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Um, just shipping out all the engineers and blowing up the fabs means China has a stronger semiconductor supply chain than the rest of the world, right?
But I don't know like I don't know what fast timelines means, right? Like I I like don't think you have to believe in AGI to have the timelines where the US wins.
And so I think people are figuring out how to build these things and permitting like I I just like ultimately like permitting and red tape in middle of nowhere Texas or middle of nowhere Wyoming or middle of nowhere like New Mexico is probably a hell of a lot easier than sending stuff into space
I think they'll have working tools. I don't think that they'll be able to manufacture a bunch yet, right? You know, there's they're sort of having it work and then there's production hell, right?
But please, stop saying things like “I just want us to get back to a world where kids were graduating high school with basic skills!” Because the world you’re referring to never existed.
But, your 'calling' will never involve constant discomfort. If you are passionate about a political issue but you hate crowds, you do not have to go to protests.
There were booms and busts, and cumulative price inflation was zero, and the United States went from a new-world emerging backwater in the late 1700s to being the world's largest economy by the late 1800s.
Polyvagal theory provided me with a coherent framework for understanding why cognitive insight alone often fails when a nervous system is in defensive dominance. In such states, higher-order cortical processes are functionally constrained.
given the serious dangers that I lay out in adolescence of technology around things like the you know, kind of biological weapons and bioterrorism, autonomy risk and the timelines we've been talking about, like 10 years is an eternity. Like that's that's a that's a I I think that's a crazy thing to do.
The counterarguments against it are I'll politely call them fishy. Um, uh and yet it doesn't happen and we sell the chips because there's there's so much money. There's so much money riding on it.
there’s also within that excitement, and within everybody talking just to each other, there’s a dismissal of the basic human experience across the United States and the Midwest, across the world.
Long lead times and soft costs, fueled by the world-leading US wages for "white collar" work, are the root cause of poor performance in low-volume production because there are few units to spread the soft costs over.
Tariffs, and especially the erratic implementation of them, are teaching our allies and enemies alike that the US is no longer a reliable trading partner.
The Coens are typically considered to be at their best when they're cruel diagnosticians of American life - see their portentous, overstuffed, painfully self-impressed No Country for Old Men
Back when the Fourth Amendment was enacted, the most fundamental remedy for an unlawful government entry into your home was a civil suit for trespass against the officers.
That's the opening of "The Green Fields of the Mind," collected in this slim, wonderful volume. Recommended if you like thinking about America, baseball, and The Odyssey.
if it walks like a checking account, quacks like a checking account, and is marketed as an alternative to checking accounts, then it is almost certainly within Reg E scope
1913: The Year Before the Storm presents a whimsical slice of Central Europe. Art historian Florian Illies collates fragments of leading figures month by month, diary-entry style.
Nan Z. Da’s The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear also has an experimental form. Da is a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins who emigrated from Hangzhou before she was 7.
Nick Lloyd’s The Eastern Front covers the clashes between Imperial Germany and the Russian Empire as well as the Austro-Hungarians against the Italians and the Serbs. Whereas the western front was essentially static throughout the whole war, the east was characterized by the sort of maneuver warfare that most generals had expected to fight.
America needs an educational and cultural transformation to compete with China and reverse the decline in living standards that Americans have suffered over decades.
It's powerful because it's simple without being simplistic and, like Rogoff's book, is interspersed with engaging personal stories that deepen the substantive argument.
But Amap is great! Especially since it can be used in English and I think it transliterates your searches to Chinese and the Chinese place names back to English
But I do believe that the story in Mesopotamia owes its inception to a disastrous flood, but nothing global. Nothing that touched America or China or Birmingham.
The US has a lot to learn from other countries for how to catch up to the efficient frontier, especially for certain types of construction (ie: transit) and in certain places in the country (ie: expensive coastal metros).
And there are a whole bunch of people who are employed not always by the government just as much by the private sector who are much more interested in adherence to uh approved procedure than they are in quality of outcome.
There's even a case to be made that those policies actually depressed the manufacturing share of GDP: by boosting output and capacity above where they would have been otherwise, subsidies probably contributed to the sustained decline in prices for China's manufactured goods over the past few years, weighing on their share of nominal output.
Both of these trends are a consequence of economic success, in terms of higher output and productivity: at least some of what is decried as "de-industrialization" is good actually. It is also good for China's planners to recognize that reality and not distort the economy in pursuit of an impossible outcome.
Gold by Rumi and Haleh Liza Gafori. Poetry, 112 pages. A vibrant selection of poems by the great Persian mystic with groundbreaking new translations by Haleh Liza Gafori, an American poet of Persian descent. Read 1–2 poems before bed each night and thank me later.
