London has the house prices of California and the income levels of Mississippi.

the UK is seriously broken, I always reflect on the energy generation statistics of the UK per capita

while in the US you see automated car washes, in the uk most car washes are Albanians n other immigrants etc

I recommend Dan’s book (https://danwang.co/breakneck/) to those wanting to better understand China - and the United States.

I read the whole post. Really revealing - so much analysis but not a single mention of a global system that is reaching a singularity in wealth concentration, and maybe how that might be an important dimension to reflect on. Its like using so many words to deeply analyze the speed differentials in a car race, but not looking up to see that all the drivers are racing towards a brick wall.

As someone unfamiliar with the author, I had a deep amount of cynicism for the length of this piece... but damn, it's good, top to bottom.

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

As a Brit, I struggled to get much interesting out of this considering how many times he mentions "Europe" (in that condescendingly general way that only US folks seem to manage).

He talks about "European" prospects and his trip to Denmark but then cites London as a representative example?

This almost broke my brain it felt so incoherent.

Never mind that (despite my personal wishes) we're not even part of the EU (which I assume is what he means by "Europe"). Surely he knows what an anomaly London is? It's not representative of anything except itself.

Referencing the extreme wage dispersion and severe housing pressure of London in a rant about Europe in general is a completely pointless endeavour.

He did say one thing I agree with. If you like good food, rich culture and great surroundings, "Europe" is indeed a lovely place to be for the most part.

Maybe I'll just keep that as my takeaway. It's too early in the year for doom and gloom anyway

To my surprise I found myself reading the entire rather long piece. His thoughts on AI, San Francisco, China, and other topics, are well worth the time.

As often the case with Dan's letters, a well balanced take on many issues. I particularly appreciated the thoughts on AI and (what I read) the undertone of infrastructure being the real differentiator between the US effort and China. We'll see how it plays out this year. "May you live in exciting times" etc.

> 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.

great line

from the piece:

“ the median age of the latest Y Combinator cohort is only 24, down from 30 just three years ago “

does yc publish stats to validate?

Great read. I listened to Dan on Tyler Cowen’s podcast and found him to be a very interesting thinker. He has the air of someone who is a lot more intellectually honest than a lot of our pundits (Tyler is pretty good though, he’s not that target of this comment)

The Europe of today is the result of 400 years of brain drain. It would take generations to reverse the effects, if anyone even wanted to.

Spot on by Dan as always, especially about the decline of Europe and the rise of China.

A fascinating and eye-opening read.

One of my intentions for this coming year is to critically examine and (if appropriate) alter or dispel some preconceptions I have. To that end, I'm curious about this part:

> You don’t have to convince the elites or the populace that growth is good or that entrepreneurs could be celebrated. Meanwhile in Europe, perhaps 15 percent of the electorate actively believes in degrowth. I feel it’s impossible to convince Europeans to act in their self interest.

Can someone elaborate on how growth is aligned with the general interest? To my mind, although growth could _theoretically_ lead to a "lifting all boats" improvement across the board, in practice it inevitably leads to greater concentration of wealth for the elite while the populace deals with negative externalities like pollution, congestion, and advertizing. Degrowth, on the other hand, would directly reduce those externalities; and, if imposed via progressive taxation, would have further societal benefits via funded programs.

I'd very much like to hear the counter-argument. It would be pleasant and convenient to believe that growth and industry are Good, Actually, so that I needn't feel guilty for contributing to them or for furthering my own position - but (sadly!) I can't just make myself believe something without justification.

he makes enough odd claims about cities and countries in the beginning that i can only assume aren't really meant to be taken seriously, so i'm at a bit of a loss for how i should be reading this

> Narrowness of mind is something that makes me uneasy about the tech world.

> The Bay Area has all sorts of autistic tendencies. Though Silicon Valley values the ability to move fast, the rest of society has paid more attention to instances in which tech wants to break things.

> There’s a general lack of cultural awareness in the Bay Area. It’s easy to hear at these parties that a person’s favorite nonfiction book is Seeing Like a State while their aspirationally favorite novel is Middlemarch.

It's refreshing to read someone addressing this aspect of the Mecca of the tech word.

For the reasons above the tech elites are the ones I trust the less and fear the most when they are involved in national and international politics. And I think the current state of the US is directly caused by the rise of post dot com Silicon Valley.

> I believe that Silicon Valley possesses plenty of virtues. To start, it is the most meritocratic part of America.

Oh come on, this is so untrue. Silicon Valley loves credentialism and networking, probably more than anywhere else. Except the credentials are the companies you’ve worked for or whether you know some founder or VC, instead of what school you went to or which degrees you have.

