Jan E. Boethius

Active investor in biotec and tec. Recognizing reality even when you don't like it and trying to see it as it is, not as you wish it to be.

[Jan E. Boethius @Jano1o2]

Eurooppa optimoi liian pitkään prosesseja samalla kun muut optimoivat mittakaavaa, nopeutta ja suorituskykyä.

Maailma järjestyy nyt uudelleen tekoälyn, energian ja teollisen kapasiteetin ympärille. Tässä ympäristössä kilpailukyky ei ole ylellisyys — vaan vaurauden ja suvereniteetin edellytys.

Merkittävää on, että myös osa Euroopan omasta johdosta alkaa nyt sanoa tämän ääneen.

Se luo tilaa toivolle — jos muutos muuttuu käytännöiksi eikä jää retoriikaksi.

[Ulrich Speck @ulrichspeck]

"In general we have spent far too long focusing on regulating instead of every day waking up and saying what can we do to make Europe the most competitive place on the planet, the most prosperous place on the planet." https://t.co/aXq6zMPckZ

[Ulrich Speck @ulrichspeck]

Increasingly, this war is about China -- the lessons Xi Jinping will take from its outcome will be a key factor in his future decisions: is the West willing to defend its interests, or will it retreat because it is weak and declining? Hugely relevant for Taiwan.

[Ulrich Speck @ulrichspeck]

For Xi Jinping, prosperity is not the goal. The goal is Chinese dominance. The economy is just one of his tools, like the military and like diplomacy. All these are instruments in the struggle for power.

[Jan E. Boethius @Jano1o2]

@ulrichspeck You are absolutely right, from our perspective. But from the Russian Lavrov perspective things look different. And you are right. It is dead serious.

[Velina Tchakarova @vtchakarova]

Nah, the crowd would say it’s nothing because of market signals.

[Ulrich Speck @ulrichspeck]

"The truth is that they/we either have to accept the consequences of Chinese industrial and mercantile policies with huge political fallout, or they/we counter with our own versions."

Doing nothing means de-industrialization and full vassalage.

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Palantir CEO Karp: Without AI systems, Russia would have won.

Without these technologies, Europe would face rampant terror attacks, and pro-Putin parties would run Europe. Europe as we know it exists because these tools are already in use.

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[Visegrád 24 @visegrad24]

🇵🇸🇩🇪🇯🇵 What the difference between Palestinians, Germans and Japanese people?

The people of Germany and Japan both achieved miraculous economic recoveries after WWII with just a fraction of the aid given to Palestinians in Gaza.

Germany and Japan received roughly $250 to $300 per person, sparking the greatest economic triumphs in human history.

It took Germany just 10 years and $1.44 billion in foreign aid to go from ruins to a top industrialized economy.

It took Japan a mere 15 years and $2.20 billion in foreign aid to go from a nuked, hopeless ruin to a global technology powerhouse.

Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip received global solidarity and over $45 billion in international aid from the US, EU, UK, and UN over the last three decades, only to devolve into a heavily dependent Islamist dictatorship and terror hub.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just put a price tag on obedience. It costs $200,000.

Musk: “You don’t need college to learn stuff. Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free.”

Every lecture. Every textbook. Every framework ever written. Free on any screen in any country right now. The entire knowledge monopoly collapsed in a decade. Nobody updated the price tag.

Musk: “Colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores. But they’re not for learning.”

Strip the ivy and the branding. What’s underneath is a four-year obedience trial. Can this person follow instructions on a schedule without asking why.

Musk: “There is a value that colleges have, which is seeing whether somebody can work hard at something, including a bunch of annoying homework assignments, and still do their homework assignments.”

That is the entire six-figure value proposition. Not what you know. Not what you can build. Whether you can be managed. The establishment doesn’t need you educated. It needs you domesticated.

Musk: “If you’re trying to do something exceptional, you must have evidence of exceptional ability. I don’t consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability.”

The system doesn’t produce exceptional. It produces manageable. It takes the most creative years of your life and teaches you to wait for instructions. That is not education. That is containment.

