Olivia
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Joined October 2010
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@Teknium I am very sorry
This is pretty insane: if you read the details of this new policy 👇 that now bans scientific collaboration with China, it's entirely driven by the Department of War.
Which means that civilian scientific research in the US is now driven by military logic - something that had basically never been the case since WW2.
I'm not making it up, you can read the new policy of the National Science Foundation for yourself: https://t.co/Bjx8sbIrcW
They explicitly write that the basis for this new prohibition is to be "aligned with the Department of War's approach to collaborations": a civilian science agency - the one that funds most fundamental research in the US - is now openly modeling its policies on the military's. The Pentagon decides who the enemy is, and science falls in line.
It doesn't take a genius to understand how this will backfire. Cancer, for instance, doesn't care about geopolitics. Some of the most promising research in oncology, like every other field, depends on international collaboration (and especially with China who are extremely advanced in cancer research, and most research fields). Putting soldiers in charge of who scientists can talk to is a guarantee that these problems will be harder to solve.
It's also the US repudiating pretty much its entire philosophical approach to scientific research for decades: the notion that science thrives on openness. Even at the height of the Cold War, Reagan - not exactly a peacenik - enacted a directive called "NSDD-189" that stated that fundamental research must remain open and unrestricted.
This is, obviously, the complete opposite direction.
The only precedent I can think of for this is the Wolf Amendment, passed in 2011, which prohibited NASA to engage in bilateral cooperation with China. The result, 15 years later: China is the only country in the world to have its own space station and to have landed on the far side of the Moon.
That's the track record of the policy they now want to extend to all of US science 🤷♂️
Brutal. Just brutal.
BREAKING: They've changed the name
Hermes Agent is built for sovereignty and constructing your AI stack how you want and need it to be.
No vendor lockins, no model limitations, and most importantly, your IP is built through the self improvement loop, automatically.
Hermes sets you free 🪽
Anthropic yet again confirmed as the most dystopian tech company out there.
Imagine the outcry if they'd done the same thing with Jews or Blacks: a piece of code that detects if a user is Jewish or Black and immediately reports him back to headquarters on that basis, covertly (they used steganography, a technique designed to make data collection invisible).
And before people start screaming fake news, an Anthropic employee confirmed it's real: https://t.co/0ifiv47J6H
It's incidentally - not that it matters - completely illegal under at least half a dozen European laws: not only is collecting ethnic and racial data forbidden (under, for instance, Europe's GDPR Article 9 and national French law) but doing so without the users' awareness or consent is itself a separate violation. And it's even worse in this case because they explicitly tried to hide this data collection with steganography.
And the immense irony, of course, is that this is precisely the kind of covert surveillance behavior the West - including Anthropic themselves - say China would do and that they want to "protect" people from...
Absolutely fascinating to see the difference in rhetoric on China between the German business community and the European political class.
This is the lead story of the business section of today's Berliner Zeitung, titled "Why We Need China | Germany needs help with a fresh start — Beijing stands ready to provide it"
The author is my good friend Michael Schumann, the chairman of the Board of the German Federal Association for Economic Development and Foreign Trade (@BWA_Vorstand) - one of Germany's main business lobbies.
Michael argues that it would be considerably harder for Germany to reindustrialize without Chinese capital, technology, and market access.
His core argument is that beyond being a competitor for some German companies, China is also "a technology driver, supply chain power, investor, and increasingly a production partner on German soil." He says that "anyone who seriously wants to shape Germany's industrial future should make strategic use of this."
As he points out, we're already at a stage where, in 2025, "China surpassed the United States in the number of new investment projects in Germany." And, given that you need new investments and new industrial projects to reindustrialize Germany, it'd be completely schizophrenic to attempt reindustrialization while simultaneously closing the door to such a major provider of new investment projects.
On reciprocity and fairness, a criticism often made to China ("your market is more closed than ours") Michael makes an interesting point: "Reciprocity is achieved through negotiating power, and a significant expansion of Chinese investment stocks in Germany strengthens rather than weakens the German position."
