[04.10] Tariff move is necessary to save America
The US buys goods from around the world with US dollars. Then with the dollar as a world reserve currency held by so many countries, it is so tempting for the US government to borrow that money. It’s almost like printing money, except that you have to pay interests back later. That’s how the US has accumulated massive amount of debts that is non-sustainable.
You borrow and spend more than you make. In addition, a large portion of the spending got purely wasted, instead of being invested to increase productivity & boost future economic output. The continuation of this situation can only be bankruptcy, decline and collapse of the empire, much like the fate of all previous major powers in history. To prevent that from happening, the US must manufacture on its own, trade deficits must decrease, and debts must be reduced. Trump knows this better than anyone. He is a hero, a rare genius who is saving America from collapse.
[03.14] Growing inequality is very concerning
Wealth inequality is going to the extreme. In the US, the top 1% of the wealthiest individuals hold around 32–35% of total wealth. The top 10% hold around 80% of total wealth. The rest of the society is being cornered to the very bottom.
You see, salary growth really dwarfed in comparison to asset growth, e.g. stocks and real estates. For every 3x salary increase, there’s at least 10x increase in asset prices. Shareholders employ hard-working individuals, let them work their ass off to increase company value, then dump massive shares to the market and cash out tens of millions, while only paying their workers just the bare minimum for them to put food on the table and pay rents.
In the COVID period, Powell the fed intentionally printed massive amount of money, knowing that high inflation was inevitable. Wealth of billionaires increased 50%-70% or even doubled, according to various estimates, while ordinary people suffered from shutdowns, layoffs, skyrocketing rents and grocery prices. It was a direct robbery to the working class.
In history, the root cause of most social upheavals can be traced to inequality. I fear that the current situation is no longer sustainable. We are reaching a tipping point. What comes next may only be pains and instability.
[03.14] Dishonesty prevails
If someone tells you that he founded an AI company because he will unleash the potential of AI to cure diseases, advance medicine, improve lives…..blah blah, he is being dishonest. The only real reason he is founding an AI company is because “oh lord I want to get rich”.
The claim that AI systems like FSD will somehow make human life safer, is also false. No technological invention has ever been safe. Car accidents kill millions of people per year. Man-made chemicals poison environments and cause diseases. Yet we still develop and use technologies, not because they are safe (in fact they are all risky and dangerous), but because of the profits in doing so. They give us an edge in productivity. Without them, people would fall behind their peers, companies would fall behind their competitors, and countries would fall behind the world, economically and eventually militarily. Human history is a theme of pursuit for fortune and dominance, not refrainment and care.
[03.14] “What did you do last week” is an outright insult
As long as one man’s decision can change the entire life paths of millions of others, we do not live in a truly democratic and equal society. In a truly equal society, no one should possess the power to subdue any other.
I’ll go so far as to say that in the future, labor relations will be completely different from now. The familiar model of employers hiring employees and employees working for employers will be over. In the abundance of AI and robots, human labors will be organized in an entirely new way.
[03.14] Frenzy selloffs are often preceded by great euphorias
[03.11] $AAPL | Apple is destroying human eyes
Apple adjusts brightness of your iPhone OLED displays by switching the display on and off in front of your eyes at 480 times per second, a process called pulse width modulation (PWM).
This method sounds very unnatural and harmful, and indeed it will cause eye strains and headaches. Another example of developing technologies for the sake of profit rather than well-being. Plus, they intentionally run down old iPhones and iPads to force you to buy new ones. I encourage everyone to short $AAPL whenever possible.
[03.03] DOGE, the bigger ambition
Elon Musk always wanted absolute control. Control Tesla, control OpenAI, control Twitter. But as a businessman, he manuevered in political environments that he couldn’t control. In the early days of SpaceX and Tesla, deals from the Obama government were critical for the companies’ survival. Not surprisingly, he supported the democrats. Just as he scrabbled to find evidence of Sam Altman denouncing Trump in ~2016 after the Stargate project infuriated him, during the very same period, Musk called Trump a “con-man”, “one of the world’s best bullshitters ever”, “the world’s champion of bullshit”. His stance quickly shifted as it became increasingly evident that the democrats were incompetent and were likely to fail in the 2024 election.
Now his chance finally came. He’s not volunteering in cutting government spending for free. By penetrating deep into the government, Musk is preparing himself to become the most powerful man in the world. This is insanely dangerous, as he maniacally ousted co-founders, enslaved his employees, silenced opinions, attacked competitors, while always claiming the opposite. Elon must be stopped at all cost or the world will be stirred into a hotpot of nightmares.
[03.02] No people, no profit
Elon Musk keeps talking about declining birth rates and the urgency for humans to have more babies, yet he never talked about the why part. He is silent over the cause of the problem. High cost of living, long working hours, and unhealthy lifestyles are pushing people to their limits. Essentially the capitalists are squeezing everything out of the working class. He doesn’t even care this issue for his own employees as they have to sacrifice their family time to work their ass off for him or they get fired.
Why does he fear a less population scenario? It’s simple: a shrinking market size for his Tesla and other products that he wants to sell to you and profit from. And the narrative of sending people to Mars would become even more of a nonsense, as the earth becomes less and less occupied.
[03.02] Restore common sense
The West was heading toward an authoritarian communism dystopia at ultra high speed before it was stopped by a massive US election victory. Trump and European right-wing leaders are literally saving the Western civilization from collapse.
It seems that as human civilization becomes advanced, people lose common sense, stop respecting nature and become astonishingly ignorant. Paper straws are terrible; and why do they mandate vaccine injection into everyone’s body without considering any long-term danger?
Either the leftists are extremely evil, or they are outright incompetent, or both.
[03.01] Zelenskyy wants his own safety guaranteed
on the clash: ①no chance of security guarantee to Ukraine from Trump because that means putting the US on the very frontline with Russia for nothing. ② To Zelenskyy, the mineral deal is almost a dishonest prelude of partition. In the event of invasion, American workers can be retreated timely and safely, leaving him and his country at risk.
This is really a tough situation for Ukraine. Difficult to predict how it’ll develop. But given the country’s weakness, Zelenskyy is likely to be compromised.
[03.01] Elon Musk is an asshole
He often touted himself as a hero for saving free speech in America by buying Twitter. Yet, there’s no single day of free speech on X.com. He has been arbitrarily banning accounts that angered him, and suppressing opinions that are unsettling to him. He is no different than a dictator.
His censorship practice described in his biography continues to today.
Worse yet, especially from the vantage of making the site a haven for free speech, Musk arbitrarily suspended a handful of journalists…
“He was doing the very things that he claimed to disdain about the previous overlords at Twitter,”
—- «Elon Musk» by Walter Isaacson
There’s no free speech on any centralized platform where users don’t own the backend servers. Only by giving people the servers can we achieve true full speech.