Balaji Srinivasan

@MacaesBruno Maybe this is something that India, the EU, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the like could cooperate on, using the Internet. They should have the collective scale.

RATIONAL INDUSTRIAL POLICY This is just theoretical at this point, but suppose a rational America wanted to wean itself off key Chinese exports in a surgical manner. What would that look like? (1) First, get data on current US supply chains. Because the state is ready to compel, it should ask for import, customer, and vendor lists on corporate tax returns. It would require paperwork, but you could partially automate it by allowing companies to link their bank transaction data to a government website, and it’s way cheaper than tariffs. (2) Equipped with the data on who each company is buying from and selling to, you get a visualization of t…

AI enables a greater degree of digital autarky. So long as you’re connected to the global Internet.

Ironically, one symptom of deindustrialization is that many commenters have never actually managed a physical business. So. Suppose your US company imports $1M of high quality parts, and adds in its own components to produce finished goods sold for $1.2M per batch. Your gross profit is $200k per batch. But wait! Suddenly a new 30% tariff is imposed on that $1M of parts. You now have to fork over $300k to customs before you sell anything. That’s cash you probably don’t have. Oh, and even if you do sell everything, you’re now losing $100k per batch. With a sinking feeling, you realize your profitable business which you somehow managed to kee…

Uncle Sam cannot get a better deal from Vietnam than free. Vietnamese women grind in factories to produce Nikes, while Uncle Sam sends them printed money in return. Who is ripping off whom? DOLLAR INFLATION IS GLOBAL TAXATION There is just a fundamental misconception about what the USA actually is. It is the seat of a global financial empire (or was). It makes its money by printing it. For example, it printed $1.25T for just one purchase back in 2010. Do you know many Nikes you’d have to sell to make a trillion dollars?!? The reason the American Empire had the right to print a trillion dollars at its whim is because it was managing the…

This is nuking every single supply chain that passes through the US in any way, under the illusion that 45 years of deindustrialization can be fixed in one day of 45% tariffs. Countless low-margin businesses, including US exporters, will be pushed into unprofitability. If you’re a 98 year old man who hasn’t been working out since 1945, and you try benching 315 because you could do that 80 years ago — what happens? Look at this. They are restoring a single parameter to 20th century levels in the hope of restoring the 20th century. But it doesn’t work like that. IBM can set their prices to 1945 levels without recovering the dominance of 19…

Here’s a reframe. AI doesn’t take your job. AI allows you to do any job. So a coder can now make films. And a filmmaker can now write code. It allows a non-specialist to get started. But a specialist will be needed for polish.

We wanted flying cars. We got them with Chinese characters. When I last posted on this, many responses like this came in: - Those aren't cars, they don't have wheels! - Those aren't planes, they don't have wings! - They're too risky! But in reality, the Chinese just made different tradeoffs. And are shipping. https://t.co/MuDhe6Gi3i The estimable @elidourado — a genuinely great guy — noted these were just scaled up quadcopters. And concluded power & risk would be too high. But China has experience from shipping ~10M DJI drones. So they're doing it. We'll see what happens. See also: https://t.co/6IfDHwZUQf @elidourado Good q, but no…

North Korea tried autarky. And you might expect them to pull it off. They're homogenous. They have no short-sighted capitalists. And they have an industrial policy. Yet they still depend on China in practice. Why didn't it work? https://t.co/WQKzoPiYZR This is partly tongue-in-cheek, but partly a real question. After all, North Koreans are not dumb. Next door China became strong under a nominally communist system. And South Korea's success, and the success of the Korean diaspora, shows that North Korea coulda been a contender. But they're not. Why? (1) The obvious answer is because they're unreconstructed Stalinists, and of course I'd agre…

Sometimes policies hurt those they’re intended to help. So it’s worth taking a real build-of-materials from an actual US manufacturer, going through each line, and seeing what tariffs do to their already thin margins. Answer: it’s not good.

@Indian_Bronson Because it can always get worse. Putin’s Russia isn’t worst case. Even Venezuela isn’t. Imperial collapse can get ugly. Every empire must end, just like every person must eventually pass, but that doesn’t mean one needs to artificially hasten it. At least one should know risk.

@mattyglesias Agree with this, though. Deregulate. And also legalize building, in the US and across the Western world.

The 50 IQ = 150 IQ meme has its limits. You can 50 IQ your way to obvious conclusions, like “men and women exist.” But you can’t 50 IQ your way to optimal economic policy. Some things actually have genuine complexity. I agree that excessive money printing = inflation, of course. But there are a few wrinkles. First, the 50 IQ opinion is actually that free money is good! You have to have >50IQ to even understand that scarcity exists, that consequences exist. Second, if you never printed any money at all, you would have no money supply. So the exact mechanism for how and when money is introduced (Bitcoin mining, gold mining, etc) is very i…

The Internet was nothing, and then it was everything. https://t.co/jOem7MALIO

Here's an app I want. Upload a graph. Get the Python code to regenerate it. And the underlying CSV file. And a hi-res PNG export. And make it extremely robust. And make it work without login — to try at least. Obviously AI can help here, but it's flaky. There are a few tools in the ballpark[1-3], but you want something that just works without login, like the early Bitly. It'd be very helpful for anyone making slide decks, because you could then convert many images into your custom house style, while including attribution. [1]: https://t.co/kqIFK1Y2vb [2]: https://t.co/5NJ8qENLm5 [3]: https://t.co/DYWO4quh6C

No reindustrialization without dedollarization. But dedollarization means imperial collapse. On the other hand, so does deindustrialization! This is the fundamental paradox.

