America Lost the Mandate of Heaven
geohot.github.io
geohot.github.io
That’s the key. The world is a delicate fabric that changes over time.
It’s nice (or frustrating) reading opinions. Forecasting the future is tricky.
While the world and us humans waste our time arguing, conflicting or dreaming, earth and the universe can easily introduce earthquakes, meteors and other unforeseen events that will have more impact than human made events we already cannot completely forecast.
(but he is not a member of "the Physics community" so their expectations won't mean anything to him?)
Self-driving cars are easy though, 12-year-olds make them in high school STEM classes. You just give it a light sensor so it can follow a strip of white tape down the middle of the "road" and let it go from one place to the other.
Oh, until it hits an obstruction.
Okay well you add some sort of bumper switch to it so if it hits an obstruction it stops and backs up, to find a route round it.
Ah right, well, let's see, that didn't work so well when the obstruction was much smaller and squashier than the car.
Let's have some sort of distance sensors that - ah bollocks, they pick up everything including objects beside the road, and stop the car.
Okay what about some sort of camera and machine vision system? Great, that lets it "see" the road ahead and steer or brake to avoid obstacles! But it turns out it now needs to understand a bit of physics, at least enough to stop it booting it wide open through a sharp bend and ending up shiny side down.
Right so now it will drive at a sensible speed through bends, use a camera to look for obstructions, LIDAR to look for obstructions too, and it can actually follow road markings quite well, and even pick up speed from signs.
Ah. It can't actually be used around other vehicles because it can't anticipate what they're going to do, and keeps getting into bad situations that it then needs to brake and swerve to avoid.
Oh well, turns out self-driving cars aren't easy after all.
There is also political alignment in funding next generation technologies even if it's disruptive of established industries. Lobbying of fossil fuel industry did not stop renewable factory investments in China. Whereas in the US any failure of a renewable investment was highlighted by fossil fuel lobbyists as a pretense to stop the investments
The EV chargers were supposed to fund hundreds of stations in each of the 50 states: only a few dozen were built in 4 years.
If the government focuses on one big project, like the SLS, it becomes rife with pork and clumsily slow.
But there’s hardly a better track record with splitting a program up among applicants or states (see SNAP, rampant fraud in “autism” services, PPP, or homelessness in California)
You've fallen for disinformation.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-electric-vehicle-charg...
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/dec/05/michael-ru...
From your own article: By early this year, only four states — Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania and Hawaii — had opened stations funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, The Associated Press reported in March. A Washington Post article published the next day said this amounted to just seven stations.“
So yes, a $7B+ allocation managed to only open a handful of stations in 3 years.
Meanwhile, in a similar 3 year period, China built the Beijing–Shanghai high speed rail line: approx. 3.5 years for ~1,300 km.
Are you really going to claim that the EV charger program has been the successful, rapid deployment necessary to enable a pivot to EVs?
> I can’t believe those who seriously try and say America’s value is in consuming.
as a case against outsourcing manufacturing really doesn't understand the value that societies create when they are on the forefront of innovation.
Maybe, just maybe, at a certain point physical labour is not the best way to use your working population, but instead, you know, services, innovation, etc?
America has been doing pretty good in that regard over the past few decades.
(For disclosure, I'm not from America, but still think this is a silly article)
Where is China leading?
What would be different in Tesla’s output if Americans didn’t start boycotting Tesla less than 2 years ago?
And I’m glad you think killing at least half a million kids in Africa to not even save any money, stealing all our social security data, etc are just “silly political reasons”.
Car companies do better if they sell cars. They also find it easier to sell cars if owning said car doesn't make you fearful some crazy person will smash it because of identity politics.
> And I’m glad you think killing at least half a million kids in Africa to not even save any money, stealing all our social security data, etc are just “silly political reasons”.
Oh, I'm not. But hurting Tesla and putting a break on saving the planet will do what exactly? Absolutely jack shit.
It's like that story about the guy who made nice Game Boy clones, and people figured out he was an arms dealer originally and started a campaign to boycott the Game Boy clone. What will this accomplish? Destroying someones moral and good business will force them to go back to their evil business. It's counterproductive as hell.
