Via The Cradle

Egypt announced on Sunday that it has approved the deployment of troops to Saudi Arabia on a “defensive mission” to help the kingdom protect itself from the retaliatory military operations carried out by the Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF).

The Egyptian House of Representatives held “an emergency session to discuss the President of the Republic and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces’ decision to send military forces to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on a defensive mission,” said MP Mostafa Bakry.

“The National Defense Council, chaired by the president, concluded its meeting and approved the deployment of the forces and the mission assigned to them,” he added. 

He said that “Egypt has never abandoned its pan-Arab role in protecting Arab national security. For us, Saudi Arabia is part of Egypt’s own national security, and any threat to its security and stability is a threat to us.”

On Saturday, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi called for the authorization of defensive measures in support of Saudi Arabia, which has been waging a brutal war and blockade against Yemen for over a decade.

“Egypt is ready to take any measure Saudi Arabia requests to defend its security and sovereignty,“ the Egyptian president said. 

The news follows the reported activation of the Mecca Defense Pact between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkiye.

Pakistani jets have reportedly been striking Yemen, yet Islamabad denied this. Thousands of Pakistani troops are in the kingdom, and Turkiye is also said to be making significant equipment and personnel deployments that are being used against Yemen.

The Ansarallah-led YAF announced it shot down a Saudi attack helicopter in a statement on Sunday, releasing footage of the operation.

The footage shows “the targeting and downing of a Saudi AH-6i attack helicopter with an indigenously manufactured surface-to-air missile while it was carrying out hostile activities off the coast of Najran.” The Saudi-led coalition confirmed that the whole crew was killed.

BREAKING: Egypt is now officially entering the Saudi-Houthi war, with at least two Egyptian Air Force C-130H transport aircraft reportedly landing at King Fahd Air Base in Taif this morning, after Egypt’s National Defence Council, chaired by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, pledged “all necessary and possible forms of support” to Saudi Arabia, per Reuters. One of the C-130Hs reportedly left Egypt with its transponder switched off. Taif sits in western Saudi Arabia, within reach of the Red Sea coast and the Yemeni border zone, where Houthi activity has been concentrated. This is now escalating into a full-blown regional war.

— The Hormuz Report (@HormuzReport) October 18, 2026

Earlier, Saudi airstrikes hit Hodeidah in western Yemen. According to the YAF, over 2,500 Saudi attacks have been launched against Yemen since the kingdom’s escalation against the country in July.

The Saudi escalation has killed dozens of civilians. In response, Saudi Arabia’s airports, military bases, and energy sites have been under heavy missile and drone fire from the YAF.

Authored by Larry C. Johnson via Sonar 21,

For most of this war, Saudi Arabia has been the shock absorber of the world oil market. When Hormuz closed, Riyadh pushed crude west through the East-West pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea and kept at least part of its exports moving. That bypass is now under attack. Ansar Allah has seized islands at the mouth of the Red Sea, declared a “maritime ban” on Saudi shipping and claimed strikes on Saudi airports, and in September drones knocked the East-West pipeline largely out of service. Riyadh blamed that strike on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. On October 4 a pumping station at Khurais, east of Riyadh, was hit for the first time and the pipeline stopped again.

Karl Miller, whose earlier assessment of the global fuel emergency I have drawn on before, has just completed a new analysis of what this means for Saudi Arabia and for the world. His conclusion is stark: the Gulf’s energy system will take far longer and cost far more to rebuild than anyone in Washington is admitting, and Saudi Arabia can no longer be counted on to cover the gap. Here are his key findings.

1. The bypass is the weak point

Miller’s starting point is that a pipeline is not a pipe. It is a connected system of pumping stations, power supplies, controls, storage tanks and loading berths, and it is only as strong as its weakest link. The September damage to the East-West pumping stations, the October interruption at Khurais, a fire at the Riyadh energy complex and the disruption of Saudi aviation all hit that system at different points. The pipeline has been partly restored, but Miller warns that permanent equipment losses remain unresolved. Yanbu can be shut down without a single bomb hitting the port: if crude stops arriving, tankers stop loading.

He also cautions against counting damaged stations as if each represented a fixed share of lost capacity. What matters is throughput, and he measures it against a benchmark of 5.8 million barrels a day through the corridor. A complete interruption for seven days would put 40.6 million barrels of movement at risk; for 30 days, 174 million. He stresses that this is a stress calculation, not a claim that the line is fully shut.

2. The rebuild now runs to 2033–2036

In his previous paper Miller set a five-year horizon for rebuilding the damaged Gulf energy complex. He has now extended it to seven to ten years for the most severely damaged, interconnected systems, meaning recovery between roughly October 2033 and October 2036. Partial output will return sooner, but full, reliable operation will not.

The reason is equipment. Large compressors, turbines, high-voltage transformers, specialized pressure vessels and integrated control systems are custom-built and cannot be pulled from a warehouse. His critical path for replacing such a package is 84 months: a year to define the damage and fund the design, three years to procure and manufacture, two years to deliver and install, and a year to commission and stabilize. Insecure sites, financing gaps, factory queues and repeated attacks could add up to three more years. As he puts it, money can reserve a manufacturing slot, but it cannot compress every stage of engineering and fabrication.