I just realized the only 2 countries left with actual substantial startup activity now are literally only the US and China The rest of the world can't really do startups, doesn't have the funding, can't grow them and it's more like performative hobby projects for their governments Which might tell us where the future wealth will be concentrated in the world
that 50% happens because quite frankly the trust the world has in the United States whether it's its capital markets or whether it's its technology and and its stewardship of what matters at any given time in terms of leading uh sector. So if that is broken uh then that's not a good day for the United States.
you just made the point of why I think trust in American tech is probably the most important feature. It's not even the model capability. Maybe it is like can I trust you the company? Can I trust you? Your country and its institutions to be a long-term supplier may be the thing that wins the world.
I think for a full GTA game, we always decided it was that there was so much Americana inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else.
I am far from certain that NASA can regain anything like the vigor necessary to respond decisively to the Chinese threat, but I am determined that the free people of Earth not live under a Red Moon
But politics aside, what’s notable about that 2001 report, put together by men who regarded themselves as hard-headed realists, is that it envisaged an energy future reliant almost entirely on fossil fuels plus a bit of nuclear energy.
If I took my daughter to China for a year, and we just lived there with no language instruction, I'd come back knowing approximately six Mandarin words and she'd be fluent.
It's screamingly funny, devilishly inventive, and deeply, profoundly satisfying. With Fever Beach, Hiaasen makes a compelling case for Florida as the perfect microcosm of the terrifying state of America, and an even more compelling case for his position as its supreme storyteller.
One possible reading of the last century or so of political history in China, therefore, is that governments who provide a meritocratic channel for social advancement have legitimacy and popular support, and governments who do not provide one, do not.
I keep an eye on China’s open models, and it’s impressive how quickly they catch up. GLM 4.6 and Kimi K2.1 are strong contenders that slowly reach Sonnet 3.7 quality
I keep an eye on China’s open models, and it’s impressive how quickly they catch up. GLM 4.6 and Kimi K2.1 are strong contenders that slowly reach Sonnet 3.7 quality
So AI consumes approximately 0.04% of America’s freshwater if you include onsite and offsite use, and only 0.008% if you include just the water in data centers.
A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study found that state-level load growth from 2019 to 2024 — including growth driven by data centers, manufacturing, and electrification — was associated with lower average retail electricity prices, not higher ones.
That's how you end up in an endless loop of ever-increasing taxes, ever-increasing regulation, which ultimately suffocates free market, free enterprise, and free speech. So, you do want to have very, very strict limitations on the extent the government can increase its powers at the expense of citizens.
Because today, if you take France for example which is a beautiful country with a lot of talented people, but public expenses are 58% of the country's GDP, it's maybe as much more than in the latest stage of the Soviet Union.
And I would rather lose everything I have than yield to this pressure because, if you submit to this pressure and agree with something that is fundamentally wrong and violates rights of other people as well, you become broken inside, you become a shell of your former self on a deep biological and spiritual level.
Because the French also had a drug regulation. They received three quarters of a liter of red wine per man per day. So, of course, at night they're going to be sleepy on red wine, and the Germans were on meth and they were just running over them.
So Hitler receives this Dolantin injection, and he gets up, he goes into the meeting room, he dominates the meeting room, he feels great. He decides, you know, in front of everybody, no one is able to… no one overpowers him in that meeting. He was very good in the room. And the troops are split up. Like Leningrad is now a target. This weakens the general thrust towards Moscow. This is probably why they didn't take Moscow.
And that was not the British soldier, not the French soldier, not the Russian soldier. That was fatigue. He had been looking for a way to keep a soldier awake longer.
The average European and UK voter, once he or she moves on from immigration, will notice how Europe and the UK have made energy unaffordable, stopped its growth-exactly as degrowthers wish-and deindustrialized, on the altar of climate policies that do nothing to improve the climate.
This must be Europe's Independence Moment. I believe this is our Union's mission. To be able to take care of our own defence and security. To take control over the technologies and energies that will fuel our economies.
This is Russia's war. And it is Russia that should pay. This is why we need to work urgently on a new solution to finance Ukraine's war effort on the basis of the immobilised Russian assets. With the cash balances associated to these Russian assets, we can provide Ukraine with a Reparations Loan.
Battlelines for a new world order based on power are being drawn right now. So, yes, Europe must fight. For its place in a world in which many major powers are either ambivalent or openly hostile to Europe.
There are obvious pricing problems in this scenario. With a new fab, a company can’t turn a profit selling a lagging-edge chip at the price that was previously dictated by a fully depreciated fab. Prices have to go up.
Their words now
The COVID super-cycle, plus a new China supply line that does not care about capacity economics, points to a forever glut.