The whole idea that this one company must be protected from any competition and fed money and support is absurd. Add to it the years of lies Musk engaged in and his nazi affiliations ... it is tripple absurd.
They were certainly a big part of it. They kickstarted the electrification of cars, which is no small feat. Now they're not really so important anymore because the other car brands got (justifiably) scared and followed.
> The whole idea that this one company must be protected from any competition and fed money and support is absurd. Add to it the years of lies Musk engaged in and his nazi affiliations ... it is tripple absurd.
I mean.. that's you making stuff up. I didn't say any of that. I will say that destroying random peoples cars because they bought a certain brand before even knowing what terrible things Musk was going to do is idiotic. It makes the people opposing Musk look like shrill karens that can't think for shit. Does this help or hurt the cause of stopping Musk from doing stupid shit? I think it hurts it.
China taking over the EV market was always going to happen. for instance, BYD sold (tens of thousands of) their first EV a decade before Musk went from le wholesome space man to le evil nazi man.
besides, I don't think being boycotted by the terminally online folx has had much impact. luxury brands just don't do well during a recession, and the market for Tesla - US and Europe - is not doing so good, to put it mildly.
Tied for AI, Smartphones
Semiconductors, rockets, and aerospace are probably the only sectors china is behind in.
China is the most technologically advanced society on earth. They are far far ahead of anyone else in using technology to make society easier. Many government services can be handled easily on your phone.
This is just a side effect of using technology to control the population.
> There have been widespread misconceptions in media reports about a unified social credit "score" based on individuals' behavior, leading to punishments if the score is too low or rewards if the score is high.
> When evaluating the top 10 percent of high-quality scientific publications, ASPI finds that China surpasses the United States across all 8 critical technology domains. The gap is particularly pronounced in the energy and environment domain, where China accounts for 46 percent of top-tier publications compared to just 10 percent for the United States. Despite U.S. leadership in AI, China produces more top publications, contributing 30 percent versus 18 percent for the United States[0]
Basically, China dominates in batteries, solar, quantum communications, robotics deployment, high-speed rail, nuclear construction, autonomous vehicle deployment, manufacturing process innovation, patent volume in most categories
[0] https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/23/how-china-is-outper...
They desperately do need to do that, though, because manufacturing alone isn’t going to grow their economy any further, as wages in China are already becoming high enough that they’re becoming less attractive to foreign investors.
They’re strategically well positioned to take over the west in the next few decades, but to argue that China is already leaving America et al behind in innovation is silly.
If you think that the US is corrupt when it comes to money, and that that’s the only innovation that the US is currently leading in, I heartily invite you to actually explore China.
(And I say this as someone who lives in South-East Asia)
But why does the economy need to grow? If you can manufacture everything you need, and you have access to the raw resources, what else do you need as a country. In what sense is growing your economy with VC scams like Juicero better than actually having industrial output?
Contrast with the SV-aligned execs-turned-thought-leaders from decades ago that used to claim that it is not in the cultural DNA of Japan to innovate. They don't say that now, but they still look to Japan for inspiration as Steve Jobs used to do before it got fashionable
Today, Japan has a diverse economy but one could argue in good faith that its the lack of financial innovation that's holding them back
(Lack of raw resources very much a red herring-- as ever, something that the almost perennially rightwing Japanese government has never gotten less OCD about)
Another "mesocosm": Hollywood is _quietly_ looking East for "cultural innovation", bc the studio system "knows" that not even Korea can catch up. Is bigtech this certain? Do they have to MJGA before MAGA?
https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-...
In another post he's quoting Curtis Yarvin. Can't say on here what should be said
> You could imagine building this exact same thing with humans. Educate them, get them to sit at a desk, read code, find vulns. Actually, I can only really imagine that in China, have you seen the current graduates from the American universities?
Imagine, sure.
But why didn't anyone? I don't think it is a question of quality, though China simply being more populous than the USA* means there are more people at any given competence in any given domain, but cost, both monetary and opportunity.
AI's cheap. It would still be cheap compared to a human even if it cost 3000 USD/month for the token limit we get from the 20/month subscription.
That's the danger.
* by about 4x: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=china%20population%2Fus...