3. A bill of $550 billion to $2.28 trillion

Miller models the reconstruction of the wider Gulf energy system, Saudi Arabia included, in three scenarios. He is explicit that these are funding envelopes built on stated assumptions, not audited damage estimates and not a Saudi-only bill.

Source: Karl W. Miller, Saudi Arabia: The Breaking Point (12 October 2026). Covers the broader Gulf reconstruction portfolio.

In the central case, $180 billion must be committed in the first two years alone, rising to $540 billion in years three to five. Over seven years that averages more than $170 billion a year. And every Gulf state will be competing for the same manufacturers, engineering firms, fabrication yards and specialist crews. A transformer slot taken by Kuwait or Qatar is one that Saudi Arabia does not get.

4. Delay is expensive

Miller puts numbers on what waiting costs. A three-year delay on the central program could add $76 billion to $125 billion in cost escalation and another $42 billion to $90 billion in financing charges. Meanwhile the fuel must still be bought somewhere: each year that 1 million barrels a day of fuel supply stays offline means 365 million barrels to replace, about $55 billion at his illustrative price of $150 a barrel. Leaving his full 3 million barrel-a-day gap unrepaired for three more years implies nearly $500 billion in replacement purchases.

5. The diesel gap gets wider

Miller’s baseline remains a minimum global shortfall of 3 million barrels a day of diesel and jet fuel. The Saudi attacks threaten to push it higher. If disruption leaves 1 million barrels a day of crude unable to reach working refineries, the loss of diesel and jet fuel is roughly 300,000 to 450,000 barrels a day. An additional net loss of 500,000 barrels a day would raise his baseline to 3.5 million, an increase of one-sixth, adding 15 million barrels of shortfall every month.

He is careful not to double count: lost crude, the refinery output it would have produced and the missed export cargo may all be the same barrels. But the direction is clear. Saudi Arabia was the Gulf’s main source of relief. If its bypass is unreliable, the global deficit grows.

6. America cannot fill the hole

Miller’s test of American capacity is sobering. Over the four weeks to October 2, US refineries produced about 5.17 million barrels a day of distillate, exported 1.56 million and used 3.77 million at home. Replacing a 3 million barrel-a-day gap from the United States alone would require 58% more distillate output than American refineries produce today. US production is only about 150,000 barrels a day higher than a year ago; the global gap is nearly 20 times that. Promising more exports does not create more fuel. It simply moves the shortage from one buyer to another and drains American inventories.

7. Food, freight and flights

The fuel crisis is already reaching the real economy. Cereal prices are 17.2% higher than a year ago. Farmers need diesel before the harvest pays, truckers before their invoices are settled, and refrigeration before food reaches the shelf. Airlines need certified jet fuel at the airports they serve, and diesel cannot substitute for it. Miller’s warning is that the weakest buyers, countries short of foreign exchange and credit, will not just pay more. They will be priced out entirely.

My take

Miller’s assessment confirms what I have been arguing for months: the energy damage from this war is not a temporary price spike that ends when a ceasefire is signed. Reopening a shipping lane does not rebuild a refinery. Saudi Arabia, which only months ago was the world’s insurance policy, is now itself a source of risk, and its economy shows it: Saudi oil activity fell by a quarter in the second quarter and GDP shrank 4.8%. The rebuilding of the Gulf will be measured in years and trillions of dollars, and the world will be short of diesel for much of that time.

That should be the frame for every promise coming out of Washington, whether it is Russian diesel, export bans or claims that prices are about to fall. As Miller concludes, recovery will be proven by fuel actually delivered, not by repairs announced or by a lower headline price.

Meta Platforms’ Threads and rival Bluesky have devolved into far-left echo chambers that some describe as platforms for the clinically insane, where intelligent conversations are severely lacking and discussions become shouting matches among those suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and infected by the woke mind virus.

Democrats flee X for Bluesky amid Musk-Trump alliance https://t.co/ZoW1VemR69

— The Hill (@thehill) November 23, 2024

That concentration of left-wing lunatics on Threads and Bluesky may be strengthening X’s competitive position, making it more attractive to professional users and youngsters seeking competing viewpoints and substantive conversations across the political spectrum and about current trends in the real world. 

Nikita Bier, who most recently led X’s product development, took to X over the weekend to explain that “Threads was an existential risk to X” last year, but that the threat has largely dissipated.

Bier explains: 

Last year I thought Threads was an existential risk to X.

When Meta puts its full weight behind something, by injecting the app into Instagram, it’s DEFCON 5:

You have to squeeze out every last drop of growth from all available surfaces to save the app.

However, I started to realize that the opposite was happening:

It was strengthening X.

If you look at any announcement by Zuck, you will see the most rude & toxic comments on the internet.

But when he makes those same announcements on X, people are thrilled about how he’s pushing humanity forward. X is a place where people are excited about the future, so it’s no surprise he and his top lieutenants are using it more than their own app.

Threads, and Bluesky, have effectively quarantined some of the worst people on the internet.

And so I had an epiphany: those apps are X’s anti-abuse systems.