Investor migration to the US fell off a cliff after the events of 2020, and hasn't really come back. https://t.co/gxizJzvGQd

We can get independent creators doing this right now with AI. The toolchain is there for images today, using character consistency. With video it’ll take a bit longer but it’ll get there too. Go direct: Hollywood edition.

For a brief period of time in the 1820s, a leader named Simón Bolívar created an embryonic United States of Latin America. It was called Gran Colombia. https://t.co/84ItMOcJ4q History is running in reverse. So it’s possible a new Bolivar emerges. And this time, he could be successful. The century is still young, but I think the next Bolivar may be @nayibbukele. Because he didn’t simply inherit a functional state. He built it from scratch. And he did it without budget, without track record, in the most inhospitable environment you could imagine. So, even as praised as he is, President Bukele is still underrated. I mean, everyone is talki…

Theory: there’s less of a generation gap in the Internet era because we’re seeing more of the same memes.

A few thoughts on the new ChatGPT image release. (1) This changes filters. Instagram filters required custom code; now all you need are a few keywords like “Studio Ghibli” or Dr. Seuss or South Park. (2) This changes online ads. Much of the workflow of ad unit generation can now be automated, as per QT below. (3) This changes memes. The baseline quality of memes should rise, because a critical threshold of reducing prompting effort to get good results has been reached. (4) This may change books. I’d like to see someone take a public domain book from Project Gutenberg, feed it page by page into Claude, and have it turn it into comic book p…

Degrees are less reliable for hiring these days. So are online exams. But the bar for side projects has never been higher. With AI you can cook up a portfolio piece in a weekend.

@Utter_Savagery The current empire may not benefit the average American, at least as much as it did. But tearing down the empire (especially unintentionally) can make things much worse. Roughly, the Russian was to the USSR as the American is to the USA. Worth understanding what happened there.

I’ve thought about this too. My conclusion is that the architects of American Empire spent so much energy obscuring reality that their heirs believed the illusion. The heirs think the postwar US is still a “democracy” or a “country” rather than the greatest empire of all time. And that it can somehow return to the prewar state without a huge decline in living standards. But, obviously, this is not the posture of a people that merely wanted to sit humbly behind their own borders: For decades the US was set up to be the hub of a global empire: - Military bases - UN headquarters in NY - Delaware multinationals - Global universities - Regula…

Dollar inflation is global taxation. If the ~$6T printed since 2020 was spread across just 330M Americans rather than 8B+ globally, you'd go from printing <$1k/head to almost $20k/head. And purchasing power would drop accordingly. https://t.co/0lw4tyGvf0 This is MAGA's fundamental error. They correctly observe that (say) Maui got $700 checks while Ukraine got $100B+, but then incorrectly conclude that all Americans are therefore being ripped off by the world. In reality, American Empire implements global taxation via dollar inflation. So the smarter route would be for MAGA to fix the empire piece-by-piece, by supporting conservatives a…

A deindustrialized America simply does not produce enough to pay for what it consumes. It prints money instead. And exchanges these pieces of paper for valuable goods. But if the world stops using that money, the US has a real problem. So, alienating allies is not a good idea. https://t.co/bdmT67vn6s

That’s because China’s currency is undervalued and America’s dollar is overvalued. Thus, if you look at financial metrics the US is still #1. But if you look at cost-of-living or manufacturing or GDP-PPP it tells a different story. On those metrics, China became #1 long ago. https://t.co/3XnV6ADnR1 In other words, China's low costs means their living standards are much higher than GDP alone would indicate. For example, see this TikTok user's comparison of groceries in China to the US. https://t.co/AmaSqcBhjf Just to calibrate, this is what the 113th largest city in the second poorest province now looks like. China is not a poor country a…

Every program expands until it can send a message, host a crypto wallet, and run an AI model. This is a proposed modernization of Zawinski's Law[1] from the late 90s: “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” Arguably this is already true for every program that uses email to do password resets. But his real insight was that successful programs build a large userbase that you want to turn into a social network. Today the messages sent need not be mails. Moreover, the messages sent need not even be messages, they could be money. Finally, the messages sent…

AI is great for rapid prototyping. But not for polished production. Why? Because the real world is complex. And you’re acting as a sensor. You are “scanning” the world. Determining what it needs. And converting that need into words. But usually not in one prompt.

AI = abundant interns