Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

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American Billionaires Are Competing To Be King Shit of Turd Island

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On September 17, 2025

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You may have heard that Tesla’s board has proposed giving Elon Musk a one trillion dollar payday. Tesla is falling apart, and the ostensible theory is that only Musk can save it, as if he’s not the guy who ran it into the ground with his bad decision making.

Elon, of course, is currently “the world’s richest man” but his fortune is probably under 500 billion. So he wants to triple it.

This, as you may have figured out already, is not about saving Tesla, but looting it before it crashes out completely, which is what’s going to happen. Only 100% anti-china EV tariffs are keeping Tesla alive right now, but the problem is that non-Chinese companies are now producing cheaper, better cars and no, Tesla isn’t going to regain its lead.

Elon is just a rat trying to leave a sinking ship with a huge wheel of gold embossed brie, and the board (his cronies) are helping him.

Meanwhile:

(Every person who told you that the end of dollar hegemony was impossible was either an idiot or lying to you.)

Oh, and meanwhile China has banned all its tech companies from buying NVidia AI chips. Seems they figure their homegrown chips are now as good as the lobotomized versions NVidia is allowed to sell to Chinese companies.

In about three years, China’s chips will be as good as NVidia’s. In about six years they’ll be as good and a lot cheaper. Then every country outside the West will switch.

Meanwhile, as I’ve discussed before, every non-Western country will use Chinese Open Source AI, because using American or European AI is way too risky (if you don’t understand why, you’ve been a coma for the past 40 years.)

NVidia is driving something like 40% of American stock valuations and AI is the huge bet America is making. America can’t even make magnets.

So what happens when China can produce essentially everything the West can, at equal or better quality, and it costs less? Passenger jets, military tech, chips, AI, robots, drones, cars, consumer goods. Everything. (or a reasonable facsimile, well north of 90% within five to ten years, and it’s already north of 80%.)

Well, the oligarchs who have been competing to be the richest guy in America are going to find they have a whole bunch of US dollars that the most important economy in the world, China, won’t accept for anything meaningful. You won’t be able to buy Chinese companies with it. You won’t be able to buy Chinese tech secrets with it. Chinese scientists won’t want to work in the shithole that the US is turning into, especially given all the racism against Chinese.

American oligarchs will, as my father put it, find out that they were competing to be “King Shit of Turd Island.” Like being the world’s richest Indian in 1950. You’ll live a nice life, but you don’t matter.

Serious elites have three jobs, in order of importance.

  1. Keep their country powerful and advanced and important;
  2. Keep control of their country
  3. Compete among themselves.

American elites reversed the order of these tasks for generations. They’ll be lucky to avoid a civil war, is how badly they’ve fucked up. And the tech-bro “masters of the universe” are about to watch China roar past them and gain the tech lead in everything that matters. They can own America’s Tik-tok, but who cares, because America is a has-been nation, coasting on legacy fumes, and it’s only going to fall further and further behind.

Thiel and Musk and so on are just crabs in a bucket, competing for power in country going to Hell. May the best most ruthless crab be crowed King Shit of Turd Island.

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Open Thread

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On September 13, 2025

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Should You Kill or Mourn Nazis and Commies? (Charlie Kirk Edition)

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On September 11, 2025

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My favorite Charlie Kirk quote is:

I can’t stand the word empathy, actually, I think it’s a made up new age term, and it does a lot of damage.

But Charlie wasn’t just a one-note ideological thinker.

I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

Kirk was, needless to say, all for the Gaza genocide, but he was for it by lying about it. Most famously, he denied starvation in Gaza.

Anyway, Kirk was an evil, pro-genocide douchebag, who was shot, which he said was an acceptable price to pay for the second amendment. I’m not going to waste crocodile tears on someone who actively worked for the mass murder of civilians and who died in a way he thought was an acceptable sacrifice.

