That’s right the US dominates the horse and buggy industry.

It can’t work without breaking cryptography. Any system with backdoors in it is fundamentally insecure.

lmao

It’s cut from a longer talk he gave which is also very good.

The fact that Signal is operated on a central server based in US is absolutely a cause for concern. Even if the encryption system is sound, and messages cannot be decrypted by a third party, there’s still a question of the server having the ability to map out who talks to whom via the server. Another thing to consider is that encryption that’s sound today, could be broken in the future. So, if these messages are shared with the government, then they could be decrypted in the future.

It’s pretty funny that all the Yoon supporters are hardcore trumpists.

I think it’s less about risk there and more about putting the trade surplus towards productive investments. China obviously wouldn’t want to cycle that money back into western countries, but using that to build out infrastructure for BRICS nations is a very smart way to reinvest the profits.

It could, but the pace of events does appear to be accelerating.

I really can’t see how Europe can dig itself out of the situation it finds itself in now. The economic fundamentals are just not there, and their biggest ally since the end of WW2 is now turning on them.

also true

To be fair they inserted the hand wavy next few years there, so basically they’re admitting that the pace will continue in 2025, but the collapse is definitely coming some time in the nebulous future. :)

🤣

I expect that the EU will simply cease to exist as a political entity within a decade. It’s only a matter of time until France and Germany end up with a nationalist governments. The political shift will be driven by the declining material conditions. Without France or Germany the whole thing quickly falls apart. Once the EU is gone, European countries will have a choice of either submitting to the US or joining BRICS. I expect we’ll see a mix of that happening.

China continues its strategy of just sitting back and letting the US fuck up.

The problem isn’t just with the style, it’s with the actual content and meaning though. What makes it AI slop is that there is no coherent logic behind the statements. It’s like somebody asked a LLM to write up why China isn’t socialist and then pasted it here.

That is indeed the case, it’s important to keep in mind that Ukraine was created by USSR out of parts of Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. I highly recommend watching a lecture that Mearsheimer gave back in 2015 to get a bit of background on the subject. Mearsheimer is certainly not pro Russian in any sense, and he gives an objective analysis of the situation. Let’s take a look at some slides from the lecture here. First, here’s the demographic breakdown of Ukraine:

here’s how the election in 2004 went:

this is the 2010 election:

As we can clearly see from the voting patterns in both elections, the country is divided exactly across the current line of conflict. Furthermore, a survey conducted in 2015 further shows that there is a sharp division between people of eastern and western Ukraine on which economic bloc they would rather belong to:

That’s not what’s happening in China though, but we could ask that question about the US.

The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf

From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4

From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&amp%3Blocations=CN&amp%3Bstart=2008

By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html

https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience

Europeans are about to find out what Kissinger meant when he said that it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.

here you go kiddo

• https://usrussiaaccord.org/acura-viewpoint-krishen-mehta-the-ukraine-war-viewed-from-the-global-south/

• https://archive.is/2023.02.23-211202/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/23/world/russia-ukraine-geopolitics.html

• https://archive.ph/4kbWG

• https://www.eiu.com/n/russias-pockets-of-support-are-growing-in-the-developing-world/

It’s inevitable that China will catch up on AI and chip production in general. First, it’s not just about having faster chips. The software matter even more here. Take Deepseek v3 for example, it outperforms top models from the US, but the training cost was only a fraction of models like GPT4 because they used an innovative approach to training and model design.

Meanwhile, on the hardware front, the reality is that we’re starting to hit limits of what you can do with silicon. There’s no where to go past 1nm or so. And it’s a game of diminishing returns, where you have to put ever greater investments in to get increasingly meagre returns. While China is catching up with their fabs, the western companies can’t advance at the same rate.

China is also investing in alternative substrates, and there already positive results like the ability to produce standard 12 inch wafers using novel materials. Even a crude chip built using such materials has potential to make silicon look like vacuum tubes overnight, and then there would be decades of optimizations to follow.

There are no comparable efforts in the west, and I’d argue this kind of fundamental research can only be accomplished with state level funding. You have to commit to invest into this for many years without any clear returns, and private companies will never do that.