Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
After three decades of creating ruin and disaster across the globe, Larry Summers is finally being pushed from the lofty heights of power and prestige.
The proximate cause of his downfall are recently released emails between Summers and suicided arms dealer/sex trafficker/intelligence asset/money launderer Jeffrey Epstein.
The emails show the married, middle-aged Summers going to Epstein for advice on how best to manipulate a woman he claimed to be mentoring into a sexual relationship.
Summers comes off like a complete putz in the exchange:
Summers: We talked on the phone. Then “I can’t talk later”. Dint think I can talk tomorrow”. I said what are you up to. She said “I’m busy”. I said awfully coy u are. And then I said. Did u really rearrange the weekend we were going to be together because guy number 3 was coming” She said no his schedule changed after we changed our plans. I said ok I got to go call me when u feel like it. Tone was not of good feeling. I dint want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits.
Epstein: shes smart. making you pay for past errors. ignore the daddy im going to go out with the motorcycle guy, you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh.
While it’s nice to finally see Summers pushed off the world stage (we hope!), Matt Stoller, Rudy Havenstein and others are pointing out that Summers’ loathsome exchange with Epstein is the least of his sins.
Surely it’s more important that Summers was “wrong on the big important stuff for most of his career” as Stoller put it than that he was a creep who looked to a monster for advice on attempted adultery.
Politico sums up Summers’ prodigious rise in politics, for which he abandoned his Harvard tenure:
Summers would never achieve the type of intellectual breakthroughs that his uncles had. Perhaps he was too attracted to — too distracted by — the more muscular life of political power and influence that he first experienced in 1981, when he went to Washington to work with Feldstein, Ronald Reagan’s chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. The year after winning the Clark medal, Summers headed to the capital again to work at the World Bank, then joined Lloyd Bentsen’s Treasury Department in the new Clinton administration.
…
(Summers) would become Robert Rubin’s deputy when Rubin took over from Bentsen in 1995. Their work together on the international debt crises of the 1990s made Summers famous; in February 1999, TIME magazine put him, Rubin and Fed chair Alan Greenspan on its cover, with the headline “The Committee to Save the World.” A few months later, Summers succeeded Rubin as Treasury Secretary, serving until the end of the Clinton presidency.
Havenstein recommends (among other excellent pieces) this 2010 Charles Ferguson take down of Summers from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Some highlights:
…rarely has one individual embodied so much of what is wrong with economics, with academe, and indeed with the American economy.
…
As a rising economist at Harvard and at the World Bank, Summers argued for privatization and deregulation in many domains, including finance. Later, as deputy secretary of the treasury and then treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, he implemented those policies. Summers oversaw passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed Glass-Steagall, permitted the previously illegal merger that created Citigroup, and allowed further consolidation in the financial sector. He also successfully fought attempts by Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the Clinton administration, to regulate the financial derivatives that would cause so much damage in the housing bubble and the 2008 economic crisis. He then oversaw passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which banned all regulation of derivatives, including exempting them from state antigambling laws.
Summers didn’t just lay the groundwork for the economic crash of the 2000s, he actively mocked those who warned it was coming:
When other economists began warning of abuses and systemic risk in the financial system deriving from the environment that Summers, Greenspan, and Rubin had created, Summers mocked and dismissed those warnings. In 2005, at the annual Jackson Hole, Wyo., conference of the world’s leading central bankers, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Raghuram Rajan, presented a brilliant paper that constituted the first prominent warning of the coming crisis. Rajan pointed out that the structure of financial-sector compensation, in combination with complex financial products, gave bankers huge cash incentives to take risks with other people’s money, while imposing no penalties for any subsequent losses. Rajan warned that this bonus culture rewarded bankers for actions that could destroy their own institutions, or even the entire system, and that this could generate a “full-blown financial crisis” and a “catastrophic meltdown.”