That's why you may notice that in making AI, companies still use teams of highly motivated humans. Obviously they could have AIs holding the reigns of other AIs. Nothing technical is stopping them
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe,
a thousand lines inside a if statement's main block,
an entire pantheon of god classes in a single project,
something something like tears in rain.
1) They report increasingly using AI to improve the AI.
2) Apples to oranges. The best humans can still beat AI in *AI research, per unit time*, but the AI beat the typical team at *finding exploitable bugs, per line of source, per unit cost*.
As the rest of the article alludes to, America is a services economy [0]. An industrial economy obviously doesn't have anything to fear from AI because their jobs don't primarily involve pressing buttons on a keyboard to justify their paycheck. That probably explains most of the difference; for China I'd imagine more AI -> More prosperity.
> A human is about 20 petaflops. All of this installed compute is only about a million people.
The number of effective humans might only be around a few million people. Gauss and Euler did a bit more for society than the average 20 petaflops of human flesh. One of the lessons of history is that being able to reliably connect a few really good humans has a lot more potential than a moderate number of more easily confused ones.
There are a lot of smartest cow in the herd phenomenons out there. Even a few hundred thousand AIs would probably outnumber the senior politicians of the world and reducing the damage those politicians do would be a huge win. Gargantuan. Possibly species level impacts like we've never yet seen if a major power like China did it.
> Oh sorry sorry, in a preemptive strike they obviously would have hit us if we didn’t attack them first. Yes yes, defensive preemptive attack. It’s just bullying. It’s stupid.
And I'm probably packing too much into one comment, but you can tell everyone knows this is stupid because the politicians consistently have to use lies instead of trying to argue things on the merits. As soon as people have to try and connect the actual facts to someone who isn't corrupt being better off the argument collapses. The worst people are the ones in the grip of that team-sports emotion where they just support "their side" despite the fact that a policy of war hurts the side engaging in it. The warmongers aren't even on the same side, they're their own lobby of psychopaths.
[0] A term which might be in for the "third world" euphemism treatment, but you never know.
It is the original sin of the American healthcare system.
America was on the road to socialism from the 1930s to the 1950s but it all went to shit and here we are: back in the Gilded Age.
Social benefits doesn’t have anything to do with socialism
From the outside it is really hard to comprehend. Was it FoxNews that poisoned the American mind or the social media brainwashing? How can a society allow a billionaire to cut programs in Africa that saved hundreds of thousands of lives that cost pennies when compared to any military adventures.
The ad-powered social media addiction stopped brainwashing?
If one wanted deeply pessimistic takes on America and Americans, there has been a media market for that since at least the advent of cable news. Mistaking TikTok, one expression of a phenomenon, for the general trend is mistaking a tree for a forest.
Pre-sale TikTok was the first time that a mirror was held up to US politics from a global perspective, where the masses could get a less fitered and channeled understanding of how they are seen by the world. (Reddit provided this previously but it has fewer users and less impact.)
As much as I hate TikTok and short videos, it had a big impact. There’s a reason that they forced the sale. Domestic control of mass media consumption is the primary method by which public opinion is shaped within the US.
And next to that is the ever-profitable imperialist/capitalist/inherently-racist pigs content.
> the first time that a mirror was held up to US politics from a global perspective, where the masses could get a less fitered and channeled understanding of how they are seen by the world
This was happening simultaneously on other tech platforms. Moderation varied. But I think a lot of people are mixing up the tail and the dog in terms of which way causation flowed.
American culture has lost its near-monopoly on optimism. We're now almost as cynical as the Europeans. (:D)
That cynicism means civic disengagement, technological doomerism and general symptoms of depression. That collectively degrades the mostly bottom-up structures we've long relied on, requiring shifts to less-efficient (and hastily cobbled together) top-down command structures.
By what metric? You have to go through Scandinavia, Germany, Spain, and a few Eastern european countries before you get to the US on voter turnout. Not to mention labor unions striking as a form of political protest (eg Italian labor unions striking against the Gaza war). And depression prevalence also seems to be higher in the US. Did you mean worse than Europe instead of "almost as" bad?
https://www.pew.org/en/trend/archive/fall-2024/americans-dee...
