Book reading list metagora.blogspot.com/2026/0… #BlogExperiment #ArtificialIntelligence #history #economics #technopolitics

A huge AI data centre is proposed on countryside by Auchtertool village in Fife - to guzzle an estimated 20% of Scotland’s energy consumption. Please sign this petition calling for the Scottish government to stop this. Over 1,200 signatures already. change.org/p/stop-the-propos…

Unhinged

Canberra is running a genoside protection racket. “Juliet Lamont came home from being raped and tortured by a foreign military.. “And her own country ransacked her luggage, seized her phone and laptop, and told her she was under arrest unless she surrendered her passcodes. “Her government did not protect her. Her government investigated her.” ‘Israeli soldiers raped her. Australian customs threatened her’ michaelwest.com.au/israeli-s… via @MichaelWestBiz

Domestic dilution allows for a permanent nuclear deal paired w sanctions relief—but before Iran agrees to any nuclear talks, their precondition is the war must end permanently, with Iranian sovereignty over the Strait recognized & the $24 B in Iran's frozen assets paid to Tehran.

So Russia is banned from FIFA because of their invasion of Ukraine, but America is allowed to HOST THE FIFA GAMES WHILE BOMBING IRAN??? HOW DOES THAT WORK?????

Are we talking about US money or 'Albanian' money laundered through Kushner? #speculation

In the words of Candace Owens; a Conservative American Traditional Catholic Black Woman married to a British blue-blood: “Everything you have been told about Russia is a LIE” #RussiaDay

The US government's illegal sanctions against Cuba are killing children, warned the UN human rights chief. The UN human rights office said US sanctions have caused “widespread harm” in Cuba: -infant mortality has doubled; -childhood cancer survival rates have fallen significantly; -only 30% of essential medicines are available; -fuel shortages have caused food production to decline by 60%. This is a barbaric, medieval-style blockade. news.un.org/en/story/2026/06…

NATO’s info-warfare units take aim at the podcasts after capturing all the AI search engines, including the Chinese DeepSeek. johnhelmer.net/would-the-las…

It’s now been proven in court: this US puppet tried to restart the Korean War with covert acts of aggression against the DPRK

University of Chicago professor Robert Pape says he’s not hopeful about an imminent resolution to the conflict with Iran, arguing that “we’re in the middle part… of the escalation trap.” He says the United States will remain caught in that “trap” through the November midterms as Iran seeks to maximize its leverage. @ProfessorPape

One half of the Labour Party defends mass impoverishment of our people to feed the gullets of the military industrial complex and war after war. The other half is demanding even more!