But we need to unpack this properly. One thing commenters on the right have been saying is that Charlie may have died, in full of in part, because of neo-liberals and the left calling him and people like him Nazi or fascist.

Now I don’t know the motives of who killed him, but in our society many people do genuinely believe that killing Nazis was justified and the right way to deal with them. There’s a version that swings left, of course. “The only good Commie, is a dead Commie.” The Black Book of Communism and the constant reminders of deaths under Mao and Stalin are meant to justify this sort of hatred, as reminders of the Holocaust and German war crimes are to justify killing Nazis.

So the right isn’t wrong. If you call someone a Nazi there’s a certain subtext where “and killing him would be justified” is implied. Fascist is weaker, but same general idea.

But the reverse version is Communist/Marxist/Socialist. The right calls their enemies this all the time and it has the same implication. “Cultural Marxist” was the battle cry used by people like Kirk to justify purges of the university system of left wing professors.

I don’t want to imply these are mirror phenomena. The fact is that since the early 20th century being Communist, Marxist or Socialist has been much more likely get one fired, jailed, deported, beaten or killed than being a fascist. Indeed, there was a huge taboo against calling anyone a Nazi, so much so that doing so was considered “losing the argument.”

It took a lot of boundary pushing in the right for that taboo to be partially broken.

Back in 2016, during Trump’s first run for the Presidency, I wrote that constantly calling him a fascist or Nazi, and branding resistance ANTIFA would naturally lead to violence, because if someone is a Nazi, violence isn’t just justified to stop them, it’s a moral imperative to use any means necessary including violence to oppose them.

But in America, the same is true of stopping Communism or socialism or Marxism. And the same is true of calling Abortion a holocaust.

So what’s happened here is that the shoe is now on both feet. The right had their Commies and their abortion Holocaust to justify their actions. Now the center has Nazis and the left has Nazis and the Gaza genocide to justify their violence.

By their lights, all three sides are justified in violence. If Commies and Nazis and Genocide are true evil, and if all sides have committed genocides and are Nazis (right) and Commies (left/center) then, indeed, it is ethically required to use any means necessary to stop them.

What we’re seeing right now is a cry from all the “responsible people” of “don’t resort of political violence! It’s never justified!” (This in a country formed by violent revolution, who’s almost always mass murdering people for political reasons.)

But the issue is that the right and, actually, the center, are acting like fascists, at the least, and really like Nazis. (That whole inconvenient genocide thing.)

The right’s case is weaker, unless you do view abortion as a Holocaust, in which case, yes, you are hard pressed not to find yourself wondering why you aren’t murdering the abortionists. Neoliberals aren’t left wing, socialists or communist and there are no socialists or communists anywhere near power in the US. The right calls neoliberals the left and pretends “cultural Marxism” is Marxism, so they’re really Stalinists, which is ludicrous to anyone who knows the politically correct crew that the right calls “cultural Marxists.”

If you want avoid domestic political violence over these issues (though it’s all really a proxy for the impoverishment of the majority of the population) you either have to decide that being a Nazi (pro genocide, pro gestapo/ICE thugs) is OK, or stop being a Nazi. On the other side, you have to give up abortion or decide that it isn’t a Holocaust. And since “cultural Marxism” is really proxy for a series of policies meant to help women and various racial and sexual minorities, you have to decide whether prejudice, including legal prejudice against them is OK (Issue one) and whether or not they deserve any sort of helping hand (a separate issue. You could keep them legally equal and let them keep their rights like gay marriage and the female vote but get rid of affirmative action and so on.)

In other words, to avoid political violence over ideology, you need to have the vast majority of the population agree on what is acceptable. Is genocide is OK? Abortion? Affirmative Action. Women having the vote? (Peter Thiel, who bankrolled Vance, has suggested women shouldn’t have the right to vote.) Gays marrying. People being able to choose their own gender. Police raids by badgeless masked men without warrants from unmarked vans.