Decades of capitalist cruelty has created a social environment so toxic it enabled a clique of conmen to rise to the top.
Now, American hard and soft power are both being dismantled at a rapid pace. Former allies and trade partners are working around the US instead of with it now. It's leadership position has been abandoned, for no good reason at all.
The internal rot is being projected onto the global stage and I don't think Americans quite understand the consequences yet.
> I know I know, that’s a socialist platitude or something, society that works. What they say right before they argue for a dumbass tax on billionaires or banning plastic straws. Don’t worry I still think most socialists are degrowth morons.
> "it is the Government's housing policy to provide public rental housing (PRH) to low-income families who cannot afford private rental accommodation"
> https://www.gov.hk/en/residents/housing/publichousing/index....
American goes abroad, sees socialist policies working well, then advocates to get rid of socialist policies in America.
From his other post:
> The government should never ever hand out money to anyone. Not poor people, not old people, and not corporations. This creates a society of beggars and lobbyists. You get what you incentivize [1].
What should I expect though? The author couldn't even fix minor bugs in Twitter, and coding is much closer to his specialty than solving social problems.
[1] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-...
> This isn’t like when stuff is made in China. Those are basically American factories, just located in another country where you don’t have to negotiate with American labor.
I guess you do need to be socialist to formulate that first sentence in the active instead of passive voice or wonder how it even was possible that America could build American factories in other countries without negotiating with any labor (American or of the other country).
The part that is also missing is how China gladly took all the outsourced jobs, said "thanks guys!" and used them to become the rivaling power to the US it is today.
For some reason, there is this unbelievably thick air of paranoia in America where everyone is just waiting for the day when their job will go away. To a point where I think it should be classified as mass hysteria and looked into by public health authorities.
We should all introspect why so many of us perceive America as this very delicate thing that is hanging on with borrowed time and will fall apart at any moment. Because I don't think it's actually like this.
Compared with China?
https://msadvisory.com/china-social-security-system/
For example, if the local minimum wage in Shanghai is RMB 2,590 per month, the unemployment benefit would range between RMB 1,813 and RMB 2,072.
If you look at those with welfare the US are pretty bad.
Lots of money but badly distributed
You could literally hire a full-time dedicated team of 10 social workers and mental health professionals to care for 1 crazy SF hobo and it still wouldn't turn around their lives, they're too far gone.
You never see the iceberg of people who are successfully helped by American welfare.
How much of the money is for actual help and how much for the companies who exploit the system to enrich themselves.
I used to work at the American office of a Chinese company. Our counterparts in China earned about half as much as we did in the Bay Area (which is a top-tier salary in China and attracts the best people). On the surface there is really no reason for a Chinese tech company to set up an engineering office in the US. And yet many of them do.
One of my colleagues asked our manager whether he thinks our jobs in the US were stable because the teams in China cost so much less. The manager just said the talent quality is still a bit better in the Bay Area so it's worth it. That sounds like a tautology, but I think there's something deeper.
The problem in America is that a lot of companies have started thinking of talent as a "toll", a cost that you need to pay to get things done. If you think of it as a toll, then your objective becomes how to minimize it. I think that's wholly the wrong perspective.
That reason would be the constant proclamation of such by business leaders, and these days, especially by AI company executives.
Just yesterday Elon Musk was in the news again for making noise about the need for a Universal Basic Income, with the clear implication of massive job market disruption.
Yea, because they are not a democracy, so power concentration and automated violence is a plus, not a minus.
Are you both talking about the same group?
You lose your job, two years go by, time to sell you your house and move. Hiring is a total circus right now as well, being subjected to a five course hiring obstacle course is a lot of time that you're burning your savings and or missing other opportunities. Compare this to nearly any time since 2012 when it was at most three, and maybe ONE was a technical.
Most people do not save in America, and even when you are employed the health care system does not take great care of you. All of this "choice" is presented as capitalism working, but really it's a set of land mines where two large entities decide how much they want to take from you (the hospital, and the insurance company). Since the pricing is opaque and the amount the insurance company pays is capricious, vaya con dios.
