albert capella

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Extraordinary words by Nvidia's CEO.

In polite terms, he effectively says that the chips export controls on China were one of the most self-destructive decisions ever taken by the US government: https://t.co/6SSe1ObSsN

He says it caused Nvidia to go "from 95% market share to 0%" in China, and that he "cannot imagine any policymaker thinking that’s a good idea. That whatever policy we implemented caused America to lose one of the largest markets in the world to 0%.”

In a separate interview (linked below) he effectively says that might have lost the US the AI race. Because, as he puts it, "winning" the AI race means that "80% of the world uses the American tech stack" and that, given that China on its own is "50% of AI research" and "30% of the technology market", then them not using the American tech stack means that by definition America is "forfeiting and conceding" the AI race.

In that separate interview he also completely ridicules the narrative - used by the US to justify the export controls - that they were to prevent "dual use" of advanced Western chips for military purposes by China, saying that "no government, surely the Chinese government, is going to be building their defense on Western technology nor does the Pentagon use Chinese chips to build our national security."

So to sum up: in a foolish attempt to slow China's AI development, not only did the US lose its largest market, they may have lost the AI race itself.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

Powerful advice for life.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

I'm normally not a big fan, but this is an absolutely brilliant answer by Larry Summers to the oft-repeated argument that China is somehow "cheating" in trade.

In fact it's probably the best answer I've ever heard on this.

It goes back to the point I was making (https://t.co/qYaO3xCXhq) in reply to Steve Miran's completely insane argument that having the dollar as a reserve currency is such a burden to the US that other countries need to compensate them for it.

Thanks to the dollar reserve status, to quote Summers's rhetorical question: "If China wants to sell us things at really low prices and the transaction is we get solar collectors or we get batteries that we can put in electric cars and we send them pieces of paper that we print. Do you think that's a good deal for us or a bad deal for us?"

Characterizing this as "cheating", like Summers rightly says, should be rejected entirely. At the end of the day, who's more "cheated": the party doing the hard work of producing goods at very low prices on razor thin margins, or the party that simply prints a virtually infinite amount of fiat money to pay for all this stuff?

[Matt Turck @mattturck]

Us: “Super productive week, I’m fully caught up on email and almost done with my big presentation!”

Elon:

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Wow, this is easily one of the most extraordinary interviews of a senior US figure on China in the past few years. So many truth bombs.

Here are the most striking things Neil Bush (who's the 4th son of President George H. W. Bush and the brother of George W.) said:

The Chinese system works for China
He says, that after coming to the country 150 times in the past 50 years, he's "come to the conclusion, and most Americans probably can't even tolerate that I will say this, that the Chinese system has worked for China. The Chinese system has been so beneficial to hundreds of millions of people."

The key reason for the US's hostility to China is simply because China is rising and the US makes up paranoiac "false narratives" about it
"[In] the book 'Destined for War' a professor from Harvard did a study of 16 cases where an established power like the United States is the strongest power faces a rising power. In today's world China is a rising power and in 12 of the 16 cases it ended up in war over the past 600 years. And the reason is that a rising power and an established power end up in wars is because the established power feels threatened by the rise and they make up these claims that the rising power wants to take over and be the most powerful force on the earth, or the rising power is gonna take over my economy... They come up with false narratives. There are many false narratives being planted right now and I think it's directly related to China's rise and the perceived threat of that rise to our standard of living, to our way of life, to our national security. I just don't I don't believe that the rise represents a threat to America so I'm so I'm in a different camp than 90% of the American people right now and I agree with you that if more people could come [to China] they could make their own judgment and not listen to the propaganda and the demagoguery of the political elite in America that make China out to be some kind of devil."

China doesn't have hostile intentions vis à vis the US, it's the US turning them into an enemy
"As China grows, clearly its military will also grow because that's what countries do: they build up defense capabilities. And the question is what will China use that military for and is it possible that that military is going to be aimed at America in some hostile way? I don't think that that's China's intentions at all. You know my father never believed that China was an enemy to the United States. And I guess you can turn a friend into an enemy if you treat them that way, you know eventually, but it would be devastating to both countries and to the world if we ended up engaging in some kind of a conflict."