Musk: “Gates is a pretty smart guy, he dropped out. Jobs is pretty smart, he dropped out. Larry Ellison, smart guy, he dropped out.”

They didn’t leave because they couldn’t keep up. They left because the ceiling was underground.

8 billion people now carry the same library in their pocket. The one these institutions charged a lifetime of debt to access.

The only product the university still sells is the belief that you need one.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Cathie Wood just explained why the establishment will never stop coming for Elon Musk.

And the reason is worse than they think.

Wood: “Tesla was an environmental move, which I think a lot of people attacking his cars… they’ve forgotten.”

They didn’t forget. You don’t forget thirty years of marching and petitioning and begging for the machine that saves the planet.

Someone built it. Forced every automaker on Earth to follow.

Then they turned on him the moment he delivered exactly what they asked for.

Not because he failed them. Because he made them unnecessary.

A solved problem is an existential threat to every institution built to solve it. Kills the funding. Kills the committee. Kills every career that exists to manage the crisis rather than end it.

Wood: “I think he’s the Thomas Edison of our age… he wants to do the right thing to transform the lot of most of humanity.”

Edison was hated too. By the people who sold candles. Every revolution looks like an attack to the people it makes obsolete.

Wood: “What we learn about material science and technologies… is going to help us here on Earth as well.”

SpaceX is not an escape. It is a forge. Build under the most brutal conditions in the solar system and every breakthrough comes home.

Most people at his level stop building and start protecting what they have.

Musk picks the hardest unsolved problem on Earth and runs straight at it.

That is not what terrifies them. What terrifies them is he does it without their funding, without their approval, without a single thing they can hold over his head.

A man you cannot buy is a man you cannot control. And a man you cannot control who keeps solving the problems you profit from is the most dangerous human alive.

They will spend their careers trying to tear him down.

Their grandchildren will live in the world he built anyway.

[Jason Brodsky @JasonMBrodsky]

#Iran regime officials mean it when they say there aren't "peace talks" ongoing with America. This is because the regime views diplomacy with the U.S. as an extension of their conflict with America, not a substitute for it or a pathway towards peace. It's a tactical pause for them to refinance, rearm, and rebuild.

[Ulrich Speck @ulrichspeck]

"While other regions actively strengthen their industries through competitive energy prices, faster permitting, targeted investments, and strategic industrial policies, Europe too often burdens its companies with excessive regulation, high energy costs, and bureaucratic hurdles"

[Brad Setser @Brad_Setser]

All these examples are manifestations of the impact of unbalanced trade, not the effect of trade per se. China isn't trading its EVs for German machine tools -- it is exporting more and importing less at the same time.

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[Walter Russell Mead @wrmead]

And VW will not be alone. Chinese planners are taking aim at German capital goods makers as well as car companies.

[Miriam M. Lexmann @MiriamMLex]

Reports that China has been training Russian personnel fighting in Ukraine show what has been clear for some time now: that China is an enabler of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, providing technology & training.

The undermining of European security requires a firm response

[Daniel Jeffries @Dan_Jeffries1]

This ugly reality is staring us right in the face:

Americans will have walled AI gardens where we beg for access from a few East India companies, open source will get banned on national security grounds, and 6 billion people who aren't American, aka the rest of the world, will standardized on a Chinese AI stack.

Bloated. Broken. Slow. Ugly.

There's still time to change it but it's slipping through our fingers like fast running sand.

Read this passage below from Bill Gurley because it's about to become our hideous reality if we don't change course quickly.

"If a credible Western open frontier player does not emerge, the consequences cascade quickly.

This is the inverse of the early Internet wave. In the 2000s and 2010s, Western companies — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft — dominated globally while China carved out its own walled garden. The AI version flips that dynamic on its head. Without a credible Western open frontier player, the only open models capable of running entire economies are made in China. If U.S. policy further restricts Chinese open-weight access on national-security grounds, the U.S. ends up with two or three closed Cathedrals serving the U.S. market — and the rest of the world picks the AI stack that is free, capable, self-hostable, and not embargoed. Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, India, the Middle East. Roughly six billion people. Chinese open models become the global default by 2030, and the United States ends up technologically isolated from the majority of the world’s AI users. We would have done it to ourselves."

