23 Jan 2025 Reading time: 2 minutes 
Another large fusion breakthrough rose in the EAST on Monday, January 20th - maintaining a steady-state high-confinement plasma operation for a world record breaking 1,066 seconds. Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) - which is also known as China’s “artificial sun” - achieved this feat; and by the way - the world record they beat was their own from 2023 of 403 seconds.
While we are quite a ways away from the promise of fusion energy - unlimited, clean energy - it is aggressively clear that China is ahead.
Energy and Growth
Graph showing the relationship between many countries’ GDP per person and their energy use per person, with some countries highlighted. While it’s not a direct causal relationship, it demonstrates that energy is a key necessity for economic growth.
Making the cost of energy effectively zero, and having it be clean, enables economic growth we can not even conceive of. Even as the innovations we are working on become more real - like superintelligent AI - they are likely going to always be constrained by energy.
Dominating Energy All Around
Like I mentioned before, usable fusion is still far away. But this isn’t stopping China from another massive energy innovation project which seems to be a large solar power plant in space. This is another massive project beyond the scale of anything the USA has done since the moon landing. This project is still in developmental phase - and execution matters more than talk — but America isn’t talkin’ or executin’.
As a third small point - China is currently building 27 nuclear power plants vs 0 (!!!!!!!!!!) in construction in the USA - and will generate more nuclear power than the USA by 2030 (5 years from now!!). (Source)
I won’t go into the other advantages China has in terms of energy innovation - I will leave that as an exercise for the reader to research.
The Fusion Fix?
I made a lot of the same points, that I will make here about fusion power, about AI in Nationalize AI - Part 5 - Superiority - but it seems like it makes little sense to have so many American firms competing to make fusion work by themselves.
Nationalization, and making the project a moonshot (think The Manhattan Project, the moon landing, etc) seems like the most appropriate move. Not only would this ensure that we could equitably distribute the benefit of fusion, but importantly the combined labor and resources. America has a proven ability to achieve groundbreaking results when it commits unified resources and effort.
Read more:
20 Jan 2025 Reading time: 1 minute 
Some of my favorite quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., including the one above:
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
“If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to hell.”
“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits”.
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience and comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”
“And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society…”
So much to learn, so much to utilize in these unprecedented times.
20 Jan 2025 Reading time: 1 minute
Some of my favorite TV shows. I am picking out the (amazing) selection on Apple TV+ for now. There’s so much quality on Apple TV+ and it is very underrated.
Meet the team behind the biggest multiplayer video game of all time. But in a workplace focused on building worlds, molding heroes, and creating legends, the most hard-fought battles don’t occur in the game-they happen in the office.
A horrific murder upends the Chicago Prosecuting Attorney’s Office when one of its own is suspected of the crime-leaving the accused (Jake Gyllenhaal) fighting to keep his family together.
Imagine a world where the global space race never ended. This thrilling “what if” take on history from Ronald D. Moore (Outlander, Battlestar Galactica) spotlights the high-stakes lives of NASA astronauts and their families.
Some lists of great movies that I’ve posted already:
Movies That Make You Think
Movies That Make You Think - Part 2
19 Jan 2025 Reading time: 6 minutes 🍐 This is an economic and economic policy article - not an article on politics. All the predictions here are based on economic principles and math, not partisan politics or anything else.
Additionally, please read the full article (including the links / additional resources) to fully get a grasp on the impacts here and before any knee jerk reactions!
The main two policies I’d like to examine are these:
- Large scale tariffs
- Mass deportation
Tariffs
While I have written about tariffs before, in a multipart series (which I am not done with, by the way) - I will summarize my thoughts.
🍐 For a more detailed set of thoughts on the situation that these will present, read through these (especially the second one):
- Tariffs Part 1: An Introduction.
- Tariffs Part 2: An Impossible Balance.
