Julio Huato

[Julio Huato @JulioHuato]

@zapatas_mom Chinese noodles had already made it to Sicily via the Arabs in the 9th century

[Julio Huato @JulioHuato]

@supremeanalisis Maybe both of them fit well in the Football Olympus, brother.

[Julio Huato @JulioHuato]

@historicpickups @NakedHedgie The ball's sensor reported otherwise. 🙂

[Julio Huato @JulioHuato]

@NakedHedgie You're wrong on this one, Alex ⚽️

[Julio Huato @JulioHuato]

@MarioNawfal And we all know that Witkoff and Kushner have the best interest of Iran and humanity at heart

[Julio Huato @JulioHuato]

@MarioNawfal How would you end homelessness? By killing the homeless?

[Julio Huato @JulioHuato]

Con respeto: No “base de datos” sino “centros de datos” — algo muy diferente. Lo primero es una estructura de datos que pueden residir en cualquier objeto adecuado, incluido el cerebro humano. Lo segundo es maquinaria interconectada (con microprocesadores como sus unidades elementales) para procesar datos en gran escala.

[Julio Huato @JulioHuato]

@MarioNawfal You managed to paint the cops as the heroes in your story. Always-punching-down “journalism”

[Julio Huato @JulioHuato]

@NakedHedgie @SankaraDispatch The Brits and the Spanish also intervened and tried to put down the Saint Domingue revolution (1791-1804), not successfully

[Julio Huato @JulioHuato]

@RT_on_X @RT_com Why did he disarm unilaterally?

[Julio Huato @JulioHuato]

@MarioNawfal It’s a Canadian brawl, highly civilized 😂

[Julio Huato @JulioHuato]

@Trevornoah An Afro-Mexican scored the first goal of the 2026 World Cup.

[Julio Huato @JulioHuato]

@SannieDaara Diplomacia estilo Coahuila. "Yo quiero un empate".

[Julio Huato @JulioHuato]

@Its_ereko An African-Mexican scored the first goal in this 2026 World Cup, brother.

[Elham Ishmael ✍︎ @EIshmael_]

This bald jerk ruined FIFA’s reputation the same guy who made up a fake FIFA Peace Prize for the Orange Fool. It’s time to boycott FIFA.

[Luxe 🌈 @luxeprogressive]

Subscribe to Aída

[Julio Huato @JulioHuato]

Tell that to @paulkrugman

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is absolutely fascinating: Jason Furman, one of the foremost economists in the U.S. and former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, explains why the so-called "China shock" is a myth.

According to him, "85 to 95% of Americans benefited" from trade with China, and "China has been part of helping [the US economy] work, not hurting it work."

In other words, the narrative that China "stole" American jobs and wages is the exact opposite of reality.

Furman's logic is pretty ironclad:

1) He points out, which is factual, that "the slowdown of wage growth and the rise of inequality began in the 1970s, when there basically was no trade with China." It then accelerated in the 1980s-90s when China trade was small, and **slowed down** after 2000. And "since about 2013," when trade with China was at its highest, "we've had pretty fast real wage growth," with "the fastest real wage growth for moderate income households."

In other words, the timing doesn't fit: if China was the cause, the problem should have gotten worse as trade with China increased. Instead, it got better.

2) A common narrative one hears about China is "who cares about affordable goods, we need well-paying jobs." But Furman points out it's actually one and the same thing: "the way we measure jobs is how much your wages can buy. If you improve purchasing power, you are making every single job in the economy better."

In very concrete terms, if salaries stay flat but Chinese imports make goods 10% cheaper, your purchasing power just went up 10%, as if you got a 10% wage hike. This makes every single job in the economy better.

In effect "jobs vs. cheap goods" is a false dichotomy: cheap goods ARE better jobs.

3) Furman also points out, rightly, that the majority of what U.S. imports from China isn't consumer goods: "more than half of what we import is actually inputs into the manufacturing process itself."

In other words, Chinese imports make U.S. manufacturing MORE competitive as it decreases their input costs. If you were to cut all Chinese imports, you'd cripple U.S. manufacturing as it would no longer be able to compete on price with anyone. And, as per point 2 above, you'd also destroy Americans' purchasing power, making every single U.S. worker worse off.