Fully essay in replies.

[Jan E. Boethius @Jano1o2]

I agree. But the challenge is wider than China and Russia.

China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are not a formal alliance. Their interests differ. But they increasingly form a loose revisionist axis seeking to weaken and reshape the post-1945 US-led order.

This also helps explain part of what many of us react to in US/Trump-era behavior. A US that feels more strategically challenged becomes more transactional about alliances, more protective of technology, more impatient about burden-sharing, and more willing to use economic power as security policy.

Anthropic/Fable 5 is the latest signal: frontier AI is no longer ordinary software. It is strategic infrastructure, now subject to national-security controls.

The contest is military, industrial, technological and domestic at once. Democracies need to coordinate accordingly — without lowering their standards for truth, precision and credibility.

[Sari Arho Havrén @SariArhoHavren]

It's a detrimental mistake that the US and Europe, along with other democracies, cannot counter China and Russia together. Without this, the world will look very different in ten years.

[Jan E. Boethius @Jano1o2]

I agree with the core point. But the challenge is wider than China and Russia.

China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are not a formal alliance, and their interests are not identical. China wants room for strategic primacy. Russia wants to revise the European security order. Iran seeks regional leverage and regime security. North Korea seeks survival, weapons leverage and sanctions escape.

But they increasingly form a loose revisionist axis seeking to weaken and reshape the post-1945 US-led order — Pax Americana, for lack of a better term.

What holds them together is not trust, ideology or a shared positive vision of global governance. It is a shared interest in reducing US power, fragmenting Western coordination, weakening sanctions pressure, and expanding their own freedom of action.

The strength of the challenge is visible not only in Ukraine, the Middle East, Taiwan or the Korean peninsula. It is also visible inside the West itself. The Trump era shows that the post-1945 order can be strained from within: by polarization, fatigue with global leadership, doubts about alliances, and a loss of confidence in the institutions that sustained that order.

The Anthropic case is another signal of the same shift. Frontier AI is no longer being treated as ordinary software. It is becoming strategic technology — closer to semiconductors, satellites, cyber capabilities and advanced weapons systems.

When the US government issues an export-control directive restricting access to frontier AI models by foreign nationals, including foreign-national employees of the company itself, we are clearly entering a new phase of great-power competition.

The answer is not panic, and not simplistic “democracies vs autocracies” rhetoric. But democracies do need to coordinate much more seriously: militarily, technologically, economically and informationally.

That also means keeping high epistemic standards. In this environment, satire, memes and ambiguous claims can easily become misinformation when amplified by serious accounts. Clear facts matter precisely because the strategic challenge is real.

[Jan E. Boethius @Jano1o2]

Olen pitkälti samaa mieltä ytimestä: Euroopan ongelma ei ole vain tekoälystrategian puute, vaan pääoman, energian, riskinoton ja teollisen mittakaavan puute.

Mutta pelkkä “vähemmän veroja ja sääntelyä” ei vielä riitä. Tarvitaan myös:
– halpaa ja varmaa energiaa
– suurempi riskipääomamarkkina
– nopeammat lupa- ja hankintaprosessit
– eurooppalaisia ostajia omalle teknologialle
– vähemmän moraaliposeerausta, enemmän teollista toteutusta

AI ei synny powerpoint-strategioilla vaan compute + energia + pääoma + osaajat -yhdistelmällä. Siinä Eurooppa on valitettavasti jäljessä.

[Ulrich Speck @ulrichspeck]

China has a strategy to exploit and dominate Europe; yet Europeans are still unwilling to grasp the magnitude of the challenge and to set up counter-strategies. China is already very powerful in Europe especially because it can blackmail European companies invested big in China.