Replacing fossil fuels.
In as much as China has become a renewable leader, they did not do that through strict emissions policies and eliminating coal plants proactively.
It's ok to be angry about capitalism
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In as much as China has become a renewable leader, they did not do that through strict emissions policies and eliminating coal plants proactively.
Towards less suffering in the long run. The point of living as a civilization/humanity is to suffer right now so the next generation suffers a little less. We are suffering allot less than the people in the 20th century, who suffer less than the 19th, etc.
The way I define suffering is that it's the usage of your time to do things that don't benefit your health which I define as spending time on things that make you live longer, time with family and friends or on hobbies, etc.
Everyone here hates the rich, and yes many do live decadent lives, but their money isn't in useless things like gold most of the time it's in R&D. Tech companies are R&D driven. It's just that the rich love to put money towards poor choices for R&D like private equity to destroy rural hospitals, and VR glasses that's the issue. Plus AI with Sora.
Not really.
Savings and investments means mostly property (land, buildings, etc.) and the stock market. What it's really chasing is profits: think how much money is chasing profits that aren't really R&D-linked, like land and construction, mineral extraction rights, financial contracts, commerce, etc.
In corporations, R&D is often a relatively modest sum even in research-focused companies. For instance, Big Pharma is generally reckoned to spend more on advertising than R&D, which should be a sobering fact about how the world actually works. What you might argue is that investment drives productivity gains, much of which can derive from upgrades to processes and equipment from new technological development. However, even still, this sort of spending is a small fraction of total spending for most companies.
For companies like SMEs yes, but most of the gains in the stock market is due to R&D like AI, and companies like the S&P 100 of which the MAG7 make up most of that's gains for a period of time which is heavy in tech. I am just pissed they didn't think to invest in non-AI products, and are overdoing it.
AI bubble - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
AI boom - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Buildings are future oriented, but more of a function hoarding, and rent seeking so I agree with you there, but new money is generally going to PE and tech not being landlords.
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Scott Wiener is two-face on Israel. I am sure he is pro-LGBTQ and a YIMBY. He is a social liberal on economic issues, but him being two face on Israel will mean he will add to the US's soft power being dragged through the mud for the medium term.
Saikat Chakrabarti is a tech bro, but was fired for being mean to moderate democrats which I find that they deserve, moderate democrats are the least dynamic and policy innovative people in the country. That being said Ray Dalio's who owns the firm that Saikat worked for keeps mentioning how the US will be overtaken by China unless we act which is a position I share as well.
Do I like the current welfare state design for old non-dynamic people to use when it could be used for R&D, pushing the country out of debt, funding healthcare and paid family leave for workers, and etc. no. But Saikat is a hedge against poor billionaires decision like Sen. Warren, and Lina Khan for poor financial firm decision-making.
Saikat Chakrabarti is a tech bro, but was fired for being mean to moderate democrats which I find that they deserve, moderate democrats are the least dynamic and policy innovative people in the country. That being said Ray Dalio's who owns the firm that Saikat worked for keeps mentioning how the US will be overtaken by China unless we act which is a position I share as well.
Do I like the current welfare state design for old non-dynamic people to use when it could be used for R&D, pushing the country out of debt, funding healthcare and paid family leave for workers, and etc. no. But Saikat is a hedge against poor billionaires decision like Sen. Warren, and Lina Khan for poor financial firm decision-making.
Okay. So, the average price for a house (/flat, etc.) in the USA is $350,000, and it has about 150 million houses. That's ~$50 trillion purely in residential housing assets (although some of that it mortgaged, or otherwise leveraged.) That's useful to put in context the value of the MAG7, or even the entire stock market (~$70 trilllion). It's useful as an idea of where people put their money (although I did state "savings" in the last comment, and one can argue that a housing asset is not necessarily "savings" per se, it's someone's home.) All of this asset wealth has ways of turning profits, of being worth investment, that don't involve (much) R&D.
I do accept that at the current moment, R&D-heavy firms are driving a lot of growth. However, they may also be a bubble. Also, I am curious whether AI has increased R&D, or whether it's more neutral because it has shifted money from R&D in other areas (so for instance there may be biotech or engineering start-ups starved of income).
It has increased R&D whereas most of the rich would have just been landlords, brought commodities like gold, etc. They now buy compute organizations. And yes it has taken away from engineering, biomedical, and very likely academic research on many other areas. Which is why I don't like many of the US elites. Allot of white collar jobs are bullshit that's intended to market people things they don't need, and likely won't use. We also have too many managers, and possibly too many professionals. We need more medical workers like doctors, more qualified and dynamic teachers, material scientists, and even more aerospace engineers. Instead we get marketing people whose whole job is to consume the economy with little value added to society using Google Ads, opinion Youtubers who aren't teaching anything, and outrage farmers. We also have way too many people who ruin their lives on OnlyFans as most of them aren't earning a living wage.
I disagree with some of those.
US house prices, for instance, are going up. This is as much proof as you need that people are continuing to invest in housing. Gold has taken a tumble in the last few months, but it's still about $1000 an ounce higher than a year ago, so people are still investing heavily in gold. The US stock market is growing about as much as ever. Growth has been disproportionately from tech stocks compared to other, but the overall growth is pretty consistent with before AI becoming the hottest new thing.