Which makes sense: if China is cut off and has nothing to lose from Germany - and Europe overall - then your word doesn't carry much weight.
Which is, incidentally, the same strategy that China itself followed with "reform and opening-up": by opening up to Western companies, China gave them a stake in its success.
Michael is arguing that Europe should give China a stake in its success as opposed to more to gain from its decline. Always sound business advice: you make your life immensely easier when incentives are aligned.
That, however, requires a political class capable of thinking strategically rather than ideologically, which is a different matter entirely...
@hapemathys Ganz einfach: entweder können wir frei entscheiden, wer in unserem Land leben darf oder dann mindestens wer darin mitbestimmen darf.
So...
We're not allowed to buy air conditioners for our houses to cool them in hot summer weather, because we don't have enough electricity to power them, because the solar panels and wind turbines we installed to stop the planet getting hot in summer, don't work when it's hot and windless in summer, so we'd need to burn gas, oil and coal instead to power the AC to cool our houses, but we blew up the oil, gas and coal power stations to stop the planet getting hot in summer, but it's still hot in summer.
But it's still ok to install heat pumps in winter, heat pumps which are also air conditioners and use the same amount of electricity or more, but we still won't have enough electricity to power them on cold, dark, windless winter evenings, because solar panels and wind turbines don't work then either, and we blew up the gas, oil and coal fired power stations because they were making the planet too hot in winter as well as summer.
Have I missed anything?
🙄🤡🌍
Andy Burnham's Chief of Staff will be James Purnell.
Ex Chair of Labour Friends of Israel.
All you need to know.
The Independent Int'l Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory presents new report to the UN Human Rights Council.
"The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted & killed by the Israeli security forces."
https://t.co/vMARqOLxpC
Es lohnt sich, sich 6 Minuten Zeit zu nehmen, um zu hören, wie gravierend unsere direkte Demokratie durch das RA2.0 ausgehöhlt wird. Hier die Zusammenfassung der Studie des Zentrum für Demokratie Aarau zu den Auswirkungen der dynamischen Rechtsübernahme auf die Demokratie und den Föderalismus.
Ich weiss nicht, ob es noch bessere Argumente gibt, diesen Vertrag abzulehnen.
@nebelspalter @Weltwoche @FuW_News @NZZ @Handelszeitung @autonomiesuisse @kompass_europa
It's over, Europe has officially given up on its digital sovereignty: they just signed up to Pax Silica, the US initiative to lock other countries in its AI stack.
In case you think I'm exaggerating, Jacob Helberg, the US Under-Secretary of State who architected Pax Silica, LITERALLY says so in the article (see screenshot 👇): he himself explicitly positions Pax Silica as designed to counter "digital sovereignty" - a concept he opposes because it would mean countries building their own tech stacks.
I wrote a long article 2 weeks ago titled "The Pax Silica Con," warning Europe that it was a "cage" to keep them "dependent on American tech and unable to build their own": https://t.co/yqq6uzhKnz
The cage door was wide open and clearly labeled. They walked in anyway.
I often like Ray Dalio's takes on China but he gets quite a lot demonstrably wrong in this FT article on the "tribute system."
China's ancient tribute system - called 朝贡 (cháogòng) in Chinese - is typically very misunderstood in the West: we typically think it involved tributary states paying some form of "tribute" to China in exchange for protection - the way medieval vassals would pay fealty to a lord in Europe.
In reality, it had little to do with that. In fact, it was almost the opposite: in the Chaogong system, it was actually China paying the "tributary states."
The system was basically a quid-pro-quo where China would get "得名" (dé míng, literally "getting name/prestige") while tributary states would get "得实" (dé shí, literally "getting substance/material benefit") in exchange. It was about China paying huge amounts of money and other material benefits for the recognition of its centrality.
That's what makes it so alien to the Western framework, where tributary states are paying UP to the center, and security is enforced through military presence. The Chaogong system was almost exactly the inverse on both counts: China was paying DOWN and regional order was maintained not through the military but through generosity.
