Ian Welsh

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

Category: AI

Did Burry, Altman, Friar, Huang, Karp and Sacks Just Pop the AI Bubble?

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On November 7, 2025

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The stock market bubble inflated by AI hype since late 2022 might finally be popping. If this week’s reversals turn into a sustained downtown, analysts might look back at the actions of tech executives and Trump adminstration figures this week as the straw that finally broke the camel’s back.

The warnings have been coming for a while.

Ed Zitron (on the business side) and Gary Marcus (on the technical side) have been warning about the AI bubble for years now.

Even rubes such as myself noticed when 7 AI-fueled stocks exceeded 50% of NASDAQ’s market cap.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been warning of an AI stock market bubble since August.

Dumbass META boss Mark Zuckerberg started saying bubble a month or so later.

JPMorgan’s Michael Cembalest noted that AI-related stocks have accounted for 75 percent of S&P 500 returns and 80 percent of earnings growth since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

Harvard economics prof Jason Furman pointed out in late September that U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2025 would have been 0.01% without AI capex investment.

Yet Another Bad News Cycle for AI

Meanwhile the litany of bad headlines for AI continued.

This is just a sampler and just from this week:

The Big Short Comes For AI

On Monday, November 3, legendary short seller Michael Burry shorted Nvidia, the chipmaker at the heart of the AI/LLM mania, and Palantir, the AI-powered government contractor.

As of Friday, he’s up about $1B.

Going for That Government Money

That’s when the AI hucksters blinked.

Well, Sam Altman had already blinked, flipping out at podcaster Brad Gerstner and walking out after a testy exchange:

Brad Gerstner: “How can a company with $13 billion in revenues make $1.4 trillion of spend commitments? You’ve heard the criticism, Sam.”

Sam Altman: If you want to sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer. Enough.

I think there’s a lot of people who talk with a lot of breathless concern about our compute stuff or whatever that would be thrilled to buy shares. We could sell your shares or anybody else’s to some of the people who are making the most noise on Twitter about this very quickly.

We do plan for revenue to grow steeply. Revenue is growing steeply. We are taking a forward bet that it’s going to continue to grow and that not only will ChatGPT keep growing, but we will be able to become one of the important AI clouds, that our consumer device business will be a significant and important thing, that AI that can automate science will create huge value.

We carefully plan. We understand where the technology, where the capability is going to grow and how the products we can build around that and the revenue we can generate. We might screw it up. This is the bet that we’re making and we’re taking a risk along with that. A certain risk is if we don’t have the compute, we will not be able to generate the revenue or make the models at this kind of scale.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp went on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday and was asked about Burry’s bet:

“The two companies he’s shorting are the ones making all the money, which is super weird. The idea that chips and ontology is what you want to short is batshit crazy. He’s actually putting a short on AI. … It was us and Nvidia. I do think this behavior is egregious and I’m going to be dancing around when it’s proven wrong. It’s not even clear he’s shorting us. It’s probably just, ‘How do I get my position out and not look like a fool?’”

Wednesday OpenAI CEO Sam Altman went on the Conversations with Tyler podcast and openly called for a government backstop:

“ When something gets sufficiently huge … the federal government is kind of the insurer of last resort, as we’ve seen in various financial crises … given the magnitude of what I expect AI’s economic impact to look like, I do think the government ends up as the insurer of last resort.”

That same day, OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar echoed the same message at a Wall Street Journal technology conference.

The Journal led its story with “OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said that …the company hopes the federal government might backstop the financing of future data-center deals.”

As OpenAI ramps up its spending on data center capacity to unheard of levels, the company is hoping the federal government will support its efforts by helping to guarantee the financing for chips behind its deals, Friar said. The depreciation rates of AI chips remain uncertain, making it more expensive for companies to raise the debt needed to buy them.

“This is where we’re looking for an ecosystem of banks, private equity, maybe even governmental, the ways governments can come to bear,” she said. Any such guarantee “can really drop the cost of the financing but also increase the loan-to-value, so the amount of debt you can take on top of an equity portion.”

Friar said OpenAI could reach profitability on “very healthy” gross margins in its enterprise and consumer businesses quickly if it weren’t seeking to invest so aggressively.