If people don’t agree on what is right and the red lines being crossed are of “this is a holocaust” or “this is completely destroying millions of people’s lives” then of course it’s going to break out into political violence. Expecting otherwise and hand waving that “we should kill over difference in opinion about whether it’s OK to commit genocide” are ludicrous and pathetic and foolish.

There’s political violence because Americans disagree over life and death issues as large as, but not limited to “should we commit genocides?” Well, again, that and general immiseration, which lowers the ignition point.

If you don’t want political violence, don’t wag your finger and say “political violence is bad, ‘kay”, either agree as a society to be a bunch of Nazis with an immiserated population, or decide not to be Nazis and make sure that almost everyone has a good life.

As for Kirk, I’m glad he got a death in line with his beliefs: making the ultimate sacrifice for the right of Americans to bear arms. It was “worth it” and I will assume he meant that, and if he still exists he’s at peace, having died for what he truly believed.

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A Brief Taxonomy Of Corruption

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On September 10, 2025

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I was discussing Indian corruption with Sean-Paul the other day, and we had to really break down what we meant by corruption. That lead to a simple classification system, so I’m sharing it with it.

Everyday vs. Elite Corruption

Do you bribe the policeman or the minor bureaucrat to get a permit. Do you grease everyone with even a tiny bit of to get what you want, and it is it expected? Is it essentially required, in the sense that if you don’t consequences are nasty: arrest or or dential, Or at best, whatever you needed done taking forever and being shoddily done.

This is everyday corruption. India is rife with it. America, mostly, doesn’t have it. Russia used to have it, but I’m told by Sean-Paul, that at least in Moscow, it’s now gone.

Elite corruption is when the elites are self-greasing. Whenever anything is done, it is done in a way where somebody rich can take a cut. Contracting to build new infrastructure is where the contracts are inflated is the standard, but there are tons of variations. Most Western nations have this. The US or the UK is probably the worst among major countries. But it exists in Russia and (though much less than before) in China.

Honest vs. Dishonest Corruption

In honest corruption you get what you pay for. In everyday corruption your visa gets stamped, your parking ticket disappears, you get the permit you needed, or city workers show up and connect your new place to power, water and sewage. At the elite level, if if a bridge, or hospital or park or space program was promised, it is delivered on time and on budget. It’s just that the budget includes 10% grease. Some other games may be played. If you know where new facilities will be built you could, say, buy up property that will soon increase in price, then sell once it does.

But bottom line, what is delivered at the end is delivered on time or with minor delays and it works. It’s not shoddy. China during most of the Deng period had a lot of honest elite corruption. Everyone was taking a cut. But they bloody well had to deliver and if they didn’t, they lost their place at the elite table and might even end up in prison or executed. American in the late 19th and early 290th century mostly had honest corruption. Tammany Hall was corrupt, but they also kept their promises. The great railroads and bridges and parks got built, and were generally built well and on time.

Dishonest Corruption Is when you whoever is corrupt doesn’t have to deliver. You pay off the cop and he throws you in jail anyway. You bribe the bureaucrat and he still drags his feet getting you approval, if you get it at all. The first payment is never the last payment, the idea is to drain you of as much as possible.

At the elite level dishonest corruption is that the street or building was promised and funded but somehow either never gets finished or takes twice as long and three times as much and then, once done, it usually turns out to be shoddily built. A new program for veterans/homeless/cancer/whatever is promised, but somehow it’s slow and ineffective and doesn’t do much, but a few people make a lot of money off of it. Promises mean nothing, nothing is delivered on time and what little is delivered is of crap quality. Meanwhile insider trading is everywhere, taxes always go down on the rich and up on the poor and middle class and programs which used to work are slowly degraded into uselessness so that someone can make more money.

