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The effect was more pronounced in countries with larger Communist Parties. Capitalism did not reduce working hours on its own.
Saw this on twitter.
Link to the book pdf: Reforming to Survive: The Bolshevik Origins of Social Policies
Checking in on the news mega - and what the hell someone tried to impersonate this account?
I honestly don’t know what happened but if the vibe’s wrong, it’s not me lol.
And in case anyone is wondering, long story short, laptop died together with hundreds of sources/references/links and pages and pages of notes I’ve written up. No backup on the cloud. Decided to touch grass and forget about the site. May or may not return as a regular. Meanwhile, I hope everyone has been doing well. The world hasn’t been kind lately and certainly hasn’t to me in many ways. Hang in there, everyone.
Edit: also in case anyone wants to hear my thoughts about the recent events, I wrote a long comment in this thread. May not be everyone’s cup of tea, and if so, just treat it as an entertaining read. Happy to be proven wrong.
What we know about China’s retaliatory measures against the US
As we reported earlier, China’s Finance Ministry has slapped tariffs on certain American items in retaliation for the Trump administration’s 10 percent tariff on all Chinese goods entering the US.
Here are more details on China’s tit for tat levies:
- Starting on February 10, China will impose levies of 15 percent for US coal and LNG and 10% for crude oil, farm equipment and some autos.
- China’s Commerce Ministry and its Customs Administration said the country is also imposing export controls on tungsten, tellurium, ruthenium, molybdenum and ruthenium-related items to “safeguard national security interests”.
- China’s anti-monopoly regulator has also announced it is launching an investigation into Google, without offering details. Google products, including its search engine, are blocked in China, but it works with local partners, including advertisers, in the country.
One Republic became the first ever American band to perform on the CCTV New Year’s Gala (春晚), live from the Wuhan stage
Why? Because during Covid lockdown, frontman Ryan Tedder came out in support of Wuhan amidst waves of anti-China sentiment, livestreaming himself enjoying the Wuhan hot dry noodle, and promised that one day he would visit the city of Wuhan!
Wuhan hot dry noodle as imagined by Tedder using spaghetti noodles:
Wuhan (武汉) hot dry noodle tattoo:
He finally got his wish to perform in front of the entire nation today, straight from Wuhan itself!
Yes, this is news.
The Short Case for Nvidia Stock
This is not a finance article nor is it financial advice despite the title (I do not condone any gambling nor do I hold any positions on Nvidia, just obligatory disclaimer here), but genuinely an excellent breakdown of the DeepSeek “breakthrough”.
To quote from a summary I read from Twitter:
- Use 8 bit instead of 32 bit floating point numbers, which gives massive memory savings
- Compress the key-value indices which eat up much of the VRAM; they get 93% compression ratios
- Do multi-token prediction instead of single-token prediction which effectively doubles inference speed
- Mixture of Experts model decomposes a big model into small models that can run on consumer-grade GPUs
That’s it! There is nothing groundbreaking about DeepSeek. There is no fundamentally new invention here (compared to the original transformer architecture). It’s simply a bunch of Chinese interns looking for shortcuts to bypass the tech sanctions, and stumbled upon a simple yet elegant solution to the problem.
What is groundbreaking though is that apparently none of the OpenAI engineers getting paid >500k per year managed to come up with a solution like this.
And this really is an indictment of the entire field of “AI”, the kind of people who are getting paid a fortune, and how overhyped, bloated and unrealistic it is to burn through $500 billion to chase their AGI scam which is never going to work. (The real AGI is as far as you can get from the current iterations of artificial neural networks based architecture, and we barely have any idea what it would look like).
The question is will it burst the AI bubble? Are we getting another AI winter? Or the US government will find a way around it like it did with all the crypto scam bullshit or the trillion dollar F-35 project?
When 50 thousand people were evacuated from the city of Pripyat following the Chernobyl incident in 1986, the Soviet government built an entirely new city, Slavutych in just two years, 50km away, to accommodate those who lost their homes.
From the start, Slavutych was planned to become a "21st-century city". Compared to other cities in Ukraine, Slavutych has a modern architecture with pleasant surroundings, and the standard of living in the city is much higher than in most other Ukrainian cities.
This would be the last city the Soviet Union would ever build. The entire country would collapse in just two years’ time, but they managed to do something like this.