This is a really fascinating paper that everyone interested in China's industrial policy should read. It destroys so many myths (see below), and is written by deeply credible people who conducted over three years of fieldwork in China and interviewed 60 Chinese officials, entrepreneurs, and engineers. When it comes to China studies, it literally doesn't get more rigorous than this. First myth it destroys: contrary to popular belief, Beijing's industrial policy didn't build the companies that became China's EV champions. They rose largely **despite** it, through its cracks. For sure, Beijing did favor EVs as an industry and pushed hard for it but their big bet was SOEs (State Owned Enterprises): research grants, pilot programs, licenses, cheap credit - virtually all of it flowed to state firms. The result? China's actual EV champions - BYD, Geely, NIO, XPeng, Li Auto, etc. - are overwhelmingly private firms that succeeded despite Beijing favoring their SOE competitors. How so? Because, when favoring SOEs, the central government didn't just pick winning companies, it picked winning cities, each SOE being anchored in a specific city: Shanghai (SAIC), Changchun (FAW), Wuhan-Shiyan (Dongfeng), etc. Which means that every city not on the list, that wanted a piece of the auto boom, had only one option left: team up with private entrepreneurs who were equally excluded from central government favor. That's what truly fueled China's EV miracle: an alliance of the excluded, between local private entrepreneurs and local mayors. This is the biggest misconception this paper destroys: the reality is that the "Chinese state capitalism" that many in the West think powered the EV boom actually tried to block many of these companies from existing. In effect, it was closer to an obstacle course that local actors (mayors and provinces) learned to game. Geely - now the third largest automaker in China - is a fantastic example of this. First of all, it started off illegal since, to build passenger cars, you had to have a central government license and they couldn't get one. Zhejiang Province told them to go ahead regardless because the province had hundreds of auto parts suppliers but no carmaker of its own. It's only a couple of years later, recognizing the fait-accompli that Geely was producing cars and was competitive, that the central government admitted them to the National Sedan Catalog - effectively legalizing them retroactively because there were facts on the ground. Then there was the Volvo acquisition in 2010, which is fair to say - looking back - proved to be the most strategically valuable acquisition in Chinese automotive history. Despite it being presented at the time (and still described this way today) as "China buying Volvo", all 3 major state-backed banks in China (Export-Import Bank, China Development Bank, Bank of China) refused to finance the deal. The only state-bank money Geely managed to get was a $200 million loan from a provincial branch of China Construction Bank - a tiny fraction of what the deal required. Geely actually did the deal with Goldman Sachs money via Hong Kong plus loans and equity from four local governments (Chengdu, Zhangjiakou, Daqing, Shanghai's Jiading district), each of which bought in by securing a Volvo plant or headquarters for itself. In effect, the doors that Beijing controlled were largely closed to Geely, but it made it because the doors subnational actors controlled were opened. Which all means this paper destroys another very common myth: the big merit of the central government in all this was to be relatively chill about it, to NOT be dictatorial. I just imagine if that had happened in France and you had - say - the mayor of Lyon or Marseilles open, fund and promote an unlicensed carmaker against Renault: the préfet would shut it down within weeks, and the mayor would be lucky to escape prosecution. That's the irony: on industrial policy, the supposedly "totalitarian" Chinese state proved more tolerant of local defiance than most Western liberal democracies would be. Beijing's greatest contribution to the EV miracle wasn't the plan - it was looking the other way while the plan was being violated. To be sure, the paper doesn't hide the costs of this system: ferocious local competition also produced what's known today in China as "involution" (内卷-Neijuan, basically a hypercompetitive price war), as well as some spectacular failures. For instance one county lost 6.6 billion yuan on a carmaker that never really made cars. But that's precisely the point: this is a high-risk, high-reward model of decentralized experimentation, the very opposite of the careful central planning Westerners imagine. I've repeated this countless times but it bears repeating again: the single greatest misconception people have about China is - probably because we wrongly associate communism with centralized control - that it is a monolith run from Beijing. Some even say it's run by "one man." The reality is the exact opposite: China is, in practice, one of the most decentralized countries on earth. Roughly 85% of government spending in China happens at the subnational level - against about 30% in the average OECD country (and even less in France, which is actually one of the most centrally controlled countries on earth). A Chinese mayor commands fiscal resources, land, investment funds and policy latitude that virtually no Western mayor could dream of. Last but not least, I'd be remiss not to mention what the paper has to say on the positive legacy of Mao and its role in the rise of EVs (given I myself wrote an article titled "Mao's economic record wasn't bad, actually": arnaudbertrand.substack.com/…). When it comes to China myths, none is more entrenched than the idea that Mao left behind nothing but ruins. This paper confirms a key argument of my article: Mao's deliberate dispersal of industry across China (during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution decentralizations) left dozens of cities with their own small auto works. Inefficient, yes - but these scattered factories survived into the 1990s and became the seed stock of everything that followed: the industrial base, the engineers, and the production licenses that EV startups would use to enter the market. The paper even says it outright: the fragmentation that industrial policy "sought to eradicate" is "precisely" what "ironically enabled" the EV sector's rapid rise. This is exactly the mechanism I described in my Mao article: structures built in the Mao era - communes becoming township governments, commune enterprises becoming TVEs, Third Front factories seeding interior industrialization - became load-bearing foundations of the reform miracle. Fittingly, the spark for China's first municipal carmaker adventure was literally a TVE (Township and Village Enterprise), the institutional descendants of Mao's commune enterprises: Tongbao, a kit-car maker in Wuhu whose success stunned local officials into building what became Chery (one of China's biggest carmakers today). You can't tell the story of China's EV miracle without crediting the legacy of Mao. What's the biggest lesson in all this for Western policymakers? The obvious one is that the part of industrial policy that most people assume China does and that they sometimes want to copy - i.e. the state picking winners - is actually the part that failed. The part that did succeed is the China nobody in the West believes exists: a radically decentralized system with a high degree of tolerance for disobedience and experimentation. We imagine China as a country where nothing happens without Beijing's approval when the reality is closer to the opposite: China's EV miracle happened precisely because localities asked for forgiveness rather than permission. All in all, and this is the lesson I often come back to, this is yet another illustration of the importance of understanding China for what it is as opposed to the caricature we've built of it. This matters whichever "camp" you're in. If you see China as a rival, you can't compete with someone you don't understand. If you see them as a source of lessons, you can't emulate what you've misunderstood. Whatever you want from China - to compete with it or learn from it - the entry fee is the same: genuinely understanding it.

Check out China's robot operated library in Shenzhen!

BREAKING: "Greater Israel" is now marketed in London. Like in Montreal and in New York. Apartheid without borders. P.S. This explains why criticism of Israel is being restricted (and "anti-antisemitism" laws keep appearing). Apartheid is not only a crime. It is a business model.

No enemy can stop our homeland’s growth and prosperity. Happy Russia Day!

🇨🇳 China acaba de romper el récord mundial con 10.000 drones en un solo espectáculo de luces. Imágenes impresionantes: dragones, espadas gigantes, figuras en movimiento perfecto y sincronización milimétrica sobre el skyline. No es solo un show bonito. Demuestra el liderazgo chino en: Tecnología de enjambres de drones (control simultáneo masivo) Ingeniería de precisión y software avanzado Capacidad industrial para producir y operar a esta escala Mientras otros países hacen pruebas con cientos, China ya opera con diez mil de forma rutinaria. El futuro de los espectáculos, la logística y hasta aplicaciones militares se está escribiendo en China.

Chinese court rules employer can’t fire worker because ai took his job fisherphillips.com/en/insigh… (@labor_attorneys) #China #ArtificialIntelligence #AIJobs

HSBC recently helped Eve Energy issue its first syndicated loan in Europe, raising EUR185 million for its Hungarian subsidiary to build a cylindrical lithium-ion battery cell manufacturing factory in the Eastern European country, the UK financial services organization said today. The plant, with an estimated annual production capacity of 30 GWh, will be the Chinese battery maker’s first in Europe. @HSBC

A series of US airstrikes have killed 175 people in Nigeria. While the US military’s AFRICOM stated that 175 “terrorists” had been eliminated over the course of three days of bombing, locals state that dozens of civilians were killed, and countless more injured. Hospitals in Borno state were overrun with emergency cases. The Nigerian government has been at war with Islamist rebels since 2009. Nigeria is just one of seven countries the second Trump administration has bombed.