Of course, we have no clue if Trump will even attempt to actually do these tariffs he is threatening. We do know American companies and consumers are already preparing for the negative effects of them:
As we enter into this next presidential term - unemployment stands at a very good 4.1%. Inflation is cooling overall, although trending upwards since The Federal Reserve has begun cutting interest rates.
As we know, American importers (and therefore, American consumers at the end of the day) pay tariffs on goods from other countries (and not other countries or their governments), and so any broad set of tariffs will cause a large upwards pressure on inflation.
This won’t only affect foreign goods, any significant tariffs will cause even goods made here more expensive, as over half of the things the United States imports are components of things we make here (intermediary good). Making our own supply chains less efficient will cause upwards price pressure in every single good regardless of where it is from.
Of course, with increased prices - comes reduced demand. The aggregate demand in an economy is a primary north star metric. As demand weakens, it is very possible to fall into a recession; how likely a recession is and how deep it is depends really how rough the tariffs are. Expect job losses if we add tariffs to imports at the levels that have been talked about.
Some additional points:
- There may be some shift of demands to American goods (although typically this effect is limited/non-existent)
- The overall price of the American good is not going to be less than the foreign good was. If we could make the good for less and more efficiently, the market likely would already have been doing that.
- Unless we increase our labor force, in order to reallocate labor to making these goods - they have to not be doing something else. We’d much rather labor creating computer chips, software, etc vs the lowest quality possible socks, for example.
- What is particularly scary is the thought of increased inflation and rising unemployment, which large scale tariffs will almost certainly cause.
Mass Deportation
There’s a lot with this topic that is not economics - morality especially, however I will not focus on these here and will primarily focus on the economic effects.
A primary economic argument for deporting people is that it will open up jobs. However, this is incorrect, and is a fallacy. The more new laborers that you add to an economy, the more total jobs the economy has in it.
This fallacy is called The Lump of Labor Fallacy. You can read more about it and how jobs are actually created and destroyed there.
In reality, the more laborers you take out of the economy - the less work there is for others.
Additional points:
- Do mass deportations cause job losses for American citizens?
- Lots of good sources that are listed here that you should dig into
- Deportations reduce tax revenue
- “Undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022.” Source
- Removing this labor increases prices
- Creating a labor shortage in the sectors primarily affected will raise prices and hamper production.
Ideally, I’d like to include details about a possible tax bill, however there’s just no detail on what it would actually be.
If it’s just another bill to cut taxes on the rich, that will increase the budget deficit even further. A profoundly bad idea if implemented but again we just have no idea.
Similarly, the new not-actually-a-real-department to reduce government spending - DOGE - will likely not have much success. It is going to be a large lift to get essentially any significant spending cuts through Congress, so I won’t even discuss the likely significant negative effects of cutting government spending at the moment. Musk has already reduced his estimate for what is likely to actually be cut — I’d look for that number to be cut to essentially 0.
By the way, there is already a department that does this function (GAO), a new duplicated “department” seems like the very government waste they claim to care about.
Overall
We are looking for a very rough year if these things are even half implemented — something, by the way, Elon Musk has already said: Elon Musk Warns Of ‘Hardship’ For Americans If Trump Puts Him In Charge Of Cutting $33 Trillion Debt.
I feel confident that this year, unless something else major counteracts these policies (again, if implemented):
- Unemployment is likely going to tick up over 5% (from 4.1% now).
- Inflation is going to grow substantially.
- Growth slows or the economy contracts.
This combination is called stagflation and, again, I covered it in my article Tariffs Part 2: An Impossible Balance. I believe The Federal Reserve may be forced to raise interest rates - depending how much inflation these policies cause - being forced to throw us further into a recession - either in late 2025 or early 2026.
Of course, no matter how disastrous these policies prove to be - it is likely the President will blame Biden.
Alternatively, the new administration could simply not implement these policies and not purposefully throw the economy into recession
I’d like to talk about some other things I see happening this year, such as effects of AI on the economy, so I may make a part 2 followup at some point soon.
I’ll be following up on these thoughts & predictions periodically, right or wrong, with more analysis as things happen.
