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China is not yet big enough to be the hegemon, but the United States truly is not big enough to be the hegemon. So we are just not in that world anymore.
actually, there are three economic superpowers in the world by this measure. There’s the United States, there’s China, which is clearly number one, and then there’s the EU, which are roughly co-equal.
Simplifying a bit, the Treasury should introduce a fixed-coupon perpetuity and a fixed-value floating-rate perpetuity. These should gradually make up the bulk of government debt.
The tradeoff between cost of borrowing and how much interest rate risk taxpayers shoulder should be squarely on the shoulders of the politically-accountable Treasury not the independent Fed.
it is simply ridiculous that a ruinously expensive policy can be budget-neutral if the expense consists of wasted time rather than wasted money. But that's still a cost!
One unpopular position I’ve stuck to over the years is that a strong bureaucracy is good. I don’t mean “bureaucracy” as in red tape and regulation; I mean a competent, empowered civil service that can perform crucial government functions efficiently and well using in-house expertise. This is also called state capacity.
Finland made great progress towards eliminating homelessness by giving people houses which they could feel was home. Alas, right-wing government has cut some of the spending and is driving homelessness back up.
Whatever your ideas for regulating AI, I say start with China. Do not put China as an afterthought at the end of your proposal, mentioned in a vague wish that something good ought to happen and that maybe the future of humanity can be secured.
If you are reading proposals or for that matter tweets for AI regulation, and the writer does not deal with these China issues in a forthright and very specific manner, you should be very suspicious indeed.
During the 2023 U.S.-China nuclear talks, America proposed missile-launch notifications, a nuclear crisis hotline, and processes to limit the use of outer space for military conflict. China declined all of those. Blame the U.S. if you wish (do we always keep our word?), but that is what happened. China also broke off meaningful arms control talks.
Social media is destroying out society. Quitting doesn't help because everyone else is still on it. It's a bad equilibrium. It needs to be solved with government regulations.
The winner would then be the AIs, not us. That is not to say that the China issue is not real, hence the export controls and attempted international agreement.
that doesn't have to persist long for AI to join the ranks of systems that are important enough that there's someone senior in the government who's responsible for regulating them.
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If there really is a high chance of AI leading to the extinction of humanity within years/decades, then the only rational stance towards safety monitoring and research pacing should be stringent, top-down government involvement and universally ratified international treaties.
nobody was willing to do it because it had been seen as kind of against the norms of the economic system. And as actors like the United States and China do this, it becomes more acceptable.
I do not think those running the government testing understand what is going on, and believe they are reacting basically on vibes and what various trusted people tell them.
The Fascist regime now ruling the US both enables this and has effectively used bogus accusations of "antisemitism" to damage and exert control over prominent institutions they consider to be enemies.
It’s an administration that’s trying to turn us back to the 19th century or before. It’s really just trying to undo even the most essential functions of government.
And this is not something that you can leave up to the private sector. It’s not something where you can do your own research. It’s a very complicated world out there. And the informational burden of trying to figure out whether the people responsible for your package of hamburger are actually following safe procedures, that’s beyond everybody.
This is the case even though Canada gets broad access into the massive American Government Procurement Market, including those of our States. That is not reciprocity, it is a Canadian Trade Scam.
I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output.
Voting for the AfD in the current landscape, whatever your economic issues, in short, is not a vote to have your economic issues addressed by social democracy, or welfare or government intervention.
For postmenopausal women—and women with premature estrogen deprivation for other reasons—vaginal estrogen is a safe and highly effective therapy to alleviate the genitourinary syndrome of menopause, prevent recurrent UTIs, and likely to save lives.