Educational post: here we will debunk the myth of China’s dollar-denominated bonds in Saudi Arabia for those who are interested in learning about how the system actually works, and those who need a little help with connecting the dots.
A few months ago, some multipolar bloggers were jumping up and down about Saudi Arabia “ending its 50-year petrodollar contract” and how that is going to “end dollar hegemony” (I already wrote a whole post debunking that). Today we see the same people saying that China issuing dollar-denominated bonds in Saudi Arabia is actually genius and how that’s going to “end dollar hegemony”. So which one is it?
The answer is neither, and far simpler than you think. But to even be able to answer this question, we need to learn a bit about the fundamentals of the financial system, and especially to debunk the many misconceptions about the role of US treasury.
Don’t worry, I have deliberately stripped all technical jargons from this post, so anyone will be able to understand even if you know nothing about banking and finance. This post is meant to be educational - I firmly believe that learning about how the economy and the financial system operate can shield us from falling for right wing propaganda, and that is my goal of spending many hours writing this post here.
First, let’s lay out the main misconceptions that have been perpetuated on social media about the China’s dollar bond in Saudi Arabia, and what questions do we need to answer:
- The misconception that the US government is financed by its treasury bonds (China is issuing dollar bonds at nearly the same rates, so investors will buy China bonds instead of US treasury bonds, so the US government can no longer finance its spending)
- Question: What is the role of US treasuries?
- A wild extrapolation that a $2 billion bond issuance somehow serves as a prelude to China issuing a $100 billion dollar bond which will then subvert the entire US treasury market.
- Question: What can a $100 billion dollar bond do if China issues that?
- The mental gymnastics involved to craft a narrative about why China issuing its bond in dollar in Saudi Arabia is actually good and that somehow is going to help the BRI countries pay back their dollar debt.
- Questions: What is the intent behind China issuing dollar-denominated bond in Saudi Arabia? Can it really help Belt and Road countries pay back their dollar debt?
Let’s go through this point by point.
What is the role of US treasuries?
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Many people will tell you that a government needs to borrow (treasury issuing bonds/securities) to finance its spending. Here, we see the same narrative that if everyone stops buying US treasuries, the US government would not be able to finance its imperialism.
This is no different than the popular neoliberal myth perpetuated by both the Republicans and the Democrats that “we have to cut our spending and bring our deficits down because we have borrowed trillions of dollars from China!”
What they really mean is that “we have to cut funding to this and that public utilities and services so all the wealth can be concentrated to the top 0.1%”. In other words, myths like this allow the ruling class to institute austerity on the working people, otherwise “your children and grandchildren will become debt slaves to China who owns our country and they have to work so much harder to pay back our debt to China!”
Let’s dispel this myth once and for all by learning about where did this myth even comes from.
Do government have to borrow to finance its spending?
You see, a long time ago when governments peg their currencies to gold (or under Bretton Woods from 1944-1971, to US dollar which is in turn pegged to gold), they run on a fixed exchange rate. This means that the government promises that its currency can be exchanged for gold (or dollar) at a certain price. If the government cannot keep that promise, they will have to default, or depreciate the value of their currency (exchange rate goes down, imports become more expensive).
A main attraction of pegging your currency to a stable metal like gold, or another stable currency like the dollar, is that it helps boost the confidence and usage of your currency. This was especially true for post-war European countries after their economies had been wrecked by WWII, and those governments desperately needed their citizens to use their currencies again (that were worth very little because the productive capacities had been destroyed) instead of foreign currencies. And so during the Bretton Woods conference, they decided that their governments would peg their currencies to the dollar, and the dollar itself to gold, with the hopes that this will help stabilize the currency exchange rate and hence the development of their economies.
However, there is a huge problem when you run on a fixed exchange rate - you need to have a reserve of the metal/foreign currency in order to defend this exchange rate, and this quickly becomes a problem when it comes to fiscal operations (government spending):
Let’s say you are a government with $100 billion worth of gold reserve, and have issued $100 billion of your currency to circulate the economy. Now, you want to spend $10 billion to build new hospitals for the country, to improve the healthcare standards for the people. Of course, you can just print $10 billion and credit the bank accounts of contractors, raw material suppliers and manufacturers and let them get to work, but you will now have $110 billion circulating the economy with only $100 billion worth of gold reserve, and this is a problem because you do not have enough reserve to defend the fixed exchange rate you have set.