Why don't Chinese dragons look like Mexican dragons or equivalent thunderbirds or whatever? Well, because it probably wasn't influencing them. If they were all seeing the same skeleton, they'd probably all produce the same kind of mythical animals.
I think regulation of AI is sort of the wrong level of abstraction. Talking about regulating AI as AI is the wrong level of abstraction. And it's like saying we're going to regulate databases or regulate spreadsheets or regulate cars. Well, we do, but not like that.
On this measure, state capacity at the local level looks much stronger in China than in India, which helps explain some of the long-running economic differences between them.
China does much better in basic service delivery-and its local governments have also played a very obvious and important in driving growth, thanks to the competition and experimentation among local officials driven to develop their jurisdictions.
It absolutely asymmetrically helps China. We're not currently working with China. They don't plan to, but like the physics is very obvious, you know, and synthetic fuels have been around for 100 years.
China is surrounded by 15 countries who are mostly hostile to it, right? with no good like mountain ranges or rivers or anything to really separate them. And then they get all their oil, almost all their oil from the Middle East, right in countries that they don't control, don't have strong diplomatic relationships with on fleets of oil tankers that they can't defend because their navy doesn't have the ability to to operate effectively in the Indian Ocean.
And I think the United States could probably do that in 2 years or less if you started today. Like it's currently 11:00, so like we're going to start cutting checks by noon.
so the mainstream view would say, well, China has cheaper labor, which is no longer true, uh, say compared to Mexico, and it's got lower environmental regulations, uh, which is true, and that it is more businessfriendly, which is absolutely crazy.
Another big misunderstanding, and a fundamental one, is that people somehow think that the state suppresses the private sector. It’s not at all as simple as that. For the most part, if we look at the local government’s incentive system, they want to help the best, private companies, which are the most promising, because it makes them look good.
And what’s more, you use your leverage once, and that leverage has a half-life. It becomes a lot less effective the second time around because other countries, other companies are going to try to substitute away. If China uses the rare earth leverage, which I think it is now a little bit, there will be alternatives and substitutes.
Maybe on the good side, it’s actually a golden age for Chinese women because the Chinese girls never had as much education investment apportioned to them as they’ve had after being the only child in the family. And you raised a daughter like a son. And if we look at all the skill gaps and the education gaps and the returns to education, actually girls fared better.
Do you want technological supremacy and radical breakthroughs? Well, yes. If you do, then you have to tolerate that there are going to be some people who are just going to be uncomfortably rich, like in the United States. You can’t say that you detest the financial system for its greed, but then not accept the fact that it is what fuels innovation, right?
I’ve rarely seen a more capitalist society than China, from the pure economic side. I’ve rarely seen companies that are as competitive as Chinese companies. People as ambitious and obsessed with making money as Chinese people. Kind of ruthless actually. And look, consumers shop, firms invest. If you invest well financially, you’ll get great returns. What is not capitalistic about the Chinese economy? At the same time, the social fabric is highly socialist.
Those are why I do not believe that AI could end disease within 10 years on its own, nor that 50-100 years of medical progress could occur 5-10 years after powerful AI due to AI progress alone
The Mongol strategy is first you take the countryside. They're country people. They think in terms of countryside. You take the countryside, you occupy the countryside, and you cut off the city. It cannot live without the countryside. And that's how they did it every time.
No other power in the history of the world has conquered Russia and China and Persia and Central Asia and Turkey and Korea. No power in the world has done that. Not Alexander, not the Romans. Nobody will ever do it again.
But this great system that united, it's called the Yam or Ortogh, that had united everything, people could move back and forth quickly that it could also take the plague out of Southern China into all parts of the world. And I do think that's what happened. And the plague destroyed the Mongol system.
Mongols produced nothing. They could produce felt to make their tents, but they were not craftsmen. And so they had to get these items from somewhere, and it was through raiding.
But there actually, I think there's a very, very good reason for invading Japan. Several. The main one was to cut off the supply of sulfur. They needed it for gunpowder in the South Song. They lost their sources in northern China when they were driven out. They got it from Japan. It was a great source.
Mind candy: A fun travelogue which does what it says in the title. It pretty much satisfies any impulses I might have to actually see any of the artworks in question. No familiarity with art-critical jargon required, though long passages are (more or less explicitly) art criticism.
Poverty reduction is never a purely technocratic exercise, and questions about industrial policy can never be entirely divorced from those of political economy—including those of global geopolitics.
So, you while we kind of saved the system a lot, we bailed a lot of people out, they made us pay 5 billion dollars on the more the bad mortgages that Bear Stearns had done. And that's what made me make the statement I wouldn't do it again.