When Rajan finished speaking, Summers rose up from the audience and attacked him, calling him a “Luddite,” dismissing his concerns, and warning that increased regulation would reduce the productivity of the financial sector.
But the punchline came when Summers was put in charge of the Obama administration’s response to the very crash his policies created:
after the 2008 financial crisis and its consequent recession, Summers was placed in charge of coordinating U.S. economic policy, deftly marginalizing others who challenged him. Under the stewardship of Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke, the Obama administration adopted policies as favorable toward the financial sector as those of the Clinton and Bush administrations—quite a feat. Never once has Summers publicly apologized or admitted any responsibility for causing the crisis.
Incredibly, before the release of his Epstein correspondence Summers had been playing a leading role in formulating the Center for American Progress’s Project 2029, intended to guide the policy for a potential Democratic administration to follow Trump 2.0.
The highest-profile think tank on the center-left, the Center for American Progress (CAP), has assigned several high-profile policy types to lead an effort that documents show was internally described as “Project 2029.”
According to two people with knowledge of the arrangement and a member of CAP, one of the leads on the economic policy plank for this project is Harvard professor and former Treasury secretary Larry Summers…
They also said that Summers was the final sign-off on a CAP housing policy paper set to be released next week.
Could it be any clearer that the Democratic party and all its policy apparatchiks are enemies of the people and must be completely purged from the party for it to have any chance on delivering positive results for the American people?
No matter how vast the conspiracies of Jeffrey Epstein, no matter how deeply tied he was to American and Israeli intelligence (and Drop Site News has proven Epstein was both), Larry Summers ruined vastly more lives, caused more death and suffering, and did more harm in his public roles as an economics advisor to two Democratic U.S. Presidents.
It’s also important to note that he started his political career working for the Republican Reagan administration and seamlessly transitioned to the Democratic Clinton and Obama administrations to complete the neoliberal economic transformation begun under Reagan.
Now that the U.S. economy is completely hollowed out and its days as a global hegemon are rapidly coming to a close, Summers is finally being pushed from his high seats at Harvard, Open AI, and the Center for American Progress.
Too bad it came at least 20 years too late.
Normally I ignore the style of government rhetoric and concentrate on the substance. But the Trump administration is so pathetically juvenile it beggars belief:
Womp womp, cry all you want. These criminal illegal aliens aren’t getting released.
Like clockwork, violent rioters have arrived at the Broadview ICE facility to demand the release of some of the worst human beings on planet earth.
Get a job you imbecilic morons. pic.twitter.com/k4HdE5IqNu
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) November 14, 2025
I mean, what? This sounds like something from a schoolyard. Womp, womp? Imbecilic morons?
Of course, the fish rots from the head:
“If there’s nothing incriminating in the files, sir, why not—” Lucey began to say as the president took questions aboard Air Force One.
Before she could finish, however, Trump pointed his finger at her and barked, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.”
…
“This reporter behaved in an inappropriate and unprofessional way toward her colleagues on the plane. If you’re going to give it, you have to be able to take,” a White House official told the Daily Beast.
There was, of course, nothing inappropriate or unprofessional about Lucey’s question.
America is ruled by stupid, foolish children. Almost everything Trump has done has backfired, harming America’s economy and position in the world. And he’s scared, as he should be, because he was Epstein’s best friend for years, and there’s no way he didn’t know what was going on. Nor is the man who leered at Teen USA contestants and grabbed women by the pussy (his words) likely to have not partaken in Epstein’s wares.
Trump was always, obviously, a sexual predator, a rapist and scum. Unlike other scum he’s barely even tried to conceal it. People voted for him because he didn’t sound like a normal politician (which is good) but were fools, because what he sounded like was a profoundly stupid, greedy and selfish man without an iota of concern for other people who enjoyed belittling and hurting them.