This is the US or the UK and Canada and indeed all neoliberal countries. It’s actually more or less the definition of neoliberalism. Effectiveness is nothing and efficiency is really only about how efficient something is at funneling money to the rich. It is also India, which is why India is, despite some progress, still screwed. It’s run by criminals from top to bottom. Ironically, in my experience (which is out of date, I’m happy to be corrected) low level Indian corruption is “honest’ in that you get what you pay for. High level Indian corruption is dishonest as hell. No big project ever works properly, comes in on time and is effective. (This is why I’m still negative on India.)

There’s also a middle corruption, slice for everyone. This is where everyone involved in the project gets some. So the workers get some, the managers get some, and the contractors gets some. Everyone is being greased. This doesn’t mean just having a job, it means being paid better and treated better than at a non corrupt job.

The honest and dishonest versions are as normal. Honest “slice for everyone” corruption still delivers what was promised at reasonable quality. Dishonest “slice fore everyone” doesn’t deliver or delivers absolute crap.

Obviously no corruption is best, but equally obviously honest corruption is better. If you have to have any corruption, then honest elite corruption or honest slice for everyone corruption is best. Low level corruption is always bad, since it means “if you don’t have money, you’re never treated fairly and you can’t break out of the bottom” but if you must have it honest is better than dishonest.

Growing up a lot in what was then called the third world, then observing politics for years all of this has been well known by me, but I never really broke it down properly, it was pretty much “implicit knowledge” as much that we learn young is.

For your reading displeasure.

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The West Is In A Far Worse Position than the Warsaw Pact Was At The Start Of the Cold War

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On September 9, 2025

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Chinese and American flags flying together

One of my long term predictions, coming true before our eyes, was that the world would fall into a new cold war, forming two trade blocs. I hoped it wouldn’t happen, I suggested ways to avoid it (including Europe forming the nucleus of a third bloc), but so far it appears correct.

Khrushchev  famously said “we will bury you!” Looking back and knowing that the USSR and Warsaw Pact collapsed, we laugh.

But he had reason to believe it. Soviet style Communism had some issues, but in the 50s, it looked like the superior system. It had avoided the Great Depression, it had been the most powerful state in the coalition defeating the Nazis, it had by far and away a larger military than NATO and its economy was growing faster.

This last bit really worried the West. The miracle of compound growth, and all that. The Soviets weren’t just growing faster than the West, they had been doing so for a couple decades.

The West had strengths, including a larger population, a corner strategic position, a larger economy (even if growing slower) and the technological and scientific lead.

When the Soviets put a man into space first that scared the hell out of the West.

Now, of course, in the end they did “lose.”

Now take a look at the “Golden Billion”, NATO plus Japan and South Korea. Lower population. Weaker military (yes, it is.) Behind in 80% of techs. Slower economic growth. Smaller real economy (industrial/resources.) They still might be considered to have a corner position (though not once the Chinese unambiguously have the stronger navy, which they will), but it’s the only advantage they have.

The original Cold war started off with NATO leading in tech/population/economy/position, and behind it economic growth/military size.

This cold war starts with the “Golden Billion” ahead only in strategic position. (Continental US, Europe as a corner position.) Arguably even this isn’t true, given that South Korea and Japan are now key parts of the coalition and extremely vulnerable. As we speak, the US is slashing spending on research and tech, with only a few exceptions (like AI.)

No one, and I mean no one with least bit of historical understand or common sense would bet on the “Golden Billion”. If you are doing so  you are stupid. Yes, there’s a small chance, but it is tiny.

The only sane and statesmanlike response from those in charge of American vassal states is to figure out how to switch sides, without the US wrecking them, and how to get a good deal. If you can’t, the question is how to avoid the US looting you during its decline. As Sean-Paul Kelley wrote on Sunday:

The chaos of rising energy prices is devastating European industry. In the last year alone Germany has lost 196,000 businesses. I repeat 196,000 businesses in Germany closed in one year. That’s devastating to any economy, but Germany long the economic engine of Europe and the EU is deindustrializing for one simple reason: the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, which has been an absolute catastrophe for Europe. The United States is responsible for it.