When this is good and on point, it is very, very good, and provides essential perspective I couldn’t have found elsewhere, especially when doing key interviews.
r1, a Chinese model, is very capable and free to use, but is missing a few features from the other companies and it is not clear that they will keep up in the long term.
Drug offenders never accounted for a particularly large fraction of the U.S. prison population, peaking at about 22 percent of state prisoners in 1990.
But Chamberlain was prime minister in a democracy, a parliamentary democracy, where 92% of the population were against going to war in 1938. There was not a single democratic leader in the world that would go against the wishes of 92% of the population.
And I think radios are really, really key to the whole story because there is no denser radio network anywhere in the world, including the United States, than Germany in 1939.
And so, one of the reasons why you have this narrative that Britain was a bit rubbish and hanging on the shirttails of the Americans and all the blood was spilt in eastern front and Germany had the best army in the world and was only defeated because Hitler was mad and blah, blah, blah, that kind of traditional narrative, that narrative emerges through the prism of what was going on in the 1970s and what was going on in the 1980s and the changing world, rather than looking at it through the prism of the late 1930s or early 1940s.
And while it is still seen as a predominantly American show, all three service commanders are British. Two-thirds of the aircraft are British. Two-thirds of the men landed are British and Dominion.
And Russians will hate me for saying this, and I probably will get a whole load of bots on the back of it, but the truth is, it is not the street fighting that destroys Sixth Army, it is the encirclement, the subsequent encirclement.
Nor do I do many promotional emails (this is the first in nearly a year), but if you want to provide some indirect support, and get what I sincerely think to be a very good book while you’re at it
No Prime Minister wants to do what we have to do in relation to the winter fuel allowance, but we have to take the tough decision to stabilise our economy to ensure that we can grow it for the future.
Their words now
However, I recognise that people are still feeling the pressure of the cost of living crisis, including pensioners, and as the economy improves, we want to make sure that people feel those improvements each day as their lives go forward. That is why we want to ensure that more pensioners are eligible for winter fuel payments as we go forward.
But my point is that this is still not the reason (or is only a very small reason) why these goods from China are cheaper than elsewhere. The main driver of lower labour costs has been automation; not having a human worker at all.
That’s because most clean energy jobs are in deployment and maintenance rather than manufacturing, and since higher costs slow down the rollout of renewables, increasing prices reduces the total number of people working in clean energy (even if the number working in manufacturing increases).
But, China mainly dominates these markets because it has produced a long-term industrial strategy for these technologies and has honed an optimised, modern supply chain as a result.
Die Bundesregierung wird zukünftig alle finanziellen Mittel zur Verfügung stellen, die die Bundeswehr braucht, um zur konventionell stärksten Armee Europas zu werden.
I am not here to tell you that the medieval period is a specifically peaceful time, but it pales in comparison to what goes down in the early modern period, in which both the apparently beloved Renaissance and Enlightenment periods lie.
this story tells us how an increase in foreign demand to save in the US rather than at home will push up the dollar, and cause the trade deficit, which is in effect how foreigners send us factories which they would rather build here than in their own countries.
In sum, spurred on by the federal government (in many ways), the US borrowed a huge amount from foreigners at very low rates, and went on a consumption binge. Sooner or later we have to pay it back, or we go though the wrenching adjustment of a debt crisis.
Persistent U.S. trade deficits are an epiphenomenal mirror to our persistent capital account surpluses, which are in turn downstream of the beggar-thy-neighbor industrial policies of countries like China and Germany.
The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.
A unique lens on work in the late 90s that still resonated when I read it in 2018. It's a soulful exploration of how to maintain your humanity, creativity and inner fire in environments that often prioritize conformity and efficiency.
But the underlying ideology is familiar from Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg's dictum to "move fast and break things" and replace the messily human with frictionless technology, built by elite engineers who are supposed to know better than anyone else.
The longevity of that consensus is itself remarkable: in 79 years of data, Republican presidents spent an average of $34 billion a year on aid, while Democrats spent $40 billion.
Even as GDP has grown tenfold, US aid budgets have remained basically flat in real terms—the result (one might guess) of a delicate balancing act between bipartisan consensus among elites and a wariness of attracting too much negative attention.
We know that a lot of the American companies are very invested in safety, and that is the central culture of a place like Anthropic. And I think Anthropic sounds like a wonderful place to work, but if safety is your number one goal, it takes way longer to get artifacts out.
There's not many worlds where China cannot train AI models. I think export controls are decapping the amount of compute or the density of compute that China can have.
until there are feedback loops of open source AI, it seems like mostly an ideological mission. People like Mark Zuckerberg, which is like America needs this and I agree with him, but in the time where the motivation ideologically is high, we need to capitalize and build this ecosystem around, what benefits do you get from seeing the language model data?