The line feels like don't get sick, and your own country has thrown you to the wolves (they're in on it). Similar to unemployment, and the other "safety nets" not managed centrally or well. Massive delays, and your mortgage is due.
Also, you are paying for all of these safety nets all the time when you are making money, but it is deeply gated when you need it. Sorry for the paragraphs, but watching a friend go through this now and it's very wild.
If you're able to save more than 10%/m, you are very ahead of the game.
As for USA losing the Mandate of Heaven, even people from other countries seem sad to see it happening. Informally, two different groups of Portuguese people I've talked to in the last two weeks in Lisbon had a sentiment of "how could this have happened to such a great country?" Mostly due to the extreme news reports coming from the US, ICE, war, rhetoric etc.
That is not just an AI problem. AI is just worsening a problem in USA society.
For years in the USA losing your job was not that big of a deal, because there were lots of other jobs to do, and they paid well.
The paranoia comes from the fact that people are discovering they have not saved anything and the jobs they need to merely survive (not even prosper anymore) are less and more difficult to obtain.
Hence the perceived value of the job you have is greater, and losing it looks worse.
The American dream was Homer Simpson, a simpleton with a huge house to his name, supporting a family as the (mostly) single earner. Today Homer would not be able to buy his own house, nor support his family.
Being poor is expensive. You have to pay rent for a house that will never be yours, often replace cheap things that break more often than the more expensive ones.You need money to make money, and that reinforces how money is essentially a zero-sum game. For billionaires to make even more, someone else has to make less.
TL;DR: It's not just AI. Americans are getting poorer. Poor is scary. And they don't have any social net like more socialist countries.
One of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, where people are living 4-6 to the room.
This is simply expat navel gazing and little more.
What's more:
> "it is the Government's housing policy to provide public rental housing (PRH) to low-income families who cannot afford private rental accommodation"
> https://www.gov.hk/en/residents/housing/publichousing/index....
Sure, there's a wait-list, but it's available in principle to all of the needy.
To this day, capitalist leaning societies outcompete socialist leaning societies. Just don’t go saying that either has ever truly existed. Socialism and capitalism are utopian fantasies. People are messy and our systems are too.
Good? Things like crypto and the current usa administration should have thought us that completely free markets are ripe for corruption and insider trading. None of that produces anything, and merely concentrates and ties together power and capital.
> As it becomes regulated, the monopolies become entrenched, innovation slows, homogenization is enforced, and products undergo a diminution in quality as monopolies needn’t compete
All of that happens because we let the monopolies do the regulation, and limit and block any antitrust action.
When people talk about a "free" market, they mean "free as in fair".
When billionaires talk about "free" market they actually mean "free as in deregulated".
You don't get "fair" without regulation.
“Freer” markets (for some definition of free) are certainly possible. Deng liberalized China’s markets, and despite persistent and heavy state influence, it has much freer markets today than under Mao. This has been great for the Chinese economy and raised a billion people out of poverty. One could argue that this wouldn’t have happened without state direction, but you can’t ignore the effect of liberalization.
In the US, we have been gradually restricting the freedom of the productive parts of the economy, often by subsidizing scams that put legitimate competitors out of business, or allowing monopolies or private equity to destroy them despite rules intended to protect fair competition. At the same time, we have let scam industries off the leash, and they are free to basically commit open fraud with no controls. It’s a kind of freedom, I guess.
> When people talk about a "free" market, they mean "free as in fair".
> When billionaires talk about "free" market they actually mean "free as in deregulated".
> You don't get "fair" without regulation.
Correct in theory, but you have another definitional problem here.
When people talk about “regulation”, they mean protecting people and businesses against predatory behavior through fair legislation.
When modern politicians talk about “regulation” they mean handouts to friends, government guaranteed monopolies through regulatory moats, and rules designed to harm perceived opponents.
We have a real problem here and it’s going to take some serious effort to fix it before it becomes an issue of “who and whom.”
OTOH, the state monopoly on telecomms since elder times (Telefónica) had scam level prices for most calls and long distance calls were a ripoff; and OFC no flat rates for internet in late 90's. Then the market opened for tons of telecos/ISP's and the prices plummetted down.