Last year I thought Threads was an existential risk to X. When Meta puts its full weight behind something — by injecting the app into Instagram, it’s DEFCON 5: You have to squeeze out every last drop of growth from all available surfaces to save the app. However, I started to realize that the opposite was happening: It was strengthening X. If you look at any announcement by Zuck, you will see the most rude & toxic comments on the internet. But when he makes those same announcements on X, people are thrilled about how he’s pushing humanity forward. X is a place where people are excited about the future, so it’s no surprise he and his top lieutenants are using it more than their own app. Threads — and Bluesky — have effectively quarantined some of the worst people on the internet. And so I had an epiphany: those apps are X’s anti-abuse systems.

— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) October 17, 2026

Bier’s revelation comes one week after he cited what appears to be internal X data that shows Bluesky users have been “coming back to X in droves the last few weeks.” 

Elon Musk responded to our note on this development, confirming it as “true.” 

@zerohedge True

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 11, 2026

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane and remind readers that PR firms and corporate media ran an information campaign centered around the key phrase “Twitter Killer” when Bluesky really gained traction in 2023. 

However, that information operation gained limited traction. 

X has challenged globalist corporate media’s role as the primary gatekeeper of information, shifting influence toward the accounts and networks users choose to follow. Its appeal extends to discussions, where competing voices across the political spectrum can have civilized conversations and challenge prevailing narratives. Threads and Bluesky have struggled to replicate X’s ecosystem, as it has merely become a ‘safe space’ for left-wing extremism. 

Authored by Lear Zhou via The Epoch Times,

The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUD) board passed a resolution on Oct. 13 to replace the current lottery-based admission policy with a neighborhood-based system for elementary schools.

Board members voted 5-2 to develop a policy under which every student would be assigned to a neighborhood school based on their home address, with a seat guaranteed even if applying late. Programs such as language immersion, K-8 schools, and special education remain open to citywide students to apply.

There were two options up for the vote: Option B and Option C.

Option B would guarantee a seat at a child’s neighborhood school for families who apply on time. Families could also apply to any other SFUSD school with available space, preserving broader citywide choice.

Option C would guarantee a neighborhood-school seat even for families who apply late. But families could apply elsewhere only to designated citywide programs, such as language immersion, K-8 schools, and special education programs.

SFUSD Superintendent Maria Su recommended option C, while the parents’ survey favored option B.

About 65 percent of families responding to the survey did not believe the district would fulfill promises made in option C, according to Su.

“Option C will actually not let the district off the hook. It will require the district to be very intentional with how we resource our schools; it puts the responsibility squarely on the district to make sure that every single neighborhood school is worth choosing,” Su told the board at the Oct. 13 meeting, promising that the schools have “safe, academically rigorous, and stable staffing by trusted adults.”

The new policy would take effect in October 2027, following the board’s approval on April 13, 2027, and would apply to the 2028-29 school year.

“Any district that goes through this type of turnover is at least going to take five to 10 years,” deputy superintendent John Davis told the board.

“There’s going to need to be a lot of difficult discussions to get a strong staff at schools that have historically been disinvested in, through their community, through redlining, through all the negatives that our society has imposed on folks.”

Under the current student assignment system, families can list any number of schools on their application in order of preference, and are assigned to their highest-ranked choice if seats are available.

If more students request the limited number of available seats at a particular school, a series of preferences is weighted in a lottery-like selection process to determine who gets the spot.

“It is every parent’s responsibility to think about what’s best for their kid. It is our responsibility to think about what’s best for all the kids,” SFUSD commissioner Matt Alexander said.

“The choice system creates an escape valve for the families that have the most wherewithal, the most understanding, the most ability to navigate the system and escape from schools that are perceived to be bad.”

SFUSD commissioner Alida Fisher, who voted no on Option C, criticized the change. “Saying it will take time and yet forcing families into a system where we know we can’t within two years equitably resource those schools and put the programs into place.” she said.

“Frankly, we are screwing over families in certain parts of the city. Neighborhood schools will by definition be segregated schools.”

The current student assignment policy, which applied from 2011, was initially designed to “reverse the trend of racial isolation and the concentration of underserved students in the same school,” but the city’s public schools became more segregated than 30 years before, according to SFUSD.

SFUSD commissioner Supryia Ray, who also voted against option C, said the elephant in the room is that SFUSD is facing a 14,000 enrollment gap.

“There seems to be some idea here that if we force people to go to their neighborhood school, outside of maybe citywide schools, somehow this will fill up all these schools,” Ray said.

If the board chose option B, Su said, “Families who do not trust their neighborhood schools will continue to leave those schools; those schools will stay under-enrolled. And that pattern impacts our southeast neighborhoods the hardest.”

Su argued that by choosing option C, the district could keep the funds in the southeast neighborhood and consider merging schools in neighborhoods with few students.

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

A federal appeals court blocked Tesla customers in California from pursuing class action claims that the company misled them about the hardware capabilities of its full self-driving (FSD) technology.

A class action is a lawsuit filed when a group of people or businesses suffer common injuries as a result of a party’s alleged conduct.

For a consumer case to proceed as a class action, the buyers generally need to show they were all exposed to the same allegedly false statements in a similar way. Otherwise, each person’s situation is too different for the claims to be tried together.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled on Oct. 16 that the case cannot move forward as a class action because every buyer’s situation is different.