“I’m not overly focused on a break-even moment today,” she said. “I know if I had to get to break-even, I have a healthy enough margin structure that I could do that by pulling back on investment.”

OpenAI is losing money at a faster pace than almost any other startup in Silicon Valley history thanks to the upside-down economics of building and selling generative AI. The company expects to spend roughly $600 billion on computing power from Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon in the next few years, meaning that it will have to grow sales exponentially in order to make the payments. Friar said that the ChatGPT maker is on pace to generate $13 billion in revenue this year.

Friar realized immediately she’d screwed up and went to LinkedIn to course correct:

Unfortunately for Friar, she couldn’t take it back nor did she address the other dumb things she said at the WSJ confab, per Bloomberg:

“I don’t think there’s enough exuberance about AI, when I think about the actual practical implications and what it can do for individuals. We should keep running at it.”

Regarding charts like this that argue that many of the AI industry’s recently announced deals are just a circular money-go-round, Friar said:

“We’re all just building out full infrastructure today that allows more compute to come into the world. I don’t view it as circular at all. A huge body of work in the last year has been to diversify that supply chain.”

Thursday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang flagrantly linked the fortunes of Amercian AI companies to American national security, telling the Financial Times that “China is going to win the AI race.”

The Nvidia chief said that the west, including the US and UK, was being held back by “cynicism”. “We need more optimism,” Huang said on Wednesday on the sidelines of the Financial Times’ Future of AI Summit.

Huang singled out new rules on AI by US states that could result in “50 new regulations”. He contrasted that approach with Chinese energy subsidies that made it more affordable for local tech companies to run Chinese alternatives to Nvidia’s AI chips. “Power is free,” he said.

Gary Marcus was on it fast, pointing out that he’d been warning that the AI bros would go for government funding since January:

Former Blackrock ace Edward Dowd quickly called out the scam as well.

Dowd also warned that:

A cluster of 3 Hindenburg Omens and Altman & Jenson signaling the end is near on the AI bubble by asking for taxpayer assistance does not bode well for the short term on $SPX.

Should Trump green light government assistance and we get a pump it will likely be faded as it will not be nearly enough. Congress has true purse strings.

The stink of desperation is in the air to keep the headline indices afloat with 7 AI stocks. Ends badly at some point.

Sam Altman went into backtracking mode too.

I’d quote the whole thing but it’s mostly bullshit and Altman is a known liar (just check out this 62 page deposition from OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever which references Altman’s “consistent pattern of lying”).

Altman’s claims were complicated when this October 27 letter from OpenAI’ Chief Global Affairs Officer to Michael Kratsios, Executive Director of the U.S. government’s Office of Science and Technology Policy emerged. The letter says (via Simp for Satoshi):

The Administration has already taken critical steps to strengthen American manufacturing by extending the Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit (AMIC) for semiconductor fabrication. OSTP should now double down on this approach and work with Congress to further extend eligibility to the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain; grid components like transformers and specialized steel for their production; AI server production; and AI data centers. Broadening coverage of the AMIC will lower the effective cost of capital, de-risk early investment, and unlock private capital to help alleviate bottlenecks and accelerate the AI build in the US.

Counter the PRC by de-risking US manufacturing expansion. To provide manufacturers with the certainty and capital they need to scale production quickly, the federal government should also deploy grants, cost-sharing agreements, loans, or loan guarantees to expand industrial base capacity and resilience.

Altman spoke to Reuters to “clarify”:

OpenAI has spoken with the U.S. government about the possibility of federal loan guarantees to spur construction of chip factories in the U.S., but has not sought U.S. government guarantees for building its data centers, CEO Sam Altman said on Thursday.

Altman said the discussions were part of broader government efforts to strengthen the domestic chip supply chain, adding that OpenAI and other companies had responded to that call but had not formally applied for any financing. He said the company believes taxpayers should not backstop private-sector data center projects or bail out firms that make poor business decisions.
…
Tech officials argue that these investments are tantamount to a national security asset for the U.S. government [Reuters supplies no source for this argument. Nat], given AI’s growing role in the U.S. economy. OpenAI has committed to spend $1.4 trillion building computational resources over the next eight years, Altman said Thursday.