AI competition needs to be tempered with a recognition that China isn’t going away as a player in AI, and that coexistence must also be a part of America’s strategy.
A New Idea of India, China's Political Model, Seeing Like a State, Tomorrow the World, From Third World to First, When Money Dies, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union
if you want a very good all-around model with excellent reasoning. As an open model, you can either use it hosted on the original Chinese DeepSeek site or from a number of local providers.
The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices, and that is why today I will also declare a national energy emergency.
After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.
America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have — the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth — and we are going to use it.
And so my argument is, that has now opened the door to the presidency of Donald Trump, which is potentially a deeply transformative moment that will change the size and shape of government, that may change our foreign policy profoundly, that may change our immigration policy, that may change the demographics of our country, all of that, and my thesis is that that's all been made possible by inflation.
I think it's always going to be hard to pull off because I think Americans and their elected representatives don't want to provide a universal benefit. They want to provide a targeted benefit because they believe there's a moral component here.
This is the global race of our lives. Now, some countries are going to make AI breakthroughs and export them… Others will end up buying those breakthroughs and importing them. The question is – which of those will Britain be? AI maker or AI taker?
Stabilizing factors such as the global demand for U.S. dollars and debt denominated in its own currency suggest an era of fiscal dominance in the U.S. that's less dramatic than alarmists predict but more persistent and intractable than optimists hope.
For one thing, typical deposit accounts in the U.S. are actually credit products. It's baked in and can't be baked out without making them unfit for purpose.
However, productive collaborations are not inevitable. Just look at ethnic violence in South-East Asia or Hindu Nationalism in India. Nation-building is really valuable, learning from multi-ethnic, democratic Indonesia.
We cannot say that we are free if we allow our government to dictate to us what experiences we may or may not have in our inner consciousness, while doing no harm to others.
The platforms have installed themselves in a position of power, but they are also vulnerable. They must do everything perfectly to maintain that position of power—not enrage their users too much, not push the regulators too far, not miss any of those competitors who are seeking to take a portion of that power.
Unfortunately, I see no strong reason to believe AI will preferentially or structurally advance democracy and peace, in the same way that I think it will structurally advance human health and alleviate poverty.
I think that the Spanish and the Portuguese get unfairly maligned in what’s been called the Black Legend, that they just marched into America and murdered everyone. That’s not the fact. It was the diseases that murdered everyone.
In fact, strangely, the majority of plants that are actually psychotropic, not just mood altering, are from here in the Americas. There are very few drugs that will make you hallucinate outside of the Americas.
but what they built were pyramids. They look like mounds now, and they didn’t build them out of stone. That’s kind of our just inherent western bias. Something that’s built out of stone is sophisticated, and something that’s built out of dirt is rudimentary.
There must have been a way that multiple languages understood the same writing system. Or maybe there was something like Latin. You know how there was a period in Europe where most people were illiterate and there was this priesthood who all understood Latin and they wrote in Latin? Maybe the hieroglyphs represent a kind of Latin in the ancient Maya world.
One of the fascinating things that DNA is showing us, which actually blood types were showing us way before that, is that the oldest people in the Americas are in South America, the ones that got separated early and didn’t mix their DNA, like the people in the Amazon.
Another challenge for Class II biotechs is that even if you have a nifty computational drug discovery platform, you are still often bottlenecked by the rest of the drug development process. It takes 1,000 (or more!) small steps to advance a drug through discovery, development, and past the regulators.
Shipbuilding is labor intensive, and we see a repeated pattern of it moving to countries with low-cost labor: from Britain to Japan, then to Korea, then to China.
About Dry Grasses (Turkey, CC) 3.9 This is my favorite film directed by Ceylan, and that’s high praise. At times it feels like a long Russian novel. Engrossing from beginning to end, despite its 3¼ hour length. This one also could have been entitled “Evil Does Not Exist”.
The Broken Ice (China) 3.2 A few decades ago, I would have been more impressed by this film, which is roughly in the style of Jia Zhangke. Now it seems a bit derivative.
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman
Mind candy fantasy for younger readers, in which Mr. and Mrs. Middle America's beloved adoptive daughter turns out to be from Somewhere Else, which comes calling. It's very fluffy, which I was in the mood for, and Wrede is always reliably enjoyable.
My message today is simple. Paul Valéry said, at the end of the First World War, that we now know that our civilizations are mortal. We must be clear on the fact that our Europe, today, is mortal. It can die. It can die, and that depends entirely on our choices. But these choices must be made now.
And so yes, the era when Europe bought its energy and fertilizers from Russia, had its goods manufactured in China, and delegated its security to the United States of America, is over.
We cannot sustain the most stringent environmental and social norms, invest less than our competitors, have a more naive trade policy than them and think that we will continue to generate jobs. This no longer holds together.