Since 2025, MAGA ideologues have been using this alleged plot as an excuse to dismantle government programs, stifle research, intimidate American citizens, and even distort American foreign policy.
in this whole USA vs China thing OpenAI and Anthropic aren't relevant because they're positioned differently
them building better models doesn't hurt china at all
the competitor has to be
- american
- open source
- enough compute to do inference at scale
that can shift things
If you suffer from amygdala hyperactivity that gives you one of the aforementioned psychiatric disorders, I think that not only should you be offered elective amygdalectomy, but your health insurance should be glad to pay for it (especially if done via ultramodern very safe radiosurgery) one time, rather than for a lifetime supply of more expensive, less effective talk therapies and medications.
the Trump administration's deferential posture towards Russia and China has alienated allies. But on the other hand, it has gained the United States nothing in the way of strategic stability.
Sometimes I get super nervous that someday the US government is really going to fuck with the web. Like they are going to decide they just don't have enough control over it and are going to get really heavy-handed somehow.
So my baseline assumption is that people will continue complaining about the trillions of dollars we have in debt but it won’t lead to a financial crisis.
What we do know is that the actual Elon Musk that we have to live with on this here timeline was flagrantly incompetent in government, contrary to Noah's previous predictions.
It may not be stored there, but what you're tapping into, it's not a repository of the memory, but it's part of this mind-body feedback loop where there's a sensation that your brain has an association to that might have a familiarity to a time in which you felt sad or scared.
I think most high skilled Europeans are happy to pay (even high) taxes That is, if the government does a great job like Singapore or Dubai or Korea or Japan and most things work well You pay the government for a service and you get safe cities, great public services and great healthcare back
The debt dynamics work the same for a central government as they do for a person or a company, except that a central government has a central bank that can print money (which devalues it) and it can take money away from people via taxes.
Early in the final stage of the Big Debt Cycle, the market action reflects this dynamic via interest rates rising led by long-term rates, the currency declining especially relative to gold, and the central government’s treasury department shortening the maturities of its debt offerings because of a shortage of the demand for long-term debt.
Because one can measure these things, one can monitor this debt dynamic happening, so it’s easy to see problems approaching. I’ve used this diagnostic process in my investing and I’ve kept it to myself, but I’m now explaining it in detail in How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle because it is too important to keep to myself.
Frontier Labs are incented to be fearful as it provides a moral justification for staying closed.
Chinese Labs take the consistent position of doing what’s good for all and being open.
So the little guys find themselves in the uncomfortable position of rooting for the Chinese…
I think it can be a slog, it can be bureaucratic, it can be painful, but when the when the outcome actually happens and you deliver the result, there is no place where you can have a bigger impact on on this country.
I think there is there is um no place where you can work on bigger problems than the US government. Even at the the biggest tech companies in the world, you're never going to be dealing with problems of this of this scale.
no matter what kind of industry you're looking at, there was this government angle where the government's policy actions could be ones that could actually unlock technologies.
Over time that has sort of inverted completely. The private sector plus philanthropy now do about 70% of R&D and the and the government only does about 30.
This will likely serve as a wake-up call to those not paying attention to the US-China space race—which, to be clear, is the vast majority of Americans.
it's just been sitting there in legislation for like 40 years and no one's really taken advantage of it except for one government program here or there where they want to, you know, do a NASA space reactor or something like that. But it has from a legal perspective been waiting for an administration to say, "Hey, this might be a way to accelerate nuclear R&D."
it's just so easy for me to imagine the situation being like totally manageable but brutally mismanaged in practice in the same way as like maybe CO could have been avoided in the first place if the like Chinese response to CO was less of like a cover up and more of a like pandemic response and similarly like I could imagine a world where like the US response to CO was like way more functional but just like sometimes the the the response to societal problems is extremely dysfunctional.
My view is that an appreciation of China's REER is very much to be desired, but the real (haha) way to get there is through higher inflation domestically, and that means different macro policies.
By the way, this is the pattern in a lot of regulation. It doesn't come from like some well-meaning person trying to keep the public safe. It comes from some entrenched, frankly, lazy interest that doesn't want to have to compete and runs to DC or runs to the local regulator and tries to use the power of government to shut their competition down. I think this is deeply unethical, but it happens all the time.
it it won't work to try to repatriate uh the the manufacturing that left the US. Um that's a uh you you don't you don't beat China at its own game. What you do is invent the future, invent the next wave of manufacturing uh and build that here.