Regardless of Altman’s backpedaling, the whole thing became moot after the Trump administration shut down talk of AI bailouts.

Trump Tech Czar Slams That Door Shut

David Sacks, the White House’s AI czar (and founding member of the PayPal mafia alongside Elon Musk and Peter Thiel) was quick to shut this talk down, tweeting Thursday morning:

I have to wonder if Sacks’ statement — which was a political must following GOP losses in Tuesday’s elections — might not be a Lehman Brothers moment for AI and the larger stock market bubble.

Ed Zitron’s latest report won’t stop the bleeding:

Based on analysis of years of revenues, losses and funding, from 2023 through 1H2025, OpenAI took in $28.6bn in cash and lost $13.7bn.

It was just reported that OpenAI ended 1H 2025 with $9.6bn in cash.

OpenAI has burned $4.1bn more than we thought.

And as long as we’re risking 2008 flashbacks, never forget that in 2023 the infamous Larry Summers joined the OpenAI board. I’m shocked Larry hasn’t already saved the day.

Sarcasm aside, this may be the beginning of the end for the Interregnum of Unreality that I posited began in 2008.

The Next Big Crash Is On Its Way

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On October 1, 2025

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Ever since Greenspan took over the Fed and the 87 crash when they figured out their playbook, the US has only had unavoidable stock market crashes. The Fed is always there to juice markets higher and to jump in at the least sign of a normal (pre-Greenspan) market correction.

But sometimes the irrational stupidity overwhelms even the Fed, because they are both stupid and ideologically unwilling to ever force a correction. This happened twice: the dot-com boom and crash and the Mortgage backed security boom and crash (if we bundle shitty mortgages based on lies together, they become not shitty, because we’re pretending they aren’t all basically the same thing!)

Now we’re going to get the AI Boom crash. I’m well over 90% on this. The AI booms is in the “wildly stupid over-claiming” stage. It’s not that token based AI isn’t a real tech, or that it doesn’t have some uses, but the claims of it completely changing everything (replacing a third of the workforce, acting without human help to run things, being able to cure cancer and make huge theoretical breakthroughs) are obvious over-reaches. So far every academic study that comes in shows that AI isn’t even good at the one thing everyone anecdotally agreed it was good at: writing code. Right now it seems to mainly be a good way to cheat at university, to have a fake relationship, or to bypass Google’s shitty search (which is what I use it for.) It hallucinates, the hallucinations cannot be removed because they are integral to the tech, and the code it produces, even when it works, is a huge mess that will cause massive maintenance issues.

In addition:

  • Since it doesn’t actually mostly reason, it requires data sets bigger than all the data in the world if it is to keep improving;
  • If it uses the data it itself produces, it experiences model collapse.
  • None of the American AI companies make money per query. Every query costs more than they can charge.
  • It requires a vast build-out of energy and data centers, of the “over a trillion dollars” variety. There literally isn’t enough money to pay for OpenAI and Anthropic’s dreams, and there isn’t a product at the end of it that could pay back all that money.
  • About 40% of the US stock market is now based around NVidia and the AI companies.
  • NVidia has now invested in Open AI, so that they can turn around and buy more NVidia cards.
  • The Chinese offer an open source AI which is almost as good and with costs somewhere between one fifteenth and one-thirtieth as much, so that it might actually be profitable AND since it’s open source, Trump can’t have a mini-stroke and decide to cut you off at his whim.

It’s my annual fundraiser. This allows us to cover the changeover of hegemony from America to China, environmental collapse, internal US fascism, what a better society would look like, Gaza, AI, the coming stock market crash and various other issues. As of this writing we’ve raised about $2,700 out of a $12,500 goal, from over 25 people. It’d be great if you can help out (please don’t donate if your financial situation is dire.) You can Subscribe or Donate here or contact me at admin-at-ianwelsh-dot-net if you need another way to donate (mail, usually. A lot of cash apps don’t work in Canada.)