It is both profoundly sad and amusing to watch him hurt those who voted for him, like farmers, the most. And costs keep soaring:
Stop voting for obvious frauds, politicians suffering from dementia, and those who get off on hurting other people. “Different” isn’t enough, it has to be different in the sense of “actually wants to help people.” I have sympathy, but complete disdain for anyone who thought Trump would be good for ordinary Americans “like them.” He has governed exactly like one would expect: vastly corrupt, cruel and almost entirely to the benefit of other billionaires.
Democracy works when, at the least, ordinary people vote their own interests. Americans, and most Westerners, seem entirely incapable of doing so. (And yes, there were other options. Stop whining about how third parties can’t win, and stop voting for the duopoly. For the slow of wit, Biden was also human garbage.)
Pathetic
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For a long time after the Industrial Revolution, many thinkers believed that automation would lead to us living lives of leisure. Twenty hour work weeks, or even less, and many people wouldn’t need to work at all, but would still live good lives.
It never happened.
Economists will tell you this is because there’s always more work to be done, but economists are the priesthood of capitalism, not scientists, not even social scientists.
Most of us are well aware that many jobs are, in David Graeber’s memorable phrase, bullshit jobs. They either don’t really need to be done or are actively harmful. Everyone working in private equity. All the engineers optimizing ads. Almost everyone who works on Wall Street or in shadow banking. Most bankers, for that matter. The jobs which are actually necessary, “essential workers”, are badly paid and treated, but if they don’t show up, as we find out in a garbage, nurse, transit or teamster strike, disaster ensues.
If the janitors don’t show up, everyone’s in shit. If the CEO doesn’t show up, life continues and most people don’t care. Indeed, without CEOs most companies would run better than they do, and you’d be in a lot less danger of losing your job.
We could easily work 20 hour weeks already, if that was a priority.
But the structure of capitalism makes this impossible. We create goods which are designed to wear out quickly and be replaced. “Planned Obsolesence.” We need people to have jobs to get money to buy these shoddy goods. We buy fast food crap because we’re too busy, rather than cooking good food, and most people spend their lives doing work they’d never do if they didn’t need money to survive.
So we find more bullshit jobs, and more harmful jobs for people, and the machine churns on, destroying the environment, making people sick and unhappy and forcing us into wage slavery. Most people spend most of their waking hours doing what they’re told. Or else. Then when you’re old, you might be allowed to retire, and enjoy your declining health. Might.
We have more houses than we need, far more than the number of homeless. America throws out one-third of its food, yet people go hungry. There’s more than enough, literally more than enough food for everyone in the world to have a full and healthy diet.
Perhaps they will, I hope so. To do so, however, they will have to move away from capitalism towards true communism, where everyone shares in the benefits of automation, and not just a few.
There is no reason why this isn’t possible. It could have been done any time in the last century or so, had we wished to.
Remember this: you work like a dog, obey some manager’s orders and don’t do what you really want to do because our system, and our leaders require it when it isn’t actually necessary.
Capitalism might (or might not) have been necessary for industrialization. But it is a set of leg irons weighing all of us down now, and threatening to destroy the very conditions required for life to continue on Earth.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, and the task of the next generation of leadership is to figure out how to run modern societies without it, without wasteful over-consumption and without destroying the environment, while making sure everyone has what they need and can live fulfilling lives: lives they choose, where most of their time is their own to do with as they would, not as some boss desires.
May it be so. The other options are far, far worse, likely catastrophically so.
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This is a thread for comments on how to prepare for bad times. All off-topic comments will be deleted. The thread will be re-upped every Saturday so that resources can build over time.
(I’m going to bring this back to the top at least once a month, maybe more, so people can read the old advice and add theirs.)
Elevated from Comments. Piece by KT Chong
China is now entering the next phase of its economic-growth engine — humanoid robots.
And just like with EVs, the shift is happening fast, quietly, and with the same pattern: Chinese companies industrialize before Western analysts even realize it’s begun.