Again, start thinking about some of the sums here. The big players (MS, Meta, Google, OpenAI) are probably spending around $50-100 billion a year on AI. There are then some notable smaller outfits (Claude, xAI, etc.) and the rest are chickenfeed.
Now consider that Walmart collects over $600 billion in revenue, which might be more than all AI R&D funding combined. So is the R&D investment really that huge?
Compared to feudalism, before the 1900s, etc. Yeah. People just generally rent seek to earn 1-10% tier money, or gatekeepered their professions with guilds. Plus Walmart earns very little profit and you need food, and consumer goods to run an economy.
This is all true, but it is worth pointing out that China's emissions per capita have not approached those of the United States. The differing energy infrastructure between the two countries casts doubt on the conclusion that the United States needs to expand coal and gas electricity production in order to make progress toward reducing fossil fuels. The answer to this question is quantitative.
I wouldn't recommend expansion, per se, at least not any more than economic forces already incentivize. I would just suggest that measures to artificially diminish fossil fuel usage, government limits and quotas, diminish productivity, which slows advancement. And also, other environmental policies will also inevitably but heads with renewables, as every energy source has some environmental impact. If you're afraid of nuclear waste, or worried about the birds, or against altering river habitats, so on and so forth, those concerns end up in opposition to decarbonizing. It's the paradoxical reality that people focused on preserving the environment can in fact make things worse for the environment.
But they are 50% higher than those of the EU. Even per capita.
China really needs to do far more even if worse offenders like the US still exist.
I still see mostly just rent seeking around.
Investment in technology mostly happens when it is nearly done and thus a sure thing that only needs to be put to scale. Most real research only happens at universities funded by taxpayers.
That is even true with AI. Most of the AI investment only came after working LLM prototypes impressed the public.
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Sure... but China makes stuff, Europe doesn't. Manufacturing is a particularly heavy driver of emissions, as it tends to be very power-hungry and involve particularly large amounts of pollutants compared to residential and service sector. Thus the world's workshop is going to generate quite a lot of dirt - and as we're importing so much of the product, that sort of makes it our dirt, just outsourced.
Where I would agree is that China has not been particularly careful about emissions until relatively recently. From what I read, much of the issue are China's internal organisation and perverse incentives. Provincial governors follow aim for certain major target metrics, and boasting they've increased power generation X% gets them plaudits. But to do this, they build a load of coal-fired power stations because they're cheap and easy. The central government wants to move away from coal power, but wasn't properly incentivising the provincial governments to actually do so.
Because they were just built so number could go up on a bureaucrat's statistics, reports are that many of these coal-fired plants will never even run at full capacity, or even close.
Germany has still an absurd trade imbalance in favor of export and this is mostly based on "making stuff" and it has lower emissions than China as well. Even Europe as a whole does actually make a lot of things, it is not continually running a deficit like the US is.
Yes, i am aware. But that already has been a problem for quite a number of years now. Alo if the provincial governments would just build the coal plants without using them, they would not contribute to the emission. The number account for actual use, not pure capacity.
Germany's manufacturing is around 20% GDP, China is around 30% GDP. That's a big difference.
I don't mean to say China is doing better or more than Europe, just that we should be fair and consider that China is doing a lot more production liable to cause high emissions than Europe.
AI contributed 'basically zero' to the US economy last year, according to Goldman Sachs
A recent interview conducted by the Atlantic Council with Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jan Hatzius reveals that AI contributed "basically zero" growth to the US economy in 2025
finance.yahoo.com
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Emissions also vary by industry. It's not a 1:1 comparison with dollars, euros, or yuan. I can't say I've looked into the question in any great depth, but I would hazard a guess that GDP increase per megawatt is generally (not always) larger for finished products than it is for stuff that is earlier in the production chain because the value adds from precise manipulation of goods like arranging the parts of a CPU in a certain way at some unfathomably microscopic level are generally less energy intensive than those from breaking large amounts of rocks apart, or heating ore to make metals, or indeed heating any of a wide variety of things to make still other things, like plastic or cement and so on. The law of large numbers isn't likely to wash those kinds of differences out in country by country comparisons because countries have different industries in different amounts.
So this is, once again, a quantitative question that requires more specific analysis to do it justice.
Economic forces include subsidies, which still exist for fossil fuel power plants. So they remain artificially incentivized by neoclassical standards. Maintaining these subsidies is not necessarily a bad approach (it's probably a bad approach), but I still think the question needs looking at in more detail. Markets, it must be said, have no particular bias toward economic growth or sustainability. Government intervention in the economy can increase or decrease either, especially in certain targeted ways. The approach of just directly (or close to directly via contract) doing the thing (making solar/wind/hydro/nuclear infrastructure) in places that it makes sense seems to be the best for competing with and displacing fossil fuels. Whether this process is sped up or slowed down by devoting labor and other inputs to making coal or gas power plants that can then be used to help produce the infrastructure to replace them is a question that can probably be solved with study and math and will vary by the existing infrastructure (the usefulness of adding an additional coal power plant changes with the amount of electricity production already available-- economists call this marginal utility). I'd guess that the optimal solution on the metric of decarbonizing probably isn't the most profitable one for the owners of capital; it would be an astonishing coincidence if it were.
Incidentally, this is also why LLMs are so energy intensive compared to the employment of human intelligence: using LLMs to imitate reason or creativity is a fundamentally dumb process much like crushing rocks to make gravel.