889 karma · joined December 31, 2025
Requiring equity > liabilities means assets > 2* liabilities.
That is nice, but not at all required for financial health. Especially for infrastructure heavy companies where the debt is used primarily to fund infrastructure buildout.
Here is longer term data also: https://www.worldometers.info/coal/china-coal/#history
China is using more coal than ever before. But it's not monotone up, there is such a thing as a business cycle as well as global commodity price swings that add noise. Certainly when there is a contraction in manufacturing or high coal prices, firms will substitute away to other goods, or similarly when we have the oil shortages now, you can bet that coal use is increasing to compensate.
But despite all that there is a marked upward trend.
> This does not match the observed reality.
It matches the observed reality, yes. China spent half a billion Yuan to increase oil production, which it did. China increased coal production. China increased nuclear production. China increased wind and solar.
Name one form of energy that China is not increasing?
This is true only in the sense that fossil fuels, as a percentage of total energy consumption, are stable or in slight decline. That is because total energy consumption is rapidly increasing, specifically as new forms of energy are added to the mix.
Fossil fuels in absolute terms are, however, increasing.
China is burning more coal today than ever before. Coal use is going up. Coal use as a percentage of total energy is going down.
China is burning more oil and natgas than ever before. It is increasing. But as a percentage of total energy, it is decreasing.
This also matches China's CO2 targets. China's plan is not to decrease CO2 emissions, those emissions will keep increasing. The targets are to decrease the emissions required to generate a dollar of GDP. By 2060, they want the ratio of emissions to GDP to be 60% lower than it was in 2020. If you look at historical trendlines, that is an easy target to meet, just with improvements in technology and energy efficiency, particularly when you are starting from such a high base. But people look at that goal and think that China wants to cut emissions by 60%. GDP in 2060 will be 10x what the GDP was in 2020, so a 60% cut in that ratio is still a 400% increase in total emissions. Everything is measured in terms of ratios, not absolute numbers. Ratios where the base is always rapidly growing.
This confuses a lot of people who see that the ratio of fossil fuel in the entire energy mix is decreasing, and think this means that actual fossil fuel use is decreasing. The charts, report, graphs that people cite, if you look carefully, are always ratios. Ratios with the denominator growing as the denominator is something tied to GDP, whether total output or total energy output.
It's more accurate to say that there are limits to how much additional fossil fuel capacity China can bring online, as these are mature industries, whereas nuclear, solar, etc, are young industries and there is a lot of capacity to bring online since you are starting from a low base. China's approach to energy is always "we want more of it, of any kind." The only reason that China's oil production is not increasing by 10% per year is because it's not possible for China to increase oil production that quickly. Same for coal. China is increasing all forms of energy as fast as possible.
To put things into perspective, China gets half its energy from coal, and about 10% from natgas (increasing to 15% by 2030) and about 20% from oil. China is rapidly increasing natgas use, primarily by building out new pipelines to get more natgas from Russia.
China is also increasing oil consumption as well as exploration, particularly starting with the 14th 5 year plan as well as a special seven year action plan to increase oil production, doing deep water drilling, unconventional (e.g. fracking) drilling as well as a massive shale oil boom. Over the course of that 5 year plan, China discovered more than 225 oil fields and oil production increased from 3.8 million barrels per day to 4.6 mbpd as a result of a ~500 billion CNY investment to increase production. Still China imports about 10 mbpd, so it has developed a massive 1.5 billion barrel strategic reserve, which allows China to weather disruptions in global oil supply even as it races to increase domestic production.
And China is also investing in battery capacity, with installed capacity now at 140 GW or 5% of their energy usage.
The statement that somehow "batteries neuter the advantage that gas has over coal" is not something I understand. Both coal and natgas are reliable forms of energy and are unaffected by battery capacity; you need batteries for unreliable energy such as wind or solar so that you can turn the variable output into something stable that a grid can consume.
Notice that you also see Google really struggling (and falling behind) in the AI race. This, despite massive resources and being responsible for key pioneering research. Same reason why IBM has failed in this area. The big established companies tend to shut their brightest people into research departments where they write papers and produce demos while the main cash cow areas remain undisturbed, so they have collections of bright people and they have money, but they rarely let their brightest people make big bets with the money, whereas startups do.
It's also why poor people spend more on lottery tickets than rich people.