You have several options here:
One, you can increase gold supply
- search and dig for more gold
- purchase gold by exporting your goods and services made using your labor and resources to countries that have a lot of gold
- steal the gold by colonizing or invading other countries who have them
Two, you will have to somehow take $10 billion currency away from the economy.
There are two common ways to do this - first, increase the taxes so you can subtract $10 billion from the economy, which brings monetary base down to $90 billion, and this frees up the space for you to issue a new $10 billion currencies to build the new hospitals.
This is where the popular misconception that taxes finance government budget come from. But as you can see, the taxes really only serve the purpose of taking money out of the circulation so new money can be added to finance new projects. Those taxed money are instead destroyed in the central bank, contrary to the popular myth that they are being used to finance government spending.
Governments that can issue their own money don’t need your taxes - why would they do that if they can already print them? The purpose of taxation is to drive the value of your currency (you are forced to earn the currency because you have to pay taxes with them), and to re-distribute wealth within the society (rich people accumulating too much wealth? Tax them away so they don’t grow too powerful, not because the government needs to be financed by billionaires - of course this does not apply in governments that have been captured by the wealthy elites, but the concept of the power of the State still applies)
The second way is to issue government securities/bonds (in the US, this is known as the US treasury bills/notes/bonds). Instead of taking away your money which many people hate, here the government says: ”hey what if you give me some of your money and I’ll keep them safe for you and in a few years’ time when they mature, I’ll pay you back with interests?”
As you can see, the function of a government bond is the same as taxes - taking money out of circulation, except that instead of the money getting destroyed through taxation, your money is being safekept in a special government savings account (the government’s version of certificate of deposit) and you are not allowed to use them until the bond matures. Then you get your money back with interests.
Because the government is technically “borrowing” from you, this is known as government debt, and you are the creditor lending money to the government. This is where the popular misconception that government debt finances government spending comes from. But really, they just want to take some money out of the circulation so they can defend their exchange rate during new budget spending.
And finally, if the government cannot fulfill its promise of exchanging their currency at the price they have set with reference to gold/dollar, they will have to default, or depreciate the value of their currency.
The above was how they roll during the fixed exchange rate era, and where all these misconceptions about US treasuries comes from.
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xiaohongshu
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I’ve said this before: these countries aren’t stupid. They know exactly what they’re doing.
Trump’s tariffs against China is curbing exports to the US, and unlike in 2008, China’s property market bursting means that it can no longer turn to massive infrastructure investment to drive economic growth like it used to, and the Internal Circulation strategy that was supposed to promote domestic consumption has ended with a whimper. The post-Covid consumption spending did not happen, and we’re actually getting deflation, which is even worse than inflation.
France knows this. It knows that China is now more dependent on export than ever before, because the surplus export goods have to go somewhere that is not America. The EU will be forced to absorb them, and France also knows that if they just let China dump all their cheap goods inside the EU, it will also be the end of their domestic industries.
With Europe in austerity since Nord Stream bombing, France has even more incentive to take maximum advantage of China’s current predicament.
These countries know exactly what they’re doing. They are all calculating to position themselves as the winners of Trump’s global tariffs.
Instead of forging a new alternative to neoliberalism, both Europe and China have chosen to become the true defender of global free trade, claiming that it is the US (Trump) that has violated the mythical sanctity of free trade agreement. And so, a mercantilistic fight it is.
And while trying to screw one another up, they also secretly hope to get a good deal from Trump behind each other’s back so they can be the winner of the race. This is the true goal of Trump’s global tariffs - to unleash a dirty mercantilist war while it hides itself behind tariffs so as to reap the harvest from the fallout, with the ultimate aim of controlling and reshaping the global supply chain to the interest of the declining empire. It was never about re-industrializing America.
All the “haha European leaders are so stupid, they’re just vassals of the US” takes that we often see on online anti-imperialist spaces aren’t grounded in material reality, as if building Nord Stream itself wasn’t an act of defiance to assert their energy independence from the US. They are only “stupid” in the sense that they are guided by the ideological indoctrination of neoliberalism. Once you understand this, Europe’s and China’s actions will make sense.