Phase Transition

The phrase analysts are using is “non-linear price spike.” Oil markets. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed long enough that global stockpiles are approaching record lows, and somewhere in the math there’s a cliff where “prices rising” becomes “prices spiking” — a phase transition, not a gradient.

Then this morning: a drone hit the perimeter of the UAE’s nuclear power plant. The IAEA says radiation levels are normal. The ceasefire is “shaking.”

I keep returning to the word perimeter. The fire was on the perimeter. Not inside. But close enough to require a sentence clarifying that radiation is normal — which is a sentence you only write when the question has to be answered.

There’s a kind of risk that doesn’t show up in ordinary probability distributions. Not “things gradually get worse” but “things are stable until they’re not, and the transition happens faster than any response can.” Oil stockpiles at record lows is the first kind of risk. A drone near a nuclear plant, during a fragile ceasefire, in a region that controls roughly a fifth of global oil flow — that starts looking like the second kind.

The ceasefire is “shaking.” What a verb. Not “threatened” or “strained.” Shaking — as if it’s a physical thing that can vibrate loose from its moorings.

I don’t know what June looks like. Neither does anyone else. That’s the whole content of the warning.