Real Mac Balzac

Apolitical Dad, Writer, Giants enthusiast, Chinese system with American characteristics

[Real Mac Balzac @mac_balzac]

Difficult to wrap my head around the difference between Trump I and Trump II.

It's almost as if they're different people with different motivations and different agendas.

That said, the System itself shows remarkable continuity, so maybe focusing on Trump is not that relevant.

[Real Mac Balzac @mac_balzac]

@NFLFrascella In hindsight, it's easy to criticize Fox for making the wrong decision.

But it was still such a bang-bang play. Not a lot of time to think.

[Real Mac Balzac @mac_balzac]

@ChrisLoesch She clearly says it without saying it.

If you doubt it, why so emphatically utter "widow" so many times?

[Real Mac Balzac @mac_balzac]

@OopsGuess Because it's not as much about having rare earth minerals. It's about the decades of industrial ecosystem investment and development which China has long-committed to while other nations like the US and Japan have not.

[Real Mac Balzac @mac_balzac]

@RickyTheGuido Or both

[Real Mac Balzac @mac_balzac]

@Osint613 It's theatrical.

But even as theater, you're ignoring the fact that Iran will respond with 1.5 x escalation. That's why the tough posturing remains just that: posturing.

[Real Mac Balzac @mac_balzac]

@LionelMedia Been so many years, I can't remember.

[Real Mac Balzac @mac_balzac]

@DLoesch "Duh WIDOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHW!"

[Real Mac Balzac @mac_balzac]

@netanyahu Is this satire?

[Real Mac Balzac @mac_balzac]

@daltonwelbern Complete inversion of the truth, gaslighter.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

That's something that many people forget: AI is an ecosystem and Chinese supply chains are smack in the middle of it.

So much for the notion that AI is a "race" that the West can "win" against China: how can you be "racing" against someone who gets paid from every stride you make?

Besides the most advanced chips, for almost everything else in data centers (cables, optical modules, transformers, batteries, etc.) China is essential. Heck even for advanced chips, because you can't make them without rare earths, polysilicon, tungsten, all of which China is dominant in.

The export numbers make this painfully obvious: for instance China exported $103.5 billion worth of integrated circuits in the first four months of 2026 alone, up 83.7% in value year on year (https://t.co/RLVE6yrILO). One way to understand the magnitude of this is that it's more than what Saudi Arabia exports in oil (over the same period this year, or last year).

You know the viral picture of Chinese workers making MAGA hats? Same concept, from China's standpoint: by all means frame it as a "race" against us, but - like it or not - we'll win it together.

[Real Mac Balzac @mac_balzac]

@mclaurine_b @X22Report Lol. Yup

[Real Mac Balzac @mac_balzac]

@mdubowitz Tough to do when you lack escalation dominance.

[Real Mac Balzac @mac_balzac]

@DavidLimbaugh @DebraMMason1 What was that Apache doing?

[Real Mac Balzac @mac_balzac]

@X22Report Complete nonsense.

[Evan @EvanWritesOnX]

AI is going to make almost everything cheaper to produce. Whether that makes you richer is a separate question, and the technology has nothing to do with the answer.

A model that does a junior analyst's job for the price of electricity, a robot that runs three shifts and never files overtime: aggregate enough of that and the cost of making things falls toward the cost of the compute and energy behind it.

For two centuries, productivity made ordinary people richer through one channel, and the channel was labor. The factory got more productive, it still needed workers to run it, and that need is what let them bargain a share back as wages. The worker's share was never a gift. It was the price the owner paid for an input he couldn't get any other way.

AI removes the need for the input, and once the system does the work without a human in the loop, the wage that used to flow to him stays with the owner as margin.

This isn't speculative. Labor's share of national income has been falling for roughly four decades while capital's share climbed, driven by earlier automation.

AI doesn't start that trend but it will certainly finish it, by automating the last input the owner still paid a person for. And the surplus pools narrowly, because the inputs are already owned by a short list. Frontier AI needs advanced chips, compute clusters bigger than most national budgets, industrial energy, and proprietary data, and every one of those sits with a handful of firms.

Asking whether capital will wall off the abundance behind regulation is the wrong question. Regulation is rarely a brake on people who can afford lobbyists. It's a moat.