Throwing all this money at AI if it really was the epochal “tech to end all techs, the singularity, dude” that the tech-bros claim it is might make sense. But I don’t see the evidence that this is the case, and even if it is, why not use the Open Source Chinese variety?

In fact, my guess is that this version of AI, based on this model and this generation of chips, is not even as big a deal as the internet was. Everyone was right that the internet was going to be HUGE, they just over-invested before it was and before people knew who the winners (Google, Facebook, Amazon) were going to be.

But so far AI doesn’t even look as important as the internet, but the spend is way larger than the internet build-out of the turn of the millennium.

But even if AI turns out to be a HUGE deal, it’s going to crash out of this bubble and we’ll find out later who can make money doing what.

The Fed will paper the AI market crash over, making hundreds of billions or even a trillion out of thin air to save the rich from their own stupidity and greed. Again. But this will be the LAST crash the Fed will be able to save the capitalists from. The one after will either wipe the capitalists out, wipe out America, or both.

“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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China Is Going to Win the AI Race

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On May 28, 2025

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Yeah, it doesn’t seem that way, but it’s how it will turn out. What China’s doing is embracing actual open AI (unlike the company named Open AI). Open source and open standards. Everyone outside North America and maybe Europe is going to prefer that, and those who set the standards control the tech. On top of that, American AI is frighteningly expensive; no one in the US is making any money. Every query costs more to produce than is earned, even from customers who are paying, let alone all the free accounts.

Deepseek is much less expensive per query, however. The idea of capitalism is to, y’know, make money? There’s a limit to how much money Softbank can throw at AI if it doesn’t start providing at least some returns.

Further, American-style AI requires massive amounts of energy, and guess who produces the equipment needed to quickly build more generation capacity? (If you need more than one guess, you haven’t been paying attention.)

Every hyper-scale or “AI-ready” data-centre campus needs its own sub-station and a bank of step-down transformers big enough to deliver 50-150 MVA per site. Add the grid-side upgrades that utilities must make to back-feed those loads, and each incremental gigawatt of GPU capacity pulls several hundred megavolt-amps (MVA) of new LPT demand.

Roughly 80 percent of U.S.’s large power transformers (LPT≥100 MVA) are imported and lead-times have ballooned from 50 weeks (2021) to 120-210 weeks (2024), and the lone domestic GOES mill provides only a fraction of what new AI loads will require.

China dominates both finished-unit exports and nearly half of global GOES output; it also supplies critical sub-components such as tap-changers and bushings. GOES now fall under Beijing’s 25 percent retaliatory-tariff list and new export-licence regime.

Export licensing is China’s retaliation for the US “don’t sell China chips or lithography machines” regime. I’m sure they won’t drag their feet or outright deny exports to the US, when the US has explicitly restricted “AI” chips to attempt to cripple China’s AI industry. I mean, turnabout isn’t fair play, amiright?

Thing is, China has proved very good at using what they can get, or make themselves, and they’re making fast progress on chips, with the possibility of creating a new class of chips which out-performs anything the US has looking very likely. The US, on the other hand, cannot ramp up production of transformers on any reasonable timescale.

Reap, sow. Fuck around, find out, etc.

As for AI destroying all jobs, well, no. It makes mistakes too often, and in anything that matters even a one or two percent serious error rate is unacceptable.

I, at least, will laugh myself sick when Silicon Valley gets its lunch eaten by the Chinese on AI. I mean, it’s sad, because Silicon Valley bros are so humble, never brag and never lord it over anyone else. It’s not like they’re assholes whose entire business model is based on gouging and taking value from everyone else, and it’s not like modern “AI” is based on the most vast theft of other people’s work in history.

And them Chinese, man, who do they think they are? Embracing open licenses and open standards and actually trying to make a profit, like they have real competitive markets or something? Commies can’t do Capitalism better than America!

 

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AI Will Degenerate In Much The Same Way Google Did

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On January 30, 2025

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If you’re old enough to remember search before and after Google, you remember how good Google search was at the beginning.

Google used links to rank what to show to searchers. In the old web, before Google, every link was, in essence, an endorsement. We linked to what we thought was good, that other people should read.

It was a pristine “state of nature” system.