To sue collectively, the buyers would have to show that they were all exposed to the same allegedly misleading company-supplied information in essentially the same way.

The panel held that the plaintiffs could not show that every class member had seen Tesla’s hardware claim – the company’s assertion that its vehicles already had the hardware needed for full self-driving. The judges wrote that an assumption of exposure to the hardware statement makes sense with product labels, because “every purchaser necessarily has the allegedly misleading statement in front of him.”

That was not true here, they said. As the district court recognized, “there [was] no specific requirement forcing [FSD purchasers] through the Autopilot page to complete their purchase,” the judges said.

The upshot of the ruling is that thousands of customers that the lower court had certified as a class cannot, at least for the time being, sue together jointly in a single legal proceeding.

The ruling does not deal with the merits of the claim advanced by Thomas LoSavio and other California-based Tesla buyers that Tesla misrepresented the vehicles’ FSD capabilities. They allege that the company’s alleged deception led them to pay extra money for software they say doesn’t work properly.

In August 2025, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco ruled that Tesla must face the class action.

She said the question of whether Tesla vehicles lacked sensors for autonomy, along with the company’s inability to “demonstrate a long-distance autonomous drive with any of its vehicles,” justified group lawsuits by two sets of drivers who purchased its FSD package.

Lin certified the plaintiffs as a class for the purposes of the litigation. She said thousands of individuals probably read the company’s claim on its website from October 2016 to August 2024 that its cars were equipped with FSD, and that Tesla CEO Elon Musk made a similar claim at a press conference in 2016.

“While these channels alone may not ordinarily be enough to establish class-wide exposure for a traditional car manufacturer, Tesla’s distinctive advertising strategy warrants a departure from the typical approach,” the judge said.

Lin was referring to the company’s direct-to-consumer model. Unlike traditional automakers that sell through dealers and lean on conventional advertising, Tesla directs most product information through its website and Musk’s public statements.

The judge concluded that this made it more likely FSD buyers would have seen the hardware claim than would be true for a conventional car company.

The Ninth Circuit panel rejected that inference, finding Lin had improperly assumed classwide exposure. The panel vacated the class certifications and sent the case back to the district court for further proceedings.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs criticized the new ruling.

“We think the panel did not fully appreciate the unique circumstances here, and the importance of the hardware statement to Tesla’s marketing campaign.“

The Epoch Times reached out to Tesla for comment. No reply was received by publication time.

Goldman Sachs’ recent upward revisions to global humanoid robot delivery forecasts through the end of the decade, along with rising estimates across Wall Street desks, point to broader expected adoption in factories, restaurants, and other workplaces. Military applications and household use could follow soon. 

BTIG strategic opportunities analyst Jesse Sobelson told clients Friday that the physical AI boom is moving onto factory floors, into warehouses, and behind restaurant counters. 

Sobelson and his team attended RoboStrategy’s Robotics Founders Forum in New York this week and reported back on what executives from several of RoboStrategy’s private-company holdings (Apptronik, Standard Bots, Dexmate, Maven Robotics, Path Robotics and Dyna Robotics) discussed: robot development, commercial deployments, and manufacturing plans. 

“One of the central themes we took away from the presentations is that physical AI and robotics are moving beyond the “science project” phase and toward commercial utility,” Sobelson said. 

Sobelson said, “While AI-enabled robotics generates limited revenue today, every company we heard from presented solid evidence that real-world deployments are increasing, performance is improving rapidly, and the addressable market could expand significantly from where we are today. RoboStrategy presenters shared an analogy to early language models that we found instructive: LLMs initially suffered from hallucinations and weak contextual understanding but improved quickly as architectures, memory, data, and compute scaled. Some presenters contended that robotics appears to be following a similar trajectory, with some task-specific systems now completing tasks at greater than 99% accuracy.” 

He said Maven Robotics offered one of the clearest examples of the gradual rollout of humanoids but stopped short of saying a “ChatGPT moment” wasn’t in the cards for the industry in the near term. 

The following company-level takeaways reflect insights executives and insiders shared at the forum, which BTIG analysts attended.

Jeff Cardenas, CEO and Co-Founder of Apptronik

Apptronik stated it is pursuing a broad vision of humanoid robotics in which versatility, and not optimization around one fixed task, is the defining advantage. The company believes a single robot eventually needs to perform hundreds or thousands of tasks, allowing customers to shift the same asset between workflows as demand changes. The company argues this versatility is particularly compelling in the logistics vertical, where inbound and outbound activity can peak at different times of day and dedicated automation often produces unattractive utilization. Apptronik believes its modular approach separates mobility from manipulation, and that emphasizing two-armed manipulation is the most versatile architecture. In effect, the company explained that when it is attempting to put all these pieces together to build the “PC of robots”: a mass-manufacturable platform whose functionality expands through software and interchangeable configurations, rather than through consistently needed to re-deploy new hardware versions.

