2025 Letter

For all the insightful takes about everything under the Sun, Dan's cynicism and skewed view towards "Europe" are shown in this letter.

It's not that all his takes are wrong, it's the exaggeration, the doom and gloom and a somewhat dismissal or some unsolved personal issues he has with "Europeans".

The irony is not lost that Dan acts as smug and dismissal as he accuses Europeans to be.

Regarding the whole "Degrowth" thing: yes Europe has those and they found their gold in Governmental entities and they entertain the rich. But.. that's exactly what happens in the US too and Dan as knowledge as he is should know this was mostly an American academia export, he just needs to talk with some people in the very same colleges he regularly set foot into.

Also, he should take a hint when he says historically liberal societies have fared much better than autocratic ones even if those are very focused and appear to make progress very quickly. Having a few mega-bilionaires directing what the populace do or not do might not be a smart move as it sounds. We'll see when the AI musical chairs stops.

Btw, Europe has been dead and on the brink of destruction for a few centuries by now. And according to experts the EU is about to collapse 3 or 4 times a year - minimum.

Exactly _how_ should society deal with it, and exactly _when_ should society deal with it?

Meh. Everywhere has foreign investment. The economic elite of the UK owns the US as well.

In the thread "Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges" [1], I wrote about China'a hardware capability now going far beyond what US can imagine. In Dan's article;

>A rule of thumb is that it takes five years from an American, German, or Japanese automaker to dream up a new car design and launch that model on the roads; in China, it’s closer to 18 months.

Not only is China 3 - 5 times faster in terms of product launches, they would have launch it with a production scale that is at least double the output of other auto marker. If you were to put capacity into the equation as well, China is an order of magnitude faster than any competing countries, at half the cost if not even lower.

Every single year since 2022 China has added more solar power capacity than the entire US solar capacity. And they are still accelerating, with the current roadmap and trend they could install double the entire US solar power capacity in a single year by 2030.

CATL's Sodium Ion Battery is already in production and will be used by EVs and large scale energy storage by end of this year. The cost advantage of these new EV would mean there is partially zero chance EU can compete. And if EU are moaning about it now, they cant even imagine what is coming.

Thanks to AI pushing up memory and NAND price. YMTC and CXMT now have enough breathing room to catch up. If they play this right, I wont be surprised by 2035 30 - 40% of DRAM and NAND will be made by the two Chinese firms. Although judging from their past execution record I highly doubt this will happen, but expect may be 10-15% maximum.

Beyond tech, there are also other part of manufacturing that China has matched or exceeded rest of the world without being noticed by many. Lab Grown Diamond, Cosmetic Production, Agricultural Machinery, Reinforced glass etc. Their 10 years plan on agricultural improvement also come to fruition especially in terms of fruit and veg. I wont be surprised if they no long need US soy bean within 10 years time.

All in all a lot of things in China has passed escape velocity and there is no turning back. China understand US better than US understand themselves, and US doesn't even have any idea about China. I think the quote from the article sums this up pretty well.

"Beijing has been preparing for Cold War without eagerness for waging it, while the US wants to wage a Cold War without preparing for it.".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273326

The UK is already close to the USA on obesity rates and catching up fast.