I went to a smaller college that the big tech firms didn’t really recruit from. I spent the first ~5 years of my career working for a couple smaller companies without much SV presence. Somehow I lucked into landing a role at a big company that almost everyone has definitely heard of. I didn’t find my coworkers to necessarily be any smarter or harder working than the people I worked with previously. But when I decided it was time to move on, companies that never gave me the time of day before were responding to my cold applies or even reaching out to _me_ to beg me to interview.

And don’t get me started on the senior leadership and execs I’ve seen absolutely run an entire business units into the ground and lose millions of dollars and cost people their jobs, only to “part ways” with the company, then immediately turn around and raise millions of dollars from the same guys whose money they just lost.

My copy of Breakneck arrived a few days ago and I'm rushing through the book, hard to put down, highly recommended

As a European, the commentary felt very biting and accurate. An entire continent defined by being smug about not being the USA. Where not competing is seen as a great virtue and where significant parts of the electorate are actively voting against fixing the glaringly obvious problems.

The supposed niceness of the cities also is just not true. Many European cities are awful places. Where, maybe with the exception of a few tourist areas, you will only find dirty streets, rows of old apartment building regularly smeared with graffiti, shops selling used phones and vapes and food stores competing over who can sell the cheapest, still edible Kebab.

I have nonspecific positive associations with Dan Wang's name, so I rolled my eyes a bit but kept going when "If the Bay Area once had an impish side, it has gone the way of most hardware tinkerers and hippie communes" was followed up by "People aren’t reminiscing over some lost golden age..."

But I stopped at this:

> “AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever.” It’s a Pascal’s Wager

That's not what Pascal's wager is! Apocalyptic religion dates back more than two thousand years and Blaise Pascal lived in the 17th century! When Rosa Luxemburg said to expect "socialism or barbarism", she was not doing a Pascal's Wager! Pascal's Wager doesn't just involve infinite stakes, but also infinitesimal probabilities!

The phrase has become a thought-terminating cliche for the sort of person who wants to dismiss any claim that stakes around AI are very high, but has too many intellectual aspirations to just stop with "nothing ever happens." It's no wonder that the author finds it "hard to know what to make of" AI 2027 and says that "why they put that year in their title remains beyond me."

It's one thing to notice the commonalities between some AI doom discourse and apocalyptic religion. It's another to make this into such a thoughtless reflex that you also completely muddle your understanding of the Christian apologetics you're referencing. There's a sort of determined refusal to even grasp the arguments that an AI doomer might make, even while writing an extended meditation on AI, for which I've grown increasingly intolerant. It's 2026. Let's advance the discourse.

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Dam Wang, good read!

This is such a long letter it would take me probably 3 months to write it. I would have to end my year by September and spend the rest of the year writing the letter.

>But American problems seem more fixable to me than Chinese problems

Dan still one of the sharper PRC writers, but like all analysts who moves from PRC to stateside, he used to be Canadian in China writing about China to US, now Canadian writing in US about China, Dan starts peddling Murican dynamism cope, maybe something in the water. i.e. see his his post breakneck Chinatalk interview: Humorless engineering governance can't beat very funny Trump/US governance is... certainly a take. Maybe he should do his audience a favor and elucidate why boring competent engineer government is less dynamic/resilient than lawyers other than elections can pivot fast to reduce lawyers (kek) and something something and see see pee can't pivot fast to make productive innovative libtards, since seeseepee STEM can't innovate. Because as we know fast 4 year election cycles work better than slow 5 year plans. CCP certain needs 50% more lawyers... to slow it down.

Happy New year

> I believe that Silicon Valley possesses plenty of virtues. To start, it is the most meritocratic part of America. Tech is so open towards immigrants that it has driven populists into a froth of rage. It remains male-heavy and practices plenty of gatekeeping. But San Francisco better embodies an ethos of openness relative to the rest of the country. Industries on the east coast — finance, media, universities, policy — tend to more carefully weigh name and pedigree.

I believe I read that 27% of the founders in the YC Spring 25 class went to an Ivy League school and 40% previously worked at a magnificent 7 company. I'm not saying this is any worse than the east coast, but so much for name and pedigree not mattering.

Northern California is what it always has been: the barrier wall of manifest destiny, where instead of crossing the ocean the pioneers and all subsequent generations stayed to incubate the same incentives, and have been relentlessly in pursuit of the next gold rush. Gold, yellow journalism, semiconductors, personal computing, SaaS, crypto, AI, etc. It's the sink drain attractor of people looking to improve their fortunes in one way or another, but almost always around some kind of bonanza of concentrated opportunity. The concept of it being "meritocratic" is a rephrasing of ideology that's always existed about the region: you too could get rich here. But I don't really see any difference in the networks of power that exist in SV as do the rest of the country.

