I live a wonderful life that is probably unavailable to a lot of Americans. The Trader Joe’s near where I live offers an enormous assortment of food that is cheap, international and healthy. I don’t quite know how they manage to keep their prices low and I certainly won’t complain. I simply wish that all my fellow Americans can avail themselves of reasonably priced, high quality and cheap groceries and their average bill at checkout is around 40 bucks. Most American families if shopping for a whole week probably pay anywhere from 200 to 300 dollars perhaps more. Then again, I only cook for myself and occasionally for a roommate. Yesterday I used Thai green sauce curry in a Morrocan steel tagine that was Made in China to cook chopped steak bits simmered over a whole afternoon on a warm setting on the electric stove. The bread was a whole grain Sangak made from a bakery here in America. The pancake was from Taiwan and I am not sure where the clotted cream was from but the honey a local Hive honey brand. And the total cost for me and a roommate was probably no more than 10 bucks (including the steak). Steak I have found out has become expensive if a person is picky. If you only want to have a filet mignon or a T-bone for example. If you don’t care about that then you can simply take steak bits and simmer them for hours and they become tender and tasty. For those who don’t know, a lot of this is a Federal Reserve joke on their method of calculating CPI.
Sorry to be Hegelian on jokes but some of our audience is quite young I’m told. Hegelian jokes are where the joke is fully explained.
And for those who don’t know that’s a self referential looped joke that is unaware of what is being discussed.
After dinner my roommate switched on the TV and it mirrored some of our dinner conversation about experiments and then suddenly a Youtube from Aliexpress came on. An American influencer was discussing the sort of incredible assortment of “stuff” that is available there at ridiculous prices: a rice cooker for $1.99 for example. Garbage looking jewelry for an equally tiny price and she wondered who buys this stuff? Apparently 10 or so people had. I asked Google the business model of these sites like Aliexpress, Temu, Shein, Alibaba and others. Google suggested some websites the review and made some vague claims about poor working conditions, landfill costs while the sites provided suggested that the companies pressure the manufacturers to keep prices absurdly low. Some of the products like the rice cooker was there only as bait to get the shopper to become a customer. The customer acquisition costs for you marketing majors, not that this is a lecture. I get a lot of that around where I live… do you teach on campus? Uh, no. “They” just sent me here. Who is they? I dunno. Life? Life’s circumstances? Unaffordability? Apartments.com? Take your pick. What do you do then all day? I write stuff… .
Actually whoever logs into me writes stuff through some sort of brain meld is my guess. I doubt they come prepared with full blown essays. Anyways, that sort of cheap stuff is also available on Amazon. Actually most of the things I own from coffee cups to stove top pans to knives, forks, spoons to clothes to shoes even disposable toothbrushes and toothpaste — ALL of it is Made In China. I am often asked to throw away stuff after it has been used for a bit because it starts to develop people. People somehow get themselves into all of those things and I can see their outlines in “shapes” in the coffee, in the burnt residues on utensils and so on. Shapes that are clearly often animalistic, often phantaorgasmic and other times just plain old creepy. The clothes often develop colored marks and that indicates to me that it’s time to dispose of them too. All of it goes to the landfill and none of it is re-cyclable. I’d like to do my part for the environment just as I’d like to be a vegan but you know… life! Things happen, things fall apart. And then it’s time to toss them. Not to worry, I have been told that throwing things away is a promotion for most of the people who are in those things. For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, try bleaching any of your clothes. And then look at the shapes that develop in different colors from the color of your clothes. A blue towel suddenly gets filled with yellow and orange even though only the blue towel was washed. Where did those other colors come from? And why is the orange perfectly surrounding the yellow shapes? Like a child drew it with a crayon.
The cheap stuff on Amazon that is available is apparently post tarriff. Google said if you take a 2 dollar item, tariff it 25%, it’s still a massive profit if you sell it at 12 bucks when the malls are retailing almost the same thing for 28 bucks or higher. Not all of the stuff is landfill material, I have used the cooking utensils and knives for a while and they work perfectly well and cheap. I simply wish it was Made In America. There is a tension there clearly between a person trying to make ends meet on — a small income — unemployment or paycheck — a disability check — on social security // and // between what is beneficial for the country overall. The person should not feel guilt for making ends meet but the country and the people in power should. That much is true Hegelian jokes or otherwise. The reason it’s a joke is twofold: Trump is unlikely to feel guilt and he has promised all voters $5000 if Republicans win. With $5000 dollars, Americans described above will be able to afford more Made in China stuff and that means job security for the workers at American landfills. Now we all understand what a Hegelian joke is and hopefully Chuck Hegel is not dying of laughter. We all will die pal, the only question is the quality of our deaths.