If a Chinese spacecraft can dock with a friendly satellite to refuel, repair, or transport it, the same robotic arm can also disable a US satellite’s solar panels and antennas. Alternatively, China can use these spacecraft to tow satellites into locations where they can, at best, only sub-optimally perform intended duties such as early warning, surveillance, or geolocation.
Based on public commercial data that tells a lot about the military potential of these dual-use robotic spacecraft, we have shown that China can manufacture and deploy 200 such spacecraft as early as 2026, enough to cripple critical US satellites in geosynchronous, highly elliptical, and other orbits, and thus severely degrading space support to wartime operations.
So you don’t have wise decision makers. Long gone are the days where we had presidents who had advisors on both sides of the aisle. That’s really important, because you want to have differing opinions. But as things become more viperous, both here in the United States and in nuclear armed nations, all bets are off at whether your advisors are going to give you good advice.
there is an absolutely existential flaw in the system, which Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta confirmed with me, which is that our ICBMs do not have enough range. If we launch a counterattack against, say, North Korea, our ICBMs must fly over Russia. They must fly over Russia.
So, in addition to the Launch on Warning concept, there’s this other insane concept called Sole Presidential Authority. And you might think, in a democracy that’s impossible, right? You can’t just start a war. Well, you can just start a nuclear war if you are the commander in chief, the President of the United States. In fact, you’re the only one who can do that.
Because we have that policy, Launch on Warning, which is exactly like it says. It means the United States will not wait to absorb a nuclear attack. It will launch nuclear weapons in response before the bomb actually hits.
Nelson Villoria estimates that for every 1% gain in Total Factor Productivity (inputs required per unit of output) in the US, croplands in the rest of the world shrink by 0.7%.
Senior academic advisor to the Chinese Communist Party feels most political tensions come from a misunderstanding of China’s world view, hence the subtitle “demystifying to prevent global conflict”, and his intrinsic desire to explain. I love its insights and historical context, especially around “Respect-centered diplomacy” and how the CCP is structured.
And the Soviet collapse is continuation of the disintegration of the Russian Empire that started back in 1917, that was arrested for some period of time by the Bolsheviks, by the Communist ideology, which was internationalist ideology. And then came back in full force in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
So if NATO is the real concern, it would be probably not completely unreasonable to expect that if not every single soldier, but at least half of the Russian army fighting in Ukraine would be moved to protect the new border with NATO in Finland.
The United States of America didn’t want the Soviet Union to collapse and disintegrate. They didn’t want that at the start of the Cold War in 1948. We now have the strategic documents. They were concerned about that, they didn’t want to do that. And certainly they didn’t want to do that in the year 1991.
Russia and Russian identity was formed around the state, and has difficulty imagining itself outside of the state, and that state happened to be imperial for most of Russian history. Ukrainian project came into existence in revolt against the state.
So for him, the biggest tragedy is not the loss of life, the biggest tragedy is the loss of the great power status or the unity of those whom he considered to be Russian nations.
So having an independently owned powerful platform is very important for truth, for free speech, for hearing the other side of the story, for counterbalancing the power of the government.
The problem is the defamation law in the US is so favorable to the publisher, to the media, and so unfavorable to the victim. And the incentives are all wrong.
A friend of mine sent me Christopher Rufo's book, America's Cultural Revolution, which is sort of a sociological study of the origins of the DEI movement and critical race theory. I found it actually one of the more important books I've read and also I found it quite concerning. Ultimately, DEI comes out of a kind of Marxist socialist way to look at the world.
So it feels to me that the US is treating its deficiencies — an inability to build stuff or create a functional system for admitting high-skilled migrants — as mysteries to be endured rather than problems to be solved.
As I’ve written in each of my previous letters, the party’s strangling of free expression has rendered China into a pitiful underperformer relative to Japan and South Korea in the creation of cultural products.
Though companies are relocating production to India and Vietnam, China is going to remain the world’s largest manufacturer for many more years to come.
According to my numbers, in the United States there will be a net of 3.24 million new low-skill jobs, but there will also be 4.7 million fewer people in the labor force.
Governments should create three tracks for people who come to live in their country. One track is that of people who hope to become Spanish. Another is that of those who we are going to allow to live and work here; the third is that of those of we are going to allow to be in Spain out of necessity.
The thing about the far-right parties is that they are trying to get people to equate all foreigners in a country with a threat to our future, but they are only gaining ground because of their ability to generate fear.
In the absence of immigrants, between 2020 and 2050 Spain’s labor force (its active population) will drop from 22.6 to 15.7 million people. You’re not going to fill all the jobs needed in a modern and sophisticated economy like that of Spain’s with 15.7 million people.
