America Or Nothing
On Sunday evening, ahead of Thanksgiving week in the US, I wrote that "for all the hand-wringing over the allegedly imminent end of American hegemony, I don't see a lot of viable contenders" for the country's top spot in the geopolitical and global economic order.
In the same short editorial, I cited the best-performing economy on Earth and an equity market that accounts for nearly three-quarters of global market cap.
The irony of America's existential crisis is that on some metrics, the coun
I wonder what will happen to the multiples of the Mag 7 when people start to realize that the prospects for AI are much greater in the eye’s of CEOs than in the eye’s of the engineers working on the technology. Current AI, like ChatGPT, is really bad at getting details correct. It gives bad (wrong) recommendations for how to implement solutions to technical problems. It also gives, very authoritatively, incorrect information regarding US Government policies.
I have been using AI to find scholarly articles for use in an academic publication. I have found it helpful, but it takes some engineering of queries to get reasonable reasults.
However I also think we are on the cusp of a multi-decade boom (to quote and unquotable) ‘the likes of which we have never seen before’. We are an energy intensive society that is just learning how to do chemistry right. In my career we used brute force. We are not at the start of a boom using catalyst routes to make basics for our society. This will lower energy requirements on top of seeing lower energy costs from solar power. Do you think it is a coincidence that an oil power attacked to start WWIII just at the start of a new energy era? No I think out of desperation, Vladimir has attacked. Not only attacked with bombs but also attacked with electioneering. We either wake up to this world or it will come a knocking at our door. Oh I guess that wake up call is me too, we just elected an orange thing that Vladimir controls that is hell bent on destroying the USA.