4) Last but not least, Furman says that the "China shock" literature is fundamentally flawed, as it "doesn't answer the most important question, which is what the net effect was." It "doesn't consider other causes for the job losses, doesn't look at all the places that gained jobs and wages, and doesn't integrate the consumer side."

All in all, he believes that if one were to actually calculate the net effect of trade with China on the U.S. economy, it'd show that "85 to 95% of Americans benefited." And even for the 5-15% who lost out, Furman says these people were failed by "our labor policies, our social safety net" - not by China.

What Furman is saying is more relevant than ever because, both in the U.S. and in Europe, this notion that China is somehow "stealing" Western jobs and prosperity has become the unquestioned premise of so many of today's policies.

Nobody even debates it anymore, it's almost universally assumed correct.

In my own country France, Macron keeps repeating it all the time, leading the charge in Europe to slap tariffs on Chinese imports, warning that China is "killing its own customers" and that it's a question of life or death for European industry (https://t.co/Auq9rvyEwk). He literally called last week for the EU to build its own version of America's Section 301 - the same protectionist tool Trump uses (https://t.co/yHJ6M43suw).

BUT, if Furman is right, and the data strongly suggests he is, France and Europe are about to inflict economic self-harm in the name of a problem that doesn't exist.

Much more affordable cars, for instance, would literally give every single European a big wage hike. It's Furman's argument on "85 to 95% benefiting" vs 5% to 15% losing out: the vast majority of Europeans would see their money go further, while a small number of jobs in legacy automakers would be disrupted. Instead of helping those workers transition, Europe wants to prevent making everyone better off.

Anyhow, please do watch the whole podcast, which has many other fascinating insights because Furman also debates with Justin Yifu Lin, the former Chief Economist of the World Bank and State Council Counsellor of China.

They're both interviewed by my friend @Hansong_Li - also a professor and an immensely smart man - in his excellent new podcast "worldviews" (imho one of the best new podcasts our there). The video is here: https://t.co/M7sVgk9v3a

[aída chávez @aidachavez]

Congress told me I can get press credentials again as soon as my journalism is properly commodified. https://t.co/VpjWWGAcyz

[Julio Huato @JulioHuato]

Vaunted.

[Big Brain AI @realBigBrainAI]

Stephen Wolfram, founder of Wolfram Research, explains how LLMs are quietly dismantling our deepest assumptions about consciousness:

He argues that large language models have done something philosophy and neuroscience couldn't:

"In terms of consciousness, I have to say, the idea that there's sort of something magic that goes beyond physics that leads to sort of conscious behavior, I kind of think that LLMs kind of put the final nail in that coffin."

His reasoning is that LLMs keep doing things people assumed they couldn't:

"There were all these things where it's like, oh, maybe it can't do this, but actually it does. And it's just an artificial neural net."

Wolfram then challenges a core assumption about conscious experience: the feeling that we are a single, continuous self moving through time.

"I think our notion of consciousness is a lot related to the fact that we believe in the single thread of experience that we have. It's not obvious that we should have a persistent thread of experience."

He points out that physics doesn't actually support this intuition:

"In our models of physics, we're made of different atoms of space at every successive moment of time. So the fact that we have this belief that we are somehow persistent, we have this thread of experience that extends through time, is not obvious."

Then Wolfram offers a striking origin story for consciousness itself.

@stephen_wolfram suggests it traces back to a simple evolutionary pressure: the moment animals first needed to move.

"I kind of realized that probably when animals first existed in the history of life on Earth, that's when we started needing brains. If you're a thing that doesn't have to move around, the different parts of you can be doing different kinds of things. If you're an animal, then one thing you have to do is decide, are you going to go left or are you going to go right?"

That single binary choice, he argues, may be the seed of everything we now call awareness:

"I kind of think it's a little disappointing to feel that this whole wanted thing that ends up being what we think of as consciousness might have originated in just that very simple need to decide if you are an animal that can move. You have to take all that sensory input and you have to make a definitive decision about do you go this way or that way."

The takeaway is unsettling but clarifying.

If LLMs can produce complex behavior from simple rules, then consciousness may not be a mystical add-on to physics.

It may just be what happens when a layered enough system has to make a decision.