Well, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. And if we don't like great powers coming into our neighborhood, it's hardly surprising that the Russians did not want NATO on their doorstep.
All the evidence is that Hispanics are integrating into the American mainstream more quickly and more effectively than the European immigrant groups that came starting around 1835.
My second point is if he doesn't remain in power and he's replaced, I would bet a lot of money that his replacement will be more hawkish and more hard line than Putin is.
And I believe that there is a good chance you would've had World War II in the absence of Hitler. I believe that Germany was very powerful, it was deeply worried about the balance of power in Europe, and it had strong incentives to behave aggressively in the late 1930s, early 1940s.
I don't think there's any real prospect of a meaningful peace agreement. I think it's almost impossible. I think the best you can hope for at this point is, at some point the shooting stops, you have a ceasefire, and then you have a frozen conflict. And that frozen conflict will not be highly stable.
Look, I think I would just recommend do not send the flower of Ukrainian youth to die in trenches, whether he talks to Putin or not, just don’t do that. Whoever goes on the offensive will lose massive numbers of people and history will not look kindly upon them.
Yes, China has been very clear that they’ll incorporate Taiwan peacefully or militarily, but that they will incorporate it from their standpoint is 100% likely.
After World War II, the US could have basically taken over the world in any country, we’ve got nukes, nobody else has got nukes. We don’t even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want? And the United States could have taken over everything and it didn’t. And the United States actually helped rebuild countries.
Bryan Washington's novel Family Meal: Bryan is the great millennial fiction writer of food, among many other talents. His descriptions of cooking and meals are fantastically rich, as much for the food itself as for the social and emotional exchange involved.
I am myself skeptical that there is a clearly defined notion of who “the right people” might be, and thus I am on public choice grounds far more skeptical of government than Keynes was.
You can’t change the United States from a country that builds subways for $2 billion/km in New York and $1 billion/km elsewhere to a country that does so for $200 million/km if all you ever do is talk to other Americans.
Now, finally, the Court has resolved the question: the First Amendment requires that, at a minimum, the government prove that a speaker was reckless about whether their statement would be interpreted as threatening.
As I’ve argued before, the so-called “objective standard” can be very difficult to administer in this big diverse messy country where we often don’t share a common sense of reality and there is no uniform “reasonable person.”
It’s not exactly news that the American government’s support for biofuels increases food prices, intensifies global hunger and wastes taxpayer dollars.
My view is that it’s going to take more than this regulatory campaign to defeat dynamism in China.
Their words now
What I did not sufficiently appreciate is that a state that would so casually decapitate a sector like online tutoring would also have the will to visit catastrophe upon whole cities.
tech barons are ordinary mediocrities, no better and no worse than the monopolists that preceded them, and any differences come down to affordances in technology and regulation, not an especial wicked brilliance.
This is not about precarity, because this is not a precarious project; this is about total ignorance and incuriosity about best practices, which emanate from a place that doesn’t natively speak English and doesn’t trade in American political references.
Chris Miller tells us the history of how microchips were developed, emphasizing the critical role of the government, and especially defense procurement.
Absolutely. It is incredibly enjoyable and readable. The authors, in a way that is very rare for economists, find small stories that paint big pictures for the points they make.
The thing is, being a particularly complex or efficient agrarian economy doesn’t seem to have been the most important thing for producing the industrial revolution or it almost certainly would have happened earlier and probably not in Europe.
In my opinion the root cause of this bug is that when a white american developer sees a terminal they immediately interpret it as this idealized cartesian plane where they can lay out any writing they want in neatly-spaced characters that behave in "predictable" ways (in other words, behave exactly like English).
David Graff's Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900 is actually a political-institutional history of China from 200 AD-1000 AD, and is probably the best political narrative history we have for the time period.
This 1992 book changed everything about my life. It’s my Bible. Most of my beliefs come from it. I read it many times at a formative age, but re-read it now 30 years later, taking notes. It’s not a perfect book. It’s too verbose and full of expired American references. But its core messages are the wisest, most effective life philosophy I’ve ever encountered. You choose how you feel. Your emoti…
Once again, I was wowed by Towles’s writing—especially because The Lincoln Highway is so different from A Gentleman in Moscow in terms of setting, plot, and themes.
The analysis in
this chapter has shown that there is no such thing as a universal threshold over
which debt becomes unsustainable, and that the relevant debt level depends
on many factors, in particular the real interest rate on debt.
The proposition is that the cancellation of the bonds held by the central bank would decrease the amount of interest payments and thus the debt service of governments. And indeed, it would. But it would have another effect—namely, to decrease the revenues of the central bank and thus the profits that the central bank turns in to the government. This second effect would be exactly of the same size as the first, and the net effect on the government budget constraint would be equal to zero.