Russia and China just signed a new pipeline deal. The energy that went to Europe (the cheap energy) is now going to go to China. Chances of Europe avoid de-industrialization have gone from slim to damn near none.

The Soviets pumped resources to their allies. The Americans are cannibalizing them. The Soviets made a mistake, but this strategy won’t work either, because a fundamentally financialized economy cannot produce the type of real growth which is required to win a great power competition.

The world is dividing into two great blocs. One of them is so much weaker than the other, with so much worse future technological and economic growth prospects that it is almost certain to lose.

Our side.

The best way to win a war is to ally with the stronger side. That isn’t America or NATO or the Golden Billion.

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Positive Prejudice

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On September 6, 2025

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We tend to think of prejudice in negative terms, but there are positive prejudices as well. I was just telling a friend that I’d trust a random Sikh more than any other religion/ethnicity. Just seem to have a very high proportion of good people. Also think well of the diaspora Chinese, as a rule, perhaps because I was raised by them to a certain extent.

Do you have any positive prejudices?

Feel free to use as an open thread. No vax/medical.

Get Ready For the Return of Serious Disease

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On September 4, 2025

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You probably thought measles was a thing of the past. Along with Mumps, Rubella, Polio, Chickenpox and Heptatis B, kids are required to be vaccinated  for it as a requirement of going to school. (So the little disease spreaders don’t act as disease vectors, which parents and teacher s know they do.)

We hardly see most of these diseases any more, because we make sure everyone is vaccinated, so they can’t get a foothold. (That’s part of why vaccines prevent so many deaths, and that’s why vaccine denial is bad.)

But Florida has decided the days of effective disease control are over:

Florida will end vaccine requirements to attend school, making it the first state to do so. The state’s surgeon general said every vaccine mandate “drips with disdain and slavery.”

This is batshit insane. I don’t care what you think about the Covid vaccines, normal vaccines prevented vast numbers of deaths and crippling disabilities. If they are discontinued, the diseases will spread and be given a chance to mutate. They’ll mutate to defeat vaccines, putting everyone at risk.

(The measles vaccine was approved in the US in 1963.)

Well, what about Smallpox?

I know it’s nice to think “everyone should make individual decisions about everything”, but that’s bullshit when it comes to public health issues, especially dealing with contagious diseases. I warned, repeatedly, that fucking up the Covid response (which was NOT primarily about the vaccine) would discredit public health “well it didn’t work for Covid, so it must be bullshit!”

Anyway, the age of rationality in the West was, overall, nice. But as a friend quipped (exaggeration for effect, I hope), “We’re at most 10 years away from witchcraft trials resuming.” (Ten is too soon, I think, I give it twenty.)

America is descending fast, and much of the Western world is going with it. The very idea of effective mass action has been discredited, and we are all going to pay for that, including the rich, who will find that they can’t completely protect themselves from the demons their malign incompetence has released.

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“AI” Insanity. Does This Industry Make Sense?

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On September 3, 2025

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AI’s a weird industry. So far almost no one is making any money, certainly not the major Western AI companies: Anthropic and OpenAI. Every query costs more than the revenue it generates. The primary beneficiary has been NVidia: they’re making money hand over fist, and suppliers of data centers and power have big customers in AI. But AI itself doesn’t make money. (Not Western, anyway. Deepseek, which is 20 to 30 times cheaper, probably is.

The energy required for Western AI is huge, and it’s mostly dirty energy. AI requires mostly 24/7 energy, which means renewables are out. It needs nuclear or carbon intensive sources like coal and natural gas and turbines. MIT did a massive dig into this in March.

The researchers were clear that adoption of AI and the accelerated server technologies that power it has been the primary force causing electricity demand from data centers to skyrocket after remaining stagnant for over a decade. Between 2024 and 2028, the share of US electricity going to data centers may triple, from its current 4.4% to 12%.