UBTech, Unitree, XPeng — they’ve all started mass-producing and delivering humanoid robots. This is not “prototype hype” or “lab demo” stuff anymore. It’s real machines getting shipped to real factories, hospitals, and even homes. China’s humanoid sector is going to be the next multi-hundred-billion-dollar growth curve, and the West is, once again, completely oblivious.
Frankly, IMO it’s already too late for the West to catch up.
Anyway, my point here today is… the Unitree G1 Ecosystem.
I’ll keep this mercifully short. One commenter in my Friday night econ news post asked, in a kind of oblique way, what would I do in this environment.
Okay, I’ll play — but not without stating firmly and loudly that I am not dispensing investment advice, nor am I licensed any longer to do so. We clear on that?
A liquidity crisis is already here. But this may not be like your father’s ’08 crisis. In ’08, the USD rose — counterintuitively — against every other major currency. Why? The need for USD to cover credit losses was global, and NYC became a literal blackhole for USD. I made an absolute killing on the USD during the ’08 crisis, and afterwards even more on the banks and zero coupon bonds. I made several people fortunes they still retain.
But the crisis now unraveling doesn’t look like one of confidence, it looks like an animal out of a medieval grotesque, certainly not something the Fed can backstop.
Fire in the hole!
Sure, the Fed might do QE. But Congress can’t do a bailout with almost $1trillion in interest payments on US debt imminent and Trump offering $2k bribes to every citizen in America. It’s impossible. What would one call inflation with QE?
What would you call that?
Hyperinflationary?
It’ll be damned ugly whatever happens; whatever you want to call it.
Were I still advising investors I’d be putting them in Yuan interest bearing accounts, I’d be buying silver on the dips, JPY, SKW, and buying way out of the money puts on S&P 500 and NASDAQ. In short, if you can find an affordable way to buy puts on things that are impossible to happen, buy them, because one or two will hit big, and you’ll rake in the money.
Silver’s in what’s called a secular bull market, not a cyclical one — cyclical means three to five year cycles, whereas secular means, “We don’t fucking have any idea how long ‘dis bitch is going up or down.” This particular secular bull is being driven by a massive externality: China’s draconian export controls of the metal. The problem, right now, from a technical trading perspective, is a failed double-top breakout. This is bearish in the near term, so an under $40 buying opportunity might be realistic. As a side note: China has a VERY long history with the white metal, but not so much the yellow one. I can recommend a good book if you are interested.
You can invest in the Yuan in several US banks/investment firms. Some accounts are interest bearing, others are just a pure play on the currency. If you want specifics, send me a DM. But the current T-bill replacement is silver, but buy it under $45 if you can. Under $40 is best.
But, for fuck’s sake, avoid paying premiums for silver. What does that mean? If you buy silver coins, buy 99 percent silver grade coins — not the overpriced ones from the US Mint. Buy the off-market ones. Otherwise, the US silver cartel will clean out your gains before you even begin.
Obviously, Epstein was scum of the lowest order; a blackmailer, a pimp, a pedophile, and a traitor. (Working with Mossad to blackmail American politicians was surely treason. And given that Israel is a genocidal, religious ethno-state, possibly the most evil country in the world, well…)
But like many effective evil people, Epstein had his virtues. I found this mix of documents from Noam Chomsky particularly interesting:
Here’s some kind of letter of recommendation that Noam Chomsky wrote for his “highly valued friend,” Jeffrey Epstein. pic.twitter.com/t73oxMcXte
— Jacob Silverman (@SilvermanJacob) November 14, 2025
And, as Glenn points out:
And that’s to say nothing of the financial entanglements. pic.twitter.com/dAfVVx1j7J
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 14, 2025
For what it’s worth, I very much doubt that Chomsky had sex with underage girls. And that’s the thing, Epstein was not a one-note pimp and blackmailer, he was a charismatic social chameleon. What Chomsky wanted was intellectual conversation, inside information on politics, and to meet and converse with interesting scientists and scholars (and money, everyone wants money).