China-US economic relation is a win-win
"The bilateral trade relationship with China doesn't have an evilness to it. It's actually very healthy and that it's been good for American consumers and good for America's prosperity but it's also been very good for China so there's been this classic win win situation and I think Americans are [eventually] going to realize that Chinese aren't bad people"

[Lex Fridman @lexfridman]

Probability of WW3 feels higher than ever.

A global war would destroy humanity.

I pray for the wisdom of our leaders.

[Rod Laver @rodlaver]

Carlos Alcaraz's triumph over a great champion like Novak Djokovic is a testament to his incredible talent, determination and composure under pressure. Carlos has cemented his place among the tennis greats with his brilliant performance today. Well done Carlos! 🚀

[James Blake @JRBlake]

Damn, he’s gotta be good at this too. Just kidding. This guy is so much more than an athlete.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Europeans don't realize just how deeply in trouble they are geopolitically.

A fascinating measure of this is the "Critical Technology Tracker" compiled by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI): https://t.co/R2wa4J85DJ Which by the way is the only interesting output that's ever come out of that institute but that's besides the point...

The ASPI tracker looks at the 64 critical technologies of the future and tries to understand how countries rank relative to each other for each technology, based on the amount of high-impact research they output.
So for how many of these 64 technologies do EU countries rank first? Answer: zero, not a single one of them. China leads in 53 of the technologies (!) and the US in the 11 others.

Let's go to 2nd place then, there has to be at least one technology for which the EU comes second, right? Nope, again, the answer is zero.

You need to go to the 3rd place to finally find EU countries ranking for 14 technologies... And all in all EU countries are in the top 5 countries for only 37 technologies, meaning that for almost half the critical technologies of the future they basically aren't even in the race at all, let alone in the lead...

You can see the concrete consequences of this in European tech companies. The biggest one created in the post-internet era (let's say after the 1990s) is Spotify and is worth $59bn. Which is a dwarf compared with US tech companies (Apple for instance is worth $2.8 trillion, Google is $2.1 trillion) or Chinese ones. Plus we can question whether it's really a EU company anymore given it's listed on the New York Stock Exchange and has more employees in the US than anywhere else in the world (https://t.co/mHStN38OE2)...

Technology is absolutely critical when it comes to geopolitics. That's how the West got on top in the first place, with the industrial revolution that begun in the UK. Their technological superiority is how, first and foremost, paired with a culture of conquest and proselytizing, they managed to submit the rest of the world.

China understood that lesson all too well. During the Qing dynasty it got complacent and arrogant. This is best illustrated by the famous letter of emperor Qianlong to King George III in which Qianlong wrote "our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders" (the whole letter is worth a read: https://t.co/ninQZPLn4Z). A handful of decades later started China's "century of humiliation"... Which is why they put so much energy into being on top technologically today.

The fact that Europe is a very distant laggard in the technology race today, after China and the US, bodes very badly for the future. The EU can very much be today's version of China's Qing dynasty.

Besides technological superiority, the other 4 key aspects of power when it comes to geopolitics are: military, economic, political and cultural. Let's have a quick look at each of these for the EU.

Military power is easy: the EU is by and large "protected" (quotation marks on purpose) by NATO, which is a US-led organization. As such, as of today, they do not have independent military power to speak of. France during a long time, until president Sarkozy in 2007, was out of NATO, and as such Europe could boast having some sovereign military, but that's over. We're now under pretty much complete military tutelage.

As for the economy, the EU went from first economic power in the world 30 years ago in 1994, claiming almost 21% of the world's GDP PPP (vs 20% for the US and 5% for China) down to 14% today, lower than the US at 15.5% and significantly lower than China at 19% (https://t.co/H1Zgg894lD). In other words it went from first economic power of the world to increasingly distant third. And given how tied economic performance is to technological development, the prospects for improvement are poor at best...