The core guiding principle of the system was established by the Hongwu emperor, the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty (incidentally one of the most interesting emperors in Chinese history since he is the only founder of a major dynasty who started off in life as a wandering beggar).
The principle he set in place was 厚往薄来 (hòu wǎng bó lái) - literally "generous outflow, modest inflow": giving out much more than you take in. This wasn't a byproduct of the system - it WAS the system. The entire architecture of Chaogong was built on this principle of asymmetric generosity.
Very concretely the way it worked is that tributary states would pay largely symbolic tribute to China (like local specialties and curiosities, the system codified that tribute should be "easy to obtain and not costly", 必易得而不贵) and they would in exchange receive 3 layers of economic benefits:
1) Immediate payback in the form of money and expensive goods (silk, brocade, porcelain, tea, silver, etc.), which value was typically dozens of times the value of the tribute received by the emperor
2) The right to trade during their tribute visit: the envoys' entourage could trade with specially licensed Chinese merchants at the Huitongguan (the official guesthouse in the capital)
3) Most importantly, and that's where the real money was, they would be granted the right to trade at Chinese ports. Under the Ming maritime prohibition, tributary status was the only legal entry point into the Chinese economy
China being China, this gave rise to some pretty funny hustles. The deal was so good that people started inventing entirely fictitious countries just to get in on it. There are several documented cases of people fabricating countries and showing up as "envoys" at the imperial court just to claim the privileges (https://t.co/nlJB8yWblv).
Another funny one is that there are several cases of Fujian merchants who would sail to Southeast Asia, get themselves appointed as minor officials by local rulers, then sail right back to China as "foreign envoys" - carrying huge commercial cargoes. In 1438, three members of Java's tribute delegation turned out to be guys from Fujian (https://t.co/QBES0IVprC).
The scam got so widespread that the Ming had to invent a credential system (勘合, kānhé) specifically to verify that tribute envoys were who they claimed to be and that the countries they came from were real.
More seriously though, the Chaogong system also led to big domestic tensions in some of China's neighboring countries, notably Japan which was permitted only one tribute mission per decade. The stakes were so high that the 2 most powerful feudal clans at the time (the Ōuchi and the Hosokawa) fought a shadow war over who controlled the trade license.
This culminated in the Ningbo Incident of 1523 (https://t.co/TgKtlc7zlO): two Japanese delegations from both rival clans arrived at the port of Ningbo and got into a dispute over whose credentials were legitimate, which ended up in a pitched battle on Chinese soil. They ended up rampaging through the city, killing Ming military officers, and altogether terrorizing the local population - all over who got to trade with China.
The aftermath of the Ningbo Incident led to the total breakdown of Japan-China trade. If that sounds familiar, it should...
Which brings back to today and Ray Dalio's description of China's tribute system, as well as his claim that we're facing some sort of modern revival of it in Asia.
First of all, some parts of his article are correct: there is indeed a significant power shift happening in Asia, with countries hedging by building closer ties with Beijing, and the US progressively withdrawing and altogether losing ground.
He is also completely right that Chinese strategic culture genuinely differs from Western strategic culture: as he writes they indeed play Go (WeiQi) and not chess.
He is however wrong to describe the tribute system as one based on pressure and intimidation. As we've just seen, it was pretty much the opposite: the basic idea was to be so generous that everyone wants in (to the extent that countries would literally fight to be tributaries), not so threatening that nobody dares leave.
He also - weirdly - seems to conflate the tribute system with the Art of War, treating them as two faces of the same Chinese playbook, when they've got strictly nothing to do with each others. They're not even from the same school of thought: the Chaogong system is fundamentally Confucian (以德服人, "winning people through virtue") whereas Sun Tzu is from an entirely different Chinese intellectual tradition - the Strategist school (兵家) - which is about as far removed from Confucian thinking as Machiavelli is from the Bible.
Mashing them together reads like someone who has picked up a handful of Chinese cliché references and treats them as interchangeable ingredients in a single "Chinese strategic culture" soup.