So that’s what Epstein gave him. Among scholars, Epstein was scholarly. Among artists, an aesthete. And yet, he was best friends with Donald Trump, who is the philistine’s philistine, a man who is not just without culture, but whose taste can only be described as tacky. A man who thinks a golden shitter is classy and who has probably never read a book.
People of great evil have virtues. Those virtues are morally neutral but real. Epstein was extremely smart and charismatic, and he was able to read people like a book and give them what they wanted. They all thought he was their friend, even as he used them. (And who knows? He may well have actually felt friendly towards a few of them. Certainly, his relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell appears to have been genuinely affectionate.)
Hitler was extremely brave and, until he burnt out on amphetamines, intelligent. Genghis Khan was brave, a military and organizational genius, and routinely made his former enemies into his most important subordinates (Subotai, for example), and none of them ever betrayed him. He inspired an insane level of loyalty.
Bravery, intelligence, loyalty, energy, and even certain types of honor are all virtues, but they are morally neutral virtues; they amplify whatever you are, making you more effective. Without bravery and energy, being good or evil doesn’t matter: the person is ineffective. With them, they become saints or monsters.
Epstein appears to have had genuine charm and social ability, as well as a surfeit of brains. That’s what made him so effectively evil. The wealth and generosity with it didn’t hurt, of course, but he was so valuable to Mossad, and many others, exactly because of his gifts.
This lesson, that evil is often comes wrapped in an attractive and impressive package is one we regularly forget. Fair enough, in the Age of Trump — a dribbling idiot who was voted for despite his known leering at teenage girls, his “grab them by the pussy” comment, rape, and his long record of stiffing people who worked for him is the opposite. Any idiot should have known he was self-serving scum who would betray his followers repeatedly.
But we’ve also had plenty of attractive evil. Reagan. Bill Clinton (not his wife, she has the charisma of dead flounder), Obama — the purveyor of hopium. Clinton and Obama were energetic, smart, and charismatic. Reagan was stupid, but charismatic, with a folksy charm that made people think he cared about them, when all he wanted to do (other than an admirable hatred of nukes) was hurt everyone who wasn’t rich. (And then there’s Tony Blair, who now looks like Satan after a debauch, but once seemed so shiny.)
Evil is often attractive. Seductive. We are warned about that often in myth, but again, and again, we forget. Let Epstein remind us.
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While reading deeper, I found something much more important: a lot of these new humanoid startups aren’t building from scratch. Instead, they’re standing on the Unitree G1 frame and layering their own proprietary AI on top. That means Unitree has quietly become the default hardware platform for China’s humanoid boom — like the Android of robot bodies.
A few examples:
1. A-Bots Robotics (Shenzhen, 2024)
• Focus: precision assembly, modular SDK
• AI layer: Baidu Ernie-ViLM for object manipulation
• Notes: 150+ units in Foxconn trials; ~$22k package; tuned for fragile electronics
2. HPDrones Tech (Guangzhou, 2023)
• Focus: warehouse logistics + drone hand-off automation
• AI layer: proprietary SLAM + multi-floor routing
• Notes: partnered with Unitree; 500-unit rollout for e-commerce warehouses in Q1 2026
3. LeRobot Labs (Beijing, 2024)
• Focus: open-source robotics + reinforcement learning
• AI layer: embodied datasets, tool-use improvisation
• Notes: hacked 20+ G1s for universities; GitHub repo exploded; expanding to eldercare
4. Weston Intelligence (Hangzhou, 2023)
• Focus: healthcare — vitals scanning, bedside conversations
• AI layer: Tencent Hunyuan conversational model
• Notes: deployed in Shanghai hospitals; sub-$20k price; measurable patient-compliance benefits
5. DexAI Dynamics (Shenzhen, 2024)
• Focus: dexterity — folding fabric, micro-adjustments, teleop self-supervision
• Notes: $80M raised; 100 units deployed in garment factories; arguably the best hands in China now
And then there’s MindOn — the one that caught my eye earlier — using the G1 frame to build a full butler/housekeeping robot (“MindOne”). One of their engineers even said they eventually want their own frame, but that’s the point: everyone is starting on Unitree first.