Politically speaking, does Europe still have its own voice? Given that the current debate in the EU is about "strategic autonomy", meaning in large part the need for Europe to indeed have its own voice, the answer is clearly a no. We can see this with Gaza, or most important geopolitical questions of the day: is there a clear, distinct European position on critical matters? Nope. At the beginning of the century Europe still dared to have its own voice, such as when Chirac famously opposed the Iraq war, but that's over today.

Lastly, the cultural realm. When is the last time you watched a contemporary French, German or say Italian movie? Or listened to a contemporary song from any of these countries? Or read an article from these countries' media? I suspect that for the immense majority of the world, the answer to these questions is "it's been a while". Heck I'm French and I haven't watched a French movie in something like 4 or 5 years (and I do watch maybe 1 movie a week), which says a lot... Europe is largely becoming culturally irrelevant.

So yup, the picture ain't pretty at all... This post is already way too long so I won't go into the reasons behind this obvious decline. I will just say that many Europeans feel rightly immensely betrayed by the EU, which was always presented to us as a way to stay in the race versus the giants that are the US and China... but delivered the exact contrary. And I am afraid that turning the situation around will necessitate extraordinary leadership, which seems to be the very thing lacking in the EU at the moment 😓

We love to give lessons to the rest of the world but I'm afraid that if we're being objective we're becoming a global basket case, given how badly we mismanaged the extraordinary good hand we started with just a few decades ago. The US is often said to be on the edge of collapse and whilst their situation too is far from great, we objectively messed things up even far worse than they did, which is quite a feat...

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Interesting "West vs rest" moment yesterday on French TV with the President of Congo, the 2nd biggest country in Africa.

The host asks: "Are you saying that the Chinese or the Russians behave better than us, Westerners, currently, in your opinion?"

"Oh absolutely!" he replies, "You don't quite understand African realities... it's astonishing to see how we are very distant in terms of cultures. We cannot understand why you come to give us lessons, for example, on human rights."

Reminds of the now famous saying from a Kenyan official: "Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture”...

[Tomàs Carbonell @tc_carbonell]

Rafa Nadal es y será irrepetible
Nadie en el universo del deporte ha sido capaz de poner delante de un televisor a personas que no tenían ningún interés en el tenis.Solamente querían ver a alguien q jamás se daba por vencido y hacía posible lo imposible
Lecciones de vida❤️❤️❤️

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is a rather extraordinary speech by Mario Draghi, former head of the EU Central Bank and currently tasked with producing a report on EU competitiveness.

If I were to summarize it: "we f*cked up big time and need radical change".
https://t.co/TnkiBT3nKv

The "we f*cked up big time" part is partly captured in this quite stunning admission he made in the speech:

"The approach we took to competitiveness in Europe after the sovereign debt crisis [was to pursue] a deliberate strategy of trying to lower wage costs relative to each other – and, combine this with a procyclical fiscal policy, the net effect was only to weaken our own domestic demand and undermine our social model.

But the key issue is not that competitiveness is a flawed concept. It is that Europe has had the wrong focus.

We have turned inwards, seeing our competitors among ourselves, even in sectors like defence and energy where we have profound common interests. At the same time, we have not looked outwards enough: with a positive trade balance, after all, we did not pay enough attention to our external competitiveness as a serious policy question."

I think he's fundamentally right. Europe was always promoted to EU citizens as a way to protect them, and a way to compete at scale against other giants out there like the U.S. or China. Instead it's turned into an internal competition machine where EU countries undermine each other, with zero coherent pan-EU industrial and global competitiveness strategies. Basically the opposite of what it was supposed to be: less security - including job security - for EU citizens, and not even attempting to run the race against the other giants.

Of course it's a bit rich for him to say this now, given he was one of the key actors of this... He seems to discover, a good 25 years too late, that the EU's competitors do actually compete.

For instance he writes that "the US, for its part, is using large-scale industrial policy to attract high-value domestic manufacturing capacity within its borders – including that of European firms – while using protectionism to shut out competitors and deploying its geopolitical power to re-orient and secure supply chains."