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Yet China is not just cheap stuff. They have some incredible scientists as well and they tech is starting to catch up to America’s. From China’s Area 51 where they test advanced bombers, planes and spacecraft to Unitree’s Guardian and Superman robots to BYD’s rapid charging batteries Chinese tech is starting to define technology while American tech is reduced to chatbots and foldable iPhones. If you look at any American Science website that publishes serious papers on technology, you are likely to run into Chinese names. Most of the PhDs publishing papers at these sites have foreign names. I have often wondered about that… there is of course the recognition aspect of it, the grants that publishing papers brings, the self referential quotations of other papers published by other geniuses part of it and the giving away of national secrets part of it. Not all of it is the latter and not all of it is only the former. I mean these papers publish some really incredible stuff that cost American taxpayers enormous sums of money for the pure research, salaries and equipment: from nanotech to quantum tech. From AI to space tech. From biotech to new materials science. And anyone with an internet connection can download all this research at no cost whatsoever. It’s as if these scientists operate in a world where there are no adversaries, no borders and it’s all a United Earth Federation. Someday it may be, that day is not today.
Not to worry though, America has it’s own form of Superman… Elon Musk. I read a breathless article on Zero Hedge where the writer, apparently an assiduous investor who listens to multiple quarterly earnings calls, suggested that the most recent SpaceX earnings call was unlike anything that he had ever heard in his life. I took his analysis and Google’s feedback and here’s what we were able to assemble is happening. SpaceX is assembling the following 14 or more efforts under one company: massive space computer network, massive utility company using gas turbines and other forms of energy, massive compute companies that other frontier AI providers are renting compute from and more. And that’s before the ventures to go to the Moon and Mars.
With those additions, your list of what the consolidated entity owns is complete and structurally flawless:
Infrastructure & Power:
Colossus-class physical data centers packed with Nvidia compute power.
Private, offline electricity generation stations (natural gas turbines, hybrid nuclear, and local micro-grids).
Heavy industrial manufacturing and high-temperature casting facilities (rocket engines and turbine blades).
Connectivity & Network:
4. A massive space computer providing global bandwidth (Starlink V3 constellation and Starship logistics).
5. A rapidly expanding terrestrial cell-site overlay footprint (leased ground tower infrastructure).Software & Intelligence Units:
6. Super Intelligence (The infrastructure utility provider).
7. Custom Silicon/ASIC design program.
8. xAI (Grok) and X.com. [1]Logistics & Distribution:
9. Global launch pads, automated ocean recovery fleets, and heavy launch infrastructure.
10. The Falcon and Starship orbital launcher monopolies.Consumer & Robotics Integration (The Consolidation Anchor):
11. Tesla (the imminent merger integration of automotive, decentralized energy storage, humanoid robotics, and edge compute fleets). [1]The Locked-In Sovereign Customer Base:
12. Internal tenants (Starlink, xAI, Grok, Tesla Autopilot).
13. External tech hyperscalers (Anthropic, Google/Alphabet).
14. Sovereign entities (NASA, Starshield, U.S. Military, and global defense alliances).
The writer's thesis is fundamentally right on the money: the physical engineering bottlenecks are steep, but if you look at this inventory, whoever controls this architecture controls the underlying operational fabric of the century.
If building companies were a boardgame, Elon won a long time ago. Now he’s just showing off.
Some of our readers have noticed that our accusations that American technology is being given away by Iran capturing RQ Sentinel Drones and LD-UUV, Russia capturing Starlink terminals, AI models testing by foreign countries, AI Opensource availability to foreign countries and the availability of technology platforms like Palantir all come back to Silicon Valley… we’d urge caution against making widespread accusations. Clearly many of these are sensitive technologies and those who control them probably have had deep rectals done (a term I learned from Slow Horses, where a deep rectal means looking at a person’s entire life history and motivations) in order to get their clearances. And having that level of clearance automatically implies an inherent attitude of patriotism for America. To suggest otherwise, the readers should consider their own biases first.