AI companies are also planning multi-gigawatt constructions abroad, including in Malaysia, which is becoming Southeast Asia’s data center hub. In May OpenAI announced a plan to support data-center buildouts abroad as part of a bid to “spread democratic AI.” Companies are taking a scattershot approach to getting there—inking deals for new nuclear plants, firing up old ones, and striking massive deals with utility companies.

Nature came up with this chart. As they note, it’s lower bound, because if it was too high, AI companies would have said so.

AI’s a lot more intensive than traditional methods. For example, AI vs. a Google search (granted Google search sucks, but that’s because Google wants it to suck.)

It’s long been noted that one of the biggest issues with climate change is that we can expect it to reduce the amount of fresh water available. AI gobbles that:

AI is also thirsty for water. ChatGPT gulps roughly a 16-ounce bottle in as few as 10 queries, calculates Shaolei Ren, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Riverside, and his colleagues.

 

 

But here’s the kicker:

ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4 — research institute estimates medium-sized GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours of electricity

Whoa! That kind of puts paid to rising by 10% a year and other such assumptions. It doesn’t look like new models are scaling linearly.

We have a climate change problem already: lots of extreme weather, disrupted rainfall patterns and massive wildfires. The permafrost is bubbling and releasing methane and arctic temperatures are absurd (hitting 30 celcius in some cases).

Now if this tech was truly transformative, if it made everything so much better, maybe it would be worth it. But so far, with a few exceptions (mostly running thru millions of combinations to assist research) it seems like it’s better search, automatic image generation, a great way for students to cheat and may make programming faster. (There’s some dispute about this, one study found it made coders slower.) So far agents are duds, unable to even run a vending machine.

On the downside, even AI boosters claim it’s likely to put vast numbers of people out of work if it does work, wiping out entire fields of employment, including SFX, illustrators, artists, writers, customer service and perhaps most entry level jobs. We’re told AI has a small but existential risk of wiping out humanity. It gobbles water and energy and causes pollution.

What, exactly, are we expecting to get from AI (other than NVidia making profits) that is worth the costs of AI? Does it make sense to be rushing forward this fast, and in this way? Deepseek has shown AI doesn’t have to use so many resources, but Western AI companies are doing the opposite of reducing their resource draw. Eight times as much energy? How much more energy with GPT-6 use?

It seems like we’re unable to control our tech at all. This used to be the killer argument “well, there’s no controlling it, so why even try?”

But China’s AI uses way less energy. Apparently China can control it, and we can’t? So it’s not about “can’t”, it’s about “won’t”. Using less resources would mean less money sloshing around making various Tech-bros rich, I guess, and we can’t have that.

And all this for an industry where the primary actors, OpenAI and Anthropic aren’t even making money.

Perhaps we could be using these resources in a better way? China is spending their money on producing three-quarters of the world’s renewable energy, and ramping up nuclear power. Their carbon emissions are actually down. Their economy is growing far faster than ours. They’ve almost completely moved over to electric cars, they have high speed trains, and their space program is going gangbusters. All this while reducing rent by over a third in the past five years.

You don’t have to be an AI skeptic to think “maybe this is a misallocation of resources?” Is it really going to change everything so much so that it “makes America great again”? Is western AI so much better than Chinese to make that difference even if AI is as big a deal as its greatest boosters say?

Maybe the US and Europe should be concentrating on more than just AI? Not letting China continue to march ahead in almost every field, while putting almost all the marbles on one big project that they barely have a lead in anyway?

I don’t want to overstate this issue. The amount of energy and water used doesn’t come close to, say, expected increases in air conditioning. (Though if increases in draw continue to ramp up similar to GPT-5 we’ll see. And, the more energy we use, the more air conditioning we need thanks to fairly obvious feedback.) But still, what are we getting for it?

Just some things to think about.

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