Why did Denmark sign the Greenland treaty? It's a humiliation ritual. Unrestricted access to develop the resources of the Greenland's economic zone, a perpetual veto over any foreign investment, and two new military bases, plus expansion of existing bases. With no end date. In exchange for a payment of... zero. And Denmark still needs to pay the block grant. Does that seem like a treaty between equals? What kind of country grants someone else veto power over investment in a region? What kind of country allows the hosting of foreign military bases, and still calls itself sovereign?
"Vassals" is too strong of a term. European states aren't vassals. Once in a while they give a speech against the US at the UN. And they are constantly complaining about how they are treated, as most vassals do. But they aren't allies. If the US were to file taxes, they would be listed as dependents. That is why they rage when someone who doesn't share their vision gets elected US President, but most Americans don't care who is elected in Europe.
That describes the ratio of the influence that European political leaders have on the lives of Americans vis-a-vis the influence that American political leaders have on the lives of Europeans.
And the thing about states in a subordinate position like that is that they are not respected. European political leaders like to pretend that this is a situation of equals and then complain when the US pushes them around, but it has never been a situation of equals since the end of WW2. Only the facade has been slowly dropped in the intervening years. The sooner Europe stops pretending, the better it will be for them, as not pretending is the first step towards gaining true autonomy. But each time I get my hopes up that Europe will take responsibility for their military and energy needs, I get disappointed by the resulting wave of irreality and wishful thinking.
What I argued is that whenever two competing groups came into contact, wanting the same land, the result was usually genocide (or one of the groups fled to another area, where they would have to fight those inhabitants), and as a result, when history records a new group "inhabiting" or "settling" a peace of land that is new to them, then that inhabitation is generally not peaceful, but genocidal in nature. Regardless of whether there is a written history to record the violence, we can have confidence that the violence did occur.
Now, given that modern humans have been around for 300,000 years at least (the date keeps being pushed back, since before the Moroccan discovery, it was thought to be 100,000 years), and have been swarming over the whole earth, that is a lot of violence and genocide, even though it was certainly possible to live a life of peace as well for a specific individual, since migrations weren't going on all the time in all places.
And I guess we will just pretend that Hollande's wealth tax experiment never happened, when 60,000 millionaires left, the state lost $200 Billion in capital, and the wealth tax cost the state twice as much revenue as was generated by the tax. That was for a country, France, whose wealth was not in the ground.
It's annoying to list your income, but people do it because the disclosure is limited to one year, and more importantly they can control their income, particularly whatever income is earned in a given state. Only realized income is taxed. But a wealth tax involves questions of valuation - of taxing unrealized gains -- that are in many ways arbitrary and subject to abuse, and a level of disclosure and state control that makes many people feel uncomfortable due to the massive expansion of state power it requires.
I don't know why people are so stubborn about this. Next up, they will argue that because people accepted a higher sales tax, they will accept a higher wealth tax, too. After all, you let the state mandate childhood vaccines, so you should be OK with the state mandating your diet, right? Anyways, we'll see how things work in out in California. The state already has massive deficit problems, so let's see how this addresses their fiscal problems.
Getting enough protein and exercising is crucial as you age, and it's something a lot of people have historically not understood, since as your metabolism slows, you get less hungry right when your protein needs are increasing.
So to run a current account surplus against the rest of the world of $100, you need to accumulate $100 of financial claims belonging to the rest of the world. There are complexities, for example I switched from "trade surplus" to "current account" because things like interest payments also need to be added in, but with these adjustments, you cannot run prolonged trade surpluses without storing your money in some other nation's jurisdiction.
Now the question is, which nation is willing to accomodate inflows of a trillion dollars a year? That's right, only a single nation is willing to do that. Most nations ban or severely restrict foreign capital inflows. Those that don't ban it, they don't have the necessary financial infrastructure to accomadate the scale of surpluses that China needs to run. This is why I laugh at all these reports of "China is dumping treasuries". China accumulated over a trillion dollars of dollar claims over the last year. That's in addition to what they already had. Why? Because who else would allow those levels of foreign capital inflows into their economy.
So once again, the US is the only nation willing and able to absorb these capital inflows.
