Laptop General @LaptopGeneral

This ad perfectly encapsulates the risky bet Democrats made in nominating El-Sayed: Gaining access to a unique type of messaging that Stevens could never deliver.

David Weigel @daveweigel

2 days ago

A head-turning new "Michigan First" ad from @AbdulElSayed - he names some issue he agrees with MAGA voters on, then plays a supercut of Fox News hosts/Tucker praising him or bashing Mike Rogers. semafor.com/article/10/23/…

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James Burnham – The Trotskyist Who Saw How It Would End. He was a Trotskyist first. In the 1930s he was one of the leading Marxist intellectuals in America – building the movement, debating Trotsky himself by letter, believing in the revolution. But he was also an American. A practical mind, trained to look at what actually happens rather than what the theory promises. So he understood what it was really about – and explained to us how it would work out. 1. In 1940 he broke with Trotsky over one question: what was the Soviet Union? Trotsky said a workers’ state, temporarily deformed. Burnham looked at it and saw something else: a new ruling class. The workers owned nothing. The capitalists were gone. Someone else was in charge – the people who ran the machine. Trotsky spent much of his last year writing against him. Burnham was right. 2. In 1941 he generalized it in The Managerial Revolution. The future would belong neither to the capitalists nor to the workers, but to the managers – the administrators, technicians and bureaucrats who control things without owning them. Capitalism would fall, he wrote – but not to the working class. To the managers. The capitalist, who risks his own fortune, would be replaced by the manager, who risks nothing, owns nothing and runs everything. That is the whole difference. The capitalist pays for his own mistakes. The manager’s mistakes are always paid by someone else – the shareholder, the taxpayer, the citizen. Burnham saw the same class rising in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and New Deal America. Different flags, the same new masters. And he said what it meant: the end of capitalism and of freedom – even if the façade stayed standing. 3. Orwell read it, argued with it – and borrowed from it. The three superstates of 1984 come from Burnham. So does its ruling class, which owns everything collectively and nothing personally. 4. In 1943 came The Machiavellians. Burnham studied the realists – Machiavelli and his modern heirs, like Pareto – and drew the lesson idealists never want to hear: every society is run by an elite. The only question is whether there is more than one. Freedom does not come from the absence of elites. It comes from their competition – rival powers that check each other, a free press, an opposition that can actually win. A single elite with no rival is tyranny, whatever it calls itself. 5. Now look at what the long march actually produced. Not the rule of the workers. The rule of the managers – the administrators of the ministries, the regulators in Brussels, the HR departments, the editorial boards. The façade of capitalism still stands – but who actually rules? Corporate boards spending other people’s money on other people’s ideologies. Officials in Brussels. Directors of foundations and NGOs. No voter elected them. The revolution succeeded. Only the managers won it. Gramsci designed the march. Burnham told us who would be waiting at the end of it. A class that owns nothing, answers to no voter, pays for none of its mistakes, and runs almost everything. 6. In 1964 he wrote Suicide of the West. Its verdict: liberalism – the modern progressive kind, not the classical one – is "the ideology of Western suicide." It lets a civilization accept its own retreat and feel good about it. Every loss becomes a sign of progress. Sixty years later, it reads like a description of Brussels. 7. The ex-Trotskyist ended up a founding editor of National Review, and in 1983 Ronald Reagan gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. From Trotsky’s comrade to Reagan’s medal. He knew the left from the inside, and he had the American instinct to ask the only question that matters: not what the theory promises, but who ends up in charge. In 1941 his answer was the managers. It still is – unless a rival elite rises. For the first time in decades, one has: builders, not administrators. Burnham would have recognized the moment. Not a revolution – a rotation.

Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland

2 months ago

Antonio Gramsci – The Most Dangerous Intellectual of the Twentieth Century. Not the most famous. Not the most read. The most dangerous and the most consequential – because he was the one who figured out why the revolution kept failing, and what to do instead. The man who

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John Oliver lists off just some of Ken Paxton’s scandals: “Paxton spent nearly 9 years under indictment for securities fraud before the charges were dropped in a deal in which he paid nearly $300,000 in restitution to his victims and agreed to complete 100 hours of community service and 15 hours of legal ethics education, which is just an amazing thing for a state AG to have to do. Not just that, he was also accused of bribery and abuse of office by eight of his own top deputies... He was later impeached by the Republican-controlled Texas House. Now the Senate later acquitted him, but by then, Paxton had fired 4 of the staff who'd reported him, which led to a lawsuit claiming he'd violated the state's whistleblower Act, and eventually Texas taxpayers had to pay over $6 million to those staffers Paxton had fired. ... But wait, because I'm still not done. Reporting recently emerged about the acquisition of 15 properties worth about $9 million by Paxton and trusts associated with him... He'd omitted rental income and mortgages from financial disclosures, obscuring his wealth, and that incredibly, he also appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in 6 elections, all of which did throw a bit of a wrench into his efforts to present himself as a law and order candidate.”