Unitree has locked down the humanoid robot ecosystem
All these startups — even if they eventually design their own skeletons — are still tying their early models to:
• Unitree’s frames
• Unitree’s actuator supply chain
• Unitree’s low-cost motor ecosystem
• Unitree’s software layer and APIs
Once you build your first few generations on someone else’s chassis + firmware, you’re effectively locked into their ecosystem. Switching costs explode. You’d have to rewrite half your AI stack.
So Unitree has already achieved what Western robotics companies wish they could do:
Become the default hardware substrate for an entire national robotics industry.
This is exactly how China overtook the West in EVs — standardized hardware, cheap mass manufacturing, and dozens of startups building on top of the same base.
Unitree is still a private company.
Given everything above, the most obvious question becomes: When does Unitree IPO?
On 15–16 November 2025 (literally this weekend), Unitree completed its pre-IPO regulatory tutoring with CITIC Securities — an unusually fast four-month process that normally takes 6–12 months.
The company publicly stated in September that it expects to submit the formal prospectus and listing application to the Shanghai STAR Market between October and December 2025.
Market sources still quote a targeted valuation of up to US$7 billion (≈50 billion RMB).
Once the prospectus is accepted (usually 2–4 rounds of CSRC questions), the actual listing can happen remarkably quickly in a hot sector — sometimes inside 3–6 months. A Q1/Q2 2026 listing is the base case, but a very late-2025 listing is still possible if the regulator fast-tracks it the way they have the tutoring.
What About America?
Meanwhile… America’s Great White Hope Elon Musk is already behind.
Elon Musk promised that the U.S. would lead the humanoid robot race with Tesla Optimus — but the timelines have slipped, and the window has basically closed. By the time Musk’s robot is actually ready for real-world deployment — 2 years from now? 3? — China’s robotics companies will already be deep into mass production, with tens of thousands of units deployed across factories, warehouses, homes, hospitals, and service industries.
And let’s be real — we all already know this:
Tesla will NOT be cost-competitive. Not even close.
China has already hit the sub–$20k price point for serious humanoids. Several G1-derived platforms will likely break below $15k. Meanwhile, Tesla Optimus — if it gets out of prototype limbo — will land somewhere between $20k–$40k+, before customization, localization, or integration costs. It’s the exact same pattern we saw with EVs, solar panels, drones, lithium batteries, telecom gear — the U.S. builds one expensive proof-of-concept; China builds ten factories and ships globally.
So yes, Tesla’s robot may survive inside the U.S., but only through:
• tariffs,
• import bans,
• national-security excuses,
and whatever industrial-policy tool Washington can wield.
It won’t survive on merit. It will survive on protectionism.
But step outside the U.S.?
Why would any ASEAN, Middle Eastern, African, or Latin American country buy a Tesla robot when Unitree, UBTech, XPeng, and others are offering machines that are:
• cheaper,
• and available now — not in 2027,
• generations ahead and more advanced by 2027.
You think Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia is going to pay double the price for a worse robot just to keep Washington happy? You think they’re going to turn down a $12k Unitree or $16k UBTech because Trump tries to bully them into paying for a $35k American robot instead?
The U.S. will absolutely try to pressure, coerce, or outright threaten developing countries into “buying American” — the same way it pressures them on telecom, semiconductors, energy infrastructure, ports, and industrial policy. But this time I don’t think most countries will obey.
They have options now.
By the time the U.S. finally ships its first commercially deployable humanoids in 2–3 years, the rest of the world will already be locked into the Chinese robotic ecosystem — Unitree frames, Chinese actuators, Chinese SDKs, Chinese AI integration, Chinese supply chains.