An immediate priority, according to Apptronik, is data and deployment. The company shared that Apptronik’s Robot Park is intended to function as a data factory, combining robot-generated data, egocentric human data and synthetic data to train and validate future systems. Customer programs with Mercedes-Benz (MBGYY, Not Rated) and GXO (GXO, Not Rated) were highlighted in the presentation as iterative learning processes, putting robots into real operating environments that should strengthen the deployment-data flywheel. The company believes collaboration with Google DeepMind is central to this strategy, linking foundation-model development with purpose-built hardware. Management also argued that its “show, not tell” posture reflects the depth of its engineering work (including more than 20 robot designs and roughly 80 actuator iterations) but the company acknowledges that Apollo 3 must ultimately demonstrate that these advances translate into manufacturability, reliability and useful out-of-the-box intelligence.

On deployment, management explained that they expect it to proceed in stages over time: warehouses and logistics first, followed by customer-facing settings such as healthcare and retail, and eventually homes and assistive care. This is because this sequencing appropriately prioritizes structured environments where the economics and workflows are easiest to prove. However, management argued longer-term urgency is due to demographic challenges: declining birth rates and shortages of caregivers could make assistive robotics a necessity rather than a convenience. Apptronik acknowledges the competition, and notes it is fighting to scale manufacturing and compress the transition from pilots to recurring commercial fleets before competing platforms establish their own data advantages.

David Golden and Leif Jentoft, Co-Founder and Head of AI Solutions at Standard Bots

In the conversation with Standard Bots, the company shared it is targeting what it sees as the largest practical barrier to industrial automation: it believes adoption has been limited because robots remain too difficult and expensive for most manufacturers to deploy. The company contends that adoption is concentrated among large automotive companies that can spend millions of dollars and months integrating a robot around a single repetitive process (such as the automotive industry). Outside those environments, Standard Bots believes penetration remains low because the integration burden overwhelms the potential return. The company argues its primary business proposition is to remove the “PhD” from deployment by allowing operators to configure robots through intuitive software (including conversational AI and an iPad-style interface) rather than specialized programming and custom engineering.

This focus makes deployment particularly urgent, according to the company. It has approximately 150 robots in service and is scaling operations in Ohio, while also operating a production facility in Glen Cove, New York. They believe the use of off-the-shelf hardware should reduce supply-chain risk and allow the company to concentrate investment on software, usability and application integration. Reliability nevertheless remains non-negotiable for the management team: they state an easy-to-program robot has limited value if downtime stops a customer’s entire production line. Standard Bots therefore stated its balancing rapid fleet growth with the need to establish industrial-grade dependability.

This led the company to explain its strategic advantage is less the robotic arm itself than the integration and data layers connecting the machine to the end application; deployments across small and mid-sized businesses may be especially valuable, according to the company, because they expose the platform to a broader variety of workflows than highly standardized automotive plants. It believes each customer installation contributes data that can improve models and product design, making the installed base increasingly difficult to replicate. The company’s conclusion is that this creates a strong incentive to deploy now: the vendor that makes robotics accessible to bakers, machine shops and other non-expert users can build a differentiated data asset before humanoids or lower-cost foreign competitors broaden their reach.

Tao Chen, Co-Founder and CEO of Dexmate

Dexmate’s core argument is straightforward: a robot that can operate close to 24/7 can produce compelling economics even before fully general-purpose autonomy arrives. The company explained how it believes that seemingly small design choices (including camera positioning, actuator geometry and data infrastructure) can materially affect whether models can interpret the environment and transfer successfully into production, and that hardware with AI requirements incorporated from the outset rather than adding perception and intelligence to a legacy machine make for more efficient hardware. The company also explained that demand from frontier AI laboratories also provides technical validation and exposes Dexmate to advanced model-development workflows.

The discussion made it clear that it is not intent on winning the foundation-model race itself. Instead, the company wants to make existing AI models accessible and useful through integrated hardware and software. They see this as a pragmatic allocation of capital because model capabilities are advancing rapidly across the ecosystem, while installation, training, workflow adaptation and user experience remain persistent customer bottlenecks. Dexmate’s argued that its differentiation must therefore come from faster integration, easier operation and lower total cost rather than from claiming the most advanced proprietary model.

Manufacturing and logistics represent the most immediate deployment opportunities, according to Dexmate, because customers can quantify labor savings and utilization easily, while the company contends that hospitals and hotels may follow more slowly given their less structured environments and higher sensitivity to service interruptions. The company also noted that requirements also differ materially among large customers such as electronics manufacturers, and robot training is not yet universal across platforms or applications. Dexmate’s near-term imperative is to reduce the time between installation and productive utility; if that friction remains high, the company believes lower-priced Asian hardware could capture the market despite weaker software integration.

Hamza Derbas, Founder and CEO of Maven Robotics

We understand that Maven Robotics is building a vertically integrated industrial robotics system spanning hardware, software and AI. The company notes its initial focus is work that remains predominantly manual despite decades of factory automation: moving containers, handling totes, mixed-case palletizing and supplying production lines. It believes these workflows require more than a repetitive pick-and-place motion; robots must manage loose items, change tools, recover from anomalies and coordinate across long sequences. Maven shared its thinking on productization is that wheeled, dual-arm architecture and quick-change end effectors attempt to combine versatility with higher throughput than a fully generalized humanoid. The platform is reportedly capable of carrying roughly 30 kilograms and changing tools to open, manipulate and precisely stack different items.

