How wrong they were “Hitherto, all European nations, including your own country’s barbarian merchants, have carried on their trade with our Celestial Empire at Canton. Such has been the procedure for many years, although our Celestial Empire possesses all things… Read More »Qianlong, letter to George III (1792)
If the models are so good, how come the company making them cannot make profit? “even if you remove the cost of training models from OpenAI’s 2024 revenues (provided by The Information), OpenAI would still have lost $2.2 billion fucking… Read More »Why Everybody Is Losing Money On AI
This topic has always fascinated me. ““This mental image that everyone has, that we don’t trade with our enemies during war, is actually an artifact of the world without any neutral rights,” Grinberg says. “Once we develop neutral rights, all… Read More »Why countries trade with each other while fighting
Maybe it is just different values and culture. “China may simply see things differently. It’s possible that the Chinese government has decided that the profits of companies like Alibaba and Tencent come more from rents than from actual value added… Read More »Why is China smashing its tech industry?
Why having one strong leader is always bad in the end. “When you have a leader that strong, it creates a lot of big risks for a country — even one as large, productive, and technologically advanced as China. These… Read More »Xi Jinping is the main thing holding China back
Why don’t we use them more if they work? “The technology works, it has many advantages over chemical batteries, and it can be utilized safely. But what very few companies have been able to do is find a new market… Read More »Nuclear Batteries Can Power Devices for Decades. Is That a Good Thing?
A bit older one but still insightful. “Food and fuel are generally the most crucial imports — people can do without the latest iPhone, or a new car, but they can’t really do without food and transportation. And since lots… Read More »Why Sri Lanka is having an economic crisis
It is not good for a lot.of stuff, but it is good if you want to build shit. “There isn’t a single answer to the question about why China can move fast and why we can’t, but Wang offers one… Read More »Why China can build so quickly and America can’t
How we got here after decades of stability. “Production workers in rich countries lost out big-time, but this was a price our country was willing to pay. America and our rich-world allies went from being the world’s workshop to being… Read More »The end of the system of the world
Why degrowth will not work. “the general principle here is that if we sacrifice much of our economy to decarbonize — as the degrowth movement would have us do — it will provide a negative example to the rest of… Read More »Decarbonization: Think globally, act locally