Back to episode — Episode 3060 CWSA 01/02/26
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me take a step and get back to that. I'm massively dehydrated but intentionally. So according to Sabine Hossenfelder, there's a new paper that has just dropped that says that scientists are 40% more productive when they use AI and increase their paper output. And for non-native English speakers, it's even more, up to 80%. So apparently this only applies to the writing part. So it doesn't apply to…
← Previous segment →FK Jr. says they're going to stop publishing. I don't know how they do this. Maybe just government publications, but they're going to ignore the once credible publications because they're no longer credible. And I think he wants to start, you also had to pay. You had to pay $10,000 to be published. So that doesn't seem like a good model, but I guess RFK Jr. is going to push for some government-endorsed technical papers. So if there's something in there it would be a little more credible, a little more.
And then finally, you may have seen that President Xi of China is ramping up the rhetoric about taking over Taiwan. And you probably also knew that China was doing very aggressive military drills in which they're surrounding Taiwan etc. And I saw a post by Dustin Walper who is cautioning us that the risk of losing our chip access in Taiwan is not the biggest threat. It's a big one. But if China were to take over Taiwan it would have, as Dustin Walper says, a much bigger influence over Japan and South Korea. And that Japan would consider it an existential threat to Japan if China took over Taiwan because apparently that would give them some access to the South China Sea that's more militarily meaningful than what they have now. So they would have unfettered access to the Philippine Sea and then China would also be in a position to more easily threaten, harass Japan's trading routes with the US and Australia. And so Dustin reminds us that Japan owns about half the industrial robotics market as a critical alternative to China for everything that we do with machines basically.
So here's my question. Would they dare take over Taiwan while Trump is in office? Or would it make infinitely more sense to spend three years preparing to do it and then when Trump is out of office, y
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ou know, maybe they have a more greased path? My guess is that Trump does a good enough job of scaring people that they wouldn't do it while he's in office. Would you agree that Xi would wait until Trump was out of office? I feel like that would be the smart play and they tend to be very patient, but it would suggest that their current moves are just preparatory and threatening. But we'll see. An…
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