Importantly, management does not claim that one model can perform every industrial task today. Maven instead explained it occupies a middle ground: progressing toward generalization while delivering economic value in defined workflows now. Its software reportedly reduces implementation from months of custom programming to a much shorter configuration process, and learning from one robot can propagate across the fleet. Acccording to the company this is critical because customer demand appears to exceed current supply. Maven reported it has five customers, including several that could eventually support fleets of thousands, and expects deployments across roughly 10 sites with multiple robots per sit, and management emphasized that these are intended as production contracts (not pilots or proofs of concept) which raises the urgency around manufacturing capacity and field reliability.

The company noted its capacity is currently modest at roughly 200–300 robots annually, but management outlined a modular factory model capable of producing approximately 2,500 robots per line, with an ambition to reach 25,000–30,000 deployed units in 2028. It contended that public market estimates broadly support an approximately $80–$100 billion opportunity for tote handling and palletizing, with broader assembly, fabrication and industrial-material-handling applications potentially adding several hundred billion dollars. The immediate constraint, in Maven’s view, is therefore supply and execution, not market imagination: the company highlighted that customers facing labor shortages or existential pressure to automate want systems now, and any delay gives competitors time to capture deployments, operational data and recurring revenue. Elaborating on this shortage, Derbas noted that the Manufacturing Institute (MI) anticipates 4M job openings for manufacturing anticipated by 2030, with an anticipated 2.1M shortfall, and Deloitte worked with MI collaboratively to note an anticipated $1Tr in economic cost for shortfalls that need to be solved.

Scott Smith, VP of Finance at Path Robotics

Path Robotics notes it selected welding as its initial beachhead because it combines high labor cost, scarce skills and direct consequences for manufacturing throughput. The company found that welding is frequently a critical production bottleneck, and workforce availability is deteriorating; indeed, the American Welding Society estimates that roughly 320,500 new welders will be needed by 2029. Path believes its installed base of approximately 50 customers across multiple industries suggests that the value proposition is transferable, while successful economics in a relatively lower-cost manufacturing market such as Mexico would indicate even stronger potential in higher-wage regions.

The company believes its Robotics-as-a-Service model is central to accelerating adoption. Rather than requiring customers to justify a large upfront capital purchase and wait for a conventional payback period, Path aims to deliver operating-expense savings from the start and contract around annual productivity. This reduces the friction associated with automation budgets and shifts some performance risk from the customer to Path. The company deploys its own integrated hardware, with the company highlighting this is rather than relying exclusively on installed equipment, which it believes gives it greater control over performance but also creates capital, manufacturing and field-service requirements.

With welding economics established, Path postulated on expanding into the next logical steps: upstream assembly and fit-up (the work required to prepare components for welding). They believe that expansion could increase wallet share and allow Path to automate a larger portion of the production flow, while mobile platforms such as quadrupeds may extend welding into outdoor or difficult-to-access environments. Shipbuilding is a particularly compelling prospective market, according to the company, because welding intensity and constrained domestic capacity create an urgent need for productivity. The key execution risk that Path sees is if it can broaden applications without losing the high-return, repeatable deployment model that made welding an attractive initial use case.

Lindon Gao, CEO and Co-Founder of Dyna Robotics

Dyna Robotics is focused on dexterous, commercially useful workflows in laundromats, hotels, restaurants and gyms. Dyna stated these markets are attractive because textile and food-service tasks remain highly manual, repetitive and difficult for traditional automation. Dyna’s deployments include napkin folding for Din Tai Fung, where the customer is reportedly requesting additional robots, providing an important signal that the system can generate operational value rather than simply perform a controlled demonstration. The broader opportunity, according to Dyna, is to expand from an individual task (such as folding) to an end-to-end workflow covering handling, loading, unloading and sorting.

Dyna sees the principal gating factor for adoption being reliability. Gao believes customer acceptance in the 80%–90% range may be encouraging for an emerging system, but it is inadequate for unattended, scaled operation. Dyna’s goal of approximately 99.9% reliability is therefore not an incremental engineering target; it is the threshold between an assisted product and scalable automation. Extending demonstrations from one continuous hour (which Dyna has a posted video of) to 24 hours should expose the edge cases that matter in production, including dropped items, variable fabrics and the cumulative effect of small errors throughout a workflow. As management succinctly frames it, deployment itself is the most meaningful evaluation.

Dyna explained that its Taku hardware was developed internally to align the body, mobility and end effectors with these workflows. It believes a human-compatible form factor offers access to environments designed around people and benefits from abundant human task data, although that does not necessarily require a fully bipedal humanoid for every application. The urgency is clear, per Dyna’s commentary: existing customers are asking for more systems, but scaling ahead of 99.9% end-to-end performance risks increasing support costs and damaging trust, in the company’s view. Dyna states it must therefore expand deployments quickly enough to collect data while maintaining the balancing act of enough operational control to close the final reliability gap and maintain customer trust.