The EU, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan — effectively U.S. satellites — may follow Washington’s orders and switch to American robots. Maybe. If their economies in two years can still afford it.
Everyone else?
Forget it.
Forcing U.S. factories and businesses to buy “American-only” humanoid robots — which will be more expensive and less advanced — will cripple U.S. competitiveness across the board.
If American companies are stuck paying $30k–$40k per unit for less capable Tesla or U.S.-made robots, while factories in China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, Vietnam, Mexico, Turkey, and everywhere across the Global South are deploying $12k–$18k Chinese robots at scale, the cost gap between U.S. and foreign manufacturing will explode. And it won’t stop at robotics — it will cascade downstream into every single sector that depends on automation:
• logistics
• warehousing
• construction
• agriculture
• textiles
• electronics assembly
• packaging
• even retail, service, and hospitality
If U.S. firms are locked into a high-cost, low-capability robotic ecosystem while the rest of the world uses cheaper, better, faster machines, then every American industry that relies on automation gets structurally handicapped. That’s not just a disadvantage — that’s YUGE and permanent.
So Trump’s protectionism will actually accelerate the decline of U.S. manufacturing competitiveness. Because the battlefield is no longer labor cost — the battlefield is automation cost.
And China will win that fight by orders of magnitude.
This is also why I doubt even America’s closest aligned countries will follow U.S. orders when Washington eventually demands they drop Chinese robots and buy American ones. Unless they’ve developed a death wish for their own industries, they simply can’t afford to sabotage themselves like that — especially when their economies will likely be in even worse shape two years from now.
Except Europe. Europe will probably obey, because their heads are shoved so far up America’s arse they can’t even think straight — and then there’s that incessant, obnoxious demand of theirs: “You must stop be friend with Russia first or we won’t play with you!”
In my opinion China will eventually move toward some form of universal income or redistribution. Once robots replace most human labor, the state will simply “tax” robotic productivity — in whatever form it chooses — and channel that output back to the population. China can do that because the government actually has the authority, the ideology, and the political structure to redistribute.
After all, that’s the logical endgame of communism, isn’t it? A fully automated productive base supporting human welfare.
America? No such luck.
In the U.S., the elites — the top 5%, or really the top 1% — will own the robots. They’ll own the factories, the logistics chains, the land, the means of production, and the automated labor force. Everyone else below them will get… nothing. No jobs, no prospects, no future, nada. Just a growing underclass structurally locked out of the new automated economy, where human labor is obsolete and redundant.
And unlike China, the U.S. government can’t — and won’t — redistribute. It won’t tax robots because it won’t tax the ultra-rich. It won’t implement a universal income. It won’t structurally rebalance anything. The millions displaced by automation will simply be left to rot — not because the technology is bad, but because the political system is incapable of adapting to it.
And if there’s one thing I’ve learned comparing Americans and Chinese: Americans are astonishingly ideologically rigid, stubbornly wedded to outdated principles even when reality punishes them. The Chinese, by contrast, are pragmatic — willing to bend, adapt, and change. That adaptability will matter a lot when robots replace human labor and make capitalism, as we know it, obsolete.
That’s why America is panicking. They know they can’t adapt.
Ian Comments: again, China is ahead in most technologies and they have an unparalleled ability to scale. Once they scale, no one else can compete. You either find a place where you’re ahead and concentrate on staying ahead, or you find a niche. It used to be that China didn’t feel the need to be ahead in everything, but Trump, in his first time, with his sanctions, changed that. The Chinese realized they had to own full stack of everything.
One side effect of this is that Musk isn’t going to get his one trillion dollar payday. It’s based on him hitting targets, including in humanoid robots which he won’t be able to make, because Tesla’s too far behind and lacks the ability to scale.
More on the transition away from labor-distribution capitalism soon.
And great piece by KT. Thanks for letting me post it.