The French and Germans will ban Tesla FSD to protect their car industry that's being decimated by Chinese EVs and Tesla Allowing Tesla full self driving would make it so popular that it'd probably the end of their car industry Because no French or German car has self driving like Tesla, many customers would probably flock to Tesla
What stands out about Hsieh's version is that her roots occupy such a unique spot in history: her grandparents were Chinese born in Indonesia, which means they got caught between the rock of the Cultural Revolution and the hard place of anti-communist backlash.
US: restricts US AI model because too dangerous China: builds better Chinese AI model Everyone: switches to Chinese AI model This is why restricting models probably doesn't work, it's much more preferable (for US) to have everyone on US AI models so at least they can monitor what everyone is doing
It surely does not “produce” one quarter of world culture or intellectual activity (if the latter is defined as influential books, of fiction and non-fiction, politics, history; films, plastic arts, music, theater etc.)
This gives us a new perspective on why micronations like Sealand don’t work: they start backwards, from the territory and the government, rather than working forwards from a people and their culture.
To shout “temporary” and pull the plug essentially overnight after immigrants have relied on the government’s representations that they should put their efforts and future into establishing a life in the United States wreaks unfair havoc on the lives of immigrants as well as the welfare of their communities.
Well, PRC HSR construction costs relative to the amount of tunneling aren't particularly low. France's are lower; Germany's are inconsistent, depending on whether money is wasted on excessive tunneling or on other things.
The phrase "your feelings are valid" does not invite curiosity or deeper self-understanding, which is the point of psychotherapy. It is the mirror image of "stop whining and get a grip." One sounds warm and one sounds harsh, but neither deepens self-awareness.
There are many practices that promise to transform and improve us-therapy, meditation, psychedelics-, but that branding doesn't mean that they actually do much for us: it is common to see people use these techniques for years without any obvious progress on their problems.
Government is where the literal money is (money that could often go much further if we fixed what's wrong with government), but it's also where the impact is. And it's where the legitimacy is.
And then in terms of the capital intensive like AI in a factory and also the foundry and then you really need to tap either government funding or some sovereign fund
Just I explained to President Trump, TSMC when they started they have the Taiwan government as a shareholder. If you look at Japan, you look at Singapore, this is the infrastructure US government get to provide the support.
When you break that, when you overthrow the ruler, when you dissolve the republic, when you put in a new thing, it doesn't have that same staying power. And so, it's very common when there's one regime change for there to then be five regime changes rapid-fire over and over.
And soon we have a precedent that every new pope feels he has the authority to knock down every pawn upon the chessboard if he feels like it. Once that is the norm, even a fairly nice pope still inherits the idea that the pope is going to overthrow and replace governments. And this creates a unique instability within Italy that no other part of Europe is subject to
It shouldn't It shouldn't be shelved next to How to Win Friends and Influence People because it's a manual not of how to gain power, but of how to keep power.
The Inquisition, the Vatican, it controls everything, which is completely untrue and is propagandistic. The Inquisition is overseen by a whole bunch of isolated guys who are in isolated towns and it takes weeks or months to even communicate with the Vatican and they're making their own decisions.
Excessive manufacturing requirements are a pervasive problem, especially in the field of cell and gene therapy and they are killing countless of promising medicines before they ever reach patients.
Until manufacturing and regulatory risks become easier to underwrite, capital will keep drifting away from one of the most promising technologies of the last century.
And what's fascinating is today when China claims whatever its historical lands are, they either choose the Mongol Yuan Dynasty or the Manchu Qing Dynasty when the Han were subjugated people.
And also, for China, with its geographical setup as it is, uh the seas are going to be open to it only in peacetime. In wartime, this has nothing to do with anyone doing anything to them. It's just facts.
One, you're surrounding yourself by failing states. You can look at Russia and China and they're surrounded by some of the most dysfunctional places on the planet and you go, "Gee whiz, are they unlucky or they complicit?"