All in all, he makes the error WAY too many Western commentators do with Chinese concepts: he uses them as exotic wrapping paper for a fundamentally Western analysis. Strip away the Chinese terminology and his argument is actually pure Western thinking: what he is claiming is that China, as a rising power, is using its growing economic and military weight to reshape the regional order, weaker states are bandwagoning, and the declining hegemon can't stop it.
He is essentially taking Graham Allison's "Thucydides Trap," awkwardly draping it in misunderstood Chinese concepts, and presenting it as if it were Chinese thinking.
That being said, he is ironically correct - I think - that there is some form of revival of a tribute-like system but not in the way he understands it: China will (and does) use trade - its "generosity" - as a gravitational force to pull countries into its orbit. Not by threatening to cut them off, but by making the relationship too valuable to walk away from. THAT is much closer to how the actual Chaogong system worked.
It doesn't mean that the system is purely benevolent. The flipside of generosity is the absence of it: in the original tribute system, you could be cut off the way Japan was after the Ningbo Incident in the 16th century. And it's also what's happening - to some extent - to Japan today: after PM Takaichi declared that Japan would go to war with China over Taiwan, China has systematically restricted trade with Japan. Same story with what happened, for instance, to Australia in 2020 over PM Morrison's declarations on Covid.
The pattern is the same: the reward for participation is trade, and the punishment for hostility is its withdrawal. Essentially in the tribute system there is no stick, just a carrot: the stick is taking the carrot away.
Which, incidentally, is why you can be extremely confident that China will go to enormous lengths to develop its internal market, and why the current situation where China runs huge trade surpluses is facing mounting pressure to change from within China itself. If countries don't feel they're benefiting enough from trade with China, the entire logic collapses. That's why developing domestic demand isn't some target China sets itself to assuage Western demands, as some claim: it's genuinely a strategic imperative.
It's also why it's ironic that the West is so keen on pushing China to boost domestic consumption: in effect, it means we're already in a de-facto Chaogong-like system and they're asking that the carrot be bigger.
-----
I also wrote a Substack version of this post, which you can find here: https://t.co/jBUIVbDT9C
🔥 This is why the clip is exploding.Sarah Netanyahu pleads for sympathy:
“My children have suffered shaming and violence simply because they are the children of the Prime Minister. We must condemn personal attacks on children in any setting.”
🇬🇧 A British activist’s response hits like a hammer:
“Did your children starve?
Were they bombed?
Did you receive them in plastic bags?
Were they shot while collecting water, ribs shattered?
Your criminal husband did this to the children of Gaza.”
The video is devastating.
Her words play while these questions overlay in Arabic.
The contrast is brutal.
This is the double standard the world can no longer ignore
Eric Schmidt saying the quiet part out loud: "What I don't like about [China's AI] is that it's all open source which means it's largely uncontrolled and not controlled in any way by us."
He adds, "if that makes you feel any better," that only 2 or 3 countries can be independent AI powers.
In other words, it's all about hegemony: the ideal scenario is a world where AI is controlled by the US - and the fewer countries that can resist that, the better.
Src for the video: https://t.co/Gk5iAMtBqa
This is not a rant by a random genocidal lunatic. It's a public post by the national security minister of the Israeli regime.
The genocidal death cult headquartered in Tel Aviv is a threat to all of humanity. It threatens all humans. Its only interest is permanent war.
One of the greatest threats to internet freedom and privacy are these manipulative laws, now spreading, that force people to prove they're of a certain age to use social media platforms and other sites. The UK Government, naturally, is now seeking this.
The defense of these laws is emotionally powerful by appealing to child protection, but the real goal is online surveillance, an end to anonymity, and control over political content that young people can access. Few have done a better job reporting on these tyrannical threats than @TaylorLorenz. Read this:
Every single person who still cringes at the memory of trying to bullshit their way through an interview or exam question: today, the slate is wiped clean. Set down your burden of shame. Nothing - nothing, I say - could touch this.
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