We’re launching the Army of Robots. In 2022, we launched the Army of Drones. Today, drones account for over 95% of battlefield strikes, and Ukraine has more than 700 UAV manufacturers. Now we need the next technological breakthrough: the robotization of warfare. The goal is simple — save lives. Robots should take on the most dangerous missions: evacuating the wounded, delivering ammunition, mining and demining, reconnaissance, defending positions and engaging targets. The Army of Robots is not one company. It’s an ecosystem. We will invest in defense tech companies, launch our own technology projects, test them with the military and scale what works on the battlefield. We’re now looking for defense tech companies and engineers working on robotic technologies — as well as a CTO / Tech Lead for the Army of Robots. Join us: thearmyofrobots.com/en

Biagio Bossone: "The IMF reads China's trade surplus and the US trade deficit as two separate domestic distortions needing two separate domestic fixes: Chinese fiscal expansion and US fiscal tightening. But the two are not separate stories. US ‘over-consumption’ is sustainable in the first place because the same surplus economies the IMF blames for excess saving do keep on holding dollars, allowing US banks to keep running the printing press and finance import demand, without hitting the ceiling all other countries hit. Fix only the fiscal numbers and leave the recycling loop untouched and the imbalance won’t shrink the way the IMF’s models predict." omfif.org/2026/09/the-mi…

There is substantial evidence that meritocracy contributed to the longevity of absolutism in Chinese history. Here is our paper published in 2022. We relied on a dataset on some 14,000 exam candidates during the Ming dynasty and exploited differences in the anonymization procedures of the exam as an identification. journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108…. We have a forthcoming paper on a related topic, journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/74…, and a book from Yale University Press.

Pokémon Master yapper @XPokemonProf

a month ago

@YashengHuang It is ironic that what some in the west call meritocratic—the exams—in fact bolsters central autocratic control at the expense of military power and opposition to central authority

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Unfortunately, this experiment has been run. Democracies without liberalism are weak, fragile things, quick to be overthrown. Liberal states without democracy end up becoming more democratic over time. In the long run, liberalism is the important thing.

Shadi Hamid @shadihamid

a month ago

Liberalism is an ideological orientation that I like but because it's an ideological orientation we can't expect everyone to subscribe to it. When democracy and liberalism are in tension — which they often are — we should err on the side of democracy as the more important

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China has faced problems with its state-supported data center buildout. People have jumped into data center construction without real industry knowledge. Utilization rates for some AI data centers were around 30% last year. “However, not all of the investment attracted by subsidies has been rational. Jin Yadong said that many computing centers rushed into construction are typically funded by a fragmented mix of private and municipal capital. “These investors tend to have plenty of money but little understanding of the industry, making it difficult for them to find suitable customers,” he said. These “outsider” investors, focused on short-term returns, often lack a deep understanding of trends in AI technology and fail to develop the necessary complementary industrial planning. As a result, some computing centers are built around a single performance metric, only to become “outdated as soon as they are completed.” They struggle to meet the market’s increasingly complex demand for AI computing, leading to an oversupply of low-quality computing capacity.” This piece from Science & Technology Daily is from last year but still relevant now: digitalchina.gov.cn/2025/xwzx/qwfb…

Artists: but I don't want to lose my job. I love it. Mathematicians: but I don't want to lose my job. I love it. Economists: LONG HAVE I AWAITED THIS HOUR! DESTROY ME, EFFICIENCY, AND LET UTILIZATION-ADJUSTED TOTAL FACTOR PRODUCTIVITY RISE ON THE WIND OF MY ASHES!

