the Cuba Endgame?

11 Million People, No Power, 90 Miles Away: What's the Cuba Endgame?

In this episode of Hardpoints, Mike and Neal turn to a story that's quietly fallen out of the headlines: Cuba. Ninety miles off the coast of Florida, 11 million people are living on an hour or two of electricity a day. Oil imports have collapsed from over 100,000 barrels a day to nearly zero in three months. Surgeries are postponed, neonatal wards are cycling off, and the US Navy is running what looks a lot like a blockade. The administration is giving Cuba the full Iran-meets-North-Korea treatment — sanctions on its energy, financial, and security sectors, and secondary sanctions on anyone trying to fill the vacuum left by a post-Maduro Venezuela. The president says the USS Abraham Lincoln will pull up 100 yards offshore and the island will simply say thank you. Southern Command says it isn't planning an invasion. So what's actually going on here — and is there an endgame, or just punishment? Mike and Neal trace the history (64 years of embargo, the Monroe Doctrine versus the "Trump Doctrine," the Venezuela playbook) and lay out the scenarios — from a friendly transition with a rebuilt grid, to a Somalia-style failed state 90 miles from Key West, with China's signals-intelligence sites and a tripling of Russian intelligence officers already on the island. Plus, the reader mailbag goes deep on how the military and FAA screen wind turbines from radar and whether turbine blades can actually be recycled — and the usual Goods, Bads & Others: clean energy investment passing double that of fossil fuels, a proposed $300B US investment in Iran, the Pacific drug-boat strikes, and an update from the Heirloom build.

Humanities Majors are Beating Computer Science. The World Has Shifted.

Three million students graduated from American colleges this year and walked straight into the worst entry-level job market in two decades. Recent graduate unemployment is running higher than the peak of 2008. Tech internships are pulling 273 applications per posting. And the New York Fed just confirmed that computer science majors now have more trouble finding work than humanities majors. That last one should make heads explode on Reddit. Mike and Neal dig into whether AI is actually the culprit, or whether this is a messier story. Information sector payrolls have collapsed back to March 2021 levels, erasing four years of gains in 16 months. Salesforce is hiring almost nobody except salespeople. But overall unemployment sits near historic lows, which means the pain is concentrated, not widespread. The conversation gets into which part of that is AI doing its job, which part is big companies using AI as a fig leaf to cut payrolls they should have cut years ago, and what it means that the cost to start a company is now essentially zero at exactly the moment those same companies have stopped hiring junior talent. They also work through the question IBM is quietly asking that nobody else seems to be: if you stop hiring junior people today, where do your middle managers come from in ten years? Mike makes the case that the current downturn is a buying opportunity for companies that are serious, that Stanford CS grads available at a discount are rocket fuel if you have the nerve to hire them. Neal's hot take is that the class of 2026 is not the group he is actually worried about. The class of 2034 is. Plus: the Orioles are climbing, Antarctic krill are getting strip-mined to feed America's omega-3 habit, Blue Origin's New Glenn turned Cape Canaveral into something resembling a tactical nuclear detonation, New York City is going car-free on 50 streets for the World Cup, and a CIA officer with a top-secret clearance stashed $40 million in gold bars in his house. Neal also makes a case for prediction markets that Mike does not buy for a second. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.

America is Being Forced to Burn More Coal. AI & Politics Did This

In May, the Department of Energy issued six emergency orders to keep coal plants that were supposed to be retired running through the summer. One in Pennsylvania. One in Maryland. And on May 18th, PJM — the grid operator serving 65 million people from Illinois to New Jersey — was authorized to cut power to data centers to prevent a wider blackout. Fifty-seven Philadelphia schools went virtual because their buildings couldn't handle the heat. None of this made national news. Mike and Neal break down why it happened, who's responsible, and why the official explanation doesn't quite hold up. The short version: we didn't build the transmission infrastructure we needed, we've been retiring generation faster than we're replacing it, and then AI showed up and nobody — not even the AI companies — was ready for what it would demand from the grid. Anthropic is reportedly paying over a billion dollars a month just to borrow data center capacity. The data centers are now a baseload power draw, and the grid wasn't built for that. They also get into the policy contradiction that's making all of this worse: the same administration issuing emergency coal orders is the one that killed offshore wind leases and blocked hundreds of onshore wind projects on national security grounds. Cheap, reliable electricity is a strategic asset for onshoring manufacturing and building chips. Coal is one of the most expensive ways to produce it. Mike lays out why this is a de facto tariff against American-made products. Plus: Neal explains why Australia is about to start giving away free electricity in the middle of the day and what it means for the energy transition globally; India's solar leapfrog and why it's more exciting than people realize; a carbon capture plant just came online in California's Kern County; and Mike's bad — Colorado Governor Jared Polis commuted Tina Peters' sentence and then showed up to his own censure hearing with duct tape across his mouth. It's episode 50. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.