This is just the latest episode in a long-running saga. The U.S. has systematically been competing against Europe in a very strategic way for a long time. For instance they completely ate the EU's lunch during the internet boom, as they developed an extremely efficient system to scale powerful companies domestically and impose them on the rest of the world through the guise of "internet freedom". China developed its great firewall, which enabled it to maintain its sovereignty in the digital space and build its own homegrown ecosystem. The EU, meanwhile, naive as hell, was like "this internet freedom thing is wonderful, we're all connected now"... All connected, yes, via US companies who now get paid every time an EU citizen clicks somewhere on the internet, know absolutely everything about our lives and control the information we have access to. That's not internet freedom, it's digital slavery!

I don't blame the U.S. by the way, or China. It's all fair game. It's absolutely the EU who were stupid enough to not even realize there WAS a game!

Draghi now says he "prepares radical change, because that is what is needed". He lists a bunch of stuff but he forgets by far the most important: it all begins with elite education. And the sad fact is that elites in Europe are educated in such a way so as to become the naive and non strategic folks who led the EU where it is now (Draghi very much included).

For instance in France most elites who then go on to become politicians study in Sciences Po, which is a factory to produce Atlantists, meaning people who believe it is paramount to promote policies that strengthen EU's bond with the U.S., as well as people who are very ideological in their outlook on the world (promotion of Western "values" and the like), which is antithetical to being strategic.

Or look at the universe of think tanks in the EU, which are of course incubators for policy, where elites shape their thinking. Some of the most influential are American: Rhodium Group, German Marshall Fund, Carnegie Endowment, Eurasia Group, etc.

Heck in France we had our president, Macron, directly paid billions of dollar to U.S. consulting firm McKinsey to shape French policy (https://t.co/ZU6LAL8wcy), which is insane!

Until we see real efforts to radically transform the way EU elites think, you can safely dismiss all this talk about "radical change" coming, it won't happen. It needs to start with a reform of mindsets.

And by the way, I'm not speaking about becoming hostile. You can very much compete and defend your interests without veering into hostility. In fact it's the smart way of doing it as becoming hostile is often against one's interests. The EU can remain friendly with the U.S., become friendly with China, etc. In fact it should be friendly to everyone... BUT it should know that we live in a Jurassic park world where, if you're weak and don't defend your interests, you get eaten. That was the key lesson from China's century of humiliation, which is why they're so educated on this and are extremely strategic in defending their interests and their sovereignty. The EU should do the same, hopefully without passing by the century of humiliation stage where it's headed at the moment.

[Ryan Buikema @prolificinvent]

@elonmusk Reminded me of this excellent immigration presentation, visualized with gumballs.

[David Miranda @davmiranda]

Salario medio en España por provincias y media nacional. Que cada uno saque sus conclusiones (imagen vía @expansioncom).

Yo voy a explicar la presión fiscal que soportan estos salarios medios. Y que cada uno saque sus conclusiones.

[Misha @mishadavinci]

100 million people use ChatGPT.

Fewer than 1% understand it.

A mega thread to get you up to speed:

[Xavier Sala-i-Martin @XSalaimartin]

More than 1000 scientists, experts and Elon Musk sign a letter demanding on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. We need to understand the social implications of these black boxes. https://t.co/uO9Ty2DjAp

[Misha @mishadavinci]

You can pay $150K plus.

Or go to YouTube university.

Here's a list of top channels where you can get a world-class education—completely free:

[#AusOpen @AustralianOpen]

Biggest rivals, best mates 🥹 #Fedal

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

The French 1-year forward electricity contract just traded above €1,000 per MWh for the first time (that's not a typo: one-thousand-euros!!!), up from the 2010-2020 average of €45 per MWh.

Earlier today, I published this @opinion column on the crisis https://t.co/DBPWoyZVf2

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

BREAKING: British energy regulator Ofgem lifts 80% the country's retail gas / electricity price cap to £3,549 from October 1. "The increase reflects the continued rise in global wholesale gas prices," Ofgem says | #EnergyCrisis #EnergyTwitter