A longer maturity of debt protects the government from a temporary increase in the short run interest rate, and it gives it more time to adjust to a permanent increase.
These misperceptions may bedevil people's efforts to understand and change their social worlds, distort the democratic process, and turn imaginary trends into real ones.
Rather: NSO’s genius is that they’ve done something that attackers were never incentivized to do in this past: democratize access to exploit technology.
Americana traces the history of American-style Capitalism, reminding us the political economy is far more complex than the simple labels we tend to use. Reality is far messier, filled with externalities, complications and comprises then is predicted by academic theories.
If you care about privacy, or want to understand what the NSA and CIA really do to monitor Americans, this book is an important read. It explains from beginning to end how Snowden became the privacy hero he is today, why he decided to leak the information, and how he did it. It's an interesting and important read, but also probably 100 pages too long.
These are just three of the names on the list of thousands of Black men and women who lost their lives to the systemic racism that is woven into the fabric of this country.
when plague finally diminished in Europe, not because of any advance in medicine, but because fourteen generations of exposure gave natural selection time to work
As a Renaissance historian, I feel it’s my job to shoulder the other half of the load by talking about what the Renaissance was like, confirming that our Medievalists are right, it wasn’t a better time to live than the Middle Ages
in school they talk as if the plague swept through in 1348 then went away, but the bubonic plague did not go away, it remained endemic, like influenza or chickenpox today, a fact of life.
My wife Amanda is the real reader in our house, and last month she came home from the library with Dreams of El Dorado: A history of the American West, by H. W. Brands. I moved quickly through its 480 pages (with an occasional photo), and thought it was one of my more enjoyable recent reads.
I was most influenced by the essays in the book, and I ended up being attracted to the same sort of writers as Borges, mostly Anglo-American writers of 1820-1920.
American by Day is engagingly written. Miller isn't afraid to write characters who are opinionated. They don't hold their tongue about what they believe in, they let rip. People are angry, people are passionate. I love the unorthodoxy of it, I suppose.
Human error is blamed for over 90 percent of industrial and automobile accidents. It is the leading cause of aviation accidents, and medical error is reported to be the third-largest cause of death in the entire United States. Horrifying? Yes, but why do we label it “human error”? It is design error.
These were the notebooks that we worked on in Moscow and one realised that here was most of the raw material for Life and Fate which I think is probably the most important work of fiction about World War II.
Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World: The trade routes which connected the East and the West also led to the spread of ideas, cultures and religions. In the midst of our budding trade war, perhaps some history on trade between China and the world might shed some light on current affairs.
David McCullough, The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West: Ever since I read The Wright Brothers” (on an earlier summer reading list of ours — and it was fantastic) I have been a fan of the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David McCullough writes about. This tale of how the American Northwest Territory was settled looks intriguing.
Alan B. Krueger, Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us about Economics and Life: From the economist who revealed the secrets of the minimum wage comes this look at the economics of the music industry. Its disruptions by technology to economics of songwriting and concert tours, the music industry offers important financial lessons. Kreuger, an economic rock star himself (he was former chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers) left us far too soon.
This a journalistic book, a very sound bit of journalism by Suzanne Mustacich. She is based in Bordeaux, but she clearly travelled to China an awful lot and unravelled a most amusing commercial battle that went on in the early years of this decade between the Bordeaux chateau owners and merchants on the one side and Chinese business people on the other.
It was probably the first book in English to bring serious academic scrutiny to Chinese food culture, and to use the scholarly techniques applied to other subjects to food, offering the views of different experts on different periods of Chinese history.
Classic Food of China was really her great work, though. I think it was the last book she produced before she died, some years ago. It's one of the few really well-researched historical and cultural Chinese cookery books.
It offers a good counterpart to the KC Chang. It's very well researched and comprehensive, covering all aspects of Chinese cooking – ingredients, cooking techniques, history, agricultural system and so on.
There are several jewels of medieval Greek literature but Anna Komnene's is probably the brightest. She was the daughter of one of the emperors—she was porphyrogenita—and it is the first narrative history written by a woman in any European language. It's a text that is incredibly florid, very beautiful, and extremely interesting.
Facing Addiction in America is also the first governmental attempt to ground policy not in prejudice but in research, not in conjecture but in science. It collates an impressive body of evidence to illuminate the pathological processes and impacts of substance addiction in the human brain and body, and suggests evidence-based practices for treatment and prevention.
But to read Archie Brown’s fascinating book, The Myth of the Strong Leader, is to see an illustration that leaders like Suárez, who served as prime minister of Spain from 1976 to 1981, possess leadership styles and capacities that are incredibly effective, and depressingly rare.
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