250 Wind Farms Blocked. 15 Million Homes Worth of Energy. The Pentagon Calls It National Security.

The Pentagon declared an energy emergency. It's also burning through missiles at a record pace and asking for a 1,327% increase in Tomahawk procurement. So why is the same Pentagon quietly blocking 250 wind farms across 30 states — enough to power 15 million American homes — and calling it a national security measure? Mike and Neal break down the radar interference argument the Defense Department is using, why it almost never actually prevented a project from being built before now, and what's really going on. Along the way: what wind leases mean for small family farms that can't survive on cattle alone, why rural red-state economies are taking the hit, and how blocking the cheapest form of new electricity undermines the manufacturing reshoring that this administration says it wants. The national security justification is technically real. It's also being abused. And everyone — ratepayers, farmers, the military itself — is paying for it. Show Notes Topics covered: How the Pentagon's energy project clearinghouse actually works — and why it resolved nearly every conflict for 15 years before now The real radar interference problem: what's legitimate, what isn't, and why 250 simultaneous disapprovals fails the smell test Wind leases as a rural economic lifeline — why this hits family farms harder than any other energy policy Why wind is uniquely compatible with agricultural land compared to solar or fossil fuel development The manufacturing reshoring contradiction: you can't onshore industry without cheap, reliable electricity How abusing the national security justification erodes its credibility for when it actually matters The 36 gigawatt shortfall and why blocking land-based wind makes it worse Mailbag: Response to "We Accidentally Made China the Climate Superpower" — was it really an accident? The Max Afterburner comment Goods, Bads & Others: Mike: A stolen 36 hours in Napa with his wife / Apple and Amazon walking back 24/7 carbon-free electricity commitments / battery-powered container ships Neal: More Americans getting Memorial Day right / the DOJ's $1.8B "anti-weaponization" fund and what it means for January 6th defendants / his team's weekly 30-minute AI workflow session Chapters (approximate) 00:00 Intro 03:25 The Pentagon's wind farm blockade 07:40 The energy shortage nobody's talking about 08:09 Property rights and who actually owns this land 13:19 Rural economies and the family farm lifeline 19:11 The radar interference argument — what's real 26:38 Who gets hurt and why the military is kneecapping itself 29:16 Mailbag 32:53 Goods, Bads & Others

China Told Trump: Touch Taiwan and We Go to War

Yesterday in Beijing, President Xi told President Trump directly: if Taiwan is not handled properly, the two countries will have — and he used the word — conflicts. That is the most direct statement any Chinese leader has made to an American president about Taiwan. Ever. Mike and Neal unpack why this moment matters and why most of the conversation about Taiwan skips the part that actually explains Chinese behavior. They trace the split back to 1949, walk through Nixon's one-China gambit, and explain why the US has spent 75 years pretending to believe something it doesn't. Then they get into the military reality: what an amphibious assault across 90 miles of open water actually looks like, where the US has real advantages and where the logistics become genuinely nightmarish, and why this fight — if it ever happens — would not look anything like Iraq. The energy angle gets serious attention too. Taiwan imports 97% of its energy. China's oil supply runs 80% through the Strait of Malacca. And the 90% of the world's advanced chip supply sitting on that island means a conflict there wouldn't just be a military event — it would be a $10 trillion hole in the global economy. Plus: Neal flags the new NERC cybersecurity standards that took effect today with zero grace period and a $1.5 million-a-day penalty, the administration's quiet kill of 200+ wind and solar projects through the Defense Siting Clearinghouse, and ICE activity in Neal's neighborhood — what he actually saw, and what it might mean. Mike is back from the PPAI conference with good news, and both hosts respond to listener mail from the Canada episodes, including TerryZanger7152 and his drunk uncle with a knife. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.