WATCH: We asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai for his reaction to 100 Stanford grads walking out of his speech today. @BBCWorld

I think SpaceX might be able to reach approximately $1T revenue in 2030

Good points by @pietergaricano against the idea of a European AI lab national champion. If Elon Musk cannot do it, what chance does the French government have? (I am still open-minded about the question, though I have strong priors against.) open.substack.com/pub/silico…

Ning Leng makes an important point here: "Over time, state-owned enterprises expand in these spaces because their soft-budget constraints make them better able to absorb the costs of visibility projects." In a 2012 Carnegie piece I warned that China was finding it increasingly difficult to identify enough productive investment projects (i.e. in which the value of the goods produced exceeded the value of the resources needed to produce them) to achieve the excessively high GDP growth rates Beijing was setting for the economy. If this continued, I argued, we would inevitably see a surge in the country's debt burden and a shift in the share of total Chinese production from private-sector producers to state and quasi-state producers. The reason was because the private sector mostly operates under hard budget constraints while the state and quasi-state sectors mostly doesn't. This means that private businesses in manufacturing sectors that have growing excess capacity (and over time more and more sectors will suffer from this problem) will find it increasingly difficult to get banks to fund growing losses and rising inventories, and so eventually they would have to cut production. Because high GDP growth targets required increasing production, rather than cutting it, and because state and quasi-state entities had much softer budget constraints, I argued that this would inevitably shift total production away from hard-budget constrained entities to soft-budget constrained entities, i.e. from the private sector to the state and quasi-state sectors. What many analysts saw as the result of a change in ideological preferences, in other words, is in fact the necessary outcome of the growth model, and this will continue either until Beijing allows GDP growth rates to drop sharply or until the system runs out of debt capacity. The point is that the regulators can insist all they want that businesses be more disciplined and that manufacturers and local governments behave more rationally, but it is precisely the hard-budget constraint that imposes discipline on investment. By insisting on excessively high GDP growth targets and all but eliminating hard budget constraints, there is simply no way to eliminate involution.

Immigration chart of the day. Indian immigrants have the highest household income of any country of birth in the United States. Among the top 20 immigrant groups, Hondurans have the lowest incomes.

autonomous robot driving through the field at night. no chemicals. no pesticides. just UV light killing pathogens and pests while everyone sleeps. this is @tricrobotics. this is what chemical-free pest control looks like at scale.

WE HAVE A BALD EAGLE MAKING AN ENTRANCE AT THE UFC FREEDOM 250 WEIGH INS [ #UFCWhiteHouse | SUNDAY, JUNE 14 | 8PM ET LIVE on @ParamountPlus ]