Circling back to Eric Sheridan, managing director and internet/e-commerce equity analyst at Goldman, he recently raised his base-case forecast for global humanoid robot shipments to 75,000 in 2026, 890,000 in 2030, and 6.5 million in 2035, versus previous estimates of 51,000, 256,000, and 1.4 million, respectively.

As we noted earlier this week, the rise of humanoid robots will further increase demand for advanced memory chips, which are already in short supply. However, some relief may be on the way as Chinese giant CXMT brings additional supply online next year.

Saudi Arabia has confirmed two military pilots are dead after their reconnaissance helicopter crashed near the border with war-ravaged Yemen – the first such reported Saudi military deaths since the renew of war with the Houthis last month.

Saudi official statements are calling it a crash, describing it as a malfunction or accident, while the Houthis are saying they shot down the aircraft.

“The AH-6i helicopter’s crash near the city of Najran was due to a technical fault and killed two of the crew members, the Saudi-led coalition leading a campaign against the Houthis said,” according to Bloomberg. “That disputes the Iranian-backed group’s earlier claim that it had downed a similar aircraft.”

Najran has been under frequent attack by the Houthis, including when the helicopter went down on Saturday. It happened amid the typical missile and drone barrage on the kingdom from neighboring Yemen.

Houthi military spokesman Yahya Sari had on Saturday soon on the heels of the incident announced the group had shot down a Saudi attack helicopter near Najran.

He said the helicopter wasn’t just for reconnaissance, but was actively targeting Houthis positions along the border.

There is a fierce PR dispute among the warring sides:

On Sunday, October 18, al-Maliki responded to Sari’s post. He posted a photo of several Apache helicopters lined up in a row and wrote: “You claim to have shot it down, but it will soon reappear on the battlefield.” Thus, the Saudi-led coalition has denied the Houthis’ claim that an Apache helicopter was destroyed. At the same time, the report of the AH-6i crash and the deaths of two crew members remains a separate, officially confirmed fact. The details of the incident and the possible connection between these reports require further confirmation. Reuters reported this, citing a statement by Saudi Coalition spokesperson Major General Turki al-Maliki.

The Houthi side has produced what it says is video proof of the AH-6i helicopter being targeted:

Ansarallah released footage showing the interception of a Saudi AH-6i attack helicopter off the coast of Najran, Yemen. The Saudi-led coalition had previously claimed that the helicopter went down due to a “mechanical failure”. This footage disproves that claim. https://t.co/LdgYju6ywy

— AMK Mapping 🇳🇿 (@AMK_Mapping_) October 18, 2026

Whichever ends up being the case, this could be the first of more military disasters for the superior-armed Saudis to come. The Houthis don’t have air power or an air force, but likely have shoulder-fired and ground-to-surface systems capable of taking out low-flying aircraft.

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Will interest rates go up to 6%? That’s the question on many investors’ minds since Pimco’s chief investment officer, Dan Ivascyn, told the Financial Times last Friday that a 6% 10-year Treasury yield is “certainly possible.” This week’s hotter-than-expected September CPI report only added fuel to that argument.

I get it. The 10-year closed at 5.31% on October 5, the highest close since May 2002. It started the year at 4.18%. However, look at what is actually driving inflation. Then look at how every major yield spike since 1990 ended. The case for a sustained move to 6% gets thin quickly.

Pimco’s 6% Call, And Why It Landed

In case you didn’t read the article, let’s start with what Ivascyn actually said, because the headlines compressed it. He did not forecast 6%. He said it was possible, and he tied a big part of the recent move to market plumbing rather than economics.

“It is certainly possible, even from a short-term trading perspective… some of the activity we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks is tied to some negative technicals.” – Dan Ivascyn, Pimco, to the Financial Times, October 9, 2026

Furthermore, he also flagged “stop-out activity from the platform hedge funds and other levered investors,” and warned that a move to 5.5% or higher would bring “some decent weakness in risk markets, both credit and equity.”

Read that last part twice, because I’ll come back to it, and it was a topic we touched on when we discussed the “Basis Trade.” The backdrop is real. Oil has spiked. The Fed raised rates in September for the first time since 2023. And today’s CPI showed headline inflation accelerating to 3.7% from 3.4% in August.

Such is the setup that makes a 6% call feel inevitable. But a forecast that depends on forced selling by levered funds is a forecast about positioning, and positioning reverses. When the “technicals” that drove a move wash out, the fundamentals reassert themselves. So the real question for investors is what the fundamentals say.

Will Interest Rates Go Up On Inflation? Look Under The Hood

The bond bears’ case rests on inflation. So let’s look at inflation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning that the energy index rose 20.4% over the past year, with gasoline up 34.2%. Gasoline alone rose 9.1% in September. Strip out food and energy, and core CPI rose 2.6% over the year. A year ago, that same core rate was running at 3.0%.

Notice in the chart above that the red and black lines diverge in March 2026. That is the oil shock, and it hasn’t spread into the core. Wages tell the same story. Average hourly earnings rose 3.0% over the past year, per the September jobs report, which is hardly a “wage-price spiral.” Employers added just 29,000 jobs in September, and July was revised to a loss of 10,000.