Safety rules and licensing raise the cost of entry for the competitor who would undercut you, and you pull the ladder up behind you and call it safety. Every company that has aggressively pursued AI will equally voice concern and advocate for the industry to slow down in the name of "safety" to create a moat for themselves.

There is a genuine fight inside the ownership class. The firms building AI want to cut as much labor as possible, because every wage eliminated is margin kept.

But the wider economy runs on consumers, and consumers are workers spending wages, so cut labor fast enough and the customer disappears along with the worker, and the cheap abundant output sits unsold for anyone with income to buy it.

That contradiction forces a response, because you can't run an economy of infinite cheap supply with no one solvent enough to absorb it.

The answer being floated around is a universal basic income. Strip the label off and it's a subsistence transfer sized to keep demand alive and the population quiet without touching who owns what, which is just a floor, not the stake the word dividend implies.

A basic income is probably coming, and probably better than destitution, and it is still a dole dressed as a dividend.

Will citizens get richer? In aggregate, yes. National wealth rises and you'll be shown headline numbers that look like broad enrichment, but the median citizen is a different measurement, and the median is where people actually live.

Own the assets and AI is the largest concentration of ownership in the history of capital. Own only your labor and you get cheaper goods bought with a collapsing or state-provided income, holding no claim on the surplus and nothing left to withhold.

There is a second twist the consumption story hides: AI makes produced goods cheaper, the things you use and discard, and does nothing for owned assets, as the surplus recycles into housing, land, and equity. Your daily life gets cheaper to run while a real stake in the system drifts further out of reach every year.

The one place this structure genuinely differs I think, is China, where the state owns its champions instead of being owned by them, which leaves it a redistribution lever the captured Western state does not have.

Whether China uses it for broad provision or party-elite concentration is open.

The AI machine can produce enough for everyone. The question was always whether the people who own it have any reason to share past the minimum that keeps the rest of us buying and obedient.

[Real Mac Balzac @mac_balzac]

@MykhailoRohoza Much better for the MIC than it is for Ukraine.

[Evan @EvanWritesOnX]

Africa was never colonized,

America was. Canada was. Australia.

Africa was merely carved up with the intention of installing local elites who served Western interests.

Local elites who locked entire regions into permanent dependency.

Borders were drawn by the West to fracture potential rivals, while institutions were rigged for extraction.

And when formal rule ended, the same powers simply shifted to debt traps, IMF conditions, and selective foreign investment that kept real power flowing outward.

Africa’s rich resources guaranteed endless Western re-engagement on terms that prevented any strong, independent state from ever emerging.

Post-independence struggles were not a failure of local governance; they were the intended result.

Singapore, with almost no natural resources, held zero strategic value.

No minerals to loot, no chokepoints to dominate, no ethnic fractures to exploit for leverage.

LKY was therefore free to build a genuine sovereign project focused on human capital, strict discipline, and port logistics without the constant interference of Western financial and military interests.

Scarcity, in this case, became the island’s blessing.

[Barrett @BarrettYouTube]

For years we’ve been told that China’s economy is on the brink, that manufacturing is leaving, that sanctions, tariffs and geopolitical pressure would finally bring the country’s export machine to a halt.

Yet here we are again.

Reuters is reporting that China’s exports are expected to rise by around 15% in May, driven by strong global demand for semiconductors, AI-related products and advanced manufacturing. China’s trade surplus is also forecast to increase significantly.

What many commentators still fail to understand is that China is no longer competing primarily on cheap labour. It is increasingly competing on technology, supply chains, manufacturing scale and speed. While some countries debate industrial policy, China is building the factories, producing the chips, manufacturing the components and shipping the finished products.

Much of this growth is being driven by the very sectors that critics claimed China would struggle to dominate: semiconductors, AI hardware and high-tech manufacturing.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Every round of pressure seems to accelerate China’s determination to innovate, localise and move further up the value chain.

The narrative may not change overnight, but the numbers don’t lie.

Do not underestimate China.

[Real Mac Balzac @mac_balzac]

@KingOffX_ Are they?

[Real Mac Balzac @mac_balzac]

@LauraLoomer Made-up nonsense.