Personally, I don't think this is sustainable, it's deindustrializing the US and is highly destabilizing, but since the liberalization of global capital flows launched by the Clinton administration, we have been doing this 30 year experiment in what happens when you let countries print money and use them to buy your bonds. The results have been, in my opinion, highly destabilizing, and it's not going to end well. But many of those who grew up in this period, think this is just how the world works and they can't imagine any other system, one in which capital inflows were highly restricted and as a result, no nation ran large trade surpluses against any other. Or they don't think about this at all and believe that China's hard work and industrial prowess is why they are able to run large trade surpluses, completely ignoring the whole money printing to buy US bonds that is happening in the background. When the US was the world's primary industrial power in the period 1870 - 1920, we ran current account deficits, not surpluses. What China is doing, industrializing while exporting capital -- that is truly unprecedented and possible only due to the combination of fiat non-convertible money combined with the US allowing unrestricted capital inflows. It's a truly bizarre state of affairs.
In terms of there being a glut of oil, the measure of that can be seen in things like the median wage/productivity gap, which began to widen during the Arab oil embargo and has not stopped widening. We do not have abundant oil, if we did, the prices would be $40 per gallon and would be stable across weather events and other things that drive the price of oil up today. We live in an era of energy scarcity, which is why capital has the upper hand over labor.
What you should take note of, is that China's trade surplus tracks the US trade deficit extremely closely, and this has been the case for the last 20 years.
Said another way, most nations in the world run roughly balanced trade. There is only one nation on earth that can sustain large and prolonged trade deficits. Only one. That is the US. So if you are a nation whose entire economic strategy rests on running large and sustained trade surpluses, then you are going to be exporting your surplus to the US, directly or indirectly, and only to the US.
Now in practice, some of that will be direct sales to the US, some will be indirect sales to the US, but at the end of the day, if you want to run a 1.2 trillion dollar trade surplus, then you have to hope to God that the US is willing to run at least a trillion dollar trade deficit, because no other country is going to do that for you, the entire rest of the world may be willing to accomodate a hundred billion or so, but for everything else, you will depend on the US, directly or indirectly, to absorb your surplus.
Thank you for putting this together. Bell Systems Technical Journal articles would be nice to add.
There are actually people who spend their lives working for peace, and die in the effort. And then there are people like Henry Kissinger. They share the same prize.
More recently, the prizes are even more obviously politicized(1), so when the west is trying to overthrow Iran, it gives the prize to western-backed dissidents fighting for "women's rights" in Iran - the nation that has female airline pilots and university professors, but not to the scores of dissidents executed by Saudi Arabia, where women only recently got the right to drive. None of those murdered by Saudi Arabia, even if they died arguing for women's rights, will ever qualify for the Nobel Peace price. Not while Iran still needs to be overthrown.
1. See https://www.eureporter.co/nobel-peace-prize/2025/10/27/when-... for a survey of recent winners and what political agenda was pushed with each award.
Private Businesses should not be able to offer citizenship as a side payment to their employees, they should stick to offering cash. If you are the french foreign legion and you want to reward military recruits with citizenship, then at least it's a government that is receiving the benefit and selling the citizenship, but private business should not be able to sell citizenship, or an easier way to get citizenship, to anyone. It's not a resource that belongs to them.
Let's count the ways that the empire costs wealth
1. You need to pay for civil administration 2. You need to put down rebellions, which means staffing it with troops/police 3. You have to build and maintain infrastructure 4. You have to protect the empire from foreign invasion -- e.g. Julius Caeser needing to fight the Helvetii 5. You have to pay bribes to local notables to be loyal to you
Let's take a look at Rome in Palestine - it had to constantly put down rebellions, build an enormous temple and civil infrastructure, man the area with troops that need to be paid, fight off invaders. Pay off all sorts of locals.
And yes, a big part of that is military expenditure, but the role of the British Navy was not primarily to enlarge the empire but to preserve the empire, protect shipping lanes, etc.
> The down fall of every empire is hubris and corruption.
This is a moralizing view of history, and things just don't work like this.
1. Empires do not generate wealth, they cost wealth. Or rather they do not generate an economic surplus (the wealth available to the central government via taxation that can be used for whatever the government/elites want). A nation of 10 million will have more economic wealth than a nation of one million, but most of that is needed to keep the 10 million alive and to maintain the infrastructure and pay the local police to keep everyone in line, etc -- only a small fraction of total wealth can be effectively taxed by the empire and spent on arbitrary stuff like increasing the size of the Navy. That is what I mean by surplus.
A nation starts out with an economic surplus (here, I mean a real surplus, not a surplus of silver, but of real wealth) and they use that surplus to get a big army and go conquering. And each time they conquer, a part of that surplus is expended until they reach their maximum extent.