But the minute Google became dominant in search, everyone started manipulating links and metadata and everything else to get Google to send them more traffic. Links were no longer organic, no longer endorsements, but attempts to manipulate the algo. The more that was true, the more it became necessary to engage in “search engine optimization”, and the more algorithmic search engines sucked. Of course, Google also self-sabotaged, by trying to optimize search results so that Google would make the most money possible.

I recently read a regular traveler saying he never reads travel blogs and magazines any more, because AI is so much better. I’m sure he’s right.

But AI is better because it’s reading all the travel blogs and magazines, sorting and summarizing. AI being better, readership is cratering, and so the blogs and magazines will slowly die off. Travel’s one of those activities where you need relatively recent information, where was great to stay years ago isn’t very helpful. So, as the blogs and magazines die, the AI’s results will slowly get worse, until they’re crap scraped from official websites of hotels, museums and other travel destinations, since that’s all that will remain.

AI, in other words, in this and other ways, many of them similar, will destroy the ecosystem required for it to be good, same as Google did.

This is “eating the seedcorn/destroying the soil’s fertility” type of stupidity. If you destroy an ecosystem you’re dependent on (and we’re all dependent on some ecosystems) then whatever you’re doing is only short term viable.

So enjoy AI as an alternative to search for now (but always check its source, because it does hallucinate) but understand this is a moment in time, a moment which is destroying what makes it possible.

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Small Chinese Company Hilariously Crushes American AI

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On January 27, 2025

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So, a Chinese financial firm (not even a software or computer company) has put out an open source AI model which is 50 times more efficient than Chat-GPT or any other American AI. It’s so simple you can run it on some phones, it doesn’t have to call home.

The sound you hear is Sam Altman screaming at the Devil as he realizes he sold his soul to become the world’s richest man, and it ain’t gonna happen.

(Faintly, in the background, the devil laughing his ass off.)

Absolutely hilarious. Oh, and they did it with a tiny team for hardly any money. Didn’t take billions. Doesn’t require massive amounts of energy.

And that whole open source thing matters: everyone else can build off their model. Deepseek, being Chinese, has some censorship in it (type Xi Jingping’s name to see it in action), but you can build your own without the censorship.

One of the interesting things is that it was built by a team of quants. Seems that the Chinese have been crushing the finance industry lately, since they saw what it has done to the West, so the Quants decided to try their hand at a bit of optimized AI code.

This chart is one of the most illustrative of Xi’s policy over the last six years or so:

Seems Xi has also figured out (as I’ve noted in the past) that billionaires suck. They form a power center outside the party and they act against the best interests of everyone in society but themselves.

Turns out that having lots of billionaire is a policy choice. The West made that choice and so did China, for a while, but when they saw how dangerous and harmful billionaires are, they reversed themselves and changed policy to crush them. They’ve even thrown them in prison. (Vietnam recently executed a mogul, though she wasn’t quite a billionaire.)

China’s CCP wants prosperity for everyone in the country. It’s the best way for them to stay in power, and hell, there’s every indication they really believe it’s the right thing to do. They’ve deliberately crushed their housing bubble and the state is moving heavily into building housing, they cracked down on exam-prep tutors, because that’s a red-Queen’s race which favors the rich and hurts everyone else, including kids. They built recreation centers just for delivery workers and forced companies to treat them better.

And they have the tech lead in about 80% of fields, plus, it appears, one more now. Just as Trump announces his five hundred billion dollar AI fund, launches his own shitcoin so people can bribe him without having to stay at one of his hotels and juices crypto, a fraudulent field which caters to the Western desire to get rich without actually doing anything useful for society.

America’s flailing around. Their only real plans is “let’s loot our vassals and satrapies”, and they’ll manage to do more of that. But it isn’t going to change America’s trajectory. It’s a failing Empire, it’s swirling the drain and nothing is going to stop that, since the actual necessary steps require policies like, y’know, slashing home prices, gutting billionaires, raising taxes on the rich, taking utilities and other public goods back into public control and so on: all the stuff no one, Trump included, wants to do.

Empires die hard, and a lot of suffering goes with that. But die the American Empire is, and will. China has already won, and they deserve to.

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