You do realize it doesn't matter whether you like the ideology or not right? Only what the leadership in China thinks matters.

Unfortunately for them, the few examples of Communist dictatorships they can reference all failed, so as far as I can tell, they've gone back to what worked for the previous 2000 years.

That's for the people. For the government, it's about acting with moral virtue and taking care of the masses (so they're convinced to not revolt). You can contrast it with the main alternative government philosophy of the time, which is legalism (basically ruling with strict laws and crushing rebellions with force).

Except it's not a huge threat. If you look at historical Chinese peasant rebellions and coups, all of them stem from economic failure. Those that are purely ideologically motivated do not succeed.

Even the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest, unlike what you'd learn from Western news media, is not primarily ideologically motivated. The leaders were calling for democracy, but they also had 18% inflation and 100 million people who had government jobs which didn't get raises to adjust for inflation. In fact if the protest succeeded, they might have ended up more socialist rather than capitalist.

No, hurting the US economy is antithetical to his goals. Remember that the main threat to his position is an internal uprising or coup, not the US fighting or winning a war against them. The more stable the international economy, the more stable the domestic one, and the less reason people have to rise up against him.

If you read up on Confucian government philosophy, it's very obvious what he wants is stability above all else.

How do you expect a tiny handful of billionaires to pay trillions? Do you understand a trillion is 1000 billion?

By the way, billionaires do not actually have billions in cash. They have billions of dollars worth of stocks at their current market valuation. But if they really tried to turn all their shares into dollars, the market would collapse, the valuation would fall, and they would not have billions worth of stocks.

The point is that there's no technology gap. If you want to make back trillions of dollars of investment on your data centers, you can't have a competitor that's almost as good, 40% cheaper and open source.

There are only 6 billion internet-connected people in the world. They invested $2.5 trillion. Just to make the investment back, they need everyone to pay roughly $400 each. By the way, in many parts of the world, $400 is twice their annual income.

Landing on the Moon is far easier than landing on Earth. You don't have the ocean rolling your landing platform, no wind to blow your booster over, and the gravity is 1/6th as strong.

20-40 turbines were destroyed from an unprecedented microburst event, out of more than 70,000 utility-scale wind turbines operating nationally. Fewer than 0.01% are lost to extreme weather each year.

You mean a Tesla Megapack? The new one is 5 MWH. If you do the math, it's $150 million for the batteries. No idea what the weight is or why that even matters. You're not supposed to move it around after installation.

So $150 million a lot right? Well, the cheapest nuclear plants built in China is that price for 50 MW. Unless you want Chinese construction firms and more importantly the Chinese state regulators in charge of your project, you're going to pay a lot more than what they pay. The most recently built US nuclear reactors are units 3 and 4 at Vogtle, with a construction cost of $16.5 million per MW, or $824 million for 50 MW.

That's almost doubling the cost of your $1 billion data center by the way.

Same number as before. You just use the ones in Arizona where the sun is shining. And just FYI, we invented this concept called a power grid, so power production and consumption don't have to be in the same location. It's pretty new so you might not have heard of it.

If you're close sourced and expect to make back trillions of investment in AI infrastructure by charging people usage fees, they're going to use your competitor's free and unencumbered product instead.

Yeah, a fishing pole with a magnet would be a better option at that point. The LEOs can stand behind tall shields or around the corner.

This year is El Nino, which actually generates excessive rainfall in California. Global warming makes the planet wetter on average.

We'll be getting a preview of that with the Strait of Hormuz shut down. That's only a 20% reduction.

How does that help? They'll end up wetting or scratching your face instead.

There's plenty of work that should be done. For example, wild fires cause $400-900 billion in damages every year in the US, yet nobody wants to pay for prevention. Poor road conditions costs $167 billion to $169 billion annually. The lack of affordable child care costs the U.S. economy $172 billion annually.

What's missing is the recognition that unemployed people need to eat anyways, so it's a sunk cost. You can put those people into an after-school program, or send them to the forest and clean up debris, or any of the millions of other things that actually make money in the long term.

You don't need new laws. Machinery occasionally kill people when they malfunction, including construction equipment. A self-driving vehicle is just another machine. The maker could be considered negligent if they knew this could happen, or it already happened multiple times and no action was taken to improve the software.

My guess is that in however millions of miles that they've driven, they must've encountered road construction. They might even have a bug filed to address it. This will be revealed in a court case, showing they had knowledge of the problem, and make them liable for any resulting harm.

They use twice much as electricity, but have 4 times our population. Moreover, a higher portion of their energy mix is electricity, whereas we use more gasoline and natural gas. So they use even less energy than the electricity number might suggest.

We should be asking what the world will look like when they use as much electricity per capita as we do. Personally, I'm just glad it's not going to be all coal.