If this was not the case, we'd have a one world government, where the bigger you get, the bigger your surplus and no one can compete with you. But that is not what we see, what we see is that empires expand until they can't afford to keep expanding. Why did England give up its colonies? Because after WW2 it had too many war debts and couldn't keep subsidizing those colonies -- they were too expensive to keep. Same reason for why Rome stopped expanding and had so many financial problems. The check on empire is always bankruptcy. You can look at the trillions the US spends on foreign wars, which far exceeds the economic benefit we get of waging those wars. You can argue, for example, that we got some oil from Iraq, but we still have to pay for that oil, so whatever discount we got on oil comes nowhere near the cost of invading and administering Iraq. That is how all empires work -- France was always better off, financially, just paying market rate for whatever minerals it could get in Africa than the massive resources it spent on trying to control and build infrastructure in Africa. Same thing for England. It doesn't even come close, when you add up the cost of the British Navy and colonial administration to whatever discount it got on raw materials over paying the market rate. Same thing for Rome, etc.
2. The situation with Spain was about financial wealth, not real wealth. They discovered huge silver mines in their colonies and were awash with silver. That dumping of money 1) created massive inflation, and 2) caused Spain to run a huge trade deficit, destroying domestic industry, as the Spanish currency was basically overvalued. It was this economic destruction that leads people to think Spain became lazy and stopped producing. They didn't become lazy, but with so much free money causing such high prices, Spanish industry could no longer be competitive with industry elsewhere. This is called "Dutch disease" as the same thing hit Holland and you also see it in the US with our overvalued currency. So you do not benefit, in terms of real wealth, when you dump a bunch of money on a country. You need just the right amount of money -- too much and you get inflation, too little and you get deflation. There is an optimal amount of money for an economy, and Spain exceeded it.
3. Many have studied the reason why England led the industrial revolution, and it is not a majority view that it had anything to do with the colonies. Most point to things like the availability of coal, development of financial markets, and of course the fact that a lot of the steam engine stuff was invented first in England.
Math isn't about collecting random theorems, progress in math is about gaining understanding of new systems, and the theorems are guideposts to aid in that understanding.
You can prove 1000 theorems and not really increase any understanding about a subject, but gain knowledge of 1000 random facts. For example, I can write down some complicated equation and ask you "does this have a solution in the integers"? And if you do a maze of very complex and tedious algebra to show that there is a solution, you would have proved a theorem, but you would not have done much to move math forward at all.
On the other hand, if you introduce some completely new technique, say you take my equation and turn that into an algebraic surface, and then you count some special curves that live on this surface using geometric ideas, and then you show that if the number of such curves is odd, there must be a solution in the integers, and in this specific case, it is odd, so there is a solution -- well, then you have really pushed math forward and people will celebrate your proof, even though no one really cares if the equation I wrote down has a solution in the integers.
For example, there is a long history of failed attempts to prove Fermat's last theorem driving algebra and number theory forward by introducing the concept of ideals, for example, and this concept ended up much more important than whether Fermat's theorem is true or false, which is not too much more than a piece of trivia.
Or for example, the recent proof of the Poincare conjecture relies on the machinery of the Ricci flow introduced by Richard Hamilton, who then applied it to solve a number of open problems, but Perelman was able to take it even more forward to solve Poincare. So Ricci flow was massively important machinery.
For this reason, we celebrate people like Gromov, who didn't really prove that many theorems but introduced amazing machinery -- for example, the h-principle, or Gromov Compactness -- these were ideas and math is about the ideas. The ideas are then applied, using laws of logic, to form theorems.
So mathematicians will need to mine these proofs to see if there are any new techniques - new machinery - being introduced, or if the AI just used the existing machinery more efficiently. Here too, we are just looking at AI as a form of search, which it is really good at, since there are so many thousands of papers and so many ideas, that there might be a connection between two areas that lead to a solution and the human mathematician, not knowing all known results, can't make that connection. In the future, we may wonder how anyone did math without AI, much like we would wonder how anyone can be a writer without access to a dictionary or reference work. Is the AI just searching through a catalogue of known ideas and connecting them or is the AI coming up with genuinely new stuff like Ricci flow or the h-principle?
What is interesting is seeing whether we can get AI to actually discover new machinery for us. That would be huge.
And then we need to find efficient ways to detect these ideas and describe them.
Really this is very exciting and opens up whole new workstreams for mathematicians.
The real loophole for normal people is that CA outsources smog checks, there are facebook groups advertising that they will pass your car -- the one without catalytic converters, for example. California is this interesting blend of lawlessness and rule-following, high taxes but also tons of absurdly low taxes (think Prop 13).