Intelligence is not the bottleneck for economic growth: energy and materials are persuasion.community/p/why-i-change…

Perhaps the most important real-life example of "abundance" and "affordability" in recent history is 🇺🇸 natural gas. Even with the war in Iran, average natural gas prices are expected to be lower this winter than last winter.

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Abdul El-Sayed: “We don’t live in capitalism. We live in corporate socialism. If you’re a corporation, you can buy a politician to get that politician to rig the system for you so you make more money and you ex out every other market in which you compete. You need good healthcare. You need a good education. We need childcare. We need good roads and bridges. We don’t need to send our money to big corporations to subsidize them, we need to be invested in people so they have the human capital to be able to do all the things as they graduate and come out”

Good question. At the level of the national party, I'd say 1) categorical opposition to all immigration enforcement, 2) land acknowledgements and other anti-American rhetoric, 3) willingness to countenance explicit racial discrimination in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and/or the 14th Amendment), and 4) various minor positions on trans issues. In terms of what people vote on, I'd say immigration and racial discrimination are much more important than land acknowledgements or trans issues. In terms of the actual future of the nation, I'd say that the ideology behind land acknowledgments -- which views America as a fundamentally illegitimate settler-colonialist entity whose dissolution is the only true path to historical and global justice -- is far more dangerous and damaging. At the local level, there is some extremism connected to the Palestine movement, which is both deeply antisemitic and deeply anti-American.

Cameron 🇺🇸 🗽🦅 @CameronCorduroy

a month ago

@Noahpinion what specific tenets of the Democratic Party are extremist to you?

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It's just really hilarious rightists have declared themselves the defenders of Western civilization. They are themselves the Third World! In values, American rightists don't cluster with the West but with China, Russia, and Turkey. richardhanania.com/p/how-trump-di…

邓月薇（Betty Ann Ong）。 她1956年出生在旧金山唐人街，第三代华裔，祖籍广东开平。 2001年9月11日当天，她是美国航空11号航班的空乘，飞机从波士顿飞往洛杉矶，起飞后不久被劫持。 她从机舱尾部用机上电话打给公司预订中心，通话约23分钟，是当天第一个向地面报告劫机的人。她冷静说明：驾驶舱没人回应、商务舱有人被刺、疑似有催泪瓦斯、乘客呼吸困难，并提供了劫机者座位等信息。 这段通话帮助当局确认是有组织的恐怖袭击，并促成联邦航空管理局首次关闭全美领空。 飞机随后撞上世贸中心北塔，机上人员全部遇难。事后她被9/11调查委员会主席称为“真正的美国英雄”。 旧金山市长曾将9月21日定为“邓月薇日”，唐人街的华人康乐中心也以她的名字命名并设有纪念。

China Is Not a K-Shaped Economy. It Is an i-Shaped Economy Using the “K-shaped economy” to describe China has become widespread and is now the mainstream description in many media. Earlier this month, I came across a new expression from economist Xia Chun, from Hong Kong University, that is starting to spread in China: the “i-shaped economy.” The dot at the top is doing well, but it has little connection with the rest of the economy below. “i” represents the small part of the economy doing very well — AI, advanced manufacturing, and exports, a relatively small part of the economy. The vertical stroke represents the much larger traditional economy, middle class, small businesses and ordinary workers. Most importantly, there is a gap between the dot and the line. Growth at the top is no longer transmitted effectively through employment, supply chains, incomes, taxation and consumption to the rest of society I think this may actually describe China better than the K. It is not only about linkage. The K also visually implies that the two halves carry roughly comparable weight. In China they don’t. In GDP contribution, employment and household income, the prosperous “upper arm” is nowhere close to the size of the struggling other part of its economy. Maybe the media should start thinking seriously about the i-shaped Chinese economy.

Space power keeps changing hands. The Soviet Union dominated launches for decades before Russia faded after 1991. China is surging, but reusable rockets and increased commercial demand driven by lower launch prices propelled the US far ahead. Source: buff.ly/29Ogskn

“Once Upon a Time in the Middle East” is something new in China: a film about the outside world that treats its location as more than just a backdrop. sixthtone.com/news/1018970

China is not going to: 1. Revalue it's currency 2. Restructure its economy 3. Officially centralize all the debt 4. Create a welfare state 5. Rebalance Move on and plan accordingly

Who Was the Most Consequential Emperor in Chinese History? Hint: Probably someone you have never heard of. yashenghuang.substack.com/p/who-was-the-…