I grew up in the bay area and am far happier living outside it. I'm happier to be in a place where art and the humanities are valued instead of cast aside as immaterial or silly or a distraction. I'm happier to live in a place where people have varied interests instead of orienting their life around whatever the prevailing Big Thing is.

> So the 20-year-olds who accompanied Mr. Musk into the Department of Government Efficiency did not, I would say, distinguish themselves with their judiciousness. The Bay Area has all sorts of autistic tendencies. Though Silicon Valley values the ability to move fast, the rest of society has paid more attention to instances in which tech wants to break things. It is not surprising that hardcore contingents on both the left and the right have developed hostility to most everything that emerges from Silicon Valley.

I see some positive aspects as to more inclusive definitions of autism and neurodivergence, but I hate that we're at the point where "trying to get rich at all costs" is now perceived as autistic (and let's be clear: using mobile gas turbines that get people sick to generate power for AI is not "autistic"). Greed is not autistic, but of course the ideology of SV is that nobody actually cares about money there. Why else would they have apartments without furniture and piles of pizza boxes. It must be the autism.

> While critics of AI cite the spread of slop and rising power bills, AI’s architects are more focused on its potential to produce surging job losses. Anthropic chief Dario Amodei takes pains to point out that AI could push the unemployment rate to 20 percent by eviscerating white-collar work. I wonder whether this message is helping to endear his product to the public.

The animating concern of developing AI since 2015 has basically been "MAD" applied to the technology. The Bostrom book mentioned later in this article was clearly instrumental in creating this language to think about AI, as you can see many tech CEOs began getting "concerned" about AI around this time, prior to many of the big developments in AI like transformers. One of the seminal emails of OpenAI between Musk and Altman talks about starting a "Manhattan Project for AI". This was a useful concept to graft the development of these companies onto:

1. Firstly, it's a threat to investors. Get in on the ground floor or you will get left behind. We are building tomorrow's winners and losers and there are a lot of losers in the future.

2. Secondly, it leads to a natural source of government support. This is a national security concern. Fund this, guarantee the success of this, or America will lose.

On both counts, this framing seems to be working pretty well.

> One way that Silicon Valley and the Communist Party resemble each other is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed, completely humorless.

There is a commedy show literally called Silicon Valley making fun of what's going on in the valley and everybody I know in tech loves it and appreciates the humor.

The beginning perfectly embodies the culture in Silicon Valley and touches on a crucial part that I notice when I visit: the complete lack of self expression or as I would put it ZERO drip.

Remove the tech, what does SF contribute to the world wrt culture? Especially when compared to other metropolitan cities: NY, London, LA, Tokyo.

>Lack of action due to the expectation of long timelines is one of the sins of the lawyerly society.

>But American problems seem more fixable to me than Chinese problems.

China has stayed on trajectory of improving life of its society for a long time. USA has been in decline all that time and decent accelerated after Cold War with Russia ended.

All of China's growth comes from its internal resource. Growth in the USA had been driven by exploiting other countries.

>I made clear in my book that I am drawn to pluralism as well as a broader conception of human flourishing than one that could be delivered by the Communist Party.

Pluralism had been eradicated in the western society. I can't speak freely in Canada. People get cancelled or jailed for speaking their mind in UK. US is not too far behind in that.

There is no meaningful pluralism in the West. They never make a long term plan they can follow for many years.

China has monolithic ( more so ) society with shared culture, language(s) and national identity that runs deep to the gene level. They don't don't allow foreign influence to erode it. It's much easier to make progress when people share the same long term vision and goals.

CPC is doing just fine leading the country into the future. Sure, it has a monopoly on power, but it also owns its mistakes and fixes them. Multiparty systems of the USA and the rest of the West are just two curtains on the stage, and when you draw the curtains you see the same people attending the same party.

Elected officials aim to earn as much as they can in their short stay in power. After all, they only have a few years before they get replaced, better make use of the short time you got.

China IMO has a much brighter outlook for the future

Wait, how funny is this guy. That's an easy top 10 funny person out of nowhere in my life.

USA is cooked sadly, that being said being Britain 2.0 ain't too bad. pretty much all the YC companies in the past few cohorts just are desperately rent seeking, sad but true - go look urself

> Which of the tech titans are funny? In public, they tend to speak in one of two registers. The first is the blandly corporate tone we’ve come to expect when we see them dragged before Congressional hearings or fireside chats. The second leans philosophical, as they compose their features into the sort of reverie appropriate for issuing apocalyptic prophecies on AI.

This is just not accurate though? For example, this post from a tech titan might not necessarily be that funny but it's neither blandly corporate nor philosophical: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2006548935372902751