Is this the kind of inflation that sends yields to 6% and keeps them there? No. This is “bad inflation,” the supply-shock variety that eats into household budgets until spending slows, hiring stalls, and the very price pressure that started the scare begins to fade on its own. It doesn’t justify “higher for longer” forever. Gasoline now runs $4.33 a gallon nationally, up from $2.98 before the current oil shock (AAA data cited by CBS News). That extra $1.35 per gallon isn’t spent elsewhere, and the economy slows under its weight. Energy-driven inflation without wage growth behind it is a tax on consumers, and taxes slow economies. Slowing economies don’t sustain 6% bond yields.

Every Yield Peak Since 1990 Ended The Same Way

Bob Farrell’s Rule #1 is that markets tend to return to the mean over time. Bond yields are no exception, and when I went back through the Federal Reserve’s daily Treasury data and pulled every major 10-year yield peak since 1990, 6 of them stand out, and each one looked unstoppable at the time.

Here are the details of that research. The table below uses the daily closing high for each episode, then measures where the yield sat 12 and 24 months later. It also lists what was happening as yields fell, because yields rarely fall for “positive” reasons.

Step back for a moment and think about the data. Since 1990, there have been 6 interest rate peaks, and 6 periods of lower yields two years later. The mechanism was the same each time: higher rates tightened financial conditions until something gave, whether that was the economy, a levered corner of the market, or the Fed’s resolve. The average decline was 1.64 percentage points, within a range of roughly 1 to 2.25 percentage points.

There are two caveats to mention. The first is that a peak is only a peak in hindsight. This study tells you how these episodes resolved, not the day they ended. Secondly, the 2018 figure includes the pandemic collapse in rates, which flatters it. Still, even 12 months out, every case was lower, by more than three-quarters of a point at minimum. So, will interest rates go up from here? They can, for a while. The history says that the higher yields climb, the faster they break the thing that is pushing them higher.

“Yields don’t peak because investors get comfortable. They peak because something breaks, and at 5.3% the list of candidates is getting long.”

Real Rates Are Already Doing The Fed’s Work

This is where the data gets even more interesting. When we measure against core inflation, the 10-year Treasury now pays a “real yield” of roughly 2.7%. That’s the highest since 2010, and well above the 1.6% average since 1990. Real yields are what borrowers actually feel, regardless of what the “soft landing” crowd says. A business deciding whether to build a plant is weighing that number, just as much as a family deciding whether to buy a house. This is why if you are wondering whether interest rates go up from here, you should watch “real yields” closely.

I’ve written about where I thought fair value sat for some time. To wit:

“By the mean-reversion logic the framework implies, the fair value of the 10-year is closer to 5.3% than to 4.6%.” – Rising Interest Rates: Why The Narrative Fails Against The Data, May 22, 2026

Interest rates have already returned to normal, and a move to 6% would be an overshoot of roughly 70 basis points beyond fair value. That level would also arrive just as payroll growth has nearly stalled and unemployment has climbed to 4.2%.

“But Lance, the debt is far bigger now than in any of those past episodes.“

I agree, and it certainly is. That is exactly why the overshoot is harder to sustain, not easier, because every extra point on the 10-year eventually rolls into the interest bill on the trillions of dollars of debt that Washington refinances every year. The CBO’s preliminary numbers show net interest on the public debt hit $1.143 trillion in fiscal 2026. That’s up 11% in a year and accounts for about 21% of all federal receipts.

Higher rates on a bigger debt pile drag on growth. That drag eventually shows up as lower yields, not higher ones. I made that case in detail in “Normal Interest Rates: What The Debt Panic Gets Wrong.”

Will Interest Rates Go Up Further? What It Means For Investors

Go back to the line I asked you to remember. Ivascyn’s own scenario says a move to 5.5% or higher brings “some decent weakness in risk markets, both credit and equity.” That is precisely the environment in which high-quality bonds tend to do their job. If rates spike far enough to hurt stocks and credit, the spike itself often sets up the bond rally. In other words, the 6% scenario partly contains its own cure.

That doesn’t mean loading up on long-duration bonds and walking away. In this past weekend’s Bull Bear Report, we noted that we’ve slightly shortened clients’ bond duration. Overall bond allocations remain in place. The trade-off is plain: duration protects you in a growth shock, when yields fall and bond prices rise, but it hurts you in an inflation shock, when yields keep climbing and longer bonds take the most pain.

If you are drawing income from your portfolio, a 5% yield is also a real cushion. It helps against the sequence of return risk I covered last week.

For the full case on owning Treasuries at these levels, see “Bonds At 5%: Is The 10-Year Treasury Finally A Buy?“

Waiting for 6% before doing anything is a bet in itself. Every peak in the table above looked like it had more room to run at the time. Whether interest rates go up another half point or roll over next month, a few basics hold. Know your portfolio’s duration and whether it matches your time horizon. Staggering maturities means you’re never forced to bet everything on one rate call. And if an oil-driven second wave would damage your plan, some inflation protection earns its keep. Such is the difference between managing risk and forecasting it.

Bottom line:The 10-year could touch 6% on forced selling, but with core inflation cooling and growth stalling, 6% looks far more like the top of this cycle than a new floor.

Every one of the last six yield peaks felt like the start of something new. Each one turned out to be the end of something old. The only question is what breaks first this time.