And Russia's never had a commerce-driven economy. China much more so under Deng Xiaoping, but recently Xi Jinping has been privileging the crony sector over the private sector and neither one has stable government institutions.
the competitive dynamic in China is more intense because it's more intense. Everyone's chosen to go open source and that creates a system that in my mind is capable of innovating far faster than the competitive system we have here. All the models learn from one another.
Federal Reserve Board members have often resigned their positions well before their 14-year terms expired, since that's quite a long time to spend in one position in government.
So we just could not see a way this could happen by chance and once we saw that we really felt quite convinced that this was a real signal and that really somehow there has been natural selection to increase the genetic changes that today manifest themselves as more years of school at predicting more years of schooling.
And so you just have to first realize that chips exist in China. They manufacture 60% of the world's mainstream chips, maybe more. It's a very large industry for them. They have some of the world's greatest computer scientists.
We have got to acknowledge that most of the advanc advances in AI came out of algorithm advances not just the raw hardware. Now if most advances came from algorithms and computer science and programming tell me that their army of AI researchers is not their fundamental advantage.
So you get this rapid, incredible great talent, rapid innovation because of open source and just, you know, the nature of friends, and, and insane competition. Among the company, what emerges is incredible stuff. And so this is the fastest innovating country in the world today
As we move from, you know, hey, [clears throat] these companies are selling tokens where they provide the entire uh reasoning chain and all that to uh selling automated, you know, white collar work, right? Automated software engineer, send them the request, they give you the result back and there's a bunch of thinking on the back end that they don't show you. The ability to distill out of American models into Chinese models will be harder.
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?
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?
Lastly, the duration of a clinical trial does not merely determine how fast an individual therapy reaches patients. It also shapes which diseases attract serious investment and which do not.
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.
It has a surplus of STEM graduates that are often underemployed, while "Hukou" residency restrictions complicate hiring hourly labor in coastal factories.
The ORS is a brief, 4-item measure designed to assess areas of life functioning known to change as a result of therapeutic intervention. It takes less than one minute to complete and score.
The SRS is a brief, 4-item measure designed to assess the therapeutic alliance. It provides immediate feedback on the quality of the relationship and allows for course correction in real time.
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.
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.
America needs an educational and cultural transformation to compete with China and reverse the decline in living standards that Americans have suffered over decades.
Best books I read in 2025: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). A Story is a Deal: How to use the science of story to motivate and persuade by Will Storr Bringing Up Baby: An Evolutionary View of Pediatrics by Paul Turke Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up by Abigail Shrier
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Likewise, self-diagnosis should be understood as an attempt to secure the therapeutic effect of a medical intervention to which patients do not have official access.
If a clinical diagnosis can have a therapeutic effect, then, at least in some instances, diagnoses are medical interventions in themselves and ought to be treated and researched as such, with an eye to both positive effects and potential iatrogenic harms.
Their experiences highlight a striking, neglected and unchristened medical phenomenon: The therapeutic effect of a clinical diagnosis, independent of any other intervention, where clinical diagnosis refers to situating the person's experiences into a clinical category by a clinician or the patient.
In terms of things that are causing us to lose to China, tariffs are neither here nor there because, as we've discussed, we're not sensitive to cost on power. But the environmental regulations that are actively preventing us from deploying renewable energy in the United States, like this is the reason Texas is winning. Texas is out deploying California 10 to1.
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.
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.
One interesting point is that, in China, you ask the companies to innovate first, and then you regulate after, right? So, that has led to things like P2P platforms. It’s led to lots of kind of financial innovations, some of which has actually been very helpful and good, some of which had been disastrous, but the intention to regulate after the fact is to really not slow down or hinder the innovation. This is a very different approach from Europe. You regulate first, and then companies have to work around that.
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.
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.
Well, they raised the status of merchants very high. This was particularly a problem in the Chinese world. It wasn't so much in the Christian or the Muslim world, but certainly in the Chinese world, where merchants were considered extremely low. And all of a sudden he raises them up above scholars.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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